The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 3

  James V fell into an even blacker mood. The birth of Mary was the end of everything and James lost his grip on hope. He died on 14 December, when the baby was only six days old. Many fathers in royal history have been disappointed with a daughter – Henry VIII included. But Mary was the only one whose birth plunged her father into a despair that seemingly speeded his death. It was a terrible burden for a child to bear, one that no one shielded her from and would often be thrown at her.

  Mary was now queen. When her father had said that a princess would be the ‘end’ of his royal line or perhaps even the country, he meant that the realm would be absorbed into another when the young queen married a fellow monarch – as Philip of Spain always hoped to do with England. Or, at worst, another monarch would see weakness and invade. As James saw it, lost and grieving, his uncle Henry VIII would likely send in the troops and seize the baby queen and claim command of the throne. After Henry’s cataclysmic victory at Solway Moss, who would prevent him taking over the whole country?

  Mary was not the youngest monarch in history. That dubious honour goes to John I of France, who ascended the throne at birth in 1316, as his father had died a few months before his birth. His reign lasted a mere five days before he died, perhaps poisoned by his uncle who then took the throne. The youngest English monarch was Henry VI, who gained the throne at nine months in 1422 and then two months later became King of France. But France was later lost, the king suffered a bout of debilitating mental illness and then the Wars of the Roses exploded – which his side lost. Ivan VI became Tsar of Russia in 1741 at the age of two months, but his regents were deposed the following year. Ivan was put in solitary confinement and murdered at the age of twenty-three.

  Child monarchs, particularly babies, tend to be failures: their position is weaker, nobles feel empowered to make a grab for power, babies are physically vulnerable and often die, so nobles constantly group around the next king-to-be. And Mary had an additional problem: she was female. Even though there was no Salic law in Scotland barring women from the throne as in France, by the standards of the sixteenth century, Scotland was particularly inhospitable to women.

  Female learning within the elite was possible in England, even congratulated. Margaret Roper, daughter of Henry VIII’s advisor Sir Thomas More, was a brilliant scholar, completing a translation of Erasmus’ soliloquy on the Lord’s Prayer, and the first book published by a woman was Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love in 1395. Anne Boleyn had a famously impressive turn for scholarship and spoke seriously to men of religion. Katherine Parr was the first woman to publish under her own name, translating John Fisher’s psalms from the Latin, creating her own set of prayers and psalms, editing an English translation of the Gospels and publishing her work The Lamentations of a Sinner in 1547. It was not until the seventeenth century that women began to publish in Scotland, with the first being Elizabeth Melville’s poem Ane Godlie Dreame in 1603.

  Even by the standards of the sixteenth century, Scotland was a fighting, masculine culture. In both England and Scotland, plenty of women worked in the middling and lower classes, keeping taverns, brewing beer, working as seamstresses, cooks and servants, but the greater trade in and out of England meant more opportunities for women, assisting in the family business, keeping shops and ale houses – roles that gave a certain amount of independence and power and demanded a higher standard of education. In some parts of Scotland, women did more agricultural work as it was thought to be beneath men.

  It was not easy to be an infant queen anywhere in the sixteenth century, but Scotland was particularly difficult for female power. Mary of Guise was a foreign queen, had few allies in the country – and although all countries and courts in Europe were dominated by factionalism, Scotland was especially riven by rivalries between competing clans and lords. Power and privilege were controlled by families who stretched back years, and to survive you needed to ally yourself with one of them. A clever Putney commoner like Thomas Cromwell could rise fast in England but his success would have been far less likely in Scotland.

  The competing families all had claims to the throne. Whereas most of those at court in England were mere nobility, and some were from families that owed everything to the king, the Scots clans had a direct interest in fighting or undermining the monarch. There were rival groups of Stuarts, descended from younger children of former monarchs – the Lennox Stuarts foremost but the Atholl Stuarts, the Stuarts of Traquair and Blantyre and Ochiltree also wanted to have a say. Other families who played a great part in the drama of Mary were in lesser ways related to her: the family of Hamilton, headed by the Earl of Arran, who were next in line to the throne after Mary; the family of Gordon, headed by the Earl of Huntly; and the family of Campbell, headed by the Earl of Argyll. These families and earls would move in and out as Mary’s supporters, crafting her life. She could never manage them, but then they were impossible to manage. The shifts of loyalty, hatreds, plots and aspirations were complex, ever-changing and shaped by age-old grudges, ambitions and slights.

  The baby Mary and her mother stayed on at Linlithgow – now in deep mourning. Despite claims that Mary was too weak to live and some reports that she was already dead, the princess was stronger than those who had come before, and the news was that the baby queen was growing well. As one report sent back to England stated, she was ‘as goodly a child as I have seen of her age and as like to live with the Grace of God’.3 The Spanish ambassador in London, however, sent reports that both the baby and her mother were extremely ill and despaired of by the doctors, but perhaps it was the wishful or confused thinking of the English that he was communicating.

  James, when deep in his misery, had no doubt expected his uncle Henry to storm the country, now there was nothing but a girl to stay his hand. But, although Henry had been planning greater and further incursions, he and his commanders suspended operations at news of the king’s death. Forcing into the kingdom of a dead man, with only a baby as queen, was too much, even for Henry. His eye was always on public opinion at home and his people would have seen it as too easy and cruel a victory. His ostensible reason for invasion had been the king’s reluctantance to join his Reformation, and that if the new men of power in Scotland decided to move towards the Protestant religion, the moral basis for his crusade would be gone. And he didn’t want the French to retaliate, protecting Mary of Guise. Moreover, invading Scotland would be more trouble than it was worth – it was one thing fighting in England at Solway Moss, but the Scots would fight to the death to protect Edinburgh. And Mary’s sex was actually a saving grace – Henry was pondering whether he might marry his son Edward to her, bending the Scots to his will through marriage.

  The cause of Protestantism and the Protestant Reformation had support in Scotland. The Catholic Church there was wealthy and the rents and taxes it collected were viewed by many as extortionate. Local churches were underfunded and some churches had no priest at all. Many monks and nuns were accused of being absorbed in themselves, and not helping the poor. And there were close links between the nobility and the Church. James V had made illegitimate sons members of the clergy. Plenty of clergy were married – and the man who seemed to embody some of the worst abuses was David Beaton, Cardinal of Scotland. He was both the head of the Church and a political administrator. He had been Lord Privy Seal in 1528 and then ambassador to France, securing the marriages with first Madeleine and then Mary of Guise. Beaton had a long-term mistress, Marion Ogilvy, daughter of the 1st Lord Ogilvy of Airlie, who was his wife, to all intents and purposes – they shared a castle and had eight children. One would be master of the household to James VI, and one married into the aristocratic Gordon family and was an ancestress of Lord Byron. Beaton might have behaved in a secular manner, in one sense, but he was determined to be a loyal son of Rome – and to keep Scotland Catholic. As such, he had access to much wealth. The Church was a significant landowner and had an income of £30,000 a year, while the king received less than £20,000.

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sp; Nonetheless, although there was criticism of the Church, a wholesale break from Rome was worrying – people wanted reform from within. And they certainly did not wish to do anything because Henry VIII told them to do so.

  And Henry had other, pressing issues. Catherine Howard had been executed in February 1542 and he was looking for a new wife. An invasion of Scotland wasn’t top of his agenda.

  James V was buried at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh, alongside his first wife, Queen Madeleine, and the bodies of his two sons with Mary, in a funeral of gloomy pomp and splendour. In the immediate aftermath of his death, no one in Scotland yet knew that Henry VIII had decided to stay his hand. The major nobles were fighting to be regent, all promising that they could protect and save Scotland as James V had not. And it was a great title to gain. Unlike in England, where the powers of the regent were limited, the regent in Scotland was prac­­tically a king – and Mary’s young age meant that the chosen one would be the stand-in ruler for a long time. The regent could assume control of the royal palaces and, more importantly, access the jewels and treasure as well as administering the Crown lands. To become regent meant gaining the opportunity to shower one’s self and one’s family with gold.

  James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran, head of the House of Hamilton and barely thirty, was the next in line to the throne after Mary, as his grandmother was Mary Stewart, Princess of Scotland, daughter of James II and sister of James III. But then Cardinal Beaton also threw his hat into the ring. Beaton was a keen supporter of the French and the Guise family and was determined to keep Scotland Catholic.

  Beaton declared that the king had made a will on the actual day of his death at Falkland, decreeing that he wished there to be four governors (Arran, Argyll, Moray and Huntly), with him, Beaton, in overall charge of the new queen and the council. Although it was not unlikely that James had tried to provide for the regency, and dividing it between various men was a good idea, it was decided that the will had been forged, even though it was witnessed by more than ten individuals, including the Master of the Household, William Kircaldy of Grange, the king’s treasurer, and the king’s doctor. The fault lay in the choice of clerk; the man used was not a registered notary. As so often in the sixteenth century, a tiny legal fault was enough to collapse everything – and now the king was dead, the cardinal was unpopular and failing to sway opinion. Many at court and in the noble families laid the blame on him for the Battle of Solway Moss, seeing him as responsible for persuading the king to fight against Henry rather than negotiating with him. To add to the tangled web, James Hamilton of Finnart, executed by James V for treason when there was scant evidence, was Arran’s ­illegitimate half-brother. Arran had been fond of him and gaining the position of regent would send a powerful message about the wrong the king had done.

  What finally decided the matter was the arrival back in Scotland of the nobles captured at the Battle of Solway Moss. Henry had imprisoned them in England and demanded that they sign documents ­promising to support a marriage between little Mary and Prince Edward, in return for money and freedom. Some had even offered to help Henry gain Scotland, in the event of the infant queen’s death. When these men arrived back at court in January, the die was cast. The government would have to be pro-English and pro-Protestant. Arran was declared regent and quickly had Beaton arrested. The cardinal was imprisoned at Dalkeith Palace, from the most feared man in the kingdom to a lowly prisoner. Rome, scandalised by the arrest of the cardinal, issued an interdict demanding all churches be closed and all communions ended. Henry VIII had ensured the best man for England had got the job.

  At Linlithgow, Mary of Guise watched these events in horror. Cardinal Beaton had been a friend and support to her (so much so that there had been scurrilous, untrue accusations that they were lovers) and the movement away from allying with France to allying with England threw her into anguish. She wanted her daughter to rule a Catholic country, a friend of France; for the Guise family to control matters, not Henry VIII.

  Arran ignored Mary of Guise. He was declared regent and tutor to the baby queen, and appointed governor and protector. Yet while Arran might have been all-powerful, he could hardly rest on his laurels. Beaton was in prison – but he had another enemy.

  Matthew Stewart, Fourth Earl of Lennox, was young, bent on power and had a strong claim to the throne. He was a great-grandson of Princess Mary and thus in the line of succession he stood behind James Hamilton and his children, already numerous by 1542 – and Lennox’s line also came from the daughter of Princess Mary, rather than her son, thus pushing him further down the succession. But he declared that Arran’s father had not been properly divorced when he married his second wife, Arran’s mother. It was a little murky. The 1st Earl of Arran had been granted a divorce in 1504 when he’d found that the husband of his wife, Elizabeth Home, had still been alive in 1490, the date of his marriage to her. But then the divorce was repeated in 1510 – so it was said that he had continued to live with Elizabeth after 1504, which complicated the validity of the divorce. He married Janet Bethune in 1516 and she had given birth to Arran and other children – but to the Lennox Stewarts, this marriage was not legitimate, and nor were any of the children. Unlike Arran, the Earl of Lennox came from a line of perfectly legal marriages. But Arran had luck: Lennox was in England and the new regent hoped to encourage Henry VIII to keep him there.

  Henry VIII was a supporter of Arran, who he believed would push forward the treaty for a marriage between the baby princess and Prince Edward, aged just five, in return for Henry’s support. Arran had hoped to see Mary married to his own son and Henry attempted to mollify him by offering up Princess Elizabeth instead. For there seemed to be little other choice of future spouse – in France, Catherine de’ Medici, wife of the king, had no children after ten years of marriage and was assumed barren, at the age of twenty-four. By now, Mary of Guise was considering the English match, for she both feared Henry VIII and the anger of the clans if she were to marry her daughter to Arran’s son. She invited the English ambassador to her in early spring and showed him Mary unclothed, to prove there was no deformity.

  The marriage plans were moving ahead and on 1 July 1543, treaties were signed at Greenwich providing that Mary would be sent to England when she was ten to be married to Edward. Yet the wider alliance between the two countries was beginning to crumble. Arran could see popular opinion turning against the English and towards the French – for the scars of Solway Moss still ran deep. The news of the signing of the treaty was greeted with distrust and anger. Earls and commoners alike naturally thought that Henry wished to subsume Scotland into England through the marriage, Scotland as subservient as a wife. And, on a more personal note, Arran’s friends reminded him, throwing his lot in with Henry angered Rome – and the last thing he wanted was the Pope to cast doubt on his father’s marriage. The Earl of Lennox was circling. In March 1543, with Mary not even six months old, he had arrived from exile in England to stake his claim to be regent over Arran. Arran needed to hang on to legitimacy, Henry suspected that he was losing his hold on Scotland, and there were rumours that French ships were near.

  Beaton escaped from his captivity and decided that he needed to save baby Mary from abduction by the English and from Arran’s influence. Mary of Guise agreed. Beaton and 7,000 men, along with Earls Huntly, Lennox, Argyll and Bothwell, marched to Linlithgow, demanding she be moved to Stirling, a stronger fortress. The infant Mary was whisked to Stirling Castle. Henry VIII attempted to put a brave face on it, declaring that the English ambassador should be her guardian and saying that he refused Mary of Guise permission to stay with her daughter – not that anyone listened. He even tried to win over Cardinal Beaton, an im­possible attempt. Unfortunately for Henry’s new friendly act, some Scottish ships were impounded by his own on the way to France, and goods taken, and anti-English sentiment surged again. The Scots and those around Mary were now doubly determined to resist.

  In September, Arran panicked. He realised – not withou
t reason – that he could not get the better of Henry VIII and that public opinion was against him. He travelled to meet Beaton and took the Catholic sacrament on the 8th of that month. The next day, Mary was crowned at her new home of Stirling Castle. The ceremony for the nine-month-old queen was rushed and peremptory, with scant pomp and glamour – it was, as the English ambassador put it, ‘not very costlie’.4 Nor was it the most auspicious day, for it was the anniversary of the crushing failure of the Scots at the Battle of Flodden. The pro-English nobles were not there. The Earl of Arran carried the crown and the Earl of Lennox held the sceptre. Mary was queen.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Rough Wooing’

  The marriage alliance with Prince Edward had well and truly collapsed. Arran had got above himself and was now hoping to marry his own son to the baby queen – much to the distress of Mary of Guise, who felt it would be awarding him too much influence. At the end of the year, on 15 December, the Scots Parliament refused to ratify the Treaty of Greenwich. It was a slap in the face for Henry. Five days later, Henry declared war by sending a messenger to Scotland. His campaign would later be called the ‘rough wooing’ – a phrase coined by the writer Sir Walter Scott, probably based on a report of the Earl of Huntly which said, ‘We like not the manner of the wooing, and we could not stoop to being bullied into love.’ Indeed, it was more war than wooing, more total attack than bullying. Henry’s men were sure of themselves, convinced that what they saw as the broken promise permitted the cruellest punishment.