Mary Queen of Scots by Retha Warnicke Page A

and with Mary in her presence chamber about her realm’s business.
    After reaching Rheims on the 26th, Mary celebrated Easter at St Pierre with her Aunt Renée and then left on 10 April for Nancy via Joinville, intending to return later to Rheims for Charles’s coronation. On the 14th while in transit with Lorraine, Guise, Aumale and other relatives, she encountered John Leslie, future bishop of Ross, at the village of Vitry-le-François in Champagne. Representing Catholic Scotsmen, most notably the earl of Huntly, the lord chancellor, Leslie suggested that she disembark at Aberdeen, meet up with the earl, who would gather a large army and overthrow the Protestants. Since Huntly had joined the Lords of the Congregation in April 1560, Mary distrusted him and refused this request. Unwilling to place herself under his control and to plunge Scotland into civil war, she was probably following her uncles’ advice to form at least a temporary alliance with the Protestant lords to facilitate her return.
    The next day her half brother, Lord James, representing Scotland’s Provisional Government, caught up with her at St Dizier, 138 miles from Paris. In their discussions over a five-day period, she promised to uphold the Protestant settlement on the condition that she be allowed to worship privately as a Catholic and pledged to seek the estates’ consent before marrying a foreign prince but still declined to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. Her refusal to permit him to accompany her to Nancy caused him to surmise that she was going there to pursue secret marriage negotiations. His concern that she was withholding important information from him is understandable since he, himself, was duplicitous. He did not inform her of his discussions with Cecil and Elizabeth en route to France.
    Furthermore, he later revealed his conversations with Mary to Throckmorton in Paris and to Cecil and Elizabeth on his return home through England. Regardless of whether Mary harbored personal reasons for preventing his journey to Lorraine, it was inappropriate for him and his attendants to arrive at the duke’s court, representing the Provisional Government of Scotland, without an official commission or an invitation. As noted earlier, Surian maintained that, if she had met with the Scottish envoys at the French court, she would have violated diplomatic protocol. She, herself, explained on 22 April that Lord James had no commission except to do his duty to her as his monarch.
    The conversations with her half brother and with Leslie on Huntly’s behalf alerted Mary to the existence of deep political divisions in Scotland, only partly rooted in religion, that ultimately erupted into revolts against her authority. By compounding her differences with Lord James and other Protestants, she signaled to Huntly her unwillingness to challenge overtly the governmental and religious status quo . 4
    At Joinville she met her grandmother, renewed her friendship with a cousin, Anne of Lorraine, dowager duchess of Arschot, and greeted Archibald Crawfurd, parson of Eaglesham, her mother’s almoner. He had recently brought her corpse to Fécamp, Normandy, where it lay in state at the cathedral before its interment at St Pierre. The grateful queen appointed him her almoner until she could grant him a benefice.
    The purpose of Mary’s visit to Nancy was to witness the baptism of Vaudémont’s child, her godson and Lady Arschot’s nephew, but it is possible that Lord James was correct and that discussions about her possible marriage did occur. Until 1564 Lady Arschot remained hopeful that Philip would name his son Don Carlos the regent of the Spanish-controlled Netherlands and that Mary would become the regent’s wife. The House of Lorraine possessed a claim to Guelders through the marriage of King René, Lady Arschot’s grandfather and Mary’s great-grandfather, to Philippa, the sister and heiress of Charles, the last Egmond duke of Guelders, who died childless. Lady