Publisher's Synopsis
From An excerpt from the beginning of:
CHAPTER I
GENERAL APPEARANCE OF SCOTLAND
IN THE TIME OF QUEEN MARY
WHO can think of the times of Queen Mary without thinking of her as the central figure to whom all contemporary persons, events, and circumstances form but the setting in which she works out her destiny?
It is her dramatic story that has made the sixteenth century the one period of our annals that has commanded the attention of the world. Historians, poets, and romancers of every country have striven to paint, to analyze, and to explain her character and her fortunes as a woman and a queen, with the result that no historical personage outside Scripture 1s better known to the world at large than Mary Stewart.
Yet it is to be remembered that the period of Mary Stewart's reign possesses a larger interest than her individual character and fortunes. In strictest truth it may be said that it was the most momentous period in the history of the Scottish people. It saw the beginnings of a new society, the birth of new national ideals, the first distinct awakening of the nation to a sense of its own destinies. And, as a survey of the moving forces of the time amply proves, this development was not bound up with the existence of Mary Stewart. Had she never lived, Scotland must have broken with her past, must have cast off her ancient religion, and placed herself in new relations to the other countries of Christendom. What were called in her own day the "strange accidentis" of her public and personal career were mere eddies in the irresistible stream which bore her people onward to fulfill "the orb of their fate."
Apart from Mary Stewart, therefore, the period of her reign presents a field of interest at once wider and more important than the incidents of her personal career. The history of no individual, however great or fascinating, is to be weighed against the interest that belongs to a people evolving the fate conditioned by its own natural forces and the changing circumstances in which these forces must be exercised.
