Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Mary’s departure was not without its tragi-comic elements. The cardinal, for example, suggested that she should for prudence’s sake leave her jewels behind in France, to which Mary, with a flash of wry humour, observed that if she herself were safe to go to sea, why then so were her jewels. She atoned for this, however, by giving her aunt the duchess of Guise, with characteristic generosity the day before she finally sailed, a magnificent necklace of rubies, emeralds and diamonds from her own collection, as a token of regard. The company of her own galley was planned to provide a galaxy of glamour and entertainment to beguile the young queen on her journey; it included three of her uncles, René of Elboeuf, the duke of Aumale and the Grand Prior Francis, as well as the four Maries, Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingston and Mary Fleming, whose French education was completed and were now to accompany their mistress back to Scotland, as they had accompanied her to France so many years ago. On Mary’s own galley were also to travel the young poet Châtelard and her admiring chronicler Brantôme.33

  The day of embarkation dawned dull and misty, despite the fact that it was high August. Mary’s wavering spirits were not lifted by the fact that a fishing boat in the harbour foundered and went down before the eyes of her watching party, with all its hands drowned. ‘What a sad augury for a journey!’ she exclaimed aloud. On Thursday, 14th August about noon, the servant of ambassador Throckmorton, passing by Calais, saw a stirring spectacle ‘haling’ out of the haven: two great galleys and two ships. He hastened to give the news to his master. It was news which Throckmorton had been expecting to hear and it cannot have been unwelcome to him. It was a brave sight which the English servant glimpsed at Calais, for it was the queen of Scotland setting forth across the North Sea on the 600-mile journey to her kingdom, unblessed by any passport of safe-conduct from the English queen, whose ships patrolled these seas. As the ambassador faithfully commenced the dispatch which would break this piece of news to England,34 he imagined only the bravado of the gesture which he must have applauded. Even if his watchful eyes had been able to spy into the great white galley and discern the tragic weeping figure on its poop, he might scarcely have recognized this tormented being for his modest self-controlled young queen.

  Up till this moment Mary had shown admirable courage and resolution, both in her dealings with Throckmorton, and more profoundly in her decision to ‘hazard all she had’ by returning to Scotland. But now that the die was cast, now that the ships were actually lying in the harbour of Calais, ready to take her away from all she had known and loved and held dear for that last thirteen years of what seemed to her like her whole life, Mary Stuart’s steadfast spirit temporarily deserted her. There was now no great challenge to call forth the resources of her nature, only the prospect of bidding farewell as it might be forever, to her family, her friends and above all France, France the beloved land of her adoption.

  As the galleys surged forward towards the unknown coast of Scotland, Mary herself gazed again and again on the fast-receding coast of France; clinging pathetically to that part of the ship which was still nearest to the French shores she murmured over and over again in a voice broken with tears: ‘Adieu France! Adieu France!’; again and again she repeated the words, and as the shoreline gradually faded from her sight, her laments only increased in fervour. Still mingling with the sound of the wind and the roars of the sea, her tragic young voice could be heard, eternally uttering its farewell, melancholy and prophetic. ‘Adieu France! Adieu France! Adieu donc, ma chère France. … Je pense ne vous revoir jamais plus.’

  * This passion, which has been enveloped in the mantle of romance by Schiller and Verdi, was in fact more the one-sided fixation of an idiot than the reciprocated grand passion of their imagination. One may prefer the notion of the romantic liberal-minded Don Carlos of the opera: but there is no historical evidence that Elisabeth of Valois ever returned the devotion of her feeble-minded step-son, and she seems indeed to have lived comparatively happily with her elderly husband, before her premature death.

  * Mary’s picture for Elizabeth was completed and sent by 1 st December 1561. The two queens also exchanged portraits again in the next year, 1562.12

  * Lord James was legitimated in February 1551. But the importance of legitimation in this period was not so much to remove a social stigma as to correct the fact that bastards could neither leave nor inherit property. The estates of a bastard descended to the crown on his death, if he was never legitimated during his lifetime.

  * Although Bothwell did not travel back to Scotland on Mary’s own galley, it does not seem fanciful to suppose that his return to France was connected with arrangements for her journey, not only on grounds of his hereditary office, but also because the contemporary Birrel’s Diary specifically states that the queen was ‘stolen out of France by sertain Lords’.32

  PART TWO

  The Personal Rule

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The State of the Realm

  ‘Assez fins, astutes et inconstans d’affection’

  A judgement on the Scottish people

  from an anonymous French memoir of 1588

  Although Ronsard, in a farewell ode to the queen, expressed the romantic wish that Scotland should fly before her ship, like the floating island of Delos, so that she would never be able to overtake it, in fact the fog-bound Scottish coast loomed out of the mist towards the queen’s galleys in a prosaically short time. Queen Catherine wrote coolly to her daughter Elisabeth of Spain on the subject of her daughter-in-law’s departure: ‘She has set sail … and if the winds are favourable, should be in Scotland within the week.’1 As it happened the journey which had begun under such dramatic auspices turned out to be comparatively uneventful and only lasted five days. Throughout much of its span, Mary’s mood of deep depression persisted; her soft heart led her to forbid the customary whipping of the oarsmen, as though in her own state of pain she could not bear to see further unnecessary suffering inflicted on others.2

  The encounter with the English ships on the high seas provided the main excitement of the voyage. The English queen had at last dispatched a friendly message, in answer to the Commendator of Inchcolm’s mission – too late for Mary to receive it in France. Elizabeth now stated that she had no intention of stopping the Scottish queen’s passage; in any case she had no fleet in the North Sea, only a few barks who were positioned there to discourage piracy. Cecil subsequently described to Throckmorton how the English ships had found the Scottish queen on the high seas with a tiny brave little train ‘not exceeding sixty persons of meaner sort’.3 Mary, unaware of Elizabeth’s volte-face, must have expected a more melodramatic meeting than that which actually took place. The English ships merely saluted the queen’s galleys, and allowed them to proceed; they examined the rest of the ships for pirates, and finally detained Lord Eglinton, on suspicion; not long afterwards, however, he too was released and permitted to return to Scotland. The only true casualty of the embargo which Elizabeth had attempted to put on the journey was Mary’s own stable of horses and mules which, having landed at Tynemouth, was prevented from proceeding further by the warden for a full month on the grounds that it lacked a proper passport.

  There was a quality of anti-climax about this tame encounter, when so much had been threatened by Elizabeth, so much courage shown by Mary. But it was certainly believed at the time that Elizabeth had intended to capture Mary if she could, and even the English officials in the north of England seemed to be under the same impression that her capture was desirable: on Sunday, 17th August, the earl of Rutland wrote to Cecil that Mary had been seen off Flamborough head, with a great fleet surrounding the royal galleys, including eight galleys and sixteen ships, and boasted that if they came ashore Cecil would ‘hear good news of their stay’. The next day or two great galleys were observed at Flamborough within a furlong of the pier, one all white, the other red, ‘well trimmed and appointed’, having two flags, a blue one with the arms of France and a white one in the stern glistening like silver
. Having let their anchors fall, the galleys each put forth one naked man to swim (what bold spirit of the French party thus tested the bracing pleasure of swimming in the North Sea waters?). All the time at a good distance away, there was apparently visible a large fleet of ships;4 but as all the contemporary evidence agrees that Mary landed at Leith with only two galleys, it seems likely that this phantom fleet off Flamborough head, far from being Mary’s own entourage, was the English fleet hovering round the Scottish queen, uncertain how to proceed as they had no precise commands to intercept her. As for the true intentions of Elizabeth in London, probably she herself was not utterly sure how she would react if an English captain took the law into his own hands and captured the queen of Scots.

  Such perplexities of motive and behaviour did not trouble Mary Queen of Scots. The only obscurity which surrounded the journey, from her point of view, once she had determined on it, was the physical obscurity induced by the weather. It had been hazy when the galleys left France, and it continued misty throughout the voyage. On the morning of the day the galleys were due to land at Leith, thick fog descended. A thick fog on the coast of Scotland was not an unexpected hazard, even in the middle of August; yet according to Brantôme the royal party seized on it as another unfortunate omen for the queen’s arrival, while John Knox from the vantage point of Scottish terra firma, but with equal pessimism, saw in the fog a symbol of the fact that the queen was bringing with her to Scotland ‘sorrow, dolour, darkness and impiety’.5 Only Mary herself seemed blithely unaware of these gloomy auguries, and determined to put on a smiling face come what might. Her natural buoyancy had helped to restore her spirits towards the end of the journey; now the prospect of meeting her subjects for what was in effect the first time on Scottish soil (discounting childhood memories when she had been queen in name only) presented her with the sort of challenge she especially appreciated – since all her life the sphere of personal encounter represented for her the most probable arena of victory. On Tuesday 19th August Mary Queen of Scots set foot once more on her native soil at the port of Leith, after an absence of just on thirteen years: her head was held high regardless of any melancholy portents.

  Her arrival was unexpectedly early – at about nine o’clock in the morning – as favourable winds had also carried the royal party from France more swiftly than had been anticipated. Nevertheless, by all accounts, her reception was enthusiastic and joyful, even if curiosity played at least as strong a part in it as loyalty. Since Holyrood Palace was not yet made ready for her arrival, the queen was taken first of all to the house of one Andrew Lamb at Leith; here she had a short rest and took her midday dinner, before being conveyed from Leith to Holyrood, on the outskirts of Edinburgh itself. She was conveyed on this short journey by a noble escort of Scottish lords including the earl of Argyll (one of the leading Protestant lords), the Lord Erskine and the Lord James, her half-brother. The memoirs of Lord Herries give further corroboration of the rejoicings which greeted her arrival, and even Knox admits that ‘fires of joy’ were lit at night.6 The nobility might be bound in loyalty to greet their sovereign; they might be fired with the intention of creating a favourable first impression, which would lead to personal advancement later; but the common people were excited by the spectacle in front of their eyes – the ‘beauty, youth and stately carriage’ of their queen, Herries’s phrase, despite the fact that Mary and her ladies were still in black or black-grey mourning for King Francis, who had been dead less than a year. Mary herself at the age of eighteen, tall, graceful, commanding, was everything in appearance that the popular imagination would have conjured up to fill the role of its newly arrived queen, if it had been allowed to choose.

  Brantôme had an acid word to say about the cortège provided for the queen. He looked with contempt on the miserable Scottish horses which were brought to convey her from Leith to Holyrood, saying that these nags were a sorry comedown for a queen who had been used to the finest horses of France. But no doubt the sweet sound of popular acclaim in Mary’s ears more than atoned for these deficiencies of transport; at all events she professed herself to be delighted with all she saw. What was more, Mary was able to express her pleasure to her subjects in their own language, for she had not lost her Scots despite the thirteen years spent in France. On her arrival in France as a child, she had indeed been able to speak nothing else, but she soon, by all accounts, learnt to speak French as well as a Frenchwoman, and it was the language which she habitually wrote and presumably thought in. Nevertheless the presence of Scots attendants such as Lady Fleming, her nurse Jean Sinclair or even the Maries must have enabled Mary to practise her Scots: for in August 1560, when she gave Throckmorton an interview, he particularly stated that Mary spoke to him in Scots, and later the papal envoy related how the queen ‘began to answer him in Scots’,* which she preferred to use to Latin. Although Mary’s Scots letters show that she never became fluent in the written language, Knox’s history confirms the fact that she was able to converse freely and colloquially in Scots from the time of her first arrival in the country.8

  At Holyrood Mary was installed in the magnificent towered and turreted palace which had been extended from an earlier tower in the reign of her father in the manner of the Scottish Renaissance; here not only the debt which the style owed to French architecture, as a whole, but also the fact that a number of French masons had been employed in the works, must have commended the whole building to critical French eyes. Lying on the outskirts of the city of Edinburgh, outside the actual town walls, Holyrood also enjoyed the amenities of wild country just beyond its very windows, as well as the convenience of having the capital city so close at hand – the ideal palace for a Stuart sovereign who could combine the pleasures of sport and politics to an ideal degree. The palace, then as now, was dominated by the bulk of Arthur’s seat: as Fynes Morison described it at the end of the century, over Holyrood ‘in a park of Hares, Conies and Deare, an high mountain hangs, called the chaire of Arthur’.9 Joined to the palace was the abbey of Holyrood; both abbey and palace had been burnt by the English at the time of Hertford’s invasion, seventeen years before, but had since been repaired.

  Queen Mary now took possession of those royal apartments in the north-west corner of the palace which were to play such a significant role in her story. By the standards of Scotland of the day, they were extremely magnificent: there was a private chapel, and the ante-room had a fine heraldic painted ceiling, put up two or three years previously.10 Security was, however, in no sense neglected at the expense of elegance: Holyrood in the time of Queen Mary was reached over an iron drawbridge, and the windows of the state rooms had iron gratings. Mary’s first night at Holyrood was scarcely restful: although for once nobody seems to have thought of interpreting the disturbances as omens of what was to come. Having retired to sleep for the night, the queen was awoken by a night chorus of five or six hundred amateur musicians, playing what Brantôme feelingly described as wretched fiddles, and rebecs,* and singing psalms out of tune. The result was a series of appalling discords, which must have grated at least as much on the ears of the music-loving queen as they did on those of the outraged Brantôme. However, the next morning, Mary with her usual charm in such small matters, when she wished to please, assured the nocturnal serenaders that it had been a delightful experience, and even went so far, in the words of the critical Knox, as to ‘will the same to be continued some nights after’.12

  Despite all Mary’s tact, despite her evident resolution to accept any manifestations of her subjects’ strange national character with heroic enthusiasm, there is no doubt that the land of Scotland as Mary first saw it represented something very alien to the land in which she had been brought up. It was not that Scotland lacked links with France – indeed the two French marriages of James V and the subsequent French marriage of his daughter Mary could hardly have failed to forge such bonds: not only the French servitors of Queen Madeleine and Queen Mary of Guise, but also the French administrators introduced by the latte
r such as de Rubay, who acted as chancellor, de Bouton, governor of the Orkneys, de Villemore, and d’Oysel existed to prove it. Mary’s own marriage, preceded by the two-way naturalization of Scots and Frenchmen in 1557, also meant that the titular ruler of Scotland lived in France, bringing a growing stream of Scots thither, on matters of administration or, as in the case of Bothwell, of petition.