Mary’s very sex was against her in Knox’s opinion: whereas in the sixteenth century it was theoretically considered to be against the natural law for women to rule men, nevertheless most people were content to regard an actual woman ruler as a necessary evil which might have to be endured from time to time. Knox, however, went much further than his contemporaries and in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558 against Mary Tudor, declared roundly that to promote any woman – those ‘weak, frail, impatient feeble and foolish creatures’ – to any form of rule was the ‘subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’, as well as being contrary to God and repugnant to nature.4 Now on 4th September he was confronted in a personal interview with one of these feeble and foolish creatures sitting on the throne of his own country of Scotland.
Lord James was also present at the interview, but tactfully stayed in the background. Mary began by attacking Knox for raising her subjects against her mother and herself, and also for writing The Monstrous Regiment. Knox conceded the point about her sex, and said that if she behaved well, and the realm was not brought to disaster by her femininity, he personally would not disallow her rule, on those grounds alone. When Mary struggled with him over the religious issue, however, she found him much less accommodating. Finally Knox agreed to tolerate her for the time being – his phrase, which owed little to courtly flattery, was ‘to be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero’ – provided that she did not defile her hands by dipping them in the blood of the saints of God. But he still firmly asserted the rights of the subject to rise up against the unworthy ruler, who opposed God’s word. Mary was quite clever enough to see the dangers in this, and quite bold enough to say so: ‘Well then,’ she exclaimed, ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me; and shall do what they list and not what I command; and so must I be subject to them and not they to me.’ When Knox replied that this subjection to God, as represented by his Church, would carry her to everlasting glory, Mary pointed out: ‘Yea … but ye are not the Kirk that I will nurse. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for, I think, it is the true Kirk of God.’ But Knox refused to admit Mary’s ability to judge on such matters: ‘Conscience requireth knowledge,’ he said, ‘and I fear right knowledge ye have none.’ Mary said quickly: ‘But I have both heard and read.’5
The result of this interview was an impasse in terms of human relations. Knox has been accused of speaking churlishly to the queen: he certainly spoke to her in a manner to which she was scarcely accustomed from her life in France, but she on the other hand seems to have been stimulated rather than otherwise by his abruptness. It is true that she relapsed into tears at one moment, but Randolph thought they were tears of anger rather than grief. All her life Mary Stuart had a feminine ability to give herself suddenly up to tears when her sensibilities were affronted; she seems to have used it as a useful method of relieving her feelings; it never prevented her actions from being extremely hard-headed once she had recovered her composure. Knox himself quickly realized that Mary was far from being a feeble puppet, which her career in France might have led him to expect. He told his friends: ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’ In the same vein, he reported to Cecil in London that on communication with her he had spied such craft as he had not found in such an age.6
Mary was still being so enthusiastically greeted by her subjects that an incident in the chapel royal, a rude sermon from Knox, and one brusque interview were not enough to damp her spirits. She had been received with elaborate rejoicings on her ceremonial entry into Edinburgh: here were to be seen fifty townsmen dressed up as moors, in yellow taffeta costumes, their arms and legs blackened, and black visors on their faces, and on a stage at the Tolbooth four fair virgins representing the virtues, while at the Cross, there were four more virgins in ‘most heavenly clothing’, and from the spouts of the Cross wine poured forth abundantly. Some of the sights had undercurrents of Protestantism – a child who appeared at the Butter Tron, descending out of a painted cloud from a temporary wooden gateway, presented her pointedly with a Bible and a Psalter, and when she reached Holyrood once more, another child made a speech suggesting she should put away the Mass. But a scheme for burning an effigy of a priest saying Mass had been abandoned at the instance of the Catholic Huntly in favour of merely burning effigies of Coron, Nathan and Abiron, the sons of Izhar and Eliab, to represent the evil of false sacrifices – a message which it was a great deal easier for the queen politely to ignore. Indeed Knox thought the welcome given to Queen Mary so irritatingly lavish, that he remarked indignantly that in their farces, masks and other prodigalities ‘fain would the fools have counterfeited France’.7
After three weeks at Holyrood, Mary set out for a short progress round her kingdom: here again she was met with the same combination of enthusiasm, marred by occasional incidents where the truth of the Protestant religion was suddenly felt to need public demonstration. She went first to Linlithgow, the palace of her birth, and after two days on to Stirling. Here she was endangered by human rather than the divine fire with which Knox had threatened her: a candle accidentally set light to her bed curtains while she was asleep. Although the fire was quickly put out, Randolph took the opportunity to record an old prophecy that a queen should be burnt alive in Stirling, which, he said, apparently with some regret, had proved just about as successful as Lady Huntly’s prophecy that Mary would never reach Scotland.8 On Sunday there was some sort of incident when her chaplains tried to sing High Mass in the chapel royal, and it was said that the earl of Argyll, a leading Protestant, and Lord James disturbed them; after a fracas some of the priests and clerks left their places with bloody heads and broken ears but the most part of the congregation seem to have taken the incident calmly. At Perth, although the pageants once more had a sternly anti-Catholic slant, the queen herself was greeted extremely honourably, and presented with a golden heart, filled with more pieces of gold.
Despite Mary’s determined optimism, and gracious behaviour towards her subjects, whatever their religious opinions, the events of her journey, her arrival and her reception had clearly subjected her to considerable strain. Now that strain inevitably began to tell on her health. The Diurnal of Occurrents relates that in the streets of Perth she fell sick and was carried from her horse into a lodging not far off, with the sort of nervous collapse ‘she is often troubled with, after any great unkindness of grief of mind’.9 However, as always, she was quick to recover, and at Dundee was once more greeted enthusiastically and given a princely reception. At St Andrews on Sunday 21st September there may have been a religious squabble of some sort, since a rumour reached Randolph in Edinburgh that a priest had been slain. Certainly at some point in the journey Lord James and Huntly had a violent quarrel about Mass, when the Catholic Huntly said that if the queen commanded it, he would set up the Mass in three shires. But the point was that the queen did not command it: instead she merely continued on her way for a quick visit to Falkland Palace, and so back to Holyrood, where she was once more safely installed on 29th September.
Knox reported that Mary remained steadfast in her ‘devilish opinions’ at the end of her journey, despite the evidence she had received that most people found them repugnant; but he had, in his prejudiced attitude to the queen, missed the point about her attitude to the reformed religion. It was not a question of her private beliefs, which were, as she herself had told Throckmorton a few months previously, steadfastly Catholic. It was a question of the administration and good government of Scotland. Here the sights she saw during her progress can only have confirmed her in the conviction which she had already expressed in her proclamation of 25th August – that it was in the best interests of peace and stability in Scotland that the Protestant status quo should be preserved, so long as she herself could worship in private in the way she pleased. When she first arrived, Mary found herself i
n a curious situation administratively speaking apropos the structure of the Protestant Church. In the years leading up to the Reformation, the power of the Scottish crown over its native Church had increased with every decade, as royal control close at hand gradually replaced that of the far-off papacy. In 1535, the Pope conceded the right of King James not only to recommend to but also to nominate to vacant prelacies. Since the income from benefices could now be granted if the king so wished to others than its spiritual incumbent, the whole system developed into a useful method of royal patronage. The process expanded so rapidly that by 1560, in the words of Professor Donaldson, ‘There was no financial temptation for the Scottish crown to proceed to a formal breach with Rome because it was already exploiting the Church’s wealth with sufficient success’.10
But this exploitation of the Church by the monarchy was not brought to an end when the religion of Scotland was officially changed by edict of Parliament in August 1560. This edict was never confirmed by the sovereign, which made it technically illegal. But in any case no provision was made at the time for linking the new religion to the old ecclesiastical regime. By 1561 no financial arrangements had been made for the new ministers. Queen Mary was as free as her predecessors to proceed with the presentation of livings and benefices: there was absolutely no incumbency upon her to present them to the ministers of the reformed Church.* Thus the Scottish crown in the 1560s, freed by the Reformation from the last vestige of papal control, had enormous potential powers of patronage within its grasp. There was an excellent opportunity in this respect for a competent sovereign, well advised, to increase his own strength, since circumstances had conspired to play into the hands of the crown. This applied to a Catholic sovereign as much as to a Protestant one – so long as the Catholic sovereign showed no signs of wishing to restore the Catholic religion to the country. Catholicism as a spiritual force had temporarily retreated into the mists by the time Mary reached the shores of Scotland. One of the factors in this retreat was the remarkable lack of Catholic leadership at the time, which meant that too little was done to rally the Catholics at the moments of crisis. Archbishop James Beaton, for example, who might have constituted a Catholic leader, went to France in 1560 and never returned. Huntly was markedly unreliable as events were to prove. The Protestants, on the other hand, felt a crusading spirit concerning their newly achieved Reformation. When Alexander Scott presented to Mary his ‘New Year Gift’ of a long poem at the beginning of 1562, his courtly connections encouraged him to address dulcet phrases towards his young queen:
Let all thy realm be now in readiness
With costly clothing to decoir thy court.
These same connections did not prevent him warning Mary solemnly that papist idolatry had been newly engraved in certain hearts as a result of her arrival – a development which was to be thoroughly deplored. Yet all the evidence shows that Mary herself was perfectly content to accept the facts of the situation, and had no wish to engrave idolatry anew on any heart, so long as that heart beat loyally towards its sovereign. Very far from being set on re-establishing the Catholic religion in Scotland, she seems to have seen herself as the powerful Catholic sovereign who rules at peace her Protestant people.
In the meantime she was also able to benefit from the breach between Knox and the less extreme members of the reformed Church, those for example who strongly doubted whether it was lawful to resist an ungodly prince as Knox suggested. Knox, strident as his voice might be, did not by any means speak for all members of the reformed religion. As Knox himself angrily reported, the Protestant lords were apt to be seduced from extremism by contact with the gentle and civilizing influence of the court.11 When the town council of Edinburgh issued an insulting proclamation on 2nd October, putting Catholic priests in the same category as prostitutes and whoremongers, Mary managed to get the proclamation suppressed and the council deprived of its privileges, with the full co-operation of both Maitland and Lord James, whom indeed Knox furiously blamed for the whole episode. Then when Queen Mary had a sung Mass in her private chapel on All Hallows Day (1st November), it was finally decided after a conference among the Protestant leaders that the queen should be able to behave as she wished with her household in private. But the actual singing of the Mass caused considerable commotion.
The English ambassador Randolph not only paid tribute to Mary’s cleverness throughout her first autumn in Scotland, but indicated that those who had imagined Mary was without wisdom were liable to be surprised, since he himself had detected in her the fruit of the ‘best-practised’ cunning of France combined with the subtle brains of Scotland.12 Part of this cleverness on the part of the young queen was to take the financial situation of the ministers of the new Church sufficiently seriously to make provision for them: in February 1562 it was decided that the monetary situation of these ministers was sufficiently desperate for it to be necessary for the crown to take some action. It was therefore decided that while two thirds of the revenues of the benefices were to remain with the existing holders for their lifetimes (probably neither ecclesiastics nor members of the reformed Church), the other third was to be collected by the government, and divided between it and the reformed Church. It was a perfectly acceptable compromise, which showed once again that Mary drew a sharp distinction between the private Mass in her chapel and the public weal in Scotland; and it also helped on the interests of the crown.
As the editor of the Register of the Privy Council at this period has observed, one looks in vain through its pages for any evidence that Mary was a rabid Catholic intent on establishing her own religion in Scotland, and intent on destroying the reformed religion which had replaced it.13 Both Melville and Castelnau confirm Randolph’s opinion that on her first arrival in Scotland Mary’s behaviour was designedly accommodating and tactful, never more so than on the subject of religion, as a result of which she was rewarded with considerable personal popularity. Melville wrote that she conducted herself ‘so princely, so honourably and so discreetly, that her reputation spread in all countries’; Castelnau indicated that the Scots were delighted with their beautiful young queen and, thanks to her efforts to make herself agreeable to them, they counted themselves lucky to be ruled by one of the most perfect princesses of her time.14 The Pope wrote to Mary anxiously in December, suggesting that on the subject of Scottish Catholicism she should take Queen Mary Tudor as her model, who ‘surely did not defend the cause of God timidly’,15 but Mary Stuart was very far from adopting the methods of her Catholic cousin in England. Her energies at this point were absorbed in an infinitely more worldly design – to get herself recognized by Queen Elizabeth as her legitimate successor to the English throne – and in this plan fervently expressed Catholicism could only work to her disadvantage.
The conciliation of her Scottish subjects was only one half of Mary’s plan: reconciliation with Elizabeth was the other. Once she was assured that Elizabeth had actually dispatched the safe-conduct – it arrived back in Scotland four days after she landed – Mary’s mood towards her cousin was as purposely friendly as her mood towards the Scots had been. Only thirteen days after her arrival, she commissioned Maitland to go to England and try to treat with the English queen on the subject of the succession; Maitland duly set off in September. William Maitland was the obvious choice for the mission. He had been Mary of Guise’s envoy to London in February 1558, and to Paris in March 1559, and envoy for the Protestants to London again in 1560: he was thus by far the most experienced diplomatist out of the rather limited selection offered by the Scottish nobility. Maitland can fairly claim to be the most interesting character in Scotland in the time of Queen Mary because he represented a type of new man: aged thirty-three when Mary arrived, roughly the same age as Lord James, and fifteen years older than the queen herself, he had been converted to Protestantism by Knox in 1555. But it was politics not religion which interested him. His grandmother had been a Seton, and his grandfather died at Flodden, but he himself, one of the seven children of Sir Ric
hard Maitland, belonged to the new highly political class of lairds surrounding the capital, who had been considerably affected by the English occupation of Haddington in the late 1540s. Maitland had been Secretary of State to Mary of Guise, but did not allow this fact to prevent him from joining the Protestant insurgents under Châtelherault in the autumn of 1559.
His father, himself in public service of one sort and another for over sixty years, gave Maitland some Polonius-like advice at the beginning of his career, Counsel to my son being in the court, in which he admonished him to be neither a flatterer nor a scorner, to remember the instability of fortune even in the highest position of government, and in short not to be over-confident in a world as changeable as the moon or the sea. But as it turned out, Maitland was not the sort of character to be easily caught in a fixed position, while the moon and the sea changed round him. His very political abilities led him to exercise a certain pragmatism – did not Buchanan term him the Chameleon? – and his relations with Mary of Guise had already shown that, like a modern civil servant, he did not feel bound to go down with the minister. Yet Maitland was regarded by his contemporaries as having a finesse lacking in others, and an ability which made him ‘subtle to draw out the secrets of every man’s minds’16 as Buchanan put it. He was excellently educated and his correspondence is garnished with classical allusions and wit. In other ways, in his lack of ascetic fervour and his emphasis on the practical in politics, Maitland’s spirit matched Mary’s own. He was even supposed to have carried his cynicism as far as to observe that ‘God is a bogle of the nursery’.* In theory at least, he was the ideal adviser for Mary out of the limited selection available in Scotland, and he was certainly the ideal envoy to send to London.