ined Protestant, she reverted to an idea that had
once before passed through her mind: she pledged herself to bring
matters in Scotland to such a point that her son should be seized and
delivered into the hands of the King of Spain: he was then to be
instructed in the Catholic faith and embrace it; if James had not done
so at the time of her death, her claim on England was to pass to
Philip II. Day and night, so she said, she bewailed her son's being so
stiffnecked in his false faith: she saw that his succession in England
would be the ruin of the country.

So it stands written in her letters: it is undeniable: but was that
really her last and well-considered word? Was it her real wish that
Elizabeth should be killed, her son disinherited notwithstanding her
dynastic feelings, and that Philip II should become King of England?
Were the Catholic-Spanish tendencies of Elizabeth's predecessor, Queen
Mary Tudor, so completely reproduced in her?

I think we can hardly maintain this with full historic certainty. Mary
Stuart was not altogether animated by hot religious zeal: if she had
been, how could she formerly have left the Protestant lords in
possession of power so long as she did, and even have once thought of
marrying Leicester with his Protestant views? Her son affirmed that he
possessed letters from her, in which she approved of his religious
views and confirmed him in them. It was not religious conviction and
the abhorrence of any other faith, as in Mary Tudor, but her dynastic
right and her self-confidence as sovereign that were the active and
predominant motives in all the actions of Mary Stuart. And if there
are contradictions in her utterances, we cannot hold her capable, like
Catharine Medici, of taking up and secretly furthering two opposite
plans at the same time; her different tendencies appear consecutively,
not simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary
Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in
the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was
brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to
escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a
moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws
all her thoughts into her letters which, even if they are aiming at
some object close at hand, are at the same time ebullitions of the
moment, passionate effusions, productions of the imagination rather
t