Mary was brought up as a devout Catholic, and received a Renaissance education alongside her future husband and his siblings. She was taught sophisticated literary skills and elegant calligraphy. In an age of developing diplomacy, there was great emphasis on languages. French became Mary’s first language, and would remain so for the rest of her life; she did retain enough of her native Scots to be able to converse in it as an adult, although she never became proficient at writing it.18She also gained “a useful knowledge”19of Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek, but did not begin to learn English until 1568. Mary brought back 240 books from France to replace the royal library at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh that had been destroyed by the English in 1544, and these were in a wide variety of languages, including Latin and Greek; there were books on history, music, geography, astronomy and theology, a selection of the works of antiquity, and a large number of romances and poetry books in French and Italian, the latter being Mary’s preferred reading. The great poet Pierre de Ronsard himself taught her to write quite competent courtly verse.
The young Queen was an intelligent girl with a quick mind, who enjoyed learning for its own sake. Although not an intellectual like her cousin, the future Elizabeth I of England, she read a great deal for pleasure, and “there was hardly any branch of human knowledge of which she could not talk well.” 20
Mary was also taught the traditional feminine accomplishments: many surviving examples of her work testify to her skilled needlework and embroidery, and she was also good at drawing. Dancing became one of her favourite pastimes, and she learned to carry herself with perfect grace and agility in the ballets and masques in which she took part at the French court. She sang beautifully and played the lute, cittern, harp and virginals “reasonably well for a queen.”21Mary was early on introduced to the pleasures of hunting, hawking and other outdoor pursuits, including archery, pell-mell (croquet) and later, in Scotland, golf; she became an expert and fearless horsewoman, and was never happier than when in the saddle. She also loved fine clothing, dogs, tame birds, long walks, puppet plays from Italy, and games such as cards, dice, chess, billiards and tables (backgammon).
Henry II saw to it that the Scots in Mary’s household were gradually replaced by French people. Mary herself began to adopt the French spelling of her surname, Stuart, and always signed herself “Marie.” There is little evidence that she received any formal training in political skills, for everyone, herself included, expected her to remain in France. Scotland would be governed by others on her behalf, so there was no necessity for her to be trained specifically for the duties of a queen regnant. Mary’s Guise uncles were there to advise if she needed any guidance in matters of state, but she was also growing up in a court where intrigue and brutality were commonplace, and she must have learned something of the Machiavellian nature of Renaissance politics, the manipulation of political factions and the contemporary controversies over religion just by observing what went on around her.
In 1551, two years after the occupying English forces were finally driven out of Scotland, peace was concluded between the two kingdoms. In 1553, Edward VI died, and was succeeded by his Catholic half-sister, Mary I, who was to spend her reign re-establishing the Church of Rome in England and devoutly burning Protestants. In 1554, Marie de Guise finally replaced Chatelherault as Regent of Scotland, and immediately revived the Auld Alliance with France, in the hope of stemming the swelling tide of Protestantism in Scotland. The Queen Dowager strengthened her position by relying on French advisers and French troops, for whom her daughter’s subjects were expected to pay, but this only served to alienate the proud and independent Scots, who feared that their country was in danger of ending up as a satellite state of France.
By 1557, the new religion had not only grown in popularity but had also become widely associated with an injured sense of national identity, born out of resentment against unwelcome French interference. That year, five leading Protestant nobles banded together and, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ, allied with militant reformist preachers and signed a bond, or covenant, undertaking to establish the new faith as the national religion of Scotland.
The Lords of the Congregation increased immeasurably in strength in 1558, when Mary’s powerful and influential bastard half-brother, the sternly Calvinist Lord James Stewart, joined them with a large following and publicly proclaimed that the Lords of Scotland would embrace the Protestant faith and restore Scotland’s independence.
Lord James Stewart, who was to play a momentous and often enigmatic role in Mary’s life, had been born around 1531, and was the most able and prominent of the nine bastard children of James V. His mother was Margaret Erskine; at the time of her liaison with James V, she had been married to Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. James had petitioned the Pope to have the marriage annulled, so that he could marry his mistress, but in vain. In adult-hood, Lord James himself tried unsuccessfully to have his parents’ union legalised retrospectively.
Lord James’s bastardy was evidently a matter of great bitterness and resentment to him, for it prevented him from wearing the crown of Scotland, a role for which he was eminently suited, both by nature and by ability. He looked like a Stuart king, being tall and dark with a distinctly regal bearing and a commanding presence. Having to give place to his half-sister, a Catholic ruler, and a female at that, cannot have been easy for one who was ambitious, strong-willed, clever and capable, and his jealousy certainly had a profound bearing on the future relations between himself and Mary, which were amicable, and often affectionate, so long as she deferred to his wisdom and judgement. For James was not interested in the outward show of royalty, but in the actual exercise of sovereign power.
Many, then and since, among them Mary herself, have claimed that Lord James never ceased from scheming to seize the Scottish throne, and certainly his record over the coming years would appear to suggest that this was his ultimate aim. Had that been the case, however, it is surprising that he did not grasp the opportunity to usurp the throne on the two occasions when he had the chance to do so.
For centuries, historians have debated whether Lord James was an upright man who acted on principle, or a treacherous villain who cleverly managed to cover his tracks and find unarguably sound pretexts for his actions: indeed, in nearly every instance, his behaviour can be interpreted in both lights. He was a man “whose peculiar art was to appear to do nothing whilst, in truth, he did all.”22Whenever there was trouble or scandal, he was always absent. And although it was said of him that he “dealt, according to his nature, rudely, homely and bluntly,”23he was ruthless, devious, subtle, and cautious in the extreme.
There can be little doubt of the sincerity and consistency of Lord James’s stern Calvinist convictions, nor that in his private life he was a model of austere rectitude. No personal scandal ever attached to his name, and he was reputed to be honest, which virtues earned him great popularity with the middle classes. Yet when it came to material things he was greedy, and through steady advancement, the acquisition of ecclesiastical property, and the bounty of his sister, he managed to make himself the richest man in Scotland.
One Protestant lord who refused to join the Lords of the Congregation was the mighty James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was perhaps the Queen Regent’s most staunch supporter and who could not be shifted from his loyalty to the Crown.
Bothwell, whose destiny was to be fatally linked to Mary’s, had been born around 1535 and succeeded his father to the earldom and the hereditary office of Lord High Admiral in 1556. The Hepburn territory was centred upon the fertile and rich region of East Lothian, and the family’s chief seat was Crichton Castle, eight miles south of Edinburgh. James had been educated in the household of his promiscuous uncle, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, at Spynie near Inverness, and in the university schools of Paris. He was a cultivated, literate man, interested in science and warfare, and spoke fluent French and some Latin and Greek.
In 1557, Bothwel
l had commanded a military force that raided the English border, and for much of his life he would play a major role in suppressing lawlessness in the Scottish Borders. He mortally hated the English and, unlike almost all the rest of the Scottish nobility, would never accept bribes from them, which was commendable as he was always chronically short of money.
Contemporaries referred to Bothwell as “a splendid, rash and hazardous young man,”24“high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition.”25His enemies said he was “false and untrue as the devil,”26the “sink of all horrible sins.”27 Although he was “all his lifetime a faithful servant of the Crown, a man valiant above all others,” he was also “audacious, inconstant and changeable.”28
Bothwell was certainly a volatile, violent and turbulent man, but hardly the “monstrous beast” or “bag of vice” 29he was made out to be by his foes. Sir Henry Percy, a respected English adversary, was impressed with Bothwell when he met him, and declared he was “very wise, and not the man he was reputed to be. His behaviour was both courteous and honourable.”30
Bothwell was probably about five feet six inches tall,31and of strong, muscular build with dark cropped hair and a moustache. His later enemy, George Buchanan, described him as looking “like an ape in purple,” and his language was of a similar lurid colour.32Yet women found him irresistible, and his private life was constantly the subject of scandal, for he had an insatiable appetite for sex and a very amoral attitude towards marriage. In 1559, aged twenty-four, he had an affair with his neighbour at Branxholm, Janet Beaton, the Lady of Buccleuch, who was nineteen years his senior, had been married three times, and had seven children. She was also reputed to have resorted to sorcery to preserve her beauty. There is some evidence that she and Bothwell went through some sort of handfasting ceremony, but there is no evidence that they were ever married. After their affair ended, they remained friends.
Bothwell himself was frequently accused by his enemies of practising witchcraft in order to achieve his ambitions, and was said to have become acquainted with the black arts whilst a student in Paris. He was also accused, again mainly by his enemies, of sodomy with men. Mary’s apologist, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, called him vicious and dissolute in his habits, while a hostile English observer wrote, “He was a fit man to be minister to a shamful act, be it either against God or man.”33Neither accusation is very explicit. But Bothwell’s former servant, Paris, later confessed, “I knew his very terrible vices, especially one in which I am said to be so good a minister. I told him it would be his ruin.” He recalled Bothwell reminding him, “You covered my dishonour when you were in my service abroad.”34Paris’s confession was extracted under the threat of torture by men who needed to destroy Bothwell’s reputation, so little reliance may be based upon it. Nor can we trust the testimony of Dandie Pringle, a servant dismissed by Bothwell for trying to poison him, who told the English Governor of Berwick that the Earl was “as naughty a man as liveth, and much given to that vile and detestable vice of sodomy.”35A scurrilous ballad by Robert Sempill, written after Bothwell’s fall, also accused Bothwell of “beastly buggery,” 36but may be dismissed as sheer character assassination by an extremist propagandist. However, given the consistency of the accusations, and the variety of people making them, there is at least a possibility that there was some truth in them.
On 4 April 1558, as the time approached for her marriage to the Dauphin, Mary, probably on the advice of the Guises, signed a secret treaty with Henry II, pledging that, if she died without issue, Scotland would become subject to the French Crown. This amounted to a betrayal of her kingdom and her Scottish heirs, and is proof that she retained little affection for, or pride in, the land of her birth, and that, thanks to the influences around her, she had come to regard it as a mere appendage of France.
Three weeks later, on 24 April, Mary and Francis were married in a magnificent ceremony at Notre-Dame in Paris. The bride was fifteen, the bride-groom fourteen. Although the Venetian ambassador reported that the marriage was consummated on the wedding night,37there is some doubt about this. Francis apparently suffered from undescended testicles, and was said to be sexually immature. However, in the late summer of 1559, Mary appeared at court in the floating tunic of a pregnant woman, obviously believing herself to be with child. In the autumn, she was ill, and nothing more is heard of the hoped-for heir to the throne. The Spanish ambassador commented that, if Mary did bear a child, “it will certainly not be the King’s.”38
In England, on 17 November 1558, Mary I died, to the great relief of most of her subjects, and was succeeded by her twenty-five-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, whom he had married in defiance of the Pope, who refused to annul Henry’s first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, mother of Mary I. It was chiefly for this reason that Henry had broken with Rome, but in the eyes of Catholic Europe, Elizabeth was a bastard and unfit to inherit the throne, and the true successor to Mary I was Mary, Queen of Scots.
The Act of Succession of 1544 and Henry VIII’s Will of 1546 laid down that the crown of England was to descend to Edward VI and his heirs, then to Mary I and her heirs, and lastly to Elizabeth I and her heirs. Both Edward and Mary had died childless, and Elizabeth was as yet unmarried, much to the consternation of her advisers. Failing these lines, the throne was to pass to the heirs of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, and then to anyone else the King might designate. The descendants of his older sister Margaret had been passed over, because Margaret Tudor had relinquished her claim to the English throne on her marriage to James IV in 1503, and because Henry VIII was hoping to annex Scotland to England through the marriage of Mary to Prince Edward.
Mary therefore had no right to the succession under English law, but Henry II ignored this minor detail, and on the day of Elizabeth’s accession had Francis and Mary proclaimed King and Queen of England, on the grounds that Elizabeth was a baseborn usurper; the English royal arms were quartered with those of France and Scotland on their shields, and they began styling themselves King and Queen of England, Ireland and Scotland in official documents, much to Elizabeth’s fury and alarm, for she feared that Henry might try to enforce Mary’s claim by mounting a military offensive against her. There were already French troops on her back doorstep in Scotland.
After the horrors of “Bloody Mary’s” reign, however, the majority of Elizabeth’s subjects would never have meekly accepted another Roman Catholic ruler, particularly one who was a member of the French royal House, and a Guise at that. Many were of the opinion that a foreigner born outside the realm could not legally inherit the throne, since aliens could not inherit property in England. In the event, Henry II had no immediate intention of making war on Elizabeth, but the real damage caused by his actions was to become apparent in the longer term, for from now on the acquisition of the English crown would be Mary’s chief mission in life, more important to her by far than her own kingdom. Mary’s pretensions were to permanently sour her relations with Elizabeth, and underpinned all the dealings between them, creating a dangerous climate of resentment and distrust.
Nor were Elizabeth’s fears allayed when, in November 1558, the Scottish Parliament agreed that Mary might bestow the Crown Matrimonial on Francis; this effectively made him her heir, in the event of her dying childless, and meant that Scotland might well come under French rule one day.
On 30 June 1559, Henry II was fatally injured when a lance pierced his eye and throat during a tournament held to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain. After lingering in agony for ten days, he died on 10 July. Francis and Mary were now King and Queen of France, but Francis’s accession signalled a bitter power struggle between the Guises and the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici, for political supremacy. Mary, of course, sided with her uncles, thereby incurring the further displeasure of her mother-in-law.
Francis II was crowned
at Rheims Cathedral on 18 September 1559; as an anointed monarch in her own right, Mary was a mere observer of the ceremony. Marie de Guise was represented at the coronation by the Earl of Bothwell. Another guest was “a young gentleman who has no beard,” 39Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the twelve-year-old son of the Earl and Countess of Lennox, who had come to offer his parents’ congratulations to Francis and Mary on their accession, and also to present a letter petitioning Mary to restore Lennox’s lands in Scotland. Although she and Francis received Darnley “with great distinction,”40she refused Lennox’s request, but sent his son home with a gift of 1,000 crowns.
When Bothwell returned to Scotland after the coronation, the land was in turmoil. The Queen Regent was now involved in a bitter conflict with the Lords of the Congregation; although she had been cautiously supportive of their calls for reform of the Church, she was appalled by the escalating violence and iconoclasm of their movement, and when they began inciting riots and vandalising and desecrating churches and abbeys, she called in French troops to stop them. But this unpopular move only served to strengthen the Lords’ resistance, which gathered momentum when the charismatic reformer John Knox returned from exile in May 1559 and allied with Lord James and his Protestant colleagues. Knox’s arrival brought more leading nobles over to the Congregation, and his fiery brand of preaching inspired much popular support for the new religion.
During his exile, Knox, a former Catholic priest, had become chaplain to Edward VI. When Mary I succeeded, he fled to Geneva, where he embraced the extreme Protestant views of the Swiss reformer, John Calvin. In 1558, he published a notorious tract against the Catholic Queens, Mary I and Marie de Guise, entitled First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. In it, he argued that it was against natural and divine law for a woman to hold dominion over men. He was a shrewd, witty man of stern convictions, single-minded and bigoted, “one who neither feared nor flattered any flesh.”41He loathed any form of frivolity, and severely castigated anyone who indulged in fornication, yet in his fifties he married in succession two sixteen-year-old girls, one of them the daughter of the fervently Calvinist Andrew Stewart, Lord Ochiltree. Knox became Minister of St. Giles’s Kirk, the foremost church in Edinburgh, and was given a fine house on the High Street, probably the one still identified as his today, which dates from c. 1490.