11

A Search for a Husband

Mary played by the rules in seeking a second husband. Female monarchy was thought to be an aberration; Knox’s account of it in his First Blast of the Trumpet was just an extreme version of a well-worn stereotype. The correct ‘solution’ for a woman ruler was to marry and settle the succession. Marriage was a matter of ‘reputation’ and of the ‘fortification of her estate’. Cecil, who continually urged his own Queen to marry, used exactly those words. Whether a reigning Queen of Scotland would become subordinate to her husband on marriage was a delicate political conundrum to which there was no textbook answer. Scotland was not France, where the Salic law prevailed. Everything depended on the personalities involved and the opinion of Parliament, but generally the nobles were more settled and less factious when dealing with a man, even if he were merely a King Consort.

A complication for Mary was that few kings or princes took widows as their first wives, usually thinking of them as second or subsequent wives in cases where their first marriages had already produced heirs. Against this could be offset the Queen of Scots’ transcendent youth and beauty, and the fact that her dowry was a kingdom. She was still only twenty and in her prime. Now that she had decided to marry again, it was a matter of identifying the best candidate in the light of her political and dynastic goals.

So far, she had been advised by Lord James Stuart, now Earl of Moray, and his allies, whom she appointed to her inner cabinet. Their policy was to maintain the amity with England by seeking a ‘middle way’ in which Mary would be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor. In turn, the preservation of the amity gave the Protestant Lords a guarantee of the religious status quo.

But the gap between Elizabeth and Cecil over how to deal with Mary was widening. Whereas he grumbled that she sought to win Mary over ‘by gentleness and benefit’ without sufficient regard for her own or the nation’s security, Elizabeth joked that her chief minister was more bothered about her ‘safety’ than she was herself. Cecil’s belief in an international Catholic and Guise conspiracy turned him into Mary’s most ardent and determined opponent, whereas Elizabeth, who repeatedly refused to name a successor, fearing it would hasten her own death or encourage a dangerous upsurge of factionalism, remained sympathetic to Mary’s claim, which she preferred to those of any other candidates.

Cecil’s fear when Maitland reappeared in London was that if Mary, frustrated by the setback she had received over the cancelled interview, now looked for a European husband, her claim to the English throne would once again become her principal asset over and above her own country. It was likely to attract large numbers of potential suitors, even those who already wore a crown. The greatest danger would be if the Pope or Philip II backed her claim, because a papal bull declaring Elizabeth to be illegitimate would be tantamount to inciting the English Catholics to revolt. Since even Cecil acknowledged that the official Protestant Reformation had barely scratched the surface in the north of England or Wales, a papal or Spanish intervention was greatly to be feared. A majority of the English people were still Catholics. Moreover, the norms and values of nobles and landowners were tied to the rules of hereditary descent where property rights were concerned, and very few outside Cecil’s inner caucus would have agreed that religion should take priority over property rights when considering the succession to the throne.

Mary reshuffled her inner circle of advisers in readiness for her search. It marked the end of Moray’s period of ascendancy. Mary was disillusioned with him. His policy of a ‘middle way’ had failed, and she began to suspect that he had plotted Huntly’s destruction for his own ends. He was the sworn enemy of the Gordons, their rival for the earldom of Moray with its extensive territorial estates. While Elizabeth and Cecil had been delighted by Mary’s sudden and unexpected disabling of the leading Catholic family in Scotland, they did nothing to reward her. On the contrary, even as Maitland rode south, Cecil was experimenting with drafts of a parliamentary bill to exclude her from the succession.

In January 1563, Mary took Maitland aside. She told him she was making him her leading councillor. She had almost completely forgiven him for his earlier intrigues with Cecil. Although a genuine Protestant, and thus a man with very different religious ideals from her own, he was so far proving himself to be a friend of the monarchy. His sense of duty made him willing to see himself as a royal servant, which made him more valuable to Mary than Moray, whose blunt but annoyingly regal manner she was fast coming to resent. She also judged her illegitimate brother to be too manipulative and ambitious to live up to his promises. Moreover, Maitland’s friendship over many years with Cecil might now be turned to her advantage.

Mary allowed Moray to drift. She decided to promote the wily and conniving Morton to the Chancellorship in place of Huntly. She had not yet plumbed the depths of his villainy. Although a Protestant, Morton was too venal and lascivious to be an ally of Knox and the Calvinists. She knew that he had rebelled against her mother, but his contribution had amounted to little. By advancing him, Mary would hope to be assured of the loyalty of the powerful Douglas clan, and at the same time provide a counterweight to Moray, who was likely to resent his demotion.

Mary was starting to assert herself as Queen. She was attempting to control the noble factions by creating a broad coalition of advisers, which would enable her to take a tougher line with Elizabeth and Cecil, since she would have wider support throughout the country than before. To help create this coalition, she asked Maitland to recommend some new appointments to the court and Privy Council. They included Catholics like Atholl as well as Protestants like Lord Ruthven, which corresponded to Mary’s aim of nurturing ideals of royal service and loyalty to the crown that transcended sectarian divisions.

Mary acted next to raise her stock in Europe. She wrote two letters, both at the end of January. One was to her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, the other to the Pope. She asked her uncle to intercede on her behalf with the Pope. Exactly what he was to say was not committed to paper, but the aim was clearly to make Mary more attractive as a prize for Catholic suitors. To the Pope, she accounted herself ‘your most devoted daughter’, whose uncle would explain ‘the state of our affairs’ and ‘the need which we have of the assistance and favour of your Holiness’.

On 13 February, Maitland set out for London and Paris, armed with parallel sets of instructions. The first related to a position Mary had adopted over the French Wars of Religion once English troops had landed in Normandy. She had offered to act as an independent arbitrator. This was clearly a non-starter and may well have been a diplomatic blind. Elizabeth was too committed to the Huguenots to consider arbitration at this stage, and the war was going too well for Catherine de Medici to wish to settle.

A second set of instructions concerned the debates in the English Parliament. Should the succession be discussed to Mary’s detriment, Maitland was to insist on a right of audience to register a protest in which her claim was set on record. This, although far from a blind, was unrealistic, because Parliament was in no mood for it. Cecil had taken care to ensure that as many Protestants as possible were elected, then lined up his friends to speak. Sir Ralph Sadler, who as Henry VIII’s former ambassador had admired Mary as an infant even as he was duped by her mother, delivered what was tantamount to a racial attack: ‘Now if these proud, beggarly Scots’, he said, ‘did so much disdain to yield to the superiority of England … why should we for any respect yield to their Scottish superiority, or consent to establish a Scot in succession to the crown of this realm?’

Maitland’s final instructions, delivered to him in March by courier, required him to negotiate first with Alvarez de Quadra, Bishop of Aquila, the Spanish ambassador in London, and then with Mary’s relatives in France, to propose a marriage to Don Carlos, Philip II’s son and heir. This was what Mary was after. It had been the match so keenly sought by the Guise family after Francis II’s death, but frustrated by Catherine de Medici’s secret diplomacy. Then, Mary’s interest had been negligible as she made her own plans to return to Scotland. Now she had decided to revive the negotiations, winning support from Maitland, who could see that without exerting pressure on England, there was little hope that Elizabeth would reopen Mary’s case. He was also under the illusion that Philip II was a religious pragmatist, taking as his cue Philip’s well-known reluctance to support Mary Tudor’s burning of the Protestants while he had been married to her. Whether for manipulative reasons or because of a misunderstanding over Philip’s stance, Maitland glossed over the problems of religion, arguing that the Calvinists would not resist Don Carlos. He chose to believe that Philip, although a Catholic, was not a Catholic ideologue. He and his son would be willing to accept the religious status quo, because he was a ‘wise politic prince’ who governed the agglomeration of territories under his control ‘according to their own humour’.

Maitland visited de Quadra, who wrote enthusiastically to Philip. ‘If your Majesty listened to it,’ he explained, ‘not only would you give your son a wife of such excellent qualities … but you also give him a power which approached very nearly to [universal] monarchy.’ To his existing dominions, Philip would add through his son the entire British Isles and Ireland. From the outset, the bait was Mary’s dynastic claim, exactly as Cecil feared.

Maitland put his Queen’s position in a nutshell. Her rebuff over the postponed interview required her to restore her honour and reputation by seeking ‘such a marriage as would enable her to assert her rights’.

De Quadra was flattered and delighted. He had assumed that Mary would try to marry her brother-in-law Charles IX. He was unaware of Catherine de Medici’s outright opposition to that idea, and Maitland did nothing to disabuse him. On the contrary, Mary’s new chief councillor actively hinted at the prospect of a second Valois marriage to create the illusion of a competition.

Maitland’s first report to Mary, sent from London, recounted de Quadra’s belief that Don Carlos, who was now almost eighteen, was ‘very far in love’ with her. His second report, written a month later from Chenonceaux where he was following the French court, was more gloomy. He had heard from the Cardinal, who had sent a strongly worded letter meant for Mary. The signs were not good. Her Guise relatives, noted Maitland, had little regard for her declared wishes or feelings. They paid attention to her only because of her ‘grandeur’ as a reigning Queen, from which they derived their own ‘advancement and surety’. Or to put it simply, they would help their niece only to the extent that they first helped themselves.

As to Catherine de Medici and the nobles, they ‘care not greatly of your marriage or with whom it be, provided it bring with it no peril to this crown’. It was a reaction as cold as it was cutting, reflecting Catherine’s unrelenting concern after Francis II’s death to keep Mary at a distance. A marriage to Don Carlos, said Maitland, was opposed as vigorously as before by the Queen Mother. Her own daughter, Elizabeth, was still childless as Queen of Spain, and however much she longed for Philip II’s support against the Huguenots, Catherine did not intend to hand him a claim to the English throne on a plate.

In England, Maitland continued to report to Mary, there were ‘three factions’: the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Queen. Elizabeth, while remaining single, wanted Mary subordinated to a man in such a way as she herself ‘had least cause to stand in fear’. The Catholics, for whom Lady Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox, was fast becoming a mouthpiece, insisted on a Catholic marriage, one that would put Elizabeth under maximum pressure. The Protestants also wanted Mary to marry for religion, but to someone who would defend the Protestant cause.

Anticipating the reaction of the Lords in Scotland, Maitland believed that, ‘albeit the best part’ would support Mary, there would be ‘divers malaperts’, notably Knox’s allies, who would vehemently speak out against Don Carlos.

The Cardinal of Lorraine had demanded an answer to his letter within six weeks, which Maitland thought unrealistic. As he had discovered, the Guise family were in no position to antagonize Catherine de Medici while both were engaged in a bitter war against the Huguenots. The Guises had performed a volte-face and decided that Mary should not marry Don Carlos. They proposed instead an alliance with the Archduke Charles of Austria, with whom Mary’s uncle was already negotiating behind her back.

It was an unwelcome twist. The Archduke was the third son of Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman Emperor. In principle highly suitable for Scotland as he had a reputation for being a moderate rather than an extreme Catholic, his main disadvantage was that he was already a candidate for Elizabeth’s hand, for which reason Mary rejected him, as she did all other suitors except Don Carlos.

The Cardinal decided that Mary was doing too much thinking for herself. He was highly apprehensive about his niece’s growing independence, and so sent Philibert du Croc to Edinburgh as his special envoy in May. Du Croc had arrived by the 15th, and Mary was closeted with him for days. Their talks were private and were accompanied by a flurry of dispatches to Maitland and the Guises. Randolph saw du Croc as a threat: ‘she useth no man’s counsel but only this man’s … and assuredly until Maitland’s return, she will do what she can to keep it secret’.

Du Croc, however, left empty-handed. Mary would decide nothing until Maitland returned, and despite the envoy’s best endeavours, he merely obtained her thanks and a request for further information about the Archduke’s personality, income, and the dowry he would offer.

This was largely diplomatic froth, and when Maitland reached Edinburgh on 24 June, he found more urgent matters in his in-tray. Some reports of Mary’s marriage plans had leaked and Knox was on the prowl. As Maitland had predicted, the influential preacher would do all he could to stir up resistance to Mary’s betrothal to a Catholic.

Knox’s imagination was in full flight, leading to a spectacular showdown. Preaching as the representative of the Kirk before the same session of Parliament that declared Huntly’s embalmed corpse guilty of treason, he attacked Mary’s proposed marriage.

She summoned him to Holyrood the same afternoon. ‘I have’, she exclaimed, ‘borne with you in all your rigorous manner of speaking, both against myself and against my uncles; yea, I have sought your favours by all possible means. I offered unto you presence and audience whensoever it pleased you to admonish me; and yet I cannot be quit of you.’

Her voice quivering with rage, she threatened, ‘I shall be once revenged’, and burst into tears of self-pity. Knox began to justify himself, but Mary jumped straight to the point: ‘What have ye to do with my marriage?’

He replied that since so many of her nobles were flatterers, neither God nor the Commonwealth were ‘rightly regarded’. At this, she once more demanded: ‘What have ye to do with my marriage?’ And ‘What are ye within this Commonwealth?’

Knox’s bile was up. ‘A subject born within the same, Madam. And albeit I neither be Earl, Lord nor Baron within it, yet has God made me (how abject that ever I be in your eyes), a profitable member within the same.’

He then proceeded to repeat everything he had said in his sermon, prophesying that if Mary married a Catholic, the realm would be ‘betrayed’ and she would end her days in sorrow. One doubts whether any other ruler in the sixteenth century was so roundly rebuked.

Mary was speechless. No longer was she able to measure up to Knox in a quarrel. He had broken every convention of political speech, every rule of courtesy, because although she was an anointed Queen he addressed her as an equal, even a moral inferior. She always found it hard to suppress her emotions. This time she was overwhelmed and simply ‘howled’.

Knox waited while she dried her eyes, then compounded his offence. He declared he had never much liked weeping and ‘can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys’ when he beat them. Since, however, he had spoken the truth and Mary had ‘no just occasion to be offended’, he must endure her tears rather than offend his conscience or ‘betray my Commonwealth through my silence’.

At this final affront, Mary ordered him out of the room. She had reached a crossroads. For the moment, she had no choice but to bide her time. She saw clearly what was at stake. She had read the First Blast of the Trumpet in which Knox had explained that a Catholic ‘idolatress’ was by simple definition a woman guided by hot and uncontrolled outpourings of passion instead of cool reason.

Knox was a fanatic, a misogynist, and a prude. He had devised his own rudimentary theory of the psychology of female Catholic rulers. Because they were ‘idolatresses’ like Jezebel or Athalia, they ruled from the heart and not the head. Their ‘idolatry’ was inflamed by their sex. They had set reason aside, since if they had been governed by reason they would have long ago converted to Protestantism.

It followed that Knox equated Catholicism in a woman with unbridled sexual lust. It would not be long before he would be accusing Mary of the crimes to which she must automatically be prone merely because she was a Catholic and not a Protestant.

This was to be the foundation of the stereotype that Mary ruled from her heart, unlike her cousin Elizabeth, who always ruled from the head. Since Elizabeth was a Protestant, Knox exempted her from his vicious attacks on female rulers. Unlike Mary, she was a Queen ‘by a miraculous dispensation of God’. It is clear where some of these ideas came from, since on this point Knox followed Calvin’s opinion that female monarchy deviated from the ‘proper order of nature’, but exceptionally there were special women who would be ‘raised up by divine authority’ to be the ‘nursing mothers’ of the Protestants.

In reality, no impartial witness of Elizabeth’s cavorting late at night in her bedroom with Lord Robert Dudley while his wife was still alive could have compared her favourably to Mary at that stage. Knox had embarked on a strange sectarian fantasy. Starting from his belief that Mary was an ‘idolatress’ who attended her mass in secret, he came to malign her as a femme fatale: a manipulative siren, whose moral defects and unfitness to rule were evident from her dancing, banquets, and flaunted sexuality.

Soon he was convinced he had unearthed a scandal. It was centred on Pierre de Bocosel, Seigneur de Chastelard, a poet on the fringes of the Pléiade. Mary had admitted Chastelard to her service, and he had written some poems for her to which she had unwisely responded in the tradition of courtly love. It was an innocent gesture, but the poet fell madly in love with her. The night before Maitland left for London, he hid under her bed, where he was discovered with a sword and dagger. He was banished, but followed Mary to Fife, entering her bedroom again, only two days later, while she was undressing. This time he was tried for treason. On the scaffold, he delivered a fine rendition of Ronsard’s ‘Hymn to Death’, after which he cried out, ‘Adieu, the most beautiful and the most cruel Princess in the world.’

Chastelard had an obsession, but Knox blamed Mary for leading him on. The charge was levelled by the time of Maitland’s return and linked to Mary’s love of dancing late into the night. ‘In dancing’, he claimed, ‘the Queen chose Chastelard, and Chastelard took the Queen.’ She would rest her head on his shoulder, ‘and sometimes privily she would steal a kiss of his neck’.

Knox’s charge of sexual transgression was a travesty. In reality, Mary had been so terrified by the poet’s appearance in her bedroom, she refused for months to sleep alone, and would not retire for the night unless Mary Fleming, the chief of her four Maries, slept in the same room.

Once Maitland was back home, he sought to neutralize Knox by denying plans for Mary’s marriage. This was strictly true: there were negotiations but no wedding plans. It was a splitting of hairs worthy of Knox himself, but the preacher continued to subvert Mary, exploiting the jealousy that had arisen between Moray and Maitland, and attempting to bind himself to Moray, who was out to court as much popular support as he could.

The events of 1563 put a considerable strain on Mary. She was already becoming estranged from her uncles when suddenly she was hit by a report of the Duke of Guise’s assassination. The Duke, returning from a routine inspection of his army near Orléans on 18 February, was shot three times in the shoulder and died a few days later. His assassin was a Huguenot who, under torture, implicated the Protestants in his crime. Mary was devastated by this news. Although the Cardinal of Lorraine had been her mentor, the Duke was her favourite uncle.

The news reached her in St Andrews on 15 March. She was ‘marvellous sad, her ladies shedding tears like showers of rain’. She decided to console herself by riding for days on end across the fields, hawking and hunting as she passed from place to place. Randolph accompanied her to Falkland, her favourite hunting palace beside the gently sloping Lomond hills. As he took his leave, she suddenly regaled him with an account of ‘all her griefs and the great adventures that have fallen unto her since the death of her husband, and how she was now destitute of all friendship’.

Mary felt very much alone. In some ways she was too gregarious to be a Queen. She could be naïve, impulsive, and impatient, sending Maitland to negotiate her marriage to the most eligible bachelor in Europe and then expecting quick results. Although she could work with her advisers, one doubts whether she liked any of them. They were too self-interested, too concerned with their private quarrels for anyone not brought up in Scotland to understand. Mary was a charismatic Queen who showed her emotions, but she also needed emotional support. With her mother dead, this she could rarely obtain. Scotland was still in many ways a foreign country. There were few people she could really talk to apart from the four Maries, who knew Scotland no better than she did. She loved her family, but often felt badly let down by them. And now the Duke of Guise was dead, which brought the terrible dangers of religious war home to her.

A week or so later, Randolph did exactly the right thing. While Mary hunted near Pitlessie, he brought her a letter of condolence from Elizabeth, written in her own hand. She stopped her horse and read the letter, ‘not without some tears that fell from her eyes’.

‘Monsieur Randolph,’ she said, ‘I have now received no small comfort, and the greatest that I can, coming from such a one as my dear sister, so tender a cousin and friend as she is to me. And though I can neither speak nor read but with tears, yet think you not but that I have received more comfort of this letter than I have of all that hath been said unto me since I heard first word of my uncle’s death.’

Mary tucked the letter into her bosom. At dinner, when she seemed to be alone, she took it out and read it again, saying aloud, ‘God will not leave me destitute. I have received the best letter from the Queen my good sister of England that ever I had, and I do assure you it comforteth me much.’

Mary was genuinely grateful for the letter, but this latest scene was a piece of theatre from beginning to end. Mary knew that she was watched by her servants, who she knew would be suborned by Randolph, who in turn would inform Cecil. She was learning to put on a show. Despite her comfort at Elizabeth’s letter, she was under no illusions that the interview between the Queens would ever take place; rather than show her disappointment, she would keep Elizabeth guessing.

Mary did not intend to be snubbed again. She meant to be fully occupied during the summer months when a rescheduled interview might have been expected. To avoid looking like a suppliant, she threw herself into plans for another royal progress, this time to Ayrshire, and from there into Argyllshire and the west Highlands, the main Gaelic-speaking territory.

Knox, meanwhile, notched up another scandal. A few days after Huntly’s attainder, Parliament passed an Act against Adultery by which the penalty was made death. That very same night, one of Mary’s French chaplains was discovered in bed with another man’s wife, providing further ‘proof’ of the moral deficiencies that sprang from saying or hearing mass. Knox could scarcely contain his glee, attempting to inflame his congregation at St Giles Kirk against Mary and the licentiousness of her court. His strictures were always the same:

O Lord, if thy pleasure be, purge the heart of the Queen’s Majesty from the venom of idolatry, and deliver her from the bondage and thraldom of Satan … The Queen’s idolatry, the Queen’s mass, will provoke God’s vengeance … Her house, whither her subjects must resort, is become the haunt of dancing and carnal concupiscence … Get thee to the Prophets, I say, for Elijah saith: ‘The wrath of God shall not spare rulers and magistrates … The dogs shall lick the blood of Ahab and eat the flesh of Jezebel’ … The devil takes the depraved at his will. Dancing is the vanity of the unfaithful, which shall cause the people to be set in bondage to a tyrant.

When the summer progress finally began, Mary’s attention turned to archery, hunting, and hawking, the outdoor sports she loved so much. But her European diplomacy was not forgotten. In late July, before she left Argyllshire, Luis de Paz, an agent of de Quadra, came all the way from London to visit her. Mary eagerly received him.

Elizabeth’s response was to warn Maitland that such secret diplomacy with Spain must cease. Her bluster would not have mattered had Mary been supported by her Guise family. This was her best opportunity to escape from the straitjacket into which the English were now steadily trying to force her. Only through an alliance with a major European power could she make the sort of marriage to which she aspired, and since Catherine de Medici refused to help her, that ally, she believed, must be Philip II. Her case against the Archduke was that, although a Habsburg and Philip’s cousin, he lacked sufficient weight to force England to recognize her claim to the succession, not least as he was already Cecil’s favoured candidate for Elizabeth’s hand.

Even as Mary was closeted with de Paz, her uncle was bargaining for the Archduke. The Cardinal was so unmoved by Mary’s objections to his diplomacy, and so supremely confident of his ability to talk her round, he travelled to Innsbruck without her knowledge to sign a treaty.

It was a wasted journey. Mary always intended to reject the suit, and when she understood the full extent of her uncle’s double-dealing, she rebelled. As she later told her aunt, the Duchess of Arschot, ‘Not that I don’t consider it great and honourable, but less useful to the advancement of my interest, as well in this country as in that to which I claim some right.’

A sudden crisis blew up when Sir Thomas Smith, the new English ambassador to France, reported what he believed to be the terms of Mary’s offer to Don Carlos. He was misled by inaccurate French intelligence, wrongly supposing that her uncle had brokered a deal with the Pope to give England as a dowry to Don Carlos. If only he had known that Philip II had entertained Maitland’s overtures in the first place solely to counter a possible marriage to Charles IX, and would end them as soon as he knew for certain that Catherine had vetoed that idea, there would have been no reason for the English to panic.

But even though Smith was misled, his report was taken at face value. In March 1563, three months after the Huguenots had been resoundingly defeated at Dreux and their leader Condé captured by the Catholics, the two sides made peace at Amboise. Then, to Elizabeth’s bewilderment and chagrin, their forces had united in a joint campaign to expel the English army of occupation from Normandy.

As the combined French armies advanced on Le Havre, the English dug in, but bad weather and plague compounded their woes. By late July, they had no option but to surrender. It was an ignominious defeat, although not a complete disaster, because the Guises had failed to achieve the mastery in Normandy to which they had aspired.

It was bad enough, however, to persuade Elizabeth not to get involved in a war for the next twenty years. She became an isolationist in foreign policy, which made her all the more determined to dictate the terms of Mary’s marriage. If England was to become a fortress, it was essential to box in Mary and coerce her to cut her own European links, otherwise the perennial problem of Scotland as the back door into England would arise again, just as it had done repeatedly under Henry VIII.

Elizabeth’s policy towards Scotland went into overdrive after her retreat from Normandy, and came to focus on a right to veto any husband Mary might actually seek to choose. When Elizabeth and Cecil heard of the Cardinal’s visit to Innsbruck, Randolph was told to inform Mary that, if she married the Archduke or anyone else from the Emperor’s family, the amity with England would be at an end.

Randolph delivered this message on 1 September at Craigmillar Castle, one of Mary’s favourite retreats just to the south of Edinburgh. She greatly disliked what she heard. As he spoke, she constantly interrupted him, asking so many questions, ‘that scarce in one hour could I utter what might have been spoken in one quarter’. She demanded that his message be submitted in writing so that she could reflect on it.

Then, Smith’s report arrived on Cecil’s desk and Randolph was recalled to London. Mary angrily insisted on knowing what marriages were ‘sortable’ for her. As Elizabeth complained, her royal cousin was threatening a showdown. She wanted to know ‘whom we can allow and whom not; secondly what way we intend to proceed to the declaration of her title’.

It was turning into a battle of wills. In an ideal world Mary would have ignored Elizabeth and gone her own way. By demanding, whether mockingly or sarcastically, to be told whom she might marry, she was giving the English Queen a clearly defined hold over her. But then she had precious little choice. Scotland was a weak country lacking the troops or cash reserves to fight a war without foreign aid. Even the richer Lowland territories were reliant for their trade and commerce on the northern counties of England. Since Catherine de Medici refused to help her, and as Philip II was still protecting Elizabeth for the moment, Mary was in a vice. At the same time, she felt she needed to be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor if she was to bolster the legitimacy of her reign and curtail the insubordination of Knox and her more turbulent Lords.

By the end of 1563, Mary had brushed aside her uncle’s advice to marry the Archduke, but this did not mean she had to cut her diplomatic links to the Continent. The extent of the breach with her Guise family was exposed when she bitingly remarked, ‘Truly I am beholden to my uncle: so that it be well with him, he careth not what becometh of me.’ But if support from France was for the moment beyond her reach, she might yet outmanoeuvre Elizabeth and Cecil.

On 17 November, Randolph was given new instructions spelling out the limits of Mary’s choice of husband. They had proved to be a drafting nightmare. The main gist remained constant. Mary was to be asked to marry someone, preferably an English nobleman, who was fully committed to the amity. If no one met those qualifications, she might seek English permission to marry a foreigner as long as he was prepared to live in Scotland after he was married. He must be ‘naturally born to love this Isle’ and be ‘not unmeet’ (Elizabeth was fond of double negatives), but ‘no one’ from Spain, France, or Austria would ever be acceptable.

That was the first draft. Elizabeth then softened her line. Once again, she followed her instincts as a Queen and a woman and laid down the basis of a compromise. Should Mary accept this English advice, her dynastic claim could be reinstated, in which case ‘we will not be behind on our part to satisfy her as far forth as if she were our only natural sister or dear only daughter’.

Cecil took one look at this and balked. First, he crossed out ‘dear only’ in the last sentence. Then he deleted Elizabeth’s entire paragraph. ‘We do’, he wrote in its place, ‘promise her, that if she will give us just cause to think that she will in the choice of her marriage show herself conformable’, then ‘we will thereupon forthwith proceed to the inquisition of her right by all good means in her furtherance’. Mary might submit evidence in support of her right to the succession. A legal adjudication would then follow, declaring whether or not her claim was upheld. Only then, ‘if we shall find the matter to fall out on her behalf’, could Mary expect to be treated as Elizabeth’s ‘natural sister or daughter’.

Cecil’s amendments prevailed. They were not only insulting to Mary, suggesting that an anointed Queen and sovereign of an independent nation should submit herself to the jurisdiction of an English court, they introduced the completely novel element into the equation that her right should be put on trial.

It was an extraordinary requirement. Simply by seeking to marry – and so fulfil the universally accepted obligations of a woman ruler as Cecil could only wish his own Queen would do – a course had been set by which Mary would be turned into an English suppliant. Already regarded as the chief antagonist, she had been imagined as the defendant in a court case.

It was surely a drastic over-reaction that exposed the increasing paranoia in England over the threat of Guise and papal conspiracy. If Mary had as yet failed to find a husband who was able to secure her rights, she might still renew the attempt. But first she would have to deal with the demands of Elizabeth and Cecil, whose efforts to assert their superiority over her and her country were becoming as blatant as they were threatening. Conciliation had been replaced by confrontation. The trick would be to appear compliant, then to pull off a fait accompli.