Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

by Margaret George

  She tiptoed back across the room. They had given her a spacious suite of rooms, although they had had to borrow furniture from all the neighbours in order to furnish them properly. Even the smallest, the bedchamber, was large enough that a folding screen gave her privacy at one end; Mary Seton slept at the other. Seton and a large contingent of other followers had been allowed to join her; and Lady Douglas had sent all the possessions she had so hastily left behind. She had even included a kindly note with them. Well, Lady Douglas, as a king’s ex-mistress, was used to the vicissitudes of fortune. She may have lost a prisoner, but her son George may have gained a royal wife, if fate decided to turn that way—Mary knew that was what she was thinking. She could not help but be amused at the adaptable old lady: a good loser, always looking ahead to the next hand.

  Certain now that Seton slept and she would not disturb her, she crept into the adjoining day-chamber, which was a few steps lower down, lit a candle on her writing table, and took out the blank-paged journal that the Curwen family had presented her with. She found it such a novelty to be able to write whatever she wished, whenever she wished, that she had gone a little mad with it. She had never been surrounded only by friends before; everyone here was sharing her exile with her, at great personal cost to themselves, and would never use anything she wrote against her.

  She had written poetry before, and had fancied herself to have a talent for it—so Brantôme had told her. In the delirium of her love for Bothwell, she had written poems to him, not very good ones, as she did not take the time to think of metaphors and similes, nor even of original wordings. But the essay, or the word-sketch, she had never attempted. Her letters—except for her love letters—were all political.

  She opened the book. Its last entry was dated August first, 1568.

  The countryside here—they call it Wensleydale—is soft and rolling, deep deep green, very different from Scotland. We are in the middle of the country, far from the sea, and there is no salt in the air. It is one of those places where the inhabitants can pass their whole lives unannoyed by any ruder intrusion. The cattle low, the milkmaids walk along the paths swinging their buckets at sunrise and sunset.

  I am becoming more used to it now—my new “host,” Lord Scrope, makes every effort to please me. Lady Scrope waits on me and whispers in my ear about the charms of her brother, the Duke of Norfolk. But he’s been married three times already! Of course they could say the same of me. Strange how it always sounds worse when applied to someone else. Hear “three wives,” and one’s first thought is: I would not care to be the fourth! She hints—delicately, of course—that the Duke is in dire need of a wife, and that if I would consider it, Elizabeth would be pleased.

  If Elizabeth would be so pleased, why must it be spoken of in whispers?

  Now she smoothed out the page and wrote:

  August 20, 1568. So many changes in three weeks! We are becoming settled. I write to Elizabeth and she responds. The Lords have agreed to submit to the hearing! So soon I shall accuse Lord James to his face, and Morton to his hideous red beard, and Maitland … I shall speak loud and clear and tell the world just what they are. I shall tell about the Craigmillar conference, in which they suggested doing away with Darnley. Oh, to be able to tell it at last! My breast is bursting with what I have to disclose!

  I believe it is Cecil who has restrained Elizabeth from taking my part more openly. The French ambassador in London and the Spanish one as well keep me informed. I know more here than ever I did in Scotland. Here there is no Lord James to intercept. But it was better still in Carlisle. This place is so secluded; no one ever passes through it. It is kept like a secret in this lush valley.

  The Scrope family has always been sympathetic to the Catholic cause. They took the part of the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII thirty years ago, and paid for it. On my floor is an exquisite chapel, which the first Lord Scrope built as a chantry where the monks could pray for the soul of Richard II. Alas, no monks pray there now, so the soul of Richard II must fend for itself in purgatory. But I go in there myself to pray, and no one forbids me.

  I am learning that so many of these families are partial to the old religion; and after all, it is only ten years since all England was Catholic. Memories are long. The great families of the North, the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland, are almost openly Catholic. Northumberland has declared himself to be sympathetic, and sent me several devotional articles of the faith. And the Duke of Norfolk, for all that he is nominally Protestant, had a Catholic wife and a son who leans that way. Here I am among friends, though some dare declare it more openly than others. The Earl of Northumberland has secretly sent me many messages to the effect that he is my partisan and will stand by me regardless, and that he can bring others to my side if necessary.

  I am not as well guarded as I am sure Lord James would wish. There is a garrison here, stationed in the southeast tower. But my rooms, which face west, give out onto open countryside. I am fifty feet up, but if I could be let down by a rope, I could escape, if only I had horses. But if I tried to escape, it would look as though I were trying to avoid the hearing. No, I am more powerful here, though I seem to be powerless—without even a horse to my name. I must wait—the thing that is, above all, hardest for me and against my nature, as it was against Bothwell’s. We are both being sorely tested, punished.…

  I have heard that Bothwell was granted a hearing before King Frederick at New Year’s, but was not released. He offered to cede the Orkneys and Shetlands back to Norway in exchange for his freedom, but it had the opposite effect: Frederick became more determined to keep him in custody and bargain with the Lords about the islands. Lord James declared that Bothwell was a convicted criminal in Scotland and should be extradited. Frederick bewailed the fact that transporting such a tricky and important state prisoner would require a squadron of ships which he could, alas, not spare at the moment. Lord James offered to send an executioner to Denmark, for Frederick’s convenience. Frederick—who well must realize what a blackguard James is!—refused his kind offer. So Bothwell is safe, and from all reports quite comfortably housed in the governor’s fortress at Malmö. Why can he not escape? I must get more particulars of his quarters. He must be closely guarded, for I have not received a letter in many months—since he came to Malmö, in fact. He must be strictly guarded, then … has he received any of my letters? The thought that he has not would be unbearable.

  When I am restored to my throne—yes, then Frederick will set him free, and bring him home in a gilded warship, with reparations and apologies for such mistreatment! And it will all seem a bad dream, and we’ll laugh together, late at night, about our prisons and how we endured them … Lochleven and Bergen and Carlisle and Copenhagen and Bolton and Malmö. Of course he’s known my gaolers—he knows the Laird of Lochleven and Lady Douglas. But he doesn’t know Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s vice-chamberlain. That sweet, long-suffering gentleman. He dearly loves his Queen—and, I sense, not only because his wife is of Anne Boleyn’s family and thus related to her. He loves the Queen in a way I have never seen before; not in France, not in Scotland. He reveres her, which is strange, since he is so much the older. I have attempted to make him joke about her, but although he tells many humorous stories about her, he never jokes about her—oh, it is very difficult to explain … exasperated humour without jokes.

  And Lord Scrope: so proper. Rather stuffed, like a dish of capon stuffed with dates and oysters. His neck is peculiarly thick and round, so that when he turns his head he has to move his shoulders as well. Yet he’s gentle, too. I have gentle keepers in a gentle country compared to the beasts that call themselves men, hiding in their castles on the windy crags of Scotland.

  Too many adjectives, she told herself, upon rereading the last sentence. But Scotland seemed to call for many, many adjectives. So she let it stay as it was.

  * * *

  September 8, 1568. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. I arose early and spent time i
n prayer in the chapel. I am not allowed a priest. When I asked for one, I was told, “There are no priests in England now.” What a judgement they bring on themselves with that statement! Instead, Knollys has brought a Reformed clergyman to try to convert me. He “instructs” me daily in the Anglican religion; this pleases Knollys. I wish to please them, in whatever ways I can. Then I go and say my rosary and pray to Our Lady to forgive me.

  There is more talk of Norfolk as a husband for me. I have been assured that many powerful people at court are in favour of this match—men like Robert Dudley, for example, and the earls of Arundel and Pembroke and Nicholas Throckmorton, my old friend the ambassador. They seem to feel that perhaps he can act as my permanent “keeper,” an approved Englishman to keep me on a chain. (It is not unlike the earlier proposal of Elizabeth that I wed her darling Dudley. He is still unmarried, but evidently she does not wish to repeat the offer.) This way, they reason, I can be kept in reserve for the succession.

  Why does no one remember that I am already married? And they call me disloyal and of shockingly short memory! Already there has been talk of marrying me to a Hamilton, to the newly widowed (for the third time—oh, how old we are becoming!) Philip of Spain, to George Douglas, to Norfolk, and then, today—oh, I almost burst into laughter—old Sir Francis Knollys offered his nephew, George Carey! If they truly think I am a murderess, then their own ambition and cynicism is shameful. Even Machiavelli would blush at such opportunism!

  * * *

  September 29, 1568. The Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels.

  O! I can hardly hold this pen, and it was all I could do to wait until nightfall to be alone. During the dinner I wanted to scream at Knollys: You knew all along.

  I am not to be allowed to appear at the hearing! I must speak only through representatives! And how can they truly speak my own words? They are not me. I had thought at long last to face my betrayers. But no! They will be allowed to come in person—and what persons! Lord James, Morton, Maitland, and the upstanding model of righteousness, Lord Lindsay! Yet I am to be detained here, forty miles away from York, where the hearings will be.

  Elizabeth herself will not be there. She sends instead the Duke of Norfolk, Sir Ralph Sadler (my enemy from the cradle!), and the Earl of Sussex, Elizabeth’s grand chamberlain, a Scots-hater if ever there was one. I have been told that he told Elizabeth that he had been taught by his grandfather never to trust any Scot or Frenchman. Of the three, only Norfolk does not see me as a villain.

  And so I must find commissioners to act for me—as if anyone truly can!

  But worse than that is the shocking news that Elizabeth is going to permit the Lords to submit the “casket letters” as evidence in the hearings. And yet they will not even allow me an opportunity to see them! I will have no idea exactly what they contain. Are they the letters and poems I wrote to Bothwell? Are they the letters, but copied over and tampered with? Or are they complete forgeries? How can I respond to them if I do not even know what their contents are?

  I would recognize my own words, even if copied out in another hand and translated. Certainly the words, when taken out of context (or worse yet, put in a new context), might paint me as guilty. Yet I did not kill Darnley. There were many others who were involved, and who tried to incriminate Bothwell after the fact—the placards, the clue of the barrel, the impersonation of him in the streets of Edinburgh that night. It was the Lords themselves who did this—the very ones who now bring forward these letters.

  O God, I am betrayed!

  * * *

  The men filed solemnly into the chamber at York—by a strange coincidence, the very same one that had been refurbished by Henry VIII to receive James V at a projected meeting in 1541. The Scots King had avoided the meeting, for fear of being kidnapped; now his captive daughter’s fate was to be determined there. They settled themselves on long benches and shuffled their papers, and tried to look grim and determined. But soon smiles were breaking out; these men had long known one another and were comfortable together.

  “Sadler! How fares your daughter, the one who had a mind to marry a clergyman?” asked Lord James. Sadler had long been involved in Scottish affairs.

  “Well, I thank you. And how is your dear wife? Ah, Lord Boyd!” Much discussion ensued about the correct procedure, and what might be entered as evidence. Mary’s commissioners presented a “book of complaints” for the Lord James’s side. Lord James demurred about his evidence, and pulled the silver casket out and placed it reverently on the table. But he declined to open it, merely making Morton describe how it had come into their possession. It sat there, tantalizingly.

  * * *

  Late at night the English delegation was startled to hear a knock on their chamber doors. It was Maitland, who asked in a low voice if any of them would care to examine the letters from the casket—unofficially, of course? They all said yes, and Maitland brought them copies. The men huddled over them in the candlelight, reading them and clucking.

  “There are most horrible and bloody,” murmured Norfolk. “Foul and abominable!” He continued reading, avidly.

  * * *

  During the day, between a discussion of the legitimacy of Lord James’s Regency and the hereditary rights of the Hamiltons, which had been set aside by it, Maitland plucked gently on Norfolk’s sleeve and suggested that they ride for a bit. The autumn was at its golden best, fat and full in the fields.

  “Yorkshire is a magnificent tract of country,” said Maitland. He hoped that Norfolk would agree to ride with him. And more than that, he hoped he would listen to what he, Maitland, was about to propose.

  Maitland realized it was time that the “casket letters” were put in their proper perspective, and he hoped there was a way to do it delicately, without calling his fellow Lords out-and-out liars. Which they were, of course. Maitland had come to know them all too well in the past two years, and what he had found out saddened him.

  For all that I like to think of myself as hardened to the failings of people, I realize now I am more of an idealist than I thought. The Lords broke all their promises to the Queen, and showed themselves morally worse than she was, whatever her sins of the flesh. Isn’t it held that Christ was more lenient with those sins than with the ones of pride and greed? he thought.

  “Indeed, yes, and at this time of year it comes close to being friendly,” said Norfolk. He looked eager to make the trip.

  They rode out beyond the high walls of the city, and took their horses along the River Ouse, with a mind to go hawking. The weather—a gold and blue day—seemed perfect for such an outing. They let the birds go, little caring if they captured anything, just happy to watch them soar.

  “How hard it must be for these birds to stay captive on their perches,” said Maitland. He watched the Duke as he said it. But there was no hint of understanding on the Duke’s blank face. The Duke was noted for being only somewhat more perceptive than the oxen of his farmers.

  “Yes. They are difficult to train,” he said, his thick lips moving slowly.

  “Think how much more painful it is for a golden eagle to be taken from his skies and made a captive to man.”

  “Fortunately there are not many of them, as only a king can hunt with an eagle. The rest of us—even dukes—must make do with falcons or hawks. Even dukes like me, who have more territory than some kings!” He nodded. “I have over six hundred square miles in my possession, you know, and sometimes I feel more of a king there than a real king must feel.”

  The hawks had flown so far away now that they were just black specks on the brilliant blue sky. A breeze was rustling the leaves on the trees down by the riverbank, and they sounded like scribes gathering up papers.

  “Perhaps you could be—” No, that was too blatant. “Dear Norfolk, as the greatest peer in England, doubtless you have spent much time in pondering the future of the country in which your ancestors have been so influential.” Maitland coughed gently. “I myself have long had one vision—that England and Scotl
and be united. Not by the sword, as in time past tyrants tried to wield, but by peaceful means. It is so clear that a union of the crowns is in the best interests of both realms!”

  “A united kingdom, stretching from Dover to the Shetlands—yes, it would be a strong country,” the Duke agreed.

  “Otherwise we cannot hope to hold our own. I tell you frankly, now that guns have rendered the longbow obsolete, we are at a severe disadvantage against France, with its larger land and population. As a small nation, we are vulnerable. My dream is to see us become as strong as possible.”

  A couple of hunters passed by on foot, their dogs scampering on ahead of them, splashing through the water. They removed their caps and nodded to Maitland and the Duke.

  The Duke’s eyes were wandering. He still had not taken the bait.

  “Let me speak frankly again,” Maitland persisted. “If you would marry the Queen of Scots, all these thorny questions would be settled.”

  “What thorny questions?”

  “The succession. The reluctance of Queen Elizabeth to marry. The obvious incapacity of Queen Mary to rule Scotland alone. The scandal to the crown.” He paused. “Shall I be completely specific? Queen Elizabeth is likely to have no heir; she is already thirty-five and shows no inclination to marry. The nearest Protestant successor was Catherine Grey, but she recently died. The English people will not have a Catholic queen, Mary Stuart or any other. But if she were married to an English Protestant, that would content them; it would, in effect, dilute her Catholicism. Do you see?”

  “Yeeess,” he finally said.

  “Her child, James, is not Catholic and therefore could succeed. Or any children you would have together. The Lords of the Congregation will never let her rule in Scotland again; indeed, how could they? Her reign has proved nothing but tumult and upheavals, and if she were free, she would just send for Bothwell again, and the Lords cannot tolerate him. But, released in the custody of yourself—”