Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  The twelve love sonnets, as they were termed, consist in fact of one long love poem of twelve verses. We are dependent on the published French and published Scottish version for their text, since no contemporary copies have survived.22 Brantôme and Ronsard, who both had intimate knowledge of Mary’s earlier verses, indignantly denied that these poems could have been by Mary Stuart. These long, rather turgid verses are certainly remarkably unlike Mary’s known poetic efforts, her early simple poems and her later more complicated poetry, which tends to be extremely courtly in phrase and analogy, as might be expected from the atmosphere of the High Renaissance in which she had been educated. But style apart, these verses contain sufficient material to convince one once more that they are the works of the other woman. This unhappy poetess has abandoned all her relatives and friends for her lover, unlike Mary who neither did nor was asked to do any such thing. There are references also to Bothwell’s wealth, which were unthinkable for Mary to make. To her, Bothwell was a comparatively poor man, who had to be subsidized with grants of money from their earliest meeting; it was she who encouraged the profitable Gordon marriage on his behalf, and finally she gave him grants of money after their marriage. Furthermore, the habitual theme of jealousy pervades the whole long poem. The only lines in the total of 158 which might seem to apply to Mary, and Mary only, are those in which she describes how she has subjected herself, her son, her country and her subjects to Bothwell:

  Entre ses mains & en son plein pouvoir

  Je mets mon fils, mon honneur, & ma vie,

  Mon pays, mes subjects, mon ame assujetie

  Et tout à lui, & n’ai autre vouloir.

  Apart from the fact that Mary neither placed nor tried to place James in Bothwell’s hands (it was a favourite accusation of her enemies but untrue: throughout the Bothwell marriage he remained in the care of the earl of Mar), the third line has an odd ring, as if the words ‘mes subjects’ (so pointedly applicable to Mary, so inapplicable to any other woman) had somehow been substituted for another shorter word in a line which already ended ‘mon ame assujetie’: ‘mon coeur’, for example, fits the rhythm much better. Although erasions and substitutions are impossible to describe with any certainty in a poem of which only a published version survives, the natural inference is that here once again the interpolator has been at work. In order to apply a melancholy, rather verbose love poem to the particular case of the queen of Scots and Bothwell, the interpolator has altered one small word – not difficult to do – on the same principle as the words ‘From Glasgow this Saturday morning’ were added to the head of Letter I, to adapt it to the fatal fetching of Darnley.

  There remain the two marriage contracts which the lords produced. One of these, in French, is a manuscript from among the Cotton MSS in the British Museum.23 It has been argued in the past that this is the original document, which was somehow never redelivered to Moray, using the previously cited alteration in the number of documents handed over to Morton in 1571. But the Journal of the Commission specified that this contract was ‘written in a Roman hand in French’;24 unless the Journal was mistaken, the Cotton contract cannot possibly be the original, since it is in an Elizabethan not Roman hand, whose salient feature is the thick backward strokes given to certain letters. Moreover, the signature MARIE R at the end of the contract is a manifest forgery, if indeed this is the original contract shown to the tribunal. The most marked characteristic of Mary Stuart’s signature, seen on letters and documents throughout her life, is the even level of all the letters, including the first letter M; there is sometimes a slight rise in the level of the word towards the end, on the R or I, but M is never of greater height than the A. The Cotton signature on the other hand is conspicuous for its capital M, which is twice the height of the other letters.

  The lords themselves exhibited this French contract with some doubts and the explanation: ‘although some words therein seem to the contrary, they suppose [the contract] to have been made and written by her before the death of her husband’. Certainly some words do seem to the contrary, for the queen specifically refers in the text to ‘my late husband Henry Stuart called Darnley’, before declaring herself once more free to marry, in consequence of which she chooses Bothwell. If an original French contract in her own handwriting, signed by her, did ever exist, this might well have been a document written and signed by the queen at Dunbar at Bothwell’s dictation, shortly after her abduction; in which case, Bothwell would certainly have preserved it among his papers. The absence of any date would be explained by the fact that the lords lopped it off, thus optimistically hoping to incriminate the queen by pretending the contract had been signed before Darnley’s death, despite the wording of the contract which states to the contrary. The fact that Mary, in the contract, says that she makes her promise to marry Bothwell ‘without constraint’ does seem, on the principle of qui s’excuse s’accuse, to suggest that this document was drawn up at Dunbar.

  The second contract does not survive in a contemporary copy but was printed by Buchanan.25 It is said to be a marriage contract signed on 5th April at Seton, between Mary and Bothwell, at a time when he was not yet ‘cleansed’ of Darnley’s murder. It is a long document in official language, quite unlike the other contract, said to have been witnessed by Huntly and Thomas Hepburn, parson of Oldamstock: the fact that Huntly should have witnessed such a contract made nonsense of many of the other letters, but these details were obviously considered unimportant. It is reminiscent of Queen Mary’s actual wedding contract, signed on 14th May, and binds the queen to marry Bothwell, rather than some foreign prince, once Dame Jean Gordon, his ‘pretended spouse’, shall have been removed from his matrimonial path. Although Mary, Bothwell and Huntly were all at Seton on 5th April, it seems highly unlikely that she would have signed such a document before Bothwell had been divorced. It has been suggested that the clerk, as sometimes happens with official documents, mistook the month, and this contract really dated from 5th May, when marriage preparations were very much under way. If this coincidence is dismissed, the most likely explanation of the contract is that Bothwell and Huntly drew it up at Seton, but only presented it to the queen for signature at Dunbar nineteen days later; otherwise her signature might have been quite plainly forged, as on the copy – this being impossible to tell without a sight of the original document.

  So much for the Casket Letters on which Mary’s reputation was so thoroughly blasted in later centuries, although Queen Elizabeth herself understandably found nothing in them which was proof against her dearest sister. Compounded of Bothwell’s previous love letters, some textual interpretations from other letters and a certain amount of inexpert forgery, all glossed over by a great deal of optimistic explanation on the part of the lords who presented them, they were plainly never intended to be exposed to the fierce glare of criticism and discussion which has been directed on to them ever since. The intensity of this discussion results from the fact that they are the only direct proof – inadequate as they are – of Mary’s adultery with Bothwell before Darnley’s death. Yet a rational consideration of the letters, in so far as is possible from mere copies, shows that at most Mary can be accused of two ‘crimes’, neither of them anything like as serious as the murder of her husband. In the first place it is likely that she induced Darnley to leave Glasgow for Edinburgh with the promise of resuming physical relations with him once he was cured of his pox; but this does not in itself constitute a proof of adultery with Bothwell, and Mary’s partisans might even point out in her defence that there was no proof that she would not have implemented her promise if Darnley had lived. Secondly, and much more cogently, she can be accused of foreknowledge of her own abduction by Bothwell. Once more this is not criminal so much as unwise behaviour and has no specific bearing on the death of Darnley six weeks earlier. It reflects much more acutely on Mary’s total inability at this point to deal with the internal politics of Scotland without leaning on some sort of support, and in the event she chose the wrong sort of supp
ort. These aspects of Mary Stuart’s behaviour in the first half of 1567 are certainly not enough to brand her as a murderess or even as a scarlet woman, deserving the vengeance of society.

  As to the hand of the forger, the finger of accusation must inevitably point in the direction of Maitland. He, who had been Mary’s secretary for so many years, must have known her handwriting by heart; it would have been an easy task to produce something of sufficient verisimilitude to convince men who were not in themselves experts on handwriting. The collation of the writings does not seem to have been particularly prolonged: the passage in the Journal is in any case ambiguous and it is just possible that the collation refers to Morton’s two declarations rather than the queen’s handwriting;26 even if such a hasty collation were made, Leicester and his company were certainly inexperienced in the delicate science of judging forged handwriting. Furthermore, as Queen Mary herself stated, her handwriting is a particularly easy one to forge for anyone who had made a study of her letters.* Of course, if it is accepted that Maitland performed the forgery, he still should not be blamed utterly for the ruin which fell upon the queen as a result of the use made of the letters: Maitland, like his contemporaries, certainly did not foresee the enormous prominence which history was to give to these botched-up documents; the mere fact that he subsequently supported Mary shows what a swift temporary expedient was the production of the famous letters. On the other hand, even if Maitland is acquitted of performing – or directing – the forgery, he cannot be acquitted altogether of participation in the fraud: from the first moment he set eyes on the letters he must have realized that they had not in fact been written by his mistress, since of all the Scottish nobles it was Maitland who had the most profound and sympathetic knowledge of Mary, from the years of service spent with her.

  It has been further adduced against Maitland as being the forger that he was married to one of the queen’s ladies, Mary Fleming, who would have been able to assist him in the task. Once again Mary Stuart herself hinted, in her declaratory statement on the subject before the conference at York, in September 1568, that her ladies might be able to counterfeit her handwriting27 – ‘There are divers in Scotland, both men and women, that can counterfeit my handwriting, and write the like manner of writing which I use, as well as myself, and principally such as are in company with themselves,’ she pronounced, before going on to add (surely with truth), ‘I doubt not, if I had remained in my own realm, but I would have gotten knowledge of the inventors and writers of such writings before now. …’ All her Maries had been educated like herself in France and therefore wrote in different forms of the italic hand. The handwriting of Mary Beaton is the most similar to that of the queen; furthermore Mary Beaton was at this point involved in a dispute with her former mistress over some jewels. This dispute has led some students to suggest in turn that Mary Beaton was the actual forger. It would be sad indeed if Mary Stuart, who always loved and nourished her attendants with a quasi-maternal passion, was rewarded by this ultimate treachery at such a critical moment in her fortunes, by one of those who had once been nearest and dearest to her. But there is no proof against Mary Beaton or indeed Mary Fleming except the merest supposition: Mary Fleming like her husband Maitland subsequently became one of Queen Mary’s keen advocates in Scotland itself; furthermore it would surely have been highly indiscreet to have involved one of the Maries in such a confidential business, when ancient loyalties might so easily have prevailed later and unloosed the tongue of the forger at some future date to reveal her own villainy and that of her confederates. There were those much closer to home, in the heart of the nobles’ party, foremost among them Maitland, who could do the job as well as any former Marie. In any case, as Queen Mary herself was never shown the letters, she at least never knew for certain the answer to that classic conundrum of history – who wrote the Casket Letters? Had she seen them, the result would surely have been, as she herself put it, ‘to the declaration of my innocence, and confusion of their falsity’.

  * The only link with the Casket Letters which remains to be seen in Scotland is the beautiful silver casket in the Lennoxlove Museum; although not garnished all over with the Roman letter F. under a crown, as the Journal of the Commission described it, it is the right size, and a French work of the early sixteenth century; its lock is also stricken up in the manner Morton described. There is room for two crossed Fs and a crown where the Hamilton arms are now engraved; alternatively the Journal’s description may have been misleading, and the Fs may have been embroidered on the velvet cover of the box, as in another velvet coffer sent to Mary on Lochleven.11 The Lennoxlove casket has a long provenance: it was purchased some time after 1632 from ‘a Papist’ by the marchioness of Douglas, daughter of the 1st marquess of Huntly. After her death, her plate was sold but her daughter-in-law Lady Anne Hamilton, later duchess of Hamilton in her own right, purchased it back, and, at her husband’s request, had the Hamilton arms engraved on the casket, in place of those of Douglas.12

  * See the Appendix, p. 693, for the two versions of this letter. The full text of all the letters has most recently been published in The Casket Letters by M. H. Armstrong-Davison, London 1965, to which the reader is recommended for a more prolonged survey of this complicated subject. The full text is also to be found in A. Lang, The Mystery of Mary Stuart, London 1901, and T. F. Henderson, The Casket Letters, London 1890.

  * Author’s italics.

  * Lang prints some examples of modern forgeries of Mary’s handwriting impossible to tell from the originals printed beside them, in The Mystery of Mary Stuart.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  My Norfolk

  ‘Our fault were not shameful: you have promised to be mine and I yours; I believe the Queen of England and country should like of it.’

  Mary Queen of Scots, to the Duke of Norfolk

  As the last farcical acts of the conference of Westminster were taking place, preparations were already afoot in faraway Yorkshire to move Queen Mary to a more secure prison at Tutbury in Staffordshire. This time Mary could hardly persuade herself that she was no longer a prisoner, or that restoration to her throne was imminent, since the news that Moray had been allowed to return to Scotland unscathed represented an undeniable blight to even her most timid hopes. In December Mary had told Knollys that she would have to be ‘bound hand and foot’ rather than be removed from Bolton.1 In January Knollys was still her jailer, although arrangements were being made to hand the queen over to the earl of Shrewsbury, owner of a magnificent string of dwellings across the midlands of England; here it was felt that Mary could be contained in safety, equally distant from the London of her desire and the dangerously Catholic northern counties. In the meantime Knollys had his own troubles: his wife was sinking fast in the south, and died in the midst of all the commotion involved in the removal.

  The journey itself, in icy winter weather through the north of England, was frightful. Lady Livingston fell ill en route and had to be left behind; two days later the queen herself also collapsed between Rotherham and Chesterfield, and the cortège had to be halted while she recovered. Then a message was received by Knollys to say that as Tutbury had not yet been made ready for the queen of Scots’ arrival, they would have to lodge temporarily at Shrewsbury’s own house at Sheffield. But before they could reach Sheffield, another bulletin arrived to say that since all the Sheffield hangings had already been sent to Tutbury, Sheffield itself was uninhabitable – so it was once more on to Tutbury.

  This medieval castle, which Mary finally reached on 3rd February, 1569, was of all her many prisons the one she hated most. She always maintained afterwards that she had begun her true imprisonment there,2 and this in itself was sufficient reason to prejudice her against it; but Tutbury quickly added evil associations of its own to combine with her innate distaste. The castle, which was large enough to be more like a fortified town than a fortress, occupied a hill on the extreme edge of Staffordshire and Derbyshire from which the surrounding country could be easi
ly surveyed. Although Plot in his History of Staffordshire written a hundred years later waxed eloquent on the subject of Tutbury’s view, comparing the castle to Acrocorinthus ‘the old Castle of Corinth whence Greece, Peloponnesus, the Ionian and Aegean seas were semel and simul at one view to be seen’, it is doubtful whether the weary royal party and the mourning Knollys would have appreciated the comparison when they finally arrived: for since the early sixteenth century, the structure originally built by John of Gaunt had been virtually falling down, and as a Dutch surveyor reported in 1559, ‘only indifferently repaired’,3 hence the powerful need to bring hangings and furnishings from Sheffield. Not only was Tutbury in many parts ruined (as the English government from the vantage point of London never seem to have realized), but it was also extremely damp, its magnificent view of the Midlands including a large marsh just underneath it from which malevolent fumes arose, unpleasant enough for anyone and especially so for a woman of Mary Stuart’s delicate health. Later on, when Mary had reason to know full well the evils of Tutbury, she wrote of its horrors in winter, and in particular of the ancient structure, mere wood and plaster, which admitted every draught – that ‘méchante vieille charpenterie’, as she put it, through which the wind whistled into every corner of her chamber. As for the view, Mary herself, in words very unlike the raptures of Plot, described Tutbury as sitting squarely on top of a mountain in the middle of a plain, as a result of which it was entirely exposed to all the winds and ‘injures’ of heaven.4