Mary Queen of Scots (16 page)

Despite these tributes, a consideration of her physiognomy leads one to believe that Mary Stuart was not a beauty in the classical sense – to use the language of our own day, she was an outstandingly attractive woman, rather than an outstandingly beautiful one. Her most marked physical characteristic to outside eyes must have been her height, and it is said that when she fled to England from Scotland after her defeat at Langside, strangers recognized her by it. In an age when the average height of the men was considerably shorter than it is today, Mary Stuart was probably about five feet eleven inches tall, that is to say, taller than all but the tallest
women today. She grew fast in adolescence, as her grandmother indicated in her letters. At her French wedding she is said to have stood shoulder to shoulder with her Guise uncles: obviously she inherited this height from her mother, Mary of Guise, who in her day was celebrated for her upstanding stature throughout Europe. Even at the date of her execution, when Mary was humped by age and rheumatics, an English eye-witness still noted that she was ‘of stature tall’;
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and the figure on her tomb in Westminster Abbey, modelled from details taken immediately after her death, is five feet eleven inches long. Yet clearly, this stature was never considered to be a disadvantage, and her height, when described, is always commented on with admiration.
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This may be in part due to the fact that, although tall, Mary had extremely delicate bones, unlike her mother who had much sturdier proportions. Mary’s height, and the slenderness of her youth, which lasted until ill-health and the troubles of captivity made her put on weight in middle-age, combined to give an appearance of graceful elongation: it also made her an excellent dancer, as both Conaeus and Melville bear witness, and a good athlete, who could hunt, hawk and even ride at the head of an army, in a manner calculated to dazzle the public eye at a time when the personal image of a sovereign was of marked consequence.

The portraits of Mary Stuart show that she had a small, well-turned head, and beautiful long hands; coins in particular reveal that she had a neck which was positively swan-like. One of her special charms was her colouring; the blonde hair of her childhood had darkened by the time of her marriage to a shade just lighter than auburn – a bright golden-red. The Deuil Blanc portrait
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shows that her eyes were almost the same colour as her hair, a colour like amber, which today would probably be described as hazel, and this colouring was of course certainly set off to brilliant advantage by her incomparable complexion. Curiously enough Mary seems to have had rather similar colouring to her cousin Elizabeth, yet one woman was generally accounted a beauty by her contemporaries, and the other was engaged in a constant, tenacious battle to extract the reassurance of compliments from her courtiers, having been so deprived of them in youth. Possibly it was the quality of the skin which distinguished the cousins as young women: Elizabeth as a young girl was described as having a good skin of somewhat sallow (‘olivastra’) tint by the Venetian ambassador at the English court – and this was an age when a luxurious skin was considered a prerequisite of beauty.
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It was Mary’s heavy lowered eyelids, under their delicately arched brows, which gave a brooding almost sensual look to her face, a physical characteristic which was to increase with age. Otherwise her features were extraordinarily firm and regular. The drawing of Mary as dauphiness shows that by the time she was fifteen, the soft roundness of her childish face had formed into a perfect oval. Although her nose was long, it was not yet pronouncedly so, and the slight aquiline tendency is only just perceptible in the drawing (illustration 7). Her chin was well-modelled, her mouth, fashionably small, had a pretty curve; she had a beautiful high
‘bombée’
forehead, which the caps and veils of the time set off to perfection; and her ears, although large, were elegantly made, and seemed indeed specially designed to bear the lambent ear-rings of the time.

Above all, in her length, her small neat head, her grace, we may suppose that Mary Stuart, resembled the contemporary Mannerist ideal. A small bronze bust of her in the Louvre, possibly by Germain Pilon, which is regarded as an authentic if not necessarily contemporary attempt at her features when queen of France, shows the lovely leaning head, the long almond-shaped eyes, and the beautiful disposition of head, neck and shoulder. How significantly she resembled the Mannerist figures of the time, the elongated figures and angular disposition of Primaticcio’s designs, the long and delicate forms, the tapering limbs, thin necks and small heads of the figures in the Galerie d’Etampes at Fontainebleau, or the sculptures of Jean Goujon. It was the same grace and elegance which her contemporaries admired in Mary Stuart, the type of beauty which they were already learning to admire in art, and could now appreciate in life, all the more satisfyingly because it was in the person of a princess. Nor must it be forgotten that to these physical attributes she added the essential human ingredient of charm, a charm so powerful that even Knox was openly afraid of its effects on her Scottish subjects – and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, also upon himself. It was the charm of Mary Stuart, that charm which is at once more dangerous and the most desirable of all human qualities, which put the finishing touches to her beauty in the eyes of her beholders.

Not only the appearance, but also the character of Mary Stuart made her admirably suited to be a princess of France in the age in which she lived. The years she spent in France represented the classical period when art and architecture flourished there; it was a time when there was a remarkable flowering in all intellectual fields as writers and artists began to free themselves from the tutelage of Italy. Nor only did Primaticcio and Serlio prosper, but individual figures appeared like Philibert de l’Orme whose art was not only classical but genuinely French. Philibert de l’Orme and Goujon, on the one hand, and Ronsard and the Pléiade on the other, created the first original and independent movements since the Renaissance first touched France. This culture was firmly centred round the court, the court at which Mary Stuart glittered, and the tributes paid to her by the poets of the time make it clear that she was the ideal star to be shining in the firmament at this particular moment. She loved their company: ‘Above all,’ wrote Brantôme, ‘she delighted in poetry and poets, and most of all in M. de Ronsard, M. du Bellay and M. de Maisonfleur, who had made such fine poems and elegies for her, which I have often seen her read to herself in France and in Scotland, with tears in her eyes and sighs in her heart.’
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Mary was exactly the sort of beautiful woman, not precisely brilliant, but well-educated and charming, who inspired and stimulated poets by her presence to feats of homage, which were also able to take their place in the annals of literature. It was an admirable combination of artist and subject, of the sort which occurs throughout history; and Mary Stuart’s own verses, although of a simple and modest nature,
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do at least illustrate her love and sympathy for the art of poetry.

The odes of Maisonfleur in praise of Mary Stuart have vanished from the eye; du Bellay, however, celebrated her personal attractions in several poems, including a sonnet in 1557, and a Latin poem celebrating her forthcoming marriage, in which he described heaven as endowing her with beauty of spirit and of face, together with royal grace and honour. With Ronsard the young queen enjoyed a genuine and long-lasting friendship: the fact that Ronsard had been in Scotland at the court of James
V
added a special poignancy to their relationship, since Ronsard understood the very different conditions of the island from which she had sprung, and to which she might one day return. In the first verses he dedicated to her, which appeared in 1556, he certainly reminded her of the fact, and how, since her arrival in France, he had served as her tutor in poetry, hailing her in lavish terms as
‘o belle et plus que belle et agréable Aurore’.
It has been suggested that it was in response to a request from Mary that Ronsard published the first collected edition of his works in 1560;
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when she departed from France, he denounced the cruel fortune which had led Scotland to seize her. When Châtelard faced the executioner, according to Brantôme, he refused all other consolation except the hymns of Ronsard, which he had been asked by Ronsard to present the Scottish queen. Four years after her departure, Ronsard sent Mary his newest volume by the French ambassador, and he boasted that he kept her portrait continually in front of him in his library.

It is sad to record that even Ronsard, despite these high-flown sentiments, occasionally deserted Mary’s shrine. In July 1565 he published a verse collection
Elegies, Mascarades et Bergeries
; although
Bergeries
is dedicated to the queen of Scotland, the first two portions are dedicated to the queen of England, and contain a quatrain suggesting that Queen Elizabeth rivalled in beauty the queen of Scotland, being two brilliant suns contained within the same island. For this outburst, he received a fine diamond from the queen of England. He may perhaps be forgiven for this temporary disloyalty for the beauty of his sonnet to Mary in captivity: he wrote that nothing now remained to him except the sorrow which unceasingly recalled to his heart the memory of his fair princess, and harangued with anger the queen who had imprisoned her –
‘Royne, qui enfermez une Royne si rare’.
It was probably for this pledge of ancient loyalties, romantically renewed, that Mary’s secretary sent Ronsard 2,000 crowns and Mary herself responded:

Her friendship with Ronsard illustrates how fully Mary enjoyed the pleasures of the French court to which she was so well suited. As Castelnau de Mauvissière, an experienced diplomat and man of the world, noted in his memoirs, she turned herself so completely into a French woman, that she seemed not only the most beautiful of all her sex, but also the most delightful, both in her speech and in her demeanour.

There was only one small cloud in this summer’s sky – and still no bigger than a man’s hand. The exquisite fifteen-year-old queen-dauphiness who danced and hawked and hunted her way through the changing routine of the court’s pleasures, was able to pursue these pastimes more by the light of will-power than that of robust physical strength. The warning signs of ill-health which had existed during her adolescence had not been successfully brushed away. Her beauty was touched, and possibly enhanced, by a certain fragility. In the spring of 1559, Sir John Mason wrote complacently to Cecil: ‘The Queen of Scots is very sick, and men fear she will not long continue.’ He added the pious hope: ‘God take her to Him so soon as may please Him.’ In May, the English ambassador, Throckmorton, mentioned that the queen-dauphiness had been ill again, and when on 24 May the English envoys were conducted before the queen, Throckmorton pronounced a grave opinion: ‘Assuredly, Sir, the Scottish Queen in my opinion looked very ill on it, very pale and green, and withal short breathed, and it is whispered here among them that she cannot live long.’
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In June 1559, she was twice reported as swooning, once she had to be given wine at the altar, and on the second occasion the Spanish ambassador said he had heard that she was suffering from an unspecified but incurable malady. The following autumn Mundt wrote to Elizabeth in London that Mary was ‘in a consumption …’.
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Yet whatever the young queen-dauphiness suffered from at this stage, it is clear that despite her pallor, her dizzy spells and her short breath, Mary also brought to her life an intense nervous energy which enabled her to lead an enormously active life when she was not actually suffering. A dangerous accident while out hunting in December 1559 when she was swept off her horse by a bough showed both her reckless courage and the straits to which it could lead her. This combination of a weak physique and overriding will was one which she shared, to some degree, with her husband Francis: it must have led to a bond between them.
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In September 1558 the first sour note was struck in the political existence of the dauphiness. On their way home to Scotland, the ranks of the nine Scottish commissioners who had come to France to arrange the marriage contract were suddenly struck by illness, as a result of which four of them died in one night, and James Stewart himself fell ill, although he recovered. In a letter to her mother of 16 September, Mary spoke of this decimation as being God’s will:
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but at the time another more sinister explanation was advanced. Knox murmured of poison, either Italian or French, as did Herries and Buchanan, and even Leslie noticed ‘through suspicion of venom, many wondered’.
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It was suggested that the brothers of the queen-regent, the Guises, had determined to poison the commissioners because they had discovered something about the secret treaties which signed away the birthright of Scotland. It is true that it was vital to the Guises’ plans that the secret of the treaties should be preserved; on the other hand, almost every sudden death in this century was attributed to poison, on principle, by the commentators: if there was anything to the suspicions at all, it was curious that when the remaining commissioners presented themselves to the Scottish Parliament in November, they suggested no further enquiry into the matter, and put no obstacle in the way of the crown matrimonial being granted to Francis.

Another phrase used by Mary in the same letter to her mother showed that the realities of the French international situation were beginning to come home to her: she described how the French court were all ‘hoping for a peace, but this is still so uncertain, that I shall say nothing to you about it, except that they say the peace should not be arranged by prisoners like the Constable and the Marshal Saint-André’. The summer of 1558 had indeed been occupied with the general European desire for a peace settlement. Henry listened the more eagerly to the counsels of the peace party in France, not only because of the desperate state of his finances, but also because he was anxious to secure the return of his favourite, the constable, from captivity. The Guises, on the other hand, were far from anxious for a peace with England and Spain by which they feared that France would surrender many of her conquests abroad, and the rival Montmorency would triumph at home, and as Mary Stuart stressed to her mother, they felt it unworthy that a prisoner like the constable should have so much say in a peace settlement, whose main provision seemed to be to secure his return to France. Even when the negotiations for peace were begun at Cercamp, the open rivalry between Guises and Montmorencys was a feature of the French king’s entourage, Diane de Poitiers having by now thrown in her lot firmly with the Montmorencys. The negotiations at Cercamp did not culminate in peace until the April of the next year, when the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was finally signed.