Mary Stuart Read online

  Chapter Four

  Return to Scotland

  (August 1561)

  A FOG, THICKER THAN IS USUAL in summer even in a northerly clime, shrouded sea and land when, on 19th August 1561, Mary stepped out of the boat which put her ashore at Leith. What a contrast was this arrival in Scotland with the magnificent send-off she had been accorded when bidding adieu to la douce France! Then she had been escorted by the bravest and noblest gentlemen of the land; princes and counts, poets and musicians, had graced her passage along the roads and at the port, coining courtly phrases and composing rapturous songs in her honour. In Scotland, no one was expecting her, and it was not until she was handed out of the boat and stepped along on firm ground that a few commoners gathered to gape at the dainty apparition. A fisherman or two in their rough working clothes, a handful of loitering soldiers, some shopkeepers and peasants who had come to sell their sheep in the town looked at her and her suite shyly rather than with enthusiasm. They seemed to be asking themselves who these fine folk could be with their sumptuous clothing and display of jewels. Strangers gazed into the eyes of strangers. A rude welcome, hard and austere as are the souls of these northern people. From the first hour of her landing, Mary Stuart was made to see the appalling poverty of her native country, to realise that during the few days of her voyage she had travelled backwards in history at least one hundred years, that she had left behind her a great civilisation, rich and luxurious, wasteful and sensuous, had exchanged the refined and open-handed culture of France for something narrow, dark, and fraught with tragedy. A dozen times and more, the town had been ravaged and plundered by the English, and by Scottish rebels, so that it could boast of no palace or baronial hall wherein Mary might be received with a dignity worthy of her rank. This night, therefore, she was put up in a burgher’s house; simple quarters it is true, but at least the Queen of Scotland had a roof over her head.

  First impressions make a distinctive mark on the mind; they are stamped in deeply, and much of subsequent happenings depends upon whether they are good or bad. Perhaps Mary herself scarcely understood what moved her so profoundly when, after an absence of thirteen years, she returned to her kingdom as a stranger. Could it be homesickness, an unconscious longing for a warm, sweet existence which had taught her to love the French soil? Was it perhaps the shadow cast upon her high spirits by the grey skies of an unknown land? May it not have been a premonition of coming disaster? Whatever the emotion was, Brantôme tells us that hardly did she find herself alone in the room allotted her when she burst into tears. It was not like William the Conqueror, strong in the consciousness of his power, that this poor girl set foot on British earth. Her feeling was one of constraint and perplexity mingled with gloomy forebodings.

  Meanwhile, her half-brother, Lord James Stuart (better known to history by his later title, the Earl of Moray, or as the Regent Moray in subsequent years), had been informed of Mary’s arrival, and he in company with some of his fellow noblemen rode with all haste to Leith in order to provide a worthy escort to accompany her on her entry into Edinburgh. But the cavalcade did not cut much of a figure. Under the very transparent pretext of a search for pirates, the English had waylaid one of Mary’s ships. This happened to be the one conveying the favourite palfrey that she used on state occasions, together with the whole of the royal stud. Since the Queen rode well, she would not have been loath to display her equestrian skill to the crowds assembled to see her pass. But being deprived of her own mount, she had to ride into her kingdom sitting on the best horse the town of Leith could provide. A sorry nag, indeed, but serviceable. The mortification was no small thing for a girl of eighteen to face. Her suite fared worse, having to be content with what the stables and stalls of the neighbouring countryside could produce. Again tears suffused Mary’s eyes, tears of wounded pride and regret, for suddenly there was borne in on her the magnitude of her loss the day her husband, Francis II, was taken from her. Also she realised that to be Queen of Scotland was a poor, mean thing when compared with the glory of being Queen of France. Her national pride was piqued at having to cut so wretched a figure before the French gentlemen who accompanied her, and she felt personally affronted at having to present herself for the first time to her new subjects in so pitiable a plight. Instead, therefore, of making a “joyeuse entrée” through the main streets of Edinburgh, Mary decided to stop at Holyrood, which was outside the city walls. Her father had built this palace; its crenellated battlements dominated the landscape, dark and defiant; at first sight it created a formidable impression, with its menacing towers, its clear-cut lines, its square-shaped majesty. But how chill, empty and dismal must it have appeared to a child who had lived amid the voluptuous refinement of the French Renaissance. Here were no Gobelins to cheer and refresh the eyes, no chandeliers reflecting their lustrous illumination in Italian mirrors from wall to wall, no costly hangings, no sheen of gold and silver. Many years had gone by since the place had been used; no laughter re-echoed from its forlorn walls, no kingly hand had cared for or renovated the building since her father’s death. Poverty, the age-long curse of her kingdom, stared down at her from every nook.

  But, night though it was, the inhabitants of Edinburgh had no sooner learnt that their Queen had come than they issued from their houses, determined to give her a suitable welcome. It is not to be wondered at that this welcome seemed uncouth and boorish to Mary and her entourage, used as they were to French brilliancy and polish. Edinburgh’s townsfolk had no festive attire to grace the ceremony, nor did they know how to set up triumphal arches in honour of their young Queen. Here were no “musiciens de la cour” to enchant the ears of Ronsard’s pupil with sweet madrigals and smoothly flowing canzoni. They could only follow the traditional customs such occasions demanded. The country was rich in wood, so what more natural than to construct huge bonfires in the public squares, and by their glare change night into day? They gathered beneath her window and serenaded her with the wild skirling of bagpipes and other outlandish instruments, a sound they called music, but which to her trained ears was nothing but an ugly noise. In addition they raised their rough, manly voices in song; and since they were forbidden by their Calvinistic pastors to sing profane melodies, they filled the air with the lilt of psalms and hymns. With the best will in the world, they were incapable of producing a more soothing lullaby. Nevertheless, Mary Stuart’s heart warmed with the honest love which breathed through these rustic endeavours; the reception was instinct with friendliness towards herself and pleasure at her advent. For decades such harmony had not existed between the sovereign and the people of this distraught and tragical land.

  Neither the Queen, young and politically inexperienced as she was, nor her chief advisers, blinked the fact that unusually difficult tasks lay ahead. Maitland of Lethington, who had one of the shrewdest brains of his day in Scotland, wrote prophetically before Mary returned to her native heath: “It could not fail to raise wonderful tragedies.” Even an energetic man, a man with an iron fist and resolute mind, could not for long impose peace on this unmanageable environment with its chaos of contradictions making for perpetual unrest. How, then, could so joyous and ethereal a young queen, a stranger in these parts, unaccustomed to rule, how could Mary be expected to fare better? A poverty-stricken country, a corrupt nobility that seized upon any and every occasion to rise in arms, a countless number of contending clans on the lookout for a pretext to engage in civil strife, a clergy that was half Catholic and half Protestant fighting for precedence, an alert and dangerous neighbour profiting by fratricidal disputes over the border to feather her own nest, antagonism on the part of the big powers ruthlessly making use of Scotland as catspaw in their bloody game—such was the situation by which Mary Stuart was faced.

  At the time of Mary’s return, dissension and discord were at their height. Instead of leaving the treasury full, Mary of Guise had left a veritable damnosa hereditas—an accursed inheritance—no money, and a war of religions which was to become, perhaps, more bitter on
this soil than anywhere else in the world. During the years Mary had spent so happily in France, the Reformation had struck deep roots in the Scottish earth, and was almost universally victorious. The cleavage was felt at court and in the home, in villages and towns, throughout whole kinships and families—one half of the nobility and gentry Catholic whilst the other half was Protestant, the towns advocating the new faith, the countryside the old, clan opposed to clan, family opposed to family, and all parties stimulated in their hatred by fanatical priests and by the political ambitions of foreign powers. What constituted the gravest danger so far as Mary was concerned was that the most powerful and influential of her nobles had gone over to the Calvinistic camp; they had made the best of their opportunities and had seized the lands and properties of the old Church while simultaneously weakening the power of the crown, two achievements which made a special and quasi-magical appeal to this rout of ambitious and greedy rebels. They found a specious and ostensibly moral pretext, as protectors of the true faith, as Lords of the Congregation, to set themselves up in opposition to their ruler, and England as usual was not tardy in giving them a helping hand in this endeavour. Though Elizabeth was by nature of a thrifty disposition, she had not grudged spending more than two hundred thousand pounds sterling in financing these traitors, in fomenting rebellion and civil war to undermine the throne of the Catholic Stuarts. Even now, when a truce had been signed, a goodly number of Mary’s subjects were in the secret pay of the English Queen. Of course equilibrium could easily be restored if Mary should consent to embrace the new faith, and some of her advisers urged her to do so. But Mary was not only a Stuart, she was also a Guise. She was a child of the most ardent champions of the Catholic cause and, though not fanatically pious, she was true to the beliefs of her forebears. Never was she to stray from the path of her convictions, no matter the dangers that encompassed her, and, loyal to her own nature, she chose rather perpetual warfare than, in a moment of cowardly weakness, to run counter to the dictates of her conscience.

  Unfortunately this meant that the cleavage between herself and her nobles was irremediable. It is always a fatal thing when a ruler belongs to a different religion from that of the majority of his subjects. The scales cannot vacillate for ever, but must incline definitely in one direction or the other. Thus in the end Mary Stuart was compelled either to make herself mistress of the Reformation or else to bow her head beneath its superior force. The inevitable settlement of accounts as between Luther, Calvin and Rome was, by an extraordinary coincidence, to find a dramatic decision in the fate that awaited her. For the personal struggle between Mary and Elizabeth, between Scotland and England, was decisive also—and this is what makes the struggle so important historically—for the struggle between England and Spain, between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

  The ominousness of the situation was aggravated by the fact that the religious dissensions above described extended into Mary’s family, her palace and her council chamber. The most powerful man in Scotland, her half-brother James Stuart, whom she found it expedient to appoint prime minister, was an ardent Protestant and protector of that Kirk which she, being a good Catholic, could not but regard as heretical. Four years earlier he had been the first to append his signature beneath the joint pledge of the Lords of the Congregation “to forsake and renounce the Congregation of Satan, with all superstitions, abominations and idolatry thereto, and moreover to declare themselves manifestly enemies thereto.” What was here called the “Congregation of Satan” was nothing other than the Holy Catholic Church of which his half-sister Queen Mary was a devoted adherent. Thus from the start there was a profound cleavage of convictions between the monarch and her chief minister. Such a state of affairs does not make for peace. For, at the bottom of her heart, the Queen had but one thought—to repress the Reformation in Scotland; whereas James, her brother, had but one desire—to make Protestantism the only religion in Scotland.

  James Stuart was to be one of the most notable figures in the life drama of Mary Queen of Scots. Fate had allotted him a leading role which he was destined to play in masterly fashion. A natural son of James V, the fruit of an enduring liaison with Margaret Erskine, who belonged to one of the best families in Scotland, he seemed, no less by his royal blood than by his iron energy, to be the most suitable heir to the throne. Nothing but the political weakness of James V’s position had forced that monarch to refrain from legal marriage with the woman he deeply loved, and (that he might increase his power and fill his purse) to contract a marriage with the French princess who became the mother of Mary Queen of Scots. Thus the stigma of illegitimacy debarred the ambitious youth from the throne. Even though, at the urgent request of James V, the Pope had officially acknowledged James Stuart and five other love children of his father to be of the blood royal, young James was still legally a bastard.

  Innumerable times have history and her greatest imaginative exponent, Shakespeare, disclosed the spiritual tragedy of the bastard who is a son and yet not a son, of one whom laws spiritual and laws temporal unfeelingly deprive of a right which nature has stamped on his character and countenance. Condemned by prejudice—the harshest, the most unbending of judges—are these illegitimates, those who have not been procreated in the royal bed, who are treated as inferior to the lawful heirs, though the latter are as a rule weaklings in comparison, because engendered, not out of love, but out of political calculation. They are eternally rejected and thrust out, condemned to beg where they should command and possess. But if the brand of inferiority is visibly placed on a man, the permanent sense of inferiority will either weaken or strengthen him decisively. Such a pressure can break a character or can consolidate it amazingly. Those who are cowardly and half-hearted will be rendered even more so by humiliations of the kind; they will become beggars and flatterers, accepting favours and employment from their officially acknowledged rivals. But in the strong, enforced inferiority will arouse and liberate latent and leashed energies. For the very reason that the direct path to power is not freely opened to them, they will learn to draw power from within their own souls.

  James Stuart was a man of strong character. The fierce resolution of his royal ancestors, their pride, and their sense of mastery were continually at work in the hidden recesses of his being. In shrewdness and determination, no less than in clarity of thought, he was head and shoulders above the rufflers who comprised the bulk of the Scottish nobility. His aims were far-reaching, his plans the fruit of profound political thought. No less able than his sister, he, a man of thirty, was enormously in advance of her, thanks to cool-headedness and masculine experience. He looked down upon her as no more than a sportive child who might go on playing so long as her games did not disturb his circles. A man fully grown, he was not, like his sister, a prey to violent, neurotic or romantic impulses; he was not a heroic ruler, but he had the virtue of patience, which gives better assurance of success than can passionate impetus.

  Nothing bears stronger witness to a statesman’s political ability and clear-mindedness than his refusal to strive after the unattainable. In Lord James Stuart’s case the unattainable was the kingly crown, since he had been born out of lawful wedlock. He knew only too well that the title “James VI” would never be his, and from the outset he renounced any pretensions he might have to ascending the throne of Scotland. But this initial abnegation made his position, as effective ruler over the realm, all the more secure. Giving up any idea of being invested with the insignia of power or of assuming the title of King, he could henceforward wield real power unmolested. As quite a young man he saw to it that he was well furnished with that tangible form of power: wealth. His father had left him handsomely provided for; he never lost countenance when the question of a gift was raised; he made good use of the wars to fill his pockets, and when the monasteries were dissolved, he saw to it that he was always present at the distribution of the prize morsels. Nor was he reluctant to accept subsidies from Elizabeth. When Mary got back to Scotland, it did no
t take her long to discover that her half-brother was the wealthiest and most powerful man in the realm, so secure that none could oust him from his position, so mighty that he would constitute one of the most solid pillars of her dominion if she acquiesced in his remaining at the helm, and would be her most dangerous enemy if she ran counter to his will.

  Mary Stuart, in her wisdom and necessity, chose to place him on a footing of friendship. Wishing above all to secure her own dominion, she was keen-sighted enough to give him, for the time being, whatever he coveted, and fed his insatiable cupidity for riches and power. It was Mary’s good fortune that her brother’s hands were both strong and supple, for he knew when to hold firm and when to give way. True statesman that he was, James Stuart chose a middle course in his undertakings—a Protestant but no iconoclast, a Scottish patriot and yet keeping in Elizabeth’s good graces, ostensibly a friend of his peers but well aware of the exact minute when they needed to be threatened with the mailed fist, a cool-headed, clear-sighted, calculating individual, with no unruly nerves, incapable of being blinded by the glitter of power, and content only when wielding power.

  A personage of such outstanding qualities was an inestimable boon to Mary Stuart so long as he remained in her faction, and a colossal danger so soon as he should become her adversary. Bound to her by the ties of blood, our cheerfully egoistical Stuart had every reason to maintain his sister’s authority so long as it suited his personal interests, for were a Hamilton or a Gordon to step into her shoes he would never be given such a free hand and such unlimited influence over administrative affairs. He could look on calmly while she was ceremoniously presented with crown and sceptre, for real government was in his safe-keeping. But if she should ever try to rule in her own right, if she should ever question his authority, then one form of Stuart pride would rise in revolt against the other form of Stuart pride, and no enmity is more to be dreaded than when similar is confronted with similar, and when both make use of the same weapons against one another.