The House of Tudor

by Alison Plowden

  Elizabeth succeeded in stalling Parliament - although there were some rebellious mutterings in the Commons about withholding subsidies if she continued to be obstinate - but the problem refused to go away. It was, after all, the same problem which had overshadowed English political life ever since the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. Elizabeth was fully alive to the dangers of the situation. On the other hand, she was even more acutely aware of the danger of having a named heir.

  As far as marriage, with its necessarily uncertain corollary of childbearing, was concerned, the Queen, quite apart from her personal inclinations and her reluctance to lose her most valuable card in the game of international diplomacy, could see the practical difficulties involved far more clearly than her faithful Lords and Commons. Since the death of Edward Courtenay, there was no available Englishman of sufficiently high rank to make him acceptable to his fellows and if Elizabeth were to marry a subject, she would arouse violent jealousies and animosities - the uproar over Robert Dudley had already proved that. If she chose a foreigner, the problems would have been as great, if not greater. Nationalistic feeling would once again have run high and, to make matters worse, pretty well every eligible European prince was a Roman Catholic. The consort of a sixteenth-century queen regnant could not remain a cipher; he would have expected, and been expected, to take an active part in the government. But to attempt to introduce a Catholic king into an increasingly fervent Protestant country would have been asking for the most alarming variety of trouble.

  Elizabeth’s instinct was to do nothing and to go on gambling on her own survival. ‘So long as I live’, she once remarked, ‘I shall be Queen of England. When I am dead, they shall succeed that have most right.’ But she was a reasonable woman. She could understand and sympathize with her subjects’ natural anxiety about their own and their children’s future, and during the early sixties she did cautiously explore the possibility of finding a way out of the impasse. It was, however, perfectly plain that, her father’s will and the Protestant preferences of her people regardless, Elizabeth never for one moment contemplated recognizing the claims of English and Protestant Katherine Grey. If a solution acceptable to the Queen of England were to be found, it would involve the Queen of Scotland.

  During the first decade of her cousin’s reign, the fortunes of Mary Stuart had fluctuated wildly. In 1558 she had apparently stood on the threshold of a career of unexampled brilliance. In the summer of 1559 the freakish death of her father-in-law, Henri II, in a tiltyard accident had brought her to the throne of France beside her youthful husband. She was a Queen twice over at the age of sixteen-and-a-half. Then in December 1560 the sickly François II was also dead and Mary had become a widow three days before her eighteenth birthday. ‘The thoughts of widowhood at so early an age’, commented a sympathetic Venetian, Michel Surian, ‘and of the loss of a consort who was so great a King and who so dearly loved her...so afflict her that she will not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate and doleful lamentations, she universally inspires great pity.’

  All the same, Mary soon began to cheer up and to take stock of her altered situation. Her ten-year-old brother-in-law was now King of France and power had passed into the hands of the Queen Mother, that formidable matriarch Catherine de Medici, who was making no particular secret of the fact that she would prefer the Queen of Scots’ room to her company. Mary Stuart had been brought up to regard her Scottish kingdom as a mere appanage of France but now, in the spring of 1561, Scotland appeared in a rather different light. To a full-blooded, optimistic teenager with little taste for taking a back seat, it offered a challenge and a promise of adventure with, perhaps, more glittering triumphs to come. The question was, would Scotland have her back, for there, too, things had changed.

  Two years before, the Protestant nobility, banded together under the title of the Lords of the Congregation and assisted, albeit somewhat reluctantly, by the Queen of England, had risen in revolt against the Catholic and alien government of Mary’s mother, the Queen Regent Mary of Guise. In June 1560 the Regent died and French influence in Scotland reached its lowest ebb for a generation. William Cecil had hurried up to Edinburgh to attend the peace talks and during the course of a fortnight’s hard bargaining succeeded in extracting a number of important concessions from the French commissioners acting on behalf of the young Queen and her husband. The religious question was tactfully left in abeyance but when the Scots Parliament met in August, they at once proceeded of their own authority to adopt the Calvinistic form of Protestantism as the national religion. In the circumstances, therefore, it was scarcely surprising that the Lords of the Congregation should have been less than enthusiastic over the projected return of their Catholic sovereign.

  Mary, as Queen of France, had refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and in the autumn of 1560 had expressed strong disapproval of the proceedings in the Scottish Parliament. ‘My subjects of Scotland do their duty in nothing, nor have they performed one point that belongeth to them’, she told Nicholas Throckmorton. ‘I am their sovereign, but they take me not so. They must be taught to know their duties.’ By the spring of 1561 she was no longer in a position to take such a high tone and instead set herself out to charm the English and Scottish envoys who came to France to look her over. She repeatedly declared her earnest desire to live in peace and friendship with Elizabeth, ‘her good sister and tender cousin’, and also declared her willingness to accept the new status quo in Scotland. Not, of course, that she could have done otherwise but she did it gracefully, insisting only that she must be given the right to practise her own religion in private, and as it dawned on the Protestant lords that their Queen’s dynastic potentialities would now work in favour of Scotland rather than France, they began to take a more optimistic view of the future.

  Young Mary Stuart was, in fact, winning golden opinions all round and Nicholas Throckmorton’s dispatches were full of her virtue and discretion, her good judgement, her modesty and her readiness to be ruled by good counsel. It may not have been very tactful to praise one Queen to another in quite such glowing terms, but Throckmorton had not yet forgiven his mistress for the acute embarrassment she had caused him over the Dudley affair. Elizabeth, for her part, was clearly disconcerted by the seductive qualities being exhibited by her eighteen-year-old cousin. If Mary could so captivate Nicholas Throckmorton, a hard-headed diplomat and a strict Protestant, who could tell what havoc the pretty creature might create among the excitable and boisterous Scottish warlords? Who could tell how many simple men might be ‘carried away with vain hope, and brought abed with fair words’?

  As it turned out Mary Stuart’s first three years in her northern kingdom were by no means unsuccessful. Her subjects, with the exception of that archetypal male chauvinist John Knox, were ready to be pleased with her and Mary, although never of the same political calibre as Elizabeth Tudor, had had the sense to make friends with her bastard half-brother, the influential James Stuart, Earl of Moray. With Moray’s efficient and tough-minded support, she was able to manage reasonably well at home. Abroad, all her efforts were directed towards ingratiating herself with the Queen of England and persuading Elizabeth to recognize her as heir presumptive to the English throne.

  Elizabeth seemed prepared to be friendly. She was even ready to admit, in private conversation with the Scottish envoy William Maitland of Lethington, that she personally considered Mary to be her natural and lawful successor; but further than that she would not go. She would not make her good sister and cousin her heir ‘by order of Parliament’, which was what Mary was after. Unless...and there was just one possible solution. The widowed Queen of Scotland was very nearly as eligible a match as the spinster Queen of England Virtually everything would depend on the identity of Mary’s second husband and it was during the spring of 1563, when Elizabeth was desperately looking for some way of relieving the almost intolerable pressure being exerted on her to settle the succession, that sh
e first proposed Robert Dudley as a bridegroom for Mary Stuart. On the face of it, it seemed such an eccentric suggestion that William Maitland thought the Queen must be joking. But no, she was apparently quite serious. That autumn, Thomas Randolph, the English agent in Edinburgh, was instructed to drop broad hints on the subject to Mary herself and finally, in the spring of 1564, Elizabeth authorized Randolph to make the matter official.

  Mary’s public reaction was non-committal. Privately she regarded the whole idea with the utmost scepticism. If, as was implicit, Elizabeth really meant to recognize her right to the reversion of the English crown in return for accepting Elizabeth’s choice of husband, the Queen of Scots might have swallowed her understandable umbrage over the choice of the notorious Lord Robert. But she could not rid herself of the suspicion that she was being hoaxed; that by offering her cousin her own discarded lover, Elizabeth was planning to turn her into a laughingstock and perhaps prevent her from making some more advantageous marriage. Mary was not alone in her opinion and many people since have found it hard to credit that Elizabeth could ever have genuinely intended to part with her favourite -and not merely part with him but give him up to a younger and prettier woman, and her most dangerous rival. But in the last resort, what mattered to Elizabeth Tudor was the peace and security of her realm. If she had felt satisfied that her peculiar plan would have achieved this end, there seems little reason to doubt that she would have gone through with it.

  Perhaps the most curious feature of the whole curious incident is the apparently unlimited degree of trust that the Queen was prepared to repose in Robert Dudley. She told James Melville that she would have married Lord Robert herself, had she ever been minded to take a husband. But being determined to end her life a maid, she wanted Mary to have him. For this, she explained, ‘would best remove out of her heart all fear and suspicion to be offended by usurpation before her death; being assured that he was so loving and trusty that he would never give his consent nor suffer such thing to be attempted during her time.’

  Melville spent about ten days in London as Mary’s special envoy during September 1564 and saw Elizabeth every day. She displayed an insatiable curiosity about the cousin she had never seen and wished repeatedly that they might meet. When Melville jokingly offered to smuggle her into Scotland disguised as a page, so that she might see his Queen, Elizabeth smiled and said, ‘Alas! that I might do it.’ But she told him she wanted a closer friendship with Mary in the future and that ‘she was minded to put away all jealousies and suspicions between them.’ Unhappily, though, the Queen of Scots found herself unable to conquer her aversion to the idea of marriage to the horse-keeper, in spite of the fact that he had now at last been elevated to the dignity of Earl of Leicester, and, in any case, by the following spring, her actions had ceased to be governed by policy. For Mary had fallen head over heels in love with her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, now a graceful, ‘lady-faced’ youth of nineteen, and was no longer willing ‘to be ruled by good counsel’. She quarrelled fatally with Moray and the ‘Protestant party and had apparently ceased to care if she offended Queen Elizabeth. Her old admirer, Nicholas Throckmorton, was shocked at the change in her and William Cecil, as usual, feared the worst.

  63 The young Queen Elizabeth by an unknown artist.

  64 Elizabeth proceeding to Westminster on the day before her coronation, 14 January 1559. The Queen is accompanied by Lord Ambrose Dudley and Lord Giles Paulet and followed by her Master of Horse, Lord Robert Dudley.

  65 Lord Burghley riding a mule in his garden; artist unknown.

  66 Queen Elizabeth I confounding Juno, Minerva and Venus’ by Hans Eworth, 1569; courtly allegories enhanced the mythical image of the virgin Queen which gave her lie hold on the imagination of her subjects.

  67 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; artist unknown.

  68 Lady Katherine Grey and Edward, her elder son by Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, born in the Tower on 24 September 1561.

  69 ‘The Succession of Henry VIII’, painted in Elizabeth’s reign, shows Henry handing his sword to Edward while Philip and Mary lead in Mars, the god of war, and Elizabeth leads in peace and plenty.

  70 Mary Queen of Scots; artist unknown.

  71 The Darnley Cenotaph painted in 1567 for the Earl and Countess of Lennox. The infant James VI, later to succeed to the Tudors’ throne, kneels before the effigy of his father. Behind him the Earl and Countess of Lennox and their younger son, Charles Stewart, pray for the revenge of Darnley. Mary’s surrender at Carberry Hill in 1567 is shown in an inset in the left-hand corner.

  72 Elizabeth riding in procession to Tilbury to address her troops in 1588 a contemporary painting on wood.

  73 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, succeeded his step-father, Leicester, for a time as the Queen’s favourite.

  74 ‘Elizabeth I with Time and Death’ by an unknown artist.

  Mary and Darnley were married in July 1565 and from then on the home life of the Queen of Scotland became different indeed from that of most well-regulated royal households. Darnley soon revealed himself to be a bully and a drunkard -weak, vain, cowardly and vicious - and an easy dupe in the hands of the Jealous, ruthless, power-hungry men pressing round the Scottish throne. Darnley was of the party which burst into that little supper room at Holyrood in March 1566 and forced the Queen - she was six months pregnant - to witness the brutal murder of her Italian secretary. Darnley had been in the plot to seize and imprison the Queen, install himself as a puppet king and bring back the exiled Earl of Moray. Mary survived the ordeal, outwitting her enemies and regaining her freedom of action in a brilliant display of courage and resourcefulness, but she did not forgive her husband.

  In spite of everything, her baby was born safely that June and James Melville came south again to bring the news to London and ask the Queen of England to stand godmother to the infant Prince James. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the arrival of Mary’s son was the best thing to have come out of the whole messy business. For if the child survived (and that was a biggish ‘if, given the current state of affairs in Scotland), who better than this double great-great-grandson of the first Henry Tudor to succeed to the Tudor throne? But that was for the future. In the meantime, what was to be done about the baby’s parents?

  It was now an open secret that Mary was urgently looking for a way to get rid of Darnley. ‘It is heartbreaking for her to think he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no outgait’, wrote William Maitland on 24 October. But it was obvious that some ‘outgait’ would be found and no one was unbearably surprised when the miserable Darnley met his Grand Guignol end at the house of Kirk o’Field in January 1567. His widow’s subsequent career, culminating four months later in marriage to the uncouth and charmless Earl of Bothwell, was, however, followed with horrified astonishment by the outside world.

  In London, Darnley’s mother was crying out for vengeance on her murdered son, and Margaret Lennox, who had been in the Tower and Queen Elizabeth’s black books for having allegedly schemed to bring about the Scottish match in the first place, was let out of gaol by her sympathetic sovereign. In Edinburgh, increasingly outspoken placards were appearing on the streets, naming Bothwell as the King’s murderer and accusing the Queen of having been his accomplice. Elizabeth, with her own experience after the death of Amy Robsart still fresh in her mind, wrote vehemently to Mary: I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend, if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge on those who have done you “such pleasure” as most people say.’ And from Mary’s friends abroad came anxious appeals to bring her husband’s murderers to justice and clear her own name.

  But Mary, having apparently cast all considerations of prudence and even elementary common-sense to the winds, paid no attention to the repeated warnings and remonstrances of her well-wishers. Instead of taking steps to bring Bothwell to justice, she continued to show every sign of pleasure in his comp
any and by May she had married him, a divorced man, according to the rites of the Protestant church. It has been suggested that she was suffering from a complete mental breakdown and that she may have been a victim of porphyria, the mysterious hereditary ailment which afflicted her descendant George III. Certainly this is the most charitable explanation, but her contemporaries could only suppose that the Queen of Scotland had allowed her illicit passion to run away with her. Whatever the real reasons behind Mary’s self-destructive rampage during the first half of 1567, nemesis was not long in catching up with her. If her second marriage had been a tragic mistake, her third was an unmitigated disaster. By June Bothwell had fled for his life and Mary was a prisoner in the hands of her outraged nobility. By July she had been forced to abdicate in favour of her year-old son.

  Elizabeth Tudor may not have felt much personal sympathy for the cousin who was making such a spectacular hash of her life, but she held strong views about subjects who, whatever the provocation, insulted, threatened and imprisoned an anointed Queen. She fired volleys of explosive warnings into Scotland about what would happen if the lords took any further action against Mary, and she sent Nicholas Throckmorton north to make the situation crystal clear to the new Scottish government. William Cecil and Throckmorton himself were strongly opposed to this policy. They, and the majority of the Privy Council, were eager to support the Scots lords and were terrified that Elizabeth’s violent hostility would have the effect of driving Scotland once again into the arms of France. But the Queen was not to be deflected and gave Cecil several anxious moments. He told Throckmorton early in August that she had sent for him in great haste and made him ‘a great offensive speech that nothing was thought of for her to do to revenge the Queen of Scots’ imprisonment and deliver her.’ ‘I answered her as warily as I could’, wrote Cecil, ‘but she increased so in anger against these lords that in good earnest she began to devise revenge by war.’