'And now to conclude all this; notwithstanding, not CHAP X meaning to make a Lent of Christmas, the most part of 1567 you may assure yourselves that you depart in your prince's grace. 'My Lord Keeper you will do as I bid you.' Again Bacon rose and in a loud voice said, Queen's Majesty doth dissolve this Parliament. every man depart at his pleasure.' January "The Dissolution Let ment. Elizabeth swept away in the gloom, passed to her barge, and returned to the palace. The Lords and Commons scattered through the English counties, and five years went by, before another Parliament met again at Westminster in a changed world. of Parlia England. On that evening the immediate prospect before Eng- Prospect of land was the Queen's marriage with an Austrian Catholic prince, the recognition more or less distant of the Catholic Mary Stuart as heir presumptive, the establishment with the support and sanction of the Catholic powers of some moderate form of government, under which the Catholic worship would be first tolerated and then creep on towards ascendancy. It might have ended, had Elizabeth been strong enough, in broad intellectual freedom; more likely it would have ended in the reappearance of the Marian fanaticism, to be encountered by passions as fierce and irrational as itself; and to the probable issue of that conflict conjecture fails to penetrate. But the era of toleration was yet centuries distant; and the day of the Roman persecutors was gone never more to reappear. Six weeks later a powder barrel exploded in a house in Edinburgh, and when the smoke cleared away the prospects of the Catholics in England were scattered to all the winds. CHAP X 1567 The murder of Henry Stuart Lord. Darnley is one of those incidents which will remain till the end of time January conspicuous on the page of history. In itself the death of a single boy-prince or king though he might be-had little in it to startle the hard world of the sixteenth century. Even before the folly and falsehood by which Mary Stuart's husband had earned the hatred of the Scotch nobility, it had been foreseen that such a frail and giddy summer pleasure-boat would be soon wrecked in those stormy waters. Had Darnley been stabbed in a scuffle or helped to death by a dose of arsenic in his bed, the fair fame of the Queen of Scots would have suffered little, and the tongues that dared to mutter would have been easily silenced. But conspiracies in Scotland were never managed with the skilful villany of the Continent; and when some conspicuous person was to be removed out of the way, the instruments of the deed were either fanatic religionists, who looked on themselves as the servants of God, or else they had been wrought up to the murder point by some personal passion which was not contented with the death of its victim, and required a fuller satisfaction in the picturesqueness of dramatic revenge. The circumstances, under which the obstacle to Mary Stuart's peace was disposed of, challenged the attention of the whole civilized world, and no after efforts availed in court, creed or nation, to hide the memory of the scenes which were revealed in that sudden lightning flash. The disorders of the Scots upon the Border had long been a subject of remonstrance from the English GovernThe Queen ment. The Queen of Scots, while the Parliament was of Scots goes to sitting at Westminster, desired to give some public proof Jedburgh. of her wish to conciliate; and after the strange appear ance of Darnley in September at the Council at Edinburgh, she proposed to go in person to Jedburgh and hear the complaints of Elizabeth's wardens. The Earl CHAP X of Bothwell had taken command of the North Marches: 1566 wounded. he had gone down to prepare the way for the Queen's November appearance, and on her arrival she was greeted with the Bothwell is news that he had been shot through the thigh in a scuffle, and was lying wounded in Hermitage Castle. The Earl had been her companion throughout the summer; her relations with him at this time-whether innocent or not-were of the closest intimacy; and she had taken into her household a certain Lady Reres, who had once been his mistress. 2 She heard of his wound with the most alarmed anxiety: on every ground she could ill afford to lose him;1 and careless at all times of bodily fatigue or danger, she rode on the 15th of October twenty-five miles over the moors to see him. The Earl's state proved to be more painful than dangerous, and after remaining two hours at his bed-side she returned the same day to Jedburgh. She had not been well thought and displeasure,' which, as she herself told Maitland, had their root in the King,' had already affected both her health and spirits. The long ride, the night air, and the great distress of her mind for the Earl,' proved too much for her; and though she sat her horse till her journey's end she fainted when she was lifted from the saddle, and remained two hours unconscious. Delirium followed with violent fever, and in this Illness of condition she continued for a week. She was frequently of Scots, insensible: food refused to remain upon her stomach; yet for the first few days there seemed to be 'no tokens of death; she slept tolerably, and on Tuesday and the Queen ''Ce ne luy eust pas esté peu de perte de le perdre!' were the unsuspicious words of du Croq, on the 17th of October.-TEULET, vol. ii. p. 289. 2 Maitland to the Archbishop of Glasgow.—Printed in KEITH. October CHAP X Wednesday the 22nd and 23rd she was thought to be 1566 improving. An express had been sent to Glasgow for Darnley, but he did not appear. On Friday the 25th there was a relapse; shiverings came on, the body grew rigid, the eyes were closed, the mouth set and rigid; she lost consciousness so entirely that she was supposed to be dying or dead, and in expectation of an immediate end a menacing order to keep the peace was sent out by Murray, Maitland, Huntly, and the other Lords who were in attendance on her. The physician, Master Naw,' however-'a perfyt man of his craft'—'would not give the matter over.' He restored the circulation by chafing the limbs; the Queen came to herself at last, broke into a profuse perspiration, and fell into a natural sleep. When she awoke, the fever was gone, but her strength was prostrated. For the few next days she still believed herself in danger, and with the outward signs-and so far as could be seen with the inward spirit of Catholic piety-she prepared to meet what might be coming upon her. The Bishop of Ross was ever on his knees at her bed-side; and courageous always, she professed herself ready to die if so it was to be. She recommended the Prince to the lords; through Murray she bequeathed the care of him to Elizabeththrough du Croq to the King of France and Catherine de Medici-and for Scotland she implored them all as her last request to trouble no man in his conscience that professed the Catholic faith,' in which she herself had been brought up and was ready to die. How much of all this was real, how much theatrical, it is needless to inquire; the most ardent admirer of Mary Stuart will not claim for her a character of piety in any sense of the word which connects it with the moral law; those who regard her with most suspicion will not refuse her the credit of devotion to the Catholic CHAP X cause. 1566 October with In a week all alarm was at an end. At length, but so late that his appearance was an affront, Darnley Differences arrived he was received with coldness; but for the Darnley. interposition of Murray he would not have been allowed to remain a single night, and the next morning he was dismissed to return to his father. In unhappy contrast the Earl of Bothwell was brought, as soon as he could be moved, to Jedburgh; and on the 10th of November the court broke up, and moved by slow journeys towards Edinburgh for the Prince's baptism. At Kelso the Queen found a letter from her husband. It seems that he had been again writing in complaint of her to the Pope and the Catholic powers.' He was probably no less unwise in the words which he used to herself; and she exclaimed passionately in Murray's and Maitland's presence that unless she was freed of him in some way she had no pleasure to live, and if she could find no other remedy she would put hand to it herself."" on the Border. Leaving Kelso and skirting the Border, she looked Mary Stuart from Halydon Hill over Berwick and the English lines, English and that fair vision of the future where Darnley was the single darkening image. A train of knights and gentlemen came out to do her homage and attend her to Ayemouth; the Berwick batteries as she went by saluted the heiress of the English crown; all through Northumberland, through Yorkshire, to the very gates of London, had she cared to visit Elizabeth, Mary Stuart 1 De Silva in a letter, late in the winter, to Philip, spoke of writing to the Queen of Scots- Á cerca del mal oficio que su marido habia hecho contra ella con V. Ma. y con el Papa 2 CALDERWOOD. |