The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Patrick tried an end run by letting it be known that she had promised to marry him. Lennox took this rumor as truth and retired to his stronghold at Dumbarton. Sulking, he decided to change sides, petitioning Henry VIII for the hand of Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece and daughter of his sister Margaret, widow of James IV, by her second marriage, to the Earl of Angus. He also sought Henry’s aid in recovering “his right and title” to the regency in Scotland, which he claimed Arran had usurped. His overture delighted Henry, who saw Lennox as a surrogate for Arran now that the latter had defected to Beaton.

  Lennox’s volte-face upset the balance between the noble factions in Scotland. Now he was pro-English rather than pro-French. In an attempt to counter this, Francis I redeemed his promise to the Guise family. In October 1543, six of his ships sailed up the River Clyde and landed at Greenock. On board were the new French ambassadors, Jacques de la Brosse and Jules de Mesnage, who brought money and artillery to help Mary of Guise and her supporters.

  The flotilla sailed on to Dumbarton, where Lennox overreached himself. He seized the ambassadors’ money and most of their guns. A stalemate was averted only when he was warned that as a naturalized French subject, he could be tried for treason in France. He grudgingly submitted and returned to Stirling, where he was briefly reconciled to the French cause.

  La Brosse then used the money at his disposal to provide pensions for the leading lords. Amounting to 59,000 crowns of the sun (more than James V’s usual revenue in the last year of his reign), it was a substantial windfall. Nothing greased the wheels of Scottish politics better than pensions, and when Parliament reassembled in December, it took less than a week to exonerate Beaton of all the charges against him and enact, in the infant Mary’s name, a renewal of the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France.

  Parliament’s next step was to repudiate the treaty of Greenwich, tearing up the marriage contract between Scotland and England. The revocation of the treaty left Henry VIII incensed. According to La Brosse, he was threatening revenge as if he had lost a great battle.

  Mary of Guise was exultant. The reinstatement of the “auld alliance” was a personal triumph. She spent a joyous Christmas with her little daughter at an ever-bustling Stirling. The entertainments for the French ambassadors were lavish and unstinting. Once more there was music, dancing and feasting. And she won £100 from Arran at the card tables.

  Lennox, however, posed a threat. On March 21, 1544, he met Mary of Guise for the last time. She had no intention of making him her daughter’s stepfather. When she finally told him so, he left in a fury. A week later he set sail for England, where he signed an indenture to marry Margaret Douglas. By this deed, equivalent to a legal conveyance, he promised to strive for a dynastic union between England and Scotland, and to govern Scotland, if he was ever to obtain the regency, at the direction of the English king, to whom he even assigned his own claim to the Scottish throne.

  On June 29, the nuptial Mass for Lennox and Margaret Douglas was celebrated in the presence of Henry VIII and Catherine Parr, his sixth and last queen. The bride’s dowry was provided by Henry, who granted the couple substantial estates in Yorkshire.

  Even before the wedding, Henry had decided to take revenge on the Scots. He was so incensed by their disavowal of the treaty, he had warned the citizens of Edinburgh that he would “exterminate” them “to the third and fourth generations” if they got in his way. Outraged by what he saw as stark treachery, he was also anxious lest Mary be shipped to France, out of his reach.

  While Lennox had been working out how best to play his cards, Henry was mustering troops for an invasion of Scotland. His paranoia was plain. Not only did he aim to unleash the biggest invasion since Edward I’s reign, he went so far as to compile hit lists of individual Scots. His plans did not balk at assassination. Beaton was a leading target, as Henry blamed him more than Mary of Guise for detaching Arran from the pro-English party. Soon Sadler, himself a supporter of the Reformation, was seeking out Beaton’s Protestant enemies, infiltrating their secret networks to see if a plot could be devised.

  The main aim of Henry VIII’s invasion was to force the Scots to reinstate the dynastic marriage clauses of the treaty of Greenwich. For this reason, it was afterward said to have begun the “Rough Wooings” of Mary Queen of Scots. The campaign started in the first week of May, under the command of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Prince Edward’s uncle.

  Since Henry had already committed himself to a summer invasion of France in alliance with Spain’s Charles V, he was potentially fighting on two fronts. To avoid this, he gave Hertford only a month, later reduced to three weeks, to fulfill his Scottish mission. Hertford was to besiege the town and castle of Edinburgh, destroy the port of Leith, the deepest harbor on the Firth of Forth and the gateway to Edinburgh, and then turn to the central Lowland belt between Edinburgh and Stirling. Once these had been laid waste, he was to cross the Forth into Fife, the breadbasket of Scotland, where he was to “extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages,” and especially at Beaton’s stronghold of St. Andrews.

  Hertford traveled by sea, sailing up the Firth of Forth and disembarking 15,000 men at Granton, two miles or so beyond Leith. Advancing toward the town, he found 6000 Scots lined up on the inside bank of the Water of Leith, the strategic position from which Edinburgh was defended from the north. Arran, Beaton and Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, commanded these forces, but after half an hour’s fighting, they were overwhelmed and fled.

  Hertford, however, failed to seize Edinburgh Castle. Its position was well-nigh impregnable; it was heavily fortified with artillery, and anyone who approached it was vulnerable to attack. So the order was given to ignore the castle and burn and pillage the rest of the town and its suburbs. The fires raged for three days: almost every house and church within the walls was looted or destroyed. The palace of Holyroodhouse and the adjacent Abbey-Kirk were ransacked. A detachment of troops was then sent over to Fife, burning Kinghorn and the villages around Kirkcaldy, but soon returning. Time was short, and Hertford’s troops were unable to come within twenty miles of St. Andrews.

  Throughout these terrifying events, Mary was protected by the high walls of Stirling. Sadler learned that her attendants, charged with her security on pain of their lives, would if necessary whisk her off to the Highlands, where “it is not possible to come by her.” Hertford did advance into the central Lowland zone. On May 15, he reported that the region had been ravaged to “within six miles of Stirling,” and Leith would be flattened the next day. The result was that Mary was taken to Dunkeld, one of the main approaches to the Highlands some thirty miles north of Stirling. She was safe there, and Hertford’s deadline was near.

  Ordered to return south so that his crack troops could be shipped to Calais to begin the French campaign, Hertford marched from Edinburgh to Berwick-upon-Tweed, down the east coast route, burning the market towns on the way and flattening as many other fortified towers, villages, churches and houses as he could manage.

  It was a catastrophe for Scotland, and Arran got the blame. He, even more than Beaton, was held accountable. The nobles argued that he should, in future, share the regency with Mary of Guise. Her popularity had soared, because her pro-French policy was held to be synonymous with Scottish freedom from its “auld enemy.” She managed to escape all the blame for the fire and brimstone brought down on the population by Henry VIII. It seemed that she alone had the interests of Scotland at heart. Certainly her family held the key to the French alliance: without her, Francis I would be less inclined to defend Scotland’s cause against England.

  Mary’s mother saw her opportunity. She wanted to be sole regent, not co-regent. Arran objected and each side summoned rival Parliaments: the deadlock lasted for months. Finally, Beaton hammered out a compromise whereby Arran promised to take her “counsel and advice.” Thereafter, she sat regularly with the lords of the Privy Council and in Parliament, where she strove to maintain the appearance of
unity while shifting Scotland as far as possible into a French orbit.

  Her morale, daunted somewhat by this distasteful compromise, was raised by a victory. In February 1545, an English raiding party crossed the Tweed to pillage the ancient abbey town of Melrose and its magnificent church. On their return, they were ambushed by a smaller Scots force, which took many prisoners. It was a blow to English prestige at a time when Henry VIII was briefly vulnerable. Paradoxically, this was the result of his success in France, where he had captured Boulogne and defended it against a countersiege. But to secure his much-vaunted conquest, Henry was forced to dig in, which tied him down. Powerful as England was relative to Scotland, the country was weak compared to France. Henry had been ditched by his ally, Charles V, who had made a separate peace with Francis I. He was fighting alone, running up vast debts and stretching his forces to the limit.

  In Paris, the Dauphin Henry was beginning to take the lead in Scottish affairs. He and the Guise family warmly congratulated Mary’s mother on the ambush, offering to assist her further. By May 1545, fresh reinforcements were ready to embark and more pensions granted to the Scottish nobles. Nothing seemed to be too much trouble. When Jacques de Lorges, Sieur de Montgommery, who was commissioned to lead the expedition, heard that Mary of Guise was “ill provided with wines,” he ordered a consignment of “good ones” to be sent to her.

  The troops arrived within a month. Whether Francis I wholeheartedly supported them is another matter. Perhaps no more than five hundred men disembarked. And there was a sting in the tail. In order to pay his soldiers, Francis had melted down 10,000 crowns of the sun and mixed in copper and lead to manufacture 150,000 crowns. The debased coinage had been given to Lorges’s men, but the deception was apparent from the moment they arrived and the canny shopkeepers of Edinburgh refused to accept the false coins.

  As the campaigning season drew to its close at Boulogne, Henry felt safe enough to turn again to Scotland. He sent Hertford over the border in September to continue the Rough Wooings. Leaving his base at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hertford led twelve thousand men toward Berwick, rested for three nights, then advanced twenty or so miles inland over the hilly terrain toward Kelso. From there, he turned south again toward Jedburgh, burning and looting everything in his path and petrifying the local inhabitants.

  Next he attacked the frontier villages in a slash-and-burn raid covering almost two hundred square miles. He began by claiming he would inflict as much damage as on his previous campaign, but ended up boasting it would be twice as bad. Still, this was a far less crushing invasion than its predecessor. Hertford did not venture deeper into Scotland, because he was wary of the French reinforcements.

  Henry VIII, meanwhile, had turned to diplomacy with France. Scotland was at the top of his agenda: his latest gambit was to offer to return Boulogne to Francis I in return for a marriage between Mary and Prince Edward. The following spring, Hertford traveled to Paris to resume the negotiations. Both kingdoms were financially exhausted, and a truce was agreed that included Scotland. It might have given both sides breathing space had not the unthinkable happened.

  On May 29, 1546, Beaton was assassinated. Three months earlier, the zealous cardinal had ordered the burning of George Wishart, a leading Protestant reformer, lashing him to the stake with ropes and strapping bags of gunpowder to his body to ensure a spectacular show. Since burnings for heresy were almost as unpopular with Catholics as with Protestants, the effect of Beaton’s display was to turn opinion sharply against him.

  The assassins, a group of lairds from Beaton’s home base of Fife, chiefly resented his social and political power. Nothing moved without his say-so, and the chief conspirator, Norman Leslie, sheriff of Fife, had challenged his jurisdictional claims. In the resulting feud, Leslie was backed by his friends. Sadler, Henry VIII’s ambassador, was directly involved. Not content to offer them unqualified English support, he had also bankrolled them, calculating that with Beaton dead, the pro-French party would collapse.

  Between five and six o’clock in the morning, a band of assassins arrived at the main entrance to St. Andrews Castle. They slipped inside with the stonemasons who were then reporting for work, passing Marion Ogilvy, Beaton’s mistress and the mother of his eight children, as she left the castle by a postern or side gate as she usually did on her way to do her shopping. Once inside, they snatched the keys from the porter. Leslie was then able to enter the courtyard and order the servants and workmen to leave, then run back to secure the postern gate in case Beaton fled that way.

  Beaton heard a noise and tried to escape, but seeing his path blocked, returned to his bedroom and bolted the door. He reopened it only when Leslie’s men stacked burning coals outside. He fell into a chair and prayed. This cut no ice with the conspirators, who preached a long-winded sermon, calling on the “vile papist” to repent, before stabbing him. “Fye, all is gone” were his last words. Leslie then hung his naked body from the castle walls by knotting a pair of sheets to make a rope.

  When the people crowded to view this spectacle, a man called Guthrie undid his breeches and “pissed” into Beaton’s open mouth. The Castilians, as they were nicknamed, since they were forced to barricade themselves in the castle to evade the authorities, then packed the corpse into a salt chest, which they cast into a deep, bottle-shaped dungeon. This was a very specific act of revenge—the body could easily have been thrown into the sea from the rear wall of the castle—because friends of the assassins had themselves been imprisoned there by Beaton. This unusual dungeon ranked for its terrors with anything to be found in Europe, as there could be no escape except through the neck of the “bottle,” requiring the use of a rope or ladder lowered from above. And because the dungeon was carved out of the cliff beneath sea level, the roar of the waves could be heard inside. This was a conspiracy fully in keeping with the tribal politics of blood feud.

  Henry VIII was overjoyed. He saw the murder as a breakthrough in his campaign to defeat the “auld alliance.” He could not have been more wrong. If anything, Beaton had been a stabilizing influence in Scotland. Now opinion veered even more sharply toward France.

  The lords hurriedly met in council and chose the Earl of Huntly, head of the Gordon clan, the leading Catholic and pro-French family in the eastern Highlands, to replace Beaton as chancellor. Several pro-English lords took this opportunity to defect to the pro-French faction. Within Fife itself there was an abrupt shift of grassroots opinion: those lairds and their dependents who had helped the Castilians were turned almost overnight from local heroes into targets of spontaneous assaults.

  What Arran could not manage was to retake St. Andrews Castle. He began a siege, but the fortress could be supplied by sea: Henry VIII dispatched food and munitions all the way from England. When Arran’s men struggled valiantly to mine their way in by hewing a passage through the solid rock, they were thwarted by a counter-mine cut by the Castilians.

  Such failure angered Mary of Guise. She was already irked at the backhanded way Francis I had “aided” her. The use of debased coin to pay the wages of Lorges’s troops especially rankled. She wanted St. Andrews Castle retaken and the Castilians punished.

  Then, momentous events occurred at breathtaking speed that conjured up exhilaration and fear in almost equal measure. Henry VIII died in January 1547, followed two months later by Francis I. These titans had dominated the affairs of the British Isles and northern Europe for thirty years. Suddenly there was a vacuum. And it was the Earl of Hertford and the Guise family who moved instantly to fill it.

  Henry VIII’s son and heir, Edward VI, was only nine. A regent or protector (as the office was called in England) would be needed to govern until the king was eighteen, but Henry had shied away from giving so much power to any one person. Instead, he had used his will to appoint a Council of Regency to rule during his son’s minority. Despite this, Hertford made himself Duke of Somerset within a week. He took viceregal powers to govern as protector: his overriding aim was to realize Henry VIII�
�s dynastic plan by imposing on Scotland the defunct treaty of Greenwich and uniting the two crowns through Mary’s marriage to Edward. To this end, he aided the Castilians. Among his first official acts was to make a pact with them, distributing pensions and wages and shipping food and munitions to St. Andrews.

  In France, the dauphin succeeded his father as King Henry II. The Guise family were among his chief advisers; the result was that Henry at once declared himself to be the “protector” of Scotland. He decided to spare no expense to safeguard the “auld alliance” and ensure that Mary would marry no one except his own son, the Dauphin Francis. He flatly countered Somerset’s idea of an Anglo-British union with his own master plan for a Franco-British empire. Moreover, his level of commitment far exceeded anything shown by his father, Francis I, whose chief concern had been to frustrate and rival Henry VIII.

  Henry II called on Leone Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a brilliant naval officer trained in Italy, to lead an expedition against the Castilians. Strozzi sailed into St. Andrews Bay on July 16, laying siege to the castle on the 24th. Serious firepower was used. On the 30th, he bombarded the castle from the roof of the ancient abbey to the east and from the tower of the university chapel to the west. The assault began at daybreak and was over by three in the afternoon. Before Arran could even cross the Forth and ride the fifty or so miles from North Queensferry to St. Andrews, the castle had been retaken and its occupants imprisoned or forced to board the French galleys.