Elizabeth and Mary Page 32
Mary’s unquestionable legitimacy outweighed the disadvantages of her sex, but her illegitimate and ambitious half-brother Lord James, Earl of Moray, was an always influential presence on the left hand of her throne. Barred from inheriting the crown, regency and the administration of power was the best for which he could hope. Meanwhile the Hamiltons, the Duke of Châtelherault and his son the Earl of Arran, loomed as alternative princes of the blood, their claim inherited from the daughter of James II of Scotland. On the death of James V, only Mary herself, his fragile infant daughter, kept a Hamilton from becoming king.
Where the father had failed to grasp the highest honour, his hopes were transferred to his son. Had the young Earl of Arran not been confounded by insanity he would have been an obvious suitor for the queen, or proved a rallying point for disaffected opinion both at home and abroad. Certainly the Hamiltons’ pre-eminence among the Scottish lords intensified the opposition ranged against them. Scottish politics was distorted by the deep-dyed rivalries of the nobility which lived on through the generations, one of the most inveterate feuds being between the Hamiltons and the Lennoxes, the bloodline which produced Lord Darnley.
In the same deadly grip of family ambition, Darnley was related to both the English and Scottish dynasties, and was from birth expected by his mother to inherit both crowns. His mother, the Countess of Lennox, was already a formidable woman with a strong sense of her own place in the Tudor line as granddaughter of Henry VII and cousin to Elizabeth. Her first son died at less than a year old. Having conceived again almost immediately following his birth, her second pregnancy was well advanced and a soothsayer consoled her with a vision of the dazzling future awaiting her unborn child. The momentous idea put into Lady Margaret’s head by ‘her prophecyers at the death of her first son’ was that this second child ‘should by King both of England and Scotland’.1 With this thought her aspiration was given wings.
From the start, Darnley was groomed by his parents for greatness. Like Mary Queen of Scots, he was a grandchild of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s eldest sister. On his Scottish side he was descended from James II through his daughter Mary, who married James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. He was encouraged in the kingly pursuits of hunting, hawking and jousting. His manners as a courtier were practised. He could play the lute, sing, compose passable poetry and dance extremely well. Physically he was a commanding presence, if only by virtue of his height which at well over six foot in his late teens was a good head taller than his contemporaries. He never lost his open-faced, smooth good looks, and his body was long-limbed, elegant and athletic.
For the first eleven years of his childhood, Lord Darnley was the only surviving child of six born to his parents. With each infant death his own life became more precious to them and the vision of his destiny more pronounced. He was eventually joined in the hothouse of Lennox ambition by another brother, Charles, whose life was as short if not quite so eminent, although the family’s dynastic ambitions were then vested in his daughter Arbella Stuart. Like Mary too, Darnley’s upbringing was focused more on the advancement of his sense of unique supremacy and certainty than on developing his character through any trial or adversity. He was a gilded youth and high rewards were his due.
Although his own religious affinities were mutable and open to debate, his mother was considered a staunch Catholic and it was this which made him first a focus for Catholic sentiment in England. As early as the spring of 1560, when Darnley was fourteen years old and Elizabeth had been on the throne for just over a year, Bishop Quadra, the Spanish ambassador, wrote optimistically to his king: ‘many Catholic lords would proclaim [Darnley] king. In any case they will not have any more women to rule them as they are so afraid of foreign influence. He has the best right of any of the claimants, and is the best in every way.’2 But the Countess of Lennox had long planned that Mary would be Darnley’s route to kingship and, on news of François II’s death in December 1560, her son and heir, aged fifteen, was dispatched to France to offer his condolences to the new young widow, herself just eighteen years old. (Mary and Darnley’s birthdays were within a day of each other’s, 8 and 9 December respectively, three years apart.) Quadra’s prescient mind was already working: ‘Lady Margaret Lennox is trying to marry her son Lord Darnley to the Queen of Scotland, and I understand she is not without hope of succeeding.’3
It took a few months more for such speculation to be common in Edinburgh, and by November 1561 Elizabeth herself could not ignore it. Court chatter suggested that even if Mary should be denied the succession because she was born out of the country, and was therefore deemed ‘a foreigner’, she could by marrying Darnley ‘nevertheless reign over the kingdom by right of this youth, the son of Lady Margaret … as he is an Englishman and beyond doubt the nearest heir to the throne after her’. Elizabeth summoned Lady Lennox, Lord Darnley and his younger brother Charles. The lady was under no illusions about Elizabeth’s touchiness on the subject of the succession, and her decided power to act. Quadra noticed the effect even on someone with a far from nervous disposition: ‘Lady Margaret much distressed, as she thinks she will be thrown into the Tower, and that her son’s life is in danger’.4 In fact it was her husband who was thrown in the Tower three months later while Darnley made a discreet exit to France.
The rough treatment and exile endured by the Lennox family was suddenly reversed in early 1563 when Elizabeth released them from confinement, allowing them to resume their lives. More than that, the apparently capricious queen decided to embrace them wholeheartedly. By summer both parents and son were seen in high favour about court. The Spanish ambassador, writing to his king, found Darnley’s improved fortunes significant. He believed that Elizabeth was using him as a stalking horse in her attempts to get Mary to marry someone of whom she approved, and not pursue her dynastic ambitions abroad. ‘If the Queen of Scotland does marry a person unacceptable to this Queen, the latter will declare as her successor the son of Lady Margaret, whom she now keeps in the palace and shows such favour to as to make this appear probable.’5
Certainly Elizabeth’s sense of the proximity of death during her attack of smallpox in October the previous year had left her less confident of her robust health, yet strengthened in her will to overcome anything. In one of the many prayers she wrote she referred to this time of fear and admonished God for his lapse of concentration in letting her and her people suffer so. ‘Thou has affected me in this body with a most dangerous and nearly mortal illness. But Thou hast gravely pierced my soul with many torments; and besides, all the English people, whose peace and safety is grounded in my sound condition as Thy handmaid nearest after Thee, Thou hast strongly disregarded in my danger, and left the people stunned.’6
The following summer when plague broke out she was uncharacteristically fearful of falling ill herself, and was careful on her progresses not to travel to areas considered unhealthy. Her sense of her own mortality might well have been intensified by the prophecies that were being vigorously circulated at the time of her imminent death. ‘Everyone is talking of them.’7 In this superstitious society, it was a grim foreboding which assailed her on all sides.
Elizabeth had realized how alarmed people were at the prospect of her death leaving no clear successor, how terrified of any possibility of civil war. In the aftermath of her restoration to health, however, she had been disturbed to find her councillors favouring the Grey sisters in the event of her untimely death. Despite her genuine sympathy for these concerns, all her deep reservations about naming a successor remained. Elizabeth sought, however, to disconcert those most obviously in line for her throne. Central to her concerns always were the political manoeuvrings of her cousin Mary, whose tenacious ambition for a marriage alliance with Don Carlos and Spain still posed for her the greatest threat.
For that reason it made diplomatic sense for Mary to keep this possibility alive. She may not have been as adept as Elizabeth at political fencing, in which to feint and parry were the English queen’s favoured tactic
s, but Mary was well aware of the necessity of retaining power, or the threat of power, to add muscle to her negotiations. Her nature was much more impulsive and straightforward than Elizabeth’s, more fiery and immediate in her way of interacting with the world. Being forced to deal at Elizabeth’s negotiating pace, embroiled in her style of procrastination, evasion and denial, was almost unbearably frustrating. Attempts to unravel the real motives behind her cousin’s words and actions disheartened much more patient, insightful and experienced diplomats than Mary.
Elizabeth’s apparently contradictory actions towards Darnley and his family were a case in point. Elizabeth may have felt that by cultivating the young lord she had at her disposal a range of ways to disconcert Mary’s plans. She could implicitly threaten her with a rival whose claim on the English throne was as compelling as Mary’s own, and to the men around Elizabeth probably preferable, for Darnley had one inestimable quality: he was male. Even the devoted (though exasperated) Cecil had been heard to mutter he could not countenance another female monarch. Alternatively, offered as a prospective bridegroom, Darnley’s own connections and personal attractiveness might distract Mary from her single-minded pursuit of the Spanish alliance and procure for the English queen more time in which to work out an alternative strategy. Then again, there were those who attributed to Elizabeth even greater prescience and Machiavellian intent. Perhaps she meant the marriage to proceed, anticipating the wreckage of a match in which Lord Darnley was to prove disastrous as both husband and king.
When it came to Elizabeth’s dealings with Mary nothing was quite as it seemed. As the French ambassador de Foix’s chess analogy shows, Elizabeth could not be certain that her strategies would not rebound on herself. Whatever the reasoning, if indeed it was yet clear even to Elizabeth, in June 1563 she petitioned Mary on Lennox’s behalf to restore the family’s hereditary lands. (Lennox’s loyalties to Henry VIII in the 1540s had resulted in his Scottish property being forfeit and he and his family living the next two decades largely in England.) Relations between the two queens were officially still amenable, even affectionate. When Randolph delivered Elizabeth’s letter Mary received him while in bed, recovering from a day’s illness, and kept him closeted with her for a full hour. This informality caused her own councillors and courtiers some amusement and surprise as they gathered outside her chamber door. Mary’s spontaneity extended to her reception of Elizabeth’s letter which she kissed, saying ‘I wyll kysse yt also … for her sake yt commethe from.’8
A ring sent by Elizabeth a few months later, as a token of goodwill, was similarly made much of, as Randolph reported back to Cecil: ‘the “juell” was marvellously esteemed, often looked upon and many times kissed … “Well” said [Mary], “two jouels I have that muste die with me, and willinglie shall never owte of my sighte,” and showed me [the other] ring which was the King her husband’s’.9 Part of this effusion of feeling was natural to an impetuous, passionate nature but there was also the realization that she was relaying her thanks and appreciation through Randolph to Elizabeth herself. This was the cousin who held the key to her greatest ambition, and with whom she could only communicate by letters and through third parties. Mary was still straining every nerve to keep Elizabeth friendly and sympathetic to her claim as her heir, while maintaining whatever small bargaining power she might feel she had in this protracted duel of wits. But it was an emotionally draining business dealing with the English queen. Her position seemed so changeable, impenetrable and indeed perverse that attempting any negotiations with her was more akin to grasping at quicksilver. Mary’s attempts at discerning Elizabeth’s true wishes, so that she might at least know how she was meant to comply, met vagueness and evasion. ‘Let me knowe playnlye what your mestres mynde is’, she asked Randolph, ‘that I maye the better devise with my self, and confer with other, and so gyve you a more resolute answer, then by these generall wordes spoken by you I cane.’10
Some of the strain may have been beginning to tell on Mary. By the end of 1563, when finally she received the ring from Elizabeth which she esteemed so, she was suffering from a mysterious illness that had resulted in two months of ‘melancholies’. This malady had manifested as fits of weeping ‘when there is little apparent occasion’. Randolph found her confined to her bed again in mid-December with a pain in her right side, ‘judged to be melancholy’.11 Much dosed on various medicines and subjected to blood-lettings, the patient endured the doctors’ attempts at cure which more often than not exacerbated the disease, or at the least undermined the body’s natural vitality, delaying recovery.
It was this detail of a persistent pain in her side together with bouts of vomiting that has stimulated more recent speculation that Mary suffered from porphyria, an inherited enzyme deficiency which, although mostly symptomless, can cause intermittent acute attacks of abdominal pain, gastrointestinal disturbances, muscular weakness and psychiatric complaints, like depression, hysteria, hallucinations – even a full-blown psychosis, such as the madness suffered by one of her descendants, King George III.12 These are wide-ranging symptoms that individually can be due to a number of physical and psychological conditions. Inevitably, there has also been a suggestion that Mary was an anorexic, even a bulimic.13
In the absence of a body, retrogressive diagnosis can only be suggestive. The one distinctive symptom of an acute attack of porphyria is the passing of urine the colour of port wine. As an unmistakable aberration and in a queen so watched and monitored for signs of illness, pregnancy or poison, such a striking excretion would not have passed without notice. In Mary’s case there was no intimation in any of the copious letters and reports that surrounded her activities of any symptom as untoward as this. The intermittent pain, weakness and emotional collapses which she suffered, in an otherwise physically vigorous and robust life, could be explained just as plausibly by other less extreme conditions.
However, for a healthy young woman, these two months spent largely in bed would appear to mark a serious episode of illness, so much so that for a few days her life was thought to be in danger. The opinions of those who attended her as to the causes have some authority. The question of her marriage had been weighing on Mary heavily during the previous three years and at about this time she had accepted finally that her long-desired alliance with Don Carlos and Spain was unlikely to happen. ‘Some think the Queen’s sickness is caused by her utterly despairing of the marriage of any of those she looked for, they abroad neither being “verie hastie,” nor her subjects here “verie wyllinge” or bent those ways.’14
Throughout her life Mary had exhibited both poles of a passionate and impetuous nature, the ‘melancholies’ alternating with periods of extreme energy and inflated mood. Certainly the emotional collapse and depression she appeared to be suffering from at this time concurred with her previous reactions to loss, disappointment and thwarted will. Mary was used to having her own way and was energetic in the pursuit of her interests and desires. Now every route she had tried in the pursuit of a dynastic marriage seemed to be blocked by obstacles largely thrown up by the two most powerful women in Europe. Catherine de Medici was doing her best to thwart any Guise pretensions to marry Mary to a French prince. Neither did she care for the Spanish connection. Having married her own daughter Elizabeth to Philip II, she naturally feared Mary gaining any ascendancy by marrying Don Carlos, Philip’s heir. And Elizabeth, in seeking to safeguard England’s and her own security by controlling her cousin’s marital choices, had used the weapons she knew best, confusion, frustration and delay. Unlike the two queens ranged against her, Mary did not bear frustration and delay with patience.
Her ambition to marry a prince of equal status to her first husband now seemed to be melting into the distance like a mirage. To make matters worse, there appeared no real alternative on the horizon. With typical archness and her supreme ability to confound, Elizabeth threw her own diversion into the ring. Having already held out the promise that if the Scottish queen should marry someone of whom the
English queen approved then the succession would be hers, why not, Elizabeth suggested, marry the man she herself would have chosen, if she had had a mind to marry? The most desirable man by her lights was offered – who knows how seriously? – to Mary Queen of Scots. In conversation with the wily Maitland of Lethington, the fencing English queen appeared to have met her match. The gist of this verbal duel was reported by Bishop Quadra to his king Philip II at the end of March 1563:
ELIZABETH: ‘If his mistress would take her advice and wished to marry safely and happily she would give her a husband who would ensure both, and this was Lord Robert [Dudley] in whom nature has implanted so many graces that if she wished to marry she would prefer him to all the princes in the world …’
LETHINGTON: ‘This was a great proof of the love she bore to his Queen, as she was willing to give her a thing so dearly prized by herself, and he thought the Queen his mistress [Mary], even if she loved Lord Robert as dearly as she [Elizabeth] did, would not marry him and so deprive her of all the joy and solace she received from his companionship.’
ELIZABETH: ‘She wished to God the Earl of Warwick his brother had the grace and good looks of Lord Robert in which each [queen] could have one … [ yet] the Earl of Warwick was not ugly either, and was not ungraceful, but his manner was rather rough and he was not so gentle as Lord Robert. For the rest, however, he was so brave, so liberal and magnanimous that truly he was worthy of being the husband of any great princess.’
LETHINGTON (upset that Elizabeth should demean Mary in offering Lord Robert’s brother and wishing to bring this embarrassing conversation to a close): ‘The Queen his mistress was very young yet, and what this Queen [Elizabeth] might do for her was to marry Lord Robert herself first and have children by him, which was so important for the welfare of the country, and then when it should please God to call her to himself she could leave the Queen of Scots heiress both to her kingdom and her husband. In this way it would be impossible for Lord Robert to fail to have children by one or other of them who would in time become Kings of these two countries.’15