An Accidental Tragedy

by Roderick Graham

  By degrees everyone will forget the death of the late king except the young queen, his widow, who, being no less noble minded than beautiful and graceful in appearance, the thoughts of widowhood at so early an age, and of the loss of a consort who was so great a king and who so dearly loved her, and also that she is dispossessed of the crown of France with little hope of recovering that of Scotland, which is her sole patrimony and dower, so afflict her that she will not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate and doleful lamentations, she universally inspires great pity.

  Mary knew that, as had happened with Diane de Poitiers, on the day after François’s death she would be required to hand over the jewels given to her by François, and so two inventories were drawn up on 6 December. The jewellery consisted mainly of large numbers of diamonds and rubies, in necklaces and crucifixes, some enamelled with the letter ‘F’, and the list runs for three pages. It is signed ‘Charles’ and was probably the first document he signed as king. Catherine added a receipt for the jewellery and an audit of Mary’s personal staff was drawn up, showing that the four Maries were still in attendance, but listing 286 other courtiers and servants. Few of these were needed as Mary kept close mourning for fifteen days, and only persons in the nearest relationship to her were admitted, but ambassadors and courtiers buzzed with furious speculation.

  Mary was now an eighteen-year-old woman of presumed, although as yet unproven, fertility and a widowed queen. The secret Treaty of Fontainebleau was now worthless, but Mary had huge personal land holdings in France as well as being able to claim the royal income of Scotland. On 20 December the boy-king Charles IX signed an order paying Mary an annual dowry of 60,000 livres to be derived from her holdings as Duchesse de Touraine and Poitou. Thus ‘impoverishment followed her loss’. This is somewhat misleading, since she was still one of the richest women in France, even without her Scottish holdings, and still a very great prize for anyone who married her.

  The court had buzzed with speculation from the moment it became clear that François was dying. Mary had sat by François’s bedside, but Catherine and the brothers were far too occupied with the joint problems of the succession and the choice of Mary’s next husband to do so. It was typical of Catherine to accept the inevitable with stoicism and to move forward at once. An early suggestion was that, given a papal dispensation, Mary might marry her brother-in-law Charles IX, but this idea was firmly rejected by Catherine. Catherine had, at first, treated Mary as one of her own daughters, but as Mary’s power increased her hostility grew, until Mary’s accession to the crown, when it became open. Mary, was, of course, protected by the Guises, but with the death of the king and Catherine’s assumption of the regency everything changed. Now Catherine wished to have as little to do with Mary as possible and certainly would not contemplate her continuing as a daughter-in-law. The list of possible candidates for Mary’s hand remained long and was entirely concerned with dynastic alliances.

  While Mary wept for her loss, the various ambassadors reported the rumours. In Toledo the English ambassador Chamberlain had noticed talk of a union with Don Carlos of Spain, Philip II’s heir. He was fifteen years old, a deformed hunchback, and was already starting to display the homicidal tendencies that would eventually lead to his perpetual imprisonment. In February 1561 de Quadra, Philip’s ambassador to Elizabeth, reported, ‘Lady Margaret Lennox is trying to marry her son Lord Darnley to the Queen of Scotland and I understand she is not without hope of succeeding. The parliament in Scotland has decided to recommend the queen to marry the Earl of Arran and, if she will not do so to withhold from her the government of the kingdom . . . things are in great confusion’. Darnley did appear in person in Orléans at the behest of his ever-ambitious mother, but he was well down the list of possible candidates. Young Arran was the Duc de Châtelherault’s son, but an alliance there would put the possible inheritance into the hands of the house of Hamilton, a prospect that raised grave suspicions in the Scottish parliament. Furthermore, the mere suggestion of it would have driven Elizabeth to lose her already celebratedly short temper as she contemplated the most ambitious and unreliable dynasty in Scotland battering down her northern frontiers.

  The list continued. François de Guise, Prior of St John, represented too close an alliance with the Guise clan. Eric XIV was the new King of Sweden, but also a Protestant, although this problem might be overlooked if Mary moved to Sweden. The other of the two Scotsmen proposed as husband also had barriers of faith. Lord James Stewart was Mary’s half-brother, but, even if that problem could have been overcome, he had been the leader of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation and a bitter opponent of Mary’s mother.

  Mary, taking a leaf from her Tudor cousin’s book, prevaricated, but, had necessity driven her, everyone would have assumed that she would marry according to political expediency and even the loathsome Don Carlos would not have been ruled out. This was far from the expectations of the enchanted princess waiting for her handsome champion. Mary had learned from Diane de Poitiers that such romantic notions were a dangerous luxury, but an apparent promise, followed by procrastination, would allow her to choose the time most opportune to satisfy her own ends.

  Throckmorton noted that the Spanish ambassador was spending more time with Mary than his embassy required and he also found the court ‘very much altered . . . [containing] not one of the house of Guise, nor but few of their friends’, while behind the scenes the Guise brothers still manoeuvred to gain Catherine’s ear and Catherine, who was too wise to antagonise them totally, kept them at arm’s length. Mary was now isolated from the day-to-day running of the court.

  One of Mary’s most obvious immediate needs was to keep the lords in Scotland informed and, if possible, pacified. She sent an embassy to Scotland in January 1561, promising to return and offering an amnesty for all that had passed in her absence. She did not tie herself to any specific timetable but used the time-honoured formula of ‘when affairs permit’. Meanwhile she seemed to Throckmorton to be ‘content to be ruled by good counsel and wise men – which is a great virtue in a Prince or Princess and which argueth a great judgement and wisdom in her’. Unfortunately, Mary had neither wise men nor good counsel who could be relied on to act in anything but their own best interests, and so she left the French court to take up residence with her Guise relatives.

  In March 1561, Cecil, guessing that Mary might return to Scotland and give him a Catholic kingdom as his northern neighbour, sent Thomas Randolph to Edinburgh to ‘sound out the Protestant lords for the maintenance of amity and goodwill’. His instructions contained a veiled threat that this ‘amity’ might be forced on Scotland, but suggested that, while their queen was in France, they might like to make a formal alliance with England. Also, the Scottish lords were recommended to ‘persuade their sovereign to marry at home or else not to marry without some great surety’. This was a recommendation which would be vehemently echoed by Elizabeth in the not-too-distant future.

  Mary was also being treated, somewhat hopefully, as a queen regnant by Pope Pius IV, who wrote to her on 6 March 1561 in the first of many letters asking her to throw her weight behind the Council of Trent by sending ambassadors to it. This would have signalled her tacit support for the Counter-Reformation, and she avoided the issue by simply doing nothing. Nine months later, on 3 December, Pius wrote again, reminding her of her Catholic duty and promising his spiritual support and the mission of a legate, Nicholas de Gouda, to stiffen her resolve. Again, Mary did not reply.

  By the end of March 1561 Mary was in Rheims, lodged with her aunt, Renée de Guise, the abbess of the Convent of St Pierre des Dames where her mother was now buried. She had stopped briefly in Paris to supervise the inventory of her personal jewellery and wardrobe, so she had definite plans for a withdrawal from the court.

  Much has been made of Mary having been driven out of the court by Catherine, and fifteen years later Delbena, the Spanish ambassador ‘made a long recital of man
y things past to persuade me that the Queen Mother never loved the Scottish Queen’. James Melville of Halhill, a young Scots nobleman and page to Constable Montmorency, reported that ‘the Queen Mother was content to be quit of the government of the house of Guise and for their cause [and] she had a great misliking of our Queen’. However, the truth seems much simpler. Mary was an eighteen-year-old widow with no close female relatives in the court. Her Maries still attended her, but they were an odd mixture of childhood friends and quasi-servants; what Mary needed, in simple terms, was a shoulder to cry on, and Renée fitted the bill exactly. In the convent she could find uninterrupted peace until her tears dried – at least for the moment.

  Mary’s intended destination was Joinville in Lorraine, the family castle of the Guises, thus throwing Throckmorton into a panic at the thought that she might continue her journey eastward to meet with Ferdinand I, the Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, who had two marriageable sons. Throckmorton repeated to Elizabeth that as far as Mary was concerned, ‘It is her religion chiefly that has made her amity so valued. At present she [Elizabeth] has peace with all the world and no war will arise from any place or person but by the Queen of Scotland.’ Cecil vehemently echoed these views.

  Mary’s progress to Joinville was, however, halted by two visitors from Scotland. The first was John Leslie, later Bishop of Ross and the leader of the Catholic faction which was now more or less confined to the north-east of the country. Ross was a 33-year-old professional churchman and a ‘supple diplomat’ who would become Mary’s ambassador during her imprisonment in England. He met Mary on 14 April and assured her that he was acting as an emissary from the earls of Huntly, Atholl and Crawford, as well as the bishops of Aberdeen, Moray and Ross. He told her she would be welcomed by all Catholics in Scotland as the restorer of the true religion and proposed that she make a sudden return, landing at Aberdeen, where he would guarantee a military force which would overthrow the Protestant parliament in Edinburgh. This dangerous proposal was accompanied by a mountain of flattery assuring her that Scotland was waiting for her like a new dawn. This, as usual, gave her a moment of cheer, although she wisely rejected the proposal.

  This was doubly wise since the next day she met Lord James Stewart, who had been sent by a convention of the nobility to ‘grope the young Queen’s mind’. She assured him that she would rule with their freedoms at the forefront of her mind and asked him to make all preparations for her return after she had attended the coronation of Charles IX. Bizarre counter-offers were made between the two when Lord James was offered a cardinal’s hat by the Guise brothers if he returned to Catholicism, while, in turn, Lord James attempted to convert Mary to Protestantism. Throckmorton had suggested this earlier and Mary had replied, ‘I will be plain with you. The religion which I profess I take to be the most acceptable to God: and, indeed, neither do I know, nor desire to know, any other. Constancy becometh all folks well, and none better than princes, and such as have rule over realms and especially in matters of religion. I have been brought up in this religion, and who might credit me in anything if I show myself light in this case?’

  Lord James also reminded her that the celebration of the Mass was now illegal in Scotland, but he gave her a loophole by saying that if she celebrated Mass privately he would assure her of her safety. Both parties ignored the uncomfortable but legally important point that since Mary had not summoned the parliament or signed its acts into law, the outlawing of the Mass had no legal validity. He ended by asking Mary to grant him the earldom of Moray and Lord James returned to Scotland, via Throckmorton in Paris and Cecil in London, giving each suitably edited versions of the interview. Mary distrusted Lord James’s ‘special devotion to the Queen of England’. And he had received no firm commitment from her as to whether she would return to Scotland or remain in France.

  In reality Mary had several options, but most of them required the eating of some humble pie served up by Catherine which was, for a Guise, unthinkable. She knew she would not be welcome at the French court as a queen dowager with no political influence, while maintaining her own expensive rival royal court and so creating a drain on France’s wildly over-extended finances.

  She had already experienced a sterile marriage to a husband whom she had treated lovingly as a younger, retarded brother and who was hardly six months dead. To contemplate a second dynastic marriage would be to re-enter the troubled world of alliances, knowing that by marrying into one princedom she would immediately antagonise all the others. She could buy herself time to reflect by entering a convent, and with two cardinals, a grand prior, and an abbess as close relatives, a suitable situation with royal comforts and diversions would not be hard to find. However, Mary was young, beautiful and elegant, educated to be courteous and a focus for the adoration of gallant nobles. She also enjoyed dancing, riding, eating and the life of the châteaux of the Loire. As Duchesse de Touraine she could retire to that beautiful province, although unfortunately not to Chenonceau, where Catherine’s masons were hard at work building her gallery across the river, and certainly not to Chambord, still a favourite choice of the court. Amboise still held blood-drenched memories, but a luxurious palace with suitable hunting grounds could easily be made available. Uncomfortably, on the Loire she would have frequent royal neighbours. However, she was still popular with the French people, for whom she was ‘La Reine Blanche’ in her white mourning, and the golden life of the Duchesse de Touraine was undoubtedly attractive.

  Her last remaining choice was a return to Scotland, a country of which she knew nothing, and had only heard of its struggles insofar as they affected her mother or the kingdom of France. Since her departure from Scotland, thirteen years previously, her interests had been entirely familial or personal. Nursing her boy-king, maintaining her own court and pleasing her uncles had happily coincided with hunting, dancing and receiving the extravagant praises of poets and musicians. It is unlikely that Mary could have named more than two towns in Scotland; she only spoke Scots as a secret game with her Maries, and she had no knowledge of the religious and political divisions she would have to rule over. As far as the impact of the Reformation on Scotland was concerned it was of no interest to her whatsoever, except that Huguenots were troublesome. During her mother’s visit to France eleven years previously, we may be sure that Mary was told that her destiny was to fill the throne of Scotland, and her duty now lay firmly in that direction. At Joinville, there had been a Guise family conference at which Mary may have been advised to return and for the moment, at least, to accept the Reformation. To avoid that duty meant taking direct action, rejecting the advances of the Scots lords and making some kind of accommodation with Catherine, and, inevitably, Mary Stewart’s enchantment with the path of least resistance took precedence over her only slight political acumen.

  First she had to tie up some family loose ends in France, and she therefore went east to the city of Nancy where her sister-in-law, Claude, was the Duchesse de Lorraine. Here the old lights of festivity flickered again with family christenings and engagements followed by banquets, balls and, of course, hunting, as well as ‘all kinds of honourable pastimes within the palace’. In spite of these relaxations Mary fell into a ‘tertian ague’. This was a common form of malaria in which the fever would recur every three days while the bout lasted. During the gaps in the fever she travelled to Joinville, where her grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, nursed her in preparation for her expected return to Rheims for the coronation of Charles IX.

  The coronation took place in Rheims Cathedral on 15 May 1561, but without the attendance of Mary, who was still in Joinville. Charles IX was even punier than his late brother, and the ceremony took place with the Guise cardinal and his brothers glaring at Catherine, who had only attended at the request of the Pope, and without much of the pomp seen eighteen months previously.

  Mary returned to Paris on 10 June to be met by the Duc d’Orléans, the King of Navarre, the Prince of Condé and the Duc de Guise. This mixture of Hugu
enots and Catholics is a clear illustration of the power struggles at the heart of Charles’s court, but they loyally joined together to escort Mary to the Palace of St Germain, where she had first met the French royal court, to be greeted by Charles and Catherine. On 24 July 1561, a fête of farewell began at St Germain which lasted four days and rekindled all her happier memories. At the fête she was celebrated by Ronsard:

  Like a beautiful field shorn of flowers,

  Like a picture drained of colour,

  Like heaven if it lost its stars,

  A tree its leaves, another its blossom,

  A great palace the pomp of its king,

  And a ring its precious pearl,

  So careworn France loses its greatest ornament,

  Its flower, its colour, its clarity.

  On 29 June 1561, Mary put an end to the speculation over her future, writing to Lethington as her principal secretary and assuring him:

  If you employ yourself in my service and show the good will whereof you assure me, you need not fear calumniators or talebearers, for such have no part with me. I look to results before believing all that is told me . . . and nothing passes among my nobility without your knowledge and advice. I will not conceal from you that if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the first I shall blame. I wish to live henceforth in amity with the Queen of England and am on the point of leaving for my realm. On arriving I shall need some money for my household and other expenses. There must be a good year’s profit from my mint . . .