Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  The next concern over the fast-changing political landscape in Scotland was the safety of the small Prince James. Rumour had it that the French were desperately trying to get their hands on him, as they had succeeded twenty years before with his mother. As the heir to Scotland and probably to England and Ireland too, this possibility caused alarm in the Spanish and English courts, not least as there was talk of hefty bribes being dangled in front of Scottish noses. Elizabeth was urged to offer an alternative security to the future hopes of Protestant Scotland by taking the child into English protection, under the auspices of his grandmother the Countess of Lennox. This was a faint echo of Henry VIII’s battles to ensure that Mary, as a baby, was brought up under his control. Elizabeth, however, was far from keen. She had told Guzman that having the baby in her care would make her anxious ‘as any little illness it might have would distress her’. She was also afraid of inciting French aggression against her own country. The Scottish lords anyway were adamant that the baby stayed in Scotland. Bothwell too was using every form of coercive encouragement to get the doughty Earl of Mar to relinquish the baby to his safekeeping and that of his mother Mary in Edinburgh. But these manoeuvres were quickly superseded by the threat of civil war.

  Nothing alarmed Elizabeth more than the threat of rebellion. She had seen first hand in her sister’s reign the divisiveness and terror of a country split by internal strife. She had learnt to abhor the loss of trust and sympathy between monarch and people. Although not many people personally mourned Darnley, the blatant lack of justice, shame at the loss of prestige abroad and the people’s anger at home, stirred the Scottish lords from an uneasy inertia. A confederacy formed on 1 May 1567 was re-energized two weeks later with the intent, ‘that the Queen’s majesty may be delivered from thraldom, the prince preserved, and the cruell murder of the King his father “tryit”, whereby our native country may be relieved of the shameful slander it has incurred among all nations’.69

  There may at this point have been some who hoped to deliver Mary also from her crown and proclaim the baby James king in her place. A child monarch and long regency was a well-established pattern of Scottish rule, one she herself had been part of from her first week of life. The main earls ranged against Bothwell were Morton, Mar and Argyll. Moray, Arran (the Duke of Châtelherault) and Lennox, all obviously anti-Bothwell, were absent from Scotland in various states of self-imposed exile. By the end of the month the confederate lords rode with accompanying nobles, lairds and three thousand men to Edinburgh. Their banner was an affecting representation of the half-naked Darnley, lying dead under a tree, with the infant prince kneeling beside the body of his father. The scroll at the top purported to be his childish prayer, ‘Judge and revenge my caus O Lord’.70

  Bothwell and Mary decided to decamp to the more easily defensible Borthwick Castle on the edge of the Borders, Bothwell’s home ground. But by 10 June he had set off to ride to the impregnable Dunbar Castle, the better to defend his and Mary’s position. Whenever courageous action was required of her, Mary’s heroic qualities came triumphantly to the fore. Transformed from a weeping, jealous woman, for a few days she became once more a remarkable warrior queen. Booted and spurred and dressed in men’s clothes she rode to meet Bothwell. The Duc de Guise had celebrated this quality in his niece, reputedly once saying to her: ‘there is one trait in which, above all others, I recognise my own blood in you – you are as brave as my bravest men-at-arms. If women went into battle now, as they did in ancient times, I think you would know how to die well.’ Loyal and protective of her husband, Mary was determined not to relinquish Bothwell and was ready instead to lead her troops into battle. An English messenger who followed her on that fateful day of 15 June reported that she was let down by her troops, and that she was among the most resolute, ‘so willing by battle to have it tried’,71 even though she was already noticeably advanced in her latest pregnancy.

  Her forces were ranged at Carberry Hill, just outside Edinburgh, against the forces of the confederate lords. There was little appetite for civil war. Instead a great deal of difficult negotiation ensued. The lords promised if Mary would abandon Bothwell then she would be reinstated as queen, declaring to the French ambassador du Croc, who was a reluctant go-between, that ‘they would rather all be buried alive than that the truth as to the death of the late King should not be known’. At first the queen refused outright. Du Croc was impressed, against his will, by Bothwell’s mastery of the situation; he appeared unconcerned at the danger he was in, declaring ‘Fortune … was to be won by anyone who chose’ and that this malice against him was mere envy from men with less desire for greatness. Bothwell did express some anxiety, however, at the trouble all this was causing Mary, ‘whose suffering was extreme’.72 To save her and avoid any bloodshed, it was suggested, possibly by Bothwell, that the issue should be determined by one-to-one combat, for which ordeal Lord Lindsay offered himself. But as the hot day wore on, most of Mary’s foot soldiers melted away, either to the ranks of the confederate lords or back to their homes and their fields. Recognizing the hopelessness of her position, she finally agreed to surrender herself to Kirkcaldy of Grange, but only after a delay to allow Bothwell a good head start on his headlong ride back to Dunbar.

  Dressed now in an ill-fitting, borrowed dress with a red petticoat showing, Mary was led down the hill on horseback. The assembled ragbag of soldiers and peasant volunteers saw for the first time the heavily pregnant body of the queen. Here, ‘with as great a stomach as ever’,73 was the unmistakable reminder of Mary’s sexuality and, just one month after her marriage to Bothwell, damning evidence it seemed of her lascivious behaviour with him. The size of her belly suggested even an adulterous relationship during her estrangement from Darnley prior to the king’s murder. Although unbeknownst to them, Mary was unlikely to be as advanced in her pregnancy as she seemed for she was carrying not one baby but twins. To be so noticeably pregnant, however, meant she must have conceived prior to the abduction on 21 April, only two months before.

  Here too, in the clothes of an ordinary Edinburgh townswoman, dishevelled in defeat, Mary appeared fallible and female, not the awesome figure of a queen ordained by God and set above other women. Elizabeth always took special care to look the part of an unassailable monarch. When she became queen, the plain princess had assumed the necessary carapace of glittering fabric and priceless jewels. She transformed herself into the glamorous, suprahuman vision of royalty. Even though she might treat her common people with familiar affection and engage in their repartee and jokes, they never doubted who was queen nor how that transmuted her into something semi-divine. Her lords, ministers and courtiers too, if ever they stepped too far out of line, were sharply reminded of her supremacy and her ability to cut them down as determinedly as she had raised them up.

  Mary’s manners as a charming, cultured French princess, her warmth and high spirits, had meant people were attracted to her but did not fear her. Her initial authority, when she had ruled judiciously a curious and grateful populace who made allowances for their newly returned queen, had long been frittered away. In her grubby dress, heat-stained and straining over her pregnant form, Mary appeared merely a degraded and dangerous woman. In Edinburgh a new flowering of popular ballads cast her variously as Delilah, Jezebel and Clytemnestra:* insulated from her people by her own troubles and desires she had not realized how her heedlessness of the larger world and its expectations of her as queen had damaged her reputation. The spontaneous raw anger of the soldiers as she passed among them took her by surprise and brought shocked tears to her eyes. ‘Burn the whore!’ they shouted with one voice, as the lords leading Mary away drew their swords to try and quell their oaths.

  Still maintaining her allegiance and love for Bothwell, and concern for his safety, the Queen of Scots was smuggled out of Edinburgh at night, ostensibly to protect her from the mob hurling stones and baying for her blood: ‘Burn her, burn her, she is not worthy to live, kill her, drown her.’ Drury quoted these terr
ible words to Cecil, pointing out ‘The people cry for punishment without respect of persons.’74 It was possible also that the confederate lords feared an insurrection from supporters of the pitiful queen if they had removed her from Holyrood Palace by day. She was taken twenty miles north to Loch Leven and rowed across to the island fortress that was to become her home for almost a year.

  Elizabeth quickly heard of the surrender of Mary at Carberry Hill. Her outrage at the whole sorry episode centred on the fact that a sovereign queen was treated with such disrespect, particularly by her lords who should have known better. The aristocracy itself depended on the sacred hierarchy that placed a monarch at the apex of society, answerable only to God. It was not only dangerous and presumptuous to invert that pattern, it was positively unnatural. The disruption of world order in this fundamental way threatened collapse, anarchy, disaster. Elizabeth wrote to Mary, ‘we assure you that whatsoever we can imagine meet for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, and a faithful friend … you [shall not] lack our friendship and power for the preservation of your honour in quietness.’ She signed it with a meaningful adieu, ‘And so we recommend ourselves to you, good sister, in as affectuous [ardent] a manner as heretofore we were accustomed.’75

  Elizabeth immediately dispatched the experienced and sympathetic Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to offer Mary her commiserations, pointing out that she would treat her with all the care and concern as she would ‘her natural sister or daughter’. Mary’s imprisonment had been the final impertinence and Throckmorton was told to promise her that Elizabeth ‘would not suffer hir, being by Goddes ordonnance the prince and soverayne, to be in subjection to them that by nature and lawe are subjected to hir’.76

  To the confederate lords, who looked to her for support, she was stern. Throckmorton’s brief was ‘to declare that as a sister Sovereign their Queen cannot be detained prisoner or deprived of her princely state. To show them how incredibly her majesty [Elizabeth] took it at first, that persons of such honour as they be (the principal nobility of that realm), could offer such violence to their sovereign as to commit her to any manner of prison.’ She wanted it made clear that this did not mean she was unconcerned by the ‘faults imputed by report to their Sovereign’ but that ‘it does not appertain to subjects so to reform their prince, but to deal by advice and counsel, and failing thereof, “to recommend the rest to Almyghty God”’.77

  Elizabeth at this time was alone among her fellow monarchs in offering human sympathy and moral support for Mary. The French majesties, Charles IX and his mother Catherine de Medici, although natural allies to Mary and important family members of her youth, were chilly and distant. Throckmorton spoke from long years as French ambassador to Elizabeth: ‘The French do in theyr negotiations as they do in theyr drynke, put water to theyr wyne. As I am able to see into theyr doings, they take it not greatlye to the heart, how the Quene [Mary] spede; whether she lyve or dye, whether she be at lyberty or in prison.’78 His experienced opinion was that, given Catherine de Medici’s antipathy for Mary, there was no obligation of family feeling: all that mattered was maintaining their old alliance with Scotland in order to confound the English. Whether that alliance was negotiated with the regent, on behalf of the baby king, or with the lords, little mattered. As far as the French majesties were concerned, Mary’s fate now was largely an irrelevance.

  In fact, in her uncompromising defence of Mary’s sovereignty and her stance against the illegality of the lords’ action against her, Elizabeth stood alone even amongst her own advisers. The more pragmatic Throckmorton, weighing the dangers upon the ground in Edinburgh, was seriously concerned that if they were to carry through Elizabeth’s orders that the lords’ first duty was to restore their monarch, then England would lose Scotland to French influence. In an attempt to persuade Elizabeth, he wrote to Leicester: ‘If the Queen’s majesty still persist in her former opinion to the Queen [Mary] (to whom she can do no good) then I see these lords and their complices will become as good French as that King could wish.’ The French were already lobbying hard to get their hands on the little prince and were courting Moray, and any other useful lords they could attract, with offers of cash advances, generous pensions and the bestowal by Charles IX of the chivalric order of St Michael (Elizabeth was right about its commonplace value in the hands of this king).

  Throckmorton was an experienced diplomat and he was worried enough to lean on both Leicester and Cecil, with the hope that they could persuade Elizabeth to be more accommodating to the lords and less scrupulous about the sovereign rights of their Scottish queen: ‘What an instrument the young prince will prove to “unquyet” England! I report me to your lordships’ wisdoms: and trust you will bethink you in time (“for yt is hye tyme”) how to advise her majesty to leave nothing undone to get the Prince in [Elizabeth’s] possession or at least at her devotion.’ Having discussed the matter with Maitland of Lethington he pointed out the English would have no chance of succeeding unless the baby James was named as Elizabeth’s successor. Otherwise it would seem ‘that the Scottyshemen have put theyre prynce to be kepte in salfetye as thoose which commyt the sheepe to be kept by the wolves!’79

  As it was, Throckmorton was not allowed to deliver Elizabeth’s stirring words of support to Mary. The confederate lords prevented him from seeing her because, as they explained, such comfort from the Queen of England might stiffen her resolve in resisting their proposals. Mary continued to insist that nothing would induce her to renounce Bothwell. The lords were taken aback at her vehemence and her threat to avenge any move made against him. Throckmorton wrote to Elizabeth, ‘[she] avows constantly she will live and die with him, and say that if it were put to her choice she would leave her kingdom and dignity to live as a simple damoisel with him, and that she will never consent that he shall fare worse or have more harm than herself’.80 Admirable as this declaration of passion before duty might seem to a modern romantic sensibility, to Elizabeth such sentiments from a fellow queen could only have been deplorable. To trade one’s kingdom for love was to fly in the face of divine law, denying every accepted tenet of princely responsibility and good government.

  The lords explained to Throckmorton that they could not release Mary as long as she refused to divorce Bothwell, for if she was free and once more in power they would have no redress against him. A month after her imprisonment Mary sent word to Throckmorton of a further reason why she would ‘rather die’ than consent to divorce: ‘by renouncing Bothwell she should acknowledge herself to be with child of a bastard, and to have forfeited her honour, which she will not do to die for it’.81 He was quick to relay this to Elizabeth, together with his fatherly advice to Mary that for the sake of her own health and safety, and that of her child, she should take the easiest option. A further kindness he attempted to do her was to counsel Knox, who had just returned to Edinburgh fired up with self-righteousness, to use less vitriol and violence in his preaching against the queen. Whether he reined in his rhetoric or not, this extraordinarily powerful preacher still threatened the whole of Scotland with ‘the great plague of God’ if Mary was allowed somehow to escape her ‘condign punishment’.82

  In fact no one came to save Mary. She was kept ‘very straightly’ in her lake-bound prison, limited in the servants, clothes and furnishings she was allowed. Only a select few were given permission to see her. Her personal magnetism was considered a further security risk. Already young Lord Ruthven had been moved from guard duty for becoming besotted and passing on sensitive information. (Mary later related to her secretary Claude Nau that he had offered to procure her freedom if she would sleep with him.) Mary remained faithful to Bothwell who had attempted to raise an army and come for her but failed and, it was rumoured, set off to join the pirates in the North Sea. A band of loyal lords, amongst them Hamilton, Argyll and Huntly, talked much and milled around but to little effect.

  Elizabeth’s good
intentions were modified by her ministers’ considerations of realpolitik. Cecil, Leicester and Throckmorton all felt it much wiser to support the Protestant lords. They were reasonable men, keen to stay on good terms with England and to maintain Scotland free of French influence; above all they were of the right religious persuasion. They provided a far better prospect for English security in Europe than the unpredictable and troublesome Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth’s pragmatic ministers would have been happy if Mary was erased for ever from the political landscape. Catherine de Medici also washed her hands of her ex-daughter-in-law. She dismissed talk of armed intervention, for the French, she said, ‘had irons enow [enough] in the fyre’.83 Even a month after her defeat at Carberry, Mary still seemed to be unforgiven by the people of Edinburgh, whose anger threatened to spill out on anyone: ‘The women be most furious and impudent against her, and yet the men be mad enough, so as a stranger over busy may soon be made a sacrifice amongst them.’84 Throckmorton wrote to Elizabeth that he seriously feared for Mary’s life.

  The confederate lords finally got their way. While the queen lay sick, recovering it was presumed from the miscarriage of twins, Lord Lindsay and Robert Melville crossed Loch Leven on 24 July, carrying the papers of abdication. They were empowered to extract Mary’s signature through persuasion, threats, or, as a last resort, ‘violence and force, as well for the coronation of the Prince, as for the overthrow of the Queen’. If she still proved obdurate then it appeared that they would charge the queen herself with the murder of her husband, having ‘proof against her as may be, as well by the testimony of her own handwriting, which they have recovered’.85 This news of how the final curtain was wrenched down on Mary’s reign was reported direct to Elizabeth by the vigilant Throckmorton.