LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

mother asked the nurse to unwrap her and show her quite naked for Sadler’s approval. Sadler, a fond husband and father himself, seemed touched and impressed by the sight: ‘I assure your majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God,’ he reported back to Henry.³⁰

      Sadler’s conversations with Mary of Guise and with Arran, the regent, were doggedly relayed back to his master in meticulous letters of epic length which make them an invaluable source of information, conveyed with an immediacy which transcends more than four and a half centuries of intervening history. Sadler was ever puzzled as to whom he should trust. Mary of Guise was charming, intelligent and a skilful stateswoman. She was quite capable of dissembling when need be. Mary gave the impression that the King of England’s plans for her daughter were exactly what she would have hoped, and Sadler was naturally credulous. But Arran had warned him, ‘that I should find her in the end (whatsoever she pretendeth) a right French woman’, with her main motive to keep England at bay and the ancient Scottish alliance with her own country strong.

      No one could fail to appreciate the incongruous weight of responsibility which had fallen to this unwitting infant. She was already queen in name. One day she would have to become queen in deed of a kingdom of proud, disputatious clans centred on ancient tribal strongholds spread out across a sparsely populated, mostly mountainous, beautiful but inhospitable land. And as Mary lay in her cradle the factions were already entrenched in their rivalries, working for their own advancement and against their foes.

      The immediate struggle for influence was between Cardinal Beaton, a powerful, worldly, pro-French ally of Mary of Guise, and the Earl of Arran, a vacillating opportunist and the leader of the pro-English tendency. Arran won the first round by wresting the regency from the churchman and declaring himself, as a Hamilton, next in line to the throne after Mary. But even these allegiances were not as they seemed, for Arran was rumoured to be intending to marry his own son to the new queen, and thereby doubly ensure his family’s hold on the crown. This meant that, despite being in the pay of Henry, he was unlikely to be working to promote the English king’s ambitions. On hearing this, Henry decided to offer his daughter Elizabeth to Arran for his son: in return Arran was expected to support the marriage proposal that really mattered to Henry, that between his heir Edward and the baby Queen of Scots.

      Elizabeth was nine years old at the time, serious, highly intelligent and so well educated that those who met her inevitably remarked on her evident abilities. When she was only six years old her father’s courtier, soon to be secretary, Wriothsley was struck by the small girl’s grace and presence of mind: having been offered the king’s blessing, Elizabeth gave her humble thanks and then ‘[asked] after His Majesty’s welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old’.³¹ Yet at the age of nine, Elizabeth was unlikely to have been informed of her father’s offer of herself in marriage to Arran’s son, a mere compensation in the hopes that the real prize, Elizabeth’s new cousin, Mary, would be saved for Henry’s grander scheme. But her impromptu place in this scheme showed that in Henry’s mind his illegitimate daughter, by the 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

Скачать книгу