PROJECT BRITAIN
‘Then that little man in black there, he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do with him.’
Sojourner Truth, Woman’s Rights Convention, Ohio, 1851
‘Woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing.’
Virgil, The Aeneid
Stirling Castle is to me the most impressive and romantic fortress in all of Scotland - easily superior to that of Edinburgh. A lot of my affection comes from living in its shadow, but context is everything and really it is the setting, in the centre of one of the most stunning views in the whole country, that adds unequalled grandeur to the stones and stained glass of the buildings themselves. The Ochil Hills provide the backdrop, their colours changing moment by moment at the whim of sun and cloud. It is across the almost unnaturally flat floodplain of the Carse, at the Ochils’ feet, that the silver ribbon of the River Forth winds absent-mindedly, as though having forgotten where it is supposed to be going.
The real genius of the natural design is in the presence of two great craggy ridges that rear up out of the Carse like ancient, battered sharks’ fins. On top of one of them, Abbey Craig, is the Wallace Monument, erected in the early nineteenth century by Unionist Scots living in self-imposed exile in London. On the other is Stirling Castle. Writing in the early nineteenth century, the geologist Dr John MacCulloch had this to say:
Who does not know Stirling’s noble rock, rising, the monarch of the landscape, its majestic and picturesque towers, its splendid plain, its amphitheatre of mountain, and the windings of its marvellous river; and who that has once seen the sun descending here in all the blaze of its beauty beyond the purple hills of the west can ever forget the plain of Stirling, the endless charm of this wonderful scene, the wealth, the splendour, the variety, the majesty of all which here lies between earth and heaven.
Quite so. The Great Hall of James IV, with its coat of lime harl, shines like a nugget of pale gold from within the battlements, the pièce de résistance. Restored to its original glory in 1999, after years in a more work-a-day incarnation as a barracks for men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, it is a beacon and magnet for the thousands of visitors who make a tour of the castle every year.
Less familiar by far is a little detail of masonry cut into the battlements above the Douglas Garden - scene of the infamous murder of William, the Black Douglas, by King James II. Here the view is out over the Haining Field, where tournaments were held in the days of the Stewart kings. The battlements are chest high, but at knee height there is a little spy-hole, maybe six inches across, cut through one grey block. It has been neatly and deliberately made but you might not even notice the thing unless it was pointed out. It is also highly unlikely that you would ever imagine it was put there in the 1540s to let little Queen Mary - then just a toddler and being kept hidden from her great-uncle Henry VIII, lest he seize her as a bride for his baby son - look out over her realm.
Mary, Queen of Scots, the most mythologised woman in the nation’s history, was dynastic dynamite from the moment she was born. All her life, her importance lay not in who she was, but what she was. The daughter of the King of Scotland and the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, she had the blood of both ruling dynasties, Scottish and English, in her veins. And so from the moment she was first held above the bloodied sheets of the royal bedroom in Linlithgow Palace, where she had been born to Marie de Guise-Lorraine, wife and queen of James V, she was a prize beyond price. By the time she was old enough to stand and take in the view through that little spy-hole in the battlements of Stirling Castle, she was wanted as a bride in royal courts across Europe.
The view from the spy-hole was narrow, fixed and immovable. In time Mary would give birth to a son with a quite different outlook - one wider, more all-encompassing and revolutionary than anything his mother ever dreamed of. But that is a long story and it starts at the very moment a sweating, anxious midwife inspected her mistress’s newborn child and found she was holding not a son and future king, but a daughter and future queen.
The news of the birth of a baby girl was received with great interest by James Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Arran and a great-grandson of James II. A Prince of the Blood, he was heir presumptive and would ascend the throne were Mary to die before she had time to produce legitimate offspring. Should she live there was the secondary hope of acquiring her as a wife for one of his kin. The de-facto leader of a Henry-backed, pro-English party in Scotland, Arran was appointed governor and regent for Mary in January 1543. He soon revealed that while the blood of kings ran in his veins, he had all the upright backbone of a snake - he certainly lacked the strength of character required honourably to navigate a sea troubled by the riptides of Reformation and prowled by brooding leviathans like King Henry VIII of England.
Sixteenth-century Scotland was especially susceptible to a virus like religious reformation. James IV had made it law for landowners’ sons to be educated, a move that caused a manifold increase in the literate population of the country. Added to this was the impact of his decision to encourage the introduction of printing; Scotland became a fertile breeding-ground for the germs of new ideas. By the time copies of William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible began circulating in the 1530s, the Church’s days as the unquestioned source of all religious knowledge were numbered.
Some of the demand for the Church to change its ways undoubtedly grew out of the discontent felt by poor people forced to look at an institution grown rich beyond belief. Church and crown had long been in each other’s pockets, sharing the spoils of power; but a Scottish population bearing the burden of feuing found it galling to be lorded over by fat, wealthy churchmen, many of whom seemed to spend their spare time fathering broods of children by assorted lady parishioners.
In the end, however, it was the natural hunger for knowledge - for answers and understanding - that fuelled the calls for revolution. People who had long desired access to the word of God had been thwarted by the priests’ stranglehold on literacy. Only the churchmen could read Latin and so the common people needed their priests to explain everything. The advent of books and pamphlets, written in everyday language, changed all of that for ever. Tossed by so many undercurrents, Arran could not decide which way to jump. On the one hand he tried to take advantage of the appetite for religious reform that followed the death of James V. But he and his advisors finally lost their nerve in the face of what suddenly seemed like an avalanche of ‘heretical’ literature and issued a blanket ban.
More troubling than the sale of seditious books though was the looming presence of Henry VIII. Ageing and in pain from various ills, he was a lion with toothache - driven by his misery into hunting easy prey. The infant Mary was as toothsome a morsel as he could have hoped for and Arran was no protection for her.
Mary’s father had resisted Henry’s calls to join him in defying Rome, and every other powerful monarch in Europe seemed wordlessly united in opposition to the English king. Scotland remained a back door through which any of his Catholic enemies, acting alone or in concert, might launch an attack. Feeling vulnerable and isolated, Henry saw his grand-niece as a way to shut and bar that door for good. If he could secure her as a future bride for his own baby son, Edward, Scotland would effectively be his.
Arran had been keen to curry favour with the English king and by 1 July 1543 he had signed the kingdom up to the Treaty of Greenwich, betrothing Mary to the English prince. But then his lack of a spine let him down. After all his sycophancy, he suddenly noticed the scent of Anglophobia in the air. To many within Scotland - from the grandest to the lowliest - Henry’s advances stank of the age-old English belief that Scotland was theirs anyway; overlordship had shown its face after it had been lurking all along. The memory of Edward I and of his machinations during the short life of his grand-niece the Maid of Norway moved through Scotland like an unquiet ghost.
Arran fell between two stools, failing comprehensively to back either the pro-English or the pro-French camps. Before he could find a third direction to run in, Marie de Guise-Lorraine made her own definite move. Backed by the pro-French, pro-Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews, David Beaton, the dowager queen asserted her God-given control over the country. By the end of 1543 the Scottish parliament had thrown out the Treaty of Greenwich and realigned the kingdom with the auld ally, France. It was against this backdrop that little Mary had been crowned. Arran, vacillating and concerned only to preserve his own hide for future duplicity, was nonetheless ‘the second person of the realm’ - and, as such, allowed to carry the crown at the coronation.
The Scots’ change of heart, their refusal to hand over Mary, made Henry VIII as angry as he had ever been. Diplomacy having failed him, he turned to violence and in May 1544 sent tens of thousands of soldiers north in a two-pronged invasion. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford attacked the city of Edinburgh, ordering wholesale murder and rape. With innocent blood pooling in the streets, Hertford’s men then set the place alight. Holyrood Abbey was desecrated and destroyed, along with the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Only Edinburgh Castle itself managed to resist the onslaught. The second English force crossed the border at Coldstream and destroyed the great abbeys of Dryburgh, Jedburgh, Kelso and Melrose. Hundreds of civilians were raped and murdered, their homes destroyed. It was Sir Walter Scott who coined the phrase ‘the Rough Wooing’ to describe Henry’s clumsy attempts to get his hands on the toddler Queen of Scots. It was murder, rape and wanton destruction choreographed by a psychopath blinded by rage.
While Scotland’s commoners suffered and died by the thousand, the most craven of her nobles slunk to the murderer’s side. Matthew Stewart, another grandson of James II and 4th Earl of Lennox, turned up in Henry’s court offering his services. He was duly appointed Lieutenant for the north of England and all of southern Scotland, with the promise of the governorship of the whole country to follow. Lennox had once been considered as a future husband for little Mary, but now he was presented with the hand of Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor and the Earl of Angus, her husband after the death King James IV. Lennox was not alone in his treachery. Either by threats of violence or the promise of jam tomorrow, Henry won over hundreds of Scots to his pro-English campaign.
Corrupt and dissolute, rotting from the inside, King Henry VIII died in the Palace of Whitehall on 28 January 1547. His orgy of violence had succeeded only in creating piles of dead and smoking ruins where towns and abbeys used to stand. The independent spirit of Scotland too was always annealed by fire, and emerged toughened yet again. The Reformation, though, which had been of interest to Henry only in so far as it enabled him to get his own way with his subjects and his crown - and to bed the women of his choice - had come on apace in Scotland.
Only a gambler with deep pockets and a crystal ball would have backed the Protestant horse in the first half of the sixteenth century. People wanted to see the Catholic Church reform a little - appear more sympathetic and honest, maybe - but its wholesale destruction was not the objective of most Scots. History up until the middle of the sixteenth century would have made it seem more likely Scotland would follow the French, rather than English, path and remain resolutely faithful to Rome. But events that unfolded north of the Border during Henry’s last months set in train the hitherto unthinkable.
Between late 1544 and early 1546, the sermons of a Reforming preacher called George Wishart had been filling churches across Scotland. In February 1546 Cardinal Beaton had him arrested, tried and sentenced to a revolting death. Beaton was as corrupt, venal and licentious a man as ever donned a surplice - owner of many mansions, immensely rich and the father of uncounted children from scores of mistresses. This guardian of the faith ordered Wishart to be strangled and then burned in St Andrews, in front of Beaton’s fellow men of God. Gunpowder had been packed into the condemned man’s clothes to ensure spectacular and spiritually enlivening fireworks.
If Beaton thought he had nipped something in the bud, he was wrong. On 28 May a group of Protestant landowners from Fife burst into Beaton’s palace and hauled him from his bed - and from the arms of one of his many lovers. He was messily butchered, his genitals cut off and stuffed into his mouth before being put into a barrel and dumped in the bottle dungeon of St Andrews Castle. In sixteenth-century Scotland, forgiveness and brotherly love were low on everyone’s agenda. The killers holed themselves up behind the battlements and sent for help from England, which never came. Henry was followed onto the throne by Edward VI; but of more significance for the Protestants in St Andrews Castle were events unfolding across the Channel.
King François I had died and his son Henri II ascended to the Valois throne on 25 July 1547. At his shoulder were the relatives of Queen Mary - the Guises - and French ships and men were soon dispatched to deal with the trouble in Fife. The castle was pounded into submission, the rebels within rounded up and imprisoned. Among them was a young preacher called John Knox - once a sword-wielding bodyguard of Wishart, now a latent firebrand. Along with many of his colleagues, he was sentenced to serve his time as a slave chained to an oar aboard a French galley.
Distractions like Beaton and the Protestant ‘Castilians’ notwithstanding, the Rough Wooing continued unabated. Chief advisor to the young King Edward VI was Edward Seymour, brother to Jane, uncle to Edward, Earl of Hertford and more recently Duke of Somerset. Having washed his spear in the destruction of Edinburgh in 1544, he returned to the bloodletting after Henry’s death with renewed vigour.
Far more Protestant than the old king had ever been, Somerset awarded himself the task of getting his hands on Mary. He was every bit as committed to a marriage between the King of England and the Queen of Scots, and took another army north with a view to forcing compliance from the northern kingdom. On 10 September 1547 at Pinkie, east of Edinburgh, he inflicted a devastating defeat on a Scots force commanded by the ineffectual Earl of Arran.
He followed up his victory by establishing English garrisons at bases all across Lowland Scotland, but like Henry VIII before him he was shortly to find that the real prize was beyond his grasp. Understanding at last that the might of England was too much for them to withstand much longer, Mary’s advisors had entered into negotiations with the French. In return for military aid, they signed up to the Treaty of Haddington, on 6 July 1548, promising the little queen’s hand in marriage to the Dauphin of France, François, eldest son of Henri II and his queen, Catherine de Medici.
Mary Stewart, just five years old, had spent her life in hiding. While her mother and the rest of the adults around her engaged in the politics that would shape her destiny, the little girl was moved from safe house to safe house. Much of her childhood was spent in Stirling Castle, and it was in an atmosphere of constant danger and uncertainty that she was forced to exist.
Temporary respite from it all began on 29 July 1547, when she stepped from the harbour wall at Dumbarton onto a ship sent by her French fatherin-law to be. Her mother stayed behind to ensure she would one day have a kingdom to return to. The five-year-old was accompanied instead by a governess and the ‘four Maries’, the daughters of four of the ladies of the court - Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston and Mary Seton. It was not love that had motivated the French king to step into the middle of the bloodbath that was the Rough Wooing. Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots and of English royal blood as well, was simply a fantastically valuable store of royal genes.
Henry VIII never had persuaded the Pope to annul his first marriage, to Catherine of Aragon. As a result, every Catholic king in Europe could dismiss Henry’s subsequent marriages to Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour as worthless. Apart from Mary Tudor, his daughter by Catherine, his children were illegitimate. In Catholic eyes at least, neither Edward nor Elizabeth - his daughter by Anne Boleyn - could rightfully sit upon the throne. Henry himself had sought to erase Elizabeth’s mother from the story of the Tudors, first divorcing her and then cutting off her head. Elizabeth had even been declared illegitimate by an Act of Parliament. Only Mary Tudor, therefore, stood between Mary Stewart and the throne of England.
If love was not the motivation for King Henri to spirit Mary away to a childhood in his Valois court, it was at least a part of what his attraction finally became. The magnificent châteaux of the Loire Valley were Mary’s refuge, and almost from his first sight of the little girl for whom he had gone to war, Henri confessed himself smitten. ‘She is the most perfect child that I have ever seen,’ he said. She was given a warm welcome in his many homes; in fact Henri treated her like one of his own. She lived in the royal nursery alongside her future husband, the Dauphin, receiving a wonderful Renaissance education in literature, rhetoric, music, dancing, falconry, horse-riding and sport. By the time she reached adulthood she had mastered classical Latin and Greek, along with French, Spanish and Italian. Little golden-haired Mary was a precious jewel - and within the glittering Valois court she shone brightest of all.
François, her betrothed, was a year younger and small for his age. He had a stutter and was said to be a clumsy little boy. By contrast, Mary was tall and graceful, with pearl-white skin and hazel eyes. An insight into her personality comes from the reports of the affection she showed François. Whatever his shortcomings, she loved him - like a little brother at least.
It is impossible to imagine the impact on Mary of the sophisticated, effortless elegance of the Valois court. Her father James V had admired French style, and no doubt his remodelling of Stirling Castle, Falkland Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse were inspired by his desire to make his two French wives feel at home. But there was no disguising the culture shock that would have been experienced by a little Scots-born girl leaving Stirling and taking up residence in the châteaux of the Loire.
If the Renaissance had had its impact on Scotland, then it was as nothing compared to its effect on France by the second half of the sixteenth century. The town of Amboise, where Mary spent many of her French years, had been the last home of no lesser a Renaissance figure than Leonardo da Vinci, invited there by François I in 1517. That the great man himself had chosen to spend his remaining time there gives some sense of its comforts and attractions. Wrapped in the silken grandeur of Henri’s court, Mary’s education was indeed second to none. But as well as all those classes in poetry and needlework, she listened while her destiny - her birthright - was whispered to her like a lullaby.
In 1550, Somerset’s control of Scotland collapsed, a financial burden too great to be borne any longer. Over in France, Henri celebrated the English withdrawal and used it as an opportunity to tell the world of the rightness of Mary’s claim to the crown of England. But with Edward VI on the throne and his elder half-sister Mary Tudor waiting in the wings, any possibility of Mary Stewart adding the kingdom of England to her collection must have seemed remote even to ambitious Valois eyes.
Then, in 1553, events took an unexpected turn with the death of fifteen-year-old Edward, after a long illness. Mary Tudor duly followed him onto the throne and married the Catholic King Philip of Spain. Suddenly England was nominally Catholic again and unhappy Mary added ‘Bloody’ to her name by burning Protestants.
Scotland, meanwhile, had been turned into a de-facto French colony. Henri was her protector and French troops were in charge of the kingdom’s defence. In 1554 Marie de Guise-Lorraine was made regent for her daughter. For the Catholic House of Valois it must have seemed as though God himself was beginning to smile upon their dreams. On 24 April 1558, fourteen-year-old François and fifteen-year-old Mary were married in the Great Hall of the Louvre Palace, in Paris. Before promising herself to François, however, she had put her name to a secret contract, a sort of prenuptial agreement. By its terms she agreed that were she to die without producing a child, the crown of Scotland would pass to her husband. She had given Scotland away.
By the year’s end, the stakes had risen yet again, and all at once the lullaby of Mary’s rights to the English throne began to sound more like a call to arms. ‘Bloody’ Mary was dead and onto her throne had stepped Elizabeth I. Here was the opportunity the French had been waiting for, yet might never reasonably have expected to see: Elizabeth had been conceived before Henry had even put a ring on Anne Boleyn’s finger. In the eyes of Valois France, and all of Catholic Europe, she was illegitimate as a daughter and as a queen.
Mary Stewart’s French family now stoked her imperial ambitions to boiling point. God had already chosen her as Queen of Scotland, they told her. One day, she would be Queen of France as well. Now, with a bastard on the throne of England, a third crown was within her reach. If she could get her hands on it a single, all-powerful empire would stretch from Scotland in the north to France in the south, with England in between. It would be a vast, Catholic empire that would dominate western Europe. Was not that what God had in mind for Mary, they whispered insistently in her ear. Was not the triple crown her God-given right?
Within the year the second crown - that of France - fell into her lap when Henri II fell from his horse, in July 1559. Fatally injured while jousting, his death made the frail and sickly François King of France. With Mary at his side he ruled for less than two years. He contracted an ear infection sometime towards the end of 1560 and died on 5 December. By all accounts Mary, who had doted on him, was heartbroken. But she had lost more than a little husband and the crown of France. Henri had been blatantly unfaithful to Catherine de Medici, his frigid queen and the mother of both François and his younger brother and heir, Charles IX. With François gone, Catherine wanted nothing whatever to do with his widow or with her power-hungry relatives. At a stroke, Mary found herself unwelcome in her French home and her principal allies, the Guises, exiled from the court.
Mary’s glittering life and fabled future had changed before her eyes like a fairy tale turned bad, and she and her husband had reigned long enough to learn some harsh lessons about the wider world as well. Just as it had in the rest of Europe, the Protestant Reformation reared up like a wave in France, threatening to wash away Catholic monarchs such as Mary and François. The floodwaters of change reached all the way to the gates of Château d’Amboise itself, when a group of French Protestant lords had attempted to capture the young king. The royal couple were unhurt, but Mary witnessed the bloodbath that followed the capture, trial and execution of the would-be religious revolutionaries. She would have seen - and smelled - the bloodied corpses that were hung from the balcony of the château as an example and a warning.
Elsewhere, the Protestant tide had continued to rise. Freed from his galley in 1549, John Knox had settled in England. But when Edward died in 1553, ‘Bloody’ Mary soon made it an unpleasant place for a Protestant activist to try to make a home. He fled across the border in 1555 and swiftly began stirring those Scottish congregations happy to have a revolutionary at their head. He won a certain amount of support among the Scottish nobility - including Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, Lord James Stewart.
For some of the ordinary folk of Scotland, Knox’s words and promises where like a match to tinder. Many had been impotently stewing about the corruption endemic in the Church: of royal bastards squatting upon lucrative senior positions; of crippling rents charged for feued lands by fat, venal abbots; of Church services delivered in Latin, that none but the priests could understand. Knox’s new world order promised to sweep all of that away. Driven by his incendiary preaching, Protestant mobs would eventually set themselves the task of attacking centuries-old churches and ripping out the iconography and idolatry of ages. Unspoken grudges and grievances found their voice in Knox - and their preferred means of expression was soon the thuggish violence of the mob. But in 1555 he was still years away from lighting the blue touch paper.
He had not had it all his own way, and during the last years of her life Mary’s mother played an intelligent political game. Her prime motivation at all times had been to safeguard her daughter’s hold on Scotland and as the 1550s had progressed, that had required considerable skill. News of Mary’s marriage to François was soon followed by the revelation that she had promised him the right to rule the land if she should die before him. Yet Marie de Guise-Lorraine still managed to steer a course through waters troubled by the very real threat that Scotland might one day be annexed by France.
Until just the year before her death, the dowager queen’s efforts helped ensure that support for the Reformation remained limited, and in 1558 Knox had stomped huffily back to Geneva where, surrounded by like-minded bigots and zealots, he felt safe enough to write The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, his misogynistic rant against female rulers like the regent and her daughter.
Only in 1559 did Knox and his Protestant nobles, known as the Lords of the Congregation, succeed in deposing Marie as regent and replacing her with the Earl of Arran, a magnate with all the integrity of an especially wealthy conman. (When the French king had assumed the mantle of protector of Scotland after Somerset’s abandonment of the Rough Wooing in 1550, Arran’s support for the plans to wed Mary to the Dauphin were bought with the gift of the duchy of Chatelherault, a title still borne proudly by his Hamilton descendants. If honour and trustworthiness are the marks of higher species, then Arran, son of immeasurable privilege, Duc de Chatelherault and Prince of the Blood, was a single-celled organism.) Knox had returned to Scotland via a stint in England. He had been brave enough to shout about ‘monstrous’ women while ensconced in Geneva, but was disinclined to fight against the sisterhood in an England now ruled by Elizabeth I.
A revolution had begun to take place, but despite Knox’s woman-hating fantasies it was about politics and paperwork rather than any intention to depose Catholic Mary Stewart. Even when the Lords of the Congregation removed the regent from office, they did so under the convincing guise of loyal nobles acting for the leadership of ‘the second person of the realm’ - Chatelherault - on behalf of Queen Mary and King François, sovereigns over the water. Back in Scotland, and given a relatively free reign, Knox had turned his volume up to maximum. He had bellowed about the evils of Popery and of the idolatry of the Mass and the mob duly attacked church buildings in Perth and St Andrews.
Protestantism had been accepted as the official religion of England that year, and the Lords appealed to their neighbour for military support. (Sensing a change in the wind, Catholic Chatelherault and his son steered a Protestant course.)
In late October, the Lords of the Congregation gathered in Edinburgh and agreed among themselves that the rule of the regent, Marie de Guise-Lorraine, was over. Now they wanted help from England to back them up. But despite the apparent logic of supporting the bold Protestant Reformers north of the Border, English Elizabeth was instinctively appalled by the prospect of challenging a sister-queen. It took the determination of her chief advisor, William Cecil, to win her round by arguing that nothing less than her own personal security - and that of Protestant England - was at stake.
Setting aside her natural horror of meddling in another’s realm, Elizabeth finally sanctioned military intervention in Scotland in December 1559. By the Treaty of Berwick, signed on 27 February the following year, she promised Lord James and his fellow Lords that her intention was only to protect the ancient rights and liberties of Scotland for the sake of Queen Mary.
Events continued to move quickly, and matters began to slip increasingly beyond Mary and her mother. After the strength and charisma of the reign of Henri II, François and Mary looked like - and were - ineffectual children at the mercy of scheming adults. Guise power had depended upon Henri’s gravity at the centre of his court and feeble François was no substitute. Mary’s relatives were being spun away from the centre by the centrifugal force of change.
In July 1560 England, Scotland and France signed up to the Treaty of Edinburgh. In reality, François and Mary had nothing to do with it until the ink was already dry on the paper. By its terms they accepted Elizabeth I as rightful Queen of England and dropped for ever their own claim on the throne. Mary for her part refused to ratify the treaty, as did her husband. Indeed, while still Queen of France she began to come into her own. When Nicholas Throckmorton, Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, met her that summer even he - a fire-breathing Protestant - confessed himself charmed.
Had she had more time, it might have all have been very different. While imbued with the confidence of two crowns, still shining within the Valois court, she was able to treat Elizabeth as an equal. But when François died his miserable, agonising death Mary found herself alone in a world turned suddenly cold … and fraught with real physical danger.
With the French rug torn from beneath her feet she was never quite so steady again. No longer welcome in the land where she had spent her gilded childhood and early adulthood - where she had ruled as queen - she turned and looked instead towards the land of her birth. How distant Scotland must have seemed to her then - especially since her mother had died that awful year as well, on 11 June 1560, just as negotiations for the Treaty of Edinburgh had got under way. No longer a land offering the solace of a mother’s love, it had also been thoroughly washed over by the same Reforming tide that had endangered her own and her husband’s life.
Inside the tiny Magdalene Chapel in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, not far from the building where Chepman and Myllar had had their printing press, the leaders of Scotland’s Reformation gathered together for the first time, on 20 December 1560. Built between 1541 and 1544, Magdalene was the last Roman Catholic chapel built in the city prior to the Reformation. Perhaps because it was set aside as the cradle of the new order it features the only surviving examples of pre-Reformation stained glass in the entire country still in their original location.
Cold winter sunlight filtered by those four roundels, showing the arms of Scotland and of Marie de Guise-Lorraine among others, fell upon the faces of Knox and his fellows as they declared themselves the architects of all-encompassing reform. They started with religion but in truth they wanted to reach out and touch every part of every person’s life. Like that from a December sun, it was a chill and revealing light they generated in their little chapel. Some of what they had to say could hardly fail to take the form of a direct attack upon their absentee monarch and Mary’s most loyal supporters - who had dominated the country on her behalf - were to be driven from power.
Knox meanwhile preached measures as extreme as anything heard outside John Calvin’s Geneva. He had approved of all he had heard during his stay within earshot of the radical Frenchman. In the world according to Calvin, and therefore Knox, blasphemers and witches would be put to death. Adulterous women would be drowned, men beheaded. Were a child to raise a hand against its parent, the offending limb would be cut off. In order to make the Scottish religious revolution secure Knox wanted nothing less than death for anyone found practising the Catholic Mass. He also preached that any Catholic monarch could, and should, be thrown from power: and he meant Catholic monarchs like his own, Mary Stewart. And yet now she was coming home.
From earliest times there had been something of the feminine about Scotland. Smaller and physically weaker than the mannish presences around her - first the Romans; the Vikings; the Anglo-Saxons and then England, France and Spain - yet desired by all of them; easy on the eye; lacking wealth in her own right but no less attractive for lack of funds; cool, aloof and infuriatingly independent against all the odds. In the end they wanted her just because no one had managed to get her.
Some would-be suitors tried sweet words, deception or downright lies, but all ultimately relied on force against a resistance they imagined would soon melt into their insistent arms. In Mary, those elusive feminine qualities of Scotland had finally been made flesh and bone - young, leggy, beautiful, intelligent, chic flesh and bone. The kingdom that had stubbornly resisted every advance was never more attractive to foreigners than when it was represented on the world stage by a female performer, by Mary Stewart. Now all those lothario states could seek to wed Scotland herself. Given life as Mary, Queen of Scots, the nation had suddenly become even more desirable and, perhaps, truly attainable for the very first time.
Mary Stewart knew all too well the nature of the pheromone she was giving off. By dint of her descent from Henry VII, she offered suitors a chance to claim the throne of England as well. She was therefore the most maddeningly alluring woman most of them had ever lived to see. That she was a Catholic in a Europe flirting with Protestantism only added an extra frisson to the whole affair. Poor little Scotland was a femme fatale.
The first, urged on by his father Philip II of Spain, was Don Carlos. Mary was not interested. Don Carlos slunk away but was followed in short order by James Hamilton, the new Earl of Arran and son of Chatelherault. Young Arran had made the grievous - and unforgivable - mistake of asking English Elizabeth to marry him first and was swiftly shown the same door as the Spanish prince. Then it was an almost unseemly rush by the dukes of Ferrara and Bavaria; the King of Sweden; the King of Denmark - even Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, looking for a wife for one of his sons. There were other sorts of offers as well. The Catholic George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly and the murdered Beaton’s replacement as Chancellor of Scotland, urged Mary to sail to Aberdeen where he would meet her with a Catholic army. Together they would ride south and sweep the Protestant Reformation before them.
In the end, it was the soft words of her Protestant half-brother, Lord James Stewart of the Lords of the Congregation, that won her over and set her on a collision course with destiny. If she would accept that Scotland was now a Protestant country, he said, she could return home safe in the knowledge that she was free to practise her own religion in private. It was a sage suggestion by Lord James - most Scots were still Catholics in private if not in public, and would continue to be so - but also a dangerous one. Rabid Calvinists like Knox were as likely to accept the continued practising of Mass as they were to shake the devil himself by the hand. But despite the way post-Reformation history was painted until recently, the change from Catholicism to Protestantism in Scotland was a process rather than a Damascene event. By 1561 The First Book of Discipline had emerged as an owner’s manual for the new religion, but it contained strong meat, too strong for many. Once the Treaty of Edinburgh came into effect and the French troopers withdrew from Scotland, any nascent fear of Catholics went with them.
The ship carrying Mary back to the land of her birth sailed into the estuary of the River Forth on 19 August 1561. The little flotilla was almost a week ahead of schedule and there was no welcoming party. A few rounds from the ship’s cannon promptly made the good people of Edinburgh aware that something momentous might be about to happen, and by the time the Queen of Scotland stepped ashore in Leith a small but suitably appreciative crowd had gathered.
Glamorous and captivating she might have been to those first onlookers, and to those who watched her make her progress to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. But within a matter of days she was to have the first clash with the realities of a Reformed Scotland - one that would set the pattern for her relationship with her kingdom for the rest of her reign.
On 21 August she had her first meeting with Knox and she asked him why her subjects should obey him rather than their queen. Straight to her face he questioned her right to rule Scotland: for one thing she was Catholic, he told her, and Scotland was not, any more - and for another, even more offensive to Knox, she was a woman.
Although Lord James had promised her the right to receive Mass in her private chapel, Knox and his ilk had different ideas. With Mary inside at prayer, and Lord James standing outside the door with his sword drawn, the firebrand preacher turned up with a mob. Someone lunged for the door; there were threats to drag the priest outside and kill him. Lord James stood his ground and the thugs withdrew, but the following Sunday Knox climbed into the pulpit of St Giles’ in Edinburgh, to preach hellfire. ‘That one Mass was more fearful,’ he thundered, ‘than if 10,000 armed men were landed in any part of the realm, of purpose to suppress the whole Protestant religion.’
Despite the white heat of his words, Knox was as yet unable to light a fire strong enough to consume Mary. Fuelled by his fervent Calvinism, he had moved faster than anyone else in the country. By the time he looked over his shoulder, he was too far ahead to be taken seriously by sane people. Young as she was - just nineteen - Mary initially proved herself up to the job of tackling and holding at a distance the extremism of the minority.
No doubt her half-brother Lord James was responsible for the direction of some of her first steps, but there can be no denying that Mary was a graceful mover across the stage of power. It was also the case that the social and political infrastructure of Scotland was unable to change overnight. The First Book of Discipline demanded root and branch reform, but the powers that be had to be - and were - pragmatic. Like any major change, it required new people to replace old in the many key jobs forming the knots in the net holding society together. It also had to be financed; and the nobles enjoying the funds they received from the Catholic Church were, unsurprisingly, disinclined to asset-strip the golden goose.
Mary spent a great deal of her time travelling around her realm, getting to know a country and a people she had last encountered when just a five-year-old. The powerful regional magnates were easily won over by her beauty and charm and she exploited an ancient truth of Scotland - either by instinct or by instruction from others - that old loyalties to kin and crown ran as deep, deeper perhaps, than obligations born of a new religion.
She could be frightening too. As 1562 drew to a close she saw to it that Huntly, who had urged her to don the mantle of Catholic figurehead and ride over the Protestants like an avenging warrior, was brought down and executed. Lord James, whom she made Earl of Moray as a demonstration of her trust, was her agent - but the will was as much Mary’s as anyone’s.
It is when you visit the castles and manor houses she must have toured herself in those first months that you encounter a moment from Scotland’s history that stays with you: Mary was back home and making a success of things. But she had been Queen all of her life - and surrounded for most of it by the opulence of the French, not the Scottish court. All those years of her childhood and adolescence she had had an ambition to be Queen of England first implanted in her imagination and then fanned into flame. Now, after all of that, could she really reconcile herself to a life lived on the edge of the world?
This, then, is part of the conundrum at the heart of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots. Was she really the committed Catholic monarch, desirous above all to follow her faith even if it must mean being forever out of rhythm with the beat of her nation’s heart? Or is there a clue in the role she took in the destruction of Huntly … a glimpse of an altogether different, grander agenda that was the truth of the matter all along?
It has been suggested that Mary’s Catholic convictions were slightly less than genuine and that she used the glamour and theatricality of her faith to disguise her driving ambition to replace Elizabeth on the throne of England. Soon after her return, she had begun asking Elizabeth to acknowledge her as heir to the throne. But Elizabeth had only prevaricated and dissembled, promising to answer eventually but never doing so.
Elizabeth was almost a decade older than her Scottish cousin: still unmarried and still without a legitimate heir of her own. The English queen wanted it both ways. In order to produce the heir who would continue her branch of the Tudor dynasty, she would have to submit to a husband and so compromise the integrity of her rule. By avoiding such a climb-down, she would ensure her unquestioned authority while at the same time condemning her line to extinction. In 1588 she would tell her soldiers at Tilbury that she had ‘the body but of a weak and feeble woman but … the heart and stomach of a king’. If those were Elizabeth’s sentiments in 1561 when Mary came home, an apology for being female, then it was yet another trait that put her at odds with her sister-queen.
Mary had no such qualms and gamely set out to survey the field for a suitable husband. (This behaviour can only have added to Knox’s rage. While he was almost prepared to tolerate Elizabeth - who seemed at least to be keeping herself pure, rather than leading on helpless men - Mary was ready to mate and to breed.) More than any mere husband, after all, she was intent on finding a man to match or even enhance her bloodline, letting her fulfil her dynastic potential. And all the time she perused the marriage market she softly but insistently pushed for an answer from Elizabeth on the question of her place in the line of succession.
A lot of the suitors she had rejected with a flick of the hand while she was still in France gamely offered themselves as suitors once more. Word spread across Europe that the Queen of Scotland was actively in pursuit of a match and now, even more ardently than before, the likely suspects came forward again.
Don Carlos of Spain was first back into the glare - and was allowed to remain optimistic for longer than anyone else. Then there was Archduke Charles of Austria, son of the Holy Roman Emperor; but like the doltish younger Earl of Arran before him he had made the mistake of offering himself to Elizabeth as well. Charles IX of France, the thirteen-year-old brother of her first husband, was in the running for a while, but Mary’s frosty relations with her motherin-law, Catherine de Medici, made him a long shot. Even Queen Elizabeth herself tried to play cupid, first offering and then practically insisting that Mary should take Lord Robert Dudley as her husband. But - and unbeknown to the likes of Knox - Elizabeth had thoroughly road-tested him (while his first wife was still alive, come to that) and the Queen of Scots was less than thrilled by the offer of her cast-off.
The man Mary settled on - a love match, in fact, at least as far as she was concerned - shocked and surprised just about everyone. He was seventeen. He was tall and beautiful to behold. By all accounts he was quite the huntsman and, like Mary, an enthusiastic and talented dancer. He was Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox and Lady Margaret Douglas. Since his mother was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, young Darnley was Mary’s own cousin - and right behind her in the succession to the English throne. Like Mary herself Darnley was, and always had been, dynastic dynamite.
The crushing irony of it all was that it was Elizabeth’s fault Mary ever set eyes on him. The Lennox family had been resident in England, an enforced residence in fact, and Darnley had been a guest of Elizabeth’s court. Like every other woman with a pulse, she had taken a shine to him and liked to have him play music for her. When she decided to release the family from their cradling in England, Elizabeth asked her cousin Mary if she would find a home for the Earl and his Countess north of the Border and out of her hair. What it seems she had not counted on was that Darnley would travel north as well.
Still promoting Dudley as her choice for Mary’s husband, she was somehow blind and deaf to the dynastic threat posed by a union between two cousins descended from Henry VII. Darnley was Scottish by name, but English by birth - a qualification likely to make him acceptable to English subjects and the English parliament. Like Mary he was Catholic, but he wore it lightly - an affectation with which to accessorise his dandy outfits. When Darnley’s qualifications are examined even casually, it almost beggars belief that Elizabeth did not do more to keep him away from husband-hungry Mary. As it was she failed even to prevent Darnley visiting Scotland, and there meeting the Queen of Scots for the first time.
Disastrously as it turned out, it was while Darnley was doing the rounds in Fife that word finally reached Mary of Elizabeth’s judgment on the vexed question of the succession. She had made a decision … not to make a decision. She would only settle the matter once she had herself found and married a husband. Mary was devastated and furious, and promptly fell in love with Lord Darnley. After a whirlwind romance it was announced they were to be married. Jolted out of her absent-mindedness, Elizabeth bridled. Since Darnley was English-born, he was her subject. She protested that her permission for him to be married to the Queen of Scotland had neither been sought nor granted.
That a queen as intelligent and shrewd as Elizabeth I could have made such apparent blunders in relation to Mary and her husband-to-be is hard to believe. At the very least she might have been happy to note that Mary had kept it in the family, marrying a local noble rather than uniting her kingdom with that of another European monarch. She would surely also have seen that by raising the stock of the Lennoxes - a family who did not have to look far within Scotland to find enemies - Mary was storing up troubles for herself in the future.
Her angry words, genuine or not, fell upon ears deafened by a combination of lust, mischief and sheer bloody-mindedness. Mary quickly showered Darnley with titles and had it proclaimed in Edinburgh that once they were married he would be made King of Scotland. There was also the tricky matter of kissing cousins to consider: technically Mary and her fiancé were too closely related and a special dispensation ought to have been obtained from the Pope.
None of it was enough to stop the runaway bridal train, though, and on Sunday, 29 July 1565 the pair were wed by Catholic rite in Mary’s private chapel in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Having married in haste, however, there was soon little for the Queen of Scots to do but set about some leisurely repentance. (Knox was strangely quiet, perhaps because he had found a distraction of his own. The great critic of the monstrous regiment of women had celebrated the start of his fifties by having a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a friend.)
Everyone knows the Mary and Darnley match was a troubled one. But in a drawer of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh there is tantalising evidence of just how quickly Mary realised her mistake: a coin struck in July 1565, to commemorate the marriage, features the happy couple face to face and gazing into each other’s eyes. The inscription has Darnley’s name before Mary’s, apparently indicating his superiority within the relationship. Very soon, however, these were recalled. The replacements that followed firmly reasserted Mary’s dominance and put her husband in his place. Too late, Mary had come to her senses.
In spite of her earlier proclamation that Darnley would be king, Mary forever withheld the so-called ‘Crown Matrimonial’ from him. He might be her husband and consort, but he did not rule. The boy was livid. Already a loose cannon, given to boasting in public about returning Scotland to ‘the true faith’ of Catholicism, the news that he would never wear a crown infuriated him. But if he was an embarrassment, in one key respect it no longer mattered - because he had already performed the most important task of all by making his wife pregnant. Ever one to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, however, he even seems to have made an attempt to undermine that single, worthwhile achievement of his spoiled and dissolute life.
Dangerously angry and often drunk, he was easily persuaded to join a group of nobles plotting to kill Mary’s private secretary and confidant, David Rizzio. An effete Italian, he had attracted the ire of those who had found themselves out of favour at court following the elevation of Darnley and his family. Mary’s half-brother Lord James, Earl of Mar was among them and they quickly convinced themselves that Rizzio was an English spy or an agent of the Pope. A plan was duly hatched to take matters, and control of the queen, back into their hands. Darnley was stupid enough to go along with them and add his dubious sanction to the plan.
The deed was done on the evening of 9 March 1566 and it unfolded in tragi-comic style. Mary was heavily pregnant by then and sitting with Rizzio and others in her private chambers in the Palace of Holyroodhouse when several of the plotters burst through the door. Patrick, Lord Ruthven shambled and clanked to the head of them. Aged, overweight and sweating profusely from a fever that would shortly kill him, he was wearing armour under his cloak and on the point of collapse when he managed to gasp a request that the private secretary be handed over to them.
Mary refused and Ruthven slumped against the door frame, desperately trying to remain upright, but the mob had spotted Rizzio hiding behind his mistress’s skirts. Squealing in a trembling falsetto voice, he was dragged out, hauled into an adjoining room and messily murdered with as many swords and knives as it was possible to stick into his body.
Fearing that she might be next, or that the intention all along had been to terrify her into a miscarriage, Mary fled from the palace - and from Edinburgh. Together with some of her staff she managed to ride on horseback all the way to Dunbar Castle, where she was joined by a man who would shortly share her destiny. James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, was a maverick noble. Yet whether by accident or design he had remained faithful to his monarch and now rode to her side like a knight in shining armour. It was a decision both of them would live to regret, but for now she was glad just to have a soldier of proven skill and bravery - he had fought with valour in skirmishes in the Borders and all across Europe - as her principal bodyguard.
The crisis of the Rizzio murder behind her, Mary’s attitude to her husband turned harder still. In all practical respects she had him at arm’s length but, lest anyone think the child she had carried was illegitimate, she ordered him to her side when, on 19 June 1566, she gave birth to their son, James. His Catholic baptism in the Chapel Royal of Stirling Castle was followed by a lavish and hugely expensive party. Darnley stayed well away and the job of welcoming the guests fell to Bothwell.
The party was held over three days in the Great Hall and Mary had ordered the construction of a huge round table as the centrepiece for a celebration designed to make a key political point. For the benefit all the English guests the Queen of Scots was conjuring up the memory of King Arthur. Little James was hailed as ‘Little Arthur’ and the message was clear: this was the boy who would be king of a reunited Britain. The visiting English ambassador was suitably offended by the Scottish royal family’s claim to be the future rulers of the whole of the British Isles. It was indeed a provocative gesture … but it was also realistic.
Time was running out for Elizabeth. She was well into her thirties and it was becoming less and less likely she would ever have a child of her own. If she did not - or simply could not - where would that leave the throne of England? The answer to that question, however bitter it might taste in English mouths, was simple: in Scotland’s hands. Mary might well miss out on the English crown but her rightful and lawful claim on it remained. Baby James would inherit that right. For a while at least Elizabeth seemed to acknowledge the inevitable and to be on the point of naming Prince James as her successor. Until, that is, his mother’s poor choice in men undid her yet again.
Darnley had had bouts of ill-health both before and during his marriage. There has been dark talk of some or other sexually transmitted disease, syphilis maybe, but whatever it was it laid him low once more in the winter of 1566-7. After all he had done to her, Mary remained fond enough of her husband first to visit him at his residence in Glasgow and then to have him brought back to Edinburgh where she could oversee his care.
Her fondness did not go so far as bringing his nameless disease anywhere near the prince, and Darnley was put up in a house in a part of the city known as Kirk o’ Field. In the early hours of 10 February 1567, the building was blown apart by the ignition of gunpowder packed into the basement by person or persons unknown. Darnley survived - in fact he may have got wind of what was going on in the minutes before the blast and climbed out of a window - but he did not live on for long. His partly clothed body was found in the garden. He was unmarked by the explosion and had been strangled or suffocated. One of his servants was discovered dead nearby.
Mary had spent the night in the Palace of Holyroodhouse as usual, but she did not escape the fallout of the blast that killed her husband. No one was ever convicted of the crime but it was widely rumoured that nobles close to the queen - perhaps her new best friend Bothwell - had carried out the deed with her blessing. However the Queen of Scots conducted herself in the aftermath of hearing the news, it seems she failed to convince anyone of her grief. Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley had been King of Scotland in all but name, and yet there was no state funeral to mark his passing. There was hardly a funeral at all. Word had it that his corpse had been dumped at night inside the walls of Holyrood Abbey. He lies, supposedly, among the rest of the dead there; but, while they have gravestones, he has nothing. No one knows for sure where he was buried.
His sordid death changed everything for Elizabeth - and, therefore, for Mary too. The English queen declared there would be no more talk of the Stewart place in the line of succession until Mary could be cleared of any involvement in her husband’s murder. But that could not and did not happen. Bothwell was being named as the killer in every pub in Edinburgh and, a month later, Darnley’s father was allowed to bring a case against him. The eventual trial was a farce, the courtroom stacked with Bothwell’s supporters. Once everyone had gone through the motions, he was loudly acquitted.
Mary was understandably rattled. If she herself was innocent, then the only logical conclusion was that the murder had been committed by some of her own nobles. These were the very men with whom she sought to govern - so how was she to perform the business of government, knowing there was a killer in the room? Even such depths of confusion and uncertainty, however, can neither explain nor excuse what Mary did next. With rumours still circling above her like vultures, and with Elizabeth watching her every move for signs of guilt, she married the man nearly everyone had named as the killer: James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.
Some said he kidnapped and raped her and that she only married him to preserve what remained of her honour. Whatever the truth of it all, whatever the attraction, she became his wife in a Protestant ceremony on 15 May 1567 in the Great Hall of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Maybe by then she honestly believed he was the only noble she could rely on, if not actually trust.
Within days of the news breaking, Scotland teetered on the brink of civil war. A group of nobles led by Lord James, Earl of Mar came together as the ‘Confederate Lords’ and pledged to free their queen from Bothwell’s clutches. It was no more than a gloss on plans for a palace coup.
Husband and wife were side by side at the head of an army on Carberry Hill, near Musselburgh, on 15 June to meet their opponents. There never was a battle. Mary lost her nerve and sued for peace on condition that Bothwell could leave the field. He was granted safe conduct and, after saying farewell to his wife, he left for Dunbar. They would never see each other again and, after many more adventures and intrigues, he would die in prison in Denmark in April 1578.
If Mary thought she would be welcomed back into Edinburgh by a sea of happy, smiling faces, she was sorely mistaken. Instead, her subjects gathered on the streets and hung from windows to call her a whore and demand her death.
The Protestant nobles who had defied her had no real interest in killing her. Regicide was usually more trouble than it was worth and it was enough just to get her out of their sight. After a last, desperate, tear-soaked night in her palace she was hustled out of the city. She had last seen her son, then a ten-month-old, in April, and perhaps she hoped to be reunited with him. It was not the case. She was taken instead to Lochleven Castle, in Perthshire, and imprisoned there. She would never see James again. Mary had once beheld her kingdom through the spy-hole cut for her through the battlements of Stirling Castle. Now she viewed it through the windows of a prison. Within a few weeks of her arrival, she suffered a miscarriage; in all likelihood the little lost twins had been fathered by Bothwell.
Just over a year after she had lost so much at Carberry, a group of hardline nobles led by the young Lord Ruthven and Lord Patrick Lindsay took a boat across to the island on which Lochleven Castle stood. They planned to take even more from her - and used threats of death to get their way.
The Confederate Lords now wanted nothing less than her abdication and her replacement upon the throne with her own infant son, whom they now controlled. Weakened by losses of many kinds, she defied them for as long as she could. Even though she did indeed sign it all away on 24 July 1567, she made it clear she was acting under duress. ‘When God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these for it is done against my will’, she told them.
With unseemly haste, little James was crowned just five days later. It was the worst-attended Scottish coronation of all time. The congregation, in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling, sang the 110th Psalm, in which the Lord gives dominion to the king: ‘The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath’. Knox the firebrand, freed at last from the woman he despised above all, preached the sermon: ‘And he brought forth the king’s son, and put the crown upon him, and gave him the testimony; and they made him king and anointed him’. For all his frothing bluster, and the story of the justifiable murder of monarchs, from 2 Kings 11, it had not been unusual to see an infant given a crown: the Stewarts did that all the time. But there was something momentous about the events of 29 July 1567, a turning point in the history of Scotland: for the very first time a King of Scotland had been crowned in a Protestant ceremony.
Mary managed to escape from her prison in May 1568 and was quickly able to gather a huge army. She had heard the wrath of the mob in Edinburgh, and been briefly cowed by it, but the truth remained that a majority of the nobility preferred to side with the queen than with the Confederate Lords. Scotland had a natural tendency towards the status quo, and was drawn towards it yet again, like filings to a magnet. Mary’s half-brother, Moray, had been made regent and he it was who led the force that faced up to her at Langside, then a village outside Glasgow, on 13 May. He was short on nobles but by his side were Lennox and also James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton and a committed Protestant. Moray had also mustered a force numbering several thousand soldiers, but noticeably fewer than Mary’s.
Archibald Campbell, 5th Earl of Argyll was Mary’s commander and it was military incompetence - his and that of her other lieutenants - that handed overwhelming victory to the veteran battler Moray. Mary fled the field. Had she stayed in Scotland, she may well have been able to build on her support and try again, especially since Moray’s control of the situation was shaky at best. But it seemed she had had enough. Not only did she flee the field, but she also fled her kingdom. Crossing into England via the Solway Firth, she threw herself on the mercy of her sister-queen. It was the start of the second half of her life - and nineteen years as a prisoner of Elizabeth.
The last obstacle to the Protestant Reformation having disappeared at last, the hardliners felt free to take a more fundamentalist approach to Church governance as well. Now came the rise of Presbyterianism, whereby each local church is governed by its own elders, or presbyters. Calvin had taught Knox about ‘the elect’ - meaning that, at the beginning of time, God had chosen all those who would be saved. These predestined, pre-saved people would naturally come together as congregations - and so the elders would be their natural leaders. It was all very convenient. At the top of the pyramid of command sat the General Assembly, where the decisions affecting the running of the Church as a whole could be made by representatives of each presbytery, or group of elders.
Convenient and effective it certainly was for churchmen like Knox, but it brought the Church straight into conflict with the crown. The symbiotic relationship between the king and the Church had evolved in such a way that the monarch exercised a degree of control over his churchmen by appointing his favourites to the top jobs. Presbyterians like Knox wanted nothing to do with bishops and archbishops, and by doing away with them they severed the link between Church and crown. This was a move that was never going to go down well with kings, definitely not with Stewart kings.
Knox was undeterred and, together with those nobles who shared his views, he ploughed his furrow. Moray and the Confederate Lords had the king in their power and a priority was to prepare him to rule a Protestant kingdom. He had been baptised as a Catholic but with his coronation a line had been drawn separating the past from the future. Given that James might one day rule a Protestant England too, nothing was to be left to chance. Little James’s education, therefore, was placed in the hands of Scotland’s leading scholar. George Buchanan had been a close confidant and advisor of Mary’s from the moment of her arrival back in her kingdom in 1561, but he had soon become one of her fiercest critics. It was now his job - his mission - to turn her son against her as well.
It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the little boy. He never knew either of his parents and spent his childhood under governors and other adults who cared only for his blood, not his heart. His uncle, Moray, had been made his regent but it was Buchanan who had day-to-day control over his life. A fine scholar he may have been, but his approach to childcare was draconian. The Countess of Mar was one of those charged with the prince’s care and, after witnessing the start of one particularly savage beating by Buchanan, she stepped in and accused him of going too far. ‘I have whippt his erse,’ he retorted, ‘you may kiss it if you want to.’ Kisses were never something little James received. Instead he suffered Buchanan’s attempted brainwashing. It was the tutor’s objective not just to educate the boy in literature and mathematics, but also in what Protestants and Presbyterians saw as the limits of royal power.
In 1579 he published De Jure Regni Apud Scotos - ‘The Powers of the Crown in Scotland’ - and sent it to James as an aide-mémoire for kings. ‘I have sent you this book to steer you through the reefs of flattery,’ he wrote, ‘that it may not only admonish you but keep you to the path that you have once embarked upon and, if you should stray from it, rebuke you and drag you back again’.
Couched in affectionate language it may have been, but still there is no mistaking Buchanan’s intent - and that was to continue to control the young prince. What he wanted, in fact, was to make a puppet king.
Within the text of the book itself Buchanan reiterated sentiments that had their roots in the Declaration of the Clergy and the Declaration of Arbroath of the fourteenth century. He wrote that if a king acted in such a way that he caused the people to despise or distrust him - if he reigned like a tyrant - then the people would be justified in getting rid of that king. In sixteenth-century Scotland ‘the people’ increasingly referred to the Protestant Church and its noble backers.
All the while the king was being prepared to rule, his Guardians continued to fight off his mother’s supporters. Mary was imprisoned, and as time went by it looked less and less likely that Elizabeth would ever let her go; but those loyal to her fought on regardless.
Moray was assassinated in 1570. His successor to the role of regent was Darnley’s father Lennox, James’s grandfather, and he too was killed the following year. Eventually it was lack of hope that undid the ‘Marian’ party. Edinburgh Castle was the last fortification in the country holding out in the name of the queen and it too succumbed to the inevitable in 1573. The civil war was over.
Since 1572 the regent had been James Douglas, Earl of Morton and one of those who had fought against Mary at Langside. During his first six years in the post he was able to bring a degree of stability to the realm that had been painfully lacking during the years of war, but he was undone in the end by an adolescent crush.
It began in 1580 with the arrival in Scotland of a Frenchman named Esmé Stuart, sieur d’Aubigny (lacking a ‘w’ in their alphabet, the French had found their own way of spelling Mary’s surname). A cousin of James’s father, he was therefore the only ‘family’ the young king would ever get close to, and it appears the boy was soon besotted with his elegant, dashing, thirty-something relative. Esmé returned the affection (some said it was even a consummated love affair for a while) and was soon showered with titles and privileges.
In 1581 Esmé used his position to accuse Morton of having been involved in Darnley’s murder, and the regent was swiftly tried, convicted and executed. James’s undoubted love soon caused Esmé more trouble than it was worth, when a group of jealous nobles lost patience with being passed over in favour of the foreigner. In August 1582 they kidnapped the king and bundled him into captivity in Ruthven Castle, near Atholl, in Perthshire. William Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie was the ringleader of what became known as the ‘Ruthven Raid’. What nobles need and desire most is the ear of the king, and with Esmé around they had been shut out. The death of Morton was the last straw - even Queen Elizabeth had grown anxious about the level of influence being wielded over the King of Scotland by a man with Catholic leanings. It was with her support, therefore, that James remained in captivity, in one fortress or another, for almost a year. Deprived of the king’s protection, Esmé soon saw the wisdom of returning to France.
Is it any wonder that James VI grew up to be a man who trusted himself above all others? Denied his parents, abused by his Guardians, used a pawn by those who sought power for themselves and, finally, given a taste of his mother’s endless captivity - it should be no surprise that while weeks turned to months behind one locked door or another, he listened to his own voice.
Buchanan had been determined to make James accept that he was subject to the will of others, not least the will of the Protestant Church and its pet nobles. What he helped to create, ironically, was the very thing he most feared - a king who had learned to look after himself, who put himself first when no one else would. Buchanan and his brethren took a helpless baby boy and made of him an absolutist king.
James managed to escape the Ruthven Raiders in June 1583. While he gathered supporters and rode towards Edinburgh to reclaim his independence and his kingdom, Ruthven and his cronies sailed for France. Having gained a hold on the reins of power, he never let them drop and the Protestant Church began to suffer for its treatment of him. Knox had died in 1572 and was replaced at the head of the Reformers two years later by Andrew Melville. Regarded by historians as the real brains of Scottish Presbyterianism he was, however, no match for James. Not just a successor to Knox, he was also a close friend of Buchanan’s and his eventual collision with the king was inevitable.
James was as convinced as any of his predecessors of his God-given right to rule and, having long since grasped the Reformed Church’s intention to make itself independent of any monarch, he acted swiftly. All of Buchanan’s published works - including his handbook for supine kings - were banned. The authority of the bishops was also loudly reasserted and the king was named supreme at the top of the hierarchy. Melville and his supporters fled the country.
With his position at home secure, James was able to cast his eye further afield. Like his mother before him he began to press Elizabeth for a ruling on his place in the succession. But despite the fact that she was allowing her dynasty to wither on the vine of her own squandered fertility, she refused to go beyond extending the hand of friendship.
The test of that friendship - upon which Scotland’s hopes of securing the English throne now depended - came in 1586 with a plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary. Hatched by Sir Henry Babington - publicly Protestant but privately Catholic, a Recusant in other words - it was an elaborate plan to liberate Mary, land a Catholic army on the south coast of England and then sweep northwards to London and triumph. It was nothing less than a plan for a holy war and Babington managed to get a letter outlining the details smuggled into Mary’s hands.
Imagine how her mind might have been working by now, after nineteen years spent practising her embroidery. Once upon a time she had been promised a triple crown, a Catholic empire with honours and titles beyond dreams. All of that was gone and, widowed twice over, she had not even her son’s love to cling to. Every letter and gift she had tried to send him had been turned back by her captors. She had learned from others how his mind had been poisoned against her by Buchanan, her one-time friend and confidant. There was nothing more to lose but life itself and what was that anyway without liberty?
She put pen to paper and wrote to Babington advising him that he would need foreign help before he might attempt her rescue. The murder of Elizabeth was something for his own conscience, she told him. Of course the letter never got there. Intercepted by the agents of Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham, it was passed to the queen.
There is a legend from Babylonian times that the lion and the unicorn hate each other. While the unicorn represents spring, the lion is the symbol of summer and so their fight is eternal. An English nursery rhyme recalls the age-old animosity not just between spring and summer, but between Scotland - represented on the coat of arms by a unicorn - and England, represented by a lion:
The lion and the unicorn
Were fighting for the crown;
The lion beat the unicorn
All around the town.
Legend also had it that the wild unicorn could only be tamed by a virgin - and, in Elizabeth, England had its virgin queen. She finally tamed her unicorn by accepting that Mary was guilty of an act of treason and sentencing her to death.
All of this left the King of Scotland in a cleft stick: should he take up the cudgels in defence of the mother he had never known and risk annoying Elizabeth enough to cut him out of the succession? Or should he meekly accept her will and risk the possibility of the Scottish people rising in rebellion? The solution he came up with would have impressed even the most duplicitous of his ancestors. Ambassadors were dispatched to London with clear instructions: ‘The one to deal very earnestly both with the queen and her councillors for our sovereign mother’s life; the other that our title to that Crown be not pre-judged.’ He also wrote to Elizabeth suggesting he would cut himself off from England were she to go ahead and kill Mary, but his language was always tempered, lacking any note of real threat. The implication was that he would be disappointed, more than anything else. Perhaps merely exiling his mother would satisfy Elizabeth, he said.
Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle, in Northamptonshire, on 8 February 1587. She departed this life in the guise of a Catholic martyr, wearing a long black dress with a blood-red petticoat beneath. Years before she had embroidered a motto into a chair: ‘En ma fin est mon commencement’ - ‘In my end is my beginning’. The chair and the sentiment stayed close by her until the end, like a premonition. It took two blows of the axe to separate her head from her body and afterwards every trace of the act was cleaned away, all her clothes and other mementoes burned. Her body was embalmed, placed in a lead coffin and eventually interred in Peterborough Cathedral, at night and by Protestant rite.
Edward I had tried to eliminate all thoughts and memories of William Wallace by tearing the patriot’s body apart and scattering it across England and Scotland. But in so doing he created the very myth and martyr he had hoped to avoid. The same was true of Mary. Fascinating, beguiling and frustrating in life, she became infinitely more potent in death. English attempts to make her disappear only succeeded in making her unforgettable and unforgotten. (A quarter of a century later James would have his mother’s coffin exhumed and moved to Westminster Abbey. The tomb he prepared for her there was more elaborate and impressive by far than that which holds the remains of Elizabeth I.)
Regardless of any legality associated with the execution, Elizabeth felt personally tainted by it. In an attempt to wash the damned spot from her hands she wrote to James claiming his mother’s death had been a mistake, almost an accident. James’s reply made it plain he cared more for his own future than for his mother’s passing. In her end, was his beginning too. ‘I dare not wrong you so far as not to judge honourably of your unspotted part therein,’ he wrote, ‘so, on the other side, I wish that your honourable behaviour in all times hereafter may fully persuade the whole world of the same. And, as for my part, I look that you will give me at this time such full satisfaction, in all respects, as shall be a means to strengthen and unite this isle’.
In public James mourned but in private he continued where Mary had left off - pressing Elizabeth to name him as her heir. She would not. Determined not to lose control of Scotland, as his mother had, he turned his attentions to matters closer to home. This was an intelligent king and he understood that his homeland needed him as well. Here was a kingdom that had been through turbulent decades of change: Reformation, Mary’s quixotic rule, the flagrant power struggles of his minority. Aged twenty-two, he tightened his grip on the reins of power. For a wife he chose Anne, Princess of Protestant Denmark. Scotland rejoiced, not least because the match proved a fruitful one. In time, the fecund Anne would produce seven children for James, three of whom survived to adulthood. There was the eldest (and favourite) son, Henry, the Princess Elizabeth and a spare heir, Charles.
Like his grandfather and great-grandfather, he gathered an elegant court around him. With memories of his childhood education still vivid, he turned to the self-help books of his age in pursuit of greater wisdom. He obtained a translation into Scots of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli’s near-legendary treatise on statecraft and the getting, keeping and exercise of power. If he did not know before, he would have learned from The Prince that a king must have the skills of a fox and also a lion. His self-education worked and, in stark contrast to his mother, he became a monarch who ruled not with his heart but with his head. In 1598 he wrote his own treatise on kingship, the Basilikon Doron - ‘The Royal Gift’. The recipient of the gift was his eldest son Henry, Duke of Rothsay, then just four years old but already the apple of his father’s eye.
Where James did resemble Mary was in his ambition. And, although Elizabeth held out, her refusal to promise him her crown became increasingly irrelevant. All he had to do - and the English queen’s advisors accepted this even if she didn’t - was to outlive her. Frustratingly, given the context, Elizabeth I lived longer than any English monarch before her. But at least her staying-power gave James time to think and plan; and what he came up with was something more radical and revolutionary than any mere takeover of the throne of the Tudors. It was a vision, and James believed its time had come.
Good Queen Bess was sixty-nine when she died on 24 March 1603. She had ruled England for forty-four years - long enough to give stability and a sense of national identity after the short reigns of her half-brother and half-sister. But the queen was dead … long live the king. The ring was slipped from her still-warm hand and entrusted to a messenger, reaching James just three days later. The message the ring accompanied was a summons to London and to the very seat of power. The kingmakers wanted him to travel with all possible haste, but James took his time, savouring the moment as he made a triumphal tour of his promised land. Those moments belonged to one of the most accomplished kings Scotland had ever produced, a king who loved peace over war, knowledge over ignorance, tolerance over persecution.
When he reached London he boarded a barge to carry him the last few miles along the Thames to Westminster. What moment in all of Scotland’s history could have matched that one? James was approaching the seat of power of his nation’s most ancient foe. The English had been the enemies of his blood, the people who had murdered, raped and burned his subjects for generations, centuries. English kings and queens had sought to dominate his nation for more than 300 years and yet now they were offering him everything they had to give - throne and crown.
James VI of Scotland was made James I of England on 25 July 1603, in a ceremony in Westminster Abbey. He sat upon St Edward’s Chair, the same that had been commissioned by Edward I in 1301 and which contained the stolen Stone of Scone, the Stone of Destiny. It was the first time a Scottish king had sat upon the stone since the illfated John Balliol in 1292.
It was a momentous occasion - and James had a grand idea to match. What he proposed was much more than mere union of the crowns. His vision was of the nations united, one Great Britain. For his subjects there would be common citizenship, a common religion, common laws. He would sit at the top of it all as emperor, ruling a union of two equal nations.
It was that word ‘equal’ that caused the first of many problems with his grand design: how, asked the English, could Scotland be described as the equal of England? The southern kingdom was bigger, richer, more developed, stronger, superior in every way. What benefit would there be, they asked, in accepting parity with poor little backward Scotland?
The English objections were not the only ones. When James had departed Scotland to take up his new crown, he had bid his people a fond farewell and reassured them he would be back every three years. He would return just once, in 1617, but the Scots smelled a rat long before that. What they feared more than anything else was a loss of their identity, and of their independence. If the Scots had learned nothing else in three centuries and more of struggle, it was that their independence was sacred. Uncounted thousands of them had fought and died to win it and secure it - and yet now their own king was proposing that their kingdom should be swallowed up by that of the Auld Enemy. To many Scots it sounded like betrayal.
It seemed the only person in favour of a Great Britain was King James himself. The idea eventually went before the English parliament in 1607 and was rejected out of hand.
With the king ensconced in London, hordes of his fellow countrymen took the high road south to join him. There had always been the occasional Scot in the capital but now they seemed to be everywhere. James surrounded himself with Scottish advisors. His bedchamber, where matters could be discussed so effectively, was full of them. English courtiers felt like foreigners in their own court. They talked among themselves about how the incomers were on the make, and stingy. And as the criticisms grew louder, so the Scots closed ranks around their king.
English Catholics were among those with a particularly powerful grudge: they felt James had let them down. Here was a king who had been baptised Catholic, who was the son of a martyred Catholic queen. He had shown tolerance of Catholics in his native land and had suggested he would do the same in England. But James had encountered rabid opposition to any talk of extending the hand of friendship and, reluctantly or not, had quietly cut them adrift.
When Catholic conspirators packed gunpowder beneath Parliament in 1605, their specific target was not the institution itself but the monarch within it. Guy Fawkes had become expert in the use of gunpowder while serving as a soldier in Europe. Caught red-handed, he initially refused to tell his captors anything. Broken on the rack, he gave up everything - including the truth that the plan was to blow Scottish James all the way back to Scotland. The plotters had the names and addresses of every significant Scot in London as well. What they had intended was the ethnic cleansing of the whole city.
With his dream in tatters - threatened by terrible violence and rejected by parliament - James resorted to signs and symbols. Soon after arriving in London he had had a number of flags designed, attempts to unite the saltire of Scotland with the English cross of St George. The Union flag was the ultimate product of his doodling, but during his own lifetime it served as no more than a reminder of what might have been.
For centuries English kings had clung to a prophecy that told them King Arthur would return one day to unify Britain. Time and again the image had been invoked to justify English attempts to subdue Scotland, to be recognised as overlord. In one of the great ironies of history, it was Scotland’s own ‘Little Arthur’ - James VI-who had finally fulfilled it. His achievement was remarkable, but within it were the seeds of new trouble.
By 1603 the people of Scotland had a strong sense of their identity as an ancient and independent nation. Waves of invaders had been defied. Alongside Wallace and Bruce they had fought for and won their freedom, developed a unique and distinctive court and forged a place in Europe. But the union of the crowns was more than just another step along the road. It was the decisive turning point in Scotland’s history.
King James I and VI has gone down in history and legend as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. The story goes that he never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one. For long, historians were disparaging about the first man to rule the kingdoms of Scotland and England together, and certainly his later years saw him succumb to one ailment after another.
We remember dead kings more fondly when, like some of James’s predecessors, they die young and beautiful:
… Smart lad to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay …
Instead, poor James suffered all the inevitabilities and indignities of old age, from arthritis, to piles, to the loss of all his teeth; and it was these physical failings as much as anything else that helped leave behind a picture of a failed king. But he was also a man of great intelligence, even a peculiar, self-preserving kind of wisdom. And because he so valued the role of kingship - a gift from God - he strived to live up to an idealised view that, by the end, was becoming distinctly unfashionable in some quarters.
It seems extraordinary now but having a Scot on the English throne after all those years of fighting off the Auld Enemy caused joyous celebration in Scotland for only a short time. It was all very well that King James VI had finally got his hands on the ancient prize, but to most Scots - and most English people as well - the reality after the honeymoon was an anticlimax. Scots in Edinburgh worried that the loss of the court to London would take the shine off the city as a place of glamour, and of gratuitous spending. Elsewhere there were slow-burning concerns for Scots about how the future would take shape. It was all very well while Scottish James sat upon the English throne - he had spent all his life in Scotland and knew well the place and the people, their likes and dislikes. But what would happen once he was gone and they were ruled by a king strange to them?
Scotland was, anyway, a kingdom that had grown used to the absence of the monarch. It had been a regular pattern down through the past three centuries and the mechanisms were in place to cope. James was in London, but he was theirs too. Short-term fascination with the novelty of a king of two countries soon faded from the forefront of most people’s minds.
James famously observed that he could rule Scotland with his pen, but some of his ideas led inevitably to the drawing of swords. By the ‘Statutes of Iona’ of 1609, he tried to bring ‘peace’ to the still-barbarous islands of the west. James had been meddling in the strongholds of Gaeldom since the 1590s, an old Stewart hobby. He tried to bring what he regarded as civilisation to the whole of the island of Lewis by leasing it to Lowlanders in 1597, 1605 and 1607, and the project failed every time under furious assault by the locals. By the Statutes he tried to force the chieftains to lead their people away from their ancient traditions and towards a lifestyle James regarded as more fitting for his subjects. Underlying it all was a determination to replace Gaelic with English and, while the new rules did little to impose Lowland ways on the folk of the islands, the damage done to the old language was irrevocable.
It was also in 1609 that James invited his Protestant aristocracy to establish ‘Plantations’ in Ireland. Soon there were thousands of Protestants in Ulster and the consequences of their presence in the north of the island resonate across the British Isles to this day.
In 1598 James had written the Basilikon Doron for his son Henry. It was all he understood about the craft of kingship and it is interesting to wonder what use the eldest son might have made of the father’s undoubted intelligence. But Prince Henry died in 1612, breaking his father’s heart. When James himself died on 27 March 1625 it was his younger surviving son, Charles, who ascended to the thrones of Scotland and England in his stead.
Unlike his handsome, athletic older brother, Charles I stood barely five feet tall in his silk-stockinged feet and was always studious and pious rather than physical and outgoing. He had been born in Dunfermline and was such a sickly little lad he had to be left behind at first while his father travelled south to claim the throne in 1603. So wary was he of people that he came across as aloof and distant. To many, even those closest to him, he often seemed charmless and abrupt. He stuttered too, and was slightly lame.
The Basilikon Doron - the Royal Gift - had passed from Henry to Charles and there is no doubt that he took the role and his destiny very seriously. He was like his father in many ways, though a much less talented, less defined version of the original. But he certainly took on board the central contention of his father’s book - that that he was a ‘little god’ set upon the throne to rule over other men.