Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 1925. LIGHTS ON OLD HISTORY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 131, 6 June 1925, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 1925. LIGHTS ON OLD HISTORY

Those who turned to the ''Encyclopaedia Britannica" for information on the fascinating woman who after the lapse of more than three centuries has been made to live again by the discovery reportod in a cable message a week ago were surprised to find that tie article which Swinburne contributed to the ninth edition forty years ago still holds the field. Such an honour has not often been bestowed on any contributor to a work which, as our standard book of reference,' has been subject to constant revision. The most striking example is Macaulay, whose essays on Johnson, Pitt, Banyan, and Goldsmith, written for the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" of nearly seventy years ago, and ever since regarded as classical models of biography on a small scale, are to be found with some slight additions in the latest edition. Swinburne's article appears to have been carried forward in this edition quite unaltered, but there is also a special article on the Casket Letters, nearly half as long as the principal article in which Andrew Lang deals minutely with one of the most difficult problems of Mary's career. Was she really an accomplice in the murder of Darnley, her second . husband? The answer turns in large measure on the genuineness of the Casket Letters which purport' to " have been written by Mary to Bothwell, the arclr-contriver of the crime and afterwards her husband. It has been said that "perhaps there is no more ardent controversy in history" than that which this problem has excited. On internal evidence , alone Swinburne arrived at the conclusion that "even in these possibly disfigured versions the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention of art." When Andrew Lang first discussed the- problem, his conclusion was that a jury of to-day would feel compelled to acquit the Queen, even if convinced at heart of her guilt. This conclusion was based on the fact that, though he believed the letters and verses found in the Casket to be partly of Mary's composition, he was satisfied that forgery had been used at least to strengthen the weak points. But it is interesting to note that in his "Encyclopaedia" article Lang abandons his previous conclusion regarding the most important letter in controversy, and reduces the scope of possible forgery to relatively small dimensions. A jury might be 'puzzled even now by the careful balancing of Lang's elaborate summing up, but his opinion now swells the preponderance of authority in favour of the Queen's guilt. Though the problem of her correspondence is still one of intense interest for the Sherlock Holmeses of history and letters, Mary's moral guilt is put beyond a doubt for the average jurymen by the bare chronology of tho three months that followed the murder of Darnley on the 10th February 15G7. On -the 12th of April, writes Mr. Joseph kobertson, Bothwcll was broucht on? !"°* tHal a"f) acquitted; on tho --Hli he -intercepted the Queen on her way from Lmlithgow to Edinburgh, and earned her, with scarcely a show of resistance., to Dmibar. On the 7th of Mavho was divorced from the young and comely wife whom he hnd"mam»d -a little more than a twelvemonth before; on the 12th Mary publicly Pardoned Ins seizure o f ] ler pei . son ' alu , created him Duke of Orkney; and on the 15th—only three months after her misband s murder—she married the man whom everyone regarded as his murderer. Mary's haste, to-marry her husband's murderer was almost as precipitate as that o[ Hamlet's mother— V'lit iwo months dead: nay. not so iiHieli, not two: and the .judgment of history, which is not limited to the technical proofs that govern a. court of law, must be the same in the two cases. ■l-''or this reason it is absurd to (alk of the verdict, of (he. experl, on the lett'ii'a which brouKb'- the unhappy \Queeu Lq .the block ats having

•'cleaved her .character." Her character was far too deeply stained by the notorious facts of her own life to permit of its clearance by the combined researches of all the chemical experts and Home Office experts in the world. "A little water clears us of this deed," said Lady Macbeth after Duncan's murder, but she knew better, and it is certain that all the chemicals of the twentieth century cannot wipe the stain of Darnley's murder from Mary Stuart. Writing to her immediately afterwards and hoping that she could clear herself, Elizabeth said, "I should wish you an honourable sepulchre instead of a stained life." The stained life was Mary's portion, yet it is impossible to resist the feeling that Elizabeth herself helped her to an honourable sepulchre twenty years later. There was little, if anything, of real moral turpitude, according to the standards of that age, in Mary's alleged share in the Babingtou conspiracy, and nothing comparable to her previous exploits. Mary's designs on the English Throne were, of course, treasonable, but they were not immoral, and if designs on Elizabeth's life were added, they may be condoned as forced upon a desperate woman as a necessary step to her exchange of her prison for the Throne. At the worst, Mary's plot against Elizabeth was a far less heinous crime than the murder of her victim which Elizabeth endeavoured to promote after the death sentence in order to escape the odium of the execution. Next to her beauty and her charm it is the courage and the skill with which the Queen of Scots fought her last fight that has biased the world in her favour. Of her struggle for life -with Elizabeth's commissioners, Swinburne writes:— . Mary conducted her own defence -with courage incomparable and unsurpassable ability. Pathos and indignation, subtlety and simplicity, personal appeal and political reasoning were the alternate 'weapons with which she fought against all odds of evidence and inference, and disputed every inch of debateable ground. And the courage and composure and majesty of her last hours were something far greater. Mary, says Mr. J. Robertson, laid her head upon the block with the dignity of a Queen and the constancy and resignation of a martyr, evincing to the last her devotion to the church of her fathers. The Stuarts were very bad rulers, and Mary was the worst. But they knew how to die, and none better than she.