Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Marie de Guise, unwell throughout the war with Knox’s rebels, did not survive her troops’ surrender; she died in Scotland in June 1560. Her daughter, Mary Stuart, Queen of France at the time, refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, one article of which was her relinquishing her claim to the English throne. Her refusal infuriated Elizabeth, and thus began their nineteen-year feud.

  Eleven months after the French surrender in Scotland, Mary Stuart, after less than two years as Queen of France, was widowed at age eighteen when her young husband, King Francis, died. With little status in the new court of her brother-in-law King Charles, Mary left France for her birthplace, Scotland, arriving at Leith by sea in August 1561, and took up her birthright, the Scottish throne.

  Elizabeth’s problems with Mary, her cousin and fellow queen, had just begun.

  Elizabeth & Mary, Rival Queens: Leadership Lost and Won

  by Barbara Kyle

  Should we act from the head or from the heart? Deliberation or passion? In fiction, the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility personify this choice in matters of love. Elinor carefully considers her desires, weighing them against her responsibilities, holding her deepest feelings in check. Marianne scoffs at such reserve and acts boldly on her passions.

  When it comes to ruling a country, with stakes infinitely higher, two queens have immortalized this crucial choice. Elizabeth Tudor of England planned her moves with Machiavellian care, keeping her ambitious nobles in line and her kingdom safe from foreign attack. Her peaceful reign spanned over forty years. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, followed her desires, making impetuous decisions that enraged her nobles. She ruled for less than seven years, created turmoil and civil war, boldly gambled her kingdom by hazarding all on the battlefield, and lost.

  The two women were cousins. Yet they never met.

  When Mary fled to England to escape the Protestant lords who had deposed her, she begged Elizabeth for protection and an army to fight her enemies. Elizabeth, however, needed Protestant Scotland as a bulwark against possible invasion by Catholic France or Spain, and so decided it was prudent to keep Mary in England under house arrest. Mary’s captivity continued for nineteen years—a comfortable captivity befitting her status as a queen—during which she plotted ceaselessly to overthrow Elizabeth with the help of Spain and take her crown. Elizabeth waited out those nineteen years and finally, after the last plot almost succeeded, executed Mary.

  It’s a story that has enthralled the world for over four hundred years, sparking plays, operas, an endless stream of biographies, novels (including my own), and several movies. In 1895, one of the first movies ever made was an 18-second film of Mary’s execution produced by Thomas Edison.

  In Edison’s brief film, the actress playing Mary lays her head across the executioner’s block. He raises his axe. An edit occurs during which the actress is replaced by a mannequin. The mannequin’s head is chopped off and the executioner holds it high in the air. It was filmdom’s first special effect.

  What is it about these two queens that so perennially fascinates us? I think it’s that primal divide of head vs. heart, of sense vs. sensibility. Elizabeth, though passionate, acted with forethought. Mary, though intelligent, acted on her desires.

  Partly, it stemmed from their upbringing. Mary became queen of Scotland just days after her birth. Her French mother, Mary of Guise, ruled in her daughter’s name and sent Mary at the age of five to France to join the French king’s family in preparation for marriage to his son and heir, Francis.

  Growing up in the most glittering court in Europe, Mary was pampered and petted and loved by the French royal family. She married Francis when they were both in their teens, and when his father died a year later the young couple became king and queen of France. At age sixteen Mary had reached the pinnacle.

  Elizabeth’s upbringing could not have been more different. Hers was a childhood of uncertainty and fear.

  Her father, Henry VIII, beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn, for adultery when Elizabeth was three. He disinherited Elizabeth. Her half-sister Mary came to the throne when Elizabeth was twenty-one and sent her to the Tower where Elizabeth, terrified, fully expected to be executed. But Mary died, and Elizabeth, who had never thought she would rule, became queen at the age of twenty-five. In those perilous years she had learned to watch and wait, and never to act rashly.

  It was a lesson Mary never learned.

  These two queens, raised so differently, had very divergent outlooks on three aspects of monarchy. The first is what we today might call patriotism.

  Mary, formed by France, was not much interested in Scotland, which she considered an unsophisticated backwater. In 1560, her husband, the young King Francis, died and so did her mother, who had ruled Scotland in Mary’s name. Mary was therefore free to return to her homeland and take up her birthright as its reigning queen. Instead, she chose to stay in France where life was pleasant and spent many months casting about for a new European husband. Finding none to her liking, she grudgingly returned to Scotland.

  Elizabeth, on the other hand, loved her country and its people with a sincerity in her words and actions that rings to us down the centuries. She was proud of being “mere English” (“mere” in those days meaning “purely”). She enjoyed meeting common people on her journeys through the shires and bantering with them with a familiarity that shocked the European aristocracy. She said often that her people were her family. Her people loved her in return.

  Second, nowhere was the head-or-heart divide more apparent than in the choices these women made about marriage. For a queen, marriage was a crucial matter of state. After four years on the Scottish throne, Mary fell passionately in love with an English nobleman, Lord Darnley, and despite the vociferous disapproval of her nobles she hastily married him. She even used her power as monarch to name him king.

  This splintered her court into factions—for and against Darnley—a situation that diminished much of Mary’s power and led to a simmering civil war. Mary bore a son, James. But the marriage quickly soured when Darnley proved to be an arrogant, charmless wastrel.

  Mary turned to a tough military man on her council, the Earl of Bothwell, and there was gossip that they were lovers. Seventeen months after marrying the queen, Darnley was murdered. (The house he was sleeping in was blown up.) Bothwell was accused of the murder, tried, and acquitted. Three months later, Mary took him as her third husband. The people suspected her of having colluded with him to murder Darnley. When she rode back into Edinburgh, the townsfolk hissed at her and called her “whore.”

  Elizabeth, famously, never married. She knew the danger if she did: her husband would be considered king, creating warring factions in her realm and eclipsing her power. For two decades foreign princes vied for her hand in marriage, and Elizabeth used them to negotiate alliances and to disrupt foreign alliances that endangered England. She frustrated her councilors, who constantly urged her to marry to produce an heir.

  Elizabeth was acutely aware of the succession problem: a monarch who left no heir consigned her realm to likely civil war. And, with no heir of her body, her throne would pass to none other than Mary, her cousin. Elizabeth’s decision to stay single was a hard one that brought her considerable personal anguish. She was heard to say, when Mary’s son was born, that she envied Mary the baby “while I am barren stock.” But she knew her decision was wise.

  Third, the head-or-heart divide had its greatest impact in how the two women ruled. The business of governance did not interest Mary. She rarely attended the meetings of her council, and when she did, she sat and sewed. She enraged Darnley and her nobles by ignoring them and spending her time with her young Italian secretary, Rizzio.

  Elizabeth was what we would call a “hands-on” leader, involving herself in every aspect of governance. Furthermore, on the eve of a possible invasion by the terrifying Spanish Armada she rode out
to her troops assembled at Tilbury and inspired them to face the foe, giving an address so stirring that in World War II Winston Churchill quoted it in the House of Commons to steel England’s people to face a possible invasion by the Nazis.

  Let tyrants fear…I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects. And therefore I am come amongst you...being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all.

  —Elizabeth I at Tilbury

  Mary Stuart is to be pitied. She spent nineteen years under house arrest and died a gruesome death, beheaded at Elizabeth’s order. But before she reached England it was her incompetence as a ruler in Scotland, her disastrous decisions in leadership, that led to her downfall there.

  If peace, prosperity, religious tolerance, and increased international respect are the fruits of successful leadership, Elizabeth Tudor remains one of England’s greatest rulers.

  Border Reivers: Kinmont Willie Armstrong

  by Tom Moss

  Kinmont Willie was, without doubt, one of the most notorious Scottish Border Reivers of the 16th century. His raids into England, in particular Tynedale in Northumberland, are particularly well documented. The primary sources from his day speak of big, organised raids involving hundreds of the Scottish Border Reiver fraternity intent on theft, spoil, and destruction south of the Border in England.

  As such, Kinmont was well prized by the English.

  Some of the raids into England in which Kinmont took part resulted in complete penury for the English families, but he was never brought to justice even though the English hotly demanded that he should be made to answer for his crimes. Yet for all his infamous notoriety and his successful and uncontested raids into England, Kinmont was to suffer the greatest of indignities when he was captured by the English at a time when he thought he was protected by the law of the Border at a “Day of Truce”.

  On 17 March 1596, a “Day of Truce” was held at the Dayholme of Kershope. The Dayholme was an area of flatland adjoining the little Kershope burn. It was a place traditionally used to hold “Days of Truce”, a time when felons and miscreants were brought to the Border Line to answer for their crimes against the Border Law.

  Written into Border Law was an “Assurance” that all who attended to witness fair play did so on the understanding that they were immune from confrontation with any enemy from the opposite side of the Border who might also be attending or, indeed, fellow countrymen with whom they might be at feud.

  The “Assurance of the Truce” was thus the vehicle which gave all confidence that they could attend with impunity. The “Assurance” lasted not only for the time that the trials were in session but until the following sunrise, so that all who had attended would have time to return to their homes in safety. Kinmont attended the “Day” only as a witness.

  The “Day of Truce” at the Dayholme of Kershope was over before sunset. Kinmont with a few compatriots from the Scottish West March rode down the Scottish side of the river Liddel whilst his English counterparts made for home down the English side. All were confident that the “Assurance” of the Truce still held and would do so until sunrise of the next day.

  Suddenly, the English turned and rode furiously across the river and chased Kinmont down the Scottish bank. Not far from where the rivers Liddel and Esk join forces and run from there to the Solway Firth, the Scottish party was overtaken and overcome. Kinmont was bound to his horse and conveyed, under guard, to Carlisle castle to await a decision on his future from Thomas Lord Scrope, English West March Warden.

  Scrope wrote to Elizabeth I, queen of England, asking what he should do with Kinmont. In his opinion, the Border Reiver was such an important prisoner that he needed the ruling of the English monarch as to the course he should take.

  Scrope did not receive a reply and thus deemed that it was best that Kinmont should stay where he was, warded in Carlisle castle.

  The whole of Scotland—monarchy, lords, and church—were incensed at what they saw as a blatant and expedient exploitation of the Border Law.

  Working behind the scenes as the episode unfolded were the premier English Border Reiver family, the Grahams. They were friends with Thomas Carleton, erstwhile Captain of Carlisle castle, who had been dismissed by Scrope because of his double-dealing with the Scottish reivers.

  The Grahams requested that Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Kinmont’s superior as Keeper of Liddesdale, should meet them to discuss the Kinmont affair. At the meeting, the Grahams ventured the thought that Buccleuch, suitably accompanied with a party of Scottish reivers mainly from the Scottish vales of the rivers Liddel, Ewes, and Annan, should raid Carlisle and force their way into the castle and rescue Kinmont. When the Grahams intimated that there would be not only inside help from members of the garrison of the castle but also a journey south through English territory uncontested by any of the English reivers, Buccleuch warmed to the notion.

  On 12 April 1596 the rescue party, about seventy strong, assembled at Mortonrigg, Kinmont’s tower in the Debateable Land, and headed south for Carlisle at sunset. Just before dawn, twenty-five or so of the raiders, mainly Armstrongs, were looking across the river Eden, near its confluence with the river Caldew, at the formidable pile of Carlisle castle. Leaving their horses on the north bank, they swam the river, and made their way to a postern gate in the western wall of the castle. The gate was opened from the inside, probably by one of Thomas Carleton’s servants still employed there.

  Only five of the raiders entered the castle. They knew the exact whereabouts of Kinmont’s warding because on the previous day a Graham, on legitimate business, had been told by one of the garrison, sympathetic to the cause, where Kinmont was held.

  The weather on the night was horrendous. On the ride south, the rescue party had been buffeted by torrential rain. On entering the castle they were served by the weather as the watch, almost to a man, were under cover, protecting themselves from the worst of the elements. Thus their entry was hardly contested. Only two men attempted to impede their progress to Kinmont’s cell, and they were soon dealt with. Another guard, marshalling the entrance to the cell, was badly wounded.

  The rescue party, now with Kinmont in their midst, left the castle, swam the river, and were soon on their way home to Scotland. The Irvines and Johnstones, stationed as ambush parties should the Scots be pursued north were soon to swell their numbers.

  Scrope was to claim in letters to Lord Burghley that the castle had been attacked by 500 men from the Scottish Borders. In a letter to the Privy Council he wrote:

  Yesternighte in the deade time therof, Walter Scott of Hardinge [Harden, south of Hawick], the chief man about Buclughe, accompanied with 500 horsemen of Buclughes and Kinmontes frends, did come armed…unto an outewarde corner of the base courte of this castell and to the posterne dore of the same-which they undermined speedily…brake into the chamber where Will of Kinmont was [and] carried him awaye… The watch, as yt shoulde seeme, by reason of the stormye night, were either on sleepe or gotten under some covert to defende themselves from the violence of the wether….

  He was soon to point the finger at his own subordinates for the ease with which the castle was breached:

  And regardinge the myndes of the Lowthers to do villeny unto me, havinge beene assured by some of their owne, that they woulde do what they coulde to disquiet my government, I am induced vehementlye to suspect that their heades have bin in the devise of this attempte, and am also persuaded that Thomas Carlton hath lent his hand hereunto; for it is whispered in myne eare, that some of his servauntes, well acquainted with all the corners of this castell, were guydes in the execution herof.

  The amity between England and Scotland, even as late as 1596, ploughed an uneven furrow. The relationship between James VI of Scotland and Elizabeth I of England had been fraught with confrontation, especially about the state
of the Borders. On receipt of a letter from James to Elizabeth saying she should listen to both sides of the Kinmont affair and that he was not prepared to hand over Buccleuch as demanded until she did, Elizabeth threatened to discontinue the pension granted to him at the Treaty of Berwick in 1586. Even her fertile mind, however, had not given due consideration to what this action would cause.

  The Scottish Council quickly perceived that James could not now conform to the wishes of Elizabeth. Had he done so and handed over Buccleuch to the English, it would appear to the people of both nations that he had done so for the pension. In due course, as a result of this, Elizabeth softened her approach. Elizabeth was to write to James and say:

  I beseech you to consider the greatness of my dishonour, and measure his [Buccleuch’s] just delivery accordingly. Deal in this case like a King who will have all this realm, and others adjoining. See how justly and kindly you both can and will use a prince of my quality.

  The plea of Elizabeth was initially ignored and she resorted to a firmer approach. “If the king of Scotland…keeping the said offenders in his grace and protection…therefore involves himself in their guiltiness, leaving the queen to have her remedy by another nature….”

  Buccleuch was finally warded in Berwick in October 1597 much to the satisfaction of Elizabeth, though he was treated with respect and eventually freed.

  The Kinmont affair, which had raged for over a year, slowly lost its impetus at a time when both countries saw nothing to gain by endless confrontation. Thus, it was consigned to history. It remains to be verified exactly what Elizabeth meant when she spoke of a “remedy by another nature.” Perhaps one day that quandary may be resolved.

  “Carrying Away the Booty”: Drake’s Attack on the Spanish Silver Train