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History Edits: Jean Stewart, Countess of Argyll

Perhaps best known as the only sister of the infamous Mary, Queen of Scots, Jean Stewart had her own adventurous life, occupying the various roles of king’s daughter, honoured lady-in-waiting, unhappy spouse, outlaw, and excommunicant over the decades. Born in the early 1530s, she was the only certainly acknowledged* illegitimate daughter of King James V. Her mother was probably Elizabeth, a member of the sprawling, yet influential and ambitious Beaton family. On her father’s side, Jean’s numerous half-siblings included James Stewart, Commendator of St Andrews who was also the future earl of Moray and Regent of Scotland; his older half-brother and namesake James Commendator of Kelso (d.1558); John Stewart Commendator of Coldingham; and Robert Stewart, Earl of Orkney, as well as her younger half-sister, Mary Stewart, who became queen of Scots at no more than a week old upon the death of their father in 1542.

As the king’s daughter she was raised at court in considerable comfort, and the Treasurer’s Accounts record various payments for her clothing, nurse, and upbringing-including payments for gowns, a canopy for her to travel under, massbooks, and mourning clothes after the death of her grandmother Margaret Tudor in 1541. Her brothers often travelled between court and St Andrews where they were being educated, but Jean was more permanently associated with the royal court. When her father married his second wife Mary of Guise, the new queen apparently took Jean under her wing, and brought her step-daughter into her own household. Jean briefly moved to the household of her first legitimate brother Prince James, who was born in 1540, but when the infant prince died the next year she returned to the queen’s household. After 1542, when her father died and the succession of the infant Mary ushered in a new period of strife, references to Jean are less frequent. However, we at least know that when her royal sister sailed for France in 1548, Jean did not travel with her, unlike several of her brothers and at least two of her cousins, (Mary Fleming and Mary Beaton). Instead, in 1553, by which time Jean was in her early twenties, Mary of Guise and the Regent Arran arranged for her to marry Archibald Campbell, Lord Lorne, and the wedding took place in April the following year. Her new husband succeeded his father as 5th earl of Argyll five years later in 1558. By that point, both Argyll and his close friend James Stewart, Commendator of St Andrews- Jean’s half-brother- had converted to Protestantism. Though her own religious views are more of a mystery, the ideals of the new reformed faith, which was formally established in Scotland in 1560, were to play an important role in her life.

When Queen Mary returned to Scotland in 1561, she soon re-established links with her birth family, and several of Mary’s half-siblings regularly attended on her at court, though their relationships with the queen varied. The Countess of Argyll quickly renewed ties with the younger sister whom she had not seen since Mary was five years old, and though she is not as well-known as the infamous Four Maries, Jean served as one of her sister’s chief ladies-in-waiting for several years. “Ma soeur” received gifts of clothes and jewels from the queen, along with an annual pension of £150 pounds. Along with Agnes Keith (who married Jean’s brother James and became Countess of Moray in 1562) and Annabella Murray, Countess of Mar, Jean was one of the ladies Lord Darnley later blamed for causing a rift between himself and his wife. At the christening of Queen Mary’s only son, the future James VI, in June 1566, Jean and the Earl of Bedford stood proxy for Elizabeth I of England as the child’s godmother. A few months earlier, on the fateful night of 9th March 1566, Jean had been the only other woman in the room when David Rizzio was murdered, though among the men present at the dinner were her half-brother Robert Stewart and her kinsman Beaton of Creich. Jean is supposed to have caught a candelabra when the table was knocked over in the struggle, preventing the room being plunged into complete darkness. Though both her half-brother the Earl of Moray and her husband the Earl of Argyll must have been aware that there was a plot to murder Rizzio, it is unclear whether Jean was forewarned. In any case it seems unlikely that her husband would confide in her, since by 1566 the couple had been estranged for years. 

Jean was a proud and determined yet often stubborn woman, and does not appear to have relished having to leave the Lowlands and court life for mountainous Argyll. Her husband was unfaithful on several occasions but does not appear to have been willing to tolerate his wife’s own infidelity, if the accusations of adultery levelled at her in the late 1550s are at all truthful. Relations steadily worsened between the couple, and Jean later alleged that, in the summer of 1560, she had been held prisoner and intimidated by several of her husband’s Campbell kinsmen. Though Jean was briefly reconciled with Argyll through the intervention of mutual friends, including the reformer John Knox, by 1563 things had deteriorated again. This time Queen Mary and John Knox made a rare collaborative effort in an attempt to reconcile the warring spouses. Mary considered Argyll a close friend and important ally and could not risk offending him, yet at the same time she was fond of her sister, and in any case their public feuding was considered an embarrassment to both the reformed faith and the royal family. While Knox gave Argyll a thorough dressing down for his infidelity and refusal to patch things up with his wife, the queen warned Jean that should she ‘behave not herself as she ought to do, she shall find no favour of me’.  

In 1567, Argyll joined with many other Scottish nobles, both Catholic and Protestant, in imprisoning Queen Mary, but baulked at the idea of deposing her. He later commanded the Queen’s Men at the Battle of Langside in 1568 and subsequently became one of her chief lieutenants in Scotland after she fled to England in the same year. Meanwhile, by 1567 his marriage had completely broken down. After Jean escaped yet another bout of imprisonment in one of her husband’s retainers’ castles, refusing return to her husband, the earl finally initiated divorce proceedings. In order to settle the matter quickly, Jean was offered 10,000 merks in return for agreeing to a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery. But although she certainly had no intention of reuniting with Argyll, she refused to cooperate in the divorce- whether this was due to personal morality or because she wanted to protect her status as countess is unclear. In this she was supported by her half-brother the Earl of Moray, now Regent of Scotland for the young James VI. Moray had also fallen out with Argyll over politics by this point and, though both men remained Protestant, Moray seems to have been very opposed to divorce (like Knox, who also berated Argyll for his behaviour). Moray publicly backed his sister and occasionally offered her financial support, as did other members of his extended family and Jean’s friends, like Annabella Murray (Moray’s aunt and another of Queen Mary’s former ladies-in-waiting). Frustrated over her refusal to grant him the divorce he needed, Argyll now attempted to compel his wife to return to him through the courts, but she refused to do so, leaving both spouses, the Kirk, and the political community in a bind. After Moray’s assassination in early 1570, Jean lost an important source of support from a close family member, and though her distant cousin the earl of Atholl attempted to intercede for her with Argyll, a reconciliation still never materialised. Holding out for a much more substantial settlement from her husband, whom she described as ‘that ongrait man’, Jean, took up residence with her friend Annabella Murray (Countess of Mar and James VI’s ‘Minnie’) at Stirling, with the household of the young king James. At this time she seems to have been acutely aware that she lacked a network of support, being described as ‘very angry and in great poverty’, and her situation worsened over the next few years.

In the early 1570s, the balance began to shift in favour of Argyll, who had turned to the church courts for a solution. Kirk officials repeatedly censured Jean for non-adherence to her husband: she ignored all of these warnings. When she continued to disobey the direct orders of the Kirk, she was put to the horn (outlawed), and not long afterwards, with nowhere else to turn, she took refuge in Edinburgh Castle. The castle was then undergoing the ‘Lang Siege’, with William Kirkcaldy of Grange and his men holding the castle on behalf of Queen Mary against the Regent Morton, who then governed Scotland on behalf of Mary’s son the young King James VI. This siege has gone down in Edinburgh’s history as infamous, and forever changed the shape of the castle itself. The garrison held out for three years, taking potshots at both the supporters of the young King James and the capital city at large, minting coins in Mary’s name, and housing numerous members of the Queen’s Men, including Mary’s former secretary the ‘machiavellian’ William Maitland of Lethington, as well as many other dissidents who had entered the castle for various reasons, Jean included. Though her sentence of outlawry was briefly relaxed to allow her to appear in court, Jean refused to leave the castle and was excommunicated by the Kirk in April 1573. 

By this time the Earl of Argyll had finally been won over by the ‘King’s Men’ and had exchanged his allegiance to Queen Mary for a position as chancellor in the government of James VI. This enabled him to get an act of parliament passed that allowed divorce for desertion and, finally, in June 1573, Argyll legally divorced his wife. This was a landmark decision in the history of Scots law, and while Jean never accepted the divorce, her tumultuous personal life did result in the emergence of the concept of ‘divorce by desertion’ and one of the first, and certainly most famous, divorces granted by the new reformed Church of Scotland. In desperate need of an heir, her ex-husband Argyll quickly remarried, but died only three months later in September 1573, with his posthumous son by his new wife dying at birth the next year.

Only a few weeks before Jean’s divorce was announced, Edinburgh Castle had finally surrendered, having been so thoroughly bombarded by English troops that David’s Tower and the Constable’s Tower, both roughly two hundred years old, collapsed in to the main entrance of the castle. Though most of the garrison were allowed to leave freely, Kirkcaldy of Grange and his brother were hanged at the mercat cross of Edinburgh along with the jewellers who had minted the coinage in Mary’s name. Maitland of Lethington died suspiciously in prison not long afterwards, possibly by his own hand. Jean, still afraid that she would be handed over to her husband, had written to Elizabeth I of England beseeching her protection, and in the meantime crossed the water to Fife, her mother’s native county. In time though, with her husband preoccupied with his remarriage and then dying soon after, Jean actually emerged in a stronger position. For the next decade or more she harassed her brother-in-law, the new earl of Argyll (who had married the Regent Moray’s widow Agnes Keith), for a settlement which would give her financial security, claiming her right as the late earl’s widow over his ‘pretendit’ second wife. She eventually won this case, receiving a handsome pay-out which supported her to the end of her life. She seems to have spent her later years living comfortably in Edinburgh, still describing herself as the Countess of Argyll. She was legitimated by the Crown in 1580, some decades after several of her half-brothers. She lived just long enough to hear of the execution of her younger sister Mary in 1587, but her thoughts on that infamous event must remain a mystery. By this point only Jean and her half-brother Robert, Earl of Orkney remained of James V’s acknowledged children: James of Kelso had died young in 1558, John Stewart succumbed to illness in 1563, the Regent Moray was shot in 1570, and now Mary had been beheaded. In January 1588, possibly aged about 55, Jean herself died in Edinburgh, ending her dramatic career a wealthy widow. She was buried in the royal vault at the Abbey of Holyrood, next to her father King James V. 

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