Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser
Francis was demonstrably incapable of ruling without guidance. But the vital regency – as it was in practice but not in name – was not surrendered to his wife’s uncles by the other great nobles of France without a struggle. The powerful family of Bourbon postulated strongly that the king was not, in fact, legally of age at all, being only fifteen. Not only had he no right to choose his own counsellors, but being still a minor, he should automatically accept the first prince of the blood as regent: this was of course none other than King Antoine of Navarre, head of the House of Bourbon. Behind this weak and indecisive figure-head stretched the shadow of his restless, ambitious and hot-headed younger brother Louis, prince of Condé, a recent Huguenot convert, and the sworn enemy of the Guises. An anonymous memoir of October 1559, which detailed these points, not only accused the Guises of trying to cut off Francis from his friends, but of aiming at putting the crown on their own heads, by emphasizing their spurious descent from Charlemagne. A Guise reply ‘Pour la majorité du Roy très chrestien Françôis deuxième’ by Jean du Tillet, bishop of Saint-Brieul, concentrated on the use of texts, laws and customs to prove firstly that the king of France traditionally came of age at fifteen, and thus had the right to choose his own Council, secondly that the regency in the past had not always been given to a prince of the blood, but on occasions also had been given to queens of France, and to the abbots of St Denis.6
King Antoine, having failed to assert his claims, withdrew from the court; the prince of Condé on the other hand took refuge in the Huguenot counter-plots which were the origin of the conspiracy of Ambroise. The spring plans of Francis and Mary and their court included a visit to Blois, and then on to the ancient medieval fortress of Amboise, where it was planned that the court should pass the Lenten season. Although this schedule was known to the Spanish ambassador at Christmas, the knowledge somehow eluded the Huguenot rebels, who laid their plans on the basis of finding the king at Blois – an infinitely easier centre to attack than Amboise, where the king was surrounded by his army. Condé was only the ‘silent captain’ of the enterprise, and did not appear in public as its leader. The ostensible ringleader of these Huguenot anti-Guisards was one La Renaudie; their aim was to seize the person of the king, with the immediate object of freeing him from the tutelage of the Guises, and the ultimate intention of setting up a new and Bourbon regency.
Amboise withstood the siege of the conspirators, and at the instigation of the cardinal of Lorraine the insurrection was punished by hideous reprisals in the streets of the town itself, while the chief rebels, having been tortured, were hung publicly in front of the castle windows after dinner in order that the court might enjoy the edifying sight. La Renaudie died bravely, protesting his loyalty to the king, and maintaining to the last that his only quarrel had been with the Guises. The cardinal, however, adroitly took the opportunity to point out to Francis that the fact that La Renaudie died so defiantly only went to show how cruelly he would have treated Francis if he had succeeded in capturing him. The blood-stained sight from the castle windows did not please every member of the French court. The gentle and tender Anne of Guise was so appalled at what she saw that she wept aloud, and cried out (all too percipiently, as it turned out) what a wealth of vengeance and hatred would fall on the heads of her innocent young sons in consequence. Nor is there any evidence that Mary, who all her life was characterized by a remarkable horror of bloodshed and positive aversion to violence, actually witnessed the hangings. It would have been remarkable if this delicate girl, whose health was a source of constant concern to those around her, and whose swoonings were a feature of court life, should have been considered a suitable spectator for these gruesome scenes.*
Quite apart from natural affection, there was another special reason for the great concern which the Guises always showed over the health of their niece. Although the Guises were accused of wishing to establish a Guise dynasty on the throne of France, it was an infinitely more practical plan to uphold the existing semi-Guise dynasty on the throne of France, in the persons of Francis and Mary, who were not only currently dominated by Guise influence, but whose children with their share of Guise blood would one day rule after them. The only flaw in all this planning was that there was as yet no dynasty, no clutch of Valois-Guise children to lay up security for the future – only an adolescent boy and girl both of them cursed with precarious health. Whether these frail creatures could be relied on to produce any child at all was very much open to question.
The question of the consummation of the marriage of Francis and Mary, owing to the delicate nature of the subject, rests in the sphere of probabilities rather than that of certainties. Yet it is of obvious importance in tracing the development of Mary’s character not only in France, but later in Scotland in the course of her confrontation with Darnley. The true facts of the situation are somewhat obscured because contemporary commentators understandably concentrated their observations on the simple issue of whether Mary was likely to conceive a child by Francis or not; whereas in the history of Mary, it is of equal interest to consider whether she had any sort of physical relationship with her first husband, or whether at the time of her return to Scotland she was still in fact a virgin. There was never apparently any doubt in the minds of those observers at the French court who had watched the young king grow up, that the queen of France would not produce a child, or if she did, as the Spanish ambassador crudely put it, ‘it will certainly not be the King’s’. Regnier de la Planche’s derisive comments on the king’s withered anatomy have already been noted (see footnote on p. 83). Although, to the joy of the Guises, Francis started to grow up somewhat once he became king, La Planche’s description of physical deformity suggests that there was no real hope of conception, even if in other respects he could be held to have attained puberty before he died. The fact that he was unable to conceive a child was also well known at court on the basis of his deformity, for this was an age when the public nature of royal life meant that problems, even of such an intimate nature, could not be kept altogether secret from the watchful ambassadors: when the Spanish ambassador in Brussels told the English ambassador categorically that it was out of the question that the Scottish queen should bear a child, he was probably acting on back-stairs palace gossip, reliable if scandalous.8
This does not altogether rule out the possibility that the marriage was in some fashion consummated. At the time of the wedding, the Venetian ambassador at the end of a long account of the ceremonies, reported that the marriage had in fact been consummated that night, indicating the respective ages of the young couple. In spite of the warnings of the doctors, Francis had not died in childhood, but had grown to the age of fifteen; the Guises presumably hoped that time would wreak a further miracle with his physique, and that he would one day be able to procreate the longed-for Valois and Guise heir. There is evidence to the effect that, despite the cynicism of the court, Mary herself believed that her marriage was a complete one. A month after the death of Henry II, when the Spanish ambassadors came to bid her adieu, they found her extremely pale, and she almost fainted.9 She received the letters of credit of the duke of Alva swooning and, supported by the cardinal, was lifted on the bed of the king. Chantonay made haste to tell the Spanish king that the general rumour was that the French queen was pregnant. Mary herself assumed the floating tunic, the conventional garb at the time for pregnant women, and the court went to Saint-Germain for the sake of better air for her health. However, by the end of September, these interesting rumours perished for lack of further support. Mary abandoned her floating tunics. There was no further mention of a royal pregnancy, and it was in fact only three months later that Challoner was able to report back to England the information which he had received in Brussels from Count de Feria.
To what then do we attribute these summer vapours of the young queen? Logically speaking, if there was to be any question of Mary being pregnant, however mistaken, the marriage must have been consummated. Unfortunately this is not an area whe
Troublesome as was the internal situation in France, the situation in Scotland was not much better – and here again religious differences mingled with those of civil policy. French troops were sent in increasing numbers to the assistance of the queen regent, and the expedition of La Brosse, authorized by Francis and Mary in November 1559, included several doctors of the Sorbonne who were sent with a view to taking part in theological disputes with the Scottish Protestants if the occasion offered. In their turn, the Scottish insurgents being Protestant lords of the congregation, appealed for aid from Protestant England. When in October 1559 the duke of Châtelherault (the former Arran) joined the party of congregation, he presented them with a titular leader who had a claim to the Scottish throne. In October of that year the insurgents even occupied Edinburgh temporarily, announcing that, since Mary of Guise had brought French troops to conquer Scotland, it was now lawful to suspend her from her authority. But the Scots rebels – or reformers – did not make any true headway until a firmer alliance was concluded with England in the following spring. By the Treaty of Berwick, signed on 27th February, 1560, between Scotland as represented by Lord James and the Scottish lords of the congregation on behalf of Châtelherault in England represented by Norfolk, lieutenant of the north, it was stated that the English were to intervene for the preservation of the Scots ‘in their old freedom and liberties’. Under these auspices English troops now came into Scotland, and besieged Leith, occupied by the queen regent and her French troops: significantly, the campaign was known as ‘the War of the Insignia’ in England, because of Mary’s use of the royal arms.
The Treaty of Berwick on the Scottish borders had virtually coincided with the Tumult of Amboise in France: since Francis was thus unable to provide further military help for his wife’s dominions, it was decided to take the more sensible course of negotiation. By a commission dated April 1560 Francis and Mary authorized M. de Montluc, M. de Pelvé and M. de la Brosse to try to bring back their Scottish subjects to obedience by peaceful means, including a promise to forget past wrongs, and also authorized them to treat with the English queen if necessary. As a result of these negotiations, culminating in the Treaty of Edinburgh which was concluded on 6th July, 1560, it was agreed that both English troops and French troops (save sixty in Inchkeith and sixty in Dunbar) should withdraw from Scotland, and that Francis and Mary by giving up the use of the English arms should thus recognize Elizabeth’s title. On 15th July the English army moved away, and the French troops also started to embark; Lord St John was sent to France to ask Francis and Mary to ratify the treaty. This ratification was, however, never destined to take place, since on 11th August the Scottish Parliament promulgated a Protestant confession of faith, and five days later abolished the Pope’s jurisdiction, and prohibited the celebration of Mass under the pain of death for the third offence. In a historic gesture, the process now known as the Scottish Reformation was thus officially brought to birth. It was Parliament, not the queen, that had acted as the midwife: although constitutionally speaking, the enactment which produced the Reformation needed the queen’s assent, in fact it never received it. The Scottish Reformation was a strictly parliamentary will, the whole image of the Scottish monarchy had been altered in the mind of the people.
This long-term effect, however, was certainly not visible to Mary at the time. From the distance of the French court, it was difficult to realize that Queen Elizabeth had been constituted the protector of Protestantism in Scotland, whether she liked it or not, and that logically the Protestant Scots would turn to England rather than France for help in the future. Still more difficult was it to envisage that if Mary ever returned to her native country, her French Catholic connections would inevitably go against her, that a country which had newly reformed its own religion by act of Parliament without assent of the sovereign would regard the combination of her monarchical power, French upbringing and religious convictions as threatening its status quo.*
In the spring and summer of 1560, however, the Scottish insurgency made its chief impression on Mary as a series of appalling troubles which faced her mother, to whom she felt an almost pathetic devotion from a distance. She identified the religious rebels of Scotland with those of France, unaware that the temper of the Scottish people was changing towards the new religion, whereas in France religious opinion was sufficiently if tragically balanced to result in long and stultifying wars. A letter to her mother, describing the coming mission of M. de la Brosse and M. d’Amiens to Scotland, dating probably from the end of March 1560, is lavish in its promises of love and assistance, saying that she swears she will not let her mother down, since the king, she knows, has a passionate desire to succour her, and has given Mary his word that he will do so. Mary begs her mother to care for her health, and to trust in God to help her in her adversities – for God has already helped her so much in all her troubles that surely He will not abandon her now when she needs Him more than ever.12
Unhappily the health which Mary so passionately wished for her mother, eluded her. This gallant woman who faced an alien people, and attempted to do at least the best she could in the cause of peaceful administration, was severely stricken with dropsy. She was seriously ill before November 1559, and by April of the next year was far gone with the disease. On 11th June, only a few weeks before the final settlement of the Treaty of Edinburgh, she died, horribly swollen and in great pain. Knox rejoiced over her end; he saw in it the hand of God taking vengeance on her for her behaviour at the siege of Leith, when she was rumoured to have exulted over the corpses of the Protestant dead (although such behaviour is more characteristic of Knox himself than of the merciful Mary of Guise). ‘And within a few days thereafter yea, some say that same day,’ wrote Knox, ‘began her belly and loathsome legs to swell, and so continued till that God did execute his judgment upon her.’
Previously, Knox had described Mary of Guise’s assumption of the regency with equal contempt – ‘A crown was put upon her head … as seemly a sight … as to put a saddle upon the back of an unruly cow.’13 But in fact Knox, as often when writing with his pen dipped in acid, did Mary Guise an injustice as a ruler. In an extraordinarily difficult situation, she had tried to do her best, and carry out the advice of her brother the duke of Guise – ‘To deal in Scotland in a spirit of conciliation, introducing much gentleness and moderation into the administration of justice.’ On occasions she was even prepared to carry out these counsels against the advice of her Guise brothers who had given it to her: as Regnier de la Planche himself admitted, Mary of Guise’s plans for Scotland had always included acting gently and slowly by the use of Parliament and it was the Guise males who rejected this course, saying that their sister
Despite her own sincere Catholicism, Mary of Guise also possessed sufficient balance and political acumen not to identify the reformed religion immediately and totally with the forces of darkness. In 1555 D’Oysel’s hopes for a good reception among the Scots were dashed by what he described as the totally selfish attitude of the nobility, who wanted each one to be their own petty tyrant. But it was not until the events of late 1557, when the nobility of Scotland refused to fight under her banner against England, that Mary of Guise herself gave way to feelings of angry distrust for these treacherous lords, Catholic and Protestant alike. Even in 1559, when Henry II instructed that heresy was to be stamped out in Scotland, according to Melville, Mary of Guise still protested against her orders: although committed to a policy of French domination, on Mary’s behalf, by which she hoped to preserve Scotland for her daughter, Mary of Guise nevertheless attempted all along to implement this policy in the most humane manner. The English certainly both feared and admired her intellectual qualities: Thomas Randolph wrote apprehensively of ‘the Dowager’s craft and subtleties’. Throckmorton admired her ‘queenly mind’, and over the peace negotiations wrote to Cecil for the love of God ‘to provide that she were rid from hence, for she hath the heart of a man of war’.15 When she was on her deathbed, Mary of Guise summoned the lords of the Congregation to her side, and in an affecting interview asked them to believe that she had genuinely favoured the weal of Scotland as well as that of France. Whether the lords believed her or not, we can at least accept her word that by her own lights she had done so.