Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  Contemporaries initially blamed her life-threatening symptoms on poison, the universal assassin. Quickly this theory was replaced by the supposition that grief and strain had taken their toll, the cause being Darnley who ‘recompensed her with such ingratitude, and misuses himself so far towards her’. Maitland wrote to Mary’s ambassador in Paris ‘that it is heartbreaking for her to think that he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no outgait [escape]’.11

  More modern interpretations have acknowledged the extent of the emotional stress to Mary during the eight months since seeing her favourite murdered, powerless to save him: of the betrayal of those closest to her; the threat to her own life and that of her unborn child; the loss of love for Darnley transformed within weeks of her marriage into revulsion. With this emotional legacy she then endured on 19 June a childbirth so difficult she was brought close to death. Postpartum exhaustion and despair followed. Subsequent rumours of Bothwell’s own death and abandonment of her exacerbated her sense of being friendless and trapped by circumstances. Mary had been raised as a pampered princess and queen. Life had not turned out as she deserved and had left her desperate to wreak revenge for wrongs done to her. Few individuals could bear this catalogue of fraught emotion and lack of insight without cracking.

  Purely physiologically, however, the collapse, the pain, the vomiting of blood could be explained by a bleeding gastric ulcer, exacerbated no doubt by stress. Or in fact she could have been suffering some gynaecological problem as suggested by the ambassador’s reported diagnosis of mal de madre. A retained placenta from the birth would have resulted in rapid descent into toxic shock. Alternatively Mary could have been suffering from an acute attack of endometriosis which then evolved into its chronic stage with occasional flare-ups of pain and collapse.* Whatever the possible diagnosis, the significant factor was that her lords at the time blamed her pathetic state on her distress over Darnley. These were pragmatic, unsqueamish Scotsmen, willing to employ desperate measures and ambitious for themselves. Without any room for psychology, morality or sentiment, they recognized that a cull of one of their number had become necessary.

  Mary recovered slowly, possibly profoundly anaemic as a result of blood loss at the birth of her child exacerbated by the further bleeding of her later illness. Bothwell came from his border fastness to visit her. Not yet healed enough to ride himself he was carried in a horse-litter. Her husband arrived a few days later but, given short shrift, stayed only a day before returning to his father’s estate at Glasgow. After a desultory progress through her border region, Mary arrived on 20 November at Craigmillar Castle near Edinburgh where her malaise continued. Certainly depressed in spirits and low in energy the queen was reputed to have told Moray, Huntly and Lethington she was so ‘tormentand’ by her situation that unless ‘she war quyt of the King be ane meane or uther, she culd nevir have a gude day in hir lyff [unless she were quit of the king by one means or another, she could never have a good day for the rest of her life]’,12 she then threatened that suicide was preferable to continuing in her current condition.

  This highly charged statement has a number of interpretations: modern medicine would suggest Mary was suffering a clinical depression, probably postnatal but possibly part of a larger pattern of manic depression. Psychoanalysis might suggest an immature character reluctant to take responsibility and resorting instead to threats of self-harm as an escape from responsibility and as a form of revenge. Elizabeth and her contemporaries were more practical and robust. She had written a letter of kindly and judicious marriage guidance to one of her privy councillors, the Earl of Derby, some six years previously. He had suddenly turned against his third wife and the queen had written of her sorrow at his ‘alteration’ in feeling, reminding him how recently he had held this wife in such esteem (as she herself did), and exhorting him to ‘receive her to such favour as heretofore you did bear her’.13 It was a policy of necessity which Elizabeth, not prone to self-pity, applied to both the demands of the heart and the exigencies of state.

  Sir James Melville had tried this Elizabethan approach, reminding Mary ‘to give place unto necessity and reason, to rule over the beastly passions of the mind. Wherefore are princes called divine persons? No prince can pretend to this title, but … [by] being slow to punish and ready to forgive.’ But Mary had not been brought up to this idea of responsibility and self-sacrifice; her nurture in France had placed her at the centre of the universe, pampered, loved, admired. Whatever she had desired was hers. Now as Queen of Scotland, a long way from those verdant châteaux on the Loire, the demands of her life were radically different but the person living that life was much the same. Beneath the depression of spirits she was still fundamentally an adventurer who defied restraint. She wanted some escape route and she looked to her lords to help provide it.

  In the dramatic events that followed every small detail, motive and possibility has been subject to more than four hundred years of passionate, mostly partisan, debate. There is little that is undisputed fact. Melville, who had no time for Bothwell and was writing with hindsight, maintained this ambitious man was the malevolent motivating force: ‘The Earl of Bothwell, who had a mark of his own that he shot at … had already in his mind to perform the foul murder of the King, which he afterwards put in execution, that he might marry the Queen.’14 Mary’s later detractors claimed that the queen was already embarked on an adulterous affair with Bothwell, and through sexual blandishments and wicked feminine wiles manipulated him and his fellow lords into carrying through the murderous deed. By bloodily freeing herself from an abhorrent marriage they thought she could be certain then of claiming Bothwell and satisfying her shameful desires. Contemporary accounts, however, only mentioned Mary’s partiality for her Border lord. In a time of wildfire rumour and little reticence there was nothing at this point linking her name inappropriately with his.*

  In fact Bothwell had only recently married at the end of February 1566. His wife was the beautiful Jean Gordon, sister of the executed Sir John and of his elder brother, now the new and reinstated Earl of Huntly, and one of Mary’s leading Catholic supporters. Bothwell also had a less exalted mistress. Neither of these facts was considered impediments to the rumour-mill. After all, the Earl of Bothwell was not a man to let mere love, or conventional morality, stand in the way of ambition.

  It was clear that a discussion had taken place at Craigmillar involving the queen and her lords, Bothwell, Moray, Huntly, Argyll and Lethington. Divorce was mooted, an uncommon and difficult manoeuvre but possible for Mary if the papal dispensation was set aside. This, however, would bastardize her son, disqualifying him from the line of succession of both the Scottish throne and also the more coveted crown of England: Mary vowed she could consider nothing that would impair her son’s inheritance or impeach her honour. It seemed likely that she was not actually soliciting the murder of her husband but was prepared to turn a blind eye, to ‘look through her fingers’, at whatever solution might be forthcoming.

  In Darnley’s isolation and distress, his means of revenge was not murder but defamation. He wrote to the pope and the kings of Spain and France, including Mary’s uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine, accusing his wife of being ‘dubious in the faith’.15 This manifestly upset and alarmed Mary who hurriedly dispatched letters and messengers to the various Catholic powers to disabuse them of the slur. Mary always saw herself in relation to the rest of the European world. It was important to her to have a place upon the wider stage and she was jealous of her status there. She did not see herself foremost as a Scot. It was alleged that during the discussions at Craigmillar about her possible divorce, Mary had suggested returning to France, the country of her childhood, where she had been most happy. Although there was no real place or welcome there for her now that Catherine de Medici was the effective ruler, Mary’s willingness to contemplate such a move showed a diminished commitment to the land of which she was queen.

  Elizabeth, so different, was proudly chauvinistic, her
gaze ever focused on her island. Never to travel outside England during her sixty-nine years, her undiluted English blood and her unwavering love for her English people (this love did not seem to extend across the Irish sea) were characteristics of which she often boasted and to which she continually returned. She was fond of familial metaphors: she was the Virgin Queen married to her people; she was the childless woman whose love for them had all the protective and autocratic passion of a mother. This loyalty was largely reciprocated not just by her common subjects but by her closest ministers who found her exasperating, intractable and unpredictable, but ultimately open to reason and fundamentally theirs. This family feeling she engendered made her more secure at home, but weak abroad and without alliance, except when engaged in her long-running sagas of marital negotiation.

  The Spanish ambassador was puzzled by the English character, a character epitomized by Elizabeth herself. As Scottish nobles plotted murder against their king and kind; as the Spanish prosecuted their religion with the effective terror of the Inquisition; as the French fell upon their own people in gruesome religious wars, Guzman de Silva noted how few English disputes ended in bloodshed, due to the ‘very cool headed … temper of the people’.16 This coolness extended to their religion too: ‘These people are so curious that they think the question of religion is of the least importance,’17 he marvelled. Guzman, who was an educated and urbane man, nevertheless admired Elizabeth despite all these failings, despite even that she was a heretic in his eyes, and she liked and seemed to confide in him. He commented indulgently on the kind of idiosyncracies which used to drive his predecessors apoplectic: ‘she is a great chatterer, and the people, even the aristocracy are offended at her manner of going on [at this time, simultaneously flirting with the Earls of Ormond and Leicester] but everything is put up with’.18

  In relation to the Spanish, the English temperament was certainly cool and lacking in fanaticism. Religion, however, was of supreme importance in English political concerns and preoccupations at the time, for instance the drive to assure the succession was largely in order to safeguard the newly established state religion and maintain a fragile status quo. Powerful emotions animated the dissident wings in English life of Puritanism and Catholicism but at the centre was Elizabeth, uninterested in enforcing uniformity of belief while demanding a show, at least, of uniformity in worship. It was fear of civil disobedience rather than spiritual dissension that motivated her punishment of her Catholic subjects and their priests. In a much longer reign she executed more Catholics than her sister Mary I burned heretics, the number of deaths increasing in direct proportion to the perceived danger to national security. But throughout, Elizabeth maintained a pragmatism and willingness to compromise which fitted comfortably with her people’s own innate conservatism.

  Philip II of Spain was deeply devout, procrastinating, dour and aloof. The English queen amazed the ambassador with her ability to combine emotional accessibility and a sure common touch with the imperiousness of majesty. Her identification with her subjects was expressed in part through her disconcerting sense of humour, a difficult quality for her courtiers and ambassadors to gauge, necessary as it was to laugh with the queen but never at her. She was arch, shrewd, earthy and ironic, and these qualities, shared with her people, perhaps also explained the lack of fanaticism and serious high-mindedness which saved the English generally from the extremes of religious persecution and popular insurgency. There were many instances of her mischievous turn of mind, the most famous perhaps being on the return to court of the Earl of Oxford after seven years self-imposed exile, having embarrassed himself in front of the queen: Elizabeth’s merry words of greeting were, ‘My Lord, I had forgot the fart!’19

  Mary Queen of Scots was not known for her sense of humour; romantics and those given to self-dramatization seldom are. She differed from her cousin also in considering religion to be of the greatest importance, and she assured the Catholic powers and the pope that ‘in the religion in which she was born and bred she will remain for ever, even though it may entail the loss of her crown and life’.20 To Elizabeth nothing mattered more than her life and her crown; religion to her was more a case of personal conscience and she accommodated her official stance to the forces of expedience. Mary’s keenness to reaffirm her place in Catholic Europe meant she baptized her baby on 17 December 1566 in the full ceremonial of the Holy Roman Church, while most of her Protestant nobles and Bedford, the representative of the English queen, withdrew, to kick their heels outside. Her sensitivity to her role on the European stage meant she insisted the celebrations be as magnificent and hospitable as possible,* thereby claiming her son’s rightful place in the hierarchy of princes. Even before the Scottish heir was three months old there was talk of his betrothal to the daughter of Philip II of Spain, recently born to Mary’s playmate of her youth, Elizabeth de Valois.

  The watchful English noted how Bothwell’s ascendancy with Mary seemed assured. ‘Bothwell is appointed to receive the ambassadors, and all things for the christening is at his appointment, and the same scarcely liked with the rest of the nobility’21 was one of the messages sent back to Cecil and Elizabeth. The news would not have improved the excruciating gout suffered by Cecil at the time. (Elizabeth had consoled him with the words, ‘My lord, we make use of you, not for your bad legs, but for your good head.’22) Even more painful to him was the letter that followed at the end of the year: on Christmas Eve 1566, Mary had pardoned the nobles involved in the killing of Riccio, the deed which she had sworn to avenge. Darnley recognized at once what this meant to him. He was equally implicated but had betrayed his fellow conspirators, Morton, Ruthven (who had subsequently died and been succeeded by his son) and Lindsay: now they were free to return from exile and prosecute their own interests. His wife, so implacably set against him, had unloosed a pack of hounds and the frightened quarry left Stirling Castle immediately to hasten back to his father at Glasgow. From that point his life hung by a thread.

  When the news of Darnley’s murder reached Elizabeth and her court there was shock and dismay. No one knew what to think. The facts were confusing enough. On the night of the 9/10 February 1567 the town of Edinburgh was woken by an enormous explosion. An explosion of such power was novel and alarming enough, but this was probably the first assassination attempt on a king using gunpowder alone. The house in Kirk o’ Field where Darnley had been sleeping was razed to the ground. In Mary’s own amazed words it had been ‘blown into the air … with such a vehemency that of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not a stone above another, but all carried away or dashed in dross to the very ground stone’.23

  Even more amazing was the discovery of the body of the king, not in the ruins of this house but about sixty paces away in the orchard. He lay lifeless in his nightshirt without a mark upon him. His favourite manservant Taylor was just as mysteriously dead beside him. It was soon ascertained that both had been strangled. It was thought that, disturbed by the final preparations of the gunpowder plotters, they had escaped by a window and been apprehended fleeing across the garden in their nightclothes. There, unknown assassins had strangled and suffocated Darnley. The young King of Scots, just two months after his twenty-first birthday, had been tossed lifeless and half-naked to the ground. His servant was reported to have exclaimed before succumbing to the same fate: ‘The King is dead. Oh. Luckless night!’24

  Mary was shocked rather than grief-stricken. She claimed that if it had not been for an act of God she too would have been killed that night. In a letter she wrote immediately to her ambassador in France she promised to take ‘a vigorous vengeance of that mischievous deed, which ere it should remain unpunished we had rather lose life and all’.25 This was to prove tragically prophetic. Given that her people generally held the Queen of Scots in affectionate esteem, especially warm since the birth of the prince, it was remarkable that dangerous rumours of her complicity in the king’s murder began to rise almost immediately the dust of the explos
ion had settled. But those further from the drama found it harder to believe that Mary could have had anything at all to do with the outrage.

  Elizabeth showed genuine sorrow at Darnley’s death, explaining that as he was her cousin and a royal personage she took his murder very seriously, even though she had been displeased by his marrying in the first place against her wishes. She took to wearing a black veil in mourning. The Spanish ambassador reported that Elizabeth had said the whole business was incredible, adding: ‘[I] cannot believe the Queen of Scotland can be to blame for so dreadful a thing notwithstanding the murmurs of the people.’26

  Less charitable was Margaret, Countess of Lennox, Darnley’s mother, who was still languishing in the Tower. Elizabeth knew her as passionately maternal and sent Cecil’s wife Mildred* and Lady Howard to break the news of the death of her much-loved son. Lady Margaret was so beside herself with grief that the queen’s own physician was summoned. She was released immediately from the Tower and her last remaining son brought to her side. The grieving mother had little compunction at blaming Mary for her elder son’s death: ‘Lady Margaret used words against his queen, [Mary]’ Guzman de Silva, the Spanish ambassador, reported to Philip II. Naturally sympathetic to Mary, he continued with a worrying report, ‘[Lady Margaret] is not the only person that suspects the Queen to have had some hand in the business, and they think they see it as revenge for her Italian Secretary, and the long estrangement which this caused between her and her husband.’27 Even six weeks later, Darnley’s mother, whom the Spanish ambassador considered a ‘sensible’ woman although ‘impassioned, as is natural in her position’,28 was still maintaining the queen’s complicity in the murder.