BY

M.

HOPKINS.

THERE are few scenes in history more striking than the interviews between these two celebrated personages. Mary, Queen of Scots! The name calls up, like a spell, thoughts of poetry, and pathos, and tenderness towards beauty in misfortune, which almost irresistibly warp the judgment from the right. It will be long before the stern truth of history tempers, in the popular mind, that mistaken fondness which, in sympa. thy for the woes of the woman, loses sight of the guilt of the sovereign; which forgets that the interests of freedom and Protestant Christianity are on one side reaching through ages and extending to nations, and on the other, one frail heart stained with crime, and one fair face bathed in tears.

"Her comely form and graceful mien
Bespoke the Lady and the Queen:
The woes of one so fair and young
Moved every heart and every tongue.
Driven from her home, a helpless child,
To brave the winds and billows wild,
An exile bred in realms afar,
Amid commotions, broils and war;
In one short year her hopes all crossed,

A parent, husband, kingdom lost!
And all ere eighteen years had shed
Their honors o'er her royal head."'*

I do not include her mournful end, nor refer to the just indignation against her great, but hateful assassin. I refer to the period when she was still Queen of Scots, and when all her efforts were bent, with a most unhappy persistency, to force on her subjects the odious ceremonies of the Papal church. It is well that men were living in Scotland at that time, of another sort than the poets and romancers who have been wailing at the "Queen's Wake," these two hundred years

or more.

Among those men John Knox stands proudly eminent; a simple minister of the Gospel, who, without rank, or wealth, or worldly power, stood against royalty, in the imminent deadly breach, and, under God, secured the triumph of Protestantism in Scotland.

Ettrick Shepherd-The Queen's Wake.

John Knox was doubtless a very indifferent courtier-not exactly what we should call a polite or "chivalrous" person in these days ; in fact a very different sort of material than that out of which carpet-knights and courtiers are made. He was a resolute, inflexible, cool, sardonic man, whom none of the appliances of a court could stir, when the interests of truth were at stake; a man perfectly insensible both to love and fear, when they came in conflict with what he conceived to be duty. If the charge is that Knox was hard, unsentimental, unpractised in the ways of

"Starr'd and spangled courts,

Where low-bowed flattery wafts perfume to pride,"

I shall set up no defense for him on that point. These were not arts which he had cultivated. But his manners were as good as the manners of his age and nation. They certainly will not suffer in comparison with those of the nobles who stabbed Rizzio under Mary's chair, and laid the heavy gauntletted hand on her arm, when she shrunk from signing her abdication.

"Mary" was an ill-favored name in the British kingdoms, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Both England and Scotland were governed by women of that name. The queen regent of the northern kingdom, after the death James the Fifth, was Mary of Guise, a sister of that fanatical and persecuting family that was straining every nerve to exterminate the Protestants of France. Contemporaneously with her, England was ruled by that wretched woman, the only princess in English history whose name is indissolubly wedded to a title of infamy, "bloody Mary." Mary of Guise gave place to her daughter Mary, "Queen of Scots." These three wo

"

It is noticeable also that four Scottish ladies of the same name, famous for partaking both of the beauty and the frailty of their mistress, were in the train of the queen. They were Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton, Mary Hamilton and Mary Carmichael. A verse of an old Scottish ballad runs thus, if I remember right:

"There were four Marys served Queen Mary,

Three in the kirk-yard lie;

They were Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton,

And Mary Carmichael and I."

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men were all devoted to the church of Rome; and it is no wonder that in the eyes of their Protestant subjects, they should have seemed re-incarnations of that idolatrous and bloody queen, who made it her great object to establish the worship of Baal in the land of Israel.

Three such instances of feminine rule were a portent that called upon the watchman to sound an alarm. John Knox published his "First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regimen of women;" and most assuredly it was a blast calculated to make the ears of all the sex tingle, from Victoria that wieldeth the sceptre to the schoolmistress that wieldeth the birchen rod. He issued this treatise anonymously, for which he gives the following reason: My purpose is thrice to blow the trumpet in the same matter, if God so permit. Twice I intend to do it without name; but at the last blast, to take the blame upon myself, that all others may be cleared"-one such blast, however, was quite enough; and it is no great matter that he never found time for the other two.

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By the year 1560, the people of Scotland were generally and resolutely Protestant; and from that time forwards, they have regarded Popery, as Mr. Macaulay observes, with a hatred little less than ferocious. The "idolatry of the mass" was especially the object of their abhorrence. It seemed to them the most perilous affront to the majesty of a jealous God, to permit the acting of a mummery by which a worthless priest professed to transubstantiate the Divine Redeemer into a piece of dough, and then held it up for the adoration of an infatuated people. In the year just mentioned, the saying of mass was solemnly prohibited throughout the kingdom by act of Parliament.

A wise princess would have respected or feared this strength of religious feeling. Mary rashly set it at defiance. She had scarcely taken possession of Holyrood House, on her return from France, when she outraged her subjects by the open celebration of mass. John Knox was no "dumb dog," to keep silence when the safety of the flock was thus endangered. The very next Sabbath, he ascended his pulpit in Edinburg, and in the spirit and power of Elijah, thundered against the idolatries that defiled the land. He detailed the calamities with which God had in other times visited nations devoted to idols, and declared that he dreaded one mass more than the swords of ten thousand Popish soldiers. Against the latter, the Almighty would fight for them; but if they shook hands with idols, they would learn by bitter experience the woe of a people forsaken by God.

This sermon led to the first interview between the preacher and the queen. Knox was summoned to the palace. Whether Mary's motive were curiosity or resentment, or perhaps the hope of softening that rugged temper by the charms of her beauty and manners, does not appear. This Cleopatra of the North would, at all events, have the man see some majesty." She began by adverting to the disloyal sentiments of his Blast against the regimen of women, and of his recent sermon. She taxed him with hostility to her mother's government as well as to her own, and with stirring up her subjects against her. Knox replied substantially, that although certainly disapproving of female rule, he had no disposition to disturb her throne. He was willing to live peacably under her government, as Christians formerly had done under wicked and tyrannical rulers. "But yet," said the queen,

ye have taught the people to receive another religion than their princes can allow; and how can that doctrine be of God, seeing that God commands subjects to obey their princes?" Knox replied by asking what would have become of true religion, in the times of Daniel and of the apostles, if subjects were bound to conform to the religion of their sovereigns? "But," the queen objected, none of those men raised the sword against their rulers." "Madam," replied the Reformer, with a stern significance, "God had not given them the power and the means." He then instanced the case of a father seized with a sudden frenzy, and seeking the lives of his family. In this case it would be the duty even of his own children to secure him, and wrest the weapon of death from his hands. "It is even so, madam, with princes that would murder the children of God that are subject unto them. Their blind zeal is nothing but a very mad frenzy; and therefore to take the sword from them, to bind their hands, and to cast them into prison till that they be brought to a more sober mind, is no disobedience against princes, but just obedience, because it agreeth with the will of God."

At these ominous words, opening perhaps before this ill-fated woman's mind a prophetic glimpse of what awaited her, she changed color, and became so agitated as to be unable, for some moments, to speak. Knox resumed the conversation in a more conciliatory tone. He reminded the queen that God called upon her to be a nurs ing-mother to his people; and that this office, so far from being unworthy of her, would be her best title to the favor of God, and the love of her subjects. Pride and resentment came to her assistance, and she answered with spirit, "Yea! but ye are not the kirk that I would nurse. I