CHAPTER NINE
Let all thy realm be now in readiness
With costly clothing to decoir thy court.
Alexander Scott: ‘A New Year Gift to the Queen Mary,
when she first came home’, 1562
Exactly how different her new kingdom was from her old one, the young queen was speedily to discover on her very first Sabbath in Scotland. Up till that morning there had been, in Knox’s phrase, nothing but ‘mirth and quietness’, but on the Sunday Mary, who had been assured by Lord James of the private practice of her religion, ordered Mass to be said in the chapel royal at Holyrood.* The preparations for the service were all too familiar to a country which had only been officially Protestant for one year. The onlookers exclaimed furiously: ‘Shall the idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?’ and speedily resolved: ‘It shall not!’ Patrick Lindsay, the future Lord Lindsay of the Byres, went so far as to shout out in the courtyard that the idolatrous priest should be put to death. The servant carrying the altar candles was put into a state of terror when his candles were seized by one of the crowd, and together with some of the altar ornaments, either broken or trodden into the mud. The reformers did not actually penetrate the chapel itself; here at the very threshold they found the person of the Lord James, barring their entry: not only had he given his word to Mary that the private Mass should be respected, but he also had a devout horror of such extremism. Inside the chapel the queen, her Guise uncles and her French servants attended a Mass which was understandably fraught with tension – the English ambassador reported that the priest was in such a state of mortal fear that he could hardly lift the Host at the Elevation.1
If the queen received a rude shock from the incident, she did not allow it to affect her determinedly tolerant religious policy. The next day, Monday 25th August, she issued a proclamation in which she announced that she intended with the aid of her Estates to take a final order, which she hoped would please everyone, to pacify the differences in religion. In the meantime, she charged the whole world, in order to prevent tumult or sedition, to make no alteration or innovation in the state of religion, or to attempt anything against the form of public worship which she had found standing on her arrival in Scotland – under pain of death. She further commanded that no one should molest any of her domestic servants or those who had come with her out of France in the practice of their religion – equally under pain of death.
This proclamation may seem to us, from a modern standpoint, comparatively wise, and certainly singularly free from Catholic bigotry. It aroused, however, the venomous ire of many of the extremist Protestants, and especially that of their leading evangelist, John Knox. The next Sunday Knox took the opportunity of preaching a great denunciation of the Mass from the pulpit: one Mass, he declaimed, was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies being landed in any part of the realm. While still in France, Mary had already formed the most unfavourable impression of Knox, and she told Throckmorton that she believed him to be the most dangerous man in her kingdom. Now she determined to grasp the nettle. She sent for Knox to come to Holyrood, and here took place the first of those dramatic interviews, which as recounted by Knox himself in his Historyhave a positively Biblical flavour.
Knox was now a man of forty-seven. Having been rescued from ‘the puddle of papistry’, as he put it,2 by George Wishart in the 1540s, he had joined the murderers of Cardinal Beaton in the castle of St Andrews, and after its fall, had done a spell in the galleys. On release he went to England, and from there, on the accession of Mary Tudor, to the Continent where his travels brought him finally to Geneva, where he became a disciple of Calvin. He returned temporarily to Scotland in 1555: the strength of his character and the force of his convictions enabled him to win over many of the greater men to Protestantism by his evangelism when the lesser men had long been interested in it. His main contribution to the Scottish Reformation had thus been made before Mary Stuart’s arrival in Scotland, and indeed before the death of Mary of Guise, but his personality ensured that he remained a potent force on the Scottish scene, and it was an unlucky hazard for Mary Stuart that he happened to be living in Edinburgh, the first year of her residence there, to act as a demoniac chorus for all her actions, which good or bad, he presented in the most malevolent light.
Knox’s character was compounded of many contradictions. He saw himself as a heaven-sent preacher, whereas in fact he was a bold earthly revolutionary who openly preached violence and notoriously considered the death of an unjust ruler absolutely justified. He was a good summarizer of the accepted truth; but he was a savage hater, and obstinate defender of a position once he had adopted it. Lord Eustace Percy in his life of Knox made a sympathetic examination of the reformer’s true nature and decided that his real spiritual bent was that of the mystic who was compelled by events to adopt the role of preacher and interpreter. ‘In the whole sweep of the Old Testament and the New, what first caught his ear was a voice which almost passes the range of human hearing: neither the words of God to man, nor the words of man to God, but a fragment of the huge soliloquy of God himself.’3 Knox was an egoist, but his egoism led him to be a cunning politician and excellent lawyer, with an eye to the essentials in any argument. He was not born to the nobility, yet he was immensely brave in his confrontations with the nobles and the queen: as Morton said at his tomb, ‘Here lies one who never feared the face of man.’ His virtues included a ferocious, rather coarse sense of humour, seen in his writings, very different from Mary’s own light ironic sense of humour, it is true, but something which might have enabled them to strike better accord if circumstances had been different; he was also genuinely patriotic when few men even knew the meaning of the word. Above all, he loved to dominate, as with so many egoists, and it was this need for domination which doomed his relations with Mary from the start. Scotland, and especially Edinburgh, was his stage: he the great preacher, the victor of the Scottish Reformation, was not going to surrender the front of the stage to the young queen, newly come from France. In his imagination he saw even his first encounter with her as a battle, from which he must emerge victorious if the whole Scottish Reformation was not to be imperilled. Knox thus braced himself for the meeting, like an ancient Catholic saint about to wrestle with the devil, not a mature Protestant politician about to meet a young girl who had so far shown herself to be remarkably tolerant in both word and deed. In short, Knox, in his preconceived notions about Mary, was quite as determinedly misguided, if not in such a romantic spirit, as many of her partisans have been since.
Mary’s very sex was against her in Knox’s opinion: whereas in the sixteenth century it was theoretically considered to be against the natural law for women to rule men, nevertheless most people were content to regard an actual woman ruler as a necessary evil which might have to be endured from time to time. Knox, however, went much further than his contemporaries and in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558 against Mary Tudor, declared roundly that to promote any woman – those ‘weak, frail, impatient feeble and foolish creatures’ – to any form of rule was the ‘subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’, as well as being contrary to God and repugnant to nature.4 Now on 4th September he was confronted in a personal interview with one of these feeble and foolish creatures sitting on the throne of his own country of Scotland.
Lord James was also present at the interview, but tactfully stayed in the background. Mary began by attacking Knox for raising her subjects against her mother and herself, and also for writing The Monstrous Regiment. Knox conceded the point about her sex, and said that if she behaved well, and the realm was not brought to disaster by her femininity, he personally would not disallow her rule, on those grounds alone. When Mary struggled with him over the religious issue, however, she found him much less accommodating. Finally Knox agreed to tolerate her for the time being – his phrase, which owed little to courtly flattery, was ‘to be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero’ – provided that she did not defile her hands by dipping them in the blood of the saints of God. But he still firmly asserted the rights of the subject to rise up against the unworthy ruler, who opposed God’s word. Mary was quite clever enough to see the dangers in this, and quite bold enough to say so: ‘Well then,’ she exclaimed, ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me; and shall do what they list and not what I command; and so must I be subject to them and not they to me.’ When Knox replied that this subjection to God, as represented by his Church, would carry her to everlasting glory, Mary pointed out: ‘Yea … but ye are not the Kirk that I will nurse. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for, I think, it is the true Kirk of God.’ But Knox refused to admit Mary’s ability to judge on such matters: ‘Conscience requireth knowledge,’ he said, ‘and I fear right knowledge ye have none.’ Mary said quickly: ‘But I have both heard and read.’5
The result of this interview was an impasse in terms of human relations. Knox has been accused of speaking churlishly to the queen: he certainly spoke to her in a manner to which she was scarcely accustomed from her life in France, but she on the other hand seems to have been stimulated rather than otherwise by his abruptness. It is true that she relapsed into tears at one moment, but Randolph thought they were tears of anger rather than grief. All her life Mary Stuart had a feminine ability to give herself suddenly up to tears when her sensibilities were affronted; she seems to have used it as a useful method of relieving her feelings; it never prevented her actions from being extremely hard-headed once she had recovered her composure. Knox himself quickly realized that Mary was far from being a feeble puppet, which her career in France might have led him to expect. He told his friends: ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’ In the same vein, he reported to Cecil in London that on communication with her he had spied such craft as he had not found in such an age.6
Mary was still being so enthusiastically greeted by her subjects that an incident in the chapel royal, a rude sermon from Knox, and one brusque interview were not enough to damp her spirits. She had been received with elaborate rejoicings on her ceremonial entry into Edinburgh: here were to be seen fifty townsmen dressed up as moors, in yellow taffeta costumes, their arms and legs blackened, and black visors on their faces, and on a stage at the Tolbooth four fair virgins representing the virtues, while at the Cross, there were four more virgins in ‘most heavenly clothing’, and from the spouts of the Cross wine poured forth abundantly. Some of the sights had undercurrents of Protestantism – a child who appeared at the Butter Tron, descending out of a painted cloud from a temporary wooden gateway, presented her pointedly with a Bible and a Psalter, and when she reached Holyrood once more, another child made a speech suggesting she should put away the Mass. But a scheme for burning an effigy of a priest saying Mass had been abandoned at the instance of the Catholic Huntly in favour of merely burning effigies of Coron, Nathan and Abiron, the sons of Izhar and Eliab, to represent the evil of false sacrifices – a message which it was a great deal easier for the queen politely to ignore. Indeed Knox thought the welcome given to Queen Mary so irritatingly lavish, that he remarked indignantly that in their farces, masks and other prodigalities ‘fain would the fools have counterfeited France’.7
After three weeks at Holyrood, Mary set out for a short progress round her kingdom: here again she was met with the same combination of enthusiasm, marred by occasional incidents where the truth of the Protestant religion was suddenly felt to need public demonstration. She went first to Linlithgow, the palace of her birth, and after two days on to Stirling. Here she was endangered by human rather than the divine fire with which Knox had threatened her: a candle accidentally set light to her bed curtains while she was asleep. Although the fire was quickly put out, Randolph took the opportunity to record an old prophecy that a queen should be burnt alive in Stirling, which, he said, apparently with some regret, had proved just about as successful as Lady Huntly’s prophecy that Mary would never reach Scotland.8 On Sunday there was some sort of incident when her chaplains tried to sing High Mass in the chapel royal, and it was said that the earl of Argyll, a leading Protestant, and Lord James disturbed them; after a fracas some of the priests and clerks left their places with bloody heads and broken ears but the most part of the congregation seem to have taken the incident calmly. At Perth, although the pageants once more had a sternly anti-Catholic slant, the queen herself was greeted extremely honourably, and presented with a golden heart, filled with more pieces of gold.
Despite Mary’s determined optimism, and gracious behaviour towards her subjects, whatever their religious opinions, the events of her journey, her arrival and her reception had clearly subjected her to considerable strain. Now that strain inevitably began to tell on her health. The Diurnal of Occurrents relates that in the streets of Perth she fell sick and was carried from her horse into a lodging not far off, with the sort of nervous collapse ‘she is often troubled with, after any great unkindness of grief of mind’.9 However, as always, she was quick to recover, and at Dundee was once more greeted enthusiastically and given a princely reception. At St Andrews on Sunday 21st September there may have been a religious squabble of some sort, since a rumour reached Randolph in Edinburgh that a priest had been slain. Certainly at some point in the journey Lord James and Huntly had a violent quarrel about Mass, when the Catholic Huntly said that if the queen commanded it, he would set up the Mass in three shires. But the point was that the queen did not command it: instead she merely continued on her way for a quick visit to Falkland Palace, and so back to Holyrood, where she was once more safely installed on 29th September.
Knox reported that Mary remained steadfast in her ‘devilish opinions’ at the end of her journey, despite the evidence she had received that most people found them repugnant; but he had, in his prejudiced attitude to the queen, missed the point about her attitude to the reformed religion. It was not a question of her private beliefs, which were, as she herself had told Throckmorton a few months previously, steadfastly Catholic. It was a question of the administration and good government of Scotland. Here the sights she saw during her progress can only have confirmed her in the conviction which she had already expressed in her proclamation of 25th August – that it was in the best interests of peace and stability in Scotland that the Protestant status quo should be preserved, so long as she herself could worship in private in the way she pleased. When she first arrived, Mary found herself in a curious situation administratively speaking apropos the structure of the Protestant Church. In the years leading up to the Reformation, the power of the Scottish crown over its native Church had increased with every decade, as royal control close at hand gradually replaced that of the far-off papacy. In 1535, the Pope conceded the right of King James not only to recommend to but also to nominate to vacant prelacies. Since the income from benefices could now be granted if the king so wished to others than its spiritual incumbent, the whole system developed into a useful method of royal patronage. The process expanded so rapidly that by 1560, in the words of Professor Donaldson, ‘There was no financial temptation for the Scottish crown to proceed to a formal breach with Rome because it was already exploiting the Church’s wealth with sufficient success’.10
But this exploitation of the Church by the monarchy was not brought to an end when the religion of Scotland was officially changed by edict of Parliament in August 1560. This edict was never confirmed by the sovereign, which made it technically illegal. But in any case no provision was made at the time for linking the new religion to the old ecclesiastical regime. By 1561 no financial arrangements had been made for the new ministers. Queen Mary was as free as her predecessors to proceed with the presentation of livings and benefices: there was absolutely no incumbency upon her to present them to the ministers of the reformed Church.* Thus the Scottish crown in the 1560s, freed by the Reformation from the last vestige of papal control, had enormous potential powers of patronage within its grasp. There was an excellent opportunity in this respect for a competent sovereign, well advised, to increase his own strength, since circumstances had conspired to play into the hands of the crown. This applied to a Catholic sovereign as much as to a Protestant one – so long as the Catholic sovereign showed no signs of wishing to restore the Catholic religion to the country. Catholicism as a spiritual force had temporarily retreated into the mists by the time Mary reached the shores of Scotland. One of the factors in this retreat was the remarkable lack of Catholic leadership at the time, which meant that too little was done to rally the Catholics at the moments of crisis. Archbishop James Beaton, for example, who might have constituted a Catholic leader, went to France in 1560 and never returned. Huntly was markedly unreliable as events were to prove. The Protestants, on the other hand, felt a crusading spirit concerning their newly achieved Reformation. When Alexander Scott presented to Mary his ‘New Year Gift’ of a long poem at the beginning of 1562, his courtly connections encouraged him to address dulcet phrases towards his young queen:
Let all thy realm be now in readiness
With costly clothing to decoir thy court.
These same connections did not prevent him warning Mary solemnly that papist idolatry had been newly engraved in certain hearts as a result of her arrival – a development which was to be thoroughly deplored. Yet all the evidence shows that Mary herself was perfectly content to accept the facts of the situation, and had no wish to engrave idolatry anew on any heart, so long as that heart beat loyally towards its sovereign. Very far from being set on re-establishing the Catholic religion in Scotland, she seems to have seen herself as the powerful Catholic sovereign who rules at peace her Protestant people.
In the meantime she was also able to benefit from the breach between Knox and the less extreme members of the reformed Church, those for example who strongly doubted whether it was lawful to resist an ungodly prince as Knox suggested. Knox, strident as his voice might be, did not by any means speak for all members of the reformed religion. As Knox himself angrily reported, the Protestant lords were apt to be seduced from extremism by contact with the gentle and civilizing influence of the court.11 When the town council of Edinburgh issued an insulting proclamation on 2nd October, putting Catholic priests in the same category as prostitutes and whoremongers, Mary managed to get the proclamation suppressed and the council deprived of its privileges, with the full co-operation of both Maitland and Lord James, whom indeed Knox furiously blamed for the whole episode. Then when Queen Mary had a sung Mass in her private chapel on All Hallows Day (1st November), it was finally decided after a conference among the Protestant leaders that the queen should be able to behave as she wished with her household in private. But the actual singing of the Mass caused considerable commotion.
The English ambassador Randolph not only paid tribute to Mary’s cleverness throughout her first autumn in Scotland, but indicated that those who had imagined Mary was without wisdom were liable to be surprised, since he himself had detected in her the fruit of the ‘best-practised’ cunning of France combined with the subtle brains of Scotland.12 Part of this cleverness on the part of the young queen was to take the financial situation of the ministers of the new Church sufficiently seriously to make provision for them: in February 1562 it was decided that the monetary situation of these ministers was sufficiently desperate for it to be necessary for the crown to take some action. It was therefore decided that while two thirds of the revenues of the benefices were to remain with the existing holders for their lifetimes (probably neither ecclesiastics nor members of the reformed Church), the other third was to be collected by the government, and divided between it and the reformed Church. It was a perfectly acceptable compromise, which showed once again that Mary drew a sharp distinction between the private Mass in her chapel and the public weal in Scotland; and it also helped on the interests of the crown.
As the editor of the Register of the Privy Council at this period has observed, one looks in vain through its pages for any evidence that Mary was a rabid Catholic intent on establishing her own religion in Scotland, and intent on destroying the reformed religion which had replaced it.13 Both Melville and Castelnau confirm Randolph’s opinion that on her first arrival in Scotland Mary’s behaviour was designedly accommodating and tactful, never more so than on the subject of religion, as a result of which she was rewarded with considerable personal popularity. Melville wrote that she conducted herself ‘so princely, so honourably and so discreetly, that her reputation spread in all countries’; Castelnau indicated that the Scots were delighted with their beautiful young queen and, thanks to her efforts to make herself agreeable to them, they counted themselves lucky to be ruled by one of the most perfect princesses of her time.14 The Pope wrote to Mary anxiously in December, suggesting that on the subject of Scottish Catholicism she should take Queen Mary Tudor as her model, who ‘surely did not defend the cause of God timidly’,15 but Mary Stuart was very far from adopting the methods of her Catholic cousin in England. Her energies at this point were absorbed in an infinitely more worldly design – to get herself recognized by Queen Elizabeth as her legitimate successor to the English throne – and in this plan fervently expressed Catholicism could only work to her disadvantage.
The conciliation of her Scottish subjects was only one half of Mary’s plan: reconciliation with Elizabeth was the other. Once she was assured that Elizabeth had actually dispatched the safe-conduct – it arrived back in Scotland four days after she landed – Mary’s mood towards her cousin was as purposely friendly as her mood towards the Scots had been. Only thirteen days after her arrival, she commissioned Maitland to go to England and try to treat with the English queen on the subject of the succession; Maitland duly set off in September. William Maitland was the obvious choice for the mission. He had been Mary of Guise’s envoy to London in February 1558, and to Paris in March 1559, and envoy for the Protestants to London again in 1560: he was thus by far the most experienced diplomatist out of the rather limited selection offered by the Scottish nobility. Maitland can fairly claim to be the most interesting character in Scotland in the time of Queen Mary because he represented a type of new man: aged thirty-three when Mary arrived, roughly the same age as Lord James, and fifteen years older than the queen herself, he had been converted to Protestantism by Knox in 1555. But it was politics not religion which interested him. His grandmother had been a Seton, and his grandfather died at Flodden, but he himself, one of the seven children of Sir Richard Maitland, belonged to the new highly political class of lairds surrounding the capital, who had been considerably affected by the English occupation of Haddington in the late 1540s. Maitland had been Secretary of State to Mary of Guise, but did not allow this fact to prevent him from joining the Protestant insurgents under Châtelherault in the autumn of 1559.
His father, himself in public service of one sort and another for over sixty years, gave Maitland some Polonius-like advice at the beginning of his career, Counsel to my son being in the court, in which he admonished him to be neither a flatterer nor a scorner, to remember the instability of fortune even in the highest position of government, and in short not to be over-confident in a world as changeable as the moon or the sea. But as it turned out, Maitland was not the sort of character to be easily caught in a fixed position, while the moon and the sea changed round him. His very political abilities led him to exercise a certain pragmatism – did not Buchanan term him the Chameleon? – and his relations with Mary of Guise had already shown that, like a modern civil servant, he did not feel bound to go down with the minister. Yet Maitland was regarded by his contemporaries as having a finesse lacking in others, and an ability which made him ‘subtle to draw out the secrets of every man’s minds’16 as Buchanan put it. He was excellently educated and his correspondence is garnished with classical allusions and wit. In other ways, in his lack of ascetic fervour and his emphasis on the practical in politics, Maitland’s spirit matched Mary’s own. He was even supposed to have carried his cynicism as far as to observe that ‘God is a bogle of the nursery’.* In theory at least, he was the ideal adviser for Mary out of the limited selection available in Scotland, and he was certainly the ideal envoy to send to London.
Maitland’s interview with Elizabeth took place in London, in the presence of both Cecil, Elizabeth’s adviser, and Dudley, her favourite. The Scottish point of view on the subject of the succession had already been put to Elizabeth in a humble letter from Lord James, before Mary even arrived in Scotland. Ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh was to be given in exchange for Elizabeth’s acknowledgement that Mary stood next in line to the throne, after herself and her lawful issue. Maitland pointed out on behalf of Mary that this meant that she could not ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh as it now stood, because the terms of the Treaty called on Mary to surrender not only her present claim to the English throne, but also all further claims after the death of Elizabeth and her problematic offspring. In reply, Elizabeth showed herself nothing if not friendly towards the queen of Scots; although her first impulse was to concentrate on the vexed subject of the treaty (‘I looked for another message from the Queen your sovereign’), once she realized that the Scots lords, as well as Mary, were in earnest on the subject of succession, she gave herself over to a frank discussion of the whole question.
In the course of this, Elizabeth even went so far as to vouchsafe the information that she herself preferred Mary to all her rivals: she knew of no better right than Mary’s, and no one who was strong enough to keep Mary from the throne. At the same time she positively declined to give Mary the acknowledgement she desired. The reason she gave was the impossible burden which it would lay on her own relations with Mary. ‘The desire is without example,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to require me in mine own life, to set my winding sheet before my eyes. Think you that I could love my own winding sheet? Princes cannot like their own children, those that should succeed unto them … How then shall I, think you, like my cousin, being declared my Heir Apparent?’ She also put forward a more practical, less personal reason of her own safety: ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’ And she quoted in Latin: ‘They are more prone to worship the rising than the setting sun.’ Elizabeth went on to describe her own experiences as a focus of opposition during the reign of Mary Tudor. With these personal revelations, and an unresolved situation, Maitland had to be content. However, Elizabeth made one concession in that she agreed to accept a certain modification of the treaty, so that Mary should not have to sign away her claim, beyond the period of Elizabeth’s life and that of her lawful offspring. Elizabeth also suggested that Maitland and Cecil should correspond privately on the subject, although under the supervision of the two queens; the situation, if fluid, seemed also full of promise. In this auspicious atmosphere Maitland returned to Scotland at the end of September.
The truth was that Elizabeth was in a more complicated situation apropros her successor than might appear from a first glance at the Tudor family tree. Mary Stuart, the obvious successor, had as we have seen been theoretically debarred by the will of Henry VIII, which precluded foreigners from succeeding. Maitland, in the course of his mission, did not enter into controversy concerning the will of Henry VIII, but merely made the point that Henry VII, in wedding Margaret Tudor to James IV, had not intended to deny her the succession; Elizabeth herself, by saying that she knew of no better right than Mary’s, showed that she was not allowing her father’s will to enter her calculations. But in 1561 Mary was extremely unpopular in England, being considered virtually a Frenchwoman and a Guise, as well as a Catholic, and she was especially disliked by the English Parliament, which was strongly Puritan in tone; Elizabeth, in her personal favour towards Mary, was certainly in contradiction to the majority of her subjects at this period. There were other claimants, whom the English as a body might be thought to prefer: Margaret, countess of Lennox, mother of Darnley, was a granddaughter of Henry VII; although her claim was inferior to Mary’s as she descended from Margaret Tudor’s second marriage, yet she was an English subject, which gave her an advantage in some English eyes. On the other hand her legitimacy could be questioned, since her father Archibald Angus had divorced her mother on grounds of precontract. Then there was the twenty-five-year-old Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, who descended from the countess of Salisbury, niece of Edward IV, and last representative of the Plantagenets. His strength was in his sex – in 1560 the Spanish ambassador de Quadra reported, ‘the cry is that they do not want any women rulers’.18 He was also Dudley’s brother-in-law, he was a Protestant, and was lieutenant for Leicestershire where he had strong connections.
By far the most serious counter-claimant was Lady Catherine Grey, the twenty-three-year-old sister of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey. Catherine Grey, like Mary Stuart, was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII, but she descended from his young daughter Mary Tudor who had married the Duke of Suffolk. By 1561 Lady Catherine had already led a checkered matrimonial career, by which she had incurred the spiteful enmity and personal dislike of Queen Elizabeth. Her first marriage to Lord Pembroke’s son was dissolved. She then secretly married Lord Hertford in late 1560, but without the queen’s permission, which had been made necessary by an act of 1536. In the summer of 1561, her obvious pregnancy forced her to admit to the marriage, as a result of which both she and Hertford were clapped in the Tower. On 24th September, at roughly the same moment as Maitland’s mission to Elizabeth on behalf of Mary, she gave birth to a son, Edward Seymour. This piece of unwelcome parturition roused Elizabeth to a pitch of vindictive fury. She referred to the unpleasant subject bitterly to Maitland when she alluded to those who, by showing themselves not to be barren, had declared to the world that they were more worthy of the throne than herself or Mary. Elizabeth had both mother and father cross-examined, and as they could provide no witnesses of their wedding or find the priest involved, the marriage was finally declared invalid in May 1562. Despite this stern lesson in the unwisdom of illicit romance, the unhappy Lady Catherine managed to have sufficient contact with her husband within the confines of the Tower to give birth to a second son Thomas in February 1563. By the finding of Elizabeth’s commission, both these sons were of course illegitimate, somewhat reducing Lady Catherine’s desirability as a candidate for the throne.
Nevertheless in the 1560s it was Lady Catherine who was regarded as the most likely successor to Elizabeth by the English Parliament, on the grounds that she was Protestant and she was English. So strong were her claims thought to be that Philip II of Spain is even supposed to have worked out a scheme by which he would have abducted her, in 1560, and married her off to that famous putative bridegroom Don Carlos, in order to establish her immediately on the throne of England, on the grounds that she was legitimate, and Elizabeth was not.19 However, when Lady Catherine was revealed to be a Protestant, Philip lost interest in her. Mary Stuart on the other hand was the subject of various English attacks at this period. ‘Garboduc’ attacked her right to succeed as an alien; in the Parliament of January 1563 Sadler made a speech against Mary the foreigner succeeding to the throne: ‘Our common people and the very stones in the streets should rebel against it.’ In October 1562, when Elizabeth was gravely ill with smallpox, de Quadra reported that there was absolutely no certainty about the succession, the Protestants being divided between Catherine Grey and Huntingdon, and the Catholics between Mary and Margaret Lennox. Under the circumstances it is easy to understand why Mary believed that the personal favour of Elizabeth constituted her best hope of being recognized. Mary believed that Elizabeth could and would override the will of HenryVIII. Elizabeth’s dislike of Catherine was blighting her chances. Elizabeth’s love of Mary – if it was sufficiently stimulated – might be the making of her fortunes. Throughout the autumn and spring, Mary devoted all her efforts to bringing about the personal meeting between the two queens, by which she felt certain she could win the all-important affections of Elizabeth.
Mary was not deluding herself on the subject. In the opinion of one of Elizabeth’s modern biographers, Sir John Neale, ‘There is no resisting the conclusion that Elizabeth was prepared virtually to assure Mary of the succession, assure her of it on conditions that are easy to guess: no league with France, friendship with England, an acceptable marriage, and probably ultimate conversion to Protestantism.’20 The first three of these conditions would not have been difficult to fulfil for a Mary so set on being acknowledged as heiress, and the last one lay only in the sphere of possibilities. The important point, which Mary had ably grasped, was that she herself should inspire Elizabeth with confidence, so that she would be armoured by Elizabeth’s favour against the hostility of the English Parliament, and presumably many of the English Protestants. By far the best way of inspiring this confidence was to meet the English queen face to face: had she not won the golden opinions of Throckmorton? Surely it would be no more difficult to win the affections of Elizabeth, with whom she had in common not only their cousinly relationship, but also the mutual problems of government in the hands of the weaker sex. As she had told Bedford, when she was first widowed: ‘We are both in one isle, both of one language, both the nearest kinswoman that each other hath, and both Queens.’21 In view of Mary’s known success in the sphere of personal contact, her steady aim to meet Elizabeth must be regarded not as the caprice of an inquisitive woman, but as a sound piece of political reasoning.
Once Maitland was back in Scotland, he corresponded with Cecil for the rest of the autumn and winter, according to Queen Elizabeth’s suggestion. At the same time Elizabeth herself sent Sir Peter Mewtas to Scotland, officially to greet Mary on her arrival in Scotland, unofficially to demand ratification of the treaty. Mary diplomatically suggested in reply that as so many matters in the treaty had concerned her late husband, the whole subject should be considered anew: in November she put forward the names of new commissioners. All Mary’s letters to Elizabeth throughout this period have the same attitude of friendliness which would seem positively sugary to our ears, were it not for the high stakes which were to be won by cajolery. Mary means ‘nothing more earnestly than continuance of tender amity and good intelligence’ between the two of them; she finds that Mewtas has ‘so wisely and discreetly uttered and expressed the sincerity of your [Elizabeth’s] affection towards us’.22
Elizabeth still evinced a personal desire that the whole affair should be conducted secretly, or through the medium of Randolph; thus on 23rd November she replied to Mary’s gracious letter, turning down the idea of new commissioners. Maitland now tried in vain to discover privately from Cecil what the next approach should be from the Scottish queen. But as Cecil did not take the hint, Mary’s answer had to be framed without any secret advice from England. Mary’s letter of 5th January is skilful, and once again tolerant and loving; she cannot imagine what lack Elizabeth has found in her letter and her answer to Mewtas, she now fully accepts Elizabeth’s own suggestion that she should communicate ‘privily’ to Elizabeth’s envoy Randolph instead of relying on a new set of commissioners, ‘Or rather’ – and here once again Mary is hammering on her favourite theme of personal contact – ‘by our own letters to you.’ ‘We will deal frankly with you,’ cried Mary to Elizabeth, ‘and wish that you deal friendly with us; we will have at this present no judge of the equity of our demand but yourself.’23 Mary was well aware of the value of flattery. If Mary was dealing with some other prince on the whole question, there is no one whose advice she would rather take than Elizabeth’s – ‘such opinion have we conceived of your unrightness in judgment’. She injects a note of appeal: ‘We will require nothing of you, but that which we could well find in our heart to grant unto you, if the like case were ours.’ Once again Mary suggested that she would ratify the treaty immediately, if only her ultimate right could be recognized, but she ended by proposing her pet objective, a personal interview. ‘If God will grant a good occasion that we may meet together, which we wish may be soon, we trust you shall more clearly perceive the sincerity of our good meaning than we can express by writing.’ It was a masterly letter, a tribute to the political cunning of Maitland, and the propitiatory temperament of Mary.
Mary did not rely only on the seductive quality of her letter: she also wooed the English queen with gifts and even verse. Randolph reported in February that Mary intended to send Elizabeth a fair ring with a diamond in it, made like a heart, and this ring seems to have been finally conveyed to England by du Croc in the summer.24 According to Bishop Jewel the ring was further enhanced by ‘flattering and elegant verses’; these may have been in French in which case they were by Mary herself, who was fond of saluting such occasions with poems of her own composition, or alternatively they were Latin epigrams composed by George Buchanan, who included two such in his works, suitably inscribed from the queen of Scotland to the queen of England. It was in return for this gift that Elizabeth sent a fine ring to Mary the next year via Randolph, which was by his account ‘marvellously esteemed, oftentimes looked upon, and many times kissed’.
The effect of these advances upon the English queen was just as Mary hoped. Elizabeth rose to the bait. In late December Cecil wrote to Throckmorton that he found a great desire in both queens to have an interview, although he gloomily feared the worst from two such different women meeting.25 When Elizabeth finally replied to Mary’s letter of 5th January, she certainly did not object to the proposed interview. Mary and Maitland took this lack of negative for a positive acquiescence in their plans; although Maitland had hoped to get some of the outstanding issues settled first, it was decided that he should return once more to London, to negotiate for the meeting, the prime impulse being still the urgent desire of Mary that it should take place. Her relations with Elizabeth were indeed a subject on which she allowed herself to dwell with fantasy as well as affection; one of her favourite jokes at this period was the notion that if the queen of England had been a man, she would have willingly married her. ‘This Queen wished that one of the two were a man, to make an end of all debates,’ reported Randolph, adding perhaps rather unnecessarily, ‘This … I trowe was spoken in her merrie mood.’ This little pleasantry of the volatile queen of Scots had, however, already occurred a year earlier to the serious-minded Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Then in the full flush of his admiration for Mary Stuart as widow of France, he wrote: ‘Methinketh it were to be wished of all wise men and her Majestie’s good subjects, that one of these two Queens of the Ile of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be an unitie of the whole and their appendances.’26
In the absence of any signs of such a miraculous transformation, however, the negotiations for the interview continued. On 19th May Mary persuaded the Scottish Council to agree to it in principle, although they were understandably worried about the safety of her person, in view of the fact that it was less than a year since the English queen had been threatening to imprison her if she landed on English soil. There were other considerations to dampen the ardour of the Scottish Protestants: such meetings were notoriously expensive, and the Scots did not especially wish to send so much money into England and leave it there. Not only that, but they feared that if Elizabeth was seduced by Mary’s charm she might cease to keep them under her protective wing. The Scottish Catholic party were concerned that their queen, who had shown a disappointing lack of interest in their case, should be further corrupted by a meeting with the Protestant Elizabeth and were correspondingly opposed to the whole project. But Mary’s will prevailed. Maitland was sent to London on 25th May and reached it on 31st May. Her enterprise bore dividends. Elizabeth now showed herself positively favourable to the whole project of the meeting and Maitland brought Cecil round to his way of thinking that on balance a meeting of the two ladies would be advantageous to their respective countries. The English Council were less enthusiastic and, like their Scottish counterpart, pleaded the expense – they reckoned that the whole undertaking would cost at least £40,000. Not only the two councils but the face of heaven itself seemed set against the meeting, since the summer of 1562 was so wet as to make many of the roads between the two countries virtually impassable.
Despite these setbacks, articles for the proposed meeting were agreed on, and duly ratified by Elizabeth. In the articles, York was suggested as the best venue, and the dates mentioned were between 20th August and 20th September. Later, Sheffield House, which was to feature again in the years of Mary’s captivity, was put forward as a possible site, before Nottingham was fixed upon in the preliminary arrangements. Maitland optimistically termed Elizabeth to be ‘earnest bent’ on the project; on 10th June she wrote a letter to this effect to Mary, which pleased the Scottish queen so much that she placed it sentimentally in her bosom, next to her skin. When Maitland returned to Mary in Scotland with the good news, he brought with him Elizabeth’s portrait. Mary, with typical female curiosity, asked Randolph whether the likeness was a good one, to which Randolph replied that soon she would be able to judge for herself. Mary exclaimed that this was what she most desired – she hoped that they would strike such deep accord at the meeting, that afterwards the most painful thing which could happen to either of them would be that they had to take leave of each other.27 In London the prospect of the encounter was considered sufficiently certain for the actual masques to be devised which were to entertain the two queens, the chosen allegorical theme being the punishment of False Report and Discord by Jupiter at the request of Prudence and Temperance. The detailed and long-winded plans for the masques – three nights of them – were vetted personally by Cecil and much courtly care was exercised in the delicate task of balancing the allegorical compliments to both royal ladies.28
Unfortunately False Report and Discord were in the end never destined to be consigned to the prison of Extreme Oblivion at the instance of Prudence and Temperance. At the very last minute, with that element of unhappy fatality which never seems far absent from the story of Mary Stuart, the meeting had to be put off – through no lack of keenness on the part of Elizabeth, or the objections of the English Council, but owing to the explosive situation in the rest of Europe. It was to be France, the country for which Mary felt such poignant affection, the country she still secretly thought of as her native land, whose chaotic affairs proved a sudden stumbling-block in the way of the long-desired meeting. On 1st March, 1562 the duke of Guise ordered his followers to fire on a Protestant prayer-meeting at Vassy; the next month Catholics and Huguenots in France were at war with each other. The natural sympathies of Mary would have been supposed to lie with her Guise uncles and the Catholics; the natural sympathies of Elizabeth with the Huguenots. It was a point Throckmorton made from France, when he instantly urged Elizabeth to back the Huguenots, as Spain was likely to intervene on behalf of the Catholics. But although Mary might weep, torn between anxiety for her uncles and fear for her English negotiations, throughout the summer she had not allowed her sympathies with France to override her political designs on England. Elizabeth answered her Council personally when they tried to use the urgency of the French situation to dissuade her from meeting the half-French Catholic queen of Scotland at such a juncture. Cecil continued to hope very practically that the interview might at least lead to a number of benefits for England – the confirmation of the Treaty of Edinburgh, the breaking off of the Franco-Scottish alliance, or even the conversion of Mary from the ‘Roman Religion’.29 On 25th June peace was agreed in France and on 6th July Elizabeth finally settled that she should set out for the meeting as arranged. On 8th July Cecil prepared a safe-conduct for Mary. But on 12th July the French peace collapsed, the war was renewed; Elizabeth had to admit that it was no longer possible for her to set out for the distant north of England with civil strife raging so closely just across the Channel, in which at any moment England might have to intervene, if Spain did likewise.
Mary first heard the news of the sudden débâcle of her plans from Maitland. She took refuge in a violent flood of tears, and kept to her bed for the rest of the day, nursing the cruel and unexpected disappointment. The next day she received Elizabeth’s envoy, Sir Henry Sidney, who had been dispatched to Scotland on 15th July to acquaint her with the course of events. Sir Henry brought with him a more consoling piece of intelligence: Elizabeth offered to plan the interview for the next year, 1563, between 20th May and 31st August, at York, Pomfret, Nottingham, or some other place nominated by Mary. Mary allowed herself to be comforted by the thought that the meeting was only postponed, not cancelled, and her spirits revived. After all, her personal energy and enthusiasm, aided by the skills of Maitland, had been within an ace of achieving this great diplomatic coup, and only circumstances, not Elizabeth’s own intentions, had prevented it. With the natural optimism of her nature, she convinced herself that in the mirror of the future, that dark and cloudy surface, she could see reflected the image of success, only a year away. Little did she know that this image was merely an illusion – that the meeting between Elizabeth and Mary, which has been so often fabled by poets and dramatists, the possible consequences of which are incalculable, but must surely have been immensely favourable to Mary, was destined never to take place.
* The chapel in which Mary had her Mass said was the private chapel royal, to be distinguished from the church attached to the abbey of Holyrood; this became known as the chapel royal in the reign of Charles II, but at this date was used as the parish church of the Canongate.
* There is hardly a single example of a minister being appointed to a benefice before the autumn of 1566.
* His biographer Sir John Skelton could, however, find no contemporary sources for this saying.17