The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Knollys spent thousands on keeping Mary in a properly royal state and she was allowed to go hunting, with a guard. The devoted Mary Seton arrived – as the only one of the four Marys still unmarried, she had the freedom to do so, and assisted her queen with the dressing of what was growing back of her hair, as well as finding elaborate curled wigs that looked very realistic. As Knollys marvelled, ‘every day, she has a new way of head dressing, setting forth her woman gaily but with no cost’.17

  Elizabeth was asked for help with a few gowns but sent only a few pieces of black velvet and dresses so worn that her advisor blushed and said they had been meant for Mary’s maids. Knollys asked for the clothes that had been brought to her at Lochleven and Moray was asked to send her wardrobe from Edinburgh. Little had survived the rampages of the lords at Holyrood, for what arrived were a few old cloaks and covers for saddles, with only one taffeta dress. Other women in Scotland had long ago been wearing Mary’s gowns. She was later sent some gloves, veils and assorted small items by her former chamberlain, but, still, it took some time and ingenuity to dress and style herself as a queen. Along with Mary Seton came Willie and George Douglas, who had engineered her escape from Lochleven. Mary was allowed her own horse, her own staff to care for her things and cook her food, and she had some of her old belongings. She had her Book of Hours, given to her as a young girl in France, beautifully and elaboratedly illuminated, both her book for daily devotions and reflections and a memory of a different time.

  But even though she lived in more comfort, Mary did not have the one thing she desired: an audience with Elizabeth. She was angry and miserable, and she constantly importuned Knollys with her distress. She knew that she was surrounded on all sides by enemies and spies and her only hope was that Elizabeth would find for her. But, so far, Mary still had not agreed to the inquiry, and this Elizabeth urgently needed. Elizabeth gathered together all her most persuasive words. Using the same language of affection and ‘cousin’ that Mary had sent to her in her pleading letters, Elizabeth wrote that if Mary would agree to ‘her case to be heard by me, as her dear cousin and friend, I will send for her rebels and know why they deposed their queen. If they cannot allege some reason for doing so, which I think they cannot, I will restore Queen Mary to her throne’, even by force – as long as Mary reneged her claim to the English throne, abandoned the Catholic Mass, received the Book of Common Prayer, no longer felt herself in league with France, and agreed not to punish the lords for their actions.18

  Mary was distressed at the suggestion she should relinquish the Mass and, at least in outward form, agree to the Protestant rites. But Elizabeth, it seemed to her, had promised that she would be restored, as she had promised to do so if the rebels could not give a ‘reason’ and she thought ‘they cannot’.19 Mary agreed to Elizabeth’s request and, even more importantly, sent word to her supporters in Scotland that they should not assemble to fight in her name. Was Elizabeth lying to Mary? Or did she really want to restore Mary to the throne by force, which could be a bloody battle? Cecil, of course, wanted Mary in prison in England so he could use her presence to threaten the lords and keep Scotland at heel. If Moray was allowed to continue as regent, he would be much in England’s debt. And sending off the army to restore Mary might create a power vacuum in England that Spain or France would rush to exploit. And Elizabeth’s own Protestant subjects, who cared not who ruled in Scotland as long as the Protestant church was ascendant, would turn against her for restoring a Catholic queen. Elizabeth was torn. Her heart wished to see Mary returned as the rightful queen. She still hoped that the lords might take Mary back as a figurehead, while Moray continued as the (Protestant) regent for James’s reign. But she was not creating a system to put that in place, instead she was rather hoping for the best. Elizabeth was coming to realise that she had promised too much.

  Mary was not allowed to look at the so-called casket letters, and nor were the commissioners for her defence. And in addition to having declined to be questioned at the inquiry, she was also forbidden to attend and thus would be unable to hear the letters read out and contest them. Cecil and Elizabeth did not want the queen’s legendary charisma being witnessed and winning people to her cause. Also, if Mary heard the letters read out, she might very well be able to disprove them on the basis that she had not been in a place specified or had not spoken to a person named. Thus the Scots queen had to write to protest her innocence without knowing exactly what the details were of her ‘guilt’. She declared that if there were any ‘writings of mine which may infer presumptions against me, ye shall desire that the principals be produced and that I myself may have inspection thereof, and make answer thereto, for ye shall affirm in my name I never wrote anything concerning that matter to any creature, and if any writings be, they are false and feigned, forged and invented by themselves’.20

  Mary noted that there were many across Scotland, both male and female, who could forge her handwriting and said that ‘if I had remained in my own realm, I should before now have discovered the inventors and writers of such writings, to the declaration of my innocence’.21 She was right that she should have stayed in her own realm. Who was she referring to as a forger? Maitland’s wife was Mary Fleming and she was familiar with her mistress’s handwriting. Could the pair together have forged the queen’s writing? In Scotland, the queen’s supporters declared the letters forgeries, but they too were unable to look at them. When Moray left for England, he gave the casket to Morton for safekeeping. Thus, he would not be bringing the originals with him and no one impartial had seen them. This hardly suggests that they were the most robust of evidence. And Moray was naturally worried that a commissioner might protest that they were insufficient. Elizabeth – no doubt to ensure that he appeared at the inquiry – wrote to him privately that Mary would not be restored if she were found guilty. Cecil was sent his own set of copies of the letters, just in case he needed them. Cecil had to hold on to his own position, and treating Mary harshly was one of his efforts to distract attention from internal politics and other foreign affairs. Elizabeth relied on him but most of her nobles were deeply resentful of his influence and many found his policies towards Catholic Europe too aggressive and anti-trade.

  On 29 August 1568, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, first aristocrat of the country and a Protestant widower, was appointed as head of the inquiry with the Earl of Sussex and Sir Ralph Sadler. They were told to press Moray to appear and given the instructions that Mary would be restored if she were found innocent – which was not what Moray had been told by Cecil.

  Cecil should have ensured the Duke of Norfolk had been married off before he was thrown into Mary’s orbit. Maitland made a suggestion to Mary that reached her no doubt through Lady Scrope, sister to Norfolk: if she married a great English aristocrat, ideally Lord Norfolk, Elizabeth might believe her a supporter. And perhaps if the lords saw that she was married to a Protestant peer, they would wish her back on the Scottish throne. This might have been an effective idea some years before – as with the possible marriage to Leicester. But now? It was wildly misguided. Elizabeth did not want her great noble marrying someone who might be her enemy. Although she had considered him as a husband for Mary years ago, when she had been wondering about Dudley, things had much changed now. A marriage between Mary and Norfolk directly threatened Elizabeth, for any son of theirs would be a very inviting heir to the throne. And Norfolk, who had lost three wives to death in quick succession by the tender age of thirty-three, was lonely, had Catholic sympathies, and was always susceptible to damsels in distress. If Maitland was hoping to encourage Norfolk to look kindly on Mary and eventually clear her in the hope of marrying her, his was a very effective strategy. After all, Norfolk genuinely believed that if Mary were cleared, she would be restored to the throne. And the anti-Cecil faction of nobles would support anything that undermined his interests. Mary expressed an interest in the possibility of marrying a kinsman of Elizabeth (Norfolk was Elizabeth’s second cousin) and this was enough to
win him to her side.

  The trial approached. Mary stayed majestic. She told her commissioners to treat Moray and anyone else who popped up as ‘disobedient subjects’, not accusers. As she told Elizabeth, ‘I will never plead my cause against them unless they stand before you in manacles.’22

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ‘With Her Own Hand’

  The inquiry at York began on 4 October 1568 – and all turned on the eight unsigned ‘casket letters’ from Mary to Bothwell, two draft marriage contracts and twelve love sonnets. Then, at the last minute, Moray declined to submit them or accuse Mary. He refused to do so without a promise of protection from her vengeance and affirmation that she would not be restored if she was guilty. Essentially, he was asking if his evidence was enough to condemn the queen. And if he received such an assent in official form, then what did this mean for the trial? Norfolk sent the demands to London. Nothing appears to have been forthcoming, but clearly Moray’s mind was laid at rest somehow, presumably by Cecil moving clandestinely. The letters were shown to the English commissioners, although not to those representing Mary.

  The paper that Elizabeth received from the inquiry survives in manuscript in the British Library. But in it, the extracts of letters are in Scots. Mary tended to write in French. The lords swore they were genuine and the English commissioners found these copies of originals they had not seen to be persuasive evidence. As they saw it, they had to be genuine because they ‘could hardly be invented or devised by any other than herself’ and ‘they discourse of some things which were unknown to any but herself and Bothwell’.1 How could they know what was and was not known by anybody other than Mary and Bothwell, without interviewing either party or questioning others about what they knew? Their other proof that the letters couldn’t be forgeries was because ‘it is hard to counterfeit so many’ – but how hard would it be to counterfeit a series? And finally they were moved by the ‘manner of them’ and how they were obtained. The reasoning was all ludicrously vague. No matter, they were evidence enough and, the commissioners decreed, ‘if the set letters be written with her own hand’, then they were ‘sufficient to convict her of the detestable crime of the murder of her husband’.2

  The caveat ‘written with her own hand’ was crucial. They were most likely looking at Scots translations of the ‘original’ letters, in the hand of the translator, and then supplied a simultaneous copy in English. It was possible for an Englishman to read and understand Scots – but it was not easy to decipher lengthy documents, and they most likely relied on translations. And, if so, how could they assert the ‘manner of them’? One has to conclude that they took the word of the lords that Letter II, for instance, revealed ‘inordinate love’ from Mary for Bothwell and ‘abhorrence’ for her husband.

  So what were these letters? Unfortunately, the originals – whether real letters or spliced-together forgeries – have been lost. Elizabeth sent her man to find them after Mary’s death and he was told that they had been destroyed, conveniently, and we have only the transcripts, notes of what was shown in York and copies sent to Cecil (some still bearing Cecil’s annotations) kept by Cecil’s descendants along with other copies made at Westminster.

  The sonnets were supposed to prove Mary’s lust for Bothwell, but one might just as easily read them as a promise of constancy to God:

  I have no other desire

  But to make him perceive my faithfulness;

  For storm or fair weather that may come,

  Never will it change dwelling or place3

  It could not be said to be erotic. Cecil discounted the poetry as irrelevant. The marriage contracts were equally ambiguous. One used the language of the Ainslie’s tavern bond, but was noted as written two weeks earlier. It was an obvious forgery. The other was a written promise from Mary to marry Bothwell, which noted that she was a widow and he was divorced. This may well have been genuine but was hardly damning – the fact that Mary agreed to marry Bothwell when she was a widow (and after he had raped her) hardly made her guilty of murder. Moray desperately flustered that although there ‘was no date and though some words therein seem to the contrary, yet it is on credible grounds supposed to have been made and written before the death of her husband.’4 What grounds? He had none. This was poor stuff and not even Mary’s keenest enemy could have put it in front of a judge.

  The letters were a different matter. They are all unsigned and un-­addressed and only one has a date – so we first must trust that Mary would have sent off letters undated, unsigned and without even an address. Letter I, often called the ‘short Glasgow letter’, ‘from Glasgow this Saturday morning’, written apparently while Mary was visiting Darnley when he was ill and Letter II, the ‘long Glasgow letter’, the longest letter of them all, were the most lurid. Letter I is apparently written by a woman suffering with illness who chides her correspondent for being away and says she will bring ‘this man’ to Craigmillar by Wednesday. She tells the unnamed correspondent he has forgotten her and asks for ‘word from you at large, and what I shall do if you be not returned’.5 The writer talks of the pain in her side and how she needs bloodletting. It could, conceivably, have been a draft from Mary to Bothwell or even to another, perhaps to Moray himself at another time, and the date and place are most likely forged. Would Mary have sent an unsigned and unaddressed letter off to a lover? The lords declared that the man addressed was Bothwell. But there was no proof. And ‘this man’ could be a reference to Prince James – as historians including Alison Weir have suggested – for the Guises often used ‘man’ to refer to a boy child, and John Guy points out that Mary’s son fitted much better than cross old Darnley the description of the ‘man’ as ‘the merriest you ever saw’.

  But even the timing of this one was wrong, if the Saturday meant was 25 January 1567. The woman complains that her correspondent has been too long away and she expected him back. But Bothwell left Edinburgh on the previous evening, to target so-called thieves on the border. Mary often went to Craigmillar as it was a convenient and pleasant retreat near Stirling. It is most likely that this was a genuine letter, probably to Darnley himself, probably from Stirling, complaining of his absence and her poor health and talking of bringing their son to them, and the lords simply changed the date and place. It was more likely written on 11 January, when Mary was at Stirling. On 12 January, she travelled with James to Holyrood, stopping at Falkirk on the way to stay with Lord Livingston, rather than Craigmillar.

  Letter II is more convincing. It is a lengthy, rambling letter in which a woman complains to a mystery correspondent about the king, who is importuning her for relations, despite his foul venereal disease, and how she deals with his various demands. ‘Cursed be this poxy fellow,’ she declares. She is making her lover a bracelet and says, ‘God forgive me, and God knit us together for ever the most faithful couple that he ever did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.’6 Even if Mary had been overwhelmed with passion for Bothwell – and there is no evidence that she was – she would not have gone so far as to blaspheme.

  That Mary had written to complain about Darnley is not unlikely – and it could have been a diary entry. The – again unnamed – woman tells her lover she is missing him and ‘being gone from the place where I have left my heart, it may be easily judged what my countenance was’. She complains that the man she is with – Darnley – wants relations and ‘I have refused it’, on account of his health. And she tells her lover that she writes to him when asleep because she so wishes to be ‘according to my desire, that is between your arms, my dear life’. She even tells him that ‘you make me dissemble’ and ‘you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it were not for [your sake – crossed out], obeying you, I had rather be dead.’ We have seen Mary threaten to wish to die throughout her life. But many women did use it as a threat – it was hardly unique to her. She begs her lover for instruction and says ‘whatsoever happens to me, I will obey you’.7

  The letter is convincing
for its intimate representations and is much more damning than a few bits of rather dull poetry and a marriage contract. Sections of it are very like Mary’s voice. But although it clearly reveals adultery, the murder it suggests is the wrong one. Mary – if it was her – talks of poison, which Bothwell was believed to be no stranger to.

  The most damning entries come at the close. The writer talks about ‘some invention more secret by physick’, says that ‘I shall never be willing to beguile one that putteth his trust in me. Nevertheless, you may do all and do not esteem me the less therefore, for you are the cause thereof. For my own revenge, I would not do it.’8 If this is read as referring to a murder, then it seriously and obviously implicates Mary. But, if it was truly written by her – which of course we will never know – she does not mention any of the other conspirators. We know that there were many men involved with Bothwell, some who had signed the Craigmillar bond and some who had not – why would Mary not mention them? The reference to poison jars oddly with the rest of the letter, and is blunt and forthright where Mary was circumspect and fond of allusion. It was most convenient for the lords and Cecil. They wanted the whole matter made into a simplistic caricature of Mary and Bothwell versus Darnley, and they could not have shown any letter that implicated even one further lord in the death.

  Moreover, when Mary’s movements are reviewed around the time, there was no moment when she could have written to Bothwell, sent it to him via Paris and the letter return in time for her to send back Letter II, on the basis that all was arranged for the death. It is more likely that the letters are a collection of extracts from original letters and notes from various dates – which the lords found when Mary was taken off to Lochleven – spliced together with some bits and pieces of forgery. The letter contains a note at the end which states ‘Of the Earl Bothwell’.9 But why put this to a postscript when the whole letter is meant to be to him? Mary Beaton, among others, had written for the queen and her handwriting was easy to counterfeit. The casket letters were rambling, odd, hardly conclusive, muddled. Any lawyer could pick holes in them. And so they were not permitted to do so. The casket letters had been found in a confusing, invented story and the letters themselves were poor evidence. But Moray and the English wanted Mary kept in prison and so these flimsy and ambiguous scribblings had to be damning for they had nothing else.