The Guises had pushed Mary to claim the throne when she had been a young woman. If only she had resisted their importuning. Their rash act condemned her in the eyes of those such as Cecil for ever. The Guises had used her for power and then abandoned her to her fate.
Elizabeth called an emergency council meeting and said that she wished to meet with Mary and discuss how she might regain her throne. Cecil and the council were horrified. Not only was Mary a Catholic who had laid claim to the English crown, but she was also a woman who had been condemned as an adulterer – and Elizabeth was supposed to be the Virgin Queen. Cecil wanted to send Mary back to Scotland. Elizabeth refused, for Mary would surely be captured and killed. As was always the case in sixteenth-century England, when in doubt, the queen turned to the law. Cecil persuaded her that the case of Lord Darnley’s murder should be fully investigated to clear Mary’s name. Then Mary could be restored, although perhaps rather more as a figurehead, with Moray in charge.7
Cecil wrote urgently to Moray asking for proof of Mary’s involvement with Bothwell and the conspiracy to kill Darnley.8 Implicitly, he was telling Moray he would support him, could do business with him. For if Cecil supported Moray in his hour of need, then in return Moray would ignore Prince James’s claim to the English throne. And if Mary had left the land where much was settled by battle and knives, she had arrived in the one in which all was agreed through (often equally unfair) legal trials. Cecil had provided for every outcome. If guilty of some knowledge, Mary could be sent into exile, as long as she never challenged Moray. If her complicity was judged to be more serious, she would be imprisoned and possibly worse. If innocent, Mary would be allowed to return but she would have to ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh. It was up to Moray to find the damning evidence of her guilt.
Mary’s flight to England was a brilliant stroke of luck for her enemies. In a flash, the existence of the anointed queen in her own land where there was another king, the likelihood of Mary continually escaping her prisons and collecting supporters, an endless game of cat and mouse – all was over. She was Elizabeth’s problem now.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Pain and Peril Seem Pleasant to Her’
At Carlisle Castle, Mary’s accommodation was much lacking. She had only two ladies to wait on her, and these were ‘not of the finest sort’.1 She did not have enough horses and felt the lack of exercise. There were iron grilles over her windows, and whenever she went out she was accompanied by a hundred men. Some of her old staff came to join her and she was allowed out to walk and cheer on her male followers as they played football against each other on a nearby green.
Elizabeth sent her loyal long-time counsellor and Treasurer of her Household, the fifty-seven-year-old Sir Francis Knollys, north to speak with the queen. He thought her brave and engaging and reported that ‘for victory’s sake, pain and peril seem pleasant to her’. In late May, Knollys was told to tell Mary that she could not be received by Elizabeth until she was proved innocent of Darnley’s murder. Mary burst into tears and in a ‘great passion of weeping’, declared that ‘no one but God could take it upon themselves to judge princes’. She angrily reminded Knollys that both Maitland and Morton had been part of the conspiracy against Darnley. And she blamed the forced abdication on the fact that she had been approaching her majority, so they deposed her to ‘keep by violence that which she had given so liberally, since by her revocation thereof within full age, they could not enjoy it by law’.2
Knollys reported back to the queen, impressed by Mary’s strength and claims of innocence, and suggested that Elizabeth might offer Mary the choice of remaining in England and submitting to trial or returning to Scotland. Elizabeth refused to let Mary return to her home country. Most likely, she knew that Mary would be taken captive by Moray and wished to save her. She still believed that Mary could be cleared and then the lords persuaded to accept her. But she could have given Mary the choice.
When Knollys returned a few days later, he brought little comfort for Mary. He told her that the queen would be the ‘gladdest in the world’ to see Mary cleared, but first Mary must submit to the inquiry.3
Elizabeth herself sent a letter along the same lines, telling her cousin that she was greatly desirous of a judgement on Mary as innocent, but she could do nothing before then. She told her that she would receive her at court and assist her to gain her throne. It was the most glittering promise, holding out everything that Mary could desire:
‘Oh Madam, there is no creature living who wishes to hear such a declaration more than I do. But I cannot sacrifice my reputation on your account. To tell you the truth, I am already thought to be more willing to defend your cause than to open my eyes to see the things of which your subjects accuse you.’ She pledged Mary would receive everything: ‘once honourably acquitted of this crime, I swear to you before God that, among all worldly pleasures [meeting you] will hold the first rank’.4 Even if she were not allowed back to Scotland, here was a possible vision of life at the English court with Elizabeth.
When Mary received the letter, she was infuriated, still resistant, declaring again that God alone could judge a sovereign and there were matters she could tell Elizabeth only in an intimate meeting. Why, she wondered, was it just her who was to be attacked and blamed? Why could the English not summon Moray and Maitland and ask both of them to explain themselves? Unbeknownst to Mary, Elizabeth had done so: she had written to Moray demanding his explanation of his ‘strange doings’ against a monarch and requiring his explanation and defence of the ‘weighty crimes’ that Mary had accused him of.5 But she did not have the power to summon him and of course he would not have come.
Mary lost all patience. She wrote a passionate letter to Elizabeth, begging her and accusing her: ‘do you not wrong me by keeping me here, encouraging by that means my perfidious foes to continue their determined falsehoods? I neither can nor will answer their false accusations, although I will with pleasure justify myself to you voluntarily as friend to friend, but not in a form of process with my subjects.’6
Elizabeth would not receive her. Mary sent her men who had come to Carlisle, Herries and Bishop Leslie, to speak to Elizabeth, who then asked them for a better reply from Mary, as if she had been making a great concession, and said she would call Moray forth to answer for himself. She said if Mary were found innocent, she would defend her and if not, she would try to create a good relationship between Mary and her subjects – or send her back. Herries was suspicious and declared that she was dissembling. Elizabeth, he said, gave fine words but he had heard she had been ‘boasting in private of the great captive she has made without having incurred the expense of a war’.7
Elizabeth’s demand that Moray appear had caused some panic in Edinburgh. The last thing Moray wanted was to accuse Mary in public in an English court – for if Elizabeth chose to attempt to put her back on the throne, he would be damned. He wrote angrily, asking what would be the consequence if Mary were found guilty. Elizabeth did not reply. She told Mary that ‘I assure you I will do nothing to hurt you but honour and aid you.’8 At the same time, Cecil told Moray through an intermediary that there was no way that the English would reinstate Mary to the throne, no matter what was found in the inquiry. Did Elizabeth know this? For if Mary was not going back on the throne then the only alternatives for her were exile – which Cecil would block in case she gathered the support of disgruntled Catholics for a bid for the English crown – or more likely a life in England. And this life had to be under protection, for Cecil and the council so feared her attempting the throne. The Spanish and French ambassadors were reporting back to their masters that the English wished to keep Mary under lock and key, so Cecil’s aims were hardly secret.
So was the queen lying, promising Mary protection to soften her to agree to the inquiry, when she had no intention of helping? Or was she unaware of Cecil’s tough approach? As Cecil’s attitude to Mary had always been hard-hearted, Elizabeth probably did know what he’d been saying, although she
did not expect that this had been communicated to Moray. They had always clashed over Mary and she no doubt hoped to change Cecil’s mind. She would have expected to follow public opinion after Mary had hopefully been cleared by the inquiry – and establish her as a type of royal figurehead. But unfortunately, Cecil had a network of spies and influencers at his fingers and he was driving operations.
In the early months of 1569, Cecil believed England was menaced on all sides. As he put it, ‘Perils are many, great and imminent, great in respect of Persons and Matters.’9 Enemy number one was Catholicism. In Cecil’s gloomy view, they faced a conspiracy of the ‘Pope, King Philip, the French king and sundry potentates of Italy to employ all their forces for the subversion of the professors of the gospel’. Across Europe, the Protestant cause was under threat. There was war in France between Huguenots and Catholics, and the Protestants in the Low Countries were threatened by Spanish forces. The English were genuinely afraid that the Catholics would soon attempt to conquer England. Elizabeth did not help matters by having her forces seize Spanish ships bound for the Netherlands that had taken shelter in English ports, which infuriated Philip and threw him into a desire for revenge.
Cecil, fearful and threatened, felt that Mary’s presence held the potential for the greatest danger of all. If Elizabeth suceeded in her attempts to put her back on the Scottish throne, England would be surrounded on all sides by Catholic powers. He doubted that a restored Queen Mary, if offered the possibility of converting England to Catholicism by a crusading Philip of Spain, would be so mindful of gratitude to her cousin that she would refuse. He had to persuade Elizabeth not to try to restore the queen. The only way to do so was by proving that she had killed Darnley.
George Buchanan, scholar and once Mary’s friend with whom she had read Latin and discussed books, set to work and, within a few weeks, Cecil had a document declaring that the Scots queen was not only ‘privy of this horrid and unworthy murder’ but was also the ‘instrument, chief organ and cause of that unnatural cruelty’.10 Apparently, she had begun the affair with Bothwell a few weeks after the birth of her son (the lords of course did not want to imply that James was not Darnley’s child and thereby bring his claim to the throne into question). Outrageously, Buchanan wrote that her sexual behaviour ‘exceeded measure and all womanly behaviour’, allowing Bothwell to ‘abuse her body at his pleasure, having passage at the backdoor – the which she excused on the basis that one of his former lovers had given him the same’.11 He did not mention that Moray had been present at this time, apparently missing such blatant adulterous behaviour going on under his nose.
Darnley, weak, syphilitic and cruel, was now a saintly victim, cuckolded and ill-treated by his Bothwell-obsessed wife. Buchanan conveniently forgot that all the lords had hated Darnley too and had encouraged Mary to divorce. In his view, Mary wanted to be with Bothwell but didn’t want to harm her son’s chances and so she ‘devised how to cut [Darnley] away’, showed no sadness and got back to openly sporting with Bothwell. Then to feign that she wasn’t wildly in lust with him, she ‘pretended herself ravished’.12 So it went on. The problem was that it was all very purple and enthusiastically damning, but it was hardly proof – it was entirely lacking in witness statements, heard speech or even reports of who exactly had been there at the time. There was no way Cecil would persuade Elizabeth, let alone a panel of judges, with this ludicrous piece of creative writing. And there was zero possibility of extracting a confession out of Mary. He needed hard evidence and he needed it fast.
Moray scrabbled to oblige. At the end of June, he wrote that he had laid his hands on a box of letters from the queen that ‘sufficiently in our opinion proves her consenting to the murder of the king her lawful husband’.13 He was going to make copies of them, translated for the Scots Lords. One might have expected Throckmorton or another would be sent to check the originals. Still, Cecil decided it was enough. A court of inquiry was instigated to be held at York. Mary was a sovereign and the English court had no right to try a foreign queen – and it would have been a dangerous precedent. But there could be an inquiry into the queen’s conduct and this Cecil intended to win. Through it all ran a wider message to Europe from Cecil and Elizabeth: English justice is official, it can solve problems, it is superior.
Cecil also asked Lennox for a written request for an inquiry – and Darnley’s father obliged with a lengthy description of events, which was overheated in the extreme, even suggesting that Bothwell and Mary began their affair when she was pregnant with Prince James. Bothwell himself had been caught off the coast of Norway with his ships, probably attempting to reach Denmark and beg the king, Frederick II, for support. He was taken to Bergen, where Anna Tronds sued him for abandonment and her dowry but agreed to take his ship as compensation, perhaps because she saw he had no other assets to give. He was on the brink of freedom – but then King Frederick had him arrested, guessing he would be a good political pawn to hold over Scotland or even England. Moray sent to Denmark to retrieve Bothwell and bring him back to Scotland, dead or alive.
Mary knew nothing. When she finally heard that the lords were using letters of hers in the inquiry, she collapsed. As she wrote to Elizabeth, ‘these letters, so falsely invented, have made me ill’. She well understood: the lords and Moray wanted her found guilty and it seemed as if all the evidence to the inquiry was coming from them – she was not able to make any accusations of her own. She could be saved if a lord turned against the rest – or if Bothwell was called to evidence, and told the truth. But Moray was trying to stop the English getting their hands on Bothwell and the lords were being held together with threats and promises. Desperately, Mary once again started begging Elizabeth to see her, writing over and over with frantic pleas in beautifully composed letters, describing her innocence, reasoning out the evidence, and reminding Elizabeth she was her ‘sister and cousin’.14 She even sent a poem to Elizabeth, comparing herself to a lost ship:
A sole thought keeps me, day and night,
Bitter and lovely, rocks my heart without end.
Between doubt and fear, it oppresses me
And while it is here, rest and peace flees from me.
Ah! I have seen a ship freed from constraint
On the high seas, very close to port,
And peaceful times turn to difficult.
But yet I am, in fear and worry,
Not afraid of you but that I will be the toy
Of fortune that rents the strongest tied chain.15
Elizabeth was not swayed by the poem. She began to complain that Mary’s letters were distressing and importuning her. Mary was lost, isolated, friendless and – Elizabeth knew – on a rapid straight line to a show trial.
The very fact that Cecil had accepted the transcriptions of the so-called casket letters as viable evidence in the inquiry suggests what a travesty of justice the trial was. Not least because none of them were signed and there were no seals or marks to suggest they definitely came from the queen. Moreover, they had not even been found among her belongings. As she was whisked off to Lochleven with only the clothes she stood up in, leaving behind all she owned, the lords had plenty of opportunity to rifle through her rooms in Holyrood and her other residences. It appears that they found nothing except jewels and treasures that they divided between them or sold, and trinkets to give to their wives. Bothwell’s belongings had also been searched. But when Cecil asked for harder evidence than Buchanan’s flight of fancy, Moray conveniently found the letters. He gave them a good back story. As we have seen, according to a statement by Morton in December 1568, after the inquiry, they had heard while Mary was at Lochleven that Bothwell’s servants had entered Edinburgh Castle. Morton sent his men off to capture the servants and found George Dalgleish. Dalgleish claimed he had only entered the castle to retrieve Bothwell’s clothes but when he was arrested and taken to the Tolbooth for torture, he panicked, took the men back to a house in Potterow, Edinburgh, and retrieved from under the bed a locked silver cas
ket that had been Bothwell’s. And yet surely any servants of the lords would have searched under the beds after Dalgleish was arrested. According to Morton, the casket was opened by various lords on 21 June and then sent to him. But no mention was made of the casket in the minutes of council that day.
Oddly, there were no other accounts of finding the casket. And Moray’s statement to Cecil was full of holes and discrepancies. He said the letters were found on 20 June. But the Act of Council of 4 December accusing Mary of Darnley’s murder declared that the letters denoting Mary’s guilt had been seen before 15 June. The Act did not explicitly state they were the letters from the silver casket. But if not, where were those letters? And if they had obtained this evidence in mid-June, then surely Lindsay and his fellow henchmen would have used it against Mary when they forced her to abdicate at the end of July, just after her miscarriage. Moreover, they would surely have handed such letters to Throckmorton. As no one but the lords seems to have seen the letters until Mary fled to England and Cecil started talking about a trial, it is hard not to conclude that they were cobbled together, possibly forged. That the evidence had been at least tampered with was clear: Drury wrote on 28 November, just before the Act of Council, that the lords had been discussing the letters that proved Mary guilty, but that ‘the writings that did comprehend the names and consents of the king for murdering the chief are turned to ashes’16 – i.e. the much-discussed Craigmillar bond.
In mid-July, Mary was moved to Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, under the charge of Knollys and Lord Scrope. As the spies told Cecil and his council, support for Mary was increasing in Scotland and there had been some anger against what was perceived as her imprisonment in England. The last thing anyone in England wanted was enthusiastic Scottish supporters attempting to rescue their queen – and so she was moved further from the border. Lord Scrope was not often present and Mary grew friendly with Lady Scrope, the sister of the Duke of Norfolk.
The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 28