7

Betrayed Queen

The Dauphin was crowned Francis II at Rheims, the holiest city of France and the traditional setting for the anointing of kings. The celebrations got off to an inauspicious start. When Francis and his escorts arrived at the gates of the city in readiness for his official welcome on Friday, 15 September 1559, a sudden downpour soaked everyone to the skin. Then, the coronation, due to take place at a high mass on Sunday, had to be postponed for a day. The Duke of Savoy, one of the highest-ranking spectators, caught a fever and everything was put off. Francis II was, in consequence, the only French King to be crowned on a day that was neither a Sunday nor an important feast day. Moreover, the medal struck in advance at Paris that was to be handed out as a souvenir to those who attended now bore an incorrect date.

The ceremony was to be held in the vast gothic cathedral famous for its magnificent stained glass. On Sunday evening, Mary attended a vigil with her husband, hearing the choir sing vespers and joining in the prayers before retiring to bed in the archbishop’s palace. During the service, Francis processed to the high altar to lay a gift of a solid-gold statue of his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, at the foot of the cross. The Archbishop of Rheims preached a sermon, to which Mary must have paid attention, because the Archbishop was none other than her uncle Charles, the Cardinal of Lorraine. It would be his great privilege to anoint and crown the new King next day.

On Monday morning, Francis, dressed in a gown of white damask over a shirt and tunic of white silk in preparation for his anointing, processed in state from the archbishop’s palace to the cathedral. As he entered the main door, the trumpets sounded and an anthem was sung. He walked up the nave towards the choir, which was decorated with the richest and most gorgeous tapestries from the palace of the Louvre. When he reached the high altar, he took his seat opposite the Archbishop’s throne.

Mary’s uncle then conducted the service. Francis was anointed with special chrism from the Holy Ampulla kept at the ancient Abbey of St-Rémi, then solemnly crowned with the crown of Charlemagne. There were antiphons and responses, more anthems, then a high mass followed by a litany. Between the anointing and the coronation, Francis withdrew briefly to a pavilion of crimson and purple velvet set up in the choir, where he changed into his coronation robes. He emerged resplendent, his blue velvet gown lined with crimson taffeta and trimmed with ermine and gold fleurs-de-lis.

Mary’s uncle presented the fifteen-year-old King with the sceptre, the rod of justice, and a ring, which he placed on the fourth finger of his right hand. He then raised the heavy gold crown above his head. There followed more prayers and benedictions, after which Francis was led up some stairs to his throne on an elevated platform at the entrance to the chancel. He was meant to be wearing his crown, but as it was so heavy it took at least four nobles to hold it in place and keep it from falling off while the puny Francis took his seat.

When at last the King was enthroned, the Archbishop bowed and shouted ‘Vivat Rex! May the King live for ever!’ The entire congregation joined in, most of them doubtless relieved that their long ordeal of sitting still – the ceremony had so far lasted more than five hours – was nearly over. They shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’, while the organist and other musicians played their instruments at full volume and more or less at random.

When order was restored, the choir sang the Te Deum in a plainsong setting, and as its gentle and evocative strains drew to a close, the keeper of the royal aviaries released some seven or eight hundred goldfinches and other songbirds from their cages hidden in the choir. They chirruped and sang as they flew up towards the roof or perched on the ledges of the triforium, a symbol of peace, tranquillity, and the dawn of a new age.

Mary watched everything as a mere spectator. Although the Queens of France were also anointed and crowned, the ceremony was held at a different time and place to the King’s coronation. Catherine de Medici had been crowned two years after Henry II at the Abbey of St-Denis on the outskirts of Paris, the usual place for the crowning of a Queen. According to the ancient Salic law, women were barred from the throne of France. The Queen was a dependent of the King, and not his partner. She was a consort, who was excluded from the succession or from exercising the powers of government. Although she might be appointed regent if her husband was sick or abroad, she had no shared rights of sovereignty.

Mary sat with the other female members of the royal family in a special closet to the side of the high altar. Catherine de Medici took precedence after her, followed by Mary’s childhood friend, Princess Elizabeth, now aged fourteen and recently married by proxy to Philip II of Spain.

Catherine wore a long black silk dress. The court was still in mourning for the dead King, and black was the colour of mourning in her native Italy. She had embraced it instantly her husband died, flouting the convention that white was the norm at the French court and continuing to dress in black until her own death in 1589, earning a reputation as something of a sombre and brooding presence.

Elizabeth and her younger sisters, Claude and Marguerite, followed their mother’s example. Mary alone insisted on wearing a white gown. Since the royal closet was clearly visible to many in the crowd, she must have stuck out like a dove among crows. Her choice of colour sparked something of a controversy. Mary wore white to be different. She was asserting her flair for the theatrical, a prospect made all the more attractive by the fact she knew the colour suited her better. And the people loved her for it, nicknaming her ‘the white Queen’ as a result.

If Mary’s dress caused several in the congregation to murmur, the official banquet did not quite go to plan either. It was served in the great hall of the archbishop’s palace, where an ancient ritual was observed. The nobles and leading guests ate at their usual tables, while the King ate alone at a special table in the middle of the room to symbolize his almost sacred status.

Francis, however, was tired and bored. He kept yawning, and wanted to retire to his chamber before the end of the meal. When he decided to leave, the reception broke up early and in some confusion. Overall, it was perhaps the most awkward and least convincing coronation day in French history.

Change was afoot at court even before the ceremony. A palace revolution began the day after Henry II’s death. The Cardinal of Lorraine evicted the Constable Montmorency from his suite of apartments and the Duke of Guise usurped his seat at dinner. The brothers took control of the conseil des affaires and put their own clients and retainers in many of the most important offices, even replacing the royal chaplains and almoners.

But Catherine was not to be underestimated. Already she perceived Mary to be a threat, and so refused to accept the usual title of ‘Dowager Queen’. Instead, she insisted on being called ‘Queen Mother’ for the rest of her life. The subtle nature of this change was that it helped her keep her place as an active, rather than a retired, politician. Catherine knew that she had to be cautious in her dealings with the Guise family. Her son regarded both the Duke and the Cardinal as his principal advisers and as national heroes. She knew she had to be willing to work with them for the time being, while she waited patiently for her opportunity to remove them.

Not just the Constable and his sons were frozen out, but almost his entire family. Since many of his relations were Huguenots, or at least supporters of the Protestants, this action acquired a religious edge. He was replaced as Grand Master of the King’s Household by the Duke of Guise, who finally achieved his ambition to hold this office.

Diane de Poitiers, the Constable’s ally, was scarcely treated better. The magnificent jewels Henry II had showered on her were reassigned to Mary, a not unreasonable decision since they belonged to the crown and Mary was now Queen. But the demand that Diane surrender Chenonceaux, her most prized château, to Catherine in exchange for Chaumont – a pleasant enough building but in a much less desirable location – rankled, and after a brief stay at the lesser property she threw it back at Catherine and withdrew to the château of Anet, one of Henry II’s gifts that she was grudgingly allowed to keep. There she lived as a mistress without a king, until she died seven years later, all her former influence evaporated.

As soon as the Guises felt secure, they reinstated their ‘Franco-British’ project, even though it was discredited by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. They could claim to be reviving Henry II’s original foreign policy, but expectations elsewhere had changed. Philip II was flatly opposed to their plans for Scotland and Normandy, which he knew to be linked and designed to win control of the English Channel and the North Sea. Normandy was the province with the largest number of Channel ports and the deepest harbours. The Guise family had made themselves the richest and most powerful landowners there, and although they were not inclined to resume an outright war with Philip, he had guessed correctly that they planned to turn the region into their military and naval base.

Philip left the Guises under no illusions that the peace was fragile. When they continued with their dynastic policy regardless, the level of tension rose. Whereas before the treaty the main theatres of European war and diplomacy had been Italy, France, and Germany, now the spotlight was on Scotland and England.

The arrogance of the Guises was their undoing. Far from exercising caution or masking their intentions, they broadcast their aims to the widest possible audience. And their niece was at the centre of it all. Wherever the French court came to rest and whichever towns it visited, the heraldic arms of Francis and Mary were blazoned with those of England on the gates. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, heard about the design of a new great seal for Scotland. When the seal was produced, it confirmed his worst fears. Francis and Mary were shown seated in ‘imperial’ majesty above the legend ‘Francis and Mary, By Grace of God, King and Queen of France, Scotland, England and Ireland’.

After Francis’s coronation, these claims were once again embossed on the gold and silver plate and carved on the furniture with which Mary’s household was newly equipped as Queen of France. The coup de grâce was delivered when Throckmorton was invited to dinner and then forced to eat his meal off silver dishes bearing the usurped insignia.

From a Guise family perspective, these may have been the correct initial steps towards claiming what they believed to be their rightful patrimony, but their behaviour towards Mary was cynical. They treated her like a puppet and took the most important decisions behind her back. As to Francis, they encouraged him to play the man by going hunting. Not a single major initiative can be traced back to Mary or her husband while they were King and Queen. The result was that their reign, an interlude of no more than five hundred days, turned into a Greek tragedy in which the main events were played out offstage by actors or unseen forces over which they had little or no control.

Mary’s health was poor for over a year. Her illness and debility may even have worsened. At St-Germain in August 1559, she was said to be sick after every meal. She fainted in the Spanish ambassador’s presence and had to be revived ‘with acqua composita’ or whisky. In September, when the court moved to Bar-le-Duc, she was at first better, then ill again. She fainted in chapel and was led to her bedchamber, where she fainted once more. Next month, she was said to be suffering from tuberculosis, and at Blois in November she looked very pale and ‘kept her chamber all the day long’.

Stress was a cause, because the reports of Mary’s ill health coincided with her own pleas of helplessness at the events unfolding in Scotland. Her mother, Mary of Guise, was still sole regent, but even before Henry II was dead, the Cardinal of Lorraine was interfering in the internal affairs of the country. In particular, he urged his sister to crush the Protestants, whom he regarded as political insurgents. He had first advocated this policy in April 1558, when Mary married the Dauphin. And his demands were soon shriller and even more insistent.

In merging the defence of Catholicism with his ‘Franco-British’ strategy, the Cardinal sought to imitate Mary Tudor. Her attempt to build a pan-European dynastic alliance with Philip II had been closely linked to her persecution of the Protestants. The impresario of her much-vaunted campaign against heresy was the papal legate and Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, who took advice from the Spanish Dominicans. The policy backfired when many of the most important Protestants fled into exile in Geneva and other Swiss and German towns, leaving the poor and less socially influential reformers to be burnt at the stake.

The exiles were free to harangue Mary and Pole from the safety of the Continent using the pulpit and the printing press. And yet despite these drawbacks, the Guises were impressed by what they believed to be the campaign’s effect. They wished to see the policy introduced into Scotland, and the Cardinal even obtained a copy of the manual used by Pole’s inquisitors for his sister, also sending her a delegation of theologians from the Sorbonne who were skilled at rooting out heresy.

Such measures proved to be wholly counterproductive in Scotland, where the threat of religious persecution led to a rapid crescendo of fears about national independence. Whereas patriotism and the pro-French alliance had been mutually compatible at the time of the treaty of Haddington, now the reverse was true.

The impetus for change came from England, where in April 1559, Elizabeth had deftly engineered a Protestant religious settlement. She had played her cards brilliantly. In the opening months of her reign, she had taken a bipartisan approach. She had made soothing noises to Philip II and appealed to Protestants and Catholics even-handedly. The former supported her because they knew she would reject the Pope and the Catholic mass. The latter took comfort from the fact of her Catholic conformity in Mary Tudor’s reign, when mass was said in her chapel. Only after the peace negotiations had been concluded at Cateau-Cambrésis did Elizabeth start to reveal her true intentions.

Her leading advisers were Protestant. Cecil, her chief minister, had been one of the leading architects of Edward VI’s Reformation. Under Mary Tudor, he had been a known supporter of the exiles, who included the fiery preacher John Knox. His name had even been linked in Edward’s reign to an offer to Knox of the bishopric of Rochester, which as a staunch Calvinist he had refused. And yet, even Cecil, to save his neck, had attended a special high mass at his house at Wimbledon, ordered by an indignant Mary Tudor when the extent of his support for the Protestant underground was discovered.

When the English Parliament voted for the religious settlement in 1559, the country became officially Protestant. It was a cue for the pro-English faction in Scotland, which won the support of the Protestants in an outright revolt against a regent who was easily depicted as the instrument of a French, and especially a Guise tyranny. From this point onwards, the rebel propaganda would blend Protestantism and nationalism opportunistically.

Up until now, Mary’s mother had governed Scotland effectively, but her determination to enforce law and order, to secure higher taxes, and above all to assimilate the Highlands and border region into a centralized Scottish state, had alienated those who believed it was their birthright to rule their own kinship networks and regions. The Scottish Lords at heart rejected a centralized monarchy. They wanted to rule themselves as a loose federation of small kings. The regent’s policies might still have been acceptable had the flow of French pensions continued, but after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, the tap was turned off. In those altered circumstances, Protestantism offered the perfect excuse to topple an unpopular regent.

Such opportunism, in turn, gave England a unique chance. Protestantism could be made the foundation of a plan to remould the entire British Isles as a single community, so reversing the disasters of the ‘Rough Wooings’. France had everything to lose, but the person most likely to be affected was Mary, since as a Catholic Queen her crown and reputation were at stake. Cecil was in the vanguard of this policy, which was to colour almost everything he did for the next thirty years and more.

Everything depended on whether the English could learn from their mistakes. It turned out that they could, because for the moment they dropped all references to England’s claims to ‘imperial’ overlordship and to the status of Scotland as a satellite. They acted circumspectly, led once again by Cecil, who sought at all costs to avert a full-scale European war: he had become Protector Somerset’s secretary just in time for the 1547 Pinkie campaign, when he had witnessed the terrible carnage and narrowly escaped being killed himself.

On the Scottish side, the nobles in revolt against the regent called themselves the ‘Lords of the Congregation’. The most powerful was the Earl of Argyll. The son of the man who had carried the sword of state at Mary’s coronation, he was a genuine Protestant who controlled huge tracts of territory in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, where royal control was weakest, and in the Western Isles and Argyllshire as far south as the Clyde estuary. His influence even stretched across to Ulster in the north of Ireland, and he was the only Scottish noble with the resources to muster a full-size army independently of the crown. He was joined by the Earl of Glencairn, Lords Ruthven, Boyd, Ochiltree, and by several others.

By far his most spectacular recruit was Lord James Stuart, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, who quickly emerged as the champion of these Lords. Born in 1531 and eleven years older than his sister, he was a big man in every sense. Physically robust, he had a bluff but offensively regal manner and a conviction that as the son of James V, he acted as a man of principle in Scotland’s best interests. He was intelligent and well educated, first appearing on the scene when he sailed in Mary’s galley on his way to the University of Paris. Destined for a career in the Church, he was appointed Prior of St Andrews, one of the richest abbeys in Scotland, a position he held as a layman and milked for all it was worth.

Lord James broke with the regent in 1559. His defection was reported in France, where his motive was guessed: he tilted at the regency, and perhaps the crown itself. His methods were cool, calculating, and insidious. He advised Mary of Guise that if she would accede to the reasonable demands of the Lords, he would support her. Meanwhile, he was continually writing to Cecil urging him to assist the Lords in their campaign to expel the French permanently from Scotland.

Events moved with breathtaking speed in May, when John Knox returned to Scotland from Geneva and joined forces with the Lords. His sermons attacking the Pope and the idolatry of the mass triggered outbreaks of spontaneous iconoclasm at Perth and St Andrews. Church buildings and ornaments were ransacked in rampant acts of civil disobedience.

In August, the Lords appealed to England for military aid against the regent. Cecil debated the pros and cons in a series of encyclopaedic memos to his colleagues in the English Privy Council. He threw his own weight unflinchingly behind the Lords, but before action could be taken, he first had to persuade Elizabeth and many of his own colleagues that an armed intervention to oust a legitimate government in alliance with its rebels could be justified.

Here lay the seeds of an ideological rift between Elizabeth and Cecil over Scottish affairs that was to mature over the next thirty years. Despite their ability to work together over almost every other issue, where Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots were concerned, Elizabeth and her chief adviser were repeatedly at loggerheads. Whereas Cecil always put the interests of Protestantism ahead of dynastic considerations, Elizabeth took the opposite approach. Although she was a Protestant, she kept religion and politics apart, putting the ideal of monarchy and of hereditary descent ahead of religion. When dealing with Mary and her mother, she found it utterly repugnant that in determining the government of Scotland, legitimate dynastic rights should be overridden by what amounted to religious preconditions.

In September, Châtelherault and his son, the young Earl of Arran, climbed aboard the bandwagon. Like many others, they converted to Protestantism for largely cynical reasons. By October, the vast majority of the Scottish Lords were behind Lord James and Argyll. Only James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Lord Borthwick, and Lord Seton were unwavering in their loyalty to the regent. Bothwell – who had succeeded his father, Patrick, as Earl in 1556 – was the most resourceful in his guerrilla tactics against Lord James, so it was hardly surprising that Mary would remember him with gratitude when she returned to Scotland.

On 19–23 October, the rebel Lords did the unthinkable. They rode to Edinburgh and deposed Mary of Guise from the regency, replacing her with a council of twenty-four nobles voted from among themselves. Their timing was perfect, because the regent was seriously ill. She was suffering from dropsy, possibly caused by a weak heart. Her legs and body swelled up, and her French doctor urged her to take plenty of rest, avoid all possible stress, and move to a warmer climate. Nothing could have been more impractical, and the regent ignored his good advice. With characteristic courage she mustered three thousand French troops and took refuge in the port of Leith, which she fortified, making it almost impregnable.

She also appealed to her family, who offered reinforcements under the command of René, Marquis d’Elbeuf, the youngest of the Guise siblings. These troops were to be sent from Normandy, confirming Spanish fears. Until they could arrive, Mary of Guise used her existing forces. When in November the Lords refused the offer of a truce, the French garrison made a sortie from Leith and routed them. The Scots attempted to rally but then dispersed, enabling the regent to return to Edinburgh in triumph.

But the respite was brief. Cecil was set on a military intervention, aware that the Lords lacked artillery and could never hope to defeat the French on their own. He was starting to hover between his aims of freeing Scotland for ever of the Guise threat and remoulding the British Isles as a single Protestant community, which meant a virtual annexation of the country. He prepared his ground for a month, then convinced a majority of the English Privy Council on 27 December that the revolt offered the chance of a lifetime to ensure Elizabeth and England’s security by effectively turning Scotland into an English dependency.

It was to be the turning point. After the Privy Council meeting, Elizabeth sent a fleet to the Firth of Forth and two thousand troops to Berwick. The fleet arrived in late January and blockaded Leith. Their orders were to await d’Elbeuf’s reinforcements, but these never arrived. Although some French ships left Dieppe, they were scattered by violent storms. They were either forced back to port or wrecked on the coasts of the Netherlands. A mere handful of men landed in Scotland.

Elizabeth then swallowed her distaste for the time being and allied with the rebels. The negotiations, directed on the Scottish side by Lord James, led on 27 February to the treaty of Berwick. She committed England to protect the ‘ancient rights and liberties’ of the kingdom of Scotland and defend the ‘just freedom’ of the crown from conquest, and the pact was to last for one year longer than Mary was Queen of France. Etched into this language was an almost complete contradiction, since ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ here meant merely the dislodgement of the Guises by the English: the removal of one occupying foreign power and its replacement by another.

A helpless and increasingly distressed Mary was completely bypassed in all this. So was her mother, who was mortified by the treaty of Berwick. She pleaded for d’Elbeuf to return, but her requests were ignored. Her brothers sent vague reassurances, but no specific aid. The reasons were partly logistical, reflecting the difficulty of supplying forces over such a long distance, but were mainly political. The balance of power in France was once again shifting, this time away from the Guises. Their palace revolution had been too extreme. The death of Henry II had created a power vacuum, enabling the Huguenots to make inroads among the nobles. The Wars of Religion were looming. The Guise brothers were encountering problems all too similar to those already experienced by their sister. The difference was they put their own interests first and left Mary’s mother to her fate.

Not everyone shared their sang-froid. Margaret of Parma, the regent in the Netherlands, warned Philip II of a threat to his sea routes. Catherine de Medici had also come to fear the scale of Guise ambition sufficiently to treat with Spain against her most hated domestic rivals. She had retained much of her independence in politics and diplomacy as ‘Queen Mother’, and she now appealed to Philip to intervene as a mediator.

By the beginning of March 1560, a new Spanish move was almost inevitable. The irony is that when d’Elbeuf’s ships were lost, the Guises were themselves reduced to seeking Philip’s aid in defending their beleaguered sister against her rebels. This played directly into Philip’s hands, as he could now step forward as the mediator to whom both sides had appealed for help and advice. In making their plea to Philip, the Cardinal of Lorraine’s ambassador railed against the Scottish Lords and joked sardonically that Elizabeth’s concern for their national independence reminded him of the fable of Reynard the Fox, who used soothing words to coax the chickens down from their high perch only in order to devour them.

Philip appointed two special envoys to intervene before the crisis erupted into war. One was sent to England, the other to France. Their missions made little progress, and in Paris the Cardinal of Lorraine resolved on a final throw of the dice. He proposed that France and Spain should unite to subdue Scotland, but only as the prelude to the conquest of England. As an inducement, England would be given as a dowry to the future son of Philip II and Elizabeth of Valois, and this son would in turn marry the daughter of Francis II and Mary. To make this possible, Mary would surrender her own dynastic claim. It was an extraordinary flight of fancy, illustrating not only the delusions of the Guises, but the extent to which they would trample over Mary to get themselves out of a hole.

Mary was not consulted by her uncle. The mother she adored was dying, and at the same time she was herself ignored. At Amboise towards the end of April, there was a scene. She confronted the Cardinal and ‘made great lamentations’. She wept bitterly, and complained that her uncles ‘had undone her’ and ‘caused her to lose her realm’. In reply, the Cardinal swore to be avenged of Elizabeth for allying with rebels, but his promises were no more than hot air. Mary burst into tears again, then took to her bed.

In an emotional last letter to her mother, Mary conveyed her deepest love and sympathy, praying ‘that God will assist you in all your troubles’. Catherine de Medici, she knew, had ‘wept many tears on hearing of your misfortunes’. As to the crisis in Scotland, she would insist that her husband ‘send you sufficient aid’, which ‘he has promised me to do and I will not allow him to forget it’.

Mary demanded fresh reinforcements for Scotland, but before they could set sail, Philip II had joined with Catherine de Medici to limit Guise power once and for all. On 6 July, after negotiations lasting a month, the treaty of Edinburgh was signed. Purporting to be a coda to the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, the accord was in reality a new one. Supposedly between England, Scotland and France, it was actually between England, the Lords of the Congregation and the Guises, with Philip’s special envoy in the wings.

The terms were a complete vindication of England and the rebel Lords, and a betrayal of Mary and her mother. In a diametric reversal of Guise policy, France recognized Elizabeth to be the rightful Queen of England. It was a slap in the face for Mary by her own side. The claim of Francis and Mary to the English throne would be dropped. French troops were to evacuate Scotland without delay; their forts and garrisons were to be razed to the ground. The council of nobles was to become the official government of Scotland for as long as Mary was an absentee ruler, so enabling it to become the vehicle for the ambitions of Lord James. Moreover, Francis and Mary were to admit that Elizabeth’s role in the whole affair had all along been that of an impartial umpire, a disinterested observer who had merely helped to create the right conditions for a negotiated treaty, and not a direct military participant who had allied with their rebels to forward English interests in Scotland.

There was a further sting in the tail. The final clause of the treaty included what might be called a surveillance clause. Despite the humiliating terms of the treaty, Francis and Mary were to promise to ratify and fulfil all of its conditions, failing which England might intervene in Scotland again whenever it thought it necessary to uphold the Protestant religion and to extirpate Catholicism and French influence from the British Isles.

The treaty of Edinburgh, and especially this last clause, was a travesty. It was to cast a long and inky shadow over Mary’s entire career, and especially her relations with Elizabeth and Cecil. It is almost impossible to exaggerate its significance. Mary and Francis had not even been consulted about its terms, nor had Mary even agreed to negotiate with Elizabeth and Cecil as Queen of Scots. A commission, issued in the joint names of Mary and her husband, was admittedly produced in Edinburgh. But this commission was prepared on her behalf by her uncles: it was neither Mary’s own personal act, nor was her mother a party to the treaty. The commission merely illustrates how far their sovereignty had been usurped. Mary’s mother was easily bypassed, as she died on 11 June 1560, shortly after the negotiations for the treaty began. Cecil and Lord James were able to stitch everything up without paying any attention to the lawful sovereign power in Scotland.

Mary was devastated by her mother’s death. Even this was to be heartlessly concealed from her: the news first arrived in France on 18 June, but was kept secret for ten days. On being finally told, she withdrew to her chamber and wept for a month. When Jane Dormer, one of Mary Tudor’s former chief gentlewomen of the privy chamber, who had married Philip II’s ambassador in London and was travelling overland to Spain, saw her, she was greatly moved by her distress. The Venetian ambassador, who was also a witness, reported that she ‘loved her mother incredibly’. She was so grief-stricken, ‘she passed from one agony to another’.

We know what Mary looked like at this time, because she was first drawn and then painted in her deuil blanc.fn1 The drawing is the work of François Clouet, who also perhaps did the accompanying panel portrait. The sittings were completed in or around August 1560, when Throckmorton met Mary at Fontainebleau and the period of official court mourning for her mother had just expired. The portrait shows her as she was approaching the age of eighteen.

It was Mary’s idea to send her portrait to England. She was impatient, she said, to find out more about her ‘sister Queen’, and hoped to make a fresh start in their relations after the disasters of recent months. Mary wanted to appeal directly to Elizabeth at the level of Queen to Queen. She had already realized the importance of personal relations in her diplomacy, and offered to send her the portrait if she would reciprocate. It was a generous gesture, even if Mary’s obvious curiosity about her cousin’s true height and appearance partly lies behind it. In the easy, almost bantering style she was beginning to adopt with people when she wanted to get her own way, she made Throckmorton promise Elizabeth would comply, ‘for I assure you,’ said Mary, ‘if I thought she would not send me hers she should not have mine’.

When Throckmorton had given the appropriate undertakings, Mary said, ‘I perceive you like me better when I look sadly than when I look merrily, for it is told me that you desired to have me pictured when I wore the deuil.’ There is no evidence Throckmorton ever said anything of the sort. The impulse for the exchange of portraits was Mary’s, but the ambassador knew what was expected of him.

The portrait shows Mary as a fully mature adult. Her pose is more confident; her face rounder and fuller, her cheek bones set higher, her chin more fully developed. Her deep-set hazel eyes are wistful and yet reveal her quick intelligence. Her nose is less snubbed and more aquiline than in the earlier chalk drawings. Her compressed lips and slightly pinched mouth convey her great sadness at her mother’s death. Her fine auburn hair is, as usual, crimped into ringlets peeping from the edges of her cap.

Everyone who saw Mary remarked on her perfect complexion, and in the portrait her marble-coloured skin exactly matched the marbled effect of the semi-transparent white gauze veil stretching down to her feet. Beneath the veil, she wore a black dress edged with white lace, cut low in the neck and rising in semi-circles at the shoulders and across the bosom. It is the portrait of a young woman attempting to cope with her grief. But above all, it is the image of a woman who had grown into the part of a Queen.

Throckmorton had already noticed an alteration in her. At his previous interviews with her, she had been flanked by Catherine de Medici or her uncles, who spoke first leaving Mary to echo their views. But this time they met privately and did not speak French. Although Throckmorton spoke in English and Mary answered in Scots, they understood each other perfectly. And Mary seemed much more relaxed. Whereas before she had been tense or arch, now she talked ‘more graciously and courteously’. She was more natural and at ease, more willing to follow her instincts. She was also a lot more spirited, confidently speaking her own lines and not those scripted by others.

This was Mary’s first solo royal audience. It was also her first interview since the making of the treaty of Edinburgh, which from this point onwards she steadfastly refused to ratify. The tussle over the treaty was to become a legendary battle of wills, and Mary handled the opening round with aplomb. When asked to confirm it, she dissembled just as her mother had done to Sadler all those years ago. ‘What the King my husband resolves in that matter,’ she said, ‘I will conform myself unto, for his will is mine.’ It was to be the first of a series of classic excuses showing Mary to be Elizabeth’s equal in the art of political evasion. She knew very well that she could count on Francis not to do anything by himself.

Mary then changed tack. She produced a killer-fact for Throckmorton to report back to his Queen. ‘I am’, she said, ‘the nearest kinswoman she hath, being both of us of one house and stock, the Queen my good sister coming of the brother, and I of the sister.’

By reminding Elizabeth of their common ancestry as descendants of Henry VII, Mary alluded to her own dynastic rights. ‘I pray her to judge me by herself,’ she continued, ‘for I am sure she could ill bear the usage and disobedience of her subjects which she knows mine have shown unto me.’

Mary called for friendship and ‘amity’ between the two Queens on the basis of their kinship ties: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country and in one island.’ This was to be a constant refrain of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy after Mary’s return to Scotland.

Finally, she made a pledge: ‘I will for my part in all my doings make it good, looking for the like at her hands, and that we may strive which of us shall show most kindness to the other.’ Her offer was as elegant as it was ironic, given that Cecil had only six weeks earlier negotiated the treaty of Edinburgh with her rebels behind her back.

Mary was finding her feet. Throckmorton had no luck with the ratification of the treaty, but was fobbed off in such style and with such charm, he hardly seemed to notice. Soon he was forced to report, ‘assuredly the Queen of Scotland … doth carry herself so honourably, advisedly and discreetly, as I can but fear her progress’. Her charisma was perhaps in the end more lethal than the dynastic threat she posed. If only, he mused playfully in an aside, ‘one of these two Queens of the Isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man to make so happy a marriage as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle’.

Back in London, Cecil saw things very differently. ‘We do all certainly think’, he informed Elizabeth in one of his more portentous but revealing memos, ‘that the Queen of Scots and for her sake her husband and the house of Guise be in their hearts mortal enemies to your Majesty’s person.’ England was in danger and must defend itself, ‘and principally the person of your Majesty’. The ‘malice’ of these conspirators was so great, they would never give up ‘as long as your Majesty and the Scottish Queen liveth’.

Cecil’s mantra for the rest of his long career was to be Elizabeth’s safety. He saw relations between the two British Queens less in terms of ‘amity’ than as an almost cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Between the Rouen fête and her wedding, Mary had been trained to set her sights on the English throne, but after her marriage was a relative bystander, even a casualty of Guise policy. Cecil never understood or made any allowances for that. Instead, he regarded her as much as her uncles as the instigator and intended beneficiary of an international Catholic conspiracy to depose and kill Elizabeth. He was already her most vehement and determined antagonist.

Cecil’s ill will scarcely augured well for the fresh start Mary had proposed, and yet thanks to the arrogance and pretensions of her uncles, it was the assumption on which all her future dealings with England were likely to rest. The Guises had played their poker game and lost. It was now up to Mary herself to see if she could reshuffle their discarded hand.