CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music’
Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(said to be a reference to Bothwell and Mary)
At the palace of Holyrood Queen Mary was woken from her sleep by a noise like twenty or thirty cannon. Shortly afterwards messengers brought her the news that the house at Kirk o’Field had been totally destroyed, and her husband’s dead body found lying at a distance of sixty to eighty paces. Her first reactions were horror and shock – horror at what had happened and shock at the feeling that she herself had had such a narrow escape. Bothwell described her in his narrative as ‘fort épleurée et contristée’.1 She wrote the same day – Monday, 10th February – to her ambassador Beaton in Paris, pouring forth her amazement and distress, although it is noticeable that her conventional grief for Darnley is outweighed by her conviction that the conspiracy had been aimed at her personally; shortly after the event, the Venetian ambassador in Paris also reported that the crime was the work of heretics (Protestants) who had intended to kill Mary too.2 ‘The matter is so horrible and strange,’ wrote the queen, ‘as we believe the like was never heard of in any country.’3 She retailed Darnley’s fate (still apparently unaware that he had been strangled, and not killed by the blast) and reported the utter demolition of the building ‘with such a vehemency, that of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not a stone above another, but all carried far away, or dung in dross to the very groundstone. It must have been done with the force of powder, and appears to be a mine.’ The queen did not yet know who was responsible, but is certain that with ‘the diligence our Council has begun already to use … the same being discovered … we hope to punish the same with such rigour as shall serve for example of this cruelty to all ages to come’. She continued: ‘Always who ever have taken this wicked enterprise in hand, we assure our self it was dressed always for us as for the King; for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and was there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town that same night at midnight, and of very chance tarried not all night, by reason of some mask in the abbey; but,’ the queen concluded piously, ‘we believe it was not chance but God that put it in our head.’
It is evident that at the moment when she wrote this letter, a few hours after the crime, it had not yet struck the queen that any of her chief nobles were involved in its execution. The sheer outrageousness of the explosion had distracted her from considering the known enmities between Darnley and many of the nobility – as Bothwell must have planned that it should; nervously convinced that she herself had only escaped death by a miracle, the queen was at first more inclined to ponder on her own enemies than on Darnley’s. The official letter sent to France by the lords of the Council on the same day also emphasized the danger to the queen. So far, then, Bothwell’s strategy had succeeded. He himself was officially notified of what had happened when George Hackett came and woke him from his bed at Holyrood, with the news that the king was dead. ‘Fie, treason!’ exclaimed Bothwell, jumping out of bed, and pulling on his clothes, which he had discarded only an hour before.* As sheriff of Edinburgh, it was now Bothwell’s duty to lead a party of soldiers from Holyrood to the scene of the crime; whereupon the king’s body, bearing as Knox said ‘no mark of fire’, was carried into the next-door new provost’s lodging. Here it was inspected by surgeons, then members of the Privy Council, and also by the general public, who were allowed to exercise their natural curiosity. It was at this point that the news that Darnley had in fact been strangled began to spread abroad – the variety of rumours on the nature of the weapon included his own belt, the sleeves of his shirt, his garters, a serviette, a napkin steeped in vinegar (Lennox’s lurid contribution), and waxed cord. The old women in the Blackfriars Wynd – who were later examined by the council and dismissed for involving too indiscreetly the names of the great – began to chatter of the men they had seen round the house and that last poignant cry of Darnley. His body was now carried on a board to Holyrood, embalmed by an apothecary and a surgeon, and laid formally in state for several days, before being buried in the vaults of the chapel royal, as was his due as a king of Scotland. So far the royal widow had behaved with perfect correctness. She ordered the court into mourning, for which £150-worth of black was ordered. Although, according to Knox’s History, Mary showed no outward sign of joy or sorrow when shown the corpse of Darnley, her strange composure – so unlike her usual ready tears – may well have been due to simple shock.5 She herself embarked heavily on the traditional forty days’ mourning for her husband, permitting herself, however, to attend the wedding of Margaret Carwood, her favourite bed-chamber woman, on the Tuesday after the murder; she had paid for the wedding-dress – £1256 – and either considered a promise to a beloved servant too important to break, or else was too dazed to realize the significance of what had just happened. Her spirits had never recovered properly from her Jedburgh illness; at the time of James’s baptism at the end of December du Croc had prophesied gloomily that her nerves would give them some trouble yet – ‘nor can I be brought to think otherwise so long as she continues to be so pensive and melancholy … She sent for me yesterday and I found her laid on the bed, weeping sore. She complained of a grievous pain in her side.’7 Now her nervous health became so critically weakened by the shock of the crime that, according to Leslie, the Privy Council were earnestly exhorted by her doctors to let her get away from the tragic and gloom-laden atmosphere of Edinburgh for a while, lest incarceration in the closed chamber of the widow should cause a total breakdown – the doctors emphasized ‘the great and imminent dangers of her health and life, if she did not in all speed break up and leave that kind of close, solitary life and repair to some good wholesome air’.8Accordingly, the queen went to Seton, one of her favourite haunts close to Edinburgh, a week after the murder, and spent three recuperative days there. Although Mary’s enemies subsequently accused her of dallying at Seton with Bothwell, it was the task of Bothwell and Huntly, as chief nobles of the kingdom, to remain at Holyrood to guard the person of Prince James.
In the course of her further reflections, once the first distressing impact of the murder wore off, it could not fail to occur to Mary that this was no hideous outrage by unknown assassins, but a deliberately planned coup on the part of those nobles who had hated Darnley, and who had openly discussed his removal with her at Craigmillar. It must now have become apparent to her that she herself had been in no personal danger, but that Darnley had paid the penalty for his treachery in the violent and bloodthirsty manner which she had by now come to associate with Scottish vengeance. Possibly she taxed Bothwell with complicity or possibly she was informed of it from another source; but in any case by the mere process of reasoning she could hardly have been ignorant as to who were the authors of the crime, when the first shock had subsided. In the meantime rumours as to the truth of the matter, and the fact that Mary’s chief nobles had been involved, began to reach both England and France. By March the Venetian ambassador in Paris had heard a comparatively accurate account of events from Moretta, the returning ambassador of Savoy, and commented further: ‘It is widely believed that the principal persons of the kingdom were implicated in this act, because they were dissatisfied with the King’, amongst whom he singled out Moray for having had a quarrel with Darnley’.9 Both Catherine de Médicis and Elizabeth reacted predictably to these rumours: a king had been killed; Mary’s leading subjects were said to be involved in the crime; it was now up to Mary herself to dispense public justice with a heavy hand, whether it was directed towards the true criminals or not being less important than the fact that justice should be seen to be done. The two queens, French and English, wrote long admonitory letters to the third Scottish queen to this effect.
Rumours were not only rife on the Continent and in England, they were also percolating rapidly round Edinburgh itself. A quantity of people, many of them servants, had been involved in the murder; it was hardly likely that an outrage of this magnitude would remain a total mystery for very long. Tongues wagged. There were dark hints, and others a good deal plainer. One story said that Sir James Balfour had had one of his underlings killed, because he threatened to reveal the truth out of a crisis of conscience.10 Placards began to appear in the streets – the art of the anonymous placard having been recently imported from France. The first placard was nailed up on 16th February, a week after the murder, naming Bothwell and Balfour, and asserting that the queen had consented to the murder, as a result of the witchcraft of Janet Beaton, the lady of Buccleuch. The second placard on 18th February took a more xenophobic line, naming three foreigners in Mary’s household – Bastian, Francisco, and Joseph Riccio. In a letter of 28th February to Cecil, Drury spoke of other bills bestowed upon the church doors, even of one posted upon a tree which mentioned a smith who would step forward if necessary and say he was the maker of the false keys for the house (if the man existed, it casts further doubt on Paris’s deposition in which he said he was instructed to steal the keys of Kirk o’Field).11 The sound of voices crying that Bothwell was the murderer of the king was heard through the night in the streets of Edinburgh. On 1st March the most famous and most virulent of all the placards appeared: it showed Queen Mary as a mermaid, naked to the waist, with a crown on her head, and Bothwell as a hare – the crest of the Hepburns – crouching in a circle of swords. The implication behind the use of the mermaid was not romantic, as might appear to modern eyes, but deliberately insulting, since the word was commonly used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to denote a siren, and thus by analogy a prostitute.*
This was the supreme moment for Mary to show herself the prudent and ruthless sovereign, and benefit from the actions of others to make her own position thoroughly secure. Her Achilles’ heel in Scotland – her husband Darnley – had been eliminated from her path by her own nobility. She had not known of the crime beforehand, and was not implicated in its details. Now her best course was to pursue the so-called murderers with public vengeance, in order to establish once and for all her own innocence of any possible complicity. After all, once the nobles came to power they took great care to produce some criminals publicly, as we shall see, in order to exculpate themselves; Mary herself should have been at least as practical while she still had the opportunity. Even if she could not go so far as arraigning Bothwell himself, there were underlings to be sacrificed. As it was, her conduct bordered on madness. The Privy Council had announced a reward of £2000 for the capture of the criminals, immediately after the deed; there had been vague questionings of Nelson and the old women; but beyond that no further steps were taken to secure any arrests. Neither the placards, the rumours, the letters from abroad, nor Lennox’s furious denunciations of his son’s murderers – about whose identity he was personally in no doubt – seemed to have the power of penetrating Mary’s passive state of despair and melancholy. Since health and shock had clearly robbed her of any shred of political judgement, she was exceptionally dependent upon her advisers. But the advisers who surrounded her were all for one reason and another incapable of pointing out the true facts of the situation; never was Mary Stuart’s pathetic lack of loyal disinterested consultants more disastrous to her than in the period immediately after Kirk o’Field.
Moray’s first concern was to clear himself of any possible guilt in the eyes of his English friends: Moretta, after all, had believed Moray implicated above all others because of his notorious hatred for Darnley. In a letter to Cecil of 13th March, Moray anxiously excused himself and also asked for a passport so that he could come to London.12 In this crisis of his sister’s affairs, Moray was eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Scottish court, partly so that he should not be involved in the contentious struggle for power which he saw coming, in which the strength of the hated Bothwell seemed to be growing hourly, partly so that he could ingratiate himself in England. He departed for London at the beginning of April – incidentally making his sister guardian of his daughter, in his will. Queen Mary wept at his departure, and wished ‘he were not so precise in religion’.13 Of the queen’s other possible advisers, Maitland had been involved in the plot, and could therefore scarcely advise her to pursue its punishment vindictively. Bothwell was hardly likely to counsel a course so alien to his own interests. There was thus no force to conjure the queen out of her mood of lassitude and melancholia. Her foreign correspondence ceased – that immense flood of letters to her Guise relations, in whom she had taken such a touching, detailed domestic interest ever since she left France, dried up; there is no more poignant evidence that Mary Stuart had fallen into a state of despair. The Scotland of her dreams and early happiness now seemed to her a cruel and barbarous country where deeds of violence succeeded each other in remorseless succession; her secretary and now her husband had been done to death within a year, not by low assassins but by the chief men of the kingdom. The renewed bloodshed less than twelve months after the death of Riccio horrified her. In her sad passivity, she allowed herself to lean increasingly on the one man close to her who still showed strength of purpose, energy and determination – and was also only too anxious to direct the affairs of the state. Unfortunately for Mary, that man was Bothwell, who, whatever his dominating qualities, was also the chief suspect of her husband’s murder.
On 8th March, the queen received a formal visit of condolence from Killigrew, Elizabeth’s envoy. He found her, by his own account, ‘in a dark chamber, so as I could not see her face, but by her very words, she seemed very doleful, and did accept my sovereign’s letters and messages in a very thankful manner …’14 On 14th March, an effort was made to punish the author of the defamatory placards, and James Murray of Tullibardine was accused of having ‘devised, invented and caused to be set up certain painted papers upon the Tolbooth door of Edinburgh, bending to her Majesty’s slander and defamation’.15 On 19th March, Bothwell began to show his mettle as director of Mary’s policies: it was time for Prince James to be returned to the royal nursery at Stirling, from which his mother had plucked him a month before, when there were rumours that Darnley was threatening his safety. While Argyll and Huntly conveyed him there, his governor, Lord Mar, was presented with the governorship of Stirling Castle. This meant, in turn, that Mar could be deprived of the vital governorship of Edinburgh Castle – which he had held loyally for the queen in August 1565. This fortress Bothwell now bestowed on his own ally Sir James Cockburn, but later, even more fatally, gave to his associate Sir James Balfour – presumably as a reward for his part in the murder.
Bothwell’s ambitions to become effective ruler of Scotland, which one may conjecture he had nourished since the summer of 1566, had been given a further fillip at the end of February by the serious illness of his wife Jean Gordon: she hovered on the brink of death, and one ambassador went so far as to announce that she had actually died. There is no need to attribute poison to Bothwell to explain the illness, since divorcing Jean later proved extremely easy – but it must surely have had the effect of sending his thoughts racing forward to his future plans. His finances were also no better than before and in February he had to sell more land to Alexander Home, which gave him another powerful motive to press forward towards a position in which his finances would be at least unassailable. By the end of March, a story had reached the English ambassador in Paris that a marriage might be forthcoming between Mary and Bothwell and, at roughly the same date, Drury reported to Cecil in London that ‘the judgment of the people’ was that Mary would marry Bothwell.16 For once more in her history, as at her birth, and after the death of Francis, the queen’s new marriageability made her a target for any ambitious man who wanted to make himself a king. And Bothwell was certainly such a man inspired either by family tradition of advancement through queens, or plain personal ambition, unmarked by any trace of sentiment or sensitivity.
On 23rd March, the fortieth day after Darnley’s death, the queen’s period of mourning officially came to an end with a solemn Mass of Requiem and a dirge for Darnley’s soul. In fact her sorrows were only just beginning. The vociferous demands of Lennox for vengeance had reached a pitch when even Mary, advised by Bothwell, felt herself unable to ignore them. In a letter of 24th March she agreed to allow him to bring a private process in front of Parliament against Bothwell as the slayer of his son, and the process was set up by an Act of the Privy Council on 28th March to take place on 12th April. It was hardly surprising that in two letters of 29th and 30th March, Drury reported the queen to be in continuous ill-health – ‘She has been for the most part either melancholy or sickly ever since, and especially this week upon Tuesday or Wednesday often swooned … the Queen breaketh very much.’17 The trial of Bothwell was not even instituted officially by the queen, but allowed to stand at the private petition of Lennox. But Lennox understandably shrank from appearing in Edinburgh with the six followers permitted to him by law, in view of the fact that the city was swarming with 4000 of Bothwell’s adherents.
On the appointed day, Bothwell rode magnificently down the Canongate, with Morton and Maitland flanking him, and his Hepburns trotting behind. The queen, with Mary Fleming, now Maitiand’s wife, watched them go from the window at Holyrood. Although the due processes of justice were observed at the trial – which lasted from noon till seven in the evening – the absence of the accuser Lennox meant that Bothwell was inevitably acquitted; the wily Morton excused himself from the jury, on the grounds that he was kin to the victim, and thus cunningly, with an eye to the future, did not partake in Bothwell’s acquittal. The Diurnal of Occurrents, written by a comparatively impartial court observer, commented sourly that Bothwell was ‘made clean of the said slaughter, albeit that it was heavily murmured that he was guilty thereof’.18 Another omen for the future was the fact that a last-minute messenger from Elizabeth arrived at Holyrood at 6 a.m., and attempted to get the trial postponed, presumably until Lennox could be present. The messenger was, however, not admitted to the Scottish queen’s presence, and treated with little courtesy.
Bothwell reacted characteristically and braggartly to his acquittal: he sent a crier round the town, and had bills stuck on the town gates and the Tolbooth, emblazoned with his arms, offering to defend his innocence with personal combat. However, that night, an anonymous acceptor of his challenge on a placard offered to prove that Bothwell was the ‘chief author of the foul and horrible murder by law of arms’, showing that the Scots spirit was not to be bullied. The next Wednesday, the queen rode to Parliament, with Bothwell carrying the sceptre, Argyll the crown and Crawford the sword once more as a year ago, but on this occasion, her nerve had evidently gone sufficiently to surround herself with hagbutters, no longer trusting the bailies of Edinburgh. At this Parliament, the proceedings of Bothwell’s trial were officially declared to be just according to the law of the land; all subjects were ordered to live in unity, despite their religious differences, and even more significantly, grants of land towards certain nobles were confirmed – the lands that went with Dunbar Castle were confirmed to Bothwell, and Huntly and four other Gordons were confirmed in their estates, although unofficial restitution had been made two years before. These were the practical aspects of the fall of Darnley.
Bothwell’s next move was absolutely in keeping with his character and the conditions of the time: if he was to make his power even more effective by occupying the position of king, he needed the support of at least some of his fellow-nobles. The contemporary expedient of a bond was once more called into play, as twice before over the murder of Riccio and the murder of Darnley. In order to secure adherents for this new bond, on Saturday 19th April, at the end of the sitting of Parliament, Bothwell duly entertained twenty-eight of the nobles and prelates then in the capital to a lavish feast – contemporary reports differing as to whether this banquet took place in his own apartments at Holyrood, or in Ainslie’s Tavern in the town itself. What was sure was that at the end of this momentous supper party, Bothwell produced a long document, the main point of which, apart from his own innocence of the murder of Darnley, was that the queen was now ‘destitute of a husband, in which solitary state, the commonwealth may not permit her to remain’.19 It continued ingenuously: if the ‘affectionate and hearty service of the said Earl, and his other good qualities’ might move the queen to select him as a new husband – and the document suggested that another reason for such a choice, quite apart from Bothwell’s noble nature, might be the fact that Mary would prefer ‘one of her native-born subjects unto all foreign subjects’ – then the signatories were to promise themselves to promote the marriage by counsel, vote and assistance. To this remarkable manifesto, known by the name of the tavern as the Ainslie bond, eight bishops, nine earls and seven barons now put their signatures including Morton, Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Cassillis, Sutherland, Glencairn, Rothes, Seton, Sinclair, Boyd and Herries.* Although the motives and loyalties of some of the signatories must be considered to be highly suspect – for surely to Morton and Maitland King James Hepburn would be no more acceptable than King Henry Stuart had been – nevertheless Bothwell now had in his pocket the document he considered he needed for his next bold move forward.
The queen having gone to her favourite Seton, Bothwell now followed her there with Maitland and Bellenden. According to Queen Mary’s own story, it was here that he first paid suit to her, suggesting both that she needed a husband, and that he was the best man to fill the role, since he had been selected to do so by her nobles. This direct request threw the queen into a state of confusion: ‘This poor young princess, inexperienced in such devices,’ wrote Nau,20 ‘was circumvented on all sides by persuasions, requests, and importunities; both by general memorials signed by their hands, and presented to her in full council, and by private letters.’ We can certainly believe Mary’s account that she did not know what to do, especially when Maitland assured her what she knew only too well, that it had become absolutely necessary that some remedy should be provided for the disorder into which the public affairs had fallen for want of a head. Now her chief nobles were apparently pleading with her to accept Bothwell – ‘a man of resolution well adapted to rule, the very character needed to give weight to the decisions and actions of the council’. However, Queen Mary always asserted afterwards that she refused Bothwell’s proposals at this point, on the grounds that there were too many scandals about her husband’s death, despite the fact that Bothwell had been legally acquitted of complicity by Parliament.
With this refusal still uppermost in her thoughts, the queen proceeded to Stirling to pay a visit to her baby. She arrived on Monday 21st April, and spent the whole Tuesday enjoying the company of her child. James was ten months old. The queen played with him in peace, happily unaware that this was the last meeting she was ever to have with her son. While she was at Stirling, she also wrote to the former papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, now back in Turin, protesting her devotion to Scotland, to the Pope, and the Holy Catholic Church – in which she intended to die.21 It is difficult to know for certain what thoughts of the future inspired this strange guilty little letter, but Mondovi’s reaction, written before he had heard news of her abduction and marriage to Bothwell, is significant: he prophesied that unless the queen of Scots was given strong support by the papacy, she might give way to the natural impulse of a young woman and seek support elsewhere from a husband instead; as a candidate for this post, Mondovi put forward the name of Bothwell ‘who has ever been the Queen’s most trusty and obedient adherent’.22
On the Wednesday Mary started back to Edinburgh. The visit to Stirling had ostensibly been a secret one, and she had with her only Maitland, Huntly, James Melville and about thirty horsemen. Mary’s health was still poor. On the road back she was seized with a violent pain and had to take rest in a roadside cottage. That night she slept at the palace of Linlithgow, the peaceful palace overlooking its lake, where she had been born. The next morning, Thursday 24th April, the ninth anniversary of her marriage to Francis, the queen and her little troupe started back on the road for Edinburgh. But as they reached the Bridges of Almond, about six miles from Edinburgh, close to the point where the Gogar Burn joined the Almond River, and travellers were ferried across, Bothwell suddenly appeared with a force of 800 men. He had spent the night at the nearby castle of Calder, apparently on his way into Liddesdale. Bothwell rode forward, put his hand on the queen’s bridle, and told her that since danger was threatening her in Edinburgh, he proposed to take her to the castle of Dunbar, out of harm’s way. Some of Mary’s followers reacted disagreeably to the sudden appearance of Bothwell, but the queen said gently that she would go with the Earl Bothwell rather than be the cause of bloodshed. Docilely, without more ado, she allowed herself to be conducted about forty miles across the heart of Scotland, skirting the capital itself; she seemed to accept Bothwell’s story so totally that she made no attempt to seek rescue from the country people as she passed. Her only positive action was to send one James Borthwick to Edinburgh to issue a warning of possible danger. When Borthwick told the provost what had happened, a very different view was taken of the disappearance of their sovereign. The alarm bell was rung and the citizens were begged to attempt a rescue. But by this time there was little that they, or anyone, could do. At midnight, the queen was within Dunbar Castle, surrounded by a force of Bothwell’s men. The gates of the castle were firmly shut behind her.
This abduction – if the word can truly be applied to anything so calm and placid as these proceedings at the Bridges – represented a typical example of Bothwell’s thinking. Even if earlier hints of Bothwell’s predilection for abduction, in Arran’s story, are disregarded, Bothwell clearly had the mentality which considered that a sufficiently public outrage covered in some curious way a multitude of sins. This had been his reasoning over Kirk o’Field. Now he confidently believed that an abduction would not only put an end to further consultation and discussion about the marriage – in which his reasoning was perfectly correct – but also distract public attention from his connection with Darnley’s death by the very flagrancy of the act; here of course his reasoning was disastrously wrong. Was Queen Mary enlightened in advance as to her prospective fate? Although we cannot have the certainty of definite proof, the contemporary evidence points strongly to the fact that Mary knew of the plan beforehand, and agreed to it weakly, as a possible way out of the morass in which despair brought on by ill-health seemed to have landed her. The intended abduction was certainly widely known about beforehand among her nobles. Lennox knew about it on the Tuesday, and Kirkcaldy of Grange, Bothwell’s bitter enemy, mentioned it on Thursday, the day it actually happened.23 In a fury at Bothwell’s rising eminence, Kirkcaldy wrote to Bedford in the same letter that the queen had been overheard saying that she would go to the end of the world in a white petticoat with Bothwell – but as Kirkcaldy did not reveal by whom or under what circumstances this extraordinary declaration had been overheard, and as he subsequently became one of Mary’s loyalest followers, it seems likely that he was allowing his dislike and jealousy of Bothwell to taint his imagination. Maitland must surely have known of the plan. Paris, in his deposition, said Bothwell’s man, Black Ormiston, came to Linlithgow Palace secretly the night before the abduction and had a long earnest conversation.24 It seems inconceivable that the scheme should not have been outlined also to the queen, if only to secure her co-operation. Mary, still envisaging Bothwell as her help and support among the nobles, and not as the reprobate adventurer whom his enemies later built up in their writings, felt in no position to withstand his latest proposition; it was presented to her by Bothwell, using the same arguments which he had used to himself, as a convenient solution to her difficulties.
Once within the castle of Dunbar, Bothwell made his second planned move – an equally characteristic one, although in this case the queen was not consulted beforehand. He decided to complete his formal abduction of her person by the physical possession of her body. His intentions in this aggressive act were as before perfectly straightforward: he intended to place the queen in a situation from which she could not possibly escape marrying him. Bothwell was certainly not in love with Mary, although he may have accompanied his actions with some sort of protestations, such as he thought suitable to the occasion. But in the course of the gratification of his ambitions, rape was not the sort of duty from which Bothwell was likely to shrink. Melville, who was present in the castle at the time, and only allowed to go free the next morning, was quite certain that the ravishment had taken place: ‘The Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and laid with her against her will.’25 It was Melville who tells us that Bothwell had already boasted that he would marry the queen – ‘who would or would not; yea, whether she would herself or not’. A fortnight later Mary gave a very vivid description of her experiences to the bishop of Dunblane, who was instructed to explain her hasty marriage to Bothwell to the French court: first of all Bothwell ‘awaited us by the way, accompanied with a great force, and led us with all diligence to Dunbar’ and there, in words which seem positively touching: ‘Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle.’ Now Bothwell, not accepting her promise to marry him, refused to have the consummation of the marriage delayed, but kept up a continuous barrage of importunity, ‘accompanied none the less by force’ until ‘he has finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and such form as he thought might best serve his turn’.26 It is interesting to note that Bothwell’s and Mary’s contemporaries believed instantaneously and strongly that the abduction scheme had been a rigged one and intended to save the queen’s face. Within three days Drury wrote that although the manner seemed to be forcible, it was known to be otherwise.27 But it was also widely believed that Bothwell had completed his scheme by making love to the queen, and that this was probably against her will. These were the conclusions drawn by those able to observe at first hand the bold and scheming character of Bothwell, and the markedly straitlaced attitude of Queen Mary to matters of sexual morality.
It is sometimes suggested that Mary found a sexual satisfaction with Bothwell which she had not experienced with either of her previous husbands. This may or may not be true: it can certainly never be proved, since the queen herself certainly never ventured any opinion upon the subject, and to the end of her life always firmly attributed her marriage to Bothwell to reasons of state rather than the dictates of the heart. In fact, the events leading up to her marriage to Darnley point far more clearly to the workings of physical infatuation, than those leading up to the Bothwell marriage. In spring 1565 Mary Stuart was a young and beautiful woman, healthy and energetic, long widowed, eager to be married; in spring 1567 she was broken in health, distraught, nervously concerned about the future of her government in Scotland. Quite apart from the evidence of events, it seems extremely doubtful whether they were the sort of couple who would have been drawn to each other if political considerations had not been involved. Practical ambition had driven Bothwell to woo the queen: this elegant, coquettish, literary-minded, slightly cold woman, with her graceful, leaning figure, her red-gold hair, her laughing flirtatious ways, her demand for obeisance to which she had been accustomed from her earliest years, was not the type to appeal to Bothwell, the lover of the lusty Bessie Crawford, the dominating courtesan Janet Beaton or the plaintive, submissive Anna Throndsen. Of all Mary Stuart’s qualities, her courage and gaiety, her ability to make quick decisions and pull herself rapidly out of an untenable situation were those most likely to appeal to Bothwell but these had been strangely in abeyance since her virtual nervous breakdown at Jedburgh. The important fact about Mary Stuart in Bothwell’s eyes was that she was queen regnant of Scotland, with the power to make her husband king consort and effective ruler of the country.
Of course it would not be essential for Bothwell to love Mary for her to respond to him: she might even have experienced some perverse satisfaction in domination by this straightforward and brutal man, so different from her other husbands, and her potential courtly lovers. Bothwell’s intellectual curiosity certainly extended into matters of sex. Apart from the common contemporary rumours of his vicious life, there was a canard that he practised homosexuality.* The feelings which Queen Mary felt for Bothwell can only be estimated in terms of the importance which as a woman she gave to the whole subject of sex. In early youth she naturally paid little attention to such questions, and during the period of her first widowhood also was remarkable for the discretion with which she conducted herself. Her disastrous marriage to Darnley, springing from physical attraction, gave her every reason to adopt an extremely suspicious attitude towards passion and its consequences. If, despite all these considerations, she experienced some genuine fulfilment in Bothwell’s embraces, it is remarkable how little effort she made to keep in touch with her husband, once she was in captivity: from the moment of her abdication onwards, she seems to have lost all interest in Bothwell, as though he belonged to some previous, unsuccessful, political phase in her life. Another interesting aspect of her captivity is that she made absolutely no attempt to quench any desires of the flesh, if indeed she felt them, during the whole nineteen years: there is no rumour, which bears investigation, of the sort of liaison which would surely have occurred had she become, under Bothwell’s tuition, the grande amoureuse of so many imaginings. On the contrary, from the age of twenty-five onwards, the queen led a life of total chastity.
Whatever Mary’s inner feelings for Bothwell during the short period of their concubinage – three weeks from Dunbar to the marriage, and four weeks thereafter – their union was certainly not founded originally on the flimsy basis of passion. Mary’s confessor Mameret later solemnly swore to the Spanish ambassador in London that, until the question of her marriage to Bothwell was raised, he had never seen a woman of greater virtue, courage and uprightness – and he therefore, with all the intimate knowledge of her character gained in the confessional, utterly believed that Mary had only taken up with Bothwell in order to settle the religious situation in Scotland.29 In fact the queen had not one but three pressing and – as it seemed to her – good reasons for giving her consent to the marriage with Bothwell. In the first place he had succeeded in convincing her that he would at last provide her with the able and masterful consort whom she had so long sought to share with her the strains of the government of Scotland. He had subjugated her by the undoubted strength of his personality at a time when broken health had induced in her a fatally indecisive, even lethargic state of mind, so that faced with the reality of Bothwell and his positive aims, she was unable to see clearly where her own best interests lay. Secondly, Bothwell was able to show to Mary the Ainslie bond which proved to her satisfaction that the majority of her nobility – not only Seton and Huntly but also the more contumacious Morton and Argyll – were prepared to accept him as their overlord. Mary had married Darnley defiantly against the advice of most of her nobles: she did not intend to make the same mistake twice. The Ainslie bond and the apparent approval of the nobility were worth more to Bothwell in furthering his suit than all the magic arts and enticements with which he was afterwards credited by Mary’s partisans in order to explain his seduction of her.* Thirdly, Bothwell had effectively ensured that the queen would not be able to go back on her word once she was back in her capital, by the act of physical rape which he had performed at Dunbar. The union had already been consummated: it remained to transform it into a legal marriage.
Having secured the queen’s acquiescence, Bothwell now faced the problem of ridding himself of his existing wife, to whom he had been married just over two years before. This did not prove difficult, since Jean Bothwell seems to have raised no objections: her marriage had been brought about by political considerations, and she was now content to have it dissolved for the same good reasons. There were already rumours by the end of March that her brother Huntly had agreed in principle to the deal. On 3rd May Lady Bothwell was given judgment against her husband in the Protestant commissary court, which had replaced the old church courts in matrimonial cases: the grounds given were his adultery with Bessie Crawford. In order to make assurance doubly sure, their marriage was then formally annulled on 7th May by the Catholic Archbishop Hamilton, on the grounds that they had not received a dispensation for their marriage, although they were within the fourth degree of consanguinity, Bothwell’s great-great-grandfather having married a Gordon. The cynicism of this gesture may be judged by the fact that not only had a dispensation actually been given, but it had been given by Archbishop Hamilton himself.31 Despite the ease of the divorce, Bothwell’s servants took the opportunity in the course of it to threaten violence to Master John Manderstoun, canon of Dunbar collegiate church, who was told that if matters did not move fast enough ‘there shall not fail to be noses and lugges (ears) cut, and far greater displeasures …’32 On 6th May Bothwell brought the queen back into Edinburgh; at the end of April she had received an offer of rescue from Aberdeen, which she had rejected. She was now regarded as firmly committed to Bothwell’s rule. The couple entered Edinburgh by the West Port and then rode up the Bow towards the castle. Both Huntly and Maitland were in their train. Although the artillery of the castle shot off magnificently for the queen’s arrival, it was generally remarked that Bothwell’s power was not absolute. The Diurnal of Occurrents recorded that the Earl Bothwell led the queen’s majesty by the bridle of her horse, as though she were a captive.33
As Queen Mary moved in a trance towards her public union with Bothwell, already the forces of aristocratic reaction were coalescing against his meteoric rise. Furious at the realization that Bothwell – one of their own number – had made himself a virtual dictator, on 1st May a party of dissidents gathered at Stirling. They vowed in yet another communal bond to strive by all means in their power to set their queen at liberty, and defend her son Prince James. In this meeting at Stirling, it is significant that the key figures were Morton, Argyll and Atholl – all three of whom only a week before, out of either cunning or weakness, had signed the Ainslie bond promising to forward Bothwell’s suit of the queen. Bedford was now asked by Kirkcaldy to write to Moray and ask him to return, and Robert Melville wrote for English support against Bothwell, threatening French support if it was not forthcoming. The pattern of Scottish politics was forming once more into the same shapes of family alliances and feuds, in which the power of one noble could not be allowed to grow unchecked, and in which English help was like the joker in the pack of cards. The Stirling conspirators diverted themselves with a drama called The Murder of Darnley and the Fate of Bothwell – in which the boy actor who played the part of Bothwell was hanged so realistically that it took some time to restore him to life. These same nobles sent a message to Mary offering her their support against the Lord Bothwell. But since Bothwell was firmly governing all matters around her, the queen could scarcely credit that he had already lost the support of the fickle Scottish lords: it was after all only a few weeks since the signing of the Ainslie bond, which had convinced her that the majority of her nobility especially desired this Bothwell marriage.
The days passed with horrible speed towards her wedding-day. When John Craig, Knox’s colleague in the parish church of Edinburgh, refused to proclaim the banns of the marriage without a writ from the queen, he was brought a command signed by her personally saying that she had been neither ravished nor yet retained in captivity. But when Craig did make his proclamation, he was still brave enough, on 9th May, to express contemporary disgust at the speed of events, by a denunciation in front of the Privy Council of Bothwell’s behaviour: ‘I laid to his charge, the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement, and proclaiming within the space of four days, and last the suspicion of the King’s death which her marriage would confirm.’34 Angrily Bothwell threatened to hang Craig; but Craig spoke no more than what the common people of Edinburgh, once so devoted to Mary, their dream figure, their beautiful young queen, felt themselves at seeing her thus recklessly and carelessly allow herself to be trampled in the mire of Bothwell’s ambition. On 12th May Mary created Bothwell duke of Orkney and lord of Shetland (titles once borne by his ancestor, the 1st earl) and placed the ducal coronet on his head with her own hands. Four of his followers were knighted, including Black Ormiston of Kirk o’Field fame. To many the queen seemed like a mindless zombie under the power of Bothwell’s authority: Beaton in Paris was naturally growing distracted at the madness or folly of his young mistress, but Clernault reported to him on 14th May that Mary neither listened to nor inspected any communication he brought her from Beaton or others of her advisers abroad.35 On the same day the queen officially pardoned those nobles who had signed the Ainslie bond.
On Thursday, 15th May, twelve days after his own divorce, just over three months after the death of her own husband, Mary and Bothwell were married in the great hall at Holyrood. Lines from Ovid were posted upon the gates of the Palace – ‘Mense malas maio nubere vulgus ait’, or as the people murmured significantly: ‘Wantons marry in the month of May’.* A greater contrast to the two previous weddings of the queen could hardly be imagined. The very fact that the ceremony took place according to the Protestant rite showed how much the queen had lost control of her destinies, although it is possible that she herself heard a Mass earlier in the day, out of which her adherents later tried to construct a story that they had been married under both forms. At the service, Adam, bishop of Orkney, preached a sermon in the course of which he chose to announce Bothwell’s penitence for his former evil and wicked life. After the wedding, there were no masques as there had been at the Darnley wedding, or ‘pleasures and pastimes’ as there had always been before when princes married.36 There was merely a wedding dinner, at which the people were allowed to watch Mary eating her meal at the head of the table, with Bothwell at the foot.
Equally significant of the queen’s state of mind is the fact that there were no rich presents for Bothwell as groom as there had been for Darnley, and certainly no lavish replenishment of her own wardrobe. Whereas Darnley had received violet velvet, furs, a cupboard for perfumes, cloth of gold for his horse’s caparison, blue bonnets with feathers for his fools, and other tokens of Mary’s love, Bothwell merely received some genet fur from one of Mary of Guise’s black cloaks for his dressing-gown – his solitary present. Furthermore, the queen seems to have paid no attention to the subject of her own clothes, once so important to her. There are only two entries in the inventories of her wardrobe in May 1567 – one being for Bothwell’s fur – compared to thirty in July 1565, the month in which she married Darnley.37 Her sartorial preparations were confined to having an old yellow dress relined with white taffeta, an old black gown done up with gold braid and a black taffeta petticoat relined. Of all the sad events in the life of Mary Stuart in Scotland, this squalid, hurried wedding, of a rite she did not profess, without any of the preparations she so loved, is surely the most pathetic.
Judged from the comments of observers, Mary’s brief married life with Bothwell brought her absolutely no personal happiness. Already on their wedding-day, du Croc reported that a strange formality was noticed between the queen and her new husband. Mary tried to excuse it, by saying that she did not wish to be merry. To Leslie, she was more explicit: she sent for him, and in floods of tears told him how much she already repented of what she had done, especially her Protestant marriage ceremony.’38 She promised him desperately she would never do anything again opposed to the Catholic Church. In front of others, Mary’s sadness was even more fearful and more desperate. Melville heard her actually ask for a knife, to kill herself in front of Arthur Erskine, her equerry, the day after the wedding, and when he remonstrated with her, the queen threatened to drown herself.39 It has been suggested that Mary’s unhappiness was due to the fact that Bothwell now made some revelation to her about his past – his guilt at Kirk o’Field, for example, or even his father’s supposed liaison with her mother Mary of Guise. But Mary Stuart’s state of mind was now too immediately disturbed for such past scandals to be able to affect her, and Bothwell’s involvement in her husband’s death was certainly no surprise to her at this point. The hysterical nature of Mary’s reaction shows not only how far she was from feeling any kind of personal love for Bothwell, but also how desperately close her nerves were to the surface and how far her self-control had vanished. As it began to dawn on her that she might have betrayed her whole reputation in order to marry a man who was no more suited than Darnley to advise her, control the nobles, or govern Scotland, her future began to look very black indeed.
Melville reported that Bothwell’s beastly and suspicious nature was such that ‘not one day passed’ during their time together without the queen shedding abundant tears. Maitland told du Croc a little later that since the day of the queen’s marriage there had been no end of tears and lamentations, since Bothwell was furious and jealous if she looked at anyone except him – he accused her of having a pleasure-loving nature, and liking to spend her time in frivolous worldly pursuits, like any other woman.40 In short there was now no lute-playing, hunting and hawking, as in the early days with Darnley. Even before their marriage, Bothwell’s unkindness had led to half a day’s quarrel between them. Bothwell’s language was said to be so filthy that even Melville was constrained to leave his presence. Gossips in London suggested that Mary suffered tortures of jealousy because Bothwell’s former wife Lady Jean still remained installed in his own castle of Crichton. Maitland helped to stir up trouble by telling Mary that Bothwell had written to Jean several letters assuring her that he only regarded Mary as his concubine – Jean was still his only lawful wife. Du Croc took care to pass the story on to the French court, adding spitefully: ‘No one in this kingdom is in any doubt but that the Duke (Bothwell) loves his former wife a great deal more than he loves the queen.’41 In fact property was probably at the bottom of Bothwell’s relations with Jean: it is unlikely that he could have turned her out of Crichton, even if he had so wished, since her dowry had redeemed the mortgage, and Jean Bothwell, as we have seen, had a commendable sense of property values.
But Bothwell in his treatment of Mary was less concerned with the niceties of their legal relationship than with the power that it brought him. In their bond of 16th June, the lords announced that Bothwell had kept Mary as the virtual prisoner of his ambition. None of their number had been able to speak to her, even on lawful business, without Bothwell being present; so suspicious had Bothwell become, that he kept the queen’s chamber door perpetually guarded by his own men of war. Drury reported on 20th May that the queen’s distress was the talk of the court: never, it seemed, had a woman changed so much in appearance in so short a space of time. It was even rumoured that she was suffering from the falling sickness (epilepsy) to explain her deranged behaviour.* The mermaid and the hare were evidently as ill-suited to live together as might be expected of a half-fairy sea creature and a wild animal of the earth.
One of the first tasks the queen and Bothwell had to face after their hasty marriage was that of explaining it away to both the French and English courts. Mary’s instructions to the bishop of Dunblane,43 who was entrusted with the mission to France, and the letter she sent along the same lines to Beaton, have a strongly apologetic note, as though she was all too aware of that unpleasant French proverb, qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Apart from her accounts of events leading up to the marriage, already quoted, she stressed her continued loyalty to the Catholic Church – she would not ‘leave her religion for him, nor for any man at all’ – aware that her actions had once more cast this seriously in doubt. Her instructions emphasized Bothwell’s loyal service to the Scottish crown, and glossed over their previous disagreements which she attributed to the jealousy of other nobles. ‘As envy follows virtues, and this country is of itself somewhat subject to factions; others began to mislike his proceeding, and so far by reports and misconstructing his doings, went about to put him out of our good grace …’ Then Mary stressed the fact that Bothwell had won over the other nobles to the marriage project – ‘He obtained an writing subscribed with all their hands, wherein they not only granted their consent to our marriage with him, but also obliged them to set him forward with their lives and goods.’ Finally she described her own helpless and broken spirit, how she felt herself inadequate to deal with the Scottish situation singlehanded – ‘this realm being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order, unless our authority be assisted and forthset by the fortification of a man who must take upon his person in the execution of justice … the travail thereof we may no longer sustain in our own person, being already wearied, and almost broken with the frequent uproars and rebellions raised against us since we came in Scotland’. Despite this plea for sympathy in her situation, which has the ring of truth, Mary felt it necessary to outline answers to two possible objections – the lawfulness of the marriage she defends by saying that Bothwell’s previous marriage was dissolved, and her failure to bring the nuncio to Scotland she defends by saying rather ingenuously that she had done all she could in this respect, and that if the nuncio had arrived such terrible events might not have happened.
Robert Melville’s instructions for breaking the news to Queen Elizabeth ran along very similar lines.44 The difficult quarrelsome nature of the Scottish people is once more emphasized, as is Mary’s personal exhaustion and despair for lack of a husband to support her in this impossible situation. Mary met the principal objection of Elizabeth – that she had married the man suspected of her husband’s death – with the point that he had been formally acquitted of the crime by the Scottish Parliament. Despite the fact that Mary accompanied her instructions with a personal and charming letter to Cecil, begging him to help her cause with Elizabeth, neither the English queen nor the French queen allowed themselves to be distracted by Mary’s excuses from the patent facts of the case. From the point of view of either France or England, the Scottish queen had totally lost her head in thus allowing herself to be wedded to the disreputable Bothwell. The only real line of defence was after all that which Mary took in her letter to Beaton: ‘The event is indeed strange and otherwise nor (we know) you would have looked for. But as it is succeeded, we must take the best of it.’
Ironically enough, if the Scottish situation had not been so factious, if Bothwell had not by the flagrant manner of Darnley’s death provided such a convenient handle against himself, if he had understood in any way how to persuade his fellow-nobles into accepting him as consort – as he attempted unsuccessfully to do through the Ainslie bond – he might not have made a bad ruler of the country. The union of Mary and Bothwell might have turned out a marriage of convenience, if not a love match. Bothwell had strength and he had intelligence; as for his tendency to search for violent solutions to problems, he was certainly not alone in possessing this failing in this epoch. He showed reverence for the queen’s position if not her person, refusing to cover himself in her presence until she took his cap and put it on. When they rode abroad together, they put up a good public front of content. Bothwell’s actions during his five weeks as consort were positively encouraging for the future of the country, were it not for the fact that his fellow-nobles were by now seething in almost open revolt. The machinery of the Privy Council, for example, was overhauled to provide for more regular attendance; a law was passed against bringing false money into Scotland; more important still, on 23rd May the proclamation concerning the religion of the country which Mary had enacted on her first arrival in Scotland in 1561 was reenacted formally to reassure the troubled minds who had heard false rumours about its validity. It was pointed out that by allowing certain persons to practise their own (Catholic) religion, the queen had intended no violation of the Act. Scotland was still very much officially Protestant. All this was done with the advice of Mary’s ‘dearest husband, James Duke of Orkney, Earl Bothwell, etc.’ Bothwell’s own letters to France and England, backing up Mary’s explanations of their marriage, revealed a certain native diplomatic ability. To Queen Elizabeth, Bothwell wrote: ‘I will thus boldly affirm that, albeit men of greater and birth and estimation might well have been preferred to this room, yet none more careful to see your two Majesties’ amity and intelligence continued by all good offices …’ He wrote in the same vein to Charles IX of France; Archbishop Beaton he tactfully requested to excuse him in so far as some of his behaviour might seem rather unceremonious and lacking respect.45 Such intelligence might have stood Mary in good stead, if she had ever been allowed the time to enjoy it. It was in exchange for his strength and support in the future that Mary had endured the humiliation of her wedding-day to Bothwell. But the cruelty of fate ensured that she was never allowed the time to enjoy her part of the bargain.
Fast as events had moved before Mary’s wedding, the speed only increased after the ceremony. By the end of May the clouds of war were gathering round Bothwell’s head with such menace that on 30th May the queen and duke were constrained to summon their people to meet them at Melrose on 15th June, with a view to taking arms. The granting of Tantallon to Morton and Edinburgh Castle to Balfour made neither of them more agreeable to see Bothwell elevated above them. Mary described the genesis of a new conspiracy in Scotland to Nau as follows:46 ‘It may have originated in some secret feuds among the lords of recent date, or possibly from grievances of remoter origin which though long hidden, at last came to scatter their poison on the surface.’ What distinguished this new fracas from the Huntly affair, the Chaseabout Raid, the Riccio killing and even the murder of Darnley, was that it now proved convenient to bring in a new dimension of morality, in order to blacken the case against Bothwell, and gloss over the previous commitments of Morton and Maitland. Undoubtedly the hatred of Bothwell and Maitland for each other proved a telling point in the rallying of the nobles against the queen. This animosity was so well known that Maitland was actually rumoured to have been killed by Bothwell at Dunbar. In the end Maitland placed his feelings for Bothwell above his loyalty to Mary, and on 6th June finally left the royal court for the west. He told Cecil that he had been in fear of his life, since Bothwell had tried to kill him in a fit of ungovernable rage in the queen’s own presence, and would have succeeded in doing so if Mary had not rushed to Maitland’s assistance. Maitland refused to admit that his disappearance at this critical juncture involved any disloyalty. To Cecil he explained smoothly that he had only remained at Mary’s side for so long, with so many hazards to his life and honour, because of his ancient affection for the queen. Now he could endure no more.47
Many of the conspirators, such as Kirkcaldy, belonged to the old Protestant party of Moray, who had hated Bothwell since Chaseabout days and before. Bothwell had many virulent enemies. After Home and Murray of Tullibardine joined, Tullibardine brought in his brother-in-law Mar, the more inclined to come over because Bothwell had deprived him of Edinburgh Castle. The allegiance of Atholl was the easier to procure because his wife was sister to Maitland’s wife Mary Fleming; Morton also dangled the prospect of the marriage of his rich young ward the countess of Angus with Atholl’s son before the earl’s eyes, although in the end the young lady was married off to Mar’s son instead. In this network of allegiances and betrayals the treachery of Sir James Balfour surpassed that of anyone else: for he, the closest involved in the murder of Darnley, who had probably drawn up the Craigmillar bond, and who had been granted the custody of Edinburgh Castle as a reward for his complicity, now secretly treated with the conspirators and agreed to support their cause, on condition that his custody of the castle was confirmed. Yet another bond was made in which Sir James Balfour promised to put Edinburgh Castle at the disposal of the nobles, on the grounds that Bothwell was wickedly keeping their sovereign’s person in thrall. A further condition of Balfour’s adhesion was a total indemnity for any past crimes he might have committed up to the present moment – which included of course his participation in the murder at Kirk o’Field.
On 6th June, Bothwell took Mary from Holyrood to the castle of Borthwick, a stark twin-towered fifteenth-century fortress set down beneath a low hill in a valley watered by a tributary of the Esk, about twelve miles to the south of Edinburgh. The lord of Borthwick was Bothwell’s neighbour and ally: from the battlements of Borthwick, the tip of Bothwell’s own castle of Crichton, only two miles away, could be discerned. Mary evidently considered her stay would be tranquil enough, for the Demoiselle de Courcelles specially brought down the royal silver hand-basin for the queen to use while she was there.48 Her hopes were disappointed. Borthwick was surrounded by the insurgents. Bothwell, with his military knowledge, realized that it was ill-situated to withstand a siege, and therefore slipped away through a postern gate, with only one companion, the son of the laird of Crookston. The boy was captured, but Bothwell galloped clean away, leaving Mary to hold the castle. The besiegers called up to the queen to abandon her husband and accompany them back to Edinburgh. When she proudly refused, they shouted insults up to the steep and forbidding walls, of a nature ‘too evil and unseemly to be told’, wrote Drury in a letter to London, as he described the new plight of ‘this poor princess’.49 The poor princess had not, however, lost all her old spirit. She sent two messengers to Huntly for help, both of whom fell into Morton’s hands. The besiegers felt unable to attack without the arrival of Mar and Lindsay, and decided to return to Edinburgh. In the meantime Mary disguised herself as a man, and escaped out of the castle by night to the nearby Black Castle at Cakemuir, which belonged to the Wauchopes, also neighbours and adherents of Bothwell. Here she met Bothwell, and together they made their way to Dunbar, by Fala, skirting the Lammermuir hills to the north to avoid detection.
It was at Dunbar that the ultimate treachery of Balfour revealed itself: for it was his message to the queen that she would do better to return to Edinburgh, where the guns of the castle, under his command, would support her, which brought her out of this comparatively safe place, before the royal forces had mustered to anything like a secure strength. In answer to this reassuring summons, Mary and Bothwell now issued forth from Dunbar, with 200 hagbutters (musketeers), sixty cavalrymen, and only three field guns taken from the castle itself. All the queen’s belongings and wardrobe had been left behind in Edinburgh or at Borthwick from which she had escaped in her male disguise; she was now dressed in clothes hastily borrowed at Dunbar: a short red petticoat, a muffler, velvet hat and sleeves tied with bows, such as the women of Edinburgh wore. Her charm and dignity were undiminished by her costume: it was her reputation which no longer had its pristine purity in the minds of her ordinary subjects and, in a tragic phrase, as the royal cortège passed, ‘the people did not join as was expected’. By the time the queen reached Haddington she had about 600 horses – the faithful Seton had joined her, but Lord John Hamilton and Fleming did not appear; as they debated the best route to take, Huntly and the rest of the Hamiltons stayed, either dispiritedly or indecisively, within Edinburgh Castle. Bothwell found himself relying on the inferior contingents of border lairds such as Ormiston, Langton, Waughton, Wedderburn and Bass. At Gladsmuir, those royal supporters to be seen were treated to a proclamation saying that the conspirators, under the pretext of saving the life of Prince James, were trying to dethrone the queen, in order that they might rule in their own fashion. Queen Mary was therefore compelled to take up arms, and those faithful subjects who had come to her assistance would be rewarded with the lands and the possessions of the rebels. The army then marched on to Leith, and reached Prestonpans, where they spent the night. Mary and Bothwell passed the night – their last together – at the palace of Seton, the house which Mary had loved so long and happily in her six years in Scotland.
At 2 a.m. on the Sunday morning, 15th June, 1567, the confederate lords marched out of Edinburgh towards Musselburgh. In the van of their procession was borne a white banner showing a green tree, with the corpse of Darnley lying underneath it, and his infant son kneeling before him, with the legend: ‘Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord’. Otherwise the rebel lords were each marked by the banner of their family. A few hours later, the royal army under Bothwell also moved out, and took up a commanding position on Carberry Hill. About eight miles east of Edinburgh, above their heads flew not family banners, but a series of banners bearing in each case the cross of St Andrew; and the position of the queen herself was marked by the solitary rampant red lion of Scotland. These nobles now took up their position on a hill opposite – Morton and Home with the cavalry, and behind them, Atholl, Mar, Glencairn, Lindsay and Ruthven with the main body of troops. It was a blazing hot day. Both parties suffered from thirst although by one account the lords had the advantage of some wine to sustain them. In between these two armies, neither of them exactly certain as to how they should proceed, the queen lacking troops, and the nobles lacking authority, there appeared the figure of du Croc, the French ambassador, who had panted out from Edinburgh after the insurgents.50
Du Croc was now deputed by the rebels to beg Mary to abandon Bothwell, at which they were to restore her to her former position, while they themselves would continue to be her loyal subjects. This Mary absolutely and furiously declined to do. She pointed out in a passion of indignation to du Croc that these same lords had signed a bond recommending marriage with the very man they were now opposing vehemently – ‘It was by them that Bothwell had been promoted’ she kept repeating. By her account, Mary had no inkling at this point that the lords intended to charge Bothwell with the murder of Darnley, but certainly she felt absolutely no temptation to desert Bothwell. In the first place, Bothwell, with all his faults, had shown himself loyal to her throughout her adversities and his own, and was pledged to her support; she felt no such confidence about the behaviour of men of the calibre of Morton, Lindsay and Ruthven. Secondly, the queen, who miscarried a child at Lochleven in the middle of July, must by now have realized herself to be pregnant by Bothwell. The fact could not fail to seal their union in the mind of such a philoprogenitive woman. A single child was scarcely enough to ensure the royal succession of Scotland – or England – as history had all too often proved: it was no coincidence that Mary’s marriage contract to Bothwell had specifically stated one of the objects of the match to be ‘that of her royal person succession might be produced’.51
As Mary refused to relinquish Bothwell, both sides now gave themselves up to a series of chivalric parleys, reminiscent of medieval warfare, in which challenges to personal combat were given and taken with great enthusiasm, but no actual battles took place. The first challenge came from the lords, who probably thus hoped to delay matters, until their reinforcements reached them. Bothwell, whom du Croc described as being in high spirits – ‘a great Captain, speaking with undaunted confidence, and leading his army gaily and skilfully … he could not count on half his men, and yet was not dismayed’ – accepted the challenge and rode out in front of the troops, sending a herald forward. James Murray of Purdovis was the first to step forward, but the queen refused to tolerate the encounter, on the grounds that his rank was so much inferior to that of the duke. Bothwell then indicated the sly Morton as a suitable recipient of his challenge. Morton characteristically delegated the job to the spirited Lindsay, who took off his armour and rested his limbs in preparation for the combat. Morton then clasped round his waist the great sword which had once belonged to his ancestor Archibald Bell-the-Cat. But even as these parleyings and preparations were proceeding, the royal troops were melting away, as can be seen in the contemporary sketch of the battlefield. This was probably the intention of the rebels, for in the end, despite these splendid preparations, no one ever did come forward to meet Bothwell’s challenge. Like an ancient hero he stood alone while his troops vanished. It was too late now to attack his enemies up hill, and his men were insufficient. There was no sign of the Hamiltons, who it was hoped might reinforce them.
At evening the rebels decided to press their advantage with a new parley. Atholl and Maitland both lacked the courage to confront the queen they had betrayed, but Kirkcaldy rode forward. Bothwell’s spirits were very far from being either broken or cowed, but as a good general he was aware that the royal party suffered from a striking lack of troops. It would be highly unwise to choose this moment to challenge the lords, when there was a possibility of rallying much more support to Mary’s side in other parts of the country. He therefore suggested to Mary that they should retreat to Dunbar: first of all the castle had a strong, virtually impregnable position on the sea; secondly it would serve as a rallying-point for new supplies of royalists. But Mary could not believe that the situation was so desperate. She still believed in Kirkcaldy’s honour. She considered that the wisest course for her to pursue in the interests of peace and the avoidance of bloodshed was to accept a safe-conduct for Bothwell, and trust herself to the confederate lords, whom she now apparently thought would investigate everything anew by Parliament. Kirkcaldy assured her that the crown as such was not being attacked; afterwards Mary told Nau that both Maitland and Atholl had assured her privately that they were not with the rebels at heart.52 Bothwell, it was agreed, would gallop off to Dunbar, either to raise further troops, or to await parliamentary developments in the capital. With renewed trust in her nobles, Mary bade farewell to the man for whom she had sacrificed so much in terms of honour and reputation. They embraced in full view of both armies. It was at this point that Bothwell entrusted to Mary the bond signed at Craigmillar, which gave her the proof of Morton’s and Maitland’s complicity in the murder; perhaps because he had been raised among them he had less optimism than his wife about her future at the hands of the rebels. At sunset Bothwell mounted his charger, and after five weeks of power galloped away down the road of Dunbar. It was the last sight Mary was ever to have of him.
The queen of Scots was now thoroughly alone. And her entry into the camp of the rebels immediately and rudely jolted her confidence in the love which she still believed her subjects bore for her. Here was no enthusiastic reception, no cheers, no protestations of devotion. On the contrary, the soldiers shouted crude insults at her. The queen’s spirit still held. She said loudly and openly to Morton: ‘How is this, my lord Morton? I am told that all this is done in order to get justice against the king’s murderers. I am told also that you are one of the chief of them.’53 Morton slunk away. But Mary Stuart needed all her courage to endure the ordeal before her, for which she seems to have been ill-prepared. She, who all her life had been greeted publicly with adulation and enthusiasm, now heard the soldiers shout, ‘Burn her, burn the whore, she is not worthy to live,’ as they conveyed her along the road into Edinburgh. ‘Kill her, drown her!’ they cried. Close to Mary’s side rode Drumlanrig and Cessford, two notorious young thugs, who joined their insults to the soldiers’ as they rode. Amazed, almost stunned, the queen allowed tears of shock and humiliation to pour down her cheeks, as she rode forward in the clothes she had acquired at Dunbar – now ‘all spoiled with clay and dirt’. For the first time she began to realize what the effect had been on the ordinary people of Scotland – the people who had once loved her – of her reckless action in marrying her husband’s assassin, and of those weeks of propaganda by the enemies of Bothwell. To them she was now no longer their young and beautiful queen, but an adulteress – and an adulteress who had subsequently become the willing bride of a murderer.
In Edinburgh, the queen was not taken to either of her own residences, Holyrood or Edinburgh Castle, but to the house of the laird of Craigmillar, the provost of Edinburgh, who was Maitland’s brother-in-law. The nobles sat down to a hearty supper, but the queen retreated in a daze of horror at her experiences into her bedroom – even here, however, she could not find peace, since the guards insisted on remaining with her inside the room, so that she could not even undress. Mary now lay down on the bed, deprived of any furniture or bedding proper to her station as a queen, still in the red petticoat in which she had come from Dunbar, and gave herself up to the wastes of despair. There seemed no hope, and certainly no honour in Scotland, since the nobles, to whom she had freely surrendered, now held her a humiliated and unconsidered captive. Looking out of her window, she caught sight of Maitland – Maitland of Lethington who had risen so high in her favours, Maitland, her earliest counsellor, Maitland, her secretary, ‘her Lethington’ who owed so much to her for kindnesses in the past. In a piteous voice, and through her tears, she cried out the name; she called him: ‘Lethington, Lethington.’54 But Maitland pulled his hat over his ears and pretended not to hear her. In the meantime that cruel white banner was stationed in front of her window, with its corpse and its legend, which had accompanied her all the way to Edinburgh, the first thing to meet her impassioned gaze.
By the next day Mary’s self-control had utterly collapsed. She came to the window and cried out to the people that she was being kept in prison by her subjects who had betrayed her. The sight of her brought about rioting outside and more mockery and more insults. The lords pulled her back, saying that shots might be fired, and that they could not guarantee her safety. But before they did so, many of her subjects had seen the distraught woman, as she showed herself at the open window – her hair hanging down about her face, her clothes torn open so that the upper half of her body was almost bare, her beauty ravaged, her courage gone.55 Where now was the exquisite princess who had fascinated the French court and half Europe, the ‘belle et plus que belle’ of Ronsard’s poetry, in this wretched, near demented creature hanging out of the window of an Edinburgh prison, half naked, her bosom exposed, shrieking out that she had been betrayed? The people of Edinburgh, their innate decency overcoming their moral disapproval, were shocked into pity and compassion at the sight. It was four weeks since Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, and not quite two years since her boldly triumphant marriage to Darnley, attended by all the panoply of the Scottish court. This was the nadir of Mary Stuart.
* In his own narrative, Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, Bothwell announced that he had spent the whole night in bed with his wife – the classic alibi of the criminal.4
* The description of a mermaid was one which was thought especially applicable to Mary: Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he wrote of
A Mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath …
that Certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
The stars were intended to represent Bothwell.
* Although one contemporary report said that Moray also put his signature to the bond, this seems unlikely as he was by now in London.
* A broadside ballad published in Edinburgh after Mary’s abdication, An Declaration of the Lord Just Quarrel, written by Robert Sempill, an extremist Protestant, exclaimed:
Such beastly buggery Sodom has not seen
As ruled in him who ruled Realm and Queen.28
* Both Leslie and Lennox, from different sides, accused Bothwell of using black magic to seduce the queen. Today he would probably have been accused of drugging her. In his Confession, a suspect document, Bothwell admits to using magic to secure the queen’s affections.30
* There was a rooted prejudice in Scotland against May marriages – or, as a similar Scottish saying had it: ‘Marry in May and regret it for ay’; and the records show a remarkable decline in the number of marriages practised during that month. Ovid’s line (from the fifth book of the Fasti) described the similar prejudice of the ancient Romans, said to have been due to the fact that the Lemuralia, or three-day feasts to appease the spirits of the dead, began on 9th May.
* From this comment Mahon argues that the queen suffered from mild epileptic seizures all her life, citing her dementia, stupor and apathy after Kirk o’Field as signs of temporary post-epileptic insanity. But the evidence of her captivity – when her health was closely observed and recorded – does not confirm the epileptic diagnosis.42