Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  A prolonged game of cat-and-mouse now ensued with Huntly; the earl himself, drawn two ways, was clearly not yet quite sure in his own mind whether he was engaged in a rebellion or not; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would’, he temporized by sending his eldest surviving son Lord Gordon to consult Gordon’s father-in-law Châtelherault in the south. Knox wrote later that Gordon actually tried to raise the south to the same effect as his father was raising the north, and to this effect even contacted Bothwell, who had just escaped from his own imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle. But in the meantime Huntly offered to join with the queen to pursue his errant son John Gordon, provided he could appear with an armed force to support him. The queen understandably did not trust the appearance of Huntly surrounded by his Gordons, and Huntly equally declined to appear alone. Frightened of being captured, the great earl now took humiliatingly to sleeping every night under a different roof (easy enough in Gordon territory) but spending his days at Strathbogie. When the queen’s army got to hear of this, Kirkcaldy set out from Aberdeen with a small party of twelve men in order to surprise Huntly at his midday dinner and hold the entrance to Strathbogie until reinforcements arrived. Unfortunately the reinforcements proceeded both too quickly and too noisily, and Kirkcaldy was still parleying with the porter for an entrance to the castle when the clatter of their approach alerted the watchmen. Huntly had time to abandon his half-eaten meal, rush through the castle to the back and escape over a wall on to a waiting horse, without boots and without sword, but nevertheless still free. And on his fresh horse he soon outdistanced his pursuers.

  Lady Huntly was now compelled to welcome the royal emissaries in Strathbogie at last: they found it stripped bare, except, rather touchingly, for the chapel, which had been left completely furnished with all its candles, ornaments and altar-books, in readiness for the queen’s visit, when it had been expected that she would use it. But as Huntly and John Gordon had both now disappeared, and the latter had recently captured fifty-six harquebusiers from a company near Findlater, which rendered him still more dangerous, it was considered by the government that the final stage of rebellion had been reached. On 16th October, by orders of the Privy Council, both Huntly and John Gordon were ‘put to the horn’ or outlawed; although the keys of both Findlater and Auchendown were sent, the queen was not to be placated. In a grim mood, she commented that she had other means to open the Gordon doors; in the meantime she demanded the surrender of Strathbogie itself, which was refused. The 4th earl promptly retired to the hills, in his fastness in the wilds of Badenoch, and might have tasted the pleasures of guerrilla warfare indefinitely, had he remained there.

  Lady Huntly, however, was not content to leave the situation in this unsatisfactory state. First of all she attempted to have a further interview with the queen outside Aberdeen, which was denied to her. She then returned to Huntly’s side, and persuaded him that in his present critical state the best defence was attack. She seems to have been encouraged in her advice by the prophecy of her tame witches that by nightfall Huntly would be lying in the Tolbooth at Aberdeen, without any wound in his body. Egged on by his martial and optimistic wife, the earl now abandoned his stronghold, and marched militantly towards Aberdeen. Randolph at any rate was in no doubt as to his intentions: he believed that Huntly intended to ‘apprehend the Queen, and do with the rest of his will’. Knox put Huntly’s force at seven or eight hundred men, although other estimates made it over a thousand.10 Clearly, from the speech which he made to his men before battle, Huntly believed that many of the queen’s host would desert to his cause when the fighting began. In any case, he was able to take up a commanding position on the Hill of Fare, above the field of Corrichie.

  Even at this stage, Huntly’s fatal indecision struck him again: according to Knox, when he saw the determined numbers falling thin, he intended to retire from the scene before the battle could begin the next morning. However, his ill-health and corpulence prevented him from rising before ten o’clock in the morning, by which time it was too late. By now Maitland had made ‘a vehement orison’ to the queen’s troops, urging them to remember their duty and not to fear the multitudes before them. Huntly addressed his vehement orison, on the other hand, to God; falling on his knees, he addressed Him in the following prayer, which he considered appropriate to the occasion: ‘O Lord I have been a bloodthirsty man, and by my means has mekle innocent blood been spilt; but thou give me victory this day and I shall serve Thee all the days of my life …’11 But the prayer was not granted. As the days went on, the royal harquebus fire raked Huntly’s troops on the hill, forcing them off their eminence, and as a swamp lay at the bottom they found themselves virtually cut off in a trap. Moray and his men hacked down the Gordons, and Huntly and two of his sons, Sir John and seventeen-year-old Adam Gordon, were captured and brought before him. At this dramatic moment in his fortunes, the great northern earl finally found the strain of the situation too much for him. There and then he dropped down off his horse in front of his captors, stone dead from either heart failure or apoplexy, brought on by strain and overweight – or as the Diurnal of Occurrents vividly put it, ‘he burst and swelled’.12

  The sudden departure of Huntly’s wayward spirit from his all too solid flesh did not prevent his lifeless body from undergoing prolonged indignities. Immediately after the battle his unmarked body was thrown roughly over a pair of ‘crealles’ (fish baskets), and as it was late, taken to the Tolbooth at Aberdeen to lie there for the night – thus fulfilling the witches’ prophecy in true ironical and Delphic fashion. His corpse was then disembowelled and shipped south from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, £50 having been spent on a French doctor in Aberdeen and a surgeon in Edinburgh, together with spices, vinegar, aqua vitae and other necessities for the embalming of the body.13 It was all the more important to guard against the putrefaction of the late Huntly since the corpse itself was destined to be brought to trial by an ancient law, which provided for the presence of the offender, living or dead, for trial in front of Parliament, in cases of treason against the queen.*

  In May 1563, seven months after his death on the field of Corrichie, the embalmed corpse of Huntly was set up in front of the full session of Parliament, with Queen Mary sitting on the royal throne. The grisly relic was then solemnly declared guilty of treason, and sentence of forfeiture passed upon it and its erstwhile belongings, with the title of the earldom of Huntly declared to be attainted. The body, still unburied, was then deposited in the Blackfriars Priory in Edinburgh, and it was not until April 1566 that it was allowed to be carried back to the north, to be laid in the family tomb of the Gordons in Elgin Cathedral. The fate of the gay young Sir John Gordon was shorter and sharper. On 2nd November he was executed, in the presence of the queen herself, who was compelled to attend in order to give the lie to stories that she had encouraged him in his affections and his wild matrimonial schemes. Having a horror of bloodshed, she was extremely reluctant to do so, and as it turned out the reality was even worse than her imaginings. Sir John cried out that the presence of the queen solaced him, since he was about to suffer for love of her. But the executioner was clumsy at his task and the spectacle reduced the queen to passionate weeping; she was indeed so horrified by her ordeal that she ended by breaking down completely, and had to be carried to her chamber, where she remained all the next day, in a state of nervous collapse.

  Two of Huntly’s sons, Alexander and John, having been sacrificed in the general holocaust of his family’s fall from grace, Mary proceeded to spare the life of the eldest son George, Lord Gordon; he had not been involved in the final battle, having been away in the south consulting Châtelherault, and after being officially condemned with his father, he was pardoned and merely put into free ward at Dunbar. Huntly’s youngest son, Adam Gordon, was also spared. The rich vestments from Aberdeen Cathedral stored at Strathbogie since 1559 were taken down to Holyrood, where it seems the queen treated them more as Gordon spoils rather than as the ecclesiastical heritage they were, for they were
probably among the gilded vestments in her belongings turned to secular uses in the spring of 1567 making a rich bed for Darnley and a doublet for Bothwell. The spoils of Strathbogie Castle were either taken by the queen or given to Moray for his new castle of Darnaway. Besides the earldom of Moray, whose revenues were estimated by Randolph at 1000 merks a year, Moray also received the sheriffdoms of Elgin, Forres and Inverness. Hence the tumbling-down of Huntly’s power in the north left an empty space which Moray, rather than the crown, was able to fill; while the disappearance of the leading Catholic magnate from the Scottish scene could not fail to weaken the Catholic cause there, and in turn benefit the reformed religion.

  It has sometimes been argued that Mary made a fundamental mistake in allowing the balance of power to be upset in this way. The north of Scotland, which conceivably could have been a Catholic bloc under a friendly Huntly, to play off against a Protestant south, was now broken up into different units; and when the attainder was removed three years later for Huntly’s son, the properties were too dissipated for him to become the magnate his father had been. But even before 1562 Mary had never shown any signs of supporting Huntly either as a magnate or as a Catholic, and had repeatedly snubbed his overtures in favour of the Protestants. Her attitude towards Huntly was very much affected by her general policy since her arrival in Scotland, of leaning upon the advice of Moray and Maitland; her aim was to quieten down all possible Catholic insurrections, in favour of general peace, the maintenance of the royal authority and the status quo. It may well be argued that Mary’s policy was unwise, compared to the more serpentine procedure of backing each noble in turn, and luring them in some fashion to destroy each other, until the crown should be left triumphant. By this reasoning Huntly should have been skilfully built up, rather than bloodily laid low. Certainly the ‘pale augurs’ might well murmur low over his ‘blasted head’, when they reflected how critical Mary’s situation could be if Moray’s loyalty faltered. There was, however, an obvious difficulty in the way of pursuing this policy of checks and balances, quite apart from Mary’s own inexperience of Scottish affairs; this was the character of Huntly – so manifestly unreliable.

  Mary herself was in no doubt afterwards that Huntly’s treachery had been proved by the evidence discovered after his death, and the confessions of Sir John and Huntly’s servants (one of them made before the battle of Corrichie): all of which suggested that in his last moments Huntly did have some wild ill-conceived plan of seizing Mary’s person, and upsetting the Protestant régime in favour of a Catholic one. Mary continued to regard Huntly as a double-dyed traitor, and when she wrote to her uncle in France and to the Pope in January 1563, protesting her continued devotion to the Catholic faith, she clearly felt no regret that circumstances had compelled her to lay low her greatest Catholic subject – it had been an unpleasant duty which it would have been dangerous not to have carried out.15 By denying her entrance at Inverness, refusing to join her in the hunt against his son, and finally in taking up arms against her with the possible object of abducting her, he had certainly made it extremely difficult for her to support him against Moray, even if she had so wished. Thus Moray was easily able to gratify his natural avariciousness, and acquire the rich spoils in the north, having no need to work out any more subtle conspiracy. It is significant that Maitland himself, on his way back to southern Scotland, revealed that he was finally convinced of Huntly’s treachery: ‘I am sorry that the soil of my native country did ever produce so unnatural a subject as the Earl of Huntly hath proved in the end against his Sovereign,’ he wrote. ‘Being a Princess so gentle and benign … Well, the event hath made manifest his iniquity, and the innocence as well of her Majestie as of her ministers towards him.’16 In short, it was the character and temperament of Huntly which made it impossible in the final analysis for any dependence to be put upon him.

  Chastened in spirit by her experiences, and by the chilling fate of Sir John Gordon, Mary made her way southwards again and was back in Edinburgh by November: here, along with Maitland, she fell victim to the fashionable new disease, influenza, lightly dubbed ‘the New Acquaintance’, but was otherwise not directly threatened by any personal danger for the next few months, at least. In the spring of 1563, however, she was to be the subject of a more intimate assault than the projected abduction plans of either Arran, Bothwell or Sir John Gordon. Among the train of French courtiers who accompanied the queen to Scotland from France in 1561 was a certain Pierre de Châtelard: well-born, charming-looking and gallant, Châtelard was also a poet, a fact which naturally commended itself to Mary. He was attached to the suite of the son of the Constable de Montmorency, Damville, who was also counted among Mary’s admirers, to the extent that he was supposed to have desired to abandon his wife, still in France, out of love for the Scottish queen. Mary certainly wrote to the constable when he departed that she found his son the most agreeable company.17 Châtelard himself speedily followed suit by professing the sort of wild lyrical passion suitable in a chivalrous man of literary aspirations for a lovely young queen. It was the sort of admiration – light, courtly and elaborately meaningless – which Mary Stuart particularly enjoyed, because it committed her to nothing (unlike the more vigorous proposals of a John Gordon) and it was something to which she had long and agreeably been accustomed at the court of France. It was after all much more to her taste to be celebrated in verses than dragged into a Highland fastness and forcibly married. There was no suggestion at the time of anything at all scandalous in her attitude to Châtelard, and Knox’s insinuations (written after the event) that she had been over-familiar with him can safely be attributed to his vicious desire to put everything the queen did in the most evil light – he was also incidentally probably unaware of the gallant licence allowed to poets at the French court, and if he had been aware of it, would have regarded it as a further proof of French devilry. Châtelard ended his visit to Scotland with his master Damville, and returned to France.

  In the autumn of 1562, however, he decided to revisit the Scottish court; on his way through London, he confided that he was about to visit ‘his lady love’, and soon he was back with Mary’s court at Aberdeen, with a letter from Damville, and a book of his own poems. Mary received him in her usual friendly way, and with the compulsive generosity which she showed to those who pleased her, presented him with a sorrel gelding which had been given her by her half-brother Lord Robert, as well as some money to dress himself as befitted a young gallant: these favours were still absolutely no more than she showed at many times in her life to those around her, nor was there even now the faintest suggestion of impropriety in this conventional relationship of beautiful queen and platonic admiring poet. All this made Châtelard’s next move particularly incomprehensible. On the night when Maitland was about to set forth again for England, at the queen’s request, Mary, Moray and Maitland all conferred together until past midnight. Châtelard seized the opportunity to dash into her bedchamber unobserved, and hide under the bed. Luckily he was discovered by two of her grooms of the chamber, making their routine search of her tapestries and bed, and thrown out. The queen was not told of the incident until the morning, but immediately the news reached her, she ordered Châtelard to leave the court.

  Châtelard, however, was either self-confident enough or crazy enough to follow the queen to St Andrews. The next night he proceeded to burst in on her, when she was alone with only one or two of her women, and according to what Randolph first heard, made such audacious advances to her that the unfortunate queen cried out for help. Her brother Moray rushed in, and Mary, in a state of near-hysteria, begged him to run his dagger through the man to save her. Moray, with greater calm and prudence, soothed his sister, and persuaded her that it would be better if Châtelard’s life were temporarily spared, so that he could face a public trial. Randolph later heard that Châtelard’s intentions in making this second foray into the royal apartments had been merely to explain away his first intrusion, on the grounds that he had been overcome
by sleep, and had sought the first convenient resting-place.18 Whether he attempted to advance this implausible explanation or not, Mary’s reaction to the whole incident was highly hysterical, and no spinster ever reacted with more horrified indignation to the presence of a man in her bed-chamber than the already once married queen of Scots.

  Châtelard was sent to the dungeons of St Andrews, and after a public trial sentenced to execution on 22nd February. Romantic to the last, just before his execution, he read aloud Ronsard’s Hymn to Death there and then in the market square of St Andrews. The beautiful last lines of the poem must have seemed strangely ironical to those of the bystanders who understood enough French to appreciate them: