The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Darnley might still survive as long as Morton stayed in exile and could not get his hands on the man who had so brazenly double-crossed him. His best hope was Mary’s baby. It was due in June, and once he was the father of the heir to the throne, he might think about staging a comeback.

  If, however, the leader of the Douglases ever returned to Scotland, Darnley’s life would be in peril. By assassinating Rizzio, he had let the genie out of the bottle. Nothing he could do would ever make it possible to put it back again.

  17

  Reconciliation

  MARY’S EFFORTS to reconcile her lords, with the sole exception of Darnley’s co-conspirators, were genuine. In arranging this new phase of détente, she was assisted by Castelnau, who reappeared at Holyrood a month after Rizzio’s assassination and shuttled to and from Paris until a resident French ambassador was sent to replace him.

  Castelnau had won everyone’s respect for his impartiality during the Chase-about Raid, which made him the perfect intermediary between the noble factions after the Rizzio plot, when the difficulty was not reconciling the lords to Mary, but reconciling the factions to each other.

  Highest in Mary’s esteem were Bothwell and Huntly. Their credit soared because of their unquestioning loyalty to her. At this critical moment in her reign, she needed advisers she could trust, who could act as a foil to the rest of the lords and keep an eye on Darnley.

  Bothwell and Huntly agreed to work together. A fortnight before Rizzio’s murder, Bothwell had married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, by Protestant rites at Holyrood. Mary herself attended the reception, to honor her two most loyal supporters and out of deep respect for Bothwell’s sister, the widow of her favorite half-brother, Lord John of Coldingham. Mary loved weddings and always came to those of the people she liked or wished to honor, usually bringing an expensive gift or paying for the bride’s dress or the wedding banquet. She gave Jean Gordon a gorgeous wedding dress of cloth of silver lined with white taffeta, and also paid for the banquet, a sumptuous feast that was followed by jousting and “running at the ring.”

  Since his recall from France, Bothwell had made a remarkable political recovery. He had moved from the sidelines to the center of events, incurring the jealousy of those he had eclipsed. He was Moray’s sworn enemy. Maitland also hated him. Relations reached their lowest point when Bothwell threatened to hunt down the disgraced secretary of state and kill him because of his involvement in the Rizzio plot.

  Under Castelnau’s auspices, such feuds were eased or appeased. The one person who consistently thwarted Mary’s attempts to pacify her country was her husband. When she learned the full extent of his and Lennox’s treachery to obtain the crown matrimonial behind her back, she banished Lennox from her court. Darnley would be much harder to manage, because she was pregnant and he was the baby’s father. She could barely believe that the man she had married could have acted in this way, conspiring with the lords to murder her confidential secretary and then dissolving Parliament without consulting her. Darnley even had the cheek to continue denying his involvement after his exiled coconspirators had sent Mary his own signed bond approving the assassination.

  Darnley just carried on plotting. Shortly after Mary’s grand ceremony of reconciliation, he wrote letters to Charles IX and Catherine de Medici in which he called himself “king of Scotland” and used a signet seal emblazoned with the royal arms. He protested his innocence of Rizzio’s murder and sought to ingratiate himself to Charles as his “dear brother.”

  Not content with this, he continued to pursue his Catholic policy despite his promises to his co-conspirators to restore the Protestant settlement. He wrote to Philip II and the pope, complaining of the state of the country, which he claimed was “out of order” because the Mass and the Catholic religion had not yet been restored. This, he said, was entirely Mary’s fault.

  More bizarre were his schemes to capture Scarborough and the Scilly Isles, both belonging to England but hundreds of miles apart. He plotted to take Scarborough Castle, a partially ruined fortress on the coast of Yorkshire some two hundred miles equidistant from London and Edinburgh, where ships could unload men and supplies in the adjacent harbor. He also studied maps of the Scilly Isles, off the southernmost tip of Cornwall, to which he staked a ridiculous claim encouraged by a small group of malcontent islanders and Cornish Catholic gentry. The Scillies were six hundred miles from Edinburgh. They had no connection with Scotland, but Darnley knew that they had been fortified during the reign of Edward VI, because he noted on his maps the positions of several disused blockhouses and a fort.

  Darnley was cooking up some madcap scheme to invade England by landing Catholic armies from the Continent at what he believed to be strategic locations in the British Isles. But he had given no thought as to how, even if a landing could be accomplished in the Scilly Isles, these troops were then to be transported to the mainland. And if troops were landed at Scarborough, how would they be supplied with food and munitions once they started their march to wherever Darnley supposed they were going?

  Cecil’s spies knew of all these plans. However foolish and implausible, they had to be taken seriously. Mary’s popularity had soared in England on the news of her pregnancy, as Cecil had always predicted. He was never shy of resorting to underhand methods where Mary was concerned. He next took an agent provocateur into his service, one Christopher Rokesby, whom he sent without Elizabeth’s knowledge—she detested such men—to try and inveigle Mary into a plot, and so discover how far she was likely to be implicated in Darnley’s schemes.

  Rokesby slipped into Scotland in May, securing access to Mary by posing as a loyal Catholic fleeing persecution in England and presenting her with an ivory carving of Christ’s crucifixion. Having gotten her attention, he told her that many of the leading Catholic nobles were weary of Elizabeth and willing to depose her, provided Mary would consent to a coup or an assassination attempt. He urged her to give him some token, and dropped the names of those leading English landowners who would join the revolt if shown proof of her support.

  Mary was not fooled by this. She was by now eight months pregnant. No one knew exactly when she would enter her confinement chamber and the child would be born. As medical understanding of gynecology and human reproduction was sketchy, even qualified doctors supposed that female fetuses spent longer in the womb than male ones because they were the weaker sex, and so the length of a pregnancy was thought to vary accordingly.

  But Mary was clearly approaching her time, staying in bed for much of the day and traveling only short distances in a horse litter. And with the hopes and fears of childbirth at the front of her mind, she was far too busy to get involved in plotting. She was also in too strong a position with an heir on the way to taint her claim to the English throne with dubious activities. She could be naive and impulsive, but was rarely vindictive: in spite of her dueling and angry clashes with Elizabeth over the years, she had never yet conspired against her. She dismissed Rokesby, who returned to England, where he set about building up a dossier that seemed to prove that he was employed by the Catholic nobles in precisely the way that he had claimed. Armed with these documents, he crossed the border to try again.

  Mary was one step ahead. Rokesby had barely finished renting rooms in Edinburgh on the day of his return when he was arrested and his papers were seized. Mary was positively gleeful when a highly incriminating letter from Cecil in code was found in his possession. When deciphered, it established Rokesby’s guilt and showed that Cecil had offered him a generous reward if he succeeded. The new English ambassador to Scotland, Henry Killigrew—Cecil’s brother-in-law, who had been sent to replace Randolph after his expulsion for covertly bankrolling Moray’s second revolt in the Chase-about Raid—was the one person to whom Elizabeth’s chief minister had confided his true relationship to Rokesby. And Killigrew was appalled at the letter’s discovery. He wrote instantly to Cecil, to warn him to prepare for Mary’s reprisals.

  It was an extraordinar
y, rare lapse of security on Cecil’s part. But Mary, preoccupied with the birth of her child, bided her time, waiting until it suited her to counterattack. She then sent one of the very few letters that she ever wrote to Cecil personally.

  “Since our first arrival within our realm of Scotland,” she began, “we ever had a good opinion of you, that you at all times had done the office of a faithful minister.” Mary said that she had never doubted Cecil’s motives until her good opinion was shaken “by the strange dealings of an Englishman named Rokesby.” Since then, she “began a little to suspend our judgment, until we receive further trial therein.”

  Mary’s rebuke was as dignified as it was measured. She explained how she had asked Robert Melville, her agent in London, to discuss the Rokesby affair with Cecil. He had reported that Cecil was “nothing altered” from his former “good inclination” toward Mary “of the which we were not a little rejoiced.” She urged Cecil to “persevere in nourishing of peace and amity.” In this way, she felt confident that he would “do acceptable service” to Elizabeth.

  This was more than artful. It was a thinly veiled threat, because Mary—after Melville’s discreet inquiries—knew quite well that Elizabeth would have been furious to hear of Cecil’s use of an agent provocateur.

  On June 3, 1566, Mary went into her confinement chamber at Edinburgh Castle. She still feared for her safety after the Rizzio plot and insisted that the Earl of Argyll, whom she trusted to defend the Scottish monarchy with his last drop of blood despite his quarrels with her or her mother, move into the room outside and stay there night and day. Her son, Prince James, was born between ten and eleven on the morning of Wednesday the 19th. It was a long and difficult labor. And yet Mary did not entirely lose her sense of humor, crying out halfway through that if she had known how painful it was going to be, she would never have got married in the first place.

  The baby, when he finally arrived, was in excellent health. Mary was exhausted but triumphant. She had produced a legitimate male heir and settled the succession to the throne in her country, exactly what women rulers were supposed to do. All this greatly strengthened her hand with Elizabeth, who pouted and sulked when she heard the news. The guns of Edinburgh Castle were fired to salute the birth, and there was spontaneous rejoicing. Some five hundred bonfires were lit in the town and its suburbs alone.

  Killigrew visited Mary in her confinement chamber two days later. After he had congratulated her on a safe delivery, she thanked him, but politely asked to be excused a lengthier interview. She was still in bed and troubled by pain in her breasts. She spoke faintly on account of her physical weakness, her voice interrupted by a hollow cough.

  Killigrew was taken to the nursery to see the baby. He was, the ambassador said, in a phrase resonant of his predecessor Sadler’s when he first admired the infant Mary, “a very goodly child.” Killigrew watched him “sucking of his nurse,” Margaret Little, and afterward saw him “as good as naked, I mean his head, feet and hands, all to my judgment well proportioned and like to prove a goodly prince.”

  Childbirth was a risky, life-threatening prospect in the sixteenth century. Women prepared for the worst. On June 9, Mary had summoned her lords to hear her will. Three copies were kept: one she sent to her Guise relations, one she retained herself, a third she signed and sealed and gave to those who would become regents if she died. No copy of the document now survives. Our only information about it is that the regency was vested in a committee. Either Darnley was not included, or else (and more likely) he was there, but counterbalanced by two independent regents. One was Lord Erskine, a moderate Protestant and the captain of Edinburgh Castle, whom Mary promoted to the earldom of Mar. The other was the Earl of Argyll, already completely rehabilitated.

  Later Mary’s enemies claimed that she had nominated Bothwell to be regent, which was quite untrue. However much the swashbuckling border earl had risen in her estimation, he was still a controversial figure whose violent temper and love of dueling made him less qualified than Mar and Argyll to protect the interests of her family and the monarchy.

  But Mar and Argyll were equally offensive to Darnley. He was furious: the terms of Mary’s will caused a smoldering resentment among the Lennoxes. Killigrew supposed that their taste for plots could only be further aroused.

  There was a codicil to the will, a testamentary inventory of Mary’s jewels, which does survive. It has sixteen rubbed and water-damaged folios listing more than 250 lots, beside which are marginal notes indicating the names of those to whom particular lots were to be given. The lists were compiled by Mary Livingston, one of the four Maries with responsibility for the queen’s jewels, and Margaret Carwood, Mary’s favorite bedchamber woman. The marginal annotations are Mary’s own. Her handwriting is untidy, even for her. She several times complained of cramps during the final weeks of her pregnancy, although her handwriting since her adolescence regularly descended into scribbling.

  Mary scrawled a note that her bequests should take effect if she and her baby died. She knew she might be close to death; her handwriting could be an indication of her mental as well as her physical state. The inventory certainly shows where her thoughts were, because it was not the Scottish nobles or her husband who dominated the lists of beneficiaries, but her Guise family. Though she had been back in Scotland for almost five years and must often have felt very alone, she would never forget her French links. Even a quick note from France brought her pleasure in later life, and she received letters from her family that brought tears of joy to her eyes.

  Out of fewer than sixty people named as beneficiaries, fourteen were members of the Guise family. They were uppermost in her mind, listed first after her bequests to the Scottish crown and taking the lion’s share of precious and showy items. One lot, a magnificent collection of rubies, pearls, brooches, collars, gold chains, earrings and a belt with a gold buckle and studded with precious stones, was to be handed down in the family in perpetuity.

  After the Guises came Mary’s Scottish relatives and the four Maries and their families. Half a dozen of her relations were listed, with a preference for the women and children: first the Countess of Argyll, then Moray’s wife and eldest daughter, then Francis the orphaned son of Lord John of Coldingham, to whom Mary was godmother. The four Maries were to receive less costly gifts, but more intimate ones that were a sign of their former playmate’s love.

  Mary made typically generous bequests to her ladies-in-waiting, to the surviving parents of the four Maries and to her bedchamber servants. Carwood was left one of Mary’s portrait miniatures framed with diamonds, and “une petite boite d’argent” (“a small silver box”), perhaps the celebrated casket, marked with the monogram of Francis II, in which the queen’s enemies later said they found her most incriminating letters.

  Darnley appeared on the lists, but was not especially favored. He was to receive up to twenty-six items, ostensibly a tenth of the inventory, depending on how Mary’s annotations are interpreted. But the reality was far less. His legacies tended to be specific objects and not the whole collections of jewels left to her Guise family; for example, a watch decorated with diamonds and rubies, or a diamond ring enameled in red. Of the ring, Mary wrote, “It was with this that I was married; I leave it to the king who gave it to me.” Her terse comment suggests her overwhelming sense of disappointment with her husband. A close examination of Darnley’s gifts reveals that very few items, if indeed any, were bequests over and above the return of gifts that he and his father, Lennox, had made to her.

  The nobles, headed by Moray, Argyll, Atholl and Mar, were to have lesser gifts, confirming the degree to which Mary saw her will as a family affair. Maitland’s name was omitted—he was still in disgrace—but Bothwell’s and Huntly’s were included. Bothwell was to get an ornamental jewel containing a diamond in a black enameled setting and a badge or brooch with the figure of a deer set with eleven diamonds and a ruby. Much was made of these putative bequests after Mary’s forced abdication, but in 1566 they
were thought unremarkable. Far from gaining special treatment, Bothwell had ranked in his usual place in the list of privy councilors. Moray and Mar were both ahead of him, and no undue favor was shown. In fact, in view of his steadfast loyalty to Mary and her mother, the marvel is not how much but how little he would receive from Mary’s will if she had died in childbirth.

  Mary’s health was fragile after the birth. She needed to rest, and in July and early August she went on holiday. Her refuge was Alloa in Clackmannanshire, a quiet and picturesque spot that was only a short trip by boat along the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. She was a guest of the Earl of Mar and was accompanied by Moray and Bothwell. Castelnau, whose instructions from Catherine de Medici were to reconcile Darnley to Mary, also arrived. He had his work cut out. Relations between the royal couple were plummeting. There was a rumor of a split at the end of April, and Darnley had twice threatened to go and live in the Netherlands.

  When Mary had been preparing to go into labor, the couple had agreed to a purely nominal truce. This now imploded. Darnley arrived at Alloa independently, staying for only a few hours. Castelnau barely got to speak to him. Compiling a report for Cecil on August 3, the Earl of Bedford wrote, “The queen and her husband agree after the old manner, or rather worse.” Mary seldom ate with Darnley anymore, and never slept “nor keepeth no company with him”—the euphemism for sexual intercourse—“nor loveth any such as love him.” Already the king and queen led separate lives.

  At Alloa, their quarrel had intensified. Mary even swore at him. She used words, said Bedford fastidiously, that “cannot for modesty nor with the honor of a queen be reported.”