Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (50 page)

The negotiations between the courts of London and Vienna continued at a painfully slow pace; but the delays and disputes over religion were acceptable to Elizabeth if they deferred any final decision. It meant also that she was still on conciliatory terms with both branches of the Habsburg empire, represented by Philip II of Spain and the new emperor Maximilian II. Philip himself was assured of her suitability as a bride to his cousin; his ambassador bought information from the queen’s laundresses about her menstrual cycle.

At this time, too, attempts were made to standardize her painted image. At the end of 1563 William Cecil had drafted a proclamation which criticized the depiction of the queen ‘in painting, graving and printing’; these unflattering or unsophisticated portraits provoked ‘complaints among her loving subjects’. It had been decided that ‘some cunning [skilful] person’ would create a great original on which all other portraits might be modelled. Since portraits were also often used in marriage negotiations, the queen might have desired a more perfect image. In this decade, too, she began to entertain hopes of an alchemical elixir of life that would maintain her youth and beauty; William Cecil noted in his diary that Cornelius Lanoy, a Dutchman, ‘was committed to the Tower for abusing the queen’s majesty, in promising to make the elixir’.

Yet her negotiations with the Habsburgs were overshadowed by the devices of Mary Stuart. The Scottish queen’s attention had turned to a young man, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; he had been born in Leeds, but his father was the fourth earl of Lennox, a prominent Scottish nobleman who had been forced into exile by a rival faction. Yet more pertinently Darnley was the grandson of Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and cousin to Mary Stuart herself. On the Scottish side, he was directly descended from James II. Any alliance with him would immensely strengthen Mary Stuart’s claim to the throne after the death of Elizabeth. Darnley was also a Catholic, and the clergy of the Scottish kirk feared above
all else the renewed prospect of Catholic supremacy. The young man was given a passport to visit Scotland, where of course he paid his respects to his cousin the queen. She saw him ‘running at the ring’, a chivalric game for horsemen, and soon enough they became inseparable. Mary had become genuinely infatuated with him, almost at first sight. She was in many respects quixotic and impulsive, relying upon her instinct rather than her judgement; she did not have her rival’s gift of calculation.

In the course of these marital games the Scottish ambassador, Sir James Melville, was obliged to haunt the court of Elizabeth in search of information or gossip. In his memoirs, written in the early years of the seventeenth century, he left certain vignettes concerning the conversation and behaviour of the queen that throw an interesting light upon her character. She discussed with him the female costume of different countries, and told him that she possessed the ‘weeds’ of every civilized country. She proved the point by wearing a fresh set of clothes every day.

She asked him ‘what coloured hair was reputed best, and whether my queen’s hair or hers was the best, and which of the two was the fairest’? He replied, in the manner of the Sibylline oracle, that ‘the fairness of both was not their worst fault’. She pressed for a more direct response. ‘You are the fairest queen in England and ours the fairest queen in Scotland.’ Still she was not satisfied with his answer. He was obliged to make a judgement. ‘You are both the fairest ladies in your courts; you are the whitest, but our queen is very lovely.’

‘Which of us,’ she now asked him, ‘is of the highest stature?’

‘Our queen.’

‘Then she is over high, for I am neither too high nor too low.’

When Elizabeth asked him about Mary’s pastimes, he told her that his mistress liked sometimes to play on the lute or virginals. She then asked him whether the Scottish queen played well.

‘Reasonably well,’ he replied, ‘for a queen.’

There then followed a contrived piece of showmanship. After dinner the queen’s cousin, Lord Hunsdon, invited Melville to a retired gallery where he promised him some enchanting music. He whispered, as if imparting a secret, that it was ‘the queen playing on her virginals’. The ambassador listened for a moment and then
very boldly put aside a tapestry that hung before the doorway of a recess, to see the great queen at her virginals. Her back was to him but she turned her head and seemed surprised to find him there; she rose from her instrument, affecting embarrassment and alleging that ‘she used not to play before men, but when she was solitary, to eschew melancholy, and asked “How I came there?” ’

Melville replied that he had been drawn by the sweetest melody, which gracious answer pleased the queen. She sat down upon a cushion, while he knelt. She then provided him with a cushion to place beneath his knee. It was a breach of etiquette but the queen insisted. She demanded to know ‘whether she or the Queen of Scots played best?’ Melville gave the palm to her. She then spoke to him in French, Italian and Dutch as a sign of her proficiency.

Two days later she decided that the ambassador must see her dance. At the end of the performance she once again wished to know which queen danced best. He replied that ‘my queen danced not so high or disposedly as she did’. By this he meant that Elizabeth’s dancing was more mannered and deliberate than that of Mary.

It is not at all clear that Melville’s recollections are always accurate. Yet he is surely right to have emphasized the implicit rivalry or jealousy between the two queens. When he returned to his native country, Mary asked him if he believed that Elizabeth’s words of affection for her were genuine. He replied that ‘in my judgement there was neither plain dealing nor upright meaning, but great dissimulation, emulation and fear that [Mary’s] princely qualities should over soon chase her out and displace her from the kingdom’.

In the early spring of 1565 Mary was so enamoured of Darnley that she helped to nurse him through an attack of measles that may in fact have been a manifestation of syphilis. An English envoy wrote to Elizabeth that ‘The matter is irrevocable. I do find this Queen so captivate either by love or cunning – or rather to say truly by boasting and folly – that she is not able to keep promise with herself, and therefore not able to keep promise with your Majesty in these matters.’ Her desire and wilfulness had outrun her discretion. Darnley was twenty, and she three years his senior.

By May they had made a secret engagement and, in July, they
were married without waiting for the papal dispensation from Rome allowing the first cousins to unite. She then proclaimed him king of Scotland without asking the advice of her parliament. She had married in haste, but she would soon repent it. Darnley was as vain as he was unbalanced; he was arrogant and dissolute; he was weak-willed; within a short time he had managed to offend most of the Scottish nobility. ‘The bruits here are wonderful,’ the English envoy wrote at the time, ‘men’s talk very strange, the hatred towards Lord Darnley and his house marvellous great, his pride intolerable, his words not to be borne . . .’ He added that in token of his ‘manhood’ Darnley is eager to ‘let blows fly where he knows they will be taken’. He was, in other words, an egregious bully.

The young queen was herself no stranger to conflict. Her illegitimate half-brother, James Stuart, first earl of Moray, espoused the Protestant cause and sought to lead a group of rebels against her. Mary summoned 5,000 of her supporters, and from summer to autumn of 1565 mercilessly harried her enemies in a series of skirmishes that became known as the Chaseabout Raid. ‘I defy them,’ she said, ‘what can they do, and what dare they do?’ She rode fast and furiously; she wore a steel helmet and carried a brace of pistols at her side. Eventually she chased her half-brother over the border into England, and in her triumph declared that she could lead her troops to the walls of London. She was a formidable opponent.

The marriage of the two Catholics posed an immediate problem for the English queen and her council. It seemed that their union was a plain hint of their right to the succession of the English throne. The Catholics of England would consider them to be their natural and proper leaders. If the young couple also produced a son and heir, which seemed most likely, an already complicated situation would become infinitely worse. In the face of Elizabeth’s refusal to marry, many other of her subjects were also prepared to countenance Mary and Darnley as the least bad alternative to a virgin queen. One day in the spring of this year the French ambassador had come upon Elizabeth playing chess.

‘Madam, you have before you the game of life. You lose a pawn; it seems a small matter; but with the pawn you lose the game.’

‘I see your meaning. Lord Darnley is but a pawn, but unless I look to it I shall be check-mated.’

Another reported conversation can be added to this account. Mary Stuart was discussing with some courtiers a portrait of the queen of England and debating whether it resembled the great original. ‘No,’ said Mary, ‘it is not like her. For I am queen of England.’

The members of the council discussed the matter endlessly. They even prepared for war, but in the end nothing was done. Elizabeth declared that Mary ‘doth look for my death’. In this period the queen of England became seriously ill with a fever commonly known as ‘the flux’. The strain of her perilous situation, perhaps, was beginning to affect her.

Yet by the end of the year it was apparent that all was not well with the marriage of Mary and Darnley. She had expected him to be pliant and tractable; instead he revealed himself to be foolish and obstinate. He carried himself like a king in role as well as name, and therefore became intolerable. Mary would not allow anyone to usurp her place, and by degrees began to demote him. He was now known as ‘the queen’s husband’ rather than king, and he was forbidden the use of the royal arms. He was drinking excessively and, when she once tried to remonstrate with him, he ‘gave her such words as she left the place in tears’. His demand for the matrimonial crown was refused. ‘I know for certain’, an English agent at the Scottish court wrote, ‘that this queen repents her marriage – that she hates him and all his kin.’

A further complication arose in the shape of Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio or Riccio, a gentleman of charming and persuasive manners. He was an accomplished musician who enchanted her with love-songs; he soon became her closest adviser and confidant. It was he, perhaps, who counselled the queen to maintain a distance from Darnley. He had also offended many Scottish nobles, perhaps on the sole grounds that he was a foreigner who had more influence with the queen than did they. As a Catholic, too, he was cause of offence to the Protestant nobility. Those who had been chased out of Scotland by Mary, with the earl of Moray at their head, were seeking revenge.

They decided to enlist the help of Darnley; he was, at least, of
Scottish stock. They informed him that Rizzio was the sole cause of his decline in influence, and that the secretary had ‘done him the most dishonour that can be to any man’. He entered a bond of association with them where, in exchange for his support and assistance in the murder of Rizzio, they would assert his claim to the throne. In particular Moray and his followers were to be pardoned for their rebellion of the previous year. After the murder Mary was to be consigned to Stirling Castle; the queen was in fact already six months pregnant, but the noblemen seem to have convinced Darnley that the child was fathered by Rizzio.

On the evening of Saturday 9 March 1566 Mary was entertaining Rizzio and some other friends in a small room next to her bedchamber in the royal palace of Holyrood; just after they had assembled Darnley led his fellow conspirators into the presence of the shocked company by means of his private staircase. When they thrust the queen aside and laid hands on Rizzio he cried out ‘Justice! Justice! Save me, my lady!’ He tried to cling to Mary’s skirts but the men dragged him away and hustled him into an adjoining room, where he was dispatched with fifty-six dagger wounds. His body was then dragged down a staircase and left at its foot.

When Mary asked her husband why he had committed this crime he repeated the slander that Rizzio ‘had more company of her body’ than he did. She stayed in her private chambers for the next few hours but, within a short time, had managed to convince Darnley that he would be the next victim of the nobles. She had divined their malevolent intent very well. They had planned all along to lay the blame for Rizzio’s murder on Darnley alone, and to inform the queen that her husband had decided to commit the murder in front of her; he wished to disable her and perhaps the unborn child.

Darnley was by now thoroughly alarmed, and at midnight on 11 March he and Mary left the palace by means of the servants’ quarters and fled on horseback to Dunbar. The other nobles, deserted by Darnley, dispersed; many of them took shelter across the border in Berwick. Mary returned in triumph to Edinburgh where she meditated vengeance on her feckless and unstable husband. But revenge would have to wait upon the birth of her child.
That child was itself the subject of whispered report; it was claimed by some that Rizzio was the real father. The somewhat unattractive features of James VI of Scotland, who was to become James I of England, were enough to guarantee the longevity of such rumours.

Elizabeth was shocked at the outrage of murder committed in the presence of a reigning queen. ‘Had I been in Queen Mary’s place,’ she told the Spanish ambassador, ‘I would have taken my husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it.’ As she was at the same time negotiating a marriage with the archduke Charles with the connivance of the Spanish, she hastened to add that she would not take any such action against
him
.

In the early summer of the year Mary Stuart gave birth to a son. A messenger arrived at the palace of Greenwich in the course of a grand party; he went up to Cecil and whispered in his ear. Then Cecil went over to his mistress. She is reported to have slumped into a chair and told those around her that ‘The queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.’ The party came to an end. This at least is the story of Melville’s
Memoirs
. As Thomas Fuller once observed, ‘when men’s memories do arise, it is time for History to haste abed’. But if the queen’s words have been improved in the telling, they perfectly suit the situation.