Scotland an Anthology.

Photo Oranzo Bray Frank Dougan Maurice Lindsay quotes Antonia Fraser from his ( Scotland an Anthology); Mary Queen of Scots~~~The Catholic Queen of Scotland! ‘ Whether she was a beauty by our standards or not, Mary Stuart was certainly rated a beauty by the standards of her own time: even the venomous Knox, never inclined to pay compliments to those with whose convictions he disagreed, described her as ‘ pleasing ’, and recorded that the people of Edinburgh called out ‘ Heaven bless that sweet face’ as she passed on her way’. One must look at the descriptions of these two adversaries and the place in people’s hearts and minds with the differences of character, and the affection that the world still holds for Mary Stuart whereas Knox has always been described as a blackguard even by his most determined allies. Antonia Fraser’s passage continues; ‘ Sir James Melville, an experienced man of the world who prided himself on his detachment, called her appearance ‘ very lovesome ’. Ronsard paid her superb tributes: he wrote of her hands which he particularly admired and their long, ringless fingers, which he compared in a poetic phrase to five unequal branches; he wrote of the unadorned beauty of her throat, free of any necklace, her alabaster brow, her ivory bosom. When she was a young widow , he wrote of her pacing sadly but gracefully at Fontainebleau, her garments blowing about her as she walked, like the sails of a ship ruffled in the wind. The word Goddess was the one which seemed to come most naturally to Brantome in writing of her: she was ‘ une vraie Deesse’ of beauty and grace; he picked out her complexion for special praise, and described its famous pallor which rivalled and eclipsed the whiteness of her veil, when she was in mourning. Furthermore Mary had the additional charm of a peculiarly soft, sweet speaking voice: (with a beautiful French accent ) not only did Ronsard and Brantome praise her ‘ voix tres douce et tres bonne’ in France but even the critical Knox admitted that the Scots were charmed by her pretty speech when she made her oration at the tollbooth at the opening of Parliament, ~~‘ exclaiming vox Dianae ! The voice of a Goddess... was there ever orator spake so properly and so sweetly!’ It was also a point on which even the most hostile English observers commented on her first arrival in that country, including Knollys and Cecil’s own emissary White. Her effect on the men around her was certainly that of a beautiful woman: the poet Chatelard fell violently, if slightly hysterically, in love with her; not only on the eve of his execution did he call her ‘ the most beautiful and the most cruel princess in the world’, but on their journey back to Scotland he exclaimed that the galleys needed no lanterns to light their way ‘ since the eyes of the queen suffice to light up the whole sea with their lovely fire’. The Seigneur de Damville was also said to have been so enamoured of the young queen that he followed her to Scotland, leaving his young wife at home, and if we are to believe Brantome, Mary’s little brother-in-law Charles was so much in love with her that he used to gaze at her portrait with longing and desired to marry her himself after the untimely death of Francis. In Scotland Mary’s beauty as well as her position was said to have captured not only the obsessional Arran, but the dashing Sir John Gordon and the youthful handsome George Douglas. Her first English jailer Sir Francis Knollys, although unpromising material for female wiles, was considerably seduced by the charming personality of his captive; and although the later so-called affair with Lord Shrewsbury was undoubtedly the creation of his wife’s malicious imagination, nevertheless the fact that the accusation could be taken so seriously by the English court shows that all her life Mary was considered a beautiful and desirable woman, whose physical attractions could never be totally left out of account. At the time of her illness at Jedburgh when she was twenty-three, the Venetian ambassador wrote of her being a princess who was ‘ personally the most beautiful in Europe’. There seems no reason to doubt that this was the general verdict of Europe during her lifetime, and that Mary Queen of Scots was a romantic figure to her own age, no less than to subsequent generations. By Antonia Fraser from; ( Mary Queen of Scots)