Elizabeth and Mary Page 36
Bewitched, in the grip of sexual desire, or suffering the manic stage of mental illness, Mary was certainly hell-bent on marrying Darnley, and the sooner the better. In this state she appeared to her contemporaries peculiarly immune to any kind of objectivity, or the apprehension even of reason. She ignored the dismay of her Guise relations. She did not falter in the face of heavyweight threats from her cousin Elizabeth, and dismissing the opposition of her nobles, she sought no permission from her own Estates. She did not even wait for dispensation from the pope. On 15 May 1565 Darnley rose from his sickbed. Mary made him Lord of Ardmanoch and then Earl of Ross. He was later to be awarded the dukedom of Albany, an honour exclusively retained for the Scottish royal family. Permitted to create fourteen new knights, Darnley with Mary attempted to secure a loyal party around themselves, many of the queen’s old supporters having melted away.
In delivering Elizabeth’s sharp message of rebuke, Throckmorton recognized that Mary was so committed to her marriage to Darnley that she was impervious to ‘perswacion or reasonable meanes’. Much as Randolph also had intimated in his despairing dispatches, he reported back to Elizabeth that the only remedy that remained was ‘vyolence’: whether this was invasion, war, abduction or assassination of the prospective bridegroom was not committed to paper. He determined to discuss the possibilities when he returned. Mary nevertheless made one concession to her cousin by promising not to finalize her marriage for a minimum of three months (to the middle of August). Throckmorton, so admiring of the young Queen of Scots when he had been ambassador to France was bemused and sorrowful at the change in her. He warned Elizabeth: ‘Yet I find her so captyved eyther by love or connying (or rather to saye truelie by bostinge or follie) that she is not hable to keape promesse with her self, and therfore not most hable to keape promess with your majestie in theis matters [Yet I find her so captive either by love or cunning (or more truthfully boasting or folly) that she is not able to keep a promise with herself let alone with your majesty in these matters].’73
Cecil drew up one of his judicious memoranda itemizing the threats of the marriage to Elizabeth, and projected courses of action, as discussed by the Privy Council at the beginning of June. Darnley’s claim to the English throne was seen to reinforce Mary’s own, therefore it was suggested Lady Catherine Grey (recognized by Mary as her main rival) should be shown greater favour. The lords sought to neutralize the threat to the Protestant religion and encouragement of the Catholics both in Scotland and England with the rather forlorn hope of Elizabeth’s speedy marriage, ‘and thus confirm the hearts of her subjects’.74 The Countess of Lennox too was to be isolated from communicating with Catholic sympathizers at home and abroad, and her son and husband recalled from Scotland on threat of their English estates being forfeit.
In the face of so much opposition, Mary looked with some urgency to Spain. For once, Philip II responded swiftly and decisively. To his ambassador Guzman he wrote, ‘the marriage is one that is favourable to our interests and should be forwarded and supported to the full extent of our power’. He was keen that the Catholic party in England should be notified of his wholehearted approval and given every encouragement. ‘You will make Lady Margaret [Lennox] understand’, he added, ‘that not only shall I be glad for her son to be king of Scotland and will help him thereto, but also to be king of England if this marriage is carried through.’75 This unqualified support for her choice of Darnley as husband and the implicit threat against Elizabeth delighted Mary and gave her heart. She was to need it, for within days she received an icy blast from Elizabeth: ‘For divers good causes we have expressly commanded the Earl of Lennox and his eldest son Henry Lord Darnley, as our subjects, to return hither without delay: and we require you to give them your safe conduct for their speedier coming.’76
Elizabeth was enraged and alarmed by the news she received daily as to the activities north of the border. Moray’s alienation from Mary grew while her Protestant lords became more agitated at supposed threats to the newly established religion and their own lives and lands. Some ‘factious lords’, Moray and Châtelherault chief among them, appealed to Elizabeth for English intervention. There was wildfire talk of conspiracies and counterconspiracies: one between Darnley and his followers to assassinate Moray; another claiming that Moray and certain disaffected Protestant lords had intended to ambush the Queen of Scots and Darnley on a projected ride from Perth to Callender House near Falkirk, due for 1 July. Debate about the likelihood or not of this wild plan washed back and forth. As Melville understood it the objective of the assault was to bundle Darnley over the border into England and Elizabeth’s custody, while Mary he thought ‘was in danger either of keeping [being confined] or heart-breaking’.77 Whatever the real truth, it was clear that feelings were so inflammable at the time that something made Mary and Darnley suddenly fear for their lives and set off on a panic-fuelled ride cross-country on that first day of July. They arrived safely, having failed to find any hostile lords on the way, but it was an odd incident which indicated the level of tension and fear which made everyone suspicious and probable rumour real.
Foreign ambassadors to Elizabeth’s court recognized that she avoided speaking of Mary’s marriage plans and that when the subject was forced on her they risked an irritable explosion of temper. She did not like to see her control on Scottish affairs slipping. She feared the shift of power between Protestant and Catholic interests within both realms and the increased influence this marriage gave the Catholic powers abroad. But there were those, like the French agent Mauvissière, who thought that Mary’s marriage ‘was not so evil taken [in England] by Her Majesty and her Council as [Throckmorton] has shown in his negotiations’.78 Elizabeth’s antagonism, he figured, was just another of her crafty political feints, for it had seemed that initially at least she had manoeuvred for the very action which now she deplored. If she had not actively stage-managed the Darnley marriage, then Melville laid covert responsibility for it at Elizabeth’s door: ‘[the] courtly dealing, shifting and drifting, by staying the Queen so far as they might from marrying with any man, far or near, great or small, caused the Queen to haste forward her marriage with my Lord Darnley’.79
There was no doubt that Mary’s marriage to Darnley heartened Catholic interests at home and abroad, but more significant advantage would have been gained – and greater dismay caused to Elizabeth and the Protestants – if instead Mary had allied herself to a prince of Spain, Austria or France. It was perhaps more likely that Elizabeth’s disaffection was genuine, owing more to Mary having sidestepped the delaying tactics and proceeded with her marriage without deferring to her cousin’s wishes. The Scottish queen had thereby upset the status quo between the queens, had abandoned her earlier subservience towards her cousin and asserted her greater autonomy. Most tellingly, perhaps, Mary’s marriage combined with her youth and robustness made it likely that eventually a son and heir would complicate their rivalry.
Elizabeth was adept at using outraged innocence as a diplomatic skill, and she maintained her stance as the injured party. Darnley’s mother, Lady Lennox, had already been notified at the beginning of June that she was to be imprisoned again in the Tower, although this was not to take effect until the 25th. Her crime was allowing her son to seek Mary’s hand in marriage without first seeking permission from their sovereign Elizabeth, but in effect her imprisonment was aimed at putting Darnley under pressure and warning Elizabeth’s subjects how any disloyalty would be treated. While the English queen meted out punishment and blamed others, the Scottish queen continued to behave as if she was in absolute control of her destiny. Declaring ‘she would only marry a King’,80 she ignored the opinion of her lords and declared Darnley ‘King of this our Kingdom’81 on the evening before she married him. So bent was she on taking Darnley as her husband, Mary was said to have valued her love even above her faith: the Imperial ambassador wrote, ‘[Mary] is reported to have said: sic libentius volo missam missam, quam sponsum missam facere [so I would rather mis
s the Mass than miss the bridegroom]’.82
The following morning, on 29 July 1565 just after dawn, Mary awaited her bridegroom in the chapel at Holyrood Palace. She was dressed in black with a white cap and veil, the mourning clothes she had worn for her first husband. Although her period of mourning had long passed, this garb was symbolic of the continuity of her wifely state. Despite her inherited status as a regnant queen, the wearing of her widow’s weeds to her second marriage underlined her essential existence as a woman in relation to a man.
After the simple marriage ceremony, Mary retired to her chamber followed by her ladies-in-waiting and the attendant lords. Again, it was her clothing that was invested with significance. With some pretended reluctance, the queen was expected to submit to the symbolic casting off of the old husband and her previous life. Her lords withdrew strategic pins from her costume and when she had been divested of the outward forms of mourning they withdrew. Her women continued to undress her and then clothe her anew in one of her court dresses of silver or gold, in a celebration of renewed life.
Mary’s sense of renewal through marriage to Darnley was notoriously short-lived. Her honeymoon period barely lasted the summer. At the public proclamation of Lord Darnley’s elevation to the monarchy of Scotland, her lords had stood glumly and silently by. The only voice raised in acclamation was the Earl of Lennox’s, Darnley’s own father. The historian Buchanan, who in quieter times had read Latin with Mary and knew her well, in the following decade wrote with the philosophical advantage of hindsight:
Some thought a widowed Queen ought not to be denied the freedom allowed to the common people. Others, on the other hand, asserted that the case was different for an heiress to a kingdom, who by the same act took a husband to herself and gave a King to the people. Many were of the opinion that it was more proper that the people should choose a husband for a girl, than that a girl should choose a King for a people.83
As Elizabeth’s ambassador to France in the early 1560s, Throckmorton had been touched by the newly widowed Mary, describing her as a paragon of maidenly modesty and good sense. He had implied she was everything a young queen should be: she compared most favourably with his own. Elizabeth at the time was not only intractable and autocratic, she was embarrassingly amorous in her relations with Lord Robert. Now, visiting Mary in her Scottish court, Throckmorton was shocked by her transformation. Perhaps it was at this point that he appreciated for the first time the self-discipline and sacrifice of Elizabeth. For a while, before the death of Lord Robert’s wife, her passions were as actively engaged as Mary’s were with Darnley. But whereas Elizabeth might have chosen her favourite for a husband she quickly realized she could not make him king and retain her own position and her people’s trust. Her security on the throne and peace in her kingdom depended on the solidarity of her people and their support for her reign.
Mary’s unshaken belief in her status as monarch meant she had never learned the lesson that she owed her continued authority to her subjects and could not rule without their collaboration. Or she knew this but had not the self-control to act upon it. Elizabeth, on the other hand, having been the heretical wanton of Europe, now in comparison with Mary during the following chaotic years came instead to epitomize majestic restraint. Throckmorton, surveying the disarray in the Scottish court during that fateful summer of 1565, wrote to Leicester and Cecil: ‘I perceive the poet [Ovid] faylyd not that sayd Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur, majestas et amor [Majesty and love do not sit well together, nor remain on one throne].’*84 Elizabeth read the Metamorphoses as a girl and she would have seen the tragic disappointments of her family in the truth of Ovid’s words. And it had made her wary in her own life. Mary was about to learn something of the same lesson, but later and with much more catastrophic consequences.
* * *
*In the same lengthy dispatch, Zwetkovich later cited Elizabeth’s own jester’s bold précis of the alternative merits of her current suitors: ‘She should not take the King of France, for he was but a boy and babe; but she should take the Archduke Charles and then he was sure she would have a baby-boy.’ Elizabeth had translated this into Italian for Zwetkovich, and when he had replied that babes and fools speak the truth the queen just laughed. The name of Elizabeth’s famous court fool was Robert Grene: there was no evidence that this was he.
*Given Darnley’s reputed sexual dissipation, there was a possibility that the rash was a symptom not of measles but of syphilis.
*The Scotts and Elliots were two of the border clans, or ‘border reivers [robbers]’ as they were called, who conducted fierce and bloody feuds among themselves, cattle rustling, pillaging and burning homesteads and crops. At this time each of these clans was largely a law unto itself, contemptuous of the jurisdiction of the kingdoms on either side of them. In 1565 there was a particularly violent confrontation when Scot of Buccleuch executed four Elliots for cattle rustling – barely a crime in those parts, more a way of life. Vengeance was swift and bloody.
*Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 846–7.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Seeking a Future King
The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son and I am but of barren stock.
Elizabeth to her ladies, on hearing of the birth of a son to Mary, June 1566
MARY’S MARRIAGE TO DARNLEY fundamentally changed the relationship between the cousins for ever. Until this point the world of ambassadors, diplomats, philosophers, nobility, clergy and councillors, a world entirely peopled by men, had considered Mary to be the wiser, more amenable, more tractable monarch. Apart from a certain impetuosity and excess of feeling, she was praised for her statesmanlike conduct and willingness to defer to her elders and betters. Elizabeth, on the other hand, they agreed was undoubtedly clever but, still in the first decade of her reign, considered capricious and unreasonable, resistant to the advice of more experienced men who counselled her and was the despair of any foreign negotiators. Her reluctance to marry was seen as wilful negligence in a monarch and unnatural perversity in a woman.
Those ambassadors who knew both queens displayed in their dispatches a more personal and sympathetic response to Mary than they ever felt for Elizabeth, however loyal to and admiring of her they may have been. Mary had a gift of intimacy and spontaneous feeling which touched everyone with whom she came into contact, especially men. The prelude to her marriage to Darnley, however, and the unbridled behaviour that followed left even the most sympathetic of these bemused and disapproving. Suddenly it seemed she had become a woman of wilful misjudgement, intent on the headstrong pursuit of her own desires with little regard for her kingdom.
To have two queens of the same generation, reigning as neighbours in one island, was a rare and significant anomaly in the history of kings. In a world of overwhelming masculine tradition, it was inevitable that each should find the other fascinating, the conduct of her life as a woman and a monarch of personal as well as political interest. In Elizabeth there was consciousness, too, of a wider responsibility to disprove the conviction that a woman was incapable of successful rule and that such a flouting of the natural order of things spelled disaster. Even the Queen of Scots’ half-brother Moray, ostensibly loyal to her and a petitioner of Elizabeth for support of the Protestant lords, displayed his conventional prejudices: ‘amongst his Friends lament[ing], that the warlike Nation of the Scots, as well as that of the English, were subjected to the Command of a Woman’.1
Elizabeth’s own sister Mary Tudor had fulfilled the worst expectations of a woman wielding ultimate power. Her needy dependence on her husband Philip II, the compromise of her own country to support his Spanish interests, and fanatic re-establishment of her religion, had left her people wounded and wary. Always sensitive to the inveterate bias against her sex, Elizabeth was careful to parade her learning and, boasting of her masculine qualities of mind, denied her feelings, even as they continued to erupt through her well-practised patterns of disguise and control. Their rarity as regnant queens made Elizabeth of
England and Mary Queen of Scots natural rivals, their failure to meet inflating the menace and the mystery of the other.
Elizabeth was the elder, her kingdom larger and wealthier, and life’s hard lessons had left her better prepared for the artfulness required in diplomacy and the lonely responsibilities of the job. Mary’s lifelong security as a cradle queen, and the lack of any character-defining trials in her youth, had given her an inflated confidence, great personal charm and a zest for adventure. Just at the point when wilfulness, impetuosity and passion propelled Mary into marriage and a suicidal flight from reason, she had recognized that she needed a new adviser and a loyal fighter by her side. James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, was one of the Queen of Scots’ earliest loyal lieutenants. He came from a line of robust courters of dowager queens. His father Patrick had wooed Mary’s widowed mother, the dowager queen and then regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. With a telling symmetry his fiercest competitor for her hand was the Earl of Lennox, Lord Darnley’s father. Both had been rejected by a woman wiser than her daughter would prove to be. Both young Bothwell and young Arran were the next generation of rivals with their sights set on the next Queen of Scots. Neither son would ignore his ancestral calling.
Bothwell, the son, had taken over the earldom and the position of Lieutenant of the Border on his father’s death in 1556, when he was twenty-one. He had served Mary’s mother loyally during the subsequent revolt of the Protestant lords. On Mary’s own widowhood, he joined the party of noblemen who travelled to France to bring her home to Scotland. From the start of her active rule, Bothwell had commended himself to the Queen of Scots. Personally he had qualities which Mary recognized as familiar and attractive in a man. For her the seductive ideal of the heroic male had been modelled on her uncle, the celebrated military commander and head of the family, the Duc de Guise. Bothwell was an adventurer, a turbulent man of war whose anti-English belligerence, rough and ready domination of the Borders and manly courage had early commanded Mary’s attention. The premature death of her Guise uncle in 1563 had left her with a sense of being bereft of family protection and support. Her other prominent uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, had upset her more recently with his apparent lack of concern for her welfare in the promotion of his own, during the whole protracted business of her marriage negotiations: ‘Trewlye I am beholdinge to my uncle: so that yt be well with hym’, Mary told Randolph in the spring of 1565, ‘he carethe not what becommethe of me.’2