CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Breakdown

‘He misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.’

Maitland: On the relations between Mary and Darnley,
October 1566

It was easy enough, once Mary was back in Edinburgh, to rescue the body of Riccio from its common grave and have it reburied according to the Catholic rite he had professed, in her own chapel royal.* Ten days later Riccio’s brother, Joseph, a boy of eighteen, was made French secretary in his place. Mary, being anxious not to rule over a torn kingdom on the eve of the birth of her child, also took the trouble to reconcile Moray, Glencairn, and Argyll, recently allowed back into her favour, with Huntly, Bothwell and Atholl; together these two groups were now to make up the effective body of the Privy Council. Mary’s vengeance was thus officially reserved for the brutal murderers of her servant who had actually burst into her apartments – Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay and their minions. But as they were now safely escaped to England, the only two lives which were actually forfeited for the crime were those of two of Ruthven’s retainers: Tom Scott, under-sheriff of Perth, whose official position of ‘warding the Queen within Holyrood’ made his crime especially reprehensible, and Henry Yair who had killed the Dominican priest Father Black shortly after the murder of the Italian, and was executed the following August. Two other underlings, Mowbray and Harlaw, were released at the scaffold when the queen, characteristically moved by mercy, ‘gave them their lives’.¹ Yet the murder of the Italian had marked a turning-point in the affairs of Mary Queen of Scots, and the memories of the affair were not so easily laid in peace and forgotten, as his poor lacerated corpse.

The most obvious result of the affair was Mary’s abiding hatred of Darnley. She had either concealed this in order to escape from Holyrood or else she did not at this point realize the full extent of her husband’s complicity. Although she told Nau that Darnley had admitted to her on the Sunday that he had signed a bond to procure the crown matrimonial, and Leslie repeats the story, she did not mention the fact in her letter to Beaton of 2nd April. Whether Mary knew beforehand or not, the conspirators now took the understandable if vindictive step of sending the bond to the queen, so that she should see for herself the full extent of her husband’s treachery. Yet once more Mary was obliged to put a good face upon the situation for the time being, and issue a public statement of his innocence at the market cross. It was not within the compass of her thoughts to take any action against her husband before the birth of her child, since Darnley was quite capable of casting doubts upon the child’s legitimacy, if it suited his purpose. Although there were already rumours of a divorce between the two by the end of April – Randolph said Thornton had gone to Rome to treat about it – Mary, like all the Scots, had heard far too many arguments over the legitimacy of heirs, as the result of the subsequent divorces of their parents, to risk considering the subject before her child was actually born. In May there was another rumour from Randolph that Darnley would leave Scotland after the birth of the baby, and go to Flanders. He described Darnley’s new situation thus: ‘He is neither accompanied for, nor looked for by any nobleman, attended by certain of his own servants, and six or eight of his guard, he is at liberty to do or go what or where he will.’² In his reflective moments Darnley must have realized that this aimless freedom might in fact be the deceptive liberty in Scotland – the queen, Moray and his associates, Bothwell and the loyalist nobles, he had betrayed them all or tried to attack them at one or other point in his career. Should these potential enemies flag, there was also a whole new ferocious band of them headed by Morton, now in England, who might not stay there forever.

Mary’s relations with Darnley settled down into an uneasy truce until the birth of her child. Darnley had not reformed his behaviour: during her confinement he ‘vagabondized every night’.³ In these circumstances it was natural that Mary should come to rely increasingly for political advice on those nobles who had proved themselves loyal to her throughout the two crises which she had faced in the past year.* Into this category fell notably James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, who as he leapt clear of the lion-pit at Holyrood, and rode off to summon Mary’s subjects successfully to her assistance, seemed to display that combination of resource, loyalty and strength which Mary had so persistently sought among her Scottish nobles. Now that he was reconciled with Moray, and firmly allied by marriage to Huntly, he seemed set in Mary’s estimation to form a useful loyal member of the Scottish polity. Yet Bothwell in his character seemed to sum up those very paradoxical contrasts which made it so difficult for anyone not brought up among them to understand the nature and behaviour of the Scottish nobles. For whereas Darnley by reason of his English royal blood and English upbringing was atypical of the Scottish nobility, Bothwell shared the turbulent contentious characteristics of his class – and it was this class whose motives and actions Queen Mary was never able to predict successfully. In the past she had been baffled and angered by Huntly, puzzled and hurt by Moray, appalled and shocked by Morton. Now she was once again, by the unwitting fault of her French upbringing, to make a mistake of judgement, and see in Bothwell the mirage – it was no more than that – of a strong wise protector, able to solve her problems by holding down the other nobles under his heel.

Bothwell was not a stupid man; he had been well educated by his kinsman the bishop of Moray, as his letters and writing show, and his books included volumes on both mathematics and the arts of war. He was well travelled: in Denmark he had picked up a Norwegian mistress, Anna Throndsen, whom he had seduced under promise of marriage; and it was seeking funds to support himself on this occasion that he had first met Queen Mary at the French court. He had made several expeditions to France, and spoke French himself. He was adventurous by nature, and his life (he was at this date about thirty) had already been full of ups and downs; apart from his imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle he had done a spell in the Tower of London in 1564 while trying to escape to France. When Mary sent for him at the time of the Chaseabout Raid, he arrived in a fishing boat from Flushing, eluding capture by the English. He came of the great border family of Hepburns, and in feudal terms his power stretched across the south-east of Scotland, with certain specifically family dominions, and the wardship of other royal castles (such as Hermitage and Dunbar) dependent on royal favour. Bothwell, like all his class, was keenly interested in the acquisition of such royal castles for the family interest, and official positions such as lieutenant of the borders had the natural corollary for him of the extension of his family’s power. His family, and indeed he himself, suffered from the proverbial pennilessness of the contemporary nobles, and his marriage contract to Jean Gordon shows that he was heavily in debt at the time. In the past there had been something amounting to a family tradition for the Hepburns to attempt to improve their fortunes by favour of widowed queens. Bothwell’s own father, Patrick, the Fair Earl, had courted Mary of Guise throughout the winter of 1543* in a ludicrous competition for her affections with Lennox (by a curious coincidence, to be Mary Stuart’s father-in-law) in which fine clothes played an important part. An earlier Patrick Hepburn had been linked with the widow of James I, and an Adam Hepburn with Mary of Guelders. After the battle of Pinkie Cleugh Bothwell’s father even negotiated with the English to marry an English princess in return for handing over the castle of Hermitage. In their marriage projects Hepburns had tried without success to become the Habsburgs of Scotland.

Yet the effect of Bothwell’s concentration on the possibilities of the main chance was in fact to give him a far better record of loyalty to the central government – in the shape of Mary of Guise and her daughter – than most of his contemporaries. In the same way his religious attitudes showed a real degree of consistency. He refused to marry Jean Gordon according to the Catholic rite, despite Queen Mary’s pressure, and was described by Randolph as being one of those very strong against the Mass.⁶ His critics retaliated by accusing him of being interested in the black arts which he was thought to have acquired during his education in France. La Mothe Fenélon told Charles IX that Bothwell had principally used his time at the schools in Paris to read and study sorcery and magic. At any rate his ambition was certainly boundless: as the memoirs of Lord Herries put it, he was a man ‘high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition’.⁷ But his brain and methods were the reverse of Machiavellian, and to consider his political acumen in the same category as that of Cecil, in the sense that he now became the adviser on whom Mary relied, as Elizabeth relied on her secretary, is to demonstrate how very retarded sixteenth-century Scotland was, in political terms, compared to sixteenth-century England.

It was significant that at two crucial moments in his career – in November 1560 serving Mary of Guise against the insurgents under Châtelherault, and in June 1567 before Carberry Hill – Bothwell issued a challenge for personal combat with his enemies; as a feudal baron, and primarily a soldier, he was apt to choose the quick, if bloody, solution to any problem. It was true that during his brief spell as the queen’s husband Bothwell showed signs of a certain administrative ability, as a soldier can sometimes make a successful politician in a crisis; in the same way the coarse-grained Morton made not a bad showing as regent from the administrative point of view. But Bothwell’s personal qualities negated his usefulness in any delicate situation, and made him the last person to unite successfully that essentially disunited and suspicious body, the Scottish nobility. For one thing, Bothwell’s violence and his boastfulness (when Throckmorton called him a ‘glorious, rash and hazardous young man’ he was of course using the word glorious in the derogatory sense of vainglorious) scarcely led to popularity. Violence in matters of policy was accompanied by a streak of roughness, verging on bullying in private life. His servant Paris testified that he had kicked him in the stomach when Paris tried to argue with him.⁸ He was certainly not a man who was prepared to try using charm to gain his objectives: as Mary told Nau, ‘he was a man whose natural disposition made him anything but agreeable or inclined to put himself to much trouble or inconvenience to gain the goodwill of those with whom he had been associated’.⁹ Bothwell’s relations with women fell into the same adventurous but straightforward pattern as his career. Although interested in women, he drew a sharp and effective distinction between sex and marriage: Anna Throndsen never did secure the marriage contract she desired and departed disconsolately to her home some time in 1563. His name was also linked with that of the legendary Janet Beaton, aunt of the queen’s Marie, made famous as Sir Walter Scott’s Wizard Lady of Branxholm, who could bond to her bidding ‘the viewless forms of air’: this remarkable lady enjoyed five husbands – the last at the age of sixty-one – and a number of lovers in the course of a long and full life. When she became Bothwell’s mistress, he was twenty-four and she many years older, her unfading beauty generally attributed to the practice of magic, a subject she may have had in common with her lover. Despite the difference in their ages, they may have gone through some sort of ceremony of ‘hand-fasting’, Bothwell being fascinated by her combination of audacity, determination and sexuality. But it was finally Jean Gordon, the comparatively rich sister of the powerful Huntly, whom Bothwell actually married, the marriage contract making it clear that it was the bride who was making the settlement on the groom rather than the other way round. Bothwell evidently regarded lust as a simple sensation to be quickly gratified. The deposition of Thomas Craigwallis at the time of his divorce gave an evocative picture of his relations with his mistress, pretty little black-eyed Bessie Crawford, the blacksmith’s daughter – a fifteen-minute rendezvous in the steeple of the abbey at Haddington, and another tryst in a mid-chamber of the kitchen tower at Crichton (Thomas remaining at the door); a subsequent encounter took place ‘in a chamber within the cloister’ according to Pareis Sempill’s evidence, ‘and when my lord came forth his clothes were loose, and Patrick Wilson helped him up therewith’.¹⁰ Marriage on the other hand was a more serious business to be undertaken for the positive motive of gain.

In appearance Bothwell lacked the hermaphrodite beauty of a Darnley; he was only of middle stature, compared to Darnley’s slender height – his mummified corpse at Dragsholm measures five feet six inches. Although those who had reason to deplore his influence over Mary Stuart, like Brantôme and Buchanan, rather childishly described him as having been hideously ugly – ‘like an ape in purple’ said Buchanan – another of Mary’s partisans, Leslie, said that he was of great bodily strength and beauty, although vicious and dissolute in his habits.¹¹ The only known portrait traditionally said to be of him – a miniature now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery – shows a face which is certainly not conventionally handsome; there is even something simian here to confirm Buchanan’s insults; the complexion is swarthy, the nose appears to have been broken, the ears large and slightly protruding, the lips under their carefully trained moustache with its curling ends are full and sensual, the eyes look suspiciously out of the picture like those of a watchful animal. It is the face of a man who might well prove attractive to certain types of women, because it is strong and vital, yet from another point of view it gives the impression of one to whom the defence of the rights of the weak would seem a thorough waste of time.

At the beginning of June Mary began to make detailed preparations for the birth of her child: at the wish of her Council, she had been lodged in Edinburgh Castle since early April, since the great castle frowning on its rock over the town below was evidently felt to be a safer locality for this important event than Holyrood, so recently demonstrated to have the flimsiest defences; it would also be understandable if Mary herself had been reluctant to give birth to her child in the same apartments where her servant had been butchered. In view of the hazards of the time towards any mother and child in the process of labour, let alone one who had been through the Scottish queen’s experiences in March, it was particularly important that Mary should make a will. This testament, of which she made three copies, one to keep, one for those who were to execute it in Scotland, and one to send to France, provides an interesting commentary on her state of mind on the eve of this critical occasion.¹² The lords also signed a document binding themselves to adhere to the queen’s testament, in view of the fact that she was (through imminent childbirth) ‘in peril and danger of her life’: in this semi-governmental measure, which was presumably directed against Darnley, it is significant that Bothwell’s signature was high up and prominent among the other loyal lords.¹³

Mary’s first thought is for her child, to whom, if it survives her own death, everything is to be left without further distinctions. But in the event of their joint death, she lays down minute provisions for the disposal of her jewels, in which her foremost concern is the establishment of a rich inheritance for the Scottish crown itself: her choicest gems, including the Great Harry, are to be annexed to the Scottish crown in perpetuity by Act of Parliament, in remembrance of herself, and the Scottish alliance with the house of Lorraine. Darnley is included in the will, as befits the queen’s husband, and is left twenty-six bequests, among them a diamond ring enamelled in red of which the queen notes in her handwriting, ‘It was with this that I was married; I leave it to the King who gave it to me’; although Buchanan later stated quite erroneously that Darnley had been totally ignored in the will, not only does Mary acknowledge the conventional claim of her husband to be remembered but she also leaves minor bequests to both Lord and Lady Lennox, as her father- and mother-in-law.

However, it is to her French relations, who seem to have possessed her true heart, that her most affectionate and detailed bequests are made: she still feels herself sufficiently a member of the house of Guise to outline a gift of rubies and pearls, to be handed down from generation to generation as the legacy of its first-born. The family of Duke Francis and Duchess Anne, whom she had known so well as little children, and who had grown to adolescence since her departure, are left rich jewels, the most precious going to the youngest son, Francis, namesake and godson of Mary’s first husband,* Duchess Anne, Mary’s beloved aunt and correspondent, herself receives splendid jewels and another aunt, the Abbess Renée, for whom the queen seems to have felt a daughter’s affection after her mother’s death, receives a number of bequests including a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the frame of a mirror. Other Guise children, those of the Elboeuf and Aumale families, all now growing up, are remembered with Mary’s own namesake and god-daughter, young Mary of Elboeuf, receiving again a specially large share. To the cardinal of Lorraine goes an emerald ring.

In Scotland, it is her illegitimate Stewart relations whom Mary treats as her own family; not only her confidante and half-sister Jean Argyll, but also Moray, his wife Agnes and their daughter are mentioned; Mary’s godson Francis, son of her half-brother Lord John Stewart and Bothwell’s sister, is given special consideration. One of Mary’s charming traits was a fondness for young children as this will shows. The queen seems always to show a particular affection for this boy, reminiscent of her later fondness of Arbella Stuart; owing to the early death of his father, he became her ward as well as her nephew and godson; she heaped him with honours and lands until in captivity she could do no more.* Other legatees included the two Lady Huntlys, young and old (young Lady Huntly being the only Hamilton to be mentioned in the will), and Privy Councillors then in favour including Argyll, Atholl, Huntly himself and of course Bothwell. Otherwise Mary’s innate concern seems to have been for her servants – not only the four Maries, but also an endless string of other ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour, women of the bed-chamber, and equerries are remembered, including the faithful Arthur Erskine, behind whom she had ridden to Dunbar, Riccio’s brother Joseph, to receive a ring to be delivered to a secret destination (perhaps some relation or dependent of David Riccio, of whose existence Mary knew), and Mary’s favourite bed-chamber woman Margaret Carwood, who had entered her service in 1564. Like all servants at court, Mary’s attendants tended to form a tight little circle who were both related to each other and who married each other – as Erskine had recently married Magdalene Livingston, a royal maid-of-honour who was also the sister of the grander ‘Marie’, Mary Livingston. Their intimate little world of service is here commemorated in the queen’s will.

According to the custom of the time, the queen took to her lying-in chamber ceremoniously on 3rd June to await the confinement. Already in May the midwife Margaret Asteane had been provided with a special black velvet dress for the coming occasion; an enormous and sumptuous bed hung in blue taffeta and blue velvet had been prepared for Mary’s use, and as much as ten ells of Holland cloth commissioned to cover the baby’s cradle.¹⁴ The apartments Mary now inhabited in Edinburgh Castle were in the south-east corner, within the old palace, and thus overlooked the town; the actual room in which the birth took place was extremely small, like so many of the important rooms of this period, and lay off the chamber now known as Queen Mary’s room. On 15th June a false alarm about the birth gave rise to premature rejoicings; but it was not until four days later that the labour actually began. This was long, painful and difficult, and the queen was ‘so handled that she began to wish that she had never been married’. This was despite the efforts of Mary Fleming’s sister Margaret, countess of Atholl, to cast the pangs of childbirth upon Margaret, Lady Reres, by witchcraft; Lady Reres lay in bed, suffering likewise with her mistress, but Mary’s pangs do not appear to have been solaced in consequence. The baby prince was finally born between ten and eleven on the morning of Wednesday 19th June, with a thin, fine caul stretched over his face. Despite this hazard, and despite the length of the labour, he was an impressively healthy child, as Killigrew, the English ambassador noticed five days later when he was shown the naked infant. Killigrew first saw the baby sucking at the breast of his wet-nurse – Lady Reres, who was perhaps given the post as a consolation for her earlier ordeal – and the baby James was later unwrapped for his inspection, much as Mary herself had been displayed in infancy to Sir Ralph Sadler. Although Mary could only manage to speak to him faintly with a hollow cough, Killigrew concluded that her child was likely to prove ‘a goodly prince’.*¹⁵

The birth of a male heir was signalled with immense rejoicings in Edinburgh, and now five hundred bonfires were lit, to illuminate the city and the surrounding hills with their festive fire. The whole artillery of the castle was discharged, and lords, nobles and people gathered together in St Giles church, to thank God for the honour of having an heir to their kingdom, the fact that St Giles was the main Protestant church demonstrating the great legacy of goodwill which awaited any queen who gave birth to a healthy prince in this era. Sir James Melville, given the good news by Mary Beaton, rode off to London an hour later to break it to Queen Elizabeth. The English queen reacted with her famous outcry, the primitive complaint of the childless woman for a more favoured sister: ‘Alack, the Queen of Scots is lighter of a bonny son, and I am but of barren stock.’¹⁸ It was true that the birth of James duly enhanced Mary’s merits as a candidate for the English throne. A strange little incident about the time of Mary’s accouchement involved an English spy, Rokeby, who was supposed to have lured Mary in Edinburgh into unwise pronouncements concerning her future on the English throne – although even Rokeby admitted in his report to Cecil that Mary ‘would be content that she would have it after …’ Others were not so discreet as to wait for ‘after’. In a poem of thanksgiving for James’s birth, Patrick Adamson in Paris even went so far as to refer to him as ‘Serenissimus princeps’ of Scotland, England, France and Ireland, a gesture which not only infuriated Elizabeth in London, who ordered her envoy Bedford to make a protest about it at James’s christening, but also produced angry outbursts in the English House of Commons; Adamson finally underwent six months’ imprisonment for his indiscretion.¹⁹ The birth of a son, however, strengthened Mary’s hand over the English succession for the future in a way which was obvious, and which even the English Commons could not obliterate by intemperate speeches.

The birth of an heir also inevitably moved the child’s own father, Darnley, further down the line of succession for both English and Scottish thrones. Queen Mary, aware of the temperament with which she was dealing, took care to display the baby to him publicly and announce: ‘My Lord, God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you.’ She went on, uncovering the child’s face: ‘Here I protest to God as I shall answer to him at the great day of Judgment, that this is your son and no other man’s son. I am desirous that all here, with ladies and others bear witness.’ She added, as though to clinch the matter by a note of contempt for her husband: ‘For he is so much your own son, that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.’²⁰ Having thus, as she hoped, preserved her child from the stigma of illegitimacy, Mary devoted the rest of her time in Edinburgh Castle to his care, having the baby to sleep in her own room, and frequently watching over him at night. A few days after the birth, she sent for Anthony Standen, the faithful equerry who had helped her escape from Holyrood, and had him knighted by Darnley. Pointing to the child in its cradle, she announced in words which showed how far Mary was from forgetting the events after the murder of Riccio: ‘For that you saved his life …’²¹

The birth of James had two dramatic effects upon Mary Stuart: she no longer had any pressing motive for demonstrating a public reconciliation with Darnley, and at the same time her own extremely precarious health had its balance finally destroyed. There is no evidence that she ever really recovered it before her extremely serious illness at Jedburgh four months later, and this illness in turn led to a prolonged phase of highly nervous, almost hysterical ill-health, which lasted right until her incarceration on Lochleven the following June. But for her actions and movements during the next eight months, the critical period from the birth of James in June 1566 until the death of Darnley in February 1567, it is extremely important to distinguish between information and reports written at the time – that is to say before the death had taken place – such as ambassadors’ comparatively impartial reports on the state of Scotland, and Mary’s own letters posted to France, which could not be altered by arrière pensée, and those accounts written long after the event, specifically to prove Mary’s guilt with Bothwell. These later accounts include the Book of the Articleswritten by Buchanan as an accusatory brief at the time of her trial in England, two years later, and Buchanan’s own History, and his Detection of Mary Queen of Scots. The point of Buchanan, who was bound by allegiance to Lennox, and therefore to Darnley, is to prove as salaciously as possible that Mary had enjoyed an adulterous liaison with Bothwell from the birth of her child, and even possibly before. But in the course of making his charge, Buchanan allowed himself the luxury of so many glaring inaccuracies that it is difficult to take his opinion on any aspect of the situation seriously – of these the comment on the queen’s will is only a minor example: the tale of Bothwell hauled up by a rope unwilling and half-naked out of one mistress’s bed directly into that of the queen by James’s wet-nurse is probably the most ludicrous.²²

It is a remarkable fact that there is no uncontested evidence among the letters or reports written before Darnley’s death, whether French, English or Scottish, to show that Mary was involved in a sexual affair with Bothwell while her husband was still alive. There are on the other hand a number of pointers to the fact that she was not. The picture of the Scottish court through the autumn and winter of 1566, built by contemporary comments, is of a queen to whom her husband was becoming an increasingly distasteful problem, and a nobility to whom he was becoming an increasingly urgent one. Not one observer made any attempt during this period to connect the queen’s growing scorn for Darnley with her growing affection for Bothwell, although the point would have been one which the ever-watchful ambassadors would have been delighted to make if they had felt it to be true. Of the couple, Mary and Bothwell, Mary was racked in health, not in itself very conducive to romance, and desperate to solve her marital problems; she was also well aware by now that she had created these problems for herself originally through her physical infatuation for Darnley; the very last intention in her mind was to tread so soon again down the treacherous paths of passion. Bothwell on the other hand was steadily bent on his own personal advancement in Scottish government affairs. It is questionable whether the one had the energy, and the second the inclination for the time-wasting business of an adulterous love affair when there were so many important matters to hand.

Before the end of July, Mary left Edinburgh for Newhaven, to see if a change of air would restore her lost health, and from there went on by sea to Alloa, the seat of Lord Mar. She particularly enjoyed the pleasure of sea travel – as Buchanan put it, she ‘joyed to handle the boisterous cables’ – but on this occasion she made the journey alone, unaccompanied by either Bothwell or Darnley. Darnley, having not been informed of her departure, later followed Mary to Alloa but stayed there only a few hours, as Bedford duly reported back to England. In the same letter Bedford also noted that Bothwell’s arrogance was making him so unpopular with his fellow-nobles that he believed that there might be some plot in hand against him. A few days later Bedford reported again that Bothwell was now as much hated as Riccio had ever been, and also that the queen was not getting on well with her husband.²³ It was significant that Bedford made no attempt to connect the two facts; on the contrary, by mid-August it was Moray’s influence over his half-sister which was said to be causing Darnley to sulk: Bedford wrote that his jealousy was such that ‘he could not bear that the Queen should use familiarity with men or women, and especially the ladies of Argyll, Moray and Mar, who keep most company with her’.²⁴Mary now went hunting in the extreme south of Peeblesshire, with Bothwell, Moray and Mar, but without Darnley.

Reunited in each other’s company at the house of Traquair, home of John Stewart of Traquair, captain of the queen’s guard, the royal couple apparently gave way to their most open and shocking disagreement. Romantic Traquair, said to be the oldest inhabited house in Scotland, guarding and guarded by the Tweed, lies amid rich park lands ideal for hunting. A stag hunt was planned for the next day, in which both Mary and Darnley were expected to take part. But at supper, the queen begged to excuse herself on the grounds that the exertion would be too much for her health. When Darnley refused to listen, she whispered in his ear that she suspected she was again enceinte. Darnley answered aloud, in roughly the same words he had used before, during the ride to Dunbar, ‘Never mind, if we lose this one, we will make another,’ at which Traquair rebuked him sharply for his un-Christian behaviour. Darnley (who was probably drunk) then exclaimed coarsely: ‘What! ought not we to work a mare well when she is in foal?’ The anecdote comes from Nau,²⁵ and in relating it to him the queen may perhaps have allowed time to have over-coloured Darnley’s brutality. But the possibility that Mary could have been enceinte once more – it was now two months since the birth of Prince James – is an interesting one in view of Buchanan’s accusations that Mary never again admitted Darnley to her bed after the child’s birth. A ballad written in 1568 after Mary had fled to England, called The Earl of Bothwell, represented her as vowing after the murder of Riccio

… for a twelve month and a day
The king and she would not come in one sheet

In view of Mary’s conviction that Darnley had aimed at her death and that of her child, her refusal to grant him his conjugal rights would be easy to understand, but of course it could scarcely be expected to lead to happier relations between them. It is noticeable that his humiliation as a husband was one of Darnley’s main points of complaint on the occasion when he voiced his grievances. Taking into account Mary’s ill-health, the most likely state of affairs between them during July and August would seem to be an occasional reluctant acquiescence on the part of the queen to her husband’s embraces, which did little to convince Darnley that she either loved or respected him. After Mary’s illness, and especially once the matter of a divorce had been broached at Craigmillar, her abstinence from any physical relationship was certainly total: by then she clearly wished to have nothing more to do with him as a husband, and would therefore hardly have run the risk of another pregnancy.

On her return from Traquair to Edinburgh, the queen arranged for the transference of the little prince to Stirling Castle, the traditional nursery of royal princes. His cortège accordingly set off with four or five hundred harquebusiers round it for protection, and the prince was handed into the care of the Erskine family as his hereditary governors. In delegating the upbringing of her child in this manner, Mary Stuart was in no way deviating from normal practice, and certainly not showing herself a cold or unfeeling mother. Fosterage was on the contrary the standard custom of the Scottish noble families, who handed over their children in babyhood, and the custom of fosterage, being regarded as a mark of aristocracy, gradually came to be copied lower down the social scale. Mary, in her anxious watching over James’s cradle, and her immense solicitude for the grandeur of his christening ceremony, which it was within her power to arrange, showed an almost pathetically strong maternal anxiety, borne out by her touching fondness for all other small children with whom she came in contact throughout her life. The preparations for his first nursery at Stirling were both detailed and sumptuous, done to the queen’s personal command: there were to be buckets of gold and silver ‘the finest that can be gottin’, lengths of blue plaiding for the baby’s cradle, fustian for his mattress, feathers for his bolster; his room was to be hung with tapestries, as well as adequately provided with blankets. The needs of Lady Reres in her capacity of wet-nurse were not overlooked: she too was to have plaiding to cover her bed and a canopy to go over it. The instructions were to be carried out without any delay, because it was all ‘very needful to be had’.²⁶

In September, Maitland, long out of favour with the queen, was reconciled to her, and returned to court; he was also reconciled with Bothwell. At the end of September there was a confrontation between Mary and Darnley in front of the French ambassador and many of the nobles, in which both stated their grievances. The emphasis was all on Darnley’s status within the kingdom, and whether Mary was still allowing him his rights as king. Lennox first brought the matter up in a letter to Mary of 29th September when he told his daughter-in-law that Darnley was now so humiliated by his position that he intended to go abroad, having a boat all prepared for the journey.²⁷ As a result Mary faced Darnley the next day in front of the Council and du Croc, and made him a ‘fort belle harangue’ in which she asked him in what respect she had offended him, and pleaded with him, with hands joined together, not to spare her anything, but to tell her the truth. The lords then joined in asking Darnley how they had offended him, and even du Croc chimed in with the view that if Darnley went abroad it would be an offence to the queen’s honour. Darnley made little of this opportunity for airing his grievances against his wife, but merely said flatly that he had no particular cause for offence; his sting was in his deliberately melodramatic departure from the queen’s side, without kissing her, and vowing in sybilline fashion that she would not see him again for a long time. Whereupon the lords and du Croc crowded round the queen and told her to continue in her present course of wise and virtuous behaviour, and the truth between her and Darnley would soon be generally known.*

Two weeks later du Croc wrote to Catherine de Médicis of the newly excellent relations which existed between Queen Mary and her subjects, through her own efforts and good qualities – they were ‘so well reconciled with the Queen as a result of her own prudent behaviour, that nowadays there was not a single division to be seen between them’. Darnley, on the other hand, was equally ill-regarded by both parties; having apparently learnt nothing from his recent experiences, he still wanted to rule everything; yet there was not a single noble who did not take his cue for his behaviour towards Darnley from the queen. Du Croc noted that preparations were already being made for the christening of the little prince, £12,000 being raised by direct taxation to pay for it, and he represented Catholics and Protestants as being equally enthusiastic about the coming celebrations. Indeed, he attributed much of Darnley’s spoilt and sulky behaviour to the fuss which was going on about the christening: not only was Darnley jealous of Mary’s reconciliation with the Protestant lords, but he was also fearful lest strangers should witness his obvious fall from favour at the ceremony – a prospect which was intolerable to his ‘haute et superbe’ temperament.²⁸

To the queen’s attitude to the official religion of her country, as much as to the birth of an heir, must be attributed much of this Indian summer of warm relations with her nobility. The tender green shoots of a pro-Catholic policy which she had put out in the spring of 1566 had been rudely blighted by the sharp frost of Riccio’s murder, which among other things demonstrated the strength of the Protestant lords who could even storm her apartments. For the rest of the fifteen months of her personal rule, Mary made no attempt to help the Scottish Catholic Church, but showed on the contrary a renewed warmth towards the organization of the reformed religion. On 3rd October an Act of Privy Council ordained that benefices worth less than 300 merks annually were to go to the Protestant ministers, and there were now some instances of ministers being appointed to benefices. On 13th December a further law was enacted to help the Protestant administration; and on 20th December the Church received from the queen a direct gift of £10,000 as well as provisions.²⁹ Such an attitude to the religion which the majority of her subjects professed may seem to us today pragmatic in terms of government and admirable in terms of tolerance and good order. There could after all be no doubt of Mary’s personal attachment to the Catholic faith, since quite apart from her early words to Throckmorton, she never wavered from the holding of her own personal Mass in Scotland, even at the times when it would have been most expedient to do so, and the Mass itself as we have seen was a most detestable symbol to the fervent Protestants. One may therefore applaud her far-sighted policy, all the more remarkable in one born after all in the year in which the Spanish Inquisition was founded. But of course Pius V, in distant Rome, could not be expected to view the situation in the same detached light: indeed, to him the flagging of his spiritual daughter’s newly kindled zeal was a painful prospect, and one to be combated with the double weapon of a papal mission and a papal subsidy. A papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, was dispatched, bearing 150,000 crowns in gold from the Pope, intended to help the queen combat the heretics; but now as before, Queen Mary showed an absolute disinclination to receive the nuncio on Scottish soil, on the grounds that his arrival would occasion ‘great tumults’.³⁰ Mondovi was in fact lingering in France, awaiting permission to land, when the news came of Mary’s serious illness in Jedburgh.

Jedburgh was one of the important towns in the Scottish border country, lying on the edge of the wild terrain which led across to the Anglo-Scottish border itself. Here Mary had arrived in early October to hold a justice eyre. She inhabited a ‘bastel-house’, or fortified dwelling, in the main street, still visible today in its original form. While she was in the midst of administering justice, news came that her lieutenant on the borders, Bothwell, had been seriously wounded in a foray there, and was now lying in danger of death at the castle of Hermitage. The queen did not immediately take any action, but five or six days later, when her business had been completed, she decided to pay Bothwell a visit, not so much to express her sympathy, as for the practical reason that he was her lieutenant and one of her chief advisers, especially on the perennially vexed border questions, and she needed to consult with him. Bedford, reporting the incident, and the earl’s recovery, commented that the queen of Scots would certainly have been sorry to lose Bothwell, but made no remotely bawdy suggestion about the loss, which was by implication a strictly political or administrative one.

On 16th October, the queen, accompanied by her half-brother Moray and a large number of her court, as well as a quantity of soldiers, decided to ride over to the Hermitage, visit Bothwell, and since this border fortress was not prepared to receive the luxurious burden of a royal stay, return to Jedburgh that same day. Hermitage Castle was a thirteenth-century fortress, gaunt and forbidding in appearance, in the centre of Liddesdale. Lying on the left bank of the Hermitage water, twelve miles south of Hawick, it was a true military outpost, where up to 1000 men and 200 horsemen could be stationed in times of danger. Already it had acquired cruel and mournful memories from earlier violent scenes in Scottish history, and being close to the English border, it was understandable that the queen should not wish to linger there overnight. In any case the day’s journey meant a ride of only a little over fifty miles. Although a good day’s ride at the time was considered to be thirty to forty miles, it was always considered possible to ride more than fifty miles in emergencies: the ride was not an outstanding hardship to a queen accustomed to daily hunting and riding hard in the saddle all her life, who had ridden twenty-five miles pillion to Dunbar when six months pregnant. The decision to make the visit within the day was certainly a practical one under the circumstances.*

However, on her return from Hermitage Queen Mary fell violently and seriously ill. Undoubtedly the ride contributed to the final impetus of her collapse, but she had evidently been sickening in her habitual and, as it seemed, nervous fashion for some sort of breakdown for weeks, since the situation with Darnley seemed to admit no solution. In a confidential letter to Archbishop Beaton, Mary’s ambassador in Paris, Maitland attributed her illness entirely to her disagreements with Darnley – ‘he misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband …’³¹ Physical and mental stress now apparently combined to produce an attack of illness so severe that many of those who observed Mary in the throes of it formed the opinion that she was unlikely to recover, even if she was not already dead. First the queen was seized by a prolonged fit of vomiting – ‘more than sixty times’ – so long and severe that she several times fell into unconsciousness; two days later, she could neither speak nor see, and had frequent convulsions. There was a temporary recovery, but by 25th October she had become so rapidly ill again – ‘all her limbs were so contracted, her face was so distorted, her eyes closed, her mouth fast and her feet and arms stiff and cold’ – that she was once more considered to be on the verge of death. Since she was generally believed to be sinking, Mary was publicly prayed for in the churches of Edinburgh as Knox’s History testifies.³² By her own account to Nau, Mary’s servants thought she was dead, and started to open the windows of the little room where she lay; Moray was accused of trying to lay his hands on silver plate and rings; mourning dresses were ordered and funeral arrangements discussed. In Maitland’s more laconic account to Cecil, it was admitted that her life had actually been despaired of for half an hour. The situation was saved by the queen’s physician, Arnault, who seeing some signs of life in her arms, bandaged her very tightly, including her toes and legs from the ankle upwards, and then having her mouth opened by force, poured wine down it. He then administered a clyster, the queen vomited an amount of corrupt blood, and subsequently began to recover.”³³

Out of these facts, dramatic enough in themselves, Buchanan wove a lecherous fairy story in which the queen rode like a maniac to be by Bothwell’s side the moment she received the news of his mishap (which as we have seen is quite contradicted by the facts), fell ill through having thus gratified her unlawful passions during her short stay at Hermitage (Moray’s presence at the interview is ignored) and subsequently had Bothwell moved into the room below hers at Jedburgh, so that they could continue their love-making conveniently during their mutual convalescences³⁴ – once again almost ludicrously far from the truth. In fact, the queen was occupied at Jedburgh far away from Bothwell, once more in making provisions for her kingdom in the event of her death. When she felt herself to be in extremis she called the nobles into her room, including Moray, and attempted to dictate some sort of settlement which would ensure a calm inheritance for her son – for it is the son who is to succeed, not the father, and Mary specified that Darnley was not to seize the crown ‘to which he laid claim by right’. Her first concern is for the young prince, who is to have no evil company around him during his ‘youth head’ – here perhaps Queen Mary was influenced by the example of Darnley, who often tried to excuse his failings on the ground that he had been corrupted by bad companions. Darnley is once more castigated for ingratitude: ‘My lords, you know the goodness that I have used towards some whom I have advanced to a great degree of honour and pre-eminence above others; who, notwithstanding, has used … ingratitude towards me, which has engendered the displeasure that presently most grieves me, and is also the cause of my sickness. I pray lord mend them.’ Perhaps her most interesting words of all were on the subject of religion, where she pleaded for the tolerance which she had shown during her life to the Protestants to be shown after her death to the Catholics: ‘I have pressed none of you that professes religion by your conscience … I pray you, brother earl of Moray, that you trouble none.’ When Father Edmund Hay, a Jesuit in Paris on his way to Scotland, reported the scene round the bedside of the apparently dying woman in a letter to St Francis Borgia of 6th November³⁵ he said that, although she affirmed her desire to die in the (Catholic) religion which her predecessors, the kings of Scotland, had practised for 1364 years, yet she frankly admitted that she had been neglectful not only in government of the realm, but also, and chiefly, in promoting the Catholic religion.

Throughout this period of illness, Darnley scarcely showed himself as the devoted husband. He was in the west of Scotland when Mary fell ill and did not, as Buchanan and Knox afterwards stated, come rushing to his wife’s side. He paid the queen a brief visit eleven days after she first fell ill, and then returned to Glasgow. The queen’s apologists have sometimes cited this in turn as an example of callousness; however, the Diurnal of Occurrents, an unbiased chronicle of events, suggests that as he was hunting and hawking, he did not even hear of the illness until 27th October, whereupon he rode to Edinburgh and the next day to Jedburgh.’³⁶ At Jedburgh he received some fancied slight, of the sort Darnley was quick to perceive – so that he went back to Edinburgh and thence to Stirling. Possibly no special messenger had been sent to advise him of the illness: at any rate the picture of a breach in their relationship is a complete one.

The next episode in the mounting tragedy of Darnley took place at the end of November at the castle of Craigmillar, an enormous baronial edifice, founded by the Preston family, in the parish of Liberton, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Mary was still in the hands of her physicians, since her illness, and was apparently in a state of deep depression. Du Croc, the French ambassador, wrote to Beaton in Paris that she often repeated the words ‘I could wish to be dead’. Du Croc commented that no future understanding could be expected between the queen and her husband for the two reasons of his arrogance and her suspicion: ‘The first is, the King will never humble himself as he ought; the other is, the Queen cannot perceive any nobleman speaking with the King, but that she presently suspects some contrivance between them.’³⁷ Ever since the murder of Riccio, Mary evidently regarded herself as permanently threatened by some possible conspiracy on the part of Darnley. But Mary’s chief nobles, lodged with her at Craigmillar, were equally resolute in their hatred of Darnley, who had betrayed them over Riccio, and was yet still left nominally able to lord it over them as king of Scotland. Experience had not curbed Darnley’s arrogance; nor were nobles of the temperament of Moray, Argyll, Bothwell and Maitland likely to forgive and forget.

According to the ‘Protestantism’ of Huntly and Argyll (written in January 1569 when Huntly and Argyll formed part of the Marian party), Moray and Maitland now broached the subject of a divorce to Argyll; Huntly was then brought in, finally Bothwell; then the queen was approached. Maitland opened up the argument by saying that means would be found for Mary to divorce Darnley, if she would only pardon Morton and the other Riccio assassins (who were still in exile). The queen promised her consent, but said that the divorce must be legally obtained without prejudice to her son. Maitland then suggested ‘other means’, and in a famous phrase told the queen that ‘Moray would look through his fingers’. At this the queen quickly asked them to do nothing against her honour, and Maitland replied: ‘Let us guide the matter among us, and your Grace shall see nothing but good, and approved by Parliament.’³⁸ This was in effect to be the case of Mary’s supporters in later years, to prove her innocence over the death of Darnley. They maintained that the queen, although anxious to rid herself of Darnley, could not have known that the nobles actually intended to kill him, since Maitland had assured her that whatever happened would have parliamentary approval. But of course Mary was not, and was never intended to be, one of the executive conspirators; the details of the deed were not within the province of her concern. At Craigmillar she made it clear that she wished to be rid of Darnley, much as Henry II had once exclaimed ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ of Thomas à Becket; she made two further points, of vital interest to her – firstly that her child must not run the risk of bastardy, and secondly that ‘her honour’ was not to be impugned. Maitland reassured her on both these points, but it was difficult to see what ‘other means’ he was contemplating except perhaps a treason trial of Darnley before Parliament, which would result in his execution. Mary, however, did not examine the situation so candidly in her own mind. She was a queen and a woman; as a woman she wished to be rid of an intolerable marital situation; as a queen she expected her nobles to help in a difficult governmental problem of order; there could be no benefit to her thinking too far or too early into how the nobles proposed to carry out her wishes. If Moray was quoted as intending to ‘look through his fingers’, Queen Mary, on the other hand, intended to keep her own hands tightly across her eyes.

It seems virtually certain that a bond was then drawn up and signed at Craigmillar by those nobles who intended to get rid of Darnley, including Maitland, Bothwell, Argyll, Huntly and James Balfour, with Morton signing later on his return to Scotland, much as a bond was signed before the murder of Riccio. Following the parallel with the Riccio bond, it is unlikely that the murder was specifically mentioned, for the death of Riccio had never been alluded to in the official document. The project could be put more vaguely, especially as Sir James Balfour, who had a legal training, probably played an important part in drawing it up. The hostile Book of Articles described the bond as follows: ‘It was thought expedient and most profitable for the common wealth, by the whole nobility and lords underscribed, that such a young fool and proud tyrant should not reign or bear rule over them; and that for diverse causes, therefore, that these all had concluded that he should be put off by one way or another; and whosoever should take the deed in hand, or do it, they should defend and fortify as themselves.’³⁹ But the actual bond does not survive for inspection, although its existence was mentioned in the confession of Bothwell’s henchman, John Hepburn of Bolton, who said that Bothwell showed it to him, and later Ormiston, another henchman, executed in 1573, described it in his death-bed confession to a priest. The queen later told Nau that when she parted from Bothwell for the last time before the battle of Carberry Hill, he pressed into her hand a piece of paper and told her to guard it well, since it was the evidence of the complicity of the other lords in the murder – those very lords who were now drawn up in battle array against them, and accusing Bothwell alone of the crime. If this account is accepted, the incriminating paper must have been taken from her after her capture and destroyed. Moray’s part in the whole affair remains obscure: he did not sign the Craigmillar bond although he certainly knew of its contents. He afterwards protested that he had taken part in, and approved of, nothing that was illegal. In view of Maitland’s assurance to Mary that Moray would ‘look through his fingers’, it seems likely that it was Moray’s intention to leave the actual execution of the deed to others, while approving the result and hoping to benefit from it. If he believed that it was intended to seize Darnley for trial for treason, and kill him in the act, he could perhaps stretch his conscience sufficiently to cover the statement that he had approved of nothing illegal.* Moray was therefore several degrees closer than Mary in his knowledge of what was planned, although in their general attitudes to the subject, the responses of brother and sister were not dissimilar. In December the queen was able to turn her mind from her vexatious problems with her husband to the happier matter of her son’s baptism. Shortly after the birth, messages had been sent to the king of France, the duke of Savoy and the queen of England to act as godparents. Darnley objected to the inclusion of Elizabeth, because of her animosity against him, but his objections were overruled by Mary who visualized a golden future for James if Elizabeth’s goodwill could be secured. On 17th December the ceremony took place, according to the Catholic rite, in the chapel royal of Stirling Castle. The little prince, now just on six months old, was carried in the arms of the count of Brienne, proxy for the king of France, from the royal apartments to the chapel between two rows of courtiers, the whole scene lit by flaring torches. M. du Croc represented the duke of Savoy. The procession was followed by a list of Catholic nobles bearing the various official accompaniments of the Catholic christening – one the cierge, one the salt, one the basin and laver and one the rood. At the entrance of the chapel, the cortège was received by the archbishop of St Andrews and other Catholic prelates.

Queen Elizabeth had sent a magnificent gold font, weighing two stones according to the Diurnal of Occurrents,⁴¹ as a present for her godson. But as Bedford, her emissary, was a leading English puritan, he could not stand proxy for her at the font. Jean, countess of Argyll, the child’s aunt, acted as proxy godmother for Elizabeth, and held James in her arms. Prince James was duly christened according to the full Catholic rite, except that the queen refused to let the priest spit in his mouth as the custom then was, saying according to a later story that she was not going to have ‘a pocky priest’ spitting in her child’s mouth. The Diurnal of Occurrents merely reported that the queen ‘did inhibit’ the use of the spittle. Throughout the ceremony, Bedford and the other Scottish Protestant lords stood outside the chapel.

The accomplishment of the ceremony was celebrated with all the magnificence which Queen Mary could command. She clothed the nobility at her own expense for the occasion, ‘Some in cloth of silver, some in cloth of gold, some in cloth of tissue, every man rather above than under his degree’.⁴² Moray was clothed in green, Argyll in red and Bothwell in blue (Buchanan afterwards chose to report that Mary had deliberately clothed Bothwell alone). There were fireworks and masques, with verses written by George Buchanan himself, evidently still at this date an admirer of the queen. The English party took offence at one masque in which some French-born satyrs deliberately turned in their direction and ‘put their hands behind them to their tails which they wagged with their hands’.⁴³ This insult apart (and the English believed it sprang from uncontrollable Gallic jealousy of the honour which was being done to their national rivals) the merriment was general, and Bedford, puritan as he might be, graciously allowed the young gentlemen in his train to join in the dancing at night.

In all these rejoicings, there was only one mysteriously absent figure, that of the baby’s father, ‘King Henry’ himself, although he was actually present within the castle of Stirling at the time. It has been suggested that his absence was due to his continued bad relations with Queen Elizabeth (who had never officially countenanced his marriage) and because Bedford had been instructed not to give him his due as king of Scotland. But no such instructions have been discovered. It seems more likely that Darnley, as du Croc suspected, hated the idea of the English, from whose ranks he sprang, whom he had once scorned, seeing how far he had fallen in prestige at the Scottish court; it would certainly be in his character to avoid any occasion of public humiliation, real or imaginary.⁴⁴ The change in his position was made all the more obvious to him, because on the day of the christening itself du Croc three times declined to give him an interview. The reason given was especially irritating. As Darnley was not now ‘in good correspondence’ with Mary, the French king had instructed du Croc to have nothing further to do with him. At the end of December, Darnley left Stirling abruptly and went to Glasgow, in the west of Scotland, the traditional centre of Lennox Stewart power, where he hoped to be more royally treated.

* Not, as Buchanan suggested, in the royal vault with Mary’s father; this lie was finally nailed in the seventeenth century when the king’s tomb was opened.

* Mary’s well-known memoir in which she expressed a preference for the services of a loyal ‘man of low estate’ to those of the nobility is attributed by Prince Labanoff to the period directly after Riccio’s death. But as it is in Nau’s handwriting, it seems more likely that Mary dictated it to her secretary later during her captivity.⁴

* There is, however, no evidence that their relations were consummated, and still less reason to suppose that Earl Patrick had a liaison with Mary of Guise early in 1542; yet the scandalous rumour that Bothwell was ‘near sib’ to Mary Queen of Scots could, as Professor Donaldson points out,⁵ only be explained if Earl Patrick had been her natural father, making Bothwell her half-brother. In the absence of any other support for the theory, the rumour must surely be dismissed along with the many other scandalous rumours concerning the parentage of famous persons which abounded during this period.

* It is interesting to note that the name Francis was introduced into Scotland by the god-children and namesakes of Queen Mary’s first husband.

* This child whom Queen Mary befriended was to become the notorious Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell, of the reign of James VI; being Bothwell’s nephew through his mother Janet Hepburn, he was given his uncle’s title in 1581 by James VI.

* This is the appropriate moment to dispose of, briefly, the imaginative notion that Mary’s child died at birth, and another Erskine baby, child of the countess of Mar, was substituted. This tale is backed by no contemporary reference, and the present (13th) earl of Mar and Kellie has told the author that he can find nothing in his extensive family archives to support the theory of an Erskine family tradition. The story has arisen apparently as a result of two events – firstly, in 1830 a skeleton, rumoured to be that of a child, was found in the wall of a chamber in Edinburgh Castle by some workmen; the bones were wrapped in a woollen cloth (not cloth of gold with a royal cipher or a fleur-de-lys on it, as is sometimes stated); secondly, at the end of the last century, it was noticed that James VI, in the portraits of his maturity, bore an undoubted resemblance to the 2nd earl of Mar, who would, if the story were true, have been his full brother.¹⁶ These two slender threads have been woven into a tissue of fantasy, by which it is suggested that Mary arranged the substitution after the death of her own child, in order to prevent Darnley seizing the throne. It ignores the fact that Mary was a young woman, able to have more children, quite apart from the difficulties of arranging such a substitution within the confines of Edinburgh Castle, filled with nobles of conflicting loyalties, including the Archbishop Hamilton, who would scarcely have stood by while the claims of his own house were set aside. Nor can any special importance be attached to the fact that Lord Mar was shortly afterwards made the governor of Prince James, since this office was, as has been seen, hereditary in the Erskine family. This leaves the question of the resemblance of James and the 2nd Lord Mar, on which two points should be noted: firstly, the interrelation of the great Scottish families which was such a feature of this period meant that such a resemblance could emerge quite naturally, as such resemblances do not always descend directly from father to son – the grandmother of the 1st Lord Mar had in fact been a Lennox Stewart. Secondly, the portrait of James VI as a child by Honthorst is so strikingly like that of his legal father Darnley as a young man by Eworth as to make further arguments on the subject surely unnecessary. In short, the little skeleton in the wall – if child it truly was, and this point was never officially stated at the time of the discovery¹⁷ – is far more likely to be the sad relic of a lady-in-waiting’s peccadillo than a queen’s conspiracy.

* It is surely inconceivable that Darnley or Lennox would not have mentioned the subject of Bothwell’s relations with the queen during the course of this long discussion on the troubles between Darnley and his wife, if indeed they had constituted a major source of dispute between the couple. Yet Bothwell’s name was never introduced into the conversation. Describing the scene afterwards to the French court, du Croc did not mention it either.

* On 16 October 1966, the 400th anniversary of Queen Mary’s ride, an equivalent ride was mounted from Jedburgh to Hermitage and back, following the route which she was believed to have taken: Banchester Bridge (via the queen’s well), Earlside, Stobs Castle, Barnes Farm, Priesthaugh, the rough country between Priesthaugh and Hermitage known as the queen’s mire (where the enamelled watch now in the museum in Queen Mary’s House was later found) and finally Hermitage Castle which was reached at 12 noon, the expedition having left Jedburgh at 7 a.m. The return journey took from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. The weather on this occasion was misty, and visibility was down to fifty yards over the queen’s mire. But Miss Elizabeth Millar, twenty-six, who took the part of Queen Mary, not at the time accustomed to long hours in the saddle (unlike her prototype), told the author that she did not feel particularly tired at the end of the journey, and was able to attend a banquet in the evening without undue exhaustion.

* This is the explanation for Moray’s behaviour and his subsequent protests advanced by his biographer Maurice Lee. But Professor Donaldson points out that so long as Darnley remained king, it was still illegal for the nobles to arrest him for treason.⁴⁰