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Our Library Table,

1. CAIRD'S Mary Stuart.

2. Bishop ULLATHORNE'S Second Letter.
3. The Gesellen-Vereinen.

4. The Irish Bishops under Queen Elizabeth.
5. The Letters of EUGENIE DE GUERIN.
6. Norwegian Country Life.

1. We have to thank Mr. Caird for a clear, plain, and very powerful statement of those chief features in the eventful story of Mary Stuart, upon which the long-debated question as to her guilt or her innocence naturally turns." * He has given us a very good summary of her life, as far as these matters are concerned, leaving his readers to fill up the vacant spaces from the works of her professed biographers. Thus we find but little in his volume about the mournful nineteen years which she spent in prison in England. Mr. Caird has come to a strong opinion in favour of her innocence from the charges brought against her by the evil genius of her life-her halfbrother Murray; and we trust that his book is a sign, not only that in Scotland the fair fame of Mary Stuart will never want defenders, but also that a reaction in her favour has set in among the really impartial and industrious students of history, to whatever nation and to whatever creed they may belong.

We have already drawn attention† to the extremely uncritical manner in which the latest English historian of the times of Mary Stuart has allowed himself to deal with this question. Mr. Froude, who has shown so much industry in his researches into the Spanish archives, has accepted with the scantiest examination the evidence against Mary contained in the celebrated Casket Letters, supposed to have been addressed by her to Bothwell. He does not give us the slightest reason for believing that he has in any way sifted the question to the bottom; and, as his history shows evident signs of being written as he studies its materials, and published as it is written, we may venture, with little fear of contradiction, to assert that he had not gone with any fulness into the matter at the time that he wrote the brilliant chapter about the murder of Darnley, which he has founded on the assumed genuineness of a set of documents which are as clearly and demonstrably spurious as any forgeries of the kind can be expected to be. Mr. Froude had read them through, but, as it appears, chiefly for the purpose of seeing what materials they

*Mary Stuart, her Guilt or Innocence.

An inquiry into the secret history of her times. By Alexander M'Neil-Caird. Edinburgh, 1866. † See the Month, vol. i. pp. 1-15.

might furnish him for an effective paragraph or a touching stroke in the showy piece of writing on which he was engaged. He knew just enough of them to take two or three detached sentences out of their context, to put them together, and so give them a new sense, and then to point out the "Shaksperian" genius of the forger-if there was one-who could have produced any thing so perfectly and pathetically natural. If there was one!-Mr. Froude at the very moment was a forger himself, improving on the work of Buchanan or some one else in the pay of Murray and Queen Elizabeth. So far Mr. Froude had studied these letters; but he made no attempt whatever to deal with the proofs of their spuriousness drawn from internal evidence, which are far too conclusive to be gainsayed, and scarcely any to elude the force of the fact, that while it was always pretended that the letters were written in French, and that the French originals shown at Westminster agreed with the handwriting of Queen Mary, on which piece of external evidence Mr. Froude professes mainly to decide the question-it is now established beyond all possibility of cavil that the French letters, as published by Mary's enemies themselves, are a translation from the Scotch through the Latin. This is proved by the mistakes which occur from the translator's having read one Scotch word for another, and so made nonsense. Two more volumes of Mr. Froude's history have lately been announced, and it is of course impossible to say to what year of the reign of Elizabeth they may bring down his narrative. But they ought to reach to the date of the examination of the letters, such as it was, at Westminster; and we shall therefore probably have an opportunity of seeing how he deals with the question when it comes more naturally before him. But surely it is an odd way of writing history-to paint a grand tragic scene on the faith of certain documents, as to which a whole literature exists, containing the strongest arguments against their genuineness; and then, some three years after, to proceed to the full examination of the question.

Mr. Caird, whose theory as to the letters we shall presently notice, has pointed out more than one additional mistake into which Mr. Froude has allowed himself to be led by his hostility to Mary, and his equally determined admiration of her thoroughly unscrupulous brother. As an instance of his unfairness to Mary, we may refer to his description of an interview between the Queen and Crawford, when she was on her way to nurse her husband in his illness at Glasgow, before he was removed, under her care, to the Kirk o' Field, the house in the outskirts of Edinburgh where his murder was soon afterwards accomplished. Mr. Froude represents Crawford as sent by Darnley to appease the Queen in consequence of some "bitter expressions about him [Darnley], which had been carried to his ears." "His heart," says Mr. Froude, "half sank in him when he was told that she was coming; and Crawford, when he gave his message, did not hide from her that his master was afraid of her. There is no remedy against fear,' the Queen said shortly. Crawford's suspicions were too evident to be concealed. The Queen did not like them. She asked sharply if he had more to say," &c.

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(Froude, viii. p. 353). Thus we have the reader prepared, by an assertion of Darnley's suspicion of some design against him on the part of his wife, for the further charge that she was a party to his death. The fact is, that Crawford was not sent by Darnley at all, but by his father, Lennox, who, as the Lieutenant of the county through which she was to pass, was bound to meet and escort her, but who had been forbidden her presence, having been in disgrace with her ever since the murder of Rizzio. Mr. Froude quotes the conversation, and may even have had the documents before him with the name of Lennox in them; but how much more dramatic it was to make Crawford the messenger of Darnley, and the exponent of his supposed fears of the treacherous blandishments of the Queen! As to Murray, he has undertaken the herculean labour of whitewashing him all through-a man, certainly, not worse than the others with whom he shared, as it seems, all those plots of treason, assassination, and calumny against Mary, of which the political history of Scotland at that time is made up, except in the circumstances that he was her trusted brother, that he always kept himself out of personal danger, and that he profited more than any one else by the success of these black intrigues. There is, however, one point in the history at which Mr. Froude seems to have combined the indulgence of his favourite aversion with that of his favourite predilection in a singularly amusing manner. Two months before Darnley's death there was a bond entered into by Murray, Huntley, Lethington, Argyle, Bothwell, and others, to get rid of the King. They proposed to Mary to bring about a divorce; and on her objecting to the whole plan as it was proposed to her, Lethington, the spokesman of the party-they were all present-used some words to her which Mr. Froude understands as containing a very intelligible proposal that he should be removed by violence; and promised her that Murray would "look through his fingers thereto, and will behold our doings, saying nothing to the same." Now, it is Mr. Froude's object, in order to inculpate Mary, that those words should have conveyed to her the blackest possible proposal against her husband; and he makes capital out of her cold and unimpassioned answer in the negative. But what of Murray, who was, with Lethington himself, the author of the proposal, and who was present when Lethington spoke? "Such subjects," says Mr. Froude, are not usually discussed in too loud a tone, and he may not have heard them distinctly."

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Mr. Caird, although he necessarily passes over ground which has been already traversed by so many diligent historians, has not failed to contribute a number of new facts to the story of Mary Stuart. Some of them throw much light on her character and the most important incidents of her life. We must confess to having shared the common impression, that she was brought up in the gay and luxurious Court of France. Mr. Caird reminds us (p. 7) that she was educated in the seclusion of a convent, which she did not leave till her marriage. Again, that ride of Mary's from Jedburgh to Hermitage, where Bothwell was lying wounded and ill, has been used perhaps as often

as any single incident in her history by the enemies of her fair fame. It seems so like a reckless display of ungovernable affection for the wounded Earl. Mr. Caird gives a very plain and prosaic account of the proceeding. Mary had come to Jedburgh to hold her Court for the pacifying of the Border, of which Bothwell was Lord Lieutenant. One of the men he had been sent to capture for trial struck him down and wounded him dangerously, and the rest of his prisoners escaped. Mary found herself in the position in which Queen Victoria's Judges of Assize might be, if on arriving at some county town, and being received in state by the sheriff and the assembled magistrates, they were greeted with the news that the gaol had been "delivered" of all the criminals they had come to try by the kind offices of some sympathisers from without, who had, moreover, broken the head of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, who-as we must suppose, to make the parallel complete-was also the governor of the gaol. Such being her position, it was essential for the purposes of justice that Mary should confer with her lieutenant as to the means of bringing the escaped culprits to justice. The contemporary account states that she was accompanied by Murray and her other lords, that they were present at the entire conversation, and that the whole visit, arrangements and all, took up two hours. It is wonderful how much light has lately been thrown on minute points in Mary's history which have been used against her character, by the simple consideration of what was customary in those times, or a matter of course in consequence of some office held by Bothwell or some other lord. Caird's book contributes more than one new instance.

to come.

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Mr.

With regard to the much-debated question of the Casket Letters, Mr. Caird follows what we conceive to be the only opinion to which it is possible for any fair person who really investigates the matter When, a few weeks ago, the English Courts rejected, as undoubtedly spurious, certain documents which were produced in the cause of the so-called Olive, Princess of Cumberland, they had not by any means stronger grounds for doing so than exist against the Casket documents. It is easy to see thus much-though Mr. Froude, we fear, will not see it. But there are further questions, requiring much delicate critical handling, with regard to the possible origin of the forgery, or, as it may have been in some cases, the interpolation of which we speak and we may repeat what we have already said, that it is very desirable that the internal evidence which may be drawn from the Letters, as compared with the acknowledged remains of Mary's correspondence, should be more thoroughly sifted. Mr. Caird has contributed a few very good suggestions to the controversy. He has remarked, for instance, that it is very probable, from the story of the King's murder, that one of the objects of the conspirators who executed it was to possess themselves of his papers; and it appears that these were actually in their possession afterwards. At all events, there is no difficulty in supposing that some of Mary's letters to her husband may have fallen into the hands of her enemies. Mr. Caird thinks that three of the Casket Letters may be admitted as genuine, as addressed, not to Bothwell, but to Darnley. One of

them is certainly beautiful and wifely; and its expressions seem alike to preclude the supposition that it was addressed to a paramour, and that the person addressed was Bothwell. It seems to allude to the injuries Mary had received from the person to whom she was writing: and it is fixed by her accusers themselves at a date before Darnley's death. They have wilfully mistranslated some of her words, altering the sense of a whole sentence, for the sake of making it appear that there is an allusion to the designs against his life. But the expressions about injuries received would not at that time have had any meaning as from Mary to Bothwell, though he injured her foully enough afterwards. It seems certain that the longest of the Casket Letters-that one of which Mr. Froude speaks as a document which no one could have forged-is in reality nothing more than a document drawn up by Mary for her Council,―or by Crawford, from Darnley's statements as to a conversation that had passed between him and the Queen,-or a rather clumsy mixture of the two, with considerable interpolations here and there, made for the purpose of blasting Mary's reputation. If this be so, it is not impossible that other papers of the Queen's writings, such as letters to Darnley, may have been joined to this one by the conspirators. The letters have, as is well known, neither date nor address nor signature. Mr. Caird's conjecture may be true, as it is certainly ingenious.

2. As far as the great mass of loyal Catholics is concerned, it is probable that the idea of joining in the "Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom" has been finally set at rest by the decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, signed by Cardinal Patrizi, which reached England several months ago. The principles on which the Catholic Church must deal with overtures such as those made by the promoters of that Association are so plainly set forth in that document as to leave no ground for further confusion of thought on the subject. We have seen but little, indeed, from the Unionists on the matter. Bishop Ullathorne's former Letter to his Clergy on the question called forth from Dr. Littledale a reply, the temper and taste of which may be estimated from the fact that he ventured to call Archbishop Manning "an accomplished master of the art of suppression and misstatement;" but neither the decree itself, nor the comments with which it has been accompanied by Dr. Ullathorne in his Second Letter,* appear to have been dealt with argumentatively by the party whose manœuvres they chiefly concerned. But Bishop Ullathorne's Second Letter is so important in itself, as throwing light on some of the most com.mon Anglican arguments of the present day, that we cannot satisfy ourselves by simply chronicling its appearance along with that of other less prominent publications on the Reunion, or Eirenicon, controversy.

After dealing with what he calls the "strange and offensive

The Anglican Theory of Unity as maintained in the Appeal to Rome and Dr. Pusey's "Eirenicon." A Second Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Birmingham. By the Right Rev. Bishop Ullathorne. London, 1866.

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