Mary Queen of Scots on the lives of rulers,
Essay on Adversity, 1580
By the summer of 1572 the public cause of Mary Stuart seemed lost indeed; she was left to discover for herself in the private life of captivity the uses of adversity, sweet or otherwise. This outward decline in her circumstances was due in great measure to the fact that the fickle wheel of fortune had rolled away from her direction in Scotland. Argyll, for example, had remained a Marian supporter after Langside, despite his failure at the scene of the battle. Mary harangued him with anxious letters from her prison, addressed at times to ‘our Counsellor and Lieutenant’, at times to ‘our dearest cousin’ and rising in a crescendo of supplication to ‘Brother’ (a relationship based on his marriage to her half-sister Jean Stewart) to whom she signed herself in a fevered personal postscript ‘your right good sister and best friend forever’.1 These frantic missives did not manage to dissuade Argyll from deserting Mary’s side for that of Moray in April 1569; he leagued once more briefly with the pro-Marian Hamiltons after the regent’s death in 1570 before, finding Mary’s cause hopeless, he abandoned it once more. The attitude of Lord Boyd – the royal servant who had brought the fatal diamond from Norfolk – was typical of that of many of Mary’s more stable former supporters: in the summer of 1571 he too began to despair of her cause. The death of the regent Lennox during a raid on Stirling in August 1571 led to the substitution of Morton as effective leader, under Mar as a nominal regent; Boyd agreed to Mar’s election and was once more enrolled in the Privy Council. Mar’s death in October 1572 confirmed Morton as regent in name as well as deed, and Morton was not only no friend to Mary at any time, but also an Anglophile, whom it suited Elizabeth to support. The final blow to Mary’s prolonged hopes for restoration at English hands came in the following spring when the castle of Edinburgh, so long held by Kirkcaldy and Maitland on behalf of the Marians, and officially on behalf of Mary herself, was at last effectively besieged by heavy cannon brought north from England manned by English gunners under Drury. This lethal English intervention proved decisive: in May 1573 the castle fell.
The gallant Kirkcaldy was executed. Maitland either died naturally or, as Melville suggested, committed suicide ‘after the old Roman fashion’, before the executioner’s axe could reach him. In any case his health had been deteriorating with a form of creeping paralysis: by March 1570 Randolph noted that his legs were ‘clean gone’, his body so weak that he could not walk, and even to sneeze caused him exquisite pain. Randolph commented spitefully: ‘To this hath blessed joy of a young wife brought him.’2 But Mary Fleming, for all Randolph’s gibes, acted the part of a loyal wife after her husband’s death. It was her moving personal plea to Cecil which saved Maitland’s wasted corpse from the humiliating treatment accorded to Huntly’s body after death in the shape of the traditional Scottish treason trial. In a firm letter to Morton, Queen Elizabeth pointed out that such barbarous habits were extremely distasteful to the English way of thinking: ‘It is not our manner in this country to show cruelty upon the dead bodies so unconvicted, but to suffer them straight to be buried and put in the earth.’ As God had shown His intentions towards Maitland by allowing him to die naturally and thus escape execution, so Maitland should be buried naturally and well and not ‘pulled in pieces’.3 Thus thanks to his wife, the foremost of the Maries, Maitland escaped the fate of Huntly.*
Mary kept her feelings to herself on the subject of Maitland’s death: ‘She makes little show of any grief,’ reported Shrewsbury. ‘And yet it nips her very near.’ In the last years of his life since his quarrel with Moray, Maitland had energetically promoted Mary’s interests; and he had died a loyal Marian. But he had not always lived as one. Queen Mary may well have reflected that if more years had been granted to him, he might have used them for further changes of allegiance. Nevertheless the death of Maitland brought to an end an era in Scotland; under Morton, a brutal man but one who showed himself to possess a certain administrative talent, the beleaguered country even enjoyed a period of comparative calm. Its quondam queen, Mary Stuart, also entered a phase of enforced tranquillity, in which the minor pains or pleasures of her prison routine became temporarily more important than European or Scottish politics.
The actual conditions of her captivity were not in themselves particularly rigorous during the 1570s by the standards of a state prisoner, except during moments of national crisis. In the first place Queen Mary was officially allowed a suite of thirty, which was enough to make her adequately comfortable if not a large number to one who had lived as queen her whole life. At the time of her first committal to Shrewsbury and Huntingdon in 1569 this thirty included Lord and Lady Livingston and their own attendants, Mary Seton, who had her own maid and groom, three other ladies of the bed-chambers, Jane Kennedy, Mary’s favourite bed-chamber woman, John Beaton, her master of the house, her cupbearer and her physician; then there were her grooms of the chambers, one of them being that witty masque-maker Bastian Pages, Gilbert Curle, her secretary, Willy Douglas, now described as her usher, and her chair-bearer. There were four officers in the pantry, and three officers in the kitchen including a master cook and a pottager. Most of these were Mary’s tried and loyal servants who made up the official thirty, but beyond this figure had crept in others, bringing the total up to forty-one. This proliferation, due not only to the infiltration of such further aides to the queen as Bastian’s wife and some stable grooms, but also to the introduction of further attendants to look after the attendants, was tolerated by Shrewsbury out of kindness, as he himself admitted.4
But as the royal suite happily escalated through Shrewsbury’s laxity, its increase in numbers inevitably reached the ears of the government in London, who took a much less generous view, especially when outside events seemed to threaten the safety of the queen of Scots. In times of danger there would be an outcry against this burgeoning suite – ‘too much enlarged at the present time’ wrote Elizabeth angrily in September 1569, at the time of her discovery of the first Norfolk marriage negotiations. There would be demands from London that numbers should be cut; this would result in tears and protests from Mary, coupled with guilty denials from Shrewsbury to London that he had ever allowed the number to rise.
More servants, quite apart from the danger of official complaints from London, meant more mouths to feed. Here Shrewsbury was less indulgent. His allowance from the government for the feeding of the queen was the subject of agonizing solicitude on his part throughout all his long years as her guardian, and as late as 1584 he was still complaining about the number of dishes the attendants consumed – eight dishes at every meal for the queen’s gentlemen, and five dishes for the ladies. When Mary was first committed to Shrewsbury, he was allowed £52 a week to maintain her, but in 1575, without any reason being given, this allowance was cut to £30 a week. Shrewsbury squeaked with protest but all to no avail: it was an economy which the careful Elizabeth was determined to make. Shrewsbury’s seventeenth-century biographer Johnston estimated that he was actually spending £30 a day, and was thus nearly £10,000 a year out of pocket; yet not only were his complaints disregarded, but he frequently had much difficulty in extracting the allowance which remained from the government.*5 Eventually, on the advice of Walsingham, Shrewsbury applied to Queen Elizabeth for a fee farm to try and get back some of the expenses in a manner that would not hurt the royal pocket; even this request took a long time to be granted. In the meantime Walsingham reflected that cutting Shrewsbury’s allowance might turn out to be a false economy if it meant that the queen of Scots was allowed to escape through lack of guards – ‘I pray God the abatement of the charges towards the nobleman that hath custody of the bosom serpent, hath not lessened his care in keeping her’.6
In fact the care which Shrewsbury showed in keeping Queen Mary, like the numbers of her suite which he tolerated, varied very much with the attitude of the central government, and this in turn depended on the state of national security. Shrewsbury was not a cruel man a
nd strictness generally had to be imposed from above. Even when the government resolved that the queen should be kept more ‘straitly’, its wishes were not always implemented very speedily; Derbyshire and Staffordshire were a long way from London, and travelling, especially in winter, from houses like Chatsworth set amidst the mountainous area of Derbyshire represented considerable difficulties. This worked both ways. In the first place Shrewsbury, like all ambitious Elizabethans, constantly pined for the royal sunshine of the court, and bewailed the duties which kept him so long away from it: he felt he was being excluded from the glorious possibilities of the queen’s favour, as well as an opportunity to make his case about his allowance. In 1582, in the autumn, deprived at the last minute of permission to make a longed-for visit to London, Shrewsbury commented sadly to Walsingham that neither the weather nor the time of the year would have prevented him arriving. Shrewsbury had to content himself with bombarding his friends at court with letters and gifts reminding them of his existence – such as some tasty ‘red deer pies’, made from his own deer, and posted off to London to win the favour of Cecil.*7 But just as Shrewsbury was often tortured by the thought of the delights of London and the court, so the government who occupied this delightful city were themselves from time to time agonized at the idea that the Scottish queen in the far-off Midlands was enjoying far too much liberty, seeing people, receiving visitors, holding a virtual court, riding about on horseback in conditions tantamount to liberty … such rumours, untrue as they were, spread by those recently arrived in London from the Midlands, caused Elizabeth to choke with fury and fire off indignant reproaches to Shrewsbury for neglecting his duty.
Although Shrewsbury never failed to write in return protesting his extreme loyalty to Elizabeth and his eternal vigilance as a jailer, there was no doubt that the question of access to the Scottish queen was a delicate one, and whatever he swore to Elizabeth Shrewsbury did not always interpret the rules in the harshest possible light. In April 1574 he wrote down to London, in answer to some accusation that he was showing too much kindness to his captive: ‘I know her to be a stranger, a Papist, my Enemy. What hopes can I have of good of her, either for me, or for my country?’8 But of course there was a simple answer to Shrewsbury’s question, as to what he – leaving out his country – could hope for from the queen of Scots, and Cecil and his fellows were well able to supply it for themselves: if Elizabeth died suddenly, who knew but that Mary’s fortunes might not be dramatically reversed? If the captive were to be transformed overnight into the queen, and Mary were to ascend the throne of England, as would have been a possibility at least, had Elizabeth died while James was still a child, then Shrewsbury could expect much from his former charge if he had shown himself a sympathetic host to her in her times of distress. This consideration of Mary’s potential as queen of England, which died away in the 1580s after James grew to manhood, was very much present in the minds of the English statesmen in the 1570s; not only Shrewsbury but also Cecil and Leicester kept the possibility at the back of their minds in their dealings with the queen of Scots.
From Mary’s own point of view she was of course anxious to be allowed to receive as many local people and enjoy as much local life as possible. Such visits helped to while away the tedium of her imprisonment: the great families of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, the Manners and the Pagets, far from being Philistines, had the particular enjoyment of music and musical festivities which Mary shared.9 These visits also provided an excellent cover for messengers and messages to slip by secretly. By the summer of 1569 irritating reports were reaching London that the Shrewsburys were allowing Mary some sort of social life at Wingfield. Lord Shrewsbury countered such complaints by detailing his extravagant precautions for Mary’s safety – how, for example, when a child was born to his son and daughter-in-law, Gilbert and Mary Talbot, in March 1575 he deliberately christened the baby himself, to prevent unnecessary strangers entering the house. Nevertheless Shrewsbury was on some occasions accused of actually showing off his distinguished captive to his visitors – a charge of which one feels he was probably not completely innocent, since the presence of the famous queen of Scots in the Midlands of England must have caused a sensation among the local gentry on her first arrival. Cecil told Shrewsbury that Elizabeth had heard in London of ‘a gentleman of Lord B’ who, on visiting Shrewsbury at his home, had been asked by him whether he had ever seen the queen of Scots. Cecil’s indictment continued: ‘Then, quoth your lordship, you shall see her anon.’10 Such tales made Elizabeth’s blood boil and Shrewsbury’s run cold.
Mary’s access to the baths at Buxton was the subject of a long-drawn-out three-cornered skirmish between Elizabeth, Shrewsbury and Mary. Buxton, which lay comparatively close to Chatsworth, although cut off from it by rough countryside, was endowed with a well, the healing properties of whose waters had been known even to the Romans. In early Tudor times it had been known as the well of St Anne, and had become a centre of religious pilgrimage, where the people came to be cured as much by their faith as by the waters themselves; as at a modern centre of pilgrimage, Lourdes, the crutches and sticks of the cured were hung up in the little chapel over the springs where Mass used to be said on behalf of the afflicted. During the iron dominion of Thomas Cromwell these innocent pursuits were rudely interrupted: the crutches and sticks and the offerings to the chapel were angrily swept away as manifestations of ‘papist idolatry’ by Cromwell’s emissary; the baths themselves were locked up and sealed. However, by the time Queen Mary reached Derbyshire, the baths were once more unsealed, and were enjoying a considerable vogue even with the courtiers in far-away London for their remedial powers which were thought to be particularly helpful in the case of gout. In 1572 a Dr Jones wrote a thesis on the benefits to be derived from the ‘Ancient Baths at Buckstones’ which described the commodious arrangements made there for the reception of the sufferers. Bess had apparently already turned her agile mind to the possible profit to be derived from these baths and their tepid, clear mineral waters: Dr Jones’s narrative implies that she planned some sort of Buxton Bath Charity, in which it was intended to have a clear scale of charges according to the wealth of the patient – £3 10s. for a duke and 12d. for a yeoman.11
To visit these baths became the dearest object of Mary Queen of Scots; again and again she pleaded the near-breakdown of her health in an effort to secure the desired permission. Shrewsbury himself built a special house next to the famous baths, in which it would be possible to house the Scottish queen as she took her cure, without danger of escape. But every time Elizabeth appeared to be on the point of agreeing, she seemed to hear of some fresh plot to rescue the prisoner. These heart-searchings eventually culminated in permission being granted, albeit reluctantly. Mary paid her first visit to Buxton at the end of August 1573 and spent five weeks there. Thereafter it became the outing to which she most keenly looked forward, not only one may suppose for the remedial effects of the waters – considered efficacious also for female irregularities as well as gout – but for the unique opportunity which it gave her to mix with people. The presence of occasional court folk at Buxton was indeed a source of equal joy to both Mary and Shrewsbury. Thus Mary was able to meet Cecil, in 1575, and later Leicester, her former suitor, in 1578 and 1584. Cecil in his cautious way actually turned down a projected match of his daughter with Shrewsbury’s son, on the grounds that it might confirm ugly reports that he had become too friendly with Mary while at Buxton. But Leicester went on after his cure at Buxton to be entertained by Shrewsbury at Chatsworth, where Mary was at that moment confined. Mary’s keenest hope was of course that Elizabeth herself would succumb to the temptation to visit the baths, so that the longed-for meeting would be brought about. But although Elizabeth visited the town of Stafford and the nearby Essex house of Chartley in the course of a progress in August 1575– the moment in their lives at which the two queens were geographically nearest to each other – she did not journey on to Buxton.
Such visits gave Shrewsbury an
opportunity of lavishing actual presents as well as showing kindness to prominent courtiers, or their wives and relations. Venison, fruit, fowl, meat, wine and ale flowed in a rich stream from the Shrewsbury domains to make the stay of these fashionable figures in distant Derbyshire more palatable. In August 1576 Sir Walter Mildmay, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, thanked Shrewsbury profusely for his kindness to his wife during the period of her cure, without which ‘her being at Buxtons, in so could and raw a country, would be very odious to her’.12 Happy Shrewsbury! The arrival at Buxton of Sir Thomas Cecil, Cecil’s elder son, and his lady, my lady Essex, and the earl of Bedford’s two daughters all with the clouds of court glory still freshly trailing about them, gave him a magnificent opportunity to load them with five hogsheads of beer and ale, further wine, sheep, rabbits, and further emoluments to supplement their diet, including ‘a fat cow’.13
Yet so long as these visits of Mary to Buxton continued, they remained a source of apprehension on the part of Elizabeth. Dreadful rumours that Mary might be endearing herself to the common people there by small acts of charity began to reach London. In 1580 Shrewsbury was once more defending himself against the accusation that Mary was being allowed too much access to the world: he admitted that there had been one poor cripple who had spoken to the Scottish queen at the well, ‘unknown to all my people that guarded the place’, but he promised it would not happen again. In 1581 Cecil complained to Shrewsbury that Mary was known to have visited Buxton twice that summer, although she only had official leave for one visit. In 1584 Elizabeth apprehensively forbade an assembly of freeholders in the forest of the Peak, three miles from Buxton, on the grounds that the inhabitants were ‘backward and for most part ill affected in religion’, despite Shrewsbury’s protests that these were good men who had been summoned in respect of Elizabeth’s rights of vert and venison there, which had fallen into disuse for the lack of such courts.14 Mary herself spoke the truest word on the subject of such terrors on the part of the Elizabethan government, that her charity might win her hearts. To Paulet, a subsequent jailer, who criticized her for giving a smock to a poor near-naked woman out of pity for her condition, she replied, ‘You fear lest by giving alms I should win the favour of the people, but you ought rather to fear lest the restraining of my alms may animate the people against you.’15