To bed the king he made him bowne; To take his rest was his desire; He was no sooner cast on sleepe, But his chamber was on a blazing fire. Up he lope, and the window brake, Who have wee here? Lord Bodwell say'd; Who have we here? Lord Bodwell say'd, 66 Ah, Lord Bodwell, I know thee well; I'll pitty thee as much, he say'd, And as much favour show to thee, As thou didst to the queene's chamberlaine, That day thou deemedst him to die. Through halls and towers the king they ledd, 'Through towers and castles that were nigh, Through an arbour into an orchard, There on a pear-tree hanged him high. When the governor of Scotland heard That in Scotlande she dare not remaine. But she is fled into merry England, And here her residence hath taine; And through the Queene of England's grace. From this unhappy period, a series of infelicities attended the Queen of Scotland to the end of her life. A few months after the assassination of Darnley, she was seized by one of his murderers, the Earl of Bothwell, carried by force to his castle of Dundar, and there brutally ravished. It has been maintained by a great many writers that Mary went willingly with Bothwell, and that the story of a rape was but an invention to shelter Mary from the imputation of having too easily yielded to his solicitations. But we believe, with the learned vindicator of Mary, that there was no previous concert whatever between Mary and Bothwell; * It deserves to be mentioned here, that the governor of Scotland, who is noticed in the last stanza but one, was the Earl of Murray, half-brother to Mary, who, according to the best historians, was nearly concerned in the murder. It is true, he afterwards pursued that unfortunate princess out of her realm, but not to revenge the death of Darnley, but to clear the way for his own ambitious views, and secure to himself the regency of the kingdom of Scotland during the minority of James VI. that she had a real repugnance to his person; and that the rape was perpetrated under the most aggravating circumstances of atrocity and profligacy. "How shamefully," says a Scottish contemporary writer," the queen, our sovereign, was led captive, and by fear, force, (and as many conjectures may well be suspected) other extraordinary and more unlawful means, compelled to become bedfellow to another wife's husband :-is manifest to the world. Upon this very striking passage, Mr. Whitaker makes the following observations :-" this carries an intimation of something superlatively villainous and horrible in the very sound of it. The extraordinary means made use of in addition to fear and force; and the means that could be more unlawful than they, must be some practices of the most diabolical nature. Dr. Stuart, an author who must ever be mentioned with the highest respect by the friends of Mary, and the first who called out this striking passage into notice, supposes "amatorious potions" to be meant by it. But it means, I doubt not, something very different. It alludes to those practices which Lovelace actually uses upon Clarissa, stupifying draughts. The former are inconsistent with fear and force, to which they are brought in as assistants, and even contradictory to the compulsion, of which they are said to have been actual instruments. But the latter coincide directly with them, and indeed with the whole history.This passage, therefore, not only confirms the incidents of the rape, and also apprises us of a circumstance in it that is charged with peculiar guilt. The stupifying draughts, ministered by the contrivances of Bothwell to the imprisoned Mary, complete the horrid picture of his daring flagitiousness, and her heroical honour. And let it ever be remembered, that those very rebels, who pretended to have intercepted the letters, sonnets, and contracts of Mary, and who on them have grounded a charge of adultery and murder against her, of adultery with Bothwell, and of murder for the sake of Bothwell; even they formally and authoritatively announce her to have been a "compelled bedfellow" to Bothwell; to have been "led captive" by him first, and then to have been" compelled by fear," by "force," and as from many circumstances they say they conjectured, and as, no doubt, they knew from Bothwell himself, though they could not avow the communication, "by other extraordinary and more unlawful means." He had," as the rebels go on, "in three months found such hap in an unhappy enterprise, that, by the murder of the babe's father, he had purchased a pretended marriage of the mother, seized her person in his hands, environed her with a continual guard of 200 harquebuziers, as well day as night, wherever she went that if any man N had to do with the queen, it behoved him, before he could come to her person, to go through the ranks of harquebuziers, under the mercy of a notorious tyrant, as it were to pass the pikes." Under this strict kind of confinement, both before and after the marriage, did the fears of Bothwell keep the unhappy queen; the fullest evidence to the world, surely, of her innocence; so full, indeed, that I hope I may be allowed to parody those well known lines of Shakespeare, and to say That had not heaven, for some strong purpose seal'd "But on the 14th of May he brought her be. fore the council, and a marriage contract was there signed between them both. A copy of it was ordered to be registered in the books of council and of session, and the next day they were married." A marriage brought about under such auspices, it may well be conceived, could not prove very fortunate. Bothwell had scarcely reached the goal of his successive villanies, when a powerful * Dr. Robertson, author of the "History of the Emperor Charles V." and of "America," who had treated the character of Mary, Queen of Scots, with extreme illiberality in his "History of Scotland." |