When Women Ruled the World by Maureen Quilligan

Author:Maureen Quilligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire: west front, seen from the gatehouse.

It looks to be a great act of generosity for Bess to allow a portrait of Mary as “Chastity” to be created and to remain at Hardwick. Having become one of Hardwick Hall’s inalienable posessions, it seems to proclaim Bess’s acceptance of the innocence of Mary, Queen of Scots, even after she had been executed for treason and for allegedly consenting to the assassination of Elizabeth. But in a sense, the hanging spoke to details of Mary’s earlier life, specifically her compromised sexual purity. Lucretia had, afer all, been raped by Tarquin, and many of Mary’s supporters understood her true downfall to have been the result of Bothwell’s abduction and probable rape of her. Perhaps Bess of Hardwick was acknowledging that it is possible for a woman to remain pure even after rape, and that she did not need to commit suicide (as Lucretia did) in order to erase the stain of the attack.19

Mary’s supporters repeatedly put out propaganda to counter the stories circulating to smear Mary’s name; one of these documents was a fake “confession” by, supposedly, the Earl of Bothwell himself, although he actually had died in 1578 in prison in Denmark—according to legend, chained to the prison wall and mad. In fact, as a nobleman, he enjoyed relatively elegant surroundings in the prison provided by his jailer. When Darnley’s mother, the Countess of Lennox, read the forged “confession,” she decided that Mary had been falsely accused and that she had been innocent of the murder charge all along. The countess sent Mary a letter of reconciliation and a piece of elegant lace embroidery into which she had woven strands of her own silver hair.

Margaret, the dowager countess of Lennox, would have been a family member with whom Bess of Hardwick needed to communicate when arranging the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish to the countess’s youngest son. For a mother to forgive someone who she had once supposed to have conspired to murder her oldest son (Darnley) is a strong testament to that person’s innocence, even if the change of heart is based on a forgery. The countess’s turnaround may have had an effect on Bess’s opinion of Mary.

The fact that the most famous picture of Mary is of her in mourning garb is something she shares with her mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici, who, as we shall see, also wore mourning throughout her entire life after the death of her husband, Henri II. Mary would have seen her mother-in-law’s mourning dress daily when she was queen consort of France, married to François II for the months of his short reign; after his death, she left for Scotland. Unlike Catherine, Mary did not continue always to wear mourning, but she must have understood how a portrait in those clothes allowed people to remember her royal virginal widowhood. Mary wore white, while Catherine wore black, but as both of them were dowager queens of France, each was insisting on the privileged position of a king’s widow through their physical representations in major works of art.

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