by Alison Weir
22
“WE FOUND HIS DOINGS RUDE”
MARY RETURNED TO EDINBURGH ON 21 April, but stayed only long enough to sign some papers, then set off immediately to visit Prince James at Stirling.1She apparently was beginning to feel more herself at last, and her first priority was to see her son. On her journey, she was accompanied by Maitland, Huntly, Melville and thirty armed horsemen. Bothwell remained in Edinburgh, having told the Queen that, in the next day or so, he would be raising a force to deal with some troublesome Borderers who had just “despoiled” Biggar.2
Thanks to the unfounded rumours spread by Grange and others, some people believed that the real purpose of Mary’s visit was to remove James from Mar’s care and place both him and Stirling Castle in Bothwell’s hands. Drury claimed on 27 April that, during the Queen’s sojourn at Stirling, Mar prevented her from delivering James into Bothwell’s care,3while Buchanan stated as a fact:
Bothwell did not consider it to his own security to protect a boy who might one day become the avenger of his father’s death; and he wanted no other to stand in the way of his own children in line of succession to the throne. So the Queen, who could refuse him nothing, personally undertook to have the boy brought back to Edinburgh. When she arrived [at Stirling], the Earl of Mar suspected what she was after. He showed her the boy, but in such a way that he was always in his own keeping. The Queen, foiled in her design and unable to take the child by force, made false excuses about why she had come, and set out on her journey home.
Buchanan even claims that Mary’s mind “did not shrink” from the crime of infanticide. “She had often been heard to say that the boy would not live long, and that she had been told by a skilled astrologer in Paris that her first child would not live more than a year.” No other source mentions this.
Events would show that Mary never contemplated giving her precious son and heir into the custody of Bothwell. After enduring great pain and suffering to give birth to the Prince, she had taken careful measures to protect him, for clearly she was terrified lest someone would harm or kidnap him. Had she entrusted James to Bothwell’s care, she could have done so in the knowledge that his loyalty to her and her House was untarnished; he was already Captain of the Prince’s Guard, and had been responsible for his safety before, during the Queen’s absence. However, by the time Buchanan came to write his libel, people were ready to believe anything of Mary, even that she was ready to facilitate the murder of her own child to make way for her issue by Bothwell.
Some historians claim that Mary rode the thirty-six miles to Stirling in one day, but considering her state of health, and the fact that she had already ridden back from Seton, it is more likely that she stayed the night at Linlithgow, then went on to Stirling on the 22nd. She spent the rest of that day with her ten-month-old baby.
On the evening of 22 April, Mary wrote to Mondovi of the failure of whose mission she was painfully aware; she also knew how her recent ratification of the Kirk in Scotland would compromise her in the eyes of Catholic Europe, and wanted the Pope to know that she had been constrained to it. She therefore begged the Nuncio to keep her in His Holiness’s good grace, assuring him that she meant to live and die in the Catholic faith. When her letter later caught up with him, Mondovi observed that, unless the Pope gave her wholehearted support, she might rush precipitately into marriage, even with a heretic like Bothwell, who had been “the Queen’s most trusty and obedient adherent.”4
On 20 May, Drury was to report that, just before she left Stirling on 23 April, Mary tried to poison her son.
The Prince being brought unto her, she offered to kiss him, but the Prince would not, but put her face away with his hand, and did to his strength scratch her. She took an apple out of her pocket and offered it, but it would not be received by him; but the nurse took it, and to a grey-hound bitch having whelps the apple was thrown. She ate it, and she and her whelps died presently. A sugar loaf also for the Prince was brought thither at the same time, and left there for the Prince, but the Earl of Mar keeps the same. It is judged to be very evil compounded.5
Although this story was to be repeated as fact by Lennox in his Narrative , it was no more than a baseless and vicious slander, for in reality, as Mary took her leave of Mar, she exhorted him to be vigilant and wary that he be not robbed of her son, either by fraud or force.6With good reason, she still feared that, if her enemies seized the person of her heir, her reign, and possibly her life, would not long endure.
Lennox, meanwhile, had decided that it was unsafe for him to remain in Scotland, and was even now at Dumbarton, waiting to sail down the Clyde for England; his ship finally left on 29 April. On 23 April, having obtained his information from a well-informed source, he wrote to tell his wife that Bothwell was about to kidnap the Queen.7
Lennox’s intelligence was correct. Nau says that, having secured the support of the Lords for his proposed marriage, “and seeing the difficulties which would arise from delay, Bothwell resolved by some means or other to seize the person of the Queen, and then, having already gained the consent of all the Lords, to compel her to give hers, in order to bring the negotiations to a conclusion.” Bothwell was well aware that he had enemies, and doubtless believed that marriage to Mary would afford him a degree of protection, especially since he had the written backing of the Lords. More to the point, he was an ambitious man, and keen to consolidate the power he already enjoyed.
Whether the Queen was about to collude in her own abduction is another matter.
Given the way that events were moving, it is hardly surprising that, on 23 April, Cecil wrote: “Scotland is a quagmire. Nobody seems to stand still; the most honest desire to go away; the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience.”8
On the day Lennox wrote his letter, Mary said farewell to her child, not realising that she would never see him again, and left Stirling for Linlithgow with Maitland, Huntly, Melville and her thirty horse. Four miles out of Stirling, the Queen suffered a severe attack of abdominal pain, and had to rest in a cottage before completing her journey. The royal party did not arrive at Linlithgow Palace until late that night.9
That day, Bothwell had ridden twelve miles south-west of Edinburgh to Calder Castle, where he raised a force of 800 horse,10ostensibly intending to lead them south to Biggar.11At midnight, according to Drury, he visited Huntly at Linlithgow to ask for his assistance in the abduction of the Queen, but a horrified Huntly refused. After an hour of fruitless persuasion, Bothwell left without seeing Mary12and when he got back to Calder, he was “in great ill humour.”13Paris, in his second deposition, claimed that Black Ormiston visited Linlithgow secretly that night, and that he had a long conversation with the Queen.14It is more than likely that Paris’s story was fabricated in order to make it appear that Mary had colluded in the abduction. If Mary had connived at the abduction, Bothwell would surely have finalised the details with her himself before she left Edinburgh, or when he visited Linlithgow; there was no need to send Ormiston.
The question of whether Mary did in fact collude in the abduction is another matter entirely, but there were those who believed, or affected to believe, that she did. At midnight, while Bothwell was arguing with Huntly, Grange was writing to Bedford:
This is to advertise you that Bothwell’s wife is going to part with her husband, and great part of our Lords have subscribed the marriage between the Queen and him. The Queen rode to Stirling this last Monday, and returns this Thursday. I doubt not but you have heard Bothwell had gathered many of his friends, some say to ride in Liddesdale, but I believe it not, for he is minded to meet the Queen this day, Thursday, and to take her by the way and bring her to Dunbar. Judge you if it be with her will or no; but you will hear at more length on Friday and Saturday. I would you tear this after the reading. The bearer knows nothing of the matter. By him that is yours that took you by the hand. At midnight.15
The information fed to Lennox and Grange probably came originally from Bothwell himself. It would have been
natural for him to confide his plans to one or more of the Lords, who knew of Mary’s rejection of his suit and had tried, through Maitland and Bellenden, to persuade her to the contrary. In view of this, Bothwell mistakenly thought he could trust them to support him, but in fact he was playing right into their treacherous hands.
On 24 April,16Mary left Linlithgow for Edinburgh with her small retinue. Six miles west of the city,17somewhere between the New Bridge over the River Almond at Cramond to the north, and the little bridge over the Gogar Burn to the south,18Bothwell was waiting for her with what Mary described as “a great force,”19all with drawn swords.20As her party drew nervously to a halt, he laid hold of her bridle,21as if she were his captive, and told her that she was in danger from a threatened insurrection in her capital, and that he was taking her, for her own safety, to Dunbar, along with Maitland, Huntly and Melville. Mary and her entourage were not convinced by this, and, fearing Bothwell’s intentions, “some of those who were with her were about to defend her, but the Queen stopped them, saying she was ready to go with the Earl of Bothwell wherever he wished, rather than bloodshed and death should result.”22Calmly, she allowed herself to be led away to Bothwell’s stronghold at Dunbar, whereupon most of her escort, apart from her personal servants, were dispersed. Robert Melville told Cecil that this “shame done by a subject to our sovereign offends the whole realm,”23but Mary’s enemies would later condemn her as collusive for offering no resistance.
Before she had been forced to ride off with Bothwell, Mary had sent one of her horsemen, James Borthwick, to Edinburgh to alert the citizens to what was happening to her. The Provost, fearing for the Queen’s safety, had the alarm bell rung, summoning the citizens “to armour and weapons,” while Skirling, the Governor of the Castle, futilely aimed cannon fire on Bothwell’s soldiers as they rode by, half a mile beyond the Flodden Wall and well out of range. When the men of the city had collected their weapons and banded together, they marched through the gates, but they were on foot and had no hope of catching up with Bothwell’s mounted force.24
After a forty-mile ride, Bothwell and his captives reached Dunbar at midnight,25and after they had entered the castle, all its gates were made fast. According to Mary’s account of this episode, which she wrote a fortnight later to the Bishop of Dunblane,26Bothwell asked pardon of the boldness he had taken to convey us to one of our own houses, whereunto he was driven by force, as well as constrained by love, the vehemence whereof had made him to set apart the reverence which naturally, as our subject, he bore to us, as also for safety of his own life.
According to Nau, Mary expressed indignation at the way she was being treated, for it must have been obvious by now that there was no uprising in Edinburgh, as Bothwell had claimed. “How strange we found it of him, of whom we doubted less than any subject we had, it is easy to be imagined,” she wrote.27But, “in answer to complaints which she made, she was reminded that she was in one of her own houses, that all her domestics were around her, that she could remain there in perfect liberty and freely exercise her lawful authority. Practically, however, all happened very differently, for the greater part of her train was removed, nor had she full liberty until she had consented to the marriage, which had been proposed by the Lords of the Council.”28Melville says that, at Dunbar, Bothwell “boasted he would marry the Queen, who would or who would not; yea, whether she would herself or not.” This was not the sentiment of a man inspired by passion or lust, but that of a man motivated by ambition and the instinct for self-preservation. Mary, however, was in no mood to yield and, for all that she desired no bloodshed, “sent secretly to the Governor of the town of Dunbar to sally out with his troops and rescue her”;29but she waited in vain for them to arrive.
In the meantime, Bothwell sought her out in private and began, she recorded, to make us a discourse of his whole life, how unfortunate he had been to find men his unfriends, whom he had never offended; how unable he was to save himself from conspiracies of his enemies, whom he might not know, by reason every man professed himself outwardly to be his friend; and yet found he such hid[den] malice that he could not find himself in surety without he were assured of our favour to endure without alteration.
His intentions, he assured her, were entirely honourable.
Other assurance he could not trust to, without it would please us to do him that honour to take him to husband; protesting always that he would seek no other sovereign, but to serve and obey us all the days of our life, joining thereto all the honest language that could be used in such a case.30
Mary, however, persisted in her refusal of his suit, even when he again produced the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond. Her conduct is hardly consistent with the licentious passion that Buchanan alleged existed between her and Bothwell.
Determined to have his way, Bothwell ignored the Queen’s rebuff. According to Melville, who was at Dunbar that night and left the next day, he raped her, laying her open to dishonour and the risk of an illicit pregnancy, with the consequent loss of her reputation. Now, “the Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished31her and lain with her against her will.”32 Mary, still in weakened health, “wearied and almost broken,” as she herself states in her letter reproduced below, and well aware that she was completely in Bothwell’s power, had no choice but to capitulate. Later, in her letter to the Bishop of Dunblane, she wrote of what had happened in less explicit terms, but her meaning was obvious:
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 depended, already welded to his appetite, and so we left alone, as it were, a prey to him, many things we resolved with ourself, but never could find a way out. And yet he gave us little space to meditate with ourself, ever pressing us with continual and importunate suit. In the end, when we saw no hope to be rid of him, never man in Scotland making a move to procure our deliverance, we were compelled to mitigate our displeasure, and began to think upon that he propounded.
Mary was well aware that her troubled realm needed a man’s strong hand to restore order and good government, and that she herself was no longer capable of controlling affairs. Such a man could take pain upon his person in the execution of justice and suppressing their insolence that was rebel, the travails whereof we may no longer sustain in our own person, being already wearied and almost broken with the frequent uproars and rebellions raised against us since we came to Scotland.
It had been made plain to Mary that her Lords would not accept a foreign consort. Bothwell had rendered her loyal service in the past, and she felt that no other of her subjects could equal him, either for the reputation of his House, or for the worthiness of himself, as well in wisdom, valiance, as in all other good qualities. Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle. As by a bravado in the beginning he had won the first point,33so ceased he never, till by persuasion and importunate suit, accompanied not the less with force, he had finally driven us to end the work begun, at such time and in such form as he thought best might serve his turn, wherein we cannot dissemble that he has used us otherwise than we would have wished or yet deserved at his hand.34
Mary’s letter was intended for her envoy to the French court, and she doubtless felt that she had to justify her acceptance of Bothwell’s suit whilst at the same time avoiding criticism of the man who was to be her husband, who could not, for the sake of his honour and her own, be openly accused of raping his sovereign. It has also been conjectured by several historians that, after experiencing sexual relations only with immature or callous youths, Mary was surprised to find that intercourse could be very satisfying with a mature man like Bothwell. Yet there is no evidence to support this theory, and her future behaviour does not bear it out.
In July, the Scottish Lords told Sir Nicholas Throckmorton “how shamefully the Queen was led captive, and by fear, force and (as by many conjectures may well be suspected) other extraordinary and mor
e unlawful means, compelled to become bedfellow to another wife’s husband.”35
Lennox, Mary’s enemy, and Leslie, her supporter, both claimed that Bothwell used black magic to seduce her, and he is said to have admitted as much in a dubious document known as his Confession, which is almost certainly a fabrication. Throughout his career, Bothwell was frequently accused by his enemies of witchcraft; in a superstitious age, it was an infallible method of character assassination, and even Knox was not immune from such accusations.36
Nau does not mention the rape at all. The Book of Articles, however, graphically describes how Bothwell “met and ravished” the Queen, “conveying her in haste to Dunbar Castle, where he plainly passed to bed with her, abusing her body at his pleasure, which form of ravishing he practised also to his own advantage, thinking it being a crime of lèse-majesté to take a remission therefor as he did, and under the same crime to comprehend the King’s murder in case it might be tried thereafter.” This means that Bothwell abducted and raped Mary with a view to securing, amongst other things, a general remission for any treasons he might have committed, which would mean he could never again be tried for Darnley’s murder. This assumption may well be correct, for the assize judges had given permission for a retrial in the event of new evidence coming to light, and Bothwell certainly did not want that particular sword of Damocles hanging over him. However, he never got his general remission, merely a pardon for the abduction and rape.