by John Guy
In the first ten years of her captivity, Mary spent much of her time working at her embroidery and talking to Bess of Hardwick. As Shrewsbury reported, Mary saw Bess whenever “she useth to sit working with the needle, in which she much delighteth.” Bess, one of four sisters born to a minor gentry family, was twenty years older than Mary, but was eager to be associated with a queen. An eighteenth-century historian, Edmund Lodge, described her as “a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” She was also an inspired interior designer, who used her links to Mary to obtain scarce stocks of silk and precious fabrics from France. They sat sewing together with their servants and companions, often for days on end.
In 1574, Bess presumptuously married off her daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, to Darnley’s younger brother, Charles, Mary’s brother-in-law. Bess had royal pretensions, greatly resented by Elizabeth and by her long-suffering husband, whom she neglected to inform of his stepdaughter’s betrothal, and who found himself on the receiving end of Elizabeth’s wrath. The marriage caused a sudden chill in Mary and Bess’s relationship, as it was undertaken with a dynastic claim in mind.
But until 1577 or thereabouts, they continued to sew together. Embroidery was one of Mary’s lifelong pleasures. In her search for designs, she leafed through emblem books, and the superb woodcuts of birds, animals and fish by Conrad Gesner offered a rich choice of subjects that appealed to her artistic taste and love of pets. She embroidered at least three designs from the second edition of his Animal Illustrations, published in 1560: the cat, the phoenix and the toucan—which Mary called “a bird of America.” She also copied the dolphin from Pierre Belon’s Nature and Diversity of Fish, published in 1555.
Mary first drew an outline onto her canvas, sketching or marking out the shapes with chalk and then choosing her colors. She then stitched in the silks and colored wools, which might take as little as a week or as much as three months. Finally, she added her MR monogram, based on the Greek mu, to her work, which was always of high quality. She did not embroider just to pass the time; the work offered her an outlet for her wicked sense of humor. Her themes might seem to be innocently chosen, but often hid a deeper, more subversive meaning for those with eyes to see.
Whereas Elizabeth was flatteringly depicted by a small army of fawning poets and artists as a star or as the sun or moon, Mary cheerfully embroidered panels that showed eclipses. Mary’s “A Catte” was a lot more than just a reproduction of Gesner’s black and white domestic pet. She for this cat was unquestionably female—was embroidered in ginger—Elizabeth’s red hair was legendary—wearing a miniature gold coronet and closely watching a mouse, details not in Gesner’s original design. Mary had several times said that she was the mouse and Elizabeth the cat, who watched and waited before deciding to pounce. The “Phenix” was, in Mary’s version, her mother’s and now also her own impresa, crowned and with the MR on either side of its head. Again, her “Delphin” was not just a sea dolphin but a pun on the word “dauphin,” and also an emblem of her first husband, Francis II, and so a reminder of Mary’s dynastic status.
She also undertook a piece of work on a more sinister theme: a panel of a wall hanging in which a hand descends from heaven with a pruning hook, cutting down a vine, with the motto “Virescit vulnere virtus” (“Virtue grows strong by wounding”). The motto could have referred to Mary’s moral outrage at her treatment by Elizabeth, but may well have signaled her determination to survive Elizabeth by whatever means. Most likely the ambiguity was malicious.
Mary’s love for animal designs reflected the way, in her solitude, she turned to her pets for solace. Not long after moving to Sheffield Lodge, she asked her ambassador in Paris to find out if her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine had gone to Lyons. “I feel sure he will send me a couple of pretty little dogs, and you will buy me some also, for besides reading and needlework, I take pleasure only in all the little animals that I can get.
You must send me them in baskets, kept very warm.” When they arrived, she confided, “I am very fond of my little dogs, but I fear they will grow rather large.”
Mary’s love of animals was also a tool of her diplomacy. Castelnau, who had known her since her teenage years, was in 1575 appointed as the French ambassador in London. He wrote to her a few months after his arrival, seeking her help in finding some English hunting dogs. “I at once asked the Earl of Shrewsbury to assist me,” she replied. “He has given me three spaniels and two of the others, which he is sure are good ones.”
When Castelnau no longer needed the dogs, Mary sent them to her Guise cousins. She recommended them as a present for Henry III, the new king of France, who had succeeded his sickly brother, Charles IX, in 1574 at the age of twenty-two after spending an extraordinary year as the elected king of Poland. Mary’s only regret was that she could not try out the dogs herself, as she said somewhat self-pityingly, “because I am a prisoner, and can only testify to their beauty, as I am not at liberty to go out on horseback nor to the chase.”
At Sheffield, she decided to start an aviary. She had become used to exotic birds at the court of Henry II, and began by asking her agent in Paris to obtain breeding pairs of turtledoves and Barbary fowl. “I wish,” she said, “to see if I can rear them in this country, as your brother told me that, when he was with you, he had raised some . . . I shall take great pleasure in rearing them in cages, which I do all sorts of little birds I can meet with. This will be a pastime for a prisoner.”
So often Mary’s thoughts were back in France. Despite the surveillance to which she was subjected, she wrote to the officials of the French embassy in London, to the Cardinal of Lorraine, to the Duke and Duchess of Nemours, and less often to her five cousins, the children of her murdered uncle Francis, Duke of Guise. She was unaware at first that her letters were being intercepted and forwarded for vetting or deciphering to the agents of Elizabeth’s new principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. Aged forty-four, he had been one of Cecil’s proteges since his days as a student at Cambridge.
Walsingham was the most single-minded ideologue at Elizabeth’s court, an avowed Calvinist who at every opportunity championed the reformed cause. Cecil had recommended him to Elizabeth as her principal secretary in December 1573. For five years or so, the younger man had worked in his office as an intelligence expert and spymaster. After Mary’s letters were painstakingly opened and copies made, they were sent on to their intended recipients, the seals apparently unbroken.
Mary was dismayed by the reactions to her letters. Often they were not even acknowledged. Her aunt Anne, the Duchess of Nemours, formerly the widow of her murdered uncle, was a sympathetic correspondent, but even her letters tailed off. The Guise family had been overshadowed at the French court by the mid-1570s; they were superseded by their rivals, the heirs and successors of Constable Montmorency and his old sparring partner Anthony of Bourbon. The Cardinal of Lorraine’s influence had dropped to a particularly low ebb. Both he and Mary’s cousin Henry, Duke of Guise, had left Paris for Joinville and Meudon.
Then, in December 1574, the cardinal died at Avignon at the age of fifty, severing Mary’s chief link with France. The news reached her in the middle of February, a month after she had written him a long letter urging him to persist in his attempt to recover Catherine de Medici’s favor. She was terribly distraught. “Though I cannot, at first, control my feelings or stop the tears that will flow,” she said, “yet my long adversity has taught me to hope for consolation for all my afflictions in a better life.”
With only one of the sons of her grandfather Claude still living, Mary knew her family’s fortunes rested in the hands of a new generation. She was sad and dejected, grieving for her loss. She feared her cousins were not really interested in her personally or in her cause, which seemed to them lost. Catherine, still the power behind the throne, remained an opponent. Equally distant and unhelpful was the family’s matriarch, Antoinette of Bourbon, once Mary’s guardian angel but now a bitterly disa
ppointed grandmother, who continued to blame her for her ill-advised second and third marriages.
Mary never lost her appetite for the luxuries to which she had grown accustomed in France. She asked her agent in Paris to send her “patterns of dresses, and of cloth of gold and silver, and of silks, the handsomest and the rarest that are worn at court.” She ordered headdresses “with a crown of gold and silver, such as were formerly made for me.” She also wanted the latest fashions from Italy: “headdresses, veils and ribbons.”
In her last letter to her uncle, she had requested “a fine gold mirror to hang from the waist with a chain to attach it to.” She wanted a motto to be engraved on the frame combining her and Elizabeth’s monograms. She also asked for miniatures of herself, to give to her supporters in England “who ask for my portrait.” Shortly after her uncle’s death, Mary obtained permission to sit for an artist in Sheffield. She claimed that she wanted to send the miniatures to her friends in France—the right thing to say, if perhaps untrue.
The identification of this likeness has caused much debate. The full-length example at Hardwick Hall in which Mary is shown as a pious Catholic, aged thirty-six, with a cross at her bosom and rosary beads at her girdle, is a posthumous image. Despite its claim to have been painted in 1578, the portrait is not listed in Bess of Hardwick’s inventory, which she drew up in 1601, and it was not commissioned until after James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603.
In 1575, Mary sat for an unknown miniaturist, and again in or after 1578 for Nicholas Hilliard, the doyen of the genre, when he returned from France. In both versions she is wearing a soft cambric cap attached to a modish wired veil and a fine lace collar. Her lustrous—but perhaps now darker and artificial—curls are visible at the sides of her cap. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes are still bright and penetrating. Her cheekbones are just as high, her nose slightly aquiline, since the view is partly from the side. Her marble-like complexion is perfect, but her face is filling out, a double chin is starting to appear, and she is no longer in the flush of youth or in her prime. Imprisonment has already taken its toll.
Mary sent expensive gifts to Elizabeth in a vain attempt to win her attention and put her under an obligation to release her. She began with confections of sugar, marzipan and nuts imported from France, which Elizabeth, who had a sweet tooth, enjoyed despite a warning that they might be poisoned. Other presents included a skirt of rich crimson satin, lined with taffeta, that Mary embroidered herself. She had designed an intricately latticed pattern of English flowers surmounted by a thistle. To achieve a stylish and sumptuous effect, she used the most expensive silk and precious metal threads, the best her French suppliers could provide. She asked the French embassy in London to deliver the skirt, which was done despite Shrewsbury’s protests.
Elizabeth was said to have admired the gift and “prized it much.” She was momentarily softer toward Mary, but it did not last and there was no easing of her restrictions. Mary was not allowed more exercise, the thing she most craved. When consulted on the matter, Shrewsbury advised, “I would be very loath that any liberty or exercise should be granted unto her, or any of hers, out of these gates . . . I do suffer her to walk upon the leads [i.e., the flat parts of a roof] here in open air, in my large dining chamber, and also in this courtyard.” That was normally quite enough, in case she was tempted to escape.
Shrewsbury did, however, sometimes bend his own rules, generally when Mary fell sick or burst into tears. One arctic January, when the snow lay deep on the ground at Sheffield, he allowed her to walk in the park, thinking she would refuse his offer and decide not to venture outdoors. Without a moment’s thought, she put on her heaviest clothes and went out, even though the snow came well over her shoes and must have soaked her feet.
Such treats were few and far between. Mary’s lack of exercise exacted a heavy price. Her legs became so inflamed and her heel so sore she was barely able to walk. In 1582, shortly before her fortieth birthday, she was allowed as a concession to use her coach to ride out to take the air. She was at first exhilarated by this. She was preceded by her secretaries and other principal officers on horseback, guarded by a contingent of Shrewsbury’s men armed with loaded pistols. Her route was reconnoitered beforehand by scouts in case anyone tried to meet or attempt to rescue her.
Mary’s pleasure was fleeting. Soon she was in pain when she walked even a relatively short distance. Just climbing in and out of the coach could be more than her legs could bear, and in the winter months Mary felt so weak, as she herself said, that she preferred to stay indoors.
Her last years at Sheffield and Chatsworth were tainted by the growing marital discord between Bess and the earl, made worse by Bess’s groundless suspicion that her husband was having a secret affair with his prisoner. Gossip was rife at Elizabeth’s court, which the queen herself joined in. Castelnau, who always tried to do his best for Mary against the odds, warned her that Elizabeth was telling tales to foreign ambassadors so that they would be spread about. “It is the final poison that your enemies have reserved,” he said; “not to poison your body, but your reputation.”
Almost all of the information that fueled this gossip came from Bess, and in a fit of pique around 1584, Mary turned the tables. She sent Elizabeth, probably through Cecil, a summary of everything Bess had said that touched her “sister queen,” prefacing her remarks with a disclaimer: “I protest that I answered rebuking the said lady [Bess] for believing or speaking so licentiously of you as a thing which I did not at all believe.”
The charges were of the raciest sort: that Elizabeth had promised to marry her favorite, Leicester, and was his lover; that she had taken a succession of paramours, including Sir Christopher Hatton (vice chamberlain of Elizabeth’s household, later lord chancellor, and a favorite second only to Leicester), and had compromised herself with a French diplomat by visiting him at night, kissing him and enjoying “various unseemly familiarities with him.” Not content with this, she had betrayed her own councilors to the French in her pillow talk. Elizabeth, according to Bess, was so vain she had to be flattered by her courtiers “beyond all reason.” They would amuse themselves by playing a game in which they tried to outdo each other in offering extravagant compliments to her. It was all they could do to avoid bursting out laughing. Mary knew how to put in the knife. She said that when Elizabeth had been ill for a while, Bess had prophesied her death based on the reports of an astrologer who, “in an old book, predicted a violent death for you and the succession of another queen, which she interpreted as myself.”
Grasping at straws in her longing to meet her rival and talk to her face to face, Mary offered to reveal more of Bess’s infamy at a personal interview. Elizabeth—if she was ever allowed by Cecil to see this extraordinary document—refused. By the 1580s, the polarization between Catholics and Protestants in Europe was approaching its climax. In the Netherlands, the revolt of the Calvinists against Spain had passed the point of no return. In France, another civil war would erupt in 1584, when the Catholic League allied with Spain to extirpate the Huguenots and block the claim to the throne of their leader, Henry of Navarre. As for Philip II himself, after nearly thirty years in which he had given Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt, he came to believe that the key to the defeat of the Dutch rebels and the mastery of the Atlantic Ocean by Spain was the conquest of England. War between England and Spain was drawing closer.
It was Cecil’s worst nightmare. Here was an international Catholic conspiracy with a vengeance. All anyone could think of in the Privy Council, in Parliament and among the “assured” Protestant elite who formed the backbone of his inner caucus was that Mary should be dealt with once and for all. The “preservation” of the Protestant state depended on it. Mary was said to be a bigger threat to her cousin’s security than Spain, and although Elizabeth had so far privately supported Mary as her heir apparent, this was too much for Cecil, whose entire career hinged on his almost apocalyptic vision of England’s Protestant destiny.
In August 1584, Shrewsbury was recalled to London to attend urgent meetings of the Privy Council. Mary was transferred to the custody of Sir Ralph Sadler and his son-in-law, John Somers. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement; hardly surprising, as this Sadler, now a venerable seventy-seven-year-old, was none other than Henry VIII’s ambassador to Scotland who had dandled Mary as a baby on his knee. His instructions were to take her first from Sheffield to Wingfield Manor, and from there to the close confinement of the damp and unhealthy Tutbury Castle, to which she finally returned in January 1585.
On the road to Wingfield, where she was guarded by forty soldiers, Mary asked Somers if he thought she would try to escape. He said that he supposed she would. It was only natural. “No,” she angrily retorted, “you are mistaken. I had rather die in this captivity than run away with shame.”
Sadler was one of Cecil’s most faithful and steadfast supporters, and yet—at least as a private man—he took pity on the captive queen. “I find her much altered,” he said, “from that she was when I was first acquainted with her.” Her incarceration had ruined her health. “She is not yet able to strain her left foot to the ground, and, to her very great grief, not without tears, finding that being wasted and shrunk of its natural measure and shorter than the other, she feareth it will hardly return to its natural state without the benefit of hot baths.”
But Mary’s allure was undiminished. When Sadler got his charge to Tutbury, she quickly won him over. Within three months, he had been caught taking her hawking. Called to account by his masters, he confessed: she “earnestly entreated me that she might go abroad with me to see my hawks fly.” It was “a pastime indeed which she hath singular delight in, and I, thinking it could not be ill taken, assented to her desire; and so hath she been abroad with me three or four times hawking upon the river here.” All the time she had been guarded by forty or fifty men. He had used his discretion and done his best. “But since it is not well taken, I would to God that some other had the charge.” Somers confirmed his father-in-law’s statement. Mary had been well guarded while out hawking: “if any danger had been offered, or doubt suspected, this queen’s body should first have tasted of the gall.”