MARY STUART

CHAPTER XXXII.

SUMMARY

Queen Mary confides her son to the care of the Earl of Mar-Sends the royal babe to Stirling Castle-Her maternal care for his comforts-Lennox renews his correspondence with her, having first written to Queen Elizabeth-He requires Mary to prosecute Bothwell, and the others denounced in the placards-Queen accedes to his request-Mary attends the mass for her husband's soul, and the midnight dirge-Her broken health and profound melancholy-She is suspected of her husband's murder-Political caricatures and libels disseminated-Her distressBothwell demands a trial-Moray quits Scotland-His treacherous conduct-Queen Mary required by Lennox and Queen Elizabeth to postpone Bothwell's trial-Impossibility of doing so-Contemptuous treatment of Queen Elizabeth's messenger by Lethington and BothwellArchbishop Beton's letter-Alarming hint from the Spanish ambassador of some treasonable enterprise against Queen Mary-Bothwell's trial and acquittal-He sets up a cartel offering to maintain his innocence by single combat-Lennox asks leave of the Queen to quit Scotland-She grants his request.-Contemporary English ballad on the death of Darnley.

QUEEN MARY remained in Edinburgh Castle from the 7th till the 9th of March, on which day she returned to her retreat at Seton with her Court.1 Her attention was at this time occupied in providing a protector and secure asylum for her infant son. The person on whom her choice naturally fell was the Earl of Mar, her former preceptor, and the son of one of her own trusty lord-keepers, the late Lord Erskine, who had guarded her, in her orphaned infancy and helpless childhood, alike from the attempts of her cruel uncle of England and his secret-service-men among her

1 Chalmers.

peers. The sons of Mary's lord-keepers, with the glorious exception of Lord Livingstone, were, unfortunately for her, men of different mettle from their sires. But, incapable of baseness herself, her generous nature forbade her to suspect treachery in those whom the ties of friendship and gratitude for benefits received, as well as loyalty and honour, ought to have bound indissolubly to her service. The Countess of Mar, whom she had already appointed governess or lady-mistress to the Prince, was her confidential friend; the Earl she had been accustomed to love and obey with filial reverence from her earliest remembrance; nor had his change of creed, and transformation from an ecclesiastic in the Church of Rome to a lay peer of Parliament and a married man, in aught abated her regard for him. She had permitted him to forsake the stole for the ermine, the cross for the sword-assisted in belting him an earl, and placed a coronet with her own hand on his shaven head, not making her opinion a rule for his in modes of faith, but allowing him that freedom of conscience she claimed for herself. It was to this nobleman, then a professed Protestant, that Mary Stuart confided the care and tuition of her only child, till he should attain the age of seventeen years. She must have been fully aware, when she did this, that her boy would be bred up in the principles of the Reformation, and the fact is indicative of the enlightened views she had formed on the subject. It was desirable that the Sovereign should be of the national religion; she had felt the evils of having been educated in a different faith from that established in her realm. She would not-she dared not-make merchandise of her religion by changing it to escape persecution, or to promote her temporal interests; but she proved her willingness that her son should be allowed the privilege of being very fully instructed in the doctrines and practice of the Protestant Church, by consigning him to the tuition of one of the Lords of the Congregation. It was her wish to deliver this precious charge to Mar with her own hands, and she wrote to him to meet her at Linlithgow for that purpose; but he excused himself under

the plea that he was confined to his bed, and unable to undertake the journey. 1 She therefore sent the Prince to Stirling, March 19, under the care of her brotherin-law, the Earl of Argyll, and the Earl of Huntley, by whom he was safely conveyed, sleeping one night on the road, and was by them consigned to the Earl of Mar on the 20th, in all due form. 2

Mary's resolution of confiding her son to the care of the Earl of Mar, appears to have been dictated by the purest feelings of maternal love, and solicitude for the safety, health, and weal of the babe. Stirling Castle had been her own salubrious nursery from her ninth month till she was five years old. Her earliest and happiest recollections were associated with her residence there, and with her visits to Inchmahome, of which John Erskine, her preceptor, this very Earl of Mar, was then the Prior. In placing her son with him, she fondly thought to secure for that dear one a series of those blessed days of peace and joy which never could return to her.

Although it was the custom of the Sovereign of Scotland, from the earliest period when oral chronicles assume the form of history, to consign the heir of the realm for nurture and education to the care of some great nobleman, who, as in the case of the representative of the house of Erskine, claimed the custody of the princely child by hereditary right, derived from a long line of ancestors, nothing but the alarm the mysterious tragedy of his father's murder had excited, would probably have induced the royal mother to deprive herself of the solace of watching over the daily improving beauty and intelligence of her lovely boy. The day she parted with him he completed his ninth month. How dire must have been the necessity that induced her, fond as she was of children, to send her first-born from her

1 Buchanan.

2 Mary has been accused by Buchanan and his copyists of bartering the custody of the Prince to Mar, in exchange for the surrender of Edinburgh Castle, in order to make Bothwell captain of that royal fortress before his trial; but this, like all the rest of the charges he has brought against his benefactress, is a perversion of facts. The custody of Edinburgh Castle was not intrusted to Bothwell by the Queen, but to Sir James Cockburn, the Laird of Skarling, and finally to Sir James Balfour.

at that charming period of infancy, when smiles and dimples are most attractive, and the mute language of affection is eloquently expressed in the beaming eyes, the outstretched arms, and the soft panting of the guileless breast that flutters with delight at the greeting of maternal love. Four days only after the departure of her boy, Mary, whose heart was still with him, and mindful of all his little wants, drew up the following "Memorandum for my Lord Prince:"

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Item, of Holland cloth, lx ells; of white Spanish taffaty, x ells; white armosie taffaty, vi ells; white Florence ribbons, lxxx ells; white knittings, lx ells. Item, of small Lyncum twine, xvi ounce ; one stick of white buckram, and one stick of fine cameraige [cambric]. "1

The following quaint note is subjoined :--

"Maister Robert Richertsoun, Thesaurer, ye sall not fail to answer Madame de Mar of this foresaid gear, ye keeping this precept for your warrant. Subscrivit with our hand. At Edinburgh, the xxiij day of March 1566-7. 66 MARIE R." 2

Attached to the memorandum of necessaries for the Prince appear two items for the use of the royal mother; viz., xxiiii papers of prenis (black pins) for the Queen's Grace's dule; also xii ells of small linen, to be foot polkis to the Queen's Grace." 3 So Mary's feet were cold of nights, it should seem, and she slept with them in bags or pokes. In the same month of March, her Majesty, when looking over the furniture of her Chapel-Royal with the officers of her wardrobe stores, ordered one of the rich copes and four tunicles of cloth-ofgold to be made into the hangings and curtains of a bed for her baby boy. Womanlike, she beguiled her regal cares and personal woes by superintending the cutting and contriving these consecrated vestments for the new purpose to which she thought proper to appropriate them. She bestowed, at the same time, three priest's copes on that perverse heretic, the Earl of Bothwell; and this is the only authentic record of any gift she ever presented to him, with the exception of the dress she provided for his livery at the christening of the

1 See Royal Wardrobe Inventories-Diurnal of Occurrents.

2 From the inedited precepts in the general Register House, Edinburgh. 3 Ibid.

Prince; 1 but then, as she gave the like to the Earls of Moray and Argyll, no inference of her favour can be drawn from that circumstance in which the other two might not as fairly be included. It is worthy of remark, that neither portrait, ring, locket, nor any other token of regard of or from Bothwell, can be traced among her jewels. Miniatures and portraits of her first dearly-loved and ever-regretted consort, Francis II., she fondly preserved, till they were torn from her, among her other little relics, by the pitiless commissioners for her last spoliation at Chartley, when it was discovered that she had treasured with no less care several miniatures of her "late lord, King Henry," as she always styled Darnley. One of these was set in a folding frame of gold, in the form of a book, with her own picture and that of the Prince their son between them. Is it possible that any woman who had been consenting to the murder of her husband, would have annoyed herself, in her long years of captivity, sickness, and sorrow, by contemplating his likeness and that of their boy, thus united? Does not the very circumstance witness that her conscience regarding Darnley was free from reproach, that her reconciliation with him at Glasgow had been perfect and sincere, and all remembrance of his trespasses against her blotted out by sorrow for his calamitous death, and that she cherished his memory and contemplated his features with no less tenderness than she dwelt on those of her son, sole pledge of their ill-fated loves?

But to return to the regular order of the narrative. After an interval of sixteen days, Lennox resumed his correspondence with his royal daughter-in-law,2 declaring his suspicions of Bothwell and several other persons, whose names had

1 Including three-quarters of an ell of rayed cloth-of-silver, to cover the shoes he was to wear on that occasion.-Treasury Accounts.

2 This letter, dated March 17th, she could not have received earlier than the 18th, or possibly the 19th, the day she sent the infant Prince to Stirling. Her arrangements with the Earl of Mar for confiding that important charge to his safe keeping, and receiving the surrender of the Castle of Edinburgh, which Mar had illegally obtained during the troubles of her late mother the Queen-Regent, had been made several days previously to the date of Lennox's letter, and could have no reference to any measure resulting from it. Laing's inferences on the subject of Bothwell's trial are consequently incorrect.