Mary Queen of Scots' Secretary

William Maitland—Politician, Reformer and Conspirator

Robert Stedall

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781526787798
• eBook ISBN: 9781526787804
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"It's as good as a Philippa Gregory, and tells you so much more about Mary Queen of Scots and the people with whom she surrounded herself." —Books Monthly
William Maitland of Lethington was the most able politician and diplomat during the lifetime of Mary Queen of Scots. It was he who masterminded the Scottish Reformation by breaking the 'Auld Alliance' with France, which presaged Scotland's lasting union with England.
Although he gained English support to defeat French troops defending Mary's Scottish throne, he backed her return to Scotland, as the widowed Queen of France. His attempts to gain recognition for her as heir to the English crown were thwarted by her determined adherence to Catholicism.
After her remarriage, he spearheaded the plotting to bring down her objectionable husband, Lord Darnley, leading to his murder, after concluding that English and Scottish interests were best served by creating a Protestant regency for their son, Prince James. With encouragement from Cecil in England and the Protestant Lords in Scotland, he concocted evidence to implicate her in her husband's murder, resulting in her imprisonment and deposition from the Scottish throne.
This is the thrilling biography of a complicated man whose loyalty wavered between queen and country and whose behind-the-throne machinations may have caused her undoing—and his own . . .
"A modern, convincing—I must also use that popular buzzword 'game-changing'—biography that combines page-turning narrative with convincing, sophisticated, scholarly argument." —Steven Veerapen, Professor of History, Strathclyde University

PART I

A BRILLIANT BUT DEVIOUS SECRETARY

Chapter 1

Maitland establishes his standing under Mary of Guise

The story of Maitland’s pivotal role in Scottish history really begins with the English Reformation. Although Henry VIII sought a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in the hope of begetting a male heir, it was turned down by the Pope. The deeply religious king now nominated himself as head of the English Church in the Pope’s place. His purpose was entirely political, and he retained Catholic Church dogma in his ‘Henrican’ church services, although Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury attempted to steer him towards Lutheranism. It was abuses within the Catholic Church which had allowed Lutheranism to sweep through Northern Europe, and Henry needed allies to defend his stance. He faced the wrath of the European Catholic superpowers, France and Spain, who threatened to launch a Counter-Reformation in England to restore the ‘old religion’ under the Pope’s authority.

Henry’s most immediate danger came from Catholic Scotland. Following the death of James V, his widow, Mary of Guise, the queen dowager, was determined to protect the Scottish throne from English belligerence for her infant daughter, Mary. She upheld the Auld Alliance with France, which ‘valued Scotland chiefly as a weapon against England’.1 Henry’s most obvious tactic was to seek a marriage between Mary and his infant son, Prince Edward, thereby uniting the two crowns. (Much later, Maitland lamented Scotland’s failure to support this marriage.)2 The queen dowager deplored his bullying tactics and preferred a French marriage for her daughter to underpin the French alliance and to uphold Scotland’s adherence to the Catholic faith.

To assert his authority and to promote the English marriage, Henry resorted to a series of lightening military strikes into Scotland better known as the ‘Rough Wooings’. Despite his undoubted military superiority, he faced the logistical difficulties of provisioning a sizeable army on the meagre produce available from Scottish soil. Furthermore, accurate maps for planning purposes were in short supply. In need of French assistance, the queen dowager managed to negotiate Mary’s marriage to the French dauphin, Francis. Not only was this an exceptional coup for her Guise relations, but the French agreed to provide garrisons of battle-hardened French troops to protect Scotland from English aggression.

Despite this setback, Henry did not immediately give up hope of arranging Mary’s marriage to Prince Edward, but he needed another line of attack. He had always blamed the Scottish Catholic Church, headed by Cardinal David Bethune (or Beaton), for failing to support an English marriage for Mary. He now used evangelist preachers to infiltrate the Scottish Church and challenge Catholic dominance by reforming its religion. Many of these preachers were Scots who had been converted to Lutheranism while travelling on the Continent. They were only waiting for the opportunity to promulgate their new-found beliefs in their homeland. The Scottish Catholic Church was an easy target. It was extremely wealthy, the result of persuading aristocratic landowners and burghers to provide it with bequests on death in return for redemption in the afterlife. This left it well able to bankroll the Scottish Crown and maintain its Catholic allegiance. It was also corrupt. It spent little of its wealth on providing education or in supporting the poor and the sick. Instead, its monastic foundations were maintained in great opulence. Its bishops lived as lairds in their own castles, with little interest in theology, often maintaining a string of mistresses, generally from aristocratic families.

It took little to persuade Scottish lairds and burghers that the Reformed Church offered a less financially demanding and corrupt regime upon which to focus their Christian faith and munificence. The Catholic Church, however, did not take criticism lightly. When George Wishart began to whip up enthusiasm for Lutheran teaching around Edinburgh, he was arrested and brought before the cardinal at St Andrews, where he was condemned for spreading heretical doctrine. In March 1546, he was burnt at the stake, making him a martyr to the Reformers’ cause. Two months later, with support for Protestant thinking already growing in southern Scotland, a group of Fife lairds managed to gain access to Bethune’s castle. The cardinal was dragged from his rooms before being hung, drawn and quartered. Henry VIII was euphoric on hearing of his death, but the lairds were holed up there for fifteen months with about 150 supporters, besieged by Scottish government and French troops. Although they were provisioned by the English from the sea, their support came to an end when Henry died in January 1547. Eventually, the French sent a powerful naval force to bombard the castle, bludgeoning the besieged ‘Castilians’ into surrender.

One of the Reformers who had made his way into the castle at St Andrews in April 1547 was a former Catholic priest, John Knox. After being converted by Wishart, Knox had become his close associate. He did much to encourage the lairds with his evangelical rhetoric, but, like his fellow prisoners, found himself serving for nineteen months afterwards on French galleys. Following English negotiations for their release, Knox made his way to England, where he was licensed to preach at Anglican services in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Such was his impact that he was soon preaching in Newcastle, from where he was picked to become one of six royal chaplains to Edward VI. Not for the last time in his career, Knox’s lack of political tact let him down. When John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, masterminded a coup to replace Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, as protector, Knox failed to recognise the political imperative for change and condemned Warwick’s action in a sermon. Although Warwick – later Duke of Northumberland – had misgivings about Knox, he did not bear grudges and brought him to London to reinforce his own more Puritan leanings. When Knox challenged the dogma of the new 1552 prayer book drafted by Cranmer, Warwick tried to assuage his criticism by offering him the Bishopric of Rochester, but Knox’s growing Calvinist faith meant that he already opposed a hierarchy of bishops and refused the appointment. He returned to Newcastle, but Cranmer received instructions to appoint him as Vicar of Allhallows in London. Knox came back to preach before Edward VI and the court but turned down the Allhallows post, moving less controversially to Buckinghamshire. When Mary Tudor became queen and restored England to Catholicism, Knox was forced, in January 1554, to flee to the Continent and, after making his way to Geneva, studied under Calvin. This led to his final break with Cranmer’s Anglican theology.

In August 1555, Knox paid a visit to Scotland, during which he travelled extensively. After his departure from St Andrews in 1549, there had been no evangelical theologian of stature to provide leadership. He now gained almost universal support when he described the Scottish Catholic clergy as a ‘greedy pack’.3 Yet the priesthood was greedy only because its charges for baptisms, marriages and burials, together with the dispossession of excommunicates, provided the principal sources of its meagre income. Knox was now espousing Calvinism in all its militancy. He converted many to the reformed faith. One of the first of these was Alexander Cunningham, 5th Earl of Glencairn, who housed Knox at Findlayston. Others were Gilbert Kennedy, 3rd Earl of Cassillis, James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, Andrew Stewart, 2nd Lord Ochiltree, Patrick, 3rd Lord Ruthven, and Robert, 5th Lord Boyd. When, in 1556, Lord James Stewart, an illegitimate half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots, Archibald Campbell, 4th Earl of Argyll, and John, 6th Lord Erskine, heard Knox preach at Calder, they too joined the growing group of like-minded Reformers among the Scottish nobility. Another secret adherent was Maitland, despite being Mary of Guise’s Secretary.

Maitland had been born in about 1528 into one of only a handful of Scottish professional families fulfilling governmental, legal and diplomatic roles on the Crown’s behalf. This coterie lived by their wits and charm rather than as aristocrats, who wielded power as landowners and soldiers in their own fiefdoms. Maitland was nothing if not a snob. His father, Sir Richard Maitland, was a grandson of the 2nd Lord Seton. The family were Anglo-Norman, whose name originated as Maltalent (evil genius), making William’s later association with the name of Machiavelli seem all the more appropriate.4

Sir Richard had held various court appointments, latterly as a distinguished Lord of Session, and was to become Keeper of the Privy Seal after Maitland’s appointment as Secretary. He was also a poet of some note, but his chief recreations, despite suffering from failing eyesight, were his books and his garden at Lethington, a handsome tower house near Dunbar (now called Lennoxlove). William’s mother was Mary Cranston of Crosbie. Together, they saw to it that William, the eldest of their seven children, gained an unrivalled education, initially at the grammar school at Haddington. In 1540, he attended St Leonard’s College, St Andrews, and in 1542, like so many of his well-to-do contemporaries, travelled to Paris to attend the Scots College, where he became proficient in Latin, French and English. His letters show that he also enjoyed French, Italian and probably Greek literature.5 If he were born in 1528, as it is thought, he was aged twelve when he arrived at St Leonard’s and fourteen when he went to Paris. His movements from 1542 to 1550 are not known, but he is likely to have undertaken studies elsewhere on the Continent, and for a layman became ‘exceptionally well equipped theologically’, being familiar with the ‘new learning’.6 Elizabeth, no mean academic in her own right, later described him as ‘the flower of the wits [brains] of Scotland’.7 It was not just his academic ability that marked him out: ‘He was an accomplished man of the world, with a genius for affairs, a skilful and persuasive diplomatist, much assisted by a good presence and a fascinating address, by imperturbable self-possession, and a charming gift of wit and repartee.’8

In 1553, Maitland married Janet Menteith of Kerse although she died before 1558 after providing him with a daughter, Marion. In 1554, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed assistant to David Paniter, the Catholic Bishop of Ross and Secretary of State. This was at the time that Mary of Guise took over as regent from James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, whose policies were in tatters. In 1543, Arran had faced strong opposition for edging Scotland towards an alliance with England, to be cemented by the marriages of Mary to Prince Edward, and of his own son, James, to Princess Elizabeth. Cardinal Bethune only prevented this by questioning Arran’s legitimacy, thereby forcing him to revert to Catholicism and the Auld Alliance (see Endnote 1). When they realised that the Scots had cold feet, the English resorted to a further round of military aggression. In 1547, Arran’s hastily gathered Scottish troops were defeated at Pinkie Cleugh, forcing him to flee the field ‘scant with honour’. The Scots needed French support. Mary of Guise gained the nobility’s backing for her daughter’s betrothal to the French dauphin, conditional on her being sent to France for her education. In the following year she travelled from Dumbarton on a galley sent by Henry II. Arran was appeased with the French dukedom of Châtelherault and an income of 10,000 livres. Although he retained nominal control as regent, he had lost credibility and Mary of Guise’s status was boosted by the arrival of French troops and political advisers to protect the Scottish government.

By 1554, Mary Tudor had become the English queen and there were fears that her marriage to Philip of Spain would result in Spanishled aggression to combat French interests in Scotland. At last, Mary of Guise persuaded the Scottish government that she should replace Châtelherault as regent. She still needed support against the Hamiltons and their allies who were now being spearheaded by his illegitimate half-brother, John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews. This left her under an obligation to a growing group of Scottish Reformers led by Lord James Stewart, who promised her their backing in return for her confirmation of religious tolerance. With Mary Tudor on the English throne, they had no hope of English support, so tolerance was their best option. This made it politically desirable for the queen regent to bring representatives of this reforming clique into her service.

Maitland had rapidly gained in respect as an Assistant Secretary. He added a Scottish dimension to the advice the queen regent was receiving, which Henry Cleutin, Sieur d’Oysel, her senior French adviser, could not offer. ‘The Regent herself did not always understand the people she ruled, and therefore fell into serious mistakes, from which a little knowledge of Scottish history would have saved her.’9 It was perhaps thanks to Maitland’s position that when Knox visited Scotland in 1555 he was surprised at the religious tolerance of the queen regent’s regime. Being established as the religious leader of the reforming movement, he found its cause making steady progress under her mild rule.10 Nevertheless, he was shocked that Reformers would attend Catholic services in addition to their own assemblies.

Although Maitland was converted by Knox, he defended the need for compromise, recognising the precarious basis upon which the queen regent’s show of tolerance rested. A conference of Reformed leaders was held at the home of John Erskine of Dun, an old and tried Lutheran, during which Maitland demonstrated his ‘theological equipment’ by challenging Knox and claiming that St Paul had attended Jewish services to allay accusations of prejudice.11 He was on a hiding to nothing. Knox cited the accepted view among all reformed creeds that the Mass was ‘formally idolatrous’, making it dishonest for convinced Protestants to follow a double course. To avoid further confrontation, Maitland climbed down, but in all probability continued his compromising practice despite becoming the Reformers’ political leader. With Knox witnessing growing support for Reformed doctrine, he wrote to the queen regent demanding that she too should become a Reformer or face her ‘dejection to torment and pain everlasting’.12 She contemptuously treated his letter as a joke, and he soon returned to Geneva.

With Mary Tudor still on the English throne, Maitland was ‘acutely aware of the Congregation’s inherent weakness and their poor prospects of success without English aid’.13 In June 1557, with England being inveigled, entirely against the will of its people, into Philip II’s war on the Continent against France, Henry II coerced the regent into raising a Scottish army to invade England from the north. Although she called a convention of Scottish nobles to join her at Newbattle Abbey, the failures of their earlier incursions at Flodden and Solway Moss had left them with no appetite to imperil their safety in the interests of France.14 On d’Oysel’s advice, her French troops built a fortress at Eyemouth to threaten the English garrison at Berwick. When this provoked the English into crossing the border, the Scottish nobles had no choice but to attend a call to protect Scottish soil. Nevertheless, when the English retired again, the Scots refused to cross into England to support d’Oysel’s French troops, which had pushed ahead to besiege Wark. Furthermore, they demanded, on pain of treason, the return of Scottish cannon that d’Oysel had taken with him. Unluckily for Maitland, he had come to Kelso with the queen regent, and found himself in the invidious position of being sent by her to require the Scots to counter their demands. Having faced personal threats, he returned to the queen regent with their flat refusal. D’Oysel had no choice but to return across the Tweed with the Scottish guns. His incursion caused petty belligerence, which was to continue in the Border region until the signing of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in April 1559.

With Mary Tudor’s Spanish connections making an Anglo-Scottish alliance impossible, the Reformers needed to support the queen regent’s government to assure their freedom of worship and to retain religious peace in Scotland. This involved them in some apparently contradictory decisions. In November 1557, Châtelherault, George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly and Argyll, who had refused to support the queen regent in her proposed English invasion, threatened to overthrow her government. Maitland realised that Châtelherault’s restoration to authority would only accelerate religious conflict at a time when the Protestant Lords in Scotland could have no expectation of English support. He thus encouraged Lord James, Glencairn, Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange, and probably Morton to rally to the queen regent’s support, even seeking additional French troops for her. Yet the Reformers also needed to deter her from embarking on another Scottish invasion of England.

To diminish Châtelherault’s authority, the lords even proposed the restoration of Matthew Stuart, 4th Earl of Lennox, to his titles and estates. The significance of this needs to be understood. After marrying Henry VIII’s niece, Margaret Douglas, Lennox had supported the English King. This had resulted in the attainder of his Scottish estates after leading an English army into Scotland as part of the Rough Wooings. His lands around Glasgow were now occupied by the Hamiltons, and his restoration would require their return. Yet the principal issue was the question mark over Châtelherault’s legitimacy originally raised by Cardinal Bethune in 1543. If upheld, this would make Lennox the heir to the Scottish throne (Bethune’s argument is explained in detail in Endnote 1). Although it is difficult to find the cardinal’s view credible, it worried Châtelherault at the time and was politically convenient for those like James VI, Lennox’s grandson, who later wanted to assert the prior claim of the Lennox Stuarts to the Scottish throne. With Châtelherault backing down, the plan for Lennox’s restoration at this time was dropped.

It was not until 3 December 1557, after Knox’s departure, that a ‘band’ known as the ‘First Covenant’ was signed in Edinburgh for the formation of the Lords of the Congregation. The original signatories were Argyll, his son, Archibald, Lord Lorne, who inherited as the 5th Earl in the fol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Also by the same author
• Introduction
• Preface
• PART I: THE BRILLIANT BUT DEVIOUS SECRETARY
• PART II: MARY TAKES PERSONAL CONTROL
• PART III: MAITLAND RE-ESTABLISHES HIS STANDING
• PART IV: DEVELOPING THE TALE OF A CRIME OF PASSION
• PART V: MARY’S ARREST AND MAITLAND’S CONTRITION
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• References
• Plate section