Mary Queen of Scots (28 page)

The rough nature of the education which the preponderance of them received may be judged from the fact that in 1559 it was thought worth delivering considerations to Parliament that the nobility should be better educated, so that the ruler should not be forced to advance new men in their place. Lennox apologized for his ‘evil hand’; Huntly and Douglas were scarcely able to write, although they could do so in times of special crisis, for secrecy; Lady Huntly and Lady Erroll apparently wrote better than their husbands. The helpmeets of these men, as Ayala had noticed half a century earlier, were indeed a remarkable race and very often more estimable than their husbands, or perhaps the unbridled spirit is simply more attractive when manifested in the female than in the male sex. Ayala had called them ‘really honest though very bold’.
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The two Lady Huntlys, old and young, of this period, showed a mettle which outstripped their husbands. Despite the almost total lack of education granted to women – it was noteworthy that at the reformation, nuns were almost illiterate, a much higher proportion than of the monks and friars – the wives of the Scottish nobility were from time to time capable of throwing up a figure of genuine intelligence and spirit, such as Jean, countess of Argyll, Jean Gordon, countess of Bothwell, or Agnes, countess of Moray, who put many of their male contemporaries in the shade.

The fortresses which these lords inhabited were in most cases as unpolished as their inmates. They were certainly very different from the fortresses of France to which Mary Stuart had been accustomed. Here she had known the magnificent newly constructed palaces of the French Renaissance, whose size alone dominated the eye. In Scotland she found a few royal palaces of only moderate size, by these standards, some few proper castles, and a plethora of strongholds, which were in effect only domesticated towers. These castles looked more like the elongated castle-houses in a German fairy-story than heavily castellated dwellings of Arthurian imagination. As for the squat tower dwellings, Lethington Tower, the home of Maitland (transformed by the work of later centuries into romantic Lennoxlove) provides an example of this sort of fortified pillar, with its heavily barred door on the ground floor, and nothing but slit
windows as high as assailants could reach. When trouble came, women, children and cattle could be driven into the safety of this ground-floor chamber. Normally the house proper began on the upper floors; turrets and dormer windows, corbels and other decorative features could ornament these pillars, but basically they were merely intended for defence; and they represented an obviously stark way of life.

In every sense (except that of unity for a given cause) the Scottish nobility formed a tightly knit body, where feudal and family relationships were interwoven like the steps of a complicated Highland reel. Intermarriage was a feature of the situation, making it often as difficult for the historian to unravel their relationship and loyalties as it must have been for themselves. Patrick Hepburn, the fair earl of Bothwell, married Agnes Sinclair, whose mother Lady Sinclair was born a Hepburn. George, 5th earl of Huntly, married a Hamilton – Anne, daughter of the duke of Châtelherault; his sister Lady Jean Gordon was married to James, earl of Bothwell; his father the 4th earl was married to Elizabeth, sister of the Earl Marischal; the Regent Moray was married to Agnes, daughter of the same Earl Marischal; Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, was married to Euphemia Douglas, the Regent Moray’s half-sister; Patrick, 3rd Lord Ruthven, was married first to Janet Douglas, natural daughter of the earl of Douglas and second to Jane Stewart, daughter of the earl of Atholl, who had herself been married three times before. Apropos of another Ruthven – Atholl marriage, an English emissary wrote to Cecil in 1579, with a mystification which we may feel we share: ‘The Earl of Atholl doth marry the Lord Ruthven’s daughter. It is a question whether by that marriage the Lord Ruthven will draw the Earl to the devotion of Morton, or the Earl will draw the Lord Ruthven to his devotion, who is yet an enemy of Morton.’
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Into this spider’s web of relationships, it was especially hard for a foreign-bred queen to infiltrate, in order to command any sort of pre-eminent loyalty. At the same time Mary’s Stewart blood meant that the nobles did not necessarily regard her, when it did not suit them, as more than
primus inter pares.
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As a class the nobles had been decimated by Flodden in 1513, and again a generation later at Solway Moss and Pinkie Cleugh, in a manner reminiscent of the two generations of Europe depleted in the World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century. The nobles with whom Mary had to deal had in many cases succeeded early to their estates, through the deaths of their fathers, and had grown up without the curb of parental discipline. Their broad lands were generally accompanied by a singular lack of cash, which left them a prey for the sort of venal considerations most prone to rob the character of any outstanding loyalties. Lack of money meant that morality was all too often a question of cash rewards, and not necessarily large ones. As de Silva wrote to Philip
II
, an expenditure of 8,000 crowns brought Queen Elizabeth not only the good will but also secret information from the principal people of Scotland although many of them were Catholics.
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In other ways than venality, the fibre of the nobles was undeniably coarse. Lyric poets such as Dunbar in an earlier period, and Fethy and Alexander Scott in a later one, spoke with clear and appealing voices where their private inspiration was concerned. Their poetry, closely mingled with the musical traditions of the time, was neither primitive nor cut off from other cultures, often showing direct connections with English courtly lyrics of earlier centuries. But in order to entertain the court in the age before Mary highly lewd verses like the ‘Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, containing sentiments of extreme crudity, were produced. In order to please the nobility, the poets had, in the words of C.S.Lewis, to ‘lavish their skill on humours now confined to the preparatory school or the barrack-room’.
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In this respect the court of the French Renaissance at which Mary had been reared cast at least a mantle of elegance over its corrupt morals.

The Scottish nobility included among its number many who were lawless and some who were violent. If the lawlessness merely reflected the general insecurity of an age of transition,
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this fact did not make it any more acceptable to their young ruler, or easier to deal with, to one hitherto cut off from such matters in France. As for the violence, there is a natural code of human decency which even insecurity does not excuse men from breaking, and this code was too often set aside by the Scottish nobility of this period, when it suited their convenience. Deeds of villainy were common. The nobles included in their ranks men like Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, ever prone to use physical assault as a weapon, whether storming the queen’s chapel at Mass, or obtaining her signature to her abdication by threatening to cut her throat; or there were the two Lord Ruthvens of the age, one of whom was an alleged warlock, a macabre but bloodthirsty spectre at the feast of Riccio’s death, and the other behaved with equal ruffianism towards Mary at Lochleven. The Regent Morton was a man of the most boorish calibre: the small greedy eyes in his florid face covered a cruel mind; his pudgy hands grasped avariciously all his life for what rewards and benefits were to be accrued; his slow speech concealed an unpleasant ability to revenge himself swiftly on those who had offended him. His atrocities in his time as regent included the hanging of women still holding their babies in their arms, and the driving of prisoners to the gallows like so many sheep, being pierced through by spears as they ran. Against such a background, the butchery of Riccio, and the explosion at Kirk o’Field can easily be explained, if not condoned.

These lawless nobles were immensely preoccupied with superstition – not the complicated astrological arts of Catherine de Medicis – but the cruder form of witchcraft. Witchcraft first made its appearance in the Scottish criminal code in 1543 when the reformed religion aroused a passionate new desire for purity in such matters. Long before this date, witchcraft played its part in the fabric of Scottish society. There was always a persistent rumour about Bothwell and witchcraft, and he was often accused of having ‘enchanted’ Mary by her defenders. Janet Beaton, the lady of Buccleuch, and an ex-mistress of Bothwell, was also accused in placards in the streets of having used witchcraft to ‘breed Bothwell’s greatness with the Queen’. Margaret Lady Atholl was thought to have the power of casting spells, having diligently studied the subject with a magician, and it was she who was rumoured to have cast Queen Mary’s pains of childbirth on Lady Reres. One ballad, ‘Northumberland betrayed by Douglas’, describing the incident when Sir William Douglas handed over the fugitive Northumberland to the English in 1570, even gives the Regent Moray’s mother, Lady Margaret Douglas,
^a
as a witch.

But the main characteristic of the nobles, which applied to the greater magnates as to the lesser, was that they had absolutely no sense of the grand design. It was true that a revolution in religion had been accomplished beneath their gaze, in which many of them joined, but here the laurels for purity of spirit, and intensity of theological vision seem to belong mainly to a lower social class than theirs. Even the cause of Protestantism did not bind together those Scottish nobles who were divided by the potent interests of family ambition. The Scottish nobles were given over to ‘particularity’ as every commentator at every level in this period pointed out:

This is how Sir Richard Maitland, father of the politician Maitland, made the point in a bitter verse, written during the civil wars of the 1570s.

When Fontenay went to investigate Scotland in 1584 on Mary’s behalf, he commented that money and family ambition were the only two things the Scottish nobles really understood; in his view, it was mere folly and a waste of time to preach to them their duty towards princes, the honour to be found in just and virtuous actions, and the desirability of leaving a memorial to posterity in the shape of good deeds done – when the only two things capable of charming the nobility with any degree of permanency were
‘de biens et de grandeur’.
He felt that it was the misfortune of Scotland that the majority of the lords were incapable of taking anything approaching the long or altruistic view of any situation – they had, in his view, no wish to extend their view further than the end of their own toes, cast not the faintest thought over the past, and still less towards the future.
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Twenty years earlier, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the same combination of goods and grandeur was already what appealed irresistibly to the Scottish lords. They were a difficult, intractable, and above all highly unstable class to deal with, since it was impossible to anticipate with any certainty in which direction the weathercock of their purposes would blow from one minute to the next. They presented an especial problem to a young queen, brought up in a foreign country, and lacking the knowledge and intuition of how to deal with such men, which might have been inculcated naturally in childhood had she been brought up in Scotland. After all, Argyll, Glencairn and Cassillis were so very unlike Montmorency, Condé and the king of Navarre, although the former might be said to have occupied roughly in Scotland the position which the latter filled in France – a point made by the French memoir of 1558 which directly compared them.
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Let us not paint the picture of the Scottish nobility too blackly at the cost of whitening the aristocracies of other countries. Ambition and intrigue were certainly not the monopoly of the Scottish nobility in sixteenth-century Europe. England had her Seymours, and France, as we have seen, her Guises. In so far as ambition could be held to constitute a vice, the cardinal of Lorraine and the earl of Morton, in both of whom its fires burnt brightly, would be judged equally for it, before the last Judgement Seat of heaven. Mary Stuart, on the other hand, was not gifted with such divine enlightenment. To her, accustomed to the cardinal with his eloquence, his literary tastes, his designs by Primaticcio, men of the type of Morton ‘unlettered and unskilful’ in Maitland’s phrase, presented a very different aspect. She could not fail to find them secretly distasteful as
well as baffling because they were so unfamiliar. The Scottish nobles may not have been impossible by some absolute standard taking into account all the factors involved: but they were certainly fatally different to the nobles amongst whom Mary had been brought up.