An Accidental Tragedy (18 page)

In reality Mary had several options, but most of them required the eating of some humble pie served up by Catherine which was, for a Guise, unthinkable. She knew she would not be welcome at the French court as a queen dowager with no political influence,
while maintaining her own expensive rival royal court and so creating a drain on France’s wildly over-extended finances.

She had already experienced a sterile marriage to a husband whom she had treated lovingly as a younger, retarded brother and who was hardly six months dead. To contemplate a second dynastic marriage would be to re-enter the troubled world of alliances, knowing that by marrying into one princedom she would immediately antagonise all the others. She could buy herself time to reflect by entering a convent, and with two cardinals, a grand prior, and an abbess as close relatives, a suitable situation with royal comforts and diversions would not be hard to find. However, Mary was young, beautiful and elegant, educated to be courteous and a focus for the adoration of gallant nobles. She also enjoyed dancing, riding, eating and the life of the châteaux of the Loire. As Duchesse de Touraine she could retire to that beautiful province, although unfortunately not to Chenonceau, where Catherine’s masons were hard at work building her gallery across the river, and certainly not to Chambord, still a favourite choice of the court. Amboise still held blood-drenched memories, but a luxurious palace with suitable hunting grounds could easily be made available. Uncomfortably, on the Loire she would have frequent royal neighbours. However, she was still popular with the French people, for whom she was
‘La Reine Blanche’
in her white mourning, and the golden life of the Duchesse de Touraine was undoubtedly attractive.

Her last remaining choice was a return to Scotland, a country of which she knew nothing, and had only heard of its struggles insofar as they affected her mother or the kingdom of France. Since her departure from Scotland, thirteen years previously, her interests had been entirely familial or personal. Nursing her boy-king, maintaining her own court and pleasing her uncles had happily coincided with hunting, dancing and receiving the extravagant praises of poets and musicians. It is unlikely that Mary could have named more than two towns in Scotland; she only spoke Scots as a secret game with her Maries, and she had no knowledge of the religious and political divisions she would have to rule over. As far as
the impact of the Reformation on Scotland was concerned it was of no interest to her whatsoever, except that Huguenots were troublesome. During her mother’s visit to France eleven years previously, we may be sure that Mary was told that her destiny was to fill the throne of Scotland, and her duty now lay firmly in that direction. At Joinville, there had been a Guise family conference at which Mary may have been advised to return and for the moment, at least, to accept the Reformation. To avoid that duty meant taking direct action, rejecting the advances of the Scots lords and making some kind of accommodation with Catherine, and, inevitably, Mary Stewart’s enchantment with the path of least resistance took precedence over her only slight political acumen.

First she had to tie up some family loose ends in France, and she therefore went east to the city of Nancy where her sister-in-law, Claude, was the Duchesse de Lorraine. Here the old lights of festivity flickered again with family christenings and engagements followed by banquets, balls and, of course, hunting, as well as ‘all kinds of honourable pastimes within the palace’. In spite of these relaxations Mary fell into a ‘tertian ague’. This was a common form of malaria in which the fever would recur every three days while the bout lasted. During the gaps in the fever she travelled to Joinville, where her grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, nursed her in preparation for her expected return to Rheims for the coronation of Charles IX.

The coronation took place in Rheims Cathedral on 15 May 1561, but without the attendance of Mary, who was still in Joinville. Charles IX was even punier than his late brother, and the ceremony took place with the Guise cardinal and his brothers glaring at Catherine, who had only attended at the request of the Pope, and without much of the pomp seen eighteen months previously.

Mary returned to Paris on 10 June to be met by the Duc d’Orléans, the King of Navarre, the Prince of Condé and the Duc de Guise. This mixture of Huguenots and Catholics is a clear illustration of the power struggles at the heart of Charles’s court, but they loyally joined together to escort Mary to the Palace of St Germain, where she had first met the French royal
court, to be greeted by Charles and Catherine. On 24 July 1561, a fête of farewell began at St Germain which lasted four days and rekindled all her happier memories. At the fête she was celebrated by Ronsard:

Like a beautiful field shorn of flowers,

Like a picture drained of colour,

Like heaven if it lost its stars,

A tree its leaves, another its blossom,

A great palace the pomp of its king,

And a ring its precious pearl,

So careworn France loses its greatest ornament,

Its flower, its colour, its clarity.

On 29 June 1561, Mary put an end to the speculation over her future, writing to Lethington as her principal secretary and assuring him:

If you employ yourself in my service and show the good will whereof you assure me, you need not fear calumniators or talebearers, for such have no part with me. I look to results before believing all that is told me . . . and nothing passes among my nobility without your knowledge and advice. I will not conceal from you that if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the first I shall blame. I wish to live henceforth in amity with the Queen of England and am on the point of leaving for my realm. On arriving I shall need some money for my household and other expenses. There must be a good year’s profit from my mint . . .

Mary was setting out her intentions with such strident clarity that the instructions might have come from Elizabeth herself, and she was putting Lethington in the place of Cecil. Lethington certainly realised this when he had her letter copied and sent to Cecil.

There can be no doubt that the now-certain knowledge of Mary’s intention to leave France must have been a great relief to all. It was also a relief to Throckmorton, who had been unable to
reach Mary on her travels and had been told by Elizabeth not to return to England without having gained Mary’s ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh. He knew that Mary did not intend to give an answer until she had consulted her advisers in Scotland and, although Mary had told him that she would sail from Calais, he had received a rumour that she intended to sail from Nantes, landing in Scotland at Dumbarton, the port from which she had sailed to France as a child. Mary now played directly into Elizabeth’s hands and sent d’Oysel as her ambassador to England to ask for a safe-conduct if she should have to land in England, and a guarantee of an untroubled time to rearrange a journey by land. Elizabeth was furious at what she saw as gross cheek, but assured d’Oysel that she would be glad to agree once Mary had ratified the treaty, and he was peremptorily sent back to France to get it. Elizabeth also confounded Mary’s principal excuse by personally writing to the Scots lords, asking them what their advice to Mary would be – her letters contained threats and promises to them in equal measure. Before they could reply, Mary informed Throckmorton that she had no need of a safe-conduct and could sail untroubled directly to Scotland. She could not ratify the treaty without meeting with her advisers and, as to the quartering of her coat of arms, it had all been the idea of her father-in-law Henri II, and she had ceased to continue with the practice since her husband’s death. Next day, probably 20 July, Throckmorton called again and received what was clearly a well-prepared speech:

Monsieur de l’Ambassadeur, if my preparations were not so much advanced as they are, peradventure the Queen your Mistress’s unkindness might stay my voyage; but I am now determined to adventure the matter, whatsoever come of it: I trust the wind will be so favourable as I shall not need to come on the coast of England: and if I do, then, Monsieur de l’Ambassadeur, the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me; and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure, and
make sacrifice of me; peradventure that casualty might be better for me than to live; in this matter God’s will be done.

Despite what Mary had told Throckmorton, she had, of course, continued the troublesome quartering and was childishly and light-heartedly brushing the matter aside, but the end of her address to Throckmorton belied her light heart. Not for the first time she was expressing the sentiment that death was a preferable option to making up her own mind, something she felt she had now been forced to do. She was returning to Scotland with no gladness in her heart or any wish to rule the country as its queen.

Mary now went to the Louvre to oversee the despatch of her furniture and wardrobe for Rouen and Newhaven, then she left Paris again for St Germain. She made her formal farewells to Charles, Catherine and the royal court on 25 July and with her six Guise uncles ensuring that she had remembered what had been discussed at Joinville, as well as a considerable retinue, travelled towards the English Channel. Her exact route and final port of embarkation were closely guarded secrets, but by 7 August she was at Abbeville, where she had her last interview with Throckmorton. The Lord of St Colme and one Arthur Erskine were sent to Elizabeth with one last appeal for a safe conduct, although, even if Elizabeth had granted it, the actual document could not have arrive until after Mary’s departure. It was simply the crossing of a diplomatic ‘t’.

The day before she sailed, Mary sent Throckmorton two basins, two ewers, two salts and a standing cup, 368 ounces of silver-gilt in all, as her traditional present for his services. With René de Guise, Marquis d’Elbeuf; Claude de Guise, Duc d’Au-male; François de Guise, Grand Prior; the poets Brantôme and Chastelard; her four Maries; a doctor of theology and two doctors of medicine, Mary and her retinue embarked on 14 August. There were two galleys for the royal passengers, under the command of the same Villegaignon who had commanded the ships bringing her to France thirteen years previously. There was also a considerable flotilla of cargo ships carrying her furniture,
plate, dresses and jewellery as well as 200 horses and mules. The final arrangements for this had been made by the high admiral of Scotland, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whose father had been a suitor to Mary’s mother in her early widowhood. Mary had previously met Bothwell in France when he had appeared fleeing not only from creditors but also from a rash engagement to Anna Throndsen, his Norwegian mistress. Throckmorton thought Bothwell ‘a glorious, rash and hazardous young man’, and he was quite right.

As the royal galley left Calais harbour, a nearby ship sank and all hands drowned, to Mary’s total horror and moans from her retinue that it was the worst of omens. Mary refused to go to her stateroom below, but had a bed made up on the poop deck, where she spent the night watching the shoreline of France recede. Mary, one of the great weepers of history, lay in floods of tears as the country she had loved disappeared, taking with it her youth. She was an eighteen-year-old virgin, a crowned queen and a widow for whom Scotland was a completely foreign country. Mary’s nineteenth-century hagiographer, the Jesuit Joseph Stevenson, said of her new country, ‘The Scotland which could admire Knox and submit to the dictation of Elizabeth was not the home for Mary Stuart [sic].’ She was about to start a life that was totally alien to anything that she had ever dreamed of.

PART III

Scotland, 1561–68

CHAPTER SEVEN

We had landed in an obscure country

On Mary’s sea journey north there had been no hostile intervention by Elizabeth, who had in fact sent the long-awaited safe-conduct to France. English ships had been sighted in the breaks in the fog, although they were England’s normal anti-pirate patrol, and the only inopportune event was a forced landing at Tynemouth of one of the cargo vessels due to adverse winds. Unfortunately it was the cargo ship carrying much of Mary’s furniture and prized horses – the finest horses that France could supply – and since the animals carried no passports, the surprised warden of the port promptly impounded them for a month.

Mary’s arrival in Scotland was not auspicious. Even though she had forbidden the use of the lash on the rowers, her two galleys arrived unexpectedly early, on the night of Monday, 18 August 1561, in the Firth of Forth, in the midst of torrential rain and thick fog. When the poet Brantôme saw the sailors lighting lanterns and braziers, he told them that their work would not be necessary since ‘One glance from the Queen’s eyes will light up the whole sea’. The crew was not convinced and anchored in the firth for the night.

Next morning Brantôme could not see the main mast from the poop, ‘a sign that we had landed in an obscure country’, but the landing went ahead. Knox, who reported that ‘scarce could any man espy another the length of two pairs of boots’, felt the weather to be an omen: ‘What comfort was brought into the country with her, to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety.’