Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  Elizabeth felt beleaguered on all sides. When the Lords also weighed in with their demand for a named successor she lost her temper and told them that the marks on her face were healing pox scars not wrinkles, and ‘although she might be old [she was 29] God could send her children as He did to Saint Elizabeth’.†64 One of the strains in Elizabeth’s life was to be eased a month later. As her hated enemy, the Duc de Guise, was about to overrun the Huguenot resistance at Orléans, he was assassinated in February 1563 by a young Calvinist who had witnessed and never forgotten the Guise vengeance at Amboise.

  Although this first religious war would be concluded with the Peace of Amboise the following month, it was a peace detrimental to England’s hopes for Calais and the long-term prospects for the Huguenots in France. This was to prove a harsh lesson to Elizabeth on the risks and cost of an active foreign policy. But the duke’s death had the greatest effect on Mary. It was first of all a political loss to her cause. For as long as the duke lived there was always the possibility that he could mobilize French military might to assert any rights or ambitions of his niece. From the day of Elizabeth’s accession he had been the one French individual most feared by the English. Randolph, Elizabeth’s agent in Scotland, hoped the duke’s demise might mark an even better stage in the relationships between the English and Scottish queens: ‘As [the Guise family] have occasioned in times past great misliking between our sovereign and this Queen, so nowe seinge God hathe taken awaye the cheiffeste autour [chief author] of that dyscorde, I hope well that he wyll so yoyne their hartes togyther, that the kyndnes betwene them by no meanes shalbe dysseverde [dissevered].’65

  Bishop Quadra, the Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth’s court, was not so keen to see greater accord between the two queens and recognized drily that Mary’s ‘chance in the matter [of the English succession] has been quite spoiled by the death of the Duc de Guise’,66 so much so that he believed Lethington would try to restore Mary’s standing in the balance of power by renegotiating a marriage for her with her young brother-in-law, Charles IX of France. This was a match with political ramifications as unfriendly to Elizabeth as the much-discussed match of Mary with Don Carlos of Spain.

  Less easy to quantify was the extent of Mary’s personal grief for the man who had been at the centre of her life. She had first met him when she arrived in France as a fatherless – and virtually motherless – child-queen of not quite six years of age. Heralded as Monsieur de Guise le grand by his contemporaries, he was Mary’s favourite uncle, the leading figure in a band of charismatic brothers who, for the whole of Mary’s youth in France, had represented the real authority in the kingdom. This opportunity for power was due to their own natural ability exalted by their relationship with Mary. This mutual enhancement meant that the Guise family treated their charming and valuable little niece with precious devotion. A brilliant soldier, cunning, courageous, ruthless in the pursuit of his ambitions and legendary for his prowess in the field of battle, he was the heroic male on a grand scale in Mary’s pantheon of influences.

  The English ambassador Sir Thomas Smith recognized the fanatic in him. ‘He was so earnest in his religion that he thought nothing evil done that maintained that sect’, and yet Sir Thomas could not hide his admiration in his dispatch to his queen. ‘He was the best general in France, some will say in all Christendom, for he had all the properties which are to be wished in a general: a ready wit, a body to endure pain, great courage, experience to conduct an army, courtesy in entertaining men, eloquence to utter his mind, and liberal in money and honour.’67

  These soldierly qualities were a large part of Mary’s inheritance, the source of much of her pride. The physical robustness and courage she displayed in her quelling of the Huntly Rebellion she would display again in her struggle with other seditionary lords. This appetite for battle was remarkable and as clearly a gift from her Guise ancestry as were her height and good looks. But the news of the death of the Duc de Guise was received very differently on either side of the English – Scottish border. Elizabeth and her council felt it was somehow providential, that the massacre of the innocents had been averted, while Mary looked to God to ‘not leave me destitute’.68

  When she heard the new of his death, Mary was ‘mervileus sadde, her ladies shedinge of teares lyke showres of rayne’.69 Elizabeth’s condolences were received by the Queen of Scots with a great show of affection and gratitude. Randolph was struck by the tenderness with which Mary treated the letter, requesting that he convey her feelings to Elizabeth with the words ‘though I can neither speak nor read but with tears, yet think you not but that I have received more comfort of this letter than I have of all that hath been said unto me since I heard first word of my uncle’s death … I will show myself as loving as kind unto my sister, your mistress, as if God had given us both one father and one mother.’ She knew she had lost some of her bargaining power and so hoped her personal appeal to Elizabeth as ‘my dear sister, so tender a cousin and friend as she is to me’,70 might touch her heart a little.

  In Mary’s use of the word ‘destitute’ to describe her state of mind on the death of the Duc de Guise she implied the sense of being forsaken. It was quite possible that this loss of the man who had been of such central importance in her life as father figure, mentor, protector and guide, made Mary subconsciously begin to search for someone to fill the void he had left in her imagination and heart. To begin with, her own half-brother, Lord James Stewart, seemed a possible candidate. Blood family mattered to Mary and she had accepted him as a natural ally from the moment she returned to Scotland, despite his strong adherence to the Protestant cause and admiration for John Knox. Lord James, however, was a pragmatic politician rather than an inspirational leader. His interest in Mary was political and self-serving rather than personally affectionate and loyal. She was to learn quite quickly that, far from being a substitute for her heroic uncle, Lord James was not someone whom she could trust with her interests, let alone her life.

  The Earl of Arran, a Hamilton and the main legitimate claimant after Mary of the Scottish throne, once mooted as a prospective husband for either Elizabeth or Mary herself, had a reckless energy and fanatic decisiveness which on short acquaintance appeared masterful. But this young man was already suffering from a periodic mania which resulted in him being declared insane when he was twenty-five.* His incipient madness focused on a number of madcap schemes to kidnap the queen with the intention of marrying her. The one in spring 1562 involved his longtime enemy, the Earl of Bothwell. Nothing came of it and there was much doubt as to the verity of Arran’s statements, but the resulting furore and scandal was an unwelcome tempest in Bothwell’s already stormy life. It also further blackened his reputation.

  Mary had already shown an interest in the Earl of Bothwell. First her mother and then Mary herself had bestowed on him various honours in recognition of his loyalty and youthful prowess as a guerilla commander in the borderlands he patrolled. When he had escaped from prison after being implicated by the unstable Arran, Mary seemed to have more sympathy for him than Randolph or Lord James, now Earl of Moray, deemed appropriate. Although a passionate and forceful fighting man, he had spent much time in the French court acquiring intellectual and cultural refinements that belied his powerful frame and turbulent nature. He had all the qualities necessary to become either a hero or a villain and was to rouse passionate contradictory emotions all his life.

  Bothwell was a Protestant but stalwartly anti-English and pro-Scottish. In a daring raid in 1559 he had ambushed an emissary galloping through his own lands en route north, carrying clandestinely six hundred English crowns. Through loyalty to Mary’s mother Mary of Guise, and self-interest too no doubt, he had stolen the money sent seditiously by Elizabeth to help finance the rebel Protestant lords. This made him bitter enemies within the Lords of the Congregation and the embarrassed English council. Randolph, the usually stolid English agent, writing to Cecil three years later could not contain his loathing of the man: ‘I kno
we hym as mortall an ennemie to our whole nation as anye man alyve, dyspytefull owte of measure, falce and untrewe as a divle; yf hys power had byne to the wyll he hath, nether the Quenes Majestie [Elizabeth] had stonde in so good termes of amytie with thys Quene [Mary] as she dothe [violently malicious beyond measure, treacherous and dishonest as the devil; if his power had been equal to his will, her majesty Queen Elizabeth would not stand on such good terms of friendship with this queen [Mary] as she does] … [he is] one that the godlye of thys whole nation hathe a cawse to curce for ever.’71

  Despite Bothwell’s apparent later involvement with the treasonous plot to kidnap her, Mary refused to think ill of him. Randolph reported a conversation with Moray, Argyll and Lethington where they felt that their queen ‘was more favourable to him than there was good cause’ believing as she did that the disapproval her main advisers bore Bothwell ‘is rather for hate of hys person … then that he hathe deserved’. Although Mary had requested the return of Bothwell from England, where he had fled, these same lords agreed that they were to instruct Cecil otherwise, in the rather sinister phrase: ‘in no way should he return but be disposed of as her Majesty [Elizabeth] pleases’.72 Of course he did return, and from that fateful moment the unravelling of Mary’s reign ensued.

  Now in her early twenties, Mary’s sexual attraction was beginning to disturb a number of young men. The Earl of Arran had already lost his sanity, with her as the focus of his obsession. Lord John Gordon had lost his head as a result of his intractable threat to her authority and chastity. Much of her charm was her power as queen, but there was a personal magnetism too which seemed to encourage men to behave recklessly towards her.

  In a peculiar incident which shocked Randolph so much he was embarrassed to relate it to Cecil, a soldier, identified as Captain Hepburn, (it was perhaps just a coincidence that he shared Bothwell’s family name) handed a note to Mary as she walked in the garden at Holyrood House in Edinburgh. Passed to Moray to open for her, there was found a poem, ‘as shamfull – and saving your honour, as ribbalde verses as anye dyvleshe wytte [devilish wit] could invent’,73 followed by an obscene drawing of a man and woman’s sexual organs in the process of copulation. This had happened in front of Sir Henry Sidney and another English visitor, and Mary was particularly distressed that the boldness of the man could be misconstrued to reflect badly on her own reputation. He had fled to England and she had asked Randolph to request that he be detained by the governor of Berwick.

  The courtier poet Chastelard was another casualty of Mary’s charm and the laxity of her court. He had travelled with Mary to Scotland in 1561 and then, within days of the rout of the Gordons and the beheading of Lord John, he had returned from France to her court at Edinburgh, bringing with him a book of his poems. It was November 1562 and the queen was pleased to see this bright and attentive young Frenchman with news of what she still considered home. Ever suspicious of envoys from France, Randolph reported, ‘he is well entertained and has great conference with the Queen, riding upon the “soore [sorrel] gelding” that my Lord Robert [Dudley] gave her grace’.74 He joined in the merriment at court, apparently writing courtly poetry to the beauty of his mistress, much to the amusement of the women. One of the Four Maries, Mary Beaton, was said to be enamoured of him. Knox, already stiff with disapproval at the fun and games encouraged at court, claimed that Queen Mary would ‘sometimes privily steal a kiss from his neck’.75

  Even if this had happened it was highly unlikely that anyone attached any importance to it at the time, apart from the lovelorn Chastelard himself. It had already been noted that the Queen of Scots’ warmth and impetuousity of feeling was open to misinterpretation. On this occasion it fuelled an already volatile infatuation. The following February the twenty-one-year-old poet was found hidden under Mary’s bed as she was about to retire for the night. This was outrageous enough and when Mary was told the following morning, rather than ‘disquieting of her that night’, she ordered him from court. However, the mad hothead followed her to Dunfermline and a few days later was found again hidden in her bedroom, ostensibly to protest his innocence of evil intent the first time.

  An especially fast messenger had set off from Edinburgh to spread the news to Elizabeth’s court. There was some suggestion Chastelard was a Huguenot intent on besmirching Mary’s honour but Lady Throckmorton, writing to her husband (whom as French ambassador she called ‘good froge’), put a woman’s gloss on the Queen of Scots’ discomfiture. She saw it as a misguided passion and probably got the measure of the case: ‘[Chastelard] did privily convey himself behind the hangings in the Queen’s chamber, and in the night would have lain with her, whereat she, making an outcry, the Lord James [Earl of Moray] came, whom she prayed either to kill the gentleman, or that she might kill him with her own hands.’76 Moray refused to do the deed then and there, but the importunate Chastelard was beheaded within the week in St Andrews market place on market day. Knox had the last words on his lips to be, ‘O cruelle dame!’ The contemporary French historian, Brantôme, who was not there, preferred to render them, ‘Adieu, most beautiful and cruel princess!’77

  Contemplating her marriage possibilities, Mary was beginning to see that the grandest of all, to Don Carlos, was increasingly unlikely, that the Archduke Charles was not really a possibility, and that she was running out of suitable foreign alliances. Still in the prime of her beauty and animal spirits, she was ready for love. Enforced celibacy – virginity even – for a young queen surrounded by lovesick youths and ambitious men, and gratifyingly aware of her own power over them, grew wearisome. Mary was a healthy young woman with strong appetites – for food, for hunting, dancing and even running skirmishes against rebel forces. One of her Protestant lairds was frank about the desirability of marrying their queen off quickly to a sympathizer of the Reformed religion: ‘Remember’, he said, ‘howe earnestye she is soughte otherwyse. You know her yeares; you see the lustyness of her boddie, you know what these thynges requere …’78

  Always wilful and impetuous, once Mary discovered sexual desire she became reckless of her own safety and unheeding of the security of her kingdom and her future as queen. Mary needed to be married again, to a real husband, someone to relieve her of her virginity and provide her with an heir. She wanted a prince to share her onerous kingdom and a fellow adventurer who, above all, would help bring her Elizabeth’s throne – by fair means or foul. The stage was set for the laying out of the dynastic and physical attractions of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the tallest young man a tall young queen could hope to meet. When introduced to him as a prospective husband Mary said ‘that he was the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had seen; for he was of a high stature, long and small [finely-built], even and erect …’79

  There were those who thought Elizabeth, despite her protests, had planned it all. If she wanted to wreck the prospects of her rival she could not have planned it better. Certainly the choice of Lord Darnley was to be the first disastrous decision of Mary’s life. It propelled her into a vortex from which there seemed no escape, until shipwreck tossed her out, deprived of everything but her increasingly imaginative claim on the throne of England.

  * * *

  *Life of Pompey, Plutarch.

  *Now called Le Havre as France’s second port, situated at the mouth of the River Seine.

  *One of the three Fates, although Clotho spins the thread of life and it is Atropos who severs it.

  *This is added in another good manuscript of the speech, see Collected Works, 72, note 6.

  †Luke recounts how Elizabeth, a kinswoman of the Virgin Mary, was ‘in advanced years’ when sent a son by God. This son became John the Baptist.

  *He was incarcerated for most of his long life, and died in 1609 aged seventy-two.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Raison de Coeur: Raison d’État

  De Foix, the French ambassador: ‘This game [chess] is an image of the words and deeds of men. If, for example, we lose a pawn, it seems but a small matte
r; nevertheless, the loss often draws after it that of the whole game.’

  Elizabeth looked up long enough to reply: ‘I understand you; Darnley is but a pawn; but he may well checkmate me if he be promoted.’

  Elizabeth in discussion with de Foix, of Mary’s intention to marry Lord Darnley, 1565

  IN UNSTABLE TIMES, with no clear successor to the throne, royal blood was a doubtful blessing. More often it was an inheritance filled with suspense, that suddenly could prove fatal. Suspicion, imprisonment, banishment, death, all were common companions for those with a share in the royal bloodline. Attempts at manipulation through marriage alliances and implication in the conspiracies of others were the occupational hazards that attended them. Even for the chief claimant to the throne, with rewards as overwhelming as the dangers, there was still no safety in blood. In her tortuous journey to the crown, Elizabeth had suffered from all these adversities. Even as she sat upon her throne she was never secure and was to inflict on a number of other blood relations the same constraints and threats that she herself had endured with dread.