Читать книгу Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens - Jane Dunn - Страница 9

I was one day present when she replied at the same time to three ambassadors, the Imperial, French, and Swedish, in three languages: Italian to one, French to the other, Latin to the third; easily, without hesitation, clearly, and without being confused, to the various subjects thrown out, as is usual in their discourse.

Elizabeth’s tutor Roger Ascham to his friend John Sturm in 1562

She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her … she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five.

Cardinal of Lorraine to Mary’s mother in 1553 when the Queen of Scots was ten

IF EXILE IS NOT JUST A PHYSICAL ABSENCE from home but an emotional and spiritual disconnection from one’s earlier self then in the late 1540s both these young queens entered a simultaneous period of exile which would mark them more deeply than anything else in their lives. The reasons, experiences and effects for Elizabeth and Mary individually, however, could not have been more different, or more significant in their differences.

For Elizabeth, the exile was gradual, a journey towards singularity. At first it was the loosening of familial ties which came with orphanhood, then the spiritual estrangement during her sister’s reign, culminating in the physical constraint on her movements, place of residence and then the denial of her rights to safety, even to life. Her contemporary, John Foxe, expressed his outrage: ‘Into what fear, what trouble of mind, and what danger of death was she brought?’¹ The transient nature of her security, prospects and hopes, the unpredictable perils she encountered, toughened Elizabeth’s character, sharpened her wits and gave her a powerful sense of her own autonomy. This exile from certainty and ease made a precocious girl endure the most testing initiation in her journey to become a great queen. Camden realized the value of these unhappiest of years: ‘taught by Experience and Adversity, (two most effectual and powerfull Masters,) she had gathered Wisedom above her age’.²

For Mary her exile was more clear cut. She was removed to France before she was six years old in what was to be a physical and spiritual severance from her homeland. Already betrothed to the dauphin, her future now was mapped out by foreign interests. She was to be a French princess and then a French queen, with Scotland as her dowry. John Knox considered in retrospect this French exile to be a poisonous inheritance for his young Scottish queen. Hayward, an early chronicler, mourned the loss to her personally: ‘our young Quene is married into France, where she nowe lyveth as a stranger both to them and us …’³ In fact this dislocation and re-education was to prove so complete that Mary, the Queen of Scotland, would come to consider her French years as the happiest time of her life.

For Elizabeth it was a painful decade which began with the death of her father on 28 January 1547. Her brother Edward was brought to see her at the manor of Enfield and they were told the news together. In a spasm of grief, so the story went, Henry’s two younger children clung together and wept bitterly, then Edward continued on his way to London and the thirteen-year-old princess returned, for the time being, to the studious patterns of her life.

The new young king, himself only nine years old, wrote to this favourite sister: ‘There is very little need of my consoling you, most dear sister, because from your learning you know what you ought to do, and from your prudence and pity you perform what your learning causes you to know.’ His letter was in answer to one from her seeking to console him and place their loss in the context of her classical and religious studies. She had obviously shown herself to be in control of her emotions for Edward added, ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind.’⁴

Elizabeth had never lived intimately with either her mother or her father and essentially both were unknown to her. However, in her governess Catherine Ashley she had the most loyal, if limited, of mother figures who had been with her all her life and was to remain, until her death, the woman Elizabeth cared for most. The death of Henry and her subsequent status as an orphan was not a personal wrench so much as a loss of the idealized father as hero. Practically too, Elizabeth could no longer rely on that powerful umbrella of protection and instead was exposed to the untrammelled ambitions of others. Henry’s death marked the end of a certain status quo.

Elizabeth’s stepmother, Catherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, was an affectionate woman with a talent for nurturing and inspiring the young. Her previous stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, left a glowing affidavit in her will: ‘I was never able to render her grace [Catherine] sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her.’⁵ On marrying Henry in 1543 Catherine had embarked on her new life as his queen with a sense of vocation and had fulfilled her duties admirably. She was thirty-one, already had been twice married and twice widowed and was a mature woman of considerable character and independent means. Catherine was the first of Henry’s wives to make any real attempt to take responsibility for the royal children and was to be a particularly important influence on the clever, watchful and spirited Princess Elizabeth. Only ten years old at the time, the young princess was already emotionally self-protective, yet avid for experience and knowledge.

Henry had at least settled the succession before he died. His immediate heir was his son Edward, for whose precious existence he had prayed, plotted and laid waste so many lives, even the foundations of his country’s faith. Edward’s children were to be next in line, followed by Princess Mary – and her heirs – and only then by his second daughter, Elizabeth.^* At this time there was every reason to hope that Edward, an intellectually gifted, brave and independent-minded boy, would survive to manhood and have children of his own. For much of her girlhood there was little expectation that Elizabeth would ever be more than a royal princess.

The death of such a long-reigning despot as Henry VIII inevitably released a ferment of long-suppressed ambitions, for power, wealth and the propagation of the reformed religion in England which Henry’s equivocation had stalled. The powerful men around the new young king, specifically in his Privy Council in whose hands his father had left the governance of the kingdom, were predominantly reformist. The most notable among them were Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the enduring Edwardian prayer book, John Dudley, and the boy-king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector, awarding himself the dukedom of Somerset.

There was a second powerful and ambitious Seymour brother, who was to teach the teenage Elizabeth some malign lessons on the delusions of sexual desire and the snares of ruthless men who would be king. Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley, at nearly forty years old, still cut a dashing soldierly figure having distinguished himself in diplomatic, naval and military campaigns under Henry. He became Lord Admiral early in the reign of Edward VI under the protectorship of his own elder brother, Somerset. Thomas Seymour had not only been admired by Henry, he had been loved by his queen. In marrying the King rather than this love, Catherine Parr had sacrificed her heart for the sake of duty. However, on Henry’s death her sense of obligation was fulfilled and after only four months of widowhood, Catherine married Seymour. This was considered indecorous haste, especially for a queen – and for a couple well into Tudor middle age. But even more surprisingly the thirty-five-year-old queen, who had remained childless throughout her first three marriages, now belatedly conceived. This could only enhance the self-confidence and reputation of an already proudly virile man. It seemed inevitable that such a man would have sired a son.

Elizabeth was still only thirteen when her stepmother, of whom she was most fond, married for love. The young princess remained in her care, living principally with her at her dower houses at Chelsea and Hanworth. Ever curious and watchful, Elizabeth could not fail to have noted the effects of the sudden transformation in Catherine Parr’s life. From patient, pious consort of an ailing elderly king she had been transmuted into a lover, desired and desiring. Although not legally her stepfather, Thomas Seymour assumed his role as head of the household and with his manly demeanour and exuberant animal spirits he became for the young princess a charismatic figure of attraction and respect. Some twenty-five years her senior, Seymour in fact was old enough to be her father and the glamour of his varied heroic exploits in war and diplomatic dealings brought a welcome worldly masculinity into Elizabeth’s cloistered female-dominated life.

Up until now, Elizabeth had never lived in daily proximity with a man other than her tutors and servants. Her father had been a distant, revered, almost superhuman figure to her, someone she strove to impress with something of her own talents and individuality, but it is unlikely that Henry offered her more than the scantest recognition. From the start, there was evidence that Seymour paid Elizabeth most gratifying attention.

From a purely political point of view, Elizabeth was worthy of this attention for Seymour always had an eye for the main chance and this receptive young woman was a royal princess, third in the line of succession. But Elizabeth was also attractive in her own right, tall with fair reddish-gold hair, fine pale skin and the incongruously dark eyes of her mother, alive with unmistakable intelligence and spirit. She was young, emotionally inexperienced and understandably hungry for recognition and love. She easily became a willing if uneasy partner in the verbal and then physical high jinks in the newly sexualized Parr – Seymour household.

There can be little doubt too that this perceptive girl noticed a marked change in the energy and manner of her much-admired stepmother. Catherine was scholarly, dutiful, religious, yet courageous and radical in a way that was similar to Elizabeth’s own mother in her promotion of the evangelical reformed religion. She maintained the heretical belief that everyone should have access to a Bible and be able to read the great book for him- or herself, a belief that had brought lesser personages than her to the stake.

She was also a woman of active feelings and, in following her passion at last and marrying the love of her younger self, both she and Seymour were aware that the prime of their lives was past and there was little time now to lose. This can only have heightened the emotional temperature and in an age when prudery had little place in personal lives it must have been clear to the curious girl that sex and love were powerful, transformative things. They could also prove to be most dangerous if you were a young woman and a princess, without wise counsel or family elders to protect you.

Events started to become unsettling, and in the end alarming, for Elizabeth when the good-natured horseplay, which in the beginning gratifyingly had included her, turned more serious. Seymour began to focus his boisterous sexual energies on his wife’s young stepdaughter sometime during Catherine’s pregnancy. Elizabeth’s loyal governess Mrs Ashley had always been very taken by Seymour’s charm and even maintained that before Henry’s death he had all but obtained the old king’s approval for a marriage between himself and Princess Elizabeth: ‘that if the King’s Majesty, that Dead is, had lived a little longer, she should have been his wife’.⁶ This was rather unlikely and, although Seymour surely considered the advantages of his marrying either one of the royal sisters, he knew that once his astute elder brother had become Lord Protector any such political advancement for himself would be strongly resisted.

The idea persisted, however, not least with Catherine Ashley who, in her limited way, felt such a marriage would be a good one for her much-loved charge. She lost no opportunity to talk of Seymour to Elizabeth, who blushed, with a ‘Countenance of Gladness, when he was well spoken of’.⁷ But Elizabeth’s governess was also foolishly fuelling romantic fancies and the natural rivalry which any girl might feel for an older woman who had prior claim on a man they both desired: ‘Kat. Ashley told me’, Elizabeth admitted under later cross-examination, ‘after that my Lord Admiral was married to the Queen, that if my Lord might have his own Will, he would have had me, afore the Queen.’⁸ Even if the young princess at that time had not considered Seymour in a romantic light, given such a provocative piece of information by her trusted governess, it is unlikely that Elizabeth could continue to view Seymour neutrally.

But it was a respectable marriage for Elizabeth for which Catherine Ashley hoped, and the Lord Admiral seemed to her the most eligible suitor: ‘I would wish her his Wife of all Men living,’⁹ she had declared. However, when Seymour, as a married man, began behaving over-familiarly with the girl, risking her reputation, Mrs Ashley exhibited all the fierce protectiveness of a mother. On one occasion Seymour had attempted to kiss Elizabeth while she was still in bed and been roundly told off by Mrs Ashley, who ‘bade him go away for shame’.¹⁰

The relationship between the Lord Admiral and the young princess was a gradual progression from playful affection to something intrusive and oppressive, denying her a necessary privacy and sense of safety in her home. In all there was an element of sexual attraction that Elizabeth felt for this flashy man of action, the first of a particular type who, throughout her life, would capture her romantic imagination. But for a young and inexperienced girl, this emotional complicity merely added confusion and guilt to the already potent combination of fear and desire his attentions aroused in her.

At first, Seymour would appear in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, before she was up and dressed, and tickle her in bed, sometimes slapping her ‘upon the Back or on the Buttocks familiarly’. Other times he would open the curtains of her bed and wish her good morning, ‘and make as though he would come at her. And she would go further in the Bed, so that he could not come at her.’ It is not clear whether Elizabeth’s shrinking from his threatened embrace was through excitement or alarm, or whether a confusing mixture of both. Certainly Catherine Ashley told of occasions when Elizabeth, wishing to avoid these early-morning incursions, rose earlier from her bed, so that Seymour then found her dressed and at her books rather than vulnerably half-dressed. On another occasion, Elizabeth, caught out and hearing the lock on her door open, rushed from her bed to hide with her women of the bedchamber until Seymour, having tarried a while, gave up and left the room. Mrs Ashley remonstrated with him on this occasion and on another when he came to bid Elizabeth good morning in a state of semi-undress himself, ‘in his Night-Gown, barelegged in his Slippers’.¹¹ He answered the governess’s warnings with anger and self-justification; he meant no harm and to suggest otherwise was to slander him.

The whole confused business was further clouded by the unexpected involvement of the Dowager Queen Catherine herself in some of her husband’s excesses. There was an episode in the garden at Hanworth when Seymour remonstrated with Elizabeth over something and then cut to ribbons the black gown she was wearing, revealing her undergarments. Elizabeth explained later to her horrified governess that she could do nothing to protect herself because the queen had been holding her down during the whole process. A possible explanation of Catherine’s implication could be that newly married, just pregnant and very much in love with her husband, she was careful to indulge him, afraid of reproving him. Perhaps she harboured some anger at Elizabeth for the continued flirtation between her stepdaughter and him. It was a historic and religious tradition that sexual attraction between a man and woman was invariably seen as the woman’s responsibility, even if she be just a girl and he a much more experienced man, old enough indeed to be her father.

There came a point, however, when Queen Catherine recovered her confidence and good sense and brought this difficult situation to an end. She had come upon Elizabeth and her own husband in an embrace. This was a traumatic debacle for the young princess and was vividly related by her treasurer, Thomas Parry: ‘I do remember also, [Mrs Ashley] told me, that the Admiral loved [Elizabeth] but too well, and had so done a good while; and that the Queen was jealous of her and him, in so much that, one Time the Queen, suspecting the often Access of the Admiral to the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone, (he having her in his Arms:) wherefore the Queen fell out, both with the Lord Admiral, and with her Grace also.’¹²

In fact, although the queen did not fall out with either husband or stepdaughter for long, this episode propelled Elizabeth and her retainers out of her stepmother’s house. As Parry continued in his confession: ‘as I remember, this was the Cause why she was sent from the Queen; or else that her Grace parted from the Queen: I do not perfectly remember whether … she went of herself, or was sent away.’¹³ It was sometime in the summer of 1548 and late in Catherine’s pregnancy and the queen’s tolerance and patience had run out. She certainly lectured Mrs Ashley on her responsibilities in keeping Elizabeth’s behaviour within bounds and her reputation free from scandal. It is evident that she also pointed out to Elizabeth the necessity of guarding her good name and the dangers of indiscreet behaviour giving rise to unwelcome talk.

It was a humiliating and unhappy situation for the fourteen-year-old princess. She had betrayed her stepmother’s kindness and trust and her pride was wounded. Her own feelings for Seymour were distressing and confusing, with elements of fear and desire, of longing and recoil. The chastened girl replied in a letter to Catherine: ‘truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. And albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me; for if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way.’¹⁴

Thus in exile from her stepmother’s house for her own unseemly behaviour, Elizabeth was denied any further exposure to this lively intellectual household, where her cousin Lady Jane Grey had also spent some time. Instead she was sent to Cheshunt in Hertfordshire to stay with Sir Anthony Denny and his wife. It was not a particularly lively household for Sir Anthony was a scholar and had been a loyal chief gentleman to her father but now was very near the end of his life. Elizabeth turned increasingly to the consolation of study.

At the beginning of 1548 her tutor Grindal had died of the plague. This young man had been an inspirational tutor to the princess since she was just eleven years old. The excellence of her grounding in Greek, Latin and foreign languages was so outstanding that his mentor Roger Ascham admitted he did not know ‘whether to admire more the wit of her who learned, or the diligence of him who taught’.¹⁵ The commonplace but tragic death of someone so young and close to Elizabeth stripped more security from her life. Both Ascham and Elizabeth’s step-parents had other suggestions for a successor for the talented Grindal, but she insisted, against some resistance, on replacing him with his friend and teacher, Roger Ascham himself. This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisers and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons. Although for the old queen, Leicester’s stepson the Earl of Essex was a less happy replacement as favourite, the young princess’s insistence on replacing Grindal with his own mentor and tutor was inspired. This was to prove a most successful marriage of teacher with pupil, with the princess impressing the scholar from the start with her native intelligence, diligence and remarkable aptitude for learning.

During those difficult months after her banishment Elizabeth’s health suffered ‘an affliction of my head and eyes’¹⁶ and she did not like either her governess or her tutor to leave her side. This suggested a kind of nervous collapse; perhaps these familiars provided the only security and family feeling left to her in an increasingly menacing world. On the last day of August, Catherine Parr’s difficult pregnancy came to an end with the birth, not of the expected son, but of a daughter, Mary. However the relief and happiness at a safe delivery were short-lived. Instead a commonplace tragedy was set in motion. Almost immediately the queen started to sicken with a fever. She became delirious as the infection took hold and within six days was dead of puerperal fever.

Apart from Catherine Ashley’s passing mention that she was sick in the period immediately after the queen’s death, we have no further record of how Elizabeth took this latest loss. She had left her stepmother’s company only a few months before, when she was healthy, hopeful of the birth of her first baby, the ‘little Knave’¹⁷ as she called it, full of life and love. But Catherine’s death showed just how dangerous love could be to life. To a clear-sighted logical young woman like Elizabeth there was no denying the evidence that if a woman’s destiny involved sex it was fraught with pain and danger. Her own mother had survived Elizabeth’s difficult birth only to die because the baby was the wrong sex; her brother’s mother, Queen Jane, had died in giving birth to him; now Catherine, the closest the young princess had come to having a mother and a female intellectual mentor, was dead herself, in the process of giving life.

Given the general sacrifice of young women to their reproductive functions it was understandable that the gods, and even God Himself, was seen to value women less highly than men. Men died prematurely in war as a result of man’s will but the risks to women’s lives through childbirth seemed inextricably bound up with some divine plan. It was not surprising if any clever, perceptive girl came to the conclusion that women were more expendable than men, but only if they succumbed to sexual desire and the usual consequence, childbirth, with its handmaidens of pain and possible death.

But sexual desire was dangerous for a woman too if it compromised her reputation. Catherine Howard, one of the more racy and fleeting of Elizabeth’s stepmothers, had lost her life for her sexual incontinence and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s own mother, had been vilified with terrible accusations of immorality and incest. Trumped up as they almost certainly were, such charges were enough to merit her death. Princes could be murderous, mad, licentious, fathering bastards at any opportunity, and still continue to rule. Princesses had to be very careful.

We cannot know what factors contributed to Elizabeth’s decision to remain celibate, despite the stirrings of her own heart and the most telling pressure from her advisers throughout her life. We only know that by the time she ascended to the throne at the age of twenty-five this revolutionary decision had already been made. It is not too fanciful to think that in her mid-teens, steeped in her classical and religious texts, drawing conclusions from sharp observations of society around her, this thoughtful girl was pondering her fate and deciding what she wanted to make of her life.

There was danger too for Elizabeth in Catherine’s death. Almost immediately Seymour reprised his ambitions to marry her, thereby dragging the young princess into a scandal which rapidly evolved into treason, with all the peril that entailed. Seymour’s jealous politicking against his brother, the Lord Protector Somerset, had alerted the Privy Council to his reckless schemes: ‘the World beginneth to talk very evil favourable of him, both for his Slothfulness to serve, and for his Greediness to get, noting him to be one of the most covetous Men living’.¹⁸ It transpired that Seymour had tried to undermine King Edward’s confidence in his elder uncle. He had bribed the boy, who resented how short he was kept of funds, with gifts of money. He corrupted an official at the Bristol Mint fraudulently to raise thousands of pounds in readiness for any possible uprising. He put into action his ambitious wooing of the Princess Elizabeth.

To be so indiscreet in his rapacity was suicidally risky, for all these activities could be interpreted as treason. Nicholas Throckmorton, in conversation with one of Seymour’s servants, spelt out the danger. ‘My Lord is thought to be a very ambitious Man of Honour; and it may so happen that, now the Queen is gone, he will be desirous for his Advancement to match with one of the King’s Sisters.’ Then in confirmation of the servant’s response that seeking to marry Elizabeth without the consents of the King and his Council would bring upon his master ‘his utter Ruin and Destruction’, Throckmorton replied: ‘it is most true, for the Desire of a Kingdom knoweth no Kindred’.¹⁹

When Thomas Seymour was arrested and sent to the Tower of London in January 1549, Elizabeth’s natural feelings of guilt, fear and shame were intensified: the whole business of the Lord Admiral’s intentions towards her were extracted under oath and spread before the Privy Council. The first she knew of how serious the situation had become for her was when her governess Catherine Ashley and her treasurer Parry were arrested at Hatfield. Elizabeth was left alone to be interrogated by Sir Robert Tyrwhit, an agent appointed for this purpose by the Privy Council. On learning that her two loyal servants had been incarcerated in the Tower too, Elizabeth was momentarily very afraid. ‘She was marvellous abashed, and did weep very tenderly a long Time, demanding of my Lady Browne, whether they had confessed any Thing or not.’²⁰

Elizabeth was not just frightened for her life, at this point her reputation was almost as precious to her. If she wished to safeguard her place in the succession, or even continue to be considered eligible for a good marriage, she had to remain virtuous and be seen to be virtuous. This was of particular sensitivity in her case because of the traumatic history of her mother’s downfall. These rumours of lascivious relations with a stepfather were too close an echo of the accusations of incest brought against Anne Boleyn and her own brother.

Elizabeth had been caught unawares. The Lord Protector and the council had their suspicions that Elizabeth herself, aided and abetted by her servants, had been complicit in some of Seymour’s plans, not least the one secretly to marry. Elizabeth needed time to collect herself and edit the story that would best protect her from these serious allegations. At this first interview she was unprepared and alarmed and could not hide her agitation. Tyrwhit reported back to the Lord Protector: ‘in no Way she will not confess any Practice by Mistress Ashley or the Cofferer [treasurer], concerning my Lord Admiral; and yet I do see it in her Face that she is guilty’.²¹

Catherine Ashley and treasurer Parry were even more afraid. On facing arrest, Parry had rushed into his wife’s room and said to her in great distress that he wished he had never been born ‘for I am undone, and wrung his Hands, and cast away his Chain from his Neck, and his Rings from his Fingers’,²² as if he expected then and there to be beheaded.

The following day, Tyrwhit interrogated Elizabeth again, but by now she had composed herself. She appeared to be wholly cooperative but gave only careful, anodyne answers: she could not be certain what Parry or Catherine Ashley had been induced to reveal but she kept her own hand as close as possible to her chest. Tyrwhit thought her calmness and reason meant he was getting round her with his subtle questioning but he did have the intelligence to realize that he was up against a fifteen-year-old girl who was already a formidable advocate: ‘I do assure your Grace’, he wrote to Somerset, ‘she hath a very good Wit, and nothing is gotten off her, but by great policy.’²³

Although Elizabeth’s servants talked more fully as Tyrwhit’s tactics frightened or tricked them, they never revealed anything that could be construed as a conspiracy between their mistress and Seymour. Any marriage involving the princess, they declared, was always dependent on the knowledge and approval of the king, the Lord Protector and the Council. Tyrwhit was suspicious that there was much more to be confessed, but he was frustrated in his investigations by the consistency of their blameless story: ‘They all sing one Song, and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the Note before.’²⁴

The fear of torture and the discomfort of the conditions in which Elizabeth’s servants were held cannot be underestimated. It was winter and Mrs Ashley had been moved into a windowless dungeon to induce her further to talk. Here during freezing February she could neither sleep at night, the cold was so intense, nor see by day where no light could penetrate. Always too was the ever present threat of death. In fact it was remarkable that everyone managed to keep that one song in tune, despite the threats, cajolery, forged letters and invented confessions which were flung at them during that chilling start to 1549. Eventually Tyrwhit gave up disgruntled. As far as he was concerned Elizabeth was the architect of this resistance: ‘I do believe that there hath been some secret Promise, between my Lady, Mistress Ashley, and the Cofferer, never to confess to Death; and if it be so, it will never be gotten out of her.’²⁵

After her initial discomposure, Elizabeth’s confidence had grown as the interrogations proceeded. Indeed, she was able to summon a tone of remarkable self-righteousness, an attitude which was to become one of her favourite and most effective stances in negotiations throughout her life when she felt she was on dubious ground. In a letter to the all-powerful Lord Protector Somerset she alternated her tone between imperiousness and submission to achieve her effect: ‘Master Tyrwit and others have told me that there goeth rumours Abroad, which be greatly both against my Honour, and Honesty, (which above all things I esteem) which be these; that I am in the Tower; and with Child by my Lord Admiral. My Lord these are shameful Slanders.’ She then requested urgent permission to come to court and show herself ‘as I am’, distinctly signing herself with the poignant reminder of her youth, her vulnerability and his responsibility, as protector of the realm, towards her, ‘Your assured Friend to my little Power, Elizabeth’.²⁶

Here was a girl, just turned fifteen, without any powerful guardian to protect her interests, or even her life, reminded in her interrogation that ‘she was but a subject’,²⁷ and how perilous her situation had become. She was bullied, threatened and lied to but had managed to keep her wits about her to such an extent that she was able to get the better of her inquisitor and make demands of him and his master, the Lord Protector. When the council decided they would replace Catherine Ashley with Robert Tyrwhit’s wife, who would keep a closer eye on the young princess, Elizabeth threw a fit: ‘She took the Matter so heavily, that she wept all that Night, and loured all the next Day.’²⁸ Tyrwhit was no match for such a dramatic display of grief. He did allow her to write to Somerset and argue her case (although he grumbled that she would take none of his advice). Through sheer force of will, emotion and logic, Elizabeth got her way. Eventually Tyrwhit’s wife was withdrawn and Mrs Ashley reinstated. Tyrwhit was nonplussed by many things about Elizabeth, not least her devotion to her governess. ‘The Love yet she beareth her is to be wondered at,’ he wrote.²⁹ His own job as interrogator was done and he himself withdrew from the fray, relieved no doubt and uneasy at the thought that somehow he had been forestalled by a mere girl.

It is impossible to know just how far Elizabeth compromised herself with Seymour, although there is plenty of evidence that she found him attractive, as well as how troubling she found that attraction. But Tyrwit may well have been right that her servants’ loyalty and courage and her own intelligence and coolness under fire prevented something more damaging to Elizabeth’s prospects, even her life, from emerging. Elizabeth was distressed by the fact that even by March, Catherine Ashley was still imprisoned in the Tower and, despite her fears that this might implicate her in any of her governess’s perceived guilt, she wrote another impassioned letter to the Lord Protector:

My lord:

I have a request to make unto your grace which fear has made me omit till this time … I will speak for … Katherine Ashley, that it would please your grace and the rest of the Council to be good unto her … First, because she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty. And therefore I ought of very duty speak for her, for Saint Gregory sayeth that we are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural for them – that is, bringeth us into this world – but our bringers-up are a cause to make us live well in it.³⁰

Elizabeth never forgot the sacrifices of these partners in her first ordeal. On her accession and throughout their lives she treated both with great favour, knighting Parry and making him treasurer of the household and visiting Catherine Ashley on her deathbed in July 1565, mourning her deeply.

Elizabeth and her servants escaped further punishment but the Lord Admiral Seymour was tried for treason, found guilty and beheaded on 20 March 1549. The whole lethal business had taken just three months. Through this treacherous time Elizabeth had learned some lessons as to the value of circumspection over spontaneity, the necessity of will and intellect ruling the heart. She also learnt about loyalty, the depths of her own, and how her very life could depend on the loyalty and love of her servants, her people. Nothing would make her join in the vilification of Seymour even when she was still under some suspicion herself. ‘She beginneth now a little to droop,’ the disliked Mrs Tyrwhit noted when Elizabeth heard that Seymour’s lands were being divided up and dispersed, but she then added, ‘She can not hear him discommended.’³¹ However, at fifteen, Elizabeth already had absorbed a wisdom that at forty had eluded the ambitious, swaggering Seymour. On the day of his execution she is reputed to have made the possibly apocryphal comment, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’³² From that day on, Elizabeth would ensure that no one could ever say that of her.

While Elizabeth, exiled from safety, protection and power, endured her baptism of fire, her cousin Mary was embarking on her own more literal exile with a cheerful heart. Her mother, Mary of Guise, had got her way at last: her daughter was to be taken to safety, contracted to marry the dauphin to become eventually Queen of France. The marriage treaty was signed on July 7 1548 and with it the alliance with France was strengthened. Mary hoped that now the French would give her much-needed aid in her struggles to protect her daughter’s kingdom from the English.

These marauding English had seized the town of Haddington, John Knox’s birthplace, in the eastern Borders. The Scottish troops, reinforced with some five thousand or more Frenchmen, were attempting to wrest it back again when Mary, intrepid as ever, just two days after signing the marriage treaty for her daughter, rode to the town to exhort the troops to greater resistance. Accompanied by her entourage of lords and ladies she headed for the nunnery on the edge of town, from there to gain a better vantage point. But unfortunately her party arrived just as the English gunners were perfecting their range. In an immense explosion of dust and smoke sixteen of her accompanying gentlemen and others of her party were mown down, along with their horses, in a scene of terrible carnage. Even for a woman of her fortitude and experience this horror was too much to bear; the dowager queen fainted with shock. Nothing could have convinced her more graphically of the wisdom of the imminent dispatch of her daughter.

The French fleet sent to spirit the young Queen of Scots away had sailed around the north coast of Scotland to elude the English and finally came to moorage at Dumbarton. To accompany her to her new life in France she had a bevy of Scottish children, among them the subsequently celebrated ‘Four Maries’ – Mary Fleming, Mary Livingston, Mary Seton and Mary Beaton – all daughters of noble Scottish families. Her adult court included the lords Erskine and Livingston and Lady Fleming, her stepaunt and governess. Also accompanying the young queen was her eldest illegitimate half-brother James Stewart and two younger, Lord Robert and Lord John. Seventeen years old, educated and adventurous, Lord James was to spend some time at the French court in the entourage of his young sister, and it is quite probable that during this time Mary forged her strong affection for this brother, a trust she found hard to relinquish even when he, as Earl of Moray, was made regent in her place years later. Mary’s mother was grief-stricken at sending her only daughter from her, on a journey which was inherently hazardous, and made all the more so by the threat of intervention from the aggressive English fleet.

By the beginning of August the French galleys bearing their important cargo eventually sailed down the Clyde and out to sea. There was every evidence that the Queen of Scots was blessed with an adventurous spirit which was to be one of the main motivating characteristics of her life. While others faded with homesickness or seasickness, Mary thrived. The journey around the west coast of England was plagued with storms and fears of an English attempt at ambush and kidnap, but nothing seemed to sap her robust health and merry temperament. Her mother meanwhile was overcome with sadness: ‘The old Queen doth lament the young Queen’s departure, and marvels that she heareth nothing from her.’³³

The French commander de Brézé had in fact sent a series of letters to console the grieving queen mother and in them consistently asserted that Mary, alone of all the party, remained cheery of temper and free of seasickness, despite the terrible storms that almost overwhelmed them off the coast of Cornwall. ‘Madam,’ he wrote on 18 August 1548, ‘in the belief that it will be a comfort to you to have news of the Queen, your daughter … she prospers, and is as well as ever you saw her. She has been less ill upon the sea than any one of her company, so that she made fun of those that were …’³⁴ In these leviathan seas they had broken their rudder but Providence, he claimed, came to their aid and the essential steerage was mended without loss of life. After almost a week at the mercy of the sea, the royal entourage arrived at Roscoff on the dramatic coastline of Finistère. There were members of that party whose suffering would have made them think it well named as ‘the end of the world’.

Mary’s charm, high spirits and adventurousness had already impressed the whole company who had shared her eventful voyage. The kind de Brézé wrote again on 1 November, ‘I believe, madame, that [the king] will find her as pleasing and as much to his fancy as all those who have seen her and found her pretty and of clever wit.’³⁵

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the French court was the most magnificent and sophisticated in Europe. When Mary arrived in 1548 it was dominated by two women, Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henri II, and Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. These women were indeed powerful but it was power exercised covertly, through influence and manipulation, through persuasion and pillow talk, bribery and possibly even poison. While Henri lived, Catherine appeared to be eclipsed by the phenomenon of Diane de Poitiers. Preternaturally beautiful, seductive and socially skilled, she was nearly twenty years his senior, a woman whom age could not diminish. But it was Catherine who was the more remarkable. Patiently willing to bide her time, wily, pragmatic, treacherous, she was to prove herself the ultimate stateswoman in utter control of herself and the dynasty through control of her children.

Diane had been the king’s mistress since he was about nineteen. The story went that François I, in despair at the death of his eldest son, had been complaining to Diane, widow of the Grand Sénéchal of Normandy, of the melancholic nature and uncouth manners of his second son, who had so tragically become dauphin and heir to his throne. Diane had laughingly replied ‘he must be made to fall in love, and that she would make him her gallant’.³⁶ Her plan worked so well that not only did she civilize him but, in introducing him young to the charms of her company, she ensured he was incapable of ever replacing her as the most influential woman in his life. For the following twenty-one years until his death Henri spent up to a third of each day in Diane’s company.

Catherine had none of her advantages of beauty or facile personality. She was a neglected scion of the Florentine merchant family of Medici, and had never been popular in France. Married at fourteen, she had to countenance very early her husband’s evident preference for his mistress and faithfulness to her until death. After ten miserable years of barren marriage, Catherine became sullen in her unhappiness and sinister in her superstitions and suspected occult powers. It had seemed to Catherine only supernatural intervention could save her from humiliation, and the threatened repudiation by her husband. The fact that she then managed to produce ten children, four of them sons, in a twelve-year flurry of miraculous fecundity explained some of her preoccupations with the occult and her subsequent absolute control over her family. Once Henri II died in 1559, however, the true power of the Medici sprang forth from its long incubation.

Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded queen. What Catherine lacked in beauty she made up for in intelligence, cunning and family ambition. After years of silence and antipathy her time at last had come. But it was not vengeance so much as power which she desired. From that point on, the interests and fortunes of her children were her main concern. Through the youth and inadequacy of her sons as kings she became the real power driving the French monarchy for the last thirty years of her life, as omnipotent queen mother throughout three reigns.

The France that Mary first encountered in 1548 was a country increasingly riven by religious dissent. Calvinism and evangelicalism were well established among the lower clergy and the urban bourgeoisie and were already infiltrating into the higher strata of society. François I’s intellectual sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was strongly evangelical in her faith, although she never broke definitively with the Catholic Church. Everywhere, heresy was enthusiastically rooted out with threats of torture, banishments and public burnings. Banned books were placed on an index and booksellers who defied these proscriptions risked being burnt along with their heretical volumes.

The court, however, seethed with its own factions and intrigues and increasingly was drawn into the religious wars. In the sixteenth century it was a lavish self-contained community, of king and queen and their families, the nobles from the provinces and their entourages, the foreign ambassadors and the princes étrangers, who, although with territories outside the kingdom, nevertheless attended the French court. This huge superstructure, centred on the glorification of the king, needed an even more vast army of workers, with priests, soldiers, officials, tradesmen, domestic servants, huntsmen, grooms, entertainers, poets, teachers and musicians. It was a largely peripatetic court, just as it had been in the Middle Ages, on the move between a series of châteaux, driven as much by the royal passion for hunting and the desire for new forests and new animals to kill, as by the more pragmatic need to clean the residences every few months or so, find new sources of food having exhausted the immediate hinterland, and display the king to his people.

To give an example of the logistics involved during François I’s reign, stabling was required for somewhere in the region of 24,000 horses and mules needed for transportation and recreation alone. His son’s court was no less prodigal. Wagons carried the plate, tapestries and furniture and when the roads became too difficult the court and all its entourage and equipment took to the water. Most of the favourite royal châteaux sat beside the mighty River Loire basking in its pleasant, hospitable climate, bordered by lush forests filled with animals, often artificially stocked for the king’s pleasure, sometimes even with imported exotics. Mary was a fine horsewoman all her life, as was her mother, and Diane de Poitiers looked particularly picturesque acting out one of her many roles as Diana the huntress. But it was Catherine de Medici who was the most fearless of all the court women. She rode as fast and recklessly as any man, and in order to facilitate her speed and manoeuvrability, had invented a way of riding side-saddle that was much closer to the modern technique, and much more effective than the old-fashioned box-like affair in which women were meant sedately to sit.

Everywhere was evidence of François I’s passion not only for hunting but for building, and the appreciation of art. This he had expressed actively, acquisitively, by collecting masterpieces for his royal palaces, particularly for Fontainebleau. Excellence in all things was the mark of an extrovert Renaissance king. Naturally, it was to the Italian masters that he turned. The king’s greatest coup was to persuade Leonardo da Vinci at the end of his life to come and live at court. He arrived in 1516 with La Gioconda (the Mona Lisa), The Virgin with Saint Anne, and Saint Jean Baptiste in his luggage, and settled at Amboise.

The great sculptor Benvenuto Cellini also spent some time at court and sculpted for François in 1544 his Nymph of Fontainebleau. On the walls of the bathhouse, situated immediately under the library, François hung his da Vincis and Raphaels and a magnificent portrait of himself by Titian, portraitist of the age to popes and kings. Although by the time Mary arrived in France, the first François was dead, the visual richness and cultural diversity of his legacy lived on in every royal palace. She would grow up amongst these treasures and then, as queen to the second François, a pygmy shadow of his grandfather, she would fleetingly inherit it all.

However, aged not yet six and newly arrived in her adopted country, Mary first had to meet the royal children, among them the dauphin, and her own Guise relations. She had been placed by her mother under the guardianship of her maternal grandmother, the remarkable Antoinette de Bourbon, Duchesse de Guise. Antoinette and her husband Claude de Lorraine had founded the Guise dynasty with their brood of ten, tall, strong and mettlesome children. Antoinette had proved a wise and rigorous mother and adviser to her impressive daughter: she would endeavour to pass on the same family pride and courage to her granddaughter.

The little Scottish queen was welcomed into this rich and glamorous court with sentimental excitement: had she not just been rescued from their mutual enemy, the brutal English? Had not French courage and nobility of purpose snatched this innocent child from the ravening beast? But there was real fascination too. She was their future queen, a pretty and spirited girl with the novelty of her Scottish tongue and the mystique of her distant mist-wreathed land to charm them. Although there was a long historic relationship between Scotland and France, and some intermixing of the countries’ nationals, Scotland was still considered by the French to be barbaric in climate, terrain and the character of its people. Mary’s beauty and charm of manner was celebrated all the more because of this piquant contrast.

Most important for the development of Mary’s character was the fact that her future father-in-law, Henri II, decreed pre-eminent status for the Queen of Scots. She was to grow up with his own sons and daughters but on any official occasion she was to precede the French princesses, a visual reminder to her companions and to the child herself of her unique importance even among the elite of the French court.

Two months after her arrival on the smugglers’ coast of Brittany, Mary was introduced to the grandeur of the French monarchy, which was now to become her own. By easy stages her party proceeded via Morlais and Nantes to St Germain-en-Laye, once a medieval fort but subsequently domesticated and decorated by François I to befit a great renaissance king. King Henri was away on progress through his kingdom and so at the palace she was greeted by his children, the family amongst whom she was to live until she was an adult. They were all younger than she was, and with her Guise inheritance she would remain taller and handsomer, even as they grew.

Her own betrothed, the Dauphin François, was not yet five and having been rather sickly since birth was much smaller and frailer than the Queen of Scots, but their friendship seemed to be forged immediately. Montmorency, the Constable of France, writing to Mary’s mother reported, ‘I will assure you that the Dauphin pays her little attentions, and is enamoured of her, from which it is easy to judge that God gave them birth the one for the other.’³⁷ François’s sister Elizabeth, just three and a half years old, was to become a real friend and as close as a sister to Mary. Claude, another sister, was just a baby, while Catherine de Medici was pregnant again with her fourth child, due the following February. Mary was entering a nursery full of much-doted-on children, to whom Catherine was to add another seven, her last pregnancy in 1556 producing twin girls, who died almost immediately.

Given Catherine’s unhappy decade of childlessness and the rigours she had gone through in attempting to conceive, these children were not just precious, semi-miraculous creatures, they were immutable proof to her enemies of her own fitness to be queen. No minutia of their health and wellbeing was too trivial for her concern. They were fussed over and indulged, the darlings of their parents and the court. Due to this odd conjugation of circumstance, Mary was introduced into, what was for the time, an unusually child-centred world, in which she was the star. Even the king, the most important personage in the land, was interested in meeting this five-year-old. He congratulated the Duc de Guise on his niece and said how much he was looking forward to seeing her: ‘no one comes from her who does not praise her as a marvel’.³⁸

Despite her later antipathy, there is no evidence that Catherine de Medici was anything other than kind to Mary when she was a child. But there was no doubt that she and the factions around her, who opposed the rapidly ascendant power of the Guises, were unhappy with the proposed alliance of the Valois monarchy with Mary Queen of Scots. Seen as merely a Guise in Scottish disguise, Mary, in marrying the dauphin, would be delivering the most terrific coup for the family. To complicate these political antagonisms further, Catherine’s arch rival, Diane de Poitiers, was an influential supporter of the Guises (her elder daughter was married to the third Guise brother, Mary’s uncle Claude) and Madame, as Diane was known, exercised the most influence of all with the king.

Diane de Poitiers’s charm and her interest in the young queen attracted Mary’s confidence and affection. Writing to Mary’s mother in Scotland, Diane recognized the young girl’s pre-eminent status and promised to extend to her a motherly care: ‘As to what concerns the Queen, your daughter, I will exert myself to do her service more than to my own daughter, for she deserves it more.’³⁹ This seductive and cultivated courtesan was to become one of the poles of female influence on the growing girl.

The other was Mary’s austerely devout and authoritative grandmother, Antoinette, Duchesse de Guise. A few of her letters to her daughter, Mary’s mother, remain and in their psychological insights and human responsiveness they speak across four and a half centuries of timeless affections and concerns:

‘I was more glad than I can say to learn of the arrival of our little Queen in as good a health as you could wish her to have.’ The duchess wrote to Mary of Guise on 3 September 1548, just before introducing her granddaughter to her new family.

I pity the sorrow that I think you must have felt during her voyage, and I hope you had news of her safe arrival, and also the pain that her departure must have caused you. You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that methinks you hardly know now what pleasure means. But still you must hope that at least this absence and loss of your child will at least mean rest and repose for the little creature, with honour and greater welfare than ever before, please God. I hope to see you yet sometimes before I die … But believe me, in the meanwhile I will take care that our little Queen shall be treated as well as you can desire for her. I am starting this week, God willing, to meet her and conduct her to St Germain, with the Dauphin. I shall stay with her there for a few days to arrange her little affairs, and until she grows somewhat used to the Dauphin and his sisters. Lady Fleming will, if the King allows it, remain with the child, as she knows her ways; and Mademoiselle Curel will take charge of her French education. Two gentlemen and other attendants are to be appointed to wait upon the little Queen, and her dress and appointments shall be fitting for her rank.⁴⁰

To her son, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Antoinette conveyed her first impressions of her little granddaughter, ‘I assure you, my son, she is the prettiest and best at her age you ever saw.’⁴¹ And when Henri II eventually met his prospective daughter-in-law in early December, he was as charmed as everyone else: ‘I have no doubt that if the Dauphin and she were of age, or nearly so, the King would soon carry the project [of their marriage] to completion. They are already as friendly as if they were married. Meanwhile he has determined to bring them up together and to make one establishment of their household, so as to accustom them to one another from the beginning. He has found her the prettiest and most graceful Princess he ever saw, as have also the Queen and all the court.’⁴²

The conversion of this charming Scottish girl into a French princess was considered the overriding purpose of her education from this point on. Apparently she had arrived speaking Scots and not much else – although very soon was speaking French with great facility and learning Latin. As French culture was universally judged to be far superior to Scottish, and her Scottish entourage already had attracted some unfavourable comment for their roughness and lack of personal hygiene, it would be unlikely that there was much attempt by her new family and tutors to keep the young Queen of Scots’ own culture alive. Her sovereignty over Scotland was always considered to be secondary to her potential as consort to the King of France. Although Mary retained some of the original household who had accompanied her from Scotland, within two years all but Lady Fleming were superseded by French men and women.

The ‘Four Maries’ remained part of the young Queen of Scots’ circle of acquaintances in France and were to return with her to Scotland in 1561, where their association with her continued more intimately. There is not much evidence, however, that they were included in her immediate life at the French court. It was possible that for a time they were educated in nearby convents or visited occasionally other French noble families, in the peripatetic way of aristocratic life then. All of them, apart from Mary Fleming, had mothers or stepmothers who were French, and therefore some connections already of their own in France. Mary’s mother, Lady Fleming, added French zest to her thoroughly Scottish blood by becoming a mistress of Henri II and, rather scandalously, bearing his child. The four Maries, although of Scottish noble families, were not of high enough social status to be considered ideal companions for Mary now that she was being groomed as a princess of France.

Almost immediately, Mary was sharing the bedchamber of the dauphin’s young sister, Elizabeth de Valois. Such was the importance of precedence and hierarchy these girls invariably were given the best room on the strength of Mary’s pre-eminent status. They were both prizes in the European marriage stakes. England was to continue to press both the Scots and the French for the return of Mary to fulfil the marriage treaty with Edward VI. The last formal offer of marriage was made in the presence of Henri II and Mary herself in June 1551, when Mary was not yet nine but already happy with the idea of marrying her French prince instead. Failing Mary, it was suggested that her newly adopted sister, Elizabeth de Valois, would make a substitute bride for the English king. But this young woman was to end up married at fourteen to an even greater potentate, Philip II of Spain, only to die at twenty-three giving birth to her third child.

In years to come, both she and Mary were to exhibit individually to their supporters a kind of tragic glamour that was to fuel rumours and fantasies which confused and inflated the posthumous reputation of each. Physical beauty helped, but prerequisite were extreme circumstances and strange congruities in life or death. For the young Queen of Spain, to die so young in childbirth was a common enough occurrence in the sixteenth century, but her tender (and almost certainly chaste) affection for her stepson – exactly her age – the physically deformed and psychologically tormented Don Carlos, inspired through the centuries a profusion of rumours and tragic romances.^*

Despite Catherine de Medici’s reliance on the prognostications of astrologers and fortune tellers, these two girls as yet knew nothing of the lives they were to live as women. There were, however, the immutable facts that one was already a queen and the other might well, through marriage, become one. At the end of 1548, Mary was six and Elizabeth de Valois was nearly four. Their interest in each other had been cemented in a court and at a time when royal children were most pampered and lavishly entertained. Mary’s Guise grandmother, writing to her daughter in Scotland, gave a lively picture of a happy and attractive young girl, revelling in the attention and affection that surrounded her: ‘It is impossible for her to be more honoured than she is. She and the King’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, live together, and I think that this is a great good thing, for they are thus brought up to love each other as sisters. It is not enough to say that they do not trouble each other in the least, for she [Mary] never works at night or sleeps in the daytime, and is very playful and pretty, and the two children are as fond as they can be of each other’s company.’⁴³

Not just a doting grandmother but even her prospective father-in-law, Henri, King of France, set apart by pomp and the amour-propre of one chosen by God, indulged the little Scottish queen as readily as everyone else. He declared he had never seen a more perfect child, a remark reported back to Mary’s anxious mother in Scotland, and he and his courtiers smiled on benignly as the diminutive dauphin danced with his intended bride at the wedding in December 1548 of Mary’s eldest uncle, François, Duc de Guise.

Surrounded by doting adults, Mary had her own instant family of brothers and sisters. Apart from the Dauphin François and his sister Elizabeth, there was the baby sister Claude and then three infant brothers were added in quick succession before Mary had reached nine years old. But it was the eldest three children to whom she was closest. When Elizabeth de Valois left France, while still just a girl, to live with her husband Philip II, Mary felt the loss so keenly she claimed in a letter to the Spanish king to be ‘the person who loves her the most in the world’.⁴⁴ This childhood intimacy with her sister-in-law was most influential in shaping Mary’s personal female relationships and, as this letter showed, her spontaneous warmth of feeling was already well in evidence.

Mary, throughout her life, sought her friendships with women. She was attracted to sisterly relationships where she, a queen since birth, was naturally deferred to, and elicited much devotion from the women who knew her. But this made her ill-equipped to deal with a woman like Elizabeth Tudor, a woman who looked to men, not her own sex, for the great friendships of her life. Although proud of family and naturally loyal, Elizabeth refused to be seduced by intimations of female solidarity and any play on the natural bonds of sex and blood. In the early years of their direct relationship, this was Mary’s main method of approach to her, and on the whole it gained her very little. She was to be most frustrated, however, by Elizabeth’s obstinate evasion of any projected meeting, for this forced Mary into an unnatural role as supplicant for another’s favour, and disarmed her potent weapon of charm.

Mary was surrounded in her childhood by powerful women: the French queen, Catherine de Medici; the king’s lover, adviser and friend, Diane de Poitiers; Mary’s grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, and finally her own mother, the dowager queen of Scotland. In direct contrast, Elizabeth’s earliest experiences were of the transience and impotence of women. Her mother had no real existence for her, her life snuffed out when she was no longer useful to the king. Stepmothers came and went, powerless in the grip of fate or the terrifying whim of her autocratic father. Even Catherine Parr, who inspired in the young Elizabeth a certain affection and admiration, was prematurely erased from life by the scourge of puerperal fever. The only constant image of power in Elizabeth’s growing years was the once magnificent, but increasingly mangy and irascible old lion of England, her father, the king.

In the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots the opposite was true. Her father through death was absent and unknown to her. Her father-in-law, Henri II, a shade of the magnificent François I, was an unimpressive figure, lacking in confidence and ruled by women. Mary’s husband, loved as he was by her, was weaker both physically and intellectually than she, and dominated during his short reign by her Guise uncles and his mother, Catherine de Medici, the dowager queen. Apart from the Duc de Guise and Cardinal of Lorraine, whose ambitions and guile powered the family’s rise, in Mary’s immediate experience, those who controlled events were women. These women got what they wanted through force of will and character, disguised by charm, beauty and artfulness. No woman in her acquaintance exhibited the undisguised authority of her own mother in her role as dowager queen and regent of Scotland. It was to Mary’s eternal detriment as a queen herself that her mother’s true work and effortful sacrifice were unknown to her daughter, hundreds of miles away in her adopted kingdom.

Rather than return to a pampered life with her children and extensive family in France, Mary of Guise had bravely battled on in an inhospitable land to try and gain some peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Scotland on behalf of her daughter. But despite the hardships and loneliness of her task, she obviously relished the challenge for herself too. A devout woman, she believed she was fulfilling God’s purpose by remaining in Scotland. A Guise, she was also being true to her proud genetic inheritance of seeking and wielding power to the advantage of one’s family. Scotland represented the only chance she would ever have to exercise real power so she determined to take the regency for herself. But her daughter never experienced firsthand the daily grind of the dutiful ruler, the astute strategic reasoning of the political mind. The fact that her mother was such an excellent example for her was largely lost to Mary, cocooned in her royal fantasy in the court of the Valois kings.

In order to effect the transference of the regency from the Earl of Arran, who had been rewarded with the French dukedom of Châtelherault, Mary of Guise needed some support from France. A visit to her homeland was mooted in the summer of 1550, for Mary also longed to see her daughter again, and the son she had left behind when she had set sail for Scotland and marriage to James V, twelve years before. The young Queen Mary was overjoyed at the thought of a reunion with her mother. Writing to her grandmother she passed on ‘les joyeuses nouvelles’: to see her again Mary claimed ‘will be to me the greatest happiness that I could wish for in this world’. In her enthusiasm, she promised her grandmother she would work particularly hard at her studies and ‘become very wise, in order to satisfy her [mother’s] understandable desire to find me as satisfactory as you and she could wish’.⁴⁵

In fact this was to be a significant period in Mary’s development. She was nearly eight years old by the time her mother arrived in France in September 1550 and nearly nine by the time she left. Mother and daughter were never to see each other again, and so this year together would gain a certain lustre in memory.

The sixteenth century was still a world bounded by order. Hierarchies were essential in every area of the spiritual and temporal worlds, the animate and inanimate; and these intricate relationships were created and maintained by an overarching power. The monarch in his court and country was like the sun in its solar system, there by the grace of God, pre-eminent among his satellites, but responsible too for sustaining the universe. This sun, the king, was inevitably male. So, to have before you the example of your mother as a successful ruler over men might inspire any young queen looking to understand her role.

But during this time together in France, Mary was not to see her mother in any executive role. Instead the full extravagance of court life was amplified. The spectacle of grand ceremonial whirled on. The young Queen of Scots accompanied her mother on her journeys and listened and watched. Mary of Guise remained in her homeland for more than a year, much of the time with her daughter and the court in its magnificent progresses from royal palaces to hunting châteaux. She was welcomed with the full honours of this most lavish state. In a financial crisis caused by its European wars, and France’s support of Scotland in its resistance to the English, the king’s spending seemed to become more extravagant as the exchequer teetered towards bankruptcy. Pageants, masques, balls, hunting expeditions, were organized at every opportunity. The pageant which welcomed the dowager queen and her young daughter, at Rouen, involved elaborate constructions of unicorns, to signify Scotland, pulling a chariot, followed by elephants transporting various nymphs and goddesses, along with representations of monarchy and the Virgin and Child. The French monarchy were aiming to ally themselves with the divine, while aggrandizing their secular kingdom.

There was a reason and a grandiose purpose behind such display. Henri II and the Guises had imperial ambitions that extended far beyond Scotland and her borders. Now that the young Scottish queen was safely in their hands, and the English had been repulsed from their ‘Rough Wooing’, these ambitions could begin to be worked out. In an extraordinarily revealing letter to Suleiman the Magnificent, the grand sultan at Constantinople, the French king in September 1549 outlined his vision of empire: ‘I have pacified the Kingdom of Scotland which I hold and possess with such command and obedience as I have in France. To which two kingdoms I have joined and united another which is England of which by a perpetual union, alliance and confederation I can dispose of as King … so that the said three kingdoms together can now be accounted one and the same monarchy.’⁴⁶

This whole bold scheme centred on Mary and her invaluable claim on the throne of England. The English were uneasily aware of these ambitions. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and Lord Robert’s father, had asked the French ambassador to Edward VI’s court, whether Henri II referred to the little Queen of Scots as his daughter. When told that he did, Dudley caustically replied: ‘After his Majesty has eaten the cabbage I fancy he wants to have the garden also.’⁴⁷ The full extent of the French king’s intent was exposed to the light of day on the accession of Elizabeth I when he made clear Mary’s implicit rights, and so instigated the deadly rivalry between the two cousins.

The continued alliance between France and Scotland was the first piece of this ambitious plan and Henri’s enthusiastic appreciation of Mary’s mother’s efforts to maintain order and repulse the English was expressed in extravagant hyperbole and spectacular celebrations: as the English emissary sourly reported, ‘in this court she is made a goddess’.⁴⁸ The eight-year-old Queen of Scots could only enjoy the pageantry and wonder at the magnificence of her family’s celebrations, but she would never know the daily struggles, danger and frustrations that were companions to her mother’s duties in Scotland. She was never to see at first hand the extent of the strategic planning, responsibility and diplomacy of government. Indulged within the hothouse of the royal nursery, flattered and celebrated more than was good for her outside it, Mary was given little chance to see any of the day-to-day workings of the French monarchy. In fact her Guise uncles encouraged the dauphin and their niece in their pursuit of pleasure, mostly in the form of the daily chase, rather than acquiring the arts of kingship. This was partly due to the fact that François was a physically weak and wilful child who showed little aptitude for study, but it also suited the Duc de Guise and the cardinal to maintain the dauphin’s fecklessness and indifference to matters of state. Thereby they assured the reins of power could be grasped by their ready hands when fate made François king.

Mary was naturally more intelligent and competent than the dauphin and she was fortunate in being a central figure in a cultured court where education mattered. But she was educated to be an accomplished consort to a great nation’s king, rather than to be a ruler in her own right. She seemed naturally to excel at dancing and music making, playing the zither, the harp and the harpsicord, and able to accompany her own singing voice in songs. In the early part of 1553 when Mary was ten and staying with the royal children at the Château of Amboise, the cardinal found her a credit to his proud line and reported such to her mother:

She has grown so much, and grows daily in height, goodness, beauty and virtue, that she has become the most perfect and accomplished person in all honest and virtuous things that it is possible to imagine … I can assure you that the King is so delighted with her that he passes much time talking with her, and for an hour together she amuses him with wise and witty conversation, as if she was a woman of twenty-five.⁴⁹

It was not just her family members, however, who sang the young queen’s praises. Capello, the Venetian ambassador to France, described Mary when she was just into her teens: ‘she is most beautiful (bellissima), and so accomplished that she inspires with astonishment every one who witnesses her acquirements. The Dauphin, too, is very fond of her, and finds great pleasure in her company and conversation.’⁵⁰

Mary was also a horsewoman of style and energy, and was as enthusiastic in the chase as even the most fanatical of the French court. She had arrived in France as a very young child, capable from the start of handling her own hunting hawk, much to the admiration of the French courtiers. She would continue to display her love of hunting and outdoor pursuits all her life, her energetic nature suffering keen frustration when she was constrained or thwarted in any way.