by John Guy
Mary was caught squarely in the middle. If she declared her support for her Guise family, she might end up on the side opposite Elizabeth in a war. If she allied with her, she would be accused of betraying her family and her religion, and of assisting heretics to rebel against their lawful sovereign.
Elizabeth was also put on the spot. She saw the extreme danger of alienating Catherine de Medici and Philip II at the same time. She could end up as a Protestant pariah: a heretic queen who seemed always to be making it her business to support her fellow rulers’ rebels. She was all too aware of the risks Cecil had taken in Scotland during the revolt of the Lords of the Congregation.
Cecil began to despair of Elizabeth, who was inclined to ignore the plight of the Huguenots. His ally Throckmorton came to the rescue: he knew which card to play. Writing to Elizabeth, he hinted that the Huguenots were likely to be victorious in northern France. If aid was sent to them, the opportunity would arise to recover Calais, which England, to Elizabeth’s deep chagrin, had been required to cede to France by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis.
It was a golden opportunity to aid the cause of religion and recover a lost territorial prize. But if a war was imminent, the interview between the queens must be postponed.
Elizabeth desperately wanted to recover Calais or another Channel port in its place. Her favorite, Lord Robert Dudley, now took center stage, opening up negotiations with the Prince of Conde and sending Sidney, his brother-in-law, as a special emissary to France. Dudley’s diplomacy was at its height in May and June, just when Maitland was lobbying Elizabeth in Mary’s favor. Then, on July 17, eleven days after Elizabeth overruled Cecil and agreed to the interview and two days after she had changed her mind again, it all came to a head. Dudley reported to a meeting of the Privy Council at which it was decided to launch a military intervention in France.
On September 20, a treaty was concluded with Conde’s delegation at Hampton Court. Elizabeth promised to supply the Huguenots with six thousand troops and a loan of 140,000 crowns, and in return was granted Le Havre as a pledge until Calais was restored.
Mary watched these events with growing alarm and despondency. Since the meeting was postponed, she decided to fulfill a summer plan she had delayed: a royal progress to northeastern Scotland, to see the country and show herself to as many of her subjects as possible there. It was a sensible decision, even if Mary made it chiefly to save face.
She began at Stirling, traveling by way of Perth, Glamis and Edzell. She reached Aberdeen at the end of August, but the journey was difficult. According to Randolph, it was “cumbersome, painful and marvelous long, the weather extreme foul and cold, all victuals marvelous dear, and the corn that is, never like to come to ripeness.”
The final stop was Inverness. Randolph thought he could relax when he reached nearby Strathbogie, the principal seat of the Earl of Huntly, the leading Catholic noble and head of the Gordons, whose house was the fairest and “best furnished” in Scotland. Huntly’s hospitality was “marvelous great,” but Mary refused to go there, even though it was within four miles of her route.
Her summer progress was taking on a sinister aspect. Huntly was in grave disfavor for opposing Mary’s proposed interview with Elizabeth. Like many of the Catholic lords, he resented the policy of conciliation toward England, which he saw as a Trojan horse for Lord James and his allies. He was also sulking because he felt he had been cheated. He had been administering the earldoms of Mar and Moray on behalf of the crown for several years, until Mary granted them to Lord James, the first early in 1562 and the second in September, in exchange for the first.
Her anger had been aroused when she first reached Aberdeen. Huntly had turned up to welcome her, but brought fifteen hundred retainers when he was commanded to bring no more than a hundred. A clash was unavoidable when Mary arrived at Inverness only to find that the captain of the castle, apparently on Huntly’s orders, refused to open the gates to her.
Huntly, known by the nickname “Cock of the North,” was the most important landowner in the northeast, second only to the Earl of Argyll in the west. A staunch adherent of Mary of Guise, he was appointed chancellor after Cardinal Beaton’s murder. When discredited for opposing the regent’s centralizing policy in the Highlands, he joined the Lords of the Congregation, but was a reluctant, halfhearted recruit. He ended up antagonizing both sides, especially Lord James, to whom he had unwisely boasted that he could restore the Mass in three counties.
Advised by her insinuating half-brother, whom Mary now officially elevated to the earldom of Moray, she decided not to tolerate Huntly’s insubordination. When she was denied entry at Inverness, she lodged for the night in the town, but next day returned with a force. She took the castle and hanged the captain from the walls of the battlements.
Huntly was still at Strathbogie, where he was lying low. He feared an attack by Lord James and decided to preempt it by separating Mary from his rival. When she set out back to Aberdeen, he planned to seize her as she forded the River Spey. He mustered his forces under Sir John Gordon, one of his younger sons, who was already wanted for a prison escape. But Mary was forewarned. When she reached the river crossing, she had three thousand men, whereas Sir John had only one thousand. They were hidden in the woods within two miles of the river, but fled as the royal army approached.
Mary was jubilant. She had escaped an attempt to kidnap her. “In all these garboils,” wrote Randolph to Cecil, “I assure Your Honor I never saw her merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find.” Her only regret was that “she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the causeway with a jack and a knapscall,* a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword.”
Randolph got caught up in the excitement. As an ambassador, he was supposed to be a neutral party, but he confessed, “It may please you to know that in good faith where so many were occupied, I was ashamed to sit still and did as the rest.” He was positively disappointed when Huntly’s men fled. “What desperate blows would that day have been given, when every man should have fought in the sight of so noble a queen, and so many fair ladies.”
In Randolph’s mind, it seemed that Mary’s ride was part of a medieval chivalric romance. When he reached Aberdeen, the gloss wore off. Mary was royally entertained “as well in spectacles, plays, interludes and other as they could best devise.” But lodgings were in short supply, and Randolph had to share a bed with Maitland. To his horror, he later discovered that Huntly had planned to attack the town, burn down the house where he was staying and assassinate Maitland in his sleep.
Mary did not intend to allow Huntly to go unpunished. Lord James had inevitably denounced him as a traitor. She ordered him to surrender, and when he prevaricated, she sent spies to Strathbogie to arrest him, but he saw them coming and escaped through a back door of the castle. By October 12, she had decided to destroy him. Five days later, the earl was outlawed and ordered to yield Strathbogie. Mary’s forces were now searching for him, and Huntly was on the run. He had a force of some seven hundred men, and aimed to wear down his opponents in a guerrilla war.
Mary named the newly promoted Earl of Moray as her lieutenant and, together with Morton and the Earl of Atholl, he led an army of two thousand out of Aberdeen. Huntly occupied a hilltop some fifteen miles away at Corrichie, but was forced by Moray’s artillery to retreat to the lower mossy ground, where he was trapped. Two of his sons were captured, one of them Sir John, who was executed next day at Aberdeen.
Huntly was also taken, but died of a stroke while still mounted on his horse. His corpse was embalmed and sent to Edinburgh, where it was kept until the following May, when it was put on trial in Parliament. As the clerk’s report put it, “The coffin was set upright, as if the earl stood on his feet.” He was then found guilty of treason, and the family estates were declared forfeit.
Two days before Huntly was outlawed, Elizabeth wrote to Mary, justifying her decision to send an army to France to ai
d the Huguenots. It was an intimate but awkward letter, full of labored metaphors. She argued that “necessity has no law,” that in an emergency “we have no choice but to protect our own houses from destruction when those of our neighbors are on fire,” and that she would so conduct herself that Mary’s brother-in-law, the young Charles IX, “will think me a good neighbor, one who preserves rather than destroys.” (The last of these arguments was taken straight out of one of Cecil’s memos, in which he argued that neighboring rulers had a duty to protect each other, especially minors, when their realms were threatened by tyranny.)
Elizabeth was on the defensive. She wanted to avoid a breach with her “sister,” but was well aware of the risks. The prospect of a split “gnawed her heart” in case “the old sparks would be fanned by this new fire.” That said, Elizabeth used a well-known device of classical rhetoric to say how much she would have preferred not to mention—so enabling her to mention in graphic detail—the innocent victims who had been so barbarously butchered of late by the Catholics. She could not imagine Mary being so infatuated with her uncles that she was able to ignore their terrible crimes.
Mary took this surprisingly well, less perhaps because of the letters contents than because it was dictated at the height of the attack of smallpox that brought the English queen close to death. “I would write more,” Elizabeth had concluded, “but for the burning fever that now holds me completely in its grip.”
Her letter arrived on the day of the battle of Corrichie. Mary was so busy, Randolph could not deliver the letter, so he decided to return the next day. He reappeared while Mary was at supper. She eagerly asked for her letter. “Let me see,” she said, “what you have for me!”
Randolph, who knew the letter’s contents, hesitated, but she insisted. In the event, she showed no emotion. Her face did not flinch. She put down the letter without saying a single word and returned to her supper “in mirth,” just as when Randolph had arrived.
Later, she recalled him. “Now Mr. Randolph, I trust we shall the next year travel as far south as we have done north, with as much ease and more pleasure than we have had of this journey.” She was adamant that her meeting with Elizabeth be rearranged. She refused to consider the implications of the letter, that it was canceled for good.
Before retiring for the night, Mary summoned Randolph to her bedroom and asked quietly, “Is my sister sick?” She pointed to the last sentence of the letter she was still clutching, and Randolph explained that Elizabeth was recovering from an attack of smallpox. Mary was genuinely concerned, and shortly afterward wrote the letter in which she referred to her own experience of the disease as a child.
But she was also secretly elated. Smallpox was often fatal. If Elizabeth died, Mary intended to stake her claim to the English succession. And yet the timing could hardly have been worse. She was caught in the middle of a war. She therefore told Randolph that she had decided to be neutral. Her uncles, she said, must surely have acted out of a sense of duty. Beyond this, she was unwilling to get involved.
Mary was struggling with her emotions. So when Randolph, despite promising himself not to say anything “grievous” against her uncles, could not resist the riposte that Elizabeth intervened in France in a godly cause, and that Charles IX, when he was older and wiser, would thank her for it, she smiled broadly and changed the subject.
Almost as soon as Mary had returned to Holyrood from the northeast, she suffered a bout of viral flu. She was in bed for six days, and when she rose was in a more belligerent mood. Lord James and Maitland had given her the news that when Elizabeth’s attack of smallpox was at its height, only a single voice had been raised in her favor in the English Privy Council as the successor.
Mary was mortified. Maitland saw the danger and warned Cecil that the war had radically altered the game. Mary, he said, was a “perplexed” queen, boxed in between her uncles and England. To ensure her friendship, she needed a more secure interest in the succession than was provided by Elizabeth’s “love.” Her religion could no longer be an obstacle when she had so obviously protected the Protestants and destroyed Huntly, the leader of the Catholic nobles.
But Cecil was unmoved. The war in France was going badly for England; the Huguenots were forced to retreat and the English troops were cornered at Le Havre. As he reminded Randolph, there were “two dangers.” One was a Catholic victory so overwhelming it would put “us here in danger for our religion”; the other was that the Guises would “build their castles so high,” they would attempt to depose Elizabeth.
It was the same old story. Strangely, Randolph’s assessment veered to the opposite extreme. However much Mary favored her uncles, he advised Cecil by return of post, “yet she loveth better her own subjects.” She understood the need for the amity with England to be greater “than a priest babbling at an altar.” Mary, he argued, “is not so affectioned to her Mass that she will leave a kingdom for it.” Cecil should be reassured. He should no longer suspect her, because “her desire was never greater to live in peace, nor never more heartily desired the Queen Majesty’s kindness and goodwill than now she doth.” “Yesterday,” said Randolph, “she spoke it and willed me to write the same.”
Mary’s charisma had worked its magic on Randolph. Cecil, however, was immune. She celebrated Christmas 1562 in fine style, but the joy was hollow. Even before the revelry was over, she was muttering that she had not heard from Elizabeth for two months.
Early in the new year, Maitland wrote to Cecil: “Sir, I cannot think it to be without some hidden mystery that the intercourse of letters (which were wont to go frequently as well betwixt the two queens as us their ministers) is thus ceased on your part.”
A full-blown crisis erupted when Mary found out that Elizabeth had summoned Parliament to meet on January 11, and that Cecil aimed to bar her from the succession by an Act of Exclusion. The news had leaked by January 5, when Randolph warned that Maitland was “in great choler.” He had reassured Mary that nothing would be “to her discontentment,” but the pressure was mounting, and in the last week of January she took to her bed for six days.
On the 31st, a letter arrived from Elizabeth full of specious excuses, which Randolph presented. She “read it quite over twice in my sight” and took it in good part. But she asked to be excused from replying. She had decided to send Maitland back to London to present her case, if necessary directly to Parliament. He was to go first to London, and then on to France.
He left Edinburgh on February 13, when he also carried a letter from Moray urging how the “love once kindled” between the two queens should be reignited, a task in which he supposed Cecil should never “relent.”
It looked very much like more of the same: another attempt to arrange an interview between the queens. But it was nothing of the kind. Cecil was entirely unprepared for what was in Maitland’s instructions. Not even Moray now knew his sister’s thoughts. She was dissembling, because Elizabeth’s prevarication and Cecil’s obstinacy were leading her to a different and (from the English viewpoint) far more threatening solution. She would seize the initiative by searching for a husband able to secure her dynastic rights in England. This was to become her policy for the next two years, and to get her own way she would, if necessary, break with her Guise relations.
11
A Search for a Husband
MARY PLAYED by the rules in seeking a second husband. Female monarchy was thought to be an aberration; Knox’s account of it in his First Blast of the Trumpet was just an extreme version of a well-worn stereotype. The correct “solution” for a woman ruler was to marry and settle the succession. Marriage was a matter of “reputation” and of the “fortification of her estate.” Cecil, who continually urged his own queen to marry, used exactly those words. Whether a reigning queen of Scotland would become subordinate to her husband upon marriage was a delicate political conundrum to which there was no textbook answer. Scotland was not France, where the Salic law prevailed. Everything depended on the personalities involved a
nd the opinion of Parliament, but generally the nobles were more settled and less factious when dealing with a man, even if he was merely a king consort.
A complication for Mary was that few kings or princes took widows as their first wives, usually thinking of them as second or subsequent wives in cases where their first marriages had already produced heirs. Against this could be offset the Queen of Scots’ transcendent youth and beauty, and the fact that her dowry was a kingdom. She was still only twenty and in her prime. Now that she had decided to marry again, it was a matter of identifying the best candidate in light of her political and dynastic goals.
So far, she had been advised by Lord James, now Earl of Moray, and his allies, whom she appointed to her inner cabinet. Their policy was to maintain the amity with England by seeking a “middle way” in which Mary would be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor. In turn, the preservation of the amity gave the Protestant lords a guarantee of the religious status quo.
But the gap between Elizabeth and Cecil over how to deal with Mary was widening. Whereas he grumbled that she sought to win Mary over “by gentleness and benefit” without sufficient regard for her own or the nation’s security, Elizabeth joked that her chief minister was more bothered about her “safety” than she was herself. Cecil’s belief in an international Catholic and Guise conspiracy turned him into Mary’s most ardent and determined opponent, whereas Elizabeth, who repeatedly refused to name a successor out of fear that it would somehow hasten her own death or encourage a dangerous upsurge of factionalism, remained sympathetic to Mary’s claim, which she preferred to those of any other candidates.
