Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  The day after Arran’s change of faith, on 9th September, 1543, Mary Stuart was solemnly crowned in Stirling Castle chapel at the age of nine months. It was an inauspicious date, being the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Flodden, and the coronation scarcely seems to have been an occasion for universal rejoicing. Sir Ralph Sadler reported back that Mary had been crowned ‘with such solemnitie as they do use in this country, which is not very costlie’.41 Certainly the Tudor use of ceremonial which Queen Elizabeth I was to put to such good effect in subjugating the imagination of her subjects, was not understood in Scotland. Sixteen years later, Elizabeth’s own coronation was a magnificent display of pageantry, with the uncrowned queen its centrepiece, sparkling with jewels, in cloth of gold, revealed to an admiring populace in an open litter. By contrast the coronation of the Stuart queen consisted of the hurried investiture of a tiny child, surrounded by feudal nobility at least as powerful as the crown they nominally served. At the ceremony, the earl of Arran bore the crown, the earl of Lennox bore the sceptre, and the earl of Argyll, also of royal descent from James I, bore the sword. The pro-English party, including Angus, Gray, Glencairn, Cassillis and Maxwell, stayed away altogether.

  * According to modern practice, Mary Queen of Scots was born a Stewart (as her father had been) and became a Stuart only through her marriage to her cousin Lord Darnley. But as the Anglo-French spelling of her name – Stuart – was adopted on her behalf during her upbringing in France, and always employed by her in the many devices and anagrams of her own name, it has been used to indicate her throughout this book. James VI and I was quite properly Stuart, rather than Stewart, taking the surname of his father Darnley. But of course too much importance should not be attached to the spelling of names in an age when many people spelt their own names in a variety of different ways on different occasions.

  * Although the throne did finally ‘pass with a lass’ as James V predicted, that lass was not his daughter. The Stewart dynasty, far from ending with Mary, went on through her son James to extend its power still further, over the throne of England and of Ireland.

  * Today the room where Mary Queen of Scots was born is roofless and the remaining structure of the palace of Linlithgow owes much of its beauty to embellishments in the next century.

  * See table of the Scottish royal succession.

  CHAPTER TWO

  England’s Rough Wooing

  ‘I perceive that proverb to be very true

  Unhappy is the age which has o’er young a King’

  Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount

  The defection of Arran marked the first turning-point in the life of Mary Queen of Scots. It decided, among other things, that Henry would no longer woo the Scots with gifts, but attempt to constrain them by force. This was indeed the course which he furiously advised his pensioners among the Scottish nobles to pursue, when he heard the news of Arran’s treachery. However, George Douglas managed to put forward a number of objections to immediate action, while continuing to profess loyalty to Henry and amazement at the turn events had taken in Scotland. The world was full of falsehood, he exclaimed, he knew not whom he might trust. Arran and Cardinal Beaton took no immediate steps to break with England, but the knowledge that they had cut themselves free from close entanglement with Protestant England encouraged both the papacy and the French king to renew their support to Scotland. The appearance of a papal legate, Marco Grimani, the patriarch of Aquileia, with a papal subsidy, and of French envoys at the Scottish court, presaged the final change of policy announced by the Scottish Parliament in December 1543. By the Treaty of 15th December, as Leslie put it, the ‘auld bands’ between the Scots and the French ‘so long and religiously kept’ since the days of King Robert the Bruce, were now once more confirmed.1 A secondary effect of Arran’s volte-face was the turning away of Lennox from the party of Scottish government. Lennox was unable to endure the fact that despite his changes of allegiance, his rival Arran still retained his position as governor of Scotland. The classical policy of the Lennox Stewarts was to ally themselves with the enemies of the Hamiltons. Lennox now veered his eyes towards England, and offered himself as a bridegroom to Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage to the earl of Angus, and niece of Henry VIII . In time to come, this formidable lady was to show herself a worthy combination of the intriguing talents of Douglas and Tudor. She was also, as the mother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, to play a significant part in the history of her daughter-in-law, the queen of Scots. But at the time of her marriage, in June 1544, her importance was mainly dynastic: she brought Lennox within the sphere of the English succession, and as Henry’s nephew by marriage, Lennox contracted a marriage treaty with him, which put him henceforth firmly into the English camp. Among other provisions, Lennox promised to do all he could to hand over Mary Stuart to Henry, and Henry in return swore to make Lennox governor of Scotland once he had subjugated the country, with Lennox’s help.

  Thus by the time Mary Stuart was one year old, the pieces on the traditional chess board which lay between Scotland and England had been rearranged to form an altogether different pattern from that which was in evidence when she first succeeded to the throne. In this realignment, human frailty had played an important part – the pliable character of the Governor Arran, steadfast in one thing only – greed for his own family’s advancement, the intemperate nature of Henry VIII’s attitude towards Scotland, the mature cunning of the cardinal, able to play on Arran’s weakness, and lastly the remarkable character of the Scottish nobles of the time, who saw no point in pursuing any policy out of principle, once it no longer suited their purpose, even if they were being bribed to do so. In twelve months the possibility of the peaceful annexation of Scotland by England, through the marriage of Mary and Edward, and the direction of Scottish affairs by King Henry, had receded with amazing rapidity. With the renewal of the French alliance, and the birth of a son to Catherine de Médicis and the future Henry II of France in January 1544, the prospect of a very different education and marriage unfolded before the child queen.

  Four and a half years were to elapse before the young queen of Scots was finally dispatched to the safety of France. They were years in which the policy of Henry VIII towards Scotland did little to correct the impression he had already given, of a vindictive bully, once his will was gain-said. In May 1544 Henry’s commander Hertford set out on the first stages of what has been aptly termed ‘the Rough Wooing’, in which Henry paradoxically attempted to win the loyalties of the Scots by a planned programme of devastation of Scottish territory. His instructions to Hertford strike a note of ruthlessness which chills the spirit,2 and the English records make it clear that their armies were remarkably successful in carrying out this ‘scorched earth’ policy, until the point when they were checked by the fortress castle of Edinburgh, which withstood their siege. There was no pity in the English hearts: an eye-witness account of the campaign sent to the Lord Russell, the Lord Privy Seal, in London, exhibits a positively self-righteous spirit towards these fiery depredations – the English seem to have considered themselves taking part in a sort of holy war, as a result of the broken promises of the Scots. The burning of Edinburgh – which took two days – is vividly described, and in the course of it the abbey and palace of Holyrood were sacked.3

  The English also broke up the pier at Leith Haven, captured the Scottish merchant ships and finally set off for home laden with booty, taking care on their way to devastate the castle of Lord Seton, including his gardens and orchards, said to be the fairest in Scotland, because he was held responsible for the release of the cardinal, the author of all this calamity. ‘In these victories who is to be most lauded but God, by whose goodness the English hath had of a great season, notable victories,’ exclaims Lord Russell’s correspondent. Allowing for natural English exaggeration of their success, even if half the destruction he reported took place, the Scots may surely have supposed that God had temporarily deserted the side of David for tha
t of Goliath. The next rough embrace on the part of the English took place in November 1544. Coming up from the borders, the English forces laid about them as before; in the course of their campaign, they devastated the ancient tombs of the Douglases at Melrose, one of the string of rich abbeys along the fertile valley of the Tweed, hives of life and industry, which made them enticing bait for predatory English soldiers. It was, however, not so much this insult to his ancestors, as the fact that the Scottish government had learnt to counter the English bribes with gifts of their own, which persuaded the venal Angus to lead the Scots to victory at Ancrum Moor in February. But the effects on Ancrum Moor were not permanent: for in September 1545 Hertford himself led a second, equally destructive expedition to the south-east, at a time deliberately chosen in order to ravish and burn the newly cut harvest.

  In this atmosphere of violence, the safety of the young queen continued to be a matter of concern – Hertford reported that at the time of his forays in May 1544 she had been removed to Dunkeld for greater security. In the same summer the statecraft of her mother Mary of Guise made its first effects felt. She had impressed the patriarch of Aquileia with her prudent and cheerful disposition, in view of her continuously desperate situation in such a divided kingdom as poor Scotland. ‘I say poor kingdom,’ wrote the patriarch, ‘because it is so divided and disturbed that if God does not show his hand and inspire these nobles to unite together, public and private ruin is clearly to be foreseen.’4 Hertford’s spoliations of 1544 did nothing to heal such divisions. On the contrary, considerable dissatisfaction was now felt with the policy of the cardinal, which had plunged Scotland into such a state of physical misery. From the summer onwards, the weight of the queen dowager’s counsels were also felt in the shifting scales of Scottish national policy. Many nobles were beginning to feel that she should share the regency with the weak Arran. From its first volume, the Register of the Acts of the Privy Council marks her presence – Presentibus, Regina et Gubernator. It is safe to assume that Queen Mary’s secret wishes were by now steadily in favour of a French marriage – France, her own country, the country of her able family, and the country with enough resources to quell the English, on behalf of the Scots, if necessary. The climate of Scottish opinion was not yet ready for such a match: it needed further action on behalf of England, to point the lesson that a French alliance, however confining to their independence, was at least preferable to extinction at the hands of their neighbours. Mary of Guise had also two specific hazards to overcome – Arran’s desire for the marriage of Mary and his own son, and the cardinal’s steady opposition to the idea of a French marriage, as marked as had been his opposition to an English one, for the same nationalist reasons.

  But Cardinal Beaton’s days were numbered. Quite apart from its political confusion, religious life in Scotland was in a ferment. Not only had high office in the Church become a valuable part of royal patronage, but in a poor country such as Scotland, with a primitive economy, the Church still presented a picture of disproportionate wealth. In a report to Pope Paul IV in 1556 on the state of the Scottish Church, Cardinal Sermoneta wrote that ‘almost one half of the revenue of the whole kingdom’ was coming in to it; it has been calculated that the Church revenues on the eve of the Reformation must have been more than £300,000, whereas the royal lands only brought in £17,500.5 Such riches had in all too many cases cut off the Scottish clergy totally from a sense of pastoral mission and many of them might well justify Knox’s abusive term of ‘a greedy pack’. It was felt that while monks and friars idled and were supported by the community, the true objects of social pity – ‘the blind, crooked, bed-ridden, widows, orphans and all other poor, so visited by the hand of God as may not work’ in the words of one contemporary complaint – were being neglected. The majority of the parish churches in the country had been assigned or appropriated to bishoprics or monasteries, and other churches had no priest at all. The provincial council of 1549 enacted a significant amount of statutes denouncing concubinage among the priesthood, or the promotion and endowing of illegitimate children. Repeated enactments by provincial councils urging the clergy to preach to the people showed both that the problem was pressing and that it was not being cured.6

  Against this background, it is easy to understand the success of any anti-clerical movement: by 1543, the flames of unrest were being fed by a continuous fuel of books, pamphlets and broadsides advocating the reformed religion. Many were spiritual in content; the others were mere lampoons. The same parallel exists in those people who were drawn to the new religion. Many were men of the most ascetic nature, who felt they could no longer stretch their wings under the tutelage of the corrupt Scottish Catholic Church; others were merely animated by a strong dislike of the Catholic clergy. In time past the Scottish nobles had often endowed the Church with land, in order that they might be prayed for in perpetuity: their reactions, once it was explained to them by the reformers that these prayers were not necessarily an assured passport to heaven, were predictably angry; the nobility considered that the land could be rightfully returned to them. In March 1546 George Wishart, a leading Protestant preacher of outstanding gentle character, in an age not over-endowed with the pure in heart, was burned to death in the forecourt of the castle of St Andrews. Cardinal Beaton and his bishops watched from cushioned seats on the castle walls. Three months later, a band of Fife lairds, disguised as the masons whom the cardinal had commissioned to re-fortify the castle, broke into St Andrews and seized the cardinal as he was resting after a night spent with his concubine Marion Ogilvy. After holding him at sword point, and asking him to repent the shedding of Wishart’s blood, they did him to death. After death the cardinal’s savagely mutilated body was hung naked from the foretower of the castle for the edification of the people.* Later, the corpse was pickled in salt, and kept in a barrel in the famous Bottle Dungeon of St Andrews for over a year, while his assassins kept the castle in their thrall.

  Knox related the death of the cardinal with all the relish of an Old Testament prophet who knows that God is on his side. It was indeed an almost Biblical end for this great prince of the Church. But his murderers, whatever their motives, did not receive the immediate help from Henry VIII which they had anticipated, once they publicly announced their support of the English marriage. The murder of Beaton had the unexpected consequence of bringing the prospect of a French marriage for Mary closer. Henry VIII lagged in sending aid to the ‘Castilians’ as they were now termed. Arran dithered, unable to condone the murder of a prelate since his half-brother John Hamilton was bishop-elect of Dunkeld, but unwilling to send for French help, which might spoil the chances of his son’s royal marriage – moreover as this very son was being held hostage in St Andrews, he had a special reason for not wishing to press the Castilians too hard. He compromised with a long but ineffective siege of the castle, which owing to its spectacular position on the Fife coast, with the sea washing round the very walls of the castle, was able to hold out for the unbelievable period of fourteen months, despite the most determined mining operations on the part of the attackers, from the land side. There was, however, a long period of armistice in the course of the siege and it was during this that Knox himself entered the castle, and began his career as a preacher in the pulpit of the parish of St Andrews: he confirms Pitscottie’s account of the impudent behaviour of those within the castle, who, when the siege was not at its hottest would ride out and harry the countryside ‘using their body in lechery with fair women’.8 It took the arrival of a French expedition off the coast to bring the siege to an end: the castle fell on 30th July, 1547, as a result of which the principal defenders were dispatched to France as prisoners, and many others of its inhabitants, including Knox, were sent to the galleys.

  The death of Francis I and the accession of his son Henry II to the throne of France in the spring of 1547 had made the climate of opinion in France newly favourable to notions of French aid for Scotland: Henry II was anxious to conciliate his powerful Guise subject
s, whose sister and niece were evidently in such a dangerous situation there. The death of Henry VIII, on the other hand, in January 1547, had no effect in reducing the savagery of the English attitude towards Scotland. In late August of that year, the former Hertford, now Protector Somerset, mounted an expedition towards Scotland which was to rival in ferocity anything the late king had commissioned. Throughout the summer, the Register of the Scottish Privy Council is full of enactments to do with the coming war: to impress the country with a sense of the emergency facing them, the fiery cross was sent to every district, as a result of which the divided Scots seem to have made some sort of genuinely national effort: 36,000 people hastened from all over the country towards Edinburgh. These also included members of the clergy, who had a special reason for wishing to fight off the heretical invader, and provision was made that if any kirkman died in battle, his next-of-kin was to have his benefice. It was in this do-or-die spirit that on 10th September the battle of Pinkie Cleugh was engaged.9