Mary Queen of Scots (42 page)

Up to this point, however much Mary had enjoyed the company of Darnley, she had not shown any evidence of passion for him: Randolph weighed up the favour she had shown him as proceeding ‘of her own courteous nature’ rather than anything more serious. In March Mary still seems to have regarded Darnley as a suitable candidate for marriage only because of his English and Scottish royal blood and his religion, and not for any more personal reason. But in April the situation dramatically changed. Darnley fell ill – an illness which was to transform his fortune and that of Mary Queen of Scots. The illness itself was of no great moment: it began with a cold, which Darnley attempted to cure by sweating it out, and then turned into measles. The young man was incarcerated in his room in Stirling Castle. It was the situation of his sick-room which was the crucial fact about his illness. Inevitably, within the confines of the enormous fortress, like a private town hanging above the plain of Stirling, the young queen found her way with increasing frequency to the bedside of her handsome young cousin. She began to visit him continually and at all hours, and she even took to staying past midnight. She constituted herself his nurse. When measles was succeeded by an ague, the distracted girl refused to ride forth to Perth until Darnley was recovered, and her care was redoubled. Under the influence of the proximity of the sick-room, and the tenderness brought forth by the care of the weak, the suffering – and the handsome – Mary had fallen violently, recklessly and totally in love.

There can be no doubt that whether Mary herself realized it or not, her feelings for Darnley were overwhelmingly physical. The demanding nature of her passion can easily be explained by pent-up longings which were the result of an inadequate first marriage, which had aroused few physical feelings in her and satisfied none. In the years since Francis’s death she had led a life of celibacy, allowing herself courtly flirtations but nothing more, and had been seemingly horrified at any more crude confrontation with life, such as Châtelard presented to her. Her thoughts about marriage had been concentrated on the power it would bring her, for Don Carlos as a bridegroom could have offered few other consolations, and she had shown little interest in the prospect of that great lover Robert Dudley as a possible husband. Now at one touch of Darnley’s hand, the caution, the concentration on the issue of her marriage in which Elizabeth’s approval was so vital, the discretion and wisdom which all had praised in her during her four years as queen of Scotland – all were swept away in a tide of tumultuous feelings which Mary Stuart can scarcely have known she possessed.

13 The Carnal Marriage

In March Darnley had been one possible candidate among the many from whom the queen of Scots might choose her consort. In April he became the one man she was determined to have beside her as husband. From Stirling she took a keen interest in the intrigues on the subject in Edinburgh. The faithful Maitland was promptly despatched to London to acquaint Elizabeth with the news and, as it was hoped, win her approval – this sanction being doubly necessary because Darnley was not only a member of the English royal family through his Tudor descent, but also held to be an English subject. At this point Mary genuinely believed that she would receive this approval. Her confidence was easy to understand: Darnley had come north with the official blessing of England, and he was an English noble of the type whom Elizabeth had often observed that she wished Mary would marry. From hearsay Mary had reason to suppose that Darnley was one of Elizabeth’s own candidates, if the Leicester marriage failed. Maitland reached London on 15 April. But at this point the honeyed trap – as Darnley now turned out to be – was sprung. Mary to marry Darnley! Darnley, the great-grandson of Henry
VII
, with a claim of his own to the English throne! No indeed, Elizabeth, made newly aware of the disapproval of the Scottish Protestants for a Catholic bridegroom and anxious to dissociate herself from the project, now took the line that the whole idea of the marriage was preposterous, and represented a renewed attempt on Mary’s part to acquire the English throne for herself. In London Margaret, countess of Lennox, was first commanded to keep to her room and later sent to the Tower. Regardless of the fact that Lennox and Darnley had gone north with her express permission, Elizabeth exploded with anger and demanded their instant return. When neither paid any attention to her angry bulletins, Throckmorton was sent north to dissuade
Mary from the disastrous, nay, menacing course of marrying Darnley.

Mary in Scotland was in no state to listen to the advice of even the sagest counsellor. Love was rampant in her heart for the first time, and she could hear no other voice except the dictates of her own passionate feelings. In the words of a poem of the period, it was a case of ‘O lusty May, with Flora Queen’ at the court of Scotland.
¹
Randolph wrote back to Leicester in anguish of his ‘poor Queen whom ever before I esteemed so worthy, so wise, so honourable in all her doings’, now so altered by love that he could hardly recognize her. To Cecil he described a queen seized with love ‘all care of common wealth set apart, to the utter contempt of her best subjects’.
²
Randolph was in a particular state of despair at the whole situation because it was being widely stated in Scotland that Darnley had been deliberately despatched by Elizabeth to trap Mary into a mean marriage: and he only wished that there was not so much concrete evidence to back up these suspicions.

Darnley himself reacted predictably. In the same breath as he bewailed his once-honoured queen’s infatuation, Randolph reported that Darnley was now grown so proud that he was intolerable to all honest men, and already almost forgetful of his duty to Mary – she who had adventured so much for his sake. Darnley’s health had taken an unconscionable long time to recover, and even while on his sick-bed he had struck the ageing duke of Châtelherault on his pate to avenge some fancied slight. By 21 May he had only been seen outside the four walls of his room once, and was still more or less confined to his bed. Well before Darnley’s final emergence Throckmorton managed to see Mary at Stirling and put to her as strongly as possible Queen Elizabeth’s dislike of what she considered to be a hasty manner of proceeding with Lord Darnley.

At this point Mary would surely have been wise to have taken serious thought. It was true that the approval of Philip 11 of Spain for the match was sought and won; Charles
IX
of France was approached through Castelnau and approved; her Guise relations were informed (although Mary’s beloved Anne of Guise must have been somewhat surprised by the development since only in September she had given it as her opinion that Mary’s innate pride was far too strong to permit her to wed a mere subject – ‘her heart was too great to debase it’).
³
All these approvals were as nothing compared to the approval of Elizabeth: for after all Elizabeth could offer Mary what none of these other potentates had it in their power to extend – the reversion of her own throne. Over the question of Mary’s marriage, hypocritically as she might behave, maddeningly as she might procrastinate, Elizabeth was still in the position of paying the piper and
therefore calling the tune. Only the rashest and most impetuous of women would have proceeded now on the same determined course without taking heed of Elizabeth’s declared disapproval – but this was what love had apparently made Mary Stuart. She and Throckmorton argued fruitlessly, while Mary tried to put her own point of view, finally Throckmorton concluded that the queen was so far committed in this matter with Lord Darnley, as it was irrevocable, and ‘that there was no point in exercising any persuasion and reasonable means any further’. Gloomily the courtier who had once so much admired Mary for her discretion in her first widowhood in France, and had wished that Elizabeth could behave more like her, concluded that she had been captivated, either by love or cunning, or rather, ‘to say truly, by boasting or folly’.
⁴

Darnley’s recovery did nothing to dim the queen’s love. Now she was so infatuated that many began to suggest that Darnley had actually bewitched her, looking for a supernatural explanation of her great love when a natural one was only too obvious. At the beginning of June Randolph moaned again to Leicester that Mary and Darnley were still exchanging great tokens of love every day, and Mary seemed to have laid aside all shame in her behaviour. He even suggested that passion had caused the queen to lose her looks somewhat – but perhaps he merely meant that her dignity had been laid aside in favour of the reckless glowing aspect of a woman in love.
⁵
Darnley’s pride waxed with the queen’s affection: to show his virility, he launched out characteristically with blows towards those whom he knew would not dare to retaliate. On the day in May on which he was created earl of Ross, he drew his dagger on the wretched justice clerk who brought him the message, because he was not also made duke of Albany as he had expected. It was the typical gesture of the spoilt and vindictive child. By the beginning of July, Darnley was held in such general contempt that even those who had been his chief friends could no longer find words to defend him. Randolph made the gloomy, but as it proved singularly accurate, prophecy: ‘I know not, but it is greatly to be feared that he can have no long life among these people.’

The truth was that even if Darnley had spoken with the tongues of men and of angels, Mary Stuart would have had sufficient problems in persuading her court to accept him as her bridegroom. In the course of the summer Darnley wooed Mary with a light and courtly love poem:
⁶

If such felicitous pleadings recalled to Mary pleasantly the far-off days of the French court, her advisers were singularly unimpressed by them. To the Scots now around the queen whatever Darnley’s poetic talent, his arrogant nature was merely the final disaster in a long train of possible disadvantages. Firstly there was the attitude of England, crystallized in the discussion of the English Privy Council on 4 June, where the two great perils of Mary’s marriage were laid down as firstly the plain intention of Mary by such a match to occupy Elizabeth’s throne now rather than later, and secondly ‘the increase and credit of the Romish religion in England’. The avowed hostility of England was naturally fuel to the smouldering flames of Scottish hostility: Moray, for example, had viewed the match with great gloom from the start, since he had little desire to see the Catholic Lennoxes raised up, and his own credit and influence with his sister, built up over four years, debased. Added to which, Darnley had made it clear that he regarded Moray’s spreading dominions in Scotland as surprisingly and disagreeably extensive, and even passed unpleasant remarks on the subject to Moray’s brother, Lord Robert Stewart, an unwise choice of confidant.