Mary Queen of Scots

by Retha Warnicke

  Held at the vesper hour the christening was a full Catholic service except that Mary forbade John Hamilton, archbishop of St Andrews, to anoint her infant’s lips with his spittle because he was rumored to be syphilitic. Between two rows of lords and gentlemen carrying candles, Brienne brought the prince into the Chapel Royal. Then in processed Atholl with a large wax candle, Hugh Montgomery, third earl of Eglinton, with the salt, Robert, third Lord Sempill, with the cross, and James, fourth Lord Ross, with the ewer and basin. Attended by various bishops, including Crichton, Leslie, and Chisholm, the archbishop received the prince from Brienne and handed him to the countess to hold at the font while he baptized him with the names of Charles James. After a trumpet fanfare, heralds proclaimed the prince’s names and titles three times.

  Elizabeth sent Lady Argyll a precious ruby for acting as her proxy, but since the countess was a Protestant, the Kirk later required her to do penance for participating in the ceremony. Bedford stood outside the chapel with Argyll, Bothwell, and Moray, who were dressed respectively in expensive red, blue, and green attire purchased by Mary for the occasion. Although Henry did not attend the service, he lingered in the castle, sending three requests to meet with du Croc, who declined the invitations because of his estrangement from Mary.

  At the entertainment, which constituted a full-scale Renaissance triumph, status dictated the seating arrangements. That evening Mary supped at a table seated between the English ambassador and the French proxies while the prelates and others ate nearby. To signal religious reconciliation, Protestant Argyll and Catholic Seton carried white staffs into the room. The banquet ended with dancing and music. Altogether, the spectacles celebrating the prince’s christening utilized the literature of four languages, Latin, French, Italian, and Scots.12

  On the 19th, Bastian Pagez, a French valet of the queen’s chamber, produced Buchanan’s Latin entry, Pompae deorum rusticorum. For the food service Pagez disguised singing waiters as nymphs and satyrs and decorated a moving stage with laurel. After the 12 satyrs led into the dining room the stage carrying the six nymphs and the food, the nymphs handed the dishes to the satyrs for delivery to Mary and her guests, who sat at a replica of King Arthur’s Round Table. When the satyrs wagged their tails with their hands, they offended the Englishmen who were aware of an old French claim that they possessed tails, but Bedford soothed their ruffled feelings. On Stirling’s Esplanate was staged the main attraction, an assault on a burning fort by actors disguised as Highlanders and Moors. Sitting under a canopy, the queen and the ambassadors observed the spectacle that ended with fireworks.

  Later she completed several official acts. To appease the Protestants she gave £10,000 to the Kirk but offended them by restoring Hamilton’s ecclesiastical authority. After the Kirk’s General Assembly protested that he planned to utilize these powers to establish Catholic courts, she rescinded the grant. Some writers have claimed that she empowered him so that he could annul Bothwell’s marriage and hers with the king, but the archbishop as papal legate a latere already possessed the authority to end the earl’s union, and since the twelfth century, only the pope or his commissioned legate could nullify a royal marriage. Bedford also understood that Hamilton intended to erect Catholic courts to compete with the new commissaries.

  To please Bedford and Moray, Mary pardoned Morton and 75 others involved in Riccio’s murder but only on the condition that they remain seven miles from court for two years. The gratified Bedford informed Cecil that his and Moray’s petition would have failed without the assistance of Bothwell, Atholl, and others. James Melville later recalled having advised the queen to pardon them. Monarchs as God’s earthly representatives, he had opined, approached nearest to His nature when exhibiting their readiness to forgive. In July after Mauvissière petitioned Mary on behalf of his government for their restoration, Morton complained he would rather not have to rely on French assistance for his relief. It is possible that Cecil pressed Bedford to obtain Morton’s pardon because he believed the Scotsman would join in a conspiracy with Bothwell to assassinate Henry and destabilize Mary’s rule. Some evidence indicates, however, that Bedford attempted to reconcile the royal couple. Elizabeth seems also to have been concerned about the presence both of armed men on her side of the Borders and of so much dissension in an adjoining realm.13

  At his queen’s behest Bedford demanded the punishment of John Adamson, a Protestant minister who composed a poem published in France that celebrated James as the prince of Scotland, England, and Ireland. For his offense Adamson spent six months in prison; Elizabeth thus clarified that agreeing to serve as James’s godmother did not alter her succession stance.

  His birth did apparently prompt her to plan an inquiry into the validity of Henry VIII’s will, a decision she communicated to Mary through Bedford and Robert Melville. The gratified Mary promised on 3 January 1567 to send councilors to discuss the investigation with Elizabeth’s advisors and expressed the hope the inquiry might occur before the end of the present English parliament, which had uttered prejudicial comments about her claims. Elizabeth did not intend to seek legislative action on this issue and on 2 January dissolved this acrimonious parliament, which futilely petitioned her to marry and name her successor. She probably planned to appoint commissioners to investigate the legality of the will. If they deemed it invalid, their decision would eliminate a major impediment to Mary’s claims but would not constitute the legislative recognition of her as heir presumptive that she desired. The king’s death seems to have ended all discussion about this inquiry.

  During the christening festivities, Mary confided to du Croc, who found her on her bed weeping on 22 December, that she had a side ache and a swollen breast, which was injured on her horse when departing Edinburgh. Henry’s health was also worrisome. At Glasgow he developed an illness that contemporaries identified as smallpox but that a later study of his skull claims was syphilis, although doubts remain about whether it is his skull. Mary sent a physician to examine him to discover when she could safely visit him since he was reputedly suffering an infectious disease. Meanwhile, she celebrated the Christmas season at the homes of David, second Lord Drummond, and Sir William Murray of Tullibardine and returned to Stirling to be with her son by 1 January.14

  MURDER OF THE KING

  About the 18th or 19th January a murder conspiracy was afoot at Whittingham, the home near Dunbar of Morton’s cousin, William Douglas. Shortly after Morton arrived there on the 10th, Bothwell and Lethington conferred with him about killing the king. At his murder trial in 1581 Morton recalled that since Bothwell and Lethington lacked Mary’s written approval, he refused to sign the band for Henry’s death, which Balfour reportedly prepared and endorsed along with Huntly, Argyll, Bothwell, and Lethington. In 1580, as an English captive, Mary instructed Archbishop Beaton to request Balfour, then in French exile, to send her a copy of the band, indicating her belief that he played this role in the conspiracy. She also informed Beaton that she felt unable to trust Balfour, but that he ought to be humored in case a need for his service arose. Balfour later sent her a version of the band without his signature.

  In 1583 Archibald Douglas, a brother of the above William, informed Mary about events following the Whittingham meeting. Morton had sent Archibald, apparently unaware of the band, with Bothwell and Lethington to Holyrood, which Mary had reached with James on the 14th, to fetch a written statement from her consenting to Henry’s death. Returning from their private audience with her, Bothwell and Lethington instructed Archibald somewhat enigmatically: “Shew to the Earl Morton that the Queen will hear no speech of that matter appointed unto him.”15

  Given the concern for her honor that Mary expressed at Craigmillar, they surely did not ask her to provide Morton with written permission to kill her husband. As Morton was prohibited from attending court, perhaps they suggested she summon him to an audience so that he could discover the extent of hers and Henry’s estrangement. If so, there are at least three reasons for her negative resp
onse. Preparing to leave for Glasgow, she probably lacked time to see him; she may have shrunk from meeting a rebel whom she had reluctantly pardoned, or she may have indicated that she hoped to reconcile with her husband. If she admitted this goal to them or if they surmised that this would be the result of her visit, she unwittingly speeded up their murderous time-table. On the 20th, perhaps the day before her departure, she reported to Archbishop Beaton that Henry and his father would injure her if their “power were equivalent to their minds,” for her husband was “occupied and busy enough to have inquisition of our doings, which, God willing, shall always be such as none shall have occasion to be offended with them, or to report of us anyway but honorably.”16 Both this letter and her October message to Lennox, promising to treat his son reasonably, explain why she went to Glasgow; she was protecting hers and his honor.

  Having primary responsibility for treating their families’ and their villagers’ sicknesses, early modern women’s control over informal medicine was substantial. Growing herbs for medicinal purposes and acquiring the knowledge to use them loomed large in their education. If wives failed to attend to their husbands’ medical needs, they breached marital etiquette and besmirched their own and their family’s honor. Catherine de’ Medici taught Mary the proper behavior when she nursed not only Mary and her own children but also Henry II. Another lesson Mary learned from her mother-in-law was that she should bear patiently her husband’s slights. Henry’s conspiracy against Riccio was more serious than the French king’s philandering, but a certain level of marital violence was condoned. It was not, for example, a dishonorable act for a man to whip his wife unless he seriously injured her. While a queen regnant would surely be exempt from her husband’s physical abuse, she could, as Mary had discovered, be victimized by his attempts to imprison her.

  As Mary set off with mounted guardsmen and a horse litter, Bothwell and Huntly accompanied her as far as Callendar, the home of Livingston. After one night there, she resumed her westward journey while Bothwell, who planned to suppress crime on the Borders, returned with Huntly to Edinburgh. On the 25th Bothwell arrived at Jedburgh and on the 27th was at Liddesdale.

  Thomas Crawford of Jordanhill, Lennox’s gentleman, greeted Mary at Glasgow, and, according to his later unverified testimony, related to her that her indisposed father-in-law was reluctant to meet her because of the manner in which she spoke to his servant at Stirling. Mary reportedly responded that if Lennox were innocent, he had nothing to worry about and then commanded Crawford’s silence.

  Entering Glasgow, she visited Henry at the castle and attended to his needs; they became reconciled, and he agreed to accompany her to Edinburgh. On the 27th with him in the horse litter, she began the return trip, reaching Edinburgh about the 31st.

  Unwilling to expose their son at Holyrood to her ailing husband, she suggested that he convalesce at Craigmillar. When he objected to residing at this fortress perhaps aware that it had served as a royal prison, James Balfour urged him to go to the more accessible Kirk o’Field, which lay near the Canongate. On the south side of its quadrangle of houses was the Old Provost’s Lodge, an unoccupied residence belonging to Balfour’s brother, Robert. Mary moved Henry to the building’s upper floor and ordered her servants to transfer to it from Holyrood some rich furnishings and the velvet bed she gave him. She slept there on the 5th and the 7th; on the latter date he wrote his father that she was a loving, attentive wife. Perhaps, he was gratified by her arranging for him to take a medicinal hot bath, a treatment that soothed the symptoms of her illness. He might well have been pleased that she scheduled his removal to Holyrood on the 10th. Sometime during their days at Kirk o’Field, as recalled by James Melville, Henry confided to Mary that Lord Robert warned him to leave the lodge or he would lose his life. When she confronted her half brother about this conversation, he denied having made that dire prediction to her husband.

  On the 9th, Shrove Sunday, Moray departed to visit his ailing wife. That same morning Mary witnessed the wedding of Christian Hogg and Pagez, the producer of her son’s christening triumph, and promised to attend a masque celebrating the occasion at Holyrood that evening. At 4:00 p.m. along with Huntly, Argyll, Bothwell, and Gilbert Kennedy, fourth earl of Cassilis, she enjoyed a farewell supper for Moretta, hosted by James Hamilton, bishop of Argyll, at John Balfour’s Canongate house where the Savoyard had resided since arriving on 24 January.17 At 9:00 p.m. she returned to Kirk o’Field for a two-hour visit with Henry and then keeping her promise to Pagez, departed for Holyrood after giving her husband a ring and promising to spend the following evening with him. While exiting according to the later account attributed to Claude Nau, she observed with surprise that Nicholas Hubert alias French Paris, her valet of the chamber and formerly Bothwell’s servant, was covered with gunpowder, apparently, unbeknownst to her, from delivering it to the lodge. Later in his book, Martyr de la Royne d’Eccosse, published at Paris in 1587, Adam Blackwood denied her complicity in the murder, citing as one of his proofs her astonishment at Paris’s filthy condition.

  After hearing the massive explosion about 2:00 a.m. on the morning of the 10th and learning that Henry was dead, Moretta briefly delayed his departure. One and one half days later, he left in the company of Chisholm and Hay, stopping in France en route to Savoy to inform Charles and Catherine of the murder. Moretta’s testimony represents what some believed occurred. When Henry became aware of suspicious noises outside his chamber, he escaped through a window overlooking the garden. Assassins then strangled him with his shirt sleeves and destroyed the part of the house where he slept, intending to have it appear that he was killed in the descent. Moretta described Mary as very fearful and repeated rumors that Moray was the instigator of the murder.18 Actually, the explosion destroyed the whole building. According to Lorraine’s client, Clernault de Villemont, an underground mine that sounded like the firing of 25 or 30 cannons in volley caused the blast. Villemont also revealed that the greatly distressed queen had been on good terms with her husband.

  In her letter to Archbishop Beaton, written the 10th but dated the 11th, Mary likewise related that the lodge was in ruins. She and some others believed that Henry was still asleep when the gunpowder exploded, but he more likely escaped through a window, as Moretta later asserted. His body and that of his valet, William Taylor, still attired in their night clothes, displayed no visible marks even though they were found some 40 yards away in a garden on the other side of the town wall. Conspirators probably grabbed them as they descended, smothered them, and dumped them there. Also, according to Moretta, some women heard him cry, “O, my brothers, have pity on me for the love of Him who had mercy on all the world,” fueling the speculation he was addressing his Douglas relatives.19 Mary confided to Beaton that she believed the murderers had planned to kill her, recalling that she had only by chance gone to Holyrood that night. She surely spent most of the 10th personally inquiring about Henry’s assassination, instructing her household about disposing of his remains, and preparing messages announcing his demise. She commissioned Villemont, for example, to carry her notification of his death to Archbishop Beaton.

  Then on the morning of the 11th, Shrove Tuesday, before beginning the widow’s customary 40-day seclusion, she witnessed the marriage of John Stewart and her attendant, Margaret Carwood, whose wedding dress she purchased for £125. Her attendance at this religious ritual has been characterized as showing her disdain for Henry’s memory, but no gala festivities celebrated the occasion. Not only had she ordered the court into mourning but also, according to Moretta’s testimony to de Silva in London, she donned a widow’s thick black veil. Leslie even claimed that questions were raised about the appropriateness of a queen’s mourning a husband, who was a private man and one of her subjects, but noted that despite these concerns, she decided to follow traditional protocol for honoring a royal spouse.

  While departing for Edinburgh Castle, the residence Mary chose for security reasons, she received Archbishop Beaton’s dispat
ch of 27 January, relating that Don Frances de Alava, the Spanish ambassador in France, informed him of rumors that a dangerous conspiracy was directed at her. By 17 February de Alava and Margaret Farnese, duchess of Parma, regent of the Netherlands, had alerted de Silva about this apparent threat to Mary.

  Meanwhile the council sent a magistrate accompanied by surgeons to examine the bodies of the king and his valet. The councilors also questioned servants who slept in adjoining buildings and called other witnesses for information. A paper on the 11th written by Alexander Hay, secretary to the council, contains notes concerning the interrogation of three deponents about the crime: two women and a surgeon who reported on the number of men they saw and other events following the explosion. George Buchanan later claimed that Huntly, Bothwell, and Leslie attended this meeting, which was convened by Argyll in his chamber.

  No evidence that the councilors continued these interrogations has survived, but on the 12th they did offer £2,000 and a pension to anyone identifying the murderers. On that same day Mary’s household began arranging Henry’s burial. They had his body embalmed and laid in state at Holyrood for three days before having it interred on the 15th in the royal vault near James V. A night funeral service without Psalms or music was held, following the custom Protestants had introduced into Scotland to avoid all hints of the Catholic tradition of praying for the dead.

  For her son’s safety Mary placed him in the custody of Huntly and Bothwell at Holyrood on the 16th before moving from the castle to Seton with her ladies, Archbishop Hamilton, Argyll, and Lethington to receive, according to James Melville, some purgations. In fact, she seems to have suffered a physical and emotional breakdown after her husband’s death. Blaming the environment for her disease, her physicians hoped Seton’s air would restore her fragile health. Leslie claimed that she wanted to continue depending on candlelight but her doctors ordered the windows open to let in the light. Other evidence attests to her persistent illness. Her letters were mostly in Scots, which she was as yet unable to write and were, therefore, dictated. She also failed to correspond with her relatives as usual.