Mary Stuart (13 page)

Moray, having been carefully drilled by Cecil, knew that now he might say anything in the world except the truth. He knew that he must take all the blame upon himself, in order to exonerate Elizabeth in the ambassador’s eyes. Instead, therefore, of stating his grievances against Mary Stuart, he praised his half-sister to the skies. She had bestowed upon him lands, titles of honour and other rewards far beyond his merits; he had, for that reason, served her faithfully, and nothing but the dread of a conspiracy against his own person, nothing but the fear of assassination, had led him to behave as foolishly, as recklessly, as he had done. He had only come to Elizabeth hoping for her gracious help to induce the Queen of Scotland to forgive him.

This seemed already to exculpate very efficiently the woman who had fomented the whole affair. But Elizabeth needed more. The comedy had been staged, not merely that Moray, before the French ambassador, should take the blame on his own shoulders, but that, as witness for the crown, he might declare that Elizabeth had had nothing whatever to do with the affair. A thumping lie never means any more to a politician than empty breath, so Moray solemnly assured the ambassador that Queen Elizabeth “had known nothing whatever about the conspiracy, and had never encouraged him or his friends to disobey the orders of their lawful sovereign.”

Elizabeth had got what she wanted. She had been solemnly whitewashed, and was able, with theatrical emotion, to rail at her fellow conspirator in front of the ambassador. “Now,” she exclaimed, “ye have told the truth; for neither did I, nor any in my name, stir ye up against your Queen, for your abominable treason might serve for example to move my own subjects to rebel against me; therefore pack you out of my presence, ye are but an unworthy traitor.” Moray bowed his head, perhaps to conceal a smile. He had not forgotten the many thousand pounds which, in the Queen’s name, had been handed to Lady Moray for him, and to some of the other rebel lords; nor had he forgotten Randolph’s imploring letters, nor yet the pledges of English military aid. He knew, moreover, that if for the time being he were prepared to accept the role of scapegoat, Elizabeth would not chase him forth into the desert. The French ambassador, meanwhile, stood respectfully listening and watching, for being a man of education he could enjoy a good comedy. Not until he got back to the embassy would he allow himself to smile, when sitting alone at his desk and writing a report to his royal master. Elizabeth, one may suppose, was not altogether happy in her mind, for she can hardly have believed that anyone could have taken these assurances at their face value. Still, no one had ventured to smile openly. Appearances had been kept up, and what did truth matter? Without a word more, sustained by the dignity of her voluminous skirts, she rustled out.

Nothing can show better how great, for the time, had become the power of Mary Stuart, than that her English cousin and adversary should, after losing the battle, have been driven to such petty subterfuges in order to make a seemly retreat. The Queen of Scotland could raise her head proudly, for everything had happened as she had willed. The man of her choice wore the Scottish crown; the barons who had risen against her had returned to their allegiance or were outlawed in foreign lands. All the omens were favourable, and when she now bore a son to her young husband, the last and greatest of her dreams was fulfilled. This Stuart boy would be King of the united thrones of Scotland and England.

The omens were favourable. Fortunate stars shed their light like a silent blessing over the land. Now, one might suppose, Mary Stuart could rest in the enjoyment of the happiness she had harvested. But the law of her unruly nature was to suffer storm or to raise it. One whose heart is untamed cannot rest content when the outer world proffers happiness and peace. Impetuously this disorderly heart continued, from within, to create fresh disasters and new perils.

I
T IS PART OF THE NATURE OF EVERY TRUE PASSION
neither to count nor to save, neither to hesitate nor to question. When one of a regal type of character loves, this implies unrestricted self-surrender and expenditure without thrift. During the first weeks of her marriage, Mary found it impossible to do enough to show her fondness for her young husband. Every day she surprised Darnley with some new gift—now a horse, now a suit of clothes; a hundred small and tender things, to follow up the bestowal of the greatest things in her power to bestow—the royal tide and the warmth of her heart. Reporting to London, Randolph, the English ambassador, wrote: “All honour that may be attributed unto any man by a wife, he hath it wholly and fully. All praise that may be spoken of him, he lacketh not from herself. All dignities that she can indue him with are already given and granted. No man pleaseth her that contenteth not him; and what may I say more? She hath given over unto him her whole will, to be ruled and guided as himself best liketh.” Mary Stuart was not one to do things by halves; she gave with both hands. Now that she was passionately in love, she was wholly obedient and ecstatically humble.

Great gifts, however, are advantageous only to one who is worthy of them; for others, they are dangerous. Strong characters become yet stronger through a sudden accession of power, since power is their natural element; weak characters, on the other hand, are ruined by unmerited good fortune. Triumph, instead of teaching them humility, makes them arrogant; and, childish in their folly, they believe that the favour of fortune is a testimony to their own worth.

It was not long before Mary’s unrestrained and voluptuous delight in giving proved disastrous to this narrow-minded and vain youth, who still stood in need of a tutor instead of becoming the master and lord of a generous and high-spirited queen. For as soon as Darnley perceived what power he had gained, he became pretentious and overbearing. He accepted his wife’s gifts as nothing more than tributes due to him and took the guerdon of her royal love as something that accrued to him by right as a man. Having become a master, he felt entitled to treat his wife as a slave. A poor creature with a “heart of wax” (to quote Mary’s own contemptuous words about him later), the spoilt lad threw off all restraint, suffered from what would nowadays be called “swelled head”, and meddled autocratically in affairs of state. The courtliness and modesty that he had assumed in the days of his wooing were now discarded as superfluous. It was no longer necessary for him to write verses to Mary, or to be gentle in his manner. At the council he assumed dictatorial airs, speaking rudely and loudly; he drank deep with his boon companions, and on one occasion, when the Queen tried to withdraw him from unworthy associates, he berated her so shamefully that the poor woman, thus publicly humiliated, burst into tears. Since his wife had granted him the title of King (the title and nothing more), he believed himself to be in very truth a king, and impetuously demanded the “crown matrimonial”, that is to say joint powers of rule. Indeed, this beardless lad of nineteen was already dreaming of autocracy, of becoming the sole and irresponsible head of the Scottish realm. Yet everyone knew that his presumption was not backed up by any effective will, that a conceited boy was intoxicating himself with his own rodomontade, and that the braggart believed himself to be a man because he displayed the arrogance of an upstart. Inevitably, before long, Mary herself came to recognise, with shame, that her first and most devoted love had been squandered upon one who was both ungrateful and unworthy.

Now, in a woman’s life, there can be no worse humiliation than to discover she has given herself to one who does not deserve or appreciate the gift, and never will a true woman pardon either herself or the man for so gross a mistake. When the love passion has once flamed high between a man and a woman, it would be unnatural were it to lapse into mere coolness and smooth civility; love, in cases of bitter disappointment, is speedily metamorphosed into hatred and contempt. Thus Mary Stuart, who was never one to show moderation in her feelings, having recognised Darnley to be a pitiful specimen of mankind, withdrew her favour from him more suddenly and swiftly than a thoughtful and calculating woman would have done. She swung from one extreme to the other. Piece by piece, she took away from Darnley what she had unreflectingly, uncalculatingly, given him in the first flush of passion. There was no more talk of his being effective joint ruler, of the “crown matrimonial” which in former days she had conceded to her sixteen-year-old husband Francis II. Wrathfully, Darnley became aware that he was no longer summoned to important sittings of the council, and he was enraged when he was forbidden to include the royal emblem in his coat of arms. Instead of becoming the autocrat he had hoped to be, he found that he had been degraded to the position of prince consort, and that instead of, as he had dreamt, playing the chief part, he was, at court, barely allowed a consultative voice. Soon his wife’s contemptuous treatment of him was copied by the courtiers. Rizzio no longer showed him state documents and, without consulting him, signed the Queen’s letters with the “iron stamp”. The English ambassador refused to address him as “Your Majesty”. At Christmas, only six months after the honeymoon, Randolph reported “strange alterations” at the Scottish court. “Until recently it was the custom here to speak of the King and the Queen, but of late Darnley has only been spoken of as the Queen’s husband. He had grown accustomed to see his name put first beneath all edicts, but now it occupies the second place. Not long ago, coins were struck bearing the joint heads of ‘Henricus et Maria’, but they have been withdrawn from circulation and new ones have been issued … Some private disorders there are among themselves, but because they may be but
amantium irae
or household words as poor men speak, it maketh no matter if it grow no further.”

But it did grow further. To the slights which the paper King had to suffer in his own court were now superadded the more grievous slights of a husband who believes himself betrayed. For years past, Mary, upright though she was by nature, had had to learn that lying is needful in politics, but she remained unable to counterfeit where her personal feelings were involved. As wife, she must give herself wholly or not at all. Lukewarm emotions and half-heartedness were impossible to her. As soon as it had become clear to her that she had given the treasure of her love to a worthless wight, directly the fancied Darnley of the honeymoon had been replaced by a foolish, vain, impudent and ungrateful youth such as Mary’s husband actually was, physical attraction was replaced by physical repulsion. It was now intolerable to her to go on surrendering her body to this man from whom her heart had been estranged. The instant she was aware of being with child, she began to shun Darnley’s embraces on any and every pretext. She was ailing, she was tired; she could always find some such reason for refusing herself to him, and whereas, during the first months of their married life (Darnley, in his anger, revealed these connubial privacies), Mary had been the more forthcoming of the two, she now shamed her husband by frequently rejecting his advances. Even in this most intimate sphere, where he had first won power over her, Darnley, to his profound mortification, found himself deprived of the ordinary privileges of a husband.

He lacked the moral strength to keep his frustration to himself. He shouted it from the housetops, chattered about it in every tavern, raged and threatened, talked fatuously of revenge. But the more bombastic his language, the more absurd an impression did he produce until, within a few months, the royal title notwithstanding, he was regarded as nothing better than a tiresome and capricious outsider to whom the courtiers showed the broad of their backs. No longer did people incline their heads reverentially; they merely smiled when Henricus rex Scotiae voiced his demands. To one who is or would be a ruler, however, universal contempt is more dangerous than universal hatred.

Mary’s disappointment in Darnley was political as well as the disappointment of a loving woman. She had hoped that, with the aid of a husband who would be devoted to her body and soul, she would at length be able to shake off the tutelage of Moray, Lethington and the Scottish lords in general; she had dreamt of ruling Scotland jointly with her beloved. But these illusions, likewise, had vanished with the honeymoon. For Darnley’s sake, she had estranged Moray and Lethington, with the result that she was now utterly alone. But a woman of such a nature as hers, however profoundly her hopes have been belied, cannot live without a confidant, so she was continually looking round her for someone upon whom she could unconditionally rely. Better, she thought, that it should be a man of low rank, lacking the prestige of a Moray or a Lethington, but having, in place thereof, a virtue which was more essential to her at the court of Scotland—absolute loyalty, the trustworthiness which is the most precious of boons in a servitor.

Chance had brought such a man to Scotland. When Marchese Moreta, the Savoyard ambassador, visited Scotland, there came in his train a young Piedmontese, David Rizzio by name, “in visage very black”, about twenty-eight years of age, with round, alert eyes and a lively mouth—that of a good singer. (“
Particolarmente era buon musico
”—He was an especially good musician.) Poets and musicians were always welcome guests at Mary’s court. Both her father and her mother had transmitted to her a passion for the fine arts. Nothing could better relieve the gloom of her environment than the strains of the lute or the violin, as accompaniment of a good voice. It happened, at the moment, that she was short of a basso, and since “Seigneur Davie” (as he came to be called by his intimates at the Scottish court) was not only a competent bass, but a fairly skilled composer, the Queen begged Moreta to allow the “
buon musico
” to remain behind in her personal service. Moreta had no objection, so Rizzio was appointed, at a salary of sixty-five pounds. In the palace account-books is inscribed “David le Chantre”, but among the domestic staff he was known as “
valet de chambre
”—groom of the chamber. In those days there was nothing degrading in such a designation for a musician, seeing that down till Beethoven’s time the greatest of musicians were at court accounted as no more than members of the domestic staff. Even Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the old white-haired Haydn, though famed throughout Europe, never sat at meals among the nobles and princes, but took their food in the servants’ hall.

Rizzio was not merely a young man with a fine voice. He had a shrewd intelligence, a lively wit and an all-round artistic education. He spoke Latin and French fluently, as well as his native Italian; he wrote a “fair hand” and in a good style; those of his sonnets which have been preserved are tasteful and correct. Soon an opportunity occurred for promoting him from the servile rank. Paulet, Mary’s private secretary, had not proved immune to a malady that was endemic at the Scottish court, namely corruption by English gold. The Queen was forced to dismiss him at short notice. The vacant place in the Queen’s study was promptly filled by David Rizzio, who now rose rapidly at court. Soon he was something more than a secretary—he became Her Majesty’s adviser. No longer did Mary Stuart dictate her letters to the Piedmontese secretary, for the latter drafted the epistles as he thought best. The precise nature of the diplomatic negotiations in which he became engaged under these circumstances, and whether he worked exclusively in the Scottish interest or also had an eye to the advantage of foreign powers, will probably never be known. This much is certain, that he came to play a more and more important part in state affairs. As we have seen, he had a good deal to do with his royal mistress’ marriage to the Catholic prince consort Darnley, and Mary’s stubborn refusal to pardon Moray and the other rebel lords was ascribed by the latter, probably with good reason, to Rizzio’s influence. Suspicion had been rife that the young Piedmontese was a papal agent at the Scottish court. How much truth there may have been in this idea must remain uncertain. Beyond question, even if Rizzio was devoted to the papal and to the Catholic cause, he served Mary Stuart with a devotion and loyalty that had not been shown by any of her Scottish subjects. Now when Mary was faithfully served, she knew how to reward, and she was wont to give freely to anyone with whom she could converse frankly. She made her favour for Rizzio all too plain, giving him costly apparel, entrusting him with the Great Seal of the realm and making him acquainted with state secrets. Before long David Rizzio, the sometime servant, rose to be a great gentleman, sitting down at table with the Queen and her ladies, helping as
maître de plaisir
like Chastelard before him (an ominous parallel!), organising musical festivals and other court diversions, and becoming more and more the Queen’s close friend instead of merely her servitor. Until far on into the night, envied by the domestic staff, this low-born foreigner was closeted with the Queen in her private apartment. In princely attire, arrogant and offhand, the man who had arrived in Edinburgh as little better than a lackey and with nothing to recommend him but a fine voice now exercised the highest functions in the realm. He had more influence in such matters than Darnley the Queen’s husband, more influence than Moray when prime minister—the “
buon musico
” who was actual chief of the state. Nothing happened without his knowledge and consent, but this knowledge and this consent were honestly subservient to the Queen’s interests.

As a second sturdy pillar of her independence, the military power as well as the political was now in trustworthy hands. In the former domain, likewise, she had found someone to serve her faithfully, the Earl of Bothwell, who years before, in early youth, had (though a Protestant) espoused the cause of Mary of Guise against the Lords of the Congregation, and had therefore been driven from Scotland by the enmity of James Stuart. Returning to his country after Moray’s rebellion and downfall, Bothwell put his powers, which were far from inconsiderable, at the Queen’s disposal. A bold soldier, prepared for every hazard, a man of iron nature, passionate both in love and in hatred, Bothwell was devotedly served by the border clansmen, whom he had led in many a guerrilla campaign against the English. His person alone was worth an army. Grateful for his support, Mary confirmed him in the hereditary appointment of Lord Admiral of Scotland.