She was nineteen when she was refused entry to her own castle. The men holding it served a great Catholic family. Mary, Queen of Scots, was Catholic too. That had not opened the gates.
On 28 October 1562, that challenge ended in victory for Mary's forces at Corrichie, west of Aberdeen. Her Protestant half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, commanded the army. Mary was in Aberdeen, not on the battlefield. The refusal at Inverness had come the previous September, during a northern journey that had brought the young queen into direct conflict with George Gordon, fourth Earl of Huntly.
She had returned to Scotland from France on 19 August 1561, a widow at eighteen. Her husband, Francis II, had died the previous December, ending her brief time as Queen of France. She had been brought up at the French court, while Scotland had been governed in her absence. By the time she came home, the Reformation had transformed its religious settlement. Mary kept her Catholic faith. She also kept Protestant men close to the business of government, among them her half-brother. Sharing her religion was no guarantee of sharing her confidence.
Huntly was one of the most powerful Catholic nobles in the kingdom, with extensive northern interests and a claim to the earldom of Moray. Mary had granted that earldom to James Stewart. The name her brother now carried was itself a grievance. This was a conflict in which religion mattered, but so did land, revenues and who would exercise power in the north. The queen's brother had interests of his own. His advancement and her authority were being asserted together.
There was also Huntly's son, Sir John Gordon. Imprisoned in Edinburgh, he had escaped, then failed to obey a command to place himself in custody at Stirling. His father's invitation to Mary to visit the family home at Strathbogie went unaccepted. Hospitality could not settle the outstanding matter of obedience. As the royal party continued north, the difference between acknowledging a queen and complying with her orders became steadily harder to overlook.
At Inverness, that difference acquired gates and walls.
The castle belonged to the Crown. Huntly's family held its keeping, but when Mary arrived she was denied admission and had to lodge in the town. Summoned to surrender, those inside answered that it would not be delivered without Lord Gordon's command. A royal fortress was being held against the sovereign whose fortress it was. There could hardly have been a plainer demonstration of how much authority the Gordons exercised on the ground, or how little the queen's arrival alone could accomplish.
Men from the surrounding country came to Mary's support. The queen herself was reported never to have been merrier, and never dismayed. When the lords came in from the night watch, her only regret was that she was not a man, "to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and knapscull, a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword." She did not lie in the fields. She went on with her progress, and then back to Aberdeen, where she remained while preparations were made to bring Huntly and his son to submission. Her government was prepared to use force. The journey had become a sustained exercise in making her commands effective.
From the other side came an appeal addressed to something older and more intimate than the dispute over an earldom.
When the queen's messenger, Captain Hay, came to Strathbogie, Huntly's wife, the Countess of Huntly, led him with heavy looks into the chapel. "Good friend," she told him, "you see here the envy that is borne unto my husband." Had he been willing to forsake God and his religion, as those now about the queen had done, he would not be treated this way. Her husband, she insisted, "was ever obedient unto her, and so will die her faithful subject." She wanted those assurances carried back to Mary.
It was an appeal from one Catholic woman to another, made in a chapel where the faith they shared still had its place. The Countess was defending her husband, her family and their standing. Her message reached Aberdeen. The queen, it was reported, believed not a word of it.
They shared a faith. They did not agree on what loyalty required.
By late October, Huntly had gathered an armed force and moved towards Aberdeen. Mary sent troops out against him before he could reach the town. At Corrichie on 28 October, Moray defeated the Gordons and Huntly was taken. He died soon after his capture, before any sentence could be passed on him. Sir John was taken prisoner and executed in Aberdeen within days. The Countess had promised that her husband would die the queen's faithful subject. She had lost both husband and son.
Mary's victory had been won with her brother's military command and the support of other nobles. It had also been pursued through her weeks in Aberdeen, her refusal to treat disobedience as a private family matter, and her readiness to act against the greatest Catholic lord in the north. For the Countess, the same authority had brought a family catastrophe.
The first answer had come weeks before Corrichie, at Inverness. The garrison that would not yield the royal castle without Lord Gordon's command surrendered it to the queen the following day. Its captain was hanged. The others were imprisoned or pardoned. A Gordon's command had held a royal castle against its queen for a single night.
