Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  At the same time, during the second half of the sixteenth century prices were rising fast all over Europe due to the influx of silver from the New World. From this desperate need for money resulted the strange ‘treasure-hunter’s’ economics of the period12 – the persistent searchings for gold and silver deposits, which unfortunately lay in Scotland only in small and scattered pockets and involved high working and transport costs. For much of her reign Mary was also too poor to issue a coinage, although this had been done yearly from 1529 to 1542. At the same time the Register of the Privy Council shows that it was the policy of Mary’s government to try and make French currency legal tender, and to discourage the entry of currency from England, which was made treasonable – although the English currency was getting a reputation for purity from the developing commerce with the Hanse towns and the Low Countries. Another economic expedient was developed when the government realized that considerable profit could be derived from the issue of a silver coinage, at a considerably greater face value than its true value in silver: ryals began to be issued with a nominal value of thirty, twenty and ten shillings, but costing much less to mint. Naturally, such debasements had the effect of only encouraging hoarding and speculation. During the period of Mary Stuart’s personal rule, it would be true to say that just as the crown suffered from straitened finances it was incapable of curing, so the country suffered from economic difficulties for which the government also could supply no certain remedy.

  Despite these gloomy considerations, for the first years of her life in Scotland Mary Stuart made a fair attempt to recreate the conditions of the French court and to enjoy the native resources of Scotland. Fortunately she had a natural appetite for pleasures of many different types, as well as being blessed with youthful high spirits and enthusiasm, which enabled her to create pastimes where she did not find them; in particular she had a positive mania for outdoor pursuits – all her life her physical constitution demanded a daily ration of fresh air and exercise if she was to feel herself well. Although later in her life, this was to mean that she suffered cruelly from the conditions of close confinement, it meant that now she was well suited to the conditions of life in Scotland, where she was destined to spend nearly half her life in the saddle, progressing about her dominions. In the Scottish countryside she also had endless opportunities for the hawking and hunting which she loved, as had her father James V, and later her father-in-law and husband. Falkland Palace in Fife was a favourite centre for royal sport, having been rebuilt for this purpose by James V, with new stables built in 1531, so that it occupied rather the same role as Balmoral Castle in the life of Queen Victoria as a holiday and hunting retreat. It was surrounded with parkland and to the north lay the Forest of Falkland. It was not left to chance that the royalties should enjoy good sport: roebucks and stags were actually brought in litters along with the court, from their last stopping place; they were then temporarily released for the chase. When the court moved on again to Edinburgh, the deer were rounded up, and brought on to be released once more in the royal park at Holyrood. Wild boar, to be hunted among the oaks of the forest, were specially imported from France. Hawks commanded good prices: James IV had paid £189 for a trained bird, Mary herself acquired hawks from as far as Orkney and Zetland, and in 1562 hawks were among the presents she sent to Elizabeth, £80 being paid for conveying them to London.

  To Mary, a fearless rider who loved the excitement of the chase, not only hawking but deer-hunting was a popular pastime; anti-poaching laws had to be made to preserve the deer for the royal delectation, since on one occasion it was found that ‘the deer [were] so destroyed that our Sovereigns can get no pastime of hunting’ when they had repaired to a special piece of forest on purpose for the chase. Deer-hunting was far from being the solitary hardy stalking of modern times: the deer were actually beaten in to where the lords would be lying, their heads and antlers appearing over the hill ‘making a show like a wood’, as Taylor described it in his Penniless Pilgrimage.13 It was a primitive sport by our standards, the cries of the men, with their arrows, javelins and clubs, mingling with the barking of the dogs, often Irish wolf-hounds, who were used to catch the beasts. In 1564 an especially magnificent deer-hunt was organized for Mary by the 4th earl of Atholl; Mary camped for the occasion on the shores of Loch Locky, on the east side of Beinn a’ Ghlo, on a spot now traditionally known as Tom na Banrigh, or the queen’s hillock. One of Queen Mary’s retainers described how 2000 Highlanders (or ‘Wild Scots’ as he noted that they were called) were employed for two months to drive all the deer from the woods and hills of Atholl, Badenoch, Moray and all the counties about, into a special area – ‘As these Highlanders use a light dress, and are very swift of foot, they went up and down so nimbly that … they brought together 2,000 red deer, besides roes and fallow deer.’ The queen and the other great men waited in the glen as the deer thundered towards them, led by one magnificent leader who thrilled Mary’s heart, until Atholl warned her that if this leader, either in fear or in rage, turned in their direction, the entire herd would follow and they might be stampeded. This did in fact happen to some of the Highlanders, when Mary let her dog loose on a wolf and the stag bolted; in spite of throwing themselves flat in the heather, two or three Highlanders were killed, and others injured.14

  In his History of Scotland, Leslie emphasizes the importance of hunting to the Scots as a national pastime: in her enthusiasm for it, Mary certainly met with the full accord of her subjects. Archery – for which she would wear a velvet glove – also appealed to her, and she had butts set up in her private gardens at Holyrood, where one spring day she was surprised by Randolph shooting with the vigorously Protestant Master of Lindsay against Lord James and one of her ladies, showing that it was easier to be friendly with the turbulent Lindsay on the common basis of sports than on that of religion.15 She played at golf and pall-mall (croquet). With her penchant for fresh air, she loved to walk in the gardens surrounding her palaces, and frequently held audiences of her ambassadors there – Randolph even mentions one interview taking place in the garden of Holyrood in February. Here there were two gardens, a north and a south, into which Mary is said to have introduced on her own initiative a young sycamore from France, which was to become the parent of all the groves celebrated in Scottish songs. The other palaces of Linlithgow, Stirling and Falkland also had their estates and parks, the gardens of Stirling lying far below the castle on the level ground, so that the butts could be surveyed from the castle walls.

  Mary Stuart had her resplendent side, when she appeared to her subjects as Diana the goddess of the chase; but she also had another charming and touchingly domesticated side to her character in marked contrast to this dazzling public persona. This paradox is stamped on many of her actions, which hover between the imperious deeds of the woman born a queen, who loved to shine in the eyes of her people, and the more clinging reactions of a woman, who was after all markedly feminine, in temperament as well as in sex. She adored small dogs, as well as the great hounds of the chase, and this trait did not wait for the cramped conditions of her captivity to manifest itself: there is mention in her inventories of pretty blue velvet colours for the queen’s little dogs; a daily ration of two loaves of bread was set apart for them; payment was made to the boys who looked after them, and occasionally they were sent to France. She loved to embroider, and is described as sitting at her Council, placidly plying her needle, a model of the compliant female. Mary Stuart was also marked all her life, in its early no less than in its later stages, by extreme attachment to her servants, particularly her own personal attendants, with whom she felt she could share her joys and woes without fear either of their presumption or of their disloyalty. Mary’s court therefore had an agreeably intimate character, which spread outwards from the feminine side of its queen’s own nature. There were certainly indoor pleasures enough to be enjoyed. The queen had a gambling streak, as her mother had had before her, and loved to play at cards or at dice, losing a jewel of crystal
set in gold to her father-in-law Lennox on one occasion. She enjoyed biles or billiards, and in Lent 1565, before they were married, Mary and Darnley together lost an agate ring and brooch worth 50 crowns to Mary Beaton and Randolph, a debt which Darnley gallantly paid. Mary enjoyed backgammon, and also chess, her library including The Rules of Chesse translated from French by William Caxton in 1474. She loved to watch the plays of puppets, a new fashion which had lately spread out of Italy.16

  Mary was also a considerable linguist, and the number of languages which she had learned as a child in France was reflected in her reading-matter. Besides French, Latin, Scots books, and a few English volumes, there were books in Italian and Spanish – while the presence of books in the original Greek suggested that the queen either understood a smattering of Greek herself, or else had at least an interest in the culture of the Greeks. At all events her library was extensive: from the two incomplete lists of it made at Holyrood in 1569 for the Regent Moray, after she had fled to England, and in 1578 at Edinburgh Castle, it is possible to form at least some impression of her literary tastes.*17 Her library was kept at Holyrood in a green-carpeted room, and by 1566 her collection of Greek and Latin books had grown sufficiently large to be left by her in her will to the university of St Andrews. There were a quantity of medieval and modern Latin prose, including the famous copy of Buchanan’s translation of the Psalms. This was dedicated by him to Queen Mary in Latin in lines which are strangely poignant when one recalls that it was later Buchanan who was to be Mary’s chief traducer:

  Lady, whose sceptre (yours by long descent)

  Gives Scotland now a happy government,

  By beauty, virtue, merit and sweet grace

  Queen of your sex, star of our age, our race –

  Accept (light task) done in the Latin tongue,

  The glorious Psalms the prophet-king once sung …†

  Greek authors represented included Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato, and there were French translations of the classics such as Suetonius, Plutarch, Ovid and Cicero. Italian books numbered the Decameron, Aristo’s Orlando Furioso, Petrarch, and Marcus Aurelius translated into Italian.

  By far the greatest proportion of the books is, of course, in French. English books are rare, but include the Acts of Parliament of Queen Mary Tudor, less frequently browsed over one feels than the volumes of history and French poetry, which seem to have been Mary Stuart’s real loves. Brantôme bore witness to her genuine passion for poetry – her library includes the works of Clément Marot, du Bellay and Ronsard, all poets she had known and loved in France. Mary seems to have had a preference also for medieval romances either of the Arthurian legends or the story of Roland. Melville reports that when she had leisure from the affairs of the state ‘she read upon good books, the history of diverse countries.18 – books such as the chronicles of the emperors and kings of Austria, found in the list of Edinburgh Castle, and histories of the medieval kings of France. The colourful mixture of event and character to be found in history evidently appealed to her – it is obvious from her answers at her trial in England, and her conversations with Paulet at the end of her life, that she had read and pondered on English history. In short, her library shows the typical all-round tastes of what might be termed an educated Renaissance woman who enjoyed reading widely as her fancy listed – as well as the individual touches to be found in any library, such as The Book of Hunting (the sort of book which might also be found in the fine library of any eighteenth-century English gentleman), a book on astronomy, and dutifully enough the bound sermons and prayers of her uncle the cardinal of Lorraine.

  There are three books on music listed: for music Mary Stuart would seem to have had a profound feeling which, like her love of poetry, appealed to the romantic, rather than the inquisitive, side of her nature. She herself played on both the lute and virginals, and as she plucked her lute strings she loved to display those long white fingers, which Brantàme and Ronsard admired. Although Melville in his famous interview with Queen Elizabeth described Mary as playing only ‘reasonably well’ for a queen, the verdict of Mary’s contemporaries who did not have to discuss the matter with her jealous rival is more generous.19 Mary had a charming, soft singing voice which, like her speaking voice, won the admiration of her listeners, and on whose natural ability Conaeus commented. Musical talent played its part in the selection of her valets of the bed-chamber – later it influenced the choice of Riccio; in 1561 she had five violas and three players on the lute, and some of the valets of the bed-chamber also played and sang, so that Mary could beguile the long dark Scottish winter evenings with the sort of little musical supper parties which she had enjoyed in France. The queen also loved to have music to accompany her Mass; at first this presented a problem, since the chapel organs had been destroyed at the time of the Reformation as being profane instruments, with the exception of that at Stirling which the mob could not reach. In 1562 Randolph reported her as being desolate because no one would play at her Mass on Christmas Day;20 however, by April 1565 she had a band of musicians, and at Easter High Mass Randolph furiously noticed that ‘she wanted now neither trumpets, drum, nor fife, bagpipe or tabor’.21

  The skill of Mary, for which Knox had a particular loathing, which summed up to him everything he detested about her character, education and upbringing, was her dancing. There was a genuine and irreconcilable difference of attitude. To Knox, dancing seemed truly an invention of the devil, something which good women never practised; in his opinion, the activities which Mary got up to whenever she was alone with her ‘French fillocks, fiddlers and others of that band’ made the whole atmosphere more like a brothel than a place for honest women. If we are to believe Knox, in December 1562 Mary danced excessively ‘beyond midnight’ out of glee, because she had received the news that the persecution of the Huguenots had begun again in France.22 He immediately resorted to his favourite weapon of the denunciation of the pulpit, as a result of which Mary summoned him to their second interview, some eighteen months after the first.

  She received him in her chamber, attended by Lord James, Maitland and Morton. Knox proceeded to qualify his condemnation of dancing with certain provisos – he said that he was prepared to tolerate dancing if the principal vocation of the dancer was not neglected, and that the dancers took care not to dance as the Philistines did, for the pleasure they took in the displeasure of God’s people. If they did fall into either of these two heinous errors, they should ‘receive the reward of dancers, and that will be drunk in hell, unless they speedily repented’. Mary Stuart on the other hand had been brought up in France to dance, and she danced well and elegantly; in the words of Melville, once more jealously cross-examined by the queen of England, she danced ‘not so high and disposedly’ as Elizabeth, but in Conaeus’s less inhibited phrase she danced most ‘gracefully and becomingly’. With Mary Stuart, dancing was a natural expression of her pleasure in life, as well as an artistic performance; it is small wonder therefore if the young queen, just nineteen, dancing with the ladies of her court in a carefree but hardly unseemly fashion, should have felt that of the two of them it was Knox, and not her, who was the Philistine.

  In her dress, at least, Mary Stuart was able to give the femininity of her nature full reign, because to be magnificently attired was expected of a sixteenth-century queen, by all except the most bigoted and puritanical. Even in childhood, she had been distinguished by a keen interest in clothes when she teased her governess into letting her have as splendid gowns as the princesses of France. When she grew up, and had what virtually amounted to a constitutional duty to dress herself elegantly, she did so with innate good taste – lacking her cousin Elizabeth’s inclination to bedizen herself ostentatiously, possibly because she was conscious that unlike Elizabeth she had the sort of beauty which was best set off by rich simplicity. Of course a large proportion of her time as a young woman was spent in mourning – for her mother, her father-in-law, and finally for her husband. The outward signs of grief
were taken extremely seriously at this period – it has been noted that she was wearing black when she first arrived in Scotland. After Francis had been dead a year, in December 1561, the court went into half-mourning but Mary herself did not totally cast off her mourning until she married Darnley four years later. Perhaps she understood how to make her many black accoutrements a dramatic foil for her red-golden hair, white skin and golden eyes; for the same reason, white appears and reappears throughout the list of dresses in her wardrobe, there being perhaps no better setting for a glowing complexion than a white dress: the list of her robes, with their descriptions and colours, fully explains how she came to be known as ‘la reine blanche’ in France. Indeed her detailed wardrobe books show the intense interest which Mary Stuart took in every detail of her clothes: there are lists of all the articles delivered from the wardrobe at Holyrood each month from the beginning of 2nd September, 1561 to June 1567 when the nobles took arms against her.23 Ordinarily, she wore dresses of camlet (a sort of mohair), damask or serge, stiffened in the neck with buckram, and mounted with lace and ribbons; the queen was also fond of loose dresses (‘à l’Espagnole’); her riding skirts and cloaks were of Florentine serge, often edged with black velvet or fur. Beneath her gowns were ‘vasquines’, stiffened petticoats or farthingales to hold out her skirts, expanded with hoops of whale bones to give a crinoline effect. Her underwear included silk doublets, and there is mention of ‘brassières’ of both black and white silk. Her ‘woven hose’ often were made of gold and silver, and it is specifically mentioned that they were of silk. Her hats and caps were of black velvet and taffetas – her veils of white.