The Wild Queen (23 page)

“It is an act of obedience, madam, to forcibly remove and imprison a ruler who is disobedient to the will of God and keep that ruler confined there until the ruler comes to his senses.”

I could scarcely believe what I heard. Never before had I been spoken to in such a way. But then, never before had I been in a position of ruling. I had held the title of queen of Scots since a few days after my birth, but for nearly eighteen years I had not had an opportunity to exercise the power that was rightfully mine. Now I intended to use it. Knox's challenge to that power astonished me.

When I found my voice, I said, “I see that you believe my subjects should obey you, rather than me, and follow their own wishes rather than my commands. In the end, then, I am subject to them and to you rather than they and you being subject to me.”

“It is as you say, madam,” he acknowledged with a bow and a barely concealed sneer.

“Then you, sir, are dismissed!”

I could not claim any sort of victory over the rude Protestant preacher, but neither could he in all conscience declare himself the winner. Once I was alone, I gave way to tears of frustration and fury, for I had no idea how to deal with a man who held so much savagery and hatred for me in his heart.

I
T HAD BEEN
nearly nineteen years since my father, King James V, had occupied the Scottish throne. After his death, my mother did her duty as regent until a governing council replaced her. Now I had returned to Scotland to claim my rightful inheritance, and I needed to establish myself as ruler in the minds and hearts of my subjects in every part of the kingdom. I had to begin at once.

My first official act was to appoint a privy council. Among the councilors were my brother James, whom I now elevated to earl of Moray, as he had so long desired and pressured me to do; William Maitland, who had served my mother well as her secretary of state; James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, with whom I felt a strong affinity; and thirteen others. Only four councilors were of the Catholic faith. In general they were an intelligent, well-educated lot; many had studied and traveled abroad. Some I trusted more than others, but they all knew the Scots people far better than I did, and many were heads of powerful clans whose cooperation I needed. I believed I could keep an eye on the one who worried me most—namely, my cousin George Gordon, earl of Huntly, about whom my mother had warned me.

I met with the privy council for the first time on the sixth of September, just two days after my distressing encounter with John Knox. When the council session ended, I left Edinburgh on a royal progress. I had two goals: to acquaint myself with my realm, and to allow my subjects to become acquainted with their new queen. My cortège, with a large retinue of servants and friends, followed a semicircular route to the north of Edinburgh. We stopped first at Linlithgow Castle, where I was born, and then moved on to Stirling, where I had spent my early years with my mother; after this we went to Perth and Dundee, and finally we traveled by ferry across the River Tay to Fife. At every stop I made a triumphal entry and received a hearty welcome and fine gifts. The greatest gift was a new appreciation of Scotland's rugged beauty, so different from the more refined landscape of France. If my elegant gilded carriage ever arrived, it was destined to remain unused on the land's deeply rutted roads, which were by turns rocky or muddy and were often impassable.

As we made our way through the country shires, I met the wealthy nobles and the prosperous lairds, those proud, powerful men who ruled their landholdings as though they were small kingdoms. These men and their wives greeted me with the same warm hospitality that Andrew Lamb's family had shown me in my first hours in Scotland. I enjoyed meat roasted on spits and every kind of delicacy from the sea, prepared simply. They presented me with lengths of woolen cloth marvelously woven in plaid patterns and assured me that I would appreciate the warmth of these woolens as the weather turned cold and damp and winter sank its teeth into every corner of the kingdom, not to let go for many a long month.

While the lairds and nobles lived in luxury in their turreted castles surrounded by walls and moats, the poor huddled in squalid hovels with neither gates nor fences, their few animals wandering freely among the hedgerows. I was deeply moved when country folk in their mended clothes rushed out of their humble dwellings and crowded around us, not to beg for alms, as I had seen so often in the towns and cities of France, but to offer their greetings and their blessings. They seemed to ask nothing in return but my goodwill, and I promised myself that as their queen I would do all in my power to improve their lot in life.

After a stay at St. Andrews, where the views from the castle were magnificent but the bloody works of the Protestant reformers a few years earlier were still fresh in everyone's memory, we moved on to Falkland Palace. I was shown the chamber where my father, lying on his deathbed, had heard the news that Marie of Guise had borne him a daughter—“a lass.” Deeply disappointed, he had turned his face to the wall and breathed his last. I sent away my escorts and remained alone in the chamber. “I was the cause of your death, Father,” I murmured, still unable to rid myself of that conviction. “What would you think of me now? What would you say to me? How would you advise me?”

The walls gave back no answer, and I had no wish to linger. My entourage was waiting for me in the antechamber, exchanging worried looks. “Shall we go on?” I asked with false cheer.

We resumed the progress, still within a long day's journey of Edinburgh. When I reached Holyrood Palace at the end of September, Scotland was, as promised, already in the firm grip of winter.

***

I was elated to find that while I had been away, the transport ships that had set out from Calais weeks earlier had finally arrived in Leith. Carts from all over the city were commandeered to unload my possessions as well as the baggage of the staff of French servants who had accompanied me. The gilded carriage was sent off directly to storage to await the day when the Scottish roads might become passable.

The chests of furnishings and trunks containing most of my finery were carried to my apartments. For the next few weeks, when I was not meeting with my advisers regarding matters of governance, I was having a delightful time decorating my new home.

Tapestries were hung in every hall and chamber, and Turkish carpets that were both beautiful and warm underfoot were rolled out on the stone floors. Special stools, carved and painted, were set out for my Four Maries, with folding stools available for visitors. My gilded throne, covered in crimson velvet and cloth of gold, was placed in the throne room with a splendid cloth of estate mounted above it. The dining hall was now properly furnished with banqueting tables and benches, and cupboards displayed enough gold and silver plate and goblets and ewers and salvers to supply the grandest banquet.

The Four Maries helped me decide where to keep my collection of gowns, furs, and jewels. “Perhaps much of it could be kept below, in the king's apartments,” Livingston suggested.

“Until you have installed in those chambers a king of the realm,” La Flamin added archly, a remark I chose to ignore.

“A good thing that you will not be required to wear mourning for much longer,” observed Livingston as servants carried away armloads of silks and velvets.

She had observed correctly; I could scarcely wait to lay aside the somber clothes that I had worn for nearly a year and dress once again in my elegant gowns. On the fifth of December, the anniversary of my husband's death, I called for two half days of mourning at Holyrood, out of respect for King François. Almost no one other than the Four Maries attended the memorial Mass with me. It seemed that
le petit roi
was nearly forgotten—and it was true that I rarely thought of him. My life had taken me in a direction we had not considered, and I had no choice but to get on with it.

When the two half days of mourning were over—on the eighth of December, and my nineteenth birthday—I put away my mourning clothes and eagerly selected a dark green damask trimmed with gold braid and the proper jewels to go with it. People were arriving in the city from the surrounding countryside for the coming Yuletide.

Beginning that day, I ordered banquets and entertainments and masques, music and dancing and feasting every night through Twelfth Night, the sixth of January. I wanted this to be a brilliant season—an entire month of celebration! Song and poetry were part of it, and I hired a number of musicians as permanent members of my staff and appointed a court poet to provide the celebrators with verses as needed. Three of my
valets de chambre
formed a singing group to perform regularly at my banquets, but they needed a fourth to sing the low part in the quartet. A member of the Italian diplomatic delegation, David Rizzio, was said to have a fine bass voice. I summoned Rizzio to my chamber.

“The quartet requires a bass,” I told him. “Do me the favor of joining them.”

Rizzio agreed, and when the ambassador returned to Italy at the end of the Yuletide season, Signor Rizzio stayed on in Edinburgh.

***

There was much to celebrate at the beginning of 1562. A monarch again occupied the throne of Scotland. Holyrood as well as the other royal palaces had been restored to a magnificence not seen in a long time—I had paid for it from my own funds. I was confident that all would go well in my kingdom, my “auld country”

The climax of the season was Twelfth Night. The cooks produced an enormous black bun cake, rich with dried fruits and spices. Somewhere inside the cake was a bean; whoever found the bean was crowned king or queen for the night. As it happened, Mary Fleming triumphantly produced the precious bean and claimed the golden crown. La Flamin took her place on my throne, and I knelt humbly before her and swore my fealty to the new queen. The “joyousity” that the Scots nobility expected and had made clear to me they wanted had returned, to the delight of everyone—except John Knox.

Just after Twelfth Night, my companions and I and members of the court made a long day's journey south of Edinburgh to James Hepburn's Crichton Castle for the wedding of Hepburn's sister Lady Janet to my half brother John Stuart. I had a fondness for weddings, and I could now indulge my taste for fine gowns and jewels, though I still often dressed in widow's black, which I found flattering. After three days of banquets and masques and other entertainments so welcome during the long nights and short days of the Scottish winter, we returned to Edinburgh to prepare for the next big wedding: my eldest brother, James, who now enjoyed the title of earl of Moray, was to marry Lady Agnes Keith. The wedding took place in February at the High Kirk of St. Giles, only a short distance from Holyrood. John Knox himself preached the sermon, and then we all withdrew to Holyrood Palace for three more days of brilliant celebration.

The preacher complained that the banquets and masques and dancing offended many godly people. It was hardly a surprise, then, when the following Sunday John Knox thundered from his pulpit in a sermon lasting some two hours condemning the “wanton skipping” by women who could not have been “honest” or they would never have indulged in such wicked behavior. The women skipping wantonly included
me.

***

Among the celebrations and the joyousity, an instance of poor judgment on my part led to disastrous consequences. A young page, Pierre de Boscotel de Chastelard, had been among those who accompanied me to Scotland from France. Chastelard was a poet and musician of considerable skill as well as an exceptionally graceful dancer. When he sent me flattering verses, I invited him to court, delighted by his talent and pleased by his presence. I gave him generous gifts of money to buy himself new clothes, as I often did to those whom I particularly liked. But I did not realize that Chastelard thought he was in love with me. Worse, he misinterpreted my friendship and convinced himself that the welcome I offered him and the compliments I paid him proved that I returned his love.

Soon after the weddings of my two brothers I danced with Chastelard until a late hour. That night, apparently carried away by his romantic delusions, he crept into my bedchamber before I arrived and hid beneath my bedstead. My grooms discovered him there and dragged him out by his ankles. When I heard the tumult, I rushed in, and, horrified at the liberties he had taken, I ordered him to leave Scotland and never return. He wept and apologized many times over, but I refused his apologies. I considered the matter finished.

I was wrong. In a matter of weeks Chastelard returned to Scotland—it is possible that he never left—and insinuated himself once again into my court. As I did not see fit to send him off to serve a term in prison, as I should have and as he deserved, he apparently believed he had been forgiven and restored to my good graces. For a second time he dared to invade the privacy of my bedchamber, this time as my ladies were preparing to undress me. My brother James heard my screams and ran in with his men-at-arms.

“He came here to ravish me!” I cried, truly terrified. “For this he must die!”

Chastelard was carried off and thrown into a dungeon to await a public trial. I worried that he would somehow convince the judge that I was at fault and had encouraged him, toyed with his deep feelings. But he was found guilty of treason and condemned to death. He begged for clemency, which I refused to grant.

My brother Lord Moray made me an unwilling witness to Chastelard's beheading. “If you order a man's execution, madam, you must be prepared to see it through,” said my brother coldly.

I took my place on a parapet overlooking the market square at St. Andrews, where a scaffold stood ready My hands were shaking, and my legs were so weak that I had to sit down as the poet was led to his doom. Chastelard gazed steadily at me as his last moments drew near and called out, “Adieu, you who are so beautiful and so cruel, you whom I cannot stop loving!” And then the ax fell.