The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power...

by Sarah Gristwood

  But fifteen years – that’s long enough, surely? The decades here in Rheims, of prayers and fasts, took the pain further away. A lot had happened in that time, though none of it to me.

  Sometimes I think of what old King James, Queen Mary’s father, said. ‘It came in with a lass and it will go out with a lass.’ Well, in some ways he was right, maybe. It’s the battle between two lasses, both gone now, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, that will be debated down the centuries. But in another he was wrong, I’m glad to say. A beginning for an ending: another King James – Mary’s son, his grandson – now sits on the English and the Scottish thrones.

  I hope Maitland knows it, somewhere, some way.

  *

  Time is the one thing you have in a convent; and perhaps time, in the end, lets you see clearly. It can’t be long now until I face another judgement day. My judgement on myself is easier these days – yes, and my judgement on Queen Mary.

  All the same, the dream has left me too restless to stay in bed. My legs wobble as I pass through the passage, and out through the refectory.

  It still comes as a surprise each time my muscles betray me. To find my legs are not the legs that once gripped a horse, with the scent of the heather rising under me.

  Out in the cloisters, pacing round the central garden – ghosts of dead lavender, on winter-bitten bushes – I assume the posture automatically. Walking blindly at prayer pace, eyes closed and fingers folded before my lips; if anyone follows me, they should be impressed. One past her seventieth year, telling her beads around the cloisters so early, on such a wintry day!

  But inside, I don’t feel like that pious old lady. Now my fright is beginning to subside, I feel… I feel naughty. Like a gleeful child who has slipped out of bed, and is where it shouldn’t be.

  I think of my childhood a lot these days. It’s the present that is not quite real to me.

  I can see Fleming’s red hair and slim white grace, and Livy’s bright colour and uncomprehending stare. Livy, sitting her horse like a bale of hay, but pushing her way into a thicket so eager that all the young huntsmen follow her anyway. Livy, swung high in the galliard by her young nobody. Saying she’d marry him, with such certainty…

  Maybe that’s why I think of Livy these days, though I’d have said that of all the Marys she mattered least to me. She made the choices seem so easy.

  Or maybe now I’m old I know that she was right. What matters is the pleasure of the day – a fast gallop, a young man’s kiss – when all the plotting and perplexities are burned away.

  Maybe in the end we are all Livies. But they’re all dead now – the queen in her English prison, the other Marys in Scotland – all except me. I am truly alone now. The last of the Marys.

  *

  ‘Soeur Marie, mais que faites vous ici? Et le temps si froid!’ I must have been muttering aloud – even shouting, maybe – because here is the infirmary nun come to lead me back to bed. She’s kind but impersonal, like a nursemaid with her charge, murmuring that the abbess will forgive me the early prayers, that a little rest is all I need, while she urges me onwards, briskly. And, like a chidden child, something in me wants to slip out again, and run away.

  But she tucks the coarse clean sheets in, tight as a shroud, and brings me a herbal posset. It’s sweet too, spiced hot on my tongue, and I sip it gratefully, but now sleep is pulling me under. The dream is back again and I cannot refuse it. I am back in the black-draped hall at Fotheringhay.

  Always, after the head has rolled, the accusing figures have come forward solemnly reading their charges again. And at the bottom of my heart, I’ve never had any doubt that I am the one guilty.

  This time, for the first time, I see things differently.

  *

  Those letters: they were never the point, not really. After enough hints and whispers to keep an army of ambassadors writing home, the lords finally produced them at that enquiry in York – our first winter in English captivity.

  By then they’d been doctored into love letters – lust letters – proving Queen Mary was plotting with Bothwell when she was still married to Darnley. Not that any woman, queen or no queen, really wrote her love that way…

  Point is, by the time the forgers had done their work, the papers I’d handed over were only one thread in the tapestry.

  Oh, I dare say it made their work easier. Elizabeth will have had the handwriting inspected, and inspected carefully. But her spymaster would have had a stable of men expert in such work in his employ. And after all that, when they looked into Queen Mary’s conduct at York, the letters weren’t enough to convince anybody. They were just something for the English to leak out later, when they wanted a bit more pitch to smear on their enemy.

  One way or another, they were going to get her. And if I made it easier so, in the end, did she.

  *

  She was, at the bottom, a queen of life and loving. She fought hard to rule a country, but that was never the woman she was meant to be. A waste of talents, you might say. But a queen is more than a creature of politics. She is a creature of story.

  There was only one way our queen could hold the stage, to face down Elizabeth through all eternity. I don’t know, in the end, who scripted her end. Cecil, maybe? Flinging down the tempting gauntlet of another plot, another escape, another opportunity.

  She could no more have resisted picking up the gage than she would one of her puppies. I don’t suppose she tried, really. She may even have known, somewhere in her heart, that this was a trap. She may have walked into its jaws gladly.

  Who was it that chose Mary’s death; who knew that her death would be her posterity? I know the answer: not Elizabeth, not Cecil. No. Someone whose soul I came at last to know, as we shared those long years in captivity.

  Through those long years in England, I sat with her as she sewed the endless dull days away. Oh, those embroideries, and every one a symbol. A complacent cat with ginger hair and a crown on its head, toying with a mouse: who could that be? A hand with a pruning hook, cutting the unfruitful branches from vine: Elizabeth again, and her lack of fertility.

  Yes, Elizabeth ordered Mary’s execution. But which one of them will be adored through history? That was the last plan of Queen Mary’s devising, and I have to say, she wrought it expertly.

  Took the canvas they gave her, and the coloured silks from relatives in Paris, and the rough hempen noose that the English held out to her so hopefully. Enough rope to hang herself…

  But what she wrought, in the end, was the image of a martyr, and perhaps she used all of us to set a stitch to that design. Even me, even Queen Elizabeth. Even Beaton, maybe.

  *

  Under the bedcovers, as the posset did its work, Seton’s old feet began to twitch, as though she were seized by the ghost of some dance at Holyrood, long ago.

  The queen had always loved to dance, and no one danced better – not a French dancing master, not the leaves blown off the tree. She had danced with two kings of France, as well as with her Marys. She had danced with Darnley and with Bothwell, but neither understood how to partner her properly.

  At last perhaps she had found another partner – and he one worthy, finally. Perhaps Queen Mary held out her hand, and said to Death, ‘Come dance with me.’

  Did he set down his scythe? Did his robed bones tread the measure, gracefully? She would look unafraid into the sockets of his eyes as he led her steps into eternity.

  It was a measured dance, down the floor of the years – thought Seton drowsily. And in that pattern, that pavane, perhaps we all had laid down a part to play.

  Historical note

  Q: How much historical information do we really have about the Four Marys?

  The figures of the ‘Four Marys’ have accrued a considerable weight of myth. But we have only snatches of information about their actual lives and personalities.

  Seton, as a spinster nun, is assumed to be pious and vaguely prudish. But she was nonetheless especially able at dressing the royal hair
– Queen Mary’s English captors noted how, under Seton’s hands, she would appear with a different style and colour each day. The only certain image that survives of any of the Marys is a famous illustration of the Battle of Carberry, which shows the tiny stick figure of Seton riding behind the queen.

  We know that Livingstone was known as ‘the lusty’; that Beaton was said to have been in love with Chastelard; that Beaton and her new lover Randolph played billiards against Queen Mary and Darnley. We know Beaton was married to a man, Alexander Ogilvie, in love with someone else, whose own sweetheart had just been married off to Bothwell, in a match made by Queen Mary. Beaton bore children, but it was said her marriage was unhappy, and after she died in 1597 her husband made haste to marry Jean Gordon, his old love.

  Of course, arranged matches were the norm for a sixteenth-century aristocracy.

  Beaton’s reactions, like those of the other Marys, may have been very different from those I have imagined here. But they must have had reactions to the traumatic events going on around them – feelings which, because of the lack of records, cannot easily be explored in history.

  *

  Q: What happened to the other Marys, after the point at which the novel ends?

  After they left the queen’s service, Livingstone, like Beaton, fades largely into obscurity. (Livy was, as I have described here, with the queen and Seton at Carberry. The ‘Lady Livingstone’ who later joined Mary in England is, however, not Livy but her sister-in-law.) The son Livy bore her husband was brought up with Prince James, and later served him faithfully. That is in itself an oddity, since Prince James was reared in strict Protestant faith. Had Livy bowed to the prevailing religion? She died in 1585 – comparatively early.

  There is no evidential basis for the suggestion that Seton may have been in love with Maitland; nor that he was actually present either at the obtaining of the Casket Letters, or on Lochleven. But he did indeed send the jewel with a tacit promise of renewed allegiance to Queen Mary, and his path after Carberry was as tortuous as I describe it.

  Maitland was with the lords at that battle, and collaborated with them over the queen’s trial at York. In Scotland’s continuing turmoils, however, he then sided with her supporters, joining his old friend Kirkaldy of Grange who was holding Edinburgh Castle for her.

  But Maitland was by that time seriously ill, immobilised by a wasting disease, and his wife quit the peace of Lethington Tower, where she had been raising their two children, to join and nurse him. When the castle was captured in 1573 he was taken prisoner and died in captivity – some said, by his own hand. Fleming had to fight like a tiger for the right to bury his body with dignity, also refusing to hand over to the new regime jewels which had been her mistress’ property.

  Fleming married again – George Meldrum of Fyvie – and is believed to have died about 1600. Her son James Maitland, raised a Catholic, had to live his life on the Continent, where he did indeed visit Mary Seton at the convent in Rheims in 1613.

  *

  Q: How much do we know about the life Seton shared with Queen Mary in England?

  Seton’s adventures did not entirely end when she followed her mistress into English captivity. In the late 1560s she was courted by one Christopher Norton, younger son of an English gentleman, whom she met at Bolton Castle, the queen’s first place of imprisonment. Mary’s captor warned Norton that Queen Mary ‘would make a fool of him’ and in 1569 Norton, joining the revolt of the Northern Earls – which aimed to put Queen Mary on England’s throne – was captured, and executed at Tyburn with all savagery.

  The following year Seton fell ill, but in the 1570s another man sought to marry her. This was Andrew Beaton (inevitably some relation to Mary Beaton), who had just succeeded his brother John as Master of the Queen’s Household. Touching letters concern gifts for Seton – a silk hanging, a watch the queen wanted as a present for her – and suggest he loved her.

  Queen Mary favoured the match (which would ally two great families among her supporters) and worked long and hard to bring it about. As late as 1577 she was writing to Andrew’s other brother, the Archbishop of Glasgow and the queen’s representative in Paris, that she had spoken three times to ‘our girl’.

  But Seton was having none of it, claiming both that Beaton was below her in rank, and that she had taken a vow of chastity. Finally she was brought to agree that she would marry him if the vow could be set aside, and Beaton left for Paris, probably to consult the authorities at the Sorbonne. He died of smallpox on the way home.

  In 1583 – fifteen years after they first arrived in England – Seton left the queen’s service on the grounds of ill health and was allowed to retire to France, entering the convent of Saint Pierre-les-Dames, where the queen’s aunt Renee de Guise was abbess. Mary Seton outlived her queen by more than a quarter of a century.

  James Maitland described her in 1613 as being ‘decrepit and in want’, but two years earlier, in 1611, she had been well enough to write a lengthy letter to a contact in England; a request for help in trying to get some sort of pension from King James.

  The letter is still preserved in the archives in Longleat. I stumbled upon it there, while researching the life of the Scots Queen’s niece Arbella Stuart – the first, perhaps, to take notice of it for centuries.

  It was that – evidence of a life lived beyond the queen’s shadow – which gave me the urge to write Mary Seton’s story.

  *

  Q: What does historical opinion today say about the ‘Casket Letters’?

  The ‘Casket Letters’ are documents that have been used to damn Queen Mary through the ages. Few historians now believe they were really written by Mary herself – or at least, that she wrote them as they were presented – and reports as to how they were ‘found’ remain conflicting.

  Morton and the other lords would afterwards claim to have found them in the queen’s apartments soon after Carberry. John Guy has argued convincingly and in detail that several letters of Mary’s were indeed found in her apartments, but written to other recipients and in other circumstances than would appear after careful alteration and addition in a forger’s hand. None of the letters really offer a convincing indictment of Queen Mary.

  Antonia Fraser, in her biography, records an old suggestion that Beaton (whose handwriting was said to resemble the queen’s) wrote the letters, or at least the incriminating parts of them. But there is, as she points out, no evidence for this; and as far as the actual work of forgery is concerned, a more prosaic explanation seems more likely. There would have been plenty of capable forgers in a government’s employ. Any possible guilt on Beaton’s part, I have envisaged differently.

  *

  Q: Is there any historical foundation for introducing witchcraft into the story?

  By and large, in this book, I can fairly say that the more unlikely a detail seems, the more chance it was rooted in reality! The queen and her ladies dressing as men to roam the streets? The attempts to cast her childbed pains onto Lady Reres? The trial of Huntly’s dead body? All described in the historical sources. Also recorded is the fact that the Countess of Atholl, like Bothwell himself, was suspected of practising witchcraft; and that Mary’s son James feared witchcraft, hysterically.

  Mary suffered swings of mood and stability so extreme that while modern medical explanations range from porphyria to bipolar disorder, they might well have seemed supernaturally inspired to contemporaries. The use of ‘sympathetic magic’ – that can transform harm inflicted onto someone’s property into harm on their body – is recorded by, among others, Sir James Frazer in his classic The Golden Bough.

  *

  Q: Are the Four Marys familiar figures of story?

  We’ve all heard them mentioned, whether we realised it or not, in a favourite nursery rhyme.

  ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary

  How does your garden grow?

  With silver bells, and cockle shells

  And pretty maids all in a row.’

  Here ‘Ma
ry’ is the queen, the silver bells those that ring out in church, and cockle shells the emblem of the Catholic pilgrim. The pretty maids are the Marys. Many of us have also heard the sixteenth-century ballad The Fower Maries:

  ‘Last night the queen had four Maries

  Tonight she’ll have but three

  There was Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton

  And Mary Carmichael, and me.’

  The ballad doesn’t work out in historical terms, and not just because Fleming and Livingstone have been written out of the story. An alternative title is Mary Hamilton’s Lament, and the narrator Mary Hamilton laments her coming execution. She has born a child by the Scots King (what – Darnley?), but the jealous queen has had the child killed. It’s practically the one crime of which no one ever accused the sixteenth-century Queen Mary!

  There was said to have been once a real-life Mary Hamilton, with a similar tale of woe. But she lived at the Russian court of Catherine the Great, in the eighteenth century. The ballad, however, has continued to have an active life, adapted by the singer Joan Baez… Though that wasn’t Mary Seton’s first outing in the twentieth century.

  In her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf gives the names Mary Beton [sic] and Mary Seton to two women at an Oxbridge college, using them to illustrate at once the difficulties women face, and their efforts to overcome them. The degree to which women have been marginalised in the narratives of men – and their determination, now, to tell their own story.

  *

  Q: Finally, Queen Mary herself… By contrast to the Four Marys, she is certainly a well-documented figure. But does that necessarily mean that writing about her is easy?

  The problems surrounding Queen Mary herself are different ones. She must be one of the most extensively written-about women in history. Canonised and vilified in her own day; rehabilitated after the Stuarts gained the English throne; reinvented as a feeling heroine for the eighteenth century, the perception that led to her being presented as opposite to Queen Elizabeth in the work of Schiller and later Donizetti.