Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

by John Guy

This was largely contrived. Mary had never truly been the ideological Catholic that she now wished to appear to the world. She was far too political for that. As a ruler in Scotland, she had sensibly accepted a compromise based on the religious status quo and the inroads made by the Protestant Reformation. Only after her imprisonment in England had she reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. What happened in the great hall at Fotheringhay was for show, and it worked. By humiliating Fletcher, Mary won a propaganda victory that resounded around Catholic Europe.

For several minutes Mary stood stock still on the stage, clad in the color of dried blood: the liturgical color of martyrdom in the Roman Catholic Church. It was a sight so melodramatic, so abhorrent to the earls, that they omitted all reference to it from their official report to the Privy Council.

She had done everything possible to prevent Mary’s execution until she felt it could no longer be avoided, and then to shift the blame for it onto the shoulders of others. Elizabeth had a firm grasp of the issues. She knew that 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 her death, finally to cross the Atlantic when Dr. William Small, a Scot, taught ethics and political science to the young Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Unlike Elizabeth, Mary was a Catholic, and Cecil’s overriding ambition was to remold the whole of the British Isles into a single Protestant community. He had little room for an independent Scotland, hence his intermittent clashes with his Scottish allies over the extent of English domination. Whereas Elizabeth did all she could to protect the ideal of divine-right monarchy irrespective of the religion of its incumbent, Cecil believed that Parliament had the right to settle the succession to the throne on religious grounds, meaning that Mary’s dynastic claim had at all costs to be discounted.

Her enemies largely won the argument. Mary has come down to us not as a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country, but rather as someone who cared more about her luxuries and pets. She knew how to play to the gallery. One of the accounts of her execution dismissed her as “transcending the skills of the most accomplished actress.” But a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century, and there was far more to Mary than so cynical a judgment implies.

Border skirmishes were the norm. Outright war was the exception, not least because the two countries were so unequally matched. England was so much richer and more powerful than its northern neighbor. Its population was around 3.5 million, Scotland’s barely 850,000. The only Scottish town of any size was Edinburgh, where 13,000 people lived. This was at most a fifth of London’s population.

The king was advised by the lords in Parliament, but although the Scottish Parliament was supposed to represent the whole country, it tended to stereotype highlanders and borderers as chancers and criminals. 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 language of the lowlanders was in fact much closer to northern English than to anything spoken by highlanders.

his thoughts turned to Marjorie Bruce, King Robert I’s daughter and the founder of the Stuart dynasty.

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.

The nobles voted for Arran as governor, but he was hardly the ideal candidate. The best thing ever said about him is that he was a survivor. Weak, vacillating and cowardly, he was also exceptionally greedy. His legitimacy was questioned by Beaton, but as the grandson of James II’s eldest daughter, he had a right by blood to the regency.

According to Henry’s version of law and history, Scotland, despite being an independent state and a sovereign realm, would become a satellite of England, a jewel within the orb of Henry’s imperial crown. It was the beginning of the Tudor claim to an “Anglo-British” empire that, while Mary was still a child, was to provoke the French counterclaim to a “Franco-British” one.

In England and France alike, plotting what might or might not happen in the future if and when the king died was a serious crime. It seemed to make his death more likely as a contingency, and was called “imagining or encompassing” his death, a branch of the law of treason and punishable by death. Sadler had to distance himself from Arran if he was scheming in this way. Otherwise he might himself be indictable as an accomplice.

On July 1, 1543, however, he was minimally rewarded by the terms of the treaty of Greenwich. Ostensibly, he got what he wanted. Mary was to stay in Scotland until she was ten, at which age she would marry Prince Edward in England.

But Henry had to make concessions. He wanted a speedy settlement to free him to concentrate fully on his planned invasion of France. To achieve a quick result, he found himself accepting terms that guaranteed Scotland’s independence. A key clause confirmed the country “shall continue to be called the kingdom of Scotland and retain its ancient laws and liberties.” The Scots also insisted that if the marriage was childless, Mary might return home as an independent queen. This was to be a dynastic “union” of England and Scotland with the core stripped out.

The treaty of Greenwich was a dead letter from the start. Mary of Guise had no intention of honoring it; she had used the period of negotiation simply to face down Arran and Henry VIII and to win time to build a new, more comprehensive coalition. Now she revealed her true hand. She allied with the pro-French Beaton and Lennox,

On the 8th, Arran agreed to revise the terms of his regency, promising to share power with Beaton and to follow the advice of a council comprising representatives of the pro-French and pro-English factions and headed by none other than Mary of Guise. The effect was to reconcile the nobles, who closed ranks against Henry VIII’s aggression.

Mary’s coronation concluded a remarkable interlude that had begun when her mother first turned her attention to Henry VIII’s ambassador. It signified a reversal of the balance of power. The pro-English lords had been marginalized and Arran reconciled to Beaton, who was restored to office as chancellor. The treaty of Greenwich was all but renounced: the pro-French faction was ascendant in Scotland.

It was a catastrophe for Scotland, and Arran got the blame. He, even more than Beaton, was held accountable. The nobles argued that he should, in future, share the regency with Mary of Guise. Her popularity had soared, because her pro-French policy was held to be synonymous with Scottish freedom from its “auld enemy.” She managed to escape all the blame for the fire and brimstone brought down on the population by Henry VIII. It seemed that she alone had the interests of Scotland at heart. Certainly her family held the key to the French alliance: without her, Francis I would be less inclined to defend Scotland’s cause against England. Mary’s mother saw her opportunity. She wanted to be sole regent, not co-regent.

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.

In France, the dauphin succeeded his father as King Henry II. The Guise family were among his chief advisers; the result was that Henry at once declared himself to be the “protector” of Scotland. He decided to spare no expense to safeguard the “auld alliance” and ensure that Mary would marry no one except his own son, the Dauphin Francis. He flatly countered Somerset’s idea of an Anglo-British union with his own master plan for a Franco-British empire. Moreover, his level of commitment far exceeded anything shown by his father, Francis I, whose chief concern had been to frustrate and rival Henry VIII.

On July 29, Mary kissed her mother goodbye and boarded her ship, which was Henry II’s own royal galley. Although only five and a half years old, she carried herself like a queen.

It reflected the wicked, mildly blasphemous sense of humor for which she was later renowned.

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.

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.

This metamorphosis influenced Mary after her flight into exile in England. She would reinvent herself in the 1580s as a good Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. But in the 1550s, the Guises were politiques, or moderates, equally opposed to Protestant and Catholic extremism. Where religion mattered most to them was in relation to their dynastic project, because only the pope could make a definitive pronouncement of Elizabeth Tudor’s illegitimacy, and so of Mary’s claim to the English throne.

Mary was herself a complication. She was beginning to assert herself through lavish spending, partly on clothes and ponies, but mainly through her generosity, never more evident than in dealings with her servants, for whom she sought promotions, improved working conditions and pay increases.

This was the first of several occasions in her life when Mary said she had been close to death or wished she were dead. This was not simply teenage melodrama. Mary really had been seriously ill. Not the least of the enigmas about her is her medical history. In many respects, her health was robust. She rode her ponies every day and was able to meet extreme physical demands. But her good health was punctuated by episodic illnesses, often triggered by anxiety or stress, sometimes lasting a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which acute physical pain and sickness were followed by rapid recovery.

A modern but disputed explanation is that Mary had inherited an illness known as 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.

She started to think independently of her uncles and to question what they told her. Under the curriculum they had chosen for her, she had acquired the same skills as a male student and was taught to think for herself.

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.

The secret documents were extremely clever. They were written in florid and high-flown language to create the illusion that Scotland’s national interests were indeed protected—but by Henry II and the Valois dynasty. Mary was only fifteen; she was not a constitutional lawyer. Her identity was shaped in France and bound up intimately with Henry II and the Valois dynasty. No one had told her that the secret documents, and especially the third, were illegal by Scots law. Again Mary was inclined to be too trusting. She had already signed thirty-five blank sheets of paper for her mother’s convenience. She trusted her other Guise relations in the same way, and might well have been prepared to sign documents presented to her without studying them properly.

What Mary lacked was direct experience of Scottish politics and of the different expectations of the nobles in that country. In most respects, Scotland and France were in parallel universes. The kings of France were almost untrammeled rulers: they got their way even over the Parlement and the law courts. In contrast, the Scottish lords saw themselves less as the ruled and more as co-rulers.

It was almost seven years since Mary had last seen her mother. Despite the strong bond between them, she had become dependent, emotionally and politically, on her Guise relations. This had positive and negative aspects. Antoinette of Bourbon and Anne d’Este treated her with genuine love and affection: they were her guardian angels. Her uncles, in contrast, were impassive and detached. Beneath their amiable and emollient exterior, they could be cold-hearted, even cruel. To them, Mary was a dynastic asset to be exploited, not an adopted daughter to be cherished. At this stage, she was mostly susceptible to her uncle Charles, who although a brilliant courtier and diplomat, was full of grandiose schemes and prone to overreach himself, his fertile imagination brimming with fresh intrigues.

A central tenet of the Guise dynastic plan was that every future dauphin would be king of Scotland whether Mary’s heirs or not, establishing the country’s subordination forever.

In Paris, Elizabeth’s accession was greeted with unconcealed scorn. The Guises swiftly proclaimed their niece to be “queen of England, Scotland and Ireland,” challenging Elizabeth’s right to succeed her elder sister on the grounds of bastardy and Protestantism. As she had indeed been declared illegitimate by act of Parliament in 1536, and since Mary Tudor’s most vaunted policy had been to restore Catholicism, returning England to the papal fold after Henry VIII’s break with Rome and burning more than three hundred Protestants at the stake for their faith, the Guise claim was not so outrageous. In order to reinforce and publicize it, the cardinal ordered the heraldic arms of England to be blazoned with those of France and Scotland on all the plate and furniture belonging to the household of the kingdauphin and queen-dauphine. This was highly provocative, tantamount to establishing a rival monarchy in exile. It was to taint the relationship of Mary and Elizabeth for the rest of their lives.

Just when it had seemed that the English throne might be within Mary’s reach, it was snatched away. Pope Paul IV refused to declare in her favor, making it impossible to justify the claim that Elizabeth was illegitimate. The pope simply could not afford to offend Philip, whose forces held the balance of power in Italy. Philip’s support was also essential to the success of the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation assembly that the pope had reconvened to rejuvenate the ideals of Catholicism and take a firm stand against the Protestants.

No claims were made to the English succession. Mary had been forced into a U-turn. The dynastic ambitions of the Guises, previously the main aim of Henry II’s foreign policy, now stood in the way of French interests.

As Mary gained in experience, she began to see how fickle her allies could be, and how she could quickly become the victim of a change in the balance between the factions.

She was just five months short of her seventeenth birthday. She was also now queen of France.

But Catherine was not to be underestimated. Already she perceived Mary to be a threat, and so refused to accept the usual title of Dowager Queen. Instead, she insisted on being called Queen Mother for the rest of her life. The subtle nature of this change was that it helped her keep her place as an active rather than a retired politician. Catherine knew that she had to be cautious in her dealings with the Guise family.

From a Guise family perspective, these may have been the correct initial steps to claiming what they believed to be their rightful patrimony, but their behavior toward Mary was cynical. They treated her like a puppet and made important decisions behind her back. As to Francis, they encouraged him to play the man by going hunting. Not a single major initiative can be traced back to Mary or her husband while they were king and queen. The result was that their reign, an interlude of no more than five hundred days, turned into a Greek tragedy in which the main events were played out offstage by actors or unseen forces over which they had little or no control.

Such measures proved to be wholly counterproductive in Scotland, where the threat of religious persecution led to a rapid crescendo of fears about national independence. Whereas patriotism and the pro-French alliance had been mutually compatible at the time of the treaty of Haddington, now the reverse was true.

When the English Parliament voted for the religious settlement in 1559, the country became officially Protestant. It was a cue for the pro-English faction in Scotland, which won the support of the Protestants in an outright revolt against a regent who was easily depicted as the instrument of a French, and especially a Guise, tyranny. From this point on, the rebel propaganda would blend Protestantism and nationalism opportunistically.

Up until now, Mary’s mother had governed Scotland effectively, but her determination to enforce law and order, to secure higher taxes and, above all, to assimilate the Highlands and border region into a centralized Scottish state had alienated those who believed it was their birthright to rule their own kinship networks and regions. The Scottish lords at heart rejected a centralized monarchy. They wanted to rule themselves as a loose federation of small kings.

He threw his own weight unflinchingly behind the lords, but before action could be taken, he first had to persuade Elizabeth and many of his own colleagues that an armed intervention to oust a legitimate government in alliance with its rebels could be justified. Here lay the seeds of an ideological rift between Elizabeth and Cecil over Scottish affairs that was to mature over the next thirty years. Despite their ability to work together on almost every other issue, where Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots were concerned, Elizabeth and her chief adviser were repeatedly at loggerheads. 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.

The Guise brothers were encountering problems all too similar to those already experienced by their sister. The difference was they put their own interests first and left Mary’s mother to her fate.

The final clause of the treaty included what might be called a surveillance clause. Despite the humiliating terms of the treaty, Francis and Mary had to promise to ratify and fulfill all of its conditions, failing which England might intervene in Scotland again whenever it thought it necessary to uphold the Protestant religion and to extirpate Catholicism and French influence from the British Isles. The treaty of Edinburgh, and especially this last clause, was a travesty. It cast a long and inky shadow over Mary’s entire career, primarily her relations with Elizabeth and Cecil. It is almost impossible to exaggerate its significance. Mary and Francis had not even been consulted about its terms, nor had Mary even agreed to negotiate with Elizabeth and Cecil as Queen of Scots. A commission, issued in the joint names of Mary and her husband, was admittedly produced in Edinburgh. But this commission was prepared on her behalf by her uncles. It was not Mary’s personal act, nor was her mother a party to the treaty. The commission merely illustrates how far their sovereignty had been usurped.

Cecil and Lord James were able to stitch everything up without paying any attention to the lawful sovereign power in Scotland.