An Accidental Tragedy (24 page)

Conveniently, Huntly’s third son – he had nine – Sir John Gordon, had just escaped from prison and fled to the refuge of the Gordon lands in the north. Sir John was a handsome, if hotheaded, young man whose various exploits had been indulged by his father. He had been cynically encouraged by Lethington and Lord James to believe that he was a suitable prospective husband for Mary and that she would favour the match. This was, in fact, an early version of the honey trap so beloved by the ‘cold warriors’ of the 1950s. The hope was that his excesses would lead to the need for his arrest and the extirpation of the Catholic Gordons. He fell neatly into the trap when he was imprisoned for his part in a street brawl which was the result of a complex feud between the Gordons and the Ogilvies, and in which he wounded Lord Ogilvie.

Ogilvie of Findlater had disinherited his own son, James, in favour of Sir John Gordon, having been told by his second wife that his son, young James, had made sexual advances to her. The rumour-mongering wife then openly became the mistress of Sir John, but did not deliver the land he had expected her to bring with her, whereupon he shut her up in a form of house arrest and abandoned her. He had now fallen for the false information that Mary was enamoured of him – they had only met in the social circumstances of the court – and believed that her favour would protect him. When he met the disinherited James Ogilvie in the street, a brawl ensued. Sir John had escaped from prison, which provided the perfect excuse for Mary’s progress to combine pleasure with a punitive expedition, accompanied by the disgruntled James Ogilvie, and ride north in pursuit of the miscreant.

Mary travelled with a considerable entourage, holding privy councils in Perth on 14 and 15 August and then travelling on to Aberdeen. Randolph was a reluctant member of her party: ‘The journey is cumbersome, painful, and marvellous long, the weather extremely foul and cold, all victuals marvellous dear.’ Huntly stayed at his house, some three miles outside the burgh, and refused to come to meet Mary, sending the countess with her train of servants in his place; likewise Mary refused to go to meet the earl. The countess pled for mercy for her son, Mary refused and Sir John gathered 1,000 horsemen to harry the royal party en route for Inverness. Randolph was certain that Sir John’s treasonable rebellion was directly on his father’s advice.

A further bone of contention was that Huntly, without any royal authority, had styled himself as Earl of Moray since 1549. When Mary elevated Lord James to the earldom of Mar, she forgot that Mar was the hereditary title of the Erskines. She had, therefore, been obliged to transfer the title to Lord Erskine and Lord James had then, to Huntly’s fury, been created Earl of Moray.

Mary reached Inverness on 11 September and, since it was a royal castle, demanded its surrender. The commander of the castle, Alexander Gordon, refused, but the local people rallied in support of Mary, and the castle, which had only some twelve or fourteen men as a garrison, was taken. Randolph reported, ‘The captain was hanged and his head set up on the castle, some others were condemned to perpetual prison, the rest received mercy.’

Mary spent five days in Inverness meeting loyal Highlanders, whom she regarded as rather quaint pets who spoke Gaelic and who wore plaid kilts and cloaks. They were every bit as entertaining as the Highlandmen who had appeared in masques at Chambord, and Mary was delighted with them. Randolph told Cecil on 18 September,

In all these garboils [adventures] I assure your honour I never saw her the merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find! She repenteth nothing but, when the lords and others at Inverness came in
the mornings from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and knapskall [leather jerkin and helmet], a Glasgow buckler [small single-handed shield] and a broad sword.

For the tomboyish aspect of Mary this was total bliss. She could, while surrounded by a strong personal bodyguard, pretend that she was leading armed men into war; she could be a warrior queen; she could be a hero of the romances; and she was completely removed from the intellectual manoeuvring of politics. It was play-acting of the most satisfying sort.

On her return to Aberdeen she did come close to actual conflict when Sir John attempted an ambush as she passed the River Spey, but Mary’s forces were now augmented by loyal Highlanders. Sir John’s support therefore melted into the woods. She sent trumpeters to call for the surrender of two Gordon houses, but both refused, and she was glad to be welcomed back into Aberdeen, where she was presented with a silver-gilt cup holding 500 crowns. Unfortunately, the city was not equipped for such a large royal incursion and Randolph’s growing enjoyment of the campaign was spoiled by finding that he had to share a bed with Lethington.

Events were now moving towards a final confrontation with Huntly who, on 25 September, was ordered to return the cannon he held on the queen’s behalf. Captain Hay returned from Huntly’s castle of Strathbogie with amazing news. Huntly claimed he was appalled at his son’s behaviour, and ‘with many tears and heavy sobs’ assured Hay that the cannon would be returned within forty-eight hours. The countess took Hay into her chapel, ‘all ornaments and Mass robes lying ready upon the altar with cross and candles standing on it’, and explained that Huntly was being persecuted for his adherence to Rome by the evil counsellors surrounding Mary. When this was reported to Mary and the council, she declared that she believed not a word of it and they all had ‘much good pastime’. There were skirmishes on both sides and, on 17 October, Huntly was ‘put
to the horn’, that is to say he was outlawed and his property declared forfeit while he was under royal command to surrender himself ‘to the Queen’s mercy’. When Mary’s men approached the front of Strathbogie, Huntly escaped without his boots or sword over a garden wall at the back of the house, leaving the countess alone with only a few servants. Huntly now took direct action and advanced on Aberdeen with about 700 men while Lord James with the Earls of Atholl and Morton marched against him on 28 October with over 2,000, including arquebusiers. This was the Battle of Corrichie, which was all over in a few minutes. Two of Huntly’s sons, the reprobate Sir John and his younger brother Kenneth, were taken prisoner and Huntly himself was captured on foot. He was placed on horseback and ‘without blow or stroke . . . suddenly [fell] from his horse stark dead’. The
Diurnal of Occurrents
said that he ‘burst and swelled’, but it is more likely the cause of death was a stroke. His corpse was taken to the Tolbooth in Aberdeen, where it was embalmed before being taken to Edinburgh, where the embalming was repeated. In the case of treason against the monarch, the corpse would have to appear in court.

The troublesome Sir John was tried in Aberdeen. Young Kenneth was pardoned on account of his youth, as was George, the next son, although he was placed under house arrest at Dunbar. Sir John was, according to Buchanan, ‘A handsome young man in the very flower of youth, more worthy of a royal bed than to be cheated by the offer of it.’ His execution was a grisly affair, however, as the executioner botched the job and several blows were needed to sever the head, Sir John all the while declaring his love for Mary. Since he was executed for treason against the crown, Mary was obliged to attend, but she fainted and had to be carried to her lodgings. Subsequently, Mary had to attend the equally grisly trial of Huntly’s now strongly smelling corpse in Edinburgh on 18 May 1563, when the open coffin was stood upright to face her on the royal throne. He was found guilty and the name of the Earl of Huntly was declared extinct, all his titles passing officially to Lord James as
Earl of Moray. Bizarrely, for a Catholic queen, the result of the raid was the destruction of the most powerful Catholic family in Scotland.

Back in Edinburgh, Mary started to relax, especially when good news arrived from France.

CHAPTER NINE

The dancing grows hot

In what would become known as the French Wars of Religion, the Guise family were in the ascendancy, occupying Rouen on 26 October 1562 after a long and bitter siege. Elizabeth’s forces, who had been supporting the Huguenots, were driven back to Le Havre. At Holyrood Mary celebrated her family’s victory with a series of balls leading up to what would be a splendid celebration of Christmas. Knox, disgusted with what he saw as the celebration of Protestant deaths, commented, ‘the dancing began to grow hot’.

Mary should have realised that in her Protestant country celebrating the Catholic victories of her family over the Huguenots was provocative in the extreme, and, instead of simply dismissing her antics as an example of a nineteen-year-old girl’s insensitivity, Knox rose to the attack in a passionate sermon in St Giles. In mid December he preached on the text of ‘Oh, understand, ye kings, and be learned, ye that judge the earth’, focussing on Mary’s having ‘danced excessively until after midnight’. This was delivered in the presence of some of Mary’s bodyguard, who promptly reported the import of the sermon to the queen. Mary could have ignored the outburst but decided to try to swat the fly, and Knox was sent for.

This interview was more formal, with Lethington, Moray, Morton and some of the witnesses from the guard also present. Mary started with a long, previously prepared, harangue accusing Knox of attempting to bring her into disrepute with her people. Knox simply, although inevitably at length, said that she had been misinformed and that he had only condemned dancing
when pleasure in the dancing came before the vocation – that is the Christian faith – of the dancers. He also condemned dancing to celebrate the ‘displeasure of God’s people’ – in this case the Huguenots. Mary backed down and acknowledged that he differed from her uncles but that, if he had any quarrel with her, ‘come to myself and I shall hear you’. His answer was that he was sure that her uncles were the ‘enemy of God’ and that she could hear him any day in his pulpit. He was now waiting on the court and thus was absent from his book. Mary and the courtiers were astonished at his apparent rudeness, and she replied weakly, ‘You will not always be at your book,’ and swept out. Asked by some of the court if he was not afraid to behave in this way, he shrugged and asked, ‘Why should the pleasing face of a gentlewoman frighten me?’

Mary now put a cautious foot into not only the politics of Scotland, but also that of England and France. In Scotland she realised that the downfall of Huntly had worked to the personal advantage of Moray, whose power base became stronger. She started to exclude him from her council, using Lethington as her chief adviser and appointing Morton as chancellor. Then, at the end of December 1562, she gave Lethington instructions to offer her services to Elizabeth as an arbitrator between Guise and Condé – ‘to see the matter amicably compounded and taken up to the reasonable and honourable content of both parties . . . we would be glad to become a mediatrix’ – and also to ensure that Mary’s claim to the throne was brought before the English parliament. How Mary, a Catholic Guise, ever thought she could be acceptable either to Condé or to Catherine is unfathomable, and, on the second point, she and Lethington must have known that Cecil was manoeuvring to put a Bill to parliament specifically excluding her from the succession. Then, in January 1563, she fired off three letters. The first, on 29 January, was to Montmorency, the constable, who had been taken prisoner by Condé at the Battle of Dreux in December, sympathising with him on his imprisonment. Since she did not write to Condé, who had coincidentally also been taken prisoner at the same battle,
her powers as a ‘mediatrix’ are seen to be limited. The second letter was to her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was about to visit Pope Pius IV, asking him to assure His Holiness that she would rather die than change her faith and give protection to heresy, and that it was her determination to reintroduce the Catholic faith to Scotland and obey all the recommendations of the Council of Trent. The third letter was to Pope Pius IV himself, reiterating what she had told her uncle. The latter two letters were written in Italian, a tongue in which Mary was not fluent, although she would have learnt some of it when a child; the letters would have been polished by David Rizzio, now no longer just a singer in the Chapel Royal but Mary’s Italian secretary and soon to replace Raulet, her private secretary. However, throughout her time in Scotland Mary made only token efforts to accommodate the Catholic faith, although she was properly protective of the Catholics in Scotland and did make efforts to prevent their persecution. Her letters to Pius were merely empty promises. Her confusion of loyalties is evident and any idea that she could involve herself in international, or even local, politics can be seen to be absurd.

The advancement of Rizzio and the continued maintenance of Mary’s largely French personal household made it obvious that her heart was not wholly in Scotland. Her close family were all in France and she claimed to think in French, not Scots. She also favoured the courtliness of France, with its florid compliments and meaningless flirtations, habits which her Scots council found unnecessarily exotic in their sovereign, while Mary longed for the artificial elegance of Chenonceau.