The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 2

  The palace had been so beautifully and elaborately decorated that a guest described it as more beautiful than the ‘Elysian Fields’. After the meal, there was a panoply of glittering entertainments, including twelve pretend horses, ‘conducted and led artificially’, ridden by Francis’ brothers and other small royals – and leading coaches full of musicians. Then came the pièce de résistance, an incredible mise en scène comprising six great mechanical ships with silver masts and gauze sails, blown by the wind from hidden bellows, sailing around the blue-painted floor of the hall. They appeared magnificently real, tossed by ‘such force and abruptness and the top sails were so well-stretched that one would have said they were conducted by the winds artificially’. The king captained one, the dauphin another, and the rest were sailed by senior male royals. A narrator told the audience that the king in his boat was Jason, leading the Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece. When the king had his boat sail to Mary and she was lifted in and joined him sailing around the room, the meaning was clear – through her he would win an empire. It was almost as if the king himself had married this young girl, rather than his son the dauphin.

  In all the glitter and the wondrous gold, the song and the lights – ‘those who were in the hall could not say whether the flambeaux and lanterns, or the jewelled rings, precious stones, gold and silver were brightest’ – the French saw their great triumph.5 The party continued over the next few days, with further feasts and even more marriages.

  The French king had gained the Golden Fleece. And the Scots had assented to it all, their future queen regnant turned into a consort, bound by fabulous cuffs of gold. So great had been the desire of the Scots to see England defeated that they had given up everything.

  Nine days before the marriage, at Fontainebleau, Mary had publicly signed an official document that gained the happy approval of her Parliament in Edinburgh. She vowed to keep ‘the freedoms, liberties and privileges of this realm and laws of the same, and in the same manner as has been observed in all kings’ times of Scotland before’.6 While she was out of the country, it would be governed by Mary of Guise as regent and the king and dauphin undertook to protect the realm.

  The dauphin, it was agreed, would be named King of Scotland, and when he became King of France, he would govern both kingdoms. Due to the Salic law, the ancient Frankish law written by King Clovis that formed the basis of the legal system and barred female monarchs, Mary could only be Queen Consort of France – she could not reign over it as a joint monarch. It was agreed that Mary and Francis’ eldest son would inherit the joint kingdoms of France and Scotland. If the royal couple produced only daughters, the eldest would be Queen of Scotland, but France would pass to the nearest male relative. For the Scots, they felt they had gained an excellent bargain. As they saw it, matters would continue as they were, with various regents governing, and the French king would send troops whenever the English threatened to attack. It was, they believed, the best they could possibly achieve with such a useless thing as a female monarch.

  But, despite his fine words, Henry was determined to make Scotland a province of France and one day do the same to England, through Mary’s claim to the English throne. The dauphin would be King of France, Scotland and England because he was the husband of Mary. Eleven days before the marriage, the king had given Mary three secret documents to sign. They were utterly shocking. In the first, she agreed that should she die without heirs, the King of France would inherit Scotland – and every right and title she had held as queen. The ostensible reason for this was due to the ‘singular and perfect affection that the kings of France had always had as to the protection and maintenance of the kingdom of Scotland against the English’.7 If this wasn’t enough, she also agreed that if she died without heirs, the King of France should gain all the revenues of Scotland up to the value of one million pieces of gold to reimburse him for his efforts in defending Scotland and funding Mary’s education. This too was outrageous for he had done very little to defend Scotland, and educating Mary had hardly cost very much, let alone a part of a million pieces of gold. Mary and Francis then signed the third document in which she assented that she understood the undertakings she had made and everything that she had promised was valid and ­effective in law and would not be affected by any assurances she had given or might give in the future. She could not overturn the agreements or later change her mind.

  In signing the documents, Mary had given up everything. She may have done so because she had little choice – pressured as she was by the king, her Guise relations and perhaps her fiancé. And, like most fifteen-year-olds, she naturally thought she was not going to die any time soon and certainly not without having given birth to a child. She trusted her Guise uncles and thought that what they advised was in her best interests, though in fact they cared only for ensuring their ascendancy in the French court. And, as they saw it, if Scotland became subservient to France, they could finally control it, taking revenge on those uppity lords who had caused Mary of Guise, Mary’s mother, so many problems.

  The young Queen of Scots had no choice but to sign. The king wanted to seize England and Scotland, and Mary was his tool.

  At base, under all of it, the dazzle of the wedding, the words of the marriage contract, was a fundamental belief that women could not and should not rule. Empress Matilda in the twelfth century was widely seen as a disaster, whose attempt to gain the English throne had plunged the country into civil war. Although Mary I was on the English throne, she was not seen as a role model. Rather, to the King of France, she was a weak female monarch who could be swept away by the force of his son’s new position: King of Scotland, one day to be King of France. As the French (and most of Europe) saw it, Scotland should feel fortunate to be absorbed into the great nation of France – to be ‘fed on the breast of the great King of France’, in the words of one poet.8

  The Scots had sent over an envoy of lords to attend the wedding and watch the pageant in dazzled excitement. Four died on the way home (some said they were poisoned but it was more likely a plague that had taken hold at the ports). Those who managed to stagger back gave an enthusiastic report. The Scots Parliament, ignorant of the secret documents, even considered offering Francis the right to retain the throne of Scotland if Mary died, but they were energetically resisted by the Protestant sect and by the Hamiltons, the noble family who were next in line to the throne after Mary. And once the excitement had died down about creating an alliance that should surely terrify England, many Scots began to question the fact that they had an absentee queen. At fifteen, she was old enough to begin the work of ruling her own people, yet her mother Mary of Guise was still doing all as regent, and their monarch was the consort-in-waiting of France.

  Mary knew little of Scotland and barely remembered it. She saw herself as the future Queen of France and the future Queen of England, Wales and Ireland, the glorious warrior of the Catholic religion and unity. Ireland had been a lordship, ruled by the Kildare family, effectively independent, but Henry VIII had re-invaded the country, largely because he feared the Kildares. There was a series of bloody rebellions and fights against oppression – including the Desmond uprising in 1569, when Lord Desmond resisted the imposition of an English governor – and one rebellion was put down with a terrible forced famine. Europe saw Ireland as England’s possession, part of its burgeoning empire. Wales, too, had been repeatedly conquered – and largely pulled in by threats to the crown. In 1536, Henry VIII passed The Act of Union, in which the law of England was to be the law of Wales with twenty-six Members of Parliament from Wales to represent the country. When Mary said England, she meant Ireland and Wales too.

  To King Henry and to Mary, England was the prize. Even though it was cold, isolated from the rest of Europe, and it had committed the anathema of breaking from Rome, it was a desirable acquisition. Its Queen, although hardly healthy, had brought back Catholicism; a true Counter-Reformation monarch. When she died, surely, no one would want the heretic Elizabeth
on the throne. Henry VII and Henry VIII had been the ultimate propagandists, proclaiming the glory and power of the Tudors across Europe, the son throwing gold dust in everybody’s eyes with his extravagant displays at the Anglo-French summit of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. England’s agricultural land was excellent, its merchants energetic and its navy efficient, a greater player in the world order than Scotland seemed ever likely to be.

  And Mary I – daughter of Henry VIII and now Queen of England – was reportedly very sick. In March, the whole court had assembled at Hampton Court for the birth of her child with Philip of Spain. The queen was swollen, ill and her menses had stopped. The court had gathered, but no child arrived, leaving the queen broken and despairing.

  For the new queen-dauphine, it was worth throwing everything at the chance to be the heir. She had made her husband King of Scotland. Now, if she became Queen of England, he would gain that title too. The Tudor dynasty would be crushed.

  Chapter Two

  ‘It Will End with a Lass’

  Mary of Guise arrived in Scotland in 1538 as a young widow aged twenty-two. It was a long journey, and, like most foreign brides, she thought she would never see her country again. Her son, three-year-old Duke François, had been left at Joinville with her mother and father, who benefited from his considerable lands. He wrote to his mother that every night he prayed for her, and once sent her a piece of string to show how tall he was.

  Mary was quickly wedded to her new husband, James V of Scotland. His reign had been violent and troubled, his coffers bankrupted before him by his mother and her second husband. He had first married Madeleine of Valois, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the French King Francis I, in 1537. Her father had initially refused the match, fearful that the poor climate of Scotland would exacerbate the princess’s fragile health. But James saw her, fell in love and insisted. Yet the French king had been right and poor Madeleine became ill after the journey and never recovered. She died a few months after the wedding. James was not discouraged. He was keen to marry a foreign princess, to ally with France and also to escape the jockeying for position among the noble Scots families, all desirous that he would make one of their daughters into a queen. He alighted on the somewhat less royal Mary of Guise, tall and strong where her predecessor had been frail. Mary had been friendly at court with Madeleine of Valois and may have met James during the initial marriage negotiations for the princess’s hand.

  The Guise family was rapidly gaining power in France and Mary’s father, Claude, Duke of Guise, and her mother, Antoinette of Bourbon, were ruling the roost. She had enjoyed a pleasant, undemanding marriage to her first husband, Louis of Orléans, busy playing cards with her ladies in all his various castles. But Louis had died in June 1537, leaving her with a small son and heavily pregnant. The second child died not far into infancy and Mary was back on the marriage market.

  Henry VIII had heard she was a girl of good constitution, and asked for her hand, after the death of Jane Seymour. The King of France was against the match for he dreaded the power of the Guises if one was married to Henry VIII. And even the power-mad Guises might have second thoughts of sending Mary off to a man who had already divorced one wife and executed another, essentially for failing to have a son. The would-be bride herself was heard to joke that she might be large, but her neck was very small. The Henry VIII marriage was never likely to happen; he was being encouraged towards a Protestant union. Still, although the French thought Henry VIII was king of a sinful, heretic country and hard on his wives, at least England was in some part civilised. Scotland, in the opinion of the French who had only heard the worst of it, was a cold and brutal land with an unhealthy climate which had killed off Madeleine.

  Nevertheless, James and Mary were married by proxy at Notre-Dame and 2,000 Scottish nobles and their attendants and retainers came over to France to accompany her to her new bridegroom. She arrived in Scotland on 16 June 1538 with celebrations at St Andrews, married once more at St Andrews Cathedral and was taken on a tour of the churches and colleges of the town.

  The marriage was not a happy one, for James was not greatly consider­­­­­­ate of her and had a mistress he preferred. Mary wrote frequent letters to her mother, yearning for home and her son. After a year, the young queen was still not pregnant. She started to attempt to make her palaces feel more like home, bringing in French food and plants, and her own doctors and apothecaries. And when she was crowned Queen of Scotland in February 1540, with a brand-new crown, at Holyrood Abbey, Mary was carrying a child. Finally, in May 1540, two years after the wedding, Mary gave birth to a son, the new Prince of Scotland. The king was delighted, the public even more so. The queen quickly became pregnant again and, in April of the following year, gave birth to another son, Robert, Duke of Albany, at Falkland. Two days later, the baby was dead – and in further terrible news, his brother, afflicted by a childhood illness, died on the same day. The queen bravely tried to withstand her losses, telling the king that they were both young and would soon have more children.

  Whispers began that the king was being smited by God for his sins. The queen’s mother blamed the baby’s death on overfeeding – a letter her daughter must have hated to read. But the king was growing paranoid and fearful. Two sons dying in quick succession seemed like fate and not cruel bad luck. The court gossiped that he was being punished for his treatment of Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, his second cousin, whom the king had become convinced was plotting against him and had executed for treason in 1540, despite there being no evidence. They said Sir James had appeared in a dream and told the king he would lose both his arms and then his head for what he had done.

  Henry VIII of England, the Scots king’s uncle, sensed weakness. He pushed James to assist him in sacking the monasteries and to break from Rome – but James refused. Henry issued a command to meet at York, which James also declined. Henry was furious at what he saw as Scotland’s disobedience and talked of war, judging he might achieve easy victory and increase his popularity at home. By the summer of 1542, troops were in the north of England, ready to invade Scotland.

  Yet James was hopeful. Mary was pregnant once more and thriving. They both wished fervently for a son. The king decided to fight Henry rather than give in to his demands. He was right to do so, for once Henry saw vulnerability, he would never let go. But there had not been sufficient time to plan and the Scottish army was disorganised. Lord Maxwell, the Scottish Warden at West March, raised over 15,000 men, but then confusion set in. Word spread that the commander was not Maxwell, who was universally respected, but Oliver Sinclair, one of the king’s favourites and no military man. Some refused to fight under him. In contrast to the ruthlessly efficient English army, there was great confusion in the Scots ranks about the chain of command, whether it was Sinclair or another. The Scots, simply, were not ready to fight and the king had failed to lead them or even inspire them into battle.

  On 24 November, the Scots encountered 3,000 English soldiers under Lord Wharton near the River Esk and Solway Moss – a large peat bog. The battle was catastrophic, and the Scots found themselves trapped around the bog itself. They surrendered their guns and the soldiers ran for dear life, many falling and drowning in the river in the panic. The English advanced without mercy and took 1,200 men, including many of the nobles and Sinclair himself. They chased down the remaining men hurrying away – not that they put up much resistance. Some of the Scots soldiers were so defeated that they surrendered to the camp’s women.

  James had been humiliated – and he thought his end was nigh. He went to Edinburgh and made an inventory of his treasure. He told one of his servants, who had asked him where he would spend Christmas, ‘On Yule day, you will be masterless and the realm without a king.’1 He visited the queen and then travelled finally to Falkland, where his son had died, and all the bad luck had begun. It had been his favourite palace, a handsome building he had extended in beautiful Renaissance style. He had enhanced the gardens and even built a real tennis court
the previous year, now the oldest surviving court in Britain. There he took to his bed in shock, crying out in despair at the horror of life.

  At Linlithgow Palace, in West Lothian, just under twenty-five miles from Edinburgh, Mary of Guise was in the final stages of labour. Her husband had been born there too in 1512 and in his reign he had renovated the palace, adding an outer gateway and a striking fountain in the courtyard. The ill-fated James Hamilton of Finnart had been keeper and added once more to the structure – before his execution two years earlier. Mary of Guise was particularly fond of it, judging it equal to a castle in the Loire. There, on 8 December, she gave birth to a daughter in a room overlooking the loch, her fifth child and one she desperately needed to live. The infant was judged very frail. ‘The queen was delivered before her time of a daughter, a very weak child and not likely to live as is thought,’ said one report.2

  The king was still in a state of hysterical grief and it was in this shocking state that he received the news that his wife had given birth to a little girl who was still alive. The messengers were hopeful that the news might cheer him and prompt him to leave his bed. Instead, James sank into a terrible gloom. Scotland had been ruled by men called James since 1406, and she was a break in that line. The last female deemed Queen of Scotland (although never crowned) was a child, Margaret. King Alexander III’s children had all died before him – and his daughter Margaret had left a daughter through her marriage to the King of Norway, also called Margaret, often called the Maid of Norway. In 1286, at three, she was declared queen, with the nobles governing for her. Her mother had died, there were no other children, and plans were made to marry her to Edward of Carnarvon, the future Edward II of England. She set off from Norway by boat to Scotland to start her new life in 1286 but died near the isles of Orkney of seasickness (probably extreme dehydration). Without her there was no clear heir and a battle began for the succession. It was hardly the most illustrious history for female rule.