Mary Queen of Scots

by Retha Warnicke

  Three interpretations have attempted to explain Darnley’s successful courtship. First, some writers have suspected that Elizabeth permitted him to join Lennox because she secretly endorsed his candidacy, but she was consistently hostile to her claimants’ marriages and routinely enforced the statute forbidding them to wed without royal permission. Until Catherine Grey’s death in 1568, she remained under arrest, and in August 1565 when her sister Mary secretly wed Thomas Keyes, a royal sergeant-porter and a widower with several children, Elizabeth ordered them separated and incarcerated. Because Randolph’s initial instructions promised Mary any suitable English noblemen, she could and did argue that Elizabeth offered Darnley to her, but later communications do not validate this claim. In short, Mary’s protests against a union with a social inferior and her well-known attempts to wed a foreign prince caused the English to underestimate the value to her of Darnley’s lineage.

  A second reason given for her marriage to him is one that modern scholars unanimously reject but that many contemporaries could accept. In June rumors spread that he bewitched her. Among the evidence cited were the bracelets that contained sacred mysteries.

  Third, as noted earlier, most biographers claim Mary fell in love with the young man, almost exactly three years younger than she, but while she was supposedly becoming enamored with him, Lethington was in London discussing both the Spanish and English alliances, either of which she would have accepted given the right circumstances. In May she promised Throckmorton to delay granting Darnley the dukedom, an act scheduled to precede the marriage. Then on 15 June she sent to England Moray’s friend, John Hay, principal master of requests, with instructions to promise Elizabeth she would “embrace all reasonable means” to please her. Mary ordered Hay to inform Elizabeth that she had suspended the wedding for “a convenient season” and to recommend a meeting of Scottish and English commissioners to discuss her marriage.21 While awaiting Hay’s return, she continued to favor Darnley, perhaps hoping the threat of an alliance with him would prompt her cousin to concede her succession rights, making it possible for her to marry Leicester. Later Mary assured Randolph that she wed Darnley because he had a claim to the English throne and Leicester did not. Even Knox believed that she selected him because of his lineage, and Godfrey Goodman, the seventeenth-century bishop of Gloucester, wisely opined: “No sooner did Queen Mary see the Lord Darnley but she instantly fell in love with him, and the rather because, next after her own title, his title was next to the crown of England.”22

  If all the facts known about Darnley were limited to the information Mary had in early 1565, he might be judged an acceptable choice. The son of Lady Lennox, whom many Catholics esteemed, he was a native Englishman and was reared as a Catholic. If English experts denied Mary’s succession rights because of her foreign birth, her union with him erased that technicality. After her and his mother, he held the best hereditary claim. Her child by him, furthermore, would have an English father. Finally, their marriage would negate concerns that Elizabeth might name him as her heir if Mary rejected Leicester or that Darnley might become a dangerous rival to Mary by converting to Protestantism and marrying into a prominent English family.

  In May 1565 Mary could have found reason, however, to be concerned about Darnley’s rash behavior and inability to handle extreme stress, if Randolph’s hostile report can be believed. He related that Darnley kept to his chamber, only emerging for the ennoblement on the 15th, and that when he learned Mary was delaying the ducal ceremony, he threatened to strike Bellenden, the bearer of the bad news. Until he possessed that title, Darnley realized she might refuse his suit. It is interesting that Randolph’s account assumed a formal relationship that kept Mary from personally revealing the postponement to Darnley.

  On 6 July Hay arrived with a negative response from Elizabeth, who had also demanded that Lennox and Darnley return to England. With her other options defeated, Mary ordered final arrangements for her wedding to Darnley. Two weeks later she ennobled him as duke of Albany, and on the 22nd the first of the three obligatory marriage banns was announced; on the 28th Mary had him proclaimed king and early the next morning, a Sunday, they were wed. She had, after all, married a prince, even if only by her own creation.

  Lennox and Atholl escorted Mary, who was dressed in a black mourning gown and wore a black hood on her head, into Holyrood chapel between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. and then fetched the groom. Following trumpet fanfare, John Sinclair, future bishop of Brechin, officiated at the service. After exchanging their vows, Henry placed three rings, the middle a valuable diamond, on her finger. Following prayers and blessings, he kissed her and departed before the nuptial mass, perhaps another conciliatory gesture to those wanting her to wed a Protestant.

  Reaching the chamber where he awaited her, she briefly resisted changing her costume out of respect for her first husband. Preparing then to retire to another room to don a brightly colored outfit, she asked each man to take a pin from her gown. As sixteenth-century garments contained component parts that were usually laced together, she obviously had hers pinned for ease in changing into another outfit to signal her departure from widowhood. Afterwards, she threw the traditional handfuls of money to the crowds outside the palace and attended a banquet. Buchanan composed masques for the three-day wedding festivities: the Pompa Deorum, Pompae Equestres, and Ad Salutem in Nuptiis Reginae.

  On her wedding day Mary denied the petition of the Kirk’s General Assembly to abolish the mass at court but promised that its members could continue to worship as they pleased and confirmed that only parliament would make religious changes. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she seems to have genuinely wished that people of differing faiths could live unmolested together. Earlier on 1 July when she and Darnley attended the Protestant baptism of her godson, the child of Agnes Fleming, Lady Livingston, and William, sixth Lord Livingston of Callendar, the brother of Mary Livingston, the queen stayed to hear the minister’s sermon.

  THE CHASEABOUT RAID

  Having left court to organize opposition to her authority, Moray joined Châtelherault in recruiting other supporters, among them Argyll and William Kirkcaldy of Grange. As expected, the Hamiltons eagerly defended their succession rights against the Lennox–Stewarts’ challenge. Moray also distrusted Darnley, who will be addressed hereafter either as king or by his first name Henry to highlight his new status, which was to have grave repercussions for the queen, his wife. Randolph encouraged Moray’s animosity to Henry by repeating his alleged remark to Lord Robert that the earl controlled too much territory. In a sense if the king did express this belief, he was answering the question Moray, himself, posed during the Leicester negotiations. At that time he had wondered, in the event that Mary married someone other than Leicester, how that husband would treat Moray, knowing he had preferred a different suitor. Buchanan later explained another motive for the rebellion: “Many were of the opinion that it was more equitable that the people should choose a husband for a girl, than a girl should choose a king for a whole people.”23

  Mary reacted with fear and official remonstrations to Moray’s desertion. She and Darnley had a scare on 1 July as they rode from Perth to Livingston’s home at Callendar for her godson’s baptism. Rumors that Moray and Argyll were planning to abduct them and incarcerate them at Lochleven, referred to as the Raid of Beith, greatly alarmed Mary and Darnley. Afterwards, Mary granted her half brother three separate safeguards to appear before the privy council, and when he failed to respond, she had him put to the horn, declaring him an outlaw on 6 August.

  Perhaps to prevent the rebels from defining their struggle as religious, Henry sat on a throne at St Giles’ church on the 19th, listening to Knox’s sermon. This ploy backfired since Knox’s comparison of the king to Julian the Apostate and the royal couple to Ahab and Jezebel was so offensive that the privy council ordered him to abstain from preaching for 20 days. Henry, nevertheless, decided to continue his Protestant pretensions and attended the sermon of John Craig, Knox’s c
olleague at St Giles, in September.

  To suppress the rebellion Mary gathered support from Moray’s enemies, recalling Bothwell and Sutherland from exile and liberating Huntly’s heir. While the rebels assembled at Ayr, she ordered a muster and pledged her jewels for the soldiers’ pay. In September Henry and she sent Francis Yaxley, a former client of Lady Lennox, to Philip to request aid against the rebels. Yaxley obtained 20,000 crowns for them but died when shipwrecked on the return voyage. Lennox also recruited allies. His wife’s renunciation of her claim to her deceased father’s estates meant that Morton, the guardian of Archibald Douglas, eighth earl of Angus, would aid the queen. The 14 mostly Protestants, whom Lennox selected for knighthood in May, likewise possessed relatives willing to join her forces.

  In late August with 12 earls and 21 lords in a broadly based coalition, Mary, having just recovered from a fainting attack, left Edinburgh with Henry to pursue Châtelherault’s and Moray’s army. The rebels evaded them but met a hostile reception upon entering Edinburgh, since Erksine, recently ennobled as the earl of Mar, turned the castle’s guns on them. Learning that her larger army was returning, they retreated to Dumfries in what is known as the Chaseabout Raid. The insurrection fizzled out in October when the raiders, except for Argyll secure in his mountainous retreat, fled to England. Indicating a disdain for challengers to lawful authority, Elizabeth permitted them asylum but refused them assistance.

  MARITAL DIFFICULTIES

  Meanwhile several disagreements between Mary and Henry began to surface. She not only failed to appoint his father as the realm’s lieutenant general but also pardoned Châtelherault on 1 December for his role in the Chaseabout Raid on the condition that he dwell in exile for five years. That Henry was expected to sign letters under the great seal permitting his family’s old enemy to move to France probably increased his aggrieved feelings. Henry’s major concern, however, was her refusal to seek a parliamentary grant to him of the title and powers of king matrimonial, which her former spouse Francis II had enjoyed, and which, given early modern gender relationships, surely he and his network of male relatives and friends thought was his due or right as her husband. Evidently, Mary had anticipated that Henry would seek to destroy the Hamiltons and replace Châtelherault as her Scottish heir presumptive. In resisting Henry’s demands for regal power, she risked antagonizing him but must have hoped, unrealistically as it turned out, to keep under control her youthful spouse, who although utterly inexperienced in governance matters, seems to have harbored more dynastic ambitions than she had realized. Several contemporaries, including Leslie, later commented on his youthfulness, unstable personality, and rash behavior, perhaps hinting at a certain immaturity for even a 19-year old man. Disappointed by her reluctance to empower him, Henry consequently disappeared on long hunting trips, forcing her to order an iron stamp with his signature to process official documents.

  Randolph suspected they were having marital problems, noting that Henry remained mostly at Fife hunting after she became ill in mid-November. When Lennox wrote his wife in December that Mary was pregnant and that their son was in good health and favor, he was either personally deceived or more likely withholding news about their estrangement. Mary had conceived probably in late September, but the major symptom of her November illness was a recurrent pain in her side, which Randolph claimed she usually suffered at that time of year.

  On 23 December Randolph related that she no longer favored her consort, that her attendants addressed him as the queen’s husband rather than king, and that contrary to recent practice her name preceded his on coins and documents. These assertions were only partially true, but they do indicate Randolph was aware of the council’s decision to create a new coin, the Mary Ryall, which carried her name before Henry’s. Some writers, citing Randolph, have argued that their estrangement prompted its issuance, but public business rarely reflected shifting personal feelings. In 1565 the decision to mint the Ryall was prompted by a quest for profit, as it was valued at 30 shillings while its bullion value was only 22 shillings.24 It is significant that three of the councilors making the decision were Henry’s relatives: Atholl, Morton, who replaced Huntly as lord chancellor, and Patrick, third Lord Ruthven. The documentary placement of Mary’s and Henry’s names, moreover, did not change: rex continued to precede regina in the privy council register, for example. Meanwhile, Randolph noted other evidence of Henry’s and Mary’s estrangement, observing that Henry revealed his true faith by attending mass on Christmas Eve while Mary played cards until almost daybreak. Immediately after Christmas, Henry departed for Peebles to hunt only returning to court in mid-January.

  The king’s celebration of Christmas mass; the queen’s selection of four Catholics to preach public sermons, among them John Black, a Dominican friar, and the royal couple’s urging of the courtiers to attend services at Holyrood may have been hints that she intended to seek a statute restoring the mass for all Catholics at the parliament scheduled to meet in March. On 1 February 1566, Candlemas Day, some individuals did agree to worship with them but others, including Bothwell, declined their invitation. It is noteworthy that these efforts to encourage their presence at mass occurred during the visit to Scotland of two Catholic envoys, Clernault de Villemont from the cardinal of Lorraine and John Thornton from Archbishop Beaton. The royal couple may have hoped to impress these visitors with their success in recruiting new converts to their faith. They could also have planned to provide information about the additional Catholic worshipers to Nicholas d’Angennes, seigneur de Rambouillet, who arrived on 4 February to invest Henry in the Order of St Michael.25

  Elaborate festivities celebrated Henry’s installation on the 10th. Disguised in male attire, Mary and her ladies presented gifts to Rambouillet and his attendants during a banquet that evening. At a later supper the royal couple and Riccio joined others in performing in a masque. On the final evening, according to the reports of Rambouillet’s attendants as translated by Sir William Drury, captain of Berwick Castle, Henry enticed the Frenchmen to become drunk. They claimed that he was an alcoholic and that Mary had departed in tears from a merchant’s house after arguing with him about his drinking. It is possible that his decision to plot the death of Riccio was unnerving the young man, as Randolph seems not to have identified drunkenness as one of his vices, although Knox did later claim that he was partial to wine.

  Henry’s installation may have raised issues that clinched his determination to move against Mary and Riccio. After investing Henry, when Rambouillet asked what arms should be emblazoned on the armorial, the council replied that since he did not possess the crown matrimonial, he should bear only his noble arms and not those of Scotland. This response as well as the council’s earlier approval of Randolph’s petition to omit the king’s name from his passport home could have been the immediate reasons Henry turned against his wife. He may have believed that if he possessed the crown matrimonial he would be able to force absolutely the recognition of his royal status.

  Henry was also disturbed by the rumors, which he may have initially believed, that Riccio was the father of the child Mary was carrying. Born in 1534 near Turin, Riccio belonged to a poor, noble family of Piedmont, which formed part of the duchy of Savoy. After serving at the Savoyard court, he became the secretary of Robert Solaro, marquis of Moretta, and accompanied him to Scotland in 1561 to discuss Mary’s union with the duke of Ferrara. On Lorraine’s recommendation and with Elboeuf’s support, Mary persuaded Riccio to remain in Scotland when Moretta returned home. According to James Melville, she needed him to sing basso with three chamber musicians who took the other parts. In late 1564 Riccio replaced Raulet as her secretary for French affairs after he departed for France to join the cardinal of Lorraine’s household.

  It was not until May 1565 when Moray lost favor that Randolph began complaining about Riccio’s undue influence at court. Wholly supportive of the Leicester match for Mary, Randolph accused Riccio and others, including Atholl, Ruthven, Balfour, and Bellend
en, of promoting her marriage to Darnley. Because the ambassador, like most of his contemporaries, assumed that women were incapable of sustained personal initiative or autonomous political action, he sought to identify the male advisor with the most input into her governmental decisions. Later in 1565 noting Mary’s estrangement from her husband, Randolph mainly condemned Riccio for the other royal policies he deplored, although he also blamed Balfour. By early 1566 rumors about the influence of these two officials had even reached France.

  James Melville recalled that when he warned both Riccio and Mary that Scotsmen did not take kindly to foreigners wielding so much influence, she denied that Riccio spent more time with her than had Raulet or that he meddled in her business except for French writing and affairs. That Melville remembered this exchange with her is interesting because of later occurrences in England. In 1574 at the death of Raulet, who had resumed these secretarial duties during her captivity, she confided to Archbishop Beaton that as her secretary was dead, her enemies could no longer suspect that he was greatly influencing her opinions.26 Women’s reputations were more susceptible to gossip than men’s, however, and Randolph’s repeated accusations in 1565 lent credibility to Riccio’s alleged importance to her. Indeed, James Melville later noted that in letters written to him and his brother Robert Melville, Throckmorton accused his countryman of deliberately causing political discord in Scotland.

  Henry apparently believed that Mary’s failure to seek the parliamentary grant of the crown matrimonial for him diminished his manhood and deprived him of the headship of his household. His feelings of inadequacy made him receptive to the gossip blaming Riccio for his powerlessness. Given social and legal practices, it was far from absurd for him to reach this conclusion. Normally after marrying, early modern women ceased to have legal personae and generally their husbands controlled their movable property and even their rents from inheritable estates. Husbands also had custody of their wives and could decide their places of residence. A later English publication summed up contemporary beliefs about spousal relationships: