An Accidental Tragedy (6 page)

France was ruled by the equally flamboyant fifty-year-old François I. Since coming to the throne the two men had been rival Renaissance princes, either at war with each other or outdoing each other in extravagant splendour. Their meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 was meant to celebrate amity but was, in reality, a spectacle of two peacocks displaying in front of each other. The only thing of consequence was that Henry met an English lady-in-waiting at the French court called Anne Bullen or Boleyn.

François was under constant threat from the Spanish Netherlands in the north and from Spain itself across the Pyrenees in the south. Spain and the Netherlands were under the rule of the 44-year-old Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles also ruled Austria and had a power base in northern Italy from which
he could, of course, attack France from the south-east through Savoy. François had fought a tragically unsuccessful war here with Charles, ending with his capture at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Most of the French aristocracy were either killed or captured and François himself became Charles’s prisoner in Spain for a year. He was finally released in exchange for his sons; thus the future Henri II became, in his turn, a prisoner in Spain for two years. Charles was a fanatical Catholic and the Spanish Netherlands represented the northern end of his pincer-like grasp on France. The Netherlands were only separated from England by the English Channel at its narrowest.

These pieces of the jigsaw interlocked all too neatly, and throughout the century the three rivals bickered, drew up treaties, formed alliances and carried out constant military incursions. But now there was a marriageable princess, albeit a toddler, and marriage alliances were the strongest alliances of all. Henry had Prince Edward as his heir, although the seven-year-old boy, whose birth had cost his mother, Jane Seymour, her life, was weak and unlikely to live long, a fact that no one at court was foolhardy enough to mention to the king. Edward would be firmly educated in the Protestant faith by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. But if Henry could neutralise the threat from a Scottish–French alliance then he could, with a free hand, turn his attentions south to France itself.

François now had a grandson of equal age to Mary, whose mother was a Guise, and who could, therefore, be relied on to favour a French marriage. Also, the child would almost certainly be raised as a good Catholic. In 1546 François had suggested that Mary might marry the son of Christian, King of Denmark, since he could rely on Marie in Scotland to favour France. With England’s eastern shores put under threat by Denmark, the French king could totally encircle Henry, remove the menace of English aggression and be free to deal with Charles V. The farsighted plan came to nothing.

Charles, in his turn, had a son Philip, married to Mary of Portugal, who might yet produce a suitable son. For the moment Charles could wait.

Henry, however, could not and the result of his impatience had been the hasty Treaty of Greenwich, now cancelled by the infuriating Scots. At the end of January 1544, Henry had written to the Earl of Suffolk at Newcastle ordering him to assemble an army of 20,000 to invade Scotland in May, and in March Suffolk was instructed to flood the Borders with a network of spies. He was given six weeks to bring the kingdom to its knees with what the English government called the Enterprise of Scotland, although it is now more commonly called the Rough Wooing. The wardens of the Border Marches would start a softening-up process by increasing raids and incursions. The preparations were all quite blatant as Henry had hoped that, thanks to intensive spying on both sides, the knowledge of his intentions would strike fear into the Scots and bring them to the negotiating table. It did nothing of the sort, producing only a stony silence from the Scottish parliament, but neither did it provoke them into strengthening the defences around the Firth of Forth.

The business of the court at Stirling continued as normal with Marie begging Pope Paul III to allow Isabel, Prioress of North Berwick Abbey, to be replaced by Margaret Home. The reason for her enforced retirement was exhaustion caused by the stress of continual English raiding, thus making evident that the increasing campaign of military incursions was now reaching to within twenty miles of Edinburgh. Four days later, on 24 January, Marie wrote to Rome again, asking that Arran’s half-brother, John Hamilton, be given the bishopric of Dunkeld, with its income. ‘In this age religion is to be supported not only with dignity but with substance in riches.’ On 1 February, Henry wrote to Charles V assuring him that his realms would not be troubled; in other words, he was asking for a guarantee of nonintervention. It was granted, provided the emperor could rely on equal support for a local problem of his own in Austria. Henry agreed.

At the end of April, Hertford was so well advanced in putting his forces together that he held a procession through the streets of Newcastle with ‘3,000 northern horsemen, in jacks [leather
jerkins] with spears, 28 nobles and gentlemen in black velvet with gold chains, 3 trumpets and 3 clarions, 3 officers of arms in tabards, a gentleman bearing a naked sword, the Earl in rich apparel, 4 pages richly clothed, 28 servants in livery and, finally, 5,000 foot soldiers’. No one could be in any doubt that a full-scale invasion was now under way, and, on 1 May, Sadler was instructed to offer final terms. Henry wanted the marriage and delivery of Queen Mary before her tenth birthday, an agreement of perpetual peace, renunciation of all amity with France, no foreign agreements without Henry’s agreement, an unconditional promise that Scotland would be England’s active ally in war, and an assurance that Arran might continue as governor, provided he continued to be well disposed towards Henry.

When there was no response to this offer, Hertford set sail with precise instructions from the Privy Council. He had received them a month previously, and despite him pointing out some practical difficulties they were, in the main, unchanged. As an example of state-authorised savagery they remain unequalled, even by Hitler’s SS or the depredations visited on Croatia by the Serbians during the 1990s.

‘Put all to fire and sword; burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance God lightened on them for their falsehood and disloyalty. Do not tarry at the castle; sack Holyrood House and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as you may conveniently. Sack Leith and burn and subvert it and all the rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception where any resistance may be made against you, and this done, pass over to Fifeland and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among the rest to spoil and turn upside down the cardinal’s town of St Andrews, as the upper stone may be nether, and not one stick standing by another sparing no creature alive. Spend one month there spoiling and burning.’

It was an over-ambitious task but Hertford set about carrying it out with grim efficiency. He landed in Fife on 3 May, burned St Monans and seized the shipping lying in the harbour before resting overnight on the island of Inchkeith. He landed unopposed at Granton on the next day and unshipped his artillery in four hours, seizing more boats, including a galley, the
Salamander
, François I’s personal gift to Marie. He was able to disembark his entire force and camp overnight before advancing on Edinburgh the next day, where he met the Scottish army of 6,000. He put Henry’s terms to Adam Otterburn, Provost of Edinburgh, and had them rejected. According to the
Diurnal of Occurrents
the Provost ‘ordered the Edinburgh men home. They [the English] besieged the castle, but they were little or nothing better, for the castle slew many of their men, and thereafter, on the next day, they burnt Edinburgh and despoiled the same, then passed to Leith again without any impediment.’ In fact, Hertford spent three days burning and pillaging in Edinburgh. He then burned the castle of Craigmillar and ravaged the countryside surrounding Edinburgh as far as Dunbar in the east and Queensferry in the west. He destroyed the Chapel of Our Lady of Loretto in Musselburgh as well as the orchards at Seton, ‘The fairest and the best that we saw in all that country.’ Crossing the Forth again he advanced as far as Kinghorn but realised that he could never reach St Andrews in the time Henry had allowed him.

In Stirling, plans were made to transport Mary, first to the Highlands, where it was ‘not possible to come by her’, then to the cathedral at Dunkeld, where Arran’s brother was now bishop. Hertford was within six miles of Stirling when he was forced by lack of time to turn for home. He and his men ‘sent home spoil and gunshots, returned home on foot through the main country of Scotland, burning both pile, fortress and town which was in their way and lost scant 40 persons’. Hertford recorded the destruction of the abbeys of Kelso, Jedburgh, Dryburgh and Melrose, 7 monasteries, 16 castles, 5 market towns, 253 villages, 13 mills and 3 hospitals. He had slain 192 Scots in battle, taken 816 prisoners and was driving 10,386 cattle,
12,242 sheep and 200 goats south as booty, as well as 850 bolls
¹
of corn. In all the towns the civilian populations had been slaughtered. Hertford had been given his strict timescale because Henry had been planning to invade France with a view to seizing Boulogne, and Hertford now rode south to join these invasion forces.

Hertford’s invasion had been a disaster for Scotland. One effect of it was, however, to strengthen the view held in Scotland that Mary should now marry in France. Help was promised from François and Marie’s stock had risen hugely as Arran’s had fallen, with Marie now sitting on the council, and it was clear that from now on she would have personal control of the choice of a husband for Mary.

Having helped Henry to win back Boulogne from François, Hertford returned to Scotland in February 1545 and once again slaughtered and burned in the border country, but when he met a Scottish army at Ancrum Moor on 27 February, it was no longer under the sole command of the inept Arran. The Scots forces were now in the more capable hands of the Earl of Angus and, for the first time in his career, Hertford was routed.

Both sides drew breath and for a year concentrated on making alliances and restocking treasuries for the inevitable restart of hostilities. Mary continued her gilded childhood in the safety of Stirling Castle, where she was starting to speak the Scots tongue of her nurses. The behaviour of the court, however, followed Marie’s tastes and French fashions prevailed. Mary accepted that regular attendance at Mass was a normal part of life, as was the formality of aristocratic attendance on her. Had it been possible for her to be taken on journeys around Stirling she might have gleaned some knowledge of life beyond the court, but security made this impossible, and her nurses’ enthusiasm in their adoration of the queen in their care went some way to compensating for her claustrophobic existence. She had no knowledge of the events unfolding in East Lothian.

On the night of 16 January 1546 the Earl of Bothwell’s soldiers, acting on orders from Cardinal Beaton, arrested a group of men in Ormiston, a village near Haddington. Bothwell’s various amorous pursuits had caused him to fall out of favour with Marie – he was ‘in glondours’, or disgrace – and his efforts in the Catholic cause restored his position. The cardinal’s target had been George Wishart, a Protestant reformer who had been gaining support wherever he preached. Wishart was under the personal protection of his ‘sword-bearer’, John Knox. Knox, a St Andrews University graduate and ordained priest, had been converted to the reformed cause by Wishart and was now one of a growing number of Protestant apostates.

Wishart was taken under arrest to St Andrews – the other men were allowed to ‘escape’ – and tried under circumstances that would have shamed Stalin’s show trials. Inevitably he was found guilty, and on 18 February 1546 the cardinal, in a colossal misjudgment, had him burned to death at a stake conveniently placed outside the castle. In fact, it was so conveniently placed that the cardinal could watch Wishart’s torments from cushioned ease while enjoying his dinner and wine.

His misjudgment became evident three months later, early on the morning of 29 May, when five men, whose quarrel with Beaton was, in fact, political rather than religious, entered the castle. Repairs were taking place and workmen were going to and fro unchallenged, so the assassins entered easily, threw the porter into the moat and narrowly missed seeing Marion Ogilvie, Beaton’s mistress, leaving the castle after the cardinal and she had spent the night ‘busy at their accounts’. Beaton was now ‘resting . . . after the rules of physic’. Having gained entry, the men admitted sixteen more conspirators, broke down the door of the cardinal’s room and, in spite of his pleas – ‘Fie, fie! I am a priest!’ – stabbed him to death. To make sure that this act came to the attention of the public, they hung his body at the foot of the castle walls, where it was thoroughly abused by the townsfolk – ‘Ane called Guthrie pisched in his mouth.’ Awaiting the inevitable reprisals, the assassins withdrew into the castle and prepared for a siege.

Henry VIII was jubilant, and, for a time, it was wrongly believed that the assassins – now called the Castilians – were acting under his orders. Arran, needless to say, hesitated. Since his son had been in the castle and was now held as a prisoner, this was not surprising, but it allowed the Castilians time to beg for help from Henry. Henry had only recently made peace with France after his seizure of Boulogne and he knew that his interference in Scotland could jeopardise this fragile agreement. But in this case Henry was being invited to invade Scotland as a liberator, and St Andrews would provide an excellent port of entry. It was very tempting. However, on 28 January 1547, before he could do anything, he died, leaving the kingdom to his ailing nine-year-old son, who became Edward VI, under the protectorship of the Earl of Hertford, recently created the Duke of Somerset.

Hardly had news of this change of power been digested than word came from France that François I had died and his son Henri II was now king. Henri had never enjoyed good relations with his father and it is said that when Anne de Pisseleu, Duchesse d’Étampes, François’s mistress, heard the news of his death, she fainted on the spot. However, Henri did enjoy good relationships with the Guise faction, and he was keen that Mary should marry his son, now the Dauphin. He proved his good intentions towards Scotland by sending a fleet to St Andrews under the command of Leon Strozzi. Where Arran had procrastinated, Strozzi acted, bombarding the castle into submission and taking the Castilians prisoner on 29 July 1547. He released Arran’s son, held the nobility for ransom and sent the rest of the Castilians, including Knox, to what were presumed to be slow deaths as galley slaves. Once again the tide of danger receded from Scotland and Marie could congratulate herself on keeping the marriage prospects with France alive.