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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ woman he had hoped to erase forever, was valued rather lowly on the scale of marital barter.

      Just as in his first abortive negotiations over his daughter Elizabeth’s prospective betrothal, Henry’s conditions for the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to his son were self-defeatingly excessive and heavy-handed. One of the main areas of disagreement was over the immediate possession of the baby queen. Henry, hoping to be supported by his recently released Scottish lords, had demanded that she be put into his hands, to be brought up in England until she was old enough to marry. The Scottish Parliament had met in March 1543 and passed a set of articles agreeing in principle to the marriage, but insisting that Mary should remain in Scotland until she was ten years old, ‘that hir personne be kepit and nurist principallie be hir moder’.³² The same Parliament gave a nod in the direction of the reformed religion by authorizing the reading of the Bible in the vernacular, an activity which previously had been widespread but discreetly done.

      On 1 July the Treaty of Greenwich allowing for the marriage of Prince Edward and Queen Mary of Scotland was drawn up. But Henry’s influence in Scotland was already on the wane. With a Guise as queen mother and dowager queen, France’s importance, on the other hand, had never been in much doubt. Towards the end of June a fleet of French ships was tracked making their way to the offshore waters of Scotland, lying off Aberdeen and then Arbroath. Rumours abounded; there were 4000 men of war on board, 1000 of them at least were hackbuteers, armed with the fearsome firearm, the harquebus: ‘they come to convoy away the young Queen, and also the old’.³³ Sadler was much concerned by this threat as he reported back to the Privy Council, but his fears were partly allayed by Arran who assured him that the Palace of Linlithgow was properly guarded, and anyway the young queen could not be moved ‘because she is a little troubled with the breeding of teeth’. This seemed to be accepted at face value by Sadler who added, ‘by my truth I cannot but see that [governor Arran] tendreth as much her health, preservation, and surety, as if she were his own natural child’.³⁴ As the tenuous thread of the infant Mary’s life was all that stood between Arran and his ambitions as next heir to the kingdom, this observation may have been more an expression of Sadler’s honourable credulity and his own paternal affections than Arran’s careful concern.

      Under armed escort of more than three thousand men, the seven-month-old queen was moved to safer ground that summer. But she went not to Edinburgh as Henry had demanded but to Stirling Castle, the great medieval stronghold much beautified and domesticated by Mary’s father James. This castle, with its lovely new French-inspired palace building, belonged to Mary’s mother through her marriage contract. Now ensconced there with her daughter, Mary of Guise’s own power was greatly increased. She was keen to appear conciliatory to their powerful neighbour and requested Sadler’s presence at Stirling where she asked him to assure his king ‘that as nothing could be more honourable for her and her daughter than this marriage, so she desired the perfection thereof with all her heart’.³⁵ Again, she wished to show off her daughter, this time with evident maternal pride at how tall she was growing and how advanced she seemed, declaring, ‘that her daughter did grow apace; and soon,’ she said, ‘she would be a woman, if she took of her mother’.³⁶ This, as Sadler reminded Henry, was a reference to the queen mother’s own unusual height, a general characteristic of the physically splendid Guises which was shared too by Mary Queen of Scots.

      By the beginning of September, Sadler’s much exercised credulity was finally worn thin when the irresolute Arran relinquished his support of the English and reformed religion and joined forces with Cardinal Beaton. The volte-face was further underlined by the Earl of Lennox, home after many years in France fortified with French cash and promises of support, who later that month joined the pro-English party solely to continue in opposition to his arch rival Arran. No imperative was more important to a Scotsman than maintaining the tribal status quo and the Lennox – Hamilton hostility was one of the dynamos of Scottish history at the time. In the midst of all this duplicity, the baby at the eye of the storm was crowned Mary Queen of Scots on 9 September 1543, aged nine months. It was an ancient but modest ceremony, ‘with such solemnity as they do use in this country, which is not very costly’.³⁷ The pro-English noblemen refused to attend.

      Sadler realised that he could trust no-one when the factions were so opportunistic and shifting, and the noblemen within them motivated by frustrating old enemies rather than consolidating new friends. Nonplussed by the dour Celtic passions which could keep alive ancestral feuds over centuries he expostulated: ‘There never was so noble a prince’s servant as I am so evil intreated as I am among these unreasonable people; nor do I think never man had to do with so rude, so inconsistent, and beastly a nation as this is.’³⁸

      As the baby Mary peacefully continued her life circumscribed by sleep, food and play, the tensions in her kingdom intensified. Although the Treaty of Greenwich, promising her in marriage to Prince Edward of England, had been ratified, albeit belatedly, her mother, desperate to try and lure Lennox back to her pro-French cause, offered the greatest prize of her daughter and the kingdom to him.³⁹

      Marriage to the infant Queen of Scots, a marriage that would make him king, thereby obliterating Arran’s power and his rival claim as next in line to the throne, was on the face of it an irresistible offer. There was the small matter of the age gap of twenty-six years but, although Lennox entered into negotiations with the queen mother for a while, he knew the offer was merely a ruse to defuse his capacity for trouble. Already his gaze had alighted on another royal bride, Lady Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor, and niece of Henry VIII, rather closer in age to himself, whose advantages of birth would become immediately available to him. The dream of kingship, however, would be worked out in the subsequent generation. The marriage of Lennox in 1545 with this strong-willed, red-headed Tudor, full of pride in her royal blood, produced an ill-fated son, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley.

      Henry VIII was increasingly impatient with the Scottish lords’ refusal to submit to his demands. He misunderstood the complex loyalties and shifting alliances of interest, which only included him and the English cause to the extent that they could extract more English gold through unsubstantiated promises of support. However his intimidation and threats of reprisals did not force the mettlesome Scots into compliance. In fact it had the contrary effect. In December 1543, their Parliament solemnly annulled the Treaty of Greenwich: the marriage, the peace and the small concessions to the reformed religion were all duly cancelled. It was obvious that the ‘auld alliance’ with France was again pre-eminent and Henry and the English were clothed in their ancient habit of the ‘auld enemie’. Perhaps, in reality, it had ever been thus.

      Henry’s revenge was to be bloodthirsty and terrible. The first raid he launched was in May 1544. The directions to his executor Hertford were as merciless as they were exact: ‘put all to fire and sword, burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God lightened upon [them] for their falsehood and disobedience’.⁴⁰ The series of invasions, burnings, massacres and lootings that followed were to become known as ‘the Rough Wooing’. But in love as in war, Henry’s judgement had become skewed with illness and age. He would never manage now to unite the two kingdoms in his lifetime, although that possibility tantalizingly remained throughout the lifetime of his children and came to haunt his daughter Elizabeth.

      At the beginning of 1543, the young Lady Elizabeth was as far away from the English throne as she had ever been. Still illegitimate, still barred from the succession, she and her half-sister Mary, nevertheless, were on warmer terms with their father and now included СКАЧАТЬ