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),* who married 'John Sempill, called the Dancer,' who, says Laing, 'acquired the lands of Beltree, in Renfrewshire.'**
*Child, vol. iii. p. 389.
**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.'*
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.
*Lockhart, i. 114, x. 138.
