Mary, Queen of Scots has traditionally been perceived as a queen who let her emotions overcome her reason, as someone who let her heart rule her head. It’s a dismissive attitude that is often used to compare her, unfavourably, to Queen Elizabeth I, who is seen instead as a ruler who was cool and rational even at times of crisis. For generations, biographers have mined Mary’s extensive surviving correspondence to construct a version of her that conforms to this emotional stereotype. It is easy to assume that Mary’s letters functioned in the same way that letters do today, that is as private or personal documents that have an almost autobiographical function, revealing our inner thoughts and feelings. So, when we come across emotion in her letters, we accept that at face value. But in fact, letter-writing in the early modern period was a complex activity, with various linguistic, rhetorical and physical features that can be easily overlooked.
For example, modern readers can sometimes find the formulaic style of early modern letters off-putting. We are used to reading letters as private documents, between only the sender and the intended recipient. But in Mary’s lifetime, letters were not always expected to be a private exchange between two individuals. In fact, letters had been read aloud for centuries, and this continued into the sixteenth century. It is likely that Mary’s secretaries and ladies-in-waiting would have read letters out loud to her that had been sent by various correspondents, especially during the frequent periods of illness she suffered.
Moreover, letters, even when sent between close and intimate relations, tended to follow conventional patterns. This is especially clear in the opening and closing phrases used in letters. Mary almost always ended her letters with a benediction, commending the person to God’s safekeeping, even when she was unhappy with them. In a letter from Mary to her sister-in-law Annas Keith, Countess of Moray in 1571 she threatened Annas with her vengeance, yet still ends ‘commending you to the protection of God’. We might try to read a lack of sincerity to this, but in fact it was a standard formula of letter-writing.
Mary has suffered especially from our modern desire to reconstruct her emotions. Her letters have been scoured for examples of her passionate nature and her generous outlook. There is emotion in Mary’s letters, but it is important to be cautious. Mary could also use emotive language for very canny purposes. Emotion was a strategy. It could be used to elicit sympathy, or to persuade. For example, Mary often employed emphatic descriptions of her ill-health to elicit sympathy from Elizabeth in the hope of being permitted to visit the spa at Buxton and escaping, albeit temporarily, from her imprisonment. Similarly, she regularly used the emotive language of faith, in particular of Catholic martyrdom, to persuade international supporters to offer her more direct aid. At the same time, she was not above resorting to more negative emotions to provoke a reaction from both her allies and her enemies. In 1586s, she lambasted her long-serving custodian, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury’s wife, Bess of Hardwick for spreading false reports of unseemly conduct between herself and Shrewsbury. She exclaimed that she would never again have anything to do ‘with so wicked a woman’.
Thousands of letters to and from Mary, Queen of Scots survive in archives and collections across the world and studying this large corpus reveals that Mary was an expert in the culture of early modern correspondence. She had been brought up at the French court, with access to some of the best academic and social learning. Her earliest surviving letters date from 1550 when she was only eight years old in France and show that she had quickly mastered the art of letter-writing. A letter from Mary to her mother, Marie de Guise, from 1550 offers us our first glimpse of the iconic signature and the accomplished italic script that would become prized by collectors over the centuries.
Letter-writing in the early modern period was more than simply a means of communicating information. Letters were embedded with social and interpersonal cues that we can easily miss today. It is also true that social rank was much more explicitly understood in the period and recipients would expect senders to address them appropriately according to their status, influence and power. The very layout of the letter could be read as courteous or insulting: letter-writers used blank space on the page to convey how they had understood the dynamic of their relationship with the person receiving the correspondence. Lengthy empty space could indicate respect or deference and was especially common between the end of the letter and the signature. Often, we see letter-writers leaving an enormous blank space with their signature placed in the bottom right corner of the page. This visual marker made it clear to the reader that the sender was being respectful. Though it is also true that people used this same technique to flatter (usually when they were asking for something) or if they were perhaps in trouble of some kind and seeking forgiveness. And the alternative was true – if a writer didn’t leave a lot of empty space on the page, they might be stating their refusal to be deferential. Mary was well versed in these strategies. In her letters to Cecil, she preferred to position her signature right below the letter text, leaving little blank space. We can see this in an example from the early years of her captivity, dated 4 December 1569 when she had been moved to Coventry. In this way she was telling him, no matter how courteous her language might be, she was still very much superior to him.
Other visual features could also reveal how you really thought about your relationship. Letters were often delivered in packets with multiple ones being sent together depending on who you could get to deliver them for you. There was no official postal system in the sixteenth century and so letter bearers were servants, friends, even strangers passing through on the way to the location you wanted the letter to reach. To keep prying eyes from reading the contents of a letter you needed to prepare it using different tools. Envelopes were not used to send letters until the nineteenth century and so letter-writers used different techniques to secure their correspondence in Mary’s lifetime. Different processes of preparation were employed, with letters being sewn shut, or slices of paper taken from the page and used to pierce the folded letter, almost like a key in a lock. Wax seals were then placed over the slits or holes to offer further security. Mary was known to use some of the most secure ways of folding and sealing her letters, reflecting her awareness of Walsingham’s surveillance and interception. It’s true that she also was not above using other less technical means to conceal her correspondence. For example, she had her servants hide letters under stones in the gardens of her various prisons, so that a messenger could go and collect it later, hopefully without any unwanted eyes watching. Similarly, she would have recipients send her replies sewn into fabric or hidden in the bindings of books.
Letters are often also preserved flat, meaning we can lose sight of other important features that can tell us about the relationship between sender and recipient. In the early modern period, how you folded your letter was also important. Letters that were folded into tiny packets could be passed surreptitiously, often hidden in the sleeves of a gown or even in the heels of shoes. These miniature letters could be used for clandestine correspondence, either secret information or perhaps as a love letter. You could take the time to carefully fold the completed letter in an intricate way, changing the direction of the folds each time, known as plaiting. This was often understood as a sign of intimacy or closeness. We find it in letters between spouses for example, and Mary herself may have used it when writing to relatives such as her mother Marie de Guise.
How you addressed the person you were writing to was also critically important. Today we understand the term ‘friend’ to mean a ‘close acquaintance’, or someone with whom we have a positive relationship at least. Some of the oldest uses of the term connote a sense of alliance and letter-writers would often use it when they were trying to convince someone to support them. It could also imply a sense of Christian piety. Yet, the term friend was also used by early modern letter-writers to emphasize a distinction in social status. Because ‘friend’ suggests a degree of familiarity or similarity at least, it would be unusual for someone of a lower rank to address a recipient in this way. Mary used the term friend across her correspondence, almost as a mark of her favour, but also to show her magnanimous and noble conduct. By calling someone a friend, she was also reminding you of her own royal status. Writing to Cecil as a friend then, as she did in an example from November 1569 could also be a way of keeping him in his place. Even during the most difficult times of her captivity, she always signed off to Cecil with her customary subscription ‘your good friend’.
It is only by resituating Mary’s letters within the context of sixteenth century epistolary cultures that we can begin to fully appreciate Mary’s strategic skills. In this way, Mary’s letters can actually challenge the emotional, irrational and naïve personas that she has been forced to perform for centuries and they offer a chance for us to recover her agency even as her circumstances deteriorated.
Dr. Jade Scott is a historian and expert in early modern letters and the author of Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots.
