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, as a female heir, may have been equally as disappointing as was her cousin, but her marital prospects in 1543 were much more dazzling. For Mary was already a regnant queen while Elizabeth’s chances of inheriting the crown, having been bastardized and disinherited by her father, seemed very remote. It was traditional that the kingdom with the misfortune to be ruled by a queen was considered part of her dowry in the marriage negotiations. The future dispensation of Scotland, therefore, made Mary’s tiny, oblivious form the immediate focus of her ambitious neighbour. Elizabeth’s father, the ageing bully Henry, was determined to annex Scotland and prevent for ever his old enemy France from getting a base from which to invade England. He meant to claim the infant Mary as a wife for his five-year-old son, Edward.
On 12 October 1537 Henry had at last been awarded his prince and heir after marrying his third wife, Jane Seymour, within eleven days of the execution of the second. The eruption of happiness in court and country was crowned with the baby’s magnificent christening later that October. Elizabeth, just four years old, was carried to the ceremony by Edward Seymour, uncle to the new prince. The elder of the ambitious brothers of the queen, Edward Seymour was to become Lord Protector on Henry’s death, the most powerful nobleman in the land.
But the birth of a male heir came at a high cost. After a gruelling three-day labour, Queen Jane was dead in less than a fortnight of a postpartum sepsis. She died in the midst of her triumph aged only twenty-eight. Henry seemed to be genuinely grief-stricken, writing to François I of France, ‘Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who brought me this happiness.’26
However, the monarch’s round of marriages, alliances and wars continued with barely a pause. And so, five years later, when his old Scottish adversary, James V, died in the winter of 1542 with a sole female heir, just five years younger than the English male heir, it appeared to Henry to be a God-sent opportunity. The Spanish ambassador considered it a possible double boon for Henry, for the ageing king was in need of a wife himself, caught in an unusual marital lacuna between Catherine Howard, whom he had just executed for adultery, and Catherine Parr, whom he had yet to woo. Certainly, for those with any memory, there was a certain justice in the possibility of Henry finally winning the admirable, and fertile, Mary of Guise, having lost her the first time to his nephew James of Scotland. Such a marriage would have brought the baby Queen of Scots into closest sisterhood with Elizabeth, most probably sharing a similar education and upbringing in England. How different her future would have been. But the idea of marrying the dowager queen did not appear to fire Henry’s imagination as it had five years before.
The marriage of his heir to Scotland’s heir was a much more rewarding enterprise. Henry wanted to get his hands on this intractable kingdom and there was no easier way, it would seem, than through such a marriage alliance. The fact that the English provided the male side of the bargain ensured England’s natural superiority in any union with Scotland, just as a husband had dominion over his wife. From the English point of view there was something right and natural about uniting these two sea-bound kingdoms, with England as the senior partner. Such a marriage of neighbours would annex Scotland in an expansion of Henry’s own house and territory and thereby reduce the attrition on the border and, more seriously, close the back door to France.
Needless to say, Scotland, with a real pride in her own ancient history and fiercely protected independence, saw the situation rather differently. There was also the small matter of how revenues were raised and where they were spent: ‘if both the realms were under one, all should go to the King of England out of the country of Scotland not to be spent there, whereby Scotland now being poor already should be utterly beggared and undone’.27 But Henry had a fistful of Scottish noblemen captured at Solway Moss, whom he would treat well, bribe with money and promises of patronage, and return to Scotland to work on his behalf to facilitate the marriage contract. Ten of these signed a secret pact recognizing Henry as King of Scotland should Mary Queen of Scots die without an heir.28 This was a shameful precursor of the secret treaty Mary herself, when a young woman, was to sign with the Guises and the French King Henri II, ceding Scotland to France in the event of her death without issue.
Initially there were fears for the baby queen’s survival: ‘a very weak child and not like to live’.29 Even two weeks after her birth, Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was writing that not only the child but the mother too was expected to die. However, the frail baby did thrive and by March the following year, Henry’s ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, had travelled north to oversee the marital negotiations and examine the prize himself.
Sadler, a loyal but literal-minded man, was shown into the presence of the dowager queen, Mary of Guise. After discussing the marriage proposals, Mary