Mary Queen of Scots (30 page)

Despite Mary’s determined optimism, and gracious behaviour towards her subjects, whatever their religious opinions, the events of her journey, her arrival and her reception had clearly subjected her to considerable strain. Now that strain inevitably began to tell on her health. The Diurnal of Occurrents relates that in the streets of Perth she fell sick and was carried from her horse into a lodging not far off, with the sort of nervous collapse ‘she is often troubled with, after any great unkindness or grief of mind’.
⁹
However, as always, she was quick to recover, and at Dundee was once more greeted enthusiastically and given a princely reception. At St Andrews on Sunday 21 September there may have been a religious squabble of some sort, since a rumour reached Randolph in Edinburgh that a priest had been slain. Certainly at some point in the journey Lord James and Huntly had a violent quarrel about Mass, when the Catholic Huntly said that if the queen commanded it, he would set up the Mass in three shires. But the point was that the queen did not command it: instead she merely continued on her way for a quick visit to Falkland Palace, and so back to Holyrood, where she was once more safely installed on 29 September.

Knox reported that Mary remained steadfast in her ‘devilish opinions’ at the end of her journey, despite the evidence she had received that most people found them repugnant; but he had, in his prejudiced attitude to the queen, missed the point about her attitude to the reformed religion. It was not a question of her private beliefs, which were, as she herself had told Throckmorton a few months previously, steadfastly Catholic. It was a question of the administration and good government of Scotland. Here the sights she saw during her progress can only have confirmed her in the conviction which she had already expressed in her proclamation of 25 August – that it was in the best interests of peace and stability in Scotland that the Protestant
status quo
should be preserved, so long as she herself could worship in private in the way she pleased. When she first arrived,
Mary found herself in a curious situation administratively speaking apropos the structure of the Protestant Church. In the years leading up to the Reformation, the power of the Scottish crown over its native Church had increased with every decade, as royal control close at hand gradually replaced that of the far-off papacy. In 1535, the Pope conceded the right of King James not only to recommend to but also to nominate to vacant prelacies. Since the income from benefices could now be granted if the king so wished to others than its spiritual incumbent, the whole system developed into a useful method of royal patronage. The process expanded so rapidly that by 1560, in the words of Professor Donaldson, ‘There was no financial temptation for the Scottish crown to proceed to a formal breach with Rome because it was already exploiting the Church’s wealth with sufficient success’.
¹⁰

But this exploitation of the Church by the monarchy was not brought to an end when the religion of Scotland was officially changed by edict of Parliament in August 1560. This edict was never confirmed by the sovereign, which made it technically illegal. But in any case no provision was made at the time for linking the new religion to the old ecclesiastical régime. By 1561 no financial arrangements had been made for the new ministers. Queen Mary was as free as her predecessors to proceed with the presentation of livings and benefices: there was absolutely no incumbency upon her to present them to the ministers of the reformed Church.
†
Thus the Scottish crown in the 1560s, freed by the Reformation from the last vestige of papal control, had enormous potential powers of patronage within its grasp. There was an excellent opportunity in this respect for a competent sovereign, well advised, to increase his own strength, since circumstances had conspired to play into the hands of the crown. This applied to a Catholic sovereign as much as to a Protestant one – so long as the Catholic sovereign showed no signs of wishing to restore the Catholic religion to the country. Catholicism as a spiritual force had temporarily retreated into the mists by the time Mary reached the shores of Scotland. One of the factors in this retreat was the remarkable lack of Catholic leadership at the time, which meant that too little was done to rally the Catholics at the moments of crisis. Archbishop James Beaton, for example, who might have constituted a Catholic leader, went to France in 1560 and never returned. Huntly was markedly unreliable as events were to prove. The Protestants, on the other hand, felt a crusading spirit concerning their newly achieved Reformation. When Alexander Scott presented to Mary his ‘New Year Gift’ of a long poem at the beginning of 1562, his courtly connections encouraged him to address dulcet phrases towards his young queen:

These same connections did not prevent him warning Mary solemnly that papist idolatry had been newly engraved in certain hearts as a result of her arrival – a development which was to be thoroughly deplored. Yet all the evidence shows that Mary herself was perfectly content to accept the facts of the situation, and had no wish to engrave idolatry anew on any heart, so long as that heart beat loyally towards its sovereign. Very far from being set on re-establishing the Catholic religion in Scotland, she seems to have seen herself as the powerful Catholic sovereign who rules at peace her Protestant people.

In the meantime she was also able to benefit from the breach between Knox and the less extreme members of the reformed Church, those for example who strongly doubted whether it was lawful to resist an ungodly prince as Knox suggested. Knox, strident as his voice might be, did not by any means speak for all members of the reformed religion. As Knox himself angrily reported, the Protestant lords were apt to be seduced from extremism by contact with the gentle and civilizing influence of the court.
¹¹
When the town council of Edinburgh issued an insulting proclamation on 2 October, putting Catholic priests in the same category as prostitutes and whoremongers, Mary managed to get the proclamation suppressed and the council deprived of its privileges, with the full cooperation of both Maitland and Lord James, whom indeed Knox furiously blamed for the whole episode. Then when Queen Mary had a sung Mass in her private chapel on All Hallows Day (1 November), it was finally decided after a conference among the Protestant leaders that the queen should be able to behave as she wished with her household in private. But the actual singing of the Mass caused considerable commotion.

The English ambassador Randolph not only paid tribute to Mary’s cleverness throughout her first autumn in Scotland, but indicated that those who had imagined Mary was without wisdom were liable to be surprised, since he himself had detected in her the fruit of the ‘best-practised’ cunning of France combined with the subtle brains of Scotland.
¹²
Part of this cleverness on the part of the young queen was to take the financial situation of the ministers of the new Church sufficiently seriously to make provision for them: in February 1562 it was decided that the
monetary situation of these ministers was sufficiently desperate for it to be necessary for the crown to take some action. It was therefore decided that while two thirds of the revenues of the benefices were to remain with the existing holders for their lifetimes (probably neither ecclesiastics nor members of the reformed Church), the other third was to be collected by the government, and divided between it and the reformed Church. It was a perfectly acceptable compromise, which showed once again that Mary drew a sharp distinction between the private Mass in her chapel and the public weal in Scotland; and it also helped on the interests of the crown.

As the editor of the Register of the Privy Council at this period has observed, one looks in vain through its pages for any evidence that Mary was a rabid Catholic intent on establishing her own religion in Scotland, and intent on destroying the reformed religion which had replaced it.
¹³
Both Melville and Castelnau confirm Randolph’s opinion that on her first arrival in Scotland Mary’s behaviour was designedly accommodating and tactful, never more so than on the subject of religion, as a result of which she was rewarded with considerable personal popularity. Melville wrote that she conducted herself ‘so princely, so honourably and so discreetly, that her reputation spread in all countries’; Castelnau indicated that the Scots were delighted with their beautiful young queen and, thanks to her efforts to make herself agreeable to them, they counted themselves lucky to be ruled by one of the most perfect princesses of her time.
¹⁴
The Pope wrote to Mary anxiously in December, suggesting that on the subject of Scottish Catholicism she should take Queen Mary Tudor as her model, who ‘surely did not defend the cause of God timidly’,
¹⁵
but Mary Stuart was very far from adopting the methods of her Catholic cousin in England. Her energies at this point were absorbed in an infinitely more worldly design – to get herself recognized by Queen Elizabeth as her legitimate successor to the English throne – and in this plan fervently expressed Catholicism could only work to her disadvantage.

The conciliation of her Scottish subjects was only one half of Mary’s plan: reconciliation with Elizabeth was the other. Once she was assured that Elizabeth had actually despatched the safe-conduct – it arrived back in Scotland four days after she landed – Mary’s mood towards her cousin was as purposely friendly as her mood towards the Scots had been. Only thirteen days after her arrival, she commissioned Maitland to go to England and try to treat with the English queen on the subject of the succession; Maitland duly set off in September. William Maitland was the obvious
choice for the mission. He had been Mary of Guise’s envoy to London in February 1558, and to Paris in March 1559, and envoy for the Protestants to London again in 1560: he was thus by far the most experienced diplomatist out of the rather limited selection offered by the Scottish nobility. Maitland can fairly claim to be the most interesting character in Scotland in the time of Queen Mary because he represented a type of new man: aged thirty-three when Mary arrived, roughly the same age as Lord James, and fifteen years older than the queen herself, he had been converted to Protestantism by Knox in 1555. But it was politics not religion which interested him. His grandmother had been a Seton, and his grandfather died at Flodden, but he himself, one of the seven children of Sir Richard Maidand, belonged to the new highly political class of lairds surrounding the capital, who had been considerably affected by the English occupation of Haddington in the late 1540s. Maidand had been Secretary of State to Mary of Guise, but did not allow this fact to prevent him from joining the Protestant insurgents under Châtelherault in the autumn of 1559.

His father, himself in public service of one sort and another for over sixty years, gave Maitland some Polonius-like advice at the beginning of his career,
Counsel to my son being in the court
, in which he admonished him to be neither a flatterer nor a scorner, to remember the instability of fortune even in the highest position of government, and in short not to be overconfident in a world as changeable as the moon or the sea. But as it turned out, Maitland was not the sort of character to be easily caught in a fixed position, while the moon and the sea changed round him. His very political abilities led him to exercise a certain pragmatism – did not Buchanan term him the Chameleon? – and his relations with Mary of Guise had already shown that, like a modern civil servant, he did not feel bound to go down with the minister. Yet Maitland was regarded by his contemporaries as having a finesse lacking in others, and an ability which made him ‘subtle to draw out the secrets of every man’s minds’
¹⁶
as Buchanan put it. He was excellently educated and his correspondence is garnished with classical allusions and wit. In other ways, in his lack of ascetic fervour and his emphasis on the practical in politics, Maitland’s spirit matched Mary’s own. He was even supposed to have carried his cynicism as far as to observe that ‘God is a bogle of the nursery’.
‡
In theory at least, he was the ideal adviser for Mary out of the limited selection available in Scotland, and he was certainly the ideal envoy to send to London.

Maitland’s interview with Elizabeth took place in London, in the presence of both Cecil, Elizabeth’s adviser, and Dudley, her favourite. The Scottish point of view on the subject of the succession had already been put to Elizabeth in a humble letter from Lord James, before Mary even arrived in Scotland. Ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh was to be given in exchange for Elizabeth’s acknowledgement that Mary stood next in line to the throne, after herself and her lawful issue. Maitland pointed out on behalf of Mary that this meant that she could not ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh as it now stood, because the terms of the Treaty called on to surrender not only her present claim to the English throne, but also all further claims after the death of Elizabeth and her problematic offspring. In reply, Elizabeth showed herself nothing if not friendly towards the queen of Scots; although her first impulse was to concentrate on the vexed subject of the treaty (‘I looked for another message from the Queen your sovereign’) once she realized that the Scots lords, as well as Mary, were in earnest on the subject of succession, she gave herself over to a frank discussion of the whole question.

In the course of this, Elizabeth even went so far as to vouchsafe the information that she herself preferred Mary to all her rivals: she knew of no better right than Mary’s, and no one who was strong enough to keep Mary from the throne. At the same time she positively declined to give Mary the acknowledgement she desired. The reason she gave was the impossible burden which it would lay on her own relations with Mary. ‘The desire is without example,’ said Elizabeth, ‘to require me in mine own life, to set my winding sheet before my eyes. Think you that I could love my own winding sheet? Princes cannot like their own children, those that should succeed unto them…. How then shall I, think you, like my cousin, being declared my Heir Apparent?’ She also put forward a more practical, less personal reason of her own safety: ‘I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed.’ And she quoted in Latin: ‘They are more prone to worship the rising than the setting sun.’ Elizabeth went on to describe her own experiences as a focus of opposition during the reign of Mary Tudor. With these personal revelations, and an unresolved situation, Maitland had to be content. However, Elizabeth made one concession in that she agreed to accept a certain modification of the treaty, so that Mary should not have to sign away her claim, beyond the period of Elizabeth’s life and that of her lawful offspring. Elizabeth also suggested that Maitland and Cecil should correspond privately on the subject, although under the supervision of the two queens;
the situation, if fluid, seemed also full of promise. In this auspicious atmosphere Maitland returned to Scotland at the end of September.