Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  That is why Elizabeth, asked to grant Mary safe conduct to travel home through her realm, rather than face the journey by sea, refused unless Mary ratified the Treaty of Edinburgh made between Elizabeth and the Scottish lords. Typically, Elizabeth changed her mind, offering the necessary conduct only too late. William Maitland, ever aiming at securing Mary’s place in the future English succession, had been as anxious as Mary herself to bring about a meeting between the two queens, which, he said, ‘shall breed us quietness for their times’. That meeting would never happen, although fictional writers have often imagined it, and Mary would continue to plead for it almost until her death.

  Mary Stuart landed at Leith on 19 August 1561. As she made her official entry into Edinburgh a fortnight later, the welcoming pageantry suggested genuine pleasure at a queen’s return, coupled with violent hostility to the Mass. A doctrine of hostility not necessarily felt by all the people but urgently propounded by men like the Protestant reformer John Knox.

  On her first Sunday at Holyrood, Mary’s Mass in her private chapel was interrupted by a noisy demonstration. She summoned John Knox, tackling him on his statement that a woman ruler was ‘a monster in nature’. Knox’s idea of an emollient reply ran: ‘If the realm finds no inconvenience from the rule of a woman, that which they approve shall I not further disallow . . . but shall be as well content to live under your Grace as St Paul was to live under Nero.’

  ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me’, Mary told him, managing to wait until he left before bursting into tears. Small wonder that the English ambassador Thomas Randolph noted what would become a regular feature of Mary’s life; a failure in health he called one of the ‘sudden passions’ that overtook her ‘after any great unkindness or grief of mind’.

  When Mary Stuart named her first council it was an inclusive blend of men. Seven out of the twelve were Protestants. Thomas Randolph wrote: ‘I see the Lord James and the Laird of Lethington, Maitland, above all others in credit . . . She is patient to hear, and beareth much’. Maitland wrote to William Cecil in England that, ‘The Queen my Mistress behaves herself so gently in every behalf as reasonably we can require’, adding that she ‘doth declare wisdom far exceeding her age’. He thought ‘that the Queen your sovereign [Elizabeth] shall be able to do much with her in religion, if once they enter into a good familiarity’. A meeting was still Mary’s passionate hope.

  In the early spring of 1562, plans for a late summer meeting at York got as far as arrangements about the bureau de change to convert Scottish currency and agreement that Mary Stuart might bring a thousand attendants and practise her religion in private. There were advantages on both sides. Elizabeth’s approval would ratify Mary in the eyes of her Protestant subjects, as well as holding out hope of the succession. But Mary’s stock with Elizabeth Tudor was also high. Her rival in the English succession stakes, Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the nine days’ queen Lady Jane, had recently blotted her copybook by contracting a secret marriage with the Earl of Hertford.1

  But the plan fell through on news of the Massacre of Vassy, at which the Duc de Guise’s men killed a party of the Huguenots. In the ensuing first outbreak of the French Wars of Religion, Elizabeth threw in her lot with the Huguenots, spurred by the hope of regaining Calais, which had been lost through her sister’s Spanish sympathies.

  Baulked of the trip to York, which put her ‘into such a passion as she did keep her bed all that day’, Mary Stuart set off on a progress into the north of Scotland. The Catholic Earl of Huntly, the so-called ‘Cock of the North’, made no secret of his disapproval of any pro-English policy, and showed, moreover, no disposition to bow to his queen’s authority. The progress turned into something like a punitive expedition, and one in which Mary showed to advantage. Randolph wrote to Cecil that autumn of 1562:

  In all these broils I assure you I never saw the Queen merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find. She repented nothing but that she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the causeway with a jack and knapscall [a soldier’s tunic and helmet], a Glasgow buckler, and a broad sword.

  When one of Huntly’s captains ordered Inverness castle to be closed against her, she had him hanged from the battlements; when one of Huntly’s sons set out to kidnap Mary (and perhaps marry her by force), she had him executed. But the stress told. When she returned to Holyrood it was to a bout of illness, and to news from England that put a different perspective on many of her policies.

  Elizabeth Tudor was ill, from an attack of smallpox so serious that her councillors were clustered around her bed in expectation of her death, terrified for the future of her country. ‘Death possessed every joint of me’, she later wrote. Mary Stuart was genuinely concerned, ordering her ladies to look out the recipe for a lotion used when she herself had had the disease in her youth, which had prevented the scarring every woman dreaded. But she must also have thought, what if?

  When the answer came it was devastating. ‘I have heard it whispered that in this late storm of yours a device was intended to prefer some other in the succession to my mistress, which I cannot think to be true, seeing none is more worthy’, wrote Maitland to Cecil, disbelievingly. Elizabeth recovered from the smallpox but when the lords had felt impelled to discuss her successor, only one voice had been raised in favour of Mary.

  This, in all its aspects, was the situation that would continue to bedevil Elizabeth and Mary’s relationship. The succession was always the problem for Elizabeth. As she told Maitland: ‘Princes cannot like their own children. Think you that I could love my own winding-sheet?’ Over the years ahead the two queens would never cease to eye each other, and their relationship continued to employ a complex rhetoric.

  Mary Stuart wrote of Elizabeth Tudor that, ‘I honour her in my heart and love her as my dear and natural sister.’ At moments they were mother and daughter; at other times they sent jewels and exchanged ardent verses, as lovers might do. In hopes of meeting with the English queen, Mary put all talk of suitors and a new marriage aside, joking that she would have no one but Elizabeth. There seems to have been a recurring fantasy in both courts that the two might marry, and although one thinks of Elizabeth as the masculine partner, it was the tall Mary who liked to roam the streets in male clothing.

  In the first days of 1563, Mary heard that Cecil was planning to have parliament bar her from the English throne by an Act of Exclusion. Mary was forced to think of other plans; of marriage. But what seemed like a fresh possibility to her loomed as a threat for Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth Tudor had long come under increased pressure from her council to marry and produce an heir, assuring parliament she would do so as soon as it might be done ‘conveniently’. Her ambivalence is understandable. When Mary Stuart was first widowed, and the question of her remarriage mooted, Elizabeth’s ambassador Throckmorton had written of the Queen of Scots:

  During her husband’s life there was no great account made of her, for that, being under band of marriage and subjection to her husband (who carried the burden of care of all her matters) there was offered no great occasion to know what was in her.

  It must have sounded more like a warning than an invitation.

  Elizabeth was still toying with her chief favourite, Robert Dudley. In the spring of 1561 Cecil had written in confidence to Throckmorton: ‘I know surely that my Lord Robert [Dudley] hath more fear than hope, and so doth the Queen give him cause.’ But that same season Elizabeth could tell the Spanish ambassador De Quadra that she:

  could not deny that she had a strong regard for the many excellent qualities which she saw in Lord Robert. She had not indeed resolved to marry either him or anyone; only every day she felt more and more the want of a husband . . .

  By the summer of 1562, rumours were rife that Elizabeth had secretly married Dudley. But weeks later, the Swedish diplomat Robert Keyle reported the queen as telling Dudley, with ‘a great rage and great checks
and taunts’ and in the presence of all the nobility, ‘that she would never marry him, nor none so mean as he’.

  This was in a sense a game; but it was play with a point, as all Elizabeth’s marital games tended to be. In the decade ahead, Elizabeth Tudor would use Robert Dudley, with his enduring pretensions to her hand, as a stalking horse, an alibi for when any other foreign suitor got too close, a suitor to be safely spurned once they had retreated.2 But the scare of her smallpox meant that, for the moment, her councillors were in no mood to play. The crisis had shown up the danger of the situation: the queen a childless woman with no near relations. The parliament that met in January 1563 was determined Elizabeth should marry. Both Houses united in sending petitions urging on Elizabeth the delight of beholding ‘an imp of your own’, whoever the father of the imp might be.

  ‘Whomsoever it be that your Majesty shall choose, we protest and promise with all humility and reverence to honour, love, and serve as to our most bounden duty shall appertain.’ It was effectively a mandate for Robert Dudley. But Elizabeth did not avail herself of the permission. Instead, at this moment, she broached a far stranger plan with Maitland: the possibility of Dudley’s marrying the Scottish queen. It would be another year before anyone dared mention it to Mary.

  The question of Mary Stuart’s remarriage had never gone away but, as was also true at Elizabeth’s court, her councillors could never all agree on whom she should marry. Maitland was willing to promote a match with Philip of Spain’s son Don Carlos, since the threat of this grand alliance – of Spanish power on their northern border – might surely push England into making to Mary the counter-offer of a secure place as Elizabeth Tudor’s heir. Mary wrote to the pope, expressing herself as his ‘most devoted daughter’; effectively seeking a sign of warmth that would make her a more attractive proposition to Catholic suitors. Her Guise relatives were trying to promote another match with the emperor’s third son, the archduke Charles of Austria, while Catherine de Medici used her influence as Philip of Spain’s mother-in-law to oppose it, just as she opposed the idea of Mary marrying her youthful brother-in-law Charles IX, the new French king. Maitland wrote to Mary from the French court that the powers there ‘care not greatly of your marriage or with whom it be, provided it bring with it no peril to this crown’.

  The marriage with Don Carlos would eventually founder on reports of his insanity. But before that, two other people had decided to take a hand. One, with an unusually broad view of a subject’s remit, was John Knox. Hearing that he had been speaking against her marriage plans from the pulpit, Mary sent for him and furiously demanded: ‘What have ye to do with my marriage?’ Alas, he was only too willing to tell her, declaring that if she married a Catholic the realm would be ‘betrayed’.

  When Mary was first widowed, Throckmorton had written admiringly of how Mary ‘more esteemeth the continuation of her honour, and to marry one that may uphold her to be great, than she passeth to please her fancy’. But now Mary Stuart’s Catholicism was being equated with the lustful urge to marriage, whence came the stereotype that she ruled from the heart not the head. Knox told his congregation at St Giles Kirk that the dogs would ‘eat the flesh of Jezebel’ and that dancing, of which Mary was so fond, ‘is the vanity of the unfaithful, which shall cause the people to be set in bondage to a tyrant’.

  Soon, Knox had a more reasonable cause of suspicion in the behaviour of one Chastelard, a French poet whom Mary had admitted to her court. Chastelard’s sighing devotion to Mary came straight from the fantasy of courtly love, but perhaps Chastelard, like Knox, who claimed that while dancing Mary would steal a kiss from the poet’s neck, confused fantasy with reality.

  In the first weeks of 1563, Chastelard was twice found hiding under the queen’s bed. The first time it was passed over as a drunken prank; the second, he was tried, sentenced, and executed. Chastelard had been found with sword and dagger, and one theory held he had been sent to assassinate Mary. Another held that he was an agent provocateur, intent on compromising her reputation. But Mary behaved as a queen should; behaved as Elizabeth in England had behaved, over the death of Amy Dudley.

  The other meddler, of course, was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Tudor wanted Mary Stuart married off – an interesting sidelight on her view of the institution – but only under such conditions as she herself had, as Maitland put it, ‘least cause to stand in fear’. Never mind the fact that Mary’s marriage, and any alliance it might bring, had huge implications for the security of England’s northern border, especially since Mary’s claim to the English throne might well be taken as the most important part of her dowry.

  Mary, however resentfully, seemed prepared to allow herself to be driven, demanding sarcastically just which husbands Elizabeth felt might be ‘sortable’ for her. Scotland had never been able safely to defy England without the French aid that Catherine de Medici was now unwilling to provide. And Mary wanted that place in the succession to the English crown.

  In November 1563, England’s definition of the ‘sortable’ candidate arrived. He should ideally be an English nobleman, committed to Scotland’s friendship with that country. Failing that, a foreigner might, subject to specific English permission, be acceptable as long as he was prepared to live in Scotland after the marriage and did not come from Spain, France or imperial Austria. Only then could Mary be treated as Elizabeth’s ‘only sister or daughter’. No wonder that, in the ensuing months, Mary began formulating her own plans.

  She neither acceded to, nor refused, Elizabeth’s demand. Instead, she would call out to her courtiers that the English ambassador wanted her to marry in England. ‘Is the queen of England become a man?’, the courtiers would call back, in mocking query. She also asked, whom exactly Elizabeth did want her to marry? When the answer came, she was never going to be pleased.

  In 1563 Elizabeth had first broached with Maitland the incredible idea that Mary should marry her favourite Robert Dudley but no one had felt it necessary to try the insulting idea on Mary. When, in the spring of 1564, Thomas Randolph brought himself to declare Dudley’s name, Mary entered into the discussion with apparent seriousness but really she was never likely to ‘so far abase my state’.

  Mary Stuart was surely closer to reality than Elizabeth Tudor, especially when Elizabeth suggested that she, Mary and Dudley might all three live at the English court, at Elizabeth’s cost and as one ‘family’: a virtual ménage à trois. But from Elizabeth’s viewpoint the idea was perhaps logical: a loyal, Protestant candidate of her own on Scotland’s throne and perhaps, just perhaps, a way to avoid actually marrying her favourite. If Elizabeth had ever wanted a husband, she told Sir James Melville, the urbane diplomat sent south from Scotland, ‘she would have chosen Lord Robert, her brother and best friend, but, being determined to end her life in virginity, she wished that the Queen her sister should marry him’.

  Melville, during his stay at the English court, was frequently called upon to prove how well he deserved the name of diplomat. Elizabeth quizzed him as to who was the fairer: Elizabeth was the fairest queen in all England, Mary in all Scotland, he said. Elizabeth’s skin ‘was whiter, but my Queen was very lovely’. Who made music more skilfully? Melville said that Mary played the lute and virginals ‘reasonably, for a queen’; Elizabeth made sure he came upon her playing like an expert the next day.

  More seriously, in one of their conversations Elizabeth told Melville that ‘it was her own resolution at this moment to remain till her death a virgin queen’. He told her the information was unnecessary. ‘I know your stately stomach. You think if you were married, you would be only a queen of England, and now ye are king and queen both. You may not endure a commander.’ In Robert Dudley, she had a man – a subject – she could enjoy without fear of mastery.

  Mary refused a proposal made by Catherine de Medici that while Elizabeth should marry King Charles IX, Mary should marry his brother Henri. Neither of the adult queens (thirty and twenty-one respectively) were eager for matches with boys of fourteen a
nd thirteen. And having been a queen in France, Mary said, she could never return there in a lesser role. In 1564 she pretended to be considering Dudley, raised a little closer to her status when Elizabeth created him Earl of Leicester, although Melville spotted her tickling his neck during the ceremony. But the new Earl of Leicester was not eager for the match. The plan was a failure; Mary was now eyeing up other possibilities.

  Mary Stuart’s experience had taught her that marriage was a necessity – even though Elizabeth Tudor, in England, was drawing a different lesson. As Mary told Randolph early in 1565: ‘Not to marry, you know it cannot be for me. To defer it long, many incommodities ensure.’ But who was the lucky man to be?

  He had already appeared on the scene. The way was clear for another candidate; not Dudley but another Englishman, the son of Margaret Douglas, newly arrived in Scotland. Like her mother Margaret Tudor, Margaret Douglas dreamt of uniting England and Scotland. But she dreamt of doing it in the person of her son: Henry, Lord Darnley.

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  Challenge and conciliation

  France, 1562–1565

  In France, two other women also dreamt of unity. They faced each other across a religious divide but neither had abandoned the idea that something (their sex?) might still be a bond between them.

  Jeanne d’Albret fled the French court in 1562, amid rumours that her husband Antoine was preparing to capture and imprison her. But Jeanne still had, she would later insist in her memoirs, the covert support of Catherine de Medici, herself anxious to escape from the influence of the Guises.

  Catherine, Jeanne wrote, ‘approved everything I had done and made an infinity of complaints against my husband’. Jeanne was the one who now withdrew, refusing to assist Catherine’s negotiations with Antoine’s committedly Huguenot brother, Condé. For the next few years she would be occupied chiefly in her own lands. ‘God . . . has always granted me the grace to preserve this little corner of Béarn, where little by little, good increases and evil diminishes.’