Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  She blamed greatlye her husbande, that was the author of so fowle an acte. It is sayde that he dyd answer, that David had more companie of her body than he, for the space of two moneths, and therefore, for her honor and his owne contentement he gave his consent that he shold be taken awaye. ‘It is not’, sayth she, ‘the woman’s parte to seeke the husbande, and therefore in that the faulte was his owne.’ He said, that when he came, she eithere wolde not, or made herselfe sicke. ‘Well,’ sayth she, ‘you have taken your laste of me and your farewell.’ ‘That were pittie,’ sayth the Lord Ruthven, ‘he is your Majestie’s husbande, and you must yelde duetie to eache other.’ ‘Why may not I’, sayth she, ‘leave hym as well as your wife did her husbande? Other have done the like.’

  The Lord Ruthven saide that [his wife] was lawfullie divorced from her husbande, and for no suche cause as the King [Darnley] found hymselfe greeved. Besides, this man [Riccio] was meane, base, enemie to the nobilitie, shame to her, and destruction to her Grace’s country. ‘Well,’ sayth she, ‘it shall be deare blude to some of you, if hys be spylte.’ ‘God forbid,’ sayth the Lord Ruthven, ‘for the more your Grace showe yourself offended, the worlde will judge the worse.’55

  If this exchange was accurately reported, Mary was in remarkable control of the situation, unfazed by the lords’ slanderous accusations and strong in her outrage and appetite for revenge. She was convinced that harm was also meant towards her and her unborn child, claiming that in the desperate meleé one of the murderers had threatened her with a dagger, and another had pressed a cocked pistol to her pregnant belly. Certainly, as she wrote in her account to Catherine de Medici and the French king, ‘we remained not only wonder stricken and astounded, but had great cause to fear for our own life’.56

  Although not placed in any further physical danger, the psychological aggression continued. More than a hundred armed men guarded the entrances to the palace where she now was kept prisoner. The Earls of Bothwell and Huntly, both close supporters of Mary and enemies of Moray, also feared for their lives and escaped out of a window into the night. When news of the commotion had reached Edinburgh the Provost ordered the bells to be rung and a group of armed townspeople rushed to the palace to enquire after the queen’s safety. The conspirators threatened Mary that if she attempted to speak to them they would cut her into ‘collops’ (pieces of meat) and throw her over the wall. Fear and the scent of blood made ordinary men brittle and unpredictable, but it made men used to violence treacherous and brutal.

  After the initial shock and sense of outrage, Mary showed a calm presence of mind and considerable courage. Despite believing her life hung in the balance, she confronted the murderers. She defended herself stoutly against the accusations from Darnley and Ruthven of being an unsatisfactory monarch and a cold wife. On hearing that Riccio was dead she dried her eyes and, with proper sixteenth-century implacability, declared, ‘No more tears; I will think upon revenge.’57 She showed a certain ruthlessness too. Just as with the earlier deaths of Huntly’s impassioned son, Sir John Gordon, and the foolish young French courtier Chastelard, here another man lay bleeding, killed for his presumptuous intimacy with the Queen of Scots. In this state of clarity she ordered one of her servants to reclaim a coffer from Riccio’s room which contained her private writing and her ciphers. Mary was going to have to think fast to salvage what she could from this disastrous day.

  Although Elizabeth and her ministers had been forewarned of the murder of Riccio they did not appear to give much credence to the charge, of which Darnley made much, of Riccio’s adultery with the Queen of Scots. Their chief concerns had been his malign political and religious influence on Mary. The fact that he was an Italian and of moderate social status probably contributed to the general lack of concern in the English court at his murder. However, the harrowing circumstances of his death in Mary’s presence, her being nearly six months pregnant at the time, seemed to have genuinely shocked Elizabeth and roused her sympathies for her unfortunate cousin.

  Riccio could have been set upon and killed at any point in his daily round, but the fact that Darnley and the lords chose to burst into Mary’s private rooms at Holyrood Palace to do their bloody deed in front of her, revealed a purposeful malevolence aimed at the Queen herself. The Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, wrote of Elizabeth’s ‘great sorrow’ and her ‘desire to assist the Queen of Scotland’.58 Quite what assistance Elizabeth meant was unclear, although she did express her anger at this new band of rebel lords and swear they would not find refuge in her kingdom. But this was more diplomatic persiflage than actual threat. Elizabeth might have been less benignly disposed to Mary if the Earl of Bedford had related to her, rather than to Throckmorton, an incident a month previously which revealed Mary’s still-active ambition and reckless confidence. In a conversation in a merchant’s house in Edinburgh where the likeness of a portrait of Elizabeth was under discussion, Mary reputedly replied: ‘Nay … it is not like her, for I am Queen of England.’59

  Elizabeth’s professed hostility to Mary’s enemies was quickly unmasked. Just as Moray and the banished lords of the Chaseabout Raid left Newcastle to return to Scotland, so this latest band of the dispossessed, the lords implicated in the Riccio murder, were to travel in the opposite direction a week later to take up reluctant and temporary residence in England, ‘where … they might find the other lords’ nests yet warm’.60 Although Elizabeth had failed to persuade Mary to reinstate Moray and his followers in order to avert such a crisis, this latest and perilous loss of confidence, and Darnley’s own betrayal, had forced the Queen of Scots to offer them quickly an expedient pardon.

  Where Mary lacked the foresight and diplomacy to prevent disaster, she was heroic in her capacity for action and thrived in a crisis when actually gazing into the abyss. She truly believed, as she explained in a letter to the Archbishop of Glasgow, that the full extent of the plan was to keep her prisoner until her child was born, and then either kill her or continue to confine her. In this way Darnley, awarded the crown matrimonial, would rule in her place with his fellow conspirators taking responsibility for the administration of his reign. Unaware of her half-brother’s involvement in the whole murderous business, on his return to Edinburgh two days later, Mary fell into Moray’s arms declaring, ‘That if he had been at home he would not have suffered her to have been so uncourteously handled’,61 a sentiment which reputedly brought tears to Moray’s eyes. Mary, brought up to believe that to know her was to love her, interpreted this as evidence of true fraternal affection when hindsight suggests it was more likely to have been guilt or remorse.

  Her calculated decisiveness at a time of real confusion and danger, however, managed to transform her situation, temporarily at least, from desperation into near triumph. In the immediate aftermath of Riccio’s murder, Mary decided her best chance lay in separating her husband from Ruthven, Morton and their fellow lords. In a state of high anxiety and fear, he was relieved to have his wife so strong and determined, and apparently on his side. He had denied all knowledge of the agreement to dispose of Riccio. Although Mary most probably knew otherwise, she overcame her own revulsion and allied herself to him to defuse the situation and effect her immediate escape. Having spent one night in captivity, fearing for her life and alone, the following night she agreed to let her husband into her bed to seal their alliance. The emotional exhaustion of the previous days took its toll, however, and sleep overcame him. But Mary’s masterful plan was complete and now she was able to turn the tables on the rebellious lords.

  Elizabeth meanwhile was outraged on Mary’s behalf at the contempt with which Darnley had treated his wife and queen: she asked the Spanish ambassador: ‘Do you think the Queen of Scotland has been well treated to have armed men entering her chamber, as if it were that of a public woman, for the purpose of killing a man without reason?’62 At an earlier meeting she had indignantly expressed her own uncompromising reaction, ‘if [Darnley] had treated her the same as he had treated the Queen of Scotland,
she would never see him again or enter his chamber’.63

  Darnley’s abandonment of the lords, however, earned the contempt of his friends while fulfilling the worst expectations of his foes. As Elizabeth was informed, ‘The King hath utterlie forsaken them, and protested before the counsell that he was not consenting to the death of David, and that it is sore agaynst his wyll: he wyll neither mayntayne them nor defende them.’64 A public declaration to this effect was made on 20 March at the market cross in Edinburgh. With this act of perfidy he set in train the writing of his own death warrant.

  By the night of the 12th, Mary had persuaded the rebel lords to withdraw some of her closest guards by promising to sign a bond of pacification the following morning, pardoning them. This was all a feint for at midnight she and Darnley and one of her women stole out of the palace and, spurred by fear for their lives, rode full tilt in the depth of the night across more than twenty-five miles of rough terrain towards a place of safety.

  By dawn they arrived at mighty Dunbar Castle where Bothwell and Huntly and other loyal lords awaited them. Here an exhausted Mary carefully composed the letter to the woman she most sought to impress, her usually disapproving cousin Elizabeth. Again it was her blood connection and their shared status which Mary played upon: ‘Praying you therefore to remember your honour and our nearness of blood, and “the Word of God quhilk commandis that all princes sould favour and defend the just actiouns of uther princes als well as their awin [as well as their own]”’. She was desperate for support, but despite the uncertainty and danger of her position, Mary’s blood was up and her tone was masterful rather than supplicatory. She had meant to write by her own hand, she said, to add import and intimacy to her missive, but she explained the toll these exertions had taken on her health, now she was six months pregnant and in fear of her life: ‘bot of trewtht we ar so tyrit and ewill at eass, quhat throw rydding twenty millis in v houris of the nycht as with the frequent seiknessis and ewill disposition, be th’occasioun of our chyld [In truth I am so tired and ill at ease through riding twenty miles in five hours at night, with the frequent sickness and discomfort occasioned by my pregnancy]’.65

  In less than a week, Mary had restored her energy, reclaimed her authority and turned flight into fight. She summoned her faithful subjects and, heavily pregnant*, rode out at the head of between three and seven thousand armed men. She returned in triumph to Edinburgh. The latest band of rebel lords slunk away ‘with dollorous hartis’.66 Again physical courage and precipitate action had won for Mary a princely though temporary triumph. Elizabeth, closely informed of all these sensational and fast-changing events north of her border, can only have been disconcerted. She told the Spanish ambassador ‘so many things had happened that it would take her three hours to tell’.67 With so much unrest, with exiled Scottish lords constantly shuttling between England and Edinburgh, with open conflict between the queen and king, how soon before Mary looked to the mighty Catholic powers for more decisive support?

  Elizabeth might have deplored Mary’s rashness and lack of foresight as a queen but she cannot but have admired her boldness as a woman in leading her troops while so big with child. Being Elizabeth, however, she had to have the last say. To Guzman de Silva, the Spanish ambassador, she declared that if she had been Mary, faced with the assault on Riccio and insult to herself, ‘[she] would have taken her husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it’.68 She added mischievously that on the other hand she, herself, would not want Philip II to think that if her current suitor, the Archduke Charles, were to become her husband she would be as ready to stab him! Despite her facetiousness, however, this comment revealed Elizabeth’s idea of herself as a figure of authority and justice, free of the usual female constraints of passivity and mercy.

  While the merry talk of her possible marriage to the archduke continued at diplomatic levels, Elizabeth’s heart was as needy as ever of Leicester. His attempt to retire from court for a few days, no doubt to deal with some affairs of his own estate, was immediately scotched by Elizabeth’s demand that he return in haste, deaf to his pleadings to the contrary. Leicester’s position as the queen’s unofficial consort was an exhausting and time-consuming one. It also claimed his life and soul, demanding all of the duties and responsibilities of marriage but offering few of the rewards. Elizabeth’s generosity to him, however, was expressed in substantial gifts of land and money. The fifth son of a disgraced and dispossessed Duke of Northumberland, he was a handsome and ambitious but impoverished young man when Elizabeth in 1558 raised him to power as her favourite and Master of the Queen’s Horse. By his creation as Earl of Leicester in 1564, she had bestowed on him the estate of Kenilworth which he enlarged and aggrandized to make it a seat for a prince. It was estimated that he spent £60,000 (roughly equivalent to £11.5 million)* on its castle, manors, parks and chase which, when he had finished, extended to twenty miles. And this was just one of his many estates. When Leicester died he was heavily in debt; to be Elizabeth’s favourite was as ruinously expensive as it was transformative of his place in history.

  Elizabeth had taken to wearing a miniature of Mary, hanging ostentatiously on a gold chain from her waist, and telling everyone who was interested that she was full of sympathy for her cousin and had offered her help. She had promised not to shelter the rebels, but the leaders were quickly settled in Newcastle with no prospect of official harassment. Mary’s notorious lack of regard for popular feeling found her once more failing to capitalize on the natural sympathy that her own people had extended to her during the whole debacle. Flying in the face of common sense and political reality, in the emotionally charged aftermath of the murder, she appointed to the controversial post of secretary Riccio’s brother Joseph. Not only did it imply an obstinate refusal to accept any responsibility for the breakdown in relations between herself and her lords, it was an act of overt defiance and continued confrontation which could only rebound on her.

  It seemed Mary had gained nothing in wisdom as she secluded herself at Edinburgh Castle to await her confinement. Her grip on an already slippery situation was weakening. Darnley seesawed between his wife and the rebels ‘in a boyish and unstable manner’. Guzman de Silva, the Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth’s court, relayed how ‘when [the king] is with the Queen he is controlled by her; when with her enemies he follows their advice’. Mary was increasingly isolated with ‘few upon whom she can depend’.69

  Knowing that childbirth was a danger that she might not survive, Mary made her will, careful to include present and former friends, being particularly generous to her French family who retained her deepest affections. Seven months pregnant she wrote to Elizabeth, apologizing for her handwriting for she did not feel well and being so ‘grosse’ made it difficult to sit to write. ‘To make firmer our friendship, I pray you, whatever God may send me, to agree to this alliance by acting as godmother.’70 Mary went on, hopefully, to suggest that by July, when she would once more have regained her strength, Elizabeth might consider meeting her at a prearranged location in the north of England, as they had attempted before. Sidestepping this last request, Elizabeth answered Mary by wishing her a speedy and happy delivery, as free of pain as possible, and mentioning that she herself was ‘grosse du desir’71 for good news of the birth of her child.

  She was as aware as anyone of the ordeal that awaited Mary, and of the risk to her life, and her letter offered a sincere sympathy. Elizabeth, however, was just as sensitive to the political significance of her closest rival to the English throne producing an heir. Her own health was giving cause for alarm; she was in the grip of a fever at this time that an edgy council ‘believed [that] any other but death to be the end of it’.72 According to Mary’s ambassador, Sir James Melville, there were powerful factions both in England and Scotland who were preparing, in the event of Elizabeth’s demise, precipitately to set the English crown upon Mary’s head.

  When the news finally came that on 19 June 1566 Mary had given birth to the prayed-for son and had survived
, it was delivered to the English court by Sir James Melville after a breakneck ride south. Elizabeth’s famous reaction was momentarily not delight but despair. She was at Greenwich, recently risen from her sickbed, and enthusiastically engaged in the merrymaking and dancing that succeeded supper. Cecil whispered the news into her ear. The music and dancing suddenly stopped as Elizabeth sank into her chair with her hand to her face. She burst out to her attendant ladies who crowded round, ‘the Queen of Scots was lighter of a fair son, while she was but of barren stock’.73 The entertainment was over for the evening.

  This spontaneous outburst was revealing of a deeper Tudor fear, possibly absorbed from her own father’s terror of sterility and desperate longing for a son. He had managed to produce only three children from six traumatically contracted marriages, and wondered if this was a judgement from God on his dynasty, or on himself for some fundamental sin. His daughter Elizabeth had seen at close quarters the anguish of childlessness destroy her sister Mary. Whatever visceral fear there may have been of her own part in the unfruitfulness of her royal line, Elizabeth was practised at quickly regaining her composure and control. When Melville went to see her the following morning he was greeted by a transformed queen. Dressed in one of her most gorgeous outfits, she greeted him with a smiling face and gracious words: ‘that the joyful news of the Queen her sister’s delivery of a fair son … had recovered her out of a heavy sickness which had holden her for fifteen days’. Melville mentioned how surprised he was that Elizabeth launched into this bravura without waiting for the formality of his letters of introduction, but it showed how much Mary’s situation was in the forefront of her mind, as indeed was her own.