Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  The redeployment of so many bed furnishings and the reinstatement of the gold-grounded Hercules seemed to have been a worthwhile investment. Mary became pregnant with the promise of an heir. But before long the marriage faltered in the face of Darnley’s debauchery, his naked ambition and his part in the murder of her favourite courtier, Rizzio. With the imminent birth of an heir, Mary seemed prepared to forgive Darnley’s involvement in Rizzio’s death and bury their differences. Much to Darnley’s fury, however, she refused to confer on him the Crown Matrimonial, putting an end to his hope to reign as her equal and be crowned King of Scotland should she die. Darnley grew more querulous, more abusive. Once Prince James was born the marriage fell once more into disarray. Darnley became ill with syphilis and although it appeared that Mary was solicitous, visiting him on his sickbed, in truth she was desperate to escape the marriage, and she and Darnley separated.

  Within the pages of his inventory Mary’s valet de chambre, Servais de Conde, recorded the break-up and Darnley’s move to separate lodgings in Edinburgh’s Kirk O’ Fields. He noted down the relocation of textiles from the royal store: a splendid set of violet-brown velvet drapes, stitched in gold and silver: ‘In August 1566 the Queen gave this bed to the King furnished with all things and in February 1567 the said bed was taken in his lodging.’ And to his separate lodging also went a black velvet cloth of estate, a canopy of yellow taffeta, a green velvet tablecloth, two quilts, various velvet cushions and six pieces of tapestry.

  On 10 February 1567, Darnley’s Kirk O’ Fields lodgings exploded. Darnley was found dead in the garden, strangled, assassinated after he escaped in a botched attempt by Scottish nobles to blow up his house with Darnley inside. The canopy of yellow taffeta was ‘lost in the King’s lodgings when he died in Feb. 1567’; the tapestries were ‘lost in the King’s gardrop [his wardrobe or dressing room] at his death’.

  James Hepburn, the powerful fourth Earl of Bothwell, was accused with others of the king’s murder. He was tried and acquitted. But, three months after her husband’s murder, Mary bestowed on Bothwell the additional titles of Duke of Orkney and Marquis of Fife and three days later, on 15 May, she married him. A group of Scottish nobles calling themselves the Confederate Lords refused to accept Bothwell’s innocence or Mary’s marriage to him. They marched into the city of Edinburgh in full armour carrying a printed proclamation announcing their intention to avenge Darnley’s murder, to deliver the queen from the clutches and ambitions of Bothwell and to protect their prince, the future King James. Battle lines were drawn. The two armies mustered on Carberry Hill outside of Edinburgh on a hot day in June. Mary, wearing a short, shabby robe she had borrowed from a countrywoman, rode with Bothwell behind the royal standard, a red lion on a yellow ground. The Confederate Lords’ banner depicted Darnley’s murder, his half naked body stretched out on the grass behind Kirk O’ Fields and beside it the kneeling figure of Mary and Darnley’s son, the young prince James, from whose mouth floated the words ‘Judge and Revenge my Cause, O Lord.’

  From eleven in the morning until five that afternoon there was a stand-off with protracted negotiations. The adversaries grew weary and dehydrated in the heat. Mary’s troops had no water and some of her men fell away. Eventually, the Confederate Lords agreed to let Bothwell flee if Mary would put herself under their protection. Just a month after their marriage, Mary and Bothwell said goodbye. They would never see each other again. Mary rode back to Edinburgh escorted by her nobles in full expectation of their loyalty. But as she entered the city she was confronted with the taunts of jeering crowds crying ‘Burn the witch. Kill the whore’, the banner depicting the murder of her husband leading her humiliation. The Scottish nobles had no intention of restoring her to the throne. They imprisoned her for the night in the heart of the city, hanging the banner across from her window for her, and all her people, to see. The next night they led her by the light of a thousand torches through the city streets to Holyrood Castle, the banner still leading her way. From there they rode on to the desolation of Loch Leven Castle, where Mary was imprisoned for almost a year.

  On 24 June 1567, Mary miscarried Bothwell’s twins and, just three days later, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, whom she never saw again. The Scottish queen was kept in humiliating impoverishment at Loch Leven and only allowed a paucity of essentials. She wrote letters pleading for clothes, for linen to make underwear, for pins to secure her coifs, for woollen bed hangings to keep out the winter freeze, for an embroiderer, for cloth and thread. It took a month before she received any supplies: a small package with a few articles of clothing, some pieces of linen stitched with outlined flowers and some coloured thread. There was no embroiderer. So it continued for almost eleven months: parsimonious parcels delivered with some garments, fabric, thread. Eventually, in May 1568, Mary escaped with the help of George Douglas, the brother of her gaoler. Under cover of the May Day festivities, dressed as a servant, Mary simply unlocked the gate and walked out. Three days after her escape, the cook and his wife at Loch Leven were commanded to make an inventory of the possessions Mary had left behind. There were just seven gowns, three waistcoats and petticoats, a pair of sheets, a handkerchief, napkins, some hose and two pairs of drawers. The list demonstrates the speed of her downfall: reduced, in less than a year, from glittering queen to a fugitive in her own land.

  Less than a fortnight later Mary had raised an army and marched against her captors at Langside in Glasgow. But she was defeated and fled to England for sanctuary. There she was to languish in captivity for nineteen years while the English queen and government debated her fate. In her first year of imprisonment, Nicholas White, Elizabeth’s envoy, wrote of his visit to her:

  She said that all the day she wrought with her needle, and that the diversity of the colours make the work seem less tedious, and continued so long at it till the very pain did make her give it over.

  Bereft of the exercise she loved, Mary became lame with rheumatism. She was in constant pain. Embroidery became her main distraction and to some degree, her uncensored form of writing. For some years, she was held in Tutbury Castle under the guard of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess. Bess was an accomplished needlewoman and together she and Mary began ‘devising works.’ These were small roundels and octagons, many sewn with meaningful symbols from their lives. Mary sewed small slips (embroideries sewn on linen or canvas, cut out and applied to larger cloth) mourning her past: a crowned dolphin leaping over waves, a nostalgic reminder of her young Dauphin, and a tortoise attempting to climb a tall crowned palm tree, an ironic cartoon encapsulating her marriage to the ineffectual Darnley. She fretted over the present: a scurrying mouse eyed by a ginger cat, an allusion to the red-haired Elizabeth and her quarry, Mary; a droop of marigolds, a symbol of Mary herself turning to snatch the rays of the sun. But there was more to Mary’s embroidery than distraction: it was her autobiography.

  She created a set of bed furnishings, sadly now lost but described in contemporary accounts, which she bequeathed to her son, James. They contained images of imprisonment: a lion caught in a net, a ship with a broken mast, a caged bird. She also added over thirty devices (the heraldic logos of identity) of the royal houses with which she was associated: Guise, Lorraine, Valois and Stuart amongst others, and metaphors of her conflicted relationship with the English queen: two women on a wheel of fortune, the eclipse of the sun and moon. The bed canopy was embroidered with an image of Mary herself kneeling before a crucifix, the royal armorial of Scotland at her side.

  Under the constant surveillance of her gaolers, with her letters censored, embroidery became a way for Mary to preserve her sense of self and continue to exercise her power. Unlike the careful text she crafted in her correspondence, which, she was only too aware, was read by others, or the letters she smuggled out that were in danger of being intercepted by Elizabeth’s spymasters, embroidery gave her freedom of expression. Under the guise of innocent motifs, her embroidery became a covert form of commun
ication.

  She received Elizabeth’s envoy Nicholas White sitting under her cloth of estate, on which there was stitched a phoenix, the symbol of resurrection and the motto: In my end, is my beginning. The phoenix was a Catholic symbol and coupled with its motto, the embroidery was a warning: the threat of her elevation to martyrdom, should she be executed.

  Mary had other plans. The fourth Duke of Norfolk was one of the richest men in England, who had been the English Earl Marshal and Elizabeth’s Lieutenant in the North. In 1569 he and Mary plotted to marry, overthrow Elizabeth and jointly rule over a united Catholic Britain. Mary sewed for him an embroidered cushion cover and sent him her gift. On it she embroidered a lace-cuffed hand descending from the divine of heaven and clutching a pruning fork, with which it was cutting back barren vines to allow younger, more fecund shoots to flourish: a clear reference to the virgin Elizabeth and the fertile Mary. Under the rolling clouds a stitched scroll proclaims VIRECIT VULNERE VIRTUS (virtue flourishes by wounding). There is a sturdy church to signify steadfast Catholicism and its architectural counterpart, a windmill, to represent the shifting religious instability of English Protestantism. There is a stag, the Catholic symbol of victory over non-believers, and two birds winging free. Mary added the Scottish royal arms and her own monogram so that the cushion’s authorship could not be in any doubt. The embroidery was discovered and the cushion cited as damning evidence in the trial of the Duke of Norfolk for high treason. He was executed in 1572 and this small embroidered cushion cover played a part in his downfall. Mary’s hopes of rescue and reinstatement were dashed and her fate became even more precarious.

  In desperation, she began to woo Elizabeth with embroidered gifts. It was a calculated generosity. Such presents in court etiquette represented a bond or inferred an obligation: used publicly, they declared intimacy. In 1574 Mary tasked the French ambassador to procure ‘eight ells of crimson satin, the same colour as the enclosed sample, the best that can be found in London’ and ‘a pound each of single and double silver thread.’

  Her request was urgent. She needed a delivery in a fortnight. With the crimson satin – the colour of love and of blood – Mary created a skirt for Elizabeth. With the silver thread, she embroidered on it intertwining silver thistles and roses as symbolic reminders of their separate but inter-related monarchies of Scotland and England, and of their personal ties. It was a deliberately gendered appeal, employing a womanly skill they both exercised and appreciated and evoking the sisterly empathy they had once enjoyed. With it, Mary sent a message insisting that the gift was ‘evidence of the honour I bear her and the desire I have to employ myself in anything agreeable to her.’

  There is no record of Elizabeth ever having worn the skirt. But she did send word, through her envoy, to say that she found it ‘very agreeable, very nice.’ Mary’s response is not recorded. More gifts to Elizabeth followed: a delicate and intricate piece of lacis work (a form of embroidered fine mesh) and three decorative night caps. None led to Mary’s release.

  She also sewed gifts for her son, the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, whom she hadn’t seen since he was an infant: a pair of child reins with its breast plate stitched in symbolic flowers that represented protection, love and fertility, its red silk ribbons inscribed with the blessing ‘God hath given his angels charge over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways’ and between each word, painstakingly, lovingly, she stitched tiny, meaningful motifs: crowns, hearts, lions. She sent him a book of prayers, for which she had embroidered the cover and written out each prayer in her own handwriting.

  After nineteen years of imprisonment, in 1586 a plot was discovered to assassinate Elizabeth and put the Catholic Mary on the throne. It was led by a Jesuit priest and a young recusant, Anthony Babington, who hoped to enlist the support of France and Spain. Mary was implicated in the plan when coded correspondence with the plotters, supposedly in her own hand, was intercepted by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham. This was treason. Mary was tried and sentenced to death. Her cloth of estate was torn down, her one remaining embroiderer dismissed. Her material trappings of power were forever silenced.

  Except that Mary had one final declaration to make. As she went to her execution, her waiting women divested her of her black outer dress. As Mary, Queen of Scotland faced death she stood resplendent in a petticoat and sleeves of blood red. It was no idle choice. Mary was a woman for whom the subtext mattered. Red was the Catholic colour of martyrdom.

  They burnt the clothes she wore that day so that no relics would remain, no scrap of cloth would be left to venerate. An inventory of all her belongings that had been made at Chartley Hall in 1586, before she was moved to Fotheringhay Castle for her execution, is illuminating. Some textiles were bequeathed to those closest to her; she had requested that others be sold to pay her servants ‘in their journey homeward.’ The inventory listed what remained of her sewing: over 350 small embroideries, evidence of her stitching hands suddenly, unexpectedly, stilled, ‘unfinished, not yet enriched, bands painted only, not completed, uncut, prepared for a design.’

  Most of her embroidery is now lost, some unpicked, some sold. Cloth, like power, is fragile. Today, only two verifiable small monogrammed pieces survive in Scotland. They sulk behind glass in a cabinet in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. There is the baleful ginger cat regarding a scurrying mouse and a crowned lily and thistle bouquet with a broken flower: symbols of power, queenship, rivalry, innocence, Catholicism, Scotland and fragility. Visual metaphors for the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

  It is thought now that Mary suffered from porphyria, the so-called Royal Disease passed down through the Stuart line, and the cause of the temporary madness of King George III in the late eighteenth century. She certainly displayed many of its physical symptoms: abdominal pain, ulcers, fits, muscle weakness. But within her personality lurked its more sinister shadow of mental illness, manifested in her rashness, depression, poor judgement, and her desperate need for approval.

  In recent years, studies into mental health have explored the use of sewing as a panacea for mental distress and proved its efficacy to regulate mood, enhance self-esteem and encourage a rhythm of calmness. While Mary used it to assert her sovereign power and campaign for her reinstatement, perhaps there also lay behind her stitching a more basic human impulse: to maintain self-control, create order and exercise choice among the tumult and humiliation of her life.

  3

  Frailty

  I am working on a textile project in Leverndale Hospital, Glasgow, with a small group of men with severe mental illness. I don’t need to know the details of their damage: it’s better to know them as I find them, week to week, not as they might be, or have been, or could be again. But I do have to be delicate, for each man is on a brink, absorbed in the fragile poise of himself, vigilant against upset, wary of emotional trespass. They prefer to work silently, hardly conversing. Simple instructions are sufficient, their questions abrupt. Any attempt at conviviality seems to exhaust them.

  We are designing and making new curtains for the hospital’s refurbished café. The men seem pleased with the practicality of the task. The hope is that the project will loosen their social guard. But it is best, the staff advise, to aim for small progress. In our first two sessions, the men have been designing and sketching a variety of shapes, drawing and cutting around swirls and scrolls, triangles and squares and gluing them together to make a collective pattern: a paper patchwork of undulating geometry which will become the template for the curtains’ deep borders. Today we are to agree the colour scheme.

  Deciding on colours is a challenge because it requires consensus among a group of people unsettled by opinions. I place an empty basket in the centre of the table. The men eye it cautiously. Then I let tumble a clatter of felt tip pens, filling the basket to the brim with colour. The group gladden a little. In a world of apportioned space, food, staff time and medication, such a plenitude is cheering. I bring out a sheaf of small strips of blank
paper, select one and, with a turquoise felt tip, draw a thick line across its top. I return the turquoise to the basket and remove an orange pen and draw its line beneath the turquoise. Then I fold the paper over, leaving only the orange visible, and pass it to David on my right.

  He feels it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger and considers my orange line. His hand stretches out towards the basket and hovers. No easy decision. His fingers rifle through the pens, searching, thinking, feeling out a good choice. The rest of the group are tense, concentrating hard on David’s rummaging fingers, willing him to complete the task. He eventually selects a purple pen and slowly draws a wide violet line below the orange. The group relax. David secretes away the orange stripe and scrapes his fingernail across the fold to sharpen it before passing the paper on.

  And so we spend the morning folding colours away, passing strips of paper to each other and marking down our choices. The creation of our rainbows takes time: time to register each other’s breath, to catch the wheeze of a cushioned chair as someone shifts his weight, to eavesdrop on the trundle and bing of hospital activity, the muffled sounds of the faraway world outside our room.

  After an hour or so we have six concertinas of paper. We unfold them and smooth them out into their disparate palettes. We lay them down beside each other, numbered one to six. I suggest we decide by vote: a hand raised for the strip that each person finds pleasing. The process of elimination is easier than I could have hoped. The favourite is an unusual medley of apricot, mauve, pink, pale turquoise, grey and red – an odd combination that somehow has harmony, yet offers surprise. Here is our collective and creative consensus.