by Lisa Hilton
I have pacified the Kingdom of Scotland which I hold and possess with the same power and authority as I have in France, to which two kingdoms I have joined and united another, England, its kingship, its subjects and its rights, which … I can dispose of as my own in such a way that the said three kingdoms together can now be deemed a single monarchy.2
Among the French magnates who actively promoted Henri’s project were Mary Stuart’s uncles, the sons of Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. The two eldest—the heir, François, and Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine—were given places on the Privy Council and in 1546, Diane de Poitiers, the king’s powerful mistress, married her daughter to the third Guise brother, Claude II. In 1548, François married the granddaughter of Louis XII of France, Anne d’Este, acquiring a huge dowry and a significant Italian alliance for the Guise, as Anne’s father, Ercole, Duke of Ferrara, was a major bankroller of French royal debt. With their sister Marie governing Scotland and the next Queen of France safely ensconced at the French court, the Guise commanded a huge and formidable power network. Yet their support for a Franco-British empire was compromised just ten years after its inception: as the biographer of the Guise observes, “It was at the heart of this project that the Reformation rebellion would strike first.”3 Although Henri II had initially continued his father’s policy of persecuting Protestants, by the mid-1550s, when such persecution was beginning in Mary Tudor’s England, executions had declined. In 1557, though, two Protestant brothers from Meaux attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate the French king. In January of that year, the French had contravened the truce agreed with the Spanish in Flanders, and Philip of Spain had pressured his wife to declare war, which the English reluctantly did on 7 June. On 10 August, the French suffered a crushing defeat at Saint-Quentin, which many anxious Catholics interpreted as a sign of divine disapproval for the harboring of heretics. For the Guise, confessional differences were not necessarily the central issue at this juncture, but they were quick to take advantage of the mood of national crisis and the confusion of their anxious king. When the marriage of sixteen-year-old Mary Stuart to François was celebrated that April at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, their stronghold on power in the next generation seemed complete.
Mary Stuart wore white to her wedding, always one of her preferred colors, though it was traditionally the shade of mourning for French queens. A sense of dramatic irony is inevitable; perhaps Mary sensed that the idyllic upbringing she had enjoyed in the gorgeous chateaux of the French monarchy was lost forever. Certainly her childhood could not have been in greater contrast to that of her kinswoman Elizabeth, who had been raised in as near to the school of hard knocks as a princess could be. One of Mary’s biographers asks perceptively whether indeed her charmed life at the French court was fit preparation for the tribulations she would have to face, but as she followed her uncle François along the great nave, all was celebration and serenity, on the surface at least.4
When the Treaty of Câteau Cambrésis was signed in April 1559, François de Guise became a figurehead for the disaffected French magnates and veteran soldiers who saw the settlement as dishonorable. Yet the family were too powerful, and too essential in Henri’s project for the Franco-British empire, to be entirely marginalized. In February, Henri’s daughter Claude had married their cousin, the Duc de Lorraine, in a series of festivities which horrified Elizabeth’s ambassador when he noticed that Mary Stuart and her husband had quartered their arms with those of both Scotland and England. The young couple had been calling themselves “King and Queen Dauphins of Scotland, England and France” since January of that year, but this display of the arms was a brazen and aggressive statement of intent. It was soon to be put to the proof. On 1 July, Henri’s visor was shattered by a lance as he ran in the celebratory tournament to mark the peace with Spain. Nine days later he was dead, and Mary Stuart was now in fact queen of both Scotland and France.
The “black legend” of the Guise derives from this moment, when they swooped down upon the physically and intellectually limited new king and his mother, Catherine de Medici, and carried them off to the Louvre. Like Richard III of England, they are portrayed as fairy-tale characters of history, the wicked uncles rubbing their hands in the background as they send their innocent young relatives to their doom. In terms of strategy, there is considerable continuity between the reigns of Henri and François II, while their position on Protestant heresy was in no measure so clear-cut or decisive as either they or subsequently hostile chroniclers were prepared to concede. In Scotland, however, conflict between the old faith and the new had already provoked a crisis. Riots had broken out in May, prompting Henri, just before his death, to communicate his intention to send an army to crush the insurrectionary reformers to the pope. When the Guise achieved their velvet revolution, the Protestant Lords of the Congregation were quick to fulminate against “the fury and rage of the tyrants of this world … the insatiable covetousness of the Guise generation.”5 In promoting their ambitions in Scotland, the Guise made two mistakes. First, they assumed that asserting their niece’s Catholic credentials in Scotland would be a strength, and second they underestimated the consequences of their imperialist attitude on Elizabeth’s policy. While the French court was at Amboise in December 1559, the arms of Mary and François were again displayed, accompanied by a Latin inscription, the translation of which reads: “Gaul and warlike Britain were in perpetual hostility… . Now the Gauls and the distant Britons are in a single territory—Mary’s dowry gathers them together in one Empire.” With Marie de Guise writing frantically to her brothers for troops to aid her in quelling the chaos in Scotland, an English declaration of support for the Congregation could prove disastrous. But the arrogance of such statements was an intolerable provocation, and Elizabeth swiftly recognized that she could not afford to remain neutral.
In the “Device” he had composed in 1558, the all-seeing Cecil had noted that the Reformation in England was to a considerable extent dependent on the balance of power across the northern border. It has been argued that English anxiety over Mary Stuart’s display of English arms has been exaggerated—did not Elizabeth after all continue to use those of France? Yet the English claim in France had been out of use for a century, and now with Calais gone was meaningless, while French power in Scotland was a genuine menace. Initially, though, Elizabeth was reluctant to engage with Scotland, where the Lords of the Congregation were, in her view, rebelling against their sovereign, and until the death of Henri II, she confined herself to sending carefully rehearsed envoys to Edinburgh who gave a good many flowery speeches without committing either English money or English troops. As Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s furious reports of Mary and François’s pretensions arrived (he had even been served at dinner from silver plate bearing the arms), Cecil prepared another radical memorandum “of certain points meet for restoring the realm of Scotland to the ancient weal.”
The terms of what became the Treaty of Edinburgh stipulated that Mary Stuart could nominate the twelve councilors who would govern the country, with the acceptance of the Scots parliament. No position was to be given to a French subject. If these terms were not kept, England had the right to intervene in Scotland in order to safeguard the Protestant faith. If Mary Stuart, influenced by the “greedy and tyrannous affection of France,” was unwilling to agree to this, then the crown should pass by consent of the Estates of Scotland to the next heir. It took another forty-four years for Cecil to get his way, but in the end, this is precisely what happened. Cecil saw in 1559, as the Guise did not, that reformation was a splinter that, with sufficient strength and perseverance, could be levered into creating a permanent rift.
In December, the arguments for and against intervention in Scotland were debated at Whitehall, where most of Elizabeth’s advisers took a conservative view. England was simply not strong enough to confront the French, therefore it was unwise, as well as unnecessary, to give overt support to the Congregation. When Cecil received intelligence on 26 December
that the French Navy was prepared to sail, with fifteen thousand German mercenaries ready to deploy, the council met again and this time voted with only the exception of the Earl of Arundel to go to war. Elizabeth listened to the arguments the following day but still refused to sanction the initiative. Cecil was so frustrated that he even prepared a letter of resignation, but he continued to insist to the queen that she had to take action against her “mortal enemies,” Mary and the Guise. Only when Elizabeth heard that François II had issued letters patent confirming the Marquis d’Elbeuf (Mary Stuart’s youngest Guise uncle) as his official Lieutenant in not just Scotland but England, too, did she allow herself to be swayed.
Why was Elizabeth so obdurate? She knew that she was poor and weak. Confronting the French was a huge risk, one that could potentially bring her government and her Church down. How could she not be acutely sensitive to Mary’s claim, given that her own remained so contentious in European eyes? Moreover, she was a new queen, still in her twenties, and she had occupied her throne for less than two years. She had to establish her authority with her own councilors, experienced though they were, to remind them that it was her will and hers alone which would ultimately determine policy. Finally, it was her own belief in the sanctity of monarchy, in the justice of her birthright, which had sustained her throughout the tumultuous years of her siblings’ rule, and however powerful the political arguments in favor of the Lords of the Congregation, they remained in rebellion against their anointed queen. For Elizabeth this was the most significant, even mystical factor, one with which it is perhaps hard to empathize from the distance of our own age, when realpolitik is the only politics, yet the conflict between chivalry and statecraft at which Elizabeth was subsequently to become so adept was still emerging in the mid-sixteenth century. Ideology may have been the future, but the divine right was by no means a thing of the past, and Elizabeth would not be prepared to challenge it for a long time to come.
Adherents of the Scots Nationalist cause rarely mention that it was the despised English who saved them from French occupation in 1560. By the Treaty of Berwick in March, Elizabeth finally agreed to send military aid to the Protestant Lords. Six thousand troops were mustered, and the port of Leith was blockaded. The French went so far as to appeal to Philip of Spain, but Philip was more concerned at that time with the threat of a Guisard empire than with reformist heretics, maintaining that the Scots should govern their own affairs. The Lords demanded the withdrawal of all French troops, who had no stomach to linger: by June the Frenchmen besieged at Leith were eating fricassée de rat. Marie de Guise succumbed to illness and died on 10 June, and by early July Cecil had completed (though not ratified) the Treaty of Edinburgh, which was to become “the touchstone of his career; he would measure everything by it, and judge everything against it, for nearly thirty years.”6 Triumphantly, the Scots Lords proclaimed in August that they no longer accepted papal jurisdiction and that the Mass was now outlawed.
The Guise remained the dominant political faction in France, but the country was now descending into the civil wars which would engulf it over the next three decades. As they had risen on the sudden death of one Valois king, they began to fall on that of another, for at the end of the year, Mary Stuart’s young husband, as feeble in body as he was stunted in mind, died of an infected abscess in his ear. Another woman ruler, Catherine de Medici, now assumed the Regency of the kingdom, but for Elizabeth, who had prided herself on being, famously, “the best match in her parish,” it meant that she now had a rival in the dance of diplomatic courtship for which she had already developed an agile taste. Beautiful, impeccably regal, Mary Stuart was now back on the marriage market, and, worse still, it appeared that she would soon be back in Scotland.
The only portrait taken from life of Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn.
Did Thomas Wyatt’s evidence help bring about Anne Boleyn’s downfall?
The scandal of her mother’s death behind her, Elizabeth (right) returns to the Tudor fold.
Princess Elizabeth: prim and scholarly, the model of a Protestant princess.
Many of the rhetorical tropes Elizabeth adopted were learned from her sister, Mary.
Edward VI: Elizabeth’s companion-in-learning.
The connection between these two pictures, of the childless Richard II and Elizabeth in her coronation robes, demonstrates Elizabeth’s early commitment to sacred virginity.
A meek monarch? The conservative Elizabeth of the early reign.
Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses. From medieval to modern, stepping into the future.
William Cecil (top left), Philip II of Spain (below left), and Robert Dudley (below right): the three most important men in the queen’s life.
Machiavelli’s work embodied the conflict between chivalric kingship and statecraft which dominated Elizabeth’s governance.
The Pelican Portrait. Elizabeth’s arrogation of religious imagery was subtly revolutionary.
A colored woodcut of Tsar Ivan, known as Ivan the Terrible. Elizabeth’s dealings with Russia signaled her engagement with the Protestant cause in Eastern Europe.
Dealing with the enemy: Sultans Murad III (left) and Mehmet III. Elizabeth profited from arms trading with the “infidel.”
The tomb of Battista Castiglione in St. Mary’s Church, Speen. Elizabeth’s Italian tutor was a key connection in her dealings with the anti-Catholic underground.
Henry Lee organized the complex propaganda festival of the Accession Day Tilts.
Francis Walsingham: the world of “spiery” often came terrifyingly close to the court.
“Monsieur”: despite her protestations, Elizabeth never really intended to marry her most serious suitor.
Mary Stuart’s execution was perhaps the greatest personal and political challenge of Elizabeth’s rule.
The apotheosis of the Armada: Elizabeth as victorious goddess.
Weary but triumphant, Elizabeth the statesman at her most human.
“My skirting hand”—when Elizabeth signed her name, she did so as a prince.
13
MARY’S ATTITUDE ON her return to her kingdom in 1561 was cautiously conciliatory. She confirmed that she would make no attempt to dispute Scotland’s religious settlement, so long as she might practice her own faith in private, but she refused, very sweetly, to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh on the grounds that she ought first to establish and consult her new council in Scotland. Cecil had no truck with such evasiveness, writing to Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador to Scotland, of his fears that Mary intended to overturn the Congregation’s accords, while Elizabeth was simply infuriated. In a rare moment of impetuous temper, she refused her permission for Mary to pass through England, which allowed Mary to portray herself as the victim of the piece. She mortified Throckmorton by claiming ingenuously that since Elizabeth would not allow her to travel through England, well, then, she must reach her kingdom by sea, “and then the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will; and if she be so hard hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me.”1 In the event, a few English galleys merely saluted the Scots queen’s brave entourage of just sixty as they made their way to Leith. The timing of Mary’s arrival was not deliberately provocative, but it could not have been more exasperating to Elizabeth. Since her coronation, she had not been allowed to forget the issue of the succession for a moment. Her romance with Leicester was effectively at an end, though its bittersweet shadow would stretch until the earl’s death and beyond. Now, not only was Mary Stuart claiming her rights north of the border, but the next designated heir in the English line, Katherine Grey, was discovered to be pregnant.
Katherine, the second daughter of Henry VII’s granddaughter Frances Brandon, had known the queen since girlhood. She had been married to Lord Herbert, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, in the same ceremony which had united her elder sister, Jane, with Guildford Dudley in 1553, though the marriage had subsequently been dissolved under Mary Tudor.
Katherine and her sister Mary had been spared Jane’s horrible end; six months after her execution, they had been invited to court with their mother, Frances, who served in Mary’s Privy Chamber, and, like Elizabeth, they had waited out her reign as compliant Catholics. Frances Brandon (who had never pressed her own claim, which earned her Elizabeth’s approval) died in 1559, and Katherine assumed that she would be designated as Elizabeth’s heir under the terms of Henry VIII’s will. Instead, she found herself demoted, within a court acutely sensitive to hierarchies of physical space, from the Privy to the Presence Chamber. According to the Spanish ambassador Feria, Katherine was unable to conceal her sense of injustice, delivering “arrogant and unseemly words” to the queen. The strength of her claim was, however, legally dubious. Since her father, the Duke of Suffolk, had been executed alongside his older daughter in 1554 in the aftermath of the Wyatt rebellion, his family were technically under attainder for treason, but in the absence of a royal husband, much less a royal baby, there were many, evidently including Katherine herself, who considered it remained valid. Elizabeth never betrayed any particular liking for Katherine, but in 1560, she was reinstated to the Privy Chamber (where a closer eye might be kept on her?) and accompanied the queen on her first summer progress, which included the palaces of Eltham and Nonsuch. Here Katherine became close to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, another second-generation victim of the deadly power game of Tudor politics. Seymour was the heir, through his second marriage, of the former Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset. By the late autumn, the flirtation between the young couple had progressed so far that they were emboldened to make a secret marriage, celebrated at Hertford’s home at Cannon Row in the presence of just a single priest and Hertford’s sister Jane. Katherine continued in service to Elizabeth, but by July 1561 she was in a desperate position. Somehow, in the cramped and very public conditions of the court, she had managed to conceal the fact that she was expecting a child, and she was now nearing its delivery. Her husband was away in Paris, and in desperation, she turned to the Earl of Leicester, once her fellow prisoner in the Tower, who agreed to inform the queen. Elizabeth’s reaction was swift and entirely unsympathetic. Katherine was tainted with her family’s audacious treason, she had foolishly confided in the Spanish ambassador when she felt herself put aside, she had dared to marry—or claim to marry—without Elizabeth’s consent, and she was heavily pregnant. Hertford himself was a minor descendant of Edward III—he had no claim of his own—but married to Katherine, the Protestant heiress and possibly the father of a son, he represented a threatening prospect. No one knew better than a Tudor that the slightest claim to a throne could sometimes be made strong enough to capture one. Elizabeth naturally suspected a plot. Katherine was sent to the Tower immediately, with Elizabeth declaring that she would “have no manner of favor, except she will show the truth.” She was questioned on 22 August but could not or would not reveal anything of substance about her marriage. The only other wedding guest, Jane Seymour, had died at age nineteen the previous March, and Katherine had no means of finding the priest who could corroborate her story. Summoned from Paris, Hertford, too, was in the Tower by 5 August.
