Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (3 page)

Inside, there were not many. The English ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler,
who saw in this the ruin of all his master's plans, stood gloomily
wishing ill on the ceremony and all its participants. D'Oysell, the
French ambassador, hated to be there at all, for his presence would
seem to condone it. But King Francois would have to be informed of all
the details, or he would punish his ambassador mightily for his
ignorance. The other Lord Keepers of the baby Queen constituted an
entire row of onlookers. Cardinal Beaton stood ready to conduct the
ceremony, hovering over the throne.

The coronation itself was not lavish, or even intricate, as would have
been its counterpart in England. The Scotsmen were ready to get on
with it, and so, in the simplest manner, the Lord Keeper Livingston
brought Mary forward to the altar and put her gently in the throne set
up there. Then he stood by, holding her to keep her from rolling
off.

Quickly, Cardinal Beaton put the Coronation Oath to her, which her
keeper, as her sponsor, answered for her; in his voice she vowed to
guard and guide Scotland and act as its true Queen, in the name of God
Almighty, who had chosen her. Immediately then the Cardinal unfastened
her heavy robes and began anointing her with the holy oil on her back,
breast, and the palms of her hands. When the chill air struck her, she
began to cry, with long, wailing sobs.

The Cardinal stopped. True, this was only a baby, crying as all babies
cried, unexpectedly and distressingly. But in the silence of the stone
chapel, where nerves were already taut with the whole clandestine,
rebellious nature of the ceremony, the sounds were shattering. The
child cried as at the fall of Man, as if in horror of damnation.

"Sssh, ssh," he murmured. But the little Queen would not be quieted;
she wailed on, until the Earl of Lennox brought forward the sceptre, a
long rod of gilded silver, surmounted by crystal and Scottish pearl. He
placed it in her baby hand, and she grasped the heavy shaft with her
fat fingers. Her crying died away. Then the ornate gilded sword of
state was presented by the Earl of Argyll, and the Cardinal performed
the ceremony of girding the three-foot sword to the tiny round body.

Later, the Earl of Arran carried the crown, a heavy fantasy of gold and
jewels that enclosed within it the circlet of gold worn by Robert the
Bruce on his helmet at the Battle of Bannockburn, not far from
Stirling. Holding it gently, the Cardinal lowered it onto the child's
head, where it rested on a circlet of velvet. From underneath the
crown, heavy with the dolour of her ancestors, Mary's eyes looked out.
The Cardinal steadied the crown and Lord Livingston held her body
straight as the Earls Lennox and Arran kissed her cheek in fealty,
followed by the rest of the prelates and peers who knelt before her
and, placing their hands on her crown, swore allegiance to her.

THREE

Henry VIII unleashed the full force of his fury against the Scots. An
army was sent to storm Stirling Castle, capture Mary, and sack and burn
everything in the surroundings. Men, women, and children were to be
put to the sword; Edinburgh destroyed, Holyrood razed, the Border
abbeys demolished, and the harvest, already gathered in, to be set on
fire.

The English soldiers slashed and murdered their way into Edinburgh.
They came down the Canongate and up to the doors of Holyrood Abbey, and
entered into the sanctuary. Seeking the Stewart tombs, they found the
great enclosed monument on the right side of the Abbey, near the altar,
and broke into it, desecrating the royal burial places. The tomb of
Mary's father was opened and his coffin dragged out into the daylight,
mocked, and then abandoned, to lie forlorn in the aisle.

Scotland wept and lamented. Scotland was wounded and cried out, but
there was none to heed or help her. The dead stank to heaven, the
children went to bed hungry, in the care of whatever relative survived,
and the razed streets of Edinburgh smouldered. The Scottish people
looked at the ruined abbeys and the deserted churches and sought the
only help left, the Divine, in a new way. Despite the ban on all
Protestant literature, there were smuggled Protestant translations of
the Scriptures William Tyndale's version, and even copies of the
English Great Bible of 1539 now coming into Scotland. But where the
heretical preachers could not hide, a Bible could be secreted; where
God seemed silent in speaking through his erst while Church, the Church
of Rome, he began speaking directly through His Word as revealed in the
Scriptures. Preachers were abroad throughout the land, having been
trained in Geneva, Holland, Germany. People listened to their sermons
and found solace in God's reaching out to them. He offered His hand
and they grasped it.

In Stirling Castle the Queen Mother and her daughter were safe. The
ancient castle on its high rock, rising out of the plain, held fast and
was beyond the power of the English to capture. Inside the palace
walls, Marie de Guise fashioned a home for her daughter, with
playmates, tutors, and pets. It was a world in itself, high above the
Forth valley, looking down on Stirling Bridge and the gateway to the
Highlands, where a person could vanish in safety from any foreign foes
that threatened. There were rare excursions to hawk and hunt and see
the countryside, before scurrying back to the safety of the rock
fortress.

There were mists. And howling winds and ice-covered hills that
sometimes the children went sledding on, using a cow's skull to ride
down the hill behind the castle. There were little furry ponies that
she and her playmates all also named Mary, which was such fun learned
to ride on. There were fogs and heather, green glens, and an enormous
sky with clouds that raced across it like bandits.

Up in the castle, there was a room in the King's apartments empty now
that had round medallions on its ceiling. Little Mary would wander
into the room and stare at the carved wooden heads in the dim light
from the shuttered windows. One of the figures had hands that clutched
the rim of the roundel, as if he would escape and leap out into the
real world. But he never moved; he remained forever on the brink of a
new world which he could not enter, gazing down at her from the
ceiling.

Her mother did not like her to be there. Usually she would come
looking for Mary and bring her back into the Queen's apartments, where
she lived and had her lessons; where there were cushions and a
fireplace and a swirl of people.

Sometime in that mist of early childhood she came to know her
half-siblings. Her mother, with odd charity or was it political
astuteness? had gathered four of her late husband's illegitimate
offspring and brought them to Stirling Castle. Mary loved them all,
loved being part of a large family; and, as her mother did not seem to
find it offensive that they were bastards, neither did she.

James Stewart was stern and grave, but as the oldest, his judgement
seemed the wisest and they deferred to it. If he said they should not
sled down the hill once more before the light faded, Mary learned that
he had always gauged it correctly and that if she disobeyed she would
find herself in the dark by the time she reached the bottom.

Before Marie had brought Mary's half-siblings to spend some time at
Stirling, she had assembled another little family for her daughter as
well: the four daughters of friends, all named Mary, and all the same
age: Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton, Mary Livingston, and Mary Seton.

Mary Fleming was entirely Scots, and also had Stewart blood, but from
further back on the wrong side of the blanket: she was the
granddaughter of James IV. Mary Fleming's mother, Janet, shared the
Stewart family traits of beauty and high spirits, and served as
governess to the five little Marys. From the earliest days, Mary
Fleming nicknamed La Flamina was the only one who would take Mary's
dares and outdo her in mischief.

The other three Marys, although they had proper Scots names and Scots
fathers, all had French mothers, ladies-in-waiting who had come over
with Marie de Guise. That their daughters should all be friends with
her daughter gave the Queen Mother great satisfaction, and a feeling of
being at home in this fortress in an alien land. Although the mothers
spoke French to each other, their daughters did not seem either
interested or able to learn it themselves, although presumably they
could understand some words of it. But the mothers, when they wanted
to talk secretly of presents and surprises for the girls, could always
speak safely in French.

To differentiate between them, Mary Livingston, robust and athletic,
was called Lusty by the others; Mary Seton, who was tall and reserved,
was called by her stately surname of Seton, and Mary Beaton, who was
plump, pretty, and inclined to daydreaming, was called Beaton because
it rhymed with Seton to make a pair. Mary Fleming had been nicknamed
La Flamina because of her flamboyant personality. Only Mary was always
only Mary, the Mary.

The eight younger children romped, fought, had secret clubs, cliques,
and codes. They kept pets and played at cards, telling fortunes; they
tattled on each other and swore eternal friendship the next day. The
ninth, James Stewart, presided over their little world with
fifteen-year-old solemnity, suspended midway between the world of the
adults and that of the children, fully belonging to neither. Both
sides turned to him for advice about the other.

Mary was only six months old when she came to live at Stirling, and the
whole world was contained in that mountaintop fortress for her. She
was crowned there; she took her first tottering steps there; her tutors
taught her her earliest lessons there in the antechamber off the
Queen's apartments. When she was only three, she was presented with a
tiny pony from the islands in the farthest north of Scotland, and so
she first learned to ride there. Lusty, of course, took to the ponies
as quickly as she, whereas Seton and Beaton preferred quieter, indoor
pastimes. Flamina could ride well enough, but she preferred human
adventures to animal ones.

Mary looked up to James, and followed him about eagerly. When she was
very small, she clung to him and pestered him to play with her. As she
grew older, she came to realize that he disliked being handled and
touched,

and that such behaviour had the very opposite effect on him. If she
wished him to pay attention to her, she had to look the other way and
talk to others. Then curiosity would draw him.

One day, when she was nearly four, she wandered away from the upper
courtyard where the children were playing ball between the Great Hall
and the Chapel Royal, and crept into the forbidden King's apartments.
They were always shuttered and dark, but they drew her. The great
round medallions on the ceiling cast a brooding presence over the room,
as if they were guarding a secret. She kept imagining that if she just
looked in every corner, and searched hard enough, she would find her
father there. He would have been hiding, playing a joke on them. And
think how happy her mother would be to have her bring him out!

Heart thumping loudly, she walked swiftly across the huge guard
chamber. She already knew that nothing was in here. The room was
bare, and there was nowhere for the King to hide. The next connected
room, the presence chamber, was likewise bare. But there were several
little hidden chambers off the King's bedchamber. She knew they were
there; she had seen a map of them. And that was where the King was
probably hiding if he was hiding at all.