Elizabeth and Mary Page 24
Elizabeth was learning her craft as a diplomat, practising her protean roles as elusive friend to all, ally to none. While the Earl of Arran travelled north, spurred with the queen’s blessing and financial support, to take his part in the Protestant uprising and offer himself as a titular head with a hereditary claim on the Scottish throne, she was assuring the French ambassador of her best intentions towards Mary of Guise. Elizabeth blamed any rumours of her duplicity on others. ‘She well knew that there were men who spread wicked lies in order to cause trouble’, she protested. Then, rather than undermine her own spurious innocence, she even implicated members of her council in a remarkable echo of modern democratic government. ‘It was quite likely [she said] that some of her ministers had been foolish enough to meddle with the evil practices among the Scots, but that she had ordered an enquiry to be made, and had sent a man expressly to set matters in order.’32
As the Scottish situation deteriorated, however, it became clear that she could not maintain for long her fiction of non-involvement in the rebels’ cause. In October 1559, having requested that Mary of Guise desist from fortifying Leith, and having her and her French allies ‘obstinatlie procead in thare wicked enterprise’,33 Knox and the Congregation formally declared at the market cross in Edinburgh that the regent was deposed. They were careful to insist that the authority of Mary Queen of Scots and France and François II, now King of France and of Scotland, remained unimpaired. ‘The battell is begun scharpe yneuht [enough]’, Knox attempted to cheer himself, ‘God geve the issew to his glory and our confort.’34 However, the reformers lacked the men, munitions and resources to enforce their rebellion against Mary of Guise and her French garrisons in the field. They looked to Elizabeth and England.
This was Elizabeth’s first real trial as queen. The country was in a parlous state. The whole of Europe knew that she had assumed the crown of a weakened kingdom: the war chest emptied by her sister’s fruitless war with France; her army and navy depleted; her munitions meagre; her fortifications neglected. There was little hope that England at this time could have repulsed even a half-hearted invasion. The presence of Mary Queen of Scots, with her unimpeachable claim on Elizabeth’s throne and the might of France at hand to enforce it, made the threat of neighbourly acquisitiveness all the more real. Her ambassador Throckmorton, writing from France, was unnerved at Mary’s bold pretensions, ‘the young French Queen, since the death of the French King [Henri II], has written into Scotland that as God has so provided, as notwithstanding the malice of her enemies she is Queen of France and of Scotland, so she trusts to be Queen of England also’.35
Mary’s rebel Scottish lords were uneasy as to what allegiance their queen might truly show. Addressing Elizabeth in their plea for help they pointed out: ‘our young Quene is married into France, where she nowe lyveth as a stranger both to them and us, unable to use the liberty of her crowne’.36 Her powerlessness they believed was due to the irresistible influence of her mother-in-law Catherine de Medici and her uncle, the focus of whose interest lay in ‘this invasion of Scotland … to open an entraunce thereby into England’. The lords tried to stiffen Elizabeth’s resolve by appealing to her sense of amour-propre: ‘Let others sit downe and lament their losses; it is the part of wise men to sit downe, and foresee, and to prevent them.’37
Cecil too was warning Elizabeth that summer that these threats were real: ‘[France] seeketh always to make Scotland an instrument to exercise thereby their malice upon England, and to make a footstool thereof to look over England as they may.’38 But Elizabeth was afraid of committing herself to any unequivocal alliance with the Scottish Protestants to rid their homeland of this colonizing power. She feared opening England to humiliation by the French on Scottish soil, and inviting retaliatory aggression towards her own realm at home. She was never keen to encourage any kind of insurrection against sovereign power, realizing how fast sedition could spread across borders, and was ever mindful that the success of her monarchy relied absolutely on the support of her people, and an ancient reverence for their monarch. But without Elizabeth’s overt help the Scottish Reformation appeared to be faltering while France increased in stature on the footstool at her borders.
Surprisingly perhaps, the cerebral and pragmatic Cecil was the most hawkish of Elizabeth’s advisers at this time. He had to work hard to persuade the council of the necessity of intervention in Scotland, as allies of the rebellious Protestants, as the only way to halt the expansion of the French: ‘good corrage in a good quarrell, as this is, to delyver a realme from conquest, and consequently to save our owne, will much furder ye matter’.39 Elizabeth, not surprisingly, was the most reluctant of them all. She was naturally averse to war, particularly when her own country seemed so unprepared, understocked in every kind of ordnance and weak in human and financial resources. Due to her own nature, and the early experiences of threat and danger, Elizabeth felt more secure with a policy of illusion and sleight of hand. Her own history had taught her she was vulnerable if she admitted to anything, and that to stand up and be counted could cost her her life. Conversely, by maintaining her favourite position, the Janus face at the entrance to her kingdom, she could dissemble and deny everything. She could sue for peace while she prepared for war.
Cecil wanted her to sue for war and this, her first great test, she could not bring herself to do. By the end of 1559, he had won over the council but still had to persuade his mistress that the time had come to send an army openly into Scotland. Sir William Paget, an ageing politician who had known Elizabeth from the Seymour years, had written to Cecil earlier in the year about the threat of France’s invasion through Scotland. He showed an appreciation of the young Queen’s qualities of mind as well as her diffidence over initiating hostilities: ‘For Godd’s Sake move that good Quene to put her Sword in to her Hand … to use that goodly Wytt, that goodly Knowledge, and that gret and special Grace of Understanding and Judgement of Things that God hath gyven her, and so I beleve she shall quaerere regnum Dei, and maynten her own Regnum also [and so I believe she shall seek the kingdom of God, and maintain her own reign also].’
The council still could not persuade Elizabeth to take up her sword but Cecil’s exasperated resignation letter, written ‘with a sorrowful heart and watery eyes’,40 forced Elizabeth’s hand. By the end of February 1560 she agreed to a treaty with the Scottish lords, the Treaty of Berwick, whereby England pledged to help protect Scotland from any attempts by the French to ‘conquere the Realme of Scotland, suppresse the Libertie thereof, and unite the same to the Crowne of France perpetually’. This protection would extend as far as sending ‘with all speed … into Scotlande a convenient Ayde of Men of Warr on Horse and Foot’. Elizabeth could maintain something of her Janus face by insisting in the treaty that the Scottish ‘Nobilitie and Subjects’ continue to acknowledge ‘theyr Soverain Lady and Queene’, her own cousin and counterclaimant to her throne, Mary Queen of Scots.41
Still she demurred, however, at the idea of translating this offer of paper protection into incontrovertible force on the ground. To her council, pressing for action, she would only say despondently: ‘It is a dangerous matter to enter into war.’42 This was a sentiment well supported by the run-down state of her nation. All of Europe knew what the Spanish Count de Feria bluntly told Throckmorton, who passed it on to Elizabeth: ‘Will she take upon herself to meddle with other Princes’ rebels? And the French being driven out, will she maintain the Scots in their religion? … What doth she think? We know well enough what her forces are: … no friends, no Council, no finances, no noblemen of conduct, no captains, no soldiers. And no reputation in the world.’43
However, Elizabeth seemed personally to be putting on a brave face as far as her Spanish ambassadors were concerned: ‘The Queen rides out every day into the country on a neapolitan courser or a jennet to exercise for this war, seated on one of the saddles they use here. She makes a brave show and bears herself gallantly. In short the people here are full of warfare and armaments
.’44 Her bold behaviour was encouraged by the presence of her dashing Master of the Horse, Lord Robert, riding high in the saddle, in her heart and her esteem. Her diffidence about waging war, however, was overcome finally, and by the end of March nearly eight thousand men under Lord Grey’s command crossed the border to join the Scottish forces and together put Leith and its French defenders under siege.
While Elizabeth was struggling with this first crisis of her reign, Mary, only six months into her reign as queen consort of France, was facing the first incursion of fear and violence into her courtly upbringing. The anti-Guise passions of the French Protestants were running so high that the lives of the young king and queen themselves appeared to be at risk, the threat culminating in the conspiracy at Amboise in March. In an age when sudden and untimely death was commonplace, these periods of upheaval and revolution added an extra dimension of anarchy and danger to which even queens were not immune. Both of Mary’s uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duc de Guise, had taken to riding with a bodyguard of ‘ten brave and faithful men … each man with a loaded pistol under his cloak’,45 every time they left the relative safety of the court.
Although the focus of antipathy was the overweening power of the Guises, the brothers themselves sought to obscure the personal animosity directed against them, and make it appear more a generalized rebellion against Catholicism and the monarchy. Convincing the young king and his queen of their own personal danger meant the Guises were given a free rein in their avowed protection of the crown. In sowing real fear in the court they were then able to advocate swingeing reprisals and thus escalate the violence in a malign circle which drew the whole of France into a bloody religious war. ‘By giving the King guards upon guards, [the Guises] endevoured nothing, they sayd, but to enterteine him in distrust of his subjects, and his subjects in fear and hatred of him.’46
The French Protestants may have been a threat to Mary but her Catholic uncles, and by association she herself, were seen as a real threat to her cousin, the English queen. Elizabeth received from her French ambassador dire warnings of an assassin already dispatched by the brothers: ‘[there exists] a pestilent and horrible device of the Guises to poison her by means of an Italian named Stephano, a burly man with a black beard, about forty-five years of age [who will] offer his services to the Queen as an engineer’.47
Such rumours of murder and mayhem were rife; rebellious citizens and foreigners with sinister intent were everywhere. And murders were common in every social stratum, assassinations were a part of state policy and death was as likely to arrive prematurely with violence as timely in a bed. Even the seemingly invincible Duc de Guise was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet on his forty-fourth birthday in 1563, and his much reviled brother the Cardinal, although escaping the violence of others, died eleven years later as a result of inflicting violence on himself.*
The spring of 1560 marked a crisis point for both queens. While decisive and difficult action was required from Elizabeth, who was naturally constrained by an analytical and wary mind, Mary, by nature headstrong and drawn to impetuous action, was powerless in the grip of her overweening family. Ideologically too their energies were opposed. Elizabeth was being asked to act in order to protect the rights of the Scottish reformers while Mary was the passive focus for the French reformers’ rebellion, and spectator of her family’s bloody retaliation.
As discussed earlier, there is no evidence as to how Mary reacted to the sights and sounds of torture, and wholesale carnage, which assailed every inhabitant of Amboise during the days of Guise revenge. But it cannot have passed her by without effect. Mary was a robust, impulsive and physically active young woman with passionate and volatile emotions. Her life had been characterized by accesses of energy expended largely on hunting, hawking and dancing, followed by short-lived collapses in health. Her periodic ill-health was due in part to the three to four days’ fever (tertian and quartan ague) commonly associated with endemic chronic malaria, suffered by the majority of the population of the time.
Emotional crises would also affect Mary dramatically. One such was reported by Throckmorton to Elizabeth. News of her mother’s seriously declining health and the escalating hostilities in Scotland elicited an outpouring of anger and grief: ‘On 25 of this present [April 1560] the French Queen made very great lamentation, and wept bitterly, and, as it is reported, said that her uncles had undone her, and caused her to lose her realm.’48 Her fears in the spring of 1560 for both her mother and her inheritance were justified by the facts, but also amplified perhaps by the extreme violence and suffering of the Protestant rebels which she had just witnessed in bloody and claustrophobic detail at Amboise. A letter she sent to Mary of Guise in Scotland, probably at the end of March and from this blood-stained town, was almost incoherent with anxiety for her mother’s safety and health, ‘la poine que j’é entendu que vous vous donnés, me fait tant craindre que n’aiés mal’ [‘The trouble that I have heard you are in makes me fear so much you will be ill’].49
Mary promised to ensure that her husband, now king, would keep his word and send more men to help her mother resist the English and the rebel Scottish forces. But her letter also revealed just how much the new queen deferred to the power of the old, Catherine de Medici, relying on her advice and trusting in her apparent affection. Try as Mary might to alleviate some of the suffering of her valiant mother, she was powerless to act. France, with its own troubles at home, did not send Mary of Guise her hoped-for salvation, and this neglect can only have added to Mary’s grief and consternation when her mother finally died in June 1560, her doughty heart failing her at last.
Elizabeth’s first war did not begin well. In the spring of 1560, the English forces failed disastrously in their first attempt at capturing Leith. Elizabeth’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed. It was mooted that between 1000 and 1500 men of the alliance were killed (although later reports put it at a tenth of that number, most of them Scots). She hated the loss of life, but above all she hated to be beaten. Cecil once more bore the brunt of her rage and grief. ‘I have had such a torment herein with the Queen’s Majesty as an ague hath not in five fits so much abated,’50 he confided to Throckmorton. However, Elizabeth was determined now to avenge this defeat and finish with glory an enterprise so reluctantly begun. She exhorted everyone to be of good cheer, backed up her words with more men, money and munitions, and directed the Duke of Norfolk to ‘use all Meanes possible to comfort the Lords of Scotland, and to assure them that the Quene’s Majesty will never give over this Enterprise, untill she have this revenged, and that Land sett at Liberty’.51 The English queen was showing already her natural ear for the ringing phrase and her gift for personalizing the relationship of monarch to her people.
This belated resolution combined with fortunate timing meant Elizabeth triumphed without any further bloodshed. The French, pragmatically realizing their limitations while they struggled with religious rebellion at home, were aware also that the besieged forces in Leith were running out of provisions and needed reinforcements urgently. Mary of Guise too was near to death. All these considerations meant they were forced to accept a negotiated settlement.
The eventual outcome was the Treaty of Edinburgh, signed on 6 July, in which the French agreed to withdraw all but a handful of men, agreed too that Elizabeth was the rightful heir to the throne of England and Ireland, and Mary Queen of Scots and François II would no longer assume the style or arms thereof. Elizabeth’s confidence and reputation were greatly enhanced. The Earl of Arran had written to Cecil of his admiration and gratitude for ‘the exceeding pity it has pleased her Grace to take upon our miserable afflicted country … hazard[ing] also the displeasure and enmity of divers mighty estates and princes … God has framed her in the shape of a woman, to excel any of her progenitors, and that he of his infinite wisdom will show what he is able to work to the manifestation of his glory in such a vessel and kind.’52
Already the incongruity of Elizabeth’s slight body, her fem
aleness, her youth, combined with an ability to govern and an appetite for robust action equal to the best of men, was beginning to exercise a certain fascination. Even the lusty Lord Robert Dudley had recognized this quality of courage and will. He gave an insight into the queen’s nature in a letter to the Lord Deputy of Ireland about her desire for some more spirited horses: ‘especially for strong, good gallopers, which are better than her geldings, which she spareth not to try as fast as they can go. And I fear them much’, he wrote, ‘but she will prove them.’53
This adventure to support the Scottish Protestants and expel the French was Elizabeth’s first piece of risky foreign policy. She had invaded another sovereign country and made herself vulnerable to the ire, or worse, of two much greater powers, France and Spain. She had gambled and won, her success having far greater ramifications than might have been evident at first. The terms of the treaty had effectively ended French supremacy in Scotland and helped establish the reformed religion. But this also marked the end of the first stand-off between the two young queens. As Elizabeth was triumphant, so Mary was humiliated and incensed. She was most upset by the clause that renounced her claim to the English throne, and most troubled by the new Scottish Parliament’s abolition of the Mass and papal jurisdiction. All she and François, as Queen and King of France and Scotland, could do was threaten to refuse to ratify the treaty.
1560 was a year of deaths which would change for ever the destinies of both Elizabeth and Mary. The first death was that of Mary of Guise who died on 11 June, worn out at the age of 44. Despite chronic heart failure, her force of will had kept her in active government and still prosecuting the war right up to the last few days. This death hastened Elizabeth’s first victory and personally robbed Mary of a passionately loved though little-known mother. It robbed her also of a spirited protector of her interests in her own kingdom of Scotland, and France of its convenient satellite. Mary was still only seventeen when her mother died, and so violent were her feelings that the Venetian ambassador had declared ‘[she] loved her mother incredibly, and much more than daughters usually love their mothers’.54 In fact, so concerned were her family about her reaction, Mary was not told of her mother’s death for at least a week. The belated news was brought by her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and her reaction was as extreme as they all feared. ‘Her majesty showed and still shows such signs of grief that during the greater part of yesterday she passed from one agony to another.’55