PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Assez fins, astutes et inconstans d’affection’
A judgement on the Scottish people
from an anonymous French memoir of 1588
Although Ronsard, in a farewell ode to the queen, expressed the romantic wish that Scotland should fly before her ship, like the floating island of Delos, so that she would never be able to overtake it, in fact the fog-bound Scottish coast loomed out of the mist towards the queen’s galleys in a prosaically short time. Queen Catherine wrote coolly to her daughter Elisabeth of Spain on the subject of her daughter-in-law’s departure: ‘She has set sail … and if the winds are favourable, should be in Scotland within the week.’1As it happened the journey which had begun under such dramatic auspices turned out to be comparatively uneventful and only lasted five days. Throughout much of its span, Mary’s mood of deep depression persisted; her soft heart led her to forbid the customary whipping of the oarsmen, as though in her own state of pain she could not bear to see further unnecessary suffering inflicted on others.2
The encounter with the English ships on the high seas provided the main excitement of the voyage. The English queen had at last dispatched a friendly message, in answer to the Commendator of Inchcolm’s mission – too late for Mary to receive it in France. Elizabeth now stated that she had no intention of stopping the Scottish queen’s passage; in any case she had no fleet in the North Sea, only a few barks who were positioned there to discourage piracy. Cecil subsequently described to Throckmorton how the English ships had found the Scottish queen on the high seas with a tiny brave little train ‘not exceeding sixty persons of meaner sort’.3 Mary, unaware of Elizabeth’s volte-face, must have expected a more melodramatic meeting than that which actually took place. The English ships merely saluted the queen’s galleys, and allowed them to proceed; they examined the rest of the ships for pirates, and finally detained Lord Eglinton, on suspicion; not long afterwards, however, he too was released and permitted to return to Scotland. The only true casualty of the embargo which Elizabeth had attempted to put on the journey was Mary’s own stable of horses and mules which, having landed at Tynemouth, was prevented from proceeding further by the warden for a full month on the grounds that it lacked a proper passport.
There was a quality of anti-climax about this tame encounter, when so much had been threatened by Elizabeth, so much courage shown by Mary. But it was certainly believed at the time that Elizabeth had intended to capture Mary if she could, and even the English officials in the north of England seemed to be under the same impression that her capture was desirable: on Sunday, 17th August, the earl of Rutland wrote to Cecil that Mary had been seen off Flamborough head, with a great fleet surrounding the royal galleys, including eight galleys and sixteen ships, and boasted that if they came ashore Cecil would ‘hear good news of their stay’. The next day or two great galleys were observed at Flamborough within a furlong of the pier, one all white, the other red, ‘well trimmed and appointed’, having two flags, a blue one with the arms of France and a white one in the stern glistening like silver. Having let their anchors fall, the galleys each put forth one naked man to swim (what bold spirit of the French party thus tested the bracing pleasure of swimming in the North Sea waters?). All the time at a good distance away, there was apparently visible a large fleet of ships;4 but as all the contemporary evidence agrees that Mary landed at Leith with only two galleys, it seems likely that this phantom fleet off Flamborough head, far from being Mary’s own entourage, was the English fleet hovering round the Scottish queen, uncertain how to proceed as they had no precise commands to intercept her. As for the true intentions of Elizabeth in London, probably she herself was not utterly sure how she would react if an English captain took the law into his own hands and captured the queen of Scots.
Such perplexities of motive and behaviour did not trouble Mary Queen of Scots. The only obscurity which surrounded the journey, from her point of view, once she had determined on it, was the physical obscurity induced by the weather. It had been hazy when the galleys left France, and it continued misty throughout the voyage. On the morning of the day the galleys were due to land at Leith, thick fog descended. A thick fog on the coast of Scotland was not an unexpected hazard, even in the middle of August; yet according to Brantôme the royal party seized on it as another unfortunate omen for the queen’s arrival, while John Knox from the vantage point of Scottish terra firma, but with equal pessimism, saw in the fog a symbol of the fact that the queen was bringing with her to Scotland ‘sorrow, dolour, darkness and impiety’.5 Only Mary herself seemed blithely unaware of these gloomy auguries, and determined to put on a smiling face come what might. Her natural buoyancy had helped to restore her spirits towards the end of the journey; now the prospect of meeting her subjects for what was in effect the first time on Scottish soil (discounting childhood memories when she had been queen in name only) presented her with the sort of challenge she especially appreciated – since all her life the sphere of personal encounter represented for her the most probable arena of victory. On Tuesday 19th August Mary Queen of Scots set foot once more on her native soil at the port of Leith, after an absence of just on thirteen years: her head was held high regardless of any melancholy portents.
Her arrival was unexpectedly early – at about nine o’clock in the morning – as favourable winds had also carried the royal party from France more swiftly than had been anticipated. Nevertheless, by all accounts, her reception was enthusiastic and joyful, even if curiosity played at least as strong a part in it as loyalty. Since Holyrood Palace was not yet made ready for her arrival, the queen was taken first of all to the house of one Andrew Lamb at Leith; here she had a short rest and took her midday dinner, before being conveyed from Leith to Holyrood, on the outskirts of Edinburgh itself. She was conveyed on this short journey by a noble escort of Scottish lords including the earl of Argyll (one of the leading Protestant lords), the Lord Erskine and the Lord James, her half-brother. The memoirs of Lord Herries give further corroboration of the rejoicings which greeted her arrival, and even Knox admits that ‘fires of joy’ were lit at night.6 The nobility might be bound in loyalty to greet their sovereign; they might be fired with the intention of creating a favourable first impression, which would lead to personal advancement later; but the common people were excited by the spectacle in front of their eyes – the ‘beauty, youth and stately carriage’ of their queen, Herries’s phrase, despite the fact that Mary and her ladies were still in black or black-grey mourning for King Francis, who had been dead less than a year. Mary herself at the age of eighteen, tall, graceful, commanding, was everything in appearance that the popular imagination would have conjured up to fill the role of its newly arrived queen, if it had been allowed to choose.
Brantôme had an acid word to say about the cortège provided for the queen. He looked with contempt on the miserable Scottish horses which were brought to convey her from Leith to Holyrood, saying that these nags were a sorry comedown for a queen who had been used to the finest horses of France. But no doubt the sweet sound of popular acclaim in Mary’s ears more than atoned for these deficiencies of transport; at all events she professed herself to be delighted with all she saw. What was more, Mary was able to express her pleasure to her subjects in their own language, for she had not lost her Scots despite the thirteen years spent in France. On her arrival in France as a child, she had indeed been able to speak nothing else, but she soon, by all accounts, learnt to speak French as well as a Frenchwoman, and it was the language which she habitually wrote and presumably thought in. Nevertheless the presence of Scots attendants such as Lady Fleming, her nurse Jean Sinclair or even the Maries must have enabled Mary to practise her Scots: for in August 1560, when she gave Throckmorton an interview, he particularly stated that Mary spoke to him in Scots, and later the papal envoy related how the queen ‘began to answer him in Scots’,* which she preferred to use to Latin. Although Mary’s Scots letters show that she never became fluent in the written language, Knox’s history confirms the fact that she was able to converse freely and colloquially in Scots from the time of her first arrival in the country.8
At Holyrood Mary was installed in the magnificent towered and turreted palace which had been extended from an earlier tower in the reign of her father in the manner of the Scottish Renaissance; here not only the debt which the style owed to French architecture, as a whole, but also the fact that a number of French masons had been employed in the works, must have commended the whole building to critical French eyes. Lying on the outskirts of the city of Edinburgh, outside the actual town walls, Holyrood also enjoyed the amenities of wild country just beyond its very windows, as well as the convenience of having the capital city so close at hand – the ideal palace for a Stuart sovereign who could combine the pleasures of sport and politics to an ideal degree. The palace, then as now, was dominated by the bulk of Arthur’s seat: as Fynes Morison described it at the end of the century, over Holyrood ‘in a park of Hares, Conies and Deare, an high mountain hangs, called the chaire of Arthur’.9 Joined to the palace was the abbey of Holyrood; both abbey and palace had been burnt by the English at the time of Hertford’s invasion, seventeen years before, but had since been repaired.
Queen Mary now took possession of those royal apartments in the north-west corner of the palace which were to play such a significant role in her story. By the standards of Scotland of the day, they were extremely magnificent: there was a private chapel, and the ante-room had a fine heraldic painted ceiling, put up two or three years previously.10 Security was, however, in no sense neglected at the expense of elegance: Holyrood in the time of Queen Mary was reached over an iron drawbridge, and the windows of the state rooms had iron gratings. Mary’s first night at Holyrood was scarcely restful: although for once nobody seems to have thought of interpreting the disturbances as omens of what was to come. Having retired to sleep for the night, the queen was awoken by a night chorus of five or six hundred amateur musicians, playing what Brantôme feelingly described as wretched fiddles, and rebecs,* and singing psalms out of tune. The result was a series of appalling discords, which must have grated at least as much on the ears of the music-loving queen as they did on those of the outraged Brantôme. However, the next morning, Mary with her usual charm in such small matters, when she wished to please, assured the nocturnal serenaders that it had been a delightful experience, and even went so far, in the words of the critical Knox, as to ‘will the same to be continued some nights after’.12
Despite all Mary’s tact, despite her evident resolution to accept any manifestations of her subjects’ strange national character with heroic enthusiasm, there is no doubt that the land of Scotland as Mary first saw it represented something very alien to the land in which she had been brought up. It was not that Scotland lacked links with France – indeed the two French marriages of James V and the subsequent French marriage of his daughter Mary could hardly have failed to forge such bonds: not only the French servitors of Queen Madeleine and Queen Mary of Guise, but also the French administrators introduced by the latter such as de Rubay, who acted as chancellor, de Bouton, governor of the Orkneys, de Villemore, and d’Oysel existed to prove it. Mary’s own marriage, preceded by the two-way naturalization of Scots and Frenchmen in 1557, also meant that the titular ruler of Scotland lived in France, bringing a growing stream of Scots thither, on matters of administration or, as in the case of Bothwell, of petition.
While a great lord like Lord Seton emulated his master and made a French marriage to Marie Pieris, one of Mary of Guise’s ladies-in-waiting, even before this outbreak of Franco-Scottish nuptials, there were links between the universities of Paris and Orléans and the Scots universities – a great prelate like Cardinal David Beaton had completed his education in Paris. The Scottish Reformation did not break these links but strengthened them since ‘earnest and brotherly’ relationships developed between the French scholars at universities and Scottish Protestant scholars: it was even thought worthwhile to publish the works of Sir David Lyndsay in France. The education of the sons of the leading Scots lords abroad was not an unheard-of phenomenon: the son of the Lord Lovat of the day slain at the Field of Shirts in 1544 was described as a ‘well learned young gentleman, and brought up with great civility and knowledge in the realm of France’.13 James Melville went to France with Mary Stuart at the age of fourteen to be educated as a page. Maitland of Lethington was educated abroad after the university of St Andrews. It is likely that Alexander Scott, the leading poet of the court of Queen Mary, went to Paris as a student of music.14 Monks were often educated abroad or in turn came from abroad. The monastery of St James of the Scots at Ratisbon, said to be founded by Prince William of Scotland, brother of King Achaeus, adopted the lively John Leslie, bishop of Ross, as their patron in this period. Such centres provided a natural interchange of news and views between Scotland and the Continent.
In the same way, the trade of the east Scottish seaports with France provided a more materialistic version of the interchange – as the merchants of the Scottish burghs exported linen and wool cloth, skins, and smoked and salted fish to France, in order to bring back such necessary luxuries as wine and salt. The courage of the average Scots as fighters gained them sufficient reputation abroad to make them in demand as fighters, demonstrated by the presence of the Scots archers and guards at the French court, even before the first marriage of James V. The Register of the Privy Seal shows that young Scotsmen went abroad for military service with enough regularity during this period to make it a definite feature of Scottish contemporary life. Leslie’s comment on the whole subject in his History was that primogeniture often caused sons to seek their fortune out of Scotland – ‘Of this comes, that so many of our countrymen, have such good success amongst strange Nations, some in the Wars, some in professing of Sciences, and some in merchandise’15 – admirable enterprise which time has only confirmed as being an essential part of the Scottish character.
Unfortunately the adventurous success of the Scots abroad did not prevent them from being regarded by their European contemporaries as an extremely primitive, not to say uncouth, race when at home. An anonymous memoir on the state of Scotland, written by a Frenchman in 1558, the year of Mary’s marriage, makes this point quite clear.16 Scotland is described as a poor and infertile land, ill-disposed to strangers, and obsessed with family honour and family disputes. The Scottish manner of living is described as rustic, and the people themselves as ‘assez fins, astutes et inconstans d’affection’. Henri Estienne described the Scots as a simple people ‘who consider themselves all to be cousins of the King’. André Thevet, almoner to Queen Catherine, painted a blacker picture: he described them as a lazy, proud, boastful people who, despite their poverty, were swollen with quite unjustifiable pride about their lineage.17 When Riccio was stabbed to death by over fifty dagger-wounds, Castelnau de Mauvissière, who knew the Scots, commented that such ferocious behaviour was only to be expected from such a nation – he called it ‘an extraordinary exhibition indeed, but one often enough to be seen among the Scots, when their spirits came under some sinister influence’.18 A current French phrase‘poignarder a l’Écossais’ (stabbing through and through) carried the same connotation of violence. It has been pointed out already that the French took a patronizing view of the question of the government of Scotland, and believed that the Scots could only benefit from good sound French administration. Whatever her good intentions, Mary Stuart could not fail to be affected by the prevailing attitude of the land of her upbringing towards the land of her birth – one of condescension not unmixed with scorn.
How far was this picture of a savage primitive people justified, and how far did Scotland in the mid-sixteenth century merit the description ‘lourde Écosse’? The terrain itself must certainly have seemed somewhat dreary to one nurtured in the Loire valley of France, human beings perennially judging beauty by the standards they have known in childhood. Surprising as it may seem to later travellers, Scotland was on the whole a treeless country in the sixteenth century: the great forests of earlier times had disappeared save in the Highlands, and constant legislation on the subject shows that the need of planting trees was considered to be urgent. Although there were still extensive forests round Loch Ness and Loch Maree, the Lowland forests were more in the nature of groups of trees and clearings, and tracts of open country dotted with trees, used for hunting; in the meantime the government endeavoured to force smallholders to plant woods or orchards to cover three acres round their domiciles. Even so, when Sir Anthony Weldon visited Scotland with James VI in 1617, he wrote that Judas himself could not have found a tree on which to hang himself. Scotland was also dissected to a far greater extent than at the present day by endless and immense watery tracts in the shape of countless lochs and lochans, many of which have now disappeared – in Fife at this period there were for example twenty lochs or lochans as big as Lochleven.19
To add to this impression of bleakness, the climate was not only demonstrably colder, windier and wetter than that of France, for obvious reasons of latitude, but it also so happened that the period of Mary Stuart’s personal rule in Scotland coincided with a marked change on the whole weather graph of Europe;* in Scotland this resulted in a series of exceptionally cold winters and stormy wet summers, and a sharp decline in the entire pattern of Scottish weather after 1560. The fact that 1563 and 1564 saw winters of outstanding severity with great loss of stock, 1565 an appalling harvest, and 1567 another unremittingly wet harvest time, can hardly have leavened the rigours of the Scottish climate to those unused to it. Even Bishop Leslie, in his account of the climate of Scotland, although he loyally denied that it was a cold place, admitted that ‘the winds which are North, blow often very vehement swift and with a horrible sound’.20
There were of course tracts of Scotland which were exquisitely cultivated: Mary of Guise had admired Fife. Leslie and Buchanan both joined in giving the palm to Lothian, but in Tweeddale Leslie was dramatically excited by the numbers of sheep, and Lithgow described Clydesdale as the paradise of Scotland. However, even the fertile areas of the Merse and Teviotdale were possibly more wonderful to a native-born Scot than to one accustomed to the fertility of France, and since in any case many of the most theoretically cultivated areas in Scotland lay within the border area, where they might be devastated at any moment by English aggression, or straightforward free-booting, they did not always present the most luxuriant panorama of growth. Obvious symbols of civilization, such as fruit and flowers, were certainly in much shorter supply in Scotland than in France. Scottish villages and dwellings had always struck outside observers by their meanness: there were no enclosures, no fences or dykes or hedges, for the simple reason, as John Major explained, that the tenants had no permanent holdings, but hired or leased their land for four or five years, and thus had no motive to enclose their land.21 Even the towns and burghs, whose political power was increasing, lacked stone walls to surround them, and life within them was still essentially medieval. Of the Scottish towns, although Edinburgh with its fair High Street extending the whole length of the town aroused universal admiration even amongst those who had travelled on the continent of Europe, few others could have compared with the French towns of Mary’s youth. At the moment of her return, Scotland was in fact on the eve of a population explosion – by the end of the sixteenth century numbers had doubled. But in 1550 the population of Scotland was between five and six hundred thousand, a figure not much greater than it had been in the time before Robert the Bruce, since intervening wars had periodically decimated the nation. The population of France at the end of the 1570s, on the other hand, was between thirteen and fifteen million.22
Communications within Scotland were exceptionally difficult at this period: roads were poor and ill-maintained, as a result of which journeys were considered hazardous and amazing if they were completed without incident. Randolph wrote of his journey from Stirling to Inverness in 1562 – ‘A terrible journey both for horse and man, the countries are so poor, the victuals so scarce.’23 Norfolk complained of the ‘deep and foul ways’ even between Berwick and Leith, so that the artillery for the siege of Leith had to go by sea. Coaches were unknown until 1561, when the first one was introduced from France for the royal use. Bridges, like roads, were supposed to be kept up by the people nearest to them, but this was seldom done satisfactorily; ferries played an important part in the kingdom, but again ferrymen were notoriously knavish, as the frequent statutes against them showed. Communications were further threatened by the prevalence of vagabonds on land – whom statutes tried in vain to exterminate – and of pirates on the sea. There were plenty of taverns, but inns or hostels with quarters for travellers were almost unknown, as the nobles journeyed from their own houses to those of their kin, and there was therefore no call for them; a stranger was an object of wonder, if not actual animal hostility.
It was hardly surprising that the different sectors of a country so ill-served by its communications should be very cut off, one from the other. The border peoples, who were comparatively easy to reach, were extraordinarily difficult to subdue for any length of time; as Leslie said, their lives were torn between war and theft, and their own feuds were far more important to them than any dictates of the central government. The Highlands were considered virtually a separate area: John Major drew a stern distinction between the wild Scots of the north and east, and the ‘householding Scots’ of the Lowlands. Of the so-called wild Scots, half the population only spoke Gaelic, ‘The language of savages’ Ayala called it;24 their main contact with the Lowlands was the moving down of cattle to Stirling and the Lowland cattle markets. The Western Isles were so distant that they could, when they chose, opt out of central politics altogether, in favour of local feuds, and play no part in Scottish national affairs. This occurred during the reign of Queen Mary; she never visited them at all personally, and there was no peer of Parliament at this period north of the earl of Argyll at Inveraray. In short, Scotland was a country still struggling painfully within the confines of a medieval framework: it had hardly begun to emerge from this restrictive cocoon at the date when Mary first arrived from France – a country in which, whatever its other faults of civil strife, this process at least was considerably more advanced.
Parallel with the primitive state of the countryside itself was the stratification of Scottish society in which notions of kinship were still held to be of paramount importance. It was the great lords, as the heads of clans or the tenants-in-chief of land, who received the true allegiance of the people who were their clansmen and their tenants based either on kinship or on formal bonds of ‘manrent’ made to them, which promised services in return for protection. These Scottish lords considered themselves to be virtually autonomous in their lands since the system of land tenure gave the crown practically no right to intervene between the tenant-in-chief and his inferiors. The growth of the lairds, who held their land directly from the monarch, was a political phenomenon whose importance was not apparent at the moment when Mary landed in Scotland. It was true that the lairds had demanded representation during the Reformation Parliament of 1560, having played a part in the revolution of 1559, but to the queen the nobles still appeared to block the way for any real contact between monarch and people. It was therefore with that complex but fascinating body, the Scottish nobility, that Mary had to deal if she was to deal with Scotland at all. And, in 1561, the great majority of their body were scarcely more advanced than the territories over which they held sway.
This is not to underestimate the power and splendour of the great magnates, who were just beginning to appreciate the value of display in a civilized society. Many of them had their own private poursuivants. In 1543 the then earl of Moray gave a banquet to the patriarch of Venice, at which he caused much fine crystal to be put on the table, as well as his silver. In order to make the point that Scotland was overflowing with such wares, at a given signal he had one of his servants tug the cloth, so that all the crystal fell to the ground and was smashed. As the patriarch was busy murmuring his regrets for this untoward occurrence, the earl casually had a further store of crystal brought in of still finer quality. The patriarch was duly impressed and exclaimed that he had seen nothing like it in Venice (where crystal was perhaps treated with greater consideration).25 In 1529 John, 3rd earl of Atholl, a great feudal magnate with vast dominions, gave King James and the papal nuncio a magnificent entertainment in the shape of a hunt, at which the king was ‘as well served and eased, with all things necessary to his Estate, as if he had been in his own palace in Edinburgh’; the earl had a special woodland palace constructed of green timber, the floor strewn with rushes and flowers, and the walls hung with tapestry and arrases of silk, with actual glass in the windows. The banquet held within this rustic folly, twenty miles from any dwelling (and which was destroyed when the banquet was finished, according to Highland custom), included ale, beer, wine, both white and claret, andaqua vitae, and for food, every kind of meat from beef, mutton and venison to swan and peacock, fish including salmon, pike and eels, and even gingerbread. The whole entertainment was supposed to have cost Atholl £1000 a day, and the nuncio summed up his reaction in outspoken terms: he thought it a ‘great marvel that such a thing could be in Scotland, considering that it was named the arse of the world in other countries’.26
Both these anecdotes tell us as much about the swaggering character of the magnates concerned as they do about the state of Scottish civilization. The list of the belongings of the earl of Huntly, taken from the castle of Strathbogie after his defeat and forfeiture in 1562, gives an interesting glimpse of the furnishings and trappings to be found in the home of a great lord: the forfeited goods included elaborate tapestries, beds covered with velvet and hung with fringes of gold and silverwork, vessels of gilded and coloured glass, and figures of animals.27 The Regent Châtelherault had his castle decorated with painted ceilings. James Stewart, earl of Moray had an excellent library. The great Lord Seton had gardens and orchards surrounding his castle which the English vengefully sacked in their invasion of 1544; he enjoyed the sport of horse-racing and, as recorded in the annals of the burgh of Haddington, in May 1552 his horse won a silver bell which he himself had presented. But as a class, the magnates with their continental affiliations – men such as Lennox and Glencairn who spoke French – must be distinguished from the mass of the nobility, who were far from appreciating such refinements. Leslie describes how nobles and commoners alike wore the same clothes: the chiefs would dress themselves up elegantly in grand clothes to go to court, and then change back again. The horse was all-important in the need for show: ‘If therefore they have speedy horses, and wherewith they may dress themselves and their wives,’ wrote Leslie, ‘they are not mickle careful for the rest of their household gear.’28
The rough nature of the education which the preponderance of them received may be judged from the fact that in 1559 it was thought worth delivering considerations to Parliament that the nobility should be better educated, so that the ruler should not be forced to advance new men in their place. Lennox apologized for his ‘evil hand’; Huntly and Douglas were scarcely able to write, although they could do so in times of special crisis, for secrecy; Lady Huntly and Lady Erroll apparently wrote better than their husbands. The helpmeets of these men, as Ayala had noticed half a century earlier, were indeed a remarkable race and very often more estimable than their husbands, or perhaps the unbridled spirit is simply more attractive when manifested in the female than in the male sex. Ayala had called them ‘really honest though very bold’.29 The two Lady Huntlys, old and young, of this period, showed a mettle which outstripped their husbands. Despite the almost total lack of education granted to women – it was noteworthy that at the Reformation, nuns were almost illiterate, a much higher proportion than of the monks and friars – the wives of the Scottish nobility were from time to time capable of throwing up a figure of genuine intelligence and spirit, such as Jean, countess of Argyll, Jean Gordon, countess of Bothwell, or Agnes, countess of Moray, who put many of their male contemporaries in the shade.
The fortresses which these lords inhabited were in most cases as unpolished as their inmates. They were certainly very different from the fortresses of France to which Mary Stuart had been accustomed. Here she had known the magnificent newly constructed palaces of the French Renaissance, whose size alone dominated the eye. In Scotland she found a few royal palaces of only moderate size, by these standards, some few proper castles, and a plethora of strongholds, which were in effect only domesticated towers. These castles looked more like the elongated castle-houses in a German fairy-story than heavily castellated dwellings of Arthurian imagination. As for the squat tower dwellings, Lethington Tower, the home of Maitland (transformed by the work of later centuries into romantic Lennoxlove), provides an example of this sort of fortified pillar, with its heavily barred door on the ground floor, and nothing but slit windows as high as assailants could reach. When trouble came, women, children and cattle could be driven into the safety of this ground-floor chamber. Normally the house proper began on the upper floors; turrets and dormer windows, corbels and other decorative features could ornament these pillars, but basically they were merely intended for defence; and they represented an obviously stark way of life.
In every sense (except that of unity for a given cause) the Scottish nobility formed a tightly knit body, where feudal and family relationships were interwoven like the steps of a complicated Highland reel. Intermarriage was a feature of the situation, making it often as difficult for the historian to unravel their relationships and loyalties as it must have been for themselves. Patrick Hepburn, the fair earl of Bothwell, married Agnes Sinclair, whose mother Lady Sinclair was born a Hepburn. George, 5th earl of Huntly, married a Hamilton – Anne, daughter of the duke of Châtelherault; his sister Lady Jean Gordon was married to James, earl of Bothwell; his father the 4th earl was married to Elizabeth, sister of the Earl Marischal; the Regent Moray was married to Agnes, daughter of the same Earl Marischal; Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, was married to Euphemia Douglas, the Regent Moray’s half-sister; Patrick, 3rd Lord Ruthven, was married first to Janet Douglas, natural daughter of the earl of Douglas, and second to Jane Stewart, daughter of the earl of Atholl, who had herself been married three times before. Apropos of another Ruthven–Atholl marriage, an English emissary wrote to Cecil in 1579, with a mystification which we may feel we share: ‘The Earl of Atholl doth marry the Lord Ruthven’s daughter. It is a question whether by that marriage the Lord Ruthven will draw the Earl to the devotion of Morton, or the Earl will draw the Lord Ruthven to his devotion, who is yet an enemy of Morton.’30 Into this spider’s web of relationships, it was especially hard for a foreign-bred queen to infiltrate, in order to command any sort of pre-eminent loyalty. At the same time Mary’s Stewart blood meant that the nobles did not necessarily regard her, when it did not suit them, as more than primus inter pares.*
As a class the nobles had been decimated by Flodden in 1513, and again a generation later at Solway Moss and Pinkie Cleugh, in a manner reminiscent of the two generations of Europe depleted in the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. The nobles with whom Mary had to deal had in many cases succeeded early to their estates, through the deaths of their fathers, and had grown up without the curb of parental discipline. Their broad lands were generally accompanied by a singular lack of cash, which left them a prey for the sort of venal considerations most prone to rob the character of any outstanding loyalties. Lack of money meant that morality was all too often a question of cash rewards, and not necessarily large ones. As de Silva wrote to Philip II, an expenditure of 8000 crowns brought Queen Elizabeth not only the good will but also secret information from the principal people of Scotland although many of them were Catholics.32 In other ways than venality, the fibre of the nobles was undeniably coarse. Lyric poets such as Dunbar in an earlier period, and Fethy and Alexander Scott in a later one, spoke with clear and appealing voices where their private inspiration was concerned. Their poetry, closely mingled with the musical traditions of the time, was neither primitive nor cut off from other cultures, often showing direct connections with English courtly lyrics of earlier centuries. But in order to entertain the court in the age before Mary highly lewd verses like the ‘Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, containing sentiments of extreme crudity, were produced. In order to please the nobility, the poets had, in the words of C. S. Lewis, to ‘lavish their skill on humours now confined to the preparatory school or the barrack-room’.33 In this respect the court of the French Renaissance at which Mary had been reared cast at least a mantle of elegance over its corrupt morals.
The Scottish nobility included among its number many who were lawless and some who were violent. If the lawlessness merely reflected the general insecurity of an age of transition,* this fact did not make it any more acceptable to their young ruler, or easier to deal with, to one hitherto cut off from such matters in France. As for the violence, there is a natural code of human decency which even insecurity does not excuse men from breaking, and this code was too often set aside by the Scottish nobility of this period, when it suited their convenience. Deeds of villainy were common. The nobles included in their ranks men like Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, ever prone to use physical assault as a weapon, whether storming the queen’s chapel at Mass, or obtaining her signature to her abdication by threatening to cut her throat; or there were the two Lord Ruthvens of the age, one of whom was an alleged warlock, a macabre but bloodthirsty spectre at the feast of Riccio’s death, and the other behaved with equal ruffianism towards Mary at Lochleven. The Regent Morton was a man of the most boorish calibre: the small greedy eyes in his florid face covered a cruel mind; his pudgy hands grasped avariciously all his life for what rewards and benefits were to be accrued; his slow speech concealed an unpleasant ability to revenge himself swiftly on those who had offended him. His atrocities in his time as regent included the hanging of women still holding their babies in their arms, and the driving of prisoners to the gallows like so many sheep, being pierced through by spears as they ran. Against such a background, the butchery of Riccio and the explosion at Kirk o’Field can easily be explained, if not condoned.
These lawless nobles were immensely preoccupied with superstition – not the complicated astrological arts of Catherine de Médicis, but the cruder form of witchcraft. Witchcraft first made its appearance in the Scottish criminal code in 1543 when the reformed religion aroused a passionate new desire for purity in such matters. Long before this date, witchcraft played its part in the fabric of Scottish society. There was also a persistent rumour about Bothwell and witchcraft, and he was often accused of having ‘enchanted’ Mary by her defenders. Janet Beaton, the lady of Buccleuch, and an ex-mistress of Bothwell, was also accused in placards in the streets of having used witchcraft to ‘breed Bothwell’s greatness with the Queen’. Margaret Lady Atholl was thought to have the power of casting spells, having diligently studied the subject with a magician, and it was she who was rumoured to have cast Queen Mary’s pains of childbirth on Lady Reres. One ballad, ‘Northumberland betrayed by Douglas’, describing the incident when Sir William Douglas handed over the fugitive Northumberland to the English in 1570, even gives the regent Moray’s mother, Lady Margaret Douglas,* as a witch.
But the main characteristic of the nobles, which applied to the greater magnates as to the lesser, was that they had absolutely no sense of the grand design. It was true that a revolution in religion had been accomplished beneath their gaze, in which many of them joined, but here the laurels for purity of spirit and intensity of theological vision seem to belong mainly to a lower social class than theirs. Even the cause of Protestantism did not bind together those Scottish nobles who were divided by the potent interests of family ambition. The Scottish nobles were given over to ‘particularity’ as every commentator at every level in this period pointed out:
Neither for king, nor queen’s authority
They strive, but for particularity.
This is how Sir Richard Maitland, father of the politician Maitland, made the point in a bitter verse, written during the civil wars of the 1570s.
When Fontenay went to investigate Scotland in 1584 on Mary’s behalf, he commented that money and family ambition were the only two things the Scottish nobles really understood; in his view, it was mere folly and a waste of time to preach to them their duty towards princes, the honour to be found in just and virtuous actions, and the desirability of leaving a memorial to posterity in the shape of good deeds done – when the only two things capable of charming the nobility with any degree of permanency were ‘de biens et de grandeur’. He felt that it was the misfortune of Scotland that the majority of the lords were incapable of taking anything approaching the long or altruistic view of any situation – they had, in his view, no wish to extend their view further than the end of their own toes, cast not the faintest thought over the past, and still less towards the future.35
Twenty years earlier, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the same combination of goods and grandeur was already what appealed irresistibly to the Scottish lords. They were a difficult, intractable, and above all highly unstable class to deal with, since it was impossible to anticipate with any certainty in which direction the weathercock of their purposes would blow from one minute to the next. They presented an especial problem to a young queen, brought up in a foreign country, and lacking the knowledge and intuition of how to deal with such men, which might have been inculcated naturally in childhood had she been brought up in Scotland. After all, Argyll, Glencairn and Cassillis were so very unlike Montmorency, Condé and the king of Navarre, although the former might be said to have occupied roughly in Scotland the position which the latter filled in France – a point made by the French memoir of 1558 which directly compared them.36 Let us not paint the picture of the Scottish nobility too blackly at the cost of whitening the aristocracies of other countries. Ambition and intrigue were certainly not the monopoly of the Scottish nobility in sixteenth-century Europe. England had her Seymours, and France, as we have seen, her Guises. In so far as ambition could be held to constitute a vice, the cardinal of Lorraine and the earl of Morton, in both of whom its fires burnt brightly, would be judged equally for it, before the last Judgement Seat of heaven. Mary Stuart, on the other hand, was not gifted with such divine enlightenment. To her, accustomed to the cardinal with his eloquence, his literary tastes, his designs by Primaticcio, men of the type of Morton, ‘unlettered and unskilful’ in Maitland’s phrase, presented a very different aspect. She could not fail to find them secretly distasteful as well as baffling because they were so unfamiliar. The Scottish nobles may not have been impossible by some absolute standard taking into account all the factors involved, but they were certainly fatally different to the nobles amongst whom Mary had been brought up.
* In the sixteenth century the Scots language (as opposed to the Highland Gaelic, which Mary did not speak, since there was no way for her to have learnt it) was generally thought of as being about as different from English as two dialects of the same language: the difference was variously compared to that between Aragonese and Castilian, or the respective dialects spoken in Normandy and Picardy. As one authority puts it, ‘any intercepted letter [in Scots] … could be read by an educated Englishman’7 (although today of course the transcription of documents in this language presents considerable difficulties). Mary only spoke English very limpingly before the period of her captivity, but was able to learn it quickly then.
* It is sometimes suggested that Mary’s first night’s sleep in Scotland was disturbed by the startlingly Scottish sound of the bagpipes. In fact a rebec is a stringed instrument played with a bow. The fault, if any, was in the unskilled nature of the playing, rather than the primitive character of the instrument.11
* The ‘Little Ice Age’ period of cold climate from 1550–1700 is now established by copious evidence from almost all parts of the northern hemisphere. See H. H. Lamb, Trees and Climatic History in Scotland, 1964. In human terms, the first years of the cold period must have been more onerous to endure than the last, when the cold weather was an established, if unpleasant, phenomenon.
* Sir James Fergusson has pointed out that the saying ‘every Stewart’s na sib to the king’ gained its relevance from the fact that so many of them were.31
* The Register of the Privy Council from the quantity of its enactments against violence, robbery, murder, etc. reveals the generally lawless state of Scotland in the 1550s, a legacy of the English invasions and the consequent breakdown of civil government.
* Child, in his edition of Scottish ballads, thinks that this slur on the regent’s mother is unjustified, and that she had been confused with that Lady Janet Douglas, sister of the earl of Angus and wife of Lord Glamis, who was burnt in 1537 on Castle Hill, for meditating the death of James V by witchcraft.34