“Long years!—It tries the thrilling frame to bear,And eagle-spirit of a child of song—Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;And the mind’s canker in its savage mood,When the impatient thirst of light and airScorches the heart; and the abhorred grate,Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brainWith a hot sense of heaviness and pain!”—Lament of Tasso.
“Long years!—It tries the thrilling frame to bear,And eagle-spirit of a child of song—Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;And the mind’s canker in its savage mood,When the impatient thirst of light and airScorches the heart; and the abhorred grate,Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brainWith a hot sense of heaviness and pain!”—Lament of Tasso.
“Long years!—It tries the thrilling frame to bear,And eagle-spirit of a child of song—Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;And the mind’s canker in its savage mood,When the impatient thirst of light and airScorches the heart; and the abhorred grate,Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brainWith a hot sense of heaviness and pain!”—Lament of Tasso.
Eighteenlong years of solitary grief—of that most wretched sickness that arises, even to a proverb, from hope too long deferred—had already passed away since, in the fatal action of Langside, the wretched Mary had for the last time seen her banner fall, and her adherents scattered like chaff before the wind by the determined valor of her foes. All, all was lost! It had been the work of months to draw that gallant army to a head, of which so many now lay stark in their curdled gore; while the miserable remnant were hunted like beasts of chase, to perish, when taken, upon the ignominious scaffold. And now, of all the noble gentlemen who had thronged to her bridle-rein on that fatal morning, high in hope as in valor, the merest had escaped to guard the person of that sovereign whom they loved so truly, and in behalf of whom they had endured so deeply. Her crown was lost for ever; nor her crown only, but her country.
Of all the glorious gifts which, at an earlier period of her eventful life, nature appeared to shower upon her head, freedom alone remained. The palfrey which bore her from the battle-field was now the sole possession of the titular monarch of three fair domains; the wild moors, over which she fled in desperate haste, her only refuge from persecutors the most unrelentingthat ever joined sagacity to hatred in the performance of their plans; the dozen gallant hearts who rallied yet around their queen, beneath the guiding of the stout and loyal Herries, her only court, her only subjects. Still she was free; and to one who for months before had never seen the blessed light of heaven but its lustre was sullied by the dim panes through which it forced its way, to lend no solace to her captivity, the fresh breeze which eddied across the purple moorlands of her native land had still the power to impart a sense of pleasure, fleeting, it is true, and doubtful, but still, in all its forms and essentials, absolute and real pleasure.
At the full distance of sixty Scottish miles from the accursed field which had witnessed the downfall of all her hopes, worn out in body and depressed in spirit, she paused to take, in the abbey of Dundrennan, a few hours of that repose without which, even in the most trying circumstances, the mind can not exist in its undiminished powers. At this juncture, it appeared to those about her person that Mary was utterly deserted by that wonderful sagacity, that clear insight into the motives of others, which had ever constituted one of the strongest points of her character. The chief object of the faithful few, who had clung to her with unblenching steadiness through this her last misfortune, had been to bear her in security to some point whence she might effect her escape to the sunny shores of that land wherein she had passed the happiest, the only truly happy, hours of her checkered existence. Queen-dowager herself of France, knit by the closest ties of interest and friendship to the court of Versailles—to which, moreover, Scotland had ever been considered an auxiliar and well-affected state, no less than an easy pretext for hostilities against its natural antagonist—she had been there secure, not of safety only, but of the full enjoyment of rank, and wealth, and dignity, and pleasure, if indeed pleasure were yet within the reach of one who had herselfsuffered, and who had beheld all those that loved her suffer, as Mary the last queen of Scotland. Inclination, it would have seemed, no less than policy, should have urged the hapless sovereign to the measure advocated by each and all of her devoted train; for but a few years had flown since she had felt all those pangs which render exile to a delicate and sensitive mind the heaviest of human punishments, on parting from the fair shores of that land, which even then perhaps some prophetic spirit whispered, she must behold no more! Herries, the bold and loyal Herries, bent his knee, stiffened with years of toil and exposure, to sue of his adored mistress the only boon of all his labors, all his sufferings, that she would avoid the fatal soil of England.
“Remember,” he had cried, in tones which seemed in after-days of more than human foresight—“remember how the false and wily woman, who sways the sceptre of England with absolute and undisputed sway—remember, I say, with what unflinching determination she has thwarted you in every wish of your heart; with what depth of secret enmity she has at all times, and in all places, cherished your foes, and injured all who were most dear to you! and wherefore, oh wherefore, my beloved mistress, wherefore should her course of action now be altered, when she has no longer a powerful queen with whom to strive, but rather a fugitive rival to oppress? Elizabeth of England—believe me, noble lady—has marked this crisis as it drew nigh, with that unerring instinct which directs the blood-raven to its destined victim while life yet revels in its veins; and surely, so surely as you enter her accursed eyry, shall you feel her vulture-talons busy about your heartstrings! For years, my noble mistress, has Herries been your servant; at council or in field, with ready hand and true word, has he ever served the Stuart. It becomes me not to boast, yet will I speak: when Seyton, and Ogilvy, and Huntley, were dismayed—whenHamilton himself hung back—Herries was ever nigh.”
“Ever, ever true and loyal!” cried the hapless queen, touched even beyond the consideration of her own calamities by the speech of the brave veteran—“my noble, noble Herries, and bitter, most bitter has been the reward of truth and valor; but so has it ever been with Mary. I tell thee, baron, for me to love a bird, a tree, a flower, much less a creature such as thou art, an honorable, upright, and devoted friend, was but that creature’s doom: all whom I have loved have I destroyed! Alas, alas for the undaunted spirits that were severed from the forms they filled so nobly, on that dark battle-field!”
“Think not of them, my liege—mourn not for them,” interrupted the baron. “Knightly, and in their duty, have they fallen. Their last blow was stricken, and their last slogan shouted, in a cause the fairest that ever hallowed warrior’s blade. They are at rest, and they are happy. But think of those who, having lost their earthly all to save thee, would yet esteem themselves pre-eminently happy so they might see thee free and in security. Oh! hear me, Mary—hear for the first, last time—hear the prayer of Herries! Go not, go not—as you love life, and dignity, and liberty—as you would prove your faith to those who have never been faithless to you—go not to this accursed England!”
But it had all been vain. The fiat had gone forth, and reason had deserted, as it would seem, the destined victim. No arguments, however lucid—no fears, however natural, could divert her from this fatal project. With the choice of good and evil fairly set before her—honor, and rank, and liberty, in France, a prison and an axe in England—deliberately and resolutely she rushed upon her fate! And when she might have found a willing asylum in the arms of kindred monarchs, she yielded herself to the tender mercies of a rival queen, a rival beauty; a fierce, unforgiving, unfeminine foe; a being who, asshe aped the name, so also displayed the attributes and nature of the lion! How could Mary—a professed foe, a claimant of her crown, a woman fairer, and of brighter parts even than her own—a mother, while she was but a barren stake—how could Mary, with so many causes to awaken her deathless hostility, hope for generosity or for mercy from a queen who could even sacrifice without a pang her inclinations to her interest; whose favors but marshalled those on whom they fell to the scaffold and the block; whose dearest favorites, whose most faithful servants had fallen, one by one, beneath the headsman’s axe; who had proved herself, in short, a worthy heiress to the soulless tyrant from whom she had sprung, by the violence of her uncurbed passions, and by the hereditary pleasure with which, through all her long and glorious reign (glorious, as it is termed, for with the multitude the ends will ever justify the means, and foreign conquest hallow domestic tyranny), she rioted in innocent and noble blood!
The Rubicon had been passed—and scarcely passed, before Mary had discovered the entire justice, no less than the deep love, manifested by the parting words of Herries. As her last sovereignty, she had stepped aboard the barge that was to waft her from her discontented and ungrateful subjects to a free and happy home, as she too fondly hoped, in merry England. Girt with the bills and bows which had battened so deeply and so often in the gore of Scottishmen, gallantly dressed, and himself of gallant bearing, Lowther, the sheriff of the marches, received the royal fugitive. With every mark of deference that manly strength is bound to show to female weakness, with all the chivalrous respect a good knight is compelled by his order to display to innocence and beauty—nay, more, with all the profound humility of a subject before his queen—did he conduct the hapless lady aboard his bark. Yet, while the words of welcome were upon his tongue, while he dwelt with loyal eagernesson the sincerity and love of England’s Elizabeth toward her sister-queen—by his refusal to admit above a limited and trifling portion of her train to share the asylum of their mistress, he had already drawn the distinction between the royal captive and the royal guest.
And so it afterward appeared. In vain did Mary petition as a favor, or claim as a right, an interview with her relentless persecutor. She should have known that even if Elizabeth could, by her constitution, have pardoned her assumption of the style or titles of the English monarchy, she could yet never overlook, never forgive her surpassing loveliness, her elegant accomplishments, her brilliant wit, her more than mortal grace! She might have condescended to despise the rival queen—she could only stoop to hate the rival beauty. From castle to castle had she been transferred, with no regard for either her rank or convenience. From prison to prison, from warder to warder, had she been conveyed, as each abode seemed in turn insecure to the lynx-eyed jealousy of her tormentor, or every jailer in turn sickened at the loathsome weariness of his hateful and degrading employment. No better proof—if proof were needed—could be adduced of Elizabeth’s tyrannical and cruel despotism, than the unconstitutional authority by which she forced noble after noble, the very pride and flower of the English aristocracy, to change their castles into prisonhouses, their households into warders and turnkeys, their very lives into a state of anxious misery, which could only be surpassed by that of the unhappy prisoner they were, so contrary to their will, compelled to guard.
After the base mockery of the trial instituted at York, but a few months after her arrival—that trial wherein a brother was brought forward to convict his sister of adultery and murder—that trial which, though it pronounced the prisoner unconvicted, yet inflicted on her all the penalties of conviction—it scarcelyappears that Mary ever entertained a hope of obtaining her liberty, much less the station which was her right, from either the justice or the generosity of the lion-queen. In vain had every course been tried, in vain had every human means been employed. In vain had Scotland sued; in vain had France and Spain threatened, and even prepared to act upon their threats. For Mary there was no amelioration, no change!
From day to day, from year to year, her hopes had fallen away one by one. Her spirits, so buoyant and elastic once, had now subsided into a heavy, settled gloom; her very charms were but a wreck and shadow of their former glory. For a time she had endeavored, by all those beautiful occupations of the pencil, the needle, or the lyre, in which none had equalled her in her young days of happiness, to while away the deep and engrossing weariness which by long endurance becomes even worse than pain. For a time she had been permitted to vary the monotony of her domestic labors by her favorite exercises in the field and forest. Surrounded by a train of mail-clad horsemen, warders with bended bows and loaded arquebuses, she had a few times been allowed to ride forth into the free woodland, and to forget, amid the gay sights and heart-stirring sounds of the chase, the cares that were heavy at her heart. But how should that heart forget, when at every turn it encountered the haggard eye of the anxious keeper—anxious, for the slightest relaxation of his duty were certain death! How should the ear thrill to the enlivening music of the pack, or to the wild flourish of the bugles, when the clash of steel announced on every side the minions of her oppressor? How should the gallop over the velvet turf, beneath the luxuriant shadow of the immemorial oaks, convey aught of freshness to the spirit that was about to return thence to chambers no less a dungeon for being decked with the mockeries of state, than though they had presented to the eye those common accessoriesof bar, and grate, and chain, which they failed not to set before the mind? After a while, even these liberties were curtailed! It seemed too much of freedom, that the titular sovereign of three realms—the cynosure of every eye, the beauty at whose very name every heart thrilled and every pulse bounded—should be permitted to taste the common air of heaven, even when hemmed in, without the possibility of escape, by guards armed to the teeth, and sworn to exercise those arms, not only against all who should attempt the rescue, but against the miserable captive herself, should she attempt to profit by any efforts made for her release!
And efforts were made—efforts by the best and noblest of the British peerage—by men whose names were almost sufficient to turn defeat to victory and shame to glory. Norfolk and Westmoreland, and a hundred others, of birth scarcely less distinguished, and of virtues no less brilliant, revolted from the soul-debasing despotism of Elizabeth, and attempted, now by secret stratagem, and now by open warfare, to force the victim from the clutches of the lion. With the deepest regret did Mary witness the destruction of so many noble spirits, and with yet deeper fury did Elizabeth behold star after star of her boasted galaxy of nobles shoot madly from their spheres in pursuit of a meteor. Bitter were her feelings, and deadly was her vengeance. The bloody reign of Mary might almost have been deemed to have returned, as day by day the death-bells tolled, as the traitor’s gate admitted another and another occupant to that above, whence the only egress was by the axe and scaffold. Nor was this all. A thousand wild and fearful rumors began to float among the multitude. The perils of a catholic insurrection, the intended assassination of the queen, the establishment of a papistical dynasty upon the throne of England, were topics of ordinary conversation, but of no ordinary excitement. At one time it was reported that a Spanish fleet wasactually in the channel; at another that the duke of Guise, with a vast army, had effected a landing on the Kentish coast, and might hourly be expected in the capital. Nor is it uncharitable to suppose that these reports were designedly spread abroad, this excitement purposely kept alive, by the wily ministers of Elizabeth. That the despot-queen had long ago determined on the slaughter of her rival, is certain; nor have we any just cause for doubting that Bacon and Walsingham were men as fully capable of goading the terrors of a multitude into fury as was their mistress of recommending the private murder of her hapless victim!
It was at this period that popular madness was raised to its utmost height by the detection of Babington’s conspiracy. Rich, young, brave, and romantic; stimulated by the hope of gaining the hand of Mary, forgetful that the personal loveliness for which she had once been conspicuous must long have yielded to the joint influence of misery and time; and deceived by the fatal maxim, then too much in vogue, that means are justified by ends—this gentleman resolved on bringing about the liberation of the Scottish by the murder of the English queen. The affair was not looked upon as so atrocious, but that twelve associates were easily found for the execution of the plot; and it is barely possible that, had they proceeded at once to action, their desperate effort might have been crowned with success. They delayed—they talked—they were discovered! Beneath the protracted agonies of the question, one was found of these convicted traitors who asserted the privity of Mary to the whole affair; and at once, as though a torch had been applied to some train long prepared, the whole of England burst forth into a perfect frenzy of terror. A people are never so terrible, never so barbarous, as when they are thoroughly and needlessly terrified. From every quarter of the kingdom the cry was at once for blood; and Elizabeth, looking in cool delight upon the tumult, perceivedthat the moment had arrived when she might gratify, without fear, her jealous thirst for her hated guest’s destruction. Addresses showered into either house of parliament, beseeching the queen and her ministers to awaken themselves at once to the perils of the people; to provide against the impended dangers of a catholic succession; and to remove at once all possibility of future conspiracies by the immediate removal of her who was, as they asserted, not the cause only, but the principal mover of every successive plot.
It is not to be supposed that, after pining so long in secret for an opportunity of gratifying her malice, Elizabeth doubted an instant. It is true indeed that, with a loathsome affectation of tender-heartedness, she pretended to regret the stern necessity; that she whined forth doleful remonstrances to her trusty ministers, entreating them to discover some mode by which she might herself be preserved from the risk of assassination, without undergoing the misery of seeing her well-beloved cousin of Scotland suffer in her stead! Well, however, did those ministers know the meaning of the motives of their odious mistress; well were they aware that there was no more of pity or reluctance in the bosom of Elizabeth than there is of mirth in that of the hyena when he sends forth his yells of laughter above his mangled prey!
It was a lovely morning in the autumn; the sun was shedding a mellow light upon the long glades and velvet turf of a park-like lawn before the feudal towers of the earl of Shrewsbury. Before the gate were assembled a group of liveried domestics, with many a noble steed pawing the earth and champing its foamy bits; hounds clamored in their couples, and falcons shook themselves and clapped their restless wings in vain impatience. It was evident that the attendants were but awaiting the approach of some distinguished personage, to commence their sports; and by their whispered conversation it appearedthat this personage was no other than the wretched Mary. The castle-gates were thrown open; a heavy guard, with arquebuss, and pike, and bow, filed through the gloomy gateway; and then, leaning upon the arm of the still stately Shrewsbury, the poor victim of inveterate persecution came slowly forward. Several gentlemen in rich attire, and among them Sir Thomas Georges, blazing in the royal liveries of England, yet bearing on his soiled buskins and the bloody spurs that graced them tokens of a long and hasty journey, followed; and another band of warders brought up the rear.
The charms which had once rendered Mary the loveliest of her sex, had faded, it is true; the dimpled cheek was sunken, and its hues, that once had vied with the carnation, had fled for ever; her tresses were no longer of that rich and golden brown that had furnished subjects for a thousand sonnets, for many a line of gray marked the premature and wintry blight which had been cast upon her beauties by the sternness and misery of her latter years. Still, there was an air of such sweet resignation in every feature, such a dignity in the port of her person—still symmetrical, though it had lost something of its roundness—such a majesty in her still-brilliant eyes—that even the wretches who had determined on her destruction dared not meet the glance of her whom they so foully wronged.
She was already seated in the saddle, and the reins just grasped in a delicate but masterly hand, when Georges, stepping forward and bending a knee—almost, as it would seem, in mockery—informed her that her confederates in the meditated slaughter of Elizabeth were convicted; that it was the pleasure of the queen that her grace of Scotland should proceed at once to the sure castle of Fotheringay, and that it was resolved that she should set forth upon the instant. For a moment, but for a single moment, did Mary gaze into the eyes of the courtly speaker, with a gaze of incredulity, almost of terror;a quick shudder ran through every limb; and once she wrung her hands bitterly—but not a word escaped her pallid lips, not a tear disgraced her noble race.
“It is well, sir,” she said, “it is well. We thank you, no less for your pleasant tidings, than the knightly considerations which prompted you to choose so well your opportunity for conveying them to our ear when we were about to set forth in search of such brief pleasure as might for a moment gild the monotony of a prisoner’s life! We thank you, sir, most warmly, and we doubt not your own noble heart will reward you by that best of gifts, a happy and approving conscience! For the rest—lead on! it matters little to the wretched and the captive by what title the prison-bars, which shut them out from light, and liberty, and hope, are dignified; and well do we know that for us there is but one exit from our dungeon, or rest from our calamities—the grave!”
She had commenced her speech in that tone of calm and polished raillery for which she had in her earlier days been so renowned, and which even pierced deeper into the feelings of those who writhed beneath it than the most bitter sarcasm; but her concluding sentences were uttered with deep feeling: and, as she turned her liquid eyes toward heaven, it seemed most wonderful that men should exist capable of exciting a single pang in the heart of such a creature.
The gates of Fotheringay received her; and, as she rode beneath the gloomy archway, a prophetic chill fell upon her soul, and she felt that here her wanderings and her sorrows would shortly be brought to a close! Scarcely had she reached the miserable privacy of her chamber, when steps were heard without. Mildmay, Paulet, and Barker, entered, and delivering a letter full of hypocritical regrets and feigned affection, informed her that the queen’s commissioners were even then assembled in the castle-hall, and prayed the lady Mary to descend andrefute the foul charges preferred against her name.
Enfeebled as she had been by sufferings and sorrows, wearied by her long and rapid journey, and, above all things, crushed by this last blow, it little seemed that so frail and delicate a form could have contained a soul so mighty as flashed forth in one blaze of indignation. Her pale cheek crimsoned, her sunken eye glared with unwonted fire; she started upon her feet, her limbs trembling, not with terror or debility, but with strong and terrible excitement.
“Knows not your mistress,” she cried, in clear, high tones, “that I, too, am a queen? or would she knowingly debase the dignity which is common to her with me? Away! I will not deign to plead! I—I, the queen of Scotland, the mother and the wife of kings—I plead to mine inferiors? Go tell your mistress that neither eighteen years of vile captivity, nor dread, nor misery, has sunk the soul of Mary Stuart so low, that she will speak one syllable to guard her life, save in the presence of her peers! Let her assemble her high courts of parliament, if she so will it: to them, and to them only, will I plead. Here she may slay me, it is true; but she must slay me by the assassin’s knife, not by the prostituted sword of justice. I have spoken!”—and she threw herself at once into a seat, immoveable alike in position and in resolve.
Well had it been for her had she continued firm in that determination; but what could a weak woman’s unassisted intellect avail against the united force of talents such as those of Hatton and Burleigh? A thousand specious arguments were summoned to overcome her scruples, but summoned all in vain, till the last hint—that her unwillingness to plead could arise only from a consciousness of guilt—aroused her. Pride, fatal pride, determined the debate, and she descended. Eloquently, sorrowfully, manfully, did she plead her cause, combating the vile chicaneries, the extorted evidences, the absence or thewant of legal witnesses, with the native powers of a clear and vigorous mind. Once during that judicial mockery did her passions burst the control of her judgment, and she openly, in full court, charged the secretary, Walsingham—and, as many now believe, most justly charged him—with the forgery of the only documents that bore upon her character, or on the case in point. But all was fruitless! For what eloquence should convince men resolved in any circumstances to convict? what facts should clear away the imputed guilt of one whom it was fully determined to destroy?
The trial was concluded. With the air of a queen she stood erect, with a calm brow and serene eye, as the commissioners departed, one by one. No doom had been pronounced against her, but she read it in the eyes of all; and as she saw her misnamed judges quit her presence, she muttered, in the low notes of a determined spirit: “The tragedy is well nigh closed—the last act is at hand! Peace—peace—I soon shall find thee in the grave.”
“Still as the lips that’s closed in death,Each gazer’s bosom held his breath;But yet afar, from man to man,A cold, electric shiver ran,As down the deadly blow descended,On her whose love and life thus ended.”—Parisina.
“Still as the lips that’s closed in death,Each gazer’s bosom held his breath;But yet afar, from man to man,A cold, electric shiver ran,As down the deadly blow descended,On her whose love and life thus ended.”—Parisina.
“Still as the lips that’s closed in death,Each gazer’s bosom held his breath;But yet afar, from man to man,A cold, electric shiver ran,As down the deadly blow descended,On her whose love and life thus ended.”—Parisina.
Itwas a dark, but lovely night; moonless, but liquid and transparent; the stars which gemmed the firmament glittered more brightly from the absence of the mightier planet, and from the influence of a slight degree of frost upon the atmosphere, although it was indeed so slight, that its presence could be traced only in the crispness of the herbage, and in the uncommon purity of the heavens. Beneath a sky such as I have vainly endeavored to portray, the towers of Fotheringay rose black and dismal above the ancestral oaks and sweeping glades of its demesne. It would have appeared to a casual observer that all were at rest, buried in utter forgetfulness of all their hopes and sorrows, within that massive pile, save the lonely sentinel, whose progress round the battlements, although invisible, might be traced by the clatter of his harness, and the sullen echoes of his steel-shod stride. But to a nearer and more accurate survey, a single light, feebly twinkling through a casement of the dungeon-keep, told a far different tale. At times that solitary ray streamed in unbroken lines far into the bosom of the darkness; at times it was momentarily obscured, as if by the passage of some opaque body, though the transit, if such it were, was too brief to reveal the form or motions of the obstacle. Once, however, the shadow paused, and then, as its outlines stood forth in strong relief against the illumination of the chamber, the delicate proportions and musing attitude of a femalemight be discerned with certainty. It was the queen of Scotland. Her earthly sorrows were drawing to their close; the peace, for which she had long ceased to look, save in the silence of the tomb, was now within her grasp. Mary’s last sun had set.
Of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death—the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard—dark, mysterious, unknown death—had become to her an intimate, and, as it were, familiar friend. It was not that she had lessoned her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with the stoic’s apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing contact with this world’s idols, must seem a punishment secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. Born to a station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality, she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled, that the very qualities which should have ministered to her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery and pain. Attached to her native land with the Switzer’s patriotism, she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and hatred. Full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head; or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal ofbenefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed. If the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered worshippers. She had been led step by step from the keenest enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth; she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to languish for a second draught. Yet there was nothing of resentment, nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings with which she looked back on the world and its adorers. She did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears and of the shadow of death, had been a region of perpetual sunshine and unclouded happiness.
From Mary’s earliest years there had been a deep spring of piety in her heart which, never utterly dried up, though choked at times, and turned from its true course by the thorny cares and troubles of life, had burst from the briers which so long concealed it in redoubled purity as it flowed nearer to the close. There was an innate tenderness in all her sentiments toward all men and all things which could never degenerate into hatred, much less into misanthropy. She looked then upon life in its true light; as a mingled landscape, now obscured by clouds, now called into glory by the sunshine; as a region, tangled here with forests, and cumbered with barren rocks, there swelling into hills of vintage, or subsiding into glens of verdure. And if to her the landscape had been most viewed beneath the influence of a dark and threatening sky—if to her life’s path had lain, for the most part, through the wilderness and over the mountains—she knew that such was the result of her own misfortune, perhaps of her own misconduct, not of defect in the wonderful contrivance, or of improvidence in the all-glorious contriver.
In proportion as she had learned to dwell on the insufficiency of earthly good to satiate that deep thirst for happiness which is not the least among the proofs of the soul’s immortality, she had come to look upon the void of futurity as the unexplored region of bliss; upon death as the portal through which we must pass from the desert of toil and sorrow to the Eden of hope and happiness. That she was drawing rapidly near to this portal she had for a long time been aware; and, during the latter years of her captivity, she had longed to see the leaves of that gate unfolded for her exit, with a sense of pining sickness, similar to that of the imprisoned eagle. The mockery of her trial she had beheld as the avenue through which she should arrive, and that right shortly, at the desired end; and although she knew that the scaffold and the axe, or the secret knife of the assassin, must need be the key to that gate, she recked but little of the means, so that the way of escape was left open to her.
She had pleaded, it is true, with brilliant eloquence and earnestness, in behalf, not of life, but of her honor. She wished for death, and she cared not for the vulgar ignominy of the scaffold; but she did care, she did shrink from the ignominy of a condemnation—a condemnation not by the suborned commissioners, not by the jealous rival, not by the perjured and terror-stricken populace of the day, but by Time and by Eternity. This was the condemnation from which she shrank; this was the ignominy which she combated; this was the doomwhich, by the masterly and dauntless efforts of her unassisted woman heart, she turned not only from herself, but back upon her murderers.
From the departure of the commissioners, she had been convinced that she was hovering as it were on the confines of life and immortality. Happy and calm herself, she had labored to render calm and happy the little group of friends—for domestics when faithful, are friends—who still preserved their allegiance. She craved no more the wanderings in the green-wood; she had even refused to join in her once-loved sports of field and forest, which, denied to her when she would have grasped the boon, were freely proffered now, as though her enemies, with a far-reaching malignity that would stretch its arm beyond the grave, had wished to reawaken in her bosom that love for things of this life which had sunk to sleep, and to sharpen the bitterness of death by the added tortures of regret. If such, indeed, were their intentions—and who shall presume to judge?—their barbarity was frustrated; and if they indeed envied their poor victim the miserable consolation of passing cheerfully and in peace from the sphere of her sorrows, we may be assured that the frustration of their wicked views was sufficient punishment to them while here, and none can even dare to conjecture what will be their doom hereafter.
This night had brought at length the balm to all her cares—the restless eagerness to be assured of that which was to come was over—the goal was reached, the gates were half-unclosed, and, to her enthusiastic and poetical imagination, the hymns and harpings of expectant seraphs seemed to pour in their soothing chimes, whispering of peace, pardon, and beatitude for evermore between the parted portals. With a bigotry, which in these days of universal toleration it is equally difficult to conceive or to condemn sufficiently, it was denied to the departing sinner—for who that is most perfect here is other thana sinner—to enjoy the consolations of a priest of her own persuasion. A firm and conscientious, though not a bigoted catholic, it was a cruelty of the worst and most outrageous nature, to deny her that which she deemed of the highest importance to her eternal welfare, and which they could not deem prejudicial, without being themselves victims of a superstition so slavish as to disprove their participation in a faith which boasts itself no less a religion of freedom than of truth.
Steadily refusing the aid of the protestant divines, who harassed her with an assiduity that spoke more of polemical pride than of Christian sincerity, she had performed her orisons with deep devotion, and had arisen from their performance assured of forgiveness, confident in her own repentance, and in the mercy of Him who alone is perfect; in peace and charity even with her direst foes, and happy in the anticipation of the morrow. She had sat down to her last earthly meal with an appetite unimpaired by the knowledge that it was to be her last; she had conversed cheerfully, gayly, with her weeping friends; she had drunk one cup of wine to their health and happiness, and, in token of her own gratitude, to each she had distributed some little pledge of her affectionate regard; and then—amid the notes of dreadful preparation, the creaking of saws and the clang of hammers, busily converting the castle-hall into a place of slaughter, as it had been not long before a place of misnamed justice—she had sunk to sleep so calmly, and slumbered on with a countenance so moveless in its innocent repose, and with a bosom so regular in its healthful pulsations, that her admiring ladies began to look on her as one about to start upon a pleasant voyage to the harbor of all her wishes, rather than as one about to perish by a cruel and ignominious death on the scaffold. Hours flew over the lovely sleeper, and the eyes of her watchers waxed heavier, till they wept themselves to sleep; and one—an aged woman, who had watched her infancy andgloried in the promise of her youth—after her eyes were sealed in sleep, yet continued, by the heavy sobs which burst from the lips of the slumberer, to manifest the extent of that misery which abode in all its vividness within the mind, although the body was wrapt in that state which men have called oblivion.
Such had been the state of things in Mary’s chamber from the first close of evening to the dead hour of midnight; but ere the east had begun again to redden with the returning glories of its luminary, sleep, which still sat leadlike on the eyelids of her attendants, forsook the hapless sovereign. Silently she arose, and, throwing a single garment carelessly about her person, passed from her sleeping-apartment into a little oratory adjoining, without disturbing from her painful slumbers one of those faithful beings to whom the distinct consciousness of waking sorrow must have been yet more painfully acute.
Here, as with a quick but regular step she traversed the narrow turret, she viewed as it were in the space of a single hour the crowded events of a life which, unnaturally shortened as it was about to be, yet contained naught of remote and rare occurrence, but in rapid and complete succession—those events which make an epoch and an era of every hour, and lengthen years of time into ages of the mind.
Calmly, piously, without a shade of sorrow for the past or of solicitude for the future, save that mysterious and yet natural anxiety which must haunt every mind, however well prepared to endure its final separation from the body, as the hour of dissolution approaches, did she expect the morning. This anxiety and this alone was blended with the various feelings which coursed through the soul of Mary during this the last night of her existence.
It was in such a frame of mind that Mary, in the solitude of that last earthly night, diverting her attention entirely from the terrible shock she was about to undergo on the morrow, thoughtupon her native land, still dear though still ungrateful, a prey to the fierce contentions of her own factious offspring—of her son, torn at the earliest dawn of his affections from the arms of a mother, nurtured among those who would teach him to eradicate every warmer recollection—to pluck forth, as if it were an offending eye, every lingering tenderness for that being, who, amid all her sins and all her sorrows, had never ceased to love him with an entire and perfect love. There is, in truth, something more evidently divine, partaking more nearly of that which we believe to be the very essence of Divinity, in a mother’s love, than in any other pang or passion—for every passion, how sweet soever it may be, has something of a pang mingled with it—in the human soul. All other love is liable to diminution, to change, or to extinction; all other love may be alienated by the neglect, chilled by the coldness, frozen to the core by the worthlessness, of the object once beloved. All other affections are influenced by a thousand trivial circumstances of time and place: absence may weaken their influence, time obscure their vividness, and, above all, custom may rob them of their value. But on the love of a mother—commencing as it does before the object of her solicitude possesses form or being; springing from agony and sorrow; ripening in anxiety and care, and reaping too often the bitter harvest of ingratitude—all incidental causes, all external influences, are powerless and vain. Time but excites her admiration, but increases her solicitude, but redoubles her affections. Absence but causes her to dwell with a more engrossing memory on him from whom her heart is never absent. Custom but hallows the sentiment to which nature has given birth. Neglect and coldness but cause her to strain every nerve to merit more and more the poor return of filial love—the solitary aim of her existence, if heartlessly denied to her. Nay, worthlessness itself but binds her more closely to him whom the hard world has cast aside, to finda refuge in the only bosom which will not perceive his errors or credit his utter destitution.
Thus it was with Mary! She knew that the child of her affections regarded those affections as vile and worthless weeds! She knew that he was selfish, vain, and heartless! She knew that a single word from that child whom she still adored—if conveyed to her persecutor in the strong language of sincerity and earnestness—if borne, not by a fawning courtier, but by one of those high spirits which Scotland has found ever ready to her need—if enforced by threats of instant war—would have broken her fetters in a moment, and conveyed her from the dungeons of Fotheringay to the courts of Holyrood! All this she knew, yet her heart would not know it! And when all Europe rang with curses on the unnatural vacillation of that son; when every Scottish heart, whatever might be its policy or its party, despised his abject cringing; while Elizabeth herself, while she flattered his vanity, and affected to honor and esteem his virtue, scoffed in her royal privacy at the tool she designed to use in public—Mary alone, Mary, the only sufferer and victim of his baseness, still clung to the idea of his worth, still adored the child who was driving her out, as the scape-goat of the Jews, to expiate the sins of himself and his people by her own destruction! But it was not on James alone that her wayward memory was fixed. At a time when any soul less dauntless, any spirit less exalted, would have failed beneath its load of sorrows, Mary had a fond regret, a tear of sorrow, a sigh of sincere gratitude, for every gallant life that had devoted itself to ward from her that fate which their united loyalty had availed only to defer, not to avert. Chastelar passed before her, with his tones of sweetest melancholy, and that unutterable love, which made him invoke blessings on her who had doomed him to the block: and Darnley, as he had seemed in the few short hours when he had been, when he had deservedto be, the idol of her heart: and Bothwell, the eloquent, the glorious, but guilty Bothwell, her ruin and her betrayer: and Douglas, the noble, hapless Douglas, he who had riven the bolts of Loch Leven, and sent her forth to a short freedom and worse captivity: Huntley, and Hamilton, and Seyton, and Kirkaldy, the most formidable of her foes until he became the firmest of her friends—all passed in sad review before the eyes of her entranced imagination.
Thus it was that the last queen of Scotland passed the latest night of her existence. With no consciousness of time, with no care for the present, no apprehension for the future, she had paced the narrow floor of her apartment during the still hours of midnight. Unperceived by her had the stars paled, then vanished from the brightening firmament; unseen had the first dappling of the east gone into the clear, cold light of a wintry morning; unheeded had the castle clock sent forth its giant echoes hour after hour, to be heard by every watcher over leagues of field and forest. Another sound rose heavily, and she was at once collected—time, place, and circumstances, flashed fully on her mind—she was prepared to meet them: it was the roar of the morning culverin; and scarcely had its deafening voice passed over, before a single bell, hoarse, slow, and solemn, pealed minute after minute, the signal of her approaching dissolution.
Calmly, as if she were about to prepare for some gay festival, she turned to the apartment where her ladies, overdone by wo and watching, yet slumbered, forgetful of the dread occasion.
“Arise,” she said, in sweet, low tones; “arise, my girls, and do your last of duties for the mistress ye have served so well! Nay, start not up so wildly, nor blush that ye have slept while we were watching. Dear girls, the time has come—the time for which my soul so long has thirsted. Array me, then, as toa banquet, a glorious banquet of immortality! See,” she continued, scattering her long locks over her shoulders—“see, they were bright of yore as the last sunbeam of a summer day, yet I am prouder of them now, with their long streaks of untimely snow—for they now tell a tale of sorrows, borne as it becomes a queen to bear them. Braid them with all your skill, and place yon pearls around my velvet head-gear. We will go forth to die, clad as a bride; and now methinks the queen of France and Scotland owns but a single robe of fair device. Bring forth our royal train and broidered farthingale: it fits us not to die with our limbs clad in the garb of mourning, when Heaven knows that our heart is clothed in gladness!”
Tearless, while all around were drowned in lamentations, she strove to cheer them to the performance of this last sad office—not with the commonplace assurances, the miserable resources of earthly consolation, much less with aught of heartless levity, or of that unfeeling parade which has so often adorned the scaffold with a jest, and concealed the anxiety of a heart ill at ease beneath the semblance of ill-timed merriment—but by suffering them to read her inmost soul; by showing them the true position of her existence; by pointing out to them the actual hardships of the body, and the yet deeper humiliations of the soul, from which the door of her escape was even now unclosing.
Scarcely had she completed her attire, and tasted of the consecrated wafer—long ago procured from the holy Pius, and preserved for this extremity—when the tread of many feet without, and a slight clash of weapons at the door of the ante-chamber, announced that the hour had arrived.
Once and again, ere she gave the signal to unclose the door, she embraced each one of her attendants. “Dear, faithful friends, adieu, adieu,” she said, “for ever; and now remember, remember the last words of Mary. Weep not for me, and, ifye love me, shake not my steadfastness, which, thanks to Him who is the Father and the Friend of the afflicted, the fear of death can not shake, by useless fear or lamentation. We would die as a martyr cheerfully, as a queen nobly! Fare ye well, and remember!” With an air of royal dignity she seated herself, and, with her maidens standing around her chair, she bore the mien of a high sovereign awaiting the arrival of some proud legation, rather than that of a captive awaiting a summons to the block. “And now,” she said, as she arranged her draperies with dignified serenity, “admit their envoy.”
The doors were instantly thrown open as she spoke, the sheriff uttered his ordinary summons, and without a shudder she rose. “Lead on,” she said; “we follow thee more joyously than thou, methinks, canst marshal us. Sir Amias Paulet, lend us thine arm; it fits us not that we proceed, even to the death, without some show of courtesy. Maidens, bear up our train; and now, sir, we are ready.”
But a heavier trial than the axe awaited the unhappy sovereign; for as she set her foot on the first step of the stairs, Melville, her faithful steward, flung himself at her feet, with almost girlish wailings. Friendly and familiarly she raised him from the ground. “Nay, sorrow not for me,” she said, “true friend. Subject for sorrow there is none, unless thou grievest that Mary is set free—that for the captive’s weeds she shall put on a robe of immortality, and, for a crown of earthly misery, the glory of beatitude.”
“Alas! alas! God grant that I may die, rather than look upon this damned deed.”
“Nay, live, good Melville, for my sake live; commend me to my son, and say to him, Mary’s last thoughts on earth were given to France and Scotland, her last but these to him: say, that she died unshaken in her faith to God, unswerving in her courage, confident in her reward. Farewell, true servant, takefrom the lips of Mary the last kiss that mortal e’er shall take of them, and fare thee well for ever.”
At this moment the earl of Kent stepped forward, and roughly bade her dismiss her women also, “for the present matter tasked other ministers than such as these.” For a moment she condescended to plead that they might be suffered to attend her to the last; but when she was again refused, her ancient spirit flashed out in every tone, as she cried, trumpet-like and clear, “Proud lord, beware! I too am cousin to your queen—I too am sprung from the high-blood of England’s royalty—I too am an anointed queen. I say thou shalt obey, and these shall follow their mistress to the death, or with foul violence shall they force me thither. Beware! beware, I say, how thou shalt answer doing me this dishonor!”
Her words prevailed. Without a shudder she descended, entered the fatal hall, looked with an air of smiling condescension, almost of pity, on the spectators crowded almost to suffocation, and, mounting the scaffold, stood in proud and abstracted unconcern, while, in the measured sounds of a proclamation, the warrant for her death was read beside her elbow.
The bishop of Peterborough then drew nigh, and, in a loud voice and inflated style, harassed her ears with an oration, which, whatever might have been its merits, was at that time but a barbarous and useless outrage.
“Trouble not yourself,” she broke in at length, disgusted with his intemperate eloquence, “trouble not yourself any more about this matter, for I was born in this religion, I have lived in this religion, and in this religion I am resolved to die.” Turning suddenly aside, as if determined to hear no further, she knelt apart, fervently prayed, and repeatedly kissed the sculptured image which she bore of Him who died to save. As she arose from her orisons, the earl of Kent, her constant and unrelenting persecutor, with heartless cruelty burst into loudrevilings against “that popish trumpery” which she adored. “Suffer me now,” she said, gazing on him with an expression of beautiful resignation, that might have disarmed the malice of a fiend, “suffer me now to depart in peace. I have come hither, not to dispute on points of doctrine, but to die.”
Without another word she began to disrobe herself; but once, as her maidens hung weeping about her person, she laid her finger on her lips, and repeated emphatically the word “Remember.” And once again, as the executioner would have lent his aid to remove her upper garments, “Good friend,” she said, with a smile of ineffable sweetness, “we will dispense with thine assistance. The queen of Scotland is not wont to be disrobed before so many eyes, nor yet by varlets such as thou.”
All now was ready. The lovely neck was bared. The wretch who was to perform the deed of blood stood grasping the fatal axe, and the fierce earl of Kent beat the ground with his heel in savage eagerness. Without a sigh she knelt; without a sign of trepidation, a quicker heave of her bosom, or a brighter flush on her brow, she laid down her innocent head, and without a struggle, or convulsion of her limbs, as the axe flashed, and the life-blood spouted, did her spirit pass away.
A general burst of lamentation broke the silence; but amidst that burst the heavy stride of Kent was heard, as he sprang upon the scaffold, and raised the ghastly visage, the eyes yet twinkling, and the lips quivering in the death-struggle. A single voice, that of the zealot bishop, cried aloud, “Thus perish all the foes of Queen Elizabeth.” But ere the response had passed the lips of Kent, a shriller cry rang through the hall—the sharp yell of a small greyhound, the fond companion of the queen’s captivity. Bursting from the attendants, who vainly strove to hold her back, with a short, sharp cry she dashed full at the throat of the astonished earl; but ere he could movea limb the danger, if danger there were, was passed. The spirit was too mighty for the little frame. The energies of the faithful animal were exhausted, its heart broken, in that death-spring. It struck the headless body of its mistress as it fell, and in an agony of tenderness, died licking the hand that had fed and cherished it so long. Wonderful, that when all men had deserted her, a brute should be found so constant in its pure allegiance! And yet more wonderful, that the same blow should have completed the destiny of the two rival sovereigns! and yet so it was! The same axe gave the death-blow to the body of the Scottish, and to the fame of the English queen! The same stroke completed the sorrows of Mary, and the infamy of Elizabeth.