An Accidental Tragedy (17 page)

This masterstroke marked the end of Guise influence. Catherine had wisely stood aside in the face of what she, rightly, took to be the irresistible force of the Guise brothers allied with Mary’s influence over François, but now she saw her chance and took it. As a girl she had studied not
Amadis de Gaul
, but Machiavelli’s
The Prince
and Castiglione’s
The Courtier
, where she would have read ‘It is the office of a good courtier to know the nature and the inclination of his Prince, and so according to the business, and as occasion serveth,
with slightness to enter into favour with him.’ She would fill this office with enthusiasm. A later English ambassador said of Catherine, ‘the truth is that she loveth and hateth as maketh most for her profit . . . as this woman can make her profit of times and occasions, and perchance seeketh to serve her turn without respect to right and wrong’. In other words she was the supreme pragmatist, in contrast to the romantic Mary.

The Cardinal ordered Masses of expiation, and prayers were said throughout France. The doctors lanced François’s ear, which caused a temporary release of putrid matter through his mouth and nostrils. Mary nursed him constantly. On 3 December an abscess formed in the king’s inner ear which spread to his brain and on 5 December he lost consciousness. Later that day he ‘rendered his soul to God’, and the ten-year-old Charles IX was King of France. The Cardinal of Lorraine broke the seals of François II in the presence of Charles and his mother. Mary Stewart, four days before her eighteenth birthday, was a royal widow.

The late king’s skull was cut open and the doctors claimed that his brain was totally rotten and beyond any medicine, thus ensuring that they could not be blamed for any lack of skill. Mary’s state was one of total collapse, reminiscent of Catherine’s behaviour at the death of Henri. She remained in heavy mourning in a black draped room lit only by candles, weeping inconsolably. ‘As heavy and dolorous a wife, as of right she had good cause to be, who, by long watching with him during his sickness and painful diligence about him . . . is not in best tune of her body, but without danger’. On 8 December Giovanni Surian summed up her state for his master, the Doge of Venice:

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 many 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.