Elizabeth and Mary Page 26
Mary Queen of Scots shared the Catholic Virgin’s name but not her public sexual status. As a married woman, albeit of a probably unconsummated union, it would be considered that she had relinquished that singularity. Unlike her cousin, she had chosen to accept the conventions and fulfil her duty as a marriageable and valuable diplomatic pawn, to begin with at least. In the late autumn of 1560, while her cousin Elizabeth was enduring the malicious gossip about her own moral turpitude and Lord Robert’s uxoricidal vice, Mary was enjoying the reputation of an irreproachably married young queen, innocent of any sexual irregularity, probably innocent even of the briefest conjugal relations. The French court was still enjoying themselves at the expense of the English queen, her ambassador humiliated on her behalf by the gossip ‘accompanied with much spite, and set so full of horror … he never heard or read of sorer or more slanderous discourse’.76
Mary had busied herself on her accession to the French throne that summer by examining the crown jewels. They were one of the significant accoutrements of monarchy, and whoever held them had symbolic power. Despite stressing to Elizabeth that being her blood cousin made her a congenial neighbour, she also consistently refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, telling the English ambassador Throckmorton with some asperity, that ‘My subjects in Scotland’ had sent an inferior representative to see her while ‘they have sent great personages to your mistress. I am their Sovereign, but they take me not so; they must be taught to know their duties.’77 She had felt that no one sympathetic to her interests had been present at the negotiations and so felt justified in her refusal. Her resistance in fact was not merely passive, she continued to bear the English and Irish arms quartered with her own, generally accepted as a considered insult, and showed scant respect for Elizabeth behind her representatives’ backs.
But Mary’s high hopes as queen of the powerful French empire were to be cut to the ground, the fine future for which she had been bred was about to be erased. By mid-October, her young husband had moved with the court to Orléans, partly in fear of assassination but also to further the Guise offensive against the heretics. Most importantly for François, it allowed him to devote himself to the chase, the only activity he engaged in wholeheartedly and with enjoyment. As the religious conflicts deepened, the king was happy enough to leave government to his wife’s uncles while he planned an extended hunting trip. By the middle of November 1560, as the weather turned from unseasonably mild to a bitter chill, the teenage king was struck down with a terrible earache, possibly a precursor to meningitis.
Court gossip was always avid and contradictory. Some said this latest illness to strike their weakling king was trifling, the fact that he was kept in his bedchamber was simply due to his mother’s over-protectiveness. Others insisted the situation was far more serious than anyone admitted, and the astrologer’s baleful prediction at François’s birth that he would not see his eighteenth birthday was grimly rehearsed in the speculations of ambassadors and courtiers. There was a sense of awful inevitability. His wife Mary and mother Catherine de Medici kept their vigil by his bed. Alternating between hope and despair, Mary suffered from nervous strain as she followed the agonizing vicissitudes of his illness.
Only six months previously she had endured the loss of her much-loved mother; now she was facing the death of the companion of her earliest childhood, the only other person in the world who really loved her. In terrific pain, enduring draconian treatments from anxious doctors, forced to be over-zealous by the Guises’ desperation to hold on to power, François appears to have borne his torments with unexpected fortitude. The infection migrated into his brain and Mary, refusing to leave his side, watched delirium and then death overcome him. François finally died on 5 December aged only sixteen. Mary herself was three days short of her eighteenth birthday.
It was a notable feature of Mary’s constitution that her active emotional nature gave rise to great eruptions of feeling and, in times of crisis, physical and nervous collapse. ‘I hear she is troubled with such sudden passions after any great unkindness or grief of mind,’78 one of the ambassadors in Scotland wrote to Cecil having seen the young queen collapse with nervous exhaustion. No one else seemed to mourn the dead king much but Mary was catapulted into a period of deepest grieving, made all the more poignant because she seemed so alone in her despair. The Venetian ambassador, prone to romantic hyperbole when writing about Mary, was nevertheless perceptive about her plight:
by degrees every one will forget the death of the late King except the young Queen, his widow, who being no less noble minded than beautiful and graceful in appearance, the thoughts of widowhood at so early an age, and of the loss of a consort who was so great a King and who so dearly loved her, and also that she is dispossessed of the crown of France with little hope of recovering that of Scotland, which is her sole patrimony and dower, so afflict her that she will not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate and doleful lamentations, she universally inspires great pity.79
Writing to Elizabeth the day after the French king’s death, Throckmorton was less romantically inclined, although even his lugubrious heart was touched by the sight of the beautiful, grieving widow: ‘he departed to God, leaving as heavy and dolorous a wife, as of right she had good cause to be, who, by long watching with him during his sickness and painful diligence about him, and specially by the issue thereof, is not in best tune of her body, but without danger’.80
Notwithstanding the personal pathos of the situation, the political consequences were what really exercised the monarchs of neighbouring kingdoms and their ambassadors laboured to interpret the signs. François was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother Charles IX. On the face of it the Guise hold on power had evaporated with François’s last breath and Catherine de Medici’s patient wait was over. During her husband’s lifetime her power had been covert and largely domestic while Henri listened more to his mistress; in François II’s reign, the Guises grasped the initiative through their family connections with the new queen: only now, with another even younger son as king, could she come into her own. Catherine’s reign as queen mother and regent with unchallenged authority had begun.
But for Mary, François’s death was the shipwreck of all her hopes. Not only had she lost the brotherly companion of her childhood and youth, in one vagary of fate she had lost the whole world and her status in that world for which she had been bred. Since she was six, Mary had been trained to consider herself a French fairytale princess who would eventually be transformed into a French queen. The most illustrious throne was fleetingly hers. Suddenly, her king was dead and her glittering future had been relegated to the past. As a childless dowager queen, Mary had no role and little status. The loss of everything she had taken for granted was painful and disorientating. Her own need to uphold her status, and her family’s political concern to maintain through her their hold on power, meant the question of her next marriage was already being discussed in courts across Europe.
The ever-anxious Throckmorton urged Elizabeth to consolidate her position in relation to France and the new reformed religion as fast as possible, ‘to make a sure and larger seat for herself and her posterity for ever, to God’s glory and her own unspeakable fame’.81 One anxiety remained, however. He feared that the Duc de Guise and his brother the cardinal might engage in a last-ditch attempt to maintain their family’s grip on power by marrying their niece to the new young king. He surmised in a letter to the council that Mary herself might welcome this remarriage for she rated being Queen of France highly indeed and would be reluctant to suffer relegation to the second division. This was to prove an astute assessment of Mary’s motivation at the time.
The Protestants across Europe had no such apprehensions that this marriage would take place. They celebrated the death of François and the dethroning of the Guises, seeing in the successive destruction of Henri and his son some pattern of divine deliverance from persecution. Knox was savagely triumphan
t, but Calvin took a longer, more measured view. ‘Have you ever heard or read anything more seasonable than the death of the King? There was no remedy for the extreme evils, when suddenly God appeared from Heaven, and He, who had pierced the eye of the father, smote the ear of the son. I only fear lest the joy of some by expressing itself too much may overturn the hope of a better state of things. For you could scarcely believe how inconsiderately many exult and even wax wanton over it.’82 The unexpected transition of power to a minor inevitably added to the ferment of uncertainty and fear: ‘by which change the state of France did fall from a fever to a frenzie’.83 Different factions struggled to grasp advantage, a struggle that would become complex and bloody, precipitating the wars of religion which convulsed and debilitated the nation for nearly four decades.
While half of France rejoiced at the death of her husband, and her companions at court busied themselves seeking preferment from the new regime of the boy king and his mother, Mary alone grieved. And the grief was for the loss of François but also for the loss of herself. She wrote to Philip II: ‘You have comforted by your letters the most afflicted poor woman under heaven; God having bereft me of all that I loved and held dear on earth … without his aid I shall find so great a calamity too insupportable for my strength and my little virtue.’84 To Elizabeth, who had sent letters of condolence, she responded through Elizabeth’s ambassador, ‘with a very sorrowful look and speech that she thanked the Queen for her gentleness in comforting her woe when she had most need of it’.85
In private she expressed her grief in poetry:
En mon triste et doux chant D’un ton fort lamentable,
Je jette un oeil tranchant, De perte incomparable,
Et en soupirs cuisants Passe mes meilleurs ans.
In my sad, quiet song, A melancholy air,
I shall look deep and long At loss beyond compare,
And with bitter tears, I’ll pass my best years.
Fut-il un tel malheur De dure destinée
Ni si triste douleur De Dame Fortunée
Qui, mon coeur et mon oeil, Vois en bière et cercueil?
Have the harsh fates ere now Let such a grief be felt,
Has a more cruel blow Been by dame Fortune dealt
Than, O my heart and eyes! I see where his bier lies?
Qui en mon doux printemps Et fleur de ma jeauness
Toutes les peines sens D’une extrême tristesse,
Et en rien n’ai plaisir Qu’en regret et désire.
In my springtime’s gladness And flower of my young heart,
I feel the deepest sadness Of the most grievous hurt.
Nothing now my heart can fire But regret and desire.86
In her fifth verse Mary explained that the world would see her grief in the paleness of her face, ‘mon pâle visage/De violettes teint/Qui est l’amoureux teint’, a paleness which the court chronicler Brantôme said she did not lose: ‘Never after she was a widow, during all the time that I had the honour to see her in France and in Scotland, was her complexion restored.’87 Although self-centred poetry was a convention of the age, it was nevertheless surprising perhaps that this poem, affecting as it is, was entirely to do with what Mary had lost. But there was every reason to think she was for a while in a state of shock as well as grief at the full extent of the dereliction of her world.
Just eighteen years old, Mary had been deprived of more than her status and power at the centre of the monarchy. Suddenly she was bereft too of close family connections. Her mother was recently dead, also her father-in-law, who had been like a father to her. Her brotherly husband now, in traumatic circumstances, was unexpectedly taken from her; so too Elizabeth de Valois, her intimate sister-in-law had recently been dispatched to be Queen of Spain, never to be seen again. Now Catherine de Medici was turning from friend into foe and, apart from her uncles and her grandmother, Mary was alone. Catherine, as her mother-in-law and close companion at court, had been the nearest to a mother figure that Mary had known. Writing to her Scottish administration shortly after François’s death, she described her as ‘the most worthy and virtuous princess in the world … in whom since we have been here, we have found so much goodness, love and humanity and so amiable affection … that we can expect from [her] what a daughter can hope from her own mother’.88 From the age of five and a half, absent from her own mother, brought up among the Valois children, Mary had naturally looked to Catherine and her husband as parental figures. Henri II’s affection for her had been real enough but Catherine was a much more considerable and complex personality. She had suffered great anguish and humiliation during her years of childlessness, and when her babies finally arrived she then invested every pent-up emotion, frustrated ambition and zest for power in her children and their dynastic futures. She had proved how steadfastly she could bide her time, how ruthlessly she would secure her own power through her family, how Machiavellian she was in her ability to do what had to be done.
During the years of Diane de Poitiers and Guise ascendancy, Catherine had dissembled and appeared complaisant. Mary belonged to that old and painful axis of power. While she was married to Catherine’s son and he was king then Catherine played the game of feigned affection and support. But once the power of Mary and her uncles had expired then Catherine’s energies turned from her old allegiances to focus on the new. The order she signed requesting Mary to return the crown jewels, and dated just one day after François’s death, appeared symbolic of the cavalcade passing on, leaving the now disregarded young queen in its wake. Catherine’s implacable opposition to the Guise suggestion that the newly-widowed queen should marry the new king, her brother-in-law and Catherine’s next son, was indicative of the waning of Mary’s star and the ascendancy of her own.
This turning aside by the queen mother, intent on her own regency and her succeeding son, exacerbated Mary’s sense of loss. Sir James Melville, an insider in the service of the Scottish queen, believed Catherine became a deadly enemy to anyone who had had influence over either her husband or her eldest son. Because of Mary’s complete identification with the Guises, Catherine had ‘a greet mis-lyking of our Quen’89 and also nursed a long grievance against her for a misjudged comment. Apparently Mary had been heard to say dismissively that Catherine was, after all, just a merchant’s daughter. This kind of indiscreet haughtiness had caused her trouble already with her cousin, Queen Elizabeth. It would cause her trouble again.
The courtiers too, once so attentive, were falling away. They now moved to a different beat. No longer in thrall to the Guise faction they ingratiated themselves with the new regime. Even her beloved Guise uncles when their paths diverged were capable of putting their own interests before hers. The Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth related how Catherine de Medici feared Mary’s alliance through marriage with Spain, ‘having regard to the Scotch Queen’s claims to this [England’s] crown’, and so put pressure on the Duc de Guise to oppose it. He chose self-interest over Mary’s wishes and ‘promised as the Queen-Mother desired’, adding, as he waved his niece off from France for ever, that ‘he could not give her the counsel that was best for her, but that she herself should look where her best interests were’.90 Within six turbulent months the emotional and political landscape of Mary’s life had changed radically. There was some reason to fear that even the kingdom to which she had been born and had given scant regard might reject their absent monarch now that she no longer brought to her subjects any guarantee of French wealth and protection. Writing to her Scottish lords she expressed her ‘incroyable regret’ if the misfortune of François’s death would weaken the ‘alliance que Dieu avoit mise entre nous [the alliance that God had placed between us]’.91
This now was the time for Mary to act with authority and return to Scotland to claim the throne her mother had kept warm for her with such unwavering loyalty and self-sacrifice. This sudden reversal and the suffering and loss it brought could have been the impetus for transformation from a pampered princess to an effective queen. It should ha
ve propelled Mary away from the past as passive consort and into the present, to become what she was born to be, a ruling Queen of Scotland. Already she was beginning to exhibit the qualities that suggested she had the makings of a considerable queen. Throckmorton was pleasantly surprised: ‘During her husband’s life there was no great account made of her, for that, being under band of marriage and subjection of her husband … there was offered no great occasion to know what was in her … now [those who once discounted her] seeing her wisdom both honour and pity her.’92
But at this critical time her will appeared to falter. Instead Mary looked to a second marriage alliance to restore her previous status and return her to the life of a richly endowed consort of a powerful king. The English ambassador recognized the overriding importance to Mary at this time of maintaining prestige. The day after François’s death he wrote, ‘As far as I can learn, she more esteemeth the continuation of her honour, and to marry one that may uphold her to be great, than she passeth to please her fancy by taking one who is accompanied with such small benefit or alliance as thereby her estimation and fame is not increased.’93 And while Scotland wondered and waited their queen spent the next eight months meandering through France, visiting Guise relations and hoping her next prince would come.