The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Mary demanded fresh reinforcements for Scotland, but before they could set sail, Philip II had joined with Catherine de Medici to limit Guise power once and for all. On July 6, after negotiations lasting a month, the treaty of Edinburgh was signed. Purporting to be a coda to the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, the accord was in reality a new one. Supposedly between England, Scotland and France, it was actually between England, the Lords of the Congregation and the Guises, with Philip’s special envoy in the wings.

  The terms were a complete vindication of England and the rebel lords, and a betrayal of Mary and her mother. In a diametric reversal of Guise policy, France recognized Elizabeth to be the rightful queen of England. It was a slap in the face for Mary by her own side. The claim of Francis and Mary to the English throne would be dropped. French troops had to evacuate Scotland without delay; their forts and garrisons were to be razed to the ground. The council of twenty-four nobles would become the official government of Scotland for as long as Mary was an absentee ruler, so enabling it to become the vehicle for the ambitions of Lord James. Moreover, Francis and Mary were to admit that Elizabeth’s role in the whole affair had all along been that of an impartial umpire, a disinterested observer who had merely helped to create the right conditions for a negotiated treaty, and not a direct military participant who had allied with their rebels to forward English interests in Scotland.

  There was a further sting in the tail. The final clause of the treaty ineluded what might be called a surveillance clause. Despite the humiliating terms of the treaty, Francis and Mary had to promise to ratify and fulfill all of its conditions, failing which England might intervene in Scotland again whenever it thought it necessary to uphold the Protestant religion and to extirpate Catholicism and French influence from the British Isles.

  The treaty of Edinburgh, and especially this last clause, was a travesty. It cast a long and inky shadow over Mary’s entire career, primarily her relations with Elizabeth and Cecil. It is almost impossible to exaggerate its significance. Mary and Francis had not even been consulted about its terms, nor had Mary even agreed to negotiate with Elizabeth and Cecil as Queen of Scots. A commission, issued in the joint names of Mary and her husband, was admittedly produced in Edinburgh. But this commission was prepared on her behalf by her uncles. It was not Mary’s personal act, nor was her mother a party to the treaty. The commission merely illustrates how far their sovereignty had been usurped. Mary’s mother was easily bypassed, since she died on June 11, 1560, shortly after the negotiations for the treaty began. Cecil and Lord James were able to stitch everything up without paying any attention to the lawful sovereign power in Scotland.

  Mary was devastated by her mother’s death. Even this was heartlessly concealed from her: the news first arrived in France on June 18, but was kept secret for ten days. On finally being told, she withdrew to her chamber and wept for a month. When Jane Dormer, one of Mary Tudor’s former chief gentlewomen of the privy chamber, who had married Philip II’s ambassador in London and was traveling overland to Spain, saw her, she was greatly moved by her distress. The Venetian ambassador, who was also a witness, reported that Mary “loved her mother incredibly.” She was so grief-stricken, “she passed from one agony to another.”

  We know what Mary looked like at this time, because she was first drawn and then painted in her deuil blanc.* The drawing is the work of François Clouet, who perhaps also did the accompanying panel portrait. The sittings were completed in or around August 1560, when Throckmorton met Mary at Fontainebleau and the period of official court mourning for her mother had just expired. The portrait shows her as she was approaching the age of eighteen.

  It was Mary’s idea to send her portrait to England. She was impatient, she said, to find out more about her “sister queen,” and hoped to make a fresh start in their relations after the disasters of recent months. Mary wanted to appeal directly to Elizabeth at the level of queen to queen. She had already realized the importance of personal relations in her diplomacy, and offered to send her the portrait if Elizabeth would reciprocate. It was a generous gesture, even if Mary’s obvious curiosity about her cousin’s true height and appearance partly lay behind it. In the easy, almost bantering style she was beginning to adopt with people when she wanted to get her own way, she made Throckmorton promise Elizabeth would comply, “for I assure you,” said Mary, “if I thought she would not send me hers she should not have mine.”

  When Throckmorton had given his promise, Mary said, “I perceive you like me better when I look sadly than when I look merrily, for it is told me that you desired to have me pictured when I wore the deuil.” There is no evidence that Throckmorton ever said anything of the sort. The impulse for the exchange of portraits was Mary’s, but the ambassador knew what was expected of him.

  The portrait shows Mary as a frilly mature adult. Her pose is more confident; her face is rounder and fuller, her cheekbones are set higher, and her chin is more fully developed. Her deep-set hazel eyes are wistful and yet reveal her quick intelligence. Her nose is less snubbed and more aquiline than in the earlier chalk drawings. Her compressed lips and slightly pinched mouth convey her great sadness at her mother’s death. Her fine auburn hair is, as usual, crimped into ringlets peeping from the edges of her cap.

  Everyone who saw Mary remarked on her perfect complexion, and in the portrait her marble-colored skin exactly matched the marbled effect of the semitransparent white gauze veil stretching down to her feet. Beneath the veil she wore a black dress edged with white lace, cut low in the neck and rising in semicircles at the shoulders and across the bosom. It is the portrait of a young woman attempting to cope with her grief. But above all, it is the image of a woman who had grown into the part of a queen.

  Throckmorton had already noticed an alteration in her. At his previous interviews with her, she had been flanked by Catherine de Medici or her uncles, who spoke first, leaving Mary to echo their views. But this time they met privately and did not speak French. Although Throckmorton spoke in English and Mary answered in Scots, they understood each other. And Mary seemed much more relaxed. Whereas before she had been tense or arch, now she talked “more graciously and courteously.” She was more natural and at ease, more willing to follow her instincts. She was also a lot more spirited, confidently speaking her own lines and not those scripted by others.

  This was Mary’s first solo royal audience. It was also her first interview since the making of the treaty of Edinburgh, which she steadfastly refused to ratify. The tussle over the treaty was to become a legendary battle of wills, and Mary handled the opening round with aplomb. When asked to confirm it, she dissembled just as her mother had done to Sadler all those years ago. “What the king my husband resolves in that matter,” she said, “I will conform myself unto, for his will is mine.” It was the first of a series of classic excuses, showing Mary to be Elizabeth’s equal in the art of political evasion. She knew very well that she could count on Francis not to do anything by himself.

  Mary then changed tack. She produced a killer fact for Throckmorton to report back to his queen. “I am,” she said, “the nearest kinswoman she hath, being both of us of one house and stock, the queen my good sister coming of the brother, and I of the sister.”

  By reminding Elizabeth of their common ancestry as descendants of Henry VII, Mary alluded to her own dynastic rights. “I pray her to judge me by herself,” she continued, “for I am sure she could ill bear the usage and disobedience of her subjects which she knows mine have shown unto me.”

  Mary called for friendship and “amity” between the two queens on the basis of their kinship ties: “We be both of one blood, of one country and in one island.” This became a constant refrain of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy after Mary’s return to Scotland.

  Finally, she made a pledge: “I will for my part in all my doings make it good, looking for the like at her hands, and that we may strive which of us shall show most kindness to the other.” Her offer was as elegant as it was ironic, given
that Cecil had only six weeks earlier negotiated the treaty of Edinburgh with her rebels behind her back.

  Mary was finding her feet. Throckmorton had no luck with the ratification of the treaty, but was fobbed off in such style and with such charm, he hardly seemed to notice. Soon he was forced to report, “Assuredly the queen of Scotland . . . doth carry herself so honorably, advisedly and discreetly, as I can but fear her progress.” Her charisma was perhaps in the end more lethal than the dynastic threat she posed. If only, he mused playfully in an aside, “one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man to make so happy a marriage as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.”

  Back in London, Cecil saw things very differently. “We do all certainly think,” he informed Elizabeth in one of his more portentous but revealing memos, “that the Queen of Scots and for her sake her husband and the house of Guise be in their hearts mortal enemies to Your Majesty’s person.” England was in danger and must defend itself, “and principally the person of Your Majesty.” The “malice” of these conspirators was so great, they would never give up “as long as Your Majesty and the Scottish queen liveth.”

  Cecil’s mantra for the rest of his long career was to be Elizabeth’s safety. He saw relations between the two British queens less in terms of amity than as an almost cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Between the Rouen fête and her wedding, Mary had been trained to set her sights on the English throne, but after her marriage she was a relative bystander, even a casualty of Guise policy. Cecil never understood or made any allowances for that. Instead, he regarded her as much as her uncles as the instigator and intended beneficiary of an international Catholic conspiracy to depose and kill Elizabeth. He was already her most vehement and determined antagonist.

  Cecil’s ill will scarcely augured well for the fresh start Mary had proposed, and yet thanks to the arrogance and pretensions of her uncles, it was the assumption on which all her future dealings with England were likely to rest. The Guises had played their poker game and lost. It was now up to Mary herself to see if she could reshuffle their discarded hand.

  8

  Return to Scotland

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1560, Mary was rumored to be pregnant. The gossip was more than credible, because in a dynastic monarchy the expectation was that rulers should marry and start a family as soon as possible in order to perpetuate their lineage. On the wedding night, a well-established ritual had been followed. Mary and Francis had been tucked in together after their nuptial bed was blessed and sprinkled with holy water. What, if anything, had transpired is unknown, and after that first night the norm for their sleeping arrangements was different. Like all royal families at the time, the king and queen occupied separate suites of rooms in their palaces and slept in separate bedrooms, although Francis was free to arrive unannounced in Mary’s room at any time of day or night if he felt disposed to exercise his conjugal rights.

  Sex was obligatory for a queen consort of France. Catherine de Medici had been vulnerable to mistresses in the first seven years of her marriage because she disliked it so. Only when Francis was born could she begin to feel more secure. Likewise, the birth of a son and heir would have given Mary an invincible position at the heart of the Valois state. The timing would have been perfect, not least because a pregnant Mary could have instantly overshadowed her dominating mother-in-law. She clearly did think she was pregnant. She put on loose-fitting gowns and insisted that the court depart from Fontainebleau for the cooler air of St.-Germain.

  Mary’s hopes lasted for six weeks, but by the end of September the pregnancy was proved false and she returned to wearing her usual clothes. Her uncles made light of the affair, joking that a sixteen-year-old king and seventeen-year-old queen had plenty of time for such matters. Then Francis became ill. He had always been a delicate child, nicknamed “le Petit Roi” by his subjects on account of his sickly and runtish appearance.

  One evening in mid-November, when he returned from hunting near Orléans, he complained of dizziness and a buzzing in his ear. The following Sunday, he collapsed in church. Soon he was suffering from an acute stabbing pain in his head. Most likely his superficial suffering was from an ear infection—when fluid began to be discharged from his ear, he was immediately confined to bed, but it became rapidly clear he was gravely ill, probably from a brain tumor.

  Mary’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, pretended the king merely had a cold exacerbated by catarrh, which they said had affected his ear. This ceased to be convincing when the Spanish ambassador was promised an audience and then fobbed off at the last moment: rumors of a fatal illness or even poisoning started to circulate.

  In late November, Francis suffered a series of violent seizures. He was unable to move or speak, gazing impassively for hours at those around his bedside. Mary fought Catherine de Medici for the right to nurse him. Her mother-in-law was becoming insufferable. She mistrusted the Guise family and had dismissed all her son’s gentilshommes without informing his wife. In the end, the wife and mother nursed Francis together, testing his food to ensure nothing had been tampered with. Every day at dawn, they took up their stations, and despite Mary’s continual protests, Catherine also insisted on entering the king’s bedroom at night.

  The doctors bled Francis, purged him with enemas, and considered performing an operation to bore inside his skull to relieve the pressure of the fluid. Shortly before the operation was due to begin, the discharge from his ear stopped, but just as the doctors were congratulating themselves, a huge eruption occurred and Francis became delirious. By the beginning of December, the pains and discharges were almost continuous and fluids were escaping from his nose and mouth. On Thursday the 5th, he was so debilitated that he lay entirely prostrate, and died late in the evening. No one knew exactly when.

  During the night, while Mary kept vigil over the body of her dead husband, Catherine de Medici convened a conseil secret. Francis was succeeded by his brother, Charles IX, who was only ten years old. By coincidence, the Estates-General, the most important representative body in France and one that had not met since Charles VIII’s reign in 1484, had been summoned to meet at Orléans. Its delegates appointed Catherine to be regent. She was determined to be revenged on the Guises, whose machinations had repeatedly undermined her. She even restored Constable Montmorency to his former positions; hence the palace revolution that had accompanied Francis II’s accession only seventeen months before was reversed.

  Mary had no place in Catherine’s plans. Within weeks of the king’s funeral, an unbridgeable gulf separated the young widow and her mother-in-law. The idea that Mary should marry Charles IX was rejected out of hand by Catherine. In response, the Guise brothers attempted to betroth their niece to Don Carlos, the only son and heir of Philip II by his first marriage, to the Infanta Mary of Portugal, who had died giving birth to him fifteen years earlier.

  Catherine quickly stepped in to frustrate the Guises. Such a marriage, she believed, would threaten the interests of her other children and risk eclipsing the future progeny of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, whom Philip had taken as his third wife and who was now living with him in Madrid.

  The Guise family’s ascendancy was over. In April 1561, the duke decided to withdraw from court. With Montmorency and many of his Huguenot relations back in power, the stage was set for conflict. Within six months, the cardinal and the rest of the Guise faction had followed the duke’s example, taking a majority of their dependents and retainers with them. The family and around seven hundred of their adherents gathered at Joinville, later moving to Nancy and Saverne, where they felt secure in their estates on the eastern frontier of France.

  Mary read the signals and never risked an outright confrontation with her mother-in-law once Francis II was dead. On her first day as a widow, she voluntarily handed over her jewels as queen of France. A rough inventory was compiled, after which the coffers and bags were sent to Catherine together with th
e list. Once the jewels had arrived, the Queen Mother ordered a full inventory, listing every item and its value, from the largest pieces such as diamond necklaces and a ruby called “the egg of Naples” down to jeweled embroideries and even individual pearls.

  On the same day as the jewels were surrendered, Mary left her royal apartments and went into mourning in a private chamber. During the first fifteen days, she refused to receive any visitors apart from her uncles and a few close friends and family members. Within the space of six months, she had been widowed and orphaned and had lost her standing as queen of France. She sat almost motionless in her white mourning clothes, the room in darkness with the windows blackened and the only light provided by candles.

  On the sixteenth day she was willing to receive certain bishops and foreign ambassadors, who offered their condolences. After forty days, she ended her term of seclusion and attended a solemn Requiem for her husband in the Greyfriars church at Orléans.

  Although barely eighteen, Mary was able to control her emotions. Her husband’s death had followed hard on her mother’s. She was at first distraught, but once the initial shock had passed, she came to terms with her loss. A dynastic marriage was not a love match. Mary had done her duty in marrying Francis and had showered him with signs of affection. But she had never loved him. Her mother’s death had been far more painful. Moreover, she had been sidelined as queen of France. She was little more than a puppet, the strings pulled by her uncles. But she was still a crowned queen in her own right.