2

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL IN EUROPE”

MARY HAD TWO OPTIONS OPEN to her: she could make a second marriage with a foreign power, or she could return to Scotland. At first, she barely considered the latter. Her priority was to recover the prestige she felt she had lost through widowhood by marrying a great Catholic king, or a king’s son. At eighteen, with her crown and her rich French dowry, she rivalled Elizabeth I as the best match in Europe.

After Mary’s period of mourning officially ended in January 1561, she began seriously to consider marriage with Don Carlos, heir to Philip II of Spain. At that time, France and Spain were the two most powerful nations in Christendom, so Don Carlos was a great prize. But Catherine de’ Medici, whose daughter Elisabeth had recently married Philip, had no wish to see her eclipsed by Mary, or the influence of the Guises reaching into Spain. She also vehemently opposed their suggestion, put forward as a means of keeping Mary in France, that the Queen of Scots marry her late husband’s brother, Charles IX. Instead, the Queen Mother urged Mary to go back to her own kingdom and take up the reins of government there.

Some people thought that Mary should consider an advantageous dynastic marriage nearer home. There were two possible candidates. One was Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the fourteen-year-old son of the Earl and Countess of Lennox. Darnley’s ambitious parents wasted no time in sending him to France in February 1561 to offer condolences on the death of Francis II and privately to press his suit.¹Naturally, they took care to keep the true purpose of his visit a secret from Queen Elizabeth, because Darnley had a strong claim to the English throne, and it did not take much to arouse her suspicions. The Catholic Lennoxes had been in high favour with Mary I, and the Countess had then gone out of her way to make life difficult for Elizabeth when the latter was in disgrace; on Elizabeth’s accession, it had been made clear to the Lennoxes that they were no longer welcome at court. The Queen feared their ambition, and had spies planted in their household to keep a watch on their movements. In happy ignorance, Lady Lennox was now writing to several Catholic nobles in Scotland in an effort to enlist support for Darnley’s marriage to Queen Mary.

Elizabeth would never have approved such a marriage, for Darnley, like Mary, was too near her throne for comfort. The Spanish ambassador in England, Alvaro de Quadra, had told Philip II that, should Elizabeth die, the English Catholics would raise Darnley to royal estate as Henry IX. Yet there were obstacles in the way of him succeeding. His mother had been excluded from the Act of Succession and from Henry VIII’s Will, not only because she was a Roman Catholic, but also because there were doubts as to her legitimacy, her parents’ marriage having been declared invalid. Nevertheless, she and Darnley, whose claim to the English succession came through her, had both been born in England, and many therefore considered that their line had a better right than Mary Stuart to succeed Elizabeth. Darnley had also inherited rights to the Scottish succession through his father. Marriage to Mary could only reinforce his claims to both kingdoms, and would also boost the Scottish Queen’s ambitions in England.

In the event, Mary was not interested in marrying Darnley. She had set her sights on the far greater match with Don Carlos.

The second candidate for Mary’s hand was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who was five years her senior and had, in 1560, unsuccessfully proposed to Elizabeth I. As Chatelherault’s heir, Arran had a strong claim to the Scottish succession, but he did not appeal to Mary as a prospective husband because he was an extreme Protestant and had been one of the most militant leaders of the Reformation. Many Scots, including Knox, were in favour of a marriage between Arran and Mary, but Mary turned him down, with ultimately tragic results.

With no immediate prospect of the great foreign marriage alliance she desired, Mary decided to return to Scotland. Although the Lords of the Congregation had formally invited her to do so, both they, and Queen Elizabeth, would have been happier to see her stay in France; Knox feared that her arrival would signal a religious counter-revolution, while another leading Protestant, William Maitland, foresaw “wonderful tragedies.”²

In March, Lord James went to France to see Mary and negotiate the conditions for a smooth transfer of power; he was determined to ensure that the arrival of a Catholic queen would not make too many difficulties for the Protestant establishment. Mary made it clear that she would come in a spirit of reconciliation. She would not interfere with the newly founded Protestant Church, but insisted on her right to hear Mass in the privacy of the royal chapels. This seemed a fair compromise, and Lord James promised “to serve her faithfully to the utmost of his power, and returned again to Scotland to prepare the hearts of her subjects against her home-coming.”³

Soon afterwards, George Gordon, the Catholic Earl of Huntly, sent John Leslie, Bishop of Ross to France to urge Mary to accept Huntly’s armed backing and restore the Catholic faith in Scotland by force. Wisely, she declined. Huntly, it turned out, had betrayed his faith by joining the Lords of the Congregation and profiting from the spoils of the Reformation. There was no guarantee that he would not turn his coat again.

In the spring of 1560, the Earl of Bothwell returned to Scotland on the Queen’s business, apparently taking Anna Throndssen with him as his mistress. Mary was grateful to him for his unswerving loyalty to her mother, and as he was high in her favour, his enemies in Scotland dared not touch him.

By the summer, Mary was well advanced in preparations for her return, but because she had refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, Elizabeth declined to issue her with a safe-conduct to journey through England. When she changed her mind, it was too late, and Mary had already put to sea, having sailed from Calais on 14 August. Bothwell, as Lord High Admiral of Scotland, was in command of the fleet that came to fetch her. Over 200 years later, painters of the romantic era would frequently depict Mary being borne off in a ship, gazing wistfully back at France, yet while she certainly retained a lasting affection for the land in which she had grown up, it is clear that she was now determined to look to the future.

At six o’clock on the misty morning of 19 August 1561,⁴Mary’s ship docked at the port of Leith, and she set foot in her kingdom for the first time in thirteen years. She was not expected for another few days, and was obliged to take shelter in the house of a local merchant until Lord James and other nobles came to receive her and escort her to Edinburgh. Here, she was warmly welcomed by eager crowds, who cheered as she rode up the High Street (now known as the Royal Mile) to Edinburgh Castle, and later, as she presided over a banquet there, lit bonfires in her honour.

Not everyone was in raptures at her arrival. Knox wrote gloomily: “The very face of Heaven did manifestly speak what comfort was brought into this country with her, to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety. The sun was not seen to shine two days before, nor two days after. That forewarning gave God unto us; but, alas, the most part were blind.” Generally, however, the people of Scotland, including many members of the Protestant establishment, welcomed their Queen. “Her Majesty returning was gladly welcomed by the whole subjects,” wrote the courtier and diplomat Sir James Melville. “For at first, following the counsel of her friends, she behaved herself humanely to them all.” Many were impressed by her beauty, charm and dignity, or felt compassion for her as a young widow. It seemed that she was going to be a success.

Mary would certainly have found Scotland very different from France. It was a much poorer, and more sparsely populated, land, inhabited by about only 5–700,000 people. Its often turbulent nobles were drably dressed⁵compared to their French counterparts, and seemed to be constantly forming rival factions, or engaging in the complicated family feuds that arose from intensive intermarrying or clan warfare. Mostly motivated by self-interest, they ruled their feudalities like independent princes, and resented any interference from the monarch or from central government. Although many still lived in strongly fortified castles, the influence of the French Renaissance, which had featured increasingly in the architecture of the royal palaces since the reign of James IV (1488–1513), was now evident in the houses of the nobility, whose tastes, thanks to the Auld Alliance, were essentially French.

Next in rank below the Lords came the gentry, or lairds, who held their lands directly from the Crown, then the articulate and often outspoken burgesses of the urban merchant class, and finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, the peasantry. Most of Mary’s subjects lived in remote villages or farming communities, in rustic hovels. Few received much in the way of education but, thanks to the vision of John Knox, the Reformation Parliament had provided for the foundation of a system of schooling that was to endure for several centuries.

The Scots were a proud and tenacious people. Foreign visitors praised them as courageous warriors, but also found them to be uncouth and lawless, hostile to strangers and inordinately quarrelsome. Their way of life was seen as primitive. The weather was often cold and wet, and the roads, where they existed, were atrocious. The people were ignorant and superstitious, and there was a widespread belief in witchcraft. It appeared that all classes valued money more than honour. However, Scotland was in many respects a civilised land: it boasted three universities, and had thriving trade and cultural links with other countries.

Although Catholics were in the majority, most of the Lords were Protestant, and the city of Edinburgh itself was slowly becoming a bastion of Calvinism. Edinburgh then had a population that has been variously estimated as numbering between 10,000 and 40,000; most were crowded into cramped accommodation in tall tenement blocks in alleyways known as closes or wynds, on either side of the High Street, the impressive wide thoroughfare that led down from Edinburgh Castle, which stood on its high rock at the top, to Holyrood Palace at the bottom, which lay in the shadow of the extinct volcano known as Arthur’s Seat. A defensive wall 21 feet high, built in 1450 and replaced in 1513 after the Scots were defeated by the English at the Battle of Flodden, encircled the city, and had eight fortified gateways; one, the crenellated Netherbow Port, straddled the High Street. Below it was the Canongate, along which the former canons of Holyrood Abbey had walked into the city. At night, the city and the wall were patrolled by the 32-strong town watch.

The Flodden Wall, which was not demolished until the eighteenth century, was responsible for the overcrowding in the city. Instead of moving outwards, the citizens preferred to stay safe inside its bounds, and simply kept adding extra levels to their tenement blocks, some of which were fifteen storeys high. Sanitation was non-existent, and the closes were awash with sewage. The Scots might take pride in the High Street itself, but one visitor likened it to “an ivory comb whose teeth on both sides are very foul, though the space between them is clean and sightly.”⁶Well-to-do citizens preferred to live in the Canongate, near Holyrood Palace, or below the High Street in the Cowgate, then a select burgh. Another visitor wrote, “There is nothing humble or rustic, but all is magnificent.”⁷

Edinburgh was Scotland’s capital, its greatest city, and a prosperous, busy market centre. It was also the political hub of the realm, for the Privy Council, Parliament and the Court of Session (the central civil court) met regularly in the new Tolbooth on the High Street, which also served as a prison, and the law courts were situated nearby. Below the castle, on the site now occupied by Princes Street Gardens, lay the Nor’ Loch, an artificial lake created by James II as part of a defensive system; this was not drained until the eighteenth century, when the Georgian New Town was built. Until then, Edinburgh was centred upon the High Street and the few surrounding streets. The principal church was the imposing St. Giles with its distinctive crown spire, which stood on the High Street and had enjoyed collegiate status since the fifteenth century, but had recently been stripped of all the trappings of the old faith. Nearby stood the turreted Mercat Cross, where proclamations were made and criminals executed.

When she arrived in Edinburgh, Mary took up residence in Holyrood Palace, which was to be her chief abode, and is still the official Scottish residence of the sovereign. The adjoining former Augustinian abbey of the Holy Rude had been founded by David I in 1128, and by the end of the fifteenth century, after Edinburgh became the capital, its guest house had become a favoured royal residence. In 1500–3, James IV built a royal palace next door to the cloisters to welcome his English bride, Margaret Tudor. Very little remains of this now, because between 1528 and 1536, their son, James V, employed French architects and craftsmen to transform Holyrood into a Renaissance showpiece with a donjon and an elegant west façade. In 1544, during the “rough wooing,” the abbey was partially destroyed by the English, and when Mary moved into the damaged palace in 1561, she had to spend some of her French dower on restoration work. At that time, Holyrood Palace was commonly referred to as “the Abbey.”

In Mary’s day, the royal apartments were housed in the massive rectangular fortified north-west tower built by James V, which was accessed by a stairway leading to an iron drawbridge on the first floor. The walls were thick and the windows small, so the rooms were quite dark. Mary occupied the second-floor chambers that had been assigned to the Queens of Scotland; the empty King’s apartments were on the floor below, and were of similar layout. A spiral stair in the north-east turret gave access to all floors, while a privy staircase (now blocked) in the north wall led up from the King’s bedchamber to the Queen’s.

Mary had a suite of four pine-panelled rooms, which still survive today, although they are not as lofty, since the ceilings on the floor below were raised in the seventeenth century. These rooms comprised a large outer, or presence, chamber, hung with black velvet, where the Queen received ambassadors and dignitaries, a bedchamber and, in the turrets that led off it, two small closets, each no more than 12 feet square. One, with crimson and green hangings, was used as a dining chamber, the other as a stool chamber or dressing room. These rooms were hung with tapestries and hangings brought from France, and lit with silver and gilt chandeliers, and there was a four-poster bed in the bedchamber. The floors were either tiled or covered with rush matting, and the shuttered windows had armorial glass and were protected by iron grilles painted red. The ribbed, oak-panelled ceiling in the presence chamber was decorated with shields bearing the arms of Mary, Francis II, James V and Marie de Guise. Some of the most dramatic events of Mary’s life were to take place within these rooms.

Adjoining the tower was a quadrangular range of buildings that housed the beautiful chapel royal, the damaged great hall, and Mary’s library. Around a series of lesser courts were ranged the new Council Chamber, where ceremonial events normally took place, the Governor’s Tower, the armoury, the mint, a forge, kitchens and other service quarters. The abbey and palace were surrounded by pleasant gardens, an orchard, a lion house, and a deer park in which Mary could exercise her passion for hunting. During her reign, the nave of the ruined abbey was converted into the parish church of the Canongate.⁸

Within the palace grounds still stands a small structure known as Queen Mary’s Bath House; this was the only building erected by Mary during her reign in Scotland. Legend has it that she bathed there in white wine in order to preserve her complexion, but the real history of the Bath House is obscure. We have no way of knowing what Mary thought of her kingdom as she beheld it anew after her long absence. Some historians have speculated that she compared Scotland with France and found it wanting. She did try to establish a French-style court at Holyrood, which was hardly surprising, as she had known nothing else and other precedents had been forgotten: it was nearly twenty years since a Stuart sovereign had held court in Scotland.

Under Mary, Holyrood became the scene of courtly entertainments and glittering ceremonials, and a magnet for the nobility. The Queen had grand tastes and, like most Renaissance monarchs, realised the importance of a display of magnificence, which she funded from her private income. She patronised poets and musicians, and her valets de chambre were all expected to display some musical ability on the lute, viola or trumpet. John Knox was horrified to learn that Mary and her ladies danced at royal balls and banquets, and warned that the palace would turn into a brothel if this devilish practice were allowed to continue; the Queen’s abominable way of life, he thundered, was “offensive in the sight of God.” The Protestant David Calderwood later wrote that, although Mary showed a grave demeanour in Council, “when she, her fiddlers and other dancing companions got into the house alone, there might be seen unseemly skipping, notwithstanding that she was wearing the deuil blanc. Her common speech in secret was that she saw nothing in Scotland but gravity, which she could not agree well with, for she was brought up in joyousity.” Yet Mary did have a more serious side, and set time aside regularly to read Latin with the respected humanist scholar, George Buchanan, who at this time was one of her most fervent admirers.

The Queen’s household numbered about 250 persons, mostly French with a few Italians. From 1563, the Master of the Household was George, 5th Lord Seton, the brother of Mary Seton and a leading Catholic noble. Educated in France, he had attended Mary’s wedding in 1558, was made a Privy Councillor in 1561, and would remain loyal to her for the rest of his life, often to his own disadvantage.

The four Maries had returned from France with their mistress and still attended her. Knox disapproved of them all, thinking them light of morals and frivolous. In 1562, Mary Livingston married Arthur Erskine of Blackgrange, brother to the future Earl of Mar, and left Mary’s service. The beautiful Mary Beaton followed suit in 1566 when she married Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne. Both remained close to the Queen. Mary Fleming, with her charm and sex appeal, was one of the most sought after ladies at court, while Mary Seton, the most pious and unworldly of the four, would never marry, and stayed with her mistress until 1583, when ill health forced her to retire to a convent in France.

Generally, the Scots were impressed with their Queen. She certainly cut a striking figure for, at about six feet tall, she was well above the normal height for a woman, slender, graceful, and dignified in her bearing. She had a pale complexion, frizzy auburn hair, grey or brown slanting, heavy-lidded eyes, an over-long nose inherited from her father and a “very sweet, very lovely”⁹voice; she later acquired “a pretty Scottish accent.”¹⁰Her neck was long, her bosom like marble and her hands delicate.

Ronsard, Brantôme and several other court poets lauded Mary’s beauty, and a Venetian ambassador called her “personally the most beautiful in Europe.”¹¹This cannot have been mere flattery, for even her enemies praised her looks. George Buchanan wrote: “She was graced with surpassing loveliness of form, the vigour of maturing youth, and fine qualities of mind.” Lennox called her “a paragon,” and even Knox found her features “pleasing.” It is therefore disappointing to discover that Mary’s surviving portraits (none of which date from her reign in Scotland) do not convey to modern eyes the beauty described by enthusiastic contemporaries. What portraits cannot capture are those indefinable qualities known as charm and sex appeal, and it seems likely that Mary had her full measure of both.

As a widow, Mary normally wore black or white gowns with white veils, but abandoned her weeds for state occasions. In her wardrobe at Holyrood were sixty gowns of cloth of gold or silver, purple or crimson velvet or silk, many adorned with gems or fine embroidery; there were also fourteen cloaks and thirty-three masquing costumes, and her inventories record over 180 fine pieces of jewellery. In Scotland, Mary took to wearing Highland dress, notably long embroidered cloaks of plaid, which was then just a warm material, not tartan as we know it today. She enjoyed dressing up, especially in men’s clothes,¹²and going about incognito. Her hair was always beautifully dressed by Mary Seton, and she was fond of wearing wigs in different colours.

Mary was loved and respected by nearly all who served her. To her friends and servants, she was kind, generous and loyal. Ambassadors praised her virtue, her discretion, her modesty and her readiness to be ruled by good counsel.¹³She was spirited, vivacious and brave, majestic yet accessible. But she lacked prudence and common sense and was a notoriously bad judge of character, which resulted in many people taking advantage of her. Ever at the mercy of her emotions, she was highly suggestible, self-absorbed, and subject to storms of hysterical weeping, and periods of nervous prostration that obliged her to take to her bed. “She often weeps when there is little apparent occasion,” a contemporary observed.¹⁴Mary also made the mistake of allowing her heart to rule her head, which on more than one occasion led to tragedy. None of these were desirable qualities in a queen in an age that regarded female rulers as unnatural aberrations, yet in a crisis Mary could keep her wits about her and act decisively, resourcefully and courageously. She functioned best, however, when she had a strong man to lean upon, both politically and personally; unfortunately, most of the men on whom she came to depend used her to further their own ambitions.

Some historians have described Mary as a foolish, passionate woman who was entirely without moral sense, and who was selfish, wilful, reckless, irresponsible and incapable of self-sacrifice. One even called her a nymphomaniac. Her enemies would later emphasise her moral depravity: Buchanan wrote of her “surface gloss of virtue” and Knox compared her to Jezebel. “We call her not a whore,” he wrote, “but she was brought up in the company of the vilest whoremongers.”

The truth of all this is hard to determine; none was more professedly jealous of her honour than Mary, yet there were undoubtedly occasions when she was constrained by circumstances or the behaviour of others to act in a way that left her open to censure. It is hard to believe that there was no alternative open to her: she was the Queen, and she almost always had powerful supporters willing to help her. Her intrigues show her to have been duplicitous and even ruthless, especially in her later machinations for the English throne; in 1561, Thomas Randolph, the English agent in Edinburgh, warned his superiors never to underestimate Mary, since he had found in her the fruit of the “best practised cunning of France combined with the subtle brains of Scotland.”¹⁵Although she suffered much ill luck, it was often the result of the flaws in her character and her own poor judgement.

All her life, Mary inspired in the imaginations of the male sex a fatal fascination. Knox himself was not immune, but put it down to “some enchantment whereby men are bewitched.” A few would be driven to take outrageous liberties, not, it seems, without imagining that they had been given some encouragement, for Mary allowed a certain familiarity in her relationships with her intimates that could easily have been misconstrued as romantic encouragement. It is unlikely that Mary was a nymphomaniac, but she may have inherited her father’s promiscuous nature, whether or not she indulged it, and she was no shrinking violet. In 1562, Thomas Randolph was shocked to see one Captain Hepburn casually pass Mary a paper on which were written “ribald verses, and under them drawn the secret members of both men and women in as monstrous a sort as nothing could be more shamefully devised.” Randolph was appalled, not only at the Queen’s lack of reaction, but at Hepburn’s disrespect in showing such an insulting thing to his mistress and the implied slur on her reputation.¹⁶

It has also been suggested that Mary was sexually frigid, but it is more probable that any reluctance in this sphere was a response to the behaviour of the men with whom she became involved. Yet there is evidence that she did enjoy male attention, but her bad judgement in choosing a husband would ultimately lead to her downfall, for she lacked the perception to spot the defects in a man’s character. During her time in Scotland, all her entanglements with men brought disaster.

Although she loved energetic outdoor pursuits, Mary’s health was never robust. In 1561, Randolph described her as “a sick, crazed woman.”¹⁷In youth, she had developed anaemia, which was probably the cause of her occasional fainting fits, and at sixteen she was rumoured to be consumptive. From adolescence onwards, until she was forty, she suffered episodes of pain in her side, which may have been of hysterical origin, but are more likely to have been caused by a gastric ulcer. She also suffered from intermittent depression; Randolph attributed this, and her outbursts of weeping, to sexual frustration resulting from her inability to find a suitable husband.¹⁸It has been suggested that Mary suffered from porphyria, a disease that later affected George III and other members of the Houses of Hanover and Windsor, and which she may have inherited from her father; this would explain many of her symptoms, such as episodic abdominal pain, vomiting, paralysis and mental disturbance, but there is not enough evidence for this diagnosis to be conclusive.

Although dignified, Mary was a most accessible and affable monarch. Like her cousin Elizabeth, she was not above exerting her feminine charm on her male advisers but, unlike Elizabeth, she lacked political experience and mature judgement. Nevertheless, her moderate and conciliatory approach soon found favour with her relieved Protestant Lords. As long as she was willing to heed the counsel of Lord James, they were happy to serve her as their mistress. In return for Mary’s compliance, and the honours and rewards she heaped upon him, James ensured her security, kept the turbulent nobility in check and took her part against the disapproving Knox. His relationship with Mary was one of mutual co-operation and fraternal affection.

That Lord James was the power behind the throne during the first four years of Mary’s personal rule there can be no doubt. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, an English diplomat who was familiar with Scottish affairs, stated that the Queen was content “to be ruled by good counsel and wise men.” In 1561, William Cecil, Elizabeth’s formidably able Secretary of State wrote, “The Queen of Scotland is, I hear, most governed by the Lord James.” Soon afterwards, Thomas Randolph echoed, “The Lord James is commander of the Queen.” The following year, a Jesuit reported: “The leading men in the government acknowledge the Queen’s title, but do not let her use her rights. They have many ways of acting in opposition to her. She is alone, and has not a single protector and good councillor. The men in power are taking advantage of her gentleness. She is well nigh destitute of human aid.” In 1562, Cecil informed a colleague that “the whole government rests with the Lord James,” and in 1563 another Jesuit noted, “The Lord James rules all. The Queen’s authority is nominal only.” Mary’s partisan, the Bishop of Ross, later recalled that “she had the name and calling, he [James] had the very sway and regiment.” In 1568, her supporters accused him of causing the Queen’s Majesty to “become subject to him as [if] Her Grace had been a pupil.”¹⁹

Mary relied heavily not only on Lord James, but also on the man whom she retained as her Secretary of State, William Maitland of Lethington.²⁰ Now aged about thirty-three, he was the son of Sir Richard Maitland, Laird of Lethington in Lauderdale, Keeper of the Privy Seal and a writer and poet of note. The family seat was the fifteenth-century Lethington Castle near Haddington, East Lothian; later it was extensively remodelled and in 1704 renamed Lennoxlove in honour of Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, who had once been courted by Charles II. It is now owned by the Duke of Hamilton.

William Maitland, a clever lawyer who had received a Renaissance education at St. Andrews University and later at the French court, was appointed Secretary of State in 1558 by Marie de Guise, who recognised his expertise as a politician and diplomat; in 1559, he had deserted her and joined the Lords of the Congregation. Thereafter, he won over several Lords to their cause, although his motivation was political rather than religious. His ultimate aim was a peaceful union with Protestant England through Elizabeth’s recognition of Mary as her heir, and his policies were all directed to that end. Consequently he collaborated closely with his opposite number in England, William Cecil, and, like Lord James, became a pensioner of the English Queen.

Astute, subtle, cunning and cultivated, Maitland was an arch-intriguer and double dealer. Elizabeth I called him “the flower of all the wits in Scotland,” but the Scots, seeing in him the pattern of a Machiavellian politician, nicknamed him “Michael Wylie”; Buchanan referred to him as a chameleon, and even Lord James, with whom he was closely associated in the government, disliked and distrusted him. His motives were often obscure: because he covered his traces so well, he was, and remains, something of an enigma, and it is uncertain whether in his dealings with Mary he acted out of loyalty or self-interest; he “held the threads of all the plots”²¹and knew more than he cared to reveal about the great dramas that would unfold during her reign.

Maitland became “the whole guider of [the Queen’s] affairs. His advice is followed more than any other.”²²In his opinion, she behaved herself “as reasonably as we can require. If anything be amiss, the fault is rather in ourselves.”

Others were more fulsome in their praise. The courtier and diplomat, Sir James Melville, wrote: “The Queen’s Majesty, after returning to Scotland, behaved herself so princely, so honourably and discreetly that her reputation spread in all countries.” She desired “to hold none in her company but such as were the best quality and conversation, abhorring all vices and vicious persons; and requested me to assist her in case she, being yet young, might forget herself in any unseemly gesture or misbehaviour, that I would warn her thereof. She made me familiar to all her most urgent affairs.”

Yet although Sir Thomas Craig claimed that he had often heard Mary “discourse so appositely and rationally in all affairs which were brought before the Privy Council that she was admired by all,”²³her attendance record at such meetings was poor, and when she was present she sometimes sat there sewing while listening to debates. Most of her time was spent in the company of her largely foreign household. The evidence suggests that her role was mainly formal and ceremonial: she opened and attended Parliament, and went on many progresses throughout her realm, meeting her subjects, exerting her Stuart charm, and administering justice. Knox gained the impression that, rather than attend to state business, Mary preferred archery and hawking. In 1562, the Earl of Bothwell claimed that she “virtually wielded no authority at all.”²⁴

Had Mary been less obsessed with the English succession, she might have been more successful at restoring royal authority in Scotland. Inevitably, as she gained confidence, she came to resent the tutelage of those formidable allies, Lord James and Maitland, and the other constraints that bound her. It would only be a matter of time before she asserted her independent authority and put her own interests before those of her kingdom, and when that time came, she would reveal herself as dangerously irresponsible and entirely out of tune with the concerns and aspirations of the majority of her subjects. The result would be disaster.

For centuries Scotland had endured an uneasy relationship with her more powerful neighbour, England. From the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Kings of England had repeatedly asserted their unfounded claim to be feudal overlords of Scotland, which nevertheless had its own independent monarchy. In 1290, following the extinction of the ancient royal line, Edward I of England, who had visions of uniting the two kingdoms under English rule, acted as arbitrator between the thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne, and chose one, John Balliol, who would act as his puppet. Scottish resistance led first by William Wallace and then by Robert the Bruce was fierce, and in 1314 Bruce vanquished the English at the Battle of Bannockburn and was able to establish himself firmly on the throne. In 1320, he published the Declaration of Arbroath, affirming Scotland’s status as an independent sovereign state. Thereafter, his descendants, the House of Stewart—named after Walter the Steward who had married Bruce’s daughter Marjorie; they were the parents of Robert II, the first Stewart king—enjoyed an undisputed succession. In the sixteenth century, however, the dynasty’s future rested upon the successful resolution of the political and religious situation in Scotland.

As a young Catholic queen in a turbulent land, Mary faced challenges that would have defeated a far more experienced ruler. She did not understand the Scottish people, and to many of them she must have seemed very alien with her frivolous French ways. In an age of religious intolerance, her willingness to compromise seemed suspect, as indeed it was, for Mary was playing a dangerous double game, professing tolerance of the new faith in Scotland in order to ensure her political survival, whilst assuring the Pope that she intended to restore the Catholic faith in her realm. Although personally devout, she did little to champion the Catholic cause in Scotland during her reign. Her private attendance at Mass gave rise to much resentment, and initially there were even riots in protest against it. Lord James managed to calm the people, but the prejudiced Knox would not be appeased, believing that Mary “plainly purposed to wreck the religion within this realm,” and crossed swords with her on several occasions, during which disputes she either spiritedly defended her position or dissolved into tears.

Although for a long time she refused to confirm officially the Acts of the Reformation Parliament, on several occasions Mary issued proclamations reiterating her undertaking not to tamper with the established religion and made generous grants to the Kirk; she even received some instruction in Calvinist doctrines from George Buchanan, but none of this satisfied her critics, nor did it do anything to allay the fears of the Catholics, who had looked to her to bring about a counter-reformation.

Yet Mary still had her sights set on a great Catholic marriage. “The marriage of our Queen was in all men’s mouths,” wrote Knox. It was her duty to remarry and provide for the succession, but the question of whom she might marry was a matter of great concern, not only in Scotland, but in England also, for Elizabeth was determined to prevent Mary from allying herself with Spain or France and giving a hostile Catholic power a foothold in mainland Britain; she warned Mary that, if she did so, she, Elizabeth, could not avoid being her enemy. But Mary had dreams of marrying Don Carlos and becoming Queen of Scotland, Spain and—with Spanish help—England. Lord James, however, was determined that she should choose a husband who was acceptable to Elizabeth, preferably one of the Protestant Kings of Sweden or Denmark. Nor were Catherine de’ Medici or Mary’s uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, keen to see Spain aggrandised by a union with Scotland. In desperation, Catherine offered her son, Charles IX, whom Mary rejected as being too young, while the Cardinal urged Mary instead to consider the Archduke Charles of Austria, who had for a long time been fruitlessly negotiating a marriage with Queen Elizabeth. But Mary eventually abandoned all ideas of this match on the grounds that the Archduke was too poor. The Lords then suggested Lord Darnley, but Mary declared “never would she wed with that faction,” and continued to pursue the idea of marrying Don Carlos, despite opposition on all sides.

Philip II, however, had reservations about the match. He knew Scotland to be unquiet, and had heard a rumour that Mary had murdered her first husband by poison. More to the point, Don Carlos himself was hopelessly unstable to the point of insanity. At only sixteen, he was morally degenerate, sadistic, severely epileptic, and unprepossessing in his person. His growth was stunted, he had a speech impediment, and he dribbled. But he was set to inherit the greatest throne in Europe, and he was fabulously wealthy. Moreover, King Philip had seen to it that his son’s worst defects had remained hidden from public scrutiny. Mary believed him to be a gallant and brave prince who would help her assert her authority in Scotland, champion the Catholic cause and assert her rights in England, and during the next few years, she doggedly persisted in her attempts to bring the reluctant Philip to an agreement.

Her obduracy on this matter did not make for easy relations with her cousin Elizabeth, who was already suspicious of Mary on account of her refusal to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh, which Mary repeatedly declared she would not do unless Elizabeth recognised her as her heir. “The Queen my mistress,” wrote Maitland, “is descended of the blood of England. I fear she would rather be content to hazard all than to forgo her rights.”

On a personal level, Elizabeth was jealous of Mary because of her youth, her reputed beauty and the fact that she was now a rival in the European marriage market. On the other hand, Elizabeth felt an affinity with Mary as her kinswoman and a fellow female ruler, and was willing enough to offer her friendship if only Mary would renounce her pretensions to the English crown. Elizabeth would not name a successor for fear of being ousted from her throne; although she privately conceded that she knew of no one with a better title to the succession than Mary, she continually refused publicly to name her her heir. Instead, she advised Mary to win the love of the English by showing herself a friendly neighbour. Nevertheless, the interest that Elizabeth showed in Mary’s choice of husband is proof that she realised that Mary had realistic hopes of succeeding in England; she hinted that her recognition of Mary as her heir was dependent on her approval of the man Mary married. Mary’s frustration over Elizabeth’s unending prevarication, and her persistence in demanding what she regarded as her rights, further soured relations between them. Yet Mary did make efforts to establish friendly relations with her cousin, with some success.

Until now, the two Queens had never met. Several times during the next few years, plans for a meeting would be made, and then scrapped for various political reasons. As it turned out, Mary and Elizabeth would never meet.