“Lochleven is your castle there” (MS III)—On an island in the lake stands
Loch Leven Castle,
where
Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned, and where she was forced to abdicate
to her infant son in
1567, who became
James VI. In
1568,
she escaped from the castle, an episode that
Ruskin would later know from
The Abbot (
1820)
by
Walter Scott (see
“The Monastery”).
In
Scottʼs telling of the story,
Mary is abetted in her escape by the young page,
Roland Graeme, who switches a fake set of keys for the closely watched genuine keys,
and assists
Mary and her attendants to a waiting boat (vol. 3, chap. 8 [
1820]).
A picture of “
Mary Queen of Scotts [
sic] making her escape from
Loch Leven”
hung in the dining room of
Ruskinʼs paternal grandparents when they lived
in
St. James Square in
New Town of
Edinburgh.
Van Akin Burd suggests that the picture may have been
Boydellʼs engraving after a
1788 treatment of the subject
by the Scottish portrait and history painter,
John Graham (
1754–1817),
The Flight of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Loch Leven Castle, by the Assistance of Young Douglas
(
Catherine Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 2 November 1807,
in
Burd ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 1:12, 14 n. 3; and see
Boydell, Catalogue of the Pictures, &c. in the Shakspeare Gallery, 126).
Grahamʼs academy for artists was also located in
St. James Square
(
Thomson, “Graham, John [1754–1817]”).