CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Uses of Adversity

‘Tribulation has been to them as a furnace to fine gold – a means of proving their virtue, of opening their so-long-blinded eyes, and of teaching them to know themselves and their own failings.’

Mary Queen of Scots on the lives of rulers,
Essay on Adversity, 1580

By the summer of 1572 the public cause of Mary Stuart seemed lost indeed; she was left to discover for herself in the private life of captivity the uses of adversity, sweet or otherwise. This outward decline in her circumstances was due in great measure to the fact that the fickle wheel of fortune had rolled away from her direction in Scotland. Argyll, for example, had remained a Marian supporter after Langside, despite his failure at the scene of the battle. Mary harangued him with anxious letters from her prison, addressed at times to ‘our Counsellor and Lieutenant’, at times to ‘our dearest cousin’ and rising in a crescendo of supplication to ‘Brother’ (a relationship based on his marriage to her half-sister Jean Stewart) to whom she signed herself in a fevered personal postscript ‘your right good sister and best friend forever’.¹ These frantic missives did not manage to dissuade Argyll from deserting Mary’s side for that of Moray in April 1569; he leagued once more briefly with the pro-Marian Hamiltons after the regent’s death in 1570 before, finding Mary’s cause hopeless, he abandoned it once more. The attitude of Lord Boyd – the royal servant who had brought the fatal diamond from Norfolk – was typical of that of many of Mary’s more stable former supporters: in the summer of 1571 he too began to despair of her cause. The death of the regent Lennox during a raid on Stirling in August 1571 led to the substitution of Morton as effective leader, under Mar as a nominal regent; Boyd agreed to Mar’s election and was once more enrolled in the Privy Council. Mar’s death in October 1572 confirmed Morton as regent in name as well as deed, and Morton was not only no friend to Mary at any time, but also an Anglophile, whom it suited Elizabeth to support. The final blow to Mary’s prolonged hopes for restoration at English hands came in the following spring when the castle of Edinburgh, so long held by Kirkcaldy and Maitland on behalf of the Marians, and officially on behalf of Mary herself, was at last effectively besieged by heavy cannon brought north from England manned by English gunners under Drury. This lethal English intervention proved decisive: in May 1573 the castle fell.

The gallant Kirkcaldy was executed. Maitland either died naturally or, as Melville suggested, committed suicide ‘after the old Roman fashion’, before the executioner’s axe could reach him. In any case his health had been deteriorating with a form of creeping paralysis: by March 1570 Randolph noted that his legs were ‘clean gone’, his body so weak that he could not walk, and even to sneeze caused him exquisite pain. Randolph commented spitefully: ‘To this hath blessed joy of a young wife brought him.’² But Mary Fleming, for all Randolph’s gibes, acted the part of a loyal wife after her husband’s death. It was her moving personal plea to Cecil which saved Maitland’s wasted corpse from the humiliating treatment accorded to Huntly’s body after death in the shape of the traditional Scottish treason trial. In a firm letter to Morton, Queen Elizabeth pointed out that such barbarous habits were extremely distasteful to the English way of thinking: ‘It is not our manner in this country to show cruelty upon the dead bodies so unconvicted, but to suffer them straight to be buried and put in the earth.’ As God had shown His intentions towards Maitland by allowing him to die naturally and thus escape execution, so Maitland should be buried naturally and well and not ‘pulled in pieces’.³ Thus thanks to his wife, the foremost of the Maries, Maitland escaped the fate of Huntly.*

Mary kept her feelings to herself on the subject of Maitland’s death: ‘She makes little show of any grief,’ reported Shrewsbury. ‘And yet it nips her very near.’ In the last years of his life since his quarrel with Moray, Maitland had energetically promoted Mary’s interests; and he had died a loyal Marian. But he had not always lived as one. Queen Mary may well have reflected that if more years had been granted to him, he might have used them for further changes of allegiance. Nevertheless the death of Maitland brought to an end an era in Scotland; under Morton, a brutal man but one who showed himself to possess a certain administrative talent, the beleaguered country even enjoyed a period of comparative calm. Its quondam queen, Mary Stuart, also entered a phase of enforced tranquillity, in which the minor pains or pleasures of her prison routine became temporarily more important than European or Scottish politics.

The actual conditions of her captivity were not in themselves particularly rigorous during the 1570s by the standards of a state prisoner, except during moments of national crisis. In the first place Queen Mary was officially allowed a suite of thirty, which was enough to make her adequately comfortable if not a large number to one who had lived as queen her whole life. At the time of her first committal to Shrewsbury and Huntingdon in 1569 this thirty included Lord and Lady Livingston and their own attendants, Mary Seton, who had her own maid and groom, three other ladies of the bed-chambers, Jane Kennedy, Mary’s favourite bed-chamber woman, John Beaton, her master of the house, her cupbearer and her physician; then there were her grooms of the chambers, one of them being that witty masque-maker Bastian Pages, Gilbert Curle, her secretary, Willy Douglas, now described as her usher, and her chair-bearer. There were four officers in the pantry, and three officers in the kitchen including a master cook and a pottager. Most of these were Mary’s tried and loyal servants who made up the official thirty, but beyond this figure had crept in others, bringing the total up to forty-one. This proliferation, due not only to the infiltration of such further aides to the queen as Bastian’s wife and some stable grooms, but also to the introduction of further attendants to look after the attendants, was tolerated by Shrewsbury out of kindness, as he himself admitted.⁴

But as the royal suite happily escalated through Shrewsbury’s laxity, its increase in numbers inevitably reached the ears of the government in London, who took a much less generous view, especially when outside events seemed to threaten the safety of the queen of Scots. In times of danger there would be an outcry against this burgeoning suite – ‘too much enlarged at the present time’ wrote Elizabeth angrily in September 1569, at the time of her discovery of the first Norfolk marriage negotiations. There would be demands from London that numbers should be cut; this would result in tears and protests from Mary, coupled with guilty denials from Shrewsbury to London that he had ever allowed the number to rise.

More servants, quite apart from the danger of official complaints from London, meant more mouths to feed. Here Shrewsbury was less indulgent. His allowance from the government for the feeding of the queen was the subject of agonizing solicitude on his part throughout all his long years as her guardian, and as late as 1584 he was still complaining about the number of dishes the attendants consumed – eight dishes at every meal for the queen’s gentlemen, and five dishes for the ladies. When Mary was first committed to Shrewsbury, he was allowed £52 a week to maintain her, but in 1575, without any reason being given, this allowance was cut to £30 a week. Shrewsbury squeaked with protest but all to no avail: it was an economy which the careful Elizabeth was determined to make. Shrewsbury’s seventeenth-century biographer Johnston estimated that he was actually spending £30 a day, and was thus nearly £10,000 a year out of pocket; yet not only were his complaints disregarded, but he frequently had much difficulty in extracting the allowance which remained from the government.*⁵ Eventually, on the advice of Walsingham, Shrewsbury applied to Queen Elizabeth for a fee farm to try and get back some of the expenses in a manner that would not hurt the royal pocket; even this request took a long time to be granted. In the meantime Walsingham reflected that cutting Shrewsbury’s allowance might turn out to be a false economy if it meant that the queen of Scots was allowed to escape through lack of guards – ‘I pray God the abatement of the charges towards the nobleman that hath custody of the bosom serpent, hath not lessened his care in keeping her’.⁶

In fact the care which Shrewsbury showed in keeping Queen Mary, like the numbers of her suite which he tolerated, varied very much with the attitude of the central government, and this in turn depended on the state of national security. Shrewsbury was not a cruel man and strictness generally had to be imposed from above. Even when the government resolved that the queen should be kept more ‘straitly’, its wishes were not always implemented very speedily; Derbyshire and Staffordshire were a long way from London, and travelling, especially in winter, from houses like Chatsworth set amidst the mountainous area of Derbyshire represented considerable difficulties. This worked both ways. In the first place Shrewsbury, like all ambitious Elizabethans, constantly pined for the royal sunshine of the court, and bewailed the duties which kept him so long away from it: he felt he was being excluded from the glorious possibilities of the queen’s favour, as well as an opportunity to make his case about his allowance. In 1582, in the autumn, deprived at the last minute of permission to make a longed-for visit to London, Shrewsbury commented sadly to Walsingham that neither the weather nor the time of the year would have prevented him arriving. Shrewsbury had to content himself with bombarding his friends at court with letters and gifts reminding them of his existence – such as some tasty ‘red deer pies’, made from his own deer, and posted off to London to win the favour of Cecil.*⁷ But just as Shrewsbury was often tortured by the thought of the delights of London and the court, so the government who occupied this delightful city were themselves from time to time agonized at the idea that the Scottish queen in the far-off Midlands was enjoying far too much liberty, seeing people, receiving visitors, holding a virtual court, riding about on horseback in conditions tantamount to liberty … such rumours, untrue as they were, spread by those recently arrived in London from the Midlands, caused Elizabeth to choke with fury and fire off indignant reproaches to Shrewsbury for neglecting his duty.

Although Shrewsbury never failed to write in return protesting his extreme loyalty to Elizabeth and his eternal vigilance as a jailer, there was no doubt that the question of access to the Scottish queen was a delicate one, and whatever he swore to Elizabeth Shrewsbury did not always interpret the rules in the harshest possible light. In April 1574 he wrote down to London, in answer to some accusation that he was showing too much kindness to his captive: ‘I know her to be a stranger, a Papist, my Enemy. What hopes can I have of good of her, either for me, or for my country?’⁸ But of course there was a simple answer to Shrewsbury’s question, as to what he – leaving out his country – could hope for from the queen of Scots, and Cecil and his fellows were well able to supply it for themselves: if Elizabeth died suddenly, who knew but that Mary’s fortunes might not be dramatically reversed? If the captive were to be transformed overnight into the queen, and Mary were to ascend the throne of England, as would have been a possibility at least, had Elizabeth died while James was still a child, then Shrewsbury could expect much from his former charge if he had shown himself a sympathetic host to her in her times of distress. This consideration of Mary’s potential as queen of England, which died away in the 1580s after James grew to manhood, was very much present in the minds of the English statesmen in the 1570s; not only Shrewsbury but also Cecil and Leicester kept the possibility at the back of their minds in their dealings with the queen of Scots.

From Mary’s own point of view she was of course anxious to be allowed to receive as many local people and enjoy as much local life as possible. Such visits helped to while away the tedium of her imprisonment: the great families of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, the Manners and the Pagets, far from being Philistines, had the particular enjoyment of music and musical festivities which Mary shared.⁹ These visits also provided an excellent cover for messengers and messages to slip by secretly. By the summer of 1569 irritating reports were reaching London that the Shrewsburys were allowing Mary some sort of social life at Wingfield. Lord Shrewsbury countered such complaints by detailing his extravagant precautions for Mary’s safety – how, for example, when a child was born to his son and daughter-in-law, Gilbert and Mary Talbot, in March 1575 he deliberately christened the baby himself, to prevent unnecessary strangers entering the house. Nevertheless Shrewsbury was on some occasions accused of actually showing off his distinguished captive to his visitors – a charge of which one feels he was probably not completely innocent, since the presence of the famous queen of Scots in the Midlands of England must have caused a sensation among the local gentry on her first arrival. Cecil told Shrewsbury that Elizabeth had heard in London of ‘a gentleman of Lord B’ who, on visiting Shrewsbury at his home, had been asked by him whether he had ever seen the queen of Scots. Cecil’s indictment continued: ‘Then, quoth your lordship, you shall see her anon.’¹⁰ Such tales made Elizabeth’s blood boil and Shrewsbury’s run cold.

Mary’s access to the baths at Buxton was the subject of a long-drawn-out three-cornered skirmish between Elizabeth, Shrewsbury and Mary. Buxton, which lay comparatively close to Chatsworth, although cut off from it by rough countryside, was endowed with a well, the healing properties of whose waters had been known even to the Romans. In early Tudor times it had been known as the well of St Anne, and had become a centre of religious pilgrimage, where the people came to be cured as much by their faith as by the waters themselves; as at a modern centre of pilgrimage, Lourdes, the crutches and sticks of the cured were hung up in the little chapel over the springs where Mass used to be said on behalf of the afflicted. During the iron dominion of Thomas Cromwell these innocent pursuits were rudely interrupted: the crutches and sticks and the offerings to the chapel were angrily swept away as manifestations of ‘papist idolatry’ by Cromwell’s emissary; the baths themselves were locked up and sealed. However, by the time Queen Mary reached Derbyshire, the baths were once more unsealed, and were enjoying a considerable vogue even with the courtiers in far-away London for their remedial powers which were thought to be particularly helpful in the case of gout. In 1572 a Dr Jones wrote a thesis on the benefits to be derived from the ‘Ancient Baths at Buckstones’ which described the commodious arrangements made there for the reception of the sufferers. Bess had apparently already turned her agile mind to the possible profit to be derived from these baths and their tepid, clear mineral waters: Dr Jones’s narrative implies that she planned some sort of Buxton Bath Charity, in which it was intended to have a clear scale of charges according to the wealth of the patient – £3 10s. for a duke and 12d. for a yeoman.¹¹

To visit these baths became the dearest object of Mary Queen of Scots; again and again she pleaded the near-breakdown of her health in an effort to secure the desired permission. Shrewsbury himself built a special house next to the famous baths, in which it would be possible to house the Scottish queen as she took her cure, without danger of escape. But every time Elizabeth appeared to be on the point of agreeing, she seemed to hear of some fresh plot to rescue the prisoner. These heart-searchings eventually culminated in permission being granted, albeit reluctantly. Mary paid her first visit to Buxton at the end of August 1573 and spent five weeks there. Thereafter it became the outing to which she most keenly looked forward, not only one may suppose for the remedial effects of the waters – considered efficacious also for female irregularities as well as gout – but for the unique opportunity which it gave her to mix with people. The presence of occasional court folk at Buxton was indeed a source of equal joy to both Mary and Shrewsbury. Thus Mary was able to meet Cecil, in 1575, and later Leicester, her former suitor, in 1578 and 1584. Cecil in his cautious way actually turned down a projected match of his daughter with Shrewsbury’s son, on the grounds that it might confirm ugly reports that he had become too friendly with Mary while at Buxton. But Leicester went on after his cure at Buxton to be entertained by Shrewsbury at Chatsworth, where Mary was at that moment confined. Mary’s keenest hope was of course that Elizabeth herself would succumb to the temptation to visit the baths, so that the longed-for meeting would be brought about. But although Elizabeth visited the town of Stafford and the nearby Essex house of Chartley in the course of a progress in August 1575– the moment in their lives at which the two queens were geographically nearest to each other – she did not journey on to Buxton.

Such visits gave Shrewsbury an opportunity of lavishing actual presents as well as showing kindness to prominent courtiers, or their wives and relations. Venison, fruit, fowl, meat, wine and ale flowed in a rich stream from the Shrewsbury domains to make the stay of these fashionable figures in distant Derbyshire more palatable. In August 1576 Sir Walter Mildmay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, thanked Shrewsbury profusely for his kindness to his wife during the period of her cure, without which ‘her being at Buxtons, in so could and raw a country, would be very odious to her’.¹² Happy Shrewsbury! The arrival at Buxton of Sir Thomas Cecil, Cecil’s elder son, and his lady, my lady Essex, and the earl of Bedford’s two daughters all with the clouds of court glory still freshly trailing about them, gave him a magnificent opportunity to load them with five hogsheads of beer and ale, further wine, sheep, rabbits, and further emoluments to supplement their diet, including ‘a fat cow’.¹³

Yet so long as these visits of Mary to Buxton continued, they remained a source of apprehension on the part of Elizabeth. Dreadful rumours that Mary might be endearing herself to the common people there by small acts of charity began to reach London. In 1580 Shrewsbury was once more defending himself against the accusation that Mary was being allowed too much access to the world: he admitted that there had been one poor cripple who had spoken to the Scottish queen at the well, ‘unknown to all my people that guarded the place’, but he promised it would not happen again. In 1581 Cecil complained to Shrewsbury that Mary was known to have visited Buxton twice that summer, although she only had official leave for one visit. In 1584 Elizabeth apprehensively forbade an assembly of freeholders in the forest of the Peak, three miles from Buxton, on the grounds that the inhabitants were ‘backward and for most part ill affected in religion’, despite Shrewsbury’s protests that these were good men who had been summoned in respect of Elizabeth’s rights of vert and venison there, which had fallen into disuse for the lack of such courts.¹⁴ Mary herself spoke the truest word on the subject of such terrors on the part of the Elizabethan government, that her charity might win her hearts. To Paulet, a subsequent jailer, who criticized her for giving a smock to a poor near-naked woman out of pity for her condition, she replied, ‘You fear lest by giving alms I should win the favour of the people, but you ought rather to fear lest the restraining of my alms may animate the people against you.’¹⁵

Apart from these desirable visits to Buxton and the demands of safety in time of crisis, Mary’s little household found the locality of their prison changing from time to time in any case, owing to the sanitary arrangements of the time: the contemporary method of cleansing large houses such as those inhabited by Shrewsbury was to empty them totally of their inhabitants, who would be transferred to another house, and then clean the dwelling thoroughly from top to bottom. Not all Mary’s prisons were as uncomfortable and hateful to her as Tutbury – whose evil drainage system and notorious ‘middens’ stinking beneath her own windows became one of her chief sources of complaint during her later years there. Wingfield was a great Derbyshire manor house of considerable style and grandeur, and even Mary approvingly called it a palace. Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor lay close together, the castle in the valley and the newly built manor on the hill: one of the reasons why Shrewsbury was anxious to transfer Mary to Sheffield in the first place was that the propinquity of the two houses would make cleaning problems easier, since Mary could be shifted conveniently from one to the other. At Chatsworth Mary could enjoy the beauty of the wild country in which it was set – those moors from which Gerard hoped she could be plucked – or the park itself where Queen Mary’s bower still commemorates today the little closed garden where she is said to have taken her exercise.

Within the pattern of these moves, the mimic court and household of the queen had its own tiny excitement and dramas. The queen was allowed to ride when governmental suspicions were not too keen, and even went hawking with Shrewsbury; at one point she had as many as ten horses in her stables, three grooms and a farrier, before this equestrian abundance was brought to an end by angry protests from London. She was allowed the pleasure of archery, which she had enjoyed in Scotland, exercising her long bow with ‘her folks’, to take her mind off her friends’ losses in Scotland, as Shrewsbury told Cecil.¹⁶ She obtained a greyhound which she later tried to persuade Paulet to let her run at a deer. Then there were little pleasures of small dogs, caged birds (sent from France), other birds including barbary fowls and turtle doves, and much lute-playing as in Scottish days. Towards the end of her life Mary introduced a billiard table for the benefit of her house, although she herself does not seem to have used it. Nor did the queen lose all her interest in fashion and dress, being prepared to send off for patterns of dresses, such as were then worn at the London court, and cuttings of suitable gold and silver cloth.¹⁷

The romances of the chaste Mary Seton provided a positive drama within such a subdued setting. The only Marie to remain unmarried, and the only one therefore to follow her queen into captivity, Mary Seton had a naturally devout nature, and also a certain amount of pardonable family pride – the Setons being among the grandest of the Scottish court families, and her father and brother in turn playing a leading part as magnates, loyal to the crown. But these two aspects of Mary Seton’s nature, admirable as they might be in theory, combined in practice to give her a certain spinsterish quality which was not a happy augury for marriage; nor was she herself as beautiful as Mary Fleming and Mary Beaton, or as vivacious as Mary Livingston. Yet in England this pious high-born Scottish lady did find her admirers: at Wingfield the younger son of Sir Richard Norton, Christopher Norton, was said to have fallen in love with her, although he was unfortunately executed at the time of the northern rising. She was no luckier with her next suitor, Andrew Beaton, who succeeded his brother John Beaton, Mary’s master of the household, when he died in October 1572. Within the propinquity of the royal family circle, Andrew Beaton fell in love with Mary Seton. But the romance hung fire; there was some question that Mary Seton had sworn a vow of perpetual chastity, but the real trouble seems to have been that Andrew Beaton, although coming of an honourable Scottish family (the Beatons of Creich had given many loyal servants to the Scottish crown), was not quite on an equal social level with the daughter of Lord Seton.¹⁸

As Andrew Beaton struggled with the combined spiritual and material obstacles of a vow of chastity and family pride, he decided to resolve at least one of the difficulties: in August 1577 he went to France to obtain the nullification of Mary Seton’s vow. On his homeward journey he was drowned. Mary Seton was left to mourn her last chance of married happiness, and as no one further attempted to dissuade her from the consolations of religion to which she had clung so long, she was able to die as she had lived under the name of Seton which she prized so much. From 1581 onwards her health declined, and began to interfere with the carrying out of her duties to her mistress, duties she had first incurred thirty-five years before when she had attended the child queen on her first journey to France. In 1583 Mary Seton was allowed to retire to France, and for the rest of her life lived at the convent of St Pierre at Rheims under the aegis of Mary’s aunt, Mme Renee of Guise. Yet her devotion to her mistress was not diminished: in the same year a book and a box sent by Mary Seton in France to Mary Stuart via the French ambassador fell under suspicion; it was considered important that they should both be searched, for they would surely contain some secret messages for the Scottish queen.¹⁹ Mary Seton’s love of Scotland also remained; in 1586 she wrote sadly to M. de Courcelles, the new French ambassador, on his way to Scotland: ‘It is now nearly 20 years since I left Scotland and in that time it has pleased God to take the best part of my relations, friends and acquaintances; nevertheless I presume there remain still some who knew me, and I shall be obliged by your remembering me to them as occasion may serve.’*²⁰

Another household event, less poignant than the blighted romance of Mary Seton, but of some significance for the future, was the death of Mary’s secretary, Augustine Raullett, in August 1574. Shrewsbury took the opportunity of Raullett’s demise to go through his papers where he found ‘Nothing of moment’, as he reported to London. Mary’s difficulty was indeed to replace him: for one problem which she had in common with her jailer, Shrewsbury, was that her finances were causing her great concern. Her accounts were by now in chaos due either to the carelessness or dishonesty of her treasurer, Dolin, a man who brought his mistress no luck, since in 1577 her jewels were actually stolen from his charge in Sheffield Park. The queen’s dowry from France was paid irregularly, and all revenues from Scotland were apprehended by the current regent. Mary was now anxious to have above all things a new secretary with a good business brain; on the other hand she could only offer little pay in return, as well as the highly restrictive conditions of work.

Claude Nau, the candidate now submitted by her Guise relations, was himself of a good Lorrainer family: one of his brothers had been in Mary’s service earlier and had been with her at Bolton. Claude Nau had studied law and practised it in Paris; he was clever and quick-witted, speaking and writing good Italian, accurate Latin and English almost as fluent as his native French. Nau was a self-centred man, fond of personal display as Riccio had once been, and altogether a less engaging character than Mary’s other secretary, the melancholy but charming Gilbert Curie. But these faults seemed for the time being outweighed by the fact that Nau was intelligent and zealous: as Mendoza said later, Curie might be good, but he was stupid. It was to Nau that Mary now related the important memorials of her personal rule in Scotland, referred to in earlier chapters. Mary was also able to employ Nau’s many gifts in her ceaseless foreign correspondence. His abilities impressed her sufficiently for her to dispatch him in 1579 on a mission to Edinburgh, the principal object of which was to see and report on the young James, now thirteen. Mary sent with Nau some little golden guns of the sort to which young princes of the period were so partial, designed to win the heart of her son.²² Perhaps she imagined James to be more martial, more Guise-like, than the scholarly creature he had in fact become. But the appeal of the little guns was never even tested, for Nau was not allowed to have access to James. After Mary’s transference to Tixall at the time of the Babington plot, one of these little guns was found pathetically back at Chartley; she seems to have given them to her surgeon as a memento just before her death, and her groom of the chamber, Hannibal, received a little golden bow and arrow which was probably originally intended for the same source.

It will be observed that with all these little activities, Mary’s day-to-day life during the 1570s and early 1580s was not particularly arduous in itself; but there was one factor which made the whole era intolerably burdensome to her, and that was her own appalling health. This ill-health was grievously exacerbated by the mere fact that she was confined, and few springs, let alone winters, passed without her being subjected to some really severe bout of illness. Her severe illness in the summer of 1569, which she compared later to her near fatal attack at Jedburgh in October 1566, was followed in the autumn by a nagging pain in the side which prevented her sleeping; she was also constantly sick. Norfolk’s death brought on a passion of sickness, and through the 1570s the eternal nagging pain in her side reduced her at times to real throes of agony. Apart from this pain, Mary also endured distressing pains in her right arm, which is often mentioned in her letters as preventing her either from writing herself, or from writing properly. A bad fall from her horse at Buxton in 1580 resulted in an unpleasant blow on her spine. In 1581 she had another dangerous illness, which began as gastric influenza, and in November 1582 the same symptoms led the royal physicians to believe that she was actually dying. Her legs were also extremely painful and by the date of her death she was almost permanently lame. Thereafter other different symptoms, thought at the time to be those of dropsy or nephritis (kidney disease), developed. Mary’s health must be regarded as by far the heaviest physical burden which she had to bear in captivity, and by the late 1570s it was a sufficiently accepted phenomenon for all those who knew her to comment upon it, not only her friends but even such creatures of lesser sympathy as Bess writing to Walsingham. Babington in his confession mentioned that at the time of his first plotting in the early 1580s the queen of Scots was considered to be an old and sickly woman, who was not likely to live much longer.²³

Yet apart from the weight of suffering itself, Mary had to endure two additional ordeals with regard to her health. In the first place her captors were extremely reluctant to believe that she was genuinely ill at all, suspecting that she merely invented her symptoms in order to secure further freedom or privileges such as visiting Buxton; such symptoms as they could not deny, they attempted to put down to hysteria. Shrewsbury himself admitted as much: ‘I perceived her principal object was and is to have some liberty out of the gates,’ he wrote in a covering letter to a report on her health, but added that, being finally convinced she was indeed ill, he had allowed her to walk at least upon the leads in the open air, in the dining-chamber, and also in the courtyard. In this report M. de Castellaune explained that he too had originally put down her illness to the ‘painful, importunate and almost constant workings of her mind’, but now the unmistakable evidence of constant vomitings, discharges from the brain and ‘the greatest debility in the stomach’ forced him to realize that her sufferings were all too genuine.²⁴ Secondly, quite apart from the difficulty of convincing her captors that she was ill at all, Mary was additionally unfortunate in that her whole being craved fresh air, the free physical exercise, the ability to ride regularly every day, which she passionately believed would alone cure her. All her life she had shown a desire for physical exercise, especially riding, bordering on a mania; as a queen it had been all too easy to gratify this wish. Now she found herself totally deprived of regular exercise, except when Shrewsbury’s régime became lax enough to permit it, and at the same time her health rapidly deteriorated. Her very muscles seemed to seize up with lack of use. It was no wonder that her letters were permeated with agonizing pleas for more sympathetic regard to her physical needs in this respect, and that she herself attributed her increasing sickness to her deprivation of sufficient exercise and fresh air.

The exact medical causes of Mary’s undoubted ill-health have been the subject of several modern investigations. It used to be suggested that her symptoms corresponded most nearly with those of a sufferer from a gastric ulcer.* But recently Drs Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, working on a group of diseases known as the porphyrias, have identified the recurrent illness of George III as belonging to it.† An important aspect of this disorder is that it is hereditary, being transmitted as a Mendelian dominant character, showing itself in varying degrees of severity, from individual to individual. In the course of their investigations they have traced back similar symptoms to George III’s ancestor and ancestress James VI and I and Mary Queen of Scots. There are of course difficulties in the way of any medical diagnosis made at the distance of four hundred years, if only because the medical language used then was inevitably angled towards the diseases of whose existence the doctors were aware. Sixteenth-century medicine was obsessed by the notion of the four ‘cardinal humours’ or chief fluids within the human body – blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy, or black choler; their relative proportions within individuals were thought to determine their physical and mental qualities as well as their total temperament. Since the various ‘defluxions’ or physical substances which proceeded from the unfortunate queen of Scots were always considered by her doctors in the context of this theory, contemporary commentators may well have overlooked clues vital to the modern diagnostician.

The symptoms of porphyria are severe attacks of abdominal ‘colicky’ pain with vomiting and extreme distress at the time, even transient mental breakdown, which may be interpreted by observers as hysterical. The attacks may be mild or severe and may occur frequently or at long intervals; another feature of the disorder is that often, despite the severity of the attack, the patient recovers quickly afterwards. It certainly seems far easier to relate these symptoms rather than those of a gastric ulcer to the case of Mary; in particular the episodic nature of her sufferings – bouts of severe illness followed by speedy physical recovery – fits better with the known pattern of the porphyria-sufferer than that of the ulcer subject. It is clear that Mary, like her descendant George III, underwent genuine rather than hysterical sufferings, which at times amounted to a complete breakdown, indistinguishable from madness.

The period when she definitely showed every sign of breakdown and hysteria to outsiders – after the birth of James until her incarceration at Lochleven – may even have been due to the exacerbating effects of her confinement upon the disease, such as have been traced by Drs Macalpine and Hunter in the case of George III’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. Mary’s gastric symptoms, her ‘colicky’ pain, which James VI himself noted that he had inherited from his mother, fit with the known symptoms of acute and intermittent porphyria. Even the pains in her arms and legs to which she so often referred in her own letters, which she ascribed to rheumatism, correspond to the painful paresis of the extremities often experienced by the porphyria-sufferer. Her attacks of ‘hysterical’ distress certainly occurred at irregular intervals, and although they appeared to die away towards the end of her life, since her lifespan was cut short at forty-four it is impossible to tell how her medical history might have developed in later years. As to the hereditary nature of the disease, the mysterious ‘hysterical’ manner of the death of James V, which has so long puzzled historians, suggests that if Mary did suffer from porphyria, it was from her father that she inherited it.

But to Mary personally it was the intensity of her sufferings, not the origins of her disease, which was of importance; the fact that she was probably a victim of inherited porphyria was unknown to her as it was to her jailers, fascinating as the speculation is to both historians and doctors. For Mary at the time, the important fact was that the nineteen years of her captivity were darkened still further by the black clouds of genuine physical suffering, in which her captors often did not believe, when her horizon was already tragically obscured by lack of liberty.

Sick woman as Mary Stuart might be, she did not abandon hopes of release. Her own correspondence continued to buzz with schemes for assistance from abroad. The fact that she was generally regarded as marriageable meant that despite her captivity she never lost her place as a piece on the complicated chessboard of European politics in the 1570s. Her right on Catholic grounds of legitimacy actually to occupy – rather than succeed to – the English throne was another factor which gave her prominence as a chess piece; even if she herself was unable to organize any move personally, there was always the possibility that some foreign monarch would step in and help her to move once more on these grounds alone. The excommunication of Elizabeth by Pius V had brought this claim of Mary’s into fresh prominence; the new Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pius in 1575, believed strongly in Mary’s claims to the English throne, and consequently also interested himself in the question of her future bridegroom. The most likely foreign monarch to help Mary – because he was the natural enemy of England – was of course Philip II. Mary herself was so anxious to court Philip’s approval that in 1577 she made a will in which she actually made over her rights to the English crown and elsewhere to Philip, supposing that her immediate son and heir James never returned to the true Catholic Church.²⁵ However, such a will, made by a captive, had little reality, and was intended rather to please Philip – who was apprised of its sentiments – than to make any serious testamentary innovations.

Encouraged by the Pope, plans were now mooted by which Mary should be married off to Philip’s dashing illegitimate brother, the famous Don John of Austria. The problem was of course not so much how to bell the cat as how to rescue the cat from her captivity, before the match could actually take place. The prelude to this marriage was intended to be an invasion of England from the Spanish Netherlands, organized by Philip II, with papal approval and led by Don John, who would be rewarded, as in a fairy story, by the hand of the captive princess; together this romantic pair would then reign happily ever after as Catholic king and queen of England. The idea of a marriage between Mary and Don John, of whom even Walsingham admiringly observed ‘Surely I never saw a gentleman for personage, speech, wit and entertainment comparable to him. If pride do not overthrow him, he is like to become a great personage’, is a tantalizing one. Unfortunately the scheme, like so many involving the rescue of the queen of Scots, was subject to all the complicated pressure of politics in Europe at this period. The marriage never actually left the realm of dreams to which it belonged, as Spain, England and France and their respective sovereigns jockeyed among themselves to maintain their position or increase it, and Elizabeth allowed her strange courtship by the duke of Anjou to hold out prospects of an Anglo-French alliance. In this situation the Spanish Netherlands, in a state of seething revolt against Spanish overlordship, acted as a perpetual apple of discord among these goddesses. From the point of view of English trade, Elizabeth was anxious to see the stabilization of the Netherlands; yet she was equally concerned that they should not be so stable that Spain should be able to use the provinces as a convenient jumping-off place for the invasion of England; at the same time unrest in the Netherlands at any moment might provide an excuse for France to intervene there, a prospect which horrified Elizabeth. In the meantime Philip continued to maintain his usual caution in considering any invasion schemes, which he was sensible enough to realize might result in the rapid execution of Mary long before her would-be rescuers ever reached her.

The curious fact was that although the Pope continued to take a great interest in the subject of Mary’s fourth husband, she was still legally married to her third husband, Bothwell. Despite the report of the English ambassador in Paris, Norris, to that effect,²⁶ the nullification of Mary’s marriage to Bothwell was not secured in the late summer of 1570. The validity of any marriage Mary might have contracted in the past had to be referred directly to Rome, the marriages of royal persons being reserved to the Pope himself ascausae majores. In Mary’s instructions to Ridolfi in February 1571, whether genuine or false, she bewailed the Pope’s delay in giving the decree of nullity and asked him to speed matters on: about July 1571, Pius V seems to have authorized a commission to examine the case.²⁷ But it was not until 1575, when Leslie was freed from his English prison, that some serious action seems to have been taken on the subject. Notwithstanding his temporary betrayal of his mistress, under interrogation in the Tower, Leslie was re-adopted into Mary’s service and his liberation was even celebrated by a short poem from her own pen, beginning:²⁸

Puisque Dieu a, par son bonte imence,
Permis qu’ayez obtins tant de bon heur …*

Leslie subsequently went to Rome on Mary’s behalf and in August 1576 a number of depositions were taken on behalf of the Bothwell marriage in Paris, at his instance, before a French judge ordinary.²⁹ The witnesses included John Cuthbert, Leslie’s servant, James Curl, an elderly Scottish Catholic exile, Sebastian Danelcourt, a Frenchman married to a Scotswoman who had abandoned Scotland for France on religious grounds, and Cuthbert Ramsay, brother of Lord Dalhousie, an expatriate Scot, as well as two Scottish priests living in Paris. Leslie’s petition for nullity was based on the fact that the marriage of Bothwell and Jean Gordon had been a true marriage; that Bothwell had taken Mary by force; and that in any case Bothwell and Jean had not been properly divorced; he also added the fact – perfectly true – that Mary and Jean were kin. The depositions of the witnesses added little to what was already known about Bothwell’s two marriages, but merely confirmed quite straightforwardly that Bothwell had lived with both Jean and Mary in turn as his lawful wedded wives.

Despite the establishment of this evidence, and despite the fact that Mary was obviously regarded as free to marry again by the Pope as by every other ecclesiastic, no decree of nullity was actually proclaimed.† The reason for this was the extreme danger which it felt threatened the queen of Scots if too much publicity was given to plans to free her: a declaration that she was no longer married to Bothwell carried the inevitable corollary that she intended to marry someone else. This would point a finger of suspicion at her. Not only might plots outside miscarry, but also her own head might be struck from its shoulders. A letter from the cardinal of Como in 1576 indicates the papal reasoning: ‘As the Queen of Scotland is a prisoner, his Holiness sees not how it will be possible to treat with her as to providing her with a husband without running manifest risk of revealing what should be left secret.’³⁰ In April 1578 the death of Bothwell in his Danish prison freed Mary in any case from the bonds of matrimony, just six months before the death of Don John himself, probably of typhoid, in the Netherlands, put an end forever to Mary’s hopes in this direction.

The conditions of Bothwell’s last years were shockingly frightful: nothing he had done in life could justify the incarceration of this once active and vigorous man in a foreign prison for eleven years without trial. At first the Danish king had held him as a possible pawn against Elizabeth; now an Anglo-Danish alliance had put an end to his usefulness in that respect. In vain his Scottish enemies had repeatedly attempted to secure his extradition. Bothwell lingered on in prisons of increasing rigour, until the swift vengeance of his fellow-nobles might have seemed an infinitely preferable fate. It seems virtually certain that he was driven mad in his last years in the cruel fortress of Dragsholm, by the intolerable conditions in which he was held; James Maitland, who wintered in Copenhagen only twelve years after his death, heard this. There is a tradition – without definite proof – that he ended by being chained to a pillar half his height like an animal, so that he could never stand upright. The memoirs of Lord Herries wrote his epitaph thus: ‘The King of Denmark caused cast him into a loathsome prison where none had access to him, but only those that carried him such scurvy meat and drink as was allowed, which was given in at a little window. Here he was kept ten years till being overgrown with hair and filth he died.’*³¹

If Mary would scarcely have recognized in this demented and pitiful figure the man to whom she had once looked above all for strength and support, perhaps Bothwell himself might not have easily discerned in the sad, staid captive of Sheffield Castle the features of the young and beautiful queen whom he had first served and then married in the year of her personal rule in Scotland. The ‘sweet face’ which the good people of Edinburgh had blessed as their queen passed nearly twenty years ago on her first arrival in Scotland had altered much as a result of ill-health and the privations and cares of close confinement. The largest and best known category of the portraits of Mary Stuart date from these later years of her life – being various versions of the picture sometimes termed the Sheffield portrait which shows her standing either full-length or three-quarters, wearing black velvet dress and the white peaked head-dress she immortalized.* The date is often painted in the corner of the picture. A number of versions of this picture were made and circulated about the Continent during Mary’s lifetime, as she became increasingly a focus of Catholic respect and devotion. After her death, this Catholic devotion only increased, while after the accession of her son James to the throne of England, versions of this picture also found their way into the possession of grand English families, as part of the general rehabilitation of Mary’s memory, as mother of the sovereign.

The origin of all these portraits seems to have been in miniatures, painted without the knowledge of the English government. Even a miniaturist was difficult enough to introduce into Mary’s prison: in 1575 she had to ask her ambassador in Paris to have some little pictures of her made up abroad, in order to distribute them to faithful Catholics in England who were asking for them.³² But by 1577 there was evidently some sort of miniaturist at work, at Sheffield, for Nau mentioned in a letter to Archbishop Beaton in Paris that ‘he had thought to have accompanied this letter with a portrait of Her Majesty, but the painter has not been able to finish it in time’.³³ Two surviving miniatures in the Mauritshuis and in Blairs College, Aberdeen, are probably to be identified with the work of this unknown painter. The actual miniature from which the whole group of Sheffield portraits derives can, however, be identified: it is by Nicholas Hilliard.³⁴ It seems likely that Hilliard was one famous painter who did personally penetrate the queen’s captivity: not only does the Hilliard miniature show signs of close observation from the life, but Bess of Hardwicke herself is known to have patronized Hilliard, and in 1591 there was some question of his painting a secret miniature of Arbella Stuart.³⁵ It would have been quite possible for Bess to have allowed Hilliard the privilege of painting her royal prisoner, in the same gambling spirit as she later considered the painting of Arbella, in order to forward Stuart claims. Although most of the later versions of this famous picture date from after 1603, despite earlier dates painted in the corner, for the Hilliard miniature itself a date of 1578 is perfectly acceptable on costume grounds.*

The face in the Hilliard miniature and all versions of this portrait shows how much the queen’s youthful beauty had been dimmed by the passage of time, even allowing for the woodenness of the treatment. Mary is now very far from being the laughing Goujon-like belle of the French court: this is a woman with a drawn face, a beaky prominent nose almost Roman in its shape but cut finely at the end, with a small rather pinched mouth; the smallness of the whole face is in contrast to the fullness of the body, which is now matronly in its proportions. It is well attested that by the date of her death nine years later Mary had fully lost that willowy slimness of figure which, combined with her elegant height, had been one of her chief attractions when she was young. It is evident from the Sheffield portrait, as also from the medallion portrait of her enprofil which was the frontispiece of Leslie’s history De Origine Moribus et Rebus Gestis Scotorum also published in 1578, that by then this process was at least well advanced. The profile, believed to have been done from a miniature in Italy, shows that the charming and clearly defined oval of Mary’s face in youth had by now blurred into fullness round the chin. Health may have been responsible for Mary putting on weight, but the queen was by now presumably approaching the age of the menopause, and this too may have played its part in the process. One beauty remains in these portraits which time could not touch: although the once gay and slanting eyes are now sad and watchful and the mouth with its lips which once curved so prettily in a delicate arch above all other features shows the effect of pain and illness in the way the corners have newly tucked in, yet the hands of Mary Stuart are as beautiful as ever. Long and exquisite, the white fingers splay out against the black velvet gown, or drape themselves in some versions of the portrait on the red table, as romantically as they ever did in the days when Ronsard hymned their beauty.

The outward changes in the appearance of Mary Queen of Scots were paralleled by the inward changes in her character. In 1580 Mary wrote on her own initiative a long Essay on Adversity in which she explained that she of all people was most suited to write on this melancholy subject – in any case the mental exercise would save from indolence one who had once been accustomed to rule, and could no longer follow her destined calling. She concluded that the only remedy for the afflicted lay in turning to God.³⁷ Indeed those long white hands were now often clasped in prayer. It was no mere coincidence that in the portraits a great gold rosary is often shown hanging down from her belt. The woman who had once believed implicitly but unreflectively in the truths of the Catholic religion, and had allowed action not thought to rule her life, now found herself involuntarily forced back on the resources of meditation. It would be true to say that the quality of Mary’s religious beliefs had never truly been tested up to the present. In France there had been nothing to try, much to encourage, them. In Scotland she had insisted on the practice of her own religion, but this minor concession had not been difficult to establish in view of the fact that she was the reigning queen, and was herself prepared to show total tolerance to the official Protestant religion of the country. In her early months in England she had seen no particular harm in allowing others to explain to her at their own invitation the truths of the Protestant religion as they saw them. But now to exercise her religion needed cunning and tenacity; she was living in a country where Catholics were not only not tolerated, but often persecuted, and persecuted with increasing severity after Pius v’s bull of excommunication towards Elizabeth.

Sir John Mortoun, the secret priest, died and was succeeded by another secret chaplain, de Préau. For a short period in 1571, Ninian Winzet, the Scottish Catholic apologist, entered her service, nominally as her ‘Scottish secretary’ but in fact acting as her confessor, through the good offices of Beaton; he was subsequently sent away to London to join Leslie in his house arrest.’³⁸ In October 1575 Mary wrote to the Pope asking that her chaplain should have episcopal function, and the power to grant her absolution after hearing her confession. She named twenty-five Catholics whom she asked should be granted absolution for attending Protestant ceremonies in order to divert suspicion. Mary asked for a plenary indulgence as she prayed before the Holy Sacrament or bore in silence the insults of a heretic: with prescience for the future, she asked that in the moment of death, if she repeated the words Jesu, Maria, even if she only spoke them with ‘her heart rather than her mouth’, her sins might be forgiven her.³⁹ A Jesuit priest, Samerie, managed to visit the queen secretly on three occasions in the early 1580s, to act as her chaplain, disguised variously as a member of her household, including her valet and her physician.⁴⁰ Such manoeuvres and the preservation in secret of the rites of the Mass by one means and another demanded courage and the real will to take part in them. But to Mary, as to many others in whom the hectic and heedless blood of youth fades, giving place to a nobler and gentler temperament, her religion itself had come to mean much more to her.

It was not only that the Catholic powers abroad represented her best hope of escape from captivity; it was also that she herself had undergone a profound change of attitude to her faith, and indeed to life itself. It is the mark of greatness in a person to be able to develop freely from one phase into another as age demands it. Mary Stuart was capable of this development. Her whole character deepened. Having been above all things a woman of action, she now became under the influence of the imprisonment which she so much detested a far more philosophical and contemplative personality. Two poems printed in Leslie’s Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes of 1574 speak of sad memories, of the world’s inconstancy and of the need for sacrifice. Lines written in a Book of Hours in 1579 allude bitterly to false friends, and the need for solitary courage, in face of the fickle changes of fortune.

Bien plus utile est l’heure et non pas la fortune
Puisqu’elle change autant qu’elle este opportune*

But in another poem, probably written in the early 1580s, she showed more Christian resignation:

Donne seigneur, donne moi patience
Et renforce ma trop debile foi
Que ton esprit me conduise en ta loi
Et me guarde de choir imprudence†

And at the end of her Essay on Adversity, after discussing a series of Biblical, Roman and medieval examples of rulers who had fallen into adversity, Mary quoted the parable of the talents to explain how much would be forgiven to those who had made the best of their lives: ‘God, like the good father of a family, distributes His talents among His children, and whoever receives them and puts them out of profit is discharged and excused from eternal suffering.’ She certainly put her own philosophy into practice to the extent that the talents she showed in her middle-age were very different from those she displayed in youth. The carefree buoyancy which Mary displayed then, so alluring in a young woman, would have been intolerable and even frivolous in the captive queen. Mary’s utterances in her forties show on the one hand an infinitely nobler and deeper spirit, and on the other a serenity and internal repose quite out of keeping with her previous behaviour.

Mary Stuart achieved this serenity and this intelligence at the cost of much pain, heart-searching and suffering. She, who had never been known to exist without an adviser, and had never wished to do so, whether it was her grandmother, her Guise uncles, the lamentable Darnley, her half-brother Moray, Riccio or Bothwell, was compelled in the last years of her life to exist without any sort of reliable advice or support from outside. She was now the shoulder on whom her servants leant, and to whom her envoys, many of them of questionable loyalty, looked for direction. She might even secretly write to the outside world for advice, and receive it, but when it came to taking action, actually within the confines of the prison itself, there was Mary and only Mary to make decisions and inspire their implementation. The pretty puppet-queen of France, the spirited but in some ways heedless young ruler of Scotland, could never have carried through the remarkable performance which Mary Stuart was to display in her last years. The uses of adversity for Mary Stuart, bitter-sweet as they might have been rather than sweet, were to teach her that self-control and strength of character which were to enable her to outwit Elizabeth at the last by the heroic quality of her ending.

* Mary Fleming lived on for many years after her husband’s death. She obtained the reversal of the forfeiture of his possessions in 1583. She seems to have brought up her children, including that son James Maitland who was to publish a defence of his father’s honour, as Catholics.

* It is difficult not to sympathize with the unfortunate Shrewsbury in his frequent moans of penury; he was certainly not justly treated by the Elizabethan government over the allowance. At the same time, it should be pointed out that it was at this same period that Shrewsbury felt himself able to embark on the major building-scheme of a new house – Worksop – although he was already amply endowed with residences. It does seem to argue that he was bankrupted more by his building-schemes than by the diet of the queen of Scots.

* Cecil was created Lord Burghley in February 1571, but for the convenience of the present narrative, he will continue to be referred to by his original name.

* The calm of the religious life led to longevity. Mary Seton survived her mistress by nearly thirty years, being last heard of in 1615. In 1602 an elaborate will provided for three High Masses to be said in the church of St Pierre for the repose of the soul of Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland. But her latter end was less glorious than her first beginning: in 1613 James Maitland reported that this once proud daughter of an ancient Scottish house was now ‘decrepit and in want’, and dependent on the charity of the nuns. Maitland begged James vi to help her, for his dead mother’s sake.²¹

* By Sir Arthur Salusbury MacNalty, Mary Queen of Scots, London 1960, Appendix I, where her symptoms are listed in detail and this conclusion is drawn.

†See Porphyria – a Royal Malady, British Medical Association publication, 1968, including articles published in or commissioned by the British Medical Journal by Drs I. Macalpine, R. Hunter, Professor Rimington, on porphyria in the Royal Houses of Stuart, etc., and by Professor Goldberg on ‘The Porphynas’ as a group of diseases.

* Since God, in His wondrous goodness, Hath given you so much joy…

† There is no record that such a decree was ever made and extensive recent researches in the Vatican Archives on the author’s behalf by Dr C. Burns have failed to reveal it.

* The mummified corpse of Bothwell is still displayed in the crypt of Faarevejle church, near Dragsholm.

* This ‘Marie Stuart hood’ consisted of a small white lawn headdress, dipping over the forehead and edged with lace; behind it flowed a lawn veil or head-rail, threaded with wire at the top to frame the head and shoulders in an arch.

* This Sheffield portrait used sometimes to be known as the Oudry portrait, after the words P. OUDRY PINXIT painted on the version of it at Hardwicke Hall. It was suggested that the unknown Oudry had been the original artist who painted Mary in captivity. But the Hardwicke Hall version is not listed in the 1601 inventory of the house; an entry in the accounts in 1613 probably relates to payments made for bringing the picture to the house. Since earlier versions of the picture do not have the words painted on them, the legend of Oudry the unknown artist is exploded.³⁶

* Time than fortune should be held more precious For fortune is as false as she is specious!⁴¹

†Give me, dear Lord, the true humility And strengthen my too feeble halting faith; Let but Thy Spirit shed his light on me – Checking my fever with His purer breath.⁴²