1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Meanwhile, the news that the French had a new, weak king had spread quickly. In Scotland, Protestant lords rose against Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, and invaded Edinburgh, calling for the French interlopers to be thrown out. The English naturally waded in to the fight and laid siege to the port of Leith, just outside Edinburgh, where Marie had taken refuge with her troops. To avoid total disaster, she had to give in to the pressure and send her French troops home. Suddenly, the Auld Alliance was in tatters and so, soon afterwards, was Mary’s life – on 11 June 1560, her mother Marie died of dropsy, or oedema, a painful swelling caused by fluid retention. Cruel proof that it can be fatal for a French woman to get fat.

  Mary was still grieving when her French ladder was kicked out from under her once and for all. In December, her husband King François died, just three days before Mary’s eighteenth birthday, apparently of an aggravated ear infection. In a few short months, Mary had gone from almost total stability at the heart of Henri II’s court to the state that the French fear most of all: précarité, precariousness, the threat of an uncertain future.

  Mary had one attractive option – she had been given the title of Duchess of Touraine, the posh part of the Loire Valley, and might have been able to put her feet up in a nice Renaissance chateau like Amboise or Chenonceau and wait for a good Catholic husband to come along, no doubt a member of an important French or Spanish family.

  But Catherine de’ Medici made it pretty clear that Mary wasn’t welcome in France any more. Just twenty-four hours after François’s death, Catherine took revenge on her bereaved daughter-in-law by demanding the return of all the crown jewels that Mary had received on becoming Queen of France. With mums-in-law like that, who needs evil stepmothers?

  Mary’s family, the Guises, weren’t exactly supportive, either. When she went to seek solace from her uncles and cousins in their homeland of Lorraine, in the east of France (Joan of Arc country), they advised her to go back to Scotland. Harsh advice to give a lone, eighteen-year-old girl, but they obviously wanted to use her to hold on to their remaining royal ties. Mary was, after all, still regarded by a large proportion of the Scots as their queen. Once back in Edinburgh, the Guises told her, she could try to buddy up to Elizabeth to prevent future interference north of the border by the Medici clan. In a typically medieval confusion between family and patriotic allegiances, these Catholic Frenchmen were encouraging Mary to unite with a Protestant* English queen.

  The Guises’ ultimate aim was no doubt to put one of their own on the throne of England. If Mary became Elizabeth’s ally, the English Queen might accept her as a successor. And with Catherine de’ Medici hovering over the French throne for the foreseeable future (her son Charles IX was now King, and she had five more children potentially in line for the crown), the Guise family stood a much better chance of gaining power and influence in England than in France.

  The problem that the Guises must have known about, and chosen to ignore, was that the English were violently opposed to Mary. As a French Catholic, and the niece of the man who’d snatched Calais, she could barely have been less attractive to the people of England if she’d had leprosy.

  In short, teenaged Mary was being thrown to the lions by her own French family because of her potential usefulness in their political games.

  Unwelcome home

  In the summer of 1561, the obedient Mary set off for Scotland from newly French Calais, sobbing ‘Adieu, France!’ as the coast disappeared from sight (one can only assume that Calais was much more picturesque than it is nowadays). She had already guessed that life wasn’t going to be as easy as the Guises implied, because Queen Elizabeth had refused to guarantee her a safe land passage through England. As a result, Mary was obliged to take a risky North Sea route infested with English pirates. And as if rough seas, pirates and the prospect of a hostile reception weren’t enough to worry about, there was something else to make the trip unpleasant – at that time, French galleys were rowed by slaves (mostly convicts), and Mary constantly had to beg the captain not to have the rowers whipped.

  She arrived in Scotland on 19 August, still aged only eighteen, and when her boat landed at Leith, she was greeted by the locals just like any beautiful princess on a royal visit – they were in awe of her chic dress and delighted when she made a speech in Scots (no doubt with a cute French accent).

  But in her heart, Mary felt totally foreign – contemporary French commentators were probably mirroring Mary’s own impressions of mid-sixteenth-century Scotland when they said that it was a barren, hostile land inhabited by uncouth, treacherous people who were constantly engaged in inter-family vendettas. Welcome home.

  She took up residence at Holyroodhouse, the royal palace in the centre of Edinburgh, which her mother’s French masons and interior designers had decorated with ornamental ceilings and magnificent wall hangings. Mary took an instant like to her refuge – it was in the city but had gardens where she could practise archery, and it was right next to a park full of animals for her to hunt. Mary also liked to go out on to the heath and play golf, a game she had loved since her Scottish childhood. She is credited with inventing the term ‘caddy’ – her clubs were carried by the young sons of French noblemen, known as cadets, which is pronounced ‘cadday’.

  Indoors, Mary preferred French amusements. She imported French musicians and jesters, and began to organize musical dinner parties and dances – none of which went down well with the local Puritans.

  In her innocence, or perhaps under the influence of her French relatives, Mary had not realized how serious the religious issue was to be. Scotland was a newly Protestant state, and although the Catholic Mary declared her intention not to interfere in the country’s official religion, she was horrified when her first attempt to celebrate Mass almost caused a riot. Her priests were threatened with violence, and music during services was deemed out of the question. Poor Mary must have felt all the more foreign – and all the more French.

  However, one thing her French education had taught her was how to exert her charms. Buoyed up by a Parisienne’s confidence that everyone will fall under her spell, she toured Scotland, meeting and greeting her people. And they quickly succumbed, despite what seems to have been a dodgy French sense of humour inherited from her mother. When visiting the priory of Beaulieu (a common name in Britain at the time, given by unimaginative medievals wanting to christen any ‘beautiful place’), Mary quipped, ‘Oui c’est un beau lieu.’ Which is a bit like someone arriving at Portsmouth harbour and saying, ‘Ah-ha, this must be the mouth of the port.’

  If the Scots were beginning to warm to their monarch, the feeling wasn’t completely mutual. As Antonia Fraser puts it in her biography of Mary, the Queen thought of the Highlanders as noble savages and the Lowland lairds as savage nobles – she knew that rival factions of Catholic and Protestant Scottish lords were hatching wild plots with her at the centre, often involving kidnap schemes which would have ended in a forced marriage to the eldest son of the family.

  But Mary and her own family had bigger ambitions. The Guises were actively looking for a husband who would be acceptable not only to the Scots but – most of all – to Mary’s nosey neighbour, Elizabeth I.

  In fact, both queens seem to have agreed that it was a pity one of them wasn’t a man, because they would have made an ideal political match. If only same-sex marriage had been legal, history would have been very different, and a whole lot of suffering (especially on Mary’s part) would have been avoided. The two women would have had to adopt children, of course, but that would have been easier than it is for modern celebrities, because in those days queens made laws.*

  But it wasn’t to be, and Mary’s name was linked with various continental Catholics before she settled on an Englishman, a hotheaded teenager called Henry Darnley. He was a Catholic cousin of Mary’s (they shared the same English grandmother), a swaggering, good-looking lord of nineteen. In 1565, he came north to visit Mary and cunningly ‘fell ill’, so that he was forced to s
tay at Stirling Castle while she nursed him. The 22-year-old Mary, who was almost certainly still a virgin, fell in lust with Henry and, despite the avowed opposition of both Elizabeth and all the Scottish Protestant lords, they married. The ceremony at which Henry was crowned King of Scotland was marked by total silence from the lords.

  If Mary’s life had been precarious for the past few years, with this marriage she was done for. From here on, she would know almost nothing but imprisonment and bloodshed.

  Domestic violence is common in the upper classes, too

  The first casualty was Mary’s French-Italian secretary, David Riccio, an ugly little man who kept the Queen – who was now pregnant – amused with card games and music while her young husband was out catching syphilis. Scottish intriguers convinced the frankly dim-witted Henry Darnley that Riccio was Mary’s lover, and one evening in March 1566 a gang of them burst into her chamber, dragged the squealing secretary out into the hallway and stabbed him over fifty times, while Henry looked on and one of the lords held a pistol to Mary’s stomach.

  Although intrigue and murder were a part of everyday royal life in the sixteenth century, and France had been racked by religious massacres even while she was living there, only now did Mary seem to realize what a violent world she was living in. She suspected that scheming lords had promised Henry the Scottish throne in his own name, and she was probably right to believe that the attack on Riccio had been intended to end with her own murder, and that she had only been spared because the killers had lost their nerve.

  So she fought down her feelings of disgust towards her husband and managed to convince him that she had forgiven him for the Riccio misunderstanding. And the stratagem worked; as soon as the scheming lords saw that Henry had defected back to his wife’s side, the plot fell to pieces. For the time being, at least.

  In June 1566 Mary gave birth to a son, James, in Edinburgh, and took the daring step of having him baptized in the Catholic tradition (although she refused to adhere to the prevalent custom of having a priest spit in the baby’s mouth). The celebrations included a sort of pantomime organized by Mary’s French valet, a man called Bastian Pages, during which French clowns made lewd gestures at some English guests, a bad joke that almost got Bastian stabbed.

  There was one notable absence from the baptism – the baby’s father, Henry, who was becoming increasingly estranged from the wife he had almost had murdered, and who now began plotting the kidnap of his own son.

  But Mary didn’t have to put up with him much longer – in February 1567, while convalescing from a bout of syphilis in a house near the walls of Edinburgh, her errant English husband was murdered by gang of scheming Scotsmen, led by the charismatic Earl of Bothwell.

  Their plot very nearly failed. They were stuffing the basement of the house with gunpowder when Henry awoke, guessed that something suspicious was going on and jumped out of a window in his nightshirt. But he was caught and strangled by the plotters, who blew the house up anyway.

  Incidentally, the first man on the scene after the explosion was a certain William Blackadder, a soldier in Bothwell’s pay. Blackadder was initially cleared of any involvement in the murder, but was later offered up as a scapegoat by the conspirators and convicted at a show trial, after which he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his severed limbs were nailed up at the gates of four different Scottish towns. Not exactly the stuff of sitcom.

  Although a single mother with increasingly severe nervous-health problems, Mary Queen of Scots was suddenly a very eligible widow again. She also knew full well how precarious life had become, and went to visit her son James, who was safely locked away in the loyal castle of Stirling. However, on the way back to Edinburgh, Mary’s party was intercepted by the Earl of Bothwell, who convinced her that she was in immediate danger and needed to hide – why not back at his place? She accepted the invitation, and Bothwell took her to Dunbar Castle, just outside Edinburgh, and raped her.

  This was a brutal but politically astute move – it meant that any child born to Mary within at least nine months could justifiably be claimed as his. And Bothwell also knew that in Catholic Mary’s mind, unlike that of modern French-educated women, sex and marriage were inextricably linked. In essence, the rape forced Mary to marry him.

  Objectively, Bothwell was actually a good match – a Scottish lord who had shown himself ruthless enough to rape the Queen was the kind of man the country needed to give it a bit of stability (in the sixteenth century, that is). The couple were married three weeks later – the delay caused by the fact that Bothwell was already married and had to rush through a divorce. The wedding itself was a dull, functional affair, and afterwards Mary gave her new husband a single, hurriedly selected, gift: a piece of fur taken from her mother’s old cloak.

  If there was any stability, though, it was cruelly short-lived. Just a month later some scheming Scots lords, who were all related to each other and seemed to change sides approximately every week, raised an army against Bothwell and his supporters. As the two forces were assembling on a battlefield just outside Edinburgh, the French ambassador came to plead with Mary to leave Bothwell and go with the rebels, who, he said, were loyal to her personally and were promising to restore her to her position as sole Queen of Scotland (which would, incidentally, therefore make her a potential French puppet again).

  Mary refused, pointing out that many of these rebels had only recently been conspiring on Bothwell’s side. By this time, she had come to the sad conclusion that she could trust absolutely no one in Scotland except her closest entourage of French servants. And she certainly couldn’t trust the French ambassador, because his boss was her old enemy Catherine de’ Medici, who wanted to preserve the Franco-Scottish alliance but would probably prefer to see the easily manipulated infant King James on the throne rather than an adult Queen Mary.

  In the end, the great battle simply fizzled out, because when Bothwell went forward to accept a challenge to man-to-man combat, most of his army sneaked off. Mary, left alone on a hilltop overlooking the scene, was escorted away by her new ‘allies’, whose soldiers welcomed her by shouting ‘burn the whore’ and ‘drown her’.

  Locked away by the loch

  Suddenly more vulnerable than ever, Mary – who was still Queen of Scotland – was taken to Lochleven Castle, a remote fortress in the middle of a loch. Here, she was imprisoned in a tower and denied any communication with the outside world. Meanwhile, false rumours about her complicity in Henry Darnley’s death were circulated in an attempt to destroy any remaining support she might have amongst the people. The most damning evidence against her was that she had played golf just after the murder – being a sportswoman was a sure sign of guilt, apparently.

  And in case the propaganda campaign didn’t work, Mary was also threatened that if she didn’t sign abdication papers in favour of her one-year-old son James, she would have her throat cut. It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  An even bigger shock was to come when James’s regent was chosen: it was James Stewart, the Earl of Moray. He was Mary’s half-brother, one of her father’s illegitimate children, and had previously acted as one of Mary’s closest advisers. In a spectacular piece of back-stabbing, he now took power and seized all of Mary’s jewels. After losing her French jewellery, Mary was now to be deprived of all her family heirlooms. This was the final Scottish straw. Mary had had enough of northerners – she wanted to go back to France.

  Although she was only twenty-four, she offered to bow out of politics for ever and shut herself away in a French nunnery or live quietly with the Guises. She even managed to smuggle out a letter to Catherine de’ Medici, begging for some French troops to come and free her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer was a crushing non. Far from offering help, Catherine immediately sent an official request to the Earl of Moray for some of the confiscated jewels.

  In desperation, Mary also wrote (in French) to Queen Elizabeth of England, pleading for assistance. But on the very day she penned her cry for h
elp, cousin Liz was admiring some of Mary’s jewels that had been sold to her by Moray.

  So Mary had to fall back on her own guile to escape from the castle. After ten months of imprisonment, in May 1568 she used her charm (but apparently nothing more than that) to win over a young cousin of her captors at Lochleven, who spirited her out lying flat in the bottom of a boat. Hearing that she was free, yet another army of so-called loyal Scottish nobles offered to fight for her cause, only to defect in mid-battle before her very eyes, exactly as they had done before.

  Mary must have felt desperately alone, having been betrayed or abandoned by absolutely everyone who had promised her help. She was faced with a life-or-death choice.

  Should she go ‘home’ to France? No, this was impossible, because Catherine de’ Medici was too vindictive an enemy. What’s more, France was in the midst of vicious religious wars in which her own family seemed to be playing a decidedly bloody role.

  Or should she stay in Scotland, claim that her abdication had been obtained under duress, and try to wrest power away from the regent? But no, that wasn’t possible, either, because of the lack of reliable supporters and the risk that her son and herself would be killed.

  So Mary turned south, to England, throwing herself on the mercy of her cousin Queen Elizabeth. And we all know what a bad move that was going to be …

  Mary gets a guided tour of the castles of England

  Here begins the story that everyone knows so well, of Mary’s incarceration from 1568 until her execution in 1587. She was held first in Carlisle, then Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire and most lengthily, for fifteen years, at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire.*