WHEN MARY OF GUISE pulled off the coup that made possible her daughter’s coronation, she knew the breathing space would be short. Arran and Lennox were rival claimants to the succession. Their families were old enemies; it was impossible to believe they would stay long on the same side. Even before Arran agreed to share power with Cardinal Beaton and restored him to office, Lennox was growing disaffected. In any case, Arran’s reconciliation to Beaton was only the prelude to his efforts to stage a comeback. Mary of Guise knew she must retain his support for her pro-French policy until the treaty of Greenwich was officially renounced by Parliament.
To this end, business could be combined with pleasure. With Mary crowned Queen, her mother could afford some fun and dalliance. Scarcely had the great hall of Stirling Castle been cleared up after the coronation festivities than it was Mary of Guise’s birthday. She was still only twenty-eight. It was, wrote a chronicler, although late autumn, ‘like Venus and Cupid in the time of fresh May, for there was such dancing, singing, playing and merriness … that no man would have tired therein’.
Such pastime had a political point, because Mary of Guise, herself barely a year older than Lennox and still one of the most beautiful women in Scotland, planned to assure his loyalty by thoughts of marriage. She had accurately judged his ambition. It would soon become a fixation, to the point where Lennox scarcely distinguished between a marriage in Scotland or England as long as it brought him closer to a crown.
Lennox was lissom and urbane, intelligent if duplicitous, ‘a strong man, of personage well proportioned in all his members, with lusty and manly visage’. Tall and svelte, he oozed sophistication and was ‘very pleasant in the sight of gentlewomen’. His savoir-faire had been acquired in France, where he served as a lieutenant in the garde écossaise, the King’s personal bodyguard.
His rival in love if not in lineage was Patrick Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Exiled by James V to Venice and Denmark for his unruliness, he had recently returned to Scotland. His ancestors were Lords of Hailes in East Lothian, an affluent Lowland region to the east and south of Edinburgh. His grandfather had risen on the battlefield, was promoted to an earldom and given Bothwell Castle in Lanarkshire. Later, he exchanged it for the Hermitage, a vast and isolated border citadel in the valley of the Hermitage Water in Liddesdale, mid-way between Hawick and Carlisle, close to the ‘Debatable Land’. The exchange turned the Hepburns into powerful border lords. The Hermitage was a key location, the fortress from which the western and central sectors of the border with England were controlled. James IV also gave the family Crichton Castle, some eleven miles south-east of Edinburgh, enabling them to improve their position at court and in Parliament.
Patrick was a Scottish patriot: pro-French and anti-English, but also an opportunist who flirted with England when it suited him. Gossip said he was a royal bastard. This is unlikely, although his mother was briefly one of James IV’s mistresses. The family’s fortunes derived from his grandfather, who had accumulated a cluster of offices retained by his heirs. As a result Patrick was hereditary Lord Admiral, a lucrative post since it entitled the Hepburns to the profits of all ships wrecked off the coast of Scotland, making them one of the few noble families to enjoy financial independence from the King. He was also Sheriff of Edinburgh, which gave the family influence with the legal profession in the Court of Session and in Parliament.
The Hepburns stood for the values of chivalry and warfare. They saw themselves as ‘men of honour’, which in their eyes justified duelling and even treachery as acts of self-defence. Their code of ethics flourished among military men on the Continent and in Ireland, but was considered repellent by civilian administrators and diplomats. Sadler, Henry VIII’s ambassador, described Patrick as ‘the most vain and insolent man in the world, full of pride and folly, and here nothing at all esteemed’. He might have said the same about Lennox, except the values of the Lennoxes were civilian, based on courtly manners and polite society: perfidy was just as rampant, but cloaked by the veil of gentility.
Patrick was sandy-haired, of medium build with a fair complexion and a slight stoop. He had a broad smile and a winning manner. Like Lennox, he could captivate women. He had numerous affairs, and had no scruple about abandoning his wife to advance his suit for Mary’s mother, using his influence in the Catholic Church to get an annulment of his marriage without prejudice to his children’s legitimacy.
Lennox and his rival calculated that whoever became Mary’s stepfather would be able to displace Arran as regent and rule in Mary’s name. So they dogged her mother’s steps from Stirling to Edinburgh and back, posturing like peacocks to catch her eye. They danced and sang and recited poems. They engaged in shooting and jousting matches, wearing the most fashionable clothes and running up massive bills in the jewellers and haberdashers of Edinburgh. They followed her to St Andrews, where she was Beaton’s guest in his castle. She handled both men as befitted an accomplished practitioner of courtly love, making encouraging noises but offering ‘nothing but fair words’.
Patrick tried a short-cut by giving out that she had promised to marry him. Lennox took this rumour as truth, and retired to his stronghold at Dumbarton. Sulking, he decided to change sides, petitioning Henry VIII for the hand of Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece and daughter of his sister Margaret, widow of James IV, by her second marriage to the Earl of Angus. He also sought Henry’s aid in recovering ‘his right and title’ to the regency in Scotland, which he claimed Arran had usurped. His overture delighted Henry, who saw Lennox as a surrogate for Arran now that the latter had defected to Beaton.
Lennox’s volte-face upset the balance between the noble factions in Scotland. Now he was pro-English rather than pro-French. In an attempt to counter this, Francis I redeemed his promise to the Guise family. In October 1543, six of his ships sailed up the River Clyde and landed at Greenock. On board were the new French ambassadors, Jacques de la Brosse and Jules de Mesnage, who brought money and artillery to help Mary of Guise and her supporters.
The flotilla sailed on to Dumbarton, where Lennox overreached himself. He seized the ambassadors’ money and most of their guns. A stalemate was only averted when he was warned that, as a naturalized French subject, he could be tried for treason in France. He grudgingly submitted and returned to Stirling, where he was briefly reconciled to the French cause.
La Brosse then used the money at his disposal to provide pensions for the leading Lords. Amounting to 59,000 crowns of the sun (more than James V’s usual revenue in the last year of his reign), it was a substantial windfall. Nothing greased the wheels of Scottish politics better than pensions, and when Parliament reassembled in December it took less than a week to exonerate Beaton of all the charges against him and enact, in the infant Mary’s name, a renewal of the ‘auld alliance’ between Scotland and France.
Parliament’s next step was to repudiate the treaty of Greenwich, tearing up the marriage contract between Scotland and England. The revocation of the treaty left Henry VIII incensed. According to La Brosse, he was threatening revenge as if he had lost a great battle.
Mary of Guise was exultant. The reinstatement of the ‘auld alliance’ was a personal triumph. She spent a joyous Christmas with her little daughter at an ever bustling Stirling. The entertainments for the French ambassadors were lavish and unstinted. Once more there was music, dancing, and feasting. She even won £100 from Arran at the card tables.
Lennox, however, posed a threat. On 21 March 1544, he met Mary of Guise for the last time. She had no intention of making him her daughter’s stepfather. When she finally told him so, he left in a fury. A week later he set sail for England, where he signed an indenture to marry Margaret Douglas. By this deed, equivalent to a legal conveyance, he promised to strive for a dynastic union between England and Scotland and to govern Scotland, if he were ever to obtain the regency, at the direction of the English King, to whom he even assigned his own claim to the Scottish throne.
On 29 June, the nuptial mass for Lennox and Margaret Douglas was celebrated in the presence of Henry VIII and Catherine Parr, his sixth and last Queen. The bride’s dowry was provided by Henry, who granted the couple substantial estates in Yorkshire.
Even before the wedding, Henry had decided to be revenged on the Scots. He was so incensed by their disavowal of the treaty, he had warned the citizens of Edinburgh that he would ‘exterminate’ them ‘to the third and fourth generations’ if they got in his way. Outraged by what he saw as stark treachery, he was also anxious lest Mary be shipped to France out of his reach.
While Lennox had been working out how best to play his cards, Henry was mustering troops for an invasion of Scotland. His paranoia was plain. Not only did he aim to unleash the biggest invasion since Edward I’s reign, he went so far as to compile hit lists of individual Scots. His plans did not balk at assassination. Beaton was a leading target, as Henry blamed him more than Mary of Guise for detaching Arran from the pro-English party. Soon Sadler, himself a supporter of the Reformation, was seeking out Beaton’s Protestant enemies, infiltrating their secret networks to see if a plot could be devised.
The main aim of Henry VIII’s invasion was to force the Scots to reinstate the dynastic marriage clauses of the treaty of Greenwich. For this reason, it was afterwards said to have begun the ‘Rough Wooings’ of Mary Queen of Scots. The campaign started in the first week of May, under the command of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Prince Edward’s uncle.
Since Henry had already committed himself to a summer invasion of France in alliance with Spain’s Charles V, he was potentially fighting on two fronts. To avoid this, he gave Hertford only a month, later reduced to three weeks, to fulfil his Scottish mission. He was to besiege the town and castle of Edinburgh, to destroy the port of Leith, the deepest harbour on the Firth of Forth and the gateway to Edinburgh, and then to turn to the central Lowland belt between Edinburgh and Stirling. Once these had been laid waste, he was to cross the Forth into Fife, the bread-basket of Scotland, where he was to ‘extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages’, and especially at Beaton’s stronghold of St Andrews.
Hertford travelled by sea, sailing up the Firth of Forth and disembarking fifteen thousand men at Granton, two miles or so beyond Leith. Advancing towards the town, he found six thousand Scots lined up on the inside bank of the Water of Leith, the strategic position from which Edinburgh was defended from the north. Arran, Beaton, and Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, commanded these forces, but after half an hour’s fighting, they were overwhelmed and fled.
Hertford, however, failed to seize Edinburgh Castle. Its position was well-nigh impregnable; it was heavily fortified with artillery, and anyone who approached it was vulnerable to attack. So the order was given to ignore the castle and burn and pillage the rest of the town and its suburbs. The fires raged for three days: almost every house and church within the walls was looted or destroyed. The palace of Holyroodhouse and the adjacent Abbey-Kirk were ransacked. A detachment of troops was then sent over to Fife, burning Kinghorn and the villages around Kirkcaldy, but soon returning. Time was short, and Hertford’s troops were unable to come within twenty miles of St Andrews.
Throughout these terrifying events, Mary was protected by the high walls of Stirling. Sadler learnt that her attendants, charged with her security on pain of their lives, would, if necessary, convey her to the Highlands, where ‘it is not possible to come by her’. Hertford did advance into the central Lowland zone. On 15 May, he reported that the region had been ravaged to ‘within six miles of Stirling’, and Leith would be flattened the next day. The result was that Mary was taken to Dunkeld, one of the main approaches to the Highlands some thirty miles north of Stirling. She was safe there, and Hertford’s deadline was approaching.
Ordered to return south so that his crack troops could be shipped to Calais to begin the French campaign, Hertford marched from Edinburgh to Berwick-on-Tweed down the east coast route, burning the market towns on the way and flattening as many other fortified towers, villages, churches, and houses as he could manage.
It was a catastrophe for Scotland, and Arran got the blame. He, even more than Beaton, was held accountable. The nobles argued that he should, in future, share the regency with Mary of Guise. Her popularity had soared, because her pro-French policy was held to be synonymous with Scottish freedom from its ‘auld enemy’. She managed to escape all the blame for the fire and brimstone brought down on the population by Henry VIII. It seemed that she alone had the interests of Scotland at heart. Certainly her family held the key to the French alliance: without her, Francis I would be less inclined to defend Scotland’s cause against England.
Mary’s mother saw her opportunity. She wanted to be sole regent, not co-regent. Arran objected and each side summoned rival Parliaments: the deadlock lasted for months. Finally, Beaton hammered out a compromise whereby Arran promised to take her ‘counsel and advice’. Thereafter, she sat regularly with the Lords of the Privy Council and in Parliament, where she strove to maintain the appearance of unity while shifting Scotland as far as possible into a French orbit.
Her morale, daunted somewhat by this distasteful compromise, was raised by a victory. In February 1545, an English raiding party crossed the Tweed to pillage the ancient abbey-town of Melrose and its magnificent church. On their return, they were ambushed by a smaller Scots force, which took many prisoners. It was a blow to English prestige at a moment when Henry VIII was briefly vulnerable. Paradoxically, this was the result of his success in France, where he had captured Boulogne and defended it against a counter-siege. But to secure his much vaunted conquest, Henry was forced to dig in, which tied him down. Powerful as England was relative to Scotland, the country was weak compared to France. Henry had been ditched by his ally, Charles V, who had made a separate peace with Francis I. He was fighting alone, running up vast debts and stretching his forces to the limit.
In Paris, the Dauphin Henry was beginning to take the lead in Scottish affairs. He and the Guise family warmly congratulated Mary’s mother on the ambush, offering to assist her further. By May 1545, fresh reinforcements were ready to embark and more pensions granted to the Scottish nobles. Nothing seemed to be too much trouble. When Jacques de Lorges, Sieur de Montgommery, who was commissioned to lead the expedition heard that Mary of Guise was ‘ill provided with wines’, he ordered a consignment of ‘good ones’ to be sent to her.
The troops arrived within a month. Whether Francis I wholeheartedly supported them is another matter. Perhaps no more than five hundred men disembarked. And there was a sting in the tail. In order to pay his soldiers, Francis had melted down 10,000 crowns of the sun and mixed in copper and lead to manufacture 150,000 crowns. The debased coinage had been given to Lorges’ men, but the deception was apparent from the moment they arrived and the canny shopkeepers of Edinburgh refused to accept the false coins.
As the campaigning season drew towards its close at Boulogne, Henry felt safe enough to turn again to Scotland. He sent Hertford over the border in September to continue the ‘Rough Wooings’. Leaving his base at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hertford led twelve thousand men towards Berwick, rested for three nights, and then advanced some twenty or so miles inland over the rough and hilly terrain towards Kelso. From there, he turned south again towards Jedburgh, burning and looting everything in his path and petrifying the local inhabitants.
Next, he attacked the frontier villages in a slash-and-burn raid covering almost two hundred square miles. He began by claiming he would inflict as much damage as on his previous campaign, but ended up boasting it would be twice as bad. Still, this was a far less crushing invasion than its predecessor. Hertford did not venture deeper into Scotland because he was wary of the French reinforcements.
Henry VIII, meanwhile, had turned to diplomacy with France. Scotland was at the top of his agenda: his latest gambit was to offer to return Boulogne to Francis I in return for a marriage between Mary and Prince Edward. The following spring, Hertford travelled to Paris to resume the negotiations. Both kingdoms were financially exhausted, and a truce was agreed that included Scotland. It might have given both sides breathing space had not the unthinkable happened.
On 29 May 1546, Beaton was assassinated. Three months earlier, the zealous archbishop had ordered the burning of George Wishart, a leading Protestant reformer, lashing him to the stake with ropes and strapping bags of gunpowder to his body to ensure a spectacular show. Since burnings for heresy were almost as unpopular with Catholics as with Protestants, the effect of Beaton’s display was to turn opinion sharply against him.
The assassins, a group of lairds from Beaton’s home base of Fife, chiefly resented his social and political power. Nothing moved without his say-so, and the chief conspirator, Norman Leslie, Sheriff of Fife, had challenged his jurisdictional claims. In the resulting feud, Leslie was backed by his friends. Sadler, Henry VIII’s ambassador, was directly involved. Not content to offer them unqualified English support, he had also bankrolled them, calculating that with Beaton dead, the pro-French party would collapse.
Between five and six o’clock in the morning, a band of assassins arrived at the main entrance to St Andrews Castle. They slipped inside with the stonemasons who were then reporting for work, passing Marion Ogilvy, Beaton’s mistress and the mother of his eight children, as she left the castle by a postern or side gate as she usually did on her way to do her shopping. Once inside, they snatched the keys from the porter. Leslie was then able to enter the courtyard, order the servants and workmen to leave, while running back to secure the postern gate in case Beaton fled that way.
Beaton heard a noise and tried to escape, but seeing his path blocked, returned to his bedroom and bolted the door. He only reopened it when Leslie’s men stacked burning coals outside. He fell into a chair and prayed. This cut no ice with the conspirators, who preached a long-winded sermon calling on the ‘vile papist’ to repent before stabbing him. ‘Fye, all is gone,’ were his last words. Leslie then hung his naked body from the castle walls by knotting a pair of sheets to make a rope.
When the people crowded to view this spectacle, a man called Guthrie undid his breeches and ‘pissed’ into Beaton’s open mouth. The ‘Castilians’, as they were nicknamed since they were forced to barricade themselves in the castle to evade the authorities, then packed the corpse into a salt chest, which they cast into a deep, bottle-shaped dungeon. This was a very specific act of revenge – the body could easily have been thrown into the sea from the rear wall of the castle – because friends of the assassins had themselves been imprisoned there by Beaton. This unusual dungeon ranked for its terrors with anything to be found in Europe, as there could be no escape except through the neck of the ‘bottle’, requiring the use of a rope or ladder lowered from above. And because the dungeon was carved out of the cliff beneath sea level, the roar of the waves could be heard inside.2 This was a conspiracy fully in keeping with the tribal politics of blood feud.
Henry VIII was overjoyed. He saw the murder as a breakthrough in his campaign to defeat the ‘auld alliance’. He could not have been more wrong. If anything, Beaton had been a stabilizing influence in Scotland. Now opinion veered even more sharply towards France.
The Lords hurriedly met in council and chose the Earl of Huntly, head of the Gordon clan, the leading Catholic and pro-French family in the eastern Highlands, to replace Beaton as Chancellor. Several pro-English Lords took this opportunity to defect to the pro-French faction. Within Fife itself, there was an abrupt shift of grass-roots opinion: those lairds and their dependants who had helped the ‘Castilians’ were turned almost overnight from local heroes into the targets of spontaneous assaults.
What Arran could not manage was to retake St Andrews Castle. He began a siege, but the fortress could be supplied by sea: Henry VIII dispatched food and munitions all the way from England. When Arran’s men struggled valiantly to mine their way in by hewing a passage through the solid rock, they were thwarted by a counter-mine cut by the ‘Castilians’.
Such failure angered Mary of Guise. She was already irked at the back-handed way Francis I had ‘aided’ her. The use of debased coin to pay the wages of Lorges’ troops especially rankled. She wanted St Andrews Castle retaken and the ‘Castilians’ punished.
Then, momentous events occurred at breathtaking speed that conjured up exhilaration and fear in almost equal measure. Henry VIII died in January 1547, followed two months later by Francis I. These titans had dominated the affairs of the British Isles and northern Europe for thirty years. Suddenly there was a vacuum. And it was the Earl of Hertford and the Guise family who moved instantly to fill it.
Henry VIII’s son and heir, Edward VI, was still only nine. A regent or Protector (as the office was called in England) would be needed to govern until the King was eighteen, but Henry had shied away from giving so much power to any one person. Instead, he used his will to appoint a Council of Regency to rule during his son’s minority. Despite this, Hertford made himself Duke of Somerset within a week. He took vice-regal powers to govern as Protector: his overriding aim was to realize Henry VIII’s dynastic plan by imposing on Scotland the defunct treaty of Greenwich and uniting the two crowns through Mary’s marriage to Edward. To this end, he aided the ‘Castilians’. Almost his first official act was to make a pact with them, distributing pensions and wages, and shipping food and munitions to St Andrews.
In France, the Dauphin succeeded his father as King Henry II. The Guise family were among his chief advisers; the result was that Henry at once declared himself to be the ‘protector’ of Scotland. He decided to spare no expense to safeguard the ‘auld alliance’ and ensure that Mary would marry no one except his own son, the Dauphin Francis. He flatly countered Somerset’s idea of an ‘Anglo-British’ union with his own master-plan for a ‘Franco-British’ empire. Moreover, his level of commitment far exceeded anything shown by his father, Francis I, whose chief concern had been to frustrate and rival Henry VIII.
Henry II called on Leone Strozzi, Prior of Capua, a brilliant naval officer trained in Italy, to lead an expedition against the ‘Castilians’. Strozzi sailed into St Andrews bay on 16 July, laying siege to the castle on the 24th. Serious firepower was used. On the 30th, he bombarded the castle from the roof of the ancient Abbey to the east and from the tower of the university chapel to the west. The assault began at daybreak and was over by three o’clock in the afternoon. Before Arran could even cross the Forth and ride the fifty or so miles from North Queensferry to St Andrews, the castle had been retaken and its occupants imprisoned or taken on board the French galleys.
When the ‘Castilians’ were finally led out in chains, they included a young Protestant reformer named John Knox, who had abandoned his previous career for the life of a preacher after meeting Wishart, the man burned by Beaton, in his native East Lothian. Knox had had no hand in the cardinal’s murder, but approved of it. He came to St Andrews, where he preached in the castle chapel and in the town. His teaching was that ‘the Pope is antichrist’ and ‘the mass is abominable idolatry’: his oratory was so compelling that he won many converts.
Knox was forced to row in the French galleys for eighteen months. Then, Somerset arranged for his release and safe conduct to London. It was to be a fateful move, because Somerset’s secretary and master of requests was a young Cambridge graduate and rising star named William Cecil. He was the man destined to be Mary’s nemesis, and now he met Knox for the first time. It was partly through Cecil’s influence that Knox received job offers in England and was appointed one of Edward VI’s chaplains.
Somerset’s response to Strozzi’s recapture of St Andrews Castle was to order a final round of the ‘Rough Wooings’. In late August, an army of fifteen thousand men arrived at Newcastle. Somerset marched at the head of his troops to Berwick and continued into East Lothian. In a change of tactics, he intended to settle permanent English garrisons in Scotland. He meant to occupy and subdue the country, and so force it into submission. His army was shadowed by an accompanying English fleet as it made its way north, ready to open fire if his troops were ambushed by the Scots.
For once, Arran had his own forces ready. When, on 10 September, the English infantry surmounted a hill close to Inveresk, near Musselburgh, on the eastern approaches to Edinburgh, they were confronted by the largest Scottish army in history. Some twelve thousand troops were skilfully positioned behind defensive trenches on the west bank of the Esk. They were put there to block the road into Edinburgh, and since on one side of them lay the sea, and on the other an impenetrable marsh, Somerset would either have to launch a frontal attack, or else wheel his army round.
As Somerset turned in search of a defensive position, Arran attacked. The armies clashed on the hills above the hamlet of Pinkie. For an awesome moment, it looked as if the Scots pikemen could win. Then, the English ordered a shock cavalry charge and fired their heavy guns to deadly effect. As the Scots buckled, Arran turned to flee. His troops panicked. In the bombardment and ensuing carnage, ten thousand Scots were scythed down and killed. It was a second Flodden: the way lay open to Edinburgh and Stirling. Mary, aged four and three-quarters, was hastily carried in a litter by night to Inchmahome Priory, a remote spot on an island in the Lake of Menteith, some eighty-five miles from the battle.
Somerset did not reoccupy Edinburgh. Instead, he started to build a grid of quick, cheap forts from coast to coast in an attempt to hold the country at his will. If he expected this to work, he miscalculated. The backlash was so massive, it led to the one thing he had inexplicably overlooked: the removal of the Queen of Scots to France.
Far from tolerating union with England on the back of a military conquest, Arran made his terms with Henry II, accepting the offer of the Duchy of Châtelherault in Poitou and the promise of a bride for his son. The bargain was sealed in January 1548, and within a month negotiations were under way for Mary’s betrothal to the Dauphin.
Henry II could not have spoken more clearly. He promised to liberate Scotland from Somerset’s garrisons. In keeping with his style, this was to be a Guise family affair. Francis, eldest son of Claude Duke of Guise, already seen as the outstanding military strategist of his generation, was put in charge. He was to plan the campaign jointly with his brother Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, the most gifted administrator at Henry II’s court. The Guise brothers were, of course, the uncles of the young Queen of Scots.
In readiness for her voyage to France, Mary was moved to Dumbarton Castle, already confiscated from Lennox and secured to the pro-French party. With Somerset increasingly bogged down in provisioning his garrisons, the greatest danger to the young Queen was from an attack of measles. Rumours that she was dead were quickly contradicted. The prospects for her safety were good, as an advance party of French troops had arrived to defend her, equipped with enough money and ammunition to last a year.
The main French expeditionary force disembarked at Leith on 17 June. An armada of 130 ships transported 5500 infantry and 1000 cavalry, striking fear into the occupants of Somerset’s forts. Many of the French soldiers were veterans who had served in Italy. Their captains were professional commanders, most of them retainers of the Guises. They were loyal to their commanders and dedicated to their country, unlike many of Somerset’s soldiers, who were foreign mercenaries.
Early in July, the French forces laid siege to Haddington, Somerset’s principal fort in the eastern Lowlands. A week later, Parliament convened in the nearby Abbey and, after only the shortest of discussions, approved the treaty between Scotland and France. The French lieutenant-general, Andre´ de Montalembert, Sieur d’Esse´, explained that Henry II had ‘set his whole heart and mind for [the] defence of this realm’ and sought to betroth Mary to his son.
Parliament quickly acceded to this as ‘very reasonable’. The potential sticking-point was national autonomy, but as Henry II had promised to defend Scotland’s laws and liberties ‘as these be kept in all kings’ times past’, the terms were easily ratified.
The day after Parliament ended, Mary of Guise wrote to her brothers, ‘I leave tomorrow to send her [Mary] to him [Henry II], as soon as the galleys have completed the circuit.’ To confuse the English naval patrols, Nicolas de Villegagnon, commander of the French ships sent to fetch Mary, sailed round the north coast of Scotland, skirting the Isles of Orkney and back down the west coast to the Clyde. It was a dangerous, roundabout route, although one the French hydrographers had charted and which the sailors knew to be navigable as long as storms did not blow their vessels too far off course.
On 29 July, Mary kissed her mother goodbye and boarded her ship, which was Henry II’s own royal galley. Although only five and a half years old, she carried herself like a Queen. Her embarkation was watched by Jean de Beaugué, an army veteran and friend of d’Essé, who wrote that she was ‘one of the most perfect creatures that ever was seen, such a one as from this very young age with its wondrous and estimable beginnings has raised such expectations that it isn’t possible to hope for more from a princess on this earth’.
As Mary walked down the narrow steps from the castle to the pier at the foot of the rock to board her ship, she had registered her personal trademark. Whatever she did, and wherever she went in the future, whether her actions and behaviour were to be applauded or demonized, she would prove to have this gift of conjuring a sense of occasion.
There followed a week’s delay caused by storms and a smashed rudder. The ships were tossed about violently at anchor, and Mary discovered that she was among the few on board immune to sea-sickness. It was perhaps the first occasion in her life when she found she could be strong while so many others around her were weak.
On 7 August, the flotilla finally reached the open sea. It was Mary’s first big undertaking: her début on the international stage. She visibly relished the part. Her high spirits were observed by Artus de Maillé, Sieur de Brézé, a Guise retainer whom Henry II had sent as his ambassador for the voyage. In a series of letters written on board ship, he informed her anxious mother, ‘the Queen, your daughter, fares as well and is, thanks to God, as cheerful as you have seen her for a long time’.
After a rough crossing lasting eighteen days, almost twice as long as had been estimated, the galleys reached St-Pol-de-Léon, a small haven not far from the busy port of Roscoff in Brittany. From there the party was to travel on to St-Germain-en-Laye, Henry II’s favourite château, built on a cliff overlooking the River Seine on the outskirts of Paris.
Exhausted by the storms, everyone was glad to relax for a few days before starting the next stage of their journey. Mary needed to rest. Her voyage was the beginning of an adventure, and yet she must have felt some apprehension. She was unsure if she would ever see her mother again. And although from here onwards she was fêted wherever she went as ‘la petite Royne’ (the little Queen), it was not just because she was royal, but because she was pledged to marry the Dauphin of France.