An Accidental Tragedy (53 page)

The year 1574 started with a letter of reassurance from the Cardinal of Lorraine but advising her, ‘dissimulate still a little and do not embitter anything’, and vowing, unconvincingly, to work for her ‘greatness and liberty’. Mary wrote yet again to Elizabeth expressing her concern at her cousin’s long silence, and begging to be told, through Fénélon, how to please her, while ‘waiting for God to inspire you to put an end to my long
troubles’. She received no reply. Shrewsbury’s policy of being strict but sympathetic drew criticism, and in April two men, Corker and Haworth, accused Shrewsbury of undue kindness to Mary and alleged that he favoured her claim to the throne. The result was a letter from the earl to Burghley: ‘I doubt not, of God’s mighty goodness, of her Majesty’s long and happy reign to be many years after I am gone . . . how can it be imagined I should be disposed to favour this Queen for her claim to succeed the Queen’s Majesty? I know her to be a stranger, a papist and my enemy.’ The rumour, which arose out of petty jealousies rather than fact, since Shrewsbury was the most meticulous gaoler, refused to go away, and a year later, on 24 December 1575, he wrote again denying the rumour that he had become Mary’s ally at Buxton. He was very sharply rebuked by Elizabeth ‘with plain charging of me favouring the Queen of Scots’. He replied, ‘As for the Queen of Scots, truly I have no spot of evil meaning to her: Neither do I mean to deal with any titles to the crown: if she shall intend any evil to the Queen’s Majesty, my sovereign, for her sake I must and will mean to impeach her: and therein I may be her unfriend or worse.’ In other words, he had no personal animosity towards Mary, unless she posed any threat to Elizabeth.

Another of Mary’s links with France parted when her brother-in-law King Charles IX died of tuberculosis in May 1574, to be succeeded by his brother, the Duc d’Anjou, as Henri III. Europe held its collective breath to see what alliances the new king would make – he was already King of Poland and had to be hastily recalled to take the French throne, and he was already accused of incest with his sister, homosexuality and black magic. He faced a disastrous economy, growing Huguenot strength under their leader Henri de Navarre and a resentful aristocracy. This left Elizabeth free to attempt negotiations with Philip over the troublesome Netherlands. Mary wrote, no longer to Catherine de Medici, but to James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow and her ambassador in Paris, expressing her sorrow at the death of Charles and wishing Henri III well.

All long-term prisoners search out any form of diversion, some often keeping, and even becoming an expert on, caged birds. In July 1574 Mary wrote to the Archbishop of Glasgow, asking him to send her some turtle doves and ‘Barbary chickens’ so that she might raise them; ‘This is the pastime of the prisoner.’ She also made further requests for cloth of gold, silver thread and headdresses, and also for her uncles to be reminded of their promises to send more caged birds. Some small dogs came from the Cardinal later in the year, and Mary wrote, ‘the little animals are the only pleasure I have.’ Mary had started to manufacture gifts for various people, especially Elizabeth, and in May, Fénélon had presented Elizabeth with a skirt of red satin embroidered with silver thread, ‘to whom the present was very agreeable’.

She wrote again to the archbishop in mid August, and it is clear from her style that she was, at last, aware that her letters were being read by Burghley and Walsingham. She mentioned the rumours that she might be proposed as a wife for Henri III, the Earl of Leicester and Don John of Austria, and she stressed that all the rumours were untrue. There was a chance that the alliance with Don John might come to fruition since he was the illegitimate half-brother of Philip and, in March 1576, he became governor of the Netherlands, an appointment he accepted on the understanding that it would be a platform for the reconversion of England and rescue and marriage to the captive Queen of Scots. The situation was complicated by the fact that Mary was technically still married to Bothwell, but in April 1578 Bothwell mercifully died, blind and insane in Denmark. In October Don John of Austria himself died during a siege in the Netherlands, thus removing another possible, if unlikely, suitor. He was at least romantic, but his proximity to the Spanish throne made him dangerous. Burghley, who knew he was lying when he said it, loudly proclaimed Don John’s death as being due to venereal disease. It was probably typhus. Walsingham wrote, ‘God dealeth most lovingly with her Majesty in taking away her enemies.’ In fact, back in 1574, Mary’s correspondence with France was suffering greatly as a result of the prolonged illness of her French
secretary, Augustine Raulet, first noted on 20 February. He had been nominated as Mary’s secretary in Scotland by the Duc de Guise in 1560 but had been sent back to France as a result of the xenophobia surrounding Rizzio. Now he had returned and had served Mary faithfully in exile, but he died on the morning of 30 August 1574, allowing the eager Shrewsbury an opportunity to search Mary’s papers. The search was fruitless, but Raulet’s death gave the Guise clan the chance to place another candidate close to their wayward relative. He was Claude Nau de la Boiselière and he arrived in early summer 1575. Nau had been a protégé of the Cardinal of Guise, who had arranged for him to study law. In some respects he was similar to Rizzio in that he dressed extravagantly and had the manners of the French court, which Shrewsbury, who spoke little or no French, found objectionable, but Mary found refreshing. Walsingham, a more objective witness, found Nau quick-spirited in Italian, Latin, and English. He merely smiled at Nau’s protestation that if his mistress failed for want of any help, ‘her Majesty [Elizabeth] would be answerable for the same before all the princes of Christendom’. Mary was so enamoured of Nau that she dictated a sort of memoir of her days in Scotland to him. In his turn he was so dazzled by her that he reported as fact her subjective account.

By September 1574 Mary was showing her usual care for her servants in asking the archbishop to find a watch – with an alarm – for Mary Seton. She was the last of the Maries to remain unmarried and was the object of devotion for Andrew Beaton, who had succeeded his father, John, as master of Mary’s household. But Mary Seton claimed a vow of perpetual chastity, presumably made while she was a child with her mistress in France. Beaton, obviously a man of some determination, went to France in 1577 to obtain an annulment for Mary. Whether it was successful or not is a mystery, since, on his return journey, the unfortunate Beaton drowned, and six years later the still-virginal Mary Seton retired to France and lived out her days in the convent of St Pierre in Reims, where Renée de Guise was abbess.

On 22 September Mary asked the archbishop to buy her some dogs, in addition to the pretty little pair she was sure her uncle the cardinal was sending her, since besides reading and necessary work she had no other pleasures. She ended her sad letter by reminding the archbishop to make sure the puppies were warmly packed for the journey.

Mary may have been concerned only with her growing menagerie, but Bess, her hostess, had a close eye on dynastic advantage. For some time she had been negotiating for her daughter, Elizabeth, to marry the Earl of Suffolk, but when she heard that the recently widowed Countess of Lennox and her son, Charles Stuart, the new earl, were to journey north, an invitation immediately went out for a meeting. Elizabeth had forbidden the countess to visit Chatsworth. The idea of Darnley’s mother, an inveterate plotter and regular resident of the Tower, coming anywhere near Mary made her blood run cold, but Rufford Abbey was a property of the Shrewsbury’s and on the countess’s route north, so a visit was planned. It lasted five days, with the two mothers locked in pre-nuptial tête-a-têtes while the nineteen-year-old children were left to each other’s company. Charles Stuart was the great grandson of Margaret Tudor and therefore had a direct claim on the crown of England, albeit through the female line, and if their marriage produced a son, he would in his turn become Earl of Lennox, with debateably a stronger claim to the English throne than that of James VI. For his peace of mind, if nothing else, Shrewsbury looked forward to the outcome: ‘This taking effect I shall be well at quiet, for there is few noblemen’s sons in England that she hath not prayed me to deal for at one time or another.’ The marriage did ‘take effect’ with great promptitude.

Elizabeth was hysterical with rage and both countesses were immediately summoned to London to be thrown into the Tower. Both of these formidable women had offended Elizabeth so often that it is not over-fanciful to imagine that they had their own regular accommodation in that grim fortress, but, thanks to the intercession of friends, they suffered no more than house arrest.
Everyone except for Bess breathed a sigh of relief when, in the autumn of 1575, a girl, Lady Arabella, was born to the couple. For Bess, this meant that Mary and her son James VI stood in the way of her becoming queen mother of a united kingdom, and Bess did not like obstacles.

Logic had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s paranoia and she hysterically included Shrewsbury and Mary in her rages, convinced that they had conspired with Bess to bring about the marriage. Mary was terrified that, at best, she might be transferred into the care of Huntingdon or, at worst, simply poisoned. She wrote to Henri III pleading for either a rescue, or the avenging of her death, and her sense of isolation increased when, on 26 December, the Cardinal of Lorraine died at Avignon. He was the last of her close advisers, and although he had embezzled large amounts of her income and had used her as a pawn in the political games of the Guise family, he represented a link with the golden days of her youth among the palaces of the Loire. She was willing to accept his death as the will of God, like all the other adversities visited upon her.

As yet unaware of the cardinal’s death, Mary was writing to the Archbishop of Glasgow on the same day, explaining why she would reject all attempts to have James acknowledged as King of Scotland. He had been crowned aged thirteen months, as soon as had been possible after she had abdicated, but she had subsequently renounced the abdication and therefore she was, in her eyes, the true ruler of Scotland. Mary wished her ambassador to make clear that the treaties of friendship between France and Scotland were treaties with herself and no one else.

One of the long-term effects of the excommunication of Elizabeth had been an increase in the persecution of the Catholics, and Mary had been no exception. Ninian Winzet had been acting as her confessor while employed ostensibly as a secretary, but he had been exiled with John Leslie, Bishop of Ross and so, for some time, Mary had been deprived of her religious observances. They had been so much a part of her life that, as a result of their absence she wrote to Pope Gregory XIII in
October 1575 asking for various concessions. Mary wanted her chaplain, a Jesuit priest called Samerie, who visited secretly, to be authorised to grant her absolution after hearing her confession. She wanted absolution also to be granted to twenty-five Catholics who had attended Protestant services only in order to avoid detection; she asked for papal forgiveness for not having refuted the insults of heretics; and, finally, she wanted to obtain
indulgentiam in articulo mortis ore dicendo Jesus Maria
, an absolute forgiveness of her sins at the moment of death simply by utterance or thought of the words ‘
Jesus Maria
’. The possibility of a violent death, either by assassination or judicial process, was very real.

At about this time Mary inscribed some lines of verse in a Book of Hours which she had kept with her since her time in France. She seems to have used this priceless medieval devotional work as a scribbling pad to pass the time during her moments of depression, and the comments are depressing in the extreme. Many of the scribblings, such as ‘was ever known a fate more sad than mine?’, are desolate and may have been written over a long period. She now accepted her fate – ‘I am no longer what I once have been!’ – and appeared to think of life as something to be endured while awaiting death. Mary was not a deep thinker, but these lines show the dark side of her character. The flashing smiles and chivalric charm had gone and imprisonment had started to crush her optimism. Five years later, in 1580, she is presumed to have written an ‘Essay on Adversity’, a collection of loose jottings on the subject of her imprisonment without any real focus, which read as if she had started to assemble her thoughts and then to fortify them with examples. Being prevented from carrying out the duty to which ‘God called me in the cradle’, Mary sought to illustrate the misfortunes of life – ‘a subject so familiar to me’ – since she felt that no one else ever had greater experience of them, certainly no one of such royal quality.

Thus she began by establishing her God-given right to rule and the uniqueness of her plight. She spelt out a plan, which she failed to follow, of examining inner torment and then physical, showing how God will finally forgive all sinners. The inevitable
examples from Scripture followed with a diversion to the classics and celebrated suicides. She accused ‘a noble and virtuous prince to whom I feel honoured to be related’ who brought his ‘illustrious name’ into disrepute by failing to confess to a small dishonour. Mary did not tell us which of her relatives did this, but the choice was wide. She ended by warning that, while humility is a great virtue, those who have been called to greatness must not avoid their divinely attributed duty. The entire work, with its many erasures, omissions and alterations, was a teenager’s version of a learned sermon delivered by a prince of the church, but at the time of composition Mary was thirty-eight years old and might have been expected to show greater maturity. The possibility of escape and restitution were no longer thought of and her only hopes for the future were an unquestioning belief in her God and the little ameliorations and relaxations accorded to life-sentenced prisoners.

Chief among those relaxations were, of course, her visits to Buxton, which she found relieved her painful joints, and, towards the end of May 1577, Nau hints at some hopeful rumour. Mary and he had received ‘very secret’ information that Elizabeth was to visit Buxton from where she would travel in disguise to Chatsworth to meet Mary. Nau was not entirely convinced of this, but Mary was certain that at last she would meet her cousin. It was an illusion and the information was completely wrong. Elizabeth had never had, from the time of Mary’s arrival in England, any intention of meeting Mary. It was a meeting from which nothing could be gained except verbal expressions of love and amity, and one which might very well lead to unflattering physical comparisons between the two women. Elizabeth has been accused of being afraid that she might have been swayed by Mary’s undoubted charm, but Mary’s was a charm which was most effective on men, while Elizabeth was susceptible only to compliments from men. If Elizabeth had any doubts as to how to act, she prevaricated brilliantly, and if there was any possibility of being put into a situation where action was essential, she deftly avoided the trap. The two queens would never meet
and in fictional portrayals of such an encounter the dramatic effect has been, at best, feeble, contributing nothing to the play.