The Sun.
London, England, 1855-02-26 00:00:00

LIT BRATUBE.

Lives of the queens_ of
.ficotL!,td. By Agnes

Stricklaii(l. Vol: V. Blackwood.

Our authoress, in this latest instalment of her
new historic composition, has narrated, and
that, moreover, with all befitting pathos and
solemnity, some among the more tragic and roman-
tic incidents in the reign of perhaps the most beau-
tiful, as she was certainly the most unfortunate, of
Princesses. Happily for the fair fame of Mary
Queen of Scots, the memory of that otherwise
luckless monarch has found at last a not unworthy
celebrant in Agnes Strickland. From the earlier
chapters of the biography here continued we
had anticipated largely as to the success of even
this tardy investigation. The expectations
we then formed are not only in a great
measure already realised, but in several particulars
very considerably surpassed. Notwithstanding the
lapse of three centuries since the period when the
events recounted by Miss Strickland originally
transpired--enotwithstanding the difficulties in the
way of research, which have necessarily, from the
mere circumstance of that protracted interval, be-
come at once wonderfully expanded, strengthened,
and multiplied—notwithstanding the accumulation
of authoritative influence upon the heads of old
partisan writers, who have all the while, so to
speak, been ripening and mellowing into classics,
as in the instance of the renowned Buchanan—
the gentle hand of a candid woman, armed
with the Pon of Truth, that weapon keener
and more pointed than the mythic Sword of
Justice, has here swept calumny after calumny
into nothingness, and vindicated from many a foul
slur and evil imputation one of the fairest of her
sex, as she was indubitably one of the unhappiest
of sovereigns.
It was admirably said of Mr. Macaulay by a
contemporary critic and annalist, no less eminent
than Sir Archibald Alison, that his genius, as
revealed through the initial volumes of his Con-
tinuation to Hume and Smollett, proved him
to have been called rather to the Bar than
to the Bench of History. Not thus has it
been with Miss Strickland. Her writings, on
the contrary, breathe rather of the summing up of
a judicial authority, than of the subtle and wire-
drawn sophistries of a special pleader. It is the blend-
ing thus in her narratives of an alluring lucidity
and a most persuasive frankness, which has won for
her the guerdon of her really enviable and distin-
guished reputation. The honours gained by her
" Lives of the Queens of England" are now being at
one* confirmed and enhanced by those inevitably
arising out of her " Lives of the Queens of Scotland."
—th.e pendant of its more ambitious predecessor—its
kindred sequel, or rather fitting companion. As
in the earlier of those remarkable productions,
the elaborately-drawn biography of Queen Eliza-
beth was the portion to which the surrounding
narrative became necessarily subordinated—so has
it come to pass, no less necessarily, in the pre-
sent undertaking, the very heart, and jewel,
and dominant charm of which is the memoir penned
by our authoress with equal care and discrimi-
nation, the narrative of the existence and suffer-
ings of Elizabeth's Scottish cousin and rival, and
one who, though in all else her rival, was in every-
thing but genius her peerless contemporary. The
volume here submitted to our consideration pos-
sesses more than the attractions usually inseparable
fro ne any ordinary record of the life of Mary Queen
of ;Scots, especially of that portion of her most sor-
rowful career which involves the recital of the more
romantic, and yet, at the same time, more homely,
booause purely home-drawn, of her misfortunes.
Co-atinually, throughout the narrative, we are, as
so repeatedly happens with us in the perusal of
the -writings of our authoress, reminded, again and.
yet again, of her favourite motto from Beaumont,
that motto which has come at last to be perma-
nently emblazoned upon her literary escutcheon—
" The treasures of antiquity laid up
In old historic scrolls I opened."
Teeasures of mouldering parchment, and scarcely
legible manuscript, which, on passing into the
h ands of Miss Strickland, have become transformed
either into amulets of extenuation, or into talismans
of complete and triumphant vindication. Let the
dozen chapters comprised in this fifth volume of
the " Lives of the Queens of Scotland" be taken in
testimony : and, judiciously examined, we doubt
not but that they will be accepted readily enough
as corroborative to the full of our somewhat earnest
but entirely merited panegyric.
Withinthecompass of these twelve additional chap- 1,
ten of the biography of Mary Stuart how many of the
mare moving calamities of her " strange, eventful
history" have been recounted—and recounted how
touchingly ! From the melancholy date of her
lying ill at Jedburgh, when she, awfully, prepares
foie death, and when at her unlooked-for convales-
cence her attendants bring for her parched lips the
solace of divers cooling citrons and pomegranates—
to the yet more melancholy period of her incar-
ceration in Lochleven Castle, where she is in-
humanly insulted by Lady Douglas almost on the
fast instant of her arrival, and where for so many
months the young Queen was left to pine among
tho petty splendours of her prison—at night under
the shadow of her green velvet bed with the stitched
taffety counterpane—by day under the gloomier
shade of her regal canopy or crimson satin cloth-of-
estate. Throughout the chequered alternation of
the vicissitudes comprised in the interval between
which occurrences—the arrival at Jedburgh and
the arrival at Lochleven—the reader has perpe-
tually looming before his imagination the on-
coming passage of eighteen dreadful years of
imprisonment over the head of the unfor-
tunate Queen of Scots within the princely palace
walls of the fatal Fotheringay. Tracing the career
of Mary Stuart from her royal assize at Jedburgh
up to the time of her sorrowful domestication in
the Castle of Lochleven, her historian, and, as we
have already intimated, her sympathising and suc-
cessful vindicator from the calumnies of so many
traducers, and chief among all from those of the
unpitying and unscrupulous Buchanan, relates the
pathetic fluctuation of the young Queen's joys and
griefs, her fleeting happiness and her prolonged
sufferings. Whoever may question the practica-
bility in Mary Stuart's regard of any vindication
as successful as that which we have already de-
clared Agnes Strickland's to be—let them turn
wonderingly to the noteworthy pages of this simple,
eloquent, -veracious, and, above all, most womanly
biography. They will there learn, doubtless for
the first time, the truth as to the horrid murder of
Darnley, and further on, likewise, in reference to the
yet more horrid marriage with Bothwell. They will
at last be enabled to appreciate more accurately than
hitherto the merits of the former iu spite of his
many weaknesses, no less than the double-dyed
ruffianism of the latter, a ruffianism befitting less
a Scottish Thane than a Tyrolese Brigand. They
—the readers of Miss Strickland, who have hitherto
dreamed over the " criminality" of Mary Queen of
Scots—may see fit thereafter to muse only with
pitying tenderness over the recollection of her
unparalleled and appalling miseries. The gentler
evidences of her affectionate nature will then be
borne sometimes at least extenuatively in the his-
toric student's remembrance. Her fondness for the
gay and graceful stripling—the beloved Darnley,
will be found to contrast somewhat strikingly with
her repugnance for the dreaded and detested Both-
well. Let our readers, we say, examine this tragic
and remarkable narrative for themselves. They will
find the work eminently repay the time requisite for
its minute investigation. And what attractive scenes
and incidents to scrutinise, under the guidance of
one as frank and impartial as Agnes Strickland
The midnight catastrophe at the Provost's house,
in Kirk-of-Field ! The Masked Ball in the pala-
tial Abbey of Holyrood ! Mary glittering in jewels
in the dance, and the beloved Darnley stark dead
in the orchard, under the gloom of the suburban
garden wall—his fur pelisse by his side, the ruins
of the fated dwelling strewn around in the grim
chaos caused by the explosion of gunpowder.
The melancholy particulars of the murder of Darn-
ley have been preserved to us with singular com-
pleteness. A rathersurprising circumstance when it
is remembered that nearly three hundred years have
now elapsed since the date of this appalling catas-
trophe. It was about midnight, between Sunday
the 9th and Monday the 10th of February, in the
year of Grace, 1567, that the conspiracy against
the life of the young King Consort of Scotland
was-consummated, and that, moreover, with inci-
dents of peculiar atrocity—incidents both by way
of preliminary and. accompaniment. Upon the
morning of the day thus deplorably terminated for
Darnley by a death of violence, we are informed
that " he heard mass devoutly" in his temporary
residence at the Provost's house in Kirk-of-Field.
Scarcely recovered from his severe illness, the
youthful prince appears to have marked the pro-
gress of his g-radualapproach towards convalescence
by a course of devotional exercises designated in
his Church a "retreat," after the manner of devout
Catholics. It was very possibly the k.newledge of
thisreligious fervour on the part of Darnley, coming
as it did with the then notorious fact of his perfect
reconciliation with the Queen—which incited the
rebel Lairds to precipitate their design for the sud-
den removal of the King Consort of Scotland.
They were doubtless goaded on to the commission
of this dark crime there and then by the reflection
that not only were Queen Mary and King Henry
enthusiastic votaries of Catholicism, but that the
education of their infant son in the tenets of their
own creed would in all likelihood be insured by
the accession of fresh zeal to the softened heart of
Darnley, by the revival of his influence over the
imagination of Mary, and by the animating force
of their mutual tenderness. For all which reasons
the gunpowder plot against the " Papist" father of