by Allan Massie
Rightly so, for there is always some truth in myth, and this was the case with Mary. Had it not been so, she could have won neither the devotion of many in her lifetime nor the partisan loyalty of posterity. Yet the reality of her story is at least as compelling, and perhaps more deeply interesting, than the myth.
She was first, inescapably, a politician, if in the end a singularly unsuccessful one, ‘whose political folly was’, in the words of one of her modern biographers, Dr Wormald, ‘seemingly unlimited’.2 She was all but born a queen, being only a week old when her father took to his bed and died, and from the first she was a cause of discord. She represented, through her mother, Marie de Guise, the French interest in Scottish affairs. Consequently those who favoured an English alliance were ranged against her. This opposition was rendered the more acute by the ideological disputes that disturbed and divided Europe. On account of Henry VIII’s marital difficulties, England had rejected the authority of the Pope and broken away from the Roman Catholic Church. Though it was not yet certain in 1542 that England would become Protestant, it was probable. France remained predominantly Catholic, but there was a strong Protestant party (the Huguenots), and some of the greatest noble families, especially in the south-west, were adherents of the Reformed religion. Intermittently, throughout Mary’s adult life, France was ravaged by civil war, in which the chief Catholic champions were her maternal relations, the great House of Guise, while the last Valois kings, dominated by their mother Catherine de Medici, tried to steer a middle course between the Huguenots and the Catholic League. Scotland was still Catholic in 1542, but Protestantism was winning converts and supporters, some religious enthusiasts, others noblemen who enviously watched their English counterparts enriching themselves on the spoils and property of the Church.
For Henry, held at a distrustful distance by James V, the accession of the infant Queen offered an opportunity to detach Scotland from France. The Earl of Angus (Margaret Tudor’s second husband and therefore, till their divorce, Henry’s brother-in law) had been resident in England since James V had escaped his control in 1528. Henry now sent him back to Scotland, along with a number of noblemen taken prisoner at Solway Moss, who obtained their liberty in return for promises to further the English interest. The regent or governor of Scotland was James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, who, as a great-grandson of James II, was next in succession to the baby Queen. A man of no great strength of character or constancy of purpose, he would swither between the French and English parties. For the moment, though, he allowed himself to be dominated by Angus. Cardinal Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, anti-English and pro-French, was imprisoned. Henry now proposed a future marriage between his only son, Edward, who was then not quite six, and the Scottish queen. His offer was accepted. In July 1543, a treaty was drawn up at Greenwich, which provided for peace between the two kingdoms, and for the betrothal of Mary and Edward. Arran ratified it the following month. However, he soon changed his mind and reversed his policy. One reason for doing so was Henry’s stipulation that the little Queen should be sent to be brought up in England till she was of marriageable age; this suggested an intention of incorporating Scotland into the kingdom of England. Arran was also influenced by his half-brother John, Abbot of Paisley, who had only recently returned to Scotland from the Continent, and who exercised considerable influence over the governor. ‘What the English lords decide him to do one day, the Abbot changes the next’ was the judgement of one observer. Finally, Arran’s second thoughts may have been prompted by the hope that his own son, the Master of Hamilton, might make a better husband for Mary than the English prince. So Cardinal Beaton was released from prison and the pro-French party was once again in the ascendant.
Henry’s hope of a marriage that would lead to the union of the two kingdoms was not yet lost, but he contrived to destroy any chance of success by characteristic brutal stupidity. Abandoning diplomacy, he turned to force, sending an army north to burn and ravage the southern counties of Scotland. The Scots called this a ‘rough wooing’ and watched helplessly but angrily as the great Border abbeys of Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose and Dryburgh went up in flames. Then in 1546 Cardinal Beaton was murdered in the castle of St Andrews. Ostensibly this was revenge for the execution of a popular Protestant preacher, George Wishart; his crime was heresy, but he may also have been an English agent. The Cardinal’s assassins, among them John Knox, the future leader of the Scottish Reformation, held the castle for some months till it was bombarded by a French fleet.
Henry died in January 1547, but his policy was still pursued by the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector to his nephew, the boy-king Edward VI. He led another army north and defeated the Scots at the Battle of Pinkie in Musselburgh. It is a measure of the resentment provoked by English aggression that the commander of the Scots at Pinkie was the Anglophile Earl of Angus. The Scottish Council now sought further help from France, and an army of 6,000 men was provided. In exchange the French stipulated that the little Queen be sent to France for her own safety and betrothed to the Dauphin, heir to the French throne, as a guarantor of this renewal of the Auld Alliance. Thus the ill-temper and impatience of the old ogre Henry VIII determined Mary’s future. She would be brought up as a Frenchwoman.
The Sieur de Brantôme3 was a French soldier, member of an old noble family, who took to writing after he was crippled by a fall from a horse. Two years older than Mary, he knew her at the French court and was one of the company who sailed with her when she returned to Scotland in 1561. In old age he wrote a brief memoir of her. More than half of it recounts the circumstances of her death, which he knew second-hand from written accounts and the testimony of two of her ladies-in-waiting, but the first part of his memoir is the more interesting. He adored her and thought her well-nigh perfect.
As time went on and the child grew older, her great beauty began to be manifest and her virtues increase, to such an extent that when she was fifteen her fairness shone bright as the sun at high noon; nay, so bright as to eclipse the sun at its brightest, so radiant the beauty of her person.
Yet the beauty of her mind was equally bright. She had made herself most learned in the Latin tongue. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, she recited publicly, in the presence of King Henri, the Queen, and the entire court, in a room of the Louvre, a speech in Latin composed by herself, sustaining against the common belief the thesis that it is becoming in women to be acquainted with literature and the liberal arts. What a rare and admirable thing it was to see this beautiful and learned Queen speak thus in Latin, which she understood and spoke exceedingly well! For this I can vouch, for I heard her on that occasion myself.
She was likewise so deeply interested in suchlike matters that she had Antoine Fouquelin, of Chauny in the Vermandois, write a French Rhetoric, which still exists, in order than she might understand the language still more perfectly, and prove more eloquent than if she had been born in France…There was no field of human knowledge in which she could not intelligently discourse, but she loved poets and poetry before all else, and her favourite poets were M. de Ronsard, M. du Bellay and M. de Maisonfleur, who all wrote beautiful verses and elegies for her. When she departed from France, I was present (both in France and later in Scotland) when such poems, being read to her, drew tears from her eyes and sighs from her heart…She even wrote verses herself, some of which I have seen.
In conversation she spoke quietly, with a charm of manner exceeding agreeable, yet majestic – a mixture of discretion and modesty, with a notable grace. She spoke her own language – naturally barbarous-sounding, crude and harsh to the ear – so gracefully that hearing it spoken by her one might imagine it a beautiful tongue. Behold how the virtue, beauty and grace of this woman were able to transform so much crude barbarism into what was delicate, courtly, and civilized. Yet this is not so marvellous as that when she was dressed like a savage (as I have seen her) in the barbaric fashion of her country, she still shone forth like a goddess.
Extolling her beauty and kindne
ss, he insists on her love of France and on her virtue. She is, in his tender memory, the princess of innumerable fairy tales; but it is probable that he neither seeks to deceive, nor consciously gilds the picture. This is how he truly saw her: the Mary of romance, of the myth or legend, the image that still exercises its charm across the centuries.
In France, Brantome declares, everybody adored her, from the King and Queen, who became her parents-in-law, downwards. (Actually Catherine seems to have been jealous of her and was certainly severely critical of much that Mary did after her return to Scotland.) When her first husband, little Francis II, died in 1560, only two years after their marriage, his young brother Charles IX, according to Brantôme, ‘was so enamoured of her that when he looked on her portrait, he could not take his eyes off it’. Indeed, ‘had he been of age (but he was then both young and small) he was as much in love with her as I have ever seen him at a later date. He would never have permitted her to leave the country and would certainly have married her.’
Throughout her life Mary was indeed adored by those around her, ladies-in-waiting, servants, small children, dogs, and also by many who stood at a distance from her. But though she was charming and amiable, she did not, contrary to the legend, inspire passionate love, and may only once have experienced that emotion.4 Neither the romantic view of her as a great lover, nor the hostile one that casts her as a sexual adventuress, can be sustained.
Mary might have been the darling of the French court, but while she lived in France, the politics of Scotland became ever more violent and unsettled. Her mother was now regent, but depended much on the support of French troops, regarded by many as an army of occupation. The Protestant reformers continued to gain strength, though from 1553 to 1558 they were unable to look for support from England, where Henry VIII’s eldest child Mary Tudor had restored the Roman Catholic Church when she succeeded her half-brother Edward on the throne. Nevertheless, the Scots Protestants were able to present themselves as the patriotic party after their queen’s marriage to the Dauphin in 1558, for her father-in-law Henry II had rashly declared that France and Scotland were now one country. This raised the possibility of Scotland becoming a French satellite, or even of being incorporated into France, as the Duchy of Brittany had been when its last independent ruler married Charles VIII of France in 1494.
Mary Tudor died in 1558 and the new queen was her half-sister Elizabeth. Since her father’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn had provoked the Reformation in England, their daughter Elizabeth was inevitably identified with the Protestant cause. In Catholic eyes she was illegitimate, since Henry had married Anne while his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was still alive, and the Pope had refused to annul his marriage to Catherine; Elizabeth was therefore no rightful queen. Accordingly, in Paris, Mary Stuart – she had changed the spelling of the family name to make it easier for the French to pronounce – was proclaimed Queen of England and Ireland as well as Scotland. The following year, on the death of her father-in-law, she was Queen of France too.
The England of Elizabeth and the Scots Protestants now had an interest in common: to break the French alliance. It was not difficult to arrange this, for the regent and the French forces that sustained her were unpopular, and the reformers, led by the Queen’s illegitimate half-brother, Lord James Stewart, could pose as representatives of the patriotic cause. In this capacity they called in an English army to expel the French. Its arrival in 1559 was followed by the unexpected death of the Queen Mother in Edinburgh Castle, which deprived those who held to the Church of Rome and the Auld Alliance of their leader. Thus that alliance, which dated from the brief reign of John Balliol three and a half centuries before, expired suddenly and ignominiously. Scots who retain a sentimental affection for its memory often forget, or don’t know, that it ended when other Scots, proclaiming themselves to be patriots, invited an English army into Scotland to drive their auld allies out.
A treaty was made at Leith between England and Scotland, the latter represented by the Protestant revolutionaries who styled themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Christ. According to its terms, Mary was obliged to relinquish her claim to be the true Queen of England and to recognise Elizabeth as queen in her stead. Though Mary never signed the treaty herself, she came to acquiesce tacitly in its content, and thereafter concentrated her attentions on trying to persuade Elizabeth to acknowledge her as heir to the English throne. Yet in her own mind she never abandoned the claim. In her last letter, written to her brother-in-law Henry III of France the night before her execution, she spoke of her ‘God-given right to the English throne’. This conviction was so strong as to be fairly called an obsession; and it brought her to her doom.
Mary’s husband, Francis, had died in 1560, a few months after the Treaty of Leith was made. He was two years younger than Mary, and had always been stunted and sickly. At the age of sixteen he was still little more than a child, but Mary had been fond of him, though perhaps as an elder sister rather than a lover or wife. She might have stayed in France, where she had great estates in Touraine, settled on her at the time of her marriage. There was the possibility of another royal match. The claims of Don Carlos, son and heir of Philip II of Spain, were canvassed, but Philip, who had been married to Mary Tudor, had no desire to antagonise his sister-in-law Elizabeth by allowing such a wedding. It was a happy escape for Mary. Don Carlos was undersized, backward, vicious and mentally unstable. Her Guise uncles, the Duke and the Cardinal of Lorraine, were eager that she should marry the new King of France, her brother-in-law Charles IX. No doubt a papal dispensation permitting the match might easily have been arranged; almost certainly her marriage with poor Francis had never been consummated. But Charles was only ten, and his mother, Catherine de Medici, intended to reduce the power of the Guises rather than enhance it. Indeed, she wanted her daughter-in-law out of France. Everyone adored Mary; few even liked Catherine.
So Mary returned to Scotland, to a country convulsed by the Protestant Reformation, which had there taken the character of a revolution. The historic Church had been overthrown, monasteries and churches sacked, Church property seized, the Mass outlawed, bishops abolished, and a Presbyterian form of Church government decreed. In August 1560 the Estates passed a series of acts in the name of the absent Queen, but without her authority. Like the Treaty of Leith, these acts, lacking Mary’s signature, might have been of dubious legality; but questions of legality yielded to revolutionary necessity.
The Estates also published a ‘Confession of Faith’, twenty-five articles defining correct religious belief and practices. Its author was John Knox. He had had a varied career since participating in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. Taken prisoner when the French stormed the castle of St Andrews, he had spent a year pulling an oar in a French galley. Released, he had made his way to England, where, in the reign of Edward VI, he was offered a bishopric, which he refused prudently, ‘in forewight’, as he later remarked, ‘of trouble to come’. When that trouble indeed arrived in the form of the Catholic reaction, he, prudently again, removed to Geneva, where he came under the influence of John Calvin. There, in what he described as ‘the most perfect schole of Christ’, he imbibed and accepted the doctrines of Predestination and the Elect, which were to be at the heart of Scotch Presbyterianism. It was from Geneva that in 1558 he delivered the pamphlet entitled A First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. This was not quite what it seems. ‘Regiment’ means ‘Rule’ and his attack was directed at Mary Tudor in England, Marie de Guise in Scotland and (perhaps) Catherine de Medici in France. In private life, Knox was no misogynist. Indeed, he rather liked women, and married twice, the second time when he was over fifty to a girl of fifteen, with whom he had three daughters.5 What he objected to was female government, all the more so because all three were Catholics, enemies of the Reformation to which he was now absolutely committed. This, however, was one occasion when his ‘forewight’ failed him. He had not considered that a Protestant queen might succeed Mary Tudo
r. Elizabeth was not amused by his trumpet-blast, and refused to allow him to return to England as he wished. So he came home to Scotland and in May 1559 preached an inflammatory sermon in Perth, which roused what his enemies described as ‘the rascal multitude’ to storm and sack the town’s monasteries and friaries.
Though guided by the Lords of the Congregation, the Reformation in Scotland was a popular movement. It was not, however, universally so – the north-east in particular remaining hostile and attached to the old ways and the Catholic faith for a long time – and its impact was not felt immediately all over the country. There are arguments as to how deep and widespread attachment to the cause of reform was. It was by no means certain in 1560 that it might not be reversed, as had happened in England when Mary Tudor became queen. The vehemence with which it was preached and the incitement of mobs may be taken, in part at least, as evidence of the nervousness and insecurity of the reformers.
Michael Lynch in his History of Scotland wrote:
For many people the Reformation is the central event of Scottish history; it was the point at which they can claim their birthright as a Protestant nation. For them, the Reformation was a kind of ‘big bang’ – everything happened overnight. In some places it did. In St Andrews, on 11 June, 1559, the citizens went to bed as Catholics and woke up as Protestants, because overnight the Lords of the Congregation – the Protestant army, with John Knox among them – had come into the town, had gone into the parish church and ripped down all the Catholic ornaments, whitewashed the walls and turned it into a Protestant church. The ‘big bang’ did not happen like that in many places.6
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that a great part of Lowland Scotland enthusiastically welcomed the rejection of Rome and embraced the reformed religion with fervent zeal. Mary was apprised of this before she returned to Scotland. On the one hand, the Catholic Earl of Huntly, chief of the great Aberdeenshire family of Gordon, came to her in Paris offering to raise an army of 20,000 men (a boast he could not have made good) to restore the kingdom to proper order and true religion. On the other, her half-brother, Lord James Stewart,7 advised her to tread warily and to practise discretion. Her Guise uncles, though eager to see Scotland return to the French alliance, counselled likewise, the Cardinal even going so far as to suggest that she might be wise to make a show of Protestantism, at the very least to declare her intention of making no attempt at counter-revolution. This advice was in tune with Mary’s own temper, which was essentially mild and generous.
