Mary Queen of Scots (50 page)

The birth of an heir also inevitably moved the child’s own father, Darnley, further down the line of succession for both English and Scottish thrones. Queen Mary, aware of the temperament with which she was dealing, took care to display the baby to him publicly and announce: ‘My Lord, God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you.’ She went on, uncovering the child’s face: ‘Here I protest to God as I shall answer to him at the great day of Judgment, that this is your son and no other man’s son. I am desirous that all here, with ladies and others bear witness.’ She added, as though to clinch the matter by a note of contempt for her husband: ‘For he is so much your own son, that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.’
²⁰
Having thus, as she hoped, preserved her child
from the stigma of illegitimacy, Mary devoted the rest of her time in Edinburgh Castle to his care, having the baby to sleep in her own room, and frequently watching over him at night. A few days after the birth, she sent for Anthony Standen, the faithful equerry who had helped her escape from Holyrood, and had him knighted by Darnley. Pointing to the child in its cradle, she announced in words which showed how far Mary was from forgetting the events after the murder of Riccio: ‘For that you saved his life….’
²¹

The birth of James had two dramatic effects upon Mary Stuart: she no longer had any pressing motive for demonstrating a public reconciliation with Darnley, and at the same time her own extremely precarious health had its balance finally destroyed. There is no evidence that she ever really recovered it before her extremely serious illness at Jedburgh four months later, and this illness in turn led to a prolonged phase of highly nervous almost hysterical ill-health which lasted right until her incarceration on Lochleven the following June. But for her actions and movements during the next eight months, the critical period from the birth of James in June 1566 until the death of Darnley in February 1567, it is extremely important to distinguish between information and reports written at the time – that is to say before the death had taken place – such as ambassadors’ comparatively impartial reports on the state of Scotland, and Mary’s own letters posted to France, which could not be altered by
arrière pensée
, and those accounts written long after the event, specifically to prove Mary’s guilt with Bothwell. These later accounts include the
Book of the Articles
written by Buchanan as an accusatory brief at the time of her trial in England, two years later, and Buchanan’s own
History
, and his
Detection of Mary Queen of Scots.
The point of Buchanan – who was bound by allegiance to Lennox, and therefore to Darnley – is to prove as salaciously as possible that Mary had enjoyed an adulterous liaison with Bothwell from the birth of her child, and even possibly before. But in the course of making his charges, Buchanan allowed himself the luxury of so many glaring inaccuracies that it is difficult to take his opinion on any aspect of the situation seriously – of these the comment on the queen’s will is only a minor example: the tale of Bothwell hauled up by a rope unwilling and half-naked out of one mistress’s bed directly into that of the queen by James’s wet-nurse is probably the most ludicrous.
²²

It is a remarkable fact that there is no uncontested evidence among the letters or reports written
before
Darnley’s death, whether French, English or Scottish, to show that Mary was involved in a sexual affair with
Bothwell while her husband was still alive. There are on the other hand a number of pointers to the fact that she was not. The picture of the Scottish court through the autumn and winter of 1566, built by contemporary comments, is of a queen to whom her husband was becoming an increasingly distasteful problem, and a nobility to whom he was becoming an increasingly urgent one. Not one observer made any attempt during this period to connect the queen’s growing scorn for Darnley with her growing affection for Bothwell, although the point would have been one which the ever-watchful ambassadors would have been delighted to make if they had felt it to be true. Of the couple, Mary and Bothwell, Mary was wracked in health, not in itself very conducive to romance, and desperate to solve her marital problems; she was also well aware by now that she had created these problems for herself originally through her physical infatuation for Darnley; the very last intention in her mind was to tread so soon again down the treacherous paths of passion. Bothwell on the other hand was steadily bent on his own personal advancement in Scottish government affairs. It is questionable whether the one had the energy, and the second the inclination for the time-wasting business of an adulterous love affair when there were so many important matters to hand.

Before the end of July, Mary left Edinburgh for Newhaven, to see if a change of air would restore her lost health, and from there went on by sea to Alloa, the seat of Lord Mar. She particularly enjoyed the pleasure of sea travel – as Buchanan put it, she ‘joyed to handle the boisterous cables’, but on this occasion she made the journey alone, unaccompanied by either Bothwell or Darnley. Darnley, having not been informed of her departure, later followed Mary to Alloa but stayed there only a few hours, as Bedford duly reported back to England. In the same letter Bedford also noted that Bothwell’s arrogance was making him so unpopular with his fellow-nobles that he believed that there might be some plot in hand against him. A few days later Bedford reported again that Bothwell was now as much hated as Riccio had ever been, and also that the queen was not getting on well with her husband.
²³
It was significant that Bedford made no attempt to connect the two facts: on the contrary, by mid-August it was Moray’s influence over his half-sister which was said to be causing Darnley to sulk: Bedford wrote that his jealousy was such that ‘he could not bear that the Queen should use familiarity with men or women, and especially the ladies of Argyll, Moray and Mar, who keep most company with her’.
²⁴
Mary now went hunting in the extreme south of Peeblesshire, with Bothwell, Moray and Mar, but without Darnley.

Reunited in each other’s company at the house of Traquair, home of
John Stewart of Traquair, captain of the queen’s guard, the royal couple apparently gave way to their most open and shocking disagreement. Romantic Traquair, said to be the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, guarding and guarded by the Tweed, lies amid rich park lands ideal for hunting. A stag hunt was planned for the next day, in which both Mary and Darnley were expected to take part. But at supper, the queen begged to excuse herself on the grounds that the exertion would be too much for her health. When Darnley refused to listen, she whispered in his ear that she suspected she was again
enceinte.
Darnley answered aloud, in roughly the same words he had used before during the ride to Dunbar: ‘Never mind, if we lose this one, we will make another,’ at which Traquair rebuked him sharply for his un-Christian behaviour. Darnley (who was probably drunk) then exclaimed coarsely: ‘What! ought not we to work a mare well when she is in foal?’ The anecdote comes from Nau,
²⁵
and in relating it to him the queen may perhaps have allowed time to have over-coloured Darnley’s brutality. But the possibility that Mary could have been
enceinte
once more – it was now two months since the birth of Prince James – is an interesting one in view of Buchanan’s accusations that Mary never again admitted Darnley to her bed after the child’s birth. A ballad written in 1568 after Mary had fled to England, called
The Earl of Bothwell
, represented her as vowing after the murder of Riccio

In view of Mary’s conviction that Darnley had aimed at her death and that of her child, her refusal to grant him his conjugal rights would be easy to understand: but of course it could scarcely be expected to lead to happier relations between them. It is noticeable that his humiliation as a husband was one of Darnley’s main points of complaint on the occasions when he voiced his grievances. Taking into account Mary’s ill-health, the most likely state of affairs between them during July and August would seem to be an occasional reluctant acquiescence on the part of the queen to her husband’s embraces, which did little to convince Darnley that she either loved or respected him. After Mary’s illness, and especially once the matter of a divorce had been broached at Craigmillar, her abstinence from any physical relationship was certainly total: by then she clearly wished to have nothing more to do with him as a husband, and would therefore hardly have run the risk of another pregnancy.

On her return from Traquair to Edinburgh, the queen arranged for the transference of the little prince to Stirling Castle, the traditional nursery of
royal princes. His cortège accordingly set off with four or five hundred harquebussiers round it for protection, and the prince was handed into the care of the Erskine family as his hereditary governors. In delegating the upbringing of her child in this manner, Mary Stuart was in no way deviating from normal practice, and certainly not showing herself a cold or unfeeling mother. Fosterage was on the contrary the standard custom of the Scottish noble families, who handed over their children in babyhood, and the custom of fosterage, being regarded as a mark of aristocracy, gradually came to be copied lower down the social scale. Mary, in her anxious watching over James’s cradle, and her immense solicitude for the grandeur of his christening ceremony, which it was within her power to arrange, showed an almost pathetically strong maternal anxiety, borne out by her touching fondness for all other small children with whom she came in contact throughout her life. The preparations for his first nursery at Stirling were both detailed and sumptuous, done to the queen’s personal command: there were to be buckets of gold and silver ‘the finest that can be gottin’, lengths of blue plaiding for the baby’s cradle, fustian for his mattress, feathers for his bolster; his room was to be hung with tapestries, as well as adequately provided with blankets. The needs of Lady Reres in her capacity of wet-nurse were not overlooked: she too was to have plaiding to cover her bed and a canopy to go over it. The instructions were to be carried out without any delay, because it was all ‘very needful to be had’.
²⁶

In September, Maitland, long out of favour with the queen, was reconciled to her, and returned to court; he was also reconciled with Bothwell. At the end of September there was a confrontation between Mary and Darnley in front of the French ambassador and many of the nobles, in which both stated their grievances. The emphasis was all on Darnley’s status within the kingdom, and whether Mary was still allowing him his rights as king. Lennox first brought the matter up in a letter to Mary of 29 September when he told his daughter-in-law that Darnley was now so humiliated by his position that he intended to go abroad, having a boat all prepared for the journey.
²⁷
As a result Mary faced Darnley the next day in front of the Council and du Croc, and made him a
‘fort belle harangue’
in which she asked him in what respect she had offended him, and pleaded with him, with hands joined together, not to spare her anything, but to tell her the truth. The lords then joined in asking Darnley how they had offended him, and even du Croc chimed in with the view that if Darnley went abroad it would be an offence to the queen’s honour. Darnley made little of this opportunity for airing his grievances against his
wife, but merely said flatly that he had no particular cause for offence; his sting was in his deliberately melodramatic departure from the queen’s side, without kissing her, and vowing in sybilline fashion that she would not see him again for a long time. Whereupon the lords and du Croc crowded round the queen and told her to continue in her present course of wise and virtuous behaviour, and the truth between her and Darnley would soon be generally known.
^b

Two weeks later du Croc wrote to Catherine de Medicis of the newly excellent relations which existed between Queen Mary and her subjects, through her own efforts and good qualities – they were ‘so well reconciled with the Queen as a result of her own prudent behaviour, that nowadays there was not a single division to be seen between them’. Darnley, on the other hand, was equally ill-regarded by both parties; having apparently learnt nothing from his recent experiences, he still wanted to rule everything; yet there was not a single noble who did not take his cue for his behaviour towards Darnley from the queen. Du Croc noted that preparations were already being made for the christening of the little prince, £12,000 being raised by direct taxation to pay for it, and he represented Catholics and Protestants as being equally enthusiastic about the coming celebrations. Indeed, he attributed much of Darnley’s spoilt and sulky behaviour to the fuss which was going on about the christening: not only was Darnley jealous of Mary’s reconciliation with the Protestant lords, but he was also fearful lest strangers should witness his obvious fall from favour at the ceremony – a prospect which was intolerable to his
‘haute et superbe’
temperament.
²⁸

To the queen’s attitude to the official religion of her country, as much as to the birth of an heir, must be attributed much of this Indian summer of warm relations with her nobility. The tender green shoots of a pro-Catholic policy which she had put out in the spring of 1566 had been rudely blighted by the sharp frost of Riccio’s murder, which among other things demonstrated the strength of the Protestant lords who could even storm her apartments. For the rest of the fifteen months of her personal rule, Mary made no attempt to help the Scottish Catholic Church, but showed on the contrary a renewed warmth towards the organization of the reformed religion. On 3 October an Act of the Privy Council ordained that benefices worth less than 300 merks annually were to go to the Protestant ministers, and there were now some instances of ministers being appointed to benefices. On 13 December a further law was enacted to help the Protestant administration; and on 20 December the Church received from the queen a direct gift of £10,000 as well as provisions.
²⁹
Such an attitude to the religion which the majority of her subjects professed may seem to us today pragmatic in terms of government and admirable in terms of tolerance and good order. There could after all be no doubt of Mary’s personal attachment to the Catholic faith, since quite apart from her early words to Throckmorton, she never wavered from the holding of her own personal Mass in Scotland, even at the times when it would have been most expedient to do so, and the Mass itself as we have seen was a most detestable symbol to the fervent Protestants. One may therefore applaud her far-sighted policy, all the more remarkable in one born after all in the year in which the Spanish Inquisition was founded. But of course Pius
V
, in distant Rome, could not be expected to view the situation in the same detached light: indeed, to him the flagging of his spiritual daughter’s newly kindled zeal was a painful prospect, and one to be combated with the double weapon of a papal mission and a papal subsidy. A papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, was despatched, bearing 150,000 crowns in gold from the Pope, intended to help the queen combat the heretics; but now as before, Queen Mary showed an absolute disinclination to receive the nuncio on Scottish soil, on the grounds that his arrival would occasion ‘great tumults’.
³⁰
Mondovi was in fact lingering in France, awaiting permission to land, when the news came of Mary’s serious illness at Jedburgh.