MIRY STUART'S "APOLOGIA."*
Mn. STEVENSON has no need to apologise for offering this work to the public. The information it contains is, as he truly says, both new and important, and the evidence is that of a witness who has, indeed, "something to say on an interesting question" which is yet, in the opinion of a faithful few, an undecided one. For the witness is no other than Mary Stuart herself, and Nan's fragmentary narrative is in reality a portion of what she intended to be her Apologia. Claude Nau de la Boisselibre was a Lorrainer, and naturally, therefore, attached to the House of Guise. He passed from the service of the Cardinal de Guise to that of the Queen of Scots in 1575, probably still a young man— Mr. Stevenson tells us nothing concerning his age—and remained with her up to the abduction of Chartley in 1586. He had studied and practised law, was a fair accountant, and a good linguist, possessing, what was in those days a rare accomplishment for a foreigner, a thorough knowledge of English. There can be little doubt that he was the author of the narrative, and as little that the narrative itself was mainly taken down from the Queen's own. lips. The narrative, or rather the fragment we possess, which has long lain unnoticed among the treasures of the Cottonian Library, deals with the history of the years intervening between the death of Rizzio and the removal of Mary Stuart from Car- lisle to Bolton Castle, in Yorkshire, in 1568, with some scant notices of events in the years 1569 and 1570. The principal occurrences recorded in it are the murder of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the imprisonment in Lochleven Castle, and the famous escape from that stronghold, so graphically told in Scott's Abbot. The narrative was certainly composed after the death of Bothwell, in 1578, and probably not long before the seizure of Mary's papers at Chartley.
Mr. Stevenson has supplemented the work of Nan with notes and illustrations drawn from various sources, and has added. several appendices, containing translations of documents pre- served among the secret archives of the Vatican. But these hardly prove more than that the Queen's story as told in the narrative was pretty much the same as that which her defenders had all along presented to the world. On the principal points in the indictment brought against her by her contemporaries and by posterity, the author offers scarcely any rebutting evidence stronger than her own assertions, which can in nowise be regarded. as proofs. And, as we shall presently attempt to show, the narrative itself not only charges her accusers with a treachery infinitely more incredible in its diabolical wickedness than what they ascribed to Mary, but by its general tone, and to some extent by positive statements, tends to confirm their case.
The assassination of Darnley, justly characterised by Mr. Fronde as belonging to that rare class of incidents which, like the murder of Cmsar, have touched the interests of the entire educated world, was the turning-point in the Queen of Scots' career, from which, deserted by her good angel, her course of life and conduct was one of uninterrupted descent. Without directly asserting the innocence of Bothwell—in one passage, indeed, his guilt seems to be distinctly implied—the narrative on the whole tends to his exculpation. It asserts that the Earl justified himself in full Parliament, and. records the Queen's persuasion that "he was entirely cleared. of the crime laid to his charge;" while a little further on, it is more positively stated • The History of Marg Stewart, from the Murder of /Mario until her Plight into England. By Claude Nan, her Secretary. Now first printed, from the Original Manuscript, with Papers from the Secret Archive, of the Vatican, ko. Edited. with Preface, by the Bev. Joseph Stevenson, S.J. Edinburgh: W. Paterson. 1888. that it was "settled (by the Lords of the Council) that Both- well should be accused of Darnley's murder," under " pretext of avenging the late King's death ;" and that this "was done by the advice of Secretary Lethington (Maitland), with whom Bothwell was on bad terms." But it is impossible to read the following very remarkable passage in the narrative without feel-
ing convinced that Mary must have had, from the beginning, at the very least a shrewd guess as to the authorship of the crime :—
" That very night [February 9th-lOtb, 1566], as her Majesty was about to leave the King, she met Paris, Lord Bothwell's valet-de- chambre, and noticing that his face was all blackened with gun- powder, she exclaimed, in the bearing of many of the lords, just as she was mounting her horse (to return to Holyrood, to assist at the wedding-feast of her servant Sebastian), Jest', Paris, how begrimed you are!' At this he turned very red."
No one doubts Bothwell's guilt at the present day, and no one, probably, doubted it at the time. It is incredible that Mary
Stuart, even if no accessory before or after the fact to her husband's murder, could have doubted it in 1586, and the tone of the narrative, which throughout aims at the exculpation of Bothwell, not merely furnishes an argument against its truthful- ness, but raises a strong presumption that the peculiarly fiendish treachery she ascribes to her accusers was a late crea- tion of her own brain, a mere count, and • an ill-conceived one, in a plea of defence :—
"Their plan," she says, " was this,—to persuade her to marry the Earl of Bothwell, so that they might charge her with being in the plot against her late husband, and a consenting party to his death. This they did shortly after, appealing to the fact that she had married the murderer."
The absurdity of this plea is made manifest by the narrative itself. The one object, we are told, of the LorUs was the usurpa- tion of the Crown, planned before Murray's departure, which had preceded the murder. With this special object, it is added, Bothwell had gained them over to his side—they are previously stated to have pressed him upon the Queen as "a man of reso- lution, well adapted to rule "—some through friendship, others through fear, and "having thus secured their help and advice," seized the Queen's person, in order to compel her consent to a marriage. The marriage, then, was forced on by Bothwell, not urged by way of persuasion by the Lords. Or if Bothwell con- spired with the Lords to bring it about, in order to prove Mary's complicity in Darnley's murder, he effected the latter object only at the expense of a practical admission of his own guilt. Lastly, the moment the marriage was accomplished, pursues the narra- tive, the Lords turned round upon Bothwell, and charged him with the crime, the sole result of which accusation, if successful, would have been the undoing of the very work they had combined to accomplish, and the restoration of Mary to independence. Both- well, as we have already mentioned, is tenderly treated throughout the narrative. The abduction on the Stirling road is mentioned with the faintest blame. The party opposed to him, although it comprised many of those who " persuaded " the Queen to marry him, is described as actuated simply by jealousy of his rapid promotion, and by disgust at his want of inclination to "put himself to much trouble to gain the good-will of those with whom he associated." The promotion, again, was the spontaneous act of the .unfortunate and infatuated woman ; at all events, the narrative makes it clear that it was not pressed upon her by any party in the State, and that Bothwell was in no position to compel it. That his enemies hated him otherwise
than on account of the elevation they, or many of them, are said to have conspired to bring about, is not hinted at. At Carberry Hill it is admitted that his cause was warmly espoused by Mary, who refused to give him up to the Lords, and it is expressly stated that it was only through her entreaties that he reluctantly left the field, and practically abandoned her to her fate. Not a single phrase or sentence, not a single expression in the narrative betrays the least resentment against the man who, after a violent abduction and imprisonment of his Sovereign, is alleged to have compelled her consent to a marriage which only a few days previously she had absolutely refused to give, and which cost her both crown and kingdom. On the whole, it is Impossible not to see in this apologia of Mary Stuart a moral
confirmation of the authenticity of the celebrated Casket Letters, to which, by the way, no allusion whatever is made from the first to the last page of the volume.
Of her life at Lochleven and of her escape some details are given which are new to history, and this portion of the narra- tive is full of dramatic interest, too full, perhaps, to be entirely trustworthy. One of the most curious revelations made is the fact that shortly after her arrival, somewhere about July 24th, 1567, the Queen gave birth to twins, the issue of Bothwell, which were still-born. The account of her escape from Holy- rood after Rizzio's murder is equally graphic, and some of the incidents narrated, especially in connection with the subsequent interviews with the Lords and with Darnley, afford a striking picture of the coarseness and brutality of the times. One more criticism, and we must take leave of this interesting and in some respects valuable book. Nau's fragment begins as follows :—
" Fops ils avoient mis la main A Preuvre, II fallait parachever, si tous tie vonloient se mectre an hazard de leant vies, d'autant qu'ils estoient trop avant, pour reculer."
Mr. Stevenson's version is :— " As for themselves, as they had begun the business, they must needs finish it. Even if all persons would not risk their lives, they had at least gone too far to recede PS
But surely the point of the passage is here missed. The proper translation seems to be,—" Since they had begun the business, they must needs finish it, if they did not all wish to pat their lives in peril; all the more so, in that they had gone too far to recede," 8z,c.
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