Four Maries- Voorhies (VA) 1935 Peel/Davis CC
[Davis' title which is incorrect as a local title. Fragment from Davis; More TBVa, 1960. His extensive notes follow. Why is there no music?? This is likely from print.
R. Matteson 2015]
MARY HAMILTON
(Child, No. 173)
In place of the final lyrical lament of Mary Hamilton, plus tune, of TBVa, a full text and tune are now available from phonographic recording, plus two additional fragments.
Child overran the alphabet from A to BB in printing twenty-eight texts or partial texts of the ballad from all the recognized Scottish sources-Sharpe, Motherwell, Scott, Buchan, Burns, Kinloch, and the rest, including nine unpublished texts from Scott's Abbotsford materials for his Minstrelsy. A single tune going back to the eighteenth century, in Child's "Ballad Airs from Manuscript" (V, 421 ), represented the only musical record of the ballad to that date (1898), except the 1884 air from the Perthshire highlands printed by Colin Brown in The Thistle, mentioned by Greig-Keith, p.109.
Since the time of Child, no English text or tune seems to have appeared from tradition-understandably, since the ballad is essentially Scottish-but, surprisingly enough, only two fragmentary texts and two tunes have been recovered by Greig and Keith from Scottish sources (pp. 107-9).
In America, the garner has been only slightly better. Until the present publication, only one full text from tradition has been printed, by J. H. Combs in Folk-Songs du Midi des Etats-Unis (1925), pp. 141-43, from West Virginia. Barry finds no text from Maine, but with characteristic inclusiveness reaches across the border to New Brunswick for a fragmentary "secondary tradition" of the piece (pp. 258-64). (He also prints as his version B a Scottish fragment, and as his version C a single stanza of a poem by a Maine poet into which a stanza of "Mary Hamilton" has entered.) TBVa (pp. 421-22) mustered only two slightly varying fragments (from the same singer), plus tune. Randolph (p. 151) has only a less-than-two-stanza fragment from Missouri, no tune. And there the traditional record of the ballad in America seems to end. The appearance of the ballad in various song collections, such as J. P. McCaskey's Franklin square Song Collection, (New York, 1887) and Thomas A. Becket, Jr.'s scotch songs (Boston : Oliver Ditson; Philadelphia: The W. F. Shaw Co., 1888), both listed by Coffin, must be set down to reprinting from other sources, as must also the text and tune in Reed Smith and Hilton Rufty's American Anthology of Old World Ballads (New York, 1937), pp. 42-43, which are reprinted, with permission and with acknowledgment, from TBVa (with some additions from an unidentified source).
The present fuller text and tune, from the son, daughter, and granddaughter of the Mrs. Chandler from whom the earlier Virginia version came, is especially welcome. Miss Peel has recorded that after she had taken down from her grandmother, who was then very old, the fragments of TBVa and sent them to the Archivist, her own memory of the song was refreshed by hearing it sung by her uncle, St. Lawrence Chandler, then of Chicago, Ill., when he was visiting in Virginia about 1924. The present editor, who took down the words and made the recording on August 9, 1932, is a witness to the familiarity also of Miss Peel's aunt, Miss Letha Chandler, of Salem, Va., with the words and tune of the song, to which she made some contribution. Though the recording was made by Miss Peel, the song had just previously been sung by Miss Chandler and Miss Peel, earlier (around 1924) by the uncle, Mr. Chandler, and earlier still by the grandmother, Mrs. Marion Chandler, who brought the song with her from Bristol, England. Mrs. Chandler learned the song from her father. We have here a direct family tradition of the ballad reaching back far into the nineteenth century and to the Old Country. Mrs. Chandler seems to have been of Scottish descent, since Miss Peel's letter (quoted in TBVa, pp. 421-22) records, "My grandmother's family all fought with the Stuarts."
In addition to the longer grandmaternal text and tune, Miss Peel is responsible for the recovery of two one-stanza fragments: a "little did my mother think" stanza from Amherst County, and a "four Marys" stanza from Roanoke County mentioning Mary Livingstone, one of the historic Marys of the Scottish court. Both are printed, as traces of this rare ballad in Virginia.
The historicity of the ballad presents some curious problems, and is still a matter of dispute. On its face, the ballad would seem to deal with an incident at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, in which Mary Hamilton. one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, is accused of murdering her newborn babe, perhaps fathered by Darnley, the Queen's husband. She is arraigned by the Queen and duly executed, after she has told her piteous story and made her lament. Scholars, including Child, have been troubled by the fact that there was no historical Mary Hamilton attendant on Queen Mary, that there was no recorded case of child-murder involving any of the real four Marys (Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton) and that the ballad itself was not known until Robert Burns in 1790 dropped a stanza of it into a personal letter and Walter Scott collected many versions of it from Scottish tradition and printed eight of them in his Minstrelsy in 1802. Scott himself thought that the ballad dealt with an incident recorded by John Knox concerning a French woman that served in the Queen's chamber and the Queen's own apothecary, both of whom were subsequently hanged in Edinburgh. In 1824 C. K. Sharpe first called attention to the remarkable parallel of a case of child-murder and execution involving a real Mary Hamilton (or Hambleton), a Scottish lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine at the court of Czar Peter the Great in Russia in 1718-19. Child, with less than his usual caution, at least for a time, gave his assent to the Russian story as the basis of the ballad, which he therefore attributes to the eighteenth century (III, 382-84), and his recantation, if it is a recantation (V, 298-99), is by no means clear-cut, nor does he present any satisfactory explanation of the ballad's history. In fairness it should be noted, however, that Child did not live to see through the press his final volume in which his later notes on the subject appear.
Child's recantation, if it is one, is the result of an article by Andrew Lang, "The Mystery of 'The Queen's Marie," in Blackwood's Magazine for September, 1895, pp. 381-90, in which he attacks Child's preference for the Russian origin and argues strongly for the ballad's Scottish origin and greater age than post 1718-19.- Albert H. Tolman, in an article on "Mary Hamilton; The Group Authorship of Ballads," in PMLA, XLII (June, 1927), 422-32, finds the dilemma of Scotch or Russian origin fallacious, and concludes soundly but rather cautiously, "Some versions are plainly a mixture of elements derived from both sources."
In the light of all the known facts, and in view of the known ways of ballads in oral tradition, the following seems the most likely account of the origin and life-history of "Mary Hamilton." The ballad is of sixteenth-century Scottish birth and originated, as Scott thought, in the French serving woman and Queen's apothecary incident at the court of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1563. one of the versions not known to Child when he wrote his original headnote,but printed in a later volume (IV, 509-10), has a stanza identifying the man as an apothecary (Child U 13) :
'My love he is a Pottinger,
Mony drink he gae me,
And a' to put back that bonnie babe!
But alas ! it wad na do.'
It is significant that this version comes from the materials of Sir Walter Scott, who first put forward the apothecary incident as the ballad's origin, with substantiating quotations from John Knox. Since Darnley did not come to Scotland until 1565, the beginnings of the ballad can scarcely have concerned him. But given his known habit of philandering even with the Queen's attendants and John Knox's bitter denunciation of the morals of the court and of the Maries, specifically Mary Livingston (Child, III, 582), it is easy to see how the ballad might have moved to the higher levels of the court, to substitute a lady-in-waiting and "the highest Stuart of all," or Darnley, for the French woman and the apothecary. John Knox testifies that there were such ballads at the time: o''What bruit the Maries and the rest of the dancers of the court had, the ballads of that age did witness, which we for modesty's sake omit" (quoted by Child from Knox's History of the Reformation, ibid, footnote).
From this time until the early eighteenth century, we lose sight of the ballad, but no doubt it was known and sung in Scotland. What the name of the original "heroine" was, we do not know, but then comes the parallel incident at the Russian court involving a Scottish lady-in-waiting actually named Mary Hamilton, who was supposed to have had an intrigue not only with her officer but with the Czar, and who is tried and condemned to die. That the existing Scotch ballad should not have been influenced by this notorious parallel is almost unthinkable, and it is possible that the name of Mary Hamilton attached itself to the existing ballad at this time. The condemned woman's address to the sailors and reference to her dying in a foreign land also point to the influence of the Russian story. But a still more conclusive argument for the impact of the Russian story on the existing tradition is that, from long obscurity, the ballad emerged into the great eighteenth-century popularity that resulted in the collection of so many variants by Scott and others by the end of the century. A clinching argument for the greater antiquity of the ballad is that no ballad of comparable duality has been known to originate in the eighteenth century. The concluding sentence of child's headnote reads, "It is remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the best." It is not one of the latest. It was, however, colored by the recent Russian affair, and the two traditions became intermingled and confused as the ballad became more popular in eighteenth-century Scotland. Even if documentary proof is lacking at certain points, the inferences seem to square with the present state of our knowledge of the ballad and of ballads in general.
After so large a venture in historical reconstruction, it is interesting to note that Professor Friedman's recent viking Book of Ballads (p. 183) classifies "Mary Hamilton" not among historical ballads but under the head of "Tabloid crime," yet that settles nothing.
Of the two more or less complete American texts of the ballad, the Combs text from west Virginia and the present Virginia text, both are closer to Child A than to any other child text. Indeed, the thirteen-stanza West Virginia text is very close to the eighteen-stanza Child A. The correspondence of its thirteen stanzas to the stanzas of Child A, in order, is as follows: 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, first half of 11 (last half = Child E 13), 12, 14, 15, 16, 17. The only significant variations (apart from omissions of stanzas 2, 6, half of 11, 13, and 18) are the presence of the lines:
Seek never grace of a graceless face,
For that you will never see
found in Child E 13 and other texts, but not in Child A, and the omission of the final "Last night there were four Maries" stanza. The relationship of the Virginia text to child A is far more complicated by reason of the dislocation of stanzas and, telescoping of parts of different stanzas. There is no mention of "the hichest Stuart of a' " in the first stanza, nor of the bad omen, "The heel cam aff her shee," of stanza 9, and the following stanzas are entirely missing: 2, 5, 11, 16. Parts of other stanzas are omitted or freely telescoped without loss of sense. The lines of the lament, present in the Virginia text, but not in Child A,
"They'll tie a napkin 'round my eyes
And ne'er let me see to dee"
are found only in the final Child fragment BB. The repetition of the "four Maries" stanza, without increment, as stanza 9 and as the final stanza,is unknown to Child A or to any other Child variant. On the whole, verbally and otherwise, the Virginia text shows the operation of oral tradition more clearly than the West Virginia text. compare the two lyrical fragments of TBVa, from the same source.
CC. "Four Maries." Collected by Miss Alfreda M. Peel, of Salem, Va. Sung by Miss Margaret Voorhies, of Amherst, Va. Amherst County. June 27, 1935. The fragment is printed as another trace in Virginia of this rare ballad. It is this stanza (with minor variations) which Robert Burns copies into his letter to Mrs. Dunlop, January 25, 1790, with the remark, "I remember
a stanza in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart." This is the earliest known literary reference to the ballad.
1 "Oh, little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in,
The death I was to dee."