CHAPTER TEN

Governor Good and Gracious

Be governor both good and gracious
Be loyal and loving to thy lieges all

Lord Darnley to Mary Queen of Scots

While Mary negotiated for the throne of distant England, the boisterous spirits of her Scottish nobles presented her with certain very different problems at home, involving not only the public peace but her own physical safety. While Lord James, whom Mary considered to be her natural protector, was away on the borders dispensing justice, there was a sudden alarm that Châtelherault’s eldest son, the eccentric earl of Arran, intended to abduct the queen. Although the court sprang to the alarm, it subsequently turned out that rumours of the plot had originated in a chance remark of Arran’s; in fact the only true stability that the nervous and highly-strung man showed in his wavering career was in his neurotic fixation on his cousin Mary. The next crisis had more substance to it. A mutual hatred existed between James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, and the Hamiltons, and Bothwell decided to win the favours of an Edinburgh girl Alison Craik (‘a good handsome wench’ said Randolph)¹ in order to practise a crude revenge on Arran ‘whose whore the said Alison was suspected to have been’. Bothwell, Mary’s half-brother Lord John Stewart and her Uncle René of Elboeuf (who lingered on in Scotland after the departure of her other Guise relations) gained entry to the house of Alison’s step-father, an Edinburgh merchant, on the first night wearing masks; the second night, they were denied admittance, either because Alison did not choose to betray Arran with his political enemies or because she simply did not care to repeat the experience. Whereupon Elboeuf and Bothwell forced their way in. The result was an uproar. The Church Assembly presented a horrified petition to the queen and the Protestants seized the opportunity to suggest that such conduct was typical of a Catholic degenerate like Elboeuf. Mary herself had a prudish horror of such bawdy behaviour. it ill accorded with her own refined interpretation of court life and she administered a stern rebuke to Elboeuf and Bothwell.

Undismayed by this rebuke, Bothwell and Lord John boldly threatened to repeat the offence the next night, and defied anyone to stop them. At this the Hamiltons took furious umbrage and assembled aggressively in the market-place armed with spears and jacks. It was now Bothwell’s turn to gather up a muster of his own adherents. At the prospect of what looked like being an ugly affray, the townsmen were summoned by the common bell, and Elboeuf’s Gallic spirits were so roused that he declared ten men would not be able to hold him back from the battle (but as he was within the royal gates of Holyrood, and the main action was centred between the Cross and the Salt Tron, in the city itself, the prospect of his intervention was somewhat limited). At the last minute it was Lord James, Argyll and Huntly, rushing down from the court, who managed to disperse the assailants. The whole incident illustrated the swift rough passions which ran so high in Mary’s nobles; in these disputes, animated by long-held family hatreds, the queen appeared in the role of an outsider.

The third incident once again involved Arran and Bothwell. At Christmas Mary had been unable to reconcile them, and Bothwell had been obliged to leave the court in the general interests of peace. Towards the end of March, these two contentious nobles were once more on amicable terms, largely as a result of the good offices of John Knox. No sooner had the reconciliation taken place than Arran went to Knox with a disreputable story about Bothwell.² Bothwell, he said, had suggested to him that they should join together in a conspiracy, by which James and Maitland would be slain, and the queen herself abducted by force to Dumbarton Castle. After that, he, Bothwell, would share the rule of the kingdom with Arran. Not content with his revelation to Knox, Arran wrote a full account of the matter to Mary and James, who were then at Falkland, saying that Bothwell’s true motive in the matter was to bring about the ruin of the House of Hamilton by devious means. Arran’s sanity had long been a matter of common speculation and family concern; as Randolph put it, the earl was ‘so drowned in dreams and so feedeth himself with fantasies, that either men fear that he will turn into some dangerous and incurable sickness or play some day some mad part that will bring him into mischief’.³ To his distracted father, it now seemed that he had finally opted for this latter alternative, and had well and truly involved himself in a most dangerous piece of mischief; Châtelherault forthwith shut up the wretched Arran. However, with the determination of lunacy, Arran managed to smuggle out a second letter in code to Randolph, which Randolph duly passed on to the queen.

Just as Queen Mary was digesting the news of the plot, which at best must have greatly perplexed her, at worst alarmed her for her own safety, Gavin Hamilton, Arran’s kinsman, panted up with the news that Mary must not credit anything that Arran might have written or would report, for it was all false. Lord James acted with dispatch on Mary’s behalf: making short work of Hamilton’s excuses, and those of Bothwell, he had them both arrested on suspicion of conspiracy. Arran proved the more slippery to hold of the two: half-naked, he managed to escape out of his window from his confinement in his father’s castle, ‘with cords made out of the sheets of his bed’.⁴ He then made his way to the home of Kirkcaldy of the Grange at Stirling. Here he gave himself to the ravings of madness, howling and shrieking of devils and witches, and protesting that everyone wanted to kill him. His passion for Mary was transformed by his addled brain into a series of delusions, in which he believed himself to be her husband, and lying in her bed. From Stirling, he was brought to St Andrews, and kept in close confinement, until he was finally confronted with Bothwell, in the presence of Mary and the Privy Council. Here, obsessed by fantasies, he charged Bothwell with high treason; Bothwell, characteristically, wanted the matter settled by single combat, but since this was obviously impossible under the circumstances, suggested a court of law. This suggestion was ignored. Instead Arran, still refusing to withdraw his accusations, was taken back to St Andrews and almost immediately to Edinburgh Castle, where he was put into the charge of James Stewart. It was certainly no age to be mad in: he does not seem to have been kindly treated, even by the low standards of the times towards lunatics, since Stewart was later ‘ill-bruited for the rigorous entertainment’ he gave to him. He never fully recovered his sanity; in 1564 he was described by Randolph as mad, jaundiced, lying eating little and desiring only solitude, suspicious of all around him. And in May 1566, he was liberated on a caution of£12,000, and was allowed to reside quietly with his mother.*

Although there was no proof of his guilt except the word of a madman, Bothwell was sternly treated. He was left to languish a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle without trial, Mary being persuaded by James that it would be highly politically embarrassing to bring the incident out into the open, since if Arran was shown to have borne false witness, he would have to be executed, and he was too near the throne for this to be desirable. It was also put to Mary that Bothwell had been intriguing with the English. Mary had the keen dislike of ingratitude sometimes found in those who themselves have generous natures, and therefore particularly hate to feel themselves treated any differently by other people. She was annoyed that the man to whom she felt she had been so good should show himself so false, and she quoted pointedly to Buchanan in Latin a maxim from Livy: ‘It is safer not to accuse an evil man, than to pardon him’. Châtelherault was in a pathetic state over the whole incident: Mary was moved to see the tears pouring down the old man’s cheeks like those of a child who had been beaten. Nevertheless he had to surrender the castle of Dumbarton, as the price for his supposed political treachery.

The episode, with its mixture of pathos and brutality, has a twofold interest. Firstly it shows that the abduction of Mary’s person was a subject of comparatively common discussion – since it arose twice within the first six months of her arrival in Scotland – and certainly not a novel idea in April 1567 when it was finally achieved. It is true that there is absolutely no tenable evidence against Bothwell except the babblings of a lunatic, but it is just possible that there was something more sinister at the back of it all, and that Bothwell did make some chance remark to Arran, which acted on Arran’s mad passion for Mary, and set him off on the whole disastrous train of thought. One must bear in mind the possibility that Bothwell was at least toying with the idea of an abduction so early in the period of Mary’s personal rule. Secondly, the episode reveals how closely Mary’s lot was joined with that of Lord James. At this point, she was making no attempt to rule the Scottish nobles by balancing them against each other, now advancing one faction, now promoting another. On the contrary, she was clearly backing Lord James in whatever he chose to do. This policy would be perfectly satisfactory so long as the interests of Lord James and Queen Mary coincided; should they ever diverge, the queen might find that she would need the other strong nobles in the kingdom to support her, whom she was now allowing her half-brother to put down as he willed.

Shortly after her arrival Mary had chosen her Privy Council, the chief nobles of the kingdom, six of whom were to be in constant attendance on her, to help her dispatch routine business. The Privy Council was vested with full executive powers, sat in the royal palace, and its members were traditionally chosen by the sovereign. However, the true direction of affairs was firmly vested in the hands of Lord James and Maitland; Randolph described them as being above all others in credit with the queen, and contrasted their two techniques of dealing with her: Lord James treated her according to his nature in a homely and blunt fashion, whereas Maitland approached his young mistress more delicately and finely. The practice of having the six nobles in attendance soon lapsed. Since the Acts of the Privy Council had the same force as Acts of Parliament, it was on the Privy Council and its directors that the full administrative business devolved. The role played by Parliament in this period on the other hand was comparatively remote: this was more especially true since between Parliament and the sovereign stood a committee called the Lords of the Articles, to which was delegated its actual business. The Lords of the Articles were an expedient which had grown up out of the remissness of some members of Parliament in attending sessions, as well as the difficulties of prolonging their attendance. Parliament only assembled in practice to vote approval or disapproval of the acts presented to it for sanction by this committee.⁵

As the Lords of the Articles in their turn tended to be amenable to whatever ruler or strong faction was in power, it will be seen that the potential powers of the Scottish crown within the constitution at this period were widespread. The problem was the implementation of these powers in a backward country, rather than the nature of these powers themselves. There were some hopeful signs for the monarchy for the future: although the great magnates held the great offices of state, transmitted by a more or less hereditary title from father to son, there were other lesser posts such as advocate, justice-clerk, treasurer and secretary to be filled by the lesser gentry – the secretaryship for example was Maitland’s post; these positions could be personally attached to the sovereign. Against the strength of local justice administered by the lords could now be balanced the endless officials attached to civil and consistorial tribunals, belonging to the central legal order, at the head of which stood the supreme court. The lesser burgesses and lairds who were first called into life at the time of the Reformation Parliament would grow to challenge the great magnates, and the crown might expect to benefit from their challenge.

It will be seen in the civil government, as in the ecclesiastical structure, that the possibilities of the crown under Queen Mary were extensive, if the potentialities of her royal position were ever converted into actualities. But apart from the obvious disadvantage of the strength of the nobles, the crown had two other great weaknesses. It had no standing army – and bitterly had the Scottish nobles resented it when Mary of Guise tried to establish such a thing; the crown, should it be involved in action necessitating war, had to depend on the locally raised hosts of other loyal nobles, with the consequent dangers of personal vendettas being involved in royal policy. Secondly, the financial resources of the Scottish crown were cripplingly restricted. Mary Stuart received an annual income of 40,000 livres as her jointure as queen dowager of France, although there were constant troubles over the payment and administration of this sum, which became acute during the years of her captivity. But the lands and properties of her father had been largely squandered by the expensive English wars during her minority.* Other royal lands had been apportioned to the nobles during Mary’s minority, although by the ancient law of minority of lesion, she would have a right to resume these on her twenty-fifth birthday, in six years’ time. The royal income therefore depended, apart from the lease on its own lands, on wardships or minors and heiresses, export dues derived from duties on trade at the burghs † and ecclesiastical revenues. The entire income from the collectory of crown property amounted to about £18,000 Scots.⁷

Apart from her personal resources, the resources of the crown were meagre indeed and economic organization correspondingly backward. The method of collecting taxes in Scotland in the sixteenth century has been compared unfavourably with that of twelfth-century England, taxes being farmed out for collection to sheriffs whose offices had become hereditary. In any case, the only instance of national taxation during the six years of Mary’s personal rule was a levy of £12,000 for the baptism of Prince James. The total royal revenue in 1560 was around £40,000 Scots or about£10,000 sterling.⁸ Compared to this, that of Queen Elizabeth was £200,000, rising to £300,000 in the last ten years of her reign:⁹ yet Elizabeth was always notoriously conscious of poverty. It is hardly surprising that in Scotland the treasurer’s deficit amounted to £33,000 in 1564, and was up to£61,000 in 1569.¹⁰ Indeed, Queen Mary would have been hard put to it to pay a standing army had she been endowed with one. In short, one problem Mary Queen of Scots faced throughout her personal rule was that of frustrating royal poverty. It was no wonder that the French memoir of 1558 on the state of the country dwelt vividly on the poverty of the Scottish monarchy, which it ascribed to the lack of a proper royal domain, and the absence of any means of imposing taxation. Mary, like her grandfather James IV, could fairly be described as ‘in want of nothing … but not able to put money into his strongboxes’.¹¹

At the same time, during the second half of the sixteenth century prices were rising fast all over Europe due to the influx of silver from the New World. From this desperate need for money resulted the strange ‘treasure-hunter’s’ economics of the period¹² – the persistent searchings for gold and silver deposits, which unfortunately lay in Scotland only in small and scattered pockets and involved high working and transport costs. For much of her reign Mary was also too poor to issue a coinage, although this had been done yearly from 1529 to 1542. At the same time the Register of the Privy Council shows that it was the policy of Mary’s government to try and make French currency legal tender, and to discourage the entry of currency from England, which was made treasonable – although the English currency was getting a reputation for purity from the developing commerce with the Hanse towns and the Low Countries. Another economic expedient was developed when the government realized that considerable profit could be derived from the issue of a silver coinage, at a considerably greater face value than its true value in silver: ryals began to be issued with a nominal value of thirty, twenty and ten shillings, but costing much less to mint. Naturally, such debasements had the effect of only encouraging hoarding and speculation. During the period of Mary Stuart’s personal rule, it would be true to say that just as the crown suffered from straitened finances it was incapable of curing, so the country suffered from economic difficulties for which the government also could supply no certain remedy.

Despite these gloomy considerations, for the first years of her life in Scotland Mary Stuart made a fair attempt to recreate the conditions of the French court and to enjoy the native resources of Scotland. Fortunately she had a natural appetite for pleasures of many different types, as well as being blessed with youthful high spirits and enthusiasm, which enabled her to create pastimes where she did not find them; in particular she had a positive mania for outdoor pursuits – all her life her physical constitution demanded a daily ration of fresh air and exercise if she was to feel herself well. Although later in her life, this was to mean that she suffered cruelly from the conditions of close confinement, it meant that now she was well suited to the conditions of life in Scotland, where she was destined to spend nearly half her life in the saddle, progressing about her dominions. In the Scottish countryside she also had endless opportunities for the hawking and hunting which she loved, as had her father James V, and later her father-in-law and husband. Falkland Palace in Fife was a favourite centre for royal sport, having been rebuilt for this purpose by James V, with new stables built in 1531, so that it occupied rather the same role as Balmoral Castle in the life of Queen Victoria as a holiday and hunting retreat. It was surrounded with parkland and to the north lay the Forest of Falkland. It was not left to chance that the royalties should enjoy good sport: roebucks and stags were actually brought in litters along with the court, from their last stopping place; they were then temporarily released for the chase. When the court moved on again to Edinburgh, the deer were rounded up, and brought on to be released once more in the royal park at Holyrood. Wild boar, to be hunted among the oaks of the forest, were specially imported from France. Hawks commanded good prices: James IV had paid £189 for a trained bird, Mary herself acquired hawks from as far as Orkney and Zetland, and in 1562 hawks were among the presents she sent to Elizabeth,£80 being paid for conveying them to London.

To Mary, a fearless rider who loved the excitement of the chase, not only hawking but deer-hunting was a popular pastime; anti-poaching laws had to be made to preserve the deer for the royal delectation, since on one occasion it was found that ‘the deer [were] so destroyed that our Sovereigns can get no pastime of hunting’ when they had repaired to a special piece of forest on purpose for the chase. Deer-hunting was far from being the solitary hardy stalking of modern times: the deer were actually beaten in to where the lords would be lying, their heads and antlers appearing over the hill ‘making a show like a wood’, as Taylor described it in his Penniless Pilgrimage.¹³ It was a primitive sport by our standards, the cries of the men, with their arrows, javelins and clubs, mingling with the barking of the dogs, often Irish wolf-hounds, who were used to catch the beasts. In 1564 an especially magnificent deer-hunt was organized for Mary by the 4th earl of Atholl; Mary camped for the occasion on the shores of Loch Locky, on the east side of Beinn a’ Ghlo, on a spot now traditionally known as Tom na Banrigh, or the queen’s hillock. One of Queen Mary’s retainers described how 2000 Highlanders (or ‘Wild Scots’ as he noted that they were called) were employed for two months to drive all the deer from the woods and hills of Atholl, Badenoch, Moray and all the counties about, into a special area – ‘As these Highlanders use a light dress, and are very swift of foot, they went up and down so nimbly that … they brought together 2,000 red deer, besides roes and fallow deer.’ The queen and the other great men waited in the glen as the deer thundered towards them, led by one magnificent leader who thrilled Mary’s heart, until Atholl warned her that if this leader, either in fear or in rage, turned in their direction, the entire herd would follow and they might be stampeded. This did in fact happen to some of the Highlanders, when Mary let her dog loose on a wolf and the stag bolted; in spite of throwing themselves flat in the heather, two or three Highlanders were killed, and others injured.¹⁴

In his History of Scotland, Leslie emphasizes the importance of hunting to the Scots as a national pastime: in her enthusiasm for it, Mary certainly met with the full accord of her subjects. Archery – for which she would wear a velvet glove – also appealed to her, and she had butts set up in her private gardens at Holyrood, where one spring day she was surprised by Randolph shooting with the vigorously Protestant Master of Lindsay against Lord James and one of her ladies, showing that it was easier to be friendly with the turbulent Lindsay on the common basis of sports than on that of religion.¹⁵ She played at golf and pall-mall (croquet). With her penchant for fresh air, she loved to walk in the gardens surrounding her palaces, and frequently held audiences of her ambassadors there – Randolph even mentions one interview taking place in the garden of Holyrood in February. Here there were two gardens, a north and a south, into which Mary is said to have introduced on her own initiative a young sycamore from France, which was to become the parent of all the groves celebrated in Scottish songs. The other palaces of Linlithgow, Stirling and Falkland also had their estates and parks, the gardens of Stirling lying far below the castle on the level ground, so that the butts could be surveyed from the castle walls.

Mary Stuart had her resplendent side, when she appeared to her subjects as Diana the goddess of the chase; but she also had another charming and touchingly domesticated side to her character in marked contrast to this dazzling public persona. This paradox is stamped on many of her actions, which hover between the imperious deeds of the woman born a queen, who loved to shine in the eyes of her people, and the more clinging reactions of a woman, who was after all markedly feminine, in temperament as well as in sex. She adored small dogs, as well as the great hounds of the chase, and this trait did not wait for the cramped conditions of her captivity to manifest itself: there is mention in her inventories of pretty blue velvet colours for the queen’s little dogs; a daily ration of two loaves of bread was set apart for them; payment was made to the boys who looked after them, and occasionally they were sent to France. She loved to embroider, and is described as sitting at her Council, placidly plying her needle, a model of the compliant female. Mary Stuart was also marked all her life, in its early no less than in its later stages, by extreme attachment to her servants, particularly her own personal attendants, with whom she felt she could share her joys and woes without fear either of their presumption or of their disloyalty. Mary’s court therefore had an agreeably intimate character, which spread outwards from the feminine side of its queen’s own nature. There were certainly indoor pleasures enough to be enjoyed. The queen had a gambling streak, as her mother had had before her, and loved to play at cards or at dice, losing a jewel of crystal set in gold to her father-in-law Lennox on one occasion. She enjoyed biles or billiards, and in Lent 1565, before they were married, Mary and Darnley together lost an agate ring and brooch worth 50 crowns to Mary Beaton and Randolph, a debt which Darnley gallantly paid. Mary enjoyed backgammon, and also chess, her library including The Rules of Chesse translated from French by William Caxton in 1474. She loved to watch the plays of puppets, a new fashion which had lately spread out of Italy.¹⁶

Mary was also a considerable linguist, and the number of languages which she had learned as a child in France was reflected in her reading-matter. Besides French, Latin, Scots books, and a few English volumes, there were books in Italian and Spanish – while the presence of books in the original Greek suggested that the queen either understood a smattering of Greek herself, or else had at least an interest in the culture of the Greeks. At all events her library was extensive: from the two incomplete lists of it made at Holyrood in 1569 for the Regent Moray, after she had fled to England, and in 1578 at Edinburgh Castle, it is possible to form at least some impression of her literary tastes.*¹⁷ Her library was kept at Holyrood in a green-carpeted room, and by 1566 her collection of Greek and Latin books had grown sufficiently large to be left by her in her will to the university of St Andrews. There were a quantity of medieval and modern Latin prose, including the famous copy of Buchanan’s translation of the Psalms. This was dedicated by him to Queen Mary in Latin in lines which are strangely poignant when one recalls that it was later Buchanan who was to be Mary’s chief traducer:

Lady, whose sceptre (yours by long descent)
Gives Scotland now a happy government,
By beauty, virtue, merit and sweet grace
Queen of your sex, star of our age, our race –
Accept (light task) done in the Latin tongue,
The glorious Psalms the prophet-king once sung …†

Greek authors represented included Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Euripides and Plato, and there were French translations of the classics such as Suetonius, Plutarch, Ovid and Cicero. Italian books numbered the Decameron, Aristo’s Orlando Furioso, Petrarch, and Marcus Aurelius translated into Italian.

By far the greatest proportion of the books is, of course, in French. English books are rare, but include the Acts of Parliament of Queen Mary Tudor, less frequently browsed over one feels than the volumes of history and French poetry, which seem to have been Mary Stuart’s real loves. Brantôme bore witness to her genuine passion for poetry – her library includes the works of Clément Marot, du Bellay and Ronsard, all poets she had known and loved in France. Mary seems to have had a preference also for medieval romances either of the Arthurian legends or the story of Roland. Melville reports that when she had leisure from the affairs of the state ‘she read upon good books, the history of diverse countries.¹⁸ – books such as the chronicles of the emperors and kings of Austria, found in the list of Edinburgh Castle, and histories of the medieval kings of France. The colourful mixture of event and character to be found in history evidently appealed to her – it is obvious from her answers at her trial in England, and her conversations with Paulet at the end of her life, that she had read and pondered on English history. In short, her library shows the typical all-round tastes of what might be termed an educated Renaissance woman who enjoyed reading widely as her fancy listed – as well as the individual touches to be found in any library, such as The Book of Hunting (the sort of book which might also be found in the fine library of any eighteenth-century English gentleman), a book on astronomy, and dutifully enough the bound sermons and prayers of her uncle the cardinal of Lorraine.

There are three books on music listed: for music Mary Stuart would seem to have had a profound feeling which, like her love of poetry, appealed to the romantic, rather than the inquisitive, side of her nature. She herself played on both the lute and virginals, and as she plucked her lute strings she loved to display those long white fingers, which Brantàme and Ronsard admired. Although Melville in his famous interview with Queen Elizabeth described Mary as playing only ‘reasonably well’ for a queen, the verdict of Mary’s contemporaries who did not have to discuss the matter with her jealous rival is more generous.¹⁹ Mary had a charming, soft singing voice which, like her speaking voice, won the admiration of her listeners, and on whose natural ability Conaeus commented. Musical talent played its part in the selection of her valets of the bed-chamber – later it influenced the choice of Riccio; in 1561 she had five violas and three players on the lute, and some of the valets of the bed-chamber also played and sang, so that Mary could beguile the long dark Scottish winter evenings with the sort of little musical supper parties which she had enjoyed in France. The queen also loved to have music to accompany her Mass; at first this presented a problem, since the chapel organs had been destroyed at the time of the Reformation as being profane instruments, with the exception of that at Stirling which the mob could not reach. In 1562 Randolph reported her as being desolate because no one would play at her Mass on Christmas Day;²⁰ however, by April 1565 she had a band of musicians, and at Easter High Mass Randolph furiously noticed that ‘she wanted now neither trumpets, drum, nor fife, bagpipe or tabor’.²¹

The skill of Mary, for which Knox had a particular loathing, which summed up to him everything he detested about her character, education and upbringing, was her dancing. There was a genuine and irreconcilable difference of attitude. To Knox, dancing seemed truly an invention of the devil, something which good women never practised; in his opinion, the activities which Mary got up to whenever she was alone with her ‘French fillocks, fiddlers and others of that band’ made the whole atmosphere more like a brothel than a place for honest women. If we are to believe Knox, in December 1562 Mary danced excessively ‘beyond midnight’ out of glee, because she had received the news that the persecution of the Huguenots had begun again in France.²² He immediately resorted to his favourite weapon of the denunciation of the pulpit, as a result of which Mary summoned him to their second interview, some eighteen months after the first.

She received him in her chamber, attended by Lord James, Maitland and Morton. Knox proceeded to qualify his condemnation of dancing with certain provisos – he said that he was prepared to tolerate dancing if the principal vocation of the dancer was not neglected, and that the dancers took care not to dance as the Philistines did, for the pleasure they took in the displeasure of God’s people. If they did fall into either of these two heinous errors, they should ‘receive the reward of dancers, and that will be drunk in hell, unless they speedily repented’. Mary Stuart on the other hand had been brought up in France to dance, and she danced well and elegantly; in the words of Melville, once more jealously cross-examined by the queen of England, she danced ‘not so high and disposedly’ as Elizabeth, but in Conaeus’s less inhibited phrase she danced most ‘gracefully and becomingly’. With Mary Stuart, dancing was a natural expression of her pleasure in life, as well as an artistic performance; it is small wonder therefore if the young queen, just nineteen, dancing with the ladies of her court in a carefree but hardly unseemly fashion, should have felt that of the two of them it was Knox, and not her, who was the Philistine.

In her dress, at least, Mary Stuart was able to give the femininity of her nature full reign, because to be magnificently attired was expected of a sixteenth-century queen, by all except the most bigoted and puritanical. Even in childhood, she had been distinguished by a keen interest in clothes when she teased her governess into letting her have as splendid gowns as the princesses of France. When she grew up, and had what virtually amounted to a constitutional duty to dress herself elegantly, she did so with innate good taste – lacking her cousin Elizabeth’s inclination to bedizen herself ostentatiously, possibly because she was conscious that unlike Elizabeth she had the sort of beauty which was best set off by rich simplicity. Of course a large proportion of her time as a young woman was spent in mourning – for her mother, her father-in-law, and finally for her husband. The outward signs of grief were taken extremely seriously at this period – it has been noted that she was wearing black when she first arrived in Scotland. After Francis had been dead a year, in December 1561, the court went into half-mourning but Mary herself did not totally cast off her mourning until she married Darnley four years later. Perhaps she understood how to make her many black accoutrements a dramatic foil for her red-golden hair, white skin and golden eyes; for the same reason, white appears and reappears throughout the list of dresses in her wardrobe, there being perhaps no better setting for a glowing complexion than a white dress: the list of her robes, with their descriptions and colours, fully explains how she came to be known as ‘la reine blanche’ in France. Indeed her detailed wardrobe books show the intense interest which Mary Stuart took in every detail of her clothes: there are lists of all the articles delivered from the wardrobe at Holyrood each month from the beginning of 2nd September, 1561 to June 1567 when the nobles took arms against her.²³ Ordinarily, she wore dresses of camlet (a sort of mohair), damask or serge, stiffened in the neck with buckram, and mounted with lace and ribbons; the queen was also fond of loose dresses (‘à l’Espagnole’); her riding skirts and cloaks were of Florentine serge, often edged with black velvet or fur. Beneath her gowns were ‘vasquines’, stiffened petticoats or farthingales to hold out her skirts, expanded with hoops of whale bones to give a crinoline effect. Her underwear included silk doublets, and there is mention of ‘brassières’ of both black and white silk. Her ‘woven hose’ often were made of gold and silver, and it is specifically mentioned that they were of silk. Her hats and caps were of black velvet and taffetas – her veils of white.

On state and ceremonial occasions, the queen’s clothes were universally glittering. The inventory of the queen’s dresses made at Holyrood in February 1562²⁴ lists 131 entries, including sixty gowns, of cloth of gold, cloth of silver, velvet, satin and silk. There are fourteen cloaks, five of which are in the Spanish fashion, and two royal mantles, one purple velvet and the other furred in ermine. There are thirty-four vasquines and sixteen devants or fronts (stomachers), mainly of cloth of gold, silver and satin. The dresses themselves ranged from the favourite white – often with silver fringes and embroidery – and preponderant black, to crimson velvet, orange damask embroidered in silver; the embroidery was so rich and detailed that it was often passed from dress to dress, and listed separately among the jewellery.

Not only Mary’s dresses, but also her jewels were of enormous importance to her: these of course represented something more than adornment, since by being treated as solid financial assets, they could be given as presents, held for security, or sold to pay troops, if necessary. In her childhood, Mary Stuart was decked by her attendants in those jewels considered fit for an infant queen; in Scotland she enjoyed the enhancement of a series of romantic gems; later in her life, her jewels were to enjoy a career as checkered as her own, as they were stolen, seized, sold to Elizabeth, or pawned, all to her violently expressed anguish. The inventory of her jewellery, made also in 1562,²⁵ contains 180 entries, an increase of twenty-one over the inventory of the queen’s jewels made at the time of her departure from France – new acquisitions include a cross of gold set with diamonds and rubies which Mary had just redeemed for £1000 from the hands into which it had been pledged by Mary of Guise. She had also acquired some new Scottish pearls from an Edinburgh goldsmith, for Scottish pearls were held to share with Bohemian pearls the honour of being the finest in Europe, although still rated as inferior to the pearls of the Orient. As she loved white, so the queen seems to have had an especial affection for pearls – it was noted that she was wearing two of a group of twenty-three pearls in her ears at the actual moment when the inventory was taken. But rubies she also seems to have admired, as she loved to wear crimson velvet; and among her profusion of rings, necklaces and earrings, there is mention of enamel, cornelian and turquoise, as well as, of course, gold and diamonds.

The queen paid fashionable attention to the care of her hair, and the elaborate dressing of it, according to the caprices of the time. We know that among her Maries, Mary Seton was an especially skilled hairdresser, having learnt the art in France. Even in her youth, when she had lovely thick glistening hair – those tresses ‘si beaux, si blonds, si cendrés’ wrote Brantôme – the dictates of the mode led her to use perukes or false hairpieces. Later in her life her glorious hair darkened, and the sorrows and illnesses of her captivity caused it to thin and go grey prematurely. Then, false pieces of hair were to be essential, but now in her heyday, she made use of them equally: there is repeated reference to her perukes or the bags to keep them in, in her wardrobe lists. By 1569 Nicholas White mentions that she had them of all different colours, and Sir Francis Knollys was impressed by the pretty fashions created on her head by Mary Seton when she first arrived in England (he considered the art a novelty although Queen Elizabeth herself had no less then eighty perukes). Queen Mary’s perukes were among the first necessities which she sent for from Lochleven, and as can be seen by the awe of Knollys, these much-travelled handmaidens of beauty were dispatched to Mary at Carlisle by her wardrobe master Servais de Condé only a month after she reached it herself.²⁶

The queen of Scots had a childish love of fancy dress and dressing-up which she preserved throughout her life. It has already been mentioned that she loved to adopt Scottish national dress in France, and even had herself painted in it, according to Brantôme, although the portrait does not survive. In Scotland, with a romantic love of the Highlands, reminiscent of her descendant and admirer Queen Victoria, Mary adopted the costume of wearing the so-called ‘Highland mantles’ – these were not plaid, but loose cloaks reaching to the ground, and generally embroidered. In this she followed her father, who had had himself made a Highland suit in 1538, including ‘variant coloured’ velvet to be a short Highland coat, and ‘Highland tartan’ to be hose – trews and a belted plaid being the contemporary form of Highland dress rather than the later kilt.* Queen Mary had three cloaks, one white, one blue and one black embroidered in gold.²⁷ In Scotland also, Mary loved to adopt male costume, and wander about the streets, enjoying the sort of romantic incognito among her subjects which has always been considered the perquisite of adventurous royalties. With her height and long legs, she must have made an engaging picture, and would surely have earned the admiration of Brantôme, who wrote that only a lady of perfect beauty with perfect legs should attempt such a disguise, in order that no man should be able to tell ‘to which sex she really belonged, whether she was a handsome boy or the beautiful woman she was in reality’.²⁸ At one banquet given to the French ambassador, the queen appeared with her Maries, all dressed as men; riding against the rebels in 1565, she dressed up as a man to ride at the head of her army, the cynosure of every loyal eye. On Easter Monday 1565, Mary and her women dressed themselves up like burgesses’ wives, in Stirling, and ran up and down the streets, according to Randolph, gathering money for the banquets; later they all banqueted where Randolph himself was lodging, to the wonder of the common spectators.²⁹ Three weeks before she married Darnley, they both sauntered about the streets of Edinburgh in disguise until supper-time, and did the same thing again the next day, causing a certain amount of gossip.

In all these pranks and escapades, of the type in which royalty have always indulged to escape the gilded bird-cage of their existence, it is unnecessary to discern more than natural high spirits and youthful love of pleasure. Certainly there were no sexual scandals surrounding the sovereign, as there had been in the time of Mary’s father, and in so many monarchs before and since. Mary, who throughout her first years in Scotland was an unattached and beautiful girl, with no restraints except those of prudence to hold her back from the wildest excesses had she wished to indulge in them, was as clearly sans reproche in her court life as she was sans peur in the hunting field. The only scandal to be seen was the scandal, in the eyes of Knox at least, of the spectacle of human enjoyment. Mary conducted herself in a thoroughly innocent, somewhat hoydenish fashion, somewhat like the Shakespearian heroines whom she so much resembles – like Rosalind, rejoicing in her boy’s attire in the Forest of Arden, but fainting at the sight of Orlando’s blood on a handkerchief. Certainly, like Rosalind, although caparisoned like a man, she did not have a doublet and hose in her disposition, but retained all her female impulsiveness.

Mary Stuart’s simple sense of fun, what Randolph called her ‘merry mood’, fitted in well with the boisterous sense of humour of her Scottish subjects at this time, although this was certainly more bawdy in its most outspoken manifestations. The sixteenth-century Scots did not necessarily see the reformation of their religion as leading to the end of those hearty, crude, bucolic games and sports which they had long enjoyed; they loved the favourite May game of Robin Hood, with its Abbot of Unreason and its Queen of the May. When these games were forbidden by the magistrates in May 1561, for the disturbance they caused, the ban caused public riots, and Robin and his men patrolled the streets all the same in defiance. One of Robin’s companions was arrested, condemned to death and carried to the gibbet, until he was rescued on the verge of the hanging by his fellow-rioters. The people who enjoyed this sort of entertainment naturally loved the pageantry brought to the country by Mary and her court. On Sunday 30th November, a few months after Mary’s arrival, her uncle Elboeuf and her half-brothers Robert and John Stewart took part in ‘running at the ring’, two teams of six, one disguised as women and the other as strangers in fancy dress. Elboeuf did well but the ‘women’, led by Lord Robert, won; the queen watched it all with great enjoyment. A week later, on Saturday 5th December, the anniversary of Francis’s death was marked by the solemn presentation of a huge wax candle draped in black velvet; the next day, possibly because it was two days off Mary’s own nineteenth birthday, there was ‘mirth and pastimes’ upon the seashore at Leith, a romantic, if chilly, prospect upon the winter sands, at which the queen was present.³⁰ Court life was enlivened by numbers of paid jesters, often female. One, known as ‘La Jardinière’, had her own keeper or gouvernante, Jacqueline; La Jardinière was given a green plaiding coat, handkerchiefs, and linen for underclothing. Another favourite of the queen, Jane Colquhoun, received a red and yellow coat in 1566. A special canvas bed was made for another of Mary’s female fools, Nichola, ‘La Folle’, whom she brought from France, and who stayed with the queen until her imprisonment in England, when Lennox paid generously for the ‘fool’s’ return to her native land.³¹

Among the special features of the social life of the time were the weddings of the nobility, which were nearly always the occasion for banquets and masques. Mary seems to have had a wistful love of weddings, and loved to give not only feasts but also bridal dresses to her favourites. Two significant weddings took place in her first year in Scotland. In January 1562 Lady Janet Hepburn, Bothwell’s sister, married Mary’s half-brother, Lord John, at Bothwell’s own castle of Crichton; both Queen Mary and Lord James came to the castle, with Bothwell acting as host, and the English ambassador was duly impressed by the sports and pastimes which were indulged in. Four weeks later Lord James’s own nuptials to Lady Agnes Keith were celebrated in Edinburgh with great splendour. He was created earl of Mar the day before the marriage, which was held in St Giles Cathedral, with Knox preaching the sermon. A long train of nobles witnessed the rites and then went to Holyrood, for the first instalment of three days’ banqueting – on which Knox commented sourly that ‘the vanity used thereat offended many godly’.³²

The series of masques included that held after the wedding of Argyll’s sister at Castle Campbell in midwinter 1563, at which shepherds appeared wearing white damask and playing sweetly upon the lute. Perhaps the most splendid of all the banquets was that which Mary herself gave at Shrovetide in 1564 when she was just recovering from an illness. It was reported by Randolph that no Scotsman had ever seen anything like it except at the marriage of a prince: it lasted for three days and all the attendants, as well as the queen herself, her ladies and her gentlemen, wore classical black and white. Randolph himself echoed the prevailing mood of carefree enjoyment when he told Cecil that until the arrival of the French ambassador, du Croc, in May 1563, who brought in the sterner atmosphere of outside affairs, all those at the Scottish court ‘did nothing but pass our time in feasts, banqueting, masking and running at the ring and such like’.³³

Through all this tapestry of court life ran the bright threads represented by the four Maries. Knox, ever eager to repeat scandals about the court if he could learn them, concentrated much of his attention on the Maries and the queen’s women in general, presumably because scandal about them could be held to smear the queen. For example, he repeated one actual case which had come to public knowledge at the beginning of Mary’s rule; of a ‘heinous murder’ committed in the court – ‘yea, not far from the Queen’s own lap’. A French woman who had served in the queen’s chamber was said to have ‘played the whore’ with the queen’s apothecary and in the course of the liaison unwisely conceived a child. Father and mother then conspired together to murder the infant: ‘Yet,’ to continue Knox’s account of it all, ‘were the cries of the newborn bairn heard; search was made, the child and mother both deprehended, and so were both the man and the woman damned to be hanged upon the public street of Edinburgh.’ But Knox did not mention what Randolph reported, that it was the queen herself, with her profound disgust of immorality in sexual matters, who insisted on the death sentence being carried out. Instead he went on to add that it had been well known that ‘shame’ hastened the marriage between John Semple, called the Dancer, and Mary Livingston, surnamed the Lusty. Having delivered this Parthian shot, he still could not resist saying it was well known what shocking reputations the Maries and the rest of the dancers at the court enjoyed: ‘The ballads of the age did witness, which we for modesty’s sake omit.’*³⁴

But pace Knox, the four Maries had in truth simple natures: like their mistress they were easily pleased by court festivities and enjoyments, and their reputations certainly did not deserve to be besmirched by his slurs. Their faults, if any, sprang from the natural light-heartedness and frivolity of youth, rather than anything more vicious. Mary Livingston owed her nickname of the Lusty to her energetic habit of dancing rather than to any raging physical appetites: there is no other contemporary evidence other than the venomous suggestion of Knox that her marriage was hastened by pregnancy, and her eldest child was indeed born a year after her marriage. Mary Livingston was considered reliable enough to be given special charge of the queen’s jewels, and her nuptials in fact at her family home at Falkirk seem to have been the occasion for special and long-planned rejoicings, which do not accord with the notion of a shameful union. The truth was that Mary Livingston was a girl of high spirits and exceptional vivacity, two qualities which were scarcely likely to commend her to Knox.

Although the first to marry, Mary Livingston was not the belle of the quartet: this honour was always accorded to Mary Fleming. Originally it was her royal blood which set her apart from the other Maries: later, as her beauty bloomed, her remarkable combination of looks and vitality made her, in the opinion of Leslie, ‘the flower of the flock’. At the Twelfth Night festivities of 1564 Mary Fleming, dressed as Queen of the Bean in cloth of silver, her neck, shoulders and what seemed like the whole of her body set with jewels, so dazzled the gaze of Thomas Randolph that, although Mary Beaton was his acknowledged favourite among the four, he expressed the opinion that ‘the fair Fleming’ was surely chosen by Fortune to be a queen, and not for Twelfth Night only: assuming the mantle of Paris, he compared her in lyrical terms to Venus in beauty, Minerva in wit and Juno in worldly wealth – the two former being given her by nature, and the third he assumed to be at her command within the kingdom of Scotland. Buchanan too extolled the praises of this queen-for-the-night in Latin verse, terming her Queen ‘Flaminia’, to whom virtue itself had already supplied a sceptre.³⁶

Mary Beaton seems to have been the most classically beautiful of the four,* but she lacked the flowering fascination of Mary Fleming, which the fair Fleming owed perhaps to her share of Stuart blood. Like Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton’s beauty and worth were praised by Buchanan in verse, but her character was cast in a less flamboyant mould. The meekest of the four, Mary Seton, a daughter of one of the grandest houses in Scotland, was naturally pious and more devoted to the service of her mistress than to the pleasures to be derived at the court, as her subsequent history showed.

Whatever Knox’s feelings about the Maries, and whatever his strictures on masques and similar diversions, we may be sure that Mary’s subjects themselves thoroughly enjoyed such display since it was twenty years since there had been anything in Scotland approaching proper court life. Randolph described what a pretty sight the Maries made as they rode with their mistress to Parliament in 1563 – ‘virgins, maids, Maries, demoiselles of honour, or the Queen’s mignons, call them as you please, your Honour’ wrote the English ambassador;³⁷ the effect was the same: they made a pleasing spectacle. The burgesses’ wives who were reported to find the queen’s dresses too rich were probably nonetheless happy to be able to watch them go by. To the argument that Mary was extravagant, it may be answered that she was considerably less extravagant than her cousin Elizabeth in both her dress and her progresses. Not only was Mary used to infinitely more prodigal expenditure at the court of France, but also much of her glamour consisted in her personal charm. In any case, such display on the part of a sovereign was an essential part of personal and monarchical government, as one Elizabethan contemporary observed: ‘in such ceremonies, does the art of good government much consist’.³⁸ The result, as even Buchanan, later to be her harshest critic, admitted, was that this pretty, high-spirited creature, with her hunting, her hawking, her masques, her clothes, her jewels, was able to charm those members of the Scots nation who were there to be charmed. She indeed ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’ in her own particular Forest of Arden. Buchanan himself wrote of this period in her life:³⁹ ‘Apart from the fascination of her varied and perilous history, she was graced with surpassing loveliness of form, the vigour of maturing youth, and fine qualities of mind which a court education had increased or at least made more attractive by a surface gloss of virtue.’

* Arran plays no further part in the story of Mary Queen of Scots. Yet he lived on, unhappy invalid, for nearly half a century, and did not die until 1609, when all the actors in his story were long since dead, and the son of the woman he had once loved with the obstinate passion of an idiot was securely established on the throne of England.

* At this point the finances of the crown had become so critical that the most intimate royal treasures had to be sold, including the gold and crimson coat worn by James v in Paris during his courtship of his first wife Madeleine, the crystal and agate cup which had been made for Queen Madeleine as a child, and the dresses left behind by the summer queen; even the cap sent by Pope Paul III to James v vanished, as did the historic cup from which Robert Bruce used to drink.⁶

† Fiscal business had of course been greatly interrupted by the English wars, with consequent loss of revenue to the crown.

* The libraries of her ancestors had been destroyed at the time of the sack of Holyrood in 1544, so that previous kings cannot be credited with the listed books. On the other hand, the Edinburgh Castle list does include the childhood books of James VI.

†Translated by James Michie.

* Tartan is also not to be understood in the modem sense: it was the name given to a certain material, which in the sixteenth century was not necessarily checkered. During his visit to the Highlands at the beginning of the next century, John Taylor still did not describe tartan more specifically than as a ‘warm stuff of divers colours’.²⁷

* From this anecdote of Knox it used to be deduced, notably by Sir Walter Scott, that the beautiful and melancholy ballad of the Queen’s Maries with its haunting refrain

Last night the Queen had four Maries
Tonight there’ll be but three
There’s Mary Seton and Mary Beaton
And Mary Carmichael and me.

applied to the court of Mary Stuart, despite the fact that the Maries of the ballad were named Mary Beaton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael and ‘me’ (Mary Hamilton) whereas Queen Mary’s last two maids were of course named Mary Fleming and Mary Livingston. The ballad has subsequently been traced to a scandal at the court of Peter the Great in early eighteenth-century Russia, where one of his wife Catherine’s maids of honour of Scottish origin, Mary Hamilton, was executed for the murder of an illegitimate child, after having had a love affair with the Tsar Peter. The ballad, which Child dated between 1719 and 1764, evidently made use of the well-known fact that Queen Mary in the sixteenth century had employed four girls named Mary to serve her, and grafted it on to the tragedy of Mary Hamilton in Russia.³⁵

* There are no contemporary portraits of the four Maries to be seen. One picture once thought to be that of Mary Beaton showing her with fair hair and dark eyes is now thought to date from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.