Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Encouraged by the Pope, plans were now mooted by which Mary should be married off to Philip’s dashing illegitimate brother, the famous Don John of Austria. The problem was of course not so much how to bell the cat as how to rescue the cat from her captivity, before the match could actually take place. The prelude to this marriage was intended to be an invasion of England from the Spanish Netherlands, organized by Philip II, with papal approval and led by Don John, who would be rewarded, as in a fairy story, by the hand of the captive princess; together this romantic pair would then reign happily ever after as Catholic king and queen of England. The idea of a marriage between Mary and Don John, of whom even Walsingham admiringly observed ‘Surely I never saw a gentleman for personage, speech, wit and entertainment comparable to him. If pride do not overthrow him, he is like to become a great personage’, is a tantalizing one. Unfortunately the scheme, like so many involving the rescue of the queen of Scots, was subject to all the complicated pressure of politics in Europe at this period. The marriage never actually left the realm of dreams to which it belonged, as Spain, England and France and their respective sovereigns jockeyed among themselves to maintain their position or increase it, and Elizabeth allowed her strange courtship by the duke of Anjou to hold out prospects of an Anglo-French alliance. In this situation the Spanish Netherlands, in a state of seething revolt against Spanish overlordship, acted as a perpetual apple of discord among these goddesses. From the point of view of English trade, Elizabeth was anxious to see the stabilization of the Netherlands; yet she was equally concerned that they should not be so stable that Spain should be able to use the provinces as a convenient jumping-off place for the invasion of England; at the same time unrest in the Netherlands at any moment might provide an excuse for France to intervene there, a prospect which horrified Elizabeth. In the meantime Philip continued to maintain his usual caution in considering any invasion schemes, which he was sensible enough to realize might result in the rapid execution of Mary long before her would-be rescuers ever reached her.

  The curious fact was that although the Pope continued to take a great interest in the subject of Mary’s fourth husband, she was still legally married to her third husband, Bothwell. Despite the report of the English ambassador in Paris, Norris, to that effect,26 the nullification of Mary’s marriage to Bothwell was not secured in the late summer of 1570. The validity of any marriage Mary might have contracted in the past had to be referred directly to Rome, the marriages of royal persons being reserved to the Pope himself as causae majores. In Mary’s instructions to Ridolfi in February 1571, whether genuine or false, she bewailed the Pope’s delay in giving the decree of nullity and asked him to speed matters on: about July 1571, Pius V seems to have authorized a commission to examine the case.27 But it was not until 1575, when Leslie was freed from his English prison, that some serious action seems to have been taken on the subject. Notwithstanding his temporary betrayal of his mistress, under interrogation in the Tower, Leslie was re-adopted into Mary’s service and his liberation was even celebrated by a short poem from her own pen, beginning:28

  Puisque Dieu a, par son bonte imence,

  Permis qu’ayez obtins tant de bon heur …*

  Leslie subsequently went to Rome on Mary’s behalf and in August 1576 a number of depositions were taken on behalf of the Bothwell marriage in Paris, at his instance, before a French judge ordinary.29 The witnesses included John Cuthbert, Leslie’s servant, James Curl, an elderly Scottish Catholic exile, Sebastian Danelcourt, a Frenchman married to a Scotswoman who had abandoned Scotland for France on religious grounds, and Cuthbert Ramsay, brother of Lord Dalhousie, an expatriate Scot, as well as two Scottish priests living in Paris. Leslie’s petition for nullity was based on the fact that the marriage of Bothwell and Jean Gordon had been a true marriage; that Bothwell had taken Mary by force; and that in any case Bothwell and Jean had not been properly divorced; he also added the fact – perfectly true – that Mary and Jean were kin. The depositions of the witnesses added little to what was already known about Bothwell’s two marriages, but merely confirmed quite straightforwardly that Bothwell had lived with both Jean and Mary in turn as his lawful wedded wives.

  Despite the establishment of this evidence, and despite the fact that Mary was obviously regarded as free to marry again by the Pope as by every other ecclesiastic, no decree of nullity was actually proclaimed.† The reason for this was the extreme danger which it felt threatened the queen of Scots if too much publicity was given to plans to free her: a declaration that she was no longer married to Bothwell carried the inevitable corollary that she intended to marry someone else. This would point a finger of suspicion at her. Not only might plots outside miscarry, but also her own head might be struck from its shoulders. A letter from the cardinal of Como in 1576 indicates the papal reasoning: ‘As the Queen of Scotland is a prisoner, his Holiness sees not how it will be possible to treat with her as to providing her with a husband without running manifest risk of revealing what should be left secret.’30 In April 1578 the death of Bothwell in his Danish prison freed Mary in any case from the bonds of matrimony, just six months before the death of Don John himself, probably of typhoid, in the Netherlands, put an end forever to Mary’s hopes in this direction.

  The conditions of Bothwell’s last years were shockingly frightful: nothing he had done in life could justify the incarceration of this once active and vigorous man in a foreign prison for eleven years without trial. At first the Danish king had held him as a possible pawn against Elizabeth; now an Anglo-Danish alliance had put an end to his usefulness in that respect. In vain his Scottish enemies had repeatedly attempted to secure his extradition. Bothwell lingered on in prisons of increasing rigour, until the swift vengeance of his fellow-nobles might have seemed an infinitely preferable fate. It seems virtually certain that he was driven mad in his last years in the cruel fortress of Dragsholm, by the intolerable conditions in which he was held; James Maitland, who wintered in Copenhagen only twelve years after his death, heard this. There is a tradition – without definite proof – that he ended by being chained to a pillar half his height like an animal, so that he could never stand upright. The memoirs of Lord Herries wrote his epitaph thus: ‘The King of Denmark caused cast him into a loathsome prison where none had access to him, but only those that carried him such scurvy meat and drink as was allowed, which was given in at a little window. Here he was kept ten years till being overgrown with hair and filth he died.’*31

  If Mary would scarcely have recognized in this demented and pitiful figure the man to whom she had once looked above all for strength and support, perhaps Bothwell himself might not have easily discerned in the sad, staid captive of Sheffield Castle the features of the young and beautiful queen whom he had first served and then married in the year of her personal rule in Scotland. The ‘sweet face’ which the good people of Edinburgh had blessed as their queen passed nearly twenty years ago on her first arrival in Scotland had altered much as a result of ill-health and the privations and cares of close confinement. The largest and best known category of the portraits of Mary Stuart date from these later years of her life – being various versions of the picture sometimes termed the Sheffield portrait which shows her standing either full-length or three-quarters, wearing black velvet dress and the white peaked head-dress she immortalized.* The date is often painted in the corner of the picture. A number of versions of this picture were made and circulated about the Continent during Mary’s lifetime, as she became increasingly a focus of Catholic respect and devotion. After her death, this Catholic devotion only increased, while after the accession of her son James to the throne of England, versions of this picture also found their way into the possession of grand English families, as part of the general rehabilitation of Mary’s memory, as mother of the sovereign.

  The origin of all these portraits seems to have been in miniatures, painted without the knowledge of the English government. Even a miniaturist was difficult enough to introduce into Mary�
��s prison: in 1575 she had to ask her ambassador in Paris to have some little pictures of her made up abroad, in order to distribute them to faithful Catholics in England who were asking for them.32 But by 1577 there was evidently some sort of miniaturist at work, at Sheffield, for Nau mentioned in a letter to Archbishop Beaton in Paris that ‘he had thought to have accompanied this letter with a portrait of Her Majesty, but the painter has not been able to finish it in time’.33 Two surviving miniatures in the Mauritshuis and in Blairs College, Aberdeen, are probably to be identified with the work of this unknown painter. The actual miniature from which the whole group of Sheffield portraits derives can, however, be identified: it is by Nicholas Hilliard.34 It seems likely that Hilliard was one famous painter who did personally penetrate the queen’s captivity: not only does the Hilliard miniature show signs of close observation from the life, but Bess of Hardwicke herself is known to have patronized Hilliard, and in 1591 there was some question of his painting a secret miniature of Arbella Stuart.35 It would have been quite possible for Bess to have allowed Hilliard the privilege of painting her royal prisoner, in the same gambling spirit as she later considered the painting of Arbella, in order to forward Stuart claims. Although most of the later versions of this famous picture date from after 1603, despite earlier dates painted in the corner, for the Hilliard miniature itself a date of 1578 is perfectly acceptable on costume grounds.*

  The face in the Hilliard miniature and all versions of this portrait shows how much the queen’s youthful beauty had been dimmed by the passage of time, even allowing for the woodenness of the treatment. Mary is now very far from being the laughing Goujon-like belle of the French court: this is a woman with a drawn face, a beaky prominent nose almost Roman in its shape but cut finely at the end, with a small rather pinched mouth; the smallness of the whole face is in contrast to the fullness of the body, which is now matronly in its proportions. It is well attested that by the date of her death nine years later Mary had fully lost that willowy slimness of figure which, combined with her elegant height, had been one of her chief attractions when she was young. It is evident from the Sheffield portrait, as also from the medallion portrait of her enprofil which was the frontispiece of Leslie’s history De Origine Moribus et Rebus Gestis Scotorum also published in 1578, that by then this process was at least well advanced. The profile, believed to have been done from a miniature in Italy, shows that the charming and clearly defined oval of Mary’s face in youth had by now blurred into fullness round the chin. Health may have been responsible for Mary putting on weight, but the queen was by now presumably approaching the age of the menopause, and this too may have played its part in the process. One beauty remains in these portraits which time could not touch: although the once gay and slanting eyes are now sad and watchful and the mouth with its lips which once curved so prettily in a delicate arch above all other features shows the effect of pain and illness in the way the corners have newly tucked in, yet the hands of Mary Stuart are as beautiful as ever. Long and exquisite, the white fingers splay out against the black velvet gown, or drape themselves in some versions of the portrait on the red table, as romantically as they ever did in the days when Ronsard hymned their beauty.

  The outward changes in the appearance of Mary Queen of Scots were paralleled by the inward changes in her character. In 1580 Mary wrote on her own initiative a long Essay on Adversity in which she explained that she of all people was most suited to write on this melancholy subject – in any case the mental exercise would save from indolence one who had once been accustomed to rule, and could no longer follow her destined calling. She concluded that the only remedy for the afflicted lay in turning to God.37 Indeed those long white hands were now often clasped in prayer. It was no mere coincidence that in the portraits a great gold rosary is often shown hanging down from her belt. The woman who had once believed implicitly but unreflectively in the truths of the Catholic religion, and had allowed action not thought to rule her life, now found herself involuntarily forced back on the resources of meditation. It would be true to say that the quality of Mary’s religious beliefs had never truly been tested up to the present. In France there had been nothing to try, much to encourage, them. In Scotland she had insisted on the practice of her own religion, but this minor concession had not been difficult to establish in view of the fact that she was the reigning queen, and was herself prepared to show total tolerance to the official Protestant religion of the country. In her early months in England she had seen no particular harm in allowing others to explain to her at their own invitation the truths of the Protestant religion as they saw them. But now to exercise her religion needed cunning and tenacity; she was living in a country where Catholics were not only not tolerated, but often persecuted, and persecuted with increasing severity after Pius v’s bull of excommunication towards Elizabeth.

  Sir John Mortoun, the secret priest, died and was succeeded by another secret chaplain, de Préau. For a short period in 1571, Ninian Winzet, the Scottish Catholic apologist, entered her service, nominally as her ‘Scottish secretary’ but in fact acting as her confessor, through the good offices of Beaton; he was subsequently sent away to London to join Leslie in his house arrest.’38 In October 1575 Mary wrote to the Pope asking that her chaplain should have episcopal function, and the power to grant her absolution after hearing her confession. She named twenty-five Catholics whom she asked should be granted absolution for attending Protestant ceremonies in order to divert suspicion. Mary asked for a plenary indulgence as she prayed before the Holy Sacrament or bore in silence the insults of a heretic: with prescience for the future, she asked that in the moment of death, if she repeated the words Jesu, Maria, even if she only spoke them with ‘her heart rather than her mouth’, her sins might be forgiven her.39 A Jesuit priest, Samerie, managed to visit the queen secretly on three occasions in the early 1580s, to act as her chaplain, disguised variously as a member of her household, including her valet and her physician.40 Such manoeuvres and the preservation in secret of the rites of the Mass by one means and another demanded courage and the real will to take part in them. But to Mary, as to many others in whom the hectic and heedless blood of youth fades, giving place to a nobler and gentler temperament, her religion itself had come to mean much more to her.

  It was not only that the Catholic powers abroad represented her best hope of escape from captivity; it was also that she herself had undergone a profound change of attitude to her faith, and indeed to life itself. It is the mark of greatness in a person to be able to develop freely from one phase into another as age demands it. Mary Stuart was capable of this development. Her whole character deepened. Having been above all things a woman of action, she now became under the influence of the imprisonment which she so much detested a far more philosophical and contemplative personality. Two poems printed in Leslie’s Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes of 1574 speak of sad memories, of the world’s inconstancy and of the need for sacrifice. Lines written in a Book of Hours in 1579 allude bitterly to false friends, and the need for solitary courage, in face of the fickle changes of fortune.

  Bien plus utile est l’heure et non pas la fortune

  Puisqu’elle change autant qu’elle este opportune*

  But in another poem, probably written in the early 1580s, she showed more Christian resignation:

  Donne seigneur, donne moi patience

  Et renforce ma trop debile foi

  Que ton esprit me conduise en ta loi

  Et me guarde de choir imprudence†

  And at the end of her Essay on Adversity, after discussing a series of Biblical, Roman and medieval examples of rulers who had fallen into adversity, Mary quoted the parable of the talents to explain how much would be forgiven to those who had made the best of their lives: ‘God, like the good father of a family, distributes His talents among His children, and whoever receives them and puts them out of profit is discharged and excused from eternal suffering.’ She certainly put her own philosophy into practice to the ex
tent that the talents she showed in her middle-age were very different from those she displayed in youth. The carefree buoyancy which Mary displayed then, so alluring in a young woman, would have been intolerable and even frivolous in the captive queen. Mary’s utterances in her forties show on the one hand an infinitely nobler and deeper spirit, and on the other a serenity and internal repose quite out of keeping with her previous behaviour.

  Mary Stuart achieved this serenity and this intelligence at the cost of much pain, heart-searching and suffering. She, who had never been known to exist without an adviser, and had never wished to do so, whether it was her grandmother, her Guise uncles, the lamentable Darnley, her half-brother Moray, Riccio or Bothwell, was compelled in the last years of her life to exist without any sort of reliable advice or support from outside. She was now the shoulder on whom her servants leant, and to whom her envoys, many of them of questionable loyalty, looked for direction. She might even secretly write to the outside world for advice, and receive it, but when it came to taking action, actually within the confines of the prison itself, there was Mary and only Mary to make decisions and inspire their implementation. The pretty puppet-queen of France, the spirited but in some ways heedless young ruler of Scotland, could never have carried through the remarkable performance which Mary Stuart was to display in her last years. The uses of adversity for Mary Stuart, bitter-sweet as they might have been rather than sweet, were to teach her that self-control and strength of character which were to enable her to outwit Elizabeth at the last by the heroic quality of her ending.

  * Mary Fleming lived on for many years after her husband’s death. She obtained the reversal of the forfeiture of his possessions in 1583. She seems to have brought up her children, including that son James Maitland who was to publish a defence of his father’s honour, as Catholics.