CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘How the Mouse for a pleasure done to her by the Lion, after that, the Lion being bound with a cord, the Mouse chewed the cord, and let the Lion loose….’
Aesop’s fable of the mouse and the lion, quoted in the deposition
of a servant after Queen Mary’s escape from Lochleven
The confederate lords were aware that they were on extremely delicate ground with regard to the queen’s imprisonment, since this imprisonment had followed ruthlessly on her own voluntary surrender in the interest of civil peace. Mary herself had genuinely, if naïvely, expected a parliamentary investigation into the murder of Darnley to follow her surrender. Under these circumstances, the lords decided that it would be too dangerous to keep the queen in ward in Edinburgh itself. The people of the city regarded the queen’s wretched state with sad astonishment: it would certainly be easier to keep their moral disapproval of her behaviour at feverpoint during her absence, when rumours of her depravity could be spread without fear of contradiction. But even in extremis Mary retained enough of her former decisiveness to send a message to the captain of Edinburgh Castle, begging him to keep ‘a good heart’ towards her, and to preserve the fortress from the rebel lords. There is no proof that Mary wrote to Bothwell on the night of her arrival swearing to be true to him: Melville believed the story was invented by the lords themselves to lend colour to the theory of the queen’s infatuation;1 in any case no such letter has ever been found. The queen did succeed in having an interview with Maitland on Monday evening (she told Nau that, in the course of it, he was never able to meet her eyes) in which she continued to demand a full inquiry into the circumstances of the late king’s death.2 It was just this inquiry which Morton, Maitland and Balfour in particular had good reason to fear, and against the possibility of which they were so determinedly blackening the name of their former colleague Bothwell. All things considered, it was clearly in their interests to remove the queen as fast as possible to some secure prison, where she could no longer make these inconvenient demands, or if she did so, her utterances need not necessarily be reported accurately beyond the bounds of the four walls which would confine her.
On the Monday evening, therefore, the queen found herself being taken down to her own palace of Holyrood, where she was reunited with her own women including Mary Seton and Mary Livingston (Sempill). Some supper was prepared for her. This was the first meal she had eaten since before her surrender at Carberry Hill, for she had been at first too upset, and later too frightened by the idea of poison, to eat anything while she was in the provost’s house. Morton stood behind her chair while she ate. In the middle of the supper he sent a message to find out if the horses were ready and, on hearing that they were, told the queen to leave her meal and get ready to ride on horseback. At this point, Mary had some vague idea that she was being taken to Stirling Castle, to join her son. She was not allowed to take any of her ladies-in-waiting with her, but only two femmes-de-chambre; nor was she allowed to take any clothes, not even a nightdress or linen. At this news, the women around her set up a great wailing. Against the background of this melancholy sound and under cover of darkness, the queen was once more conducted out of her palace.
Mary found herself being taken at great speed not to Stirling, but fifty miles north, to Kinross-shire. The two lords whom she had most reason to fear for their previous boorish conduct to her – Ruthven and Lindsay – were put in charge over her. Still scarcely able to credit what was happening to her, Mary had got as far as Leith, which was posted full of soldiers, when a rumour reached her that the Hamiltons were going to mount a rescue attempt. The queen tried to slow down the pace of her horse, but the gesture was in vain, since her escorts whipped it on. Late at night Mary reached the vast waters of Lochleven. Here, on one of the four islands in the middle of the loch, lay the dour castle of Sir William Douglas. Douglas was a most trustworthy jailer from the point of view of the lords: he was the half-brother of Moray, being the son of Moray’s mother Margaret Erskine by her legal husband Robert Douglas; he was the nephew of the earl of Mar, Margaret Erskine’s brother; he was cousin and heir presumptive to Morton. The lords could certainly rely on his interests being bonded to theirs. The queen was now rowed across the bleak waters of the lake. On arrival she was conducted quickly and unceremoniously to the laird’s room; it had in no way been prepared for her visit, and lacked any sort of furniture, equipment or even bed suitable to her rank and condition. Mary sank once more into a stupor in which sickness, aggravated by pregnancy, despair and exhaustion, all played a part. She remained in this semi-coma for a fortnight, neither speaking to anyone nor, as she remembered afterwards, eating or drinking, until many of those within the house actually thought she would die.
Beyond the laird himself, the inmates of Lochleven consisted of his mother Lady Margaret – ‘the old lady’ as she was known – who as the mother of the bastard Moray by Mary’s own father, James V, was said to bear a natural, if illogical, grudge against the queen for occupying the throne from which fate had debarred her own son. Also within the castle was one of the old lady’s younger sons, George Douglas who was nicknamed ‘pretty Geordie’, a handsome and dashing young man, very unlike his half-brother Moray both in appearance and in the romanticism of his character. Mary had visited the castle itself previously under happier auspices, using it as a centre from which to hunt in Kinross-shire: it was here in its great hall that she had debated with Knox in the spring of 1563. But by nature, Lochleven was indeed more suited to be a prison than a pleasure haunt.* In the sixteenth century, the island on which it stood was so small that it hardly extended beyond the walls and garden of the fortress – the present-day slightly larger island being the result of a considerable fall in the water level of the lake in the last century. Its dominating, square main tower, from which an excellent view of the shore was to be obtained, stuck up out of the lake like a signpost pointing to its inviolability. This tower had been built in the late fourteenth century, and contained five storeys, with the entrance only on the second floor; in this tower the laird and his family lived. The castle also contained another round tower, built in the corner of the courtyard, and here the queen was eventually incarcerated, on the grounds that this would make it more difficult for her to signal to the shore. The lake itself, then twelve miles across, was a bleak place even in August, with the Lomond hills lowering over it, and the flat grey waters punctuated only by the occasional dark trees of the islands; during the winter, the winds and rain would sweep across the lake and make it a desolate place indeed. It was certainly a prison from which escape would prove a virtual impossibility without connivance from the inside.
On 16th June the warrant for the queen’s imprisonment was signed by nine lords including Morton, Glencairn and Home, who only eight weeks before had put their signatures to the Ainslie bond supporting the Bothwell marriage. The lords left in power in Edinburgh – for Lindsay and Ruthven remained at Lochleven to guard the queen – like robber barons, did not fail to take possession of the queen’s silver plate, jewels and other goods which she had involuntarily left behind her. Calderwood wrote that the lords went through her belongings, as well as overthrowing the religious furnishings of her private chapel, as soon as she was gone to her prison. Mary herself told Nau that the silver and furniture and her multitudinous wardrobe were handed over to the lords by the treachery of one of her Italian servants – who probably felt himself unable to resist the new powers in the land. Certainly by 10th July arrangements were made for twenty-seven pieces of the queen’s plate to be delivered over by her chamberlain, Servais de Condé, to be melted down into silver coin.’3 In view of the fact that the previous bond of the rebel lords had expressly referred to their intention of releasing Mary from the thraldom of Bothwell, and restoring her to liberty to rule as before, it was small wonder that the queen now felt herself totally betrayed – being in closer thraldom than ever, with her belongings sequestrated and her liberty far more grievously curtailed than it had ever been in the days of her marriage to Bothwell.
In the meantime Bothwell himself was still at liberty. From Carberry Hill he had gone to Dunbar, but on hearing of the queen’s imprisonment, he sallied forth from the castle, and during his remaining two months within the bounds of Scotland attempted with great energy and singlemindedness to raise some sort of support for her. At first he enjoyed a certain success, with the Hamiltons at Linlithgow, and then at Dumbarton which Lord Fleming still held for the queen; Argyll and Boyd actually rejoined the royal cause, showing once more the chameleon-like character of Scottish family allegiances. The speed of Bothwell’s movements defied capture by the lords, even after 1000 crowns was offered for his apprehension as a result of the protests of the Assembly of the General Kirk; he was able to make a quick visit to the borders, where he hoped to be able to galvanize his family adherents.
He was now called to the Tolbooth officially to answer for murdering Darnley, kidnapping the queen, and making her promise to marry him: having ignored the statutory three weeks’ notice to appear, Bothwell was formally declared an outlaw and a rebel, with his titles, offices and dignities forfeit. The outlawry cracked the somewhat weak nerves of the royalist party, who feared for their own possessions: Seton and Fleming withdrew from the connection; Huntly, whom Bothwell visited at Strathbogie, discerned how little backing Bothwell now had in the Lowlands and lost heart at the idea of raising the Highlands; his sister Jean Bothwell shortly afterwards abandoned the castle of Crichton and returned to her mother at Strathbogie, pausing on the way to inform the countess of Moray that she wished to have nothing more to do with her outlawed ex-husband. With the queen immured silently at Lochleven, the royalist party crumbled away, despite all Bothwell’s energetic foraging for support from one end of Scotland to the other. Bothwell was eventually compelled to withdraw to the palace of his kinsman, the bishop of Moray, at Spynie in the far north. Here he was betrayed to his enemies by the bishop’s illegitimate sons, but even so, managed to make his way to the Orkneys, where as their duke, and also as lord high admiral of Scotland, he hoped either to rally support once more by sea, or at least to continue to elude capture.
Unlike Mary herself, the lords now took care to pursue with relentless ferocity those of Bothwell’s underlings who had been involved in the murder of Darnley. This process, which continued throughout the rest of the year, was intended to distract public attention from the complicity of the new governors of Scotland, Morton, Balfour and Maitland, in the crime. William Blackadder – he who maintained he had merely run out of a nearby tavern when he heard the explosion at Kirk o’Field – was the first to be captured; he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his limbs posted up on the gates of the leading burghs of Scotland. William Powrie, who had been in charge of transporting that suspiciously small amount of gunpowder through the streets of Edinburgh, was caught; under threat of torture he provided two separate depositions, contradicting each other in many respects, and he was finally hanged. Bastian and Francisco Busso were imprisoned in the Tolbooth. Another of Bothwell’s men, John Spens, was given his life, in return for handing over the coffers full of his master’s money. John Hepburn and John Hay of Tallo were caught and executed before the turn of the year; in each case they made self-incriminatory depositions before the end. It was another year before the lords managed to lay their hands on ‘French’ Paris – he who described how he had been kicked and bullied by Bothwell into participation in the murder; by this time Mary was in an English prison and Moray securely installed as regent; Paris’s deposition therefore proved the most fruitfully damning of them all. But when Cecil sent a request from London that Paris should be sent down for cross-examination, the page was promptly hanged in Scotland. Black Ormiston was hanged in 1573, after making a highly dubious death-bed confession to a priest. Pat Wilson and Hob Ormiston were never caught.
The most dramatic capture, from the point of view of the future, was that of the tailor, George Dalgleish, he who had watched Bothwell while he changed his carnival clothes to a cloak of ‘sad English cloth’; his seizure was afterwards said to have marked the first appearance of those most debatable of all controversial documents – the Casket Letters. The alleged circumstances of their discovery were not made public until eighteen months later, at the Conference of Westminster in December 1568, in a declaration given by Morton. But it is worth giving the declaration’s story in detail here, at the moment in history at which these events were afterwards said to have taken place, in order to see how far this later declaration fits in with the happenings of the time. The story of Dalgleish’s apprehension was given by Morton as follows.4 On 17th June Morton was dining with Maitland in Edinburgh Castle when a spy reported to them secretly that Dalgleish was known to have come into the castle from Dunbar, with the parson of Oldamstocks. Archibald Douglas was sent to catch the clergyman, but Dalgleish himself had almost escaped when his whereabouts were betrayed. Dalgleish protested that he had only arrived on a simple errand to fetch his master’s clothing, but after being threatened by torture he changed his story, and according to Morton’s statement, led his interrogators to a house in the Potterow where he produced from under his bed a silver casket. This was the first appearance of the famous silver casket in which the Casket Letters were said to have been discovered, and it will be seen how dubious the circumstances of its discovery were from the first, with the threat of torture playing a sinister role. Morton’s declaration went on to state how on 20th June he had the casket formally opened; the papers within it were presumably read, but no note was taken of their contents, beyond the fact that the documents pertained to Bothwell. There was absolutely no mention of the queen, or of letters in her handwriting. Morton sealed up the casket again and took it into his own possession, where it remained.
The strange fact about this declaration, and the whole affair of George Dalgleish’s capture, was that absolutely no mention was made of these remarkable facts at the time. According to Morton’s December 1568 statement, the lords were from 20th June, 1567 onwards in full possession of the vital evidence of the Casket Letters; but although these letters thoroughly incriminated Mary in Darnley’s murder, it was remarkable that the lords still made no mention of her guilt three weeks later when they made a series of accusations against Bothwell at the Tolbooth. As has been seen, throughout the summer of 1567, the blame for Mary’s downfall was heaped by the lords on Bothwell; the queen’s crime was considered to be her refusal to abandon him; there was no suggestion that she had participated personally in Darnley’s death. Yet the lords were nothing if not anxious to retain the queen in her prison at Lochleven; it seems inconceivable that they should not have used this damning evidence against her at this point, if indeed they possessed it. More extraordinary still, if Morton’s declaration was to be believed, was the matter of George Dalgleish’s deposition.5The unfortunate tailor, although later described as so instrumental in its discovery, was asked no questions at the time about the silver casket, nor cross-questioned in any way about its contents. His interrogators concentrated entirely on the subject of Darnley’s murder. By the time the subject of the Casket Letters was raised in England, eighteen months later, George Dalgleish had long since been executed.
It was hardly likely that such untoward events in Scotland would pass unnoticed or undigested in England and France. Queen Elizabeth’s first reaction was strong distaste for such unmannerly treatment of queens, and her second characteristic reaction was to see what advantage could be obtained from the situation for England. She sent Throckmorton north to parley with the lords, and also to see if there would be a possibility of obtaining the wardship of the little Prince James whom she now suggested could be brought up conveniently in England by his grandmother the countess of Lennox, conveniently forgetting that day when Elizabeth had flung her into the Tower out of rage at the marriage of James’s parents. The French were animated with the same happy idea of bringing up the young prince; the discussions over his welfare were strongly reminiscent of the arguments over Mary’s own custody during her infancy. Throckmorton reached Edinburgh before the middle of July; his letters back to London provide a valuable insight into the state of affairs in the Scottish capital, since he brought the fresh mind of an outsider to his commentary. It is more difficult to assess Mary’s own state of mind during the crucial early weeks of her captivity: none of her own letters from this period has survived, with the exception of two or three smuggled out of the island towards the end of her stay there; it is more than probable that the strict conditions of her confinement simply did not permit her to write them. The narrative of her secretary, Nau, dictated by the queen while in captivity in England, is the only guide extant to her personal feelings, and it suffers from the obvious disadvantage of having been written many years after the events in question took place, by one who had not himself been present on the island.
The first fortnight of Mary’s incarceration was an agonizing experience, not only on account of her wretched health. Throckmorton heard that the queen was kept ‘very straightly’; the lords did not intend that there should be any dramatic moonlight flittings from Lochleven. After a fortnight her total nervous collapse seems to have drawn to an end; Drury heard from Berwick that she was ‘better digesting’ her captivity, and could even take a little exercise. Bedford heard about three weeks later that her health was improving.6With the return of her strength, some of her personal magnetism seemed also to be exerting itself, since Lord Ruthven, son of that Lord Ruthven who had appeared like a vengeful ghost at the murder of Riccio, was considered by his colleagues to be falling under her spell, and was removed from his post. According to the queen’s own account,7 he made advances to her, throwing himself on his knees near her bed, promising that he would free her if only she would love him. From the amorous behaviour of this former enemy of Mary’s can be deduced either the glamorous effect of her personal presence or, more cynically, the quickness of Ruthven’s wits. He may have realized already that the departure of Bothwell made the queen once more potentially marriageable, with all the advantages likely to ensue from such a match.
The queen still absolutely refused to hear of divorcing Bothwell: her reasons for this, as before Carberry Hill, were twofold. Her pregnancy by Bothwell was now thoroughly established in her own mind, and she feared more than ever to compromise the legitimacy of her unborn child; secondly, her extreme suspicion of the intention of the lords towards her own person had only been deepened by their behaviour since Carberry Hill. Although Maitland told her that if she agreed to divorce Bothwell she would be restored to liberty and freedom, Queen Mary must have doubted whether the lords would have carried out their part of the bargain. Why should the same men who had planned to ward her in Stirling Castle eighteen months before have agreed to release her now, even if she put away Bothwell as they suggested? Her return could not fail to threaten their newly acquired power, as well as bringing out into the open once more the events leading up to the death of Darnley. Had the lords really wished to re-establish her, they had an excellent opportunity after Carberry Hill, instead of which they locked her up on Lochleven. The existence of the infant Prince James, held at Stirling Castle under the governorship of the earl of Mar, one of the principal confederate lords, which had once seemed to promise so much for Mary’s future, now told as strongly against her. A long royal minority, with a series of noble regents, was traditionally regarded by the Scottish aristocracy as a time for aggrandizement. It should be borne in mind that on 8th December, 1567 Mary herself was approaching her twenty-fifth birthday, on which date it was possible by custom for a sovereign to call back wardships and properties given out during his or her own minority. To the Scottish nobility, the rule of the thirteen-month-old James was an infinitely preferable prospect to that of his twenty-five-year-old mother, whether she divorced Bothwell or not.
It is noticeable that Throckmorton was deeply shocked by the brutal attitude of the Scots towards their sovereign on his arrival from England. He was genuinely convinced that her life was in danger, and believed that it was his appearance and intervention which actually saved her; otherwise she too might have died as violently as Riccio and her husband. The common people too he found to be highly hostile to their queen, especially the women: Tullibardine took the opportunity of explaining to him that Mary would be in danger of death if they released her. But of course this attitude was only increased by the propaganda of the nobles in her enforced absence: what especially shocked Throckmorton was to find that noble families like the Hamiltons, who had a vested interest in the succession, were ready to join the lords if Mary died, and on 18th July he wrote to England that the Hamiltons would concur with the confederate lords in all things, ‘yea, in any extremity against the Queen’, as long as they were assured that Darnley’s younger brother, Charles, would not be preferred in the Scottish succession over them, if Prince James died.8 On 7th August Murray of Tullibardine went as far as to tell Throckmorton that the Hamiltons, Argyll, Huntly and others in their groups only refrained from joining the confederates because they had so inconveniently allowed the queen to live. The Hamiltons were ambitious enough to see how their chances of succession were greatly improved with the disappearance of Mary; there was now only the little king to be eliminated ‘and then we are home’.9 The behaviour of Maitland was as before highly ambivalent: Throckmorton accused him also of threatening the queen’s life, and pointed out to him that her death, apart from being an outrage, would only clear the way for the Hamiltons; Maitland in turn accused Throckmorton of having liberty in his mouth but not in his heart. At all events, by 9th August Throckmorton was convinced that his intervention had saved the Scottish queen’s life and that ‘this woefull Queen’ would not now die except by an accident, although he could not forbear from commenting, when he heard of the new agreement between the lords and the Hamiltons, that he hoped their accord would not be like that of Herod and Pilate who agreed to put Christ to death.10
On one point the lords were adamant: Throckmorton should not visit the queen personally, despite his many requests to do so. He was thus compelled to depend on their own bulletin as to her state of mind. They assured him that Mary was still madly infatuated with Bothwell, and said in addition that she would be willing to abandon her kingdom for him and live like a simple damsel (a statement for which there was no other confirmation and on which Mary’s subsequent career casts considerable doubt). On 16th July Throckmorton heard that the queen was in great fear of her life, and had said to some of the lords about her that she would be well contented to live in a close nunnery in France or with her grandmother, Antoinette of Guise.11 These sentiments, if indeed Mary expressed them, must be regarded as coming out of the depths of her despair and physical weakness. More importance can be attached to her first communication to Throckmorton, which he reported on 18th July, when she sent word that she would in no way consent to a divorce from Bothwell ‘giving this reason, that taking herself to be seven weeks gone with child, by renouncing him she should acknowledge herself to be with child of a bastard and forfeit her honour’.12 It was now some eight weeks since the queen’s marriage to Bothwell: in her letter she therefore suggests that the baby had been conceived subsequent to the marriage. But at some date before 24th July, no doubt as a result of privations and stress, she miscarried the child, and according to Nau, who inserted the phrase very carefully as an afterthought on the page, found herself to have been bearing ‘deux enfants’.13 If the twins had been conceived at Dunbar, on or about 24th April, they were about three months old at the moment of miscarriage, and the double gestation would have been easily recognizable. Even at eight weeks, the foetus is just over one inch in length; but at twelve to thirteen weeks, the foetus is three and a half inches long, which would have made the recognition of ‘deux enfants’ perfectly possible. On balance of probabilities, it seems likely therefore that the queen conceived the twins at Dunbar at the end of April, and that by Carberry Hill, at least, if not earlier, knew for certain that she was pregnant by Bothwell; uncertainty on the subject could have been a factor in hastening on her actual wedding date in May.
What is virtually impossible is the suggestion, sometimes made since by historians, that the queen could have conceived twins by Bothwell in January before Darnley’s death, and carried them in complete secrecy, without the faintest contemporary report of her pregnancy, throughout the vital months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy. It was mid-June before Bedford heard that the queen was pregnant; although Guzman, the Spanish ambassador in London, wrote to Philip II on 21st June, saying that the Scottish queen was five months pregnant,14 he probably mistook five months for five weeks, since there is no reference of any sort through March, April and May to the royal pregnancy, which would have been becoming rapidly more apparent as the queen’s figure changed. This was an age in which such facts were speedily known by the accurate news service of servants’ gossip: as a girl queen in France, Mary’s prospects of becoming a mother had been intimately assessed by the ambassadors at the court. Randolph’s extraordinarily early reports of Mary’s pregnancy with James in the autumn of 1565 will be recalled – he heard the first rumours of her condition about five weeks after conception, giving as his reference such ‘tokens … annexed to the kind of them that are in that case’.15 The spring months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy were among the most critical of Mary’s existence, in which her every word and action were watched, checked and reported: how inconceivable is it then that an event of such moment as her growing pregnancy outside the bonds of marriage should have passed quite unnoticed until the sixth month, by observers who would certainly have grasped joyfully at such a convenient weapon to destroy, if not Mary, at least Bothwell, the child’s father.*
The queen’s miscarriage proved a turning-point in her attitude to Bothwell, for it removed one important obstacle in the way of divorce. By 5th August Throckmorton no longer despaired of securing her consent to the divorce, as he had done previously.17 It has occasionally been supposed that Mary did not in reality miscarry the child, but merely concealed her pregnancy; according to this legend, she gave birth to the baby – a daughter – in the following February; the little girl was smuggled away to France and there grew up as a nun in the convent of Notre Dame de Soissons. Alas, nothing would have been more impracticable than for the Scottish queen to have concealed her condition in the confined space of Lochleven, quite apart from the fact that there is no contemporary evidence to back up the story.† It is also highly unlikely that Mary would have ignored the continued existence of such a daughter – next heiress after James to the Scottish and English thrones – in the later years of her captivity when she quarrelled with her son. Such a daughter could have been introduced with effect into her last testaments.
It was while the queen was lying in bed after her miscarriage, by her own account ‘in a state of great weakness’ having lost a great deal of blood, and scarcely able to move, that Lindsay came to her and told her that he had been instructed to make her sign certain letters for the resignation of her crown. Mary now believed herself once more to be in great personal danger, on this tiny island, in the midst of an enormous lake, whose waters could claim any victim silently without the circumstances of their death being ever properly known. Despite her fears the queen was outraged at the monstrousness of the request, and continued to demand that she should be taken in front of her Estates for the parliamentary inquiry which had been promised to her; but Lindsay’s rough words on the subject, that she had better sign, for if she did not she would simply compel them to cut her throat, however unwilling they might be to do so, only convinced her further of her own personal danger. She had no allies to assist her, except the two femmes-de-chambreshe had been allowed to bring from Holyrood. In a state of terror and despair, she declared that she refused to leave the house. When Lindsay threatened her with forcible removal she replied that she would have to be dragged out by the hairs of her head.
It was at this point that Robert Melville hinted to Mary that by no means every member of the Douglas family was as hostile to her as the laird of Lochleven himself: his brother, for example, the young debonair George Douglas, was already showing himself susceptible to the charms of the beautiful if unfortunate prisoner: he showed his sympathies by persuading the servants of the house to rise up in rebellion at the project of her removal. But from the actual signing of the letters of resignation there was no escape. Mary told Nau later that Throckmorton had managed to smuggle her a note in the scabbard of a sword, telling her to sign to save her own life, as something so clearly signed under duress could never afterwards be held against her.19 Certainly if duress was ever held to affect questions of legality there could be no possible legality about such a document, by which Mary signed away the crown she had inherited twenty-four and a half years ago, in favour of her own son, and a regency of her half-brother, on a lonely island, without any advisers and surrounded by soldiers, under the command of the new regent’s own brother. Shortly afterwards, Mary fell seriously ill again: her body began to swell up, chiefly in one arm and leg; her skin turned yellow, and she broke out in pustules, so that she began to believe she might have been poisoned. This disease, which seems to have had something to do with the liver, was relieved by bleeding, and a potion which was said to strengthen the heart.
As a result of the instruments which his mother had been compelled to sign in this manner, on 29th July James was crowned king of Scotland at the Protestant church, just outside the gates of Stirling Castle, at the tender age of thirteen months. The oath was taken on his behalf by Morton and Home. The circumstances strongly recalled those of Queen Mary’s own coronation twenty-four years before: once more the Scottish crown was in the grasp of a puny child, hedged round by a grasping nobility, whose powers seemed to have been curtailed very little in the intervening years. Letters of commission signed by the ex-queen were read out – one established a regency in the name of Moray, and after him Morton, during the king’s minority; one resigned the crown and kingdom on Mary’s behalf; a third appointed a Council to act with Moray. On the day of the coronation, the gloomy peace of Lochleven was disturbed by all the artillery of the house being discharged; the queen, sending to find out what the matter was, discovered that bonfires had been lit in the garden, and that the laird was celebrating riotously at the news. He asked her mockingly why she too was not making merry at the coronation of her own son, at which Mary started to weep and went indoors.20
No further excitements disturbed the queen’s close imprisonment, until her half-brother returned to Scotland to assume the position of regent. Some of Mary’s supporters had hoped that Moray’s arrival would result in some amelioration of her condition, remembering the many benefits which she had bestowed upon him in the past. George Douglas, falling further under the spell of Mary’s charm, chose to remind Moray of how he had been used to call himself the queen’s ‘creature’. But Moray had now no call to term himself anyone’s creature, with the prospect ahead of him of at least twelve or fourteen years’ rule of Scotland, during his own nephew’s childhood. When he arrived at Lochleven, it was in a cold and punitive mood. To Mary’s surprise, her brother was now addressed as ‘Grace’, a title usually reserved for kings or their children. In their first interview, he chose to harangue her in a tone of angry condemnation, which justified Throckmorton’s description of him as leading his people like the ancient prophets of Israel. It was true that Moray’s lofty sermon on Mary’s past imprudences, unattractive as it might be, contained many observations which were most applicable to her case: he told her that the Scottish people were dissatisfied with her conduct, and even though innocent before God, she should have had regard to her reputation in the eyes of the world, ‘Which judges by the outward appearance and not upon the inward sentiment’. On the subject of her marriage to Bothwell, and the rumours it had aroused concerning the death of Darnley, he observed perfectly correctly that it was not enough to avoid a fault, but also the occasions of being suspected of it. Such admirable pieces of advice would have been the more effective if the lords associated with Moray in the government of the realm had not been far more practically implicated in the death of Darnley than the unfortunate queen.
Moray gave a full account of his interview to Throckmorton on his return to Edinburgh.21 Sometimes, he said, Mary had wept bitterly, sometimes she acknowledged her imprudence and misgovernment, some things she did confess plainly, some things she did extenuate. Almost certainly Moray went so far as to threaten Mary with execution, for their interview took place on two consecutive days, and the first night, as he told Throckmorton, he left her with the hope of nothing but God’s mercy. Throckmorton was impressed with Moray’s grave and pious character – as the English almost universally were – and praised his sincere qualities to Queen Elizabeth. But in fact there was little to admire in such cruel hectoring of his sister, who on Lochleven was totally at his mercy. Nevertheless the ruse worked. Mary once more passed a night of horror and fear; now even her own brother seemed to have turned against her; the next day she begged Moray to accept the regency. Moray told Throckmorton that Mary kissed him and asked him not to refuse it. She had of course extorted no concessions of any sort from him in return for the offer – neither the promise of liberty nor any other hint that she might enjoy freedom in the near future. In the meantime Moray was able to assure Cecil on 30th August that his new public state was neither welcome nor pleasing,22 and even repeatedly assured Mary herself that he had no personal wish to assume the regency for his own private tastes led him to shun such grandeur and ambition, as she well knew. He might, however, be able to be of service to her as regent, where another in the same position would ruin her. Mary’s own account of the interview to Nau put herself in a less desperate, more spirited light than Moray’s account to Throckmorton. Although more reliance should be placed on Moray’s account since it was delivered immediately, Mary did deliver herself of one significant aphorism on the subject of ruling Scotland. She warned Moray that if she, a born queen, was rebelled against by her people, how much more would the people rebel against him, a bastard by birth and origin. She quoted the maxim: ‘He who does not keep faith where it is due, will hardly keep it where it is not due.’23
On 22nd August James Stewart, earl of Moray, was proclaimed regent of Scotland. One side-effect of his new status was the opportunity which it gave him to take possession of Mary’s rich hoard of jewellery. It was a subject on which the queen felt strongly, and continued to do so for the rest of her life: the rape of her jewels by Moray caused her as much indignation as any other single injury he did to her. Moray was cunning enough to tell Throckmorton that Mary had actually begged him to take charge of her jewels on Lochleven in order to preserve them for herself and her son, but Mary afterwards accused Moray of simply stealing them. According to Nau, Mary pointed out to her brother not only that she wanted many of the jewels to be permanently united with the crown of Scotland (as she had specified in her will of 1566) but also that a preponderance of the jewels had been given to her by King Henry of France, or her husband Francis, and were therefore her own private property. Strong feelings on all sides were roused by the thought of this glowing prize. On 10th September Melville reported that Moray’s acquisition of the jewels had ‘colded many stomaches among the Hamiltons’.24 The one thing which Moray did not do with the jewels was to unite them permanently to the honour of the Scottish crown, as Mary intended. He gave some to his wife. Others he sold to Queen Elizabeth the following April in order to remedy his forlorn finances. The latter action may perhaps be justified, if not excused, as an act of state – but the former cannot. The pearls, which were shown to Elizabeth on 1st May, 1568, in front of Pembroke and Leicester, consisted of six rows, strung like rosaries, and separate pearls as large as black grapes. They were thought to be of ‘nonpareiled’ beauty; there were also rings of lesser value, and a piece of heavily bejewelled narwhal tooth; the pearls seem to have been those intended in Mary’s will to be divided between the crown of Scotland and the house of Guise, and the narwhal tooth for her favourite nephew Francis Stewart. From France Catherine de Médicis scented out the secret disposal of the pearls she had once admired and envied round her daughter-in-law’s white throat at Fontainebleau, and tried in vain to obtain them for herself.
The proclamation of Moray as regent, coupled with the disappearance of Bothwell from the Scottish scene, led to a period of comparative calm on the little island of Lochleven. The queen’s health gradually returned, after her privations and her miscarriage, since the enforced seclusion, however odious, did at least ensure her the rest which she so grievously needed. With health and the sinking away of hysteria returned also resolution and calm positive thinking. By the beginning of September, she was able to write to Robert Melville far more in her old vein of practical decisiveness, as though the year from the birth of James onwards had been lived under some black and disastrous shadow, now fortunately rolled away. She asked for materials, silks to embroider, and clothes for her ladies including her favourite Mary Seton who had recently been allowed to join her – ‘for they are naked’.25 On 23rd September Moray was able to tell Bedford that her health was good, and she herself was ‘merrily disposed’.26 The question of her clothes was now better resolved: much of her gilded wardrobe was gone forever, seized by the confederates, and not a great deal of attention seems to have been paid to her luggage-less state until after the arrival of Moray, when Mary accused him of bringing her some old and mean garments, very roughly made up, in place of her own clothes.
But the private aide-mémoires of her chamberlain, Servais de Condé,27 show that even in June some clothes were of necessity brought, to supplement the clothes in which she had travelled: such as a red satin petticoat furred with marten, some satin sleeves, a cloak of Holland, a pair of black silk tights, or chausses, and more practically, some pins and a box of sweetmeats. In July she received another box of sweets, various stockings and garments of a utilitarian nature, such as leather shoes and wool chemises as well as a little red velvet box with crossed Fs on it in silver. From August onwards she began to receive supplementary provisions, the lists of which sound like any parcels sent to prisoners of war or state in any century: boxes of sweets, more pins, lengths of Holland material to make clothes, soap, Spanish silk and gold and silver thread for embroidery to while away the hours, handkerchiefs, an embroidered peignoir and a little blue box of taffeta full of ‘poudre de santeur’. In October she received what must have been a welcome parcel – her perukes of false hair, and other accessories to arrange her coiffure. In November she received a striking clock with an alarm or ‘réveille matin’, more pins and linen. To a queen accustomed to the lavish grandeur of royal state since childhood, this was the diet of captivity. There was certainly no mention of the gorgeous dresses of the earlier inventories of the royal wardrobe in these lengths of Holland for her ladies to make up clothes. But, as captivities go, it was not particularly stringent, and on Lochleven, once her health was recovered, the queen began to develop those harmless, agreeable but petty activities with which royal prisoners while away their time – an unwitting dress rehearsal for the long years of imprisonment which lay ahead. She began to dance once more, and played at cards. She embroidered. She walked in the garden. She also looked out of the window towards the dark sedge of reeds along the distant edge of the lake and fed by the prisoners’ fare of hope pictured the moment when she too would be standing on that wind-blown shore, once more at liberty.
If the queen dreamt of freedom, in the manner of all prisoners, it is unlikely that she also dreamt of Bothwell. Melville’s hint to her concerning George Douglas had borne fruit. The young man was personable, gallant, and only too happy to see in his sovereign a frail and helpless woman, the victim of a cruel fate. Her fragile beauty drawn with suffering, coupled with her romantic history, could not fail to move him further; Cecil said afterwards that he fell into ‘a fantasy of love’ with the queen. By August, the queen was attempting to draw over the inhabitants of Lochleven to sympathize with her by the exertion of her famous personal charm and gentleness; even Lady Margaret was thought to be succumbing. By the end of October, even Drury from Berwick was able to report to Cecil in London that there was a nasty suspicion of over-great familiarity existing between the queen and Mr Douglas.*28 Although George Douglas’s heart was genuinely stirred by the presence of this romantic heroine, Mary’s aim in this relationship, however much she appreciated the admiration, was quite clearly to escape from Lochleven; she now hoped to have found in George Douglas the weak link in the Douglas chain. But she was also able to extend her allure and her promise beyond even that of her own affections: for as Bothwell had now disappeared, there was in theory no reason why George Douglas should not aspire to her hand. This in turn did not necessarily displease his ambitious mother Margaret, who could imagine a worse future for her younger son than seeing him the husband of the queen of Scotland, with her other son the regent, able to restore his sister to power at any moment. As these projects buzzed in the minds of its inhabitants, during the autumn the island of Lochleven ceased to be an absolute slough of despair for the imprisoned queen of Scots.
The disappearance of Bothwell was the key to this new hope, as it was also to the temporary stability of Scotland. Beyond the confines of the island, Bothwell had been pursued to the Orkneys by his inveterate enemy Kirkcaldy of Grange, who promised to bring him dead to Edinburgh or die himself. In the event, neither death took place, for although Bothwell’s capture was scheduled to take place before the end of August, at the beginning of September Moray was still obliged to observe warily on the subject: ‘We cannot merchandise for the bear’s skin before we have him.’29Kirkcaldy lived on, to become later one of the queen’s most loyal adherents; Bothwell escaped to the Karmoi sound on the coast of Norway, but here had the misfortune to encounter some kinsmen of his former mistress Anna Throndsen, as well as some creditors from his previous Scandinavian travels. The combination resulted in him being officially captured and taken to Bergen on 2nd September, with two ships and 140 men. By the end of September he was being held in Copenhagen Castle, since King Frederick, joint sovereign of Denmark and Norway, quickly perceived in his uninvited guest a useful pawn in international politics, who as the husband of the queen of Scots, heiress-presumptive to the English throne, could certainly be used against the English queen. Although Moray pressed for his extradition, and Bothwell himself wrote anxiously to the king of France, asking for help, he was destined to remain in a series of Danish prisons, of increasing squalor, for the rest of his life.*
Throckmorton returned to England at the beginning of September, having never succeeded in achieving that audience with Queen Mary on Lochleven which he had so earnestly desired. On instructions from the English queen, he refused the silver plate given to him on his departure in the name of King James, on the grounds that Queen Elizabeth did not acknowledge Queen Mary’s abdication from the throne of Scotland; nor did she acknowledge the regency of Moray, despite his many friendly overtures to England. Despite this disapproval from across the border, the Marian party in Scotland seemed temporarily in abeyance: Huntly and Herries had recrossed to Moray’s side; Dunbar surrendered to the regent; Dumbarton, in the west of Scotland, was the only fortress left, and its effectiveness was considerably annulled by the fact that it lay in the centre of Lennox country. By the middle of October, Moray was able to write to Cecil that Scotland was quiet.30
Scotland might be quiet, and no part of it quieter than the tiny island in the middle of Lochleven which held the imprisoned queen. Nevertheless the course of Mary’s fortunes did not stand still. The winter of 1567 was remarkable for an unpleasant new development in her affairs. The governing lords found that circumstances dictated they should change their attitude both towards her and towards the official reasons for her imprisonment. It was not enough to keep Mary incarcerated, having procured her abdication; the lords needed to provide some further public justification for their behaviour towards her. Originally they had claimed to be freeing Mary from Bothwell’s tutelage at Carberry Hill – there was no question of implicating Mary personally in Darnley’s murder. But now that Bothwell had disappeared from the Scottish scene and Mary was in prison at Lochleven, they could hardly continue to criticize her on the score that she was unduly influenced by Bothwell. Some other reason had to be put forward to justify her continued confinement. It was time for the lords to gloss over the deep implication of some of their number in the murder at Kirk o’Field. The Craigmillar bond of November 1566, to get rid of the king, had been signed by Maitland, Morton and James Balfour amongst others; now this was conveniently forgotten. In December 1567, nearly a year after the event, Mary was herself publicly blamed for the death of Darnley.
The existence of certain documents which implicated Mary in the crime was mentioned for the first time in front of the Privy Council on 4th December.31 The text of these writings was not quoted, nor were the actual documents produced; but their existence was used to justify a new Act of Council which stated that the official cause of Mary’s detention was her involvement in her husband’s death. Mary was said to have encouraged the outrage ‘in so far as by divers her privy letters written and subscribed with her own hand and sent by her to James Earl Bothwell, chief executioner of the horrible murder’. At the Parliament convened by Moray on 15th December, Mary’s abdication of the government was said to be ‘lawful and perfect’; James’s investiture and coronation was described as being as valid as those of his ancestors, since it was to be considered as though his mother were actually dead. Moray’s appointment as regent was confirmed, and the lords who had taken up arms at Carberry Hill were formally vindicated in that Queen Mary had been ‘privy, art and part of the actual devise and deed of the forenamed murder of the King her lawful husband’.32 This was quite a new departure from the line which the lords had actually taken on the eve of the battle. Then all the talk had been of Bothwell’s guilt; now for the first time the subject of Mary’s guilt was introduced. It was a change of emphasis which boded no good for Mary’s future.
Although Mary herself on her island was unaware of the turn which matters were taking, the news that Moray was summoning a Parliament was enough to cast her into a state of fervour agitated by frustration. She addressed a long letter to her brother, asking that she should be allowed to vindicate herself before it, as previously arranged; she touched on her relationship to Moray, the favours she had shown him, his promises to the French court to support her, and earnestly suggested that she would submit to any law, even laying aside her queenly rank, if only she could be allowed a hearing; Queen Mary also pointed out pathetically her past virtues as a ruler – how she had never been extravagant or embezzled her subjects’ money, like so many sovereigns.33 To this cri de coeur,in which can be heard the desperation of the captive who will promise anything, if only he or she can be allowed a hearing from the outside world, Moray sent only a few lines of acknowledgement. On his next visit to Lochleven, when he brought James Balfour and Morton, relations between the brother and sister were cold and quarrelsome. Yet by mid-winter the graph of Scottish loyalties was rising once more in Mary’s favour. For one thing, the Hamiltons were annoyed that Moray had assumed the regency, which they thought belonged rightfully to their family, as in the past, and did not attend the December Parliament. Kirkcaldy and Maitland were both privately concerned lest Mary’s abdication under duress might be considered illegal in the future. It was not long before Maitland began to display his usual political ambiguity: in her prison the queen received secretly an engraved ring representing Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse.34 The gift was said to come from Mary Fleming, but at the time it was generally believed that its true significance was the promise of future support from her husband Maitland – the grateful mouse who would gnaw through the bonds of the lion, Mary.
The Scots people, who had been told that their queen had been removed for complicity in Darnley’s murder, could see for themselves that many nobles, far more intimately involved than she, were not only at liberty, but forming part of the government of the country. Moray’s persistent hunting down of the lesser criminals was intended to distract attention from this patent fact, but when John Hay of Tallo was publicly executed at the beginning of January 1568, he stood up on the scaffold and declared boldly to the large crowd assembled that Huntly, Argyll, Maitland and Balfour had all subscribed the bond for Darnley’s murder. This scarcely helped on the process of distraction. The hacked-off limbs of Hay, Powrie and Hepburn were in turn posted up on the gates of the leading Scottish towns, twenty-two shillings being paid to the boy who went on his way from Edinburgh to Leith, Haddington and Jedburgh bearing the grisly burden of a pair of legs.35 But such public expenditure, such improving sights, still did not prevent Queen Mary’s erstwhile subjects from clamouring against the lords in the government, that they too should ‘suffer for their demerits’.
The marriageability of the queen became once more a matter of public comment and private speculation. Drury thought Mary asked her brother if she might marry George Douglas as early as December36 – fresh evidence of the unenduring quality of her feelings for Bothwell; the regent was said to have refused on the grounds that his half-brother was an ‘overmean’ marriage for the queen. George Douglas had the advantage of being able to press his suit in person. Other names, some of them strange indeed in the context, were mentioned, including a Hamilton, son of the duke of Châtelherault, Argyll’s brother, and a young Stewart (Lord Methven). The most optimistic rumour was that which advanced the name of Morton himself, although it was agreed that the queen might not take easily to the notion. The junta of nobles in power, in between scheming privately for their relations or themselves to marry the queen, jested publicly about what would befall them if the queen managed to escape.
As spring came to Lochleven, Mary was able to smuggle out a few letters to France describing her plight and appealing for aid. They have a determined and desperate tone. She begged Queen Catherine de Médicis, in a letter (written while her jailers were at dinner) which stressed her wretched condition, to send some French soldiers to deliver her – ‘it is by force alone I can be delivered. If you send never so few troops to countenance the matter, I am certain great numbers of my subjects will rise to join them; but without that they are overawed by the power of the rebels and dare attempt nothing of themselves.’37 She managed to write to Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in Paris, describing her sufferings, but begged him to burn her letters, lest they be discovered and get some of her supporters, who had helped her smuggle them out, into trouble.’38 She also wrote to Queen Elizabeth, a letter dated 1st May, in a large sprawling handwriting, very unlike her usual even lines, showing the ravages of despair after ten months’ captivity: she described movingly ‘la langueur du temps de mon ennuieuse prison’ and the cruel slights of those to whom she had done nothing but good; how her brother Moray had taken all she has (this letter was written on the very day on which Queen Elizabeth was viewing those ‘nonpareiled pearls’, a fact of which Queen Mary was fortunately in ignorance). Mary also attached great importance to the ring which Elizabeth had once sent her, and considered it as a talisman which would bring good luck to their relations. To her great distress she had not managed to persuade Robert Melville to part with the jewel, for fear of Moray’s vengeance, so that she could not dispatch it to England as she wished to move Elizabeth’s heart with pity. The letter ended pathetically: ‘Ayez pitié de votre bonne soeur et cousine.’39
Yet within twenty-four hours of writing this anguished letter, the queen was able to escape from her prison largely by her own generalship, ably assisted by George Douglas and an orphan member of the Douglas household whom she had won over by her kindness and captivated with her charm. Her active temperament fortunately allowed her to cast about ceaselessly for some practical means of terminating her confinement, like the lioness pacing its cage to which Maitland had compared her, while at the same time pouring forth as many appeals for outside help as she could smuggle out of the island. In the end it was inside rather than outside assistance which proved effective. So long as George Douglas remained on the island itself, there was not a great deal he could do to help his heroine beyond organizing her correspondence by bribing the boatman. But in the spring George Douglas quarrelled with his brother the laird (they both seem to have had their share of the peppery Douglas temper) and was ordered out of the house and off the island. This gave him the necessary opportunity to alert on the queen’s behalf lords such as the faithful Lord Seton, on whose loyalty she knew she could rely. Not only did George Douglas incur his brother’s wrath, but his rumoured plans to marry the queen seem to have also brought down the anger of Moray on his head, so that he was in a mood of fair rebellion towards his family, and the established government of Scotland, by the spring. Queen Mary was able to turn this to full advantage. The attitude of his mother Lady Margaret was more ambivalent; Melville hinted that she had been ‘upon the counsel’ of the plot, although if Nau’s account is accepted, she was left in total ignorance of it all.40 As a mother, she would be torn between ambition for one son, George Douglas, and fear for the fate of another son, Sir William Douglas, if Mary escaped from his custody – for this would surely bring down the wrath of a third son, Moray the regent.
Queen Mary’s chief female companions during her incarceration were the laird’s wife, young Lady Douglas, who often slept in her room, and generally accompanied her throughout the day, old Lady Margaret Douglas, and two young Douglas girls of fourteen and fifteen, daughter and niece of the laird. These girls conceived a hero-worship of their captive, and the younger one especially was so obsessed by her presence that thoughts of the queen filled her imagination, even when she was asleep. In the late spring, however, young Lady Douglas gave birth to a child. This gave Queen Mary a little more liberty during the period of the lying-in; she determined to avail herself of the opportunity to effect escape. One romantic attempt, variously placed at the end of March or the end of April, involved the queen disguising herself as a laundress and escaping by boat with a bundle of washing while Mary Seton took her place in the castle.41 Unfortunately one of the boatmen, mortified at the way she refused to show her face, tried to take down the muffler with which she kept it covered. Instinctively the queen put up her hand to stay him. The whiteness of the hand – that hand with its long fingers like five unequal branches which Ronsard had once praised – betrayed her. She was returned to her quarters, although the boatman kept his silence and did not report the attempt to the laird.
The key element in any escape was obviously the crossing of the water itself. Having suborned the boatman, George Douglas’s first idea was to carry off the queen in a box; but the boatman dissuaded him, and together they agreed that it would be far easier to abduct the queen in disguise. There was by now another spy within the castle dedicated to the queen’s cause – young Willy Douglas, an orphaned cousin of the house called ‘the little Douglas’, who was also by now devoted to her interests, won over by the charm and kindness she had shown to him. Willy became involved in smuggling out the queen’s correspondence, for which he received a number of gold pieces, and incurred suspicion as he flaunted them about. There were other similar minor hazards to overcome: the laird’s daughter noticed Willy Douglas delivering some letters to the queen, one of which she dropped on the ground; as a result the girl had a nightmare in which she saw Willy Douglas bringing a black raven into the house which flew away with her precious queen from the edge of the loch. The girl was so distressed at this that Mary was frightened she might arouse suspicion, and had to make her promise not to mention either the letters or the dream, on condition that the queen would take her with her when she escaped. But, Mary quickly added, of this escape she had at present neither hopes nor means. The laird of Markyston, a notorious wizard, also predicted that the queen would have escaped by the beginning of May and made a bet on it – as a result of which unhelpful piece of prophecy or sportsmanship her guard was increased.
George Douglas now asked permission to revisit Lochleven in order to say farewell to his mother, using the pretext that he intended to leave Scotland altogether and go to France. Both his mother and brother were deeply upset at this decision, and tried to persuade him to live instead with his half-brother the regent; they even enlisted the queen to write to him to this effect, and it was in this letter, which the queen obligingly wrote at their request, that she was able to send George Douglas a secret message urging the need to act swiftly before young Lady Douglas recovered from her confinement. The day fixed for the attempt was 2nd May, but the fact that Mary took the trouble to write to both Queen Elizabeth, quoted earlier, and Catherine de Médicis, appealing once more for assistance by French troops, on 1st May, shows that there was a great deal of doubt in her mind at least as to whether the escape would be successful. As spring stole towards summer, life on Lochleven became somewhat less bleak, and there were even modest boating expeditions on the lake; in the course of one of these, in which the laird accompanied the queen, her servants played a joke pretending their mistress had escaped, and in the ensuing fracas, half-playful, half-serious, some of the crowd on the shore of the island were wounded, and had to be attended to by the queen’s surgeons. This incident was later considered by the queen to have distracted attention from the plots of George Douglas in Lochleven village itself.42
As George Douglas remained on shore in this village, having alerted Lord Seton of what was on hand, Willy Douglas took charge of arrangements on the island. His first idea was that the queen should leap a seven-foot wall in the garden, but when a gallant lady-in-waiting attempted the drop as an experiment and severely injured her foot, the plan was abandoned. Willy Douglas decided that the only safe course was for the queen to march boldly out of the main gate of the castle. On 2nd May he therefore organized a May-Day pageant, with himself as Abbot of Unreason; in the manner of such celebrations, the queen was made to swear to follow the abbot about all day; whereupon Willy Douglas gave a splendid exhibition of drunken fooling, as a result of which by the afternoon the queen declared herself to be so exhausted that she must sleep; she then flung herself down on her bed, not exhausted but desperately excited. As she rested, she heard a woman in the next room chattering and saying that a great troupe of horsemen had passed through the village of Lochleven that day, including Lord Seton, saying that they were going to an assize, and also that George Douglas had been seen in the village that day.
There were still some dramatic dangers to be overcome: for example, Lady Margaret insisted on discussing the question of the queen’s escape, saying how she would ruin the Douglases if she did so and, in the midst of the actual conversation, noticed some horsemen on the shore: she would have raised an immediate outcry if the queen had not distracted her by fulminating bitterly against Moray. The laird himself looked out of the window and noticed Willy putting pegs into the bottoms of all the boats on the shore except one (to hole them against pursuit); he began to exclaim against Willy’s idiocy, without exactly understanding what he was up to, until the queen pretended to faint, and the laird was compelled to go and fetch her a glass of wine. He was still sufficiently suspicious to ask to be near the window at dinner so that he could keep an eye on the loch and the village. Finally George Douglas bade farewell to his mother before his theoretical journey to France. One of the queen’s maids then brought her one of the pearl earrings which she habitually wore, saying that George Douglas had recovered it for her from the boatman who had found it and had wished to sell it to him; but George Douglas had recognized the earring as belonging to the queen. This little piece of by-play was the signal that everything was now ready for the escape.
The queen retired into her room an hour before supper and put on a red kirtle belonging to one of her women, and one of her own long mantles over it. Then she went into the garden to walk with Lady Margaret. The queen was served her own supper by the laird, according to custom; next the laird went across the courtyard into the main tower, to eat his own supper with his family. Drysdale, the chief soldier of the island’s guard, who generally stayed in the queen’s room, went too and played at handball (thus reinforcing contemporary suspicions that he was in the plot).* The queen now had to rid herself of her faithful escort of the admiring young girls. She went to the upper room of her own tower, announcing that she wanted to say her prayers; this was not solely an excuse to absent herself since she did indeed pray fervently for the success of her venture. Here she cast off her own mantle and put on a hood like those worn by the countrywomen; one of her femmes-de-chambre dressed herself similarly, the other stayed below and tried to allay the suspicions of the girls, who kept asking why the queen was so long upstairs.
In the meantime Willy Douglas dexterously removed the laird’s keys as he was handing him his evening drink at supper.* He then gave a sign through the window to the queen’s woman that all was ready. The queen, in her disguise, boldly crossed the courtyard, although it was full of servants passing to and fro, and went out of the main gate; having re-locked the gate, Willy Douglas threw the keys into a cannon near at hand. The queen and her attendant stood for a time in the shadow of the castle wall, fearing they might be seen from the windows of the house, before finally going to the boats. Here the queen laid herself down beneath the boatman’s seat, partly to be hidden, partly to avoid cannon shot. Several washerwomen by the boats recognized her, and one of them made a sign to Willy that she had done so; but the boy called out to the woman to hold her tongue. Even now the last hazard was not at an end: as they neared the opposite shore, Willy thought he saw an enemy lurking. It turned out to be one of George Douglas’s servants who was a stranger to him. Finally they landed.
Mary was welcomed by the faithful George Douglas and by John Beaton. By a piece of ironic justice, Beaton had with him the best horses belonging to the laird of Lochleven, stolen out of the laird’s own stables, which lay on the mainland. The queen mounted, and taking only Willy Douglas with her – even her femme-de-chambre was left behind for the time being – she set off to meet Lord Seton, the laird of Riccarton and their followers, about two miles away. They then crossed the sea at Queensferry, and were at the Seton palace of Niddry by about midnight. The country people, who recognized the queen, cheered as she passed, and even the laird’s uncle, who saw her, did not try to stop her. The music of popular acclaim sounded sweetly in Mary’s ears after her confinement: there is a tradition that when she greeted her people outside Niddry the next morning, her long auburn hair was still flowing about her shoulders, for in her eagerness to show herself she had not even paused to have it dressed.
Queen Mary was once more at liberty after ten and a half months of captivity on a tiny island. In the meantime a countryman of lesser loyalty had rowed back to Lochleven to report her escape. Her disappearance had already been made known by the eager young girls, who found the queen’s mantle in the upper room and thought she was hiding. The laird of Lochleven fell into such a passion of distress that he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.* But it is pleasant to record that those two other Douglases, George and Willy, who had placed devotion to their queen above family interest, were duly rewarded by her continual gratitude in later life, for as Mary herself wrote later to Beaton, asking him to forward George Douglas’s cause in France, ‘tels services ne se font pas tous les jours’45 (such services are not performed every day). The dashing George continued in Mary’s employ during her English captivity; although he did not succeed in winning the hand of the queen he loved, his romantic aspirations might not have been so quickly extinguished if she had remained longer at liberty in Scotland. As Moray’s brother, a Protestant and a member of the powerful Douglas clan, he would have represented a good compromise candidate as a husband. Willy Douglas, the boy Mary plucked from Lochleven, whom she called ‘her orphan’, remained attached to her service until death, and was mentioned in her last will at Fotheringhay.
* Later the earl of Northumberland was also imprisoned there by Morton when he fled to Scotland in 1570 after the failure of the northern rebellion.
* Dan McKenzie in his short article on the subject, ‘The Obstetric History of Mary Queen of Scots at Lochleven’, Caledonian Medical Journal, suggests that the time of conception might be ‘about the time of Darnley’s murder’ (9th February) on the evidence of Guzman, although he does not make any suggestion as to how the queen concealed all signs of her condition until mid-June. Professor Donaldson, although giving McKenzie as a reference, goes further and suggests that Mary ‘knew or feared’ she was pregnant on 20th January, when she went from Edinburgh to Glasgow to fetch back Darnley, and this provided her with the motive for the reconciliation.16 This of course suggests a conception date of early January, which makes her concealment of her condition until six months later still more remarkable.
† The story was first given credence in the edition of the memoirs of Castelnau, with notes by Le Laboureur, written in 1659, and published in 1731; Le Laboureur added the information in a footnote.18 On the grounds that Le Laboureur occupied a post of confidence at the court of France as counsellor and almoner of the king, and therefore might have special access to this sort of information, Lingard accepted his story, as did Prince Labanoff, in his edition of the letters of Mary Queen of Scots. The whole story has been the subject of a historical novel – Unknown to History by Charlotte M. Yonge – in which sphere it rightly belongs.
* Out of this statement, an absurd story had been built, quoted by Bishop Burnet in his History, that Mary Stuart conceived and bore a son by George Douglas while on the island of Lochleven. This son was said to have been the father of Robert Douglas, the covenanting divine who preached at the coronation of Charles II at Scone in 1651. There is no contemporary evidence whatsoever to support this story which is, in terms of time alone, scarcely possible.
* It was while in the Castle of Copenhagen that Bothwell wrote his own narrative, Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, referred to earlier over the events of Kirk o’Field. Completed by 5th January, 1568, it was intended to procure his release. It is to be distinguished from his so-called death-bed Confession, a dubious document which was probably written much later on Mary’s behalf to secure her release. Bothwell would in any case have been unable to write a death-bed confession, since he died insane.
* But these suspicions do not seem to have been justified. A later letter written by Mary from England shows that she continued to dislike and fear Drysdale.43
* Some doubt has been cast on the possibility of this feat, which is related by Nau. But the story is confirmed by a report, received in Paris by the Venetian ambassador at the time of the escape, via John Beaton.44
* The laird later sent on the queen’s belongings from Lochleven, and in a report on her character to Morton said that there was no vice in her. This still does not prove that he connived at the escape, as has been suggested. While Mary was on Lochleven, he had good reason to fear the wrath of his half-brother Moray if he failed in his trust; once she was at liberty, she was once more queen of Scotland in many people’s eyes, and it would be worth trying to win her favour.