Mary Queen of Scots (19 page)

In 1564 Randolph did report troubling gossip to Cecil. Many Scots, he claimed, believed that when their queen invited Mary to wed any appropriate Englishmen, she actually meant Darnley; the ambassador had also heard that they believed Mary preferred Darnley to the other English candidates. Despite these and other rumors, Elizabeth relied on her ambassador’s assurances that her cousin would never marry beneath the rank of prince and ennobled Dudley to make him more acceptable to her. In September 1565 two months after Mary wed Darnley, Cecil was still complaining about the inequality of the match, and when Mary was her prisoner, Elizabeth continued to accuse her of enticing her English subject to Scotland and marrying him without her permission.

Throckmorton’s initial instructions on 24 April directed him to warn Mary to wed Leicester rather than Darnley, but if she must choose a foreign prince, she could marry Condé. Apparently, this Huguenot’s name surfaced because after his wife died in 1564, Elizabeth’s advisors heard that Lorraine was recommending him to his niece. Following discussions with Paul de Foix, the French ambassador, Cecil dropped this option from Throckmorton’s final instructions, dated 2 May, which ordered him to inform Mary that she was free to marry any English nobleman except Darnley. However, only if she wed Leicester, whom Elizabeth regarded as if he were her own son and whose virtues she esteemed, would she permit an inquiry into Mary’s English succession rights or a publication of her claims to the throne.

After receiving Lethington’s negative messages from London on 3
May about both her inheritance claims and the Spanish marriage, Mary planned on the 15th to grant Darnley the lordship of Ardmanoch and the earldom of Ross and to knight 14 men, nominated by Lennox, and scheduled on the 16th to advance Darnley to the dukedom of Albany.
When Throckmorton reached Stirling on the 15th and found the gates closed to him, he retired under protest to await her summons to an audience, as he still hoped to prevent Darnley’s ennoblement. Later that day, Mary explained to Throckmorton that she informed Elizabeth
as soon as she had decided to marry Darnley, but she promised to delay the ducal ceremony until after receiving further communications from her cousin.

Mary then sought her privy council’s approval for her decision to wed Darnley, but without the presence of Moray, who had left court greatly offended by her marital plans. Upon gaining the council’s agreement, Mary invested Darnley with the earldom and knighted the appropriate candidates. Despite the council’s official action, some of its assenting members, including Lethington, were privately opposed to her plans. He later complained to Archbishop Beaton that she had advanced Darnley to great honors without the advice of her friends or her subjects and had received only ingratitude from him.

Throckmorton believed she was either a victim of love or cunning and recommended that Elizabeth incarcerate Darnley’s mother and invite Anne, dowager duchess of Somerset, to court. As she was the mother-in-law of Catherine Grey, who was still under arrest for marrying Hertford, observers might view this royal treatment of the duchess as a move toward recognizing the Grey succession claims.

Mary’s wedding preparations included dispatching messengers to the continent concerning Darnley’s candidacy. As Francis’s widow, she appropriately sought his mother’s permission before remarrying. Both Catherine and Philip accepted her choice primarily because Darnley was neither Spanish nor French. Since she and Darnley were related in the second and fourth degrees of consanguinity, Mary also sent William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, to Pius IV to request a dispensation.
Although unenthusiastic about his niece’s plans, Lorraine assisted Chisholm in obtaining the dispensation, which was issued in September after the wedding but was backdated to May. It was not unusual for individuals to wed before a dispensation arrived or even to request one retroactively.

Three interpretations have attempted to explain Darnley’s successful courtship. First, some writers have suspected that Elizabeth permitted him to join Lennox because she secretly endorsed his candidacy, but she was consistently hostile to her claimants’ marriages and routinely enforced the statute forbidding them to wed without royal permission. Until Catherine Grey’s death in 1568, she remained under arrest, and in August 1565 when her sister Mary secretly wed Thomas Keyes, a royal sergeant-porter and a widower with several children,
Elizabeth ordered them separated and incarcerated. Because Randolph’s initial instructions promised Mary any suitable English noblemen, she could and did argue that Elizabeth offered Darnley to her, but later communications do not validate this claim. In short, Mary’s protests against a union with a social inferior and her well-known attempts to wed a foreign prince caused the English to underestimate the value to her of Darnley’s lineage.

A second reason given for her marriage to him is one that modern scholars unanimously reject but that many contemporaries could accept. In June rumors spread that he bewitched her. Among the evidence cited were the bracelets that contained sacred mysteries.

Third, as noted earlier, most biographers claim Mary fell in love with the young man, almost exactly three years younger than she, but while she was supposedly becoming enamored with him, Lethington was in London discussing both the Spanish and English alliances, either of which she would have accepted given the right circumstances. In May she promised Throckmorton to delay granting Darnley the dukedom, an act scheduled to precede the marriage. Then on 15 June she sent to England Moray’s friend, John Hay, principal master of requests, with instructions to promise Elizabeth she would “embrace all reasonable means” to please her. Mary ordered Hay to inform Elizabeth that she had suspended the wedding for “a convenient season” and to recommend a meeting of Scottish and English commissioners to discuss her marriage.
²¹
While awaiting Hay’s return, she continued to favor Darnley, perhaps hoping the threat of an alliance with him would prompt her cousin to concede her succession rights, making it possible for her to marry Leicester. Later Mary assured Randolph that she wed Darnley because he had a claim to the English throne and Leicester did not. Even Knox believed that she selected him because of his lineage, and Godfrey Goodman, the seventeenth-century bishop of Gloucester, wisely opined: “No sooner did Queen Mary see the Lord Darnley but she instantly fell in love with him, and the rather because, next after her own title, his title was next to the crown of England.”
²²

If all the facts known about Darnley were limited to the information Mary had in early 1565, he might be judged an acceptable choice. The son of Lady Lennox, whom many Catholics esteemed, he was a native Englishman and was reared as a Catholic. If English experts denied Mary’s succession rights because of her foreign birth, her union with
him erased that technicality. After her and his mother, he held the best hereditary claim. Her child by him, furthermore, would have an English father. Finally, their marriage would negate concerns that Elizabeth might name him as her heir if Mary rejected Leicester or that Darnley might become a dangerous rival to Mary by converting to Protestantism and marrying into a prominent English family.

In May 1565 Mary could have found reason, however, to be concerned about Darnley’s rash behavior and inability to handle extreme stress, if Randolph’s hostile report can be believed. He related that Darnley kept to his chamber, only emerging for the ennoblement on the 15th, and that when he learned Mary was delaying the ducal ceremony, he threatened to strike Bellenden, the bearer of the bad news. Until he possessed that title, Darnley realized she might refuse his suit. It is interesting that Randolph’s account assumed a formal relationship that kept Mary from personally revealing the postponement to Darnley.

On 6 July Hay arrived with a negative response from Elizabeth, who had also demanded that Lennox and Darnley return to England.
With her other options defeated, Mary ordered final arrangements for her wedding to Darnley. Two weeks later she ennobled him as duke of Albany, and on the 22nd the first of the three obligatory marriage banns was announced; on the 28th Mary had him proclaimed king and early the next morning, a Sunday, they were wed. She had, after all, married a prince, even if only by her own creation.

Lennox and Atholl escorted Mary, who was dressed in a black mourning gown and wore a black hood on her head, into Holyrood chapel between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. and then fetched the groom.
Following trumpet fanfare, John Sinclair, future bishop of Brechin, officiated at the service. After exchanging their vows, Henry placed three rings, the middle a valuable diamond, on her finger. Following prayers and blessings, he kissed her and departed before the nuptial mass, perhaps another conciliatory gesture to those wanting her to wed a Protestant.

Reaching the chamber where he awaited her, she briefly resisted changing her costume out of respect for her first husband. Preparing then to retire to another room to don a brightly colored outfit, she asked each man to take a pin from her gown. As sixteenth-century garments contained component parts that were usually laced together, she obviously had hers pinned for ease in changing into another outfit to
signal her departure from widowhood. Afterwards, she threw the traditional handfuls of money to the crowds outside the palace and attended a banquet. Buchanan composed masques for the three-day wedding festivities: the
Pompa Deorum, Pompae Equestres
, and
Ad Salutem
in Nuptiis Reginae
.

On her wedding day Mary denied the petition of the Kirk’s General Assembly to abolish the mass at court but promised that its members could continue to worship as they pleased and confirmed that only parliament would make religious changes. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she seems to have genuinely wished that people of differing faiths could live unmolested together. Earlier on 1 July when she and Darnley attended the Protestant baptism of her godson, the child of Agnes Fleming, Lady Livingston, and William, sixth Lord Livingston of Callendar, the brother of Mary Livingston, the queen stayed to hear the minister’s sermon.

THE CHASEABOUT RAID

Having left court to organize opposition to her authority, Moray joined Châtelherault in recruiting other supporters, among them Argyll and William Kirkcaldy of Grange. As expected, the Hamiltons eagerly defended their succession rights against the Lennox–Stewarts’
challenge. Moray also distrusted Darnley, who will be addressed hereafter either as king or by his first name Henry to highlight his new status, which was to have grave repercussions for the queen, his wife.
Randolph encouraged Moray’s animosity to Henry by repeating his alleged remark to Lord Robert that the earl controlled too much territory. In a sense if the king did express this belief, he was answering the question Moray, himself, posed during the Leicester negotiations. At that time he had wondered, in the event that Mary married someone other than Leicester, how that husband would treat Moray, knowing he had preferred a different suitor. Buchanan later explained another motive for the rebellion: “Many were of the opinion that it was more equitable that the people should choose a husband for a girl, than a girl should choose a king for a whole people.”
²³

Mary reacted with fear and official remonstrations to Moray’s desertion. She and Darnley had a scare on 1 July as they rode from
Perth to Livingston’s home at Callendar for her godson’s baptism.
Rumors that Moray and Argyll were planning to abduct them and incarcerate them at Lochleven, referred to as the Raid of Beith, greatly alarmed Mary and Darnley. Afterwards, Mary granted her half brother three separate safeguards to appear before the privy council, and when he failed to respond, she had him put to the horn, declaring him an outlaw on 6 August.

Perhaps to prevent the rebels from defining their struggle as religious, Henry sat on a throne at St Giles’ church on the 19th, listening to Knox’s sermon. This ploy backfired since Knox’s comparison of the king to Julian the Apostate and the royal couple to Ahab and Jezebel was so offensive that the privy council ordered him to abstain from preaching for 20 days. Henry, nevertheless, decided to continue his Protestant pretensions and attended the sermon of John Craig, Knox’s colleague at St Giles, in September.

To suppress the rebellion Mary gathered support from Moray’s enemies, recalling Bothwell and Sutherland from exile and liberating Huntly’s heir. While the rebels assembled at Ayr, she ordered a muster and pledged her jewels for the soldiers’ pay. In September Henry and she sent Francis Yaxley, a former client of Lady Lennox, to Philip to request aid against the rebels. Yaxley obtained 20,000 crowns for them but died when shipwrecked on the return voyage. Lennox also recruited allies. His wife’s renunciation of her claim to her deceased father’s estates meant that Morton, the guardian of Archibald Douglas, eighth earl of Angus, would aid the queen. The 14 mostly Protestants, whom Lennox selected for knighthood in May, likewise possessed relatives willing to join her forces.

In late August with 12 earls and 21 lords in a broadly based coalition, Mary, having just recovered from a fainting attack, left Edinburgh with Henry to pursue Châtelherault’s and Moray’s army. The rebels evaded them but met a hostile reception upon entering Edinburgh, since Erksine, recently ennobled as the earl of Mar, turned the castle’s guns on them. Learning that her larger army was returning, they retreated to Dumfries in what is known as the Chaseabout Raid. The insurrection fizzled out in October when the raiders, except for Argyll secure in his mountainous retreat, fled to England. Indicating a disdain for challengers to lawful authority, Elizabeth permitted them asylum but refused them assistance.

MARITAL DIFFICULTIES

Meanwhile several disagreements between Mary and Henry began to surface. She not only failed to appoint his father as the realm’s lieutenant general but also pardoned Châtelherault on 1 December for his role in the Chaseabout Raid on the condition that he dwell in exile for five years. That Henry was expected to sign letters under the great seal permitting his family’s old enemy to move to France probably increased his aggrieved feelings. Henry’s major concern, however, was her refusal to seek a parliamentary grant to him of the title and powers of king matrimonial, which her former spouse Francis II had enjoyed, and which, given early modern gender relationships, surely he and his network of male relatives and friends thought was his due or right as her husband. Evidently, Mary had anticipated that Henry would seek to destroy the Hamiltons and replace Châtelherault as her Scottish heir presumptive. In resisting Henry’s demands for regal power, she risked antagonizing him but must have hoped, unrealistically as it turned out, to keep under control her youthful spouse, who although utterly inexperienced in governance matters, seems to have harbored more dynastic ambitions than she had realized. Several contemporaries, including Leslie, later commented on his youthfulness, unstable personality, and rash behavior, perhaps hinting at a certain immaturity for even a 19-year old man. Disappointed by her reluctance to empower him, Henry consequently disappeared on long hunting trips, forcing her to order an iron stamp with his signature to process official documents.