Mary’s evil fortunes began with her birth. Her dying father, heart-broken over a disastrous battle, lived only a week after his “poor lass,” as he called her, was born. Then Henry VIII. of England saw in this infant niece of his a means of uniting the two crowns, much in the way by which a wolf unites itself with the lamb it devours, by having a marriage contracted between her and his only son, Prince Edward. He sent negotiators to enforce, under threats, his project. There was much opposition amongst the Scottish nobility. It looked like surrendering their country to England. They said to Henry’s negotiators, “If your lad were a lass, and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter; and could you be content that our lad should, by marrying your lass, become King of England? No! your nation would never agree to have a Scot for King; and we will not have an Englishman as our King. And tho’ the whole nobility of the realm should consent thereto, yet the common people would rebel against it; the very boys would hurl stones, and the wives handle their distaffs against it.”

Henry was wroth exceedingly, threatened war, and demanded the custody of the child-Queen. To have him for an ally against the Queen-Regent and her minister, the persecutor Beaton, the Reformers temporized, and the Scottish Parliament consented to the match; Mary to be sent to Henry when she was ten years old.

In the meantime Henry got embroiled with France; and Scotland, under the influence of the Queen-Regent, allied itself with that country. Henry sent an army into Scotland. There were some Scottish successes; but at Pinkie, in 1547, the English general Somerset gained a complete victory. Before this event Henry had died; but his long cherished object, the possession of the child of Scotland, was still pressed, and now seemed on the point of attainment. But the Scottish people were irritated and alarmed to such a degree that they resolved to make the projected marriage impossible, by marrying their young mistress to the Dauphin of France, and sending her to be brought up at the French court. To this resolve Parliament gave a hasty assent; and in July 1548, the poor child, now in her sixth year, accompanied by her four Maries—girls her own age, of noble birth, her present play-fellows and future companions—was shipped off to France.

Prince Edward, who succeeded Henry as Edward VI., was twelve years of age when his father died, and he reigned only four years. Then there was the painful incident of Lady Jane Grey being pushed forward by her ambitious kindred as a claimant to the throne; the venture being death to her and to them. And then Henry’s daughter by his first wife became Queen. A rigid Catholic, she at once took steps, intolerant, relentless, and cruel, to re-establish the old faith. The savage persecutions of her reign have rendered it for ever infamous. She goes down through all time as the Bloody Mary. Smithfield blazed with the fires of martyrdom; five Protestant bishops were amongst the sufferers. Happily her reign was a brief one, lasting only five years; and they were for her years of domestic misery, her marriage with the Spanish King, Philip II., being an unhappy and unfruitful one.

Her half-sister Elizabeth, the issue of Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn, succeeded to the throne in 1558. Elizabeth had been brought up as a Protestant, had been kept a close prisoner during Mary’s reign,—narrowly escaping being herself a martyr. And now to maintain her claims to the throne, she had to depend upon her Protestant subjects; for the Catholics denied the validity of her father and mother’s marriage, and consequently denied her legitimacy and right to reign. They asserted that Mary Stuart of Scotland was the rightful heir, and as such entitled to their allegiance.

A brief explanation will show on what foundation the Stuart claim—afterwards allowed at the death of Elizabeth in favour of Mary’s son James—was based. At Bosworth Field, Richard III., of the house of York, was defeated and slain. The victor was Richmond of Lancaster, who thus became King Henry VII.; his son was Henry VIII., and his daughter Margaret married James IV., King of Scotland. The neighbouring Kings, James and Henry VIII., were thus brothers-in-law; none the less did they quarrel and go to war with each other, their hostilities ending, so far as James was concerned, with the battle of Flodden. Henry was then engaged in a war with France, and James was killed in the battle which his vanity had provoked, and which he generalled so badly. His son, James V., was Henry’s nephew, and full cousin to Henry’s children, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Thus, failing direct legitimate heirs to the English throne, James’s daughter Mary was, in virtue of her descent as the grand-daughter of Henry VII., the nearest heir.

At Elizabeth’s accession, in 1558, Mary was sixteen years of age. As the wife of the Dauphin of France, the French monarchy put forward her claims as the rightful sovereign of England, and even had a coinage struck with her effigy thus designated. So Elizabeth feared and hated Mary as her rival; hated her yet more, with a woman’s spite, for her beauty and accomplishments. Soon Mary, by his early death, lost her husband, then King of France, and at nineteen years of age, in the splendour of her queenly beauty, she—regretfully for the land of her youth—returned to her native Scotland.

By her sweet presence, her courtesy, and winning manners, Mary largely gained the hearts of her people; but murmurings soon arose about her foreign ways, her foreign favouritisms, and her fidelity to her Catholic faith. And a cloud gathered over her domestic life. She had married a young nobleman, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He was next to Mary in the hereditary line of succession to the English throne—as Mary was a grand-daughter of Margaret Tudor he was a grandson—by Margaret’s second marriage with the Earl of Angus. He was also a Catholic. Darnley seems to have been little other than a handsome, but petulant, ill-behaved, and ill-mannered boy, fitted, neither by intellect nor disposition, to be the husband and life-companion of such a proud, clever, and accomplished woman as Mary. Mary refused him the crown-matrimonial, and they very soon fell apart. Mary was not forbidden to have her private chapel; an Italian singer in this chapel, David Rizzio, became a favourite, he acted as her secretary, and was admitted into the inner circle of Holyrood. One evening the supper-party was broken in upon by Darnley and a number of his associates, and Rizzio was dragged out to the landing, and by several weapons barbarously stabbed to death. Mary’s fair countenance and gentle voice were mated with an iron will, persistent in carrying out her hatreds to the death. Darnley was murdered by a rude villain, Earl Bothwell, and Mary has never been satisfactorily cleared of complicity in the murder. Shortly afterwards she married this Bothwell—by force, her apologists say.

We shall not even briefly go over the oft-told tale of Mary’s after-life. As the incidents loom out of the tangled web, we feel, even through the centuries, as if we would fain arrest them by a warning voice, fain save that fascinating woman from her doom. We feel a yearning pity, almost akin to love, although stern justice gives her blame as a woman, a wife, and a Queen. That pitiful winter’s morning in Fotheringay Castle, in 1587, brought to Mary, by the headsman’s axe, a cruel death, but also a kind release from captivity and unrest.

And what of her rival queen and kinswoman, “that bright Occidental star,” Elizabeth? A woman with a strong masculine intellect, of dauntless courage, one fitted to rule and govern, and advance a nation. But unmistakably her father’s daughter, cruel, heartless, unforgiving, and thoroughly false: with a woman’s caprice exalting to supreme favouritism to-day, and striking down into the dust to-morrow. She signed Mary’s death-warrant, and, by grimaces and plainest hints, she made her people slay her own cousin. And when the deed was irretrievably done she went into a hypocritical paroxysm of well-acted anger and regret, and dealt round punishment for the act which she herself had compassed. These two women cited to the bar of judgment, Mary might well hide her face for many sins and frailties; but the better actor would try to stand up, boldly and unabashed. Our own hearts must answer which of the two we justify, rather than the other.