The husband whom Elizabeth apparently had in mind was her own favourite Lord Robert Dudley. She had first mentioned his name to Maitland in the spring of 1563, when he arrived in London: jokingly, as it seemed to Maitland, she observed that Lord Robert Dudley would make a good husband for the queen of Scots. Maitland could indeed hardly fail to treat the suggestion as a pleasantry since at first sight Dudley had absolutely no obvious advantages as a husband, and a great many obvious disadvantages. His stock, far from being royal, was actually tainted by treason, his father the duke of Northumberland having been beheaded, and the title put under attainder; he himself was generally considered to be Queen Elizabeth’s paramour, and whatever the truth of their relationship, her familiarity with him had certainly caused scandal throughout Europe, and continued to do so; thirdly, his first wife Amy Robsart had died under the most suspicious circumstances, which, it was generally believed, left him free to marry Queen Elizabeth, if she would have him, and the country would accept it. Now Maitland was asked to consider this controversial figure as a husband for his own mistress, a born queen, the widow of another king, and herself highly conscious of her own position, as well as being the bearer of an unblemished character. Maitland showed himself at his diplomatic best when he answered Queen Elizabeth that it was a great proof of the love she bore to the Scottish queen ‘as she was willing to give her a thing so dearly prized by herself’, but that Queen Mary would hardly wish to deprive Queen Elizabeth of the joy and solace of Lord Robert’s companionship. In a further vein of witty invention, he suggested that Elizabeth herself should marry Dudley, and then bequeath both her husband and her kingdom to Mary when she died.3
In September 1563, the Scots had perforce to take the suggestion more seriously: Randolph was instructed to approach Queen Mary, newly arrived at the castle of Craigmillar near Edinburgh, after a western progress, and hint broadly at Queen Elizabeth’s own wishes on the subject of Mary’s marriage; he was to indicate a husband, the English queen added in her own hand to the instructions, ‘perchance as she would hardly think we would agree to’.4 Randolph of course mentioned no actual name of an English noble, but he did confirm to Mary that the continuance of friendship with Elizabeth was impossible if she married into either imperial family. In November Randolph was given further instructions on the subject – but still he did not officially name Lord Robert Dudley, contenting himself with pouring cold water on ‘the children of France, Spain or Austria’, and telling Mary that her late husband, the king of France, had been a perfect example of whom not to marry.5 Mary replied that she could only give a vague answer to such vague propositions; she needed after all to know the names of suitable bridegrooms, not unsuitable ones. It was not until the end of March 1564 that Randolph was authorized officially to offer Lord Robert Dudley, as most suitable among the English nobles, a year after Elizabeth’s first hint to Maitland. Mary’s outward reaction was meek: she listened graciously once more, and suggested as she had done previously in the autumn that a conference should be held at Berwick between English and Scots. Inwardly, however, she can hardly have regarded the notorious Lord Robert as an acceptable husband – she who still longed for the heir of the Spanish empire – unless of course he brought with him a definite recognition of her title to succeed Elizabeth as a dowry.
While Mary pursued a Catholic marriage abroad, her policy at home continued to favour the reformed religion as it had done ever since her arrival. She herself certainly felt that she had absolutely no choice in the matter. At an interview with the papal nuncio Gouda in the summer of 1562, Mary told him that she could not even promise him a safe conduct while he was in Scotland, and advised him to stay indoors as much as possible and not attempt to deliver the Pope’s briefs – unless he wished to die violently. She herself, explained Mary patiently, would be quite powerless to help him if anything untoward occurred. Nor did Gouda feel that Mary’s apprehensions were unjustified: she made an excellent personal impression on him, and he accepted her word that she intended privately to live and die a Catholic, whatever the ways of her kingdom. Mary also refused quite flatly to consider sending Scottish priests to the Council of Trent: once again she protested her personal devotion to the Catholic cause, but said that the dispatching of a Scottish deputation would be quite out of the question under the present circumstances. Equally, when a college for training Catholic priests was suggested to her, Mary dismissed it in on word as ‘impracticable’.6 The truth was that Mary, from the vantage point of Scotland, could perceive realities about the religious situation there not readily understandable by the distant papacy or even by her uncle in France, the cardinal. Her continual aim in her letters abroad was to explain this dichotomy she was obliged to practise in order to preserve the peace – devotion to Catholicism in private, tolerance towards Protestantism in public. But, of course, it was a dichotomy which it was not easy to convey in letter to those who had never visited the country.
In 1563, Parliament, with the queen’s agreement, provided that Protestant ministers should have the use of manses and glebes and that churches should be repaired. Symbolical of Mary’s desire to preserve religious amity and peace in her country (at the expense of those zealous Catholics who still hoped she would fight for their cause) was her renewed attempt to win the friendship or at least the approval of John Knox. In the middle of April 1563 the queen was staying on the island of Lochleven with Moray’s mother Lady Margaret Douglas and his half-brother, Sir William Douglas. Here, in this ill-omened fortress which was to play such a significant part in her future story, she sent for Knox. Together queen and reformer took part in a long and fairly friendly dispute in the great hall of the castle. Mary asked Knox to abate the persecution of the Catholics, especially in the western regions of Scotland, where it was fierce, and Knox in return asked her to administer the laws of her kingdom, which had made Catholicism illegal. The next morning, as she was hawking near Kinross, the queen sent for Knox again, and among other topics she raised were the fearful quarrels between the earl of Argyll and his wife – Mary’s beloved but wayward half-sister, Jean Stewart, who was, as the queen herself admitted, ‘not so circumspect in all things as that she wished her to be’, and much preferred the delights of Holyrood life to a quieter existence in the west of Scotland with her husband. Now Mary attempted to charm Knox by asking him to mediate in this domestic dispute, which was becoming a scandal of court life: and although Knox said later that the whole conversation showed how deeply Mary Stuart was able to dissemble, in fact he did write a stern letter to Argyll on his matrimonial problems.*7
The news of Mary’s Spanish negotiations, however, provoked a sterner reaction from Knox. A Catholic match was the very last thing he could be expected to countenance and he thundered forth from the pulpit on the subject in Edinburgh, in front of a large congregaton of the nobility, assembled in the city for Parliament, despite Maitland’s somewhat disingenuous assertion that ‘such thing never entered in her (the Queen’s) heart’. The public rebuke was too much for Mary. She sent for Knox to come to Holyrood and in ‘vehement fume’ exclaimed that no prince had ever been so treated – had she not borne with him more patiently than any other ruler ‘in all your rigorous manner of speaking both against my self and my uncles; yea,’ she continued indignantly, ‘I have sought your favours by all possible means. I offered unto you presence and audience whensoever it pleased you to admonish me; and yet I cannot be quit of you.’ She added in a voice choked with ‘howling’, in Knox’s immortal trenchant phrase, and tears (so many tears that the chamber boy, Knox says, could scarcely find enough napkins to mop them up) that she would be revenged upon him.8
Knox tried to justify himself by saying that it was his duty to speak plainly but Mary burst out again and again: ‘What have you to do with my marriage?’ and finally in a surge of irritation: ‘What are you within this commonwealth?’ which gave Knox the opportunity for the crushing reply: ‘A subject born within the same, madam.’ He proceeded to speak again at lengt
h on the horrors of a Catholic marriage, which only brought forth further floods of angry tears from the queen. Erskine of Dun tried to calm her by tactfully praising her beauty and charms and suggesting that any prince in Europe would be glad to marry her, but Mary was not to be smoothed with fair words; furiously she requested Knox to leave her presence, regardless of the fact that he solemnly assured her how much he disliked tears, since even the tears of corrected children wounded him. Knox departed, characteristically taking the opportunity on his way out to point out to the maids of honour in attendance that their ‘gay gear’ would little avail them at the impending coming of the Knave Death.
That summer the queen made her progresses in west and south-west Scotland, visting the local castles, seeing and being seen by her subjects and last but not least enjoying the pleasures of the chase. The court made ready their ‘highland apparel’ for the tour and the English ambassador Randolph, not to be outdone, fitted himself out ‘in outer shape … like unto the rest’.9 In July, Mary was actually guest of the earl of Argyll, the warring husband of Jean Stewart, at Inveraray; in August she toured the south-west, staying first with Lord Eglinton, on to Dunure Castle at St Mary’s Isle by mid-August, then to Dumfries and so to Drumlanrig; by 27th August she was at Peebles. As the queen hunted and harmlessly enjoyed the sight of some of the most beautiful scenery of her dominions, back in Edinburgh Knox was enraged to hear that she was having the Mass said constantly on her route. Nothing daunted by the interview in the spring, Knox took the opportunity to preach energetically against Mary once more: ‘Deliver us, O Lord, from idolatry.’ Such defiance could not pass forever unchecked. But as the year wore on, Knox dared to go even further. Two militant Protestants forced their way into the chapel royal in Mary’s absence and broke up the Mass of her household. They were arrested but Knox took the line that their trial should be an occasion when the congregation showed its solidarity in favour of the accused, in order to protect them from condemnation. To this effect, he wrote round Scotland, urging the members of the congregation to attend the trial. It was a flagrant insult to the authorities and to the queen. As a result, in December, Knox was summoned before the Council on a charge of treason. He arrived with an enormous following, and when the queen saw him sitting there bareheaded at the end of the table, she burst out laughing, and in an access of high spirits, her angry tears dismissed but not apparently forgotten, she exclaimed in her broad Scots: ‘Yon man gart me greit (make me weep) and grat never tear himself. I will see if I can gar him greit.’ However, although Knox admitted having written the offending letter, the Council voted that he had not committed treason; so far from being made to weep by Mary, the following spring Knox merely succeeded in angering her further – and pleasing himself. As the burgesses of Edinburgh gossiped, the fifty-year-old reformer married, as his second wife, the seventeen-year-old Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and as such one of Mary’s own kin – ‘of her own blood and name’.10
It was hardly surprising that throughout the autumn of 1563 the courtiers noted that the poor queen frequently succumbed to fits of weeping and depression, alternating with bursts of merriment. Her French physician attempted to cure her by putting her on a diet. But the death of her uncle, the slow progress of her marriage plans, her own loneliness, to say nothing of the loquacious hostility of the uncharmable Knox, were all enough to produce a pattern of nervous ill-health. In December she took to her bed with an unidentified pain in her right side – which was to recur for the rest of her life; Randolph suggested that her collapse might have been due to exhaustion after dancing too long on her twenty-first birthday, and she herself put it down to praying too long in an icy chapel after Mass, in a bitterly cold winter.11 By mid-January she had recovered. The whole attack may well have been exacerbated by Mary’s tension at the lack of conclusion over her marriage plans.
Although Elizabeth’s nomination of Lord Robert had come to Mary’s attention in spring 1564, she continued to hope rather for success in the direction of Spain until August: then Philip II, changing his mind once more on the subject, and having procrastinated once again for nearly eighteen months, indicated to his ambassador that the negotiations were once more closed (a decision in which the growing insanity of his son must have played some part). Even so, in the autumn of 1564 Mary dispatched James Melville to London, with the vain hope of revivifying the plan of the Spanish match: in fact Melville’s main occupation was to charm Queen Elizabeth with his courtly manners and enjoy in return a prolonged display of her accomplishments, in order that he should thus estimate her more highly than her rival queen of Scots. Melville was, however, also called upon to witness a significant rite by which Dudley was created earl of Leicester and baron of Denbigh, which honours were specifically intended to fit him to wed Queen Mary, although one unrehearsed detail of the rite – by which Elizabeth tickled her favourite’s neck in the midst of the ceremony – may have been considered by Melville to have had the opposite effect.12
Nevertheless the Dudley negotiations still wound on, and in November 1564 a conference was finally held at Berwick on the subject between Moray and Maitland on one side, and Randolph and Bedford on the other, without, however, anything definite being promised by the English with regard to the recognition of Mary’s title in return for the Leicester marriage. As the Scots naturally regarded this recognition as the vital quid pro quo for a match which they had no other reason to desire, by December, as Randolph reported to Cecil, they were beginning to clamour for some sort of frankness on the subject from the English. But in reply Cecil was far from frank; on the contrary, he took refuge in phrases of much obscurity more suitable for an oracle than a statesman: let their negotiations, so full of promise, not ‘be converted to a matter of bargain or purchase’ he wrote, since the English crown ‘if it be sort for, may sooner be lost than got, and not being craved, may be as soon offered as reason can require’.13
This sort of riddle was all very well, but it was now nearly two years since Mary had started her second serious round of marriage negotiations, and still the English party were taking refuge in saws and sayings and making no definite commitment. In short, Mary was no nearer getting either a husband or the succession to the English throne, although she had been a childless widow over four years, as a result of which there was still no direct heir to the Scottish throne closer than the Hamiltons. Under the circumstances, the impatience of the Scottish party who wrote to Cecil of his ‘many obscure words and dark sentences’ is understandable; Maitland and Moray pointed out to him quite plainly that if Elizabeth would not establish ‘the succession of her crown’ it would be quite impossible for them to induce Mary to marry an Englishman, and she would then make her own choice.14 Yet still no promise came. Not only that, but the next emanation from England – the appearance of young Lord Darnley himself, mysteriously granted permission to travel to Scotland in early February 1565 – cast serious doubts over the whole straight-forwardness of the English point of view.
It was an interesting enigma why Darnley, young, eligible and handsome, with the royal blood of England and Scotland in his veins, should be suddenly allowed to return to Scotland at this very moment, by permission of Queen Elizabeth. The name of Darnley had always played a minor part in any discussion of Mary’s possible suitors because of his position in both the Tudor and Stuart family tree, and because he was roughly the right age to be Mary’s bridegroom. The match had certainly always been in the mind of Darnley’s ambitious striving mother Margaret, countess of Lennox, and it was not for nothing that she had sent him hotfoot to France to condole with Mary on the death of Francis.* In September 1564 the earl of Lennox, who had long been banished from Scotland for trying to capture Dumbarton Castle in 1544 with English troops, was allowed to return to Scotland ostensibly to look to his estates. None other than Queen Elizabeth herself pleaded with Queen Mary to receive him. According to Melville, Elizabeth’s motive in thus smoothing Lennox’s way was quite definitely to promote the Darnl
ey marriage: Elizabeth told Melville Darnley was one of the two that she had in her head to offer unto the queen, as born within the realm of England.16 In the course of the ceremony by which Leicester was invested with his titles, Elizabeth also teased Melville that he would prefer to see Darnley, who was standing by, as a husband for his queen rather than Leicester. The presence of her husband in the rival camp did not dim the ardour of Margaret Lennox in forwarding the claims of her son: the Lennox Jewel, for example, once thought to commemorate Lennox’s death in 1571, is not thought on grounds of style to date from this earlier period, and in any case contains no memorial details of Lennox’s life, such as might be expected in a commemorative piece. Margaret Lennox certainly took advantage of the return of Melville to Scotland to send jewels to her husband in 1564: she may have taken the opportunity to create an elaborately emblematic objet d’art, whose complicated symbolism would convey messages to her husband on the subject of her matrimonial schemes, too dangerous to commit to paper.* When Mary wrote to Elizabeth in December 1564 asking that Darnley might be allowed to come north to join his father, neither Elizabeth nor her advisers can have been in any doubts that Darnley was now a strongly fancied runner in the Scottish queen’s matrimonial stakes. The Spanish contender had recently vanished from the race, and in view of Elizabeth’s behaviour Leicester was still not a certain starter: the odds on Darnley, who was Catholic, semi-royal, and apparently approved of by Elizabeth, now dramatically shortened.
It was popularly believed at the time by the Scots that Elizabeth herself had launched Darnley, in order to trap Mary into a demeaning marriage, although, as Randolph indicated in his letter of 12th February, it seems to have been Leicester and Cecil who combined together to get the boy his licence to come north.17 Elizabeth’s part seems to have been a passive one: having an extraordinary inability to make up her mind on matters of emotion, she probably did not know herself whether she desired the marriage of the beloved Leicester and Mary. This inability nearly always turned out fortunately for her, since it allowed others to take the action, and in doing so, it was they who made the mistakes. In this particular case, it is likely that Leicester and Cecil, encouraged by the indecisive passivity of Elizabeth, launched Darnley as a sort of Trojan horse into the Scottish queen’s kingdom. Queen Mary could not fail to be interested in such an obvious candidate for marriage: as Melville put it, she might prefer Darnley ‘being present’ to Leicester ‘who was absent’; and of Leicester and Cecil it was of course Leicester who had a further personal motive to embroil the negotiations – he may well have been anxious not to have them concluded while Elizabeth herself still remained unmarried. Elizabeth later told de Silva that it was Leicester who had refused to consent to the match, and thus wrecked it.18 The Scots, who were becoming obstreperous in their desire for some sort of concrete result, would become confused between Leicester and Darnley. Mary herself would dither between the two claimants and continue to remain unwed. The English therefore would be able to continue in that policy of masterly inactivity which best suited their own interests over the marriage of the Scottish queen; as for Elizabeth, she could continue to use the unmarried and therefore uncommitted state of Mary as an argument for not recognizing her place in the English succession. This seems to have been the tortuous reasoning of the English at the beginning of February when Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, left London, by specific permission of the English queen.