Mary Queen of Scots (3 page)

Missing from Fraser’s conclusion are two salient facts: first, Mary selected as James’s godmother Elizabeth, who became by contemporary standards in some sense his second mother and who eased his succession when she politically isolated English pretenders to her throne. Second, in May 1586 less than a year before her execution, Mary promised Philip II of Spain through an intermediary, Bernardino de Mendoza, his ambassador in France, to bequeath her English inheritance claims to him if James failed to convert to Catholicism. Her son’s accession in England was definitely more complex than mere biological destiny.

Fraser’s biography has other problems. It presents a too benign view of Mary’s long, difficult captivity, repeats inaccurate facts, and relies on outdated information and interpretations. Since it was first published in 1969, numerous histories of early modern Britain have appeared, an impressive number specifically on Scotland: its Renaissance and Reformation, court life, politics and constitution, and gender and family history. Among them is Michael Lynch’s excellent volume of 1988, which was a special issue of the
Innes Review.
Written by a mixture of experts on Scottish, French, and English history, these essays explore selected topics, like “The Release of Lord Darnley and the Failure of the Amity” by Simon Adams.
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In the Introduction, Lynch claimed correctly that a major problem for biographers of a woman, who was queen of two kingdoms and a pretender to another, is that they have mostly received academic training within a particular national historiography.

Jenny Wormald’s negative study of Mary, which appeared the same year as Lynch’s edition, is an analysis of the queen’s personal rule rather than a true biography.
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When Wormald, an expert on Scottish history, reissued it in 2001, she included Lynch’s volume and other recent publications in her bibliography but did not revise her text to incorporate their findings. Focusing on what she considered was the best scenario for Scotland, Wormald claimed that Mary’s reluctance to return home after Francis’s sudden death led her to linger frivolously in France for several months. Surely, however, arrangements for moving to her overseas realm that Protestant rebels controlled would have taken longer than a few weeks to complete. After beginning her personal rule in Scotland, Mary rarely attended the privy council meetings identified in its register. Among other facts, Wormald cited this absenteeism to rate Mary the most unsuccessful monarch since Robert III who died in 1406. As the register lacks reference to many council sessions that are identified in other contemporary records, it is hardly appropriate evidence for forming this negative judgment. It is also interesting that, according to the register, the attendance of the noble councilors was extremely erratic.
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Furthermore Wormald denied that some of Mary’s regal difficulties were gender based despite the published research confirming the marginalized status of early modern women that appeared before her book was reissued. Agreeing with Fraser that Mary wed Darnley for love, Wormald conceded Bothwell’s abduction and apparent rape of her.

James MacKay published his study in 1999 specifically to refute Wormald’s analysis.
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An experienced biographer of male subjects who lived in later centuries than Mary’s, he presented a somewhat different nationalistic perspective than Wormald’s, identifying parallels in Anglo-Scottish relations between the 1560s and the modern devolution debate and referendum. Throughout the text his prejudices flow unchecked, describing, for example, John Knox as the Ayatollah. Like Fraser and Wormald, MacKay claimed Mary fell in love with Darnley and acquitted her of complicity in Bothwell’s abduction.

Susan Watkins’s beautiful book about the queen, which appeared in 2001, contains photographs by Mark Fiennes.
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The strength of her publication is that it not only relates Mary’s life through the medium of photography but also offers vivid descriptions of artifacts and clothing. As Watkins previously utilized this method to present the lives of Jane Austen and Marie Antoinette, she lacks experience in writing sixteenth-century history and sometimes shied away from documentary analysis, merely commenting, for example, that Mary may or may not have consented to Bothwell’s abduction.

Like Fraser’s study, the biography of Mary published in 2004 by John Guy, a prominent Tudor political historian, provides a romantic conceptualization of her. Validating claims that Mary wed Darnley for love, Guy argued that after Bothwell’s forcible abduction of her, she consented to sexual relations with him because she never would have married her rapist, thus transferring modern sensibilities on to early modern people. In his memoirs, however, Sir James Melville, a witness to Mary’s abduction, claimed that Bothwell raped her, and although the aged Melville knew well her subsequent history, including the imprisonment in Scotland and the flight to England that led to her life-long captivity, he still maintained that she “could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against her will.”
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Guy also maintained – unrealistically – that if Mary had not fallen in love with her captor within two or three days after he seized her, she could have escaped from Dunbar Castle or, at least, kept her chamber door locked. It must be noted that it took her almost one year to win release from Lochleven prison.

A major reason Guy turned to this biography was to establish that William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, schemed to engineer Mary’s downfall. In 1566 Cecil instructed his ally, Francis Russell, second earl of Bedford, to persuade Mary to pardon her exiled rebels, especially James Douglas, fourth earl of Morton, because Cecil anticipated that upon reaching home Morton would join Bothwell and other Protestants in murdering Darnley. Guy cited extensive evidence to prove his conspiracy theory but failed to explain why Catholics, such as Darnley’s kinsman, John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl, and even members of the French government, also pressed for Morton’s return.

Like most recent scholars, Guy pronounced as forged the Casket Letters, which include eight French love letters allegedly written by Mary to Bothwell. To prove that her adulterous love for Bothwell caused her to collude in Darnley’s murder, her illegitimate half brother, James, earl of Moray, who served as her son’s regent, introduced these documents into the English inquiry commissioned to determine whether she should be returned to Scotland. As the originals have disappeared, Guy turned to extant sixteenth-century transcripts and discovered that Cecil altered the English translations of the French versions to make it appear as though she had referred to Darnley’s murder. It is difficult to judge the impact of Cecil’s mistranslations, however, as some commissioners could read French. Furthermore, one of their charges was comparing the handwriting in the French Casket Letters to that in French documents unquestionably composed by Mary. Ultimately, the Englishmen seemed far less interested in validating the letters’ contents than in understanding why Moray was so willing to besmirch his half sister’s honor and reputation.

Besides these manuscripts, Guy utilized other archival evidence for his biography of over 500 pages. Despite its length, the book fails to refer to some significant issues, for example, Wormald’s arguments about Mary’s ineffectiveness as a ruler, and gives relatively limited attention to her extended captivity. Finally, it relies on unconfirmed diplomatic gossip and contains several surprising factual errors.
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That Alison Weir, a popular writer who was intrigued by the mystery surrounding Darnley’s murder, also published a romantic study of Mary in 2004 indicates the continuing public demand for works on her life.
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This highly readable book relies on a manuscript attributed to Claude Nau, who became Mary’s secretary for French affairs in 1575 while she was an English prisoner. Weir treated this manuscript as though it were the queen’s memoirs, although Mary’s authenticated writings contradict some of its statements.

APPROACHES TO MARY’S LIFE

These earlier studies generally reflect their authors’ interest in British political history as well as photography. By contrast, this biography represents not only an understanding of political history but also my experience in researching a wide range of cultural rituals, mores, and behavior. Since the 1980s, I have examined queenship conventions, gender relations, family networks, the honor code, death customs, religious conflict, aristocratic education, court politics, and royal protocol. In interpreting Mary’s controversial decisions at critical moments in her life, I have also utilized works by anthropologists, such as Victor Turner, which remind us of the limited range of choices, specific to their culture, which individuals have when responding to personal crises.

In some sense all Marian scholars have benefited from and have even built upon their predecessors’ studies of her. Besides becoming familiar with this extensive historiography, I have turned to recent research on early modern cultural, legal, and social topics, especially concerning Scotland, which highlight information that makes possible new approaches to her life. Her royal status, her kinship networks and French upbringing, her dynastic vision, her marital difficulties and gender relations, her religious views, the conspiracies against Elizabeth, and the preparations for her execution – these all gain richer and fresher nuances when examined for the first time within early modern frameworks.

EARLY MODERN FRAMEWORKS: ROYAL KINSHIP AND DYNASTIC VISION

It is significant to the development of Mary’s character and personality that as she was growing up, she could not remember a time when she was not the queen of her realm. As she moved from infancy to childhood, she must have slowly become aware that in social groups and at every public and private moment she occupied the premier place. She headed a social hierarchy in which the royal family held a superior status to that of dukes, who, in turn, took precedence over earls. Below them were situated lesser members of the titled classes. In Scotland the royalty, noblemen, and lesser aristocracy even wore different kinds of helmets to confirm visually their social standing. Their placement in public processions or ceremonies also reinforced their status in the pervasive early modern pyramid.

After reaching France, Mary learned from Henry II, her future father-in-law, important lessons about Scotland’s diplomatic status in Christendom. He granted her first place at court among his daughters, but although she was a queen regnant, he situated her behind Catherine de’ Medici, his queen consort, and his sons. That Mary was destined to marry his heir Francis, the dauphin, was the reason Henry advanced her to this high ranking. Following the medieval papacy’s protocol, European leaders had customarily privileged the princes of the blood of France above all others, except the pope, the emperor, and his heir the king of the Romans. At diplomatic conferences and festive occasions French envoys were placed immediately after papal and imperial legates. When Emperor Charles V no longer governed Spain, however, its monarchs challenged their demotion to the second-place position. Shortly after the accession of the emperor’s son, Philip II, to the Spanish throne in 1556, he began unsuccessfully to dispute the French primacy. Meanwhile, Henry VIII claimed third place for England but occasionally, as, for example, at the imperial court, his envoys had to acquiesce in the loss of their status to Portugal, whose infanta, Isabella, was Emperor Charles’s wife. Scotland came further down the list, after Sicily but before Cyprus and Denmark. Monarchs, as well as their aristocratic subjects, jealously guarded their social and diplomatic standings, sometimes responding violently when threatened with displacement.

In France Mary also became aware of the prominence of her Guise uncles, her mother’s brothers, who dominated the royal council and government after her husband Francis’s accession. They taught her the political and social advantages of their powerful kin networks. Her mother had, after all, chosen to match Mary with the dauphin rather than an English prince in order not only to ally Scotland with the more prestigious realm but also to enhance the influence and authority of her French relatives in their native land.

During Mary’s residence in France while receiving a humanist education similar to Francis’s, she was instructed in the strategies conducive to political survival at royal courts. Her mother’s brother, Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, taught her how to manipulate protocol to mask her opinions, to shun gossips that might spread rumors about her, to prevent enemies from entering her household, and to employ ciphers and codes in her sensitive correspondence. Her life in France may have been happy but it was never carefree.

Earlier in 1543 Henry VIII had demanded her as a bride for his son Edward, partly because Mary was also a claimant to the English throne. Scottish officials agreed to the Treaties of Greenwich, arranging for her removal to England as Edward’s betrothed when she was ten years old, but rejected those treaties a few months later. In retaliation English raids, which have been termed the Rough Wooing since Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase in the nineteenth century, devastated parts of her realm, attempting to capture her and remove her to England. In his will which set out the English succession, Henry ignored the Stewarts, apparently intending that Mary would become England’s queen only if she wed Edward, his heir.

These childhood experiences and Henry II’s endorsement of her English rights in 1559 after the accession of Henry VIII’s Protestant daughter Elizabeth, whom Catholics viewed as illegitimate, may have strengthened Mary’s dynastic resolve. It would, however, have been uncharacteristic for an early modern ruler to surrender a hereditary asset like hers without a struggle. Henry II and his father, Francis I, for example, fought ruinous wars with Emperor Charles, trying to capture Milan to which they held only a remote claim.

GENDER ISSUES AND MARITAL DIFFICULTIES

Believing that it was more appropriate for men than women to wield monarchical power, many British people deplored the rule of queens regnant. When Parliament entailed the Scottish crown in 1373 to Robert II’s sons, it noted the “evils and misfortunes” that had in many places “arisen from the succession of female heirs.”
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In 1542 the crown had reverted to Mary only because her father’s heir apparent and cousin, John Stewart, second duke of Albany, had died childless in 1536. Among the multitudinous early modern voices preferring kings to queens regnant were besides John Knox, a leading reformer, David Lindsay the herald, David Calderwood, historian of the Kirk, and her own son James VI. In a sermon at the court of Edward VI, the English preacher, Hugh Latimer also publicly expressed concerns about the possible accession of the king’s sisters.
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