Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  Touché, Lethington may have felt as Elizabeth fell silent.

  Mary of course had much grander designs than Elizabeth’s handme-on lover. But she still longed to meet the English queen, still badly desired the recognition of her succession, and feared alienating her. Desultory negotiations continued for quite a while but no one really thought Robert Dudley was a serious candidate for the Queen of Scots, not least he himself whose own high aspirations still centred on marriage to Elizabeth. He admitted to Melville, the envoy Mary sent to deal with Elizabeth in the summer of 1564, that the whole scheme had been thought up by ‘his secret enemy’ Cecil, ‘“for if I”, says [Dudley], “should have appeared desirous of that marriage, I should have lost the favour of both the queens”’.16 Elizabeth had offered to Melville a further explanation for the surprising offer of her favourite. As she had determined to remain a virgin it was only sensible that ‘the Queen her sister’ should have him and then she could declare Mary her successor, secure in the knowledge that ‘being matched with [Dudley], it would best remove out of her mind all fear and suspicion, to be offended by usurpation before her death; being assured that he was so loving and trusty that he would never give his consent nor suffer such thing to be attempted during her time’.17

  In fact nothing would be more certain to put Mary off. Elizabeth was stating as clearly as possible that Dudley’s allegiance, love and loyalty would remain centred on herself, that even marriage to Mary and all the honours that would bring could not win for the Scottish queen his primary loyalty. It was all the more indication that Elizabeth never meant to share her favourite with Mary, and Mary had not the slightest intent to try. Apart from this confusing sham offer, the Scottish queen had been given only vague encouragement to ‘marie [with]in England’, which caused much merriment when she related it to the Earl of Argyll and he enquired – ‘how so then? Is the Quene of Englande become a man?’18 Along with these unspecific prescriptions from Elizabeth were threats of loss of favour, even enmity, if Mary should disobey and marry out of the kingdom, choosing instead some forbidden European prince. Uncertainty and frustration and constant, if covert, demands for her submission to Elizabeth’s will certainly added their emotional toll.

  Randolph also felt that a tragedy that befell two popular members of the Scottish court contributed to Mary’s mood of depression and despair. One of her French maids-in-waiting became pregnant by the queen’s apothecary who, in a panic, turned to abortifacient potions in an attempt ‘to cover his fawlte with medicines, the childe was slayne in the mothers bellie’. The young woman had been highly favoured by Mary who was ‘so offended, it is thought they [the lovers] shall die’. Randolph’s mention of the closeness of this young woman to the queen, together with Mary’s extreme reaction, implied that she was not only concerned with the crime but was careful that the immorality did not taint her own maidenly reputation too. Both the apothecary and lady-in-waiting were friends to many in what was a very small and intimate court and when they were duly hanged, within a fortnight of their confession, their tragic deaths upset everyone. The pragmatic Moray was keen to stress to Cecil (and therefore Elizabeth) how much moral probity mattered in this new Protestant government helped into being by English support. He related how even a man as mighty as the Lord Treasurer of Scotland, having made a woman pregnant outside marriage, had to subject himself to a public confession in church on Sunday, and then endure one of Knox’s blistering, self-righteous sermons. This Moray hoped would prove ‘“oure greate severitie” to offenders’.19

  A more interesting suggestion perhaps was that Mary’s illness that winter was partly diplomatic. She was practising some of the negotiating tactics of her cousin. Randolph commented on how well she looked, even while she kept to her bed, and certainly being indisposed gave her the best excuse for procrastination and evasion, two of Elizabeth’s most effective tools in her diplomatic armoury, at a time when the English queen herself was pressing for some kind of decision. Randolph explained that Mary would as readily change her mind, her words ‘so drawne backe agayne from me as thoughe theie had not byne spoken’. Also, he recognized in Mary a habit he claimed as common to all women, when she denied most vehemently her liking for the very person she liked most. On this occasion she was almost as successful at sowing confusion as her cousin. Mary exasperated Randolph, who awaited some kind of answer, being willing to discuss her marriage one day, then capriciously denying any interest the next, professing rather ‘the weddows lyf is beste, honorable, quiet etc’. Such contrariness had strong echoes of Elizabeth as Mary claimed, ‘Sometimes she may marry where she will, sometimes she is sought of nobody.’20 In desperation, Randolph urged her to take pity on her Four Maries, contemporaries and friends since childhood, who apparently had all vowed celibacy until the queen had made her choice, and by marrying herself release them from this unnatural state.

  In fact Mary was learning fast other lessons her cousin had perfected. Her conversations with Elizabeth’s ambassadors showed an increasingly sharp intelligence and sure-footedness in the quick-fire debate of realpolitik. To Randolph, she enquired whether Elizabeth’s professed care for her as a sister or daughter was best expressed by requiring she marry a subject like Lord Robert. Was it not better to marry her where some helpful foreign alliance would ensue? When Randolph pointed out that the chief alliance sought by Elizabeth was to live in amity with Scotland, something Mary’s own people desired, she was quick to fire back: ‘Are you’, said she, ‘so assured of my subjectes myndes, that you dare assure that?’ And when Randolph described Scotland as ‘wonte to be verie troblesome, full of contention, I wyll not say commotions agaynste the authoritie’, and therefore influenced for the better by proximity with England and thereby ‘shall for ever live in obedience with so friendly a neighbour as England’, Mary retorted, ‘You myghte … have saide the same of your owne countrie.’ To which Randolph partly had to agree.21

  Despite her apparent eagerness to please Elizabeth, despite the professions of love and admiration for her cousin and desire for nothing more than friendship and support, as long as Mary managed to keep her emotions in check she was an increasingly intelligent, crafty and competent politician. Her ambition, her attractive manner and the high sense of herself had an immutable force that persuaded others she was someone to be reckoned with. Sir James Melville, meeting her again when she was twenty-one, described the effect. ‘She was so affable, so gracious and discreet, that she won great estimation and the hearts of many both in England and Scotland, and mine among the rest.’ So much so, that he decided to give up his own foreign connections and ambitions to settle for Scotland and Mary, as someone ‘more worthy to be served for little profit than any other prince in Europe for great advantage’.22 Despite Mary’s increasing stature as a monarch, she was up against a consummate politician in Elizabeth, someone who seldom allowed her emotions sway. In fact, exhibiting an instinctive brilliance, Elizabeth harnessed emotion, her own and her people’s, to add force and poetic resonance to the workings of her will.

  It was when the wills of these two queens clashed that the hidden rivalries and animosities fractured their professions of love. The rivalry was, however, a natural one. Two queens governing adjacent countries in one small island would naturally harbour an intense interest in each other, as well as rampant competitiveness. The fact that both claimed the same crown just fuelled the flame. Each’s obstinate refusal of what the other requested – Mary to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh whereby she relinquished her claim on Elizabeth’s throne while she lived, and that of Elizabeth to recognize Mary as her successor when she died – had been complicated by the whole issue of whom Mary should marry. There was also an underlying power struggle in which Elizabeth assumed she was the senior partner in their relationship, and had rights to dictate terms. Mary, however, was unused and unwilling to accept dictation from anyone. One of Mary’s lairds, discussing with Randolph how best to get his queen and Elizabeth to collaborate, astutely understood the cla
sh of wills: ‘I wolde that bothe the Quenes wolde laye aparte these worldlye opinions and termes of greatnes and suche lyke, and in thys poynte I wolde that theie lacked some what of their willes; for whear all is in will, reason ys not the guide.’23

  With the spring of 1564 came renewed health and vigour, and despite any diplomatic protestations to the contrary, Mary was ready to marry again. Having accepted the probable end of her hopes for a dynastic alliance she turned her eager gaze closer to home. She seemed to have been as aware of Lord Darnley’s possibilities as anyone. By the middle of the year relations between the two queens had so cooled that the weekly flow of letters between them had all but stopped, as Mary’s agent James Melville explained, ‘for in their hearts from that time forth there was nothing but jealousies and suspicions’.24 The immediate cause was a brusque letter from Mary to Elizabeth objecting to Elizabeth’s ambivalence and accusing her of double-dealing over the return to Scotland of Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox. Elizabeth admitted in a private note to Cecil that she was confounded by how best to deal with the troublesome question of Mary’s marriage. Her own stratagems threatened to get the better of her. As she said to de Foix, the French ambassador, ‘Darnley is but a pawn; but he may well checkmate me if he be promoted.’ Much as she needed to feel in control of everything, there were so many imponderables in every situation; she could never be sure of the outcome. She was confounded too by Mary’s own character, a nature so unlike her own: ‘In such a manner of labyrinth am I placed by the answer that I am to give to the Queen of Scotland that I do not know in what way I will be able to satisfy her, since I will not have given her any answer for all this time, nor do I know what I now should say,’ she wrote despairingly to her chief minister, asking that he suggest something appropriate for her brief to Randolph.25

  That summer of 1564 had provided a small triumph for Elizabeth, away from the diplomatic wrangles and frustration over her intractable cousin. She had visited the university at Cambridge and been greeted by a half-hour speech in Latin by the official orator. Every virtue he praised in her elicited a self-deprecating response such as shaking her head, biting her lip or her fingers and even occasionally calling out with passion, ‘Non est veritas, et utinam [It is not true; would that it were]’. However, when he praised her for her virginity Elizabeth did not deny that particular virtue but gracefully concurred, ‘God’s blessing of thine heart’ and bade him continue.26 When the speech had come to an end she was urged by all the dignitaries present, including Lord Robert, Cecil and most of her lords, to respond likewise, if only in a few words.

  With apparent reluctance and maiden shyness, afraid, she said, of making a fool of herself with her inferior grasp of the language, Elizabeth then launched into an extempore speech, in her excellent Latin, in which she promised to ‘leave an exceptional work after my death, by which not only may my memory be renowned in the future, but others may be inspired by my example’.27 This was greeted with an eruption of gratitude and approval. Such progresses into her kingdom invariably increased her popularity and renewed her confidence in the love her people bore her, the one insurance Elizabeth had against rival claims to her throne, plots on her life, the loneliness of her state and the random blows of fate. She returned to London, prepared to enter the diplomatic fray once more.

  Mary appeared to be more concerned than Elizabeth over the recent estrangement between them. Characteristically, she was impatient and more inclined to act. In late September she dispatched Melville south, ostensibly to smooth matters over with Elizabeth, but also to meet with the Spanish ambassador and other select sympathizers, as well as secretly to deliver a message to Darnley’s mother, Lady Margaret, ‘to procure liberty for [Darnley] to go to Scotland’.28

  Melville’s record of the series of meetings he had with the thirty-one-year-old Queen of England in September 1564 is celebrated. Yet, it offers such a fresh and powerful evocation of the character, cunning and wit of this great queen in the making, and also throws into relief the human curiosity and rivalry at the heart of the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary, that its reiteration here is apt. Melville himself was twenty-eight and had been in France for most of the last fourteen years. His experiences had given him an urbane and wide-ranging viewpoint that was stimulating to someone as intellectually demanding as Elizabeth. Now, as envoy on this historic visit, his own perceptions were acute and free from prejudice, although his memoir was composed when his career was over, and with some of the benefit of hindsight.

  The queen was at Westminster and early in the morning Melville was escorted there on a horse provided by Lord Robert. Shown into the garden, he came upon Elizabeth walking in a narrow alley between high hedges. She offered her hand to him to kiss and he greeted her in French, apologizing for not yet regaining an easy fluency in his own language. Elizabeth was well prepared for his embassy and produced from her pocket not only the offending letter from Mary, so ‘full of despiteful language that she believed all friendship and familiarity to have been given up’, but her own angry response which she had only refrained from sending, she said, because she thought it was too gentle and she should write another ‘more vehement’.

  Melville, shown both letters, confessed himself confused as to how Elizabeth could have so miscontrued Mary’s ‘loving and frank’ missive to her, suggesting that although ‘Her Majesty could speak as good French as any who had not been out of the country, that yet she lacked the use of the French court language, which was frank and short’, and liable to more than one interpretation. Good friends and familiars could be counted on always to choose the best of possible meanings, he added. Elizabeth seemed to take this slur on her linguistic sophistication in good part. In what appeared to be more an episode of diplomatic shadow-boxing than a sincere expression of outrage appeased, she theatrically tore up both the letters in front of Melville, promising to interpret for the best all future dealings with ‘her good sister’.

  Melville stayed at court for nine days, in audience with the queen sometimes as many as three times a day. Elizabeth had told him that ‘seeing she could not meet with the Queen her good sister to confer with her familiarly, she should open a good part of her inward mind to me, that I might show it again unto the Queen’. Professing great affection for Mary and a ‘great desire to see her’, a great desire also that she would accept her proposal of Dudley for a husband, Elizabeth took Melville into her bedchamber and out of her desk produced a collection of miniatures wrapped in paper and named in her own handwriting. The first had ‘My Lord’s picture’ written upon its paper wrapping. Holding a candle, Melville leaned forward to look. Elizabeth feigned reluctance, turning it away from him, but he managed to ascertain that it was indeed Lord Robert’s picture. When Melville asked that he might have it to carry back to Mary, Elizabeth refused, saying it was the only one she had. Looking across to Lord Robert in conversation with Sir William Cecil at the far side of the room, Melville pointed out that Elizabeth already had the original. ‘Then she took out [my] queen’s picture, and kissed it; and I kissed her hand, for the great love I saw she bore my mistress. She showed me also a fair ruby, as great as a tennis-ball.’ When Melville asked that she send either the picture of Lord Robert or the ruby as a token of goodwill to Mary, Elizabeth answered ‘if the Queen would follow her counsel, that she would in process of time get them both, and all she had’.

  The following day Elizabeth cross-examined him about his European travels; for a woman steeped in European culture, she would never manage to travel outside the boundaries of her own small country and she liked to converse with educated foreigners and adventurous Englishmen. Elizabeth also asked Melville about the fashions abroad and what kinds of dress best became a gentlewoman. The queen herself paraded the best of her wardrobe, wearing something different every day, representing the styles of France, Italy and England. When he was asked to choose which suited her best she was flattered when he said her Italian outfit, ‘for she delighted to show her golden coloured
hair, wearing a caul and bonnet as they do in Italy. Her hair was more reddish than yellow, curled in appearance naturally.’ There followed the most pointed questioning of how the two queens compared in beauty and accomplishments, judicious answers to which Melville was hard pressed to find: ‘Then she entered to discern what colour of hair was reputed best; and whether my Queen’s hair or hers was best; and which of them two was fairest … I said she was the fairest Queen in England and ours the fairest Queen in Scotland.’ Elizabeth, however, was not happy with these discreet evasions and pressed the poor man further. His ingenious reply, ‘they were both the fairest ladies of their courts and that Her Majesty was whiter, but our queen was very lovely’, seemed to satisfy her.

  Then she turned to their respective heights; which was the taller she asked. Melville thought this would not prove problematic and answered truthfully: Mary was. Elizabeth mischievously turned this to her own account: ‘Then, saith she, she is too high and that herself was neither too high nor too low.’ The comparisons then ranged over the queens’ sporting interests and accomplishments. Melville mentioned that as he left the Scottish court to come south Mary had just returned from a hunting expedition in the Highlands, then added, ‘when she had leisure from the affairs of her country she read upon good books, the histories of diverse countries, and sometimes would play upon the lute and virginals’. Elizabeth asked if Mary played well: Melville replied, ‘reasonably for a Queen’.