BLACKWOOD'S 2 EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. VOL. CXLIII. MARY STUART IN SCOTLAND. JOHN KNOX AND WILLIAM MAITLAND. MARY landed at Leith on the 19th of August 1561; she was married to her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, on the 29th of July 1565. During these years her life, though uneventful, was not happy. Holyrood was the headquarters of the Court, and the sombre old pile, which had more than once been gutted by the "auld enemy," put on something of summer brightness during her stay. Mary had the easy manners of her race; she cared little for ceremony or ceremonial state; had she been a man she would have sought adventure like her father"riding out through any part of the realm him alone, unknown that he was king." She dined with the wealthier citizens; for the poorest she had a ready smile and a pleasant word. The Reformers complained that she was addicted to dancing," her common speech in secret was, she saw nothing in Scotland but gravitie, which she could not agree weill with, for she was brought up in joyousitie-so termed she dancing and other things thereto belonging; and there were frequent sports and masques among the courtiers and the ladies of the Court, after the somewhat ponderous fashions of the time. Yet graver matters were not neglected, she read Livy "daily" with Buchanan, she sat in Council with her nobles, the envoys of foreign princes were duly welcomed and hospitably entertained. She did not, however, I believe, care much for Holyrood; the palace lay low among its marshes; and the turbulent Calvinism of the capital was a constant menace to a Catholic queen. It was at Falkland and St Andrews In that she felt most at home. She of Ross; and returning leisurely loved the hardy outdoor life with by the east coast, reached Holyrood hawk and hound. During the on the 26th of September. She four years preceding her marriage, was at Wemyss Castle in Fife passing, as I have said elsewhere, when, on 16th February 1565, she whole days in the saddle, she had met Darnley for the first time; ridden through every part of her and it is probable that she was kingdom, except the wild and in- with Athol at Dunkeld some-time accessible district between the in June of the same year, for it Cromarty and the Pentland Firths. was on her return from the HighBefore she had been a month in lands that, hearing of the plot of Scotland she had visited Linlith the disaffected nobles to kidnap gow, Stirling, Perth, and St An- her lover and herself, she rode drews. The spring of 1562 was from Perth by the Queensferry in spent in Fife; the autumn in the one day to Lord Livingston's northern counties. She was at house of Callendar-a ride of not Castle Campbell in January 1563, less than forty miles. .when the Lady Margaret was married to Sir James Stewart of Doune. She went back for a few weeks to Holyrood, but she left again in February, and did not return till the end of May. She had promised to go to Inverary early in June; but Lethington, who had been in France, was still absent, and she was anxious to confer with him before she left. "We have now looked so long for the Lord of Lethington that we are almost at our wits'-end. The Queen thinketh it long, and hath stayed her journey towards Argyle these seven days, with purpose whether he come or not to depart upon Tuesday next." On the 29th of June (Lethington having in the meantime returned) she started for Inverary, where she arrived on the 22d July. Crossing the Clyde and making a long round through Ayrshire and the Stewartry to St Mary's Isle, it was the late autumn before she regained the capital. The spring of 1564 was passed in Fife; then in July, Parliament having been dissolved, she went to the great deer-hunt in Athol, where "three hundred and sixty deer, with five wolves, and some roes," were slain; crossed the "Mounth" to Inverness; visited the Chanonry During most of this time Maitland, as the Prime Minister of the Queen, was the most conspicuous figure in the Scottish Court. all Scotland, indeed, no man, Knox only excepted, was more widely known, or, upon the whole, more widely liked. He had attained a great political position; and Mary, one of the most generous of women, was even extravagantly munificent to her favourite ministers. She created her brother, the Lord James, Earl of Moray, enriching him with the spoil of half-a-score of abbeys; the revenues of Crossraguel were given to Buchanan; and out of the Church lands round Haddington ample provision was made for Maitland. "At my arrival at Dunbar, I heard that the Lord of Ledington was at Ledington, taking possession of the whole abbacy which the Queen had given him, so that he is now equal with any man that hath his whole lands lying in Lothian. chanced upon him there, and accompanied him the next day to Edinburgh." Many of the men who had been the recipients of Mary's bounty came by-and-by to conspire against her: Buchanan took away her good name, Moray her crown; but Maitland, as I ex I pect to be able to show, was never ungrateful to his liberal mistress. The relations between them were from first to last (with hardly a bleak) intimate and cordial. There can be no doubt, I think, that Maitland was warmly attached to Mary. He vindicated her title; he advocated her claims; he believed quite sincerely that, supported as she was by the great nobles and the mass of the common people in either realm, she was in the end bound to win; and though his confidence must have been sometimes severely tried, yet even when her fortunes grew hopeless, he clung to the cause which he had made his own with obstinate fidelity, and he laid down his life in a service which had become desperate. The personal fascination of the Queen unquestionably accounts for several incidents in his career which, on any other theory of the motives by which he was influenced, would appear inexplicable. It must be frankly admitted that on more than one occasion his policy, as her minister, could not have been dictated by political considerations only; and we are driven to conclude that even the cool and wary diplomatist had not been insusceptible to "the enchantment whereby men are bewitched." Of the policy, civil and ecclesiastical, which Maitland pursued, of his attitude to the great political and religious problems of the age, I have now to speak; and I shall endeavour to do so as clearly and briefly as is practicable. It is necessary that the arguments which weighed with the men to whom he was opposed should be fairly stated; and I propose to state them, as far as need be, in their own words. In this paper, therefore, the chief fig. ures will be Maitland and-Knox; in the next, Maitland and-Cecil. The most charming and spontaneous of German lyrists insists, in his essay on the Romantic revival, that Leo X. was just as zealous a Protestant as Luther. Luther's protest at Wittenberg was in Latin prose; Leo's at Rome in stone and colour and ottava rhymes. "Do not the vigorous marbles of Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano's laughing nymph-faces, and the life-intoxicated merriment in the verses of Master Ludovico, offer a protesting contrast to the old gloomy withered Catholicism?" And he concludes that the painters of Italy, "plunging into the sea of Grecian mirthfulness," combated priestdom more effectively than the Saxon theologians; and that the Venus of Titian was a better treatise against an ascetic spirituality than that nailed to church door of Wittenberg. the The bubbles blown by a jester like Heine are sometimes more suggestive than the weightiest argument of the moralist. No one knew better than Heine did that the passage from which I have quoted was in one sense (the Italian renascence being in comparison with the German sterile if not corrupt) extravagantly unfair. But it is not to be denied that in another and possibly a larger sense it is the simplest statement of fact. The Reformation, in its initiation and in its essence, was a measure of enfranchisement. was a mental, as well as a moral and spiritual, revolt; the aspiration of the intellect for "an ampler ether," as well as the aspiration of the conscience for "a diviner air." It The Church of Rome, which had once done much for the freedom of mankind, had latterly become a burden too heavy to be borne. A colossal system of priestcraft, of sacerdotal pretences and sacra mental mystifications, was sup- Protestant revolt in the Netherported by sanctions which, when lands; yet even Sainte Aldegonde not artificial, were immoral. The was vexed and irritated by the Maker of heaven and earth could tolerant temper of William the only be approached through the Silent. "The affair of the Anapriest; the priest was often a baptists," he wrote on one occaman of ill repute; the penalties of sion, "has been renewed. The wrong doing were remitted, the Prince objects to exclude them grace of God was secured, not by from citizenship. He answered repentance and amendment of life, me sharply that their yea was but by the conjuring of a conse- equal to our oath, and that we crated caste; pardons for past should not press this matter unsins, indulgences for future sins, less we were willing to confess might be bought for money. This that it was just for the Papists clerical absolutism, as arbitrary as to compel us to a divine service it was unconscientious, as sordid which was against our conscience. as it was corrupt, as hurtful to In short, I don't see how we can intellectual freedom and political accomplish our wish in this matliberty as to the spiritual life, was ter. The Prince has uttered rethe system which the Reformers proaches to me that our clergy undertook to abolish. are striving to obtain a mastery But-happy or unhappily, ac- over consciences. He praised lately cording to the point of view-few the saying of a monk who was not of the Reformers had any adequate long ago here, that our pot had conception of the higher and wid- not gone to the fire as often as er interests which their struggle that of our antagonists, but that against an exclusive sacerdotalism when the time came it would be involved. Protestantism is the re- black enough. In short, the Prince ligion of reasonableness as opposed fears that after a few centuries to the religion of authority; and the clerical tyranny on both sides the Protestant who puts an in- will stand in this respect on the fallible book or an infallible creed same footing." in the place of an infallible Church Wise and memorable words! is disloyal to the principles of the The Prince was not mistaken; in Reformation, if not to the practice the highest sense-as a vindication, of the Reformers. The practice, that is, of the rights of reason and we may admit, was not uniform or conscience, as a protest against a consistent; but the men who most sacerdotal monopoly, as well as powerfully impressed the infant against an incredible superstition Churches of the Continent were the Reformation failed,- nothe Luthers and the Calvins. It where more conspicuously than in was the same in Scotland. Mait- Scotland. The Reformers did not land represented the spirit of loose the bonds of superstition : criticism, Knox the spirit of they banished one incredibility to dogma; yet it cannot be said that replace it by another. And the Maitland was more successful than Church of Knox was as arbitrary, Erasmus. as domineering, as greedy of power as the Church of Hildebrand. Sainte Adlegonde a man of versatile ability, a poet, an orator, We are now told that the cona theologian, a fine scholar, an junction was inevitable; it was acute diplomatist-was one of the the sixteenth century, not the most accomplished leaders of the nineteenth; the age needed a |