Mary, Queen of Scots (26 page)

In her extremity, Mary had lowered her guard and revealed her desperation at the prospect of being tied to Darnley for life. There had been unsubstantiated rumours that she had sent to Rome for an annulment after Rizzio’s death, but this is the first evidence that she had seriously considered ways of freeing herself from her husband.

The optimism expressed by Beaton and Maitland about Mary’s health was premature. At 10 p.m. that evening, “Her Majesty swooned again and failed in her sight; her feet and knees were cold, which were handled by extreme rubbing, drawing and other cures, by the space of four hours, that no creature could endure greater pain, and through the vehemence of this cure, Her Majesty got some relief.”
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Believing she was dying, Mary summoned the Lords and du Croc, and made her final dispositions, declaring that the crown must pass to her son, not to Darnley, “not doubting that the King his father would wrong him as to the succession of the crown,” and entrusting Moray with charge of the Prince and “the principal part of the government.” Moray was also to ensure that James was “nourished in the fear of God and all virtues” and that “no evil company be near him during his youth.” In an obvious reference to Darnley, she beseeched God to mend one “whom I have advanced to a great degree of honour and pre-eminence among others; who, notwithstanding, has used ingratitude towards me, which has engendered the displeasure that presently most grieves me, and is also the cause of my sickness.” She remitted to God the exiled traitors, but urged that, if they returned to Scotland, the Lords would not suffer them to come near her son. She asked Moray to be as tolerant of Catholics as she had been of Protestants, then asked pardon for sins that had arisen from “the fragility of my nature” and, finally, protested that she died in the Catholic religion. As she “disposed herself as one at the point of death,” Bishop Leslie offered up prayers for her.
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That night, Mary slipped into a coma and became so stiff and cold that everyone thought she had died. Her servants threw open the windows “to let her spirit go free,” her ladies ordered mourning clothes, her Privy Councillors, including Bothwell,
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prepared for her funeral and issued an edict to safeguard public order, while Moray, with unseemly haste, “started to lay hands on her silver plate and jewels.”
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But Arnault, the Queen’s French surgeon and “a perfect man of his craft,” noticed that one of Mary’s arms had not completely stiffened, and worked frantically to revive her. He tightly bandaged her limbs and extremities, massaged her body vigorously for three hours, forced wine down her throat, and gave her some medicine and an enema of wine and herbs, “the evacuations produced by which were considered by the physicians to be very suspicious.”
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Gradually, Mary’s sight and speech were restored, then she began to sweat, and “from that time, she gradually recovered.”
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Up to 27 October, Darnley was “hawking and hunting” in Glasgow and the west of Scotland,
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perhaps unaware of Mary’s illness; there is no record of any messenger being sent to inform him. On the 22nd, Robert Melville had reported that the King was still threatening to leave the country because the Queen had not agreed to his demand that she dismiss Maitland, Bellenden and MacGill.
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It appears that Darnley finally learned that Mary was sick on 27 October because, on that day, he suddenly set off for Edinburgh and the Borders; both Knox and Buchanan claim he travelled with the utmost haste to his wife’s bedside.

He arrived at Jedburgh on the 28th, but did not stay long. In the
Diurnal of Occurrents
, Buchanan and Lennox all state that he was offended by a hostile reception from Mary and her nobles, which is hardly surprising, given that most of them, including Mary herself, believed him to have been the cause of her illness. Certainly, his visit did nothing to improve relations between him, Mary and the Lords. After spending only one night in Jedburgh— in one account, Buchanan claims he stayed in the lodgings of Lord Home, in another he states he slept in the bed of the Bishop of Orkney—Darnley rode north to Edinburgh, and thence to Stirling.
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Buchanan says “his departure seemed the more shameful because, at the same time, Bothwell was openly transferred from the house where he had been lodging to the Queen’s apartments”—which contradicts his earlier account.

By 30 October, Mary was well enough to order material for a new dress. Buchanan alleges that, around this time, she and Bothwell, “though not yet fully recovered, returned to their former pastime, and that blatantly”—so blatantly, in fact, that no one else noticed it. Buchanan also states that “the world in the same days began to speak of it,” but there were many people present at Jedburgh, and no other contemporary source, not even Lennox, mentions such flagrant behaviour.

On 30 October, Mary’s convalescence was disrupted by a fire that destroyed part of her lodgings, and she and her entourage were obliged to move to a “bastel” (fortified) tower owned by the Kers of Ferniehurst, which was perhaps that which survives today and is known as Mary, Queen of Scots’ House. This was one of six fortified houses built in the fifteenth century after Jedburgh Castle was demolished. In Mary’s day, it had four storeys, a thatched roof, gables, turrets, tiny windows and a garden.
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The service quarters were on the ground floor, but the upper floors could be accessed only by an outside stair. There was a banqueting room, forechamber and garderobe on the first floor, and bedchambers and a guard room above. The Queen paid Lady Ferniehurst £40 for the use of the house.

Queen Elizabeth, fearing the intervention of Philip II in Flanders, was now finding the prospect of an alliance with Scotland attractive, and had instructed Cecil to draw up instructions for an embassy in which it was to be intimated that Elizabeth was prepared to acknowledge Mary as her heir. On 31 October, Elizabeth asked the Countess of Argyll, a Protestant, to stand proxy for her at James’s christening.
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At the beginning of November, the Comte de Brienne arrived in Scotland to represent Charles IX at the ceremony.
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In his train was the son of du Croc, who may have acted as the Cardinal of Lorraine’s messenger to Mary,
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for he already held a post in her household and could therefore easily gain access to her. It was probably one of these men who informed Mary that Papal support would be dependent upon her agreeing to execute Moray and the other leading Protestants listed by Mondovi.

Meanwhile, on 29 October, King Philip had ordered the Duke of Alva to make ready for war on the Netherlands, which was probably what Darnley was waiting for. Darnley’s grievances had already reached the ears of the Nuncio in Paris, who reported on 4 November: “He cannot obtain from the Queen the authority he had before the late tumults, that is, to sit by the side of his wife in Council and in public places [and] set his name with hers in treaties and public affairs.”
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But Darnley was about to have his revenge in full measure.

Mary was making slow progress, but on or just before 1 November,
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she received a letter from, or about, Darnley
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that, according to Buchanan, caused her “miserably to torment herself, wailing wretchedly as if she would have fallen again into her former sickness.” She told Moray, Maitland and Huntly that, “unless she might by some means or other be despatched of the King, she would never have any good day, and if by no other way, she would attain it, rather than she would abide to live in such sorrow she would slay herself.” Buchanan put these words into Mary’s mouth with the aim of demonstrating that she was in a frame of mind in which she could contemplate murdering Darnley, but there is independent corroboration of her reaction to the letter, for by 13 November, de Silva in London had been given details of it by Mary’s messenger, Stephen Wilson, who left Scotland around 8 November and arrived in London on the 13th. De Silva informed his master that Mary “had heard that her husband had written to Your Majesty, the Pope, the King of France and the Cardinal of Lorraine that she was dubious in the faith.”
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Knox confirms this, and states that Darnley had also complained “of the state of the country, which was all out of order, all because that Mass and Papacy were not again erected, giving the whole blame thereof to the Queen as not managing the Catholic cause aright.”

This was the first concrete evidence of Darnley’s dealings abroad, and the first intimation that Mary had received of the extent of his duplicity, and it is hardly surprising that she was devastated by his embarrassing betrayal. She had certainly not done as much for the Catholic faith in Scotland as she could have done, and in some respects she had actively undermined it, but she was in an impossible political situation and had made a virtue of necessity in order to ensure her own survival. Of the two of them, she was personally by far the more genuinely devout, while Darnley bent with the wind, but, by his condemnation of her lack of zeal, he meant to show himself in the best possible light as the champion of Catholicism in Britain. Mary was ignorant of the wider implications of his calumnies, but she was all too aware that they had the power to ruin her credit with the Catholic rulers of Europe; in the case of Philip II and Catherine de’ Medici, they seem to have succeeded, for hereafter neither offered much support to Mary, even though Philip later denied that he had ever received from Darnley any letter detrimental to her.
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Mary was desperate to repair the damage her husband had caused. De Silva told Philip that she had asked him to assure Your Majesty that, as regards religion, she will never, with God’s help, fail to uphold it. Although she has entrusted this man [Wilson] to assure me verbally in the matter, she has in addition written to me as regards her steadfastness in the Faith, and I believe, from all that has ever been heard of the Queen, she is as faithful in religion as she professes to be. It seems to me, however, difficult to believe that her husband should have taken such a course, and it must be some French device to sow discord.
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Stephen Wilson left Jedburgh around 8 November. He was to go not only to London to reassure de Silva of his Queen’s zeal for the faith, but also to Paris and Rome in order to restore Mary’s credit with Charles IX, Catherine de’ Medici and the Pope, and to inform Pius that the Nuncio
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be received in Scotland with all honour. Mondovi was to be told, however, that he could only be received under some colour other than that of religion. Wilson arrived in Paris around 20 November.
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Because the Nuncio had been “compelled to linger in France, for the Queen cannot devise any way of receiving him with the respect which is due to himself, to the Papal See and to her own dignity without occasioning very great tumults,” the Pope had decided to send secretly to Scotland a fanatical Jesuit priest, Father Edmund Hay, a Scot who was Rector of the Jesuit College in Paris, to assess the situation and persuade Mary to agree to Mondovi’s conditions. Mary had almost certainly been apprised of these by now, and the knowledge that she was expected to put to death her half-brother and many of her foremost advisers in return for papal help must have plunged her into even greater turmoil.

Father Hay knew all about the Queen’s illness, and had no doubts about her “heroic constancy in her adherence to the Catholic religion,” but he was well aware of “the dangers which hang over my head” and the political constraints that bound the Queen, which it was his mission to make her surmount. “May God grant that she may lay to heart this fatherly correction, and that it may lead her to carry out with greater diligence the work which hitherto she has only begun.”
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On 7 November, Elizabeth instructed Bedford to propose a new treaty by which Mary’s rights to the English succession might be secured.
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This, however, was at variance with what she had told her Parliament two days earlier, when she warned them that any limitation of the succession would mean “some peril unto you and certain danger unto me.”
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However, on the 9th, she snapped that Parliament must cease urging her to marry and be content with her promise to acknowledge Mary as her successor. Mary, too trusting as ever, was joyfully to believe that Elizabeth was sincere.

Mary left Jedburgh for Kelso on 9 November, travelling by litter and accompanied by Moray, Bothwell and other Lords, and a train of 1,000 horse. Maitland informed Cecil that she was perfectly restored to health,
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but later reports contradict this. Nevertheless, she was determined to complete her progress through the Borders.

Mary spent the nights of 9 and 10 November at Kelso,
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and held another justice eyre there. The time for the Prince’s baptism was approaching, and Elizabeth’s ambassador, the Earl of Bedford, was already on his way, but on 11 November, de Silva wrote that there was no news of the envoy from Savoy.
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The Duke had in fact written to Mary a day earlier announcing that he would be sending Robertino Solaro, Count Moretta, to stand proxy for him.
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Moretta, a staunch Catholic, was a seasoned diplomat who had visited Scotland in 1561 and knew Mary; he may also have met Mondovi during the latter’s two visits to Savoy. His movements during the next weeks have led some historians to speculate that he had a secret mission that was perhaps connected with Darnley’s schemes, and it has also been suggested that he was a Spanish spy. Certainly, some suspicion attaches to his behaviour.

Mary left Kelso for Hume Castle, the seat of Lord Home, on 11 November.
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Her reluctance to consent to the Nuncio’s demands had already been communicated to him, for, on the 12th, he reported that, while the Queen was anxious to receive the balance of the subsidy, she was not prepared to agree to the attached conditions. He added that Father Hay was to be accompanied to Scotland by the Bishop of Dunblane, and that both were determined to discover whether Mary really would be able to keep her promise to receive the Nuncio, whilst giving “courage to the Queen to prosecute the holy cause.”
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