Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

* But Mary was wrong in supposing that the dispensation had already been granted. The dispensation was granted in Rome some time after 1st September and before 25th September; it arrived in Scotland several weeks after that – but was not of course published, since the marriage had already taken place on the assumption of its existence, and to publish its actual date would have been embarrassing to the queen.8 Unless Mary and Darnley went through a further marriage ceremony after the date of its granting (of which there is no record) their marriage was technically invalid.

  * The title of Lord Darnley was a courtesy title, which he bore as the elder surviving son of the earl of Lennox, according to the English custom (in Scotland at this period Darnley would have been known as the master of Lennox). Darnley was created earl of Ross in May and duke of Albany in July, before being proclaimed as ‘King Henry’ by the queen. In the present work, however, which already contains three King Henrys – Henry VIII of England, and Henry II and III of France – he will still be referred to as Darnley for the sake of clarity. But it is important to realize that Darnley was universally referred to as ‘the king’ in Scotland at the time.

  * The correct spelling of his name. Rizzio seems to have originated from Rizio in the first printing of Knox’s History in 1644.

  † The portrait usually given as that of Riccio, from which many engravings have been made, showing a soulful gentleman fingering a lute, with fine eyes, a chiselled mouth, a neat beard, certainly does not depict him as ugly; but it is an imaginary portrait, dating from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century, and has no connection with his true appearance.

  * He was credited with the composition of the music for seven Scottish songs – The Lass of Patie’s Mill, Bessie Bell, The Bush Aboon Traquair, The Bonnie Boatman, And Thou were my Ain Thing, Auld Rob Morris and Down the Burn David, in the 1725 edition of Orpheus Caledonius; later James Oswald attached his name to certain songs in the Caledonian Companion, and was accused of having done so for the sake of publicity. In fact the legend of Riccio the composer rests on tradition only, and as such can be neither proved nor disproved – although it seems infinitely more likely that a native Italian would be interested by, collect and play rather than actually compose such characteristically Scottish melodies. See John Glen, Early Scottish Melodies, for a balanced discussion of the whole subject.

  * The six documents among the state papers in the Register House at Edinburgh dated from July 1565 to May 1566 signed by Queen Mary and Darnley after their marriage invariably show their signatures in this position; on at least two occasions, however, Darnley asserted himself by making his signature considerably larger than that of the queen.

  * In England signatures by wooden stamp were used from the reign of Henry VI onwards.

  † James was born on 19th June 1566. By the law of averages, he was therefore conceived on or about 19th September 1565. The circumstances of his birth might seem to suggest that he was premature, since his mother had endured such hardships during the pregnancy. But after the murder of Riccio, Mary specifically declared in her letter to Archbishop James Beaton of 2nd April 1566,27 that she had been nearly seven months pregnant at the time of the assassination (9th March 1566). Yet a calculation based on James’s birth shows that she was in fact only approaching six months pregnant. This seems to show that Mary in April believed her pregnancy to be more advanced than it was. It certainly disposes of the notion that James was premature, since by Mary’s calculations James was born late rather than early. One therefore returns to the most likely date of on or a little before 19th September 1565 for conception.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Our Most Special Servant

  ‘Some of our subjects and council by their proceedings have declared manifestly what men they are … slain our most special servant in our own presence and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably.’

  Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth of England,

  15th March 1566

  In January 1566 Mary Queen of Scots was in her own estimation riding high, with her courage unimpaired and her resolution only strengthened by the recent ordeal through which she had passed with such success; the future, bringing with it the prospect of the birth of an heir, looked bright to a woman whose nature combined spirit and optimism with tenderness. But there was no denying that the opposition which was building up against her both within and without Scotland had an ugly aspect to it: if she had appreciated its real extent, even Mary in her most buoyant mood might have experienced some unquiet moments while she speculated just how and when such thunder clouds would break into the fury of the storm. First of all there were set steadily against her those Protestant lords temporarily in exile, such as Moray; their primary desire was to return to Scotland, but their hostility to Mary was given a new edge when she threatened, in addition to banishment, to attaint them and declare their properties forfeited at the forthcoming session of Parliament, to be held in the spring.

  Then there were the Kirk and Knox who feared to see Mary take advantage of her new strength since the defeat of Moray to advance the claims of the Catholic Church; this they also suspected she might try to accomplish at the coming parliamentary session. As it happens, the contemporary rumours that Mary was about to join a Catholic League with other foreign Catholic powers have been shown to be groundless – no record having been found of such a League, let alone Mary’s intended participation in it* – and what plans if any Mary had for helping the Catholics at the forthcoming Parliament will never be known. At most she would probably have asked for toleration of the Mass for Scottish Catholics, rather than the rabid attacks to which the Mass and priests were subjected when detected; Mary was certainly modern enough in thought to wonder why the Catholics should not enjoy the free practice of their own religion, which she had so unquestioningly granted to the Protestants from the first moment of her arrival in Scotland. But of course Knox, like all those who have accomplished a revolution, was hysterically fearful to see its effects undone, and any ideas of mutual tolerance would have fallen on very deaf ears indeed. In January an emissary came from the new Pope Pius V, with an extremely friendly if somewhat over optimistic message for the queen on the subject of the recent revolt: ‘Most dear daughter – We have heard with the utmost joy that you and His Highness, your husband, have lately given a brilliant proof of your zeal by restoring the due worship of God throughout your whole realm. Truly, dearest daughter, you understand the duties of devout kings and queens …’ The Pope went on to encourage her to weed out completely ‘the thorns and tares of heretical depravity …’,1 and promised all the help possible in this worthwhile task. Although Pius V seemed to have but little idea of the true state of affairs in Scotland, Mary was quite acute enough to send her own emissary, the bishop of Dunblane, for the second time to ask for a papal subsidy – since the Pope’s mention of ‘all the kind offices that paternal love can suggest’ certainly spelled financial aid to Mary, always extremely conscious of this problem.

  Added to these two groups were those other Protestant nobles within the confines of Scotland, such as Morton and Maitland, who hated to see Mary’s other ‘base-born’ advisers advanced to the detriment of their own position. It will be seen that Riccio, as chief representative of this despised and hated class, was the natural scapegoat for all the sections of the community opposed to the queen. He was also of course the obvious suspect on which Darnley could pour his rage and jealousy against his wife – if such a jealousy could be focused on the hunched figure of the little Italian. It was now the work of Mary’s opponents at court to incite the foolish bombastic Darnley into such a state of frenzy that he might be persuaded to join in their own more serious enterprises. In order to do so it was necessary to present to Darnley that in the opinion of many Scottish nobles he, not Mary, would make the most suitable ruler of Scotland. This was the notion which was now ‘buzzed’ in Darnley’s excitable brain.

  The extreme cynicism of such behaviour should not be overlooked – th
e Scottish nobles, including Moray, were now proposing a scheme which involved the coronation of Darnley, the very man against whose elevation they had rebelled in August. Darnley was still nominally a Catholic, and since Christmas 1565, when he ostentatiously went to Mass to score a point over his wife, he had been flaunting his faith in the face of his compatriots for some reason of his own. On the Feast of the Purification, he processed through the streets of Edinburgh with lighted tapers, a notably Catholic gesture; on another occasion he asked Lords Fleming, Livingston and Lindsay whether they would be content to go to Mass with him ‘which they refusing, he gave them all evil words’.2 Bedford reported that Darnley would have liked to shut up the noblemen in their chambers and force them to go to Mass. Yet this Catholicism was apparently of no account to the Protestant Lords Moray, Ochiltree, Boyd and Rothes now that their persons and properties were threatened by the oncoming session of Parliament: Darnley’s qualities and religion, so distasteful in July that he could not be tolerated as a royal consort, were in February apparently sufficiently worthy to make a candidate for supreme power, with the backing of the Protestant lords.

  It was now plainly suggested to Darnley that his wife was Riccio’s mistress, and the waning of his own power was due to the machinations of the Italian. It was not difficult to arouse the jealousy of a man of Darnley’s vain temperament, and Darnley’s cousin Morton seems to have done much of the trouble-making. Mary, conscious of her innocence, added fuel to the flames by openly finding pleasure in Riccio’s counsels and his company. Could there have been any truth in the story? Neither Riccio’s age, height nor his ugliness would have been any certain bar against a woman finding him desirable, since attraction follows its own rules. It is true that Mary Stuart herself did not appear to find men of this sort appealing – Darnley, young, elegantly beautiful and outwardly romantic, was the type she apparently admired; all we know of her relations with Riccio, including her behaviour at his death, seems to fit into the pattern of ruler and confidant, rather than mistress and lover. But what really militates against the possibility of Mary having had a love affair with David Riccio is the timing of it. Later the reproach was to be flung in the face of James VI that he was actually ‘Davy’s son’.* In January Randolph wrote dolefully to Leicester. ‘Woe is me for you, when Davy’s son shall be a King of England’,3 but as this was only a few weeks before he was asked to leave Scotland by Mary, and as ever since her marriage to Darnley his reports on her behaviour had been openly laced with spite, too much attention should not be paid to the scandalous prophecy. In order for the accusation to be true the queen would have to have been indulging in a secret love affair with Riccio throughout that same summer in which she was so obviously infatuated with Darnley; she would then have had to conceive a child by Riccio less than two months after her marriage to Darnley, when to outward observers she was still deeply in love with her husband. It seems that the worst that Mary can be accused of, with Riccio, as with Châtelard, is a certain lack of prudence which was very much part of her character, rather than some more positive indiscretion.

  The character of Darnley was like a tinderbox, on which it was all too easy for the disaffected nobles to strike a flame, using Riccio as a flint. Early in 1566 the Order of St Michel was brought by a French envoy M. Rambouillet to Edinburgh, to bestow upon Darnley on behalf of the king of France. When asked what arms should be placed upon Darnley’s shield, Mary coldly ‘bade them give him his due’,4 as Knox’s narrative has it: the fact that she did not specify the royal arms was a further unwelcome indication that she did not intend to bestow the crown matrimonial upon Darnley in the coming Parliament. Darnley retaliated with a series of debauched and roistering parties, which caused considerable scandal in Edinburgh; in the course of them, he made several of Rambouillet’s suite hopelessly drunk. Quite apart from the intoxication he spread about him, Darnley’s own drunkenness was beginning to constitute a public problem. At the home of an Edinburgh merchant, he became so wild in Mary’s presence that she tried to halt his drinking, at which he insulted her, and she left the house in floods of tears. Nor was his drunkenness his only weakness: he searched for his pleasures in many different corners of human experience. On the one hand there were rumours of love affairs with court ladies; on the other, in a letter to Cecil in February, Sir William Drury hinted at something so vicious which had taken place at a festivity at Inch-Keith, too disgraceful to be named in a letter, that Mary now slept apart from her husband.5

  Despite the anxiety caused by Darnley’s behaviour, Mary persisted in her plan to hold a Parliament in March at which the Protestant lords who had rebelled would be attainted and their properties forfeited. She turned a deaf ear to any suggestion that they should be pardoned, with the exception of Châtelherault, who had been forgiven on condition he went into banishment for five years. Under these circumstances the two-pronged conspiracy to restore these lords and give Darnley the crown matrimonial went forward. On 9th February Maitland, who now clearly despaired of the pardoning of Moray, and feared for his whole Anglo-Scottish policy, wrote to Cecil that since the rebels were not to be readmitted, there was nothing for it but ‘to chop at the very root’.6 This sinister phrase seemed to hint at least at the possibility of removing Mary from her throne – and it might of course mean something more violent directed towards her actual life. On 13th February Randolph sent a communication to Leicester on the whole subject, which casts an even more lurid light on the secret intentions of the conspirators: ‘I know for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth Darnley and all his kin,’ he wrote. ‘I know there are practices in hand contrived between father and son to come by the crown against her will. I know that if that take effect which is intended, David, with the consent of the King [Darnley], shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many things grievouser and worse than these are brought to my ears, yes, of things intended against her own person.’7 Let us not forget, what was surely ever-present in the minds of Lennox and Darnley, that if Mary vanished from the scene, and her unborn child never saw the light of day, Darnley had an excellent chance of becoming king of Scotland in his own right. It was a propitious moment for the Lennox Stewarts, since the head of the Hamiltons was abroad in disgrace; this might prove the ideal opportunity for them to stigmatize the Hamilton claim to the throne as illegal once and for all.

  A bond was now drawn up by those conspirators active in Scotland; these included Morton, George Douglas the Postulate, his illegitimate half-brother, Ruthven and Lindsay, both married to Douglas wives. The former Protestant rebel lords who signed included Ochiltree, Boyd, Glencairn, Argyll and Rothes, as well as Moray, who signed it at Newcastle on 2nd March. Maitland did not actually sign the bond, from whatever motives of caution or self-preservation, although Randolph listed his name among the conspirators. In this bond, the declared intentions were to be the acquisition of the crown matrimonial for Darnley, and the upholding of the Protestant religion, and the return of the exiles. The lords were careful to obtain Darnley’s signature, in order that he should be as thoroughly implicated as themselves; but in all the clauses of the bond there was no mention of any sort of violence or of David Riccio – only Item Five had a faintly menacing ring: ‘So shall they not spare life or limb in setting forward all that may bend to the advancement of his [Darnley’s] honour.’8 One aspect of the conspiracy which seemed to rob it still further of any possible content of idealism was the fact that it was known about in London beforehand. In February Randolph’s known agent had been caught flagrante supplying money to the rebels; Mary had sent for Randolph, furiously upbraided him, and then ordered him to leave Scotland; from Berwick, however, he still remained thoroughly in touch with the seething atmosphere of Edinburgh. On 25th February he was able to write a full report of the conspiracy and its known adherents to London; Elizabeth reacted characteristically to a situation which she saw was about to put Mary at a new disadvantage: on 3rd March she wrote her a threatening letter, criticizing Ma
ry’s treatment of both Moray and Randolph, although one was an ambassador caught bribing rebels, and another a Scottish subject who had rebelled against his queen.9 Elizabeth also sent £1000 to Moray at Newcastle.

  Yet Mary herself seemed to have no inkling of what was about to happen – or else she had gained sufficient self-confidence in the past year to believe that she would weather the storm. The spreading panoply of court life continued to flower on majestically, ignorant of the fact that its roots were threatened. On 24th February the marriage of Bothwell and Lady Jean Gordon, sister to Huntly, was celebrated with considerable pomp. The significance of the match was the dynastic union of two of Mary’s firmest adherents. In token of her approval, Mary herself supplied the eleven ells of cloth of silver for Lady Jean’s wedding-dress, although Bothwell firmly insisted on the marriage taking place according to the Protestant rite. Love does not seem to have played much part in the match: Lady Jean had a cool detached character, warmed by a masculine intelligence – ‘a great understanding above the capacity of her sex’ as her son later put it.10 Her long clever face with its firm nose and rather bulbous eyes lacked beauty and softness: she was hardly the type to appeal to Bothwell, judged from the standard of those women with whom he had been involved up to the present. She did, however, possess one definite attraction in her solid dowry, provided by her brother Huntly, and Lady Jean herself proved to have an excellent appreciation of the values of the property – later she managed to hold on to her lands through thick and thin despite Bothwell’s attainder. The real love of her life, the man for whom she reserved affections which Bothwell never touched, seems to have been Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne: two months after Lady Jean’s own marriage, he was wedded to the beautiful Mary Beaton.*

  In the meantime the behaviour of Riccio, like that of Darnley, played into the hands of the conspirators. Froude has given the most sympathetic interpretation of Darnley’s fatal incursion into Scottish politics – he was ‘like a child who has drifted from the shore in a tiny pleasure boat, his sails puffed out with vanity …’.11 But if Darnley was a child, Riccio was like the bullfrog in Aesop’s fable, inflated by his own arrogance. The astrologer Damiot tried to warn him of the dangers of his situation, and told him to ‘Beware of the Bastard’; Riccio assumed this referred to Moray and replied confidently: ‘I will take good care that he never sets foot in Scotland again’ – forgetting that the description could apply to a number of other people in sixteenth-century Scotland. Damiot talked of his unpopularity, Riccio said grandly: ‘Parole, parole, nothing but words. The Scots will boast but rarely perform their brags.’ Mary took the same line. Melville tried to warn her also of what was going on, saying he had heard ‘dark speeches’, and that there were rumours current that they should hear some unpleasant news before Parliament was ended. Mary replied that something of the sort had also come to her own ears, but she had paid no attention since ‘our countrymen were well-wordy’.12