by Linda Porter
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THE QUEEN OF SCOTS’ first Privy Council consisted of sixteen men: twelve members of the nobility and four officials. The earls of Athol, Errol, Montrose and Huntly were the only Catholics. The rest were all key players among the Congregation. Most, with the notable exception of the earl of Morton, a man personally disliked by Mary, were politically beholden to Lord James. Châtelherault, always a hard man to categorize but ever present, remained as a councillor. The most important, however, after the representatives of the old families and the coming men of the new Protestant elite, was William Maitland of Lethington, a close ally of the queen’s eldest half-brother. He would play a crucial part in the early successes of Mary’s reign yet finally desert her at her hour of greatest need.
Maitland’s family of Scottish courtiers was on the rise in the mid-sixteenth century. His father, Sir Richard Maitland, was an accomplished poet and he passed his courtly skills on to his son, who used them to excellent effect in Mary’s company as well as in his dealings with European politicians. William Maitland had been born some time between 1525 and 1530 and well educated, in Scotland and in Paris, as was so common among prominent Scots at the time. He was highly intelligent, widely read and, uncommonly for the age in which he lived, tolerant of different ideas and religions. Well informed on theological matters, he was not afraid to challenge Knox’s emphatic interpretations of scripture and was even denounced by the preacher as an atheist at one stage, though Maitland would have counted himself as a good Protestant. Contemporaries, even those who thoroughly disliked him, testified to his abilities and intellect. Elizabeth I herself called him ‘the flower of the wits of Scotland’ – no mean compliment. His portrait shows a man soberly but richly dressed, his starched white collar edged with fine lace. It is a compelling face but also one with a hint of good humour around the eyes.
There are gaps in our knowledge of Maitland’s early career but towards the end of 1554 his prospects were immensely improved when he was appointed as assistant to the Scottish secretary, David Paniter. As the first ever clerk to the Privy Council, he gained unparalleled knowledge of its workings and acted as a gatekeeper on financial matters to the queen regent, Mary of Guise, who clearly valued him highly. During this time, he was also gaining diplomatic experience and was sent on a mission to London early in 1558 to try to mediate a peace between England and France. The mission did not succeed (England had just lost Calais and Queen Mary I was not in the mood for compromise) but it did give Maitland useful contacts for the future.
Following his appointment to the secretaryship in 1558 on Paniter’s death, Maitland was able to exploit his position to the benefit of the Lords of the Congregation while still seeming to serve Mary of Guise. Opponents criticized this subsequently as devious Machiavellianism. He did not openly defect to the Congregation until the end of 1559, at a time when its future looked inauspicious. His subsequent involvement in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Berwick greatly enhanced his stock with the English and with Cecil in particular. But it was only after the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed and the opportune death of Mary of Guise that the victory of the Congregation was ensured and Maitland and Lord James could breathe more easily. Maitland had played a double game in the last years of Mary of Guise’s rule with consummate skill and did not, at first, welcome the return of her daughter, believing it would be a disaster for Scotland. In a letter to Cecil the downhearted Scottish secretary predicted ‘wonderful tragedies’. History would prove him correct, though not in the timing or manner that he dreaded in 1560. He was soon won over by Mary and changed his tune completely, to the bewilderment of his English counterpart, when he wrote: ‘The Queen my Mistress behaves herself so gently in every behalf as reasonably as we can require. If any be amiss, the fault is rather in ourselves … [She] doth declare a wisdom far exceeding her age … Surely, I see in her a good towardness, and think the Queen your sovereign shall be able to do much with her in religion, if they once enter in a good familiarity.’6 This was not really what Cecil wanted to hear but he was soon to have it confirmed by the arrival of the man himself in London. Within two weeks of her homecoming, Mary, whose flexibility and maturity had so impressed her highly experienced Secretary, sent William Maitland south to London, ostensibly to announce officially her return to Scotland, but, in reality, to begin the process of establishing her recognized place in the English succession.
Armed with two letters for the Queen of England, a personal one from Mary herself and a much more forthright one from the Scottish nobility, which greatly annoyed Elizabeth, Maitland set about achieving his goal. In the course of three separate meetings with Elizabeth, it was made clear that the Scots desired to continue their friendship with England, but on the clear understanding that their queen would only ratify a modified version of the Treaty of Edinburgh if she was also recognized as Elizabeth’s successor. Of course, it is easy to say with hindsight that Maitland never stood a chance of persuading Elizabeth to agree to such a course of action but this is to overlook the fact that Maitland had come up against a woman who could outdo him where deviousness was concerned. It was in her interests and England’s to appear, at least, to keep the door open. There were warning signs: ‘This desire,’ she told him, ‘is without an example to set my winding sheet before my eye … think you that I could love my own winding sheet?’7 But then Elizabeth waxed so lyrical about ‘her sister’ as she referred to Mary, that there still seemed to be some real hope for resolution of these difficult issues, especially the following year when Maitland was back in London to put the case all over again and press for a meeting between the two queens.
Maitland reported the tenor of his meeting with Queen Elizabeth to Mary at the beginning of June 1562. His letter reveals Elizabeth’s skill in saying all the right things without making any actual commitment. She told the Scottish secretary:
My sister hath no greater desire to see me, than I have to see her … Lord, how merry shall we be together. I will marry her, be you sure, I will never have another husband. I would to God we might marry together. I hear of many that we do somewhat resemble, but I take it to be spoken to me for flattery. For if I thought that indeed there were anything in me that were like unto her, I would like myself a great deal the better.
Maitland let Elizabeth’s bizarre comments about marrying Mary go by, but there are hints that he had reservations about the queen’s overall sincerity, commenting that Mary’s good wishes ‘were accepted in so good part as I could wish, the visage and countenance always so accompanying the words that it might thereby well appear they did proceed from an inward affection.’8 Yet for all Elizabeth’s gushing, she balked at the idea of an interview taking place within two months, pointing out that her father’s abortive meeting with James V at York had been nine months in the planning. This was an unhappy precedent to have raised but there was more to be considered. Elizabeth used the possibility of Guise interference as a further excuse for delay. Being a public person, she said, she could not follow her own inclinations, though she would go on foot to see Mary if she could. So Maitland returned once more to Scotland having failed to make progress.
Yet the commitment to union between England and Scotland that formed the backbone of his political ideology remained unshaken. Before coming to London in the summer of 1562 he had reiterated this to Cecil, despite his frustrations with the suspicions of his English colleague: ‘I have,’ he wrote, ‘in a manner consecrated myself to the commonwealth. The uniting of this isle in friendship hath in my concept been a scope whereof I have long shot and whereunto all my actions have been directed these five or six years.’ And he would keep going, despite changes of monarch and shifting developments. ‘And as ever as one occasion doth fail me I begin to shuffle the cards off new, always keeping the same ground. I shall not weary so long as any hope remaineth.’9 The following year, he demonstrated his absolute commitment to this goal and to his queen in a four-month mission to London in which he again demanded recognitio
n by the English parliament of Mary’s right to the succession. But he was also looking for ways to bring pressure on Cecil and Elizabeth by advertising Mary’s importance in the European marriage market, an area that was bound to cause friction while Elizabeth herself remained without a husband. The English queen’s support of the Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion added to the atmosphere of doubt. Maitland was playing for high stakes and he knew it. Meanwhile, his own standing and that of his staunch and, as he acknowledged to Cecil at one point, only true ally, Lord James Stewart, remained high. For while the Queen of Scots rewarded her secretary with the gift of the abbey of Haddington, she had bestowed the title of earl of Moray on her half-brother and provided a lavish ceremony for him early in 1562 when he married Agnes Keith, daughter of Scotland’s third earl marischal. Mary appeared to be establishing her rule in Scotland with considerable success, using her own personal skills and following the guidance of the two men to whom she had committed herself in these first years of her reign. But it was impossible to please everyone and allegiances could be lost quickly, as Mary was soon to discover.
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MARY HAD NEVER intended to use her return to Scotland merely as a stepping stone to the throne of England. She wanted to be a successful ruler in her own realm. The romantic Hollywood image of a pretty woman who allowed her heart to rule her head does Mary Stewart a great injustice. She worked hard at the business of being queen and is often given insufficient credit for her role in the government of Scotland at this time. An acute listener and observer, she sat in Privy Council meetings working on her embroidery, but while her head was bent over her needle she paid attention to what was going on around her and would take people aside if she wanted subsequent private conversations. This was a tactic she employed after meetings with the English emissary, Thomas Randolph, who felt flattered by such individual attention. Her grandfather, James IV, had enjoyed his needle and silk threads but it seems unlikely that he used them in meetings with his councillors. Nor, so far as we know, did Elizabeth I sew during discussions on weighty matters of state but then she seldom attended council meetings. But Mary had learned this art from Catherine de Medici in France and though it may have reinforced her femininity with men who had their own reservations about being governed by a woman, it meant that she could be at the hub of what was going on without seeming threatening.
The Queen of Scots also took her commitment to rule in conjunction with Scotland’s institutions seriously. In the space of six years, five parliaments or conventions were held. The most important of these was the first, held in May 1563, when Mary processed into the parliament house adorned in her royal robes and wearing the crown. The meeting was well attended and its legislative programme steered clear of contentious religious matters, a remarkable testament to the political skills of the queen and her chief advisers. On theological issues, Mary had attempted to contain any difficulties that might ensue from the still strident views of John Knox by having two interviews with him on successive days in the weeks before the parliament met. Knox stuck to his hard line that all who celebrated Mass were lawbreakers and eventually Mary agreed that anyone hearing Mass outside her court itself could be prosecuted. Yet even her confirmation that she would not try to undo the Protestant Reformation in Scotland and her concession to Knox’s uncompromising views failed to stop him preaching against the queen and her religion at the end of May 1563. In this sermon he raised the question of the queen’s marriage, claiming that if she married a Catholic, the entire Reformation in Scotland would be jeopardized. Mary, like Elizabeth, was extremely sensitive on the issue of her marriage and reacted with tears and anger in a subsequent confrontation with her Protestant tormentor.
Knox’s vehement hostility was never going to lessen, but Mary’s life as Queen of Scots was not all weighty affairs of state. She was a cultured young woman who loved the style of the Renaissance court and she was determined to live in the manner that she believed befitted a European court. Mary would have agreed with Sir Richard Maitland’s poem that contained the line: ‘He rules well that well in court can guide.’ Etiquette was carefully observed, nowhere more so than in the elaborate arrangements for dining, where the queen’s household sat in hierarchical arrangement. While she enjoyed a varied diet, consuming a variety of meats, seafood and game and drinking good wine, the lower orders, in separate rooms, generally had bread and ale at the main midday meal.
Mary’s pastimes ranged from the energetic to the contemplative. Like her English cousin, she loved riding, hunting and walking and she was also fond, when the Scottish summer weather permitted, of going on picnics near Linlithgow Palace. Dining al fresco was another pleasure that she had learned from Catherine de Medici. Mary was a keen tennis player and was competent with a bow and arrow. A love of drama and music was also in her blood; masques were performed in the evenings and Mary’s penchant for disguisings (made easier by her height, since she could pass herself off as a man) would have pleased her great-uncle, Henry VIII. On a number of occasions she and her ladies wandered around Edinburgh dressed as ordinary citizens. The queen wrote poetry, though some of the verses later attributed to her are almost certainly forged, and encouraged poets at her court. Alexander Scott was the leading vernacular poet of her personal reign and George Buchanan, who sometimes read Livy with Mary in the evenings, was her Latin court poet. Like a number of the men who partook of the queen’s generosity and the vivacity of her person and court, Buchanan, too, would abandon her in 1568 and become one of the most vicious of her critics in the propaganda warfare that followed her deposition. Appointed as tutor to her son during his minority, James VI came to regard his teacher with a mixture of admiration and fear.
Mary’s court undoubtedly presented opportunities for poets, lawyers, philosophers, musicians (including an Italian, David Riccio, who would rise greatly in her favour with disastrous repercussions) and the Scottish nobility. Her household, however, was much more closed. It was, in the words of the distinguished historian Michael Lynch, ‘heavily French in both numbers and its cultural leanings, largely Catholic in its sympathies, and on the whole made up of lesser nobles.’10 Here Mary exercised her own prerogative to organize and appoint as she saw fit, supported by her ladies, including the four Marys, who had all touchingly sworn not to marry before the queen chose a new husband, and by the youngest of her Guise uncles, René, marquis d’Elbeuf.11 The royal household was an important part of Mary’s identity, a piece of France that had returned with her, providing continuity and reassurance. She was reluctant to compromise on its composition. The Protestant culture at her court centred on the figure of her half-brother, Lord James. Paradoxically, it was his wedding in February 1562 that was one of the great set-piece festivities of Mary’s reign.
Lord James had been secretly given the earldom of Moray (vacant since the death of its earlier holder, the illegitimate son of Janet Kennedy and James IV) on 30 January 1562. It was his sister’s acknowledgement of the role he had played in helping facilitate her return to Scotland and of his support in her claim to the English succession. But while the earldom may have been available, it was highly coveted by the earl of Huntly, whose lands were adjacent and who had been administering it since the previous incumbent’s death. The choice of Lady Agnes Keith as Lord James’s bride was equally provocative, as the Keiths were also rivals of the Gordons, Huntly’s family. This was not, however, a match prompted solely by political ambition and the sizeable dowry that his new wife brought with her. Agnes and Lord James seem to have been genuinely in love. They had known each other for some time – she was then aged twenty-two and he thirty – and became a very happy couple. The countess of Moray, one of a family of eleven children, was a formidably capable woman as well as an attractive one. Nobly born, she appreciated the importance of playing her part, both in the way that she dressed and her frequent appearances at court. A firm favourite with her sister-in-law, the queen, their friendship survived the anguish of Mary’s eventual split with h
er half-brother.
The austere Calvinist marriage ceremony in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh was conducted by John Knox. This was appropriate for the avowed Protestantism of both bride and groom but it was followed by a lavish celebration at Holyrood House on the wedding night. It was reported that the whole nobility of the realm was present and that there was much celebration afterwards (to the horror of Knox) with fireworks and feasting. Mary intended to make a point and succeeded in combining spectacle and magnificence with a political message about her own power and intentions. She also knighted a number of Moray’s associates. The stock of her half-brother had never stood as high. Huntly, however, was so aggrieved that he rose in rebellion against the queen, attempted to kidnap her when she came to Aberdeen to confront him, and was eventually defeated by Moray in a skirmish at Corrichie. His forces largely deserted him and he died of a stroke while still astride his horse, either during or just after the battle. One of his sons, Sir John Gordon, was hanged in Mary’s presence two days later. The queen had won an important victory over one of her most powerful subjects, a man who shared her religion and had been a reluctant rebel, but whom she wanted to be rid of, nevertheless. Mary could be ruthless when she chose. But her faith in Moray was not, ultimately, to be rewarded. It foundered on the twin difficulties of her marriage and the continued refusal of Elizabeth to acknowledge Mary as her successor.
