CHAPTER FOUR

Betrothal

‘How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favoured, fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most magnanimous King of France …’

Estienne Perlin, 1558

By the end of 1553, when she entered her twelfth year, Mary Stuart’s charmed childhood was drawing to a close, in favour of a more troubled adolescence. As the princesses of France grew older, Queen Catherine decided that they should spend more time at court in order that she should supervise their development personally. The question therefore arose whether Mary should not at this point be awarded her own household since with the departure of the princesses, her domestic arrangements seemed on occasion almost threadbare. The main drawback to the establishment of such a household was that it would entail an extra financial burden on the Estates of Scotland, who were scarcely in the mood to find still further funds for the maintenance of their young queen in France, while the budget for the French troops in Scotland remained high. The cardinal of Lorraine was obliged to write a series of letters to his sister before the final permission was granted. One of his arguments was the keen desire of Mary Stuart herself to be thus set up since at present she felt herself to be shabbily treated – the first hint of a rebellious character in this otherwise docile little paragon.¹ The pleadings of the cardinal prevailed. On 1st January, 1554 Mary Stuart entered into her new estate, and to celebrate the occasion she invited her uncle to supper that evening.

The choice was significant. Up till now the Guises had been content to let their nursing spend much of her time in the royal household: but from now onwards it was important that her character should be formed in accordance with their wishes, and that she should receive her early lessons in statecraft from the people who stood to gain so much from her future high position in France – the Guises. On her mother’s side, Mary formed part of one of the most fascinating family nexus in French history, and it is impossible to understand the extremes of hostility and popularity which the Guises aroused during this period without considering briefly their antecedents. The family of Guise only entered France at the beginning of the sixteenth century when the widow of a younger son of the duke of Lorraine (then an independent duchy) applied to the French king to become naturalized French, along with his family of twelve children. The eldest of this family was Claude de Guise, grandfather of Mary Stuart, who was not only a highly successful general himself, but was supported on the secular flank by his ambitious brother the Cardinal Jean of Lorraine. But with success inevitably came jealousy. The Guises were accused of being foreigners by their enemies – Lorrainers rather than true Frenchmen. The Guises riposted by claiming that the royal blood of Charlemagne flowed in their veins, which, they said, entitled them to the highest place at the French court. This in turn led their detractors to accuse them of aiming at the very throne of France.² In truth nothing as thin as the last fainéant drops of Charlemagne’s blood flowed in the veins of the Guises: they possessed something infinitely more potent – a furious life force and an admirable feeling of blood brotherhood. It is possible that the manner in which they upheld each other may have tempted Mary Stuart later in Scotland to suppose that all relatives supported each other as the Guises had done – a theory which the behaviour of the Stewarts sadly disproved. At all events, contemporary historians began to refer to the Guises as the Maccabees.

Mary’s future was affected politically by the power of the next generation of Guises at the court of Henry II, principally the two eldest sons of Duke Claude’s enormous family – Francis, second duke of Guise, and Charles who followed his uncle into the Church, and became first cardinal of Guise, later cardinal of Lorraine in his turn. During her childhood Mary also formed deep attachments to some of her Guise aunts and their children. For lack of any brothers and sisters she came to regard these young Guises as her own intimate family, especially once she was grown up, and back in Scotland, no longer in such close touch with the French royal family. Her gentle and cultivated aunt, Anne d’Esté, wife of Duke Francis, she loved with an especial warmth. The attachment was reciprocated: Duchess Anne wrote rapturously to Mary of Guise that her nine-year-old niece was ‘the most beautiful and prettiest little Queen that anyone could want’,³ and she only hoped that her own daughter Catherine would be allowed to serve her when she grew up. When Mary was older, she used to dance with her aunt in front of the court, a sight which Brantôme romantically compared to the two suns of Pliny appearing together in the heavens to astonish the world – Mary being all grace and slenderness, and Anne having the statelier, fuller figure and the more apparent majesty of bearing. One effect of Mary’s friendship with her aunt was to throw her together with her little Guise cousins, despite the disparity in their ages. The future Duke Henry of Guise was eight years younger than Mary, a handsome, blond, curly-haired little boy whom Marguerite de Valois, his contemporary, considered arrogant and overbearing. Mary Stuart, however, from the vantage point of superior age, described Henry and his brothers more sentimentally as the best-looking little boys in all the world.⁴

The three main centres of Guise family life were the palace of Joinville in the north-east of France whose gardens and parks were much beloved of Mary and her cousins, the palace of Meudon, close to Paris, and the Hôtel de Guise in Paris itself. Meudon was in the course of construction under the direction of Primaticcio and his pupils in the 1550s, at the cardinal’s behest to include an exquisite grotto: Mary boasted of its coming marvels in a letter to her mother. The magnificent Hôtel de Guise occupied the site of four previous hotels: on the vast quadrangular space, the duke and duchess of Guise built a splendid new hotel, in which the chapel, decorated by Niccol ò del Abbate from drawings by Primaticcio, showed them to be patrons of the arts, and the staircase, decorated by their emblem of the Cross of Lorraine, signified their conscious pride in their family. In each of these three magnificent homes, Mary was welcomed as the young and promising member of the Guise connection, from whom much could be expected.

The influence of the Guise family was marked at the very outset of the reign of Henry II: at his coronation, the new king received his crown from the hands of Charles of Guise, who was created cardinal five days later. At the royal tournament in celebration of the event, it was Francis of Guise who made a particularly brilliant appearance. The glamour of Duke Francis was indeed such that anti-Guisard historians like de l’Aubespine, the courtier, could not bring themselves to condemn him totally, but were inclined to ascribe his actions, of which they disapproved, to the ambitions of his brother Charles.⁵ The spell which he cast over his contemporaries was, however, due not only to his pre-eminent generalship, but also to the fact that he was fortunate enough to be able to come to his country’s rescue on two dramatic occasions. The history of Europe in the early part of the 1550s was dominated by the rivalry between the house of Austria, personified by the Emperor Charles V, who included Spain in his vast dominions, and the house of Valois under Henry II. When the Emperor Charles handed over Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1556, this struggle narrowed to a rivalry between Spain and France. In this rivalry both England and Scotland were involved as pawns – England was linked to the side of Spain by the marriage of the English queen, Mary Tudor, to the Spanish King Philip; Scotland was linked to France by the planned marriage of their queen, Mary Stuart, to Henry’s son Francis. But at the beginning of 1552, by making an alliance with the federation of Protestant German princes, who applied for help against the emperor, which allowed him to occupy the key border fortresses of Metz and Verdun, King Henry had brought to an end the uneasy peace which existed between France and the Empire. In reply, the emperor massed his troops with a view to regaining possession of Metz; and it was Francis of Guise who gallantly held the fortress during the prolonged siege which followed. In February the next year, the duke of Guise was solemnly thanked by the French Parliament for saving his country; he seemed indeed to justify the verdict of his brother, that he was ‘the most valiant man in the whole of Christendom’.⁶

The character of the cardinal is both more complex and less outwardly attractive than that of his brother. He certainly possessed intelligence, erudition and statecraft, amply illustrated in his letters, but there was also another side to his character on which anti-Guisards loved to dwell: he was accused of avarice, probably with truth (despite the fact that he died deeply in debt and did not show much skill in managing his own financial affairs or those of Mary) since he was in perpetual need of funds to keep up his army of couriers bringing him political news from every corner of Europe. His ecclesiastical career certainly provided an example of pluralism: however, as even in youth he showed sufficient precocity to present King Francis I with a thesis on morals and theology, perhaps his ecclesiastical advancement was not totally unjustified. His sermons aroused the general admiration of the French court; in Holy Week 1560 the Venetian ambassador reported that no one could think of anything else except these uplifting discourses, which were attracting huge audiences – although at the same time the cardinal’s enemies were busy in the streets pinning up scurrilous placards against him.⁷ In his career the cardinal of Guise summed up most completely of all his brothers the dichotomy in the Guise character: on the one hand lay their superb endowment of natural gifts, to grace the public life which they craved; on the other side of the balance lay their remarkable family ambition, which was capable, under certain circumstances, of vitiating all their services. This dichotomy is seen in the two contemporary explanations of the family emblem – the two-barred Cross of Lorraine. At the funeral oration of Duke Claude of Guise, it was pronounced that the cross meant that the Guises would die twice for Christ, once in France and once in the Holy Land. But at the time of the Holy League, under Duke Henry, it was cynically suggested the double cross meant that Christ had been crucified twice, once by the Jews, and once by the Leaguers.⁸

It is difficult to estimate the true nature of the cardinal of Lorraine’s religion, since by modern standards his determined persecution of the French heretics arouses abhorrence, and by the political standards of the day they led not to peace but to the disastrous civil wars of the next ten years. The word tolerance has a mellifluous ring in modern ears. To us, tolerance of another’s beliefs has become a touchstone of liberalism, and intolerance is considered, by many, to be the final crime in a civilized society; but in the sixteenth century tolerance was certainly not among the public virtues expected in a ruler. As Father Pollen pointed out, what to us may seem like defence of the weak, seemed to them more like allowing vice to flourish; liberty of conscience was scarcely worthy of discussion, let alone worth fighting for. Sufferers on both sides of religious issues certainly did not expect to find that their ordeals had resulted in the spread of religious tolerance; they merely bore witness to their faith. The question of how far diversity of religion could be tolerated was indeed largely a question of public order: the Guises believed that French Catholicism was strong enough to eliminate Calvinism altogether, whereas in the next decade, Catherine de Médicis was obliged to exhibit political tolerance because she found that on the contrary neither religion was strong enough to drive out the other. In neither case can true conclusions be drawn about their private qualities of mercy. It is an interesting fact that Mary Stuart, whose religious views, as well as her views on statecraft, were formed with such care by the cardinal during her adolescence, showed throughout her career a quite remarkable clemency and lack of bigotry towards her subjects of a different religion, marking her off from almost all her contemporaries, except possibly her own mother. Every letter to her mother bears some sort of witness to the detailed supervision which her uncle was now giving to her upbringing: deeply impressionable as she was by nature, Mary Stuart’s admirable innate quality of mercy could certainly have been tempered by the teachings of the cardinal, had he so wished. On the contrary, it was allowed to flourish, and guide her actions as ruler of Scotland in her later career, for better or for worse.

The cardinal’s lessons in statecraft encouraged the young queen to take an interest in Scottish affairs. In her letters to her mother on the subject, she shows aptitude and application, rather than any marked independence of judgement, and at every juncture quotes, or refers back to, the opinion of one of her uncles. Scottish affairs were also the more vivid to Mary Stuart now that her mother had at last succeeded in ousting the ineffective Arran from the official role of regent, and in April 1554 her appointment was ratified by the Estates of Scotland. At the end of one letter on the subject of some presents she heard were coming from the Duke Châtelherault (Arran had been granted this French dukedom in 1549 and was now known by his new title) Mary told her mother that she had shown the missive to her uncle of Guise as she knew this was what her mother would wish her to do. On another occasion, she paid tribute to the enormous care her uncle and aunt of Guise had taken of her – and most of all her uncle the cardinal. In 1555 specifically on the advice of her uncle the cardinal she sent back blank letters to her mother signed MARIE* for administrative purposes.⁹

Despite the agreeable tutelage of the cardinal, and her modest advance into the realms of statecraft, Mary Stuart’s adolescence was marred by a tiresome domestic drama, the more enervating because it occurred right in the heart of her little household. Mme de Parois, the governess who replaced Lady Fleming, proved to be admirably lacking in the human frailty of her predecessor, but she had defects of character of her own which were considerably less beguiling. Money matters led to constant troubles. On one occasion Mme de Parois was forced to write to Mary of Guise and ask for more money to buy her mistress’s clothes; Mary Stuart positively had to have a dress of cloth of gold for the approaching marriage of the Count de Vaudermont since she had been so annoyed at lacking a dress of cloth of silver for the marriage of the governor’s son. On another occasion Mme de Parois bemoaned the fact that the princesses’ dresses were now lined with cloth of gold, which made them so dear to copy, and she explained that the Scottish queen was very anxious to have embroidered ciphers on her dresses, also an expensive luxury. Permission was sought for two new outfits a year, for reasons of prestige, whatever the lack of finance at home.¹⁰

There was another side of the story: some of Mary’s entourage took the line that there was quite enough money to go round if only Mme de Parois had employed it more economically. The controversy was at times bitter and at times petty. In one letter, Mary of Guise’s controller inquired angrily what had happened to some money which the French king had given to Mary to spend at the fair at Saint-Germain. Mme de Parois continued to grumble over the general shortness of funds, although she pointed out primly that she took care to keep her young mistress in happy ignorance of the situation. The fact that Mary’s accounts for the year 1556–7 showed outgoings of 58,607 livres and incomings of only 58,000 livres showed that wherever that fault lay, the financial situation was certainly not a satisfactory one.¹¹

But now the governess fell out with her mistress. In their fractious disputes, which read like a domestic storm in a teacup, the real irritant seems to have been Mme de Parois’s ill-health. When she finally surrendered the post of governess it was due to advancing dropsy; no doubt her declining health exacerbated her troubles with her charge in her own mind, and equally made her difficult to deal with. The trouble began with the distribution of the Scottish queen’s outworn clothing, which Mme de Parois felt to be her own perquisite. Mary had other ideas. In a furious letter to her mother she complained that she had given some of the dresses to her Guise aunts, the abbesses of Saint Pierre and Farmoustier, to make vestments, and others to her servants, all according to her mother’s instructions. In April 1556 the cardinal himself intervened and wrote to Mary of Guise that in his opinion Mme de Parois was no longer suited to be her daughter’s governess. Nevertheless, in the May of the following year, Mme de Parois still had not been dislodged; and Mary wrote again to her mother complaining that Mme de Parois was now making such bad blood between Mary, Duchess Antoinette and Queen Catherine, that Mary was terrified that the malicious governess would go further and stir up trouble between mother and daughter.¹²

The dispute does reveal significantly the direction in which Mary Stuart’s character was developing. There is a vein of near hysteria in some of her letters to her mother on the subject: she was passionately upset at the notion that the love of her mother might be turned away from her by the trouble-making efforts of this woman. She rebuts with anguish the notion that she who is generous should be so unfairly described as mean. The episode suggests that from adolescence onwards, Mary Stuart was peculiarly sensitive to the onslaughts of criticism which she had good reason to feel were unfair. This feminine and perfectly understandable sensitivity had dangerous possibilities for one who was, after all, destined to be a queen regnant: for there was no certainty that she would always be surrounded with the right sort of advisers to provide a balancing stability of attitude. The suggestion that the young queen had become positively ill as a result of this domestic fracas is also of interest for her future. She told her mother that Mme de Parois had almost been the cause of her death ‘because I was afraid of falling under your displeasure, and because I grieved at hearing through these false reports so many disputes and so much harm said of me’.¹³ This tendency of apparently nervous stress to show itself in physical symptoms almost approaching a breakdown was something she clearly inherited from her father, since the Guises were remarkably free from it: as a characteristic it was to play a marked part in her later career.

After a robust childhood, Mary Stuart’s general health began to show cause for concern in adolescence. When she was thirteen, her uncle thought it necessary to write angrily to her mother in order to contradict reports that she was generally ailing; he told her that the verdict of the doctors was that she would outlive all her relations, although she sometimes got a certain heartburn or plain indigestion, due to a hearty appetite which would certainly lead to her overeating if the cardinal did not watch her carefully. ‘I am astonished at what you have been told about her being sickly,’ exclaimed the cardinal, in disgust at the very idea of such tale-bearing behaviour. ‘It can only have been said by malicious persons out of ill nature.’¹⁴ The truth was that, despite the cardinal’s vehement protests, all her life Mary Stuart was to suffer from gastric troubles, of which these were only the first ominous symptoms, and her fierce appetite, coupled with sickness, stood for something more sinister than the mere hunger of a healthy adolescent girl. Other illnesses from which Mary suffered during adolescence included smallpox – possibly for the third time, if the two other reported attacks in Scotland are correct, but more probably for the sole occasion in her life. She told Queen Elizabeth in 1562 that she had been cured and her beauty preserved by the action of the famous physician Jean Fernel – certainly in all the tributes to the famous complexion of the queen of Scots, there is no suggestion that it was ever marred by the pox. In the summer and autumn of 1556 she fell ill with a series of fevers, possibly the precursor of the tertian fevers which haunted the rest of her life, and for all his angry denials to outsiders the cardinal’s letters to Mary of Guise in Scotland show that he felt extreme concern at the time.¹⁵

In 1556 peace was once again temporarily established in Europe by the Truce of Vaucelles: the Emperor Charles V, anxious to retire from the world and hand over his vast dominions to his son Philip, agreed to accept the general results of the war between France and the Empire for five years. The cardinal of Lorraine was absent in Rome, and his counsels had not been felt effectively at the French court for six months; Henry II was swayed in his absence by the advice of the great rival of the Guises, the Constable Anne of Montmorency. On his return home the cardinal determined to undo the peace, which meant the virtual wrecking of his work in Rome, where he had at last persuaded the aged Pope Paul IV to enter into an alliance with France against the imperialists. As it happened, even the constable was not totally reluctant to see the great duke of Guise wasting his reputation in a series of fruitless Italian campaigns: so that once more war was resumed, and in Italy, for once, the duke was not immediately successful. The importunity of Philip of Spain to his wife, Mary Tudor, queen of England, eventually succeeded in bringing England also into the war on the side of Spain. In August 1557 the army of the constable, on its way to relieve beleaguered Saint-Quentin, was routed by King Philip’s army, which included English units. Philip now captured Saint-Quentin and seemed set to march on Paris. Once more it was Duke Francis of Guise who came to the rescue of the French people. By turning the tables of the war, and finally capturing Calais itself from the English in January 1558, after 220 years, Francis of Guise not only confounded those anti-Guise critics who had rejoiced at his Italian failure, but also elevated the prestige of his family to new heights.

The victory of Francis of Guise at Calais and the reappearance of the bright star of the Guises had an important effect on the fortunes of his niece Mary. She was now, in the spring of 1558, over fifteen, and the dauphin was just fourteen. By the standards of the age, Mary was marriageable, but Francis only marginally so.* But Henry II now had two strong motives, both political, to persuade him towards the finalization of this marriage which had been arranged in theory nearly ten years previously. The words of the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Sorenzo, writing on 9th November, 1557, sum up the situation: ‘The causes for hastening this marriage are apparently two; the first to enable them more surely to avail themselves of the forces of Scotland against the kingdom of England for next year, and the next for the gratification of the Duke and Cardinal of Guise, the said Queen’s uncles, who by the hastening of this marriage, choose to secure themselves against any other matrimonial alliance which might be proposed to his most Christian majesty in some negotiation for peace, the entire establishment of their greatness having to depend on this; for which reason the Constable by all means in his power continually sought to prevent it.’¹⁷ Henry sent to Scotland, to remind the Scottish Parliament that the time had come to implement their promises. In years gone by, there had been other matrimonial possibilities suggested for Mary Stuart, despite her theoretical betrothal to the dauphin. In July 1556, the French ambassador at Brussels threatened that if the king of Spain married the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to Elizabeth Tudor, Henry II would give Mary Stuart to Lord Courtenay, an English aristocrat in the line of succession to the English throne.¹⁸ The aim of this dynastic and diplomatic marriage roundabout was to prevent the house of Austria establishing itself in England, from which position it was felt it could effectively threaten France. But in the end Mary Stuart was not forced to ride on the roundabout. The death of Lord Courtenay, a few months later, put an end to this interesting possibility. Mary Stuart was given back her original position on the chess board of the French king’s policy as the Scottish pawn who would help to checkmate England by marrying his son.

Commissioners were duly appointed in Scotland to come to France, in order to carry out the marriage negotiations. The nine envoys thus chosen included three supporters of the Reformation – the queen’s half-brother, James Stewart, the earl of Cassillis and John Erskine of Dun; for in her anxiety to arrange the marriage contract of her daughter smoothly, Mary of Guise determined to exhibit the utmost conciliation towards the reformers, who might otherwise upset the design to which she attached such importance. The reformers took full advantage of her quiescent mood, and as the marriage negotiations proceeded, so did the reformed religion and its preaching spread in Scotland. The First Band of the Congregation which pledged the signatories to work for the cause of the reformed religion in Scotland was actually signed by Argyll, his son Lord Lorne, later the 5th earl of Argyll, Morton, Glencairn and others, in the same month in which the commissioners left for France.

Unable to leave Scotland herself, Mary of Guise appointed her mother Antoinette to act as her proxy during the arranging of the marriage contract. As a result the formal betrothal of the young pair took place on 19th April, 1558, in the great hall of the new Louvre, with the cardinal of Lorraine joining their hands together. A magnificent ball followed, at which Henry II danced with the bride-elect, Antoine of Navarre with Catherine de M é dicis, the dauphin with his aunt Madame Marguerite, and the duke of Lorraine with the princess Claude whom he later married. By the terms of the betrothal contract, the dauphin declared that of ‘his own free will and with the fullest consent of the King and Queen his father and mother, and being duly authorized by them to take the Queen of Scotland for his wife and consort, he promised to espouse her on the following Sunday April 24th’.¹⁹

Despite the formality of the language, and the political considerations which had prompted his elders to hurry forward the match, the young groom does seem to have felt genuine affection for his bride. His mother, Catherine de Médicis, and Mary Stuart seem to have been indeed the only two human beings for whom this pathetic, wizened creature felt true emotion. Sickly in childhood, he had become difficult and sullen in adolescence; his physique was scarcely developed and his height was stunted; furthermore there is considerable doubt whether he ever actually reached the age of puberty before his untimely death, when he was not quite seventeen.* The dauphin showed little enthusiasm or aptitude for learning, although his enthusiasm for the chase astonished the courtiers, considering his frail physique. All the Venetian ambassadors in turn commented on the fact that he was an invalid, from Matteo Dandolo who saw him when he was three, to Sorenzo who was at the wedding. Dandolo described him as being pale and swollen rather than fat, but rather dignified (as child invalids do often acquire a certain pathetic dignity). Obviously, for better or for worse, he soon became conscious of his high position: in 1552 he was described as having a considerable sense of his own importance, and Capello commented again on the fact when he was eleven: ‘He shows that he knows he is a prince’, before going on to say that he spoke little, and seemed generally ‘bilieux’.²¹ This taciturn and stubborn character suffered from a chronic respiratory infection, resulting from his difficult birth, which cannot have added to his appeal, since it prompted his mother Catherine at one point to write to his governor and urge that the dauphin should blow his nose more, for the good of his health.

However, the same ambassadors who described him as a rather unattractive and self-important invalid also commented on the real signs of love which he exhibited towards his future bride. Capello wrote that he adored ‘la Reginata de Scozia’ who was destined to be his wife, and whom Capello called an exceptionally pretty child. He paints a touching picture of the pair of them drawing apart into a corner of the court, in order to exchange kisses and childish secrets. When he was eleven, the cardinal referred to him jokingly as ‘l’amoureux’, and when he was only six, he was hoping to joust with the duke of Guise in order to enjoy the favours of ‘une dame belle et honnête’, his niece Mary Stuart.²² They played childish games of chance together, on one occasion Mary won 74 sols, and on another lost 45. In short, she was the companion to whom he was accustomed, and she was in addition young, romantic and beautiful – increasingly so, in the eyes of the courtiers. It would have been odd indeed if the dauphin had not loved and admired this exquisite and radiant bride being presented to him, who was in addition a comforting friend from his childhood.

What were Mary’s own feelings for her bridegroom? First of all it must be said that it is not difficult for the young to be fond of those who are fond of them, and openly display this fondness. Furthermore, as a character, Mary responded exceptionally easily to love all her life. She was used to being loved in the widest sense, since her childhood; she desired to continue being loved, since it was a state she enjoyed; where she saw love, or thought she saw it, she found it easy to bestow her own generous affections in return. The dauphin loved her, of that she felt certain enough in herself, but in any case the Guises and the French court combined were always assuring her that he did. Her feminine wish to charm and please those around her made her naturally want to show the conventional affection for her bridegroom which was clearly expected of her. And as she showed the affection, the imitative side of her nature made her begin to feel it. To those who have never known the transports of romantic love, companionship and the feeling of general approval are agreeable substitutes: Mary felt that she loved her bridegroom in the most worthy manner, although his infantile physique and immaturity make it unlikely that he actually aroused in her any of the feelings with which most adults would endow the word.

While the two protagonists of the match were thus perfectly content to be united, there were certain political undertones to the arrangements which were considerably more sinister than the innocent childlike emotions of Francis and Mary. Two marriage treaties were in fact signed, one open and one secret. The first official marriage treaty, whose witnesses included Diane de Poitiers, provided terms with which the Scottish delegates were adequately satisfied: the young queen bound herself to preserve the ancient freedoms, liberties and privileges of Scotland; so long as she was out of the country, it was to be governed by the regency of the queen mother, and the French king and the dauphin both bound themselves and their successors, in the case of Mary’s death without children, to support the succession to the Scottish throne of the nearest heir by blood – still the head of the house of Hamilton, the duke of Châtelherault. Mary was given a satisfactory jointure. It was further agreed that the dauphin should bear the title of king of Scotland and that, on his accession to the French throne, the two kingdoms should be united under one crown, and the subjects of both countries should be thus naturalized with each other, in anticipation of the joint reign. Letters of naturalization were granted to Henry in June, and confirmed by the parliament of Paris on 8th July. In November the Scottish Estates in their turn granted letters of naturalization to all the subjects of the king of France. Up till the death of Henry, Francis and Mary were to be known as the king-dauphin and the queen-dauphiness. In the case of the death of her husband, Mary was to be allowed to choose whether she remained in France or returned to her kingdom; as a widowed queen, Mary was to receive a fortune of 600,000 livres; should there be male issue, the eldest surviving child should inherit both crowns, whereas if the couple bore only daughters, owing to the workings of the Salic Law in France, the eldest daughter would inherit the Scottish crown alone.

All these terms were nothing more than those the standards of the time dictated, when a female heiress married the representative of a more powerful kingdom. The only condition at which the Scottish commissioners demurred was Henry’s suggestion that the crown of Scotland be sent to France, to be used for the coronation of the dauphin. As by the following November the Scottish Estates had agreed that the dauphin should be granted the crown matrimonial – which gave him equal powers as king of Scotland with his wife as queen – even this objection seems to spring from an admirably cautious attitude towards sending away a valuable object to a foreign country, rather than a disinclination towards granting the office itself. The state documents of Scotland were henceforth signed by both Francis and Mary jointly: Francis’s signature, however, always appeared on the left hand and Mary’s on the right – the left hand in this case, as dexter in heraldry, being the more important position, because it was read first.

At the same time, a second secret treaty was drawn up, of which the Scottish commissioners were given no official knowledge. Before the marriage contract was actually signed, Mary signed three separate deeds by which, first of all, in the event of her death without children, Scotland and Mary’s rights to the throne of England were made over freely to the crown of France; secondly Scotland and all its revenues were made over to the king of France and his successors until France should be reimbursed of the money spent in Scotland’s defence; and thirdly, Mary actually renounced in anticipation any agreement she might make at the Estates’ behest which might interfere with these arrangements. If implemented, these secret agreements would certainly have had the effect of transforming Scotland into a mere French dominion, in the pocket of the French king. To some, the fact that Mary Stuart signed these deeds represents the first blot on her character. Yet surely Mary, aged fifteen years and four months at the time of her marriage, should not be judged too harshly on this issue, and condemnations should rather be saved for the French king and French statesmen who presented her with the deeds. She was given them to sign by an older man whom she had been trained from childhood to love and admire, and by the uncles who had been as parents to her, and had given her for the last ten years every proof of their devotion and welfare. She also had been brought up to believe that although she was virtually born reigning queen of Scotland, her actual destiny was to be queen consort of France. France was her adopted country, and half of her blood was French; as we have seen, little attempt had been made to preserve in her a sense of the true importance of Scotland. Although she had been conscientiously inculcated in statescraft by her uncle, the net result of hearing about her mother’s troubles must have been to lead her to believe that Scotland was not much more than a tiresome colony or protectorate; it needed firm government, but had little right to sovereign interests, so long as the French existed to provide it with a wise administration, through the queen regent, and the French officials in power in Scotland.

All Mary’s emotional inclinations led her to believe that the happiest fate of Scotland would be to be united with France – this was, after all, the union which she was about to effect by her marriage. She was far from unique in this attitude, in her age. The French panegyrics on her marriage exhibit exactly the same half-patronizing approach towards Scotland.²³ There are conventional tributes to the young queen’s charms – she is Helen in beauty, Lucrece in chastity, Pallas in wisdom, Ceres in riches, Juno in power. But the panegyrists agree that while the bride is beautiful, her country is a minor one, which must consider itself fortunate to be governed for the future by France. The wedding hymn of Michel l’Hôpital puts forward the political gain to France in acquiring new territory and revenues, it is true, but also expresses the view that the Scots will be delighted to gain a new set of rulers in the French. With perhaps a certain overconfidence, he suggests that even Mary’s father James V will be pleased to notice Scotland now taking second place to France, as he looks down from his eternal resting-place:

Nor would he shrink his ancient realm to see
Ranked second in his regal blazonry.

A work of Estienne Perlin, published in 1558, and dedicated to Henry’s sister, the duchess of Berry, observes patronizingly: ‘How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favoured, fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most magnanimous King of France, the greatest lord in the whole world, and the future monarch of that round machine, for without him thou wouldn’st have been laid in ashes, thy country wasted and ruined by the English, utterly accursed by God’.²⁴

In such a climate of opinion, it would have needed a woman of maturity, and of stubbornly independent political opinions, not a young girl who had been trained to act in feminine obedience to her powerful uncles, to hold out against the signing of the secret treaties. In April 1558, Mary Stuart can scarcely be blamed for thinking more of the gorgeous pageantry of her wedding celebrations than of the true implications of the three deeds which she had just been led to sign.

* Throughout her life, Mary used the name in its French form in her signature. A feature of this signature, seen already in her earliest letters, is the fact that all the letters, including the first M, are made to be of the same size. She may have modelled her signature on that of her mother: the two signatures are not unalike.

* It has been suggested, on the evidence of a letter from Henry to Mary of Guise, that the French king had even contemplated carrying out the marriage a year earlier, when the bride and groom would have been only fourteen and thirteen respectively. This letter has now been convincingly re-dated to the next year, and thus disposes of the theory that Henry did ever in fact consider such a union of children.¹⁶

* He probably suffered from the condition known medically as undescended testicles. The Protestant historian Regnier de la Planche used these words to describe the formation of his body: ‘Il avoit les parties génératives du tout constipées et empeschés sans faire aucune action.’ Although deeply hostile to the Guises, and thus prejudiced in many of his views of history, la Planche was likely to be well-informed on this subject through his friendship with Catherine de Médicis.²⁰