The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Once Mary had set in train the mischief of agreeing to readmit Lennox to Scotland, she proposed to Randolph that both queens should appoint commissioners to meet on the border at Berwick-upon-Tweed to discuss terms for the possible Dudley marriage. Elizabeth immediately took fright. Mary was dueling with her. Already she regretted ever asking Mary to repatriate Lennox. But the damage was done, and she could hardly refuse to condone the very course of action she herself had proposed. She appealed, clandestinely as she believed, to Maitland and Moray to block Lennox’s return, but her overtures were rebuffed and reported with glee to an increasingly determined Mary.

  In the summer of 1564, Mary put herself deliberately out of reach. She let Elizabeth stew and went on another progress, this time to the far north, starting at Inverness and moving on to Gartly in Aberdeenshire and then to Easter Ross. She was attempting to bind together the Gaelic-speaking parts of the country to the Scots-speaking Lowlands by their shared allegiance to herself. And the plan was working, in that she was well received and lavishly entertained by her hosts at every stop. Her willingness to order the court to put on Highland dress helped, as well as her liking for the harp and bardic poetry. She was even willing to listen to bagpipes, which, more than the harp, were coming to be regarded as symbolic of Highland identity and culture.

  By the time Mary was back in Edinburgh, there was yet another twist. Catherine de Medici had sent Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissière, on a mission to both Elizabeth and Mary, uncertain about the endgame in Mary’s suit for Don Carlos and anxious to prevent a future crisis.

  Catherine was assiduously promoting a peace policy after the combined Catholic and Huguenot victory over the English at Le Havre. She wanted peace within France and between France and its neighbors; she especially wanted peace in the British Isles to guarantee the Anglo-French entente. She therefore proposed a new double alliance: Elizabeth should marry Charles IX, and his younger brother and heir, Henry Duke of Anjou, should be given to Mary.

  When Castelnau put the offer to Elizabeth, she sidestepped it with a joke. “The king,” she said, laughing, “is both too big and too small!” She meant that France was too powerful to match with England, whereas Charles IX, who was by now fourteen to Elizabeth’s thirty, was too young. She had no desire at all to marry Charles. If she left the country, she would become an absentee ruler, and the king of France could hardly be expected to live in England. But she asked Castelnau to thank Catherine for the honor she had done her and reiterated her support for their entente.

  Mary was distinctly frostier. She would soon be twenty-two and the Duke of Anjou was barely thirteen. That, however, was not the reason for her disapproval. She rejected Catherine’s proposal less because of the age disparity than because she held the offer to be unworthy. It was a consolation prize. As Castelnau put in his report, Mary “had as big and restless a spirit as her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine.” The offer was insufficient for her “grandeur.” Despite this, he found her absolutely “enchanting”: a woman “in the flower of her youth” who was “esteemed and adored by her subjects.”

  Castelnau knew Mary already, having watched her grow up at Henry II’s court. He brought her letters from her Guise relations, and as she gradually thawed, she gave him better reasons for rejecting the offer. “Of all the kingdoms and countries of the world,” she said, “none touches my heart more than France, where I was nurtured and had the honor of being a queen . . . But I cannot really imagine how I could return there in a lesser role, and in any case if I left my realm of Scotland unattended, I might even be in danger of losing it.”

  Mary flatly refused to consider a marriage to a prince who she believed (wrongly, as it turned out) had no prospect of ever inheriting a throne. Her next move was to send a gentleman of her bedchamber, Sir James Melville, as her ambassador to Elizabeth. He left Edinburgh in late September, instructed first to play down the effect of an angry letter Mary had written protesting against her cousin’s clandestine efforts to block Lennox’s repatriation, and then to stand ready to act on her dynastic claim should Parliament, currently prorogued until October, reassemble. Lastly, Melville was charged to negotiate secretly with the Countess of Lennox to obtain a passport for Darnley to travel north.

  Mary was still pretending to consider Dudley as a possible husband while quietly investigating the prospect of marrying Darnley, whose dynastic assets, if united with her own, would give her an almost invincible claim to the English succession, provided the rales of hereditary right were followed.

  When Melville reached the palace of Whitehall, Elizabeth rolled out the red carpet. She smothered him with blandishments, seemingly taking him into her confidence and granting him up to three interviews a day. He was flattered, even as he realized it was all part of a game. In fact, his entire visit was orchestrated to bring the topic of conversation continually around to Dudley.

  One of Elizabeth’s ploys was to summon Melville to her bedroom to view her collection of portrait miniatures. The pretext was that she “delighted often” to look at Mary’s portrait; but when the hapless envoy arrived, the miniature at the top of the pile was none other than Dudley’s, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper with the sitter’s name inscribed on the outside in Elizabeth’s own hand.

  The inscription read “My lord’s picture,” wording that suggested an outright declaration of love and the more baffling to Melville: to show this inscription to him while attempting to advocate Dudley’s merits as a husband for Mary only served to expose Elizabeth’s own indecision about the course of action on which she had embarked.

  Melville was then closely interrogated about Mary. What did she wear? What color was her hair? How beautiful was she? Was she tall? What were her favorite pastimes? Could she play the virginals? The questioning was endless, and it was almost more than the patriotic and loyal Melville could bear to describe his queen with enough faint praise to avoid offending the vain and jealous Elizabeth.

  At the end of a grueling nine days, Melville looked forward to his departure. He was exhausted, but was obliged to stay on to attend Dudley’s creation as Earl of Leicester in honor of his suit for Mary, an event at which he and the French ambassador clearly spotted Elizabeth tickling her kneeling favorite’s neck.

  It seemed to be just another, if more elaborate, royal charade. More perilous was that portion of Melville’s mission that concerned Darnley. Elizabeth was becoming wary of him. His stock had risen relative to the gossip about him, which Elizabeth curiously sought to counter by promoting him. At the ceremony for Dudley’s ennoblement, Darnley bore the sword of state and was invited to the official reception.

  Asked point-blank about Mary’s opinion of him, Melville dissembled. “No woman of spirit,” he said, “would make choice of such a man that was more like a woman than a man, for he was very lusty, beardless and lady-faced.” It was just about a credible answer, because while Darnley was polished and urbane, his character was tainted by recklessness, sexual excess, pride and stupidity. He was almost certainly bisexual, as was the vogue of young hedonistic courtiers in France. Contemporaries had ways of making sexual excess known, and when Darnley was described as a “great cock chick,” the pun was intentional. The Cardinal of Lorraine was more polite, merely dismissing him as “a polished trifler.”

  When Melville returned to Edinburgh, he found Lennox had preceded him. The earl was riding high in Mary’s esteem and occupying some of the best rooms at Holyrood. His estates, traditionally concentrated in the region of the Clyde around Glasgow, had been forfeited on his defection to Henry VIII twenty years before, but on October 16 were fully restored. Mary had to speak “very comely” to her councilors to pull this off. The lords in Parliament sanctioned the grant to please her, but Argyll predicted that Lennox had enemies who would stir up trouble if he was allowed to lord it over them.

  Mary was unwilling to listen to such objections. She relished too much the irony of proclaiming how his rehabilitation was “at the request of her dearest si
ster Elizabeth.”

  Lennox, meanwhile, was greasing the wheels. His wife used Melville as a courier to send luxurious gifts for Mary and her lords. Mary’s presents included “a marvelous fair and rich jewel,” a clock and a jewel-encrusted mirror. Maitland and Atholl were each given a ring set with a large diamond, while the four Maries received such “pretty things” as Lennox “thought fittest.” Moray, the sworn enemy of the Lennoxes, significantly received nothing—a deliberate slap in the face.

  Mary’s gift may well have been the famous Lennox Jewel. According to Randolph, everyone who saw it thought it stunning, and it bore a coded message that Mary would have appreciated. Designed to be worn around the neck on a gold chain or ribbon, the jewel is in the shape of a golden heart. On the outer face is a crown surmounted with three white fleurs-de-lis on an azure background, set with three rubies and an emerald. Beneath it is a winged heart with a huge sapphire as its centerpiece, above which is a crown set with rubies and an emerald. These emblems are supported by the classical-style figures of Faith, Hope, Truth and Victory. Around the border is the motto “Who hopes still constantly with patience shall obtain victory in their pretense.”

  The jeweled crown opens, and inside the lid are two hearts and a golden true-love knot, pierced with Cupid’s arrows and over them the motto “What we resolve.” Below, in a cavity within the crown, is the monogram MSL (for Matthew and Margaret Stuart Lennox) inscribed in white, blue and red enamel. Inside the lid of the winged heart are two joined hands holding a green hunting horn by red cords, with the motto “Death shall dissolve.” Within another cavity is a skull and crossbones.

  The inner portions of the jewel are a celebration of the marriage of Lennox and Lady Margaret Douglas. Its fulfillment is, however, to be the victory of the “pretense” proclaimed by the motto around the classical figures. The word “pretense” had no pejorative connotation in the sixteenth century. Someone who “pretended” merely asserted a claim to something to which he believed he had a right. This inscription most likely applied to Mary’s claim to the English throne, and then to Darnley’s, and the winged-heart centerpiece may have hinted at a unification of their claims.

  Whether or not this was the “marvelous fair and rich jewel” presented to Mary, she had decided by the end of 1564 to prise Darnley away from Elizabeth. Her plan slowly unfolded after the failure of the meeting between the English and Scottish commissioners that was held at Berwick in November.

  Maitland had opened the bidding. He proposed that Mary be allowed to marry the husband of her choice, with certain specific exceptions, in exchange for which she would be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir apparent. This went nowhere. But his subsequent offer, that she be recognized as heir and confirmed as “second person of the realm” in return for which she would renounce her immediate Catholic claim and marry Dudley, was little more than everyone had been led to think would be acceptable.

  Although a Dudley marriage was not ideal, it was a serious offer on the Scottish side. If Mary had been named as Elizabeth’s heir, she would have married him as the price of a dynastic settlement.

  But when the report of the English commissioners arrived in London, everything went back to square one. Elizabeth retreated at the prospect of actually identifying a named person as her successor. It was not that she objected to Mary as such; it was the same old story as before.

  Cecil, who had always opposed a settlement with Mary, made no effort to persuade Elizabeth to honor her commitment. Instead, he wrote a serpentine letter to Maitland and Moray in which he attempted to dilute the clear and binding commitment given on the English side into a nonbinding pledge, urging the Scots to move forward by way of “friendship” and not by way of “contracting.” The “ticklish” matter of “princes determining their successors” was cited: the primordial problem of Elizabeth’s “winding-sheet.” Faced with identifying her heir, her nerve had failed.

  On Christmas Eve, Maitland and Moray wrote an anguished reply. They were incredulous, both that the settlement was in jeopardy and that Cecil had taken this opportunity to revive his earlier proposal of a trial of Mary’s claim.

  The Scots were quite candid. Without a guarantee of Mary’s place in the succession, Cecil should know that Dudley was “no fit match” for their queen, even if he was made a duke, a higher rank than the earldom he now held.

  And this was the rub. Dudley was a nobleman of Elizabeth’s own creation. He owed everything he possessed to her. He lacked sufficient patrimonial estates of his own and a claim to a throne. In addition, he was the son of a convicted and executed traitor, since his father had been the same Duke of Northumberland who had engineered the Protestant Lady Jane Grey’s failed coup before Mary Tudor’s accession in 1553.

  Darnley, by comparison, was the genuine article: a scion of the royal house of Tudor whose dynastic pedigree would be unassailable if it was annexed to Mary’s own. Mary had exposed her thinking to Randolph: “Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.” She had intended to keep something of herself in reserve. Now she would finally break free of English coercion. Although Darnley was still Elizabeth’s subject, he would shortly be across the Scottish border. She had not yet definitely made up her mind to marry him. Snatching him away and marrying him were two very different things. But he was her insurance policy. She would reintegrate him into Scottish politics, where he would become a foil to attempts by Elizabeth and Cecil to dictate her choice of husband.

  Mary did not quite know how she would manage this. To her astonishment, she had in the end to do nothing. A fiasco at the English court, one for which Elizabeth would forever rebuke herself, was about to catapult Darnley into Scotland and from there into Mary’s arms.

  13

  A Marriage of Convenience

  ENGLISH POLICY toward Mary was beginning to fall apart. Elizabeth was losing her nerve. On September 23, 1564, she had written to Cecil, then ill at home, to ask for his advice. It was the scrappiest, most faltering note she ever wrote. Typically it was in Latin, the language into which she retreated when lost for words: “I am in such a labyrinth that I do not know how I shall be able to reply to the Queen of Scots after so long a delay. I am at a loss to know how to satisfy her, and have no idea as to what I now ought to say.” Cecil filed it away with a cryptic comment: “The Q[ueen] writing to me being sick.”

  The Dudley marriage plan had been a disaster. No one had ever bothered to ask Lord Robert for his opinion, and he had no desire whatever to marry Mary and live in Scotland. He was dropping frantic hints and doing everything within the bounds of discretion to evade the nomination, which, since he could hardly refuse to marry Mary if asked to do so by Elizabeth, meant finding an alternative husband. In Dudley’s mind, the ideal surrogate was the English-born and supposedly loyal Darnley, whose candidacy he and his close friends supported.

  One of Dudley’s mentors was Throckmorton. Although a staunch Protestant, he did not agree with Cecil’s reading of the threat Mary posed to Elizabeth’s security. He had been arguing since before she left France that she should be recognized as the heir apparent to the English throne on the condition that she ally permanently with England.

  Throckmorton lobbied for Darnley to get Dudley off the hook. By the end of December, Cecil could write of “a device” to steer Elizabeth in this direction. She had, he believed, “no disposition thereto”; but she proved him wrong. She was far from always living up to her image as a politically astute, dispassionate ruler. That, of course, was the Protestant stereotype. As Knox had proclaimed, Elizabeth ruled from the head and Mary from the heart, because in his eyes a Protestant queen was an “exceptional” personality able to overcome the frailty of her gender, whereas Catholic queens were not.

  Over the winter of 1564–65, Elizabeth ruled from the heart. She allowed her emotions to dictate policy. Although she had herself named Dudley as the preferred suitor for Mary, she now pulled back, because if he really went to Scotland, she would los
e the only man she had ever loved to a rival—for it seemed to her, in her jaundiced state after the Berwick conference, that Mary was actively seeking to steal Dudley from her!

  At the start of February 1565, Darnley was given a passport to visit his father. For a few days, but just long enough to allow him to cross the border, Elizabeth decided it would, after all, be better if he and not Dudley married Mary. Mary had only to sit back and wait for Darnley to arrive. When he was safely in Scotland, she had Elizabeth exactly where she wanted her.

  No longer did anyone suppose that Mary would marry Dudley. Just this was certain: she did intend to remarry. The pace quickened during a visit to St. Andrews in early February. Randolph had accompanied her, and she chatted with him after supper, sitting beside the fire.

  “Not to marry,” she said, “you know it cannot be for me. To defer it long, many incommodities ensue.” She had made up her mind. But she also had regrets. She gently chided the ambassador that it could all have been so different if Elizabeth had lived up to her own rhetoric and treated her in a womanly, sisterly way.

  “How much better were it,” she said, “that we being two queens so near of kin, neighbors and living in one isle, should be friends and live together like sisters, than by strange means divide ourselves to the hurt of us both.”

  Randolph protested Elizabeth’s friendship, but Mary knew the score. It was all just words. “To say that we may for all that live friends,” she said, “we may say and promise what we will, but it will pass both our powers!”

  Mary deplored the lost opportunity. Two women rulers, working together for the benefit of the British Isles, could have achieved “notable things.” Now there were too many obstacles, not least that of marriage.