by John Guy
As Mary’s champions could scarcely fail to remark, few of the Scottish lords who had thwarted her during her turbulent reign had lasted long. Almost all came to a sticky end. Moray’s quick intelligence, bluff humor and infamously “regal manner” were not enough to see him through. He lived to enjoy his coveted position as regent of Scotland for less than eighteen months. He was assassinated in January 1570 while riding through the streets of Linlithgow.
He had partly brought it on himself by his own unscrupulous deceptions. He had supported the Duke of Norfolk’s plan to marry Mary, then betrayed it to Elizabeth. This was too much for Norfolk’s allies, who tried to murder Moray on his journey home after Elizabeth’s tribunal to inquire into the Casket Letters. He evaded his assassins, and on arriving in Edinburgh claimed that he was as devoted as ever to the marriage project and that his accusations against his sister had been forced on him by Elizabeth and Cecil.
Having gained time in this way, he reasserted himself as regent and secured a formal indemnity for all his proceedings against Mary. In April 1569, he threw the Duke of Châtelherault, the leader of the Hamiltons, into prison. The duke had returned to Scotland after two years of voluntary exile after the Rizzio plot, when he had taken up Mary’s cause alongside Huntly and Argyll. Moray would be assassinated nine months after signing the warrant for the duke’s imprisonment. The fatal bullet, which went right through his body, was fired by James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Hamilton also had a personal grudge, because Moray had deprived his wife of some property near Edinburgh and allowed her to be forced out of her house.
Moray was barely forty when he died. His passing went unmourned by Mary, who seems to have made no reference whatsoever to it. The funeral sermon at St. Giles Kirk was preached by Knox, and Buchanan devised a Latin epitaph praising Moray as a man of virtue and a Scottish patriot. It was inscribed on a brass plate set above the tomb.
Maitland, “the Scottish Cecil,” otherwise nicknamed “Mekle Wylie” and “the chameleon,” died three years after Moray. He had soon fallen out with his old ally over the skullduggery surrounding the Casket Letters, copies of which he may have leaked to Mary’s advocates at Elizabeth’s tribunal, which he had attended as a member of the Scots’ delegation.
On his return to Scotland, Maitland was accused by Moray of complicity in Darnley’s murder, but secured a discharge and his freedom on the evening of the murdered regent’s funeral. He rejoined Huntly and Argyll, Mary’s chief supporters, but his efforts came to nothing, and in 1573 he was forced to surrender while seeking refuge in Edinburgh Castle. Morton had stormed the castle with massive English aid, and Maitland gave himself up to Drury, the former English border official at Carlisle who had been promoted to command these forces. Maitland’s surrender availed him little. He was said to have committed suicide in prison at Leith. According to Sir James Melville, “he took a drink and died as the old Romans were wont to do.”
Morton, the most sinister of the leading lords, who had thirsted for revenge on Darnley after the Rizzio plot and offered to do Cecil “such honor and pleasure as lies in my power” as he traveled to rendezvous with Bothwell at Whittingham Castle, survived until 1581. Strongly backed by Elizabeth and Cecil, he became regent of Scotland for a full six years after 1572, but his fiscal and sexual rapacity made him many enemies. He had lived by factionalism and was to die by it. He was ousted when d’Aubigny returned to Scotland, then executed for his role in Darnley’s murder.
The Earl of Lennox, Darnley’s father, would fare no better. He had first appeared on the scene as the elder Earl of Bothwell’s rival for Mary’s mother’s hand. He would be appointed regent, succeeding Moray, then stabbed in the back fourteen months later by one Captain Calder during a skirmish after a surprise raid on Stirling by Mary’s supporters in 1571. Wounded, he rode to the safety of the castle, but bled to death within a few hours. He died in agony. More than most, however, he died content. His last words were “If the bairn’s well, all’s well.” He meant that as long as his grandson, James VI, remained alive, the Lennox claim to the English throne would be vindicated, so that his and his wife’s efforts to obtain a crown for their family would not have been in vain.
As to the indomitable John Knox, he at last showed his true colors. Maitland plucked up the courage to tell him, “You are but a drytting [i.e., shitting] prophet.” When he was fifty Knox had married a girl of sixteen and never recovered from the scandal. Thomas Randolph, who had been sidelined by Elizabeth as postmaster-general but who returned briefly as ambassador to Scotland during Mary’s captivity, quipped gleefully how Knox had gone “quiet,” having more on his mind than sermons. The preacher had reemerged at James Vi’s coronation, to expound on the text “I was crowned young.” He suffered a stroke in 1570, which explains his letter to Cecil written “with his one foot in the grave.” He died in 1572 at the age of fifty-eight and was buried in the kirkyard of St. Giles. Two years later, his young widow married Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, the man who had pointed a loaded pistol at Mary during the Rizzio plot, then lurked in the alleyway close to Kirk o’Field. The mind boggles at what they must have talked about in bed.
Perhaps surprisingly, Walsingham, the man who led Mary to her destruction in the Babington plot, went unrewarded. Elizabeth had little time for the murky world of spies and intelligence. By 1586, she wanted Mary dead but resented the methods used to entrap her. When Walsingham died in 1590, he was described by Camden as “a man exceeding wise and industrious . . . a diligent searcher out of hidden secrets, who knew excellently well how to win men’s minds unto him and to apply them to his own uses.” This was cutting rather than flattering. Walsingham had many more talents than this, but it is as Cecil’s spymaster that he is remembered.
The man who lived longest and enjoyed himself the most was William Cecil. Not even Mary’s execution tempted him to retire. He suffered from gout and bad teeth in his old age, but the profits of office were lucrative, and he had several luxurious houses and amassed a fortune. Elizabeth had raised him to the peerage as Lord Burghley in 1571, and he liked nothing more than to ride around his gardens on a mule, admiring his ornamental trees and plants. Shakespeare lampooned Cecil as old Polonius, the establishment bureaucrat whose idea of politics was haplessly eavesdropping behind the arras. In his last sickness, Elizabeth sat at his bedside and fed him with a spoon. He died in 1598, a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday.
More than anyone else, Cecil was Mary’s nemesis. The volatile factionalism of the lords had gradually worn her down, and their refusal to put the interests of Scotland above their private feuds seriously weakened the monarchy. But it was Cecil who had actively encouraged their first revolt of 1559–60. He afterward stood behind Moray, Maitland and Morton, whom he covertly aided and with whom he constantly corresponded, and without his backing they would have made little headway.
Cecil had an apocalyptic, almost messianic vision of England as a Protestant state. When the revolt of the Lords of the Congregation erupted, he knew it gave him a unique opportunity to transform the British Isles into a single Protestant community. He was, of course, English through and through. He treated Scotland as a satellite state of England, just as much as Henry VIII and Protector Somerset had before him. The role of the Scottish nationalist fell most conspicuously, if perhaps ironically, to the swashbuckling adventurer the Earl of Bothwell.
Most of all, Cecil feared the Guise dynastic plan for a Franco-British empire. He considered Mary to be his and his country’s most dangerous adversary from the moment her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine ordered the royal arms of England to be quartered with those of Scotland and France on her badges and escutcheons. Although Mary was barely sixteen, he saw her as the instigator and main beneficiary of an international Catholic conspiracy to depose and kill Elizabeth and destroy the true faith. Cecil believed this so strongly he referred to it in the epitaph he composed for his tomb in his hometown of Stamford in Lincolnshire. His life’s achievement, he declared, had been t
o “safeguard” the queen and the Protestant state.
The collapse of Mary’s rule in Scotland was not an accident. All along, Cecil had been following a script of his own creation. It is one of the most remarkable documents in the whole of British history, because it became a template for the actual course of events. He had written it two years before Mary’s return from France. It took the form of a memo dated “31 August 1559” and entitled “A memorial of certain points meet for restoring the realm of Scotland to the ancient weal.” The wording seems innocuous. The contents were dynamite, because by “the ancient weal” Cecil meant his view of Scotland as a “satellite,” as he was convinced it had been under Edward I, who had claimed the feudal overlordship of Scotland in the 1290s.
Scotland, said Cecil, was not to be administered by a governor or regent, in the case of an absentee ruler such as Mary, but by a council of nobles appointed “to govern the whole realm.” And if Mary, already now queen of France, “shall be unwilling to this,” then quite simply, said Cecil, she should be deposed. “Then is it apparent,” he wrote portentously, “that Almighty God is pleased to transfer from her the rule of that kingdom for the weal of it.”
Two years before Mary left France, Cecil had already taken his first tentative steps toward her forced abdication. His ideal was for the Protestant lords to call themselves by the name of the “States of Scotland” in order to supplant her. Cecil, like Knox, portrayed Mary from the start in the language of biblical prophecy. She was “Jezebel” and “Athalia,” and in his heart he was a supporter of Knox’s theory of armed resistance to “tyrannous” (i.e., Catholic) rulers.
Cecil went on to serve Elizabeth for forty years. He was her “loyal subject” and “humble servant,” as he fervently protested, even as he went behind her back. And yet his chief priorities were to exclude Mary from the English succession by fair means or foul, while undermining her rule in Scotland by destabilizing her at critical moments—whereas Elizabeth respected Mary’s rights as independent Queen of Scots and was repelled by Henry VIII’s cavalier disregard for the principles of hereditary succession in his will. Repeatedly, Cecil complained that Elizabeth had been far too generous and understanding to Mary and far too willing to compromise.
The deeper the modern scholar digs into the Elizabethan State Papers, the more Cecil demands scrutiny. The well-entrenched interpretation that sees Elizabeth and Mary as rival queens goes only so far. Of course there was rivalry, and Elizabeth was ruthless in her attempts to dictate the terms and the object of Mary’s marriages. But the two queens had much more in common than this reductionist model allows. In particular, they had a clear understanding of the ideological issues. That is, when female monarchs had to deal with male councilors in a dynamic political environment informed by religious sectarianism, more than just business as usual was at stake.
What we glimpse in Elizabeth’s relationship with Mary are the contradictions inscribed in a monarchy where the vagaries of dynastic succession competed with loyalties to an ideal of an exclusively Protestant commonwealth. When Elizabeth spoke in her own voice, hereditary rights took priority over religion, but when Cecil did the talking, it was always the other way around. And whereas Elizabeth stood for the ideal of monarchy and was prepared to defend Mary’s rights as an anointed queen, Cecil was working toward a definition of Protestant citizenship and toward a framework in which Parliament had the sovereign right to determine the succession in order to defend its citizens’ religious beliefs.
Despite the electrifying stage confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth dramatized in Friedrich von Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1801, itself the inspiration of Donizetti’s opera first performed in 1835, the two “British” queens never met. Elizabeth in the end would not grant Mary the personal interview she had always craved. And as the years passed, the real reason became apparent from her many lame excuses. She feared that the younger, possibly more beautiful Queen of Scots was so magnetic, so brilliant in conversation, that she would overshadow or surpass her.
Mary herself was a mass of contradictions, but some qualities abided. She was glamorous, intelligent, gregarious, vivacious, kind, generous, loyal to her supporters and friends, and devoted to her Guise relations, whether or not they returned her love. She could be ingenious and courageous with a razor-sharp wit, and never more animated and exuberant than when riding her horse at the head of her army wearing her steel cap.
But she had deep emotional needs. She expected love and needed to be loved. And to a large extent she got what she demanded: from her Guise family as a child, from her Maries as an adult, from her domestic servants and, until she married Bothwell, from her people, who were spellbound by her youth, beauty and glamour. Maitland came closest to the mark when he predicted that the ordinary people of Scotland would be captivated by her merest smiles or frowns. But as queen she lacked the love of a partner, an equal, who could have bolstered her in her anxieties and tempered her impulsiveness. And this hunger for a partner, a husband, a king, led her to her most grotesque and uncharacteristic miscalculations.
Although her rank meant that she was never alone, loneliness must often have consumed her, and it was a sign of her emotional isolation during her later years that her pets became everything to her. Her final reckless throw of the dice in 1586, endorsing a madcap plot in which not even the motives of the principals were clear, is a reflection of her desperation.
Beyond this, Mary was a genuine celebrity. She brought out the crowds to her wedding at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and to her triumphal entries into Edinburgh and Perth. After her return to take up her throne, she brought something different and altogether more vibrant and compelling to the drab routine of Scottish government. When she was led through the streets of Edinburgh for the last time before her journey to Lochleven, the cries of “Burn her, burn her . . . kill her, drown her” came not from the masses but from a group of dissidents handpicked by the Confederate Lords.
For these lords, with their honor code based on tribal loyalties and regional ties, the rules of the game were quite different. Love and loyalty could be bought and sold like a commodity. For Mary, it was to become an unequal contest. The portrait that emerges of her is not of a political pawn or a manipulative siren, but of a shrewd judge of character who could handle people just as masterfully as her English cousin and counterpart. She relished her role as queen and, for a time, managed to hold together a divided and fatally unstable country. Contrary to Knox’s well-worn stereotype, she knew how to rule from the head as well as the heart. In fact, she made the transition from France back to Scotland so successfully that within six months Maitland could report to Cecil: “The queen my mistress behaves herself so gently in every behalf as reasonably we can require. If anything be amiss, the fault is rather in ourselves.”
Mary was a queen to the last fiber of her body and soul. One of her regal attributes was her desire to defend her honor and keep up appearances. Yet she could be willful as well as astonishingly naive. She was naive in thinking that blood would be thicker than water, that her uncle and her half-brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine and Moray, would not put their own interests before hers time and time again. She was naive in expecting Bothwell to love her simply because she had fallen in love with him. She was naive in fleeing to England after losing the battle of Langside and expecting Elizabeth to help her to recover her lost throne. She was perhaps most naive in expecting a son, who could not remember anything about her, never to betray her.
She had an innate belief in her destiny. However many times she was let down by her uncles or the Scottish lords, she tried to rebuild her bridges, until Darnley’s murder made it impossible for her to do so. Her courage has never been in doubt. Even Knox applauded what he called her “manly” ability to stand her ground against Darnley after the Rizzio plot, when she won him over and escaped with him at midnight from Holyrood, riding through the night to Dunbar while heavily pregnant and stopping only to be sick. She made two escape attempts fr
om Lochleven in a rowboat, the second successful, and after the battle of Langside rode for sixty miles at a stretch.
She stuck as best she could with her unhappy marriage to Darnley despite his intolerable behavior. She decided to put him under house arrest at Craigmillar Castle only when she was faced with the prospect of a coup d’état. She kept up appearances with Bothwell after their marriage, even when his true colors emerged and his violent temper raged unrestrained. She allowed nothing to slip during her captivity. Her household followed the strict protocol of a royal court in exile, and she always contrived to look her best, even when in the privacy of her bedroom she must have watched with sadness and dismay as her hair thinned and her waist thickened. She was determined to live up to her image, though her youth and beauty were fading, and spent extraordinary sums and energy to acquire the most sumptuous clothes and jewels to wear in the closed world of her confinement.
Her “solution” to the issue of female monarchy was hardly a radical one. “Not to marry,” she told Randolph at St. Andrews shortly before she married Darnley, “you know it cannot be for me.” She did what the (male) councilors in all the European dynastic monarchies expected of a woman ruler: she married and settled the succession in her country. Her choice of her first and second husbands is explicable solely on dynastic criteria. The enigma relates to her third husband. Here the truth is more complex. She first saw Bothwell in the role of queen’s protector against the incessant infighting of the lords, and then married him to seal the bond. It was a calculated move. In the kaleidoscopic world she had inhabited since her return to Scotland, Bothwell seemed to offer the one chance of stability. “This realm,” she said, “being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man.” Where she went disastrously wrong was in allowing Bothwell, still a married man, to seduce her at Dunbar. Her worst mistake was to allow herself, a queen, to fall in love.
