by John Guy
One of Mary’s sporting and cultural innovations was the equestrian masque, which she introduced within weeks of her arrival. Such events were normally staged outdoors, taking the form of “running at the ring” in costumes or disguises. One team dressed up as Stranger Knights and the other as Female Knights, after which the teams rode in competition on Leith sands. The object of the game was to see which team could score the most points by spearing a ring suspended from a post in a fixed number of turns. But every so often they were indoor entertainments, as when troops of knights rode into the great hall and recited verses eulogizing Mary and pledging themselves as her lieges.
A few days after Mary’s inaugural masque, Randolph, the resident English ambassador, was summoned while she was in the council chamber. He found her “where she herself ordinarily sitteth the most part of the time sewing some work or other.” When her councilors departed, she asked him to wait. “I will,” she said, “talk with you apart in the garden.” One of Mary’s special skills was the ability to persuade the person with whom she was conversing that he was the only one who really mattered, and Randolph knew the interview was important.
She began in a low key. “How like you this country? You have been in it a good space and know it well enough.” Randolph answered, “The country is good and by policy might be made much better.” To this she replied, “The absence of a prince hath caused it to be worse, but yet is it not like unto England?” Randolph said there were many countries in far worse condition than Scotland, but few were “better than England,” which he trusted she would visit.
He was struggling, because he had little idea what was afoot. But he had said the right thing. A visit to England was exactly what Mary wanted. “I would,” she quickly agreed, “be content therewith if my sister your mistress so like.”
Mary chose her moment. After Maitland’s return from his embassy, there had been a sudden turnabout and his diplomacy had failed. No longer would Elizabeth appoint commissioners to renegotiate the treaty of Edinburgh, to clear the way for Mary to be recognized as heir apparent in England in exchange for renouncing her immediate dynastic claim. As the years went by, Elizabeth developed an almost primordial dread of naming a successor or allowing the succession to be discussed. She had a superstitious fear that to identify her successor would hasten her own death: she was still scarred by the plots and revolts of her brother’s and elder sister’s reigns. “I know,” she said, “the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government, and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.”
The result was that six weeks after Maitland departed, she rescinded her offer and called on Mary to ratify the treaty in its original form. Mary refused to do this, but still believed it would be possible to reach a settlement with her cousin.
She was all the more determined because she did not wish merely to be a figurehead in Scotland. She wanted to rule effectively. With Knox’s insubordination so fresh in her mind, she was beginning to fear that her Scottish subjects would never obey her in the manner she thought she should be able to expect unless her right of succession in England was accepted. Her dynastic claim and her prestige in Scotland were connected, because as long as Knox and his supporters were writing to Cecil in England and colluding with him behind her back, her authority was undermined.
If, however, Elizabeth accepted her as the successor, then she would have legitimized her once and for all, making it far riskier for Mary’s subjects to appeal to England against her authority, whether she outlived a woman who was only nine years older than herself or not.
Elizabeth had an agenda of her own. She had made it clear to Parliament in 1559 that she did not intend to marry. Her speech was widely reported: “This shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, died a virgin.”
Such a statement cannot be taken at face value. Elizabeth was a superb rhetorician who knew that her marriage and the succession were linked. While a marriage, if there ever was to be one, would settle the succession as long as she bore children, it was politically naive for a woman ruler to announce her plans to marry much in advance of her final choice of candidate. Not only would her authority be shaken by factionalism at home, her wedding—assuming she had chosen to marry a foreign prince—would raise the same vexed questions of absentee monarchy that had so humiliated Mary Tudor, when Philip II had left England and his wife after just over a year to attend to more important concerns.
In 1560, Elizabeth had seriously contemplated marriage. She had fallen madly in love with her handsome favorite, Lord Robert Dudley, with whom she had a fling lasting eighteen months. As it was explained by the Spanish ambassador, “Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.” Their affair seems to have stopped at heavy petting, but was scandalous because Dudley was a married man. His wife was Amy Robsart, whom he had married ten years before.
The gossip ran riot in September 1560, when Amy died at the age of twenty-eight in highly suspicious circumstances. She fell down a flight of eight steps at her home in Cumnor Place, near Oxford, and broke her neck after sending all her servants to enjoy themselves at a nearby fair. A coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental death, but whether she died accidentally, committed suicide or was murdered is impossible to judge from the meager evidence. Elizabeth would hear nothing against Dudley, but by the end of the year had decided that marriage to him was too risky. In November, she drew back from giving him an earldom. She picked up a knife at the last moment and slashed the deed of grant.
After Maitland had returned home, convinced that the treaty of Edinburgh was renegotiable, Elizabeth changed her mind. All her life she was prone to such bouts of indecisiveness and vacillation. Sir Walter Raleigh later quipped that “Her Majesty did all by halves.” It was a failing she seemed to regard as a virtue, since it gave her more time to weigh her options.
On Cecil’s advice, she decided that to replace the treaty would be too dangerous. She knew that she was illegitimate in the eyes of the Catholic Church. She also knew that her father’s Parliament had declared her illegitimate when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed. And if the treaty was to be picked apart, all that could stand once more in the way of Mary’s immediate claim to the English throne was Philip II’s decision to recognize and protect Elizabeth.
England’s relations with Philip II were still cordial, but that might not last forever. A crack had opened up in the spring of 1561 when Elizabeth refused to send representatives to a new session of the Council of Trent, provoking accusations from Catholics all over Europe that she was schismatic, heretical, illegitimate and immoral. The more Elizabeth thought about it, the more reluctant she was to put a sword into the hands of those who might eventually be in a position to turn it against her.
She had been uncharacteristically frank with Maitland. She usually kept her doubts to herself, but this time she had made them known. She feared a threat to her own security if Mary was named as her successor. However honorable her cousin’s intentions, the mere process of naming a successor would stir up a hornet’s nest. “Princes,” she said, “cannot like their own children. Think you that I could love my own winding-sheet?”
As a result, Mary wanted to meet Elizabeth face to face. She was confident that if she could only talk to her cousin at the level of queen to queen, their differences would quickly melt away and a fresh accord be reached. As soon as she broached the possibility of a visit, Maitland set to work to arrange it.
Nor was Elizabeth unresponsive. The truth is, she was already wavering again. In January 1562, she wrote to her cousin, saying that although she could not yet send her portrait to complete the earlier agreed exchange, this was only because the artist was sick and unable to “set it out.” She would, as soon as it was ready, dispatch her picture to her “sister.” It was a good example of Elizab
eth’s genius for public relations, but also an acknowledgment that a settlement between the two queens was still in the cards.
The English Privy Council was deeply divided over Mary’s claim to the succession. As long as Elizabeth refused to marry, there would always be those who wished to keep their lines open to someone with as strong a claim to the throne as Mary’s. Although she was a Catholic, she had many supporters in England. Her policy of compromise and conciliation with the Protestant lords had been warmly received. And other events worked to her advantage.
Henry VIII’s will had set aside the strict rules of hereditary descent. If his children died without heirs, then the throne was to pass to the offspring of the Duchess of Suffolk. By the 1560s, this meant Lady Catherine Grey or her younger sister Mary Grey. They were Protestants, and Catherine’s claim was strongly supported by Cecil, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to promote it.
Elizabeth, however, loathed the Grey sisters. She did what she could to humble them, and when Catherine secretly married the Earl of Hertford and became pregnant, the scandal benefited Mary Stuart. The marriage was discovered in August 1561, when a furious Elizabeth sent both parties to the Tower. A son, called Edward after his father, was born to Catherine. Elizabeth persuaded the Court of Star Chamber to fine the earl £15,000 for seducing a royal virgin and the Archbishop of Canterbury to annul the marriage, thereby denying any resulting children a place in the order of succession.
Whereas Cecil supported Catherine Grey’s claim to the succession, Elizabeth favored Mary Stuart’s. When looking at it from this viewpoint and not from that of fear of the papacy and Philip II, she believed that the Queen of Scots was undeniably a proper queen and not an upstart. She was a respectable widow, a woman around whom there had never been the slightest whiff of scandal, and although privately a Catholic, in public she had accepted the official Protestant Reformation in Scotland, where her star was rising fast.
The crux was the place of religion. Elizabeth was a Protestant, but not as Protestant as Cecil wanted her to be. The ideological rift between her and Cecil over Mary was fast taking shape. Elizabeth would always be reluctant to settle the succession if that meant identifying a named successor. But in her mind she kept religion and politics apart. Her overriding aim was to defend the ideal of monarchy, and if left to her own devices, she would sooner or later acknowledge the deficiencies of the treaty of Edinburgh and reach an accord with Mary. She would be tempted to recognize her right to be regarded as heir apparent, but without actually naming Mary as her successor.
What terrified Cecil was that Elizabeth might one day overrule him and do exactly this. And what better way was there for Mary to persuade Elizabeth to do so than at a personal interview?
By the spring of 1562, Mary was eagerly making plans for the forthcoming meeting. All suitors for her hand were politely rejected, and if the topic of marriage was broached, she would joke that she would have no one else but Elizabeth.
Mary was so hopeful, she sent another portrait of herself to her cousin. It was a miniature this time, set in a ring behind a large diamond framed like a heart, the sort of token exchanged by royal lovers. The jewel took almost three months to manufacture, but was ready by the middle of June.
Mary wrote verses to accompany it. As with her oration at the Louvre, she needed help, which Buchanan ably provided. The gift had the desired effect. Elizabeth replied two weeks later, sending Mary her own verses in Italian. Mary then reciprocated in French and Italian “with a few more in number written in the best sort she can”:
Just one thought gives me pleasure and grief,
My heart fills first with bitterness and then sweetness,
Fluctuating between the doubt and hope that afflict me,
So that peace and sleep flee from me.
Therefore, dear sister, if this verse brings you
The desire to meet that also moves me,
I can only be left in pain and sadness
If the meeting does not happen soon.
These exchanges between the two queens were, in a flirtatious way, the prelude to a rapprochement. Maitland was in correspondence with Cecil, who was attempting to put a damper on the proceedings. He saw where this was heading. He especially disliked the idea of a symbolic marriage, and could never accept that Mary, a Catholic and a Guise, had changed her colors.
On May 25, Maitland was sent again to London, where he stayed until early July. His instructions were to make the final arrangements for the interview.
But Cecil dragged his heels. Maitland complained of his “brief and dark sentences.” Then shocking news arrived from France. The Duke of Guise, traveling from Joinville to Paris, had passed through the village of Vassy just as several hundred Huguenots were worshiping in a barn. His retinue tried to break up the congregation, but were repulsed. So his musketeers fired, leaving twenty-three dead and almost one hundred wounded. The duke vehemently denied that he had started the massacre. He always insisted that the violence had erupted because the Huguenots had pelted him and his men with stones. Whatever the truth of this, Cecil’s worst fears were confirmed; it seemed that the Guises were set on a religious crusade that would eventually cross the channel and spread to England.
Cecil appealed to Elizabeth to bury the interview with Mary, who knew herself that the massacre would seriously damage her cause. On May 29, Mary summoned Randolph to dissociate herself from her uncles. She “lamenteth their unadvised enterprise, which shall not only bring themselves in danger of their own persons, but also in hatred and disdain of many princes in the world.”
Cecil settled down to another round of memos. He was determined to block the meeting and scraped the bottom of the barrel of feeble excuses, claiming it had rained so much, “the great wet” would clog the wheels of the coaches carrying the queens. York or Nottingham had been suggested as the venue, midway between London and Edinburgh. But Cecil argued there were shortages of “wine and fowl” there. He even felt confident enough to draft instructions to Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Robert Dudley’s brother-in-law and the president of the Council in Wales, who was to be sent to Mary as a special envoy to say the meeting had been canceled.
Maitland continued to lobby Elizabeth at Greenwich. His efforts seemed doomed, and yet to his delight Elizabeth overruled Cecil. She made her decision on July 6, when a contract was drawn up finalizing the small print for the meeting. It would take place at York in August or September. Mary was to be allowed one thousand attendants as a reflection of the esteem in which she was held. She would be permitted to use “the rites of her religion as at home,” a generous privilege. She was not, however, to be a guest, but was to pay her own way. Provision was made for a bureau de change where Scottish gold and silver coins could be exchanged for English money to buy provisions and other necessities.
If Cecil was shaken, Mary was jubilant. Maitland was back in Edinburgh by the 15th, when she told Randolph how elated she was and how she could not possibly have received better news. Elizabeth had even sealed the bargain by sending her long-overdue portrait.
Mary showed it to Randolph and quizzed him repeatedly. “How like is it,” she asked, “unto the queen your mistress’s lively face?” He answered that she herself would shortly be able to judge, when she “would find much more perfection than could be set forth with the art of man.”
“That,” replied Mary, “is the thing that I have most desired ever since I was in hope thereof.” She was almost overcome with joy. “And let God be my witness,” she said, “I honor her in my heart and love her as my dear and natural sister.” Mary’s language shows that she had made a heavy psychological investment in the meeting’s success.
Once again she would be foiled. Nine days after Elizabeth first offered the interview, she changed her mind. It was to be postponed until the following year on account of the tragic events in France. Cecil had gotten his way. Sidney, already earmarked to break the news to Mary and whose instructions were ready and waiting, left London on the 16
th. He arrived in Edinburgh on the 21st, but Mary was indisposed. Lord James and Maitland had already heard the news. They told Mary, who fell “into such a passion as she did keep her bed all that day,” refusing to move or speak to anyone. She received Sir Henry next day, “with great grief . . . as well appeared by divers manifest demonstrations not only in words but in countenance and watery eyes.”
Worse was to come. Within three months, the first of the Wars of Religion would have begun in France, and England would have intervened in Normandy on the side of the Huguenots against the Guises. All thoughts of the interview would be sidelined.
The civil war in France broke out less because Catherine de Medici, still the regent there, had opposed the Huguenots than because she had stopped supporting them. After her ten-year-old son Charles IX’s accession, her policy had been to eclipse the Guises and deal with the religious question by appeasing the Huguenots. She had little choice, because their rapid advances at court were matched by their expansion in the country as a whole. In the short term, Catherine’s policy of allowing them to worship freely in their own homes worked. Their two great leaders, Louis Prince of Condé and Gaspard de Châtillon, Admiral Coligny, were sufficiently powerful to keep their supporters in check. The trouble started when the Huguenots demanded the right of public worship and the Guises successfully detached Anthony, the titular king of Navarre, from his brother Condé.
Anthony of Navarre was lieutenant-general of the kingdom and commanded the royal army. When the Guises won him over to their side, they were seemingly back in power, which pushed their enemies into a revolt. The Huguenots, led by Condé, seized the town of Orléans, followed by Angers, Tours and Blois. When Lyons fell to their forces, Catherine was pressed into a volte-face. She turned again to Constable Montmorency and the Duke of Guise, who agreed to bury their differences, and looked for aid to the pope, the Duke of Savoy and Philip II. The Huguenots, for their part, appealed to Elizabeth and Cecil.
