In Search of the Ladies-In-Waiting and Maids of Honour of Mary, Queen of Scots: a Prosoprographical Analysis of the Female Household
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IN SEARCH OF THE LADIES-In-WaITING AND MAIDS OF HONOUR OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS: A PROSOPROGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE FEMALE HOUSEHOLD Rosalind K. Marshall Mary, Queen of Scots is without doubt the best-known monarch in Scot- tish history, the dramatic events of her life told and re-told many times, in religious polemic, biography, theatrical performance and opera. A queen in her own right since the death of her father, James V, King of Scots, in 1542, when she was six days old, she was sent to France at the age of five, to be brought up at Henri II’s court as the future bride of his son, the Dauphin François, later François II. With the premature death of her husband in 1560 bringing to an end her brief period as Queen Consort of France, she ignored the advice of her friends and returned to Scotland to begin her personal rule, a Roman Catholic monarch in an officially Protestant country. After two disastrous marriages, to her cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley and, after his assassination, to James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, she was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James VI. She escaped, was defeated at the Battle of Langside on 13 May 1568 and fled to England, where she hoped to gain the support of Elizabeth I. Instead, still only twenty-five years old, she was imprisoned and held captive until her execution 19 years later. Throughout these public yet very personal traumas she was surrounded by her female attendants. Often dismissed as a sort of Greek chorus, watching in the background while she travelled from early promise to final tragedy, they are well worth closer examina- tion, not least because in number and in identity they reflect not only her changing circumstances as child queen, queen regnant, queen dowager and finally prisoner in a foreign land, but the ambitions of people like her Guise relatives who saw their control of her as their best avenue to ever- increasing power at the French court. 210 rosalind k. marshall With one exception, however, no comprehensive analysis of her atten- dants, male or female, has ever been attempted.1 Stock characters such as Lady Fleming her childhood governess and David Rizzio her musician and secretary flit in and out of biographies of her,2 and much sentimental gushing has swirled around the Four Maries, the small girls who were in her retinue from childhood,3 but even the facts of their lives are often vague and imprecise. Their very identities have been confused in the public mind, thanks to an old ballad well-known to generations of Scots since it was first collected in the late eighteenth century and published in 1802–3 by the famous writer, Sir Walter Scott. Entitled ‘Marie Hamilton’, this tells the sad tale of one of Mary’s maids of honour who supposedly had an affair with the queen’s second husband Lord Darnley, drowned their illegitimate child and was condemned to be hanged for the crime. Mary Hamilton is the imagined singer of the song on the eve of her execution and she names her fellow Maries as Mary Beaton, Mary Seaton and Mary Carmichael. In fact, the four maids of honour were Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming and Mary Livingston, none of whom had an illicit affair with Darnley or produced an illegitimate child.4 The story actually seems to derive from the tale of another Mary Hamilton who had reputedly gone to Russia where she had an affair with the Tsar, murdered not only their infant but her two other illegitimate children, and was duly executed on 14 March 1719. Despite the efforts of Thomas Duncan who published a scholarly article in The Scottish Historical Review 1 Rosalind K. Marshall, Queen Mary’s Women: Female Relatives, Servants, Friends and Enemies of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), 18–89, 141–91. 2 The principal women in Mary’s childhood household are mentioned briefly in, for example, Antonia Fraser, Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 39, 43, 55; John Guy, My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), 49, 57–9, 62, 64–5, 67–8 and Susan Doran, Mary, Queen of Scots, An Illus trated Life (London: British Library, 2007), 26–7, 32, 34–5. Again, they give a little detail about the female element in her declining household during her English captivity: Fraser, 383–4, 434–5, 440; Guy, 437–9, 442–5. Jenny Wormald, Mary, Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (1988; London: George Philip, 1991), 80, 119, 124 makes a handful of very general remarks about the male and female household while Gordon Donaldson, Mary, Queen of Scots (London: English Universities Press, 1974) has nothing at all to say about the women attendants. 3 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis points this out concisely in Mary, Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998), 179–80. Arnold Fleming even managed to write an entire book, The Four Maries (London: MacLellan, 1951), in what was an already outmoded romantic vein. 4 G. Eyre-Todd, ed., Scottish Ballad Poetry (Glasgow: W. Hodge, 1893), 318–23..