Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  On state and ceremonial occasions, the queen’s clothes were universally glittering. The inventory of the queen’s dresses made at Holyrood in February 156224 lists 131 entries, including sixty gowns, of cloth of gold, cloth of silver, velvet, satin and silk. There are fourteen cloaks, five of which are in the Spanish fashion, and two royal mantles, one purple velvet and the other furred in ermine. There are thirty-four vasquines and sixteen devants or fronts (stomachers), mainly of cloth of gold, silver and satin. The dresses themselves ranged from the favourite white – often with silver fringes and embroidery – and preponderant black, to crimson velvet, orange damask embroidered in silver; the embroidery was so rich and detailed that it was often passed from dress to dress, and listed separately among the jewellery.

  Not only Mary’s dresses, but also her jewels were of enormous importance to her: these of course represented something more than adornment, since by being treated as solid financial assets, they could be given as presents, held for security, or sold to pay troops, if necessary. In her childhood, Mary Stuart was decked by her attendants in those jewels considered fit for an infant queen; in Scotland she enjoyed the enhancement of a series of romantic gems; later in her life, her jewels were to enjoy a career as checkered as her own, as they were stolen, seized, sold to Elizabeth, or pawned, all to her violently expressed anguish. The inventory of her jewellery, made also in 1562,25 contains 180 entries, an increase of twenty-one over the inventory of the queen’s jewels made at the time of her departure from France – new acquisitions include a cross of gold set with diamonds and rubies which Mary had just redeemed for £1000 from the hands into which it had been pledged by Mary of Guise. She had also acquired some new Scottish pearls from an Edinburgh goldsmith, for Scottish pearls were held to share with Bohemian pearls the honour of being the finest in Europe, although still rated as inferior to the pearls of the Orient. As she loved white, so the queen seems to have had an especial affection for pearls – it was noted that she was wearing two of a group of twenty-three pearls in her ears at the actual moment when the inventory was taken. But rubies she also seems to have admired, as she loved to wear crimson velvet; and among her profusion of rings, necklaces and earrings, there is mention of enamel, cornelian and turquoise, as well as, of course, gold and diamonds.

  The queen paid fashionable attention to the care of her hair, and the elaborate dressing of it, according to the caprices of the time. We know that among her Maries, Mary Seton was an especially skilled hairdresser, having learnt the art in France. Even in her youth, when she had lovely thick glistening hair – those tresses ‘si beaux, si blonds, si cendrés’ wrote Brantôme – the dictates of the mode led her to use perukes or false hairpieces. Later in her life her glorious hair darkened, and the sorrows and illnesses of her captivity caused it to thin and go grey prematurely. Then, false pieces of hair were to be essential, but now in her heyday, she made use of them equally: there is repeated reference to her perukes or the bags to keep them in, in her wardrobe lists. By 1569 Nicholas White mentions that she had them of all different colours, and Sir Francis Knollys was impressed by the pretty fashions created on her head by Mary Seton when she first arrived in England (he considered the art a novelty although Queen Elizabeth herself had no less then eighty perukes). Queen Mary’s perukes were among the first necessities which she sent for from Lochleven, and as can be seen by the awe of Knollys, these much-travelled handmaidens of beauty were dispatched to Mary at Carlisle by her wardrobe master Servais de Condé only a month after she reached it herself.26

  The queen of Scots had a childish love of fancy dress and dressing-up which she preserved throughout her life. It has already been mentioned that she loved to adopt Scottish national dress in France, and even had herself painted in it, according to Brantôme, although the portrait does not survive. In Scotland, with a romantic love of the Highlands, reminiscent of her descendant and admirer Queen Victoria, Mary adopted the costume of wearing the so-called ‘Highland mantles’ – these were not plaid, but loose cloaks reaching to the ground, and generally embroidered. In this she followed her father, who had had himself made a Highland suit in 1538, including ‘variant coloured’ velvet to be a short Highland coat, and ‘Highland tartan’ to be hose – trews and a belted plaid being the contemporary form of Highland dress rather than the later kilt.* Queen Mary had three cloaks, one white, one blue and one black embroidered in gold.27 In Scotland also, Mary loved to adopt male costume, and wander about the streets, enjoying the sort of romantic incognito among her subjects which has always been considered the perquisite of adventurous royalties. With her height and long legs, she must have made an engaging picture, and would surely have earned the admiration of Brantôme, who wrote that only a lady of perfect beauty with perfect legs should attempt such a disguise, in order that no man should be able to tell ‘to which sex she really belonged, whether she was a handsome boy or the beautiful woman she was in reality’.28 At one banquet given to the French ambassador, the queen appeared with her Maries, all dressed as men; riding against the rebels in 1565, she dressed up as a man to ride at the head of her army, the cynosure of every loyal eye. On Easter Monday 1565, Mary and her women dressed themselves up like burgesses’ wives, in Stirling, and ran up and down the streets, according to Randolph, gathering money for the banquets; later they all banqueted where Randolph himself was lodging, to the wonder of the common spectators.29 Three weeks before she married Darnley, they both sauntered about the streets of Edinburgh in disguise until supper-time, and did the same thing again the next day, causing a certain amount of gossip.

  In all these pranks and escapades, of the type in which royalty have always indulged to escape the gilded bird-cage of their existence, it is unnecessary to discern more than natural high spirits and youthful love of pleasure. Certainly there were no sexual scandals surrounding the sovereign, as there had been in the time of Mary’s father, and in so many monarchs before and since. Mary, who throughout her first years in Scotland was an unattached and beautiful girl, with no restraints except those of prudence to hold her back from the wildest excesses had she wished to indulge in them, was as clearly sans reproche in her court life as she was sans peur in the hunting field. The only scandal to be seen was the scandal, in the eyes of Knox at least, of the spectacle of human enjoyment. Mary conducted herself in a thoroughly innocent, somewhat hoydenish fashion, somewhat like the Shakespearian heroines whom she so much resembles – like Rosalind, rejoicing in her boy’s attire in the Forest of Arden, but fainting at the sight of Orlando’s blood on a handkerchief. Certainly, like Rosalind, although caparisoned like a man, she did not have a doublet and hose in her disposition, but retained all her female impulsiveness.

  Mary Stuart’s simple sense of fun, what Randolph called her ‘merry mood’, fitted in well with the boisterous sense of humour of her Scottish subjects at this time, although this was certainly more bawdy in its most outspoken manifestations. The sixteenth-century Scots did not necessarily see the reformation of their religion as leading to the end of those hearty, crude, bucolic games and sports which they had long enjoyed; they loved the favourite May game of Robin Hood, with its Abbot of Unreason and its Queen of the May. When these games were forbidden by the magistrates in May 1561, for the disturbance they caused, the ban caused public riots, and Robin and his men patrolled the streets all the same in defiance. One of Robin’s companions was arrested, condemned to death and carried to the gibbet, until he was rescued on the verge of the hanging by his fellow-rioters. The people who enjoyed this sort of entertainment naturally loved the pageantry brought to the country by Mary and her court. On Sunday 30th November, a few months after Mary’s arrival, her uncle Elboeuf and her half-brothers Robert and John Stewart took part in ‘running at the ring’, two teams of six, one disguised as women and the other as strangers in fancy dress. Elboeuf did well but the ‘women’, led by Lord Robert, won; the queen watched it all with great enjoyment. A week later, on Saturday 5th December, the anniversary o
f Francis’s death was marked by the solemn presentation of a huge wax candle draped in black velvet; the next day, possibly because it was two days off Mary’s own nineteenth birthday, there was ‘mirth and pastimes’ upon the seashore at Leith, a romantic, if chilly, prospect upon the winter sands, at which the queen was present.30 Court life was enlivened by numbers of paid jesters, often female. One, known as ‘La Jardinière’, had her own keeper or gouvernante, Jacqueline; La Jardinière was given a green plaiding coat, handkerchiefs, and linen for underclothing. Another favourite of the queen, Jane Colquhoun, received a red and yellow coat in 1566. A special canvas bed was made for another of Mary’s female fools, Nichola, ‘La Folle’, whom she brought from France, and who stayed with the queen until her imprisonment in England, when Lennox paid generously for the ‘fool’s’ return to her native land.31

  Among the special features of the social life of the time were the weddings of the nobility, which were nearly always the occasion for banquets and masques. Mary seems to have had a wistful love of weddings, and loved to give not only feasts but also bridal dresses to her favourites. Two significant weddings took place in her first year in Scotland. In January 1562 Lady Janet Hepburn, Bothwell’s sister, married Mary’s half-brother, Lord John, at Bothwell’s own castle of Crichton; both Queen Mary and Lord James came to the castle, with Bothwell acting as host, and the English ambassador was duly impressed by the sports and pastimes which were indulged in. Four weeks later Lord James’s own nuptials to Lady Agnes Keith were celebrated in Edinburgh with great splendour. He was created earl of Mar the day before the marriage, which was held in St Giles Cathedral, with Knox preaching the sermon. A long train of nobles witnessed the rites and then went to Holyrood, for the first instalment of three days’ banqueting – on which Knox commented sourly that ‘the vanity used thereat offended many godly’.32

  The series of masques included that held after the wedding of Argyll’s sister at Castle Campbell in midwinter 1563, at which shepherds appeared wearing white damask and playing sweetly upon the lute. Perhaps the most splendid of all the banquets was that which Mary herself gave at Shrovetide in 1564 when she was just recovering from an illness. It was reported by Randolph that no Scotsman had ever seen anything like it except at the marriage of a prince: it lasted for three days and all the attendants, as well as the queen herself, her ladies and her gentlemen, wore classical black and white. Randolph himself echoed the prevailing mood of carefree enjoyment when he told Cecil that until the arrival of the French ambassador, du Croc, in May 1563, who brought in the sterner atmosphere of outside affairs, all those at the Scottish court ‘did nothing but pass our time in feasts, banqueting, masking and running at the ring and such like’.33

  Through all this tapestry of court life ran the bright threads represented by the four Maries. Knox, ever eager to repeat scandals about the court if he could learn them, concentrated much of his attention on the Maries and the queen’s women in general, presumably because scandal about them could be held to smear the queen. For example, he repeated one actual case which had come to public knowledge at the beginning of Mary’s rule; of a ‘heinous murder’ committed in the court – ‘yea, not far from the Queen’s own lap’. A French woman who had served in the queen’s chamber was said to have ‘played the whore’ with the queen’s apothecary and in the course of the liaison unwisely conceived a child. Father and mother then conspired together to murder the infant: ‘Yet,’ to continue Knox’s account of it all, ‘were the cries of the newborn bairn heard; search was made, the child and mother both deprehended, and so were both the man and the woman damned to be hanged upon the public street of Edinburgh.’ But Knox did not mention what Randolph reported, that it was the queen herself, with her profound disgust of immorality in sexual matters, who insisted on the death sentence being carried out. Instead he went on to add that it had been well known that ‘shame’ hastened the marriage between John Semple, called the Dancer, and Mary Livingston, surnamed the Lusty. Having delivered this Parthian shot, he still could not resist saying it was well known what shocking reputations the Maries and the rest of the dancers at the court enjoyed: ‘The ballads of the age did witness, which we for modesty’s sake omit.’*34

  But pace Knox, the four Maries had in truth simple natures: like their mistress they were easily pleased by court festivities and enjoyments, and their reputations certainly did not deserve to be besmirched by his slurs. Their faults, if any, sprang from the natural light-heartedness and frivolity of youth, rather than anything more vicious. Mary Livingston owed her nickname of the Lusty to her energetic habit of dancing rather than to any raging physical appetites: there is no other contemporary evidence other than the venomous suggestion of Knox that her marriage was hastened by pregnancy, and her eldest child was indeed born a year after her marriage. Mary Livingston was considered reliable enough to be given special charge of the queen’s jewels, and her nuptials in fact at her family home at Falkirk seem to have been the occasion for special and long-planned rejoicings, which do not accord with the notion of a shameful union. The truth was that Mary Livingston was a girl of high spirits and exceptional vivacity, two qualities which were scarcely likely to commend her to Knox.

  Although the first to marry, Mary Livingston was not the belle of the quartet: this honour was always accorded to Mary Fleming. Originally it was her royal blood which set her apart from the other Maries: later, as her beauty bloomed, her remarkable combination of looks and vitality made her, in the opinion of Leslie, ‘the flower of the flock’. At the Twelfth Night festivities of 1564 Mary Fleming, dressed as Queen of the Bean in cloth of silver, her neck, shoulders and what seemed like the whole of her body set with jewels, so dazzled the gaze of Thomas Randolph that, although Mary Beaton was his acknowledged favourite among the four, he expressed the opinion that ‘the fair Fleming’ was surely chosen by Fortune to be a queen, and not for Twelfth Night only: assuming the mantle of Paris, he compared her in lyrical terms to Venus in beauty, Minerva in wit and Juno in worldly wealth – the two former being given her by nature, and the third he assumed to be at her command within the kingdom of Scotland. Buchanan too extolled the praises of this queen-for-the-night in Latin verse, terming her Queen ‘Flaminia’, to whom virtue itself had already supplied a sceptre.36

  Mary Beaton seems to have been the most classically beautiful of the four,* but she lacked the flowering fascination of Mary Fleming, which the fair Fleming owed perhaps to her share of Stuart blood. Like Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton’s beauty and worth were praised by Buchanan in verse, but her character was cast in a less flamboyant mould. The meekest of the four, Mary Seton, a daughter of one of the grandest houses in Scotland, was naturally pious and more devoted to the service of her mistress than to the pleasures to be derived at the court, as her subsequent history showed.

  Whatever Knox’s feelings about the Maries, and whatever his strictures on masques and similar diversions, we may be sure that Mary’s subjects themselves thoroughly enjoyed such display since it was twenty years since there had been anything in Scotland approaching proper court life. Randolph described what a pretty sight the Maries made as they rode with their mistress to Parliament in 1563 – ‘virgins, maids, Maries, demoiselles of honour, or the Queen’s mignons, call them as you please, your Honour’ wrote the English ambassador;37 the effect was the same: they made a pleasing spectacle. The burgesses’ wives who were reported to find the queen’s dresses too rich were probably nonetheless happy to be able to watch them go by. To the argument that Mary was extravagant, it may be answered that she was considerably less extravagant than her cousin Elizabeth in both her dress and her progresses. Not only was Mary used to infinitely more prodigal expenditure at the court of France, but also much of her glamour consisted in her personal charm. In any case, such display on the part of a sovereign was an essential part of personal and monarchical government, as one Elizabethan contemporary observed: ‘in such ceremonies, does the art of good government much consist’.38 The
result, as even Buchanan, later to be her harshest critic, admitted, was that this pretty, high-spirited creature, with her hunting, her hawking, her masques, her clothes, her jewels, was able to charm those members of the Scots nation who were there to be charmed. She indeed ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’ in her own particular Forest of Arden. Buchanan himself wrote of this period in her life:39 ‘Apart from the fascination of her varied and perilous history, she was graced with surpassing loveliness of form, the vigour of maturing youth, and fine qualities of mind which a court education had increased or at least made more attractive by a surface gloss of virtue.’

  * Arran plays no further part in the story of Mary Queen of Scots. Yet he lived on, unhappy invalid, for nearly half a century, and did not die until 1609, when all the actors in his story were long since dead, and the son of the woman he had once loved with the obstinate passion of an idiot was securely established on the throne of England.

  * At this point the finances of the crown had become so critical that the most intimate royal treasures had to be sold, including the gold and crimson coat worn by James v in Paris during his courtship of his first wife Madeleine, the crystal and agate cup which had been made for Queen Madeleine as a child, and the dresses left behind by the summer queen; even the cap sent by Pope Paul III to James v vanished, as did the historic cup from which Robert Bruce used to drink.6