Mary was setting out her intentions with such strident clarity that the instructions might have come from Elizabeth herself, and she was putting Lethington in the place of Cecil. Lethington certainly realised this when he had her letter copied and sent to Cecil.
There can be no doubt that the now-certain knowledge of Mary’s intention to leave France must have been a great relief to all. It was also a relief to Throckmorton, who had been unable to reach Mary on her travels and had been told by Elizabeth not to return to England without having gained Mary’s ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh. He knew that Mary did not intend to give an answer until she had consulted her advisers in Scotland and, although Mary had told him that she would sail from Calais, he had received a rumour that she intended to sail from Nantes, landing in Scotland at Dumbarton, the port from which she had sailed to France as a child. Mary now played directly into Elizabeth’s hands and sent d’Oysel as her ambassador to England to ask for a safe-conduct if she should have to land in England, and a guarantee of an untroubled time to rearrange a journey by land. Elizabeth was furious at what she saw as gross cheek, but assured d’Oysel that she would be glad to agree once Mary had ratified the treaty, and he was peremptorily sent back to France to get it. Elizabeth also confounded Mary’s principal excuse by personally writing to the Scots lords, asking them what their advice to Mary would be – her letters contained threats and promises to them in equal measure. Before they could reply, Mary informed Throckmorton that she had no need of a safe-conduct and could sail untroubled directly to Scotland. She could not ratify the treaty without meeting with her advisers and, as to the quartering of her coat of arms, it had all been the idea of her father-in-law Henri II, and she had ceased to continue with the practice since her husband’s death. Next day, probably 20 July, Throckmorton called again and received what was clearly a well-prepared speech:
Monsieur de l’Ambassadeur, if my preparations were not so much advanced as they are, peradventure the Queen your Mistress’s unkindness might stay my voyage; but I am now determined to adventure the matter, whatsoever come of it: I trust the wind will be so favourable as I shall not need to come on the coast of England: and if I do, then, Monsieur de l’Ambassadeur, the Queen your mistress shall have me in her hands to do her will of me; and if she be so hard-hearted as to desire my end, she may then do her pleasure, and make sacrifice of me; peradventure that casualty might be better for me than to live; in this matter God’s will be done.
Despite what Mary had told Throckmorton, she had, of course, continued the troublesome quartering and was childishly and light-heartedly brushing the matter aside, but the end of her address to Throckmorton belied her light heart. Not for the first time she was expressing the sentiment that death was a preferable option to making up her own mind, something she felt she had now been forced to do. She was returning to Scotland with no gladness in her heart or any wish to rule the country as its queen.
Mary now went to the Louvre to oversee the despatch of her furniture and wardrobe for Rouen and Newhaven, then she left Paris again for St Germain. She made her formal farewells to Charles, Catherine and the royal court on 25 July and with her six Guise uncles ensuring that she had remembered what had been discussed at Joinville, as well as a considerable retinue, travelled towards the English Channel. Her exact route and final port of embarkation were closely guarded secrets, but by 7 August she was at Abbeville, where she had her last interview with Throckmorton. The Lord of St Colme and one Arthur Erskine were sent to Elizabeth with one last appeal for a safe conduct, although, even if Elizabeth had granted it, the actual document could not have arrive until after Mary’s departure. It was simply the crossing of a diplomatic ‘t’.
The day before she sailed, Mary sent Throckmorton two basins, two ewers, two salts and a standing cup, 368 ounces of silver-gilt in all, as her traditional present for his services. With René de Guise, Marquis d’Elbeuf; Claude de Guise, Duc d’Au-male; François de Guise, Grand Prior; the poets Brantôme and Chastelard; her four Maries; a doctor of theology and two doctors of medicine, Mary and her retinue embarked on 14 August. There were two galleys for the royal passengers, under the command of the same Villegaignon who had commanded the ships bringing her to France thirteen years previously. There was also a considerable flotilla of cargo ships carrying her furniture, plate, dresses and jewellery as well as 200 horses and mules. The final arrangements for this had been made by the high admiral of Scotland, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whose father had been a suitor to Mary’s mother in her early widowhood. Mary had previously met Bothwell in France when he had appeared fleeing not only from creditors but also from a rash engagement to Anna Throndsen, his Norwegian mistress. Throckmorton thought Bothwell ‘a glorious, rash and hazardous young man’, and he was quite right.
As the royal galley left Calais harbour, a nearby ship sank and all hands drowned, to Mary’s total horror and moans from her retinue that it was the worst of omens. Mary refused to go to her stateroom below, but had a bed made up on the poop deck, where she spent the night watching the shoreline of France recede. Mary, one of the great weepers of history, lay in floods of tears as the country she had loved disappeared, taking with it her youth. She was an eighteen-year-old virgin, a crowned queen and a widow for whom Scotland was a completely foreign country. Mary’s nineteenth-century hagiographer, the Jesuit Joseph Stevenson, said of her new country, ‘The Scotland which could admire Knox and submit to the dictation of Elizabeth was not the home for Mary Stuart [sic].’ She was about to start a life that was totally alien to anything that she had ever dreamed of.
PART III
Scotland, 1561–68
CHAPTER SEVEN
We had landed in an obscure country
On Mary’s sea journey north there had been no hostile intervention by Elizabeth, who had in fact sent the long-awaited safe-conduct to France. English ships had been sighted in the breaks in the fog, although they were England’s normal anti-pirate patrol, and the only inopportune event was a forced landing at Tynemouth of one of the cargo vessels due to adverse winds. Unfortunately it was the cargo ship carrying much of Mary’s furniture and prized horses – the finest horses that France could supply – and since the animals carried no passports, the surprised warden of the port promptly impounded them for a month.
Mary’s arrival in Scotland was not auspicious. Even though she had forbidden the use of the lash on the rowers, her two galleys arrived unexpectedly early, on the night of Monday, 18 August 1561, in the Firth of Forth, in the midst of torrential rain and thick fog. When the poet Brantôme saw the sailors lighting lanterns and braziers, he told them that their work would not be necessary since ‘One glance from the Queen’s eyes will light up the whole sea’. The crew was not convinced and anchored in the firth for the night.
Next morning Brantôme could not see the main mast from the poop, ‘a sign that we had landed in an obscure country’, but the landing went ahead. Knox, who reported that ‘scarce could any man espy another the length of two pairs of boots’, felt the weather to be an omen: ‘What comfort was brought into the country with her, to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety.’
Since the voyage had been so fast and the Scots lords had not thought to post look-outs, there was no one to meet the royal party and Mary, wearing her deuil blanc with her Maries in the more conventional black or grey, stepped ashore alone in the fog and the rain. Cannon were fired from her galley to notify the town and a messenger was sent into Edinburgh to fetch help – the horses were still in Tynemouth – while the royal party approached the most prosperous house they could discern in the fog. It belonged to an astonished merchant, Andrew Lamb, who managed to arrange a makeshift luncheon for his unexpected royal guests. Two hours later, the breathless Châtelherault arrived with apologies, followed shortly by the official welcoming party of Lord James, the Earl of Argyll and Erskine of Dun with horses and even more apologies. Messengers were sent to make hasty preparations at Holyrood, which was no
t yet entirely ready, so Mary and her dripping wet entourage set off on what was hardly an entrée joyeuse. It goes without saying that Mary wept at the squalor of her reception and Brantôme tells us that she felt she had exchanged Paradise for Hell, although he was probably speaking for himself.
Hardly had they set out when they were approached by a party of petitioners. A month previously a Feast of Misrule had taken place in Edinburgh and one John Gillon, a tailor, had played the part of Robin Hood, the ‘Lord of Inobedience’. This was a festival of mischievous nonsense, and ‘Robin Hood’ was given licence to indulge in petty pilfering for the day – although most of the goods were returned. Heavy drinking and casual sex also played major roles and the festival had got out of hand. Gillon had been arrested and sentenced to death, expecting the sentence to be reduced to a judicial whipping in accordance with tradition, but Knox had forbidden the pardon. On the day of Mary’s arrival a mob had broken into the Tolbooth – Edinburgh’s civic jail – and rescued Gillon. He was now on his knees, as was the mob, before Mary and begging for his life. She had not the slightest idea of what was going on, or of what the condemned man was accused of, but was advised, probably by Lord James, to grant the pardon, and the mob returned to Edinburgh shouting the praises of a beautiful and merciful queen. Politically this was the perfect start to her reign – today it would be a photo opportunity – and cannot have been a pure coincidence. By the time Mary arrived at Holyrood there were bonfires lit around the city to welcome the new and merciful queen who, the populace had been informed, had paid Scotland the compliment of landing without a bodyguard. Mary had only been in her kingdom for a few hours and, unknowingly, she had already been manipulated by her nobles. All of this, to say nothing of the laggard welcome and the weather, were completely unexpected and quite unlike anything she had ever experienced before; neither had any of the accounts of the political and religious changes in Scotland prepared her for it. She now faced an impossibly steep learning curve.
It is fair to say that any memories Mary retained from her infancy in Scotland would have been of no use whatsoever since during her absence the country had undergone one of the most profound changes in its history. Calls to Queen Regent Marie for greater tolerance toward the Protestant faith by such nobles as Lord James Stewart and Erskine of Dun had fallen on deaf ears; the Catholic Mary Tudor had ruled England with fierce intolerance; the absentee Queen Mary had become Queen of France, and Marie de Guise was firm in her resolve to contain, or even to reverse, the reforming movement. The exiled Knox had returned briefly in the winter of 1555/56 and dined with Erskine of Dun and Maitland of Lethington, but his presence was only tolerated provided he maintained a low profile. Since his profile was never low, he returned to Europe to bombard Scotland with the inspirational letters of an exiled leader. On 3 December 1557 the earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Morton, along with Lord Lorne and Lord Erskine, had signed the Band of Congregation, openly declaring their Protestant faith and, in so doing, becoming an alternative government to that of the queen regent. They were now the Lords of the Congregation and their reformed faith attracted growing support from the minor lairdry and some of the burgh elite – provided, of course, it did not interfere with trade.
In 1558 Christopher Goodman, a fellow minister of Knox in Geneva, had published How Superior Powers ought to be Obeyed. In it he had argued that the people had the power and the moral authority to remove the government if it did not conform to their ideas of good administration and justice. This was totally revolutionary and highly suspicious to the nobility, but Marie had inflamed the majority of Scotland and reaffirmed the need for reform by the totally unnecessary burning of Walter Myln, a harmless eighty-year-old schoolmaster of ‘decrepit age’ who had been arrested for teaching a child its catechism. To the eternal credit of the town of St Andrews the civic authorities had flatly refused to take part in the martyrdom and the churchmen had had to perform the grisly deed themselves. Unfortunately they had bungled the affair, prolonging the old man’s agonies unnecessarily.
On 17 November 1558 Mary Tudor had died, and the Protestant Elizabeth had become Queen of England. Then in early May of the following year Knox had returned to Scotland. Marie, her resolution hardening, had outlawed the Lords of the Congregation, who had gathered in Perth – then called St Johnston – where Knox preached against idolatry in the Church of the Holy Cross and St John the Baptist. The result had been a riot in which all the decorations of the church were destroyed by what Knox called the ‘rascal multitude’ – for whose acts he never took responsibility – and the fire of reform had burst into flame with a sporadic war breaking out between the Lords and the queen regent. Both sides had suffered changes of fortune and defections, but the end had been put beyond all doubt when Elizabeth had sent military help to her fellow Protestants. Marie’s death on 11 June 1560 had marked the end of hostilities and paved the way for the Treaty of Edinburgh and the meeting on 8 August of the Reformation Parliament.
Technically, since the queen had not summoned the parliament, it had no validity, but the presence of the three estates of the nation in Edinburgh had given it all the authority it needed. Knox had preached for a religious settlement to be included – according to Randolph, the English ambassador, ‘Mr Knox spareth not to tell them’ – and had begged that the Catholic clergy be excluded from the second estate. This did not happen, but, in the event, most of them stayed away. One of the first actions of the parliament had been for Speaker Lethington – he was called ‘Harangue Maker’ – to ask Knox to prepare a Confession of Faith. This endorsed the Protestant faith and could easily have been written in Geneva. Parliament had gone further by outlawing the Mass in Scotland and completely rejecting the authority of Rome. The celebration of Christmas and Easter had been banned as being Papist and idolatrous, but, perhaps wisely, the pagan festival of Hogmanay had been left untouched. Scotland had now become a totally Protestant country and a commission had been sent to France asking for Mary’s endorsement of these sanctions as well as her signature to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. This was when Lord James Stewart had arrived ‘to grope the young Queen’s mind’. He wisely had not pressed the points of her endorsements. Her acceptance of the Acts of the Reformation Parliament was vital for the peace of mind of the Lords since, in 1555, an agreement had been reached in Augsburg, principally to end the various wars and skirmishes between Catholic and Protestant factions in Germany, but with an overriding clause allowing that a ruler could personally decide on the legal religion of his – or her – subjects. Although this Peace of Augsburg had no legal force in Scotland, it could have been used as a dangerous precedent since Scotland was not simply a small country on the northern fringes of civilisation, but was subject to the pull of European tides. Therefore, what was current practice in Augsburg could have soon become a bone of contention in Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly, no endorsement of either the treaty or the Acts of the Reformation Parliament had been received, although Mary had endorsed the principle of ‘amity’ with England. With both Scotland and England now in the Protestant camp, this ‘amity’ was more important to the Scots than the Auld Alliance had been.
Meanwhile, Knox had produced a draft of the Book of Discipline and had presented it to an assembly of the reformed church, which was, in effect, the first General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. This was rejected and the consultative committee was widened to redraft the book. This was a far-reaching proposal for the parishes – roughly equivalent to today’s parliamentary constituencies. Each parish was to elect a committee, or ‘session’, which would appoint the minister and the schoolteacher, teaching a surprisingly liberal range of subjects. The sessions were answerable to synods, although including some laymen, and all were answerable to the annual General Assembly which now formed the clerical estate. Secondary schools and universities were included in Knox’s proposal, with a range of fees making universal tertiary education available and, indeed, even obligatory to those who were ‘docile’ – in other words, o
f sufficient ability. The whole would be financed by the income from confiscated Catholic ecclesiastic revenues. Unfortunately most of the confiscated church revenues were already in the hands of the nobility, who were reluctant to give them up, so the book received praise but no financial support. Recently, a very senior Scottish political leader was asked what, in theory, he would do with such a document presented to him today as a green paper. His response was that he would sing its praises from the rooftops and then ask his civil servants quietly to bury it.
In Scotland there had by no means been an overwhelming call for Mary’s return since many people saw her as a possible replica of her mother, and on 9 August Randolph reported to Cecil, ‘Some care not though they never saw her face.’ The Earl of Huntly’s wife consulted her ‘familiars’ – she maintained a private coven of witches – and was assured that Mary would ‘never set foot on Scottish ground’.
Mary’s plans, however, had been made without regard to Scottish opinion; her relations with France had been severed, and, like it or not, Scotland now had a queen regnant whose actions would be closely watched for any signs of persecution or tolerance, and her choice of privy councillors would be examined as closely as the Roman augurs picked over the entrails of sacrificial animals – that is, unless Mary herself was that sacrificial animal. Whatever was to happen, the new queen had now arrived at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which was to be her home for the next six years.
As she approached the palace from the hill of Abbeymount to the north, the sight lifted her spirits. A richly carved gateway, surmounted by James V’s coat of arms, led into a wide forecourt beyond which was the west front, finished in the best French style, with a rectangular tower at the north-west corner and the old abbey church nestling against the north side. The abbey had been restored after the Rough Wooing, but it would, technically at least, be limited to members of the Protestant faith since a new royal chapel had been built by James V in the south quarter and would be Mary’s private chapel. The entrance led into an inner courtyard, with the royal apartments on the west side and, to the east, a range of buildings providing accommodation for the court and the officers of state. The building was surrounded by a huge royal park with three lochs, dominated by the volcanic plug of Arthur’s Seat with the spectacular crags to its west. In the forecourt there was space for a tiltyard to be constructed, and there were plentiful private gardens and stabling beyond the main building to the east. It was a far cry from the magnificence of Chambord or the charm of Chenonceau, but it was certainly not squalor and it represented a welcome shelter from the rain. Grooms rushed to take the horses and Mary was shown to her private quarters on the first floor: an audience chamber, measuring about fifty feet by twenty with a table and stools; a hastily lit warming fire; and a bed which would be disassembled during the day to provide a private chamber. Servants were unpacking what had been carried from the ships at Leith – the bulk of Mary’s goods were still impounded at Tynemouth. Mary went on to inspect her private supper room, which was in fact a tiny twelve-foot square closet with a fireplace and windows opening from her bedroom. All the windows faced west and the quarters were still rather dingily decorated, although she had a clear view of Edinburgh, half a mile distant and now ablaze with celebratory bonfires.
An Accidental Tragedy Page 14
