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Only after her imprisonment in England had she reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone.
Mary’s death would alter the way that monarchy was regarded in the British Isles. A regicide would give a massive boost to Parliament, diminishing forever the “divinity that hedges a king.” It would help to propagate the theory of popular sovereignty—the belief that political power lies in the people and not in the ruler—and the idea that the representatives of the people were those they elected to Parliament. This was the ideology invoked by Mary’s rebel lords in Scotland to depose her. And the same theory would be instilled there, and more subversively in parts of France, for 250 years after
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The Highland clans stood aloof from the rest of the country, and as a rule the highlanders and lowlanders had a tacit agreement to ignore one another. Many highlanders spoke Gaelic rather than Lowland Scots, exacerbating cultural differences.
The wars within the British Isles resumed under Henry VIII, who acceded to the English throne in 1509.
His ambition was to resume the Hundred Years War against France and to win conquests there.
if Henry sought to conquer French territory, he had to deal first with Scotland, France’s “auld ally” and England’s back door.
James V died of natural causes, unlike his father, who had perished at Flodden in the murkiest of circumstances. Although seemingly killed by the English in the battle, it is just as likely that he was murdered in the closing stages of the fight by one of his rebellious lords. His son had succeeded him at the age of seventeen months. Now history had repeated itself. His granddaughter, Mary Stuart, was queen at the age of six days.
England and France were competing to assert a hegemony over Scotland, which became a pawn in the struggle between the two larger countries and their ruling dynasties. As a child, Mary played no role herself in these intrigues, but all of them were about her. The aim of each and every plot was either to secure physically the person of the infant queen or else to marry her into the English or French royal family as a guarantee of future influence.
Henry VIII died in January 1547, followed two months later by Francis I. These titans had dominated the affairs of the British Isles and northern Europe for thirty years. Suddenly there was a vacuum. And it was the Earl of Hertford and the Guise family who moved instantly to fill it.
As soon as the galleys landed at St.-Pol-de-Léon, advance word was sent to Paris that Mary was on her way. Henry II had already given orders that all the towns and villages near his palace at St.-Germain be carefully checked to make sure that none of the stonemasons had been in contact with plague during the extensive rebuilding projects. Mary was to be welcomed by her grandparents Claude Duke of Guise and Antoinette of Bourbon, to whom an outrider was sent. Another messenger set out on the long journey across the Alps to Turin, where Henry II was visiting his northern Italian garrisons, to
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Illness, probably gastroenteritis, struck down some of the men.
Mary Seton’s brother, “le petit Ceton,” died of a “flux of the stomach” at Ancenis, some twenty miles from Nantes on the way to Angers. Mary and her female attendants did not succumb, possibly because they took more care than the men about what they were drinking. It was considered a normal precaution for royal and aristocratic women to carry bottled water in their luggage, whereas the men would have consumed local wine and beer. Little Seton’s fate gave Mary her first close experience of mortality.
Such dancing was a vital precursor to a betrothal, as it displayed to the court that the “lovers” were in good health and sound in all their limbs. At the end of the dance, the performers of whatever age were expected gently to kiss.
In her haste to finish the letter, Mary lost her main verb in a cluster of subordinate clauses, but the sense is clear.
In a final spectacle, a mock sea battle was staged on the Seine between rival “French” and “Portuguese” fleets in which real ships were packed with barrels of gunpowder. The sailors fired genuine cannons, most likely without shot. However, the inevitable happened and one of the barrels exploded, causing one ship to sink and its crew to lose their lives. Next day, the event was repeated with a substitute ship, but the same thing happened and more sailors were killed.
Through Mary’s marriage to the dauphin, the Valois monarchy could realize its full potential, creating a Franco-British empire that would subsume the British Isles and then cross the Atlantic to Brazil, where French merchants were already making inroads and starting to challenge Portugal’s commercial power.
Mary was the cornerstone of the project.
But to the Catholics, Mary Queen of Scots was Mary Tudor’s rightful successor. To them, Elizabeth was illegitimate. She was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, whom Henry VIII had married while his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was still alive. The pope and the Catholic Church did not recognize Anne Boleyn as Henry’s lawful wife, nicknaming her “the concubine.” Henry had himself repudiated her, divorcing and then executing her in 1536, when Elizabeth was declared to be illegitimate by act of Parliament in a clause that had never been repealed. This left the way wide open for the claim of Mary
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In the 1550s and for most of the 1560s, the Guises put their own interests above the cause of religion. It was only after 1567, when Charles V’s son and heir, Philip II, ordered Spanish troops into the Netherlands to crush a militant Protestant revolt and when a crusading Catholic League against the Huguenots began to take shape in France, that the family became synonymous with the absolute defense of Catholicism.
A modern but disputed explanation is that Mary had inherited an illness known as porphyria. An overproduction of purple-red pigments in the blood intoxicates the nervous system, and in cases of acute intermittent porphyria,
The riddle cannot be resolved. From the viewpoint of her biographers, it does not greatly matter, since what she herself experienced were her symptoms, which are fully documented. As to the illnesses of her youth, there is more than enough evidence that they were quite unrelated to porphyria.
The most striking thing about Mary’s education is that she followed a curriculum almost identical to that of her male counterpart, the dauphin. This was unusual for a girl. It cannot have been solely because she was a queen, because Henry II’s daughters and those of a number of his leading councilors also took their places in the schoolroom.
Her set texts included Cicero’s On Duties, Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics and Rhetoric, Quintilian’s Training of an Orator, and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of famous Greeks and Romans.
regarded as a vocational course of study, the equivalent (for a prospective ruler) of a degree in business administration.
She was only too aware that her uncles had set their sights on acquiring the throne of England for her and the dauphin, so making themselves indispensable at the heart of the Valois state.
She started to think independently of her uncles and to question what they told her.
However unimpressed she may have been by classical rhetoric, it had trained her in how to argue a case and how to spot the strengths and flaws in the reasoning of others.
MARY’S WEDDING was spectacular. The service took place on Sunday, April 24, 1558, at the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the spiritual heart of Paris.
She looked radiant in her shimmering white dress, itself a daring and unconventional choice because white was the traditional color of mourning for royalty in France. Mary, however, was not going to be bound by convention on her wedding day. She meant to make a dramatic gesture. She knew that white suited her delicate skin and auburn hair, and insisted on it.
During the meal, Mary found her solid-gold crown had become too heavy to wear. She signaled to Henry II, who ordered one of his gentilshommes to hold it over her head.
The king-dauphin and queen-dauphine would unite the crowns of France, Scotland and England, and this dynastic theme of triple monarchy was the leitmotif of the poems and anthems specially composed for the occasion.
The core assumption of these celebrations was the idea that the British Isles were part of an emerging French empire. Scotland and England were to be the provinces that France had subjugated by the dauphin’s union with Mary. This notion was more tangibly expressed in July 1558, when Henry II instructed the Parlement of Paris to register an edict granting French citizenship to all Scots on account of Mary’s marriage.
Two mutually contradictory sets of undertakings were given. First, Mary promised to observe and keep faithfully “the freedoms, liberties and privileges of this realm and laws of the same, and in the same manner as has been kept and observed in all kings’ times of Scotland before.”
But at Fontainebleau on April 4, eleven days earlier, Mary had signed three secret documents to a quite different effect. The first was a conveyance or deed of gift, made, as she noted in its opening clause, “in consideration of the singular and perfect affection that the kings of France had always had to the protection and maintenance of the kingdom of Scotland against the English.” In the event of her death without an heir, the king of France and his successors would inherit Scotland, also succeeding to all her rights and title to the throne of England.
The document also nullified any future contract or agreement made by the Scottish Parliament on the strength of the previous contract that she herself made with the commissioners.
Perhaps she should have been more careful, but then, she did not expect her uncles to act illegally.
What Mary lacked was direct experience of Scottish politics and of the different expectations of the nobles in that country.
The true extent of the Guise deception before Mary’s marriage was not proved until the reign of Louis XIV, a century later, when the secret documents were found.
Elizabeth was a Protestant. But she was a moderate in religion: more a Lutheran than a Calvinist, unlike the man she chose as her chief minister. This was William Cecil, who had first entered politics as Somerset’s secretary and then become Elizabeth’s steward.
Whereas Cecil always put the interests of Protestantism ahead of dynastic considerations, Elizabeth took the opposite approach. Although she was a Protestant, she kept religion and politics apart, putting the ideal of monarchy and of hereditary descent ahead of religion. When dealing with Mary and her mother, she found it utterly repugnant that in determining the government of Scotland, legitimate dynastic rights should be overridden by what amounted to religious preconditions.
She kept up her French establishment throughout her reign in Scotland, paying for it out of her revenues as dowager queen of France,
a fourth tableau was in preparation. Choreographed by the Calvinists in a threatening way to show a Catholic priest burned at the altar in the act of elevating the host, it was stopped by the Earl of Huntly, who carried the sword of state at the front of the procession and got there well ahead of Mary. In its place, a revised scene was hastily improvised in which effigies of three Israelites were burned for defying Moses, which satisfied the Protestants but also delighted the Catholics, who took it as an allegory against blasphemy.
She was beginning to work out the values and honor systems of the Scottish nobles, which she knew from their treatment of her mother stemmed in most cases from ambition and opportunism more than from religious principle, but which they justified to themselves as protecting Scottish national interests.
Knox had asserted that female monarchy was “repugnant” to God and Scripture, and a woman ruler was “a monster in nature.”
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1).
He claimed that since multiple powers were intended, then the nobility (whom he designated as the “inferior power”) had to be included as well as the ruler. Both “powers” were legitimate and both “ordained of God.” In which case, concluded Knox, the nobles (or “inferior power”) could resist and, when necessary, depose the ruler in a godly cause,
Knox had made a conceptual leap, turning him from a theologian into a resistance theorist.
When she was denied entry at Inverness, she lodged for the night in the town, but next day returned with a force. She took the castle and hanged the captain from the walls of the battlements.
Huntly was also taken, but died of a stroke while still mounted on his horse. His corpse was embalmed and sent to Edinburgh, where it was kept until the following May, when it was put on trial in Parliament. As the clerk’s report put it, “The coffin was set upright, as if the earl stood on his feet.” He was then found guilty of treason, and the family estates were declared forfeit.
She most of all needed Elizabeth’s friendship to arm herself against the volatility of her lords and to bolster the legitimacy of her reign in her own country.
