John Guy: Queen of Scots

It may seem odd to begin a discussion of a biography of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, with a proclamation of my deep and abiding interest in her cousin Elizabeth I of England, but the truth is that fate and the shifts of European politics bound the two together from the day Elizabeth took the crown, and there’s no discussing one eithout considering the other. That two such iconic women should have ruled the neighbouring kingdoms of England and Scotland for a period of time, when reigning queens were rare, is a remarkable fact in itself. That they should be cousins and the Maey should have a claim to Elizabeth’s throne is ironic, though not unusual, given the way that royal women were traded in marriage at the time.

But there it is. Elizabeth, her life, her reign, her thoughts and politics and achievements, has long been one of my deep fascinations. I read novels and histories about her, I watch movies and miniseries, and carp about the inaccuracies and the things that get missed. She was a great ruler, but not always a good person. I recognise that.

Because I have been so drawn to Elizabeth, I have often to some extent ignored the intricacies of the life of Mary Stuart. I know that fans of Elizabeth often demonise or minimise Mary - something I don’t do, even though I haven’t found her as interesting or inspiring - but I don’t know as much about her as I should, given how much the thought of her, her sovereignty in Scotland, her ties with France, her claim to the English throne, her popularity among die-hard English Catholics and her position as Europe’s last hope of bringing England back to the Roman church, influenced Elizabeth’s domestic and foreign policy.

So, I’m reading John Guy’s well-regarded recent biography of the Scottish Queen, called, not surprisingly, Queen of Scots. I haven’t kept up with new scholarship regarding Mary, and I think it’s time I took a look at a good and fair interpretation of her life and reign - since much of what I consume about the period comes from the camp of Elizabeth’s supporters, and is often not unbiased toward Mary.

One of Guy’s themes is to refute the oft repeated aphorism that Elizabeth ruled from the head and Mary from the heart. Again and again, he notes where Mary’s policies were based in thoughtful statecraft - though often lacking in full knowledge of the motivations of others, especially her powerful French relatives, the de Guises, while Elizabeth made policy based on her affections for her favourites, or her fears of becoming a target of a named heir. Both women had moments of great success, and great failure. The difference in their fates lay less in the their abilities and skill at governing, than the kinds of difficulties they faced, their political enemies, and the resources they had to call on - and the nature of the political climate in their respective realms. And for Mary, the fact that she faced, for most of her adult life, not fully aware of the degree of the opposition, the active enmity of one of the more devious political minds of the age, William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s senior advisor for most of her reign. Not even Elizabeth, Guy argues, was aware if the degree to which Cecil manipulated communications between them, and interfered in the internal clan politics of Scotland to Mary’s detriment.

Cecil had his reasons, of course. He was devoted to Elizabeth and concerned about the preservation of her life and reign, and he was committed to the maintenance of the Protestant Reformation in England. From the first day that the teenaged Mary, a Catholic, and Queen of France and Scotland, made her claim to be queen of England as well, Cecil counted her as one of the greatest threats to both Elizabeth and to a Protestant England. This was perhaps her greatest misfortune.

Mary’s life can be divided into three very different phases - her life in France as dauphine and queen, her life in Scotland as the reigning Queen, and her life in England as the prisoner of Elizabeth. It is interesting to note that each shift in her life was precipitated by the deaths of several people close to her. Perhaps this is not so unusual, when one studies the lives of hereditary rulers - deaths within their own families, and the families if other dynastic rulers, would inevitably change the political landscape, but still, it is one of the ways of marking the phases of her life, beginning with the death if her father, James V of Scotland, which made her queen when she was but six days old.

Guy is meticulous in his account of the various political milieus in which Mary found herself in each period of her life. In her youth, France, her role as dauphine and later queen, and her relationships with the royal family, and her powerful de Guise relations, predominate. For much of this time, while she was the annointed queen of Scotland, the country was ruled by a shifting combination of Scottish lords, most notably James Stuart, her older, illegitimate half-brother, a string and ambitious man, and by her mother Marie de Guise, James V’s widow and a formidable woman in her own right, especially when backed by the influence of the de Guises and the military power of France. Mary was educated in France, and along with the royal children, received an education appropriate for a prince. She studied languages, history, philosophy and the classics, and was a competent scholar, though lacking the brilliance and discipline of her lifelong rival Elizabeth of England.

During this period, little was demanded of her, except that she be elegant and regal in her manner and appearance. French queens did not rule; and the dominant women of the court, The Queen, later Queen Mother Catherine Medici, and the King’s mistress Diane de Poitiers, were strong personalities with well-established spheres of influence.

When her husband, King Francis, died following a severe ear infection, Mary, as Dowager Queen of France, had no real place at the French court. Her mother had died a few months earlier, and Mary was now 18, of an age to rule Scotland in her own name. She returned to her homeland, utterly unprepared for the delicate balance between the various factions, both clan and religious. France was still at this tie an absolute monarchy; but kings in Scotland had long been required to negotiate their policies with the great lords. While Mary faced a steep learning curve, as Guy pints out, she did reasonably well at managing the lords, and maintaining peace between Catholic and Protestant. Where her policies failed utterly, again and again, were in her attempts to arrange a mutually satisfactory relationship with Elizabeth. Ironically, Elizabeth actually tended to favour Mary as the most logical successor should she die childless - she simply did not, as she said repeatedly, with to prepare her own winding sheet by naming an heir and creating conditions where plot in favour of her successor might flourish - as had happened during the reign of her own sister Mary Tudor, when she was the declared successor and the focus of suspicion from Mary, and plots from unhappy factions within England. However, whenever it seemed there was a chance of a breakthrough, Guy argues that Cecil was there to create suspicion and muddy the negotiations.

However, Mary ruled with some success until the disaster of her marriage with Henry Lord Darnley. Elizabeth had suggested that if Mary were to choose as a husband an English nobleman of whom she approved, obstacles to the succession might be removed. Elizabeth suggested her own favourite, Robert Dudley. Mary was deeply offended, and instead offered marriage to Darnley, then in Scotland with his father, the Earl of Lennox.

Darley was a provocative choice. Catholic, of both English and Scottish nobility, and cousin to both Mary and Elizabeth, marriage to Darnley united two dynastic claims on the English throne. Unfirtunately, Darnley was also a wastrel, a sexual libertine, and an arrogant man of limited ability who sought the power of being King of Scotland. Although he was never granted to criwn matrimonial, he behaved as though he was King of Scotland in his own right, eventually organising a coup against Mary in which her freedom was briefly curtailed, and one if her trusted friends and advisors, David Rizzio, murdered before her eyes. Her escape came at yhe hands of the man who would become her third husband, James Bothwell, a powerful but not popular border lord. Darnley’s primary achievement was to father the future James VI before falling seriously ill from syphillis. While separated from Mary and receiving treatment for his condition, Darnley was murdered by an alliance of Scottish lords that included most of the great magnates, including Bothwell. It was this death that triggered the collapse of Mary’s reign and her exile and imprisonment in England. Most observers suspected Bothwell’s involvement, and indeed, Mary herself was rumoured to have had a hand in planning the murder. Mary made matters worse by allying with Bothwell, as she had come to see him as a protector and defender. The ambitious Bothwell abducted Mary, and by some method - some say persuasion, others rape, persuaded her to marry him. The lords united against them, Bothwell was captured and sent into exile, Mary essentially imprisoned in one of the royal castles. After some months, she escaped and fled to England where she hoped to find financial and military support to retake her throne. Instead, the rumours of her involvement in Darnley’s murder, bolstered by the production of the famous Casket Letters, supposedly letters written by Mary to Bothwell, which purported to prove her role, resulted in her detainment. A commission was called to investigate her role , but it was never completed. Instead, she was held in English castles under close observation, in varying degrees of severity and suspicion, for the remainder of her life, a situation that suited both Elizabeth and Mary’s brother James, who ruled on behalf of the minor James VI.

Guy spends considerable time examining the evidence contained in the Casket Letters - which no longer exist as original documents, only as transcriptions and translations from William Cecil’s paper. He makes a convincing case that the evidence was fabricated, largely from drafts of legitimate letters written by Mary, but to other people, or to Bothwell but at other times, with brief incriminating passages forged to make them appear to be letters to Bothwell written before the murder.

Whether Mary was involved or not, her life as a queen and free agent was over. For the remainder of her life - 18 years - she would live as Elizabeth’s prisoner until finally, her implied consent to the details of the Babington plot to assassinate the English Queen led to her conviction and execution, in spite of Elizabeth’s reluctance to act against an anointed queen, even one who was willing to see her dead.

I very much enjoyed Guy’s clear and detailed examination of Mary’s life, and it left me with a greater understanding of both iconic queens.