WHEN ELIZABETH rejected Mary’s request for a personal audience and Mary refused to discuss the Casket Letters through intermediaries, a stalemate was reached. The tribunal did not reconvene. No decision was ever given. Mary had not won, but neither had she lost, except that Elizabeth yielded to Cecil’s insistent demands and grudgingly recognized Moray as regent of Scotland. Otherwise, there would have been a power vacuum in the country.
But Elizabeth still mistrusted Moray. He was fobbed off with a loan of £5000, which from his point of view was woefully inadequate. Even if his sister had been marginalized for the moment, she was alive and well and living as a queen in exile with nothing proved against her. Elizabeth had such a high respect for the ideal of monarchy, she had sworn all the judges at the tribunal to strict secrecy. As far as English public opinion was concerned, the Casket Letters did not exist.
Mary would be held in captivity by Elizabeth for the next eighteen years, a prisoner in the sense that she was under house arrest and forbidden free access to visitors, and yet for much of this time she was allowed many if not all of the courtesies and luxuries due to an exiled ruler and guest. Despite the length of her imprisonment, it was never actually decided that this would be a permanent arrangement. Almost until the end, her privileges included the right to diplomatic representation, the use of ceremonies and protocol appropriate to a royal court (on a strictly reduced scale), as well as the right to exercise and occasionally to ride, but only within a mile or two of her lodgings. In some respects, Mary could behave as she pleased, in others she was severely restricted, her movements watched, her letters intercepted, her person guarded—sometimes rigorously, sometimes in ways that were unbelievably lax—and yet despite her many entitlements, she saw herself as wronged from the very first day to the last.
What rankled was less the nature of her imprisonment than the reason for it. Mary felt that Elizabeth did not have the nerve to do her duty and restore her to her throne. Her deep sense of grievance remained through all the tedium and trauma of confinement. Beyond that, her spirits were often high. Her first custodian, Sir Francis Knollys, said of her, “She is a rare woman; for, as no flattery can abuse her, so no plain speech seems to offend her, if she thinks the speaker an honest man.” She was never distant or reserved as long as her “royal estate” was recognized. She talked a lot, but was bold, pleasant and “familiar.” “She sheweth a great desire to be avenged of her enemies.” She abhorred cowardice, whether in friend or foe. “She sheweth a readiness to expose herself to all perils, in hope of victory.” To all other concerns, she was “indifferent.”
Mary had arrived in England without money or a change of clothes. She had at first only sixteen attendants, but soon more than a hundred of her old domestic staff congregated around her. Among those returning were Mary Seton, Bastian Pages and his wife, and George Douglas (“Pretty Geordie”) and “Little Willie” Douglas, the heroes of her escape from Lochleven. Alone of the four Maries, Seton was happy to share her mistress’s dark days for fifteen long years, until her own health gave way, when she retired to the convent of St.-Pierre-des-Dames at Rheims, over which Mary’s aunt Renée presided.
Curtailing the size of Mary’s household was the most visible way in which the wings of the royal eagle could be clipped. Within a few months, her attendants had been reduced to sixty, a number that was halved within a year. After three years, the number crept back up to forty, then was reduced to thirty when one of the men was denounced as a Catholic priest in disguise. In time the number was halved again, to sixteen, although this excludes the ten or so kitchen and pantry help, laundry staff and stable grooms needed for menial services. Mary’s food was cooked in her own kitchens. Her sheets were washed by her own laundresses, and she kept her own horses, even if she was not allowed to ride as often as she wished. In the final and most straitened years of her captivity, when almost every courtesy was denied her, the total number of her staff was still as high as fifty-one.
But Mary was several times forced to say goodbye to servants she very much wanted to keep. When she refused to choose those who were to be retained and those dismissed, it would be done for her without further consultation. “She was exceedingly troubled, weeping and sorrowing,” but no notice was taken. “Little Willie” Douglas was one of those let go. With typical generosity, Mary cushioned the blow, sending the laid-off servants to her ambassador in Paris, who was ordered to give them pensions. Sometimes she could find them other positions. When one of her favorite servants, her perfumer, known affectionately as Angel Mary, was dismissed, Mary managed to get her a new job at the French embassy in London.
Within a few weeks of her arrival, Mary began to eat normally and was allowed to venture outdoors from her apartments in the tower of the southeast corner of Carlisle Castle, overlooking the River Eden. She was twice permitted to cheer on her male domestic staff as they played football, ten men on each team, on a nearby village green. Later she went hare-coursing, galloping off so fast that her guards thought she was trying to escape across the border into Scotland.
Despite her initial lack of funds, and until fresh installments of her private income as dowager queen of France were paid, Mary kept up appearances. She was short of cosmetics for the first six months, but took as much trouble as ever over her clothes. When she refused to wear any clothes except her own, a resigned Knollys dispatched a messenger to fetch her wardrobe from Lochleven Castle and also asked Moray to send her coach and a supply of dresses from Edinburgh. Since the royal apartments at Holyrood had been looted by Morton’s men, there was little to be had from there beyond a selection of chemises, some perfumed gloves and a clock, but five cartloads and four horseloads of clothes and personal effects arrived from Lochleven, which was a start. Mary was soon commissioning replacement items, and some thirty carts would be needed a year later for her belongings when she moved from place to place.
When Seton reappeared, Mary could begin to look like a queen again. Her hair needed attention, because to avoid recognition in her headlong escape after the battle of Langside, she had cut much of it off. In Knollys’s hearing, she praised the most devoted of her Maries as “the finest ‘busker,’ that is to say, the finest dresser of a woman’s head and hair, that is to be seen in any country.” There was nothing she could not do. “Among other pretty devices . . . she did set such a curled hair upon the queen that was said to be a periwig* that showed very delicately.” Every day she gave Mary a different style “without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well.”
Mary spent her twenty-sixth birthday at Lord Scrope’s house at Bolton Castle, an isolated spot on the rugged high ground overlooking the picturesque valley of Wensleydale in north Yorkshire. She was taken there from Carlisle in July 1568, a fortnight or so after Cecil began his careful reading of Buchanan’s dossier. Her birthday, on December 8, was the day after Moray exhibited the originals of the short and long Glasgow letters at Westminster.
Bolton Castle may have seemed less a place of captivity than one of refuge. Lord Scrope was the senior English official on the western side of the Scottish border. As he was stationed at Carlisle, he was regularly away from home. Mary was entertained by Lady Scrope, the Duke of Norfolk’s sister. Her sympathies were with Mary, her religious opinions Catholic. Like her brother, she had a low opinion of Moray, and it must have been reassuring for Mary to have her shoulder to cry on when the Casket Letters were produced.
Moreover, her home was warm and comfortable. Not just a cold and damp fortress, its living quarters had one of the earliest central heating systems of any house in Britain. Mary would not be allowed to stay there long. Within a few months, she would be moved again to a more secure and forbidding location. Cecil not only feared Lady Scrope’s influence, he was also greatly exercised about how close the castle was to the border and the sea. Already he was on his guard in case Mary should try to escape.
In late January 1569, she was taken on a long journey south to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, a ten-day trip through the steep and muddy pathways of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Tutbury lay in the Midlands, the heartland of England: far enough away to make a rescue by the northern Catholic gentry difficult, and sufficiently distant from London and the ports to make a dash for freedom unlikely.
Mary was received by George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who was to be her custodian for the next fifteen years. He was one of Elizabeth’s leading noblemen, the highest-ranking peer after the Duke of Norfolk and the ideal candidate, from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, to manage an exiled Catholic queen. He was a Protestant, but only just, and knew better than anyone the sorts of contradictions involved in dealing with Mary. He had to win her compliance, but definitely not her affection. He had been present at the concluding sessions of Elizabeth’s tribunal, so he knew of Moray’s accusations and the Casket Letters. As Mary had never made a secret of her Catholic and Guise connections or her desire to outwit her captors, she was a constant focus of gossip, rumor and innuendo.
Mary came to respect Shrewsbury, whose gruffly expressed opinions of Cecil were closer to those of Sussex and Norfolk than anyone else. He outlived his ordeal, even if after more than a decade in the post he sank into black moods and a sense of paranoia in his dealings with Elizabeth and her courtiers. He felt obliged to denounce Mary periodically as a “foreigner,” a “papist” and “my enemy” to maintain his credentials. He also faced the burden of the spiraling costs of entertaining Mary and her suite. It was lucky that he could afford it, because Elizabeth was too tightfisted to bear the full expenses of his charge. Sometimes she would give some money, often none at all, and while Mary could afford to support herself, she refused to contribute any of her French income unless she was granted her liberty. Shrewsbury was caught in the middle, forced to pay the lion’s share of what amounted to a gigantic cuckoo in his domestic nest—a mimic royal court.
Shrewsbury had his own domestic ambiguities. Shortly before becoming Mary’s custodian, he had married the redoubtable Bess of Hardwick, with whom Mary was to spend a great deal of her time. Bess was a woman of lofty pride, quick jealousy and insatiable ambition for herself and her children by a previous marriage. In her dealings with Shrewsbury, her fourth and last husband, the traditional gender roles were reversed. Her favorite Greek heroine was Penelope, the most independent woman in classical literature, whose picture, flanked by those of Perseverance and Patience, was Bess’s theme for her best-loved tapestry. Her ambition, not to mention her unfounded suspicion that her husband was sleeping with Mary, led to the breakdown of her marriage. Whereas in 1568, Shrewsbury called Bess “my own sweetheart,” “my dear,” “my jewel,” ten years later he would castigate her as “my wicked and malicious wife,” “my professed enemy” or simply just “wife.” He refused to spend a single night under the same roof as her.
Fortunately, the earl had a mistress and seven mansions, while his wife owned houses at Chatsworth and Hardwick, in Derbyshire, in her own right. Tutbury was their least important property, a royal castle belonging to the duchy of Lancaster that was merely leased. It was damp, dilapidated and almost destitute of furniture, and had a particular problem with the drains. Elizabeth sent beds, bedding and a dozen carpets to provide a minimum of creature comforts for Mary on her arrival, but these were inadequate to the task, and within days of crossing the drawbridge into the courtyard, the exiled Queen of Scots was in bed with rheumatism and a fever.
Over the ensuing months, Shrewsbury painstakingly negotiated with Elizabeth and Cecil to transfer Mary from Tutbury to one of his more comfortable residences. She was moved first to Wingfield Manor and then to Bess’s house at Chatsworth. Then, in November 1570, she was taken to Sheffield Castle, the earl’s principal home, where she was allowed to settle down for more than two years, her longest unbroken stay in any one place.
A mile or so from the castle was Sheffield Lodge, or Manor, a magnificent house on the site of a former hunting lodge which Shrewsbury extended and rebuilt while Mary was in his charge. She first stayed there in April 1573, and over the next eleven years was shuttled between the two Sheffield addresses, making occasional forays to Chatsworth and to a lodge that Shrewsbury built for her at the spa at Buxton—until the earl was replaced as her custodian in 1584.
The close proximity of Sheffield Lodge and the castle was invaluable, since to counterbalance the number of Mary’s attendants and cope with the security threat should an escape attempt be made, Shrewsbury had to maintain an even larger staff than she did. This meant that the total size of the joint household was second only to Elizabeth’s own court. And in the absence of modern plumbing, long stays at individual houses occupied by large numbers of people were always to be avoided for sanitary and medical reasons. To keep houses free from disease, the drains and latrines had to be cleaned periodically. This involved digging them out and carting the excrement and kitchen waste elsewhere, a noxious chore not easily undertaken while the house was inhabited.
Throughout her long years in Shrewsbury’s custody, Mary was treated honorably. Her rooms were luxuriously hung with tapestries and lit at night by candles set in gilt chandeliers, which was just as well, since Mary often refused to go to bed until one o’clock in the morning. Turkish carpets lay on the floor, items so valuable they were normally used only as table covers. Mary’s chairs were upholstered with crimson velvet and cloth of gold, while her female attendants sat on low stools, as they had at Holyrood when she was still a reigning queen. At one end of her presence chamber was a high-backed chair under a cloth of state on a dais. A smaller cloth of state was erected over her chair in her bedroom. She slept in a large canopied state bed shrouded by curtains, and her sheets were of the finest linen, changed every day. She would have expected no less.
One of Cecil’s emissaries, Nicholas White, who visited her at Tutbury on his way to Ireland, remarked on the layout of her space. She had two main rooms, which she had arranged as a privy chamber and a presence chamber. Mary “came forth of her privy chamber into the presence chamber where I was, and in very courteous manner bade me welcome.” She then conducted a royal audience, impressing even this staunchly Protestant visitor with her looks and charm. “She hath withal,” he informed Cecil, “an alluring grace, a pretty Scottish accent, and a searching wit, clouded with mildness.” The conversation turned to connoisseurship. It was a subject on which Mary felt at home, and she extolled painting as the “most commendable” of the arts.
When White protested that painting, at least in religious art, was “false truth,” Mary ended the interview. It was a deliberately provocative remark. “She closed up her talk, and bidding me farewell, retired into her privy chamber.” White was left to find his own way out, but before departing, he looked up at her cloth of state. “I noted this sentence embroidered” on it, he said: “‘En ma fin est mon commencement’—‘In my end is my beginning’—which is a riddle I understand not.”
Little did he know about Mary’s love of emblems and epigraphs. “In my end is my beginning” was the motto of her mother, Mary of Guise, whose emblem, or impresa, was the phoenix. This was the mythical bird that set fire to itself and rose anew from the ashes every five hundred years; it stood for unsurpassing beauty or quality, for hope and for ultimate triumph. Up to now, Mary’s own impresa, chosen while she was in France, had been the marigold turning to face the sun. Her motto was “Its virtue draws me.” Later she had used the same motto with an iconographic variant: the lodestone, a naturally magnetic rock used by sailors as a navigational aid.
Now a prisoner in England, Mary changed her motto to her mother’s, which was much better suited to her predicament. It was innocuous in the sense that it belonged to her family, but was resonant with prophetic meaning. “In my end is my beginning” was her way of proclaiming that even if she was killed, her dynastic claim would live on in the person of her son, James, who would inherit the English throne.
White’s report shows how civilized and luxurious Mary’s surroundings were. And yet they were still a prison. She despised the guards who patrolled outside her bedroom window and who escorted her, often carrying pistols, on the rare instances when she rode out in the park or on the moors. Indoors, she was watched night and day by sentries who were summoned by a drumroll at five in the morning. She increasingly feared poison, which was why she insisted on appointing her own kitchen and pantry staff.
But if Mary sometimes lapsed into pessimism, she never forgot she was a queen. She stuck stubbornly to protocol, clinging to the rituals of royal eating whenever she took her meals. Her “diets” were recorded in her household accounts. Like Elizabeth, she enjoyed two “courses” at both dinner and supper, and each course included sixteen separate dishes, individually presented and accompanied by bread, wine, salads and fruit. This meant thirty-two dishes for each meal and sixty-four for each day. Sometimes there were more, sometimes slightly fewer “as the provision serveth” (i.e., depending on what was available). And it was Mary’s prerogative to choose whichever of these dishes she wished to eat or taste.
Meat dishes predominated except on “fish days”—usually Fridays and every day of Lent. At dinner, normally served between 11 A.M. and noon, there would be soup, veal, beef, mutton, pork, capon, goose, duck and rabbit for the first course, followed by pheasant, partridge, kid lamb, quail, pigeon, tart and frittered apples or pears for the second. At supper, generally between 5 and 6 P.M. in winter and 7 and 8 P.M. in summer, there would be soup, veal, kid lamb, tripe, tongue, chicken, pheasant, pigeon and rabbit, followed by quail, baked pudding, tart and fruit. On fish days there would be plaice, whiting, haddock, cod, turbot, skate, barbel, ling, eel and pike, followed by carp, sprats, trout, tench, herring and tart for dinner; and salmon, chub, trout, herring, perch, eel, shrimp and crayfish for supper.
Mary dined in state at her own table. Her food was delicately served off silver dishes, her wine poured into crystal glassware. She probably used cutlery made in Sheffield. It was of such high quality, she sent it as gifts to her relatives in France. Before beginning to eat and while taking a break between the two courses, she washed her hands in a silver-gilt bowl. Her principal officers presented her food and wine to her in her presence chamber (which doubled as a dining room) before themselves sitting down to eat at their own table. Mary’s gentlewomen were given meals of nine dishes; her secretaries were allowed seven or eight. Most of the lesser servants and their wives and children ate in the kitchens, consuming the leftovers but holding some back for Mary’s many dogs.
Inevitably, Mary put on weight. Although her diet was similar to what she had enjoyed in Scotland, there she had exercised daily, usually in the form of long rides, whereas now the combination of limited exercise and heavy meals caused problems. As she became stouter, her shoulders became rounded and she acquired a slight stoop. She suffered from constipation and other digestive disorders, and her old episodic illness returned.
Almost as soon as Mary had reached Tutbury, she was ill for a fortnight. No sooner had she recovered than she was ill again. She complained of severe abdominal pains, which were blamed on “wind” but could easily have been caused by complications arising from her gastric ulcer. Shrewsbury wrote anxiously to Cecil, “Oft times, by reason of great pains through windy matter ascending unto her head and other parts, she is ready to swoon. On Thursday last she received pills devised by her own physician, whereof she was very sick that night, but after the working amended.”
A few weeks later, Mary vomited and fainted after taking her pills. Her doctor gave her whisky to bring her around, just as his predecessor had done at the court of St.-Germain ten years before. A petition was sent to Elizabeth that Mary might have two physicians in constant attendance, which was swiftly granted. Almost all her illnesses in captivity seem to have been related to her gastric ulcer, to neuralgia and severe headaches caused by inactivity and frustration, to digestive and bowel imbalances, or to a severe swelling of her leg. This last was perhaps an ulcerated leg or a form of deep-vein thrombosis—again, most likely stemming from inactivity—that is known to have first afflicted her in prison at Lochleven. She also suffered from chronic rheumatism, from pains in her left heel and from recurrent bouts of an unidentified viral illness. One of these attacks occurred at Sheffield in 1575, where she was laid low by what she said was a fever linked to abdominal pains and catarrh.
Mary felt she was aging before her time. She complained of “an incessant provocation to vomit,” when she threw up “a very great quantity of raw, tough and slimy phlegm.” Her abdominal pains were always on her left side, “under her short ribs.” She was unable to sleep, sometimes for ten or twelve days at a stretch. Her doctors prescribed an enema, which caused her to vomit again. She continued to take her pills, without visible signs of improvement. At least some of her illnesses were psychosomatic, brought on by stress at times when it seemed that Elizabeth had forgotten her or refused to extend an olive branch. “No one can cure this malady as well as the queen of England,” Mary repeatedly said, not without justification.
She especially yearned for her son. She could glean little news of him beyond the galling fact that he was being tutored by her enemies and brought up as a Protestant. She was not allowed to write to him, and in all the years of her captivity, she had hardly a single letter from him or his guardian. James’s first letter to his mother appears to have been written as late as March 1585, when he was eighteen.
Some two or three years before she received it, Mary could contain herself no longer. She blurted out her feelings: “Is this just and right that I, a mother, shall be forbidden not only to give counsel and advice to my oppressed son, but also to understand what distressed state he is in?”
That she longed to see him again is suggested by an item she kept beside her until the day she died. It was a thin gold case with a folding flap, described in her probate inventory as “a book of gold enameled [and] containing the pictures of the late Scottish queen, her husband and her son.” Aside from the fact that she wanted her son’s portrait miniature close to her, it would be surprising if she had kept it in the same frame as a picture of herself and her dead husband if she had murdered him.
Mary’s poor health was exacerbated by the lack of support she felt she had received from France. After two years had gone by, she so far humbled herself as to implore Catherine de Medici to take pity on her. She begged her hardhearted former mother-in-law to listen to “this little word of humble request to have some aid for Scotland.” When she wrote to Charles IX recommending a servant for a position in the Garde Écossaise, she let slip pathetically that “I have not received an answer to any of my letters, which is the reason I did not trouble you about any of my affairs.”
In all of the passing years, there was little sign of the acute intermittent porphyria from which some medical experts have claimed Mary suffered. Her illnesses stemmed chiefly from inactivity, stress and depression. To counter the last of these, she wore an amethyst ring, which she claimed had magical properties “contrę la melancholie.” She wrote to her ambassador in Paris for “mithridate,” a substance said to be an antidote to every poison and an instant remedy. She asked him to supply “a piece of fine unicorn’s horn, as I am in great want of it.” Unicorn’s horn was an expensive quack remedy that had a particular cachet among the ruling families of the age. Henry VIII had kept a supply of it with his ointments and salves. It was really made from rhinoceros horn or narwhal tusk, but was believed to be a miracle cure.
Mary was itching to get outdoors, knowing that she would feel much better for it. She first asked to visit the spa at Buxton in 1572. The hot springs there had been famous since Roman times for their curative powers. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and other courtiers made regular visits, giving the town a cosmopolitan flavor that appealed to Mary’s desire to venture into a wider and more sophisticated world. Ironically, she twice met Leicester there, coming face to face at last with the still cherished favorite whom Elizabeth had so bizarrely offered to her as a husband.
And there was always a chance that she would meet Elizabeth herself. In July and August 1575, when the English queen’s summer progress took her to the Midlands and so to Staffordshire, the two “sisters” and “cousins” were only a few miles apart. But Elizabeth would not take the risk of meeting Mary, who all along she feared would get the better of her in an argument. When she heard that Mary would be at the spa, she quickly changed her plans.
Between 1573 and 1584, Mary spent many of her summers at Buxton. She enjoyed it so much that a considerate Shrewsbury built a secluded lodge there for her private use. He had not wanted her to go at first; he thought it a security risk. Why did she need the baths when she already bathed regularly with herbs and had started using white wine as a facial toner? Mary’s request was sent up to Elizabeth, who handed it to Cecil, who referred it to the Privy Council, and from there back to the queen.
While this buck was being passed, Mary was taken to Chatsworth, a staging post on the road to Buxton, before her stay was finally approved.
Visitors at the spa both drank the water—several pints a day—and bathed in it. When their ablutions were completed, they played games or relaxed in the well-appointed bathhouse (also owned by Shrewsbury), which functioned as a thirty-room hotel. There were chairs around the hot springs, and “chimneys for fire to air your garments in the bath’s side, and other necessaries most decent.” The men amused themselves at bowling or archery, the women by playing a game of boules called “Troule in Madame.” Mary would have loved to mingle freely with the other visitors, but as far as possible was kept in isolation. She did sometimes get the opportunity to speak to the other bathers. When the spa was at its busiest, however, she was taken to visit the limestone caves nearby or confined to her lodge and its gardens.
In the first ten years of her captivity, Mary spent much of her time working at her embroidery and talking to Bess of Hardwick. As Shrewsbury reported, Mary saw Bess whenever “she useth to sit working with the needle, in which she much delighteth.” Bess, one of four sisters born to a minor gentry family, was twenty years older than Mary, but was eager to be associated with a queen. An eighteenth-century historian, Edmund Lodge, described her as “a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” She was also an inspired interior designer, who used her links to Mary to obtain scarce stocks of silk and precious fabrics from France. They sat sewing together with their servants and companions, often for days on end.
In 1574, Bess presumptuously married off her daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, to Darnley’s younger brother, Charles, Mary’s brother-in-law. Bess had royal pretensions, greatly resented by Elizabeth and by her long-suffering husband, whom she neglected to inform of his stepdaughter’s betrothal, and who found himself on the receiving end of Elizabeth’s wrath. The marriage caused a sudden chill in Mary and Bess’s relationship, as it was undertaken with a dynastic claim in mind.
But until 1577 or thereabouts, they continued to sew together. Embroidery was one of Mary’s lifelong pleasures. In her search for designs, she leafed through emblem books, and the superb woodcuts of birds, animals and fish by Conrad Gesner offered a rich choice of subjects that appealed to her artistic taste and love of pets. She embroidered at least three designs from the second edition of his Animal Illustrations, published in 1560: the cat, the phoenix and the toucan—which Mary called “a bird of America.” She also copied the dolphin from Pierre Belon’s Nature and Diversity of Fish, published in 1555.
Mary first drew an outline onto her canvas, sketching or marking out the shapes with chalk and then choosing her colors. She then stitched in the silks and colored wools, which might take as little as a week or as much as three months. Finally, she added her MR monogram, based on the Greek mu, to her work, which was always of high quality. She did not embroider just to pass the time; the work offered her an outlet for her wicked sense of humor. Her themes might seem to be innocently chosen, but often hid a deeper, more subversive meaning for those with eyes to see.
Whereas Elizabeth was flatteringly depicted by a small army of fawning poets and artists as a star or as the sun or moon, Mary cheerfully embroidered panels that showed eclipses. Mary’s “A Catte” was a lot more than just a reproduction of Gesner’s black and white domestic pet. She for this cat was unquestionably female—was embroidered in ginger—Elizabeth’s red hair was legendary—wearing a miniature gold coronet and closely watching a mouse, details not in Gesner’s original design. Mary had several times said that she was the mouse and Elizabeth the cat, who watched and waited before deciding to pounce. The “Phenix” was, in Mary’s version, her mother’s and now also her own impresa, crowned and with the MR on either side of its head. Again, her “Delphin” was not just a sea dolphin but a pun on the word “dauphin,” and also an emblem of her first husband, Francis II, and so a reminder of Mary’s dynastic status.
She also undertook a piece of work on a more sinister theme: a panel of a wall hanging in which a hand descends from heaven with a pruning hook, cutting down a vine, with the motto “Virescit vulnere virtus” (“Virtue grows strong by wounding”). The motto could have referred to Mary’s moral outrage at her treatment by Elizabeth, but may well have signaled her determination to survive Elizabeth by whatever means. Most likely the ambiguity was malicious.
Mary’s love for animal designs reflected the way, in her solitude, she turned to her pets for solace. Not long after moving to Sheffield Lodge, she asked her ambassador in Paris to find out if her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine had gone to Lyons. “I feel sure he will send me a couple of pretty little dogs, and you will buy me some also, for besides reading and needlework, I take pleasure only in all the little animals that I can get.
You must send me them in baskets, kept very warm.” When they arrived, she confided, “I am very fond of my little dogs, but I fear they will grow rather large.”
Mary’s love of animals was also a tool of her diplomacy. Castelnau, who had known her since her teenage years, was in 1575 appointed as the French ambassador in London. He wrote to her a few months after his arrival, seeking her help in finding some English hunting dogs. “I at once asked the Earl of Shrewsbury to assist me,” she replied. “He has given me three spaniels and two of the others, which he is sure are good ones.”
When Castelnau no longer needed the dogs, Mary sent them to her Guise cousins. She recommended them as a present for Henry III, the new king of France, who had succeeded his sickly brother, Charles IX, in 1574 at the age of twenty-two after spending an extraordinary year as the elected king of Poland. Mary’s only regret was that she could not try out the dogs herself, as she said somewhat self-pityingly, “because I am a prisoner, and can only testify to their beauty, as I am not at liberty to go out on horseback nor to the chase.”
At Sheffield, she decided to start an aviary. She had become used to exotic birds at the court of Henry II, and began by asking her agent in Paris to obtain breeding pairs of turtledoves and Barbary fowl. “I wish,” she said, “to see if I can rear them in this country, as your brother told me that, when he was with you, he had raised some . . . I shall take great pleasure in rearing them in cages, which I do all sorts of little birds I can meet with. This will be a pastime for a prisoner.”
So often Mary’s thoughts were back in France. Despite the surveillance to which she was subjected, she wrote to the officials of the French embassy in London, to the Cardinal of Lorraine, to the Duke and Duchess of Nemours, and less often to her five cousins, the children of her murdered uncle Francis, Duke of Guise. She was unaware at first that her letters were being intercepted and forwarded for vetting or deciphering to the agents of Elizabeth’s new principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham. Aged forty-four, he had been one of Cecil’s proteges since his days as a student at Cambridge.
Walsingham was the most single-minded ideologue at Elizabeth’s court, an avowed Calvinist who at every opportunity championed the reformed cause. Cecil had recommended him to Elizabeth as her principal secretary in December 1573. For five years or so, the younger man had worked in his office as an intelligence expert and spymaster. After Mary’s letters were painstakingly opened and copies made, they were sent on to their intended recipients, the seals apparently unbroken.
Mary was dismayed by the reactions to her letters. Often they were not even acknowledged. Her aunt Anne, the Duchess of Nemours, formerly the widow of her murdered uncle, was a sympathetic correspondent, but even her letters tailed off. The Guise family had been overshadowed at the French court by the mid-1570s; they were superseded by their rivals, the heirs and successors of Constable Montmorency and his old sparring partner Anthony of Bourbon. The Cardinal of Lorraine’s influence had dropped to a particularly low ebb. Both he and Mary’s cousin Henry, Duke of Guise, had left Paris for Joinville and Meudon.
Then, in December 1574, the cardinal died at Avignon at the age of fifty, severing Mary’s chief link with France. The news reached her in the middle of February, a month after she had written him a long letter urging him to persist in his attempt to recover Catherine de Medici’s favor. She was terribly distraught. “Though I cannot, at first, control my feelings or stop the tears that will flow,” she said, “yet my long adversity has taught me to hope for consolation for all my afflictions in a better life.”
With only one of the sons of her grandfather Claude still living, Mary knew her family’s fortunes rested in the hands of a new generation. She was sad and dejected, grieving for her loss. She feared her cousins were not really interested in her personally or in her cause, which seemed to them lost. Catherine, still the power behind the throne, remained an opponent. Equally distant and unhelpful was the family’s matriarch, Antoinette of Bourbon, once Mary’s guardian angel but now a bitterly disappointed grandmother, who continued to blame her for her ill-advised second and third marriages.
Mary never lost her appetite for the luxuries to which she had grown accustomed in France. She asked her agent in Paris to send her “patterns of dresses, and of cloth of gold and silver, and of silks, the handsomest and the rarest that are worn at court.” She ordered headdresses “with a crown of gold and silver, such as were formerly made for me.” She also wanted the latest fashions from Italy: “headdresses, veils and ribbons.”
In her last letter to her uncle, she had requested “a fine gold mirror to hang from the waist with a chain to attach it to.” She wanted a motto to be engraved on the frame combining her and Elizabeth’s monograms. She also asked for miniatures of herself, to give to her supporters in England “who ask for my portrait.” Shortly after her uncle’s death, Mary obtained permission to sit for an artist in Sheffield. She claimed that she wanted to send the miniatures to her friends in France—the right thing to say, if perhaps untrue.
The identification of this likeness has caused much debate. The full-length example at Hardwick Hall in which Mary is shown as a pious Catholic, aged thirty-six, with a cross at her bosom and rosary beads at her girdle, is a posthumous image. Despite its claim to have been painted in 1578, the portrait is not listed in Bess of Hardwick’s inventory, which she drew up in 1601, and it was not commissioned until after James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603.
In 1575, Mary sat for an unknown miniaturist, and again in or after 1578 for Nicholas Hilliard, the doyen of the genre, when he returned from France. In both versions she is wearing a soft cambric cap attached to a modish wired veil and a fine lace collar. Her lustrous—but perhaps now darker and artificial—curls are visible at the sides of her cap. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes are still bright and penetrating. Her cheekbones are just as high, her nose slightly aquiline, since the view is partly from the side. Her marble-like complexion is perfect, but her face is filling out, a double chin is starting to appear, and she is no longer in the flush of youth or in her prime. Imprisonment has already taken its toll.
Mary sent expensive gifts to Elizabeth in a vain attempt to win her attention and put her under an obligation to release her. She began with confections of sugar, marzipan and nuts imported from France, which Elizabeth, who had a sweet tooth, enjoyed despite a warning that they might be poisoned. Other presents included a skirt of rich crimson satin, lined with taffeta, that Mary embroidered herself. She had designed an intricately latticed pattern of English flowers surmounted by a thistle. To achieve a stylish and sumptuous effect, she used the most expensive silk and precious metal threads, the best her French suppliers could provide. She asked the French embassy in London to deliver the skirt, which was done despite Shrewsbury’s protests.
Elizabeth was said to have admired the gift and “prized it much.” She was momentarily softer toward Mary, but it did not last and there was no easing of her restrictions. Mary was not allowed more exercise, the thing she most craved. When consulted on the matter, Shrewsbury advised, “I would be very loath that any liberty or exercise should be granted unto her, or any of hers, out of these gates . . . I do suffer her to walk upon the leads [i.e., the flat parts of a roof] here in open air, in my large dining chamber, and also in this courtyard.” That was normally quite enough, in case she was tempted to escape.
Shrewsbury did, however, sometimes bend his own rules, generally when Mary fell sick or burst into tears. One arctic January, when the snow lay deep on the ground at Sheffield, he allowed her to walk in the park, thinking she would refuse his offer and decide not to venture outdoors. Without a moment’s thought, she put on her heaviest clothes and went out, even though the snow came well over her shoes and must have soaked her feet.
Such treats were few and far between. Mary’s lack of exercise exacted a heavy price. Her legs became so inflamed and her heel so sore she was barely able to walk. In 1582, shortly before her fortieth birthday, she was allowed as a concession to use her coach to ride out to take the air. She was at first exhilarated by this. She was preceded by her secretaries and other principal officers on horseback, guarded by a contingent of Shrewsbury’s men armed with loaded pistols. Her route was reconnoitered beforehand by scouts in case anyone tried to meet or attempt to rescue her.
Mary’s pleasure was fleeting. Soon she was in pain when she walked even a relatively short distance. Just climbing in and out of the coach could be more than her legs could bear, and in the winter months Mary felt so weak, as she herself said, that she preferred to stay indoors.
Her last years at Sheffield and Chatsworth were tainted by the growing marital discord between Bess and the earl, made worse by Bess’s groundless suspicion that her husband was having a secret affair with his prisoner. Gossip was rife at Elizabeth’s court, which the queen herself joined in. Castelnau, who always tried to do his best for Mary against the odds, warned her that Elizabeth was telling tales to foreign ambassadors so that they would be spread about. “It is the final poison that your enemies have reserved,” he said; “not to poison your body, but your reputation.”
Almost all of the information that fueled this gossip came from Bess, and in a fit of pique around 1584, Mary turned the tables. She sent Elizabeth, probably through Cecil, a summary of everything Bess had said that touched her “sister queen,” prefacing her remarks with a disclaimer: “I protest that I answered rebuking the said lady [Bess] for believing or speaking so licentiously of you as a thing which I did not at all believe.”
The charges were of the raciest sort: that Elizabeth had promised to marry her favorite, Leicester, and was his lover; that she had taken a succession of paramours, including Sir Christopher Hatton (vice chamberlain of Elizabeth’s household, later lord chancellor, and a favorite second only to Leicester), and had compromised herself with a French diplomat by visiting him at night, kissing him and enjoying “various unseemly familiarities with him.” Not content with this, she had betrayed her own councilors to the French in her pillow talk. Elizabeth, according to Bess, was so vain she had to be flattered by her courtiers “beyond all reason.” They would amuse themselves by playing a game in which they tried to outdo each other in offering extravagant compliments to her. It was all they could do to avoid bursting out laughing. Mary knew how to put in the knife. She said that when Elizabeth had been ill for a while, Bess had prophesied her death based on the reports of an astrologer who, “in an old book, predicted a violent death for you and the succession of another queen, which she interpreted as myself.”
Grasping at straws in her longing to meet her rival and talk to her face to face, Mary offered to reveal more of Bess’s infamy at a personal interview. Elizabeth—if she was ever allowed by Cecil to see this extraordinary document—refused. By the 1580s, the polarization between Catholics and Protestants in Europe was approaching its climax. In the Netherlands, the revolt of the Calvinists against Spain had passed the point of no return. In France, another civil war would erupt in 1584, when the Catholic League allied with Spain to extirpate the Huguenots and block the claim to the throne of their leader, Henry of Navarre. As for Philip II himself, after nearly thirty years in which he had given Elizabeth the benefit of the doubt, he came to believe that the key to the defeat of the Dutch rebels and the mastery of the Atlantic Ocean by Spain was the conquest of England. War between England and Spain was drawing closer.
It was Cecil’s worst nightmare. Here was an international Catholic conspiracy with a vengeance. All anyone could think of in the Privy Council, in Parliament and among the “assured” Protestant elite who formed the backbone of his inner caucus was that Mary should be dealt with once and for all. The “preservation” of the Protestant state depended on it. Mary was said to be a bigger threat to her cousin’s security than Spain, and although Elizabeth had so far privately supported Mary as her heir apparent, this was too much for Cecil, whose entire career hinged on his almost apocalyptic vision of England’s Protestant destiny.
In August 1584, Shrewsbury was recalled to London to attend urgent meetings of the Privy Council. Mary was transferred to the custody of Sir Ralph Sadler and his son-in-law, John Somers. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement; hardly surprising, as this Sadler, now a venerable seventy-seven-year-old, was none other than Henry VIII’s ambassador to Scotland who had dandled Mary as a baby on his knee. His instructions were to take her first from Sheffield to Wingfield Manor, and from there to the close confinement of the damp and unhealthy Tutbury Castle, to which she finally returned in January 1585.
On the road to Wingfield, where she was guarded by forty soldiers, Mary asked Somers if he thought she would try to escape. He said that he supposed she would. It was only natural. “No,” she angrily retorted, “you are mistaken. I had rather die in this captivity than run away with shame.”
Sadler was one of Cecil’s most faithful and steadfast supporters, and yet—at least as a private man—he took pity on the captive queen. “I find her much altered,” he said, “from that she was when I was first acquainted with her.” Her incarceration had ruined her health. “She is not yet able to strain her left foot to the ground, and, to her very great grief, not without tears, finding that being wasted and shrunk of its natural measure and shorter than the other, she feareth it will hardly return to its natural state without the benefit of hot baths.”
But Mary’s allure was undiminished. When Sadler got his charge to Tutbury, she quickly won him over. Within three months, he had been caught taking her hawking. Called to account by his masters, he confessed: she “earnestly entreated me that she might go abroad with me to see my hawks fly.” It was “a pastime indeed which she hath singular delight in, and I, thinking it could not be ill taken, assented to her desire; and so hath she been abroad with me three or four times hawking upon the river here.” All the time she had been guarded by forty or fifty men. He had used his discretion and done his best. “But since it is not well taken, I would to God that some other had the charge.” Somers confirmed his father-in-law’s statement. Mary had been well guarded while out hawking: “if any danger had been offered, or doubt suspected, this queen’s body should first have tasted of the gall.”
It was not enough. Sadler was too decent and considerate a man to be Mary’s keeper. Although a devout Protestant and unswerving in his allegiance to Elizabeth, he was unable to square his political and religious obligations with his feelings as a human being. He accepted an honorable discharge, clearing the way for the appointment of a man better equipped to be a jailer—for this is what the menacing international threat made necessary.
His successor was Sir Amyas Paulet. He was a fluent French speaker, formerly an ambassador to France, where he had colluded with Catherine de Medici to blacken Mary’s name. A Calvinist and close ally of Walsingham, he was the sworn enemy of Spain and the Catholic League, a fervent supporter of the Huguenots and the Dutch Protestants. His work in Paris had brought him into contact with several of Mary’s agents, about whose malice he never had the slightest doubt. He arrived at Tutbury in April 1585, assuming full responsibility for his prisoner on the 19th, when Sadler returned home to Hertfordshire.
Paulet was not a man likely to allow Mary to ride out hawking. He made no distinction between his private and public duties. “Others,” he said, “shall excuse their foolish pity as they may.” For his part, as he once bragged, he would rather renounce his claim to a share in the joys of heaven than put any feelings of compassion above his obligations to Elizabeth. He was Mary’s sole keeper until November 1586, when his friend Sir Drue Drury—a minor courtier from a prominent legal family, whom Mary described as “most modest and gracious in all things”—was sent to assist him.
Mary found Paulet “one of the most zealous and pitiless men I have ever known; and, in a word, fitter for a gaol of criminals than for the custody of one of my rank and birth.” She had quickly gotten the measure of her man.
To begin with, Paulet tore down her cloth of state whenever he had occasion to enter her presence chamber, saying such regalia had no place in her household as there could be only one queen in England. This led to a battle of wills in which he would dismantle the offending canopy and a tearful Mary would have it put back. He opened her letters and packets looking for evidence of a conspiracy, treating anything sent to or from the French embassy with the utmost suspicion. His intrusions extended to random searches of her cabinets, and as a last resort he was willing to break down Mary’s bedroom door. All the documents he impounded were instantly forwarded to Walsingham for examination.
Paulet suspected everyone and everything. To avoid being overheard by anyone in the household, he would sometimes confer with messengers sent from London in the open fields. He put Mary’s domestic staff into quarantine. They were not allowed to mix with the other servants or to enter or leave the castle unless searched. No one, however menial, was spared the new procedures. Mary’s coachmen and laundresses were singled out for special attention. They were to be watched at all times, particularly three women who lodged in a little house in the park adjoining the castle. They had outside contacts as well as access to Mary’s rooms. Paulet ordered that they were not just to be searched, but stripped down to their smocks whenever they entered or left the building.
Mary’s health continued to deteriorate. She put out a bulletin denying she had dropsy or cancer, but her legs were more swollen than ever. She was allowed to ride out once or twice a month, her coach surrounded by a small infantry detachment bearing loaded muskets and a lighted fuse. At other times, she was carried into the garden in a chair. When she did succeed in walking, two of her secretaries had to support her. Her legs needed poultices and bandages, which had to be applied every day. “Her legs,” said Paulet, “are yet weak, and indeed are wrapped in gross manner, as hath appeared to my wife.”
Paulet’s harsh treatment aroused protests from the French. On Christmas Eve 1585, Mary was moved from spartan Tutbury, notorious for its dark, damp rooms and stinking latrines, to Chartley, a manor house almost palatial in comparison that was chosen because it was surrounded by a large moat.
Mary’s mood was changing to one of defiance. She had never made any secret of her aim to be restored as queen in Scotland, if necessary as co-ruler with her son. All her attempts to reach a political accord with Elizabeth foundered over her desire for liberty and to return home. She never gave up on her dynastic claim to the English throne, and talked passionately about it, causing Paulet to protest at her “tediousness” and her “superfluous and idle speeches.” When Mary was in full flood, he simply walked away.
Mary’s defection to the Spanish interest would finally be her undoing. She believed that France and her Guise relations had deserted her. She had tentatively approached Philip II after the stalemate at Elizabeth’s tribunal, and her policy gained a fresh impetus when the Cardinal of Lorraine died. By the 1580s, Mary was beginning to talk openly about linking her cause to Philip’s grand European strategy. This was incredibly injudicious, but it put her back in the spotlight. Once again she was about to take center stage in a pan-European drama.
Cecil had bided his time. The spider was poised to catch the fly. Mary felt irrelevant and disposable, and she reacted in the only way she knew.
She reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. It was almost entirely a theatrical pose, but she had nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, Walsingham had recruited a mole in the French embassy. He had pulled off this intelligence coup while Mary was still at Sheffield. The mole was active for little more than eighteen months, but it was long enough for Cecil’s spymaster to identify many of her secret agents at home and abroad. It was only a matter of time before Mary’s fate was sealed.