Mary Queen of Scots

by Retha Warnicke

  Although Mary enjoyed disguised entertainment, she was also aware that some popular practices could lead to public unrest. In April 1562 on the authority of a 1555 act against masquerading as Robin Hood and Little John, she forbade her subjects at Edinburgh and St Andrews to dress up as these legendary figures because of the uproarious celebrations that had occurred in May 1561 before her arrival.

  Randolph had relatively easy access to her court because Mary wished Elizabeth to understand by her ambassador’s treatment just how deeply her Scottish cousin valued her friendship. Shortly after returning home, Mary began corresponding with Elizabeth about negotiating an Anglo-Scottish accord that recognized her English succession rights. On the other hand, Elizabeth still hoped Mary would ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. On 5 January 1562, Mary explained to Elizabeth she would not ratify the treaty because it was prejudicial to her lineage, but she also promised either to fulfill its reasonable requirements or to enter into a new amity that would secure her claims to the English throne next after those of Elizabeth and her issue.

  Mary hoped Elizabeth would approve her official succession rights and override Henry VIII’s will, which ignored the descendants of Margaret his elder sister and privileged the Grey descendants of Mary his younger sister. Publicly authenticating her Scottish cousin’s claims was an act Elizabeth would not concede. She feared a rebellion favoring Mary Stewart like the one Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger waged on her behalf in 1554 against her sister Mary Tudor; as a Protestant Elizabeth also worried that validating her cousin Mary’s claims would encourage Catholic conspiracies against herself. Furthermore, she suspected that many of her advisors supported the pretensions of the Protestant Greys. In 1561 Elizabeth ordered Catherine Grey imprisoned for marrying without royal consent Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, a union that produced two sons who were declared illegitimate. Elizabeth seems to have been ambivalent about the Greys, who in 1553 took advantage of their status in Henry’s will to attempt to usurp his daughters’ premier places in the succession.

  Since her contemporaries believed that failing to enforce their royal claims would compromise their honor, it was virtually impossible for Mary to relinquish her English succession rights at this time. Both Francis I and Henry II, had, of course, fought ruinous wars, attempting to conquer Milan, which a distant ancestor once ruled. Mary’s English claim was not only much more recent than their Italian ones but many Catholics also considered it more valid than Elizabeth’s. One major difference between these queens regnant was that Elizabeth recognized no worldly superiors to herself, as all her advisers were her appointees and were, in some sense, her creatures. Mary, by contrast, possessed religious superiors with great expectations of her. Pius IV, for example, advised her to marry a Catholic prince and to model herself after Mary Tudor. That in Scotland Mary condoned the Protestant settlement seems to have caused her to be more concerned about protecting her reputation as a loyal Catholic than she might otherwise have been.

  On 7 December attempting to build a lasting Anglo-Scottish amity, Lethington wrote to Cecil, exploring the possibility of scheduling a personal interview between their monarchs. A stream of correspondence ensued with Mary sending Elizabeth a heart-shaped diamond ring, emphasizing to her cousin the importance she placed on arranging this meeting. At special occasions like these, exchanging jewelry, particularly rings valued for their talismanic and symbolic functions, conveyed the sentiments held by both the presenters and recipients and served to recognize and validate their mutual standing and relationship in the social hierarchy.

  In early May 1562 at Falkland Palace, a serious riding accident in which Mary’s arm and the right side of her face were injured delayed deliberations until the 19th, but her councilors finally agreed on a rendezvous between 20 August and 20 September somewhere in northern England. Elizabeth postponed it when the first French religious war flared up again that summer after a short truce. Guise had set off the initial conflict in March 1562, when his forces killed some 70 Protestants and wounded 100 others at an illegal prayer-meeting at Vassy, which was part of Mary’s jointure lands under his administration.

  Although the warfare’s renewal led Elizabeth at first to delay the conference, she postponed it again in July after deciding to aid Condé at Rouen and Dieppe in exchange for English control of Le Havre, which she planned to trade for Calais. According to Randolph, Mary shed many tears to emphasize her deep disappointment when she learned of Elizabeth’s decision. The English intervention in France, which began in October, was a failure; Guise defeated Condé in December and French troops expelled the English from Le Havre in the summer of 1563. Some months earlier in February, a Huguenot assassinated Guise, causing Mary, of course, great sorrow, but his death did not end the conflict, which lingered into 1564.

  ABDUCTION SCARES

  Meanwhile in Scotland attempts were afoot to besmirch Mary’s honor. Previous analyses of these confrontations have failed to consider adequately contemporary attitudes concerning abductions. In most realms noble competition for custody of monarchs who were minors occurred because control of them also meant control of their governments. Kidnappers seized both Mary’s father and her son, and Henry VIII attempted to remove her forcibly to England, when she was a child. In political terms noblemen viewed women rulers as naturally subordinate to them and susceptible, like children, to their authority. In Scotland and elsewhere, moreover, men occasionally abducted heiresses and ravished them with the intention of pressuring them into marriage. Hence, they utilized the sexual act as a political tool to dishonor the victims, who had little recourse except to wed their abductors. Official documents used interchangeably the words, ravishment and abduction, because the two acts were so closely associated together. The heiresses’ abductors were required to pay a compounded amount to their new wives’ parents or guardians for their property losses.14 Occasionally an heir, who was a minor, might also be abducted, but this convention mainly affected heiresses.15 It was not until 1612 that the problems of abduction and rape prompted the Scottish privy council to promulgate an act against the ravishment of women.

  If committed independently of abduction, rape was a crime but a greatly under-reported one. The rapes that reached court dockets mostly involved children although sexual assaults against adult females who were of higher social status than their attackers or who were mauled might also be adjudicated. In the latter cases the punishment meted out was more for the women’s injuries than for the rapes. This cavalier attitude stemmed from the notion that women were more passionate and lecherous than men. As a final insult, if the victim became pregnant, she could not claim it was the result of a rape. Her contemporaries believed that conception occurred only when both partners enjoyed the sexual act, the weakness of her flesh causing her to become responsive despite her initial refusal.16

  In November 1561 Mary’s first abduction scare in Scotland arose from an alleged comment of Arran, whose father wanted him to wed her. Arran reportedly asked why it would not be as easy to take her from the abbey, as others had once thought it would be to seize her mother. On the 16th at 9:00 p.m. when Lord James was away from court, rumors that Arran had crossed the Firth of Forth with an armed band greatly frightened Mary. Lords Robert and John kept watch that evening to calm her, and later she decided to form a personal bodyguard of 19 archers for protection.

  A dispute between Arran and Bothwell in December may have been related to this incident, as the two had been enemies since Arran’s return home two years earlier. Bothwell, born in 1535, remained a loyal supporter of Mary of Guise despite his conversion to Protestantism. In October 1559, he ambushed Cockburn of Ormiston, wounded him in the face, and seized the English gold he was delivering from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Congregation. In retaliation, Arran and Lord James, accompanied by 300 armed men and some artillery, attempted to capture Bothwell at Crichton Castle, a few miles from Haddington. As he had already fled, they sacked his castle and seized his papers. Subsequently, Bothwell challenged Arran
to single combat to settle the points of honor between them; early modern men wore their swords as weapons for fighting not merely as clothing accessories. Denouncing him as a liar, Arran refused the offer.

  Two years later in December 1561 the month following Mary’s panicked reaction to Arran’s alleged abduction scheme, Bothwell, Elboeuf, and Lord John, wearing masks, entered an Edinburgh merchant’s house, seeking Arran’s mistress, Alison Craik, the stepdaughter of Cuthbert Ramsay and Agnes Stewart, James IV’s sometime mistress and Bothwell’s grandmother.17 After gaining admission the first night, they forced their way in the next evening. This intrusion is often dismissed as a drunken frolic, but the cooperation of Mary’s uncle and her favorite half brother with Bothwell lends a more serious complexion to it; they surely did not concoct this conspiracy over some chance glasses of wine. Bothwell had a close relationship with Lord John, who intended to marry his sister, Janet Hepburn, and the earl must also have become acquainted with Elboeuf in France. Dispatched on a mission to that realm by Mary of Guise shortly before her death in 1560, Bothwell reached Paris in September. It is likely that he met with Elboeuf, who had planned to succeed his ailing sister as the Scottish governor. In November after Francis appointed Bothwell to his privy chamber and supplied him with financial support and Mary named him as one of her commissioners for summoning the estates, he returned to Scotland. The next year in 1561, Elboeuf escorted his niece home, and while his two brothers departed for France, he remained as her special councilor to advise her about handling governmental emergencies and difficulties.

  That December at Edinburgh, it seems likely that these three men, one Arran’s determined enemy and the two others Mary’s beloved relatives, conspired to harass Arran’s mistress to retaliate for his having caused the queen’s recent abduction fright. The controversy almost escalated into a pitched battle the third evening when the Hamiltons gathered to challenge Bothwell and his allies, but Lord James, Argyll, and Huntly arrived with a royal proclamation and successfully disbursed the posturing warriors. On this final evening of the dispute perhaps responding to his niece’s request, Elboeuf remained at Holyrood. It was partly his share in this controversy that prompted Randolph, a Hamilton sympathizer, to rate the marquis’s judgment as inferior to that of his brothers, although the ambassador had already been complaining about his expensive dining habits. In February 1562 Randolph was delighted to learn that Elboeuf would return home earlier than expected because of his wife’s serious illness.

  Meanwhile in January 1562 during the interval between the Arran–Bothwell conflict in December and another that was to occur in March, Mary attended Lord John’s and Janet Hepburn’s wedding at Bothwell’s Crichton Castle. Responding positively to Mary’s reconciliation efforts, Lord James first joined Cockburn of Ormiston in exchanging with Bothwell promises to keep the peace before the privy council and then agreed to witness this marriage at the castle he had helped Arran to sack less than three years earlier.

  A few days later at Lithlingow, Arran submitted to Mary and promised to attend with his father the wedding on 8 February of Lord James and Agnes Keith, sister of William, fourth Earl Marischal, at St Giles’ Church in Edinburgh. Along with Châtelherault, Arran, Huntly, and Randolph, Mary was present at the marriage banquet, the lavishness of which elicited complaints from Knox who conducted the wedding. The day before the ceremony, Mary granted Lord James the Mar earldom, but after John, sixth Lord Erskine, the son of her deceased guardian, protested that the title was his family’s perquisite, she substituted the richer Moray earldom. In some sense it was an appropriate ennoblement because its last holder was their father’s illegitimate brother who died childless. She momentarily kept the grant a secret to postpone the anticipated negative reaction of Huntly, the administrator of the Moray and Mar estates since 1549. The Gordon family had actually been attempting to acquire these properties for two centuries.

  Another confrontation the next month with Cockburn of Ormiston prompted Bothwell to attempt to end his estrangement from Arran. While horseback riding with his wife and his son Alexander, Ormiston learned that Bothwell and eight companions were lying in wait for them. Retreating with his wife, he left Alexander to check on the intruders’ intentions. When Alexander discharged his gun at the earl, he seized the young man and attempted unsuccessfully to carry him off to Crichton.

  Probably because this confrontation displeased both Mary and the privy councilors, Bothwell requested Knox, whose father and forbears were Hepburn dependents, to mediate an understanding between him and Arran. The two earls’ subsequent reconciliation fell apart after they dined together on 26 March at Hamilton House in the parish of St Mary-in-the-Field, known as Kirk o’Field. The next day Arran informed an unsympathetic Knox that Bothwell planned to capture Mary, take her to Dumbarton Castle, which was held by Châtelherault, and murder Lord James and her other advisers. He also sent a message to Mary that his father the duke supported the abduction scheme. Because he was descending into madness, Arran was somewhat incoherent, making it difficult for observers to separate facts from fantasy.

  After meeting with the two earls, the privy council ordered the incarceration ultimately at Edinburgh Castle of both Arran and Bothwell, the latter protesting his innocence. In late August Bothwell escaped from the castle and was shipwrecked in England, a flight that led many to credit Arran’s testimony. When in early 156418 Mary finally agreed to forward permission to Elizabeth for Bothwell’s departure to France, Randolph condemned his character as worthless and complained about Arran’s continued imprisonment. Although never completely regaining his senses, Arran was freed in 1566 but remained under house confinement until his death in 1609. Meanwhile, indicating that she gave some credence to his accusations, Mary took the opportunity this dispute offered to remove Dumbarton from his father’s control. Châtelherault’s possession of that stronghold had long been of some concern to her. The memoirs written later either by Sir John Maxwell of Terrigles, who became fifth Lord Herries in late 1566, or more probably by one of his descendants, claims that Bothwell did concoct this plot. It is interesting that Buchanan, a Lennox ally, believed that both Bothwell and the Hamiltons planned to abduct her but that Randolph, a Hamilton ally, blamed only Bothwell for the scheme.

  HUNTLY’S REBELLION

  An examination of Châtelard’s writings is helpful to an understanding of yet another assault on the queen’s honor in late 1562. After accompanying her to Scotland, Châtelard, a maternal grand-nephew of Pierre du Terrail, chevalier de Bayard, and a poet of the Ronsard school, expressed grief at her attentions to three men: Damville, Arran, and Sir John Gordon of Findlater, the third son of Huntly. Rumors spread even before Damville accompanied Mary to Scotland that a friend had offered to poison his wife so that he might wed the queen. In short, Châtelard’s writings indicate that these suitors had something more serious on their minds than mere dalliance. The poet ultimately concluded that Gordon of Findlater had captured Mary’s heart and described him in glowing terms:

  the paragon of excellence in man...the youthful Gordon...what majesty was in his port;...Upon his knees he came to greet his queen;...such grace was in his motion, that had Apollo’s self been there, the god had been a Gordon.19

  In August 1562 after the meeting with Elizabeth was postponed, Mary traveled northward, reached Old Aberdeen by the 27th, and visited the university. In her train were Lord James, still addressed as the earl of Mar, James Ogilvy of Cardell, master of her household, and Randolph, among others. As she entered Gordon territory, Elizabeth Keith, countess of Huntly, attempted to intercede for her son, Findlater, a fugitive from justice. Two months earlier, he was imprisoned in the Edinburgh Tolbooth for mutilating the right arm of James, fifth Lord Ogilvy of Airlie, but had since escaped and fled to Aberdeen.

  The assault on Lord Ogilvy was an episode in an ongoing inheritance dispute between Findlater and Ogilvy of Cardell, master of the queen’s household. Lord Ogilvy was drawn into it as the guardian of Walter, the g
randson and heir of Cardell. After Cardell’s deceased father had married as his second wife Elizabeth Gordon, he disinherited Cardell and bequeathed the Ogilvy estates to his wife’s cousin, Findlater. Reportedly, Findlater kept Elizabeth Gordon, who became his mistress, imprisoned so that he could control her jointure lands.

  Following a conversation with Findlater’s mother Lady Huntly, Mary ordered him to appear before Aberdeen’s court of justiciary. After it demanded that he repair within seven days to Stirling for confinement, he departed but failed to appear at the castle. Besides this incident, the Gordons nurtured other grievances. As Huntly disliked both English and French interference in Scotland, he opposed Mary’s efforts to meet with Elizabeth and boycotted the privy council meeting that approved the conference. Moreover, as noted above, Huntly administered both the Mar and Moray estates and could be expected to react with hostility when he learned that Mary had granted the Moray earldom to Lord James, his old enemy.

  As she departed Aberdeen, Mary anticipated trouble and declined to visit Huntly’s home, Strathbogie Castle. She continued on to Darnaway Castle, the earl of Moray’s hereditary seat, and at a privy council meeting on 10 September, decided to respond to Gordon of Findlater’s defiance with force and to recognize her half brother as Moray. The councilors also ordered Findlater and his pretended spouse to release the Ogilvy estates to the crown. When Mary reached the royal castle at Inverness, which the Gordons had largely built and controlled for 50 years, its keeper, Alexander Gordon, refused to admit her on Huntly’s orders as sheriff of Inverness. Since she had to spend that night in private lodgings rather than the more secure castle, the earl apparently was planning to make it easier to capture her and forcibly marry her to his son Findlater. Obtaining local support, she ordered Gordon to open the gates and had him hanged when he complied, thus enforcing the statute that declared this illegal behavior a treasonable act. After she left the castle, Findlater harried her forces. Finally on 28 October, eleven days after she ordered Huntly declared a traitor with three blasts of the horn at Aberdeen’s Mercat Cross, Mary’s army of about 2,000 led by Moray defeated the attacking Gordon force of some 700 or so at Corrichie, near Aberdeen. As she approached this showdown, Randolph reported that he had not seen her merrier and never thought she would be able to stomach these violent events. Indeed, her physical endurance must also have impressed him. He described as a miserable experience their more than two-month journey on horseback that covered difficult terrain amidst cold and foul weather.