Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  On 23rd March, the fortieth day after Darnley’s death, the queen’s period of mourning officially came to an end with a solemn Mass of Requiem and a dirge for Darnley’s soul. In fact her sorrows were only just beginning. The vociferous demands of Lennox for vengeance had reached a pitch when even Mary, advised by Bothwell, felt herself unable to ignore them. In a letter of 24th March she agreed to allow him to bring a private process in front of Parliament against Bothwell as the slayer of his son, and the process was set up by an Act of the Privy Council on 28th March to take place on 12th April. It was hardly surprising that in two letters of 29th and 30th March, Drury reported the queen to be in continuous ill-health – ‘She has been for the most part either melancholy or sickly ever since, and especially this week upon Tuesday or Wednesday often swooned … the Queen breaketh very much.’17 The trial of Bothwell was not even instituted officially by the queen, but allowed to stand at the private petition of Lennox. But Lennox understandably shrank from appearing in Edinburgh with the six followers permitted to him by law, in view of the fact that the city was swarming with 4000 of Bothwell’s adherents.

  On the appointed day, Bothwell rode magnificently down the Canongate, with Morton and Maitland flanking him, and his Hepburns trotting behind. The queen, with Mary Fleming, now Maitiand’s wife, watched them go from the window at Holyrood. Although the due processes of justice were observed at the trial – which lasted from noon till seven in the evening – the absence of the accuser Lennox meant that Bothwell was inevitably acquitted; the wily Morton excused himself from the jury, on the grounds that he was kin to the victim, and thus cunningly, with an eye to the future, did not partake in Bothwell’s acquittal. The Diurnal of Occurrents, written by a comparatively impartial court observer, commented sourly that Bothwell was ‘made clean of the said slaughter, albeit that it was heavily murmured that he was guilty thereof’.18 Another omen for the future was the fact that a last-minute messenger from Elizabeth arrived at Holyrood at 6 a.m., and attempted to get the trial postponed, presumably until Lennox could be present. The messenger was, however, not admitted to the Scottish queen’s presence, and treated with little courtesy.

  Bothwell reacted characteristically and braggartly to his acquittal: he sent a crier round the town, and had bills stuck on the town gates and the Tolbooth, emblazoned with his arms, offering to defend his innocence with personal combat. However, that night, an anonymous acceptor of his challenge on a placard offered to prove that Bothwell was the ‘chief author of the foul and horrible murder by law of arms’, showing that the Scots spirit was not to be bullied. The next Wednesday, the queen rode to Parliament, with Bothwell carrying the sceptre, Argyll the crown and Crawford the sword once more as a year ago, but on this occasion, her nerve had evidently gone sufficiently to surround herself with hagbutters, no longer trusting the bailies of Edinburgh. At this Parliament, the proceedings of Bothwell’s trial were officially declared to be just according to the law of the land; all subjects were ordered to live in unity, despite their religious differences, and even more significantly, grants of land towards certain nobles were confirmed – the lands that went with Dunbar Castle were confirmed to Bothwell, and Huntly and four other Gordons were confirmed in their estates, although unofficial restitution had been made two years before. These were the practical aspects of the fall of Darnley.

  Bothwell’s next move was absolutely in keeping with his character and the conditions of the time: if he was to make his power even more effective by occupying the position of king, he needed the support of at least some of his fellow-nobles. The contemporary expedient of a bond was once more called into play, as twice before over the murder of Riccio and the murder of Darnley. In order to secure adherents for this new bond, on Saturday 19th April, at the end of the sitting of Parliament, Bothwell duly entertained twenty-eight of the nobles and prelates then in the capital to a lavish feast – contemporary reports differing as to whether this banquet took place in his own apartments at Holyrood, or in Ainslie’s Tavern in the town itself. What was sure was that at the end of this momentous supper party, Bothwell produced a long document, the main point of which, apart from his own innocence of the murder of Darnley, was that the queen was now ‘destitute of a husband, in which solitary state, the commonwealth may not permit her to remain’.19 It continued ingenuously: if the ‘affectionate and hearty service of the said Earl, and his other good qualities’ might move the queen to select him as a new husband – and the document suggested that another reason for such a choice, quite apart from Bothwell’s noble nature, might be the fact that Mary would prefer ‘one of her native-born subjects unto all foreign subjects’ – then the signatories were to promise themselves to promote the marriage by counsel, vote and assistance. To this remarkable manifesto, known by the name of the tavern as the Ainslie bond, eight bishops, nine earls and seven barons now put their signatures including Morton, Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Cassillis, Sutherland, Glencairn, Rothes, Seton, Sinclair, Boyd and Herries.* Although the motives and loyalties of some of the signatories must be considered to be highly suspect – for surely to Morton and Maitland King James Hepburn would be no more acceptable than King Henry Stuart had been – nevertheless Bothwell now had in his pocket the document he considered he needed for his next bold move forward.

  The queen having gone to her favourite Seton, Bothwell now followed her there with Maitland and Bellenden. According to Queen Mary’s own story, it was here that he first paid suit to her, suggesting both that she needed a husband, and that he was the best man to fill the role, since he had been selected to do so by her nobles. This direct request threw the queen into a state of confusion: ‘This poor young princess, inexperienced in such devices,’ wrote Nau,20 ‘was circumvented on all sides by persuasions, requests, and importunities; both by general memorials signed by their hands, and presented to her in full council, and by private letters.’ We can certainly believe Mary’s account that she did not know what to do, especially when Maitland assured her what she knew only too well, that it had become absolutely necessary that some remedy should be provided for the disorder into which the public affairs had fallen for want of a head. Now her chief nobles were apparently pleading with her to accept Bothwell – ‘a man of resolution well adapted to rule, the very character needed to give weight to the decisions and actions of the council’. However, Queen Mary always asserted afterwards that she refused Bothwell’s proposals at this point, on the grounds that there were too many scandals about her husband’s death, despite the fact that Bothwell had been legally acquitted of complicity by Parliament.

  With this refusal still uppermost in her thoughts, the queen proceeded to Stirling to pay a visit to her baby. She arrived on Monday 21st April, and spent the whole Tuesday enjoying the company of her child. James was ten months old. The queen played with him in peace, happily unaware that this was the last meeting she was ever to have with her son. While she was at Stirling, she also wrote to the former papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, now back in Turin, protesting her devotion to Scotland, to the Pope, and the Holy Catholic Church – in which she intended to die.21 It is difficult to know for certain what thoughts of the future inspired this strange guilty little letter, but Mondovi’s reaction, written before he had heard news of her abduction and marriage to Bothwell, is significant: he prophesied that unless the queen of Scots was given strong support by the papacy, she might give way to the natural impulse of a young woman and seek support elsewhere from a husband instead; as a candidate for this post, Mondovi put forward the name of Bothwell ‘who has ever been the Queen’s most trusty and obedient adherent’.22

  On the Wednesday Mary started back to Edinburgh. The visit to Stirling had ostensibly been a secret one, and she had with her only Maitland, Huntly, James Melville and about thirty horsemen. Mary’s health was still poor. On the road back she was seized with a violent pain and had to take rest in a roadside cottage. That night she slept at the palace of Linlithgow, the peaceful palace overlooking
its lake, where she had been born. The next morning, Thursday 24th April, the ninth anniversary of her marriage to Francis, the queen and her little troupe started back on the road for Edinburgh. But as they reached the Bridges of Almond, about six miles from Edinburgh, close to the point where the Gogar Burn joined the Almond River, and travellers were ferried across, Bothwell suddenly appeared with a force of 800 men. He had spent the night at the nearby castle of Calder, apparently on his way into Liddesdale. Bothwell rode forward, put his hand on the queen’s bridle, and told her that since danger was threatening her in Edinburgh, he proposed to take her to the castle of Dunbar, out of harm’s way. Some of Mary’s followers reacted disagreeably to the sudden appearance of Bothwell, but the queen said gently that she would go with the Earl Bothwell rather than be the cause of bloodshed. Docilely, without more ado, she allowed herself to be conducted about forty miles across the heart of Scotland, skirting the capital itself; she seemed to accept Bothwell’s story so totally that she made no attempt to seek rescue from the country people as she passed. Her only positive action was to send one James Borthwick to Edinburgh to issue a warning of possible danger. When Borthwick told the provost what had happened, a very different view was taken of the disappearance of their sovereign. The alarm bell was rung and the citizens were begged to attempt a rescue. But by this time there was little that they, or anyone, could do. At midnight, the queen was within Dunbar Castle, surrounded by a force of Bothwell’s men. The gates of the castle were firmly shut behind her.

  This abduction – if the word can truly be applied to anything so calm and placid as these proceedings at the Bridges – represented a typical example of Bothwell’s thinking. Even if earlier hints of Bothwell’s predilection for abduction, in Arran’s story, are disregarded, Bothwell clearly had the mentality which considered that a sufficiently public outrage covered in some curious way a multitude of sins. This had been his reasoning over Kirk o’Field. Now he confidently believed that an abduction would not only put an end to further consultation and discussion about the marriage – in which his reasoning was perfectly correct – but also distract public attention from his connection with Darnley’s death by the very flagrancy of the act; here of course his reasoning was disastrously wrong. Was Queen Mary enlightened in advance as to her prospective fate? Although we cannot have the certainty of definite proof, the contemporary evidence points strongly to the fact that Mary knew of the plan beforehand, and agreed to it weakly, as a possible way out of the morass in which despair brought on by ill-health seemed to have landed her. The intended abduction was certainly widely known about beforehand among her nobles. Lennox knew about it on the Tuesday, and Kirkcaldy of Grange, Bothwell’s bitter enemy, mentioned it on Thursday, the day it actually happened.23 In a fury at Bothwell’s rising eminence, Kirkcaldy wrote to Bedford in the same letter that the queen had been overheard saying that she would go to the end of the world in a white petticoat with Bothwell – but as Kirkcaldy did not reveal by whom or under what circumstances this extraordinary declaration had been overheard, and as he subsequently became one of Mary’s loyalest followers, it seems likely that he was allowing his dislike and jealousy of Bothwell to taint his imagination. Maitland must surely have known of the plan. Paris, in his deposition, said Bothwell’s man, Black Ormiston, came to Linlithgow Palace secretly the night before the abduction and had a long earnest conversation.24 It seems inconceivable that the scheme should not have been outlined also to the queen, if only to secure her co-operation. Mary, still envisaging Bothwell as her help and support among the nobles, and not as the reprobate adventurer whom his enemies later built up in their writings, felt in no position to withstand his latest proposition; it was presented to her by Bothwell, using the same arguments which he had used to himself, as a convenient solution to her difficulties.

  Once within the castle of Dunbar, Bothwell made his second planned move – an equally characteristic one, although in this case the queen was not consulted beforehand. He decided to complete his formal abduction of her person by the physical possession of her body. His intentions in this aggressive act were as before perfectly straightforward: he intended to place the queen in a situation from which she could not possibly escape marrying him. Bothwell was certainly not in love with Mary, although he may have accompanied his actions with some sort of protestations, such as he thought suitable to the occasion. But in the course of the gratification of his ambitions, rape was not the sort of duty from which Bothwell was likely to shrink. Melville, who was present in the castle at the time, and only allowed to go free the next morning, was quite certain that the ravishment had taken place: ‘The Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and laid with her against her will.’25 It was Melville who tells us that Bothwell had already boasted that he would marry the queen – ‘who would or would not; yea, whether she would herself or not’. A fortnight later Mary gave a very vivid description of her experiences to the bishop of Dunblane, who was instructed to explain her hasty marriage to Bothwell to the French court: first of all Bothwell ‘awaited us by the way, accompanied with a great force, and led us with all diligence to Dunbar’ and there, in words which seem positively touching: ‘Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle.’ Now Bothwell, not accepting her promise to marry him, refused to have the consummation of the marriage delayed, but kept up a continuous barrage of importunity, ‘accompanied none the less by force’ until ‘he has finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and such form as he thought might best serve his turn’.26 It is interesting to note that Bothwell’s and Mary’s contemporaries believed instantaneously and strongly that the abduction scheme had been a rigged one and intended to save the queen’s face. Within three days Drury wrote that although the manner seemed to be forcible, it was known to be otherwise.27 But it was also widely believed that Bothwell had completed his scheme by making love to the queen, and that this was probably against her will. These were the conclusions drawn by those able to observe at first hand the bold and scheming character of Bothwell, and the markedly straitlaced attitude of Queen Mary to matters of sexual morality.

  It is sometimes suggested that Mary found a sexual satisfaction with Bothwell which she had not experienced with either of her previous husbands. This may or may not be true: it can certainly never be proved, since the queen herself certainly never ventured any opinion upon the subject, and to the end of her life always firmly attributed her marriage to Bothwell to reasons of state rather than the dictates of the heart. In fact, the events leading up to her marriage to Darnley point far more clearly to the workings of physical infatuation, than those leading up to the Bothwell marriage. In spring 1565 Mary Stuart was a young and beautiful woman, healthy and energetic, long widowed, eager to be married; in spring 1567 she was broken in health, distraught, nervously concerned about the future of her government in Scotland. Quite apart from the evidence of events, it seems extremely doubtful whether they were the sort of couple who would have been drawn to each other if political considerations had not been involved. Practical ambition had driven Bothwell to woo the queen: this elegant, coquettish, literary-minded, slightly cold woman, with her graceful, leaning figure, her red-gold hair, her laughing flirtatious ways, her demand for obeisance to which she had been accustomed from her earliest years, was not the type to appeal to Bothwell, the lover of the lusty Bessie Crawford, the dominating courtesan Janet Beaton or the plaintive, submissive Anna Throndsen. Of all Mary Stuart’s qualities, her courage and gaiety, her ability to make quick decisions and pull herself rapidly out of an untenable situation were those most likely to appeal to Bothwell but these had been strangely in abeyance since her virtual nervous breakdown at Jedburgh. The important fact about Mary Stuart in Bothwell’s eyes was that she was queen regnant of Scotland, with the power to make her husband king consort and effective ruler of the country.

  Of course it would not be essential for Bothwell to love Mary for her to respond to him: she might ev
en have experienced some perverse satisfaction in domination by this straightforward and brutal man, so different from her other husbands, and her potential courtly lovers. Bothwell’s intellectual curiosity certainly extended into matters of sex. Apart from the common contemporary rumours of his vicious life, there was a canard that he practised homosexuality.* The feelings which Queen Mary felt for Bothwell can only be estimated in terms of the importance which as a woman she gave to the whole subject of sex. In early youth she naturally paid little attention to such questions, and during the period of her first widowhood also was remarkable for the discretion with which she conducted herself. Her disastrous marriage to Darnley, springing from physical attraction, gave her every reason to adopt an extremely suspicious attitude towards passion and its consequences. If, despite all these considerations, she experienced some genuine fulfilment in Bothwell’s embraces, it is remarkable how little effort she made to keep in touch with her husband, once she was in captivity: from the moment of her abdication onwards, she seems to have lost all interest in Bothwell, as though he belonged to some previous, unsuccessful, political phase in her life. Another interesting aspect of her captivity is that she made absolutely no attempt to quench any desires of the flesh, if indeed she felt them, during the whole nineteen years: there is no rumour, which bears investigation, of the sort of liaison which would surely have occurred had she become, under Bothwell’s tuition, the grande amoureuse of so many imaginings. On the contrary, from the age of twenty-five onwards, the queen led a life of total chastity.