The known person least unlike Mr. Courthope’s late ‘maker’ was ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie Leslie,’ ‘an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race,’ says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sang, and sold PRINTED ballads. ‘Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?’ asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. ‘Oh ay, but--THEY WINNA BUY THEM!’ said Charlie. ‘Where do you buy them?’ ‘Why, faur I get them cheapest.’ He carried his ballads in ‘a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder.’ Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince’s health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song, ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie’ [‘this sang Charlie made hissel’), then this maker could never have produced ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.* Against Mr. Child and Mr. Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in--that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, such as ‘Philiphaugh,’ and that it soon was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719-1730, compose ‘The Queen’s Marie’ in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.
*See, for example, Mr. Macquoid’s Jacobite Songs and Ballads, pp. 424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.
Secondly, WHY, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts? His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction, betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts ‘palpitated with actuality,’ and, since Homer’s day, ‘men desire’ (as Homer says) ‘the new songs’ on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular ‘Musselmou’d Charlie’ even know, by 1719, the names of the Queen’s Maries? Mr. Courthope admits that ‘he may have been helped by some ballad,’ one of those spoken of, as we shall see, by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the ‘maker’ add? If it did NOT, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name ‘Hamilton’ from the Russian tragedy could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks ‘the jolly sailors’ not to
