Their customs, their laws, their wealth and their culture lay a hundred years in arrear of England and the rest of Europe. Whereas, with the advent of new times in the coast towns elsewhere banks and exchanges were beginning to flourish, in Scotland, as in biblical days, wealth was calculated by the amount of land and the number of sheep a man owned. James V, Mary’s father, possessed ten thousand head, and that was the whole of his fortune. He had no crown treasure; nor had he an army, or a bodyguard wherewith to strengthen his authority, for he could not have paid for their services. Nor would his parliament, where the decisive word belonged to his lords, ever consent to vote him supplies. Everything this King needed over and above the barest necessities of life was provided by wealthy allies, France and the Pope for instance, either as a loan or as a gift, so that every carpet, every Gobelin, every chandelier to be found in his palaces, was bought with fresh humiliation.

Poverty—such was the purulent ulcer which sapped the strength from political life in this fair and hardy land. Because of the poverty and the voracity of its kings, its soldiers and its lords, this realm was ever the gruesome plaything of foreign powers. Those who fought against the King and in the cause of Protestantism were in the pay of London; those who championed the Catholic side received their emoluments from Paris, Madrid and Rome. Outsiders gladly put their hands into their pockets for the spilling of Scottish blood. A final decision had yet to be come to between England and France after perennial strife, and Scotland furnished France with a trump card in her contest with the mighty rival across the Channel. Each time the English armies set foot in Normandy, France hastened to stab England in the back. At the first summons, the Scots, who were by nature a war-lusty people, would be over the border, prepared for the enjoyment of a bonnie fecht with the “auld enemies”. Even in times of peace they were a perpetual menace to the southern realm. It became, therefore, a recognised feature of French policy to strengthen Scotland from the military point of view. What could be more natural, in the circumstances, than that England should seek to consolidate her own position by sowing discord and encouraging rebellion among the Scottish nobles? Thus the unhappy country was the cockpit of centenarian wars, of which Mary’s fate was at length to mark the close.

With her incurable delight in racy and paradoxical symbolism, Dame History decreed that this decisive struggle should begin while Mary Stuart was an infant in the cradle. The wee lassie can neither speak nor think as yet, hardly is she sentient and conscious, her tiny hands are scarcely strong enough to move, yet already the world of politics thrusts relentlessly into her innocent life, seizing upon her immature body and grasping at her unsuspecting soul. For it was Mary’s doom to be under the spell of this dicers’ game of politics. Never was she allowed to develop her ego unhindered. All her life long she would be the pawn of policy; be queen or heiress, ally or foe, never simply child or girl or woman. The messenger bearing the twin tidings of James V’s death and the birth of his daughter as Queen of Scotland and the Isles had barely time to convey his news to the King of England when the latter determined to sue for her hand in favour of his little son Edward. A bride worth the wooing from every point of view, Henry VIII considered. So it was that this girl’s body with its yet unawakened soul became an object of haggling from the outset. But politics is impervious to the feelings of mankind; what it is interested in are crowns, countries, heritages. The individual man or woman simply does not exist when politics is in the ascendant; such things are of no value as compared with tangible and practical values to be won in the world-game.

In the present instance, however, Henry VIII’s desire to bring about a matrimonial union between the heiress to Scotland’s throne and the heir to the throne of England was reasonable and humane. For the sempiternal warfare between the neighbouring nations had long since become a senseless iniquity. England and Scotland, forming as they do one island in the northern seas, their shores washed by the waters of the selfsame oceans, their peoples so closely akin, and their mode of life so similar, could have but one common duty to perform: come together in unity and concord. Nature in this case could not have made her wishes plainer. There was nothing to hinder unification except the jealous rivalries which existed between the two dynasties of the Tudors and of the Stuarts. But if a marriage between the children of the contending dynasts could be successfully arranged, then the differences might be amicably smoothed out and the Stuarts and Tudors would achieve simultaneously kingship of England, Scotland and Ireland. Thus the contentious parties would become friends; no more blood need be spilt in fratricidal strife; and a powerful, united Great Britain could take the place that was due to her among the nations in their struggle for dominion over the world.

When, quite exceptionally, a clear and logical idea comes to light up the political arena, it is invariably ruined by the idiotic way men have of putting it into execution.