30

“THE DAUGHTER OF DEBATE”

MARY WAS MOVED TO TUTBURY Castle in Staffordshire on 26 January 1569, and placed in the custody of its owner, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. For the next eighteen years, she would remain Elizabeth’s prisoner. It is often claimed that, throughout that time, she maintained her silence over the Darnley murder, yet it is almost certain that her version of events formed the substance of Claude Nau’s Memorials, written in 1578 while he was employed as her secretary.¹

On 31 January, Mary’s commissioners were allowed to depart for Scotland. Lord Fleming returned at once to Dumbarton Castle, which he thereafter helped to hold in the Queen’s name against the Lords in power. Herries united with Chatelherault and the Hamiltons to plot a revolt against Moray, but in April 1569, after refusing to acknowledge James as King, they were imprisoned by the Regent.

As the years passed, Mary was confined in several different houses, notably Wingfield Manor and Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, and Sheffield Castle in Yorkshire. Her existence in captivity was not unduly onerous to begin with, but as it became clear that she was increasingly becoming the focus of plots against Elizabeth’s throne, security was tightened and further restraints were placed on her. Although keeping Mary under restraint had seemed the best solution in 1568, Elizabeth was to find that her presence in England was a constant source of anxiety, for there was always the risk that she might either escape, incite Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects to rebel, or inspire attempts on Elizabeth’s crown or her life.

Nevertheless, Mary was housed in some luxury and deferred to as a queen. Amongst her possessions, she kept miniatures and portraits of Francis II and Darnley, but none of Bothwell.² Although she was only twenty-six when she was moved to Tutbury, she aged rapidly in captivity, and took to wearing wigs to hide her greying hair, while her health, never particularly robust, declined over the years, making her a martyr to rheumatism. Yet poor health did not deflect her from her ambition to seize the English throne and be revenged on her enemies.

Her brief flirtation with Anglicanism over, she became increasingly pious, as became the rightful Catholic Queen of England. With a conscious display of religiosity, she cultivated a new and successful image as a martyr who had suffered for her faith at the hands of heretics, which was calculated to enlist the sympathy and support of the Pope and the Catholic powers, and obliterate the false and unfair stigma of murderess and adulteress.³ As time went by, many Catholics forgot the scandals that had touched Mary’s past, and thought of her only as the dynastic hope of their religion, and the Catholic powers in Europe came to espouse her cause with increasing—and, to Elizabeth, alarming—fervour. Yet for Scottish and English Protestants, she remained the evil woman who had killed her husband in order to marry her lover.

After the imprisonment of Herries and Chatelherault, Leslie returned to England to work for Mary’s restoration, and was told by Elizabeth that she fully intended to bring this about “without making any mention of the murder of her husband or any part of the rest of the heinous crimes.”⁴ Leslie was also hoping to bring about the marriage between Mary and Norfolk, which he believed would be to the advantage of both Queens. He had been working for some time on a written defence of Mary, in response to the calumnies of Buchanan, and this spirited work was published abroad in May 1569, although, significantly, it was suppressed in England and made an indignant Elizabeth think again about restoring Mary. Of Mary, Leslie wrote: “Her person and the whole trade of her godly and virtuous life past do far repel and drive away all suspicion and conjectural presumptions.” After the Defence was published in France in 1571, copies of it were smuggled into England.

Moray was still trying to justify his position, and on 13 May 1569, published a proclamation accusing Mary afresh of Darnley’s murder.⁵Around the middle of June, Paris was brought back to Scotland.

Mary was still making plans for a marriage with Norfolk, which she regarded as a means of escaping from captivity. In June, at her instigation, Bothwell authorised Lord Boyd to procure an annulment of his marriage to Mary,⁶ and she herself commanded Boyd to ask Moray and the Lords for a written mandate to institute “an action for divorce” in Scotland, on the grounds that, when their wedding took place, Bothwell was already contracted to another wife and had not been lawfully divorced from her. Mary may also have applied to the Pope for an annulment. By 8 July, Norfolk himself was negotiating with Moray to secure the annulment of the Bothwell marriage, with a view to marrying Mary and thereby uniting England and Scotland.⁷ In this enterprise, he had Maitland’s support, as well as that of Philip of Spain and the powerful Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland. The Catholics’ agenda differed, in that they saw the Norfolk marriage as a means to Elizabeth’s overthrow and the re-establishment of the ancient religion in England.

But, at a congress of the Scottish Lords at Perth on 25 July, forty of the forty-nine nobles present dismissed Mary’s request for an annulment on the grounds that it was impious; in truth, they feared that any man she married now would take up arms in her cause. They also publicly avowed that they would never allow her to return to Scotland, either as Queen or co-regent, or even as a private person. Balfour, surprisingly, was among the nine who voted for Mary’s restoration:⁸he had already fallen foul of Moray, and perhaps feared exposure for his part in Darnley’s murder. Maitland, who had also declared for Mary, publicly opined that it was very strange that those who had so lately taken up arms against their Queen expressly for the purpose of separating her from Bothwell, should now have so entirely changed their minds.⁹ Relations between Moray and Maitland were now, understandably, icy. The Secretary, having “seen that the scales had turned,” had long since secretly begun “to traffic for the Queen’s return to Scotland,”¹⁰ and now he was making his position clear. It was, unfortunately, too late for either himself or Mary.

Argyll had also voted in favour of Mary, but soon afterwards submitted to Moray and was reconciled to the Lords.

Three days later, the Scottish Lords rejected Norfolk’s request, pointing out that, if the Queen of Scots wanted her freedom, she only had to ask King Frederick to chop off Bothwell’s head. Mary was greatly grieved that her proposals had been rejected out of hand, while her supporters in Scotland gave more serious thought to the notion of restoring her by armed force.

On 9 and 10 August, in his prison at St. Andrews, Paris made two depositions. In the first, apparently voluntary, one, he made no accusations against Mary; but in the second, which was almost certainly extracted under torture, the interrogation being supervised by (among others) Buchanan and John Wood, Paris charged the Queen directly with Darnley’s murder. Significantly, and probably correctly, he also implicated Maitland, Balfour, Huntly and Argyll in the crime. Of course, the aim of this, in the light of recent events, was to undermine the Queen’s party, but these depositions were never made public because the testimony in them was greatly at variance with that in the earlier depositions, and much of it was obviously contrived. Even Buchanan omitted to publish them, although he included the depositions of Hay, Hepburn and Dalgleish in his Detectio.

There is no record of Paris being put on trial. He was summarily hanged and quartered for his part in Darnley’s murder on 16 August. Six days too late, Elizabeth wrote to Moray requesting that he be sent to London for interrogation, her purpose being to discover the extent of Moray’s involvement in the crime. But Moray had already ensured Paris’s silence. Instead, he sent Paris’s depositions to London, trusting that they would be “found so authentic as the credit thereof shall not seem doubtful.”¹¹ But even the wily Cecil could find no use for such obviously flawed documents, and they were consigned to oblivion.¹²

Moray now set out to destroy Maitland. At the beginning of September, he enticed him to Stirling and caused Thomas Crawford to accuse him in Council of Darnley’s murder.¹³ As a result, Maitland was placed under house arrest, where, “seeing that his life was in immediate danger, [he] began with increased activity to organise a party for his own security” and continued to plan Mary’s restoration, negotiating “with every member of her party.”¹⁴ He secured as allies Grange, Atholl and Seton.

Balfour, another turncoat, was also arrested at this time and accused of the murder of Darnley, but was freed on condition that he agree to answer a summons to trial when required, which, for “secret causes” between him and the Lords, he never was.¹⁵This may refer to the indemnity about which several historians have speculated.

Moray’s intention was to imprison Maitland in the fortress of Tantallon, a castle on the East Lothian coast that was owned by Morton, but while he was being conveyed there, he was rescued by Kirkcaldy of Grange and carried off to Edinburgh Castle, which Grange was holding for Mary. Maitland was only too pleased to join him. This coalition between Scotland’s greatest politician and her greatest soldier was a blow to Moray, but he had not the resources to besiege the mighty fortress of Edinburgh.

In England, that September, Elizabeth found out that Norfolk was scheming to marry Mary, and her rage was such that Moray’s government became more secure overnight. By 11 October, Norfolk was a prisoner in the Tower of London. That month, in retaliation, a rising broke out in the north of England, orchestrated by the Catholic Earls; its aims were to depose Elizabeth and set up Mary in her place, bring about Mary’s marriage to Norfolk, and thereby return England to the Church of Rome. The King of France was supporting the rebels, King Philip was sympathetic, and a Florentine banker and papal agent, Roberto Ridolfi, was funding the enterprise. This was the most dangerous threat to her security that Elizabeth had encountered since her accession.

Although Mary did not support the rebellion, Cecil warned Elizabeth that “the Queen of Scots is, and always shall be, a dangerous person to your estate,” and said, with some prescience, that, if she were found guilty of her husband’s murder, “she shall be less a person perilous; if passed over in silence, the scar of the murder will wear out, and the danger [will be] greater.” Elizabeth’s Councillors were urging her to have Mary executed, and for a time she gave serious thought to their pleas; she even allowed them to draw up a death warrant. Then she backed down, realising that the execution of an anointed queen would set a very dangerous precedent indeed. She did, however, write reminding Charles IX that Mary’s husband had been “foully murdered” and that she had married “the principal murderer.”¹⁶

In November, as the northern rebels marched south towards Tutbury, Mary was moved to Coventry; at this point, the rebellion began to collapse. By 20 December, it had been ruthlessly suppressed by Elizabeth’s forces. But Mary was still cherishing hopes of marrying Norfolk, and in December and January, sent passionate letters to him in the Tower.

By 1570, many nobles had become disaffected from Moray’s rule, and the Hamiltons were openly voicing suspicions that he was plotting to seize the throne, which they themselves claimed as next heirs after James VI. On 23 January, a nephew of Archbishop Hamilton,¹⁷ James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, assassinated the Regent as he rode through the streets of Linlithgow. There can be little doubt that the Archbishop himself was implicated in the murder. Bothwellhaugh escaped to France.

Moray was buried in St. Giles’s Kirk, Knox having preached his funeral sermon, in which he called upon God to remember the Regent’s foolish pity for Mary and the other murderers of Darnley. “He is at rest, O Lord, and we are left in extreme misery!” he cried. It was true, for the death of “the good Regent,” as the people were now calling him, plunged Scotland into chaos.

When Mary heard of her half-brother’s death, she wrote to Archbishop Beaton “that she was the more indebted to the assassin,” but “that he had acted without her instigation.” In a letter to Moray’s widow, she declared that the murder had been done against her will. Nevertheless, she awarded Bothwellhaugh a pension.¹⁸

She had much to thank him for, because after the Regent’s death, her party grew in strength, which weakened the position of the Protestant Lords, whose unofficial leader was Morton. This led to civil war in Scotland. The Lords began attacking Grange in Edinburgh Castle, but with little success. It seemed at one point that the Marian party might emerge triumphant, for Huntly was holding the north-east and the Hamiltons the west, Chatelherault and Herries having been released after Moray’s death. The King of France had offered them his support. It would be easy for him to land an army at Dumbarton, which commanded the estuary of the Clyde and was held by Lord Fleming for the Queen.

As the crisis deepened in Scotland, Pope Pius V, having learned of the ruthless suppression of the Northern Rising, precipitately excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, exhorting her subjects to rise against her and set Mary in her place. The English government feared that, armoured with this papal sanction, Catholics might be encouraged to plot against the Queen, and from this time they were regarded less as heretics than as traitors. Further restrictions were placed upon them, and security around Mary was tightened. Most Catholics in England ignored the Bull of excommunication, but the government could afford to take no chances.

Elizabeth was determined that the next Regent of Scotland should be someone who was friendly towards England. She chose Lennox, and forced the reluctant Scots to accept him. He was elected Regent on 12 July 1570, although his wife and son Charles were made to stay in England as hostages for his good behaviour. At this time, both Elizabeth and Mary were independently scheming to have James brought to England and placed in the care of his grandmother, Lady Lennox. Mary’s mother-in-law had always condemned her as Darnley’s murderess, but on 10 July, in the interests of her son, Mary swallowed her pride and wrote an aggrieved letter to the Countess, expressing the hope that her innocence would be made manifest to her:

Madam, if the wrong and false reports of rebels, enemies well known for traitors to you, and alas! too trusted of me by your advice, had not so far stirred you against mine innocency (and, I must say, against all kindness, that you have not only condemned me wrongfully, but so hated me, as some words and open deeds have so testified to all the world, a manifest misliking in you against your own blood), I would not thus long have omitted my duty in writing to you, excusing me of those untrue reports made of me. But hoping, with God’s grace and time, to have my innocency known to you, as I trust it is already to the most part of all indifferent [impartial] persons, I thought it not best to trouble you for a time, till such a matter is moved that touches us both, which is the transporting your little [grand]son and my only child in this country. I would be glad to have your advice therein, as in all other matters touching him. I have borne him, and God knows at what danger to him and me both, and of you he is descended. So I mean not to forget my duty to you in showing herein any unkindness to you, how unkindly soever ye have dealt by me, but will love you as my aunt and respect you as my mother-in-law. Your natural good niece and loving daughter, Marie.¹⁹

Mary may have hoped, by bringing Lady Lennox over to her side, to have some future contact with the son she had not seen for over three years. She had sent gifts and later wrote letters to him, but it is doubtful he was allowed to receive any of them. Nor would the Scots consent to him being taken out of the country, so Mary’s scheming came to nothing. Her letter to Lady Lennox was doubly in vain, for that lady refused to revise her implacable opinion of her daughter-in-law, and when, the following September, Elizabeth was toying with the idea of restoring Mary to her throne, Lady Lennox begged her to reconsider:

The knowledge thereof is to me of no small discomfort, considering that, notwithstanding the grievous murder which, by her means only, was upon my son, her husband, executed, divers persons in this realm doth yet doubt, and a great many doth credit that, since her coming hither, she is found clear and not to be culpable of that fact.²⁰

Lady Lennox also sent Mary’s letter on to Lennox, who responded:

What can I say but that I do not marvel to see her write the best [she] can for herself. It will be long time that is able to put a matter so notorious in oblivion, to make black white, or innocency to appear where the contrary is so well known. The most indifferent, I trust, doubts not of the equity of your and my cause, and of the just occasion of our misliking. Her right duty to you and me were her true confession and unfeigned repentance of that lamentable fact. God is just and will not in the end be abused.²¹

As Regent, Lennox espoused the Protestant cause with fervour, but met constant opposition from his old rivals, the Hamiltons, and the rest of the Marian party, who refused to recognise his Regency. Never popular in Scotland, he made himself even more hated by his grim determination to avenge Darnley’s murder. On 16 July, he wrote to his wife that he was still assured of Mary’s guilt, having been convinced by the Casket Letters, “the confessions of men gone to the death, and other infallible experience.”²²

Maitland, who had felt it safe to leave Edinburgh Castle after Moray’s death, had gone to Atholl, and was now acknowledged the leader of the Queen’s party, despite having been struck down of late with a wasting disease: he could no longer walk and was so weak that even to sneeze was painful.²³ Grange had remained at his post, determined to hold Edinburgh Castle for Mary. Balfour had also stayed loyal to Mary, if only out of self-interest, for Lennox was out for his blood. In August, Lennox defeated Huntly at Brechin, and Elizabeth brought about a truce between the two parties, which was, however, broken early in 1571 by the Hamiltons.

Under Lennox’s auspices, George Buchanan was appointed tutor to the four-year-old King, a post he would hold for eight years. Buchanan saw to it that James was well educated, but he brought the child up to believe in his mother’s guilt, and accordingly subjected him to a severe Calvinist regime. Years later, James would reject and suppress Buchanan’s views, and would also condemn Moray as an unnatural rebel, but by then he had been so indoctrinated that, not remembering Mary, he could never love her, but saw her chiefly as a threat to his throne.

Lennox made renewed efforts to secure Bothwell’s extradition, and sent one Thomas Buchanan to Denmark to demand it. This envoy became aware that Bothwell and Mary were still corresponding freely, and protested that this should be stopped and that the couriers concerned—an English spy called Horsey and Bothwell’s Danish page, Herman—should be imprisoned. Mary was also in contact with Hepburn of Riccarton, Bothwell’s cousin, who doubtless provided another channel of communication. After reading Thomas Buchanan’s report, Cecil expressed concern that Bothwell could so easily make contact with Mary. None of the letters between the couple has survived.

In the summer of 1570, Elizabeth demanded that Frederick have Bothwell executed, reminding him that it did him no honour “that a regicide should wander free to live unpunished.”²⁴Again, in March 1571, she urged that the Earl be released for trial in Scotland or England, which was the last thing the Scottish Lords wanted: they were pressing for Bothwell’s summary execution. But Frederick demurred; he still regarded Bothwell as a useful political pawn, and it was by no means uncertain that Mary would regain her kingdom. Furthermore, Bothwell had consistently denied any involvement in Darnley’s murder.²⁵

There is little doubt that the English establishment knew very well who Darnley’s true killers were. In a letter to Cecil dated 15 October 1570, Thomas Randolph wrote from Scotland that he minded not “to name such as are yet here living,” who were “most notoriously known to have been chief consenters to the King’s death; only I will say that the universal bruit cometh upon three or four persons which subscribed a bond promising to concur and assist each other in doing the same.”²⁶These persons were almost certainly Maitland, Huntly, Argyll and Bothwell (Moray being dead), and Cecil must have already known or guessed who they were.

In November 1570, Sir Henry Norris, the English ambassador in Paris, incorrectly reported that the Pope had annulled Mary’s marriage to Bothwell on the grounds of rape.²⁷ No documentation of this exists in the Vatican archives, and the report is proved false by the fact that Mary again raised the question of nullity in 1575. In January 1571, Mary sent Master Horsey with a message to King Frederick, urging “that Lord Bothwell be not delivered up to punishment,”²⁸and in June that year, the French government echoed her request, fearing that, if Bothwell were put on trial, his revelations might be damaging to her. The next month, Lennox informed Frederick that he was content to postpone Bothwell’s case until another day.

Norfolk’s release from the Tower in August 1570 signalled the inception of what became known as the Ridolfi Plot, the aim of which was to place Mary and Norfolk on the English throne with Spanish help. The Florentine Ridolfi was to act as agent and financier, and Bishop Leslie was one of the brains behind the plot.

In January 1571, Ridolfi offered to act as Mary’s representative in the courts of Europe, where he would be well placed to enlist support for her cause. He later claimed that she agreed to this, but none of her written credentials survives, nor do any of the incriminating letters he alleged she had written. In one of these, dated 8 February, she outlined the plot to Norfolk and invited him to join the conspiracy, much to his alarm; but he had been won over by 10 March.

At the end of March, Thomas Crawford, crying “A Darnley! A Darnley!,” captured the seemingly impregnable Dumbarton Castle from the Queen’s supporters, depriving them of a strategically valuable fortress, and bringing the West under the control of the Regent. Fleming escaped to France (he died in September 1572), but one of those taken was Archbishop Hamilton, who was to feel the full force of Lennox’s vengeance. The Regent was convinced that the Archbishop had helped to murder Darnley, and also knew him to be the man who had masterminded Moray’s assassination. On 7 April, without bothering with the formality of a trial, he had him hanged in his ecclesiastical vestments, and then quartered, at Stirling.²⁹To the last, the Archbishop protested his innocence. Afterwards, Buchanan wrote the account of Darnley’s murder that imputed it to Hamilton, which, as has already been noted, was at variance with his earlier allegations; but it was now necessary to provide justification for Lennox’s tyrannical and unprecedented execution of the Primate of Scotland.

The Archbishop’s death provoked Grange into publishing an act of defiance against Lennox, and led to an intensification of the civil war. Grange was now holding Edinburgh Castle against what would become known as the “Lang Siege,” and was joined there by Maitland and Rothes. In June 1571, Captain Cullen, who had been in Edinburgh Castle with Balfour, was captured by Morton and promptly executed, “to the end that [Morton] might the more freely enjoy the favour of his fair wife.”³⁰ Thereafter, Morton lived in open adultery with Mrs. Cullen.

Herries, believing that Mary’s cause was hopeless, sought a reconciliation with Morton in August 1571. But the Hamiltons were not giving up without a fight. On 4 September, in revenge for the murder of Archbishop Hamilton, they and their allies attempted a coup, and Lennox was assassinated in the process, being shot during an attack on Stirling Castle. His title was inherited by his sixteen-year-old son, Charles, and the moderate but ailing Mar, Elizabeth’s candidate and Morton’s puppet, replaced him as Regent the following month.

The English government had now received secret intelligence of the Ridolfi Plot. On 7 September, Norfolk was arrested on a charge of high treason, and sent to the Tower of London. When questioned, Mary admitted having dealings with Ridolfi, but denied being involved in any conspiracy. Bishop Leslie was also sent to the Tower, on 24 October, and that same week, an outraged Elizabeth, convinced that Mary had connived at her assassination, finally authorised the publication in London of Buchanan’s Detectio, which included transcripts of three of the Casket Letters in an appendix and Thomas Wilson’s Actio contra Mariam (known in English as The Oration), a venomous attack on Mary modelled on the Detectio, but with even more errors. A Scots edition of the Detectiowas also published in London (and again in Scotland in 1572), which included all eight of the Casket Letters. Now, for the first time, the people of England and Scotland could read the evidence for Mary Stuart’s complicity in the murder of her husband, and, unsurprisingly, these works became bestsellers. In January 1572, Elizabeth at last recognised James VI as King of Scots, and thereby made the Scottish government aware that she had no further intention of restoring Mary.

On 3 November, under interrogation by Thomas Wilson, Master of the Court of Requests, and in fear of the rack, Leslie broke, and made the first of several statements that were highly damaging to Mary, attributing the Northern Rising to a plot between her, Norfolk and the northern Earls. Three days later, he said that “the Queen his mistress was not fit for any husband,” for she had “poisoned the French King, as he credibly understood,” consented to the murder of Darnley, then “matched with the murderer,” Bothwell, and brought him to Carberry Hill in the hope that he too would be killed. Now she was planning to marry Norfolk, who Leslie believed would not survive long. In the circumstances, little credence can be given to this statement, although some writers have relied on it as evidence that Leslie believed in Mary’s guilt. Dr. Wilson himself was shocked by it, and observed, “Lord, what a people are these! What a Queen, and what an ambassador!”³¹

Two days later, Leslie was made to write to Mary to tell her that he had been forced to confess all he knew about the plot, since her letters had been produced before the Council.³² Mary also received a copy of Buchanan’s book, which Elizabeth had pointedly sent her; she promptly denounced it as “the lewd work of an atheist.” Her detractors have pointed out that she did not specifically comment on the Casket Letters or disclaim authorship of them, but as they were part of the book, and she had denounced it in its entirety, there was no need for her to do so.

Norfolk was condemned to death for high treason on 16 January 1572. For some months, Elizabeth could not bring herself to sign the death warrant. She also resisted the insistent pleas and demands of her government to put Mary to death also, despite having been warned that, until the Scottish Queen was dead, neither her crown nor her life would be secure. It was probably at this time that Elizabeth wrote her famous poem about Mary:

The daughter of debate, that aye discord doth sow,
Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know.

On 26 May, aware that public feeling against Mary was intensifying, the English Parliament drew up a Bill of Attainder listing the Scottish Queen’s offences and depriving her of her claim to the English throne, but it never became law because Elizabeth vetoed it. Instead, she threw Norfolk to the wolves. On 2 June, he was beheaded.

The following August, the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre took place in France, and hundreds of French Protestants were mercilessly slaughtered. Any remaining sympathy that the English may have felt for Mary was extinguished in the ensuing anti-Catholic backlash, and again there were demands for her execution. The English ambassador in Paris did his utmost to persuade the French government that Mary was guilty of multiple adultery, the murder of two husbands, and bigamy. Yet even now, Mary was continuing with her secret intrigues, which moved Charles IX to comment with acute foresight that “the poor fool” would never cease until she lost her head.

In September 1572, in an attempt to shift the problem of what to do with Mary on to the Scots, the English government asked Mar to demand that she be returned to Scotland to face trial for the murder of Darnley, a trial that would almost certainly lead to demands for the extreme penalty. Although Mar personally felt that Mary’s death was “the only salve for the cures of this commonwealth,” the Scottish Lords in general were not in favour of the idea, not wishing to take responsibility for the execution of a queen. Morton said they would agree to the proposal if Elizabeth was prepared to send English troops to stand around the scaffold. Naturally, Elizabeth would not agree to this: she could not be seen to be sanctioning the beheading of a fellow sovereign, so the plan was abandoned.

Once Elizabeth’s resolve not to restore Mary became known in Denmark, Bothwell lost his value as a political prisoner, and King Frederick withdrew his privileges. With them went Bothwell’s hopes of ever regaining his freedom.

Mar died suddenly, “regretted by many,” on 28 October 1572. According to Melville, he became violently ill after dining with Morton at Dalkeith. “Some of his friends and the vulgar suspected he had gotten wrong at his banquet.”³³

A month later, on 24 November, the day Knox died urging Elizabeth “to apply the axe to the root of evil,”³⁴Morton was elected Regent of Scotland, being the fourth man to hold the office since Mary’s deposition. Morton was one of Mary’s most implacable enemies, and he was determined to crush her party; he was to prove an effective, if ruthless and avaricious, regent, and restored relatively stable rule to Scotland whilst maintaining very friendly relations with Elizabeth. Argyll had now established his loyalty to the Lords, and was made Lord High Chancellor by Morton; he died in 1574. Balfour also came to terms with the new Regent, professed the Protestant religion and obtained the reversal of his forfeiture.³⁵ However, he proved something of an embarrassment to Morton, for many were offended that he “should enjoy the benefit of pacification,”³⁶so in 1573 he went to France and Spain, where he tried to raise funds and support for the restoration of the Catholic faith in Scotland.

Since Lennox’s death, Lady Lennox had undergone a change of heart towards Mary. She no longer believed her guilty of Darnley’s murder. Proof of this may be found in a letter from Mary to Archbishop Beaton, dated May 1578, in which Mary states that “this good lady was, thanks to God, in very good correspondence with me these five or six years bygone,” which places the reconciliation around 1572/3. Mary revealed that Lady Lennox had confessed to me, by sundry letters under her hand, which I carefully preserve, the injury she did me by unjust pursuits which she allowed to go out against me in her name, through bad information, but principally, she said, through the express orders of the Queen of England and the persuasion of her Council, who also took much solicitude that she and I might never come to good understanding together. But how soon she came to know of my innocence, she desisted from any further pursuit against me; nay, went so far as to refuse her consent to anything they should act against me in her name.³⁷

We do not know how Lady Lennox came to be convinced of Mary’s innocence, but it is easy to believe that she had been the tool of Elizabeth and her Council. Therefore, she must have had sound reasons for resisting their demands that she continue to spread slanders about Mary.

Under Morton, the last bastions of Marian resistance were destroyed. Blackness Castle, which had been held by Lord Claude Hamilton for a year, fell to the Regent on 10 February 1573. Until now, Chatelherault had remained faithful to the Queen’s cause, but on 23 February, at the entreaty of Elizabeth, he and the rest of the Hamiltons, along with Huntly, were reconciled to Morton at what became known as the Pacification of Perth. This would lead shortly to the final collapse of Mary’s cause in Scotland and the end of the civil war. According to the terms of the Pacification, the lands of the Hamiltons and Gordons were restored, and Archbishop Hamilton was posthumously rehabilitated. Chatelherault retired to Hamilton and died there on 22 January 1575. Huntly died the following year.

Morton was now free to concentrate his efforts on taking Edinburgh Castle, which was the only fortress left in the hands of Mary’s supporters. But Grange had so far successfully resisted his besiegers. In April, at Morton’s invitation, an English army led by Sir William Drury arrived in Edinburgh with its siege guns to boost the Regent’s forces. On 29 May, after thirteen days of massive bombardment that had virtually reduced it to ruins, the once-mighty stronghold fell to Morton, and Mary’s party was finally crushed. Even Seton made his peace with the Regent, and was soon afterwards admitted to the Privy Council.

Grange, Maitland and Lord Home were taken prisoner. Grange was hanged on 3 August at the Mercat Cross.³⁸Home was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle and died there, still a captive, on 11 August 1575. Maitland, who was so ill that he had been carried down to the vaults during the siege, was imprisoned at Leith,³⁹ and would no doubt have met the same fate as Grange had he not either died from a stroke on 8 or 9 June, or taken his own life by poison: Melville claimed that he had committed suicide “after the old Roman fashion.” Morton had his decomposing body brought to trial in its coffin so that he could be condemned as a traitor, an outrage that provoked angry protests from Elizabeth. At her intercession, Morton had the body decently buried.

Shrewsbury reported that, after hearing of Maitland’s death, Mary made “little show of grief, and yet it nips her near.”⁴⁰ Perhaps she had come to realise that Maitland had, in his latter years, been a true friend to her.

Bothwell was first reported to be mad in March 1573. “A man lately out of Sweden reported that the Earl Bothwell was stark mad and had long been so.”⁴¹ It was probably for this reason that, on 16 June that year, Frederick had him transferred to close captivity in “a much worse prison,” the formidable Dragsholm Castle.⁴² In the sixteenth century, insanity was not understood and lunatics were usually kept under lock and key, often in rigorous conditions. Bothwell was now of little use to Frederick, so his immurement had no political consequence.

Dragsholm was a grim thirteenth-century Romanesque fortress situated on the north-west coast of Zealand: in Bothwell’s time, the sea lapped its 8-foot-thick walls, but has since receded. The castle was often used as a state prison, many of its inmates being lodged in rooms in the great north-eastern tower.⁴³Bothwell may have been kept there, but once he disappeared behind the walls of Dragsholm, very little information about him seeped out. Herries, whose source is unknown, wrote: “The King of Denmark cast him in a loathsome prison, where none had access to him, but only those that carried him such scurvy meat and drink as was allowed, which was given in at a little window.” That he was badly treated is confirmed by a French envoy, M. de Thou, who said he had been “thrust into the severest confinement at Dragsholm.” Spottiswoode described it as “a vile and loathsome prison,” and speaks of Bothwell “falling in a frenzy,” which, if he were not obliviously insane already, would surely have been provoked by the rigours of his incarceration, which would have been unbearable for such an active and intelligent man.

In June 1574, Morton made a final attempt to have Bothwell extradited,⁴⁴ as well as the mercenary, John Clerk, who had also been imprisoned at Dragsholm for making a nuisance of himself. But Frederick refused to let either man go.

Late in 1573, the Regent’s spies tracked down and arrested Black Ormiston, who was tried and sentenced to death. On 13 December, before he left his prison in Edinburgh Castle for the scaffold, he made a formal confession of his part in Darnley’s murder to John Brand, Minister of the Canongate Kirk. Some writers believe that Ormiston’s confession is unreliable as evidence, and in some respects this is almost certainly true, for it incorporates glaring errors that make it obvious that Brand was doing his poor best to keep to the official version of events, yet it nevertheless frequently manages to contradict the depositions of Hay, Hepburn, Powrie, Dalgleish and Paris. Seemingly, both Ormiston and Brand had become confused with the passage of time. However, the confession contains no attempt to incriminate the Queen: Ormiston declared that he had never spoken with her about the murder and that when, afterwards, he told her that people were saying he had been present at the scene, she said nothing.⁴⁵ If she knew nothing, she would have been unable to comment. It seems, moreover, that Brand was more concerned to extract information that would incriminate Maitland, who was dead, and Balfour, who had become disaffected from the Regent. Ormiston was executed later that day.

In December 1573, Queen Elizabeth appointed Sir Francis Walsingham her chief Secretary of State in place of Cecil, who had been made Lord Treasurer. Walsingham was a Puritan and an implacable enemy of the Queen of Scots, whom he called “that bosom serpent,” and he would from now on make it his mission in life to bring her to justice. To this end, he set up an efficient and powerful network of spies in order to counteract the Catholic plots that centred upon Mary.

By 1574, Jesuit seminary priests were infiltrating England, their purpose being to undermine Elizabeth’s rule and the Anglican Church, and to work under cover for the re-establishment of the Catholic faith. Soon, there were rumours that Philip of Spain was planning to invade England with the intention of overthrowing Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary, rumours that would alarmingly prove not to be unfounded.

In such a climate, anyone showing themselves sympathetic to Mary’s cause was automatically under suspicion. In September 1574, Lady Lennox was asked by Elizabeth if the rumours of her reconciliation with Mary were true, but she prudently denied it, and wrote to Cecil, now Lord Burghley, I asked Her Majesty if she could think so, for I was made of flesh and blood, and could never forget the murder of my child; and she said nay, by her faith, she could not think that ever I could forget it, for if I would, I were a devil.⁴⁶

On 4 November 1575, after yet another spell in the Tower, this time for marrying off her son Lennox without the Queen’s permission,⁴⁷ Lady Lennox wrote to Mary the letter that is proof of their reconciliation and the ongoing correspondence between them:

It may please Your Majesty, I have received your token, both by your letter and other ways, much to my comfort, especially perceiving that most zealous care Your Majesty hath of our sweet and peerless jewel in Scotland [James]; I have been no less fearful and careful as Your Majesty of him, that the wicked Governor [Morton] should not have power to do ill to his person . . . I beseech Your Majesty, fear not, but trust in God that all shall be well; the treachery of your traitors is known better than before. I shall always play my part to Your Majesty’s content, willing God, so as [He] may tend to both our comforts. And now must I yield to Your Majesty my most humble thanks for your good remembrances. Almighty God grant to Your Majesty long and happy life. Your Majesty’s most humble and loving mother and aunt, M.L.⁴⁸

It is evident from this letter that Lady Lennox had become convinced of the guilt of Morton and his colleagues, hence her fears for James’s safety. Unfortunately, the letter never reached Mary: it was intercepted by spies and sent to Cecil.

That same month, Mary published her Will, in which she bequeathed her claim to the English succession in turn to Elizabeth, then young Lennox, and the rights to the earldom of Angus to Lady Lennox, in defiance of Morton’s claim, which she declared had been invalidated by “his secret understanding with our enemies and rebels that made the enterprise against [Darnley’s] life, and also took up arms and bore banners displayed against me.”⁴⁹ Lennox died in April 1576, leaving his claim to the throne to his infant daughter, Arbella Stuart, but the Scottish Parliament refused to allow her to inherit her father’s title and lands, arguing that these should pass by right to Darnley’s heir, James VI. After the death of her only surviving son, Lady Lennox suffered a “languishing decline.”⁵⁰

In 1575, Mary made another attempt to have her marriage to Bothwell annulled, on the grounds that he had not been properly divorced from his first wife, and that he had taken Mary by force. Leslie, recently released from the Tower, was sent to Rome to present evidence in support of her suit.⁵¹ In August 1576, several depositions from key witnesses were transcribed in Paris.⁵² This evidence is still in the Vatican Library, but there is no record of an annulment having been granted.

This was perhaps because, from late 1575 onwards, there were several false reports of Bothwell’s death. On 24 November, Cecil wrote: “There came news out of Denmark that the Earl Bothwell and Captain Clerk were dead in prison. Howbeit, since that, the death of Captain Clerk is confirmed, and that Bothwell is but great swollen and not dead.”⁵³

But the rumours persisted—Bothwell was again reported dead late in 1577—and it was also said that, prior to 1573, the ailing Earl, believing himself to be on his deathbed, had made a written testament in which he confessed that he had killed Darnley with the connivance of Moray, Maitland and Morton, and “testified by his soul[’s] salvation to [Mary’s] innocence.” Hearing these rumours, Mary naturally desired to gain possession of this testament, and on 1 June 1576, wrote to Archbishop Beaton asking him to make inquiries on her behalf. At the end of July, Beaton regretfully informed her that, although he had sent a courier to Denmark to find out more, it would prove too expensive (probably in bribes to courtiers, officials and gaolers) to investigate the matter. On 6 January 1577, Mary informed Beaton that Frederick had sent a copy of the testament to Elizabeth, who naturally kept it secret.

Mary and Nau continued to believe in the testament’s authenticity, but it can now be established from the abstracts that are extant that, if it existed at all, it was a forgery. Two of those listed as witnesses were already dead when they were supposed to have signed it, and it contains far-fetched allegations that Grange, Boyd and Lord Robert Stewart were among the murderers. It was probably the work of a well-meaning but misguided supporter of the Queen, who was zealous to proclaim her innocence.

On 9 March 1578, Lady Lennox died, having been seized with violent pains only hours after dining with Leicester. There was talk that he had poisoned her, but unfounded popular rumour credited him with the deaths of several other people, among them his first wife: several unproven allegations appear in a scurrilous tract entitled Leicester’s Commonwealth, which was published in 1584. Lady Lennox had been ailing for some time, and it has been claimed that Leicester would have had no motive for killing her.⁵⁴That is not quite true. Leicester was staunchly loyal to Elizabeth, and it was well known in court circles that Lady Lennox, that inveterate intriguer, was in regular correspondence with Mary, which would certainly have aroused suspicions and anxieties in Elizabeth. After the Countess’s death, Leicester took her steward, Thomas Fowler, into his service, probably in order to gain access to her papers, of which Fowler apparently had custody. Leicester may have believed that among those papers was to be found the evidence for Lady Lennox’s change of heart towards Mary, which, if it got into the wrong hands and were made public, could seriously compromise Elizabeth’s policy of keeping Mary in custody. So there were good reasons for murdering Lady Lennox, even though it can never be certain that Leicester did so.

The Countess was buried in Westminster Abbey in a splendid tomb surmounted by her painted effigy and adorned with kneeling figures of her eight children. The statue of Darnley is distinguished by a crown suspended above the head and an ermine mantle, denoting his royal but uncrowned status. Her son Lennox was interred with her.

Three days after Lady Lennox’s death, Atholl and the new Earl of Argyll brought off a coup against their old enemy, Morton, and forced him to resign from the Regency. Having gained control of the eleven-year-old James VI, they had him declare himself of age. Real power, however, would remain in the hands of a regency Council headed by Atholl, who was appointed Chancellor of Scotland on 29 March. But Morton had no intention of relinquishing power. At the beginning of June, he effected a counter-coup and regained control of the King and the Regency, conceding that Atholl and Argyll should assist him in the government. When Atholl died unexpectedly, in April 1579, Morton was suspected of poisoning him, although this was never proved.

At Dragsholm, the crazed Bothwell had been held in increasingly vile conditions. It is often stated that he was chained to a pillar in such a way that he was unable to stand upright, but there is no contemporary evidence for this allegation, which rests on a local tradition that was related to the Earl’s biographer, Gore-Browne, when he visited Dragsholm in 1935.⁵⁵ But many of Bothwell’s contemporaries testify to his insanity, notably Herries, Buchanan, Melville, the French envoy de Thou, and Maitland’s brother John, who, during a visit to Copenhagen in 1590, heard how Bothwell had become “distracted of his wits or senses.” Herries also says that the Earl was “overgrown with hair and filth.” Buchanan states that he “was driven mad by the filth and other discomforts of his dungeon.” The cessation of entries relating to expenses for Bothwell in the castle accounts in the spring of 1576 gives credence to these reports.

In the end, this cruel treatment claimed its victim. Bothwell “died miserably”⁵⁶on 14 April 1578. What was almost certainly his body was embalmed and placed in an oak coffin and buried beneath the nave of Faarvejle Church, twenty miles from Dragsholm. In 1858, the coffin was opened and the body found to be in a good state of preservation, having been naturally mummified by the salty sea air; the head had become detached, and lay below the shoulder; it was taken away and placed on a writing table in the castle for a time. Thereafter, the mummy was displayed under glass in a shallow crypt until 1970, when, at the instigation of the future Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, it was buried in Riis’s Chapel, an annexe to the church. Although there is no inscription on the coffin, this body was obviously that of a nobleman, since it rested on a white satin cushion and was shrouded in fine linen and silks, so it is unlikely to have been that of Captain Clerk, as has been suggested.⁵⁷ The body measured about 5 feet 6 inches long; in the nineteenth century there were traces of red and silver hair on the skull, and in 1935 Gore-Browne observed a faint white scar on the temple, probably the result of the wound dealt by Jock Elliott in October 1566. In 1976, a move to have the body returned to Scotland ended in failure.⁵⁸

There is no record of Mary’s reaction to the death of Bothwell. In 1580, in liaison with the Spanish ambassador in London, she embarked on a fresh round of dangerous plotting against Elizabeth. That year, Pope Gregory XIII ruled that whoever sent the English Queen out of the world “with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin, but gains merit.” In Mary’s eyes, this would have justified all her future conspiracies against Elizabeth.

In March, Mary learned that Balfour, then in the Netherlands, was offering to provide evidence to incriminate Morton in the murder of Darnley in return for permission to re-enter Scotland unmolested and the restoration of his Scottish estates, an offer that was to be enthusiastically taken up by Morton’s enemies, who were again looking for an excuse to topple him. Balfour was doubtless hoping to ensure that he would not be in danger of prosecution if he returned to Scotland; of all those who had been involved in Darnley’s murder, most were dead, but Morton was not only still alive but in power, and must be neutralised. Mary also had an interest in Balfour’s evidence, and on 18 March asked Archbishop Beaton to secure possession of it, especially the murder Bond that Morton was supposed to have signed.⁵⁹In response, Balfour sent Mary such evidence as he had, but it apparently did not amount to much, and it certainly did not include the Bond. In May, Mary told Beaton that they should play along with Balfour, evidently hoping that more documents could be extracted from him.

Balfour spent several months negotiating the terms of his return with King James and Morton’s enemies, and on 12 December 1580, he arrived in Edinburgh and was granted a private audience with the young King. James was now heavily reliant on his handsome but ruthless French-born cousin, the pro-Catholic Esmé Stuart, Count of Aubigny: having conceived an adolescent passion for Stuart, he had created him Earl of Lennox on 5 March 1580. Lennox was ambitious and wanted Morton ousted from power, and it was he who headed this new conspiracy against the Regent, which was backed by Ochiltree’s son, Captain James Stewart, another royal favourite who was soon to be created Earl of Arran by James. Lennox was aware of Balfour’s Catholic sympathies and confident that his testimony would bring down the Regent, for Balfour had assured Lennox that he did indeed hold the murder Bond, and that Morton’s signature was on it.

On 31 December 1580, in front of the King and his Council, Captain Stewart fell on his knees, denounced Morton for having conspired in Darnley’s murder, and demanded his arrest. Morton contemptuously denied the charge, insisting that it was well known that he had punished with the utmost rigour every person who had been involved in the late King’s death.

“It is false!” cried Stewart. “Where have you placed your cousin, Archibald Douglas? Does not that most infamous of men now pollute the bench of justice with his presence,⁶⁰ instead of suffering the penalty due to the murderer of his sovereign?”⁶¹ At this, Morton drew his sword, but he was seized and, with the other Lords present loudly supporting the charge, placed under arrest and confined in Edinburgh Castle, the King making no move to save him. In January, Morton was transferred to a prison cell in Dumbarton Castle.⁶² Elizabeth, meanwhile, was making frantic but fruitless efforts to save him, which suggests that she was perhaps fearful of what might be revealed at his trial, but his other “friends” had abandoned him, “for he was loved by none and envied and hated by many, so they all looked through their fingers to see his fall.”⁶³

Sir William Douglas, Archibald Douglas and other members of Morton’s family were also summoned to answer charges. Sir William was banished beyond the Firth of Cromarty in the far north. The Laird of Whittinghame, Archibald’s brother, revealed under interrogation that Archibald had forged letters in an attempt to bring down Lennox;⁶⁴as has been noted, these may not have been the first incriminating letters that he had forged. Furthermore, it was almost certainly he who had actually struck down Darnley. But Douglas, alerted by the Regent’s apprehension, had already fled to England, and thus managed to evade arrest, for Elizabeth adamantly refused to deliver him up to James VI. In his absence, his lands were declared forfeit, and his servant, John Binning, was arrested.

Morton’s removal from power left Scotland in the hands of a clique that was sympathetic to Mary, and paved the way for schemes for her restoration as joint ruler with her son. But, while Elizabeth affected to support such schemes, they never reached a satisfactory conclusion because there were so many conflicting interests involved. Even though the truth about Darnley’s murder was now well known, Mary was still being punished for it.

On 30 January, Balfour asked Mary to produce an affidavit containing everything that she knew about the Darnley murder. This, of course, did not amount to much. In March, Thomas Randolph, the English agent, informed Lords Hunsdon and Huntingdon: “I spoke again of the Bond in the green box, containing the names of all the chief persons consenting to the King’s murder, which Sir James [Balfour] either hath or can tell of.”⁶⁵ But Balfour had still not shown anyone the Bond.

Morton’s trial took place at the Edinburgh Tolbooth on 1 June. He was accused of having been “art and part” of Darnley’s murder, and in answer to the charge, “granted that he was made privy thereto, but had no hand in devising thereof.”⁶⁶Balfour testified against him, but failed to produce the murder Bond; he had probably never had it in the first place. Morton was found guilty of treason, declared forfeit, and condemned to be hanged and quartered the very next day, but King James commuted the sentence to decapitation.

Before his execution, Morton made a confession to John Brand and two other ministers of the Kirk, which was first published in the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. This is not the full text of the original, since Holinshed admitted that he had omitted sensitive passages that mentioned “great persons now living,” who may have included Queen Elizabeth herself, and possibly Mary: anything favourable to Mary would have been unwelcome in the political climate that prevailed in England at the time. There are manuscript copies of the confession extant, but they too may have been censored. In his confession, Morton admitted that he had with others foreknown the crime, but that nothing had been done to prevent it because it was known that the Queen of Scots desired it, which is what he had been told by Bothwell and Maitland. He also confessed to meeting with those men at Whittinghame and to receiving Archibald Douglas after the murder.

Morton was beheaded on 2 June 1581 in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh on a guillotine known as “the Maiden,” which he himself had introduced from Halifax as a more humane method of execution. “He died resolutely” with his hands untied, and his head was set up on a spike above the Tolbooth, where it remained until December 1582.⁶⁷ Mary professed herself “most glad” at his passing.⁶⁸

The next day, John Binning, Archibald Douglas’s servant, was put to the torture, and revealed Douglas’s part in Darnley’s murder. He was tried and condemned,⁶⁹ then hanged and quartered at the Mercat Cross that same day. In 1582, another of Archibald Douglas’s men, George Home, Laird of Sprott, was tried for complicity in Darnley’s murder but acquitted.

On 19 June 1581, James VI reached the age of fifteen, and assumed personal rule. He had done with regents, preferring to rely on the counsels of Esmé Stuart, who was created Duke of Lennox in August 1582. That month, hardline Protestants led by William Ruthven, now Earl of Gowrie, kidnapped the King and forced Lennox to flee to France, where he died in 1583. James escaped from his captors in June 1583 and reasserted his authority as King.

Meanwhile, there had been a new conspiracy to place Mary on the throne of England, hatched by the Guises, the Pope, Philip of Spain and the Jesuits. In October 1582, Walsingham discovered that Mary was communicating in cipher with her foreign allies, and her correspondence was thereafter vetted and she herself kept under closer surveillance. At this time, Elizabeth again taxed Mary with the murder of Darnley. Mary demanded to have any charges put in writing before she answered them, but this was never done, exposing Elizabeth’s words as an idle threat. In the wake of Morton’s execution, Elizabeth would have been on very tenuous grounds had she formally accused Mary of murdering Darnley. On 21 November, an aggrieved Mary wrote a scathing letter to Elizabeth, accusing her of bringing about her downfall:

By the agents, spies and secret messengers sent in your name into Scotland while I was there, my subjects were corrupted and encouraged to rebel against me, and to speak, do, enterprise and execute that which has come to the said country during my troubles. Of which I will not at present specify any proof, than that which I have gained of it by the confession of one who was afterwards amongst those that were most advanced for their good service.⁷⁰

Mary was apparently referring to Morton.

Balfour, who had almost certainly been a leading player in the Darnley murder, died in his bed in 1583. He “had served with all parties, had deserved all, yet had profited by all.”⁷¹ Mary called him “a traitor who offered himself first to one party and then to the other.”⁷² Yet, of all those who had been involved in the Darnley conspiracy, he was one of the few who met a peaceful end.

Between April and November 1583, Archibald Douglas, now in France, was doing his best to ingratiate himself with Mary in the hope that she would be a suitor to James VI on his behalf. On 12 November, Mary wrote to Castelnau that she had promised to do her best for Douglas, but desired to know “the main cause of his banishment, for if he is in any way connected with the death of the late King my husband, I will never intercede for him.”⁷³ Soon afterwards, Douglas wrote to her, stating that in 1566, Moray, Atholl, Bothwell, Argyll and other Lords had entered into a bond with the then exiled Lords to have nothing to do with Darnley as King, and to sue for the return of the exiles; this, he said, had been discussed at the Craigmillar Conference. Douglas naturally made no mention of the murder Bond. He added that he had been chosen as the intermediary between the Lords and the exiles.

Around this time, the plot to place Mary on the English throne was revealed to the English government by one of its participants, Francis Throckmorton, who was later executed. Mary was heavily implicated, as was the Spanish ambassador, who was expelled. Elizabeth was urged to bring Mary to justice, but refused out of hand.

In May 1584, after he had again been discovered conspiring against James VI, the Earl of Gowrie was executed; it was at this time that the Casket Letters came into the possession of the King. Neither James nor his mother had any reason to love the Ruthven family, and when, in 1600, the Earl’s sons were involved in another treasonable plot, Parliament ruled that the name of Ruthven be abolished for all time. The last of the line died in the Tower of London in 1652, nearly a century after Patrick, Lord Ruthven had burst into Mary’s supper chamber at Holyrood and demanded that Rizzio leave it.

Mary was gratified by the punishment meted out to Gowrie, and soon afterwards sent a messenger to James to demand the head of Lindsay also, which she had sworn she would have after Carberry Hill. James, however, contented himself with imprisoning Lindsay at Tantallon Castle. Lindsay died in 1589.

Walsingham still feared that Mary was plotting against Elizabeth, and in August 1584, he tightened the security net around her. The next month, he showed Elizabeth a letter that convinced her that Mary was again conspiring to overthrow her. This led in October to the famous Bond of Association, whereby thousands of English gentlemen pledged themselves under oath to take up arms and destroy Mary if it became known that, knowingly or otherwise, she was the focus of any plot against the Queen’s life. The principles of this bond were enshrined in the Act of Association, passed by Parliament in February 1585. The following month, King James wrote to his mother to tell her that it was impossible to ally himself with her because she was “captive in a desert”; in truth, he was anxious not to jeopardise his hopes of the English succession by favouring one who was regarded with such deep suspicion by the English. In May, he concluded a treaty with Elizabeth that made it clear that he had abandoned all ideas of sharing sovereignty with his mother and implied that Mary was to remain in captivity. For Mary, this was a devastating betrayal that marked the end of her long-cherished hopes of freedom and restoration. Deeply embittered, she resolved to bequeath her crown and her dynastic claim to England to Philip of Spain, effectively disinheriting her son.

Increasing demands that Mary be kept under stricter surveillance led in April 1585 to the appointment of the sternly puritanical disciplinarian, Sir Amyas Paulet, as her custodian. Under his rule, Mary was allowed no visitors and no correspondence.

In May 1586, nearly twenty years after the event, Archibald Douglas was at last tracked down and tried for the murder of Darnley. The trial—which was the last of those related to the crime—was a farce, since Douglas had in his possession evidence of collusion between the English and Scottish governments, and Elizabeth bribed James to ensure a favourable verdict, even though most people now knew that Douglas was the man who had killed Darnley. Of the nineteen chosen jurors, ten deemed it unwise to put in an appearance, and their places were filled by ten others “who happened to be at the bar,” amongst them Douglas’s man, George Home. The court was packed with the Douglases and their supporters.

The depositions of Ormiston, Hay, Paris and Binning were offered in evidence, despite the fact that there was no reference to Douglas in any of them. No witnesses were called to testify against the accused. In his defence, Douglas stated he could not have lost his velvet mule at Kirk o’Field because he was not wearing it, since the road that led there from his house was too rough for a man in armour to walk on in slippers. At the end of the day, he was pronounced “clean and acquit of being in company with Bothwell, Ormiston, Hay and Hepburn in committing the crime.”⁷⁴Douglas’s rehabilitation led to his being restored to his lands and appointed ambassador to England.

Douglas’s acquittal and the treachery of her son may have been factors in Mary’s decision, made in July 1586, to approve the plan of a young Catholic gentleman, Anthony Babington, to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her with the Scottish Queen. Mary was unaware that Walsingham was being sent all her letters and had in fact set up the means by which she was able to smuggle them out to her friends, and she walked straight into his trap when, against Nau’s advice, she approved in writing Babington’s treasonable conspiracy. After nineteen years in unjust captivity, she was desperate for freedom and the opportunity to win by force that which she believed to be hers by right. She was so detached from reality that she had little idea that she was hated and feared by the majority of Elizabeth’s subjects.

Elizabeth reacted to news of the plot with panic, and had the cousin whom she referred to as a “wicked murderess” arrested on 9 August. The English government could now proceed against Mary under the Act of Association. Under questioning, Nau admitted sending her letter and did not refute its contents. Mary saw this as a betrayal, but it was no more than the truth.

Babington and his associates were tried and condemned on 13 September, and executed a week later with horrific barbarity. On 25 September, Mary was moved to mediaeval Fortheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire to await trial. Thirty-six commissioners appointed by Elizabeth assembled there on 11 October, but Mary insisted that no court was competent to try her since she was “a queen and sovereign” and not one of Elizabeth’s subjects. But when Elizabeth wrote that it was her will that Mary answer the charges “as if I were myself present,” Mary capitulated, although she continued to refuse to acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction.

Her trial took place on 15 and 16 October. Although Mary put up a spirited defence and denied all the charges, its outcome was a foregone conclusion, for the evidence was incontrovertible. But just as the commissioners were about to give their verdict, Elizabeth’s messenger arrived, proroguing the court to the Star Chamber at Westminster, to meet again in ten days’ time. There, on 25 October, Mary was pronounced guilty. Four days later, Parliament ratified the verdict and pressed for “a just sentence”; in their view, there could only be one just sentence.

Elizabeth embarked on her usual stalling tactics, but Parliament was determined to resolve the problem of the Queen of Scots for good. On 12 November, it petitioned Elizabeth to have Mary executed. Elizabeth was plunged into an agony of indecision. Mary was undoubtedly guilty and had increasingly menaced Elizabeth’s security ever since the latter’s accession in 1558. On the other hand, Elizabeth knew that executing an anointed queen would establish a dangerous precedent and undermine the whole institution of monarchy, which she held as sacred, and she feared the reaction of Catholic Europe, and her Catholic subjects, if she took such a drastic step. Over the years, it had been Elizabeth, with her hatred of bloodshed, who time and again had intervened to save Mary’s life, even when Mary had plotted against hers; now she was being pressurised to kill her. Understandably, she refused. But the demands of Parliament and her Council for justice grew ever more insistent. At last, on 1 February 1587, Elizabeth gave way and signed Mary’s death warrant, which was immediately sent by her Councillors to Fotheringhay. Later, she would deny that she had authorised its dispatch and punish those concerned.

The warrant arrived on 7 February, and Mary was told to prepare for death on the morrow. That night, she wrote her last letter, to Henry III of France,⁷⁵ in which she protested that she would meet death “innocent of any crime”: as a devout Catholic, she would not have counted the assassination of the heretical Elizabeth as a crime because the Pope had sanctioned and urged it, but she was almost certainly also referring to the murder of Darnley. She further asserted that “the Catholic faith and the assertion of my God-given right to the English crown are the two issues on which I am condemned.”⁷⁶In her own eyes, she was dying as a martyr for her faith.

The following morning, she walked calmly to the scaffold in the great hall of the castle, and there, before a large concourse of people, removed her black gown to reveal a kirtle of red, the Catholic colour of martyrdom. It took three strokes to sever her head, but she was probably unconscious after the first. Afterwards, her body was sealed in a lead coffin and stored in the castle until late July, when Elizabeth authorised its burial in Peterborough Cathedral. There was a solemn funeral with the banners of Mary, Francis II and Darnley hung on the pillars of the nave; Bothwell’s was deliberately omitted. In his funeral sermon, the Protestant Dean of Peterborough could not resist raking up old scandals and portraying Mary’s execution as divine retribution: “The day [of the execution] being very fair did, as it were, show favour from Heaven and commended the justice; the eighth day of February, that judgement was repaid home to her, which the tenth day of the same month, twenty years past, she measured to her husband.”⁷⁷

But Mary’s courageous demeanour on the scaffold obliterated for many—as it still does—the earlier image of her as an adulteress and murderess, and led to perceptions of her as a tragic heroine rather than a fallen woman.

When Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603, James VI of Scotland succeeded her as James I of England, and Mary’s and Maitland’s vision of the union of the crowns was fulfilled. However, this was a Protestant union, and Mary’s hopes of the two kingdoms being returned to the Church of Rome were never to be realised.

Although James had loudly condemned his mother’s execution, he did not allow it to prejudice his friendship with Elizabeth nor his hopes of the English succession. But his conscience remained disquieted, and in 1612, to ease it, he translated Mary’s remains to a magnificent tomb in Westminster Abbey, in the opposite side chapel of the Henry VII Chapel to that where Elizabeth lay. Mary’s tomb is next to that of Lady Lennox, and bears a beautiful effigy of white marble. She lies among the English monarchs, whose throne she so coveted in life but was destined never to occupy.

It is said that James also ordered the demolition of Fotheringhay Castle, but in fact he sold it off. It was already decaying and was described as ruinous in 1635, ten years after James’s death. It was later dismantled and its stones used for local buildings. The staircase down which Mary walked to her execution is now in the Talbot Hotel at Oundle, which was built in 1626. All that remains of Fotheringhay today is the grassy mound on which it once stood and a single block of masonry.

Most of those who had been involved in one way or another in Darnley’s murder had now died or come to a violent end. Only Archibald Douglas, the actual murderer, survived in prosperity.

Given the nature of the circumstantial evidence against Mary, it is not surprising that so many writers have concluded, with the Dean of Peterborough, that her execution was a just punishment for one who had killed her husband. But it can be demonstrated again and again—and has been in this text—that the bulk of the evidence against Mary is flawed. Apart from the notorious Casket Letters and the highly dubious deposition of Paris, there is no documentary evidence of an adulterous relationship with Bothwell, nor is there any contemporary evidence that Mary plotted Darnley’s death. Leaving aside the later libels and the claims of her enemies, who had powerful motives for constructing a case against her, there is nothing but the often ill-informed opinions of historians to condemn her. The arguments for her innocence are many, and have been well rehearsed in the foregoing chapters. Taken together, they constitute a strong case in her defence.

It is easy to see why Mary’s detractors consider her guilty. Even after extensive research, I believed, as I began to write this book, that Mary was guilty. But when I came to analyse the source material in depth, it became increasingly obvious that such a conclusion was not possible. Mary’s own reluctance to answer the Lords’ charges against her has been seen as suspicious, but it clearly arose from her conviction that she was not answerable to anyone but her equal, Elizabeth, rather than from a wish to evade awkward questions. It has been said that she never directly refuted the charges, but, as we have seen, that is not so.

Mary’s poor judgement repeatedly served her ill. Her imprudent marriage to Darnley, her rash favour shown to Rizzio and her utterly foolish decision to flee to Protestant England rather than Catholic France, and to ask for succour from a queen whose throne she had laid claim to, all contributed to her ruin. Yet she had no control over the events that overtook her, the plotting that led to Darnley’s death, and her own frail health which prevented her from responding to his murder as her contemporaries expected. Nor, as an inexperienced Catholic female sovereign, could she halt the reformist movement in Scotland, of which her removal from power was a natural progression. Instead, in an age that did not understand religious tolerance, she followed a policy of conciliation whilst making the right noises to the Pope about the restoration of Catholicism, and consequently lost credibility with both sides. Her tragedy was that she was in many respects innately unsuited for the role to which she had been born. Compared with her cousin Elizabeth, she was a political innocent, and as such she was thrust into a situation in which a seasoned, hard-headed male ruler might have floundered.

No court of law would today convict Mary of the charges laid against her by the Lords. The integrity of her character is well attested by the opinions of those who faithfully served her over a period of many years. That she was the object of an extended campaign of character assassination is beyond doubt. Furthermore, since so much of the evidence of her enemies has been discredited, doubt must be cast on the rest. Mary paid a high price for the ambitions of others: she paid for it in the loss of her throne, the long years of captivity, separation and alienation from her only living child, and her own violent death. In the circumstances, she must, with justice, be regarded as one of the most wronged women in history.