“still as the lips that’s closed in death, each gazer’s bosom held his breath; but yet afar, from man to man, a cold, electric shiver ran, as down the deadly blow descended, on her whose love and life thus ended.”—parisina.

it was a dark, but lovely night; moonless, but liquid and transparent; the stars which gemmed the firmament glittered more brightly from the absence of the mightier planet, and from the influence of a slight degree of frost upon the atmosphere, although it was indeed so slight, that its presence could be traced only in the crispness of the herbage, and in the uncommon purity of the heavens. beneath a sky such as i have vainly endeavored to portray, the towers of fotheringay rose black and dismal above the ancestral oaks and sweeping glades of its demesne. it would have appeared to a casual observer that all were at rest, buried in utter forgetfulness of all their hopes and sorrows, within that massive pile, save the lonely sentinel, whose progress round the battlements, although invisible, might be traced by the clatter of his harness, and the sullen echoes of his steel-shod stride. but to a nearer and more accurate survey, a single light, feebly twinkling through a casement of the dungeon-keep, told a far different tale. at times that solitary ray streamed in unbroken lines far into the bosom of the darkness; at times it was momentarily obscured, as if by the passage of some opaque body, though the transit, if such it were, was too brief to reveal the form or motions of the obstacle. once, however, the shadow paused, and then, as its outlines stood forth in strong relief against the illumination of the chamber, the delicate proportions and musing attitude of a female379 might be discerned with certainty. it was the queen of scotland. her earthly sorrows were drawing to their close; the peace, for which she had long ceased to look, save in the silence of the tomb, was now within her grasp. mary’s last sun had set.

of life she had taken her farewell long, long ago; and death—the bugbear of the happy, the terror of the dastard—dark, mysterious, unknown death—had become to her an intimate, and, as it were, familiar friend. it was not that she had lessoned her shrinking spirit to endure with calmness that which it had shuddered to encounter; it was not that she had weaned her heart, yet clinging to the vanities of a heartless world, with difficulty and trembling, to their abandonment; least of all was it that she had been taught to regard that final separation with the stoic’s apathy, or to look for that dull and sunless rest, that absence of all feelings, whether of good or evil; that total annihilation of mind, in the great hereafter, which, to a sensitive temperament, and soul not rendered wholly callous by the debasing contact with this world’s idols, must seem a punishment secondary, if secondary, only to an eternity of wo. born to a station lofty as the most vaulting ambition could desire, nurtured in gentleness and luxury, gifted with a mind such as rarely dwells within a mortal form, and having that mind invested in a frame, by its resplendent beauty fitted to be the door of immortality, she had felt, in a succession of sorrows almost unexampled, that the very qualities which should have ministered to her for bliss, had been converted into the instruments of misery and pain. attached to her native land with the switzer’s patriotism, she had endured from it the extremities of scorn and hatred. full of the warmest sympathies even for the meanest of mankind, she had never loved a single being but he had recompensed that love with coals of fire heaped upon her head; or if a few had passed unscathed through the trying ordeal of380 benefits received, they had themselves miserably perished for their gratitude toward one whose love seemed fated to blight the virtues, or destroy the being of all on whom it was bestowed. if the sun of her morning had ridden gloriously forth in a serene heaven, with the promise of a splendid noontide and an unclouded setting, yet scarcely had it scaled one half of its meridian height, ere it had been compassed about with gloom and darkness; and ere its setting the thunders had rolled and the deadly lightnings flashed between the daygod and its scattered worshippers. she had been led step by step from the keenest enjoyment to the utmost disregard of the pleasures of the earth; she had drained the cup, and knew its bitterness too well to languish for a second draught. yet there was nothing of resentment, nothing of hard-heartedness or scorn, in the feelings with which she looked back on the world and its adorers. she did not despise the many for that they still lingered in pursuit of a star which she had found, by sad experience, to be but a delusive meteor; much less did she hate the happy few to whom that valley, which had been to her indeed a vale of tears and of the shadow of death, had been a region of perpetual sunshine and unclouded happiness.

from mary’s earliest years there had been a deep spring of piety in her heart which, never utterly dried up, though choked at times, and turned from its true course by the thorny cares and troubles of life, had burst from the briers which so long concealed it in redoubled purity as it flowed nearer to the close. there was an innate tenderness in all her sentiments toward all men and all things which could never degenerate into hatred, much less into misanthropy. she looked then upon life in its true light; as a mingled landscape, now obscured by clouds, now called into glory by the sunshine; as a region, tangled here with forests, and cumbered with barren rocks, there swelling into hills of vintage, or subsiding into glens of verdure. a381nd if to her the landscape had been most viewed beneath the influence of a dark and threatening sky—if to her life’s path had lain, for the most part, through the wilderness and over the mountains—she knew that such was the result of her own misfortune, perhaps of her own misconduct, not of defect in the wonderful contrivance, or of improvidence in the all-glorious contriver.

in proportion as she had learned to dwell on the insufficiency of earthly good to satiate that deep thirst for happiness which is not the least among the proofs of the soul’s immortality, she had come to look upon the void of futurity as the unexplored region of bliss; upon death as the portal through which we must pass from the desert of toil and sorrow to the eden of hope and happiness. that she was drawing rapidly near to this portal she had for a long time been aware; and, during the latter years of her captivity, she had longed to see the leaves of that gate unfolded for her exit, with a sense of pining sickness, similar to that of the imprisoned eagle. the mockery of her trial she had beheld as the avenue through which she should arrive, and that right shortly, at the desired end; and although she knew that the scaffold and the axe, or the secret knife of the assassin, must need be the key to that gate, she recked but little of the means, so that the way of escape was left open to her.

she had pleaded, it is true, with brilliant eloquence and earnestness, in behalf, not of life, but of her honor. she wished for death, and she cared not for the vulgar ignominy of the scaffold; but she did care, she did shrink from the ignominy of a condemnation—a condemnation not by the suborned commissioners, not by the jealous rival, not by the perjured and terror-stricken populace of the day, but by time and by eternity. this was the condemnation from which she shrank; this was the ignominy which she combated; this was the doom382 which, by the masterly and dauntless efforts of her unassisted woman heart, she turned not only from herself, but back upon her murderers.

from the departure of the commissioners, she had been convinced that she was hovering as it were on the confines of life and immortality. happy and calm herself, she had labored to render calm and happy the little group of friends—for domestics when faithful, are friends—who still preserved their allegiance. she craved no more the wanderings in the green-wood; she had even refused to join in her once-loved sports of field and forest, which, denied to her when she would have grasped the boon, were freely proffered now, as though her enemies, with a far-reaching malignity that would stretch its arm beyond the grave, had wished to reawaken in her bosom that love for things of this life which had sunk to sleep, and to sharpen the bitterness of death by the added tortures of regret. if such, indeed, were their intentions—and who shall presume to judge?—their barbarity was frustrated; and if they indeed envied their poor victim the miserable consolation of passing cheerfully and in peace from the sphere of her sorrows, we may be assured that the frustration of their wicked views was sufficient punishment to them while here, and none can even dare to conjecture what will be their doom hereafter.

this night had brought at length the balm to all her cares—the restless eagerness to be assured of that which was to come was over—the goal was reached, the gates were half-unclosed, and, to her enthusiastic and poetical imagination, the hymns and harpings of expectant seraphs seemed to pour in their soothing chimes, whispering of peace, pardon, and beatitude for evermore between the parted portals. with a bigotry, which in these days of universal toleration it is equally difficult to conceive or to condemn sufficiently, it was denied to the departing sinner—for who that is most perfect here is other than383 a sinner—to enjoy the consolations of a priest of her own persuasion. a firm and conscientious, though not a bigoted catholic, it was a cruelty of the worst and most outrageous nature, to deny her that which she deemed of the highest importance to her eternal welfare, and which they could not deem prejudicial, without being themselves victims of a superstition so slavish as to disprove their participation in a faith which boasts itself no less a religion of freedom than of truth.

steadily refusing the aid of the protestant divines, who harassed her with an assiduity that spoke more of polemical pride than of christian sincerity, she had performed her orisons with deep devotion, and had arisen from their performance assured of forgiveness, confident in her own repentance, and in the mercy of him who alone is perfect; in peace and charity even with her direst foes, and happy in the anticipation of the morrow. she had sat down to her last earthly meal with an appetite unimpaired by the knowledge that it was to be her last; she had conversed cheerfully, gayly, with her weeping friends; she had drunk one cup of wine to their health and happiness, and, in token of her own gratitude, to each she had distributed some little pledge of her affectionate regard; and then—amid the notes of dreadful preparation, the creaking of saws and the clang of hammers, busily converting the castle-hall into a place of slaughter, as it had been not long before a place of misnamed justice—she had sunk to sleep so calmly, and slumbered on with a countenance so moveless in its innocent repose, and with a bosom so regular in its healthful pulsations, that her admiring ladies began to look on her as one about to start upon a pleasant voyage to the harbor of all her wishes, rather than as one about to perish by a cruel and ignominious death on the scaffold. hours flew over the lovely sleeper, and the eyes of her watchers waxed heavier, till they wept themselves to sleep; and one—an aged woman, who had watched her infancy and384 gloried in the promise of her youth—after her eyes were sealed in sleep, yet continued, by the heavy sobs which burst from the lips of the slumberer, to manifest the extent of that misery which abode in all its vividness within the mind, although the body was wrapt in that state which men have called oblivion.

such had been the state of things in mary’s chamber from the first close of evening to the dead hour of midnight; but ere the east had begun again to redden with the returning glories of its luminary, sleep, which still sat leadlike on the eyelids of her attendants, forsook the hapless sovereign. silently she arose, and, throwing a single garment carelessly about her person, passed from her sleeping-apartment into a little oratory adjoining, without disturbing from her painful slumbers one of those faithful beings to whom the distinct consciousness of waking sorrow must have been yet more painfully acute.

here, as with a quick but regular step she traversed the narrow turret, she viewed as it were in the space of a single hour the crowded events of a life which, unnaturally shortened as it was about to be, yet contained naught of remote and rare occurrence, but in rapid and complete succession—those events which make an epoch and an era of every hour, and lengthen years of time into ages of the mind.

calmly, piously, without a shade of sorrow for the past or of solicitude for the future, save that mysterious and yet natural anxiety which must haunt every mind, however well prepared to endure its final separation from the body, as the hour of dissolution approaches, did she expect the morning. this anxiety and this alone was blended with the various feelings which coursed through the soul of mary during this the last night of her existence.

it was in such a frame of mind that mary, in the solitude of that last earthly night, diverting her attention entirely from the terrible shock she was about to undergo on the morrow, thought385 upon her native land, still dear though still ungrateful, a prey to the fierce contentions of her own factious offspring—of her son, torn at the earliest dawn of his affections from the arms of a mother, nurtured among those who would teach him to eradicate every warmer recollection—to pluck forth, as if it were an offending eye, every lingering tenderness for that being, who, amid all her sins and all her sorrows, had never ceased to love him with an entire and perfect love. there is, in truth, something more evidently divine, partaking more nearly of that which we believe to be the very essence of divinity, in a mother’s love, than in any other pang or passion—for every passion, how sweet soever it may be, has something of a pang mingled with it—in the human soul. all other love is liable to diminution, to change, or to extinction; all other love may be alienated by the neglect, chilled by the coldness, frozen to the core by the worthlessness, of the object once beloved. all other affections are influenced by a thousand trivial circumstances of time and place: absence may weaken their influence, time obscure their vividness, and, above all, custom may rob them of their value. but on the love of a mother—commencing as it does before the object of her solicitude possesses form or being; springing from agony and sorrow; ripening in anxiety and care, and reaping too often the bitter harvest of ingratitude—all incidental causes, all external influences, are powerless and vain. time but excites her admiration, but increases her solicitude, but redoubles her affections. absence but causes her to dwell with a more engrossing memory on him from whom her heart is never absent. custom but hallows the sentiment to which nature has given birth. neglect and coldness but cause her to strain every nerve to merit more and more the poor return of filial love—the solitary aim of her existence, if heartlessly denied to her. nay, worthlessness itself but binds her more closely to him whom the hard world has cast aside, to find 386a refuge in the only bosom which will not perceive his errors or credit his utter destitution.

thus it was with mary! she knew that the child of her affections regarded those affections as vile and worthless weeds! she knew that he was selfish, vain, and heartless! she knew that a single word from that child whom she still adored—if conveyed to her persecutor in the strong language of sincerity and earnestness—if borne, not by a fawning courtier, but by one of those high spirits which scotland has found ever ready to her need—if enforced by threats of instant war—would have broken her fetters in a moment, and conveyed her from the dungeons of fotheringay to the courts of holyrood! all this she knew, yet her heart would not know it! and when all europe rang with curses on the unnatural vacillation of that son; when every scottish heart, whatever might be its policy or its party, despised his abject cringing; while elizabeth herself, while she flattered his vanity, and affected to honor and esteem his virtue, scoffed in her royal privacy at the tool she designed to use in public—mary alone, mary, the only sufferer and victim of his baseness, still clung to the idea of his worth, still adored the child who was driving her out, as the scape-goat of the jews, to expiate the sins of himself and his people by her own destruction! but it was not on james alone that her wayward memory was fixed. at a time when any soul less dauntless, any spirit less exalted, would have failed beneath its load of sorrows, mary had a fond regret, a tear of sorrow, a sigh of sincere gratitude, for every gallant life that had devoted itself to ward from her that fate which their united loyalty had availed only to defer, not to avert. chastelar passed before her, with his tones of sweetest melancholy, and that unutterable love, which made him invoke blessings on her who had doomed him to the block: and darnley, as he had seemed in the few short hours when he had been, when he had deserved387 to be, the idol of her heart: and bothwell, the eloquent, the glorious, but guilty bothwell, her ruin and her betrayer: and douglas, the noble, hapless douglas, he who had riven the bolts of loch leven, and sent her forth to a short freedom and worse captivity: huntley, and hamilton, and seyton, and kirkaldy, the most formidable of her foes until he became the firmest of her friends—all passed in sad review before the eyes of her entranced imagination.

thus it was that the last queen of scotland passed the latest night of her existence. with no consciousness of time, with no care for the present, no apprehension for the future, she had paced the narrow floor of her apartment during the still hours of midnight. unperceived by her had the stars paled, then vanished from the brightening firmament; unseen had the first dappling of the east gone into the clear, cold light of a wintry morning; unheeded had the castle clock sent forth its giant echoes hour after hour, to be heard by every watcher over leagues of field and forest. another sound rose heavily, and she was at once collected—time, place, and circumstances, flashed fully on her mind—she was prepared to meet them: it was the roar of the morning culverin; and scarcely had its deafening voice passed over, before a single bell, hoarse, slow, and solemn, pealed minute after minute, the signal of her approaching dissolution.

calmly, as if she were about to prepare for some gay festival, she turned to the apartment where her ladies, overdone by wo and watching, yet slumbered, forgetful of the dread occasion.

“arise,” she said, in sweet, low tones; “arise, my girls, and do your last of duties for the mistress ye have served so well! nay, start not up so wildly, nor blush that ye have slept while we were watching. dear girls, the time has come—the time for which my soul so long has thirsted. array me, then, as to388 a banquet, a glorious banquet of immortality! see,” she continued, scattering her long locks over her shoulders—“see, they were bright of yore as the last sunbeam of a summer day, yet i am prouder of them now, with their long streaks of untimely snow—for they now tell a tale of sorrows, borne as it becomes a queen to bear them. braid them with all your skill, and place yon pearls around my velvet head-gear. we will go forth to die, clad as a bride; and now methinks the queen of france and scotland owns but a single robe of fair device. bring forth our royal train and broidered farthingale: it fits us not to die with our limbs clad in the garb of mourning, when heaven knows that our heart is clothed in gladness!”

tearless, while all around were drowned in lamentations, she strove to cheer them to the performance of this last sad office—not with the commonplace assurances, the miserable resources of earthly consolation, much less with aught of heartless levity, or of that unfeeling parade which has so often adorned the scaffold with a jest, and concealed the anxiety of a heart ill at ease beneath the semblance of ill-timed merriment—but by suffering them to read her inmost soul; by showing them the true position of her existence; by pointing out to them the actual hardships of the body, and the yet deeper humiliations of the soul, from which the door of her escape was even now unclosing.

scarcely had she completed her attire, and tasted of the consecrated wafer—long ago procured from the holy pius, and preserved for this extremity—when the tread of many feet without, and a slight clash of weapons at the door of the ante-chamber, announced that the hour had arrived.

once and again, ere she gave the signal to unclose the door, she embraced each one of her attendants. “dear, faithful friends, adieu, adieu,” she said, “for ever; and now remember, remember the last words of mary. weep not for me, and, if389 ye love me, shake not my steadfastness, which, thanks to him who is the father and the friend of the afflicted, the fear of death can not shake, by useless fear or lamentation. we would die as a martyr cheerfully, as a queen nobly! fare ye well, and remember!” with an air of royal dignity she seated herself, and, with her maidens standing around her chair, she bore the mien of a high sovereign awaiting the arrival of some proud legation, rather than that of a captive awaiting a summons to the block. “and now,” she said, as she arranged her draperies with dignified serenity, “admit their envoy.”

the doors were instantly thrown open as she spoke, the sheriff uttered his ordinary summons, and without a shudder she rose. “lead on,” she said; “we follow thee more joyously than thou, methinks, canst marshal us. sir amias paulet, lend us thine arm; it fits us not that we proceed, even to the death, without some show of courtesy. maidens, bear up our train; and now, sir, we are ready.”

but a heavier trial than the axe awaited the unhappy sovereign; for as she set her foot on the first step of the stairs, melville, her faithful steward, flung himself at her feet, with almost girlish wailings. friendly and familiarly she raised him from the ground. “nay, sorrow not for me,” she said, “true friend. subject for sorrow there is none, unless thou grievest that mary is set free—that for the captive’s weeds she shall put on a robe of immortality, and, for a crown of earthly misery, the glory of beatitude.”

“alas! alas! god grant that i may die, rather than look upon this damned deed.”

“nay, live, good melville, for my sake live; commend me to my son, and say to him, mary’s last thoughts on earth were given to france and scotland, her last but these to him: say, that she died unshaken in her faith to god, unswerving in her courage, confident in her reward. farewell, true servant, take390 from the lips of mary the last kiss that mortal e’er shall take of them, and fare thee well for ever.”

at this moment the earl of kent stepped forward, and roughly bade her dismiss her women also, “for the present matter tasked other ministers than such as these.” for a moment she condescended to plead that they might be suffered to attend her to the last; but when she was again refused, her ancient spirit flashed out in every tone, as she cried, trumpet-like and clear, “proud lord, beware! i too am cousin to your queen—i too am sprung from the high-blood of england’s royalty—i too am an anointed queen. i say thou shalt obey, and these shall follow their mistress to the death, or with foul violence shall they force me thither. beware! beware, i say, how thou shalt answer doing me this dishonor!”

her words prevailed. without a shudder she descended, entered the fatal hall, looked with an air of smiling condescension, almost of pity, on the spectators crowded almost to suffocation, and, mounting the scaffold, stood in proud and abstracted unconcern, while, in the measured sounds of a proclamation, the warrant for her death was read beside her elbow.

the bishop of peterborough then drew nigh, and, in a loud voice and inflated style, harassed her ears with an oration, which, whatever might have been its merits, was at that time but a barbarous and useless outrage.

“trouble not yourself,” she broke in at length, disgusted with his intemperate eloquence, “trouble not yourself any more about this matter, for i was born in this religion, i have lived in this religion, and in this religion i am resolved to die.” turning suddenly aside, as if determined to hear no further, she knelt apart, fervently prayed, and repeatedly kissed the sculptured image which she bore of him who died to save. as she arose from her orisons, the earl of kent, her constant and unrelenting persecutor, with heartless cruelty burst into loud391 revilings against “that popish trumpery” which she adored. “suffer me now,” she said, gazing on him with an expression of beautiful resignation, that might have disarmed the malice of a fiend, “suffer me now to depart in peace. i have come hither, not to dispute on points of doctrine, but to die.”

without another word she began to disrobe herself; but once, as her maidens hung weeping about her person, she laid her finger on her lips, and repeated emphatically the word “remember.” and once again, as the executioner would have lent his aid to remove her upper garments, “good friend,” she said, with a smile of ineffable sweetness, “we will dispense with thine assistance. the queen of scotland is not wont to be disrobed before so many eyes, nor yet by varlets such as thou.”

all now was ready. the lovely neck was bared. the wretch who was to perform the deed of blood stood grasping the fatal axe, and the fierce earl of kent beat the ground with his heel in savage eagerness. without a sigh she knelt; without a sign of trepidation, a quicker heave of her bosom, or a brighter flush on her brow, she laid down her innocent head, and without a struggle, or convulsion of her limbs, as the axe flashed, and the life-blood spouted, did her spirit pass away.

a general burst of lamentation broke the silence; but amidst that burst the heavy stride of kent was heard, as he sprang upon the scaffold, and raised the ghastly visage, the eyes yet twinkling, and the lips quivering in the death-struggle. a single voice, that of the zealot bishop, cried aloud, “thus perish all the foes of queen elizabeth.” but ere the response had passed the lips of kent, a shriller cry rang through the hall—the sharp yell of a small greyhound, the fond companion of the queen’s captivity. bursting from the attendants, who vainly strove to hold her back, with a short, sharp cry she dashed full at the throat of the astonished earl; but ere he could move392 a limb the danger, if danger there were, was passed. the spirit was too mighty for the little frame. the energies of the faithful animal were exhausted, its heart broken, in that death-spring. it struck the headless body of its mistress as it fell, and in an agony of tenderness, died licking the hand that had fed and cherished it so long. wonderful, that when all men had deserted her, a brute should be found so constant in its pure allegiance! and yet more wonderful, that the same blow should have completed the destiny of the two rival sovereigns! and yet so it was! the same axe gave the death-blow to the body of the scottish, and to the fame of the english queen! the same stroke completed the sorrows of mary, and the infamy of elizabeth.