Mary Queen of Scots (5 page)

On 1 September 1536 James V, king of Scots, sailed for France with a fleet of six ships and some 500 men and reached Dieppe eight or nine days later. He undertook the voyage to wed a French lady, as first arranged in 1517 by his governor, John Stewart, second duke of Albany, with Francis I in the Treaty of Rouen. Having initially appointed one of his daughters for James to wed, Francis retracted this promise in 1534 and offered him a substitute bride, Mary of Bourbon, daughter of Charles, duke of Vendôme. Departing from his court which removed to Rouen, James rode on horseback with John Tennant and six servants to Vendôme’s home at St Quentin, Picardy, to make her acquaintance. Traveling with so small an escort required that he go incognito not only for security reasons but also for greater speed since he could thereby avoid the usual pomp of royal progresses.

The fifth consecutive Scottish monarch with this name, James was a descendant of Robert Bruce, who succeeded in founding an independent dynasty despite civil war and English aggression. Beginning in 1296 Edward I had invaded Scotland almost yearly in attempts to enforce his suzerainty on the realm. Bruce and his successors countered English threats and attacks by adhering to a military agreement with France first negotiated in 1295 that ultimately gained recognition as the auld alliance. The Treaty of Rouen proposing a French bride for James continued that Franco-Scottish tradition.

The chronicles detailing personal information, such as James’s visit to St Quentin, are replete with errors, partly because their authors often composed them long after the events they recorded. It is possible, nevertheless, that Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie was correct in asserting that Mary of Bourbon had some deformity, perhaps a misshapen back.
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A disability such as this appalled her contemporaries, who believed God caused the birth of monstrous children to punish their parents for their sins, especially sexual ones.

Whether her appearance repelled James or whether he planned to take the opportunity his incognito visit to the Vendôme home offered to pressure Francis into substituting one of his two daughters for Mary cannot now be determined. After rejoining his court, James traveled toward Francis at Lyons and proposed to wed Madeleine, the elder princess.

In 1536 James was seeking a bride because of a recent adverse papal decision. At the age of 24, he was the father of some nine illegitimate children, including six sons who held monastic posts in commendam, a status that provided them with church revenues without requiring them to enter religious orders. James considered wedding his favorite mistress, Margaret Erskine, daughter of John, fifth Lord Erskine, and legitimizing their son Lord James, who was born in 1531. The obstacle to these plans was that she was the wife of Robert Douglas of Lochleven and was probably married to him when she gave birth to James’s son. After Paul III refused to nullify her marriage, James did not challenge papal authority but chose to seek the wife arranged in 1517, partly because he relied on Church revenues to supplement his limited income.

James’s dependence on papal funds was caused by the crown’s poverty; unable to afford a royal army, for example, he had to rely on noblemen’s lieges during troubled times. His realm, which was much poorer economically and financially than England, was also regionally and politically diverse. The approximately 850,000 Scots, whose occupation was mainly farming and cattle-grazing, lived in distinctly different areas, covering some 30,500 square miles, much of which was rugged and mountainous. From one-third to one-half of the population inhabited the Lowlands, which contained the realm’s capital Edinburgh with a population of some 12,000. The remainder lived in the Highlands and the Borders. The Highlanders, who spoke Gaelic rather than Lowland Scots, held stronger allegiance to their clan leaders than to the monarch, and many Border inhabitants, both Scots and English, were notorious criminals.

Writers have characterized the marriage in January 1537 of the reputedly handsome Scottish king to 16-year-old Madeleine as a love match, partly because she seems to have helped him overcome the reluctance of her father, who was concerned about her fragile health. Aware that as the elder princess, she might have to marry a stranger she had never seen, she preferred to wed the king she had met. Monarchs’ daughters, like her, often harbored ambitions to marry kings or their heirs. In 1560 Juana, the younger sister of Philip II and the widow of Emanuel John of Portugal, refused a match with Francesco Maria de’ Medici because his father Cosmo was only the duke of Florence.

In May 1537 when travel on the North Sea was less risky than in the winter, James and Madeleine sailed for Scotland accompanied by, among others, Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest of the Pléiade group of French poets. They arrived safely at Leith, Edinburgh’s harbor, on the 19th, but her father’s fears about her health were soon realized, as she died on 7 July some six weeks later. On that same day, her widowed husband wrote a letter to Francis, reporting her demise and stating that he was sending its bearer, David Beaton, abbot of Arbroath, the future cardinal archbishop of St Andrews, with a proposal, which was, as it turned out, a request for another French bride.

MARRIAGE TO MARY OF GUISE

Rather than attempting to persuade James to wed the still available Mary of Bourbon, Francis offered him Mary of Guise, the widow of Louis II, duke of Longueville, who died about a month before Madeleine. Pregnant with Longueville’s second child Louis, who was born in August but who died four months later, Mary was displeased about the possibility of marrying a foreigner. If she wed James, she would have to move to his realm and leave behind her two-year-old son Francis, the new duke. James had probably met Mary at his wedding to Madeleine, which she and her late husband Longueville attended. The advantages of Mary’s candidacy were that James was acquainted with her and obviously approved of her appearance, that she had a dowry of 150,000 livres, and that she had proved her fertility.

Ironically, after Jane Seymour died in childbirth in October 1537, Henry VIII chose to compete with his nephew for this alliance and sent Sir Peter Mewtes, a gentleman of his privy chamber, to visit Mary twice at Châteaudun Castle, the Longueville home on the Loire River. Having learned that she was a tall person, Henry informed Louis de Perreau, sieur de Castillon, the French ambassador, that as he was a big man, he required a big wife.

Henry’s diplomacy failed to prevent the marriage on 9 May 1538 of Mary and James at Châteaudun with Robert, fifth Lord Maxwell, serving as the groom’s proxy and with Erskine and Beaton in attendance. Maxwell placed a diamond ring on her finger valued at 300 crowns;
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the one for Madeleine was worth four times as much, but these varying amounts reflected the difference between a gift suitable for a king’s daughter and one for his cousin.

The descendants of Charlemagne as well as John II of France through the female line, the Guises were originally from Lorraine, a semi-autonomous duchy of the Holy Roman Empire that was incorporated into France in 1766. Before his death in 1508, René II of Anjou, titular king of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem, and duke of Lorraine, divided his territories between his two older sons, the first Anthony, succeeding to the duchy of Lorraine, and the second Claude, inheriting many of his father’s French estates and later gaining the dukedom of Guise. Claude’s wife, Antoinette of Bourbon, gave birth to ten surviving children, the oldest of whom was Mary, born on 20 November 1515 at Bar-le-Duc, their château built above the Ornain River, and the youngest of whom was René, future marquis of Elboeuf, born in 1536. After Claude’s mother Queen Philippa of Guelders retired to a nunnery in 1519, he moved his family into the ancestral home at Joinville, which was situated on a hill above the Marne River.

On 10 June 1538 Mary and her household left Le Havre in three royal galleys and landed at Crail in Fife on Trinity Sunday. They traveled to Balcomie Castle, some two miles distant where James met her the next day and escorted her to St Andrews, which lies about ten miles away on a promontory jutting into the North Sea. Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, the king’s herald and future Lyon King of Arms, produced her entry pageants. In the high middle ages, citizens began celebrating their rulers’ first entries into their towns in festivities that extolled and justified royal policies and applauded their realm’s peace and prosperity. James encouraged this practice, recognizing that the creative achievements and wealth displayed on these occasions helped to reinforce his realm’s position among the states of Western Europe.

Before the new Abbey Gate at St Andrews, a lady disguised as an angel stepped from an artificial cloud and delivered the keys of Scotland to Mary. Subsequently, Lindsay gave an oration exhorting her to serve God, obey her husband, and live in a pure state according to God’s will. Afterward, James accompanied her to the archbishop’s guest house for the night, and they were married for a second time in the cathedral the next morning.

On 16 November Lindsay supervised the festivities for Mary’s entry into Edinburgh. She followed the traditional path, entering the city at the West Port, processing up the hill to the castle, then moving down High Street, and exiting at the Netherbow Port, the entrance to the Canongate, on the way to Holyrood Palace. At set locations, the citizens presented pageants featuring biblical scenes, moral allegories, and mythological topics, the splendor and creativity of which signaled the existence of a flourishing Renaissance culture in Scotland.

Evidence of it could also be found in royal architecture. James had continued his father’s remodeling efforts at Holyrood, Linlithgow, Falkland, Dunfermline, and the two nearly impregnable castles of Stirling and Edinburgh, although the latter was mostly used as a prison before its apartments were refurbished in 1566. Constructed on a smaller scale than Mary of Guise had known in France, where the Loire châteaux, for example, are truly grand structures, the new facades and decorations of the Scottish palaces represented some of the earliest and finest examples of Renaissance building on the British Isles. Foreign developments inspired James’s architectural vision, but his innovations were refined into an unmistakable and impressive native style.

In the first phase between 1534 and 1536, he may have followed Henry VIII’s lead, as the northwest Tower at Holyrood, a quadrangular structure on the west side of the Augustinian Abbey, and the gatehouse and fountain at Linlithgow recall English designs. Overlooking a loch about 19 miles west of Edinburgh, Linlithgow, the queen’s jointure house, reportedly greatly pleased her. It had castellated chivalric imagery, a noble courtyard, and an elaborate fountain with three tiers of basins decorated with medallion heads that spouted out water to basins below. Its long galleries on the east and south also possessed an Italianate air.

On returning from France James brought with him wines, jewels, tapestries, and works of art and introduced architecture reflecting his admiration for French Renaissance models of Italianate style. At Falkland in Fife, his favorite palace, and at Stirling, James employed masons sent to him by the duke and duchess of Guise. With its delicate classical buttresses fronted by columns on the facades, Falkland reflects the architecture of Villiers-Cotterets, a French château. However, the royal house at Stirling, with its life-sized sculpted statues and decorated ceilings with wooden roundels, is Scotland’s finest example of Renaissance architecture and compares favorably with Châteaudun and Joinville. A final palace at the royal Benedictine Abbey of Dunfermline was created by enlarging the king’s guest house there. Funds extracted from the Church made possible this extensive building program.

In the autumn of 1539, one year after Mary’s Edinburgh entry, James accompanied her on a pilgrimage to St Adrian’s Shrine on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth. Believing that childbirth required a special divine intervention, barren women customarily visited this shrine to seek assistance in conceiving. Many women also assumed that touching something infertile or barren would affect their childbearing abilities. Catherine de’ Medici, for example, refused to ride on a mule for fear she would somehow take on its infertility. When in 1539 shortly after the St Adrian pilgrimage, Mary discovered she was pregnant, James ordered her coronation to take place, and Cardinal Beaton crowned her on 22 February 1540 at Holyrood Abbey.

Their first child, his father’s namesake, was born on 22 May. The next year, on 24 April, another son, christened Robert, was born. To their parents’ dismay both infants died within a week of Robert’s birth. In a six-year period, Mary was delivered of four children, only one of whom, Longueville, was still alive, but in 1551 he also died prematurely. Historians have estimated that some 34 per cent of all early modern English children died before the age of ten. When compared to the modern English percentage of 2.4 for this age group, this toll was exceedingly high but even higher for Mary’s male offspring, 75 per cent of whom failed to reach their tenth year.

BIRTH OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

On 8 December 1542, the day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, the queen gave birth to a namesake daughter. Although other dates, especially the 7th, have been credited, the 8th was the day on which Mary celebrated her birthday. It is likely that she was born at midnight or shortly thereafter, since contemporaries were often inconsistent in dating an event that occurred in the early morning hours. In recounting Darnley’s death, for example, Mary related that on the evening of 9 February about two hours after midnight, his house was blown up.
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Even the official trial record placed his murder on the 9th, although it actually occurred about 2:00 a.m. on the 10th.

Born at Linlithgow, Mary was christened at nearby St Michael’s during a time of great trouble for her realm. On 24 November a Scottish raiding party lost the Battle of Solway Moss to the English, and although only a few were killed, some 1,000 became English prisoners. Afterwards, James, who was not present at the defeat, visited his consort at Linlithgow
en route
to Falkland where by 6 December he lay seriously ill with a fever. Lindsay of Pitscottie’s claim that when James learned about Mary’s birth, he predicted, “Adieu, farewell, it came with a lass, it will pass with a lass,” was undoubtedly an invention, perhaps created by the chronicler.
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During the days before his death on 14 December, James was mostly delirious and incoherent from “a serious illness of the mind,” possibly suffering from cholera or the plague.
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James’s alleged comment alluded to the Stewarts’ descent through Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie, the wife of Walter Fitzalan, sixth Grand Steward of Scotland, but Mary’s accession did not eliminate her family’s name from the dynasty. She married Darnley, who was a Stewart and the father of her son, who took his family name.