The misunderstood Mary, Queen of Scots and the people in her life

In this latest in a series of columns on the powers behind the Scottish throne down the ages, I will be looking this week and the next two weeks at the reign of Mary Stuart – it was she who changed the family name from Stewart to the French spelling – and concentrating on six men and a woman who all played a huge role in Mary’s story.

In no order at all they were her mother, Marie de Guise; Mary’s husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox; James Hamilton, the 2nd Earl of Arran; James Stewart, the 1st Earl of Moray; William Maitland of Lethington; and James Hepburn, the 4th Earl of Bothwell.

Unlike so many historians, authors and screenwriters, I am not going to expend any passion in making the case ‘for’ or ‘against’ Mary, but will let readers decide whether she was more sinned against than sinning.

Mary’s life certainly had a tragic beginning in that her father, King James V, died when she was only six days old. Once again Scotland needed a regent and there were two main candidates – Cardinal David Beaton and James Hamilton, the 2nd Earl of Arran. Beaton was head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland and was thus a divisive figure at a time when the Protestant Reformation was gathering pace, while 24-year-old Arran was a leading figure in the Scottish court as well as being heir presumptive to the Scottish throne.

Using James V’s allegedly forged will, Beaton attempted to seize power and made himself Chancellor, but Arran and the Protestant nobles outflanked him and took control of the country. It should be noted here that while the Protestant nobles generally were pro-England and the Catholics were pro-French, there was no hard and fast division between the two factions and loyalties often changed in that period, as Arran himself later showed.

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A key figure in Queen Mary’s life enters the scene at this point. Beaton possibly realised that becoming governor or regent was not a good move for himself, so he asked Mathew Stuart, the 4th Earl of Lennox, who had spent most of his life in France, to return to Scotland and oppose Arran for the regency. Beaton may also have suggested that Lennox could gain the hand of Marie de Guise and thus rule Scotland, but that union did not come to pass.

Lennox came to the family stronghold of Dumbarton Castle but arrived a few days after the Scottish Parliament deposed Beaton and made Arran the Regent and governor for Queen Mary.

Lennox, who also had a claim to be heir to the Scottish throne, would become a thorn in Arran’s side, especially as he asserted that Arran could not be the heir presumptive as he was illegitimate since his father had married his mother without first divorcing his wife.

Arran acted quickly to secure his regency, and had Cardinal Beaton imprisoned in the custody of George Seton, the 6th Lord Seton. He also moved to ensure that Marie de Guise was ‘accommodated’ in Linlithgow Palace. Having been declared ‘second person in the realm’ by the Scottish Parliament, Arran and his Anglophile associates started dealings with Protestant England rather than Catholic France and negotiations began with King Henry VIII for the future marriage of his son Prince Edward and young Mary.

Henry was his usual meddling self and is said to have provided funds for the Protestant faction, which was now in the ascendancy. These negotiations resulted in the Treaty of Greenwich signed on July 1, 1543, and ratified in Scotland on August 25. In between those two dates Marie de Guise pulled off an amazing stunt when on July 26, 1543, she assembled an army and took herself and the baby queen to Stirling Castle. The Earl of Lennox, after negotiating with Arran, was at the head of the royal escort.

Arran did not oppose the royal flit, as he had been secretly negotiating with Cardinal Beaton and was forgiven for his Reformist ‘sins’ as he helped the Cardinal to be fully restored to power. Arran’s flip-flopping of allegiances and return to Catholicism gained him a notable reward – when the nine-month-old baby Queen’s official coronation was held on September 9, 1543, it was Arran who carried the crown.

The two main elements of the Greenwich Treaty were a peace accord between Scotland and England and the planned marriage of Mary to the future Edward VI – it would take place in 1552 when Mary would be ten. Henry got what he wanted – any children of the marriage would mean the Scottish crown would be subsumed into the Tudor dynasty. Arran himself was paid off and would gain a royal daughter-in-law as an understanding was reached that his son James would marry Henry’s daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth – how different might British history have been had that marriage gone ahead.

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Seton wasn’t very good as a jailer as Beaton was eventually freed as the pro-French nobles gained prominence in the polity. Arran was still in charge, however, when in December, 1543, the Scottish Parliament rejected the Treaty of Greenwich which many Scots saw as a capitulation to Henry’s demands to be acknowledged as overlord of the whole island of Great Britain. That vote by the Parliament directly led to the invasions by the English army that would become known as the Rough Wooing. Beaton was made Chancellor by that same Parliament which also voted to resume the Auld Alliance with France, while Arran was made to accept a regency council to advise him, with Marie de Guise and Cardinal Beaton chief among its 16 members.

The Earl of Lennox, meanwhile, had allied himself with Henry VIII who had dispatched thousands of soldiers to harry the Scots on the east coast and in the Borders. In early 1544, Lennox attacked the isles of Arran and Bute with English naval ships and about 800 troops.

It was now that the Earl of Arran was at his best.

Arran is often portrayed as a weak and vacillating regent, but examining his record I have concluded that he was a Machiavellian character who promoted his own self-interests. Yet even as heir presumptive, he never took the final step of usurping Mary’s throne. He probably calculated that would be a fatal move as there were strong men in both factions who would happily kill any would-be king. He also did his best to cope with England’s Rough Wooing tactics and there’s no doubting Arran’s bravery in defence of Scotland. He also suffered personal tragedy when his wife Margaret neé Douglas became insane – he tried and failed to divorce her in 1544. It appears to have been a hereditary disease as two of their children also suffered similar mental problems which caused their deaths.

FACING the invasion of Lennox and his English troops, Arran assembled an army loyal to Queen Mary and himself and marched to Glasgow where Lennox and his ally, William Cunningham, the 4th Earl of Glencairn, had quartered their men. On the field of Glasgow Muir, just east of the main town, a pitched battle took place on March 16, 1544.

At first the Lennox-Glencairn army looked likely to succeed, but Arran had chosen his officers well and Robert Boyd, the 4th Lord Boyd of Kilmarnock, turned the day with a well-timed sally that eventually won Arran the victory. The Regent then attacked Glasgow’s Bishop’s Castle and forced the surrender of the mostly English force occupying the building. The garrison walked out and Arran promptly hanged a goodly number of them.

The two sides returned to Glasgow Moor around May 25, and this time it was the Earl of Glencairn who was in command of the forces that took on Arran and his army once again. The result was the same and Lennox fled from Dumbarton Castle back to England a few days later.

As well as military duties against would-be invaders, Arran was also operating in a time of tumultuous religious upheaval. Beaton wanted to crack down heavily on the “heresy”, as he saw it, of Protestantism and he saw to it that one preacher, George Wishart, was prosecuted for heresy and burned at the stake in St Andrews. Arran knew all about the church’s cruelty to Protestants – his own relative, Patrick Hamilton, had been the first Protestant martyr of the Scottish Reformation when he was burned alive at St Andrews in 1527.

Beaton himself suffered a martyrdom of sorts when on May 29, 1546, he was savagely murdered in his rooms at St Andrews Castle by a group of Protestant lairds from Fife who had been supporters of Wishart. The Cardinal had been with his mistress Marion Ogilvy, mother of eight of his children, when the lairds attacked which is possibly why he was never beatified as a martyr by the Catholic Church.

With St Andrews Castle now occupied by Protestants, including Wishart’s assistant John Knox, Arran’s reaction to Beaton’s murder was to defer to Marie de Guise who sought help from her family who were now the closest advisors to the new French king, Henri II. Henry VIII of England having died in January, 1547, and been replaced by nine-year-old Edward VI, there was nobody in these isles to stop a Catholic king helping out a Catholic queen, so Henri II sent a French navy to attack St Andrews Castle. The ‘Castilians’, as they were known, held out for weeks but eventually surrendered on July 31, with the junior members of their force, such as John Knox, hauled off to serve in the French galleys.

We do not know what was Arran’s reaction to all these events, but we do know that he played a leading role in a battle that was to prove disastrous for Scotland. Even after Henry VIII’s death, the English court still wanted Edward VI to marry Queen Mary, despite the fact that Scotland and France were negotiating for a match between Mary and the Dauphin Francois. Edward VI’s uncle the Duke of Somerset assembled a huge army and marched north to force the Scots to conform to the Treaty of Greenwich, and it was Arran who led the Scottish army to confront them.

The inevitable battle took place at Pinkie Cleugh on the coast near Musselburgh on September 9 and 10, 1547. I have written extensively before about Pinkie, in which Arran was the Scottish commander and took control of the centre of the Scottish army with the other two ‘battles’, as the sections were called, under the command of the Earls of Argyll and Angus. The battle began on the afternoon of September 9, and Somerset brought ships into the Firth of Forth where they were unopposed as they poured cannon fire into the Scottish ranks.

The Scottish cavalry under Lord Home broke ranks to attack Somerset’s mounted troops but the English had more men and horses, as well as better armour. Arran could only watch helplessly as Lord Home was himself captured and his force effectively destroyed.

On the morning of September 10, Arran could see that his remaining army was going to be caught in a pincer attack from land and sea so he decided to send his battles into action. They were duly routed and the Regent and the Earl of Angus fled the field, not stopping until inside Edinburgh Castle itself.

Find out next week how Arran turned to the Auld Alliance for help.