ON DECEMBER 5, 1561, the first anniversary of Francis II’s death, Mary showed her respect for her late husband by putting the court at Holyrood into half mourning for two days. Black velvet was given to her chaplains for use in special Masses to be sung in her private chapel. She herself wore her deuil blanc, and at the solemn climax of the Requiem, she lit a great wax candle trimmed with black. The services were thinly attended except by the most loyal of her servants. Even Paul de Foix, the visiting French ambassador, found it prudent to stay away. Many of Mary’s household were afraid they would be beaten up by gangs of Edinburgh Calvinists if they were there. None of the Scottish lords would attend, and when Mary asked those who were at court or starting to arrive in Edinburgh for the festive season to wear mourning clothes for a day, they all refused. Despite this, she was undeterred and no detail of the liturgy was omitted.
Then, as Christmas approached, the mood changed. Mary was once more behaving as her Scottish subjects expected her to behave, which meant presiding over a court renowned for its “joyousity.” The hospitality and entertainments may have been on a smaller scale than those to which she had grown accustomed in France, but they were almost as glittering. As Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador, reported, “The ladies here be merry, leaping and dancing, lusty and fair.” Soon he was almost overcome by it all: “My pen staggereth, my hand faileth farther to write . . . I never found myself so happy, nor never so well treated.”
As soon as Mary’s transport ships had arrived with her goods and furniture, she restored her palaces to a state of splendor and magnificence unseen in Scotland since her mother was sole regent. Ten cloths of state were for use as indoor canopies over Mary’s throne. Five other canopies were for outdoor use: one of crimson satin was effectively a parasol to “make shadow before the queen” on hot sunny days. More than one hundred tapestries were unpacked and used to decorate the walls of the royal apartments and state rooms. Thirty-six Turkish carpets were rolled out on the floors. No fewer than forty-five beds were reassembled, fifteen of them trimmed with gold or silver lace or adorned with richly embroidered valances and bed curtains for the use of Mary and her guests.
Mary’s tapestries were the glory of her collection. She had some twenty complete sets, often comprising between seven and a dozen individual pieces, enabling many rooms to be hung. One set depicted the History of Aeneas, another the Judgment of Paris, another the French triumph over the Spanish and papal forces at the battle of Ravenna in 1512. This third set was one of Mary’s favorites. It followed her everywhere she went for the rest of her life, and her rooms at Fotheringhay Castle were decorated with it before her execution. A single tapestry was marked in the inventory as “not yet complete.” It must have been taken from the factory in a hurry, and as it was impossible to finish it in Scotland, it was cannibalized to make an extra cloth of state.
The queen’s gilded throne was high-backed and upholstered with crimson velvet and cloth of gold. The table in her presence chamber was painted and gilded. Low stools were set out for the four Maries and folding stools for important visitors, all of them covered in velvet. As many as eighty-one embroidered cushions were scattered around the rooms, which included thirty-three of cloth of gold, fifteen of cloth of silver and thirteen of satin or brocade. Cupboards or buffets were used to display gold or silver plate, glasses and decorative objects. Side tables had covers of the finest velvet, damask or cloth of gold, one embroidered with the lilies of France in gold thread. For banquets held in the great hall, Mary had two white linen tablecloths, each more than forty feet long.
Lastly, although Mary always preferred to ride on horseback rather than be carried in a litter or a coach, her luggage included a horse-drawn litter covered with velvet and fringed with gold and silk, as well as a coach that looked like a four-poster bed on wheels. Such an equipage was the height of luxury. (Mary of Guise had owned one, as she received a bill for 13 shillings for repairs to it at St. Andrews, but hers was the first seen in Scotland.) Coaches were still rare even in Paris: the only women important enough to have them in Henry II’s reign were Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers.
Sumptuousness of this kind was unknown in Scotland. James V’s belongings had been more modest. And while Mary of Guise had owned tapestries and personal effects of a similar style and quality, they were fewer in number. There was a separate inventory of her mother’s possessions, which Mary inherited and added to her display. Their strength was in the visual and decorative arts. Her mother had amassed twelve sets of tapestries, one on the theme of the Twelve Labors of Hercules, and ten paintings on wood. She had six maps of the world and a pair of globes, one astronomical and the other terrestrial. Ten clocks in jeweled or silk cases took pride of place on her side tables. One of her mother’s most treasured items was a panel portrait of herself. It had been secreted away by her executors, and Mary insisted that it be returned to her. This together with her mother’s globes were among Mary’s own most cherished objects. They too were to be rediscovered in her bedroom at Fotheringhay.
Mary always loved clothes, and her wardrobe was vast. She had dozens of gowns, petticoats, chemises, Spanish farthingales (undergarments of wooden hoops designed to support wide skirts), skirts, bodices, detachable sleeves (often stuffed or on wire supports), jackets, cloaks and mantles. She had drawers crammed with black silk stockings, white crepe stockings, woolen and silk stockings embroidered with gold and silver thread, stockings of the finest Guernsey worsted, and special fine-knitted stockings that showed off the shape of the leg, which she would have worn while dancing. She had silk garters, buttons of pearl, gold buttons, silver buttons and more than fifty embroidered handkerchiefs.
She had wired headpieces, soft linen caps, veils, mufflers, scarves, hats and hatbands. One of her many inventories recorded thirty-six pairs of velvet shoes laced with gold and silver. She had soft leather shoes, leather and buckram shoes, as well as innumerable pairs of gloves, some leather, some of Guernsey worsted and some that were specially perfumed.
Her indoor dresses were made from cloth of gold or silver, silk, satin, velvet or damask, and lined with taffeta or sarcenet. The strapwork and decorations were of gold and silver embroidery or of jeweled embroidery, the buttons of solid gold or silver or else of black or green enamel, the tassels of woven lace. Her outdoor clothes were generally of velvet, damask or Florentine serge, and her riding clothes were of a specially stiffened serge that was decorated with lace and ribbons.
Mary scarcely had occasion enough to wear all these clothes; and this at a time when a reasonably well-off woman might boast of three dresses. A rich noblewoman might have at most two dozen. A poor woman would be lucky to have more than one, perhaps of linen made from home-grown flax, but more usually knitted out of wool that the wearer had carded and spun herself on a spinning wheel.
As a woman ruler exercising a role normally occupied by men, Mary soon showed that she had a passion for frolics and high jinks that inverted sexual or social stereotypes. Almost six feet tall, she could pretend to be a man and liked to roam incognito with her Maries through the streets of Edinburgh wearing men’s clothes. Or else she and her four beloved companions would forget their positions and dress up as burgesses’ wives. In St. Andrews they amused themselves by playing house, banishing the symbols of royalty and doing their own shopping. At Stirling, they walked in disguise through the streets begging for money, to see who would give and who refuse. At a masque after a banquet in honor of the French ambassador, they appeared dressed as men again, causing shock and consternation. To indulge her wicked sense of humor, Mary employed her own fool or court jester, a woman named Nichola, or “La Jardinière,” whom she brought back from France and with whom she loved to banter.
She liked to take regular exercise. She rode one of her horses every day, sometimes alone and for up to three hours. Her favorite sports were hunting, hawking, archery and equestrian events. She even played golf on the links close to the Firth of Forth. When it rained or was too cold to exercise outdoors, she stayed in and played chess, cards or billiards.
Not everyone wanted “joyousity.” John Knox complained that Mary “kept herself very grave” in the presence of her advisers, but the moment “her French fillocks”—wanton young women—“fiddlers and others of that band got the house alone, there might be seen skipping not very comely for honest women.” He saw himself as a voice crying in the wilderness, because Mary was a gregarious queen who enjoyed the constant cycle of banquets, dancing, masques and dramatic entertainments she had become used to in France.
Her first masque was staged at a banquet in honor of her Guise relations, who were shortly to return to France. The queen, her Maries and the leading nobles played the main characters. At other times when they were spectators, the principal roles were taken by professional actors or servants. Sometimes the performance was a dumb show, but usually there were recitations followed by music and dancing, and on special occasions mechanical or clockwork effects. George Buchanan often scripted these masques. In one, he made Apollo and the Muses march in procession before Mary while explaining how, being driven from their homes by war, they flocked to her court. In another, the four Maries played the parts of nymphs who came to offer their oblations to Mary, herself depicted as Hygieia, the goddess of health, whose animal was a serpent drinking from a saucer held in her hand.
Mary employed Buchanan to read to her. Shortly after her arrival, they were studying Livy’s history of Rome for an hour or so each afternoon. How interested Mary really was in Livy is unknown. She had never much enjoyed history or classical literature, and the true reason for her afternoons with Buchanan was more likely her love of French vernacular poetry, because although a native Scot, he was one of the finest poets writing in Latin and French. Even Ronsard and the Pléiade had eulogized his work.
Buchanan was soon recognized to be Mary’s official court poet. He scripted most of her masques for the next five years and also spoke the impromptu verses in honor of Mary Fleming when she was chosen as “Queen of the Bean” in the revels on Twelfth Night. In accordance with tradition, a bean was baked in a great “Twelfth cake.” Whoever found the bean in her slice of cake was queen for the day. When Mary Fleming paraded it in triumph, she was given a crown and seated in state on her throne. Mary would have delighted in this play, which appealed to the same love of social inversion that had her enjoying the part of a bourgeois housewife at St. Andrews.
Music was indispensable to the masque, and as Mary adored dancing, she always kept minstrels and musicians on her payroll. She had a consort of five viol players and three lute players. Some of her valets sang and played the lute. She also liked wind instruments. At first she had several pipers and a shawm player—a shawm was an early type of oboe. Later she kept a small orchestra of trumpets, oboes, fifes, drums and tabors. Her domestic staff formed a choir, which sang at her evening functions. When three valets who sang three parts needed a bass to sing the fourth part, David Rizzio, a young Piedmontese valet and musician who had traveled to Edinburgh in the suite of Signor di Moretta, the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador, left his post to enter her service.
One of Mary’s sporting and cultural innovations was the equestrian masque, which she introduced within weeks of her arrival. Such events were normally staged outdoors, taking the form of “running at the ring” in costumes or disguises. One team dressed up as Stranger Knights and the other as Female Knights, after which the teams rode in competition on Leith sands. The object of the game was to see which team could score the most points by spearing a ring suspended from a post in a fixed number of turns. But every so often they were indoor entertainments, as when troops of knights rode into the great hall and recited verses eulogizing Mary and pledging themselves as her lieges.
A few days after Mary’s inaugural masque, Randolph, the resident English ambassador, was summoned while she was in the council chamber. He found her “where she herself ordinarily sitteth the most part of the time sewing some work or other.” When her councilors departed, she asked him to wait. “I will,” she said, “talk with you apart in the garden.” One of Mary’s special skills was the ability to persuade the person with whom she was conversing that he was the only one who really mattered, and Randolph knew the interview was important.
She began in a low key. “How like you this country? You have been in it a good space and know it well enough.” Randolph answered, “The country is good and by policy might be made much better.” To this she replied, “The absence of a prince hath caused it to be worse, but yet is it not like unto England?” Randolph said there were many countries in far worse condition than Scotland, but few were “better than England,” which he trusted she would visit.
He was struggling, because he had little idea what was afoot. But he had said the right thing. A visit to England was exactly what Mary wanted. “I would,” she quickly agreed, “be content therewith if my sister your mistress so like.”
Mary chose her moment. After Maitland’s return from his embassy, there had been a sudden turnabout and his diplomacy had failed. No longer would Elizabeth appoint commissioners to renegotiate the treaty of Edinburgh, to clear the way for Mary to be recognized as heir apparent in England in exchange for renouncing her immediate dynastic claim. As the years went by, Elizabeth developed an almost primordial dread of naming a successor or allowing the succession to be discussed. She had a superstitious fear that to identify her successor would hasten her own death: she was still scarred by the plots and revolts of her brother’s and elder sister’s reigns. “I know,” she said, “the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government, and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.”
The result was that six weeks after Maitland departed, she rescinded her offer and called on Mary to ratify the treaty in its original form. Mary refused to do this, but still believed it would be possible to reach a settlement with her cousin.
She was all the more determined because she did not wish merely to be a figurehead in Scotland. She wanted to rule effectively. With Knox’s insubordination so fresh in her mind, she was beginning to fear that her Scottish subjects would never obey her in the manner she thought she should be able to expect unless her right of succession in England was accepted. Her dynastic claim and her prestige in Scotland were connected, because as long as Knox and his supporters were writing to Cecil in England and colluding with him behind her back, her authority was undermined.
If, however, Elizabeth accepted her as the successor, then she would have legitimized her once and for all, making it far riskier for Mary’s subjects to appeal to England against her authority, whether she outlived a woman who was only nine years older than herself or not.
Elizabeth had an agenda of her own. She had made it clear to Parliament in 1559 that she did not intend to marry. Her speech was widely reported: “This shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, died a virgin.”
Such a statement cannot be taken at face value. Elizabeth was a superb rhetorician who knew that her marriage and the succession were linked. While a marriage, if there ever was to be one, would settle the succession as long as she bore children, it was politically naive for a woman ruler to announce her plans to marry much in advance of her final choice of candidate. Not only would her authority be shaken by factionalism at home, her wedding—assuming she had chosen to marry a foreign prince—would raise the same vexed questions of absentee monarchy that had so humiliated Mary Tudor, when Philip II had left England and his wife after just over a year to attend to more important concerns.
In 1560, Elizabeth had seriously contemplated marriage. She had fallen madly in love with her handsome favorite, Lord Robert Dudley, with whom she had a fling lasting eighteen months. As it was explained by the Spanish ambassador, “Lord Robert has come so much into favor that he does whatever he likes with affairs and it is even said that Her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night.” Their affair seems to have stopped at heavy petting, but was scandalous because Dudley was a married man. His wife was Amy Robsart, whom he had married ten years before.
The gossip ran riot in September 1560, when Amy died at the age of twenty-eight in highly suspicious circumstances. She fell down a flight of eight steps at her home in Cumnor Place, near Oxford, and broke her neck after sending all her servants to enjoy themselves at a nearby fair. A coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of accidental death, but whether she died accidentally, committed suicide or was murdered is impossible to judge from the meager evidence. Elizabeth would hear nothing against Dudley, but by the end of the year had decided that marriage to him was too risky. In November, she drew back from giving him an earldom. She picked up a knife at the last moment and slashed the deed of grant.
After Maitland had returned home, convinced that the treaty of Edinburgh was renegotiable, Elizabeth changed her mind. All her life she was prone to such bouts of indecisiveness and vacillation. Sir Walter Raleigh later quipped that “Her Majesty did all by halves.” It was a failing she seemed to regard as a virtue, since it gave her more time to weigh her options.
On Cecil’s advice, she decided that to replace the treaty would be too dangerous. She knew that she was illegitimate in the eyes of the Catholic Church. She also knew that her father’s Parliament had declared her illegitimate when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed. And if the treaty was to be picked apart, all that could stand once more in the way of Mary’s immediate claim to the English throne was Philip II’s decision to recognize and protect Elizabeth.
England’s relations with Philip II were still cordial, but that might not last forever. A crack had opened up in the spring of 1561 when Elizabeth refused to send representatives to a new session of the Council of Trent, provoking accusations from Catholics all over Europe that she was schismatic, heretical, illegitimate and immoral. The more Elizabeth thought about it, the more reluctant she was to put a sword into the hands of those who might eventually be in a position to turn it against her.
She had been uncharacteristically frank with Maitland. She usually kept her doubts to herself, but this time she had made them known. She feared a threat to her own security if Mary was named as her successor. However honorable her cousin’s intentions, the mere process of naming a successor would stir up a hornet’s nest. “Princes,” she said, “cannot like their own children. Think you that I could love my own winding-sheet?”
As a result, Mary wanted to meet Elizabeth face to face. She was confident that if she could only talk to her cousin at the level of queen to queen, their differences would quickly melt away and a fresh accord be reached. As soon as she broached the possibility of a visit, Maitland set to work to arrange it.
Nor was Elizabeth unresponsive. The truth is, she was already wavering again. In January 1562, she wrote to her cousin, saying that although she could not yet send her portrait to complete the earlier agreed exchange, this was only because the artist was sick and unable to “set it out.” She would, as soon as it was ready, dispatch her picture to her “sister.” It was a good example of Elizabeth’s genius for public relations, but also an acknowledgment that a settlement between the two queens was still in the cards.
The English Privy Council was deeply divided over Mary’s claim to the succession. As long as Elizabeth refused to marry, there would always be those who wished to keep their lines open to someone with as strong a claim to the throne as Mary’s. Although she was a Catholic, she had many supporters in England. Her policy of compromise and conciliation with the Protestant lords had been warmly received. And other events worked to her advantage.
Henry VIII’s will had set aside the strict rules of hereditary descent. If his children died without heirs, then the throne was to pass to the offspring of the Duchess of Suffolk. By the 1560s, this meant Lady Catherine Grey or her younger sister Mary Grey. They were Protestants, and Catherine’s claim was strongly supported by Cecil, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to promote it.
Elizabeth, however, loathed the Grey sisters. She did what she could to humble them, and when Catherine secretly married the Earl of Hertford and became pregnant, the scandal benefited Mary Stuart. The marriage was discovered in August 1561, when a furious Elizabeth sent both parties to the Tower. A son, called Edward after his father, was born to Catherine. Elizabeth persuaded the Court of Star Chamber to fine the earl £15,000 for seducing a royal virgin and the Archbishop of Canterbury to annul the marriage, thereby denying any resulting children a place in the order of succession.
Whereas Cecil supported Catherine Grey’s claim to the succession, Elizabeth favored Mary Stuart’s. When looking at it from this viewpoint and not from that of fear of the papacy and Philip II, she believed that the Queen of Scots was undeniably a proper queen and not an upstart. She was a respectable widow, a woman around whom there had never been the slightest whiff of scandal, and although privately a Catholic, in public she had accepted the official Protestant Reformation in Scotland, where her star was rising fast.
The crux was the place of religion. Elizabeth was a Protestant, but not as Protestant as Cecil wanted her to be. The ideological rift between her and Cecil over Mary was fast taking shape. Elizabeth would always be reluctant to settle the succession if that meant identifying a named successor. But in her mind she kept religion and politics apart. Her overriding aim was to defend the ideal of monarchy, and if left to her own devices, she would sooner or later acknowledge the deficiencies of the treaty of Edinburgh and reach an accord with Mary. She would be tempted to recognize her right to be regarded as heir apparent, but without actually naming Mary as her successor.
What terrified Cecil was that Elizabeth might one day overrule him and do exactly this. And what better way was there for Mary to persuade Elizabeth to do so than at a personal interview?
By the spring of 1562, Mary was eagerly making plans for the forthcoming meeting. All suitors for her hand were politely rejected, and if the topic of marriage was broached, she would joke that she would have no one else but Elizabeth.
Mary was so hopeful, she sent another portrait of herself to her cousin. It was a miniature this time, set in a ring behind a large diamond framed like a heart, the sort of token exchanged by royal lovers. The jewel took almost three months to manufacture, but was ready by the middle of June.
Mary wrote verses to accompany it. As with her oration at the Louvre, she needed help, which Buchanan ably provided. The gift had the desired effect. Elizabeth replied two weeks later, sending Mary her own verses in Italian. Mary then reciprocated in French and Italian “with a few more in number written in the best sort she can”:
Just one thought gives me pleasure and grief,
My heart fills first with bitterness and then sweetness,
Fluctuating between the doubt and hope that afflict me,
So that peace and sleep flee from me.
Therefore, dear sister, if this verse brings you
The desire to meet that also moves me,
I can only be left in pain and sadness
If the meeting does not happen soon.
These exchanges between the two queens were, in a flirtatious way, the prelude to a rapprochement. Maitland was in correspondence with Cecil, who was attempting to put a damper on the proceedings. He saw where this was heading. He especially disliked the idea of a symbolic marriage, and could never accept that Mary, a Catholic and a Guise, had changed her colors.
On May 25, Maitland was sent again to London, where he stayed until early July. His instructions were to make the final arrangements for the interview.
But Cecil dragged his heels. Maitland complained of his “brief and dark sentences.” Then shocking news arrived from France. The Duke of Guise, traveling from Joinville to Paris, had passed through the village of Vassy just as several hundred Huguenots were worshiping in a barn. His retinue tried to break up the congregation, but were repulsed. So his musketeers fired, leaving twenty-three dead and almost one hundred wounded. The duke vehemently denied that he had started the massacre. He always insisted that the violence had erupted because the Huguenots had pelted him and his men with stones. Whatever the truth of this, Cecil’s worst fears were confirmed; it seemed that the Guises were set on a religious crusade that would eventually cross the channel and spread to England.
Cecil appealed to Elizabeth to bury the interview with Mary, who knew herself that the massacre would seriously damage her cause. On May 29, Mary summoned Randolph to dissociate herself from her uncles. She “lamenteth their unadvised enterprise, which shall not only bring themselves in danger of their own persons, but also in hatred and disdain of many princes in the world.”
Cecil settled down to another round of memos. He was determined to block the meeting and scraped the bottom of the barrel of feeble excuses, claiming it had rained so much, “the great wet” would clog the wheels of the coaches carrying the queens. York or Nottingham had been suggested as the venue, midway between London and Edinburgh. But Cecil argued there were shortages of “wine and fowl” there. He even felt confident enough to draft instructions to Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Robert Dudley’s brother-in-law and the president of the Council in Wales, who was to be sent to Mary as a special envoy to say the meeting had been canceled.
Maitland continued to lobby Elizabeth at Greenwich. His efforts seemed doomed, and yet to his delight Elizabeth overruled Cecil. She made her decision on July 6, when a contract was drawn up finalizing the small print for the meeting. It would take place at York in August or September. Mary was to be allowed one thousand attendants as a reflection of the esteem in which she was held. She would be permitted to use “the rites of her religion as at home,” a generous privilege. She was not, however, to be a guest, but was to pay her own way. Provision was made for a bureau de change where Scottish gold and silver coins could be exchanged for English money to buy provisions and other necessities.
If Cecil was shaken, Mary was jubilant. Maitland was back in Edinburgh by the 15th, when she told Randolph how elated she was and how she could not possibly have received better news. Elizabeth had even sealed the bargain by sending her long-overdue portrait.
Mary showed it to Randolph and quizzed him repeatedly. “How like is it,” she asked, “unto the queen your mistress’s lively face?” He answered that she herself would shortly be able to judge, when she “would find much more perfection than could be set forth with the art of man.”
“That,” replied Mary, “is the thing that I have most desired ever since I was in hope thereof.” She was almost overcome with joy. “And let God be my witness,” she said, “I honor her in my heart and love her as my dear and natural sister.” Mary’s language shows that she had made a heavy psychological investment in the meeting’s success.
Once again she would be foiled. Nine days after Elizabeth first offered the interview, she changed her mind. It was to be postponed until the following year on account of the tragic events in France. Cecil had gotten his way. Sidney, already earmarked to break the news to Mary and whose instructions were ready and waiting, left London on the 16th. He arrived in Edinburgh on the 21st, but Mary was indisposed. Lord James and Maitland had already heard the news. They told Mary, who fell “into such a passion as she did keep her bed all that day,” refusing to move or speak to anyone. She received Sir Henry next day, “with great grief . . . as well appeared by divers manifest demonstrations not only in words but in countenance and watery eyes.”
Worse was to come. Within three months, the first of the Wars of Religion would have begun in France, and England would have intervened in Normandy on the side of the Huguenots against the Guises. All thoughts of the interview would be sidelined.
The civil war in France broke out less because Catherine de Medici, still the regent there, had opposed the Huguenots than because she had stopped supporting them. After her ten-year-old son Charles IX’s accession, her policy had been to eclipse the Guises and deal with the religious question by appeasing the Huguenots. She had little choice, because their rapid advances at court were matched by their expansion in the country as a whole. In the short term, Catherine’s policy of allowing them to worship freely in their own homes worked. Their two great leaders, Louis Prince of Condé and Gaspard de Châtillon, Admiral Coligny, were sufficiently powerful to keep their supporters in check. The trouble started when the Huguenots demanded the right of public worship and the Guises successfully detached Anthony, the titular king of Navarre, from his brother Condé.
Anthony of Navarre was lieutenant-general of the kingdom and commanded the royal army. When the Guises won him over to their side, they were seemingly back in power, which pushed their enemies into a revolt. The Huguenots, led by Condé, seized the town of Orléans, followed by Angers, Tours and Blois. When Lyons fell to their forces, Catherine was pressed into a volte-face. She turned again to Constable Montmorency and the Duke of Guise, who agreed to bury their differences, and looked for aid to the pope, the Duke of Savoy and Philip II. The Huguenots, for their part, appealed to Elizabeth and Cecil.
Mary was caught squarely in the middle. If she declared her support for her Guise family, she might end up on the side opposite Elizabeth in a war. If she allied with her, she would be accused of betraying her family and her religion, and of assisting heretics to rebel against their lawful sovereign.
Elizabeth was also put on the spot. She saw the extreme danger of alienating Catherine de Medici and Philip II at the same time. She could end up as a Protestant pariah: a heretic queen who seemed always to be making it her business to support her fellow rulers’ rebels. She was all too aware of the risks Cecil had taken in Scotland during the revolt of the Lords of the Congregation.
Cecil began to despair of Elizabeth, who was inclined to ignore the plight of the Huguenots. His ally Throckmorton came to the rescue: he knew which card to play. Writing to Elizabeth, he hinted that the Huguenots were likely to be victorious in northern France. If aid was sent to them, the opportunity would arise to recover Calais, which England, to Elizabeth’s deep chagrin, had been required to cede to France by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis.
It was a golden opportunity to aid the cause of religion and recover a lost territorial prize. But if a war was imminent, the interview between the queens must be postponed.
Elizabeth desperately wanted to recover Calais or another Channel port in its place. Her favorite, Lord Robert Dudley, now took center stage, opening up negotiations with the Prince of Conde and sending Sidney, his brother-in-law, as a special emissary to France. Dudley’s diplomacy was at its height in May and June, just when Maitland was lobbying Elizabeth in Mary’s favor. Then, on July 17, eleven days after Elizabeth overruled Cecil and agreed to the interview and two days after she had changed her mind again, it all came to a head. Dudley reported to a meeting of the Privy Council at which it was decided to launch a military intervention in France.
On September 20, a treaty was concluded with Conde’s delegation at Hampton Court. Elizabeth promised to supply the Huguenots with six thousand troops and a loan of 140,000 crowns, and in return was granted Le Havre as a pledge until Calais was restored.
Mary watched these events with growing alarm and despondency. Since the meeting was postponed, she decided to fulfill a summer plan she had delayed: a royal progress to northeastern Scotland, to see the country and show herself to as many of her subjects as possible there. It was a sensible decision, even if Mary made it chiefly to save face.
She began at Stirling, traveling by way of Perth, Glamis and Edzell. She reached Aberdeen at the end of August, but the journey was difficult. According to Randolph, it was “cumbersome, painful and marvelous long, the weather extreme foul and cold, all victuals marvelous dear, and the corn that is, never like to come to ripeness.”
The final stop was Inverness. Randolph thought he could relax when he reached nearby Strathbogie, the principal seat of the Earl of Huntly, the leading Catholic noble and head of the Gordons, whose house was the fairest and “best furnished” in Scotland. Huntly’s hospitality was “marvelous great,” but Mary refused to go there, even though it was within four miles of her route.
Her summer progress was taking on a sinister aspect. Huntly was in grave disfavor for opposing Mary’s proposed interview with Elizabeth. Like many of the Catholic lords, he resented the policy of conciliation toward England, which he saw as a Trojan horse for Lord James and his allies. He was also sulking because he felt he had been cheated. He had been administering the earldoms of Mar and Moray on behalf of the crown for several years, until Mary granted them to Lord James, the first early in 1562 and the second in September, in exchange for the first.
Her anger had been aroused when she first reached Aberdeen. Huntly had turned up to welcome her, but brought fifteen hundred retainers when he was commanded to bring no more than a hundred. A clash was unavoidable when Mary arrived at Inverness only to find that the captain of the castle, apparently on Huntly’s orders, refused to open the gates to her.
Huntly, known by the nickname “Cock of the North,” was the most important landowner in the northeast, second only to the Earl of Argyll in the west. A staunch adherent of Mary of Guise, he was appointed chancellor after Cardinal Beaton’s murder. When discredited for opposing the regent’s centralizing policy in the Highlands, he joined the Lords of the Congregation, but was a reluctant, halfhearted recruit. He ended up antagonizing both sides, especially Lord James, to whom he had unwisely boasted that he could restore the Mass in three counties.
Advised by her insinuating half-brother, whom Mary now officially elevated to the earldom of Moray, she decided not to tolerate Huntly’s insubordination. When she was denied entry at Inverness, she lodged for the night in the town, but next day returned with a force. She took the castle and hanged the captain from the walls of the battlements.
Huntly was still at Strathbogie, where he was lying low. He feared an attack by Lord James and decided to preempt it by separating Mary from his rival. When she set out back to Aberdeen, he planned to seize her as she forded the River Spey. He mustered his forces under Sir John Gordon, one of his younger sons, who was already wanted for a prison escape. But Mary was forewarned. When she reached the river crossing, she had three thousand men, whereas Sir John had only one thousand. They were hidden in the woods within two miles of the river, but fled as the royal army approached.
Mary was jubilant. She had escaped an attempt to kidnap her. “In all these garboils,” wrote Randolph to Cecil, “I assure Your Honor I never saw her merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find.” Her only regret was that “she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the causeway with a jack and a knapscall,* a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword.”
Randolph got caught up in the excitement. As an ambassador, he was supposed to be a neutral party, but he confessed, “It may please you to know that in good faith where so many were occupied, I was ashamed to sit still and did as the rest.” He was positively disappointed when Huntly’s men fled. “What desperate blows would that day have been given, when every man should have fought in the sight of so noble a queen, and so many fair ladies.”
In Randolph’s mind, it seemed that Mary’s ride was part of a medieval chivalric romance. When he reached Aberdeen, the gloss wore off. Mary was royally entertained “as well in spectacles, plays, interludes and other as they could best devise.” But lodgings were in short supply, and Randolph had to share a bed with Maitland. To his horror, he later discovered that Huntly had planned to attack the town, burn down the house where he was staying and assassinate Maitland in his sleep.
Mary did not intend to allow Huntly to go unpunished. Lord James had inevitably denounced him as a traitor. She ordered him to surrender, and when he prevaricated, she sent spies to Strathbogie to arrest him, but he saw them coming and escaped through a back door of the castle. By October 12, she had decided to destroy him. Five days later, the earl was outlawed and ordered to yield Strathbogie. Mary’s forces were now searching for him, and Huntly was on the run. He had a force of some seven hundred men, and aimed to wear down his opponents in a guerrilla war.
Mary named the newly promoted Earl of Moray as her lieutenant and, together with Morton and the Earl of Atholl, he led an army of two thousand out of Aberdeen. Huntly occupied a hilltop some fifteen miles away at Corrichie, but was forced by Moray’s artillery to retreat to the lower mossy ground, where he was trapped. Two of his sons were captured, one of them Sir John, who was executed next day at Aberdeen.
Huntly was also taken, but died of a stroke while still mounted on his horse. His corpse was embalmed and sent to Edinburgh, where it was kept until the following May, when it was put on trial in Parliament. As the clerk’s report put it, “The coffin was set upright, as if the earl stood on his feet.” He was then found guilty of treason, and the family estates were declared forfeit.
Two days before Huntly was outlawed, Elizabeth wrote to Mary, justifying her decision to send an army to France to aid the Huguenots. It was an intimate but awkward letter, full of labored metaphors. She argued that “necessity has no law,” that in an emergency “we have no choice but to protect our own houses from destruction when those of our neighbors are on fire,” and that she would so conduct herself that Mary’s brother-in-law, the young Charles IX, “will think me a good neighbor, one who preserves rather than destroys.” (The last of these arguments was taken straight out of one of Cecil’s memos, in which he argued that neighboring rulers had a duty to protect each other, especially minors, when their realms were threatened by tyranny.)
Elizabeth was on the defensive. She wanted to avoid a breach with her “sister,” but was well aware of the risks. The prospect of a split “gnawed her heart” in case “the old sparks would be fanned by this new fire.” That said, Elizabeth used a well-known device of classical rhetoric to say how much she would have preferred not to mention—so enabling her to mention in graphic detail—the innocent victims who had been so barbarously butchered of late by the Catholics. She could not imagine Mary being so infatuated with her uncles that she was able to ignore their terrible crimes.
Mary took this surprisingly well, less perhaps because of the letters contents than because it was dictated at the height of the attack of smallpox that brought the English queen close to death. “I would write more,” Elizabeth had concluded, “but for the burning fever that now holds me completely in its grip.”
Her letter arrived on the day of the battle of Corrichie. Mary was so busy, Randolph could not deliver the letter, so he decided to return the next day. He reappeared while Mary was at supper. She eagerly asked for her letter. “Let me see,” she said, “what you have for me!”
Randolph, who knew the letter’s contents, hesitated, but she insisted. In the event, she showed no emotion. Her face did not flinch. She put down the letter without saying a single word and returned to her supper “in mirth,” just as when Randolph had arrived.
Later, she recalled him. “Now Mr. Randolph, I trust we shall the next year travel as far south as we have done north, with as much ease and more pleasure than we have had of this journey.” She was adamant that her meeting with Elizabeth be rearranged. She refused to consider the implications of the letter, that it was canceled for good.
Before retiring for the night, Mary summoned Randolph to her bedroom and asked quietly, “Is my sister sick?” She pointed to the last sentence of the letter she was still clutching, and Randolph explained that Elizabeth was recovering from an attack of smallpox. Mary was genuinely concerned, and shortly afterward wrote the letter in which she referred to her own experience of the disease as a child.
But she was also secretly elated. Smallpox was often fatal. If Elizabeth died, Mary intended to stake her claim to the English succession. And yet the timing could hardly have been worse. She was caught in the middle of a war. She therefore told Randolph that she had decided to be neutral. Her uncles, she said, must surely have acted out of a sense of duty. Beyond this, she was unwilling to get involved.
Mary was struggling with her emotions. So when Randolph, despite promising himself not to say anything “grievous” against her uncles, could not resist the riposte that Elizabeth intervened in France in a godly cause, and that Charles IX, when he was older and wiser, would thank her for it, she smiled broadly and changed the subject.
Almost as soon as Mary had returned to Holyrood from the northeast, she suffered a bout of viral flu. She was in bed for six days, and when she rose was in a more belligerent mood. Lord James and Maitland had given her the news that when Elizabeth’s attack of smallpox was at its height, only a single voice had been raised in her favor in the English Privy Council as the successor.
Mary was mortified. Maitland saw the danger and warned Cecil that the war had radically altered the game. Mary, he said, was a “perplexed” queen, boxed in between her uncles and England. To ensure her friendship, she needed a more secure interest in the succession than was provided by Elizabeth’s “love.” Her religion could no longer be an obstacle when she had so obviously protected the Protestants and destroyed Huntly, the leader of the Catholic nobles.
But Cecil was unmoved. The war in France was going badly for England; the Huguenots were forced to retreat and the English troops were cornered at Le Havre. As he reminded Randolph, there were “two dangers.” One was a Catholic victory so overwhelming it would put “us here in danger for our religion”; the other was that the Guises would “build their castles so high,” they would attempt to depose Elizabeth.
It was the same old story. Strangely, Randolph’s assessment veered to the opposite extreme. However much Mary favored her uncles, he advised Cecil by return of post, “yet she loveth better her own subjects.” She understood the need for the amity with England to be greater “than a priest babbling at an altar.” Mary, he argued, “is not so affectioned to her Mass that she will leave a kingdom for it.” Cecil should be reassured. He should no longer suspect her, because “her desire was never greater to live in peace, nor never more heartily desired the Queen Majesty’s kindness and goodwill than now she doth.” “Yesterday,” said Randolph, “she spoke it and willed me to write the same.”
Mary’s charisma had worked its magic on Randolph. Cecil, however, was immune. She celebrated Christmas 1562 in fine style, but the joy was hollow. Even before the revelry was over, she was muttering that she had not heard from Elizabeth for two months.
Early in the new year, Maitland wrote to Cecil: “Sir, I cannot think it to be without some hidden mystery that the intercourse of letters (which were wont to go frequently as well betwixt the two queens as us their ministers) is thus ceased on your part.”
A full-blown crisis erupted when Mary found out that Elizabeth had summoned Parliament to meet on January 11, and that Cecil aimed to bar her from the succession by an Act of Exclusion. The news had leaked by January 5, when Randolph warned that Maitland was “in great choler.” He had reassured Mary that nothing would be “to her discontentment,” but the pressure was mounting, and in the last week of January she took to her bed for six days.
On the 31st, a letter arrived from Elizabeth full of specious excuses, which Randolph presented. She “read it quite over twice in my sight” and took it in good part. But she asked to be excused from replying. She had decided to send Maitland back to London to present her case, if necessary directly to Parliament. He was to go first to London, and then on to France.
He left Edinburgh on February 13, when he also carried a letter from Moray urging how the “love once kindled” between the two queens should be reignited, a task in which he supposed Cecil should never “relent.”
It looked very much like more of the same: another attempt to arrange an interview between the queens. But it was nothing of the kind. Cecil was entirely unprepared for what was in Maitland’s instructions. Not even Moray now knew his sister’s thoughts. She was dissembling, because Elizabeth’s prevarication and Cecil’s obstinacy were leading her to a different and (from the English viewpoint) far more threatening solution. She would seize the initiative by searching for a husband able to secure her dynastic rights in England. This was to become her policy for the next two years, and to get her own way she would, if necessary, break with her Guise relations.