MARY STUART
854
MARY STUART
mandcd to see the originals. Elizabeth granted the reasonableness of the demand, but never complied with it. She demanded to face her accusers. Elizabeth hair promised that she should do so, but never fulfilled tlie pledge. The commission broke up without a ver- dict. Elizabeth had no interest to press for either ac- ouittal or conviction. Murray was glad to return to his regency. Jlary alone had any reason to demand the comjiletion of the investigation, but Mary was a prisoner, and her access to the public not the most eas}-. Though inconclusive, the trial had revealed enough to strength- en the worst suspicions of the Scottish people, and no one thought of finding fault with Elizabeth for retain- ing 5Iary a prisoner. For nineteen years Mary Stuart thus passed life. "For nineteen years both captive and captor are made miserable by plots and counterplots; and whether Mary in prison or Mary at large is the more dangerous to the security of Protestant England is a question so hard to decide that Elizabeth never fairly attempts to determine it. At length a \Aot is vm- covered more deadly than any that has preceded. Half a score of assassins band themselves together to attempt Elizabeth's life, and to put Catholic Mary on the vacant throne. The blessing of the pope is pronounced upon the enterprise. The Catholic powers of Europe stand ready to welcome its consummation. Mary gives it her conlial approbation. ' The hour of deliverance,' she writes exultingly, ' is at hand.' But plots breed coun- terplots. In all the diplomatic service of Europe there is no so ingenious spy as Walsingham, Elizabeth's prime minister. E^-ery letter of Mary's is opened and copied by his agents before sent to its destination. The con- siiiracy is allowed to ripen. Then, when all is ready for Consummation, the leaders are arrested, the plot is brought to the light of day. Mary, with all her faults, never knew fear ; no craven heart was hers. The more dangerous was she because so brave. She battles for her life with a heroism well worthy a nobler nature — battles to the last, though there be no hope. She re- ceives the sentence of death with the calmness of true courage, not of despair. With all her treachery, never recreant to her faith — never but once, when her infatu- ated love of Bothwell swerved her from it for a few short weeks — she clings to her crucifix till the very hour of death. Almost her last words are words of courage to her friends. 'Weep not,' she says; 'I have promised for you.' Her ver\' last are a psahn from her Prayer-book — ' In thee. O Lord, have I pu., my trust.' And then she lays her head upon the block as peace- fully as ever she laid it upon her pillow. No 'grizzled, wrinkled old woman,' but in the full bloom of ripened womanhood — forty-five, no more — Mary Stuart pays on the scaffold at Fotheringay [whither she had been re- moved for trial of conspiracy from Charpley in Septem- ber, l.")8(i] the penalty of lier treacliory at iMlinburgh, May 8, 1587. The spirit of the stern old I'uritans is sat- isfied, and the pro])hecy of the Good Book receives a new and pregnant illustration — 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' " Five months after the execution her body was^ buried with great pom;) at Peterborough, whence, in 1012, it was removed to king Henry VlTs ('hajiel at Westminster, where it still lies in a sumptuous tomb erected by king James YI. " Whoever has attended but little to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into char- acter and disposition. Everj' one is a peqilexity to himself and a jierplexity to his neighbors; and men who are born in the same generation, who arc exposed to the same influences, trained bj' the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial f<wni and outline, but di- vided inwardly b}' impalpable and mysterious l)arriers." Thus Froude opens the fourth volume of his f/istan/ <if J'^iii/IiiikJ, wlien about to jiass in review the affairs of Scotland and Ireland in the IGth centurv, Yet. when