Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Whatever Mary’s inner feelings for Bothwell during the short period of their concubinage – three weeks from Dunbar to the marriage, and four weeks thereafter – their union was certainly not founded originally on the flimsy basis of passion. Mary’s confessor Mameret later solemnly swore to the Spanish ambassador in London that, until the question of her marriage to Bothwell was raised, he had never seen a woman of greater virtue, courage and uprightness – and he therefore, with all the intimate knowledge of her character gained in the confessional, utterly believed that Mary had only taken up with Bothwell in order to settle the religious situation in Scotland.29 In fact the queen had not one but three pressing and – as it seemed to her – good reasons for giving her consent to the marriage with Bothwell. In the first place he had succeeded in convincing her that he would at last provide her with the able and masterful consort whom she had so long sought to share with her the strains of the government of Scotland. He had subjugated her by the undoubted strength of his personality at a time when broken health had induced in her a fatally indecisive, even lethargic state of mind, so that faced with the reality of Bothwell and his positive aims, she was unable to see clearly where her own best interests lay. Secondly, Bothwell was able to show to Mary the Ainslie bond which proved to her satisfaction that the majority of her nobility – not only Seton and Huntly but also the more contumacious Morton and Argyll – were prepared to accept him as their overlord. Mary had married Darnley defiantly against the advice of most of her nobles: she did not intend to make the same mistake twice. The Ainslie bond and the apparent approval of the nobility were worth more to Bothwell in furthering his suit than all the magic arts and enticements with which he was afterwards credited by Mary’s partisans in order to explain his seduction of her.* Thirdly, Bothwell had effectively ensured that the queen would not be able to go back on her word once she was back in her capital, by the act of physical rape which he had performed at Dunbar. The union had already been consummated: it remained to transform it into a legal marriage.

  Having secured the queen’s acquiescence, Bothwell now faced the problem of ridding himself of his existing wife, to whom he had been married just over two years before. This did not prove difficult, since Jean Bothwell seems to have raised no objections: her marriage had been brought about by political considerations, and she was now content to have it dissolved for the same good reasons. There were already rumours by the end of March that her brother Huntly had agreed in principle to the deal. On 3rd May Lady Bothwell was given judgment against her husband in the Protestant commissary court, which had replaced the old church courts in matrimonial cases: the grounds given were his adultery with Bessie Crawford. In order to make assurance doubly sure, their marriage was then formally annulled on 7th May by the Catholic Archbishop Hamilton, on the grounds that they had not received a dispensation for their marriage, although they were within the fourth degree of consanguinity, Bothwell’s great-great-grandfather having married a Gordon. The cynicism of this gesture may be judged by the fact that not only had a dispensation actually been given, but it had been given by Archbishop Hamilton himself.31 Despite the ease of the divorce, Bothwell’s servants took the opportunity in the course of it to threaten violence to Master John Manderstoun, canon of Dunbar collegiate church, who was told that if matters did not move fast enough ‘there shall not fail to be noses and lugges (ears) cut, and far greater displeasures …’32 On 6th May Bothwell brought the queen back into Edinburgh; at the end of April she had received an offer of rescue from Aberdeen, which she had rejected. She was now regarded as firmly committed to Bothwell’s rule. The couple entered Edinburgh by the West Port and then rode up the Bow towards the castle. Both Huntly and Maitland were in their train. Although the artillery of the castle shot off magnificently for the queen’s arrival, it was generally remarked that Bothwell’s power was not absolute. The Diurnal of Occurrents recorded that the Earl Bothwell led the queen’s majesty by the bridle of her horse, as though she were a captive.33

  As Queen Mary moved in a trance towards her public union with Bothwell, already the forces of aristocratic reaction were coalescing against his meteoric rise. Furious at the realization that Bothwell – one of their own number – had made himself a virtual dictator, on 1st May a party of dissidents gathered at Stirling. They vowed in yet another communal bond to strive by all means in their power to set their queen at liberty, and defend her son Prince James. In this meeting at Stirling, it is significant that the key figures were Morton, Argyll and Atholl – all three of whom only a week before, out of either cunning or weakness, had signed the Ainslie bond promising to forward Bothwell’s suit of the queen. Bedford was now asked by Kirkcaldy to write to Moray and ask him to return, and Robert Melville wrote for English support against Bothwell, threatening French support if it was not forthcoming. The pattern of Scottish politics was forming once more into the same shapes of family alliances and feuds, in which the power of one noble could not be allowed to grow unchecked, and in which English help was like the joker in the pack of cards. The Stirling conspirators diverted themselves with a drama called The Murder of Darnley and the Fate of Bothwell – in which the boy actor who played the part of Bothwell was hanged so realistically that it took some time to restore him to life. These same nobles sent a message to Mary offering her their support against the Lord Bothwell. But since Bothwell was firmly governing all matters around her, the queen could scarcely credit that he had already lost the support of the fickle Scottish lords: it was after all only a few weeks since the signing of the Ainslie bond, which had convinced her that the majority of her nobility especially desired this Bothwell marriage.

  The days passed with horrible speed towards her wedding-day. When John Craig, Knox’s colleague in the parish church of Edinburgh, refused to proclaim the banns of the marriage without a writ from the queen, he was brought a command signed by her personally saying that she had been neither ravished nor yet retained in captivity. But when Craig did make his proclamation, he was still brave enough, on 9th May, to express contemporary disgust at the speed of events, by a denunciation in front of the Privy Council of Bothwell’s behaviour: ‘I laid to his charge, the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement, and proclaiming within the space of four days, and last the suspicion of the King’s death which her marriage would confirm.’34 Angrily Bothwell threatened to hang Craig; but Craig spoke no more than what the common people of Edinburgh, once so devoted to Mary, their dream figure, their beautiful young queen, felt themselves at seeing her thus recklessly and carelessly allow herself to be trampled in the mire of Bothwell’s ambition. On 12th May Mary created Bothwell duke of Orkney and lord of Shetland (titles once borne by his ancestor, the 1st earl) and placed the ducal coronet on his head with her own hands. Four of his followers were knighted, including Black Ormiston of Kirk o’Field fame. To many the queen seemed like a mindless zombie under the power of Bothwell’s authority: Beaton in Paris was naturally growing distracted at the madness or folly of his young mistress, but Clernault reported to him on 14th May that Mary neither listened to nor inspected any communication he brought her from Beaton or others of her advisers abroad.35 On the same day the queen officially pardoned those nobles who had signed the Ainslie bond.

  On Thursday, 15th May, twelve days after his own divorce, just over three months after the death of her own husband, Mary and Bothwell were married in the great hall at Holyrood. Lines from Ovid were posted upon the gates of the Palace – ‘Mense malas maio nubere vulgus ait’, or as the people murmured significantly: ‘Wantons marry in the month of May’.* A greater contrast to the two previous weddings of the queen could hardly be imagined. The very fact that the ceremony took place according to the Protestant rite showed how much the queen had lost control of her destinies, although it is possible that she herself heard a Mass earlier in the day, out of which her adherents later tried to construct a story th
at they had been married under both forms. At the service, Adam, bishop of Orkney, preached a sermon in the course of which he chose to announce Bothwell’s penitence for his former evil and wicked life. After the wedding, there were no masques as there had been at the Darnley wedding, or ‘pleasures and pastimes’ as there had always been before when princes married.36 There was merely a wedding dinner, at which the people were allowed to watch Mary eating her meal at the head of the table, with Bothwell at the foot.

  Equally significant of the queen’s state of mind is the fact that there were no rich presents for Bothwell as groom as there had been for Darnley, and certainly no lavish replenishment of her own wardrobe. Whereas Darnley had received violet velvet, furs, a cupboard for perfumes, cloth of gold for his horse’s caparison, blue bonnets with feathers for his fools, and other tokens of Mary’s love, Bothwell merely received some genet fur from one of Mary of Guise’s black cloaks for his dressing-gown – his solitary present. Furthermore, the queen seems to have paid no attention to the subject of her own clothes, once so important to her. There are only two entries in the inventories of her wardrobe in May 1567 – one being for Bothwell’s fur – compared to thirty in July 1565, the month in which she married Darnley.37 Her sartorial preparations were confined to having an old yellow dress relined with white taffeta, an old black gown done up with gold braid and a black taffeta petticoat relined. Of all the sad events in the life of Mary Stuart in Scotland, this squalid, hurried wedding, of a rite she did not profess, without any of the preparations she so loved, is surely the most pathetic.

  Judged from the comments of observers, Mary’s brief married life with Bothwell brought her absolutely no personal happiness. Already on their wedding-day, du Croc reported that a strange formality was noticed between the queen and her new husband. Mary tried to excuse it, by saying that she did not wish to be merry. To Leslie, she was more explicit: she sent for him, and in floods of tears told him how much she already repented of what she had done, especially her Protestant marriage ceremony.’38 She promised him desperately she would never do anything again opposed to the Catholic Church. In front of others, Mary’s sadness was even more fearful and more desperate. Melville heard her actually ask for a knife, to kill herself in front of Arthur Erskine, her equerry, the day after the wedding, and when he remonstrated with her, the queen threatened to drown herself.39 It has been suggested that Mary’s unhappiness was due to the fact that Bothwell now made some revelation to her about his past – his guilt at Kirk o’Field, for example, or even his father’s supposed liaison with her mother Mary of Guise. But Mary Stuart’s state of mind was now too immediately disturbed for such past scandals to be able to affect her, and Bothwell’s involvement in her husband’s death was certainly no surprise to her at this point. The hysterical nature of Mary’s reaction shows not only how far she was from feeling any kind of personal love for Bothwell, but also how desperately close her nerves were to the surface and how far her self-control had vanished. As it began to dawn on her that she might have betrayed her whole reputation in order to marry a man who was no more suited than Darnley to advise her, control the nobles, or govern Scotland, her future began to look very black indeed.

  Melville reported that Bothwell’s beastly and suspicious nature was such that ‘not one day passed’ during their time together without the queen shedding abundant tears. Maitland told du Croc a little later that since the day of the queen’s marriage there had been no end of tears and lamentations, since Bothwell was furious and jealous if she looked at anyone except him – he accused her of having a pleasure-loving nature, and liking to spend her time in frivolous worldly pursuits, like any other woman.40 In short there was now no lute-playing, hunting and hawking, as in the early days with Darnley. Even before their marriage, Bothwell’s unkindness had led to half a day’s quarrel between them. Bothwell’s language was said to be so filthy that even Melville was constrained to leave his presence. Gossips in London suggested that Mary suffered tortures of jealousy because Bothwell’s former wife Lady Jean still remained installed in his own castle of Crichton. Maitland helped to stir up trouble by telling Mary that Bothwell had written to Jean several letters assuring her that he only regarded Mary as his concubine – Jean was still his only lawful wife. Du Croc took care to pass the story on to the French court, adding spitefully: ‘No one in this kingdom is in any doubt but that the Duke (Bothwell) loves his former wife a great deal more than he loves the queen.’41 In fact property was probably at the bottom of Bothwell’s relations with Jean: it is unlikely that he could have turned her out of Crichton, even if he had so wished, since her dowry had redeemed the mortgage, and Jean Bothwell, as we have seen, had a commendable sense of property values.

  But Bothwell in his treatment of Mary was less concerned with the niceties of their legal relationship than with the power that it brought him. In their bond of 16th June, the lords announced that Bothwell had kept Mary as the virtual prisoner of his ambition. None of their number had been able to speak to her, even on lawful business, without Bothwell being present; so suspicious had Bothwell become, that he kept the queen’s chamber door perpetually guarded by his own men of war. Drury reported on 20th May that the queen’s distress was the talk of the court: never, it seemed, had a woman changed so much in appearance in so short a space of time. It was even rumoured that she was suffering from the falling sickness (epilepsy) to explain her deranged behaviour.* The mermaid and the hare were evidently as ill-suited to live together as might be expected of a half-fairy sea creature and a wild animal of the earth.

  One of the first tasks the queen and Bothwell had to face after their hasty marriage was that of explaining it away to both the French and English courts. Mary’s instructions to the bishop of Dunblane,43 who was entrusted with the mission to France, and the letter she sent along the same lines to Beaton, have a strongly apologetic note, as though she was all too aware of that unpleasant French proverb, qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Apart from her accounts of events leading up to the marriage, already quoted, she stressed her continued loyalty to the Catholic Church – she would not ‘leave her religion for him, nor for any man at all’ – aware that her actions had once more cast this seriously in doubt. Her instructions emphasized Bothwell’s loyal service to the Scottish crown, and glossed over their previous disagreements which she attributed to the jealousy of other nobles. ‘As envy follows virtues, and this country is of itself somewhat subject to factions; others began to mislike his proceeding, and so far by reports and misconstructing his doings, went about to put him out of our good grace …’ Then Mary stressed the fact that Bothwell had won over the other nobles to the marriage project – ‘He obtained an writing subscribed with all their hands, wherein they not only granted their consent to our marriage with him, but also obliged them to set him forward with their lives and goods.’ Finally she described her own helpless and broken spirit, how she felt herself inadequate to deal with the Scottish situation singlehanded – ‘this realm being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order, unless our authority be assisted and forthset by the fortification of a man who must take upon his person in the execution of justice … the travail thereof we may no longer sustain in our own person, being already wearied, and almost broken with the frequent uproars and rebellions raised against us since we came in Scotland’. Despite this plea for sympathy in her situation, which has the ring of truth, Mary felt it necessary to outline answers to two possible objections – the lawfulness of the marriage she defends by saying that Bothwell’s previous marriage was dissolved, and her failure to bring the nuncio to Scotland she defends by saying rather ingenuously that she had done all she could in this respect, and that if the nuncio had arrived such terrible events might not have happened.

  Robert Melville’s instructions for breaking the news to Queen Elizabeth ran along very similar lines.44 The difficult quarrelsome nature of the Scottish people is once more emphasized, as is Mary’s personal exhaustion and despair for
lack of a husband to support her in this impossible situation. Mary met the principal objection of Elizabeth – that she had married the man suspected of her husband’s death – with the point that he had been formally acquitted of the crime by the Scottish Parliament. Despite the fact that Mary accompanied her instructions with a personal and charming letter to Cecil, begging him to help her cause with Elizabeth, neither the English queen nor the French queen allowed themselves to be distracted by Mary’s excuses from the patent facts of the case. From the point of view of either France or England, the Scottish queen had totally lost her head in thus allowing herself to be wedded to the disreputable Bothwell. The only real line of defence was after all that which Mary took in her letter to Beaton: ‘The event is indeed strange and otherwise nor (we know) you would have looked for. But as it is succeeded, we must take the best of it.’

  Ironically enough, if the Scottish situation had not been so factious, if Bothwell had not by the flagrant manner of Darnley’s death provided such a convenient handle against himself, if he had understood in any way how to persuade his fellow-nobles into accepting him as consort – as he attempted unsuccessfully to do through the Ainslie bond – he might not have made a bad ruler of the country. The union of Mary and Bothwell might have turned out a marriage of convenience, if not a love match. Bothwell had strength and he had intelligence; as for his tendency to search for violent solutions to problems, he was certainly not alone in possessing this failing in this epoch. He showed reverence for the queen’s position if not her person, refusing to cover himself in her presence until she took his cap and put it on. When they rode abroad together, they put up a good public front of content. Bothwell’s actions during his five weeks as consort were positively encouraging for the future of the country, were it not for the fact that his fellow-nobles were by now seething in almost open revolt. The machinery of the Privy Council, for example, was overhauled to provide for more regular attendance; a law was passed against bringing false money into Scotland; more important still, on 23rd May the proclamation concerning the religion of the country which Mary had enacted on her first arrival in Scotland in 1561 was reenacted formally to reassure the troubled minds who had heard false rumours about its validity. It was pointed out that by allowing certain persons to practise their own (Catholic) religion, the queen had intended no violation of the Act. Scotland was still very much officially Protestant. All this was done with the advice of Mary’s ‘dearest husband, James Duke of Orkney, Earl Bothwell, etc.’ Bothwell’s own letters to France and England, backing up Mary’s explanations of their marriage, revealed a certain native diplomatic ability. To Queen Elizabeth, Bothwell wrote: ‘I will thus boldly affirm that, albeit men of greater and birth and estimation might well have been preferred to this room, yet none more careful to see your two Majesties’ amity and intelligence continued by all good offices …’ He wrote in the same vein to Charles IX of France; Archbishop Beaton he tactfully requested to excuse him in so far as some of his behaviour might seem rather unceremonious and lacking respect.45 Such intelligence might have stood Mary in good stead, if she had ever been allowed the time to enjoy it. It was in exchange for his strength and support in the future that Mary had endured the humiliation of her wedding-day to Bothwell. But the cruelty of fate ensured that she was never allowed the time to enjoy her part of the bargain.