She reminds us of Bathsheba in the novel which has been already quoted. Talking with her maid Liddy, she said, "I hope I am not a bold sort of maid,--mannish?" she continued, with some anxiety. To which Liddy replied, "Oh, no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis getting on that way sometimes."
At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman set sail from France for Scotland, to begin that long, indomitable struggle to succeed Elizabeth, and to break the Reformation in England. The wiliest and most inflexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until imprisonment, which was twice escaped from, and death,--
became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable, bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.
Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred of Protestantism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame of constant pique at the influence and reputation of Elizabeth. The Scottish reformers kept her skirmishing talent well employed. Defending her amusements or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as it flowed, the lines of resolution upon her face were etched more clearly. She could lend her person to Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party. With power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile to control the transitional epoch into which she was born. Her life was a series of shifts and dramatic surprises. But no dark recollections ever disturbed her sleep; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight of a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected murders.
In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, who felt but one great passion, and had no art nor culture to lavish in retaining its object. She might have said,--
"I am as true as truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of truth."
