Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Apart from these desirable visits to Buxton and the demands of safety in time of crisis, Mary’s little household found the locality of their prison changing from time to time in any case, owing to the sanitary arrangements of the time: the contemporary method of cleansing large houses such as those inhabited by Shrewsbury was to empty them totally of their inhabitants, who would be transferred to another house, and then clean the dwelling thoroughly from top to bottom. Not all Mary’s prisons were as uncomfortable and hateful to her as Tutbury – whose evil drainage system and notorious ‘middens’ stinking beneath her own windows became one of her chief sources of complaint during her later years there. Wingfield was a great Derbyshire manor house of considerable style and grandeur, and even Mary approvingly called it a palace. Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor lay close together, the castle in the valley and the newly built manor on the hill: one of the reasons why Shrewsbury was anxious to transfer Mary to Sheffield in the first place was that the propinquity of the two houses would make cleaning problems easier, since Mary could be shifted conveniently from one to the other. At Chatsworth Mary could enjoy the beauty of the wild country in which it was set – those moors from which Gerard hoped she could be plucked – or the park itself where Queen Mary’s bower still commemorates today the little closed garden where she is said to have taken her exercise.

  Within the pattern of these moves, the mimic court and household of the queen had its own tiny excitement and dramas. The queen was allowed to ride when governmental suspicions were not too keen, and even went hawking with Shrewsbury; at one point she had as many as ten horses in her stables, three grooms and a farrier, before this equestrian abundance was brought to an end by angry protests from London. She was allowed the pleasure of archery, which she had enjoyed in Scotland, exercising her long bow with ‘her folks’, to take her mind off her friends’ losses in Scotland, as Shrewsbury told Cecil.16 She obtained a greyhound which she later tried to persuade Paulet to let her run at a deer. Then there were little pleasures of small dogs, caged birds (sent from France), other birds including barbary fowls and turtle doves, and much lute-playing as in Scottish days. Towards the end of her life Mary introduced a billiard table for the benefit of her house, although she herself does not seem to have used it. Nor did the queen lose all her interest in fashion and dress, being prepared to send off for patterns of dresses, such as were then worn at the London court, and cuttings of suitable gold and silver cloth.17

  The romances of the chaste Mary Seton provided a positive drama within such a subdued setting. The only Marie to remain unmarried, and the only one therefore to follow her queen into captivity, Mary Seton had a naturally devout nature, and also a certain amount of pardonable family pride – the Setons being among the grandest of the Scottish court families, and her father and brother in turn playing a leading part as magnates, loyal to the crown. But these two aspects of Mary Seton’s nature, admirable as they might be in theory, combined in practice to give her a certain spinsterish quality which was not a happy augury for marriage; nor was she herself as beautiful as Mary Fleming and Mary Beaton, or as vivacious as Mary Livingston. Yet in England this pious high-born Scottish lady did find her admirers: at Wingfield the younger son of Sir Richard Norton, Christopher Norton, was said to have fallen in love with her, although he was unfortunately executed at the time of the northern rising. She was no luckier with her next suitor, Andrew Beaton, who succeeded his brother John Beaton, Mary’s master of the household, when he died in October 1572. Within the propinquity of the royal family circle, Andrew Beaton fell in love with Mary Seton. But the romance hung fire; there was some question that Mary Seton had sworn a vow of perpetual chastity, but the real trouble seems to have been that Andrew Beaton, although coming of an honourable Scottish family (the Beatons of Creich had given many loyal servants to the Scottish crown), was not quite on an equal social level with the daughter of Lord Seton.18

  As Andrew Beaton struggled with the combined spiritual and material obstacles of a vow of chastity and family pride, he decided to resolve at least one of the difficulties: in August 1577 he went to France to obtain the nullification of Mary Seton’s vow. On his homeward journey he was drowned. Mary Seton was left to mourn her last chance of married happiness, and as no one further attempted to dissuade her from the consolations of religion to which she had clung so long, she was able to die as she had lived under the name of Seton which she prized so much. From 1581 onwards her health declined, and began to interfere with the carrying out of her duties to her mistress, duties she had first incurred thirty-five years before when she had attended the child queen on her first journey to France. In 1583 Mary Seton was allowed to retire to France, and for the rest of her life lived at the convent of St Pierre at Rheims under the aegis of Mary’s aunt, Mme Renee of Guise. Yet her devotion to her mistress was not diminished: in the same year a book and a box sent by Mary Seton in France to Mary Stuart via the French ambassador fell under suspicion; it was considered important that they should both be searched, for they would surely contain some secret messages for the Scottish queen.19 Mary Seton’s love of Scotland also remained; in 1586 she wrote sadly to M. de Courcelles, the new French ambassador, on his way to Scotland: ‘It is now nearly 20 years since I left Scotland and in that time it has pleased God to take the best part of my relations, friends and acquaintances; nevertheless I presume there remain still some who knew me, and I shall be obliged by your remembering me to them as occasion may serve.’*20

  Another household event, less poignant than the blighted romance of Mary Seton, but of some significance for the future, was the death of Mary’s secretary, Augustine Raullett, in August 1574. Shrewsbury took the opportunity of Raullett’s demise to go through his papers where he found ‘Nothing of moment’, as he reported to London. Mary’s difficulty was indeed to replace him: for one problem which she had in common with her jailer, Shrewsbury, was that her finances were causing her great concern. Her accounts were by now in chaos due either to the carelessness or dishonesty of her treasurer, Dolin, a man who brought his mistress no luck, since in 1577 her jewels were actually stolen from his charge in Sheffield Park. The queen’s dowry from France was paid irregularly, and all revenues from Scotland were apprehended by the current regent. Mary was now anxious to have above all things a new secretary with a good business brain; on the other hand she could only offer little pay in return, as well as the highly restrictive conditions of work.

  Claude Nau, the candidate now submitted by her Guise relations, was himself of a good Lorrainer family: one of his brothers had been in Mary’s service earlier and had been with her at Bolton. Claude Nau had studied law and practised it in Paris; he was clever and quick-witted, speaking and writing good Italian, accurate Latin and English almost as fluent as his native French. Nau was a self-centred man, fond of personal display as Riccio had once been, and altogether a less engaging character than Mary’s other secretary, the melancholy but charming Gilbert Curie. But these faults seemed for the time being outweighed by the fact that Nau was intelligent and zealous: as Mendoza said later, Curie might be good, but he was stupid. It was to Nau that Mary now related the important memorials of her personal rule in Scotland, referred to in earlier chapters. Mary was also able to employ Nau’s many gifts in her ceaseless foreign correspondence. His abilities impressed her sufficiently for her to dispatch him in 1579 on a mission to Edinburgh, the principal object of which was to see and report on the young James, now thirteen. Mary sent with Nau some little golden guns of the sort to which young princes of the period were so partial, designed to win the heart of her son.22 Perhaps she imagined James to be more martial, more Guise-like, than the scholarly creature he had in fact become. But the appeal of the little guns was never even tested, for Nau was not allowed to have access to James. After Mary’s transference to Tixall at the time of the Babington plot, one of these little guns was found pathetically back at Chartley; she seems to have given them to her surgeon as a memento just before
her death, and her groom of the chamber, Hannibal, received a little golden bow and arrow which was probably originally intended for the same source.

  It will be observed that with all these little activities, Mary’s day-to-day life during the 1570s and early 1580s was not particularly arduous in itself; but there was one factor which made the whole era intolerably burdensome to her, and that was her own appalling health. This ill-health was grievously exacerbated by the mere fact that she was confined, and few springs, let alone winters, passed without her being subjected to some really severe bout of illness. Her severe illness in the summer of 1569, which she compared later to her near fatal attack at Jedburgh in October 1566, was followed in the autumn by a nagging pain in the side which prevented her sleeping; she was also constantly sick. Norfolk’s death brought on a passion of sickness, and through the 1570s the eternal nagging pain in her side reduced her at times to real throes of agony. Apart from this pain, Mary also endured distressing pains in her right arm, which is often mentioned in her letters as preventing her either from writing herself, or from writing properly. A bad fall from her horse at Buxton in 1580 resulted in an unpleasant blow on her spine. In 1581 she had another dangerous illness, which began as gastric influenza, and in November 1582 the same symptoms led the royal physicians to believe that she was actually dying. Her legs were also extremely painful and by the date of her death she was almost permanently lame. Thereafter other different symptoms, thought at the time to be those of dropsy or nephritis (kidney disease), developed. Mary’s health must be regarded as by far the heaviest physical burden which she had to bear in captivity, and by the late 1570s it was a sufficiently accepted phenomenon for all those who knew her to comment upon it, not only her friends but even such creatures of lesser sympathy as Bess writing to Walsingham. Babington in his confession mentioned that at the time of his first plotting in the early 1580s the queen of Scots was considered to be an old and sickly woman, who was not likely to live much longer.23

  Yet apart from the weight of suffering itself, Mary had to endure two additional ordeals with regard to her health. In the first place her captors were extremely reluctant to believe that she was genuinely ill at all, suspecting that she merely invented her symptoms in order to secure further freedom or privileges such as visiting Buxton; such symptoms as they could not deny, they attempted to put down to hysteria. Shrewsbury himself admitted as much: ‘I perceived her principal object was and is to have some liberty out of the gates,’ he wrote in a covering letter to a report on her health, but added that, being finally convinced she was indeed ill, he had allowed her to walk at least upon the leads in the open air, in the dining-chamber, and also in the courtyard. In this report M. de Castellaune explained that he too had originally put down her illness to the ‘painful, importunate and almost constant workings of her mind’, but now the unmistakable evidence of constant vomitings, discharges from the brain and ‘the greatest debility in the stomach’ forced him to realize that her sufferings were all too genuine.24 Secondly, quite apart from the difficulty of convincing her captors that she was ill at all, Mary was additionally unfortunate in that her whole being craved fresh air, the free physical exercise, the ability to ride regularly every day, which she passionately believed would alone cure her. All her life she had shown a desire for physical exercise, especially riding, bordering on a mania; as a queen it had been all too easy to gratify this wish. Now she found herself totally deprived of regular exercise, except when Shrewsbury’s régime became lax enough to permit it, and at the same time her health rapidly deteriorated. Her very muscles seemed to seize up with lack of use. It was no wonder that her letters were permeated with agonizing pleas for more sympathetic regard to her physical needs in this respect, and that she herself attributed her increasing sickness to her deprivation of sufficient exercise and fresh air.

  The exact medical causes of Mary’s undoubted ill-health have been the subject of several modern investigations. It used to be suggested that her symptoms corresponded most nearly with those of a sufferer from a gastric ulcer.* But recently Drs Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, working on a group of diseases known as the porphyrias, have identified the recurrent illness of George III as belonging to it.† An important aspect of this disorder is that it is hereditary, being transmitted as a Mendelian dominant character, showing itself in varying degrees of severity, from individual to individual. In the course of their investigations they have traced back similar symptoms to George III’s ancestor and ancestress James VI and I and Mary Queen of Scots. There are of course difficulties in the way of any medical diagnosis made at the distance of four hundred years, if only because the medical language used then was inevitably angled towards the diseases of whose existence the doctors were aware. Sixteenth-century medicine was obsessed by the notion of the four ‘cardinal humours’ or chief fluids within the human body – blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy, or black choler; their relative proportions within individuals were thought to determine their physical and mental qualities as well as their total temperament. Since the various ‘defluxions’ or physical substances which proceeded from the unfortunate queen of Scots were always considered by her doctors in the context of this theory, contemporary commentators may well have overlooked clues vital to the modern diagnostician.

  The symptoms of porphyria are severe attacks of abdominal ‘colicky’ pain with vomiting and extreme distress at the time, even transient mental breakdown, which may be interpreted by observers as hysterical. The attacks may be mild or severe and may occur frequently or at long intervals; another feature of the disorder is that often, despite the severity of the attack, the patient recovers quickly afterwards. It certainly seems far easier to relate these symptoms rather than those of a gastric ulcer to the case of Mary; in particular the episodic nature of her sufferings – bouts of severe illness followed by speedy physical recovery – fits better with the known pattern of the porphyria-sufferer than that of the ulcer subject. It is clear that Mary, like her descendant George III, underwent genuine rather than hysterical sufferings, which at times amounted to a complete breakdown, indistinguishable from madness.

  The period when she definitely showed every sign of breakdown and hysteria to outsiders – after the birth of James until her incarceration at Lochleven – may even have been due to the exacerbating effects of her confinement upon the disease, such as have been traced by Drs Macalpine and Hunter in the case of George III’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. Mary’s gastric symptoms, her ‘colicky’ pain, which James VI himself noted that he had inherited from his mother, fit with the known symptoms of acute and intermittent porphyria. Even the pains in her arms and legs to which she so often referred in her own letters, which she ascribed to rheumatism, correspond to the painful paresis of the extremities often experienced by the porphyria-sufferer. Her attacks of ‘hysterical’ distress certainly occurred at irregular intervals, and although they appeared to die away towards the end of her life, since her lifespan was cut short at forty-four it is impossible to tell how her medical history might have developed in later years. As to the hereditary nature of the disease, the mysterious ‘hysterical’ manner of the death of James V, which has so long puzzled historians, suggests that if Mary did suffer from porphyria, it was from her father that she inherited it.

  But to Mary personally it was the intensity of her sufferings, not the origins of her disease, which was of importance; the fact that she was probably a victim of inherited porphyria was unknown to her as it was to her jailers, fascinating as the speculation is to both historians and doctors. For Mary at the time, the important fact was that the nineteen years of her captivity were darkened still further by the black clouds of genuine physical suffering, in which her captors often did not believe, when her horizon was already tragically obscured by lack of liberty.

  Sick woman as Mary Stuart might be, she did not abandon hopes of release. Her own correspondence continued to buzz with schemes for assistance from abroad. The fact that
she was generally regarded as marriageable meant that despite her captivity she never lost her place as a piece on the complicated chessboard of European politics in the 1570s. Her right on Catholic grounds of legitimacy actually to occupy – rather than succeed to – the English throne was another factor which gave her prominence as a chess piece; even if she herself was unable to organize any move personally, there was always the possibility that some foreign monarch would step in and help her to move once more on these grounds alone. The excommunication of Elizabeth by Pius V had brought this claim of Mary’s into fresh prominence; the new Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pius in 1575, believed strongly in Mary’s claims to the English throne, and consequently also interested himself in the question of her future bridegroom. The most likely foreign monarch to help Mary – because he was the natural enemy of England – was of course Philip II. Mary herself was so anxious to court Philip’s approval that in 1577 she made a will in which she actually made over her rights to the English crown and elsewhere to Philip, supposing that her immediate son and heir James never returned to the true Catholic Church.25 However, such a will, made by a captive, had little reality, and was intended rather to please Philip – who was apprised of its sentiments – than to make any serious testamentary innovations.