Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 2 (of 2) — John Shaqi
Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 2 (of 2)Bell, Henry Glassford
History
Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 2 (of 2)
Bell, Henry Glassford
Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542-1587
In accordance with the resolution intimated in the above letter, to seek
out and vigorously punish her husband's murderers, a proclamation was
issued upon Wednesday the 12th, immediately after an inquisition had been
taken by the Justice-General, offering a reward of two thousand pounds,
and "an honest yearly rent," to whosoever should reveal "the persons,
devisers, counsellors, or actual committers of the said mischievous and
treasonable murder," and promising besides to the first revealer, although
a partaker of the crime, a free pardon. The same proclamation declared,
that as "Almighty God would never suffer so horrible a deed to lie hid,
so, before it should remain untried, the Queen's Majesty, unto whom of all
others the case was most grievous, would rather lose life and all."[61] In
the mean time, not knowing but that the same traitors who had murdered her
husband, might intend a similar fate for herself, Mary removed to the
Castle, as a place of greater security than Holyrood Palace. There she
remained shut up in a dark chamber, hung with black, till after Darnley's
burial. He lay in the Chapel at Holyrood, from the 12th to the 15th of
February. His body having been embalmed, he was then interred in the royal
vault, in which King James V., together with his first wife, Magdalene,
and his two infant sons, Mary's brothers, lay. Buchanan, and his follower
Laing, have both insisted upon the nocturnal secrecy and indifference with
which the funeral ceremony was conducted. "The nobles that were there
present," says Buchanan, "decreed, that a stately and honourable funeral
should be made for him; but the Queen ordered it so, that he was carried
by private bearers in the night-time, and was buried in no manner of
state." The interpretation to be put upon this insidious passage is, that
the Protestant Lords proposed to bury Darnley after the Presbyterian form,
and that Mary refused her consent, and, in consequence, only the Catholics
attended. "The ceremonies indeed," says Lesley, "were the fewer, because
that the greatest part of the Council were Protestants, and had before
interred their own parents without accustomed solemnities."[62] That
Mary's calumniators should have insisted upon this circumstance at all,
only shows how eager they were to avail themselves of everything which
they could pervert to their own purposes. Had Mary wished to act the
hypocrite, nothing could have been easier for her than to have made a
great parade at Darnley's funeral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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