Mary Stuart (17 page)

In general, as sovereign, Elizabeth was a skilful diplomatist, self-controlled, practised in the art of hiding her true feelings. But this news struck at the woman in her, pierced her like a dagger. For a moment she lost the mastery over her rebellious nerves. So overwhelming was her consternation that her angry eyes and her tight-pressed lips forgot to dissemble. Her face grew rigid; she flushed beneath her make-up; her hands closed convulsively. She ordered the musicians to cease playing; the dance was suddenly stopped; the Queen hurried out of the ballroom. Having reached her bedchamber, when she was surrounded by her agitated ladies-in-waiting, she broke down completely, bursting into tears, collapsing onto a chair and sobbing out: “The Queen of Scotland is mother of a fair son, whereas I am but a barren stock.”

At no moment during the seventy years of her life was the profound tragedy of her unhappy career more plainly revealed; never did she disclose more openly how stricken to the heart she was by her incapacity for love’s fruition. The bitter awareness of her infertility found vent in the exclamation that burst from the depths of her heart. One feels that she would have given all the kingdoms of this world for a simple, clear and natural happiness—for the happiness of being wholly woman, wholly beloved, wife and mother. Despite Elizabeth’s jealousy she could have forgiven Mary everything but this. To her, who could be neither wife nor mother, it was unpardonable that Mary should be both.

Next morning, however, she was once more wholly the Queen, the politician, the diplomatist. Splendidly did she apply the art in which she was practised, the art of concealing discontent and sorrow behind cold and majestic phrases. When Sir James returned to Greenwich by boat next morning to pay his respects to Her Majesty, he was received by a woman who “had got to show a glad countenance, was clad in her best apparel, and said ‘that the joyful news of the Queen her sister’s delivery of a fair son, which I had sent unto her by Mr Cecil, had delivered her out of a heavy sickness which had holden her fifteen days.’ Therefore she welcomed me with a merry volt, and thanked me for the diligence I had used.” She begged the Scottish envoy to convey her most heartfelt congratulations to Mary, renewed her pledge to become the child’s godmother and, if possible, to be present at the baptism. For the very reason that Elizabeth grudged Mary her good fortune, she wished—always the play-actress eager to convince the audience of her own greatness—to appear before the world as a magnanimous patroness.

Everything seemed to have been admirably settled, and the omens pointed to peace and friendship. On the one hand, it would be impossible for Elizabeth to contest this male heir’s twofold claim to the English succession and, on the other hand, the certainty that her little son would in due time become King of England would bridle Mary Stuart’s impatience for the English crown. Once more the clouds which had from the first hovered over Mary Stuart’s destiny seem to have been happily dispelled, but, as had happened again and again, when life was prepared to give her peace and happiness, her own inmost nature drove her to fashion unrest for herself. A destiny does not acquire meaning and form from the chance happenings of the outer world; “character is destiny”; it is invariably the innate and primal laws of being that shape a life to high issues or destroy it.

I
N THE TRAGEDY OF MARY STUART
the birth of her son signified the close of the first act. Only with the opening of the second act did the situation assume a thoroughly dramatic character, aquake with internal dissensions and uncertainties. New characters appeared on the stage; the play was performed in a changed theatre; the tragedy became personal instead of political. Hitherto Mary had had to contend, somewhat ineffectively, against the rebels in her own country and against her enemies across the border; but now new powers had accrued to her, which made her mightier than all the Scottish lords put together. Simultaneously, however, her own senses rose in revolt, so that the woman in her warred against the Queen. For the first time the fervour of her blood gained precedence over the will-to-power. With the levity of passion, the awakened woman destroyed what the monarch had sedulously preserved. In an ecstasy of love scarcely paralleled in history, forgetting every other claim, she flung herself recklessly into an abyss, dragging down with her honour, law, morals, crown and country—displaying characteristics which no one had suspected in her, whether in the diligent and worthy princess or as the woman who (Queen-Dowager of France as well as Queen of Scotland and the Isles) seemed to be indifferently awaiting the course of events. During the year that ensued Mary increased the dramatic intensity of her life a thousandfold, and in this one year she shipwrecked her existence.

At the opening of the second act, Darnley appeared once more on the scene, likewise modified, and in tragical lineaments. He was alone, uncompanioned, for no one could have confidence in the man who had so shamelessly betrayed his confederates. The ambitious youth was embittered and full of impotent wrath. Having done the utmost a man can do for a woman, he expected in return, on Mary’s part, gratitude, self-sacrifice, and perhaps even love. Instead, his wife, who no longer needed him, showed him nothing but repulsion. She was inexorable. The alarmed conspirators, wishing to take vengeance on Darnley, had, on the sly, confided to Mary the bond he had signed with them before Rizzio’s murder. This proof of her husband’s complicity did not disclose to Mary anything she had not already guessed, but it confirmed her in her disdain for Darnley’s treachery and cowardice, so that she found it hard to forgive herself because her fancy had been ensnared by a man who was as worthless as he was handsome. Her detestation of him was, in part, a detestation of her own mistake. Darnley had become as loathsome to her as some horrid and venomous creature which one cannot bear to touch and, least of all, admit to the familiarities of conjugal intimacy. She could not endure breathing the same air as her husband; his proximity was as oppressive to her as a nightmare. But one thought monopolised her by day and by night—how to get rid of him, how to free herself from a position which had become intolerable.

This notion of freeing herself from Darnley was not, to begin with, overshadowed by the wish-dream of a deed of violence. Mary Stuart’s trouble was not peculiar to herself. Like thousands of other women, after a brief period of marriage she felt profoundly disappointed in her husband; so gravely disappointed that the man was now a stranger to her, with the result that the thought of his embraces and even of less intimate association with him had become insufferable. In such instances divorce seems the obvious and logical way out of the difficulty, and Mary discussed the possibility with Moray and Lethington. They pointed out to her that a divorce so soon after the birth of her child would be likely to lead to widespread gossip about her relations with Rizzio, so that ill-natured tongues innumerable would proclaim her child a bastard. It would, they declared, damage James’s title to the throne if his name were spotted by scandal, and therefore the Queen, at all costs to herself, must refrain from trying to divorce her husband.

Well, there was another possibility. While continuing to refuse herself to Darnley as a wife in the full sense of the term, Mary might keep up appearances. The pair could live together in the eyes of the world as King and Queen, while leaving one another free as far as their private lives were concerned. Evidence that Mary considered this way out is furnished by the report of a conversation with Darnley in which she suggested his taking a mistress—if possible the Countess of Moray, wife of Darnley’s chief enemy. Although the proposal was made jestingly, it was seriously intended by Mary to show her husband that she would not be mortified by his seeking sexual gratification elsewhere. Unfortunately for her scheme, however, Darnley was in thrall, and wished for no other woman in the world than his proud and strong wife. He was crazy to possess her once more, perpetually demanding the restoration of his conjugal rights, and the more ardently he wooed her, the more scornfully and decisively did she repel his advances. Her coldness, her aversion, served only to increase his ardour. Again and again he returned to the charge, giving her ever fresh reason to deplore the haste with which in the eyes of law and religion she had conceded a husband’s privileges to this graceless young man, whom she now abhorred, and to whom she was irrevocably bound.

In this cruel situation Mary Stuart did what human beings are so apt to do in such circumstances. She evaded decision, refrained from open combat and took refuge in flight. Almost all her biographers have declared it incomprehensible that she did not take a longer rest after giving birth to her child, but in four weeks forsook both castle and baby in order to take boat to Alloa, one of the estates of the Earl of Mar. In reality this flight is perfectly explicable. By the time her little James was four weeks old, an end had come to the period during which, without some special pretext, she could refuse to give herself to her unloved husband. Darnley would, without any breach of ordinary conventions, become more and more importunate. Day after day, night after night, he would clamour to possess her, and she could not endure to accept as a lover the husband whom she had ceased to love. What could be more natural then, than that she should run away from him, to place between herself and him a distance which would free her mind while freeing her body? Through the ensuing weeks and months, during the whole of the summer and far on into autumn, she saved herself by renewed flight, wandering from castle to castle, from hunting lodge to hunting lodge. If in these circumstances she did her best to amuse herself, if in Alloa and elsewhere Mary Stuart, who was not yet twenty-four years of age, thoroughly enjoyed herself whenever she could, reviving the masked balls and other entertainments of Chastelard’s and Rizzio’s days, if, unteachable as ever, she killed time merrily—this only shows with what rash nonchalance she could thrust the memory of unhappy experiences away from her. Once Darnley made a timid attempt to assert his position. He rode over to Alloa, but was brusquely received, and was not invited to stay the night. Mary had done with him. Her feeling for him had burnt up and died down again like a straw fire. He had been no more than one of those blunders which one wants to forget as soon as possible; that was what Henry Darnley had become for Mary who in the folly of her love had made him lord of Scotland and lord of her own body.

Darnley no longer counted for her. Even in Moray, her half-brother, although she had been outwardly reconciled to him, her confidence had not been fully restored and never again would she wholly trust Lethington. Yet she needed someone in whom she could put her trust. Alike as Queen and as woman, throughout her life Mary Stuart was consciously and unconsciously in search of the steadfast antipode to her own restless and inconstant nature.

Since Rizzio’s death, Bothwell had become the only man on whom she could rely. Strong though he was, life had ruthlessly driven him hither and thither. In youth, during the rebellion of the Scottish lords, he was exiled because he refused to make common cause with them. Though he was a Protestant, he was loyal to Mary of Guise, defending her against the Lords of the Congregation and continuing to resist them when the cause of the Catholic Stuarts seemed lost. In the end, however, he had had to flee the country. In France he was appointed commanding officer of the Scottish lifeguards, and while he held this honourable position at court, some of his asperities were smoothed off without any diminution in the elemental energy of his nature. Bothwell was too much the warrior to be content with a sinecure. As soon as James Stuart, his deadly enemy, turned against the Queen, he sailed across the sea to battle for the daughter of the House of Stuart. Whenever, thereafter, Mary needed a stout helper against her intriguing subjects, Bothwell was ready to man the breach. On the night of Rizzio’s murder, he jumped out of a first-storey window in order to fetch help; his boldness and circumspection rendered the Queen’s flight possible; his military renown was so alarming to the conspirators that they hastened to capitulate. No one in Scotland had hitherto done Mary such excellent service as this sturdy soldier, who was now about thirty years of age.

Bothwell produces the impression of a figure hewn out of black marble. Like Colleoni, the great condottiere, his Italian prototype of a century before, he looked coolly and challengingly athwart the times in which he lived, a man through and through, with all the harshness and brutality of overpowering virility. His family name of Hepburn had for centuries been honoured in Scotland, but one might rather have thought him of Viking or Norman stock, sprung from those untamable sea-reivers. Though a man of fair education, who could speak excellent French and had a taste for collecting books, he was full of the swashbuckling spirit of a born rebel against peaceful civic order, retaining the adventurousness of all outlaws, of such men as Byron’s Corsair. Tall, broad-shouldered, of exceptional bodily strength, equally skilled with the broadsword and the rapier, and able to steer a ship through a storm at sea, his confidence in his own powers gave him great moral (or rather unmoral) valour. He was afraid of nothing, and the law of the stronger was the only law by which he would abide—the law that would enable him to seize ruthlessly and to defend what he had grasped. But this predatoriness of his had nothing in common with the petty brawls and calculations of the other Scottish lords, whom he, ever heedless, despised, because they always assembled in large numbers for their raids and carried these out under cover of darkness. He would league himself with no man, taking his course arrogantly and challengingly in defiance of laws and customs, striking down with the mailed fist any who got in his way. Unconcernedly he did whatever he liked, permissible or unpermissible, in broad daylight. Yet for all his violence, for all his disregard of established standards (such as there were, in those days), and though he was so completely amoral, Bothwell had the merit of straightforwardness. Amid his peers, whose characters were so untrustworthy and whose actions were so ambiguous, he stands out like a beast of prey, fierce and yet royal, a panther or a lion amid slinking wolves and hyenas. Not a moral, not a humane figure, but at least a man, such as man was in the prime.

For this reason, other men hated and feared him, but his frank brutality gave him extraordinary power over women. We hardly know whether this ravager of women was handsome. Such portraits of him as have come down to us are unsatisfactory. But from these, and from such descriptions as we have of him, we cannot but think of him as he might have been painted by Franz Hals, and of that Dutch artist’s
Laughing Cavalier
—a young and bold warrior, with his hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and ready to stare everyone out of countenance. Some describe James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, as ill-favoured. But a man need not be handsome in order to win the favour of women. The aura of virility that radiates from these forcible personalities, their arrogant savagery, their ruthless violence, their atmosphere of war and victory, radiate sensual seduction. Women are apt to fall passionately in love with a man whom they simultaneously fear and admire, one who arouses in them a sense of horror and peril which exerts a mysterious lure. When such a being is not merely ultra-masculine, a bull-like and savage male animal, but is also, as was Bothwell, courtly and cultured, shrewd and adroit, he becomes irresistible. Wherever he went, this adventurer, seemingly without effort, made conquests among the fair sex. At the French court his amours were notorious; in Mary Stuart’s own circle he enjoyed the favour of one of her ladies-in-waiting; in Denmark, for his sake, a woman left her husband and her property. Yet, these triumphs notwithstanding, Bothwell was far from being a typical seducer, a Don Juan, a woman-hunter, for he did not seriously hunt women. Since he was a man of fighting temperament, his victories in this field came too easily and with too little risk. Bothwell took possession of women as his Viking ancestors had done; they were but casual booty, which came his way in the intervals between carousing and gaming, between riding and fighting; and he accepted the conquests willingly enough as earnest of his powers in the manliest of all manly sports. He took women, but he did not give himself to them. He took them because forcible seizure was the most natural expression of his will-to-power.

At first Mary Stuart paid no heed to the man in Bothwell, who was for her but one among her more trusty vassals. Just as little did Bothwell see in the Queen a young and desirable woman. With his usual bluntness and unrestraint he had openly commented on her appearance in an unseemly manner, saying: “She and Elizabeth rolled together would not suffice to make one proper woman.” They showed no erotic leaning towards one another. At one time, indeed, the Queen had been inclined to forbid Bothwell’s return to Scotland, having heard that he had spread impudent rumours about her while in France, but as soon as she had had experience of his valour and skill as a soldier she was glad to rely on him. One mark of favour followed another. He was appointed Lieutenant of the Border and, as previously said, was confirmed in his hereditary position as Lord Admiral of Scotland. He also became commander-in-chief of the forces in the event of war or rebellion. The escheated lands of the outlawed rebels were transferred to him, and as a special mark of friendliness the Queen herself chose a wife for him, Lady Jane Gordon, sister of Mary’s faithful counsellor, the Earl of Huntly. There could not be a better proof of the fact that at this juncture there was no love affair between Bothwell and Queen Mary.