The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Maitland wrote next, offering his “faithful service” and complaining about “calumniators” and “talebearers.” He too was seeking to exonerate himself, in his case against the charge that he was too much Cecil’s lackey.

  Mary sent an illuminating reply, a remarkably clear-sighted one for an eighteen-year-old. She told him she was willing to forget the past and would judge him solely by his loyalty from now on. She told him candidly that she saw him as the “principal instrument” of all the “practices” attempted against her, and advised him to curtail his “intelligence” with Cecil. “Nothing,” she said, “passes among my nobility without your knowledge and advice. I will not conceal from you that if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the one that I shall blame first.” Her letter does more than anything to explain why Maitland reinvented himself over the next two years as Mary’s loyal servant. He was soon working harder for Mary than he was for Cecil, but typically hedged his bets by sending a transcript of Mary’s letter directly to Cecil by courier.

  Lord James and his allies knew that the treaty of Edinburgh would shortly become a major stumbling block in their relationship with Mary. Its final surveillance clause required her to ratify and fulfill all of its conditions, failing which England might intervene at any time in Scotland—a threat that was now a serious cause for alarm. To deal with it, Maitland drafted a blueprint for a fresh concordat with Elizabeth and Cecil, one in which Mary would renounce her immediate Catholic claim to the English throne and recognize Elizabeth as England’s lawful queen during her own lifetime. It was to be a more or less straightforward trade: in exchange for surrendering her immediate dynastic claim, Mary would be recognized in England as “the second person of the realm.” She would become heir apparent to the English throne, and would succeed to the throne if Elizabeth died unexpectedly without children of her own.

  Maitland was trying to engineer a compromise even while Throckmorton was still badgering Mary to ratify the treaty in its original form. He argued that the effect would be the same as if she had ratified the treaty. She would have acknowledged Elizabeth to be England’s legitimate queen. His idea was that with Cecil’s agreement, Mary should travel home to Scotland through England. She would cross from Calais to Dover, where she would be greeted by a Scottish delegation and taken to London. While there, she would be able to meet Elizabeth face to face and conclude the final terms. In Maitland’s words, such an interview between the queens “shall breed us quietness for their times.”

  After visiting her relations at Nancy, Mary returned to Joinville and Rheims, and finally to Paris, where she arrived on June 10, 1561. She was received with honor and lodged at the Louvre. On the 18th, Throckmorton reappeared to try his luck again. Mary replied that she meant to delay her “resolute answer” until she had the advice of her lords, which would not be until after her arrival in Scotland. This would, she assured him, be soon. She meant to take her departure “very shortly.” D’Oysel was to be sent to Elizabeth with a message, and to request a diplomatic passport in case through storm or illness Mary’s galleys were forced to take shelter in England. Beyond this, she did not propose to commit herself.

  Throckmorton was in a quandary. His instructions bound him to persuade Mary to ratify the treaty as a condition of his own recall to London. He therefore called a spade a spade. Mary’s insistence on obtaining her lords’ approval before the treaty was ratified was, he said, ridiculous. It was these very same lords who had negotiated it. That, retorted Mary, was now less certain. Things, she suggested, were changing: “It will appear when I come amongst them whether they will be of the same mind.”

  It was not the answer Throckmorton needed. And it only got worse when d’Oysel arrived in London to request the passport. Although such documents were issued routinely for diplomatic travel, Elizabeth flatly refused to grant Mary or her companions any safe-conduct unless she first ratified the treaty. When d’Oysel was asked point-blank when that would be, he declined to answer, thereby causing a furor.

  Elizabeth had been advised by Cecil. On July 14, following the clash with d’Oysel, he spoke his mind to Throckmorton. If Mary relinquished her immediate dynastic claim before leaving France, then, providing she also ratified the treaty as the surveillance clause required, she might be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir. She might travel to Scotland via Dover, and a personal interview between the two queens could be arranged, which, as d’Oysel was curtly reminded, would be “a friendly meeting” to confirm the “amity.”

  Cecil had been corresponding with Maitland, but there was a fatal divergence in their approach. Whereas Maitland sought to “allure” Mary toward a compromise with England, believing she might become Elizabeth’s heir without ratification of the treaty, Cecil still required her not only to renounce her claim but to ratify as well.

  In effect, he vetoed the Scottish scheme. Without ratification, there would be no deal. As if this were not enough, his innermost thoughts were betrayed when, after conceding Mary might be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir apparent, he added: “Well, God send our mistress a husband, and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.”

  Even if a settlement was reached, Cecil intended to do all in his power to persuade Elizabeth to marry and have children, thereby excluding Mary from the English succession forever. “This matter,” he concluded, “is too big for weak folks, and too deep for the simple; the Queen’s Majesty knoweth of it, and so I will end.”

  On July 20, Mary’s farewell tour ended at St.-Germain, where a fête was held in her honor lasting four days. Verses by Ronsard celebrated her as “this beauty, honor of our times, who makes both kings and peoples content.”

  She withdrew from St.-Germain on the 25th and, accompanied by her uncles and a large retinue, headed north for the channel ports. False information about her itinerary was given out to confuse English spies: the tactic succeeded, because although Elizabeth relented at the last moment and issued a safe-conduct, it could not be delivered and Mary traveled without it.

  Mary reached Calais on August 10. There she rested for four days before boarding her galley on the morning of the 14th. Her departure was organized by her uncles, one of the last pieces of stage management they would ever undertake for her. They had arranged for the Marquis d’Elbeuf and two of his older brothers to attend her during the crossing. Constable Montmorency’s son, Henry, was also with them. He returned to France a month or so after Mary arrived in Edinburgh, and she wrote to thank his father for his courtesy. Her diplomatic escort was Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissière, an astute diplomat and intellectual who later played a key role as one of the French ambassadors in Scotland and England and who described Mary in his Memoirs as a “naturalized Frenchwoman . . . not just the most beautiful, but the most elegant of all her sex, both in speech and good manners.”

  Also on board Mary’s galley were her loyal companions the four Maries, whom she had teased so mercilessly on their outward journey thirteen years before. A second galley was provided for the rest of her staff, with a flotilla of more than a dozen vessels for the baggage, some of them merchant ships chartered from the Dutch. So many ships were needed because on top of Mary’s tapestries, furniture and several hundred coffers stuffed with gowns, gold and silver plate, paintings and other works of art, vast quantities of bed linen and other stores and equipment were transported, including one hundred horses and mules.

  She sailed out of the harbor at around noon, watched by one of Throckmorton’s servants, who had finally tracked her down. As on her outward voyage, the captain of her galley was Nicolas de Villegagnon. And just as there had been false starts and a smashed rudder when she left Scotland, on this occasion also, as her flotilla attempted to leave the port, there was an accident. At the narrow entrance to the harbor, a badly steered ship collided with another boat, which sank. Mary rushed forward, calling on Villegagnon to rescue the drowning sailors and offering a typically generous reward to anyone who succeeded.
But the ship had plunged to the bottom and there were no survivors.

  “What an omen is this?” asked Mary as the signal to hoist sail was given again and the journey resumed. She flatly refused to go down to her cabin, and instead the four Maries prepared a bed for her on the poop deck, where she spent her first night at sea.

  Since the shock of her double bereavement in 1560, Mary had acted with courage and composure, especially in her dealings with Throckmorton. But as the coast of France disappeared into the haze, she lost her nerve and burst into tears. With her elbows leaning on the stern rail, she sobbed her heart out, her eyes fixed on the speck of land she had just left as it finally slipped out of view. Her last words as her galley sailed into the open sea were “Adieu France. It’s all over now. Adieu France. I think I’ll never see your shores again.”

  9

  Into the Labyrinth

  MARY’S ARRIVAL in the land of her birth took her subjects somewhat by surprise. Her voyage lasted barely five days, almost a record for the crossing and up to a week less than anyone had expected. As soon as Villegagnon’s flotilla had entered the open waters of the North Sea after leaving the English Channel, the captain had ordered the two smaller and much faster galleys under his command to sail ahead, leaving the slower transport ships to follow at their own speed.

  On Tuesday, August 19, 1561, at six o’clock on what by all accounts was an unusually damp and depressing morning, the galleys sailed up the Firth of Forth and anchored at the entrance to the harbor at Leith. A thick haar, or cold sea mist, cloaked the shore as they arrived, so the sailors were told to wait until it dispersed before tying up at the wooden pier. Mary disembarked shortly before ten, just as the sun was starting to pierce the haze. It ended an absence of thirteen years: she had left a Scots child and returned a French woman.

  She washed and rested at a nearby house for an hour or so. Then she rode with her retinue up the steep hill from the port to the town of Edinburgh, and from there down the Canongate to Holyroodhouse, the most magnificent of the palaces of Scotland. The royal apartments were situated there, in the great fortified tower her father, James V, had constructed to eclipse the older buildings on the grounds of the ancient Abbey-Kirk.

  It was hardly the homecoming of which Mary had dreamed. She had reached the shores of Scotland before anyone had thought it necessary to organize a welcome party, and her transport ships were left behind. One carrying her horses, including her favorite state palfrey, had been intercepted by an English naval patrol on suspicion of piracy and diverted to Tynemouth, where the horses were detained for a month before being allowed to proceed by land to Edinburgh. Mary was forced to make a lackluster entry into her capital without the familiar trappings of monarchy and on borrowed horses. She was unable to use her own saddles and bridles, which lay in her coffers on the slower chartered vessels.

  Not everything was a disappointment. Although Leith was deserted when she arrived, Villegagnon had the galleys fire their guns, which quickly produced a crowd to watch the show. By evening the celebrations had started, and even John Knox had to admit that the people rejoiced with bonfires and music. A company of “honest musicians,” he noted with grim satisfaction, “gave their salutations at her chamber window.” They were, of course, his fellow Calvinists, who aroused rather different reactions among the members of Mary’s entourage. The Catholic Pierre de Bourdeille, who traveled in her suite, complained that when the queen wished to go to bed, several hundred “knaves of the town” congregated under her window, playing fiddles and other stringed instruments and singing psalms “so badly and out of tune that nothing could be worse.”

  On August 31, almost a fortnight after Mary’s return, the provost of Edinburgh finally got his act together. For the queen and her retinue, including her Guise relations, he mounted a civic banquet in Cardinal Beaton’s old mansion. The next day, Villegagnon set sail again for home, accompanied by those of Mary’s escorts who did not wish to stay longer in Scotland than their official duties required.

  When Mary first walked through the largely empty rooms of the royal apartments at Holyrood, she must have felt excitement at taking up her role as queen. She had been trained for such a moment since birth. There would have been sadness too, because these rooms had been unoccupied since her mother’s death the year before. The furniture had been stored away, and Mary’s own had not yet arrived.

  Holyrood was unfamiliar to her. She had never seen it as a child. Now that she had arrived there, she would instantly have noticed that her father’s architectural plan was in the French style. The James V tower in which she lived was modeled on the Francis I tower of the château of Chambord, where she had stayed many times. The new west front of the palace with its great expanses of glazing and ornamental carvings was most likely an imitation of the famous terrace at Chambord. It had been built in honor of Madeleine, Francis I’s daughter and James V’s first wife. Then, when she died and James married again, the vast gardens were laid out by Mary’s mother after the patterns she knew so well from her many visits to St.-Germain, Fontainebleau, Amboise and Blois.

  Mary found herself to be in more congenial surroundings than she might have expected. She would have noticed very little change in her food and daily routine, because she had brought a skeleton domestic staff with her from France, including valets de chambre, ushers, chefs, pantry staff, a tailor, chaplains, doctors and an apothecary. She kept up her French establishment throughout her reign in Scotland, paying for it out of her revenues as dowager queen of France, and it steadily grew to be more than 170 strong.

  One thing she discovered to be different was the climate. Scotland was neither Paris nor the Loire Valley. The summer heat lacked the searing intensity of the Paris basin or the Touraine; the winter cold was far more severe than in Picardy or Normandy. Spring came six weeks later, and autumn a month or so earlier.

  Her escorts remarked on the poverty of the Scottish people. Bourdeille, with his tendency to exaggerate, predicted it would be easy for Mary to dazzle those who were so poor: the very sight of their penury, he said, had brought tears of sorrow to her eyes when she had first arrived. And Cecil, forever keen to gather news of her reception, heard that “the poverty of her subjects greatly advanceth whatsoever she intendeth.”

  This was not the whole story. There were more beggars in France than in Scotland. The difference was less the humble, hand-to-mouth existence of the Lowland tenant farmers and Highland cottagers than the absence of a strong urban bourgeoisie outside Edinburgh. The towns and burghs were so small as to be almost inconspicuous. What was really noticeable was the extreme contrast between the cottages and huts of the rural masses and the castles and tower houses of the nobles and lairds—the gulf between rich and poor. Rumors of Mary’s vast collections of dresses, diamonds, pearls and jeweled embroideries, her gold and silver plate, her furniture and tapestries, had preceded her return. It was the sheer glamour of a Scottish queen who could rival anything seen at the ruling courts of Europe that most likely overawed her less well-off subjects rather than her wealth as such.

  Soon Mary felt sufficiently confident in her new home to stage a triumphal entry into Edinburgh. She wanted to compensate for the lack of spectacle she felt had detracted from her arrival. The entrée royale was a core element of the cult of monarchy in France, and she decided it was now the best way to introduce herself to her people.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of September 2, she left Holyrood by a back way, skirting around the town on the north side and reentering through a specially made opening in the town wall. She then rode in state up the hill to the castle flanked by her leading nobility. When they entered the great hall of the castle, a state banquet was served at which Mary was the host and civic dignitaries the guests of honor. As she left, the guns of the citadel thundered a salute.

  This completed the formalities of the entrée. There followed civic pageants laid on by the Edinburgh town council to welcome her home. When Mary rode down Castle Hill, she w
as met by fifty young townsmen dressed up as “Moors,” clad in yellow taffeta with black hats and masks and bedecked with jeweled rings and gold chains. A procession was formed in which the nobles and “Moors” led the way, after which came Mary, flanked by civic officials who bore a purple canopy aloft above her head. “Moors” and “Turks” were the favorites of the crowds at spectacles of this sort, and companies of “Moors” had appeared in processions designed to honor Mary of Guise when she was regent. The town council had enough of their costumes already in stock, and decided to use what was available.

  The procession advanced in stages. When Mary reached the Lawnmarket, she was treated to the first in a series of pageants and moral allegories. A triumphal arch had been built out of wood and painted in rich colors. From a gallery above the arch, a choir of children sang “in the most heavenly wise,” and as Mary passed underneath, a mechanical globe constructed to look like a cloud opened, from which emerged a “bonny bairn” who descended on a rope as if he were an angel. He first handed the keys of the town to Mary, then presented her with a Bible and a psalter, bound in fine purple velvet. After handing her the books, he recited some verses:

  Welcome our sovereign, welcome our native queen,

  Welcome to us your subjects great and small,

  Welcome I say even from the very spleen

  To Edinburgh your city principal.

  Whereof your people with heart both one and all,

  Doth here offer to your excellency

  Two proper volumes in memorial,

  As gifts most worthy for a godly prince . . .

  Mary had kept up her Scots, so understood every word. She willingly accepted the gifts, but when the recitation began, she frowned and with some panache passed them to Arthur Erskine, the captain of her guard, who stood nearby. He was a diehard Catholic who had served her in France as her butler. She knew at once that the presentation was more than it seemed: the phrase “godly prince” was code for a Protestant one, and to the Huguenots and other Calvinists, the Bible and psalter symbolized their sermons and psalm-singing. Mary realized that she was being petitioned to adopt a Calvinist religious policy, and she decided to move on.