IN THE SUMMER OF 1560, Mary was rumored to be pregnant. The gossip was more than credible, because in a dynastic monarchy the expectation was that rulers should marry and start a family as soon as possible in order to perpetuate their lineage. On the wedding night, a well-established ritual had been followed. Mary and Francis had been tucked in together after their nuptial bed was blessed and sprinkled with holy water. What, if anything, had transpired is unknown, and after that first night the norm for their sleeping arrangements was different. Like all royal families at the time, the king and queen occupied separate suites of rooms in their palaces and slept in separate bedrooms, although Francis was free to arrive unannounced in Mary’s room at any time of day or night if he felt disposed to exercise his conjugal rights.
Sex was obligatory for a queen consort of France. Catherine de Medici had been vulnerable to mistresses in the first seven years of her marriage because she disliked it so. Only when Francis was born could she begin to feel more secure. Likewise, the birth of a son and heir would have given Mary an invincible position at the heart of the Valois state. The timing would have been perfect, not least because a pregnant Mary could have instantly overshadowed her dominating mother-in-law. She clearly did think she was pregnant. She put on loose-fitting gowns and insisted that the court depart from Fontainebleau for the cooler air of St.-Germain.
Mary’s hopes lasted for six weeks, but by the end of September the pregnancy was proved false and she returned to wearing her usual clothes. Her uncles made light of the affair, joking that a sixteen-year-old king and seventeen-year-old queen had plenty of time for such matters. Then Francis became ill. He had always been a delicate child, nicknamed “le Petit Roi” by his subjects on account of his sickly and runtish appearance.
One evening in mid-November, when he returned from hunting near Orléans, he complained of dizziness and a buzzing in his ear. The following Sunday, he collapsed in church. Soon he was suffering from an acute stabbing pain in his head. Most likely his superficial suffering was from an ear infection—when fluid began to be discharged from his ear, he was immediately confined to bed, but it became rapidly clear he was gravely ill, probably from a brain tumor.
Mary’s uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, pretended the king merely had a cold exacerbated by catarrh, which they said had affected his ear. This ceased to be convincing when the Spanish ambassador was promised an audience and then fobbed off at the last moment: rumors of a fatal illness or even poisoning started to circulate.
In late November, Francis suffered a series of violent seizures. He was unable to move or speak, gazing impassively for hours at those around his bedside. Mary fought Catherine de Medici for the right to nurse him. Her mother-in-law was becoming insufferable. She mistrusted the Guise family and had dismissed all her son’s gentilshommes without informing his wife. In the end, the wife and mother nursed Francis together, testing his food to ensure nothing had been tampered with. Every day at dawn, they took up their stations, and despite Mary’s continual protests, Catherine also insisted on entering the king’s bedroom at night.
The doctors bled Francis, purged him with enemas, and considered performing an operation to bore inside his skull to relieve the pressure of the fluid. Shortly before the operation was due to begin, the discharge from his ear stopped, but just as the doctors were congratulating themselves, a huge eruption occurred and Francis became delirious. By the beginning of December, the pains and discharges were almost continuous and fluids were escaping from his nose and mouth. On Thursday the 5th, he was so debilitated that he lay entirely prostrate, and died late in the evening. No one knew exactly when.
During the night, while Mary kept vigil over the body of her dead husband, Catherine de Medici convened a conseil secret. Francis was succeeded by his brother, Charles IX, who was only ten years old. By coincidence, the Estates-General, the most important representative body in France and one that had not met since Charles VIII’s reign in 1484, had been summoned to meet at Orléans. Its delegates appointed Catherine to be regent. She was determined to be revenged on the Guises, whose machinations had repeatedly undermined her. She even restored Constable Montmorency to his former positions; hence the palace revolution that had accompanied Francis II’s accession only seventeen months before was reversed.
Mary had no place in Catherine’s plans. Within weeks of the king’s funeral, an unbridgeable gulf separated the young widow and her mother-in-law. The idea that Mary should marry Charles IX was rejected out of hand by Catherine. In response, the Guise brothers attempted to betroth their niece to Don Carlos, the only son and heir of Philip II by his first marriage, to the Infanta Mary of Portugal, who had died giving birth to him fifteen years earlier.
Catherine quickly stepped in to frustrate the Guises. Such a marriage, she believed, would threaten the interests of her other children and risk eclipsing the future progeny of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, whom Philip had taken as his third wife and who was now living with him in Madrid.
The Guise family’s ascendancy was over. In April 1561, the duke decided to withdraw from court. With Montmorency and many of his Huguenot relations back in power, the stage was set for conflict. Within six months, the cardinal and the rest of the Guise faction had followed the duke’s example, taking a majority of their dependents and retainers with them. The family and around seven hundred of their adherents gathered at Joinville, later moving to Nancy and Saverne, where they felt secure in their estates on the eastern frontier of France.
Mary read the signals and never risked an outright confrontation with her mother-in-law once Francis II was dead. On her first day as a widow, she voluntarily handed over her jewels as queen of France. A rough inventory was compiled, after which the coffers and bags were sent to Catherine together with the list. Once the jewels had arrived, the Queen Mother ordered a full inventory, listing every item and its value, from the largest pieces such as diamond necklaces and a ruby called “the egg of Naples” down to jeweled embroideries and even individual pearls.
On the same day as the jewels were surrendered, Mary left her royal apartments and went into mourning in a private chamber. During the first fifteen days, she refused to receive any visitors apart from her uncles and a few close friends and family members. Within the space of six months, she had been widowed and orphaned and had lost her standing as queen of France. She sat almost motionless in her white mourning clothes, the room in darkness with the windows blackened and the only light provided by candles.
On the sixteenth day she was willing to receive certain bishops and foreign ambassadors, who offered their condolences. After forty days, she ended her term of seclusion and attended a solemn Requiem for her husband in the Greyfriars church at Orléans.
Although barely eighteen, Mary was able to control her emotions. Her husband’s death had followed hard on her mother’s. She was at first distraught, but once the initial shock had passed, she came to terms with her loss. A dynastic marriage was not a love match. Mary had done her duty in marrying Francis and had showered him with signs of affection. But she had never loved him. Her mother’s death had been far more painful. Moreover, she had been sidelined as queen of France. She was little more than a puppet, the strings pulled by her uncles. But she was still a crowned queen in her own right.
She reviewed her options and decided to return to Scotland. Her mind was made up within a month. “Amongst others,” as Throckmorton informed the English Privy Council, “she holds herself sure of the Lord James, and of all the Stuarts.” Here Mary showed that despite her experiences with her uncles, she could still be too trusting. Throughout her life, she retained her belief in the importance of family ties. Lord James was her half-brother, the son of her father, James V, even if he was an enemy of the Guises. The reality was that by the terms of the treaty of Edinburgh, he could wield more power in Scotland than she did as long as she stayed away, but she naively believed that if she returned, he would be reconciled to her. Her suspicions turned more toward the ambitions of Châtelherault and his son, the young Earl of Arran, who had made a firm pact with Knox and the Calvinists. Their latest and most outlandish scheme was to send Arran south as a suitor to Elizabeth and so make him king of England.
Mary was learning to speak and act for herself. She was getting her information from her mother’s former servants in Scotland. She knew that she could win the hearts of the ordinary people there. Unlike the more selfish nobles, they did not seek war or revolt. “All those who hold themselves neuters,” she declared, would support her if she returned, as would “the common people, who now, to have their queen home, she thinks will altogether lean and incline unto her.”
But if Mary preferred to take up her own throne rather than to pit her wits against her mother-in-law for years to come, her uncles had other ideas. Their niece was their best hope for making a comeback. They were indefatigable, straining every nerve to engage Spain in the negotiations that they hoped would lead to Mary’s betrothal to Philip II’s son, Don Carlos.
Mary ignored their intrigues. By acquiescing in the treaty of Edinburgh, her uncles had betrayed her. She did not even begin to forgive them for almost a year. Not one of her letters between Francis II’s death and her return to Scotland is on the subject of a second marriage. It is impossible to believe that Mary, who could not resist writing to her family whenever she was genuinely excited, would have said nothing about a new marriage if she had really wanted one then. Instead, her uncles took the initiative, using her aunt Louise, Duchess of Arschot, as an intermediary on account of her many Spanish friends.
Offers came in thick and fast: from the king of Denmark, from the king of Sweden, from the Dukes of Ferrara and Bavaria, and from Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman Emperor and head of the Austrian branch of the Hapsburg family, who was in the marriage market on behalf of his sons. All of these suitors were credible, even if they were not good enough for the Guise family.
Other candidates included the overbearing and ineffectual Arran, whom Mary already held in contempt for his suit to Elizabeth, and Lord Darnley, the fourteen-year-old son of the Earl of Lennox and Lady Margaret Douglas, the couple who had married and lived inconspicuously in Yorkshire after Lennox’s hectoring attempt to become Mary’s stepfather had failed and he had defected to Henry VIII in 1544.
Court gossip went into overdrive, but the Venetian ambassador, who most feared a marriage to Don Carlos, knew that Mary was not herself a willing partner. It was all the work of her uncles, who sought to manipulate her against her will. In any case, Philip II rejected the suit. He was already closely allied to Catherine de Medici by reason of his recent marriage to her eldest daughter, Elizabeth. His links to Catherine were multiple: through his ambassador in Paris, through her letters to his wife, and through a secret correspondence with Catherine directly, in which Mary was discussed under the code name of “un gentilhomme.”
The Guises believed that Philip would sit up and pay attention to them, thinking that Mary could be the key to a future Spanish hegemony in the British Isles if she allied dynastically with his family. At this moment, they could not have been more wrong. Philip’s entente with Elizabeth had survived the setback (from a Spanish perspective) of the 1559 Protestant religious settlement: his relations with England were still cordial. He privately knew that he could depend on Cecil and his ally Lord James to keep Mary in her place. Catherine, too, was bound to Elizabeth and Cecil, and for some fifteen of the next twenty years, their rapprochement enabled Cecil to attack the Guises while staying on good terms with Catherine and her children.
When the forty days of official mourning ended, Mary withdrew six miles into the countryside. She used this period of privacy and retreat to collect her thoughts and reconstitute her household from that of a queen to a dowager queen of France. It was a significant change, one she planned with her return to Scotland in mind, because she chose as her new advisers those with recent experience of the country. The most important of her appointments was Henri Cleutin, Seigneur d’Oysel, formerly her mother’s chief lieutenant, who was made a knight of honor, the equivalent of a lord-in-waiting. Next in rank was Jacques de la Brosse, the French ambassador to Scotland at the time of Henry VIII’s Rough Wooings and a long-serving Guise client who had accompanied her to France in 1548.
Mary’s appointments confirm that she was eager to return and wanted to learn much more about her country than she had gleaned from Ptolemy’s Geography in the schoolroom. D’Oysel had recently married a beautiful young Parisian woman. He had no further desire to live and work in Scotland, but in advising Mary in this interim phase, he made a vital contribution, since only a native Scot knew more about noble factionalism and the habits and idiosyncrasies of the individual lords.
D’Oysel briefed Mary fully on the revolt of 1559–60, urging her to give credence to Lord James despite his prominent role in her mother’s deposition. His undoubted treachery aside, he was the most capable of the lords and the only one who could hold them together. So far, he had applied all his wit to his own private ambition, which he had cloaked under the pretense of religion. Lord James was a Protestant, but a pragmatic rather than an ideological one. He was not a hard-line Calvinist, and was no friend of Knox. The trick for Mary would be to turn her illegitimate brother from a virtually autonomous agent into a royal servant. If she could do that, she could succeed in ruling her country as well as any of her royal predecessors.
In February 1561, Catherine de Medici and the court moved from Orléans to Fontainebleau as they usually did about this time of year. Mary ended her retreat a few days later, and on the 16th received Throckmorton and the Earl of Bedford, whom Elizabeth had sent with letters of condolence for her.
It was a successful audience. Mary read Elizabeth’s letters, then “answered with a very sorrowful look and speech.” Bedford was to thank his mistress “for her gentleness in comforting her [Mary’s] woe when she had most need of it.” Elizabeth, said Mary, “now shows the part of a good sister, whereof she [Mary] has great need.” As she spoke, Mary gained in confidence and reiterated her idea of a fresh start after the debacle of the treaty of Edinburgh, saying she interpreted Elizabeth’s letters as a positive gesture and would strive to match her goodwill. She invited the ambassadors to return whenever they wished, asking d’Oysel to escort them back to their lodgings.
They reappeared on the 18th, when Mary repeated her desire for “amity.” She and Elizabeth, she started to say, were two queens “in one isle, of one language, the nearest kinswomen that each other had . . .”
But the ambassadors interrupted her, raising the vexed issue of the treaty of Edinburgh, which they insisted be ratified “without delay.” It was a peremptory demand, and Mary balked. Perhaps Bedford, Cecil’s close ally and one of his most trusted friends, imagined that she could be bludgeoned into submission. If so, he had seriously misjudged her.
She refused to be intimidated, anticipating Elizabeth’s own later and more celebrated tactics when browbeaten by her ministers or Parliaments. “She was,” Mary said disingenuously of herself, “without counsel.” The Cardinal of Lorraine was absent, and none of her Scottish nobles had yet arrived, although some were on their way. Their “counsel and advice” were essential, since “the matter was great for one of her years.”
Pressed by Throckmorton, Mary countered that she “was not to be charged” for contracts to which she was not a party. She turned the argument around, accusing Elizabeth of breaking her own agreements, because although she had accepted Mary’s portrait in her deuil blanc the previous year, she had not sent her own in return. Mary now asked Throckmorton to bring it as he had promised.
It was a shot across the bow, because the exchange of portraits was, in Mary’s view, symbolic of her offer to make a fresh start. If the portrait was to be withheld and demands for ratification of the treaty continued, then by implication all subsequent bets were off.
The ambassadors tried again on the 19th, when Mary stonewalled them. She recited the aphorisms on the duties of rulers she had learned from her tutors, saying she must always be “advised” on matters touching her crown and state, turning prudence into an excuse for delay.
She also scored a palpable hit. She cautioned Bedford that if she treated her nobles as contemptuously as he appeared to be suggesting by acting without their advice, she could only expect them to behave as badly in the future as they had done in their revolt against her mother.
If Mary kept her dignity, however, she made no progress beyond this. Elizabeth, if left to her own devices, would almost certainly have offered concessions before very long, since, like Mary, she was well aware of the clandestine nature of the treaty of Edinburgh.
But there was a more formidable obstacle. Mary’s most determined opponent was Cecil. To him, Mary’s refusal to ratify the treaty was tantamount to a hostile act; it meant in his opinion that she had refused to recognize Elizabeth as the rightful ruler of England, in which case he was more convinced than ever that she was the prime mover of an international Catholic conspiracy to depose and kill his queen.
Mary left Fontainebleau in the middle of March, beginning a three-month tour of her family to say goodbye. It was a gesture typical of her, and yet she received a mixed reception. Her aunts were sympathetic. They could see that she had taken a bold, brave step: she would have no mother to greet her in Scotland and was leaving almost all she knew behind. Her uncles were far from understanding or approving, and perhaps this was why there was so much confusion over the itinerary for these farewell visits.
Mary went first to Rheims, where she was met at the city gates by her uncles and grandmother, but stayed with her aunt, the Abbess Renée, at the convent of St.-Pierre-des-Dames. After three weeks there, she had just set out for the Duke of Lorraine’s estates at Nancy when she was overtaken at Vitry-le-François by John Lesley, a young Catholic lawyer who had ridden posthaste from the Netherlands, and at St.-Dizier a few miles down the road by Lord James, who had come from Calais. They had been sent to her by the rival factions in Scotland, as it was expressly said in the case of Lord James, to “grope her mind” before she set sail for home.
Their soundings were the coordinates for her return. Lesley, who arrived first by a whisker, was the emissary of the Catholic contingent. Led by the Earl of Huntly, the murdered Beaton’s successor as chancellor and the head of the Gordon family, this group included the Earls of Atholl, Cassillis, Caithness and Crawford. A powerful faction, almost as powerful as the Protestants and far more united, they had convened at Stirling, where they urged Mary to return home unconditionally.
Lesley warned Mary against Lord James, whom he denounced as treacherous and a rebel, a man attacking Catholicism with the intention of overthrowing the monarchy. She ought to have him imprisoned in France, or else she should land in Aberdeen, where her loyal Catholic nobles would meet her with an army of twenty thousand men and march with her to Edinburgh.
Mary sensibly rejected this advice, which was a recipe for civil war. She turned instead to Lord James, the Protestants’ representative. His mission was to capitalize on the success of the Lords of the Congregation, who in August 1560 had successfully outflanked the Catholics and convoked a Parliament declaring Scotland to be officially Protestant.
But Lord James was calculating the odds: he had also come to safeguard his own position. For this he was accused by Lesley and even by some of his own side of conspiring “to make himself great.” As he talked intently to Mary over the next few days, he came to sense her determination to return to Scotland. Although his own strong preference must have been for her to stay permanently in France, especially given his role in the treaty of Edinburgh, he could see that she had made up her mind.
Throughout their conversations Lord James marketed himself as reliable and incorruptible. Whatever his ambition, he had a keen intelligence, a rare ability to bring people together and predict their reactions. He could even build bridges to the Catholics. And he was, after all, a blood relative, for Mary a strong and important bond.
She talked to him for five days until he steadily won her confidence. They agreed that she would follow his advice and maintain the religious status quo, the existing uneasy balance between Catholics and Protestants, but one in which Protestantism was recognized as Scotland’s official religion, even if a majority of people were still privately Catholic and worshiped as such when they could. In exchange for this arrangement, Mary might hear the Catholic Mass in her own chapel at her palace of Holyroodhouse.
In making these terms, Lord James supped with the devil. His compromise was even more abhorrent to the Calvinists than to the Catholics. John Knox, the doyen of Calvinist preachers, and his allies the young Earl of Arran and Lord Lindsay, had already threatened to rebel again if Mary refused to submit to the demands of the reformed Kirk* and if the “idolatry” of the Catholic rite was allowed to persist in any form.
But when French troops evacuated Scotland, in accordance with the conditions of the treaty of Edinburgh, much of the fear of Catholicism evaporated in Scotland and so did most of Arran and Lindsay’s support. Many of the former Lords of the Congregation were inclined toward the Reformation, but of these only a small minority were genuine Protestants. And very few were outright Calvinists.
Arran, meanwhile, had become a figure of fun. His suit to marry Elizabeth had been rejected: it had been as forward as it was insolent and presumptuous. As if that were not enough, when the English queen had refused his offer, he set his sights on marrying Mary. He convinced himself he had fallen in love with her, even though he may have seen her only once, briefly, in Paris and from a distance, believing she was a woman who could easily be forced into marriage. It was an arrogant and absurd policy that completely misjudged Mary’s character and made Arran look like a fool.
Lord James had little to fear from Arran’s quarter. Moreover, to be excoriated by Knox was an attraction where Mary was concerned. She had never seen her brother as a Calvinist. His conversion to Protestantism was largely political, and within two years he would be quarreling with Knox almost as often as she did.
Mary saw eye to eye with her older brother. She even considered appointing him acting governor of Scotland, until she was informed afterward by d’Oysel that he had gone to meet Throckmorton in Paris as soon as he left her, not to mention briefing Cecil in London on both the outward and return legs of his journey. When she learned this, she had second thoughts about the regency, but stuck to the rest of their agreement.
Mary had no better option than to make terms with her half-brother. In her final days in France, she was trying to identify those who would be her leading councilors as a reigning queen of Scotland. She had to attempt this blindfolded, and all she could do was trust her instincts. It was not a difficult decision in the end. Lord James already led the council of twenty-four nobles that by the treaty of Edinburgh was the lawful government of Scotland. He had personal charm and outstanding diplomatic skills: he was the adviser most likely to be able to build up a broad consensus.
Mary knew that aligning herself with Lord James would mean accepting his cronies as her advisers. His closest allies were William Maitland of Lethington, the secretary of state to the council of nobles, and James Douglas, Earl of Morton. They formed an axis that—thanks to Lord James’s journey to St.-Dizier—would prove to dominate policymaking in the formative years of Mary’s rule in Scotland.
Maitland was the cleverest of the three. He had been Mary of Guise’s secretary, but defected to the Lords of the Congregation, who sent him to London as their mouthpiece. A genuine and deeply committed Protestant, he had done more than anyone else to steer the Scottish Reformation legislation through Parliament. He formed a close bond with Cecil, at whose London house he stayed. Their friendship was based partly on their shared religious beliefs and partly on their mutual admiration for classical literature. Maitland was known in England as “the Scottish Cecil” and in Scotland would come to be known as “Mekle Wylie” (or Much Wily), a pun on “Machiavelli.” Neither nickname was meant to be complimentary, but acknowledged his political suppleness.
Morton was the most dangerous and least complicated. Vindictive, harsh and cruel, he was also a sexual predator who fathered four illegitimate sons and a daughter. Notably rapacious in fiscal matters, he was a technocrat who rose on the strength of his administrative ability and territorial power as the head of the Douglas family. In Edward Vi’s reign, he was a prisoner in England, where he tasted the Reformation and acquired an English accent. He vacillated in his support for the revolt against Mary of Guise, sitting on the fence until he was sure that the Lords of the Congregation would be victorious.
As soon as Lord James departed home for Scotland, confident of his success, the jockeying for position began. Morton wrote a memo justifying his role in the lords’ revolt, which his cousin Archibald Douglas delivered to Mary in person. He blamed others for the “wrong information” she had received about him. Unfortunately he spoiled the effect by asking her to ratify his claim to the estates of the earldom of Angus, which he held in trust for his nephew with a disputed legal title. And Mary ignored the request.
Maitland wrote next, offering his “faithful service” and complaining about “calumniators” and “talebearers.” He too was seeking to exonerate himself, in his case against the charge that he was too much Cecil’s lackey.
Mary sent an illuminating reply, a remarkably clear-sighted one for an eighteen-year-old. She told him she was willing to forget the past and would judge him solely by his loyalty from now on. She told him candidly that she saw him as the “principal instrument” of all the “practices” attempted against her, and advised him to curtail his “intelligence” with Cecil. “Nothing,” she said, “passes among my nobility without your knowledge and advice. I will not conceal from you that if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the one that I shall blame first.” Her letter does more than anything to explain why Maitland reinvented himself over the next two years as Mary’s loyal servant. He was soon working harder for Mary than he was for Cecil, but typically hedged his bets by sending a transcript of Mary’s letter directly to Cecil by courier.
Lord James and his allies knew that the treaty of Edinburgh would shortly become a major stumbling block in their relationship with Mary. Its final surveillance clause required her to ratify and fulfill all of its conditions, failing which England might intervene at any time in Scotland—a threat that was now a serious cause for alarm. To deal with it, Maitland drafted a blueprint for a fresh concordat with Elizabeth and Cecil, one in which Mary would renounce her immediate Catholic claim to the English throne and recognize Elizabeth as England’s lawful queen during her own lifetime. It was to be a more or less straightforward trade: in exchange for surrendering her immediate dynastic claim, Mary would be recognized in England as “the second person of the realm.” She would become heir apparent to the English throne, and would succeed to the throne if Elizabeth died unexpectedly without children of her own.
Maitland was trying to engineer a compromise even while Throckmorton was still badgering Mary to ratify the treaty in its original form. He argued that the effect would be the same as if she had ratified the treaty. She would have acknowledged Elizabeth to be England’s legitimate queen. His idea was that with Cecil’s agreement, Mary should travel home to Scotland through England. She would cross from Calais to Dover, where she would be greeted by a Scottish delegation and taken to London. While there, she would be able to meet Elizabeth face to face and conclude the final terms. In Maitland’s words, such an interview between the queens “shall breed us quietness for their times.”
After visiting her relations at Nancy, Mary returned to Joinville and Rheims, and finally to Paris, where she arrived on June 10, 1561. She was received with honor and lodged at the Louvre. On the 18th, Throckmorton reappeared to try his luck again. Mary replied that she meant to delay her “resolute answer” until she had the advice of her lords, which would not be until after her arrival in Scotland. This would, she assured him, be soon. She meant to take her departure “very shortly.” D’Oysel was to be sent to Elizabeth with a message, and to request a diplomatic passport in case through storm or illness Mary’s galleys were forced to take shelter in England. Beyond this, she did not propose to commit herself.
Throckmorton was in a quandary. His instructions bound him to persuade Mary to ratify the treaty as a condition of his own recall to London. He therefore called a spade a spade. Mary’s insistence on obtaining her lords’ approval before the treaty was ratified was, he said, ridiculous. It was these very same lords who had negotiated it. That, retorted Mary, was now less certain. Things, she suggested, were changing: “It will appear when I come amongst them whether they will be of the same mind.”
It was not the answer Throckmorton needed. And it only got worse when d’Oysel arrived in London to request the passport. Although such documents were issued routinely for diplomatic travel, Elizabeth flatly refused to grant Mary or her companions any safe-conduct unless she first ratified the treaty. When d’Oysel was asked point-blank when that would be, he declined to answer, thereby causing a furor.
Elizabeth had been advised by Cecil. On July 14, following the clash with d’Oysel, he spoke his mind to Throckmorton. If Mary relinquished her immediate dynastic claim before leaving France, then, providing she also ratified the treaty as the surveillance clause required, she might be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir. She might travel to Scotland via Dover, and a personal interview between the two queens could be arranged, which, as d’Oysel was curtly reminded, would be “a friendly meeting” to confirm the “amity.”
Cecil had been corresponding with Maitland, but there was a fatal divergence in their approach. Whereas Maitland sought to “allure” Mary toward a compromise with England, believing she might become Elizabeth’s heir without ratification of the treaty, Cecil still required her not only to renounce her claim but to ratify as well.
In effect, he vetoed the Scottish scheme. Without ratification, there would be no deal. As if this were not enough, his innermost thoughts were betrayed when, after conceding Mary might be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir apparent, he added: “Well, God send our mistress a husband, and by him a son, that we may hope our posterity shall have a masculine succession.”
Even if a settlement was reached, Cecil intended to do all in his power to persuade Elizabeth to marry and have children, thereby excluding Mary from the English succession forever. “This matter,” he concluded, “is too big for weak folks, and too deep for the simple; the Queen’s Majesty knoweth of it, and so I will end.”
On July 20, Mary’s farewell tour ended at St.-Germain, where a fête was held in her honor lasting four days. Verses by Ronsard celebrated her as “this beauty, honor of our times, who makes both kings and peoples content.”
She withdrew from St.-Germain on the 25th and, accompanied by her uncles and a large retinue, headed north for the channel ports. False information about her itinerary was given out to confuse English spies: the tactic succeeded, because although Elizabeth relented at the last moment and issued a safe-conduct, it could not be delivered and Mary traveled without it.
Mary reached Calais on August 10. There she rested for four days before boarding her galley on the morning of the 14th. Her departure was organized by her uncles, one of the last pieces of stage management they would ever undertake for her. They had arranged for the Marquis d’Elbeuf and two of his older brothers to attend her during the crossing. Constable Montmorency’s son, Henry, was also with them. He returned to France a month or so after Mary arrived in Edinburgh, and she wrote to thank his father for his courtesy. Her diplomatic escort was Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissière, an astute diplomat and intellectual who later played a key role as one of the French ambassadors in Scotland and England and who described Mary in his Memoirs as a “naturalized Frenchwoman . . . not just the most beautiful, but the most elegant of all her sex, both in speech and good manners.”
Also on board Mary’s galley were her loyal companions the four Maries, whom she had teased so mercilessly on their outward journey thirteen years before. A second galley was provided for the rest of her staff, with a flotilla of more than a dozen vessels for the baggage, some of them merchant ships chartered from the Dutch. So many ships were needed because on top of Mary’s tapestries, furniture and several hundred coffers stuffed with gowns, gold and silver plate, paintings and other works of art, vast quantities of bed linen and other stores and equipment were transported, including one hundred horses and mules.
She sailed out of the harbor at around noon, watched by one of Throckmorton’s servants, who had finally tracked her down. As on her outward voyage, the captain of her galley was Nicolas de Villegagnon. And just as there had been false starts and a smashed rudder when she left Scotland, on this occasion also, as her flotilla attempted to leave the port, there was an accident. At the narrow entrance to the harbor, a badly steered ship collided with another boat, which sank. Mary rushed forward, calling on Villegagnon to rescue the drowning sailors and offering a typically generous reward to anyone who succeeded. But the ship had plunged to the bottom and there were no survivors.
“What an omen is this?” asked Mary as the signal to hoist sail was given again and the journey resumed. She flatly refused to go down to her cabin, and instead the four Maries prepared a bed for her on the poop deck, where she spent her first night at sea.
Since the shock of her double bereavement in 1560, Mary had acted with courage and composure, especially in her dealings with Throckmorton. But as the coast of France disappeared into the haze, she lost her nerve and burst into tears. With her elbows leaning on the stern rail, she sobbed her heart out, her eyes fixed on the speck of land she had just left as it finally slipped out of view. Her last words as her galley sailed into the open sea were “Adieu France. It’s all over now. Adieu France. I think I’ll never see your shores again.”