Mary Stuart as a child neither had nor was trained to have the brain of the calibre of, for example, an Elizabeth Tudor. She was, however, by nature bright and quick, with a pliant turn of mind which her governess praised, because it made her eager to learn. Her schoolmasters, chosen by Catherine, included Claude Millot and Antoine Fouquelin. In true Renaissance fashion, she was given all-round education; she learnt not only Latin, but Italian, Spanish and apparently some Greek;* she learnt to draw; she learnt to dance, an art at which she was universally agreed to excel both in childhood and in later life; she learnt to sing – the songs of Clément Marot were special favourites; she learnt to play the lute, for which Brantôme described her long white fingers as being ideally suited.22 Graceful, athletic, she was above all anxious to please those around her.
Her letters to her mother, the earliest, preserved in the Register House at Edinburgh, dating from the age of seven, show her as having a clear, legible hand, remarkably like the even, rounded hand-writing which she retained for the rest of her life (although with age the writing grew considerably larger). This early, polite little note – whose neatness probably bears witness to some sort of overseer – ends with the characteristic salutation of any seven-year-old child to its mother – M. de Brezé will give her all the rest of her news, thus saving her daughter a longer letter.23 Mary Stuart’s letters to Mary of Guise bear witness to the enormous interest which the mother took in the smallest details of her daughter’s upbringing, despite the distance which separates them: the sphere in which she appears to have exerted the strongest influence of all is that of her daughter’s religious education. Mary of Guise laid it down that her daughter was to hear daily Mass; she was given a French chaplain of her own, Guillaume de Laon, as well as retaining her Scottish one, the prior of Inchmahome, who stayed with her in France out of devotion, and without wages. In all the travels of the court, care was taken to transport the young queen’s own communion vessels, so that she could receive the sacrament from them, without any risk of infection; her accounts include payments for a coffer in which to carry these vessels around.24 The religious education of the royal children was supervised among others by Pierre Danes, professor of Greek and later bishop of Lavane, and Jacques Amyot, abbot of Bellosaire and translator of Plutarch.
Happily, Duchess Antoinette was able to report to Mary of Guise that her daughter was extremely devout. When the duchess and the cardinal felt that it was time for the child to make her first Holy Communion, Mary wrote to her mother eagerly of her desire to do so. She was at her grandmother’s at Meudon for the feast of Easter, and requested the necessary permission, not only because her grandmother and her uncle thought it right, but also because she herself fervently desired to ‘receive God’. Mary signed herself: ‘Your very humble and obedient daughter, Marie’.25
In 1550 Mary of Guise herself came to France to judge the progress of her very humble and obedient daughter. Her letters of 1549 show her to have become increasingly depressed and lonely in Scotland, for which the internal situation certainly gave her just cause; she longed to consult with her brothers on her best course of action, as well as to see her daughter and son Francis again; furthermore, there was the perennial vexed question of her French dowry, whose emoluments were more than ever necessary, as a result of her financial straits brought on by maintaining the French troops in Scotland. This visit represented the central point of Mary’s childhood; overjoyed at the prospect, she wrote off ecstatically to her grandmother: ‘Madame, I have been very glad to be able to send these present lines, for the purpose of telling you the joyful news I have received from the Queen my Mother, who has promised me by her letters dated April 23rd that she will be here very soon to see you and me, which is to me the greatest happiness which I could wish for in this world, and indeed I am so overjoyed about it, that all I am thinking about now is to do my whole duty in all things and to study to be very good, in order to satisfy her desire to see in me all that you and she hope for …’26 Evidently Mary had conceived a sort of hero-worship for her mother, a superior being, the female equivalent of her splendid uncles, an image of strength, reliability and comfort, whom she wished to do her best to impress.
Mary of Guise landed at Dieppe in September, and arrived at the court, which was then at Rouen, on 25th September. Her household had made detailed preparations for the journey to fashionable France – although the recent death of the dowager’s father, Duke Claude of Guise, meant that her own clothes were all of black, and her ladies at brightest in grey velvet and taffeta.27 Mary Stuart had had a dangerous attack of flux in early September, but she was apparently well enough to be present at the regal reception which Henry and Catherine gave to her mother in Normandy. Throughout all the next winter, the dowager queen of Scotland enjoyed the plentiful pageantry of the court ceremonies, and enjoyed also the company of her daughter. Nothing seems to have marred the love which existed between mother and daughter, when a year later Mary of Guise sailed back to Scotland again; having had what turned out to be the last sight of her daughter in her lifetime, she left behind such strongly growing roots of love in her daughter’s heart that the young Mary had a virtual nervous breakdown with grief at the news of her death in 1560, even though she had not actually seen her for nine years.
In other spheres than that of mother and daughter relations, the visit of Mary of Guise to France was considerably less successful. She herself marred it to a certain extent by her financial importunities towards the French king: anxious as she was to pave the way for her final assumption of the regency of Scotland as soon as possible, she was determined to secure as many honours and as much French money as might be available for her Scottish train, in order to bind them to her. Her personal finances were also desperately in need of succour, her servants’ wages were in arrears, she was forced to borrow from her friends such as the countess of Montrose and Elizabeth, countess of Moray, who could ill afford it, and also to lean on the Scottish merchants as a possible source of aid.28 The lawlessness of Scotland had increased mightily in the last two years, and hatred of the new foreigner – the French who were now attempting to administer this apparently barbaric country, by their own lights – was succeeding ripely to the previous hatred of the English. In May 1551 Sir John Mason reported from Tours that the dowager of Scotland was making the whole court weary of her, from the highest to the lowest, by being such an importunate beggar for herself and her chosen friends. ‘The King,’ said Sir John, ‘would fain be rid of her, and she, as she pretendeth, would fain be gone.29
Two untoward incidents also marred the atmosphere of the visit. In the first place – although no hint of it reached the young Mary’s own ears – her daughter’s safety did not seem to Mary of Guise to be totally secure. At the end of April 1551 a mysterious plot for poisoning the young Scottish queens was discovered;30 it was devised by an archer of the guard named Robert Stuart, but a certain mystery hangs over the whole conspiracy, and it has never been made clear exactly why, or at whose instigation, the murder was supposed to take place. The French ambassador in London reported to the Constable de Montmorency in France that a Scot named Henderson had revealed to him Stuart’s fell design. The would-be assassin had suggested to Lord Warwick and Lord Paget that by committing such a crime he might render valuable service to the English Council. Warwick, by his own account, expressed horror at the proposal, and sent Stuart to prison, but finally let him be extradited to France. Stuart was thus imprisoned in the castle of Angers, and finally hanged, drawn and quartered, without the enigma of his true inspiration or purpose ever being cleared up. It seems an unlikely moment for the English government to have sponsored any such plan: firstly, the English had not yet given up all hope of the eventual marriage of Mary Stuart and Edward VI, and when Lord Northampton came on a formal embassy to France in the summer of 1551, to convey the Garter to Henry II, he once again applied for the Scottish queen’s hand. Secondly, the English were not noticeably enraged by the refusal of the French to en
tertain the proposal – a refusal which they had certainly anticipated. Northampton took the denial calmly, and according to his instructions, merely applied formally for the hand of the Princess Elisabeth for the English king, in the place of that of Mary Stuart.31
The second untoward incident was the flagrant love affair which sprang up between Henry II and Mary’s governess, Lady Fleming. The king’s eye lighted on the pretty Scotswoman comparatively early in her stay at the French court, for de Brezé reported on the success she was having, and with perhaps a certain lack of taste, Henry himself took the trouble to write to Mary of Guise and tell her what an excellent job Lady Fleming was making of her task as her daughter’s governess. Regarded as captivating by her admirers, Lady Fleming also appears to have had a strongly irritating streak, which involved her enjoying her success at the French court to the full, but making little effort to accommodate herself to French ways in a manner which would smooth the path of the Scottish queen’s household. When the question of a doctor for Mary Stuart arose, a letter from Giovanni Ferreri to the bishop of Orkney puts forward the name of a certain Scotsman, William Bog – ‘so learned he will bear comparison with any Frenchman’ and also particularly adept at ‘diagnosing Scottish temperaments’.32 The understanding of Scottish temperaments was felt to be particularly essential in this case, because not only was Mary’s ‘temperament’ held, for medical purposes, to be Scottish, but also Lady Fleming would not otherwise be able to explain what was wrong with her mistress, as she was incapable of communicating with a French doctor.
Constable de Montmorency saw in Lady Fleming’s charms, and their effect on the king, an excellent opportunity of spiting his established enemy, Diane de Poitiers. The liaison did not succeed in toppling the favourite, but it did result in the incautious Lady Fleming giving birth to a son, Henry, later known as the Bastard of Angoulême, whose famous agility in later life at Scottish dances at the French court bore permanent witness to his hybrid heredity. According to Brantôme’s wittily malicious report, Lady Fleming scandalized the court by exclaiming aloud in French, which she spoke with a broad Scottish accent: ‘I have done all that I can, and God be thanked, I am pregnant by the King, for which I count myself both honoured and happy.’33 Her happiness at her condition was short-lived: her indiscretion was punished by her being sent home to Scotland, as a result of the combined wrath of Catherine and Diane, to whom no interloper was tolerable, and Mary was given a new governess in the shape of Mme de Parois.
The departure of Mary of Guise first to London, where the French fashions of her ladies impressed the English court, and then to Scotland for a renewal of the harsh struggle for stable government, marked the breaking of one more Scottish link in Mary Stuart’s childhood. Even Mary of Guise’s last weeks in France were marked by tragedy, for her son Francis of Longueville, who had greeted the arrival of his half-sister in France with such generous boyish enthusiasm, and declared her to be the most charming sister in all the world, died suddenly in September 1551, the victim of some swift, childish disease. ‘I think, Madame, that Our Lord will that I should be one of His own,’ wrote Mary of Guise sadly to her mother on the subject, ‘since he has visited me so often and so heavily.’34
The substitution of Mme de Parois for the errant Lady Fleming marked a further step in the obliteration of Mary’s Scottish personality. Mary still loved to dress herself up in Scottish national dress. She even managed to charm the French with the spectacle, although to their critical gaze her attire seemed dreadfully outlandish, if not downright bizarre: however, as, according to a French print current at the time, ‘Scottish dress’ for a girl consisted merely of a series of wild animals’ skins draped about the person,* perhaps the dismay of the sophisticated French court is not too difficult to understand. At all events it was the graceful deportment and queenly bearing which Mary brought to her garb which was generally felt to carry the day. But for all Mary’s enthusiasm for her native country or its customs Scottish clothes were by now for her definitely a form of fancy dress. Patriotism, wilfulness or the desire to please might lead her to don them: nothing could alter the fact that with the passing of every year, the progress of Mary towards becoming a French woman – a child of the smooth land of France rather than of the rugged land of Scotland – became still more marked.
* It is noticeable that the French love affair with Mary Stuart has been gallantly continued by many French historians; this point of view may be summed up by the words of the eminent chronicler of her childhood, Baron de Ruble, who, writing in 1891, describes: ‘les belles années qu’elle passa en France, jusqu’à la date néfaste où ell fut obligeé d’échanger le séjour de son pays d’adoption, un riant climat, la cour galante et polie des Valois, l’espérance d’un règne glorieux, contre l’Ecosse, un ciel brumeux et le commerce plein d’aigreur et de perfidie des lairds presbytériens’.
* One charming tradition concerning the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots is not founded on fact: there is a story that the word ‘marmalade’ originated when a chef in the royal kitchen stirred and stirred his oranges muttering over and over again the words: ‘Marie est malade’ until the oranges turned into a delicious golden mixture. Unfortunately, the word ‘marmelade’ was already in use in 1480, deriving from the Portuguese marmelo (a quince).18
* The editor of Mary’s Latin themes, A. de Montaiglon, suggested that Mary might have heard the name of Calvin often mentioned since an edition of his Institutes was published in Paris in 1553. But there is no record of any such edition in France, either in French or Latin, before 1562. An edition of the Institutes was published in Geneva in 1554.
* Her Scottish library contained Greek books.
* Plaid of a sort was already known at this date, and Mary later wore it in Scotland; but tartan, in the form we know it today, was not, and nor was the kilt.
CHAPTER FOUR
Betrothal
‘How happy oughtest thou to esteem thyself, O kingdom of Scotland, to be favoured, fed and maintained like an infant on the breast of the most magnanimous King of France …’
Estienne Perlin, 1558
By the end of 1553, when she entered her twelfth year, Mary Stuart’s charmed childhood was drawing to a close, in favour of a more troubled adolescence. As the princesses of France grew older, Queen Catherine decided that they should spend more time at court in order that she should supervise their development personally. The question therefore arose whether Mary should not at this point be awarded her own household since with the departure of the princesses, her domestic arrangements seemed on occasion almost threadbare. The main drawback to the establishment of such a household was that it would entail an extra financial burden on the Estates of Scotland, who were scarcely in the mood to find still further funds for the maintenance of their young queen in France, while the budget for the French troops in Scotland remained high. The cardinal of Lorraine was obliged to write a series of letters to his sister before the final permission was granted. One of his arguments was the keen desire of Mary Stuart herself to be thus set up since at present she felt herself to be shabbily treated – the first hint of a rebellious character in this otherwise docile little paragon.1 The pleadings of the cardinal prevailed. On 1st January, 1554 Mary Stuart entered into her new estate, and to celebrate the occasion she invited her uncle to supper that evening.
The choice was significant. Up till now the Guises had been content to let their nursing spend much of her time in the royal household: but from now onwards it was important that her character should be formed in accordance with their wishes, and that she should receive her early lessons in statecraft from the people who stood to gain so much from her future high position in France – the Guises. On her mother’s side, Mary formed part of one of the most fascinating family nexus in French history, and it is impossible to understand the extremes of hostility and popularity which the Guises aroused during this period without considering briefly their antecedents. The family of Guise only entered France at th
e beginning of the sixteenth century when the widow of a younger son of the duke of Lorraine (then an independent duchy) applied to the French king to become naturalized French, along with his family of twelve children. The eldest of this family was Claude de Guise, grandfather of Mary Stuart, who was not only a highly successful general himself, but was supported on the secular flank by his ambitious brother the Cardinal Jean of Lorraine. But with success inevitably came jealousy. The Guises were accused of being foreigners by their enemies – Lorrainers rather than true Frenchmen. The Guises riposted by claiming that the royal blood of Charlemagne flowed in their veins, which, they said, entitled them to the highest place at the French court. This in turn led their detractors to accuse them of aiming at the very throne of France.2 In truth nothing as thin as the last fainéant drops of Charlemagne’s blood flowed in the veins of the Guises: they possessed something infinitely more potent – a furious life force and an admirable feeling of blood brotherhood. It is possible that the manner in which they upheld each other may have tempted Mary Stuart later in Scotland to suppose that all relatives supported each other as the Guises had done – a theory which the behaviour of the Stewarts sadly disproved. At all events, contemporary historians began to refer to the Guises as the Maccabees.