Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Murder of Darnley

  ‘I’ll pity thee as much’ he said

  ‘And as much favour I’ll show to thee

  As thou had on the Queen’s chamberlain

  That day you deemedst him to die’

  Bothwell to Darnley, from the ballad Earl Bothwell

  In October at Jedburgh Mary Queen of Scots had nearly died. At Glasgow in the New Year Darnley in his turn fell extremely ill. At the time it was given out that he had smallpox, but it seems more likely that he was actually suffering from syphilis. Bothwell, on his own narrative of events written during his captivity in Denmark, Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, took the trouble to cross out the words petite vérole (smallpox) and insert roniole (syphilis) in his own handwriting. The Diurnal of Occurrents, a contemporary diary probably written by a minor official of the court, referred to the ‘pox’, a word often used at the time for syphilis, and Pitscottie stated that the king was stricken with ‘a great fever of the pox’.1 Darnley’s skull, now in the Royal College of Surgeons at London, was analysed by Sir Daniel Wilson, at the request of Dr Karl Pearson, and discovered to be pitted with traces of ‘a virulent syphilitic disease’.*2 The queen did not immediately visit her husband, but she did show her habitual humanity: she sent him her doctor to Glasgow, and in early January, according to the accounts, gave orders for the royal linen to be cut into ruffs for the king’s nightshirt.

  Yet despite Mary’s careless kindness – so typical of her nature – clearly she was still pondering in her mind legal ways and means of ridding herself of this degenerate creature as a husband. On Christmas Eve she duly pardoned Morton and his associates – a fact which lends conviction to the story of the Protestation that Mary believed herself to have struck a bargain with Maitland and other nobles: now that she had allowed Morton
to return, it was up to these nobles to rid her of Darnley in such a way as would be ‘approved by Parliament’. The return of Morton and his friends also of course substantially increased the numbers of Darnley’s potential enemies within the boundaries of Scotland. A further step taken by the queen before Christmas shows that she was still considering the question of a divorce: the Catholic Archbishop Hamilton of St Andrews was temporarily restored to his consistorial jurisdiction from 23rd December until some date before 9th January, when the privilege was again removed. The intention was presumably to allow the archbishop to pronounce decrees of nullity between the queen and her husband. The brief restoration suggests that the queen was still casting around for ways to come about a decent divorce which would not compromise Prince James, and did not regard the subject as totally closed by Maitland’s adverse advice; after all as a Protestant Scot he did not necessarily represent the views of Catholic Rome, which had not yet been officially sounded. In any case the marriages of royal persons were by Canon Law reserved for the consideration of the Pope himself, as causae majores. However, divorce for royal personages was by no means unthinkable in the sixteenth century, even within the structure of the Catholic Church. There had been some significant divorces in the French royal house. Mary and Darnley’s mutual grandmother, Margaret Tudor, had been divorced from her second husband, the earl of Angus; and the marital problems of Henry VIII, which he had originally attempted so hard and so long to solve within the structure of the Church, were only a generation away.