Mary Stuart

M
ARY STUART WAS ONLY SIX DAYS OLD
when she became Queen of Scotland, thus obeying in spite of herself what appears to have been the law of her life—to receive too soon and without conscious joy what Fate had to give her. On the same dreary December day in 1542 that Mary was born at Linlithgow Castle, her father, James V, was breathing his last in the royal palace at Falkland, little more than twenty miles away. Although he had hardly reached the age of thirty-one, he was broken on the wheel of life, tired of his crown and wearied of perpetual warfare. He had proved a brave and chivalrous man, fundamentally cheerful by disposition, a passionate friend of the arts and of women, trusted by his people. Many a time would he put on a disguise in order to participate unrecognised at village merry-makings, dancing and joking with the peasant folk. But this unlucky scion of an unlucky house had been born into a wild epoch and within the borders of an intractable land. From the outset he seemed foredoomed to a tragical destiny.

A self-willed and inconsiderate neighbour, Henry VIII, tried to force the Scottish King to introduce the Reformation into the northern realm. But James V remained a faithful son of the old Church. The lords and nobles gleefully took every opportunity to create trouble for their sovereign, stirring up contention and misunderstanding, and involving the studious and pacific James in further turmoil and war. Four years earlier, when he was suing for Mary of Guise's hand in marriage, he made clear in a letter to the lady how heavy a task it was to act as King to the rebellious and rapacious clans. “Madam,” he wrote in this moving epistle (penned in French),

All the disasters foretold by the King in this letter took place, and even worse things befell the writer. The two sons Mary of Guise brought into the world died in the cradle, so that James, in the flower of his manhood, had no heir growing up beside him, an heir who should relieve him of the crown which, as the years passed, pressed more heavily on his brow. In despite of his own will and better judgement, he was pressed by his nobles to enter the field against England, a mighty enemy, only to be deserted by them in the eleventh hour. At Solway Moss, Scotland lost not only the battle but likewise her honour. Forsaken by the chieftains of the clans, the troops hardly put up even the semblance of a fight, but ran leaderless hither and thither. James, too, a man usually so acutely aware of his knightly duty, when the decisive hour came was no longer in a position to strike down the hereditary foe, for he was already wounded unto death. They bore him away, feverish and weary, and laid him to bed in his palace at Falkland. He had had his fill of the senseless struggle and of a life which had become nothing but a burden to him.

Mist wreaths darkened the window panes on 9th December 1542, when there came a messenger knocking at the door. He announced to the sick King that a daughter had been born to the House of Stuart—an heiress to the throne. But James V was by that time so near his end that he lacked the strength to feel happy at the tidings or to harbour any hope as to the issue. Why was he not granted a son, a male heir? The dying man could see nothing but disaster in every event, nothing but tragedy and defeat. In a resigned voice, he answered the messenger: “Farewell, it came with ane lass and it will pass with ane lass.” This dismal prophecy proved to be the last words he was destined to utter. With a sigh, he turned his face to the wall and, heeding nobody, refused to answer any questions. A few days later he was buried, and Mary Stuart, before she had been given time to open her baby eyes and look around her, became Queen of the Scottish realm.

To be a Stuart and at the same time to be Queen of Scotland was to be placed indeed under an evil star and to be exposed to a twofold doom, for no Stuart had so far been happy on the Scottish throne, nor had any occupied it for long. James I and James III were murdered; James II and James IV perished on the battlefield; while for two of their descendants, the unwitting infant Mary and her grandchild Charles I, an even crueller end was in prospect, for they both died on the scaffold. Not one of this Atrides-race ever reached the zenith of life's course, not one was born under a happy star. The Stuarts were always to be at war with enemies without, with enemies within the frontiers of their homeland, with themselves; they were surrounded by unrest, and unrest raged perpetually in their hearts. Just as they could find no peace for their own turbulent spirits, so they could not safeguard peace for their country. Those who should have proved the most loyal of their subjects were the least to be depended upon—lords and barons of the dark, strong land, the whole knighthood, inconstant and headstrong, wild and unbridled, rapacious and rejoicing in the fight, constantly betraying and betrayed. As Ronsard sighed during his enforced stay in this fog-bound region, “
c'est ung pays barbare et une gent brutelle
”—This is a barbaric country with a brutal people. Themselves acting the king on their estates, behind the massive walls of their strongholds they would herd the clansmen, who were their ploughmen and shepherds, into vast armies so as to carry on their endless feuds and forays—for these autocrats of the clans knew only one genuine pleasure, and that pleasure was war. “A bonnie fecht” was their delight; they were goaded on by jealousy; their one thought was to have power and ever more power. The French ambassador wrote: “Money and personal advantage are the only sirens to whose voices the Scottish lords will lend an ear. To try and bring them to a sense of their devoir towards their prince, to talk to them of honour, justice, virtue, decent and reliable negotiations, merely incites them to laughter.” In their amoral combativeness and cupidity they resembled the Italian condottieri, though lacking their culture, and being even more unbridled in their instincts. Thus they were ceaselessly battling for precedence; and the ancient and powerful clans of the Gordons, the Hamiltons, the Arrans, the Maitlands, the Crawfords, the Lindsays, the Lennoxes, the Argylls, were unendingly at one another's throats. During certain periods they would be fighting their age-long feuds; during others, swearing a pact—which was never of long duration!—that they might outwit and overthrow a third party; though they were never tired of forming cliques and factions, none of these minor leagues ever possessed any internal cohesion; and no bond of blood or of kinship by marriage was able to break down the relentless feeling of envy and enmity that existed among them. A vestige of the heathen barbarian lived on in their wild souls, whether they called themselves Protestants or Catholics; and they took up with either faith according to which would be most profitable to their ambitions. They were genuine descendants of Macbeth and Macduff, the fierce thanes of Shakespearian drama.

One cause only was capable of bringing this envious rabble to act in concert: to attack their liege lord, their King; for they knew neither what loyalty meant nor obedience. If, in actual fact, this “pack of rascals” (as Burns, that true son of his native soil, nicknamed them) tolerated a shadow king to rule over their castles and estates, this was made possible solely through the jealousies entertained by one clan against another. The Gordons helped to keep the crown on the Stuarts' heads merely that it might not fall to the Hamiltons; whereas the Hamiltons swore fealty to the King to keep the Gordons out. But woe to him who should try to act as a genuine king in Scotland, should endeavour to introduce discipline and order into the realm, should, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, set his will up against the arrogance and greed of his nobles! In such circumstances, they would join forces to frustrate the designs of the sovereign, and if the issue could not be solved on the battlefield, it could easily be dealt with through the assassin's dirk.

This last outpost of Europe towards the northern seas that lash its rugged coasts was indeed a tragic land, perpetually rent in sunder by antagonistic passions, dark and romantic as a saga, a poverty-stricken land to boot, since unremitting warfare crushed every effort to make it prosperous. The few towns, which hardly deserved the name seeing that they consisted of a huddle of wretched hovels clustering for protection around a stronghold, were eternally being plundered and destroyed by fire, so that it was impossible for them to acquire wealth or to bring the semblance of well-being to a settled burgherdom. We may still behold today the ruins of the gloomy and domineering castles wherein the nobles dwelt, castles by courtesy, for these buildings show none of the ornate brilliance we are accustomed to find in such edifices, nor is it easy to imagine any courtly state possible within those austere walls. Their uses were purely for war, and there had been no scope in their construction for the gentler arts of entertainment and hospitality. Between this handful of nobles and their serfs there existed no middle estate of the realm which could serve as an efficient pillar for the maintenance of the state authority. The most populous district, that situated between Tweed and Forth, was never given a chance to prosper, for it was always being invaded by the English from over the border, its people killed and the fruits of their industry destroyed. In the northern half of the country a man could walk for hours by lonely lake shores over boundless heaths, through mysterious forests and woodlands, without spying a village, a castle, a town. Here the hamlets did not press one upon the other as they did on the overpopulated continent of Europe; here were no broad highways serving as channels for intercourse and commerce; not here, as in Holland and England, did one see the ships sail forth out of busy harbours, making for far-off strands, and bringing back gold and spices. Sheep-herding, fishing, hunting—such constituted the patriarchal occupations of the folk in northern Scotland at that date. Their customs, their laws, their wealth and their culture lay a hundred years in arrear of England and the rest of Europe. Whereas, with the advent of new times in the coast towns elsewhere banks and exchanges were beginning to flourish, in Scotland, as in biblical days, wealth was calculated by the amount of land and the number of sheep a man owned. James V, Mary's father, possessed ten thousand head, and that was the whole of his fortune. He had no crown treasure; nor had he an army, or a bodyguard wherewith to strengthen his authority, for he could not have paid for their services. Nor would his parliament, where the decisive word belonged to his lords, ever consent to vote him supplies. Everything this King needed over and above the barest necessities of life was provided by wealthy allies, France and the Pope for instance, either as a loan or as a gift, so that every carpet, every Gobelin, every chandelier to be found in his palaces, was bought with fresh humiliation.

Poverty—such was the purulent ulcer which sapped the strength from political life in this fair and hardy land. Because of the poverty and the voracity of its kings, its soldiers and its lords, this realm was ever the gruesome plaything of foreign powers. Those who fought against the King and in the cause of Protestantism were in the pay of London; those who championed the Catholic side received their emoluments from Paris, Madrid and Rome. Outsiders gladly put their hands into their pockets for the spilling of Scottish blood. A final decision had yet to be come to between England and France after perennial strife, and Scotland furnished France with a trump card in her contest with the mighty rival across the Channel. Each time the English armies set foot in Normandy, France hastened to stab England in the back. At the first summons, the Scots, who were by nature a war-lusty people, would be over the border, prepared for the enjoyment of a bonnie fecht with the “auld enemies”. Even in times of peace they were a perpetual menace to the southern realm. It became, therefore, a recognised feature of French policy to strengthen Scotland from the military point of view. What could be more natural, in the circumstances, than that England should seek to consolidate her own position by sowing discord and encouraging rebellion among the Scottish nobles? Thus the unhappy country was the cockpit of centenarian wars, of which Mary's fate was at length to mark the close.