Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

by John Guy

She was more natural and at ease, more willing to follow her instincts. She was also a lot more spirited, confidently speaking her own lines and not those scripted by others. This was Mary’s first solo royal audience.

Mary called for friendship and “amity” between the two queens on the basis of their kinship ties: “We be both of one blood, of one country and in one island.” This became a constant refrain of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy after Mary’s return to Scotland.

Mary had been trained to set her sights on the English throne, but after her marriage she was a relative bystander, even a casualty of Guise policy. Cecil never understood or made any allowances for that. Instead, he regarded her as much as her uncles as the instigator and intended beneficiary of an international Catholic conspiracy to depose and kill Elizabeth. He was already her most vehement and determined antagonist.

Its delegates appointed Catherine to be regent. She was determined to be revenged on the Guises, whose machinations had repeatedly undermined her. She even restored Constable Montmorency to his former positions; hence the palace revolution that had accompanied Francis II’s accession only seventeen months before was reversed.

Within the space of six months, she had been widowed and orphaned and had lost her standing as queen of France.

She knew that she could win the hearts of the ordinary people there. Unlike the more selfish nobles, they did not seek war or revolt.

Mary ignored their intrigues. By acquiescing in the treaty of Edinburgh, her uncles had betrayed her. She did not even begin to forgive them for almost a year. Not one of her letters between Francis II’s death and her return to Scotland is on the subject of a second marriage.

The trick for Mary would be to turn her illegitimate brother from a virtually autonomous agent into a royal servant. If she could do that, she could succeed in ruling her country as well as any of her royal predecessors.

It was the sheer glamour of a Scottish queen who could rival anything seen at the ruling courts of Europe that most likely overawed her less well-off subjects rather than her wealth as such.

When Mary’s mother was deposed as regent, the government of Scotland had ceased to be that of the queen and become that of the lords, to the point where Cecil’s clerk, filing letters from Scotland in his office in London, endorsed them “Letters from the States of Scotland.” The word “States” had strong republican connotations, and the council of twenty-four nobles was to all intents and purposes a quasi-republican institution.

Elizabeth always made it her priority to defend the ideal of monarchy. She now relented, allowing that if Mary would appoint commissioners to review the treaty, she would do the same.

Before her arrival, Maitland had imagined Mary to be an ideological Catholic whose return “shall not fail to raise wonderful tragedies.” He now believed she “doth declare a wisdom far exceeding her age.” After Francis II’s death, the politics of the British Isles had been dictated by Cecil’s agenda. But when Elizabeth conceded that the treaty of Edinburgh was renegotiable, the spotlight fell on Mary. Her proposal of a “fresh start” made shortly before she left France no longer looked naive. Her charisma could yet become her winning card. The benefits were potentially huge.

Almost six feet tall, she could pretend to be a man and liked to roam incognito with her Maries through the streets of Edinburgh wearing men’s clothes.

The crux was the place of religion. Elizabeth was a Protestant, but not as Protestant as Cecil wanted her to be. The ideological rift between her and Cecil over Mary was fast taking shape. Elizabeth would always be reluctant to settle the succession if that meant identifying a named successor. But in her mind she kept religion and politics apart. Her overriding aim was to defend the ideal of monarchy, and if left to her own devices, she would sooner or later acknowledge the deficiencies of the treaty of Edinburgh and reach an accord with Mary. She would be tempted to recognize her right to be regarded as heir apparent, but without actually naming Mary as her successor.

She was dissembling, because Elizabeth’s prevarication and Cecil’s obstinacy were leading her to a different and (from the English viewpoint) far more threatening solution. She would seize the initiative by searching for a husband able to secure her dynastic rights in England. This was to become her policy for the next two years, and to get her own way she would, if necessary, break with her Guise relations.

Everything depended on the personalities involved and the opinion of Parliament, but generally the nobles were more settled and less factious when dealing with a man, even if he was merely a king consort.

But the gap between Elizabeth and Cecil over how to deal with Mary was widening. Whereas he grumbled that she sought to win Mary over “by gentleness and benefit” without sufficient regard for her own or the nation’s security, Elizabeth joked that her chief minister was more bothered about her “safety” than she was herself. Cecil’s belief in an international Catholic and Guise conspiracy turned him into Mary’s most ardent and determined opponent, whereas Elizabeth, who repeatedly refused to name a successor out of fear that it would somehow hasten her own death or encourage a dangerous upsurge of factionalism, remained sympathetic to Mary’s claim, which she preferred to those of any other candidates.

A majority of the English people were still Catholics. Moreover, the norms and values of nobles and landowners were tied to the rules of hereditary descent where property rights were concerned, and very few outside Cecil’s inner caucus would have agreed that religion should take priority over property rights when considering the succession to the throne.

She also judged her illegitimate brother to be too manipulative and ambitious to live up to his promises. Moreover, Maitland’s friendship over many years with Cecil might now be turned to her advantage.

Mary was starting to assert herself as queen. She was attempting to control the noble factions by creating a broad coalition of advisers, which would enable her to take a tougher line with Elizabeth and Cecil, since she would have wider support throughout the country than before.

From Elizabeth’s viewpoint, of course, Dudley’s candidacy was logical. By marrying him, Mary would be subordinated to a Protestant male on whom the English queen knew she could always rely, a man she still loved and trusted never to betray her. More maddeningly eccentric was her idea of how it might play out. Of two minds about allowing Dudley to leave her sight, she came up with the almost ludicrous proposal that there would be a ménage à trois or extended royal family. Mary, Dudley and Elizabeth would all live together at Elizabeth’s court after Mary was married, where the English queen would bear the costs of the “family,” which, she said, was merely the right way for “one sister” to behave toward “another.” This was not a ploy to drag out negotiations and so stall plans for any marriage Mary might seek to make on the Continent; Elizabeth was serious. Of all her designs, it comes closest to fantasy and makes nonsense of the traditional interpretation that she was always astute and never prone to making decisions on the basis of her emotions. As Randolph ruefully observed, Elizabeth’s idea of happy families turned “this comedy” of Mary’s marriage “altogether liker to a tragedy.”

From this moment on, the smart money backed Lord Darnley as a likely husband for Mary. He was probably the last person Elizabeth had in mind. If Mary married him, her claim to the succession would be greatly strengthened, because unlike Mary, he was male and born in England, which countered the two overriding objections to her claim in the Parliament of 1563: that she was a woman and a foreigner. Darnley was not a Protestant, but neither was he an orthodox Catholic. He did not take his religion very seriously, and was able to attend a Catholic Mass in the morning and a Protestant sermon in the afternoon unfazed by any sense of inconsistency.

The word “pretense” had no pejorative connotation in the sixteenth century. Someone who “pretended” merely asserted a claim to something to which he believed he had a right.

And this was the rub. Dudley was a nobleman of Elizabeth’s own creation. He owed everything he possessed to her. He lacked sufficient patrimonial estates of his own and a claim to a throne. In addition, he was the son of a convicted and executed traitor, since his father had been the same Duke of Northumberland who had engineered the Protestant Lady Jane Grey’s failed coup before Mary Tudor’s accession in 1553. Darnley, by comparison, was the genuine article: a scion of the royal house of Tudor whose dynastic pedigree would be unassailable if it was annexed to Mary’s own.

The Dudley marriage plan had been a disaster. No one had ever bothered to ask Lord Robert for his opinion, and he had no desire whatever to marry Mary and live in Scotland. He was dropping frantic hints and doing everything within the bounds of discretion to evade the nomination, which, since he could hardly refuse to marry Mary if asked to do so by Elizabeth, meant finding an alternative husband. In Dudley’s mind, the ideal surrogate was the English-born and supposedly loyal Darnley, whose candidacy he and his close friends supported.

Mary deplored the lost opportunity. Two women rulers, working together for the benefit of the British Isles, could have achieved “notable things.” Now there were too many obstacles, not least that of marriage.

If, therefore, one effect of Elizabeth’s message was to strengthen Mary’s resolve to seek a marriage that would take her closer to the English succession, another was the resurgence of factionalism. Everything was once again on a knife edge.

A majority of Elizabeth’s subjects—he spoke repeatedly of “the people of England”—favored Mary. They would flock to a queen who, unlike their own, was prepared to marry and have children. The sixteenth century was an age of gender stereotypes. By marrying, Mary would do what Cecil and every other male councilor and head of household wanted a female monarch to do. She would put a man at the head of the royal family. She would recreate a truly regal monarchy and prove that it would be her heirs, and not Elizabeth’s, who would eventually unite the thrones of England and Scotland.

This time Moray would discover that he did not face a middle-aged dowager queen who suffered from dropsy and had to rely on unpopular French troops, but an energetic, charismatic and infuriated queen who had the loyal, unstinting support of her own native Scots.

Castelnau sensed a change in Mary. On his last visit, he had been struck by her sense of “grandeur.” His comment then was that she “had as big and restless a spirit as her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine.” This time, it was not so much that she was proud or overconfident. She had become defiant, tending to dramatize her problems and generalize from them. Moray’s revolt, an uprising of a serious but not unfamiliar type in the age of the Wars of Religion, posed in her mind a general threat to European monarchy and so required some form of extraordinary aid. Mary saw Moray as a republican revolutionary, and was unable to comprehend Castelnau’s inability to agree with her.

Darnley was not a devout Catholic. He was certainly not a Protestant, despite his well-timed visits to Knox’s sermons, but was cynically exploiting religion for his own political purposes, chiefly as a way of drawing attention to himself. His efforts to secure European influence and recognition were just another aspect of his narcissism. His ambition was truly overweening. Mary had allowed him to be styled king to appease his vanity. She was prepared to allow him to take an equal share in governing Scotland, but he expected her to cede all her power as a reigning queen to him. He really believed that their marriage had made her his subordinate.

Things had worsened in December, when Mary pardoned Châtelherault and his family, the ancient enemies of the Lennoxes, for their part in Moray’s revolt. The Lennoxes were furious about the pardon. Darnley told her bluntly that as her husband and superior, he forbade any further remissions. No one had ever talked to Mary like that and got away with it. Her reaction was predictable. She would not be dictated to by a man she had raised up from nothing.

Although the quarrels took place in their private apartments, the news soon leaked. Whereas, said Randolph, “a while [ago] there was nothing but ‘King and Queen, His Majesty and Hers,’ now ‘the Queen’s husband’ is the most common word.” Quite simply, Mary had decided to demote him. In her proclamation after her marriage, she had conceded a dual monarchy in which power was exercised “conjointly.” In state papers and on recently minted coins, Darnley’s name had taken precedence. Now this arrangement was canceled.

As quickly as Mary had granted Darnley a royal title, she decided to strip him of it. She could not prevent him from signing his letters “Henry R” (i.e., Henry Rex) if he chose to do so, but she could deny him the “crown matrimonial.” Fortunately for her, that could be granted only in Parliament. And if the crown matrimonial was withheld, then Darnley could never be crowned. He would enjoy no legal status as king, and could make no claim to the succession should Mary die childless.

She was unwilling to be bullied by her dissolute and conspiratorial husband, yet she had become embroiled in his “enterprise” to restore Catholicism, not (as he wished) to impress a putative Catholic League, but because after Pius V’s election, she believed she could use Catholicism to achieve a final recognition of her dynastic claim.

Darnley might still survive as long as Morton stayed in exile and could not get his hands on the man who had so brazenly double-crossed him. His best hope was Mary’s baby. It was due in June, and once he was the father of the heir to the throne, he might think about staging a comeback. If, however, the leader of the Douglases ever returned to Scotland, Darnley’s life would be in peril. By assassinating Rizzio, he had let the genie out of the bottle. Nothing he could do would ever make it possible to put it back again.

She could barely believe that the man she had married could have acted in this way, conspiring with the lords to murder her confidential secretary and then dissolving Parliament without consulting her. Darnley even had the cheek to continue denying his involvement after his exiled coconspirators had sent Mary his own signed bond approving the assassination.

Mary’s popularity had soared in England on the news of her pregnancy, as Cecil had always predicted. He was never shy of resorting to underhand methods where Mary was concerned. He next took an agent provocateur into his service, one Christopher Rokesby, whom he sent without Elizabeth’s knowledge—she detested such men—to try and inveigle Mary into a plot, and so discover how far she was likely to be implicated in Darnley’s schemes.

even qualified doctors supposed that female fetuses spent longer in the womb than male ones because they were the weaker sex, and so the length of a pregnancy was thought to vary accordingly.

This was more than artful. It was a thinly veiled threat, because Mary—after Melville’s discreet inquiries—knew quite well that Elizabeth would have been furious to hear of Cecil’s use of an agent provocateur.

Bedford had his own spies and was well aware of Darnley’s jealousy and paranoia. “He cannot bear,” wrote one of these sources, “that the queen should use familiarity either with men or women, and especially the ladies of Argyll, Moray and Mar.” All her attention had to be on him for every second or else he stormed out in a tantrum.

Even the lords were appalled at this. They too wanted to keep him in Scotland, since apart from the dishonor that he would do to Mary by leaving her, it was clear that Darnley plotting abroad would be more dangerous than Darnley plotting at home.

When Darnley arrived at the gates of Holyroodhouse a week later, insisting that her councilors must be evicted before he would deign to enter, he was personally hauled inside by his wife. She spent most of the night trying to drum some sense into him, and when she failed, the Privy Council was summoned with du Croc as an independent witness. Darnley was then asked to explain exactly what it was that he complained of, and when he was unable to give any credible answer, but continued to ask for a separation from Mary, the Privy Council wrote officially to Catherine de Medici, setting down a record of his insanity and seeking French cooperation should he attempt to establish a royal court in exile.

Up to now, she was trying to live with the consequences of her marriage, keeping up appearances and balancing the advantages of a legitimate male heir against the disadvantages of Darnley. But the lords, including Bothwell, saw things differently. By removing Darnley, they would be doing everyone a favor.

As the year 1566 moved to its close, it seemed as if Darnley, with his manic obsession to be crowned king and his longing to make a name for himself in Catholic Europe by restoring the Mass, was an intractable problem for everyone except his own family. It would be very convenient to lose him. He had served his purpose by fathering a male heir. His conduct was intolerable; he was politically expendable. He did not bother to visit Mary at Jedburgh until she had almost recovered. Even then, he stayed for only one night, returning to Lennox’s stronghold at Glasgow the next day.

When mortality was staring her in the face, she decided that if she failed to recover, then “the special care of the protection of our son” was to be given to Elizabeth, who should come to regard Prince James as her own child. It was fairly obvious that Elizabeth did not intend to marry, in which case Mary could best protect her son’s life and dynastic rights in Scotland and England by making this extraordinary gesture. She knew that despite their earlier dueling, Elizabeth would always respect the ideal of monarchy and give precedence to hereditary rights over religious differences. In England, James would be brought up as a Protestant, in which case his prospects in both countries would be unrivaled.

Then, at two o’clock in the early morning of February 10, while Melville was still packing his bags, Darnley was assassinated. From the moment the news reached London, Mary’s reconciliation with Elizabeth was a dead letter.

The theme of the autumn and winter of 1566–67 was reconciliation, and yet in a shocking act of terrorism, the king of Scotland and two of his personal servants were suddenly murdered. The prospect of a dynastic accord between the two British queens is not in itself proof that Mary played no part in or had no foreknowledge of the assassination. But it makes her complicity improbable. Nothing can be proved by circumstantial evidence. The imminent dynastic accord does, however, create a compelling new context for a reinvestigation of Darnley’s murder, forcing us to consider afresh the true facts of the first British gunpowder plot.

Since there was no unbiased report, all accounts of Darnley’s death must to some extent be hypothetical. Beyond this, the who, where and why in the equation have been confused.

Although Rizzio’s murder nine months before had struck at her sense of personal security and loyalty to servants, Mary had put her revulsion aside in the interest of reconciling her volatile and factious lords to the crown and to each other. Her policy was magnanimous, but she had never fully grasped the limitations of the honor culture in Scotland, where a stance of loyalty to the crown was an attractive option to lords wishing to advance their own ambitions, but was primarily an option chosen for self-interested reasons. Mary’s lords wanted to serve her solely on their own terms: they were incapable of settling their grudges even when they got what they wanted.