The Wild Queen

by Carolyn Meyer

  “Stop meddling in affairs that do not concern you.”

  My biggest problem was not the preacher or the queen of England but my brother James, earl of Moray. While I had been young and unmarried and dependent on my brother’s counsel, the jealous monster lying dormant in his heart had slumbered. Since the hour of my birth, my illegitimate half brother had known that I, and not he, would inherit the Scottish throne. But James wanted more than anything in the world to be king. Now my marriage to a man he did not like had awakened the beast. My growing confidence to make my own decisions merely fed his jealousy. He was preparing to lead a rebellion against me.

  Informed that my brother was a traitor, I ordered Lord Moray—I would no longer call him familiarly James—to appear before me within six days and explain himself.

  I feared for my safety and for Henry’s if Lord Moray gathered enough support to conquer my army and seize us both. His rebellion had to be put down swiftly. I knew that I had the loyalty of the common people, and I was confident they would rally around me and would not aid the rebel lords. But I needed help.

  First I wrote to James Hepburn, Lord Bothwell, who had been living in Paris since his escape from the Tower of London. (Livingston had won the first part of her wager, that he would somehow get himself out of the Tower, and had kept her diamond combs.) I forgave him whatever misdeeds he had committed that had landed him in prison and then in exile. I sent for him now.

  At the same time I freed George Gordon the younger, son of the earl of Huntly whom I had defeated in battle two years earlier. I restored to Gordon his lands and his title as well as his freedom, and in gratitude he promised to aid my efforts to stop my brother and the rebels.

  Six days had passed since my ultimatum to my brother, with no response. I summoned the messenger-at-arms and gave him the order: “Go now and put Lord Moray to the horn.” The messenger obeyed, proceeding to the High Cross near the fountain on the High Street. After blowing the royal horn, he loudly declared, “Hear ye, hear ye! Know ye that James Stuart, earl of Moray, is hereby declared an outlaw by order of Her Majesty Mary, queen of Scots!” He repeated this horn blast and declaration three times.

  A month after the magnificence of my wedding day and the splendid nights of indulging my passion for my husband, I assumed another role. Donning a metal helmet and placing a loaded pistol in my saddlebag, I mounted my strongest horse, and with Henry, king of Scots, beside me—how he loved that title!—I rode at the head of an army of eight thousand. I led my men out of Edinburgh and west, toward Glasgow, where I intended to confront my brother and his rebel troops. Heavy downpours sent every stream surging over its banks, hindering our advance but not stopping us.

  Lord Moray and his rebel followers managed to elude my forces, riding east and slipping past me to Edinburgh, where they attempted to take the castle. My loyal troops drove them out. We had successfully held off the rebels, but I was nevertheless immensely relieved when Lord Bothwell reached Scotland.

  “Thank God you are here!” I cried when my old friend was ushered into the outer chamber at Holyrood. “Are you all right, Lord Bothwell?” I asked anxiously, for he looked exhausted, his beard in need of trimming, his clothes of fine quality but ill-fitting.

  “As well as can be expected, my lady queen,” he replied with the crooked smile I found so charming. “Queen Elizabeth did her best to capture me when she learned that I was on my way here. Her warships were plying the North Sea in search of me, and she even sent a notorious pirate to seize me! But as the pirate and his minions boarded my ship, I let myself down the other side with several of my men, and we escaped undetected in rowboats. We came ashore south of here with a few pistols and little else. I set out immediately for Edinburgh, stopping for the night at Dunbar Castle with Lord Huntly, lately restored to your good graces. He made me a gift of clothing, but I regret, madam, that we are of a somewhat different size.”

  I applauded his outrageous tale of escape, ordered quarters readied for him, suits of clothes found, and a fine meal prepared. I reinstated Lord Bothwell to his position on my privy council and announced my intention to put him in command of my royal army. Then we set to work on our strategy to put my brother Lord Moray in his place.

  When Henry found out, he was angry. “I mean my father to command,” he said. “Revoke your order at once, Mary.”

  “It is my army and my choice, not yours, Henry. Lord Bothwell stays.”

  Henry erupted in a rage. “And I say that he goes! You will obey me, for I am your husband and your king!”

  My anger rose up to match his. “You are the king because I made you the king,” I snapped. “Before me, you were nothing. Nothing!”

  That reminder was like a match to tinder. More harsh words were exchanged. I pounded the table. Henry hurled a candlestick across the room. Servants witnessed it all, pretending to avert their eyes.

  The argument raged, died down, and flared again. In the end tempers cooled, and we reached a grudging compromise. Lord Lennox would lead the advance troops, and Lord Bothwell and Henry would ride together at the head of the main forces.

  Early in October we were ready Nearly twelve thousand men had answered my call! I gave the order, and the army marched southward, toward the border with England. I understood very well what Moray and the rebel lords intended: they wished to depose me and make Scotland a Protestant country. I could not allow that to happen. I wanted the rebels crushed and James Stuart, Lord Moray, taken alive.

  My brother, counting on Queen Elizabeth’s support, retreated across the border with the rebel lords, only to find that Elizabeth was unwilling to help him. I put out the order requiring him and his friends to appear in Parliament in March to learn of the forfeiture of all their property. I believed that the earl of Moray was unlikely to trouble me further. After a splendid banquet at Dumfries to celebrate our victory over my brother and the rebels, Henry and I made our way back to Holyrood, leaving Lord Bothwell with troops to guard the border.

  I should have been happy, deliriously so. I was enormously popular with the common people of Scotland. I had shown Queen Elizabeth that she could not interfere in Scottish affairs. I had routed the rebel lords without a drop of blood being shed. I grew increasingly confident in my ability to rule. And best of all, I suspected that I was with child.

  What made a mockery of my triumph was this: I had begun to recognize that my husband was not the man I had thought he was. We argued about nearly everything, and I often ended in tears. In the first flush of new love and passionate fulfillment, I was so eager to please him that I agreed to almost anything he wanted. Now I balked at some of his demands.

  Henry insisted that on every document we signed together as king and queen, his name should be on the left, the position of honor. Mine, he said, should come second, on the right.

  I resisted. “As queen, it is my privilege to place my name first, on the left.”

  “I am your lord and master!” he cried. “And I shall sign on the left!”

  That was just one issue. We were headed for trouble, and I knew it.

  Chapter 36

  Unhappiness

  I PRAYED TO HAVE A SON, and as the new life quickened inside me, I was convinced that it would be a boy. This was a great joy and consolation to me, for I understood more with every passing day that my husband would provide neither joy nor consolation. I had hoped that as Henry got older—he would turn twenty the day before I turned twenty-three—and with the guidance of some of my most able and trusted ministers, he would grow into his role as king of Scots. But what grew instead were his arrogance and insolence. There was no way to reason with him, to make him understand that I had been a queen practically from birth, the daughter and granddaughter of kings, and he was king only because I had made him one. I was willing to share power; I was not willing to surrender it. But Henry truly seemed to believe that I would hand over to him all my authority as sovereign simply because he was a male and my husband! It was disgraceful. For the first ti
me I understood the reluctance of Queen Elizabeth of England to marry.

  There was one important policy in which Henry stubbornly opposed me. In the face of the growing legions of Protestant followers of John Knox, I had always insisted that all men had the right to worship as they chose. While I demanded my right to hear Mass in my own chapel, I would not try to deprive the Protestants of their right to follow a different way—even those rebel lords who opposed me. Henry had grown up Catholic, as I had, but he had attended Knox’s services and sat through the tirades against me and the Catholic Church. Now Henry decided that he would make his mark by forcing the Protestants into submission and returning Scotland to the one true church.

  “It is my desire to be recognized as the greatest king in all of Europe!” he announced; I cringed and said nothing. Restoring the country to Catholicism was the means by which he intended to accomplish his goal.

  By Christmas of 1565, barely five months after our spectacular wedding, it was clear to me and surely becoming evident to everyone else that whatever love Henry and I had borne each other—if indeed he had ever truly loved me, and if the desire I had felt for him had really been love—had vanished like the early-morning mists on the firth.

  The ones who knew best were the Four Maries, often witnesses to what happened between us. I had decided to pardon a nobleman and his whole large family who had been enemies of Lord Lennox for a long time. When Henry heard of the pardon, he stormed into my outer chamber, where I sat with my ladies, stitching a little garment for the bairn. He did not bother to greet me or my ladies civilly but merely announced loudly, “You have pardoned people without asking my permission. I forbid any further pardons, madam!”

  Startled, I looked up from my needlework. How dare he speak to me in such a manner! My ladies, who had been chatting amiably among themselves, fell silent and gaped at Henry.

  “You forget yourself, my lord,” I retorted. I was trembling, but I tried to keep my voice steady. “You have no authority to forbid me to do anything.”

  “I am your husband!” Henry shouted. “I am your superior!”

  There was a gasp from my ladies as Henry and I glared at each other.

  “You may believe yourself superior to the man who cleans your boots,” I said coldly, “but you are certainly not. superior to me.”

  Bellowing incoherently, my husband turned and stormed out even more angrily than he had entered.

  There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence. “We have our differences,” I said and picked up the tiny gown. But I was too upset to take another stitch and burst into tears.

  The Maries rushed to comfort me. “How dare he speak to you in that manner!” they cried.

  Most of them were not strangers to unhappy love affairs. Mary Fleming was still deeply involved with William Maitland, who had long enjoyed my confidence as my secretary of state. But I had come to rely more heavily on David Rizzio; Maitland resented Davy, and that had driven a painful wedge between La Flamin and me. Beaton had broken off her affair with Randolph, Elizabeth’s ambassador to England and generally no friend to me, and was in love with a man named Alexander Ogilvie. But Ogilvie was possibly about to marry another woman, a situation that kept Beaton in a state of misery. Livingston, married for three years to John Sempill, did her share of complaining about men in general and her husband in particular. Only Seton, deeply pious and claiming to have no interest in marriage, had little to say on the subject but was always quietly sympathetic. None of them could bear Henry Stuart.

  Henry received the symbols of kingship at a ceremony of investiture on the Feast of Candlemas, the second of February. I had informed him that he would be denied the right to use the royal arms of Scotland on his coat of arms. This infuriated him, as I had expected it would, but I was not done. He still signed his name Henry R, the R for Rex, or king, and he always succeeded in getting his signature on the document first, in the place of honor on the left, but I was determined he would not receive the Crown Matrimonial, which had to be approved by Parliament. Without that, he could never be crowned, would never rule as king, and had no right to succeed me if I should die before him. I would have him where I now wanted him: not in my bed, but under my control. Henry would have to wait until he was worthy of the responsibility and the honor.

  So far he was not. I heard far too many tales of his drunken carousing and of his dalliances with low women and even, though I scarcely believed it, with men.

  The investiture ceremony was followed by a banquet for the foreign ambassadors who had come from all over the Continent to attend. I took this occasion, with so many dignitaries present, to remind them that I, and none other, was the true queen of England as well as Scotland. Nothing more was said about it, but the look of shock on all those aristocratic faces was something to behold.

  If I could not enjoy a happy marriage to a loving husband, then I was more determined than ever to have the English throne.

  ***

  On the twenty-fourth of February in 1566, I attended the wedding of James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, to Lady Jean Gordon, sister of the recently forgiven George Gordon, earl of Huntly. Lord Bothwell was a close friend of Lord Huntly, and I knew that he had demonstrated much interest in Lady Jean. But his suit had been rejected until a broken heart changed the picture dramatically.

  Lady Jean was deeply in love with Alexander Ogilvie, but he had broken off with her and married Mary Beaton. This was the very same man Beaton had been weeping over just weeks earlier. Now it was Lady Jean who came to me weeping over the perfidy of her beloved Lord Ogilvie.

  “Why has he done this to me?” she wailed, bursting into fresh tears.

  “It is, I think, the way of men,” I said, remembering that Madame de Poitiers, for all her charms, had not been able to keep King Henri from Lady Fleming’s bed. “Now it must be your way to make the best of your life,” I counseled. I comforted her and recommended Lord Bothwell to her.

  Lady Jean seemed to take my advice to heart, and soon she came to tell me that plans were being made for the wedding, though she still wore black to show that she was like a widow in mourning for her lost love.

  I sent immediately to my wardrobe mistress and ordered suitable lengths of cloth of silver and white taffeta, and then called upon my seamstresses to make Lady Jean a wedding gown. The banns were read out for their wedding; I was present at the signing of their marriage contract, and after the ceremony at St. Giles I entertained the bridal couple at a banquet at Holyrood. Bothwell seemed content—he had acquired a large dowry from his bride—but the new Lady Jean Hepburn looked glum.

  After a few days with her husband at Seton Palace, the bride was wearing black again and had gone alone to Bothwell’s Crichton Castle while Bothwell returned to Edinburgh on his own. In fact, he asked my permission to stay at Holyrood Palace. I granted it, promising that we would sup together soon.

  I sighed and wondered aloud to Seton when he had gone, “Do you not think it possible for two people to be happy together?”

  “Our sole happiness is in God,” she assured me, and I wondered if she was right.

  Chapter 37

  Murder

  FROM THE END of February and into early March, much was going on without my knowledge. William Maitland, La Flamin’s lover, had dropped broad hints to Henry that I was having an affair with David Rizzio, my private secretary, whom Maitland despised. This was a complete fabrication and Sir William knew it, but he was not above making mischief. Henry, jealous of many people for many things, swallowed this lie. It had been easy to convince my dissolute husband that he had been betrayed by a man who had once been his close friend.

  On a winter night in 1566, when I was six months’ pregnant with child, I was witness to an unspeakable event. I was in the small tower room hung with crimson and green just off my bedchamber, enjoying a late meal with several friends. Among them was David Rizzio. Henry appeared unexpectedly. We seldom dined together, he having no interest in my supper parties and card games
and much preferringbn to go drinking in the town with his disreputable friends.

  While we spoke briefly, in a not unfriendly way, a half dozen of Henry’s so-called gentlemen burst into the tower room from a secret circular stairway that connected my bedchamber to Henry’s directly below. The men, all heavily armed, boldly ordered David Rizzio to accompany them to answer to some unspecified charge.

  “What is this about, my lord?” I asked Henry sharply. “Why are these men here? Who let them in?”

  “I know not, my lady,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder in a way meant to soothe me. I did not believe him. Henry surely knew what it was about and had a role in it.

  When the intruders continued to insist, more rudely now, I rose, angrily demanding, “What is Signor Rizzio’s offense?”

  “A grievous one,” growled one of the men.

  I shook off Henry’s hand and ordered the men to leave. “Under pain of death for treason!” I shouted.

  But one of the men drew a dagger and lunged at David Rizzio. Davy tried to evade the knife, crying out to me to save him. My guests moved to defend him, and in the melee that followed, the table and stools were overturned. Silver plate, goblets, and platters of food crashed to the floor. Ewers of wine spilled everywhere. Candles were extinguished, save for one, by whose flickering light the horrific scene unfolded.

  The main stairway to my outer chamber had been locked; I was certain of that, for I had locked it myself, but someone—possibly even Henry—had unlocked it. That door now burst open and a much larger crowd of men surged through the outer chamber and into my bedchamber. They were armed with swords and daggers; one carried a pistol. My guests were quickly overpowered and watched helplessly as the assassins seized the terrified David Rizzio and dragged him into my bedchamber.