THE NEWS OF Mary’s death was kept from her daughter until the end of the month because the Guises feared she would be greatly distressed. On 28 June, the Cardinal told Mary that her mother was dead and Mary collapsed in grief and mourning for the woman she had not seen in nine years. Funeral rites were held on 12 August but it took some time to have the body sent to France.
After Mary of Guise’s death, the Protestant lords moved in to govern and negotiate with the English and French for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Scotland. This peace, the Treaty of Edinburgh, was punishing to the French and to Mary. Her country would be governed by the Protestant lords. She also had to agree to accept Elizabeth’s title and claim to the English throne. Mary would not try to claim England and Ireland – they were Elizabeth’s. She must no longer claim English arms and insignia. To add insult to injury, Francis and Mary were told that if they failed to abide by the terms of the treaty, England was once more empowered to threaten Scotland and intervene. By this point, Elizabeth could afford to be magnanimous and declared that Mary’s ‘injurious pretensions’ to her throne could be laid at the door of the ambitions of the Guises, rather than Francis and Mary, who were ‘very young’. Mary and Francis had been entirely excluded from any chance to expand their power into England.
The treaty decreed that the council of nobles would govern in Mary’s place. And swift upon the heels of the treaty came more laws issued by an assembly of Parliament in August: the lords abolished the Pope’s jurisdiction, banned the celebration of Mass (punishable by death) and began the Scottish Reformation. Parliament agreed to pursue the marriage of Arran’s son, James, to Elizabeth I – an unlikely event – but it made their import clear: England was the ally now. Although there was still much Catholic feeling among the ordinary people, Mary was suddenly a less desirable queen. The mood of the country was changing and Mary had been left behind. The nobles who had supported her mother moved towards the monasteries, sacking them and taking their land.
Mary was still courageous – when she met with Elizabeth’s ambassador, Throckmorton, she refused to express her assent to the Treaty of Edinburgh, instead saying it was up to the king. As she said, ‘I pray her to judge me by herself for I am sure she could ill bear the usage and the disobedience of her subjects which she knows mine have shown unto me.’ Mary emphasised how everything had been done against her will. ‘My subjects in Scotland do their duty in nothing’, she said. ‘I am their Queen and so they call me but they use me not so.’1 She would not ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh or agree with any of the acts of the Congregation Lords. The Reformation Parliament had been enthusiastically received, but not ratified. Elizabeth was on alert. William Cecil, now forty and the queen’s ever-loyal advisor, detested Mary, was convinced she wished to overthrow Elizabeth, and thought of her as a danger to England.
At some point in the autumn of 1560, Mary received a visit in Paris from the Scottish noble James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, twenty-six and spoiling for adventure. Gruff, not handsome and barely polite, but possessed of a forceful, magnetic personality to which it was hard to say no, the man who would change her life and tear it apart was the Lord High Admiral and had recently sailed around Europe. Already, he showed signs of cruelty. In Copenhagen, he had met a Norwegian noblewoman, Anna Tronds, and probably married her. If so, the marriage was not successful, and Bothwell demanded she sold her possessions because he was so short of cash. He set off to the French court and was kindly received by Mary and Francis, most likely because they knew he was a supporter in Scotland of the late Mary of Guise. As he recorded, ‘The queen recompensed me liberally and more honourably than I had deserved.’2 That might be a motto to fit his whole life and relationship with Mary. Throckmorton was deeply worried by Bothwell’s visit and told London that spies should watch him for he was a ‘rash and hazardous young man’.3 He soon set off again but would be back for a visit in the spring. Mary was, as a fault, too loyal and laid too much emphasis on the relationships of her youth. It was fate that she met Bothwell in France, for those Scots she met early in her life remained indelibly important to her. When most of the lords had committed great treachery against her and driven her mother to illness and death, Bothwell seemed different: loyal and devoted.
Even though the rebellion at Amboise had been ruthlessly routed, Francis still feared he would be kidnapped and killed. There were complaints in the Grand Council that his guard was too numerous and was a division between him and his people. He, Mary and Catherine moved away from Paris in the hope he would be safer in the countryside at Orléans. There, the young king went hunting, encouraged by the Guises who wanted to govern without his interference. The weather was damp and freezing but still the king hunted, hoping to improve his strength. On Saturday 16 November 1560, Francis returned from hunting with a dreadful earache and fainted the next day in chapel. He collapsed in bed, sick and feverish. Mary and Catherine took up constant vigil at his side. The Guises lied to the court and the ambassadors, telling them it was a minor chill. The Spanish ambassador was refused entry to the king’s chamber and the rumours that the king was dying began.
The king was racked with shocking fevers, swellings and pain. Holding his hand in his darkened sickroom, Mary tried to comfort her childhood friend and husband through the tyrannies of the disease. Her Guise uncles shouted at the doctors to do more, making everything more nervous and strained, pushing the doctors to do unnecessary treatments, bleeding him excessively and forcing him to purge and vomit. The king needed calm and to be made comfortable, but they did not even give him that.
By 27 November, Elizabeth’s ambassador was writing to her that the king had ruined his constitution with hunting and he was unlikely to live. Mary could not leave his side and exhausted herself nursing, making herself ill but refusing to rest. Francis needed her and she knew he was in danger. The swelling on his face was particularly severe – and then it moved towards his brain. On 3 December, he was so ill that the doctors paused their bleedings. Two days later, he collapsed unconscious and Mary sat by his side, clutching the hand of a man who no longer knew she was there, wiping his brow, hoping against hope he would recover. By the evening of 5 December, the king was dead, not yet quite seventeen. His heart was taken in a lead vase to Saint-Denis, where it was placed on a pillar surrounded by flames carved out of stone.
Mary was devastated at losing her husband and childhood friend. ‘Her unhappiness and incessant tears call forth general compassion’, wrote the Venetian ambassador.4 She wore white and fled to a darkened room lit only by torches as she mourned for her allotted forty days. She wrote a broken little poem:
Wherever I am out
Whether in forest or meadow
Whatever time it may be
Whether dawn or evening
Without end, my heart still feels
The pain of who is lost.
As I am at rest
Sleeping on my couch
I feel that he is near
I feel that he touches me
In work or repose
He is always near me.5
Francis had been her friend since she was four, and then her husband. They had been always together, enjoying a golden childhood in the royal nursery, surrounded by their pets, married in glory, the marvel of the world. In the space of little over a year, she had lost her mother, her father-in-law, both sisters-in-law to marriage overseas – and now her dearest husband. In her mourning chamber, wearing the white that had been so glorious at her wedding, she abandoned herself to paroxysms of grief.
The new king was now Charles IX, aged only ten, Mary’s old playmate, the little boy who had once been mooted as a husband for Elizabeth. Catherine de’ Medici, so long pushed out of influence by her husband’s mistresses, finally gained power as regent for her son. She immediately demanded the return of the crown jewels from her daughter-in-law.
Mary was no longer the queen.
All of Henry’s work and plotting, the secret treaties and the late-night discussions, had been directed towards Francis outliving Mary, the possibility that she would die without heirs. Instead, Francis had died, almost without warning, and Mary’s certain and glittering future as Queen of France was smashed to pieces.
For the first fifteen days, Mary was too heartbroken to receive anyone and guests were restricted only to those of great rank. Catherine de’ Medici was also grieving but she was manoeuvring and working for position. She wished to thrust the Guise family out of power. Mary was in a precarious position, no longer wanted at court for she was a reminder of the old influence. As one court observer said, she was ‘widowed, has lost France, and has little hope of Scotland’.6
By the terms of Mary’s marriage contract, she was permitted to remain in France and keep a position at the French court after her husband’s death. She had received estates in Touraine and Poitou as part of her marriage jointure, so she could have theoretically gone to live there, in rural exile like Diane de Poitiers. But Mary was fundamentally a court soul and her ambition was to live out a royal life. She needed a powerful husband (it was unfortunate that Philip of Spain had just married Elisabeth), a ruler who had an army to back her up in Scotland. For now that Mary of Guise was dead, the lords were ruling as they wished.
Mary wrote a careful letter to the Scottish Lords and Parliament suggesting she wished to return and asked for the royal accounts accrued since her mother’s death. She told Throckmorton that she intended to return to the country of her birth, at the request of her subjects.
After Mary’s first fortnight of grieving was over, she was expected to receive ambassadors – and all of them were keen to suggest suitors for her hand. As Throckmorton declared to the council, only three weeks after the king’s death, as ‘the Scottish queen is left a widow, one of the special things your lordships have to consider, and have an eye to, is the marriage of that queen’.7 Various royal men were mooted, including the kings of Denmark and Sweden, and Philip II’s heir – or even the new king, little Charles. Mary told Throckmorton at an interview on New Year’s Eve that she would be guided by advisors. The ambassador thought her interest in wise advice excellent. ‘I see her behaviour to be such and her wisdom and kingly modesty so great, in that she thinketh herself not too wise but is content to be ruled by good counsel and wise men (which is a great virtue in a Prince or Princess, and which argueth a great judgement and wisdom in her).’8 The ‘her’ was important. Back in England, Elizabeth was showing herself anything but biddable.
After Mary had completed her forty days of mourning, locked up in her dark room, dressed in white and writing poetry, she attended a service for the king’s death at a convent in Orléans and took occupation of a nearby palace with her grandmother, Antoinette. Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, fifteen and already taller than Mary, arrived to express his sympathies. He was something of a wunderkind, said to be very clever, a superb horseman and skilled at hunting, good looking and charming. Moreover, he was a Catholic. His parents staked everything on his brilliance and golden good looks. He was Mary’s cousin through his mother, Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and former Queen Consort of James IV. He was in line to the throne after Mary and, arguably, as a man, was more desirable – in other words he was a direct threat to her ambitions to get the throne of England (and Wales and Ireland). Mary had already met him before Francis’ coronation. Then, his parents had been hoping he might charm Mary into restoring the family estates. Now, they wanted her to see their (very) handsome son and think of marriage.
But the widowed queen was not to be swayed by anything but a great foreign power – as Throckmorton fretted, ‘she more esteemeth the continuation of her honour and to marry one that may uphold her to be great’.9 Catherine de’ Medici would never allow her to marry the new King Charles. And so Mary set her sights on Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, fifteen-year-old son and heir of Philip II with his first wife, Maria of Portugal, who had died in 1545. Carlos was barely healthier than Francis had been, but he marked the possibility of a great alliance, and her Guise uncles threw all into promoting it. The Spanish ambassador made lengthy visits to the young widow. Everything seemed to be progressing marvellously. But no one had reckoned on Catherine de’ Medici. The Queen Regent wanted to get rid of Mary as quickly as possible – but she didn’t want her marrying Philip’s son. Her own daughter, Elisabeth, had not yet had a child and Don Carlos was Philip’s only offspring at this point. Ideally, for Catherine, he might die off, and then Elisabeth’s child would be heir. But if Don Carlos had a child with Mary, Elisabeth’s position would be much reduced. Catherine wrote to Elisabeth asking her to push Philip towards marrying Don Carlos with her own sister little Marguerite instead, even though she was only seven. For Philip of Spain, Mary’s marriage to his son had too high a price to pay: his young wife, of whom he was very fond, did not wish it and he expected it would mean he had to send troops to Scotland to restore Mary. Elizabeth I was against it (she didn’t want Mary backed up by Spanish power) and Marguerite might be a better ally.
Elizabeth sent an official embassy of condolence to France in February and Mary received the Earl of Bedford politely and praised her cousin queen for ‘showing the part of a good sister, whereof she has great need’. Unfortunately for Mary, in the following meetings Bedford demanded she ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. Mary, grieving and isolated, was still courageous and she refused, stalling and saying she must speak to her council. She suggested also that she and Elizabeth should meet personally to talk and thus ‘satisfy each other much better than they can do by messengers and ministers’.10 She was not unwilling to ratify the treaty, but she wished for Elizabeth to give her a gift in return: to declare her heir to the English throne.
Mary was increasingly unwelcome at the French court. Catherine de’ Medici was manoeuvring to exclude her at every possibility and so she set off to make some extended travels and visits to her Guise relations. She visited the convent of her aunt Renée at Rheims, where her mother’s body finally arrived. Away from the French court, she was visited by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who told her she was needed by the Scottish Catholics and she should come to Scotland, where he would have 20,000 men waiting to restore her by force. Leslie struck a poetic argument, telling her she would be like a newly risen sun, dispelling the clouds that had come across Scotland. She was also visited by her illegitimate brother, James Stewart, son of her father and Margaret Erskine, who had been one of the men accompanying her to France when she had first left the country of her birth, and after his return to Scotland had become a key member of court and a leader of the Protestant Reformation. On the way to visit Mary, he had met Cecil in England and made various promises. Not long after his arrival, James Stewart told Mary to become a Protestant. She refused but did make a concession: she said that if she came back, she would celebrate Mass in private. On the way back, James visited Throckmorton and told him everything Mary had said, and was rewarded with gifts of money for himself, Arran and others of their supporters.
James Stewart thought he could control Mary and inch her towards Protestantism. Despite all Elizabeth and Cecil’s fine words, the Scots lords were deeply distrustful of England and Mary’s claim to the throne might act as an excellent ballast against further English aggression. And if Mary was content to celebrate Mass in private and support the Reformation in public, then who could complain?
Mary continued on her peregrinations and visited Claude, the twelve-year-old Duchess of Lorraine. The city gave her a beautiful reception but Claude was not friendly, presumably because she too had been told to work against any marriage between Mary and Don Carlos. The duchess had once been great friends with Mary, but now, as with all the remaining French royal siblings and their mother, the happy relationship of intimacy was over. Mary was no longer useful and could limit any future alliances that Catherine de’ Medici and the new child king might want to make. For poor Mary, the end of her friendship with a little girl who had once looked up to her felt like a dreadful betrayal, the final straw. Nothing could make Mary’s much-reduced position more obvious to her. She was not wanted, not liked, not respected. The Guises, particularly her uncles, were no longer so interested in her, the court was focused on the new king and Catherine, and now Claude, had little desire for her company either. Mary fell ill with nervous exhaustion. When she finally recovered, she returned to the French court with her mind made up. It was her duty to go back to Scotland. No one seemed to esteem her in France and no marriage alliance was forthcoming. And, for Mary, a woman of great religious faith, God had created her Queen of Scotland and so His will must be respected. James Stewart sent a letter on 10 June requesting her return and it was an irresistible invitation. She began to practise the Scots language, asking those around her who knew it for help. She told Throckmorton she believed Knox the most dangerous man in the kingdom – and she was half right.
On 18 June, Throckmorton asked again for Mary to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. She told him that she would deal with the matter when she returned to Scotland, which she soon expected to do. Still, Mary wanted Elizabeth to make two concessions: to withdraw the proviso that she could interfere in Scotland and make Mary officially her heir. If Elizabeth gave this concession, Mary would be in a position of great strength.
Mary had lost everything: no longer Queen Dauphine of France, out of favour and influence at the French court, and her country in the hands of Protestants. She was determined to return herself to power. And yet the lords had been used to governing themselves as they pleased. The Scottish Reformation had been set in train by Parliament. They wanted a figurehead, who would rubber-stamp their decision. Mary wanted to rule. The stage was set for a battle of wills.