Mary Queen of Scots (13 page)

The cardinal’s lessons in statecraft encouraged the young queen to take an interest in Scottish affairs. In her letters to her mother on the subject. she shows aptitude and application, rather than any marked independence of judgement, and at every juncture quotes, or refers back to the opinion of
one of her uncles. Scottish affairs were also the more vivid to Mary Stuart now that her mother had at last succeeded in ousting the ineffective Arran from the official role of regent, and in April 1554 her appointment was ratified by the Estates of Scotland. At the end of one letter on the subject of some presents she heard were coming from the Duke Châtelherault (Arran had been granted this French dukedom in 1549 and was now known by his new title) Mary told her mother that she had shown the missive to her uncle of Guise as she knew this was what her mother would wish her to do. On another occasion, she paid tribute to the enormous care her uncle and aunt of Guise had taken of her – and most of all her uncle the cardinal. In 1555 specifically on the advice of her uncle the cardinal she sent back blank letters to her mother signed MARIE
*
for administrative purposes.
⁹

Despite the agreeable tutelage of the cardinal, and her modest advance into the realms of statecraft, Mary Stuart’s adolescence was marred by a tiresome domestic drama, the more ennervating because it occurred right in the heart of her little household. Mme de Parois, the governess who replaced Lady Fleming, proved to be admirably lacking in the human frailty of her predecessor: but she had defects of character of her own which were considerably less beguiling. Money matters led to constant troubles. On one occasion Mme de Parois was forced to write to Mary of Guise and ask for more money to buy her mistress’s clothes; Mary Stuart positively had to have a dress of cloth of gold for the approaching marriage of the Count de Vaudermont since she had been so annoyed at lacking a dress of cloth of silver for the marriage of the governor’s son. On another occasion Mme de Parois bemoaned the fact that the princesses’ dresses were now lined with cloth of gold, which made them so dear to copy, and she explained that the Scottish queen was very anxious to have embroidered ciphers on her dresses, also an expensive luxury. Permission was sought for two new outfits a year, for reasons of prestige, whatever the lack of finance at home.
¹⁰

There was another side of the story: some of Mary’s entourage took the line that there was quite enough money to go round if only Mme de Parois had employed it more economically. The controversy was at times bitter and at times petty. In one letter, Mary of Guise’s controller enquired angrily what had happened to some money which the French king had given to Mary to spend at the fair at Saint-Germain. Mme de Parois continued to grumble over the general shortness of funds, although she pointed out primly that she took care to keep her young mistress in happy ignorance of the situation. The fact that Mary’s accounts for the year 1556–7 showed outgoings of 58,607
livres
and incomings of only 58,000
livres
showed that wherever that fault lay, the financial situation was certainly not a satisfactory one.
¹¹

But now the governess fell out with her mistress. In their fractious disputes, which read like a domestic storm in a tea-cup, the real irritant seems to have been Mme de Parois’s ill-health. When she finally surrendered the post of governess it was due to advancing dropsy; no doubt her declining health exacerbated her troubles with her charge in her own mind, and equally made her difficult to deal with. The trouble began with the distribution of the Scottish queen’s outworn clothing, which Mme de Parois felt to be her own perquisite. Mary had other ideas. In a furious letter to her mother she complained that she had given some of the dresses to her Guise aunts, the abbesses of Saint Pierre and Farmoustier to make vestments, and others to her servants, all according to her mother’s instructions. In April 1556 the cardinal himself intervened and wrote to Mary of Guise that in his opinion Mme de Parois was no longer suited to be her daughter’s governess. Nevertheless, in the May of the following year, Mme de Parois still had not been dislodged; and Mary wrote again to her mother complaining that Mme de Parois was now making such bad blood between Mary, Duchess Antoinette and Queen Catherine, that Mary was terrified that the malicious governess would go further and stir up trouble between mother and daughter.
¹²

The dispute does reveal significantly the direction in which Mary Stuart’s character was developing. There is a vein of near hysteria in some of her letters to her mother on the subject: she was passionately upset at the notion that the love of her mother might be turned away from her by the trouble-making efforts of this woman. She rebuts with anguish the notion that she who is generous should be so unfairly described as mean. The episode suggests that from adolescence onwards, Mary Stuart was peculiarly sensitive to the onslaughts of criticism which she had good reason to feel were unfair. This feminine and perfectly understandable sensitivity had dangerous possibilities for one who was, after all, destined to be a queen regnant: for there was no certainty that she would always be surrounded with the right sort of advisers to provide a balancing stability of attitude. The suggestion that the young queen had become positively ill as a result of this domestic fracas is also of interest for her future. She told her mother that Mme de Parois had almost been the cause of her death
‘because I was afraid of falling under your displeasure, and because I grieved at hearing through these false reports so many disputes and so much harm said of me’.
¹³
This tendency of apparently nervous stress to show itself in physical symptoms almost approaching a breakdown was something she clearly inherited from her father, since the Guises were remarkably free from it: as a characteristic it was to play a marked part in her later career.

After a robust childhood, Mary Stuart’s general health began to show cause for concern in adolescence. When she was thirteen, her uncle thought it necessary to write angrily to her mother in order to contradict reports that she was generally ailing; he told her that the verdict of the doctors was that she would outlive all her relations, although she sometimes got a certain heartburn or plain indigestion, due to a hearty appetite, which would certainly lead to her over-eating if the cardinal did not watch her carefully. ‘I am astonished at what you have been told about her being sickly,’ exclaimed the cardinal, in disgust at the very idea of such tale-bearing behaviour. ‘It can only have been said by malicious persons out of ill nature.’
¹⁴
The truth was that, despite the cardinal’s vehement protests, all her life Mary Stuart was to suffer from gastric troubles, of which these were only the first ominous symptoms, and her fierce appetite, coupled with sickness, stood for something more sinister than the mere hunger of a healthy adolescent girl. Other illnesses from which Mary suffered during adolescence included smallpox – possibly for the third time, if the two other reported attacks in Scotland are correct, but more probably for the sole occasion in her life. She told Queen Elizabeth in 1562 that she had been cured and her beauty preserved by the action of the famous physician Jean Fernel – certainly in all the tributes to the famous complexion of the queen of Scots, there is no suggestion that it was ever marred by the pox. In the summer and autumn of 1556 she fell ill with a series of fevers, possibly the precursor of the tertian fevers which haunted the rest of her life, and for all his angry denials to outsiders the cardinal’s letters to Mary of Guise in Scotland show that he felt extreme concern at the time.
¹⁵

In 1556 peace was once again temporarily established in Europe by the Truce of Vaucelles: the Emperor Charles
V
, anxious to retire from the world and hand over his vast dominions to his son Philip, agreed to accept the general results of the war between France and the Empire for five years. The cardinal of Lorraine was absent in Rome, and his counsels had not been felt effectively at the French court for six months; Henry
II
was swayed in his absence by the advice of the great rival of the Guises, the
Constable Anne of Montmorency. On his return home the cardinal determined to undo the peace, which meant the virtual wrecking of his work in Rome, where he had at last persuaded the aged Pope Paul
IV
to enter into an alliance with France against the imperialists. As it happened, even the constable was not totally reluctant to see the great duke of Guise wasting his reputation in a series of fruitless Italian campaigns: so that once more war was resumed, and in Italy, for once, the duke was not immediately successful. The importunity of Philip of Spain to his wife, Mary Tudor, queen of England, eventually succeeded in bringing England also into the war on the side of Spain. In August 1557 the army of the constable, on its way to relieve beleaguered Saint-Quentin, was routed by King Philip’s army, which included English units. Philip now captured Saint-Quentin and seemed set to march on Paris. Once more it was Duke Francis of Guise who came to the rescue of the French people. By turning the tables of the war, and finally capturing Calais itself from the English in January 1558, after 220 years, Francis of Guise not only confounded those anti-Guise critics who had rejoiced at his Italian failure, but also elevated the prestige of his family to new heights.

The victory of Francis of Guise at Calais and the reappearance of the bright star of the Guises had an important effect on the fortunes of his niece Mary. She was now, in the spring of 1558, over fifteen, and the dauphin was just fourteen. By the standards of the age, Mary was marriageable, but Francis only marginally so.
†
But Henry
II
now had two strong motives, both political, to persuade him towards the finalization of this marriage which had been arranged in theory nearly ten years previously. The words of the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Sorenzo, writing on 9 November 1557, sum up the situation: ‘The causes for hastening this marriage are apparently two; the first to enable them more surely to avail themselves of the forces of Scotland against the kingdom of England for next year, and the next for the gratification of the Duke and Cardinal of Guise, the said Queen’s uncles, who by the hastening of this marriage, choose to secure themselves against any other matrimonial alliance which might be proposed to his most Christian majesty in some negotiation for peace, the entire establishment of their greatness having to depend on this; for which reason the Constable by all means in his power continually sought to prevent it.’
¹⁷
Henry sent to Scotland, to remind the Scottish Parliament that the time had come to implement their promises. In years gone by, there had been other matrimonial possibilities suggested for Mary Stuart, despite her theoretical betrothal to the dauphin. In July 1556, the French ambassador at Brussels threatened that if the king of Spain married the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to Elizabeth Tudor, Henry
II
would give Mary Stuart to Lord Courtenay, an English aristocrat in the line of succession to the English throne.
¹⁸
The aim of this dynastic and diplomatic marriage roundabout was to prevent the house of Austria establishing itself in England, from which position it was felt it could effectively threaten France. But in the end Mary Stuart was not forced to ride on the roundabout. The death of Lord Courtenay, a few months later, put an end to this interesting possibility. Mary Stuart was given back her original position on the chess board of the French king’s policy, as the Scottish pawn, who would help to checkmate England, by marrying his son.

Commissioners were duly appointed in Scotland to come to France, in order to carry out the marriage negotiations. The nine envoys thus chosen included three supporters of the Reformation – the queen’s half-brother, James Stewart, the earl of Cassillis and John Erskine of Dun; for in her anxiety to arrange the marriage contract of her daughter smoothly, Mary of Guise determined to exhibit the utmost conciliation towards the reformers, who might otherwise upset the design to which she attached such importance. The reformers took full advantage of her quiescent mood, and as the marriage negotiations proceeded, so did the reformed religion and its preaching spread in Scotland. The First Band of the Congregation which pledged the signatories to work for the cause of the reformed religion in Scotland, was actually signed by Argyll, his son Lord Lorne, later the 5th earl of Argyll, Morton, Glencairn and others, in the same month in which the commissioners left for France.

Unable to leave Scotland herself, Mary of Guise appointed her mother Antoinette to act as her proxy during the arranging of the marriage contract. As a result the formal betrothal of the young pair took place on 19 April 1558, in the great hall of the new Louvre, with the cardinal of Lorraine joining their hands together. A magnificent ball followed, at which Henry
II
danced with the bride-elect, Antoine of Navarre with Catherine de Medicis, the dauphin with his aunt Madame Marguerite, and the duke of Lorraine with the princess Claude whom he later married. By the terms of the betrothal contract, the dauphin declared that of ‘his own free will and with the fullest consent of the King and Queen his father and mother, and being duly authorized by them to take the Queen of Scotland
for his wife and consort, he promised to espouse her on the following Sunday April 24.’
¹⁹

Despite the formality of the language, and the political considerations which had prompted his elders to hurry forward the match, the young groom does seem to have felt genuine affection for his bride. His mother, Catherine de Medicis, and Mary Stuart seem to have been indeed the only two human beings for whom this pathetic, wizened creature felt true emotion. Sickly in childhood, he had become difficult and sullen in adolescence; his physique was scarcely developed and his height was stunted; furthermore there is considerable doubt whether he ever actually reached the age of puberty before his untimely death, when he was not quite seventeen.
‡
The dauphin showed little enthusiasm or aptitude for learning, although his enthusiasm for the chase astonished the courtiers, considering his frail physique. All the Venetian ambassadors in turn commented on the fact that he was an invalid, from Matteo Dandolo who saw him when he was three, to Sorenzo who was at the wedding. Dandolo described him as being pale and swollen rather than fat, but rather dignified (as child invalids do often acquire a certain pathetic dignity). Obviously, for better or for worse, he soon became conscious of his high position: in 1552 he was described as having a considerable sense of his own importance, and Capello commented again on the fact when he was eleven: ‘He shows that he knows he is a prince’, before going on to say that he spoke little, and seemed generally
‘bilieux’.
²⁰
This taciturn and stubborn character suffered from a chronic respiratory infection, resulting from his difficult birth, which cannot have added to his appeal, since it prompted his mother Catherine at one point to write to his governor and urge that the dauphin should blow his nose more, for the good of his health.