Mary, throughout her life, sought her friendships with women. She was attracted to sisterly relationships where she, a queen since birth, was naturally deferred to, and elicited much devotion from the women who knew her. But this made her ill-equipped to deal with a woman like Elizabeth Tudor, a woman who looked to men, not her own sex, for the great friendships of her life. Although proud of family and naturally loyal, Elizabeth refused to be seduced by intimations of female solidarity and any play on the natural bonds of sex and blood. In the early years of their direct relationship, this was Mary’s main method of approach to her, and on the whole it gained her very little. She was to be most frustrated, however, by Elizabeth’s obstinate evasion of any projected meeting, for this forced Mary into an unnatural role as supplicant for another’s favour, and disarmed her potent weapon of charm.
Mary was surrounded in her childhood by powerful women: the French queen, Catherine de Medici; the king’s lover, adviser and friend, Diane de Poitiers; Mary’s grandmother, Antoinette de Guise, and finally her own mother, the dowager queen of Scotland. In direct contrast, Elizabeth’s earliest experiences were of the transience and impotence of women. Her mother had no real existence for her, her life snuffed out when she was no longer useful to the king. Stepmothers came and went, powerless in the grip of fate or the terrifying whim of her autocratic father. Even Catherine Parr, who inspired in the young Elizabeth a certain affection and admiration, was prematurely erased from life by the scourge of puerperal fever. The only constant image of power in Elizabeth’s growing years was the once magnificent, but increasingly mangy and irascible old lion of England, her father, the king.
In the childhood of Mary Queen of Scots the opposite was true. Her father through death was absent and unknown to her. Her father-in-law, Henri II, a shade of the magnificent François I, was an unimpressive figure, lacking in confidence and ruled by women. Mary’s husband, loved as he was by her, was weaker both physically and intellectually than she, and dominated during his short reign by her Guise uncles and his mother, Catherine de Medici, the dowager queen. Apart from the Duc de Guise and Cardinal of Lorraine, whose ambitions and guile powered the family’s rise, in Mary’s immediate experience, those who controlled events were women. These women got what they wanted through force of will and character, disguised by charm, beauty and artfulness. No woman in her acquaintance exhibited the undisguised authority of her own mother in her role as dowager queen and regent of Scotland. It was to Mary’s eternal detriment as a queen herself that her mother’s true work and effortful sacrifice were unknown to her daughter, hundreds of miles away in her adopted kingdom.
Rather than return to a pampered life with her children and extensive family in France, Mary of Guise had bravely battled on in an inhospitable land to try and gain some peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Scotland on behalf of her daughter. But despite the hardships and loneliness of her task, she obviously relished the challenge for herself too. A devout woman, she believed she was fulfilling God’s purpose by remaining in Scotland. A Guise, she was also being true to her proud genetic inheritance of seeking and wielding power to the advantage of one’s family. Scotland represented the only chance she would ever have to exercise real power so she determined to take the regency for herself. But her daughter never experienced firsthand the daily grind of the dutiful ruler, the astute strategic reasoning of the political mind. The fact that her mother was such an excellent example for her was largely lost to Mary, cocooned in her royal fantasy in the court of the Valois kings.
In order to effect the transference of the regency from the Earl of Arran, who had been rewarded with the French dukedom of Châtelherault, Mary of Guise needed some support from France. A visit to her homeland was mooted in the summer of 1550, for Mary also longed to see her daughter again, and the son she had left behind when she had set sail for Scotland and marriage to James V, twelve years before. The young Queen Mary was overjoyed at the thought of a reunion with her mother. Writing to her grandmother she passed on ‘les joyeuses nouvelles’: to see her again Mary claimed ‘will be to me the greatest happiness that I could wish for in this world’. In her enthusiasm, she promised her grandmother she would work particularly hard at her studies and ‘become very wise, in order to satisfy her [mother’s] understandable desire to find me as satisfactory as you and she could wish’.45
In fact this was to be a significant period in Mary’s development. She was nearly eight years old by the time her mother arrived in France in September 1550 and nearly nine by the time she left. Mother and daughter were never to see each other again, and so this year together would gain a certain lustre in memory.
The sixteenth century was still a world bounded by order. Hierarchies were essential in every area of the spiritual and temporal worlds, the animate and inanimate; and these intricate relationships were created and maintained by an overarching power. The monarch in his court and country was like the sun in its solar system, there by the grace of God, pre-eminent among his satellites, but responsible too for sustaining the universe. This sun, the king, was inevitably male. So, to have before you the example of your mother as a successful ruler over men might inspire any young queen looking to understand her role.
But during this time together in France, Mary was not to see her mother in any executive role. Instead the full extravagance of court life was amplified. The spectacle of grand ceremonial whirled on. The young Queen of Scots accompanied her mother on her journeys and listened and watched. Mary of Guise remained in her homeland for more than a year, much of the time with her daughter and the court in its magnificent progresses from royal palaces to hunting châteaux. She was welcomed with the full honours of this most lavish state. In a financial crisis caused by its European wars, and France’s support of Scotland in its resistance to the English, the king’s spending seemed to become more extravagant as the exchequer teetered towards bankruptcy. Pageants, masques, balls, hunting expeditions, were organized at every opportunity. The pageant which welcomed the dowager queen and her young daughter, at Rouen, involved elaborate constructions of unicorns, to signify Scotland, pulling a chariot, followed by elephants transporting various nymphs and goddesses, along with representations of monarchy and the Virgin and Child. The French monarchy were aiming to ally themselves with the divine, while aggrandizing their secular kingdom.
There was a reason and a grandiose purpose behind such display. Henri II and the Guises had imperial ambitions that extended far beyond Scotland and her borders. Now that the young Scottish queen was safely in their hands, and the English had been repulsed from their ‘Rough Wooing’, these ambitions could begin to be worked out. In an extraordinarily revealing letter to Suleiman the Magnificent, the grand sultan at Constantinople, the French king in September 1549 outlined his vision of empire: ‘I have pacified the Kingdom of Scotland which I hold and possess with such command and obedience as I have in France. To which two kingdoms I have joined and united another which is England of which by a perpetual union, alliance and confederation I can dispose of as King … so that the said three kingdoms together can now be accounted one and the same monarchy.’46
This whole bold scheme centred on Mary and her invaluable claim on the throne of England. The English were uneasily aware of these ambitions. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and Lord Robert’s father, had asked the French ambassador to Edward VI’s court, whether Henri II referred to the little Queen of Scots as his daughter. When told that he did, Dudley caustically replied: ‘After his Majesty has eaten the cabbage I fancy he wants to have the garden also.’47 The full extent of the French king’s intent was exposed to the light of day on the accession of Elizabeth I when he made clear Mary’s implicit rights, and so instigated the deadly rivalry between the two cousins.
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