Mary Stuart (20 page)

No unprejudiced person can doubt the genuineness of the poems, and since the style of these sonnets is in perfect harmony with that of the letters, we have to admit that the latter are authentic and were written by Mary herself. Maybe in the course of the translation into Latin and into Scots certain details were doctored, or tampered with, and it is obvious that a few interpolations were made. A final consideration, a psychological one, has to be adduced in favour of the letters being Mary's. If a suppositious “gang of criminals” inspired by hatred and malice had set to work forging letters, would not the forgers have produced documents showing beyond question that the alleged author was a contemptible creature, a lascivious and spiteful wanton? They would have been wasting their pains if, in their desire to injure Mary, they had produced as forgeries the extant Casket Letters, which exculpate her rather than incriminate her, exhibiting as they do Mary's horror at her foreknowledge of and complicity in the intended crime against young Darnley. For what these documents show forth is not the voluptuousness of passion but its bitter distress. The letters are like the muffled cries of one who is being burnt alive.

Although, as already said, the letters are in Mary's style, they are rough-hewn. They manifest a wild and confused flow of thought and feeling, were evidently written in haste and disorder by a hand that (one feels) was tremulous with excitement. All these things are fully accordant with what we know from other sources regarding the Queen's overstrained mental condition during the days from which they date, and they correspond to the writer's actions at the same period. None but the most skilful of psychologists could have imagined so perfect a spiritual background for the known facts. Moray, Lethington and Buchanan, who by turns and haphazard have been mentioned as the forger by professional champions of Mary's honour, were neither Shakespeares nor Balzacs nor Dostoevskys, but little souls, able to finesse and to cheat when trickery would serve their turn, but utterly incompetent, putting pen to paper, to produce word pictures so admirably representing Mary Stuart for all time. First let the genius who forged these letters be produced! We, who know that Mary in times of stress always poured her heart out in verse, can have no doubt that she composed both letters and poems. This granted, we can have no better testimony than her own as to her state of mind at this juncture.

The verses reveal the beginning of her unfortunate passion. Three or four lines disclose that Mary's love for Bothwell did not arise by a slow process of crystallisation, but seized an unsuspecting woman as its prey. The immediate occasion was, apparently, a crude act of bodily possession, an onslaught by Bothwell that was half or wholly rape. In her sonnet the darkness is dispelled by a lightning flash:

(Full many a tear have I wept because of him. The first was shed when he took possession of my body, whose heart did not then belong to him.) Instantly we are made to feel the situation. For weeks Mary had been thrown into close companionship with Bothwell. As chief adviser, and as commander of her armed forces, he had accompanied her from castle to castle. Since she had so recently chosen a beautiful and high-born lady as his wife, and had graced the wedding with her royal presence, it never occurred to her to think of him as a suitor; she was a queen, he a vassal; her position was inviolable. She could, therefore, travel about her realm with him unconcerned. But some of Mary's most charming qualities, her lack of caution and her sense of security, had always been a danger to her. One can picture the scene. Presumably she had allowed him some trifling liberties, showing towards him that coquetry which twice already had led to disaster, in the cases of Chastelard and of Rizzio. He was alone with her for hours; she talked with him more confidentially than was customary; jested and sported with him. But Bothwell was no Chastelard, no romantic lute-player and languishing troubadour; Bothwell was not a Rizzio, an upstart with a flattering tongue; Bothwell was a man with hot senses and hard muscles, a creature of impulse and instinct, who would not shrink from any audacity. Such a man does not lightly allow himself to be led on and stimulated. Abruptly, he must have seized her, this woman who had long been in a vacillating and irritable state of mind, whose passionate nature had been aroused by her foolish fondness for Darnley—aroused but not assuaged. “
Il se fit de ce corps possesseur
”—he took her by storm or violated her. Who, at such moments, can distinguish between the two? They are moments of intoxication when a woman's longing to give herself and desire to defend herself interlace. On Bothwell's side the act of possession was probably just as little premeditated as it had been on Mary's. The embrace was not the fulfilment of a tender inclination which had been growing in ardour over a lengthy period of time, but an impulsive act of lust devoid of spiritual tone, a purely physical capture.

The effect on Mary Stuart was overwhelming. Something wholly new invaded her life like a thunderclap. In taking possession of her body, Bothwell had also raped her soul. Both of her husbands, the fifteen-year-old boy Francis II and the beardless Darnley, had lacked virility; they had been weaklings. In her experience of sexual relations Mary had hitherto bestowed herself magnanimously, to confer pleasure on her partner, remaining mistress and Queen even in this intimate sphere; she had never played the passive role, had never been possessed by force. In this encounter with Bothwell, which left her amazed senses tingling with surprise, she came for the first time into close contact with the primitive male, one who trampled upon her femininity, her modesty, her pride, her sense of security, and therewith he caused a voluptuous uprush from a universe within herself hitherto unsuspected. Before she realised the danger and before she even thought of warding it off, she had already been conquered. This taking of her body by storm gave vent to a geyser of feeling—of feeling which, in the first moment of alarm, may have been dominated by wrath, by fierce hatred of the ruffian who had thus brutally ravaged her womanly pride. But it is one of the profoundest mysteries of our composite souls, as we find in external nature, that extremes meet, and especially in the realm of feeling. The skin cannot distinguish between intense heat and intense cold; frost can burn like fire. A woman may pass in one moment from hatred into love, from mortified pride to uttermost humility; she may desire and affirm with all the wealth of her body that which, a moment before, she has repudiated and regarded with loathing.

The upshot in the present case was that, henceforward, a woman who had been tolerably reflective was consumed by an inner fire. What had hitherto been the pillars sustaining her life (honour, dignity, repute, pride, self-confidence and reason) collapsed. Having once plunged into deep waters, she wished for nothing better than to sink in them. A new and strange voluptuousness seized upon her. Avid and intoxicated, Mary wished to enjoy so novel a sensation at the cost of self-destruction. Humbly she kissed the hand of the man who had annihilated her womanly pride and had taught her the ecstasy of self-surrender.

This passion was something immeasurably vaster than her fondness for Darnley. With Darnley she had played at self-surrender; now it had become deadly earnest. With Darn-ley she had merely wanted to share the crown, her sovereign authority, her life. To Bothwell she wished to give, not this, that or the other, but all that she had on earth, impoverishing herself to enrich him, lustfully debasing herself from her high estate in order to uplift him to the skies. With an unwonted thrill, Mary flung aside restraints, that she might seize and hold him who had become for her the only man in the world. She knew that her friends would forsake her, that people in general would revile her and look upon her with contempt. But these realities gave her another pride in place of that which had been shattered, and she enthusiastically proclaimed the fact:

(For him since then I have despised honour, which alone can provide us with happiness. For him I have risked dignity and conscience, for him I have forsaken all my relatives and friends, and all other considerations have been put aside … For his sake I have come to regard my friends as less than nothing … For his sake I would fain renounce the world, I would gladly die that he might rise … For him alone I wish to be great, and I shall so behave that he will recognise that I have neither well-being nor luck nor contentment than in obeying and serving him loyally. I hope for him nothing but good fortune. For his sake I wish to retain health and life …) Unduly tensed feelings affect the mind profoundly. Storms of passion liberate unfamiliar and unique energies in women such as Mary, who had hitherto been reserved and indifferent. During these weeks her mental and bodily life seemed multiplied tenfold, and she showed capabilities she had never shown before nor was ever to show again. She spent eighteen hours in the saddle, and then sat up nearly all night writing letters. Though as poetess she had hitherto composed no more than brief epigrams and casual fragments of verse, under the stimulus of fresh inspiration she penned the sonnet cycle in which her pleasures and her pains were manifested with wonderful command of language. Ordinarily incautious, at this time she concealed her sentiments most effectively, with the result that for months none suspected her intimacy with Bothwell. His lightest touch made her senses reel, yet before the eyes of the world she addressed him as calmly as any other subordinate; she preserved a cheerful mien while her nerves were twitching and her mind was filled with despair. A demonic superego took possession of her, lending her a strength which far transcended her natural powers.

But these achievements had to be paid for by a terrible collapse. When this ensued, day after day she remained in bed, utterly exhausted; or else she wandered for hours from room to room in a state of partial stupefaction, sobbing and groaning, exclaiming “
je voudrais être morte
”
—
I would like to be dead
—
clamouring for a knife with which to stab herself. Thus her vitality would wane as strangely as it came to her rescue again.

Nothing can show more plainly than does the famous Jedburgh episode how much her body had been exhausted by the frenzy of passion. On 7th October 1566, in an affray with a border brigand, Bothwell was dangerously wounded. The news reached Mary on her way to the town, where she was about to hold an assize. Though her first impulse was to ride forthwith to Hermitage, twenty-five miles away, she restrained the impulse lest such behaviour should arouse remark. There can be no doubt, however, that she was profoundly distressed by the tidings, for du Croc, the French ambassador (who was the most dispassionate observer in her entourage, and who could not as yet have had an inkling of her liaison with Bothwell), reported to Paris: “
Ce ne luy eust esté peu de perte de le perdre
”
—
To lose him would have been no small loss to her. Lethington too noticed how absent-minded she was but, being equally ignorant of the true state of affairs, he opined that her “thought and displeasure had their root in the King.”

Not until a week had elapsed and the assize was over did the Queen ride over to Hermitage Castle accompanied by Moray and others of her lords. She spent two hours by the wounded man's bedside and rode back to Jedburgh the same afternoon. On dismounting, she fell into a faint which lasted two hours. Thereafter she was feverish and delirious. Then her body suddenly stiffened; she neither saw nor felt anything. Her courtiers and the doctor stood round, contemplating her with alarm. Messengers were sent in all directions to fetch the King and the bishop—the latter to administer extreme unction. For a week Mary hovered between life and death, since seemingly her secret wish to die had sapped her vital forces. What shows, however, that the collapse was mental rather than physical, that it was, indeed, a characteristic hysterical attack, is the fact that as soon as Bothwell, now regaining health and strength, was brought to Jedburgh in a horse litter, the Queen took a turn for the better and, a fortnight after her suite had supposed her to be dying, she was well enough to be in the saddle once more. Danger had threatened her from within, and from within it had been overcome.

Though restored in body, for the next few weeks the Queen was much distraught in mind. Comparative strangers noticed that she had become “a different person”. Something in her aspect and her manner underwent modification; her usual levity and self-confidence vanished. Her demeanour was that of one sorely afflicted. She shut herself up in her room, and through the closed door her ladies could hear her sobbing. But though it was her custom to be frank and outspoken, on this occasion she confided in no one. Her lips remained closed, and none guessed the secret which burdened her mind by day and by night

A terrible feature of Mary's infatuation for Bothwell, that which made it at once splendid and gruesome, was that from the first the Queen must have known her love to be sinful, and disastrous to the plans she had most at heart. Her awakening from the first embrace must have been like that of Tristan and Iseult from the effects of the love potion, when they recalled that they were not living by themselves in the infinite realm of love, but were bound to this world by numerous ties and duties. So Mary probably realised her situation. She who had given herself to Bothwell was another man's wife, and Both-well another woman's husband. This was a twofold adultery into which the turmoil of the senses had led her. How long was it—two weeks, or three, or four—since she herself, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, had signed and issued an edict declaring adultery and every form of illicit lust to be capital offences? From the outset her insane passion was, therefore, branded as a crime. Having committed a crime, she could save herself from punishment only by further criminal offences. If ever she and Bothwell were to be wedded, she would have forcibly to rid herself of her husband, and Bothwell to divorce his wife. This love plant could bear none but poisoned fruit. In so desperate a plight, Mary's courage rallied though she realised that she would never again enjoy peace of mind and knew that henceforward she was past saving. As always, her intrepid nature came to her aid, were it no more than an endeavour to try vain hazards and to challenge fate. She refused to draw back like a coward; she would not draw back; she would, with head erect, march forward to the abyss. Though she should lose all, there would be joy in her torment, since she would lose all for her lover's sake.