Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Henry Glassford Bell

MARY’S SUITORS, AND THE MACHINATIONS OF HER ENEMIES.

Mary had now continued a widow for about three years, but certainly not from a want of advantageous offers. It was in her power to have formed almost any alliance she chose. There was not a court in Europe, where the importance of a matrimonial connexion with the Queen of Scotland, and heir-apparent to the English throne, was not acknowledged. Accordingly, ambassadors had found their way to Holyrood Palace from all parts of the Continent. The three most influential suitors were, the Duke of Anjou, brother of Mary’s late husband, Francis II., and afterwards King of France, on the death of his other brother, Charles IX.—the Archduke Charles of Austria, third son of the Emperor Ferdinand—and Don Carlos of Spain, heir-apparent to all the dominions of his father, Philip II. None of these personages, however, were destined to be successful. The death of the Duke of Guise, and the greater influence which consequently fell into the hands of Catharine de Medicis, made some alteration in the Duke of Anjou’s prospects, and diminished his interest with Mary. Besides, it was considered dangerous to marry the brother of a late husband. The Archduke Charles found, that his proposals to the Scottish Queen excited so much the jealousy of his elder brother, Maximilian, that it became necessary for him reluctantly to quit the field. It is not improbable that Don Carlos might have been listened to, had not Mary found it necessary, for reasons which will be mentioned immediately, to give up all thoughts of a Continental alliance. Had she married Carlos, she might have saved him from the untimely fate inflicted by parental cruelty in 1568.

Of all the sovereigns who at this time watched Mary’s intentions with the most jealous anxiety, none felt so deeply interested in the decision she might ultimately come to, as Elizabeth. To her, Mary’s marriage was a matter of the very last importance. If she connected herself with a powerful Catholic prince, her former claims upon the English throne might be renewed; and her Scottish armies, assisted by continental forces, might ultimately deprive Elizabeth of her crown. Even though Mary did not proceed to such extremities, if she had a Catholic husband, and more especially if there were any children of the marriage, all the Catholics of Europe would rally round her, and her power would be such, that her requests would be tantamount to commands. So far as Elizabeth’s own interests, and those of the kingdom over which she reigned, were involved, she was called upon to pay all due attention to the proceedings of so formidable a rival as Mary. But the English Queen’s selfish and invidious policy far over-stepped the limits marked out by the laws of self-defence. Having determined against marriage herself, she could not bear to think that the Queen of Scots should be any thing but a “barren stock” also. It made her miserable to know that her power should end with her life, whilst Mary might become the mother of a long line of kings. She hoped, therefore, though she did not dare to avow her object, to be able to exert such influence with Murray and the Scottish Reformers, that Mary, by their united machinations, might find it impossible ever to form another matrimonial alliance; and with this view her first step was to inform “her good sister,” that if she married without her consent, she would have little difficulty in prevailing upon the Parliament of England to set aside her succession.

Driven hither and thither by so many contrary opinions and contending interests, it was no easy matter for the Scottish Queen to come to a final determination upon this subject. Although, in her own words, “not to marry she knew could not be for her, and to defer it long many incommodities might ensue,” she at the same time saw that there were insuperable reasons against a foreign alliance. The loss of her best and most powerful continental friend, the Duke of Guise, was one of these; another was, the avowed wish of Elizabeth and the English nation; and the third, and that which weighed most forcibly, the earnest entreaties of her own subjects. The great proportion of the inhabitants of Scotland were now Protestants; and to have attempted to place over them a foreign Catholic Prince, would have been to have incurred the risk of throwing them at once into the arms of Elizabeth, and of losing their allegiance for ever. Mary was therefore willing to make a virtue of necessity, and to allow herself to be guided very much by “her good sister’s discretion.” This concession to the English Queen was far from being agreeable to Catharine de Medicis and the French Court. It seemed to be paving the way for a cessation of that friendship which had so long existed between France and Scotland. Catharine, altering her policy, began to treat Mary with every mark of attention. She paid up the dowry she received from France, which had fallen into arrears, and requested Mary to exercise as much patronage and influence in that country as she chose. Elizabeth, however, had already suggested a husband for her; and, to the astonishment of every body, had named her favourite minion, Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Though the proposal of one of her own subjects, and one too, whom she had raised from comparative obscurity, was regarded by Mary as little else than an insult, she agreed, that two commissioners upon her part, Murray and Maitland—should meet two of Elizabeth’s, the Duke of Bedford and Randolph, to discuss the expediency of the match. At the conference, which took place at Berwick, it was stated for Mary, that she could never condescend to marry a newly-created English Earl, having so long a list of princes of the blood-royal of the noblest houses of Europe among her suitors; and it was added, boldly, that Elizabeth seemed somewhat deficient even in self-respect, when she could think of recommending such a husband for a Queen, her kinswoman. It is not at all likely, that either Elizabeth, or the Earl of Leicester, expected or wished any other answer. Elizabeth could hardly have done without her favourite; and the Earl would have fallen into irretrievable disgrace, had he dared to confess a preference for any mistress over the one he already had.

It was soon after this conference that Randolph, by Elizabeth’s directions, repaired to the Queen at St Andrews, to ascertain from her own lips what were her real sentiments on the subject of marriage. He found her living very quietly in a merchant’s house, with a small train. She had been wearied with the state and show of a Court, and had determined to pass some weeks in her favourite retirement of St Andrews, more as a subject than a queen. She made Randolph dine and sup with her every day during his visit; and she frequently, upon these occasions, drank to the health of Elizabeth. When Randolph entered upon matters of business, Mary said to him playfully,—“I sent for you to be merry, and to see how like a bourgeoise wife I live with my little troop; and you will interrupt our pastime with your great and grave matters? I pray ye, Sir, if ye be weary here, return home to Edinburgh; and keep your gravity and great embassade until the Queen come thither; for, I assure ye, you shall not get her here, nor I know not myself where she is become. Ye see neither cloth of estate, nor such appearance that you may think that there is a Queen here; nor I would not that you should think that I am she at St Andrews, that I was at Edinburgh.” Randolph was thus, for the time, fairly bantered out of his diplomatic gravity. But next day, he rode abroad with the Queen, and renewed the subject. Mary then told him, that she saw the necessity of marrying, and that she would rather be guided in her choice by England than by France, or any other country after Scotland. She frankly added, that her reason for paying this deference to Elizabeth, was to obtain an acknowledgment of her right of succession to the English crown. She was making a sacrifice, she said, in renouncing the much more splendid alliances which had been offered her; and she could not be expected to do so without a return on the part of Elizabeth. Fearful that the crafty Randolph might make a bad use of this open confession, she suddenly checked herself;—“I am a fool,” she said, “thus long to talk with you; you are too subtle for me to deal with.” But Randolph, finding her in a communicative mood, was unwilling that the conversation should drop so soon. Some further discourse took place, and Mary, in conclusion, gave utterance to the following sentiments, which do honour both to her head and heart. “How much better were it,” said she, “that we two being queens, so near of kin and neighbours, and being in one isle, should be friends and live together like sisters, than, by strange means, divide ourselves to the hurt of us both; and to say that we may for all that live friends, we may say and prove what we will, but it will pass both our powers. You repute us poor; but yet you have found us cumbersome enough. We have had loss; ye have taken scaith. Why may it not be between my sister and me, that we, living on peace and assured friendship, may give our minds, that some as notable things may be wrought by us women, as by our predecessors have been done before. Let us seek this honour against some other, rather than fall to debate amongst ourselves.”[81]

Mary, however, was by this time convinced of Elizabeth’s want of sincerity, and formed, therefore, a matrimonial plan of her own, which, she flattered herself, would be considered judicious by all parties. It will be recollected, that, during the troubles which ensued soon after Mary’s birth, Matthew, Earl of Lennox, having drawn upon himself the suspicion, both of the Protestant and Catholic parties in Scotland, retired into England, where Henry VIII. gave him his niece in marriage. The Lady Margaret Douglas was daughter of the eldest daughter of Henry VII., the Princess Margaret, who, upon the decease of her first husband James IV., had married the Earl of Angus, of which marriage the Lady Margaret was the issue. Lennox, belonging as he did to the house of Stuart, was himself related to the Royal Family of Scotland; and his wife, failing the children of Henry VIII., and the direct line of succession by her mother’s first husband James IV., in which line Mary stood, was the legal heir to the crown of England. The first child of this marriage died in infancy. The second, afterwards known as Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was born in 1546, and was, consequently, about four years younger than Mary. This disparity in point of years, though unfortunate in another point of view, was not such as to preclude the possibility of an alliance between two persons, in whose veins flowed so much of the blood of the Stuarts and the Tudors.

Henry VIII. had, along with his niece, bestowed upon Lennox English lands, from which he derived a yearly revenue of fifteen hundred marks. His own estates in Scotland were forfeited, so that he thus came to be considered more an English than a Scottish subject. He had long, however, nourished the secret hope of restoring his fortunes in his native land. His wife, who was a woman of an ambitious and intriguing spirit, induced him, at an early period, to educate his son with a view to his aspiring to the hand of the Scottish Queen. On the death of Francis II. she went herself to Paris, for the purpose of ingratiating herself with Mary, and securing a favourable opinion for Darnley. Mary, probably, gave her some hope that she might, at a future date, take her proposals into serious consideration; for it appears, by some papers still preserved in the British Museum, that few rejoiced more sincerely at the Queen’s safe arrival in Scotland, than Lady Lennox. She is said to have fallen on her knees, and, with uplifted hands, thanked God that the Scottish queen had escaped the English ships. For this piece of piety, and to show her the necessity of taking less interest in the affairs of Elizabeth’s rival, Cecil sent Lady Lennox to prison for some months.

Seeing the difficulties which stood in the way of all her other suitors, Mary, in the year 1564, began seriously to think of Darnley. A marriage with him would unite, in the person of the heir of such marriage, the rival claims of the Stuarts and the Tudors upon the English succession, failing issue by Elizabeth; and it would give to Scotland a native prince of the old royal line. It was difficult to see what reasonable objections could be made to such an alliance; and that she might at all events have an opportunity of judging for herself, Mary granted the Earl of Lennox permission to return to Scotland, in 1564, after an exile of twenty years, and promised to assist him in reclaiming his hereditary rights. Elizabeth, who was well aware of the ultimate views with which this journey was undertaken, and had certainly no desire to forward their accomplishment, made nevertheless no opposition to it. With her usual sagacity, she calculated that much discord and jealousy would arise, out of the Earl’s suit, in favour of his son. She knew that the House of Hamilton, whose claims upon the Scottish crown were publicly recognised, looked upon the Lennox family as its worst enemies; and that the haughty nobility of Scotland would ill brook to see a stripling elevated above the heads of all of them. Besides, the principal estates of Lennox now lay in England; and in the words of Robertson, “she hoped by this pledge to keep the negotiation entirely in her own hands, and to play the same game of artifice and delay which she had planned out, if her recommendation of Leicester had been more favourably received.”

In the Parliament which assembled towards the end of the year 1564, Lennox was restored to his estates and honours. Such of his possessions as had passed into the hands of the Earl of Argyle, were surrendered with extreme reluctance; and the Duke of Chatelherault, dreading the marriage with Darnley, continued obstinate in his hatred. The Earl of Murray too, aware that this new connection would be a fatal blow to his influence, set his face against it from the first. Maitland, on the contrary, who felt that he had been hitherto kept too much under by the prime minister, did not anticipate with any regret the decline of his ascendancy. The Secretary, and most of the other members of the Privy Council, were assiduously courted by Lennox. He made presents both to the Queen and them of valuable jewels; but to Murray, whose enmity he knew, he gave nothing.[82] That Murray’s weight in the government, however, had not yet decreased, is apparent, from his procuring an enactment, to gratify the Protestants, in the parliament of this year, making the attending of mass, except in the Queen’s chapel, punishable with loss of goods, lands, and life: and the Archbishop of St Andrews having infringed this act, was imprisoned, in spite of Mary’s intercession, for some months.

Early in 1565, Darnley obtained leave from Elizabeth to set out for Scotland. His ostensible purpose was to visit his father, and to see the estates to which he had been recently restored; but that his real object was to endeavour to win the good graces of Mary, was no secret. Elizabeth’s wish being to involve Mary in a quarrel, as well with some of her own nobility, as with England, there was much art in the plan she laid for its accomplishment. She consented that the Earl of Lennox should go into Scotland to recover his forfeited estates, and that his son should follow him to share in his father’s good fortune; she even went the length of recommending them both to the especial favour of the Scottish Queen; but of course said not a word of any suspicions she entertained of the projected alliance. As soon as it should appear that Mary’s resolution was taken, she would affect the greatest indignation at the whole proceedings, and pretend that they had been cunningly devised and executed, hoping either to break off the match altogether, or to make Mary’s nuptial couch, any thing but a bed of roses. Thus was the Scottish Queen to be systematically harassed, and made miserable, to gratify the splenetic jealousy, and lull the selfish terrors, of her sister of England.