Game of Queens (44 page)

When Jeanne d'Albret's ever-fragile health gave way, Antoine changed tactics and sought to separate himself from her. A year after his wife's conversion, he openly set his face even against the measures of tolerance now proposed by Catherine de Medici, declaring his determination to ‘live in closest friendship with the Guises'. His brother Condé, however, would take his place as leader of the threatened Huguenots. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1561, the anti-Protestant alliance of the Guises and Montmorency had the support also of Spain, the emperor, and the pope: an all-male conspiracy to which they were eager to recruit Antoine.

Catherine de Medici, by contrast, was strongly behind the Colloque of Poissy, which met that summer in what proved a vain attempt to reconcile religious divides. She issued an amnesty for all religious offences committed since her husband's death, delaying French churchmen from attending the Counter-Reformation's Council of Trent, but Catherine's toleration was a pragmatic measure aimed at preserving her son's monarchy. As she wrote to her reproachful son-in-law Philip of Spain, the experience of decades in France taught that ‘violence only serves to increase and multiply [this infection], since by the harsh penalties which have constantly been enforced in this kingdom, an infinite number of poor people have been confirmed in this belief'.

Her edict in January 1562 allowed Protestants to practise their faith as long as it were outside town walls. But it was greeted with horror by domestic and foreign Catholic powers, despite her continued assurance that she and her children ‘wished to live in the Catholic faith and obedience to Rome'. The
parlement
of Paris at first refused to register the edict, specifically, in their formal remonstrance, linking their refusal to Catherine's sex. ‘Laws both sacred and profane insist that the woman is in holy bond to her husband and children in holy bond to their father, which is to say that the entire family is of the same religion as the father of the family'; that is, of the religion Henri II had followed. Failing to follow this, they said, produced ‘nothing but contention, rancour, and division'. Deliberately, Catherine displayed herself, with her children, at every Catholic ritual.

To her daughter Elisabeth, Philip's wife, Catherine wrote word to ignore any rumours: ‘I do not mean to change my life or my religion or anything. I am what I am in order to preserve your brothers and their kingdom.' But Jeanne d'Albret was cut from very different cloth. When Catherine de Medici asked Jeanne to moderate her Protestant behaviour, Jeanne's reply was uncompromising: ‘Madame, if I had my son and all the kingdoms in the world within my hands, I would rather cast them to the bottom of the sea than lose my salvation.'

Catherine de Medici did not give up. She was still cultivating Jeanne d'Albret to a marked degree. As Jeanne prepared to leave the French court in the spring of 1562, Catherine kept her close as she and her son received foreign ambassadors; even going shopping in Paris together, ‘disguised as bourgeois ladies in simple headdress'. Indeed, Catherine was identified with Jeanne's interest to the point where Elizabeth Tudor could instruct Throckmorton ‘to encourage the Queen Mother, the Queen of Navarre, and the Prince of Condé to show their constancy [and to convey] her intention to stand by them'.

But it was no longer possible to resist the demands of Antoine, and of the Spanish ambassador, that Jeanne should be sent away from court. Her son Henri had been taken away from her, to be educated under his father's charge by conservative Catholic tutors. Jeanne, allowed to say goodbye to him, told the child that if ever he went to Mass she would disinherit him, or so the Cardinal of Ferrara said. The eight-year-old held out for several months before finally, predictably, being seen at Mass with his father and the royal family. By that time, the temperature of the religious conflict had risen in an alarming way.

On 1 March 1562 the Duc de Guise, while visiting family estates in the Champagne region, was riding to Mass through the small town of Vassy, property of his niece Mary Stuart, when he heard the provocative sound of a Protestant service coming, illegally, from a building within the town walls. Whether or not his armed escort actually began what came to be called the Massacre of Vassy, it left more than seventy Protestants dead and more than a hundred wounded. Small wonder that Jeanne d'Albret secretly fled southwards to her own territories. The First War of Religion, as it would become known, was under way, with women prominent on either side.

38

‘Two Queens in One Isle'

Scotland and England, 1561–1565

Events in France had radically altered the life of one young woman who had expected to live out her life there. Now that Catherine de Medici was the power in the land where Mary Stuart had expected to be queen, the Queen of Scots's eyes turned another way. After her young husband King François died, Mary, as a childless widow, had no role in France, while Scotland had no royal visible on the throne.

In August 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots landed at Leith, with the intention of governing her country. Just what kind of a fist she made of it is hotly disputed by historians; a question that goes right to the heart of the notion of the female ruler in the sixteenth century.

Mary made no attempt to consolidate her position in France. On the first day of her widowhood she handed the queen's jewels back to Catherine de Medici. A Scottish contemporary mentioned her next move as being motivated by Catherine's ‘rigorous and vengeable dealing'. The forty days seclusion may have given Mary the thinking space she needed. Her Guise relatives were pushing for another marriage; pushing hard (through her aunt Louise who had many Spanish connections) for the Spanish heir Don Carlos, receiving offers from the kings of Denmark and Sweden, from the dukes of Ferrara and Bavaria. The Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand offered one of his sons, while the Scots offered their leading noble Arran, Châtelherault's son. Philip's son Don Carlos was the prize but this was blocked by Catherine de Medici, who was writing in code to the Queen of England – who likewise had no wish to be caught between two jaws, northern and southern, of a Spanish vice – that this should be circumvented. Catherine's daughter Elisabeth, Mary's old playfellow, had married Philip II but was as yet childless; and Catherine did not want a rival at her court.

Mary herself was determined on returning to Scotland. The English envoy Throckmorton reported that Mary felt she could count on her family there; that she ‘holds herself sure of Lord James and all the Stuarts'. It was, perhaps, a mark of her political naivety. Her half-brother Lord James Stuart – able, ambitious and quickly gaining control of a country where only his illegitimacy prevented him succeeding his father James V – would surely have preferred to see his legitimate but wholly inexperienced half-sister stay well away.

There was a perverse benefit in the very fact of Mary being a young woman whom the lords thought they could manipulate. Mary agreed that she would maintain the religious status quo, with Protestantism the official (if far from universal) religion, while she herself should be allowed to hear the Catholic Mass in her own chapel at Holyrood. It is unlikely, however, that she altogether understood the deal she was making. On her very first progress, it became clear that Lord James regarded the deal as extending only to Holyrood; not even to any other of her palaces where Mary might happen to be staying. And the problem was more fundamental. After the death of Marie de Guise in 1560, Scotland had reorganised itself into a country run by its lords, together with a Reformation Parliament which abolished the Mass and refuted the pope's authority. In England, letters were filed as coming from ‘the States of Scotland', as if from a Scottish republic.

This was the rub. In the centuries ahead it would be speculated why Mary Stuart failed in Scotland while Elizabeth Tudor in England succeeded. One answer surely lies in the fact that Mary was eighteen when she began to rule. Elizabeth Tudor had been an unusually experienced twenty-five when she ascended the throne; her sister Mary thirty-seven. But too much altogether may be put down to personality, ability and training; too little to the fact that the Scottish nobles, and the Scottish church, had a very different concept of their relationship with their monarchy.

There is also the issue of her ministers. It is sometimes regretted that Mary had no minister as able as Elizabeth's Cecil. That is not altogether true; in William Maitland of Lethington she had ‘Michel Wylie', the Scottish Machiavelli, who would become one of her chief officers. Maitland, like Lord James, was a Protestant, and his devotion to an increasing rapport with an England would eventually put him at odds with his queen, although for the first half of her reign, Mary's own eyes were turned England's way.

On the death of her husband François II, Mary Stuart told the Earl of Bedford, who brought Elizabeth's letters of condolence, that Elizabeth ‘shows the part of a good sister, whereof she [Mary] has great need'. She reiterated that she and Elizabeth were (as she had written of Mary Tudor) two queens ‘in One Isle, both of one language, both the nearest kinswoman that each other hath and both Queens'. She failed to realise that although Elizabeth told Maitland she was ‘obliged' to love Mary (‘as being nearest to me in blood of any other'), for the English, the question of Mary's claim to the English throne, stood – and would continue to stand – in the way.

That is why Elizabeth, asked to grant Mary safe conduct to travel home through her realm, rather than face the journey by sea, refused unless Mary ratified the Treaty of Edinburgh made between Elizabeth and the Scottish lords. Typically, Elizabeth changed her mind, offering the necessary conduct only too late. William Maitland, ever aiming at securing Mary's place in the future English succession, had been as anxious as Mary herself to bring about a meeting between the two queens, which, he said, ‘shall breed us quietness for their times'. That meeting would never happen, although fictional writers have often imagined it, and Mary would continue to plead for it almost until her death.

Mary Stuart landed at Leith on 19 August 1561. As she made her official entry into Edinburgh a fortnight later, the welcoming pageantry suggested genuine pleasure at a queen's return, coupled with violent hostility to the Mass. A doctrine of hostility not necessarily felt by all the people but urgently propounded by men like the Protestant reformer John Knox.

On her first Sunday at Holyrood, Mary's Mass in her private chapel was interrupted by a noisy demonstration. She summoned John Knox, tackling him on his statement that a woman ruler was ‘a monster in nature'. Knox's idea of an emollient reply ran: ‘If the realm finds no inconvenience from the rule of a woman, that which they approve shall I not further disallow . . . but shall be as well content to live under your Grace as St Paul was to live under Nero.'

‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me', Mary told him, managing to wait until he left before bursting into tears. Small wonder that the English ambassador Thomas Randolph noted what would become a regular feature of Mary's life; a failure in health he called one of the ‘sudden passions' that overtook her ‘after any great unkindness or grief of mind'.

When Mary Stuart named her first council it was an inclusive blend of men. Seven out of the twelve were Protestants. Thomas Randolph wrote: ‘I see the Lord James and the Laird of Lethington, Maitland, above all others in credit . . . She is patient to hear, and beareth much'. Maitland wrote to William Cecil in England that, ‘The Queen my Mistress behaves herself so gently in every behalf as reasonably we can require', adding that she ‘doth declare wisdom far exceeding her age'. He thought ‘that the Queen your sovereign [Elizabeth] shall be able to do much with her in religion, if once they enter into a good familiarity'. A meeting was still Mary's passionate hope.

In the early spring of 1562, plans for a late summer meeting at York got as far as arrangements about the bureau de change to convert Scottish currency and agreement that Mary Stuart might bring a thousand attendants and practise her religion in private. There were advantages on both sides. Elizabeth's approval would ratify Mary in the eyes of her Protestant subjects, as well as holding out hope of the succession. But Mary's stock with Elizabeth Tudor was also high. Her rival in the English succession stakes, Lady Katherine Grey, sister of the nine days' queen Lady Jane, had recently blotted her copybook by contracting a secret marriage with the Earl of Hertford.
¹

But the plan fell through on news of the Massacre of Vassy, at which the Duc de Guise's men killed a party of the Huguenots. In the ensuing first outbreak of the French Wars of Religion, Elizabeth threw in her lot with the Huguenots, spurred by the hope of regaining Calais, which had been lost through her sister's Spanish sympathies.

Baulked of the trip to York, which put her ‘into such a passion as she did keep her bed all that day', Mary Stuart set off on a progress into the north of Scotland. The Catholic Earl of Huntly, the so-called ‘Cock of the North', made no secret of his disapproval of any pro-English policy, and showed, moreover, no disposition to bow to his queen's authority. The progress turned into something like a punitive expedition, and one in which Mary showed to advantage. Randolph wrote to Cecil that autumn of 1562:

In all these broils I assure you I never saw the Queen merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find. She repented nothing but that she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the causeway with a jack and knapscall [a soldier's tunic and helmet], a Glasgow buckler, and a broad sword.