Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Now entered the King-Dauphin Francis, led by the King Antoine of Navarre and his two younger brothers Charles, duke of Orléans, and Henry, duke of Angoulême. Finally entered the centrepiece of the occasion, Mary, queen-dauphiness, led by Henry II and her cousin the duke of Lorraine. Mary Stuart, on this the first of her three wedding-days, was dressed in a robe as white as lilies, so sumptuous and rich that the pen of the contemporary observer fell from his hands at the thought of describing it. Since white was traditionally the mourning colour of the queens of France, Mary Stuart had defied tradition to wear it on her wedding-day; it certainly remained a favourite shade with her throughout her youth, and even in later years she loved to have something white about her face and neck: perhaps of all colours she felt that it set off her brilliant colouring to best advantage. On this occasion, her immensely long train was borne by two young girls; tall and elegant, she herself must have glittered like the goddess of a pageant, with diamonds round her neck, and on her head a golden crown garnished with pearls, rubies, sapphires and other precious stones, as well as one huge carbuncle worth over 500,000 crowns.

  The young queen was followed by Catherine de Médicis, led by the prince of Condé, Mme Marguerite, the king’s sister, the duchess of Berry, and other princesses and ladies dressed with such grandeur that once again their robes could hardly be described for fear of repetition. The queen of Navarre had brought with her to Paris her six-year-old son, the future Henry IV, who at this wedding had his first sight of the capital which he was one day to make his own. At a given moment, the king drew a ring off his finger and gave it to the cardinal of Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, who thus espoused the pair, in the presence of the bishop of Paris; the bishop then made a wedding oration, described as being both ‘scientific and elegant’.

  All the while, with typical concern for the reactions of the populace, the duke of Guise was touring the whole theatre with two heralds, making sure that the nobles were not blocking the view of the people in the streets or at the windows. When he was satisfied the heralds cried out loudly: ‘Largesse! Largesse!’ and threw a mass of gold and silver pieces to the crowd, at which there was an immediate tumult and clamour as the people scrambled over each other to help themselves – so much so that some fainted and others lost their cloaks in their greed. Meanwhile all the nobility entered the church itself in the same order as before, to find another resplendent royal canopy, as well as gold carpets, within. The bishop of Paris then said Mass with King Henry and Queen Catherine on one side of the altar, and King-Dauphin Francis and Queen-Dauphiness Mary on the other; during the offertory, further sums of gold and silver were distributed outside. When Mass was over, the fine display of nobility paraded all over again, with Henry taking the greatest care to show himself to his people, although in the words of the Discours – ‘Monseigneur de Guise arranged everything’.

  A long and Lucullan banquet followed in which only one jarring note occurred to mar the general rejoicing: in the course of the meal, the gracefully leaning head of the queen, on its frail neck, started to ache under the weight of the heavy crown which adorned it. King Henry had to command a lord-in-waiting, M. de Saint-Seuer, Chevalier de Saint-Crispin, to take the crown and hold it. If this ominous incident portended the danger of placing too heavy a crown on too young a head, no one at the time commented on the symbolism. Otherwise nothing untoward marked the celebrations, except that the Sire de Saint-Jehan, favourite of the dauphin, had his eye put out during the jousting: but even this minor tragedy was not held to mar the general sense of accomplishment. At the ball, Henry danced with Mary, Francis with his mother, the king of Navarre with the Princess Elisabeth, the duke of Lorraine with the Princess Claude, and so on down the royal scale. This was only the beginning: when the ball was over at four or five in the afternoon, the entire court then processed to the palace of the parliament, the gentlemen on horseback and the ladies in litters. In order to give the maximum pleasure to the people, they travelled by a different route, and the crowds who rushed in vast numbers to watch them pass, almost blocking their progress by their density, were rewarded by a sight of the new queen-dauphiness in a golden litter with her mother-in-law Catherine, and the new king-dauphin following on horseback with his gentlemen, their horses adorned with crimson velvet trappings.

  A new order of entertainment now followed, organized by the duke of Guise as grand master of the ceremonies: indeed, although the dauphin wrote sadly to the constable at Brussels, regretting that he would be absent on the wedding-day of his ‘bon compère Francôis’,2 it is doubtful whether the Duke of Guise shared his new nephew’s sorrow, since the marriage celebrations thus entrusted to him gave him a renewed opportunity to shine in the popular eye. The president, counsellors and officers of the Parliament were all present at the supper which now ensued, their scarlet robes mingling with glittering robes of the court. After a supper, a second celebratory ball was held, even more splendid than the first, and punctuated by an endless series of masks and mummeries, in which the royal family themselves took part. Twelve artificial horses made of gold and silver cloth were brought into the ball-room: the dauphin’s brothers, Charles and Henry, the Guise and Aumale children, and other princelings then mounted the horses, and proceeded to draw along a series of coaches with them which contained a number of bejewelled occupants singing melodiously. After this spectacle, in which the fact that the gem-studded passengers were intended to be pilgrims struck the only conceivable note of austerity, six ships were drawn into the ball-room; their silver sails were so ingeniously made that they seemed to be billowing in an imaginary wind, and the ships themselves gave the impression of truly floating on the ball-room floor. Each of these magic barques had room for two voyagers, and after touring the ballroom, the noble gentlemen at the helm selected the ladies of their choice, and helped them into their boats. Once again, however, in spite of the delicate fantasy of the scene, choice was dictated more by court ceremony than by the promptings of romance. The duke of Lorraine chose Mme Claude, the king of Navarre chose his wife, the duke of Nemours chose Mme Marguerite, King Henry chose his daughter-in-law and Francis chose his mother. The further magnificence of the occasion proved once again to beggar description – for as the author of the Discours observed, no one could really decide which was lighting up the ball-room more brightly – the flambeaux, or the flash of the royal jewels.

  While distinctions of this esoteric nature occupied the contemporary observers, it is, however, possible for us, with hindsight, to see behind these elaborate ceremonies, which continued for several days, and discern the tarnish behind the tinsel. The land of France was virtually bankrupted by its prolonged struggle against the Empire, which had involved it in such time-, men-and money-consuming Italian wars. Yet Henry felt it essential to make this luxurious display, to uphold the prestige of the monarchy in the eyes of the people, and indeed the nobility. The king of Navarre whispered malevolently into the ear of the Venetian ambassador at the celebrations, ‘Thou seest the conclusion of a fact which very few credited till now,’ and hinted that the constable had steadily opposed this Guise marriage. The ambassador commented that the special pomp and display of the occasion was due to the fact that no dauphin of France had been married in Paris for two hundred years since they had all brought wives from abroad.3 It is, however, likely that King Henry was less impressed by the historical nature of the occasion than by his desperate need to wipe out the defeat of Saint-Quentin in the imagination of the populace.

  There is no reason to suppose that this canker at the centre of the gilded apple of fortune which now lay within her palm was apparent to Mary herself. During the wedding ceremonies, she had fulfilled the role to perfection for which she had been trained since childhood. Her new husband loved her, and was scarcely likely to treat her as Henry had treated Catherine, since the danger of a Diane de Poitiers was remote in such an immature bridegroom. Boy-husband or not, he was nevertheless the dauphin of France, and Mary thoroughly enjoyed her elevate
d rank as queen-dauphiness, for which she felt herself to be eminently fitted, being unable to remember a time when she was not treated with deference as a queen in her own right. When she needed advice, her uncles were to hand, anxious to supply it. She enjoyed the feminine friendship of her sister-in-law Elisabeth, or her Aunt Anne of Guise. She was young. She was beautiful. She was admired. An ecstatic letter to her mother in Scotland, written on her actual wedding-day, is almost incoherent with happiness at her new state and mentions how much honour not only Francis but her new father-in-law and mother-in-law continually do to her.4 Scotland itself seemed far away. Although on her wedding-day, the great cannon of Edinburgh Castle, Mons Meg, was fired, the shot reaching as far as Wardie Moor, not many reverberations of either this or any other Scottish explosion were liable to be heard at the French court of which Mary was the most lucent ornament. The first few months of her new existence as queen-dauphiness were among the happiest and most carefree in a lifespan which did not turn out to include many such oases: this was indeed the time when Mary, like Faust, might have addressed the passing moment: ‘Linger awhile, you are so fair.’

  The legendary beauty of Mary Stuart has been much vaunted. She was praised in her own day by her contemporaries, and in the four centuries since her death her charms have often been extolled in literature and poetry. It is interesting to consider whether she was, in fact, a beauty in the classical sense of the word, or whether her reputation was based on courtly flattery in her own day, and the romantic circumstances of her history ever since. A true estimate of her appearance is the more difficult to make because no authentic portraits of her exist, dating from the years of her personal reign in Scotland. We have no record at all of her beauty or otherwise from the age of nineteen to twenty-five, generally held to be the peak years of a woman’s appearance. The authentic portraits of her as dauphiness and queen of France, all done before she was twenty years old, are also comparatively few in number; yet it is on these we must rely in order to acquire an accurate impression of her appearance when she was in her prime, since the next series of pictures were done nearly twenty years later and spring from the years of captivity. Her beauty has sometimes been judged disparagingly on the evidence of these portraits – unjustly so, since by then it had naturally been somewhat impaired by the ravages of ill-health, and imprisonment, to say nothing of middle-age itself. The beauty of Mary Stuart should be judged firstly on the evidence of the French portraits of her youth; secondly, since beauty, that insubstantial quality, exists so powerfully in the eye of the beholder, it should be judged from the verdicts of her contemporaries who, flatterers or otherwise, had at least an opportunity of estimating her quality for themselves.

  Whether she was a beauty by our standards or not, Mary Stuart was certainly rated a beauty by the standards of her own time: even the venomous Knox, never inclined to pay compliments to those with whose convictions he disagreed, described her as ‘pleasing’, and recorded that the people of Edinburgh called out ‘Heaven bless that sweet face’ as she passed on her way. Sir James Melville, an experienced man of the world who prided himself on his detachment, called her appearance ‘very lovesome’. Ronsard paid her superb tributes: he wrote of her hands which he particularly admired and their long, ringless fingers, which he compared in a poetic phrase to five unequal branches; he wrote of the unadorned beauty of her throat, free of any necklace, her alabaster brow, her ivory bosom. When she was a young widow, he wrote of her pacing sadly but gracefully at Fontainebleau, her garments blowing about her as she walked, like the sails of a ship ruffled in the wind.5 The word goddess was the one which seemed to come most naturally to Brantôme in writing of her: she was ‘une vraie Déesse’ of beauty and grace; he picked out her complexion for special praise, and described its famous pallor which rivalled and eclipsed the whiteness of her veil, when she was in mourning. Furthermore Mary had the additional charm of a peculiarly soft, sweet speaking voice: not only did Ronsard and Brantôme praise her ‘voix très douce et très bonne’ in France but even the critical Knox admitted that the Scots were charmed by her pretty speech when she made her oration at the Tolbooth at the opening of Parliament, ‘exclaiming vox Dianae! The voice of a goddess … was there ever orator spake so properly and so sweetly!’ It was also a point on which even the most hostile English observers commented on her first arrival in that country, including Knollys and Cecil’s own emissary White.6

  Her effect on the men around her was certainly that of a beautiful woman: the poet Châtelard fell violently, if slightly hysterically, in love with her; not only on the eve of his execution did he call her ‘the most beautiful and the most cruel princess in the world’, but on their journey back to Scotland he exclaimed that the galleys needed no lanterns to light their way ‘since the eyes of this Queen suffice to light up the whole sea with their lovely fire’. The Seigneur de Damville was also said to have been so enamoured of the young queen that he followed her to Scotland, leaving his young wife at home, and if we are to believe Brantôme, Mary’s little brother-in-law Charles was so much in love with her that he used to gaze at her portrait with longing and desired to marry her himself after the untimely death of Francis.7 In Scotland Mary’s beauty as well as her position was said to have captured not only the obsessional Arran, but the dashing Sir John Gordon and the youthful, handsome George Douglas. Her first English jailer, Sir Francis Knollys, although unpromising material for female wiles, was considerably seduced by the charming personality of his captive; and although the later so-called affair with Lord Shrewsbury was undoubtedly the creation of his wife’s malicious imagination, nevertheless the fact that the accusation could be taken so seriously by the English court shows that all her life Mary was considered a beautiful and desirable woman, whose physical attractions could never be totally left out of account. At the time of her illness at Jedburgh when she was twenty-three, the Venetian ambassador wrote of her being a princess who was ‘personally the most beautiful in Europe’.8 There seems no reason to doubt that this was the general verdict of Europe during her lifetime, and that Mary Queen of Scots was a romantic figure to her own age, no less than to subsequent generations.

  Despite these tributes, a consideration of her physiognomy leads one to believe that Mary Stuart was not a beauty in the classical sense – to use the language of our own day, she was an outstandingly attractive woman, rather than an outstandingly beautiful one. Her most marked physical characteristic to outside eyes must have been her height, and it is said that when she fled to England from Scotland after her defeat at Langside, strangers recognized her by it. In an age when the average height of the men was considerably shorter than it is today, Mary Stuart was probably about five feet eleven inches tall, that is to say, taller than all but the tallest women today. She grew fast in adolescence, as her grandmother indicated in her letters. At her French wedding she is said to have stood shoulder to shoulder with her Guise uncles: obviously she inherited this height from her mother, Mary of Guise, who in her day was celebrated for her upstanding stature throughout Europe. Even at the date of her execution, when Mary was humped by age and rheumatics, an English eye-witness still noted that she was ‘of stature tall’;9 and the figure on her tomb in Westminster Abbey, modelled from details taken immediately after her death, is five feet eleven inches long. Yet clearly, this stature was never considered to be a disadvantage, and her height, when described, is always commented on with admiration.* This may be in part due to the fact that although tall, Mary had extremely delicate bones, unlike her mother who had much sturdier proportions. Mary’s height, and the slenderness of her youth, which lasted until ill-health and the troubles of captivity made her put on weight in middle-age, combined to give an appearance of graceful elongation: it also made her an excellent dancer, as both Conaeus and Melville bear witness, and a good athlete, who could hunt, hawk and even ride at the head of an army, in a manner calculated to dazzle the public eye at a time when the personal image of a sovereign was of marked consequence
.

  The portraits of Mary Stuart show that she had a small, well-turned head, and beautiful long hands; coins in particular reveal that she had a neck which was positively swan-like. One of her special charms was her colouring; the blonde hair of her childhood had darkened by the time of her marriage to a shade just lighter than auburn – a bright golden-red. The Deuil Blanc portrait† shows that her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a colour like amber, which today would probably be described as hazel, and this colouring was of course certainly set off to brilliant advantage by her incomparable complexion. Curiously enough Mary seems to have had rather similar colouring to her cousin Elizabeth, yet one woman was generally accounted a beauty by her contemporaries, and the other was engaged in a constant, tenacious battle to extract the reassurance of compliments from her courtiers, having been so deprived of them in youth. Possibly it was the quality of the skin which distinguished the cousins as young women: Elizabeth as a young girl was described as having a good skin of somewhat sallow (‘olivastra’) tint by the Venetian ambassador at the English court – and this was an age when a luxurious skin was considered a prerequisite of beauty.11