Mary Queen of Scots (69 page)

The arrival of Mary Seton, the remaining unmarried Marie of happier times, provided a welcome relief, more especially as Mary Seton was an expert hairdresser: Knollys noted with admiration her skill in the art of ‘busking’, as he termed it, excelling anything he had seen previously – ‘among other pretty devices, yesterday and today she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of head dressing, without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well’.
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Such feminine skills were all the more necessary since the queen had chopped off her own hair during the flight from Langside; it never grew again in its old abundance and in any case was frequently cut to guard against persistent headaches; it seems that for the rest of her life Mary was dependent on wigs and falsepieces. Despite Mary Seton’s endeavours, the queen’s clothing remained a problem. Queen Elizabeth, appealed to for some help out of her own copious wardrobe, responded with gifts of such mean quality – some odd pieces of black velvet and old dresses – that the embarrassed
Knollys tried to explain them away by saying that they had been intended for Mary’s maids. Moray was scarcely more generous: when he despatched three coffers of his sister’s clothes from Scotland, the queen noted angrily that there was but one taffeta dress amongst them, the rest merely cloaks, and ‘coverage for saddles’ – ironically useless to a captive. She had to send for sartorial reinforcement from Lochleven. In July she did receive from her own chamberlain in Scotland a number of belongings, mainly accessories including gloves, pearl buttons, tights, veils, coifs of black and white, and twelve
orillettes
or bandages, to place over the ears when asleep, no doubt to cut out from the royal consciousness the heavy tread of the hagbutters in the three rooms outside.
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To Mary these feminine considerations of dress and hair, and even the conditions of her confinement (which shocked Montmorin, the French ambassador) were secondary to her grand design to reach the presence of Queen Elizabeth. From her arrival at Workington towards the end of May, until the end of the conference at York, and its removal to London, Queen Mary wrote over twenty letters to Queen Elizabeth, most of them extremely long, well thought out, intelligent pieces of pleading, all elaborations on the same theme of Mary’s need for succour to regain her Scottish throne, and her trust in Elizabeth to provide it. Mary even summoned her poetic gifts to her aid: she wrote a poem to her
‘chère soeur’
of which both an Italian and a French version survive, expressing the mingled pleasure and pain which the subject of their meeting produced in her heart, torn as she was between hope and doubt. She likened herself to a ship blown backwards by contrary winds just as it was entering the harbour, the poem ending with a prophetic fear that Fortune might once more turn against her in this as in so many things:

Other variations on the theme in letters were the evil plight of her supporters in Scotland under Moray’s cruel persecution, and the monstrous nature of her subjects’ rebellion against her, a tendency which surely no sovereign queen would encourage. One of the most poignant of the pleas, on 5 July, expostulated: ‘Alas! Do not as the serpent that stoppeth his hearing, for I am no enchanter but your sister and natural cousin. If Caesar had not disclaimed to hear or heede the complaint of an advertiser [soothsayer] he had not so died….’ And with still more anguish, on the subject of the personal interview: ‘I am not of the nature of the basilisk and less of the chameleon, to turn you to my likeness.’
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Mary was of course writing not only to Elizabeth, but also to France, to Catherine de Medicis, to Charles
IX
, to whom she protested that she was suffering for the true religion, the duke of Anjou, and her uncle the cardinal. Some of these letters touched naturally on the vexed subject of money, the perennial preoccupation of exiled royalty: Mary now desperately needed the income of her French estates to provide for herself and her household, having arrived without a penny. But her instructions of 30 May to Lord Fleming, whom she despatched to London, made it clear that if Elizabeth did not agree to help her, then help was to be sought immediately from France, and that Mary herself in these circumstances would arrange to depart thence as soon as possible.
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Fleming, however, was not allowed to proceed from London to France; and the instructions were never able to be carried out. On 8 June Mary received a visit from Middlemore, Elizabeth’s emissary to Scotland, on his way north. Middlemore handed her a letter in which Elizabeth promised to restore Mary if she consented to have her innocence proved by Elizabeth’s enquiry. Mary wept and stormed. In vain she tried to tempt Middlemore with the notion of the confidences she would make personally to Elizabeth if only she was allowed to meet her: ‘I would and did mean to have uttered such matter unto her as I would have done to no other…. No one can compel me to accuse myself, and yet if I would say anything of my self, I would say of myself to her and to no other.’
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To such beguilements, Elizabeth was deaf.
§

In Scotland Middlemore found that Moray and his supporters had quite independently reached the same conclusion as Elizabeth, to which they had been working since the previous winter: Mary’s guilt over Darnley’s death and her subsequent marriage to Bothwell were the points to be stressed if Mary was to be kept where Moray would most like to see her – in an English prison. The difference between Elizabeth and Moray was that Elizabeth at this point intended ultimately to restore Mary to Scotland, and only wished to delay the process; Moray on the other hand had no wish to see Mary back on the throne on any terms whatsoever. To Moray, the viciousness of his sister was no moral issue, it was a question of his own survival as governor of Scotland. Moray was therefore determined to go much further than the English and make the mud already thrown at Mary stick so hard, that there could be no question of this besmeared figure returning to reign.

It was significant that Cecil himself, in one of those private memoranda he was so fond of drawing up for his own guidance giving the
pros
and
contras
of any given situation, could find Mary’s alleged moral turpitude the only true excuse for keeping her off the Scottish throne, and in an English prison.
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In favour of setting Mary at liberty were the following arguments: that she had come of her own accord to England, trusting in Elizabeth’s frequent promises of assistance; that she herself had been illegally condemned by her subjects, who had imprisoned her and charged her with the murder of Darnley, without ever allowing her to answer for her crimes either personally or through a lawyer in front of Parliament; that she was a queen subject to none, and not bound by law to answer to her subjects; lastly there were her own frequent offers to justify her behaviour personally in front of Queen Elizabeth. It was indeed a hard case to answer; it was certainly not answered by Mary’s opponents at the time, nor has the passage of time and the unrolling of history made it seem any less formidable as an indictment of England’s subsequent behaviour. The case which Cecil put
contra
Mary’s liberty was entirely based on the assumption that she had been an accessory to the murder of her husband, and gone on both to protect and to marry the chief assassin, Bothwell – apart from a somewhat dubious argument that since Darnley had been constituted king of Scots, and by Mary herself, so he was ‘a public person and her superior’, and therefore her subjects were bound to search out his murderer. This argument ignored the fact that Darnley had never in fact received the crown matrimonial, without which, despite his title of king, he could scarcely claim to be Mary’s equal, let alone her superior.

It was under these circumstances that, shortly after Mary’s flight to England, the first salvoes in the new campaign to blacken her reputation once and for all were fired by the men who now occupied the throne from which they had ejected her. The queen’s ‘privy letters’, of which nothing had been heard since the Parliament in the previous December, and which had apparently lain the while untouched in Morton’s keeping, now made a new appearance on the political scene. It was interesting to note that these letters seemed not only to swell in importance, but also actually to grow in number as the campaign mounted in fervour. In England at the end of May, Lennox presented his own supplication to Elizabeth, wildly inaccurate in many details and poisonously accusatory of his former daughter-in-law; it referred to one letter only written by Mary by which she was supposed to have lured Darnley to his death. On 27 May Moray commissioned George Buchanan, Lennox’s feudal vassal, to prepare a
Book of Articles
to denounce Mary. These articles, to whose inaccuracies reference has already been made in Chapter 15, were originally in Latin, and contained a short reference to Mary’s ‘letters’. But this term did not necessarily imply that there was more than one letter: the Latin word was
litterae
which was used to denote one letter as well as several, and in sixteenth-century English, also, the term ‘letters’ was always used to describe a solitary letter. The Latin
Book of Articles
was ready by June. On 21 May, five days after Mary’s flight, Moray despatched his secretary John Wood to London, gnawingly anxious to prevent Elizabeth showing favour to Mary; Wood’s instructions were to ‘resolve’ Elizabeth’s mind of anything she might ‘stand doubtful to’.
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A little while later, translated copies of an unspecified number of the queen’s writings were sent on to Wood from Scotland; as copies of letters said to have been written originally in French and now translated into Scottish they were, of course, of little value as evidence. But Wood was to show them secretly to the English establishment, in order to hint what big guns Moray might be able to bring against his sister, if only the English would encourage him to do so.

The encouragement which Moray needed was an assurance from Elizabeth that she would not restore Mary to her throne in the event of her being found guilty of the murder. On 22 June, therefore, Moray despatched an extraordinary letter to Elizabeth in reply to her request to explain his
rebellion; he virtually asked to be assured in advance that the verdict of Elizabeth’s judges would be guilty
if
Moray was able to produce some of Mary’s own letters, and
if
he could prove they were genuine. The English were asked to make up their minds on the basis of the translated copies of the letters now in London in order to resolve Moray’s dilemma for him. Moray continued the letter on a note of near indignation at his difficulties: ‘For what purpose shall we either accuse, or take care how to prove, when we are not assured what to prove, or, when we have proved, what shall succeed?’
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Moray’s letter was a remarkable document. It may be thought to show more regard for the principles of statecraft than those of justice; it certainly outlined the problems of Moray and his supporters. For it was of no avail to accuse Mary of murder, and even prove it by fair means or foul, if she was subsequently to be restored to her throne, whatever the English verdict. Her vengeance might then be expected to be fierce upon those who had accused her. At this critical juncture, it seems likely that in response to Moray’s anxious enquiries, Cecil did in fact give some private unwritten assurances to John Wood in London, to pass on to Moray: whatever Elizabeth might say in public, in order to lure the Scottish queen into accepting her arbitration voluntarily, it was not in fact intended to restore Mary to Scotland if she was found to be guilty.
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At all events, Moray received some sort of satisfactory answer to his problems at the end of June, for he now began to endorse the plan of an English ‘trial’ with enthusiasm.

While Mary’s emissary in London, Lord Herries, treated with Cecil and Elizabeth over the possibility of the English holding such a ‘trial’ if Mary would agree to it, Mary herself suffered a change of prison. It was decided to remove her to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. Carlisle was dangerously near the Scottish border. From the moment of Mary’s arrival there, other more secure places of confinement for her had been discussed, including Nottingham and Fotheringhay. The move was complicated by the fact that Mary was still not officially a prisoner. When the suggestion of a change was first broached to Mary, she quickly asked Middlemore whether she was to go as a captive or of her own choice. Middlemore tactfully replied that Elizabeth merely wished to have Mary stationed nearer to herself. To this Mary countered with equal diplomacy that since she was in Elizabeth’s hands, she might dispose of her as she willed.
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But when the actual moment came to leave Carlisle, Mary showed less composure. She began to weep and rage with a temper which was rapidly quickening with
the frustrations of her unexpected imprisonment. Knollys had to exercise all his patience to get Mary to agree to proceed, since he did not wish to practise duress. Eventually Mary saw the threats and lamentations were achieving nothing, whereas gentleness might win her some advantage. She therefore withdrew her objections to departure, like a wise woman, said Knollys, and allowed herself to be removed quite placidly, on condition that she should be permitted to despatch messengers to Scotland. The journey took two days, with a night at Lowther Castle and a night at Wharton. On arrival, Mary was pronounced by Knollys to his satisfaction, to be very quiet, tractable, and ‘void of displeasant countenance’.
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