Chapter 3

He chose for his emissary one Jehan Simier, an experienced gallant, who soon wooed Elizabeth to such good purpose that she fell violently in love with the messenger, as well as with his absent master. Protestant England took fright at the pending marriage of the queen with a papist of half her age. Simier, whom she called her "monkey," had bewitched her, said the courtiers, and remonstrances from all sides came to the queen.

_V.--The Battle of Wits_

Alençon's demands were high, but Elizabeth seems really for once to have lost her head, and but for the strong opposition of her Council, might have been drawn into the marriage. Simier, seeing the deadlock, decided to bring Alençon over at all risks. Leicester, deadly jealous, tried to assassinate Simier, who revenged himself by divulging to the queen Leicester's secret marriage. Elizabeth was beside herself with rage, and more in love than ever with Alençon and his envoy. At length, in August 1579, the young French prince, in disguise, suddenly appeared at Greenwich. The queen's vanity was flattered, and though the visit was supposed to be secret, she hardly left her young lover, whilst he, to judge by his letters, was as badly smitten as she. But though she promised him marriage, he had to return with little else, and as soon as he had gone she found many good reasons for delay and hesitation.

In October 1580, a new Catholic combination forced Elizabeth's hands, and she promised greater help to Alençon's project, whilst trying to draw France also into open war with Spain. The combat of wits was keen and cynical, each party trying to pledge the other and to keep free himself. A great French embassy came to England in April 1581, to negotiate an alliance and the queen's marriage with Alençon, who had now re-entered Flanders and was immersed in the struggle against the Spaniards. The discussions in England were becoming interminable, for the French ambassadors asked hard terms, when Alençon, in June 1581, losing patience, suddenly rushed over to England to plead his own cause independently of his brother's envoys, whom he distrusted with good reason. This suited Elizabeth, for it made Alençon more dependent upon her, and again she sent her lover back full of great promises to help him.

In August Alençon again entered Flanders, depending entirely upon Elizabeth for support, and thenceforward he looked alone to his marriage with her for his salvation. She was sparing, and the poor prince retired to France in September. In desperation he came to England again to press for money and marriage in November 1581; and for months the love-making was fast and furious. Frantic prayers, sighs, and tears on his part were answered by kisses and promises on hers, but she gave as little money as would serve to get rid of him. On February 1, 1582, Alençon sailed for Holland to Elizabeth's professed grief and real joy; and thenceforward the prince, first in Flanders as sovereign, and afterwards in France a fugitive, supplicated and threatened his betrothed for money, and ever more money. But Elizabeth had now taken the Netherlands revolt into her own hands, and thenceforward her French lover was useless to her there. So, though she still kept up the pretence of her willingness to marry him on impossible conditions, and drove the poor creature to love-lorn despair, Alençon had served his matrimonial purpose before he died, in 1584, and Elizabeth's courtships with a political object came to an end. She and England were strong enough now to face her possible foes without fear.

* * * * *

The Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots

Mary Queen of Scots was one of the most remarkable women who ever presided over the destinies of a nation. She was born at Linlithgow on December 8, 1542, a few days before the death of her father, James V., thus becoming a queen before she was a week old. Her complex personality and varied accomplishments have inspired many and various historians, but it has remained for Major Martin Hume to demonstrate the historical fatality of Mary's love affairs. In "The Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots," published in 1903, Major Hume gives a convincing and logical reason for Mary's political failure, inasmuch as it did not spring from her goodness or badness as a woman, but from a certain weakness of character. This epitome has been prepared by Major Hume himself.

_I.--Betrothed in her Cradle_

When in the great hall at Worms, on that ever-memorable April day in 1521, before the panic-stricken princes, Luther insolently flung at the emperor his defiance of the mediaeval church, the crash, though all unheard by the ears of men, shook to their base the crumbling foundations upon which, for hundreds of years, the institutions of Europe had rested. The sixteenth century thenceforward was a period of disintegration and reconstruction, in which fresh lines of cleavage between old political associates were opened, new affinities were formed, and the international balance re-adjusted.

In the long struggle of the house of Aragon, and its successor, Charles V., with France for the domination of Italy, the only effectual guarantee against England's actively aiding its traditional ally, the ruler of Spain and Flanders, against its traditional enemy, France, was for the latter country to keep a tight hold of its alliance with Scotland, by means of which English force might be diverted at any time. The existence of the Scottish "back door" to England, with the ever probable enemy behind it, had long been a check upon English power, and a humiliation to English kings in their efforts to hold the balance between the Continental rivals. But with the spread of Lutheranism in Germany and Henry VIII.'s defiance of the Papacy, the Catholic powers, drawn together in the face of common danger, found a fresh bond of union in their orthodoxy which partially superseded old rivalries.

In these circumstances the English policy, which had aimed at the control of Scottish foreign relations to the exclusion of French influence, became not only desirable as it always had been, but vitally necessary to preserve England's independence.

Henry VIII.'s policy towards Scotland had been that of _divide et impera_, and a series of royal minorities and the greed and poverty of the semi-independent Scottish nobles had aided him. The rout of the Scots at Solway Moss, and the pathetic passing of the gallant James V., leaving his new-born daughter, Mary, as queen (December 1542), seemed at length to place Scotland in England's power. The murder of Cardinal Beaton, the bribery of the Douglases, and the marriage of Lennox with Henry's sister were all subsequent moves in the same game. Mary was betrothed in her cradle to the heir of England, and France, whose sheet anchor for centuries had been the "auld alliance" with the Scots, appeared to be helpless against a coalition of England and the emperor.

Thenceforward, England's main object was to keep a tight grip upon Scotland by religion or otherwise, while at first France, and subsequently the Catholic league, strove ceaselessly, with the help of Mary Stuart, to free Scotland from English influence. The marriage juggle of Elizabeth was largely inspired by her Scottish aims, and if the fortuitous adjustment of her qualities kept England Protestant, and France wavering for all those critical years, if she secured the inactivity of Spain, the resistance of Protestant Holland, and the freedom of navigation by her skilful statecraft, her rival Mary Stuart was a hardly less powerful factor in the final triumph of England by reason of certain defects in her character, the consequences of which are dealt with in this book.

Mary possessed a finer and nobler nature than Elizabeth; she was a woman of higher courage and greater conviction, more generous, magnanimous, and confiding, and, apart from her incomparably greater beauty and fascination, she possessed mental endowments fully equal to those of the English queen. But, whilst caution and love of mastery in Elizabeth always saved her from her weakness at the critical moment, Mary Stuart possessed no such safeguards, and was periodically swept along helplessly by the irresistible rush of her amorous passion.

French intrigue and money, aided by the queen-regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, succeeded, after Henry's death and Somerset's invasion of Scotland, in gaining firm hold upon Scotland, and Mary, as the betrothed wife of the dauphin Francis, was carried to France in 1548, at the age of six, to be reared by her cunning kinsmen of Lorraine, and made, as it was hoped, a future powerful instrument to aid Catholic French objects against England, and the reformation in France and elsewhere. As she grew towards womanhood in the bravest and most amorous court in Europe, the queen-dauphiness became a paragon of beauty, charm, accomplishments, the theme of poets, the despair of lovers innumerable worshipping her from afar.

The boy Francis de Valois, to whom she was affianced, was a poor, bilious, degenerate weakling, stunted in figure, uncomely of face. He was shy and timid, shunning active exercises, and though at the time of his marriage (1558) he was too young to have been actively engaged in the vices of the outwardly devout court, he appears to have been fully alive to the desirability of his bride. Mary was precocious and ambitious; she was surrounded by profligates, male and female, and, though she can hardly have been in love with her young husband, she appears to have been fully reconciled to the union.

With unsurpassed magnificence the wedding of Mary and Francis took place in Paris, but it signified to the world much more than the wedding of a boy and girl. So far as men could see, it meant the triumph of the papal Guises in France, and a death-blow to Protestant hopes of ranging Scotland on the side of the reformation.

_II.--Intrigue, Plot, and Intrigue_

Francis died after sixteen months reign, and Mary Stuart and her Guisan uncles, hated jealously by the queen-mother, Catharine de Medici, and by the reforming Bourbons, fell, for a time, into the background. Mary can hardly have loved her puny boy husband, but she nursed him night and day in his long sickness and his death so affected her that "she would not receive any consolation, but, brooding over her disasters with constant tears and passionate, doleful lamentations, she universally inspired deep pity." She had, indeed, lost much besides her royal husband; and in a poem written by her afterwards, the waste of her youth in widowhood, the loss of her great position as Queen of France, and her powerlessness any longer to enforce her rule in Scotland by French power, are the main burden of her complaints against Providence, not pity for the husband she had lost.

The Guises were loath to surrender power without a struggle, and as soon as Francis died they sought to sell their niece in marriage again. Their first idea was for her to marry her child-brother-in-law, the new King Charles IX., but Catharine de Medici at once stopped that plan, though the boy himself was anxious for it and Mary was not averse. That failing, Cardinal Lorraine turned to the heir of Spain, Don Carlos, as a husband for her. This would have been a death-blow to Elizabeth, and Philip feigned to listen to it; but all the strength and cunning of Huguenots and Protestants, joined by those of Catharine and Elizabeth, were brought into play against this threatening move, and Mary went to Scotland with a sinking, sad, and angry heart in 1561, fearing her uncouth subjects, foreign to her now, vexed with the Protestant party for standing in the way of her ambitious marriage, and determined to oppose Elizabeth to the utmost in her designs against the independence of Scotland.

With these views, gay and winsome though she was, it was not long before Mary was at issue with her dour Protestant subjects and their spokesman, John Knox. It was hoped by her brother, James Stuart (Murray), and Secretary Lethington that a _modus vivendi_ might be found by persuading Elizabeth to secure to Mary the English succession in case she herself died childless, on the undertaking of Mary that her marriage and policy should be dictated by England; but it was not Elizabeth's plan to pledge the future of England, and her nimble evasiveness drove the Scottish statesmen to despair.

Brawls and bitterness grew in Mary's court around the Catholicism of the queen, and English money and intrigue were freely lavished to set Scotland by the ears. Half the nobles were disaffected, and Murray and Lethington, having failed to secure Scottish interests by moderate counsels and the conciliation of Elizabeth, were forced to take a strong course. Of foreign suitors Mary had many, some promoted by the Protestants, some by the Pope and the Guises, while the Catholics of England were secretly intriguing to force Elizabeth's hand by arranging Mary's marriage with young Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, eldest son of Margaret, Countess of Lennox, niece of Henry VIII., who lived at Elizabeth's court. Cecil's spies were everywhere, and the plot was soon known and stopped by Elizabeth, violently angry with her kinswoman for listening to such a scheme.

But Murray and Lethington, in desperation, were aiming at higher game even than this. They were Protestant, they had tried their best to win Elizabeth's recognition; but they were Scotsmen first, and if their country was to be independent it must have a great ally behind it. France was out of the question while the Guises were in the shade and Catharine was queen-mother. So the ministers of Mary turned their eyes to the Protestant heir of the Catholic king. Elizabeth soon heard of this, too, and suddenly pretended to be in favour of the Darnley match for Mary, while she developed the most cordial friendship for Mary herself; for the Guises had again become paramount in France, and Elizabeth could not afford to flout all the Catholic interests at once.

That danger soon passed, for the Huguenots flew to arms, and Guise was murdered, Mary losing thus her principal prop abroad. And Lethington now pushed vigorously what seemed to be Scotland's only chance of safety--the marriage of Mary with the semi-idiot heir of Spain.

The English Catholics were drawn into the plot. "Only let Mary marry the heir of Spain, and we will salute her as our leader," said they. But Elizabeth soon gained wind of it, as usual, and was ready with her antidote--a most extraordinary one--the proposal that Mary should wed her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley, with the assurance of the English succession after Elizabeth's death without issue. It was a mere feint, of course, but it divided Scotland, and unsettled Mary herself.

Meanwhile, Philip, with his leaden methods, was pondering and seeking fresh pledges and guarantees from the English Catholics. Before his temporising answer came Elizabeth had frightened Mary's advisers into doubt, while she was holding the English Catholics in check by dangling Darnley and Dudley before Mary's eyes, and swearing deadly vengeance if she married the Spaniard.

Elizabeth's first aim was to embroil Mary's prospects by discrediting her in the eyes of foreign powers. To this end was directed the offer alternately of Dudley and Darnley as a husband, and Elizabeth's pretence of shocked reprobation of Mary in connection with Chastelard's escapade. It must be confessed that Mary's imprudence aided Elizabeth's object, and the sour bigotry of Knox, which looked upon all gaiety as a sin, served the same purpose. All this drove the unhappy queen more and more into the arms of the Catholic party as her only means of defence.

_III.--Prudence Overcome by Passion_

The intrigue to wed Mary to the Spanish prince was met by Elizabeth cordially taking up Lady Lennox, and her son, Darnley, who by many was now regarded as the intended heir of England, and was held out to Mary as an ideal husband for her. So long as she had hopes of the Spanish prince she gave but evasive answers; but late in 1564 the cunning diplomacy of Catharine and the falseness of Cardinal Lorraine had diverted that danger; and Philip gave Mary to understand that the match with his son was impossible, Mary's great hope had been founded upon this marriage. Unless she could have a foreign Catholic husband strong enough to defy Elizabeth she knew that she must make terms with Elizabeth's enemies, the English Catholics, and thus bring pressure to bear upon her by internal dissensions.

It was a dangerous game to play, for it meant conspiracy; and so long as the Lennoxes and their effeminate, lanky son were basking in Elizabeth's favour, the English queen held her trump card. But Lady Lennox was intriguing and ambitious, the head of English Catholic disaffection, and could only be held to Elizabeth's side by delusive hopes of the English succession for her son. Lennox himself, with some misgiving, was allowed to go to Scotland to claim his forfeited estates, and there, to Elizabeth's anger, was received with marked respect, which made the English queen hold Darnley and his mother more firmly than ever, and again push forward Dudley as a suitor for Mary's hand. Anxious to get Darnley to Scotland, not necessarily to marry him, but as a useful instrument, Mary feigned willingness to accept Dudley; and, in face of this, Elizabeth was induced to allow young Darnley to go to Scotland for a short time, ostensibly on business of the family estates.

In February 1565, Darnley, aged nineteen, crossed the border, to the dismay of the English agents in Scotland. It was soon after Mary had received news that the Spanish match was at an end, and she was ready for a new plan to circumvent Elizabeth. Darnley as a husband would bring to her the support of English Catholics, and a new claim to the English crown. So when her eyes first lit upon the fair stripling at Wemyss Castle, she looked upon him with favour as "the properest tall man she ever saw." He was on his best behaviour, and danced delightfully with the queen. Up to this time Mary had played her game with self-command and policy, but now for the first time her heart ran away with her, and she took a false step.

To have married Darnley as part of a transaction with Elizabeth, and with the approval of her own Protestant subjects, would have been a master-stroke. But she fell in love with the "long lad," and could not wait for negotiation; so she at once sent off to pray King Philip to support her with money and men against England and the Protestants if she married Darnley and became the tool of Spain. Philip, nothing loth, consented, and welcomed the coming union as a Catholic alliance and a powerful weapon against Elizabeth. Mary thus made herself the head of a vast Catholic conspiracy looking to Spain for support, and Elizabeth was furious both with Mary and Darnley for having apparently beaten her at her own cunning game.

How Elizabeth sought a diversion, at first by new matrimonial schemes of her own, has been told elsewhere, but her more effectual weapon was to arouse the fears of Scottish Protestants, and breed dissension in Mary's realm. "The young fool," Darnley, insolent and proud of his new greatness, offended all the nobles, whilst Mary grew daily more infatuated with him. They were married in July 1565, and the great conspiracy against Elizabeth and Protestantism was complete. Already the Scottish Protestant lords were in a panic, and after an abortive rising, they fled before Mary's bold attack, taking refuge in England.

The queen herself led her forces, armed and mounted, with her stripling husband by her side; but she was followed close by the shaggy, stern, martial figure of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, just returned from exile to serve her; and upon him she looked with kindling eyes as a stouter man than the fribble she had wed. Mary had now apparently triumphed by her Darnley marriage, but the avalanche was gathering to crush her. She looked mainly to Spain and the Pope for help, and had all Protestantism against her, led by Elizabeth, whose hate and fury knew no bounds. It was a duel now of life or death between two systems and two women, one with a heart and the other without; and, as usual, the heartless won.

English money and skill honeycombed Scottish loyalty. Darnley, vicious, vain, and passionate, was an easy prey to intrigue. The tools of England whispered in his ear that his wife was too intimate with the Italian secretary Rizzio, who had conducted the correspondence with the Catholic powers. Darnley, who had earned his wife's contempt already, was beside himself with jealousy, and himself led the Protestant conspirators and friends of England, who murdered Rizzio in the queen's presence at Holyrood (March 1566). From that hour Darnley's doom was sealed.

He had thought to be king indeed now, but Mary outwitted him; for she recalled her exiled lords, welcomed her brother Murray, and threw herself into the arms of Darnley's Protestant foes, the very men who had risen in arms against the marriage. As she fled by night with Darnley after Rizzio's murder, to betray him, she swore over Rizzio's new-made grave that a "fatter one" than he should lie there ere long. Whether she knew of the plot of his foes to murder her husband is not proved, but she almost certainly did so, and welcomed the deed when it was done. She made no pretence of love for him after Rizzio's death, and her husband repaid her coldness by sulky loutishness and bursts of drunken violence. Mary's conduct toward Bothwell, too, began to arouse scandal. By November 1566, matters had reached a crisis, and Mary, at Kelso, said that unless she was freed from Darnley she would put an end to herself. She spoke not to deaf ears. Morton, and the rest of Rizzio's slayers and bitter enemies, were pardoned, and the deadly bond was signed.

_IV.--Dire Infatuation_

On February 9, 1567, as the doomed consort lay sick and sorry outside Edinburgh at the lone house of Kirk o' Field, he was, done to death by Bothwell and the foes of the Lennoxes; and Mary Stuart's first true love affair was ended in tragedy. But already the second was in full blast. Bothwell had recently married; he was disliked by the Scottish nobles, and the queen's constant association with him had already brought discredit upon her. There had been a good political excuse for her union with Darnley, but Bothwell could bring no support to her cause; for his creed was doubtful, and he had no friends. Nothing, indeed, but the infatuation of an amorous woman for a brutally strong man could have so blinded her to her own great aims as to make her take Bothwell, the prime mover of Darnley's murder, for her husband.

As soon as the crime was known, all fingers were pointed to Bothwell and the queen as the murderers, and Protestants everywhere hastened to cast obloquy upon Mary for it. But for the nobles' jealousy of Bothwell, and the religious animus, probably Darnley's death would soon have been forgotten or condoned; but as it was, Scotland blazed out in denunciation of it, and though Bothwell was put upon a mock trial and acquitted, the hate against him grew, especially when he arranged to divorce his wife in April 1567, and, ostensibly by force, but clearly by Mary's connivance, abducted the queen and bore her off to his castle of Dunbar.