Moray had won. Even though the plot for the perfect murder had failed at the last minute when Darnley had jumped out of the window, it had still had a magnificent effect. Darnley was dead. Mary was hated. Bothwell was blamed. All Moray had to do was lie low and brief against his sister until Bothwell was put on trial. He had no idea that Bothwell’s anger at being betrayed and his fury against the other lords was going to explode into terrible violence – and unsuspectingly play right into Moray’s hands.
Some might think a brother could never do such a thing. But for Moray, Mary’s presence blocked the money and power he wanted for himself and his family, and she was also the barrier to the Protestant Reformation he desired. As she was a Catholic queen, a woman who’d married a terrible husband, he could easily justify it to himself that he had been acting in the interests of the country.
On Good Friday, the council decreed that the men named by Lennox would be tried on 12 April. Bothwell was present for the decree. This was surprising speed for the sixteenth-century legal system, and Lennox didn’t like it. He begged Cecil to ask for a postponement, convinced it would be a show trial, because there was no time to gather evidence. Lennox himself set out for Edinburgh with 3,000 retainers, but was told at Linlithgow that he could only proceed to Edinburgh with six – and he was naturally too afraid to continue.
Elizabeth considered her position and finally wrote to Mary asking for a delay, but when it arrived at Holyrood at 6 a.m. on the day of the trial, the messenger was sent away because Mary was said to be asleep. He came back and was once more rebuffed, waited until ten, saw Bothwell’s men assembling and tried again, but was refused and then everybody pretended not to hear him. One of Bothwell’s relatives then brought a message from Bothwell saying Elizabeth’s letter would not be received because the queen was ‘so molested and disquieted with the business of that day’.6 Finally, Maitland came out, spotted the messenger and took the letter. The messenger asked for an answer and he was told Mary was still asleep, even though she had just appeared at the window. The messenger lost patience and demanded an honest answer – and Maitland said he had not delivered it to the queen and would not do so until after the trial. Did Mary know there was a letter arriving for her from her cousin? Almost probably. She dreaded, no doubt, reading her cousin’s criticism. And stopping the trial at this point might have caused a surge of anger in the common people, since they had waited so long.
But, also, Bothwell was dominant and she was increasingly afraid of him. There was simply no comparing the positions of Elizabeth and Mary. Men on trial in London wouldn’t have expected to be able to take thousands of retainers with them, neither would witnesses. But Bothwell set off from Holyrood with 4,000 retainers, riding Darnley’s favourite horse, with Morton and Maitland riding beside him and Hepburn’s relatives bringing up the rear. Mary watched him depart from her window, accompanied by Mary Fleming. When Bothwell arrived at the Tolbooth and all had entered, his men were put to guard the door so that Bothwell’s enemies could not enter.
Lennox’s and Cecil’s fears had been correct. The trial turned out to be a sham. Although Bothwell was correctly accused of killing Darnley and causing the explosion, there was no evidence given on either side. Lennox’s plea for an adjournment was considered and dismissed. After eight hours, the court declared Bothwell not guilty. He promptly pinned up a notice on the door declaring his innocence and set off back to Holyrood. Mary was now officially spared.
Bothwell had his crier put it out across Edinburgh that he was innocent and put bills up on the Tolbooth announcing he would fight anyone who now accused him. Four days after Bothwell’s sham trial, Mary rode to Parliament, and Bothwell carried the sceptre beside her. Her guards were no longer the usual bailiffs of Edinburgh but his personal musketeers. He used his acquittal to influence her, told her that only he cared for her, and insinuated that everyone else would kill her if they could. Parliament confirmed the judgement of Bothwell as not guilty and also gave him more: confirming and enlarging his rights as Lord Admiral, awarding loyalist Argyll some of Darnley’s former estates and ensuring other lords had their possession of estates confirmed. And then they produced an ‘Act against the Makers and Setters Up of Placards and Bills’. No one would be allowed to paint Bothwell as a hare with a sensual mermaid again. On the last night of the parliament, Saturday 19 April, Bothwell took twenty-eight lords to dinner at Ainslie’s tavern and asked them to sign a bond declaring his innocence of the murder and expressing their support for him and noting that the queen was ‘now destitute of a husband, in the which solitary state the commonwealth of this realm may not permit her to continue and endure’. That was bad enough. But then, the Ainslie bond continued, ‘at some time her highness in appearance may be inclined to yield unto a marriage’ and, as she might prefer a native-born subject to a foreign prince, ‘to take to husband the said earl’.7
Eight bishops, nine earls and seven barons signed but many of the lords managed to escape the pen. Four refused at the tavern, some had cleverly declined to attend, and Moray was on his way to France. The various copies have different signatures but it seems as if Huntly and Morton signed and Argyll probably did too, despite qualms.8 It was hardly conclusive. But Bothwell was now power-hungry, emboldened to grab what he wanted and willing to do anything to get it. And the more he said that Mary was going to marry him, the more people believed it. They couldn’t draw Mary as a mermaid anymore, but they still whispered. As one put it, she would ‘go to the world’s end in a white petticoat ere she leave him’.9
But Bothwell was already losing supporters. Balfour, who was suspected of having transported the gunpowder that killed Darnley, asked Mary for a similar trial but was refused. He was nervous – one of his own servants had already threatened to inform and Balfour had ordered him murdered. A trial would dispel all the gossip. But Mary did not want the matter discussed any further. Morton, too, felt excluded and as if he hadn’t been sufficiently rewarded for his role, and Argyll now felt shocked by the signing of the paper and was keen to leave his old friend’s camp.
The day after the parliament was over, Mary fled to the better air of Seton and Bothwell followed her, proposed marriage and said that her nobles wished it, citing the Ainslie bond. Bothwell wrangled all his supporters out in force and they besieged her with letters encouraging her to marry him. But Mary refused, on the grounds that there was too much scandal surrounding the death of her husband. Had she really wanted to marry Bothwell, then this moment, following a document held and agreed to by many lords, would be the one. And yet she did not.
Mary later said that her country needed male authority. It was, as she said, ‘being divided into factions as it is, cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man’.10 But she was growing less convinced that Bothwell was that man. After all, he had been no protection from the horror and humiliations she had been exposed to, and Elizabeth and Cecil still meddled in her country. Perhaps a foreign prince might add to her power – he’d certainly have more troops to send over in support of her. Bothwell ventured his suit and Mary discouraged him. She thought that would be an end of the matter.
She needed the protection of her son, now ten months old, who had been moved from Holyrood in the previous month. On Monday 21 April, Mary rode to Stirling. She took with her comparatively few men because it was supposed to be a private visit – she had Maitland, Huntly, Melville and about thirty horsemen – a small number for the queen. There, the Earl of Mar told her she was allowed to enter with only two female attendants and forbade her to take little James for he feared the child would be put into Bothwell’s clutches. Mary was incensed but she had no choice. She spent two days with her child and set off back for Edinburgh. Just out of Stirling, she fell ill with stomach pain and had to rest in a cottage. They arrived late at night at Linlithgow and resumed the journey the next morning. Next day, a few miles outside Edinburgh and crossing the river Almond, Mary and her men were
ambushed. Bothwell leapt out, grabbed the bridle of Mary’s horse. He had 800 soldiers with him, all with their swords drawn. Holding tight to her horse, he said danger was threatening her in Edinburgh and offered to escort her to Dunbar to ensure her safety. She told her servant, James Borthwick, to ride to Edinburgh to get help – and then turned to Bothwell and agreed to go with him, for, she said, there would be danger and bloodshed if she did not. What could she do? She had only a few men, he had hundreds and he could have overpowered her easily. He had been so sure of success that he had told the lords his plan. In the words of Kirkaldy of Grange, who was passing on information to Elizabeth’s man, the Earl of Bedford, ‘he is minded to meet the queen this day, Thursday, and to take her by the way, and bring her to Dunbar.’11 Mary had sent Borthwick to Edinburgh to raise the alarm, but otherwise she trusted her captor to treat her as a queen.
As planned, Bothwell took Mary on a forty-mile ride to Dunbar – which she had given him as a reward for his support after the Rizzio murder. He bundled her into the castle and slammed shut the gates.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Whether She Would or Would Not’
At Dunbar, Bothwell took the queen to a room and he raped her. Melville, who was with Mary in the castle, wrote that ‘he had ravished her and laid with her against her will’ and that Bothwell was boasting that he would have her whether she ‘would or would not’.1 He did not care that she was a queen. She was a woman and to him, women had one use only. He would force her to submit. As soon as she arrived, he dismissed her attendants and began pressing her to marry him, as had been provided for by the council. She refused and sent a secret message out to the Governor of Dunbar to come with his men to rescue her. No rescue came.
Mary was caught in a web, all of it spun by Bothwell. For some historians, the fact she did not scream and resist, much less fight to the death, was evidence of complicity. But Mary considered Bothwell a friend and an ally. She expected to be taken to a castle and treated well. But most of all, we view the incident with the benefit of hindsight. Mary trusted him as she always had done and she thought he was saving her from riots in Edinburgh.
Bothwell’s crime was dreadful. Even though the code of gallantry in Scotland was not always strong, to seize a lady from the road was seen as shocking behaviour. And a queen anointed by God was a sacred being. To take her was enough – and a rape was beyond imaginable. Bothwell raped Mary to attempt to reduce her into marrying him, to gain power over her, to show her that despite her riches and authority and God-given crown, she was nothing more than a body and reducible to subservience by a man’s act on her. Most of all, he wanted to impregnate her so she had no choice but to marry him. And once Mary was married and pregnant, everyone would forget the method. He deluded himself into believing he had the lords’ support, clutching the Ainslie tavern bond, signed by nobles, saying they would support the marriage.
Bothwell had precedent in mind. Men kidnapping and raping women who had refused to marry them or whose fathers had resisted their overtures was not uncommon. Heiresses were often at risk of being abducted. In such cases, the rapist would be allowed, even encouraged, to marry the girl, perhaps after a small fine had been paid to the father. Women in the sixteenth century were constantly exposed to the possibility of sexual assault – and Scotland, where there were long and dangerous roads without settlements, was a dangerous place for female travel.
In Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, nearly all female characters, including those standing for Elizabeth, are threatened with rape, which Spenser tends to denote with the word ‘spoil’. But although these encounters are demarcated as forced, they are represented as vital for the founding of the world they create: the women give birth to children, and Agape, who is raped and bears three sons, is described as ‘full blessed’ for producing such brave young men. Rape comes to seem a necessary part of the dynastic creation of a strong race of warriors. For many men committing rape, such language could function as a pleasing cover: they committed the assaults to create a dynasty and sons. As the historian and sociologist Georges Vigarello shows in his study of sexual violence in France in the early modern period, trials, even of child victims who were victims of rape, ended up with the child castigated and seen as spoiled, and if the man was more powerful, recourse was rarely possible.2
But to do this to the queen? Too many historians have found it impossible that a man would dare, and thus judged her complicit. Others have argued that because Mary did not fight back, she must have consented. We have a much greater understanding of sexual assault and consent these days: many victims panic or fear that if they do not submit, they will be killed. Bothwell was furious that she was refusing to marry him, and he took his revenge on her in the cruellest and most devastating way, using his physical force to intimidate her. If Andrew Ker had been happy to hold a gun to her stomach during the Rizzio murder, it is possible that Bothwell’s men threatened her with guns to submit to him – and witnessed her horrible assault.
Those who say she could have then escaped – and should have done so – reflect a misunderstanding of the effect of trauma on the mind. Mary was excessively proud, obsessed with her status as a queen. She had been tormented and attacked by a former friend, and this may have been witnessed by his servants – most things were at the time. She was deeply distressed, may have been too physically injured to move, and was consumed by fear. Moreover, it was possible that she thought she was pregnant.
As Mary knew, women who had been raped were generally expected to come to terms with their rapist and usually marry him. As Melville, her supporter, put it, ‘The Queen could not but marry him, seeing he ravished her and laid with her against her will.’3
Exodus and Deuteronomy suggested the father of a single woman could agree her marriage to her rapist. Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was assaulted and groomed by her tutor, but was blamed for it. And heiresses who were seized were blamed for having been too friendly to the man – wearing certain gowns, looking at him in company, walking in the garden alone with him. Later fiction was filled with heroines who were raped, married their assaulters and then managed to ‘reform’ the man into love and piety.
Mary, who had encouraged Bothwell, given him presents and let him remain at Holyrood, had given him so much that she knew the world would blame her. And, like most victims, she no doubt castigated herself when there was no reason to do so. Historians who claim Mary did not flee the castle and so wanted the rape, enjoyed it, or had even colluded with Bothwell all along, ignore the fundamentally sexist nature of sixteenth-century society: a woman who was raped was to blame for it. And since the Governor of Dunbar had not come for her and the Ainslie bond had been signed by so many, she felt she had no one to support her.
Mary was in fear of her life, possibly injured and afraid of another rape at Bothwell’s hands – one that he might make even worse this time. She remained at the castle and submitted to him. Today, our notions of consent are undergoing a fundamental shift, with the whole understanding of rape being re-evaluated in terms of the power structure between men and women. I write in modern times and we are dealing with the sixteenth century here – but one thing that does not change is the pain and suffering and struggle with self-blame that survivors feel, often years later. Some women, after they have been attacked by someone they know, attempt to get a handle on the situation and get some power back by contacting the rapist or even attempting to seduce him on their terms. Mary had often used sex or the promise of it to gain some control over Darnley. Perhaps she hoped that by promising to marry Bothwell, she could encourage some sort of rapprochement or at least equality.
The worst arguments have come from historians who argue that after the effete Darnley, Mary was thrilled to receive sexual satisfaction from a ‘real man’. But Bothwell was no romantic hero – he was gruff, violent and opportunist, unloved by his wife and mistresses. Even consensual intercourse with him was unlikely to be tender. Such notions of him as being sexua
lly a ‘real man’ rest dangerously close to notions that all women want to be overpowered and attacked, that having rape fantasies (a way of gaining control over what is for many a perennial fear) is the same as wanting to be assaulted. As was entirely the case here, rape is about power not sex. Bothwell didn’t assault Mary because he was overwhelmed with sexual desire for her and had to act on it. He wanted to be king, he was furious that she would not marry him, and wished to force her submission.
Mary was never going to forgive a man who had attacked her, so keenly wanting to humiliate her and debase her. She could never bear to speak of what had happened, such were her feelings of shame, and she could only refer to ‘doings rude’ – ‘rude’ being a word applied to rape. Later, when in captivity, she did not talk of him or write to him – which hardly suggested she was in love with him. But, exhausted, afraid and fearful of the consequences, she agreed to marry him. ‘As it is succeeded, we must take the best of it’, she said. She might be pregnant. And, moreover, she thought she was doing what her nobles desired, since so many had signed the Ainslie bond. As she wrote, ‘seeing ourselves in his power, sequestered from the company of our servants and others, of whom we might ask counsel, yea, seeing them upon whose counsel and fidelity we had before dependene, already welded to his appetite and so we left alone, as it were, a prey to him’.4
She was utterly isolated and friendless and saw, as she said, ‘no way out’. She was perhaps hoping that if she married Bothwell, no one would hear about the rape.
However, the news got out fast, and because Mary was no ordinary woman, sympathy was with her. Taking an heiress? Unfortunate, but her father should have been more careful and she should marry the offender quickly. Seizing a queen? A scandal that would damn Scotland in the eyes of the world. A petition from Aberdeen on 27 April asked what could be done since she had been ‘ravished by the Earl of Bothwell against your will’. Morton, Argyll and Mar met urgently at Stirling three days after the abduction and agreed to free the queen, safeguard little James, and kill Bothwell ‘the barbarous tyrant’.5 Robert Melville requested English support and urgent letters were sent to Moray asking him to return.
The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 23