CHAPTER SEVEN

Mary the Widow

‘Since her husband’s death the Scottish Queen hath showed … that she is both of great wisdom for her years, modesty and also of great judgment … which, increasing with her years, cannot but turn greatly to her commendation, reputation, honour and great benefit of her and her country.’

Throckmorton to Queen Elizabeth, January 1561

By tradition the mourning period of a queen of France lasted for forty days. The obsequies of the young king ended when his heart, enclosed in a leaden vase, was taken to the cathedral of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, traditional resting-place of the kings of France: here amid the numerous tombs the vase was placed on a pillar surrounded by sculptured flames, to symbolize that Francis as king had been as a pillar of flame in the Hebrew desert – a reference to his stand against the heretics. Immediately after the death of Francis, Mary, as we have seen, was prostrated by grief, and kept herself solitary; in any case visitors during the first fifteen days of her widowhood were limited by convention to those whose rank was considered sufficiently elevated to justify their entrance – the new King Charles IX, the king of Navarre, her uncles of Guise and the constable of Montmorency. For more personal consolation Mary depended on her grandmother Duchess Antoinette. However, once the first fortnight was over, and Mary’s storm of sorrow had abated, it was inevitable that she should consider her future in the world: more especially did the subject of her future come rapidly into prominence since ambassadors were permitted to visit her during the second period of her mourning, and whatever the private unhappiness of a girl of eighteen who had lost her husband, they at least were untroubled by such considerations and, like her uncles of Guise, eager to press on to the burning topic of her future.

There were two possible cornerstones on which such discussions could be founded: a theoretical second marriage, and Mary’s prospective return to Scotland. The Scottish situation was, however, rendered extremely uncertain by the fact that any sort of royal government had been in virtual abeyance since the death of Mary of Guise: the country was now ruled by a Protestant régime containing both John Knox and the queen’s half-brother Lord James Stewart, under the titular leadership of Hamilton duke of Châtelherault. Mary was virtually an unknown quantity in Scotland at the time of Francis’s death, and what little was known of her was feared: she was regarded not only as a Catholic by a country newly Protestant, but also as a foreigner by reason of her French upbringing and marriage. It therefore seemed highly unlikely that Mary would be received back in Scotland unless some foreign army propelled her there; for this reason her return to Scotland was regarded as being bound up with and dependent on her second marriage. Consequently during the spring of 1561 it was this marriage which received the full force of diplomatic and courtly considerations.

The historian Froude, in a trenchant phrase, has accused Mary herself of speculating on her next choice of husband before her first husband’s body was cold.¹ In fact the marriage of a queen was unavoidably a political issue in the sixteenth century; just as Mary’s first marriage had been fervently discussed from the very moment of her birth, when she was far too young to take any effective interest in the subject, so now it was natural that the subject of her second marriage should obsess the conversation and correspondence of ambassadors and courtiers, to say nothing of her Guise relations, quite regardless of her own personal feelings. The English ambassador, Throckmorton, made the point with his usual clarity when he indicated to the Council three weeks after Francis’s death, on the occasion of his first interview with Mary: ‘Now that death had thus disposed of the late French king, whereby the Scottish queen is left a widow, one of the special things your lordships have to consider, and have an eye to, is the marriage of that Queen.’² His letters are abundantly filled with rumours on this critical subject. A whole week before Francis’s death when Mary was immured in her husband’s sick-room, Throckmorton reported from Orléans that there were plenty of discourses to be heard already of the French queen’s second marriage and he cited the names of Don Carlos of Spain, Philip II’s heir, the Archduke Charles of Austria, and the earl of Arran, Châtelherault’s heir. After the death of Francis, beside the three front-runners already cited by Throckmorton, who continued to lead the field of gossip, an increasing number of other names were mentioned, including the kings of Denmark and Sweden, the young Lord Darnley, with his desirable inheritance of English royal blood, even the recently widowed duke of Ferrera, who was thought to have a special affection for the Scottish queen. There was always the possibility, mentioned at the Spanish court, that Mary would eventually marry her own brother-in-law, Charles, with a papal dispensation: even the name of her own uncle, Grand Prior Francis of Guise, was canvassed. In short, by the time Mary emerged from her forty days of mourning, possible candidates could be said to include almost any currently unmarried male of roughly suitable age, whose own position could be held to benefit in any way that of the queen of Scots, either by establishing her own throne of Scotland, or by strengthening her claim to the throne of England, or even by re-establishing her on the throne of France.

The torrent of speculation made it inevitable that Mary herself would have to express some sort of personal predilection on the two subjects of re-marriage and Scotland, once she returned to the ways of ordinary life – unless, of course, she was content to leave her affairs and her future in the hands of her uncles as she had done in the past. This, however, she did not seem especially inclined to do, or at any rate, not to the extent which she had suffered herself to be guided during her time as dauphiness and queen of France. It has been suggested that the Guises lost interest in their niece once she no longer occupied the throne from which she could advance their interests: but the evidence of Mary’s widowhood in France shows that on the contrary, it was she who attempted to stretch her political wings, and to struggle free as a butterfly from the chrysalis in which the Guises had lovingly contained her. As she was careful to tell Throckmorton just before her departure for Scotland, her uncles did not advise her on Scottish matters ‘being of the affairs of France’.³ Yet in the negotiations for a second marriage, the cardinal showed himself as anxious as ever to guide his niece. It was Mary the widow who was making the first efforts to think for herself, in a way which impressed all those around her.

In the first instance she evidently used the period of her mourning for a serious consideration of her future problems once her first collapse had given way to a more philosophical mood of resignation. Throckmorton visited her on 31st December, and his account of the interview shows us the first glimpse of the new Mary Stuart. There is no question but that the young queen made an excellent impression upon the English ambassador.⁴ He wrote back to England that no great account had been made of the queen during her husband’s lifetime, seeing that she had been ‘under band of marriage and subjection to her husband (who carried the burden and care of all her matters)’, and there had thus been no great opportunity to get to know her. But, he continued, since her husband’s death she had shown, and continued to do so, that she was ‘both a great wisdom for her years, modesty, and also of great judgment in the wise handling herself and her matters, which, increasing with her years, cannot but turn greatly to her commendation, reputation, honour and great benefit of her and her country’. Mary further impressed Throckmorton by professing herself ready to be guided by suitable advisers; ‘And for my part,’ continued Throckmorton, ‘I see her behaviour to be such and her wisdom and kingly modesty so great, in that she thinketh herself not too wise, but is content to be ruled by good counsel and wise men (which is a great virtue in a Prince or Princess, and which argueth a great judgment and wisdom in her).’

Throckmorton’s last comment was of course not only intended to apprise the English Council as to the true nature of the Scottish queen with whom they had to deal, it was also intended as an acid reference to the somewhat less wise and modest conduct of their own Queen Elizabeth. The later reputations of Elizabeth and Mary have somewhat obscured the fact that in the early 1560s, when they were both young women, it was Elizabeth who was considered headstrong, extravagant and stubborn, whereas Mary was generally rated to be modest, intelligent and anxious to do her best as a ruler by taking wise advice. One contemporary described Elizabeth’s court at this period as a by-word for frivolity: ‘Nothing is treated earnestly, and though all things go wrong they jest, and he who invents most ways of wasting time is regarded as one worthy of honour.’⁵

Only a few months before, in September 1560, Amy Robsart, wife of the English queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, had been found dead in mysterious circumstances. The scandal, which invites comparison with the Scottish court tragedy of Kirk o’Field, although it had a different outcome, was not allayed by Elizabeth’s continued association with Dudley and profuse rumours throughout the following winter that she intended to marry him now that he was free. Throckmorton himself was so terrified that his hair stood on end at the very thought, and he declared that he would not wish to live should that day ever come. How different was the conduct of the young queen of Scots, and how infinitely more becoming! It was no coincidence that Throckmorton chose to write to Dudley in the same vein, praising Mary’s youthful discretion.⁶

Mary’s forty days of mourning were officially ended when she attended a memorial service for Francis in the convent of Grey Friars at Orléans on 18th January 1561. She now withdrew from the strict seclusion of her first deuil to a palace a few leagues outside the town of Orléans, which she occupied with her grandmother. By this date Mary had already written to Scotland a moderate temporizing letter, by which she broke the news of Francis’s death formally to the Scottish Estates, and assured them that she intended to forget past troubles and differences; she went on to express her desire to return to Scotland as soon as possible, in token of which she asked for royal accounts since the death of her mother, and demanded from the Estates a list of candidates to fill the roles of treasurer and controller in Scotland.⁷ The gentle, positively placating tone of this letter was thoroughly in tune with what Mary had also told Throckmorton on the subject of Scotland – that she wished to return home as soon as possible, and hoped it would be at the request and suit of her subjects.

But at this very moment, Mary was also the willing participant in marriage negotiations with Don Carlos of Spain; it is evident that her attitude towards Scotland in the spring, despite her soft words to Throckmorton, was very much one of ‘wait and see’. Marriage to Don Carlos, heir to the great throne of the Spanish empire, was an infinitely more glorious prospect than a highly speculative return to a distant kingdom. Mary Stuart had been trained to believe herself a worthy incumbent of thrones, and the Guises had encouraged her in this belief. Don Carlos was a Catholic and could be expected to be supported by Spanish troops. The Spanish marriage was Mary’s first choice for her future after Francis’s death, and the return to Scotland only assumed its full importance once the prospect of the Spanish marriage faded from the scene for the time being. As has been seen, while Francis lay in extremis, there had been rumours at the French court of the possibility of such a match. When the Spanish ambassador visited Mary in the second stage of her mourning, he was thought to have lingered an unconscionably long time, ‘above an hour together’ – too long, thought Throckmorton, for a conventional visit of condolence. The cardinal told Chantonay that his niece only wished for a Spanish marriage. On 10th January Throckmorton reported that ‘the house of Guise use all means to bring to pass the marriage between the prince of Spain and the Queen of Scotland’. At the end of January Don Juan Manrique arrived at the French court, and according to the Venetian ambassador ‘went to visit the Queen of Scotland, with whom, in the presence of the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, he held very confidential communications and, I am assured that, besides his other concerns, Don Juan is also empowered to treat a marriage between her Majesty and the Prince of Spain’.⁸

Don Carlos himself had little to commend him personally as a husband, and indeed in many ways was merely a still feebler version of the wretched Francis, without the advantage of having been well known to Mary in childhood. He was physically undersized, weighing less than five and a half stone. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, he had a marked speech impediment and was also an epileptic. At the time of Mary’s first widowhood, he was sixteen, a few months older than his young step-mother Elisabeth of Valois. At the age of seventeen he fell headlong down a staircase, supposedly pursuing a serving maid, and the resulting concussion did nothing to improve his mental state. He lay for a long time, blind and partially paralysed, until an Italian surgeon gave him partial relief by a trepanning operation to cut a triangular piece out of his skull. This relieved the paralysis, but left him in turn prone to fits of homicidal mania: he also subsequently developed a passionate attachment to his young step-mother and a corresponding hatred of his father, the king.* There was certainly nothing in Don Carlos to inspire any flight of fancy in the mind of a young, recently widowed queen: it is interesting to note that at this stage in her career, Mary Stuart’s choice of husband was without hesitation one whose attractions were strictly political and dynastic. She thoroughly justified Throckmorton’s shrewd estimate of her character in this respect – so commendably different from that of his own wayward mistress Elizabeth. ‘As far as I can learn, she more esteemeth the continuation of her honour and to marry one that may uphold her to be great than she passeth to please her fancy by taking one that is accompanied with such small benefit or alliance, as thereby her estimation and fame is not increased.’⁹

Fortunately or unfortunately, Mary Stuart was not destined to become another Spanish bride, like her cousin Mary Tudor. The possible consequences of such an alliance to a strong Catholic power, early in her career, for Mary herself, for Scotland and indeed the whole British Isles, lead one down the pleasurable but irrelevant avenues of speculation. There was an implacable, if unseen, obstacle in the way of these early negotiations, in the shape of the hostility of Catherine de Médicis. The death of Francis had resulted in a real political triumph for the dowager queen: although it was confidently expected that the regency of the kingdom would fall into the hands of the king of Navarre, Catherine had, by a mixture of coercion and cajolery, cleverly persuaded him to leave it in her own hands. In return she allowed his brother Condé to be pardoned, and past misdemeanours on the part of the Bourbons to be forgotten, and further fobbed off the king with the title of lieutenant-general of the kingdom. It was a gesture of supreme political and personal intelligence, since by retaining the regency in her own hands Catherine both prevented the warring nobles of the court from tearing the kingdom in two, and also promoted the interests of her own family, in the way which was dearest to her heart. The Guises, who only eighteen days before Francis’s death had been so confident of Catherine’s support, found that their power was considerably and effectively diminished, although Catherine was once again too clever to go so far as to drive them into open hostility. Her ultimate object was, after all, the safe rule of her son over all nobles in the kingdom, rather than personal revenge.

Catherine’s attitude to her son’s widow showed the same judicious mixture of outward conciliation and inward rigidity on any subject where their interests might clash. In her letter to the Estates of Scotland, in January, Mary paid Catherine a warm tribute for her kindness, and said that she could not have expected more consolation in her sorrow from her own mother. She also told the Estates that since France was now ruled by the queen mother, the Franco-Scottish alliance would be firmer than ever. Catherine’s private letters to her daughter Elisabeth of Spain tell a very different story.¹⁰ Mary is referred to by the code name of le gentilhomme, a figure of whom Elisabeth is to be extremely wary. Officially, Catherine was given no cognizance of Mary’s negotiations for a Spanish marriage; but her hostility to the match was none the less effective for being devious and serpentine, since it allowed her to maintain a delusive mask of friendliness to her daughter-in-law. Catherine feared that the house of Valois would be twice threatened by Mary’s return to glory, through her marriage to Don Carlos. First of all, the star of the Guises would inevitably rise again, and with their niece so close to the Spanish throne, who knew what new twists they might not give to the skein of their ambitions. Secondly, Catherine feared for the position of her own daughter Elisabeth on the throne of Spain if Philip should die and Carlos inherit, in which case Elisabeth might be pushed aside as she, Catherine, had once been. While Catherine gave Elisabeth precise instructions on how to frustrate the match from the Spanish end, Catherine herself complicated the issue by dangling the prospect of another royal bride for Don Carlos in front of Philip’s eyes – her own daughter Marguerite.

France was not the only country where Mary’s Spanish match was looked on with concern. In England the prospect of Mary Stuart’s marriage to a foreign prince, especially a Spanish one, was regarded as scarcely less threatening to the maintenance of English power, and when in March Elizabeth’s minister Cecil wrote a memorial to his agent in Scotland, Thomas Randolph, on Anglo-Scottish affairs, the third point on his draft was headed ‘the menace of a foreign marriage by the Scottish Queen’.¹¹ To Philip, confronted with the firm hostility of Catherine and Elizabeth of England, and with the prospect of Marguerite held out before him, Mary no longer seemed so alluring as a future daughter-in-law. Not only did Philip believe he would have to establish Mary on her throne by force, but he would also have to sacrifice his present good relations with Elizabeth of England. Hitherto Philip had supported her in calming down her English Catholics, in order to balance the opposing Franco-Scottish nexus. So long as Elizabeth did not marry Dudley – and the possibility was now slightly receding – a Catholic rising in England to put Mary on the throne was unlikely. Faced with these considerations Philip understandably preferred the substance of Elizabeth to the shadow of Mary; perhaps he also shrank somewhat from the prospect of introducing a Guise cuckoo into the Spanish nest. By the end of April, Elisabeth of Spain was able to inform her mother that the Spanish negotiations with Mary had foundered finally, for lack of interest on Philip’s part.

In the meantime Mary naturally continued to be a focus of interest for other countries, other aspirants. In February, the earl of Bedford arrived on an official embassy of condolence from Queen Elizabeth of England. Queen Mary thanked him graciously for her fellow-queen’s comfort in her distress and added in her most friendly manner ‘considering that the Queen now shows the part of a good sister, whereof she has great need, she will endeavour to be even with her goodwill; and though she be not so able as another, yet she trust the Queen will take her goodwill in good part’. It was on this occasion that Mary also took the opportunity to remind Throckmorton that he had not sent her the portrait of Elizabeth, despite her fervent desire to exchange pictures.* Bedford’s next two interviews with Queen Mary were, however, on a less gracious, more down-to-earth level, since he had been instructed to ask her yet again to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. This treaty, by which peace had been established the previous July between England, Scotland and France, provided for the withdrawal of French troops from Scotland and pledged both France and England to a policy of non-interference there; it had also laid down that Mary and Francis should abandon forever the bearing of the English royal arms. Mary politely but firmly declined to agree to the ratification on the grounds that she must first consult with her Council, in view of her changed status as a widow, but once again went out of her way to show friendliness. She hinted that ‘if her Council were here she would give such an answer as would satisfy him’, and expressed a strong desire to meet Elizabeth personally, to talk over their differences, for she felt that thus ‘they would satisfy each other much better than they can do by messages and ministers’.¹³ This desire on the part of Mary to meet Elizabeth face to face, whether prompted by friendship, political wisdom or sheer feminine curiosity, was perfectly understandable; it is also easy to sympathize with Mary’s reluctance to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh so long as Elizabeth declined to recognize her cousin as heiress-presumptive to the English throne. By ratifying the Treaty of Edinburgh immediately, Mary would be discarding a potentially valuable card, for in return for the ratification it was Mary’s hope that Elizabeth would set aside the will of Henry VIII from the English succession.

While still at Orléans, Mary received another manifestation of the importance of her claim to the English throne. A young scion of both English and Scottish royal houses, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, appeared at the court on an official visit of condolence to his widowed cousin. Darnley, then a youth of only fifteen or sixteen, had not himself provided the impetus for the visit. He had in fact met Mary Stuart briefly once before at the time of Francis’s coronation, when his mother Margaret, Countess of Lennox, dispatched him with a letter to the French court, concerning the restoration of Lennox to the family estates in Scotland. Now his ambitious, striving mother propelled the good-looking boy yet again in the direction of France, with the clear intention of dangling him, royal blood and all, in the path of the newly marriageable young queen. Darnley’s mother was a Catholic, and having been born in England, it could be argued that he was not debarred from the succession by the will of Henry VIII. The Spanish ambassador in England, de Quadra, told his master Philip that if anything happened to Elizabeth, it was understood that the English Catholics would raise Darnley to the throne of England. But in the convoluted world of royal claims and counter-claims, wavering rights were held to be generally strengthened if reinforced by marriage to someone with other wavering rights. The plan was to induce Mary to wed Darnley, with the lure of thus bolstering up her claim to the English throne; Margaret Lennox entered into negotiations with the Scottish nobles at the same time, to the same effect. But, on this occasion at least, the royal fish did not rise to the bait. Mary herself was still involved in her dreams of a glorious Spanish alliance: if Darnley’s appearance did make any impression on her sensibilities, this impression was stored away for the future, since her sensibilities at this time were so acutely subordinated to her political activities.

In the middle of March Mary decided to leave the French court, and set off on a prolonged round of visits to her Guise relations. She went first of all to the Guise château of Nanteuil, and then on to Rheims, where she made a three-week stay in the convent of her Aunt Renée, abbess of St Pierre, breaking the journey for a brief visit to Paris on 20th March to check over her clothes and jewels. From Rheims, she planned to go to Nancy, in Lorraine, to visit the court of her kinsman, Duke Charles, and her sister-in-law, Duchess Claude; from Nancy she could proceed easily to Joinville, the most outlying of the Guise châteaux. Melville, in his memoirs, attributes the journey to the spite of Catherine, now openly displayed: ‘Our Queen, then Dowager of France, retired herself by little and little farther and farther from the court of France; that it should not seem that she was in any sort compelled thereunto, as of truth she was by the Queen Mother’s rigorous and vengeable dealing; who alleged that she was despised by her good daughter, during the short reign of King Francis her husband, by the instigation of the House of Guise.’¹⁴ But Melville is not always strictly accurate in his recollections. Mary had plenty of motives to take such a journey, without the animus of Catherine to inspire her, while Catherine herself understood only too well that hostile intrigues were more easily conducted under the guise of friendship to the victim. Apart from her natural desire to pay a round of visits to the family of whom she had always been so fond, it seems likely that Mary was also anxious to take part in family conclaves on the subject of her future, which would be easier to arrange away from the confined atmosphere of the French court.

It so happened that while Mary Stuart was on the route from Rheims to Nancy, she received two rival embassies from Scotland, which at the moment when the Spanish negotiations were foundering, opened up new possibilities in terms of a Scottish future. To Vitry in Champagne came first of all John Leslie, bishop of Ross, Mary’s future envoy and historian, representing the party of the Scottish Catholics, and secondly James Stewart her half-brother, on behalf of the self-constituted Scottish Protestant government. Leslie’s suggestions were bold enough: he believed that Mary should detain Lord James in France, and herself disembark at Aberdeen, where he swore she would find 20,000 men levied by her friends in the north of Scotland. She would then be in a position to take Scotland by storm. It is to Mary’s credit that she rejected such extremist counsels immediately. The advice was of doubtful value in any case since even the strongest Catholic noble Huntly showed uncertain loyalties at this moment. However, one of the side-effects of Leslie’s embassy was to confirm Mary’s own view that she would be personally popular once she reached Scotland. (Had she not confidently told Throckmorton that the common people would be glad to see their queen come home?) Leslie told the queen that he expected her to ‘over-shadow’ her subjects with her presence when she returned like a newly-risen sun to scatter the clouds of all tumult shortly from the minds of her subjects.¹⁵ In her interview with her half-brother the next day, Mary retained the bishop’s image, while rejecting his advice.

The new emissary with whom Mary had to deal was her half-brother the Lord James. James Stewart was now a man of thirty, some twelve years older than his half-sister. His mother, Margaret Erskine, was that royal mistress who had served for the model of ‘Lady Sensualitie’ in Sir David Lyndsay’s Satire of the Three Estates; as the sister of the earl of Mar she ensured her son a place in the network of Scottish noble families surrounding the crown, in which the Erskines were honourably situated. From his father King James V, Lord James inherited the royal Stewart blood which placed him so close yet so tantalizingly far from the Scottish throne. One consequence of the importance of kinship in sixteenth-century Scotland was to endow the sovereign’s illegitimate children with great natural importance, because they shared the royal Stewart blood. It was not quite impossible that a strong male ruler born out of wedlock might be preferred to a weak female of legitimate descent. Of the nine known bastards of James V, three sons – Lord James, Lord Robert and Lord John Stewart – occupied high positions at Mary’s court; and a daughter, Jean Stewart, who married the earl of Argyll, became one of her closest friends, a friendship which originated in their shared blood. James V had even made some sporadic efforts in 1536, when Lord James was four years old, to obtain the papal dispensation which would have enabled him to marry the child’s mother, Lady Margaret. However, the position of Lord James would not have been automatically clarified by the marriage of his parents: although by Scots law the subsequent marriage of parents legitimated their offspring, this only applied to parents who were free to marry at the time of the conception; Lady Margaret had been married to Robert Douglas in 1527, four years before the birth of her son in 1531. Lord James might also have found himself in a disadvantageous position compared to any subsequent children born to James V and Margaret, who would have begun life as royal princes, without the stain of bastardy.*

Lacking the charm of his father, Lord James was a man of solemn manner and appearance; yet this gravitas, so unlike the qualities of the contemporary French nobility, was to prove highly successful in impressing the English when he dealt with them. From his Stewart father, James had inherited at least a subtlety lacking in many of his contemporaries among the Scottish nobility, which to the English made him seem a distinct improvement on his peers – or perhaps this fortunate ability to deal with England could be attributed to the fact that he was also one quarter Tudor. The English were delighted to be able to discern in him what they supposed to be a type of new Scotsman, upright, serious-minded and full of conscious rectitude, frequently given public expression, who seemed to them a distinct advance on the self-seeking Scottish nobles of the previous generation. Although more gifted politically than the sons of his fellow-nobles, Lord James was in fact far from immune from that practical avarice so characteristic of the Scottish nobility of this period – nor did he lack the hypocrisy which so often accompanies frequent public statements on the subject of honour. But this temperament, and above all quality of his religious views, which fitted in so well with those of the English politicians of the period like Cecil, meant that he was always able to deal easily, if not honourably, with his English equivalents, and this was to give him a practical advantage in Anglo-Scottish affairs at a later stage in his half-sister’s career.

On his way to France on this occasion, Lord James had stopped in England: he certainly conferred with Cecil, with whom he had an old friendship, and may even have stayed in his house. His interview with Mary, held at St Dizier, was not unsatisfactory to both the participants, despite their widely differing points of view. Lord James had been instructed to ask the queen to embrace the Scottish Protestant faith: this she steadily refused to do. But she did state with some courage that she was prepared to come home without any other restrictions, or a personal armed escort, provided she could have use of her own religion in private. This Lord James himself had already expressed publicly to the Scots as being an acceptable demand. When it was suggested to him that the celebration of any sort of Mass, public or private, within the realm of Scotland would be a betrayal of the cause of God, he replied reasonably enough that this might indeed apply to a public Mass – ‘but to have it secretly in her (Mary’s) bedchamber, who could stop her?’¹⁶ Mary also allowed herself to be convinced by Lord James that it was politically wise to give the Protestant party its head for the time being in Scotland, although James later told Throckmorton Mary had begun the interview by ordering him a cardinal’s hat, and several rich benefices in France, if he in turn would forswear Protestantism. The sacrifice of the prospect of these rich benefices did not mean that Lord James’s mind was altogether concentrated on Scottish affairs, on this occasion, to the exclusion of personal gain, since he almost certainly took the opportunity to ask his half-sister for the rich earldom of Moray. Apart from the general understanding which they had reached on the subject of her return, Mary must also have been impressed as a result of this meeting with the notion that Lord James would constitute her natural adviser in Scotland, by virtue of their blood connection, as the Guises had done in France. She had emphasized to Throckmorton that she was prepared to listen to advice and even if all Lord James’s advice had not been to her liking, the basis for some tolerable modus vivendi, in the event of her return, had at least been reached between them.

Yet Lord James was very far from being a Scottish Guise, in any sense of the word; his next actions showed that in his order of loyalties he placed the interests of the Scottish Protestant party, as embodied in an English alliance, well above those of his sister’s confidence. Returning to Paris, he went secretly to Throckmorton’s lodgings, and, in Throckmorton’s own words, ‘declared unto me at good length all that passed between the Queen, his sister and him, and between the Cardinal of Lorraine and him’.¹⁷Throckmorton in turn passed the information on to Elizabeth. Although James did actually inform Mary that he had met Throckmorton, he presumably did not impart to her the full nature of their discourses. On his way back to Scotland, Lord James once again stopped in England, and conferred with Cecil: it has been suggested on the evidence of Camden’s Annales, that during his two weeks in London, James suggested to Elizabeth that she should provide for her religion and her safety by intercepting Mary on her journey back to Scotland.¹⁸ But in fact, he had little motive for doing so, so long as Mary showed herself so adaptable, and so amenable to his advice; his subsequent actions show that his real intentions were to keep in well with both queens, rather than secure the captivity of one by the other. The prospect of a Queen Mary on the throne of Scotland, dependent on his counsels, and Queen Elizabeth on the throne of England, favourable to his policies, opened up new and agreeable avenues of ambition to Lord James. In the meantime James certainly won golden opinions from Throckmorton as a result of his confidences, who despite their illicit nature, wrote ecstatically that he was ‘one of the most virtuous noblemen, and one in whom religion, sincerity and magnanimity as much reign as ever he knew in any man in any nation’. He also took care to suggest that there should be a genuinely silver lining to this cloud of intrigue – in the shape of a distribution of £20,000 sterling, among the chief men of Scotland, to include Châtelherault and, of course, Lord James.

James’s advice to his sister on the subject of the Scottish Protestants accorded well with what Mary had already been told from other sources about the Scottish situation. Throckmorton heard that even the king of Spain had advised her to be prepared to temporize in matters of religion, on her first arrival. Melville tells us that all the Frenchmen who had recently returned from Scotland advised her to be most familiar with James, Argyll, Maitland and Kirkcaldy of Grange, in short to learn to repose most upon the members of the reformed religion.¹⁹ Such practical advice, coloured by tolerance, accorded well with Mary’s own temperament and religious convictions. In religious matters, her leaning was towards the tolerance of her mother, rather than the fanaticism of a cardinal of Guise. As a born Catholic, who had known no other creed, her faith was to her like her everyday bread, something which she took for granted, and yet which was essential to her, and without which she could not imagine her existence; it was, however, in no sense an Old Testament faith, a fierce Moloch of a faith, which demanded the sacrifice of all other faiths to propitiate it, such as animated Philip II of Spain.

Mary’s innate clemency in matters of religion has sometimes been mistaken for lukewarm convictions. The truth was that she drew a clear distinction between private faith and public policy. She herself gave Throckmorton the most explicit avowal of her beliefs, on the eve of her departure for Scotland;²⁰ ‘I will be plain with you,’ she told him. ‘The religion which I profess I take to be the most acceptable to God; and, indeed, neither do I know, nor desire to know any other. Constancy becometh all folks well, and none better than princes, and such as have rule over realms, and specially in matters of religion. I have been brought up in this religion; and who aught would credit me in anything if I should show myself lighter in this case.’ This eloquent profession of faith can scarcely be bettered as the personal apologia of a ruler, who at the same time believed in toleration and mercy for those around her. Although Randolph wrote when she was in Scotland, ‘She wishes that all men should live as they please,’²¹ Knox was quick to realize that such permissiveness did not mean, as some suggested in October 1561, that the queen herself should ever be of their opinion. Mary’s personal Catholicism was total, her attitude to a state religion inclined to be pragmatic.

Mary’s pilgrimage among her Guise relations culminated in a visit to the court of Lorraine, where Duchess Claude, her erstwhile friend, reigned in state. Claude was not destined to atone in public for the private disloyalty of her sister Elisabeth. The princess had grown proud, and used to the adulation of her little court; the widowed queen found little feminine consolation in her company. Nevertheless the Lorrainers gave her a grandiose reception, and ‘a magnificent triumph’ was planned, with cannons discharged from the city walls of Nancy, in her honour. Bishop Leslie describes how Mary was further entertained with hunting in the fields, and pleasant farces and plays.²² These diversions did not prevent her falling ill with one of those tertian fevers to which she was so subject. It is possible that the attack was induced by the mental stress of deciding about her future, now that the negotiations for the Spanish marriage were finally halted. The attack was certainly sufficiently severe and prolonged to prevent her arriving at Rheims in time for thecoronation of the young Charles IX as she had planned. Instead her grandmother fetched her from Nancy to Joinville, and here even on 25th May, she was still in bed in the throes of a prolonged convalescence, and not allowed to speak to anyone except her doctors. However, by 28th May she had managed to reach Rheims, and was there entertained once again by her aunt the abbess and her uncle the cardinal. On 10th June, Mary finally returned once more to the environs of the French court, from which she had been absent for a critical three months. Her return was accompanied by the formal rejoicings which befitted her rank as a dowager queen of France. She was officially greeted a league outside Paris by the duke of Orléans, the king of Navarre, the prince of Condé and the other princes of the blood, who accompanied her in state into the town. Here she was conducted to her actual lodgings within the palace by the king, the queen mother and the entire court.

Whether Mary’s illness was induced by indecision or not, by the time she returned to the court from her wanderings, her mind was evidently made up to return to Scotland. Although a number of factors induced her to reach this decision, it was not the only alternative open to her. Despite the secret hostility of Catherine, Mary’s rank in France entitled her to an honourable position at the French court, from which it would have been difficult to dislodge her, if she had been determined to maintain it. Her marriage contract to Francis specifically stated that in the event of his death, she was to be allowed the choice of remaining in France or returning to Scotland. Her marriage portion had made her duchess of Touraine, and her estates there and in Poitou were sufficiently widespread and lucrative to have maintained her in an adequate state; the Guise family, although somewhat blighted, were not totally destitute of power; if she remained on the Continent, it was not likely to be long before some more ardent royal suitor than Don Carlos emerged. To Mary herself must be given the credit of having personally settled for a bold course of adventure, rather than the more placid, less demanding existence which it would still have been possible for her to lead in France. The truth was that even as ayoung girl, Mary showed signs of having a gambling streak, and she was certainly singularly unendowed with conservatism in her nature: the familiar path was never to her automatically the most attractive path while there was another more daring route to be explored. Life in France, as she had known it so gloriously, appeared to have come to an end; but on the horizon, Scotland beckoned, which might provide in time – who could tell, but Mary was an optimist – as many golden opportunities.

As it happened, at the same moment the Scots themselves were beginning to feel more warmly about their absent queen. Among the politicians, it was the quick-witted Maitland with his sense of international values who pointed out that Mary’s dynastic claim to the English throne could now work to the advantage of Scotland, rather than France, if she returned to her own country. They suddenly realized that a malleable young ruler, with a strong personal claim to succeed to the neighbouring throne, and apparently prepared to behave reasonably over religion, was certainly not to be discarded in a hurry. As a result of these cogitations, Lord James wrote a letter on 10th June which constituted a virtual invitation on behalf of the Protestant lords to return. Maitland himself wrote to Mary promising to do all he could for her service. Scotland for Mary therefore was not a pis aller, but a hopeful venture, in which her Guise blood encouraged her to expect success.

Neither Moray nor Maitland was especially put out by the fact that Mary still declined to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh: not unnaturally they shared Mary’s view that it was a subject that could be best dealt with once she had returned to Scotland and could consult her Council. Throckmorton on the other hand was still desperately hoping to secure the ratification. He sent Somer to Nancy in April and to Rheims in May: both missions were fruitless. Now that Mary was returning to the French court, he begged her with renewed fervour to grant long-withheld ratification. At an audience of 18th June, Mary pointed out that her health was still too frail for serious consideration of such matters, but she went on to say that since in any case she intended to return to Scotland very shortly, she would defer her answer until she had the advice of the Estates and nobles of her own realm. She told Throckmorton that she intended to embark shortly at Calais, and to this effect d’Oysel was being sent to Elizabeth with a message asking for a safe-conduct on her route back to Scotland.²³

But when d’Oysel had his interview with Elizabeth on 13th July requesting a passport for Mary, the English queen at once asked him whether he had brought the ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh with him. D’Oysel replied that he had no instructions on the subject. At this he was greeted by such hostility from Elizabeth as well as a blank refusal to give the safe-conduct that when Mary next spoke with Throckmorton she ironically suggested they should draw apart, in case he angered her by his speech, as she herself did not wish to be witnessed giving such a display of ‘choler and stomache’ as Elizabeth had shown to d’Oysel.²⁴ Elizabeth’s behaviour smacks of childish pique rather than statecraft, and it was not well regarded at the time, even by her own ambassador. Throckmorton was frankly amazed at the refusal and said so to Cecil: in his opinion, the sooner Mary was plucked out of the tangled web of continental intrigue, into the comparative safety of distant Scotland, the better it would be for England. The Scots were appalled, since their avowed aim in the words of Maitland was to see both queens ‘as near friends, as they were tender cousins’, with a view to getting Elizabeth to recognize Mary as her heir; now here was one tender cousin treating the other in a way more likely to lead to distant enmity than near friendship. The Venetian ambassador, a more impartial judge of the situation, described the refusal as contrary to expectation and humanity.²⁵

Elizabeth’s refusal gave Mary Stuart her first public opportunity of rising magnificently to a crisis. She now displayed for the first time that quality of cool courage, when in the public eye, which was to be a feature of her later career. It was courage which owed nothing to physical well-being. At the beginning of July Mary had a renewed attack of the tertian fever, and when Throckmorton saw her on 9th July he noted that it had ‘somewhat appaired her cheer’, although Mary herself dismissed it lightly and said that the worst was over. Now, when she received Throckmorton on 20th July at Saint-Germain, having heard the news of the denied passport, she was infinitely composed; in a series of speeches to the English ambassador of fine histrionic power, she showed herself to be not only brave, but also reasonable and even charitable towards the woman who had thus rejected her – as well as incidentally having an eloquent command of language.²⁶ Like an actress before an audience, the eighteen-year-old queen seemed to derive strength from the fact that the eyes of Europe were upon her. Her interviews with Throckmorton lead one to the conclusion that Mary, far from being daunted by the drama of the situation, was positively inspired by it.

She began by expressing in polite terms her regrets that she should have bothered Throckmorton by demanding a passport which she did not in fact require. She had reached France in safety, she pointed out proudly, in spite of the efforts of the king of England to intercept her. Thirteen years later, she would surely once more reach her own country with her own people to help her. Mary also told Throckmorton that she had no intention of ratifying the treaty until she reached her own land, where she would have the benefit of the advice of the Estates, since she was bound neither in honour nor in conscience to perform what her late husband had commanded. But as a proof that she wished to live in amity with the English queen, Mary also pointed out on the vexed point of the English arms that since the death of both her father-in-law and husband she had borne neither arms nor title.

The next day Throckmorton came to see her again, and Mary spoke to him with renewed oratorical fervour. ‘Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, if my preparations were not so much advanced as they are, peradventure the Queen, your Mistress’ unkindness might stay my voyage; but now I am determined to adventure the matter, whatsoever come of it; I trust the wind will be so favourable as I shall not need to come on the coast of England; and if I do, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, the Queen your Mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me; and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure, and make sacrifice of me; peradventure that casualty might be better for me than to live,’ added Mary dramatically, although one suspects her real expectations were somewhat less pessimistic. ‘In this matter, God’s will be fulfilled,’ she concluded and, in a final superb gesture, embraced the attendant Throck-morton.²⁷

Mary followed up the interview with a friendly letter to Elizabeth to see if the safe-conduct could still be obtained, but without awaiting the answer, she forthwith made her preparations to leave France, passport or no passport. On 25th July, she departed from the court of Saint-Germain, here bidding adieu to King Charles, Queen Catherine and the majority of the nobility who had known her throughout childhood, youth and marriage. According to Leslie, the ancient Franco-Scottish alliance was not forgotten at this final moment and confirmation was made of ‘a perpetual friendship to stand among them, as it had been between their predecessors, by most ancient band and league, inviolably in all times past’.²⁸ When the grand farewell fête, which was held in her honour at Saint-Germain, and lasted for four days, was over, the young queen set out for Calais, accompanied by her six uncles and other members of the court. The train stopped at Merly, the constable’s house, on their way, where both the cardinal and duke of Guise fell ill overnight – although in this case the proverbial rumours of poison which greeted the incident were made less realistic by the fact that the king of Navarre was also stricken. On 3rd August, Mary was still at Beauvais, and Throckmorton then followed her on to Abbeville, where on 7th August, he had a final interview with the queen, at which both reiterated their former arguments, Mary laying special emphasis on the fact that since she was acting without the advice of her uncles, she genuinely needed to obtain the advice of the Scots before she proceeded further – ‘I do so much know mine own infirmity that I will do nothing … without counsel.’²⁹

On 8th August Throckmorton bid the queen a last goodbye. The admiration which the ambassador felt for the queen seems to have been reciprocated. Always generous to those who served her, Mary wrote to Lady Throckmorton the day before she sailed from Calais, saying that she had charged her maître d’hôtel to visit her and give her a present as a remembrance of her affection, and a token of the regard which she felt for her husband. Lady Throckmorton subsequently received two basins, two ewers, two salts and a standing cup, all of gilt. A zealous Protestant, whose career in England had been under a cloud during the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor, when he was tried for complicity in the Wyatt rebellion, in France Throckmorton openly hated the Catholic Guises and admired the Huguenots. Yet he was clearly fascinated by the Catholic queen of Scots, as were so many of Queen Elizabeth’s servitors who were to come into personal contact with her. As Mary was beginning to expand in her mind the possibilities of meeting the queen of England face to face, perhaps Elizabeth at the same moment was already digesting the fact that personal contact with the queen of Scots was apt to have an alarmingly seductive effect on the listener.

On the evening of 8th August, Mary rode to the abbey of Forest Monstrier, where she decided to send the lord of St Colme Inch and Alexander Erskine to England, accompanied by Throckmorton’s servant Tremaine, for a final appeal for the passport. Before the effects of this letter could be felt – once again its tone was extremely friendly – the preparations for Mary’s journey had been completed. The queen and her party were to travel in two galleys, accompanied by two ships. The preparations were not left entirely in the hands of the French. The hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland was also involved – this was none other than James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell. This spirited border lord had already swum into the ken of the Scottish queen during the previous autumn, when he had arrived at the French court for the first time. He did so characteristically, out of financial necessity, abandoning his Norwegian mistress, Anna Throndsen, in Flanders, while he made the expedition to seek further funds. Bothwell had been kindly received by Mary and Francis, and as he put it himself, ‘The Queen recompensed me more liberally and honourably than I had deserved’³⁰ – these particular benefits being a present of 600 crowns as well as the post and salary of gentleman of the king’s chamber. On this occasion Throckmorton had suspected some political coup and warned his correspondents in London that Bothwell needed watching, for he was a ‘glorious [i.e. vainglorious], rash and hazardous young man’.³¹ He paid a further visit to France in the spring, and by 5th July was back in Paris for the third time;* this time he was accompanied by the bishop of Orkney, himself a seaman of distinction, and Lord Eglinton, no stranger to nautical enterprise in the sense that he was generally suspected of piracy. As for Elizabeth, too late she relaxed her fury; by the time she wrote back to Mary denying any intention of ‘impeaching’ her passage, and saying that she had no ships at sea except for two or three small barks to apprehend pirates who were attacking the North Sea fishermen, Mary was no longer in France to receive the letter.

Mary’s departure was not without its tragi-comic elements. The cardinal, for example, suggested that she should for prudence’s sake leave her jewels behind in France, to which Mary, with a flash of wry humour, observed that if she herself were safe to go to sea, why then so were her jewels. She atoned for this, however, by giving her aunt the duchess of Guise, with characteristic generosity the day before she finally sailed, a magnificent necklace of rubies, emeralds and diamonds from her own collection, as a token of regard. The company of her own galley was planned to provide a galaxy of glamour and entertainment to beguile the young queen on her journey; it included three of her uncles, René of Elboeuf, the duke of Aumale and the Grand Prior Francis, as well as the four Maries, Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingston and Mary Fleming, whose French education was completed and were now to accompany their mistress back to Scotland, as they had accompanied her to France so many years ago. On Mary’s own galley were also to travel the young poet Châtelard and her admiring chronicler Brantôme.³³

The day of embarkation dawned dull and misty, despite the fact that it was high August. Mary’s wavering spirits were not lifted by the fact that a fishing boat in the harbour foundered and went down before the eyes of her watching party, with all its hands drowned. ‘What a sad augury for a journey!’ she exclaimed aloud. On Thursday, 14th August about noon, the servant of ambassador Throckmorton, passing by Calais, saw a stirring spectacle ‘haling’ out of the haven: two great galleys and two ships. He hastened to give the news to his master. It was news which Throckmorton had been expecting to hear and it cannot have been unwelcome to him. It was a brave sight which the English servant glimpsed at Calais, for it was the queen of Scotland setting forth across the North Sea on the 600-mile journey to her kingdom, unblessed by any passport of safe-conduct from the English queen, whose ships patrolled these seas. As the ambassador faithfully commenced the dispatch which would break this piece of news to England,³⁴ he imagined only the bravado of the gesture which he must have applauded. Even if his watchful eyes had been able to spy into the great white galley and discern the tragic weeping figure on its poop, he might scarcely have recognized this tormented being for his modest self-controlled young queen.

Up till this moment Mary had shown admirable courage and resolution, both in her dealings with Throckmorton, and more profoundly in her decision to ‘hazard all she had’ by returning to Scotland. But now that the die was cast, now that the ships were actually lying in the harbour of Calais, ready to take her away from all she had known and loved and held dear for that last thirteen years of what seemed to her like her whole life, Mary Stuart’s steadfast spirit temporarily deserted her. There was now no great challenge to call forth the resources of her nature, only the prospect of bidding farewell as it might be forever, to her family, her friends and above all France, France the beloved land of her adoption.

As the galleys surged forward towards the unknown coast of Scotland, Mary herself gazed again and again on the fast-receding coast of France; clinging pathetically to that part of the ship which was still nearest to the French shores she murmured over and over again in a voice broken with tears: ‘Adieu France! Adieu France!’; again and again she repeated the words, and as the shoreline gradually faded from her sight, her laments only increased in fervour. Still mingling with the sound of the wind and the roars of the sea, her tragic young voice could be heard, eternally uttering its farewell, melancholy and prophetic. ‘Adieu France! Adieu France! Adieu donc, ma chère France. … Je pense ne vous revoir jamais plus.’

* This passion, which has been enveloped in the mantle of romance by Schiller and Verdi, was in fact more the one-sided fixation of an idiot than the reciprocated grand passion of their imagination. One may prefer the notion of the romantic liberal-minded Don Carlos of the opera: but there is no historical evidence that Elisabeth of Valois ever returned the devotion of her feeble-minded step-son, and she seems indeed to have lived comparatively happily with her elderly husband, before her premature death.

* Mary’s picture for Elizabeth was completed and sent by 1 st December 1561. The two queens also exchanged portraits again in the next year, 1562.¹²

* Lord James was legitimated in February 1551. But the importance of legitimation in this period was not so much to remove a social stigma as to correct the fact that bastards could neither leave nor inherit property. The estates of a bastard descended to the crown on his death, if he was never legitimated during his lifetime.

* Although Bothwell did not travel back to Scotland on Mary’s own galley, it does not seem fanciful to suppose that his return to France was connected with arrangements for her journey, not only on grounds of his hereditary office, but also because the contemporary Birrel’s Diary specifically states that the queen was ‘stolen out of France by sertain Lords’.³²