An Accidental Tragedy (20 page)

The first test came on Sunday, 24 August 1561, five days after Mary’s arrival, when she celebrated Mass in her private chapel, as she had been promised by Lord James, who now guarded the door of the chapel, ostensibly to prevent any Scotsmen from
entering, but in fact to prevent any attack on the priest. A mob led by Lord Lyndsay demanded that ‘the idolater priest should die the death’, the Earl of Montrose attended Mass, while according to the
Diurnal of Occurrents
‘the rest [of the nobility] were at Mr Knox’s sermon’. The congregation included Randolph, who feared that Knox might ‘mar all’ with his inflexible attitude. The mob reappeared later in the day in the abbey and met some of Mary’s court, including her uncles and female attendants. These attendants were habitually referred to by Knox as ‘dontibours’, an old Scots word, sadly translatable only as ‘whores’. They all declared that they could not live without the Mass and without access to it they would return to France, an idea which Knox enthusiastically embraced, but which was, in fact, an empty threat. Mary felt, however, that some of the doubts of the Lords – especially over the Peace of Augsburg – should be put to rest, and on the following day, 25 August, the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland shows an undertaking by the queen and her council, ‘For the contentment of the whole, that none of them take on hand privately or openly to make any alteration or innovation of the state of religion, or attempt anything against the form which her majesty found publickly and universally standing at her arrival in her realm under pain of death’. As a quid pro quo worthy of Catherine de Medici, permission to attend Mass was tacitly extended to all in Mary’s personal household. Mary’s charm was having its effect on the Lords, with the young Arran alone opposing the move.

It is significant that Mary’s first direct intervention in government was to assure the Reformation supporters by an act of the Privy Council that they could expect no trouble from their Catholic sovereign. In other words, she had no religious, or political, zeal and would happily let the government be run by her advisers, without royal intervention, while she did what she did best – behave as a glittering jewel, sufficiently schooled in the arts – and used her charm to ensure a quiet reign, which may have suited her Guise advisers very well.

Nine days later, on 2 September, Mary turned that charm on
the notoriously fickle population of Edinburgh with an
entrée joyeuse
. The burgh council had had only a week to prepare for this and needed the co-operation of the craft guilds, but Mary’s pardon granted to Gillon had ensured this. She left the palace early and rode up to the castle to have lunch with the nobility, except for Châtelherault and his son, Arran. The procession later that day was politically and religiously important in that Protestants were by no means in the majority in Edinburgh, and the possibility of the faint-hearted returning to Rome at the sight of their beautiful young queen was high. Then at one o’clock Mary left the castle as ‘the artillery shot vehemently’. Crossing the drawbridge, she was met by fifty young men dressed as Moors in yellow taffeta. They had black painted legs and faces and black hats with precious rings in their mouths and gold chains on their arms and legs. During her progress down the High Street, ‘sixteen most honest men held her pall of purple velvet lined with red taffeta, fringed with gold and silk’, then, as the approach to the castle widened out, a cart with children offering silver plate – hastily purchased from the Earl of Morton and Maitland of Lethington – appeared. Mary graciously touched the plate and the cart then followed her to the palace. By now most of the population were lining the street and shouting themselves hoarse at their beautiful eighteen-year-old queen in her white silk, glittering with jewels. A gate had been built across the street at the West Bow, above which were children as if in heaven and a cloud which opened to reveal ‘a bonny bairn’ who descended with angel’s wings and presented Mary with the keys of the town, a Bible and a book of psalms bound in purple velvet. Not only were the psalms Protestant psalms but both the psalms and the Bible were in the vernacular, a totally new experience for Mary. According to Knox, who was not present, she began to frown and handed the books to Arthur Erskine. The child ‘made some small speeches and gave her three tracts the tenor of which are uncertain’ but were designed to show her ‘the perfect way unto the heavens high’. He then returned to his own cardboard heaven. The procession came to a halt at the Butter Cross just
west of what was then called the High Kirk of St Giles. Knox’s house was nearly opposite the great church, on the first floor, and the temptation for him to look at the embodiment of his greatest fear in all her royal glory must have been enormous; but he was nowhere to be seen. At the Tolbooth she was met by three virgins, one dressed as Fortune, the others as Justice and Policy; she then went down to the Mercat Cross where four more sumptuously dressed virgins greeted her at a fountain flowing with wine. At her next stop, the Salt Tron, or weighbridge, she received a stern lecture on the abolition of the Mass and a representation of the fiery fate of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who were burnt for rebelling against Moses, was acted out on a scaffold in front of her. There had been a plan to have an effigy of a priest burnt, but Huntly ‘stayed that plan’. However, the French courtiers in Mary’s entourage thought the display ‘derisive, contemptible and presumptuous’. At the Netherbow, Edinburgh’s eastern gate, a dragon – the symbol of the Antichrist – was burnt and a psalm sung; then, finally, back at Holyrood another psalm was sung and the children with their cart made a plea for Mary to accept the cupboard of plate, worth 2,000 merks, as a gift from the burgesses. She had won the hearts of the populace as only a well-trained princess of France knew how and enough of the nobility were on her side to guarantee her support in the council. But the religious opposition had to be faced, and to do this she felt that she had to turn her charm on to Knox, blithely ignoring any advice that Knox was impervious to charm. After all, she had been constantly assured by poets and courtiers in France that her charm equalled that of the very goddesses of classical times. Thus, on Thursday, 5 September, only three days after her
entrée joyeuse
and with her memory of it still fresh, Mary, the sovereign queen, met John Knox, the subject preacher, for the first of their confrontations.

Before leaving France, Mary had told Throckmorton that she felt that Knox was the most dangerous man in her kingdom and she was prepared for a battle. Mary’s resentment of Knox stemmed mainly from his pamphlet ‘The First Blast of the
Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’, published in 1558. This often quoted and seldom read tract would be more properly entitled ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Impropriety of Women holding Royal Power’ and was written as an attack on Mary Tudor. It was composed as a treatise full of Biblical precedents showing the disastrous results of female power. Knox’s timing could not have been worse since Mary Tudor died almost immediately, and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne the very mention of Knox turned her white with fury. Knox tried to calm her by casting her not as a Jezebel but as a Deborah, thus weakening his arguments and going no way to calm the Tudor rage. Mary, as a teenager and a Guise, would tolerate no criticism and would meet Knox head on.

Knox, on the other hand, had been largely ignored by Marie de Guise, whose quarrel was a temporal one with rebel nobles, and under her reign there had been very few martyrdoms compared to the bloodbaths of Mary Tudor. Knox had cast Mary as a Jezebel out to impose the Mass on Scotland and put the Reformation into reverse, neither of which were her intentions. In normal life, as his letters show, Knox was very sympathetic to women and was courteously polite to them, but in this instance he wanted Mary to be a symbol of everything he hated and he would use all his debating skills to crush her. Knox had been trained at the University of St Andrews by John Mair (or Major), one of the most brilliant minds of his time, and in subsequent life he had honed his debating technique across Europe. Mary’s training in rhetoric had been suitable for a royal princess, not a theologian, and she had simply accepted the teachings of the Cardinal of Lorraine as a dutiful daughter of the Church. The confrontation would be one-sided, and since our only record of what was said is that written by Knox himself, our knowledge of it is equally one-sided.

They met in Mary’s audience chamber, where she was attended by two of her ladies-in-waiting, and Knox was accompanied by Lord James, acting as a sort of umpire. Mary was seated throughout while Knox stood at a respectful distance, not,
as some Marian apologists have suggested, ‘towering accusingly over the Queen’. In fact, he was only of medium height, but broad-shouldered from his time as a galley slave, and in debate he spoke quietly with a pronounced English accent.

Mary started by referring to ‘The First Blast’, and how Knox had caused ‘great slaughter in England’, and, bizarrely, how he achieved all his fame by necromancy. These wild accusations were hardly worth answering, but Knox begged her patience to hear his ‘simple answers’. If to teach people to follow the truth of God was to preach sedition then he pled guilty, and as to the book which ‘seemeth so highly to offend your Majesty’, he was content that ‘all the learned of the world should judge of it’. Pointedly, he did not include Mary among the ‘learned’, and he knew she felt inferior and nervous without a Guise cardinal standing at her elbow. As a skilled debater he also knew that if she lost her temper he would win the argument. Nettling her further, he claimed that he was as content to live under her rule as Paul was to live under Nero.

Mary was forced to change tack and claimed that Knox had taught people to receive another religion than their princes could allow. Therefore, since God commands subjects to obey their princes, Knox’s doctrine cannot be of God. Mary felt that this argument was decisive, but Knox replied that subjects were not bound to follow the religion of their princes, although they are commanded to give their princes their obedience. However, if the sovereigns are exceeding their bounds, and if the subjects have the means, they may then disobey their sovereign, as a child, who is bound to obey his father, may resist him if the father is ‘stricken with a frenzy in which he would slay his own children’. This was rigorously logical but was running totally counter to everything Mary had ever been taught, and she ‘stood as it were amazed more than the quarter of an hour’. It was probably the first time in her life that anyone, apart from her childhood nurse Janet Sinclair, lovingly, had ever contradicted her, and yet here she was, a crowned queen, used to the total obeisance of her courtiers, sitting under her cloth of state in her own palace, being told that she could be disobeyed, even
removed, if she exceeded bounds drawn up, not by her, but by her subjects. She had no answer for Knox and the silence was broken by Lord James asking what had offended her. She replied in a mixture of girlish petulance and outrage: ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you and not me . . . so I must be subject to them and not they to me’.

Knox now had a wide-open goal and could afford to give the ball the gentlest of taps, assuring her that he never sought to have anyone obey him since everyone should obey God, that kings should be foster fathers to His Kirk and queens should be nurses to His people. Mary retired into her own faith, telling Knox she would defend the true Kirk – the Kirk of Rome. Knox naturally denied this but Mary said that her conscience told her it was so. Knox chided her that conscience required knowledge and feared that she had none. Mary said, ‘I have both heard and read’ and clearly fervently wished that the Cardinal of Lorraine was still by her elbow and that she had listened more carefully to his teachings instead of merely accepting them blindly. In such a close argument Mary realised that she was losing heavily. Knox then struck a final blow, telling her that ‘Christ Jesus neither said, nor yet commanded Mass to be said at his Last Supper, seeing that no such thing as their Mass is made mention of in the whole Scriptures.’ Obviously Mary had not read the Scriptures in their entirety, but merely said that if her authorities were present they would be able to answer him. Knox pounced on this saying that he would be glad to answer them. Mary, now thoroughly rattled, threatened him that such an event might happen sooner than he thought, and Knox, as was his custom, got the final word by saying if it happened in his lifetime it would indeed be sooner than he thought. To her relief, Mary was then called in to dinner, probably since a prearranged period had passed, and Knox prayed that she would be as blessed in Scotland as Deborah was in Israel.

Mary managed to retire before the inevitable tears, but Randolph reported, ‘Mr Knox spoke upon Thursday to the Queen, he knocked so hastily upon her heart that he made her
weep.’ She could not understand why, when she had made no attempt to impose Catholicism on her people, Knox should be so vehement. Mary had started by directly accusing Knox of stirring up dissent and of using necromancy, charges that she could not possibly maintain, but, having heard of his forceful style of argument, she had decided to attack from the start. Knox was polite, if not deferential, and argued from his base of total Protestant conviction. Defeated by this, Mary alternately hectored or retired into a ‘little girl lost’ attitude. Her faith had been part of her life since birth, while Knox had departed from the Church of Rome as a result of internal debate, giving him all the vehemence of the convert. Thus Knox could not believe that Mary’s simplicity was genuine: ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit, and an indurate heart against God and His truth, my judgement faileth me.’ His judgment had failed him, since he could not believe that everyone was not a fanatical zealot cast in his own mould. Zealots see only faith or heresy, politicians see plots and conspiracies everywhere, lovers see devotion or betrayal in every action, and none of them can imagine a simple middle ground of stability or peace. Mary was no zealot, had no head for politics, and loved only physical pursuits and the calm contemplation of beauty. In her highly percipient essay, ‘Godly Reformer, Godless Monarch’, Dr Jenny Wormald says that ‘Mary saw him [Knox] not as messenger of the Lord so much as a profound irritant, a huge and buzzing fly – a pest’.