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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    politician needed* * * §, but ultimately that passion rose against both the theological and the political systems, and in destroying the Stewart dynasty struck the offending head, if not the vital members of the body of factional politics. The rule by noble factions was to last two centuries longer, but had the Stewarts been other than they were—with more of Tudor and less of Stewart and Hamilton blood—they might have had insight enough to side with the people and reduce by beheading the numbers of the factional politicians. Elizabeth could have done it,—her finger, as Green-f expresses it, was always on the popular pulse; it was impossible for a descendant of Darnley who combined imbecility with his tyrannous spirit J. It seems necessary here to visualise something of the times in which Darnley’s murder occurred, and the reader may ask for some justification of the judgment we have given, but it can only be given in brief, if indisputable outline. That Catherine de’ Medici was an assassin in both fact and spirit is demonstrable: the murder of Coligny and the massacre of St Bartholomew were her method of balancing factions^. Walsingham and Cecil, through their agent provocateur Dr Gilbert Gifford and their agent forgeur Thomas Phillips, staged the Babington conspiracy with the direct aim of bringing Mary Queen of Scots to the scaffold. But their devious methods were not wholly pleasing to Elizabeth; she accordingly directed her secretaries—Walsing¬ ham and Davison—to write a letter to Sir Amias Paulet saying that the Queen took as most unkindly that men professing to love her should cast the burden on her of shedding Mary’s blood j]. There can be no doubt that the letter was a direct incen¬ tive to Paulet to assassinate Mary in one way or another and save Elizabeth from the “judicial” murder. Paulet refused definitely to be concerned in the business, and regretted that he was ordered by his sovereign “to do an act which God and the law forbade.” He would “never make so foul a shipwreck of his conscience, or * The pulpit, it is needless to say, was a powerful instrument in the hands of Moray and Morton. Cecil used it with equal advantage, especially in his handling of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary, Queen of Scots’ affairs. See Thomas Wright: Queen Elizabeth and her Times, Yol. n. p. 438. London, 1838. f Short History, Edn. 1894, p. 375. X No worse combination could well be imagined than that of Tudor and Lenox blood. Mathew, Earl of Lenox, Darnley’s father, was feeble in all his doings, and had nothing of the subtlety requisite for the successful politician of those days. Margaret Douglas had a certain amount of Tudor strength, but what she handed to her elder son was uncontrolled by any native wit. § The Admiral himself was certainly de animo, if not de facto, an assassin, for on the assassination of the Duke of Guise he wrote to Catherine and, after vigorously protesting his own innocence, con¬ tinued : “Cependant ne pensez pas ce que j’en dis soit pour regret que j’aie k la mort de M. de Guise; car j’estime que ce soit le plus grand bien qui pouvait advenir k ce royaume et a l’eglise de Dieu, et particulierement a moi et a toute ma maison.” (Lacrotelle: Histoire de France pendant les Guerres de Religion, Vol. ii. p. 134.) || Details of the whole matter will be found in Sir N. Harris Nicolas: Life of William Davison, Secretary to Queen Elizabeth. London, 1823. See pp. 86, 273—6. For Elizabeth, Paulet’s want of readiness in disposing of Mary showed “a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looked for at your hands, in that you have not in all this time, of yourselves, without other provocation, found out some way to shorten the life of that queen, considering the great peril she is subject unto hourly so long as the said queen shall live.” (Letter of Walsingham and Davison.) Wotton, undoubtedly working with Elizabeth’s approval, contrived a plot for the assassination of James Stewart, Earl of Arran, in 1585, and some of Randolph’s schemes—as that for the transfer of Lenox and Darnley back to England, alive or dead—were of a like murderous character. 1-2