Mary Queen of Scots (75 page)

As to the hand of the forger, the finger of accusation must inevitably
point in the direction of Maitland. He, who had been Mary’s secretary for so many years, must have known her hand-writing by heart; it would have been an easy task to produce something of sufficient verisimilitude to convince men who were not in themselves experts on hand-writing. The collation of the writings does not seem to have been particularly prolonged: the passage in the Journal is in any case ambiguous and it is just possible that the collation refers to Morton’s two declarations rather than the queen’s hand-writing;
²⁶
even if such a hasty collation were made, Leicester and his company were certainly inexperienced in the delicate science of judging forged hand-writing. Furthermore, as Queen Mary herself stated, her hand-writing is a particularly easy one to forge for anyone who had made a study of her letters.
§
Of course, if it is accepted that Maitland performed the forgery, he still should not be blamed utterly for the ruin which fell upon the queen as a result of the use made of the letters: Maitland, like his contemporaries, certainly did not foresee the enormous prominence which history was to give to these botched-up documents; the mere fact that he subsequently supported Mary shows what a swift temporary expedient was the production of the famous letters. On the other hand, even if Maitland is acquitted of performing – or directing – the forgery, he cannot be acquitted altogether of participation in the fraud: from the first moment he set eyes on the letters he must have realized that they had not in fact been written by his mistress, since of all the Scottish nobles it was Maitland who had the most profound and sympathetic knowledge of Mary, from the years of service spent with her.

It has been further adduced against Maitland as being the forger that he was married to one of the queen’s ladies, Mary Fleming, who would have been able to assist him in the task. Once again Mary Stuart herself hinted, in her declaratory statement on the subject before the conference at York, in September 1568, that her ladies might be able to counterfeit her handwriting
²⁷
– ‘There are divers in Scotland, both men and women, that can counterfeit my hand-writing, and write the like manner of writing which I use, as well as myself, and principally such as are in company with themselves,’ she pronounced, before going on to add (surely with truth) ‘I doubt not, if I had remained in my own realm, but I would have gotten knowledge of the inventors and writers of such writings before now….’ All her Maries had been educated like herself in France and therefore wrote in different forms of the italic hand. The hand-writing of Mary Beaton is the most similar to that of the queen; furthermore Mary Beaton was at this point involved in a dispute with her former mistress over some jewels. This dispute has led some students to suggest in turn that Mary Beaton was the actual forger. It would be sad indeed if Mary Stuart, who always loved and nourished her attendants with a quasi-maternal passion, was rewarded by this ultimate treachery at such a critical moment in her fortunes, by one of those who had once been nearest and dearest to her. But there is no proof against Mary Beaton or indeed Mary Fleming except the merest supposition: Mary Fleming like her husband Maitland subsequently became one of Queen Mary’s keen advocates in Scotland itself. Furthermore it would surely have been highly indiscreet to have involved one of the Maries in such a confidential business, when ancient loyalties might so easily have prevailed later and unloosed the tongue of the forger at some future date to reveal her own villainy and that of her confederates. There were those much closer home, in the heart of the nobles’ party, foremost among them Maitland, who could do the job as well as any former Marie. In any case, as Queen Mary herself was never shown the letters, she at least never knew for certain the answer to that classic conundrum of history – who wrote the Casket Letters? Had she seen them, the result would surely have been, as she herself put it: ‘to the declaration of my innocence, and confusion of their falsity.’

21 My Norfolk

As the last farcical acts of the conference of Westminster were taking place, preparations were already afoot in far-away Yorkshire to move Queen Mary to a more secure prison at Tutbury in Staffordshire. This time Mary could hardly persuade herself that she was no longer a prisoner, or that restoration to her throne was imminent, since the news that Moray had been allowed to return to Scotland unscathed represented an undeniable blight to even her most timid hopes. In December Mary had told Knollys that she would have to be ‘bound hand and foot’ rather than be removed from Bolton.
¹
In January Knollys was still her jailer, although arrangements were being made to hand the queen over to the earl of Shrewsbury, owner of a magnificent string of dwellings across the midlands of England; here it was felt that Mary could be contained in safety, equally distant from the London of her desire and the dangerously Catholic northern counties. In the meantime Knollys had his own troubles: his wife was sinking fast in the south, and died in the midst of all the commotion involved in the removal.

The journey itself, in icy winter weather through the north of England, was frightful. Lady Livingstone fell ill
en route
and had to be left behind; two days later the queen herself also collapsed between Rotherham and Chesterfield, and the cortège had to be halted while she recovered. Then a message was received by Knollys to say that as Tutbury had not yet been made ready for the queen of Scots’ arrival, they would have to lodge temporarily at Shrewsbury’s own house at Sheffield. But before they could reach Sheffield, another bulletin arrived to say that since all the Sheffield hangings had already been sent to Tutbury, Sheffield itself was uninhabitable – so it was once more on to Tutbury.

This medieval castle, which Mary finally reached on 3 February, was of all her many prisons the one she hated most. She always maintained afterwards that she had begun her true imprisonment there,
²
and this in itself was sufficient reason to prejudice her against it; but Tutbury quickly added evil associations of its own to combine with her innate distaste. The castle, which was large enough to be more like a fortified town than a fortress, occupied a hill on the extreme edge of Staffordshire and Derbyshire from which the surrounding country could be easily surveyed. Although Plot in his
History of Staffordshire
written a hundred years later waxed eloquent on the subject of Tutbury’s view, comparing the castle to Acocorinthus ‘the old Castle of Corinth whence Greece, Peloponnesus, the Ionian and Aegean seas were semel and simul at one view to be seen’, it is doubtful whether the weary royal party and the mourning Knollys would have appreciated the comparison when they finally arrived: for since the early sixteenth century, the structure originally built by John of Gaunt had been virtually falling down, and as a Dutch surveyor reported in 1559, ‘only indifferently repaired’,
³
hence the powerful need to bring hangings and furnishings from Sheffield. Not only was Tutbury in many parts ruined (as the English government from the vantage point of London never seem to have realized), but it was also extremely damp, its magnificent view of the midlands including a large marsh just underneath it from which malevolent fumes arose, unpleasant enough for anyone and especially so for a woman of Mary Stuart’s delicate health. Later on, when Mary had reason to know full well the evils of Tutbury, she wrote of its horrors in winter, and in particular of the ancient structure, mere wood and plaster, which admitted every draught – that
‘méchante vieille charpenterie’
, as she put it, through which the wind whistled into every corner of her chamber. As for the view, Mary herself, in words very unlike the raptures of Plot, described Tutbury as sitting squarely on top of a mountain in the middle of a plain, as a result of which it was entirely exposed to all the winds and
‘injures’
of heaven.
⁴

Nevertheless Mary had perforce to make the best of her new accommodation – her comfort not increased by the fact that her jailers had not even any money to provide for her, and Knollys wrote desperately to London for an immediate grant of £500, since they were destitute.
⁵
She now made the acquaintance of George Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, and his famous or infamous second wife, known to history as Bess of Hardwicke. Shrewsbury, who was to act as the queen’s jailer, with only short breaks, for the next fifteen and a half years, was a man of about forty. He himself was a Protestant although his father had been a fervent Catholic and he
had many Catholic relations. He was immensely rich and possessed an enormous range of properties across the centre of England; but like many rich men he was obsessed with the need to preserve his inheritance, so that in the course of his ward-ship of Queen Mary, his letters to the English court began to sound like one long complaining account book of rising prices, servants’ keep and inadequate subsidies. But Shrewsbury had long proved his loyalty to Elizabeth, and his character, fussy and nervous, constantly worrying about the reactions of the central government to his behaviour or that of his prisoner, made him in many ways an ideal jailer, for a state captive. Despite these suitable attributes of a public servant, Shrewsbury was not a strong character; at the time when he took charge of Mary, he was totally dominated by the redoubtable Bess.

Bess was now forty-nine, eight years older than her husband, and over twenty years older than Mary. She had been married three times previously, and by her second husband Sir William Cavendish of Chatsworth had had eight children. It was no mere flight of fancy that led her third husband Sir William St Loe to address her in letters by the name of this Cavendish mansion, which she herself inherited – the salutation which he often used of ‘my honest sweet Chatsworth’ gives a more realistic indication of the attention which this remarkable lady bestowed upon material possessions than of her actual qualities of nature. Bess’s practical streak led her to marry off two of her Cavendish children, Henry and Mary, to Shrewsbury’s heir Gilbert Talbot and his daughter Grace, in order to preserve as much wealth as possible within the bounds of the family. She was also, in the words of Lodge, ‘a builder, a buyer and seller of estates, a money-lender, a farmer and a merchant of lead and coals and timber’.
⁶
Apart from this financial acumen, in private life the ‘honest sweet Chatsworth’ occupied the role of a termagant, for as Lodge painted her, she was ‘a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling’. In short, Bess was in character the exact opposite of her new charge, Mary Stuart, who was so feminine in both brain and intuition, and, if proud, was also full of generosity and feeling towards others.
*

However, at first meeting, the queen and her new captors got on agreeably enough. The queen spoke ‘temperately’ to Shrewsbury, and Shrewsbury spoke
‘de belles paroles’
to her, as each graciously admitted. Mary was allowed to set up her cloth of state to which she attached such importance, and a certain Sir John Morton was introduced into her
ménage
, who was in fact a Catholic priest, a fact of which Shrewsbury was either ignorant or agreed to turn a blind eye; in any case Mary must have been pleased by the innovation. The queen and Bess were even described by the fond husband Shrewsbury as sitting peacefully together embroidering in Bess’s own chamber where, with Agnes Livingstone and Mary Seton, they delighted in ‘devising’ fresh works to carry out. ‘They talk together of indifferent trifling matters,’ reported Shrewsbury happily, ‘without any sign of secret dealing or practice, I can assure you.’
⁸
It was during this first visit to Tutbury and the early honeymoon period of Mary’s relations with Bess that much of the joint embroideries attributed to them, at Hardwicke Hall, Oxburgh Hall and elsewhere, must have been completed.