Mary Queen of Scots (4 page)

On 24 November, the forces under Oliver Sinclair encountered the English deputy warden of the West March near the River Esk at Solway Moss, and were driven back in a disorderly rout, as a result of which 1,200 Scots were captured, among them many of the leading nobles, who were then taken to London for confrontation with King Henry. Although Knox discerned the hand of God in the discomfiture,
¹⁸
it was the great reluctance of the Scots to pursue a long campaign away from their homes, and the fact that as fighters they lacked not courage but endurance, which had once more defeated their efforts. The English increased in valiance as they fought, but the Scots declined. As the Scots cast aside their weapons and fled, many were drowned by the incoming tide, and others still fell in the Moss, losing either horse or rider or both. Some were so anxious to be saved by capture that they surrendered themselves to women. An English eye-witness wrote that night from Carlisle that anyone who wanted prisoners had only to follow the retreating Scots, for they were past making any sort of self-defence.
¹⁹

The king of this stricken country, in a state of appalling mental anguish, exacerbated by worry over the fate of Oliver Sinclair, retired to Edinburgh, where he made an inventory of all his treasure and jewels. From there he went secretly to Hallyards, in Fife, the seat of Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange, the treasurer. When Kirkcaldy’s wife tried to cheer him and persuade him to take the ‘work of God’ in good part, the king replied with conviction that his portion of the world was on the contrary short, and he would be dead in fifteen days. When his servants asked him where he wanted to spend his Christmas, he replied with a contemptuous smile: ‘I cannot tell: choose ye the place. But this I can tell you, on Yule day, you will be masterless and the realm without a king.’

The working out of these gloomy prophecies took only a short time. James went to Linlithgow where he spent some days with Queen Mary, now in the last stage of her pregnancy. From there he went to Falkland, the beloved palace which he had built for himself in admiration of the French Renaissance, and which like an animal he now chose as his lair in which to die. Incapable of digesting the disasters of his hopes, his personal humiliation and the humiliation of his country, the king now underwent a complete nervous collapse. He lay on his bed, sometimes railing at the
cruel fate which had led to his defeat, at other times silent and melancholy, meditating on the wastes of despair. He heard of the capture of Sinclair and cried out: ‘Oh fled Oliver! Is Oliver tane [taken]? Oh fled Oliver!’
²⁰
It seems to have been his last true pang of earthly emotion.

Into this sad sick-room came a messenger from Linlithgow who brought the news that the queen had been confined, and given birth to a daughter. The onlookers hoped that the king’s sorrow might be somewhat alleviated by the fact that he now had an heir once more. But the king observed cynically: ‘Adieu, fare well, it came with a lass, it will pass with a lass’, thus alluding to the marriage of Marjorie Bruce and Walter Stewart, which had founded the Stewart dynasty.
†
²¹
Six days later, on 14 December King James was dead at the age of thirty. In a letter to the king in 1540, Cardinal Pole reminded him how his uncle, Henry
VIII
, had once been a man of promise and goodness, and what he was now; the cardinal told King James that he dreaded to see him follow the same route.
²²
It is likely that the cardinal was right in thus stressing King James’s Tudor blood; if he had lived, his character too might have deepened in cruelty and sadism, to have eradicated totally the fair impression of his youth. He also seems to have included a mysterious, apparently hysterical, streak in his nature: there is no need to regard the contemporary suggestion of poison either by angry prelates, or seditious heretics, to explain his nervous breakdown after Solway Moss. Clearly a tendency to sudden physical collapse at moments of stress ran in the Stuart blood, a tendency which James handed on to his daughter, so that twenty-five years later, after Kirk o’Field, Scotland again witnessed the prostration of its monarch at the critical moment in her fortunes.

The daughter and only surviving child of King James, who now succeeded to the throne of Scotland, had been born at the palace of Linlithgow, West Lothian, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, 8 December. She was baptized Mary, by tradition in the church of St Michael, at the gates of the palace, although one rumour stated that she had been named Elizabeth, which if true would have led in later years to two rival Queen Elizabeths on the thrones of England and Scotland.
²³
A certain confusion surrounds the date of her birth, as indeed it surrounds the date of her father’s death, due to the perilous political situation in Scotland at the time. The date of James’s death was finally established in the seventeenth century by the discovery of the date engraved on his coffin. The date of Mary Stuart’s birth, although given as the 8th by a concurrence of contemporary accounts, including Knox, is given as the 7th by her own partisan Leslie, who had special access to official records.
²⁴
It has therefore been suggested that Mary was actually born on the 7th and that the date was altered to the 8th in order to coincide with the feast of the Virgin. Whatever the truth of this, which can never be proved, Mary Stuart herself always believed that she had been born on the 8th, heading a letter as late as 1584: ‘December 8, the forty second anniversary of my birth.’
²⁵
It certainly seems likely that she was born prematurely, the confinement of Queen Mary being brought on by anxiety over her husband: on 12 December Lisle and Tunstall reported to England from Alnwick that ‘the said Queen was delivered before her time of a daughter, a very weak child, and not likely to live as it is thought’. In a private letter to King Henry on the same day, Lisle told him that the baby was actually dead. For the first ten days of her life, all the rumours spread about Mary Stuart were of an exceptionally frail baby, unlikely to survive, any more than her brothers. On 17 December, Sir George Douglas, writing from Berwick, still referred to ‘a very weak child’, and although by 19 December Lisle was able to tell Henry that ‘the princess lately born is alive and good-looking’, rumours of her ill-health continued long enough for Chapuys, the imperial ambassador in London to write to the queen of Hungary on 23 December that both mother and child were very ill and despaired of by their physicians.
²⁶

Perhaps with the English the wish was father to the thought, since the death of the infant queen would have increased the confusion of Scotland still further, to the point of the possible extinction of their government. The secret wishes of the Scots on the other hand are probably expressed by the rumour of the time that the child was actually a boy. The position of a country with a child heiress at its head was widely regarded as disastrous in the sixteenth century. As Knox put it, ‘all men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed.’
²⁷
The reason is not difficult to seek. In 1542, the successful reign of Queen Elizabeth
I
lay very much in the future. The birth of an heiress generally led to the swallowing up of the country concerned, as happened in the case of Burgundy, Spain, Bohemia and Hungary with Habsburgs, and with England, in the time of Mary Tudor. To the disadvantages of Mary Stuart’s situation at birth, herself frail in health, the country divided and facing the prospect of a long minority, was therefore added the disadvantage of being of the weaker, and therefore the wrong sex.

The palace of Linlithgow, where Mary was born – in a room in the north-west corner, overlooking the loch
‡
– and where she was destined to spend the first seven months of her life, was a traditional lying-in place of queens. James
V
himself had been born there. It was he who had enriched it by many improvements and who had developed it in a quadrangular form, from an earlier castle, in the course of his munificent Scottish rebuilding schemes, and it was certainly considered to be a splendid palace by the standards of the time: Mary of Guise compared it approvingly to the castles of the Loire on her arrival, and Sir David Lyndsay called it a ‘palace of pleasance’ worthy to be put beside those of Portugal and France. Leslie wrote warmly of its fine position, above the loch ‘swimming full of fine perch and other notable fishes’, and even in the next century, John Ray the naturalist called it ‘a very good house, as houses go in Scotland’.
²⁸
However, in December 1542, above this serene place, and its youthful incumbent, hovered a series of political thunder clouds of a highly ominous nature.

James
V
was buried with due pomp, says Leslie, with lighted torches and the sound of mourning trumpets (
buccinae querelae
); the nobles were in black, Cardinal Beaton hung his head down, while the people were loud in sorrow and lamentation. But with an outward delicacy of feeling which probably sprang in fact from shrewd political calculation, it was now thought unseemly for the English commander to pursue an attack against the kingdom of a dead man. Lisle reported as much to King Henry: ‘I have thought good to stay the stroke of your sword until your majesty’s pleasure be farther known to me in that behalf’ and he included in his forbearance ‘the young suckling’, the late king’s daughter.
²⁹
Thus curiously enough, the premature death of King James, which had such dire results for Scotland in producing another long minority, had the short-term effect of staying the avenging hand of the English army after Solway Moss. As a result the first year of his daughter Mary’s existence, instead of being threatened by English armies, was dominated by two questions of important bearing on her subsequent history – who was to govern the kingdom during her infancy, and whom she was destined to marry.

Of these two issues, it was the first which demanded immediate settlement, for while the bridals of the queen would only be a matter of speculation for many years to come, if Scotland was to survive as an independent nation the office of the governor had to be filled at once. Despite this urgency, a fierce controversy at once arose on the subject, to add to the country’s troubles. It arose out of the clash of the hereditary claim of the earl of Arran, head of the house of Hamilton, to be sole governor, with the rival claim of Cardinal Beaton, which he based on a forged will supposed to have been made by the late king. This provided for four governors (Huntly, Moray, Argyll and Arran) with the cardinal himself to be the governor of the princess, and chief ruler of the Council. The prize was a rich one. The prestige and importance of the governor, or regent, was considered to be equivalent to that of the king himself; and the political powers were interwoven with the material rewards of office. It was tradition for the governor to take over the palaces, jewels and treasure of the late king during the minority of his successor; he was responsible for the administration of the crown revenues, for which he would be given a discharge signed at the end of his period of office.

As it happened, the man with the hereditary right to this important office at this critical juncture in Scottish history, James, 2nd earl of Arran and later 1st duke of Châtelherault, was singularly unfitted to hold it. Mary of Guise described him succinctly as the most inconstant man in the world: the most charitable verdict is that of a chaplain who called him ‘a good soft God’s man’, presumably referring to the fact that for the past five years he had been a supporter of the reformed religion.
³⁰
Yet this vacillating figure, by the very fact that he was the head of the house of Hamilton, was destined for the most prominent position among the Scottish nobles.

Arran’s grandfather, James, 1st Lord Hamilton, had been married to Princess Mary Stewart, sister of James
III
.
§
If the child Queen Mary died, Arran could fairly claim the Scottish throne, as the next heir by blood. It was true that there was a complication: there was some doubt whether Arran’s father had ever been properly divorced from his second wife and it was therefore conceivable that Arran, as the fruit of the third marriage, was illegitimate: in which case, the Lennox Stewarts who descended perfectly correctly from Princess Mary and Lord Hamilton – but from the daughter not a son – were the true heirs to the throne. This in turn meant that the earl of Lennox, not the earl of Arran, had the hereditary claim to be governor of Scotland, and second person in the realm. Despite this Lennox shadow across the Hamilton claim, a fact to be born in mind when considering the perennially explosive relations between the two families during this period, the Hamiltons still managed to retain their position as heirs or next heirs to the Scottish throne for nearly a hundred years. Throughout much of the reign of Mary’s father, her own reign, and that of James
VI
, until the birth of his quiverful of Stuart children in the 1590s, the Hamiltons were separated from the throne by only one life. Unfortunately the accidental importance of their position was in no way matched by the calibre of their blood. They possessed natural advantages other than their descent, in the shape of great estates, strategically placed close to the capital, and strong political connections in half a dozen counties. But at a time when most of the Scottish nobles made up in quickness and an eye to the main chance what they lacked in graces and civilization, the Hamiltons were strangely untypical of their kind: the Governor Arran was indecisive but his eldest son actually went mad and had to be confined. During the whole of this period, Hamilton blood was generally considered a convenient scapegoat on which to blame abnormalities of temper.
³¹

There was nothing softened or indecisive about the character of David Beaton, cardinal-archbishop of St Andrews, the man who now opposed Arran’s claim with the will of the late king, apparently made in his favour. The evidence that Beaton actually forged the will seems conclusive,
³²
but in view of the weakness of Scotland at the time, it may be argued that Cardinal Beaton was at least making a bid to give his country some sort of strong government to combat England’s rapacity. He was now a man of over fifty, having been made cardinal of San Stefano by Pope Paul
III
five years previously, and succeeded his uncle as archbishop of St Andrews in 1539; he had considerable knowledge of Europe, having studied in Paris and acted on various diplomatic missions abroad. Certainly the cardinal’s pro-French, Catholic policy, which had led to disaster at Solway Moss, did represent the only alternative to subjugation under the yoke of Henry
VIII
. Knox has described the worldliness of the cardinal at length in his usual vivid phrases, referring to ‘that kingdom of darkness, whereof within this realm he was the head’ and how he was ‘more careful for the world than he was to preach Christ … as he sought the world, it fled him not’. Knox even goes so far as to hint at Cardinal Beaton’s lascivious relations with Mary of Guise – an accusation of which the verdict of history has acquitted the queen, although undoubtedly the cardinal lived openly with at least one woman, in a way which made nonsense of his vows of celibacy.
³³
Whatever the cardinal’s moral deficiencies, he was certainly not a man of straw; as a prelate without any family that he might be bound to favour, he at least showed some signs of identifying his personal policies with those of Scotland, in contrast to the rest of the venal Scottish nobility.