• BOOKS ABOUT MARY STUART.*

IT will probably occur to a good many people when they read the title of Mr. Andrew Lang's work that the mystery of Mary Stuart should have been solved by this time, or if not it ought to have got a place among those problems of history which admit of no solution. A hundred and fifty years ago it was said by Hume that those who believed in Mary's innocence were beyond the reach of argument. But books still continue to come, as Mr. Lang says, from America, Russia, France, and Germany in which the guilt of Mary is denied. One reason for the persistence of the controversy is that romantic sentiment and ecclesiastical prejudices have always played a large part in it ; and these are not readily convinced by reasoning, or even by facts. But there is an additional

reason. The evidence against the Queen, although ample in quantity, rests upon the testimony of most untrust-

worthy persons. Hardly one of the witnesses is to be believed on his bare word. The truth can only be got at by a process of cross-examination similar to that resorted to in a Court of Justice when it becomes apparent that all the witnesses are liars. The case cannot therefore be regarded as concluded, especially as new evidence has recently come to light, and Mr.

Lang's retrial of it is not by any means superfluous. The Mystery of Mary Stuart, we may add, is written in the author's best manner. That it is interesting we need not say, for Mr. Lang could not be dull if he tried; but there's here the dignity and self-restraint of the historian who feels that he is dealing with the supreme tragedy of Scottish

history.

Among those who have written of Queen Mary Mr. Lang occupies a position of his own. The admirers of the Queen. almost without exception, have denied that she was guilty of any share in the death of her husband. Mr. Lang with hesitation, and one may say, we think, with reluctance, leans to the opposite conclusion. He refuses, however, on that account to shut his eyes to the noble qualities of the hapless Queen. "She fell," he writes, "if fall she did, like the Clytaemnestra

to whom a contemporary poet compares her, under the almost demoniacal possession of passion : a possession so sudden, strange, and overpowering that even her enemies attributed it

to unlawful arts." In the following striking passage Mr' Lang thus describes those qualities of the Queen which ought not to be omitted, he thinks, in our estimate of her character:— "Mary's gratitude was not of the kind proverbial in prince! In September, 1571, when the Ridolfi plot collapsed, and Mary' household was reduced, her sorest grief was for Archibald Beaton; her usher, and little Willie Douglas, who rescued her from Loci'

,

Leven. They were to be sent to Scotland, which meant death to both, and she pleaded pitifully for them. To her servant. she wrote : Pray God that you be true men and constant, to suck He will never deny His grace, and for you, John Gordon and, William Douglas, I pray that He will inspire your hewts.. one.w.lt* can do no more. Live in friendship and holy charity

trifling

another, bearing each other's imperfections.' transaction she writes : 'Rather would I pay twi In a ce over than • (L) The Mystery of Mary Stuart. By Andrew Lang.. _Nvandith whoflIIIIti°1c;r1".t.. London ; Longmans and Co. [18s.]—(2.) Mary Queen OJ be° S. ".a Low, the Casket Letters ? By Samuel Cowan, 5.1'. 2 vols. Londm : S1m5.a Marston, and Co. [286.]

injure or suspect any man.' In the long lament of the letters written during her twenty years of captivity we always hear the

note of loyalty even to her humblest servants, of sleepless memory of their sacrifices for her, of unstinting and generous gratitude. Such was the Queen's 'natural,' ,non nature/ : with this character she faced the world : a lady to live and die for ; and many died. This woman, sensitive, proud, tameless, fierce, and kind, was brow- beaten by the implacable Knox ; her priests were scourged and pilloried, her creed was outraged every day ; herself scolded, preached at, insulted ; her every plan thwarted by Elizabeth. Mary had reason enough for tears even before her servant was slain almost in her sight by her witless husband and the merciless Lords. It may well be that after this last worst of cruel insults her heart had now become hard as the diamond ; and that she was possessed by the evil spirits of loathing, and hatred, and longing for revenge. It had not been a hard heart, but a tender ; capable of sorrow for slaves at the galley oar. After her child's birth, when she was holiday-making at Alloa, according to Buchanan, with Bothwell and his gang of pirates, she wrote to the Laird of Abercairnie, bidding him be merciful to a poor woman and her 'company of puir bairnis' whom he had evicted from their kindly rowme,' or little croft."

In another place Mr. Lang writes that Mary at worst, and even admitting her guilt, seems to have been a nobler nature than any of the persons most closely associated with her fortunes. This view, to which many will take exception, is defended in the two chapters entitled respectively "Dramatis

Personae" and" The Minor Characters." We have nothing to object to in Mr. Lang's admirably written sketches of Mary's contemporaries, except to the interpretation he gives to the later conduct of Maitland of Lethington. It is strange indeed that Mr. Lang, of all people in the world, should deal unkindly with "the flower of the wits of Scotland." We can- not help, however, thinking that Maitland's return to his allegiance was due to a nobler motive than a craven fear of the Queen's knowledge of his past, especially as at the time the captive Queen had little opportunity to do good or harm to any.

The characterisation of Moray, although severe, is sub- stantially just. Moray, a brave and capable man, was not without a conscience, and we do not believe that he took an active part in any crime ; but he was not the man to hinder crime if he saw that it was likely to turn to his own advantage.

As Mr. Lang writes, "at the hypocrisies and falsehoods of his party, deeds of treachery and blood, Moray 'looked through his fingers.' " It has been the cue of Mary's enemies to speak of her passion for Bothwell as a mark of quite abnormal depravity by representing Bothwell to have been an ungainly old monster. Bothwell was only a few years older than Mary, and as he had spent much time at the French Court, he was probably one of the best-bred men at the Court of Holyrood. He possessed also some intellectual cultivation. He was, of course, bold and reckless, but he was a special favourite with women, having, Mr. Lang says, been beloved by many women, always to their ruin. Mary's passion for him, however wicked, was not unnatural ; indeed, only too natural in a young woman trained in a dissolute Court, and at the time longing to free herself from a weak husband whom she had come to bate. The murder of Rizzio, it should be remembered, was a deadly insult aimed at the Queen's character. Knox and her other enemies publicly proclaimed to her people that her Italian servant had been put to death because he was the Queen's paramour.

That Mary loved the bold bad Bothwell is beyond all reasonable doubt, and also that she was abducted and married with her own consent, although she speedily repented when she saw how little Bothwell cared for her.

The only question unsettled is whether Mary played the part of Lady Macbeth, and instigated Bothwell to murder Darnley. If the Casket Letters are genuine, she certainly did so. The greater part of Mr. Lang's book is taken up with an examina- tion of the external and internal evidence for the genuineness of. the Letters. The external evidence is unsatisfactory. The originals are lost. We do not possess even copies of them, only translations. They emerge first in the hands of men

Oil wbcse word no reliance can be placed; and there are in- dications in the Letters themselves, and in what we hear of

them from the reports of others, that forgery, or at all events garbling, had been practised. This is especially the case with regard to the very incriminating Letter II., which Mr. Lang

adnuts "is possibly a forged letter." Suspicion is further deoPeoed by the circumstance that Scotland was rich at • the time in '• fause notaries" whp made a profession of falsification. It is known, too, that among Mary's enemies there were experts in forgery. With these facts before him, a Judge would almost certainly direct a jury to pay no attention to the evidence of the Casket Letters. An historian, however, is not bound by the strict rules which regulate criminal trials, and may still ask,—What is the probable truth regarding the authorship of the Letters ? The internal evidence is certainly formidable. Mr. Lang writes of Letter II.—the most incriminating Letter—that parts of it seem beyond the genius of forgery to have produced. It is perhaps difficult for us, living in times when forgery has fallen into the hands of ordinary criminals, to estimate what it was capable of when made use of by scholars and statesmen.

The sonnets which, as is alleged, were also found in the Casket make no mention of Darnley, and if genuine are only evidence of Mary's passion for Bothwell. Branttome and Ronsaad pronounced them to be unlike the verses of Mary which they had seen ; and Mr. Lang says that his own com- parison of them with the few surviving poems of the Queen does not convince him that the favoured rhymes are especially characteristic of Mary. His reason for regarding them to be possibly genuine is that it is improbable that a forger would think of such a task as forging verses by Mary ; and he knows of no one among her enemies who could have produced the verses,—not a very cogent argument when we remember the close connection that existed between France and Scotland at the period.

Mr. Cowan's work does not take rank with Mr. Lang's as a contribution to historical literature. It is, however, full of interest of a kind. A number of documents are printed by him which have been hitherto in manuscript, or are only to be found in rare and expensive works. The story of Mary's captivity is well told with great fulness of detail. But the spirit of partisanship which pervades it deprives the work of historical authority. The author is as incapable of seeing faults in his Queen and virtues in her foes as a Highland retainer. Moray was the murderer of Darnley. Mary had never any passion for Bothwell, whom she always treated with marked disfavour, because she disapproved of his dissolute life. The sonnets cannot have been written by Mary because they contain indelicate expressions Even Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton are rebuked for their lukewarmneas in the Holy War against the enemies of the Queen. A pleasing feature in Mr. Cowan's volumes are the portraits of the Queen, of which there are no fewer than eight; but they only tell us that contemporary painters differed as much about Mary's personal appearance as historians have since differed about her character.