Mary Queen of Scots (2 page)

In the interests of clarity, I have not entered into the various complications of dating in the sixteenth century, i.e. I have ignored the fact that the calendar year was held to start on 25 March during this period, and have used the modern style of dates starting on 1 January throughout. I have also ignored the ten days’ difference between English and European dates in the period of the Babington Plot, due to the fact
that the adjustment to the Gregorian calendar was not made in England until the eighteenth century; and, in order to avoid confusion, have given the dates of letters coming from abroad as if they originated in England.

With regard to Scots words and spelling, and documents both in Scots and French – notably Queen Mary’s own letters, which were nearly always written in French – I have translated, adapted to modern spelling, and in certain cases, paraphrased the text, as it seemed to me necessary to make the meaning clear to the general reader today.

It will be found that sums of money relevant to Scotland are given in pounds Scots and those concerning England in pounds sterling – the pound Scots being worth roughly one-quarter of the pound sterling in this period.

The task of writing such a book – covering ground well-trodden by scholars of the present, as of previous generations – would not have been possible without the benefit of their works, which are listed in the
bibliography
, and whose assistance I gratefully acknowledge. I was also fortunate enough to be able to draw upon the advice of a number of people, whose suggestions concerning the lines of research to pursue were a major contribution to my book (although the conclusions drawn are of course all my own). In the first place I should like to thank Sir James Fergusson of Kilkerran, Keeper of the Register House, Edinburgh, for valuable advice over reading-matter as well as guidance in researches within the Register House itself; Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk on whose encyclopaedic knowledge of Scottish history I frequently drew; Archbishop David Mathew for advice and encouragement at an early stage; and Father Francis Edwards S.J., Archivist of the English Society of Jesus, for advice and help in researches within the Farm Street Library, including the opportunity to use the notes of the late Fr J.H.Pollen.

I would also like to acknowledge most gratefully the help of the following: Mr Andrews, Clerk of the Works, Westminster Abbey; the Duke of Argyll; Sir Charles Barratt, Town Clerk of Coventry; Mr and Mrs Godfrey Bostock of Tixall, Stafford; Dr C.Burns of the Vatican Archives, Rome; Fr Philip Caraman S.J.; Miss Margaret Crum, Deputy Keeper of Western MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Mr Stanley Cursiter; Fr Martin D’Arcy S.J.; Dr Chalmers Davidson; Professor A.A.M. Duncan of Glasgow University; the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton and Brandon; Mr R.E.Hutcheson, Keeper of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, for advice on the authenticity of Scottish portraits of the period; Mr and Mrs W.J.Keswick of Glenkiln, Dumfriesshire; Mr A.H.King of the Music Room, British Museum and Miss Marion Linton of the
Music Room, National Library of Scotland for help over Riccio’s music; Mr King, Northamptonshire County Archivist; Mr Eric Linklater; Dr Ida Macalpine and Dr Richard Hunter for additional help on the subject of porphyria, beyond their B.M.A. publication; Mr John MacQueen of the University of Edinburgh, for advice on the literature of the period, and for showing me his paper on Alexander Scott in advance of publication; Dr William Marshall of Peterborough; the Earl of Mar and Kellie; Mr James Michie for his translation of George Buchanan’s poem on
this page
; Miss Elizabeth Millar of Jedburgh; Mr J.W.Moor, of Stone; the Duke of Norfolk and his archivist Mr Francis Steer; the Earl of Oxford and Asquith; Mr Peter Quennell; Sir Patrick Reilly, then British Ambassador in Paris, and Mr C. S. de Winton, British Council representative in France, for assistance in the course of French researches; Mr Jasper Ridley (whose own life of Knox was unfortunately published after this book went to press), for suggestions and criticism at the manuscript stage; the Marquess of Salisbury for permission to research at Hatfield House and reproduce certain documents in the illustrations, and also his librarian, Miss Clare Talbot for special assistance over the Casket Letters; Mr F.B. Stitt, Staffordshire County Archivist; Dr Roy Strong, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, for generous help over the complicated subject of the iconography of Mary Queen of Scots; M.Marcel Thomas, Conservateur en Chef of the Cabinet des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Mr Hugh Tait of the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities, British Museum; Mr F.A.Warner, of the British Embassy, Brussels; Mr Neville Williams, Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office; the late Mr F.Wismark of Madame Tussaud’s; Mr T.S.Wragg, librarian to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth; Canon A. de Zulueta.

I am grateful to G. Bell & Sons Ltd for permission to quote passages from
Queen Mary’s Book
edited by Mrs P. Stewart-Mackenzie Arbuthnot.

Lastly I should like to thank the Librarian and staff of the London Library; the staff of the Reading Room of the British Museum; my aunt Lady Pansy Lamb who kindly read the proofs; and my mother Elizabeth Longford, who made vital critical suggestions at the manuscript stage, and without whose admirable example I should never have attempted to write the book at all.

ANTONIA FRASER

September 1968

52 Campden Hill Square, London W8
Eilean Aigas, Beauly, Inverness-shire

PART ONE
The Young Queen

1 All Men Lamented

The winter of 1542 was marked by tempestuous weather throughout the British Isles: in the north, on the borders of Scotland and England, there were heavy snow-falls in December and frost so savage that by January the ships were frozen into the harbour at Newcastle. These stark conditions found a bleak parallel in the political climate which then prevailed between the two countries. Scotland as a nation groaned under the humiliation of a recent defeat at English hands at the battle of Solway Moss. As a result of the battle, the Scottish nobility which had barely recovered from the defeat of Flodden a generation before, were stricken yet again by the deaths of their leaders in their prime; of those who survived, many prominent members were prisoners in English hands, while the rest met the experience of defeat by quarrelling among themselves, showing their strongest loyalty to the principle of self-aggrandizement, rather than to the troubled monarchy. The Scottish national Church, although still officially Catholic for the next seventeen years, was already torn between those who wished to reform its manifold abuses from within, and those who wished to follow England’s example, by breaking away root and branch from the tree of Rome. The king of this divided country, James v, having led his people to defeat, lay dying with his face to the wall, the victim in this as much of his own passionate nature, as of the circumstances which had conspired against him. When James died on 14 December 1542, the most stalwart prince might have shrunk from the Herculean task of succeeding him. But his actual successor was a weakly female child born only six days before, his daughter Mary, the new queen of Scotland.

James v, the last adult male king of Scotland for nearly fifty years, has been treated kindly by contemporary historians, who look back to his reign with nostalgia across the turbulence of that of his daughter. He has
been credited with the qualities of King Arthur, whereas on balance his character seems to have been more like that of Sir Lancelot. Since his physical description, ‘of midway stature’,
¹
bluish grey eyes, sandy hair, weak mouth and chin, does not justify the general reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries for good looks, he clearly possessed an animal magnetism, impossible for another century to understand through pictures. This, and his health, seems to have been his chief physical legacy to his daughter, since in all other respects, starting with her height and athletic carriage, the features and build of Mary Queen of Scots are far easier to trace among her physically magnificent Guise uncles, than in her Stewart forbears. Ronsard described him as having
‘le regard vigoureux’
: James certainly possessed the cyclical high spirits and gaiety of the Stewarts – another quality which he handed on to his daughter – and the ability to fire the imagination of his subjects, an attribute generally described in monarchs as possessing the common touch. Unfortunately there is no doubt as to the reverse side of this golden coin: the evidence of the debauchery of James
V
is unanimous. ‘Most vicious we shall call him,’ wrote Knox with relish,
²
relating how he spared neither man’s wife nor maiden, no more after his marriage than he did before.

James inherited a kingdom bankrupted by his mother Margaret Tudor and her second husband, the earl of Angus; unfortunately his various efforts to search about him for new sources of income brought further troubles in their train. Even his prolonged search for a wealthy foreign bride set his feet firmly on the path of a foreign policy which proved in the final analysis to be disastrous. In view of the predatory attitude of his uncle, Henry
VIII
, towards Scotland, James determined upon the traditional Scottish alliance with the French king, in order to bolster himself with French aid against any possible English claims of suzerainty. Rightly or wrongly, James viewed Henry’s offer of his daughter Mary Tudor as a bride, as a further effort on the part of his uncle to envelop Scotland in his bear’s hug. At one point James even dangled after the young Catherine de Medicis, niece of the Pope, lured by the thought of her magnificent inheritance.
³
The results of such a union, between Mary Stuart’s father and the woman who was later to be her mother-in-law, provide an interesting avenue of historical speculation; in fact the match was doubly vetoed, by the Pope’s reluctance to see his niece set off for the far land of Scotland, and by Henry
VIII
’
S
anger at the idea of such a powerful match for his nephew. James’s mother had been the elder of the two daughters of Henry
VII
; later this share of Tudor blood was to play a vital part in shaping the life story of James’s daughter Mary; the deaths of two out of the three surviving
children of Henry
VIII
meant that by the time Mary was sixteen she was next in line to the English throne after her cousin Queen Elizabeth. But in the 1530s, at the time of James v’s marriage projects, these coming events had not yet cast their shadow. It was Henry
VIII
, in the fulness of his manhood, and with two children to his credit already branching out of the Tudor family tree, who seemed blessed with heirs. His nephew James on the other hand singularly lacked them.

The position of the Stewart monarchs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was peculiarly perilous in dynastic terms, for a number of reasons. In the first place chance had resulted in a total of seven royal minorities – there had been no adult succession since the fourteenth century – which had an inevitable effect of weakening the power of the crown and increasing that of the nobility. Secondly, the Stewarts had a special reason for needing to separate themselves from the nobility, and raise themselves above it into a cohesive royal family, by the nature of their origins. These were neither obscure nor royal. On the contrary the Stewarts were no more than
primus inter pares
among the body of the Scottish nobles. They had formerly been stewards, as their name denotes, first of all to the ruling family of Brittany, and later more splendidly, great stewards to the kings of Scotland. It was Walter, sixth great steward, who by marrying Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert
I
, fathered Robert
II
, king of the Scots, and thus founded the Stewart royal line.