Like her cousin of England, Mary was fond of dancing, and, as her Latin biography informs us, showed to great advantage in it.35 From a passage quaintly noted as "full of diversion" in Sir James Melville's Memoirs, we learn that the knight being pressed by Queen Elizabeth to declare whether she or his own sovereign danced best, answered her with courtly ambiguity that "the Queen dancit not so hich and so disposedly as she did".36 In reply to the same royal enquirer he also stated that Mary "sometimes recreated herself in playing upon the lute and virginals", and that she played "reasonably for a queen", not so well, however, as Elizabeth herself.37 We gather from Con38 and Brantôme that her voice was well trained, and that she sang well.
The indoor amusements in favour at Holyrood were chess, which James VI condemned as "over wise and philosophic a folly",39 tables, a game probably resembling backgammon, and cards. That these last were not played for "love" merely, is shown by an entry in the Lord Treasurer's accounts of "fyftie pundis" for Her Majesty "to play at the cartis".40 Puppets or marionettes were also in great vogue. A set of thirty-eight, together with a complete outfit of "vardingaills", "gownis", "kirtillis", "sairkis slevis", and "hois", is mentioned in an inventory of the time, where we see these "pippenis" – an old Scottish corruption of the French "poupine" – dressed in such costly stuffs as damask brocaded with gold, cloth of silver, and white silk.41
Quieter employment for the leisure hours of the Queen and her ladies was supplied by various kinds of fancy-work, amongst which knitting and tapestry are particularly mentioned. To the latter she devoted much of her time, both at Lochleven, where she requested to be allowed "an imbroiderer, to draw forth such work as she would be occupied about",42 and in England. Whilst she was at Tutbury, Nicholas White once asked her how she passed her time within doors when the weather cut off all exercises abroad. She replied "that all that day she wrought with her needle, and that the diversity of the colours made the work seem less tedious, and continued so long at it till very pain made her to give over… Upon this occasion she entered into a pretty disputable comparison between carving, painting, and working with the needle, affirming painting, in her own opinion, for the most commendable quality."43
At his interview with Elizabeth, Sir James Melville was asked what kind of exercises his Queen used. He answered, that when he received his dispatch, the Queen was lately come from the Highland hunting. Her undaunted behaviour on this occasion is recorded by an eyewitness, Dr. William Barclay of Gartley, who tells us that she herself gave the signal for letting the hounds loose upon a wolf, and that in one day's hunting three hundred and sixty deer, five wolves, and some wild goats were slain.44
In common with her father, who took great pains to introduce "ratches" or greyhounds and bloodhounds into Scotland, and with her great-grandson, Charles II, who gave his name to a breed of spaniels, Mary Stuart shared a great fondness for dogs. In her happier days she always possessed several, which she entrusted to the keeping of one Anthone Guedio and a boy. These canine pets were provided with a daily ration of two loaves, and wore blue velvet collars as a distinguishing badge.45 During her captivity, her dogs were amongst her most faithful companions. Writing from Sheffield to Beton, Archbishop of Glasgow, she said: "If my uncle, the Cardinal of Guise, has gone to Lyons, I am sure he will send me a couple of pretty little dogs, and you will buy me as many more; for, except reading and working, my only pleasure is in all the little animals that I can get. They must be sent in baskets well-packed, so as to keep them warm."46 The fidelity of one of these dumb friends adds to the pathos of the last scene of her sad history. "One of the executioners," says a contemporary report, "pulling off her clothes, espied her little dog which was crept under her clothes, which would not be gotten forth but by force, and afterwards would not depart from the dead body, but came and lay betwixt her head and shoulders, a thing diligently noted."47
In recording one of his interviews with Queen Mary, Knox gives us information concerning another of the sports with which she beguiled her time, for he tells us that it was at the hawking near Kinross that she appointed him to meet her.48 Archery, too, seems to have been a favourite amusement. She had butts both at Holyrood and St. Andrews. Writing to Cecil in 1562, and again in 1567, Randolph informs him that the Queen and the Master of Lindsay shot against Mary Livingston and the Earl of Murray; and that, in another match, the Queen and Bothwell won a dinner at Tranent from the Earl of Huntley and Lord Seton.49 Neither did she neglect the "royal game", for one of the charges brought against her and embodied in the articles given in by the Earl of Murray to Queen Elizabeth's commissioners at Westminster, stated that a few days after Darnley's murder "she past to Seytoun, exercing hir one day richt oppinlie at the feildis with the pallmall and goif".
To sketch Mary's character further would be trenching on debatable ground and overstepping the limits which we have imposed upon ourselves. There is one trait, however, which may be recorded on the authority even of her enemies – her personal courage. Randolph represents her as riding at the head of her troops "with a steel bonnet on her head, and a pistol at her saddle-bow; regretting that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and a knapscull, a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword". The author of the poem preserved in the Record Office, to which we have already made reference, allows that "no enemy could appal her, no travail daunt her intent", that she "dreaded no danger of death", that "no stormy blasts could make her retire", and he likens her to Tomiris:
Tomiris hir selffe
Who dreaded (awed) great hosts with her tyrannye
Cold not showe hir selffe more valiant.
But never, surely, was her fortitude shown more clearly to the world than when, three hundred years ago, "she laid herself upon the block most quietly, trying her chin over it, stretching out her hands, and crying out: 'In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum'".
THE FOUR MARYS
Reference is seldom made to the Queen's Marys, the four Maids of Honour whose romantic attachment to their royal mistress and namesake, the ill-fated Queen of Scots, has thrown such a halo of popularity and sympathy about their memory, without calling forth the well-known lines:
Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
The night she'll hae but three;
There was Marie Seton, and Marie Beton,
And Marie Carmichael and me.
To those who are acquainted with the whole of the ballad, which records the sad fate of the guilty Mary Hamilton, it must have occurred that there is a striking incongruity between the traditional loyalty of the Queen's Marys and the alleged execution of one of their number, on the denunciation of the offended