Difficulties arise about the English aid to Malcolm. History, in fact, declines to be dramatic. Liberties must be taken. In his plays of the Mary Stuart cycle, Mr Swinburne telescopes the affair of Darnley into that of Chastelard, which was much earlier. He makes Mary Beaton (in love with Chastelard) a kind of avenging fate, who will never leave the Queen till her head falls at Fotheringay;though, in fact, after a flirtation with Randolph, Mary Beaton married Ogilvy of Boyne (really in love with Lady Bothwell), and not one of the four Maries was at Fotheringay. An artist ought to be allowed to follow legend, of its essence dramatic, or to manipulate history as he pleases. Our modern scrupulosity is pedantic. But Tennyson read a long list of books for his Queen Mary, though it does not appear that he made original researches in MSS. These labours occupied 1874 and 1875. Yet it would be foolish to criticise his Queen Mary as if we were criticising "exact history." "The play's the thing."The poet thought that "Bloody Mary" "had been harshly judged by the verdict of popular tradition." So have most characters to whom popular dislike affixes the popular epithet--"Bloody Claverse,""Bloody Mackenzie," "Bloody Balfour." Mary had the courage of the Tudors. She "edified all around her by her cheerfulness, her piety, and her resignation to the will of Providence," in her last days (Lingard). Camden calls her "a queen never praised enough for the purity of her morals, her charity to the poor" (she practised as a district visitor), "and her liberality to the nobles and the clergy."She was "pious, merciful, pure, and ever to be praised, if we overlook her erroneous opinions in religion," says Godwin. She had been grievously wronged from her youth upwards. In Elizabeth she had a sister and a rival, a constant intriguer against her, and a kinswoman far from amiable. Despite "the kindness and attention of Philip" (Lingard), affairs of State demanded his absence from England. The disappointment as to her expected child was cruel. She knew that she had become unpopular, and she could not look for the success of her Church, to which she was sincerely attached. M.
Auguste Filon thought that Queen Mary might secure dramatic rank for Tennyson, "if a great actress arose who conceived a passion for the part of Mary." But that was not to be expected. Mary was middle-aged, plain, and in aspect now terrible, now rueful. No great actress will throw herself with passion into such an ungrateful part.
"Throughout all history," Tennyson said, "there was nothing more mournful than the final tragedy of this woman." MOURNFUL it is, but not tragic. There is nothing grand at the close, as when Mary Stuart conquers death and evil fame, redeeming herself by her courage and her calm, and extending over unborn generations that witchery which her enemies dreaded more than an army with banners.
Moreover, popular tradition can never forgive the fires of Smithfield. It was Mary Tudor's misfortune that she had the power to execute, on a great scale, that faculty of persecution to the death for which her Presbyterian and other Protestant opponents pined in vain. Mr Froude says of her, "For the first and last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England, the genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man."That was precisely the spirit of Knox and other Presbyterian denouncers of death against "Idolaters" (Catholics). But the Scottish preachers were always thwarted: Mary and her advisers had their way, as, earlier, Latimer had preached against sufferers at the stake. To the stake, which he feared so greatly, Cranmer had sent persons not of his own fleeting shade of theological opinion. These men had burned Anabaptists, but all that is lightly forgotten by Protestant opinion. Under Mary (whoever may have been primarily responsible) Cranmer and Latimer were treated as they had treated others. Moreover, some two hundred poor men and women had dared the fiery death. The persecution was on a scale never forgiven or forgotten, since Mary began cerdonibus esse timenda. Mary was not essentially inclement. Despite Renard, the agent of the Emperor, she spared that lord of fluff and feather, Courtenay, and she spared Elizabeth. Lady Jane she could not save, the girl who was a queen by grace of God and of her own royal nature. But Mary will never be pardoned by England. "Few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing," says Mr Froude, a great admirer of Tennyson's play. Yet, taking Mr Froude's own view, Mary's abject and superannuated passion for Philip; her ecstasies during her supposed pregnancy; "the forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face," with all her "symptoms of hysterical derangement, leave little room, as we think of her, for other feelings than pity." Unfortunately, feelings of pity for a person so distraught, so sourly treated by fortune, do not suffice for tragedy.
When we contemplate Antigone or OEdipus, it is not with a sentiment of pity struggling against abhorrence.