Elizabeth and Mary

by Jane Dunn

  Before she could wield sovereign power again, however, Mary had to work out the means by which she would once more resume her throne. She asked two of her lawyers ‘how she might be restored again to honour and rule’ and was given the answer ‘by Parliament or by battle’. It was entirely in character that she should favour the quick and the combative over the measured and judicious. ‘By battle let us try it’,5 was her impetuous response.

  Such bellicose impulses ran counter to everything that was expected of women who were considered not only weak-minded but feeble of body too. At about the time Mary was plotting her escape from the middle of Loch Leven, the Venetian ambassador in Vienna reported home an incident in August 1567 which revealed the disadvantaged sex in a new and unsettling light. In a battle between the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, of the fifteen hundred Swedes dead on the battlefield, five hundred were found to be women. They had worn their hair ‘knotted under their helmets’, and their clothes and the arms they carried were exactly the same as the men’s. To everyone’s amazement, they had fought with as much valour and strength as any army of men. The ambassador thought these warrior women must be a phenomenon of modern womanhood. ‘Such a thing was never perhaps heard of by our grandfathers or greatgrandfathers’,6 he wondered. But while Mary did not engage in hand-to-hand combat, nevertheless she had few qualms at leading her troops into battle against fellow Scotsmen, ‘father … against son and brother against brother’.7

  Eleven days after her surprise escape, the queen’s troops were gathering at Langside, a village outside Glasgow, to face the regent Moray and what were called ‘the King’s men’, the soldiers of her own two-year-old son James VI. On Mary’s imprisonment and forced abdication the previous summer, Moray had returned hastily to Scotland. Mary’s reckless behaviour had tossed into his lap the most glittering prize he could attain as a royal bastard. To help reinstate his half-sister to her throne was not part of his scheme, and in her disempowered state he no longer needed to maintain even the fiction of fraternal love. His interview with her at Loch Leven Castle was so full of reproach and disdain that he had ‘cut the thread of love and credit betwixt the Queen and him for ever’.8 Now he faced a queen unexpectedly sprung to freedom and intent on revenge. His hastily raised troops were outnumbered but not outclassed by the queen’s. She had between five and six thousand, he barely four thousand.

  Elizabeth received the news officially about a week later. Watched carefully for her reactions, the foreign ambassadors reported back that she appeared delighted and promised every help necessary to restore the Queen of Scots. Like the rest of the court she was eager to hear of Mary’s latest escapades. It was reported that on 13 May 1568 battle was engaged for three-quarters of an hour, fiercely for about a third of that time, with Mary’s followers suffering the worst of it. There was no great loss of life – contemporary estimates put the dead at under 150 – but the queen, watching on horseback from a vantage point on the hill, suddenly lost her nerve, turned her horse and rode off at speed. Melville noted how out of character this was, but Mary herself explained that suddenly she was confronted by the dread of prison again, or even of her own murder. She set off with a few of her followers, including the boy Will Douglas who had rowed her across Loch Leven to freedom, and galloped the ninety miles through Dumfries to Dundrennan, on the Solway Firth, in fear of her life.

  Against all the advice of her followers, Mary determined to throw herself on Elizabeth’s hospitality, calling in her promises of help and restitution. From Dundrennan she sent a first letter, explaining her predicament and enclosing the great diamond Elizabeth had previously given her, ‘the jewel of her promised friendship and assistance’.9 Only daring to travel at night, to avoid detection, and ignoring her followers’ misgivings, Mary was set on getting to England as soon as she could. On 16 May her party crossed the Solway Firth in a fishing boat to arrive at Workington, on the coast of Cumbria. She had barely the clothes she stood up in. Dishevelled and exhausted she wrote a long letter of explanation and justification to Elizabeth the following day, ending with the plea: ‘I entreat you to send to fetch me as soon as you possibly can, for I am in a pitiable condition, not only for a Queen, but for a gentlewoman’. She signed herself emotionally, ‘Votre très fidelle et affectionnée bonne soeur et cousine et eschappée prisonière, Marie R’.10

  Once more Mary was utterly lacking in political judgement. With a little forethought she would have recognized in what an impossible position she placed herself and Elizabeth by seeking refuge in England. On impulse, and certain she would get to meet her cousin at last, she gambled everything on her personal charm, claims of consanguinity and affectionate blandishments winning her the necessary support to restore her to the Scottish throne. In the grip of her fantasy, it seemed her presence in England might also secure her coveted place as successor to the English crown. This inflated sense of her own power and lack of real understanding of the political realities would begin to exasperate Elizabeth who by the beginning of the new year was provoked into issuing a sharp warning: ‘the fine weather of fair promises and the echoes of voices which seem to honour you above all the world should not envelop you in so thick a cloud that you may not see plain day. They are not so dedicated to adoring you as they make your ministers believe … be not blind nor think me blind.’11

  With a four-day journey time between the Scottish and English courts, letters and dispatches were always crossing halfway. Never was this time lag more inconvenient than in reporting Mary’s activities for she was so precipitate in her actions, and those were too often incredible, that it was impossible to keep up with the news. In fact Elizabeth had written her cousin a letter on the same day as Mary’s historic announcement of her arrival and the messengers passed each other somewhere in the English Midlands. Elizabeth did not yet know that Mary had crossed the border and was already in her own country when she wrote rather less effusively of the ‘joyful news of your happy enlargement [release]’. She felt constrained, she went on, to offer Mary advice ‘touching your estate and honour’, for ‘if you had as much regard thereto as to “ung malheureuse meschant” [Bothwell]* all the world would have condoled with you, as to speak “sans faincte” [without pretence], not many do’. She ended abruptly with the warning not to try and put pressure on her by threatening to involve the French: ‘remember that those who have two strings to their bow may shoot stronger, but they rarely shoot straight’.12

  Mary did not take kindly to advice and her next letter to Elizabeth pressed even more insistently for a meeting, and repeated her old blackmail: ‘If for any reason I cannot come to you, seeing I have freely come to throw myself in your arms, you will I am sure permit me to ask assistance of my other allies – for thank God, I am not destitute of some.’13 This raised the old spectre of a French – Scottish alliance which reminded Elizabeth of her vulnerability to invasion through her distant and difficult northern borders. She could not countenance Mary transferring her troublesome presence across the Channel. As she angrily exclaimed to the Venetian ambassador a while later, ‘My prudence would weigh but lightly were I to permit the departure of her who lays claim to be mistress of this realm, and who of yore assumed its arms and title.’14 But to return her to Scotland against the wishes of Moray and the majority of the Protestant nobles was fraught with difficulties too.

  The problem of Mary in England was to draw Elizabeth increasingly into a labyrinth of cause and effect from which there would be no escape. Although ostensibly Elizabeth was in control, with power to affect Mary’s fate, in reality the relationship between the guest-prisoner and the host-jailer was much more complex and finely balanced. In her letters to Mary, Elizabeth’s tone was often imperious but would turn tentative with guilt and uncertainty about how best to proceed. Mary’s voice, playing on Elizabeth’s sympathies and reliant on her own sovereign status, was often the more confident and threatening. She might lack temporal power but this gave her access to the emotional power of the innocent in chains.
She knew the unassailable moral force of suffering and martyrdom. Against this theatrical high ground, Elizabeth could only appear diminished.

  News that Mary Queen of Scots had arrived over the border spread locally like wildfire. There was much excitement among the nobility and some competition as to who would temporarily give her shelter. The north of England was notoriously unresponsive to government from London, and still largely Catholic in its sympathies. Mary’s reputation was already lustrous with the glamour of sex, monarchy and scandal, and her person seldom failed to work its magic, even when she was dressed in borrowed clothes and lacking the trappings of royalty. In fact the loss of her jewellery, left behind in various flights from the enemy, was of real concern to her. Mary described Moray at this time ‘as hyr grevous enemye and seller of hyr juells’,15 as if appropriating her throne and threatening her life was on a par with stealing the furnishings. Venice was known as Europe’s great marketplace and it was expected that if Moray chose to sell her jewellery it would end up there. The Venetian ambassador had sent notice to his court to look out for any pieces of fine quality and high value passing through their dealers’ hands. Later in the year, Mary asked Elizabeth to persuade Moray not to sell her jewels, which Elizabeth promptly did, receiving an immediate undertaking that nothing yet had been sold to enrich himself or his friends.

  Mary was escorted with great courtesy as befitted her rank to Carlisle Castle and there her retinue of forty, among them Lords Herries and Fleming, were accommodated and efforts made to supply her with more clothes and other necessities. Until Elizabeth had assessed the situation Mary’s status was unclear and her hosts discomfited as to whether she was an honoured queen, seeking temporary refuge, or a fugitive from justice in need of close restraint.

  Sir Francis Knollys, vice-chamberlain, and Lord Scrope, governor of Carlisle, were dispatched to Mary with letters of sympathy from Elizabeth. Knollys, despite his Puritan sensibilities, was immediately impressed by his first audience with Mary. His subsequent letter to Elizabeth was bound to deepen her incipient unease: ‘We found her to have an eloquent tongue and a discreet head, and it seemeth by her doings she hath stout courage and liberal heart adjoined thereunto.’ Inviting the two men into her bedchamber for greater privacy, Mary ‘fell into some passion with the water in her eyes’ and complained at how disappointed she was not to have been taken immediately into Elizabeth’s presence. She wanted her cousin either to ‘aid her to subdue her enemies’ or failing that then allow her to pass through England to Europe to enlist help from a prince from France or Spain.

  Knollys explained that Elizabeth desired a meeting as much as Mary did herself but she ‘could not do her that great honour … by reason of this great slander of murder, whereof she was not yet purged’. He was sensitive to Elizabeth’s dilemma as to how and where to keep the Queen of Scots: ‘a body of [Mary’s] agility and spirit may escape soon, being so near the Border. And surely to have her carried farther into the realm is the highway to a dangerous sedition’.16

  He had also brought with him a collection of Elizabeth’s clothes for Mary to use until hers arrived but these were not well received by the Queen of Scots. An embarrassed Knollys, pressed by Elizabeth for news of the reception of her gift, wrote that Mary’s silence ‘argues rather scornful than grateful acceptance’.17 But then he had thought the dresses were rather mean himself and excused them as having been selected by one of Elizabeth’s maids, he suggested, mistakenly for the use of a servant like herself. The quality and richness of costume and jewellery were intimately bound up with perceived status. Elizabeth’s gift of her inferior gowns was more a reminder of their relative power than solely an expression of lack of sisterly generosity.

  On 8 June, Elizabeth sent an envoy north with a letter for Mary and one for Moray, both holding exercises while she determined how best to resolve the growing conundrum. To Mary she promised a parent’s care for her honour and safety, and insisting that once she was acquitted of this crime ‘among all worldly pleasures [meeting you] will hold the first rank’.18 She explained that she had already risked her own reputation in defending Mary while these accusations remained unanswered. To Moray she rehearsed Mary’s accusations against him and the Protestant lords, and mildly requested that he ‘forbear from all hostility and persecution’ against those followers of the queen. These were diplomatic sentiments but given Elizabeth’s reputation for opacity and sharp dealing such judiciousness was easily interpreted as double-dealing. The Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, who liked and admired Elizabeth, found himself agreeing with the words of one of Mary’s followers: ‘the Queen of England uses towards his mistress fair words and foul deeds’.19

  Mary’s criticism of her cousin was in a different vein. She found Elizabeth’s caution maddening and her even-handedness galling in the extreme. She told Knollys she was unimpressed by Elizabeth’s message to Moray. Such ‘coolde dealyng’ Mary declared would not satisfy her own ‘fyerye stomake’. The kindly vice-chamberlain shared his astute opinion of the situation with Cecil and Elizabeth: ‘it is great vanity to think [the Queen of Scots] will be stayed by courtesy, or bridled by fear, from bringing the French to Scotland, or employing her money, men of war, and friendship to satisfy her “bluddye appetyte to shed the blude” of her enemies’.20 Poor Knollys had already had the tempestuous and tearful Mary ranting at him about how set she was on revenge, so determined to ruin Moray that she would rather ‘all her partie were hanged’ than that they should accept the regent’s rule. Her blood was so roused that she cared not for Elizabeth’s mediation. She would rather be back again in Scotland, she declared, ‘to abide all adventures’.21 As Knollys recognized, for such a temperament as Mary’s, ‘all deedes are no deedes with her, unless her vyolent appetytes be satisfyed’. She had threatened her English cousin, ‘I have made great warrs in Skotland, and I praye God I make no troubles in other realmes also’, adding as a parting shot, which was relayed by Knollys, ‘if we dyd detayne her as a prysoner, we should have much ado with her’.22

  None of this was music to Elizabeth’s overstrained ears. Not only did Mary appear intractable and defiant, with the rash courage of a fighting man, she dangerously combined this masculine bellicosity with the full panoply of female seductiveness and guile. Puritan and loyal Englishman that he was, Knollys could not help but be impressed by the force of Mary’s character and the contrast of her attractive and charming female form. Her emotionalism also brought out his protective side. He immediately dropped any subjects that made her cry and consoled her whenever she burst into paroxysms of weeping – tears more often of frustration at the lack of action or anger at not getting her own way. After two weeks of daily contact with Mary, he wrote a character sketch of such insight that Elizabeth and Cecil, to whom it was addressed, can only have been chillingly forewarned what a formidable adversary they were up against, and what trouble this queen would prove to be:

  this ladie and pryncess is a notable woman. She seemeth to regard no ceremonious honor besyde the acknowledging of her estate regalle. She sheweth a disposition to speake much, to be bold, to be pleasant, and to be very famylyar. She sheweth a great desyre to be avenged of her enemyes; she sheweth a readines to expose herselfe to all perylls in hope of victorie; she delyteth much to hear of hardines and valiancye, commending by name all approved hardy men of her cuntry, altho they be her enemyes; and she commendeth no cowardnes even in her frendes. The thyng that most she thirsteth after is victory … for victorie’s sake, payne and perrylls semeth pleasant unto her … Nowe what is to be done with such a ladie and a pryncess.23

  This was Elizabeth’s problem. Mary’s presence in the north of England was fomenting excitement and rumour. The Catholic nobility’s numbers were greatest there and yet had caused their monarch little trouble so far, but their hopes were being roused from a long slumber. When even Knollys fell under the legendary spell of the Queen of Scots, and the Spanish ambassador drily commented that she ‘knows how to ingratiate herself wit
h her keepers’,24 Elizabeth, in the absence of a meeting with Mary, could only imagine a rival larger than life and more dangerous than Circe. This was at the heart of the tragedy of the relationship between these queens. Because they never met, the self-interested reports of others, malicious gossip and their own fantasies, coloured by wishful thinking or fear, took the place of reality. It was inevitable that for each their rival should grow to monstrous scale and, deprived of humanity, become a cipher for predatory threat.

  Mary bombarded Elizabeth with emotionally charged, fluently authoritative letters, aimed at reminding her cousin of their blood ties and the injustice of imprisonment without a chance of reply. These were hard enough to answer, too easily wrong-footing Elizabeth who, having escaped from injustice herself, did not like being cast as the oppressor. Mary’s attitude veered between the extremes of warmongering and tearful hysteria. At the halfway mark was a charming, energetic, fun-loving and self-aware woman who attracted affection and admiration from all quarters. She had an unerring sense of how best to win friends and influence people. Her keeper Knollys, a loyal Elizabethan, was filled with admiration for the way Mary conducted herself, assuring her allies with ‘hearty letters and messages’, promising ‘liberal rewards’, making much of the Hamiltons, whose support she relied on in her determination to return to Scotland, and craftily enticing into her circle ‘those she would fain have as friends’ by making them believe ‘they were her friends at heart, however drawn otherwise’.25 Knollys was watching a consummate networker and practised charmer at her art, and he could not hide his respect.