The ballad - Index of

The Ballad
between the father and the mother. Its cries,
however, had been heard ;
search was made, and
both parents were " damned to be hanged upon
the public street of Edinburgh." That story
is
obviously not on all fours with the ballad, which
makes Darnley and an unheard-of Mary Hamilton
the culprits, and says nothing of a French
woman nor of the Queen's apothecary. Another
similar story
is derived from the Court of Peter
the Great. Here the murdering mother was
actually named Mary Hamilton her seducer was
;
one Orloff, an aide-de-camp to the Czar ;
but
some accounts say that she had previously been
mistress to Peter himself. She dressed herself in
white (as the ballad relates), hoping to touch the
Czar's heart, but she was executed, after a year's
imprisonment, on March 14, 1719. Orloff was
imprisoned, too, but released.
What is one to decide in a case of this sort
Professor Child himself changed his mind ;
at
first believing the Russian story to be the original,
and commenting
" it is remarkable that one of
the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads
should be one of the very best " ;
afterwards
concluding, at the instigation of Andrew Lang,
that it was more improbable that the eighteenth
century could have produced such a ballad, than
that a Russian Court scandal of 1718 should correspond,
in important and unimportant details,
with a Scottish ballad already extant. We must
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