saving salt of Elizabeth’s character, with all its wellnigh incredible mixture of heroism and egotism, meanness and magnificence, was simply this, that, overmuch as she loved herself, she did yet love England better. Her best though not her only fine qualities were national and political, the high public virtues of a good public servant; in the private and personal qualities which attract and attach a friend to his friend and a follower to his leader, no man or woman was ever more constant and more eminent than Mary Queen of Scots. (A. C. S.)
Bibliography.—The biography of Mary Stuart being virtually the history of Scotland during the period covered by her life, with which the history of England at the same period is also largely concerned, the chief events in which she figured are related in all the general Histories of both countries. The most important original authorities are the voluminous State Papers of the period, with other MS. documents preserved at the British Museum, the Cambridge University Library, Hatfield and elsewhere. See especially the Reports of the Hist. MSS. Commission; Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots (Scottish Record Publ. 1898); Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs, principally in the Archives at Simancas (vols. i.–iv., 1892–1899); and the Calendars of State Papers: Domestic Series, Edw. VI.–James I.; Foreign Series, Elizabeth; Venice Series.
The most important unofficial contemporary works are the Histories of John Knox, Bishop John Lesley, George Buchanan, and Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie; the Diurnal of Remarkable Occurrents from the death of James IV. till 1575 (Bannatyne Club, 1833); Robert Birrell’s “Diary” in Sir J. G. Dalzell’s Fragments of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1798); History of Mary Stuart, by her secretary Claude Nau, ed. by J. Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1883); Sir James Melville’s Memoirs of his own Life (Bannatyne Club, 1827); Richard Bannatyne, Memoriales of Transactions in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1836); William Camden’s Annales (Eng. trans., London, 1635); Michel de Castelnau’s Mémoires (Brussels, 1731); the Mémoires of Brantôme (ed. by L. Lalanne, 12 vols., Paris, 1864–1896); Relations politiques de la France et de l’Espagne avec l’Écosse au 16th siècle (ed. by J. B. A. Teulet, 5 vols., Paris, 1862), containing important original letters and documents; Thomas Wright’s Queen Elizabeth and her Times (2 vols., London, 1838), consists of private letters of Elizabethan statesmen many of which refer to Mary Stuart, and others are to be found in Sir Henry Ellis’s Original Letters illustrative of English History (London, 1825–1846); much of Mary’s own correspondence will be found in Prince A. Labanoff’s Lettres inédites, 1558–1587 (Paris, 1839), and Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Marie Stuart (7 vols., London, 1844), selections from which have been translated into English by W. Turnbull in Letters of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1845), and by Agnes Strickland in Letters of Mary Queen of Scots and Documents connected with her Personal History (3 vols., London, 1842).
Among authorities not actually contemporary but written within a century of Mary’s death are David Calderwood’s Hist. of the Kirk of Scotland (8 vols., Edinburgh, 1842–1849); Archbishop Spottiswoode’s Hist. of the Church of Scotland (ed. by M. Russell, 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1847–1851), and Robert Keith’s Hist. of Affairs of Church and State in Scotland (Spottiswoode Society ed., 1844); to which should be added the modern classic, George Grub’s Ecclesiastical History of Scotland (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1861).
Of modern general histories those of chief importance on the subject are the Histories of England by Hume, Lingard and Froude; and the Histories of Scotland by Robertson, P. F. Tytler, John Hill Burton, Malcolm Laing and Andrew Lang. Numerous biographies of Mary Stuart have been published, as well as essays and treatises dealing with particular episodes in her life, of which the most worthy of mention are: George Chalmers, Life of Mary Queen of Scots, (2 vols., London, 1818); Henry Glassford Bell, Life of Mary Queen of Scots (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1828–1831); the “Life” in Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of Scotland (8 vols., Edinburgh, 1850); J. D. Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in Captivity (Sheffield, 1880); Colin Lindsay, Mary Queen of Scots and her Marriage with Bothwell (London, 1883); Mrs Maxwell-Scott, The Tragedy of Fotheringay (London, 1895); F. A. M. Mignet, Histoire de Marie Stuart (2 vols., Brussels, 1851); Martin Philippson, Histoire du règne de Marie Stuart ( 3 vols., Paris, 1891); Sir John Skelton, Mary Stuart (London, 1893), Maitland of Lethington and the Scotland of Mary Stuart (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1887), The Impeachment of Mary Stuart (Edinburgh, 1878), and Essays in History and Biography, including the Defence of Mary Stuart (Edinburgh, 1883); Joseph Stevenson, Mary Stuart: The First Eighteen Years of her Life (Edinburgh, 1886); D. Hay Fleming, Mary Stuart (2nd ed. 1898); Jane Stoddart, Girlhood of Mary Queen of Scots.
With special reference to the controversy concerning the Casket Letters, in addition to the article Casket Letters and the above-mentioned works by Sir John Skelton, the following should be consulted: Walter Goodall, Examination of the Letters said to be written by Mary Queen of Scots to Bothwell (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1754), which contains the letters themselves; William Tytler, Inquiry into the Evidence against Mary Queen of Scots (2 vols., London, 1790); John Whitaker, Mary Queen of Scots Vindicated (3 vols., London, 1788); F. de Peyster, Mary Stuart, Bothwell and the Casket Letters (London, 1890); T. F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh, 1889); Andrew Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stuart (London, 1900).
In 1690 Giovanni Francesco Savaro published a play La Maria Stuarda, and since then the story of the Queen of Scots has been the subject of numerous poems and dramas, of which the most celebrated are Schiller’s Maria Stuart, and three tragedies by A. C. Swinburne—Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881).
MARY (1457–1482), duchess of Burgundy, only child of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and his wife Isabella of Bourbon, was born on the 13th of February 1457. As heiress of the rich Burgundian domains her hand was eagerly sought by a number of princes. When her father fell upon the field of Nancy, on the 5th of January 1477, Mary was not yet twenty
years of age. Louis XI. of France seized the opportunity
afforded by his rival’s defeat and death to take possession of
the duchy of Burgundy as a fief lapsed to the French crown,
and also of Franche Comté, Picardy and Artois. He was
anxious that Mary should marry the Dauphin Charles and thus
secure the inheritance of the Netherlands for his descendants.
Mary, however, distrusted Louis; declined the French alliance,
and turned to her Netherland subjects for help. She obtained
the help only at the price of great concessions. On the 11th of
February 1477 she was compelled to sign a charter of rights,
known as “the Great Privilege,” by which the provinces and
towns of the Netherlands recovered all the local and communal
rights which had been abolished by the arbitrary decrees of
the dukes of Burgundy in their efforts to create in the Low
Countries a centralized state. Mary had to undertake not to
declare war, make peace, or raise taxes without the consent of
the States, and not to employ any but natives in official posts.
Such was the hatred of the people to the old regime that two
influential councillors of Charles the Bold, the Chancellor
Hugonet and the Sire d’Humbercourt, having been discovered
in correspondence with the French king, were executed at
Ghent despite the tears and entreaties of the youthful duchess.
Mary now made her choice among the many suitors for her hand,
and selected the archduke Maximilian of Austria, afterwards
the emperor Maximilian I., and the marriage took place at
Ghent on the 18th of August 1477. Affairs now went more
smoothly in the Netherlands, the French aggression was checked,
and internal peace was in a large measure restored, when the
duchess met her death by a fall from her horse on the 27th of
March 1482. Three children had been the issue of her marriage,
and her elder son, Philip, succeeded to her dominions under the
guardianship of his father.
See E. Münch, Maria von Burgund, nebst d. Leben v. Margaretha v. York (2 vols., Leipzig, 1832), and the Cambridge Mod. Hist. (vol. i., c. xii., bibliography, 1903).
MARY (1496–1533), queen of France, was the daughter of Henry VII. of England and Elizabeth of York. At first it was intended to marry her to Charles of Austria, the future emperor Charles V., and by the treaty of Calais (Dec. 21, 1507) it was agreed that the marriage should take place when Charles should have attained the age of fourteen, the contract being secured by bonds taken from various princes and cities in the Low Countries. On the 17th of December 1508 the Sieur de Bergues, who had come over as Charles’s representative at the head of a magnificent embassy, married the princess by proxy. The contract, originally made by Henry VII., was renewed on the 17th of October 1513 by Henry VIII. at a meeting with Margaret of Savoy at Lille, the wedding being fixed for the following year. But the emperor Maximilian I., to whom Louis XII. had proposed his daughter Renée as wife for Charles, with Brittany for dowry, postponed the match with the English princess in a way that left no doubt of his intention to withdraw from the contract altogether. He was forestalled by the diplomacy of Wolsey, at whose instance peace was signed with France on the 7th of August 1514, and on the same date a treaty was concluded for the marriage of Mary Tudor with Louis XII., who had recently lost his wife Anne of Brittany. The marriage was celebrated
