Mary Queen of Scots
Page 4
Perhaps with the English the wish was father to the thought, since the death of the infant queen would have increased the confusion of Scotland still further, to the point of the possible extinction of their government. The secret wishes of the Scots on the other hand are probably expressed by the rumour of the time that the child was actually a boy. The position of a country with a child heiress at its head was widely regarded as disastrous in the sixteenth century. As Knox put it, ‘all men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed’.27 The reason is not difficult to seek. In 1542, the successful reign of Queen Elizabeth I lay very much in the future. The birth of an heiress generally led to the swallowing up of the country concerned, as happened in the case of Burgundy, Spain, Bohemia and Hungary with Habsburgs, and with England, in the time of Mary Tudor. To the disadvantages of Mary Stuart’s situation at birth, herself frail in health, the country divided and facing the prospect of a long minority, was therefore added the disadvantage of being of the weaker, and therefore the wrong sex.
The palace of Linlithgow, where Mary was born – in a room in the north-west corner, overlooking the loch*– and where she was destined to spend the first seven months of her life, was a traditional lying-in place of queens. James V himself had been born there. It was he who had enriched it by many improvements and who had developed it in a quadrangular form, from an earlier castle, in the course of his munificent Scottish rebuilding schemes, and it was certainly considered to be a splendid palace by the standards of the time: Mary of Guise compared it approvingly to the castles of the Loire on her arrival, and Sir David Lyndsay called it a ‘palace of pleasance’ worthy to be put beside those of Portugal and France. Leslie wrote warmly of its fine position, above the loch ‘swimming full of perch and other notable fishes’, and even in the next century, John Ray the naturalist called it ‘a very good house, as houses go in Scotland’.28 However, in December 1542, above this serene place, and its youthful incumbent, hovered a series of political thunder clouds of a highly ominous nature.
James V was buried with due pomp, says Leslie, with lighted torches and the sound of mourning trumpets (buccinae querelae); the nobles were in black, Cardinal Beaton hung his head down, while the people were loud in sorrow and lamentation. But with an outward delicacy of feeling which probably sprang in fact from shrewd political calculation, it was now thought unseemly for the English commander to pursue an attack against the kingdom of a dead man. Lisle reported as much to King Henry: ‘I have thought good to stay the stroke of your sword until your majesty’s pleasure be farther known to me in that behalf’ and he included in his forbearance ‘the young suckling’, the late king’s daughter.29 Thus curiously enough, the premature death of King James, which had such dire results for Scotland in producing another long minority, had the short-term effect of staying the avenging hand of the English army after Solway Moss. As a result the first year of his daughter Mary’s existence, instead of being threatened by English armies, was dominated by two questions of important bearing on her subsequent history – who was to govern the kingdom during her infancy, and whom she was destined to marry.
Of these two issues, it was the first which demanded immediate settlement, for while the bridals of the queen would only be a matter of speculation for many years to come, if Scotland was to survive as an independent nation the office of the governor had to be filled at once. Despite this urgency, a fierce controversy at once arose on the subject, to add to the country’s troubles. It arose out of the clash of the hereditary claim of the earl of Arran, head of the house of Hamilton, to be sole governor, with the rival claim of Cardinal Beaton, which he based on a forged will supposed to have been made by the late king. This provided for four governors (Huntly, Moray, Argyll and Arran) with the cardinal himself to be the governor of the princess, and chief ruler of the Council. The prize was a rich one. The prestige and importance of the governor, or regent, was considered to be equivalent to that of the king himself; and the political powers were interwoven with the material rewards of office. It was tradition for the governor to take over the palaces, jewels and treasure of the late king during the minority of his successor; he was responsible for the administration of the crown revenues, for which he would be given a discharge signed at the end of his period of office.
As it happened, the man with the hereditary right to this important office at this critical juncture in Scottish history, James, 2nd earl of Arran and later 1st duke of Châtelherault, was singularly unfitted to hold it. Mary of Guise described him succinctly as the most inconstant man in the world: the most charitable verdict is that of a chaplain who called him ‘a good soft God’s man’, presumably referring to the fact that for the past five years he had been a supporter of the reformed religion.30 Yet this vacillating figure, by the very fact that he was the head of the house of Hamilton, was destined for the most prominent position among the Scottish nobles.
Arran’s grandfather, James, 1st Lord Hamilton, had been married to Princess Mary Stewart, sister of James III.* If the child Queen Mary died, Arran could fairly claim the Scottish throne, as the next heir by blood. It was true that there was a complication: there was some doubt whether Arran’s father had ever been properly divorced from his second wife and it was therefore conceivable that Arran, as the fruit of the third marriage, was illegitimate: in which case, the Lennox Stewarts who descended perfectly correctly from Princess Mary and Lord Hamilton – but from the daughter not a son – were the true heirs to the throne. This in turn meant that the earl of Lennox, not the earl of Arran, had the hereditary claim to be governor of Scotland, and second person in the realm. Despite this Lennox shadow across the Hamilton claim, a fact to be borne in mind when considering the perennially explosive relations between the two families during this period, the Hamiltons still managed to retain their position as heirs or next heirs to the Scottish throne for nearly a hundred years. Throughout much of the reign of Mary’s father, her own reign, and that of James VI, until the birth of his quiverful of Stuart children in the 1590s, the Hamiltons were separated from the throne by only one life. Unfortunately the accidental importance of their position was in no way matched by the calibre of their blood. They possessed natural advantages other than their descent, in the shape of great estates, strategically placed close to the capital, and strong political connections in half a dozen counties. But at a time when most of the Scottish nobles made up in quickness and an eye to the main chance what they lacked in graces and civilization, the Hamiltons were strangely untypical of their kind: the Governor Arran was indecisive but his eldest son actually went mad and had to be confined. During the whole of this period, Hamilton blood was generally considered a convenient scapegoat on which to blame abnormalities of temper.31
There was nothing softened or indecisive about the character of David Beaton, cardinal-archbishop of St Andrews, the man who now opposed Arran’s claim with the will of the late king, apparently made in his favour. The evidence that Beaton actually forged the will seems conclusive,32 but in view of the weakness of Scotland at the time, it may be argued that Cardinal Beaton was at least making a bid to give his country some sort of strong government to combat England’s rapacity. He was now a man of over fifty, having been made cardinal of San Stefano by Pope Paul III five years previously, and succeeded his uncle as archbishop of St Andrews in 1539; he had considerable knowledge of Europe, having studied in Paris and acted on various diplomatic missions abroad. Certainly the cardinal’s pro-French, Catholic policy, which had led to disaster at Solway Moss, did represent the only alternative to subjugation under the yoke of Henry VIII. Knox has described the worldliness of the cardinal at length in his usual vivid phrases, referring to ‘that kingdom of darkness, whereof within this realm he was the head’ and how he was ‘more careful for the world than he was to preach Christ … as he sought the world, it fled him not’. Knox even goes so far as to hint at Cardinal Beaton’s lascivious relations with Mary of Guise – an accusation of which the verdict o
f history has acquitted the queen, although undoubtedly the cardinal lived openly with at least one woman, in a way which made nonsense of his vows of celibacy.33 Whatever the cardinal’s moral deficiencies, he was certainly not a man of straw; as a prelate without any family that he might be bound to favour, he at least showed some signs of identifying his personal policies with those of Scotland, in contrast to the rest of the venal Scottish nobility.
Despite Cardinal Beaton’s strength of purpose, the deciding factor in the contest for the governorship proved to be the return of those Scottish nobles captured at Solway Moss: after a sojourn in London, they were now dispatched north again by Henry VIII, like so many Trojan horses, as emissaries of his policy; they included Cassillis, Glencairn, Maxwell and Fleming, besides Angus and his brother George Douglas, who were already in England in exile. While in London they had been induced to sign a series of articles which pledged them to help Henry bring about the marriage of Mary and Prince Edward, and generally advance the cause of England in Scotland in return for which they were given suitable pensions of English money. Ten of them had even gone further and promised to help Henry himself to achieve dominion and government over Scotland, should the young queen die. The signing of these articles seems to us by modern standards unpatriotic to the point of treachery; it is only fair to point out that they should be judged in the context of an age in which patriotism, as a modern concept, was only just beginning to exist. Xenophobia there was, a primordial dislike of the foreigner, at a period when bad communications made foreigners out of those who would seem close neighbours today; but although this xenophobia was starting to push out a few green shoots of patriotism from time to time, it certainly cannot yet be too closely identified with it.
In January Arran was confirmed in his office of governor, and a few days after the return of the English faction among the nobles, Cardinal Beaton was arrested: it seemed thus certain that the rulers of Scotland during Queen Mary’s minority were to be a protestant pro-English faction. Equally, the matrimonial future of the young queen seemed to lie in the direction of England. Only eleven days after Mary’s birth, Lisle had expressed the general English wish concerning her future: ‘I would she and her nurse were in my lord prince’s house.’34 Henry’s son, Prince Edward, then aged five, seemed the ideal spouse to unite Scotland and England firmly forever under English suzerainty, and Henry furthermore intended to bring up the Scottish queen actually at the English court, in order to check any possible fluttering for liberty in the Scottish dove-cots. This marriage, which if Edward VI had lived would have antedated the peaceful union of England and Scotland by half a century, would not necessarily have been such a terrible prospect for Scotland, had it not been for the savagely bullying attitude which Henry VIII persisted in adopting towards his neighbour. It must be recalled that at this date Mary’s future husband the dauphin of France had not yet been born and his mother Catherine de Médicis, wife of the heir to the French throne, appeared to be barren, having been married ten years without producing any children at all. Thus there was no French prince in prospect whose merits could be weighed against those of Prince Edward.
If a match with a foreign prince was rejected altogether, then the other obvious matrimonial possibility before the Queen’s guardians was to wed her to the son of one of her own nobles: Arran, for example, took the line that his own son would make her the best bridegroom, because the marriage would keep the crown of Scotland within the control of its own people. In March Sir Ralph Sadler came to Scotland as Henry’s envoy, charged with negotiating the marriage of Edward and Mary with the Scottish Parliament. He reported that the queen dowager was far from unfavourable to the project. Indeed at the time, the behaviour of the Scottish nobility may easily have encouraged Mary of Guise to believe that a royal match with her daughter, even with England, was the lesser of two evils. She certainly took the opportunity to display the baby proudly to Sadler, anxious no doubt to contradict the rumours at the time of her birth that the princess was frail and unlikely to live. She had her daughter brought into the room, now aged three and a half months, and with determined thoroughness had her unwrapped by her nurse out of all her clothes, until she was totally naked; thus there could be no suspicion afterwards of some deformity concealed under the swaddling clothes. Sir Ralph Sadler was duly impressed by the sight. He wrote back to King Henry: ‘I assure your Majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the Grace of God.’35 In the meantime, lest Arran suffer disappointment at the thought of this rich matrimonial prize being wrested from his own son, Henry deliberately wooed the earl with the prospect of a match between his son and Henry’s daughter Princess Elizabeth.
On 1st July the Treaties of Greenwich were drawn up, providing for the marriage of Edward and Mary. These treaties respected Scotland’s independence as a country and provided for the return of Mary as a childless widow if Edward died; the main point on which the Scots insisted and on which Henry disagreed was that the child should not actually leave Scotland until she was ten years old. Henry remained avuncularly anxious to oversee her upbringing personally at the English court – or perhaps he did not trust the Scots to implement their promises in ten years’ time. But in any case the point was never put to the test, since already by the summer of 1543 the internal situation in Scotland had changed radically. Opinion, although Henry VIII might be ignorant of the fact, was no longer predominantly favourable to the Protestant and pro-English cause. It was true the advent of Arran as governor had led to the extension of the reformed doctrines and practices – especially the reading of the Bible and preaching in the vernacular. Knox commented cynically on the number of those who now flaunted their Bibles with the boast, not always true: ‘This has lain under my bed-foot these ten years.’36 Protestant sympathies formed the most natural bond between those Scots and those English who shared that inclination. But by the summer Cardinal Beaton had somehow eluded captivity – the English suspected that no great efforts had been made to hold him – and in Pitscottie’s words, he began to rage as any lion loosed of his bond; in short he was once more in a position to galvanize Catholic pro-French opinion.37 Two new arrivals on the Scottish scene – the governor’s bastard half-brother John Hamilton, abbot of Paisley, and Mathew, earl of Lennox, himself – only helped to poison Arran’s mind further against the English alliance. John Hamilton pointed out that by abandoning the cause of Rome, Arran put himself in a vulnerable position in which his father’s divorce might be questioned; Lennox, as head of the rival Stewarts, represented a positive alternative to Arran as governor. Under the circumstances Arran’s vacillating wits were no match for the machinations of the cardinal. French subsidies began to enter Scotland, to vie with the English ones, and the very day after the Treaties of Greenwich had been signed, Sadler reported to Henry that the French ships had been seen lying off the coast of Scotland.
Henry reacted to this news predictably by demanding that the queen be moved away from Linlithgow, which he thought altogether too accessible to the French if they landed. Arran replied smoothly to Sadler that the baby was suffering from ‘the breeding of teeth’ and it might be dangerous to move her at this precise moment. Sadler noted that Arran was as much concerned for her well-being as if she had been his own child. In point of fact, Linlithgow did no longer seem a suitable place in which to guard their queen, although it was fear of abduction by the English, rather than by the French, which now prompted the Scots to move her. On 21st July, Cardinal Beaton assembled about 7000 followers at Stirling and marched down to Linlithgow, together with Huntly, Lennox, Argyll and Bothwell, with the avowed aim of putting the child in charge of some reliable guardians at Stirling Castle. There was as yet no conclusive evidence of a volte-face on the part of the Scottish government. The Protestant earl of Glencairn was deputed to make the new arrangements, and of the four lords thus chosen – Graham, Lindsay, Livingston and Erskine – Erskine was a natural choice, since the Erskines enjoyed a hereditary right
to guard the person of the heir to the throne. (This same Lord Erskine had been one of the personal guardians of the young King James V as well as guardian to Mary’s dead brother the prince of Scotland when his father visited the Isles in 1540.) Equally, since Stirling had formed part of Mary of Guise’s dowry, there was no particular reason why she should not visit it at any time she wished, although additional care was taken to explain to Sadler that Linlithgow, that splendid palace, was actually too small to lodge both queens comfortably.
The new home of Mary, Stirling, had in the time of Edward I’s invasion been considered the strongest castle in Scotland. Even that optimistic maker of promises, Sir George Douglas, thought it would be extraordinarily difficult to abduct Mary from Stirling in the autumn, and hand her over to King Henry, although he characteristically offered to try, if supplied with enough gold. In spite of its subsequent ornamentation, its commanding situation, surveying both plain and mountain, looking towards the Ochils on one side (where silver for the royal mint was mined) and the Grampian and Trossachs on the other, the castle was unaltered since the days of Edward I. Its attractions included the splendour of the great hall of James V, which in 1618 John Taylor compared favourably to Westminster Hall,’38 and the palace, a jewel of the Scottish Renaissance, today still showing King James’s initials in the carved panels over its windows. But in 1543 it was the fortress aspect of the castle, high over the town of Stirling, higher still over the plain, and standing at the gateway of the impenetrable territory of the Highlands, which commended it to the lords who there incarcerated their queen for safety.
Henry VIII still felt secure enough in the terms of the treaty he had just signed to imagine that he could put Sadler in charge of the queen in her new abode, and he actually laid it down that Mary of Guise was not to be allowed to lodge in the castle with her baby, but should be kept elsewhere in the town and allowed to visit her from time to time, as the little queen’s keepers should think fit.39 Such might be the distant relationship which Henry in England considered suitable for a child and its mother. But the time when Henry would have any say in Scotland’s affairs was rapidly passing. The king made a series of frantic efforts to maintain his ascendancy over Arran; he also tried to woo his former enemy Cardinal Beaton, and tempt him to throw in his lot with the English, after laying aside his cardinal’s hat and his religion; but his arrest of some Scottish merchant ships sailing to France, and the impounding of the merchants and their goods, aroused popular indignation. Sadler warned him that the temper of the country was turning against him. After torments of indecision, Arran finally decided to throw in his lot with Beaton and the pro-French party, his mind probably made up in the end by the renewed promise of the little queen’s hand for his son. On 8th September, in the church of the Franciscans at Stirling, ‘the unhappy man’, as Knox disgustedly termed him, did penance for his apostasy and received the Catholic sacrament while Argyll and Patrick, earl of Bothwell, held the towel over his head.40