Mary Queen of Scots (6 page)

The biological difference between a male and a female was and is the basic social distinction overriding all others, and in the early modern period, that organizing principle was translated into specific gender roles and expectations. Medicinal and philosophical treatises taught that women were not only naturally passionate, hysterical, and irrational but also inferior to men anatomically and intellectually. Religious tracts generally proclaimed God had subjected women to men as punishment for Eve’s sins. These theories were applied at all social levels. David Calderwood, the historian of the Scottish Church, stated, for example, that in 1542, “all men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed.”
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As the 1373 parliamentary entail of the crown had expired on Albany’s death in 1536, Mary’s accession went unchallenged, although most who accepted her rule, like Lindsay the herald, remained hostile to the notion of a female ruler:

Ladyis no way I can commend,

Presumptuouslie quhilk dois pretend,

Till use the Office of ane King,

Or Realmes tak in governing.
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In contrast to her undisputed accession, James Hamilton, second earl of Arran, born in 1516, had difficulty enforcing his claim to be her governor, the office to which as the heir presumptive he had the best hereditary right. Since the direct male line was extinct, Arran had gained recognition as heir presumptive because his father, the first earl of Arran, was the heir of Mary, daughter of James II (d. 1460) by her husband, James, Lord Hamilton. Arran’s difficulty was Beaton’s testimony that the king had committed his infant to the cardinal’s care. An extant notarial instrument dated on the day of his demise named Beaton, Huntly, Archibald Campbell, fourth earl of Argyll, and James, earl of Moray (the king’s illegitimate half brother), to Mary’s governing council. Denying the legality of this council, Arran alleged its authority derived from the king’s will that Beaton had manufactured for his own advancement. Although, unlike Beaton, Arran had not witnessed James’s death, his accusation gained credibility because churchmen did fabricate documents favorable to themselves, justifying their behavior with the excuse that they were furthering God’s cause. Many great abbeys, for example, possessed invented charters validating their property rights. Indeed, forgery was an increasingly popular medieval practice that did not level off until the fifteenth century. Unless the crime involved forging the king’s coins or seal or an over-lord’s seal, it was treated as a misdemeanor even when it included introducing false documents into court.

A competition ensued between Beaton and Arran for custody of the young queen and for control of her marriage, which English intrigue made more complicated. Before releasing the Solway Moss prisoners, Henry’s officials forced them to pledge to promote a match between his heir Edward and their queen. For additional leverage, Henry also sent to Scotland two allies, the earl of Angus, the divorced husband of his sister Margaret Tudor, and Sir George Douglas, the earl’s brother. Angus had originally fled to England to escape the hostility of his royal stepson James V.

To gain recognition for his double role as governor and heir presumptive, Arran favored the English alliance and succeeded in imprisoning the cardinal at the Douglas castle of Dalkeith. In March 1543 Arran convened a parliament, which confirmed his authority as Mary’s governor and approved reform measures, such as criticizing the papacy, promoting Protestant preachers, and translating the scriptures into English or Scots. Later that month when support for the English policy was declining, Beaton was transferred to St Andrews and in April gained his freedom.

On 1 July 1543 the governments of Scotland and England agreed to the Treaties of Greenwich, the first ending the war and the second stipulating that at the end of Mary’s tenth year, she would marry Edward by proxy and move to England. A clause also confirmed Scotland’s right to retain its laws and liberties. In the negotiations leading to this amity, the English ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, obtained Mary of Guise’s reluctant, momentary agreement to her daughter’s marriage to Edward. On 22 March Sadler was permitted to view the infant naked to reassure his monarch about her health and appearance, most importantly about her lack of deformity, and observed that she was “as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, as like to live, with the grace of God.”
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Opposition to the alliance mounted because of the agreement to send the queen to England while she was still a child. On 24 July having gathered an army larger than Arran’s, Beaton and his allies challenged the earl’s control of her. Among Beaton’s supporters were Argyll, Huntly, and Lennox, who had recently reached Scotland as the ambassador of Francis I. Eleven years earlier possibly for safety reasons, Lennox had moved to France where he became a French subject. Usually, when two Scottish forces encountered each other, the side with fewer numbers withdrew, as occurred at this confrontation. On the 27th Beaton supervised the transfer to Sterling of Mary, who was teething, and her grateful mother, who had earlier expressed the opinion to Sadler that it was inappropriate for Arran, the heir presumptive whom she considered untrustworthy, to have sole custody of her child. At their young queen’s removal to Stirling, Arran and Beaton each appointed two guardians for her: Arran chose Alexander, fifth Lord Livingston of Callendar, and John, fifth Lord Lindsay of the Byres, while Beaton selected Lord Erskine, and William Graham, second earl of Montrose.

After meeting with the queen dowager at Stirling, Sadler reported on 10 August her opinion that “her daughter did grow apace; and soon, she said, she would be a woman, if she took after her mother.” He also commented, “She is a right fair and goodly child, as any that I have seen, for her age.” A week later, responding to an inquiry about whether she was ill with a childhood disease, Sadler related that she had contracted smallpox but had been fully recovered from it for at least ten days.
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Often reports were vague and contradictory about childhood diseases. As Mary later suffered smallpox in France, the ailment to which Sadler referred was probably chickenpox.

On Sunday, 9 September, Beaton crowned her at Stirling; in the procession to the chapel, Arran marched with the crown, Argyll with the sword of state, and Lennox with the scepter. This was the first occasion on which these regalia, obtained by James IV and James V, were carried together to symbolize royal power. The usual festivities, tournaments, and masques celebrated the event. Although Sadler criticized the day’s meagerness, remarking that she was crowned with such ceremony as they employ in Scotland, which was not very costly, comparisons of later versions of the ceremony to their English and French counterparts indicate a great similarity.

It is, furthermore, unclear just what evidence Sadler was using for his assessment since he was unable to attend the ritual. His enforced seclusion at Edinburgh, 38 miles from Stirling, could have prompted his disgruntled remark, as ambassadors usually held places of honor on these occasions. Three days before the coronation, he reported that someone had shot at and almost hit one of his men. He also complained that Edinburgh’s citizens were so hostile: “I dare not go, nor almost send out of my doors, and much less might I ride or travel abroad in the country...without suspicion and danger.”
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In somewhat different circumstances, the imperial ambassador, Francis van der Delft, who marched in Edward VI’s procession from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey on the eve of his coronation but was not invited to the ritual itself, reported that it was “no very memorable show of triumph or magnificence.”
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Since Scotland was Mary’s dowry, Henry VIII was not the only father seeking to match his heir with her. Before confirming the English treaties, Arran proposed her for his namesake son, who was about five years her senior; another contender was Argyll, a descendant of James II, who settled for his namesake heir’s union with Jean, one of James V’s illegitimate daughters. It was the 26-year-old Lennox, who was momentarily successful, signing a secret pact in October with the queen mother to wed her infant daughter.
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After Lennox returned to Scotland as a French subject, Beaton and Mary of Guise agreed to recognize him as the young queen’s heir presumptive. Like Arran, Lennox was a descendant of James II’s daughter Mary but through her daughter Elizabeth, not her son. Lennox and his allies argued, however, that because Arran was born to his father’s wife, Janet Beaton, during the lifetime of his former divorced spouse, Janet Home, he was illegitimate and therefore ineligible for the succession. If this allegation were to win acceptance, Lennox would be declared the true heir presumptive, but most Scots continued to favor Arran’s claim.

In November Sadler reported the unconfirmed rumor that Beaton had tried unsuccessfully to reconcile Arran and Lennox with two proposals: Arran was to divorce his wife and marry the queen mother and Lennox was to wed her daughter. No evidence suggests that Beaton approved Arran’s union with Mary of Guise although Lennox did agree to wed her child. Not wishing to wait well more than a decade before marrying, however, Lennox began competing with Patrick Hepburn, third earl of Bothwell, for Mary of Guise, who had earlier expressed her feelings about remarriage to Sadler: “Since she had been a king’s wife her heart was too high to look any lower.”
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Mary of Guise would not normally, of course, reveal her marital inclinations to the English ambassador, but her invocation of early modern hierarchical social standards was tactful and went unquestioned. That she spent the remainder of her life protecting her daughter’s patrimony indicates her major concern was that child’s well-being. She undoubtedly believed it would not facilitate her daughter’s rule as queen to advance a Scottish nobleman as her stepfather. Although Lennox ultimately departed for England, Bothwell procured a divorce from his wife, Agnes Sinclair, known thereafter as the Lady of Morham, to make it possible for him to wed Mary of Guise should she decide to accept him as her husband.

Meanwhile, having lost control of the young queen and observing a growing hostility to her English marriage, Arran had retreated in September from his reformist stance, sometimes referred to as his Protestant fit, and was reconciled to the Church and Cardinal Beaton. Fear that his anti-clericalism might lead the Church to revoke his father’s divorce from Janet Home and declare Arran illegitimate may have prompted this policy change. Three months later in parliament, he rejected the Treaties of Greenwich. Reacting angrily to this negative decision, Henry sent armed forces into Scotland under the command of Edward Seymour, future duke of Somerset, as part of a strategy known as the Rough Wooing, which spanned two hostile periods, first from late 1543 to mid-1546 and then from late 1547 to the spring of 1550. During the first phase, raiding parties destroyed many buildings and fortifications and burned several towns but failed to capture the young queen. In May 1544, according to a letter co-authored by the future Somerset, Charles Brandon, future duke of Suffolk, and Sadler, when English forces approached within six miles of Stirling, Mary’s guardians removed her temporarily to Dunkeld, 44 miles away on the edge of the Highlands.

After Arran began favoring the French alliance, Lennox left for England to champion the young queen’s marriage to Edward; thus the Scottish claimants switched their diplomatic stances. In 1544 Lennox transferred his allegiance from France to England and agreed to capture Mary for Henry, who planned to serve as her protector. The king then permitted Lennox to wed Margaret Douglas, the daughter of his sister, Margaret Tudor, and her second husband, the earl of Angus. On 7 December 1545 the countess gave birth to Darnley, who possessed claims to the English and Scottish thrones through his mother and father, respectively. Some writers have questioned whether this was his birth year, but after his death, Mary recalled that he was nineteen on their wedding day in July 1565.

Between 1543 and 1548 Mary resided mostly at Stirling in the care of her nurse, Janet Sinclair, and her guardians, whose number was reduced in 1545 to two lords: Erskine and Livingston. Her spiritual advisers were her almoner, John Erskine, prior of Inchmahome, and Alexander Scott, canon of the chapel royal of Stirling and parson of Balmaclellan.

After Arran rejected his reformist stance, Henry encouraged his col-laborators in Scotland to support anti-papal behavior, hoping to promote a religious understanding between the two realms that would result in the reinstatement of the Treaties of Greenwich. One Scotsman pressing for reform was John Knox, a tutor of Alexander, son of John Cockburn of Ormiston. Knox condemned Cardinal Beaton’s crusade against heresy and his decision in March 1546 to burn the charismatic reformer, George Wishart, a Cambridge alumnus and probably an English agent.

In retaliation for his execution, some Fife men, disguised as stone-masons, invaded the castle at St Andrews in May 1546 and assassinated Beaton. Others, including Knox, who were associated with Wishart, joined the murderers, known as the Castilians. With some limited English aid, they controlled the castle until July 1547 when a French fleet forced their surrender. Their conquerors sent some Castilians of high social rank to French prisons but employed others as galley slaves, including Knox and James Balfour.

Some months following the castle’s surrender, the second phase of the Rough Wooing commenced. After Edward’s accession in January 1547, his uncle, Somerset, the Lord Protector, decided to use force to complete his nephew’s marriage to Mary. In September after he defeated the Scots at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh near Musselburgh, Mary of Guise transferred her daughter to the priory of Inchmahome, which lies on an island in the Lake of Menteith. Their short residence led to the growth of many legends, among them that the little queen planted a garden there, but she was much too young for this achievement and was back at Stirling by early October. After William, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Lennox led armies into Scotland in February 1548, Grey to the east and Lennox to the west, the queen mother had her child removed on the 29th to Dumbarton, the most important strategic castle in western Scotland. The English captured several fortifications, built two new forts, and created an area regarded as their pale that centered on Haddington, which lay 18 miles from Edinburgh.