Tudors Versus Stewarts

by Linda Porter

  Elizabeth’s rejection of Arran cast a pall over Anglo–Scottish relations. But it was the death of Francis II and Mary’s projected return to Scotland that brought everything into sharp relief. While she had been queen consort of France, there were clearly opportunities for men like Lord James to exercise real power and influence in the running of Scotland. It was in his own interests, and not merely those of the Protestant lords, to ensure clarification of Mary’s intentions and to brief her on what could and could not be done.

  Lord James met his sister at St-Dizier, which lay in the Guise heartlands of north-eastern France, on 15 April 1561. It was not an interview she was likely to forget. Her brother was a man who did not mince his words, though he could be persuasively charming when necessary. He expected that she would listen to him. Of stern, even austere countenance, he resembled his father but lacked the good looks of James V. He was also much more self-contained than Mary and his strategy for facilitating her return to Scotland in a way that would be acceptable to her and her subjects was carefully considered. Cecil’s respect for his Scottish ally’s diplomatic skills was amply justified. For although Lord James was representing the Scottish Protestant lords, he was also a Stewart and concerned that his sister should rule with her personal dignity and beliefs intact.

  The five days he spent with her convinced Mary that she should pay him heed. So much so that she considered appointing him regent until her return (a post that Lord James would no doubt have welcomed) until she was subsequently made aware of the fact that her brother had gone straight to Paris after seeing her for discussions with Throckmorton, the English ambassador, and had then briefed Cecil and Elizabeth in London on his way home. Though she now had ample cause to wonder whose side Lord James was really on, Mary still preferred his advice over that of Leslie. She did not wish to return home to immediate hostilities and precipitate civil war. Instead, Lord James offered her a compromise – one that Mary found easier to accept than John Knox. She agreed to recognize Protestantism as the dominant religion in her country (despite the fact that the majority of the population were probably still Catholic in their beliefs) and work with her brother and his close ally, William Maitland of Lethington, her mother’s former secretary, as her chief advisers. Their part of the agreement was to ensure that the queen could practise her religion in private without interference. They also undertook to promote something perhaps even dearer to Mary’s heart: her claim to the English succession.

  Lord James went back to Scotland pleased with his success. He believed his sister was biddable but in this he was deceived. Mary would do precisely what she wanted when it suited her. For the present, however, she heeded the advice he gave her in a letter written the following month, which shows an underlying level of anxiety he probably did not reveal when they had talked at St-Dizier: ‘Madame,’ he wrote, ‘for the love of God, press no matters of religion, not for any man’s advice on the earth.’ For he assured Mary, in this long and detailed missive, that ‘I also promise your grace in presence of my God to adventure my blood and my life in the defence of your highness’s realm whenever that or the like occasion shall be offered without exception of any person under God.’1 In defence of her realm but not, explicitly, of her person. One wonders whether she noticed the distinction.

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  SCOTTISH POLITICS may have been thrown into confusion by the death of Francis II but 1560 had not been a good year for Elizabeth, either. Her dismissal of the Arran proposal highlighted the fraught question of marriage and appeared to her advisers to emphasize her own vulnerability. Cecil and the council simply could not accept that she would remain unmarried for much longer. Only Robert Dudley, her undisputed favourite, seems to have recognized all along that Elizabeth’s determination to remain single was never likely to be swayed. The mysterious death of his own neglected wife, Amy Robsart, in September caused speculation and scandal and had the perverse effect of freeing him while at the same time making marriage with the queen out of the question. Probably Elizabeth never seriously considered it anyway. Her emotional dependence on Dudley was extreme but she was always clear-headed enough to recognize that there were many, including her most trusted advisers, who harboured grave doubts about this son of executed traitor the duke of Northumberland.

  William Cecil, who disliked Dudley but accepted that he would have to work with him, became increasingly desperate. Affairs in Scotland, at least while Mary remained in France, seemed to be turning to England’s advantage but he could not seem to get his queen to take the business of ruling seriously. She was forever on progresses, hunting or dancing. She would not make decisions or listen to his earnest concerns. Mr Secretary was a prodigious worker, frequently at his desk until midnight, and his health began to suffer under the strain of business and the frustrations of the queen’s attitude. He considered resigning but his sense of duty and an underlying belief that Elizabeth’s qualities would somehow come to the fore kept him going.

  The perils of these early years of Elizabeth’s reign still tend to be underestimated, a product of the hagiography of the queen. We forget that it was Elizabeth herself who created the image of Gloriana later in her reign and that successive generations have been taken in by biographies where adulation replaces a more balanced analysis. If anyone had told William Cecil in 1560 that Elizabeth would still be viewed in the early twenty-first century as England’s greatest monarch, his jaw would surely have dropped. Economic recovery seemed elusive, there was rebellion in Ireland, the queen was unpopular and her frequent bouts of ill health merely added to the sense of insecurity. In July 1561, just a month before Mary Stewart returned to her kingdom, Cecil wrote to Throckmorton in Paris: ‘Well, God send our mistress a husband and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession. This matter is too big for weak folks and too deep for simple. The Queen’s Majesty knoweth of it. And so I will end.’2 In England, no less than in Scotland, the desirability of a masculine ruler was taken for granted.

  The problem of Elizabeth’s continued evasion on this key issue was compounded when another cousin, Lady Katherine Grey, the sister of Lady Jane who had ruled so briefly in 1553, secretly married the earl of Hertford and became pregnant. Katherine, a Protestant, was the nearest heir to Elizabeth by Henry VIII’s will and the favoured candidate of parliament should anything happen to Elizabeth. But the queen apparently disliked the Grey family, perhaps because of this very proximity to her throne and the memory of their grab for power less than a decade before. She may have been willing to overlook the part of the Dudleys in all of this, who were heavily embroiled due to Guildford Dudley’s marriage to Lady Jane, but she was less forgiving of the Greys. When Elizabeth found out about Katherine Grey’s irregular marriage arrangements and her pregnancy, she was enraged. The unfortunate couple ended up in the Tower and were eventually able, through lax supervision, to produce another son to add to the one they had conceived on their wedding day. For the rest of her short life, Katherine was kept under house arrest. Elizabeth was not merciful to those who crossed her. But what did she make of the return of her ‘sister queen’ to Scotland?

  As with many aspects of Elizabeth’s behaviour, the truth is hard to know. She at least affected to be less concerned about the implications of Mary’s presence in the same isle than Cecil. Elizabeth respected Mary as an anointed monarch, the crowned head of state and her royal equal, despite the tensions that traditionally bedevilled Anglo–Scottish relations. The religious difference between Mary’s observant, if not fervent, Catholicism and her own brand of Protestantism was less significant than the ties of blood that they shared. It is possible that, even at this early stage of her reign, she accepted privately that if she stuck by her decision to remain unwed, then the Stewarts were her rightful successors, regardless of her father’s will. But she had a morbid fear of acknowledging any heir apparent publicly, lest they become a focus for opposition. Her manoeuvring to maintain this position has often been depicted as one of her gr
eat skills but she was lucky to get away with it, given the state of England in the 1560s and the accepted practices of the time.

  Cecil was, at first, relieved that Lord James and the Protestants in Scotland appeared to have worked out a system of government that would contain any threat that Mary’s return might pose. He was keeping a very close eye on affairs north of the border from the moment of her return in August 1561. There was, in his view, no cause for alarm: ‘She hath no soldiers nor train,’ he wrote, ‘but a few household; she meaneth to commit herself to the trust of her own.’3 Elizabeth, on the other hand, was more interested in her cousin’s person. She wanted a picture of Mary and there was talk of a meeting between the two queens, something that Mary earnestly encouraged. Cecil, however, was dead set against it and Elizabeth eventually realized that personal feelings should not be allowed to get in the way of political caution. In addition, there was always likely to be an element of rivalry and Elizabeth’s vanity may have warned her off discovering that tales of her cousin’s beauty, charm and accomplishments were true. Yet, in reality, the mere fact of Mary Stewart’s homecoming and assumption of personal rule threatened the short-lived amity with England much more profoundly than Cecil had, at first, hoped. Elizabeth’s refusal of the Arran match compromised it severely. When Mary began her personal rule in Scotland the amity was effectively over, though its acknowledged demise was still several years off. When, in the autumn of 1562, Elizabeth contracted smallpox, the fear that she would die was palpable in London. By then, Mary Queen of Scots was establishing her rule in Scotland with apparent success. But Elizabeth recovered, so the question of the English succession and Mary’s place in it remained unresolved.

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  MARY HAD TAKEN a gentle, prolonged leave of France. The preparations for her departure began in June 1561. Elizabeth having refused her a passport (not a sign of sisterly commitment) and then, typically, changed her mind too late, Mary was obliged to make the entire journey by sea, as she had done in 1548. Most of the spring was passed in Champagne, but by June she was back in Paris, installed in the Louvre. Her final days at the French court were spent in July at St Germain, attending a four-day fête in her honour. Afterwards, she left for the Channel ports, accompanied by a large train, but her departure point was deliberately kept vague to confuse English spies. Finally, on 14 August, she boarded her galley at Calais, taking leave of her uncles and the country that had nurtured her. ‘The queen,’ it was reported, ‘broke down in tears and said that she would miss the pomp, the attentions, the magnificence and the superb mounts of France that she had enjoyed for so long, but that she would be patient now that her paradise was to be exchanged for a hell.’ If she did actually utter those words, then they were prophetic but it seems unlikely that Mary, despite the fact that she was undoubtedly regretful to leave France, said anything so undiplomatic. There were reasons, on the contrary, to be optimistic. She could establish her own style and court, get to know her subjects and still pursue the great goal of England’s throne. For, in the months before she left France, even the experienced Throckmorton could not get the Queen of Scots to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. Her excuse that this would need verification with the Scottish lords cut no ice with the English ambassador – after all, they were the people who had negotiated it – but Mary’s reply that things would be different once she returned was alarming to Cecil, who had calculated on them staying the same. Yet the men in whom he had placed his confidence, who would now become Mary’s advisers, knew that there would be repercussions in the relationship with England when she returned. It remained to be seen how these could best be managed.

  Mary’s unexpectedly fast voyage of just five days from Calais to Leith caught those waiting to receive her by surprise. The absence of any official welcoming party was hastily remedied when her brothers, Lord James and Lord Robert Stewart, rushed to greet her and to conduct her to Holyrood Palace. It must have seemed, in those first days of the queen’s residence there, an empty and disquieting place. Work had not even been completed on making it ready for her when she arrived and it had been unoccupied, its furniture stored away, since her mother’s death. Mary had never lived at Holyrood, so would not even have had childhood memories. But it was a fine building, extensively remodelled on the lines of the Loire château of Chambord by her father, James V, and with the support of her French staff and the arrival of her belongings it soon became habitable again.

  There was much to be done in the first weeks but in the crucial area of religion, Lord James and his sister kept their word to each other. When Mary heard Mass in her private chapel on Sunday, 24 August, her male half-siblings barred the door from those trying to disrupt the service and protected the priests conducting it. The following day, Mary, for her part, issued a proclamation forbidding religious changes and announcing that she would call a parliament at a convenient time and take their counsel. But she also required her subjects to keep the peace and to refrain from attacking her French attendants, an indication that she knew very well that she was a target for the vocal and often physically aggressive Calvinist minority. When she made her official entry to Edinburgh on 2 September, it was apparent even during the pageants and speeches that no opportunity would be lost to remind her that Protestantism was the state religion of Scotland and that she was expected to be a ‘godly prince’. There were also signs of the restiveness of the population, made unruly by fountains flowing with wine for the occasion. It was rather a strange and contradictory event, certainly a contrast to the superbly orchestrated entries of her late father-in-law, Henry II of France, and must have brought home to the queen her brother’s words. Mary’s displeasure at the audacity and sheer rudeness of her religious opponents was demonstrated by her order to the Edinburgh council that the provost and bailies involved in the organization of her entry be dismissed. In private, however, she resolved to meet the chief of her Calvinist critics as soon as possible.

  Mary had both friends and enemies when she returned to Scotland but, by his own admission (and it should be remembered that he had a flair for over-dramatization that went with his self-image as a latter-day Old Testament prophet), John Knox was the most consistent and relentless of these. The week after Mary heard her first Mass at Holyrood he preached one of his epic fire and brimstone sermons against idolatry. By his own account, he ‘showed what terrible plagues God had taken on realms and nations for the same,’ and added, ‘One Mass is more fearful to me than if ten thousand armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm … when we join hands with idolatry God’s amicable presence and comfortable defence leaveth us, and what shall then become of us?’4

  For all his eloquence, Knox was not preaching to the majority and he knew this. In Edinburgh the Mass was still heard frequently and most Scots outside urban areas remained true to Mary’s faith. As in England under Edward VI, it was one thing to legislate sweeping changes and quite another to instil them in the hearts of the population. Mary’s Catholic supporters, led by the earl of Huntly, represented in reality the views of most of her subjects. Perhaps it was this realization and a feeling that Knox’s challenge to her authority must be contained that caused Mary to decide to confront her stern opponent as soon as possible.

  The interview, the first of four that Knox had with the queen, did not go well. She accused him of inciting her subjects to rebellion and undermining the entire basis of her sovereignty. Had he not said that princes could be resisted, the more so if they were mere women like herself? Knox defended his right to hold his own opinion and added, ‘If the realm finds no inconvenience from the rule of a woman … [I] shall be as well content to live under your Grace as St Paul was to live under Nero.’ This comparison with one of the great villains of Roman history did not go down well with Mary and Knox’s final assertion that if princes exceeded their bounds they could be resisted ‘even with power’ only made matters worse. After an argument about interpretation of the scriptures, the meeting came to a close when Mary was called to di
nner. Knox took his leave of her with the words: ‘I pray God, Madam, that ye may be as blessed within the Commonwealth of Scotland, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever Deborah was in the Commonwealth of Israel.’ But he later told friends who asked him what he thought of the young queen at this first meeting: ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and his Truth, my judgement faileth me.’5 He did not know that, shocked and frustrated, Mary had burst into tears once he had gone. Lord James Stewart, present throughout the interview, had nothing whatsoever to say.

  Mary’s positive reaction, after the tears subsided, was to go on a progress before the winter arrived. She wanted to see more of her country, to revisit the palaces of her childhood, like Linlithgow and Stirling, where there were happy memories of her mother, and to show herself to the people. During the year 1562–3 she travelled 1,200 miles, leaving a legacy of strong personal loyalty among the lords she visited in distant parts of her kingdom, from Inverness in the north to Ayr in the southwest. In this, she exhibited the true spirit of the Stewarts, for whom travel and personal visibility were so important. Accompanying her were Huntly and Lord James, the two men who represented opposing religious views and also different personal interests. The Gordons, Huntly’s family, were de facto rulers of northern Scotland, while Lord James was hoping, if he stayed on the right side of his sister, to gain an earldom and more lands; he did not care if these were at Huntly’s expense. The tensions between the two men would grow steadily and as Lord James was still hoping not to lose Cecil’s support entirely, he was keeping his lines of communication with England open. Mary remained committed to her brother but her return had produced its own strains and she was fast gaining an appreciation of the difficulties that faced her as a young female ruler in a divided country. In Perth during her autumn progress she once again experienced the contradictions of being joyfully received by some of her subjects and baited by Protestants. She felt unwell and had to retreat indoors from public gaze for a while. This kind of physical reaction to stress was not just an emanation of regal disapproval; it was part of a pattern that would be repeated in similar circumstances. Mary, for all her height and bearing, was not a woman who enjoyed good health and her frequent bouts of illness would have an undoubted impact on her ability to govern. Yet in these first months of her rule, she had shown a determination and clear-headedness that appeared to bode well for the future. This was particularly apparent in the balanced choice of advisers for her Privy Council, made as early as 6 September. A number of these men were to play a crucial part in the continuing drama of the rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts.