Mary Stuart rallied her remaining energies for this ultimate struggle. Her last hope had to be taken from her. She would have to submit to a final and profound affront. This had ever been the case with Mary—her superb courage, her unlimited resoluteness, were never greater than when all was lost or seemed to be lost. Her true heroism shone forth whenever there was nothing more to expect.
Mary’s last hope now was that she might come to an understanding with her son. For during the tedious and uneventful years that had crumbled away behind her, and during which her fresh and youthful visage had been changed into a sere and pallid countenance, a child had grown to boyhood, the son of her womb, with her own blood coursing in his veins. She had left her infant behind at Stirling Castle when she rode forth to Edinburgh, where Bothwell’s troopers surrounded and abducted her. Never since then had she set eyes on James. Ten years passed, fifteen years went by; now the baby she had clasped in her arms was a stripling of seventeen, James VI, King of Scotland. Soon he would be a full-grown man. Qualities of both his parents were mingled in his disposition. He possessed a queer makeup; his body was plump and stocky; his speech was heavy, his tongue unwieldy; his spirit lay under a pall of anxiety and shyness. A superficial glance conveyed the impression that the boy was abnormal. He withdrew from social intercourse, was alarmed at the sight of naked steel, trembled before dogs. His ways were uncouth, his manners far from polished. The delicate and ingrained charm of his mother was completely lacking. Nor was he musical; indeed he loved neither music nor the dance; he could not participate in gay and pleasant conversation. But he acquired foreign languages with ease, had an excellent memory and a certain shrewdness and resoluteness manifested themselves where his personal advantage was concerned. Unhappily, many of the father’s unworthier traits had been transferred to the son; for James was infirm of purpose, had no true sense of honour and was never to be depended upon. Elizabeth once asked irritably what one could expect from this double-tongued fellow. James, like Darnley, was twisted hither and thither by almost anybody he came in contact with. Generous impulses remained totally alien to his nature; cold and calculating ambition governed his decisions, and his unwavering coolness towards his mother can be understood only when we consider it without any reference to accepted ideas of filial piety and sentiment.
The lad had been mainly educated and taught Latin by one of Mary’s bitterest enemies, George Buchanan, the author of the defamatory pamphlet Detection; and all his life James had been brought up to believe that his mother had encompassed his father’s death, and that from her places of captivity across the border she contested his right to reign though he was crowned King of Scotland. From the outset it had been dinned into his ears that he must look upon his mother as a stranger and as an obstacle in the way to his own achievement of power. Even if a tender and childlike longing to meet the woman who had given him birth still lingered in James’s heart, he could never have attained his object, for the English and Scottish wardens of both prisoners kept too keen a watch on their movements—indeed, just as Mary Was Elizabeth’s prisoner so was James the prisoner of the Scottish lords and of various regents during his minority. Nevertheless, from time to time a letter would pass over the border. Mary Stuart sent occasional presents to her boy, playthings too, and once she got him a little monkey. Most of these communications and gifts were returned to the sender, because Mary would not bend her pride to addressing the child as King. So long as she persisted in calling James VI “Prince of Scotland”, and refused him his regal title, the lords maintained that her letters were an insult to their sovereign. Not even a formal relationship between mother and son was possible if she and he respectively continued to stand upon their royal prerogatives and looked upon the possession of power as of more importance than the ties of blood; if she persisted in maintaining that she alone was Queen and sovereign lady of Scotland, while he considered that he alone was King and sovereign lord of the same realm.
Mary and James could perhaps begin to draw together if she curtailed her pretension of alone being the reigning sovereign of Scotland. Despair and weariness might exercise more power over her proud and impatient spirit than any other means of persuasion. Of course, even if she yielded on a point or two, she had no intention of wholly renouncing her privilege to bear the title of Queen. She intended to live and die with the crown upon her consecrated head. But she was now prepared, at the price of regaining freedom, at least to share the royal sovereignty with her son. For the first time her thoughts turned to compromise. Let James rule the land and call himself King; but let her retain her title of Queen, so that her renunciation might at least be gilded with a little honour. Could not some formula be found? Negotiations at first promised well. But James VI, perpetually at the mercy of his threatening nobles, carried on the parleyings in a spirit of cold calculation. Without scruple, he bargained simultaneously with everyone, playing off Mary against Elizabeth and Elizabeth against Mary, using one religion as a lever against the other. He was content to sell his favour to the highest bidder, since for him the struggle did not concern his honour. What he hoped to win out of the barter was the recognition of himself as the sole and unlimited monarch of Scotland, and at the same time to secure his own succession to the English throne. He was not satisfied with being the accredited heir of one only of these two women, but must bear that relation to both. Quite prepared to remain Protestant if by doing so he added to his advantages, he was, nevertheless, equally amenable to the idea of entering the Catholic Church if the old faith offered him a handsomer price; the seventeen-year-old monarch was not even dismayed by the notion of marrying Elizabeth, if these nuptials were likely to make him King of England the sooner. Yet Elizabeth Tudor was by this time a jaded and worn-out piece of womanhood, nine years older than Mary Stuart, and the fiercest and most embittered enemy of James’s mother. For Darnley’s son these contemptible quibbles were no more than matters of deliberate calculation. For Mary, on the other hand, the undying child of illusion, shut away as she was from the world and its events, the parleyings to and fro acted like a bellows upon the glowing brazier of her final hopes, so that she truly believed she might come to an understanding with her son and yet retain her title of Queen.
But Elizabeth was fully awake to the peril that such a reconciliation entailed for herself. Any outcome of the sort must be hindered. She quickly took a hand in the game. Sharp-eyed and cynical as she was, it would prove no difficult affair to decoy the unscrupulous careerist—she need but trade upon his weakness. Knowing the uncouth youngster to be madly in love with the chase, Elizabeth sent him gifts of the finest horses and hounds she could lay hands on. His counsellors were handsomely bribed; and he himself—who like all the Scottish nobles and gentry was perennially short of money—was offered a yearly pension of five thousand pounds. Finally the promise of the English succession was dangled before his eyes. Money, as always, decided the issue. While Mary, ignorant of these counter-intrigues, was making diplomatic contacts with the Pope and with Spain in an endeavour to bring Scotland into the Roman Catholic fold, James VI was signing a treaty with Elizabeth wherein were incorporated the clauses which might accrue to his benefit, but where no mention was made of Mary Stuart’s liberation. No thought was given to the captive, for she had become a creature of no consequence to James her son since she had no advantages to offer. As if Mary had ceased to live, he came to a workable arrangement with Elizabeth, his mother’s cruellest foe. The woman to whom he owed his existence might disappear for all he cared, or must at least not enter the circle of his life. No sooner was the bond between himself and Elizabeth signed, no sooner had he got the promised pension in hand and become the master of some fine hunting dogs and horses, than, at a moment’s notice, he broke off negotiations with Mary Stuart. Why should he bother about behaving courteously to a woman who had lost all power? He announced that he was under the necessity “of declining to associate her with himself in the sovereignty of Scotland”; nor could he “treat with her
otherwise than as Queen Mother.” Thus a son heartlessly abandoned his royal mother to lifelong captivity. Realm, crown, power, freedom, had been snatched out of her grasp by her rival. The childless enemy thus completed her vengeance, for she had brought about the defection of Mary Stuart’s son.
Elizabeth’s triumph on this occasion shattered Mary’s last hopes. Once again she realised that her enemy had sold and betrayed her. Having lost her husband, her brother and her subjects, she now lost her child; henceforward she was to stand alone. Her disappointment was only equalled by her disgust. She need consider nobody’s feelings for the future! Just as well, perhaps! Since her own child denied her, she would deny him. Since he had nearly bartered away her rights to the crown of Scotland, she would pay the youngster back in his own coin. She accused him of having forgotten the “duty and obligation” he owed her, and threatened to bestow her malediction “and invoke that of heaven on my ungrateful son”; further, she affirmed that, unless James became a convert to the Church of Rome, she would debar him from his rights to the crowns of England and of Scotland. She would rather, “if he perseveres in the heresy of Calvin”, transfer these rights to a foreign prince—to the King of Spain, for instance, should that monarch consent to fight for her freedom and to humiliate the assassin of her best hopes, Queen Elizabeth of England. No longer was her son or her country of importance to her. All she needed now was freedom, liberty to live her own life, once more to be victor in the arena. Even the boldest venture seemed natural to her. One who has lost everything has nothing left to risk.
Year after year anger and embitterment had accumulated within this tortured and humiliated woman; year after year she had hoped and negotiated and compromised and conspired. Her cup was now full, and even overfull. A flame of hatred streamed upward against the torturer, the usurper, the wardress of her imprisonment. No longer was it as one queen against another or as one woman against another that Mary Stuart hurled herself tooth and nail against Elizabeth Tudor. A petty incident brought things to a head. The Countess of Shrewsbury, a confirmed scandal-monger and peculiarly malicious slanderer, declared that Mary Stuart had entered into amorous relationships with the Earl, her husband and Mary’s jailer. Such gossip was not meant to be taken seriously, but Elizabeth, who had always been at pains to show up the moral lapses of her rival, quickly seized the opportunity in order to acquaint the continental courts of her cousin’s fresh misdemeanour. It was, then, not enough that she should have power taken from her, that she should be deprived of her freedom, that the affection of her son should be alienated from her; now her fair name must be besmirched, and she, who lived like a nun, who dispensed with any form of pleasure or of love, was to be held up before the eyes of the world as an adulteress. Wounded pride made her wrath blaze high. She demanded immediate reparation, and Lady Shrewsbury “upon her knees” denied that there were any grounds for the infamous reports spread abroad against the Queen of Scots. But Mary knew well who was responsible for the speedy extension of the rumours initiated by her jailer’s wife; she guessed the secret and malignant joy of her perennial foe at having so luscious a morsel of calumny to serve up to the courts of Europe, and she determined to counter the blow that had been dealt her in the dark by a blow dealt in the open. Impatience had long possessed her soul to exhibit this so-called virgin queen in true colours. She who set herself up as a model of virtue and righteousness would hear the truth at last as between one woman and the other.
Mary, therefore, wrote a letter (to outward seeming a friendly one, but in truth one of the spiciest documents in the English archives) to Elizabeth, narrating in the frankest language the gossip anent the English Queen’s private life and morals that was being disseminated by the Countess of Shrewsbury. The ostensible motive was, as I have said, a friendly one; but Mary’s real object was to show her “dear sister” how slight were the latter’s claims to pose as an exemplar of good morals or as an authority upon ethical standards. Every word in this epistle seems like a fresh blow, whose punch was backed up by despair and hate. All the fearful things one woman can say to another are herein stated; Elizabeth’s faults of character are flung vindictively in her face; the most hidden secrets of her womanhood are ruthlessly unveiled. “Bess of Hardwick” had indulged her tongue beyond the limits of the excusable, had declared Elizabeth to be so vain and to hold so exalted an opinion of her own loveliness as to make her hearers believe she must be the Queen of Heaven. Never was she satiated with flattery, continually forcing her ladies into the most absurd exaggerations; her uncontrolled vulgarity was displayed in the way she would, when vexed, mishandle these same gentlewomen and the tiring maids in her suite. She had actually broken the finger of one and had slashed another with a knife on the hand because of some lack of dexterity in the serving of a meal.
These items, however, were nothing when compared to other revelations, such as that Elizabeth had a running sore on the leg (a hint that she might have inherited syphilis from her father); that she had lost her youth prematurely, but nevertheless continued to lust after men. That “infinies foys”, countless numbers of times, she had gone to bed with Leicester; nor had he been her only paramour; that she sought her pleasure anywhere and everywhere; that she never wanted to lose her freedom to make love and to have her desires satisfied by ever fresh lovers. At night she had been known to slip out of her own bedchamber, wearing nothing more than a nightgown with, maybe, a shawl flung about her for warmth’s sake, and creep into the room of some man of her choice; these illicit delights had to be paid for dearly. Mary heaped name upon name, detail upon detail. But the deadliest bolt of all, Elizabeth’s bitterest wound to her pride as a woman, about which Ben Jonson blabbed freely in the taverns he frequented, was not spared the English sovereign: “She says, moreover, that indubitably you are not like other women, and it is folly to advance the notion of your marriage with the duc d’Anjou, seeing that such a conjugal union could never be consummated.” There Elizabeth had it plain and flat; her secret was known to all; everyone knew that because of her physical imperfection she could only gratify her lust but never her natural sexual appetite, that she could only play at love but was debarred entirely from wedlock and motherhood. One woman alone had the courage to tell the mightiest of queens this ultimate and terrible truth; one captive woman alone, after twenty years of pent-up hatred, of stifled anger, of imprisoned energies, rallied her forces to deal this ghastly assault upon the heart of her tormentor.
After such an explosion, reconciliation was impossible. The woman who had composed the letter, and the woman who was intended to read it, could no longer breathe the same air or live in the same country. “Hasta el cuchillo as the Spaniards say, war to the knife, war to the death—such was the only issue. After more than two decades of double dealing, of obstinate spying and irreconcilable enmity, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor had brought their historic combat into the light of day. The Counter-Reformation had used every conceivable diplomatic art, but neither side had as yet had recourse to arms. What was to be proudly (and afterwards derisively) styled the “Invincible Armada” was being slowly and laboriously built in Spain. But, despite the inflow of wealth from America, the court of that unhappy land was always short alike of money and of resolution. Philip the Pious resembled John Knox in looking upon the removal of an adversary who adhered to another creed as an act well pleasing to Almighty God. Would it not be cheaper and easier to hire a few bravos who would forthwith rid the world of Elizabeth, the protectress of heresy? The age of Machiavelli and his pupils was not troubled by moral considerations when power was at stake. Here the stakes were colossal—faith against faith, south against north, the admiralty of the world.
When politics are heated white-hot in the furnace of passion, moral and legal scruples are thrown to the winds; no one bothers about honour or decency, and even assassination is glorified. Through the excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 and of William the Silent in 1580, the two chief enemies of Catholicism had been outlawed by the Roman Ch
urch; and after the Pope had expressly approved the Massacre of St Bartholomew, every Catholic was assured that he would be doing a praiseworthy deed if he succeeded in assassinating either of these hereditary foes of the true faith. A vigorous thrust with a dagger, a skilfully aimed pistol bullet, might free Mary Stuart from captivity and place her on the throne at Westminster, with the result that England and the world would be regained for Rome. The Jesuits were busily and secretly going to and fro across the Channel. The Spanish government did not hesitate to avow that the murder of Elizabeth was one of its chief political aims. Mendoza, Spanish ambassador in London, referred frequently in his dispatches to “killing the Queen” as a laudable enterprise. The Duke of Alva, governor of the Netherlands, approved the scheme. Philip II, lord of two continents, drafted with his own hand a plan which he hoped that “God would favour”. Matters were to be decided, not by diplomatic arts, nor by open warfare, but by the assassin’s knife. There was not much to choose between England and Spain as to methods. In Madrid, the killing of Elizabeth was decided on in a secret conclave, and was endorsed by the King. In London, Cecil and Walsingham and Leicester were agreed upon making short work of Mary Stuart. There were to be no more hesitations and no more expedients. The account had long been overdue, and its settlement would be marked by a line drawn in blood. The only question was, which would act more promptly, the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation, London or Madrid? Would Mary Stuart sweep Elizabeth Tudor out of her path, or would Elizabeth make an end of Mary?