Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  Under armed escort of more than three thousand men, the seven-month-old queen was moved to safer ground that summer. But she went not to Edinburgh as Henry had demanded but to Stirling Castle, the great medieval stronghold much beautified and domesticated by Mary’s father James. This castle, with its lovely new French-inspired palace building, belonged to Mary’s mother through her marriage contract. Now ensconced there with her daughter, Mary of Guise’s own power was greatly increased. She was keen to appear conciliatory to their powerful neighbour and requested Sadler’s presence at Stirling where she asked him to assure his king ‘that as nothing could be more honourable for her and her daughter than this marriage, so she desired the perfection thereof with all her heart’.35 Again, she wished to show off her daughter, this time with evident maternal pride at how tall she was growing and how advanced she seemed, declaring, ‘that her daughter did grow apace; and soon,’ she said, ‘she would be a woman, if she took of her mother’.36 This, as Sadler reminded Henry, was a reference to the queen mother’s own unusual height, a general characteristic of the physically splendid Guises which was shared too by Mary Queen of Scots.

  By the beginning of September, Sadler’s much exercised credulity was finally worn thin when the irresolute Arran relinquished his support of the English and reformed religion and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton. The volte-face was further underlined by the Earl of Lennox, home after many years in France fortified with French cash and promises of support, who later that month joined the pro-English party solely to continue in opposition to his arch rival Arran. No imperative was more important to a Scotsman than maintaining the tribal status quo and the Lennox – Hamilton hostility was one of the dynamos of Scottish history at the time. In the midst of all this duplicity, the baby at the eye of the storm was crowned Mary Queen of Scots on 9 September 1543, aged nine months. It was an ancient but modest ceremony, ‘with such solemnity as they do use in this country, which is not very costly’.37 The pro-English noblemen refused to attend.

  Sadler realised that he could trust no-one when the factions were so opportunistic and shifting, and the noblemen within them motivated by frustrating old enemies rather than consolidating new friends. Nonplussed by the dour Celtic passions which could keep alive ancestral feuds over centuries he expostulated: ‘There never was so noble a prince’s servant as I am so evil intreated as I am among these unreasonable people; nor do I think never man had to do with so rude, so inconsistent, and beastly a nation as this is.’38

  As the baby Mary peacefully continued her life circumscribed by sleep, food and play, the tensions in her kingdom intensified. Although the Treaty of Greenwich, promising her in marriage to Prince Edward of England, had been ratified, albeit belatedly, her mother, desperate to try and lure Lennox back to her pro-French cause, offered the greatest prize of her daughter and the kingdom to him.39

  Marriage to the infant Queen of Scots, a marriage that would make him king, thereby obliterating Arran’s power and his rival claim as next in line to the throne, was on the face of it an irresistible offer. There was the small matter of the age gap of twenty-six years but, although Lennox entered into negotiations with the queen mother for a while, he knew the offer was merely a ruse to defuse his capacity for trouble. Already his gaze had alighted on another royal bride, Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor, and niece of Henry VIII, rather closer in age to himself, whose advantages of birth would become immediately available to him. The dream of kingship, however, would be worked out in the subsequent generation. The marriage of Lennox in 1545 with this strong-willed, red-headed Tudor, full of pride in her royal blood, produced an ill-fated son, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley.

  Henry VIII was increasingly impatient with the Scottish lords’ refusal to submit to his demands. He misunderstood the complex loyalties and shifting alliances of interest, which only included him and the English cause to the extent that they could extract more English gold through unsubstantiated promises of support. However his intimidation and threats of reprisals did not force the mettlesome Scots into compliance. In fact it had the contrary effect. In December 1543, their Parliament solemnly annulled the Treaty of Greenwich: the marriage, the peace and the small concessions to the reformed religion were all duly cancelled. It was obvious that the ‘auld alliance’ with France was again pre-eminent and Henry and the English were clothed in their ancient habit of the ‘auld enemie’. Perhaps, in reality, it had ever been thus.

  Henry’s revenge was to be bloodthirsty and terrible. The first raid he launched was in May 1544. The directions to his executor Hertford were as merciless as they were exact: ‘put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon [them] for their falsehood and disobedience’.40 The series of invasions, burnings, massacres and lootings that followed were to become known as ‘the Rough Wooing’. But in love as in war, Henry’s judgement had become skewed with illness and age. He would never manage now to unite the two kingdoms in his lifetime, although that possibility tantalizingly remained throughout the lifetime of his children and came to haunt his daughter Elizabeth.

  At the beginning of 1543, the young Lady Elizabeth was as far away from the English throne as she had ever been. Still illegitimate, still barred from the succession, she and her half-sister Mary, nevertheless, were on warmer terms with their father and now included in court ceremonial. But they remained marginal to the future of the monarchy. However, that spring Henry’s mind turned to the fundamental issue of securing the Tudor dynasty. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that his god-like being was mortal after all. Hugely obese and in failing health, he suffered excruciating pain from a chronically ulcerated leg. In June, Parliament formally restored Mary and then Elizabeth to the succession, to follow their half-brother Edward. However, Henry did not choose at the same time to reinstate the legitimacy of both his daughters, leaving them with a fundamental insecurity and vulnerability to counterclaims on their throne.

  At this point it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would ever become Queen of England, but her restoration to the succession made the dream at least possible. Aged nearly ten, this clever, watchful, ambitious girl was no longer a child and was beginning instead to think about her own destiny. She was uncritically adoring of her distant father and grateful for the warmth and authority of her new stepmother, Catherine Parr, a mature and intelligent woman who was herself avid for education and self-improvement. That summer Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary had been summoned to court to meet the young widow and then attended as special guests the sixth and last wedding of their father. Closer to him than she had ever been previously, Elizabeth’s most vivid memories of Henry as a father and king would date from these last three years of his life when the turmoil of his private life was over and he turned once more to engage in self-aggrandisement abroad. Ill-judged and costly as these grandiose schemes may have been, they energized the ageing king with something of the charismatic vitality and splendour of his youth.

  It is impossible to know what Elizabeth knew of her father’s military campaigns against both their Scottish neighbours and the French in the summer of 1544. But he was in her thoughts when, on the last day of July, she wrote her first extant letter, to her stepmother Catherine Parr, and ended this exercise in courtly Italian with the sentiments: ‘I humbly entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to his majesty you will deign to recommend me to him, entreating ever his sweet benediction and likewise entreating the Lord God to send him best success in gaining victory over his enemies, so that your highness, and I together with you, may rejoice the sooner at his happy return.’41 Elizabeth was living at St James’s Palace, immersed in her books and study, reading and translating from Latin and Greek the stories of classical battles and mythic heroes. While she laboured at home, her own flesh and blood hero Henry was so revivified by war that he led the siege of Boulogne him
self in a last gesture of defiance against the French, his doctors and the approach of death. Eventually he entered the city in triumph in the middle of September. For that moment, perhaps, he felt he had turned back the years.

  Elizabeth was at Leeds Castle in Kent to welcome him home, an awe-inspiring father and, it would seem to her then, a Hercules among men. Although when she was queen she was to choose equivocation and peace rather than confrontation and war, all her life Elizabeth was to consider it as the highest compliment to be likened to him, the man she loved and admired more than anyone; ‘my own matchless and most kind father’.42 The king she saw in the last years was an ageing old lion but in his young daughter Elizabeth’s opinion, he was ‘a king, whom philosophers regard as god on earth’.43

  As queen she was to invoke the glorious reputation of her father whenever she felt at all defensive as a woman with her all-male government ranged against her, or facing military aggression from abroad: ‘though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had’,44 she was to tell her Lords in November 1566, when she was thirty-three and still angrily resisting their pressure to marry or otherwise settle the succession. And writing to her father at the time of his ‘Rough Wooing’ when she herself was only twelve years old, Elizabeth claimed not only kinship with her ‘illustrious and most mighty’ father but also an intimate intellectual and personal bond with him: ‘May I, by this means [the trilingual translation of her stepmother Catherine Parr’s book of prayers], be indebted to you not as an imitator of your virtues but indeed as an inheritor of them.’45 It took courage and confidence in this girl to place herself on a par with her father, a distant figure of gigantic proportions and terrifying reputation, a tyrant and a divinely ordained king.

  Her public identification was always with her heroic father, but in private it seems Elizabeth honoured the memory of her mother too. At some point in her life she began to wear a diamond, ruby and mother of pearl ring with a secret compartment which revealed a portrait of Anne, face to face with a companion miniature of her daughter. They folded together when the ring was closed. The vilification of Anne’s reputation and the disputed legality of her marriage, together with the dangerous imputations of witchcraft, incest and depravity attached to her name, meant Elizabeth’s attempt at some identification and intimacy with her mother was necessarily secretive. She did show, however, interest and sympathy for her Boleyn relations, promoting her cousin, Henry Carey, Mary Boleyn’s son, to the baronetcy of Hunsdon. Anne may not have been publicly celebrated by her daughter but she was not forgotten.

  Although Boulogne was a short-lived victory for Henry and virtually bankrupted his country, it did a great deal for the old king’s morale and his people’s insular pride. Knowing once more the thrill of conquest he could forget the years of domestic frustration and impotence. Scotland and the baby queen were to be casualties of his new energy and belligerence, for he was determined to force the marriage of his heir with Mary, Scotland’s queen. By the autumn of 1545, Henry was furious at the Scots’ continued recalcitrance and once again unleashed his warlord, the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour. While the almost three-year-old Mary was kept in close confinement by her mother at Stirling Castle, the marauding English rode over the border to burn and destroy crops and towns and particularly the abbeys and religious establishments. Kelso Abbey, Melrose Abbey, and the abbeys of Dryburgh and Jedburgh were all put to the torch, and their inhabitants and the surrounding populace dispersed or killed. As great a destruction as possible was wreaked on the fair and fertile valleys between these towns as Hertford and his troops swept through on their vengeance raids. It was harvest time and Henry wanted the Scots to reap their bitterest for spurning the English alliance.

  Henry’s counterproductive ‘Rough Wooing’ was to be continued even more ruthlessly after his death in 1547 by Edward Seymour, now the Lord Protector of Edward’s reign. The baby Scottish queen had grown into a bonny child, intelligent and charming who, having outlived the extreme perils of infancy and risks of neonatal disease, now had to face the dangers of her predatory neighbour. So important was it for England to secure Scotland as insurance against her Continental enemies that Somerset remained intent on prising Mary away from her mother and her country to ensure her alliance with the young English king, himself not yet ten years old. On 10 September 1547, a day that became known in Scottish annals as ‘Black Saturday’, Somerset’s troops routed the Scots under Arran’s ineffectual command at Pinkie Cleugh near Inveresk. Once more the flower of Scottish nobility was slain or taken prisoner. Once again the Earl of Arran managed to escape unscathed from the bloody destruction of the best of Scotland’s fighting men.

  This latest defeat was so devastating that Mary of Guise feared that even Stirling Castle, that great bulwark against attack, might not be able to protect her daughter from the English. Lord Erskine, one of the queen’s guardians, and a man already grieving the loss of his son at Pinkie, suggested he take the precious child into safekeeping and install her on the nearby island of Inchmahome, where the secluded Augustinian priory there was surrounded by the deep waters of the Lake of Menteith. Although Mary was not yet five years old and was only to stay for two to three weeks, the stealth and urgency of her departure from Stirling and the mysterious atmosphere and beauty of the place may well have impressed her with a visceral memory of excitement and tension.

  Perhaps at this impressionable age Mary’s natural polarity of impetuous courage and nervous sensibility thus was etched deeper in her developing psyche. The atmosphere of isolation and meditation on the mysterious island was far removed from the world from which she had been plucked, of aggressive self-interest, anxious politicking and the alarms of war. The sixteenth century was not a time troubled by modern ideas of child rearing and the fragility of the emergent self, and Mary’s retainers would have talked freely in front of her. Even at so young an age this child not only would have sensed the fear and the excitement of the adults around her but she would have understood intellectually some of the facts of the situation.

  Within weeks she was back with her mother at Stirling but, at the next invasion of the English, the queen mother dispatched her precious daughter to Dumbarton where the French, for whose help she had petitioned in increasing desperation, could easily arrive by sea and collect her. The new King of France had an infant son and heir, named François after Henri’s own illustrious father. This firstborn but sickly boy seemed to unloose a surge of fertility in his mother Catherine de Medici who, after eleven anguished years of childless marriage, suddenly produced ten children in the following twelve years.

  Mary of Guise had never lost her primary allegiance to her home country and cajoled her lords into allowing her to negotiate a marriage contract between her young daughter and the even younger Dauphin of France. On 7 July 1548 the treaty was signed and Mary’s fate was sealed. Neither England nor Scotland now was to be her home. Instead she was to be brought up as a French princess and would learn to rate her adopted crown of France higher than that of Scotland, and covet for most of her adult life the crown of England. The child queen was made ready for the next poignant journey of her life, as a fugitive from the marauding English and an emotional and political captive of the French.

  Just as the five-year-old Mary Stuart was beginning to attain consciousness of herself as a queen while imbibing the adrenaline of flight and concealment, adventure and romance, her older cousin Elizabeth Tudor was deep in her studies at various royal manors in the country outside London. Just fourteen, she was polishing her French and Italian, and reading and translating from Latin and Greek. Pindar’s poetry and Homer’s Iliad were among the specific works in her mind when she wrote to her brother Edward in the autumn of 1547: ‘Nothing is so uncertain or less enduring than the life of a man, who truly, by the testimony of Pindar, is nothing else than a dream of shadows.’*46 Her father had died the previous January and this letter was in elegiac mood. What more telling example could t
here be of the essential transience of all things than the fact that someone as superhuman and magnificent in life as this omnipotent king had to succumb to death as inevitably as the commonest thief or beggar?

  In fact Henry’s death was the beginning for Elizabeth of a decade of uncertainty and at times extreme danger. These painful years were the furnace that would temper her nature for good and ill. While Elizabeth learnt her lessons the hard way, Mary was to have the danger of her birthright as Queen of the Scots deferred. Instead she entered her defining decade in the French court, pampered, admired, groomed for the mostly decorative role as Dauphine, then fleetingly Queen of France. John Knox, austerely Calvinist in his sympathies, recognized the decadence of this French courtly inheritance from his experiences at the time as a prisoner and galley slave of the French. His warning of the effect on the young Queen of Scots, growing up away from her country and her people in this artificial and alien air, had a terrible truth: ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm and for her final destruction’.

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  *There is some confusion over the spelling of the dynasty. I have opted for Stewart prior to Mary’s accession, and for Mary and her descendants Stuart thereafter.