Mary Stuart (5 page)

The sun in its setting often illuminates the countryside with a red and golden glory, giving to the landscape a false aspect of life and vitality. Such a deceptive aureole surrounded Mary Stuart as she took her final leave of France, for the French made a point of carrying out in her honour a full ceremonial in all its magnificent ostentation. She, who had been a French king's bride, who had fallen from her high estate through no fault of her own, and who had been deprived of her position as France's ruler by a mishap, could not be allowed to leave the land of her adoption unaccompanied and unsung. It must be made abundantly clear to everyone that Mary was not sailing forth under a cloud, as the unhappy widow of a French monarch or as a weak and helpless woman whom her friends had left in the lurch. No, the Queen of Scotland was going home, backed by French honour and French arms. Setting out from Saint-Germain, she made her way to Calais in the company of a vast procession, a cavalcade whose horses were caparisoned with the most elaborate and beautiful harness, trappings inlaid with gold and other precious metals, and whose riders were dressed in the full splendour of which the French Renaissance was capable. The highway leading to the little port was made gay with colour, bright with the polished steel of weapons, loud with the voices of the flower of the French nobility. At the head of the brilliant retinue was a state carriage conveying the Queen's uncles, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinals of Lorraine and Guise. Mary herself was surrounded by the four girls who had never left her, by noblewomen, pages, poets and musicians. The days of romance and chivalry seemed to be living a second springtime. The train was followed by a succession of chariots bearing costly furniture and other objects that had gone to the making of her homes in France. The crown jewels were transported in a closed shrine. As she had come a queen, welcomed with a pageantry and honour worthy of her rank, so too did she leave the country of her adoption, the country which had won the love of her heart. But on this occasion joy was lacking, that innocent joy which had lit up the eyes of an astonished child; this was the fading afterglow of sunset and not the radiance of dawn.

The main body of the princely cortège stayed ashore in Calais. Then the cavalcade dispersed, each rider seeking his own home. Away in Paris, sheltered behind the walls of the Louvre, another monarch was awaiting the return of these nobles who were henceforth to serve him, for courtiers may not live in the pomp of yesterday, it being their business to think only of the present and the future. Dignities and position, not the human being who has to shoulder them, are the only things that count so far as a courtier is concerned. These fine fellows will forget Mary Stuart as soon as the wind has filled the sails of her galleon; they will expunge her image from their hearts. The parting was no more to them than a pathetic ritual, belonging to the same category of public pageantry as a coronation or a funeral. Genuine sorrow at Mary Stuart's melancholy pilgrimage was felt only by the poets, for poets are endowed with keener perceptions and with the twofold gifts of prophecy and remembrance. Those who wept over Mary's going knew only too acutely that with this young woman, who had wished to create a court of cheerfulness and beauty, the Muses would disappear likewise from French territory; they foresaw days filled with vicissitude and uncertainty for themselves and the French people; they sensed the advent of political and religious disputes and contentions, the struggle with the Huguenots, the disastrous St Bartholomew's night, squabbles with zealots and quibblers. Gone were the days of chivalry, gone romance, as the maidenly figure disappeared over the waters. The star of poesy, the star of the “Pléiade”, was about to set in a murky sky rendered the gloomier by the prospect of war. Spiritual happiness, pure and unsullied, sailed away with Mary Stuart. As Ronsard put it, in his elegy
Au Départ
:

(The day whereon the breeze did fill the sails of the galleon which snatched you from our streaming eyes, carried, likewise, far away from France the Muses, who had thought to make that land their dwelling place.) In this same poem the writer, with a heart ever responsive to all that was young and charming, wished to celebrate in the written word that which his ardent eyes would never again behold in the quick, warm flesh. The genuine grief which pulled at his heart strings inspired him to pen a dirge which alone would make him rank high among the poets of his day.

(How can the mouths of poets pour forth song since your departure has struck the Muses dumb? Beauty lives no longer than a day, roses and lilies die when spring is dead. Thus has your flowerlike loveliness passed away after gracing our France for fifteen years, passed with the speed of a lightning flash, leaving behind it nothing but regret, and a grief which continually calls to mind the memory of so radiant a princess.) Whereas by the court and nobles and gentry of France the absent Queen was soon to be forgotten, the poets of that fair realm were to remain for long her faithful servitors; for to the poetic imagination misfortune invests the sufferer with fresh nobility, and she whom the poets had sung on account of her beauty would henceforward be doubly loved because of the evils which befell her. To the end of her days Mary Stuart kept their faithful homage, and their tuneful lyrics accompanied her even as she mounted the scaffold. When a person of intrinsic worth lives a life that is a genuine poem, a true drama, a beautiful saga and ballad, poets will never be lacking to clothe it anew and to breathe into it the fresh and vibrant imagery of inspiration.

A splendid white galleon was riding at anchor in Calais roads. She was a French flagship, flying the Scottish colours as well. Here, on 14th August 1561, Mary Stuart went aboard, accompanied by three of her uncles, a few of the most distinguished noblemen and the four Marys, her inseparable companions. Two other vessels formed an escort. But the ship had not left the inner harbour, her sails had not been fully unfurled, when a portent cast a shadow on this voyage into the unknown. A vessel entering the port the Queen had barely left struck the bar, foundered and sank. Mary, greatly agitated, called upon her captain to save the drowning mariners. But the accident had occurred too suddenly for human aid to be of any avail. This catastrophe was, indeed, a bad omen for the young and inexperienced woman who was leaving the protection of a land she loved to take up her duties as Queen and ruler in a country that was strange and foreign to her.

Was it a secret dread of what fate held in store for her, was it a keen sense of loss as she left what had hitherto been her homeland, was it a feeling that she would not return to these shores, which brought the tears to eyes whose gaze never for a moment left the retreating landscape, the country where she had spent her carefree girlhood, where she had been so happy because no worries had been allowed to approach her? Her passionate grief on bidding farewell to France has been touchingly described for us by Brantôme:

A
FOG, THICKER THAN IS USUAL
in summer even in a northerly clime, shrouded sea and land when, on 19th August 1561, Mary stepped out of the boat which put her ashore at Leith. What a contrast was this arrival in Scotland with the magnificent send-off she had been accorded when bidding adieu to
la douce France
! Then she had been escorted by the bravest and noblest gentlemen of the land; princes and counts, poets and musicians, had graced her passage along the roads and at the port, coining courtly phrases and composing rapturous songs in her honour. In Scotland, no one was expecting her, and it was not until she was handed out of the boat and stepped along on firm ground that a few commoners gathered to gape at the dainty apparition. A fisherman or two in their rough working clothes, a handful of loitering soldiers, some shopkeepers and peasants who had come to sell their sheep in the town looked at her and her suite shyly rather than with enthusiasm. They seemed to be asking themselves who these fine folk could be with their sumptuous clothing and display of jewels. Strangers gazed into the eyes of strangers. A rude welcome, hard and austere as are the souls of these northern people. From the first hour of her landing, Mary Stuart was made to see the appalling poverty of her native country, to realise that during the few days of her voyage she had travelled backwards in history at least one hundred years, that she had left behind her a great civilisation, rich and luxurious, wasteful and sensuous, had exchanged the refined and open-handed culture of France for something narrow, dark, and fraught with tragedy. A dozen times and more, the town had been ravaged and plundered by the English, and by Scottish rebels, so that it could boast of no palace or baronial hall wherein Mary might be received with a dignity worthy of her rank. This night, therefore, she was put up in a burgher’s house; simple quarters it is true, but at least the Queen of Scotland had a roof over her head.

First impressions make a distinctive mark on the mind; they are stamped in deeply, and much of subsequent happenings depends upon whether they are good or bad. Perhaps Mary herself scarcely understood what moved her so profoundly when, after an absence of thirteen years, she returned to her kingdom as a stranger. Could it be homesickness, an unconscious longing for a warm, sweet existence which had taught her to love the French soil? Was it perhaps the shadow cast upon her high spirits by the grey skies of an unknown land? May it not have been a premonition of coming disaster? Whatever the emotion was, Brantôme tells us that hardly did she find herself alone in the room allotted her when she burst into tears. It was not like William the Conqueror, strong in the consciousness of his power, that this poor girl set foot on British earth. Her feeling was one of constraint and perplexity mingled with gloomy forebodings.

Meanwhile, her half-brother, Lord James Stuart (better known to history by his later title, the Earl of Moray, or as the Regent Moray in subsequent years), had been informed of Mary’s arrival, and he in company with some of his fellow noblemen rode with all haste to Leith in order to provide a worthy escort to accompany her on her entry into Edinburgh. But the cavalcade did not cut much of a figure. Under the very transparent pretext of a search for pirates, the English had waylaid one of Mary’s ships. This happened to be the one conveying the favourite palfrey that she used on state occasions, together with the whole of the royal stud. Since the Queen rode well, she would not have been loath to display her equestrian skill to the crowds assembled to see her pass. But being deprived of her own mount, she had to ride into her kingdom sitting on the best horse the town of Leith could provide. A sorry nag, indeed, but serviceable. The mortification was no small thing for a girl of eighteen to face. Her suite fared worse, having to be content with what the stables and stalls of the neighbouring countryside could produce. Again tears suffused Mary’s eyes, tears of wounded pride and regret, for suddenly there was borne in on her the magnitude of her loss the day her husband, Francis II, was taken from her. Also she realised that to be Queen of Scotland was a poor, mean thing when compared with the glory of being Queen of France. Her national pride was piqued at having to cut so wretched a figure before the French gentlemen who accompanied her, and she felt personally affronted at having to present herself for the first time to her new subjects in so pitiable a plight. Instead, therefore, of making a “
joyeuse entrée
” through the main streets of Edinburgh, Mary decided to stop at Holyrood, which was outside the city walls. Her father had built this palace; its crenellated battlements dominated the landscape, dark and defiant; at first sight it created a formidable impression, with its menacing towers, its clear-cut lines, its square-shaped majesty. But how chill, empty and dismal must it have appeared to a child who had lived amid the voluptuous refinement of the French Renaissance. Here were no Gobelins to cheer and refresh the eyes, no chandeliers reflecting their lustrous illumination in Italian mirrors from wall to wall, no costly hangings, no sheen of gold and silver. Many years had gone by since the place had been used; no laughter re-echoed from its forlorn walls, no kingly hand had cared for or renovated the building since her father’s death. Poverty, the age-long curse of her kingdom, stared down at her from every nook.

But, night though it was, the inhabitants of Edinburgh had no sooner learnt that their Queen had come than they issued from their houses, determined to give her a suitable welcome. It is not to be wondered at that this welcome seemed uncouth and boorish to Mary and her entourage, used as they were to French brilliancy and polish. Edinburgh’s townsfolk had no festive attire to grace the ceremony, nor did they know how to set up triumphal arches in honour of their young Queen. Here were no “
musiciens de la cour
” to enchant the ears of Ronsard’s pupil with sweet madrigals and smoothly flowing canzoni. They could only follow the traditional customs such occasions demanded. The country was rich in wood, so what more natural than to construct huge bonfires in the public squares, and by their glare change night into day? They gathered beneath her window and serenaded her with the wild skirling of bagpipes and other outlandish instruments, a sound they called music, but which to her trained ears was nothing but an ugly noise. In addition they raised their rough, manly voices in song; and since they were forbidden by their Calvinistic pastors to sing profane melodies, they filled the air with the lilt of psalms and hymns. With the best will in the world, they were incapable of producing a more soothing lullaby. Nevertheless, Mary Stuart’s heart warmed with the honest love which breathed through these rustic endeavours; the reception was instinct with friendliness towards herself and pleasure at her advent. For decades such harmony had not existed between the sovereign and the people of this distraught and tragical land.

Neither the Queen, young and politically inexperienced as she was, nor her chief advisers, blinked the fact that unusually difficult tasks lay ahead. Maitland of Lethington, who had one of the shrewdest brains of his day in Scotland, wrote prophetically before Mary returned to her native heath: “It could not fail to raise wonderful tragedies.” Even an energetic man, a man with an iron fist and resolute mind, could not for long impose peace on this unmanageable environment with its chaos of contradictions making for perpetual unrest. How, then, could so joyous and ethereal a young queen, a stranger in these parts, unaccustomed to rule, how could Mary be expected to fare better? A poverty-stricken country, a corrupt nobility that seized upon any and every occasion to rise in arms, a countless number of contending clans on the lookout for a pretext to engage in civil strife, a clergy that was half Catholic and half Protestant fighting for precedence, an alert and dangerous neighbour profiting by fratricidal disputes over the border to feather her own nest, antagonism on the part of the big powers ruthlessly making use of Scotland as catspaw in their bloody game—such was the situation by which Mary Stuart was faced.

At the time of Mary’s return, dissension and discord were at their height. Instead of leaving the treasury full, Mary of Guise had left a veritable
damnosa hereditas
—an accursed inheritance—no money, and a war of religions which was to become, perhaps, more bitter on this soil than anywhere else in the world. During the years Mary had spent so happily in France, the Reformation had struck deep roots in the Scottish earth, and was almost universally victorious. The cleavage was felt at court and in the home, in villages and towns, throughout whole kinships and families—one half of the nobility and gentry Catholic whilst the other half was Protestant, the towns advocating the new faith, the countryside the old, clan opposed to clan, family opposed to family, and all parties stimulated in their hatred by fanatical priests and by the political ambitions of foreign powers. What constituted the gravest danger so far as Mary was concerned was that the most powerful and influential of her nobles had gone over to the Calvinistic camp; they had made the best of their opportunities and had seized the lands and properties of the old Church while simultaneously weakening the power of the crown, two achievements which made a special and quasi-magical appeal to this rout of ambitious and greedy rebels. They found a specious and ostensibly moral pretext, as protectors of the true faith, as Lords of the Congregation, to set themselves up in opposition to their ruler, and England as usual was not tardy in giving them a helping hand in this endeavour. Though Elizabeth was by nature of a thrifty disposition, she had not grudged spending more than two hundred thousand pounds sterling in financing these traitors, in fomenting rebellion and civil war to undermine the throne of the Catholic Stuarts. Even now, when a truce had been signed, a goodly number of Mary’s subjects were in the secret pay of the English Queen. Of course equilibrium could easily be restored if Mary should consent to embrace the new faith, and some of her advisers urged her to do so. But Mary was not only a Stuart, she was also a Guise. She was a child of the most ardent champions of the Catholic cause and, though not fanatically pious, she was true to the beliefs of her forebears. Never was she to stray from the path of her convictions, no matter the dangers that encompassed her, and, loyal to her own nature, she chose rather perpetual warfare than, in a moment of cowardly weakness, to run counter to the dictates of her conscience.

Unfortunately this meant that the cleavage between herself and her nobles was irremediable. It is always a fatal thing when a ruler belongs to a different religion from that of the majority of his subjects. The scales cannot vacillate for ever, but must incline definitely in one direction or the other. Thus in the end Mary Stuart was compelled either to make herself mistress of the Reformation or else to bow her head beneath its superior force. The inevitable settlement of accounts as between Luther, Calvin and Rome was, by an extraordinary coincidence, to find a dramatic decision in the fate that awaited her. For the personal struggle between Mary and Elizabeth, between Scotland and England, was decisive also—and this is what makes the struggle so important historically—for the struggle between England and Spain, between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

The ominousness of the situation was aggravated by the fact that the religious dissensions above described extended into Mary’s family, her palace and her council chamber. The most powerful man in Scotland, her half-brother James Stuart, whom she found it expedient to appoint prime minister, was an ardent Protestant and protector of that Kirk which she, being a good Catholic, could not but regard as heretical. Four years earlier he had been the first to append his signature beneath the joint pledge of the Lords of the Congregation “to forsake and renounce the Congregation of Satan, with all superstitions, abominations and idolatry thereto, and moreover to declare themselves manifestly enemies thereto.” What was here called the “Congregation of Satan” was nothing other than the Holy Catholic Church of which his half-sister Queen Mary was a devoted adherent. Thus from the start there was a profound cleavage of convictions between the monarch and her chief minister. Such a state of affairs does not make for peace. For, at the bottom of her heart, the Queen had but one thought—to repress the Reformation in Scotland; whereas James, her brother, had but one desire—to make Protestantism the only religion in Scotland.

James Stuart was to be one of the most notable figures in the life drama of Mary Queen of Scots. Fate had allotted him a leading role which he was destined to play in masterly fashion. A natural son of James V, the fruit of an enduring liaison with Margaret Erskine, who belonged to one of the best families in Scotland, he seemed, no less by his royal blood than by his iron energy, to be the most suitable heir to the throne. Nothing but the political weakness of James V’s position had forced that monarch to refrain from legal marriage with the woman he deeply loved, and (that he might increase his power and fill his purse) to contract a marriage with the French princess who became the mother of Mary Queen of Scots. Thus the stigma of illegitimacy debarred the ambitious youth from the throne. Even though, at the urgent request of James V, the Pope had officially acknowledged James Stuart and five other love children of his father to be of the blood royal, young James was still legally a bastard.

Innumerable times have history and her greatest imaginative exponent, Shakespeare, disclosed the spiritual tragedy of the bastard who is a son and yet not a son, of one whom laws spiritual and laws temporal unfeelingly deprive of a right which nature has stamped on his character and countenance. Condemned by prejudice—the harshest, the most unbending of judges—are these illegitimates, those who have not been procreated in the royal bed, who are treated as inferior to the lawful heirs, though the latter are as a rule weaklings in comparison, because engendered, not out of love, but out of political calculation. They are eternally rejected and thrust out, condemned to beg where they should command and possess. But if the brand of inferiority is visibly placed on a man, the permanent sense of inferiority will either weaken or strengthen him decisively. Such a pressure can break a character or can consolidate it amazingly. Those who are cowardly and half-hearted will be rendered even more so by humiliations of the kind; they will become beggars and flatterers, accepting favours and employment from their officially acknowledged rivals. But in the strong, enforced inferiority will arouse and liberate latent and leashed energies. For the very reason that the direct path to power is not freely opened to them, they will learn to draw power from within their own souls.