by Jane Dunn
In imagination Scotland had become an alien and inhospitable place to its young widowed queen. The reformed religion had been established without her agreement, and Elizabeth had supported the Protestant rebels in their intent to expel the French and overtake Catholicism. In effect this was akin to outlawing Mary herself, for she was above all French and Catholic. She was to return to the country of her birth as queen only with some reluctance when she had exhausted other possibilities. The preoccupation with another foreign marriage, the reluctant return, did not suggest a deep-rooted and reciprocal bond between the Queen of Scots and her distant people.
Elizabeth and her ministers were initially delighted with the unexpected turn of events over the Channel. The end of Guise domination could only be interpreted as favourable to England and the new religion. The fading of Mary’s star as Queen of France was also good news; no longer was there such imminent threat of French reinforcement of her claim on the English throne. As always, every silver lining was accompanied by a darker cloud. If Mary was to return to Scotland to take up her birthright she would establish her power base in the same island, in territory where only a strip of lawless border land separated England from its independent monarchs and unpredictable and factious people.
In fact Mary had expressed her wish to be friends, with a sweet reason which charmed Throckmorton. She pointed out that she and Elizabeth were ‘both in one isle, both of one language, the nearest kinswoman that each other had, and both Queens’.94 But like much of Mary’s sweetness it was possible to discern a bitter aftertaste. Given her ambitions, there was an inevitable threat in all that professed intimacy. She would prove herself a formidable adversary for Elizabeth. It would be a mistake to think because she fought with different weapons she was any the less capable of harm.
Mary was also now, like Elizabeth, a queen without a husband, and the question of whom she might marry was as important and vexing as it was for Elizabeth and her advisers. In fact, there was only a limited number of candidates for either, and this would prove a further area for rivalry and discontent. The shifting foreign alliances and internal policies of each country affected the power balance with the other. Throckmorton was quick to see the difficulties of this newly unattached rival and was himself not immune to her charm. He offered his own solution in a letter to Lord Robert Dudley, and by association to Elizabeth too. He began, however, with a veiled comparison and reproof of his own queen’s indiscreet behaviour: ‘The Queen of Scotland, her Majesty’s cousin, doth carry herself so honourably, advisedly, and discreetly, as I cannot but fear her progress. Methinketh it were to be wished of all wise men and her Majesty’s good subjects, that the one of these two queens of the Isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage as thereby there might be an unity of the whole isle and their appendants.’95
If 1558 had been the year when both queens accepted their larger fates then 1560 was the year of reckoning. Two years earlier, Elizabeth had survived the ordeals to succeed to her throne. She had pledged herself to her people and claimed she would not marry. Her subjects represented all the family she would ever need. But her love for Lord Robert Dudley was the lasting test of her commitment to her kingdom. Although tempted to break her vow of celibacy and marry her greatest love, against all opposition, she chose instead the loneliness of princely duty. She promised Cecil she would not marry Dudley, and no one at court was unaware of that sacrifice. Even six years later the Venetian ambassador to France was relating the still commonly-held belief ‘that the love her Majesty bears Lord Robert is such that she will either finally take him for husband, or will never take anyone else’.96 And yet no one wanted either possibility to come about. Elizabeth’s settled intent was to show that the latter was her only true option. It was to define her as the Virgin Queen.
Mary too held to the path she had chosen in 1558, the year she accepted her dynastic marriage to François II. Less than two years later when this glittering alliance suddenly fell away she set herself to replicate it. She would seek immediately to ally herself to a stronger power, for herself and for her lineage. Strength of character, energy, the capacity to govern, all these she had. But it was wilfulness, within a larger pattern of emotional dependence and conformity, which was to seal the destiny of the Scottish queen.
* * *
*Having become a flagellant, he caught a chill while wearing inadequate clothing during a session of self-mortification, and never recovered.
*Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon (1535–95), was a companion to Edward VI in their youth, and later brother-in-law to Robert Dudley. His claim to the English throne came through descent on his mother’s side from Edward IV’s brother George, Duke of Clarence. Puritan in his sympathies and, more importantly, male, he was the favoured candidate as a successor to Elizabeth for the majority of the Protestant lords at various crisis points in her reign. Mild-mannered and unremarkable, he died without heirs.
CHAPTER SIX
Complicity and Competition
Of this Queen’s [Mary] affection to the Queen’s Majesty, either it is so great that never was greater to any, or it is the deepest dissembled, and the best covered that ever was.
Randolph to Cecil, about Mary’s affection, or otherwise, for Elizabeth, 30 January 1562
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS securely fixed in France, first as dauphine and then queen, had represented one kind of challenge to Elizabeth and her throne. But Mary, cut loose, single again, in search of a husband and a dynastic alliance, represented a completely new and unknown danger. And that danger was coming home.
To have a rival living next door presents its own particular problems. To have a rival in such proximity, but one you never meet, inflates the imagination. Character lours into caricature, conversations relayed through third parties inevitably grow distorted and facts become sullied with the interests of others. When that rival claims not only one’s God-given vocation, the very purpose of one’s life, but also one’s identity and birthright, threatens even life itself, the rivalry becomes a mortal combat.
At first Elizabeth and her advisers felt that Mary’s return to Scotland would be favourable to England. There she would be easier to keep an eye on and perhaps even better to control. Certainly it was a relief that her interests were no longer shared by the French royal family and backed by their diplomatic and military might. It was a relief too to see Guise ambition so unexpectedly capsized. After the English support of the Scottish Protestant lords’ rebellion against the French and their regent – and in effect therefore against their queen – Elizabeth expected to maintain her position with the influential lords as a neighbourly persona grata. With the establishment also of the reformed religion in Scotland, she could believe for a while that she rather than their own queen, a stranger to them and a resolute Catholic, might seem the more sympathetic.
However Throckmorton’s increasingly admiring asides from France about the personal qualities of the young Scottish queen may well have alerted Elizabeth to what was to become the most troubling characteristic of her rival. Mary, now just eighteen, was to prove disconcertingly attractive and affecting to most of the men who crossed her path. It is gratifying for historians in search of motive to recognize retrospectively her fatal attraction, but it appears from contemporary responses that Mary’s appeal was every bit as powerful then. In an age that believed in witches, angels, divination and the supernatural it appeared that she was possessed of ‘some enchantment, whereby men are bewitched’.1 It was certainly a charismatic charm that never deserted her, even when she was middle-aged and had lost her health, her beauty and temporal power.
On the last day of 1560, Throckmorton wrote two letters that contrast his view of the Scottish monarch with that of his own difficult queen. His warm approval of the intelligent and modest conduct of Mary contrasted forcefully with the exasperation and despair he felt at Elizabeth’s continued indiscretions with Robert Dudley. Writing to Elizabeth’s council he declared of Mary:
<
br /> Since her husband’s death, she hath showed (and so continueth) that she is both of great wisdom for her years, modesty, and also of great judgement in the wise handling of herself and her matters, which, increasing with her years, cannot but turn greatly to her commendation, reputation, honour, and great benefit of her and her country.2
As English ambassador to France, Throckmorton felt justified in writing the following caution to Cecil about their own queen’s conduct and her ministers’ reluctance to curb her:
if Her Majesty do so foully forget herself in her marriage [with Robert Dudley] as the bruit runneth here [in France], never think to bring anything to pass, either here or elsewhere. I would you did hear the lamentation, the declamation, and sundry affections which have course here for that matter … remember your mistress is young, and subject to affections; you are her sworn counsellor, and in great credit with her.
He then urged Cecil to do his best to dissuade Elizabeth from what appeared to be her disastrous course, ‘so as Her Majesty’s affection doth find rather wind and sail to set it forward than any advice to quench it, my duty to her, my good will to you, doth move me to speak plainly’.3
Quite contrary to the posthumous reputations of these two queens, at this point in their relationship there is no doubt that it was Elizabeth who was considered the wanton and flighty one whereas Mary was seen to exhibit every feminine and queenly virtue. Within six years this dynamic would be completely reversed as Mary relinquished her reputation, good sense and sovereignty in a moment of emotional and sexual abandon. But interestingly, Mary was considered an exemplary queen during the time she remained innocent of the power of sexual desire. Elizabeth had discovered already the dangerous attractions of erotic love, albeit deferred, in her flirtations with Seymour and more unambiguously with Robert Dudley. This irrepressible side of her nature, together with her sharp tongue and intent to rule, meant that for a time she was considered less favourably in all comparisons with her cousin Mary.
Throckmorton had taken personally the French court’s ribaldry over his queen’s conduct with Dudley, and chose to rub salt in the wounds of Elizabeth’s own council by pointing out how tractable was the young Scottish queen. ‘Her wisdom and kingly modesty so great, in that she thinketh herself not too wise, but is content to be ruled by good counsel and wise men (which is a great virtue in a Prince or Princess, and which argueth a great judgement and wisdom in her).’4
Mary, however, was not as compliant as she appeared. In the months following widowhood, once she began to emerge from the shadow of the powerful family around her and act on her own behalf, the foreign ambassadors were given ‘[more] occasion to know what was in her’.5 As direct negotiations with her proceeded it became evident just how intelligent and self-willed she could be. If she had not in fact been born wily she made it clear she had learnt a certain craft at the knees of those great masters of guile, Catherine de Medici, Diane de Poitiers and the Cardinal of Lorraine. One of Throckmorton’s more thankless tasks every time he saw the Queen of Scots was to press her to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, which withdrew her claim on Elizabeth’s throne. Initially she replied that she could give no authoritative answer until she had consulted with her Scottish Estates. Elizabeth, however, was tenacious and quick to anger. When, in the summer of 1561, Mary requested a safe conduct through English waters for her journey to Scotland, while continuing to resist ratification of the treaty, Elizabeth lost her temper, and in great dudgeon refused the passport.
Mary had as unerring a sense of the theatrical as did her cousin, and in a situation where Elizabeth was thought, even by her own ambassadors, to have behaved in a rash and unstatesmanlike way, Mary, inexperienced though she was, effortlessly assumed the higher ground. Her response was a sophisticated mixture of courteous reasoning spiced with a veiled threat that went to the heart of Elizabeth’s fears. Turning aside the studied insult of her assumption of the English arms and the title of Queen of England and Ireland, she explained that it was simply an expression of her husband and father-in-law’s will and that since their deaths she had used neither arms nor title. With Elizabeth’s invasion of Scotland in support of the rebel lords raw in her memory, Mary then revealed her ability to disconcert her rival by pricking her insecurity and intimating her own power to raise dissent. Declaring that she, as Queen of Scots, had never tried to harm Elizabeth in any way, Mary pointed out that neither did she plot with Elizabeth’s subjects against her, though there were those ‘inclined enough to hear offers’, claiming that she represented more nearly those of Elizabeth’s disaffected subjects who ‘be not of the mind she is of, neither in religion, nor other things’.6 This was the threat that was to echo through the years in their battle of wills.
Not only intelligent, wilful and defiant, the young Queen of Scotland proved she had a striking facility also for self-dramatization: ‘I am determined to adventure the matter, whatsoever come of it; I trust the wind will be so favourable that I shall not need to come on the coast of England; for if I do, then, Monsieur l’Ambassador, the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me; and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure, and make sacrifice of me.’ For good measure she then added a dollop of self-pity, ‘Peradventure that casualty might be better for me than to live.’7
By this time, Elizabeth had realized that Mary’s proximity in the neighbouring realm was a less than happy proposition. Her charm was already well advertised, her self-possession was becoming more evident, and the last thing Elizabeth needed in the early days of her reign and establishment of the new religion was an attractive focus for Catholic and every other disgruntled opinion in her own kingdom. Despite the success of the Protestant Parliament in Scotland, already it was clear that enthusiasm for the return of their queen was growing daily amongst the populace at large. The Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth’s court was watching affairs over the border with particular interest: ‘the Catholic party and those who desire the coming of the Queen are so numerous that, if she were present, they would restore religion in spite of the others; and, as they understand this well here [in London], they do all they can to prevent it’.8
Elizabeth, frustrated by the obstinacy of the Queen of Scots’ refusal to ratify the treaty, wrote instead to the Estates of Scotland to remind them of their duty, and to include her own more overt threat. ‘We must plainly let you all understand that this manner of answer without fruit, cannot long content us … We think it strange she has no better advice, and require you all the Estates of the realm, to consider the matter deeply, and make answer whereto we may trust. If you support her breach of solemn promise, we shall accept your answer, and doubt not by the grace of God, you shall repent it. If you will have it kept, we promise you the like, and all shall go well with your Queen, yourselves and posterities.’9
The withdrawal of the safe conduct might have delayed the departure of a more timorous young woman, but Mary was temperamentally drawn to adventure, and was not used to being thwarted. In fact Elizabeth quickly relented and sent her cousin the passport, but it arrived too late. Bravely and in a turmoil of emotion at leaving her beloved adopted country and the people who had been all the friends and family she had ever really known, Mary took to the water on 14 August 1561. With her was a small entourage, in just two boats: three Guise uncles escorted her and the Four Maries, the girl companions, now women, who had accompanied her to France nearly thirteen years before. In her party also were two men, the young courtier and poet Chastelard and Patrick Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whose support of her mother against the Lords of the Congregation’s revolt had recommended him to Mary. Their presence seemed unremarkable at the time but these men were to play differing roles in the bloodstained tragedy of Mary’s life, and because of her attractions were to die themselves in pitiable circumstances, long before her own violent end.
With more speed and less danger than on her first voyage, which as a five-year-old she had weathered so robust
ly, Mary and her companions arrived at Leith sooner than expected, after a mere five days’ journey. There were many commentators ready to read significance into the fact that the Scottish queen’s historic return to her kingdom was shrouded in a dense sea mist. It was either an omen for the sorrow that lay ahead for the young queen and her people or it was symbolic of the spiritual obfuscation and oppression of the old religion which Mary, as a devout Catholic and half a Guise, was expected to reintroduce. Knox, who could always be relied on for thundering sentiment and a rousing phrase, was full of doom:
The verray face of heavin, the time of hir arryvall, did manifestlie speak what confort was brought into this cuntrey with hir, to wit, sorow, dolour, darkness, and all impietie … The sun was not seyn to schyne two dayis befoir, nor two dayis after. That foirwarning gave God unto us; but allace, the most pairt war blind [but alas, the most part were blind].10
There were those who were not only blind to Knox’s prognostication but instead saw the fog as something positive, a celestial swaddling of the boats’ precious cargo which allowed Mary to pass unseen and unmolested by either pirates or Elizabeth’s navy. None of these speculations seemed to cloud the reception with which the Scottish people welcomed their returning queen. The cannons broadcasting her arrival brought them into the streets, the nobles hastening from Edinburgh to greet her, partly in curiosity, partly in delight to have a Stuart monarch back on Scottish soil again. Mostly they came, however, to introduce themselves, gloss their actions during her absence and sue for position in the new court.
Lord James Stewart, Mary’s eldest illegitimate brother, was a main influence on policy, which, since he was an admirer of Knox and a prime mover of the Reformation, meant that initially ‘all matters touching religion should stand as she found them’.11 William Maitland of Lethington, her mother’s subtle and astute secretary, was now Mary’s chief minister and most influential in her foreign policy. Together he and Lord James guided her first years of government. Although the celebration of Mass had been banned by Parliament the previous August, Mary was allowed to attend her own private Mass conducted at her chapel at Holyrood House. The Protestant lords were vocal in their disapproval and a dissenting rabble initially caused a commotion by trampling candles underfoot and threatening the priests. A plea for mutual religious toleration, however, and an insistence that Mass would not be reinstated, but remain a private affair for the queen and her immediate circle, calmed the situation.