Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  On 8th December, her forty-second birthday, Mary wrote to Elizabeth still wistfully hoping for two hours’ personal talk with her, the talk which she still felt after all these years would settle everything between them; and with her birthday uppermost in her mind, she took the opportunity to hope that Elizabeth would live to enjoy in the future as many happy years as Mary had endured unhappy ones in the past. On 14th December Mary reminded Gray by letter that James was not the sole king of Scotland, and that Gray must at all costs prevent mother and son being driven apart by ‘evil counsellors’ since it was so important to Mary’s cause that James should show himself a ‘natural and obedient son’.14 As late as January Mary was still hoping that liberty for her on these new terms was just round the corner, and desired the French king and queen to write separately to James acknowledging the Association in order to bring her son into accord with her.15 Yet all the while Gray had successfully concluded his mission in London on James’s behalf: he had indicated to Elizabeth that the release of Mary was not necessary to win James’s friendship, and he had learnt from Elizabeth also that her friendship could be won for James by a direct channel, without taking into account the claims, rights and certainly not the desires of the imprisoned Queen of Scots. The Association was now doomed; it became stamped merely as the unrealistic scheme of a tiresome middle-aged woman in prison, to whom no further attention need be paid in this context.

  It was in March 1585 that the full horrifying truth could no longer be kept from Mary: James in Scotland assembled his whole Council as Gray gleefully wrote to Elizabeth; at which point it was formally concluded that the ‘Association desired by his mother should neither be granted nor spoken of hereafter’.16 At first Mary, in her pathetic desire to protect the image of her son in her own mind, even tried to persuade herself that the betrayal could be blamed on Gray. On being informed that James could not negotiate with her while she was a prisoner, she inquired miserably with childlike logic why Elizabeth could not then free her, so that she would at least be able to negotiate with her own son. A passionate postscript to this letter, in her own hand, revealed the depth of her agitation: ‘I am so grievously offended at my heart,’ she scrawled, ‘at the impiety and ingratitude that my child has been constrained to commit against me, by this letter which Gray made him write.’ Wildly she threatened to disinherit James and give the crown to the greatest enemy he had, rather than allow this sort of treatment. In her letter to Elizabeth the same day, Gray is ‘ce petit broullon’ (troublemaker) and James this badly brought up child (‘mal gouverné enfant’). In her next letter to Elizabeth she bewailed the mischief which had been made recently between herself and James by sinister counsels17 – unaware of the grisly truth still more unbearable to a mother’s heart. That it was not a few months’ trouble-making by Gray but nearly twenty years of total separation which had led to the breach between mother and son. James’s welcome of the Association in July 1584 had been apparently unrestrained: his repudiation of it the following March was total. He had betrayed Mary, and so had Gray. But in the delicate game of Anglo-Scottish relations, James had discovered that whereas he held some of the cards and Elizabeth held some of the others, Mary held none at all. There was nothing Mary, still firmly within the four walls of her prison, could do except rage and weep alternately at the perfidy of her son, and the betrayal of her child.

  In 1584, the year of Mary’s repudiation by James, her own domestic circumstances underwent an unpleasant change. Mary had been able in the last years in prison to enjoy a pleasant quasi-maternal relationship with her own niece, little Arbella Stuart, the pretty pudgy dimpled child of Darnley’s younger brother, Charles Stuart, and Bess of Hardwicke’s own daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish. The marriage of Arbella’s parents had been brought about under romantic circumstances within the orbit of Mary herself. In 1574 Charles’s mother, countess of Lennox, now reconciled to Mary over the subject of James, had asked permission from Elizabeth to visit her ex-daughter-in-law at Chatsworth on her way to Scotland to see her grandson. To Elizabeth the possible combination of these two formidable matrons, Margaret Lennox and Bess of Hardwicke, seemed lethal; permission was refused. However, while the countess of Lennox was lodging at a neighbouring house on her way north, her son Charles fell ill; Bess of Hardwicke had already ridden over to visit the countess, bringing her daughter by the hand. As ten years before the timely illness of Darnley had led to his romance with Mary, so now once more the sick-room played its part in the fortunes of the Lennox Stuarts. Before the boy recovered, the young couple had fallen in love, and whether the circumstances of the romance were quite as fortuitous as they seemed, certainly both the grand ladies involved were pleased by it. Margaret Lennox was poor, but her son stood in line to two kingdoms as his brother Darnley had once done; furthermore she was the grandmother of a little king of Scotland. Bess of Hardwicke, on the other hand, was of low birth but had made herself rich and powerful. Once more, as with Mary’s marriage to Darnley, Elizabeth flew into a violent rage at hearing of this pretty romance which was supposed to have flared up so innocently in the Midlands. Both countesses were summoned back to London, and both clapped into prison.

  The terms of imprisonment were in both cases relatively short. Out of this ill-starred marriage, some time during the autumn of 1575 the little Arbella Stuart was born: her sex must have been a sad disappointment to both grandmothers, but as with Mary Stuart herself, Arbella was not destined to be replaced by the birth of a brother. Her sickly young father died of consumption in the spring of the next year; although her mother lived on till 1582, when she too died in her early twenties, from then on the child was brought up much of the time with her maternal grandmother Bess. In vain both grandmothers tried to secure the earldom of Lennox for the little girl after her father’s death: the regent of Scotland admitted that the earldom had originally been granted to Charles Stuart, instead of to James, who as direct male heir and son of the elder son Darnley should rightfully have inherited it from his grandfather, Matthew, earl of Lennox; but he stated that the patent could be revoked as James had been a minor at the time, especially as Charles’s child was a female. In spite of being known as the comitessa and having the formal title grandly painted on her portrait as a two-year-old child, little Arbella never did secure her earldom; and when Esmé Stuart rose to favour in Scotland, it was this earldom which James used to bestow honour upon him.

  Only Mary Queen of Scots continued to acknowledge the baby as the claimant: her will of February 1577 referred to ‘Arbelle, ma nièce’ as earl of Lennox and commanded James to respect Arbella’s right if she, Mary, died.18 Mary also tried to get Queen Elizabeth to hand over Margaret, countess of Lennox’s jewels to Arbella after the countess’s death. She played with the idea of marrying Arbella to her first cousin James. In addition to these practical efforts on behalf of ‘my precious jewel, Arbell’, as her grandmother Bess called her, Mary also enjoyed the innocent and touching companionship of the little girl, who with her royal blood and claims to two thrones, so incongruous with the simple routines of infancy, may have reminded Mary of the child she had once been. Mary had another favourite – Elisabeth Pierrepoint, also one of Bess’s grand-daughters, who was her own god-daughter, whom she loved to spoil and pet; she called her her ‘mignonne’, and ‘little bedfellow’ (since they sometimes shared a bed, according to the domestic custom of the time). Mary even took pains to make her little favourite a special black dress.19 Marguerite de Valois in her memoirs condescendingly observed that it was natural for old people to love little children whereas those who were in their prime were apt to look down upon them and dislike ‘their unfortunate simplicity’. In Mary’s case, she had never looked down upon the unfortunate simplicity of children, showing fondness for the young such as her godson Francis Stewart even when she was barely twenty, not yet a mother herself and in the midst of the full excitement of reigning in Scotland; yet certainly once she was a prisoner, her maternal feelings increased, and the little Shrewsb
ury grandchildren who pattered about the many Shrewsbury palaces – or prisons – provided much solace for her affectionate nature, just as she in turn must have constituted a glamorous feature of their childhood.

  Close contact between Arbella* and Mary was, however, put to an end by the reverberating row which now broke out between Mary and Bess of Hardwicke, an altercation in which Bess was entirely the aggressor since Mary was only involved as the innocent victim of the scandals surrounding the break-up of the Shrewsbury ménage. The Shrewsbury marriage troubles seem to have started some time after the death of Shrewsbury’s son, Gilbert Talbot, in 1582; property was at the root of their quarrels. Now in her efforts to get the best of the dispute, Bess cast about her in her well-filled mental armoury and decided to accuse her husband of scandalous relations with his prisoner Mary Queen of Scots. It was a sharp-edged weapon indeed; it was typical of Bess’s clever but unscrupulous tactics that she picked the accusation most likely to embarrass and wound her husband where it hurt – in his area of public service. Such charges horrified Shrewsbury, for they would surely confirm all the old rumours that he was as a jailer too favourably disposed towards the queen of Scots. Blown up by rumours, the scandal ballooned outwards. A certain John Palmer went on record as saying at St James’s Palace that the queen of Scots had borne two bastard children to Lord Shrewsbury, and had to make a public submission in consequence.20 One Babsthorpe wrote a book full of lewd speeches on the subject, and Shrewsbury was eventually allowed to sue him, although Elizabeth attempted to stop the case under the statute of scandalum magnatum.

  Mary herself was indignant and furious. Her honour was outraged and she persistently demanded that she should be allowed to come to court to clear herself: it was like the conference of Westminster all over again to her sensitive spirit – there was Bess at liberty in London spreading malicious stories, and yet Mary was not even allowed the opportunity to appear and contradict them. In a long letter to Elizabeth in October 1584 she demanded that Bess and her son Charles Cavendish should be publicly examined and their servants examined also and then punished for spreading such slanders; to Walsingham, Mary threatened to make known the evil-doing of ‘la bonne Comptesse’, as she sarcastically termed Bess, to all the princes of Christianity.21 In the end Bess’s calumnies proved too much for Mary’s self-control; in November she wrote a long and burning letter to Elizabeth not only rebutting Bess’s charges against her, but, more to the point, detailing all the many salacious stories which Bess had spread about Elizabeth in the past. Mary described how Bess had been wont to regale the household at Chatsworth and elsewhere in days gone by with cruel stories of Elizabeth’s vanity, and shocking stories of her immorality. Elizabeth believed herself to be so beautiful that she resembled a goddess of the skies – how Bess and the countess of Lennox had laughed at her behind her back! Mary had often heard Elizabeth treated as ‘une comédie’ even in the presence of her own waiting-women. This ridiculous monster of vanity had also been described as lying in bed with Leicester many times and, among other scandals, taking the wretched Christopher Hatton by force. Bess was supposed to have joined disloyalty to ridicule and scandal-making: Mary also retailed how delightful Bess had been when Elizabeth fell ill because this fulfilled an astrological prediction that Elizabeth would soon be dead and Mary reigning in her place, after which James and Arbella would succeed as king and queen.22 It is easy to believe that most of this unsavoury scandal had indeed tripped off Bess’s tongue in the course of those female conversations in Bess’s chamber; private conversation of a gossiping nature never looks particularly pretty set down much later and Bess’s tales were no exception. As for Mary’s part in passing on all this stale and unprofitable abuse, it seems that even despite provocation she had second thoughts after she had written the letter. There is no evidence that Elizabeth, to whom it was addressed, ever read this bombshell: it was found later among the Cecil papers, and although it is possible that Cecil himself intercepted it before it reached the queen, the most likely explanation seems to be that Mary herself, like so many writers, reconsidered the letter after she had exhausted her venom with her pen, and kept it among her own papers without ever sending it. From here it would have been seized with the rest of her correspondence at Chartley in 1586.

  There was certainly no grain of truth in all these rumours as Lady Shrewsbury and her daughter subsequently admitted to the English Council. Mary had by now a sufficient reputation as a femme fatale to be the natural target for such fabricated arrows. John Palmer’s stories of bastard children by Shrewsbury may be seen as being the last of a long progression of such philoprogenitive rumours throughout Mary Stuart’s life, which if all had been true would have made her instead of the lioness with her one whelp the mother of a sizeable family.* Shrewsbury was not immune to Mary’s charm any more than had been Knollys, White or even Cecil himself; he had known her over a long period of time in circumstances of great intimacy. One can understand that such propinquity, coupled with the kindness Shrewsbury generally showed to Mary, may have led to moments of gentleness between them, even tenderness, especially as the femininity of Mary must have contrasted forcibly with the masculinity of Bess, who was in any case the elder of the two by twenty years. But for Shrewsbury to seek to give this tenderness such as it was any sort of external expression beyond relaxation of the conditions of captivity would have been quite out of keeping with his character. The queen of Scots might present a charming picture to him as she sat there plying her needle, but when it came to the prospect of physical relations with her she was terrifying to him as the Giant Hop O’Thumb’s daughter in the fairy story, with the shadow of Elizabeth hanging over them in the role of the vengeful Giant. Mendoza was probably nearer summing up Shrewsbury’s true feelings when he said that the earl was only too grateful to Elizabeth for delivering him from two demons – his wife and the queen of Scots.24

  For reasons other than the seedy domestic wrangles of the Shrewsburys, Mary was being conducted remorselessly down the path which led to closer conditions of imprisonment. She herself at one point hesitated to complain too forcibly about the Shrewsbury scandal, lest she should be removed from his charge altogether and placed in the hands of a far more severe jailer. It was a valid fear. But even without the malice of Bess, Mary’s days with Shrewsbury were numbered, due to external conditions in England over which she once more had no control. The effects of the papal bull of excommunication against Elizabeth, promulgated in 1570, only began to be properly felt towards the end of the decade when the reconversion of England was attempted once more from abroad; a trickle and then a faster flow of Jesuit missionaries, many of them Englishmen returning after training abroad, made this cause their own.* There were differences of temperament among the missionaries themselves, who ranged from men of incandescent faith and sanctity, such as Edmund Campion, to the more diplomatic-minded missionaries, such as Robert Persons, who had contacts in every European capital. Both men arrived in England in 1580, although Persons subsequently went on to Spain from where, from knowledge gained during his visit, he suggested Catholicism should be restored in England by force rather than pure missionary fervour.

  The appearance of these rekindlers of Catholic flames in English hearts had a two-fold effect: in the first place the English Catholics themselves became more sanguine and therefore more zealous; secondly the English government tightened up the laws against the recusants (those who refused to attend the official Protestant services once a week), increased the fines, which became heavy from 1577 onwards, and using the double-edge weapon of the papal excommunication, began to blur the distinction between recusant and rebel. The English Catholics themselves were divided by many gradations of feeling, apart from the Faith which united them. There were many English Catholics who, although they declined to abandon the faith of their fathers at the orders of Parliament, yet equally declined to forfeit their loyalty to their Queen Elizabeth at the instigation of the hope. It was just these Catholics whom it was now po
ssible for the English government to brand as rebels, using the papal bull as proof. As one of their number, the eloquent Jesuit missionary Father William Weston himself, wrote, these were now bitter days, filled with immeasurable suffering for the English Catholic community: ‘Catholics now saw their own country, the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and unloving land.’26