The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power... Read online

  The Queen’s Mary

  Sarah Gristwood

  © Sarah Gristwood 2017

  Sarah Gristwood has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  Summer 1561 – Summer 1562

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  PART II

  Autumn 1562 – Summer 1563

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  PART III

  Spring 1565 – March 1566

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  PART IV

  March 1566 – January 1567

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  PART V

  February/March 1567

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  PART VI

  April – June 1567

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  PART VII

  May 1568

  Thirty-six

  Epilogue

  Queen Mary kept caged birds all her life, but not every bird can settle in captivity. Seton remembered one – a skylark it was. Not bred to the cage, you see. It was nothing to look at, grey-brown and stripy, with pearly white on its belly. But the man who sold it said, ‘Nurse it through the mopes, and it will sing so you think you’re in heaven already.’

  But this bird didn’t want to be coddled. It just wanted to be free. In the end Seton set the cage by an open window and slipped the catch on its door. Captive, it wouldn’t last another day. She said that the lark had died, when Queen Mary asked, eventually.

  Before that she’d watched it, and felt what she was seeing down to her very stomach. Watched till her own chest swelled and tightened with the same desperation that hardened the bird’s fragile eggshell breast, and kept it battering the bars with its tiny body. From one side to the other it went, all four sides in turn, ordered as the steps of court dance. The dance a courtier performed every day.

  The dance anyone who is around a queen must do, or try to, actually.

  Sometimes Seton felt she’d been turning all her life, unsure where her duty lay. Still, in the end, it didn’t matter. Just one dancer ever really mattered, and that was the Queen’s Majesty.

  Prologue

  Summer 1548, off the coast of Scotland

  ‘I hate the queen! I hate her! I wish she were dead!’

  Crack! Bridie’s hand slapped across her charge’s face, miserable as only the face of a five-year-old can be. ‘If you were a grown woman, they’d cut your head off for that.’

  Mary Seton stared dumbly at her nurse. She wasn’t a grown woman, she was five years old. And she was going to be sick again.

  ‘Ah well,’ Bridie reached for her, kinder this time, ignoring the mess on the slimy cabin floor, ‘it’s not as if this smell could get much worse.’

  It had been more than a week since they were carried on board the ship. Five days since they first put out to sea, and four since the winds forced them to turn back again. They’d all heard Lady Fleming begging the captain to let a small boat carry her onto the shore, but the captain swore, and told her that she had a choice, to puke her guts out or to try to swim and drown.

  The only one who’d never been seasick was the queen. That’s why Seton hated her – she seemed to think the rest of them were funny, the grown-ups and the four Marys. Well, Seton didn’t hate her. But she wanted to go home.

  And they were, all of them, only there because of Queen Mary.

  Lady Fleming was Fleming’s mother. She was gay and pretty and Bridie said she was special because she was sort of royalty but not really… ‘She was the last king’s by-blow – och, you’re too young to understand.’

  Fleming was Mary Fleming, but then the little girls were all called Mary, like the queen. There was Mary Livingstone, whose father was on the boat too. Lady Fleming was the queen’s governess, but Lord Livingstone was in charge of the whole party. There was no family on board for Mary Beaton, or Mary Seton either – except for her brother William, but he was only eight himself, ’And he teases me!’ Not like her big brother George at home, who tossed her up above his head when he came back on a visit from court, and always brought a present.

  The Queen laughed at Mary Seton, too, just like William did, but Seton hadn’t minded at first. (Just when she knew I was about to be sick all over my new shoes, thought Mary Seton resentfully, and she giggled at me.)

  The queen was even taller than Mary Seton, although she wasn’t quite six, and she had long red hair, and the grown-ups said the others had to treat her very politely.

  Mary Seton remembered the day she had been taken into the young queen’s service. Her own mother, with her special way of speaking, her black curls and her beautiful clothes, had stooped down, and taken her hands, and told her it was a great opportunity.

  ‘Do you understand, Mary? The four of you, four little girls, will be with the queen always. You’ll be her special companions – her Marys.’

  Then she led the way into another room of the palace, to meet the queen regent, who was the young queen’s mother. She’d been a tall lady with tired eyes, and a voice like Seton’s mother but even stranger – foreign, Bridie told her later – so that it was hard to understand.

  ‘When my daughter goes away to France, you four will go with her. France! My own old homeland. Dieu, how I envy you.’

  Lady Seton had sighed, sympathetically, and taken her daughter’s hands again, with eyes looking past her at the tired lady. ‘Stay with her little Majesty. Her welfare is all your duty now.’

  They’d made going to France sound so wonderful, and now this had happened. The miserable five-year-old retched again, painfully.

  ‘Ach, it’s clear you’re no Selkie,’ Bridie said, pulling her close.

  The old nurse loved to tell stories from her own old home in the Isles of the West, of the dark seal people who came out of the sea; men who swam with tails like fishes, though on land they walked with human legs. Her charge had always loved to hear them – but not now.

  Right now, she wanted nothing that was strange, or shifting. She wanted firm land under her feet, and the blessed certainty of her nursery.

  *

  On the fourth day out, when the waves were lower, Bridie carried her up on deck.

  ‘It’s time you got to know the other Marys.’

  She saw at once that there was a game in progress. The girl whose hair shone in the sun was Mary Fleming, she remembered, though just for a moment the bright red-gold had made her think she was Queen Mary. Fleming quietly smiled at the newcomer.

  There was another girl beyond her, with dark eyes and brown hair cut short, and bright coloured cheeks. She looked nice, but a bit dumpy. ‘I’m Livy,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Mary Livingstone.’ She had a ball in her hands. There wasn’t much space between the coils of tarred rope on deck, but all the sailors seemed to stay away. ‘We’re playing piggy in the middle, but we just ha
ve to wait for the queen to come back.’

  Mary Seton craned round in Bridie’s arms. There was another little girl, though all Seton could see of her was her bent head, and even that looked mousy. She was crouched by herself on the edge of the deck, she seemed to be playing with some counters, and something that smelled of fish. She didn’t look up. That wasn’t the queen, that was… ‘Beaton,’ said Fleming helpfully.

  And then there she was, the queen, coming through the hatchway, and Bridie hastily put her burden down, and hissed a command to curtsey.

  *

  After that, Seton remembered later, the five children played together for part of every day. They played catch ball, sometimes, and the queen usually won, and tag, and dollies – and yes, when she wasn’t there, they played another game called ‘Mary’.

  ‘You can be Mary this time,’ Fleming had said one day.

  ‘But I am Mary,’ Seton had said, confused. ‘I’m Mary Seton.’

  ‘That’s not your name now. You’re just Seton. Only the queen is Mary.’

  Seton started to throw up again, and Livy went running for Bridie. She went on being sick the whole eighteen days, but at least Queen Mary stopped laughing. She sat by Seton’s bunk and squeezed her hand, and said she was sorry.

  But they survived the voyage, of course they did – even if they had to go the long way round to avoid the English warships, so that Seton thought they’d been forever on the sea. And at last they landed on the coast of Brittany.

  *

  An old lady was there to meet them in Brittany, dressed in black satin and lace. She was the queen’s grandmother, the Duchesse de Guise, and she didn’t seem very interested in any of them except Queen Mary.

  Perhaps just a little in Fleming. She glanced at Lord Livingstone, eyeing Fleming’s red hair, so like the queen’s, and murmured, ‘C’est elle qui…?’

  She smiled at the rest of the little girls, and asked whether they had enjoyed the voyage, but she looked at them the way grown-ups look when children are being naughty.

  ‘Really, those accents,’ she murmured to the tall man in priest’s dress who stood beside her, and who had said, ‘My lovely niece,’ when he met Queen Mary. ‘And not as much as a crimson petticoat between them, though I’m told they’re all of excellent family.’

  It was only later Seton understood crimson was the distinguishing mark of the nobility.

  But as they began to travel deeper into France, every town they came to was like a party, and men in gold chains and furred collars came out to bring presents and kiss the hand of Queen Mary. Seton didn’t notice them so much as an innkeeper’s puppy, but she could see the grown-ups seemed to find it all extraordinary.

  One day, she’d slipped away from the rest. They were staying in the bishop’s palace at Nantes and, sitting cross-legged under a table, she was tracing the pattern of flowers on a carpet on the floor. No one put carpets on the floor in Scotland, only on the sideboards for display. She heard Lady Fleming and a man come into the room, but the cloths draping the table hid her from view.

  They were laughing a little, and talking quietly, as if they didn’t want anyone else to come in. Seton heard a soft sound, and a rustle of fabric, as if Lady Fleming were getting undressed. The man murmured something, admiringly: ‘…as if you were the Queen of France!’ he said.

  ‘Thank you for nothing,’ Lady Fleming said. ‘A dumpy Italian merchant’s daughter, who no one attends to anyway?’ She was trying to sound cross, but you could tell she wasn’t really angry.

  ‘If not Catherine de Medici, how about Diane de Poitiers? They say the king’s mistress bathes in powdered gold every day. Not that you need such aids to beauty. Even the French admire you, my lady, and there aren’t many of us they don’t despise, quite openly.’

  ‘Oh, poor Jamie, are your feelings hurt? But it is a little ridiculous of our Scottish men to ride through this country with their hands on their daggers, as if they feared brigands every step of the way.’

  ‘It’s well for the French – their last wars were foreign ones. If they’d had to see the English pillaging their own homes, they wouldn’t mock us as barbarians so quickly.’ There was a soft consoling sound, before they both went away.

  *

  As the journey wore on, the children lost all interest in the towns, or their displays of pageantry. The whole world seemed to be just an endless road, with the sway of a horse’s step to make your back ache, or the leather curtains of a litter to stifle you.

  It was at Ancenis that the men of the party fell sick, with a flux so violent they couldn’t even reach the latrines before voiding their belly. None of the ladies suffered. They carried bottled water. They could drink in safety.

  Seton didn’t weep when they told her William was so sick that he’d gone to heaven. He wasn’t someone she knew especially. Back in Scotland, they hadn’t even been in the same house most of the time. It was only in later years Seton thought of the man he might have become – the first of the Scottish men to suffer for Queen Mary.

  *

  When their travels resumed again, it was by water. The grown-ups said it would be easy, and that no one could be seasick on a canal. But when the time came to climb aboard a boat again, Seton had to stuff her knuckles in her mouth so no one would see her cry.

  They arrived at the palace of St Germain as night was falling. The children roused as the grown-ups exclaimed aloud in wonder, and forced open bleary eyes to see walls and turrets reaching right up to the sky.

  In the morning the nurses curled the children’s hair, and dressed them each in their grandest gown. Seton’s was of pink brocade, with silver embroidery. Her stockings felt smooth, of fine knit, and Bridie hung a gold chain round her neck, as if she were a grown lady.

  When they were ready, Lord Livingstone came in, and addressed them all formally.

  ‘I’m going to speak to you little girls as though you were older,’ he said. ‘Yes – if I may take the liberty – even you, your Majesty.

  ‘You are about to meet the royal family of France, and we are all depending upon you to uphold the honour of your country. Remember to curtsey low when the dauphin, Francois, is presented.’

  Livy chirped up: ‘Is that the one Queen Mary is to marry?’

  Her father silenced her with a frown. ‘But of course you curtsey lowest to the king himself, and then to the queen, and after them to Madame de Poitiers, who by the king’s own special request oversees the royal nurseries.’

  He broke off, hastily as the doors were opened. It was hard to remember how the dauphin looked. He was simply a little boy, only just breeched, and pale, and puny.

  The king was a tall, dark-haired man, flanked by two ladies. One of them was beautiful, in black and white and silver. The other was just ordinary.

  Lord Livingstone presented the Scots Queen, and then introduced the four Marys briefly. Fleming first, because she was partly royal too, and then Seton (‘from one of our noblest Scottish families’). Then Beaton (the king murmured something about ‘the cardinal – of course, her poor uncle’), then Livy. They made their curtsies to the king, and the dauphin, and then to the black and silver lady.

  Someone gasped behind them, and the king frowned quickly as if displeased. But he spoke kindly to them for a moment or two about the journey.

  Then he frowned again and murmured something about ‘accents’, just as the queen’s grandmother had done, though they couldn’t see why, they were speaking French properly. Seton heard the black and silver lady murmur something about ‘Poissy’.

  When the French party left, the small girls were told two things. One was that they had curtseyed lowest to the wrong lady. The beautiful one in black had been Madame de Poitiers. The French Queen Catherine had been the one who was ordinary.

  The other thing was that the four Marys were to be sent to the Dominican convent at Poissy for their education, while Queen Mary went to forget her rough Scots ways in the French royal nursery. They were to leave immediately.


  The grown-ups bundled the four into a carriage together, while the nurses travelled behind. Fleming held tightly onto Seton’s hand. Livy was sobbing quietly, though when they asked her, she said she didn’t know why.

  Beaton was huddled in the far corner of the seat. She made no sound, but her face was white. Seton pushed Livy off her shoulder, and held out her other hand, and Beaton came over with a rush, and joined the miserable huddle, silently.

  They’d come all this way to be with the queen, and now… Seton’s mother, that last conversation, had told her it was a great thing to stay close to royalty. Now not even Fleming had her mother, or Livy her father. The grown-ups would have to accompany the Queen’s Majesty.

  Her voice quavering, Seton asked how long they would be separated.

  ‘Oh, just a year or two, maybe.’

  On the ship, Seton had said she hated the queen. But now she felt almost afraid to leave her – as if the queen were a grown-up person, and one who could protect them all in this strange new country.

  PART I

  Summer 1561 – Summer 1562

  One

  So there they were again, washed up on the Scottish foreshore like pieces of flotsam. As if the whole French adventure had never been – or as if some sea monster had swallowed them up for a decade and more, then spat them out at the end of their story. Squatting in the shelter of a clump of marram grass, Seton dug her fingers into the damp sand, as if the gritty feel on her skin could make the surging in her stomach go away.

  ‘You look as if you’re about to evacuate,’ giggled Livy, heartlessly. She would be a good sailor, Livy. Stabbing the quill of a fallen feather into the mound of the dune beside her, Seton only wished she had the strength to make a sharp reply.

  Further off, some of the queen’s party sprawled on the slimy pebbles. But the queen’s maids of honour knew, none better, how hard it is to get water marks out of silk; and they’d all dressed up in their finery.

  Already Seton had a gloomy feeling that in this place, if anything got spoiled, it might not be replaced too easily.