Mary Stuart Read Free

worth the wooing from every point of view, Henry VIII considered. So it was that this girl’s body with its yet unawakened soul became an object of haggling from the outset. But politics is impervious to the feelings of mankind; what it is interested in are crowns, countries, heritages. The individual man or woman simply does not exist when politics is in the ascendant; such things are of no value as compared with tangible and practical values to be won in the world-game.
    In the present instance, however, Henry VIII’s desire to bring about a matrimonial union between the heiress to Scotland’s throne and the heir to the throne of England was reasonable and humane. For the sempiternal warfare between the neighbouring nations had long since become a senseless iniquity. England and Scotland, forming as they do one island in the northern seas, their shores washed by the waters of the selfsame oceans, their peoples so closely akin, and their mode of life so similar, could have but one common duty to perform: come together in unity and concord. Nature in this case could not have made her wishes plainer. There was nothing to hinder unification except the jealous rivalries which existed between the two dynasties of the Tudors and of the Stuarts. But if a marriage between the children of the contending dynasts could be successfully arranged, then the differences might be amicably smoothed out and the Stuarts and Tudors would achieve simultaneously kingship of England, Scotland and Ireland. Thus the contentious parties would become friends; no more blood need be spilt in fratricidal strife; and a powerful, united Great Britain could take the place that was due to her among the nations in their struggle for dominion over the world.
    When, quite exceptionally, a clear and logical idea comes to light up the political arena, it is invariably ruined by the idiotic way men have of putting it into execution. At the start the suggestion of this marriage seemed to strike the precise note that was required to establish harmony. The Scottish lords, whose pockets were quickly and amply filled with moneys from England, gladly agreed to the proposal. But Henry VIII was astute enough not to be satisfied with a mere piece of parchment. Too often had he suffered from the double-dealing and greed of these honourable gentlemen not to know that such shifty wights can never be bound by a treaty, and that should a higher bidder present himself—should, let us say, the French King offer his son and heir as aspirant for Mary’s hand—they would snap their fingers at the first proposal in order to reap what advantage they might from the second. He therefore demanded of the negotiators that Mary should immediately be sent to England. But if the Tudors were suspicious of the Stuarts, the latter wholeheartedly reciprocated the sentiment. The Queen Mother, in especial, opposed the treaty. A Guise and a strict Catholic, she had no wish to see her daughter brought up by heretics. Moreover, in the treaty itself she was not slow to detect a trap which might prove highly injurious to her child’s welfare. In a clause that had been kept secret Henry VIII bribed the Scottish nobles to agree that if the little girl died before her majority the whole of her rights and ownership in the Scottish crown should pass to him. The clause was undoubtedly suspect, especially when associated with the fact that its inventor had already done away with two wives. What more natural than to suppose that a child might die prematurely and not altogether by natural means in order that he might come into the heritage the sooner? Mary of Guise, in her role of prudent and loving mother, rejected the proposal of sending her infant daughter to London. Thereupon the proxy wooing was upon the verge of being converted into a war, for Henry VIII, overbearing as was his wont, dispatched his troops across the border that they might seize the coveted prize by force of arms.