MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS[1] (1542-1587), daughter of King James V. and his wife Mary of Lorraine, was born in December 1542, a few days before the death of her father, heart-broken by the disgrace of his arms at Solway Moss, where the disaffected nobles had declined to encounter an enemy of inferior force in the cause of a king whose systematic policy had been directed against the privileges of their order, and whose representative on the occasion was an unpopular favourite appointed general in defiance of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following the ceremony of coronation was duly performed upon the infant. A scheme for her betrothal to Edward, prince of Wales, was defeated by the grasping greed of his father, whose obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scotland at once to that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation of Scottish patriotism. In 1548 the queen of six years old was betrothed to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived on the 15th of August. The society in which the child was thenceforward reared is known to readers of Brantôme as well as that of imperial Rome at its worst is known to readers of Suetonius or Petronius as well as that of papal Rome at its worst is known to readers of the diary kept by the domestic chaplain of Pope Alexander VI. Only in their pages can a parallel be found to the gay and easy record which reveals without sign of shame or suspicion of offence the daily life of a court compared to which the court of King Charles II. is as the court of Queen Victoria to the society described by Grammont. Debauchery of all kinds, and murder in all forms, were the daily matter of excitement or of jest to the brilliant circle which revolved around Queen Catherine de' Medici. After ten years' training under the tutelage of the woman whose main instrument of policy was the corruption of her own children, the queen of Scots, aged fifteen years and five months, was married to the eldest and feeblest of the brood on the 24th of April 1558. On the 17th of November Elizabeth became queen of England, and the princes of Lorraine--Francis the great duke of Guise, and his brother the cardinal--induced their niece and her husband to assume, in addition to the arms of France and Scotland, the arms of a country over which they asserted the right of Mary Stuart to reign as legitimate heiress of Mary Tudor. Civil strife broke out in Scotland between John Knox and the queen-dowager--between the self-styled "congregation of the Lord" and the adherents of the regent, whose French troops repelled the combined forces of the Scotch and their English allies from the beleaguered walls of Leith, little more than a month before the death of their mistress in the castle of Edinburgh, on the 10th of June 1560. On the 25th of August Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed in Scotland by a convention of states assembled without the assent of the absent queen. On the 5th of December Francis II. died; in August 1561 his widow left France for Scotland, having been refused a safe-conduct by Elizabeth on the ground of her own previous refusal to ratify the treaty made with England by her commissioners in the same month of the preceding year. She arrived nevertheless in safety at Leith, escorted by three of her uncles of the house of Lorraine, and bringing in her train her future biographer, Brantôme, and Chastelard, the first of all her voluntary victims. On the 21st of August she first met the only man able to withstand her; and their first passage of arms left, as he has recorded, upon the mind of John Knox an ineffaceable impression of her "proud mind, crafty wit and indurate heart against God and His truth." And yet her acts of concession and conciliation were such as no fanatic on the opposite side could have approved. She assented, not only to the undisturbed maintenance of the new creed, but even to a scheme for the endowment of the Protestant ministry out of the confiscated lands of the Church. Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and most liberal thinker in the country. By the influence of Lord James, in spite of the earnest opposition of Knox, permission was obtained for her to hear Mass celebrated in her private chapel--a licence to which, said the Reformer, he would have preferred the invasion of ten thousand Frenchmen. Through all the first troubles of her reign the young queen steered her skilful and dauntless way with the tact of a woman and the courage of a man. An insurrection in the north, headed by the earl of Huntly under pretext of rescuing from justice the life which his son had forfeited by his share in a homicidal brawl, was crushed at a blow by the Lord James against whose life, as well as against his sister's liberty, the conspiracy of the Gordons had been aimed, and on whom, after the father had fallen in fight and the son had expiated his double offence on the scaffold, the leading rebel's earldom of Murray was conferred by the gratitude of the queen. Exactly four months after the battle of Corrichie, and the subsequent execution of a criminal whom she is said to have "loved entirely," had put an end to the first insurrection raised against her, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard, who had returned to France with the other companions of her arrival, and in November 1562 had revisited Scotland, expiated with his head the offence or the misfortune of a second detection at night in her bedchamber. In the same month, twenty-five years afterwards, the execution of his mistress, according to the verdict of her contemporaries in France, avenged the blood of a lover who had died without uttering a word to realize the apprehension which (according to Knox) had before his trial impelled her to desire her brother "that, as he loved her, he would slay Chastelard, and let him never speak word." And in the same month, two years from the date of Chastelard's execution, her first step was unconsciously taken on the road to Fotheringhay, when she gave her heart at first sight to her kinsman Henry, Lord Darnley, son of Matthew Stuart, earl of Lennox, who had suffered an exile of twenty years in expiation of his intrigues with England, and had married the niece of King Henry VIII., daughter of his sister Margaret, the widow of James IV., by her second husband, the earl of Angus. Queen Elizabeth, with the almost incredible want of tact or instinctive delicacy which distinguished and disfigured her vigorous intelligence, had recently proposed as a suitor to the queen of Scots her own low-born favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, the widower if not the murderer of Amy Robsart; and she now protested against the project of marriage between Mary and Darnley. Mary who had already married her kinsman in secret at Stirling Castle with Catholic rites celebrated in the apartment of David Rizzio, her secretary for correspondence with France, assured the English ambassador, in reply to the protest of his mistress, that the marriage would not take place for three months, when a dispensation from the pope would allow the cousins to be publicly united without offence to the Church. On the 29th of July 1565 they were accordingly remarried at Holyrood. The hapless and worthless bridegroom had already incurred the hatred of two powerful enemies, the earls of Morton and Glencairn; but the former of these took part with the queen against the forces raised by Murray, Glencairn and others, under the nominal leadership of Hamilton, duke of Châtelherault, on the double plea of danger to the new religion of the country, and of the illegal proceeding by which Darnley had been proclaimed king of Scots without the needful constitutional assent of the estates of the realm. Murray was cited to attend the "raid" or array levied by the king and queen, and was duly denounced by public blast of trumpet for his non-appearance. He entered Edinburgh with his forces, but failed to hold the town against the guns of the castle, and fell back upon Dumfries before the advance of the royal army, which was now joined by James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, on his return from a three years' outlawed exile in France. He had been accused in 1562 of a plot to seize the queen and put her into the keeping of the earl of Arran, whose pretensions to her hand ended only when his insanity could no longer be concealed. Another new adherent was the son of the late earl of Huntly, to whom the forfeited honours of his house were restored a few months before the marriage of his sister to Bothwell. The queen now appealed to France for aid; but Castelnau, the French ambassador, replied to her passionate pleading by sober and earnest advice to make peace with the malcontents. This counsel was rejected, and in October 1565 the queen marched an army of 18,000 men against them from Edinburgh; their forces dispersed in face of superior numbers, and Murray, on seeking shelter in England, was received with contumely by Elizabeth, whose half-hearted help had failed to support his enterprise, and whose intercession for his return found at first no favour with the queen of Scots. But the conduct of the besotted boy on whom at their marriage she had bestowed the title of king began at once to justify the enterprise and to play into the hands of all his enemies alike. His father set him on to demand the crown matrimonial, which would at least have assured to him the rank and station of independent royalty for life. Rizzio, hitherto his friend and advocate, induced the queen to reply by a reasonable refusal to this hazardous and audacious request. Darnley at once threw himself into the arms of the party opposed to the policy of the queen and her secretary--a policy which at that moment was doubly and trebly calculated to exasperate the fears of the religious and the pride of the patriotic. Mary was invited if not induced by the king of Spain to join his league for the suppression of Protestantism; while the actual or prospective endowment of Rizzio with Morton's office of chancellor, and the projected attainder of Murray and his allies, combined to inflame at once the anger and the apprehension of the Protestant nobles. According to one account, Darnley privately assured his uncle George Douglas of his wife's infidelity; he had himself, if he might be believed, discovered the secretary in the queen's apartment at midnight, under circumstances yet more unequivocally compromising than those which had brought Chastelard to the scaffold. Another version of the pitiful history represents Douglas as infusing suspicion of Rizzio into the empty mind of his nephew, and thus winning his consent to a deed already designed by others. A bond was drawn in which Darnley pledged himself to support the confederates who undertook to punish "certain privy persons" offensive to the state, "especially a strange Italian, called Davie"; another was subscribed by Darnley and the banished lords, then biding their time in Newcastle, which engaged him to procure their pardon and restoration, while pledging them to insure to him the enjoyment of the title he coveted, with the consequent security of an undisputed succession to the crown, despite the counter claims of the house of Hamilton, in case his wife should die without issue--a result which, intentionally or not, he and his fellow-conspirators did all that brutality could have suggested to accelerate and secure. On the 9th of March the palace of Holyrood was invested by a troop under the command of Morton, while Rizzio was dragged by force out of the queen's presence and slain without trial in the heat of the moment. The parliament was discharged by proclamation issued in the name of Darnley as king; and in the evening of the next day the banished lords, whom it was to have condemned to outlawry, returned to Edinburgh. On the day following they were graciously received by the queen, who undertook to sign a bond for their security, but delayed the subscription till next morning under plea of sickness. During the night she escaped with Darnley, whom she had already seduced from the party of his accomplices, and arrived at Dunbar on the third morning after the slaughter of her favourite. From thence they returned to Edinburgh on the 28th of March, guarded by two thousand horsemen under the command of Bothwell, who had escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder, to raise a force on the queen's behalf with his usual soldierly promptitude. The slayers of Rizzio fled to England, and were outlawed; Darnley was permitted to protest his innocence and denounce his accomplices; after which he became the scorn of all parties alike, and few men dared or cared to be seen in his company. On the 19th of June a son was born to his wife, and in the face of his previous protestations he was induced to acknowledge himself the father. But, as Murray and his partisans returned to favour and influence no longer incompatible with that of Bothwell and Huntly, he grew desperate enough with terror to dream of escape to France. This design was at once frustrated by the queen's resolution. She summoned him to declare his reasons for it in presence of the French ambassador and an assembly of the nobles; she besought him for God's sake to speak out, and not spare her; and at last he left her presence with an avowal that he had nothing to allege. The favour shown to Bothwell had not yet given occasion for scandal, though his character as an adventurous libertine was as notable as his reputation for military hardihood; but as the summer advanced his insolence increased with his influence at court and the general aversion of his rivals. He was richly endowed by Mary from the greater and lesser spoils of the Church; and the three wardenships of the border, united for the first time in his person, gave the lord high admiral of Scotland a position of unequalled power. In the gallant discharge of its duties he was dangerously wounded by a leading outlaw, whom he slew in single combat; and while yet confined to Hermitage Castle he received a visit of two hours from the queen, who rode thither from Jedburgh and back through 20 miles of the wild borderland where her person was in perpetual danger from the freebooters whom her father's policy had striven and had failed to extirpate. The result of this daring ride was a ten days' fever, after which she removed by short stages to Craigmillar, where a proposal for her divorce from Darnley was laid before her by Bothwell, Murray, Huntly, Argyle and Lethington, who was chosen spokesman for the rest. She assented on condition that the divorce could be lawfully effected without impeachment of her son's legitimacy; whereupon Lethington undertook in the name of all present that she should be rid of her husband without any prejudice to the child--at whose baptism a few days afterwards Bothwell took the place of the putative father, though Darnley was actually residing under the same roof, and it was not till after the ceremony that he was suddenly struck down by a sickness so violent as to excite suspicions of poison. He was removed to Glasgow, and left for the time in charge of his father; but on the news of his progress towards recovery a bond was drawn up for execution of the sentence of death which had secretly been pronounced against the twice-turned traitor who had earned his doom at all hands alike. On the 22nd of the next month (Jan. 1567) the queen visited her husband at Glasgow and proposed to remove him to Craigmillar Castle, where he would have the benefit of medicinal baths; but instead of this resort he was conveyed on the last day of the month to the lonely and squalid shelter of the residence which was soon to be made memorable by his murder. Between the ruins of two sacred buildings, with the town-wall to the south and a suburban hamlet known to ill fame as the Thieves' Row to the north of it, a lodging was prepared for the titular king of Scotland, and fitted up with tapestries taken from the Gordons after the battle of Corrichie. On the evening of Sunday, the 9th of February, Mary took her last leave of the miserable boy who had so often and so mortally outraged her as consort and as queen. That night the whole city was shaken out of sleep by an explosion of gunpowder which shattered to fragments the building in which he should have slept and perished; and the next morning the bodies of Darnley and a page were found strangled in a garden adjoining it, whither they had apparently escaped over a wall, to be despatched by the hands of Bothwell s attendant confederates. Entry: MARY
His long connexion with this lady may most conveniently be summarized here. It was indeed for some time the one redeeming and restraining factor in his life, though her devotion and self-sacrificing conduct were in marked contrast with his unscrupulousness and selfishness. Mary Anne (or as she always called herself, Maria) Fitzherbert (1756-1837) was the daughter of Walter Smythe, the second son of Sir John Smythe, Bart., of Acton Burnell Park, Shropshire, and came of an old Roman Catholic family. Educated at a French convent, she married first in 1775 Edward Weld, who died within the year, and secondly in 1778 Thomas Fitzherbert, who died in 1781, leaving his widow with a comfortable fortune. A couple of years later she became a prominent figure in London society, and her beauty and charm at once attracted the young prince, who wooed her with all the ardour of a violent passion. She herself was distracted between her desire to return his love, her refusal to contemplate becoming his mistress, and her knowledge that state reasons made a regular marriage impossible. The Act of Settlement (1689) entailed his forfeiture of the succession if he married a Roman Catholic, apart from the fact that the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 made any marriage illegal without the king's consent, which was out of the question. But after trying for a while to escape his attentions, her scruples were overcome. In Mrs Fitzherbert's eyes the state law was, after all, not everything. To a Roman Catholic, and equally to any member of the Christian church, a formal marriage ceremony would be ecclesiastically and sacramentally binding; and after a period of passionate importunacy on his part they were secretly married by the Rev. R. Burt, a clergyman of the Church of England, on the 15th of December 1785.[1] There is no doubt as to Mrs Fitzherbert's belief, supported by ecclesiastical considerations, in her correct and binding, though admittedly illegal, relationship to the prince as his canonical wife; and though that relationship was not, and for political reasons could not be, publicly admitted, it was in fact treated by their intimates on the footing of a morganatic marriage. The position nevertheless was inevitably a false one; Mrs Fitzherbert had promised not to publish the evidence of the marriage (which, according to a strict interpretation of the Act of Settlement might have barred succession to the crown), and the rumours which soon got about led the prince to allow it to be disavowed by his political friends. He lived in the most extravagant way, became heavily involved in debt, and as the king would not assist him, shut up Carlton House, and went to live with Mrs Fitzherbert at Brighton. In 1787 a proposal was brought before the House of Commons by Alderman Newnham for a grant in relief of his embarrassments. It was on this occasion that Fox publicly declared in the House of Commons, as on the prince's own authority, in answer to allusions to the marriage, that the story was a malicious falsehood. A little later Sheridan, in deference to Mrs Fitzherbert's pressure and to the prince's own compunction, made a speech guardedly modifying Fox's statement; but though in private the denial was understood, it effected its object, the House voting a grant of £221,000 to the prince and the king adding £10,000 to his income; and Mrs Fitzherbert, who at first thought of severing her connexion with the prince, forgave him. Their union--there was no child of the marriage--was brutally broken off in June 1794 by the prince, when further pressure of debts (and the influence of a new Egeria in Lady Jersey) made him contemplate his official marriage with princess Caroline; in 1800, however, it was renewed, after urgent pleading on the prince's part, and after Mrs Fitzherbert had obtained a formal decision from the pope pronouncing her to be his wife, and sanctioning her taking him back; her influence over him continued till shortly before the prince became regent, when his relations with Lady Hertford brought about a final separation. For the best years of his life he had at least had in Mrs Fitzherbert the nearest approach to a real wife, and this was fully recognized by the royal family.[2] But his dissolute nature was entirely selfish, and his various liaisons ended in the dominance of Lady Conyngham, the "Lady Steward" of his household, from 1821 till his death. Entry: GEORGE
He now definitely though not openly joined the royal cause, and refused office in January 1642 with Colepeper and Falkland in order to serve the king's interests more effectually. Charles undertook to do nothing in the Commons without their advice. Nevertheless a few days afterwards, without their knowledge and by the advice of Lord Digby, he attempted the arrest of the five members, a resort to force which reduced Hyde to despair, and which indeed seemed to show that things had gone too far for an appeal to the law. He persevered, nevertheless, in his legal policy, to which Charles after the failure of his project again returned, joined the king openly in June, and continued to compose the king's answers and declarations in which he appealed to the "known Laws of the land" against the arbitrary and illegal acts of a seditious majority in the parliament, his advice to the king being "to shelter himself wholly under the law, ... presuming that the king and the law together would have been strong enough for any encounter." Hyde's appeal had great influence, and gained for the king's cause half the nation. It by no means, however, met with universal support among the royalists, Hobbes jeering at Hyde's love for "mixed monarchy," and the courtiers expressing their disapproval of the "spirit of accommodation" which "wounded the regality." It was destined to failure owing principally to the invincible distrust of Charles created in the parliament leaders, and to the fact that Charles was simultaneously carrying on another and an inconsistent policy, listening to very different advisers, such as the queen and Digby, and resolving on measures (such as the attempt on Hull) without Hyde's knowledge or approval. Entry: CLARENDON
His vigorous and active public career closed with a great victory gained over the common law and his formidable antagonist, Sir Edward Coke. The chancellor's court of equity had originated in the necessity for a tribunal to decide cases not served by the common law, and to relax and correct the rigidity and insufficiency of the latter's procedure. The two jurisdictions had remained bitter rivals, the common-law bar complaining of the arbitrary and unrestricted powers of the chancellor, and the equity lawyers censuring and ridiculing the failures of justice in the courts of common law. The disputes between the courts, concerning which the king had already in 1615 remonstrated with the chancellor and Sir Edward Coke,[9] the lord chief justice, came to a crisis in 1616, when the court of chancery granted relief against judgments at common law in the cases of _Heath v. Rydley_ and _Courtney v. Granvil_. This relief was declared by Coke and other judges sitting with him to be illegal, and a counter-attack was made by a praemunire, brought against the parties concerned in the suit in chancery. The grand jury, however, refused to bring in a true bill against them, in spite of Coke's threats and assurances that the chancellor was dead, and the dispute was referred to the king himself, who after consulting his counsel and on Bacon's advice decided in favour of equity. The chancellor's triumph was a great one, and from this time the equitable jurisdiction of the court of chancery was unquestioned. In June 1616 he supported the king in his dispute with and dismissal of Coke in the case of the _commendams_, agreeing with Bacon that it was the judge's duty to communicate with the king, before giving judgments in which his interests were concerned, and in November warned the new lord chief justice against imitating the errors of his predecessor and especially his love of "popularity."[10] Writing in 1609 to Salisbury, the chancellor had described Coke (who had long been a thorn in his flesh) as a "frantic, turbulent and idle broken brayned fellow," apologizing for so often troubling Salisbury on this subject, "no fit exercise for a chancellor and a treasurer."[11] He now summoned Coke before him and communicated to him the king's dissatisfaction with his _Reports_, desiring, however, to be spared further service in his disgracing. After several petitions for leave to retire through failing health, he at last, on the 3rd of March 1617, delivered up to James the great seal, which he had held continuously for the unprecedented term of nearly twenty-one years. On the 7th of November 1616 he had been created Viscount Brackley, and his death took place on the 15th of March 1617. Half an hour before his decease James sent Bacon, then his successor as lord keeper, with the gift of an earldom, and the presidentship of the council with a pension of £3000 a year, which the dying man declined as earthly vanities with which he had no more concern. He was buried at Dodleston in Cheshire. Entry: BRACKLEY