By the terms of Henry’s will Catherine was excluded from the regency, to be known henceforth as Queen Dowager and not Queen Regent. During the days between Henry’s demise and the announcement of his passing Edward Seymour, the brother of Catherine’s former inamorata Thomas, made a power grab and created himself Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector of the realm, claiming the regent’s mantle on behalf of his little nephew.
Within weeks of Henry’s death, although she was technically still in mourning, Catherine secretly became the mistress of her old flame. Although she had put aside her feelings for Thomas Seymour when she wed Henry, she had never forgotten her attraction to the dashing hero. She wrote to inform him that “I would not have you think that this . . . honest good will toward you [a] sudden . . . passion, for as truly as God is god, my mind was fully bent [inclined to be yours] the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know.”
Tongues wagged like mad over their clandestine affair even though they attempted discretion. The lovers soon became the target of court gossip and ribald tavern jokes. Accused of wantonness and the libidinousness of a barren woman, Catherine’s honor was so maligned and the jests so bawdy that Seymour tried to get an Act of Parliament passed forbidding public slander of the former queen.
Then, having surreptitiously tied the knot toward the middle of the spring, Seymour and Catherine campaigned for royal permission for their fait accompli. Finally, on June 25, 1547, nine-year-old King Edward wrote to his stepmother in support of the marriage. But when he learned that he had been tricked into sanctioning a done deal, the boy king felt utterly betrayed by the woman he had believed so sage and virtuous. Mary, too, whose trust and friendship Catherine had nurtured for years, was insulted that her stepmother had not observed a proper mourning period for her father before remarrying.
And Thomas Seymour, Lord Admiral of England as of February 1547, turned out not to be such a terrific catch. He vastly abused his office, permitting pirates to roam the high seas as long as he got a percentage of their bounty. His marriage to Catherine was often marked by tension, especially when the nubile Princess Elizabeth was placed under their care. Much to his wife’s humiliation, Seymour openly flirted with and fondled the girl. According to Elizabeth’s governess and confidante, Kat Ashley: “He wold . . . strike hir upon the bak, or on the buttocks familiarly . . . And one mornyng he strove to have kissed hir in hir Bed.” Once, Catherine even caught her husband holding the princess in his arms.
After three childless marriages, on August 30, 1548, at the age of thirty-six, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, whom they named for the Princess Mary. But thanks to her doctor’s dirty hands she developed puerperal fever, just as Jane Seymour had, and died on September 5. Catherine was buried in the manor chapel at Sudeley, her husband’s country seat. Her chief mourner was ten-year-old Lady Jane Grey, whose wardship Thomas Seymour had purchased. Lady Jane was being raised in their home as a surrogate daughter so that the ambitious Thomas would be responsible for arranging her eventual marriage, which of course he did—to his own nephew, Edward Seymour’s son, Lord Guilford Dudley.
Catherine’s death was followed by her husband’s swift descent. By the fall of 1548, having embezzled funds from a Bristol mint to finance the raising of his own private army, Thomas Seymour had become the most dangerous man in England. And it’s just as well that Catherine didn’t live to see him break into Edward VI’s bedchamber on January 16, 1549, with a retinue in tow and mischief on his mind, having first obtained a stamp of the young king’s signature and keys to several of the royal apartments. Moreover, Thomas shot his nephew’s lapdog when it tried to bite him.
He received his just deserts on Tower Hill on March 20, 1549, having been charged by the Privy Council with thirty-three counts of treason.
Although their daughter did not survive childhood, Catherine Parr’s legacy lived on through her stepdaughter Elizabeth. Her capability as well as her religious convictions left an indelible stamp on Elizabeth’s reign, and by extension, had a lasting effect on the kingdom and the history of England.
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS 1542-1587
RULED SCOTLAND: 1542-1567
QUEEN CONSORT OF FRANCE: 1559-1560
and
FRANÇOIS,
DAUPHIN OF FRANCE, LATER FRANÇOIS II
1544-1560
married 1558-1560
and
HENRY STUART,
LORD DARNLEY
1545-1567
married 1565-1567
and
JAMES HEPBURN,
4TH EARL OF BOTHWELL
c. 1534-1578
married 1567-1578
“For all the offense that is done to me, my lord, you have the weight thereof, for . . . which I shall be your wife no longer nor sleep with you any more, and shall never be well until I have caused you to have as sorrowful a heart as I have at this present.”
—Mary, Queen of Scots to Lord Darnley, March 9, 1566
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS WAS BORN ON DECEMBER 8, 1542, to Marie of Guise, the French-born wife of Scotland’s dying king, James V. The English had just routed James’s army at Solway Moss, and upon the birth of little Mary, the sonless king foretold that a daughter would spell the end of the family line. Alluding to the Stuarts’ history (which began with the son of Marjory, daughter of Robert the Bruce), James lamented, “Woe is me. My dynasty cam wi’ a lass and it’ll gang [go] wi’ a lass.”
The granddaughter of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret, Mary was only nine months old when she was crowned Queen of Scotland on September 9, 1543. And she was still an infant when her great-uncle brokered her marriage with his five-year-old son, Prince Edward. But in 1548, with Henry dead, Marie of Guise, as the little queen’s regent, decided not to honor her daughter’s betrothal to Edward. Instead, Marie sent Mary across the North Sea to be raised in the court of Henri II, not merely as a playfellow for the royal children, but as the intended wife of François, the frail and sickly four-year-old dauphin.
The little Scots queen was not quite six years old when she left her mother and made the journey to France. But Mary was cosseted and loved by her foster family, who treated her with deference and respect. Henri II called Mary his “reinette” or “little queen,” declaring her to be “the most perfect child I have ever seen,” and preferring her to his own offspring. She was tall for her age, towering above the runty, stuttering dauphin, who followed her about like a spaniel. Mary, it seems, returned his affection, but in the way that seemed more appropriate for a younger brother rather than an intended spouse. François was a weak little boy with a delicate constitution, an adenoidal voice due to a chronic respiratory infection, and a perpetual runny nose that made him into something of a sniveler. Henri’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, coached Mary on how to ensure the dauphin’s fondness for her: the little queen was to indulge him, never permitting him to be overly ambitious about anything, lest he unregally fail in the attempt.
On April 24, 1558, at the age of fifteen, Mary, Queen of Scots married the dauphin at Notre Dame. François was given the “crown matrimonial” of Scotland by the Scottish Parliament, so the teens were henceforth known as the Queen-Dauphine and the King-Dauphin. They made an odd couple at the altar. The fourteen-year-old dauphin, puffy-faced, pale, and sickly, was significantly shorter than his statuesque, redheaded bride. Nearly six feet tall, Mary was clearly the main attraction, dazzling spectators in her shimmering gown, “white unto a lily, fashioned so richly and beautifully that none could imagine it,” according to the French court chronicler Pierre de Brantôme. “The train thereof six ells in length was borne by two maids. About her neck hung a circlet of untold value.” Mary’s white wedding gown was a daring choice, as it was the traditional color of mourning for French queens. Adorned by a golden crown studded with pearls and precious gemstones, her auburn hair cascaded down her back. That morning Mary had written to her mother, declaring “all I can tell you is that I account myself one of the happiest wo
men in the world.”
After the ceremony, conducted by the Archbishop of Rouen, a herald standing outside the cathedral cried “Largesse!” and gold and silver coins were tossed into the crowd. The mad scramble to retrieve them resulted in several bodily injuries. A Scottish student standing amid the throng recalled, “The gentlemen took their cloaks, gentlewomen their farthingales, merchantmen their gowns, masters in art their hoods, students their peaked caps, and religious men had their scapulars violently riven from their shoulders to gather the showers of money.”
No expense was spared at the lavish wedding banquet and the intriguing entertainments that followed. Twelve man-made horses covered in gold and silver carried the young princes and the Guise children—Mary’s cousins from her mother’s side of the family. Later in the day they pulled carriages transporting the singers for the banquet, which rivaled any Long Island bar mitzvah. Six silver ships glided onto the dance floor. On board each of them was a man who selected a lady to join him. Henri chose the bride, while the groom extended his invitation to his mother.
Because Mary’s marriage to François was a political one, there were numerous agreements that had been executed before the “I dos” could be uttered. Nine days before the marriage, Mary affixed her signature to a document confirming Scottish autonomy. But two days earlier, at Fontainebleau, she had signed three secret premarital treaties, cleverly devised by her powerful Guise uncles (the brothers of her mother, Marie), that were not only highly beneficial to France but were extremely prejudicial to Scotland. Naturally, no one told the fifteen-year-old Mary that the agreements were illegal according to Scots law.
A little more than a year later, the forty-year-old Henri II died after a freak jousting accident on July 10, 1559, and Mary and her young husband became the King and Queen of France. François II was crowned at Rheims on September 18, although the royal family and the court were still in mourning. Because Mary was already the crowned Queen of Scotland, she could not be crowned twice.
Her joy at becoming Queen of France was tempered with sorrow, as Mary was not able to cast off her mourning clothes for long. In June 1560, her mother died of dropsy. When the news reached Mary in France, the devastated young queen suffered a nervous collapse. Throughout her life, this was Mary’s reaction to undue stress. Death, bloodshed, strife—all would send her into nearly paralytic hysteria. She began having fainting spells, which she misinterpreted as signs of pregnancy, and took to wearing a tunic—the maternity fashion of the day.
But the ambitious Guise family wasn’t counting their chickens. Their hopes for a healthy baby were doubtful in the extreme, given the problems with François’s “secret parts.” It appears that no one had given Mary that little talk about the birds and the bees before her wedding night. She couldn’t have become pregnant because their marriage had never been consummated. Even if it had, they might never have conceived a child, as François had an undescended testicle that probably rendered him infertile.
To compensate, perhaps, for his lack of masculinity, he dressed like a popinjay and became obsessed with riding. Although he’d grown taller during the autumn of 1559, François’s health remained poor. His dizzy spells had worsened. When he felt himself losing consciousness, he’d flail his limbs about in an effort to avoid passing out. His skin was blotchy and his face had become extremely swollen and was covered with pimples and boils.
Just as Mary was beginning to cope with the death of her mother, in November the fifteen-year-old king developed an agonizing abscess in his left ear, which oozed with a foul-smelling pus. He also began experiencing seizures accompanied by a stabbing pain in his head, and soon he became incapable of speech. The doctors bled the young king, administered enemas, and considered drilling a hole into his skull to release the fluid. Regardless of (or perhaps hastened by) these ministrations, on December 5, 1560, he died. Although he and Mary had been wed for a little more than two years, they had been companions for a full decade before their nuptials took place—almost the entirety of their youth.
Mary, who had loved her husband as a childhood friend, if not as a childhood sweetheart, “was as dolorous a wife as she had good cause to be,” reported Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador. She had been a good nurse to François, though she had exhausted herself “by long watching with him during his sickness.”
Almost as soon as her forty-day formal mourning period had ended, the eighteen-year-old Mary was urged by the royal family to remarry. But as the uncrowned widow of the king, she was merely an extraneous cipher in France, so she sailed back to Scotland in 1561.
The young queen found her country in turmoil, governed by a body of regents that included the evangelical Protestant vicar and theologian John Knox and Mary’s bastard half brother, James Stewart, who chose to spell his name the Scots way, rather than the Francofied “Stuart.”
In addition to the crippling poverty facing her wild and rugged nation, Mary had a lot of institutionalized hostility to handle. And because the core of the Scots queen’s foreign policy was for her cousin, Elizabeth of England, to acknowledge her as heiress presumptive, owing to her status as Margaret Tudor’s granddaughter, Mary had to manage Elizabeth’s increasing wariness that she might want to claim the throne of England sooner rather than later.
Mary had many strikes against her on her return: she was a female, a foreigner (having been raised in France), and she was a devout Catholic in a Protestant country that had embraced the Reformation with a vengeance. But unlike her royal counterparts in other countries, Mary drew a distinction between private faith and public policy, and religious tolerance became a hallmark of her reign. “She wishes all men to live as they please,” wrote the resident English ambassador, Thomas Randolph.
Additionally, Mary’s eagerness to give positions of power and influence to baseborn men because they lacked the personal agenda and the clannish ties of the nobility worked to her detriment. Such rare egalitarianism won the people’s hearts, but Scotland was a land where kinship was more important than government. Mary’s efforts to strip the nobles of their power and instead consolidate it within the purview of the crown angered many of the lairds whose backing she needed most—misogynists who were already malcontented at being ruled by a lassie. And Mary, Queen of Scots reveled in her femininity. She was a striking, though fragile, beauty—slender and unusually tall for the era, with high cheekbones, hazel eyes, and the Tudor red-gold hair. Her speaking voice was praised as très douce et très bonne—“very sweet and very pretty,” and she excelled at artistic as well as athletic pursuits, such as archery, hawking, and hunting.
John Knox denounced Mary for her womanhood and “the monstrous rule of women” in general. To allow these “weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures” to rule a realm was “the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.” Knox equated Mary’s Catholicism with unbridled female lust and uncontrollable passion. And he arrogantly and most emphatically believed that Mary should secure his approval before choosing a husband.
An enraged Mary, all of twenty-one years old at the time, summoned the fifty-year-old Knox to Holyrood on June 24, 1563. In “vehement fume,” she claimed that even though she had done everything in her power to extend the olive branch to him, no prince had been so “ill treated by a subject in all your rigorous manner of speaking both against myself and my uncles [the Guises of France]; yea, I have sought your favors by all possible means. I offered unto you presence and audience whensoever it pleased you to admonish me; and yet I cannot be quit of you.” Choked with tears, Mary demanded, “What have you to do with my marriage? What are you within this commonwealth?”
“A subject born within the same,” Knox replied tersely. He went on to say that he had never been much moved by tears, even from his own boys after he beat them.
Enraged by his temerity, Mary ordered him to quit her sight.
Queen Elizabeth weighed in on the subject of Mary’s marriage as well. She would never conscience her cous
in’s union with a Frenchman, nor to anyone from Spain or the Holy Roman Empire. If her new husband were otherwise foreign-born, that would be satisfactory as long as he was prepared to live in Scotland after the wedding, although Elizabeth’s preference was for a man who would support amity between her kingdom and Scotland, and who was “naturally born to live this isle.” That said, Mary would be expected to seek her permission to marry an English subject.
Mary was justifiably insulted by Elizabeth’s conditions—to demand that an anointed sovereign of an independent realm submit to the approval of a sister monarch. The stress and the pressure, particularly from Knox and Elizabeth, made her physically ill.
Elizabeth took it into her head to fob off her own sometime paramour, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, onto Mary, which would insure that Scotland would be governed according to Elizabeth’s wishes. But Leicester was damaged goods. His wife, Amy Robsart, had died under suspicious circumstances, and his father, the 1st Duke of Northumberland, had been executed for treason. However, Mary conceded that she would be willing to marry Leicester if Elizabeth named her as her heir.
In 1563 Elizabeth wrote to Mary asking her to grant a passport for the Earl of Lennox to return to his native Scotland after a lengthy exile in England. Elizabeth did not expect the earl to be accompanied by his handsome son and heir, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Darnley, who had been living at the English court, had the second-best hereditary claim to the English throne after Mary’s. Both were grandchildren of Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of Henry VIII. And like Mary, Darnley’s veins ran thick with both Scottish and English (Stuart and Tudor) royal blood. He, too, was Catholic, though he wore his religion lightly. Were Mary and Darnley to marry, her rights of succession to the English crown would be strengthened significantly.
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