Mary Queen of Scots (38 page)

Two of Huntly’s sons, Alexander and John, having been sacrificed in the general holocaust of his family’s fall from grace, Mary proceeded to spare the life of the eldest son George, Lord Gordon; he had not been involved in the final battle, having been away in the south consulting Châtelherault, and after being officially condemned with his father, he was pardoned and merely put into free ward at Dunbar. Huntly’s youngest son, Adam Gordon, was also spared. The rich vestments from Aberdeen Cathedral stored at Strathbogie since 1559 were taken down to Holyrood, where it seems the queen treated them more as Gordon spoils rather than as the ecclesiastical heritage they were, for they were probably among the gilded vestments in her belongings turned to secular uses in the spring of 1567 making a rich bed for Darnley and a doublet for Bothwell. The spoils of Strathbogie Castle were either taken by the queen or given to Moray for his new castle of Darnaway. Besides the earldom of Moray, whose revenues were estimated by Randolph at 1,000 merks a year, Moray also received the sheriffdoms of Elgin, Forres and Inverness. Hence the tumbling-down of Huntly’s power in the north left an empty space which Moray, rather than the crown, was able to fill; while the disappearance of the leading Catholic magnate from the Scottish scene could not fail to weaken the Catholic cause there, and in turn benefit the reformed religion.

It has sometimes been argued that Mary made a fundamental mistake in allowing the balance of power to be upset in this way. The north of Scotland, which conceivably could have been a Catholic
bloc
under a friendly Huntly, to play off against a Protestant south, was now broken up into different units; and when the attainder was removed three years later for Huntly’s son, the properties were too dissipated for him to become the magnate his father had been. But even before 1562 Mary had never shown any signs of supporting Huntly either as a magnate or as a Catholic, and had repeatedly snubbed his overtures in favour of the Protestants. Her attitude towards Huntly was very much affected by her general policy since her arrival in Scotland, of leaning upon the advice of Moray and Maitland; her aim was to quieten down all possible Catholic insurrections, in favour of general peace, the maintenance of the royal authority and the
status quo.
It may well be argued that Mary’s policy was unwise, compared to the more serpentine procedure of backing each noble in turn, and luring them in some fashion to destroy each other, until the crown should be left triumphant. By this reasoning Huntly should have been skilfully built up, rather than bloodily laid low. Certainly the ‘pale augurs’ might well murmur low over his ‘blasted head’, when they reflected how critical Mary’s situation could be if Moray’s loyalty faltered. There was, however, an obvious difficulty in the way of pursuing this policy of checks and balances, quite apart from Mary’s own inexperience of Scottish affairs; this was the character of Huntly – so manifestly unreliable.

Mary herself was in no doubt afterwards that Huntly’s treachery had been proved by the evidence discovered after his death, and the confessions of Sir John and Huntly’s servants (one of them made before the battle of Corrichie): all of which suggested that in his last moments Huntly did have some wild ill-conceived plan of seizing Mary’s person, and upsetting the Protestant régime, in favour of a Catholic one. Mary continued to regard Huntly as a double-dyed traitor, and when she wrote to her uncle in France and to the Pope in January 1563, protesting her continued devotion to the Catholic faith, she clearly felt no regret that circumstances had compelled her to lay low her greatest Catholic subject – it had been an unpleasant duty which it would have been dangerous not to have carried out.
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By denying her entrance at Inverness, refusing to join her in the hunt against his son, and finally in taking up arms against her with the possible object of abducting her, he had certainly made it extremely difficult for her to support him against Moray, even if she had so wished. Thus Moray was easily able to gratify his natural avariciousness, and acquire the rich spoils in the north, having no need to work out any more subtle conspiracy. It is significant that Maitland himself, on his way back to southern Scotland, revealed that he was finally convinced of Huntly’s treachery: ‘I am sorry that the soil of my native country did ever produce so unnatural a subject as the Earl of Huntly hath proved in the end against his Sovereign,’ he wrote. ‘Being a Princess so gentle and benign…. Well, the event hath made manifest his iniquity, and the innocence as well of her Majestie as of her ministers towards him.’
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In short, it was the character and temperament of Huntly which made it impossible in the final analysis for any dependence to be put upon him.

Chastened in spirit by her experiences, and by the chilling fate of Sir John Gordon, Mary made her way southwards again and was back in Edinburgh by November: here, along with Maitland, she fell victim to the fashionable new disease, influenza, lighdy dubbed ‘the New Acquaintance’, but was otherwise not directly threatened by any personal danger for the next few months, at least. In the spring of 1563, however, she was to be the subject of a more intimate assault than the projected abduction plans of either Arran, Bothwell or Sir John Gordon. Among the train of French courtiers who accompanied the queen to Scotland from France in 1561 was a certain Pierre de Châtelard: well-born, charming-looking and gallant, Châtelard was also a poet, a fact which naturally commended itself to Mary. He was attached to the suite of the son of the Constable de Montmorency, Damville, who was also counted among Mary’s admirers, to the extent that he was supposed to have desired to abandon his wife,
still in France, out of love for the Scottish queen. Mary certainly wrote to the Constable when he departed that she found his son the most agreeable company.
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Châtelard himself speedily followed suit by professing the sort of wild lyrical passion, suitable in a chivalrous man of literary aspirations for a lovely young queen. It was the sort of admiration – light, courtly and elaborately meaningless – which Mary Stuart particularly enjoyed, because it committed her to nothing (unlike the more vigorous proposals of a John Gordon) and it was something to which she had long and agreeably been accustomed at the court of France. It was after all much more to her taste to be celebrated in verses, than dragged into a Highland fastness and forcibly married. There was no suggestion at the time of anything at all scandalous in her attitude to Châtelard, and Knox’s insinuations (written after the event) that she had been over-familiar with him can safely be attributed to his vicious desire to put everything the Queen did in the most evil light – he was also incidentally probably unaware of the gallant licence allowed to poets at the French court, and if he had been aware of it, would have regarded it as a further proof of French devilry. Châtelard ended his visit to Scotland with his master Damville, and returned to France.

In the autumn of 1562, however, he decided to revisit the Scottish court; on his way through London, he confided that he was about to visit ‘his lady love’, and soon he was back with Mary’s court at Aberdeen, with a letter from Damville, and a book of his own poems. Mary received him in her usual friendly way, and with the compulsive generosity which she showed to those who pleased her, presented him with a sorrel gelding which had been given her by her half-brother Lord Robert, as well as some money to dress himself as befitted a young gallant: these favours were still absolutely no more than she showed at many times in her life to those around her, nor was there even now the faintest suggestion of impropriety in this conventional relationship of beautiful queen and platonic admiring poet. All this made Châtelard’s next move particularly incomprehensible. On the night when Maitland was about to set forth again for England, at the queen’s request, Mary, Moray and Maitland all conferred together until past midnight. Châtelard seized the opportunity to dash into her bed-chamber unobserved, and hide under the bed. Luckily he was discovered by two of her grooms of the chamber, making their routine search of her tapestries and bed, and thrown out. The queen was not told of the incident until the morning, but immediately the news reached her, she ordered Châtelard to leave the court.

Châtelard, however, was either self-confident enough or crazy enough
to follow the queen to St Andrews. The next night he proceeded to burst in on her, when she was alone with only one or two of her women, and according to what Randolph first heard, made such audacious advances to her that the unfortunate queen cried out for help. Her brother Moray rushed in, and Mary, in a state of near-hysteria, begged him to run his dagger through the man to save her. Moray, with greater calm and prudence, soothed his sister, and persuaded her that it would be better if Châtelard’s life were temporarily spared, so that he could face a public trial. Randolph later heard that Châtelard’s intentions in making this second foray into the royal apartments had been merely to explain away his first intrusion, on the grounds that he had been overcome by sleep, and had sought the first convenient resting-place.
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Whether he attempted to advance this implausible explanation or not, Mary’s reaction to the whole incident was highly hysterical, and no spinster ever reacted with more horrified indignation to the presence of a man in her bed-chamber, than the already once married queen of Scots.

Châtelard was sent to the dungeons of St Andrews, and after a public trial sentenced to execution on 22 February. Romantic to the last, just before his execution, he read aloud Ronsard’s Hymn to Death there and then in the market square of St Andrews. The beautiful last lines of the poem must have seemed strangely ironical to those of the bystanders who understood enough French to appreciate them:

In fact, it was far from clear for whose honour, or in whose service, Châtelard was dying. Just before he died, his last words echoed out: ‘Adieu, the most beautiful and the most cruel princess of the world’ – words which are given slightly differently by Knox – ‘In the end, he concluded looking unto the heavens, with these words “O cruel Dame”.’ The sense, however, is in both cases the same, despite Knox’s efforts to give the common French word
dame
a more sinister import: ‘That is,’ he wrote, ‘Cruel mistress. What that complaint imported, lovers may divine.’
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Châtelard’s general behaviour and these rhetorical last words all lead one to suppose that the young poet was a victim of one of those unbalanced passions for a royal personage, to which princesses have been subject all through history, royalty being notoriously a great aphrodisiac to an unstable mind. Châtelard had mistaken Mary’s gracious reception for something more humanly passionate, and died for his error. The queen’s outraged withdrawal from his advances makes it quite clear that she never reciprocated them in her own mind – as indeed does the method by which Châtelard chose to approach her, since if they had been lovers already or intending to become so, she would presumably have arranged a more convenient rendezvous than one which was less likely to be interrupted.

But it is possible that there was a more sinister explanation for Châtelard’s advances. Publicity seems to have been one of the main features of his attempt on the queen’s virtue: if Châtelard’s wits were not actually wandering, he must have realized that he was all too likely to be discovered in her bed-chamber by her attendants. The ugly speculation arises whether this was not in fact Châtelard’s intention, and whether his ultimate aim was to blacken Mary’s reputation rather than win her love. According to Maitland, Châtelard had confessed to Mary that he had been despatched by persons in a high position in France expressly to compromise her honour, and the duchess of Guise hinted at the same thing to the Venetian ambassador. Mary mentioned the name of Coligny’s first wife, and told Maitland there were other names involved she could not trust to paper. The nuncio at the French court heard that the incident had been arranged to give Mary a bad name.
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In the circumstances, it is significant that Châtelard himself turned out to be a Huguenot. Even his casual remark in London about his lady love may have been intended to draw attention to his relationship with the queen. Whether Châtelard was an emissary of the French Huguenots or a lovesick fool, the one certain piece of evidence which emerges from the whole affair is that Mary’s reaction to the escapade was markedly severe. Death was after all a high price for Châtelard to pay for an amorous adventure: it is true that Mary may have justified his subsequent execution in her mind by the knowledge of the plot which had been woven around her: yet both Randolph and Knox confirm that her first reaction to his entry had been to demand for him to be killed by Moray. There was no hint here of the loose easy-going morals of the French court, which it has sometimes been suggested that she acquired along with her education.

It was a sad spring for the young queen. Two or three days after Châtelard’s execution, her uncle Duke Francis of Guise was shot down by a Huguenot assassin, Poltrot, who knew him by the white plume in his hat,
and attacked him from behind – thus fulfilling the prophecy of Luc Gauric that he would die from a wound in his back, which the duke had once angrily repudiated as being a slur on his courage. On 15 March came the news that he had died. Mary was overcome with grief and her ladies shed tears ‘like showers of rain’.
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Only a few weeks later another uncle, the Grand Prior Francis, also died. Mary, upset by these repeated sorrows in the only family she had really known, melancholy after the Châtelard episode, so distasteful to her nature, exhausted in health by the long Scottish winter and bouts of illness, burst out to Randolph that she was really almost destitute of friends; she outlined her many adventures and vicissitudes since her husband’s death, and confessed that the burden suddenly seemed too much for her to bear. In an access of feminine weakness, she read Queen Elizabeth’s letter of sympathy with tears in her eyes, and exclaimed to Randolph that neither of them could afford to turn down a possible support – how much better everything would be, if the two queens were indeed friends! ‘For I see now that the world is not that that we do make of it, nor yet are they most happy that continue longest in it.’
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These were gloomy sentiments for a young girl just turned twenty-one: Mary Stuart had now been a widow for over two years. Since the Châtelard incident Mary Fleming had been taken to sleep in her room for company and protection. But it was high time that she made a serious attempt to share the load of her responsibilities with a proper partner, especially since her naturally dependent nature inevitably turned to a masculine adviser, as a sunflower turns to the sun. Neither James Stewart, earl of Moray, in her counsels, nor Mary Fleming in her bed-chamber were adequate substitutes for the wise, strong, loyal husband whom she now more than ever needed to support her.