Mary Queen of Scots (83 page)
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Authors: Antonia Fraser
The outward changes in the appearance of Mary Queen of Scots were paralleled by the inward changes in her character. In 1580 Mary wrote on her own initiative a long
Essay on Adversity
in which she explained that she of all people was most suited to write on this melancholy subject – in any case the mental exercise would save from indolence one who had once been accustomed to rule, and could no longer follow her destined calling. She concluded that the only remedy for the afflicted lay in turning to God.
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Indeed those long white hands were now often clasped in prayer. It was no mere coincidence that in the portraits a great gold rosary is often shown hanging down from her belt. The woman who had once believed implicitly but unreflectively in the truths of the Catholic religion, and had allowed action not thought to rule her life, now found herself involuntarily forced back on the resources of meditation. It would be true to say that the quality of Mary’s religious beliefs had never truly been tested up to the present. In France there had been nothing to try, much to encourage, them. In Scotland she had insisted on the practice of her own religion, but this minor concession had not been difficult to establish in view of the fact that she was the reigning queen, and was herself prepared to show total tolerance to the official Protestant religion of the country. In her early months in England she had seen no particular harm in allowing others to explain to her at their own invitation the truths of the Protestant religion as they saw them. But now to exercise her religion needed cunning and tenacity; she was living in a country where Catholics were not only not tolerated, but often persecuted, and persecuted with increasing severity after Pius v’s bull of excommunication towards Elizabeth.
Sir John Mortoun, the secret priest, died and was succeeded by another secret chaplain, de Préau. For a short period in 1571, Ninian Winzet, the Scottish Catholic apologist, entered her service, nominally as her ‘Scottish secretary’ but in fact acting as her confessor, through the good offices of Beaton; he was subsequently sent away to London to join Leslie in his house arrest.
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In October 1575 Mary wrote to the Pope asking that her chaplain should have episcopal function, and the power to grant her absolution after hearing her confession. She named twenty-five Catholics whom she asked should be granted absolution for attending Protestant ceremonies in order to divert suspicion. Mary asked for a plenary indulgence as she prayed before the Holy Sacrament or bore in silence the insults of a heretic: with prescience for the future, she asked that in the moment of death, if she repeated the words
Jesu, Maria
, even if she only spoke them with ‘her heart rather than her mouth’, her sins might be forgiven her.
39
A Jesuit priest, Samerie, managed to visit the queen secretly on three occasions in the early 1580s, to act as her chaplain, disguised variously as a member of her household, including her valet and her physician.
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Such manœuvres and the preservation in secret of the rites of the Mass by one means and another, demanded courage and the real will to take part in them. But to Mary, as to many others in whom the hectic and heedless blood of youth fades, giving place to a nobler and gentler temperament, her religion itself had come to mean much more to her.
It was not only that the Catholic powers abroad represented her best hope of escape from captivity; it was also that she herself had undergone a profound change of attitude to her faith, and indeed to life itself. It is the mark of greatness in a person to be able to develop freely from one phase into another as age demands it. Mary Stuart was capable of this development. Her whole character deepened. Having been above all things a woman of action, she now became under the influence of the imprisonment which she so much detested, a far more philosophical and contemplative personality. Two poems printed in Leslie’s
Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes
of 1574 speak of sad memories, of the world’s inconstancy and of the need for sacrifice. Lines written in a Book of Hours in 1579 allude bitterly to false friends, and the need for solitary courage, in face of the fickle changes of fortune.
Bien plus utile est l’heure et non pas la fortune
Puisqu’elle change autant qu’elle este opportune
g
But in another poem, probably written in the early 1580s she showed more Christian resignation:..
Donne seigneur, donne moi patience
Et renforce ma trop debile foi
Que ton esprit me conduise en ta loi
Et me guarde de choir imprudence
h
And at the end of her
Essay on Adversity
, after discussing a series of Biblical, Roman and medieval examples of rulers who had fallen into adversity, Mary quoted the parable of the talents to explain how much would be forgiven to those who had made the best of their lives: ‘God, like the good father of a family, distributes His talents among His children, and whoever receives them and puts them out of profit is discharged and excused from eternal suffering.’ She certainly put her own philosophy into practice to the extent that the talents she showed in her middle-age were very different from those she displayed in youth. The carefree buoyancy which Mary displayed then, so alluring in a young woman, would have been intolerable and even frivolous in the captive queen. Mary’s utterances in her forties show on the one hand an infinitely nobler and deeper spirit, and on the other a serenity and internal repose quite out of keeping with her previous behaviour.
Mary Stuart achieved this serenity and this intelligence at the cost of much pain, heart-searching and suffering. She, who had never been known to exist without an adviser, and had never wished to do so, whether it was her grandmother, her Guise uncles, the lamentable Darnley, her half-brother Moray, Riccio or Bothwell, was compelled in the last years of her life to exist without any sort of reliable advice or support from outside. She was now the shoulder on whom her servants leant, and to whom her envoys, many of them of questionable loyalty, looked for direction. She might even secretly write to the outside world for advice, and receive it, but when it came to taking action, actually within the confines of the prison itself, there was Mary and only Mary to make decisions and inspire their implementation. The pretty puppet-queen of France, the spirited but in some ways heedless young ruler of Scotland, could never have carried through the remarkable performance which Mary Stuart was to display in her last years. The uses of adversity for Mary Stuart, bittersweet as they might have been rather than sweet, were to teach her that self-control and strength of character which was to enable her to outwit Elizabeth at the last by the heroic quality of her ending.
*
Mary Fleming lived on for many years after her husband’s death. She obtained the reversal of the forfeiture of his possessions in 1583. She seems to have brought up her children, including that son James Maitland who was to publish a defence of his father’s honour, as Catholics.
†
It is difficult not to sympathize with the unfortunate Shrewsbury in his frequent moans of penury; he was certainly not justly treated by the Elizabethan government over the allowance. At the same time, it should be pointed out that it was at this same period that Shrewsbury felt himself able to embark on the major building-scheme of a new house – Worksop – although he was already amply endowed with residences. It does seem to argue that he was bankrupted more by his building-schemes than by the diet of the queen of Scots.
‡
Cecil was created Lord Burghley in February 1571: but for the convenience of the present narrative, he will continue to be referred to by his original name.
§
The calm of the religious life led to longevity. Mary Seton survived her mistress by nearly thirty years, being last heard of in 1615. In 1602 an elaborate will provided for three High Masses to be said in the church of St Pierre for the repose of the soul of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland. But her latter end was less glorious than her first beginning: in 1613 James Maitland reported that this once proud daughter of an ancient Scottish house was now ‘decrepit and in want’, and dependent on the charity of the nuns. Maitland begged James
VI
to help her, for his dead mother’s sake.
21
‖
By Sir Arthur Salusbury MacNalty,
Mary Queen of Scots
, London 1960, Appendix I, where her symptoms are listed in detail and this conclusion is drawn.
a
See
Porphyria – a Royal Malady
, British Medical Association publication, 1968, including articles published in or commissioned by the
British Medical Journal
by Drs I. Macalpine, R. Hunter, Professor Rimington, on porphyria in the Royal Houses of Stuart, etc., and by Professor Goldberg on ‘The Porphyrias’ as a group of diseases.
b
Since God, in His wondrous goodness
Hath given you so much joy
…
c
There is no record that such a decree was ever made and extensive recent researches in the Vatican Archives on the author’s behalf by Dr C. Burns have failed to reveal it.
d
The mummified corpse of Bothwell is still displayed in the crypt of Faarevejle church, near Dragsholm.
e
This ‘Marie Stuart hood’ consisted of a small white lawn head-dress, dipping over the forehead and edged with lace; behind it flowed a lawn veil or head-rail, threaded with wire at the top to frame the head and shoulders in an arch.
f
This Sheffield portrait used sometimes to be known as the Oudry portrait, after the words P. OUDRY PINXIT painted on the version of it at Hardwicke Hall. It was suggested that the unknown Oudry had been the original artist who painted Mary in captivity. But the Hardwicke Hall version is not listed in the 1601 inventory of the house; an entry in the accounts in 1613 probably relates to payments made for bringing the picture to the house. Since earlier versions of the picture do not have the words painted on them, the legend of Oudry the unknown artist is exploded.
36
g
Time than fortune should be held more precious
For fortune is as false as she is specious!
41
h
Give me, dear Lord, the true humility
And strengthen my too feeble halting faith;
Let but Thy Spirit shed his light on me
–
Checking my fever with His purer breath.
42
23 Mother and Son‘… nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her …
The advice of Hamlet’s ghost-father on the subject of his mother Gertrude (the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude is thought to have been founded by Shakespeare on the story of Mary Queen of Scots and James
VI
)
While Mary languished in captivity, the child whom she had last seen as a ten-month-old baby at Stirling Castle in 1567 had grown to a precocious adulthood. Mary still pined for James, or the idea of the infant she had lost. In return she genuinely imagined that James also longed for her, prompted by the dictates of natural affection which she believed must always exist between a child and its mother. No doubt she allowed herself to be buoyed up with the falsely sanguine stories of his love for her related to her by kindly courtiers. Such apocryphal tales were easily spun, and greedily accepted by the maternal heart of the prisoner, who had no means to check them, and every reason to hope they were true. One such tale, from a Catholic source, related how James as a boy had once been observed to be in an especially happy mood at supper, and had smiled all over his face; the reason for his genial temper proved to be that he had secretly obtained a copy of Bothwell’s dubious
Testament of Confession
, read it and from this had realized that his mother was in fact quite innocent of the murder of his father. Similar stories must have given Mary a very false impression of the way James’s mind was being bent. As late as 1584 Lady Margaret Fleming wrote to Mary from Scotland and told her that although Scottish court manners had sadly changed for the worse, this was not James’s fault, and he himself would certainly always behave as ‘a humble, obedient and most loving son’ towards her.
*
1
The reality was to be very different: nor did James ever show himself in the light of a loving, let alone obedient, son to Mary. It was Mary’s tragedy that she continued to believe that he would do so, and that she had from the first a totally false impression of the mother-and-son relationship. In the first vital years of infancy, James had been looked after by the countess of Mar, a ‘Jezebel’ of a woman as Knox called her, who hated Queen Mary. From four years onward his education was mainly in the hands of Mary’s inveterate enemy and chief traducer George Buchanan. The man, once Mary’s respectful admirer, who had allowed himself to concoct the disgusting stories of the
Detection
was scarcely likely to spare Mary’s reputation when discussing his mother with the child. Later James imbibed a great deal of Calvinist theology from the one tutor, Peter Young, for whom he seems at least to have felt some affection. James’s childhood was an unhappy compilation of long hours of learning – he later commented ruefully that he had been made to learn Latin before he could even speak Scots – with occasional dramatic and bloodthirsty interventions, as terrifying as any pre-natal influence from Riccio’s slaughter, as when at the age of five he witnessed the bleeding corpse of his grandfather Lennox being carried past him into Stirling Castle. Not only was he totally cut off from a mother’s love in childhood, but he was also trained to regard his mother as the murderess of his father, an adulteress who had deserted him for her lover, and last of all, the protagonist of a wicked and heretical religion.
