Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Mary’s apparent Anglicanism did not pass unnoticed in England. Towards the end of September Mary heard that the local Catholics believed she was turning away from the old religion, and were very upset by the news; immediately in the great hall of Bolton, in front of a full assembly, she professed herself as fervently Catholic as ever before, her arguments, according to Knollys, being ‘so weak, they only showed her zeal’. To Knollys alone she attempted to make capital out of the incident, saying pointedly that she could scarcely be expected to lose France, Spain and all her foreign allies by seeming to change her religion, and yet still not be certain that Elizabeth was her ‘assured friend’. But her letter to her girlhood friend, Elisabeth de Valois, queen of Spain, at the end of September shows that her heart was evidently as Catholic as ever beneath its convenient show of Anglican interest.’36 Mary invokes the memory of their common childhood, the food they had shared in the past which had nourished an indissoluble friendship, to plead for Spanish aid. She tells Elisabeth that she has been offered ‘de belles choses’ to change her religion, but whatever Elisabeth may hear to the contrary, Mary will never abandon the Faith, but merely try to accommodate herself to her changing circumstances. In the meantime Mary hoped somehow to smuggle out her little son James from Scotland to marry one of Elisabeth’s daughters. By the time this letter reached Spain, Elisabeth was already dead in childbirth (incidentally leaving Philip II, that ever recurring prospective bridegroom, once more free to marry). But in November Mary wrote angrily in the same vein to Philip himself, saying that she was considered too closely related to the queen of England to enjoy the services of a Catholic priest, but that it should not be believed on that account that she had given up the beliefs of her religion, as well as the practice.37

  The point was a good one. It was perfectly true that on her first arrival in England Mary had asked Lord Scrope for a Catholic priest to attend her and he had replied firmly that there was none left in England. It was also true, as Mary told Philip, that if Knollys introduced a Protestant preacher into her chamber, she could hardly prevent him. Nevertheless Mary always felt somewhat sensitive in later life on this point of her alleged Anglicanism, not so much out of intellectual distaste – for her own strong but primitive faith seems to have remained perfectly unaffected by all the assaults made upon it – but for the good practical reasons she outlined to Knollys. By such aspersions on her Catholicism, she feared to forfeit the support of her Catholic allies. On the eve of her death, she still took trouble to justify herself for having listened to Protestant sermons when she first came to England. One may perhaps detect in these protestations the murmur of a faintly guilty conscience; possibly Mary did feel later that she had compromised herself a little in this respect in her desire to please Elizabeth. This very minor essay into the realms of Protestantism on the part of Mary may be ascribed in part to the wishful thinking of the ardent Puritan Knollys, in part to the natural curiosity of the captive cut off from contact with her own religion, but mainly to Mary’s devouring obsession with the subject of Elizabeth.

  Knollys worried himself constantly over the prospect of his prisoner escaping: he even sent a map of the castle down to London so that his security arrangements could be approved. The royal train at Bolton now consisted of Leslie, Herries, the Livingstons, the Flemings, Gavin Hamilton, the master of the household of John Beaton, Bastian Pages and his wife Mary Seton and young Willy Douglas, a corps of loyal supporters. Bolton was only sixty miles to the southwest Scottish border as the crow flies. Escape might or might not have been possible. Knollys’s forebodings indicate that Mary might with luck have eluded her captors. But at this point there were positively no attempts at escape, no disguises as a laundress, no stolen keys, no corrupted guards; Mary herself made it clear that this was at her own wish. She saw no reason to try and escape when she hoped for so much from Elizabeth. It suited her too to pretend to be a guest, not a captive. At the beginning of October Mary warned Knollys that things might be very different in the future: ‘If I shall be holden here perforce, you may be sure then being as a desperate person I will use any attempts that may serve my purpose either by myself or my friends.’38

  In the meantime, with the prospect of the successful conference of York in front of her, Mary was content to stay where she was. Knollys really had no need to fear those hare-hunting expeditions across the moors – ‘the wind never so boisterous’ which made him feel so nervous because he constantly imagined a dozen or so Scots would ride over the moors and carry off their queen. In his mind’s eye he saw them riding over mountains and heaths with spare horses, avoiding villages and towns, and rescuing this Diana – ‘for she hath an able body to endure to gallop apass’. Knollys believed that the country folk would certainly not stop her: they would laugh in their sleeves to see her go.39 Mary on the other hand no longer saw herself in this romantic and impulsive light. In mid-September she wrote proudly to the king of France, saying that the fact she had had no response to any of her letters to him pleading for assistance no longer worried her, since now Queen Elizabeth her good sister had promised to do all things to her honour and grandeur and restore her to her estate.40 In October Mary pinned all her hopes on that conference to open at York, the result of which she believed, win or lose, guilty or innocent, could not fail to be her restoration to the throne of Scotland.

  * Tradition has it that the old woman received the freehold of her croft – for which she had previously paid rent – for this Samaritan deed. This was probably through the good offices of Lord Herries, who was the principal local landowner, and in a position to make such a gesture.

  * From the point of view of the succession, there was something to be said for having Elizabeth’s nearest relative under lock and key; acting on this principle, the emperors of Ethiopia used to incarcerate all the princes of blood royal on a mountain near Gondar, until the time came for one of them to succeed.

  * A longing haunts my spirit, day and night Bitter and sweet, torments my aching heart ’Twixt doubt and fear, it holds its wayward part, And while it lingers, rest and peace take flight… Ah! I have seen a ship freed from control On the high seas, outside a friendly port, And what was peaceful change to woe and pain: Ev’n so am I, a lonely trembling soul, Fearing – not you, but to be made the sport Of Fate, that bursts the closest, strongest chain!20

  * It has sometimes been conjectured from these words that Mary intended to reveal to Elizabeth the full truth about the murder of Darnley. But Mary’s words have the unmistakable ring of the captive, to be heard increasingly from now on in her utterances and letters, who will make any promise, hold out any lure, in order to achieve liberty.

  * The English were careful to avoid using the word ‘trial’, aware that they had no possible right to try the queen of another country, for a crime said to be committed there. But of course the proceedings were a form of trial, and the word is used hereafter without inverted commas.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Her Privy Letters

  ‘By divers her privy letters written wholly with her own

  hand … it is most certain that she was privy, art and

  part of the actual devise and deed of the fore-named

  murder of the King, her lawful husband.’

  From the Act of the Scottish Parliament, 15th December 1567

  The conference of York, which opened in October 1568, was remarkable from the first for the confusion of aims among its participants. Elizabeth had already left conflicting impressions upon Mary and the Scottish nobles as to what she regarded the desirable outcome of this conference to be. Their own intentions were equally at variance. Of those present, only Moray was able to show true singleness of purpose, in that he intended to prove the queen of Scotland’s guilt up to the hilt in order to prevent her return north; with this object in view he officially took custody from Morton of the debatable ‘privy letters’ in their silver casket on 16th September, before setting out for England. However, the incriminating documents had
signally increased from the solitary letter of Lennox’s supplication, and the briefly mentioned litterae of Buchanan’s June Book of Articles. They were now named in the receipt as ‘missive letters, contracts or obligations for marriage, sonnets or love-ballads, and all other letters contained therein’.1 Buchanan’s English translation of his Articles, prepared at the end of September for use in front of the commission, also contained an additional long postscript on the specific subject of the letters, in contrast to the single phrase used three months earlier.

  Moray’s supporters were much less single-minded than their chief in their aims; Maitland in particular still dangled after his old scheme of Anglo-Scottish union, in which a restored Mary could play her part. Nor were Mary’s own commissioners, including John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and Lord Herries, as resolute in their determination to prove her innocence as was the queen herself; having lived through the troubled times of the queen’s marriage to Bothwell, they conceived their role as rather to secure some sort of compromise by which Mary could be brought back to Scotland, than to shout out Queen Mary’s freedom from guilt from the house-tops. As for the English ‘judges’, the earl of Sussex, Sir Ralph Sadler and the duke of Norfolk, it soon transpired that they too were not immune to private considerations. Norfolk had recently been widowed; he was England’s leading noble, and himself a Protestant, although he had many Catholic relations; the queen of Scots was now generally regarded as once more marriageable, despite the fact that divorce from Bothwell was not yet secured, and Norfolk’s name had been mentioned in this context, even before the opening of the conference. As a ‘judge’, therefore, Norfolk might be supposed to be somewhat parti pris.

  Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the conference at York seemed at first to achieve but little. On 11th October Moray decided to make a bold essay to resolve matters. Copies of the ‘privy letters’ were secretly shown to the English commissioners. Maitland, however, seems to have leaked the news to Mary’s own commissioners for the next day they rode over to Bolton and informed her of this development, although they had not actually seen the letters themselves. Moray was still acting cautiously: Norfolk reported back to London that the letters had not been shown to them officially as commissioners, but merely ‘for our better instruction’.2 Moray asked Norfolk to find out how Elizabeth would react to the letters, and whether they would be considered sufficient proof to condemn the queen of Scots of murder. Despite the judicial irregularity of Moray’s behaviour, Norfolk professed himself to be horrified by the contents of the letters; although he had only seen copies, he expressed the view that so many letters could hardly be counterfeited; in asking Elizabeth’s advice on how to proceed next, he gave the opinion that conviction of the Scottish queen would scarcely be avoided, if indeed the letters were written in her own hand.

  Elizabeth’s reaction to this communication was to send for the whole conference to start again at Westminster. It was felt that away from the frenetic atmosphere which seemed to have developed at York, calmer counsels might prevail, and some solid solution emerge from out of this morass in which, as Sussex truly pointed out, the crown of Scotland was being tossed about on wave after wave of private feud and interest. Elizabeth was as yet unaware that only five days after Norfolk wrote in such shocked terms concerning Mary’s letters, he had had some private conference with Maitland in which it seems likely that Maitland held out to him the bait of Mary’s hand in marriage. From Maitland’s point of view, the marriage of Mary with a leading English Protestant noble was an excellent step forward in his plans. It had been suggested that at this point Maitland must also have revealed to Norfolk that the so-called Casket Letters were not all they seemed, and that the allegations against Mary as a murderess were not really to be taken too seriously. After all, in this strange quasi-judicial world of a trial which was not a trial, guilt might also be considered non-guilt. At all events, Norfolk now allowed himself to be involved secretly in certain schemes for a marriage between himself and Mary.

  Sussex, another English commissioner, did not seem to take the letters particularly seriously himself. In a letter back to London, he neatly summed up the course future developments might be expected to take, if Mary was allowed to appear before the tribunal at Westminster:3 she would obviously deny the authenticity of the letters in toto as a result of which she could never be convicted on their evidence; after this Elizabeth would be compelled to acquit her, and set her free. If on the other hand Mary was not allowed to appear personally, the whole matter could probably be ‘huddled up’ with some show of saving Mary’s honour, and yet without exposing the Scottish lords as forgers; after this Mary could still be kept in prison. It was a shrewd summary, and with its emphasis on the need to prevent Mary making a personal appearance at Westminster, a prophetic one. Knollys, from Bolton, put his finger on the same urgent necessity to condemn Mary somehow or other, if she was to be kept in captivity: he could not see how Elizabeth could with honour and safety detain Mary, unless she was utterly disgraced to the world and ‘the contrary party [Moray] thoroughly maintained’.

  Knollys’s solution to the problem of Mary was to marry her off to his wife’s nephew, and Queen Elizabeth’s own cousin, young George Carey, Lord Hunsdon’s son. This handsome young man had called on Mary at Bolton in September, on his way north to join his father, the newly appointed governor of Berwick. The visit was probably prompted by Knollys’s matchmaking. Carey was courteously received by Mary, although her mind seems to have been more on politics than on dalliance: she spent most of their conversations retailing to him a list of messages to give to his father about border matters, where conditions were by now exceptionally turbulent, as always during a period of governmental unrest in Scotland. Mary was still blithely unaware of the cool conclusions which Sussex had drawn concerning the paramount need to prevent her appearing personally in London. To Cassillis in Scotland she wrote quite confidently on 23rd October of the ‘good procedure’ at York where nothing had been proved against her. At first puzzled by the transference of the conference, she then consoled herself with the thought that from the first she had always wanted Elizabeth to take personal control of the whole matter, and now she was achieving her wish. Her letter to Elizabeth of 22nd October was a model of docility: ‘Since you, my good sister, know our cause best, we doubt not to receive presently good end thereof; where through we may be perpetually indebted to you.’4

  The commission of Westminster opened officially on 25th November. It was a considerably enlarged body from that of the three commissioners at York, and now included both Leicester and Cecil. Shortly before its opening, on hearing that Elizabeth was constantly receiving her rival plaintiff Moray into her presence, Mary wrote commandingly to her own commissioners saying that they were on no account to take part in the conference if she, Mary, were not allowed to attend it on exactly the same footing as Moray; nevertheless she still does not seem to have believed that this right could actually be denied to her throughout the proceedings.5 On 29th November, Moray presented his ‘Eik’ or list of accusations, followed by the presentation of a personal accusation by Lennox. It was not, however, until 1st December that Mary’s commissioners put in their first protest, that Mary also should be allowed formal access to the court, since Moray was personally appearing in it; they demanded that Mary should be allowed to speak in her own defence in front of the English Council and the foreign ambassadors. Elizabeth, however, refused the request on the ingenious grounds that no proofs had as yet been shown against Mary (the Casket Letters had not yet been produced in court); there was therefore no point in her appearing at this juncture, when as far as Elizabeth knew, it might never be found necessary at all, and Mary might be able to be declared innocent in absentia. Winter had come early that year. Thick snow piled the ground between London and distant Bolton, 250 miles and days of hard riding away. Mary’s enforced isolation proved once more a disastrous hindrance to her cause. For without consulting her, her commissioners co
ntinued to try and bring about some sort of compromise to restore her to Scotland, in spite of the fact that Moray in his Eik had openly accused the queen of murder. They thus acted in direct contradiction of Mary’s specific instructions to break off from the conference if she personally was not allowed to appear on the same terms as Moray: ‘since they have free access to accuse us’.

  On 6th December Mary’s emissaries made their first protest on the subject; but the English still retained the Marian commissioners within the conference, by the expedient of arguing over the condition of withdrawal. Moray was now asked to produce additional proofs to his Eik; he exhibited the December 15 67 Act of Parliament, and Buchanan’s Book of Articles. Finally, on 7th December the casket itself was produced by Moray and his supporters in front of Mary’s own commissioners. According to the Journal of the Commission for that day, the tribunal saw ‘a small gilded coffer not fully one foot long, being garnished in many places with the Roman letter F. set under a royal crown’.6 The circumstances of its finding, outlined earlier in Chapter 18, were now solemnly declared by Morton. Before the casket’s contents were exhibited, however, the tribunal were shown two marriage contracts which were not included in it: after this the first two letters from the casket were produced. The next day seven letters out of the casket were displayed, all said to be in French, written in the Roman hand. The English tribunal, according to their account, duly had the letters copied out for themselves, collated the copies with the originals, and then, at Moray’s own request, handed him back the originals. This done, Moray produced the cases against Bothwell’s servants, Hepburn, Hay, Powrie and Dalgleish, including their depositions.