Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Nevertheless Mary had perforce to make the best of her new accommodation – her comfort not increased by the fact that her jailers had not even any money to provide for her, and Knollys wrote desperately to London for an immediate grant of £500, since they were destitute.5 She now made the acquaintance of George Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, and his famous or infamous second wife, known to history as Bess of Hardwicke. Shrewsbury, who was to act as the queen’s jailer, with only short breaks, for the next fifteen and a half years, was a man of about forty. He himself was a Protestant although his father had been a fervent Catholic and he had many Catholic relations. He was immensely rich and possessed an enormous range of properties across the centre of England; but like many rich men he was obsessed with the need to preserve his inheritance, so that in the course of his wardship of Queen Mary, his letters to the English court began to sound like one long complaining account book of rising prices, servants’ keep and inadequate subsidies. But Shrewsbury had long proved his loyalty to Elizabeth, and his character, fussy and nervous, constantly worrying about the reactions of the central government to his behaviour or that of his prisoner, made him in many ways an ideal jailer, for a state captive. Despite these suitable attributes of a public servant, Shrewsbury was not a strong character; at the time when he took charge of Mary, he was totally dominated by the redoubtable Bess.

  Bess was now forty-nine, eight years older than her husband, and over twenty years older than Mary. She had been married three times previously, and by her second husband Sir William Cavendish of Chatsworth had had eight children. It was no mere flight of fancy that led her third husband Sir William St Loe to address her in letters by the name of this Cavendish mansion, which she herself inherited – the salutation which he often used of ‘my honest sweet Chatsworth’ gives a more realistic indication of the attention which this remarkable lady bestowed upon material possessions than of her actual qualities of nature. Bess’s practical streak led her to marry off two of her Cavendish children, Henry and Mary, to Shrewsbury’s heir Gilbert Talbot and his daughter Grace, in order to preserve as much wealth as possible within the bounds of the family. She was also, in the words of Lodge, ‘a builder, a buyer and seller of estates, a money-lender, a farmer and a merchant of lead and coals and timber’.6 Apart from this financial acumen, in private life the ‘honest sweet Chatsworth’ occupied the role of a termagant, for as Lodge painted her, she was ‘a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling’. In short, Bess was in character the exact opposite of her new charge, Mary Stuart, who was so feminine in both brain and intuition, and, if proud, was also full of generosity and feeling towards others.*

  However, at first meeting, the queen and her new captors got on agreeably enough. The queen spoke ‘temperately’ to Shrewsbury, and Shrewsbury spoke ‘de belles paroles’ to her, as each graciously admitted. Mary was allowed to set up her cloth of state to which she attached such importance, and a certain Sir John Morton was introduced into her ménage,who was in fact a Catholic priest, a fact of which Shrewsbury was either ignorant or agreed to turn a blind eye; in any case Mary must have been pleased by the innovation. The queen and Bess were even described by the fond husband Shrewsbury as sitting peacefully together embroidering in Bess’s own chamber where, with Agnes Livingston and Mary Seton, they delighted in ‘devising’ fresh works to carry out. ‘They talk together of indifferent trifling matters,’ reported Shrewsbury happily, ‘without any sign of secret dealing or practice, I can assure you.’8 It was during this first visit to Tutbury and the early honeymoon period of Mary’s relations with Bess that much of the joint embroideries attributed to them, at Hardwicke Hall, Oxburgh Hall and elsewhere, must have been completed.

  Embroidery was to prove the great solace of Queen Mary’s long years of captivity. It was a taste she had already acquired as a young queen, and it has been seen that one of her first actions on Lochleven was to send for her sewing materials. Now, with all too ample leisure at her command, the taste was to become a passion and almost a mania. Pieces of embroidery, lovingly and hopefully done with her own hand as though the needle could pierce the stony heart where the pen could not, were to prove the basis of the gifts which Queen Mary sent to Queen Elizabeth; Norfolk was similarly honoured with an embroidered pillow. An inventory of her belongings six months before her death included many items of embroidery not yet finished, including bed hangings and chair covers, as though the captive had set herself the Penelope-like task of ornamenting every object in her daily life. Into her embroidery the queen put much of herself, including her love of literary devices and allusions, which she had first acquired at the French court, and which had led her during her first widowhood to adopt two anagrams of her own name as devices: TU AS MARTYRE and TU TE MARIERAS (both of which were in a manner of speaking prophetic). This enthusiasm for devices was also shared by Elizabethan society, having reached England from Italy, where it had been introduced by the French invasions at the beginning of the century;9 thus Mary’s passion was able to find an answering echo in the heart of Bess – she who was to have E S (Elizabeth Shrewsbury) so firmly carved round the pedestals of the new Chatsworth. But quite apart from the contemporary delight in such conceits, which today might be satisfied by the more mundane pursuits of crossword puzzles and acrostics, they seem to have appealed to the romantic streak in Queen Mary’s nature, a child-like love of intrigue and secrecy. This was a strain only encouraged by captivity and her attitude to codes, secret messages and the like can be compared to her love of emblems and devices; it is as though having been captured at the age of twenty-four, and cut off from outside society before she had fully reached maturity, Mary remained in some ways frozen in curiously youthful and even naïve attitudes.

  In 1614 William Drummond of Hawthornden gave a full and marvelling description of the joint embroideries of Mary and Bess in a letter to Ben Jonson; these panels, which in most details can be equated with the hangings now at Oxburgh Hall,* contained a series of impresas, or allegorical pictures with text, in which the words expressed one part of the meaning, and the emblem another. One panel consisted of a lodestone turning towards a pole and the name MARIA STUART turning into the anagram SA VERTUE M’ATTIRE which Drummond preferred to the other anagram of her name VERITAS ARMATA. A phoenix in flames was said to be the emblem of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, and the words accompanying the device were that now famous motto of Mary Stuart: EN MA FIN MON COMMENCEMENT. About the same date Cecil’s emissary White noticed this motto also embroidered on Queen Mary’s cloth of state.†10 Some emblems referred to Queen Mary’s past – the crescent moon and the motto DONEC TOTUM IMPLEAT ORBEM for Henry II, the salamander for King Francis I. Others alluded more directly to Mary’s recent fortunes and her future hopes from Elizabeth – for example two women upon the wheels of fortune, one holding a lance, and the other a cornucopia with the motto FORTINAE COMITES. A lioness with a whelp and the motto UNUM QUIDEM SED LEONEM referred to Mary and her son James. At Oxburgh, one panel just below the centrepiece, which is yet another monogram of Mary Stuart, has a large monogram GEORGE ELIZABETH beneath a coronet, and is surrounded by the legend GEORGE ELIZABETH SHREWSBURY in full – representing a unity later to be crudely disrupted by the marital disputes of Mary’s jailers, just as the unity between Mary and Bess, embodied in these hangings, was also to be torn asunder by Bess’s venomous accusations. It seems also that Mary’s early French life was never to be forgotten: the cipher combining the Greek letter Phi and M – for Francis and Mary – which the queen had used on her own signet ring after her return to Scotland, is also to be found in the corner of at least four of the Oxburgh panels, yet it was now half a generation since the death of Francis.

  In captivity Mary’s health was her most obvious problem, apart from her desire for freedom. It was often the old pain in her side which put a final end to a day’s embroidering. Her health was only worsened by the discomfort of Tutbury. In March Shrewsbury noted that she was once mo
re severely ill from what he termed ‘grief of the spleen’ and which his doctor told him was‘obstructio splenis cum flatu hypochondriaco’; the queen’s symptoms were pains, said to be the result of ‘windy matter ascending to the head’ strong enough to make her faint.11 Even a move from odious Tutbury to the more salubrious Shrewsbury dwelling of Wingfield Manor did not effect the desired cure. At the end of April, the queen went into such a decline at hearing of the dreadful fates of some of her friends in Scotland that her whole face swelled up, and she sat weeping silently and uncontrollably at supper. By 12th May the queen was critically ill once more; at Chatsworth – ‘my wife’s house’, as Shrewsbury put it – where she was taken for the cleaning or ‘sweetening’ of Wingfield, she had to be seen by two doctors.12 As it happened Shrewsbury’s own health suffered that summer, for he had both gout and ‘the hot ague’, to the extent of announcing that he no longer wished to live; his physician Dr Francis was deeply concerned over the many hot choleric vapours which had apparently found their way up to the patient’s head from his stomach, when Shrewsbury took a fever after drinking too much cold water. But whereas Shrewsbury suffered occasionally from bouts of painful ill-health, Queen Mary’s health now became a chronic problem for her and her jailers, only exacerbated by the conditions of captivity, and there are few of her letters in the ensuing years which do not refer in some manner to the physical pain she had to endure.

  It was at the end of February 1569 that Nicholas White, who was journeying to Ireland on Cecil’s behalf, broke his journey at Tutbury in order to report on the state of the Scottish queen. From his letter back to his master, it is clear that he found her as dangerously fascinating as had Knollys nine months earlier – although White, like Knox, had a rather less chivalrous reaction to the spectacle of her beguiling charms.13 He too observed that the queen spent much of her time embroidering, telling him that ‘all the day she wrought with her needle and that the diversity of colours made the time seem less tedious’. They also had a pleasantly intellectual discussion on the comparative artistic merits of carving, painting and embroidering, in the course of which Queen Mary expressed the view that painting was the most commendable of the three. At which White, who had already unpleasantly and most unfairly told Mary that she was responsible for the death of Lady Knollys by keeping Sir Francis away from her side (although there was surely nothing Mary would have liked better than for Knollys’s duties to have been ended by her own release), replied rudely that he had read that painting was a false truth – Veritas Falsa. Mary understandably drew the audience to a close at this brusqueness, and withdrew to her own room.

  Nevertheless for all his churlishness – and he may have feared to be seduced by this famous basilisk – White fully took in the physical appearance of Mary, informing Cecil that he found her hair dark, although Knollys had warned him that she often wore false hair of different colours.* And the percipient White added: ‘She hath withal an alluring grace, a pretty Scotch accent, and a searching wit, clouded with mildness. Fame might move some to relieve her, and glory joined with gain might stir others to adventure much for her sake.’

  White’s words concerning the inducements there would be to rescue Mary were prophetic. Indeed, already the thought of ‘glory joined with gain’ had led Norfolk to go forward in the negotiations to marry the Scottish queen, the project first mentioned to Mary before the York conference. Mary’s captivity in England had after all no legal basis, and even her abdication from the throne of Scotland had been made under duress, which robbed it of its validity; in the meantime her blood relationship to Queen Elizabeth, and her possible succession to the English throne – cast into further prominence by the death in 1568 of the unfortunate Lady Catherine Grey, the main Protestant Tudor candidate – made her a rich prize. Elizabeth’s disapproval was by no means a foregone conclusion: after all she herself had suggested Norfolk as a possible bridegroom for Mary before her marriage to Darnley. Under these circumstances the secret moves to marry Mary to Norfolk, and then presumably restore her to the throne of Scotland, neatly linked to a Protestant English bridegroom, proceeded apace. Maitland was involved, and shares with Mary’s envoy, John Leslie, bishop of Ross, the possible credit or discredit for having first initiated the plan; many of the Scots were said to look on the scheme with favour, and even Moray himself appeared to play along with the idea of the marriage for the time being, although he soon had an opportunity of publicly showing his strong disapproval of any notions of Mary’s restoration. Many of the English nobles, who themselves disliked the dominance of Cecil within the English Privy Council, and in addition felt that his foreign policy, so intensely hostile to Spain, was against England’s best commercial interests, saw in the elevation of Norfolk as Mary’s bridegroom a convenient way of dealing with Cecil’s rising influence. This particular question in English internal politics had been brought to a head in the winter of 1568–9 when Elizabeth confiscated three Spanish treasure ships at Cecil’s instigation, and to the violent disapproval of many others within the council.*

  The actual part played by Queen Mary herself in all the cobwebs of intrigue and counter-intrigue which followed was negligible: considerations of Anglo-Spanish commercial rivalry became somehow enmeshed with rival considerations of Scottish internal politics; England’s foreign policy towards France and the attitude of the Pope towards Queen Elizabeth and the English Catholics were likewise issues which became firmly entangled in the simple topic of Mary’s marriage to Norfolk. Yet throughout all these negotiations, whether secret or open, Mary remained a comparatively isolated captive, and her personal role was therefore a minor one, except in so far as her mere existence made her, as Elizabeth angrily wrote at the end of it all, ‘the daughter of debate that eke discord doth sow’. But Mary could hardly be blamed for her mere existence, and as for her captivity, which made such an apple of discord in the centre of England, there was no one more anxious to end it than Mary herself. In all the first attempts or conspiracies to procure her release, Queen Mary adopted exactly the same attitude: since her imprisonment was illegal, she would consider herself free to try and achieve her liberty by any means in her power, as she had warned Knollys that she would in October 1568. As a ‘sovereign princess’ over whom Elizabeth had no jurisdiction, she never considered that any schemes, letters of instruction, however daring from the English point of view, could possibly be fairly held against her by English justice.

  This was her personal point of view on the subject of escape. There were refinements to it: for example Queen Mary was strongly predisposed towards any scheme that sounded as if it might have the backing of a major power, and strongly disinclined to consider any hare-brained scheme which had exactly the opposite ring. At the head of her list of major powers who she thought might help her was still Elizabeth – whom Mary still hoped would achieve her restoration to Scotland in the end. Beyond that Philip of Spain was one possibility and Charles IX of France another. With the latter in mind she early established a code with which to correspond with the French ambassador in London, Mothe de la Fénelon. But Elizabeth was still, and continued to be so for the next three years at least, the person from whom Mary hoped for the most effective succour. It was the blood tie which joined them, which Mary always felt must surely in the end influence Elizabeth to assist her; and Elizabeth’s approval or disapproval, so far as she could guess at it, was something Mary always took into account in any project which was outlined to her. Mary was therefore a catalyst rather than the chief conspirator in the two plots which followed.

  Mary’s new potential bridegroom, Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk, now a man of thirty-three and a widower, was not an especially glamorous figure by any standards: an anonymous admirer described him in 1569 as being ‘no carpet knight … no dancer or lover knight’, while going on to boast that he came of the race of Howards who could never be made to hide their face from the enemy.14 Mary never actually met him, and most of her information on the subject of his personal attract
ions seems to have come from his sister Lady Scrope in whose charge she had been placed at Carlisle, and with whom Mary had become extremely friendly.* In spite of being no carpet knight, Norfolk had other more solid qualities to commend him: he came of ancient lineage (he was in fact the only duke in England) and was a territorial magnate on a grand scale, who was able to tell Elizabeth that he was ‘as good a prince in his bowling-alley at Norwich’ as Mary would have seen in the midst of her own country of Scotland.15 He was also an experienced administrator, who had been English lieutenant-general in the north from 1559 to 1560, before becoming chief commissioner at York. Mary’s part in the marriage negotiations – conducted in strict secrecy from Queen Elizabeth whose temper on the subject of any marriage, and especially royal ones, was notoriously uncertain – was confined to writing a series of affectionate and even loving letters to Norfolk; yet since she had never met their object, these letters belonged very much to the world of pen-friendship and dreams rather than to that of reality. He was now to Mary ‘my Norfolk’, to whom she emphasized her unhappiness and the desire for liberty. ‘My Norfolk’, she wrote charmingly on occasion, ‘you bid me command you, that would be beside my duty many ways, but pray you I will, that you counsel me not to take patiently my great griefs. …’16 She also underlined the fidelity she would show to him: ‘I trust none that shall say I ever mind to leave you,’ she wrote, ‘nor to anything that may displease you, for I have determined never to offend you, but remain yours. I think all well bestowed for your friendly dealings with me, all undeserved.’ The famous pillow which Leslie later revealed Mary had sent to Norfolk was embroidered with the motto VIRESCIT IN VULNERE VULTUS, and the arms of Scotland, to signify Mary’s courage. Norfolk himself sent Mary a fine diamond, which was brought to her by Lord Boyd, and Mary prettily vowed in a letter of thanks to keep it hung round her neck unseen ‘until I give it again to the owner of it and me both’.17