The lords set out against them, bearing a banner of Darnley dead under a tree, with Prince James kneeling before him, crying, ‘Judge and Avenge My Cause O Lord,’15 exactly the words written on the sketch of the murder scene sent to Cecil. Most of them rode under family banners. The stage was set for war.
The forces came together at Carberry Hill, about two miles from Edinburgh, on 15 June, an extremely hot day. And then it was a standoff. Du Croc helpfully offered to negotiate a truce – hardly the French ambassador’s job, but the world had been turned upside down. He was deeply distressed at the thought of engaging a queen in battle and he begged the lords to reconsider. They argued that Mary needed to leave Bothwell or hand him over. As Morton put it, if she would either give him up to be ‘punished or remove him from her company, she should find them in continuation of all dutiful obedience’.16
Du Croc rode over to Mary, who was sitting on a stone in her red dress. Mary had been broken and blown back and forth by the winds of betrayal and treachery, old friends changing sides and being lied to. She believed that the lords had once supported Bothwell – which they had – and would do so again. She could not believe that he had been guilty of the murder. She had thrown in her lot with Bothwell, the father of her unborn child, a child that would have rights over the succession. She said they had already acquitted Bothwell of the murder and were very wrong to ask for vengeance again. But she offered that if they begged for her pardon, she would be merciful. Bothwell vowed he would fight anyone of sufficient rank. Du Croc told the lords that Mary would pardon them if they asked for it and they were furious. The poor Frenchman had only made things worse. As the hot day wore on, the soldiers began to demand why Bothwell did not just simply fight – and save them all the misery. Some began to desert. Finally, Bothwell agreed to fight Morton, his fellow murderer, a man both fifteen years Bothwell’s senior and very unfit. Lord Lindsay, strong, younger and a good fighter, offered to be surrogate. But no fighting came to pass – and the whole palaver was probably a delaying tactic. The lords hoped that the royalist forces would weary of waiting and leave their mistress.17
Mary’s men were deserting her. There was some talk that this had been her plan all along, she wished to escape Bothwell but was too afraid to do it. She asked the lords how she would be received if she surrendered and they agreed to let Bothwell go. As he wished her goodbye, he thrust into her hand a bombshell: a copy of the bond in which the lords promised to despatch Darnley – and she saw the signatures of Morton, Maitland, Argyll, Huntly and the others. Mary was devastated. They had lied to her all along, telling her that they would chastise Darnley, and instead they had always wanted to kill him. Mary hardly had a moment to process the horrific news before she was taken off to the lords. She had expected polite treatment – in Bothwell’s words, she could go to them in ‘perfect safety’ and the men would be ‘offering to the Queen, as their rightful superior, their true allegiance . . . that each single one of them wanted no more than to accord her all honour and obedience’.18 Mary believed that the lords would conduct her back to Parliament, which would restore order. Morton and the other leaders greeted her with respect but from the army there were shouts about burning the whore and cruel insults. Mary turned on Morton.
‘How is this, my Lord Morton? I am told all this is done to get justice among the King’s murderers. I am also told you were one of the chief of them.’ Morton refused to listen to her, shuffling away. Mary was courageous, but it was a terrible mistake to expose to the lords how much she now knew. They had to keep her quiet and stop her speaking. The paper of the Craigmillar bond was taken from her, probably at this point. She was given to two rough young guards and rudely jostled about. She was pushed forward, to ride back to Edinburgh, with men yelling insults, and the Darnley banner borne in front of her. Exhausted, in shock at what she had learned, terrified by her treatment, she wept all the way.
In Edinburgh, groups shouted insults against her, some of them planted by the lords. Instead of going to Holyrood, she was taken to the Provost’s house. She was now a prisoner. The guards accompanied her to her bedroom and she could not even undress in privacy. The white banner was hung in front of the window, depicting Darnley dead and her baby son begging for vengeance. After a miserable night, in horror and distress, she came to the window the next morning, her beautiful hair wild and her bodice unlaced so her breasts were revealed, begging for assistance. Mary as Queen of Scots, as the most powerful woman in the country, and Queen of France, she who had claimed the English throne, was no more.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘They Have Robbed Me of Everything I Have in This World’
The lords had expected that the people would attack and mock their queen, but the people of Edinburgh were outraged to see her so treated and flocked to the Provost’s house to shout that she should be freed. And even those they expected to be loyal were complaining that she had been promised good conduct and was instead being treated as a common prisoner.
From her awful captivity, Mary spotted Maitland in the crowd and managed to persuade him to speak to her, even though he was too ashamed to meet her eye. Her old friend, Secretary of State and husband of her beloved Mary Fleming rebuffed her cruelly, telling her that ‘it was suspected and feared that she meant to thwart the execution of the justice demanded on the death of the late king’. He talked on about the sins of Bothwell. Mary countered that the lords were engaging in ‘false pretexts’ and trying to hinder ‘justice done for the murder which they themselves had committed’. As she had with Morton, she revealed to Maitland that she knew he was guilty: ‘She told him that she feared that he, Morton and Balfour, more than any others, hindered the inquiry into the murder, to which they were the consenting and guilty parties.’ She told Maitland that Bothwell had shown her the bond. If she was treated thus for attempting to prevent the investigation into Darnley’s murder, how much harder would the inquiry be against Maitland, ‘with how much greater certainty could they proceed against him, Morton, Balfour and the rest who were the actual murderers?’1
Again, Mary rushed to speak when she should have stayed quiet. She should have published the truth herself, engaged her lawyers or used the knowledge she now had to get other lords on her side before going public. Instead, she gave the lords even more reason to try to silence her and lock her away. Maitland, the man she had thought of as a friend, was terrified. He told the queen that if she said he was responsible, it would ‘drive him to greater lengths than he yet had gone in order to save his own life’. He suggested too that her own life was under threat but that he could save her – he blackmailed her to stay quiet. She was making a great mistake in telling them what she knew.
It does not seem, however, that Mary told them she was pregnant. Even if she had not been with child, arguing that she was would have been a protection for her. If it had reached the public that the queen was pregnant with an heir to the throne – even by the hated Bothwell – there would have been a heavy surge of support for her. For Mary could do the one thing that the lords could not: give birth to a future king. And James was still only a toddler. He had not reached the golden age of five, when the mortality rate was much reduced. But she appears to have said nothing and the chance was lost.
Maitland went straight to the others and told them that Mary knew about their involvement and was talking. They had to act. They could not put her on trial because she would speak of their guilt. A few lords proposed she might be put on the throne as a figurehead, but that idea was shouted down: she might put the signatories to the bond on trial and give power to her old supporters. In the mire of her life, unloved by the lords, her best friend was the French ambassador, and du Croc tried valiantly to save her, suggesting that if she were sent to France, the king would put her in a convent. Du Croc tried to help but the lords did not trust Charles IX and suspected that if Mary was put in a convent, she would be allowed a certain liberty (which was likely) and start plotting against them.2
As for asking Elizabeth for help or sending Mary to an English prison, the lords knew they would be playing into the hands of the English. Elizabeth would hold Mary’s presence over them, using it to reduce their power and blackmail them into doing as she wished. As they saw it, there was no option but to keep Mary captive – but away from Edinburgh and all her supporters. The last thing they wanted was the queen, dishevelled and weeping in the Tolbooth again, gathering sympathy, constantly talking of how the lords had killed her husband. A harsh warrant for Mary’s incarceration was produced, noting that her indefinite imprisonment was because she had been ‘fortifying’ Bothwell in his terrible acts. She simply had to be stopped for the good of Scotland for she was in thrall to following her ‘inordinate passion, to the final confusion and extermination of the whole realm’.3 It was signed by Morton, Mar, Atholl, Lindsay and others, some of whom had also signed to support Bothwell’s claim of marriage, only two months earlier. Thus far, one might be able to excuse the lords on the basis that they were attempting to secure the country after a period of bloodshed. But locking up the queen indefinitely was nothing more than a blatant grab for power. They wanted the crown and the fact that she was a woman more emboldened them to seize it.
That evening, Mary was escorted to Holyrood with the Darnley banner carried in front of her. The lords were keen to make a show of her, like the conquering Romans displaying a captive queen, and so she was escorted on foot, guarded by 200 soldiers and 1,000 of the lords’ own servants, insulted by the crowds as she walked. Exhausted and dishevelled, she was the single woman in the midst of over 1,200 men, the power imbalance never more evident.
At Holyrood, Mary was overcome with relief. Two of her Marys, Seton and Livingston, tended to her and she was given the first meal she had eaten since she had given herself up at Carberry Hill. Morton was standing behind her chair, an impatient gargoyle, and he grew cross at Mary’s lengthy dinner of various courses. Halfway through, he roughly told her that she must leave on the instant, and she would be forbidden from taking her ladies with her. She was wearing only a thin silk gown and she seized a rough brown cloak to warm herself and was ushered to the dreaded lords Lindsay and Ruthven, who were waiting on horses outside. Still trusting the lords would protect her due to her surrender, she gathered from Morton she was going to Stirling to see her son. Instead, they forced her out and headed north, towards Loch Leven, just over thirty miles from Edinburgh. There poor Mary was shoved onto a boat and taken to Lochleven Castle, on an island in the middle of the loch. The laird received her and took her to a meagre room on the ground floor.
None of the royal furniture that she might expect was there. She collapsed in exhaustion and shock. As Mary herself wrote: ‘They have robbed me of everything I had in the world, not permitting me either to write or speak, in order that I might not contradict their false inventions.’4 She was right. While she was being whisked away from Holyrood, the lords looted her rooms and tore down the religious decorations in her private chapel. Still concerned about the force of public opinion, they told preachers to rail against her from the pulpit. Lochleven had long been selected as a jail: Mary had been on a fast track to her isolated captivity from the moment she had given herself up at Carberry Hill.
The Queen of Scots was now a prisoner. There was only one person who could save her and that was Elizabeth. She wrote in secret to ‘my Good Sister’, pleading for assistance. Mary was still dreaming of the romantic meeting between queens, in which they would speak in perfect sympathy and all Mary’s problems would be at an end.
The length of my weary imprisonment and the wrongs I have received from those on whom I have conferred so many benefits, are less annoying to me than not having it in my power to acquaint you with the realities of my calamities, and the injuries that have been done to me in various ways. It may please you to remember that you have often told me several times ‘that on receiving the ring you gave me, you would assist me in any time of trouble’. You know that Lord James [Moray] has seized all I have. Melville, to whom I have sent secretly for this ring as my most precious jewel, says that he dare not let me have it. Therefore I implore you to have compassion on your good sister and cousin, and believe you have not a more affectionate relative in the world. You should also consider the importance of the example practised against me.5
Mary begged Elizabeth not to let anyone know that she had written, ‘for it would cause me to be treated worse than I am now’.
Elizabeth was shocked when she heard that Mary had been whisked away secretly to an extremely secure fortress. She was scandalised by the rough treatment of a queen and deeply worried that they had had the audacity to put Mary in prison, without a trial. Even the lowest peasant was supposed to be allowed to stand trial. But Mary had been flung into jail by the exercise of brute force. She started talking of war and Cecil dissuaded her, told her to wait to see if diplomatic efforts might succeed.
Elizabeth wrote to the lords of her horror and dictated a letter of support to Mary. Her words couldn’t have been plainer. She declared of the lords that ‘They have no warrant nor authority, by the law of God or man, to be as superiors, judges or vindicators over their prince and sovereign,’ and decreed, ‘We are determined we will take plain part with them to revenge their sovereign, for an example to all prosperity.’6 But Moray and the rest were not burned by Elizabeth’s fiery words. Their men were sorting through the queen’s jewellery and choosing pieces for him and Agnes and setting aside other jewels to sell. They guessed that England would not be invading Scotland any time soon – Moray expected Cecil to support him and his pro-Protestant government. Elizabeth sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to try to reconcile Mary to the lords and get her back on the throne, even if by force, as well as to hunt down Darnley’s killers and persuade the Scots to send Prince James to be brought up in the English court under Elizabeth’s guardianship (the French also wanted the prince).
Elizabeth had set her man the most Sisyphean task imaginable. How on earth was the English ambassador to force Mary back into power when she was imprisoned and the lords were all-powerful? If Elizabeth had told Throckmorton to engage in long-term sedition, dividing the lords one by one from their cause and over to Mary’s, promising money and support to those who did, that could have been successful. Plenty of the lords were wavering or already aggrieved at not getting what they perceived as their just desserts. But to tell him to get Mary back on the throne without the back-up of a full threat of war was as incredible as sending her to the moon.
Elizabeth was preoccupied by the sanctity of royal blood. But Cecil undermined her by sending his own set of instructions to the envoy. He decreed that Mary should become a figurehead, divested of all authority, named queen, but the power would lie with a council of nobles. No doubt, as politic as ever, he felt that this much-reduced offer was the only chance of getting Mary restored and doing what Elizabeth wanted. But he also despaired of Mary and thought she didn’t deserve to rule. He scribbled on his letter in Latin, ‘Athalia was killed so Joash could be king’,7 an example from Chronicles that Knox had used against poor female rulers. Athalia had been a bad and idolatrous queen, deposed by her elites in favour of her seven-year-old son, for whom they ruled as regent. Although it is unlikely that Cecil at this point supported the idea of killing Mary, he certainly wanted her out of the way.
For everyone other than Elizabeth, the easiest eventuality would be if Mary was found dead. As the lords had rued, a trial and execution would be a hornets’ nest, for Elizabeth and other monarchs might protest the queen going on trial, there was no real evidence against her, and plenty of the lords had been involved in the various plots and Mary had already threatened to talk. Moreover, if Mary appeared at trial, she would very likely win over sympathies and the ordinary Edinburgh people would protest the process vociferously. So it would be easier simply to kill the queen off in a secret execution, by poison or even by gunpowder or strangling, as with Darnley. Mary was in danger – and she knew it. But by se
nding Throckmorton and writing incensed letters, Elizabeth made it clear that she was watching and her spy networks were doubling their efforts. If Mary was found murdered, Elizabeth would very likely insist on war.
Throckmorton met Maitland, told him of Elizabeth’s fury and demanded to see the queen, but he was denied. Maitland threatened Throckmorton that if he caused trouble, it would expose Mary to more risk of her life. Mary’s old friend insisted that she was in prison to save her from the wrath of the common people. He said that as soon as she prosecuted the murderers and relinquished Bothwell they would ‘restore her to her estate’.8 Throckmorton knew he had to find more surreptitious means of contacting the queen.
Lochleven, on one of four islands in the loch, felt utterly isolated. The castle was owned by Sir William Douglas, nephew of Mar and half-brother to Moray, and Ruthven and Lindsay had been left in charge of Mary. There had been no preparation of her crude downstairs room – a calculated insult to a queen. For the first two weeks after her arrival, Mary sank into a stupor of shock and inaction, unable to drink, speak or eat. In private, she must have drunk a little. But to Sir William, she would give no sign of submitting. She feared that she might be poisoned. Mary Seton, in attendance on her, was the only person she could trust.
The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 25