Sayfadaki görseller
PDF
ePub

affection-and it is worthy of notice that she sends it by Paris, who was said to have carried the most important of the letters; and she finally describes herself as his obedient lawful wife. Is this the language of a murderess? and were these simple and tender thoughts traced by the same hand which composed the Glasgow letters? We believe they were not. We believe that this is a genuine production of the Queen of Scots, but that it was addressed not to Bothwell, but to her husband, Darnley. Her allusions to the dangers which threaten him, her complaint of his neglect, and, above all, her reference to their marriage, all point to Darnley, and not to Bothwell, as the person to whom it was addressed.

No one has asserted that the Queen of Scots was ever privately married to Bothwell; but we now know that she was privately married to Darnley at Stirling, some months before she was publicly married to him in Edinburgh. In this letter she obviously alludes both to their private and their public marriage-to the one as a past, and to the other as a future, event. The inference is plain, that this letter was written in the interval between their private and their public marriage.

She speaks of the absence of her husband; but this could not possibly refer to Bothwell, for from the time that she married him until she was made a prisoner at Carberry Hill, which was exactly one month, we know that he never left her for a single day.

The next of these three letters, as it appears in the French original, bears equally plainly the evidence of being addressed to Darnley. But there are in the Scotch version of it (which every critic of the letters admits to be but a version) two notable alterations, which clearly were made with a double object; first, for the purpose of connecting the letter with Bothwell rather than with Darnley; and secondly, for the purpose of involving Mary, as the writer, in the imputation of complicity with the intended murderers of her husband.

The remark of Robertson respecting the previous letter appears to be almost as applicable to this. It refers to some matters which can now only be the subject of conjecture; and it contains nothing from which we can infer that the writer contemplated the commission of any crime. My own impression is, that it is a genuine letter of the Queen, but that, like the former, it was not addressed to Bothwell, but to Darnley.

But it contains one or two passages which bear, or have been made to bear, a suspicious aspect. We have marked these in italics; and on comparing them with the Scotch version of this letter, they will be found to differ from the French, which clearly appears to be the original. In the passage respecting Jason, for example, "celles" in the French is rendered into "her" in the Scotch, in order to indicate Lady Bothwell, of whom, according to the long Glasgow letter, the Queen was inordinately jealous. This would imply that Mary had been Bothwell's mistress before his marriage, and that she was now jealous of his wife, as Medea became jealous of Glauce; but no one, not even Buchanan,

asserts that any intimacy subsisted between the Queen and Bothwell before his marriage, so that the alleged reference to Lady Bothwell cannot be the true one. Darnley, we know, gave the Queen abundant cause of jealousy; and assuming that this letter was addressed to him, we cannot but conclude that she here alludes, half in jest, half in earnest, to some Court scandal of the day. We need hardly add that Medea, the "unpitiful woman," to whom she obviously alludes, was not the second, but the first love of Jason. This is just such an oversight as we might expect from a female hand. It is not one that the alleged forgers of the letters, Maitland or Buchanan, were at all likely to have made.

A more remarkable variation between the French and the Scotch of this letter remains to be noticed. The passage near the close which we have marked in italics runs as follows: "Comme l'oyseau eschappé de la cage, ou la tourtre qui est sans compagne, ainsi je demeureray seule, pour pleurer vostre absence, quelque brieve qu'elle puisse estre." In the Scotch this passage is rendered thus: "Mak gude watch. Gif the burd eschaip out of the cage, or without hir mate, as the turtur I sall remane alone for to lament the absence, how schort yet sa ever it be."

The words "mak Why they have been They entirely change

No one can doubt which of these passages is the original; and no one can doubt that the remarkable variation between the two has been made by design. Nothing, in short, can be more clear and simple than the French; nothing more clumsy and confused than the Scotch, the sense of which is made to differ entirely from the original. gude watch do not occur in the French at all. introduced into the Scotch is abundantly clear. the sense of the original by giving a criminal meaning to a sentiment as innocent as ever was expressed by woman. We need not, therefore, be surprised that this monstrous interpolation attracted the attention of Elizabeth's commissioners at York. "The Queen wrote to Bothwell," they say, "especially to make good watch that the bird escape not out of the cage." They only had the Scotch version of the letter before them, and that, they were solemnly assured, was written in the Queen's own hand.

Mr. Hosack holds the same regarding the fifth letter, which will be found entire in a former page.

The internal proofs of this are very strong. The Queen is vexed at the misconduct of one of her women, and still more so at the displeasure of her correspondent, whoever that might be. But can we suppose that a profligate like Bothwell would give himself a moment's thought about the misconduct of a waiting-woman ? And can we suppose that the Queen would have applied to him to find her another in her place? Such an application could only have been addressed to her husband. And is anything more probable than that the silly meddling Darnley should have mixed himself up in an affair like this, and caused annoyance to every one by his interference? A recent able writer justly observes that there is a

touch of quiet humour in the Queen's remark, "as for their tongues or their faithfulness to you I will not answer," words which might be addressed most appropriately to her wayward husband.

Here, although the subject of the Marriage Contracts and the still more interesting subject of the Sonnets remain entirely untouched, we must reluctantly pause; the more reluctantly, because we feel that in the attempt to bring into so small a compass a discussion so long and so dependent for clearness upon fulness of detail, we have necessarily failed to do fair justice to the argument. Mr. Hosack's pages, however, will amply supply what has been here overlooked or lightly touched. He has brought to light several new papers of much interest, and especially the original "Book of Articles" presented against Mary at the Westminster Commission, together with the original Minute, corrected by Cecil's own hand of the proceedings of that Commission on the day on which the Casket papers were there presented. In confining our notice to that single subject we have left the general interest of Mr. Hosack's work almost entirely untouched. He has treated with rare impartiality, and with most scholarlike skill and patience, every part of the story of the Queen of Scots, from her birth down to the death of the Regent Murray, in 1570; and there is not one of the many controversies which beset the student at every step, to which he has not brought if not new light, at least the aid of calm, patient, and enlightened criticism. Without avowedly following the track of Mr. Froude, he has had that historian's narrative under view at every point of the history; and he has calmly but successfully exposed many of his inaccuracies, and exploded many of his reckless and unauthorized assumptions.

We shall only add, in taking leave, our earnest hope that the success of Mr. Hosack's present volume may induce him to continue and complete the inquiry. The history of Mary's English prison-life, if it lack the darker and more tragic interest of the wild and bloody period with which the present volume is engaged, is full of memories which no generous mind can recall without deep emotion; and the harsh, fanatical, almost unmanly hatred which pervades the concluding volume of Mr. Froude's history of this unfortunate Queen has so deformed the closing scenes of her life, that we shall look anxiously for some new historian of Mary Stuart's captivity, trial, and execution, who shall prove himself capable of treating the story, if not with generous sympathy, at least with some touch of human feeling and some small measure of discriminating impartiality.

ART. VII.-THE LANDLORD AND TENANT

QUESTION IN IRELAND.

The Irish Land Question Practically Considered. By WILLIAM M'COMBIE. Aberdeen D. Wylie & Son. 1869.

The Irish Land Question. By JAMES CAIRD. London: Longmans. 1869. The Irish Land. By GEORGE CAMPBELL, Chief Commissioner of the Central Province of India. London: Trübner & Co.; Dublin: Hodges & Foster.

1869.

The Land Difficulty in Ireland, with an Effort to solve it. By GERALD FITZGIBBON, Master in Chancery. London: Longmans; Dublin : M'Glashan & Gill. 1869.

Land Culture and Land Tenure in Ireland. By PETER MACLAGAN, M.P. Edinburgh Blackwood; Dublin: Hodges & Co., and Smith & Sons.

1869.

Studies of the Land and Tenantry of Ireland. By B. SAMUELSON, M.P. London: Longmans. 1870.

ACCORDING to the promise made in our last number wo

resume the discussion of this paramount question. We have already endeavoured to prove the necessity of bold and vigorous, but at the same time just legislation. We now propose to point out the remedies which, in our opinion, without interfering with the just rights of the landlord, would in a short time produce peace and contentment in Ireland.

In our first article we divided the people of Ireland into two classes. 1. Those who have a direct interest in the land; and, 2. Those who have not. The first class comprises landlords, tenants, and agricultural labourers; the second, shopkeepers, artizans, and all other members of the community who are not comprised in the first class. We divided the tenants into two classes: the graziers, who make no agricultural improvements, and the large tillage farmers, on whose holdings, as in the case of Mr. Pollock, the landlord has made all the improvements; and the small tillage farmers, who, in almost every instance, have made all the improvements themselves. Now it appears to us that in legislating on the land question all these classes must be considered. By a strange perversion of reasoning Mr. Campbell endeavours to prove, in his very able pamphlet,* that the agricultural labourers should not be considered in legislating on the land, and that the landlords and actual occupiers are the only parties to be

* P. 96 and following.

But

thought of. In order to support this view of the question he tries to diminish the number of the labouring class, and to exaggerate that of the occupiers. He says the occupiers are stated to have been, in 1861, 540,000, which, at the usual calculation of five to a family, would account for half the population of Ireland. He then quotes from "Modern Ireland, by an Ulsterman," a statement which estimates the farmers in Ulster at 176,663, and the ploughmen at 15,236. Mr. Campbell should know, that it is only on comparatively large farms, on which the farmer does not himself usually work as a labourer, that any of the farm servants will be known as the ploughman. On farms of a good size, in the cultivation of which two or even three men are employed, where the farmer labours and ploughs as well as his men, scarcely any of the latter are ever designated by the name of ploughman. In any other sense the statement made by an Ulsterman is wholly incorrect.

Again, Mr. Campbell assumes that every farmer is a married man, and has a family. But this is not true, "for in some counties marriages have almost ceased. In Meath, in 1867, there were only 189; in Westmeath, 131, or about 1 in 420 of the population of those counties, as against 1 in 190 for all Ireland." The total number of farmers and graziers in 1861 was nearly 100,000 less than that given by Mr. Campbell. On the authority of Thom's "Directory" the number of farmers in 1861 was 440,882. In the same year the agricultural labourers amounted to 478,916, and other labourers to 386,769, making in all 865,685.* No doubt, a large number of these were domestic farm-servants, who slept either in the farmhouse or somewhere on the premises, and were not married; but certainly a large proportion, probably one half, were married. Emigration may have somewhat altered the proportion of farmers and farm-labourers since 1861, but we do not think it has done so in any great degree. But on this subject we must let Mr. Campbell speak for himself:

[ocr errors]

The Irish landlords, he says, being pressed by the farmers, have an uncommon concern for the labourers, and think that these are the people most to be considered. Let us see how far this view is well founded. I may begin with that which would seem almost to render further argument unnecessary, viz., that the universal outcry in the agricultural districts of Ireland is that there are no labourers. They have almost all emigrated. Those who remain are masters of the situation. There are three or four farmers running after one labourer. It is a common complaint in many

*P. 99 et seq.

« ÖncekiDevam »