These three female monarchs responded to dynastic expectations with different degrees of success. Mary Tudor is often viewed as a failure partly because she could not bear children at what was then considered an advanced age for a first pregnancy. Having learned from her Guise relatives the importance of marriage for the advancement of family goals, Mary Stewart wed Darnley to strengthen her English succession claims and gave birth to a male heir, but partly because she lost her throne to that son, she, too, is deemed a failure. Most contemporaries and subsequent writers have condemned her third, forced marriage that fostered the discord that led to her captivity, but it is a fact that rebellions were directed against not only all three of her unions but also that of Mary Tudor because their subjects anticipated that their husbands would gain control of their realms. Having the advantage of learning from their experiences, Elizabeth ultimately chose to ignore contemporary expectations about marriage, thereby avoiding sharp factional divisions on that issue among her advisors and possibly rebellions against her authority. Her decision kept her from bearing children, but partly because of her longevity, her choice proved wise and her reign is deemed a success.
More particularly, it is also appropriate that Mary’s and Elizabeth’s tombs lie in precise symmetry on the north and south sides of Henry VII’s chapel. Too much emphasis has focused on their personal rivalry that supposedly arose from differences in their personal make-up, one exhibiting masculine self-control and the other demonstrating feminine passion, but their disagreements derived from dynastic and religious issues much larger than their individual characteristics. Elizabeth, who never departed England’s shores, slowly and reluctantly agreed under pressure from her advisors, especially Burghley, to seek for defensive purposes the pacification of the British Isles under essentially Protestant rule. By contrast, through her marriages, Mary hoped to attach Scotland and ultimately England to a Catholic continental empire governed by either the royal families of France or Spain. This was a goal she learned in her childhood education and experience in France.
By placing their tombs in the same chapel, James sought to achieve dynastic reconciliation, since Elizabeth was the godmother that his mother chose for him. It is noteworthy that godparents’ duties in the sixteenth century were not limited to supervising their godchildren’s religious education but also involved aiding them in achieving their political and social aspirations, especially in the absence or the death of their biological parents. In 1581 Mary reminded James that Elizabeth was his second mother, godmother, and kinswoman. In 1592 some years after Mary’s death and the defeat of Philip’s Armada, although Elizabeth’s relationship with James still had to endure difficult periods, her message to him reflected a sense of her duty but not exactly as his mother had intended:
You know my dear brother, that, since you first breathed, I regarded always to conserve it my womb it had been you bear. Yes, I withstood the hands and helps of a mighty king to make you safe, even gained by the blood of many my dear subjects’ lives. I made myself the bulwark betwixt you and your harms when many a wile was invented to steal you from your land, and making others possess your soil.15
Mary not only gave him an hereditary claim to England but also selected Elizabeth as his godmother, making it possible for her in some sense to view him as her son.
MARTYRDOM?
From the moment of Mary’s death, Catholics began to recognize her as a martyr to their cause while Protestants, like Burghley, denied that the English punished individuals for their faith. Others have argued that Mary’s early flirtation with Protestantism and her political scheming prevented her from achieving martyrdom status. For the validity of Burghley’s claim, it will be helpful briefly to consider the life of Norfolk’s heir, Philip, earl of Arundel.
Along with other Howards, the government suspected Arundel was involved in Throckmorton’s plot. After the earl converted to Catholicism in late 1584, he worried about his fate and without royal permission attempted to seek sanctuary abroad with William Allen.
When Arundel was captured, the Court of Star Chamber ordered him to pay the exorbitant fine of £10,000 and imprisoned him at Elizabeth’s pleasure. In 1588 still in captivity, he was accused of urging a priest to say mass for the Armada’s success. Although he admitted only to praying for Catholicism and for himself, he was condemned as a traitor and remained a prisoner in the Tower until his death in 1595. Lacking any firm evidence except his attempted flight and his prayers, his government incarcerated him for ten years during which time he was not permitted to see his wife or child. Can it truly be said that Catholics were not being punished for their faith? In 1970 he was canonized.
When considering whether Catholics may view Elizabethan victims as martyrs, the judgments of Catholics and the condemned’s preparation for death should have more credibility than the opinions of Protestants. In the early 1580s on the continent, Catholic authors, such as Richard Verstegan, extolled Mary’s commitment to her faith and in various publications after her death described her as a martyr to their religion. From her first communion to her execution, only briefly did Mary personally flirt with Protestantism. That she was willing to support the Scottish Protestant establishment was a decision she made in association with her six Guise uncles, three of whom traveled with her to her realm. Although Mamerot, her confessor, deserted her after she married Bothwell in a Protestant service to protect her honor, the Frenchman testified to her previous religious constancy. As an English prisoner, she held out the possibility of converting to the Church of England in negotiations to obtain her freedom, but by 1570 she had won the sympathy of Catholic leaders abroad. On 9 January of that year, Pius V avowed his “paternal affection” for her and praised her “burning zeal” for their faith.16 Afterward, she behaved as a loyal Catholic, repeatedly demanding a resident priest for her household, aiding religious refugees abroad, and calling for the return of Catholicism to Britain. Finally, in despair at her son’s betrayal and refusal to accept her faith, she bequeathed her English succession rights to Philip, who commended her for privileging her religion over her son.
In 1587 her faith aided her in preparing for a Christian death to the outrage of the dean of Peterborough and the earl of Kent, who challenged her to convert to their religion. Had she complied, they would have eagerly welcomed her into their church. Mary relished Kent’s earlier claim that her life would be the death of his religion, since she interpreted his words to mean she was dying for hers.
Catholics unanimously condemned her execution, and soon after her translation to Westminster Abbey, her bones were rumored to work miracles. Henry Clifford, the contemporary biographer of Jane Dormer, an English Catholic who wed Don Gomes de Figueroa, duke of Feria, and moved with him to Spain, referred to Mary as a dying saint and martyr.17 So did others.
Although through the centuries that have passed, biographers have sometimes presented her life within a romantic framework, both sixteenth-century sympathizers and critics often interpreted her life as tragic. Michele Surian, the Venetian ambassador in France, predicted in 1569 that someday the English and their monarch, instigated by Moray, would find the means to kill Mary because she had treated Elizabeth as a bastard when she assumed her arms and style. And so, he said, “her life, which till now has been compounded of comedy and tragi-comedy, would terminate at length in pure tragedy.”18 And so it did.
It was not a tragedy stemming ultimately from the disappointment of romantic love affairs gone sour. It was a tragedy largely rooted in the gender relations of early modern Europe through which she was forced as queen to negotiate her rule. She made two decisions that ignored the advice of her councilors, one to marry Darnley, and the second, to seek refuge in England, which contributed greatly to her tragic ending. When she chose to wed Darnley, she gave him the trappings of royal office but not the power, which most people, including her husband, expected he would wield. She had depended on her experience and his youthful status to help her retain her regal authority, but she
underestimated the influence of his male relatives and allies, who urged the ambitious young man, a claimant to her throne, to take charge of his household and, therefore, the realm. His ambition for power led him to plan Riccio’s death, which culminated in his own murder and made Mary vulnerable to abduction, forcible marriage to Bothwell, and then imprisonment.
After escaping Lochleven and facing defeat at Langside, her advisors and friends begged her to remain in Scotland. Clearly, she should have done so, but prevented from reaching the safety of Dumbarton, she would have had to place herself in the power of either the Hamiltons or the Campbells, one of whom she would have been expected to marry and who, like her second husband, would have demanded control of her realm. Argyll could certainly have protected her from Moray in his mountainous retreat, for example, but there she would have lost independence of authority and action.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Mary, herself, viewed the end of her pilgrimage on earth as a triumph, not as a tragedy, and she believed that her suffering was part of God’s plan for her. She approached death calmly, having defended her honor at the trial, and looked forward to eternal salvation. It was with this expectation that she prepared herself to die bravely and serenely. It seems appropriate to close here by letting her speak for herself. The following, which is part of “Meditation in Verse” written originally by her in French in 1573, seems to capture her feelings in 1587:
So, when, my Savior, from captivity,
Thy clemency and goodness set me free,
And when I turn to bid a last adieu
To woe and grief and sickness, then I sue
That Thou wilt grant me this one favor yet,
That never shall my weeping soul forget
Thy grace and mercy, and Thy boundless love,
Which Thou hast ever sent me from above.
And finally,
I plead no merit. Witness, on my part,
Thy Passion, deeply graven in my heart.19
When she composed this piece, she could not have anticipated, of course, that a public execution would liberate her. Because of her chronic, debilitating illness, she may have supposed she would die in prison of natural causes, although she feared then and continued to fear until shortly before her death, that she would suffer private assassination. The bloody execution that she sought in 1587 allowed her to prove publicly and courageously that she died a true woman to her religion and a true woman of Scotland and France.
NOTES
1: INTRODUCTION
1 The Scottish spelling for her name is used because her importance in British and continental diplomacy stemmed from her status as queen regnant. Although as a child, she learned to use the French spelling of her name, she never ceased to identify herself with her native land and with her Stewart relatives.
2 Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, New York: Delacorte Press, 1969; New York: Delta, 1993, 2001.
3 Michael Lynch (ed.), Mary Stewart in Three Kingdoms, London: Blackwell, 1988.
4 Jenny Wormald, Mary, Queen of Scots: Politics, Passion and a Kingdom Lost, New York: Tauris Park, 2001; Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure, London: George Philip, 1988.
5 The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, (ed.) J.H. Burton, et al., 14 Vols, Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1877–98.
6 James MacKay, In My End is My Beginning: A Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999.
7 Susan Watkins, Mary Queen of Scots, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001.
8 John Guy, The Life of Mary Queen of Scots: My Heart is my Own, London: Fourth Estate, 2004; The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill, ed. Gordon Donaldson, London: Folio Society, 1969, p. 64.
9 Guy, Mary Queen of Scots, pp. 226–7 (for my discussion, see Chapter 4, note 18); see also pp. 282, 366, for other examples.
10 Alison Weir, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, New York: Random House, 2004; Claude Nau,The History of Mary Stewart From the Murder of Riccio Until her Flight into England, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1883. Another popular work appearing in 2004 is Jane Dunn, Elizabeth & Mary: Cousins, Rivals,Queens, New York: Knopf, 2004.
11 Gordon Donaldson (ed.), Scottish Historical Documents, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1970, p. 68, quoted from Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, vol. I, 492–3.
12 The Warkis of Schir David Lyndesay (Edinburgh, 1574), New York: Da Capo Press, 1971, p. 108 (see Chapter 2).The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles McIlwain, New York: Russell and Russell Reprint, 1965, p. 34; David Calderwood, The True History of the Kirk of Scotland from the Beginning of the Reformation unto the End of the Reign of King James VI, ed. Thomas Thomson, 8 vols, Edinburgh: Woodrow Society, 1843–49, vol. I, p. 57; Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Alan Chester, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968, p. 34.
13 A.N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 1–2, 26.
14 Roger Mason, “Imagining Scotland: Scottish Political Thought and the Problem of Britain, 1560–1650,” ed. Mason,Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 6.
15 Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots, ed. J. Bain, et al., 13 vols, Edinburgh: H.M. General Register Office, 1898–1969, vol. I, pp. 270, 510, 517. (Hereafter CSP Scot.) 16 Margaret Christian, “Elizabeth’s Preachers and the Government of Women: Defining and Correcting a Queen,”The Sixteenth Century Journal, 24, 1993: 561–76.
17 Julian Goodare, “Scotland,” in B. Scribner, R. Porter, and M. Teich (eds), The Reformation in National Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 95–111; Michael Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, Edinburgh: John Donald, 1981, pp. 214–23.
18 These can be accessed through a variety of printed catalogues. Most, but not all, are at the Public Record Office, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. An example of the misuse of diplomatic records is the oft-quoted allegation that in 1560 Mary ridiculed Elizabeth’s intention to marry her “horse-keeper.” Her alleged remark survives in Robert Jones’s letter to Throckmorton, the English ambassador in France. He reported that Lord Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s master of the horse, asked whether he knew about Mary’s comment, which Cecil had recently repeated to Dudley. Jones admitted he knew nothing about her quip but lacked any evidence denying she had said it. A reading of Jones’s dispatch indicates that Dudley was less concerned about Mary’s description of him as a “horse-keeper,” a somewhat accurate, although simplistic, rendering of master of the horse, than about her claim that Elizabeth would marry him. See P. Yorke (ed.), Miscellaneous State Papers from 1501 to 1726, 2 vols, London: Strahan and Cadell, 1728, pp. 163–4.
19 Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Marie Stuart, Reine D’Écosse, ed. Alexandre Labanoff, 7 vols, London: Dolman, 1844.
2: SCOTTISH BEGINNINGS TO 1548
1 Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland from the Slauchter of King James the First to the Ane Thousand Fyve Hundreith Thrie Scoir Fyftein Zeir, ed. A.J.G. MacKay, 3 vols, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966, vol. I, p. 358.
2 An English crown was worth 5 shillings.
3 Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Marie Stuart Reine D’Écosse, ed. Alexandre Labanoff, 7 vols, London: Dolman, 1844, vol. II, p. 2.
4 Lindsay, Historie, vol. I, 407; John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, ed. W. Croft Dickinson, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA: Philosophical Library, 1950, vol. I, ix, p. 39, made a similar claim, which was likely a rumored expectation that was transposed on to James. Knox’s and Lindsay’s writings remained in manuscript until after their deaths, Knox’s first appearing in an incomplete and suppressed version in 1586–87 after Lindsay composed his in the 1570s.
5 Quoted by Elizabeth Bonner, “The F
rench Reactions to the Rough Wooings of Mary Queen of Scots,” The Journal of the Sydney Society for Scottish History, 6, 1998: 13. For the speculation about the disease, see Roger Mason, “Scotland, Elizabethan England, and the Idea of Britain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 14, 2004: 283.
6 Calderwood, The True History of the Kirk of Scotland from the Beginning of the Reformation unto the End of the Reign of King James VI, ed. Thomas Thomson, 8 vols, Edinburgh: Woodrow Society, 1843–49, vol. I, 57.
7 The Warkis of Schir David Lyndesay (Edinburgh, 1574), New York: Da Capo Press, 1971, p. 108. All quotations have been put in modern English except verses in Lowland Scots.
8 The State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, ed. A. Clifford, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Constable, 1809, vol. I, p. 87.
9 Ibid., pp. 253, 263.
10 Ibid., pp. 285, 347.
11 Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers Relating to Negotiations Between England and Spain, ed. G. Bergenroth, et al., 13 vols, 2 supplements, London: Longman, 1862–1954, vol. IX, p. 47.
12 Two Missions of Jacques de la Brosse, An Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Year 1543 and the Journal of the Siege of Leith, 1560, ed. Gladys Dickinson, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1942, pp. 29, 39.
13 Sadler, Papers, vol. I, pp. 86, 265.
3: FRENCH UPBRINGING, 1548–61
1 Joachim du Bellay was not aboard, although his later poem quoted by Alphone de Ruble, La Première Jeunesse de Marie Stuart, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1891, pp. 15–16, referred to a similar voyage.
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