The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  In the end, it came down to a vote, taken in Mary’s absence. Knox was acquitted, and when she returned to the court to hear the verdict, she demanded it be taken again. The result was exactly the same. Her illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, who was jealous of Maitland’s promotion over him, was the cause. He had spoken in favor of Knox’s prosecution in the Privy Council, but then used his influence in the court to secure an acquittal. It was his first open act of betrayal. Mary had been humiliated. She was resentful and exasperated, incredulous that victory could have been snatched away from her like this.

  But she was willing to learn from the experience. In an attempt to avoid new conflicts, she reined in Maitland somewhat, so that he and Moray were once more treated as equals. Her aim was still to balance the factions by creating a broad coalition of advisers willing to subordinate their private quarrels to royal interests, and to a large extent she was succeeding. Her working Privy Council, with whom she met almost every day at Holyrood, embraced a wide cross section of lords.

  Heartened by their support and for the moment taking no discernible offense at Moray’s duplicity, Mary decided to pick herself up and begin again after her suit for Don Carlos failed. She was still looking for a husband, but this time the focus of her diplomacy was England. She intended to test Elizabeth by teasing out the full extent of her unreasonable demands. It was becoming clear that Mary had a deep-seated need to secure recognition of her “grandeur” not just from her own subjects, but from the other rulers with whom she came into contact.

  Mary signaled the start of her latest round of diplomacy at a Shrovetide masque at Holyrood in February 1564. It was performed at a banquet said to be the most sumptuous and extravagant in living memory. There were three courses, each comprising not a single dish but a choice of some forty or fifty dishes of every conceivable kind of fish, fowl, game and meat, followed by jellies, pies, cakes, baked pudding, tart and fruit, all carried into the great hall by servants dressed in costumes of black and white. Mary, her attendant lords and the four Maries also wore these colors.

  A boy dressed as Cupid led the procession that served the first course to the strains of an Italian madrigal sung by Mary’s choir. After a suitable break, while the diners washed their hands and faces in silver bowls and dried them on white linen towels, the second course was served. At the head of the new procession was a beautiful young girl representing Chastity. As the waiters served the food, Latin verses were recited: a eulogy of the pure mind and radiant beauty that the child symbolized and which were iconic of Mary herself. Lastly, a boy in the character of Time ushered in the serving of the third course. The choir sang another divertissement, this time a setting of verses foretelling that as long as heaven and earth might endure, the mutual love and affection of Mary and Elizabeth would prevail.

  Randolph, the English ambassador, attended the feast and sent a report of it to Cecil. He also shuttled between Mary and her advisers, seeing first the one and then the others. He was becoming increasingly apprehensive, since almost three months had elapsed since he had delivered his message and Mary had so far declined to make any answer to the conditions he had conveyed about her marriage. He had no way of knowing what was in her mind, and believed that only Maitland really knew what she was thinking.

  The symbolism of the masque seemed unequivocal. But the answers given directly to Randolph by Mary and her councilors were more quixotic and far less easy to interpret.

  Maitland began the parley. He made “great protestation” to Randolph of Mary’s love for Elizabeth. And yet, how much better it would be, he said, if so difficult and confidential a topic as her marriage could be discussed face to face between the queens alone, without the intercession of their subjects. He clearly had Cecil firmly in his sights.

  Moray and Argyll then joined in. They coordinated with Maitland to inform Randolph that because his stipulations for Mary’s marriage had been “only general,” her reply could only be “uncertain.” It was a delphic response, a masterly piece of rhetorical obfuscation akin to what Elizabeth, when giving an equally unacceptable answer to her Parliaments on the subject of Mary, would later call an “answer answerless.”

  But there was a clear method to this. Mary, closely advised by Maitland and Moray, was inching toward a position in which Elizabeth would be forced to break cover and give the name of her favored candidate for Mary’s hand. Randolph was summoned to see Mary in a private interview a week after the Shrovetide banquet to receive his answer to the terms he had delivered before Christmas. He had no choice but to write a letter afterward to Elizabeth, rather than simply sending in a report to Cecil as he was usually expected to do.

  Once again, Mary had taken a leaf out of Elizabeth’s own textbook. One of the English queen’s time-honored ploys was to muddy the waters when imparting unwelcome news, saying one thing herself while getting her councilors to say something rather different. Now Mary did something similar. Her councilors had been noncommittal. They had not bound their queen to pay attention to Elizabeth’s conditions.

  But Mary did not want to leave it like that. She was still striving as hard as she could for a settlement in which her dynastic rights in England were recognized. Her councilors, she said, had given the mere “words” of her answer, but she wanted Randolph to explain to Elizabeth the full extent of their “meaning.”

  “Princes,” she confided, “at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.” Mary paused as she spoke, to emphasize that she was “without evil meaning” to Elizabeth. When she continued, she said that she longed for “nothing more” than her fellow sovereign’s lifelong love and goodwill.

  Mary had momentarily exposed her inner self. All her resolve and determination, her strength of will and sense of “grandeur,” were packed into these words. They were disarmingly honest. They recognized that her sheer determination and force of character would not always allow her to get her own way even if she had set her mind on something. And yet they were layered to the point of being enigmatic. They implied that she always intended to keep something of her own in her heart: to retain a part of herself for herself, no matter what politics and policy forced on her. To this extent, she would always remain elusive. Her goodwill toward Elizabeth was genuine, but not to be presumed upon.

  What most struck Randolph at the time was Mary’s sincerity. She spoke straightforwardly, wholeheartedly and without guile. She was to be trusted. “The word of a prince,” he added reassuringly, was of far greater worth than “the mutable mind of inconstant people.”

  Randolph had appealed to a well-known maxim of the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, Elizabeth’s favorite classical author. In a passage she had learned by heart as a child, he had advised rulers: “Throughout all your life show that you value truth so highly that your word is more to be trusted than other people’s oaths.” For Elizabeth, it was a lifelong moral axiom. She claimed time and time again in her own letters and speeches that her word alone was sufficient, because the words of rulers were the badges or symbols of their authority.

  Mary’s tactics worked. Honesty brought forth honesty, and Elizabeth sent Randolph an answer explaining that her preferred candidate for her cousin’s hand was none other than her own favorite, Lord Robert Dudley.

  It was a breathtaking reply. Dudley had first been mentioned as a possible husband for Mary during the 1563 session of Parliament. In what at the time was an off-the-cuff remark and not a considered proposition, Elizabeth urged Maitland, then preparing to advance Mary’s suit for Don Carlos, to recommend Dudley on account of his qualities and graces, a hint Maitland brilliantly deflected with the riposte that if Lord Robert was so desirable as a husband, Elizabeth had better snap him up herself!

  Mary was likely to be gravely affronted at the prospect of inheriting her cousin’s castoff lover. Randolph was beside himself at the thought of transmitting such advice. He broke the news in a lengthy audience at Perth. Mary could scarcely believe her ears. She listene
d implacably. At length she said, “Monsieur Randolph, you have taken me at a disadvantage.” But she quickly recovered her wits, her mood switching in a matter of seconds from incredulity and bemusement to anger.

  “Do you think that it may stand with my honor to marry my sister’s subject?” The whole idea, she said, was insulting, whereupon Randolph only made things worse, replying that there could surely be no greater honor than to match herself with a nobleman “by means of whom she may perchance inherit such a kingdom as England is.”

  Mary bridled. Why did Dudley make any difference to her dynastic prospects in England when she was already the strongest claimant by hereditary right?

  “I look not for the kingdom,” she said, “for my sister may marry and is like to live longer than myself. My respect [i.e., concern] is what may presently be for my commodity, and for the contentment of my friends, who I believe would hardly agree that I should abase my state so far as that!”

  Mary laid out her position clearly. She countered those of her critics who had been unable to understand why, once her initial policy of conciliation failed, she continued so relentlessly to set her sights on recognition as the heir to a woman who was only nine years older than she was and perfectly capable of bearing children if only she chose to marry. Despite the apparent illogic of such a policy, it was in fact the only possible course of action open to her. The “commodity” of princes was their honor and reputation. It was vital for Mary to safeguard them, and given her emphasis on family ties, the “contentment” of her relatives also mattered to her, despite her recent disappointment with them.

  Still more important after her latest and most embarrassing clash so far with Knox was her continued belief that her Scottish lords and the Calvinists would come to obey her in the way she expected only when her dynastic rights were recognized. She most of all needed Elizabeth’s friendship to arm herself against the volatility of her lords and to bolster the legitimacy of her reign in her own country. Since Knox had only just finished yet another round of correspondence with Cecil, using Randolph as his intermediary, it was a burning issue for her.

  Up until now, Mary had conducted this interview with Randolph in the presence of her advisers, but she now ordered them to leave, her Maries excepted.

  “Now Monsieur Randolph,” she began again in her most winning and confidential tone. “Doth your mistress in good earnest wish me to marry my Lord Robert?” Randolph assured her that it was so. “Is that,” she said, “conforming to her promise to use me as her sister or daughter, to marry her subject?” Randolph said he thought it might be.

  “If I were,” she said, “either of them both, and at her disposition, were it not better to match me where some alliance and friendship might ensue, than to marry me where neither of them could be increased?”

  Randolph hesitated. He then replied, “The chief alliance my sovereign desires is to live in amity with Scotland.”

  “The queen your mistress,” said Mary, “being assured of me, might let me marry where it may best like me, and I always remain friend to her as I do.”

  Mary paused, thinking carefully. Finally she said, “These things are uncertain.” There were many risks and no guarantees. She did not intend to marry Dudley simply on her cousin’s say-so. She would not rule out the suggestion completely. But she needed more time to think it through.

  While Randolph was pondering this, the lords reappeared and everyone went to supper. Afterward, the discussion resumed by candlelight in Mary’s bedroom. Tempers were beginning to fray, and Moray was unable to restrain himself. He took a dig at Randolph, but one that was also a swipe at Mary, exposing the rising tension as it began to sink in that whoever married her was likely to become king and could make or break their careers.

  “Why,” Moray asked Randolph, “do you not persuade your own queen to marry, but trouble our queen with marriage that yet never had more thought thereof than she hath of her dinner when she is hungry?” This was vintage Moray: bluff, shrewd, cynical, always calculating the odds. He was a master of the thinly disguised insult. Mary laughed and walked away.

  From Elizabeth’s viewpoint, of course, Dudley’s candidacy was logical. By marrying him, Mary would be subordinated to a Protestant male on whom the English queen knew she could always rely, a man she still loved and trusted never to betray her. More maddeningly eccentric was her idea of how it might play out. Of two minds about allowing Dudley to leave her sight, she came up with the almost ludicrous proposal that there would be a ménage à trois or extended royal family. Mary, Dudley and Elizabeth would all live together at Elizabeth’s court after Mary was married, where the English queen would bear the costs of the “family,” which, she said, was merely the right way for “one sister” to behave toward “another.”

  This was not a ploy to drag out negotiations and so stall plans for any marriage Mary might seek to make on the Continent; Elizabeth was serious. Of all her designs, it comes closest to fantasy and makes nonsense of the traditional interpretation that she was always astute and never prone to making decisions on the basis of her emotions. As Randolph ruefully observed, Elizabeth’s idea of happy families turned “this comedy” of Mary’s marriage “altogether liker to a tragedy.”

  Mary spent the rest of the spring and early summer of 1564 shoring up her position. She adopted two tactics. Her first was to capitalize on potentially her greatest asset: her popularity with the ordinary people of Scotland, so visible to her when she first returned from France and on her summer progresses. A popular queen was likely to be a strong one. She was the “fountain of justice” responsible for the impartial administration of the legal system, and she took her opportunity to score points off Knox and the Calvinists when a group of poor people petitioned her against the judges of the Court of Session, many of them Knox’s friends, whom they accused of favoring the rich and powerful and sitting in judgment on each other’s cases and those of their friends and kinsfolk.

  The Lords of Session had been established by Mary’s grandfather, James IV, to sit regularly in Edinburgh and hear legal cases as expeditiously and fairly as they could. They were the highest court of justice, independent of the crown, later incorporated as a special College of Justice, charged to act professionally and set an example for all the other judges in Scotland. Despite this, they were ignoring their responsibilities to poorer litigants who could not afford to pay for justice.

  The time had come for Mary to intervene. She issued a reforming ordinance that required the Court of Session to sit more frequently to hear the cases of the poor. All the judges were to sit at least three days a week, “as well after noon as afore noon.” For their extra work, Mary generously increased their salaries. But she also made it clear that she expected justice to be done without fear or favor. She even arrived unannounced in the courtroom one Friday afternoon to watch some poor people’s cases being heard. All this was something of a publicity coup, and went a long way to undermine Knox’s claims that she was a queen who was interested only in dancing and courtly frippery and not in her subjects’ welfare.

  Mary’s second tactic in the spring of 1564 was to hit back quietly at Elizabeth for attempting to destabilize her country. The previous year, Elizabeth had asked for a favor. She had written to Mary to see if she would give the Earl of Lennox, who had caused so much trouble in Scotland during Henry VIII’s reign, a passport to return home from his long exile in England. It was a totally disingenuous move. Elizabeth was no friend of Lennox, whose wife, Lady Margaret Douglas, had only recently been released from the Tower. Elizabeth interceded for Lennox only at the height of Mary’s suit for the hand of Don Carlos, when she wanted to stir up trouble.

  In making her request, Elizabeth had played with fire. The son and heir of Lennox and his countess was Henry, Lord Darnley, now seventeen, stunningly handsome and the claimant with the best hereditary right to the English throne after Mary herself. When Elizabeth made her bid for the passport, Darnley was not expected to accompany his father to
Scotland. On the contrary, he was living at the English court, where he could be closely watched, effectively under house arrest. He was allowed to wait on Elizabeth, to whom he sang and played on the lute in the evenings. But if his father returned to Scotland, would Darnley follow? And if so, could he conceivably become a suitor for Mary?

  It seemed a fantastic idea. Randolph dismissed it out of hand. Then, in the last week of April 1564, Mary decided she would take Elizabeth at her word, grant the passport for Lennox and allow him to return to his ancestral home. A close friend of Knox, William Kirkcaldy of Grange, wrote from Perth: “The Earl of Lennox will obtain license to come home and speak [to] the queen. Her meaning therein is not known, but some suspect she shall at length be persuaded to favor his son.”

  From this moment on, the smart money backed Lord Darnley as a likely husband for Mary. He was probably the last person Elizabeth had in mind. If Mary married him, her claim to the succession would be greatly strengthened, because unlike Mary, he was male and born in England, which countered the two overriding objections to her claim in the Parliament of 1563: that she was a woman and a foreigner.

  Darnley was not a Protestant, but neither was he an orthodox Catholic. He did not take his religion very seriously, and was able to attend a Catholic Mass in the morning and a Protestant sermon in the afternoon unfazed by any sense of inconsistency. This made him seem less threatening in Scotland than Don Carlos or Archduke Charles. Beyond this, he was physically attractive. He was four years younger than Mary, stood fully six feet tall and looked as svelte and lissome as had Lennox in his youth, when he had followed Mary of Guise from Stirling to Edinburgh and St. Andrews. He was more effeminate and baby-faced than his father, but the implications of that were not yet talked about.