Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

by Margaret George

  I Thee implore / That Thou wilt / Grant me liberty.

  With her bodily liberty, the many Mary Stuarts that had been contained in one body, bundled together as it were, fled to their various domains, diverging into irreconcilable elements.

  The beautiful, youthful spirit returned to France. It flew to Reims and saw at last its mother’s grave, its beloved aunt, its bereft friend Mary Seton. It lingered in fondness at the wall where the ivory crucifix had originally hung. It flew, no bodily constraints now, but pure spirit, to Notre Dame and heard its own funeral eulogy.

  There, in the darkness of the great cathedral where she had married in a blaze of earthly glory, her spirit heard an old priest—young then—speak of her and of those days.

  “Many of us saw, in the place where we are now assembled, this Queen on the day of her bridal, arrayed in her regal trappings, so covered with jewels that the sun himself shone not more brightly, so beautiful, so charming withal, as never woman was. These walls were then hung with cloth of gold and precious tapestries; every space was filled with thrones and seats, crowded with princes and princesses, who came from all parts to share in the rejoicings. The palace was overflowing with magnificence, spendid fêtes and masques; the streets with jousts and tourneys. In short, it seemed as if our age had succeeded that day in surpassing the pomp of all past centuries.

  “A little time has flown on, and it is all vanished like a cloud. Who could have believed that such a change could have befallen her who appeared then so triumphant, and that we should have seen her a prisoner who had restored prisoners to liberty; in poverty, she who was accustomed to give so liberally to others; treated with contumely by those on whom she had conferred honours; and finally, the axe of the base executioner mangling the form of her who was doubly a queen; that form which honoured the nuptial bed of a sovereign of France falling dishonoured on a scaffold, and that beauty, which had been one of the wonders of the world, faded in a dreary prison, and at last effaced by a piteous death?”

  He looked around the cathedral. “This place, where she was surrounded by splendour, is now hung with black for her. Instead of nuptial torches we have funeral tapers; in the place of songs of joy, we have sighs and groans; for clarions and hautboys, the tolling of the sad and dismal bell.

  “It appears as if God had chosen to render her virtues more glorious by her afflictions. Others leave to their successors the care of building fair and splendid monuments to escape forgetfulness, but this Queen in dying exonerates you from that care, having by her death itself imprinted on the minds of men an image of constancy which should not be for this age alone, but for time and eternity.”

  The youthful spirit was touched, and then moved on.

  * * *

  The Monstrous Dragon and Threat to Protestantism flew to London and beheld Elizabeth at last. It saw her grief and shock when she was told of the execution, and knew in its new knowledge that Elizabeth’s ministers had carried out the warrant on their own authority. But it mattered not. It watched the celebrations in London, understood the hatred, but was not touched by it.

  * * *

  The mother went to Scotland and saw James, a grown man, dressed all in black. She saw the courtiers, too. New ones, ones that were not there when she had ruled. And the old ones, the ones who had held sway and terror in her time, now quite vanished. But Holyrood was the same; Edinburgh Castle was the same.

  She saw the Earl of Sinclair striding in in armour; heard James ask, peevishly, if he had not received the order to wear mourning for the Queen of Scotland; heard the Earl cry out, striking his armour, “This is the proper mourning for the Queen of Scotland!” and flourish his sword.

  Scotland … it had not changed. But now she could love it.

  Mary the daughter of Rome, the martyr to the faith, saw the proliferation of pamphlets, of accounts of her piety, of portraits and poems that circulated as soon as her attendants escaped from England and made their way to the Continent to tell their story of her last days. Her spirit was touched by the devotion of her fellow Catholics. But it did not recognize this staid, stern captive they had created.

  * * *

  There were two burials, two funerals. The first took place six months after her death, in the nearby Peterborough Cathedral. The service was Anglican, and conducted by the Dean. Her spirit was not vexed by it, only filled with compassion. Father de Préau walked along behind him, his cross prominently displayed. Elizabeth was chief mourner, but of course was not there in person. She sent a proxy, the Countess of Bedford. The day was very hot, the coffin enormously heavy. The spirit knew that they had encased her body in a thousand pounds of lead, as if they were afraid she would escape. They did not understand, in spite of all their prayers and religion.

  * * *

  Time, which was no time, passed, and the second funeral took place. The coffin made its way slowly to London on the orders of James, who was now King of England and Scotland. He wished to honour his mother, and lay her to rest (they did not understand) in the chapel of her great-grandfather, Henry VII. In the same chapel, under a structure and statue carved by the same sculptor, lay Elizabeth.

  The spirit saw her own coffin passing only a few yards from Elizabeth’s monument. They were to be separated by the nave of the chapel, held apart by the walls and carved stalls, never to gaze on one another’s tombs.

  Mary’s elaborate monument, with a black-and-white marble canopy, had a white marble statue of her lying in state. It was beautiful as only earthly things could be.

  And so the spirit liked to visit it and linger there. Some of those who came felt its presence, and soon they were talking of miracles and sainthood.

  They did not understand.

  It wearied the spirit to see how little they understood, that the presence of the spirit was not extraordinary, or even unusual; so that in time, little by little, the spirit lost its desire to roam abroad.

  It found its resting place in God, who had always understood that all the Mary Stuarts were one, and created for eternity.

  * * *

  The exile had come home.

  In my end is my beginning.

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

  It has been said that “the Age of Kings”—Henry VIII, Francis I, and the Emperor Charles V—was followed by “the Age of Queens”: Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen, Catherine de Médicis of France and Mary Queen of Scots. Certainly the second half of the sixteenth century saw an unusual number of female rulers, if one remembers that before Elizabeth I there reigned Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) and before Mary Queen of Scots, her mother Marie de Guise served as Regent of Scotland. John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, argued that it was unnatural to have a female as head of a realm. He was a sworn enemy of Mary Stuart, queen of his own country, seeming to dislike her personally as well as on principle.

  Of these rulers, it is Mary Queen of Scots who seems most elusive today. Opinions of her varied violently in her own day, and four centuries have done very little to reconcile the opposing views. Was she the depraved Jezebel of Knox’s imagination, steeped in lust and folly? Or was she the long-suffering, tolerant goddess of her partisans?

  In order to try to answer these questions, I have had to build up a composite picture of Mary as a person, much as modern reconnaissance missions use computer-enhanced and overlapping photographs to map surfaces. I have not felt it necessary to exclude any material, for some things cancel each other out. Gradually a coherent picture does begin to emerge, of a woman who is warmhearted, loyal, brave, generous, and spirited, but also unable to read character, volatile, impulsive, and better at quick action than at sustained strategy. She was clever but not intellectually brilliant, had marked artistic and poetic talent, and evidently had a great deal of charm and the ability to fit into any setting, whether opulent as in France or simple, as in a merchant’s house in St. Andrews. She was not especially fond of elaborate fashions and jewels, and had a boyish or warrior side to her.
Later in life, a mystical side emerged.

  No book about Mary Queen of Scots can escape the controversial questions of her life: 1. Was she really in love with James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, her third husband? 2. Who wrote the Casket Letters? 3. Who planned Darnley’s death? 4. Did Mary wish Elizabeth to be assassinated? On the answers to these four questions hang one’s verdict of her character.

  It is my opinion that she indeed loved the Earl of Bothwell and married him of her own free will. Her actions toward that end are too determined for the truth to be otherwise, and I tend to believe that she made the famous declaration that she “would go to the end of the earth with him in a white petticoat.” It is almost impossible to believe that their liaison did not begin before Darnley’s death—but it may just be that I wish to grant her some happiness, however brief.

  As for the Casket Letters, when all the texts have been analysed and reanalysed, the famous Second Casket Letter sounds so exactly like what a distracted women, deeply in love but tormented about her situation, would write, that I accept Mary as its author. That does not rule out the possibility that other letters, from other women (we know Bothwell had a romantic history), were added to Mary’s, and even some outright forgery may have taken place. The tone of the letters varies widely, and some of them do not sound like Mary. Even in love, Mary was never petty (although she may have been jealous or angry), and certain of the letters sound catty and mean-spirited, which is out of character. None of the originals remains, and thus we can never know what tampering took place.

  As for who killed Darnley, I have taken the position that although Mary longed to be free of him, she did not actually authorize the murder. There are different levels of knowing and at the deepest level she must have “known” in some way what had happened, but she was not a conscious murderess.

  The question of Elizabeth is a thorny one. We know that Mary was involved in four major plots during her imprisonment in England, and although only the last one specifically called for Elizabeth’s assassination, it must have been implicit in all the others. How else was Mary to become Queen, as her rescuers wished, unless Elizabeth were dead? But the question of whether someone who is wrongfully imprisoned has a moral right to attempt to escape by any means is one best left to the theologians and ethical and legal scholars. In real life, someone of Mary’s impulsive and fiery spirit would have been untrue to her own character had she not tried to extricate herself. She had a history of spectacular escapes: from Holyrood Palace after the Riccio murder, from Borthwick Castle, from Lochleven. Old habits—especially successful ones—die hard. It was probably just this history that gave her hope and kept her from seeing that her situation was fundamentally different in England. She was never able to convert any of her gaolers into accomplices as she had in Scotland. They were all loyal to Elizabeth. I believe she focused on the “escape” aspect rather than the fate of Elizabeth, because it was her nature to look to physical action and not give deep thought to long-range consequences. By the time of the Babington Plot, she was probably too demoralized to think very clearly.

  A few final notes: I took the liberty of blending a few characters to avoid confusion. There were actually two French physicians, Monsieur Lusgerie and Monsieur Bourgoing. But since Bourgoing was present at her execution and wrote an account of it, I simply made him her physician all the way through. There were also two Messieurs Naus, the brothers Jacques and Claud, both of whom served as her secretaries in sequence. And there were two Melville brothers, James and Robert, who served as Mary’s ambassadors.

  I have used Antonia Fraser’s distinction between the Scottish Stewarts and the French branch of that family, the Stuarts. So when Mary marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the spelling changes. Also, when she lived in France, her name was spelled Stuart.

  There are over two hundred characters in this novel mentioned by name, and all of them are historic, with the exception of two minor characters in the Scots Guard of archers in the French court, Patrick Scott and Rob MacDonald. Likewise, there are over sixty poems, songs, and letters quoted in the novel. All are geniune except Ronsard’s Hymn to the Moon, Darnley’s poem about Hadrian’s Wall, Mary and Bothwell’s letters to each other from gaol (although it is known that they wrote to each other, no letters have survived), the letter from the dying Lady Bothwell to Mary, and the specific wording of notes, from the French ambassador in regards to Gifford, from Sir Christopher Hatton to Elizabeth, and from Thomas Morgan to Mary. (Again, we know the notes existed.)

  I could not help making a few affectionate comments about my ancestors, the Scott clan. (My father’s first name is derived from his mother’s maiden name.) I was gratified to find that they indeed stayed loyal to Mary to the end—and so I am just following in the family tradition.

  If you would like to read more, and form your own composite picture of Mary, I can recommend the following biographies of Mary: the account in Agnes Strickland’s The Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses, 8 volumes (Edinburgh and London: Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1858), is invaluable for presenting the minutiae of Mary’s life. This Victorian account holds Mary blameless and near-perfect. Moving into later times, T. F. Henderson in Mary Queen of Scots, Her Environment and Tragedy, 2 volumes (New York, Haskell House: 1969 [reprint of 1905 edition]), has a more balanced and critical view. However, the period of her stay in England is not well represented here; it is very short. The leading modern biography, Antonia Fraser’s Mary Queen of Scots (New York: Delacorte, 1969), has been invaluable, and it covers every aspect of her life.

  In addition, there is a new biography written for the four-hundred-year observance of her death, by Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen of Scots (London: HMSO, 1987). Mary Stewart, Queen in Three Kingdoms, edited by Michael Lynch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1988), includes detailed scholarly essays on such subjects as Mary’s library and her dowager estate income. There is a “psychobiography” by Stefan Zweig, The Queen of Scots (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1935). Martin Hume wrote The Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, Ltd.). For an analysis of the different schools of thought about Mary’s character, see Alastair Cherry, Princes, Poets, and Patrons: The Stuarts of Scotland (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1987).

  If you are curious to know what Mary looked like, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery had an exhibition of authentic portraits and engravings, as well as the later historical paintings. The catalogue, The Queen’s Image, by Helen Smailes and Duncan Thomson (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1987), reproduces these and analyses them.

  Another book put out in honour of the quadricentenary is David J. Breeze, The Queen’s Progress, (London: HMSO, 1987), which depicts all the buildings associated with Mary. Also, David and Judy Steele’s Mary Stuart’s Scotland (New York: Harmony Books, 1987), shows the landscapes and people of Mary’s environment.

  Books about the Casket Letters and the Darnley murder abound. The earliest, Walter Goodall, An Examination of the Letters said to be written by Mary Queen of Scots to fames Earl of Bothwell, also, an Inquiry into the Murder of King Henry (Edinburgh: T.&W. Ruddimans, 1754), painstakingly tries to construct a case absolving Mary. T. F. Henderson, The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), is more even-handed. R. H. Mahon constructed a model of Kirk O’Field in an attempt to discover exactly what happened. It was he who first proposed the theory that Darnley himself had put the powder there. For every known detail of the event, Mahon’s The Tragedy of Kirk O’Field (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1930), is required reading.

  Other books important for understanding her years in Scotland are: Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London: Collins, 1937); Frank A. Mumby, The Fall of Mary Stuart (London: Constable and Co., 1921); Jasper Ridley, John Knox (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1968); John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1950); Martin A. Breslow, The Political Writings of John Knox
(Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, 1985); Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd., 1983); George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets (London: Collins Harvill, 1989).

  Once Mary gets to England, the cast of characters changes. See Conyers Read’s Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955); Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (Jonathan Cape, 1960); Mr. Secretary Walsingham, 3 volumes (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Archon Books, 1967 [reprint of 1925 edition]) to understand Mary’s political adversaries. Read Alison Plowden’s Danger to Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1973), and Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stewart, Two Queens in One Isle (Barnes & Noble, 1984), to understand the stage upon which Mary and Elizabeth were placed by fate. Gordon Donaldson’s The First Trial of Mary Queen of Scots (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1969) examines the forerunner of the final trial eighteen years later. For a succinct and elegant biography of the Virgin Queen, see J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), still the definitive one.

  A Reading Group Guide

  1. “Is there no Scots in me at all?” Mary asks her uncle when she is still in France. To what extent do you feel that Mary—who never knew her father and was brought up in France—was truly Scottish? How much does “blood” count?

  2. What do you think of Mary’s choice to go back to Scotland to take her place as queen there? How did both Scotland’s needs and her own figure into that choice?

  3. All of Mary’s major decisions were impulsive—to go to Scotland, to marry Darnley and Bothwell, to flee to Elizabeth. She was a cool and quick thinker in physical crises, such as the Riccio murder and her own escapes—but not in politics, where she was unable to read character. Is it possible for someone like Mary to be an effective ruler?

  4. Who was Mary’s strongest adversary—Knox or Elizabeth? Short of converting, there was nothing that Mary could have done to placate Knox, but were there ways that she could have won Elizabeth?