Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

by Margaret George

  Your assured cousin and sister,

  Elizabeth R.

  There. Did that put the warning strongly enough? The French must not set foot—or the embossed boot they so favoured—in Scotland. But the Lords would not just step aside meekly. There would be another civil war in Scotland.

  She shuddered. Civil war in Scotland. Civil war in France. Now civil war was looming in the Netherlands as the Dutch rose up against Spain.

  I will do anything to prevent civil war here in England, she thought. I will feint, and promise, and prevaricate, and threaten, and compromise, and sacrifice. There must not be civil war here. If posterity can give me no other credit, saying “there was peace in her land in her reign” will be enough for me.

  Now she was free to go outside and take the air. She always felt oddly ill at ease when dealing with the Scots Queen, as if there were something she had overlooked. Now that unpleasant task was over—for the present.

  Just as she was rising to go to the door, an urgent knocking came. It was a messenger, with two letters addressed in the same hand. He held them out apologetically.

  She took them. One was lumpy, the other slim. She opened the lumpy one first. Out fell a ring bearing a heart-shaped diamond held by a hand. It was meant to fit together with another one. What was this?

  The letter was from the Scots Queen. It was written at Dundrennan. Elizabeth sat back down and read it carefully. She exhaled to steady herself.

  Mary was asking permission to seek sanctuary in England! She had met the Regent’s forces in battle near Glasgow and had been utterly defeated. Now she was fleeing, and asked her sister Queen for refuge—on the strength of this diamond ring.

  Elizabeth turned the ring around and stared at it. She could not even remember sending it to her. If she had, it was only a token, not to be taken seriously, like all the portraits and miniatures and other such things that royalty exchanged routinely. Surely … surely Mary had not put faith in it? No. No one could be that naïve. The Scots Queen was only playing a deep game.

  She could not come here! It was unthinkable! Yet … if she went to France, that would be bad for England. She would stir up her French relatives to make trouble in Scotland. Spain … no, that was impossible. O God! Best to have her … where?

  She tore open the second letter, and as her eyes flew over it, she actually felt the blood draining out of her face until it felt cold.

  Mary was already here! That woman—she had not waited for a reply, but had just come ahead, in her own imperious way. Never thinking of me, and what position it puts me in! she thought angrily. How dare she? Hating herself for feeling only anger and no sympathy, she forced herself to reread the letter, this time slowly.

  … My people seeing this, and moved by that extreme malice of my enemies, encountered them without order, so that, though they were twice their number, they were at so great a disadvantage, that God permitted them to be discomfited, and several taken and killed. The pursuit was immediately interrupted, in order to take me on my way to Dumbarton; they stationed people in every direction, either to kill or take me.

  But God, in His infinite goodness, has preserved me, and I escaped to my Lord Herries’s, who, as well as other gentlemen, have come with me into your country. I am assured that, hearing of the cruelty of my enemies, and how they have treated me, you will, conformably to your kind disposition and the confidence I have in you, not only receive for the safety of my life, but also aid and assist me in my just quarrel, and I shall solicit other princes to do the same.

  I entreat you to send to fetch me as soon as you possibly can, for I am in a pitiable condition, not only for a queen, but for an ordinary woman. I have nothing in this world but what I had on my person when I made my escape, travelling across the country sixty miles the first day, and not having since ever ventured to proceed, except by night, as I hope to declare before you, if it pleases you to have pity, as I trust you will, upon my extreme misfortune; of which I will forbear complaining, in order not to importune you. I pray God that he may give to you a happy state of health and long life, and me patience, and that consolation which I expect to receive from you, to whom I present my humble commendations.

  Your most faithful and affectionate good sister, and cousin, and escaped prisoner,

  Mary R.

  Where was she now? Elizabeth saw that the letter was written from Workington. That was a coastal town near Carlisle. Mary must have come by boat. Suddenly she could picture it: the dishevelled queen, a hasty council, not knowing which way to turn.… Like a person running naked from a burning building out into the snow, there to perish from the cold. She must have taken leave of her senses. Or her courage and resourcefulness had failed her at last. Everyone had a limit—as the inventors of the rack and the iron maiden knew only too well. Mary had been living in a nightmare for so long it must have destroyed her reason.

  I must send for her, thought Elizabeth. Yes, I must. Charity alone demands it. I must not add to her torment.

  But of course I will first have to announce this extraordinary news to the Privy Council. They must be informed.

  * * *

  The Council did not enjoy being summoned to sit inside on this glorious May day. Occasionally a bee would fly in the window, buzz around in confusion, and eventually bump its way back out again. The councillors envied the bees. They had to sit, elaborately dressed, and stay as long as their mistress and sovereign demanded. And today she seemed agitated.

  “My dear advisers,” she began, glancing especially at Cecil, “a matter of great consequence has occurred on our northern border. Yea, I will not keep it from you: the Queen of Scots has fled into England.” She waited to make sure they all comprehended. “She is even now at Carlisle, having been taken there in custody by the deputy governor, Sir Richard Lowther. She flings herself on our mercy, and desires to come to us.”

  The men looked around at each other as if the one sitting next to him would be privy to special insight. Only Cecil, Elizabeth’s foremost adviser and councillor since the very beginning, stared straight ahead, impassive.

  “She awaits an answer. Shall I send for her?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Why does she wish to come?” asked Robert Dudley.

  “To explain everything to me, so she says, so that I will be convinced of the righteousness of her cause and help her regain her throne.”

  “And what is your own, wise feeling about this?” asked Cecil. He fingered his forked beard.

  “That I should send for her,” said Elizabeth. “Poor lady, she is destitute.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  Elizabeth looked at the Duke of Norfolk. “And what say you, as the first peer of England, and premier estate holder in the land?”

  The Duke, a thirty-year-old veteran of three marriages, looked startled. “I say—I say—that you must examine her carefully before admitting her to your presence. Do not look at her directly; let someone else do it. I have heard that she has the power to enchant and work others to her power.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “So we should send some victims north and see what becomes of them? Perhaps they should walk backwards in to see her, holding up a mirror! Do you wish to go?”

  “N-no, Your Majesty.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple rising pointedly in his long, narrow throat.

  “If I sent for her, where should she be lodged?” asked Elizabeth. “Should I prepare a palace for her?”

  “No, Your Majesty. That would be too generous. It would also be an implicit recognition of her as your chosen successor,” said Robert Dudley.

  “Oh. Then I should give her apartments within one of my own palaces?”

  “That you should not!” said Sir Francis Knollys, Elizabeth’s uncle-in-law and a leading Protestant. “She should not be granted access to your august presence until she has … shown herself worthy. I mean by that, that she has been acquitted of the crimes that drove her from her own country—and not by such blatant injustice as that mock trial the Earl of
Bothwell went through. That trial was a shameful sham that merely confirmed his guilt!” His face was flushed with emotion and disgust.

  “I must protest,” said the Earl of Sussex, the Duke of Norfolk’s brother-in-law and a man known to lean toward the Catholic faction. “Our most merciful Queen is not a judge. She herself has said she has no wish to make windows into men’s souls.”

  Young Christopher Hatton, turning his handsome face toward his Queen, said, “I myself have seen the Scottish Queen, when I had the honour to represent our most glorious Majesty at the baptism in Edinburgh. I hereby declare to you that she is a most noble creature and must be treated with honour. Let us not prove as wicked as her lords in Scotland. We are Englishmen, and pride ourselves on our laws and justice, and our chivalry.”

  Elizabeth gave a sigh. “Ah, I know not what to do! My heart flies out to her in charity, while my Council bids me beware of the serpent!”

  Cecil spoke at last. “It were perhaps best if you could detain her while you made arrangements for her safety. We know that there is no place for her at present. For her to go to France—and possibly reassert her claims to your throne, as she did once there already—is not wise. Likewise, Spain might resurrect those claims. Lastly, well we know that if she reenters Scotland she will be promptly executed. The only way she could return to Scotland—which is the only place for her—would be if she and the lords could come to some arrangement. Perhaps if you agreed to recognize the King in exchange for their permitting Mary to rule in name alongside him? But all these things would take time to arrange.…” He raised his hands in a gesture of delicate helplessness.

  “Yes…” Elizabeth thought silently about it for a moment. “Perhaps you, Knollys, should go to Carlisle, as my representative. I understand that the Earl of Northumberland has already hurried to her and attempted to whisk her away to Alnwick, his castle seat. Lowther and he nearly came to blows. The Catholics are already flocking to her, they say, bringing bouquets and obeisance … that region of the country has ever had a fondness for the old ways and the old religion. Yes, Knollys—you shall go to her, to my dear sister, and inform her that I cannot receive her in her present state.”

  Knollys looked discomfited. “But—but—have you nothing else, beyond that, to tell her? Am I then to allow her to go where she will?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But—if we cannot receive her, if we have nothing to offer, then she must seek her fortune elsewhere.”

  “But we do have something to offer her,” said Cecil. “We will act as mediators, and insist the rebel lords justify themselves to us. If they can show no convincing proof that their actions were called for, then we shall restore Queen Mary.” He nodded sagaciously.

  “And if they bring forward proof?” Knollys persisted.

  “Then we shall find some way to allow them to remain in power, provided Queen Mary can return to Scotland in safety.”

  “It shall be your task to convince Queen Mary that, regardless of the findings, she will be restored to her estate in Scotland,” said Elizabeth.

  “Will she be content with that? Or does she seek more? Perhaps she is just as glad to be quit of Scotland and on a larger stage where she can have a grander scope,” said Walsingham, a saturnine young man who was Cecil’s confidential lieutenant.

  “I doubt that she has any such ambitions; they were most likely blown up at Kirk O’Field,” said Elizabeth slowly.

  “Ambitions do not die so easily,” Walsingham insisted, “and soon Scotland may appear to her like a nightmare to which she would never return, whereas England will seem most meet for her appetites.”

  “We must not, then, serve to drive her to desperation. Knollys, you shall comfort her, and assure her of our loving concern for her. My only interest is to compose the differences between her and her subjects.”

  “When shall I depart?” asked Knollys, in resignation.

  “Why, as soon as possible,” Elizabeth replied. “Tomorrow. And be sure to take a mirror.”

  * * *

  After the councillors filed from the room, Cecil stayed discreetly behind. As the one member of the Council who had already known about Mary’s arrival, he had had time to prepare a memorandum on it. His memoranda, in which he always examined the pros and cons of any question in orderly form, were famous. Now he withdrew it from his bosom.

  “Ah, my dear Cecil, I was waiting for this.” Elizabeth took the paper. “Have you laboured over it long?”

  “All night, Your Majesty. I must confess, this matter deeply troubles me.”

  “Your man Walsingham seems to fear the worst.”

  “He is … vigilant, Your Majesty.”

  “Oh, Cecil, what am I to do?” she burst out. “I have never been in such a quandary!”

  Cecil could not help smiling. “You have indeed been in worse quandaries, in which your own life was at stake. Always you have acted with foresight and prudence; I have no doubt that you will do so in this instance. Always remember that there are two persons in one that you are faced with. There is Mary, an anointed queen who has been persecuted and driven from her throne, and who is now a crowned head without a pillow to lay it on. This woman has lost her husband, her son, her throne, her country. She is made of flesh and blood like you, and she shakes if she is chilled and becomes ill if she has no food. She inspires pity. The other Mary is a political creature, the tool of the Catholics, who would not care if she were made of wood and spouted blood that was green, so long as she could function as their figurehead. This woman is your deadly enemy. She inspires respect and fear. To treat one with kindness and the other with wariness, when they both live together in one body, is an impossible task.”

  “Why did she have to come here?” cried Elizabeth.

  “You should only be thankful that she is not in France,” Cecil insisted. “You can use this for your own advantage.”

  “Oh, leave me!” said Elizabeth. “Leave me to study all your pros and cons!”

  After he was gone, she opened the paper and stared at it. Cecil’s neat handwriting covered the page.

  PRO REGINA SCOTORUM:

  1. That she has come willingly into England, trusting Queen Elizabeth’s promises of help.

  2. That she was unlawfully condemned, for her subjects seized and imprisoned her, charged her with her husband’s murder, refused her permission to answer in person or by advocate in the Parliament which condemned her.

  3. That she is a queen subject to none, and not bound by law to answer her subjects.

  4. That she offers, in Elizabeth’s presence, to acquit herself.

  CON REGINA SCOTORUM:

  1. That she procured her husband’s murder, whom she had constituted King, and so he was a public person and her superior. Therefore her subjects were bound to search for and punish the offender.

  2. She protected Bothwell, the chief murderer, and defended him to defeat justice.

  3. She secured his acquittal by a legal technicality.

  4. She procured his divorce from his lawful wife.

  5. She feigned to be forcibly taken by him and then married him, increasing his power to a point that none of her nobles dared abide about her.

  6. Bothwell detained her by force and yet when her nobles sought to deliver her she refused to dismiss him and helped him to escape.

  It would seem that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth can neither aid her, permit her to come to her presence, or restore her, or suffer her to depart before trial.

  So there was to be a trial. There was no other way. Elizabeth felt as if all the peace in her kingdom, so carefully cultivated for ten years, was now in jeopardy. The Queen of Scots had come to sow dragon’s teeth in her realm.

  II

  Mary waited until Mary Seton had finally fallen asleep before she rose and went to the window. She stood, dreamily, looking out over the hills and dales of the gentle countryside around her. To think I fought so against coming here, she thought. I did not want to be moved from Carlisle;
I even refused to go unless I was tied up. Everything was so confusing. Elizabeth’s baffling behaviour—the way she kept Lord Herries waiting for two weeks before she even admitted him to her presence; the way she forbade Lord Fleming even to sail for France. Those ugly, worn-out clothes she sent for me—Knollys tried to pretend she had sent them for my maidservants. And her refusal to see me unless I was cleared of any suspicion of guilt in the murder—as if I would contaminate her. But since then I have come to understand that she means to restore me to my throne, but that in order to do so, she has to establish herself as an impartial party—else the Lords will not cooperate with her. How clever she is! She has got Lord James to agree to submit to a hearing.

  A warm breeze, heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, blew into the window with little puffs. This Bolton Castle, located fifty miles deeper into England than the border city of Carlisle, had been her home since mid-July. It stood on a ridge in the western part of Yorkshire. Elizabeth had said it was necessary for Mary to move in order for her to be closer to her, Elizabeth. But she was still two hundred miles away from her. What good had it done?

  Bolton itself was pleasantly situated—a very high castle that consisted of four towers joined together by curtain walls, making a square with an empty center. In this center was a cobbled courtyard with a heavily fortified gatehouse guarding it. Mary’s suite of rooms—all four of them—was on the third, uppermost floor. The remarkable thing about Bolton was that the walls had flues running through them like a honeycomb, which carried heat from the fireplaces—not that this mattered in the summer. But in the winter … oh, but they would be gone by winter. She would not have an opportunity to compare this heating to the tiled room furnaces at Fontainebleau that she remembered from her childhood.

  She leaned out the window and breathed deeply. She felt completely restored and calm, and her spirits were rising daily. She was eager to have her hearing, to be able at last to pour out the truth to someone who was not a Scot, but to whose arbitration the Scots would be submissive.