In every sense (except that of unity for a given cause) the Scottish nobility formed a tightly knit body, where feudal and family relationships were interwoven like the steps of a complicated Highland reel. Intermarriage was a feature of the situation, making it often as difficult for the historian to unravel their relationships and loyalties as it must have been for themselves. Patrick Hepburn, the fair earl of Bothwell, married Agnes Sinclair, whose mother Lady Sinclair was born a Hepburn. George, 5th earl of Huntly, married a Hamilton – Anne, daughter of the duke of Châtelherault; his sister Lady Jean Gordon was married to James, earl of Bothwell; his father the 4th earl was married to Elizabeth, sister of the Earl Marischal; the Regent Moray was married to Agnes, daughter of the same Earl Marischal; Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, was married to Euphemia Douglas, the Regent Moray’s half-sister; Patrick, 3rd Lord Ruthven, was married first to Janet Douglas, natural daughter of the earl of Douglas, and second to Jane Stewart, daughter of the earl of Atholl, who had herself been married three times before. Apropos of another Ruthven–Atholl marriage, an English emissary wrote to Cecil in 1579, with a mystification which we may feel we share: ‘The Earl of Atholl doth marry the Lord Ruthven’s daughter. It is a question whether by that marriage the Lord Ruthven will draw the Earl to the devotion of Morton, or the Earl will draw the Lord Ruthven to his devotion, who is yet an enemy of Morton.’30 Into this spider’s web of relationships, it was especially hard for a foreign-bred queen to infiltrate, in order to command any sort of pre-eminent loyalty. At the same time Mary’s Stewart blood meant that the nobles did not necessarily regard her, when it did not suit them, as more than primus inter pares.*
As a class the nobles had been decimated by Flodden in 1513, and again a generation later at Solway Moss and Pinkie Cleugh, in a manner reminiscent of the two generations of Europe depleted in the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. The nobles with whom Mary had to deal had in many cases succeeded early to their estates, through the deaths of their fathers, and had grown up without the curb of parental discipline. Their broad lands were generally accompanied by a singular lack of cash, which left them a prey for the sort of venal considerations most prone to rob the character of any outstanding loyalties. Lack of money meant that morality was all too often a question of cash rewards, and not necessarily large ones. As de Silva wrote to Philip II, an expenditure of 8000 crowns brought Queen Elizabeth not only the good will but also secret information from the principal people of Scotland although many of them were Catholics.32 In other ways than venality, the fibre of the nobles was undeniably coarse. Lyric poets such as Dunbar in an earlier period, and Fethy and Alexander Scott in a later one, spoke with clear and appealing voices where their private inspiration was concerned. Their poetry, closely mingled with the musical traditions of the time, was neither primitive nor cut off from other cultures, often showing direct connections with English courtly lyrics of earlier centuries. But in order to entertain the court in the age before Mary highly lewd verses like the ‘Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’, containing sentiments of extreme crudity, were produced. In order to please the nobility, the poets had, in the words of C. S. Lewis, to ‘lavish their skill on humours now confined to the preparatory school or the barrack-room’.33 In this respect the court of the French Renaissance at which Mary had been reared cast at least a mantle of elegance over its corrupt morals.
The Scottish nobility included among its number many who were lawless and some who were violent. If the lawlessness merely reflected the general insecurity of an age of transition,* this fact did not make it any more acceptable to their young ruler, or easier to deal with, to one hitherto cut off from such matters in France. As for the violence, there is a natural code of human decency which even insecurity does not excuse men from breaking, and this code was too often set aside by the Scottish nobility of this period, when it suited their convenience. Deeds of villainy were common. The nobles included in their ranks men like Patrick, Lord Lindsay of the Byres, ever prone to use physical assault as a weapon, whether storming the queen’s chapel at Mass, or obtaining her signature to her abdication by threatening to cut her throat; or there were the two Lord Ruthvens of the age, one of whom was an alleged warlock, a macabre but bloodthirsty spectre at the feast of Riccio’s death, and the other behaved with equal ruffianism towards Mary at Lochleven. The Regent Morton was a man of the most boorish calibre: the small greedy eyes in his florid face covered a cruel mind; his pudgy hands grasped avariciously all his life for what rewards and benefits were to be accrued; his slow speech concealed an unpleasant ability to revenge himself swiftly on those who had offended him. His atrocities in his time as regent included the hanging of women still holding their babies in their arms, and the driving of prisoners to the gallows like so many sheep, being pierced through by spears as they ran. Against such a background, the butchery of Riccio and the explosion at Kirk o’Field can easily be explained, if not condoned.
These lawless nobles were immensely preoccupied with superstition – not the complicated astrological arts of Catherine de Médicis, but the cruder form of witchcraft. Witchcraft first made its appearance in the Scottish criminal code in 1543 when the reformed religion aroused a passionate new desire for purity in such matters. Long before this date, witchcraft played its part in the fabric of Scottish society. There was also a persistent rumour about Bothwell and witchcraft, and he was often accused of having ‘enchanted’ Mary by her defenders. Janet Beaton, the lady of Buccleuch, and an ex-mistress of Bothwell, was also accused in placards in the streets of having used witchcraft to ‘breed Bothwell’s greatness with the Queen’. Margaret Lady Atholl was thought to have the power of casting spells, having diligently studied the subject with a magician, and it was she who was rumoured to have cast Queen Mary’s pains of childbirth on Lady Reres. One ballad, ‘Northumberland betrayed by Douglas’, describing the incident when Sir William Douglas handed over the fugitive Northumberland to the English in 1570, even gives the regent Moray’s mother, Lady Margaret Douglas,* as a witch.
But the main characteristic of the nobles, which applied to the greater magnates as to the lesser, was that they had absolutely no sense of the grand design. It was true that a revolution in religion had been accomplished beneath their gaze, in which many of them joined, but here the laurels for purity of spirit and intensity of theological vision seem to belong mainly to a lower social class than theirs. Even the cause of Protestantism did not bind together those Scottish nobles who were divided by the potent interests of family ambition. The Scottish nobles were given over to ‘particularity’ as every commentator at every level in this period pointed out:
Neither for king, nor queen’s authority
They strive, but for particularity.
This is how Sir Richard Maitland, father of the politician Maitland, made the point in a bitter verse, written during the civil wars of the 1570s.
When Fontenay went to investigate Scotland in 1584 on Mary’s behalf, he commented that money and family ambition were the only two things the Scottish nobles really understood; in his view, it was mere folly and a waste of time to preach to them their duty towards princes, the honour to be found in just and virtuous actions, and the desirability of leaving a memorial to posterity in the shape of good deeds done – when the only two things capable of charming the nobility with any degree of permanency were ‘de biens et de grandeur’. He felt that it was the misfortune of Scotland that the majority of the lords were incapable of taking anything approaching the long or altruistic view of any situation – they had, in his view, no wish to extend their view further than the end of their own toes, cast not the faintest thought over the past, and still less towards the future.35
Twenty years earlier, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the same combination of goods and grandeur was already what appealed irresistibly to the Scottish lords. They were a difficult, intractable, and above all highly unstable class to deal with, since it was impossible to anticipate wi
th any certainty in which direction the weathercock of their purposes would blow from one minute to the next. They presented an especial problem to a young queen, brought up in a foreign country, and lacking the knowledge and intuition of how to deal with such men, which might have been inculcated naturally in childhood had she been brought up in Scotland. After all, Argyll, Glencairn and Cassillis were so very unlike Montmorency, Condé and the king of Navarre, although the former might be said to have occupied roughly in Scotland the position which the latter filled in France – a point made by the French memoir of 1558 which directly compared them.36 Let us not paint the picture of the Scottish nobility too blackly at the cost of whitening the aristocracies of other countries. Ambition and intrigue were certainly not the monopoly of the Scottish nobility in sixteenth-century Europe. England had her Seymours, and France, as we have seen, her Guises. In so far as ambition could be held to constitute a vice, the cardinal of Lorraine and the earl of Morton, in both of whom its fires burnt brightly, would be judged equally for it, before the last Judgement Seat of heaven. Mary Stuart, on the other hand, was not gifted with such divine enlightenment. To her, accustomed to the cardinal with his eloquence, his literary tastes, his designs by Primaticcio, men of the type of Morton, ‘unlettered and unskilful’ in Maitland’s phrase, presented a very different aspect. She could not fail to find them secretly distasteful as well as baffling because they were so unfamiliar. The Scottish nobles may not have been impossible by some absolute standard taking into account all the factors involved, but they were certainly fatally different to the nobles amongst whom Mary had been brought up.
* In the sixteenth century the Scots language (as opposed to the Highland Gaelic, which Mary did not speak, since there was no way for her to have learnt it) was generally thought of as being about as different from English as two dialects of the same language: the difference was variously compared to that between Aragonese and Castilian, or the respective dialects spoken in Normandy and Picardy. As one authority puts it, ‘any intercepted letter [in Scots] … could be read by an educated Englishman’7 (although today of course the transcription of documents in this language presents considerable difficulties). Mary only spoke English very limpingly before the period of her captivity, but was able to learn it quickly then.
* It is sometimes suggested that Mary’s first night’s sleep in Scotland was disturbed by the startlingly Scottish sound of the bagpipes. In fact a rebec is a stringed instrument played with a bow. The fault, if any, was in the unskilled nature of the playing, rather than the primitive character of the instrument.11
* The ‘Little Ice Age’ period of cold climate from 1550–1700 is now established by copious evidence from almost all parts of the northern hemisphere. See H. H. Lamb, Trees and Climatic History in Scotland, 1964. In human terms, the first years of the cold period must have been more onerous to endure than the last, when the cold weather was an established, if unpleasant, phenomenon.
* Sir James Fergusson has pointed out that the saying ‘every Stewart’s na sib to the king’ gained its relevance from the fact that so many of them were.31
* The Register of the Privy Council from the quantity of its enactments against violence, robbery, murder, etc. reveals the generally lawless state of Scotland in the 1550s, a legacy of the English invasions and the consequent breakdown of civil government.
* Child, in his edition of Scottish ballads, thinks that this slur on the regent’s mother is unjustified, and that she had been confused with that Lady Janet Douglas, sister of the earl of Angus and wife of Lord Glamis, who was burnt in 1537 on Castle Hill, for meditating the death of James V by witchcraft.34
CHAPTER NINE
Conciliation and Reconciliation
Let all thy realm be now in readiness
With costly clothing to decoir thy court.
Alexander Scott: ‘A New Year Gift to the Queen Mary,
when she first came home’, 1562
Exactly how different her new kingdom was from her old one, the young queen was speedily to discover on her very first Sabbath in Scotland. Up till that morning there had been, in Knox’s phrase, nothing but ‘mirth and quietness’, but on the Sunday Mary, who had been assured by Lord James of the private practice of her religion, ordered Mass to be said in the chapel royal at Holyrood.* The preparations for the service were all too familiar to a country which had only been officially Protestant for one year. The onlookers exclaimed furiously: ‘Shall the idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?’ and speedily resolved: ‘It shall not!’ Patrick Lindsay, the future Lord Lindsay of the Byres, went so far as to shout out in the courtyard that the idolatrous priest should be put to death. The servant carrying the altar candles was put into a state of terror when his candles were seized by one of the crowd, and together with some of the altar ornaments, either broken or trodden into the mud. The reformers did not actually penetrate the chapel itself; here at the very threshold they found the person of the Lord James, barring their entry: not only had he given his word to Mary that the private Mass should be respected, but he also had a devout horror of such extremism. Inside the chapel the queen, her Guise uncles and her French servants attended a Mass which was understandably fraught with tension – the English ambassador reported that the priest was in such a state of mortal fear that he could hardly lift the Host at the Elevation.1
If the queen received a rude shock from the incident, she did not allow it to affect her determinedly tolerant religious policy. The next day, Monday 25th August, she issued a proclamation in which she announced that she intended with the aid of her Estates to take a final order, which she hoped would please everyone, to pacify the differences in religion. In the meantime, she charged the whole world, in order to prevent tumult or sedition, to make no alteration or innovation in the state of religion, or to attempt anything against the form of public worship which she had found standing on her arrival in Scotland – under pain of death. She further commanded that no one should molest any of her domestic servants or those who had come with her out of France in the practice of their religion – equally under pain of death.
This proclamation may seem to us, from a modern standpoint, comparatively wise, and certainly singularly free from Catholic bigotry. It aroused, however, the venomous ire of many of the extremist Protestants, and especially that of their leading evangelist, John Knox. The next Sunday Knox took the opportunity of preaching a great denunciation of the Mass from the pulpit: one Mass, he declaimed, was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies being landed in any part of the realm. While still in France, Mary had already formed the most unfavourable impression of Knox, and she told Throckmorton that she believed him to be the most dangerous man in her kingdom. Now she determined to grasp the nettle. She sent for Knox to come to Holyrood, and here took place the first of those dramatic interviews, which as recounted by Knox himself in his History have a positively Biblical flavour.
Knox was now a man of forty-seven. Having been rescued from ‘the puddle of papistry’, as he put it,2 by George Wishart in the 1540s, he had joined the murderers of Cardinal Beaton in the castle of St Andrews, and after its fall, had done a spell in the galleys. On release he went to England, and from there, on the accession of Mary Tudor, to the Continent where his travels brought him finally to Geneva, where he became a disciple of Calvin. He returned temporarily to Scotland in 1555: the strength of his character and the force of his convictions enabled him to win over many of the greater men to Protestantism by his evangelism when the lesser men had long been interested in it. His main contribution to the Scottish Reformation had thus been made before Mary Stuart’s arrival in Scotland, and indeed before the death of Mary of Guise, but his personality ensured that he remained a potent force on the Scottish scene, and it was an unlucky hazard for Mary Stuart that he happened to be living in Edinburgh, the first year of her residence there, to act as a demoniac chorus for all her actions, which good or bad, he presented in the most malevolent light.
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Knox’s character was compounded of many contradictions. He saw himself as a heaven-sent preacher, whereas in fact he was a bold earthly revolutionary who openly preached violence and notoriously considered the death of an unjust ruler absolutely justified. He was a good summarizer of the accepted truth; but he was a savage hater, and obstinate defender of a position once he had adopted it. Lord Eustace Percy in his life of Knox made a sympathetic examination of the reformer’s true nature and decided that his real spiritual bent was that of the mystic who was compelled by events to adopt the role of preacher and interpreter. ‘In the whole sweep of the Old Testament and the New, what first caught his ear was a voice which almost passes the range of human hearing: neither the words of God to man, nor the words of man to God, but a fragment of the huge soliloquy of God himself.’3 Knox was an egoist, but his egoism led him to be a cunning politician and excellent lawyer, with an eye to the essentials in any argument. He was not born to the nobility, yet he was immensely brave in his confrontations with the nobles and the queen: as Morton said at his tomb, ‘Here lies one who never feared the face of man.’ His virtues included a ferocious, rather coarse sense of humour, seen in his writings, very different from Mary’s own light ironic sense of humour, it is true, but something which might have enabled them to strike better accord if circumstances had been different; he was also genuinely patriotic when few men even knew the meaning of the word. Above all, he loved to dominate, as with so many egoists, and it was this need for domination which doomed his relations with Mary from the start. Scotland, and especially Edinburgh, was his stage: he the great preacher, the victor of the Scottish Reformation, was not going to surrender the front of the stage to the young queen, newly come from France. In his imagination he saw even his first encounter with her as a battle, from which he must emerge victorious if the whole Scottish Reformation was not to be imperilled. Knox thus braced himself for the meeting, like an ancient Catholic saint about to wrestle with the devil, not a mature Protestant politician about to meet a young girl who had so far shown herself to be remarkably tolerant in both word and deed. In short, Knox, in his preconceived notions about Mary, was quite as determinedly misguided, if not in such a romantic spirit, as many of her partisans have been since.