The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  At five o’clock, there was a new procession to the Palais, the official residence of the Parlement of Paris, where the state banquet was to be held. Henry II and the dauphin rode on horseback, and Mary and Catherine de Medici traveled in a golden litter. As the Palais was only at the other end of the Cité, a few hundred yards away, the procession took an indirect route. It crossed the main Pont Notre-Dame into the business and residential districts of Paris and returned by the Pont au Change, a small wooden bridge lined with goldsmiths’ shops and moneychangers’ stalls. As the master of ceremonies, the Duke of Guise had planned this route to maximize the numbers able to catch a glimpse of his ravishing niece.

  The state banquet was designed to impress foreign ambassadors and the magistrates of the Parlement and the Hôtel de Ville. It was followed by masques, revels, dancing and entertainments on a breathtaking scale. The banquet sprawled across several different halls, and as no fête was complete without exotic floats or clockwork devices, six mechanical ships had been constructed. They were decked with cloth of gold and crimson velvet, with silver masts and sails of silver gauze that billowed in an artificial wind created by hidden bellows. The ships rocked from side to side and moved backward and forward. Painted canvas had been laid on the floor of the great hall to imitate waves, which undulated gently to complete the effect. On each deck were two seats of state, one empty, the other occupied by the ship’s captain, who was in each case played by a male member of the royal family or a prince of the blood.

  The ships made several circuits of the hall until each in turn stopped by the lady of the captain’s choice; she was then lifted into the vacant seat of state. Henry II chose Mary, the dauphin Catherine de Medici, and the Prince of Condé took Anne d’Este, Duchess of Guise. The festivities lasted all night and continued the next day at the Louvre, culminating in a spectacular three-day tournament at the Tournelles, the most important royal palace in Paris and the one Henry II used most often as a family home.

  Mary was exultant. She had made what seemed to everyone to be the ideal dynastic marriage, and the mise en scène was choreographed to reflect this. As the clockwork ships circumnavigated the hall, a narrator explained how the scene depicted Jason, the Greek hero who led the Argonauts in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Henry II, he announced, was Jason. By capturing the Golden Fleece, he would conquer an empire and create a universal monarchy. His son Francis was already dauphin of France; the wedding made him king consort of Scotland and therefore a king-dauphin. But that was only the beginning. The king-dauphin and queen-dauphine would unite the crowns of France, Scotland and England, and this dynastic theme of triple monarchy was the leitmotif of the poems and anthems specially composed for the occasion.

  Ronsard, the Pléiade’s inspiration and Mary’s poetry tutor, began with an epic poem in honor of the Guises, eulogizing the Cardinal of Lorraine as a master strategist and explaining how the dauphin, by choosing the most perfect queen alive, had subordinated Scotland and England to France. Mary was the bearer of a magnificent dowry: she was the heir to two kingdoms. By her marriage she had helped to shape a dynasty that would dominate not only the British Isles, but eventually the whole of Europe.

  Michel de l’Hopital, the president of the Chambre des Comptes, or treasury, and an amateur poet, then boasted of a time when the “gallant heirs” of Henry II would each take their place among the crowned heads of Europe—in France, northern Italy and the British Isles. “So shall one house,” he foretold, “the world’s vast empire share.” Only through Mary’s marriage could the Valois monarchy subjugate England “without war and murder.” Or, to use the metaphor of the pageant, she herself was the Golden Fleece.

  Lastly, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard’s chief collaborator in the Pléiade, rhapsodized in an ode to Mary: “Through you, France and England will change the ancient war into a lengthy peace that will be handed down from father to son.”

  The core assumption of these celebrations was the idea that the British Isles were part of an emerging French empire. Scotland and England were to be the provinces that France had subjugated by the dauphin’s union with Mary. This notion was more tangibly expressed in July 1558, when Henry II instructed the Parlement of Paris to register an edict granting French citizenship to all Scots on account of Mary’s marriage. It was a contentious demand. To smooth its passage the royal lawyers stressed that Henry intended to safeguard French sovereignty throughout all his provinces and dominions: the purpose of the new edict was to allow him to exercise an imperial monarchy over Scotland modeled on the example of the Roman empire.

  Within two years, Henry II’s imperial vision would damage the Franco-British project as irreparably as Henry VIII’s Rough Wooings had the Anglo-British one. In Scotland, nothing was more important than the idea of national independence. When Henry II had first announced the date of Mary’s marriage, the Scottish Parliament sent a delegation of eight commissioners to Paris to discuss terms. The Scots still approved of the dynastic alliance, which they saw as a guarantee of stability and security against England, but asked that their “laws and liberties” be confirmed, to comply with the treaty of Haddington.

  Henry referred them to Mary. Now that she had been declared of age, the obligation was hers. She turned for advice to her mother, who in her absence appointed Mary’s grandmother Antoinette of Bourbon to represent her. And Antoinette turned to her sons, in particular the Cardinal of Lorraine, even though they had no experience of Scotland and its political and cultural traditions.

  Two mutually contradictory sets of undertakings were given. First, Mary promised to observe and keep faithfully “the freedoms, liberties and privileges of this realm and laws of the same, and in the same manner as has been kept and observed in all kings’ times of Scotland before.” It was an unequivocal declaration of national independence, signed and sealed with her own hand and binding on her successors. A copy was taken back to Edinburgh, where it was kept with the registers of Parliament.

  That was nine days before the marriage. But at Fontainebleau on April 4, eleven days earlier, Mary had signed three secret documents to a quite different effect. The first was a conveyance or deed of gift, made, as she noted in its opening clause, “in consideration of the singular and perfect affection that the kings of France had always had to the protection and maintenance of the kingdom of Scotland against the English.” In the event of her death without an heir, the king of France and his successors would inherit Scotland, also succeeding to all her rights and title to the throne of England.

  Next, Mary acknowledged that if she died without heirs, the king of France would have full rights to all the revenues of Scotland until he was repaid one million pieces of gold, this sum being a necessary reimbursement of his investment in the country’s defense and in Mary’s education. The sheer size of this debt was yet another guarantee that Scotland would remain a French province for a very long time.

  The final document was a letter of renunciation or “protestation” signed jointly by Mary and Francis, in effect a combined oath and prenuptial agreement, whereby she affirmed as Queen of Scots and he confirmed as her fiance that the dispositions and gifts she had secretly made were valid and effective in law, and would remain so irrespective of her marriage and of any other assurances she had formerly given or might give in the future. The document also nullified any future contract or agreement made by the Scottish Parliament on the strength of the previous contract that she herself made with the commissioners.

  It is impossible to believe that in asking her to sign these documents, the Guises acted out of ignorance or naivete. They knew what they were doing; but did Mary?

  The secret documents were extremely clever. They were written in florid and high-flown language to create the illusion that Scotland’s national interests were indeed protected—but by Henry II and the Valois dynasty. Mary was only fifteen; she was not a constitutional lawyer. Her identity was shaped in France and bound up intimately with Henry II and the Valois dynasty. No on
e had told her that the secret documents, and especially the third, were illegal by Scots law. Again Mary was inclined to be too trusting. She had already signed thirty-five blank sheets of paper for her mother’s convenience. She trusted her other Guise relations in the same way, and might well have been prepared to sign documents presented to her without studying them properly.

  Perhaps she should have been more careful, but then, she did not expect her uncles to act illegally. Her adolescence suggests she was uneven in her precocity. She was both older than her years and no more than her years. Diane de Poitiers noticed that she spoke to the Scottish commissioners “not as an inexperienced child, but as a woman of age and knowledge.”

  What Mary lacked was direct experience of Scottish politics and of the different expectations of the nobles in that country. In most respects, Scotland and France were in parallel universes. The kings of France were almost untrammeled rulers: they got their way even over the Parlement and the law courts. In contrast, the Scottish lords saw themselves less as the ruled and more as co-rulers. Their code of honor was closely linked to their belief that they were the national “guardians” of the realm and the “commonwealth.” It was on this basis that they justified their volatile shifts of allegiance. They saw themselves as the protectors of Scottish interests, the repository of ancient Scottish values. It had taken Mary of Guise twenty years to come to grips with them, and even then, d’Oysel, her chief minister, was constantly by her side. Since the Rouen fête, moreover, her authority had been buttressed by Henry II’s seemingly inexhaustible flow of pensions, a gravy train of patronage to keep the nobles malleable and compliant.

  It was almost seven years since Mary had last seen her mother. Despite the strong bond between them, she had become dependent, emotionally and politically, on her Guise relations. This had positive and negative aspects. Antoinette of Bourbon and Anne d’Este treated her with genuine love and affection: they were her guardian angels. Her uncles, in contrast, were impassive and detached. Beneath their amiable and emollient exterior, they could be cold-hearted, even cruel. To them, Mary was a dynastic asset to be exploited, not an adopted daughter to be cherished. At this stage, she was mostly susceptible to her uncle Charles, who although a brilliant courtier and diplomat, was full of grandiose schemes and prone to overreach himself, his fertile imagination brimming with fresh intrigues.

  The true extent of the Guise deception before Mary’s marriage was not proved until the reign of Louis XIV, a century later, when the secret documents were found. This does not mean that the Scottish commissioners did not smell a rat, because as well as attending Mary’s wedding, they were invited to the state banquet and so witnessed the pageant of the ships and what that symbolized. Mary’s half-brother Lord James Stuart, now twenty-seven, had been in the crowd outside Notre-Dame watching his sister’s wedding. He disliked everything he saw, partly from jealousy, partly because many of his friends came from the close circle of Scottish and English Protestant exiles in Paris, who hated the idea that there were still French (Catholic) troops in Scotland and were determined to expel them if they could.

  The Protestants later accused Mary and her family of a plot to murder the eight Scottish commissioners on their way home. Since four of them died of a mysterious illness before they had even returned to their ships, it was easy to claim that they were poisoned. But there is no evidence of such a plot: in her letters to her mother, Mary spoke generously of the dead commissioners and mentioned the plague epidemics ravaging France at the time, in particular near Amiens and the channel ports.

  More credible is a report that the Cardinal of Lorraine had lobbied the commissioners to surrender the “crown imperial” of Scotland to France (the same one with which Mary had been crowned at Stirling). He wanted the crown kept at the abbey of St.-Denis, the royal mausoleum and the holiest shrine in France. If Francis and Mary had no children, Scotland would be held by each successive dauphin as an apanage or duchy of France. A central tenet of the Guise dynastic plan was that every future dauphin would be king of Scotland whether Mary’s heirs or not, establishing the country’s subordination forever.

  No one in Scotland knew about this. Mary’s marriage was celebrated in Edinburgh with bonfires and processions, and when the four surviving commissioners returned to submit their report, Parliament of its own accord offered the dauphin the “crown matrimonial,” a considerable accolade and Mary of Guise’s greatest achievement as regent, because as well as making Francis lawfully king of Scotland with the prospect of a future coronation at Stirling, the grant implied he had the right to retain the throne for the Valois dynasty should Mary have no children.

  No sooner had Francis been given this honor than the Hamiltons, the family and followers of the Duke of Châtelherault, the heirs apparent to the Scottish throne if Mary did die childless, joined with the Protestants to oppose it. As a result, the crown was never sent. Parliament’s grant was not officially revoked, but neither was it fulfilled. What dictated this reverse was the lords’ determination to maintain their own rights and privileges. Hitherto, the French alliance had not threatened these, because the regent’s power was limited by the terms of the treaty of Haddington. But when Mary married Francis, the mood began to shift. The lords realized that her position as the future queen of France could mean she would always be an absentee queen of Scots. This was a major change. Scotland might forever become a French province, as indeed Henry II and the Guises intended it should, and unlike the French tributes in honor of the wedding, all those written by Scots stressed their country’s equality with France.

  Amid this dynastic turmoil, sudden shock waves reverberated around Europe. Mary Tudor, the English queen, fell mortally ill at the age of forty-two. She had long suffered from severe headaches, abdominal pains and heart palpitations. In her final months she was almost blind. Her life had been ruined by the false pregnancy she suffered in 1555, when her womb swelled and her breasts spontaneously lactated. She went excitedly to her confinement chamber, only to emerge more than three months later a broken woman. Philip II had come to resent the fact that his wife was eleven years older than he was. He found her sexually unattractive, joking that she was his “aunt.” But he badly wanted a son by her, and decided to put up with her until he knew she would never bear one. In August 1555, he left abruptly for Brussels to resume command of the war effort against France, only to return for a single brief visit in 1557 to bring England into the war.

  Mary Tudor died on November 17, 1558, and from this moment a Valois dynastic project that might otherwise have seemed to be little more than a fantasy—a romantic flight of fancy expressed through pageants and poetic allegories, but without any prospect of political success—had real potential.

  In London, Elizabeth—Mary Tudor’s younger sister and Mary Stuart’s cousin—was proclaimed queen. She was twenty-five years old. Her education had closely paralleled her cousin’s, but whereas the young Queen of Scots was not noticeably academic, Elizabeth was a natural scholar. She spoke French and Italian fluently and had a smattering of Spanish. She could converse “readily and well” in Latin and “moderately” in Greek. She could keep pace with the ablest of her tutors, and could still denounce an ambassador in Latin when she was over sixty. Her favorite subjects were Scripture, history, classical literature and music, and while Mary could play competently but not brilliantly on the clavichord or the lute, Elizabeth was something of a virtuoso on the virginals.

  Elizabeth was attractive with bright eyes and long golden hair. But she was less tall and therefore less striking than Mary, at most about five feet four inches. And her complexion was olive: the Venetian ambassador used the word “olivastra,” or sallow. This was something of a disadvantage at a time when a perfect white skin mattered so much to a woman. Unlike Mary’s marble-like features, Elizabeth’s were said to be “comely,” and whereas Mary’s delicate breasts and tight slim waist were legendary, her cousin’s were merely “well formed.”

  Elizabeth’s firs
t surviving portrait depicted her at the age of thirteen, immaculately dressed in a crimson robe with an embroidered kirtle and sleeves of cloth of gold, her headdress and the strapwork of her gown bedecked with pearls. Her image was always carefully projected, and in this portrait she was holding a book of devotions complete with a marker peeping out to prove she had been reading it. On the lectern beside her, another book, perhaps the Gospels, stood open. None of this was accidental. Elizabeth was a Protestant. But she was a moderate in religion: more a Lutheran than a Calvinist, unlike the man she chose as her chief minister. This was William Cecil, who had first entered politics as Somerset’s secretary and then become Elizabeth’s steward. In Edward VI’s reign, he was promoted to secretary of state, playing a leading role in the Protestant revolution, which brought him into close contact with John Knox, and forming the ideas that were to pit him so vehemently against Mary in later years.

  In Paris, Elizabeth’s accession was greeted with unconcealed scorn. The Guises swiftly proclaimed their niece to be “queen of England, Scotland and Ireland,” challenging Elizabeth’s right to succeed her elder sister on the grounds of bastardy and Protestantism. As she had indeed been declared illegitimate by act of Parliament in 1536, and since Mary Tudor’s most vaunted policy had been to restore Catholicism, returning England to the papal fold after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and burning more than three hundred Protestants at the stake for their faith, the Guise claim was not so outrageous.

  In order to reinforce and publicize it, the cardinal ordered the heraldic arms of England to be blazoned with those of France and Scotland on all the plate and furniture belonging to the household of the kingdauphin and queen-dauphine. This was highly provocative, tantamount to establishing a rival monarchy in exile. It was to taint the relationship of Mary and Elizabeth for the rest of their lives.