"That fell arrest,
Without all bail,"--
became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable,
bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church
at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her
resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.
Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by
sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor
drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred
of Protestantism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame
of constant pique at the influence and reputation of Elizabeth. The
Scottish reformers kept her skirmishing talent well employed. Defending
her amusements or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his
bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as it flowed, the
lines of resolution upon her face were etched more clearly. She could
lend her person to Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party.
With power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile to control
the transitional epoch into which she was born. Her life was a series
of shifts and dramatic surprises. But no dark recollections ever
disturbed her sleep; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight of
a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected murders.
In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, who felt but one
great passion, and had no art nor culture to lavish in retaining its
object. She might have said,--
"I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."
We shall find this sun-lighted heart less capable of endurance than the
other blondes of history.
LADY MACBETH.
To make and share a husband's fortune was her only motive, and the
only driving-power she could supply to that was love: her character
was most inartificially contrived out of one or two broad elements of
womankind; a Semele to invite the solar ray that consumed her. To be a
woman was her sole resource.
Let us notice, therefore, how prompt was her first inspiration, and how
quickly it recoiled exhausted from its terrible victory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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