Little did my mother think
That day she cradled me
What land I was to travel in,
Or what death I should die.

Writing to Mrs. Dunlop on January 25, 1790, Burns quoted these lines, ‘in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart.’ Mr. Carlyle is said, when young, to have written them on a pane of glass in a window, with a diamond, adding, characteristically, ‘Oh foolish Thee!’ In 1802, in the first edition of ‘The Border Minstrelsy,’ Scott cited only three stanzas from the same ballad, not including Burns’s verse, but giving

Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she’ll hae but three,
There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton,
And Marie Carmichael and me.

In later editions Sir Walter offered a made-up copy of the ballad, most of it from a version collected by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

It now appeared that Mary Hamilton was the heroine, that she was one of Queen Marie’s four Maries, and that she was hanged for murdering a child whom she bore to Darnley. Thus the character of Mary Hamilton was ‘totally lost,’ and Darnley certainly ‘had not sufficient for two.’ Darnley, to be sure, told his father that ‘I never offended the Queen, my wife, in meddling with any woman in thought, let be in deed,’ and, whether Darnley spoke truth or not, there was, among the Queen’s Maries, no Mary Hamilton to meddle with, just as there was no Mary Carmichael.

The Maries were attendant on the Queen as children ever since she left Scotland for France. They were Mary Livingstone (mentioned as ‘Lady Livinston’ in one version of the ballad),262 who married ‘John Sempill, called the Dancer,’ who, says Laing, ‘acquired the lands of Beltree, in Renfrewshire.’263

262 Child, vol. iii. p. 389.

263 Laing’s Knox, ii. 415, note 3.

When Queen Mary was a captive in England she was at odds with the Sempill pair about some jewels of hers in their custody. He was not a satisfactory character, he died before November 1581. Mary Fleming, early in 1587, married the famous William Maitland of Lethington, ‘being no more fit for her than I to be a page,’ says Kirkcaldy of Grange. Her life was wretched enough, through the stormy career and sad death of her lord. Mary Beaton, with whom Randolph, the English ambassador, used to flirt, married, in 1566, Ogilvy of Boyne, the first love of Lady Jane Gordon, the bride of Bothwell. Mary Seaton remained a maiden and busked the Queen’s hair during her English captivity. We last hear of her from James Maitland of Lethington, in 1613, living at Rheims, very old, ‘decrepid,’ and poor. There is no room in the Four for Mary Hamilton, and no mention of her appears in the records of the Court.

How, then, did Mary Hamilton find her way into the old ballad about Darnley and the Queen?

To explain this puzzle, some modern writers have denied that the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ is really old; they attribute it to the eighteenth century. The antiquary who launched this opinion was Scott’s not very loyal friend, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. According to him, a certain Miss Hambledon (no Christian name is given), being Maid of Honour to the Empress Catherine of Russia, had three children by an amour, and murdered all three. Peter the Great caused her to be, not hanged, but decapitated. Sharpe took his facts from ‘a German almanac,’ and says: ‘The Russian tragedy must be the original.’ The late Professor Child, from more authentic documents, dates Miss Hambledon’s or Hamilton’s execution on March 14, 1719. At that time, or nearly then, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission from the Chevalier de St. George (James III.), and through him the news might reach Scotland. Mr. Courthope, in his ‘History of English Poetry,’ followed Sharpe and Professor Child, and says: ‘It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.’

The occurrence would not only be remarkable, but, as far as possibility goes in literature, would be impossible, for several reasons. One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and makers of street ballads appear, about 1719–1730, to have been capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad style, at its best, or anything near its best. There is no mistaking the literary touch in such ballads as Allan Ramsay handled, or in the imitation named ‘Hardyknute ‘ in Allan’s ‘Tea Table Miscellany,’ 1724. ‘It was the first poem I ever learned, the last I shall ever forget,’ said Scott, and, misled by boyish affection, he deemed it ‘just old enough,’ ‘a noble imitation.’264 But the imitation can deceive nobody, and while literary imitators, as far as their efforts have reached us, were impotent to deceive, the popular Muse, of 1714–1730, was not attempting deception. Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on Sheriffmuir and in Skirving’s amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as is ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ in all its many variants (Child gives no less than eighteen), we do not know a single printed example before Scott’s made-up copy in the ‘Border Minstrelsy.’ The latest ballad really in the old popular manner known to me is that of ‘Rob Roy,’ namely, of Robin Oig and James More, sons of Rob Roy, and about their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ I scarcely hope that any one can produce, after 1680, a single popular piece which could be mistaken for a ballad of or near Queen Mary’s time.

264 Lockhart, i. 114, x. 138.

The known person least unlike Mr. Courthope’s late ‘maker’ was ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie Leslie,’ ‘an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race,’ says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sang, and sold PRINTED ballads. ‘Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?’ asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. ‘Oh ay, but — THEY WINNA BUY THEM!’ said Charlie. ‘Where do you buy them?’ ‘Why, faur I get them cheapest.’ He carried his ballads in ‘a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder.’ Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince’s health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song, ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie ‘ (‘this sang Charlie made hissel’’), then this maker could never have produced ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.265 Against Mr. Child and Mr. Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in-that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, such as ‘Philiphaugh,’ and that it soon was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719–1730, compose ‘The Queen’s Marie’ in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.

265 See, for example, Mr. Macquoid’s Jacobite Songs and Ballads, pp. 424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.

Secondly, WHY, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts? His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction, betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts ‘palpitated with actuality,’ and, since Homer’s day, ‘men desire’ (as Homer says) ‘the new songs’ on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular ‘Musselmou’d Charlie’ even know, by 1719, the names of the Queen’s Maries? Mr. Courthope admits that ‘he may have been helped by some ballad,’ one of those spoken of, as we shall see, by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the ‘maker’ add? If it did NOT, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name ‘Hamilton’ from the Russian tragedy could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks ‘the jolly sailors’ not to

‘Let on to my father and mother
But that I’m coming hame.’

This passage, according to Mr. Courthope, ‘was suggested partly by the fact of a Scotswoman being executed in Russia.’ C. K. Sharpe also says: ‘If Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely’ (why not?) ‘that her relations resided beyond seas.’ They MAY have been in France, like many another Hamilton! Mr. Child says: ‘The appeal to the sailors shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land — not that of her ancestors.’ Yet the ballad makes her die in or near the Canongate! Moreover, the family of the Mary Hamilton of 1719 had been settled in Russia for generations, and were reckoned of the Russian noblesse. The verses, therefore, on either theory, are probably out of place, and are perhaps an interpolation suggested to some reciter (they only occur in some of the many versions) by a passage in ‘The Twa Brithers.’266

266 Child, i. 439.

We now reach the most important argument for the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ Mr. Courthope has theoretically introduced as existing in, or after, 1719, ‘makers’ who could imitate to deception the old ballad style. Now Maidment remarks that ‘this ballad was popular in Galloway, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Aberdeen, AND THE VERY STRIKING DISCREPANCIES GO FAR TO REMOVE EVERY SUSPICION OF FABRICATION.’ Chambers uses (1829) against Sharpe the same argument of ‘universal diffusion in Scotland.’ Neither Mr. Child nor Mr. Courthope draws the obvious inferences from the extraordinary discrepancies in the eighteen variants. Such essential discrepancies surely speak of a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner. Did such rhapsodists exist after 1719? Old Charlie, for one, did not sing or sell the old ballads. Again, if the ballad (as it probably would be in 1719) was PRINTED, or even if it was not, could the variations have been evolved between 1719 and 1802?

These variations are numerous, striking, and fundamental. In many variants even the name of the heroine does not tally with that of the Russian maid of honour. That most important and telling coincidence wholly disappears. In a version of Motherwell’s, from Dumbartonshire, the heroine is Mary Myle. In a version known to Scott (‘Minstrelsy,’ 1810, iii. 89, note), the name is Mary Miles. Mr. Child also finds Mary Mild, Mary Moil, and Lady Maisry. This Maisry is daughter of the Duke of York! Now, the Duke of York whom alone the Scottish people knew was James Stuart, later James II. Once more the heroine is daughter of the Duke of Argyll, therefore a Campbell. Or she is without patronymic, and is daughter of a lord or knight of the North, or South, or East, and one of her sisters is a barber’s wife, and her father lives in England! —(Motherwell.) She, at least, might invoke ‘Ye mariners, mariners, mariners!’ (as in Scott’s first fragment) not to carry her story. Now we ask whether, after the ringing tragedy of Miss Hamilton in Russia, in the year of grace 1719, contemporaries who heard the woeful tale could, between 1719 and 1820, call the heroine —(1) Hamilton; (2) Mild, Moil, Myle, Miles; (3) make her a daughter of the Duke of York, or of the Duke of Argyll, or of lords and of knights from all quarters of the compass, and sister-inlaw to an English barber, also one of the Queen’s ‘serving-maids.’ We at least cannot accept those numerous and glittering contradictions as corruptions which could be made soon after the Russian events, when the true old ballad style was dead.

We now produce more startling variations. The lover is not only ‘the King,’ ‘the Prince,’ Darnley, ‘the highest Stuart o’ a’,’ but he is also that old offender, ‘Sweet Willie,’ or he is Warrenston (Warriston?). Mary is certainly not hanged (the Russian woman was beheaded) away from her home; she dies in Edinburgh, near the Tolbooth, the Netherbow, the Canongate, and —

O what will my three brothers say
When they COME HAME frae sea,
When they see three locks o’ my yellow hair
Hinging under a gallows tree?

It is impossible here to give all the variations. Mary pulls, or does not pull, or her lover pulls, the leaf of the Abbey, or ‘savin,’ or other tree; the Queen is ‘auld,’ or not ‘auld;’ she kicks in Mary’s door and bursts the bolts, or does nothing so athletic and inconsistent with her advanced age. The heroine does, or does not, appeal vainly to her father. Her dress is of all varieties. She does, or does not, go to the Tolbooth and other places. She is, or is not, allured to Edinburgh, ‘a wedding for to see.’ Her infanticide is variously described, or its details are omitted, and the dead body of the child is found in various places, or not found at all. Though drowned in the sea, it is between the bolster and the wall, or under the blankets! She expects, or does not expect, to be avenged by her kin. The king is now angry, now clement — inviting Mary to dinner! Mary is hanged, or (Buchan’s MS.) is not hanged, but is ransomed by Warrenston, probably Johnston of Warriston! These are a few specimens of variations in point of fact: in language the variations are practically countless. How could they arise, if the ballad is later than 1719?

We now condescend to appeal to statistics. We have examined the number of variants published by Mr. Child in his first six volumes, on ballads which have, or may have, an historical basis. Of course, the older and more popular the ballads, the more variants do we expect to discover — time and taste producing frequent changes. Well, of ‘Otterburn’ Mr. Child has five versions; of the ‘Hunting of the Cheviot’ he has two, with minor modifications indicated by letters from the ‘lower case.’ Of ‘Gude Wallace’ he has eight. Of ‘Johnnie............