Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  On 22nd August James Stewart, earl of Moray, was proclaimed regent of Scotland. One side-effect of his new status was the opportunity which it gave him to take possession of Mary’s rich hoard of jewellery. It was a subject on which the queen felt strongly, and continued to do so for the rest of her life: the rape of her jewels by Moray caused her as much indignation as any other single injury he did to her. Moray was cunning enough to tell Throckmorton that Mary had actually begged him to take charge of her jewels on Lochleven in order to preserve them for herself and her son, but Mary afterwards accused Moray of simply stealing them. According to Nau, Mary pointed out to her brother not only that she wanted many of the jewels to be permanently united with the crown of Scotland (as she had specified in her will of 1566) but also that a preponderance of the jewels had been given to her by King Henry of France, or her husband Francis, and were therefore her own private property. Strong feelings on all sides were roused by the thought of this glowing prize. On 10th September Melville reported that Moray’s acquisition of the jewels had ‘colded many stomaches among the Hamiltons’.24 The one thing which Moray did not do with the jewels was to unite them permanently to the honour of the Scottish crown, as Mary intended. He gave some to his wife. Others he sold to Queen Elizabeth the following April in order to remedy his forlorn finances. The latter action may perhaps be justified, if not excused, as an act of state – but the former cannot. The pearls, which were shown to Elizabeth on 1st May, 1568, in front of Pembroke and Leicester, consisted of six rows, strung like rosaries, and separate pearls as large as black grapes. They were thought to be of ‘nonpareiled’ beauty; there were also rings of lesser value, and a piece of heavily bejewelled narwhal tooth; the pearls seem to have been those intended in Mary’s will to be divided between the crown of Scotland and the house of Guise, and the narwhal tooth for her favourite nephew Francis Stewart. From France Catherine de Médicis scented out the secret disposal of the pearls she had once admired and envied round her daughter-in-law’s white throat at Fontainebleau, and tried in vain to obtain them for herself.

  The proclamation of Moray as regent, coupled with the disappearance of Bothwell from the Scottish scene, led to a period of comparative calm on the little island of Lochleven. The queen’s health gradually returned, after her privations and her miscarriage, since the enforced seclusion, however odious, did at least ensure her the rest which she so grievously needed. With health and the sinking away of hysteria returned also resolution and calm positive thinking. By the beginning of September, she was able to write to Robert Melville far more in her old vein of practical decisiveness, as though the year from the birth of James onwards had been lived under some black and disastrous shadow, now fortunately rolled away. She asked for materials, silks to embroider, and clothes for her ladies including her favourite Mary Seton who had recently been allowed to join her – ‘for they are naked’.25 On 23rd September Moray was able to tell Bedford that her health was good, and she herself was ‘merrily disposed’.26 The question of her clothes was now better resolved: much of her gilded wardrobe was gone forever, seized by the confederates, and not a great deal of attention seems to have been paid to her luggage-less state until after the arrival of Moray, when Mary accused him of bringing her some old and mean garments, very roughly made up, in place of her own clothes.

  But the private aide-mémoires of her chamberlain, Servais de Condé,27 show that even in June some clothes were of necessity brought, to supplement the clothes in which she had travelled: such as a red satin petticoat furred with marten, some satin sleeves, a cloak of Holland, a pair of black silk tights, or chausses, and more practically, some pins and a box of sweetmeats. In July she received another box of sweets, various stockings and garments of a utilitarian nature, such as leather shoes and wool chemises as well as a little red velvet box with crossed Fs on it in silver. From August onwards she began to receive supplementary provisions, the lists of which sound like any parcels sent to prisoners of war or state in any century: boxes of sweets, more pins, lengths of Holland material to make clothes, soap, Spanish silk and gold and silver thread for embroidery to while away the hours, handkerchiefs, an embroidered peignoir and a little blue box of taffeta full of ‘poudre de santeur’. In October she received what must have been a welcome parcel – her perukes of false hair, and other accessories to arrange her coiffure. In November she received a striking clock with an alarm or ‘réveille matin’, more pins and linen. To a queen accustomed to the lavish grandeur of royal state since childhood, this was the diet of captivity. There was certainly no mention of the gorgeous dresses of the earlier inventories of the royal wardrobe in these lengths of Holland for her ladies to make up clothes. But, as captivities go, it was not particularly stringent, and on Lochleven, once her health was recovered, the queen began to develop those harmless, agreeable but petty activities with which royal prisoners while away their time – an unwitting dress rehearsal for the long years of imprisonment which lay ahead. She began to dance once more, and played at cards. She embroidered. She walked in the garden. She also looked out of the window towards the dark sedge of reeds along the distant edge of the lake and fed by the prisoners’ fare of hope pictured the moment when she too would be standing on that wind-blown shore, once more at liberty.

  If the queen dreamt of freedom, in the manner of all prisoners, it is unlikely that she also dreamt of Bothwell. Melville’s hint to her concerning George Douglas had borne fruit. The young man was personable, gallant, and only too happy to see in his sovereign a frail and helpless woman, the victim of a cruel fate. Her fragile beauty drawn with suffering, coupled with her romantic history, could not fail to move him further; Cecil said afterwards that he fell into ‘a fantasy of love’ with the queen. By August, the queen was attempting to draw over the inhabitants of Lochleven to sympathize with her by the exertion of her famous personal charm and gentleness; even Lady Margaret was thought to be succumbing. By the end of October, even Drury from Berwick was able to report to Cecil in London that there was a nasty suspicion of over-great familiarity existing between the queen and Mr Douglas.*28 Although George Douglas’s heart was genuinely stirred by the presence of this romantic heroine, Mary’s aim in this relationship, however much she appreciated the admiration, was quite clearly to escape from Lochleven; she now hoped to have found in George Douglas the weak link in the Douglas chain. But she was also able to extend her allure and her promise beyond even that of her own affections: for as Bothwell had now disappeared, there was in theory no reason why George Douglas should not aspire to her hand. This in turn did not necessarily displease his ambitious mother Margaret, who could imagine a worse future for her younger son than seeing him the husband of the queen of Scotland, with her other son the regent, able to restore his sister to power at any moment. As these projects buzzed in the minds of its inhabitants, during the autumn the island of Lochleven ceased to be an absolute slough of despair for the imprisoned queen of Scots.

  The disappearance of Bothwell was the key to this new hope, as it was also to the temporary stability of Scotland. Beyond the confines of the island, Bothwell had been pursued to the Orkneys by his inveterate enemy Kirkcaldy of Grange, who promised to bring him dead to Edinburgh or die himself. In the event, neither death took place, for although Bothwell’s capture was scheduled to take place before the end of August, at the beginning of September Moray was still obliged to observe warily on the subject: ‘We cannot merchandise for the bear’s skin before we have him.’29 Kirkcaldy lived on, to become later one of the queen’s most loyal adherents; Bothwell escaped to the Karmoi sound on the coast of Norway, but here had the misfortune to encounter some kinsmen of his former mistress Anna Throndsen, as well as some creditors from his previous Scandinavian travels. The combination resulted in him being officially captured and taken to Bergen on 2nd September, with two ships and 140 men. By the end of September he was being held in Copenhagen Castle, since King Frederick, joint sovereign of Denmark and Norway, quickly perceived in
his uninvited guest a useful pawn in international politics, who as the husband of the queen of Scots, heiress-presumptive to the English throne, could certainly be used against the English queen. Although Moray pressed for his extradition, and Bothwell himself wrote anxiously to the king of France, asking for help, he was destined to remain in a series of Danish prisons, of increasing squalor, for the rest of his life.*

  Throckmorton returned to England at the beginning of September, having never succeeded in achieving that audience with Queen Mary on Lochleven which he had so earnestly desired. On instructions from the English queen, he refused the silver plate given to him on his departure in the name of King James, on the grounds that Queen Elizabeth did not acknowledge Queen Mary’s abdication from the throne of Scotland; nor did she acknowledge the regency of Moray, despite his many friendly overtures to England. Despite this disapproval from across the border, the Marian party in Scotland seemed temporarily in abeyance: Huntly and Herries had recrossed to Moray’s side; Dunbar surrendered to the regent; Dumbarton, in the west of Scotland, was the only fortress left, and its effectiveness was considerably annulled by the fact that it lay in the centre of Lennox country. By the middle of October, Moray was able to write to Cecil that Scotland was quiet.30

  Scotland might be quiet, and no part of it quieter than the tiny island in the middle of Lochleven which held the imprisoned queen. Nevertheless the course of Mary’s fortunes did not stand still. The winter of 1567 was remarkable for an unpleasant new development in her affairs. The governing lords found that circumstances dictated they should change their attitude both towards her and towards the official reasons for her imprisonment. It was not enough to keep Mary incarcerated, having procured her abdication; the lords needed to provide some further public justification for their behaviour towards her. Originally they had claimed to be freeing Mary from Bothwell’s tutelage at Carberry Hill – there was no question of implicating Mary personally in Darnley’s murder. But now that Bothwell had disappeared from the Scottish scene and Mary was in prison at Lochleven, they could hardly continue to criticize her on the score that she was unduly influenced by Bothwell. Some other reason had to be put forward to justify her continued confinement. It was time for the lords to gloss over the deep implication of some of their number in the murder at Kirk o’Field. The Craigmillar bond of November 1566, to get rid of the king, had been signed by Maitland, Morton and James Balfour amongst others; now this was conveniently forgotten. In December 1567, nearly a year after the event, Mary was herself publicly blamed for the death of Darnley.

  The existence of certain documents which implicated Mary in the crime was mentioned for the first time in front of the Privy Council on 4th December.31 The text of these writings was not quoted, nor were the actual documents produced; but their existence was used to justify a new Act of Council which stated that the official cause of Mary’s detention was her involvement in her husband’s death. Mary was said to have encouraged the outrage ‘in so far as by divers her privy letters written and subscribed with her own hand and sent by her to James Earl Bothwell, chief executioner of the horrible murder’. At the Parliament convened by Moray on 15th December, Mary’s abdication of the government was said to be ‘lawful and perfect’; James’s investiture and coronation was described as being as valid as those of his ancestors, since it was to be considered as though his mother were actually dead. Moray’s appointment as regent was confirmed, and the lords who had taken up arms at Carberry Hill were formally vindicated in that Queen Mary had been ‘privy, art and part of the actual devise and deed of the forenamed murder of the King her lawful husband’.32 This was quite a new departure from the line which the lords had actually taken on the eve of the battle. Then all the talk had been of Bothwell’s guilt; now for the first time the subject of Mary’s guilt was introduced. It was a change of emphasis which boded no good for Mary’s future.

  Although Mary herself on her island was unaware of the turn which matters were taking, the news that Moray was summoning a Parliament was enough to cast her into a state of fervour agitated by frustration. She addressed a long letter to her brother, asking that she should be allowed to vindicate herself before it, as previously arranged; she touched on her relationship to Moray, the favours she had shown him, his promises to the French court to support her, and earnestly suggested that she would submit to any law, even laying aside her queenly rank, if only she could be allowed a hearing; Queen Mary also pointed out pathetically her past virtues as a ruler – how she had never been extravagant or embezzled her subjects’ money, like so many sovereigns.33 To this cri de coeur, in which can be heard the desperation of the captive who will promise anything, if only he or she can be allowed a hearing from the outside world, Moray sent only a few lines of acknowledgement. On his next visit to Lochleven, when he brought James Balfour and Morton, relations between the brother and sister were cold and quarrelsome. Yet by mid-winter the graph of Scottish loyalties was rising once more in Mary’s favour. For one thing, the Hamiltons were annoyed that Moray had assumed the regency, which they thought belonged rightfully to their family, as in the past, and did not attend the December Parliament. Kirkcaldy and Maitland were both privately concerned lest Mary’s abdication under duress might be considered illegal in the future. It was not long before Maitland began to display his usual political ambiguity: in her prison the queen received secretly an engraved ring representing Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse.34 The gift was said to come from Mary Fleming, but at the time it was generally believed that its true significance was the promise of future support from her husband Maitland – the grateful mouse who would gnaw through the bonds of the lion, Mary.

  The Scots people, who had been told that their queen had been removed for complicity in Darnley’s murder, could see for themselves that many nobles, far more intimately involved than she, were not only at liberty, but forming part of the government of the country. Moray’s persistent hunting down of the lesser criminals was intended to distract attention from this patent fact, but when John Hay of Tallo was publicly executed at the beginning of January 1568, he stood up on the scaffold and declared boldly to the large crowd assembled that Huntly, Argyll, Maitland and Balfour had all subscribed the bond for Darnley’s murder. This scarcely helped on the process of distraction. The hacked-off limbs of Hay, Powrie and Hepburn were in turn posted up on the gates of the leading Scottish towns, twenty-two shillings being paid to the boy who went on his way from Edinburgh to Leith, Haddington and Jedburgh bearing the grisly burden of a pair of legs.35 But such public expenditure, such improving sights, still did not prevent Queen Mary’s erstwhile subjects from clamouring against the lords in the government, that they too should ‘suffer for their demerits’.

  The marriageability of the queen became once more a matter of public comment and private speculation. Drury thought Mary asked her brother if she might marry George Douglas as early as December36 – fresh evidence of the unenduring quality of her feelings for Bothwell; the regent was said to have refused on the grounds that his half-brother was an ‘overmean’ marriage for the queen. George Douglas had the advantage of being able to press his suit in person. Other names, some of them strange indeed in the context, were mentioned, including a Hamilton, son of the duke of Châtelherault, Argyll’s brother, and a young Stewart (Lord Methven). The most optimistic rumour was that which advanced the name of Morton himself, although it was agreed that the queen might not take easily to the notion. The junta of nobles in power, in between scheming privately for their relations or themselves to marry the queen, jested publicly about what would befall them if the queen managed to escape.

  As spring came to Lochleven, Mary was able to smuggle out a few letters to France describing her plight and appealing for aid. They have a determined and desperate tone. She begged Queen Catherine de Médicis, in a letter (written while her jailers were at dinner) which stressed her wretched condition, to send some French soldiers to deliver her – ‘it is by force alone I ca
n be delivered. If you send never so few troops to countenance the matter, I am certain great numbers of my subjects will rise to join them; but without that they are overawed by the power of the rebels and dare attempt nothing of themselves.’37 She managed to write to Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in Paris, describing her sufferings, but begged him to burn her letters, lest they be discovered and get some of her supporters, who had helped her smuggle them out, into trouble.’38 She also wrote to Queen Elizabeth, a letter dated 1st May, in a large sprawling handwriting, very unlike her usual even lines, showing the ravages of despair after ten months’ captivity: she described movingly ‘la langueur du temps de mon ennuieuse prison’ and the cruel slights of those to whom she had done nothing but good; how her brother Moray had taken all she has (this letter was written on the very day on which Queen Elizabeth was viewing those ‘nonpareiled pearls’, a fact of which Queen Mary was fortunately in ignorance). Mary also attached great importance to the ring which Elizabeth had once sent her, and considered it as a talisman which would bring good luck to their relations. To her great distress she had not managed to persuade Robert Melville to part with the jewel, for fear of Moray’s vengeance, so that she could not dispatch it to England as she wished to move Elizabeth’s heart with pity. The letter ended pathetically: ‘Ayez pitié de votre bonne soeur et cousine.’39