The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (11 page)

On our wedding morning I was shrouded in funereal black. A long cloak of black taffeta covered my dark gown, and its large wide hood came down over my bright reddish-gold hair and nearly hid my face.

I would have liked to wear bridal white, as I was still young and very nearly virginal, Francis having been so immature and inept as a lover, but it was traditional that a widow wear black on her wedding day, and so I did.

The windows of the chapel at Holyrood had barely begun to be illumined by the first pink rays of the rising sun when I gave my arm to my father-in-law to be, the proud, beaming Earl of Lennox, and we walked down the aisle, with the Earl of Argyll on my other side.

Henry stood waiting at the front of the church, before the altar, looking as tall and straight as I had ever seen him—I believe he was the tallest man in the room—and as we approached him he smiled—and, very quietly, hiccupped.

Most of the members of my court were in attendance in the chapel, though nearly all of them, I knew, were opposed to my marriage to a man they considered to be an Englishman and a very high and mighty one besides. However my half-brother James Stewart, to whom I had
given the title Earl of Moray, was not there. Brother James, who had led my armies against the rebellious Gordons and had been my principal adviser ever since I came to Scotland following my mother’s death, was now a rebel himself. My half-brother Robert, on the other hand, was very prominent, standing beside Henry and looking very pleased with himself in his wedding finery.

My escorts and I reached the altar and they stood back to let Henry move into place beside me. The priest began to repeat the opening prayers, the choristers sang, we said our vows and Henry slipped a gold band onto my finger—and then he left me, whispering that he would see me later on.

He left me there, in my black cloak, to hear the mass on my own. He had not warned me that he intended to do this, and for an instant I thought he meant to abandon me, to go back to England and never see me again. I nearly panicked. But then I came to my senses, and realized what he was doing. I remembered that he had been seen attending John Knox’s long Protestant sermons at Knox’s church near the palace. Henry was Catholic, but his Catholicism was not very firm or constant. He wanted to appease the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, who had been the loudest to shout their opposition when I announced that Henry and I were to be married. By leaving the chapel the way he did he was teasing the Protestant lords, the way he had teased me ever since the previous winter. And he was doing it at my expense.

I was glad to reach my apartments after the ceremony ended and throw off my black cloak and hood. My tirewomen helped me undress and brought the lovely lace gown I was to wear for the bedding ceremony. Henry appeared, looking amiable but hardly amorous, and when I had changed into the beautiful gown, the two of us took our places in the wide canopied marital bed, while the courtiers filed in to witness our coupling.

It was an old ceremony, and a quaint one. I had been through it once before, with Francis. While the members of the court looked
on, Henry solemnly put one naked foot against my ankle, and this touching of flesh to flesh symbolized the consummation of our marriage. A sullen cheer went up from a few throats. Then we were left alone.

We were left alone, and nothing happened.

A painful silence enveloped us, broken only by the ticking of my clock and the faint noise of distant voices in other parts of the palace and of cart wheels passing over the worn cobblestones in the courtyard below.

Then Henry spoke.

“There is a pretty saying in the north of England,” he said, not looking at me but speaking to me in quite a normal tone of voice. “It is this: Birds of a feather fly together. You and I, my little wife, are not birds of a feather, though we come from a common lineage. We were not meant to share a nest.”

It was by far the longest speech he had ever made to me, and the cruelest, though I did not think then that he meant to be cruel, only bluntly truthful.

“Rather than pretend otherwise, let us agree to go on as we were when I first came here. I will join you in the afternoons, from time to time, and we will endeavor to be pleasant companions. There is a suite of rooms below this one, is there not? The two suites connect by a private stair. I will take the lower rooms as my own, and you will stay here, in comfort and in peace.”

I heard a moan of anguish erupt from my lungs.

“No!” I screamed. “You cannot do this to me!” I raised my hand to slap him but he caught it in midair.

“And what have you done to me? Made me your caged pet, your chirping canary, your gallant—”

“My husband, whom I love so dearly, so very dearly.” I sobbed then, I couldn’t help it.

He got up from the bed, and went to stand at the window. I could not stop weeping. I thought I would sob my heart out.

“You are older than I am,” he resumed after a time, “but I have known much more of the world, and of the pleasures of the flesh. You have not yet learned how to take your pleasure. It will not be difficult for you. You are beautiful, fragile. You must learn to seek out the birds of your feather, Mary, and fly with them.”

“You speak in riddles,” I said, my voice ragged, “to hide your beastly cruelty.”

He turned and faced me. “Then let me speak more plainly. You are much admired. Do as the French do, as it is said our cousin Queen Elizabeth does, and choose a lover. Choose more than one. Satisfy yourself. But do not expect me to be what I cannot.”

“So Jamie was right about you, all along,” I whispered. “And all the gossip I have not wanted to believe is true.”

He shrugged. “Who knows what lies are told by the envious? Your own reputation is far from pure.”

He took a silver flask from his pocket, opened it, and drank from it, then handed it to me.

“Shall we have a toast then? To our future.”

Despite the pain I felt, despite feeling cheated and full of a growing rage, my courage did not desert me. I seized the flask he offered, and drank the fiery liquid in it to the dregs. Then I flung it as hard as I could toward the window, breaking the pane and causing Margaret to come running in from the next room, looking worried and shaken, as Henry bolted down the stairs.

I was furious. I was enraged. I was murderous! I wanted to kill my husband, to pursue him and kill him. So strong was my lust for revenge that I really believe that if it had not been for all the sermons I had heard and all that I had been taught since childhood of Christian charity and forgiveness, I might well have done so.

Instead, I took my revenge by denying Henry the thing he wanted most: the crown matrimonial. I denied him the right, which only I could confer, to rule the kingdom of Scotland in his own name and not by virtue of being my husband.

And I had another weapon in my arsenal. Because of the haste in which we married, soon after I proposed to Henry, there had not been time to obtain a dispensation from the pope, the dispensation that would have made marriage between us as cousins valid. To wait for a dispensation would have meant a long delay. It would have taken many months for a messenger to travel from my court to Rome, then wait there for the papal chancery to draw up the proper documents, then travel back to Scotland. So I decided to go ahead with the wedding and request the dispensation later.

Henry was not aware of this; he assumed the pope had removed any hindrance to the validity of our marriage under church law. But I knew
otherwise. I knew that, until the proper documents were obtained from Rome, we were in a kind of limbo, married yet not married—which meant that Henry had no rights at all as my husband, not even under Scottish law.

It pleased me to ponder this, as thoughts of revenge burned themselves into my aching mind on long sleepless nights—nights I spent listening to the raucous shouting and laughter in Henry’s apartments below mine and wanting to drive the occupants out with a bullwhip.

For Henry had wasted no time in filling his suite of rooms with the riffraff of the streets: sailors from Leith harbor, roughs from the taverns of the Royal Mile, brigands like Red Ormiston and his thugs, low women of the sort that hid in the shadows of the wynds and let men take them for a few coins. I could hear them, night after night, laughing and shrieking at all hours, their bawdy singing keeping me awake.

Finally one night I had had enough. I commanded my guards to drive every one of my husband’s ragtag companions out of the palace, even though the result, as I might have expected, was an icy confrontation with Henry.

“I am king here,” he said. “I shall do as I like, and keep what company I like, and you will never interfere with me again.”

“I am queen here, and my guards do as I command them. You may not turn my palace into a den of vice.” (I could not believe my words, I was sounding like John Knox!)

“And since you are king,” I went on, “then you will command our men when we take the field against the rebels. My brother James has turned against me, with five hundred men. I need you to lead the loyal troops against him.”

It was another act of revenge. I knew that Henry had never been a warrior. He had never even ridden in a tournament, much less led men in warmaking against an enemy. I ordered my armorer to provide
him with a heavy suit of armor, splendidly gilded so that it shone brilliantly in the sunlight, and I gave him a huge strong warhorse to ride.

The gilded armor was fastened on, and he was hoisted up onto the warhorse, but as I had expected, Henry could barely hold his seat in the saddle. He lurched embarrassingly from side to side, and nearly fell off.

The men ridiculed him, and I did too, shouting taunts at him and calling him a coward and saying—I was to regret this—that he was not a man. In the end he simply gave up, humiliated and angry, and had to be helped off his horse and into his tent, where he promptly drank himself into a stupor. I managed to find one of my brother James’s former lieutenants, one who had stayed loyal to me when James left my court, and put him in command of my royal army. Under his leadership, and with me, clad in my steel helmet and breastplate, riding with my men and urging them on, we defeated James’s force, took our grisly trophies, and returned home to Edinburgh victorious.

As before, I found the warmaking exhilarating, despite the carnage. But in the aftermath of the conflict there was, for me, a terrible price to pay.

One night soon after our victory over the rebels I was awakened by Henry, coming up the private stairs into my bedchamber, accompanied by two lithe, handsome young men, both stark naked.

Before I was fully awake I felt Henry’s cold, clammy hand over my mouth. With his other hand he pulled my nightdress up to my waist.

“Here she is then,” he was saying to the boys, “the warrior queen. The one who wears a man’s armor and thinks she can fight like a man—and thinks I am less than a man. Well then, I’ll just have to show her that she is wrong.”

Kneeling above me, he spread my legs apart and pulled out his penis. While the boys stood by watching, he thrust himself inside me and, with a stream of insults, came to a climax.

The pain was sharp and terrible. This was nothing like Francis’s feeble attempts at lovemaking. I tried to scream but his hand was smothering me so that it was all I could do to keep breathing.

“There now,” he said when he had finished. “What do you think, was she worth a kingdom?”

I was terrified that the two boys would use me for their pleasure as well, but they did not. Instead Henry released me roughly and all three left the way they had come, leaving me panting and weeping from pain and shock, and doing my best to call out weakly for help.