Mary Queen of Scots (14 page)

During the next two months Mary enjoyed more entertainments.
On 18 November Randolph noted that her ladies were merry and dancing, lusty, and attractive. Then at Leith Sands on two Sundays in late November and early December, the ambassador witnessed competitions called running at the ring, which pitted two teams of six men against each other. On 30 November one team led by Lords Robert and John, which was disguised as women, defeated the other team led by Elboeuf, which was dressed in elaborate masks and costumes. Although masking was a usual noble amusement, reformers inveighed against cross-dressing, citing Deuteronomy 22:5 as their authority, and Knox probably deplored the victory of men masquerading as women. His complaints may have had some effect. In December 1562, after he had preached for more than a year against Mary’s festivities Randolph blamed him for the decrease in the usual court dancing.

Although Mary enjoyed disguised entertainment, she was also aware that some popular practices could lead to public unrest. In April 1562
on the authority of a 1555 act against masquerading as Robin Hood and Little John, she forbade her subjects at Edinburgh and St Andrews to dress up as these legendary figures because of the uproarious celebrations that had occurred in May 1561 before her arrival.

Randolph had relatively easy access to her court because Mary wished Elizabeth to understand by her ambassador’s treatment just how deeply her Scottish cousin valued her friendship. Shortly after returning home, Mary began corresponding with Elizabeth about negotiating an Anglo-Scottish accord that recognized her English succession rights. On the other hand, Elizabeth still hoped Mary would ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. On 5 January 1562, Mary explained to Elizabeth she would not ratify the treaty because it was prejudicial to her lineage, but she also promised either to fulfill its reasonable requirements or to enter into a new amity that would secure her claims to the English throne next after those of Elizabeth and her issue.

Mary hoped Elizabeth would approve her official succession rights
and override Henry VIII’s will, which ignored the descendants of Margaret his elder sister and privileged the Grey descendants of Mary his younger sister. Publicly authenticating her Scottish cousin’s claims was an act Elizabeth would not concede. She feared a rebellion favoring Mary Stewart like the one Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger waged on her behalf in 1554 against her sister Mary Tudor; as a Protestant Elizabeth also worried that validating her cousin Mary’s claims would encourage Catholic conspiracies against herself. Furthermore, she suspected that many of her advisors supported the pretensions of the Protestant Greys.
In 1561 Elizabeth ordered Catherine Grey imprisoned for marrying without royal consent Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, a union that produced two sons who were declared illegitimate. Elizabeth seems to have been ambivalent about the Greys, who in 1553 took advantage of their status in Henry’s will to attempt to usurp his daughters’ premier places in the succession.

Since her contemporaries believed that failing to enforce their royal claims would compromise their honor, it was virtually impossible for Mary to relinquish her English succession rights at this time. Both Francis I and Henry II, had, of course, fought ruinous wars, attempting to conquer Milan, which a distant ancestor once ruled. Mary’s English claim was not only much more recent than their Italian ones but many Catholics also considered it more valid than Elizabeth’s. One major difference between these queens regnant was that Elizabeth recognized no worldly superiors to herself, as all her advisers were her appointees and were, in some sense, her creatures. Mary, by contrast, possessed religious superiors with great expectations of her. Pius IV, for example, advised her to marry a Catholic prince and to model herself after Mary Tudor. That in Scotland Mary condoned the Protestant settlement seems to have caused her to be more concerned about protecting her reputation as a loyal Catholic than she might otherwise have been.

On 7 December attempting to build a lasting Anglo-Scottish amity, Lethington wrote to Cecil, exploring the possibility of scheduling a personal interview between their monarchs. A stream of correspondence ensued with Mary sending Elizabeth a heart-shaped diamond ring, emphasizing to her cousin the importance she placed on arranging this meeting. At special occasions like these, exchanging jewelry, particularly rings valued for their talismanic and symbolic functions,
conveyed the sentiments held by both the presenters and recipients and served to recognize and validate their mutual standing and relationship in the social hierarchy.

In early May 1562 at Falkland Palace, a serious riding accident in which Mary’s arm and the right side of her face were injured delayed deliberations until the 19th, but her councilors finally agreed on a rendezvous between 20 August and 20 September somewhere in northern England. Elizabeth postponed it when the first French religious war flared up again that summer after a short truce. Guise had set off the initial conflict in March 1562, when his forces killed some 70
Protestants and wounded 100 others at an illegal prayer-meeting at Vassy, which was part of Mary’s jointure lands under his administration.

Although the warfare’s renewal led Elizabeth at first to delay the conference, she postponed it again in July after deciding to aid Condé at Rouen and Dieppe in exchange for English control of Le Havre, which she planned to trade for Calais. According to Randolph, Mary shed many tears to emphasize her deep disappointment when she learned of Elizabeth’s decision. The English intervention in France, which began in October, was a failure; Guise defeated Condé in December and French troops expelled the English from Le Havre in the summer of 1563. Some months earlier in February, a Huguenot assassinated Guise, causing Mary, of course, great sorrow, but his death did not end the conflict, which lingered into 1564.

ABDUCTION SCARES

Meanwhile in Scotland attempts were afoot to besmirch Mary’s honor.
Previous analyses of these confrontations have failed to consider adequately contemporary attitudes concerning abductions. In most realms noble competition for custody of monarchs who were minors occurred because control of them also meant control of their governments.
Kidnappers seized both Mary’s father and her son, and Henry VIII attempted to remove her forcibly to England, when she was a child.
In political terms noblemen viewed women rulers as naturally subordinate to them and susceptible, like children, to their authority.
In Scotland and elsewhere, moreover, men occasionally abducted heiresses and ravished them with the intention of pressuring them into
marriage. Hence, they utilized the sexual act as a political tool to dishonor the victims, who had little recourse except to wed their abductors. Official documents used interchangeably the words, ravishment and abduction, because the two acts were so closely associated together. The heiresses’ abductors were required to pay a compounded amount to their new wives’ parents or guardians for their property losses.
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Occasionally an heir, who was a minor, might also be abducted, but this convention mainly affected heiresses.
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It was not until 1612
that the problems of abduction and rape prompted the Scottish privy council to promulgate an act against the ravishment of women.

If committed independently of abduction, rape was a crime but a greatly under-reported one. The rapes that reached court dockets mostly involved children although sexual assaults against adult females who were of higher social status than their attackers or who were mauled might also be adjudicated. In the latter cases the punishment meted out was more for the women’s injuries than for the rapes. This cavalier attitude stemmed from the notion that women were more passionate and lecherous than men. As a final insult, if the victim became pregnant, she could not claim it was the result of a rape. Her contemporaries believed that conception occurred only when both partners enjoyed the sexual act, the weakness of her flesh causing her to become responsive despite her initial refusal.
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In November 1561 Mary’s first abduction scare in Scotland arose from an alleged comment of Arran, whose father wanted him to wed her. Arran reportedly asked why it would not be as easy to take her from the abbey, as others had once thought it would be to seize her mother. On the 16th at 9:00 p.m. when Lord James was away from court, rumors that Arran had crossed the Firth of Forth with an armed band greatly frightened Mary. Lords Robert and John kept watch that evening to calm her, and later she decided to form a personal bodyguard of 19 archers for protection.

A dispute between Arran and Bothwell in December may have been related to this incident, as the two had been enemies since Arran’s return home two years earlier. Bothwell, born in 1535, remained a loyal supporter of Mary of Guise despite his conversion to Protestantism. In October 1559, he ambushed Cockburn of Ormiston, wounded him in the face, and seized the English gold he was delivering from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Congregation. In retaliation, Arran
and Lord James, accompanied by 300 armed men and some artillery, attempted to capture Bothwell at Crichton Castle, a few miles from Haddington. As he had already fled, they sacked his castle and seized his papers. Subsequently, Bothwell challenged Arran to single combat to settle the points of honor between them; early modern men wore their swords as weapons for fighting not merely as clothing accessories.
Denouncing him as a liar, Arran refused the offer.

Two years later in December 1561 the month following Mary’s panicked reaction to Arran’s alleged abduction scheme, Bothwell, Elboeuf, and Lord John, wearing masks, entered an Edinburgh merchant’s house, seeking Arran’s mistress, Alison Craik, the stepdaughter of Cuthbert Ramsay and Agnes Stewart, James IV’s sometime mistress and Bothwell’s grandmother.
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After gaining admission the first night, they forced their way in the next evening. This intrusion is often dismissed as a drunken frolic, but the cooperation of Mary’s uncle and her favorite half brother with Bothwell lends a more serious complexion to it; they surely did not concoct this conspiracy over some chance glasses of wine. Bothwell had a close relationship with Lord John, who intended to marry his sister, Janet Hepburn, and the earl must also have become acquainted with Elboeuf in France. Dispatched on a mission to that realm by Mary of Guise shortly before her death in 1560, Bothwell reached Paris in September. It is likely that he met with Elboeuf, who had planned to succeed his ailing sister as the Scottish governor. In November after Francis appointed Bothwell to his privy chamber and supplied him with financial support and Mary named him as one of her commissioners for summoning the estates, he returned to Scotland. The next year in 1561, Elboeuf escorted his niece home, and while his two brothers departed for France, he remained as her special councilor to advise her about handling governmental emergencies and difficulties.

That December at Edinburgh, it seems likely that these three men, one Arran’s determined enemy and the two others Mary’s beloved relatives, conspired to harass Arran’s mistress to retaliate for his having caused the queen’s recent abduction fright. The controversy almost escalated into a pitched battle the third evening when the Hamiltons gathered to challenge Bothwell and his allies, but Lord James, Argyll, and Huntly arrived with a royal proclamation and successfully disbursed the posturing warriors. On this final evening of the dispute
perhaps responding to his niece’s request, Elboeuf remained at Holyrood.
It was partly his share in this controversy that prompted Randolph, a Hamilton sympathizer, to rate the marquis’s judgment as inferior to that of his brothers, although the ambassador had already been complaining about his expensive dining habits. In February 1562 Randolph was delighted to learn that Elboeuf would return home earlier than expected because of his wife’s serious illness.

Meanwhile in January 1562 during the interval between the Arran–
Bothwell conflict in December and another that was to occur in March, Mary attended Lord John’s and Janet Hepburn’s wedding at Bothwell’s Crichton Castle. Responding positively to Mary’s reconciliation efforts, Lord James first joined Cockburn of Ormiston in exchanging with Bothwell promises to keep the peace before the privy council and then agreed to witness this marriage at the castle he had helped Arran to sack less than three years earlier.

A few days later at Lithlingow, Arran submitted to Mary and promised to attend with his father the wedding on 8 February of Lord James and Agnes Keith, sister of William, fourth Earl Marischal, at St Giles’
Church in Edinburgh. Along with Châtelherault, Arran, Huntly, and Randolph, Mary was present at the marriage banquet, the lavishness of which elicited complaints from Knox who conducted the wedding.
The day before the ceremony, Mary granted Lord James the Mar earldom, but after John, sixth Lord Erskine, the son of her deceased guardian, protested that the title was his family’s perquisite, she substituted the richer Moray earldom. In some sense it was an appropriate ennoblement because its last holder was their father’s illegitimate brother who died childless. She momentarily kept the grant a secret to postpone the anticipated negative reaction of Huntly, the administrator of the Moray and Mar estates since 1549. The Gordon family had actually been attempting to acquire these properties for two centuries.

Another confrontation the next month with Cockburn of Ormiston prompted Bothwell to attempt to end his estrangement from Arran.
While horseback riding with his wife and his son Alexander, Ormiston learned that Bothwell and eight companions were lying in wait for them. Retreating with his wife, he left Alexander to check on the intruders’ intentions. When Alexander discharged his gun at the earl, he seized the young man and attempted unsuccessfully to carry him off to Crichton.