Tudors Versus Stewarts

by Linda Porter

  But his warrior’s life and his wanderings, his betrayal of the Stewarts and his distant period of power in the 1520s were now well behind him. Angus spent the last years of his life doggedly pursuing the restitution of his lands, supported by his loyal brother, George. He never forgot that, first and foremost, he was a Douglas and he had little respect for the niceties of court etiquette. Mary of Guise, a woman he could not abide, once rebuked him for turning up at her court clad in armour and was told: ‘It is only my old dad Lord Drummond’s coat, a very kindly coat to me. I cannot part with it.’ Towards the end of his life, he regretted that he had not seen his grandson, Lord Darnley, the child of Margaret Douglas and the earl of Lennox. Yet he was not willing, when he died in 1557, to leave Margaret his lands, entailing them instead on the male Douglas line. Though she had forgiven her second husband on her deathbed, Margaret Tudor would not have been pleased.

  The Scottish defeat at Pinkie, remembered in popular folklore as ‘Black Saturday’, sent waves throughout Europe but was especially significant in France, where Henry II, determined to challenge the English, began to perceive how he could derive the maximum advantage from the renewed reliance of this small northern ally on his support and goodwill. During the year 1547–8 he concentrated his financial inducements, his largesse, on the leading Scottish magnates – Arran, Argyll, Huntly (who escaped from his English prison at the end of 1548 and immediately, through Mary of Guise, offered his services to the French king), the earl of Angus and his brother, Sir George Douglas. As has been pointed out, together with the Crown lands and those controlled by the queen dowager, the territories and clan loyalties these nobles held made up the greater part of Scotland.22 The Scottish author of The Complaynt of Scotlande, a rebuff to English propaganda, wrote that realms were not conquered by words but rather by blood. He might have added financial inducement into the mix, for it was undoubtedly powerful, and the English nobility, many receiving generous pensions from the emperor Charles V, were no more immune to it than their Scottish counterparts. But the person who would be most directly affected by the Scots’ acceptance that their independence from England could not be achieved without French military and monetary aid was their young queen, now in her fifth year and fast developing into a bonny, self-confident and intelligent child.

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  IMMEDIATELY AFTER the rout at Pinkie, Mary Queen of Scots was moved at night to Inchmahome Priory on an island in the Lake of Menteith on the upper reaches of the rivers Forth and Teith, north of Stirling, a city which had been her home since she was nine months old. Mary’s reaction to being spirited away in such tense circumstances is not known but she was certainly safer in this remote part of central Scotland than if she had stayed put and perhaps suffered a siege in Stirling Castle. After three weeks, when it became apparent that Somerset intended no attack on Edinburgh or further inroads into the heart of Scotland, Mary was able to leave. She spent the autumn of 1547 and the early part of the winter of 1548 back in Stirling but there was continued concern over her safety and discussions with the French were intensifying following Arran’s agreement in principle with Henry II of France in January 1548. Though it would be some months before the detail of these negotiations was finalized and put to the Scottish parliament, Mary was moved on the last day of February in preparation for her journey to France. Accompanied by her guardians, Lords Livingston and Erskine, who had day-to-day responsibility for her education and security, she spent the next five months in Dumbarton Castle on the west coast of Scotland, the former stronghold of Matthew Stewart, earl of Lennox. The irony of this was probably lost on Mary, though we have no idea how much she was told of the state of her realm and that the castle’s traditional lord was now in English pay.

  Indeed, we know very little of her early education and daily life. She appears to have been an energetic and largely healthy child, though she did contract measles while at Dumbarton and the inevitable rumours of her death, from what was admittedly a serious childhood disease in those days, swirled around. There are no surviving portraits of Mary from this period but those painted in her early teens suggest a pretty girl. She became tall for her age and soon demonstrated the easy charm and affability of both sides of her family. At five years old she would probably, given her status as queen, have commenced lessons in the basics of reading and writing. She spoke Scots and strove to keep it up during her time in France, but no English (which she did not learn to write until she had fled Scotland in 1568) and apparently little, if any, French, which is somewhat odd given her mother’s background and ambitions for her. The formal part of Mary’s education was, however, to follow in France.

  The earl of Arran, despite criticisms of his conduct and his apparent capitulation to the French when offered a duchy in Poitou and the revenues of the estate that went with it, was never going to let his little queen go without getting the best terms and assurances that he could for Scotland. In this, he had the full support of the Scottish parliament and the natural enthusiasm of Mary of Guise to see her daughter become a queen in two countries. The governor’s price, Scotland’s price, as he justified it, for the French marriage was the arrival of sufficient French troops to defend Scotland against further English depredations, for Henry II to acknowledge Arran’s continued role as the head of Scottish government and for the king of France to ‘keep and defend the realm, laws and liberties thereof … as has been kept in all Kings’ times of Scotland bypast and to marry her upon no other person but upon the said Dolphin only.’23

  The Scottish parliament, meeting in tents outside the walls of the east coast town of Haddington, then held by the English, ratified the treaty on 7 July. The French force, under the Sieur d’Esse, had arrived in mid-June and disembarked at Leith. It duly laid siege to the English fortification at Haddington but was not able to recapture the town. But for Mary of Guise, this was a small setback. The day after the Treaty of Haddington was signed she wrote in triumph to her brothers at the French court: ‘I leave tomorrow to send her [Mary] to him [Henry II].’ For the Guise family, upstarts or no, the marriage of their Stewart niece into the French royal family promised to make them the most powerful men in France and power brokers in Europe.

  The greatest victory, however, was that claimed by Henry II in a letter to the Ottoman Sultan:

  I have [he wrote] pacified the kingdom of Scotland, which I hold and possess with such authority and obedience as I do in France, to which two kingdoms I am joining another, namely England, which by perpetual union, alliance and confederation is now under my control, as if it were my own self: the King, his subjects and his powers; in such a manner that the said three kingdoms together can now be regarded as one and the same monarchy.24

  Had they known of these claims, Arran and the Scottish nobility might have winced, but would no doubt still have believed that being a client state of France was preferable to union with England. Yet insofar as Henry II’s posturing accurately reflected the position of England, it was an empty boast. Neither widespread revolts in the summer of 1549 nor the ensuing fall of Somerset brought England under French control. The regime of the duke’s erstwhile friend, John Dudley, now duke of Northumberland, took a more conciliatory and pro-French view, returning Boulogne, the great prize of Henry VIII’s 1544 war, for a much needed payment of 400,000 crowns into the English exchequer. The rapprochement even led to talks about a marriage between Edward VI and Henry II’s eldest daughter, Élisabeth, though Edward VI died before he could be united with the French princess, whose sizeable dowry he found as attractive as the young lady’s person. Even if the marriage had one day gone ahead, this scarcely meant that Tudor England was under French control – merely that Henry II liked to think it might be.

  Mary Queen of Scots left Dumbarton for her new life in France on 29 July 1548, kissing her mother goodbye and walking with all the self-possession of royalty on to Henry II’s royal galley, one of an escort sent to transport her safely through the dangerous waters of the English Channel, where En
glish ships were expected to try and intercept her. But it was the weather, rather than the English, that held up Mary’s departure. Delayed by storms for a week, Mary and her retinue finally arrived in Brittany, at St-Pol-de-Léon, on 18 August 1548. It would be thirteen years before she saw Scotland again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Daughter of France

  ‘She is the most perfect child that I have ever seen.’

  Henry II of France to the French constable Montmorency, describing Mary Queen of Scots in December 1548

  MARY’S EXUBERANCE and natural confidence at such an early age have been much remarked upon but she was still only five and a half years old and the voyage from Scotland had been arduous. After landing in Brittany, it was felt advisable that she rest before commencing her journey to the French court. Nothing less than a full royal progress had been planned for the young queen. It took her first to Nantes and then by barge along the Loire, visiting some of this beautiful region’s main towns, via Tours and Orléans, where the journey would be concluded overland. Mary was to take up residence with the French royal children at the château of Carrières in St Denis, to the north of Paris. She did not meet Henry II until the second week of November, in his favourite palace of St Germain, just outside the capital. By that time, she had already won the hearts of many French citizens who had warmed to this attractive, confident child.

  Her first few days in France were passed in the peaceful surroundings of a Dominican convent at Morlaix. Some time for recuperation was needed by the rest of her substantial entourage, many of whom had suffered more than Mary during the sea crossing. For Mary had a considerable number of companions and servants to support her and ease the pain of parting from the familiarity of Scotland and her mother. Accompanying the queen were three of her illegitimate half-brothers, Lords James, Robert and John Stewart. It is possible that Mary had not been much in contact with these siblings before leaving Scotland. Lord James Stewart was the son of Margaret Erskine, the favourite mistress of James V. At seventeen, he was the oldest of the brothers (the other two each had different mothers) and en route for university in Paris. Though he also spent time at the French court, Lord James never took his sights off political developments in Scotland and was to become a major player in the unfolding drama of Mary Stewart’s life.

  Four young Scottish noblewomen of the same age and sharing her first name, the Marys Beaton, Seton, Livingston and Fleming, also went to France with the queen, though they were separated from her once she had settled in to the French court. Lords Erskine and Livingston, her official guardians, the nurse who had cared for her since her infancy, Janet Sinclair, and her lady governess, Lady Janet Fleming, née Stewart, an illegitimate daughter of James IV and widow of Lord Fleming, who had died at Pinkie, completed her household staff. Lady Fleming, a sensual and handsome woman who shared her father’s weakness for passionate romantic adventure, was a confidante of Mary of Guise. As befitted her role as Queen of Scots, Mary also had her own staff of spiritual advisers.

  So Mary was certainly not isolated from her Scottish roots as she sailed along the Loire. The journey was not without incident, as a serious outbreak of dysentery, perhaps caused by drinking water, nearly felled Lords Livingston and Erskine and proved fatal to the young brother of Mary Seton. At the official level, however, all went smoothly. On 21 September 1548, Mary made her entry into Angers, a splendid fortified town in the western Loire. A magnificent display greeted the Queen of Scots. She and her party processed from the gate of St Nicholas to the main church, where speeches were made by the mayor and gifts of sugared almonds, fruits and jams, all demonstrating the bounty of the region, were provided for the visitors. The Scottish queen’s governors received presents of red and white wine. Mary’s own regal status was underlined when she granted letters of remission to a number of prisoners in the town. The organization of this and Mary’s other entries into towns along her route was entrusted to Henry II’s valet de chambre, the Sieur de la Cabassoles. The king himself, however, had made it very clear to the inhabitants of Angers two months previously that he expected them to put on their very best for Mary:

  As our very dear and beloved daughter and cousin the Queen of Scotland will shortly be arriving in our kingdom, we wish that by the towns and places where she will pass, that she should be well honoured and well treated as if she were our own daughter. And for this cause, we command and expressly entreat you that when the said Queen passes by our town of Angers you will come before her with the best company of high-ranking men that can be assembled in order to receive and honour her and make gifts of wine, fruits and other offerings …1

  Evidently the good citizens of Angers responded with enthusiasm to these instructions.

  At Tours, Mary was met by her maternal grandmother, Antoinette de Bourbon, and the half-brother she had never seen, her mother’s son, François de Longueville. Both were delighted with her. Even before she had met Mary, the duchess of Guise sought to reassure her own anxious daughter in Scotland that all would be well now the child was in France. After meeting Mary, Antoinette wrote to her own son, the future cardinal of Lorraine: ‘I assure you, she is the prettiest and best for her age that you ever saw. She has auburn hair, with a fine complexion, and I think that when she comes of age she will be a beautiful girl, because her skin is delicate and white.’2 The sixteenth century prized pale skin as a mark of true beauty and Mary impressed at an early age.

  To judge from his comments, the man who was to take responsibility for the direction of Mary’s life for the next twelve years was himself instantly charmed by the little girl who now joined his family. Perhaps it was his own dramatic and often unhappy childhood that made Henry II an attentive father, determined to do his best for his children and for the Queen of Scots, who had so providentially come under his protection and would, he hoped, allow him one day to unite the three crowns of France, Scotland and England.

  Henry II was twenty-nine years old when Mary arrived in France and the father of four children – Francis, his heir, two girls, Élisabeth and Claude, and Louis, who would die of the measles not long after. Carefully nurtured and educated, they did not have to endure the dislocation that had shaped Henry’s early years or the feeling of being second best that his father, Francis I, had so unfortunately inculcated in him. The entire balance of Henry’s life had been thrown out of kilter by the humiliating defeat visited on Francis I by the emperor Charles V at the battle of Pavia in northern Italy in 1525. Francis was imprisoned for a year and the price of his release was high, especially for his two eldest boys, the dauphin (also Francis) and Henry, who were to be sent to Spain as hostages. Henry was not quite seven years old and the effect on him of an increasingly hard captivity was profound. Although the boys arrived in Spain in 1526 with a considerable retinue of servants, their lives were made much more difficult when their father double-crossed Charles V in creating the League of Cognac two years later. They were subsequently deprived of their French household and sent to the fortress of Pedrazza in the mountains north of Segovia in central Spain. By now speaking more Spanish than French, existing on a frugal diet and not allowed any visitors, their outlook seemed bleak until Queen Isabella, the Portuguese wife of Charles V, intervened to alleviate their condition. Concerned for their health, the queen provided money and instructions to improve the boys’ well-being. Charles V’s aunt, Margaret of Austria, also added her voice to pleas for better treatment for the two French princes. But even then, matters proceeded slowly. In 1529 a huge ransom of two million gold ecus (approximately £320 million today) was demanded for their release and a representative of Francis I was not allowed to see the boys until the money had been gathered. He was so appalled by their forlorn condition and ragged clothes that he burst into tears. Finally, on 1 July 1530, accompanying Charles V’s sister, Eleanor, who was to marry Francis I, the boys were handed back on a raft in the middle of the river Bidassoa, the Pyrenean boundary between France and Spain. They had been exiles for four years
.

  Henry never hid his contempt for his Spanish gaolers or his hatred of Charles V. When it came his turn to challenge the man who ruled most of Europe, he was very happy to take up the Valois cause. Not that it seemed, until the summer of 1536, that his destiny would allow him such revenge. The unexpected death of the dauphin that year devastated Francis I, who had adored his outgoing elder son. With the more timid and reserved Henry now his heir, Francis could not hide his disappointment, informing the bewildered seventeen-year-old that he must strive to be more like his dead brother. The king himself, however, did not make much attempt to transfer his affections to Henry, reserving them instead for his third son, Charles.

  If all of this made Henry miserable, his marriage in 1533 to Catherine de Medici, the plain fourteen-year-old heiress of one of the wealthiest families in Europe and niece of the pope, was a further contributory factor. It is an often overlooked irony that Henry VIII, godfather to Henry II and for whom he was named, objected to the match on the grounds that the bride was not good enough for the second son of a French king. But though Catherine soon fell deeply in love with her husband, the marriage seemed to be a disaster for almost a decade. Henry II was besotted with his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, duchess of Valentinois, a woman twenty years his senior. His own mother had died when he was five, he did not like his stepmother, Eleanor, despite her attempts to become closer to him, and, without seeming too Freudian, it is hard to escape the view that his relationship with Diane de Poitiers might not at least partly be explained by the absence of a maternal figure in his life. Indeed, it was Diane who kissed little Henry goodbye when he went into exile in Spain and on his return Diane was there to help train him in the courtly manners that he had lost. Small wonder, then, that he came to adore her. She was probably his mistress by 1538, a handsome rather than beautiful woman, with deep-set eyes, a prominent nose and slightly pointed chin. Several nude paintings of her suggest that her main attraction was a fine figure, with lovely breasts. Certainly, Henry II seems to have thought so, as he often fondled them on front of his courtiers. For the rest of his life, she exercised a powerful personal and political influence and though Catherine de Medici understandably resented Diane greatly, she owed the preservation of her marriage to her rival’s insistence that Henry should perform his marital duties with the wife who was so obviously less attractive in every way.