"Mary Hamilton", or "The Fower Maries", is a common name for a well-known sixteenth-century ballad from Scotland based on an apparently fictional incident about a lady-in-waiting to a Queen of Scotland. It is Child Ballad 173 and Roud 79. In all versions of the song, Mary Hamilton is a personal attendant to the Queen of Scots, but precisely which queen is not specified. She becomes pregnant by the Queen's husband, the King of Scots, which results in the birth of a baby. Mary kills the infant – in some versions by casting it out to sea or drowning, and in others by exposure. The crime is seen and she is convicted. The ballad recounts Mary's thoughts about her life and her impending death in a first-person narrative. Versions of the ballad have been recorded by a number of artists, including Joan Baez, The Corries, and Angelo Branduardi.
Mary Hamilton in Russia
The story may have been transferred from a wholly different context. It has been noted that it most closely matches, rather than any event in Scotland, the legend of Maria Danilova Gamentova, daughter of an expatriate branch of the Clan Hamilton established in Russia by Thomas Hamilton during the reign of Tsar Ivan IV. A lady in waiting to Tsarina Catherine, second wife of Tsar Peter I "The Great", Mary Hamilton was also the Tsar's mistress. She bore a child in 1717, who may have been fathered by the Tsar but whom she admitted drowning shortly after its birth. She also stole trinkets from the Tsarina to present them to her lover Ivan Orlov. For the murder of her child, she was beheaded in 1719. Mary's head was preserved and displayed in the Kunstkamera, a palace holding natural and scientific "curiosities". At that time, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission for James Francis Edward Stuart, and through him news of the incident might have reached Scotland. In many versions of the song, the queen is called "the auld Queen". This would normally indicate a Queen Dowager or Queen Mother, but in this context suggests a queen consort who was an older woman, and married to a king of comparable age. If the reference is limited to Queens named Mary, another candidate would be Mary of Guelders, queen to James II, King of Scots.
"Mary Hamilton" in ''A Room of One's Own''
In her highly influential text A Room of One's Own, author Virginia Woolf alludes to the characters in the ballad. She refers by name to Mary Beton, Mary Seton, and Mary Carmichael as recurrent personae, leaving only Mary Hamilton, the narrator of the ballad, unmentioned. Mary Beton plays the prominent role in Woolf's extended essay, as she serves as the speaker. According to her narrator in A Room of One's Own, "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being." A few sentences later, the narrator returns to the concept of identity and subjectivity and invokes the subjects of the ballad for the first time: "Here then was I..." Mary Beton serves as the narrator throughout A Room of One's Own. The six chapters of the essay follow Mary Beton's walks through Oxbridge grounds and London streets, and her mental explorations of the history of women and fiction. The name reappears in the character of the narrator's aunt, who serves as both the namesake and benefactor of Mary Beton. Woolf is able to detach herself from the narrative voice of the essay through the use of Beton. Mary Seton is a friend of Mary Beton at the fictitious Fernham College. It is partially through her conversations with Seton that Beton raises questions about the relationship between financial wealth and the opportunities for female education. Speaking of Mary Seton's mother, the narrator states, "If she had left two or three hundred thousand pounds to Fernham, we could have been sitting at our ease tonight and the subject of our talk might have been archaeology, botany, anthropology, physics, the nature of the atom, mathematics, astronomy, relativity, geography." Mary Carmichael plays the role of a fictitious author referenced by the narrator in A Room of One's Own. Her fabricated novel, Life's Adventure, allows Woolf to introduce the concept of female relationships. Mary Carmichael may also evoke the idea of the real author and birth-control activist Marie Carmichael and her novel Love's Creation.
Lyrics
Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. Oh little did my mother think The day she cradled me The lands I was to travel in The death I was tae die Oh tie a napkin roon my eyen No let me seen to die And sent me a'wa tae my dear mother Who's far away o'er the sea But I wish I could lie in our ain kirkyard Beneath yon old oak tree Where we pulled the rowans and strung the gowans My brothers and sisters and me Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. But why should I fear a nameless grave When I've hopes for eternity And I'll pray that the faith o' a dying thief Be given through grace tae me Yest're'en the Queen had fower Maries The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Car-Michael and me. —————————— Notes to the lyrics:
