Mary Queen of Scots (5 page)

Despite Cardinal Beaton’s strength of purpose, the deciding factor in the
contest for the governorship proved to be the return of those Scottish nobles captured at Solway Moss: after a sojourn in London, they were now despatched north again by Henry
VIII
, like so many Trojan horses, as emissaries of his policy; they included Cassillis, Glencairn, Maxwell and Fleming, besides Angus and his brother George Douglas, who were already in England in exile. While in London they had been induced to sign a series of articles which pledged them to help Henry bring about the marriage of Mary and Prince Edward, and generally advance the cause of England in Scotland, in return for which they were given suitable pensions of English money. Ten of them had even gone further and promised to help Henry himself to achieve dominion and government over Scotland, should the young queen die. The signing of these articles seems to us by modern standards unpatriotic to the point of treachery; it is only fair to point out that they should be judged in the context of an age, in which patriotism, as a modern concept, was only just beginning to exist. Xenophobia there was a primordial dislike of the foreigner, at a period when bad communications made foreigners out of those who would seem close neighbours today; but although this xenophobia was starting to push out a few green shoots of patriotism from time to time, it certainly cannot yet be too closely identified with it.

In January Arran was confirmed in his office of governor, and a few days after the return of the English faction among the nobles, Cardinal Beaton was arrested: it seemed thus certain that the rulers of Scotland during Queen Mary’s minority were to be a protestant pro-English faction. Equally, the matrimonial future of the young queen seemed to lie in the direction of England. Only eleven days after Mary’s birth, Lisle had expressed the general English wish concerning her future: ‘I would she and her nurse were in my lord prince’s house.’
³⁴
Henry’s son, Prince Edward, then aged five, seemed the ideal spouse to unite Scotland and England firmly forever under English suzerainty, and Henry furthermore intended to bring up the Scottish queen actually at the English court, in order to check any possible fluttering for liberty in the Scottish dove-cots. This marriage, which if Edward
VI
had lived, would have antedated the peaceful union of England and Scotland by half a century, would not necessarily have been such a terrible prospect for Scotland, had it not been for the savagely bullying attitude which Henry
VIII
persisted in adopting towards his neighbour. It must be recalled that at this date Mary’s future husband the dauphin of France had not yet been born and his mother Catherine de Medicis, wife of the heir to the French throne, appeared to be barren, having been married ten years without producing any children at all. Thus
there was no French prince in prospect whose merits could be weighed against those of Prince Edward.

If a match with a foreign prince was rejected altogether, then the other obvious matrimonial possibility before the queen’s guardians was to wed her to the son of one of her own nobles: Arran, for example, took the line that his own son would make her the best bridegroom, because the marriage would keep the crown of Scotland within the control of its own people. In March Sir Ralph Sadler came to Scotland as Henry’s envoy, charged with negotiating the marriage of Edward and Mary with the Scottish Parliament. He reported that the queen dowager was far from unfavourable to the project. Indeed at the time, the behaviour of the Scottish nobility may easily have encouraged Mary of Guise to believe that a royal match with her daughter, even with England, was the lesser of two evils, She certainly took the opportunity to display the baby proudly to Sadler, anxious no doubt to contradict the rumours at the time of her birth that the princess was frail and unlikely to live. She had her daughter brought into the room, now aged three and a half months, and with determined thoroughness had her unwrapped by her nurse out of all her clothes, until she was totally naked; thus there could be no suspicion afterwards of some deformity concealed under the swaddling clothes. Sir Ralph Sadler was duly impressed by the sight. He wrote back to King Henry: ‘I assure your Majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the Grace of God.’
³⁵
In the meantime, lest Arran suffer disappointment at the thought of this rich matrimonial prize being wrested from his own son, Henry deliberately wooed the earl with the prospect of a match between his son and Henry’s daughter Princess Elizabeth.

On 1 July the Treaties of Greenwich were drawn up, providing for the marriage of Edward and Mary. These treaties respected Scotland’s independence as a country and provided for the return of Mary as a childless widow if Edward died; the main point on which the Scots insisted and on which Henry disagreed was that the child should not actually leave Scotland until she was ten years old. Henry remained avuncularly anxious to oversee her upbringing personally at the English court – or perhaps he did not trust the Scots to implement their promises in ten years’ time. But in any case the point was never put to the test, since already by the summer of 1543 the internal situation in Scotland had changed radically. Opinion, although Henry
VIII
might be ignorant of the fact, was no longer predominantly favourable to the Protestant and pro-English cause. It was true the advent of Arran as governor had led to the extension of the reformed doctrines and practices – especially the reading of the Bible and preaching
in the vernacular. Knox commented cynically on the number of those who now flaunted their Bibles with the boast, not always true: ‘This has lain under my bed-foot these ten years.’
³⁶
Protestant sympathies formed the most natural bond between those Scots and those English who shared that inclination. But by the summer Cardinal Beaton had somehow eluded captivity – the English suspected that no great efforts had been made to hold him – and in Pitscottie’s words, he began to rage as any lion loosed of his bond; in short he was once more in a position to galvanize Catholic pro-French opinion.
³⁷
Two new arrivals on the Scottish scene – the governor’s bastard half-brother John Hamilton, abbot of Paisley, and Mathew, earl of Lennox, himself – only helped to poison Arran’s mind further against the English alliance. John Hamilton pointed out that by abandoning the cause of Rome. Arran put himself in a vulnerable position in which his father’s divorce might be questioned; Lennox, as head of the rival Stewarts, represented a positive alternative to Arran as governor. Under the circumstances Arran’s vacillating wits were no match for the machinations of the cardinal. French subsidies began to enter Scotland, to vie with the English ones, and the very day after the Treaties of Greenwich had been signed, Sadler reported to Henry that the French ships had been seen lying off the coast of Scotland.

Henry reacted to this news predictably by demanding that the queen be moved away from Linlithgow, which he thought altogether too accessible to the French if they landed. Arran replied smoothly to Sadler that the baby was suffering from ‘the breeding of teeth’ and it might be dangerous to move her at this precise moment. Sadler noted that Arran was as much concerned for her well-being as if she had been his own child. In point of fact, Linlithgow did no longer seem a suitable place in which to guard their queen, although it was fear of abduction by the English, rather than by the French, which now prompted the Scots to move her. On 21 July Cardinal Beaton assembled about 7,000 followers at Stirling and marched down to Linlithgow, together with Huntly, Lennox, Argyll and Bothwell, with the avowed aim of putting the child in charge of some reliable guardians at Stirling Castle. There was as yet no conclusive evidence of a volte-face on the part of the Scottish government. The Protestant earl of Glencairn was deputed to make the new arrangements, and of the four lords thus chosen – Graham, Lindsay, Livingstone and Erskine – Erskine was a natural choice, since the Erskines enjoyed a hereditary right to guard the person of the heir to the throne. (This same Lord Erskine had been one of the personal guardians of the young King James
V
as well as guardian to Mary’s dead brother the prince of Scotland when his father visited the Isles in 1540.)
Equally, since Stirling had formed part of Mary of Guise’s dowry, there was no particular reason why she should not visit it at any time. She wished, although additional care was taken to explain to Sadler that Linlithgow, that splendid palace, was actually too small to lodge both queens comfortably.

The new home of Mary, Stirling, had in the time of Edward
I
’s invasion, been considered the strongest castle in Scotland. Even that optimistic maker of promises, Sir George Douglas, thought it would be extraordinarily difficult to abduct Mary from Stirling in the autumn, and hand her over to King Henry, although he characteristically offered to try, if supplied with enough gold. In spite of its subsequent ornamentation, its commanding situation, surveying both plain and mountain, looking towards the Ochils on one side (where silver for the royal mint was mined) and the Grampian and Trossachs on the other, the castle was unaltered since the days of Edward
I
. Its attractions included the splendour of the great hall of James
V
, which in 1618 John Taylor compared favourably to Westminster Hall,
³⁸
and the palace, a jewel of the Scottish Renaissance, today still showing King James’s initials in the carved panels over its windows. But in 1543 it was the fortress aspect of the castle, high over the town of Stirling, higher still over the plain, and standing at the gateway of the impenetrable territory of the Highlands, which commended it to the lords who there incarcerated their queen for safety.

Henry
VIII
still felt secure enough in the terms of the treaty he had just signed to imagine that he could put Sadler in charge of the queen in her new abode, and he actually laid it down that Mary of Guise was not to be allowed to lodge in the castle with her baby, but should be kept elsewhere in the town and allowed to visit her from time to time, as the little queen’s keepers should think fit.
³⁹
Such might be the distant relationship which Henry in England considered suitable for a child and its mother. But the time when Henry would have any say in Scotland’s affairs was rapidly passing. The king made a series of frantic efforts to maintain his ascendancy over Arran; he also tried to woo his former enemy Cardinal Beaton, and tempt him to throw in his lot with the English, after lying aside his cardinal’s hat and his religion; but his arrest of some Scottish merchant ships sailing to France, and the impounding of the merchants and their goods, aroused popular indignation. Sadler warned him that the temper of the country was turning against him. After torments of indecision, Arran finally decided to throw in his lot with Beaton and the pro-French party, his mind probably made up in the end by the renewed promise of the little queen’s hand for his son. On 8 September, in the church of the
Franciscans at Stirling, ‘the unhappy man’, as Knox disgustedly termed him, did penance for his apostasy and received the Catholic sacrament while Argyll and Patrick, earl of Bothwell, held the towel over his head.
⁴⁰

The day after Arran’s change of faith, on 9 September 1543, Mary Stuart was solemnly crowned in Stirling Castle chapel at the age of nine months. It was an inauspicious date, being the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Flodden, and the coronation scarcely seems to have been an occasion for universal rejoicing. Sir Ralph Sadler reported back that Mary had been crowned ‘with such solemnitie as they do use in this country, which is not very costlie’.
⁴¹
Certainly the Tudor use of ceremonial which Queen Elizabeth
I
was to put to such good effect in subjugating the imagination of her subjects, was not understood in Scotland. Sixteen years later, Elizabeth’s own coronation was a magnificent display of pageantry, with the uncrowned queen its centrepiece, sparkling with jewels, in cloth of gold, revealed to an admiring populace in an open litter. By contrast the coronation of the Stuart queen consisted of the hurried investiture of a tiny child, surrounded by feudal nobility at least as powerful as the crown they nominally served. At the ceremony, the earl of Arran bore the crown, the earl of Lennox bore the sceptre, and the earl of Argyll, also of royal descent from James
I
, bore the sword. The pro-English party, including Angus, Gray, Glencairn, Cassillis and Maxwell, stayed away altogether.

2 England’s Rough Wooing