Mary Queen of Scots (8 page)

All four little Maries were of noble birth, but Mary Fleming was considered chief among them by reason of the royal blood which flowed in her veins, through her mother Lady Fleming. Mary Seton came from one of the grandest Scottish families, being the daughter of George, 6th Lord Seton, by his second marriage to a French woman, Marie Pieris, who had come to Scotland as one of Mary of Guise’s maids-of-honour. Mary Beaton was the daughter of Robert Beaton of Creich, and grand-daughter of Sir John Beaton, the hereditary keeper of the royal palace of Falkland; the Beatons of Creich were a younger branch of that family whose senior line had given to Scotland Cardinal David Beaton, and were to provide Queen Mary with her faithful ambassador, Archbishop James Beaton; Mary Beaton’s mother like that of Mary Seton had been a French lady-in-waiting. Mary Livingstone was the daughter of Mary’s guardian, Lord Livingstone, and thus also lay within the magic inner circle of families who could expect to attend on the queen. Mary Stuart’s Maries were very far
from being four ciphers, who could be dismissed by one generic name; of widely different characters, they were to enjoy widely different adventures. Although their public lives all began at the same point on a galley sailing to France in 1548, they ended at points far from each other, and in all but one case, far from the queen they were appointed to serve.

Accompanied by her train of lords, and her miniature train of children, Mary Stuart embarked for France. Her mother’s sorrow was extreme, as the Englishman Henry Jones noted when he wrote to Somerset, on 9 August. ‘The Old Queen do lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvelleth she heareth nothing from her.’
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Mary of Guise’s feelings can be readily understood. For the second time in her life she had to endure the keen pain of being parted from her child, to be brought up in a distant land, by other hands than hers. Furthermore, her daughter’s journey was believed to be hazardous, and there was no certainty that she would arrive safely in France, since it was thought that the English intended to intercept the galleys. It is true that this danger proved in the end to be illusory: the English, who must have known that the Scottish queen would shortly be despatched to France, once Parliament had given its assent to the marriage, made no serious efforts at interception. But this was not appreciated at the time of Mary Stuart’s departure, and elaborate precautions were taken to send her on the longer western route from Dumbarton, rather than the natural short route from the east coast, in order to elude the English. Mary of Guise had to suffer the natural pangs of a mother’s loss coupled with fears for her daughter’s safety, at the same time as the political situation in Scotland, even with French aid, was scarcely such as to promote peace of mind. The combination of anxieties called forth all the resources of this stoical lady, who returned for a short while to the pleasant palace of Falkland to ease her sorrow.

For the alleviation of her unhappiness, the French commander sent by Henry
II
, the Seigneur de Brezé, wrote a series of letters to Mary of Guise, for which we are indebted for an account of her daughter’s behaviour on the journey.
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On 31 July de Brezé reports that Mary is ‘as cheerful as you have seen her for a long time’. Whether out of diplomacy or genuine feeling, de Brezé announced that in the ten days in which the queen and her retinue remained at sea without sailing, it was only Mary who did not fall sea-sick. On 3 August, de Brezé reports that Mary is still in good health and has still not been sea-sick, in spite of the storms, which makes him think she will do well on the open sea. Finally, on 7 August, they departed, although the weather was still far from settled, and de Brezé wrote to the queen dowager that on two or three occasions he even thought they would
have to go back to Dumbarton again. The route taken led them westwards, right round the coast of the Isle of Man, Wales, the point of Cornwall, and so to the English Channel and the coast of France. The stormy weather chased them all the way, and one night, when they were about ten leagues off the Cornish point, the sea was so remarkably wild, and the waves so high and vast, that the rudder of the ship was smashed. Dismay was universal. According to de Brezé, it was only due to divine intervention that they were able to replace the rudder almost at once, and so proceed in safety, in spite of the heavy seas which were running. In all this drama, Mary Stuart alone seems to have remained unmoved, unknowing of the dangers ahead, uncaring of the dangers around her. In high spirits, untroubled by the maladies which laid low her attendants, she was even able to poke fun at them for their sea-sickness.

The company finally landed on the coast of France on 13 August. The poet Joachim du Bellay mentions the general relief of the French at reaching dry land in his
Epithalamion
on the marriage of Mary and Francis ten years later.

he wrote, with a vividness which suggests some member of the court had provided him with a personal description of the incident. On balance of probabilities it is to Roscoff, a little fishing village near Brest which sits out into the sea like a ship riding at anchor, that the honour of receiving Mary’s first footsteps on French soil must be given.
†
But there is no contemporary evidence to support the story that this famous footstep was actually traced on the rock on her arrival, nor the tradition that the chapel of St Ninian, now standing to mark the spot, was founded by Mary later in the year. As Mary did not return to Brittany in 1548, the chapel’s origins seem to lie among the many pleasant cobwebs of fantasy which surround her story.
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According to John Knox, Mary Stuart had thus been sold to the devil, and despatched to France ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm, and for her final destruction’.
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In the eyes of Mary of Guise, whatever her personal unhappiness, her ewe-lamb had thus been snatched from danger in ever-changing and ever-perilous Scotland, and sent on her way to the glorious future which awaited her at the French court. Of Mary herself, nothing is known of her feelings beyond her high spirits on the journey itself. As she was five years and eight months at the time of her landing in France, it may be conjectured that Scotland, Scottish life and all it stood for, for better or for worse, must quickly have faded from her mind, in favour of new and vivid French impressions. Some memories there were which must have remained, and the visit of her mother to France two years later brought them back to the surface. But in general, her recollections were at the mercy of the tales told to her by her Scottish attendants in France, since stories, often repeated, soon achieve the status of memories in the minds of young children. Presumably Mary’s remembrances of her native land became rapidly formalized. The next thirteen years of her life, from the age of six to nineteen, were to be spent in France. The development of her character is therefore predominantly a French creation. Up till now, vague events of violence, political intrigue and flight have swirled above her unconscious head. From the moment of her arrival in France, the career of Mary Stuart embarks on a more positive course.

3 The Most Perfect Child

From the moment of her arrival in France, and indeed for the next twelve years, Mary Stuart was the focus of excited happy interest. The eulogistic poems and formal epithalamia which poured forth from the pens of French poets such as du Bellay and Saint-Gelais on the occasion of her marriage in 1558 were not more laudatory than the enthusiastic descriptions which were now penned by the entire French court as well as her Guise relations. Henry
II
himself set the tone. When asked what precedence Mary should be given, he ruled that
‘ma fille, la Royne d’Ecosse’
should walk before his daughters, the princesses of France, first of all because the marriage with the dauphin had already been decided on, and secondly because she was herself a crowned queen of an independent country. ‘And as such,’ he wrote, ‘I want her to be honoured and served.’
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In marked contrast to her childhood treatment in Scotland, where she was considered at first a sickly child, unlikely to live, and later a pawn in a dynastic game, even at five years old Mary was hailed as a figure of romance in France, a brave little queen who had been forced to flee the barbaric Scots, the cruel English, for the safe arms of all-embracing France. The stage was already set in French minds for the appearance of a childish heroine; to their satisfaction, Mary Stuart with her charm, her prettiness and the natural docility of youth, was ideal material to be moulded into the playing of this golden role.
*

The first stage of her two-month journey towards the French court took Mary merely to Morlaix, where she was received by the lord of Rohan, accompanied by the nobility of the country, and lodged in a Dominican convent. She was then taken to the church, where a
Te Deum
was sung in honour of her safe arrival, which appears to have had but a limited effect, since on her route past the town gate, the drawbridge broke, and fell into the river under the weight of horsemen. The Scottish lords in her suite, their natural suspicions of the foreigners unassuaged after a week in France, immediately started to shout ‘Treachery! Treachery!’, at which the lord of Rohan shouted out indignantly ‘No Breton was ever a traitor !’ However, for the few days Mary remained at Morlaix, to pacify the Scots all the gates of the town were taken off their hinges and the chains of the bridges were broken.
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From Morlaix, Mary’s route lay overland to the Loire, and she then proceeded down the great river by boat towards the castle of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the royal children were then in residence. King Henry himself was absent from his family throughout the summer and autumn campaigning. A request for M. de Brezé to join him meant that Mary’s companion during her sea voyage now handed her over in turn to the care of her grandmother, Duchess Antoinette of Guise, who, it was planned, should smooth over the next period of transition before she reached Saint-Germain. Although we learn from de Brezé’s report to Mary of Guise, made many months later, that the whole journey was punctuated with tragedy – both guardians, Lords Erskine and Livingstone, were severely ill, and one of the queen’s train
‘le petit Ceton’
(young Seton) died at Ancenis
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– this decimation of Mary Stuart’s suite seems to have passed comparatively unnoticed, since into her life now swept the formidable lady who was to exert one of the strongest influences on her childhood.

The kindly interference of Antoinette of Guise in her daughter Mary’s Scottish affairs, at the time of her marriage to James
V
, has already been noticed. Alone of Mary Stuart’s close relations, she was blessed with longevity, dying only in 1583, four years before her grand-daughter’s execution, at the age of eighty-nine, though perhaps she herself did not view her longevity as such a blessing, since in the course of her life she was fated to witness time’s sickle cut such terrible swathes in her family, that she in fact outlived all of her twelve children except one. The daughter of Francis, count of Vendôme and Marie of Luxembourg, she was married to Claude, duke of Guise at the age of sixteen. The birth of twelve children, between 1515 and 1536, was not a particularly remarkable feat by the standards of the time, but the vigorous strain of the Guises appears to have
resisted the inroads of infant mortality with unusual vitality and of the twelve, ten survived; the mother of this remarkable brood was, in herself, a remarkable woman. She exhibited considerable administrative talent, which she handed on to her daughter Mary of Guise – not only at domestic economy, a subject at which she was considered to excel, but in the running of the vast and increasing Guise dominions, surrounding their palace of Joinville. Unlike her sons, she seems to have had a genuine streak of austerity in her disposition, and the great life of the court, the magnificent but insubstantial rewards of human glory, seem to have plucked no chord of sympathy in her nature. Her family pride, on the other hand, was enormous, and her sense of her sons’ destiny on a similar scale. Much later in her history, when Charles
IX
offered her a choice of rank as a princess of the blood, to which in spite of the pretension of the Guises, she was not strictly entitled, she replied loftily that no rank could be more honourable to her than that of her husband. Traditionally, she kept her coffin in the gallery which led the way to Mass, dressed herself in black and with a proper sense of her own end, reminiscent of Philip
II
of Spain, surrounded herself with objects necessary to her own funeral.
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