The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560-1690

Rhetoric, Passions and Political Literature

John D. Staines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138376311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351881029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Author John Staines here argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers in England, Scotland, and France wrote tragedies of the Queen of Scots - royal heroine or tyrant, martyr or whore - in order to move their audiences towards political action by shaping and directing the passions generated by the spectacle of her fall. In following the retellings of her history from her lifetime through the revolutions and political experiments of the seventeenth century, this study identifies two basic literary traditions of her tragedy: one conservative, sentimental, and royalist, the other radical, skeptical, and republican. Staines provides new readings of Spenser and Milton, as well as of early modern dramatists, to compile a comprehensive study of the writings about this important historical and literary figure. He charts developments in public rhetoric and political writing from the Elizabethan period through the Restoration, using the emotional representations of the life of this tragic woman and queen to explore early modern experiments in addressing and moving a public audience. By exploring the writing and rewriting of the tragic histories of the Queen of Scots, this book reveals the importance of literature as a force in the redefinition of British political life between 1560 and 1690.

Chapter 1
Character, Passion, and Political Rhetoric in Buchanan’s Tragic History of the Queen of Scots

The flight of Mary Queen of Scots to England in 1568 initiated four years of intense political and diplomatic maneuvering that would do much to determine the survival and success of the Elizabethan regime. The series of crises formed, in Wallace MacCaffrey’s words, “the great testing time of Elizabeth’s reign.”¹ The course of these four years would establish many of the mythic images through which future generations would understand the English queen: Protestant, nationalist, virginal, just, and wise. Although Elizabeth may not have had all of these qualities—indeed, even William Cecil, whose actions during these crisis years would do so much to create the myth, probably did not believe most of it—all future portraits of the queen would derive in part from these events and how they were represented by her and her government. The basic outlines of Elizabeth’s myth thus developed from the confrontation with her opposite: a tyrannical Scottish, French queen from the Catholic Guise family, failed in politics, routed on the field of battle, and thrice married—the third time to her husband’s murderer.

The wellspring of this version of Mary’s tragedy was the pamphlet Ane Detectiovn of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes, a collaboration between Cecil and George Buchanan, who was, besides Mary, the most famous Scot in Europe, a leading humanist, educator, and neo-Latin poet.² The two men had entirely different motives in preparing the text. Buchanan wrote the Latin text of the first part of Ane Detectiovn, known as the Detectio, to defend the rebellion of the Scottish nobility against Mary, their lawful, anointed queen.³ Cecil edited and expanded Buchanan’s original Latin manuscript into a printed, popular vernacular pamphlet to see that Mary would never become queen of England. Although the two men appear to have become friendly while Buchanan was serving the Scottish

government in England,⁴ there is no evidence that Cecil ever consulted Buchanan while editing his attack upon Mary. It is unlikely that Buchanan even knew in advance that the pamphlet was being published.

Over the centuries, Cecil and Buchanan’s success in defaming Mary has made them targets of similar character assassination. In John Guy’s defense of the queen, Cecil is her “nemesis,” irrationally obsessed with her, spending decades plotting her destruction.⁵ As an intellectual, Buchanan has been an even more attractive target, especially for those with a deep distrust of modern politics and a sentimental attachment to royalty. Once an official poet for Mary and her French relations (such critics say), an ungrateful Buchanan, thinking only of his career under the new regime, invented slanders and forged documents. He was “the prince of literary prostitutes. … First the sycophant and then the slanderer of his sovereign, his pen was ever at the service of the highest bidder.”⁶ Such an attack implies that poets and intellectuals should stay out of politics—or know that their place is just to celebrate the beauties of monarchy. This pamphlet, however, epitomizes a very different vision of the humanist intellectual. Presenting itself as an oration before the queen of England, as a rhetorical exercise designed to persuade her to support the Scottish Protestant lords in their revolt against tyranny, the text has its roots in the heroic vision of an ancient orator protecting his republic and its institutions. This modern, heroic republican intellectual speaking on the public stage would be the model for later republican thinkers, like Milton delivering his print orations to his Parliament and all of Europe.

Buchanan prepared three main defenses of the revolution that deposed Mary: the oration of the Detectio, the political theory of De iure regni apud scotos, and the historical narrative of Rerum Scoticarum Historia. As political scientists and intellectual historians often note, Buchanan’s theoretical justification for Mary’s deposition in De iure regni apud scotos became one of the most influential statements of radical politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pulling the classical humanist and Protestant traditions together into a largely secular theory of the political contract and the right to resistance.⁷ Since his Rerum Scoticarum Historia demonstrates these theories operating in Scottish history, the two became companion pieces, printed together throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.⁸ Despite taking up this same event, the Detectio—written contemporaneously with the first drafts of the De iure regni—is generally omitted from editions of the Historia and De iure regni and rarely finds its way into modern considerations of Buchanan’s ideas such as Quentin Skinner’s.⁹ In giving a rhetorical response to the events, Detectio does not fit the expectations of political theorists and historians, while literary critics are uncomfortable with its political and polemical engagements. All are troubled by the narrative’s loose treatment of facts. This version of Mary’s fall is important, however, as an early experiment in methods of addressing and moving the public. Buchanan’s rhetoric and Cecil’s pamphlet use narrative to create a character of unbridled passion. Initially addressed to the limited public of the sovereign Elizabeth and the noble commission she appointed to investigate Mary’s deposition, it was transformed into a text that spoke to a broad English and European public. The text not only shaped all future understandings of Mary’s character, but it influenced how the public related to all sovereign powers by providing a definition of the tyrant and asking readers to participate in the process of judging Mary and implicitly all rulers by it.

Buchanan’s Detectio is an exercise in forensic rhetoric that employs satirical ad feminam attacks to set out a character of a tyrant. He builds this image of Mary’s character or ethos for two reasons. First, Buchanan wants readers to use his version of the Mary’s character to interpret the ambiguous language of the so-called Casket Letters, the collection of incriminating documents named for Bothwell’s gilded box in which they were allegedly discovered. This tactic employs standard humanistic reading practices, which teach that the way to understand doubtful passages is to understand in full the spirit or character of an author and thus his or her hidden intention.¹⁰ That is, throughout the Detectio, Buchanan gathers small pieces of historical and narrative evidence, scandalous and often spurious, in order to build a character of Mary as a woman out of control of her passions; he then uses this portrait to suggest how his readers should interpret the unclear and ambiguous documents that are supposed to prove that Mary was complicit in her husband’s murder. Second, Buchanan attacks Mary’s character so that readers will accept the conclusion that Mary, as a tyrant, had to be deposed. Buchanan’s devastating character of Mary forms an exemplary narrative of tyranny that complements his theoretical defense of tyranicide in De iure regni apud scotos. In fact, Buchanan’s last major work, the Rerum Scoticarum Historia, reprints large segments of the Detectio verbatim as the centerpiece of a series of examples from Scottish history that demonstrate the right and obligation of the people to depose a tyrant. This text makes the reader an active participant in the process of making political decisions and political actions. Buchanan’s methods became useful to Elizabeth’s government in its campaign against Mary’s claim to the English throne, but the implications of making the judgment process fully public threatened Elizabeth’s own claims to absolute royal authority. Cecil’s editing of Buchanan’s original oration thus keeps the focus on Mary’s character, demonstrating that Mary is capable of committing all sorts of bloody and lustful deeds, especially treasons against her cousin Elizabeth. The text is to be about the tyrant Mary, not queens or monarchy in general. Nonetheless, despite English attempts to control public responses to the text, the way the text makes the reader an active judge of the queen remains potentially subversive—a potentially republican work in service of a believer in absolute monarchy.

This dangerous and paradoxical work grew out of two different but related controversies, Mary’s deposition from the crown of Scotland and her imprisonment in England. After Mary sought refuge in England, Elizabeth, already recognized as the protector of the Scottish Kirk (albeit a reluctant one), found herself in the role of powerbroker.¹¹ Leading the Council, Cecil was shrewdly aware of the opportunities and risks at stake. At the subsequent Conferences of York and Westminster in late 1568, often referred to as the first trial of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth demanded a detailed account of Mary’s alleged crimes.¹² The Regent Moray initially professed a reluctance to publicize Mary’s crimes in a foreign court (though he held no such qualms in Scotland), but after some delay released a bundle of documents purporting to prove Mary’s adultery with the Earl of Bothwell and her complicity in the murder of her husband. Buchanan had come to Westminster with Moray and had the task of preparing these Scottish legal documents for submission to Elizabeth. The exact shape of Buchanan’s original manuscript is not clear, though from contemporary references we can assume that Buchanan gathered the Casket Letters and some other documents and prefaced them with a Latin oration narrating Mary’s crimes. There is no direct evidence that Buchanan formally presented a final version to Elizabeth or Cecil—earlier versions were in circulation—but subsequent events confirm that the English had Buchanan’s text in their possession by the beginning of 1569, when Elizabeth dissolved the conference inconclusively. Faced with the prospect of passing judgment on her fellow monarch, who had withdrawn from the conference in protest, Elizabeth refused to make a decision on the case. She would wait, and issued orders that all those who had seen the evidence should stay silent. Defending Buchanan’s role in these events, his biographer I.D. McFarlane characterizes him as “essentially an amanuensis of a high order, who translates into literate, even literary form, the wishes of his masters.”¹³ This strangely condescending portrait downplays his achievement in rhetoric and political theory, as well as releases him from ethical responsibility for his writings. Even as he was preparing these documents, Buchanan was beginning to work on his De iure regni, which was circulating in manuscript by 1569, and his magisterial Historia. Buchanan possibly saw himself playing the role of Cicero presenting his Philippics as a defense of the Roman Republic before the encroachments of dictatorial tyranny. Suggestively, Thomas Wilson, who translated Buchanan’s Detectio for Cecil and probably wrote the second part of the Latin pamphlet (the Actio), was at this time translating Demosthenes’ Philippics. Just as Cicero had used those speeches as his model, so Wilson used them to create an attack upon Philip II of Spain and an argument in favor of intervention in the Netherlands. Demosthenes, Wilson wrote in his dedicatory letter to Cecil, was “so necessarie a writer for all those that loue their Countries libertie.” Liberty, Wilson added in a note to the text, was “sweete and desired of all men.”¹⁴ For Buchanan, as we shall see, working in this republican rhetorical tradition was not merely a secretarial duty but the culmination of his career, a role he took on with energy and conviction.

The audience for Buchanan’s oration was initially limited to Elizabeth and the participants of the Westminster Conference. After Elizabeth disbanded the conference, the English kept the Detectio from the public eye—though Cecil was careful to keep at least one copy on hand in case he or Elizabeth would need it. As Mary sat regally under house arrest, a sequence of political and religious events began to change the ideological significance of the Queen of Scots and, indeed, of Elizabeth herself. In the months before Mary’s regime collapsed, she had lost the support of the Pope and the major Catholic powers; the scandal surrounding the murder of Darnley and the Protestant marriage with a divorced Bothwell alienated Catholics as much as Protestants. The image of her in captivity, however, rapidly eclipsed her failures as a queen. Even though Elizabeth insisted Mary was her guest, she appeared to be a prisoner of a Protestant queen; as a result, she increasingly gained the halo of a Catholic martyr. As France polarized into ever violent religious warfare, the Catholic party, dominate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Mary’s Tragedy and Public Rhetoric in an Age of Reform and Revolution
• 1 Character, Passion, and Political Rhetoric in Buchanan’s Tragic History of the Queen of Scots
• 2 Mary’s Passions Made Public: Other Early Versions of Her Tragic Fall
• 3 The Tragedy at Fotheringhay
• 4 Guile and Public Representation: Mary’s Tragedy in Book V of The Faerie Queene
• 5 “Out of this lamentable fortune”: Mary’s Tragedy and the Royal Succession
• 6 Charles’s Grandmother and the Rhetoric of Revolution
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index