Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  While a great lord like Lord Seton emulated his master and made a French marriage to Marie Pieris, one of Mary of Guise’s ladies-in-waiting, even before this outbreak of Franco-Scottish nuptials, there were links between the universities of Paris and Orléans and the Scots universities – a great prelate like Cardinal David Beaton had completed his education in Paris. The Scottish Reformation did not break these links but strengthened them since ‘earnest and brotherly’ relationships developed between the French scholars at universities and Scottish Protestant scholars: it was even thought worthwhile to publish the works of Sir David Lyndsay in France. The education of the sons of the leading Scots lords abroad was not an unheard-of phenomenon: the son of the Lord Lovat of the day slain at the Field of Shirts in 1544 was described as a ‘well learned young gentleman, and brought up with great civility and knowledge in the realm of France’.13 James Melville went to France with Mary Stuart at the age of fourteen to be educated as a page. Maitland of Lethington was educated abroad after the university of St Andrews. It is likely that Alexander Scott, the leading poet of the court of Queen Mary, went to Paris as a student of music.14 Monks were often educated abroad or in turn came from abroad. The monastery of St James of the Scots at Ratisbon, said to be founded by Prince William of Scotland, brother of King Achaeus, adopted the lively John Leslie, bishop of Ross, as their patron in this period. Such centres provided a natural interchange of news and views between Scotland and the Continent.

  In the same way, the trade of the east Scottish seaports with France provided a more materialistic version of the interchange – as the merchants of the Scottish burghs exported linen and wool cloth, skins, and smoked and salted fish to France, in order to bring back such necessary luxuries as wine and salt. The courage of the average Scots as fighters gained them sufficient reputation abroad to make them in demand as fighters, demonstrated by the presence of the Scots archers and guards at the French court, even before the first marriage of James V. The Register of the Privy Seal shows that young Scotsmen went abroad for military service with enough regularity during this period to make it a definite feature of Scottish contemporary life. Leslie’s comment on the whole subject in his History was that primogeniture often caused sons to seek their fortune out of Scotland – ‘Of this comes, that so many of our countrymen, have such good success amongst strange Nations, some in the Wars, some in professing of Sciences, and some in merchandise’15 – admirable enterprise which time has only confirmed as being an essential part of the Scottish character.

  Unfortunately the adventurous success of the Scots abroad did not prevent them from being regarded by their European contemporaries as an extremely primitive, not to say uncouth, race when at home. An anonymous memoir on the state of Scotland, written by a Frenchman in 1558, the year of Mary’s marriage, makes this point quite clear.16 Scotland is described as a poor and infertile land, ill-disposed to strangers, and obsessed with family honour and family disputes. The Scottish manner of living is described as rustic, and the people themselves as ‘assez fins, astutes et inconstans d’affection’. Henri Estienne described the Scots as a simple people ‘who consider themselves all to be cousins of the King’. André Thevet, almoner to Queen Catherine, painted a blacker picture: he described them as a lazy, proud, boastful people who, despite their poverty, were swollen with quite unjustifiable pride about their lineage.17 When Riccio was stabbed to death by over fifty dagger-wounds, Castelnau de Mauvissière, who knew the Scots, commented that such ferocious behaviour was only to be expected from such a nation – he called it ‘an extraordinary exhibition indeed, but one often enough to be seen among the Scots, when their spirits came under some sinister influence’.18 A current French phrase ‘poignarder a l’Écossais’ (stabbing through and through) carried the same connotation of violence. It has been pointed out already that the French took a patronizing view of the question of the government of Scotland, and believed that the Scots could only benefit from good sound French administration. Whatever her good intentions, Mary Stuart could not fail to be affected by the prevailing attitude of the land of her upbringing towards the land of her birth – one of condescension not unmixed with scorn.

  How far was this picture of a savage primitive people justified, and how far did Scotland in the mid-sixteenth century merit the description ‘lourde Écosse’? The terrain itself must certainly have seemed somewhat dreary to one nurtured in the Loire valley of France, human beings perennially judging beauty by the standards they have known in childhood. Surprising as it may seem to later travellers, Scotland was on the whole a treeless country in the sixteenth century: the great forests of earlier times had disappeared save in the Highlands, and constant legislation on the subject shows that the need of planting trees was considered to be urgent. Although there were still extensive forests round Loch Ness and Loch Maree, the Lowland forests were more in the nature of groups of trees and clearings, and tracts of open country dotted with trees, used for hunting; in the meantime the government endeavoured to force smallholders to plant woods or orchards to cover three acres round their domiciles. Even so, when Sir Anthony Weldon visited Scotland with James VI in 1617, he wrote that Judas himself could not have found a tree on which to hang himself. Scotland was also dissected to a far greater extent than at the present day by endless and immense watery tracts in the shape of countless lochs and lochans, many of which have now disappeared – in Fife at this period there were for example twenty lochs or lochans as big as Lochleven.19

  To add to this impression of bleakness, the climate was not only demonstrably colder, windier and wetter than that of France, for obvious reasons of latitude, but it also so happened that the period of Mary Stuart’s personal rule in Scotland coincided with a marked change on the whole weather graph of Europe;* in Scotland this resulted in a series of exceptionally cold winters and stormy wet summers, and a sharp decline in the entire pattern of Scottish weather after 1560. The fact that 1563 and 1564 saw winters of outstanding severity with great loss of stock, 1565 an appalling harvest, and 1567 another unremittingly wet harvest time, can hardly have leavened the rigours of the Scottish climate to those unused to it. Even Bishop Leslie, in his account of the climate of Scotland, although he loyally denied that it was a cold place, admitted that ‘the winds which are North, blow often very vehement swift and with a horrible sound’.20

  There were of course tracts of Scotland which were exquisitely cultivated: Mary of Guise had admired Fife. Leslie and Buchanan both joined in giving the palm to Lothian, but in Tweeddale Leslie was dramatically excited by the numbers of sheep, and Lithgow described Clydesdale as the paradise of Scotland. However, even the fertile areas of the Merse and Teviotdale were possibly more wonderful to a native-born Scot than to one accustomed to the fertility of France, and since in any case many of the most theoretically cultivated areas in Scotland lay within the border area, where they might be devastated at any moment by English aggression, or straightforward free-booting, they did not always present the most luxuriant panorama of growth. Obvious symbols of civilization, such as fruit and flowers, were certainly in much shorter supply in Scotland than in France. Scottish villages and dwellings had always struck outside observers by their meanness: there were no enclosures, no fences or dykes or hedges, for the simple reason, as John Major explained, that the tenants had no permanent holdings, but hired or leased their land for four or five years, and thus had no motive to enclose their land.21 Even the towns and burghs, whose political power was increasing, lacked stone walls to surround them, and life within them was still essentially medieval. Of the Scottish towns, although Edinburgh with its fair High Street extending the whole length of the town aroused universal admiration even amongst those who had travelled on the continent of Europe, few others could have compared with the French towns of Mary’s youth. At the moment of her return, Scotland was in fact on the eve of a population explosion – by the end of the sixteenth century numbers had doubled. But in 1550 the population of Scotland was betw
een five and six hundred thousand, a figure not much greater than it had been in the time before Robert the Bruce, since intervening wars had periodically decimated the nation. The population of France at the end of the 1570s, on the other hand, was between thirteen and fifteen million.22

  Communications within Scotland were exceptionally difficult at this period: roads were poor and ill-maintained, as a result of which journeys were considered hazardous and amazing if they were completed without incident. Randolph wrote of his journey from Stirling to Inverness in 1562 – ‘A terrible journey both for horse and man, the countries are so poor, the victuals so scarce.’23 Norfolk complained of the ‘deep and foul ways’ even between Berwick and Leith, so that the artillery for the siege of Leith had to go by sea. Coaches were unknown until 1561, when the first one was introduced from France for the royal use. Bridges, like roads, were supposed to be kept up by the people nearest to them, but this was seldom done satisfactorily; ferries played an important part in the kingdom, but again ferrymen were notoriously knavish, as the frequent statutes against them showed. Communications were further threatened by the prevalence of vagabonds on land – whom statutes tried in vain to exterminate – and of pirates on the sea. There were plenty of taverns, but inns or hostels with quarters for travellers were almost unknown, as the nobles journeyed from their own houses to those of their kin, and there was therefore no call for them; a stranger was an object of wonder, if not actual animal hostility.

  It was hardly surprising that the different sectors of a country so ill-served by its communications should be very cut off, one from the other. The border peoples, who were comparatively easy to reach, were extraordinarily difficult to subdue for any length of time; as Leslie said, their lives were torn between war and theft, and their own feuds were far more important to them than any dictates of the central government. The Highlands were considered virtually a separate area: John Major drew a stern distinction between the wild Scots of the north and east, and the ‘householding Scots’ of the Lowlands. Of the so-called wild Scots, half the population only spoke Gaelic, ‘The language of savages’ Ayala called it;24 their main contact with the Lowlands was the moving down of cattle to Stirling and the Lowland cattle markets. The Western Isles were so distant that they could, when they chose, opt out of central politics altogether, in favour of local feuds, and play no part in Scottish national affairs. This occurred during the reign of Queen Mary; she never visited them at all personally, and there was no peer of Parliament at this period north of the earl of Argyll at Inveraray. In short, Scotland was a country still struggling painfully within the confines of a medieval framework: it had hardly begun to emerge from this restrictive cocoon at the date when Mary first arrived from France – a country in which, whatever its other faults of civil strife, this process at least was considerably more advanced.

  Parallel with the primitive state of the countryside itself was the stratification of Scottish society in which notions of kinship were still held to be of paramount importance. It was the great lords, as the heads of clans or the tenants-in-chief of land, who received the true allegiance of the people who were their clansmen and their tenants based either on kinship or on formal bonds of ‘manrent’ made to them, which promised services in return for protection. These Scottish lords considered themselves to be virtually autonomous in their lands since the system of land tenure gave the crown practically no right to intervene between the tenant-in-chief and his inferiors. The growth of the lairds, who held their land directly from the monarch, was a political phenomenon whose importance was not apparent at the moment when Mary landed in Scotland. It was true that the lairds had demanded representation during the Reformation Parliament of 1560, having played a part in the revolution of 1559, but to the queen the nobles still appeared to block the way for any real contact between monarch and people. It was therefore with that complex but fascinating body, the Scottish nobility, that Mary had to deal if she was to deal with Scotland at all. And, in 1561, the great majority of their body were scarcely more advanced than the territories over which they held sway.

  This is not to underestimate the power and splendour of the great magnates, who were just beginning to appreciate the value of display in a civilized society. Many of them had their own private poursuivants. In 1543 the then earl of Moray gave a banquet to the patriarch of Venice, at which he caused much fine crystal to be put on the table, as well as his silver. In order to make the point that Scotland was overflowing with such wares, at a given signal he had one of his servants tug the cloth, so that all the crystal fell to the ground and was smashed. As the patriarch was busy murmuring his regrets for this untoward occurrence, the earl casually had a further store of crystal brought in of still finer quality. The patriarch was duly impressed and exclaimed that he had seen nothing like it in Venice (where crystal was perhaps treated with greater consideration).25 In 1529 John, 3rd earl of Atholl, a great feudal magnate with vast dominions, gave King James and the papal nuncio a magnificent entertainment in the shape of a hunt, at which the king was ‘as well served and eased, with all things necessary to his Estate, as if he had been in his own palace in Edinburgh’; the earl had a special woodland palace constructed of green timber, the floor strewn with rushes and flowers, and the walls hung with tapestry and arrases of silk, with actual glass in the windows. The banquet held within this rustic folly, twenty miles from any dwelling (and which was destroyed when the banquet was finished, according to Highland custom), included ale, beer, wine, both white and claret, and aqua vitae, and for food, every kind of meat from beef, mutton and venison to swan and peacock, fish including salmon, pike and eels, and even gingerbread. The whole entertainment was supposed to have cost Atholl £1000 a day, and the nuncio summed up his reaction in outspoken terms: he thought it a ‘great marvel that such a thing could be in Scotland, considering that it was named the arse of the world in other countries’.26

  Both these anecdotes tell us as much about the swaggering character of the magnates concerned as they do about the state of Scottish civilization. The list of the belongings of the earl of Huntly, taken from the castle of Strathbogie after his defeat and forfeiture in 1562, gives an interesting glimpse of the furnishings and trappings to be found in the home of a great lord: the forfeited goods included elaborate tapestries, beds covered with velvet and hung with fringes of gold and silverwork, vessels of gilded and coloured glass, and figures of animals.27 The Regent Châtelherault had his castle decorated with painted ceilings. James Stewart, earl of Moray had an excellent library. The great Lord Seton had gardens and orchards surrounding his castle which the English vengefully sacked in their invasion of 1544; he enjoyed the sport of horse-racing and, as recorded in the annals of the burgh of Haddington, in May 1552 his horse won a silver bell which he himself had presented. But as a class, the magnates with their continental affiliations – men such as Lennox and Glencairn who spoke French – must be distinguished from the mass of the nobility, who were far from appreciating such refinements. Leslie describes how nobles and commoners alike wore the same clothes: the chiefs would dress themselves up elegantly in grand clothes to go to court, and then change back again. The horse was all-important in the need for show: ‘If therefore they have speedy horses, and wherewith they may dress themselves and their wives,’ wrote Leslie, ‘they are not mickle careful for the rest of their household gear.’28

  The rough nature of the education which the preponderance of them received may be judged from the fact that in 1559 it was thought worth delivering considerations to Parliament that the nobility should be better educated, so that the ruler should not be forced to advance new men in their place. Lennox apologized for his ‘evil hand’; Huntly and Douglas were scarcely able to write, although they could do so in times of special crisis, for secrecy; Lady Huntly and Lady Erroll apparently wrote better than their husbands. The helpmeets of these men, as Ayala had noticed half a century earlier, were indeed a remarkable race and very often more estimable than their
husbands, or perhaps the unbridled spirit is simply more attractive when manifested in the female than in the male sex. Ayala had called them ‘really honest though very bold’.29 The two Lady Huntlys, old and young, of this period, showed a mettle which outstripped their husbands. Despite the almost total lack of education granted to women – it was noteworthy that at the Reformation, nuns were almost illiterate, a much higher proportion than of the monks and friars – the wives of the Scottish nobility were from time to time capable of throwing up a figure of genuine intelligence and spirit, such as Jean, countess of Argyll, Jean Gordon, countess of Bothwell, or Agnes, countess of Moray, who put many of their male contemporaries in the shade.

  The fortresses which these lords inhabited were in most cases as unpolished as their inmates. They were certainly very different from the fortresses of France to which Mary Stuart had been accustomed. Here she had known the magnificent newly constructed palaces of the French Renaissance, whose size alone dominated the eye. In Scotland she found a few royal palaces of only moderate size, by these standards, some few proper castles, and a plethora of strongholds, which were in effect only domesticated towers. These castles looked more like the elongated castle-houses in a German fairy-story than heavily castellated dwellings of Arthurian imagination. As for the squat tower dwellings, Lethington Tower, the home of Maitland (transformed by the work of later centuries into romantic Lennoxlove), provides an example of this sort of fortified pillar, with its heavily barred door on the ground floor, and nothing but slit windows as high as assailants could reach. When trouble came, women, children and cattle could be driven into the safety of this ground-floor chamber. Normally the house proper began on the upper floors; turrets and dormer windows, corbels and other decorative features could ornament these pillars, but basically they were merely intended for defence; and they represented an obviously stark way of life.