by Jane Dunn
Mary’s youth, beauty and gracious demeanour did not fail to touch everyone. She had come with a small entourage and without arms, and her vulnerability and trust in her people encouraged their protectiveness. There was a fascination about her personal history too. The pathos of her story together with her physical attraction was enough to make even battle-scarred chieftains weaken. She appealed also to the patriotism in all Scottish breasts for she was a Stuart monarch returning to the land of her birth. There was an undeniable glamour around Mary’s person that drew men in and enhanced Scotland’s pride, for a little while at least.
Knox alone seemed immune to Mary’s charm, reducing her to tears at their first meeting with his ferocity against the Mass and his threats of ‘the greveus plagues of God that had fawlen upon all estates for commyttinge of idolatrye’. Informing Cecil of the clash, Randolph, Elizabeth’s agent, was not sure if Mary’s tears were of grief or anger, but she had had the temerity to urge the hellfire preacher to ‘use more meeknes in his sermons’.12 Many in his audiences might have agreed with her. Maitland sent a knowing aside in a letter to his opposite number Cecil: ‘Yow know the vehemency of Mr Knox spreit, which cannot be brydled, and yet doth sometymes uter soche sentences as can not easely be dygested by a weake stomach.’ He nevertheless thought Mary’s willingness to enter the debate with Knox ‘declare[d] a wisdome far exceading her age!’, that exclamation mark expressing admiration for the young queen’s courage in issuing a countercharge.13
In fact, unlike that of Elizabeth, Mary’s attitude to her religion was more a matter of the heart than of the head. During a discussion with Throckmorton before she left France she had explained ‘the religion that I profess I take to be most acceptable to God, and indeed neither do I know, or desire to know, any other. Constancy doth become all folks well, but none better than Princes and such as have rule over realms, and especially in the matter of religion. I have been brought up in this religion, and who might credit me in anything if I should show myself light in this case? And though I am young and not greatly learned, yet I have heard this matter disputed of by my uncle, my Lord Cardinal.’14 About the Mass she admitted to Knox a similar unquestioning and conventional faith, ‘she coulde not reason, but she knewe what she ought to beleve’.15 He considered this a sure sign of how corrupted her heart had been by her uncle. He was also certain of something that few at the time would even speculate; that beneath Mary’s mild, conciliatory manner was a fanatic intent to restore the true religion not only to Scotland but to her neighbouring and, she believed, rightful English kingdom too. From the beginning Knox had considered ‘maynie men are dysceaved in thys woman; he fearethe yet that posteriora erunt pejora primis [many men are deceived in this woman; he feared that the later things will be worse than the first]’.16
However, welcomed by her people with ‘good entertainment, great cheer, and fair words’,17 Mary’s homecoming included many rude shocks and some danger, not least the fact that only a month after her arrival her bed and its hangings caught fire, and she was almost suffocated as she slept. This seemed to fulfil some old prophecy ‘that a Quene sholde be burnte at Sterlinge’,18 which held a certain menace. The atmosphere was edgy. Her priests still risked being attacked when they attempted to celebrate Mass. Mary had been exposed to the brutality and danger of rebellion and its aftermath at Amboise, but there she had been cloistered in a protected citadel, her brilliant soldier uncle in charge, a loyal army of horsemen at his disposal, a ruthless policy of punishment and suppression already in place.
In Scotland she was much less distanced from the people. Their affection and displeasure was immediately apparent and directly expressed. One of her early historians had characterized her arriving in Scotland ‘suddenly … as if she had flown through the air’,19 and what a rare, brightly plumaged bird she must have appeared. But also, who could have prepared Mary herself for the radical change in every aspect of her life as a result of this homing flight north?
She had left the rich soil and balmy climate of the Loire valley. She would never see again its royal châteaux built in honeyed stone and sumptuously furnished as ostentatious monuments to the power and plenitude of the Valois dynasty. The court which had fashioned her manners, accomplishments and expectations was luxurious, rich and profligate. Crowded with sumptuously dressed, bejewelled princes and their courtiers, serviced by armies of retainers, it was a showplace of culture and decadence where she as their princess and then their queen had been the brightest star. It was as if she had flown direct from high summer into autumn, from feast to frugality. Scotland was much poorer, the landscape harsher, the climate colder. The court was small and the Scots were not known for their facile tongues, studied flattery or unwarranted admiration. The castles and palaces had their own beauty but they loured, the toughness of their granite walls as resistant to embellishment as to battery. The light was cold and grey, and the people as hardy, obdurate and resistant to authority as the stone.
A scattered population who were independent and contentious, with deep-held clan loyalties but often scant respect for the law, were a difficult people to govern, ‘hard to be held in bridle even by the arme and authoritie of men’.20 Piracy at sea and plundering, or reiving, of their neighbours’ livestock were widespread. A teenage queen was unlikely to persuade such subjects to abandon a centuries-old way of life. The more remote of her people, like those in the Highlands of Argyll, were called ‘wylde men’21 even by their fellow Scots.
In leaving France for Scotland, Mary had not just crossed a stretch of sea. She had left behind a world where she had been a precious princess, protected from reality, asked to perform nothing more onerous than to appear beautifully dressed, pursue courtly pleasures, and accept the admiration of that inward, narcissistic world. Instead, in Scotland, she was brought face to face with a rough and red-blooded reality that she could not easily evade by collapsing into tears or retreating to the virginal or her needlework. But Mary was robust and loved outdoor pursuits, particularly hunting and hawking. She was young enough and adventurous enough to rise to the challenge. Mary spent the years immediately after her return to the country on lengthy and at times arduous progresses, extending as far north as Inverness and as far south as her borderlands, inspecting her country and showing herself to the people. She was a good horsewoman and, like her father, she enjoyed disguise, on occasion dressing as a man – she was taller than most men – and riding with a pistol in her belt.
Mary did make an early attempt to catch and punish some of the ‘theeves and revers’ in these borders, and in conversation with Randolph, Elizabeth’s agent, asked him what he thought of her country. When he said it was good enough but could be better she replied, ‘Th’absence of a prince hathe cawsed yt to be worce.’ Then her curiosity got the better of her: ‘But yet is yt not lyke unto Englande?’ she enquired artfully, to which Randolph replied that there were many countries in the world worse than Scotland but few better than England, which he trusted ‘som tyme her grace sholde wytnes’.22 This Mary said she would like as long as it pleased Elizabeth. Always her eye was on her cousin and never far from mind was her own claim to the English throne. She was impatient to visit this neighbouring land and test whether her charm would work as gratifyingly on Elizabeth’s subjects too.
Signs may not have been propitious for co-operation between Elizabeth and Mary, but their relationship as neighbouring queens began with at least a show of amity. In her letters and messages through her ambassadors, Mary employed a tone of sisterly affection, stressing their blood ties and natural bonds as women: ‘Yt is fetter for none to lyve in peace then for women: and for my parte, I praye you thynke that I desyer yt with all my harte.’23 She liked to foster intimacy between them and requested that Elizabeth’s letters to her should be in her own hand. Mary’s main advisers, Lord James and Lethington, both favoured close ties with England, thereby weakening the French connection and reinforcing the Protestant cause. Cecil and Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s m
ain counsellors, were also amenable to this policy of friendship.
Both sets of advisers sought to persuade their respective queens that there was a satisfactory resolution to the stalemate of the Treaty of Edinburgh. If Mary would ratify the treaty and thereby withdraw her claim on the English throne then Elizabeth would name her as her successor, in the event that she had no children to succeed her. But persuading each queen of the necessity to fulfil the other’s requests was an exhausting and in the end fruitless obstacle course where their ambassadors always seemed to return on a loop to the beginning. A transcript of a remarkable conversation between Elizabeth and Mary’s secretary Lethington showed something of the vividness and intellectual tenacity of Elizabeth’s debating style. It also makes clear how difficult to deal with she was:
To begin with Elizabeth was exasperated by Mary: ‘When the Queen has done to me that thing she is obliged anent [concerning] the ratification, then were it time to require me to do her any pleasure; but before that time I cannot with honour gratify her in anything.’ To which Lethington replied that although Elizabeth considered her inheritance of the throne to be entirely lawful there were many abroad, not least all Catholics, who did not. Mary’s claim, on the other hand, was ‘without all controversy’. The Scottish queen herself, he warned, had the idea of the validity of her claim ‘deeper rooted in her head’ and it was unlikely she could ‘be easily persuaded to forgo it’.24
Elizabeth could be as frank and revealing of her own feelings and fears: ‘I have always abhorred to draw in question the title of the crown, so many disputes have been already touching it in the mouths of men. Some that this marriage was unlawfuly, some that someone was a bastard, some other, to and fro, as they favoured or misliked.’ The conversation flowed seamlessly into a defence of her resistance to marriage for herself: ‘So many doubts of marriage in all hands that I stand awe myself to enter in marriage, fearing the controversy. Once I am married already to the realm of England when I was crowned with this ring, which I bear continually in token thereof.’ She then returned again to Mary’s aspiration to be named as heir, ‘Howsoever it be, so long as I live, I shall be Queen of England; when I am dead, they shall succeed that has most right.’25
Elizabeth was adamant that she would do nothing to impair Mary’s claim, but insisted it was quite unreasonable, in fact actually dangerous to her own security, to name a successor, ‘to require me in my own life to set my winding-sheet before my eye! The like was never required of no prince.’ It was a subject she came back to time and again, the impossibility of a prince resting secure when there was an heir in waiting. She explained how she had experienced personally in her sister’s reign the fickleness of popular feeling: ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and has their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed; and naturally men be so disposed: “Plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentum.* [More do adore the rising than the setting sun.]” And what danger it were, she [Mary] being a puissant princess and so near neighbor, ye may judge; so that in assuring her of the succession we might put our present estate in doubt. I deal plainly with you, albeit my subjects, I think, love me as becomes them; yet where is so great perfection that all are content!’26
In the ebb and flow of their conversation over a number of meetings Elizabeth, so often criticized for the obscurity, equivocation and duplicity of her diplomatic exchanges, was remarkably frank and comprehensive in her responses. She explained her opinions and motivations without evasion or pretence, and in fact during the forty-one years that remained of her reign was to change nothing of the substance of what she said to Lethington during that autumn of 1561, having just turned twenty-eight. She never married, she kept and built upon that conjugal bond with her people, and she resisted naming an heir until she was nearing death when the winding sheet was inescapable.
From these earliest exchanges between the two queens, with the dispute over the accession to Elizabeth’s throne as the central stumbling block, it was clear that each woman was as uncompromising as the other, each determined to maintain every advantage possible over her cousin. Mary’s sense of amour-propre had been developed during her years as princess and then Queen of France. To maintain that image of herself, she required a kingdom larger and more important than Scotland alone. Elizabeth, on the other hand, had an overdeveloped sense of insecurity due to the ambivalent circumstances of her birth, together with the experiences of fear and powerlessness she suffered during the last years of her sister’s reign.
This insecurity made Elizabeth intensely suspicious of any clear successors to her throne. During Lethington’s visit, while resisting Mary Queen of Scots’ blandishments, her mind was preoccupied with the problem of the succession as represented by the remaining Grey sisters, particularly the elder, Catherine. Like the Queen of Scots, Lady Catherine and Lady Mary Grey were great-granddaughters of Henry VII and therefore cousins of Elizabeth, once removed. Their sister Jane, having been propelled by Dudley’s ambition to the throne in 1553, in place of Mary Tudor, was eventually executed in 1554. Just as the Queen of Scots claimed an irreproachable legitimacy in her direct line to the founder of the dynasty, so too could Jane’s sisters.
Elizabeth and Catherine Grey did not like each other. Elizabeth thought Catherine stupid and self-important. Catherine, proud of her bloodline, was foolish and arrogant enough to disdain Elizabeth’s parentage, in her hearing. However, her proximity to the throne only began really to trouble Elizabeth when she heard that the Spanish were keen to secure a possible heir to the English crown, (at the time the French had Mary and were pursuing the Stuart claim) and intended to inveigle her into marriage with a Spanish nobleman. Having treated her with scant regard and ignored her expectations of the highest courtesies at court, Elizabeth realized it was better not to push Catherine too far. She made an effort to include her more in court ceremonial and even talked of adopting her. Such a move, however, was more to spread consternation in the Queen of Scots’ camp, by stressing that there were other claimants for the English throne and Mary could not take her supremacy for granted.
Lady Catherine, however, sidestepped Spanish ambitions and confounded Elizabeth by marrying for love. She was rash enough not only to do this behind her sovereign’s back but to choose as her husband a scion of another traitorous family, Edward Seymour, nephew of Thomas Seymour, the man who had first stirred Elizabeth’s heart. It was forbidden for anyone in the line of succession to marry without the sovereign’s approval, but in Catherine’s case there was an added threat. There was a generalized fear that Elizabeth was about to plunge into marriage with Robert Dudley, a match made all the more divisive by rumours that his suit was supported by the Spanish, with the understanding that once he was king he would persuade Elizabeth to re-establish the Catholic religion. So many nobles were opposed to Dudley and his pretensions to be king that it was suspected that some encouraged Catherine’s marriage in order to make her a suitable successor to Elizabeth in any attempt to depose her.
Catherine had courted disaster with her duplicity and the suspicion that it was part of a larger, more sinister conspiracy directed at Elizabeth’s throne. This disaster was compounded, however, by Catherine becoming pregnant and producing a son. At the time of Elizabeth’s conversation with Lethington, Lady Catherine had been imprisoned by the queen in the Tower and had just given birth there. As long as Elizabeth remained childless, these other claims on her throne gained momentum. Most in Catholic Europe considered her legitimacy dubious and so sons, particularly, born to any of her rivals inspired a certain hope, embodying a renewed threat.
To Lethington, Elizabeth confided that she preferred Mary to any of her other putative successors, and then added: ‘You know them all, alas; what power or force has any of them, poor souls? It is true that some of them has made declaration to the world that they are more worthy of it [the crown] than either she or I, by experience that they are not barren but able to have childre
n.’27 Cecil was not as sanguine. His queen’s intransigent opposition to marriage burdened him with a frustration and foreboding that no amount of scheming on his part could ease. To Throckmorton he confided: ‘I am most sorry of all that her Majesty is not disposed seriously to marriage, for I see likelihood of great evil both to this State, and to the most of the good particular persons, if she shall not shortly marry.’ He went on plaintively, hopefully, ‘Well, God send our Mistress a husband, and in time a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.’ He had explained this forcefully to Elizabeth. There was no doubt she was subject to unrelenting pressure to agree to marriage, a matter that Cecil characterized as ‘too big for weak folks, and too deep for simple’.28
In fact it seemed so simple to the men who surrounded her, a matter of diplomacy and pragmatic duty. If only Elizabeth could be induced to marry and bear a son then all these problematic female claimants on her throne would be disarmed in one decisive blow. Cecil was specifically concerned with Mary. He considered there was everything to gain by agreeing to her request to be named as successor but then disabling her with the coup de grâce – Elizabeth’s marriage and then a son for England! But in this Cecil was left with just his dreams.