Mary Queen of Scots

by Retha Warnicke

  Although Surian blamed the French for mistreating her, “a widow unarmed and almost banished from her own home,”8 she said good-bye to many friends two of whom were her favorite poets: Jerôme de l’Huillier, seigneur de Maisonfleur, and Ronsard. Another poet she greatly admired was the deceased Joachim du Bellay, whose elegy by William Aubert she owned. The most well known of them was and is, of course, Ronsard, who composed a farewell elegy in the Petrarchan style, claiming that the court would miss her as a pasture would miss its flowers, the sky its stars, or the sea its waves. The next year, he again lamented her absence and recalled her loveliness:

  Even so your beauty, brilliant as the sun,

  In one brief day for France has risen and set;

  Bright as the lightning, ’twas as quickly gone,

  And left us only longing and regret.9

  This and other references to her beauty have caused skeptical historians, after closely examining portraits of her, to accuse her contemporaries of flattering her looks. Since artistic conventions and practices have altered over time, studying images of her to determine her beauty is at best an unproductive exercise. Modern likenesses usually exude warmth, vitality, and sometimes friendliness, while early modern portraits are often stylized representations, intending to display the rank and wealth of their subjects as embodied in their clothing and jewelry. Ultimately, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder and is culture bound, it seems sufficient to note that not only poets but also relatives, diplomats, and other observers lauded her attractiveness beyond the level that the royalty might usually have expected. Indeed, in December 1559 even d’Oysel reported to Mary of Guise that her daughter was gentle and beautiful and that the king, her husband, greatly esteemed her. It is possible that those who praised her were influenced by her height of six feet, which provided her with a special presence at a time when males were on average only about five feet, four inches tall.

  Meanwhile, Mary’s fleet moved northward, all but one of her ships outdistancing an English squadron. Its crew captured the vessel with her stable of horses and escorted it to England but subsequently released it with apologies, although the warden of Tynemouth impounded the horses for a month. A thick, normal summer fog, a Forth ha’, descended as they sailed into Leith about 9:00 a.m. on 19 August, discharging cannons to announce their arrival.

  REACHING SCOTLAND

  Because the voyage went so smoothly and quickly, Mary reached Scotland before Holyrood Palace was prepared to receive her. Andrew Lamb invited her to his Leith home where Châtelherault, Arran, and Lords James and Robert welcomed her. Later she and her attendants rode to Holyrood on borrowed ponies, which Brantôme ridiculed as inferior beasts. Since she expected to utilize her own horses, which remained at Tynemouth, she had not anticipated transportation difficulties and was probably grateful for any animals that could be rounded up on such short notice. In June 1562, moreover, Mary later viewed Scottish horses as suitable gifts for her French friends. Brantôme also disparaged the serenade sung and played on violins and rebecs by several hundred Edinburgh youths, but she seems to have appreciated their thoughtfulness in welcoming her and thanked them for their efforts. As he wrote after her death, it is not surprising that he was critical of the Scots, who usurped her throne. Some of his assertions were obviously inaccurate, for example, that her fleet left France in the autumn and that she died on 7 February. In his memoirs, Mauvissière also indicated he retained mostly vague memories of her reception, noting incorrectly, for example, that no one greeted her until she removed to Holyrood.10

  From her arrival, which caused astonishment since she lacked a personal bodyguard, she exercised her right to hear mass in her chapel. On Sunday, the 24th, Lord James kept his promise and barred her door from those trying to disrupt her services while Lords Robert and John prevented attacks on her priests. The next day at Edinburgh’s Mercat Cross, the central meeting place for announcing laws and punishing criminals, she issued a proclamation, forbidding religious changes, promising to obtain her estates’ advice at a convenient time, and ordering her subjects to keep the peace and refrain from molesting her French attendants. Her order may have raised some reformers’ hopes that when parliament did meet, it would re-enact the Reformation Acts of 1560, which she had not ratified. Others may have worried that her proclamation represented only a temporary reprieve for Protestantism, leaving it with an uncertain future. Mary’s private court services and this public religious stance prompted Knox to storm against Catholic idolatry on the next Sunday. Like many other preachers he believed that it was his duty to act as God’s prophet in the Old Testament sense and denounce the sinfulness of all people, especially of female monarchs.

  Mary scheduled an audience with him for 4 September and then turned to official Edinburgh business. On 2 September the day after its provost and magistrate hosted a banquet for her, she made her official entry into her capital, which, as it unfolded, seemed more an occasion for religious baiting than for welcoming her. Although Catholics out-numbered Protestants in Edinburgh, the council supervising the entry was selected in 1560, shortly after the dissolution of the Reformation Parliament. Its actions later prompted her to order the replacement of its members but on 2 September the day belonged to them.

  Some of the evidence is obscure but the following account generally reflects the occurrences.11 Entering at the West Port, she rode to the castle to dine; afterwards, she was met on capital hill by 50 young men, dressed as Moors, symbolizing the forces of disorder that needed taming. Then probably at the Butter Tron, the weighing station, citizens arrived with a pall of purple velvet to hold over her head and with a cart carrying musicians that followed her through the town. The cart also contained a golden propine or coffer with a gift for her perhaps of wine. Next, a cloud descended from which emerged a boy dressed as an angel, who not only delivered the keys to the town to her but also gave her a vernacular Bible and a Psalm book, two well-known Protestant symbols. At the Tolbooth, which functioned as a prison as well as the meeting place of the council and the courts of justice, she observed a double pageant: fortune standing on the upper story above three ladies on the lower story, appearing as Love, Justice, and Policy. Mary continued on to the Mercat Cross, viewed four virgins representing the traditional virtues and drank wine from the fountain. Next she approached the Salt Tron with the day’s coup de grâce. In his dispatch Randolph, the English resident ambassador, reported that Huntly had intervened to prevent the citizens from burning an effigy of a priest celebrating mass. Regardless of the report’s accuracy, they did set afire effigies of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, the Old Testament rebels against Moses whom God destroyed, a sacrifice that seemed to warn that similar punishments awaited the enemies of Protestantism. At the Netherbow actors also burned a dragon, which represented the apocalyptic Antichrist and, therefore, the pope in the reformers’ view. Finally, with the cart still following her, she reached Holyrood only to hear a speaker admonish her to relinquish the mass.

  Two days later Mary was surely in less than a cheerful mood when she received Knox, whose opposition to women rulers was well known. In early 1558 while on the continent, he published his treatise against women rulers, claiming that a woman’s rule violated natural, civil, and divine law and equating a realm governed by a woman to that of a monstrous body with its head where its feet should be. In discussions with Mary and in correspondence with Elizabeth, he explained that his treatise applied specifically to Mary Tudor, whom he labeled an English Jezebel for approving the execution of almost 300 Protestants. Even so he never altered his theoretical position concerning female rulers.

  According to Knox’s later account of the audience, which only Lord James witnessed, Mary accused him of inciting a rebellion against her mother and of writing a book against her own authority. He responded it was his duty to disclose the tyranny of the pope, the Antichrist, and while he detested female rule, as long as her subjects found hers convenient, he was willing to accept her governance, noting that P
aul had been willing to live under Nero’s rule. Knox also remarked that if monarchs exceeded their lawful limits, they might be resisted, even by force. The audience was ended when she was called to dinner.

  Reactions to her exchanges with Knox varied. Maitland of Lethington informed Cecil that she behaved reasonably and remarked he wished Knox would treat her more gently; although she was not a Protestant, she still displayed a wisdom in dealing with him far exceeding that expected from one of her young years. Randolph heard that she wept, but Knox did not refer to any emotional response in his later account, although he did recall her weeping during their fourth interview in 1563. It is possible that the ambassador, who wrote shortly after this first audience, was correct since he did later observe her tearful reaction to other bad news. About her alleged weeping during Knox’s harangue, Randolph explained, “there be of that sex that will do that, as well for anger as for grief.”12

  In reporting on his conversation with Mary in May 1562, Randolph offered another interpretation for her outbursts. After merely raising the possibility that the conference she hoped to arrange with Elizabeth might be postponed, he was astonished to observe tears rolling down Mary’s cheeks. He realized that her reaction must have led observers to believe that the news he conveyed seemed rather worse that it actually was. She thus used her tears to manipulate the views not only of listeners but also of witnesses out of ear shot. In fact, Buchanan claimed that she was “well qualified to conceal her emotions.”13

  Early modern Europeans often used excessive gestures and facial expressions to indicate the depths of their feelings. In 1562 Bishop Alvaro de la Quadra, the Spanish ambassador to England, informed Philip that when Elizabeth learned about a conversation at the home of Henry Fitzalan, 12th earl of Arundel, concerning the succession rights of Catherine Grey, sister to Jane Grey, and a descendant of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s younger sister, the queen wept with rage. Five years later during Throckmorton’s meeting with the earl and countess of Lennox in London to discuss how Elizabeth intended to react to their son’s recent murder, Lady Lennox wept bitterly and her husband sighed deeply.

  GOVERNANCE ISSUES

  Meanwhile at Holyrood on 6 September 1561, Mary appointed 16 men to her privy council, four Catholics, including Huntly, who retained the lord chancellorship, and virtually all the important Congregation leaders. Privy council guidelines required six noblemen to reside at court, but Lord James and her secretary, Lethington, played the major governmental roles. In addition, Robert Richardson, treasurer, James Makgill, clerk register, and John Bellenden, justice clerk, also served on the council.

  Interested in becoming reacquainted with her realm, Mary departed in early September with Elboeuf, Huntly, Archibald, fifth earl of Argyll, and Lord James, among others, for Linlithgow, her birthplace, and then for Stirling, her childhood residence. On the evening of the 14th at Stirling, an accident threatened her life when a lit candle burned the drapery around her four-poster bed, releasing smoke that almost suffocated her. Another assault on the priests singing high mass in her chapel on that day reportedly left some of them with minor injuries. In Edinburgh Randolph heard that Argyll and Lord James were the attackers, but since her half brother was seeking an earldom from her, it was more likely a scuffle initiated by their households.

  Randolph later claimed that at Holyrood Lord James heard sermons in his lodgings, which lay near the royal chapel where her priests celebrated mass, and that these two groups of clerics sometimes exchanged blows. These confrontations continued, as a servant of Lord Robert’s beat up her priests celebrating the choral mass on All Hallows’ Day.

  At Stirling just before Mary set out for Perth on the 15th, Arthur Lallart presented a petition from Lennox, requesting the recovery of his Scottish estates. She responded that she was unable to offer a remedy but would do what she could for his family at the appropriate time. Then continuing northward to Perth, she reportedly swooned during the entry festivities, which, according to Randolph, featured anti-Catholic pageants. He also explained that she often suffered sudden attacks such as this after experiencing great unkindness. She recovered her senses enough to depart the next day for Dundee. After visiting St Andrew’s, where on the 24th Huntly apparently disputed with Lord James about permitting the public celebration of mass, she was back at Holyrood on the 29th.

  Three days later the Edinburgh council ordered the expulsion of monks, friars, priests, nuns, adulterers, fornicators, and all filthy people. Mary subsequently met with the council at the Tolbooth and insisted on the removal of the provost and four bailies. Thomas McCalzean, a moderate reformer, was then selected to replace Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, the provost chosen in 1560 and 1561. During the remainder of her personal rule, she usually did not attempt to advance Catholics to the council but supported moderate Protestants, thus dividing them politically from their more extreme colleagues.

  In governmental policy she also maintained a conciliatory attitude toward the reformers and in December summoned a convention, her first great advisory council, to address the Kirk’s financial problems. Conventions, like parliaments, contained the three estates sitting in one chamber: nobles, senior clergy, and commissioners from the burghs. Differences between the institutions did exist, however, as parliaments required a 40-day notice before meeting and possessed judicial as well as advisory and legislative authority. By contrast, conventions could be summoned on shorter notice and could advise the crown, enact temporary laws, and authorize taxation but not dispense justice.

  The convention’s deliberations concerning the need to provide funds from Catholic benefices for Protestant ministers formed the backdrop to the privy council’s decision in February 1562 to approve a settlement for offering salaries to reformers and for supplementing crown revenue. The holders of Catholic benefices retained two-thirds of their income for their lifetimes, and the crown confiscated the other one-third to cover governmental costs and to support Protestant ministers. This arrangement accepted the existence of two religious entities, one reformed and one Catholic, although priests still could not celebrate mass except at court. In time the amount distributed to reformers decreased. In 1562 the crown obtained for its use £12,700 but in 1565 £32,033. Even with this revenue stream, because of an eroded customs income and the lack of a sound tax base, the deficit continued to mount reaching £33,000 by 1565. The only tax Mary levied was for her son’s christening in 1566. Her annual jointure of 60,000 livres, although she received only about two-thirds of this amount, funded her household.

  Her determination to avoid religious controversy kept her from acknowledging officially the visit of the papal envoy, Nicholas de Gouda, who reached Scotland in June 1562 to request her participation in what was to be the last session of the Council of Trent. After a lengthy delay, she agreed to meet him secretly in late July but declined to send envoys to Trent. About a month later, the disappointed de Gouda departed disguised as a sailor, having been able to confer with only one of her Catholic ecclesiastics, Robert Crichton, bishop of Dunkeld. In May the next year Lorraine read a letter from Mary to the Council of Trent, explaining that she was resolved to live and die a loyal Catholic and promising to abide by all their decrees. Both Pius IV, who later sent her two copies of Trent’s printed canons, and the delegates expressed satisfaction with her explanations.

  Even some who did not complain publicly about her mass longed for her to abandon it. In August 1562 Randolph reported that she was recently ill at chapel and hoped if it happened again, her sickness would cause her to stay away from Catholic services. Unlike Randolph, Knox continued to harass her publicly. On 15 December 1561, two days after he preached against royal frivolities, such as dancing and banqueting, she summoned him in the presence of Lord James, the earl of Morton, and Lethington to her Holyrood bedchamber, which was utilized for daily activities beyond merely sleeping. To her claim that he attempted to engender contempt for her, he responded that he had spoken generally about princes and not specifically about h
er and that if she wanted to know his exact words, she should attend his services. He went on to characterize her uncles as God’s enemies and predicted they would not spare the blood of many innocents to maintain their noble life and worldly glory. When he questioned what others might think about his being absent from his book so long, she turned away, reminding him that he could not always be at his book.

  The festivities that offended him may have been more boisterous than those to which Edinburgh residents had become accustomed during the rule of her mother and the provisional governors. In October 1561 the month after Aumale returned home with the galleys, a second Guise uncle, Francis, the Grand Prior, along with Damville, Châtelard, Brantôme, and Mauvissière, obtained Elizabeth’s permission to travel through England to France. Before they left, Mary arranged a farewell banquet and masque in which the Grand Prior and Damville took parts. For this occasion, Buchanan may have written the Apollo et Musae Exceles.

  During the next two months Mary enjoyed more entertainments. On 18 November Randolph noted that her ladies were merry and dancing, lusty, and attractive. Then at Leith Sands on two Sundays in late November and early December, the ambassador witnessed competitions called running at the ring, which pitted two teams of six men against each other. On 30 November one team led by Lords Robert and John, which was disguised as women, defeated the other team led by Elboeuf, which was dressed in elaborate masks and costumes. Although masking was a usual noble amusement, reformers inveighed against cross-dressing, citing Deuteronomy 22:5 as their authority, and Knox probably deplored the victory of men masquerading as women. His complaints may have had some effect. In December 1562, after he had preached for more than a year against Mary’s festivities Randolph blamed him for the decrease in the usual court dancing.