The Mystery of Mary Stuart

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Lang Andrew. The Mystery of Mary Stuart

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

I. DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

II. THE MINOR CHARACTERS

III. THE CHARACTERS BEFORE RICCIO’S MURDER

IV. BEFORE THE BAPTISM OF THE PRINCE

V. BETWEEN THE BAPTISM AND THE MURDER

VI. THE MURDER OF DARNLEY

VII. THE CONFESSIONS OF PARIS

VIII. MARY’S CONDUCT AFTER THE MURDER

IX. THE EMERGENCE OF THE CASKET LETTERS

X. THE CASKET LETTERS

XI. THE LETTERS AT THE CONFERENCE OF YORK

XII. THE LETTERS AT WESTMINSTER AND HAMPTON COURT

XIII. MARY’S ATTITUDE AFTER THE CONFERENCE

XIV. INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THE LETTERS

Letter I

Letter II

XV. THE SIX MINOR CASKET LETTERS

Letter III (IV)

Letter IV

Letter V

Letter VI

Letter VII

Letter VIII (III in Henderson)

XVI. THE CASKET SONNETS

XVII. CONCLUSIONS AS TO THE LETTERS AND THE POSSIBLE FORGERS

XVIII. LATER HISTORY OF CASKET AND LETTERS

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

APPENDIX E

THE CASKET LETTERS

Letter I

Letter II

Letter III. ORIGINAL FRENCH VERSION AT HATFIELD

Letter IV. ORIGINAL FRENCH VERSION

Letter V. ORIGINAL FRENCH VERSION AT HATFIELD

Letter VI. PUBLISHED SCOTS TRANSLATION

Letter VII. SCOTS VERSION

Letter VIII. ORIGINAL FRENCH VERSION

Letter IX. THE FRENCH ‘SONNETS’

CRAWFORD’S DEPOSITION

Отрывок из книги

Mr. Carlyle not unjustly described the tragedy of Mary Stuart as but a personal incident in the true national History of Scotland. He asked for other and more essential things than these revelations of high life. Yet he himself wrote in great detail the story of the Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette. The diamonds of the French, the silver Casket of the Scottish Queen, with all that turned on them, are of real historical interest, for these trifles brought to the surface the characters and principles of men living in an age of religious revolution. Wells were sunk, as it were, deep into human personality, and the inner characteristics of the age leaped upwards into the light.

For this reason the Mystery of Mary Stuart must always fascinate: moreover, curiosity has never ceased to be aroused by this problem of Mary’s guilt or innocence. Hume said, a hundred and fifty years ago, that the Scottish Jacobite who believed in the Queen’s innocence was beyond the reach of reason or argument. Yet from America, Russia, France, and Germany we receive works in which the guilt of Mary is denied, and the arguments of Hume, Robertson, Laing, Mignet, and Froude are contested. Every inch of the ground has been inspected as if by detectives on the scene of a recent murder; and one might suppose that the Higher Criticism had uttered its last baseless conjecture and that every syllable of the fatal Casket Letters, the only external and documentary testimony to Mary’s guilt, must have been weighed, tested, and analysed. But this, as we shall see, is hardly the fact. There are ‘points as yet unseized by Germans.’ Mary was never tried by a Court of Justice during her lifetime. Her cause has been in process of trial ever since. Each newly discovered manuscript, like the fragmentary biography by her secretary, Nau, and the Declaration of the Earl of Morton, and the newly translated dispatches of the Spanish ambassadors, edited by Major Martin Hume (1894), has brought fresh light, and has modified the tactics of the attack and defence.

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Miss Dorothy Alston made reduced drawings, omitting the figures, of the contemporary charts of Edinburgh, and of Kirk o’ Field. Mr. F. Compton Price supplied the imitations of Mary’s handwriting, and the facsimiles in Plates A B, B A, &c.

For leave to photograph and publish the portrait of Darnley and his brother I have to acknowledge the gracious permission of his Majesty, the King.

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