



Produced by David Widger.





                             *MARY STUART*

                                  _By_

                        *Alexandre Dumas, Pere*

            _From the Eight Volume set "Celebrated Crimes"_


                                  1910




CONTENTS


    *MARY STUART--1587*
    CHAPTER I
    CHAPTER II
    CHAPTER III
    CHAPTER IV
    CHAPTER V
    CHAPTER VI
    CHAPTER VII
    CHAPTER VIII
    CHAPTER IX
    CHAPTER X




*MARY STUART--1587*




CHAPTER I


Some royal names are predestined to misfortune: in France, there is the
name "Henry". Henry I was poisoned, Henry II was killed in a tournament,
Henry III and Henry IV were assassinated. As to Henry V, for whom the
past is so fatal already, God alone knows what the future has in store
for him.

In Scotland, the unlucky name is "Stuart". Robert I, founder of the
race, died at twenty-eight of a lingering illness. Robert II, the most
fortunate of the family, was obliged to pass a part of his life, not
merely in retirement, but also in the dark, on account of inflammation
of the eyes, which made them blood-red. Robert III succumbed to grief,
the death of one son and the captivity of other. James I was stabbed by
Graham in the abbey of the Black Monks of Perth. James II was killed at
the siege of Roxburgh, by a splinter from a burst cannon. James III was
assassinated by an unknown hand in a mill, where he had taken refuge
during the battle of Sauchie. James IV, wounded by two arrows and a blow
from a halberd, fell amidst his nobles on the battlefield of Flodden.
James V died of grief at the loss of his two sons, and of remorse for
the execution of Hamilton. James VI, destined to unite on his head the
two crowns of Scotland and England, son of a father who had been
assassinated, led a melancholy and timorous existence, between the
scaffold of his mother, Mary Stuart, and that of his son, Charles I.
Charles II spent a portion of his life in exile. James II died in it.
The Chevalier Saint-George, after having been proclaimed King of
Scotland as James VIII, and of England and Ireland as James III, was
forced to flee, without having been able to give his arms even the
lustre of a defeat. His son, Charles Edward, after the skirmish at Derby
and the battle of Culloden, hunted from mountain to mountain, pursued
from rock to rock, swimming from shore to shore, picked up half naked by
a French vessel, betook himself to Florence to die there, without the
European courts having ever consented to recognise him as a sovereign.
Finally, his brother, Henry Benedict, the last heir of the Stuarts,
having lived on a pension of three thousand pounds sterling, granted him
by George III, died completely forgotten, bequeathing to the House of
Hanover all the crown jewels which James II had carried off when he
passed over to the Continent in 1688--a tardy but complete recognition
of the legitimacy of the family which had succeeded his.

In the midst of this unlucky race, Mary Stuart was the favourite of
misfortune. As Brantome has said of her, "Whoever desires to write about
this illustrious queen of Scotland has, in her, two very, large
subjects, the one her life, the other her death," Brantome had known her
on one of the most mournful occasions of her life--at the moment when
she was quitting France for Scotland.

It was on the 9th of August, 1561, after having lost her mother and her
husband in the same year, that Mary Stuart, Dowager of France and Queen
of Scotland at nineteen, escorted by her uncles, Cardinals Guise and
Lorraine, by the Duke and Duchess of Guise, by the Duc d'Aumale and M.
de Nemours, arrived at Calais, where two galleys were waiting to take
her to Scotland, one commanded by M. de Mevillon and the other by
Captain Albize. She remained six days in the town. At last, on the 15th
of the month, after the saddest adieus to her family, accompanied by
Messieurs d'Aumale, d'Elboeuf, and Damville, with many nobles, among
whom were Brantome and Chatelard, she embarked in M. Mevillon's galley,
which was immediately ordered to put out to sea, which it did with the
aid of oars, there not being sufficient wind to make use of the sails.

Mary Stuart was then in the full bloom of her beauty, beauty even more
brilliant in its mourning garb--a beauty so wonderful that it shed
around her a charm which no one whom she wished to please could escape,
and which was fatal to almost everyone. About this time, too, someone
made her the subject of a song, which, as even her rivals confessed,
contained no more than the truth. It was,