CHAPTER TWELVE

A Husband for a Girl

‘… The case was different for an heiress to a kingdom, who by the same act took a husband to herself and gave a King to the people. Many were of the opinion that it was more equitable that the people should choose a husband for a girl, than that a girl should choose a King for a whole people.’

Buchanan on the marriage of queens

Mary Stuart was young, beautiful and attractive: she was also a queen, and she could offer an independent kingdom as a dowry to any husband. On the surface, it would seem that it should not have been too difficult for her to find a suitable candidate, since she had none of the psychological problems of an Elizabeth Tudor, and was sufficiently conventionally feminine to long for a male partner on whom to depend. In theory therefore she had a wide choice of possible husbands: but, in practice, so many considerations had to be taken into account, that while the field was not exactly reduced – since many candidates met one or other of the requirements – it was impossible to declare a clear winner, since none of them met them all. This was true if only because many of the requirements were actually contradictory. The only point on which everyone agreed was that the choice was an important one, not in terms of Mary Stuart’s happiness, but because whomever she married would inevitably expect to become king of Scotland – not merely a titular consort in the more modern sense. Francis had always been known as king of Scotland, and had also been granted the crown matrimonial: any future consort might expect to enjoy the former privilege and hope to enjoy the latter. Under the circumstances, Buchanan’s views on the subject of an heiress to a kingdom may be appreciated: by the same act she ‘took a husband to herself and gave a King to the people. Many were of the opinion that it was more equitable that the people should choose a husband for a girl, than that a girl should choose a King for a whole people.’¹ However, Mary had no intention of consulting her people on this subject, which she considered to be essentially a matter of royal prerogative: it was now the subject of anxious consultation between herself and Moray and Maitland, in Scotland, while her French relations the Guises held and acted on views of their own in France.

The first problem was that of religion: was Mary to marry a Catholic like herself, as was generally assumed to be her intention, an Archduke Charles of Austria for example, or even her cousin Henry of Guise? Or would she perhaps attempt the more daring policy of binding together her subjects by wedding someone of their own religion – even the name of the prince of Condé was put forward at one point. Both courses had obvious dangers: a Catholic marriage would inevitably upset the balance she was so carefully maintaining between her private religion and the public religion of her country, by emphasizing that she was very much a Catholic at heart whatever her outward tolerance to the Protestants; a Protestant marriage on the other hand would be difficult to explain to her Catholic relations and allies on the Continent, on whom she still depended.

Apart from the religious question there was the question of status: was she to marry an independent prince with a kingdom of his own, a king of Denmark or Sweden, or even her ex-brother-in-law the twelve-year-old King Charles of France, whose name was mentioned in this connection despite his youth and their previous relationship? Don Carlos, as sole heir to the mighty Spanish dominions of Philip II, also came into this category. Or was she to marry a subject within a kingdom: an Englishman such as her cousin, Henry, Lord Darnley, or even the duke of Norfolk, a Scot – a Hamilton, a Gordon or some other scion of a powerful clan – or a Frenchman such as the duke of Nemours? Once again there were obvious disadvantages to both courses: an independent ruler with a kingdom of his own could not fail to treat Scotland as a satellite, and could scarcely be expected to put Scottish interests above those of his own country; the raising-up of a mere subject to royal rank, on the other hand, would certainly arouse jealousy and dissension among the Scottish nobles, who scarcely allowed their actual sovereign the prerogatives of monarchy, and would certainly view the elevation of one of their own rank most unfavourably. As Archibald Douglas had noted long ago, when the queen was a baby, the ideal thing might seem to be a second son of ‘France, Denmark, or England if such a thing existed … that one of the second sons might thereby be King of Scots, and dwell among them keeping the Estate of Scotland which evermore hath been a realm of itself’.²The trouble with this solution, quite apart from the comparative shortage of second sons among the European royal families at this date – none in England or Spain, and those in France still mere children in 1563 – was that such a candidate might easily combine the disadvantages of both the foreign prince and an inferior subject: his foreign nationality would inevitably involve Scotland in certain alliances and commitments in which her own interests might not be paramount, and his own status might not be sufficiently impressive to cow the Scots.

Among all these imponderables, there was the matter of the views of Queen Elizabeth on the subject. So far, while Mary’s domestic policy had been towards the maintenance of peace and order, and the religious status quo, her foreign policy had been directed towards getting herself recognized as Queen Elizabeth’s successor on the throne of England. In this endeavour, in which so far no real progress had been made, Mary’s putative husband was obviously a trump card: yet once more how was this card to be played? Was Elizabeth to be asked to nominate a husband of her own choice, which Mary would meekly accept in order to show herself satisfactorily pliant to Elizabeth’s wishes, and thus worthy of the recognition which she desired? Or was the prospect of a foreign Catholic husband hostile to England to be held over Elizabeth’s head, to blackmail her into granting the recognition, lest her own problems with her English Catholics should be thus increased? Again there were drawbacks to both courses: if Elizabeth nominated the husband, but still refused to give formal recognition until after the marriage, Mary would have surrendered her advantage, with no certainty of gain; if Mary carried through her threat and married a strong Catholic, then Elizabeth might understandably announce that Mary by her actions had excluded herself forever. Still on the tack of the English royal succession, might it not be more to the point if Mary attempted to bolster up her English claim (still strongly rebutted at this date by the English Parliament, and with the shadow of Henry VIII’s will lying across it) by marrying someone else in whose veins also ran the vital blood which brought them within the English royal family tree. It could be argued that marriage to a Darnley, for example, or even one of Geoffrey Pole’s sons, would reinforce Mary’s own claim by a sort of royal osmosis. But here again, Elizabeth’s attitude to the subject would clearly be vital, for although such a marriage might impress the English Parliament, Elizabeth herself might feel that her actual throne, rather than the succession to it, was being threatened.

In the face of so many unknown or unknowable elements, so many possible avenues of action, each one barred by some sort of obstacle, so many diplomatic negotiations, both secret and open, some merely the reported rumours of ambassadors, others the declared (but not necessarily sincere) intentions of monarchs, the marriage of Mary Stuart took on a very different appearance from the simple matching of a nubile and beautiful young girl with an excellent worldly position to offer her husband. In face of the chaos and tragedy in which these negotiations ended, it is legitimate to question whether there was indeed any happy solution to the marriage problems of Mary Queen of Scots: one may perhaps return to the ‘merry’ wish of Mary and the devout wish of Throckmorton – how much simpler if one of the queens had been a man, so that they could have married each other.* The consort was indeed the perennial problem of the female ruler in this century: it is significant that the one queen who emerged in the eyes of the people as having never made a mistaken match was Queen Elizabeth – who made no match at all, despite negotiations which lasted for three-quarters of her reign.

The first negotiations on the subject which Maitland undertook in the spring of 1563 revealed that Mary’s personal attitude to marriage had not changed since the early days of her widowhood as queen of France: Don Carlos was still the object of her desire, and as it was Spanish prestige – backed up by troops and Spanish money – which made him so desirable, it is evident that Mary saw marriage at this point very much in terms of power politics. Just after the Châtelard incident, Maitland was sent again to London, on the ostensible excuse of offering Mary’s meditation between Queen Elizabeth and the warring French; his instructions also bade him pursue the subject of Mary’s claim to the English throne after Elizabeth, but secretly he was commissioned to reopen the negotiations for a Spanish marriage with de Quadra, Philip II’s ambassador in London, by hinting that the alternative might be a match with the young French king. The mere mention of this prospect was enough to terrify Philip sufficiently to start up discussions of the subject once more – although he did stipulate that the utmost secrecy should be preserved if the negotiations were to have any chance of success. The true attitude of Moray and Maitland towards this Spanish marriage can only be guessed at: it is impossible to be certain whether they actually approved of a Catholic bridegroom for the queen, hoping to be able to rule an independent Protestant Scotland for themselves once more, with Mary safely installed on the throne of Spain as she had once been installed on the throne of France; or whether they were merely attempting to bluff Queen Elizabeth into showing her own hand over Mary’s projected marriage. In any case the Spanish negotiations now went forward once more.

Despite Philip’s plea for secrecy, the news of these discussions began to leak out in France: here they naturally caused the same apprehension in the breast of Catherine de Médicis as the prospect of a French marriage had caused in that of Philip of Spain. The Guisards themselves with the traditional French jealousy of Spain would have infinitely preferred the prospect of the Archduke Charles, brother of the emperor, and Mary’s uncle the cardinal took it upon himself to enter negotiations for his hand, of his own accord, parallel with the Spanish negotiations. But there is no reason to suppose that Mary herself ever seriously considered the archduke – at one point the queen grew quite angry with her uncle for thus embroiling her with definite authority. Archduke Charles had one important defect, in that he was generally thought in Scotland to be too poor to maintain the state of consort, especially for a queen who was hard put to it to manage her own finances; even if his brother gave him a large allowance, as was suggested, he still would not have the army behind him, which his cousin Don Carlos could command as heir to the Spanish throne.

Naturally the news of these negotiations also came to the ears of Queen Elizabeth herself – Maitland was after all conducting them under her nose in London, and Throckmorton took care to repeat all the gossip from France. Before Maitland returned to Scotland, Elizabeth took the opportunity to inform him that if Mary married either Don Carlos or the Archduke Charles, or indeed any other imperial candidate, she could not avoid becoming her enemy; if on the other hand Mary married to her satisfaction, Elizabeth sweetly added, she would surely be a good friend and sister to her, and in the course of time, make her her heir. This was the crux of the problem: how was Mary to marry to Elizabeth’s satisfaction, if Elizabeth did not express any definite choice? Now, from the autumn of 1563 onwards, Elizabeth began to drop broad hints as to who her personal choice might be. The only trouble was that Elizabeth’s choice of candidate was sufficiently eccentric to arouse serious doubts as to whether it was a genuine suggestion, or whether on the contrary she was merely trying to prevent Mary in the end making any marriage at all.

The husband whom Elizabeth apparently had in mind was her own favourite Lord Robert Dudley. She had first mentioned his name to Maitland in the spring of 1563, when he arrived in London: jokingly, as it seemed to Maitland, she observed that Lord Robert Dudley would make a good husband for the queen of Scots. Maitland could indeed hardly fail to treat the suggestion as a pleasantry since at first sight Dudley had absolutely no obvious advantages as a husband, and a great many obvious disadvantages. His stock, far from being royal, was actually tainted by treason, his father the duke of Northumberland having been beheaded, and the title put under attainder; he himself was generally considered to be Queen Elizabeth’s paramour, and whatever the truth of their relationship, her familiarity with him had certainly caused scandal throughout Europe, and continued to do so; thirdly, his first wife Amy Robsart had died under the most suspicious circumstances, which, it was generally believed, left him free to marry Queen Elizabeth, if she would have him, and the country would accept it. Now Maitland was asked to consider this controversial figure as a husband for his own mistress, a born queen, the widow of another king, and herself highly conscious of her own position, as well as being the bearer of an unblemished character. Maitland showed himself at his diplomatic best when he answered Queen Elizabeth that it was a great proof of the love she bore to the Scottish queen ‘as she was willing to give her a thing so dearly prized by herself’, but that Queen Mary would hardly wish to deprive Queen Elizabeth of the joy and solace of Lord Robert’s companionship. In a further vein of witty invention, he suggested that Elizabeth herself should marry Dudley, and then bequeath both her husband and her kingdom to Mary when she died.³

In September 1563, the Scots had perforce to take the suggestion more seriously: Randolph was instructed to approach Queen Mary, newly arrived at the castle of Craigmillar near Edinburgh, after a western progress, and hint broadly at Queen Elizabeth’s own wishes on the subject of Mary’s marriage; he was to indicate a husband, the English queen added in her own hand to the instructions, ‘perchance as she would hardly think we would agree to’.⁴ Randolph of course mentioned no actual name of an English noble, but he did confirm to Mary that the continuance of friendship with Elizabeth was impossible if she married into either imperial family. In November Randolph was given further instructions on the subject – but still he did not officially name Lord Robert Dudley, contenting himself with pouring cold water on ‘the children of France, Spain or Austria’, and telling Mary that her late husband, the king of France, had been a perfect example of whom not to marry.⁵ Mary replied that she could only give a vague answer to such vague propositions; she needed after all to know the names of suitable bridegrooms, not unsuitable ones. It was not until the end of March 1564 that Randolph was authorized officially to offer Lord Robert Dudley, as most suitable among the English nobles, a year after Elizabeth’s first hint to Maitland. Mary’s outward reaction was meek: she listened graciously once more, and suggested as she had done previously in the autumn that a conference should be held at Berwick between English and Scots. Inwardly, however, she can hardly have regarded the notorious Lord Robert as an acceptable husband – she who still longed for the heir of the Spanish empire – unless of course he brought with him a definite recognition of her title to succeed Elizabeth as a dowry.

While Mary pursued a Catholic marriage abroad, her policy at home continued to favour the reformed religion as it had done ever since her arrival. She herself certainly felt that she had absolutely no choice in the matter. At an interview with the papal nuncio Gouda in the summer of 1562, Mary told him that she could not even promise him a safe conduct while he was in Scotland, and advised him to stay indoors as much as possible and not attempt to deliver the Pope’s briefs – unless he wished to die violently. She herself, explained Mary patiently, would be quite powerless to help him if anything untoward occurred. Nor did Gouda feel that Mary’s apprehensions were unjustified: she made an excellent personal impression on him, and he accepted her word that she intended privately to live and die a Catholic, whatever the ways of her kingdom. Mary also refused quite flatly to consider sending Scottish priests to the Council of Trent: once again she protested her personal devotion to the Catholic cause, but said that the dispatching of a Scottish deputation would be quite out of the question under the present circumstances. Equally, when a college for training Catholic priests was suggested to her, Mary dismissed it in on word as ‘impracticable’.⁶ The truth was that Mary, from the vantage point of Scotland, could perceive realities about the religious situation there not readily understandable by the distant papacy or even by her uncle in France, the cardinal. Her continual aim in her letters abroad was to explain this dichotomy she was obliged to practise in order to preserve the peace – devotion to Catholicism in private, tolerance towards Protestantism in public. But, of course, it was a dichotomy which it was not easy to convey in letter to those who had never visited the country.

In 1563, Parliament, with the queen’s agreement, provided that Protestant ministers should have the use of manses and glebes and that churches should be repaired. Symbolical of Mary’s desire to preserve religious amity and peace in her country (at the expense of those zealous Catholics who still hoped she would fight for their cause) was her renewed attempt to win the friendship or at least the approval of John Knox. In the middle of April 1563 the queen was staying on the island of Lochleven with Moray’s mother Lady Margaret Douglas and his half-brother, Sir William Douglas. Here, in this ill-omened fortress which was to play such a significant part in her future story, she sent for Knox. Together queen and reformer took part in a long and fairly friendly dispute in the great hall of the castle. Mary asked Knox to abate the persecution of the Catholics, especially in the western regions of Scotland, where it was fierce, and Knox in return asked her to administer the laws of her kingdom, which had made Catholicism illegal. The next morning, as she was hawking near Kinross, the queen sent for Knox again, and among other topics she raised were the fearful quarrels between the earl of Argyll and his wife – Mary’s beloved but wayward half-sister, Jean Stewart, who was, as the queen herself admitted, ‘not so circumspect in all things as that she wished her to be’, and much preferred the delights of Holyrood life to a quieter existence in the west of Scotland with her husband. Now Mary attempted to charm Knox by asking him to mediate in this domestic dispute, which was becoming a scandal of court life: and although Knox said later that the whole conversation showed how deeply Mary Stuart was able to dissemble, in fact he did write a stern letter to Argyll on his matrimonial problems.*⁷

The news of Mary’s Spanish negotiations, however, provoked a sterner reaction from Knox. A Catholic match was the very last thing he could be expected to countenance and he thundered forth from the pulpit on the subject in Edinburgh, in front of a large congregaton of the nobility, assembled in the city for Parliament, despite Maitland’s somewhat disingenuous assertion that ‘such thing never entered in her (the Queen’s) heart’. The public rebuke was too much for Mary. She sent for Knox to come to Holyrood and in ‘vehement fume’ exclaimed that no prince had ever been so treated – had she not borne with him more patiently than any other ruler ‘in all your rigorous manner of speaking both against my self and my uncles; yea,’ she continued indignantly, ‘I have sought your favours by all possible means. I offered unto you presence and audience whensoever it pleased you to admonish me; and yet I cannot be quit of you.’ She added in a voice choked with ‘howling’, in Knox’s immortal trenchant phrase, and tears (so many tears that the chamber boy, Knox says, could scarcely find enough napkins to mop them up) that she would be revenged upon him.⁸

Knox tried to justify himself by saying that it was his duty to speak plainly but Mary burst out again and again: ‘What have you to do with my marriage?’ and finally in a surge of irritation: ‘What are you within this commonwealth?’ which gave Knox the opportunity for the crushing reply: ‘A subject born within the same, madam.’ He proceeded to speak again at length on the horrors of a Catholic marriage, which only brought forth further floods of angry tears from the queen. Erskine of Dun tried to calm her by tactfully praising her beauty and charms and suggesting that any prince in Europe would be glad to marry her, but Mary was not to be smoothed with fair words; furiously she requested Knox to leave her presence, regardless of the fact that he solemnly assured her how much he disliked tears, since even the tears of corrected children wounded him. Knox departed, characteristically taking the opportunity on his way out to point out to the maids of honour in attendance that their ‘gay gear’ would little avail them at the impending coming of the Knave Death.

That summer the queen made her progresses in west and south-west Scotland, visting the local castles, seeing and being seen by her subjects and last but not least enjoying the pleasures of the chase. The court made ready their ‘highland apparel’ for the tour and the English ambassador Randolph, not to be outdone, fitted himself out ‘in outer shape … like unto the rest’.⁹ In July, Mary was actually guest of the earl of Argyll, the warring husband of Jean Stewart, at Inveraray; in August she toured the south-west, staying first with Lord Eglinton, on to Dunure Castle at St Mary’s Isle by mid-August, then to Dumfries and so to Drumlanrig; by 27th August she was at Peebles. As the queen hunted and harmlessly enjoyed the sight of some of the most beautiful scenery of her dominions, back in Edinburgh Knox was enraged to hear that she was having the Mass said constantly on her route. Nothing daunted by the interview in the spring, Knox took the opportunity to preach energetically against Mary once more: ‘Deliver us, O Lord, from idolatry.’ Such defiance could not pass forever unchecked. But as the year wore on, Knox dared to go even further. Two militant Protestants forced their way into the chapel royal in Mary’s absence and broke up the Mass of her household. They were arrested but Knox took the line that their trial should be an occasion when the congregation showed its solidarity in favour of the accused, in order to protect them from condemnation. To this effect, he wrote round Scotland, urging the members of the congregation to attend the trial. It was a flagrant insult to the authorities and to the queen. As a result, in December, Knox was summoned before the Council on a charge of treason. He arrived with an enormous following, and when the queen saw him sitting there bareheaded at the end of the table, she burst out laughing, and in an access of high spirits, her angry tears dismissed but not apparently forgotten, she exclaimed in her broad Scots: ‘Yon man gart me greit (make me weep) and grat never tear himself. I will see if I can gar him greit.’ However, although Knox admitted having written the offending letter, the Council voted that he had not committed treason; so far from being made to weep by Mary, the following spring Knox merely succeeded in angering her further – and pleasing himself. As the burgesses of Edinburgh gossiped, the fifty-year-old reformer married, as his second wife, the seventeen-year-old Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and as such one of Mary’s own kin – ‘of her own blood and name’.¹⁰

It was hardly surprising that throughout the autumn of 1563 the courtiers noted that the poor queen frequently succumbed to fits of weeping and depression, alternating with bursts of merriment. Her French physician attempted to cure her by putting her on a diet. But the death of her uncle, the slow progress of her marriage plans, her own loneliness, to say nothing of the loquacious hostility of the uncharmable Knox, were all enough to produce a pattern of nervous ill-health. In December she took to her bed with an unidentified pain in her right side – which was to recur for the rest of her life; Randolph suggested that her collapse might have been due to exhaustion after dancing too long on her twenty-first birthday, and she herself put it down to praying too long in an icy chapel after Mass, in a bitterly cold winter.¹¹ By mid-January she had recovered. The whole attack may well have been exacerbated by Mary’s tension at the lack of conclusion over her marriage plans.

Although Elizabeth’s nomination of Lord Robert had come to Mary’s attention in spring 1564, she continued to hope rather for success in the direction of Spain until August: then Philip II, changing his mind once more on the subject, and having procrastinated once again for nearly eighteen months, indicated to his ambassador that the negotiations were once more closed (a decision in which the growing insanity of his son must have played some part). Even so, in the autumn of 1564 Mary dispatched James Melville to London, with the vain hope of revivifying the plan of the Spanish match: in fact Melville’s main occupation was to charm Queen Elizabeth with his courtly manners and enjoy in return a prolonged display of her accomplishments, in order that he should thus estimate her more highly than her rival queen of Scots. Melville was, however, also called upon to witness a significant rite by which Dudley was created earl of Leicester and baron of Denbigh, which honours were specifically intended to fit him to wed Queen Mary, although one unrehearsed detail of the rite – by which Elizabeth tickled her favourite’s neck in the midst of the ceremony – may have been considered by Melville to have had the opposite effect.¹²

Nevertheless the Dudley negotiations still wound on, and in November 1564 a conference was finally held at Berwick on the subject between Moray and Maitland on one side, and Randolph and Bedford on the other, without, however, anything definite being promised by the English with regard to the recognition of Mary’s title in return for the Leicester marriage. As the Scots naturally regarded this recognition as the vital quid pro quo for a match which they had no other reason to desire, by December, as Randolph reported to Cecil, they were beginning to clamour for some sort of frankness on the subject from the English. But in reply Cecil was far from frank; on the contrary, he took refuge in phrases of much obscurity more suitable for an oracle than a statesman: let their negotiations, so full of promise, not ‘be converted to a matter of bargain or purchase’ he wrote, since the English crown ‘if it be sort for, may sooner be lost than got, and not being craved, may be as soon offered as reason can require’.¹³

This sort of riddle was all very well, but it was now nearly two years since Mary had started her second serious round of marriage negotiations, and still the English party were taking refuge in saws and sayings and making no definite commitment. In short, Mary was no nearer getting either a husband or the succession to the English throne, although she had been a childless widow over four years, as a result of which there was still no direct heir to the Scottish throne closer than the Hamiltons. Under the circumstances, the impatience of the Scottish party who wrote to Cecil of his ‘many obscure words and dark sentences’ is understandable; Maitland and Moray pointed out to him quite plainly that if Elizabeth would not establish ‘the succession of her crown’ it would be quite impossible for them to induce Mary to marry an Englishman, and she would then make her own choice.¹⁴ Yet still no promise came. Not only that, but the next emanation from England – the appearance of young Lord Darnley himself, mysteriously granted permission to travel to Scotland in early February 1565 – cast serious doubts over the whole straight-forwardness of the English point of view.

It was an interesting enigma why Darnley, young, eligible and handsome, with the royal blood of England and Scotland in his veins, should be suddenly allowed to return to Scotland at this very moment, by permission of Queen Elizabeth. The name of Darnley had always played a minor part in any discussion of Mary’s possible suitors because of his position in both the Tudor and Stuart family tree, and because he was roughly the right age to be Mary’s bridegroom. The match had certainly always been in the mind of Darnley’s ambitious striving mother Margaret, countess of Lennox, and it was not for nothing that she had sent him hotfoot to France to condole with Mary on the death of Francis.* In September 1564 the earl of Lennox, who had long been banished from Scotland for trying to capture Dumbarton Castle in 1544 with English troops, was allowed to return to Scotland ostensibly to look to his estates. None other than Queen Elizabeth herself pleaded with Queen Mary to receive him. According to Melville, Elizabeth’s motive in thus smoothing Lennox’s way was quite definitely to promote the Darnley marriage: Elizabeth told Melville Darnley was one of the two that she had in her head to offer unto the queen, as born within the realm of England.¹⁶ In the course of the ceremony by which Leicester was invested with his titles, Elizabeth also teased Melville that he would prefer to see Darnley, who was standing by, as a husband for his queen rather than Leicester. The presence of her husband in the rival camp did not dim the ardour of Margaret Lennox in forwarding the claims of her son: the Lennox Jewel, for example, once thought to commemorate Lennox’s death in 1571, is not thought on grounds of style to date from this earlier period, and in any case contains no memorial details of Lennox’s life, such as might be expected in a commemorative piece. Margaret Lennox certainly took advantage of the return of Melville to Scotland to send jewels to her husband in 1564: she may have taken the opportunity to create an elaborately emblematic objet d’art, whose complicated symbolism would convey messages to her husband on the subject of her matrimonial schemes, too dangerous to commit to paper.* When Mary wrote to Elizabeth in December 1564 asking that Darnley might be allowed to come north to join his father, neither Elizabeth nor her advisers can have been in any doubts that Darnley was now a strongly fancied runner in the Scottish queen’s matrimonial stakes. The Spanish contender had recently vanished from the race, and in view of Elizabeth’s behaviour Leicester was still not a certain starter: the odds on Darnley, who was Catholic, semi-royal, and apparently approved of by Elizabeth, now dramatically shortened.

It was popularly believed at the time by the Scots that Elizabeth herself had launched Darnley, in order to trap Mary into a demeaning marriage, although, as Randolph indicated in his letter of 12th February, it seems to have been Leicester and Cecil who combined together to get the boy his licence to come north.¹⁷ Elizabeth’s part seems to have been a passive one: having an extraordinary inability to make up her mind on matters of emotion, she probably did not know herself whether she desired the marriage of the beloved Leicester and Mary. This inability nearly always turned out fortunately for her, since it allowed others to take the action, and in doing so, it was they who made the mistakes. In this particular case, it is likely that Leicester and Cecil, encouraged by the indecisive passivity of Elizabeth, launched Darnley as a sort of Trojan horse into the Scottish queen’s kingdom. Queen Mary could not fail to be interested in such an obvious candidate for marriage: as Melville put it, she might prefer Darnley ‘being present’ to Leicester ‘who was absent’; and of Leicester and Cecil it was of course Leicester who had a further personal motive to embroil the negotiations – he may well have been anxious not to have them concluded while Elizabeth herself still remained unmarried. Elizabeth later told de Silva that it was Leicester who had refused to consent to the match, and thus wrecked it.¹⁸ The Scots, who were becoming obstreperous in their desire for some sort of concrete result, would become confused between Leicester and Darnley. Mary herself would dither between the two claimants and continue to remain unwed. The English therefore would be able to continue in that policy of masterly inactivity which best suited their own interests over the marriage of the Scottish queen; as for Elizabeth, she could continue to use the unmarried and therefore uncommitted state of Mary as an argument for not recognizing her place in the English succession. This seems to have been the tortuous reasoning of the English at the beginning of February when Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, left London, by specific permission of the English queen.

Darnley was on the borders of Scotland by 10th February, and at Dunbar the next day, whence he went on to Haddington, finally reaching Edinburgh on 13th February. Here he spent three days, in the course of which he was most warmly received by Elizabeth’s envoy Randolph, who lent him his own horses, as Darnley’s had not arrived. Darnley was entertained by Lord Robert Stewart at Holyrood where, according to Randolph, his pleasant social manner made an agreeable impression. Mary was away hunting in Fife. Here on Saturday, 17th February, at the house of the Laird of Wemyss, the first meeting for four years between the ill-starred couple took place. The young man whom Mary saw before her was eminently handsome. Although Melville had assured Queen Elizabeth that he found him almost too effeminate – ‘beardless and lady-faced’ were the words he used – this was more evidence of Melville’s wish to please Elizabeth, than of Darnley’s lack of attraction.¹⁹ The contemporary portraits by Eworth, standing with his younger brother, or painted alone three-quarter length, show that Darnley at the age of eighteen* was nothing if not outwardly good-looking. In these portraits Darnley appears at first sight like a young god, with his golden hair, his perfectly shaped face with its short straight nose, the neat oval chin, and above all the magnificent legs stretching forth endlessly in their black hose. But on closer inspection the god appears to be more Pan than Apollo: there is something faun-like about his pointed ears, the beautiful slanting hazel eyes with their unreadable expression, and even a hint of cruelty in the exquisitely formed mouth with its full rosy lips. It was Darnley’s height which was considered at the time to be his main physical characteristic – had not Elizabeth called him ‘yon long lad’ when she pointed him out to Melville – and he was fortunate in being slender with it, or as Melville put it, ‘long and small, even and straight’. His elegant physique could hardly fail to commend itself to Mary for two reasons. Firstly, beautiful as she was, Mary was nevertheless tall enough to tower over most of her previous companions, including her first husband Francis. The psychological implications of this height can only be guessed at, but Darnley was certainly well over six feet one inch.* Mary for once could feel herself not only overtopped at dancing, but also physically protected by her admirer if she so wished; as a novel sensation it could hardly have failed to be pleasant. Secondly, as Mary was also a woman of strong aesthetic instincts, she would tend to appreciate the effeminate beauty of a Darnley more than the masculine vigour of some of her Scottish nobles.

The handsome youth had been well-trained in all the arts considered suitable for a gentleman – or princeling – of the period; he could ride a horse, hunt, dance gracefully and play the lute extremely well. In this respect he took after his father Mathew, earl of Lennox, who had been one of the most gallant figures at the Scottish court before his English marriage. The aim of his ambitious mother had been to make his courtly ways as winning as his outward appearance. To his internal qualities she had unfortunately paid less regard. It was true that his education was in the impressive mould of royalty at the time of the Renaissance: when he was only eight he was accomplished enough to send a letter to Queen Mary Tudor in which he asked her to accept ‘a little plot of my own penning’ which he termed Utopia Nova. He is traditionally supposed to have translated the works of Valerius Maximus into English. Better attested is the fact that he wrote some pleasant poems, a talent he must have inherited from his mother, herself a poetess;²¹ the subjects Darnley chose for his verses included fittingly enough a long address ‘to the Queen’ on how to treat her subjects, in which he adjured her somewhat priggishly:

Be governor both good and gracious
Be loyal and loving to thy lieges all
Be larger of freedom, and nothing desirous;
Be just to the poor, for any thing may fall …

But whatever the veneer of education lovingly applied to his surface, it had in no sense left Darnley an intellectual. Throughout his short life he showed remarkably little interest in any matters of the mind, and a single-minded concern for the pursuit of pleasure. The truth was that Darnley was thoroughly spoilt: he was the product of a striving mother and a doting father, and even the most rigorous education would probably have left little impact on a personality which from his earliest years had been encouraged to regard himself as the important centre round which the world revolved.

As a character there was very little to commend him despite or more probably because of all the maternal solicitude which had been expended on him – on his first arrival in Scotland Randolph did not want ‘a little cold’ which he was suffering from to get to the ears of Lady Lennox, lest she should be alarmed.²² Apart from being spoilt, he was headstrong and ambitious; but he was ambitious only in so far as his mind could hold any concept for long enough to pursue it, since above all he desired the palm and not the race. It was the outward manifestations of power, the crown, the sceptre and the orb, which appealed to him: the realities of its practice made no appeal to his indolent and pleasure-loving temperament. Vanity was by far the strongest motive which animated him. It was vanity which made him seek out evil companions, such as the profligate Lord Robert Stewart, even from the first moment of his arrival in Edinburgh, and seek solace in the admiration of low company. If the pursuit of pleasure led him inevitably on to fresh excitements, and thus to more vicious enjoyments as simpler pleasures failed, it was his vanity which brought about his quick touchy temper, and his fatally boastful nature; finally, his vanity was the fatal flaw which made Darnley incapable of assessing any person or situation at its true worth, since he could not help relating everything back to his own self-esteem. The kindest judgement made about him was that of the cardinal of Lorraine – ‘un gentil huteaudeau’²³ (a nice young cockerel) – but such lightweight figures had a way of becoming dangerous if they were inserted into serious situations.

None of this was apparent to Mary Queen of Scots at her first meeting with her cousin in Scotland, at Wemyss Castle. She merely saw and admired his charming exterior, which, like a delightful red shiny apple ready for the eating, gave no hint of the maggots which lay inside. Her reaction was instantaneously romantic: she told Melville that ‘he was the properest and best proportioned long man that ever she had seen …’²⁴ Although the long man went on to see his father Lennox who was at Dunkeld with his kinsman Lord Atholl, he was back at the queen’s side on the following Saturday, in order to cross over the queen’s ferry with her towards the south. From now on, he was scarcely allowed to be away from her side. On Monday Darnley listened to Knox preach, dined with Moray and Randolph, and finally at Moray’s instance danced a galliard with Mary – the tall graceful young couple looked so suitable together that at this point Randolph reported, ‘A great number wish them well – others doubt him, and deeply consider what is fit for the state of their country, than, as he is called “a fair jolly young man”.’²⁵ Yet the tide was running very strongly in favour of the fair jolly young man – more especially since in mid-March Randolph was finally instructed to tell Mary that the Leicester marriage would definitely not be exchanged for her succession rights. Mary was deeply depressed by the news, and wept bitter tears: but it had the inevitable effect of focusing her attention still more strongly on Darnley now physically present by her side, as Elizabeth and her advisers must surely have anticipated when they sent the final crushing message.

In the meantime marriage was in the air of Mary’s little Scottish circle. During the previous autumn Mary’s secretary Maitland had begun to court the dazzling Mary Fleming, he being a recently widowed man of forty, and she a girl of twenty-two. Maitland was clearly fascinated by her radiant youth and vitality, although Kirkcaldy scornfully described her as being about as suitable for him ‘as I am to be pope’.²⁶ Maitland’s passion became an open subject for discussion at the court, and in February Maitland confessed to Cecil that his passion brought him at least one ‘merry hour’ out of the four and twenty, whatever the troublesome affairs of the kingdom, even advising Cecil himself to turn to such amorous sport for relaxation since ‘those that be in love, be ever set upon a merry pin’.²⁷ Randolph was scornful over Maitland’s infatuation which he described in withering terms, but Randolph himself, a forty-five-year-old bachelor who observed the gambolling of the Mars with gallant approval, was himself an unsuccessful admirer of Mary Beaton, and his account was probably tinged with jealousy. In the end it was not the acknowledged belle Mary Fleming who was to be the first Marie to wed, but, as we have seen, her energetic agile companion, Mary Livingston, who chose as her bridegroom a younger son of Lord Sempill. The marriage took place on Shrove Tuesday, 6th March, 1565. The queen was not only party to the marriage contract and gave the bride a dowry of £500 a year in land, but also paid for the wedding gown and bridal banquet, as was her custom with her favourite ladies. As the first of the Maries to marry, the wedding of Mary Livingston naturally attracted a great deal of attention, and the French and English ambassadors give many details of the impending ceremonies for two months beforehand (the detailed preparations certainly give the lie to Knox’s suggestion of a hurried ceremony). Randolph described Sempill as ‘a happy Englishman’ for winning the estimable Mary Livingston as a bride. Mary Stuart’s own views on the subject were best expressed by the French ambassador in his report to Catherine de Médicis: ‘She has begun to marry off her Maries, and says that she wished she herself were of the band.’²⁸

Up to this point, however much Mary had enjoyed the company of Darnley, she had not shown any evidence of passion for him: Randolph weighed up the favour she had shown him as proceeding ‘of her own courteous nature’ rather than anything more serious. In March Mary still seems to have regarded Darnley as a suitable candidate for marriage only because of his English and Scottish royal blood and his religion, and not for any more personal reason. But in April the situation dramatically changed. Darnley fell ill – an illness which was to transform his fortune and that of Mary Queen of Scots. The illness itself was of no great moment: it began with a cold, which Darnley attempted to cure by sweating it out, and then turned into measles. The young man was incarcerated in his room in Stirling Castle. It was the situation of his sick-room which was the crucial fact about his illness. Inevitably, within the confines of the enormous fortress, like a private town hanging above the plain of Stirling, the young queen found her way with increasing frequency to the bedside of her handsome young cousin. She began to visit him continually and at all hours, and she even took to staying past midnight. She constituted herself his nurse. When measles was succeeded by an ague, the distracted girl refused to ride forth to Perth until Darnley was recovered, and her care was redoubled. Under the influence of the proximity of the sick-room, and the tenderness brought forth by the care of the weak, the suffering – and the handsome – Mary had fallen violently, recklessly and totally in love.

There can be no doubt that whether Mary herself realized it or not, her feelings for Darnley were overwhelmingly physical. The demanding nature of her passion can easily be explained by pent-up longings which were the result of an inadequate first marriage, which had aroused few physical feelings in her and satisfied none. In the years since Francis’s death she had led a life of celibacy, allowing herself courtly flirtations but nothing more, and had been seemingly horrified at any more crude confrontation with life, such as Châtelard presented to her. Her thoughts about marriage had been concentrated on the power it would bring her, for Don Carlos as a bridegroom could have offered few other consolations, and she had shown little interest in the prospect of that great lover Robert Dudley as a possible husband. Now at one touch of Darnley’s hand, the caution, the concentration on the issue of her marriage in which Elizabeth’s approval was so vital, the discretion and wisdom which all had praised in her during her four years as queen of Scotland – all were swept away in a tide of tumultuous feelings which Mary Stuart can scarcely have known she possessed.

* Confronted with such a problem, it was perhaps regrettable that the solution of the royal family of Egypt was not open to that of Scotland: Dr A. L. Rowse once suggested that if Mary had been able to marry her half-brother Moray, as Cleopatra married Ptolemy, she might have fared much better.

* The earl and his countess were never permanently reconciled despite the good offices of Knox and the queen: they were finally divorced and Argyll married again.

* Dr Strong has pointed out that the double portrait of Darnley and his brother, from which Eworth copied his own picture, is in the unusual medium of tempera painted on linen, which suggests that it was designed for travelling: it may therefore have formed part of the ambitious countess’s plans for bringing her handsome son to the notice of the queen of Scots.¹⁵

* See G. H. Tait, FSA, ‘Historiated Tudor Jewellery’, Antiquaries Journal, 1962.

* Hay Fleming pointed out that there is mystery about the actual date of Darnley’s birth. This is usually given as 7th December, 1545. But Knox’s Continuator states that Darnley was not yet twenty-one at the time of his death (10th February, 1567). In March 1566 he was specifically stated by Mary’s own messenger to the cardinal of Lorraine to be nineteen years old.²⁰ It seems that the earliest date he could have been born to fit with this evidence was 11th February, 1546. If the 7th December birthday is accepted however, Darnley must have been born on 7th December, 1546: he was thus four years younger than Mary, not three.

* His height has been calculated to have been between six foot one and six foot three inches on the evidence of his reputed thigh bone in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. See Skull and Portraits of Henry Stuart Lord Darnley, Karl Pearson, FRCS.