In January 1562 Mary asked for an interview with Elizabeth. Certainly Lethington hoped that Elizabeth “would be able to do much with Mary in religion,” meaning that, if Mary’s claims to succeed Elizabeth were granted, she might turn Anglican. The request for a meeting, dallied with but never granted, occupied diplomatists, while, at home, Arran (March 31) accused Bothwell of training him into a plot to seize Mary’s person. Arran probably told truth, but he now went mad; Bothwell was imprisoned in the castle till his escape to England in August 1562. Lethington, in June, was negotiating for Mary’s interview with Elizabeth; Knox bitterly opposed it; the preachers feared that the queen would turn Anglican, and bishops might be let loose in Scotland. The masques for Mary’s reception were actually being organised, when, in July, Elizabeth, on the pretext of persecutions by the Guises in France, broke off the negotiations.
The rest of the year was occupied by an affair of which the origins are obscure. Mary, with her brother and Lethington, made a progress into the north, were affronted by and attacked Huntly, who died suddenly (October 28) at the fight of Corrichie; seized a son of his, who was executed (November 2), and spoiled his castle which contained much of the property of the Church of Aberdeen. Mary’s motives for destroying her chief Catholic subject are not certainly known. Her brother, Lord James, in February made Earl of Mar, now received the lands and title of Earl of Murray. At some date in this year Knox preached against Mary because she gave a dance. He chose to connect her dance with some attack on the Huguenots in France. According to ‘The Book of Discipline’ he should have remonstrated privately, as Mary told him. The dates are inextricable. (See my ‘John Knox and the Reformation,’ pp. 215-218.) Till the spring of 1565 the main business was the question of the queen’s marriage. This continued to divide the ruling Protestant nobles from the preachers. Knox dreaded an alliance with Spain, a marriage with Don Carlos. But Elizabeth, to waste time, offered Mary the hand of Lord Robert Dudley (Leicester), and, strange as it appears, Mary would probably have accepted him, as late as 1565, for Elizabeth let it be understood that to marry a Catholic prince would be the signal for war, while Mary hoped that, if she accepted Elizabeth’s favourite, Dudley, she would be acknowledged as Elizabeth’s heiress. Mary was young, and showed little knowledge of the nature of woman.
In 1563 came the affair of Châtelard, a French minor poet, a Huguenot apparently, who, whether in mere fatuity or to discredit Mary, hid himself under her bed at Holyrood, and again at Burntisland. Mary had listened to his rhymes, had danced with him, and smiled on him, but Châtelard went too far. He was decapitated in the market street of St Andrews (Feb. 22, 1563). It is clear, if we may trust Knox’s account, singularly unlike Brantôme’s, that Châtelard was a Huguenot.
About Easter priests were locked up in Ayrshire, the centre of Presbyterian fanaticism, for celebrating Mass. This was in accordance with law, and to soften Knox the girl queen tried her personal influence. He resisted “the devil”; Mary yielded, and allowed Archbishop Hamilton and some fifty other clerics to be placed “in prison courteous.” The Estates, which met on May 27 for the first time since the queen landed, were mollified, but were as far as ever from passing the Book of Discipline. They did pass a law condemning witches to death, a source of unspeakable cruelties. Knox and Murray now ceased to be on terms till their common interests brought them together in 1565.
In June 1563 Elizabeth requested Mary to permit the return to Scotland of Lennox (the traitor to the national cause and to Cardinal Beaton, and the rival of the Hamiltons for the succession to the thrones), apparently for the very purpose of entangling Mary in a marriage with Lennox’s son Darnley, and then thwarting it. (It was not Mary who asked Elizabeth to send Lennox.) Knox’s favourite candidate was Lord Robert Dudley: despite his notorious character he sometimes favoured the English Puritans. When Holyrood had been invaded by a mob who, in Mary’s absence in autumn 1563, broke up the Catholic attendants on Mass (such attendance, in Mary’s absence, was illegal), and when both parties were summoned to trial, Knox called together the godly. The Council cleared him of the charge of making an unlawful convocation (they might want to make one, any day, themselves), and he was supported by the General Assembly. Similar conduct of the preachers thirty years later gave James VI. the opportunity to triumph over the Kirk.
In June 1564 there was still discord between the Kirk and the Lords, and, in a long argument with Lethington, Knox maintained the right of the godly to imitate the slayings of idolaters by Phineas and Jehu: the doctrine bore blood-red fruits among the later Covenanters. Elizabeth, in May 1564, in vain asked Mary to withdraw the permission (previously asked for by her) to allow Lennox to visit Scotland and plead for the restitution of his lands. The objection to Lennox’s appearance had come, through Randolph, from Knox. “You may cause us to take the Lord Darnley,” wrote Kirkcaldy to Cecil, to stop Elizabeth’s systems of delays; and Sir James Melville, after going on a mission to Elizabeth, warned Mary that she would never part with her minion, now Earl of Leicester.
Lennox, in autumn 1564, arrived and was restored to his estates, while Leicester and Cecil worked for the sending of his son Darnley to Scotland. Leicester had no desire to desert Elizabeth’s Court and his chance of touching her maiden heart.
The intrigues of Cecil, Leicester, and Elizabeth resemble rather a chapter in a novel than a page in history. Elizabeth notoriously hated and, when she could, thwarted all marriages. She desired that Mary should never marry: a union with a Catholic prince she vetoed, threatening war; and Leicester she offered merely “to drive time.” But Mary, evasively tempted by hints, later withdrawn, of her recognition as Elizabeth’s successor, was, till the end of March 1565, encouraged by Randolph, the English ambassador at her Court, to remain in hope of wedding Leicester.
Randolph himself was not in the secret of the English intrigue, which was to slip Darnley at Mary. He came (February 1565): Cecil and Leicester had “used earnest means” to ensure his coming. On March 17 Mary was informed that she would never be recognised as Elizabeth’s successor till events should occur which never could occur. On receiving this news Mary wept; she also was indignant at the long and humiliating series of Elizabeth’s treacheries. Her patience broke down; she turned to Darnley, thereby, as the English intriguers designed, breaking up the concord of her nobles. To marry Darnley involved the feud of the Hamiltons, and the return of Murray (whom Darnley had offended), of Châtelherault, Argyll, and many other nobles to the party of Knox and the preachers. Leicester would have been welcome to Knox; Darnley was a Catholic, if anything, and a weak passionate young fool. Mary, in the clash of interests, was a lost woman, as Randolph truly said, with sincere pity. Her long endurance, her attempts to “run the English course,” were wasted.
David Riccio, who came to Scotland as a musician in 1561, was now high in her and in Darnley’s favour. Murray was accused of a conspiracy to seize Darnley and Lennox; the godly began to organise an armed force (June 1565); Mary summoned from exile Bothwell, a man of the sword. On July 29th she married Darnley, and on August 6th Murray, who had refused to appear to answer the charges of treason brought against him, though a safe-conduct was offered, was outlawed and proclaimed a rebel, while Huntly’s son, Lord George, was to be restored to his estates. Thus everything seemed to indicate that Mary had been exasperated into breaking with the party of moderation, the party of Murray and Lethington, and been driven into courses where her support, if any, must come from France and Rome. Yet she married without waiting for the necessary dispensation from the Pope. Her policy was henceforth influenced by her favour to Riccio, and by the jealous and arrogant temper of her husband. Mary well knew that Elizabeth had sent money to her rebels, whom she now pursued all through the south of Scotland; they fled from Edinburgh, where the valiant Brethren, brave enough in throwing stones at pilloried priests, refused to join them; and despite the feuds in her own camp, where Bothwell and Darnley were already on the worst terms, Mary drove the rebel lords across the Border at Carlisle on October 8.