Free Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig Page B

matter the dangers that encompassed her, and, loyal to her own nature, she chose rather perpetual warfare than, in a moment of cowardly weakness, to run counter to the dictates of her conscience.
    Unfortunately this meant that the cleavage between herself and her nobles was irremediable. It is always a fatal thing when a ruler belongs to a different religion from that of the majority of his subjects. The scales cannot vacillate for ever, but must incline definitely in one direction or the other. Thus in the end Mary Stuart was compelled either to make herself mistress of the Reformation or else to bow her head beneath its superior force. The inevitable settlement of accounts as between Luther, Calvin and Rome was, by an extraordinary coincidence, to find a dramatic decision in the fate that awaited her. For the personal struggle between Mary and Elizabeth, between Scotland and England, was decisive also—and this is what makes the struggle so important historically—for the struggle between England and Spain, between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
    The ominousness of the situation was aggravated by the fact that the religious dissensions above described extended into Mary’s family, her palace and her council chamber. The most powerful man in Scotland, her half-brother James Stuart, whom she found it expedient to appoint prime minister, was an ardent Protestant and protector of that Kirk which she, being a good Catholic, could not but regard as heretical. Four years earlier he had been the first to append his signature beneath the joint pledge of the Lords of the Congregation “to forsake and renounce the Congregation of Satan, with all superstitions, abominations and idolatry thereto, and moreover to declare themselves manifestly enemies thereto.” What was here called the “Congregation of Satan” was nothing other than the Holy Catholic Church of which his half-sister Queen Mary was a devoted adherent. Thus from the start there was a profound cleavage of convictions between the monarch and her chief minister. Such a state of affairs does not make for peace. For, at the bottom of her heart, the Queen had but one thought—to repress the Reformation in Scotland; whereas James, her brother, had but one desire—to make Protestantism the only religion in Scotland.
    James Stuart was to be one of the most notable figures in the life drama of Mary Queen of Scots. Fate had allotted him a leading role which he was destined to play in masterly fashion. A natural son of James V, the fruit of an enduring liaison with Margaret Erskine, who belonged to one of the best families in Scotland, he seemed, no less by his royal blood than by his iron energy, to be the most suitable heir to the throne. Nothing but the political weakness of James V’s position had forced that monarch to refrain from legal marriage with the woman he deeply loved, and (that he might increase his power and fill his purse) to contract a marriage with the French princess who became the mother of Mary Queen of Scots. Thus the stigma of illegitimacy debarred the ambitious youth from the throne. Even though, at the urgent request of James V, the Pope had officially acknowledged James Stuart and five other love children of his father to be of the blood royal, young James was still legally a bastard.
    Innumerable times have history and her greatest imaginative exponent, Shakespeare, disclosed the spiritual tragedy of the bastard who is a son and yet not a son, of one whom laws spiritual and laws temporal unfeelingly deprive of a right which nature has stamped on his character and countenance. Condemned by prejudice—the harshest, the most unbending of judges—are these illegitimates, those who have not been procreated in the royal bed, who are treated as inferior to the lawful heirs, though the latter are as a rule weaklings in comparison, because engendered, not out of love, but out of political calculation. They are eternally rejected and thrust