by John Guy
As soon as the Guises felt secure, they reinstated their Franco-British project, even though it was discredited by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. They could claim to be reviving Henry II’s original foreign policy, but expectations elsewhere had changed. Philip II was flatly opposed to their plans for Scotland and Normandy, which he knew to be linked and designed to win control of the English Channel and the North Sea. Normandy was the province with the largest number of channel ports and the deepest harbors. The Guise family had made themselves the richest and most powerful landowners there, and although they were not inclined to resume an outright war with Philip, he had guessed correctly that they planned to turn the region into their military and naval base.
Philip left the Guises under no illusions that the peace was fragile. When they continued with their dynastic policy regardless, the level of tension rose. Whereas before the treaty the main theaters of European war and diplomacy had been Italy, France and Germany, now the spotlight was on Scotland and England.
The arrogance of the Guises was their undoing. Far from exercising caution or masking their intentions, they broadcast their aims to the widest possible audience. And their niece was at the center of it all. Wherever the French court came to rest and whichever towns it visited, the heraldic arms of Francis and Mary were blazoned with those of England on the gates. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, heard about the design of a new great seal for Scotland. When the seal was produced, it confirmed his worst fears. Francis and Mary were shown seated in imperial majesty above the legend “Francis and Mary, by grace of God, king and queen of France, Scotland, England and Ireland.”
After Francis’s coronation, these claims were once again inscribed on the gold and silver plate and carved on the furniture with which Mary’s household was newly equipped as queen of France. The coup de grâce was delivered when Throckmorton was invited to dinner and then forced to eat his meal off silver dishes bearing the usurped insignia.
From a Guise family perspective, these may have been the correct initial steps to claiming what they believed to be their rightful patrimony, but their behavior toward Mary was cynical. They treated her like a puppet and made important decisions behind her back. As to Francis, they encouraged him to play the man by going hunting. Not a single major initiative can be traced back to Mary or her husband while they were king and queen. The result was that their reign, an interlude of no more than five hundred days, turned into a Greek tragedy in which the main events were played out offstage by actors or unseen forces over which they had little or no control.
Mary’s health was poor for more than a year. Her illness and debility may even have worsened. At St.-Germain in August 1559, she was said to be sick after every meal. She fainted in the Spanish ambassador’s presence and had to be revived “with acqua composita” or whisky. In September, when the court moved to Bar-le-Duc, she was at first better, then ill again. She fainted in chapel and was led to her bedchamber, where she fainted once more. Next month, she was said to be suffering from tuberculosis, and at Blois in November she looked very pale and “kept her chamber all the day long.”
Stress was a cause, because the reports of Mary’s ill health coincided with her pleas of helplessness at the events unfolding in Scotland. Her mother, Mary of Guise, was still sole regent, but even before Henry II was dead, the Cardinal of Lorraine was interfering in the internal affairs of the country. In particular, he urged his sister to crush the Protestants, whom he regarded as political insurgents. He had first advocated this policy in April 1558, when Mary married the dauphin. And his demands soon became shriller and more insistent.
In merging the defense of Catholicism with his Franco-British strategy, the cardinal sought to imitate Mary Tudor. Her attempt to build a pan-European dynastic alliance with Philip II had been closely linked to her persecution of Protestants. The impresario of her much-vaunted campaign against heresy was the papal legate and Archbishop of Canterbury Reginald Pole, who took advice from the Spanish Dominicans. The policy backfired when many important Protestants fled to exile in Geneva and other Swiss and German towns, leaving the poor and less socially influential reformers to be burned at the stake.
The exiles were free to harangue Mary and Pole from the safety of the Continent, using the pulpit and the printing press. And yet despite these drawbacks, the Guises were impressed by what they believed to be the campaign’s effect. They wished to see the policy introduced into Scotland, and the cardinal even obtained a copy of the manual used by Pole’s inquisitors for his sister, also sending her a delegation of theologians from the Sorbonne who were skilled at rooting out heresy.
Such measures proved to be wholly counterproductive in Scotland, where the threat of religious persecution led to a rapid crescendo of fears about national independence. Whereas patriotism and the pro-French alliance had been mutually compatible at the time of the treaty of Haddington, now the reverse was true.
The impetus for change came from England, where in April 1559 Elizabeth had deftly engineered a Protestant religious settlement. She had played her cards brilliantly. In the opening months of her reign, she had taken a bipartisan approach. She had made soothing noises to Philip II and appealed to Protestants and Catholics evenhandedly. The former supported her because they knew she would reject the pope and the Catholic Mass. The latter took comfort from the fact of her Catholic conformity in Mary Tudor’s reign, when Mass was said in her chapel. Only after the peace negotiations had been concluded at Cateau-Cambrésis did Elizabeth start to reveal her true intentions.
Her leading advisers were Protestant. Cecil, her chief minister, had been one of the leading architects of Edward Vi’s Reformation. Under Mary Tudor, Cecil was a known supporter of the exiles, who included the fiery preacher John Knox. His name had been linked in Edward’s reign to an offer to Knox of the bishopric of Rochester, which as a staunch Calvinist Knox had refused. And yet, even Cecil, to save his neck, had attended a special High Mass at his house at Wimbledon, ordered by an indignant Mary Tudor when the extent of his support for the Protestant underground was discovered.
When the English Parliament voted for the religious settlement in 1559, the country became officially Protestant. It was a cue for the pro-English faction in Scotland, which won the support of the Protestants in an outright revolt against a regent who was easily depicted as the instrument of a French, and especially a Guise, tyranny. From this point on, the rebel propaganda would blend Protestantism and nationalism opportunistically.
Up until now, Mary’s mother had governed Scotland effectively, but her determination to enforce law and order, to secure higher taxes and, above all, to assimilate the Highlands and border region into a centralized Scottish state had alienated those who believed it was their birthright to rule their own kinship networks and regions. The Scottish lords at heart rejected a centralized monarchy. They wanted to rule themselves as a loose federation of small kings. The regent’s policies might still have been acceptable had the flow of French pensions continued, but after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, the tap was turned off. In those altered circumstances, Protestantism offered the perfect excuse to topple an unpopular regent.
Such opportunism, in turn, gave England a unique chance. Protestantism could be made the foundation of a plan to remold the entire British Isles as a single community, so reversing the disasters of the Rough Wooings. France had everything to lose, but the person most likely to be affected was Mary, since as a Catholic queen her crown and reputation were at stake. Cecil was in the vanguard of this policy, which was to color almost everything he did for the next thirty years and more.
Everything depended on whether the English could learn from their mistakes. It turned out that they could, because for the moment they dropped all references to England’s claims to imperial overlordship and to the status of Scotland as a satellite. They acted circumspectly, led once again by Cecil, who sought at all costs to avert a full-scale European war: he had become Prote
ctor Somerset’s secretary just in time for the 1547 Pinkie campaign, when he had witnessed the terrible carnage and narrowly escaped being killed.
On the Scottish side, the nobles in revolt against the regent called themselves the Lords of the Congregation. The most powerful was the Earl of Argyll. The son of the man who had carried the sword of state at Mary’s coronation, he was a genuine Protestant who controlled huge tracts of territory in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, where royal control was weakest, and in the Western Isles (Hebrides) and Argyllshire as far south as the Clyde estuary. His influence even stretched across to Ulster in the north of Ireland, and he was the only Scottish noble with the resources to muster a full-size army independent of the crown. He was joined by the Earl of Glencairn, Lords Ruthven, Boyd, Ochiltree and several others.
By far his most spectacular recruit was Lord James Stuart, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, who quickly emerged as the champion of these lords. Born in 1531 and eleven years older than his sister, he was a big man in every sense. Physically robust, he had a bluff but offensively regal manner and a conviction that as the son of James V, he acted as a man of principle in Scotland’s best interests. He was intelligent and well educated, first appearing on the scene when he sailed in Mary’s galley on his way to the University of Paris. Destined for a career in the Church, he was appointed Prior of St. Andrews, one of the richest abbeys in Scotland, a position he held as a layman and milked for all it was worth.
Lord James broke with the regent in 1559. His defection was reported in France, where his motive was guessed: he tilted at the regency, and perhaps the crown itself. His methods were cool, calculating and insidious. He advised Mary of Guise that if she would accede to the reasonable demands of the lords, he would support her. Meanwhile, he was continually writing to Cecil, urging him to assist the lords in their campaign to expel the French permanently from Scotland.
Events moved with breathtaking speed in May, when John Knox returned to Scotland from Geneva and joined forces with the lords. His sermons attacking the pope and the idolatry of the Mass triggered outbreaks of iconoclasm at Perth and St. Andrews. Church buildings and ornaments were ransacked in rampant acts of civil disobedience.
In August, the lords appealed to England for military aid against the regent. Cecil debated the pros and cons in a series of encyclopedic memos to his colleagues in the English Privy Council. He threw his own weight unflinchingly behind the lords, but before action could be taken, he first had to persuade Elizabeth and many of his own colleagues that an armed intervention to oust a legitimate government in alliance with its rebels could be justified.
Here lay the seeds of an ideological rift between Elizabeth and Cecil over Scottish affairs that was to mature over the next thirty years. Despite their ability to work together on almost every other issue, where Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots were concerned, Elizabeth and her chief adviser were repeatedly at loggerheads. Whereas Cecil always put the interests of Protestantism ahead of dynastic considerations, Elizabeth took the opposite approach. Although she was a Protestant, she kept religion and politics apart, putting the ideal of monarchy and of hereditary descent ahead of religion. When dealing with Mary and her mother, she found it utterly repugnant that in determining the government of Scotland, legitimate dynastic rights should be overridden by what amounted to religious preconditions.
In September, Châtelherault and his son, the young Earl of Arran, climbed aboard the bandwagon. Like many others, they converted to Protestantism for largely cynical reasons. By October, the vast majority of the Scottish lords were behind Lord James and Argyll. Only James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Lord Borthwick and Lord Seton were unwavering in their loyalty to the regent. Bothwell—who had succeeded his father, Patrick, as earl in 1556—was the most resourceful in his guerrilla tactics against Lord James, so it was hardly surprising that Mary would remember him with gratitude when she returned to Scotland.
Between October 19 and 23, the rebel lords did the unthinkable. They rode to Edinburgh and deposed Mary of Guise from the regency, replacing her with a council of twenty-four nobles voted from among themselves. Their timing was perfect, because the regent was seriously ill. She was suffering from dropsy, possibly caused by a weak heart. Her legs and body swelled up, and her French doctor urged her to rest, avoid all stress and move to a warmer climate. Nothing could have been more impractical, and the regent ignored his good advice. With characteristic courage she mustered three thousand French troops and took refuge in the port of Leith, which she fortified.
She also appealed to her family, who offered reinforcements under the command of René, Marquis d’Elbeuf, the youngest of the Guise siblings. These troops were to be sent from Normandy, confirming Spanish fears. Until they could arrive, Mary of Guise used her existing forces. When in November the lords refused the offer of a truce, the French garrison made a sortie from Leith and routed them. The Scots attempted to rally but then dispersed, enabling the regent to return to Edinburgh in triumph.
But the respite was brief. Cecil was set on a military intervention, aware that the lords lacked artillery and could never hope to defeat the French on their own. He was starting to hover between his aims of freeing Scotland forever of the Guise threat and remolding the British Isles as a single Protestant community, which meant a virtual annexation of the country. He prepared his ground for a month, then convinced a majority of the English Privy Council on December 27 that the revolt offered the chance of a lifetime to ensure Elizabeth and England’s security by effectively turning Scotland into an English dependency.
It was to be the turning point. After the Privy Council meeting, Elizabeth sent a fleet to the Firth of Forth and two thousand troops to Berwick. The fleet arrived in late January 1560 and blockaded Leith. Its orders were to await d’Elbeuf’s reinforcements, but these never arrived. Although some French ships left Dieppe, they were scattered by violent storms. They were either forced back to port or wrecked on the Netherlands coast. A mere handful of men landed in Scotland.
Elizabeth swallowed her distaste for the time being and allied with the rebels. The negotiations, directed on the Scottish side by Lord James, led on February 27 to the treaty of Berwick. She committed England to protect the “ancient rights and liberties” of the kingdom of Scotland and defend the “just freedom” of the crown from conquest, and the pact would last for one year longer than Mary was queen of France. Etched into this language was an almost complete contradiction, since “liberty” and “freedom” here meant merely the dislodgement of the Guises by the English: the removal of one occupying foreign power and its replacement by another.
A helpless and increasingly distressed Mary was bypassed in all this. So was her mother, who was mortified by the treaty of Berwick. She pleaded for d’Elbeuf to return, but her requests were ignored. Her brothers sent vague reassurances, but no specific aid. The reasons were partly logistical, reflecting the difficulty of supplying forces over such a long distance, but mainly political. The balance of power in France was once again shifting, this time away from the Guises. Their palace revolution had been too extreme. The death of Henry II had created a power vacuum, enabling the Huguenots to make inroads among the nobles. The Wars of Religion were looming. The Guise brothers were encountering problems all too similar to those already experienced by their sister. The difference was they put their own interests first and left Mary’s mother to her fate.
Not everyone shared their sang-froid. Margaret of Parma, the regent in the Netherlands, warned Philip II of a threat to his sea routes. Catherine de Medici had also come to fear the scale of Guise ambition sufficiently to seek support from Spain against her most hated domestic rivals. She had retained much of her independence in politics and diplomacy as Queen Mother, and she now appealed to Philip to intervene as a mediator.
By the beginning of March 1560, a new Spanish move was almost inevitable. The irony is that when d’Elbeuf’s ships were lost, the Guises were themselves reduced to seeking Philip’s aid
in defending their beleaguered sister against her rebels. This played directly into Philip’s hands, as he could now step forward as the mediator to whom both sides had appealed for help and advice. In making his plea to Philip, the Cardinal of Lorraine’s ambassador railed against the Scottish lords and joked sardonically that Elizabeth’s concern for their national independence reminded him of the fable of Reynard the Fox, who used soothing words to coax the chickens down from their high perch only in order to devour them.
Philip appointed two special envoys to intervene before the crisis erupted into war. One was sent to England and the other to France. Their missions made little progress, and in Paris the Cardinal of Lorraine decided on a final roll of the dice. He proposed that France and Spain should unite to subdue Scotland, but only as a prelude to the conquest of England. As an inducement, England would be given as a dowry to the future son of Philip II and Elizabeth of Valois, and this son would in turn marry the daughter of Francis II and Mary. To make this possible, Mary would surrender her own dynastic claim. It was an extraordinary flight of fancy, illustrating not only the delusions of the Guises, but the extent to which they would trample over Mary to get themselves out of a hole.
Mary was not consulted by her uncle. The mother she adored was dying, and at the same time she was ignored. At Amboise toward the end of April, there was a scene. She confronted the cardinal and “made great lamentations.” She wept bitterly and complained that her uncles “had undone her” and “caused her to lose her realm.” In reply, the cardinal swore to be avenged of Elizabeth for allying with rebels, but his promises were no more than hot air. Mary burst into tears again, then took to her bed.
In an emotional last letter to her mother, Mary conveyed her deepest love and sympathy, praying “that God will assist you in all your troubles.” Catherine de Medici, she knew, had “wept many tears on hearing of your misfortunes.” As to the crisis in Scotland, she would insist that her husband “send you sufficient aid,” which “he has promised me to do and I will not allow him to forget it.”
