by Jane Dunn
The evidence mentioned, written in her own hand, which was deemed to prove Mary a murderess, was possibly a reference to the notorious ‘casket letters’ – love letters, purporting to be from Mary to Bothwell, stowed away in a silver casket in his keeping and taken from Bothwell’s servant on 20 June, after the rout at Carberry Hill.
Whatever blackmail or force had been brought to bear on Mary as she languished, powerless to resist, she did sign the abdication documents, with many tears, and vowing to overturn them once she was free. On 24 July her reign formally came to an end and her year-old son became James VI. He was crowned five days later on the 29th, with the Earl of Moray, hurrying back from France, installed as regent.
Mary subsequently related that Lindsay had intimidated her with threats, variously to throw her in the lake, secretly incarcerate her for life on an uninhabited island at sea, or slit her throat. She believed herself to be in real danger of her life, a fear which did not abate as she was moved into the castle’s tower and watched ever more closely. Her charm once more had brought her this latest grief, for her jailers, the women as much as the men, had grown fond of their captive queen and become talkative and too lenient in their care.
Throckmorton and Drury believed that so great was the hostility towards Mary, from the confederate lords down to the common townspeople, that the Scottish queen at this time was very close to being killed. Elizabeth’s doughty disapproval of the lords’ unconstitutional behaviour (‘a precedent most perilous for any Prince’,86 she feared) and insistence on Mary’s reinstatement caused her ministers grave concern. ‘Nothing will sooner hasten [Mary’s] death, as the doubt these Lords may conceive of her redemption to liberty and authority by the Queen [Elizabeth]’s aid,’87 Throckmorton lamented to Leicester. But Elizabeth was not cowed and for once was unimpressed by the call for equivocal diplomacy. Leicester answered Throckmorton, explaining that Elizabeth’s combative spirit was up: ‘She is most earnestly affected towards the Queen of Scots … There is no persuading the Queen to disguise or use polity, for she breaks out to all men in this matter, and says most constantly that she will become an utter enemy to that nation if that Queen perish.’88
Despite the concerted warnings of her advisers, Elizabeth insisted that word was got to Mary, in her watery isolation, of ‘the Queen’s great grief for her, and how much she takes care for her relief, and [Throckmorton] is to use all ways of best comfort to her in the Queen’s name’.89 The more Elizabeth thought about the presumption of the Scottish lords the more incensed she became. She ranted at Cecil and threatened war. Like all Elizabeth’s close advisers, Cecil was pleased to have the threat of Mary neutralized by her imprisonment, and was keen to maintain good relations with the Protestant lords. But none of these considerations carried much weight for Elizabeth, fuelled with outrage that they could treat a sovereign queen with so little respect. Throckmorton was ordered by her to give the following message to the recalcitrant lords ‘as roundly and sharply as he can’:
The more she considers these rigorous and unlawful proceedings of those lords against their sovereign lady, the more she is moved to consider how to relieve the Queen her sister … having cause to doubt, that as they have begun so audaciously, they will increase in cruelty against her, whom they have it seems violently forced to leave her crown to an infant, to make her appear but a subject, and themselves, by gaining the government, to become superiors to her whom God and nature did create to be their head! … For as she is a prince, if they continue to keep her in prison or touch her life or person, she will not fail to revenge it to the uttermost.90
There was no doubt that Elizabeth was sincere at the time, although her strength of feeling rose from a deep vein of doctrinal and pragmatic self-interest. If a bunch of mere subjects could get away with dealing so outrageously with their queen, how inevitably was her own position undermined. It was God’s place alone to appoint and to punish a sovereign, but the Scottish lords had shown how easy it was to overthrow that sovereign and in effect usurp the kingdom for themselves. Elizabeth, more than anyone, recognized that for all the implication of the divine in her vocation as queen, it was the will of the people who maintained her reign: to continue that supremacy she needed to uphold their perception of her role as inviolable. The unwavering principle of the divine right of kings reiterated forcefully by their irascible neighbour unsettled the Scottish lords. It could have pushed them either way, and for a while Elizabeth’s ambassadors argued it might in fact further threaten and not protect Mary’s safety. The prospect of the English invading to reinstate the disgraced queen might appear to those with most to lose as a worse alternative than regicide. Throckmorton, however, believed that Elizabeth’s implacable principle forcefully expressed actually stayed their hand. His presence as an ambassador empowered by the might and majesty of the English queen defused the lords’ ‘fear, fury or zeal’,91 and actually saved Mary’s life.
Mary’s ambassador Robert Melville agreed. His queen had also recognized the singular and unwavering support that was offered, for the first time, by her neighbour and cousin Elizabeth. In her weakened and beleaguered state it was little wonder that Mary thought Elizabeth was about to become the intimate and powerful friend she had initially hoped she would be. Melville reported to Elizabeth her fateful response: ‘She would rather herself and the Prince were in your realm, than elsewhere in Christendom.’92
When Mary Queen of Scots finally escaped, and in haste and fear bade farewell to Scotland, she thought she was leaving ignominy and danger behind. It was England and Elizabeth which she sought. This seemed the most sympathetic refuge, the most effective means by which she could restore her crown. But hers was a heritage recklessly squandered through wilfulness, lack of political instinct and princely control. Her own crown was lost but her flight to England, she felt, would bring closer that other crown, long coveted and, in many ways, valued more.
* * *
*Estimated to have cost Elizabeth £1000 (£230,000 by today’s currency).
†According to Kirkcaldy of Grange, Mary used 5000 crowns of this to part-finance 500 foot soldiers and 200 horsemen to defend herself and Bothwell against the confederate lords (State Papers, Scottish, II, 328). After Mary’s surrender at Carberry Hill, the lords searching the Royal Mint found only 6lbs of gold from the font remaining.
*This condition can mimic symptoms of pregnancy and there was a rumour relayed by the Spanish ambassador to Philip II of Spain on 12 October that Mary was pregnant again. On the other hand she might have been pregnant and suffered a miscarriage after the gruelling sixty-mile ride, but that possibility would have occurred to her contemporaries and there was no mention of it at the time.
*This compares revealingly with the universal rumours about Elizabeth’s lack of chastity at a time when she was almost certainly innocent of anything other than flirtation.
*She had raised taxation of £12,000 to pay for the baptism, rich clothes for herself and her nobles, and presents for the ambassadors (a rope of diamonds to the Earl of Bedford).
*Mildred Cooke was Cecil’s second wife, one of the five impressively intelligent and well-educated daughters of the evangelical politician Sir Anthony Cooke, and mother of Robert Cecil. Another daughter, Anne, married Sir Nicholas Bacon. She was a translator and mother of Francis Bacon.
*They were probably referring to Deuteronomy 19:18–21: ‘And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother; Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from you. And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you. And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall be for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.’
*Crichton Castle, a Bothwell stronghold some twelve miles to the southeast of Edinburgh.
†L’Ordre de St-Michel was a chivalric order of knighthood establis
hed by Louis XI in 1469 (abolished in 1830) presented with great ceremony to Elizabeth’s father in 1527 by François I.
*Three proverbially devilish women: Delilah, beautiful but treacherous mistress, who betrayed to his enemies the ancient Hebrew hero Samson; Jezebel, infamous wife of Ahab, King of Israel, whose name came to mean any immoral woman; Clytemnestra, in Greek legend an adulterer and husband slayer, who with her lover killed Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, on his return from the Trojan wars.
CHAPTER TEN
Double Jeopardy
Sonnet to Queen Elizabeth by Mary Queen of Scots (c. 1568)
One thought, that is my torment and delight, Ebbs and flows bittersweet within my heart And between doubt and hope rends me apart While peace and all tranquillity take flight. Therefore, dear sister, should this letter dwell Upon my weighty need of seeing you, It is that grief and pain shall be my due Unless my wait should end both swift and well. I’ve seen a ship’s sails slackened by taut ropes On the high tide at the harbour bar And a clear sky suddenly fill with cloud; Likewise fear and distress fill all my hopes, Not because of you, but for the times there are When Fortune doubly strikes on sail and shroud.
The Doubt of Future Foes by Elizabeth I (c. 1568–71)
The doubt of future foes
Exiles my present joy
And wit me warns to shun such snares
As threatens mine annoy.
For falsehood now doth flow
And subjects’ faith doth ebb,
Which should not be if reason ruled
Or wisdom ruled the web.
The daughter of debate
That discord aye doth sow
Shall reap no gain where former rule
Still peace hath taught to know,
No foreign banished wight
Shall anchor in this port:
Our realm brooks no seditious sects –
Let them elsewhere resort.
My rusty sword through rest
Shall first his edge employ
To poll their tops who seek such change
Or gape for future joy.
Vivat Regina
THERE WAS NO DOUBT that Mary became the bane of Elizabeth’s life. For the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, she was truly the ‘daughter of debate/that discord aye doth sow’: now with her exile from Scotland she brought that discord straight to Elizabeth’s door. Her presence in England and the conduct of her life grieved Elizabeth on many counts. Everything Mary did had a direct or implied effect on her English cousin, struggling to maintain the delicate balance between her emergent Protestant country and the Catholic powers, her role as a great prince despite her perceived weakness as a woman, her determination to govern a united and peaceful kingdom while rebellions and wars raged abroad. Mary threatened all of this.
Yet Elizabeth, right to Mary’s death, had sympathy with her plight. While at times filled with real fear for her own life and kingdom, and astonishment and anger at Mary’s self-righteousness, arrogance and scheming, Elizabeth could not erase her deep uneasiness at having Mary imprisoned on her soil, by her will. She too had suffered imprisonment and had feared for her life, and the memories never fully faded. She held as sacred the role of queen and found it hard to countenance, let alone conspire with, those who would keep Mary from her rightful throne.
Mary chose Elizabeth and England as her refuge, rather than Catherine de Medici and France, because of the fundamental sympathy she recognized in her ambivalent cousin. Elizabeth was thirty-four years old and Mary was twenty-five. Mary had been brought up in the protective embrace of her powerful Guise family and the Valois monarchy. She was not educated for government. Powerful and intelligent herself, she was not easy striking out alone, personally or politically. Mary was happier always in a collaborative relationship. In her desperation, she thought she might find in Elizabeth the kind of protection and support she had received in her defining years. Her letters to Elizabeth, plaintive, longing, often accusatory, stressed a maternal and filial relationship between them. Lonely on their solitary thrones, devoid of close family relations, perhaps for a short while both thought their loneliness could be breached, that their solidarity as regnant queens would overrule their rivalry and capacity to cause each other harm.
If such a thought had ever existed in Elizabeth’s mind it can only have been short-lived for more sinister elements soon began to alter the balance of power between them. She had written to Catherine de Medici in outrage at Mary’s imprisonment by her lords, ‘These evils often resemble the noxious influence of some baleful planet, which, commencing in one place, without the good power, might well fall in another …’.1 The evil she referred to was the insolence of the Scottish nobility in respect of the Queen of Scots, but Elizabeth’s arresting image was as truly applicable to Mary herself on her catastrophic trajectory towards England.
Although she brought death and disruption to many in her path, although her political and diplomatic skills were intermittent and often misguided, Mary excelled on those occasions where physical resilience and courage in action was required. Like her cousin Elizabeth, she was a fine horsewoman and possessed of terrific energy and stamina, but as a ruler she was more bellicose and less afraid of consequences. Mary’s temperament was more that of the independent adventurer, not that of a great tactician or general. She had shown soon after her return to Scotland how much she had enjoyed the roustabout skirmishes of the Huntly Rebellion. She appeared in her element in such situations, on horseback, riding hell for leather on some clandestine journey, or leading a body of armed men in pursuit of revenge or freedom.
She was to have one more chance for this kind of enterprise before her combative energy was frustrated for ever, to be expressed only through tortuous scheming, emblematically aggressive embroidery and physical ill-health. The means by which she effected her last escape from Loch Leven Castle combined her greatest strengths of an adventurous spirit and irresistible charm. The events that followed, however, embodied her greatest weaknesses – poor political judgement and wilful disregard for the interests of others.
Mary’s physical beauty and pathetic circumstances had long before spun a web around the susceptible heart of the young George Douglas, brother of the Laird of Loch Leven, whose misfortune it was to confine her. After two failed attempts at escape and more than ten months of imprisonment, the Scottish queen once more was free. In the evening of 2 May 1568 she slipped out of the castle and was rowed across the lake by another young male devotee, Will Douglas, to be delivered to the waiting George, ‘who was in fantasy of love with her’.2 With him were ten horsemen and a friend of Bothwell’s, the Laird of Riccarton. A further body of horsemen waited in the hills under the command of Lord Seton and they conveyed her by land and then sea to Seton’s castle at Niddry, then on to Hamilton, from where she sent out messages to muster an army and an extensive and enthusiastic following began to convene. Nearly a year had elapsed since the outraged passions roused by Darnley’s murder had threatened her life. Now their beautiful, mistreated and rightful queen had gained a certain lustre in memory.
News of her escape astounded her half-brother, the regent Moray. Immediately he issued an urgent proclamation demanding that all loyal men congregate with him in Glasgow, carrying fifteen days’ provisions and ready to fight ‘for the preservation of the King’s [the infant James VI] person and authority and the establishing of quietness’.3 Elizabeth was equally astonished at the news but, unlike the male advisers who surrounded her and the Protestant lords in Scotland, she was delighted to hear that Mary was free. Much against her ministers’ pragmatic politics, and despite the English support of Moray and his regency, Elizabeth still hoped that Mary would now not only reclaim her throne but deal severely with her treasonous lords. In reasserting her sovereign authority and punishing her presumptuous nobility she would reinforce the rights of all princes in every realm.
Cecil had been suspicious of Mary’s ability to cause trouble ever since she had first made c
oncrete her claim to the English throne. A more radical Protestant than Elizabeth, he also recognized Mary’s Catholicism as a perennial focus and encouragement for dissidents, and a dangerous point of natural alliance with the Catholic powers of France and Spain. He was unimpressed with Elizabeth’s passionate belief in the sacred hierarchy – with God at the apex, then His prince and then the people – which no mere subjects could override.
From Hamilton, and under some influence from the Hamilton family of which the Duke of Châtelherault was head, Mary wrote the most coruscating document attacking all those who had betrayed or abandoned her. Moray was ‘James, callit Erle Morray, quhome we of ane spurious bastard (althocht nameit our brother) promovit fra ane religious monk to Erle and Lord’ [ James, called Earl Moray, whom we from a spurious bastard (although named our brother) promoted from a religious monk* to Earl and Lord]. The other named rebels were variously described as ‘hell houndis, bludy tyrantis … godles traitouris, commoun murtheraris and throt cutteris … and the rest of that pestiferous factioun, quihome fra mair indigence, schamefull slavery, and base estait, we promovit, and oft pardonit thair offences’ [hell hounds, bloody tyrants … godless traitors, common murderers and cut-throats … and the rest of that pestilential faction, whom from mere indigence, shameful slavery, and base estate, we promoted, and often pardoned their offences].4
Although some of the document may well have been composed by one of the Hamilton family, the abuse heaped on the heads of the men whom Mary had personally elevated and then pardoned, specifically for the murder of Riccio, had the unmistakable mark of her own outrage and desire for revenge. These sentiments, in slightly more moderate language, were exactly those in her letter to Elizabeth, announcing her arrival in England less than a week later. Although she was capable of using self-pity to dramatize her situation, and in rhetoric to get what she wanted, Mary was not a woman to remain a victim for long. Like her cousin she did not pass up an occasion for self-dramatization, but where Elizabeth relied on lofty hauteur and righteous indignation, Mary capitalized shamelessly on the seductive appeal of innocence betrayed.