Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig

something cheerful, something touching and romantic, a ray of youth and beauty, had come like sunshine into this austere and gloomy land with the advent of its girlish Queen. A nation’s love is quickly captured by a ruler who is both young and handsome. The lords were more beguiled by what was manly in her composition; she would gallop for hours at a stretch without showing undue fatigue, far in advance of her followers. Just as her gentleness and her kindhearted ways were backed by a latent and invincible pride, so did the lithe, slim, soft, thistledown body, though feminine in its curves, mask a frame of iron, incapable of weariness. No exercise seemed too hard for her endurance; and once, as she rode in a foray, the swordsmen beside her overheard their lady wishing she were a man “to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields.” When Moray marched against the clan of the Huntlys in the north, she declared it her will to go with him, sword at her side and pistols in her belt. She gloried in risk and adventure, and whatever she undertook to do she entered into with her whole soul and body, brought to it all the passion her resolute nature was capable of feeling. But in spite of her manlike courage, her huntsman’s simplicity, her warlike valiance and hardihood, when closeted in the apartments of her palace she showed herself a ruler both astute and cool-headed; in the midst of her gay court she would be the gayest of the party, pleasant and familiar in her small world. In her juvenile person the ideals of her epoch seemed to be conjoined—courage with lightheartedness, strength with gentleness. A last ray of the setting sun from the days of troubadour and knight illuminated the misty chill of this northern clime as Mary moved sprightly and gay among its shadows made all the deeper by the gloomy teachings of the Reformation.
    Never had the romantic figure of this girl-wife and girl-widow shone more radiantly than in the first years of her third decade, but here, likewise, her triumphs came too early, for she did not understand that they were indeed triumphs, and she therefore failed to make the best use of her advantage. Her inner life had not yet been fully awakened; the woman in her did not yet know what were the claims her blood might make on her; her proper, her deepest self was still unformed and undeveloped. Not until roused by excitement and passion would it reveal its true essence. But the first years of her sojourn in Scotland were a period of indifference and waiting, an aimless, happy-go-lucky passage of time, a preparation for eventualities, without the inner will guessing what it was awaiting or whom. Resembling as it did the taking of a deep breath before great exertion, it was a moment of stagnation, a dead point in her life. For Mary Stuart, having as a maid experienced what it was like to be Queen of one of the mightiest realms in Europe, was not concerned about remaining the ruler of so poor, so small, so out-of-the-way a land as Scotland. Not for this had she returned. Wider ambitions floated before her mind. The crown of Scotland was nothing better than a makeshift which might lead to the winning of a more dazzling one. They err vastly who maintain that Mary Stuart’s highest aim was to rule over the heritage her father had left her, in tranquillity and peace and wisdom. To equip her with so small an ambition is to minimise her spiritual and intellectual greatness; for, young though she was, she was already dominated by an untamable and unbridled will-to-power. She who at seventeen had been wedded to a king of France in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, who in the Louvre had been acclaimed as the sovereign lady of millions of subjects, could not rest content with governing a few dozen unruly clodhoppers going by the title of earl or laird, together with a few hundred thousand worthy shepherds and fisherfolk. It is fallacious to ascribe patriotic and nationalistic