Mary Queen of Scots (70 page)

There was, however, much to displease Mary’s countenance in the intrigues which were now being spun between Edinburgh and London. In spite of her incarceration, she had some inkling of what was taking place, and her knowledge of Scotland led her to guess more. Some messages from Wood in London to Moray fell into her hands by chance in June and uncovered some of the regent’s plotting. The news that some of her own letters were to be used against her reduced her to a state of nervous collapse, and she ended one letter to Elizabeth with a plea to excuse her ‘bad writing, for these letters, so falsely invented, have made her ill’.
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The move away from Carlisle proved to be a severe handicap. Carlisle was at least the capital of the western portion of the English borders, a frontier town with administrative connections, easy of access for travellers. Bolton was an isolated castle in a remote corner of the North Riding of Yorkshire, looking over the broad pastoral valley of Wensleydale; it had no town of its own to surround it, and lay forty miles from York, and over fifty miles from Carlisle. The castle itself was comparatively unfurnished on her arrival, and hangings and other belongings had to be borrowed from Sir George Bowes’s house some distance away. Far more serious to Mary’s cause than these minor discomforts was the fact that she was from now on placed physically outside the mainstream of political life, although mentally she remained very much part of it. Mary had never been well-endowed with advisers, although she was a woman who wished by nature to lean upon others for advice; for the next nineteen years she was deprived of any sort of proper worldly contact by which to judge the situations which were reported to her. Her own servants, although loyal, were no match in intelligence for the English politicians with whom they had to deal. A Herries certainly could not hope to worst a Cecil: in any case the mistress of one presided at liberty over an illustrious court, whereas the mistress of the other pined in enforced seclusion.

Herries came to Bolton from London at the end of July and put the
English proposals to his queen; it is easy to understand how Mary, lit up by false hopes of restoration at Elizabeth’s hands, agreed at last to the prospect of an English ‘trial’.
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The fact that the English had no right to try her seemed now less important than the fact that Elizabeth had promised to restore her whatever the outcome, although if the lords proved her guilt, it was stipulated that the lords themselves should go unpunished for their rebellion. If the lords brought no evidence against Mary, on the other hand, or if their evidence was not held to be valid, then Mary was to be adjudged innocent in any case and restored as before, on condition that she renounced her present title to the crown of England during the lifetime of Elizabeth and her lawful issue. Other conditions made were the abandonment of the alliance with France, and the substitution of an alliance with England, the Mass in Scotland to be abandoned by Mary and common prayer after the English form to be practised instead and the ratification at last of the Treaty of Edinburgh. Believing herself to be on the eve of liberty, Mary even bade her partisans in Scotland cease fighting on condition that Moray’s would do the same.

The climate in the outside world was harsher than Mary, within her prison walls, remembered. Whether or not Mary’s partisans did lay down their arms – at any rate at the Parliament of 16 August Moray swiftly declared the forfeiture of the Hamiltons, Fleming and the bishop of Ross, before ever the boasted English trial had taken place. More damaging still to Mary’s cause, on 20 September Elizabeth wrote privately to Moray promising him what Cecil had already divulged in secret: whatever impression Elizabeth might have given Mary, the Scottish queen would not in fact be restored to her throne if she were found guilty in England. This letter, following on Cecil’s hints to Wood, was crucial to the development of Moray’s behaviour. On 23 September Cecil repeated the same information to Sussex.
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Moray had now every impetus to prepare the blackest possible case against his sister. The queen’s ‘privy letters’ had therefore become the central plank of his accusatory edifice.

The English translation of Buchanan’s
Book of Articles
, prepared for the coming trial in September or October, contained a much expanded reference to these letters. Instead of the brief phrase in the Latin version written in June, there was now a long postscript specially devoted to the subject. Mary’s own supporters also began to appreciate that these writings were to be the testing-point not only of her own guilt or innocence, but also of the whole future government of Scotland. The Marian nobles, gathered together at Dumbarton, took the opportunity to declare publicly that ‘… if it be alleged that her Majesty’s writing, produced in parliament, should prove her Grace culpable, it may be answered, that there is in no place mention made in it by the which Her Highness may be convicted; albeit it were in her own hand-writing, as it is not’.
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Only Mary herself, wrapped in her little prisoner’s world, believed, trusting Elizabeth, that the trial was a mere formality, and that she would be set free in any case.

Under these inauspicious circumstances, the conference of York was set up. It was decided that the trial should take the form of examination of the evidence by an English panel, headed by the duke of Norfolk. Both Mary and Moray were to be allowed commissioners. Moray’s commissioners included himself and Maitland; Mary’s included among others John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and Lords Livingstone, Boyd and Herries. Her instructions to her commissioners illustrate Mary’s personal conviction that the conference was only being held in order that Elizabeth might in the future restore her to her throne, having accomplished ‘the reduction of our said disobedient subjects to their dutiful obedience of us’. With such rising hopes to illuminate her horizon, even captivity at Bolton seemed tolerable to Mary. She occupied herself learning to write English under the tuition of Knollys. It is obvious from his letters that propinquity led Knollys to fall a little in love with his glamorous prisoner. Exercising her arts of fascination on those around her in charming little ways was second nature to Mary Stuart: to Knollys she wrote her first letter in English when he had been absent from Bolton for two or three days. The letter, which is indeed exceedingly misspelt and scarcely intelligible as English at all, announces that she has sent him a little token, asks after his wife, and ends touchingly: ‘Excus my ivel vreitn thes furst tym….’
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Knollys also applied himself enthusiastically to trying to persuade his captive of the delights of the English religion which he himself practised. Knollys reported happily that Mary was now at Bolton growing to a ‘good liking of English common prayer, had received an English chaplain, and had listened to his sermons which had happened to deal severely with the pharisaical justification of works by faith, as well as all kinds of papistry, with ‘attentive and contented ears’. Her replies were gentle and weak and Knollys reported complacently that ‘she does not seem to like the worse of religion through me’.
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Mary was by now surrounded by Protestants: her cousin Agnes Fleming, Lady Livingstone, joined her in August and both Livingstones belonged to the reformed Church, as did Herries;
they may have added their influence to that of Knollys. It is possible also that she felt some genuine and laudable intellectual curiosity concerning the doctrines which the majority of her subjects practised, and that her enquiries helped to while away the captive hours. But the true motive behind this suspicious docility was now as ever her desire to win the good opinions of Elizabeth, for whom Knollys was merely a stalking-horse. At the end of August Knollys put his finger on the point when he reported how marvellously polite Mary had been of late ‘as though she conceived I could persuade her Highness to show her great favour’.
³⁵
The
beaux yeux
of Knollys, that good family man, who worried over the welfare of his daughters in London (‘experience teaches what foul crimes youthful women fall into for lack of orderly maintenance’ he pronounced in an anxious letter), were quite incidental to Mary Stuart’s plans.

Mary’s apparent Anglicanism did not pass unnoticed in England. Towards the end of September Mary heard that the local Catholics believed she was turning away from the old religion, and were very upset by the news; immediately in the great hall of Bolton, in front of a full assembly, she professed herself as fervently Catholic as ever before, her arguments, according to Knollys, being ‘so weak, they only showed her zeal’. To Knollys alone she attempted to make capital out of the incident, saying pointedly that she could scarcely be expected to lose France, Spain and all her foreign allies by seeming to change her religion, and yet still not be certain that Elizabeth was her ‘assured friend’. But her letter to her girlhood friend, Elisabeth de Valois, queen of Spain, at the end of September shows that her heart was evidently as Catholic as ever beneath its convenient show of Anglican interest.
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Mary invokes the memory of their common childhood, the food they had shared in the past which had nourished an indissoluble friendship, to plead for Spanish aid. She tells Elisabeth that she has been offered
‘de belles choses’
to change her religion, but whatever Elisabeth may hear to the contrary, Mary will never abandon the Faith, but merely try to accommodate herself to her changing circumstances. In the meantime Mary hoped somehow to smuggle out her little son James from Scotland to marry one of Elisabeth’s daughters. By the time this letter reached Spain, Elisabeth was already dead in childbirth (incidentally leaving Philip
II
, that ever recurring prospective bridegroom, once more free to marry). But in November Mary wrote angrily in the same vein to Philip himself, saying that she was considered too closely related to the queen of England to enjoy the services of a Catholic priest, but that it should not be believed on that account that she had given up the beliefs of her religion, as well as the practice.
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The point was a good one. It was perfectly true that on her first arrival in England Mary had asked Lord Scrope for a Catholic priest to attend her and he had replied firmly that there was none left in England. It was also true, as Mary told Philip, that if Knollys introduced a Protestant preacher into her chamber, she could hardly prevent him. Nevertheless Mary always felt somewhat sensitive in later life on this point of her alleged Anglicanism, not so much out of intellectual distaste – for her own strong but primitive faith seems to have remained perfectly unaffected by all the assaults made upon it – but for the good practical reasons she outlined to Knollys. By such aspersions on her Catholicism, she feared to forfeit the support of her Catholic allies. On the eve of her death, she still took trouble to justify herself for having listened to Protestant sermons when she first came to England. One may perhaps detect in these protestations the murmur of a faintly guilty conscience; possibly Mary did feel later that she had compromised herself a little in this respect in her desire to please Elizabeth. This very minor essay into the realms of Protestantism on the part of Mary may be ascribed in part to the wishful thinking of the ardent Puritan Knollys, in part to the natural curiosity of the captive cut off from contact with her own religion, but mainly to Mary’s devouring obsession with the subject of Elizabeth.

Knollys worried himself constantly over the prospect of his prisoner escaping: he even sent a map of the castle down to London so that his security arrangements could be approved. The royal train at Bolton now consisted of Leslie, Herries, the Livingstones, the Flemings, Gavin Hamilton, the master of the household John Beaton, Bastian Pages and his wife, Mary Seton and young Willy Douglas, a corps of loyal supporters. Bolton was only sixty miles to the south-west Scottish border as the crow flies. Escape might or might not have been possible. Knollys’s forebodings indicate that Mary might with luck have eluded her captors. But at this point there were positively no attempts at escape, no disguises as a laundress, no stolen keys, no corrupted guards; Mary herself made it clear that this was at her own wish. She saw no reason to try and escape when she hoped for so much from Elizabeth. It suited her too to pretend to be a guest, not a captive. At the beginning of October Mary warned Knollys that things might be very different in the future: ‘If I shall be holden here perforce, you may be sure then being as a desperate person I will use any attempts that may serve my purpose either by myself or my friends.’
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In the meantime, with the prospect of the successful conference of York in front of her, Mary was content to stay where she was. Knollys really had no need to fear those hare-hunting expeditions across the moors – ‘the
wind never so boisterous’ which made him feel so nervous because he constantly imagined a dozen or so Scots would ride over the moors and carry off their queen. In his mind’s eye he saw them riding over mountains and heaths with spare horses, avoiding villages and towns, and rescuing this Diana – ‘for she hath an able body to endure to gallop apass’. Knollys believed that the country folk would certainly not stop her: they would laugh in their sleeves to see her go.
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Mary on the other hand no longer saw herself in this romantic and impulsive light. In mid-September she wrote proudly to the king of France, saying that the fact she had had no response to any of her letters to him pleading for assistance no longer worried her, since now Queen Elizabeth her good sister had promised to do all things to her honour and grandeur and restore her to her estate.
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In October Mary pinned all her hopes on that conference to open at York, the result of which she believed, win or lose, guilty or innocent, could not fail to be her restoration to the throne of Scotland.