



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, so it was said, by M. de
Maison-Fleur, a cavalier equally accomplished in arms and letters: Here
it is:--

"In robes of whiteness, lo, Full sad and mournfully, Went pacing to and
fro Beauty's divinity; A shaft in hand she bore From Cupid's cruel
store, And he, who fluttered round, Bore, o'er his blindfold eyes And
o'er his head uncrowned, A veil of mournful guise, Whereon the words
were wrought: 'You perish or are caught.'"

Yes, at this moment, Mary Stuart, in her deep mourning of white, was
more lovely than ever; for great tears were trickling down her cheeks,
as, weaving a handkerchief, standing on the quarterdeck, she who was so
grieved to set out, bowed farewell to those who were so grieved to
remain.

At last, in half an hour's time, the harbour was left behind; the vessel
was out at sea. Suddenly, Mary heard loud cries behind her: a boat
coming in under press of sail, through her pilot's ignorance had struck
upon a rock in such a manner that it was split open, and after having
trembled and groaned for a moment like someone wounded, began to be
swallowed up, amid the terrified screams of all the crew. Mary,
horror-stricken, pale, dumb, and motionless, watched her gradually sink,
while her unfortunate crew, as the keel disappeared, climbed into the
yards and shrouds, to delay their death-agony a few minutes; finally,
keel, yards, masts, all were engulfed in the ocean's gaping jaws. For a
moment there remained some black specks, which in turn disappeared one
after another; then wave followed upon wave, and the spectators of this
horrible tragedy, seeing the sea calm and solitary as if nothing had
happened, asked themselves if it was not a vision that had appeared to
them and vanished.

"Alas!" cried Mary, falling on a seat and leaning both arms an the
vessel's stern, "what a sad omen for such a sad voyage!" Then, once more
fixing on the receding harbour her eyes, dried for a moment by terror,
and beginning to moisten anew, "Adieu, France!" she murmured, "adieu,
France!" and for five hours she remained thus, weeping and murmuring,
"Adieu, France! adieu, France!"

Darkness fell while she was still lamenting; and then, as the view was
blotted out and she was summoned to supper, "It is indeed now, dear
France," said she, rising, "that I really lose you, since jealous night
heaps mourning upon mourning, casting a black veil before my sight.
Adieu then, one last time, dear France; for never shall I see you more."

With these words, she went below, saying that she was the very opposite
of Dido, who, after the departure of AEneas, had done nothing but look
at the waves, while she, Mary, could not take her eyes off the land.
Then everyone gathered round her to try to divert and console her. But
she, growing sadder, and not being able to respond, so overcome was she
with tears, could hardly eat; and, having had a bed got ready on the
stern deck, she sent for the steersman, and ordered him if he still saw
land at daybreak, to come and wake her immediately. On this point Mary
was favoured; for the wind having dropped, when daybreak came the vessel
was still within sight of France.

It was a great joy when, awakened by the steersman, who had not
forgotten the order he had received, Mary raised herself on her couch,
and through the window that she had had opened, saw once more the
beloved shore. But at five o'clock in the morning, the wind having
freshened, the vessel rapidly drew farther away, so that soon the land
completely disappeared. Then Mary fell back upon her bed, pale as death,
murmuring yet once again--"Adieu, France! I shall see thee no more."

Indeed, the happiest years of her life had just passed away in this
France that she so much regretted. Born amid the first religious
troubles, near the bedside of her dying father, the cradle mourning was
to stretch for her to the grave, and her stay in France had been a ray
of sunshine in her night. Slandered from her birth, the report was so
generally spread abroad that she was malformed, and that she could not
live to grow up, that one day her mother, Mary of Guise, tired of these
false rumours, undressed her and showed her naked to the English
ambassador, who had come, on the part of Henry VIII, to ask her in
marriage for the Prince of Wales, himself only five years old. Crowned
at nine months by Cardinal Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews, she was
immediately hidden by her mother, who was afraid of treacherous dealing
in the King of England, in Stirling Castle. Two years later, not finding
even this fortress safe enough, she removed her to an island in the
middle of the Lake of Menteith, where a priory, the only building in the
place, provided an asylum for the royal child and for four young girls
born in the same year as herself, having like her the sweet name which
is an anagram of the word "aimer," and who, quitting her neither in her
good nor in her evil fortune, were called the "Queen's Marys". They were
Mary Livingston, Mary Fleming, Mary Seyton, and Mary Beaton. Mary stayed
in this priory till Parliament, having approved her marriage with the
French dauphin, son of Henry II, she was taken to Dumbarton Castle, to
await the moment of departure. There she was entrusted to M. de Breze,
sent by Henry II to fetch her. Having set out in the French galleys
anchored at the mouth of the Clyde, Mary, after having been hotly
pursued by the English fleet, entered Brest harbour, 15th August, 1548,
one year after the death of Francis! Besides the queen's four Marys, the
vessels also brought to France three of her natural brothers, among whom
was the Prior of St. Andrews, James Stuart, who was later to abjure the
Catholic faith, and with the title of Regent, and under the name of the
Earl of Murray, to become so fatal to poor Mary. From Brest, Mary went
to St. Germain-en-Laye, where Henry II, who had just ascended the
throne, overwhelmed her with caresses, and then sent her to a convent
where the heiresses of the noblest French houses were brought up. There
Mary's happy qualities developed. Born with a woman's heart and a man's
head, Mary not only acquired all the accomplishments which constituted
the education of a future queen, but also that real knowledge which is
the object of the truly learned.

Thus, at fourteen, in the Louvre, before Henry II, Catherine de Medici,
and the whole court, she delivered a discourse in Latin of her own
composition, in which she maintained that it becomes women to cultivate
letters, and that it is unjust and tyrannical to deprive flowery of
their perfumes, by banishing young girls from all but domestic cares.
One can imagine in what manner a future queen, sustaining such a thesis,
was likely to be welcomed in the most lettered and pedantic court in
Europe. Between the literature of Rabelais and Marot verging on their
decline, and that of Ronsard and Montaigne reaching their zenith, Mary
became a queen of poetry, only too happy never to have to wear another
crown than that which Ronsard, Dubellay, Maison-Fleur, and Brantome
placed daily on her head. But she was predestined. In the midst of those
fetes which a waning chivalry was trying to revive came the fatal joust
of Tournelles: Henry II