IN NOVEMBER 1563, Elizabeth had asserted a right of veto over Mary’s choice of husband and advised her to marry an English nobleman. If Mary refused, she might consider a foreigner as long as he were not from Spain, France, or Austria; but the conditions laid down were so narrowly restrictive, they would be impossible to fulfil with honour. No names had yet been mentioned. Did Elizabeth all along have one of her own favourites in mind? It was as yet impossible to be sure.
Cecil then went a stage further, demanding a trial of Mary’s dynastic claim. Elizabeth gave in to Cecil’s nagging, but softened the blow by sending Mary a token of her affection. It was a jewel, a diamond ring that she ‘marvellously esteemed’. Not the least of Mary’s challenges, in the year before she finally broke free of English intimidation over the terms of her marriage, was making sense of such mixed, even mutually contradictory messages.
When Randolph presented the ring, Mary was delighted. It symbolized Elizabeth’s role as her ‘lover’ and seemingly put the clock back to the spring of 1562, when the agenda was a meeting between the two ‘sister Queens’ as the prelude to their symbolic union. As if to emphasize the point, Mary ‘often looked upon and many times kissed’ the ring.
But Randolph sent it to her ahead of the stipulations for her marriage. When Mary read these, she showed great presence of mind. Not wishing to protest outright, but keen to set a different tone in her relations with England, she indulged her mischievous sense of humour, pointing to two rings on her fingers, one Elizabeth’s, the other the gift of her late husband, Francis II.
‘Well,’ she said with a smile, ‘two jewels I have that must die with me and willingly shall never [be] out of my sight.’ By this, she made it clear she was keeping her options open.
She then laid on a charade, poking fun at Randolph. Everyone joined in, and the scenes may have been loosely scripted. She would open with the line, ‘Randolph would have me marry in England!’ Argyll or someone else would then call out, ‘Is the Queen of England become a man?’ Mary would ask, ‘Who is it there in that country whom you would wish me to marry?’ To which Randolph would have to answer lamely, ‘Whom you could like best. Maybe there is so noble a man there as you could like?’
Or else Mary would pose as an innocent bystander, eager to oblige the English Queen if only Randolph could be less ‘obscure’ about whom it was she wanted her to marry.
It was all, at least on the surface, innocuous. It also caused a lot of merriment in the court. Randolph, whose instructions expressly forbade him from naming any particular candidate, could only squirm or suggest that a delegation be sent to London to quiz Elizabeth in person.
Despite Mary’s sang-froid, the pressure was taking its toll. For two months she had been sick. Her affliction, as Randolph reported, was ‘divers melancholies’. She disguised these as best she could, but ‘often weeps when there is little apparent occasion’. The day after her twenty-first birthday, she was in bed all day after dancing late into the night. With Knox as vigilant as ever, the official explanation was a cold, ‘being so long that day at her divine service’.
But the sickness persisted. As Christmas approached, Randolph knew that ‘her disease … daily increaseth’. This is the first mention of symptoms that would later suggest a gastric ulcer rather than porphyria. ‘Her pain’, he continued, ‘is in her right side.’ Here he was mistaken. He was soon correcting himself, reporting that the abdominal pain was on her left side. She had taken ‘divers medicines, but hitherto findeth herself little the better. Upon Saturday she was out of her bed, but took no great pleasure in company nor to have talk with any.’
Knox had partly caused Mary’s distress. She had bided her time until the Lords gathered in Edinburgh for Christmas, when she had finally decided to strike against the man she believed to be her scourge. During her last summer progress, a priest who had celebrated mass in her private chapel in her absence was threatened by two Calvinists. When they were imprisoned for defying Mary’s proclamation on religion, Knox summoned ‘a convocation of the brethren’ to free them. His letter, an implicit incitement to acts of violence, was shown to Mary, who consulted the Privy Council, a majority of whom thought it treasonable. Mary was elated by their response. It looked as if Knox had gone too far this time and, despite Maitland’s deep reservations, he was put on trial.
The court was packed. Mary was flanked by her Lords, and when she saw Knox standing at the other side of the table with his cap off, she first smiled and then ‘guffawed’. She was in high spirits, saying, ‘This is a good beginning … Yon man made me weep and shed never tear himself. I will see if I can make him weep.’
A worried Maitland whispered in her ear, advising her to be quiet. He believed the proceedings to be ill advised and wanted to minimize the damage, but Mary wanted her revenge on a man she saw as her implacable enemy. Knox was charged with conspiracy to ‘raise a tumult’ against her. By attempting to ‘convoke’ the Protestants to free the offenders, he had summoned Mary’s subjects to arms and so threatened armed resistance against his lawful Queen.
Knox conducted his own defence. He argued there was a difference between a legal and an illegal assembly. In this he was supported from the table by Lord Ruthven, a Calvinist, who pointed out that Knox ‘makes convocation of the people to hear prayer and sermon almost daily’. To this, Knox himself added that all his actions were authorized by the Kirk, and therefore he had acted lawfully as a minister of the Gospel.
In the end, it came down to a vote, taken in Mary’s absence. Knox was acquitted, and when she returned to the court to hear the verdict, she demanded it be taken again. The result was exactly the same. Her illegitimate half-brother, the Earl of Moray, who was jealous of Maitland’s promotion over him, was the cause. He had spoken in favour of Knox’s prosecution in the Privy Council, but then used his influence in the court to secure an acquittal. It was his first open act of betrayal. Mary had been humiliated. She was resentful and exasperated, incredulous that victory could have been snatched away from her like this.
But she was willing to learn from the experience. In an attempt to avoid new conflicts, she reined in Maitland somewhat, so that he and Moray were once more treated as equals. Her aim was still to balance the factions by creating a broad coalition of advisers willing to subordinate their private quarrels to royal interests, and to a large extent she was succeeding. Her working Privy Council, whom she met almost every day at Holyrood, embraced a wide cross-section of Lords.
Heartened by their support, and for the moment taking no discernible offence at Moray’s duplicity, Mary decided to pick herself up and begin again after her suit for Don Carlos failed. She was still looking for a husband, but this time the focus of her diplomacy was England. She intended to test Elizabeth by teasing out the full extent of her unreasonable demands. It was becoming clear that Mary had a deep-seated need to secure recognition of her ‘grandeur’ not just from her own subjects, but from the other rulers with whom she came into contact.
Mary signalled the start of her latest round of diplomacy at a Shrovetide masque at Holyrood in February 1564. It was performed at a banquet said to be the most sumptuous and extravagant in living memory. There were three courses, each comprising not a single dish but a choice of some forty or fifty dishes of every conceivable kind of fish, fowl, game, and meat followed by jellies, pies, cakes, baked pudding, tart, and fruit, all carried into the great hall by servants dressed in costumes of black and white. Mary, her attendant Lords, and the four Maries also wore these colours.
A boy dressed as Cupid led the procession that served the first course to the strains of an Italian madrigal sung by Mary’s choir. After a suitable break while the diners washed their hands and faces in silver bowls and dried them on white linen towels, the second course was served. At the head of the new procession was a beautiful young girl representing Chastity. As the waiters served the food, Latin verses were recited: a eulogy of the pure mind and radiant beauty that the child symbolized and which were iconic of Mary herself. Lastly, a boy in the character of Time ushered in the serving of the third course. The choir sang another divertissement, this time a setting of verses foretelling that as long as heaven and earth might endure, the mutual love and affection of Mary and Elizabeth would prevail.
Randolph, the English ambassador, attended the feast and sent a report of it to Cecil. He also shuttled between Mary and her advisers, seeing first the one and then the others. He was becoming increasingly apprehensive, as almost three months had elapsed since he had delivered his message and Mary had so far declined to make any answer to the conditions he had conveyed about her marriage. He had no way of knowing what was in her mind, and believed that only Maitland really knew what she was thinking.
The symbolism of the masque seemed unequivocal. But the answers given directly to Randolph by Mary and her councillors were more quixotic and far less easy to interpret.
Maitland began the parley. He made ‘great protestation’ to Randolph of Mary’s love for Elizabeth. And yet, how much better it would be, he said, if so difficult and confidential a topic as her marriage were to be discussed face to face between the Queens alone, without the intercession of their subjects. He clearly had Cecil firmly in his sights.
Moray and Argyll then joined in. They coordinated with Maitland to inform Randolph that because his stipulations for Mary’s marriage had been ‘only general’, her reply could only be ‘uncertain’. It was a delphic response, a masterly piece of rhetorical obfuscation akin to what Elizabeth, when giving an equally unacceptable answer to her Parliaments on the subject of Mary, would later call an ‘answer answerless’.
But there was a clear method to this. Mary, closely advised by Maitland and Moray, was inching towards a position in which Elizabeth would be forced to break cover and give the name of her favoured candidate for Mary’s hand. Randolph was summoned to see Mary in a private interview a week after the Shrovetide banquet to receive his answer to the terms he had delivered before Christmas. He had no choice but to write a letter afterwards to Elizabeth, rather than simply sending in a report to Cecil as he was usually expected to do.
Once again, Mary had taken a leaf out of Elizabeth’s own textbook. One of the English Queen’s most time-honoured ploys was to muddy the waters when imparting unwelcome news, saying one thing herself while getting her councillors to say something rather different. Now Mary did something similar. Her councillors had been non-committal. They had not bound their Queen to pay attention to Elizabeth’s conditions.
But Mary did not want to leave it like that. She was still striving as hard as she could for a settlement in which her dynastic rights in England were recognized. Her councillors, she said, had given the mere ‘words’ of her answer, but she wanted Randolph to explain to Elizabeth the full extent of their ‘meaning’.
‘Princes’, she confided, ‘at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.’ Mary paused as she spoke to emphasize that she was ‘without evil meaning’ to Elizabeth. When she continued, she said that she longed for ‘nothing more’ than her fellow sovereign’s lifelong love and goodwill.
Mary had momentarily exposed her inner self. All her resolve and determination, her strength of will and sense of ‘grandeur’ were packed into these words. They were disarmingly honest. They recognized that her sheer determination and force of character would not always allow her to get her own way, even if she had set her mind sufficiently on something. And yet, they were layered to the point of being enigmatic. They implied that she always intended to keep something of her own in reserve: to retain a part of herself for herself, no matter what politics and policy forced upon her. To this extent, she would always remain elusive. Her goodwill towards Elizabeth was genuine, but not to be presumed upon.
What most struck Randolph at the time was Mary’s sincerity. She spoke straightforwardly, wholeheartedly, and without guile. She was to be trusted. ‘The word of a prince’, he added reassuringly, was of far greater worth than ‘the mutable mind of inconstant people’.
Randolph had appealed to a well-known maxim of the Athenian rhetorician, Isocrates, Elizabeth’s favourite classical author. In a passage she had learnt by heart as a child, he had advised rulers: ‘Throughout all your life show that you value truth so highly that your word is more to be trusted than other people’s oaths.’ For Elizabeth, it was a lifelong moral axiom. She claimed time and time again in her own letters and speeches that her word alone was sufficient, because the words of rulers were the badges or symbols of their authority.
Mary’s tactics worked. Honesty brought forth honesty, and Elizabeth sent Randolph an answer explaining that her preferred candidate for her cousin’s hand was none other than her favourite, Lord Robert Dudley.
It was a breathtaking reply. Dudley had first been mentioned as a possible husband for Mary during the 1563 session of Parliament. In what at the time was an off-the-cuff remark and not a considered proposition, Elizabeth urged Maitland, then preparing to advance Mary’s suit for Don Carlos, to recommend him on account of his qualities and graces, a hint Maitland brilliantly deflected with the riposte that, if Lord Robert was so desirable as a husband, then Elizabeth had better snap him up herself!
Mary was likely to be gravely affronted at the prospect of inheriting her cousin’s cast-off lover. Randolph was beside himself at the thought of transmitting such advice. He broke the news in a lengthy audience at Perth. Mary could scarcely believe her ears. She listened implacably. At length she said, ‘Monsieur Randolph, you have taken me at a disadvantage.’ But she quickly recovered her wits, her mood switching in a matter of seconds from incredulity and bemusement to anger.
‘Do you think that it may stand with my honour to marry my sister’s subject?’ The whole idea, she said, was insulting, whereupon Randolph only made things worse, replying that there could surely be no greater honour than to match herself with a nobleman ‘by means of whom she may perchance inherit such a kingdom as England is’.
Mary bridled. Why did Dudley make any difference to her dynastic prospects in England when she was already the strongest claimant by hereditary right?
‘I look not for the kingdom,’ she said, ‘for my sister may marry and is like to live longer than myself. My respect [i.e. concern] is what may presently be for my commodity, and for the contentment of my friends, whom I believe would hardly agree that I should abase my state so far as that!’
Mary set out her position clearly. She countered those of her critics who had been unable to understand why, once her initial policy of conciliation failed, she continued so relentlessly to set her sights on recognition as the heir to a woman who was only nine years older than she was and perfectly capable of bearing children if only she chose to marry. Despite the apparent illogicality of such a policy, it was in fact the only possible course of action open to her. The ‘commodity’ of princes was their honour and reputation. It was vital for Mary to safeguard them, and given her emphasis on family ties, the ‘contentment’ of her relatives also mattered to her, despite her recent disappointment with them.
Still more important after her latest and most embarrassing clash so far with Knox was her continued belief that her Scottish Lords and the Calvinists would only come to obey her in the way she expected when her dynastic rights were recognized. She most of all needed Elizabeth’s friendship to arm herself against the volatility of her Lords and to bolster the legitimacy of her reign in her own country. Since Knox had only just finished yet another round of correspondence with Cecil, using Randolph as his intermediary, it was a burning issue for her.
Up until now, Mary had conducted this interview with Randolph in the presence of her advisers, but she now ordered them to leave, her Maries excepted.
‘Now Monsieur Randolph,’ she began again in her most winning and confidential tones, ‘doth your mistress in good earnest wish me to marry my Lord Robert?’ Randolph assured her that it was so. ‘Is that’, she said, ‘conforming to her promise to use me as her sister or daughter, to marry her subject?’ Randolph said he thought it might be.
‘If I were’, she said, ‘either of them both, and at her disposition, were it not better to match me where some alliance and friendship might ensue, than to marry me where neither of them could be increased?’
Randolph hesitated. He then replied, ‘The chief alliance my sovereign desires is to live in amity with Scotland.’
‘The Queen your mistress’, said Mary, ‘being assured of me might let me marry where it may best like me, and I always remain friend to her as I do.’
Mary paused again, thinking carefully. Finally, she said: ‘These things are uncertain.’ There were many risks and no guarantees. She did not intend to marry Dudley simply on her cousin’s say-so. She would not rule out the suggestion completely. But she needed to think carefully about it. She was not willing to give an immediate answer.
While Randolph was pondering this, the Lords reappeared and everyone went to supper. Afterwards, the discussion resumed by candlelight in Mary’s bedroom. Tempers were beginning to fray, and Moray was unable to restrain himself. He took a dig at Randolph, but one that was also a swipe at Mary, exposing the rising tension as it began to sink in that whoever married her was likely to become King and could make or break their careers.
‘Why’, Moray asked Randolph, ‘do you not persuade your own Queen to marry, but trouble our Queen with marriage that yet never had more thought thereof than she hath of her dinner when she is hungry?’ This was vintage Moray: bluff, shrewd, cynical, always calculating the odds, and a master of the thinly disguised insult. Mary laughed and walked away.
From Elizabeth’s viewpoint, of course, Dudley’s candidacy was logical. By marrying him, Mary would be subordinated to a Protestant male on whom the English Queen knew she could always rely, a man she still loved and trusted never to betray her. More maddeningly eccentric was her idea of how it might play out. In two minds about allowing Dudley to leave her sight, she came up with the almost ludicrous proposal that there would be a ménage à trois or extended royal ‘family’. Mary, Dudley, and Elizabeth would all live together at Elizabeth’s court after Mary was married, where the English Queen would bear the costs of the ‘family’, which, she said, was merely the right way for ‘one sister’ to behave towards ‘another’.
This was not a ploy to drag out negotiations and so stall plans for any marriage Mary might seek to make on the Continent; Elizabeth was serious. Of all her designs, it comes closest to fantasy and makes nonsense of the traditional interpretation that she was always astute and never prone to making decisions on the basis of her emotions. As Randolph ruefully observed, Elizabeth’s idea of happy families turned ‘this comedy’ of Mary’s marriage ‘altogether liker to a tragedy’.
Mary spent the rest of the spring and early summer of 1564 shoring up her position. She adopted two tactics. Her first was to capitalize on potentially her greatest asset: her popularity with the ordinary people of Scotland, so visible to her when she first returned from France and on her summer progresses. A popular Queen was likely to be a strong one. She was the ‘fountain of justice’ responsible for the impartial administration of the legal system, and she took her opportunity to score points off Knox and the Calvinists when a group of poor people petitioned her against the judges of the Court of Session, many of them Knox’s friends, whom they accused of favouring the rich and powerful and even sitting in judgement on each other’s cases and those of their friends and kinsfolk.
The Lords of Session had been established by Mary’s grandfather, James IV, to sit regularly in Edinburgh and hear legal cases as expeditiously and fairly as they could. They were the highest court of justice, independent of the crown, later incorporated as a special College of Justice: charged to act professionally and set an example to all the other judges in Scotland. Despite this remit, they were ignoring their responsibilities to poorer litigants who could not afford to pay for justice.
The time had come for Mary to intervene. She issued a reforming ordinance that required the Court of Session to sit more frequently to hear the cases of the poor. All the judges were to sit at least three days a week, ‘as well after noon as afore noon’. For their extra work, Mary generously increased their salaries. But she also made it clear that she expected justice to be done without fear or favour. She even arrived unannounced in the courtroom one Friday afternoon to watch some poor people’s cases being heard. All this was something of a publicity coup, and went a long way to undermine Knox’s claims that she was a Queen who was only interested in dancing and courtly frippery and not in her subjects’ welfare.
Mary’s second tactic in the spring of 1564 was to hit back quietly at Elizabeth for attempting to destabilize her country. The previous year, Elizabeth had asked for a favour. She had written to Mary to see if she would give the Earl of Lennox, who had caused so much trouble in Scotland in Henry VIII’s reign, a passport to return home from his long exile in England. It was a totally disingenuous move. Elizabeth was no friend of Lennox, whose wife, Lady Margaret Douglas, had only recently been released from the Tower. Elizabeth interceded for Lennox only at the height of Mary’s suit for the hand of Don Carlos, when she wanted to stir up trouble.
In making her request, Elizabeth had played with fire. The son and heir of Lennox and his countess was Henry, Lord Darnley: now seventeen, stunningly handsome, and the claimant with the best hereditary right to the English throne after Mary herself. When Elizabeth made her bid for the passport, Darnley was not expected to accompany his father to Scotland. On the contrary, he was living at the English court where he could be closely watched, effectively under house arrest. He was allowed to wait on Elizabeth, to whom he sang and played on the lute in the evenings. But if his father returned to Scotland, would Darnley follow? And if so, could he conceivably become a suitor for Mary?
It seemed a fantastic idea. Randolph dismissed it out of hand. Then, in the last week of April 1564, Mary decided she would take Elizabeth at her word, grant the passport for Lennox, and allow him to return to his ancestral home. A close friend of Knox, William Kirkcaldy of Grange, wrote from Perth: ‘The Earl of Lennox will obtain licence to come home and speak [to] the Queen. Her meaning therein is not known, but some suspect she shall at length be persuaded to favour his son.’
From this moment onwards, smart money backed Lord Darnley as a likely husband for Mary. He was probably the last person that Elizabeth had in mind. If Mary married him, her claim to the succession would be greatly strengthened because, unlike Mary, he was male and born in England, which countered the two overriding objections to her claim in the Parliament of 1563: that she was a woman and a foreigner.
Darnley was not a Protestant, but neither was he an orthodox Catholic. He did not take his religion very seriously and was able to attend the Catholic mass in the morning and the Protestant sermon in the afternoon unfazed by any sense of inconsistency. This made him seem less threatening in Scotland than Don Carlos or even the Archduke Charles. Beyond this, he was physically attractive. He was four years younger than Mary, stood fully six feet tall, and looked as svelte and lissom as had Lennox in his youth, when he had followed Mary of Guise from Stirling to Edinburgh and St Andrews. He was more effeminate and baby-faced than his father, but the implications of that were not yet talked about.
Once Mary had set in train the mischief of agreeing to readmit Lennox to Scotland, she proposed to Randolph that both Queens should appoint commissioners to meet on the border at Berwick-on-Tweed to discuss terms for the possible Dudley marriage. Elizabeth immediately took fright. Mary was duelling with her. Already she regretted ever asking Mary to repatriate Lennox. But the damage was done, and she could hardly refuse to condone the very course of action she had herself proposed. She appealed, clandestinely as she believed, to Maitland and Moray to block Lennox’s return, but her overtures were rebuffed and reported with glee to an increasingly determined Mary.
In the summer of 1564, Mary put herself deliberately out of reach. She let Elizabeth stew, and went on another progress, this time to the far north of Scotland, starting at Inverness and moving on to Gartly in Aberdeenshire and then to Easter Ross. She was attempting to bind together the Gaelic-speaking parts of the country to the Scots-speaking Lowlands by their shared allegiance to herself. And the plan was working, in that she was well received and lavishly entertained by her hosts at every stop. Her willingness to order the court to put on Highland dress helped, as well as her liking for the harp and bardic poetry. She was even willing to listen to the bagpipes, which, more than the harp, were coming to be regarded as symbolic of Highland identity and culture.
By the time Mary was back in Edinburgh, there was yet another twist. Catherine de Medici, uncertain as to the end game in Mary’s suit for Don Carlos and anxious to prevent a future crisis, had sent Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissière, on a mission to both Elizabeth and Mary.
Catherine was assiduously promoting a peace policy after the combined Catholic and Huguenot victory over the English at Le Havre. She wanted peace within France and between France and its neighbours: she especially wanted peace in the British Isles to guarantee the Anglo-French entente. She therefore proposed a new double alliance: Elizabeth should marry Charles IX, and his younger brother and heir, Henry Duke of Anjou, should be given to Mary.
When Castelnau put the offer to Elizabeth, she sidestepped it with a joke. ‘The King’, she said laughing, ‘is both too big and too small!’ She meant that France was too powerful to match with England, whereas Charles IX, who was by now aged fourteen to Elizabeth’s thirty, was too young. She had no desire at all to marry Charles. If she left the country she would become an absentee ruler, and the King of France could hardly be expected to live in England. But she asked Castelnau to thank Catherine for the honour she had done her and reiterated her support for their entente.
Mary was distinctly frostier. She would soon be twenty-two and the Duke of Anjou was barely thirteen. That, however, was not the reason for her disapproval. She rejected Catherine’s proposal less because of the age disparity than because she held the offer to be unworthy. It was a consolation prize. As Castelnau put in his report, Mary ‘had as big and restless a spirit as her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine’. The offer was insufficient for her ‘grandeur’. Despite this, he found her absolutely ‘enchanting’: a woman ‘in the flower of her youth’ who was ‘esteemed and adored by her subjects’.
Castelnau knew Mary already, having watched her grow up at Henry II’s court. He brought her letters from her Guise relations, and as she gradually thawed, she gave him better reasons for rejecting the offer. ‘Of all the kingdoms and countries of the world,’ she said, ‘none touches my heart more than France where I was nurtured and had the honour of being a Queen … But I cannot really imagine how I could return there in a lesser role, and in any case if I left my realm of Scotland unattended, I might even be in danger of losing it.’
Mary flatly refused to consider a marriage to a prince who she believed (wrongly as it turned out) had no prospect of ever inheriting a throne. Her next move was to send a gentleman of her bedchamber, Sir James Melville, as her ambassador to Elizabeth. He left Edinburgh in late September, instructed first to play down the effect of an angry letter Mary had written protesting against her cousin’s clandestine efforts to block Lennox’s repatriation, and then to stand ready to act on her dynastic claim should Parliament, currently prorogued to meet in October, reassemble. Lastly, Melville was charged to treat secretly with the Countess of Lennox, to obtain a passport for Darnley to travel north.
Mary was still pretending to consider Dudley as a possible husband while secretly investigating the prospect of marrying Darnley, whose dynastic assets, if united to her own, would give her an almost invincible claim to the English succession provided the rules of hereditary right were followed.
When Melville reached the palace of Whitehall, Elizabeth laid out the red carpet. She smothered him with blandishments, seemingly taking him into her confidence and granting him up to three interviews a day. He was flattered, even as he realized it was all part of a game. In reality, his entire visit was orchestrated to bring the topic of conversation continually around to Dudley.
One of Elizabeth’s ploys was to summon Melville to her bedroom to view her collection of portrait miniatures. The pretext was that she ‘delighted often’ to look at Mary’s portrait; but when the hapless envoy arrived, the miniature at the top of the pile was none other than Dudley’s, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper with the sitter’s name inscribed on the outside in Elizabeth’s own hand.
The inscription read ‘My Lord’s picture’: the closest wording possible to an outright declaration of love and the more baffling to Melville in that to show this inscription to him while attempting to advocate Dudley’s merits as a husband for Mary only served to expose Elizabeth’s own indecision about the course of action on which she had embarked.
Melville was then closely interrogated about Mary. What did she wear? what colour was her hair? how beautiful was she? was she tall? what were her favourite pastimes? could she play the virginals? The questioning was endless, and it was almost more than the patriotic and loyal Melville could bear to describe his Queen with sufficiently faint praise to avoid offending the vain and jealous Elizabeth.
At the end of a gruelling nine days, Melville looked forward to his departure. He was exhausted, but was obliged to stay on to attend Dudley’s creation as Earl of Leicester in honour of his suit for Mary, an event at which he and the French ambassador clearly spotted Elizabeth tickling her kneeling favourite’s neck.
It seemed to be just another, if more elaborate, royal charade. More perilous was that portion of Melville’s mission that concerned Darnley. Elizabeth was becoming wary of him. His stock had risen relative to the gossip about him, which Elizabeth curiously sought to counter by promoting him. At the ceremony for Dudley’s ennoblement, he bore the sword of state and was invited to the official reception.
Asked pointblank about Mary’s opinion of him, Melville dissembled. ‘No woman of spirit’, he said, ‘would make choice of such a man that was more like a woman than a man, for he was very lusty, beardless and lady faced.’ It was just about a credible answer, because while Darnley was polished and urbane, his character was tainted by recklessness, sexual excess, pride, and stupidity. He was almost certainly bisexual, as was the vogue of young hedonistic courtiers in France. Contemporaries had ways of making sexual excess known, and when Darnley was described as a ‘great cock chick’, the pun was intentional. The Cardinal of Lorraine was more polite, merely dismissing him as ‘a polished trifler’.
When Melville returned to Edinburgh, he found that Lennox had preceded him. The Earl was riding high in Mary’s esteem and occupying some of the best rooms at Holyrood. His estates, traditionally concentrated in the region of the Clyde around Glasgow, had been forfeited on his defection to Henry VIII twenty years before, but on 16 October they were fully restored. Mary had to speak ‘very comely’ to her councillors to pull this off. The Lords in Parliament sanctioned the grant to please her, but Argyll predicted that Lennox had enemies who would stir up trouble if he were allowed to lord it over them.
Mary was unwilling to listen to such objections. She relished too much the irony of proclaiming how his rehabilitation was ‘at the request of her dearest sister Elizabeth’.
Lennox, meanwhile, was greasing the wheels. His wife used Melville as a courier to send luxurious gifts for Mary and her Lords. Mary’s presents included ‘a marvellous fair and rich jewel’, a clock, and a jewel-encrusted mirror. Maitland and Atholl were each given a ring set with a large diamond, while the four Maries received such ‘pretty things’ as Lennox ‘thought fittest’. Moray, the sworn enemy of the Lennoxes, significantly received nothing: a deliberate slap in the face.
Mary’s gift may well have been the famous Lennox Jewel. According to Randolph, everyone who saw it thought it stunning, and it bore a coded message that Mary would have appreciated. Designed to be worn around the neck on a gold chain or ribbon, the jewel is in the shape of a golden heart. On the outer face is a crown surmounted with three white fleurs-de-lis on an azure background, set with three rubies and an emerald. Beneath it is a winged heart with a huge sapphire as its centrepiece, above which is a crown set with rubies and an emerald. These emblems are supported by the classical-style figures of Faith, Hope, Truth, and Victory. Around the border is the motto: ‘Who hopes still constantly with patience shall obtain victory in their pretence.’
The jewelled crown opens, and inside the lid are two hearts and a golden true-love knot, pierced with Cupid’s arrows and over them the motto ‘What we resolve’. Below, in a cavity within the crown, is the monogram ‘MSL’ (for Matthew and Margaret Stuart Lennox) inscribed in white, blue, and red enamel. Inside the lid of the winged heart are two hands joined together holding a green hunting horn by red cords, with the motto ‘Death shall dissolve’. Within a further cavity is a skull and crossbones.
The inner portions of the jewel are a celebration of the marriage of Lennox and Lady Margaret Douglas. Its fulfilment is, however, to be the victory of the ‘pretence’ proclaimed by the motto around the classical-style figures. The word ‘pretence’ was non-pejorative in the sixteenth century. Someone who ‘pretended’ asserted their claim to something to which they believed they had a right. This inscription most likely applied to Mary’s claim to the English throne and in the next degree to Darnley’s, and the winged heart that formed the centrepiece of the Jewel may have hinted at a unification of their claims.
Whether this was the ‘marvellous fair and rich jewel’ presented to Mary or not, she had decided by the end of 1564 to prise Darnley away from Elizabeth. Her plan slowly unfolded after the meeting between the English and Scottish commissioners that was held at Berwick in November.
Maitland had opened the bidding. He proposed that Mary be allowed to marry the husband of her choice with certain specific exceptions, in exchange for which she would be recognized as Elizabeth’s heir apparent. This was a non-starter. But his subsequent offer, that she be recognized as heir and confirmed as ‘second person of the realm’, in return for which she would renounce her immediate Catholic claim and marry Dudley, was little more than everyone had been led to think would be acceptable.
Although a Dudley marriage was not ideal, it was a serious offer on the Scottish side. If Mary had been named as Elizabeth’s heir, she would have married him as the price of a dynastic settlement. But when the report of the English commissioners arrived in London, everything went back to square one. Elizabeth retreated at the prospect of actually identifying a named person as her successor. It was not that she objected to Mary as such: it was the same old story as before.
Cecil, who had always opposed a settlement with Mary, made no effort to persuade Elizabeth to honour her commitment. Instead, he wrote a serpentine letter to Maitland and Moray in which he attempted to dilute the clear and binding commitment given on the English side into a non-binding pledge, urging the Scots to move forward by way of ‘friendship’ and not by way of ‘contracting’. The ‘ticklish’ matter of ‘princes determining their successors’ was cited: the primordial problem of Elizabeth’s ‘winding-sheet’. Faced with identifying her heir, her nerve had failed.
On Christmas Eve, Maitland and Moray wrote an anguished reply. They were incredulous, both that the settlement was in jeopardy, and also that Cecil had taken this opportunity to revive his earlier proposal of a trial of Mary’s claim. The Scots were quite candid. Without a guarantee of Mary’s place in the succession, Cecil should know that Dudley was ‘no fit match’ for their Queen, even if he were to be made a duke, a higher rank than the earldom he now held.
And this was the rub. Dudley was a nobleman of Elizabeth’s own creation. He owed everything he possessed to her. He lacked sufficient patrimonial estates of his own and a claim to a throne. He was even the son of a convicted and executed traitor, since his father had been the very same Duke of Northumberland who had engineered the Protestant Lady Jane Grey’s failed coup before Mary Tudor’s accession in 1553.
Darnley, by comparison, was the genuine article: a scion of the royal house of Tudor, whose dynastic pedigree was unassailable if it were to be annexed to Mary’s own. She had exposed her thinking to Randolph: ‘Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.’ She had intended to keep something of herself in reserve. Now she would finally break free of English coercion. Although Darnley was still Elizabeth’s subject, he would shortly be across the Scottish border. She had not yet definitely made up her mind to marry him. Snatching him away and marrying him were still two very different things. But he was her insurance policy. She would reintegrate him into Scottish politics, where he would become a foil to attempts by Elizabeth and Cecil to dictate her choice of husband.
Mary did not quite know yet how she would manage this. To her astonishment, she had in the end to do nothing. A fiasco at the English court, one for which Elizabeth would for ever rebuke herself, was about to catapult Darnley into Scotland and from there into Mary’s arms.