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THE THREE CROWNS

TO EVERYONE’S DISMAY,¹ THE BABY born to James V of Scotland and his second wife, Marie de Guise, on 8 December 1542²at Linlithgow Palace was a girl. After the deaths of two infant sons in 1541, her father had hoped for another boy to succeed him, because Scotland needed a man’s strong hand to rule it. For James V was already mortally ill, and following a crushing defeat by the English at the Battle of Solway Moss on 24 November, he had taken to his bed at Falkland Palace. When news was brought to him of the birth of his daughter, he turned his face to the wall and, recalling that the crown had descended to the Stewart dynasty through Marjorie, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, muttered, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.”³Soon afterwards he died, “wherefore there was great mourning in Scotland.”⁴

At only six days old, the infant Mary became Queen of Scots. Scotland was used to royal minorities, for every one of its monarchs since 1406 had succeeded as a child. As a result, the nobility had grown in strength and autonomy, having become used to long periods without royal interference during which they enjoyed the unfettered exercise of power. These minorities had also bred rivalries and factions, as different families struggled for power.

In March 1543, Parliament appointed Mary’s cousin and next heir, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, as Second Person and Governor of the Realm until the Queen attained her majority at the age of twelve. Arran, then twenty-seven, was a Protestant, and head of the powerful Hamilton clan, whose lands straddled Clydesdale and central Scotland. An English envoy described the Hamiltons as a good looking race, but vicious, faithless and inept.⁵Arran’s claim to the succession was not undisputed, because there was uncertainty as to whether his parents had been lawfully married; hence his overriding purpose in life was to establish the legality of his claim. Self-interest and the advancement of his House dictated his political policies, but his indolence, instability and lack of decisiveness lost him the support of many nobles.

The King of England at that time was Henry VIII, and he was resolved to marry his five-year-old son and heir, Prince Edward, to the little Queen of Scots, and thereby unite England and Scotland under Tudor rule. Arran, eager to secure the support of the English King for his claims, was willing to co-operate, and on 1 July 1543 a treaty was concluded at Greenwich, which provided for the marriage of Mary and Edward. Mary was to go to England when she was ten, and be married the following year.

But the Catholic party in Scotland, led by Marie de Guise and Cardinal David Beaton, were opposed to the treaty. They removed Mary from Arran’s care, took her to Stirling Castle, and had her crowned there, in the Chapel Royal, on 9 September. In December, a Catholic-dominated Parliament repudiated Mary’s betrothal and renewed the ancient alliance between Scotland and France, England’s enemy.

Henry VIII was incensed, and in 1544 retaliated by sending an army to Scotland. The savage campaign that followed became known as the “rough wooing”: in the course of it, scores of towns, villages and abbeys in the south-east were mercilessly sacked and burned, leaving vast swathes of devastation. Even the city of Edinburgh did not escape Henry’s fury: he had ordered his commanders to sack, “burn and subvert it, and put every man, woman and child to the sword.”⁶Far from bringing the Scots to heel, the barbarity of the English only strengthened them in their resolve.

In 1543, there had returned to Scotland a man who was to play a prominent role in the drama of Mary, Queen of Scots. Matthew Stuart, 4th Earl of Lennox, whose power base was centred upon Glasgow, had been born in 1516 at Dumbarton, and had succeeded to his earldom at the age of ten, after the murder of his father by Arran’s bastard half-brother. This was cause enough for bad blood between Lennox and Arran, but they were also bitter rivals for the succession. Like Arran, Lennox was descended from Mary, daughter of James II, but only in the female line; unlike Arran, he had been born in undisputed wedlock. With such contentious issues dividing them, there could be no friendship between the Lennox Stuarts and the Hamiltons.

In 1531, Lennox had gone to France, where he joined the royal guard, became a naturalised subject of the French King and changed the spelling of his surname from Stewart to Stuart. Twelve years later, to Arran’s consternation, he returned to Scotland and began paying court to Marie de Guise. Like most women, she found him handsome, charming and gallant: he was “a strong man of personage, well-proportioned with lusty and manly visage, and carried himself erect and stately, wherefore he was very pleasant in the sight of gentlewomen.”⁷A well-educated man, he spoke fluent French and was skilled at playing the lute. The Queen Dowager and Cardinal Beaton believed Lennox to be an ardent Francophile who would support them against the ambitions of Arran. But Lennox was unreliable, treacherous and driven by self-interest, and when Marie refused to marry him, he defected to the English in search of better prospects. In return for his support against the Scots, Henry VIII bestowed on him the hand of his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas.

The wedding took place in July 1544 at St. James’s Palace in London. Born in 1515, Margaret was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor (widow of James IV and grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots) by her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus; Margaret was therefore near in blood to the English throne, and a marriage between her and Lennox could only reinforce the dynastic claims of both parties. Yet although their union was politically advantageous, it was also a love match on both sides: he was said to be “far in love,”⁸and in his letters, he addressed his wife as “mine own sweet Madge” or “my Meg,” told her she was his “chiefest comfort,” and signed himself “Your own Matthieu and most loving husband.” Margaret was a devout Catholic, so Lennox, who had been reared in the old faith but recently converted to Protestantism, now tempered his spiritual views to please his wife and King Henry; religion was ever a matter of expediency with him.

Margaret Douglas was a formidable woman. Beautiful, intelligent, domineering and relentlessly ambitious, she had an alarming talent for dangerous intrigue. She had spent much of her youth at the English court and become a great favourite of her uncle the King, but incurred his anger when she twice, in 1536 and 1541, became involved with unsuitable men; on each occasion Henry sent her for a spell in the Tower, a place with which she was to be become all too familiar during the course of her turbulent life. There can be no doubt that Margaret Douglas became the driving force in the Lennoxes’ marriage.

In 1545, Lennox led an English army into Scotland in the hope of taking Dumbarton Castle for Henry VIII. It was during this campaign that he ordered the slaughter of eleven child hostages whose Scottish fathers had been forced into his ranks and then defected;⁹this earned him undying notoriety and a perpetually haunted conscience. His offensive ended in failure, and on 1 October the Scottish Parliament attainted him for treason and confiscated all his estates and titles, some of which were given to Arran. Lennox was now the most hated man in Scotland. For the next nineteen years, he remained an exile in England, living on the bounty of Henry VIII. The Lennoxes’ chief seat was Temple Newsham in Yorkshire, and they owned another house nearby at Settrington. When in London, they resided at the former royal manor of Hackney. Lennox never abandoned hope of regaining his lost lands and asserting his dynastic claims, his ambitions having been sharpened by his grand marriage and the birth of eight children, who inherited the royal blood of both Scotland and England.

During the 1540s, the impact of the Protestant Reformation began to be felt in Scotland. For decades now, the Catholic Church in Scotland had been morally lax and corrupt, and there had been calls for its reform. Now, religious affiliations became identified with political issues, and two noble factions emerged: the Catholics, who favoured the “auld alliance” with France, and a growing number of Protestants, who wanted closer relations with England, whose King, although a Catholic, had severed links with the Church of Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Trouble began when a Protestant heretic, George Wishart, was burned on the orders of Cardinal Beaton in 1546. In reprisal, Wishart’s followers brutally murdered Cardinal Beaton, then held out for a year in St. Andrews Castle before the arrival of a French fleet forced them to surrender. Among those taken prisoner was the reformist preacher John Knox, who would one day become one of the prime movers in the Protestant Reformation. He was sentenced to two years as a galley slave.

In 1547, when Henry VIII died and was succeeded by the nine-year-old Edward VI, England became a Protestant state. The Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was determined to carry on the war against Scotland, and ordered another invasion. On 10 September 1547, the Scots under Arran suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, which enabled the English to occupy south-eastern Scotland. On the day after the battle, the Scots hastily moved their little Queen to Inchmahome Priory for safety, and appealed to the French for aid.

By January 1548, Arran, who had hoped to marry his own son to Mary, was negotiating with King Henry II of France for her marriage to Henry’s eldest son, the Dauphin Francis. Mary’s maternal uncles, Francis, Duke of Guise and Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, were rising men at the French court, and they, foreseeing great advantages to themselves through the marriage of their niece to the heir to the French throne, added their persuasions to Arran’s. Henry was more than amenable, as he realised that the match was of far greater benefit to France than Scotland, for it would ultimately bring Scotland under French control, since a wife, even a crowned queen, was always subject to her husband. Given the situation they were in, the Scots had little choice in the matter: whether they married Mary to a French or an English prince, they would be under threat of interference by a foreign power. In the circumstances, it seemed safer to ally with an old friend than a hostile enemy, and in February 1548, the Scottish Parliament gave its consent to the marriage. In return, the French promised to send troops to help expel the English garrisons from Scotland. At the end of the month, Mary was moved to the greater safety of Dumbarton Castle.

In June, having cut a swathe through the occupying forces, a French army recaptured the strategic town of Haddington in East Lothian, and there, on 7 July, a treaty was signed formally providing for the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin, with provisions for safeguarding Scotland’s future political autonomy.

Arran was now a spent force, although he was to remain Regent for six more years. Real power in Scotland now lay in the hands of the Queen Dowager, who was determined to protect her daughter’s interests and preserve her Catholic kingdom intact. In order to ensure Arran’s support, she persuaded the French King to grant him the dukedom of Chatelherault, and promoted his bastard half-brother, John Hamilton, Abbot of Paisley to the office of Archbishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland.

The new Archbishop, who was one day to be accused of involvement in Darnley’s murder, was the most able and opportunist politician of all the Hamiltons, and a liberal conservative in religion. Wily and self-seeking, like all his family, “he spent the least part of his time in spiritual contemplations”¹⁰ and led “a life somewhat dissolute” ¹¹with a “harlot” called Grizzel Sempill, who bore him at least three children, and was the widow of the Provost of Edinburgh. For his sins, Hamilton contracted syphilis, and in 1566 underwent an expensive course of mercury treatment. Marie de Guise ignored the scandals of the Archbishop’s private life; she hoped he would be the saviour of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

On 7 August 1548, the five-year-old Mary said goodbye to her mother and her kingdom, and sailed to France. Amongst her attendants were four well-born girls of similar age to her own, all called Mary, who were to be her special companions, and to whom she became especially close: vivacious Mary Livingston, beautiful Mary Beaton, devout Mary Seton and enchanting Mary Fleming.

When Henry II first saw Mary, he declared she was “the most perfect child that I have ever seen.”¹²From the first, he treated her as his own daughter, and placed her in the household of his children by his Florentine Queen, Catherine de’ Medici. Mary was to grow up in luxurious royal châteaux such as Blois, Chambord and Fontainebleau, surrounded by the art and culture of the Renaissance and the sophisticated, glittering life of the court, where she was petted and pampered by all who came into contact with her, and particularly by her magnificent Guise uncles, who hoped for great things from her in the future, and who guided her in all matters.

Yet the French court was also a moral cesspit, and Mary was exposed from an early age to its promiscuity and corruption. Her own governess bore the King a bastard child. “Here, it is not the men who solicit the women, but the women the men,” observed the Queen of Navarre disapprovingly.¹³The court was ruled by the King’s mistress, the elegant and cultivated Diane de Poitiers, who was nineteen years his senior yet still beautiful. An affronted Queen Catherine was relegated to the sidelines while Diane was given responsibility for arranging the education of the royal children. From Diane, Mary learned to regard Catherine with contempt, and consequently the Queen “had a great misliking” of her daughter-in-law. ¹⁴

The moral laxity of the court is reflected in two paintings that apparently show a teenaged Mary, the future Queen of France, in the nude. Two figures in the erotic allegorical work The Bath of Diana, attributed to Francis Clouet (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen) are thought to be portraits of Mary, and she is almost certainly the bare-breasted sitter wearing a ruff and headdress in the portrait of A Lady at her Toilet by an artist of the School of Fontainebleau (now in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts).¹⁵It is not known whether Mary herself posed naked for these pictures, or whether her portrait was superimposed on the body of a nude model, but the portrayal of her in such poses belies the later image she fostered of a prim and virtuous princess.

Even the royal children were tainted by the corruption of the court. Both their grandfathers had died of syphilis, and its effects were now tragically apparent in them. Of the ten children born to Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, Francis was sickly and feeble, Charles suffered from hallucinations, Henry became a homosexual cross-dresser, and Marguerite a nymphomaniac who had an incestuous affair with her brother Hercule.

Mary’s closest companion in childhood and youth was her future husband, the ugly little Dauphin Francis, for whom she early on conceived a tender affection. Born in January 1544, he was weak and sickly from birth. His growth was stunted, and he was afflicted not only by a permanently running nose but also, later on, by such terrible eczema that it was reported he had leprosy. ¹⁶ As a result, he was shy, moody and difficult, but he soon grew very fond of Mary, and she, in turn, referred to him as her “sweetheart and friend.”¹⁷

Mary was brought up as a devout Catholic, and received a Renaissance education alongside her future husband and his siblings. She was taught sophisticated literary skills and elegant calligraphy. In an age of developing diplomacy, there was great emphasis on languages. French became Mary’s first language, and would remain so for the rest of her life; she did retain enough of her native Scots to be able to converse in it as an adult, although she never became proficient at writing it.¹⁸She also gained “a useful knowledge”¹⁹of Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek, but did not begin to learn English until 1568. Mary brought back 240 books from France to replace the royal library at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh that had been destroyed by the English in 1544, and these were in a wide variety of languages, including Latin and Greek; there were books on history, music, geography, astronomy and theology, a selection of the works of antiquity, and a large number of romances and poetry books in French and Italian, the latter being Mary’s preferred reading. The great poet Pierre de Ronsard himself taught her to write quite competent courtly verse.

The young Queen was an intelligent girl with a quick mind, who enjoyed learning for its own sake. Although not an intellectual like her cousin, the future Elizabeth I of England, she read a great deal for pleasure, and “there was hardly any branch of human knowledge of which she could not talk well.” ²⁰

Mary was also taught the traditional feminine accomplishments: many surviving examples of her work testify to her skilled needlework and embroidery, and she was also good at drawing. Dancing became one of her favourite pastimes, and she learned to carry herself with perfect grace and agility in the ballets and masques in which she took part at the French court. She sang beautifully and played the lute, cittern, harp and virginals “reasonably well for a queen.”²¹Mary was early on introduced to the pleasures of hunting, hawking and other outdoor pursuits, including archery, pell-mell (croquet) and later, in Scotland, golf; she became an expert and fearless horsewoman, and was never happier than when in the saddle. She also loved fine clothing, dogs, tame birds, long walks, puppet plays from Italy, and games such as cards, dice, chess, billiards and tables (backgammon).

Henry II saw to it that the Scots in Mary’s household were gradually replaced by French people. Mary herself began to adopt the French spelling of her surname, Stuart, and always signed herself “Marie.” There is little evidence that she received any formal training in political skills, for everyone, herself included, expected her to remain in France. Scotland would be governed by others on her behalf, so there was no necessity for her to be trained specifically for the duties of a queen regnant. Mary’s Guise uncles were there to advise if she needed any guidance in matters of state, but she was also growing up in a court where intrigue and brutality were commonplace, and she must have learned something of the Machiavellian nature of Renaissance politics, the manipulation of political factions and the contemporary controversies over religion just by observing what went on around her.

In 1551, two years after the occupying English forces were finally driven out of Scotland, peace was concluded between the two kingdoms. In 1553, Edward VI died, and was succeeded by his Catholic half-sister, Mary I, who was to spend her reign re-establishing the Church of Rome in England and devoutly burning Protestants. In 1554, Marie de Guise finally replaced Chatelherault as Regent of Scotland, and immediately revived the Auld Alliance with France, in the hope of stemming the swelling tide of Protestantism in Scotland. The Queen Dowager strengthened her position by relying on French advisers and French troops, for whom her daughter’s subjects were expected to pay, but this only served to alienate the proud and independent Scots, who feared that their country was in danger of ending up as a satellite state of France.

By 1557, the new religion had not only grown in popularity but had also become widely associated with an injured sense of national identity, born out of resentment against unwelcome French interference. That year, five leading Protestant nobles banded together and, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ, allied with militant reformist preachers and signed a bond, or covenant, undertaking to establish the new faith as the national religion of Scotland.

The Lords of the Congregation increased immeasurably in strength in 1558, when Mary’s powerful and influential bastard half-brother, the sternly Calvinist Lord James Stewart, joined them with a large following and publicly proclaimed that the Lords of Scotland would embrace the Protestant faith and restore Scotland’s independence.

Lord James Stewart, who was to play a momentous and often enigmatic role in Mary’s life, had been born around 1531, and was the most able and prominent of the nine bastard children of James V. His mother was Margaret Erskine; at the time of her liaison with James V, she had been married to Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. James had petitioned the Pope to have the marriage annulled, so that he could marry his mistress, but in vain. In adult-hood, Lord James himself tried unsuccessfully to have his parents’ union legalised retrospectively.

Lord James’s bastardy was evidently a matter of great bitterness and resentment to him, for it prevented him from wearing the crown of Scotland, a role for which he was eminently suited, both by nature and by ability. He looked like a Stuart king, being tall and dark with a distinctly regal bearing and a commanding presence. Having to give place to his half-sister, a Catholic ruler, and a female at that, cannot have been easy for one who was ambitious, strong-willed, clever and capable, and his jealousy certainly had a profound bearing on the future relations between himself and Mary, which were amicable, and often affectionate, so long as she deferred to his wisdom and judgement. For James was not interested in the outward show of royalty, but in the actual exercise of sovereign power.

Many, then and since, among them Mary herself, have claimed that Lord James never ceased from scheming to seize the Scottish throne, and certainly his record over the coming years would appear to suggest that this was his ultimate aim. Had that been the case, however, it is surprising that he did not grasp the opportunity to usurp the throne on the two occasions when he had the chance to do so.

For centuries, historians have debated whether Lord James was an upright man who acted on principle, or a treacherous villain who cleverly managed to cover his tracks and find unarguably sound pretexts for his actions: indeed, in nearly every instance, his behaviour can be interpreted in both lights. He was a man “whose peculiar art was to appear to do nothing whilst, in truth, he did all.”²²Whenever there was trouble or scandal, he was always absent. And although it was said of him that he “dealt, according to his nature, rudely, homely and bluntly,”²³he was ruthless, devious, subtle, and cautious in the extreme.

There can be little doubt of the sincerity and consistency of Lord James’s stern Calvinist convictions, nor that in his private life he was a model of austere rectitude. No personal scandal ever attached to his name, and he was reputed to be honest, which virtues earned him great popularity with the middle classes. Yet when it came to material things he was greedy, and through steady advancement, the acquisition of ecclesiastical property, and the bounty of his sister, he managed to make himself the richest man in Scotland.

One Protestant lord who refused to join the Lords of the Congregation was the mighty James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was perhaps the Queen Regent’s most staunch supporter and who could not be shifted from his loyalty to the Crown.

Bothwell, whose destiny was to be fatally linked to Mary’s, had been born around 1535 and succeeded his father to the earldom and the hereditary office of Lord High Admiral in 1556. The Hepburn territory was centred upon the fertile and rich region of East Lothian, and the family’s chief seat was Crichton Castle, eight miles south of Edinburgh. James had been educated in the household of his promiscuous uncle, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, at Spynie near Inverness, and in the university schools of Paris. He was a cultivated, literate man, interested in science and warfare, and spoke fluent French and some Latin and Greek.

In 1557, Bothwell had commanded a military force that raided the English border, and for much of his life he would play a major role in suppressing lawlessness in the Scottish Borders. He mortally hated the English and, unlike almost all the rest of the Scottish nobility, would never accept bribes from them, which was commendable as he was always chronically short of money.

Contemporaries referred to Bothwell as “a splendid, rash and hazardous young man,”²⁴“high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition.”²⁵His enemies said he was “false and untrue as the devil,”²⁶the “sink of all horrible sins.”²⁷ Although he was “all his lifetime a faithful servant of the Crown, a man valiant above all others,” he was also “audacious, inconstant and changeable.”²⁸

Bothwell was certainly a volatile, violent and turbulent man, but hardly the “monstrous beast” or “bag of vice” ²⁹he was made out to be by his foes. Sir Henry Percy, a respected English adversary, was impressed with Bothwell when he met him, and declared he was “very wise, and not the man he was reputed to be. His behaviour was both courteous and honourable.”³⁰

Bothwell was probably about five feet six inches tall,³¹and of strong, muscular build with dark cropped hair and a moustache. His later enemy, George Buchanan, described him as looking “like an ape in purple,” and his language was of a similar lurid colour.³²Yet women found him irresistible, and his private life was constantly the subject of scandal, for he had an insatiable appetite for sex and a very amoral attitude towards marriage. In 1559, aged twenty-four, he had an affair with his neighbour at Branxholm, Janet Beaton, the Lady of Buccleuch, who was nineteen years his senior, had been married three times, and had seven children. She was also reputed to have resorted to sorcery to preserve her beauty. There is some evidence that she and Bothwell went through some sort of handfasting ceremony, but there is no evidence that they were ever married. After their affair ended, they remained friends.

Bothwell himself was frequently accused by his enemies of practising witchcraft in order to achieve his ambitions, and was said to have become acquainted with the black arts whilst a student in Paris. He was also accused, again mainly by his enemies, of sodomy with men. Mary’s apologist, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, called him vicious and dissolute in his habits, while a hostile English observer wrote, “He was a fit man to be minister to a shamful act, be it either against God or man.”³³Neither accusation is very explicit. But Bothwell’s former servant, Paris, later confessed, “I knew his very terrible vices, especially one in which I am said to be so good a minister. I told him it would be his ruin.” He recalled Bothwell reminding him, “You covered my dishonour when you were in my service abroad.”³⁴Paris’s confession was extracted under the threat of torture by men who needed to destroy Bothwell’s reputation, so little reliance may be based upon it. Nor can we trust the testimony of Dandie Pringle, a servant dismissed by Bothwell for trying to poison him, who told the English Governor of Berwick that the Earl was “as naughty a man as liveth, and much given to that vile and detestable vice of sodomy.”³⁵A scurrilous ballad by Robert Sempill, written after Bothwell’s fall, also accused Bothwell of “beastly buggery,” ³⁶but may be dismissed as sheer character assassination by an extremist propagandist. However, given the consistency of the accusations, and the variety of people making them, there is at least a possibility that there was some truth in them.

On 4 April 1558, as the time approached for her marriage to the Dauphin, Mary, probably on the advice of the Guises, signed a secret treaty with Henry II, pledging that, if she died without issue, Scotland would become subject to the French Crown. This amounted to a betrayal of her kingdom and her Scottish heirs, and is proof that she retained little affection for, or pride in, the land of her birth, and that, thanks to the influences around her, she had come to regard it as a mere appendage of France.

Three weeks later, on 24 April, Mary and Francis were married in a magnificent ceremony at Notre-Dame in Paris. The bride was fifteen, the bride-groom fourteen. Although the Venetian ambassador reported that the marriage was consummated on the wedding night,³⁷there is some doubt about this. Francis apparently suffered from undescended testicles, and was said to be sexually immature. However, in the late summer of 1559, Mary appeared at court in the floating tunic of a pregnant woman, obviously believing herself to be with child. In the autumn, she was ill, and nothing more is heard of the hoped-for heir to the throne. The Spanish ambassador commented that, if Mary did bear a child, “it will certainly not be the King’s.”³⁸

In England, on 17 November 1558, Mary I died, to the great relief of most of her subjects, and was succeeded by her twenty-five-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, whom he had married in defiance of the Pope, who refused to annul Henry’s first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, mother of Mary I. It was chiefly for this reason that Henry had broken with Rome, but in the eyes of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth was a bastard and unfit to inherit the throne, and the true successor to Mary I was Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Act of Succession of 1544 and Henry VIII’s Will of 1546 laid down that the crown of England was to descend to Edward VI and his heirs, then to Mary I and her heirs, and lastly to Elizabeth I and her heirs. Both Edward and Mary had died childless, and Elizabeth was as yet unmarried, much to the consternation of her advisers. Failing these lines, the throne was to pass to the heirs of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, and then to anyone else the King might designate. The descendants of his older sister Margaret had been passed over, because Margaret Tudor had relinquished her claim to the English throne on her marriage to James IV in 1503, and because Henry VIII was hoping to annex Scotland to England through the marriage of Mary to Prince Edward.

Mary therefore had no right to the succession under English law, but Henry II ignored this minor detail, and on the day of Elizabeth’s accession had Francis and Mary proclaimed King and Queen of England, on the grounds that Elizabeth was a baseborn usurper; the English royal arms were quartered with those of France and Scotland on their shields, and they began styling themselves King and Queen of England, Ireland and Scotland in official documents, much to Elizabeth’s fury and alarm, for she feared that Henry might try to enforce Mary’s claim by mounting a military offensive against her. There were already French troops on her back doorstep in Scotland.

After the horrors of “Bloody Mary’s” reign, however, the majority of Elizabeth’s subjects would never have meekly accepted another Roman Catholic ruler, particularly one who was a member of the French royal House, and a Guise at that. Many were of the opinion that a foreigner born outside the realm could not legally inherit the throne, since aliens could not inherit property in England. In the event, Henry II had no immediate intention of making war on Elizabeth, but the real damage caused by his actions was to become apparent in the longer term, for from now on the acquisition of the English crown would be Mary’s chief mission in life, more important to her by far than her own kingdom. Mary’s pretensions were to permanently sour her relations with Elizabeth, and underpinned all the dealings between them, creating a dangerous climate of resentment and distrust.

Nor were Elizabeth’s fears allayed when, in November 1558, the Scottish Parliament agreed that Mary might bestow the Crown Matrimonial on Francis; this effectively made him her heir, in the event of her dying childless, and meant that Scotland might well come under French rule one day.

On 30 June 1559, Henry II was fatally injured when a lance pierced his eye and throat during a tournament held to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain. After lingering in agony for ten days, he died on 10 July. Francis and Mary were now King and Queen of France, but Francis’s accession signalled a bitter power struggle between the Guises and the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, for political supremacy. Mary, of course, sided with her uncles, thereby incurring the further displeasure of her mother-in-law.

Francis II was crowned at Rheims Cathedral on 18 September 1559; as an anointed monarch in her own right, Mary was a mere observer of the ceremony. Marie de Guise was represented at the coronation by the Earl of Bothwell. Another guest was “a young gentleman who has no beard,”³⁹Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the twelve-year-old son of the Earl and Countess of Lennox, who had come to offer his parents’ congratulations to Francis and Mary on their accession, and also to present a letter petitioning Mary to restore Lennox’s lands in Scotland. Although she and Francis received Darnley “with great distinction,”⁴⁰she refused Lennox’s request, but sent his son home with a gift of 1,000 crowns.

When Bothwell returned to Scotland after the coronation, the land was in turmoil. The Queen Regent was now involved in a bitter conflict with the Lords of the Congregation; although she had been cautiously supportive of their calls for reform of the Church, she was appalled by the escalating violence and iconoclasm of their movement, and when they began inciting riots and vandalising and desecrating churches and abbeys, she called in French troops to stop them. But this unpopular move only served to strengthen the Lords’ resistance, which gathered momentum when the charismatic reformer John Knox returned from exile in May 1559 and allied with Lord James and his Protestant colleagues. Knox’s arrival brought more leading nobles over to the Congregation, and his fiery brand of preaching inspired much popular support for the new religion.

During his exile, Knox, a former Catholic priest, had become chaplain to Edward VI. When Mary I succeeded, he fled to Geneva, where he embraced the extreme Protestant views of the Swiss reformer, John Calvin. In 1558, he published a notorious tract against the Catholic Queens, Mary I and Marie de Guise, entitled First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. In it, he argued that it was against natural and divine law for a woman to hold dominion over men. He was a shrewd, witty man of stern convictions, single-minded and bigoted, “one who neither feared nor flattered any flesh.”⁴¹He loathed any form of frivolity, and severely castigated anyone who indulged in fornication, yet in his fifties he married in succession two sixteen-year-old girls, one of them the daughter of the fervently Calvinist Andrew Stewart, Lord Ochiltree. Knox became Minister of St. Giles’s Kirk, the foremost church in Edinburgh, and was given a fine house on the High Street, probably the one still identified as his today, which dates from c. 1490.

The Queen Regent appointed Bothwell her Lieutenant-General, “with special responsibility for affairs of war.”⁴²Elizabeth I, who had already established the Protestant Church of England, was now secretly supporting the Lords of the Congregation, most of whom were in the pay of the English government. In October, Bothwell intercepted 6,000 crowns that the English had sent to aid the Scottish rebels, and gave them to Marie de Guise. For this, he earned the undying enmity of Lord James, Chatelherault and most of the other Protestant nobles.

In February 1560, the Lords and the English concluded the Treaty of Berwick, whereby Elizabeth agreed to send troops to overthrow the Catholic Regent and drive out the French. In April, an English army laid siege to Leith, which was then held by French troops for Marie de Guise. Later that month, the Lords overthrew the ailing Regent. In her place, Scotland was to be governed on behalf of its absent Queen by a Protestant Great Council comprising Chatelherault, his son, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, and Lord James: Chatelherault was merely a figurehead—the real power lay with James and Knox. On 11 June, Marie de Guise died of dropsy. When the news reached France, Mary was prostrated with grief for the beloved mother she had not seen for ten years.⁴³

Hostilities now ceased, and the Treaty of Leith brought to an end the ancient alliance between Scotland and France. On 6 July, a treaty signed at Edinburgh paved the way for closer and more lasting bonds between Scotland and England. Under its terms, all foreign troops were to leave Scotland, foreigners were to be barred from holding any government office, and the English undertook not to interfere in Scottish affairs; in return, the grateful Scots, on behalf of Queen Mary, recognised Elizabeth as Queen of England, and promised that Mary would renounce her claims to the English throne and succession. The Treaty of Edinburgh was negotiated without Mary’s consent, its terms were odious to her, and she would consistently refuse to ratify it, much to Elizabeth’s mortification.

In August, the Scottish Parliament met and, in defiance of its lawful sovereign, and without her assent, passed the legislation that would establish the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. Such legislation was undoubtedly illegal, for Mary refused to ratify it, but it had been enacted in response to popular demand. In an Act opposed by only three peers, without a murmur of protest from Archbishop Hamilton, the Catholic faith was outlawed and the celebration of Mass made a capital offence. When she heard, Mary angrily expressed her disapproval to the English ambassador in Paris: “My subjects of Scotland do their duty in nothing. I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must be taught to know their duties.” ⁴⁴There was talk in Scotland at this time of deposing Mary and replacing her with Lord James, but it came to nothing.

Bothwell, meanwhile, had gone to Denmark, having been sent to Europe to raise support for the late Regent. In Copenhagen, a Norwegian admiral, Christopher Throndssen, offered him the hand of his daughter Anna, with a dowry of 40,000 silver dollars. When Bothwell moved on to Germany and Flanders, Anna went with him and sold her jewellery to finance his travels, for he had spent most of his money in supporting the Regent. Anna and her family later insisted that a marriage had taken place, but this may have been to save face, for there is no record of it, nor of the impecunious Bothwell receiving the dowry, and Anna never styled herself Countess of Bothwell. It seems more likely that she attached herself to Bothwell on the promise of marriage, but that he lost interest in making such a commitment. Anna may have been the mother of his only known bastard, William, to whom Bothwell’s mother later willed all her possessions.

The death of Marie de Guise robbed Bothwell of political and financial support in Scotland. He therefore left Anna in Flanders and went to the French court to seek service with Queen Mary and perhaps the restitution of some of the funds he had outlaid. Mary did grant Bothwell an audience, but its outcome is unknown. In the autumn, he rejoined Anna in Flanders.

That November, Francis II fell seriously ill with a virulent inflammation of the middle ear that spread to his brain and caused an abscess.⁴⁵His sufferings were terrible and prolonged, and on 5 December he passed away, aged not quite seventeen. After a post-mortem examination, his physician declared that much of the young King’s brain had been destroyed by the abscess. Mary, who had nursed Francis devotedly, was inconsolable at his death; ⁴⁶for the third time in less than eighteen months, she was facing the loss of someone dear to her. Again, she donned the deuil blanc, the white mourning of French queens, then disappeared into her black shrouded chamber for the customary forty days of seclusion imposed on royal widows.

The throne now passed to Francis’s younger brother, the ten-year-old Charles IX, but the reign of the Guises was effectively over; Mary, the instrument of their greatness, was now a childless Queen Dowager, and no longer of great political importance at the French court. Real power now lay in the hands of the hostile Queen Mother, who presently made it perfectly clear that Mary was no longer welcome in France. It was at this point that Mary began to think seriously about returning to her own kingdom.