Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. Jane Dunn

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СКАЧАТЬ a young woman but technically no longer a queen.

      The baby princess’s future also was in the balance. Although she too was to be threatened with a traitor’s death eighteen years later, at this time she was not in peril. Elizabeth’s own status, however, was inextricably bound up with her mother’s and just as the legality of Anne’s marriage was denied, so too was her daughter’s legitimacy. Two months after her mother’s execution, an act removing her from the succession stated she was ‘illegitimate … excluded and banned to claim, challenge or demand any inheritance as lawful heir … to [the king] by lineal descent’. From being the much-vaunted Princess Elizabeth, for a time sole heir to her father’s crown, she now became just Lady Elizabeth, with no clear place in the Tudor succession. Significantly, given the sexual charges against her mother, there was never any occasion when Henry chose to doubt the fact that Elizabeth was his true daughter.

      Although largely oblivious at the time, for she was not yet three years old and living in a separate household, Elizabeth’s subsequent demeanour and expectations were affected fundamentally by the legacy of Anne’s spectacular fall from favour, her execution for treason and subsequent vilification for obscene acts and rumours of evil. Of all Henry’s wives, her own mother, Anne Boleyn, was to attract the most attention and opprobrium during her lifetime and the most scandalous stories in the centuries which followed. Lurid tales of incest and witchcraft grew with the telling. And witchery was strongly believed to be passed to subsequent generations as a hereditary taint: people born of ‘bad and wicked parents’ were deemed likely to be witches themselves.²⁴ This was a damnation that would fuel her daughter’s enemies and echo in unexpected ways down the years.

      But even more damaging to Elizabeth’s confidence was her disputed legitimacy and shifting status as one of her father’s heirs – or not – as his own dynastic struggles continued. Even as a small child she appeared to be conscious of her demotion. When the new queen, Jane Seymour, recalled the Princess Mary to court in the spring of 1537, the three-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth was reputed to have said to the governor of her household: ‘How haps it, Governor, yesterday my Lady Princess, and today but my Lady Elizabeth?’ This insecurity would become a lasting strain in her life, played upon and exacerbated by the indubitable claims on the English throne of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots.

      Prior to Mary’s birth and the beginning of her own lifelong competition for the English throne, her father, James V of Scotland, was already locked into a futile arm-wrestling with his uncle and neighbour Henry VIII, both conducting raids and counter-raids of the border lands between their two kingdoms. Although James had managed to wrong-foot his uncle in the marriage stakes by winning the hand of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, from under Henry’s nose (Henry had her in mind as his fourth wife), he was having less luck with his frontier skirmishes against the English king. Henry had launched spasmodic raids across the border and James, increasingly demoralized by the lack of solidarity from his lords (many of whom were accepting money from the English exchequer), had attempted a counterattack. In 1542, in the bitter end of November, James presided over an ill-judged retaliatory invasion of the Debatable Land, the unruly and ungovernable strip of wild country to the west of Liddesdale. In this godforsaken heath he suffered a humiliating rout of his men by the English troops at Solway Moss. His uncommitted nobles had deserted him and over a thousand Scots were taken prisoner.

      James was left to ride north, broken in spirit and submerged in deepest melancholy. He was an intelligent, sensual man, a creative builder of beautiful palaces, personally attractive to his people but temperamentally more suited perhaps to the life of an enlightened landowner than to the crown of thorns of the Scottish monarchy. He had a complex character, combining opposing qualities of rapacity and a certain identification with his people. He tried to break the domination of his lords and establish a rule of law but earned the suspicion of both church and nobility with his attempts at raising money from their assets in order to build grand palaces such as Falkland and Linlithgow. Striving to secure a male heir for his dynasty he, nevertheless, was known for his licentiousness and fathered seven or more illegitimate children, at least five of whom were sons. John Knox managed succinctly to sum up his doublesided nature, a polarity that fatally weakened him as a man and a king: ‘Hie was called of some a good poore mans king; of otheris hie was termed murtherare of the nobilitie, and one that had decreed thair hole destruction. Some praised him for the repressing of thyft and oppressioun; otheris dispraised him for the defoulling of menis wiffis and virgines. And thus men spake evin as affectionis led thame. And yitt none spack all together besydis the treuth: for a parte of all these foresaidis war so manifest that as the verteuis could nott be denyed, so could nott the vices by any craft be clocked [cloaked].’²⁵ After a long night’s ride James arrived at Linlithgow, where Mary of Guise was awaiting the birth of their baby, the much-needed son and heir.

      Part of the king’s melancholy lay in the recent deaths of his two baby sons and heirs, cared for in separate establishments but dying within days of each other in a tragic synchrony. The timing was so inexplicable and shocking that poison was suggested, as it always was in cases of sudden death. But these deaths mingled natural grief in James’s mind with a supernatural warning. They seemed to give ominous meaning to a nightmare that had haunted him. In his dreams a dead man, possibly his old friend Sir James Hamilton (whose property James V had appropriated after he had been executed on trumped-up charges), approached, brandishing a sword. The animated corpse then cut off both the king’s arms and swore he would return to cut off his head.

      When, in the late April of 1541, King James’s eleven-month-old heir, James, and the week-old infant, Robert, died it seemed to James as if he had in fact symbolically lost both his arms, as the dream had foretold. All that remained now was for him to lose his head and thereby his life. With the betrayals of Solway Moss followed so closely by the birth of Mary, not the replacement prince who would bring hope for the future but a weak and premature girl, James’s own death seemed to him to be an awful certainty.

      As the King of Scotland rode further north and collapsed into bed in Falkland Palace, the following day Mary of Guise went into labour at Linlithgow. She cannot have been in a peaceful and optimistic frame of mind. Contemporary reports suggest that the labour was not full term and so the subsequent risk to the child was increased, especially as she was born in the heart of a storm in the deepest of bitter winter. Her husband too had just left her in a state so utterly distraught that she could not be sure when or if she would ever see him again. The country was in dire peril without an effective king and with a ruthless neighbour in Henry threatening invasion and war. Religious divisions were sweeping Europe, the Reformation had a dynamic all its own which James V had resisted, but which focused factions within Scotland and inflamed dissent.

And all the while the Scottish nobles were in disarray, captured, bribed by the English, unwilling to serve the crown before their own interests. Scotland that December was especially cold, dark and dangerous. On the 8th of that month a small frail baby entered the world. Unwelcome as she may have been to her father, she was her mother’s fifth child^* and her first daughter. Mary of Guise was a redoubtable woman and a fond mother, with a close relationship with her own mother, and there is every reason to believe that, despite the dynastic disappointment of her child’s sex, she was happy to have given birth to a girl.

      Both Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart were to become queens regnant in their own right but aware always of the pitfalls and inveterate expectations of their roles. Just as for less exalted women, marriage was their unequivocal duty and procreation the necessary thing. But the marriage contract for princesses and queens traditionally had little to do with personal choice and everything to do with political expedience. Just as the three-month-old Elizabeth had been offered in marriage by her father to a French prince, in order to build an alliance between historic enemies, so the infant Mary, now Queen of Scots, became the focus of a fierce struggle between these same old adversaries.

      Mary, СКАЧАТЬ