An Accidental Tragedy (23 page)

This was a high-spirited court headed by a nineteen-year-old girl, surrounded by her four best friends, all with similar
tastes, and full of physical energy. The masques gave them a golden chance for dressing up and, led by the tall Mary, the ladies of the court on occasions disguised themselves as Edinburgh housewives and, with much giggling, went unescorted into the town. In this case half of the fun must have been escaping from the halberdiers, chamberlains and servants who watched their every move. When Mary was
en travestie
, with her long legs exposed, Brantôme confessed that he could not tell whether she was a beautiful woman or a handsome boy, and this mixture of freedom and flattery was a heady brew for royalty usually closely confined by strict convention. Even for Mary’s middle-aged courtiers her behaviour and the atmosphere it engendered were a welcome breath of fresh air from the weightier matters of the court. The Privy Council sat on 29 February and did not meet again until 19 May; Mary – who was in Edinburgh at the time – attended neither session. It seemed a carefree existence.

Mary had created a replica of life in the Valois courts of her childhood, devoid of all political cares. Her private court did not involve itself in the affairs of Scotland, and, apart from her allowance of the thirds, she cost the country nothing at all, while providing a permanent party at Holyrood. Provided she ensured that her close courtiers, especially the foreign elements among them, took no part in Scottish affairs, Mary would be tolerated as a highly decorative figurehead.

In May one result of being a beautiful and unmarried monarch manifested itself grimly. Knox, who had a highly efficient intelligence service, was informed that Arran and Bothwell had conceived a plot to ride to Falkland Palace, where Mary was in residence, seize the queen and murder Mar and Lethington, Knox’s enemies. Knox was a zealot, but he was no fool, and he set about defusing the danger by sending for Arran, who now told him that when the queen was taken she would undergo a forced marriage to himself [Arran]. Arran also told Knox that he knew that Mary was secretly in love with him. Knox realised that the man was totally mad and counselled him to wait, instead of
which Arran fled to his father Châtelherault’s house at Kinneil, near Bo’ness, where he confessed all to the duke. Acting with prompt good sense for once in his life, Châtelherault locked his mad son in his room, but he failed to mount a proper guard, whereupon Arran wrote a letter, of unknown content, to be given to Mar by Randolph. He then escaped by the traditional method of knotting sheets together and climbing down them into the garden. Randolph received the letter when he was riding in Holyrood Park with Mary and immediately sent the news on to Mar that Arran and Bothwell were plotting treason. Both were swiftly arrested, although, as normally happened, Bothwell escaped to his castle, Hermitage. Arran, now totally mad, was locked up in Edinburgh Castle, where he believed Mary was in bed with him. He was shackled, but he sent for a saw to cut off his legs, and, since he was now no danger to anyone, he was eventually released into the care of his family, who kept him in more or less benign imprisonment with occasional releases until his death in 1606. In this instance, Knox had acted as a useful alarm bell on Mary’s behalf.

More distant warning bells came from France, where the freedom of Huguenots to worship in their own way had suffered a severe setback. There had been an attempt at reconciliation between Catholics and Huguenots in October 1561 at the Colloquy of Poissy, but little had been achieved except for a very uneasy truce. Then, on 1 March 1562 at Vassy, a Huguenot village in the Champagne region, the Duc de Guise had found the Protestant villagers holding a church service contrary to the agreements in force. According to one source – and there are many versions of what took place – he sent some armed men to stop what he considered to be blasphemy and the dispute grew to an armed conflict ending with thirty dead Huguenots. This was a sufficient spark for the Huguenot Louis de Condé to start the first of France’s seven Wars of Religion. Randolph was inundated by requests for passage through England by Scots volunteers eager to join the Huguenot cause, and over 1,000 Scotsmen left from Mary’s kingdom to take arms against her uncle. Catherine de
Medici was forced to support the Huguenot Condé to prevent the power of the Guises becoming all-powerful, thus putting politics and her family before the interests of the Catholic Church. This misfired badly when Condé announced Catherine’s support as a call to arms for all Huguenots, and she was forced hastily to backtrack.

Mary herself was brought into contact with Catholic Europe in July when the promised papal nuncio, Nicholas de Gouda, arrived in Edinburgh. He had travelled in secret, but knowledge of his presence leaked out and the street cry was for true followers of the Reformed Kirk to make ‘a noble sacrifice to God and wash their hands in his blood’. Having travelled from safe house to safe house, he entered the capital on foot with a Scots priest, Edmund Hay, and was admitted into Mary’s presence, with, according to legend, the four Maries guarding the door, an hour before the time that Knox was due to start preaching in St Giles. De Gouda spoke in Latin, which Mary claimed to understand, but, in fact, she had to rely entirely on Hay as a translator. De Gouda delivered an appeal from Pope Pius IV begging Mary to accept letters once again inviting the Scottish bishops to attend the Council of Trent, where the Counter-Reformation was being put into motion. Mary, according to de Gouda, was nervous throughout the interview and kept glancing at clocks, but assured him that she would rather die than abandon her faith. She also refused him a safe conduct and advised him ‘to keep in some secret chamber’.

Later she accepted the letters, but John Sinclair refused to meet de Gouda who commented, ‘Hoc de illo!’ (‘So much for him!’). After a meeting with the Bishop of Dunkeld, which he had to attend disguised as a banker’s clerk, de Gouda’s final conclusion was one of despair: ‘Et haec quidem de Episcopis’ (‘And so much for the bishops’). Of Mary he said, dismissively, ‘She has been nurtured in princely luxury and numbers scarce twenty years.’ He went on, ‘Although religion is most dear to her, yet, as I have said before, she cannot execute the holy desires of her heart, because she is alone and well-nigh destitute of human
aid.’ Needless to say, by ‘human aid’ he meant Catholic doctrinal advice.

Mary’s wish for a face-to-face meeting with Elizabeth had now grown urgent. She had written to Elizabeth on 5 January 1562 offering to create a new treaty in favour ‘of you and the lawful issue of your body . . . we shall present to the world such an amity as has never been seen’. Her letter was backed up by Lethington on the same day, asking Cecil to ‘push forward’ with the plan, and again, on 29 January, saying that Mary ‘is a great deal more bent on it than her councillors dare advise her’. In Scotland the Protestants favoured the meeting while the Catholics were wary of it, and in England the Privy Council was deeply suspicious. Lethington was in London petitioning Elizabeth directly, while Elizabeth objected on the grounds of seeming to ally herself with a niece of the anti-Huguenot faction. Then, on 29 May, Mary met with Randolph, who tried once more to delay a meeting, suggesting postponement for a year since Elizabeth could not travel far from London during the French crisis. Mary, while ‘tears fell from her cheeks’, avowed that she would rather forfeit her love for her uncles than lose ‘amity’ with her sister. By mid June Elizabeth wrote to Mary agreeing, in principle, to a meeting. Mary was so overjoyed that she sent Elizabeth a heart-shaped diamond, and melodramatically showed Randolph that she kept Elizabeth’s letter next to her skin. ‘If I could put it nearer to my heart, I would.’

The lengthy memorandum by Cecil agreed a suitable midway meeting place between York and the River Trent between 20 August and 20 September. The terms of the meeting were that Mary must ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, while Elizabeth was not obliged to discuss any subject offensive to her. Mary would pay her own costs – Elizabeth had a cautious way with money – and would change her Scots currency for English at Berwick, where she was not allowed to pass with more than 200 people in her train, although her final court could number 1,000, all of whose names would be sent to Cecil at least ten days before their departure from Scotland. Mary could hear Mass privately. It was a
supreme civil servant’s agreement with every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed. Elizabeth sent Mary a portrait and the latter asked Randolph if it was a true likeness, to which he replied that she would soon be able to judge for herself. By 8 July Cecil had, through gritted teeth, prepared a safe-conduct for Mary, who was preparing her council for the journey south. Cecil had even taken possession of an elephant, which would carry an effigy of Peace for the inevitable accompanying pageant. Châtelherault claimed he had a diseased arm and could not travel, while Huntly, his Catholic suspicion of Elizabeth coming to the fore, had a sore leg and had to remain at home. Randolph believed neither of these schoolboy excuses.

Four days later, on 12 July, Protestant England went to war with Catholic France as the Duc de Guise strengthened his hand by hiring more ‘Switzers’ [Swiss mercenaries], and Catholic troops started to pour into France from Spain, Savoy and the Papacy. Elizabeth wrote to Mary, ‘Our good sister will well understand and consider how unmeet it is for us and our councils to be so careless of the time as to depart from these parts.’ Everything was cancelled, with both sides protesting that this was only a temporary postponement, but with everyone, apart from Mary herself, foreseeing that such postponements would be a regular feature of the plans for future proposed meeting.

Mary’s reasons for wanting the meeting were politically naïve. If she were to become legally established as Elizabeth’s heir, in default of Elizabeth having children of her own – Elizabeth was thirty – then Mary’s children would inherit the crown of England to add to that of Scotland. Ironically, this was exactly what would, in fact, take place. Mary was relying solely on her personal charm to achieve Elizabeth’s acceptance, since Elizabeth would gain nothing by the arrangement except peace and ‘amity’ on her northern border. Mary’s charm was legendary, honed by Diane de Poitiers and applauded by the French court, but courtiers are by nature sycophantic, and, in reality, her charm had failed totally with the politically minded Catherine de Medici. Mary’s chances of success with Elizabeth, backed by
Cecil, one of the sharpest political intellects in Europe, whose Treaty of Edinburgh she resolutely refused to sign, were precisely nil.

What Mary could not understand was that raising the subject of the succession meant discussing two completely forbidden subjects: Elizabeth’s marriage intentions and, more dangerously, the inevitability of her death, of which she had an unreasoning horror. She had a deeply seated fear that she was the result of a union condemned by the Pope and that she would join her father Henry VIII in Hell. She had no wish to look at her winding-sheet before her time. Admittedly this fear only arose at moments of extreme depression, but discussion of the succession could bring it boiling to the surface.

As to marriage, Elizabeth had often said privately, ‘First there is love, then there is marriage and then there is death,’ and such was, indeed, her mother’s cruel experience. Realising that a marriage was thought to be a dynastic imperative, she agreed to accept the suits of all comers, thus pleasing everyone, and then confused everyone by refusing them all. Her policy of acceptance and postponement worked superbly, although it sometimes infuriated even Cecil. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that she had only a dynastic, and probably loveless, marriage to contemplate. She had, as a young queen, been romantically in love with Lord Robert Dudley, her master of horse. At the time, Dudley was married to Amy Robsart, whom he neglected disgracefully, and the court abounded in gossip of the affair which ended in tragedy on 8 September 1560. Amy, alone in Oxfordshire, had given her servants leave to attend a local fair, but on their return they found their mistress dead at the foot of the staircase with a broken neck. On hearing the news, Mary is reputed to have said, ‘The Queen of England is going to marry her groom and he has killed his wife to make way for her.’ After his inevitable exile, Dudley, whom she nicknamed ‘My Eyes’, remained at Elizabeth’s side until his death on 4 September 1588 – for Elizabeth, a vivid example of love ending in death.

It was never Elizabeth’s intention to meet a woman, reputedly
more beautiful than herself and whose claim to the throne did not involve divorces, to hold negotiations involving talk of marriage and death, none of which would hold any great political advantage. Mary lacked the political skills to understand this, but by August she realised that the meeting would not take place in 1563. A relieved Cecil was able to return his performing elephant.

Mary’s usual reaction to being thwarted was to burst into tears and take to her bed, but in this case she decided on physical activity as a distraction, and on 11 August she started on a tour of her northern provinces. North of Perth, Scotland was virtually a foreign country for her. In the north-west of the country the Earl of Argyll ruled Gaelic-speaking lands from north of Dumbarton to the Outer Hebrides, while in the northeast the Gordon earls of Huntly ruled from Aberdeen to Inverness. Both men held their own sheriff courts and each regarded their own areas as private fiefdoms, with the Highlanders themselves feeling more loyalty to their own chiefs than to a monarch in Edinburgh whom they had never seen. The Lowlanders regarded the Highlanders as almost subhuman; an Act of the Scottish parliament in 1600 defined them as ‘a barbarous and evil disposed people’.

Establishing herself in her Guisian splendour among these people was an excellent reason for her journey, and Mary knew that making a royal progress was one of the aspects of queenship at which she excelled. However, Lord James and Lethington felt that there was another more pressing reason for her journey. Mary would be visiting Aberdeen, the centre of the Huntly dominions. After their meetings in France and St Andrews, she already distrusted Huntly as a loose cannon whose devotion to the Catholic faith was liable to cause as much trouble as Knox’s Protestant zealotry. But while Knox’s ranting might lead to civil disorder, Huntly commanded a large private army. He had been in and out of prison for most of his life, captured by the English at Pinkie, imprisoned by Marie de Guise, and then released, and after Marie’s death he had suggested to Mary in
France that he would lead a Catholic rising if she landed at Aberdeen. He was fifty years old, an excessive eater and drinker, hugely fat, with a wife whom it was rumoured maintained a private coven of witches. George Buchanan said of her, ‘she was a woman with the passions and purposes of a man’. Mary was easily persuaded that Huntly should be brought into line if a legal reason could be found.