Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  The decision once taken, Herries wrote to Lowther, the deputy governor of Carlisle, asking permission for the Scottish queen to take refuge in England. But Mary did not even wait for the return of the messenger. She was now in borrowed linen, and in clothes and a hood lent by the laird of Lochinvar. The hood was especially necessary because her head was shorn of its beautiful red-gold wealth of hair as a precaution against recognition: one of Nau’s most poignant headings reads: ‘How she caused her head to be shaved.’8 In this disguise she made her way west from Terregles to the abbey of Dundrennan, lying among trees in a secluded valley at the end of winding roads from Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas, which finally led down to the coast. Dundrennan, a twelfth-century Cistercian foundation, was one of the most beautiful abbeys in Scotland, but the queen had little time to admire its beauties or even to listen to the soft roar of the sea a mile away. Her mind was on the future and on England. She sent yet another letter to Elizabeth from Dundrennan – ‘After God, she has now no hope save in Elizabeth. …’9 But having so firmly fixed her earthly hopes on the English queen, Mary seemed to find no point in waiting for an answer to her letter.

  On the afternoon of Sunday 16th May she went down to the little port at the mouth of the Abbey Burn from which the monks of Dundrennan used to trade with the continent. From this undistinguished sea shore, she could actually see the coast of England across the Solway Firth. Perhaps the sight encouraged her, for at three o’clock in the afternoon the queen of Scotland embarked in a small fishing boat, with only a tiny party of loyal followers – Lord Herries, Maxwell and Fleming, Lord Claud Hamilton and about sixteen other attendants. In this humble fashion, Mary Stuart, who had been born in such magnificence in the palace of Linlithgow, a princess of Scotland, left her native country in a common fishing boat, never to return.

  According to one tradition, during the four-hour journey the queen had a sudden premonition of the fate which awaited her in England, and ordered the boatmen to take her after all to France; but the winds and tide were against her, and the boat went remorselessly on towards England.10 Nau mentions no such vacillation: when Queen Mary arrived at the small Cumberland port of Workington at seven in the evening, she seemed as elated as ever by the heady wine of optimism. Queen Mary stumbled as she first set foot on English soil: this omen, which might have been interpreted in a sinister light, was on the contrary taken by her followers as a sign that their queen was coming to take possession of the country. At Workington, the queen rested and was given supper, while Lord Herries sent a message to Sir Henry Curwen of Workington Hall, whom he knew of old, to say that he had with him a young heiress whom he had carried off from Scotland with the hope of marrying her to Sir Henry’s son. The answer to this inviting proposition came back that Sir Henry was in London but that his house and servants were at Lord Herries’s disposal. Already Mary’s surprising and sudden arrival at the small port, combined with her marked height and dramatically beautiful appearance, were leading the inhabitants to guess only too easily that they had the famous Scottish queen in their midst. One of the Curwen servants, who was French, did not even have to guess: he recognized Queen Mary immediately and told Lord Fleming that he had seen her majesty before ‘in better days’.

  The next morning the deputy governor, Lowther, already warned by Herries’s letter, arrived with a force of 400 horsemen. In the absence of the governor, Lord Scrope, who was at that moment in London, he planned to conduct the queen back to Carlisle. Queen Mary told Lowther calmly that she had come to England to solicit the assistance of the queen of England against her rebellious subjects. She had already in her brief space of freedom in Scotland sent John Beaton to Elizabeth in London with the famous diamond to which Mary attached such importance; she had written to Elizabeth from Dundrennan; now Mary wrote a third letter from Workington asking for help. The queen was taken to Cockermouth the next day, where she lodged in the home of Master Henry Fletcher, and by 18th May was installed in semi-captivity at Carlisle Castle. On her route she encountered the French ambassador to Scotland, Villeroy de Beaumont, on his way back to France after having had his train plundered by Moray’s followers. The news he gave Mary of the fate of her own supporters in Scotland was discouraging: Mary was confirmed in her gloomy supposition that she would need English aid if she was ever to make her own way back to Scotland.

  Lowther had reported that the attire of the Scottish queen was ‘very mean’:11 once more in Mary’s history a hurried escape from danger, in disguise, had left her with nothing in the way of a change of clothes. However, Fletcher, who was a merchant, is said to have presented her with a length of velvet for her wardrobe and a black dress was made for her on credit. Also Lowther, noting that the Scottish queen had so little money with her that it would scarcely cover the costs of clothing she so sadly needed, gallantly ordered her expenses at Cockermouth to be defrayed, and provided geldings of his own accord, to convey the queen and her train to Carlisle. Lowther was evidently genuinely puzzled as to exactly how he should treat this strange bird of rare plumage which had so confidently flown into the English aviary; but he was determined to err if anything on the side of courtesy, not knowing from one minute to the next whether his guest might not be summoned to London and there received with every honour by Queen Elizabeth herself. As a result, at this point Mary’s own confidence in the rightness of her decision was unshaken, and in a letter to the earl of Cassillis dictated from Carlisle on 20th May she described herself as ‘right well received and honourably accompanied and treated’ in England; she expected to be back in Scotland at the head of an army, French if not English, ‘about the fifteenth day of August’.12

  Puzzled as Richard Lowther might have been as to how to treat his royal visitor, whether as queen or captive, or a nice combination of both, his bewilderment was as nothing compared to the perturbation of Elizabeth’s advisers in London. Here Queen Mary’s arrival, romantic foolish gesture as it might be, had caused a flutter from which the English court would take time to recover. After all, how was Queen Elizabeth to treat the royal fugitive? She had not captured Queen Mary, nor sought to do so. Mary had arrived of her own free will, expressly seeking English assistance, as her own letters immediately before and after her arrival testified. It is a point worth emphasizing, since it was to be raised by Mary again and again during the years as an English prisoner, last of all, with pardonable bitterness, at her own trial in England. Yet Queen Mary’s request to be restored to her own throne posed Elizabeth a whole series of problems which she could hardly ignore. It was unthinkable in fact for the Protestant English queen to take arms against Scotland on behalf of her Catholic cousin; on the other hand if Elizabeth did not do so, there was nothing to stop Mary making the same request of the French, who might seize with enthusiasm upon this new opportunity for entry on to the British mainland. Therefore, to allow Mary to pass freely through England to France was hardly good politics from the English point of view.

  Was the Scottish queen to be received at the English court, and permitted to enjoy full liberty in England? The Venetian ambassador in Paris sanguinely reported that a palace was being specially prepared for Mary in London, with great pomp;13 but this was an equally obnoxious prospect from the angle of English statecraft. Mary Stuart at liberty might prove an unpleasant focus for the loyalties of the English Catholics. Mary herself might have forgotten that ten years before as dauphiness of France she had claimed to be rightful queen of England, rather than heiress-presumptive to the throne. But Elizabeth’s principal adviser, Cecil, had not forgotten her pretensions, and there was no guarantee that the English Catholics had either. Mary at this point knew nothing at first hand of the remarkable character of these people: their obstinacy, their heroism, their fineness of spirit which made them, paradoxically, for all their attitude to the new official religion of the country, among the most admirable of the Elizabethans. But to the prudent Cecil, the possible reactions of the English Catholics to Mary had to be taken into account.
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br />   Taken all in all, the most politic course from the English point of view was to temporize, until sufficient assessment had been made of the interior situation of Scotland. In the long run, Elizabeth felt, it would probably be wisest to dispatch Mary back to her difficult subjects, rather than let her loose in either England or France, and furthermore there was that other consideration that subjects should not be encouraged to rebel against queens. But of course there was no question of restoring Mary by the force of an English army; the terms on which the Scots would accept Mary back would have to be discovered by cautious inquiries – and, if possible, negotiated to Elizabeth’s own advantage. In the meantime it would be best to keep Mary in the north not exactly a prisoner, but not exactly free, not exactly debarred for ever from Elizabeth’s presence, but certainly not welcomed into it.* The only course which was emphatically to be debarred to Mary was that of seeking French help: as Elizabeth’s instructions of 18th May stated, Mary was to be told plainly that as Elizabeth intended to assist her herself, any attempt on the Scottish queen’s part to bring in the French as well would be regarded as merely renewing old quarrels.14 Fortunately Mary had not arrived in England with an unbesmirched reputation: there was that unresolved matter of Darnley’s death, and the scandal she had caused by marrying the chief suspect. The cloud of old scandal round Mary’s head now provided a convenient excuse for putting her off from Elizabeth’s presence, until she should have been cleared of all guilt. And in such a work of arbitration, who would be more suitable to act as judge between Mary’s cause and that of her nobles than the English queen herself?

  Queen Elizabeth’s next move was to send her trusted counsellor, Sir Francis Knollys, north to treat with her guest-captive along these delicate lines. Knollys was the husband of Catherine Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s sister, who was Elizabeth’s first cousin through the Boleyns, as well as being her intimate friend. The Knollys had an enormous family, to whom Sir Francis was a punctilious father. He was now about fifty-five, a man of the highest honour, and a leading Puritan, who had fled to Germany during the reign of Mary Tudor. Despite their religious differences, Mary made an immediately favourable impression upon this experienced courtier. He discovered in her a woman of innate intelligence, blessed with an eloquent tongue and full of practical good sense; to these qualities, she also joined considerable personal courage. A little later, when he felt he knew her better, Knollys ventured on a further and even more favourable character sketch of the Scottish queen:15 to begin with she was a ‘notable woman’ because she had no care for ceremonies beyond the acknowledgement of her royal estate (possibly a sly dig at Queen Elizabeth); then she spoke freely to everyone, whatever their rank, and ‘showeth a disposition to speak much and to be bold and to be pleasant to be very familiar’. Furthermore not only was she brave herself, but she was also delighted by valour in others, ‘commending by name all approved hardy men of her country, although they be her enemies, and she concealeth no cowardice even in her friends’. In short, ‘For victory’s sake pain and peril seem pleasant to her and in respect of victory, wealth and all other things seem to her contemptible and vile’. Knollys metaphorically scratched his head as he concluded by wondering what on earth was to be done with such a spirited creature. Was ‘such a lady and princess’ to be nourished in the English bosom? He questioned his correspondents in London whether it was indeed ‘wise to dissemble with such a lady’.

  The answer came back from the south that it was indeed wise to dissemble, since it was for the moment the most politically advantageous course open to the English. Knollys was therefore instructed to tell Queen Mary that she could not be received at the English court until she had been purged of the stain of her husband’s murder, and this purgation could only be achieved if she submitted herself to the judgement of Elizabeth. Tears flowed from Mary’s eyes at the news; in a passion of rage at the injustice, she pointed out that both Maitland and Morton had assented to the murder of Darnley ‘as it could well be proved, although now they would seem to persecute the same’.16 Knollys himself was impressed by her arguments: he wrote to Elizabeth that as Mary had easily convinced those around her in the north of her innocence, it might be better for Elizabeth’s honour to offer her the choice of remaining in England (to be cleared by Elizabeth of complicity in the crime) or returning once more to Scotland of her own volition. The worst that could happen, thought Knollys, was that Mary would decide to go to France, and in any case Moray would probably put a stop to that from Scotland. But in London Queen Elizabeth found it wiser to concentrate on Mary’s honour than on her own – and this honour, she persisted in pointing out, had been too besmirched for her cousin to be released before the formality of an English investigation. Mary and Knollys were left together at Carlisle, with Knollys under orders to get his captive to agree to submit herself to this process.

  On 30th May they argued on the subject of Mary’s deposition; when Mary inveighed against Moray for his behaviour, Knollys maintained that if princes could be deposed for being mad so they could also for common murdering. Both crimes were the result of evil humours, he continued, with characteristic sixteenth-century preoccupation with the subject, one coming from melancholy (madness) and the other from choler (murder). Poor Mary wept and tried to excuse herself. But Knollys only seized the opportunity to press her further and say that she should now allow herself to be tried by Elizabeth, and thus officially purged of her crimes.17

  Mary’s state within Carlisle Castle was on Knollys’s own admission far from luxurious. Her chief lack was of waiting-women: she who had been surrounded all her life by ladies of the highest rank to attend her now had only two or three to help her, and they were ‘not of the finest sort’. Her gentlemen included the romantic-minded George Douglas who had followed the queen into exile: he was one of the three or four allowed to sleep within the precincts of the castle, the rest of the gentlemen leaving the castle at sunset and sleeping within the town, with the rest of her train, down to cooks and scullions, making a total of between thirty and forty. Another serious lack was of horses – for the queen had of course arrived without any at all, and with her enthusiasm for physical exercise she felt the deprivation keenly. There were heavy iron gratings across Mary’s windows and a series of three ante-chambers packed with soldiers led to her own chamber. Although Mary was able to attend football matches organized by her own retinue on the green – Knollys noted with surprise that there was no foul play – whenever she walked or rode she was attended by a guard of a hundred men, lest George Douglas’s fancy should once again turn to the subject of escape. Her one attempt at hare-hunting was her last: it was thought too risky to let her ride abroad even under the pretext of sport.

  The arrival of Mary Seton, the remaining unmarried Marie of happier times, provided a welcome relief, more especially as Mary Seton was an expert hairdresser: Knollys noted with admiration her skill in the art of ‘busking’, as he termed it, excelling anything he had seen previously – ‘among other pretty devices, yesterday and today she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of head dressing, without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well’.18 Such feminine skills were all the more necessary since the queen had chopped off her own hair during the flight from Langside; it never grew again in its old abundance and in any case was frequently cut to guard against persistent headaches; it seems that for the rest of her life Mary was dependent on wigs and false-pieces. Despite Mary Seton’s endeavours, the queen’s clothing remained a problem. Queen Elizabeth, appealed to for some help out of her own copious wardrobe, responded with gifts of such mean quality – some odd pieces of black velvet and old dresses – that the embarrassed Knollys tried to explain them away by saying that they had been intended for Mary’s maids. Moray was scarcely more generous: when he dispatched three coffers of his sister’s clothes from Scotland the queen noted angrily that there was but one taffeta dress amon
gst them, the rest merely cloaks, and ‘coverage for saddles’ – ironically useless to a captive. She had to send for sartorial reinforcement from Lochleven. In July she did receive from her own chamberlain in Scotland a number of belongings, mainly accessories including gloves, pearl buttons, tights, veils, coifs of black and white, and twelve orillettes or bandages, to place over the ears when asleep, no doubt to cut out from the royal consciousness the heavy tread of the hagbutters in the three rooms outside.19 To Mary these feminine considerations of dress and hair, and even the conditions of her confinement (which shocked Montmorin, the French ambassador), were secondary to her grand design to reach the presence of Queen Elizabeth. From her arrival at Workington towards the end of May until the end of the conference at York and its removal to London, Queen Mary wrote over twenty letters to Queen Elizabeth, most of them extremely long, well thought out, intelligent pieces of pleading, all elaborations on the same theme of Mary’s need for succour to regain her Scottish throne, and her trust in Elizabeth to provide it. Mary even summoned her poetic gifts to her aid: she wrote a poem to her ‘chère soeur’ of which both an Italian and a French version survive, expressing the mingled pleasure and pain which the subject of their meeting produced in her heart, torn as she was between hope and doubt. She likened herself to a ship blown backwards by contrary winds just as it was entering the harbour, the poem ending with a prophetic fear that Fortune might once more turn against her in this as in so many things: