Elizabeth and Mary Read online

  In fact this was to prove an accurate assessment of Mary’s mood at the time. In the height of her excitement, and what can only be described as infatuation for Darnley, she expressed herself in bold, decisive action. No attempt at conciliation, diplomacy and consideration of the longer view reined her spirit in. Mary determined to deal ruthlessly with her rebel half-brother and his followers. She had been heard to declare, with what Randolph considered ‘owtragieus wordes’, that she would rather lose her crown than fail to seek revenge on Moray.18 Ever the emollient diplomat, Melville urged reconciliation: ‘your subjects, and also a good number in England who favour them and their religion … would admire such princely virtues, as to see Your Majesty to master your own passions and affections, and thereby think you most worthy to reign over kingdoms’. The use of kingdoms in the plural was held out as a carrot suggesting England and Ireland as well.

  Mastering her passion and deferring action in favour of the long view was not Mary’s style: ‘Her Majesty entered into choler, saying, “I defy them; what can they do, and what dare they do?”.’19 Summoning a large band of well-armed supporters, Mary engaged in a number of hard-riding pursuits of her brother’s considerably smaller rebel force, during August to early October of 1565. This period of vigorous, and potentially bloodthirsty, hide-and-seek became known as the Chaseabout Raid. Although no battle was entered, Mary appeared to be in her element, impressing all with her energy and bravado. She rode many score miles at full tilt, a steel helmet on her head and a heavy pistol in her saddle which she was more than ready to use. Darnley rode at her side, wearing a gilded breastplate as much for show as safety, but her ladies were unable to come near to keeping pace with the Queen of Scots, apart from one who was described as ‘stronger’ than the rest. Largely unattended by her women, Mary, for a few weeks, lived the life of an itinerant soldier, with the kind of rough freedom she had said she dreamed of when she first set out to avenge the Huntly Rebellion, three years before.

  Her campaign of revenge received a fillip when Bothwell arrived in the middle of September. He had been set upon at sea by pirates in the pay of Bedford, Elizabeth’s commander at Berwick, determined as the English were to try and stay his return. Bothwell’s enemies were in awe of his fearsome reputation. Randolph, already in despair at the anarchy that had overtaken Scotland, where ‘no honest man is sure of his life or goods’, felt the arrival of this prince of darkness marked the end of all common security: ‘[Bothwell’s] power is to do more myscheif, than ever he was mynded to do good in all his lyf, a feete man to be made a minister to any shamfull acte, be yt ether agaynste God or man.’20 As far as Mary was concerned, however, he was just the person she needed to energize her campaign. In a later letter to the Bishop of Dunblane, she credited Bothwell with the ultimate rout of Moray and his followers: ‘being callit hame, and immediatlie restorit to his former charge of Lietenent-generall, oure authoritie prospered sa weill in his handis, yat suddanlie oure haill* rebellis [that suddenly all our rebels] wer constranit to depart the realme, and remane in Ingland’.21

  Elizabeth had been loath to give any encouragement, other than minimal (and clandestine) financial support, to subjects in rebellion against their lawful sovereign. This would invite too many dangerous parallels and precedents to rebound against her. Without outside help, Moray and his followers eventually admitted defeat, and in the first week of October sought refuge in England. Mary, armed and ready for action, had ridden with a ragbag army of between six and twelve thousand men from Edinburgh to Dumfries, her unruly troops laying the country waste as they passed. At Dumfries, Bothwell was left in charge of a sizeable force while she returned to Edinburgh, still spoiling for a fight. Her aggressive note to Elizabeth on the day she rode out at the head of her army was animated with the warning that she could rely on Spanish or French support against her neighbour, if need be. She began peremptorily, ‘Madame ma soeur’, and then barely bothered to veil the threat, ‘If it pleases you to make your cause that of our traitors, which I cannot believe, we shall be compelled not to conceal it from our princely allies.’22

  This was a dramatic change in her attitude towards the English queen. In the dynamic between them, she had seized the initiative. Although she had always been proud of her status as queen and careful to maintain her place in the hierarchy of European monarchs, Mary had been unsure how to assert her own political will. Prior to the moment when she decided to marry Darnley against the wishes of Elizabeth and most of her own nobility, she had assumed the attitude of a junior partner who desired to please, a supplicant in search of favour, someone whose power was conditional on the charity of others. The once diplomatically docile and temporizing Queen of Scots was now in the grip of an irrepressible confidence, whether born of the potency of newly discovered sexual love, or the relief of acquiring a husband to share her kingly burdens, or indeed as an expression of the reckless energy of a manic-depressive mania.

  This latter explanation has some plausibility given the extremes of Mary’s behaviour on previous and subsequent occasions. Even at the height of her triumph in asserting her authority over her lords, her tireless energy imploded into episodes of weeping and a two-day retirement to her chamber, in the old pattern she had already exhibited of elation and extraordinary strength followed by despair. So quickly too would Mary’s overwhelming passion for Darnley turn to loathing in such a rapid and extreme volte-face that it gave some pause for thought, even to her contemporaries.

  Randolph, once so fond and admiring of the Queen of Scots, admitted to Leicester it seemed strange to write of her in such derogatory terms but to his amazement and dismay she had ‘so myche chaynged in her nateur, that she bearethe onlye the shape of that woman she was before’. He characterized both Mary and Darnley as having grown impossibly arrogant: ‘a wylfuller woman, and one more wedded unto her owne opinion, withowte order, reason, or dyscretion, I never dyd knowe or hearde of. Her hows-bonde in all these conditions, and maynie worce, farre [sur]passethe herself.’23

  Alarmed by the Catholic league contracted by Catherine de Medici between France and Spain ‘to maintain papistry’, Elizabeth had reason to believe that Mary was a covert supporter of this ‘band’.*24 Two years previously the pope’s council at Rome had issued a resolution inviting the faithful to assassinate Elizabeth and be rewarded on earth with ‘a perpetual annuity’, and in heaven: ‘A pardon to be granted to any that would assault the Queen, or to any cook, brewer, baker, vinter, physician, grocer, chirurgeon, or of any other calling whatsoever that would make her away.’25 The Catholics in Scotland were growing more confident and militant, encouraged as they were by their newly emboldened queen and her husband’s ambitious Catholic family. In early 1566, Mary was showing signs of some determination to restore Catholicism to Scotland. She put pressure on her lords to attend Mass (the newly reinstated Huntly and Bothwell were amongst those who refused) and impressed the newly consecrated Pope Pius V with her intention to fulfil the promise made to his predecessor: to ‘make all our subjects obey [the Holy Church] if God by his Grace can reduce and annihilate the heresies as I hope’.26

  This keen new pope sent Mary fulsome but premature congratulations for ‘the brilliant proof of your zeal by restoring the due worship of God throughout your whole realm’.27 All of this overconfidence had repercussions on Elizabeth and the balance of influences in her kingdom. Any undermining of Protestantism in Scotland gave heart to the sizeable Catholic constituency in England and raised again the spectre of her own illegitimacy. Elizabeth was mindful of the need to maintain her diplomatic advantage through equivocation and uncertainty and resorted once more to her well-tried act of smoke and mirrors.

  Careful not to antagonize the powerful forces of Spain and France, she was embarrassed that the rebel Scottish lords fled to her side, claiming she had offered them moral and practical support. Having attempted to stay them at the border, Elizabeth summoned Moray to appear before her council in the presence of the two French ambassadors, de Foi
x and Mauvissière. With Moray on one knee and speaking in Scotch, translated by Elizabeth into French for the benefit of their audience, the English queen launched into an imperious admonishment of the rebel lord. Humiliating as this was meant to appear, it was generally suspected to be a charade to impress her Catholic neighbours with her best intentions towards Mary Queen of Scots, ‘whom she had hitherto regarded as a sister and hoped to be able to do for the future, although the Queen had given her reasons to think to the contrary’.28 (Guzman de Silva, the Spanish ambassador, related to his king how Elizabeth and Cecil had been in conference with Moray the previous night, rehearsing the following day’s proceedings.)

  In her messages to Mary, Elizabeth continued to patronize her as if she was an unruly subject in need of disciplining and control. But in fact, in her new incarnation, Mary seemed to have become a much more wily opponent. There was even the possibility that she had followed her cousin’s unscrupulous example by covert encouragement of rebels in a neighbouring sovereignty, which Elizabeth herself had done to such devastating effect when the Scottish Lords of the Congregation rose against Mary’s own mother to dethrone her as regent of Scotland, and expel her French allies. Mary’s possible interference was in Ireland. She admitted later, ‘I had power at that time, of which [Elizabeth] was much afraid.’29

  The fact of Mary’s marriage reflected badly on Elizabeth. Even though ‘“Jarres” had already risen between her and her husband’30 no one yet knew what a disaster the Darnley match would prove to be. Instead Mary’s acceptance of what was regarded as the chief duty of a queen had made Elizabeth’s determination to remain unmarried look all the more careless of her responsibility to her people. Through studied ambivalence and the courtship dance of flirtation and repulse, Elizabeth had turned the conundrum of her marriage into her greatest diplomatic tool. Her prevarication, however, had made the major European ambassadors all come to believe, with some exasperation, that she would never marry. If by chance she did decide to take a husband, they all assumed that the only possible candidate was Leicester, the man she so obviously favoured above all others. This weariness of the whole fruitless business had meant that the French and Spanish ambassadors had abandoned proposals of serious candidates. Consequently Elizabeth’s foreign policy risked losing its element of equivocal threat and surprise.

  Perhaps in a determination to re-energize her marriage prospects with foreign princes, specifically the Archduke Charles, Elizabeth attempted to appear to distance herself from Leicester with a couple of half-hearted flirtations. These resulted in Leicester’s sulky withdrawal from court followed by passionate, even tearful, reunions with the queen. In the immediate aftermath of news of Mary’s precipitate marriage, Elizabeth began her flirtation with Sir Thomas Heneage, a good-looking and trusted courtier, and member of her Privy Chamber. Leicester retaliated by turning his attentions to one of the court beauties, Lettice Knollys, Viscountess Hereford, later Countess of Essex. She eventually persuaded an ageing Leicester to make her his countess. She was also a cousin of the queen.

  Elizabeth’s flirtation with Heneage had been contrived. As Cecil explained to the Spanish ambassador, the whole thing ‘was baseless nonsense. The Queen made a show of it for purposes of her own.’31 However, so emotionally insecure and reliant on Leicester’s presence and evident devotion was she, his withdrawal from her and attentions instead to the beautiful Lettice caused her anguish. Elizabeth put pen to paper, and in the last leaf of her French psalter wrote the following heartfelt poem:

  No crooked leg, no blearèd eye,

  No part deform’d out of kind,

  Nor yet so ugly half can be

  As is the inward, suspicious mind.

  Your loving mistress, Elizabeth R*32

  Attempts to separate Elizabeth and Leicester were doomed to failure. Her love, lifelong loyalty and emotional reliance on him, his affection for her and vaulting ambition for himself, were such that they were more wedded than any married couple. Her lack of family meant he was family. She had known him since they were barely out of childhood and she called him her brother. They shared a long history together, the most painful experience of their lives being imprisonment in the Tower under threat of death, endured separately but binding them in fellowship for ever. They were together in the bad times and the good, and although they argued bitterly on occasion it was never for long. Elizabeth’s aversion to marriage, and the danger for her of consummation of sexual passion outside marriage meant Leicester was the focus too of her amorous nature. She made huge demands on him and she rewarded him with titles and significant riches. But Leicester’s pre-eminence in Elizabeth’s life was seen by Cecil to be a major obstacle to one of his most urgent duties of state: to persuade his obstinate queen to marry and secure the succession.

  Cecil’s antipathy to Leicester was long-standing and well known. He deplored his influence on the queen and was disconcerted at talk of their marriage. Elizabeth’s loyalty extended as steadfastly to her devoted Secretary of State, and in 1560 she had promised Cecil she would never marry Lord Robert. In his judicious way, however, Cecil made a list of the reasons why marriage to Leicester would be undesirable. Apart from the obvious, ‘Nothing is increased by Marriadg of hym either in Riches, Estimation, Power’, he was concerned that by finally marrying her favourite, Elizabeth would give credence to all the ‘slanderooss Speches’33 about her immoral behaviour with him that had circulated ever since she had first come to the throne. For years these salacious rumours had been common currency around the courts; this time, at the beginning of 1566, the French ambassador swore to the Spanish ambassador that he had been reliably informed that Leicester ‘had slept with the Queen on New Year’s night’, but then added that the French were promoting the Leicester marriage in opposition to the Spanish and their backing of the archduke and so there was some vested interest in the claim.34

  As news of Mary’s pregnancy reached the English court – it was formally announced on New Year’s Day when she was in her third month – Cecil, Elizabeth’s council and her people were all the more desperate for Elizabeth to marry. Just twenty-three years old, Mary seemed well on the way to proving she was a queen who could secure the succession: the contrast with Elizabeth could not have been more marked; she was already thirty-two and there was not a suitable husband in sight. More disturbing was the possible effect of this pregnancy on Elizabeth’s throne. If Mary was to have a son, her claim on Elizabeth’s crown gained psychological and political force. There was nothing more consoling to a people than to have a fertile monarch and a healthy male heir waiting in the wings. Randolph wrote gloomily to Leicester, ‘The Queen of Scots’ faction increass greatly in England.’ But she appeared to undermine her advantage by her reckless indulgence of an unpopular favourite. Randolph added a doom-laden – and scurrilous – prediction, ‘Woe is me for you when David [Riccio] sone shalbe a kynge of England.’35

  This comment from Randolph revealed the extent to which Riccio was seen to be in closest collaboration with Mary. She spent so much time with him and blatantly enjoyed his company more than that of her drunken, boorish husband, that a nervous whispering had begun that Riccio, not Darnley, was the father of her unborn child. Elizabeth too was well aware of the mistakes her cousin was making in not separating her personal feelings from political expediency. She told the French ambassador, de Foix, that the reason for Mary’s implacable hatred of her half-brother Moray was his antagonism to Riccio. Moray had wanted to hang Riccio, ‘whom [Mary] loved and favoured, giving him greater influence than was good either for her interest or her honour’.36

  Elizabeth cannot have failed to see the significance of Mary’s pregnancy. At the very least it increased the pressure on her to make some kind of decision. In conversation with the Spanish ambassador in January 1566, having heard Mary’s news, she explored the fantasy of marrying Leicester. Always ready to compare herself with Mary, she then laughingly told de Silva that if she went ahead with such a marriage ‘two neighbouri
ng Queens would be wedded in the same way [marrying a subject and out of personal choice]’ but she ended the speculation by saying that her ‘inclination tended higher [the Archduke]’. Guzman de Silva wrote to Philip II in amazement and no little exasperation: ‘She is so nimble in her dealing and threads in and out of this business in such a way that her most intimate favourites fail to understand her, and her intentions are therefore variously interpreted.’37

  The two people who came closest to understanding the sensitivities and subtleties of Elizabeth’s complex nature were the men who loved her best. Cecil and Leicester were inveterate enemies, rivals for the queen’s ear, and yet lifelong colleagues in council and at court. They were Elizabeth’s most influential ministers and later, with Walsingham, became the triumvirate who helped her transform a demoralized country into a largely peaceful and prosperous realm. But Cecil was ever wary of Leicester. He showed his care of the queen as well as his mistrust of her favourite in his final entry in the list of reasons to oppose Elizabeth’s marriage to him: ‘he is lyke to prove unkynd, or gelooss [jealous] of the Quene’s Majesty’.38 Leicester knew that he was blamed by everyone for the fact that Elizabeth remained a spinster. Proud as he was to be her favourite, he had recognized by this time that the ultimate prize could not be his. He accepted the Duke of Norfolk’s threatening analysis that, while he promoted his own interests over the needs of the country, ‘so great would be the hatred aroused against him that evil could not fail to befall him’.39 To mitigate this tide of malignity Leicester agreed to absent himself from court, and give the archduke’s suit with the queen a fighting chance.