Mary Stuart

  Chapter Eleven

  The Tragedy of a Passion

  (1566–7)

  MARY STUART’S PASSION FOR BOTHWELL was one of the most notable in history. Those devouring loves of classical antiquity that have become proverbial hardly excel it in frantic intensity. It shot skyward like a sheet of flame into ecstasy; its ardours spewed themselves forth into crime. When mental states are thus intensified, it is foolish to scrutinise for logic and rationality the actions of those in whom they rage, since it is of the essence of uncontrollable impulses to be irrational. Passions, like illnesses, can neither be accused nor excused; they can only be described with ever-renewed astonishment not untinged with horror in face of the elemental forces which disclose themselves from time to time in nature and not infrequently in human beings, violent discharges of energy which are not amenable to the measuring rod of customary human laws. Their expression does not belong to the realm of the conscious, but to the subconscious impulses of man, and is quite outside the circle of his personal responsibility. It is just as senseless to sit in judgement upon an individual who happens momentarily to be a prey to an overwhelming passion as it would be to call a thunderstorm to account or wish to hold an assize upon the eruption of a volcano. So Mary Stuart, a product of her epoch both in the mental and the moral sphere, must not be condemned out of hand, seeing that her actions were temporarily governed by something irrespective of her normal and hitherto moderate and sedate outlook on life. With eyes closed and ears stopped, drawn as it were by a magnet, she moved along her path towards disaster and crime. No advice could influence her, no call could awaken her. Not until the fires had burnt themselves out would she come to her senses, consumed and distraught. In one who has passed through such a furnace, life itself has been incinerated.

  So massive a feeling cannot take hold of a person twice in the same lifetime. Just as an accumulated store of gunpowder goes up in one huge explosion, so in such an overwhelming passion are the reserves of emotion completely expended. Mary Stuart’s voluptuousness glowed at white heat for no more than half a year. Nevertheless, during this brief space her heart knew such an ecstasy that all subsequent feelings appeared to her as wraiths in a mist. Certain writers, such as Rimbaud, and certain musicians, such as Mascagni, spend themselves in a single work, and when this work is finished they lie exhausted and impotent for evermore—thus is it too with certain women who give their all in one access of passion, instead of spreading their love, as do more moderate natures, economically over decade after decade. Such women’s love and passion is a concentrated extract, their ardours are compressed into one convulsive episode, they drink the cup to the dregs, and for them there exists no salvation and no way back. Mary Stuart was a supreme example of this kind of love, of love that is spendthrift because it despises contumely and death, of love that is truly heroic, that allows passion to have its fullest range and to exhaust the emotions even should this lead to self-destruction.

  At a first glance one may well be puzzled to account for so speedy a transformation of her affection for Darnley into her elemental passion for Bothwell. Yet such a development was both logical and natural; for, like every other art, love needs to be learnt, tested and practised. Never, or rarely—as with the arts—is the first essay in love a perfect success, and Shakespeare, the profoundest psychologist of all time, knew this well, showing that calf love is merely a tentative and initial stage to the real passion which may flame up on a day to come. One of the most admirable touches in his immortal tragedy of love is that he did not, as any lesser artist or expert judge of the human soul might have done, allow Romeo’s infatuation for Juliet to begin without a prelude, but that he made it arise as a sequel to an earlier amour for some Rosalind or the other. A fugitive and stray feeling is swept away by genuine passion; there is a prentice introduction, half unwitting, to the conscious artistry of the artist in love. Shakespeare shows in this splendid instance that there can be no full knowledge without foreboding, no wholehearted pleasure without a preliminary sojourn in the anterooms of pleasure, and that, if feeling is to soar into the infinite, it must first have been kindled in a narrow and finite realm. Only because Romeo is already in a state of inward tension, because his strong and passionate spirit craves for fuller experience of passion, does his will-to-love, having directed itself haphazardly and blindly towards Rosalind, the first-comer, then, becoming sighted and fully aware of the difference, direct itself anew and swiftly towards a supreme object, exchanging Rosalind for Juliet. “When half-gods go, the gods arrive.”

  In like manner Mary Stuart, awakening from the long twilight of her youth, was carried away by a blind affection for Darnley, precisely because he was comely and young and made his entry into her orbit at a propitious hour. But the lad’s dull breath was too weak to fan her inward glow. He could not lift her into the paradise of ecstasy, where the glow would have burnt itself out. It continued, therefore, like a smothered fire, to excite her senses and nevertheless disappoint them—a distressing condition in which the fires struck inward because their outward expression had been stifled. As soon, however, as he came who had the power to relieve her from this torment, he who gave air and fuel to this stifled glow, the repressed flames rushed up to heaven and down to hell. Just as Romeo’s feeling for Rosalind vanished without a trace when his genuine passion for Juliet was aroused, so did Mary Stuart completely forget her sensual inclination for Darnley in the unresting and voluptuous feeling for Bothwell.

  We possess two sources of information relating to the story of Mary’s love for Bothwell. In the first place there are the state papers and other contemporary official documents, and there are the chronicles and the annals of the time. As second source, we have a number of letters and poems ascribed to her. The recorded facts and the self-revelation of the letters and verses dovetail into one another with the utmost precision. But the genuineness of the letters and poems is denied by those champions of Mary Stuart who, in the name of their own moral codes, believe that they must defend her against a passion against which she herself was quite defenceless. There is, of course, some ground for doubt as to the authenticity of letters and sonnets which have come down to us only in transcribed, translated and perhaps mutilated texts. The holograph versions, which would have been irrefutable evidence, were destroyed—we know when and by whom. For James, her son, had but shortly succeeded to power when, as a measure of protection for his mother’s honour as a woman, he consigned the original papers to the flames. Ever since then an embittered fight has been raging as to the authenticity of these “Casket Letters”, a party strife wherein religious motives and national served as foundation for charge and countercharge in the assize upon Mary Stuart. For one who is above party it is all the more essential that he should go warily in his judgements. In any case his conclusions can never be anything more than personal ones, since the original letters have long since been destroyed and, in the last resort therefore, he has to depend upon his individual deductions.

  Nevertheless, if a true portrait of Mary is to be drawn, if her real character is to be depicted, an author is bound to decide one way or the other; he must make up his mind to accept these letters and poems as authentic or to declare them spurious. He cannot be allowed merely to shrug his shoulders and mutter: “Maybe they’re genuine—and, then again, maybe they’re not.” For these writings, if authentic, are a pivot whereon the whole subsequent psychical development of the woman turned. If we cast the die in favour of their genuineness, then it behoves us to prove and make perfectly clear the reasons for such an assumption.

  As will be subsequently related in fuller detail, the letters and sonnets in question were found in a silver casket after Bothwell’s flight from Carberry Hill. It goes without saying that such missives as Mary actually wrote to her lover must have been incautious and compromising. She had always been venturesome, not to say foolhardy, and had never learnt to hide her feelings when she spoke or wrote. Next, the huge delight of her adversaries at the discove
ry of the originals shows that these must have contained revelations injurious or shameful to the Queen.

  However, those who describe the Casket Letters as forgeries do not go so far as to deny that some such genuine letters may have existed. Their contention is that, during the brief interval between the discovery of the casket and the official examination of the letters, some of the Scottish lords had substituted malicious falsifications for the originals, so that the documents laid before parliament were by no manner of means those discovered in the casket. Who was responsible for this accusation? Nobody in particular. The Scottish lords of council in Edinburgh, immediately the booty had been handed over to Morton, assembled on the selfsame day and solemnly swore to the authenticity of the documents as soon as the casket was opened. Parliament too at a later date (and among the members were personal friends of the Queen), examined the script carefully and uttered no word of doubt. Subsequently, at the York Conference, they were again overhauled, and for a fourth time, at Hampton Court, they underwent close scrutiny. Each time they were compared with Mary’s writing, and each time they were declared authentic and coming from Mary’s own hand. More convincing still is it that Elizabeth had the texts printed and circulated among the courts of Europe. Now, although we have many reasons to distrust the actions of the Queen of England, we can hardly credit the assumption that she would compromise her high position by going to the length of forgery, since at any moment discovery was possible. Elizabeth was an able politician, and as such too careful to let herself be caught in a petty snare. The only person who, for repute’s sake, should have protested vehemently if the letters and sonnets were forgeries, namely Mary Stuart herself, was content to utter a feeble and quite unconvincing protest. Furthermore, she tried by underground means to hinder their production at the Conference of York. One cannot but ask why, if indeed the documents were forgeries, seeing that this would have greatly strengthened her position. An additional reason for believing that Mary suspected that her enemies had got hold of the originals is that she commanded her representatives to repudiate wholesale her authorship of everything alleged to be written by her hand, and this before any inquiry had been held. Of course this is not of very great evidential value, for in political matters Mary was never a stickler where truth was concerned. Moreover she held that her “parole de prince”—word as a prince—was of far greater worth than any amount of proof against her. Even when Buchanan published the letters in his Detection, and they were eagerly read at all the courts, Mary raised no cry of protest; she did not then declare them to be “false and feigned, forged and invented” to her “dis-honour and slander”. She was content to call her sometime Latin master a “defamatory atheist”. When writing to the Pope or to the King of France and her other relatives, she never mentioned a word about forgery of her letters and love verses. Nor was any suggestion of forgery made by the French court, to which transcripts of the letters were sent immediately after their disclosure. Among her contemporaries none cast the shadow of a doubt upon their authenticity, or raised a voice to confute so spiteful an accusation, or mooted the suggestion that fraudulent papers had been slipped into a batch of original ones. It was not for a century or so after James had rid the world of his mother’s love letters and poems that the hypothesis as to their falsification was first propounded, and this in a well-meant endeavour to describe a spirited and impulsive woman as an innocent creature incapable of doing wrong or committing a crime if such a course seemed to her necessary. These kindly souls wish us to believe that Mary was the hapless victim of a base conspiracy.

  Unquestionably, the attitude of Mary’s contemporaries seems to prove the authenticity of both letters and love ballads, and in my opinion, when considered from the stylistic and psychological standpoint, the evidence is no less forcible. Take the verses alone. Who was there in the Scotland of that day capable of producing a whole cycle of poems in the French tongue and at such short notice? Did any living person in sixteenth-century Scotland possess such a genius for poetry as not only to reproduce the literary style of the Queen but to show so intimate an acquaintance with her hidden thoughts and feelings? No doubt there have been many remarkable forgeries of historical documents and important letters, and in the realm of literature we are acquainted with a number of apocryphal poems and other imaginative compositions, but whether we think here of Macpherson’s Ossian or of the Königinhof Manuscript and the like, we are concerned with skilful reproductions of the style of long-past epochs. There is, however, no record of any attempt to palm off a whole sonnet cycle upon a living author. How absurd to suppose that rough Scottish lairds, barons and earls, to whom poesy was the most alien thing on earth, would be able, animated by the desire of compromising their Queen, to produce eleven sonnets in French. Again, I ask, who was this nameless genius, this magician, who possessed the gift for composing in a foreign tongue a sequence of love verses so precisely in the style of the Queen that the work could be attributed to her pen without raising a doubt in the minds of any of her relatives, her friends or her contemporaries? Not one of her champions has so far answered this question. Not even Ronsard, not even du Bellay, could have done as much. How ridiculous then to ascribe such a talent to the Mortons, the Argylls, the Hamiltons or the Gordons, who could wield the sword well enough, but did not know French sufficiently to carry on a dinner-table talk.

  No unprejudiced person can doubt the genuineness of the poems, and since the style of these sonnets is in perfect harmony with that of the letters, we have to admit that the latter are authentic and were written by Mary herself. Maybe in the course of the translation into Latin and into Scots certain details were doctored, or tampered with, and it is obvious that a few interpolations were made. A final consideration, a psychological one, has to be adduced in favour of the letters being Mary’s. If a suppositious “gang of criminals” inspired by hatred and malice had set to work forging letters, would not the forgers have produced documents showing beyond question that the alleged author was a contemptible creature, a lascivious and spiteful wanton? They would have been wasting their pains if, in their desire to injure Mary, they had produced as forgeries the extant Casket Letters, which exculpate her rather than incriminate her, exhibiting as they do Mary’s horror at her foreknowledge of and complicity in the intended crime against young Darnley. For what these documents show forth is not the voluptuousness of passion but its bitter distress. The letters are like the muffled cries of one who is being burnt alive.

  Although, as already said, the letters are in Mary’s style, they are rough-hewn. They manifest a wild and confused flow of thought and feeling, were evidently written in haste and disorder by a hand that (one feels) was tremulous with excitement. All these things are fully accordant with what we know from other sources regarding the Queen’s overstrained mental condition during the days from which they date, and they correspond to the writer’s actions at the same period. None but the most skilful of psychologists could have imagined so perfect a spiritual background for the known facts. Moray, Lethington and Buchanan, who by turns and haphazard have been mentioned as the forger by professional champions of Mary’s honour, were neither Shakespeares nor Balzacs nor Dostoevskys, but little souls, able to finesse and to cheat when trickery would serve their turn, but utterly incompetent, putting pen to paper, to produce word pictures so admirably representing Mary Stuart for all time. First let the genius who forged these letters be produced! We, who know that Mary in times of stress always poured her heart out in verse, can have no doubt that she composed both letters and poems. This granted, we can have no better testimony than her own as to her state of mind at this juncture.

  The verses reveal the beginning of her unfortunate passion. Three or four lines disclose that Mary’s love for Bothwell did not arise by a slow process of crystallisation, but seized an unsuspecting woman as its prey. The immediate occasion was, apparently, a crude act of bodily possession, an onslaught by Bothwell that was half or wholly rape. In her sonnet the darkness
is dispelled by a lightning flash:

  Pour luy aussi, ie gete mainte larme.

  Premier quand il se fit de ce corps possesseur,

  Du quel alors il n’auoyt pas le coeur.

  (Full many a tear have I wept because of him. The first was shed when he took possession of my body, whose heart did not then belong to him.) Instantly we are made to feel the situation. For weeks Mary had been thrown into close companionship with Bothwell. As chief adviser, and as commander of her armed forces, he had accompanied her from castle to castle. Since she had so recently chosen a beautiful and high-born lady as his wife, and had graced the wedding with her royal presence, it never occurred to her to think of him as a suitor; she was a queen, he a vassal; her position was inviolable. She could, therefore, travel about her realm with him unconcerned. But some of Mary’s most charming qualities, her lack of caution and her sense of security, had always been a danger to her. One can picture the scene. Presumably she had allowed him some trifling liberties, showing towards him that coquetry which twice already had led to disaster, in the cases of Chastelard and of Rizzio. He was alone with her for hours; she talked with him more confidentially than was customary; jested and sported with him. But Bothwell was no Chastelard, no romantic lute-player and languishing troubadour; Bothwell was not a Rizzio, an upstart with a flattering tongue; Bothwell was a man with hot senses and hard muscles, a creature of impulse and instinct, who would not shrink from any audacity. Such a man does not lightly allow himself to be led on and stimulated. Abruptly, he must have seized her, this woman who had long been in a vacillating and irritable state of mind, whose passionate nature had been aroused by her foolish fondness for Darnley—aroused but not assuaged. “Il se fit de ce corps possesseur”—he took her by storm or violated her. Who, at such moments, can distinguish between the two? They are moments of intoxication when a woman’s longing to give herself and desire to defend herself interlace. On Bothwell’s side the act of possession was probably just as little premeditated as it had been on Mary’s. The embrace was not the fulfilment of a tender inclination which had been growing in ardour over a lengthy period of time, but an impulsive act of lust devoid of spiritual tone, a purely physical capture.