Quotes4study

"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six months! Who said that? It is not possible that any one could have said that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' cafe; but he had spoiled my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately--truly, Monsieur Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I, and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am perfectly honest. Ah! my God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

HOLLAND, HENRY RICHARD VASSALL FOX, 3RD BARON (1773-1840), was the son of Stephen Fox, 2nd Baron Holland, his mother, Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, being the daughter of the earl of Upper Ossory. He was born at Winterslow House in Wiltshire, on the 21st of November 1773, and his father died in the following year. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became the friend of Canning, of Hookham Frere, and of other wits of the time. Lord Holland did not take the same political side as his friends in the conflicts of the revolutionary epoch. He was from his boyhood deeply attached to his uncle, C. J. Fox, and remained steadily loyal to the Whig party. In 1791 he visited Paris and became acquainted with Lafayette and Talleyrand, and in 1793 he again went abroad to travel in France and Italy. At Florence he met with Lady Webster, wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, Bart., who left her husband for him. She was by birth Elizabeth Vassall (1770-1845), daughter of Richard Vassall, a planter in Jamaica. A son was born of their irregular union, a Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873), who after some service in the navy entered the Grenadiers, and was known in later life as a collector of Greek coins. His collection was bought for the royal museum of Berlin when he died in 1873. He married Lady Mary Fitzclarence, a daughter of William IV. by Mrs Jordan. Sir Godfrey Webster having obtained a divorce, Lord Holland was enabled to marry on the 6th of July 1797. He had taken his seat in the House of Lords on the 5th of October 1796. During several years he may be said almost to have constituted the Whig party in the Upper House. His protests against the measures of the Tory ministers were collected and published, as the _Opinions of Lord Holland_ (1841), by Dr Moylan of Lincoln's Inn. In 1800 he was authorized to take the name of Vassall, and after 1807 he signed himself Vassall Holland, though the name was no part of his title. In 1800 Lord and Lady Holland went abroad and remained in France and Spain till 1805, visiting Paris during the Peace of Amiens, and being well received by Napoleon. Lady Holland always professed a profound admiration of Napoleon, of which she made a theatrical display after his fall, and he left her a gold snuff-box by his will. In public life Lord Holland took a share proportionate to his birth and opportunities. He was appointed to negotiate with the American envoys, Monroe and W. Pinkney, was admitted to the privy council on the 27th of August 1806, and on the 15th of October entered the cabinet "of all the talents" as lord privy seal, retiring with the rest of his colleagues in March 1807. He led the opposition to the Regency bill in 1811, and he attacked the "orders in council" and other strong measures of the government taken to counteract Napoleon's Berlin decrees. He was in fact in politics a consistent Whig, and in that character he denounced the treaty of 1813 with Sweden which bound England to consent to the forcible union of Norway, and he resisted the bill of 1816 for confining Napoleon in St Helena. His loyalty as a Whig secured recognition when his party triumphed in the struggle for parliamentary reform, by his appointment as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in the cabinet of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, and he was still in office when he died on the 22nd of October 1840. Lord Holland is notable, not for his somewhat insignificant political career, but as a patron of literature, as a writer on his own account, and because his house was the centre and the headquarters of the Whig political and literary world of the time; and Lady Holland (who died on the 16th of November 1845) succeeded in taking the sort of place in London which had been filled in Paris during the 18th century by the society ladies who kept "salons." Lord Holland's _Foreign Reminiscences_ (1850) contain much amusing gossip from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. His _Memoirs of the Whig Party_ (1852) is an important contemporary authority. His small work on _Lope de Vega_ (1806) is still of some value. Holland had two legitimate sons, Stephen, who died in 1800, and Henry Edward, who became 4th Lord Holland. When this peer died in December 1859 the title became extinct. Entry: HOLLAND

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 13, Slice 5 "Hinduism" to "Home, Earls of"     1910-1911

Of his skill as an artist we have sufficient evidence in a picture dated 1504. But as to the development of his manner prior to that date we are altogether in ignorance. In contrast with this obscurity is the light thrown upon Cranach after 1504. We find him active in several branches of his profession,--sometimes a mere house-painter, more frequently producing portraits and altar-pieces, a designer on wood, an engraver of copper-plates, and draughtsman for the dies of the electoral mint. Early in the days of his official employment he startled his master's courtiers by the realism with which he painted still life, game and antlers on the walls of the country palaces at Coburg and Lochau; his pictures of deer and wild boar were considered striking, and the duke fostered his passion for this form of art by taking him out to the hunting field, where he sketched "his grace" running the stag, or Duke John sticking a boar. Before 1508 he had painted several altar-pieces for the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg in competition with Dürer, Burgkmair and others; the duke and his brother John were portrayed in various attitudes and a number of the best woodcuts and copper-plates were published. Great honour accrued to Cranach when he went in 1509 to the Netherlands, and took sittings from the emperor Maximilian and the boy who afterwards became Charles V. Till 1508 Cranach signed his works with the initials of his name. In that year the elector gave him the winged snake as a motto, and this motto or _Kleinod_, as it was called, superseded the initials on all his pictures after that date. Somewhat later the duke conferred on him the monopoly of the sale of medicines at Wittenberg, and a printer's patent with exclusive privileges as to copyright in Bibles. The presses of Cranach were used by Luther. His chemist's shop was open for centuries, and only perished by fire in 1871. Relations of friendship united the painter with the Reformers at a very early period; yet it is difficult to fix the time of his first acquaintance with Luther. The oldest notice of Cranach in the Reformer's correspondence dates from 1520. In a letter written from Worms in 1521, Luther calls him his gossip, warmly alluding to his "Gevatterin," the artist's wife. His first engraved portrait by Cranach represents an Augustinian friar, and is dated 1520. Five years later the friar dropped the cowl, and Cranach was present as "one of the council" at the betrothal festival of Luther and Catherine Bora. The death at short intervals of the electors Frederick and John (1525 and 1532) brought no change in the prosperous situation of the painter; he remained a favourite with John Frederick I., under whose administration he twice (1537 and 1540) filled the office of burgomaster of Wittenberg. But 1547 witnessed a remarkable change in these relations. John Frederick was taken prisoner at the battle of Mühlberg, and Wittenberg was subjected to stress of siege. As Cranach wrote from his house at the corner of the market-place to the grand-master Albert of Brandenburg at Königsberg to tell him of John Frederick's capture, he showed his attachment by saying, "I cannot conceal from your Grace that we have been robbed of our dear prince, who from his youth upwards has been a true prince to us, but God will help him out of prison, for the Kaiser is bold enough to revive the Papacy, which God will certainly not allow." During the siege Charles bethought him of Cranach, whom he remembered from his childhood and summoned him to his camp at Pistritz. Cranach came, reminded his majesty of his early sittings as a boy, and begged on his knees for kind treatment to the elector. Three years afterwards, when all the dignitaries of the Empire met at Augsburg to receive commands from the emperor, and when Titian at Charles's bidding came to take the likeness of Philip of Spain, John Frederick asked Cranach to visit the Swabian capital; and here for a few months he was numbered amongst the household of the captive elector, whom he afterwards accompanied home in 1552. He died on the 16th of October 1553 at Weimar, where the house in which he lived still stands in the market-place. Entry: CRANACH

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 6 "Coucy-le-Château" to "Crocodile"     1910-1911

Lord Eldon was no legislator--his one aim in politics was to keep in office, and maintain things as he found them; and almost the only laws he helped to pass were laws for popular coercion. For nearly forty years he fought against every improvement in law, or in the constitution--calling God to witness, on the smallest proposal of reform, that he foresaw from it the downfall of his country. Without any political principles, properly so called, and without interest in or knowledge of foreign affairs, he maintained himself and his party in power for an unprecedented period by his great tact, and in virtue of his two great political properties--of zeal against every species of reform, and zeal against the Roman Catholics. To pass from his political to his judicial character is to shift to ground on which his greatness is universally acknowledged. His judgments, which have received as much praise for their accuracy as abuse for their clumsiness and uncouthness, fill a small library. But though intimately acquainted with every nook and cranny of the English law, he never carried his studies into foreign fields, from which to enrich our legal literature; and it must be added that against the excellence of his judgments, in too many cases, must be set off the hardships, worse than injustice, that arose from his protracted delays in pronouncing them. A consummate judge and the narrowest of politicians, he was doubt on the bench, and promptness itself in the political arena. For literature, as for art, he had no feeling. What intervals of leisure he enjoyed from the cares of office he filled up with newspapers and the gossip of old cronies. Nor were his intimate associates men of refinement and taste; they were rather good fellows who quietly enjoyed a good bottle and a joke; he uniformly avoided encounters of wit with his equals. He is said to have been parsimonious, and certainly he was quicker to receive than to reciprocate hospitalities; but his mean establishment and mode of life are explained by the retired habits of his wife, and her dislike of company. His manners were very winning and courtly, and in the circle of his immediate relatives he is said to have always been lovable and beloved. Entry: ELDON

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 2 "Ehud" to "Electroscope"     1910-1911

BENNETT, JAMES GORDON (1794-1872), American journalist, founder and editor of the New York Herald, was born at Newmills in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1794 (not in 1800, as has been stated). He was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood in a seminary at Aberdeen, but in the spring of 1819, giving up the career which had been chosen for him, he emigrated to America. Landing at Halifax, Nova Scotia, he earned a poor living there for a short time by giving lessons in French, Spanish and bookkeeping; he passed next to Boston, where starvation threatened him until he got employment in a printing-office; and in 1822 he went to New York. An engagement as translator of Spanish for the _Courier_ of Charleston, South Carolina, took him there for a few months in 1823. On his return to New York he projected a school, gave lectures on political economy and did subordinate work for the journals. During the next ten years he was employed on various papers, was the Washington correspondent first of the _New York Enquirer_, and later of the _Courier and Enquirer_ in 1827-1832, his letters attracting much attention; he founded the short-lived _Globe_ in New York in 1832; and in 1833-1834 was the chief editor and one of the proprietors of the _Pennsylvanian_ at Philadelphia. On the 6th of May 1835 he published the first number of a small one-cent paper, bearing the title of _New York Herald_, and issuing from a cellar, in which the proprietor and editor played also the part of salesman. "He started with a disclaimer of all principle, as it is called, all party, all politics"; and to this he consistently adhered. By his industry, sagacity and unscrupulousness, and by the variety of his news, the "spicy" correspondence, and the supply of personal gossip and scandal, he made the paper a great commercial success. He devoted his attention particularly to the gathering of news, and was the first to introduce many of the methods of the modern American reporter. He published on the 13th of June 1835, the first Wall Street financial article to appear in any American newspaper; printed a vivid and detailed account of the great fire of December 1835, in New York; was the first, in 1846, to obtain the report in full by telegraph of a long political speech; and during the Civil War maintained a staff of sixty-three war correspondents. Bennett continued to edit the Herald almost till his death, at New York, on the 1st of June 1872. Entry: BENNETT

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Slice 5 "Bedlam" to "Benson, George"     1910-1911

Of course in this great mart a large variety of types is to be found and the members fall into some kind of rough grouping. Export buyers, attended by salesmen, are commonly more or less stationary and prominent; Burnley manufacturers abound in one locality and spinners of Egyptian yarns in another. The importance of the Exchange as a bargaining centre is fairly maintained, though buyers are assiduously cultivated in their own offices, and the telephone has done a good deal to abbreviate negotiation. As to the amount of business transacted on the Exchange there is no record. The market reporters make some attempt to materialize the current gossip, and doubtless catch well enough the great movements in the ebb and flow of demand, but the sum of countless obscure transactions cannot be estimated. Some few years ago an attempt was made to mark more clearly the course of business in Manchester, and a scheme was prepared for the recording of daily transactions. This could only have been a somewhat rough affair, but its originator maintained reasonably that it would be of interest if some indication of the daily movements could be obtained. For some time a memorandum of the total of daily sales reported was posted on 'Change, but the indifference of traders, together with the distrust that makes any innovation difficult, caused the scheme to be abandoned. Entry: 1903

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 5 "Cosway" to "Coucy"     1910-1911

On the 24th of April 1783, Fanny Burney's "most judicious adviser and stimulating critic," "daddy" Crisp, died. He was her devoted friend, as she was to him, "the dearest thing on earth." The next year she was to lose two more friends. Mrs Thrale married Piozzi, and Johnson died. Fanny had met the celebrated Mrs Delany in 1783, and she now attached herself to her. Mrs Delany, who was living (1785) in a house near Windsor Castle presented to her by George III., was on the friendliest terms with both the king and queen, and Fanny was honoured with more than one royal interview. Queen Charlotte, soon afterwards, offered Miss Burney the post of second keeper of the robes, with a salary of £200 a year, which after some hesitation was accepted. Much has been said against Dr Burney for allowing the authoress of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_ to undertake an office which meant separation from all her friends and a wearisome round of court ceremonial. On the other hand, it may be fairly urged that Fanny's literary gifts were really limited. She had written nothing for four years, and apparently felt she had used her best material. "What my daddy Crisp says," she wrote as early as 1779, "'that it would be the best policy, but for pecuniary advantages, for me to write no more,' is exactly what I have always thought since _Evelina_ was published" (_Diary_, i. 258). Her misgivings as to her unfitness for court life were quite justified. From Queen Charlotte she received unvarying kindness, though she was not very clever with her waiting-maid's duties. She had to attend the queen's toilet, to take care of her lap-dog and her snuff-box, and to help her senior, Mrs Schwellenberg, in entertaining the king's equerries and visitors at tea. The constant association with Mrs Schwellenberg, who has been described as "a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in the buckram of backstairs etiquette," proved to be the worst part of Fanny's duties. Her diary is full of amusing court gossip, and sometimes deals with graver matters, notably in the account of Warren Hastings' trial, and in the story of the beginning of George III.'s madness, as seen by a member of his household. But the strain told on her health, and after pressure both from Fanny and her numerous friends, Dr Burney prepared with her a joint memorial asking the queen's leave to resign. She left the royal service in July 1791 with a retiring pension of £100 a year, granted from the queen's private purse, and returned to her father's house at Chelsea. Dr Burney had been appointed organist at Chelsea Hospital in 1783, through Burke's influence. Entry: D

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 9 "Dagupan" to "David"     1910-1911

In 1616 he began his course of lectures, and first brought forward his views upon the movements of the heart and blood. Meantime his practice increased, and he had the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Arundel among his patients. In 1618 he was appointed physician extraordinary to James I., and on the next vacancy physician in ordinary to his successor. In 1628, the year of the publication of the _Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis_, he was elected treasurer of the College of Physicians, but at the end of the following year he resigned the office, in order, by command of Charles I., to accompany the young duke of Lennox (James Stuart, afterwards duke of Richmond) on his travels. He appears to have visited Italy, and returned in 1632. Four years later he accompanied the earl of Arundel on his embassy to the emperor Ferdinand II. He was eager in collecting objects of natural history, sometimes causing the earl anxiety for his safety by his excursions in a country infested by robbers in consequence of the Thirty Years' War. In a letter written on this journey, he says: "By the way we could scarce see a dogg, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomise; only sum few miserable people, the reliques of the war and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came." Having returned to his practice in London at the close of the year 1636, he accompanied Charles I. in one of his journeys to Scotland (1639 or 1641). While at Edinburgh he visited the Bass Rock; he minutely describes its abundant population of sea-fowl in his treatise _De generatione_, and incidentally speaks of the account then credited of the solan goose growing on trees as a fable. He was in attendance on the king at the battle of Edgehill (October 1642), where he withdrew under a hedge with the prince of Wales and the duke of York (then boys of twelve and ten years old), "and took out of his pocket a book and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station," as he afterwards told John Aubrey. After the indecisive battle, Harvey followed Charles I. to Oxford, "where," writes the same gossiping narrator, "I first saw him, but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D. who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation." In Oxford he remained three years, and there was some chance of his being superseded in his office at St Bartholomew's hospital, "because he hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament." It was no doubt at this time that his lodgings at Whitehall were searched, and not only the furniture seized but also invaluable manuscripts and anatomical preparations.[1] Entry: HARVEY

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 13, Slice 1 "Harmony" to "Heanor"     1910-1911

That the coarse and imperious nature of the hardy and able ruffian who had now become openly her master should no less openly have shown itself even in the first moments of their inauspicious union is what any bystander of common insight must inevitably have foreseen. Tears, dejection and passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her affectionate gaiety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he kept cap in hand as a subject she would snatch it from him and clap it on his head again; while in graver things she took all due or possible care to gratify his ambition, by the insertion of a clause in their contract of marriage which made their joint signature necessary to all documents of state issued under the sign-manual. She despatched to France a special envoy, the bishop of Dumblane, with instructions setting forth at length the unparalleled and hitherto ill-requited services and merits of Bothwell, and the necessity of compliance at once with his passion and with the unanimous counsel of the nation--a people who would endure the rule of no foreign consort, and whom none of their own countrymen were so competent to control, alike by wisdom and by valour, as the incomparable subject of her choice. These personal merits and this political necessity were the only pleas advanced in a letter to her ambassador in England. But that neither plea would avail her for a moment in Scotland she had ominous evidence on the thirteenth day after her marriage, when no response was made to the usual form of proclamation for a raid or levy of forces under pretext of a campaign against the rievers of the border. On the 6th or 7th of June Mary and Bothwell took refuge in Borthwick Castle, twelve miles from the capital, where the fortress was in the keeping of an adherent whom the diplomacy of Sir James Melville had succeeded in detaching from his allegiance to Bothwell. The fugitives were pursued and beleaguered by the earl of Morton and Lord Hume, who declared their purpose to rescue the queen from the thraldom of her husband. He escaped, leaving her free to follow him or to join the party of her professed deliverers. But whatever cause she might have found since marriage to complain of his rigorous custody and domineering brutality was insufficient to break the ties by which he held her. Alone, in the disguise of a page, she slipped out of the castle at midnight, and rode off to meet him at a tower two miles distant, whence they fled together to Dunbar. The confederate lords on entering Edinburgh were welcomed by the citizens, and after three hours' persuasion Lethington, who had now joined them, prevailed on the captain of the castle to deliver it also into their hands. Proclamations were issued in which the crime of Bothwell was denounced, and the disgrace of the country, the thraldom of the queen and the mortal peril of her infant son, were set forth as reasons for summoning all the lieges of the chief cities of Scotland to rise in arms on three hours' notice and join the forces assembled against the one common enemy. News of his approach reached them on the night of June 14, and they marched before dawn with 2200 men to meet him near Musselburgh. Mary meanwhile had passed from Dunbar to Haddington, and thence to Seton, where 1600 men rallied to her side. On the 15th of June, one month from their marriage day, the queen and Bothwell, at the head of a force of fairly equal numbers but visibly inferior discipline, met the army of the confederates at Carberry Hill, some six miles from Edinburgh. Du Croc, the French ambassador, obtained permission through the influence of Maitland to convey to the queen the terms proposed by their leaders--that she and Bothwell should part, or that he should meet in single combat a champion chosen from among their number. Bothwell offered to meet any man of sufficient quality; Mary would not assent. As the afternoon wore on their force began to melt away by desertion and to break up for lack of discipline. Again the trial by single combat was proposed, and thrice the proposal fell through, owing to objections on this side or on that. At last it was agreed that the queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar with the few followers who remained to him. Mary took leave of her first and last master with passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies, and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks, demanding her death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate spirit of the woman, represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile, flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and crucified, in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand" she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner representing the corpse of Darnley with her child beside it invoking on his knees the retribution of divine justice. From the violence of a multitude in which women of the worst class were more furious than the men she was sheltered in the house of the provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the 20th a silver casket containing letters and French verses, miscalled sonnets, in the handwriting of the queen, was taken from the person of a servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to Dunbar. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his accession to the English throne--even in these possibly disfigured versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention of art (see CASKET LETTERS[2]). Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven and Sir Robert Melville were despatched to Lochleven, there to obtain the queen's signature to an act of abdication in favour of her son, and another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and a commission of regency was established till the return from France of Murray, who, on the 15th of August, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athole. According to his own account, the expostulations as to her past conduct which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears, confessions and attempts at extenuation or excuse; but when they parted next day on good terms she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for bedfellows. Their mother and the regent's, her father's former mistress, was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm. A rumour transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun in France. It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on the 25th of March, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterwards remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and perplexity to herself, succeeded on the 2nd of May in assisting her to escape by a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland, where George Douglas, Lord Seton and others were awaiting her. Thence they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton palace, round which an army of 6000 men was soon assembled, and whither the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The queen's abdication was revoked, messengers were despatched to the English and French courts, and word was sent to Murray at Glasgow that he must resign the regency, and should be pardoned in common with all offenders against the queen. But on the day when Mary arrived at Hamilton Murray had summoned to Glasgow the feudatories of the Crown to take arms against the insurgent enemies of the infant king. Elizabeth sent conditional offers of help to her kinswoman, provided she would accept of English intervention and abstain from seeking foreign assistance; but the messenger came too late. Mary's followers had failed to retake Dunbar Castle from the regent, and made for Dumbarton instead, marching two miles south of Glasgow, by the village of Langside. Here Murray, with 4500 men, under leaders of high distinction, met the 6000 of the queen's army, whose ablest man, Herries, was as much distrusted by Mary as by every one else, while the Hamiltons could only be trusted to think of their own interests, and were suspected of treasonable designs on all who stood between their house and the monarchy. On the 13th of May the battle or skirmish of Langside determined the result of the campaign in three-quarters of an hour. Kirkaldy of Grange, who commanded the regent's cavalry, seized and kept the place of vantage from the beginning, and at the first sign of wavering on the other side shattered at a single charge the forces of the queen with a loss of one man to three hundred. Mary fled 60 miles from the field of her last battle before she halted at Sanquhar, and for three days of flight, according to her own account, had to sleep on the hard ground, live on oatmeal and sour milk, and fare at night like the owls, in hunger, cold and fear. On the third day from the rout of Langside she crossed the Solway and landed at Workington in Cumberland, May 16, 1568. On the 20th Lord Scrope and Sir Francis Knollys were sent from court to carry messages and letters of comfort from Elizabeth to Mary at Carlisle. On the 11th of June Knollys wrote to Cecil at once the best description and the noblest panegyric extant of the queen of Scots--enlarging, with a brave man's sympathy, on her indifference to form and ceremony, her daring grace and openness of manner, her frank display of a great desire to be avenged of her enemies, her readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope of victory, her delight to hear of hardihood and courage, commending by name all her enemies of approved valour, sparing no cowardice in her friends, but above all things athirst for victory by any means at any price, so that for its sake pain and peril seemed pleasant to her, and wealth and all things, if compared with it, contemptible and vile. What was to be done with such a princess, whether she were to be nourished in one's bosom, above all whether it could be advisable or safe to try any diplomatic tricks upon such a lady, Knollys left for the minister to judge. It is remarkable that he should not have discovered in her the qualities so obvious to modern champions of her character--easiness, gullibility, incurable innocence and invincible ignorance of evil, incapacity to suspect or resent anything, readiness to believe and forgive all things. On the 15th of July, after various delays interposed by her reluctance to leave the neighbourhood of the border, where on her arrival she had received the welcome and the homage of the leading Catholic houses of Northumberland and Cumberland, she was removed to Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. During her residence here a conference was held at York between her own and Elizabeth's commissioners and those appointed to represent her son as a king of Scots. These latter, of whom Murray himself was the chief, privately laid before the English commissioners the contents of the famous casket. On the 24th of October the place of the conference was shifted from York to London, where the inquiry was to be held before Queen Elizabeth in council. Mary was already aware that the chief of the English commissioners, the duke of Norfolk, was secretly an aspirant to the peril of her hand; and on the 21st of October she gave the first sign of assent to the suggestion of a divorce from Bothwell. On the 26th of October the charge of complicity in the murder of Darnley was distinctly brought forward against her in spite of Norfolk's reluctance and Murray's previous hesitation. Elizabeth, by the mouth of her chief justice, formally rebuked the audacity of the subjects who durst bring such a charge against their sovereign, and challenged them to advance their proofs. They complied by the production of an indictment under five heads, supported by the necessary evidence of documents. The number of English commissioners was increased, and they were bound to preserve secrecy as to the matters revealed. Further evidence was supplied by Thomas Crawford, a retainer of the house of Lennox, tallying so exactly with the text of the casket letters as to have been cited in proof that the latter must needs be a forgery. Elizabeth, on the close of the evidence, invited Mary to reply to the proofs alleged before she could be admitted to her presence; but Mary simply desired her commissioners to withdraw from the conference. She declined with scorn the proposal made by Elizabeth through Knollys, that she should sign a second abdication in favour of her son. On the 10th of January, 1569, the judgment given at the conference acquitted Murray and his adherents of rebellion, while affirming that nothing had been proved against Mary--a verdict accepted by Murray as equivalent to a practical recognition of his office as regent for the infant king. This position he was not long to hold; and the fierce exultation of Mary at the news of his murder gave to those who believed in her complicity with the murderer, on whom a pension was bestowed by her unblushing gratitude, fresh reason to fear, if her liberty of correspondence and intrigue were not restrained, the likelihood of a similar fate for Elizabeth. On the 26th of January 1569 she had been removed from Bolton Castle to Tutbury in Staffordshire, where proposals were conveyed to her, at the instigation of Leicester, for a marriage with the duke of Norfolk, to which she gave a graciously conditional assent; but the discovery of these proposals consigned Norfolk to the Tower, and on the outbreak of an insurrection in the north Mary, by Lord Hunsdon's advice, was again removed to Coventry, when a body of her intending deliverers was within a day's ride of Tutbury. On the 23rd of January following Murray was assassinated; and a second northern insurrection was crushed in a single sharp fight by Lord Hunsdon. In October Cecil had an interview with Mary at Chatsworth, when the conditions of her possible restoration to the throne in compliance with French demands were debated at length. The queen of Scots, with dauntless dignity, refused to yield the castles of Edinburgh and Dumbarton into English keeping, or to deliver up her fugitive English partisans then in Scotland; upon other points they came to terms, and the articles were signed the 16th of October. On the same day Mary wrote to Elizabeth, requesting with graceful earnestness the favour of an interview which might reassure her against the suggestion that this treaty was a mere pretence. On the 28th of November she was removed to Sheffield Castle, where she remained for the next fourteen years in charge of the earl of Shrewsbury. The detection of a plot, in which Norfolk was implicated, for the invasion of England by Spain on behalf of Mary, who was then to take him as the fourth and most contemptible of her husbands, made necessary the reduction of her household and the stricter confinement of her person. On the 28th of May 1572 a demand from both houses of parliament for her execution as well as Norfolk's was generously rejected by Elizabeth; but after the punishment of the traitorous pretender to her hand, on whom she had lavished many eloquent letters of affectionate protestation, she fell into "a passion of sickness" which convinced her honest keeper of her genuine grief for the ducal caitiff. A treaty projected on the news of the massacre of St Bartholomew, by which Mary should be sent back to Scotland for immediate execution, was broken off by the death of the earl of Mar, who had succeeded Lennox as regent; nor was it found possible to come to acceptable terms on a like understanding with his successor Morton, who in 1577 sent a proposal to Mary for her restoration, which she declined, in suspicion of a plot laid to entrap her by the policy of Sir Francis Walsingham, the most unscrupulously patriotic of her English enemies, who four years afterwards sent word to Scotland that the execution of Morton, so long the ally of England, would be answered by the execution of Mary. But on that occasion Elizabeth again refused her assent either to the trial of Mary or to her transference from Sheffield to the Tower. In 1581 Mary accepted the advice of Catherine de' Medici and Henry III. that she should allow her son's title to reign as king of Scotland conjointly with herself when released and restored to a share of the throne. This plan was but part of a scheme including the invasion of England by her kinsman the duke of Guise, who was to land in the north and raise a Scottish army to place the released prisoner of Sheffield beside her son on the throne of Elizabeth. After the overthrow of the Scottish accomplices in this notable project, Mary poured forth upon Elizabeth a torrent of pathetic and eloquent reproach for the many wrongs she had suffered at the hands of her hostess, and pledged her honour to the assurance that she now aspired to no kingdom but that of heaven. In the spring of 1583 she retained enough of this saintly resignation to ask for nothing but liberty, without a share in the government of Scotland; but Lord Burghley not unreasonably preferred, if feasible, to reconcile the alliance of her son with the detention of his mother. In 1584 the long-suffering earl of Shrewsbury was relieved of his fourteen years' charge through the involuntary good offices of his wife, whose daughter by her first husband had married a brother of Darnley; and their orphan child Arabella, born in England, of royal descent on the father's side, was now, in the hopeful view of her grandmother, a more plausible claimant than the king or queen of Scots to the inheritance of the English throne. In December 1583 Mary had laid before the French ambassador her first complaint of the slanders spread by Lady Shrewsbury and her sons, who were ultimately compelled to confess the falsehood of their imputations on the queen of Scots and her keeper. It was probably at the time when a desire for revenge on her calumniatress made her think the opportunity good and safe for discharge of such a two-edged dart at the countess and the queen that Mary wrote, but abstained from despatching, the famous and terrible letter in which, with many gracious excuses and professions of regret and attachment, she transmits to Elizabeth a full and vivid report of the hideous gossip retailed by Bess of Hardwick regarding her character and person at a time when the reporter of these abominations was on friendly terms with her husband's royal charge. In the autumn of 1584 she was removed to Wingfield Manor under charge of Sir Ralph Sadler and John Somers, who accompanied her also on her next removal to Tutbury in January 1585. A letter received by her in that cold, dark and unhealthy castle, of which fifteen years before she had made painful and malodorous experience, assured her that her son would acknowledge her only as queen-mother, and provoked at once the threat of a parent's curse and an application to Elizabeth for sympathy. In April 1585 Sir Amyas Paulet was appointed to the office of which Sadler, accused of careless indulgence, had requested to be relieved; and on Christmas Eve she was removed from the hateful shelter of Tutbury to the castle of Chartley in the same county. Her correspondence in cipher from thence with her English agents abroad, intercepted by Walsingham and deciphered by his secretary, gave eager encouragement to the design for a Spanish invasion of England under the prince of Parma,--an enterprise in which she would do her utmost to make her son take part, and in case of his refusal would induce the Catholic nobles of Scotland to betray him into the hands of Philip, from whose tutelage he should be released only on her demand, or if after her death he should wish to return, nor then unless he had become a Catholic. But even these patriotic and maternal schemes to consign her child and re-consign the kingdom to the keeping of the Inquisition, incarnate in the widower of Mary Tudor, were superseded by the attraction of a conspiracy against the throne and life of Elizabeth. Anthony Babington, in his boyhood a ward of Shrewsbury, resident in the household at Sheffield Castle, and thus subjected to the charm before which so many victims had already fallen, was now induced to undertake the deliverance of the queen of Scots by the murder of the queen of England. It is maintained by those admirers of Mary who assume her to have been an almost absolute imbecile, gifted with the power of imposing herself on the world as a woman of unsurpassed ability, that, while cognisant of the plot for her deliverance by English rebels and an invading army of foreign auxiliaries, she might have been innocently unconscious that this conspiracy involved the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth. In the conduct and detection of her correspondence with Babington, traitor was played off against traitor, and spies were utilized against assassins, with as little scruple as could be required or expected in the diplomacy of the time. As in the case of the casket letters, it is alleged that forgery was employed to interpolate sufficient evidence of Mary's complicity in a design of which it is thought credible that she was kept in ignorance by the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her service,--that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting party. At Tixall she was detained till her papers at Chartley had undergone thorough research. That she was at length taken in her own toils even such a dullard as her admirers depict her could not have failed to understand; that she was no such dastard as to desire or deserve such defenders the whole brief course of her remaining life bore consistent and irrefragable witness. Her first thought on her return to Chartley was one of loyal gratitude and womanly sympathy. She cheered the wife of her English secretary, now under arrest, with promises to answer for her husband to all accusations brought against him, took her new-born child from the mother's arms, and in default of clergy baptized it, to Paulet's Puritanic horror, with her own hands by her own name. The next or the twin-born impulse of her indomitable nature was, as usual in all times of danger, one of passionate and high-spirited defiance on discovering the seizure of her papers. A fortnight afterwards her keys and her money were confiscated, while she, bedridden and unable to move her hand, could only ply the terrible weapon of her bitter and fiery tongue. Her secretaries were examined in London, and one of them gave evidence that she had first heard of the conspiracy by letter from Babington, of whose design against the life of Elizabeth she thought it best to take no notice in her reply, though she did not hold herself bound to reveal it. On the 25th of September she was removed to the strong castle of Fotheringay in Northamptonshire. On the 6th of October she was desired by letter from Elizabeth to answer the charges brought against her before certain of the chief English nobles appointed to sit in commission on the cause. In spite of her first refusal to submit, she was induced by the arguments of the vice-chamberlain, Sir Christopher Hatton, to appear before this tribunal on condition that her protest should be registered against the legality of its jurisdiction over a sovereign, the next heir of the English crown. Entry: MARY

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 17, Slice 7 "Mars" to "Matteawan"     1910-1911

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