Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  This was a gauntlet that could not be allowed to lie. That evening after dinner Melville was taken up to a gallery by one of Elizabeth’s nobles, ostensibly to hear some music on the virginals played by an anonymous musician. After listening for a while, he pulled back the tapestry that hung over the door of the chamber to find what he had expected. The queen’s back was towards him and he stood watching for a while ‘and heard her play excellently well’. The moment Elizabeth caught sight of him she stopped playing and pretended to strike him playfully with her hand, ‘alleging that she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary, to shun melancholy’. Then, sitting on a cushion on the floor with Melville kneeling beside her (she insisted he take a cushion for greater comfort which rather touched him), she proceeded to ask whether Mary or she played the virginals better. Melville was relieved to be able to say that Elizabeth was the more accomplished. He was keen to get back to Scotland but she pressed him to stay a further two days, long enough to see her dance. Elizabeth was praised generally for her high-stepping style and the tireless energy she brought to everything she did: when Melville was cross-examined on the dancing abilities of both queens he had become more skilled in his own footwork, ‘I answered that [my] Queen danced not so high and disposedly [with measured steps] as she did’.29

  During this time at Elizabeth’s court, Melville had been present when Lord Robert Dudley was ennobled at last as the Earl of Leicester. Elizabeth claimed this was to elevate him to a status more acceptable as a consort for the Queen of Scots, but it was just as likely to be the long-promised reward for the love and support of the man she ‘esteemed … as her brother and best friend’.30 This was an occasion of historic pageantry, symbolism and solemnity. Melville noticed that as Dudley knelt before the queen, ‘keeping a great gravity and discreet behaviour’, she helped put on his ceremonial garb and then ‘could not refrain from putting her hand in his neck to tickle him smilingly’.

  Was this a gesture that showed she was unable to resist him, or was it more to show that, whatever might happen, he belonged to her and as his monarch she could do with him as she wished? Either way it was a remarkably intimate gesture on such an august occasion, and one which surprised Melville, performed as it was in clear sight of himself and the French ambassador. Thinking of her cousin and the current debate over her marriage, Elizabeth then turned to Mary’s envoy and asked him how he liked the new earl. Melville was carefully noncommital in his reply and Elizabeth, artful as ever and probably aware of the covert communications between Mary and the Countess of Lennox, pointed to the languid youth who was holding the ceremonial sword before her: ‘Yet’, she said, ‘you like better of yonder long lad.’31 Lord Darnley, as nearest prince of the blood, favoured with ceremonial duties such as this, was prominent at court at the time while his parents and Mary were making overtures to obtain his passport to Scotland. Melville’s answer to Elizabeth was possibly coloured by discretion, if not by hindsight: ‘no woman of spirit would make choice of such a man, that was more like a woman than a man; for he was very lusty [pleasing], beardless and lady-faced’.32

  On his return to Scotland, Melville was questioned just as penetratingly by his own queen on the condition of Elizabeth’s heart towards her. Mary professed herself delighted that the two queens’ friendship was restored, not just for sentimental reasons but because an easy dialogue between both countries allowed her ‘access to get intelligence from a great number of noblemen and others her friends and factioners in England’. This implied that Mary even at this early stage in her relationship with Elizabeth was hopeful, if not active, in attempting to build a clandestine faction of support for her interests, under the English queen’s nose. When she asked of Melville whether Elizabeth’s inner feelings for her matched her fine words of affection, he replied: ‘in my judgement there was neither plain dealing nor upright meaning, but great dissimulation, emulation, and fear that [Mary’s] princely qualities should over soon chase her out and displace her from the kingdom’.33

  By August 1564, the Earl of Lennox finally had his licence to travel to Scotland, twenty years after he had left. At first, however, Elizabeth would not allow his family to follow. Her acceptance of the Lennoxes’ return to Scottish affairs appeared to embody on her part both political manoeuvring and inducement, with young Darnley as bait. Cecil and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, were more unequivocal. In fact it was likely that Cecil authorized financing the cost of Lennox’s re-establishment. But it was a risky move, for an alliance with Darnley offered to Mary a further strengthening of her own substantial claim on the English throne. Melville believed that Elizabeth had suddenly become concerned that Mary was considering her proposal of Leicester more seriously, and as she never intended to relinquish her favourite she hoped that reinstating Lord Darnley’s family fortunes and introducing him as a more attractive suitor might temporarily deflect the Queen of Scots. Perhaps the English intent was to destabilize the political alliances north of the border. Certainly there were many who were made uneasy at the re-emergence of Lennox power, not least the Duke of Châtelherault, head of the Hamiltons, ancestral foes of the Lennoxes, who feared ‘the overthrow of hys house, if the Lord Darlie marrye the Quene’.34 Many of the other Protestant lords feared such a major shift in tribal power and strengthening of the Catholic party. Whatever the spur, as was often Elizabeth’s way, almost as soon as she had given permission she regretted her move.

  The most extreme and outspoken among the opposition was John Knox, always canny and unconciliatory in his approach. ‘It is whispered to me’, he had written to Randolph in May, ‘that licence [for the Lady (Lennox) and the young Erle] is allready procured for thare hitther-cuming. Goddis providence is inscrutable to man … But to be plaine with you, that jorney and progress I lyke not.’35 Moray had at first mooted the marriage between Lord Darnley and Mary as early as February 1564 and later actively lobbied for Lennox’s return, but very soon political acumen and self-interest had him rue the day that father and son set foot on Scottish soil.

  Events seemed to move forward with an inexorable force. By November the new Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth’s court, Guzman de Silva (sent to replace Bishop Quadra who had died, possibly of the plague), reported to Philip II that the Lennox estates in Scotland had been restored and the earl wished his son, Lord Darnley, might be allowed to join him to be introduced at last to his inheritance. Elizabeth issued a licence, this time for Darnley, but again immediately revoked it, with the excuse that Lady Margaret had been less than straightforward in her dealings. She was persuaded to reinstate it but the passport was still not forthcoming. ‘This is the way with everything – absolutely no certainty’,36 the new ambassador commented on what he was learning to be the leitmotif of Elizabeth’s negotiating tactics; procrastination, disguise, equivocation, then sudden disconcerting audacity. If Elizabeth was more a Greek, then Cecil was a Roman and the same ambassador was thankful for the relief of Cecil’s straight road: ‘[He is] truthful, lucid, modest and just, and, although he is zealous in serving his Queen, which is one of his best traits, yet he is amenable to reason … With regard to his religion I say nothing except that I wish he were a Catholic, but to his credit must be placed the fact that he is straightforward in affairs.’37

  Elizabeth had insisted that only if Mary chose an approved suitor from the nobility of England or her own country would she remain friends and name her as her successor. Mary and her advisers, however, had been exasperated for months by Elizabeth’s evasiveness about an acceptable consort. Only Lord Robert, now Earl of Leicester, had been formally suggested and no alternatives had been openly admitted. In fact, in a list of negotiating instructions for the Earl of Bedford and Randolph, written in Cecil’s hand, there was the startling suggestion that Elizabeth was willing to have Mary and Leicester come and live with her, and to shoulder the household expenses, should Mary accept Leicester as a husband: ‘if the Queen her sister pleased to be “conversant with” and live with her “in house
hold” she will gladly bear the charges of the “famyly” both of the Earl of Leicester “and hir, as shall be mete for on sister to doo for another”’.38 With Mary so completely in her control, this suggested that Elizabeth would have dominion implicitly over both kingdoms. But Mary was a spirited and proud woman and such a scheme, even if it was seriously mooted by Elizabeth and Cecil, even if it assured her the inheritance of the English throne, was a lost cause. If the suggestion showed anything, apart from the English queen’s mischievous sense of humour, it revealed how loath Elizabeth was to lose Leicester, her ‘Robin’, from her side.

  In the deep cold of December, Elizabeth acceded to Mary’s requests for some action on the matters of her marriage and the English succession. She sent the Earl of Bedford on the long ride north to Berwick to meet Randolph, together with Mary’s half-brother Moray and her chief minister Maitland of Lethington, with the express purpose of discussing the English queen’s wishes on the Scottish queen’s marriage. It is likely that in his pocket were these instructions, neatly written out in Cecil’s orderly hand.

  The central proposal made by Elizabeth to Mary was ‘that she should choose between the following three Englishmen: the Earl of Leicester, the Duke of Norfolk and the son of Lady Margaret Lennox, and in the event of her marrying either of them [an interesting slip] she will declare her heiress to the crown’. Mary apparently was willing ‘to marry an Englishman if the succession was declared, but not the Earl of Leicester although she said nothing of the other two’.39 Perhaps she had already turned her mind to Darnley. According to the Spanish ambassador, Mary had written recently to Elizabeth asking the English queen’s permission for him to travel to Scotland.

  Christmas and the new year of 1565 were marked by unnaturally bitter winter weather. The Thames in London was frozen fast ‘and people walk upon it as they do the streets’,40 and in Scotland a ‘great storm of snow and wind, as the like many years has not been seen’,41 had sent Mary to her bed, not through sickness but to ward off the worst of the cold. In fact, everyone at her court was ill at some time during that severe winter but Mary alone escaped and remained in the best of health and spirits, ‘never merrier nor lustiar!’42 On the contrary, Elizabeth herself was unwell, suffering from catarrh and extreme headaches. Cecil was seized once more with worry: an ill queen, no clear succession; it was a grim season indeed. The doctors pronounced her constitution weak, which the Spanish ambassador was pleased to relate to Philip II, adding that, with the widespread predictions of her short life, she was not expected to live much longer.

  This news had reached Mary in her snowy fastness. Her true feelings were not so well dissembled beneath the fulsome declarations: ‘I wysshe [her full recovery] for … she is everie daye more dere to me than other, and I am assured that her lyf, and that compagnie that I truste to have with her, shalbe more worthe to me, then her whole kingedome with her deathe, yf she were dysposed to leave yt me.’43 Not surprisingly Elizabeth discerned through the blandishments something more sinister: she declared that Mary ‘doth looke for her death, and that all thys kyndenes is pretended onely to hunt a kyngdome!’44

  The deep freeze then turned to sudden thaw and the southern part of the country was in flood. In the midst of this extreme weather Lord Darnley began his precipitate ride north to rejoin his father. There was a sense of expectation. His father had been spending money lavishly, refurbishing the ancestral pile, entertaining influential lords and giving expensive gifts to Mary, Lethington and each of the Four Maries, amongst others, ‘thus to win all their hearts’.45 Randolph estimated that in just a month Lennox already had run through most of the £700 he had brought with him. The longer he stayed, the more he bragged (he was heard to say to the Lord of the Session, in hearing of the Earl of Atholl, that his son would marry the queen), the more anxious certain factions grew.

  Randolph, who had favoured Leicester’s suit and did not believe Darnley would prevail, told Cecil in mid-December ‘more was thought of Darnley before his father’s coming than at present. The father is now here well known; the mother more feared than beloved of any that know her.’46 The talk went that Darnley’s mother might gain as influential a hold on the Scottish queen as she had on Mary I and ‘[send] home as greate a plague [of Catholicism] unto this countrie’.47 Randolph wrote to Cecil that there was general unrest and some foreboding with stories of unruly bands of armed men on the loose in Edinburgh at night, ‘fighting one with the other. The strokes they say are heard, the clamours of men great …’48

  Into this rumour mill, this court of intrigues, shifting rivalries and brazen ambition, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, arrived in the middle of February, travel-weary and nursing a cold. At first his graceful manners and good looks meant he was well received. Although some were doubtful as to his true nature and others concerned by the possible outcome of his coming, they generally considered him ‘a fayer yollye yonge man’.49 Everyone trod carefully: this presentable youth might be just another noble scion, or alternatively he might become their king whom those with aspirations needed to placate. Darnley had ridden north at such speed he had turned up sooner than expected and remained in Edinburgh for three days, introducing himself to his fellow lords and awaiting advice from his father. The queen’s court had removed from Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth to Fife. Lennox sent word to his son advising him to visit Mary first and only then come on to see him at Glasgow. Darnley’s horses had yet to arrive and so he borrowed two from Randolph before setting off for Wemyss Castle.

  The first meeting on Scottish soil of Mary and Lord Darnley was watched from all quarters with beady eyes. It was Saturday, 17 February 1565, and the ambassadors were agog, their dispatches winging their way between Edinburgh and London, and out to the courts of Spain and France where the news that Darnley had reached Scotland ‘had wonderfully awakened’ the French court and inspired the general belief that ‘the Scottish Queen shall marry him’.50 Randolph reported back to Cecil and Elizabeth, ‘The young lord was “welcomed and honourably used … [and] lodged in the same house where [Mary] was”’.51 Darnley returned from his father’s in time to accompany the queen on her return over the Queen’s Ferry to Edinburgh. In an attempt to calm Protestant disquiet the following Monday he attended Knox’s sermon in the company of the Earl of Moray. In the evening he danced a galliard with Mary who surprised Randolph with how radiantly healthy she appeared, although she had just endured a journey through atrocious cold and blizzards: ‘come home lustiar then she wente fourthe’.52

  Mary’s renewed energy and ebullience continued and a few days later when she heard that Moray had organized a great dinner with Darnley, his father, Lennox, Randolph and ‘most of the noblemen in town and the ladies of the court’, she sent her messenger to say she wished to be present too and was sorry not to be invited. This impulsive informality from the queen caused much delighted surprise: ‘It was merrily answered, the house was her own, she might come undesired; others said they were merriest when the table was fullest, but princes ever used to dine alone.’ They all ended up in robust discourse with the Queen of Scots, asking her to defend her position on the Mass, and cross-examining her about her marriage plans. She was in the best of moods and full of goodwill towards ‘her good systar’ Elizabeth, commending her government, her judicial mercy towards offenders and her refusal to follow her forbears ‘in shedding blood’.53 Mary had enjoyed herself so much she summoned them all to another banquet the following Sunday.

  Randolph who had long promoted the match with Lord Robert, now Earl of Leicester, found it hard to accept that there was any immediate attraction between the Queen of Scots and this handsome youth who had arrived in their midst. He was not a subtle man and was confused by his own government’s motives and how he was meant to act. He knew that Lennox was being funded by Cecil, and in fact had written to point out to his government that at the earl’s current rate of expenditure, ‘he must shortly be supported with more money, or shall find lack in what he has to do’.54
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  Soon after Darnley’s arrival there were mutterings among the lords expressing already their anxiety and disapproval of how affairs between him and the Queen of Scots were progressing. The Earl of Argyll was plain spoken – he disliked this youth’s homecoming and feared for the future, but after all, he pointed out, women’s affections were notoriously fickle. Almost to reassure himself Randolph wrote to Cecil: ‘For myself, I see no great goodwill borne to [Darnley]. Of her grace’s good usage and often talk with him, her countenance and good visage, I think it proceeds rather of her own courteous nature, than anything is meant which some here fear may insue.’55

  Melville, however, recalled that Mary from that first meeting at Wemyss had liked what she saw, being particularly struck by Darnley’s remarkable height and fine physique. She was twenty-two and in the prime of life, her prodigious energies and appetites restored to her. Her patience with the dilatory and confusing directives on her marriage, issued over the preceding years by Elizabeth, had been stretched to the limit. Absent princes and distant promises could not compete with the real presence of a young man of flesh, blood and ambition. The young Scottish queen was lonely, in need of companionship, adventure, and ready for love. She also believed that a suitable marriage would strengthen her position at home and abroad. Mary was not a queen prepared to remain ruling alone.

  Although Elizabeth could not have known that the dramatis personae were being assembled for the enactment of a tragedy, from her ambassadors’ reports she monitored the growing unease surrounding Mary. News travelled so fast between the two courts that, as Randolph related, ‘We lack no news, for what is most secret among you, is sooner at this Queen’s ears, that some would think it should be out of the privy chamber door where you are!’56 To Cecil he likened the posts and packets that flew back and forth almost daily as being like fowls in the air. He disapproved of the resultant gossip. While Mary waited increasingly impatiently for her cousin’s response to her marriage plans, news of Elizabeth and Leicester’s latest indiscretions entertained the Scottish and European courts.