“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]”).

when tis so long when cried aloud / was boat is near when queen of scots / stepped in the boat and rowed from shore—Ruskin evidently refers to the cry raised by Queen Maryʼs escape (i.e., “it is so long since that boat was near, the boat into which the queen stepped”). In Scottʼs novel, the dash of the oars wakens a sentinel, who cries: “‘A boat—a boat!—bring to, or I shoot!’” (Scott, Abbot, 3:267).