by Linda Porter
This was a bold move but there were doubts about its legality, as some members of the judiciary in England had the temerity to point out. But Edward refused to listen to their arguments and was supported by Northumberland – unsurprisingly, since Lady Jane Grey had conveniently become his daughter-in-law a matter of weeks earlier. When Edward died on 6 July at Greenwich, Lady Jane was proclaimed queen and brought by river to the Tower of London, at first her palace but later her prison. Mary had fled to East Anglia, a conservative, largely Catholic area where she was a major landowner. Elizabeth, whose reaction to the crisis remains opaque, stayed put at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, perhaps wondering why her extravagant overtures of devotion to her brother had not borne fruit.
After nearly two weeks of uncertainty and the threat of civil war, Mary Tudor, a woman of thirty-seven who had survived psychological and emotional torment following the divorce of her parents, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, as well as political marginalization for much of her adult life, acquired sufficient support in the east of England and the Thames Valley to drive a wedge through the increasingly divided Privy Council in London. Northumberland had left the capital with a substantial force but it never saw military action. Ever the pragmatist, he knew he had lost. Even a last-minute rediscovery of his Catholic roots could not save his life and he was beheaded at the end of August 1553, one of the few immediate victims of the Succession Crisis, as it has come to be known.
The Scottish reaction to these unfolding events in England has largely escaped attention but there was certainly an impact on Scottish politics and not merely because Mary of Guise was yet to achieve the removal of Arran as regent. Once more the Lennox family entered the frame. Matthew and especially Margaret had been quiet but determined opponents of Edward VI’s religious changes; their house at Temple Newsam outside Leeds was a gathering place for northern Catholics and, in a region that had not forgotten the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII’s religious changes in 1536 nor forgiven the dissolution of the monasteries, this gave the Lennoxes considerable influence. They had been careful, however, not to offend or contradict Edward VI as publicly as his sister Mary had done and when their second surviving son, the future Henry, Lord Darnley was born, Margaret felt it prudent to put in an appearance at court with her baby, who had deliberately been given Tudor rather than Scottish names.
Margaret Douglas was a childhood friend of the new queen and in 1553 the Lennox stock rose dramatically in England. They were showered with gifts at Mary’s coronation – the best horse from Edward VI’s stable and some of the late king’s clothes for young Darnley. Apartments were found for them in Whitehall Palace and they were generously provided with tapestries, expensive furnishings, clothing and jewels (a gold belt set with diamonds and rubies for Margaret) as well as having their household’s expenses in London paid for by the Crown and a grant of 3,000 marks a year from wool trade taxes. And if all of this did not make the Lennoxes think their time might have finally arrived, the queen’s increasing coolness towards her half-sister, Elizabeth, was interpreted by the imperial ambassador, at least, as a sign that Margaret would take precedence at court and might even be regarded as Queen Mary’s heir. Yet though Mary was clearly delighted to be able to favour her cousin, there is no evidence that she ever contemplated such a move.
With so many reasons to be hopeful and Mary of Guise looking for support, the earl of Lennox found that, once again, he might be considered as a player in Scotland, despite his defection to Henry VIII a decade earlier. Mary of Guise wrote to him (the letter has not survived) asking for his support against Arran. In return, she offered to restore his lands in Scotland. Mary Tudor and her council decided to support the earl, but only on condition that he double-crossed Mary of Guise. Thwarting the French dowager would also strike a blow against France, a policy favoured by the queen of England, who was half-Spanish and a natural ally of the Habsburgs, not the French. So the earl of Lennox was encouraged to ‘secretly enter into communication with the Regent [Arran] against the Dowager, with a view not only to driving her from the country, but to making himself King if possible and throwing Scottish affairs into confusion. If he is able to do this, the Queen will help him with money to the best of her ability.’6
This scheme, which sounds somewhat fanciful, might well have foundered on the deep-seated animosity between the Hamiltons and the Lennox Stewarts, even if the increasingly desperate Arran could have been induced to see the earl of Lennox as a temporary solution to his own difficulties. It does, though, indicate how importantly Matthew Stewart’s claim to the Scottish throne was viewed in England. In fact, nothing came of it but this did not quell the earl of Lennox’s ambition. For much of the 1550s he continued to intrigue and plot, hoping to restore his Scottish fortunes. But his time had not yet come.
The French, meanwhile, followed Mary Tudor’s accession and pro-Habsburg policy with alarm. Their fears seemed fully realized when, after prolonged and detailed treaty negotiations, she was married to Philip of Spain, son of the Emperor Charles V, in the summer of 1554. Mary was no warmonger but she felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude to her cousin Charles, despite the fact that during the reigns of her father and brother he had done nothing besides giving verbal support and sending a boat to allow her to escape from England if she wanted. Mary, showing true Tudor spirit, had stayed but it was no thanks to Charles V that she triumphed over Lady Jane Grey in 1553, since he never lifted a finger to help her. Nevertheless, she regarded him as a father figure and she fell deeply in love with his son, who may have been a prince of Spain but was a true Burgundian in his features and colouring. If her Habsburg husband and the emperor, her cousin, wanted to involve England in a war with France, Mary would not oppose them. Indeed, her council and the majority of her nobles, eager for gain and glory in France, were in full support. In 1557, when English forces crossed the Channel for France once again, the French suffered their most humiliating defeat of the sixteenth century at the battle of St Quentin. Revenge was not long in coming. In the unpromising dead of winter, a time not normally regarded as suitable for a military campaign, Henry II inflicted a blow on English pride fully commensurate with that he had suffered himself months earlier. Crossing the frozen marshland that surrounded Calais, the French won back this poorly armed and defended fortress, finally ending an English presence in France that had once been a substantial empire.
It was not just Mary’s foreign policy that affected Scotland, however. Her determination, one might almost call it a crusade, to restore the Catholic faith and quell religious opposition led to an exodus of Protestants from England. Many went to Switzerland or Germany, where they joined forces with Scottish religious exiles, creating, for the first time, a ‘British’ Protestant identity. This was, though, a gradual outcome. An English congregation in Frankfurt asked John Knox, increasingly radicalized by contacts with Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin, to be their minister but he was such a divisive figure that he lasted only a year. His assault on the Book of Common Prayer enraged his flock but he had already fallen out with the regime of Edward VI before the young king’s death. Cranmer and Northumberland found him too curmudgeonly for their liking but he remained as one of the king’s chaplains and even when Mary came to the throne, he bided his time in the north. He did not leave England until the beginning of 1554. Returning to Scotland in 1555, he found a country where religious opposition to the established Catholic faith was growing but was not yet ready to challenge the status quo seriously.
There continued to be tensions along the Anglo–Scottish border and the French tried to stir up trouble amongst Mary Tudor’s subjects in Ireland. It seemed that very little in the centuries-old struggle between the two British kingdoms had altered. The only thing that Mary of Guise and Mary Tudor had in common was their first name and the Catholic religion and even here there were important differences in how they approached the spread of heresy. In all other respects, they were natural rivals. Mary of Guise may not have been b
orn a Stewart but she was committed to ensuring that the Stewart dynasty survived and, in her regency, to assuming the powers and persona of a Stewart monarch herself. She believed she owed her daughter no less.
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MARY OF GUISE had waited more than eleven years since the death of her husband to assume a regency that she had always believed was rightly hers. But the triumph was very much that of France as well, and lest the Scots who attended Mary’s investiture as regent should be in any doubt of where power lay, it was d’Oisel, the French ambassador, who placed the crown of Scotland on her head and gave her the sword of state and sceptre to hold. At this highly symbolic moment, the Scottish nobles who had chosen French influence over capitulation to the English could not have been left in any doubt of the implications of their decision. Franco-Scotland was a reality and Mary of Guise its embodiment. The country’s actual monarch, a twelve-year-old girl being brought up as a French queen consort, was irrelevant to these proceedings.
The new regent intended to display her power and keep a court that would underline her prestige. While her household expenses were not exorbitant, being roughly equivalent to those that she had incurred as a queen consort, her public image was important. She left her mark on the Scottish coinage by incorporating the cross of Lorraine, a Guise symbol, on coins that were issued before her daughter’s marriage to the dauphin.
Aided by d’Oisel as her newly appointed lieutenant governor, Yves du Rubay as French vice chancellor and Bartholomew de Villemore as her comptroller, with responsibility for financial management, Mary of Guise set about imposing her own French-influenced style of government and justice on Scotland. Though many of the Scottish clerics and lords who served on Arran’s Privy Council remained in office, the assumption of key positions, including the possession of the Great Seal of Scotland by du Rubay, was always going to be a possible source of friction with all but the most Francophile of Scottish magnates. And what Mary of Guise overlooked, or perhaps discounted while she could call upon the financial and military support of France, was that resentment could lead to more serious disaffection. The country’s foreign policy was already dictated by Henry II but in domestic matters the regent had somewhat more leeway. Though she was aware of the need to tread carefully with the Scottish nobility, she was quite capable of challenging them in pursuit of her aims. One of the major reasons for this was Mary of Guise’s view that government and justice in Scotland needed to be more centralized. Undercutting the authority of the Scottish nobility in their local power bases was always going to be a difficult course of action and one where immediate gains might have much more dubious long-term implications. A particular case in point was the regent’s attempt to bring to heel the earl of Huntly, her late husband’s childhood friend and a man who was not known as the ‘Cock o’ the North’ for nothing.
The earl had been a supporter of the regent at various times in her decade-long struggle with Arran, but he began to abuse his position and the rewards she gave him in a manner that put enhancement of his local position above the authority of the Crown. Determined to gain control of the whole of Moray in north-eastern Scotland, Huntly’s high-handed behaviour in dispensing summary justice to local clan leaders and his abject failure to follow this up militarily were too embarrassing to be ignored. The lady who believed that it was her duty as a de facto Stewart monarch to dispense justice herself came in person to Huntly’s region and made her point by holding justice assizes in all the major towns in 1556. Initially, Mary of Guise imprisoned Huntly in Edinburgh Castle but having extracted a large fine and sent him packing to the Borders, Mary felt sufficiently confident to restore him slowly to favour. What she privately thought of his magnificent palace at Strathbogie, or the equally splendid castle at Balvenie owned by the earl of Atholl, Huntly’s son-in-law, we do not know, but her visits to both these properties must have brought home to her the power and pretensions of Scotland’s leading families. She was not cowed, however, for she had earlier set out her commitment to making a difference in the administration of Scottish justice in a letter to her brother, the cardinal of Lorraine: ‘my determination [is] to see justice take a straightforward course, and they that find me a little severe, they will not endure it, and say that these are the laws of the French, and that their old laws are good, which for the most part are the greatest injustices in the world, not in themselves, but from the way they are administered.’7
Clear in her aims as Mary of Guise undoubtedly was, she could not always achieve them. Money was a particular problem and one that brought her into conflict with parliament. The regent was perfectly willing to work with Scottish institutions but in her efforts to get parliament to approve a new tax regime she was unsuccessful. A tax proposed on goods and wealth rather than valuation of lands seemed to be the precursor of annual tax demands by the Crown. Feeling threatened, the lesser Scottish nobility turned out in force for the parliamentary session of 1556 and voted down the new proposals. Mary of Guise believed the extra money was needed if England invaded yet again as a result of the deteriorating relations between France and Mary Tudor’s England. This did not happen, but the regent had lost a major battle.
It was not the only cause of alarm for her regime as the 1550s progressed, for religious opposition was also becoming more pervasive, though the full force of Protestant dissent was yet to be realized. There were attempts at reform in the Scottish Catholic Church, but vested interests remained strong and there was a fundamental belief that laymen should not be included in any considerations of change. This was completely at odds with the beliefs of evangelical reformers, radicalized by their direct involvement in matters of organization and the development of doctrine. A new social class was growing in Scotland, made up of lesser nobility and tenants of Church lands who had prospered from the practice of ‘feuing’, whereby Church property increasingly ended up in the hands of laymen in return for a yearly rent, or by the direct transfer of Church lands to private ownership. Articulate, comfortably off and frequently attracted to new religious ideas, many of these Scots formed their own small ‘privy kirks’ where visiting ministers, such as John Knox, administered the sacraments. But Knox would not stay quiet for long and it was from men like him that the steadily increasing band of Scottish Protestants heard preaching that told them that the Mass was idolatrous. Many of his listeners hedged their bets, not yet ready to make a clean public break. Disgusted, Knox went back to Geneva in 1556. But his time, and that of the growing number of Scots who shared his ideas, was growing ever closer.
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IN 1557, as warfare broke out between England and France, the relationship between France and Scotland became more strained. Mary of Guise tried to do Henry II’s bidding by sending an army to invade England. Undermanned and acutely mindful of past failures under such circumstances, the Scots went reluctantly to the Borders where they eventually argued with their French commanders and chose to return home instead of fighting. The regent had demonstrated her loyalty to the king of France by accompanying the abortive expedition in person and this was her second humiliation at the hands of the Scots in a few months, as parliament had earlier taken her to task for the continued delay in the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the dauphin. This had been a recurring theme since one of the young queen’s more serious bouts of illness two years previously. At that time Mary of Guise sent her brother Charles a letter which reveals the full extent of her frustrations, as well as her accurate assessment of the problems with which she was confronted. In its heartfelt description of the difficulties faced by any regent, but especially a woman, it is reminiscent of a similar missive written in the 1550s by the regent of the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary, to her own brother, the Emperor Charles V. Scotland’s politicians had told her, Mary of Guise reported:
that it would be putting the cart before the oxen and deceiving myself if I thought of settling anything before the marriage is accomplished … Moreover, my daughter’s illness has put many things in doubt, and, to
keep nothing back from you, men’s minds have been so changeable and in such a state of suspense that those from whom I hoped the most I have found more estranged than I have ever seen them, not just since I have ruled them but since I came to Scotland … God knows, brother, what a life I lead. It is no small thing to bring a young nation to a state of perfection and to an unwonted subservience to those who wish to see justice reign. Great responsibilities are easily undertaken but not so easily discharged to the satisfaction of God. Happy is he who has least to do with worldly affairs. I can safely say that in twenty years past I have not had one year of rest and I think that if I were to say not one month I should not be far wrong, for a troubled spirit is the greatest trial of all.8
By the spring of 1558, however, and despite signs of growing unrest in Scotland, the queen regent’s troubled spirit was temporarily lifted when her daughter’s marriage to the dauphin Francis was finally celebrated. In fact, it is hard to see how it could have come about much sooner, since Francis was only fourteen and his bride a year older. The timing of the marriage followed the huge propaganda victory of the French over the English when they retook Calais and was, at least in part, intended to keep the pressure on the regime of Mary Tudor by publicly reinforcing the ambition of Henry II to unite the Crowns of France and Scotland. It was also a recognition of Mary of Guise’s loyalty to the French king and a demonstration to wavering supporters of the French alliance in Scotland that Henry would keep his word.
