by Неизвестный
As the New Year dawned Henry again fell ill, this time felled ‘full of the smallpox’. Mary finally attended to her husband, sending her physician to Henry on 9 January 1567. On 14 January she travelled to Edinburgh, carrying James and accompanied by ‘the whole nobility’; six days later, she set off for Glasgow,17 taking an empty horse litter to bear Henry home. Henry greeted news of her arrival with satirical ennui: ‘If she come it shall be to my comfort and she shall be welcome. If she tarry, even as it pleaseth her so be it. But this much you shall declare unto her, that I wish Stirling to be Jedburgh, Glasgow to be the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here, and then I doubt not that she would be quickly with me, undesired.’18 Asking why she had brought the litter, Mary explained that it was intended to make his journey more gentle than it would be on horseback. A sick man shouldn’t travel in such cold weather, he responded. Mary insisted that she would accompany him to take the waters at Craigmillar ‘to be with him and not far from her son’. Henry vetoed the Craigmillar suggestion, and insisted on returning to Edinburgh, a slow journey which took them four days, reaching the city on 30 or 31 January. Mary claimed that Holyroodhouse was not a suitable venue due to its bad air – which had not deterred her from placing James there, however – so Henry was lodged at the Old Provost’s House at Kirk o’ Field, an estate on Edinburgh’s south side, on higher ground, ‘a place of good air, where he might best recover his health’, as Sir James Melville put it.19 Henry was unhappy about his lodging, but the Queen insisted he stay there, pointing out its handsome furnishings, many of them imported specially from Holyrood.
While Mary lodged with her son at Holyrood, she was a frequent visitor to Kirk o’ Field, sitting for hours at Henry’s bedside and often spending the night in a room below her husband. For ten days, the King and Queen seemed happier than they had ever been: on 7 February, Henry wrote to his father, celebrating the return of ‘my good health’ which he attributed to ‘the good treatment of such as hath this good while concealed their good will, I mean my love the Queen. Which I assure you hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife. I hope yet that God will lighten our hearts with joy that have so long been afflicted with trouble.’ As Henry finished the letter, Mary read it over his shoulder, put her arm around his neck and kissed him. But, as later Lennox wrote, Mary ‘kissed him as Judas did the Lord his Master This tyrant having brought her faithful and most loving husband, that innocent lamb, from his careful and loving father to his place of execution, where he was a sure sacrifice unto Almighty God.’20
By Sunday 10 February, the King had been given a clean bill of health. He expected to resume his full public life the following day. That morning, Mary visited Henry at Kirk o’ Field in the afternoon, and then returned to Holyroodhouse to attend the marriage festivities of her musician servant Bastien Pagès and Margaret Carwood, her principal bedchamber woman. After retiring for the night, Mary, along with most of Edinburgh, was shaken awake by a huge explosion, which appeared to come from Kirk o’ Field. ‘The blast was fearful to all about,’ wrote Herries. ‘Many rose from their beds at the noise, and came in multitudes to looke upon the dead corpses, without knowing the cause.’21 The bodies of King Henry and his man William Taylor, who shared his bedchamber, were found in the garden of the house. It was obvious to all, from the state of the bodies, that the two men had been killed before the explosion, probably by strangulation.
In time, it would become clear that the murder was indeed Bothwell’s doing, although the precise sequence of events remains unclear. In one account, Bothwell and two associates strangled the King and his servant in their beds, carried the corpses down to the garden, and then fired some gunpowder stored under the King’s bedchamber, to make it appear that the house was blown up by accident, and the two corpses flung over the wall by the force of the explosion. But, as Herries notes, ‘neither were their shirts singed, nor their clothes burnt (which were likeways laid by them), nor their skins anything touched with fire’.22 Another scenario had the King awakened by the sound of the conspirators laying the explosives under his chamber, and attempting to escape through the window, only to meet his death outside.
Bothwell volunteered to the Queen to investigate the noise, and on his return, was the one to break the news of the King’s death. ‘The Queen was suddenly taken with grief,’ reports Herries.23 Writing to Beaton in Paris, Mary claimed that the attack was evidently aimed at her personally: ‘We assure ourself it was dressed always for us as for the King; for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and was there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town that same night at midnight, and of very chance tarried not all night, by reason of some masque in the Abbey.’ Her decision to leave Henry’s lodging must have been heaven-sent: ‘we believe it was not chance but God put it in our head.’24
The English ambassador Sir Henry Killigrew was not allowed audience with Mary until 8 March, when he delivered letters from Elizabeth. ‘I found the Queen in a dark chamber, and could not see her face; but by her words she seemed very doleful.’25 Elizabeth wrote to express her sorrow for the ‘horrible and abominable murder of your late husband and my killed cousin’, but also to advise Mary more pragmatically. ‘I cannot conceal that I grieve more for you than him,’ she wrote. As ‘a faithful cousin and friend’, she urged Mary to be seen to preserve her honour rather than merely ‘look through your fingers at revenge’. Mary should ‘take this matter to heart, that you may show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are. I write thus vehemently not that I doubt, but for affection.’26 Elizabeth’s advice was timely: Killigrew sensed ‘a general misliking among the commons and others which abhor the detestable murder of their King, a shame as they suppose to the whole nation. The preachers say, and pray openly to God, that it will please Him both to reveal and revenge; exhorting all men to prayer and repentance.’27
Early searches ordered by Edinburgh’s magistrate ‘for any suspicious people’ had only turned up one Captain William Blackature, who had been drinking wine in the house of William Henderson at the Trone. It was alleged that Blackature, on hearing the explosion, ‘run out and left the wine undrunk’, a detail that in itself was alleged to be suspicious behaviour for a captain; Blackature was arrested and hanged, ‘although no clear proof was brought against him’. Official investigations continued, with interrogations of ‘mean people’ who lived near the Kirk o’ Field, and of Henry’s servants. But these were largely irrelevant: ‘the streets were strown [strewed] full of libels and pamphlets, that divulged the contrivers and actors, with all the circumstances’ – namely, that Moray and Morton had planned it, and Bothwell carried out the act. Moray’s departure on the morning before the murder to see his heavily pregnant wife at St Andrews was denounced as a ruse.28
Mary may not have been strictly complicit in the murder, but at the very least it seems probable that she had foreknowledge of the conspirators’ plans: her recorded attempt to persuade Moray to stay on the morning of the murder suggests that she understood this to be a signal that the act was imminent. Now, however, the dangers to herself and to her baby son were clear. On 19 March Bothwell decreed that Prince James should be returned to Stirling Castle, and he was conveyed there by Argyll and Huntly. The Earl of Mar, ‘a trusty man’, according to Herries,29 was removed from Edinburgh Castle and presented with the governorship of Stirling Castle: James could now be raised by Mar at Stirling. Such an upbringing was by no means abnormal for a future King of Scots. Life expectancy of Scottish sovereigns was low: since the accession of Robert III in 1390, every monarch had come to the throne a minor. The upbringing and educating of Scottish heirs to the throne away from their parents was therefore an old, honourable and politically wise practice, to ensure the crown’s succession. Mary’s directions to Mar, dated 29 March 1567, have survived. James, ‘our dearest son, your natural Prince’, was to be placed in Mar’s hands ‘to be conserved, nursed and upbrought’
in Stirling Castle ‘under your tutill and governance’. Mar was expressly commanded to ‘suffer nor permit no noblemen of our realm or any others, of what condition soever that they be of, to enter or come within our said Castle or to the presence of our said dearest son, accompanied with any more persons but two or three at the most.’30 Such regulations would appear on the surface to be merely precautionary, and highly sensible: that no sizeable armed force should be allowed anywhere near the body of the young and highly vulnerable Prince. But there was another implication to these guidelines, as Mary well knew. For a nobleman to be accompanied by no more than ‘two or three at the most’ was deeply insulting, as nobility was often vouchsafed by a performance of strength in numbers. Mary’s rules meant that anyone wishing to be granted access to her son would have to humble themselves in a highly visible manner.
Bothwell, shaken by the unanimity of public opinion that laid the murder at his door, urged Moray and Morton to procure Mary’s consent to marry him. Moray and Morton, according to Herries, saw how this might redound to their favour: ‘three strokes shall be given with one stone!’ – attention would be deflected from their involvement, Mary would be defamed, and Bothwell (who had the power to reveal their complicity) ruined. In the meantime, however, Henry’s father Lennox was waging an insistent campaign of ‘continual cries, expostulations and petitions’ to bring Bothwell to justice. Moray and Morton advised Bothwell to submit, to clear his name before proposing marriage. Bothwell and Lennox were summoned to appear in Edinburgh on 12 April, giving only ten days’ notice (the usual was forty); moreover, Lennox was commanded to come with only his domestic servants. Lennox could not demean himself to respond so quickly and so meanly, and he sent instead Robert Cuningham as his procurator, who complained that the procedure was contrary to proper practice, especially since Bothwell had brought with him a substantial force that would intimidate and silence hostile witnesses. A panel comprised mainly of ‘Bothwell’s particular friends’ forwarded the verdict that there was no cause to condemn Bothwell, but if anyone later accused him they would have indemnity. Bothwell, absolved by law, still wanted to clear his name, and ‘sets up a challenge upon the cross, that if any man (his equal) will say that he is guilty of the King’s murder, he was ready to clear himself by his sword’. This challenge was soon answered. An anonymous gentlemen replied that he would take up the challenge, ‘if a convenient place were appointed, where he might show himself with security’; of course, no such place existed.31 A short poem proclaimed
It is nocht aneuch the pure king is deid
Bot the mischand murthararis occupand his steid
And doubell addulltrie hes all this land schamit …
[It is not enough the poor king is dead, but the wicked
murderers occupying his place and double adultery has
shamed all the land … ]
An anonymous libel asserted that ‘There is none that professes Christ and his Evangel, that can with upright conscience part Bothwell and his wife, albeit she prove him an abominable adulterer and worse: as he has murdered the husband of her he intends to marry, whose promise he had long before the murder.’32
Although popular opinion thought Bothwell guilty, he was now technically cleared, and Morton and Moray urged Mary to consider marriage. She could not govern without a husband, they claimed (a ‘fact’ often urged on cousin Elizabeth south of the border, now nine years a queen without a husband), and her husband should be a powerful man, and her own subject. Bothwell, they concluded, was ‘fittest both for courage and friends’. Mary thanked them for their counsel, and said that she would consider. But events would take the decision out of her hands.
Feeling her popularity slipping, Mary decided to regain control of her most powerful weapon: her son. It was reported on 20 April by a source hostile to Mary that ‘The Queen intends to take the Prince out of the Earl of Mar’s hands and put him into Bothwell’s keeping, who murdered his father.’33 Observers avidly followed the movements of baby James. On 24 April, Sir William Drury, the Marshal of Berwick, reported to Sir William Cecil in England that ‘On Monday the Queen took her journey to Stirling to see the Prince, and this day minds to return to Edinburgh or Dunbar’, implying that she would be taking James with her.34 The following day, Drury confirmed that ‘Yesternight the Queen of Scots came to Dunbar well and strongly accompanied, and brought the Prince with her from Stirling.’ But in a postscript, he changed his information: ‘The Earl Bothwell met her three miles from Stirling. She passed by Edinburgh, sending the Prince into the Castle.’35 Two days later, he was forced to change his story again, and admit that ‘The arrival of the Prince into Edinburgh is untrue. The Queen and Bothwell intended to compass it,’ he said in his defence, ‘howbeit the Earl of Mar would not suffer it to have effect.’36 It transpired that Mary had indeed ridden to Stirling on 21 April to see her son, with the intention of taking him back to Edinburgh. Mar ‘admitted her to the sight of her son; but suspecting her intention, had so provided that he was master and commander’ – simply by following Mary’s own orders and allowing her only two ladies-in-waiting in attendance when she was allowed in to see her son.37 She was therefore unable to seize him by force.
The meeting at Stirling between mother and son gave rise to one story that belongs more to fairy tale than history. The following comes from a serious intelligence report of 20 May:
At the Queen last being at Stirling, the Prince being brought unto her, she offered to kiss him, but he would not, but put her away, and did to his strength scratch her. She offered him an apple, but it would not be received of him, and to a greyhound bitch having whelps was thrown, who eat it, and she and her whelps died presently. A sugar-loaf also for the Prince was brought at the same time; it is judged to be very ill-compounded.38
Already Mary was being demonised as the evil, poisoning mother. The Kirk historian David Calderwood tells of how Mary set out from the castle, but ‘[a] grievous pain seized upon her within four mile to Stirling. Whether it proceeded of her travel, or grief because she was disappointed, it is uncertain.’39 Whatever the truth of Mary’s encounter with James at Stirling, this was the last time she saw her child.
Continuing on her journey, her small train was intercepted by Bothwell; faced with his customary large, armed escort, she had no choice but to go with him to Dunbar. There, it was alleged, he raped her; Melville records that he had heard the Earl boast that ‘he would marry the Queen, who would or would not; yea, whether she would herself or not’.40 But by this point, the people did not trust Mary, and it was assumed that the ‘abduction’ was another piece of royal theatre. Within days, Bothwell had obtained a divorce from his wife, Lady Jean Gordon, who was forced to petition citing his adultery with a maid named Bessie Crawford. A decree of nullity was pronounced by Archbishop Hamilton on the grounds that the couple were related and had been married without dispensation, neatly forgetting the fact that the Archbishop himself had provided such a dispensation.41
This new turn of events was not liked by all Bothwell’s erstwhile supporters, who felt themselves to have been shut out of his latest moves. Now Argyll and Morton joined Atholl and Mar at Stirling, to sign a bond on 1 May resolving to rescue their ‘ravished and detained’ Queen, to preserve the life of the Prince, and to pursue the murderers of the King – and specifically Bothwell. Their resolve was strengthened by the report of du Croc that, despite his pleas to Mary not to marry Bothwell, ‘she will give no ear’.42 On 15 May 1567, three months after the murder of her second husband, Mary Queen of Scots married the Earl of Bothwell at Holyrood, and created him Duke of Orkney. This time it was a Protestant ceremony. After the marriage, it was reported, the new bride wept inconsolably, and talked of killing herself. There was no honeymoon period for this unhappy marriage. Only a month later, Mary and Bothwell were on a battlefield at Carberry Hill, near Musselburgh. Argyll, Morton, Atholl and Mar, known as the Confederate Lords, had taken over Edinburgh, where they issued a proclamation urging the townspeo
ple to follow their three-article manifesto. Prince James played a major part in their propaganda. As their forces were massed at Carberry Hill, they prominently carried a large banner with a painting of King Henry’s half-naked corpse lying under a tree, as it had been found at Kirk o’ Field. In one corner, a small child prayed to God for divine vengeance, a cartoon scroll from his lips pleading, ‘Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord.’ While the eleven-month-old child slept at Stirling, the image of Prince James was at war.43
There was to be no fighting. After a day-long standoff, Mary surrendered to the Confederate Lords on the condition that Bothwell be allowed to flee. Although the Queen was well treated by the lords to whom she surrendered, she had to endure an angry, jeering mob as she was led back to Edinburgh. The Confederate Lords imprisoned Mary in Lochleven Castle, on an island in Kinross-shire, under the supervision of Moray’s half-brother, Sir William Douglas of Lochleven, and their mother, the Lady of Lochleven. There, in July, apparently five months into a pregnancy, she miscarried twins.44 Shortly after, on 24 July, she was forced to sign a ‘voluntary demission’ – in effect an abdication – although she maintained for the rest of her life that such a document, signed under extreme duress, had no legal standing.45