AFTER ONLY A few years in Scotland, Mary was in an impossible position. Knox and the Protestant lords were stirring dissent against her, Catherine de’ Medici refused to openly ally with her, and Elizabeth was refusing to play the tender cousin. In late 1563, Elizabeth laid down what she expected of Mary’s marriage. Ideally, she would marry an Englishman, but the queen was prepared to consider a foreigner, although not Spanish, French or Austrian – which pretty much ruled out all the power players in Europe. If Mary obeyed, she would be rewarded and would in time be decreed as heir. As Elizabeth wrote, ‘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’.1
This was too much for Cecil. He got rid of ‘dear only’ before ‘daughter’ and then scratched out the entire section. Instead, if she ‘show herself conformable’, they would set up an ‘inquisition of her right’, to which she could submit evidence regarding her right of succession. A judgement would then be made on whether Mary should be deemed the queen’s ‘natural sister or daughter’. Afraid of the Guises and obsessively protective of the queen, he went too far. One might ask, if Elizabeth was determined to be the Virgin Queen, who would succeed if not Mary? The queen’s instincts were right and she should have retained the first draft. Instead, Mary was now to be subject to an English court and her rights examined by judges – when surely blood should be enough? No one was saying that she was not legitimate, or that her family had not been. There was no possible reason to put her claim on trial – especially when Elizabeth had been deemed illegitimate and had not reinstated her parents’ marriage. The idea that a queen’s claim could be judged and made subordinate by lawyers was a typical Cecil move, but it contained within it the beginning of the end for absolute royal rule. If Mary’s claim could be examined by the courts, then why not any monarch’s? We can be sure Elizabeth had mixed feelings about the document, for ahead of its arrival, she sent Mary a handsome diamond ring.
Mary kissed the ring and expected a kindly letter from Elizabeth. When the document arrived, she was shocked but restrained her anger. There was no use fighting back. She needed to encourage Elizabeth to trust her – and Knox’s insubordination and rudeness had grown so extreme that she dared not offend the queen. For, if it came to it, she felt sure Elizabeth would back her against the rebellious lords – and she had become convinced that if she only gained her dynastic rights, then they would respect her. She had Knox put on trial for suggesting that two imprisoned Calvinist priests should be freed by a ‘convocation of brethren’. To Mary, that was treasonous and she felt sure she had caught Knox in his own web. But he defended himself nimbly, said that he was a minister and authorised by the Kirk to intervene, and he was acquitted. Mary was furious, and demanded that the verdict be re-examined. She was beginning to look powerless and she believed that Knox would never dare behave so if she were married. In this, she was perhaps right. But still, Elizabeth was proving reluctant to name a possible fiancé.
It simply wouldn’t have been possible for Mary to create the brilliant propaganda vision of the Virgin Queen, as Elizabeth did. Elizabeth ruled a country where no noble would talk openly of assaulting and kidnapping her; she had grown up in England; no one could accuse her of split loyalties, and the qualities that underpinned the wider political governance were the rule of law and bureaucracy. Mary’s lords had been used to doing as they pleased for too long – and Mary needed support.
There was not a large pool of suitors. Poor Don Carlos was still suffering from mental illness after his operation and showed little signs of recovery. Catherine de’ Medici was suggesting the suffering and mentally distressed Earl of Arran, but Mary had no desire to give more power to his father – and she felt sorry for the young man, so could never love him. The Guises were enthusing a union with one of their own, the young Duke of Guise, but Mary wisely knew that if she married a Guise, she would be much condemned.
Mary pushed the English ambassador, Thomas Randolph, to gain an answer from the queen for a possible groom – and one came. The queen wished her dear cousin to marry Robert Dudley, who all Europe said was Elizabeth’s lover.
As Randolph informed Mary at Holyrood that her cousin had named Dudley, she listened quietly, essentially in shock. Dudley was not royal and the matter of Amy Robsart’s death had been seen as greatly scandalous in Europe. ‘You have taken me at a disadvantage’,2 she said to him, in confusion. When she recovered her senses, she was outraged. She knew well that Robert had been Elizabeth’s admirer, if not lover. He was also a committed Protestant and, as she knew, he would be Elizabeth’s spy after any marriage – and possibly even continue as her lover. Elizabeth had proposed a husband for Mary who would always be loyal to Elizabeth. Even worse, he was the son of a traitor, the executed Earl of Northumberland, and had no land that Elizabeth had not given to him. He was entirely the English queen’s man. ‘Do you think it may stand with my honour to marry my sister’s subject?’ she demanded. Randolph tried to dig himself out of the hole by saying Dudley was a nobleman and would add to her claim to the throne. The idea that a minor aristocrat could assist her in her claim, when she was of royal blood, naturally infuriated Mary. She did not restrain her language and told poor Randolph that her family would never allow ‘that I should abase my state as far as that!’3 Her blood was truly special and would only be tainted if she married Dudley or someone of his ilk. Royals married royals – that was the whole point of the European marriage market. She was being offered someone who was so far below her that she couldn’t even consider it.
Elizabeth had actually suggested Robert to William Maitland, Mary’s envoy and secretary of state, some months earlier. He had been quite nonplussed, managing to recover himself to say that Mary would not wish to take ‘joy and solace’4 away from Elizabeth. An experienced diplomat, he thought on his feet and made the polite suggestion that Elizabeth should marry Dudley and Mary take him after Elizabeth’s death. He had hoped that it was all a passing fancy and that Elizabeth would not wish to lose her companion. He had not reckoned on Cecil, who was keen to get rid of Robert Dudley.
Cecil pushed hard for the Scottish marriage plan and Elizabeth grew persuaded. Elizabeth cherished a romantic vision that Mary and Dudley would live together at the English court, and they would be a happy threesome together, but Cecil was keen for Dudley to go to Scotland and stay there. Dudley himself, of course, had no desire either to marry Mary or go to Scotland. He blamed Cecil for the plan, complaining to the Scottish ambassador about his ‘secret enemy’.
Mary was infuriated. Still, she could not afford to offend Elizabeth and she spoke to the ambassador confidentially. If she married Dudley, would Elizabeth ‘use me as her sister or daughter’?5 For, if she would, then perhaps the price was worth paying. And she had a point: had she married Dudley and her groom, as one might expect, spent most of his time popping back to see Elizabeth and England, she might have had the advantage of a husband and pregnancy, without the disadvantage of a man trying to meddle. And even though Mary resented Dudley as Elizabeth’s lover, she knew that some of the Scottish lords would be intimidated by his riches, power and connection to the English queen. She would have strengthened her alliance with England and also, to a degree, been able to control the messages fed back to her cousin. And Dudley was a loyal man, a good strategist, and his genius for spectacle might have created effective propaganda for Mary in Scotland. But Mary didn’t want a husband simply to produce an heir. She wanted a strong shoulder to lean on, someone to help her with the business of governing. She had come to believe that a husband could quell the troublesome and power-hungry lords and force them to respect her.
But, as she soon found out, Elizabeth didn’t want Dudley in Scotland and desired both Mary and Dudley at the English court, with Elizabeth paying the bills. This was impossible. Mary would be her cousin’s subordinate in every way. And Elizabeth, at the heart of it, found the idea unsettling too. When she entertained Mary’s new envoy, Sir James Melville, she showered him with questions about Mary’s appearance and personality: who played the virginals better? Who was fairer? Melville tactfully replied that Elizabeth was ‘whiter, but my queen was very lovely’.6 If Elizabeth did send Dudley up to Scotland, she didn’t want him falling in love.
Melville was a Fife man, who had gone to France aged thirteen – in the year after Mary had arrived there – to be a page in her train. She had become very fond of him and the King of France had trusted him to work for his government. Mary took him into her household on her return to Scotland and trusted him absolutely. As she saw it, if anyone could sort out the problematic web of the question of marriage, it was Melville.
The spies were reporting, everyone whispering in corners, bribes offered for information. Poor Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador, was caught between two queens. He had started operating in Scotland in 1559 and worked hard to encourage dissent with Mary of Guise. But the wars over the throne and regency were as nothing, compared to this. He began confiding in Mary Beaton, forty-five to her twenty-two, entranced (like most men at court) with her pretty face and gentle manner. He began courting her in earnest – which the queen did not mind, for she wanted Randolph on side. But he grew so desperate that he tried to compel Mary Beaton to spy on the queen – and that was too much. The love affair crumbled; the lady put the queen first. In September 1564, Elizabeth made Dudley Earl of Leicester, which surely, she hoped, would make him more acceptable to her troublesome Scottish cousin.
Moray and the lords closest to Mary, such as the pro-English Argyll, encouraged the English plan. It was not just in keeping with Moray’s pro-English foreign policy. It would also be an ideal situation for Mary’s half-brother if his troublesome younger sibling were to go to live in England with Dudley – for he would be the obvious candidate to be regent in her absence. Then, he could gain all the power he desired. He encouraged his half-sister to think of Dudley, but found she was proving annoyingly independent. She remained very upset at the suggestion she should marry.
The marriage proposal was a fatal error on Elizabeth’s behalf. It turned Mary against her and convinced Mary that she should find her own husband. Undermined and thwarted by the Guises, her mother-in-law, her cousin and her lords, she had decided to rely on herself, no matter what happened.
Mary agreed to Elizabeth’s request to allow the Earl of Lennox to return from his lengthy exile in England. Elizabeth was simply trying to be a thorn in Mary’s side and annoy her by sending back a troublesome lord. But when Mary agreed, it opened up the possibility in Lennox’s mind that she might marry his son, handsome, seventeen-year-old Henry, Lord Darnley.
With the paucity of choices, Darnley was certainly an interesting option. Three years younger than the queen and handsome, he had come twice to visit her in France. Later, Elizabeth had imprisoned him and his mother for fear of plots against her throne and then released him to be something of an enforced court prisoner and he was called on to play the lute for her. If Mary married him, her claim would be much strengthened for he had blood rights to the English throne – and like Dudley, he was English born and he would hopefully be similarly popular with the English. He was also Catholic. Married to an Englishman who had been at court with a claim to the throne, Mary felt she could not be set aside as Elizabeth’s successor. The throne would have to go to her.
Too late, Elizabeth realised what she had set in motion and tried to stop Lennox’s return. But Mary now had the idea in her mind and she was making the right noises about marrying Dudley, whilst asking questions about Darnley. He seemed to be the answer to all her problems. Suspicious, Elizabeth asked Melville what Mary thought of Darnley. He hurried to deny the possibility, declaring that a woman of spirit would never choose ‘such a man that was more like a woman than a man’. As he pointed out, Darnley was ‘lusty, beardless and lady-faced’.7 Elizabeth was not much comforted. The courtiers thought him a lover of men as well as women, but she enjoyed his company and could see how Mary might feel the same. To add to the web, Dudley, who knew that refusing to marry Mary outright would displease Elizabeth and Cecil, was busily using his friends at court to push the Darnley marriage. Back in Scotland, Lennox, Darnley’s father, showered Mary with gifts and gave hefty jewels to her advisors. The would-be lover gave her a ‘marvellous fair and rich jewel’ and all in all it was enough to make Mary fall in love with him.
Mary had made Holyrood beautiful and elegant, decorated with her tapestries and hangings. She created her own library, so large that she later left it to the University of St Andrews. It was filled with beautiful leatherbound volumes of Italian, French, Latin, Spanish and English poetry, histories and translations, even a few books in Greek. Among the translations she owned were Plutarch, Ovid, Cicero and there were copies of the Decameron and Orlando Furioso. She had hundreds of books in French, particularly history and poetry, including romantic tales such as the Chanson de Roland. She even had a book on astronomy and others on her beloved music. Mary herself played the lute and the virginals with some skill and loved to sing. Her real talent was for dancing. She was beautiful, skilled and graceful – but sometimes over-tired herself with her enthusiasm.
Mary’s spirits were rather low around the winter of 1564 and she suffered from various ailments. She longed for the support of the Guises, which had been fragmented by the death of the Duke of Guise, her uncle. She badly needed a friend. Mary’s trusted French secretary, Pierre Raullet, was discovered to have been accepting bribes from English agents. He was dismissed and Mary replaced him with one of her musicians, a charming but rather plain Italian, David Rizzio, who was fond of luxurious clothes and brilliant at flattery. In his early thirties, he had come to Scotland attending the Savoyard ambassador and the queen had been delighted by his lute playing and excellent bass voice. She pressed him to stay and be part of her musical quartet. Her circle was quite happy to let a foreign lute player carry on making sweet music but when she promoted him to secretary, there was great resentment. James Melville thought he couldn’t even do the job, failing to write out the letters so that Mary had to do it herself. The rest dubbed him a manipulative, upstart spy and thought his lack of good looks denoted a cruel heart. Mary trusted him and saw him as her own man. She always believed that those she had raised would forever remain loyal to her – a mistake she would later make with Darnley. Mary had long been criticised for employing French servants and courtiers when she could have appointed Scots men and women to such position. Using an Italian minstrel as a secretary was a step too far and to the Protestant Lords it was more evidence that she was making secret Catholic plots.
Darnley headed up to Scotland and arrived to meet Mary at the castle of the Earl of Wemyss on Saturday 17 February 1565. Darnley, at over six foot, was one of the few men taller than Mary and he was incredibly handsome. He was generous, deferential and courtly – unlike most of the men she dealt with daily. She had met him before but this time she saw him anew and called him the ‘properest and best proportioned long man that ever she had seen’.8 She was delighted by his charming manner and good looks, as well as his suitability. Under the handsome sheen, however, Darnley was a vain, conceited and spoilt young man, obsessed with his own gratification, but Mary saw none of it. Some scholars have wondered at why Elizabeth sent Darnley up to Mary, such a handsome little bomb as he was. But Elizabeth didn’t think that Mary would fall in love with him: what she wanted was to divide and rule, spread unrest, amass people behind him against Mary and the Hamiltons. Darnley was an heir to her throne, after Arran, and was keen to fight for his rights. But he didn’t have to. Mary had chosen him.
In March, Mary Livingston married the younger son of Lord Sempill, to a predictable chorus of complaints from John Knox, who even claimed the bride was pregnant. Mary, who always loved a wedding, paid for the dress and the banquet in a grand celebration. She also gave the couple a fine bed of red and black velvet with embroidered curtains. Mary Fleming was still being enthusiastically courted by William Maitland, recently widowed and forty to her twenty-two. ‘She has begun to marry off her Maries,’ said the French ambassador, ‘and says she wishes herself were of the band’.9
The teenaged Darnley was now the frontrunner for Mary’s heart. Elizabeth complained but she didn’t do what might have changed Mary’s mind entirely and declare that Mary would be her heir if she married Dudley. If she had stated this – and said that Mary would not have to live in England as Mrs Dudley (after all, it would be irritating to have another, younger, better-looking queen always beside her, holding Dudley’s hand) – Mary might have agreed and Dudley would have had no choice but to accept that marriage to a monarch, if not the one he’d wanted, was still a prize. But Cecil simply said that the question of Mary as heir would be discussed and that was not enough.
With Darnley as a possible husband, Mary was confident enough in her position to express her regret about Elizabeth’s treatment of her. ‘How much better were it that we being two queens so near of kin, neighbours and living in one Isle, should be friends and live together like sisters, than by strange means divide ourselves to the hurt of us both.’10 Darnley was full of youthful bravado and was convinced he had charmed the queen. He attended court and danced with Mary but she was not showing any signs of particular favour in public. She was waiting to hear from Elizabeth.
Finally, Elizabeth replied. There would be no discussion of Mary’s position as heir until Elizabeth either married or decreed that she would never marry. Mary was furious and did ‘nothing but weep and write’.11 The letter was the final straw – and it pushed Mary into Darnley’s arms. She was gay and high spirited with love. On Easter Monday, in residence at Stirling, she and her ladies dressed themselves up like merchants’ wives and wandered the streets, asking for money for their evening banquets, delighting in pulling the wool over people’s eyes, a proto-Marie Antoinette desire to mingle and not be recognised (of course, the ordinary people pretended: everyone recognised the tall beautiful woman surrounded by ladies as their queen).
In April, the young swain fell ill with a cold and a rash, possibly measles or an early sign of the effects of syphilis. Mary accommodated him in the royal apartments, visited him at all hours and he played the complaisant, gentle, sickly lover. Mary was delighted by him. She made up her mind. There was clearly no use attempting to please Cecil and the Queen of England. She sent her messenger to Elizabeth to demand she be allowed to marry Darnley. Elizabeth and Cecil panicked and both wrote demanding she put him aside. But they had tarried for too long and they were too late. The Queen of Scots was determined. She created Darnley Earl of Ross and gave him land in Scotland. She was in love with him, she wanted to marry and he was a marvellous way of standing up to Elizabeth. Mary has been viewed as wild and rash for marrying Darnley, but what other choice did she have? And Darnley had come to the kingdom to cause trouble. By marrying him, she was attempting to neutralise his threat.
Randolph thought Mary was so overcome with love that she was barely the same person. Cecil was shocked and terrified. His policy had always been ‘to hold the queen unmarried as long as he could’ – a foolish one, since she was always determined to marry somebody.12 He feared Mary and Darnley would create a new dynasty and it would unseat Elizabeth. He was right. Such was the importance of a man that a baby boy born of their union had the potential to throw Elizabeth from the throne. He whipped up the Privy Council into a frenzy, suggesting Darnley was set to raise an army, invade England and create civil war. Elizabeth had Lennox and Darnley recalled to England and put Margaret Lennox, still in England, under house arrest. Father and son refused to obey the summons and Mary was furious. She told the ambassador that Elizabeth had ‘went about to abuse me’ and said that ‘being as free as she is, I would stand to my own choice’. Elizabeth, she said, had wrecked everything and brought it on herself. Had she just been kind, she ‘cannot have a daughter of her own that would have been more obedient to her than I would have been’. When it was suggested she might become a Protestant, Mary lost all patience and said ‘it will be as well for her to lose my amity as hers will be to me’.13
As Elizabeth could offer Mary no one better than her discarded lover as a potential husband, she can hardly be criticised for taking matters into her own hands. She and Darnley continued in a passionate haze of admiration. Unfortunately, her subjects hated him. Maitland and the other administrators on their mission to the English court dreaded Elizabeth’s anger. Darnley had punched Arran while on his sickbed. Knox disliked him, and even the four Marys expressed their concerns. Moray detested him and feared he would lose all influence over Mary once she was married. Darnley had been swaggering around, making it clear that he would be ruling the roost once he was married. He threatened that he could deprive Moray of his possessions, telling him that he thought his future brother-in-law had too much land. Moray, already nervous about Elizabeth’s wrath, tried to dissuade his sister – but she would not listen. Until this point, Moray had tried hard to play the supportive advisor, despite his ambitions, even though he fed information to the English. The advent of Darnley changed everything. He feared Catholic resurgence under Darnley, knew that it would mean a diminution of his own power – and knew he had to act so as not to lose everything. A plot bubbled up to seize Darnley and his father, to send them back to Elizabeth and force Mary to submit – and there was even talk of a kidnap attempt in summer, one that Mary’s spies helped her dodge.
Meanwhile, the husband-to-be was demanding the title King of Scotland and, despite Parliament’s complaints and her own uncertainty, Mary persuaded the Privy Council to assent and it was announced that Darnley would indeed be dubbed King of Scotland. Mary, so long occupying a sensible route, ruling with strength and courage, had given all to love. She pushed forth the wedding, even though Elizabeth had refused her consent and the papal dispensation (because of their relation as step-first cousins) had not yet arrived. Three weeks before the wedding, Mary pulled her fiancé into one of her favourite games: dressing up. She and the future king donned a disguise and wandered the town, amused by the reactions of those walking past. The future king and queen were playing happy, basking in the delight of the ordinary people.