Mary Queen of Scots
Retha M. Warnicke
A ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY
Contents
CHRONOLOGY
ABBREVIATED GENEALOGICAL CHARTS 1. Scottish Succession
2. English Succession
3. Lorraine-Guise Family
4. Valois Dynasty
PLATES Plate 1 James V and Mary of Guise, King and Queen of Scotland
Plate 2 Francois II c.1553 by Francois Clouet
Plate 3 Henry Lord Darnley and his younger brother Charles, by Hans Eworth
Plate 4 James VI of Scotland and I of England holding a bird of prey, c.1580 by Arnold Bronckorst
Plate 5 A miniature, by an unknown artist, traditionally said to be of Bothwell
Plate 6 Mary Queen of Scots in white mourning, 1560 by Francois Clouet
Plate 7 Mary Queen of Scots, miniature by Nicholas Hilliard
Plate 8 The execution of Mary Queen of Scots, 1587
Plate 9 Mary’s effigy on her tomb in Westminster Abbey
1: INTRODUCTION
2: SCOTTISH BEGINNINGS TO 1548
3: FRENCH UPBRINGING, 1548–61
4: RETURNING HOME, 1561-63
5: RULING SCOTLAND, 1563–66
6: CONFRONTING ADVERSITY, MARCH 1566–MAY 1567
7: SEEKING REFUGE, 1567–69
8: NEGOTIATING RESTITUTION, 1569–84
9: FAILING ENTERPRISES, 1584–86
10: ENDING CAPTIVITY
NOTES
FURTHER READING: SELECTED TOPICS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
CHRONOLOGY
ABBREVIATED GENEALOGICAL CHARTS
1. Scottish Succession
2. English Succession
3. Lorraine-Guise Family
4. Valois Dynasty
PLATES
Plate 1 James V and Mary of Guise, King and Queen of Scotland
Plate 2 Francois II c.1553 by Francois Clouet, Musee Conde, Chantilly, France/The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate 3 Henry Lord Darnley and his younger brother Charles, by Hans Eworth. © Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Temple Newsam House) UK/The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate 4 James VI of Scotland and I of England holding a bird of prey, c.1580 by Arnold Bronckorst, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland/The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate 5 A miniature, by an unknown artist, traditionally said to be of Bothwell, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
Plate 6 Mary Queen of Scots in white mourning, 1560 by Francois Clouet, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate 7 Mary Queen of Scots, miniature by Nicholas Hilliard. Victoria & Albert Museum, London/The Bridgeman Art Library
Plate 8 The execution of Mary Queen of Scots, 1587. © Bettmann/CORBIS
Plate 9 Mary’s effigy on her tomb in Westminster Abbey. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster
1: INTRODUCTION
On 8 February 1587 with two English soldiers supporting her under her arms, the crippled Mary Stewart, queen of Scots, encountered Andrew Melville, the master of her household, at the entrance to the execution hall at Fotheringhay Castle.1 During their brief conversation, she asked Melville to testify to the world that she died a true woman to her religion and a true woman of Scotland and France. Although her English succession rights were important to her, she clearly identified herself in those last critical moments as a Catholic of Scotland and France. Mary’s final thoughts focused on her lineage and faith, not her alleged romantic marriages in Scotland that culminated in her long English imprisonment and ultimately her violent, tragic death.
By contrast, beginning even in Mary’s lifetime, her defenders and detractors have mostly been more concerned with the formation and dissolution of those marriages than with her self-identification and understanding of her royal responsibilities and religious commitments. In 1570 John Leslie, bishop of Ross, her ambassador to England, was the first to deny in print that the imprisoned queen had aided and abetted the murder of her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, in order to marry James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell, his assassin and her abductor. About two years later, a treatise, written by George Buchanan, a Protestant humanist and Mary’s former tutor, was published to counter Leslie’s defense. Depicting her as an evil, lecherous woman, it claimed she colluded both in Darnley’s death and in Bothwell’s capture of her.
During the more than four centuries since the polemical works of Leslie and Buchanan appeared, many historians have supported one of their two contrasting characterizations, although some scholars have also favored a third position that somewhat amends Leslie’s stance. Doubting she was totally innocent concerning Darnley’s death, they speculate that she must at least have suspected that a conspiracy against him was afoot but usually agree that Bothwell forcibly seized her.
MARY’S HISTORY
Mary’s life that ended in England had begun in Scotland 44 years earlier on 8 December 1542. The basic outlines of her history are well known. She was the child of Mary of Guise and James V, who died six days after her birth, leaving his crown to her. That she was not only the Scottish queen regnant but also as the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor a claimant to the English throne, caused many parents, including her great-uncle Henry VIII, to seek her as a bride for their sons. In 1548 her mother and her governor, James Hamilton, second earl of Arran, arranged for her transportation to France as the betrothed of Francis, the dauphin. In 1558 she wed Francis, who succeeded as king about one year later. After his death in 1560, she returned home to a realm controlled by Protestants but insisted on continuing Catholic worship at court. She remarried twice: in 1565 to Darnley, the father of her son, and in 1567 to Bothwell, her abductor. Her outraged rebels then imprisoned her at Lochleven, forced her to abdicate, and crowned her son as James VI. In 1568 she escaped, raised an army that was defeated, and fled to England. After holding an inquiry into whether Mary should be restored to her throne, Elizabeth decided to retain her in England, leaving Scotland to the rule of James and his Protestant regents. In 1587 having discovered that Mary consented to Anthony Babington’s plot, which included a scheme for her assassination, Elizabeth signed the warrant for her cousin’s execution, prompting Catholic desires for Mary to be recognized as a martyr to their faith. In 1603 her son succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England.
RECENT STUDIES OF MARY
The most well-known biography of Mary, which was published in 1969 and reprinted in 1993 and 2001, was composed by Antonia Fraser, a popular writer.2 A volume of over 600 pages, it romanticizes her life, claiming she married Darnley for love but wed Bothwell only because he abducted and ravished her. It includes moving passages about the queen’s four attendants also called Mary, who were undoubtedly Mary of Guise’s namesake goddaughters, as their parents were her allies and dependants. Fraser ended the book with references to the corpse of Mary’s son James, which was interred in the tomb of Henry VII in the Tudor king’s chapel at Westminster Abbey, and to Mary’s coffin, which rests under her tomb in that same chapel, surrounded by her many tiny descendants who died in their infancy. In contrast, the remains of the childless queens regnant, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, lie together by themselves under the latter’s tomb, ironically also in Henry’s chapel. By thus highlighting Stewart fertility and Tudor barrenness, Fraser emphasized the Stewart subsumption of the Tudor dynasty.
Missing from Fraser’s conclusion are two salient facts: first, Mary selected as James’s godmother Elizabeth, who became by contemporary standards in some sense his second mother and who eased his succession when she politically isolated Eng
lish pretenders to her throne. Second, in May 1586 less than a year before her execution, Mary promised Philip II of Spain through an intermediary, Bernardino de Mendoza, his ambassador in France, to bequeath her English inheritance claims to him if James failed to convert to Catholicism. Her son’s accession in England was definitely more complex than mere biological destiny.
Fraser’s biography has other problems. It presents a too benign view of Mary’s long, difficult captivity, repeats inaccurate facts, and relies on outdated information and interpretations. Since it was first published in 1969, numerous histories of early modern Britain have appeared, an impressive number specifically on Scotland: its Renaissance and Reformation, court life, politics and constitution, and gender and family history. Among them is Michael Lynch’s excellent volume of 1988, which was a special issue of the Innes Review. Written by a mixture of experts on Scottish, French, and English history, these essays explore selected topics, like “The Release of Lord Darnley and the Failure of the Amity” by Simon Adams.3 In the Introduction, Lynch claimed correctly that a major problem for biographers of a woman, who was queen of two kingdoms and a pretender to another, is that they have mostly received academic training within a particular national historiography.
Jenny Wormald’s negative study of Mary, which appeared the same year as Lynch’s edition, is an analysis of the queen’s personal rule rather than a true biography.4 When Wormald, an expert on Scottish history, reissued it in 2001, she included Lynch’s volume and other recent publications in her bibliography but did not revise her text to incorporate their findings. Focusing on what she considered was the best scenario for Scotland, Wormald claimed that Mary’s reluctance to return home after Francis’s sudden death led her to linger frivolously in France for several months. Surely, however, arrangements for moving to her overseas realm that Protestant rebels controlled would have taken longer than a few weeks to complete. After beginning her personal rule in Scotland, Mary rarely attended the privy council meetings identified in its register. Among other facts, Wormald cited this absenteeism to rate Mary the most unsuccessful monarch since Robert III who died in 1406. As the register lacks reference to many council sessions that are identified in other contemporary records, it is hardly appropriate evidence for forming this negative judgment. It is also interesting that, according to the register, the attendance of the noble councilors was extremely erratic.5
Furthermore Wormald denied that some of Mary’s regal difficulties were gender based despite the published research confirming the marginalized status of early modern women that appeared before her book was reissued. Agreeing with Fraser that Mary wed Darnley for love, Wormald conceded Bothwell’s abduction and apparent rape of her.
James MacKay published his study in 1999 specifically to refute Wormald’s analysis.6 An experienced biographer of male subjects who lived in later centuries than Mary’s, he presented a somewhat different nationalistic perspective than Wormald’s, identifying parallels in Anglo-Scottish relations between the 1560s and the modern devolution debate and referendum. Throughout the text his prejudices flow unchecked, describing, for example, John Knox as the Ayatollah. Like Fraser and Wormald, MacKay claimed Mary fell in love with Darnley and acquitted her of complicity in Bothwell’s abduction.
Susan Watkins’s beautiful book about the queen, which appeared in 2001, contains photographs by Mark Fiennes.7 The strength of her publication is that it not only relates Mary’s life through the medium of photography but also offers vivid descriptions of artifacts and clothing. As Watkins previously utilized this method to present the lives of Jane Austen and Marie Antoinette, she lacks experience in writing sixteenth-century history and sometimes shied away from documentary analysis, merely commenting, for example, that Mary may or may not have consented to Bothwell’s abduction.
Like Fraser’s study, the biography of Mary published in 2004 by John Guy, a prominent Tudor political historian, provides a romantic conceptualization of her. Validating claims that Mary wed Darnley for love, Guy argued that after Bothwell’s forcible abduction of her, she consented to sexual relations with him because she never would have married her rapist, thus transferring modern sensibilities on to early modern people. In his memoirs, however, Sir James Melville, a witness to Mary’s abduction, claimed that Bothwell raped her, and although the aged Melville knew well her subsequent history, including the imprisonment in Scotland and the flight to England that led to her life-long captivity, he still maintained that she “could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against her will.”8
Guy also maintained – unrealistically – that if Mary had not fallen in love with her captor within two or three days after he seized her, she could have escaped from Dunbar Castle or, at least, kept her chamber door locked. It must be noted that it took her almost one year to win release from Lochleven prison.
A major reason Guy turned to this biography was to establish that William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, schemed to engineer Mary’s downfall. In 1566 Cecil instructed his ally, Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford, to persuade Mary to pardon her exiled rebels, especially James Douglas, fourth earl of Morton, because Cecil anticipated that upon reaching home Morton would join Bothwell and other Protestants in murdering Darnley. Guy cited extensive evidence to prove his conspiracy theory but failed to explain why Catholics, such as Darnley’s kinsman, John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl, and even members of the French government, also pressed for Morton’s return.
Like most recent scholars, Guy pronounced as forged the Casket Letters, which include eight French love letters allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell. To prove that her adulterous love for Bothwell caused her to collude in Darnley’s murder, her illegitimate half brother, James, earl of Moray, who served as her son’s regent, introduced these documents into the English inquiry commissioned to determine whether she should be returned to Scotland. As the originals have disappeared, Guy turned to extant sixteenth-century transcripts and discovered that Cecil altered the English translations of the French versions to make it appear as though she had referred to Darnley’s murder. It is difficult to judge the impact of Cecil’s mistranslations, however, as some commissioners could read French. Furthermore, one of their charges was comparing the handwriting in the French Casket Letters to that in French documents unquestionably composed by Mary. Ultimately, the Englishmen seemed far less interested in validating the letters’ contents than in understanding why Moray was so willing to besmirch his half sister’s honor and reputation.
Besides these manuscripts, Guy utilized other archival evidence for his biography of over 500 pages. Despite its length, the book fails to refer to some significant issues, for example, Wormald’s arguments about Mary’s ineffectiveness as a ruler, and gives relatively limited attention to her extended captivity. Finally, it relies on unconfirmed diplomatic gossip and contains several surprising factual errors.9
That Alison Weir, a popular writer who was intrigued by the mystery surrounding Darnley’s murder, also published a romantic study of Mary in 2004 indicates the continuing public demand for works on her life.10 This highly readable book relies on a manuscript attributed to Claude Nau, who became Mary’s secretary for French affairs in 1575 while she was an English prisoner. Weir treated this manuscript as though it were the queen’s memoirs, although Mary’s authenticated writings contradict some of its statements.
APPROACHES TO MARY’S LIFE
These earlier studies generally reflect their authors’ interest in British political history as well as photography. By contrast, this biography represents not only an understanding of political history but also my experience in researching a wide range of cultural rituals, mores, and behavior. Since the 1980s, I have examined queenship conventions, gender relations, family networks, the honor code, death customs, religious conflict, aristocratic education, court politics, and royal protocol. In interpreting Mary’s controversial decisions at critical moments in her life, I have also utilize
d works by anthropologists, such as Victor Turner, which remind us of the limited range of choices, specific to their culture, which individuals have when responding to personal crises.
In some sense all Marian scholars have benefited from and have even built upon their predecessors’ studies of her. Besides becoming familiar with this extensive historiography, I have turned to recent research on early modern cultural, legal, and social topics, especially concerning Scotland, which highlight information that makes possible new approaches to her life. Her royal status, her kinship networks and French upbringing, her dynastic vision, her marital difficulties and gender relations, her religious views, the conspiracies against Elizabeth, and the preparations for her execution – these all gain richer and fresher nuances when examined for the first time within early modern frameworks.
EARLY MODERN FRAMEWORKS: ROYAL KINSHIP AND DYNASTIC VISION
It is significant to the development of Mary’s character and personality that as she was growing up, she could not remember a time when she was not the queen of her realm. As she moved from infancy to childhood, she must have slowly become aware that in social groups and at every public and private moment she occupied the premier place. She headed a social hierarchy in which the royal family held a superior status to that of dukes, who, in turn, took precedence over earls. Below them were situated lesser members of the titled classes. In Scotland the royalty, noblemen, and lesser aristocracy even wore different kinds of helmets to confirm visually their social standing. Their placement in public processions or ceremonies also reinforced their status in the pervasive early modern pyramid.
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