The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Of course, as well as sympathy for Mary, the lords were motivated by horror at the vaunting power of Bothwell. But still, Scotland saw her as an innocent victim of Bothwell’s criminal acts. Even at this point, Mary could have turned things around by waiting until it was possible and then fleeing back to Edinburgh, throwing herself on her people for help. But Mary did not know what support she had in the capital. Bothwell watched all her messengers and later she said that she never heard from her nobles, even though the nobles at Stirling said they had written to her and she had replied that she had been ‘evil and strangely handled’.6 Even if she was lying and they did write to her and she replied, still, she could see no effort to rescue her. And she believed that they had all wished her to marry her attacker. She was caught in Bothwell’s trap and could not escape.

  All her life, Mary had believed that she was special because she was a queen. The one and only time that this belief could have served her well – in believing that she would be better treated than the average woman and public sympathy would lie with her – this confidence deserted her. There was not a single lord, it seemed, who had not tried to imprison her, capture her, demean her or undermine her. Bothwell had killed her spirit.

  On 6 May, Bothwell’s divorce still not completed, Mary and Bothwell rode back to Edinburgh. On the arrival at the gate, Bothwell took Mary’s horse and led her up to the castle. This was Mary’s moment to show displeasure for Bothwell and her desire to escape. The crowds would have supported her. But all the other lords had plotted against her in one way or another and she had no one left to trust. On the same day, John Craig of St Giles Kirk was asked to pronounce the banns of marriage between the pair. He refused. Next day he was given a writ in which Mary said she had not been raped nor held by Bothwell. But, as he put it, if she had not been assaulted, she had committed adultery with a still-married man. He was compelled to read the banns but he made it clear that he found the marriage a disgrace. Bothwell summoned him and asked for an apology. But Craig, loyal man of Knox, was not easily cowed and launched into what everyone was thinking, declaring Bothwell guilty of breaking ‘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 the last, the suspicion of the king’s death, which her marriage would confirm’.7 Bothwell should have realised that if the minister dared say this to his face then he was losing his grip. Craig repeated the lot in his sermon the next day and Bothwell was apoplectic, threatening to have him hanged.

  Mary was desperate now. She felt that if she, the most injured, had forgiven Bothwell then everybody else should too. But the church was scandalised, the ordinary people distressed, and Mar and Argyll and the rest had begun to create a separate court of James at Stirling, going so far as performing a masque in which Bothwell was hanged. The implication was clear: Bothwell should die and Mary should be deposed for James. They feared – rightly – that Bothwell would try to make himself king. The foreign ambassadors watched matters in shock and disbelief. As Cecil had put it, Scotland was ‘in a quagmire’.8 Elizabeth was deeply distressed and appalled. Mary’s acts were to her horrific and wrong – and the possibility that she would be deposed for her son was an implicit condemnation of all female rule. Still, Mary made Bothwell Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland on 12 May. She commissioned a beautiful wedding gown and set her seamstresses to work.

  In France, Moray read reports of what was happening in Scotland. Mary’s actions were playing more into his hands than anything he could have imagined. The suspicions that he had been behind her husband’s murder had drowned under this new scandal.

  Mary signed the marriage contract, which was all written to support Bothwell. Much of the language seemed to have been copied directly from the Ainslie bond, as it noted that Mary was ‘destitute of a husband’. As it put it, Mary was ‘living solitary in the state of widowhood, and yet young and of flourishing age, apt to procreate and bring forth children, has been pressed and humbly require to yield to some marriage’.9 The latter was guaranteed to outrage everyone. The last thing anyone wanted was Bothwell fathering a child he could then claim was a legitimate heir to the throne and unseat Prince James – or even kill him. Mary’s friends begged her not to marry but she said that ‘her object in marrying [was] to settle religion by that means’. She was desperate, felt she had no choice and believed that Bothwell must be able to cow the lords, as he had attacked her. And she – or more likely he – had clearly created some kind of great fantasy, where their differing religions might represent religious co-existence, a king and queen who were both Protestant and Catholic respectively, representing union and unity. This might just possibly have worked, if Bothwell had not been universally hated and he hadn’t sexually assaulted the queen in order to force her into marriage.

  The contract noted that all documents must be signed by Mary alone or in joint signature, but this was scant consolation to the lords, the Scottish people and the foreign crowns. As soon as Bothwell had managed to beget a child, he would be demanding unlimited powers. Du Croc declared he had no mandate from France to recognise Bothwell as Mary’s husband and would not attend the wedding – and encouraged others to do the same.10 The stage was set for the most scandalous marriage in royal history.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘So Wearied and Broken’

  On Thursday 15 May, Mary and Bothwell were married in the great hall at Holyrood in a Protestant service. There were few witnesses. The four Marys were present, along with Bothwell’s men, and Huntly and Maitland, but nearly everybody else had stayed away. The bishop presiding mumbled about Bothwell’s penitence for his sins as an ‘evil liver’.1 The queen was resplendent in the old black gown that her seamstresses had converted and embroidered in gold and silver thread. Once more, she was showing that she came to her husband as a widow, not a virgin.

  Stately as ever, her auburn hair set off by the black, many thought she had never been so beautiful. And yet she was marrying in a ceremony that she would never ordinarily have recognised. The horrifying events of the last months had left her cowed. There were no masques or plays or celebrations, which always followed a royal wedding and indeed those of many ordinary people – she had been at a masque for the wedding of Bastian Pagezz, just before Darnley died. There was merely a rather sombre wedding dinner, to which the public were invited to watch Mary eat.

  Some historians have stated there was no wedding banquet – but this was not the case. There was a dinner, it was just no comparison to the great events in the past, lesser even than the marriage festivals of the courtiers and certainly much less than that of the Earl of Moray. It was a sad contrast to the astonishing tableaux of her first wedding with its mechanised boats and royal glory. Mary gave no wedding presents to Bothwell and barely attended to her own wardrobe. Later, she burst into tears about the heretical ceremony and told the Bishop of Ross that she would never again do anything to harm the church. She summoned the French ambassador, du Croc, who was always sympathetic, and he found her heartbroken. She was distressed at how little support she had for the wedding, from noble and commoner alike, was suffering at the thought of the Protestant ceremony, and was haunted by the shame and pain of the rape and news of the nobles who were creating a court around her son. As he reported to Catherine de’ Medici, ‘if I saw her sad, it was because she did not wish to be happy, as she said she never could be, wishing only to die’.2 A new placard appeared in Edinburgh noting ‘Only harlots marry in the month of May’.3

  Mary sent ambassadors out to tell Catherine de’ Medici and Elizabeth her reasons for taking Bothwell to be her husband. Her man, the Bishop of Dunblane, was to tell the French court that Bothwell had been loyal and ‘dedicated his whole service to his sovereign’ but also to explain the truth: that he had behaved with ‘plain contempt of our person and use of force to have us in his power’. She said that she was compelled to marry in a Protestant ceremony
because Bothwell was more concerned about pleasing his Protestant allies than ‘regarding our contention, or weighing what was convenient to us’.4

  She begged the pardon of her ‘dear sister’ for not ‘asking her advice and counsel’ about the marriage. She said only a Scottish man could stop the division, saying that the ‘factions and conspiracies . . . occurring so frequently had already in a manner so wearied and broken us’ that he seemed a proper option. She noted that Bothwell had been cleared of Darnley’s murder by Parliament. She also added a graceful letter to Cecil, asking him to speak to his mistress on her behalf. But the letter took some time to reach Elizabeth.5

  Mary emphasised the Ainslie bond and how the nobles had wished her to marry Bothwell. Most of all, she wrote, she needed a man, since the realm was so ‘divided into factions’ that it ‘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’.Mary said all the correct words, but she wrote to Beaton in France from the heart. ‘The event is indeed strange and otherwise nor (we know) you would have looked for it. But as it is succeeded, we must take the best of it.’6 But the truth was that Bothwell was a brutal husband, shouting at Mary and treating her cruelly.

  But by this point, Mary was not giving up Bothwell. She was pregnant.

  When exactly did Mary conceive her child by Bothwell? She said that it was after her marriage, dating a pregnancy of seven weeks on 16 July, suggesting conception at around the end of May. But Bedford noted that the queen was pregnant on 15 June. Either he was making a lucky guess or Mary was pregnant before marriage. Granted, the knowledge of pregnancy and the female anatomy was poor and dates were sometimes wildly out, but if the queen knew she was pregnant before her marriage, this would explain her misery and desperate submission. But Mary had suffered from vomiting and fainting fits and even fake pregnancies before. Even if she actually conceived after marriage, it is very likely that, tortured, miserable and suffering from real and psychosomatic pain, she imagined that she was pregnant after the rape. A pregnancy outside wedlock was not only a scandal, it would mean her child was illegitimate. Rape was near impossible to prosecute anyway, but if the woman fell pregnant, it was even more problematic, for the conception might suggest that she had enjoyed it (some believed ovulation was the consequence of arousal) thus it was not defined as rape.

  Whether she was pregnant or not on her wedding day, Mary was constantly ill and weeping. Once Bothwell had secured the queen, his behaviour worsened. He was madly jealous and flew into a rage when she even dared look at a man, refused to allow her ministers to speak to her alone, had his men guard her chamber, was equally obsessive about and resentful of her female confidants, and he was in a fury about a horse she had given to the younger brother of the Earl of Arran, an old enemy of his. Every day, he said cruel things and made her cry. Mary’s friends told her he still visited his former wife, Lady Jean Gordon, at Crichton Castle not far from Edinburgh, and even that he had written to Jean telling her he thought her his lawful wife still, and Mary was just a concubine. As the French ambassador put it, it was said he ‘loves his former wife greatly more than he loves the queen’.7 As it was becoming clear to Mary, he’d never had any affection or even sexual desire for her. She was a mere tool for him to advance himself.

  Perhaps, had he been madly in love with her, or sexually obsessed with her, the argument proposed by some historians that she stayed with him because she loved him might be more understandable. A woman knows when a man is only pretending to desire her – but the only thing he wanted was power over her. She was never his type – he liked jolly servant girls. He was spiteful in public and cruel in private. In the words of Sir James Melville he ‘mishandled’ her – giving the lie to the view held by those historians who argue that Mary found sexual satisfaction with him. Only two days after the marriage, still firmly in what should have been the honeymoon period, she was alone in a room with Bothwell and screamed out for someone to bring her knife so she could kill herself. Otherwise, she said, she’d drown herself. Those around her believed she was serious: ‘if God does not aid her she will become desperate’.8 As poor du Croc, saddened by the terrible state of a monarch he respected, said in a letter some three days after the marriage, it was ‘already repented of’.9

  Bothwell stepped up his campaign. He put guards outside the queen’s door so she could not speak to anybody without him being present. Had he attempted to bring the lords together, spoken to those at Stirling and invoked the Ainslie bond, offered sweeteners and treated Mary fairly, he might have managed to win the other lords to his cause, as well as Cecil. After all, he was Protestant and plenty of them could be implicated in the death of Darnley. He had the good sense to write with humility to England, ‘albeit men of greater birth and estimation might well have been preferred’ to him, ‘yet none more careful to see your two Majesties’ amitie and intelligence continued by all good offices’,10 and was equally polite with France. But in Scotland, he swaggered, threatened and shouted, and so those who had once tolerated him or even been friendly with him turned to plotting. As du Croc said, he ‘will not remain so long, for he is too much hated in this realm, as he is always considered guilty of the death of the King’. Balfour, who had got the gunpowder used on the night of Darnley’s murder, was now entirely gone to the other side. He offered the rebels his possession of Edinburgh Castle and his support, as long as all past crimes were forgiven.

  Elizabeth wrote a letter, dismayed and outraged. ‘To be plain with you, our grief has not been small; for how could a worse choice be made for your honour than in such haste to marry a subject who, besides other notorious lacks, public fame has charged with the murder of your late husband, besides touching yourself in some part, though, we trust in that behalf, falsely.’11 She said that England would now ‘procure the punishment of that murder’, whoever was guilty. Safe in a country where no one would kidnap her, Elizabeth could not believe what Mary had done. She did not say in the letter, but she hardly needed to: there was no possibility that she would give Mary the position of heir now. As Melville put it, the marriage ‘was at last the Queen’s wreck, and the hindrance of all our hopes in the hasty obtaining of all our desires concerning the crown of England’.12 Catherine de’ Medici told Beaton that France would no longer give the queen advice or counsel.

  In public, Mary tried to put a brave face on things. She planned a great water pageant for the court to celebrate their marriage. She was graceful and beautifully gowned. But, crucially, she made no effort to reconcile with the lords at Stirling and bring them into her fold. Bothwell added to his men and planned to lead an army against his enemies. He was high-handed with those who remained and finally was so aggressive with Maitland that his old ally stormed off for Stirling. With him he took his wife, Mary’s beloved Mary Fleming, much to the queen’s shock. Maitland wrote to Cecil that Bothwell had been so angry with him that he had tried to kill him, and only Mary’s intervention had saved him.13 The lords ranged against them had now reached thirty and public opinion was very strong. Mary was told it was said she would be burnt as a witch or die. Desperate for money, she melted down the pure gold font that Elizabeth had sent as a present for the christening of Prince James.

  The lords were planning to attack Holyrood and seize her. And many of those in Edinburgh, even though they had assented to the marriage, were now opposed to it. When Bothwell heard, he realised how friendless he was. He might have written polite letters to France and England but neither Charles IX or Elizabeth were about to send troops to support him, and Cecil, at least, was probably giving funds to those who planned to bring Bothwell down.

  Bothwell forced Mary to flee and she bundled up some belongings, a silver basin and a kettle for heating water, a small lockable box for her papers and pins for her beautiful hair. The queen who had brought back dozens of boats filled with tapestries, silver, books, jewels and clothes from France was now reduced to a few poi
gnant items. They shifted to Borthwick Castle, which was strongly fortified, almost impossible to enter. It was superbly safe – but Mary had made a terrible mistake in quitting her palace and castle. Four days later, the lords attacked, Bothwell galloped away, claiming he was going for reinforcements, and Mary stood on the battlements of Borthwick and shouted down at them to leave her. Once more, she could have saved herself if she had claimed to have been tormented by Bothwell and desperate to be free. Elizabeth might have played such a game. But Mary had no idea of the danger approaching. As she saw it, she was the rightful queen, put there by God, and the lords must understand it. She refused to go with them because she did not trust them. When they shouted up at her with ‘undutiful and unseemly speeches’ she defended herself valiantly.

  The lords set out for Edinburgh with 2,000 men, broke through the fortified gates and took control of the city. Their call to arms was clear: everybody should accompany them to revenge Bothwell and take the queen from him. For he ‘having put violent hands on the queen’s person and shut her up in the castle of Dunbar’, marrying her ­dishonestly and ‘already murdered the late king and now attempting by his gathering together of forces to murder the young prince also’, they commanded ‘all the lieges to be ready on three hours’ warning to pass forward with them to deliver the queen’s person and take revenge on the Earl Bothwell’.14 Morton and his men sacked the royal mint for funds and so potential soldiers were offered the stunning sum of twenty shillings a month.

  Mary was fearful of what might happen. She dressed as a man and fled Borthwick Castle to meet Bothwell in the middle of the night and hurry back with him to Dunbar. There she received a letter from Balfour, who asked her to return to Edinburgh, where he would support her and the guns at his castle would be at her disposal. Mary believed him and Bothwell and she set off with 200 musketeers, along with cavalrymen and guns from the castle. She had left all her clothes at Holyrood and Borthwick and so rode forth in a borrowed red skirt made for a much shorter woman, and a velvet hat. She gathered men as she went, promising lands to those of gentle birth who assisted her. They did not accrue as many people as they hoped.