The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  The young princess, meanwhile, was beginning to sustain and create her networks – with her trusted William Cecil at the helm. London’s Somerset House had become the place where she assembled her loyal men and her court-in-waiting – and possibly saw those pamphlets against the queen. The Venetian ambassador had noted that gentlemen in the kingdom were seeking employment in her train and that all eyes were turned to her as successor. She was ready.6

  On 17 November, Elizabeth received the news. Mary had died, and she was queen. She did not legitimise the marriage of her parents and thus herself. The country had loved the former queen, Catherine of Aragon. But they did not feel the same about Anne Boleyn and so for now, Elizabeth refrained from restoring her mother’s status. Being a queen was surely enough, and yet retaining her illegitimacy opened her up to challenge. Particularly from the next in line to the throne – Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Chapter Ten

  Queen of All Realms

  On the death of Mary I, King Henry II of France moved quickly. He formally declared his daughter-in-law Queen of England and Ireland, as well as France and Scotland. Mary was put into mourning for the late English monarch and the courtiers around her told everybody that she was now the Queen. King Henry, however, did not attempt to enforce his claim with military action or even diplomatic moves. Instead, he made constant reference to his daughter-in-law’s new position, much to the annoyance of the English ambassador. A great seal was struck for Mary and Francis, referring to them as King and Queen of France, Scotland, Ireland and England. Mary rode under flags bearing the arms of England and had them engraved on her plate, the Queen of England, Wales and Ireland, as well as Scotland.

  The King of France was banking on the Pope decreeing Elizabeth illegitimate. As a female heir, she would get little support, a male monarch would be required, and deposition would be simple. But Henry knew that to the Pope he must be the restorer of all Catholic glory, any invasion allowed because it would be bringing back the correct religion. Henry was rattling sabres, threatening England to ensure that France would get what it wanted in any negotiations, whether political or trade. But if Henry was to take the English throne, he needed it to be a two-pronged invasion – and thus Mary of Guise needed to secure Scotland as a Catholic and pro-French country. And unfortunately for him, Mary of Guise had already given a degree of power to the Protestant lords, as a way of crushing the influence of Arran and his family.

  Mary was claiming herself as Queen of England and Ireland to please her husband and father-in-law, bringing glory to France as she thought she always must. But she also had long believed the Guise promises that Elizabeth was the illegitimate heretic and she was the true queen. For her, nothing could be more glorious than Scotland, England, Ireland and France, united under one crown. She was not even sixteen, with all the rashness, innocence and wild enthusiasm of youth. What to Elizabeth was a hostile act of war was to Mary a dream of glory.

  In the aftermath of her wedding, Mary had been feted and admired. She also had another jewel in mind: in the summer she had been faint and pale, travelled to Saint-Germain for better air and worn the loose tunic that was sixteenth-century maternity wear. She probably was simply suffering from dizzy spells and pain as she often did, but Mary, conscious of the desire to have an heir, turned everyday illness into pregnancy. Plenty of women did the same and it reflects how seriously Mary took her role. Scholars have argued that Francis was too weak to consummate the marriage, but Mary’s behaviour shows that at some point he was capable. The Guises would have made sure that Mary’s position was as strong as possible, and Antoinette told her about how to conduct the wedding night. And if Francis was sufficiently strong to go hunting, he could have managed the duties of the marriage bed. Unlike most kings, he had a wife he genuinely esteemed and admired. The dream of pregnancy had not succeeded that time, but the couple were young and had time to try again.

  The lords who had attended the wedding arrived back and everybody seemed keen to gloss over the fact that men of their number had died on the way home. The mood was one of all praise for the wedding and the great union of peace with Scotland. James Stewart, Mary’s half-brother, had made it back safely, luckily, as he was a favourite of Mary of Guise. Supporters were already massing behind him in case Mary of Guise died and he became the next regent.

  After the wedding, the French king had considered movements towards peace with the Holy Roman Emperor, after nine years of war. Both sides were heavily in debt. The Guises wished to remain at war, for they had gained much success from it, while Diane de Poitiers and the powerful Montmorency family were supporters of a peace. Discussions dragged on between the countries until a peace between Henry and Philip II of Spain was signed at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in northern France on 3 April. Henry was no longer facing a war on multiple fronts, but he had failed to break the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, as he had hoped, and Spain affirmed its control of much of Italy.

  Diane de Poitiers and the Montmorencys had won. Diane married off one of her granddaughters to one of the Montmorencys. It was the beginning of the end of Guise influence.

  The first year after her wedding was one of the happiest periods of Mary’s life. She had been married in a blaze of glory and now she was participating in the greatest and grandest banquets for other court marriages, holding precedence over everybody, save the king and queen and her husband. By the terms of the treaty, Mary’s old playmate, Princess Elisabeth, fourteen, would be married to Philip of Spain, eighteen years her senior, as his third wife. No one at the court had great confidence about Philip as a husband, since he was famously unfaithful and had treated poor Mary I with little kindness. But the king was pleased with the magnificent marriage, glistening with power and alliance, and the court threw banquets, jousts and receptions and revelled in the union. Elisabeth was married by proxy at Notre-Dame and the court threw celebrations to commemorate her before her planned departure for Spain in November 1559. Eleven-year-old Princess Claude had already been married to the sixteen-year-old Charles III, the Duke of Lorraine, who had been held at the French court since he was nine, at Notre-Dame in a great wedding and the young couple expected to leave just before Elisabeth. Mary was sad about losing two childhood friends – but she meant to dance, eat and rejoice with them before they departed.

  Henry turned his attentions to Scotland and to England. After Lorraine had been so easily taken and pacified through marriage, Scotland would surely be similar. Unfortunately for him, the Reformation was proceeding apace. John Knox had been living and preaching in Geneva with émigrés from England, busily writing his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, about how unfit women were to rule. His target was Mary I but he also meant Mary of Guise and Mary, Queen of Scots. As he put it, ‘woman in her greatest perfection was meant to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him’. Nothing, indeed, could be more ‘against God’ than the rule of a woman, since Genesis had commanded ‘he shall bear dominion over thee’. It was ‘repugnant to nature’ and an insult against God and the ‘subversion of all good order, all equity and justice’.1 In the autumn after it was published, Elizabeth came to the throne, and the émigrés in Geneva began returning to their homes. Knox, too, decided to return to Scotland – although he had a lengthy journey because Elizabeth I was so angered by his Trumpet that she refused him a passport. On 2 May 1559, he arrived in Scotland and Mary of Guise immediately declared him an outlaw. She also attempted to demand that all persons should profess the Catholic faith and loyalty to the Pope – and this turned Protestant lords towards the cause of Knox.

  Knox and his supporters fled to Perth, where he preached fire and brimstone and a mob rushed out and looted two local friaries. Perth was on the brink of uprising and the whole country could be dragged into civil war. Mary of Guise sent Argyll and James Stewart to negotiate and promised that she would not send French troops if Knox and the others agreed to leave Perth. They did so but Mary sent Scots soldiers who were being
paid by France and this, for James Stewart and Argyll, was enough to make them defect. Argyll, certainly, had been looking for an excuse to join Knox, for he had signed the agreement and wished Scotland to be of the new religion. Through her earlier strategy of favouring the Protestant lords as a way of pushing Arran out of favour, Mary had strengthened them. Now, with the accession of Elizabeth in the neighbouring country and the return of Knox and other Protestant preachers, they had the weapons they needed to succeed in their plans.

  In France, Mary and her father-in-law were sure that French troops would be able to stop the madness in Scotland. What they didn’t understand was that the public mood had moved against the French. The vision of happy unity trumpeted by the poets at Mary’s wedding, the idea of the crowns joined together and Scotland happy to be the junior partner – it had all crumbled. For those lords ranged against Mary of Guise, France wished to seize Scotland’s independence, subsume it in an act of aggressive Catholicism – and they would be better off allying with Protestant England. When the French had landed troops at Leith, just before little Mary had embarked her ship, they had been met with great enthusiasm. Now, twelve years later, they were seen as occupying forces, the army of oppression.

  Knox set off for St Andrews to preach sermons and gangs of people looted the nearby churches and monastic houses. Knox and his supporters moved towards Edinburgh. Many Protestant lords had joined him in a bid to seize power. They called themselves the Congregation.

  In France, Mary read the letters and reports and saw that her mother’s authority was crumbling. She and her father-in-law were convinced that French troops could force the rebels back. After all, he had just signed a peace treaty with Elizabeth I and Philip II – he had troops to spare. The king continued to celebrate the peace of Le Cateau-Cambrésis and the marriage of Princess Elisabeth with great jousts, banquets and parties. He and Philip II had also agreed a wedding between Margaret, Henry’s sister, who had rather been thought on the shelf at thirty-six, and the Duke of Savoy, five years her junior.

  In summer 1559, the queen, Catherine de’ Medici, had odd premon­itions. She saw the king in a joust, his eye pierced by a lance. The king laughed it off. The court was beginning on another round of celebrations for the weddings of Elisabeth, Claude and Margaret. The marriage contract between Margaret and the duke was agreed on 27 June.

  On 30 June, at Place des Vosges, in a celebration of the marriage between Elisabeth and Philip, Henry II was jousting against Gabriel, Count of Montgomery. During the joust, Montgomery’s lance hit Henry’s helmet and in a freak accident, a splinter went through Henry’s eye and lodged in his brain. The king collapsed and was carried off unconscious, ‘as one amazed’, as the English ambassador said, to the nearby Tournelles Palace.2 The doctors were called. Henry begged for Diane de Poitiers but Catherine de’ Medici refused to send for her. He absolved Montgomery from blame and ordered that his sister should be immediately married, in case the duke withdrew from the agreement after his death. Instead of the great wedding at Notre-Dame, there was a miserable midnight wedding near Tournelles on 9 July. Francis and Mary remained by the king but the queen oversaw Margaret’s wedding, weeping throughout. The king called the dauphin to him, tried to speak. ‘My son, I recommend you to the Church and my people’.3 But he could not go on and kissed his son. In the early hours of 10 July, as the newly married couple were exiting the church, the king fell into a coma. He died at 1 a.m., hands and feet swollen in pain. The whole court sank into shocked mourning.

  Mary was now the Queen of France, and Francis her king. Mary shut herself up in mourning, as she had to do, wearing white rather than black. She mourned with Catherine in their dark, closed rooms. Henry II was buried on 15 August, surrounded by Guise family members, with Cardinal Charles conducting the burial. They were now, as they saw it, the rulers behind the throne. Catherine de’ Medici banished Diane de Poitiers to her estates (the mistress helped herself to a good portion of the crown jewels as she left) and the Montmorencys were also excluded. Catherine de’ Medici was pushing to expand her influence but the Guise family had the power over the new king and his queen. The English ambassador declared that the Guise brothers were ruling the country, Guise loyalists were gentlemen of the bedchamber and Mary put her aunt and grandmother in charge of her household.

  Mary was Queen of France but her mother was losing her grip on her other realm. In Scotland, the death of the all-powerful French king was good news for the Protestant lords. They believed the new king would not have the strength to hit against them and they moved towards Edinburgh and seized all but Edinburgh Castle. By all appearances, Knox was succeeding at thrusting a queen off her throne. Mary of Guise fled to Dunbar. Knox set off secretly to Lindisfarne to negotiate with English officers for troops to come to assist them. When French troops arrived to support Mary, English troops advanced. It was a stalemate. In the end the lords and Mary of Guise signed a treaty at the close of July in which she offered a degree of religious toleration.

  The new Queen of France’s suspected pregnancy over the summer had come to nothing. But now she had all eyes upon her and a pregnancy: for her child (if a boy) would be next in line to the throne.

  In September 1559 Francis was crowned in a poor ceremony, all those attending dressed in black for the late king, except Mary, who was still wearing mourning white. All the other ladies wore black and court mourning resumed on the following day. As at her wedding, Mary cut a striking figure, the white-gowned queen, taller, more beautiful than anyone else. Mary was not to be crowned – it was thought that because she was Queen of Scotland, she need not be crowned as the wife of Francis. She had a brief meeting with her handsome fourteen-year-old cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, whose father Matthew Lennox was constantly declaring he should be Mary’s heir. Lennox had sent him to the Court, now Mary was queen, to beg for her help in regaining the family estates. Mary gave him 1,000 crowns instead.

  In the winter, the family travelled towards Blois to send Elisabeth on her way. Catherine and Mary were heartbroken and Mary sent a letter to Philip as ‘Votre bien bonne soeur, Marie’. For Mary, it had been a year of great loss. Young and trusting, her reaction to the losses was to give too much power to her Guise relations and to trust them to save her mother in Scotland.

  Meanwhile, from England, Elizabeth wrote to Mary offering to send a portrait and pledged her affection. Mary wrote back expressing her pleasure at receiving the portrait and told her cousin ‘her affection is fully reciprocated’.4 Mary told the English ambassador, ‘The queen my good sister may be assured to have a better neighbour of me being her cousin, than of the rebels.’5 It all seemed charming. In reality, Elizabeth was plotting to resume hostile military action against Scotland by backing up the Protestant lords. Attacking Scotland would be easier now the great king was dead.

  The treaty signed between Mary of Guise and the lords at the end of July fragmented. In September, Arran joined with the Lords of the Congregation as their leader – and essentially declared themselves an alternative government. Mary of Guise fled to Leith, and her secretary, William Maitland, left her and moved to the Protestant side and was allowed to continue in position. Mary of Guise was losing her grip and she was shocked and heartbroken. She had done everything, tried everything.

  As spring resumed, the Scots brought men to their cause by complaining about French domination. Mary of Guise’s dream of unity was shattered. She had fought so hard for the French union and it had been welcomed with great excitement and congratulations. But now that the memory of English harrying was fading, the Scots saw the French troops at Leith, the French advisors to the court and even Mary’s marriage to the dauphin as evidence of oppression. In January, Arran and the other Protestant lords wrote a letter complaining how they had been ‘handed and suppressed by strangers and already invaded by fire and sword for the debating of the true ministry of god’s word and liberty of this realm’. They proceeded to accuse the French of wishing for their ‘wild slavery a
nd bondage’ and the ‘utter extermination of us and our posterity’.6 And thus, they had been driven to beg for English support. In February, Arran and the Protestant lords and the Duke of Norfolk, representing Elizabeth I, agreed the Treaty of Berwick, by which Elizabeth would send troops to support the lords in their effort to expel the French troops. English forces would be sent on sea and by land. Elizabeth issued a proclamation, declaring her determination to keep the peace.

  The English and Scots laid siege to the French garrison at Leith. Once the symbol of freedom from English tyranny, it was now seen as a foreign occupation. Mary and Francis sent troops to Scotland, along with learned men keen to debate with Scottish Protestants.

  But despite his affection for his wife, Francis had his own problems: a rebellion against the Guise control of government had sprung up in Nantes, and when the king retired to Amboise for security, they planned an attack in March 1560. Their coup was betrayed, the Cardinal of Guise demanded terrible reprisals and over a thousand men, most of them Huguenots, were hanged and quartered or drowned in the Loire. The Guises believed there would be more unrest and wanted all the troops at home. They saw Scotland as a lost cause and the Cardinal of Lorraine actually suggested France and Spain ally to crush Scotland, then England. Bewildered, afraid, Mary of Guise and her supporters fled to Edinburgh Castle. She was forty-five and ill with a form of dropsy, barely able to walk due to swelling of her legs, besieged on all sides, not knowing who to trust. The fighting continued throughout the spring. In France, Mary did not understand the severity of the situation: she thought the uprisings isolated rebellions. She wrote an enthusiastic letter to her mother, telling her she would support her, and her husband would do the same – and God would do so too.7