Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots (79 page)
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;
Our realm it brooks no stranger’s force, let them elsewhere resort
Our rusty sword, with rest, shall first his edge employ
To poll their tops that seek such change, and gape for joy.
But although Elizabeth’s sword, rusty or otherwise, did eventually and reluctantly poll the top of Norfolk in June, despite the most ferocious baying for blood on the part of her faithful Commons, Elizabeth refused to consider the execution of Mary. In mid-June the English commissioners Shrewsbury, Delawarr and Sadler visited Mary at Sheffield and solemnly accused her of her heinous part in the Ridolfi plot as well as a list of other crimes: of having taken up arms against England, approving the papal bull of ex-communication of Elizabeth (
Regnans in Excelsis
), and actually claiming the crown of England. To all these charges Mary replied firmly that as a sovereign princess she could not recognize their jurisdiction over her; she requested to appear before the English Parliament to justify herself, and once more demanded to be taken into the presence of Elizabeth. In detailed answer to the charges, the queen freely admitted that she had written to the king of France, the king of Spain and the Pope and others asking for help, in order to be set at liberty and restored to her own country. She admitted the original offence of bearing the English title, when she had been a girl of seventeen, but denied ever bearing it since the death of Francis, over eleven years ago, which was correct. Over the Norfolk marriage, she reiterated her genuine belief that the match had been to the general liking of England. She admitted having given a commission to Ridolfi but said that it had been of a financial nature, and strongly denied any more compromising schemes with the Italian.
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Despite the Scottish queen’s dignity, it was the will of Queen Elizabeth,
not the answers of Queen Mary, which stayed the hand of the Commons against her in the summer of 1572. Elizabeth personally prevented the Commons from passing a bill of attainder on the Scottish queen; instead a bill was passed merely depriving Mary of her right to succeed to the English throne, and declaring her liable to a trial by peers (peers of the English realm, rather than her own peers, or equals, who would be sovereigns), should she be discovered plotting again. Most unfortunately the publication of the papal bull,
Regnans in Excelsis
, although not sought by Mary, and not even intended by Pius
V
to assist her personally, since he disapproved of her marriage to Bothwell, had begun the process of presenting her as a foreign traitor in their midst to English patriots. The massacre of the Huguenots on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, at the hands of the French Catholics, led by the Guises, although once again hardly any fault of the prisoner of Sheffield Castle, only increased Mary’s unpopularity in England. ‘All men now cry out of [against] your prisoner,’ wrote Cecil ominously to Shrewsbury. But Elizabeth would not allow this tide of xenophobia to sweep away her ‘good sister and cousin’, in spite of all the revelations of Ridolfi.
In the strange tortuous map of Mary’s relations with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s with Mary, Mary’s feelings are much better charted than those of Elizabeth, since she gave many open declarations on the subject. But just as Elizabeth’s incarceration of Mary on evidence she herself declared to be insufficient is greatly to her discredit, her preservation of Mary Stuart’s life in 1572 by personal intervention must be allowed to be to her credit. Elizabeth, like Mary, had a constitutional dislike of spilling blood. Perhaps both of them were reacting against their blood-thirsty Tudor ancestors. Elizabeth was also conscious that Mary was by now by far her closest adult relation, since the sons of the dead Catherine Grey were still boys, and James was not only a mere child, but a child in control of the Scots; Elizabeth may have had some reluctance to abandon her kingdom to the care of young children (which had proved so fatal in the case of Scotland) if the assassin should find her as he had found Moray. Most of all, however, she was aware that Mary like herself was a sovereign princess: the death of one princess might strike at them all.
Too little is known of Elizabeth’s inner feelings for Mary, since the English queen had learnt in childhood to hide all inner feelings, those dangerous traitors, within the breast. That closeness which two queens and near cousins should feel for each other, so often chanted by Mary, may have found more echoes in Elizabeth’s heart than she ever admitted. In the meantime this merciful strain, this sneaking affection, could not fail to be
noticed by Elizabeth’s advisers: the point was taken that if ever the execution of Mary Stuart was to be secured, Elizabeth would have to be thoroughly convinced that her good sister had repaid her clemency with flagrant and harmful ingratitude.
*
A letter from Bess in the unpublished Bagot papers illustrates her attitude to those who stood in the way of her schemes: an elderly widow who is failing to agree to some project which is to Bess’s advantage (but not her own) is described as ‘behaving very badly’.
7
†
See
Embroideries by Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Talbot at Oxburgh Hall
, by Francis de Zulueta, for a discussion of the authenticity of these tapestries. Also
English Secular Embroidery
, by M. S. Jourdain, for a further discussion of Queen Mary’s embroideries.
‡
These famous words have always been taken to refer to Queen Mary’s religious beliefs and the victory of the soul after death; but if Drummond is correct in reporting that they were attached to the emblem of Mary of Guise, they originally had the more philoprogenitive meaning that in the end of the mother was the beginning of the child.
§
White may have been deceived by false hair in this instance. Mary in youth had light red-golden hair. Although hair darkens with age, it could never have reached a really black tint naturally.
‖
These ships, however, continued to be held, and were not in fact released till 1572.
a
It is sometimes suggested that Mary and Norfolk did meet briefly while she was at Carlisle, staying with his sister. But there is no proof of this, and if so, it is strange that neither of them ever referred to the incident in their correspondence. Certainly, Norfolk himself was always emphatic that he had never met Mary.
b
It is difficult to believe that Moray ever really countenanced the match, which would have been dangerous to his prospect. Moray’s biographer, Lee, suggests that all along Moray relied on Elizabeth to prevent the marriage once she heard of it – as indeed she did.
21
c
Local legends suggest that she was kept in the upper room of the building known as ‘Caesar’s Tower’ (now rebuilt) which adjoined St Mary’s Hall.
22
d
A popular rhyme current at the time of the conference of Westminster suggested that Moray was a traitor trying to seize the Scottish crown on the pretence of his mother’s lawful marriage.
24
e
See Francis Edwards,
Dangerous Queen
, London 1964, and
The Marvellous Chance
, London 1968, for a detailed consideration of the validity of the various documents in these intrigues.
22 The Uses of Adversity‘Tribulation has been to them as a furnace to fine gold – a means of proving their virtue, of opening their so-long-blinded eyes, and of teaching them to know themselves and their own failings.’
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
on the lives of rulers
, Essay on Adversity, 1580
By the summer of 1572 the public cause of Mary Stuart seemed lost indeed; she was left to discover for herself in the private life of captivity the uses of adversity, sweet or otherwise. This outward decline in her circumstances was due in great measure to the fact that the fickle wheel of fortune had rolled away from her direction in Scotland. Argyll, for example, had remained a Marian supporter after Langside, despite his failure at the scene of the battle. Mary harangued him with anxious letters from her prison, addressed at times to ‘our Counsellor and Lieutenant’, at times to ‘our dearest cousin’ and rising in a crescendo of supplication to ‘Brother’ (a relationship based on his marriage to her half-sister Jean Stewart) to whom she signed herself in a fevered personal postscript ‘your right good sister and best friend forever’.
1
These frantic missives did not manage to dissuade Argyll from deserting Mary’s side for that of Moray in April 1569; he leagued once more briefly with the pro-Marian Hamiltons after the regent’s death in 1570 before, finding Mary’s cause hopeless, he abandoned it once more. The attitude of Lord Boyd – the royal servant who had brought the fatal diamond from Norfolk – was typical of that of many of Mary’s more stable former supporters: in the summer of 1571 he too began to despair of her cause. The death of the regent Lennox during a raid on Stirling in August 1571 led to the substitution of Morton as effective leader, under Mar as a nominal regent; Boyd agreed to Mar’s election and was once more enrolled in the Privy Council. Mar’s death in October 1572 confirmed Morton as regent in name as well as deed, and Morton was not only no friend to Mary at any time, but also an Anglophile, whom it suited Elizabeth to support. The final blow to Mary’s prolonged hopes for
restoration at English hands came in the following spring when the castle of Edinburgh, so long held by Kirkcaldy and Maitland on behalf of the Marians, and officially on behalf of Mary herself, was at last effectively besieged by heavy cannon brought north from England manned by English gunners under Drury. This lethal English intervention proved decisive: in May 1573 the castle fell.
The gallant Kirkcaldy was executed. Maitland either died naturally or, as Melville suggested, committed suicide ‘after the old Roman fashion’, before the executioner’s axe could reach him. In any case his health had been deteriorating with a form of creeping paralysis: by March 1570 Randolph noted that his legs were ‘clean gone’, his body so weak that he could not walk, and even to sneeze caused him exquisite pain. Randolph commented spitefully: ‘To this hath blessed joy of a young wife brought him.’
2
But Mary Fleming, for all Randolph’s gibes, acted the part of a loyal wife after her husband’s death. It was her moving personal plea to Cecil which saved Maitland’s wasted corpse from the humiliating treatment accorded to Huntly’s body after death in the shape of the traditional Scottish treason trial. In a firm letter to Morton, Queen Elizabeth pointed out that such barbarous habits were extremely distasteful to the English way of thinking: ‘It is not our manner in this country to show cruelty upon the dead bodies so unconvicted, but to suffer them straight to be buried and put in the earth.’ As God had shown His intentions towards Maitland by allowing him to die naturally and thus escape execution, so Maitland should be buried naturally and well and not ‘pulled in pieces’.
3
Thus thanks to his wife, the foremost of the Maries, Maitland escaped the fate of Huntly.
*
Mary kept her feelings to herself on the subject of Maitland’s death: ‘She makes little show of any grief,’ reported Shrewsbury. ‘And yet it nips her very near.’ In the last years of his life since his quarrel with Moray, Maitland had energetically promoted Mary’s interests; and he had died a loyal Marian. But he had not always lived as one. Queen Mary may well have reflected that if more years had been granted to him, he might have used them for further changes of allegiance. Nevertheless the death of Maitland brought to an end an era in Scotland; under Morton, a brutal man but one who showed himself to possess a certain administrative talent, the beleaguered country even enjoyed a period of comparative calm. Its quondam queen, Mary Stuart, also entered a phase of enforced tranquillity, in which the minor pains or pleasures of her prison routine became temporarily more important than European or Scottish politics.
The actual conditions of her captivity were not in themselves particularly rigorous during the 1570s by the standards of a state prisoner, except during moments of national crisis. In the first place Queen Mary was officially allowed a suite of thirty, which was enough to make her adequately comfortable if not a large number to one who had lived as queen her whole life. At the time of her first committal to Shrewsbury and Huntingdon in 1569 this thirty included Lord and Lady Livingstone and their own attendants, Mary Seton, who had her own maid and groom, three other ladies of the bed-chambers, Jane Kennedy, Mary’s favourite bed-chamber woman, John Beaton, her master of the household, her cupbearer and her physician; then there were her grooms of the chambers, one of them being that witty masque-maker Bastian Pages, Gilbert Curle, her secretary, Willy Douglas, now described as her usher, and her chair-bearer. There were four officers in the pantry, and three officers in the kitchen including a master cook and a pottager. Most of these were Mary’s tried and loyal servants who made up the official thirty, but beyond this figure had crept in others, bringing the total up to forty-one. This proliferation, due not only to the infiltration of such further aides to the queen as Bastian’s wife and some stable grooms, but also to the introduction of further attendants to look after the attendants, was tolerated by Shrewsbury out of kindness, as he himself admitted.
4
