PART THREE
CHAPTER NINETEEN
And I’m the sovereign of Scotland
And mony a traitor there
Yet here I lay in foreign bands
And never-ending care
Robert Burns, Queen Mary’s Lament
On Lochleven Mary had been compared by Maitland to a captive lion; the feelings of the Regent Moray on hearing that his sister had escaped from her prison may be compared to those of Prince John, regent of England, when he learnt that his brother King Richard was on his way home, and ‘the lion was unloosed’. The Regent Moray was sore amazed, said the Diurnal of Occurrents,1 more especially because he happened to be at Glasgow when he learnt the evil news, and by now Mary herself had reached nearby Hamilton from Niddry. The regent’s first instinct was to desert the unhealthy area of western Scotland – where such loyal Marian lords as Herries and Maxwell held sway in the south, and Argyll, now also a Marian, in the north, to say nothing of the menacing prospect of the key fortress of Dumbarton, still firmly held for the queen, to the west beyond Glasgow. But prudence prevailed: the regent decided to stand firm, rather than let the whole west unite for the queen; as it turned out, he was amply repaid for the steadfast nature of his decision.
Supporters were flocking to the queen, as a result of the series of proclamations in which she once more sought her subjects’ allegiance. On 8th May nine earls, nine bishops, eighteen lairds and over 100 lesser supporters declared for her in a joint proclamation. Despite this impressive show of loyalty and strength, Mary was not without her problems. The Hamiltons seized this ripe opportunity of emphasizing their own claims to the succession if both Mary and James disappeared – and their right to act as governors if only Mary did. Another particularly virulent Marian proclamation, thought to be the work of Archbishop Hamilton, referred to Moray as ‘an bastard gotten in shameful adultery’ and Châtelherault as the ‘Queen’s dearest father adoptive … head of the good house of Hamilton’. Although it is unlikely that this proclamation was ever published,2 its tone certainly makes it clear why Mary feared to remain overlong at Hamilton. Having escaped her Lochleven bonds, she did not wish to become the puppet of another Scottish house. She therefore determined to march towards Dumbarton and here on neutral ground try to draw her subjects back to her. Mary was certainly not particularly anxious to fight Moray before she reached Dumbarton, seeing no advantage in confronting him at the head of a Hamilton force when she might in the future be able to face him backed up by a more truly national army. In her desire to be restored to her throne at all costs, Mary was even prepared to treat with Moray; but the regent refused to enter into negotiations.
The Marian party had by now reached impressive proportions – twice as many as that of the regent, said the queen.3 Estimates vary from 6000 royalists to Moray’s 4000 to 5000 and 3000 respectively; but all agreed that Mary’s party had considerable numerical superiority. This preponderance had the fatal effect of encouraging the queen’s army to skirt Glasgow narrowly on their route to Dumbarton, in the hopes of drawing the regent into a fight and thus annihilating him. The Hamiltons had, after all, suffered much at Moray’s hands; his occupation of the regency was a flagrant insult to their ancient position in Scotland: they now saw an excellent opportunity of obliterating their enemy under what seemed to be ideally weighted conditions. As the Marians reached the small village of Langside, the vanguard under Lord Claud Hamilton stormed forward. Moray was established beyond Langside on the Burgh Muir. He appeared to accept their challenge, despite the Marian numerical superiority. But Moray was fortunate in having two experienced and skilful soldiers beside him – Kirkcaldy of Grange and Morton. Morton remained at Moray’s side, in charge of the main battle, while Kirkcaldy rode forward with his hagbutters to harry the royal troops as they entered the narrow main street of Langside.
Under the regent’s attack, the border horsemen under Lord Herries did valiantly, and Hamilton’s men fought their way gallantly forward. But by an evil chance, the main command of the royal army had been given to Argyll, now made ‘Lieutenant of the Kingdom’4 on the grounds that he had supplied by far the largest amount of men. And now the main body of the royal troops under Argyll’s personal command entirely failed to follow up their van. It was said afterwards, to explain his defection, that Argyll had actually fainted, or else had had an exceptionally ill-timed epileptic fit; his enemies pointed out that as he was Moray’s brother-in-law and erstwhile comrade, his failure of generalship might have the less medical and more sinister explanation of pre-arranged treachery. Whatever its origin, the temporary suspension of Argyll’s faculties proved fatal to the cause of Mary Queen of Scots at Langside. As Kirkcaldy’s pikemen fell upon the Hamiltons, they found themselves totally unsupported by Argyll’s men who, leaderless and unable or unwilling to withstand a full charge, broke away from it, and fled back towards their native Highlands. The crossfire of the hagbutters, the depredations of the pikemen, and the failure of Argyll combined to bring about a colossal defeat for the queen in which few members of Moray’s side were killed even by Herries’s gallant charge (although Lords Home and Ochiltree were injured). Over 100 of the queen’s party were slain, mainly Hamiltons, and over 300 were taken prisoner, including the faithful Lord Seton, Sir James Hamilton and many other members of his clan.
The queen watched this gloomy contest from a nearby hill. For once might had been allied with right; but sadly, the combination had worked out to the advantage of neither. Mary’s servant John Beaton told Catherine de Médicis later that Mary had mounted on her own horse, and like another Zenobia ridden into the battle, to encourage her troops to advance; she would have led them to the charge in person, but she found them all quarrelling among themselves, insensible to her eloquence and more inclined to exchange blows with each other than to attack the rebel host.5 Once the battle was clearly decided in favour of Moray, the queen had more pressing problems to deal with than the feuds of her own supporters. She had now to ride, not like Zenobia into battle, but like any fugitive away from the scene of her defeat, and away from the searing sweep of Moray’s men. Dumbarton was the obvious target for her – Dumbarton, from which French help could be introduced into the country, or from which France itself could be reached, if the situation became so desperate that the queen had to flee. But Dumbarton was cut off by hostile Lennox country and Moray’s forces; guided by Lord Herries, the queen decided to flee south instead, into the south-western territories of Scotland which were still extremely Catholic in feeling as well as loyal to Mary, under the feudal sway of two Catholic magnates, Herries and Maxwell.
The journey itself was rough and wild; the conditions of travel were primitive in the extreme. Afterwards the queen seemed to remember so little about this nightmare flight in her account of it to Nau, that his narrative, so free and detailed during the period of her captivity at Lochleven, degenerates into a mere list of headings. Once she was in captivity, perhaps Mary preferred to throw a veil in her own mind over these last Scottish sufferings, which had been a prelude to the long years of English imprisonment. Immediately after the flight, in June 1568, she gave a description of it to her uncle in France: ‘I have endured injuries, calumnies, imprisonment,’ she wrote, ‘famine, cold, heat, flight not knowing whither, 92 miles across the country without stopping or alighting, and then I have had to sleep upon the ground and drink sour milk, and eat oatmeal without bread, and have been three nights like the owls. …’6 Queen Mary fled first to Dumfries, a journey of about sixty miles; by tradition Lord Herries led her down through theunfrequented passes of the Glenkens and along the west bank of the River Ken. They paused to rest at the head of the valley of the Tarff, at a point now named Queen’s hill. The Dee was crossed just beyond the village of Tongland, where her escort destroyed the ancient wooden bridge to avoid pursuit; close by, at Culdoach, Mary received the reviving bowl of sour milk which she mentioned to her uncle.* Having rested at Herries’s own castle of Corrah on the way, the queen finally reached the Maxwell castle of Terregles.
It was here at Terregles that the critical decision was taken to flee further on into England. The decision was made by the queen alone. She herself described dolefully to Archbishop Beaton in Paris how her supporters had cautioned her piteously not to trust Queen Elizabeth, since the English in the past had savagely imprisoned a Scottish sovereign, in the shape of James I , and even her own father had not trusted himself to meet Henry VIII at York. The general view was that she should either stay in Scotland – where Herries guaranteed that she could hold out for at least another forty days – or go to France and hope to rally some support there. In retrospect, either course would seem to have been more sensible than seeking an English refuge. We cannot tell what considerations weighed with Mary Stuart to choose it nevertheless, what dreams of friendship and alliance with Elizabeth still possessed her; yet the siren song of Elizabeth’s friendship, the mirage of the English succession, were still strong enough in this moment of decision to blot out the stable image of the proven friendship of France, where Mary had actually lived for thirteen years, and which could still be so easily sought from a western port of Scotland, the sea-route past Wales and Cornwall which Mary had taken years before as a child. In France Mary had the inalienable estates and incomes of a queen dowager of the country; as a Catholic queen fleeing from a Protestant country, she had every reason to expect the support of her brother-in-law, Charles IX, and Queen Catherine, to say nothing of her Guise relations, of whom the latest scion Henry, duke of Guise, was just rising into a manhood which promised to be as glorious as that of his father Duke Francis. Even if Elizabeth had shown stronger support for Mary against her rebels in the short interval since Carberry Hill than the French king, the patent fact that Mary was a Catholic whereas her insurgents were mainly Protestants meant that the French would always have a vested interest to help the Scottish queen as their co-religionist.
In place of friendly France, Mary Stuart chose to fling herself upon the mercy of unknown England, a land where she had no party, no money, no estates, no relatives except her former mother-in-law, Lady Lennox, who hated her, and Queen Elizabeth herself, whom she had never met personally, and whose permission she had not even obtained to enter the country. As decisions go, it was a brave one, a romantic one even, but under the circumstances it was certainly not a wise one. No human character is static. Different circumstances develop different aspects of the same personality. Perhaps ten months in prison had served to bring out in Mary’s nature that streak either of the romantic or of the gambler, which leads the subject fatally on ever to prefer hope and high adventure to the known quantity, and which Mary Stuart passed on so dramatically to many of her later Stuart descendants. From now on, like all captives, Mary Stuart was to live of necessity far more in the world of dreams than in that of reality. Her confinement in Lochleven seemed to have already begun the process of attrition in her powers of judgement. The queen herself summed up the subject of her fatal decision in a sentence at the end of a letter to Beaton towards the end of her life as sad as any she ever wrote: ‘But I commanded my best friends to permit me to have my own way.…’7
The decision once taken, Herries wrote to Lowther, the deputy governor of Carlisle, asking permission for the Scottish queen to take refuge in England. But Mary did not even wait for the return of the messenger. She was now in borrowed linen, and in clothes and a hood lent by the laird of Lochinvar. The hood was especially necessary because her head was shorn of its beautiful red-gold wealth of hair as a precaution against recognition: one of Nau’s most poignant headings reads: ‘How she caused her head to be shaved.’8 In this disguise she made her way west from Terregles to the abbey of Dundrennan, lying among trees in a secluded valley at the end of winding roads from Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas, which finally led down to the coast. Dundrennan, a twelfth-century Cistercian foundation, was one of the most beautiful abbeys in Scotland, but the queen had little time to admire its beauties or even to listen to the soft roar of the sea a mile away. Her mind was on the future and on England. She sent yet another letter to Elizabeth from Dundrennan – ‘After God, she has now no hope save in Elizabeth. …’9 But having so firmly fixed her earthly hopes on the English queen, Mary seemed to find no point in waiting for an answer to her letter.
On the afternoon of Sunday 16th May she went down to the little port at the mouth of the Abbey Burn from which the monks of Dundrennan used to trade with the continent. From this undistinguished sea shore, she could actually see the coast of England across the Solway Firth. Perhaps the sight encouraged her, for at three o’clock in the afternoon the queen of Scotland embarked in a small fishing boat, with only a tiny party of loyal followers – Lord Herries, Maxwell and Fleming, Lord Claud Hamilton and about sixteen other attendants. In this humble fashion, Mary Stuart, who had been born in such magnificence in the palace of Linlithgow, a princess of Scotland, left her native country in a common fishing boat, never to return.
According to one tradition, during the four-hour journey the queen had a sudden premonition of the fate which awaited her in England, and ordered the boatmen to take her after all to France; but the winds and tide were against her, and the boat went remorselessly on towards England.10 Nau mentions no such vacillation: when Queen Mary arrived at the small Cumberland port of Workington at seven in the evening, she seemed as elated as ever by the heady wine of optimism. Queen Mary stumbled as she first set foot on English soil: this omen, which might have been interpreted in a sinister light, was on the contrary taken by her followers as a sign that their queen was coming to take possession of the country. At Workington, the queen rested and was given supper, while Lord Herries sent a message to Sir Henry Curwen of Workington Hall, whom he knew of old, to say that he had with him a young heiress whom he had carried off from Scotland with the hope of marrying her to Sir Henry’s son. The answer to this inviting proposition came back that Sir Henry was in London but that his house and servants were at Lord Herries’s disposal. Already Mary’s surprising and sudden arrival at the small port, combined with her marked height and dramatically beautiful appearance, were leading the inhabitants to guess only too easily that they had the famous Scottish queen in their midst. One of the Curwen servants, who was French, did not even have to guess: he recognized Queen Mary immediately and told Lord Fleming that he had seen her majesty before ‘in better days’.
The next morning the deputy governor, Lowther, already warned by Herries’s letter, arrived with a force of 400 horsemen. In the absence of the governor, Lord Scrope, who was at that moment in London, he planned to conduct the queen back to Carlisle. Queen Mary told Lowther calmly that she had come to England to solicit the assistance of the queen of England against her rebellious subjects. She had already in her brief space of freedom in Scotland sent John Beaton to Elizabeth in London with the famous diamond to which Mary attached such importance; she had written to Elizabeth from Dundrennan; now Mary wrote a third letter from Workington asking for help. The queen was taken to Cockermouth the next day, where she lodged in the home of Master Henry Fletcher, and by 18th May was installed in semi-captivity at Carlisle Castle. On her route she encountered the French ambassador to Scotland, Villeroy de Beaumont, on his way back to France after having had his train plundered by Moray’s followers. The news he gave Mary of the fate of her own supporters in Scotland was discouraging: Mary was confirmed in her gloomy supposition that she would need English aid if she was ever to make her own way back to Scotland.
Lowther had reported that the attire of the Scottish queen was ‘very mean’:11 once more in Mary’s history a hurried escape from danger, in disguise, had left her with nothing in the way of a change of clothes. However, Fletcher, who was a merchant, is said to have presented her with a length of velvet for her wardrobe and a black dress was made for her on credit. Also Lowther, noting that the Scottish queen had so little money with her that it would scarcely cover the costs of clothing she so sadly needed, gallantly ordered her expenses at Cockermouth to be defrayed, and provided geldings of his own accord, to convey the queen and her train to Carlisle. Lowther was evidently genuinely puzzled as to exactly how he should treat this strange bird of rare plumage which had so confidently flown into the English aviary; but he was determined to err if anything on the side of courtesy, not knowing from one minute to the next whether his guest might not be summoned to London and there received with every honour by Queen Elizabeth herself. As a result, at this point Mary’s own confidence in the rightness of her decision was unshaken, and in a letter to the earl of Cassillis dictated from Carlisle on 20th May she described herself as ‘right well received and honourably accompanied and treated’ in England; she expected to be back in Scotland at the head of an army, French if not English, ‘about the fifteenth day of August’.12
Puzzled as Richard Lowther might have been as to how to treat his royal visitor, whether as queen or captive, or a nice combination of both, his bewilderment was as nothing compared to the perturbation of Elizabeth’s advisers in London. Here Queen Mary’s arrival, romantic foolish gesture as it might be, had caused a flutter from which the English court would take time to recover. After all, how was Queen Elizabeth to treat the royal fugitive? She had not captured Queen Mary, nor sought to do so. Mary had arrived of her own free will, expressly seeking English assistance, as her own letters immediately before and after her arrival testified. It is a point worth emphasizing, since it was to be raised by Mary again and again during the years as an English prisoner, last of all, with pardonable bitterness, at her own trial in England. Yet Queen Mary’s request to be restored to her own throne posed Elizabeth a whole series of problems which she could hardly ignore. It was unthinkable in fact for the Protestant English queen to take arms against Scotland on behalf of her Catholic cousin; on the other hand if Elizabeth did not do so, there was nothing to stop Mary making the same request of the French, who might seize with enthusiasm upon this new opportunity for entry on to the British mainland. Therefore, to allow Mary to pass freely through England to France was hardly good politics from the English point of view.
Was the Scottish queen to be received at the English court, and permitted to enjoy full liberty in England? The Venetian ambassador in Paris sanguinely reported that a palace was being specially prepared for Mary in London, with great pomp;13 but this was an equally obnoxious prospect from the angle of English statecraft. Mary Stuart at liberty might prove an unpleasant focus for the loyalties of the English Catholics. Mary herself might have forgotten that ten years before as dauphiness of France she had claimed to be rightful queen of England, rather than heiress-presumptive to the throne. But Elizabeth’s principal adviser, Cecil, had not forgotten her pretensions, and there was no guarantee that the English Catholics had either. Mary at this point knew nothing at first hand of the remarkable character of these people: their obstinacy, their heroism, their fineness of spirit which made them, paradoxically, for all their attitude to the new official religion of the country, among the most admirable of the Elizabethans. But to the prudent Cecil, the possible reactions of the English Catholics to Mary had to be taken into account.
Taken all in all, the most politic course from the English point of view was to temporize, until sufficient assessment had been made of the interior situation of Scotland. In the long run, Elizabeth felt, it would probably be wisest to dispatch Mary back to her difficult subjects, rather than let her loose in either England or France, and furthermore there was that other consideration that subjects should not be encouraged to rebel against queens. But of course there was no question of restoring Mary by the force of an English army; the terms on which the Scots would accept Mary back would have to be discovered by cautious inquiries – and, if possible, negotiated to Elizabeth’s own advantage. In the meantime it would be best to keep Mary in the north not exactly a prisoner, but not exactly free, not exactly debarred for ever from Elizabeth’s presence, but certainly not welcomed into it.* The only course which was emphatically to be debarred to Mary was that of seeking French help: as Elizabeth’s instructions of 18th May stated, Mary was to be told plainly that as Elizabeth intended to assist her herself, any attempt on the Scottish queen’s part to bring in the French as well would be regarded as merely renewing old quarrels.14 Fortunately Mary had not arrived in England with an unbesmirched reputation: there was that unresolved matter of Darnley’s death, and the scandal she had caused by marrying the chief suspect. The cloud of old scandal round Mary’s head now provided a convenient excuse for putting her off from Elizabeth’s presence, until she should have been cleared of all guilt. And in such a work of arbitration, who would be more suitable to act as judge between Mary’s cause and that of her nobles than the English queen herself?
Queen Elizabeth’s next move was to send her trusted counsellor, Sir Francis Knollys, north to treat with her guest-captive along these delicate lines. Knollys was the husband of Catherine Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s sister, who was Elizabeth’s first cousin through the Boleyns, as well as being her intimate friend. The Knollys had an enormous family, to whom Sir Francis was a punctilious father. He was now about fifty-five, a man of the highest honour, and a leading Puritan, who had fled to Germany during the reign of Mary Tudor. Despite their religious differences, Mary made an immediately favourable impression upon this experienced courtier. He discovered in her a woman of innate intelligence, blessed with an eloquent tongue and full of practical good sense; to these qualities, she also joined considerable personal courage. A little later, when he felt he knew her better, Knollys ventured on a further and even more favourable character sketch of the Scottish queen:15 to begin with she was a ‘notable woman’ because she had no care for ceremonies beyond the acknowledgement of her royal estate (possibly a sly dig at Queen Elizabeth); then she spoke freely to everyone, whatever their rank, and ‘showeth a disposition to speak much and to be bold and to be pleasant to be very familiar’. Furthermore not only was she brave herself, but she was also delighted by valour in others, ‘commending by name all approved hardy men of her country, although they be her enemies, and she concealeth no cowardice even in her friends’. In short, ‘For victory’s sake pain and peril seem pleasant to her and in respect of victory, wealth and all other things seem to her contemptible and vile’. Knollys metaphorically scratched his head as he concluded by wondering what on earth was to be done with such a spirited creature. Was ‘such a lady and princess’ to be nourished in the English bosom? He questioned his correspondents in London whether it was indeed ‘wise to dissemble with such a lady’.
The answer came back from the south that it was indeed wise to dissemble, since it was for the moment the most politically advantageous course open to the English. Knollys was therefore instructed to tell Queen Mary that she could not be received at the English court until she had been purged of the stain of her husband’s murder, and this purgation could only be achieved if she submitted herself to the judgement of Elizabeth. Tears flowed from Mary’s eyes at the news; in a passion of rage at the injustice, she pointed out that both Maitland and Morton had assented to the murder of Darnley ‘as it could well be proved, although now they would seem to persecute the same’.16 Knollys himself was impressed by her arguments: he wrote to Elizabeth that as Mary had easily convinced those around her in the north of her innocence, it might be better for Elizabeth’s honour to offer her the choice of remaining in England (to be cleared by Elizabeth of complicity in the crime) or returning once more to Scotland of her own volition. The worst that could happen, thought Knollys, was that Mary would decide to go to France, and in any case Moray would probably put a stop to that from Scotland. But in London Queen Elizabeth found it wiser to concentrate on Mary’s honour than on her own – and this honour, she persisted in pointing out, had been too besmirched for her cousin to be released before the formality of an English investigation. Mary and Knollys were left together at Carlisle, with Knollys under orders to get his captive to agree to submit herself to this process.
On 30th May they argued on the subject of Mary’s deposition; when Mary inveighed against Moray for his behaviour, Knollys maintained that if princes could be deposed for being mad so they could also for common murdering. Both crimes were the result of evil humours, he continued, with characteristic sixteenth-century preoccupation with the subject, one coming from melancholy (madness) and the other from choler (murder). Poor Mary wept and tried to excuse herself. But Knollys only seized the opportunity to press her further and say that she should now allow herself to be tried by Elizabeth, and thus officially purged of her crimes.17
Mary’s state within Carlisle Castle was on Knollys’s own admission far from luxurious. Her chief lack was of waiting-women: she who had been surrounded all her life by ladies of the highest rank to attend her now had only two or three to help her, and they were ‘not of the finest sort’. Her gentlemen included the romantic-minded George Douglas who had followed the queen into exile: he was one of the three or four allowed to sleep within the precincts of the castle, the rest of the gentlemen leaving the castle at sunset and sleeping within the town, with the rest of her train, down to cooks and scullions, making a total of between thirty and forty. Another serious lack was of horses – for the queen had of course arrived without any at all, and with her enthusiasm for physical exercise she felt the deprivation keenly. There were heavy iron gratings across Mary’s windows and a series of three ante-chambers packed with soldiers led to her own chamber. Although Mary was able to attend football matches organized by her own retinue on the green – Knollys noted with surprise that there was no foul play – whenever she walked or rode she was attended by a guard of a hundred men, lest George Douglas’s fancy should once again turn to the subject of escape. Her one attempt at hare-hunting was her last: it was thought too risky to let her ride abroad even under the pretext of sport.
The arrival of Mary Seton, the remaining unmarried Marie of happier times, provided a welcome relief, more especially as Mary Seton was an expert hairdresser: Knollys noted with admiration her skill in the art of ‘busking’, as he termed it, excelling anything he had seen previously – ‘among other pretty devices, yesterday and today she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of head dressing, without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well’.18 Such feminine skills were all the more necessary since the queen had chopped off her own hair during the flight from Langside; it never grew again in its old abundance and in any case was frequently cut to guard against persistent headaches; it seems that for the rest of her life Mary was dependent on wigs and false-pieces. Despite Mary Seton’s endeavours, the queen’s clothing remained a problem. Queen Elizabeth, appealed to for some help out of her own copious wardrobe, responded with gifts of such mean quality – some odd pieces of black velvet and old dresses – that the embarrassed Knollys tried to explain them away by saying that they had been intended for Mary’s maids. Moray was scarcely more generous: when he dispatched three coffers of his sister’s clothes from Scotland the queen noted angrily that there was but one taffeta dress amongst them, the rest merely cloaks, and ‘coverage for saddles’ – ironically useless to a captive. She had to send for sartorial reinforcement from Lochleven. In July she did receive from her own chamberlain in Scotland a number of belongings, mainly accessories including gloves, pearl buttons, tights, veils, coifs of black and white, and twelve orillettes or bandages, to place over the ears when asleep, no doubt to cut out from the royal consciousness the heavy tread of the hagbutters in the three rooms outside.19 To Mary these feminine considerations of dress and hair, and even the conditions of her confinement (which shocked Montmorin, the French ambassador), were secondary to her grand design to reach the presence of Queen Elizabeth. From her arrival at Workington towards the end of May until the end of the conference at York and its removal to London, Queen Mary wrote over twenty letters to Queen Elizabeth, most of them extremely long, well thought out, intelligent pieces of pleading, all elaborations on the same theme of Mary’s need for succour to regain her Scottish throne, and her trust in Elizabeth to provide it. Mary even summoned her poetic gifts to her aid: she wrote a poem to her ‘chère soeur’ of which both an Italian and a French version survive, expressing the mingled pleasure and pain which the subject of their meeting produced in her heart, torn as she was between hope and doubt. She likened herself to a ship blown backwards by contrary winds just as it was entering the harbour, the poem ending with a prophetic fear that Fortune might once more turn against her in this as in so many things:
Un seul penser qui me profficte et nuit
Amer et doux change en mon coeur sans cesse
Entre le doubte et l’espoir il m’oppresse
Tant que la paix et le repos me fuit …
J’ay veu la nef relascher par contraincte
En haulte mer, proche d’entrer au port,
Et le serain se convertir en trouble.
Ainsi je suis en souci et en crainte
Non pas de vous, mais quantes foir a tort
Fortune rompt voille et cordage double.*
Other variations on the theme in letters were the evil plight of her supporters in Scotland under Moray’s cruel persecution, and the monstrous nature of her subjects’ rebellion against her, a tendency which surely no sovereign queen would encourage. One of the most poignant of the pleas, on 5th July, expostulated: ‘Alas! Do not as the serpent that stoppeth his hearing, for I am no enchanter but your sister and natural cousin. If Caesar had not disclaimed to hear or heede the complaint of an advertiser [soothsayer] he had not so died. …’ And with still more anguish, on the subject of the personal interview: ‘I am not of the nature of the basilisk and less of the chameleon, to turn you to my likeness.’21 Mary was of course writing not only to Elizabeth, but also to France, to Catherine de Médicis, to Charles ix, to whom she protested that she was suffering for the true religion, the duke of Anjou, and her uncle the cardinal. Some of these letters touched naturally on the vexed subject of money, the perennial preoccupation of exiled royalty: Mary now desperately needed the income of her French estates to provide for herself and her household, having arrived without a penny. But her instructions of 30th May to Lord Fleming, whom she dispatched to London, made it clear that if Elizabeth did not agree to help her, then help was to be sought immediately from France, and that Mary herself in these circumstances would arrange to depart thither as soon as possible.22 Fleming, however, was not allowed to proceed from London to France, and the instructions were never able to be carried out. On 8th June Mary received a visit from Middlemore, Elizabeth’s emissary to Scotland, on his way north. Middlemore handed her a letter in which Elizabeth promised to restore Mary if she consented to have her innocence proved by Elizabeth’s inquiry. Mary wept and stormed. In vain she tried to tempt Middlemore with the notion of the confidences she would make personally to Elizabeth if only she was allowed to meet her. ‘I would and did mean to have uttered such matter unto her as I would have done to no other. … No one can compel me to accuse myself, and yet if I would say anything of myself, I would say of myself to her and to no other.’23 To such beguilements, Elizabeth was deaf.*
In Scotland Middlemore found that Moray and his supporters had quite independently reached the same conclusion as Elizabeth, to which they had been working since the previous winter: Mary’s guilt over Darnley’s death and her subsequent marriage to Bothwell were the points to be stressed if Mary was to be kept where Moray would most like to see her – in an English prison. The difference between Elizabeth and Moray was that Elizabeth at this point intended ultimately to restore Mary to Scotland, and only wished to delay the process; Moray on the other hand had no wish to see Mary back on the throne on any terms whatsoever. To Moray, the viciousness of his sister was no moral issue, it was a question of his own survival as governor of Scotland. Moray was therefore determined to go much further than the English and make the mud already thrown at Mary stick so hard that there could be no question of this besmeared figure returning to reign.
It was significant that Cecil himself, in one of those private memoranda he was so fond of drawing up for his own guidance giving the pros and contras of any given situation, could find Mary’s alleged moral turpitude the only true excuse for keeping her off the Scottish throne, and in an English prison.24 In favour of setting Mary at liberty were the following arguments: that she had come of her own accord to England, trusting in Elizabeth’s frequent promises of assistance; that she herself had been illegally condemned by her subjects, who had imprisoned her and charged her with the murder of Darnley, without ever allowing her to answer for her crimes either personally or through a lawyer in front of Parliament; that she was a queen subject to none, and not bound by law to answer to her subjects; lastly there were her own frequent offers to justify her behaviour personally in front of Queen Elizabeth. It was indeed a hard case to answer; it was certainly not answered by Mary’s opponents at the time, nor has the passage of time and the unrolling of history made it seem any less formidable as an indictment of England’s subsequent behaviour. The case which Cecil put contra Mary’s liberty was entirely based on the assumption that she had been an accessory to the murder of her husband, and gone on both to protect and to marry the chief assassin, Bothwell – apart from a somewhat dubious argument that since Darnley had been constituted king of Scots, and by Mary herself, so he was ‘a public person and her superior’, and therefore her subjects were bound to search out his murderer. This argument ignored the fact that Darnley had never in fact received the crown matrimonial, without which, despite his title of king, he could scarcely claim to be Mary’s equal, let alone her superior.
It was under these circumstances that, shortly after Mary’s flight to England, the first salvos in the new campaign to blacken her reputation once and for all were fired by the men who now occupied the throne from which they had ejected her. The queen’s ‘privy letters’, of which nothing had been heard since the Parliament in the previous December, and which had apparently lain the while untouched in Morton’s keeping, now made a new appearance on the political scene. It was interesting to note that these letters seemed not only to swell in importance, but also actually to grow in number as the campaign mounted in fervour. In England at the end of May, Lennox presented his own supplication to Elizabeth, wildly inaccurate in many details and poisonously accusatory of his former daughter-in-law; it referred to one letter only written by Mary by which she was supposed to have lured Darnley to his death. On 27th May Moray commissioned George Buchanan, Lennox’s feudal vassal, to prepare a Book of Articles to denounce Mary. These articles, to whose inaccuracies reference has already been made in Chapter 15, were originally in Latin, and contained a short reference to Mary’s ‘letters’. But this term did not necessarily imply that there was more than one letter: the Latin word was litterae which was used to denote one letter as well as several, and in sixteenth-century English, also, the term ‘letters’ was always used to describe a solitary letter. The Latin Book of Articles was ready by June. On 21st May, five days after Mary’s flight, Moray dispatched his secretary John Wood to London, gnawingly anxious to prevent Elizabeth showing favour to Mary; Wood’s instructions were to ‘resolve’ Elizabeth’s mind of anything she might ‘stand doubtful to’.25 A little while later, translated copies of an unspecified number of the queen’s writings were sent on to Wood from Scotland; as copies of letters said to have been written originally in French and now translated into Scottish they were, of course, of little value as evidence. But Wood was to show them secretly to the English establishment, in order to hint what big guns Moray might be able to bring against his sister, if only the English would encourage him to do so.
The encouragement which Moray needed was an assurance from Elizabeth that she would not restore Mary to her throne in the event of her being found guilty of the murder. On 22nd June, therefore, Moray dispatched an extraordinary letter to Elizabeth in reply to her request to explain his rebellion; he virtually asked to be assured in advance that the verdict of Elizabeth’s judges would be guilty if Moray was able to produce some of Mary’s own letters, and if he could prove they were genuine. The English were asked to make up their minds on the basis of the translated copies of the letters now in London in order to resolve Moray’s dilemma for him. Moray continued the letter on a note of near indignation at his difficulties: ‘For what purpose shall we either accuse, or take care how to prove, when we are not assured what to prove, or, when we have proved, what shall succeed?’26
Moray’s letter was a remarkable document. It may be thought to show more regard for the principles of statecraft than those of justice; it certainly outlined the problems of Moray and his supporters. For it was of no avail to accuse Mary of murder, and even prove it by fair means or foul, if she was subsequently to be restored to her throne, whatever the English verdict. Her vengeance might then be expected to be fierce upon those who had accused her. At this critical juncture, it seems likely that in response to Moray’s anxious inquiries, Cecil did in fact give some private unwritten assurances to John Wood in London, to pass on to Moray: whatever Elizabeth might say in public, in order to lure the Scottish queen into accepting her arbitration voluntarily, it was not in fact intended to restore Mary to Scotland if she was found to be guilty.27 At all events, Moray received some sort of satisfactory answer to his problems at the end of June, for he now began to endorse the plan of an English ‘trial’ with enthusiasm.
While Mary’s emissary in London, Lord Herries, treated with Cecil and Elizabeth over the possibility of the English holding such a ‘trial’ if Mary would agree to it, Mary herself suffered a change of prison. It was decided to remove her to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. Carlisle was dangerously near the Scottish border. From the moment of Mary’s arrival there, other more secure places of confinement for her had been discussed, including Nottingham and Fotheringhay. The move was complicated by the fact that Mary was still not officially a prisoner. When the suggestion of a change was first broached to Mary, she quickly asked Middlemore whether she was to go as a captive or of her own choice. Middlemore tactfully replied that Elizabeth merely wished to have Mary stationed nearer to herself. To this Mary countered with equal diplomacy that since she was in Elizabeth’s hands, she might dispose of her as she willed.28 But when the actual moment came to leave Carlisle, Mary showed less composure. She began to weep and rage with a temper which was rapidly quickening with the frustrations of her unexpected imprisonment. Knollys had to exercise all his patience to get Mary to agree to proceed, since he did not wish to practise duress. Eventually Mary saw the threats and lamentations were achieving nothing, whereas gentleness might win her some advantage. She therefore withdrew her objections to departure, like a wise woman, said Knollys, and allowed herself to be removed quite placidly, on condition that she should be permitted to dispatch messengers to Scotland. The journey took two days, with a night at Lowther Castle and a night at Wharton. On arrival, Mary was pronounced by Knollys to his satisfaction to be very quiet, tractable, and ‘void of displeasant countenance’.29
There was, however, much to displease Mary’s countenance in the intrigues which were now being spun between Edinburgh and London. In spite of her incarceration, she had some inkling of what was taking place, and her knowledge of Scotland led her to guess more. Some messages from Wood in London to Moray fell into her hands by chance in June and uncovered some of the regent’s plotting. The news that some of her own letters were to be used against her reduced her to a state of nervous collapse, and she ended one letter to Elizabeth with a plea to excuse her ‘bad writing, for these letters, so falsely invented, have made her ill’.30 The move away from Carlisle proved to be a severe handicap. Carlisle was at least the capital of the western portion of the English borders, a frontier town with administrative connections, easy of access for travellers. Bolton was an isolated castle in a remote corner of the North Riding of Yorkshire, looking over the broad pastoral valley of Wensleydale; it had no town of its own to surround it, and lay forty miles from York and over fifty miles from Carlisle. The castle itself was comparatively unfurnished on her arrival, and hangings and other belongings had to be borrowed from Sir George Bowes’s house some distance away. Far more serious to Mary’s cause than these minor discomforts was the fact that she was from now on placed physically outside the mainstream of political life, although mentally she remained very much part of it. Mary had never been well-endowed with advisers, although she was a woman who wished by nature to lean upon others for advice; for the next nineteen years she was deprived of any sort of proper worldly contact by which to judge the situations which were reported to her. Her own servants, although loyal, were no match in intelligence for the English politicians with whom they had to deal. A Herries certainly could not hope to worst a Cecil: in any case the mistress of one presided at liberty over an illustrious court, whereas the mistress of the other pined in enforced seclusion.
Herries came to Bolton from London at the end of July and put the English proposals to his queen; it is easy to understand how Mary, lit up by false hopes of restoration at Elizabeth’s hands, agreed at last to the prospect of an English ‘trial’.* The fact that the English had no right to try her seemed now less important than the fact that Elizabeth had promised to restore her whatever the outcome, although if the lords proved her guilt, it was stipulated that the lords themselves should go unpunished for their rebellion. If the lords brought no evidence against Mary, on the other hand, or if their evidence was not held to be valid, then Mary was to be adjudged innocent in any case and restored as before, on condition that she renounced her present title to the crown of England during the lifetime of Elizabeth and her lawful issue. Other conditions made were the abandonment of the alliance with France, and the substitution of an alliance with England, the Mass in Scotland to be abandoned by Mary and common prayer after the English form to be practised instead and the ratification at last of the Treaty of Edinburgh. Believing herself to be on the eve of liberty, Mary even bade her partisans in Scotland cease fighting on condition that Moray’s would do the same.
The climate in the outside world was harsher than Mary, within her prison walls, remembered. Whether or not Mary’s partisans did lay down their arms – at any rate at the Parliament of 16th August Moray swiftly declared the forfeiture of the Hamiltons, Fleming and the bishop of Ross, before ever the boasted English trial had taken place. More damaging still to Mary’s cause, on 20th September Elizabeth wrote privately to Moray promising him what Cecil had already divulged in secret: whatever impression Elizabeth might have given Mary, the Scottish queen would not in fact be restored to her throne if she were found guilty in England. This letter, following on Cecil’s hints to Wood, was crucial to the development of Moray’s behaviour. On 23rd September Cecil repeated the same information to Sussex.31 Moray had now every impetus to prepare the blackest possible case against his sister. The queen’s ‘privy letters’ had therefore become the central plank of his accusatory edifice.
The English translation of Buchanan’s Book of Articles, prepared for the coming trial in September or October, contained a much expanded reference to these letters. Instead of the brief phrase in the Latin version written in June, there was now a long postscript specially devoted to the subject. Mary’s own supporters also began to appreciate that these writings were to be the testing-point not only of her own guilt or innocence, but also of the whole future government of Scotland. The Marian nobles, gathered together at Dumbarton, took the opportunity to declare publicly that ‘… if it be alleged that her Majesty’s writing, produced in parliament, should prove her Grace culpable, it may be answered, that there is in no place mention made in it by which Her Highness may be convicted, albeit it were in her own hand-writing, as it is not’.32 Only Mary herself, wrapped in ‘her little prisoner’s world’, believed, trusting Elizabeth, that the trial was a mere formality, and that she would be set free in any case.
Under these inauspicious circumstances, the conference of York was set up. It was decided that the trial should take the form of examination of the evidence by an English panel, headed by the duke of Norfolk. Both Mary and Moray were to be allowed commissioners. Moray’s commissioners included himself and Maitland; Mary’s included among others John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and Lords Livingston, Boyd and Herries. Her instructions to her commissioners illustrate Mary’s personal conviction that the conference was only being held in order that Elizabeth might in the future restore her to her throne, having accomplished ‘the reduction of our said disobedient subjects to their dutiful obedience of us’. With such rising hopes to illuminate her horizon, even captivity at Bolton seemed tolerable to Mary. She occupied herself learning to write English under the tuition of Knollys. It is obvious from his letters that propinquity led Knollys to fall a little in love with his glamorous prisoner. Exercising her arts of fascination on those around her in charming little ways was second nature to Mary Stuart: to Knollys she wrote her first letter in English when he had been absent from Bolton for two or three days. The letter, which is indeed exceedingly misspelt and scarcely intelligible as English at all, announces that she has sent him a little token, asks after his wife, and ends touchingly: ‘Excus my ivel vreitn thes furst tym …’33
Knollys also applied himself enthusiastically to trying to persuade his captive of the delights of the English religion which he himself practised. Knollys reported happily that Mary was now at Bolton growing to a ‘good liking of English common prayer’, had received an English chaplain, and had listened to his sermons which had happened to deal severely with the pharisaical justification of works by faith, as well as all kinds of papistry, with ‘attentive and contented ears’. Her replies were gentle and weak and Knollys reported complacently that ‘she does not seem to like the worse of religion through me’.34 Mary was by now surrounded by Protestants: her cousin Agnes Fleming, Lady Livingston, joined her in August and both Livingstons belonged to the reformed Church, as did Herries; they may have added their influence to that of Knollys. It is possible also that she felt some genuine and laudable intellectual curiosity concerning the doctrines which the majority of her subjects practised, and that her inquiries helped to while away the captive hours. But the true motive behind this suspicious docility was now as ever her desire to win the good opinions of Elizabeth, for whom Knollys was merely a stalking-horse. At the end of August Knollys put his finger on the point when he reported how marvellously polite Mary had been of late ‘as though she conceived I could persuade her Highness to show her great favour’.35 The beaux yeux of Knollys, that good family man, who worried over the welfare of his daughters in London (‘experience teaches what foul crimes youthful women fall into for lack of orderly maintenance’ he pronounced in an anxious letter), were quite incidental to Mary Stuart’s plans.
Mary’s apparent Anglicanism did not pass unnoticed in England. Towards the end of September Mary heard that the local Catholics believed she was turning away from the old religion, and were very upset by the news; immediately in the great hall of Bolton, in front of a full assembly, she professed herself as fervently Catholic as ever before, her arguments, according to Knollys, being ‘so weak, they only showed her zeal’. To Knollys alone she attempted to make capital out of the incident, saying pointedly that she could scarcely be expected to lose France, Spain and all her foreign allies by seeming to change her religion, and yet still not be certain that Elizabeth was her ‘assured friend’. But her letter to her girlhood friend, Elisabeth de Valois, queen of Spain, at the end of September shows that her heart was evidently as Catholic as ever beneath its convenient show of Anglican interest.’36 Mary invokes the memory of their common childhood, the food they had shared in the past which had nourished an indissoluble friendship, to plead for Spanish aid. She tells Elisabeth that she has been offered ‘de belles choses’ to change her religion, but whatever Elisabeth may hear to the contrary, Mary will never abandon the Faith, but merely try to accommodate herself to her changing circumstances. In the meantime Mary hoped somehow to smuggle out her little son James from Scotland to marry one of Elisabeth’s daughters. By the time this letter reached Spain, Elisabeth was already dead in childbirth (incidentally leaving Philip II, that ever recurring prospective bridegroom, once more free to marry). But in November Mary wrote angrily in the same vein to Philip himself, saying that she was considered too closely related to the queen of England to enjoy the services of a Catholic priest, but that it should not be believed on that account that she had given up the beliefs of her religion, as well as the practice.37
The point was a good one. It was perfectly true that on her first arrival in England Mary had asked Lord Scrope for a Catholic priest to attend her and he had replied firmly that there was none left in England. It was also true, as Mary told Philip, that if Knollys introduced a Protestant preacher into her chamber, she could hardly prevent him. Nevertheless Mary always felt somewhat sensitive in later life on this point of her alleged Anglicanism, not so much out of intellectual distaste – for her own strong but primitive faith seems to have remained perfectly unaffected by all the assaults made upon it – but for the good practical reasons she outlined to Knollys. By such aspersions on her Catholicism, she feared to forfeit the support of her Catholic allies. On the eve of her death, she still took trouble to justify herself for having listened to Protestant sermons when she first came to England. One may perhaps detect in these protestations the murmur of a faintly guilty conscience; possibly Mary did feel later that she had compromised herself a little in this respect in her desire to please Elizabeth. This very minor essay into the realms of Protestantism on the part of Mary may be ascribed in part to the wishful thinking of the ardent Puritan Knollys, in part to the natural curiosity of the captive cut off from contact with her own religion, but mainly to Mary’s devouring obsession with the subject of Elizabeth.
Knollys worried himself constantly over the prospect of his prisoner escaping: he even sent a map of the castle down to London so that his security arrangements could be approved. The royal train at Bolton now consisted of Leslie, Herries, the Livingstons, the Flemings, Gavin Hamilton, the master of the household of John Beaton, Bastian Pages and his wife Mary Seton and young Willy Douglas, a corps of loyal supporters. Bolton was only sixty miles to the southwest Scottish border as the crow flies. Escape might or might not have been possible. Knollys’s forebodings indicate that Mary might with luck have eluded her captors. But at this point there were positively no attempts at escape, no disguises as a laundress, no stolen keys, no corrupted guards; Mary herself made it clear that this was at her own wish. She saw no reason to try and escape when she hoped for so much from Elizabeth. It suited her too to pretend to be a guest, not a captive. At the beginning of October Mary warned Knollys that things might be very different in the future: ‘If I shall be holden here perforce, you may be sure then being as a desperate person I will use any attempts that may serve my purpose either by myself or my friends.’38
In the meantime, with the prospect of the successful conference of York in front of her, Mary was content to stay where she was. Knollys really had no need to fear those hare-hunting expeditions across the moors – ‘the wind never so boisterous’ which made him feel so nervous because he constantly imagined a dozen or so Scots would ride over the moors and carry off their queen. In his mind’s eye he saw them riding over mountains and heaths with spare horses, avoiding villages and towns, and rescuing this Diana – ‘for she hath an able body to endure to gallop apass’. Knollys believed that the country folk would certainly not stop her: they would laugh in their sleeves to see her go.39 Mary on the other hand no longer saw herself in this romantic and impulsive light. In mid-September she wrote proudly to the king of France, saying that the fact she had had no response to any of her letters to him pleading for assistance no longer worried her, since now Queen Elizabeth her good sister had promised to do all things to her honour and grandeur and restore her to her estate.40 In October Mary pinned all her hopes on that conference to open at York, the result of which she believed, win or lose, guilty or innocent, could not fail to be her restoration to the throne of Scotland.
* Tradition has it that the old woman received the freehold of her croft – for which she had previously paid rent – for this Samaritan deed. This was probably through the good offices of Lord Herries, who was the principal local landowner, and in a position to make such a gesture.
* From the point of view of the succession, there was something to be said for having Elizabeth’s nearest relative under lock and key; acting on this principle, the emperors of Ethiopia used to incarcerate all the princes of blood royal on a mountain near Gondar, until the time came for one of them to succeed.
* A longing haunts my spirit, day and night Bitter and sweet, torments my aching heart ’Twixt doubt and fear, it holds its wayward part, And while it lingers, rest and peace take flight… Ah! I have seen a ship freed from control On the high seas, outside a friendly port, And what was peaceful change to woe and pain: Ev’n so am I, a lonely trembling soul, Fearing – not you, but to be made the sport Of Fate, that bursts the closest, strongest chain!20
* It has sometimes been conjectured from these words that Mary intended to reveal to Elizabeth the full truth about the murder of Darnley. But Mary’s words have the unmistakable ring of the captive, to be heard increasingly from now on in her utterances and letters, who will make any promise, hold out any lure, in order to achieve liberty.
* The English were careful to avoid using the word ‘trial’, aware that they had no possible right to try the queen of another country, for a crime said to be committed there. But of course the proceedings were a form of trial, and the word is used hereafter without inverted commas.