Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Of course there were happy times. I particularly enjoyed what I came to term ‘optical research’, that is to say, visiting every conceivable castle, mire, byre or whatever associated with the queen in three countries. There was, for example, the trip to Château d’Anet, home of the legendary beauty Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Mary’s father-in-law, Henri II. I wished to see for myself the elegant memorial chapel in the black and white colours she made her own; I wished to admire the architecture of Philibert de l’Orme, who designed it for her with its many crescent moons, symbol of the goddess Diana, which this sixteenth-century goddess took as her own symbol. The Château d’Anet was actually in private hands, but I secured an introduction to the owner (a South American whom I will call Don Luis). I did so via Gaston Palewski, an extremely worldly and sophisticated French ambassador, who kindly fixed it for me.

  On the appointed day, I set forth confidently for Anet, arrived, was duly received, and asked for a full tour. Don Luis proved to be both chivalrous and knowledgeable: and, as I remember it, he did not even allow the fact that I had interrupted an enormous lunch party on the terrace to deter him from showing me every black-and-white nook and cranny that I demanded. A very long time later, Don Luis was interrupted by a servant telling him he was wanted on the telephone. When he came back, he was as courteous as ever. ‘So you are Madame Fraser,’ he said. ‘That was a call from my friend Gaston Palewski arranging for your visit. How happy I am to know your name! And yet a little sad that you are not just some stranger come out of the blue to visit me, some goddess sent perhaps by the immortal Diana herself …’ My opinion of South American gallantry and good manners soared even as my rating of French diplomatic efficiency fell.

  Less satisfying for me in terms of gallantry was my visit to Stirling Castle. At that time, visitors to the castle were supposed to employ the services of a (paid) guide. However, I was by now under the impression that I knew more about the history of Stirling Castle than any guide; I also wanted to drink in the atmosphere alone, since Stirling, as the traditional nursery of Scottish royal princes, had housed Mary’s infant son James. Under the circumstances, I hit upon an expedient which I considered to be brilliant. I decided to pay for a guide, book a solo tour, but suggest that my guide did not actually accompany me, instead he should sit out his allocated time in silence.

  It did not work out. Perhaps it did not deserve to. I duly paid my money, but ‘my’ guide did not choose to sit out his allotted time in silence. Instead, he took on another complete tour and trailed around just behind me. This enabled him to give his own version of events – well within earshot. Every now and then, however, he indulged in a theatrical pause. Then he would proceed: Whisht! But not too loud! There’s a very clever young lady here from England and she knows all there is to be known about our poor wee castle. We wouldn’t want to disturb the very clever young lady…’ My feelings of impotent fury may be compared to those of Hilaire Belloc’s Lord Canton, who collapsed suddenly:

  The insolence of an Italian guide

  Appears to be the reason that he died.

  Yet for all the adventures, occasionally ludicrous, which ‘optical research’ produced, I still believe in its value. To take only one example, I would never have understood the pattern of events following the murder of Riccio at Holyrood, had I not been able to go and investigate the layout of the palace for myself. It was the tiny cramped size of Mary’s room, where the crime took place, which explained to me more vividly than any document how the events of that tragic occasion must have fallen out; just as the correspondingly enormous size of the fireplace – virtually half one wall – showed me that the dashing-out of all the candles would still have left a very well-lit room.

  Publication day came at last. Or rather, it didn’t come. A press strike meant that publication had to be postponed at the last minute from May Day – which seemed an especially appropriate day for Mary Queen of Scots – to two weeks later. By this time I was of course in a state of full-blown author’s paranoia. James Joyce famously regarded World War II as a conspiracy to blight the publication of Finnegans Wake. Rather less famously, I interpreted a review which mistakenly appeared on the original date – by V.G. Kiernan in The Listener – as some kind of plot. The fact that it was favourable (‘Exquisite Princess’ – I can still see the headline) only increased my paranoia. Other reviewers, incensed by Kiernan’s innocent jumping of the gun, might take the opportunity to band together and do me down.

  They didn’t do that. Or rather there was no conspiracy. I have also learned from first-hand experience of reviewers that they have neither the time nor the desire to band together. But, as it happens, the very first review I read on the actual day of publication was also by far my worst review. It was by Elizabeth Jenkins, in the Daily Telegraph, and you didn’t have to be paranoid – although I was – to find it extremely critical. Looking at it again all these years later, I half expected to find my memory had exaggerated the sting: not so. At the very start I am described as presenting ‘a beautiful and very dangerous leopard as if it were an endearing Persian cat…’, and the review goes on from there. It was my mother, Elizabeth Longford, ever a stalwart in this kind of situation, who made it all right. She asked cautiously: ‘Did you put her books (on Elizabeth I and Leicester) in your bibliography?’ ‘No.’ I added that I admired the work of Elizabeth Jenkins but had not included it in my bibliography since I hadn’t drawn upon it for the book. ‘Ah,’ said my mother.

  After that it all got better because the next lesson learned was that reviews, like reviewers, fade away but readers remain – and remain and remain. A voluminous correspondence came my way, all of it welcome. That goes for the distinguished retired diplomat Sir Reader Bullard, who seemed to while away his leisure hours correcting my grammar; or even for the equally distinguished Jesuit priest in Rome whose energetic criticisms of my Latin only came to an end when I decided to eliminate it from future texts.

  And when the book became a surprise success in the United States (despite a damning reader’s report beginning ‘this and scholarly book…’), the volume only increased. My favourite letter went as follows:

  Dear Ms Fraser,

  I am on duty tonight on top of a railroad drawbridge over the Betaluma River in North California. I brought your book Mary Queen of Scots with me to pass the hours and I think it is a really keen book but contains many phrases in French. There is no one in all northern California who reads French. Nor does the Northwestern Pacific railroad supply its drawbridge tenders with a French–English dictionary so these phrases are not intelligible to me.

  Even more succinct was the letter of one irate gentleman from Chicago:

  Madam, when you wrote Mary Queen of Scots, did you ever think of the problems of an ex-Polish miner from the Ukraine now living in Chicago? You really ought to translate your French phrases.

  The answer is, no, I did not think of these problems … but I certainly would have if I had known that my book would enjoy these amazing peregrinations: Egypt, Poland, Iraq, Italy, Argentina, Japan, to name only a few of the eighteen countries where it has been published.

  Then there were the correspondents – a surprising number of them – who believed in reincarnation and, having existed as Mary Queen of Scots in a previous life (no question about it), were able to put me right about sundry details, which I, from the inferior vantage point of historical research, had got absolutely wrong. There was even the gentleman whose letter began: ‘Madam, you have dared to write about my wife, Mary Queen of Scots…’ although the signature at the end of the letter appeared to read Genghis Khan, rather than Francois II, Darnley or Bothwell. I have since learned from the experience of other books that the Reincarnation Lobby is a strong if slightly bizarre one as no one has ever been a maid and many people have been a mistress: ‘I fear I was that saucy wench Nell Gwynn…’, began a delightful letter from a self-proclaimed vicar’s wife.

  But I do not mean to mock. Nor would I mock the numerous owne
rs of that particular prayer book which Mary Queen of Scots carried to her execution (enough of them to make a library) nor those who treasure relics of the authentic white veil she wore on the same occasion (if put together, they would drape the whole of Fotheringhay Castle). To all of these fans of Mary Queen of Scots, as to me, she lives. And it is we, all of us, who give her life.

  Forty years later I don’t know whether I would write my book differently. I return to my original analogy of first love. I cannot be that person again, and many other historical loves have followed. Researching Marie Antoinette – another childhood passion – in the late nineties in the state archives in Vienna, I had the odd experience of returning at night to the hotel and finding my husband Harold Pinter reading Mary Queen of Scots for the first time. He was eager to talk about that earlier Queen of France, Mary Stuart, even as I burned to share my discoveries about Marie Antoinette, the equally ill-fated eighteenth-century queen.

  Now that I am working at last on Mary Queen of Scots’ rival and kinswoman, Elizabeth I – a project I originally planned to follow my first book directly before turning to the challenge of Oliver Cromwell – I sometimes fancy that pictures of Queen Mary in my study are eyeing me reproachfully. They need not do so. I remain grateful for ever for the passion I once felt: and grateful to the brave, romantic, doomed queen, dead over four hundred years ago, whose existence changed my life.

  ANTONIA FRASER, 2009

  PART ONE

  The Young Queen

  CHAPTER ONE

  All Men Lamented

  ‘All men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed.’

  John Knox

  The winter of 1542 was marked by tempestuous weather throughout the British Isles: in the north, on the borders of Scotland and England, there were heavy snow-falls in December and frost so savage that by January the ships were frozen into the harbour at Newcastle. These stark conditions found a bleak parallel in the political climate which then prevailed between the two countries. Scotland as a nation groaned under the humiliation of a recent defeat at English hands at the battle of Solway Moss. As a result of the battle, the Scottish nobility which had barely recovered from the defeat of Flodden a generation before, were stricken yet again by the deaths of their leaders in their prime; of those who survived, many prominent members were prisoners in English hands, while the rest met the experience of defeat by quarrelling among themselves, showing their strongest loyalty to the principle of self-aggrandizement, rather than to the troubled monarchy. The Scottish national Church, although still officially Catholic for the next seventeen years, was already torn between those who wished to reform its manifold abuses from within, and those who wished to follow England’s example, by breaking away root and branch from the tree of Rome. The king of this divided country, James V, having led his people to defeat, lay dying with his face to the wall, the victim in this as much of his own passionate nature, as of the circumstances which had conspired against him. When James died on 14th December, 1542, the most stalwart prince might have shrunk from the Herculean task of succeeding him. But his actual successor was a weakly female child born only six days before, his daughter Mary, the new queen of Scotland.

  James V, the last adult male king of Scotland for nearly fifty years, has been treated kindly by contemporary historians, who look back to his reign with nostalgia across the turbulence of that of his daughter. He has been credited with the qualities of King Arthur, whereas on balance his character seems to have been more like that of Sir Lancelot. Since his physical description, ‘of midway stature’,1 bluish grey eyes, sandy hair, weak mouth and chin, does not justify the general reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries for good looks, he clearly possessed an animal magnetism, impossible for another century to understand through pictures. This, and his health, seems to have been his chief physical legacy to his daughter, since in all other respects, starting with her height and athletic carriage, the features and build of Mary Queen of Scots are far easier to trace among her physically magnificent Guise uncles, than in her Stewart forbears. Ronsard described him as having ‘le regard vigoureux’; James certainly possessed the cyclical high spirits and gaiety of the Stewarts – another quality which he handed on to his daughter – and the ability to fire the imagination of his subjects, an attribute generally described in monarchs as possessing the common touch. Unfortunately there is no doubt as to the reverse side of this golden coin: the evidence of the debauchery of James V is unanimous. ‘Most vicious we shall call him,’ wrote Knox with relish,2 relating how he spared neither man’s wife nor maiden, no more after his marriage than he did before.

  James inherited a kingdom bankrupted by his mother Margaret Tudor and her second husband, the earl of Angus; unfortunately his various efforts to search about him for new sources of income brought further troubles in their train. Even his prolonged search for a wealthy foreign bride set his feet firmly on the path of a foreign policy which proved in the final analysis to be disastrous. In view of the predatory attitude of his uncle, Henry VIII, towards Scotland, James determined upon the traditional Scottish alliance with the French king, in order to bolster himself with French aid against any possible English claims of suzerainty. Rightly or wrongly, James viewed Henry’s offer to his daughter Mary Tudor as a bride as a further effort on the part of his uncle to envelop Scotland in his bear’s hug. At one point James even dangled after the young Catherine de Médicis, niece of the Pope, lured by the thought of her magnificent inheritance.3 The results of such a union, between Mary Stuart’s father and the woman who was later to be her mother-in-law, provide an interesting avenue of historical speculation; in fact the match was doubly vetoed, by the Pope’s reluctance to see his niece set off for the far land of Scotland, and by Henry VIII’s anger at the idea of such a powerful match for his nephew. James’s mother had been the elder of the two daughters of Henry VII; later this share of Tudor blood was to play a vital part in shaping the life story of James’s daughter Mary; the deaths of two out of the three surviving children of Henry VIII meant that by the time Mary was sixteen she was next in line to the English throne after her cousin Queen Elizabeth. But in the 1530s, at the time of James V’s marriage projects, these coming events had not yet cast their shadow. It was Henry VIII, in the fullness of his manhood, and with two children to his credit already branching out of the Tudor family tree, who seemed blessed with heirs. His nephew James on the other hand singularly lacked them.

  The position of the Stewart monarchs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was peculiarly perilous in dynastic terms, for a number of reasons. In the first place chance had resulted in a total of seven royal minorities – there had been no adult succession since the fourteenth century – which had an inevitable effect of weakening the power of the crown and increasing that of the nobility. Secondly, the Stewarts had a special reason for needing to separate themselves from the nobility, and raise themselves above it into a cohesive royal family, by the nature of their origins. These were neither obscure nor royal. On the contrary the Stewarts were no more than primus inter pares among the body of the Scottish nobles. They had formerly been stewards, as their name denotes, first of all to the ruling family of Brittany, and later more splendidly, great stewards to the kings of Scotland. It was Walter, sixth great steward, who by marrying Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert I, fathered Robert II, king of the Scots, and thus founded the Stewart royal line.

  The ramifications and interconnections of the Stewart family were henceforward focused on the throne. The many intermarriages, common to all Scottish noble families of this period, meant that by the 1540s there were descended from younger sons or daughters of the kings a number of rival Stewart families4 – the Lennox Stewarts, who later came to use the French spelling of Stuart and thus handed it officially on to the royal line through the marriage of Mary to Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley;* the Atholl Stewarts, the Stewarts of Traquair, the Stewarts of Blantyre, and the Stewarts of Ochiltree. Even those dignitar
ies whose name was not actually Stewart often stood in close relationship to the crown through marriage or descent; throughout her reign Mary correctly addressed as ‘cousin’ the earls of Arran, Huntly and Argyll, heads respectively of the families of Hamilton, Gordon and Campbell. Kinship as a concept was all-important in Scotland of the period: unfortunately kinship to the monarchy was universally held to strengthen the position of the family concerned, rather than add to the resources of the monarchy. Compared to the Stewarts, how fortunate then – or how prudent – were their Tudor cousins in England. By the reign of Queen Elizabeth, her Tudor forebears had seen to it long ago that the crown was not surrounded by a host of ambitious relatives, by a policy of steady elimination directed towards possible rivals. The many Scottish minorities meant that the Stewart kings had never ruled for long enough to follow this same course.

  Determined to cut his way free from this prickly dynastic hedge, on 1st January, 1537 James finally brought about his marriage to Madeleine, daughter of the French King Francis I. Her dowry – 100,000 livres on the marriage day, and annual rents on a sum of 125,000 livres – was obviously desirable, and so was the support of her father; but the Maytime beauty and fragility of this princesse lointaine seems to have played on a genuine chord of romance in the nature of the Scottish king. Her hand had already been refused him by her father on the grounds of her physical delicacy, and James had actually set out for France to marry Marie, daughter of the duke of Vendôme. The sight of Madeleine prompted him to pursue his original aim with pertinacity, and at length success. Alas! her father’s premonitions concerning the effect of the Scottish climate on a girl brought up in the soft air of the Loire valley proved all too correct. The sixteen-year-old queen, who arrived in Scotland in May, was dead by July; the mourning veils which were thus for the first time introduced into Scotland, remained the only permanent memorials of a summer’s marriage.5