"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed, The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore; And to the throng, that on the Cumbrian shore Her landing hailed, how touchingly she bowed! And like a star (that, from a heavy cloud Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts, When a soft summer gale at evening parts The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud) She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian seer, Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand With step prelusive to a long array Of woes and degradations hand in hand-- Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!"
Mary was escorted with all courtesy to Cockermouth Castle and thence to Carlisle, where hospitality soon became imprisonment. Her first request of Elizabeth was for clothing, and it was in one of the deep-walled rooms of Queen Mary's Tower, of which only the gateway now remains, that she impatiently looked on while her ladies opened Elizabeth's packet to find--"two torn shifts, two pieces of black velvet, and two pairs of shoes." The parsimony of Queen Bess has a curious echo in the words of Sir Francis Knollys, who, set to keep this disquieting guest under close surveillance, was much concerned when she took to sending to Edinburgh for "coffers of apparell," especially as she did not pay the messengers, so that Elizabeth, after all, was "like to bear the charges" of Mary's vanity. The captive queen was allowed a semblance of freedom in Carlisle. She walked the terrace of the outer ward of the castle, went to service in the cathedral, and sometimes, with her ladies, strolled in the meadows beside the Eden, or watched her gentlemen play a game of football, or even hunted the hare, although her warders were in a fever of anxiety whenever she was on horseback lest she should take it into her wilful, beautiful head to gallop back to Scotland.
But these frowning towers have more terrible records of captivity. Under the old Norman keep are hideous black vaults, with the narrowest of slits for the admission of air and with the walls still showing the rivet-holes of the chains by which the hapless prisoners were so heavily fettered.
"Full fifteen stane o' Spanish iron They hae laid a'right sair on me; Wi' locks and keys I am fast bound Into this dungeon dark and dreerie."