CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Mother and Son

‘… nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her …’

The advice of Hamlet’s ghost-father on the subject of
his mother Gertrude (the relationship of Hamlet and Gertrude
is thought to have been founded by Shakespeare on the story of
Mary Queen of Scots and James VI)

While Mary languished in captivity, the child whom she had last seen as a ten-month-old baby at Stirling Castle in 1567 had grown to a precocious adulthood. Mary still pined for James, or the idea of the infant she had lost. In return she genuinely imagined that James also longed for her, prompted by the dictates of natural affection which she believed must always exist between a child and its mother. No doubt she allowed herself to be buoyed up with the falsely sanguine stories of his love for her related to her by kindly courtiers. Such apocryphal tales were easily spun, and greedily accepted by the maternal heart of the prisoner, who had no means to check them, and every reason to hope they were true. One such tale, from a Catholic source, related how James as a boy had once been observed to be in an especially happy mood at supper, and had smiled all over his face; the reason for his genial temper proved to be that he had secretly obtained a copy of Bothwell’s dubious Testament of Confession, read it and from this had realized that his mother was in fact quite innocent of the murder of his father. Similar stories must have given Mary a very false impression of the way James’s mind was being bent. As late as 1584 Lady Margaret Fleming wrote to Mary from Scotland and told her that although Scottish court manners had sadly changed for the worse, this was not James’s fault, and he himself would certainly always behave as ‘a humble, obedient and most loving son’ towards her.*¹

The reality was to be very different; nor did James ever show himself in the light of a loving, let alone obedient, son to Mary. It was Mary’s tragedy that she continued to believe that he would do so, and that she had from the first a totally false impression of the mother-and-son relationship. In the first vital years of infancy, James had been looked after by the countess of Mar, a ‘Jezebel’ of a woman as Knox called her, who hated Queen Mary. From four years onward his education was mainly in the hands of Mary’s inveterate enemy and chief traducer George Buchanan. The man, once Mary’s respectful admirer, who had allowed himself to concoct the disgusting stories of the Detection was scarcely likely to spare Mary’s reputation when discussing his mother with the child. Later James imbibed a great deal of Calvinist theology from the one tutor, Peter Young, for whom he seems at least to have felt some affection. James’s childhood was an unhappy compilation of long hours of learning – he later commented ruefully that he had been made to learn Latin before he could even speak Scots – with occasional dramatic and bloodthirsty interventions, as terrifying as any pre-natal influence from Riccio’s slaughter, as when at the age of five he witnessed the bleeding corpse of his grandfather Lennox being carried past him into Stirling Castle. Not only was he totally cut off from a mother’s love in childhood, but he was also trained to regard his mother as the murderess of his father, an adulteress who had deserted him for her lover, and last of all, the protagonist of a wicked and heretical religion.

It was true that James subsequently turned on Buchanan for his libels on his mother; he called the regent Moray that ‘bastard who unnaturally rebelled and procured the ruin of his own sovereign and sister’; in 1584 he obtained the condemnation of Buchanan’s writing in Parliament. Much later he counselled his own son against reading ‘the infamous invectives’ of Buchanan and Knox.³ But the point remained that enough had been done in early childhood to rob James of any natural feeling at all, let alone for his mother. Intellectually he could replace Buchanan’s false picture of Mary with one he chose to believe was the true one. But he could never replace in his heart the inborn love of son for mother, since this flickering newly-lighted flame had been extinguished shortly after his birth by Mary’s enemies.

James, like Mary herself, had been brought up to believe himself to be a ruling monarch, despite the fact that his mother was still alive. In appearance he had grown up to be a wizened creature with sad eyes, in stature very unlike his tall and godlike parents. Fontenay, who visited him at Mary’s instigation in 1584, was impressed by James’s intelligence: he found him to have a retentive memory, to be full of penetrating questions and able to conduct a good argument; yet he had three faults which Fontenay listed – overconfidence or an inability to estimate his own poverty and insignificance, an indiscreet love of favourites, and a tendency to pursue pleasure rather than politics which too easily allowed others to seize the reins of the realm.⁴ In 1580 Father Robert Abercromby, a Jesuit on a mission to Scotland, gave his own opinion on James: he found the king to be deep in Calvinism, simply because he had known no other religion discussed since adolescence.⁵ None of this added up to much possibility of genuine sympathy with Mary; this was not the tender charming boy of Mary’s imagination who would make every effort to release his mother from the nightmare of her captivity. Like many people who have had an unhappy and unaffectionate childhood and withdrawn into their own thoughts for security, James was already a practised deceiver by the time he reached his teens. Elizabeth’s comment when she heard of the execution of Morton in 1581 probably contained far more important guidance for Mary on the subject of James’s character than any of the more optimistic comments to which Mary herself listened: ‘That false Scotch urchin!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘What can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!’⁶

Mary’s picture of her son and of their relations was very different: she had after all carried this child in her womb through manifold dangers and difficulties, and he was her only child – ‘One like the lioness’ as the motto proudly proclaimed which she had embroidercd on her hangings. She had few other objects on which to lavish her affections. The years in which James had grown up from unconscious babyhood to near adulthood had been spent by Mary cut off in captivity; her memories of her child kept green in her heart. Her will of 1577 in which she formally expressed the wish that her son should marry a Spanish princess and embrace the Catholic faith was only one example of how out of touch she had become with her son’s true development. In 1561 when Mary returned to Scotland, one of her problems had been that having been brought up in France she had insufficient understanding of the working of the Scots’ mind: now, from 1581 onwards, in the course of Mary’s schemes for unity with James, her difficulty was not being able to follow the complexities of her son’s mind after thirteen years of captivity.

Quite apart from this obstacle to their accord, Mary’s position as queen of Scots threatened that of her son as king. Mary had revoked the abdication she made under duress at Lochleven, during her few days of liberty before Langside in May 1568. In her own mind, therefore, and those of her supporters, especially the Catholic powers abroad, she was still the true queen of the country; James, despite his coronation at the age of thirteen months, and the government in his name which had existed ever since, was a usurper. This was Mary’s real hold over her son in 1580, rather than the natural ties of affection. There were advantages to James in having his de facto kingship recognized as de jure: not only would his position with France and Spain be improved, but also his position in the English succession might also be better secured. When James grew up, his letters to his mother struck an uneasy compromise: he addressed her as the queen of Scots, but signed himself James R. It was under these circumstances that, early in 1581, Mary outlined her own plan for ‘Association’ – or the joint rule of mother and son – through a Guise emissary, a scheme which naturally involved the restoration of Mary to Scotland.

The project naturally commended itself vividly to Mary, who had suggested it: once more she envisaged the prison gates opening and her own return to her throne. James himself was sufficiently attracted by the idea of the recognition of the Catholic powers at least to write a pleasant letter in return. The key to the whole project in James’s mind was of course the attitude of Elizabeth: English approval was still in the reign of James, as it had been in the reign of Mary, very much a factor of Scottish politics; the same considerations of an English alliance, English subsidies, the shared Protestant religion, and the involvement of the Scottish monarchy in the English royal succession, still obtained. In 1581 the emergence of James’s first favourite, his cousin Esmé Stuart whom he created duke of Lennox, in alliance with the bold swashbuckling Captain James Stewart,* led to the downfall of the pro-English regent, Morton. Morton was tried and executed for the murder of Darnley (who, like Banquo’s ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive). Mary had never forgiven Morton, and exulted over his death from her prison – ‘of whose execution I am most glad’, she wrote firmly.⁷ The new duke of Lennox did not long enjoy the power which this denouement gave to him; in August 1582 a palace revolution in the shape of the kidnapping of the king’s person by the Ruthven family, headed by the earl of Gowrie, placed the government of Scotland once more in pro-English hands. Esmé Stuart, duke of Lennox, retired to France after the raid of Ruthven and there died. A year later, however, James eluded his captors, and power was once more in the hands of the apparently anti-English Arran (James Stewart). James therefore professed himself to the Guises ready to entertain the notion of the Association, at the sacrifice of Elizabeth’s favour. Arran’s position was further strengthened when an unsuccessful attempt to unseat him on the part of pro-English lords including Mar and some Hamiltons, in the spring of 1584, ended with their flight to England, as Moray had once fled after the Chaseabout Raid in 1565; there was a further parallel – these lords had expected English aid in the project but had not received it.

James might be prepared to toy with the idea of the Association – since it temporarily fitted with his plans – but Mary herself was enthusiastic on the subject; into her service in this cause she now enlisted Patrick, master of Gray. Gray, a young man of Lucifer-like beauty, had also all the mingled potentialities of talent and treachery of the former archangel within his breast. In France Gray had entered the service of Mary’s ambassador, James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, and on being received into the inner circle of Mary’s supporters in Paris had become extremely friendly with the Guises; the esteem in which he was held in these circles may be judged by the fact that he was presented with silver plate to the value of five or six thousand crowns. Gray had paid one visit to Scotland, either with Esmé Stuart, or after the fall of Morton, during which his ostensibly Catholic faith had wavered, and he had promised to renounce it in favour of the reformed religion. His second visit occurred in November 1583, when he brought back Esmé Stuart’s young son, at James’s request, to be brought up at the Scottish court. Although entrusted by Mary to represent her counsels at the Scottish court, and push forward the notion of the Association, Gray quickly appreciated that it would be far more profitable personally to ally himself with the son, a king on a throne, than the mother, a prisoner without a kingdom. He became the friend and confidant of Arran, and from here reached the ear of James himself. From the first, Gray was in possession of enough of Mary’s secrets, and those of her little clique of supporters in France, to be able to betray both parties to James whenever he wished to convince him anew that, in a case of mother versus son, it would always be the son whom he would serve. Yet Mary, under the illusion that Gray was her emissary, continued to trust him to work for her, as she continued to believe in the affections of James.

It was now that the attitude of Elizabeth became so vital to the future, if any, of this plan of the Association. On mature reflection it was only too easy for James to see that the return of a released Mary to Scotland would be at least a serious nuisance to his own position; they were of different religion, to say nothing of different generation; how much better to secure the benefit of the Association, in the shape of Elizabeth’s favour and foreign approval, without the release of Mary. In an extreme case, it would still benefit James more to have an alliance and subsidy from Elizabeth than the official recognition of France. Yet such negotiations had to be conducted with enormous delicacy, since Elizabeth’s attitude could only be ascertained by secret probing, and in the meantime Mary had to be encouraged lest after all the Association might turn out to be advantageous to James. In the summer of 1584 it was Gray who was sent down to London to conduct these negotiations on behalf of the king. In the meantime not only was Mary specifically assured of James’s welcoming attitude towards her proposals by a letter from James himself in July, but she was also further informed that Gray’s mission was merely to treat with Elizabeth over the subject of the rebel lords who had fled to England.⁸

Mary had reluctantly to accept this story; from her prison there was little else she could do. Her own emissary Fontenay believed the season would never again be so favourable – ‘jamais si belle’ – to bring about the Association since both James and the Scots were now inclined towards Mary.⁹Nevertheless, in a series of letters written during October to Gray, and to Castelnau de Mauvissière, the French ambassador in London, she showed herself highly conscious of the dangers of her position should James ever try to negotiate separately; Mary, with the keen perception of the captive, saw that her only hope of eluding her prison was if James made her release one of his conditions of treating with Elizabeth. She emphasized to Gray the importance of not letting Elizabeth think that there were divisions between James and herself; furthermore Gray must demand Mary’s liberty as one of the conditions of an Anglo-Scottish rapprochement. Mary, still believing herself to be employing Gray, gave him a series of very explicit instructions as to how he was to negotiate while in London, and although her eventual destination after her release was left vague – either England or Scotland – the importance of the release was underlined.¹⁰ Yet from the first moment Gray arrived in London, it was immediately realized by the English that he would now serve the interests of James and Elizabeth rather than those of James and Mary: indeed, in view of the excellent knowledge Gray had acquired of Mary’s organization and her secrets while in her service, Elizabeth had acquired a valuable potential ally and Mary a dangerous potential traitor. In London Gray was given lodging by Sir Edward Hoby who had known him in France: Hoby, commenting to Cecil on Gray’s keen personal ambition, the desire for glory which ‘burnt in his stomach’, hinted that Gray had much secret information about Mary which he was prepared to impart: ‘he can speak and tell tales if he list …’¹¹

In vain Mary underlined to Gray what those around her were in danger of overlooking but she herself would never forget, that her imprisonment was illegal from the first moment, since she had not even been captured in war. Mary begged Gray to make Elizabeth realize that by liberating Mary she would be meriting the approval of James.¹² But even as Mary wrote, it was being made clear to Elizabeth that in fact this was the very last thing that would merit James’s approval. While Mary pleaded pathetically with Gray to pay her a personal visit in her prison, such contacts being most suitable to make mother and son better acquainted, Gray was busy in London betraying the cause of the mother at the instigation of the son. On 28th November Nau drew up twenty-eight heads of proposals on the subject of the Association at Mary’s request:¹³ Mary announced herself ready to stay in England if necessary, prepared to allow an amnesty to be declared over all the wrongs she had suffered at the hands of the English, renounce the Pope’s bull of excommunication, and abandon forever her own pretensions to the English crown over those of Elizabeth. Although confident of French agreement to these proposals, she also offered to join an offensive league against France, so long as an English dowry was assured to her, equivalent to that she would have to abandon in France, in the event of the French not subscribing to the idea of the Association. In Scotland she was also prepared to allow an amnesty, to agree that there should be no upset in the present state of the religion of the country; the only condition she made was that James should marry with Elizabeth’s knowledge and ‘good counsel’, and the only demand the immediate softening of her present harsh conditions of captivity. Such sweeping concessions on the part of Mary made it clear that sixteen years after her first English imprisonment she had one aim in view, and one aim only, to which she was prepared to sacrifice all other considerations – her freedom, by any means at all.

On 8th December, her forty-second birthday, Mary wrote to Elizabeth still wistfully hoping for two hours’ personal talk with her, the talk which she still felt after all these years would settle everything between them; and with her birthday uppermost in her mind, she took the opportunity to hope that Elizabeth would live to enjoy in the future as many happy years as Mary had endured unhappy ones in the past. On 14th December Mary reminded Gray by letter that James was not the sole king of Scotland, and that Gray must at all costs prevent mother and son being driven apart by ‘evil counsellors’ since it was so important to Mary’s cause that James should show himself a ‘natural and obedient son’.¹⁴ As late as January Mary was still hoping that liberty for her on these new terms was just round the corner, and desired the French king and queen to write separately to James acknowledging the Association in order to bring her son into accord with her.¹⁵ Yet all the while Gray had successfully concluded his mission in London on James’s behalf: he had indicated to Elizabeth that the release of Mary was not necessary to win James’s friendship, and he had learnt from Elizabeth also that her friendship could be won for James by a direct channel, without taking into account the claims, rights and certainly not the desires of the imprisoned Queen of Scots. The Association was now doomed; it became stamped merely as the unrealistic scheme of a tiresome middle-aged woman in prison, to whom no further attention need be paid in this context.

It was in March 1585 that the full horrifying truth could no longer be kept from Mary: James in Scotland assembled his whole Council as Gray gleefully wrote to Elizabeth; at which point it was formally concluded that the ‘Association desired by his mother should neither be granted nor spoken of hereafter’.¹⁶ At first Mary, in her pathetic desire to protect the image of her son in her own mind, even tried to persuade herself that the betrayal could be blamed on Gray. On being informed that James could not negotiate with her while she was a prisoner, she inquired miserably with childlike logic why Elizabeth could not then free her, so that she would at least be able to negotiate with her own son. A passionate postscript to this letter, in her own hand, revealed the depth of her agitation: ‘I am so grievously offended at my heart,’ she scrawled, ‘at the impiety and ingratitude that my child has been constrained to commit against me, by this letter which Gray made him write.’ Wildly she threatened to disinherit James and give the crown to the greatest enemy he had, rather than allow this sort of treatment. In her letter to Elizabeth the same day, Gray is ‘ce petit broullon’ (troublemaker) and James this badly brought up child (‘mal gouverné enfant’). In her next letter to Elizabeth she bewailed the mischief which had been made recently between herself and James by sinister counsels¹⁷ – unaware of the grisly truth still more unbearable to a mother’s heart. That it was not a few months’ trouble-making by Gray but nearly twenty years of total separation which had led to the breach between mother and son. James’s welcome of the Association in July 1584 had been apparently unrestrained: his repudiation of it the following March was total. He had betrayed Mary, and so had Gray. But in the delicate game of Anglo-Scottish relations, James had discovered that whereas he held some of the cards and Elizabeth held some of the others, Mary held none at all. There was nothing Mary, still firmly within the four walls of her prison, could do except rage and weep alternately at the perfidy of her son, and the betrayal of her child.

In 1584, the year of Mary’s repudiation by James, her own domestic circumstances underwent an unpleasant change. Mary had been able in the last years in prison to enjoy a pleasant quasi-maternal relationship with her own niece, little Arbella Stuart, the pretty pudgy dimpled child of Darnley’s younger brother, Charles Stuart, and Bess of Hardwicke’s own daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish. The marriage of Arbella’s parents had been brought about under romantic circumstances within the orbit of Mary herself. In 1574 Charles’s mother, countess of Lennox, now reconciled to Mary over the subject of James, had asked permission from Elizabeth to visit her ex-daughter-in-law at Chatsworth on her way to Scotland to see her grandson. To Elizabeth the possible combination of these two formidable matrons, Margaret Lennox and Bess of Hardwicke, seemed lethal; permission was refused. However, while the countess of Lennox was lodging at a neighbouring house on her way north, her son Charles fell ill; Bess of Hardwicke had already ridden over to visit the countess, bringing her daughter by the hand. As ten years before the timely illness of Darnley had led to his romance with Mary, so now once more the sick-room played its part in the fortunes of the Lennox Stuarts. Before the boy recovered, the young couple had fallen in love, and whether the circumstances of the romance were quite as fortuitous as they seemed, certainly both the grand ladies involved were pleased by it. Margaret Lennox was poor, but her son stood in line to two kingdoms as his brother Darnley had once done; furthermore she was the grandmother of a little king of Scotland. Bess of Hardwicke, on the other hand, was of low birth but had made herself rich and powerful. Once more, as with Mary’s marriage to Darnley, Elizabeth flew into a violent rage at hearing of this pretty romance which was supposed to have flared up so innocently in the Midlands. Both countesses were summoned back to London, and both clapped into prison.

The terms of imprisonment were in both cases relatively short. Out of this ill-starred marriage, some time during the autumn of 1575 the little Arbella Stuart was born: her sex must have been a sad disappointment to both grandmothers, but as with Mary Stuart herself, Arbella was not destined to be replaced by the birth of a brother. Her sickly young father died of consumption in the spring of the next year; although her mother lived on till 1582, when she too died in her early twenties, from then on the child was brought up much of the time with her maternal grandmother Bess. In vain both grandmothers tried to secure the earldom of Lennox for the little girl after her father’s death: the regent of Scotland admitted that the earldom had originally been granted to Charles Stuart, instead of to James, who as direct male heir and son of the elder son Darnley should rightfully have inherited it from his grandfather, Matthew, earl of Lennox; but he stated that the patent could be revoked as James had been a minor at the time, especially as Charles’s child was a female. In spite of being known as the comitessa and having the formal title grandly painted on her portrait as a two-year-old child, little Arbella never did secure her earldom; and when Esmé Stuart rose to favour in Scotland, it was this earldom which James used to bestow honour upon him.

Only Mary Queen of Scots continued to acknowledge the baby as the claimant: her will of February 1577 referred to ‘Arbelle, ma nièce’ as earl of Lennox and commanded James to respect Arbella’s right if she, Mary, died.¹⁸ Mary also tried to get Queen Elizabeth to hand over Margaret, countess of Lennox’s jewels to Arbella after the countess’s death. She played with the idea of marrying Arbella to her first cousin James. In addition to these practical efforts on behalf of ‘my precious jewel, Arbell’, as her grandmother Bess called her, Mary also enjoyed the innocent and touching companionship of the little girl, who with her royal blood and claims to two thrones, so incongruous with the simple routines of infancy, may have reminded Mary of the child she had once been. Mary had another favourite – Elisabeth Pierrepoint, also one of Bess’s grand-daughters, who was her own god-daughter, whom she loved to spoil and pet; she called her her ‘mignonne’, and ‘little bedfellow’ (since they sometimes shared a bed, according to the domestic custom of the time). Mary even took pains to make her little favourite a special black dress.¹⁹ Marguerite de Valois in her memoirs condescendingly observed that it was natural for old people to love little children whereas those who were in their prime were apt to look down upon them and dislike ‘their unfortunate simplicity’. In Mary’s case, she had never looked down upon the unfortunate simplicity of children, showing fondness for the young such as her godson Francis Stewart even when she was barely twenty, not yet a mother herself and in the midst of the full excitement of reigning in Scotland; yet certainly once she was a prisoner, her maternal feelings increased, and the little Shrewsbury grandchildren who pattered about the many Shrewsbury palaces – or prisons – provided much solace for her affectionate nature, just as she in turn must have constituted a glamorous feature of their childhood.

Close contact between Arbella* and Mary was, however, put to an end by the reverberating row which now broke out between Mary and Bess of Hardwicke, an altercation in which Bess was entirely the aggressor since Mary was only involved as the innocent victim of the scandals surrounding the break-up of the Shrewsbury ménage. The Shrewsbury marriage troubles seem to have started some time after the death of Shrewsbury’s son, Gilbert Talbot, in 1582; property was at the root of their quarrels. Now in her efforts to get the best of the dispute, Bess cast about her in her well-filled mental armoury and decided to accuse her husband of scandalous relations with his prisoner Mary Queen of Scots. It was a sharp-edged weapon indeed; it was typical of Bess’s clever but unscrupulous tactics that she picked the accusation most likely to embarrass and wound her husband where it hurt – in his area of public service. Such charges horrified Shrewsbury, for they would surely confirm all the old rumours that he was as a jailer too favourably disposed towards the queen of Scots. Blown up by rumours, the scandal ballooned outwards. A certain John Palmer went on record as saying at St James’s Palace that the queen of Scots had borne two bastard children to Lord Shrewsbury, and had to make a public submission in consequence.²⁰ One Babsthorpe wrote a book full of lewd speeches on the subject, and Shrewsbury was eventually allowed to sue him, although Elizabeth attempted to stop the case under the statute of scandalum magnatum.

Mary herself was indignant and furious. Her honour was outraged and she persistently demanded that she should be allowed to come to court to clear herself: it was like the conference of Westminster all over again to her sensitive spirit – there was Bess at liberty in London spreading malicious stories, and yet Mary was not even allowed the opportunity to appear and contradict them. In a long letter to Elizabeth in October 1584 she demanded that Bess and her son Charles Cavendish should be publicly examined and their servants examined also and then punished for spreading such slanders; to Walsingham, Mary threatened to make known the evil-doing of ‘la bonne Comptesse’, as she sarcastically termed Bess, to all the princes of Christianity.²¹ In the end Bess’s calumnies proved too much for Mary’s self-control; in November she wrote a long and burning letter to Elizabeth not only rebutting Bess’s charges against her, but, more to the point, detailing all the many salacious stories which Bess had spread about Elizabeth in the past. Mary described how Bess had been wont to regale the household at Chatsworth and elsewhere in days gone by with cruel stories of Elizabeth’s vanity, and shocking stories of her immorality. Elizabeth believed herself to be so beautiful that she resembled a goddess of the skies – how Bess and the countess of Lennox had laughed at her behind her back! Mary had often heard Elizabeth treated as ‘une comédie’ even in the presence of her own waiting-women. This ridiculous monster of vanity had also been described as lying in bed with Leicester many times and, among other scandals, taking the wretched Christopher Hatton by force. Bess was supposed to have joined disloyalty to ridicule and scandal-making: Mary also retailed how delightful Bess had been when Elizabeth fell ill because this fulfilled an astrological prediction that Elizabeth would soon be dead and Mary reigning in her place, after which James and Arbella would succeed as king and queen.²² It is easy to believe that most of this unsavoury scandal had indeed tripped off Bess’s tongue in the course of those female conversations in Bess’s chamber; private conversation of a gossiping nature never looks particularly pretty set down much later and Bess’s tales were no exception. As for Mary’s part in passing on all this stale and unprofitable abuse, it seems that even despite provocation she had second thoughts after she had written the letter. There is no evidence that Elizabeth, to whom it was addressed, ever read this bombshell: it was found later among the Cecil papers, and although it is possible that Cecil himself intercepted it before it reached the queen, the most likely explanation seems to be that Mary herself, like so many writers, reconsidered the letter after she had exhausted her venom with her pen, and kept it among her own papers without ever sending it. From here it would have been seized with the rest of her correspondence at Chartley in 1586.

There was certainly no grain of truth in all these rumours as Lady Shrewsbury and her daughter subsequently admitted to the English Council. Mary had by now a sufficient reputation as a femme fatale to be the natural target for such fabricated arrows. John Palmer’s stories of bastard children by Shrewsbury may be seen as being the last of a long progression of such philoprogenitive rumours throughout Mary Stuart’s life, which if all had been true would have made her instead of the lioness with her one whelp the mother of a sizeable family.* Shrewsbury was not immune to Mary’s charm any more than had been Knollys, White or even Cecil himself; he had known her over a long period of time in circumstances of great intimacy. One can understand that such propinquity, coupled with the kindness Shrewsbury generally showed to Mary, may have led to moments of gentleness between them, even tenderness, especially as the femininity of Mary must have contrasted forcibly with the masculinity of Bess, who was in any case the elder of the two by twenty years. But for Shrewsbury to seek to give this tenderness such as it was any sort of external expression beyond relaxation of the conditions of captivity would have been quite out of keeping with his character. The queen of Scots might present a charming picture to him as she sat there plying her needle, but when it came to the prospect of physical relations with her she was terrifying to him as the Giant Hop O’Thumb’s daughter in the fairy story, with the shadow of Elizabeth hanging over them in the role of the vengeful Giant. Mendoza was probably nearer summing up Shrewsbury’s true feelings when he said that the earl was only too grateful to Elizabeth for delivering him from two demons – his wife and the queen of Scots.²⁴

For reasons other than the seedy domestic wrangles of the Shrewsburys, Mary was being conducted remorselessly down the path which led to closer conditions of imprisonment. She herself at one point hesitated to complain too forcibly about the Shrewsbury scandal, lest she should be removed from his charge altogether and placed in the hands of a far more severe jailer. It was a valid fear. But even without the malice of Bess, Mary’s days with Shrewsbury were numbered, due to external conditions in England over which she once more had no control. The effects of the papal bull of excommunication against Elizabeth, promulgated in 1570, only began to be properly felt towards the end of the decade when the reconversion of England was attempted once more from abroad; a trickle and then a faster flow of Jesuit missionaries, many of them Englishmen returning after training abroad, made this cause their own.* There were differences of temperament among the missionaries themselves, who ranged from men of incandescent faith and sanctity, such as Edmund Campion, to the more diplomatic-minded missionaries, such as Robert Persons, who had contacts in every European capital. Both men arrived in England in 1580, although Persons subsequently went on to Spain from where, from knowledge gained during his visit, he suggested Catholicism should be restored in England by force rather than pure missionary fervour.

The appearance of these rekindlers of Catholic flames in English hearts had a two-fold effect: in the first place the English Catholics themselves became more sanguine and therefore more zealous; secondly the English government tightened up the laws against the recusants (those who refused to attend the official Protestant services once a week), increased the fines, which became heavy from 1577 onwards, and using the double-edge weapon of the papal excommunication, began to blur the distinction between recusant and rebel. The English Catholics themselves were divided by many gradations of feeling, apart from the Faith which united them. There were many English Catholics who, although they declined to abandon the faith of their fathers at the orders of Parliament, yet equally declined to forfeit their loyalty to their Queen Elizabeth at the instigation of the hope. It was just these Catholics whom it was now possible for the English government to brand as rebels, using the papal bull as proof. As one of their number, the eloquent Jesuit missionary Father William Weston himself, wrote, these were now bitter days, filled with immeasurable suffering for the English Catholic community: ‘Catholics now saw their own country, the country of their birth, turned into a ruthless and unloving land.’²⁶

In view of the delicate situation of England, perpetually facing the prospect of a Spanish invasion, it was a natural act of public relations on the part of the government to seek to present the Catholics from 1580 onwards as dangerous aliens within the state. The Act of Persuasions, by which it was made high treason to reconcile or be reconciled to the Catholic faith, was passed in 1581. In 1585 it was further made high treason for a Jesuit to set foot in England. Just as the dangers to England from the Catholics were constantly emphasized, so too the personal danger of Queen Elizabeth was underlined in order to boost her popularity with her subjects, as a symbol of national solidarity. Both moves – early exercises in the subtle art of propaganda – augured of course extremely ill for the future of the queen of Scots, who was both a Catholic and a rival queen to Elizabeth. To the forefront of this calculated campaign was the leading secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham. Walsingham was a prominent Puritan; but he drew, as he said himself, a sharp and effective distinction between private and public morality, and had no intention of bringing the strict tenets of the Puritan faith into the latter sphere. He was an experienced diplomatist, with a useful knowledge of Europe, having been employed by Elizabeth on missions to both the Low Countries and France; and in 1583 he was sent on a mission to James in Scotland. Walsingham also combined to a remarkable degree the political abilities of an Italian Renaissance statesman with a very modern conception of the uses of a spy system within the state.*

Walsingham understood to perfection the art not only of forgery but also of permeating his enemies’ organizations with his own men – an art which often led to such confusion of plotting at the time that the truth is impossible to disentangle at four hundred years’ distance. Walsingham now managed to place at least one and probably more spies in the heart of Mary’s councils in Paris. In view of this fact, it was not surprising that Mary’s reputation became increasingly besmirched in the English mind and in that of Elizabeth, as a result of each of the three plots against her which were uncovered in the 1580s before the final crisis of the Babington plot. The first of these plots, the Throckmorton plot, was apparently Guise-inspired, although right at the centre of it lay one of Walsingham’s most successful agents, Charles Paget. Paget came of a noble family, one of whose houses, Beaudesert, was in Staffordshire. His elder brother Thomas, Lord Paget, was a devout Catholic who refused to take the Oath of Conformity, and was eventually obliged to flee to France in 1583, although up till this time he had been kindly treated by his friends at court who had attempted to persuade him into wiser courses: indeed much of his desire to leave England seems to have arisen not only from his professed religion, but from his troubles with his vociferous wife Nazareth, Lady Paget.²⁸ Charles Paget was, on the other hand, an outright spy, who entered Walsingham’s service secretly in 1581 when he reached Paris, at roughly the same moment that he entered the little Marian embassy of Archbishop Beaton.

The Throckmorton plot, uncovered by Walsingham’s agents, led in November 1583 to the arrest of Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic cousin of Sir Nicholas, on suspicion of carrying letters to and from Mary; the earl of Northumberland was also placed in the Tower for being implicated. The details of the Throckmorton plot involved once more the invasion of England by Spain, and the release of Mary; Throckmorton, who had acted as messenger throughout, made a very full confession before his execution in which he thoroughly implicated the queen. She was said to have known every detail of the invasion plans. Mary had certainly written encouraging letters to the Spanish ambassador, who was banished for his part in it all; but the true details of this invasion scheme are still obscure, since it seems that Charles Paget in the course of a short visit to England secretly poured cold water on the scheme to Northumberland, having first of all tried in vain to dissuade the duke of Guise from asking for Spanish help.²⁹ In view of the troubles which Paget was also brewing up in France, it is doubtful whether such a scheme penetrated by a double-agent could ever have come to very much; nevertheless, the discovery of the plot gave Walsingham an excellent opportunity to excite a wave of popular indignation against the Catholics, and their figurehead, Mary.

Despite Throckmorton’s revelations, and despite the fact that Mary had clearly the details of the intended plot, Mary herself was in fact at this point no longer in complete sympathy with her Guise relations or indeed with her ambassador of so many years, James Beaton. One of the cruellest aspects of Mary’s last years from her own point of view was that while Walsingham was engaged in building up her image as this dangerous conspirator, the spider at the centre of a network of plans with agents at every foreign Catholic court, Mary herself was actually becoming increasingly alienated from her own organization abroad. She was accused increasingly in the popular imagination of crimes in which she was decreasingly involved. From 1583 onwards her relations with her ambassador Beaton were distinctly cool, and by the autumn of 1584 she actually accused him openly of mishandling her finances, regretting that such an old servant should choose this opportunity to treat her so shabbily.³⁰ She believed that in France Beaton’s wishes rather than hers were being considered and that her other servants were being mistreated.

Such complaints were not merely the querulous imaginings of a middle-aged woman who had been too long in captivity. It was true that the handling of Mary’s organization in France, and her finances in particular, left much to be desired. Much of the muddle and maladministration was due to the earlier actions of Mary’s uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, who appears to have had little grasp of finance. This dowry, so vital to Mary’s existence, since it represented her only income, was further impaired by the actions of the king of France, who obliged her to exchange the profitable estates in Touraine, granted to her under her marriage settlement, for others much less profitable, in favour of his brother, the duke of Anjou. The income itself of 2000 crowns which she took yearly for personal expenses in England does not always seem to have been paid regularly: at Mary’s death the king of France still owed her money. French officials battened upon the estates, an easy enough action to perform without speedy retribution, since their owner was both abroad and in prison. In 1580 the foolish or knavish Dolin was replaced as Mary’s treasurer by Chérelles’s brother, but even so by this time the French estates had a mortgage of 33,000 crowns upon them. Although it was believed that if Mary put her dowry out to farm she would be able to get 30,000 crowns yearly, the encumbrance of the mortgage was a fatal obstacle to this scheme. Mary was compelled to raise loans in London to pay for her necessities in captivity: she borrowed money from de Mauvissière on credit, and another loan was later arranged from Arundel, which was only repaid after Mary’s death by the king of Spain, out of respect for her memory. Financial shortages, the humiliation of not being able to pay for small luxuries to be brought to her from London as well as not being able to grant baillages from her French estates to repay creditors freely, owing to the interference of the French court, were naturally all exacerbating to Mary, who could do little in prison except fire off anguished letters. But although she came to blame Beaton, he seems to have been the least of the offenders in this respect. Furthermore, the evidence points to the fact that there was a distinct campaign to create trouble between Mary and Beaton, a campaign once more all the more dangerous because it was directed from within rather than without her organization.

Into Beaton’s service had come in the late 1570s a certain Thomas Morgan, who had once been Shrewsbury’s secretary in the early days of Mary’s imprisonment: he was a friend of Walsingham’s chief agent Phelippes and his Catholicism was doubtful; most of the English Catholic exiles seem to have regarded him as a spy and the fact that it was he who introduced the arch spy Gilbert Gifford into Mary’s service certainly tells against him.³¹ Nevertheless, he managed to capitalize on the friendliness he had once shown to Mary – perhaps he convinced her he had been dismissed from Shrewsbury’s service for helping her – to enlist her sympathy, and she regarded him as ‘poor Morgan’. Although she did not recommend him to Beaton personally, she endorsed his application and, at different times, with her habitual sympathy for the financial plight of her servants, made him grants of money. Morgan became Beaton’s chief cipher clerk, a position of enormous trust, since it put him in virtual control of the French correspondence with Mary. But Morgan, although trusted by Mary, was soon regarded as suspect in France. According to the later testimony of Father Robert Persons, neither Morgan nor Paget was fully trusted with the invasion plans of 1583, ‘fearing lest they might hold secret correspondence with some of the Council in England, although the said Queen trusted in them contrary to the wish and opinion of the said Duke of [Guise] and Archbishop ambassadors’.*³²

It was tragic that Mary’s service should thus be permeated with spies and trouble-makers at this critical moment in her fortunes. From the tone of her own letters, certainly her relations with Beaton seem to have been temporarily impaired, at the very moment when she had most need to be in complete accord with him. Such discord would have been only too easy for Morgan as cipher clerk to whip up. For example Mary’s outspoken complaint that Beaton had not written to her for six months may easily have been due not to Beaton’s neglect – which was unlike him – but to the suppression of his letters by his clerk. This trouble-making had two effects: as Samerie, the Jesuit chaplain who visited her secretly three times in prison and was devoted to her cause, warned Mary in October 1584, there were dangers in trusting such men as Morgan and Paget: ‘You wish to have too many manners of proceeding,’ he wrote, ‘which clearly they know’, and he advised her to abandon all private ways of dealing and treat of all her affairs through herambassadors.³³ It was excellent advice, based on sound knowledge of Mary’s predilection for intrigue. Unfortunately this advice did not stick. In March 1585 Ragazzini, the nuncio, told the cardinal of Como: ‘This Morgan is considered by many here and particularly the Jesuits, to be a knave; yet the Queen of Scots relies upon him more than on her own ambassador [Beaton] as the ambassador himself has told me many times.’³⁴

The second result of such disputes within Mary’s organization was that her own feelings towards the Guises and Spain became permeated with distrust: she began to be convinced that the Guises were only intending to seize England in order to hand it over to Spain and had no interest in her release. The prospect of losing touch with reality over the years is one which every long-term prisoner has to face. In Mary’s case, at the exact moment when her struggles to free herself through the Association were crumbling about her, and the need to concentrate on the aid of Spain and the Guises grew more acute, she became the prey of false notions on the subject and grew to rely more on private schemes than on Beaton.

By January 1585, when the Association was virtually dead as a practical scheme, Mary was murmuring against Spain. She was indeed profoundly shocked by the new plot now uncovered in which a Dr Parry apparently intended to assassinate Elizabeth. Her horror was probably genuine, for she expressed it in a letter not only to Elizabeth herself, but also to her ally, the French ambassador in London.³⁵ When Parry proved to be implicated with her own agent in Paris, the wily Thomas Morgan, Mary could scarcely believe the news. Mary was quite right to be horrified by the news of the Parry plot, for it seems that Parry began his career as an agent provocateur for the Elizabethan government, and was only now sacrificed by his employers for propaganda reasons. Even without this inner knowledge, Mary was quite clever enough to see the dangers of such involvements: the plots of Parry against Elizabeth would always point indirectly at Mary, but the involvement of Parry with Morgan enabled the plot to be laid squarely at her door. In France, Morgan was put in prison for his part in the Parry plot. It was no wonder that Mary hastened to express her indignation. She was sympathetic towards the Jesuit Father Creighton who was captured aboard ship with a whole pile of incriminating letters and documents: she asked the French ambassador to see what could be done for the wretched man, to save him from destruction.³⁶ Parry on the other hand clearly brought her own neck into danger.

The point was all the more easy for Mary to appreciate since from June 1584 onwards there had been murmurings in Parliament for a new type of Association – not to be confused with Mary’s Association with James – in this case a bond or pledge of allegiance. But this was a pledge with a difference. It was not enough for the signatories of this new bond to swear to bring about the death of all those who might plot against Elizabeth. In addition they also swore – and the inspiration was Walsingham’s – to bring about the death of all those in whose favour such plots might be instigated, whether they had personally connived at them or not. In short, if it could be proved that a particular conspiracy had been aimed at the elimination of Elizabeth and the placing of Mary on the throne, Mary herself was as much eligible for execution as any of the plotters, even if she had been in complete ignorance of what was afoot. This bond was formally enacted into a statute by the English Parliament in the spring of 1585 when the murder of the prince of Orange brought home still further to the English the constant dangers of assassination to their own queen; in the meantime signatures poured in from loyal subjects, and were presented to Elizabeth in an endless series of documents, from the autumn onwards. Mary, ever conscious of the delicate path she was treading, and the need for Elizabeth’s favour, actually offered to sign the bond herself.³⁷ But her pathetic offer could not gloss over the fact that the enactment of the bond into English law amounted to the drawing up of her own death warrant: it was hardly likely that many years would pass before some conspiracy or other in Mary’s favour, to the detriment of Elizabeth, would be brought to book by Walsingham, and once such a charge should be proved, it was now legal in England to try and execute the Scottish queen. No one was more conscious of the dangers of the bond to Mary than Elizabeth herself, and the possibility of the trial of a crowned queen was one Elizabeth preferred not to contemplate too closely in advance:³⁸ she therefore chose to regard the bond of Association as a spontaneous act of loyalty on the part of her people in the first place, of whose genesis she had been quite ignorant. In the parliamentary proceedings which followed, she began by showing considerable reluctance that the statute for her safety should be enacted at all and went on to take care that James VI should be excepted from the clause which barred even the descendants of the nameless beneficiary of her murder from the succession. Parliament itself, understandably less worried by the problem of regicide, showed no such scruples. To them the bond seemed only too natural, as well as essential. In 1572, when Mary’s life had been in danger, the whys and wherefores of her captivity, her original illegal detention, had seemed already remote; but thirteen years later they appeared positively prehistoric. The ‘monstrous dragon’ was now considered to be part of the English policy – and a singularly unpleasant part.

By the spring of 1585 there was very little that was encouraging to be discerned in the situation of the queen of Scots. Her son had repudiated and betrayed her; her French organization was in administrative chaos, and penetrated by Walsingham’s spies; the English Catholics were quarrelling among themselves abroad and increasingly persecuted at home; Mary herself no longer felt complete trust for her erstwhile allies abroad and at times suspected the good faith of the Guises and Spain; in the meantime her position in England may be compared to that of someone tied down unwillingly over a powder keg, which may at any moment be exploded by a match held by an over-enthusiastic friend. To add to Mary’s distress her prison was changed for the worse. In September 1584 she had been taken out of the custody of Shrewsbury and handed into that of the upright and elderly Sir Ralph Sadler. The real reason for the change was presumably to free Mary from the imbroglio of the Shrewsbury scandals; but according to Camden, in order not to offend Shrewsbury it was explained to him that Catholic plots now made it essential for Mary to be put in the charge of the Puritans.³⁹ Sadler was a fair and considerate jailer. But in the autumn of 1584 the edict went forth that Mary was to be taken back to the hated Tutbury for greater security. She was once more incarcerated in this loathsome if impregnable fortress in early January 1585. Not only that but at the same time the care of her person was handed over to a new and infinitely more severe jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, who became in time as odious to her as the masonry of Tutbury itself. Under these doleful circumstances, with very little to cheer her as she surveyed her prospects for the future, Mary Stuart entered on the last and most burdensome phase of her captivity.

* One version of the Sheffield portrait which was definitely known to the engravers before 1603 is the large double portrait of Mary and James, now at Blair Castle, dated 1583. But although mother and son are here shown tenderly side by side, such a meeting never actually took place outside the realm of the artist’s imagination.²

* Now created earl of Arran by James despite the continued existence of the wretched, mad, true incumbent of the title, Mary’s former suitor.

* Despite her royal lineage, and the glorious plans laid for her future, Arbella Stuart never lived to enjoy the splendid destiny which might have been expected for one who combined the genes of the Stuarts with those of Bess of Hardwicke. At the age of thirty, no suitable bridegroom having been found for her, she eloped with William Seymour, grandson of Lady Catherine Grey. For this presumption, she was imprisoned in the Tower by her cousin, King James, where she died in 1615.

* Even Elizabeth, the virgin queen, was not left free of this sort of imaginative calumny. In November 1575 the Venetian ambassador in Spain reported that Elizabeth had a natural daughter of thirteen in existence, who was about to marry Cecil’s son, and thus cement their relations.²³

* By 1582 the Jesuits had reached Staffordshire, close to where Mary lay; in the same year the Staffordshire county records show the first really large-scale prosecution of the recusants at the Easter sessions of the peace.²⁵

* Walsingham had already showed his enterprising attitude to the production of compromising evidence at the time of the conferences of Westminster: he offered to Cecil ‘that if for the discovery of the Queen of Scots, consent to the murder of her husband, there lack sufficient proofs, he is able (if it shall please you to use him) to discover certain that should have been employed in the said murder’ in London.²⁷

* At this point quite a separate dispute, originating at Rome in 1578, between English Jesuits and the English secular priests (called the Welsh faction after their leader Dr Owen Lewis) was also spreading through the English Catholic community abroad and affecting the trust of Jesuits and seculars. See Leo Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem, for a detailed examination of the subject, in relation to Morgan and Mary.