An Accidental Tragedy (5 page)

On 27 July, Mary, accompanied by Lennox with 2,500 cavalry and 1,000 infantry, travelled to Stirling in state along the path taken by the messenger who had delivered the news of her birth to James V. She was only some eight months old, still being suckled by her wet nurse, but no one who saw the procession could have been in any doubt that it was the progress of a queen. Mary was firmly in the care of Marie de Guise, and Arran had no further negotiating power.

The castle was, if anything, more impregnable than Edinburgh. It had also received the attentions of James V and had magnificent carved roundels in the French style and a great hall that, it was rumoured, could seat 400. Thanks to Marie’s clandestine removals from Linlithgow it was furnished to the standards expected of a royal palace. The castle was the first royal building in Scotland to have a Chapel Royal. There were gardens within the walls and here Mary could be brought to womanhood in perfect safety. Even Sadler, used as he was to his king’s extravagances at Hampton Court, was impressed and reported of the mother and child, ‘she is very glad to be at Stirling. Her daughter did grow apace and soon she would be a
woman if she took of her mother who is indeed the largest stature of women.’ Although in later life her weight would become a major problem for her, Marie was still an attractively tall woman.

Henry, trying desperately to keep control of a deteriorating situation at 500 miles distant, now asked that only Mary be lodged in the castle and that her mother be lodged in the town with only limited visiting rights. He was quite right in diagnosing what everybody on the ground could see: Marie was totally in charge of the situation. His request was simply ignored.

Sadler, however, cautious as usual, asked to see the child Mary again and she was obediently displayed, in good health after recovering from a bout of chickenpox. Arran, realising that he had now lost any chance of deceiving anybody, decided, as he usually did, to join the winning side and met Beaton, who arranged for him to make a public confession of his apostasy and to receive absolution. Arran also gave his son, James Hamilton, into the cardinal’s care in the castle of St Andrews. Now, all the power of Scotland was united around Mary, and her mother could proceed immediately to the next vital stage.

Mary’s coronation took place on 9 September 1543. She was exactly ten months old and can have remembered nothing of it in later life. The ceremony was held in the Chapel Royal in Stirling with, according to Sadler, ‘such solemnity as they do use in this country, which is not very costly’. Arran carried the crown – as his descendant, the Duke of Hamilton does to this day – Lennox carried the sceptre and Argyll the sword of state. Mary was carried by her mother, and Beaton, in the scarlet vestments of a cardinal, conducted the ceremony. The crown had last been worn by James V at the coronation of Marie; now it was being held by the cardinal above the tiny queen’s head. She was duly anointed with the holy oil mixed with balm – chrism – and immediately became God’s anointed. She was now possessed of certain holy powers – such as curing scrofula, or the King’s Evil, with a touch – and her wearing of the crown, with the secular power represented by it, had been given to her by divine right. She was, in effect, two people in one: Mary Stewart, a
ten-month-old baby, and Queen Mary, verging on being half human and half divine in one body. In later life, when speaking as queen, to show the presence of both elements she would refer to herself as ‘we’. Adherence to these quasi-medieval beliefs would contribute to the end of the reign of the house of Stewart 200 years later.

The new queen behaved extremely badly throughout the ceremony, screaming constantly so that no one could hear the nobility pledging their often hypocritical allegiance. The heralds, whose duty it was to announce Mary’s lengthy new titles in full, simply gave up the task, and while Janet Sinclair put her new queen in her night cradle the court attended a ball in the great hall. The pro-English lords were absent, and there now seemed no possibility of them being able to carry out their promises to Henry. Marie de Guise had demonstrated that she was not simply the queen mother, to be respected and quietly bypassed, but a woman of skill and determination, representing a Franco-Scottish power base that could not be ignored. Henry was left with his Treaty of Greenwich, now worthless, and never again would he trust the Scots.

Although it was autumn, the court could still for the moment enjoy itself with hawking, hunting and dancing. Musicians and painters flocked to Stirling, and Marie, for once free of her dynastic cares, started to enjoy the pleasures of young widowhood. She was twenty-eight years old and sexually attractive, so her simplest way to ensure the loyalty of her squabbling nobility was to play the marriage game. Arran could be bought by power and money but Lennox’s favour could be bought with the flicker of an eyelash. He was cosmopolitan, having been a lieutenant in the Garde Écossaise, a group of aristocratic mercenaries who acted as the French king’s personal bodyguard. He was sophisticated and could easily beguile the ladies of the court with his elegant manner.

Such a flirtation with one person could be dangerous unless balanced by another, and Marie had a perfect foil in Patrick Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. He had already been exiled for
arrogant unruliness and was reputed, wrongly, to be a royal bastard – a slander he did nothing to correct. Hereditary lord admiral, he was entitled to the profits from the sales of all ships wrecked on the coasts of Scotland, giving him a steady and dependable income. His castles were Crichton, near Edinburgh, and the grim tower of Hermitage in the Middle March, held on the royal behalf, but from where he could challenge or welcome any force from England as the fancy took him. His behaviour would have been recognisable to the knights of the twelfth century, with violence as the immediate answer to any problem; today he would enthusiastically embrace the code of honour of the Mafia. He was married, but as soon as he realised that he could soon be the stepfather of the queen he gained a rapid annulment.

Lennox and Bothwell vied as to who should be the ‘most gallzeart in their clothing’ and ‘behaved themselves in the queen’s presence sometimes in dancing, sometimes in shooting, sometimes in singing and jousting and running of the great horse at the lists, with all other knightly games that might satisfy the queen’. They were carrying out the sort of courtship which had delighted Eleanor of Aquitaine 400 years previously in her Courts of Love. The chronicler Lindsay of Pitscottie said Marie’s court ‘was like Venus and Cupid in the time of fresh May’.

The commanding presence of the court was undoubtedly Marie, the queen dowager, but the jewel at its heart was the infant Queen Mary. Marie made sure that the child was treated with the dignity due to her, and when she was allowed to watch the court dancing its galliards and pavanes, the ladies and gentlemen would bow gravely to the child before taking their first steps. When the ever-watchful Janet Sinclair decided it was time for Mary to be taken to bed, the chamberlain would call out, ‘The Queen retires!’ The dancing would stop and the entire company would drop onto one knee. Mary would never have seen the armed guards who surrounded her at a discreet distance, but would have been aware of the attention she was paid by courtiers privileged enough to come near to her. Hardened
warriors like Bothwell would boast that the infant queen had smiled at them and they lifted their caps to her as she watched concourses of men on horseback ride out with birds of prey on their forearms, although she was too precious to be allowed to join them beyond the castle walls. Her young world was full of music, either at frequent balls or, more regularly, in the Chapel Royal, where sacred music by Robert Carver and Robert Johnson accompanied the Mass. She could not have remembered any precise details of this time, but the first adult influences on her infant mind were of music, dancing and courtly obeisance. She would not have known of the desperate scheming taking place just below the surface of the glittering court.

Marie was an expert at playing the game of courtship, but Bothwell could only think one step ahead and spoiled the game by publicly announcing Marie’s non-existent promise of marriage. Lennox now felt he was an abandoned lover and slouched away to sulk in his fortress at Dumbarton. At a stroke, Marie’s carefully constructed unity looked as if it might fall apart.

There was, of course, the strong possibility of help from France, and the Duchesse Antoinette wrote to her daughter, ‘I do not doubt that the King for his part will give you all the help he can. Your brother the Duc d’Aumale and I will petition him.’ Realising that Marie was now in trouble, François I acted by sending a fleet, money, arms and matériel and two ambassadors, de Brosse and Mesange. Lennox seized the treasure, but was reminded that by doing so, as a French citizen, he was committing treason. He knew that the French had a short way with traitors, involving a long and painful death, and was immediately reconciled to Marie’s cause. Lennox now extracted a promise of marriage from Marie, and she agreed with Arran that Lennox and he had the authority to administer the kingdom jointly. In return Lennox allowed the ambassadors to distribute 59,000 crowns among the nobility, and the unity of the First Estate which Marie had achieved, having wobbled dangerously, was restored.

Arran, like Marie, had naturally not meant any of his praises of
Lennox, and he took the extreme action often rashly favoured by the slighted coward; he immediately marched against him at Glasgow Muir and was badly trounced. But Lennox now knew that his chance of sole power in Scotland was illusory, and he fled south to London where, on 29 June 1544, he married Henry VIII’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. Their son was Henry Darnley.

Marie’s court now had French ambassadors and their retinues restored, and she was enjoying her motherhood free from political conflicts. Arran and Beaton were her allies and she could regard the defection of Lennox as one less complication. The infant queen was where a daughter should be – in the direct care of her mother – and adored by everyone. Marie had gained a total victory without a shot being fired or a drop of blood being spilt, and it did not escape her notice that Henri, the French Dauphin, and his Italian bride, Catherine de Medici, had, at last, become parents of a son, François, so a Catholic dynastic marriage across the Channel could now be regarded as a strong possibility.

Henry, whose fury was increasing daily, now rashly seized and burnt some innocent Scots merchantmen and so gave the Scottish parliament the excuse to make an official repudiation of the Treaty of Greenwich. The Act of the Scottish Parliament stated, ‘The King of England has violate [sic] and broken the said peace . . . the said contracts to be expired in themselves and not be kept in time coming.’ By 11 November letters in the name of eleven-month-old Mary were sent to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, asking for protection for Scottish ships trading to Lower Germany, i.e. Hamburg and Lübeck. Her seals were in the hands of Arran, and the council and the letters acknowledged the presumed fact that Scotland was now at war with England. Henry had written a furious letter to Arran in October accusing him of having gone back on his word – a word which had cost Henry £1,000 to acquire. Henry’s herald warned Arran and the council that death and destruction were at hand, causing Beaton to assure Henry that he was as desirous as any subject of either
realm to ‘entertain the concord’ that had existed between Henry and his late king. Beaton did not mean it, and Henry believed not a word of it. He said that Beaton ‘worketh only to please France’.

Sadler was isolated and under surveillance. ‘I am not able to do his majesty the service where my poor heart would . . . the whole body of the realm is inclined to France,’ he wrote. In England, Henry had started on the long decline of his later years, his ulcerated leg swelling to such a degree that he was intermittently confined to bed and, in spite of the careful nursing of his last wife, Catherine Parr, was in continual pain. His temper had always been short and now he was in a constant rage against Marie and the Scots for their repudiation of the Treaty of Greenwich. He had never made empty threats and had no intention of starting now.

On 20 December 1543, Henry’s herald, Henry Ray, Berwick Pursuivant, told the Scots that the raid at Solway Moss a year before was regarded in London as an act of war, and therefore Scotland should now make ready to do everything to please Henry or defend itself.

In May of 1544, the Earl of Hertford disembarked 15,000 men at Granton, three miles north of Edinburgh. His instructions were precise and savage.

CHAPTER TWO

One of the most perfect creatures

Mary was now eighteen months old, sturdy and starting to grow tall, even as a toddler, playing in the spring sunshine with her attentive nurses inside the safety of Stirling Castle. She was naturally unaware that to possess her had become the urgent aim of the rulers of Western Europe.

Three powerful men ruled most of the continent. In England it was the 53-year-old Henry VIII, unchallenged domestically but aware that his northern border could be threatened by Scotland. He knew that, alone, Scotland was too poor to mount more than annoying border-raids, but Henry was the only Protestant king in Europe, and Scotland could count on support – moral from Rome and practical from France. Henry’s English reformation had made him no friends.