The Anatomy of Greatness
Great of History profile
Queen at six days old, raised as the jewel of the French court and widowed at eighteen, Mary came home to a poor, factional, newly Protestant Scotland and for six years ruled it with charm, courage and a shrewd "middle way" in religion, then threw everything on two marriages and a flight to England, spent nineteen years as her cousin's prisoner, and died on the block in a performance so perfectly staged that it won the argument her politics had lost.
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Critical acts
- 1
Going Home, and Choosing the "Middle Way"
"She reviewed her options and decided to return to Scotland. Her mind was made up within a month." She refused Lesley's plan, "a recipe for civil war," and after five days with her Protestant half-brother Lord James agreed to keep the religious status quo in exchange for her own private Mass.
- 2
Marrying Darnley in Defiance of Elizabeth
"To answer me with nothing," she told Randolph, "I find great fault." She sent Maitland to London with an ultimatum disguised as a mission to France, secured Spanish and French acquiescence, isolated Moray, and bought Morton by settling his claim to the Angus estates.
- 3
Turning Darnley and Escaping from Holyrood
She smuggled out orders through her gentlewomen to Bothwell, Huntly and Argyll, faked the onset of labour with a primed midwife to get her women back, and embraced Moray on his return. Then she worked on Darnley.
- 4
Marrying Bothwell
Guy's verdict is that she "made no serious effort to bring Darnley's murderers to justice." She let Bothwell be tried in a court where Lennox was too afraid to appear, and he was acquitted without evidence. Believing Moray was behind the murder, she decided to make Bothwell her protector: "A poacher was to be turned into a gamekeeper."
- 5
Escaping Lochleven, and Crossing the Solway
She signed, but blurted out: "When God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these, for it is done against my will." Then "she bided her time, resting and eating properly," while she recruited George Douglas, the laird's younger brother, who "fell in love with her."
- 6
Answering Babington, and Defending Herself at Fotheringhay
"Mary ruminated for a week," sure that "her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness." On 17 July she answered: "then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work." Guy: "She had consented to Elizabeth's assassination and a foreign invasion."
Maxims
Never sign what you have not read
At fifteen she signed secret deeds handing Scotland to France, "illegal by Scots law," because she trusted her uncles. Guy says she "might well have been prepared to sign documents presented to her without studying them properly."
Tell the clever traitor he will be blamed first
Her letter to Maitland, "if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the one that I shall blame first," turned Cecil's friend into her servant for two years.
Read your enemy's book before you meet him
"You speak of women in general" proved to Knox that she had read the First Blast, and she held him to its text. See Knox and the Right of Resistance
When the stronger side says "nothing," choose for yourself
Elizabeth's "nothing shall be done" ended four years of waiting, and Mary married Darnley inside four months: "I would no longer stay upon her fair words."
Hold the initiative, even from a locked room
After Rizzio's murder she wrote orders, faked labour, divided her captors and was out of Holyrood in two days. Her enemies "were the first to concede that she had shown amazing coolness."
Part IThe Story
Think Ye That Subjects May Resist Their Princes?
On 4 September 1561, within days of coming home to a country she had not seen since she was five, an eighteen-year-old queen summoned the most dangerous preacher in Scotland to have it out. Men had already been shouting outside her chapel for her priest to be killed. Mary Stuart decided to confront John Knox, "nipping the threat in the bud."
She had done her reading. Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women called a woman ruler "a monster in nature." With her half-brother Lord James beside her, she accused Knox of inciting her subjects to armed revolt. "You think then," she asked, "that I have no just authority?" Knox replied that "learned men in all ages have had their judgments free," and that he would be "as well content to live under Your Grace as St. Paul was to live under Nero." When he claimed his book was aimed only at the English queen, Mary Tudor, she cut him off: "You speak of women in general."
Then she demanded a plain answer. "Think ye," she said, "that subjects having power may resist their princes?"
Knox gave it. Princes who "exceed their bounds" may be "resisted, even by power," locked up like a frenzied father "until his frenzy be overpast." The room went silent. Even Lord James could not speak. After a long pause Mary said: "Well then, I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me; and shall do what they like, and not what I command: and so must I be subject to them, and not they to me."
When Knox left she wept with rage. But her biographer John Guy's verdict is that "she had proved to be his equal in a quarrel." Six years later, Knox's theory was used to depose her.
That is the shape of Mary, Queen of Scots: quick, brave, clear-sighted in the room, and then undone by forces and choices that her quickness could not master. Guy, who works from the manuscript State Papers and is openly revisionist, argues that her enemies "largely won the argument," and that she should be remembered "as a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country." Paul Johnson, in Heroes, calls her "a classic case of hero worship," a woman who "cannot be assessed dispassionately as a political strategist and stateswoman, as Elizabeth can. She has to be loved and admired as a person."
Both are right about something. She is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness as a study in agency under hard constraint: a queen with real gifts, ruling a poor, factional kingdom of men who "saw themselves less as the ruled and more as co-rulers," who lost almost every round she played and still won the last one.
By the Numbers
The Queen of Scots
6 daysHer age when she became queen
17 monthsFrancis II's reign as king of France before he died, leaving her a widow at eighteen
7 of 12Protestants on her first Privy Council
56Dagger and sword strokes that killed her secretary Rizzio
3 months, 5 daysFrom Darnley's murder to her marriage to Bothwell
~19 yearsAs Elizabeth's prisoner in England
44Her age on the scaffold at Fotheringhay, 8 February 1587
The Jewel of the French Court
Mary was born on 8 December 1542 and became Queen of Scots six days later, on the death of her father, James V. Johnson begins with him, a king "saddled by a persistent ill fortune that marked her own life." In 1548, at five, she was sent to France to be betrothed to the dauphin Francis and raised at the court of Henry II.
She flourished there. She grew to nearly six feet tall, had "a razor-sharp wit and was a natural conversationalist," and was at her best in the saddle. Calling her childhood companions Fleming, Beaton, Seton and Livingston the "four Maries" was a "mildly blasphemous" joke on a devotional manual. Contemporaries "remarked on her almost magical ability to create the impression that the person she was talking to was the only one whose opinion really mattered to her."
At thirteen she also fought her first battle for authority. Her new governess, Lady Parois, was "at best fussy, at worst a killjoy and a prig," and had already reported her "for insubordination when Mary had insisted on wearing too much jewelry." When Mary gave some old dresses to two aunts who were abbesses, Parois snapped: "Obviously you mean to keep me poor." Mary said "How sad," left, and wrote to her mother, turning the knife on her mother's pride in generosity: "I've never had of her the credit of giving away a single pin, and thus I've acquired a reputation for being mean to the point where quite a few people have said to me how little I resemble you." Parois fell "ill," resigned and never came back. "The young Queen of Scots had gotten her way." It cost her: she later said the affair "had almost been the cause of my death," the first of many collapses. The pattern of her adult life was already set.
There was a darker lesson in those years that she did not learn. At fourteen she sent her mother thirty-five signed blank sheets. At fifteen, before her wedding to Francis at Notre-Dame on 24 April 1558, she signed secret deeds giving Scotland to France if she died childless, "illegal by Scots law," while promising Scotland's commissioners its "freedoms, liberties and privileges." She did it because "she trusted her other Guise relations." Guy thinks she "might well have been prepared to sign documents presented to her without studying them properly." Trust in her kin would be the thread that ran through every one of her disasters.
Adieu France
In December 1560 Francis II died after seventeen months as king. Within six months of losing her mother, Mary had "been widowed and orphaned and had lost her standing as queen of France." Catherine de Medici blocked a second French match and a Spanish one. Her Guise uncles had let William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister, and the Protestant Lords of the Congregation make the Treaty of Edinburgh behind her back. Scotland had gone officially Protestant in her absence, governed by a council of nobles that Cecil's clerk filed as "the States of Scotland."
She had two easy options. She could stay in France as a rich dowager. Or she could take the course offered by the Catholic envoy John Lesley: land at Aberdeen, where twenty thousand men would march her to Edinburgh.
"She reviewed her options and decided to return to Scotland. Her mind was made up within a month." She refused Lesley's plan, "a recipe for civil war." After five days with her Protestant half-brother Lord James she agreed to keep the religious status quo in exchange for her own private Mass. She hired her mother's old lieutenant d'Oysel to brief her on the lords. She refused to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh: she "was not to be charged" for contracts to which she was not a party. Denied an English safe-conduct, she sailed anyway. Leaving Calais she wept: "Adieu France. It's all over now. Adieu France. I think I'll never see your shores again."
It worked. Her first proclamation froze religion as she "found publicly and universally standing" to avoid "any tumult or sedition." Her first Privy Council had seven Protestants out of twelve, with Lord James, William Maitland of Lethington and Morton as its inner cabinet. She brought a French court with her, valets, chefs, tailor, chaplains and doctors, more than 170 strong in time and paid from her French dowry; Knox complained of her "French fillocks, fiddlers, and others of that band." She rode to Stirling, Perth, Dundee and St. Andrews "to see more of her country and her people, and to show herself to them."
Maitland, who had predicted that her return "shall not fail to raise wonderful tragedies," wrote within months: "the queen my mistress behaves herself so gently in every behalf as reasonably we can require. If anything be amiss, the fault is rather in ourselves." She had won him with a letter Guy calls "remarkably clear-sighted."
"Mary entered a labyrinth on her arrival in Scotland, but so far she had successfully found her way." The price was a ruling partnership with the lords who had deposed her mother.
I Never Saw Her Merrier
Her summer progress of 1562 turned into a war. The Earl of Huntly, the "Cock of the North" and the greatest Catholic lord, resented Lord James's rise. He greeted her at Aberdeen with fifteen hundred retainers instead of the hundred allowed. At Inverness the castle captain shut the gates on her. Mary came back next day with a force, took the castle and hanged the captain from the battlements. Huntly planned to seize her at the Spey ford; she was warned, crossed with three thousand men, and his son's thousand fled.
Thomas Randolph, Elizabeth's ambassador and no friend, rode with her and could not hide his admiration. "In all these garboils," he wrote to Cecil, "I assure Your Honor I never saw her merrier, never dismayed, nor never thought that stomach to be in her that I find." Her one regret, he wrote, was that "she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk on the causeway with a jack and a knapscall." Randolph admitted that "I was ashamed to sit still and did as the rest."
Then came the battle of Corrichie. Huntly died of a stroke on his horse. His son was executed at Aberdeen, and his embalmed corpse was stood upright in its coffin in Parliament to be found guilty of treason. The campaign shows both sides of her rule: high spirits and real ruthlessness.
Her Own Choice
For four years Mary's foreign policy rested on one trade: give up her immediate claim to England in return for recognition as Elizabeth's heir. "We be both of one blood, of one country and in one island," she wrote. "How much better were it ... that we being two queens so near of kin, neighbors and living in one isle, should be friends and live together like sisters." She sent Elizabeth her portrait in mourning. Elizabeth asked her to marry an Englishman, offered her own favourite Robert Dudley, and implied that compliance would be rewarded.
Then, in March 1565, Elizabeth's answer arrived: "nothing shall be done until Her Majesty shall be married, or shall notify her determination never to marry." Guy calls it "a bombshell" that "made a mockery of Mary's policy of conciliation."
"To answer me with nothing," she told Randolph, "I find great fault." Henry, Lord Darnley, the Earl of Lennox's son, who carried Tudor blood of his own, had been allowed north. His defects ("recklessness, sexual excess, pride and stupidity") were known. Lord James, now Earl of Moray, opposed the match and was raising a bond against it.
Mary moved with speed and skill. She sent Maitland to London with an ultimatum disguised as a mission to France, secured Spanish and French acquiescence, isolated Moray, and bought Morton by settling his claim to the Angus estates. When the English Council sent a formal "Determination" against the match, she knighted Darnley and made him a baron and Earl of Ross "all on the same afternoon." When he was recalled to London, she kept him. "I would no longer stay upon her fair words," she said, "but being [as] free as she is, I would stand to my own choice." When Randolph suggested that conversion might ease Elizabeth's consent: "What! Would you that I should make merchandise of my religion, or frame myself to your ministers' wills? It cannot be so."
She married Darnley on 29 July 1565, in her white mourning, and proclaimed him king without Parliament's consent. When Moray rose, she rode against him with "a pistol in her saddle holster and a steel cap on her head." Even Knox wrote that "the queen's courage increased man-like so much that she was ever with the foremost." She chased Moray over the border without a battle.
— Mary, Queen of Scots, 1565Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.
"Her victory was complete. She was more powerful and popular than ever before." "While Elizabeth dithered and English policy was in disarray, she had acted decisively." But the infatuation was over within weeks, and making Darnley king was, Guy says, done "naively and impulsively." When Darnley claimed to be "participant and equal with you in all things," she said she would be "your wife no longer"; she "would never be told by anyone except a reigning monarch that she was someone's equal." The campaign had also brought back the Earl of Bothwell, a loyal strongman she wanted "reserved, though it were in prison, in store to be employed." He would ruin her.
Fifty-Six Strokes
On the evening of 9 March 1566 Darnley led Lord Ruthven and some eighty armed men up a secret stair into Mary's supper room at Holyrood. She was six months pregnant. They dragged her secretary David Rizzio from behind her skirts and killed him next door with "fifty-six strokes with whiniards [daggers] and swords." One man held a cocked pistol on her. The plotters meant to give Darnley the crown matrimonial and to pardon Moray's exiled rebels.
She was a prisoner in her own apartments, under guard, cut off from her women, with the outlawed lords riding back to Edinburgh. The conspirators knew she "could be a skillful operator and an unflinching adversary," who "in a crisis would always try to hold the initiative." She did.
She smuggled out orders through her gentlewomen to Bothwell, Huntly and Argyll. She faked the onset of labour with a primed midwife to get her women back. She embraced Moray on his return. Then she worked on Darnley. She offered to sleep with him that night, knowing "he would be incapably drunk by bedtime," and next morning explained that once the lords had their pardons "they would ditch Darnley." "Step by step, Mary persuaded Darnley to retreat." She promised the lords their pardon; hours later, she and Darnley slipped out through a cellar passage after midnight and rode twenty-five miles to Dunbar, where she had to stop "several times" to vomit.
Within a week she was back in Edinburgh with three to five thousand troops. She pardoned Moray and the earlier rebels and outlawed Morton, Ruthven and the Douglases. She had told the kneeling lords, "I was never bloodthirsty nor greedy upon your lands and goods since my coming into Scotland, nor will I be upon you." Now she "intended to be unremitting to the Douglases." "Mary had shown extraordinary daring and presence of mind ... Her enemies were the first to concede that she had shown amazing coolness."
The victory planted the next disaster. The plotters sent Mary Darnley's signed bond for the murder, and the Douglases now had a blood feud with him. "By assassinating Rizzio, he had let the genie out of the bottle."
Three months later her son James was born. His three-day baptism was "modeled on the festivities on the theme of reconciliation staged at Bayonne," designed to bind the lords to her. At the start of 1567, Guy writes, she was "at the height of her powers and about to reach a final political accord with Elizabeth."
The Biggest Throw of the Dice
In the early hours of 10 February 1567 the house at Kirk o'Field where Darnley lay sick was blown up, and he was found strangled in the garden. Guy's reading of the reports is that a pact of lords did it, with Bothwell and Morton at its heart, Sir James Balfour's gunpowder and Ker of Fawdonside's horsemen. Placards called Bothwell "the murderer of the king" and cried "Farewell gentle Henry, but a vengeance on Mary." Elizabeth wrote that people said Mary would "look through your fingers at this deed instead of avenging it."
She did. Guy, her strongest modern defender, writes that she "made no serious effort to bring Darnley's murderers to justice." She let Bothwell be tried in a court where Lennox was too afraid to appear, and he was acquitted without evidence. Believing Moray was behind the murder, she decided to make Bothwell her protector: "A poacher was to be turned into a gamekeeper." "This realm," she argued, "being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man."
On 24 April Bothwell intercepted her at Almond Bridge and took her to Dunbar. Guy accepts that the abduction was genuine, but finds the twelve days at Dunbar decisive: she "made no attempt whatever to escape." She pardoned him, made him Duke of Orkney with her own hands, and married him by Protestant rites on 15 May, "three months and five days" after Darnley's murder. "Mary was a gambler, and this was to be her biggest throw of the dice."
Within days Bothwell was "jealous and suspicious and thinks to be obeyed," and witnesses heard her call "for someone to give her a knife with which to kill herself." Her account of Dunbar sent to Paris was, Guy says, "deeply disingenuous. She had been a fool for love." "What happened then tarnished her reputation forever, and rightly so." Johnson calls it "a second scandal, worse than the first."
The Red Petticoat at Carberry Hill
The lords who had signed the Ainslie's Tavern Bond backing the marriage now rose in arms "to deliver the queen's person." On 15 June 1567, a month after the wedding, the queen who had married in jewels faced them in borrowed clothes "after the attire and fashion of the women of Edinburgh," a "red petticoat with sleeves tied with points" and a skirt that "scarcely reached halfway down her legs." The lords' banner showed Darnley dead under a tree and his son kneeling: "Judge and revenge my cause O Lord."
All through a blazing day the armies faced each other. The French ambassador du Croc found her sitting on a stone, and she flashed at the lords' terms: "It looks very ill of them to go against their own signed bond, after they themselves married me to him, having already acquitted him of the deed of which they would now accuse him." Bothwell offered single combat; Morton sent Lord Lindsay with the family's great two-handed sword. Then Mary "in a split-second decision forbade" the fight, reasoning, Guy thinks, that she would lose whatever the result, because Morton "would never accept the result."
Her soldiers drank wine in the heat and slipped away until about four hundred were left. She gave Bothwell her hand and a safe conduct, watched him ride two miles toward Dunbar, and turned to Kirkcaldy. They never met again. Captured, she told Lindsay, "I will have your head for this." Guy: "Mary's threats cost her dearly. She had betrayed her intentions at a moment when she and the Confederate Lords were locked in a struggle for survival." She "talked of nothing but hanging and crucifying them all."
She rode down "her head high," and the soldiers stood still in awe until Atholl's men broke the spell: "Burn the whore! Burn the murderess!" That night she entered Edinburgh "all disfigured with dust and tears."
Lochleven and the Solway
She was rowed to the island castle of Lochleven, held by Moray's half-brother. There, weakened by miscarrying Bothwell's twins, she was told by Lindsay to sign an abdication or be "thrown into the loch," and that he would "cut her throat." She signed, and blurted out: "When God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these, for it is done against my will." Her son was crowned at thirteen months old and Moray became regent. She was twenty-four.
"She bided her time, resting and eating properly," and recruited George Douglas, the laird's younger brother, who "fell in love with her." Her first attempt, disguised as a laundress, failed when a boatman noticed her hands were "very fair and white." On 2 May 1568 the sixteen-year-old Willie Douglas pocketed the gate key at supper and rowed her across while Mary Seton stood in for her. Within days her army outnumbered Moray's.
At Langside it broke in three quarters of an hour; Argyll had collapsed with a seizure at the start. Mary fled to Dumfries and wrote to Elizabeth from Dundrennan, trusting the diamond ring Elizabeth had once sent "as a token of love and friendship to be redeemed." On 16 May she crossed the Solway in a fishing boat, "too afraid" to wait for the reply.
It was, Guy says, "a catastrophic mistake." Cecil "got there first" and had her put under guard at Carlisle. She never returned to Scotland and never met Elizabeth. Before Elizabeth's tribunal on the Casket Letters she refused to plead: "I am not an equal to my rebels, neither will I submit myself to be weighted in equal balance with them." She asked, "when did you ever hear a prince censured for listening in person to the grievances of those who complain that they have been falsely accused?" The refusal preserved her dignity and cost her the chance to answer the evidence.
The Cat and the Mouse
For nearly nineteen years she was, in Johnson's phrase, "passed on like an unwanted parcel." She kept a court in exile, with a presence chamber and a cloth of state. Her keepers fell one after another. Sir Francis Knollys called her "a rare woman; for, as no flattery can abuse her, so no plain speech seems to offend her," and the old Cecilian Sir Ralph Sadler was caught taking her hawking. Johnson: "She could charm the stone lions on the balustrade."
For the first decade she sat with Bess of Hardwick, wife of her custodian the Earl of Shrewsbury, "working with the needle, in which she much delighteth," and sewed her politics into her embroidery. Elizabeth's poets painted her as sun and moon; "Mary cheerfully embroidered panels that showed eclipses." Her cat was female, "embroidered in ginger—Elizabeth's red hair was legendary," wearing a little gold coronet and watching a mouse. "Mary had several times said that she was the mouse and Elizabeth the cat, who watched and waited before deciding to pounce." One panel showed a hand from heaven pruning a vine, with the motto "Virescit vulnere virtus" ("Virtue grows strong by wounding"). "Most likely the ambiguity was malicious." Her cloth of state carried her mother's motto, "En ma fin est mon commencement," "her way of proclaiming that even if she was killed, her dynastic claim would live on in the person of her son."
She plotted, and she was plotted around: the Northern Rebellion, the Ridolfi plot, the Throckmorton plot. She kept a secret chancery, with letters hidden in shoe soles and trunk panels.
Her son was the last betrayal. When James offered her only the title of Queen Mother, she raged: "I am your true and only queen. Do not insult me further with this title of Queen Mother." "There is neither king nor queen in Scotland except me." She "threatened to disinherit her son and to curse him." He refused her joint sovereignty and made a treaty with England that left her "irrelevant and disposable."
The Beer Cask
By 1586 Mary was lame and in the charge of Sir Amyas Paulet, a Calvinist who would not let her ride out hawking. The Act for the Queen's Safety made her liable to death for any plot on her behalf. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster, had given her a "safe" postal channel, a watertight box in a beer cask, and read everything in it. She had sent her own new cipher key through Gifford, Walsingham's man.
On 6 July Anthony Babington asked her to approve a rising, a Spanish invasion and the "dispatch of the usurper" by "six noble gentlemen." "Mary ruminated for a week," sure that "her destruction was sought, and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness." On 17 July she answered: "then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work." Guy dismisses the forged postscript but not the letter: "She had consented to Elizabeth's assassination and a foreign invasion." The reply reached her accusers with a gallows drawn on the outside.
Arrested, "Mary tried to lie her way out of trouble." At Fotheringhay she first refused to appear: "I am a queen ... and not a subject." "I am an absolute queen," she said, "and will do nothing which may prejudice either mine own royal majesty, or other princes in my place and rank, or my son." Then she fought point by point: "I knew not Babington ... If you want to prove it, then produce my letters signed with my own hand." "It was an easy matter," she told Walsingham, "to counterfeit the ciphers and characters of others," and argued that "the circumstances of her guilt might be proved, but never the fact." She wept, "I would never make shipwreck of my soul by conspiring the destruction of my dearest sister." To Cecil she said: "Ah, I see you are my adversary."
Walsingham had the decipher, Babington's confirmation and her secretaries' confessions, and she was convicted. Guy says she "stood up remarkably well to her ordeal." Her logic was a sovereign's: "If she was not an independent queen, she was guilty. If she was ... she was innocent." Elizabeth wanted her quietly killed; Paulet refused ("God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience"), and Cecil sent the warrant behind his queen's back. Mary got a public execution instead of a private murder, and the stage she wanted.
The Colour of Dried Blood
On her last evening Paulet pulled down her cloth of state. She spent the night dividing her clothes, lutes and music book among her servants. She "had carefully prepared herself. This was to be her grandest performance."
On 8 February 1587 she came down to the great hall at Fotheringhay in black satin and a white veil, with crucifix and Latin prayer book, leaning on two soldiers because her legs were swollen. To her weeping steward Andrew Melville she said, "tell my friends that I die a true woman to my religion, and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman." She bullied the earls into letting six servants attend: "You know that I am cousin to your queen, and descended from the blood of Henry VII."
When the Dean of Peterborough began his sermon and stammered three times, she cut him off: "Mr. Dean, I will not hear you. You have nothing to do with me, nor I with you." "I am settled," she said, "in the ancient Roman Catholic religion, and mind to spend my blood in defense of it." She outprayed him in Latin, then in English.
When her black gown came off there were "stifled cries of shock." Underneath she was dressed in tawny red, "the color of dried blood: the liturgical color of martyrdom." She joked that she had "never had such grooms before to make her unready," and told her women: "Peace, peace, cry not, I have promised the contrary." The axe took two blows and then had to be used "as a cleaver." When the headsman raised the head, the auburn wig came away, and the head beneath was "very grey and near bald." The earls burned everything with blood on it so there would be no relics.
Guy is unsentimental about it. "This was largely contrived. Mary had never truly been the ideological Catholic that she now wished to appear to the world. She was far too political for that." Only in captivity had she "reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone." But: "What happened in the great hall at Fotheringhay was for show, and it worked." Her death "won a propaganda victory that resounded around Catholic Europe."
— Mary, Queen of Scots, embroidered on her cloth of state in captivityEn ma fin est mon commencement. (In my end is my beginning.)
In My End Is My Beginning
The only victory was posthumous and dynastic. Her son James inherited England "by law, by lineal succession and undoubted right," and built her a larger tomb than Elizabeth's at Westminster. Guy: "every subsequent British ruler has been descended from her," down to Elizabeth II.
Johnson's case for her is that she is a hero of feeling, not achievement. Her impulsiveness "is precisely the trait that makes her so attractive to so many people, then and now. She is real, alive, her eyes flashing, her heart pounding, her body quivering with emotion." "All her life she was trouble, to her friends, relations, adherents, subjects, enemies and would-be assassins, above all to herself." By his own test, that courage is "the one indispensable element in heroism," the end redeems her: she "met her death with the greatest possible courage, dignity and grace." Guy agrees on one point beyond dispute: "Her courage has never been in doubt."
Why She Lost
Mary lost almost everything she fought for in her lifetime. After six years of personal rule she was forced under threat of death to abdicate in favour of a one-year-old son who was raised a Protestant by her enemies and never knew her. Her one counterstroke collapsed at Langside. She never won recognition as Elizabeth's heir, never met her cousin, was disowned by her son, and was beheaded at forty-four.
♛
Six Causes of Mary's Fall
Structure, judgement, temperament and luck, as Guy and Johnson weigh them.
| Cause | Kind | The evidence |
|---|---|---|
| The Bothwell gamble and the unpunished murder | Judgement | Both books weigh this most heavily. "It is not what happened before the murder that precipitated her downfall, but the astonishing events that followed it." |
| Credulity toward kin and allies | Trait | Her uncles, Lord James, Maitland, Bothwell, Elizabeth's ring, Gifford's beer cask, her son. Her "hunger for a partner, a husband, a king, led her to her most grotesque and uncharacteristic miscalculations." |
| A weak crown in a divided kingdom, with Cecil against her | Structure | About 850,000 Scots to England's 3.5 million; politics "tribal, based on organized revenge and the blood feud." Guy's chief villain is Cecil, "her great nemesis." |
| The all-or-nothing temperament | Trait | She met crisis by raising the stake: Darnley, Bothwell, the Solway and Babington, "her final reckless throw of the dice." |
| Throwing herself on Elizabeth's mercy | Judgement | The Solway turned a defeated but free queen with a party at home into a hostage. Every later plot became evidence against her. |
| Bad luck | Luck | Francis II's early death, a cancelled 1562 meeting with Elizabeth, Argyll's seizure at Langside. "Mary was the unluckiest ruler in British history." |
Johnson makes impulsiveness the master flaw. Guy's epilogue lists the naivety behind them: "She was naive in thinking that blood would be thicker than water ... naive in expecting Bothwell to love her ... naive in fleeing to England ... perhaps most naive in expecting a son, who could not remember anything about her, never to betray her." And: "Her worst mistake was to allow herself, a queen, to fall in love."
The counterfactual is partly editorial, though Johnson sets the two queens side by side. Elizabeth I shared Mary's sex, rank and dynastic claim, faced the same male councillors pressing her to marry, and came through. Three of Johnson's rules for Elizabeth are the exact reverse of Mary's choices. "First, never marry ... Her virgin state, and her freedom from a marital tie, were the sources of her vast authority." Mary held that not to marry "cannot be for me," and each husband became a rival centre of power. "Second, she picked wise counselors, and stuck to them"; Mary's ministers were the men who had deposed her mother and would depose her. And: "Where Mary was impulsive, Elizabeth had a horror of irrevocable decisions."
Guy adds a caveat: Elizabeth too "ruled from the heart" over Dudley, and Mary "knew how to rule from the head as well as the heart," as her first four years show. The difference was less intelligence or courage than the size of the stake. Elizabeth never bet the crown on a person. Mary bet it on Darnley, on Bothwell, on Elizabeth's goodwill and on a stranger's beer cask.
Part IIThe Playbook
Mary is the hardest kind of figure to learn from: someone with real political gifts whose life is remembered for the moments those gifts failed. Her first four years in Scotland are a lesson in ruling a hostile kingdom from a weak position. Her last twenty are a lesson in how credulity, impatience and the need for a partner can undo all of it. The principles below take both halves.
The principles
- 1.Rule from the middle.
- 2.Tell the clever traitor he will be blamed first.
- 3.Hold the initiative, even from a locked room.
- 4.When the stronger side says nothing, choose; but don't hand over the title untested.
- 5.A strongman in reserve is a weapon that can turn.
- 6.Never sign what you have not read, or trust who carries your letters.
- 7.Don't cross the border before the reply comes back.
- 8.If you cannot win the trial, win the scaffold.
Principle 1
Rule from the middle
Mary came home to a Protestant kingdom run by the lords who had fought her mother. She refused both easy paths: the dowager's retreat and the Catholic army at Aberdeen. Instead she froze religion as she found it, kept her own Mass, and put the ablest Protestant lords in her cabinet. She told Darnley the way to rule Scotland "was to rise above and then balance the rival factions, not to ally with any one of them 'and so become enslaved.'" It worked for four years. It stopped working when she took a side, first with Darnley and then with Bothwell.
Tactic: When you inherit a divided organisation, freeze the most contested question, keep your private commitments private, and staff the top table from every camp. Stay above the factions; the moment you join one, the rest unite against you.
Principle 2
Tell the clever traitor he will be blamed first
At eighteen Mary wrote to Maitland, Cecil's friend and her likeliest enemy, that she knew he was the "principal instrument" of the practices against her. She promised "to forget the past" and to "judge him solely by his loyalty from now on," and added that "if anything goes wrong after I trust you, you are the one that I shall blame first." He served her for two years.
Guy's final judgement is that she was "a shrewd judge of character who could handle people just as masterfully as her English cousin." The exceptions were the people she loved or was related to.
Tactic: When you must work with someone capable who has worked against you, name what you know, offer a fresh start, and tell them plainly that they will own the result. Clarity is more binding than suspicion.
Principle 3
Hold the initiative, even from a locked room
After Rizzio's murder Mary was pregnant, guarded and cut off. Within forty-eight hours she had smuggled out orders, faked labour to recover her women, embraced the returning rebel she needed, turned her husband against his allies, and escaped through a cellar. Within a week she held Edinburgh with thousands of troops. "Her enemies were the first to concede that she had shown amazing coolness."
The same reflex worked in the Chase-about Raid, when "she retained the initiative from the start," and at Lochleven, where she "feigned resignation at her captivity" while planning the boat.
Tactic: In a crisis, act first on whatever channels you still control, however small. Find the weakest link among your captors and work on him. The side that moves first sets the terms everyone else reacts to.
Principle 4
When the stronger side says nothing, choose; but don't hand over the title untested
Elizabeth's "nothing shall be done" ended four years of waiting, and Mary married Darnley inside four months: "I would no longer stay upon her fair words." It was a decisive answer to a stalling partner, and in the short run it made her "more powerful and popular than ever before."
But she made Darnley king before he had shown he could carry it, and against Parliament's custom. Guy says she "would have done better to insist that Parliament be asked." He used the title to plot against her, and the plot ended in Rizzio's death.
Tactic: When a more powerful party keeps you waiting with no answer, set a deadline and then act on your own choice. But give the people you raise their titles in stages, as they prove themselves, and through the proper process.
Principle 5
A strongman in reserve is a weapon that can turn
Mary kept Bothwell "reserved, though it were in prison, in store to be employed" against Moray and England; Kirkcaldy said she wanted him "at all times ready to shake out of her pocket." It worked in 1565 and 1566. In 1567 she let his acquittal go through a frightened court, failed to pursue Darnley's murderers, and married him. Guy calls her reasoning, that the realm needed "the fortification of a man," a solution to female monarchy "hardly a radical one." It handed the lords the moral cause they had lacked.
Tactic: Keep a loyal enforcer if you must, but never let him become the issue. If he is suspected of a crime that touches you, see the accusation through publicly before you rely on him again.
Principle 6
Never sign what you have not read, or trust who carries your letters
The same flaw opened and closed her life. At fifteen she signed away her kingdom to France because she trusted her uncles. At forty-three she sent her new cipher key through Gifford, Walsingham's agent, and answered Babington through a beer cask that Walsingham read. In between, she was "sure of the Lord James," who was briefing Cecil, and she trusted Elizabeth's ring enough to cross the Solway.
She was a fine reader of strangers. She was blind to the people she thought were hers. And she broke her own best rule: in the Ridolfi affair she followed her uncle's maxim "Discretion sur tout" to the letter, and Cecil could not catch her out. In 1586 she did not.
Tactic: Apply the most scrutiny to the people you trust most, because that is where an adversary will place an agent. Read every document before you sign it, and assume every channel you did not build yourself is being read.
Principle 7
Don't cross the border before the reply comes back
After Langside Mary wrote to Elizabeth from Dundrennan and sailed the same day, "too afraid" to wait. Cecil "got there first." A defeated but free queen with a loyal party at home became a prisoner for nineteen years, and every plot on her behalf, real or provoked, became evidence against her.
Tactic: When you are desperate, the move that feels safest is often the one that hands your fate to someone else. Before you put yourself in another party's power, wait for their answer in writing, and know what you will do if it is no.
Principle 8
If you cannot win the trial, win the scaffold
Mary's politics lost. Her execution won. She refused to plead as an equal of her accusers, got a public execution instead of a quiet murder, and choreographed it down to the colour of her petticoat. "What happened in the great hall at Fotheringhay was for show, and it worked." The honesty matters: Guy is clear that the martyrdom was "largely contrived," and that she had consented to her cousin's assassination.
Tactic: When the verdict is certain, stop arguing the verdict and start shaping the record. Decide what you want observers to remember, and control every detail of the moment they will remember it by.
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Part IIIMaxims
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Never sign what you have not read. At fifteen she signed secret deeds handing Scotland to France because she trusted her uncles.
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Tell the clever traitor he will be blamed first. It turned Cecil's friend into her servant for two years.
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Read your enemy's book before you meet him. "You speak of women in general."
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When the stronger side says "nothing," choose for yourself. "I would no longer stay upon her fair words."
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Don't give a man the title before he has proved he can carry it. Darnley used the crown she gave him to plot against her.
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Avenge the murder before you marry the suspect. She married the acquitted Bothwell three months and five days after Darnley died.
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Never let your threats outrun your power. "I will have your head for this," said the captured queen to Lindsay.
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Don't cross the border before the reply comes back. She sailed the day she wrote, and never came home.
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Check who carries your letters. Her Babington reply reached her accusers with a gallows drawn on the outside.
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If you cannot win the trial, win the scaffold. Her politics lost; her death "won a propaganda victory that resounded around Catholic Europe."
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In your end may be your beginning. She lost every round to Elizabeth and Cecil, yet "every subsequent British ruler has been descended from her."
