The elements which met together in Mary were all of a finer quality than those which were found in Elizabeth; but in Mary some troublous elements were added to the choicer ones. In her high land there were ominous volcanic peaks, while in the decorous plain of Elizabeth’s character there was a monotonous blending of vegetation and sand. In some of our greatest characters (the truism is well-worn) there have been grave defects. Burns’ life never comes to any generous mind save with the deepest regret as well as the keenest admiration. Bacon’s was a great mind with a great fault. Shakspere and Goethe—the two foremost spirits which time has yet given to us—are not held to have led altogether stainless lives. Now the Queen of Scots was not by any means one of the immortals, but she was nevertheless and in truth a great woman. Yet in the splendid block out of which the ever-pathetic figure of Mary was chiselled there came to light an ineradicable flaw. The good and evil of all these characters were mainly, though not wholly (for circumstance must not be forgotten), due to organisation and inheritance. A little difference in their organisation, and they would have been other individuals than they were, and would most likely have remained unknown to us; but having the parentage they had, and being what they were, a little difference in circumstance would probably have mattered little. What there was in each of organisation, what of circumstance, and what of volition, is a problem the solution of which is still far off. In all of them volition, whatever that may be, did its best; organisation, let us say, did its worst; circumstance looked on, helping here and hindering there,—the compromise is history.

As the six-wives business clings to Henry’s name, so does the Darnley matter, though curiously with less odium, cling to that of Mary. Henry has had no friends save those who lived in or near his time. In our time an inquirer, here or there, strives perhaps to gain for him something of impartial judgment. Mary has never been without warm friends, and her friends seem to grow in number and in warmth. The controversy still rages touching Mary’s part in the tragic event which inflicted so deep a wound into her life. But although the controversy goes on at even fever heat, the public judgment remains cool and is probably just. It is kept cool and just by the weight of a few colossal truths which the deftest manipulation of a cloud of smaller truths cannot hide. At critical moments the physiological historian, who looks steadily at a few large incidents in the light of human nature, discovers clues which escape the vision of the purely literary historian, who is for ever diving—and usefully diving—into the wells of parchment detail. In reality it matters little whether this diver or that has dived most deeply; matters little whether certain documents are spurious or genuine. Mary Stuart accepted—she certainly did not reject—the passion of a certain man; that man was a leader among a number of men who murdered her husband; after the murder Mary Stuart married that particular man, and thereby most assuredly held a candle to murder. This was Mary. Now if everything that has been said in her favour could be proved, she would be but little better than this; if everything that has been said against her could be proved, she would be but little worse.

The student of historic characters never forgets the time the country and the circumstance in which his characters lived. We are now looking at a time when not only noble and ignoble characters existed side by side, but when noble and less noble elements existed together in one and the same character. For indeed the good elements of a better time come in slowly, and the evil elements of a bad past die a lingering death. The active Scotland (there was, we know, a good quiet Scotland in the background), the active Scotland of Tudor times was given over to factions, fanatics, self-seekers and assassins. Life was taken and given with scant ceremony. The highest personages of that time contrived murder, or sanctioned it, or forgave it—the popes did, continental sovereigns did, Henry did, Elizabeth did. The murders thus contrived or sanctioned or condoned were, it is true, mainly on behalf of thrones or dominions or religions, while the murder which Mary assuredly forgave, if she did not sanction, was on behalf of her passions. The moral difference between murder for a crown and murder for a love we may not now discuss.

It was to this Scotland, the active and factious Scotland just described, that the young queen of nineteen years was brought—brought from a different atmosphere and with an unpropitious training. The more favoured Elizabeth meanwhile was ruling over a quieter, a more united people, and was helped at her council-table by high-minded and unselfish men. It is useless now perhaps to ask if we may be allowed to admire the gifts, to deplore the faults, and to pity the fate of the more unfortunate queen. We can indeed, individually, do what we please, but the queen’s posterity with no uncertain voice has declared that we may. Emerson says that the great soul of the world is just, and the great soul has kept Mary within the territory of its favour. It would seem that the affection and devotion which were given to Mary were not based on any single great or on any group of great actions; they were based (it is to her credit) on daily acts of kindliness and patience and unruffled grace. The sum of Mary’s qualities, whatever they were, endowed her with the rare gift of making the world her friend; and the world does not, as a rule, make lasting friendships on insufficient grounds. Mary indeed, with all her faults, deserved a better country than Scotland; and England, it may be added, deserved a more gracious queen than Elizabeth. But whatever she deserved or whatever she was fitted for, Mary’s fate was destined to be one of the saddest of recorded time. Inward force and outer circumstance are so commingled that mortal reason fails to disentangle them. To-day men seem to put a curb on circumstance, and to-morrow circumstance seems to run away with men. An ocean of complex and imperious circumstance surged around two queens, one it lifted up and kept afloat and carried into a secure haven, the other it tossed mercilessly to and fro and finally drew her underneath its waves.

A number of leading Scottish nobles gave out and probably believed that the wretched Darnley’s life was incompatible with the general good. Bothwell was but one of this number. Yet how clear it has ever been to all eyes, save to those of the blindly passionate actors themselves, that the Scottish queen’s fatal error, even if there were no grave error before, was in marrying any one of the misguided band. But misguidance was in the ascendant. Could she by some magic web have concealed the husbands from each other and have married them all, she would at any rate have fared no worse than she did. But, to be serious, if a queen marries one of half a dozen ambitious assassins, the other five will assuredly make her life intolerable and her rule impossible.

In no aspect of character did the two queens differ more than in their attitude to religion. Elizabeth’s piety, like her father’s, though less deep than his, was of a similar passionless, perceptive, unreflective order. Mary’s religion, like Elizabeth’s, like that of all individuals in all parts of the world, was no doubt at first the product of her early surroundings; but with the Scottish queen it was much more than this—it was a profoundly passionate conviction and a deeply revered ideal. A living writer, who is perhaps unrivalled in the historic art and who rarely errs in his historic judgments, is less happy than is his wont in his verdict on the catholic queen. He avers that she had no share “in the deeper and nobler emotions;” yet almost in the same breath he states that she had “a purpose fixed as the stars to trample down the Reformation.” To have a purpose “fixed as the stars” to trample down one religion was, in that age of the world, surely to have a purpose “fixed as the stars” to strengthen and protect another; to yearn to put down the Reformation was surely to yearn to bring in catholicism—catholic teaching and catholic rites and catholic rule. We may not be catholics, but we are not entitled to say that from an impassioned catholic woman’s point of view this was not a high ideal; it had been the ideal of the judicial mind, Sir Thomas More, as well as the ideal of the enthusiast, Ignatius Loyola; it had been for a thousand years the ideal of a multitude of noble natures both men and women. Elizabeth, opportunely enough, had no ideals of any kind; ideals indeed are often inconvenient in a ruler; but she had, despite her acrimonious speech, plenty of sincerely good wishes and good intentions for all the world. If the Queen of England had no ideals she had many devices, and one was to check the flow of all sorts of zeal, especially Protestant zeal. In the two lives religion told in different ways—the difference was in the two natures, be it noted, not in the two religions. Elizabeth, with a skin-deep religion only, was evenly and enduringly virtuous. Mary had ardent and deep convictions, but her career was not one of unbroken virtue. Elizabeth was certainly unfortunate in her religious attitudes. She did not like the Protestants for she was not a good Protestant; the Catholics did not like her for she was not a good Catholic. In religion, indeed as in all things, she was greatly influenced by her inborn spirit of “contrariness.” If the Catholics had intrigued less persistently against her throne and her life, and if (the idea is sufficiently ludicrous) the Queen of Scotland had chanced to run in harness with the hated John Knox (hated of both queens), she would gladly have given the rein to her Catholic impulses.

The two queens differed as much in body as in mind. I have elsewhere sought to show not only that certain leading features of character tend to run together (in itself a distinct contribution to our knowledge), but also that these allied features are associated with a group of bodily peculiarities, a contribution, if it really is a contribution, of greatly additional interest. Elizabeth, large and pink-skinned like her father, was by no means without impressiveness and even stateliness. She carried her head a little forward and her chin a little downward, both these positions being due to a slightly curved upper spine. Her hair was scanty and her eyebrows were practically absent. All these bodily items, as well as her mental items, she inherited from her father. Mary had a wholly different figure and a different presence; her head was upright, her spine straight; in her back there was no convexity either vertically or transversely. Her eyebrows were abundant and her head of hair was long and massive. All these peculiarities, too, we may be quite sure, she derived from her parentage (not necessarily the nearest parents) on one side or the other. In my little work on body and parentage in character I urge—it is well to say here—that the bodily signs of certain classes of character (two more marked and one intervening) are now and then subject to the modifying influences of ailment and accident, and especially when these happen in early life. In Elizabeth and Mary, however, no such influences disturbed the development of two strongly-marked examples, both in body and in character, of two large classes of women and, with but little alteration, of two large classes of men also.

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Footnote:

[1] From historic comparison we may feel sure that no such cruelty was found in the Gothic and Frankish and Norman blood of France.