Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. . On the 9th February in 1587, news reached London of Mary, Queen of Scots execution the previous day. The people went wild with joy, church bells were rung out in celebration, guns thundered a.
THE EXECUTION OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS Her prayers being ended, the executioners, kneeling, desired her Grace to forgive them her death: who answered, 'I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.' Then they, with her two women, helping her up, began to disrobe her of her apparel: then she, laying her crucifix upon the stool, one of the executioners took from her neck the Agnus Dei, which she, laying hands off it, gave to one of her women, and told the executioner, he should be answered money for it. Then she suffered them, with her two women, to disrobe her of her chain of pomander beads and all other apparel most willingly, and with joy rather than sorrow, helped to make unready herself, putting on a pair of sleeves with her own hands which they had pulled off, and that with some haste, as if she had longed to be gone. All this time they were pulling off her apparel, she never changed her countenance, but with smiling cheer she uttered these words,'that she never had such grooms to make her unready, and that she never put off her clothes before such a company.' Then she, being stripped of all her apparel saving her petticoat and kirtle, her two women beholding her made great lamentation, and crying and crossing themselves prayed in Latin. She, turning herself to them, embracing them, said these words in French, 'Ne crie vous, j'ay prome pour vous', and so crossing and kissing them, bad them pray for her and rejoice and not weep, for that now they should see an end of all their mistress's troubles. Then she, with a smiling countenance, turning to her men servants, as Melvin and the rest, standing upon a bench nigh the scaffold, who sometime weeping, sometime crying out aloud, and continually crossing themselves, prayed in Latin, crossing them with her hand bade them farewell, and wishing them to pray for her even until the last hour. This done, one of the women have a Corpus Christi cloth lapped up three-corner-ways, kissing it, put it over the Queen of Scots' face, and pinned it fast to the caule of her head. Then the two women departed from her, and she kneeling down upon the cushion most resolutely, and without any token or fear of death, she spake aloud this Psalm in Latin, In Te Domine confido, non confundar in eternam, etc. Then, groping for the block, she laid down her head, putting her chin over the block with both her hands, which, holding there still, had been cut off had they not been espied. Then lying upon the block most quietly, and stretching out her arms cried, In manus tuas, Domine, etc., three or four times. Then she, lying very still upon the block, one of the executioners holding her slightly with one of his hands, she endured two strokes of the other executioner with an axe, she making very small noise or none at all, and not stirring any part of her from the place where she lay: and so the executioner cut off her head, saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder, he lift up her head to the view of all the assembly and bade God save the Queen. Then, her dress of lawn [i.e. wig] from off her head, it appeared as grey as one of threescore and ten years old, polled very short, her face in a moment being so much altered from the form she had when she was alive, as few could remember her by her dead face. Her lips stirred up and a down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off. Then Mr. Dean [Dr. Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough] said with a loud voice, 'So perish all the Queen's enemies', and afterwards the Earl of Kent came to the dead body, and standing over it, with a loud voice said, 'Such end of all the Queen's and the Gospel's enemies.' Then one of the executioners, pulling off her garters, espied her little dog which was crept under her cloths, which could not be gotten forth by force, yet afterward would not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay between her head and her shoulders, which being imbrued with her blood was carried away and washed, as all things else were that had any blood was either burned or washed clean, and the executioners sent away with money for their fees, not having any one thing that belonged unto her. And so, every man being commanded out of the hall, except the sheriff and his men, she was carried by them up into a great chamber lying ready for the surgeons to embalm her. Recorded by Robert Wynkfield (spelling modernized) |
The Execution Of Mary Stuart 1895
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Far o’er the crashing forest
The giant arms lie spread:
And the pale augurs murmuring low
Gaze on the blasted head
Lord Macaulay
On nth August, 1562, Mary Queen of Scots rode north on her first visit to her Highland dominions. She had long intended to visit these wild and individual territories: a ceremonial visit to Aberdeen had been planned for Easter-tide as early as January, but had apparently been delayed by the English negotiations. Now that the interview with Queen Elizabeth was temporarily postponed, the queen of Scots was free to resume the plan; but in the interval since the progress was first mooted, it seemed that her purpose had altered. Her primary intention was no longer to extend her knowledge of her kingdom, nor merely sporting (as the date might suggest to modern eyes); it had now become distinctly punitive. The might of the Gordons, under their magnificent but unpredictable head, George, 4th earl of Huntly, had long loomed over the northeast of Scotland like the shadow of a great eagle which might at any moment swoop on its prey. This fact in itself, however disquieting, would not have inspired a martial expedition – quite apart from the fact that Huntly’s state approached that of an independent monarch, he was in any case the leading Catholic magnate. Firstly, it might be dangerous to attack him, and secondly, it might be unwise. But in the course of the summer, Huntly’s third son, Sir John Gordon, became involved in an unsavoury scandal, and provided the queen with a casus belli against one Gordon at least, if she needed one.
In June Sir John severely wounded Lord Ogilvie in a street brawl in Edinburgh as a result of which he was thrown into prison. The feud with the Ogilvies had arisen because the Ogilvie of Findlater had disinherited his own son James Ogilvie of Cardell and left his lands, including the castle of Findlater, to Sir John in his place. The disinheritance was at the instance of Ogilvie’s second wife, who persuaded Ogilvie that his son had made amorous advances to her, and thus deserved punishment. The step-mother herself now became the mistress or ‘pretended spouse’ of John Gordon, who was not only a bold cavalier but good-looking also, and as Buchanan put it ‘in the very flower of youth’. Public opinion was outraged and the scandalous alliance did the poor woman little good in the end, for when Sir John could not secure from her all the lands he wanted, he shut her up in a ‘close chamber’ and both discarded her as a mistress and disowned her as a wife.1 But matrimony was much on the mind of the ebullient Sir John: as a scion of the Catholic Gordons, he had been suggested as a possible husband for the queen herself. He himself seems to have been confident (on little foundation) that his dashing good looks had already caught her eye. Now his volatile temperament could not long endure the incarceration of prison. He escaped, and fled northwards to the safety of his father’s domains.
Mary did not view his offence with either a merciful or an indulgent eye. He had escaped justice, and he had also possessed himself of the lands of her own master of the household – none other than that James Ogilvie of Cardell who had been so cruelly dispossessed by the accusations of his step-mother. Mary now determined to pursue Sir John in the course of her northern progress, and James Ogilvie was among the courtiers who accompanied her on the journey. Scandal apart, Mary also intended to demonstrate that the Gordons could not behave as they pleased with impunity. Huntly had been out of favour with the queen since January, since he had made no secret of his disapproval of her cool policy towards the Scottish Catholics. Not only had Mary rejected his plan of a Catholic rising at Aberdeen, when she was still in France, but ever since she had refused such provocative offers as ‘setting up the Mass in three shires’. The untrustworthy temperament of the 4th earl made him indeed a delicate subject to handle either in conflict or alliance – as Randolph observed unpleasantly, were it not for the fact that ‘no man will trust him either in word or deed’, he would have been capable of doing a great deal of mischief.2
The character of the 4th earl belongs to that great tradition of independent Highland lords who throughout history have posed such problems for the central government – since their policies, which have seemed so strangely inconsistent from the viewpoint of the centre, have in fact been consistently bent towards the aggrandizement of their own clans. Huntly had powerful royal connections: as the grandson of James IV by his natural daughter Margaret Stewart, he was, although thirty years older, Mary Stuart’s first cousin (she always addressed both him and his son as ‘cousin’ in her letters), and since his own father died when he was a baby, he was actually brought up with King James V. Two of his nine sons were married to two daughters of the duke of Châtelherault. His power extended across the north-east of Scotland in a formidable array of tangible castles, and intangible but effective family alliances. Not only did he hold the royal castles of Inverness and Inverlochy, but he was further supported by his own castles of Strathbogie, Bog of Gight, Aboyne, Ruthven in Badenoch and Drummin in Glenlivat; from 1549 onwards, he was allowed to hold the large and profitable earldom of Moray under the crown. At different dates, the local Fraser lords of Saltoun and Lovat had made bonds of manrent to him, as had the captains of Clan Cameron and Clan Chattan. The grandeur of his household impressed even Mary of Guise’s French court when they came north. Now, at fifty, grown corpulent with age, like a great northern bear, he seemed the very pattern of the Highland patriarch.
The past career of this patriarchal figure had, however, been somewhat chequered. As one of the leaders of the Scots army at Pinkie Cleugh (where his white and gilt armour dazzled the eye) he had been captured by the English; although Leslie tells the story of his romantic escape from Morpeth while his jailers were playing cards, in fact he procured his release by the more down-to-earth method of signing an indenture with Somerset to pursue the cause of King Edward VI in Scotland. He was imprisoned by Mary of Guise in 1555, but restored to favour to become lieutenant-general of the kingdom two years later. Yet her favour and his Catholicism did not prevent him defecting to the reformers briefly in April 1560: his motives seem to have been his notorious ‘doubleness and covetousness’ since he was careful to stipulate that he should continue in supreme authority in the north as before. When his castle of Strathbogie was sacked, among its contents was found a large proportion of the ecclesiastical ornaments of Aberdeen Cathedral which Huntly was said to have stored away for use when Catholicism was restored.3 Yet his defection at this critical moment virtually wrecked the Catholic cause. Now Huntly was once more openly professing the faith of his fathers, but Mary’s caution towards this unstable character can readily be imagined, since not only she but all his contemporaries generally reckoned him to be totally untrustworthy in the final analysis, in all except that which intimately concerned his own clan.
There was a further complication between Huntly and the central government: although Huntly, free from interference in the north, had profited from the revenues of the lands of the earldom of Moray ever since 1549, the title itself had been given secretly to Lord James at the end of January 1562 by the queen. At his wedding in February Lord James had actually been invested earl of Mar, but when Lord Erskine protested that this earldom was an Erskine perquisite, Lord James resigned it a few months later, retaining only the secret Moray earldom; nevertheless despite this private assurance of Moray from the queen to Lord James, the news was not broken to Huntly. It has been suggested that the prospect of the formal acquisition of the earldom of Moray provided a sinister motive for Lord James to drag his sister northwards, and persuade her to strike down the overmighty Huntly. It was true that Lord James was quite as avaricious as most of his contemporaries: certainly his best chance of publicly acquiring the earldom which he had already acquired secretly was to proceed north with an adequate force, and possess himself of it. In this, he clearly needed the assistance of the queen. But it is equally certain that when Mary and James set forth for the north in August 1562 they were perfectly united in their aims. For the last year James had been Mary’s chief adviser and she had accepted all his lessons. James did not need to drag Mary north: she herself was anxious to make her progress and in doing so restore the errant Sir John to the arms of justice. As for the earldom of Moray, one of the points of the gift was intended to be the curtailment of Huntly’s expanding powers. With regard to Mary’s ultimate intentions towards Huntly, the evidence suggests that in August the queen had made no positive decision, but was content to see how Huntly would react to her northern progress before judging whether he was indeed an over-mighty subject, or merely a convenient Catholic viceroy. The focus was therefore for better or for worse on the behaviour of Huntly.
Queen Mary arrived at Aberdeen, via Stirling, Coupar Angus, Perth and Glamis, on 27th August. Here in this Huntly-dominated town, she paid a visit to the university (although it was to St Andrews she left a bequest of Greek and Latin books to its library in her will of 1566). At Aberdeen she was also greeted by the countess of Huntly, who was surrounded by a splendid train of attendants. This remarkable and vigorous woman had been born at Keith, a sister of the Earl Marischal, and was incidentally aunt to that Lady Agnes Keith whom Lord James had recently married. Clearly the strain provided a series of redoubtable helpmeets, for Elizabeth, countess of Huntly, not only provided the decision which her husband often lacked, but was also not above turning to the aid of her tame ‘familiars’ or witches, when inspiration from any other source was lacking. Now she pleaded as a mother with the queen to overlook Sir John Gordon’s indiscretion and pardon him. Queen Mary, with the strictness with which she seems to have regarded allscandalous misdemeanours, insisted that Sir John must return to ward at Stirling before he could be pardoned. The gallant Sir John was thus temporarily induced to surrender himself – but shortly afterwards his turbulent nature reasserted itself, and escaping once more, he gathered a force of 1000 horse about him.
The Gordons were traditionally skilful horsemen. With this force, Sir John now proceeded impudently to harry the queen’s train as she proceeded north. He later admitted that this was done with the deliberate intention of abducting her and, unlike Arran, he seems to have been gaily certain that the queen would accede to the arrangement. His confidence in his powers of physical attraction was unfortunately misplaced. This flagrant defiance of her royal authority enraged the queen, who promptly refused to visit the Huntly stronghold of Strathbogie, on her road to Inverness. Caution as well as anger may have played its part in the decision: for it was highly uncertain what might befall her once inside the Gordon stronghold, in the grasp of the unstable Huntly, to say nothing of the mercurial Sir John. It was afterwards suggested that had Mary stopped at Strathbogie, Huntly would have had Lord James, Maitland and Morton killed and established a Catholic coup. He would most likely have completed the operation by marrying off Mary – to be ‘kept at the devotion of the said Earl of Huntly’ – to his son. Mary certainly told Randolph indignantly later that among Huntly’s crimes had been the fact that he would have married her off ‘where he would’.4
In the meantime Huntly was given no chance to put these dastardly plans, if indeed he held them, into effect. Queen Mary by-passed Strathbogie, and taking a more western route to Inverness, she stopped instead at Darnaway Castle. Here in this stronghold a few miles from the sea, set aloft amid surrounding forests in the centre of the earldom of Moray (‘very ruinous’ complained Randolph, except for the hall which was ‘fair and large’) she took the opportunity to announce that Lord James had been granted the earldom in place of that of Mar. She also issued an order against John Gordon for his efforts to ‘break the whole country, so far as is in his power’, as well as failing to return to ward.5 When Mary finally reached Inverness on 11th September, she had brusque confirmation of Huntly’s attitude towards her. The keeper of the castle, Alexander Gordon, another of Huntly’s numerous offspring (he had nine sons and three daughters), refused her entrance, although it was a royal, not a Gordon, castle, being only committed into Huntly’s charge by virtue of his position as sheriff of Inverness. This was not so much insolence as actual treason, whether by Huntly’s specific orders or not, and in the queen’s mind certainly lent colour to what he would have done if Mary had stopped at Strathbogie. Huntly, on hearing that the rest of the Highlanders were rallying behind the queen, took alarm at the situation, and sent orders to his son to admit the queen. Mary Stuart then entered Inverness Castle, and its captain was promptly hanged over the battlements for his defiance.6
Installed at Inverness Castle, Mary was now able to taste the sweets of Highland life, which has commended itself to so many royalties since: the sport, the freedom, the beauty of the scenery all appealed to her romantic temperament. She felt a childish happiness to feel herself among this strange people dressed in their skins (half of whom only spoke Gaelic, a language she could not speak), so tough that they habitually slept out in the heather, said Leslie, but now came down from their distant glens to gaze on this beautiful young creature they were told was their queen. In order to please them, not only did the queen herself adopt Highland dress, some of it acquired hastily in Inverness according to the royal accounts, but plaids were also purchased locally for several of her courtiers. To Inverness came the local lords: the young gentlemen of the Fraser clan were presented to her, at their head their seventeen-year-old chief Lord Hugh of Lovat, nephew of that Lord Lovat who had perished with his eldest son and so many of the Fraser men eighteen years before in a clan battle on the Field of Shirts at Loch Lochy. The newly be-plaided courtiers were impressed by this muster of Highlanders, having never seen such an abundance of them before, and the queen showed particular favour to the good-looking young boy. As a result young Lord Hugh, ‘not a little vain’ of the dash which he had cut, offered the services of his Frasers to the queen against the Gordons, in order to avenge the deaths of his forebears at the Field of Shirts. The queen tactfully replied, however, that she was loath to give cause for a further quarrel between the clans. When Queen Mary departed from Inverness, Lord Hugh and his Frasers merely conveyed her to the banks of the Spey – and sad to relate for the self-confidence of youth, a number of Frasers ended by fighting against the queen for the Gordons.7
Although Randolph grumbled dreadfully at the appalling journey from Stirling to Inverness, and though the surrounding power of the Gordons was to say the least of it menacing, all in all Mary Stuart had never seemed more blithe. She evidently looked on the Highlanders as noble savages, a category she found more sympathetic than their opposite numbers, the savage nobles, in the south. Randolph was amazed at her happiness and her health: ‘In all these garbullies,’ he wrote, ‘I never saw her merrier, nor dismayed, nor never thought that stomache to be in her that I find! She repenteth but, when the lardes and other at Inverness came in the mornings from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and knapscall [helmet] a Glasgow buckler and a broad sword.’8 In short, Rosalind was in her element: the very spice of danger, provided by the fact that Sir John still hovered impudently in her wake, far from upsetting, merely stimulated the queen.*
From Inverness, Mary, still dogged by Sir John, proceeded to the seat of the Catholic bishop of Moray at Spynie. It was suspected that Sir John might finally choose to attack as the royal party crossed the Spey, and Mary’s scouts reported that up to 1000 Gordon horsemen were concealed in the woods. But no attack came. As the queen passed the castle of Findlater, the former Ogilvie stronghold, she called on it to surrender; but since there was no response, and the castle could not be captured without cannon, owing to its sea-girt position, she abandoned the effort, and passed on back to Aberdeen. Here, on 22nd September, she was received with a rapturous and loyal welcome, whatever intrigues Huntly might be meditating at nearby Strathbogie. The great question which now faced the queen and the new earl of Moray* was how next to proceed against Huntly: was he to be allowed to maintain this mighty sway over the north of Scotland, so complete that his son temeritously dared to defy the queen outside her own castle of Inverness, and another son, an escaped criminal, harried the queen’s troops, with impunity, while he himself apparently planned a state of near-independence? Mary, spurred on by Moray, now sent for 120 harquebusiers and experienced soldiers such as Lord Lindsay, Kirkcaldy of the Grange and Cockburn of Ormiston (all incidentally keen Protestants), as well as some cannon. She also forwarded a message to Huntly asking him to surrender his own formidable cannon, which stood in the courtyard at Strathbogie, in order to menace the Highlanders into subjection.
A prolonged game of cat-and-mouse now ensued with Huntly; the earl himself, drawn two ways, was clearly not yet quite sure in his own mind whether he was engaged in a rebellion or not; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would’, he temporized by sending his eldest surviving son Lord Gordon to consult Gordon’s father-in-law Châtelherault in the south. Knox wrote later that Gordon actually tried to raise the south to the same effect as his father was raising the north, and to this effect even contacted Bothwell, who had just escaped from his own imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle. But in the meantime Huntly offered to join with the queen to pursue his errant son John Gordon, provided he could appear with an armed force to support him. The queen understandably did not trust the appearance of Huntly surrounded by his Gordons, and Huntly equally declined to appear alone. Frightened of being captured, the great earl now took humiliatingly to sleeping every night under a different roof (easy enough in Gordon territory) but spending his days at Strathbogie. When the queen’s army got to hear of this, Kirkcaldy set out from Aberdeen with a small party of twelve men in order to surprise Huntly at his midday dinner and hold the entrance to Strathbogie until reinforcements arrived. Unfortunately the reinforcements proceeded both too quickly and too noisily, and Kirkcaldy was still parleying with the porter for an entrance to the castle when the clatter of their approach alerted the watchmen. Huntly had time to abandon his half-eaten meal, rush through the castle to the back and escape over a wall on to a waiting horse, without boots and without sword, but nevertheless still free. And on his fresh horse he soon outdistanced his pursuers.
The Execution Of Mary Queen Of Scots (1895)
Lady Huntly was now compelled to welcome the royal emissaries in Strathbogie at last: they found it stripped bare, except, rather touchingly, for the chapel, which had been left completely furnished with all its candles, ornaments and altar-books, in readiness for the queen’s visit, when it had been expected that she would use it. But as Huntly and John Gordon had both now disappeared, and the latter had recently captured fifty-six harquebusiers from a company near Findlater, which rendered him still more dangerous, it was considered by the government that the final stage of rebellion had been reached. On 16th October, by orders of the Privy Council, both Huntly and John Gordon were ‘put to the horn’ or outlawed; although the keys of both Findlater and Auchendown were sent, the queen was not to be placated. In a grim mood, she commented that she had other means to open the Gordon doors; in the meantime she demanded the surrender of Strathbogie itself, which was refused. The 4th earl promptly retired to the hills, in his fastness in the wilds of Badenoch, and might have tasted the pleasures of guerrilla warfare indefinitely, had he remained there.
Lady Huntly, however, was not content to leave the situation in this unsatisfactory state. First of all she attempted to have a further interview with the queen outside Aberdeen, which was denied to her. She then returned to Huntly’s side, and persuaded him that in his present critical state the best defence was attack. She seems to have been encouraged in her advice by the prophecy of her tame witches that by nightfall Huntly would be lying in the Tolbooth at Aberdeen, without any wound in his body. Egged on by his martial and optimistic wife, the earl now abandoned his stronghold, and marched militantly towards Aberdeen. Randolph at any rate was in no doubt as to his intentions: he believed that Huntly intended to ‘apprehend the Queen, and do with the rest of his will’. Knox put Huntly’s force at seven or eight hundred men, although other estimates made it over a thousand.10 Clearly, from the speech which he made to his men before battle, Huntly believed that many of the queen’s host would desert to his cause when the fighting began. In any case, he was able to take up a commanding position on the Hill of Fare, above the field of Corrichie.
Even at this stage, Huntly’s fatal indecision struck him again: according to Knox, when he saw the determined numbers falling thin, he intended to retire from the scene before the battle could begin the next morning. However, his ill-health and corpulence prevented him from rising before ten o’clock in the morning, by which time it was too late. By now Maitland had made ‘a vehement orison’ to the queen’s troops, urging them to remember their duty and not to fear the multitudes before them. Huntly addressed his vehement orison, on the other hand, to God; falling on his knees, he addressed Him in the following prayer, which he considered appropriate to the occasion: ‘O Lord I have been a bloodthirsty man, and by my means has mekle innocent blood been spilt; but thou give me victory this day and I shall serve Thee all the days of my life …’11 But the prayer was not granted. As the days went on, the royal harquebus fire raked Huntly’s troops on the hill, forcing them off their eminence, and as a swamp lay at the bottom they found themselves virtually cut off in a trap. Moray and his men hacked down the Gordons, and Huntly and two of his sons, Sir John and seventeen-year-old Adam Gordon, were captured and brought before him. At this dramatic moment in his fortunes, the great northern earl finally found the strain of the situation too much for him. There and then he dropped down off his horse in front of his captors, stone dead from either heart failure or apoplexy, brought on by strain and overweight – or as the Diurnal of Occurrents vividly put it, ‘he burst and swelled’.12
The sudden departure of Huntly’s wayward spirit from his all too solid flesh did not prevent his lifeless body from undergoing prolonged indignities. Immediately after the battle his unmarked body was thrown roughly over a pair of ‘crealles’ (fish baskets), and as it was late, taken to the Tolbooth at Aberdeen to lie there for the night – thus fulfilling the witches’ prophecy in true ironical and Delphic fashion. His corpse was then disembowelled and shipped south from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, £50 having been spent on a French doctor in Aberdeen and a surgeon in Edinburgh, together with spices, vinegar, aqua vitae and other necessities for the embalming of the body.13 It was all the more important to guard against the putrefaction of the late Huntly since the corpse itself was destined to be brought to trial by an ancient law, which provided for the presence of the offender, living or dead, for trial in front of Parliament, in cases of treason against the queen.*
In May 1563, seven months after his death on the field of Corrichie, the embalmed corpse of Huntly was set up in front of the full session of Parliament, with Queen Mary sitting on the royal throne. The grisly relic was then solemnly declared guilty of treason, and sentence of forfeiture passed upon it and its erstwhile belongings, with the title of the earldom of Huntly declared to be attainted. The body, still unburied, was then deposited in the Blackfriars Priory in Edinburgh, and it was not until April 1566 that it was allowed to be carried back to the north, to be laid in the family tomb of the Gordons in Elgin Cathedral. The fate of the gay young Sir John Gordon was shorter and sharper. On 2nd November he was executed, in the presence of the queen herself, who was compelled to attend in order to give the lie to stories that she had encouraged him in his affections and his wild matrimonial schemes. Having a horror of bloodshed, she was extremely reluctant to do so, and as it turned out the reality was even worse than her imaginings. Sir John cried out that the presence of the queen solaced him, since he was about to suffer for love of her. But the executioner was clumsy at his task and the spectacle reduced the queen to passionate weeping; she was indeed so horrified by her ordeal that she ended by breaking down completely, and had to be carried to her chamber, where she remained all the next day, in a state of nervous collapse.
Two of Huntly’s sons, Alexander and John, having been sacrificed in the general holocaust of his family’s fall from grace, Mary proceeded to spare the life of the eldest son George, Lord Gordon; he had not been involved in the final battle, having been away in the south consulting Châtelherault, and after being officially condemned with his father, he was pardoned and merely put into free ward at Dunbar. Huntly’s youngest son, Adam Gordon, was also spared. The rich vestments from Aberdeen Cathedral stored at Strathbogie since 1559 were taken down to Holyrood, where it seems the queen treated them more as Gordon spoils rather than as the ecclesiastical heritage they were, for they were probably among the gilded vestments in her belongings turned to secular uses in the spring of 1567 making a rich bed for Darnley and a doublet for Bothwell. The spoils of Strathbogie Castle were either taken by the queen or given to Moray for his new castle of Darnaway. Besides the earldom of Moray, whose revenues were estimated by Randolph at 1000 merks a year, Moray also received the sheriffdoms of Elgin, Forres and Inverness. Hence the tumbling-down of Huntly’s power in the north left an empty space which Moray, rather than the crown, was able to fill; while the disappearance of the leading Catholic magnate from the Scottish scene could not fail to weaken the Catholic cause there, and in turn benefit the reformed religion.
It has sometimes been argued that Mary made a fundamental mistake in allowing the balance of power to be upset in this way. The north of Scotland, which conceivably could have been a Catholic bloc under a friendly Huntly, to play off against a Protestant south, was now broken up into different units; and when the attainder was removed three years later for Huntly’s son, the properties were too dissipated for him to become the magnate his father had been. But even before 1562 Mary had never shown any signs of supporting Huntly either as a magnate or as a Catholic, and had repeatedly snubbed his overtures in favour of the Protestants. Her attitude towards Huntly was very much affected by her general policy since her arrival in Scotland, of leaning upon the advice of Moray and Maitland; her aim was to quieten down all possible Catholic insurrections, in favour of general peace, the maintenance of the royal authority and the status quo. It may well be argued that Mary’s policy was unwise, compared to the more serpentine procedure of backing each noble in turn, and luring them in some fashion to destroy each other, until the crown should be left triumphant. By this reasoning Huntly should have been skilfully built up, rather than bloodily laid low. Certainly the ‘pale augurs’ might well murmur low over his ‘blasted head’, when they reflected how critical Mary’s situation could be if Moray’s loyalty faltered. There was, however, an obvious difficulty in the way of pursuing this policy of checks and balances, quite apart from Mary’s own inexperience of Scottish affairs; this was the character of Huntly – so manifestly unreliable.
Mary herself was in no doubt afterwards that Huntly’s treachery had been proved by the evidence discovered after his death, and the confessions of Sir John and Huntly’s servants (one of them made before the battle of Corrichie): all of which suggested that in his last moments Huntly did have some wild ill-conceived plan of seizing Mary’s person, and upsetting the Protestant régime in favour of a Catholic one. Mary continued to regard Huntly as a double-dyed traitor, and when she wrote to her uncle in France and to the Pope in January 1563, protesting her continued devotion to the Catholic faith, she clearly felt no regret that circumstances had compelled her to lay low her greatest Catholic subject – it had been an unpleasant duty which it would have been dangerous not to have carried out.15 By denying her entrance at Inverness, refusing to join her in the hunt against his son, and finally in taking up arms against her with the possible object of abducting her, he had certainly made it extremely difficult for her to support him against Moray, even if she had so wished. Thus Moray was easily able to gratify his natural avariciousness, and acquire the rich spoils in the north, having no need to work out any more subtle conspiracy. It is significant that Maitland himself, on his way back to southern Scotland, revealed that he was finally convinced of Huntly’s treachery: ‘I am sorry that the soil of my native country did ever produce so unnatural a subject as the Earl of Huntly hath proved in the end against his Sovereign,’ he wrote. ‘Being a Princess so gentle and benign … Well, the event hath made manifest his iniquity, and the innocence as well of her Majestie as of her ministers towards him.’16 In short, it was the character and temperament of Huntly which made it impossible in the final analysis for any dependence to be put upon him.
Chastened in spirit by her experiences, and by the chilling fate of Sir John Gordon, Mary made her way southwards again and was back in Edinburgh by November: here, along with Maitland, she fell victim to the fashionable new disease, influenza, lightly dubbed ‘the New Acquaintance’, but was otherwise not directly threatened by any personal danger for the next few months, at least. In the spring of 1563, however, she was to be the subject of a more intimate assault than the projected abduction plans of either Arran, Bothwell or Sir John Gordon. Among the train of French courtiers who accompanied the queen to Scotland from France in 1561 was a certain Pierre de Châtelard: well-born, charming-looking and gallant, Châtelard was also a poet, a fact which naturally commended itself to Mary. He was attached to the suite of the son of the Constable de Montmorency, Damville, who was also counted among Mary’s admirers, to the extent that he was supposed to have desired to abandon his wife, still in France, out of love for the Scottish queen. Mary certainly wrote to the constable when he departed that she found his son the most agreeable company.17 Châtelard himself speedily followed suit by professing the sort of wild lyrical passion suitable in a chivalrous man of literary aspirations for a lovely young queen. It was the sort of admiration – light, courtly and elaborately meaningless – which Mary Stuart particularly enjoyed, because it committed her to nothing (unlike the more vigorous proposals of a John Gordon) and it was something to which she had long and agreeably been accustomed at the court of France. It was after all much more to her taste to be celebrated in verses than dragged into a Highland fastness and forcibly married. There was no suggestion at the time of anything at all scandalous in her attitude to Châtelard, and Knox’s insinuations (written after the event) that she had been over-familiar with him can safely be attributed to his vicious desire to put everything the queen did in the most evil light – he was also incidentally probably unaware of the gallant licence allowed to poets at the French court, and if he had been aware of it, would have regarded it as a further proof of French devilry. Châtelard ended his visit to Scotland with his master Damville, and returned to France.
In the autumn of 1562, however, he decided to revisit the Scottish court; on his way through London, he confided that he was about to visit ‘his lady love’, and soon he was back with Mary’s court at Aberdeen, with a letter from Damville, and a book of his own poems. Mary received him in her usual friendly way, and with the compulsive generosity which she showed to those who pleased her, presented him with a sorrel gelding which had been given her by her half-brother Lord Robert, as well as some money to dress himself as befitted a young gallant: these favours were still absolutely no more than she showed at many times in her life to those around her, nor was there even now the faintest suggestion of impropriety in this conventional relationship of beautiful queen and platonic admiring poet. All this made Châtelard’s next move particularly incomprehensible. On the night when Maitland was about to set forth again for England, at the queen’s request, Mary, Moray and Maitland all conferred together until past midnight. Châtelard seized the opportunity to dash into her bedchamber unobserved, and hide under the bed. Luckily he was discovered by two of her grooms of the chamber, making their routine search of her tapestries and bed, and thrown out. The queen was not told of the incident until the morning, but immediately the news reached her, she ordered Châtelard to leave the court.
Châtelard, however, was either self-confident enough or crazy enough to follow the queen to St Andrews. The next night he proceeded to burst in on her, when she was alone with only one or two of her women, and according to what Randolph first heard, made such audacious advances to her that the unfortunate queen cried out for help. Her brother Moray rushed in, and Mary, in a state of near-hysteria, begged him to run his dagger through the man to save her. Moray, with greater calm and prudence, soothed his sister, and persuaded her that it would be better if Châtelard’s life were temporarily spared, so that he could face a public trial. Randolph later heard that Châtelard’s intentions in making this second foray into the royal apartments had been merely to explain away his first intrusion, on the grounds that he had been overcome by sleep, and had sought the first convenient resting-place.18 Whether he attempted to advance this implausible explanation or not, Mary’s reaction to the whole incident was highly hysterical, and no spinster ever reacted with more horrified indignation to the presence of a man in her bed-chamber than the already once married queen of Scots.
Châtelard was sent to the dungeons of St Andrews, and after a public trial sentenced to execution on 22nd February. Romantic to the last, just before his execution, he read aloud Ronsard’s Hymn to Death there and then in the market square of St Andrews. The beautiful last lines of the poem must have seemed strangely ironical to those of the bystanders who understood enough French to appreciate them:
Je te salue, heureuse et profitable mort …
… puisqu’il faut mourir
Donne-moi que soudain je te puisse encourir
Ou pour l’honneur de Dieu, ou pour servir mon Prince …*
In fact it was far from clear for whose honour, or in whose service, Châtelard was dying. Just before he died, his last words echoed out, ‘Adieu, the most beautiful and the most cruel princess of the world’ – words which are given slightly differently by Knox: ‘In the end, he concluded looking unto the heavens, with these words “O cruel Dame”.’ The sense, however, is in both cases the same, despite Knox’s efforts to give the common French word dame a more sinister import: ‘That is,’ he wrote, ‘Cruel mistress. What that complaint imported, lovers may divine.’19 Châtelard’s general behaviour and these rhetorical last words all lead one to suppose that the young poet was a victim of one of those unbalanced passions for a royal personage, to which princesses have been subject all through history, royalty being notoriously a great aphrodisiac to an unstable mind. Châtelard had mistaken Mary’s gracious reception for something more humanly passionate, and died for his error. The queen’s outraged withdrawal from his advances makes it quite clear that she never reciprocated them in her own mind – as indeed does the method by which Châtelard chose to approach her, since if they had been lovers already or intending to become so, she would presumably have arranged a more convenient rendezvous and one which was less likely to be interrupted.
But it is possible that there was a more sinister explanation for Châtelard’s advances. Publicity seems to have been one of the main features of his attempt on the queen’s virtue: if Châtelard’s wits were not actually wandering, he must have realized that he was all too likely to be discovered in her bedchamber by her attendants. The ugly speculation arises whether this was not in fact Châtelard’s intention, and whether his ultimate aim was to blacken Mary’s reputation rather than win her love. According to Maitland, Châtelard had confessed to Mary that he had been dispatched by persons in a high position in France expressly to compromise her honour, and the duchess of Guise hinted at the same thing to the Venetian ambassador. Mary mentioned the name of Coligny’s first wife, and told Maitland there were other names involved she could not trust to paper. The nuncio at the French court heard that the incident had been arranged to give Mary a bad name.20 In the circumstances, it is significant that Châtelard himself turned out to be a Huguenot. Even his casual remark in London about his lady love may have been intended to draw attention to his relationship with the queen. Whether Châtelard was an emissary of the French Huguenots or a lovesick fool, the one certain piece of evidence which emerges from the whole affair is that Mary’s reaction to the escapade was markedly severe. Death was after all a high price for Châtelard to pay for an amorous adventure. It is true that Mary may have justified his subsequent execution in her mind by the knowledge of the plot which had been woven around her, yet both Randolph and Knox confirm that her first reaction to his entry had been to demand for him to be killed by Moray. There was no hint here of the loose easygoing morals of the French court, which it has sometimes been suggested that she acquired along with her education.
It was a sad spring for the young queen. Two or three days after Châtelard’s execution, her uncle Duke Francis of Guise was shot down by a Huguenot assassin, Poltrot, who knew him by the white plume in his hat, and attacked him from behind – thus fulfilling the prophecy of Luc Gauric that he would die from a wound in his back, which the duke had once angrily repudiated as being a slur on his courage. On 15th March came the news that he had died. Mary was overcome with grief and her ladies shed tears ‘like showers of rain’.21 Only a few weeks later another uncle, the Grand Prior Francis, also died. Mary, upset by these repeated sorrows in the only family she had really known, melancholy after the Châtelard episode, so distasteful to her nature, exhausted in health by the long Scottish winter and bouts of illness, burst out to Randolph that she was really almost destitute of friends; she outlined her many adventures and vicissitudes since her husband’s death, and confessed that the burden suddenly seemed too much for her to bear. In an access of feminine weakness, she read Queen Elizabeth’s letter of sympathy with tears in her eyes, and exclaimed to Randolph that neither of them could afford to turn down a possible support – how much better everything would be if the two queens were indeed friends! ‘For I see now that the world is not that that we do make of it, nor yet are they most happy that continue longest in it.’22 These were gloomy sentiments for a young girl just turned twenty-one. Mary Stuart had now been a widow for over two years. Since the Châtelard incident Mary Fleming had been taken to sleep in her room for company and protection. But it was high time that she made a serious attempt to share the load of her responsibilities with a proper partner, especially since her naturally dependent nature inevitably turned to a masculine adviser, as a sunflower turns to the sun. Neither James Stewart, earl of Moray, in her counsels, nor Mary Fleming in her bed-chamber were adequate substitutes for the wise, strong, loyal husband whom she now more than ever needed to support her.
* In all Queen Mary made two expeditions to the Highlands: it was on the second occasion, in the summer of 1564, that she made her way north to Ross-shire once more through Inverness. En route to Dingwall, the chief town of the earldom of Ross, Mary stopped at the priory of Beauly, founded in the thirteenth century by monks of the Valliscaulian order, and taking its name from the beauty of the place, commemorated in its Latin charter – Monasterium de Bello Loco. The name seemed apt also to the queen three hundred years later, and inspired her to a royal play upon the words: ‘Oui, c’est un beau lieu’ she is said to have exclaimed, with gracious good humour.9
* As Lord James will be referred to in the future to distinguish him from Mary’s son James.
* This ghoulish procedure has been traced back to the days when Parliament was a ceremonial sitting of the court of the lists for trial by battle, and the importance of the presence of the corpse was a reminder of the personal element in trial by combat.14
* I salute you, happy and profitable Death…
… since I must die
Grant that I may suddenly encounter you
Either for the honour of God, or in the service of my Prince.