Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  One such incident had the new earl and the much longer established Duke of Norfolk playing tennis in front of Elizabeth. Leicester, ‘beinge verie hotte and swetinge, tooke the quenes napken owte of her hande and wyped hys face’. This was an action which implied great intimacy between Elizabeth and her favourite; it was also highly disrespectful. The Duke of Norfolk, who had never liked Leicester, called him saucy and threatened to hit him across the face with his racquet. Such brawling in front of the queen was contrary to all the laws of etiquette, but instead of admonishing both, Elizabeth took Leicester’s part and was ‘offended sore with the Duke’.57 Such stories, keenly embellished in rival courts, kept alive the years of speculation that Leicester was Elizabeth’s true love. They made her offer of him in marriage to Mary seem all the emptier, and his evident lack of interest in the Scottish queen all the more insulting.

  Elizabeth’s prevarication in negotiations was difficult enough for anyone wishing to expedite matters, but for an impatient, impulsive woman like Mary, whose temperament was fiery, headstrong and unused to any check, the frustration was insupportable. Through her consuming desire to be recognized as the heir to the English throne, Mary had enslaved herself to Elizabeth’s power, pulled one way and then the other, rocked by whatever policy or whim her cousin might advise. Temperamentally, Mary was ill-equipped to cope with inactivity and stasis. As long as she had freedom and will, then action – however wrongheaded – became inevitable. In her early twenties, with power in her own hands at last, the emotional polarities in her nature were beginning to be more marked. The episodes of illness and ‘melancholies’ to which she was subject speedily transformed into a state of high energy and remarkable physical strength, expressed with robust courage and recklessness. At times it seemed that action and madness were closely allied in Mary’s experience: denied action she was susceptible to depression, but in her wildest, most wilful periods the action she embarked on too often appeared close to madness.

  Nowhere was this more evident than in her precipitate relationship with Darnley. Propelled by Elizabeth’s licence to travel, he had arrived in Scotland to a guarded welcome from his fellow nobles. Within weeks whatever goodwill had been extended to him was fast leaking away. According to Randolph, his father had done him few favours with his swaggering manner and aggrandizing claims of his son’s chances with the Queen of Scots. Darnley’s own behaviour, however, quickly alienated whatever support remained. He was young, spoilt and ‘not well acquainted with the nature of this nation’.58 Unable to hold his drink and not very bright, this boy who was barely out of his teens surprised even the combative Scottish nobles with his loutish ways and ill-judged comments. Shown the extent of the Earl of Moray’s lands on a map, he told Moray’s brother that he thought they were ‘too much’, implying he would do some judicious pruning once he was king. His uncontrolled temper earned him an ugly reputation: while ill in bed he threatened the august Duke of Châtelherault that he would ‘knock his pate’;59 he hit people who could not return his blows and gained a reputation for being quick to pull a knife on anyone who displeased him.

  As her nobles turned away from Darnley, Mary appeared all the more set on favouring him. Elizabeth was alarmed at how events north of the border were fast slipping from her control. Mary’s abandonment of diplomacy was a direct result of the English queen’s blocking of all her marriage choices. The last straw had been the message via Randolph on 15 March. In this Elizabeth had declared that even if Mary chose to marry Leicester, still England’s preferred candidate, she would not commit herself to naming a successor until she herself had decided to marry – or not. And this she was still deliberating. Mary’s anger and frustration at her powerlessness to effect anything when dealing with the shifting sands of Elizabeth’s diplomacy found its characteristic outlet in a paroxysm of tears.

  In fact, Elizabeth had allowed her own marriage negotiations to be reopened with the envoys of the Archduke Charles, son of the Emperor Ferdinand. The Earl of Sussex had suggested that Mary’s imminent marriage plans would put Elizabeth under renewed pressure to marry and produce an heir. Elizabeth once more entered the diplomatic dance, professing to be ready to marry for duty. She could not hide her personal antipathy, however, explaining that if ever she were to be induced to marry it would be as Queen of England not as Elizabeth. When one of the imperial ambassadors referred to marriage as a desirable evil, she had laughingly enquired ‘Desirable?’60 To the same ambassador she had declared: ‘If I am to disclose to you what I would prefer if I follow the inclination of my nature, I will tell you. It is this: Beggarwoman and single, far rather than Queen and married.’61 The whole marriage debate was continually rehearsed in her mind, and in conversations with her own councillors and every foreign dignitary who paid their respects to her at court, none of whom ever let the matter rest. To the new Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, Elizabeth elaborated on her thoughts and revealed a radicalism more at home in feminist thought four centuries later:

  [Marriage] is a thing for which I have never had any inclination. My subjects, however, press me so that I cannot help myself, but must marry or take the other course, which is a very difficult one. There is a strong idea in the world that a woman cannot live unless she is married, or at all events that if she refrains from marriage she does so for some bad reason, as they said of me that I did not marry because I was fond of the Earl of Leicester, and that I would not marry him because he had a wife already. Although he has no wife alive now, I still do not marry him … We cannot cover everybody’s mouth, but must content ourselves with doing our duty and trust in God, for the truth will at last be made manifest. He knows my heart, which is very different from what people think, as you will see some day.62

  Elizabeth continued to choose the much more difficult path, which meant she was pressured all her life to fulfil her destiny as a woman and her duty as a queen. However, in a conversation with Adam Zwetkovich, envoy of the Emperor Maximilian, concerning the projected marriage between herself and the Archduke Charles, a chink of light was cast on her insistence that there was nothing more to her lifelong celibacy than natural inclination. She had enquired about the rumour that the late emperor had loved his wife very much ‘and therefore hoped that the same could be expected of his son [Charles]’. When Zwetkovich swore on his heart that the son had inherited all the virtues of his father and ‘would hold his wedded consort dear all his life long’, Elizabeth was apparently delighted and related a conversation with one of her ladies of the bedchamber who had assured her ‘that even if her husband were not handsome, she, the Queen, should be content, if he but loved her and was kind to her’.63

  In Elizabeth’s closest family circle examples of conjugal happiness and a husband’s loyalty were singularly lacking. She was the product of her father’s grotesque fickleness of feeling and a bystander at his ruthless disposal of unloved queens. She had seen at close hand the pathos of her sister’s passion for her consort Philip II, a love not only not reciprocated but publicly spurned. Then Elizabeth’s fond stepmother Catherine Parr had endured her husband Thomas Seymour’s dangerous flirtation with Elizabeth herself with painful and fatal consequences. Closer to home, her own beloved Leicester had shown much greater care of her, his mistress, than of his poor, neglected wife, who eventually, like the other wives of Elizabeth’s most intimate acquaintance, had died a lonely and premature death. No wonder she laughed at the suggestion that marriage was an evil which was ‘desirable’.

  Her discussion with Zwetkovich was also interesting in belying the accepted view that dynastic marriages were always purely political with little expectation of personal attraction or affection. Elizabeth showed that emotion was very much a part of her reasoning in the matter – even if only just another excuse to prevaricate. Mary too brought emotion very much to the marriage choices she made in her maturity: indeed it could be argued that she would have made much better alliances, maintained her throne – and been happier – if there had been more politi
cs and less passion in her preferences.

  Elizabeth may not have desired a princely, or indeed any, suitor, but she had an emphatic sense of her own majesty and a natural competitiveness with Mary. In the preliminary marital negotiations over the Archduke Charles she mentioned to his envoy how surprised she was to hear that Charles had made an offer previously to Mary, ‘this [Elizabeth] took to mean that if the Queen of Scotland did not wish to have the Archduke, she, the Queen of England, was to be the jester to the Queen of Scotland’.* When Zwetkovich replied that he had heard the French ambassador praise Mary, ‘saying that she was very beautiful, and the heir to the throne of England and therefore worthy of such a Prince as the Archduke’, Elizabeth was quick to remind him, ‘that she was superior to the Queen of Scotland’.64 She might demand impossible conditions of a suitor, she might reject him outright, but she did not want her inveterate reluctance to mean she was passed over in favour of her cousin, nor did she welcome any intimation that she was inferior to her as queen, woman or bride.

  Mary herself had a wilful and irresistible nature but she was entirely conformable to her church and society in her attitudes to marriage. She had never seriously questioned the desirability of the state, even for a regnant queen whose power, ordained by God, resided in her hands alone. She had been traded in marriage when barely out of babyhood and been bred to consider it the pinnacle of her achievement. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary’s own personal experiences from childhood had been more benign, her first husband expressed real devotion to her and her father-in-law, Henri II, the closest husband-figure in her formative years, had shown affection and respect to both Catherine and Diane de Poitiers. For Mary, celibacy held no practical or emotional appeal: marriage was a central ambition to help attain every other ambition in her life. It was her only option and she embraced it with fervour.

  As summer approached, Lord Darnley was firmly in the Queen of Scots’ sights. She had waited long enough for her first experience of a true marriage. Her blood was up and an attractive young suitor was at hand. Darnley’s pedigree was suitable enough. He was tall and elegant, he looked the part of a prince, and for a time at least she found him sexually irresistible. A fortuitous bout of measles* gave Mary the opportunity of attending his sickbed and entertaining him in his recuperation. In the close intimacy of his chamber, where illness temporarily disarmed his braggardly nature, Mary found her initial attraction become a simulacrum of love. Randolph reported, ‘[The queen’s] care has been marvellous great and tender over him. Such tales and bruits of her spread abroad, that it is wonder to hear the discontent of her people.’65

  Stories of this unseemly familiarity between them flew around the courts of Europe. News of their marriage was expected at any time, indeed most ambassadors reported that the marriage had already been solemnized secretly. To general consternation, the Earl of Moray had left the court, some said banished, others said wilfully and in disgust at the queen’s marriage plans and her dereliction of responsibility and duty. He only returned on 1 May to make his presence felt at the trial of Bothwell for treason: the border lord failed to turn up. In the absence of Moray and the eclipse of Lethington, Mary’s secretary, the Italian Riccio, became even more obviously influential as her adviser. He was Darnley’s leading champion. Suddenly the fact that he, the queen and the Lennox family, if not Darnley himself, were all prominent Catholics took on sinister significance. Fear, suspicion and confusion fuelled rumours that Mary would be encouraged to attempt nothing less than the restoration of Catholicism. The Protestant lords in Scotland, and Elizabeth and the English court, were concerned at the thought that Spain was stirring again and could seek some alliance with Scotland. There was even talk that the English Catholics might be energized into rebellion.

  Randolph was in despair at how much his hopes for friendship between Elizabeth and Mary, and their countries were thrown into disarray, how threatening the situation was likely to become: from Edinburgh he wrote to Cecil, ‘Such discontent, large talk, and open speech I never heard in any nation, and for myself see not but it must burst out in great mischief – for [Mary] is suspected of many of her nobles, and her people discontented for her religion, this match a-making without advice, and other as evil things they suspect, besides her unprincely behaviour in many of her doings … The speech of this marriage to any of them, is so contrary to their minds, that they think their nation dishonoured, the Queen shamed, and country undone … She is now in utter contempt of her people, and so far in doubt of them herself, that without speedy redress, “worce is to be feared”.’66

  Not least of Randolph’s worries was the angry talk amongst the disaffected nobles that Elizabeth had masterminded the whole sorry state of Scottish affairs by allowing Lennox and his son Darnley to return: ‘I would that her majesty [Elizabeth] were void of the suspicion that is here spoken to my face, that the sending him home was done of purpose to match the Queen meanly and poorly, rather than live long in amity.’67 In fact the picture he painted of the breakdown of the recent and fragile civilities north of the border went some way to explaining the volatile emotions which dominated Scottish political life in the ensuing years: ‘[The master of] Maxwell … wiser than many, laments the state of his country and is ashamed of it. The country is broken – daily slaughter between Scotts and Elliots* – stealing on all hands – justice no where … such pride, excess in vanities, proud looks and dispiteful words, and so poor a purse I never heard of … [Lennox’s] men are bolder and saucier with the Queen’s self and many noble men, than I ever thought could have been borne; divers resort to the mass, and glory in their doings.’68

  The mob expressed their antagonism by capturing a priest who was saying Mass on Palm Sunday and tying him, still in his vestments, to the market cross in Edinburgh, there he was pelted with eggs ‘and filth of the street’ so ferociously that it was thought he was killed. Mary was so incensed that she precipitately called all the men ‘of Fife, Lothian, Tividale, and Liddesdale, to rise to revenge his death’ then finding he had survived countermanded her hasty directive and sent the men home.69

  In the grip of the coup de foudre that had befallen her in the intimacy of the young lord’s sickroom, Mary had determined to marry Darnley in the teeth of all opposition. She sent Lethington to Elizabeth to ask her approval. Predictably Elizabeth was furious. She called in the more wily and diplomatic Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to take over from a demoralized Randolph the urgent dealings aimed at steering Mary away from the match with Darnley. Lethington and he became frequent travellers on the weary road between Edinburgh and London. On 11 May they met at Berwick, Lethington disobeying Mary’s orders to return to Elizabeth with the defiant message that ‘she minded … to use her own choice in marriage; she would no longer be fed with yea and nay, and to depend upon uncertain dealings’. The careful, judicious Lethington who, with Moray, supported the English alliance, was incandescent with rage at Mary’s foolhardiness. This was so out of character that Throckmorton wrote to Leicester and Cecil that he ‘would have little believed that for any matter [Lethington] could have been so moved’.70

  Lethington’s anger was not the most remarkable transformation that summer. The ambassadors’ reports from the Scottish court were striking in their puzzlement and concern at the change wrought in Mary’s character and behaviour. Even her looks seemed altered. Randolph had got to know Mary well and, although Elizabeth’s agent, he admired the Scottish queen, being more than a little touched by her person and caring for her wellbeing. What he saw of this match filled him with doom: ‘this Queen in her love is so transported, and Darnley grown so proud, that to all honest men he is intolerable, and almost forgetful of his duty to her already who had adventured so much for his sake’.71 He had been shocked to see Darnley use his dagger to threaten Mary’s justice clerk who brought him the unwelcome news that one of the honours promised him by the queen would be delayed.

  By early June, Randolph was filled with a genuine pity for Mary’s plight, a plight to which she
seemed oblivious: ‘In this Queen’s mind’, he wrote sorrowfully to Leicester, ‘can no alteration be perceived, but as great tokens of love as ever before, which in her has wrought such strange effects that shame is laid aside, and all regard of that which chiefly pertains to princely honour removed out of sight.’ Perhaps Mary’s besotted behaviour towards Darnley shared a similarity with Elizabeth’s own amorousness with Lord Robert, Earl of Leicester, which had caused so much embarrassment and outrage at the time. However, Randolph went on to describe a transformation more extreme and ill-favoured than anything of which Elizabeth was ever accused: ‘This Queen is so much altered from what she was that who beholds does not think her the same. Her majesty is laid aside; her wits not what they were; her beauty another than it was; her cheer and countenance changed into he wots not what. A woman more to be pitied than any other that he ever saw. Such one now as neither her own regards, nor she takes count of any that are virtuous or good.’ He stressed how much it pained him to write this of a queen he had come to esteem so highly, but he assured Leicester there were many witnesses to the sad facts he was relating.

  Where modern interpretations might identify some kind of breakdown or mental illness in Mary, in an age where the supernatural coexisted with the everyday, and witches and spirits were interwoven with reality, Randolph thought only an occult reason could explain the dramatic alteration in the behaviour of the Queen of Scots: ‘The saying is that she is bewitched, the parties named to be the doers; the tokens, the rings, the bracelets, are found and daily worn that contain the sacred mysteries.’72 The parties named would probably have included the Lord Ruthven who was reputed to use witchcraft; Riccio, as a papist and an Italian, was also suspected in these matters.