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

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СКАЧАТЬ of aggressive self-interest, anxious politicking and the alarms of war. The sixteenth century was not a time troubled by modern ideas of child rearing and the fragility of the emergent self, and Mary’s retainers would have talked freely in front of her. Even at so young an age this child not only would have sensed the fear and the excitement of the adults around her but she would have understood intellectually some of the facts of the situation.

      Within weeks she was back with her mother at Stirling but, at the next invasion of the English, the queen mother dispatched her precious daughter to Dumbarton where the French, for whose help she had petitioned in increasing desperation, could easily arrive by sea and collect her. The new King of France had an infant son and heir, named François after Henri’s own illustrious father. This firstborn but sickly boy seemed to unloose a surge of fertility in his mother Catherine de Medici who, after eleven anguished years of childless marriage, suddenly produced ten children in the following twelve years.

      Mary of Guise had never lost her primary allegiance to her home country and cajoled her lords into allowing her to negotiate a marriage contract between her young daughter and the even younger Dauphin of France. On 7 July 1548 the treaty was signed and Mary’s fate was sealed. Neither England nor Scotland now was to be her home. Instead she was to be brought up as a French princess and would learn to rate her adopted crown of France higher than that of Scotland, and covet for most of her adult life the crown of England. The child queen was made ready for the next poignant journey of her life, as a fugitive from the marauding English and an emotional and political captive of the French.

Just as the five-year-old Mary Stuart was beginning to attain consciousness of herself as a queen while imbibing the adrenaline of flight and concealment, adventure and romance, her older cousin Elizabeth Tudor was deep in her studies at various royal manors in the country outside London. Just fourteen, she was polishing her French and Italian, and reading and translating from Latin and Greek. Pindar’s poetry and Homer’s Iliad were among the specific works in her mind when she wrote to her brother Edward in the autumn of 1547: ‘Nothing is so uncertain or less enduring than the life of a man, who truly, by the testimony of Pindar, is nothing else than a dream of shadows.’^*46 Her father had died the previous January and this letter was in elegiac mood. What more telling example could there be of the essential transience of all things than the fact that someone as superhuman and magnificent in life as this omnipotent king had to succumb to death as inevitably as the commonest thief or beggar?

      In fact Henry’s death was the beginning for Elizabeth of a decade of uncertainty and at times extreme danger. These painful years were the furnace that would temper her nature for good and ill. While Elizabeth learnt her lessons the hard way, Mary was to have the danger of her birthright as Queen of the Scots deferred. Instead she entered her defining decade in the French court, pampered, admired, groomed for the mostly decorative role as Dauphine, then fleetingly Queen of France. John Knox, austerely Calvinist in his sympathies, recognized the decadence of this French courtly inheritance from his experiences at the time as a prisoner and galley slave of the French. His warning of the effect on the young Queen of Scots, growing up away from her country and her people in this artificial and alien air, had a terrible truth: ‘to the end that in her youth she should drink of that liquor, that should remain with her all her lifetime, for a plague to this realm and for her final destruction’.

^*There is some confusion over the spelling of the dynasty. I have opted for Stewart prior to Mary’s accession, and for Mary and her descendants Stuart thereafter.

^*Pope Clement VII (1523–34), a Medici prince, nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

^*Alexander Alesius (1500–65) writer and theologian. Born Alexander Alane, he became a canon of St Andrew’s Cathedral but adopted the Greek name ‘Alesius’ (meaning ‘wandering’) to signify his exile from Scotland after the trauma of witnessing his Lutheran mentor, Patrick Hamilton, burned at the stake in 1528. From 1535 he was in England at the heart of the English Reformation and is valued for his lively accounts and reminiscences.

^*One of Anne’s recent biographers, Retha M. Warnicke, has suggested that this miscarried son was in some way deformed; this in a time when monstrous births were considered another fingerpost of witchcraft. But that thesis has to remain speculation.

^*Mary of Guise had been married to the Duc de Longueville in 1534 and had two sons, François born in 1535 and Louis in 1537, a few months after his father’s death. Louis died and François, as the new duke, was left with her Guise relations when she travelled to Scotland to marry James V.

^*Elizabeth was refering to the Pythian Ode: ‘Creatures of a day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow. But when a god given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a gentle life’.

       CHAPTER THREE The Education of Princes

      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 СКАЧАТЬ