The skull and portraits of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, and their bearing on the tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots / by Karl Pearson, F.R.S.; with frontispiece, forty-five plates, four figures in the text and six tissues of cranial contours.

  • Pearson, Karl, 1857-1936.
Date:
[1928]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The skull and portraits of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, and their bearing on the tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots / by Karl Pearson, F.R.S.; with frontispiece, forty-five plates, four figures in the text and six tissues of cranial contours. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “the pockie priest James Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews, the fanatic Knox “with ecclesiastical assertiveness almost boundless in characterf,” the over subtle Maitland of Lethington, “the chameleon of politicsJ,” who could have blackmailed every Scottish factional leader, but must refrain for fear of incriminating himself, the senile Duke of Chatelherault flitting across the scene and typical of nothing but the mental deficiency which then cursed the Hamiltonian stock§, George Buchanan, who might have been the Erasmus of Scotland, but was content to exchange scholarship for well-paid scurrility, and as historian to dance to whatever tune his master for the time might play, and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, seeking like all the others his own advancement, be it by fair or foul means, but scarcely troubling to screen his actions as they did theirs, marching to his ends by force rather than by guile and quite incapable of reducing the removal of foes to a fine art. Behind them, treating them all as pawns in the game of international politics, lurk in the wings the a-moral Catherine de’ Medici, the wavering Philip of Spain, and Elizabeth of England alternating between fits of Tudor ruthlessness and of Howard vacillation||, which were the causes of the infinite worry and the infinite success of the feline Cecil and his policy. Assassins de facto or de ammo one and all. If poison or the hired dagger were not feasible, then the forged document, the agent provocateur, the trial for treason which admitted no counsel who knew the legal mazes, these were the instruments of destruction. Politics was a game of one against all, in which men only united till they had dispatched a common rival, and wherein a man’s word or bond was only good as long as it appeared immediately advantageous to that man. There was no moral code such as we understand it today; it is indeed difficult to grasp any standard of morality at all in the political life of the sixteenth century, only factional chiefs with their respective gangs of kinsmen and henchmen, assassins, forgers and mud¬ scattering propagandists in place of the venal press of later years. Behind the notables a commonalty ignorant and subjected, but gradually rising to the conception that the real prizes of this game of politics were after all the enjoyment of the lion’s share of their own handicraft and the produce of the soil they tilled. For a time the pulpit could guide the strength of ignorant popular passion in the direction the * Workes of.Prince James. Edited by Montague, 1616, p. 301. f Characterisation of T. F. Henderson in his Mary Queen of Scots, Vol. i. p. 135. London, 1905. The Apostles’, but not Knox’s own statements, might fail to proceed from the Holy Ghost. Knox, Works, Edinburgh, 1864, Vol. i. p. 248. J So characterised by George Buchanan in his Chamaeleon. See the Opera Omnia. Ed. Buddiman, 1715, Vol. i. Last paper, printed from a ms. in the Cotton Library. § James, Earl of Arran, the eldest son, went off his head, and Drury in a letter to Cecil (April 15, 1567) writes: “The Lord David, son to the Duke, is mad and Arbroath [John, the Commendator], his brother, hath already had a show of the same disease.” || Typical examples are her treatment of the executions of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots. For example, in the former case she signed and then revoked the warrant four times in the course of a single month. (Thomas Carte: A General History of England, Vol. in. pp. 525—6. London, 1752.) As Elizabeth herself said: “Methinkes that I am more beholdinge to the hindar part of my hed than wel dare trust the forwards side of the same.” (Holograph letter to Cecil countermanding Norfolk’s execution for the fourth time. H. Ellis: Original Letters, Vol. ii. p. 263.)