Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Reunited in each other’s company at the house of Traquair, home of John Stewart of Traquair, captain of the queen’s guard, the royal couple apparently gave way to their most open and shocking disagreement. Romantic Traquair, said to be the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, guarding and guarded by the Tweed, lies amid rich park lands ideal for hunting. A stag hunt was planned for the next day, in which both Mary and Darnley were expected to take part. But at supper, the queen begged to excuse herself on the grounds that the exertion would be too much for her health. When Darnley refused to listen, she whispered in his ear that she suspected she was again enceinte. Darnley answered aloud, in roughly the same words he had used before, during the ride to Dunbar, ‘Never mind, if we lose this one, we will make another,’ at which Traquair rebuked him sharply for his un-Christian behaviour. Darnley (who was probably drunk) then exclaimed coarsely: ‘What! ought not we to work a mare well when she is in foal?’ The anecdote comes from Nau,25 and in relating it to him the queen may perhaps have allowed time to have over-coloured Darnley’s brutality. But the possibility that Mary could have been enceinte once more – it was now two months since the birth of Prince James – is an interesting one in view of Buchanan’s accusations that Mary never again admitted Darnley to her bed after the child’s birth. A ballad written in 1568 after Mary had fled to England, called The Earl of Bothwell, represented her as vowing after the murder of Riccio

  … for a twelve month and a day

  The king and she would not come in one sheet

  In view of Mary’s conviction that Darnley had aimed at her death and that of her child, her refusal to grant him his conjugal rights would be easy to understand, but of course it could scarcely be expected to lead to happier relations between them. It is noticeable that his humiliation as a husband was one of Darnley’s main points of complaint on the occasion when he voiced his grievances. Taking into account Mary’s ill-health, the most likely state of affairs between them during July and August would seem to be an occasional reluctant acquiescence on the part of the queen to her husband’s embraces, which did little to convince Darnley that she either loved or respected him. After Mary’s illness, and especially once the matter of a divorce had been broached at Craigmillar, her abstinence from any physical relationship was certainly total: by then she clearly wished to have nothing more to do with him as a husband, and would therefore hardly have run the risk of another pregnancy.

  On her return from Traquair to Edinburgh, the queen arranged for the transference of the little prince to Stirling Castle, the traditional nursery of royal princes. His cortège accordingly set off with four or five hundred harquebusiers round it for protection, and the prince was handed into the care of the Erskine family as his hereditary governors. In delegating the upbringing of her child in this manner, Mary Stuart was in no way deviating from normal practice, and certainly not showing herself a cold or unfeeling mother. Fosterage was on the contrary the standard custom of the Scottish noble families, who handed over their children in babyhood, and the custom of fosterage, being regarded as a mark of aristocracy, gradually came to be copied lower down the social scale. Mary, in her anxious watching over James’s cradle, and her immense solicitude for the grandeur of his christening ceremony, which it was within her power to arrange, showed an almost pathetically strong maternal anxiety, borne out by her touching fondness for all other small children with whom she came in contact throughout her life. The preparations for his first nursery at Stirling were both detailed and sumptuous, done to the queen’s personal command: there were to be buckets of gold and silver ‘the finest that can be gottin’, lengths of blue plaiding for the baby’s cradle, fustian for his mattress, feathers for his bolster; his room was to be hung with tapestries, as well as adequately provided with blankets. The needs of Lady Reres in her capacity of wet-nurse were not overlooked: she too was to have plaiding to cover her bed and a canopy to go over it. The instructions were to be carried out without any delay, because it was all ‘very needful to be had’.26

  In September, Maitland, long out of favour with the queen, was reconciled to her, and returned to court; he was also reconciled with Bothwell. At the end of September there was a confrontation between Mary and Darnley in front of the French ambassador and many of the nobles, in which both stated their grievances. The emphasis was all on Darnley’s status within the kingdom, and whether Mary was still allowing him his rights as king. Lennox first brought the matter up in a letter to Mary of 29th September when he told his daughter-in-law that Darnley was now so humiliated by his position that he intended to go abroad, having a boat all prepared for the journey.27 As a result Mary faced Darnley the next day in front of the Council and du Croc, and made him a ‘fort belle harangue’ in which she asked him in what respect she had offended him, and pleaded with him, with hands joined together, not to spare her anything, but to tell her the truth. The lords then joined in asking Darnley how they had offended him, and even du Croc chimed in with the view that if Darnley went abroad it would be an offence to the queen’s honour. Darnley made little of this opportunity for airing his grievances against his wife, but merely said flatly that he had no particular cause for offence; his sting was in his deliberately melodramatic departure from the queen’s side, without kissing her, and vowing in sybilline fashion that she would not see him again for a long time. Whereupon the lords and du Croc crowded round the queen and told her to continue in her present course of wise and virtuous behaviour, and the truth between her and Darnley would soon be generally known.*

  Two weeks later du Croc wrote to Catherine de Médicis of the newly excellent relations which existed between Queen Mary and her subjects, through her own efforts and good qualities – they were ‘so well reconciled with the Queen as a result of her own prudent behaviour, that nowadays there was not a single division to be seen between them’. Darnley, on the other hand, was equally ill-regarded by both parties; having apparently learnt nothing from his recent experiences, he still wanted to rule everything; yet there was not a single noble who did not take his cue for his behaviour towards Darnley from the queen. Du Croc noted that preparations were already being made for the christening of the little prince, £12,000 being raised by direct taxation to pay for it, and he represented Catholics and Protestants as being equally enthusiastic about the coming celebrations. Indeed, he attributed much of Darnley’s spoilt and sulky behaviour to the fuss which was going on about the christening: not only was Darnley jealous of Mary’s reconciliation with the Protestant lords, but he was also fearful lest strangers should witness his obvious fall from favour at the ceremony – a prospect which was intolerable to his ‘haute et superbe’ temperament.28

  To the queen’s attitude to the official religion of her country, as much as to the birth of an heir, must be attributed much of this Indian summer of warm relations with her nobility. The tender green shoots of a pro-Catholic policy which she had put out in the spring of 1566 had been rudely blighted by the sharp frost of Riccio’s murder, which among other things demonstrated the strength of the Protestant lords who could even storm her apartments. For the rest of the fifteen months of her personal rule, Mary made no attempt to help the Scottish Catholic Church, but showed on the contrary a renewed warmth towards the organization of the reformed religion. On 3rd October an Act of Privy Council ordained that benefices worth less than 300 merks annually were to go to the Protestant ministers, and there were now some instances of ministers being appointed to benefices. On 13th December a further law was enacted to help the Protestant administration; and on 20th December the Church received from the queen a direct gift of £10,000 as well as provisions.29 Such an attitude to the religion which the majority of her subjects professed may seem to us today pragmatic in terms of government and admirable in terms of tolerance and good order. There could after all be no doubt of Mary’s personal attachment to the Catholic faith, since quite apart from her early words to Throckmorton, she never wavered from the holding of her own personal Ma
ss in Scotland, even at the times when it would have been most expedient to do so, and the Mass itself as we have seen was a most detestable symbol to the fervent Protestants. One may therefore applaud her far-sighted policy, all the more remarkable in one born after all in the year in which the Spanish Inquisition was founded. But of course Pius V, in distant Rome, could not be expected to view the situation in the same detached light: indeed, to him the flagging of his spiritual daughter’s newly kindled zeal was a painful prospect, and one to be combated with the double weapon of a papal mission and a papal subsidy. A papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, was dispatched, bearing 150,000 crowns in gold from the Pope, intended to help the queen combat the heretics; but now as before, Queen Mary showed an absolute disinclination to receive the nuncio on Scottish soil, on the grounds that his arrival would occasion ‘great tumults’.30 Mondovi was in fact lingering in France, awaiting permission to land, when the news came of Mary’s serious illness in Jedburgh.

  Jedburgh was one of the important towns in the Scottish border country, lying on the edge of the wild terrain which led across to the Anglo-Scottish border itself. Here Mary had arrived in early October to hold a justice eyre. She inhabited a ‘bastel-house’, or fortified dwelling, in the main street, still visible today in its original form. While she was in the midst of administering justice, news came that her lieutenant on the borders, Bothwell, had been seriously wounded in a foray there, and was now lying in danger of death at the castle of Hermitage. The queen did not immediately take any action, but five or six days later, when her business had been completed, she decided to pay Bothwell a visit, not so much to express her sympathy, as for the practical reason that he was her lieutenant and one of her chief advisers, especially on the perennially vexed border questions, and she needed to consult with him. Bedford, reporting the incident, and the earl’s recovery, commented that the queen of Scots would certainly have been sorry to lose Bothwell, but made no remotely bawdy suggestion about the loss, which was by implication a strictly political or administrative one.

  On 16th October, the queen, accompanied by her half-brother Moray and a large number of her court, as well as a quantity of soldiers, decided to ride over to the Hermitage, visit Bothwell, and since this border fortress was not prepared to receive the luxurious burden of a royal stay, return to Jedburgh that same day. Hermitage Castle was a thirteenth-century fortress, gaunt and forbidding in appearance, in the centre of Liddesdale. Lying on the left bank of the Hermitage water, twelve miles south of Hawick, it was a true military outpost, where up to 1000 men and 200 horsemen could be stationed in times of danger. Already it had acquired cruel and mournful memories from earlier violent scenes in Scottish history, and being close to the English border, it was understandable that the queen should not wish to linger there overnight. In any case the day’s journey meant a ride of only a little over fifty miles. Although a good day’s ride at the time was considered to be thirty to forty miles, it was always considered possible to ride more than fifty miles in emergencies: the ride was not an outstanding hardship to a queen accustomed to daily hunting and riding hard in the saddle all her life, who had ridden twenty-five miles pillion to Dunbar when six months pregnant. The decision to make the visit within the day was certainly a practical one under the circumstances.*

  However, on her return from Hermitage Queen Mary fell violently and seriously ill. Undoubtedly the ride contributed to the final impetus of her collapse, but she had evidently been sickening in her habitual and, as it seemed, nervous fashion for some sort of breakdown for weeks, since the situation with Darnley seemed to admit no solution. In a confidential letter to Archbishop Beaton, Mary’s ambassador in Paris, Maitland attributed her illness entirely to her disagreements with Darnley – ‘he misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband …’31 Physical and mental stress now apparently combined to produce an attack of illness so severe that many of those who observed Mary in the throes of it formed the opinion that she was unlikely to recover, even if she was not already dead. First the queen was seized by a prolonged fit of vomiting – ‘more than sixty times’ – so long and severe that she several times fell into unconsciousness; two days later, she could neither speak nor see, and had frequent convulsions. There was a temporary recovery, but by 25th October she had become so rapidly ill again – ‘all her limbs were so contracted, her face was so distorted, her eyes closed, her mouth fast and her feet and arms stiff and cold’ – that she was once more considered to be on the verge of death. Since she was generally believed to be sinking, Mary was publicly prayed for in the churches of Edinburgh as Knox’s History testifies.32 By her own account to Nau, Mary’s servants thought she was dead, and started to open the windows of the little room where she lay; Moray was accused of trying to lay his hands on silver plate and rings; mourning dresses were ordered and funeral arrangements discussed. In Maitland’s more laconic account to Cecil, it was admitted that her life had actually been despaired of for half an hour. The situation was saved by the queen’s physician, Arnault, who seeing some signs of life in her arms, bandaged her very tightly, including her toes and legs from the ankle upwards, and then having her mouth opened by force, poured wine down it. He then administered a clyster, the queen vomited an amount of corrupt blood, and subsequently began to recover.”33

  Out of these facts, dramatic enough in themselves, Buchanan wove a lecherous fairy story in which the queen rode like a maniac to be by Bothwell’s side the moment she received the news of his mishap (which as we have seen is quite contradicted by the facts), fell ill through having thus gratified her unlawful passions during her short stay at Hermitage (Moray’s presence at the interview is ignored) and subsequently had Bothwell moved into the room below hers at Jedburgh, so that they could continue their love-making conveniently during their mutual convalescences34 – once again almost ludicrously far from the truth. In fact, the queen was occupied at Jedburgh far away from Bothwell, once more in making provisions for her kingdom in the event of her death. When she felt herself to be in extremis she called the nobles into her room, including Moray, and attempted to dictate some sort of settlement which would ensure a calm inheritance for her son – for it is the son who is to succeed, not the father, and Mary specified that Darnley was not to seize the crown ‘to which he laid claim by right’. Her first concern is for the young prince, who is to have no evil company around him during his ‘youth head’ – here perhaps Queen Mary was influenced by the example of Darnley, who often tried to excuse his failings on the ground that he had been corrupted by bad companions. Darnley is once more castigated for ingratitude: ‘My lords, you know the goodness that I have used towards some whom I have advanced to a great degree of honour and pre-eminence above others; who, notwithstanding, has used … ingratitude towards me, which has engendered the displeasure that presently most grieves me, and is also the cause of my sickness. I pray lord mend them.’ Perhaps her most interesting words of all were on the subject of religion, where she pleaded for the tolerance which she had shown during her life to the Protestants to be shown after her death to the Catholics: ‘I have pressed none of you that professes religion by your conscience … I pray you, brother earl of Moray, that you trouble none.’ When Father Edmund Hay, a Jesuit in Paris on his way to Scotland, reported the scene round the bedside of the apparently dying woman in a letter to St Francis Borgia of 6th November35 he said that, although she affirmed her desire to die in the (Catholic) religion which her predecessors, the kings of Scotland, had practised for 1364 years, yet she frankly admitted that she had been neglectful not only in government of the realm, but also, and chiefly, in promoting the Catholic religion.

  Throughout this period of illness, Darnley scarcely showed himself as the devoted husband. He was in the west of Scotland when Mary fell ill and did not, as Buchanan and Knox afterwards stated, come rushing to his wife’s side. He paid the queen a brief visit eleven days after she first fell ill, and then ret
urned to Glasgow. The queen’s apologists have sometimes cited this in turn as an example of callousness; however, the Diurnal of Occurrents, an unbiased chronicle of events, suggests that as he was hunting and hawking, he did not even hear of the illness until 27th October, whereupon he rode to Edinburgh and the next day to Jedburgh.’36 At Jedburgh he received some fancied slight, of the sort Darnley was quick to perceive – so that he went back to Edinburgh and thence to Stirling. Possibly no special messenger had been sent to advise him of the illness: at any rate the picture of a breach in their relationship is a complete one.

  The next episode in the mounting tragedy of Darnley took place at the end of November at the castle of Craigmillar, an enormous baronial edifice, founded by the Preston family, in the parish of Liberton, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Mary was still in the hands of her physicians, since her illness, and was apparently in a state of deep depression. Du Croc, the French ambassador, wrote to Beaton in Paris that she often repeated the words ‘I could wish to be dead’. Du Croc commented that no future understanding could be expected between the queen and her husband for the two reasons of his arrogance and her suspicion: ‘The first is, the King will never humble himself as he ought; the other is, the Queen cannot perceive any nobleman speaking with the King, but that she presently suspects some contrivance between them.’37 Ever since the murder of Riccio, Mary evidently regarded herself as permanently threatened by some possible conspiracy on the part of Darnley. But Mary’s chief nobles, lodged with her at Craigmillar, were equally resolute in their hatred of Darnley, who had betrayed them over Riccio, and was yet still left nominally able to lord it over them as king of Scotland. Experience had not curbed Darnley’s arrogance; nor were nobles of the temperament of Moray, Argyll, Bothwell and Maitland likely to forgive and forget.