The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  On his way through England on one of his return journeys to Paris, Castelnau blithely assured Bedford that Mary and Darnley were reconciled. This was either wishful thinking or a ploy to deceive the English. Bedford had his own spies and was well aware of Darnley’s jealousy and paranoia. “He cannot bear,” wrote one of these sources, “that the queen should use familiarity either with men or women, and especially the ladies of Argyll, Moray and Mar.” All her attention had to be on him for every second or else he stormed out in a tantrum.

  It was the little things that caused the most trouble. Mary loved dogs, and when Sir James Melville gave Darnley a fine water spaniel he was sent from England, Mary had an attack of pique. She berated her loyal Melville, calling him a “dissembler” and a “flatterer.” She too adored spaniels, and was jealous that the dog had not been offered to her first. “How can I trust you if you can give something like this to someone I hate?” she asked.

  By the middle of August, Mary had moved on to Peebleshire, where she went stag hunting in the hills close to the Water of Megget. Moray, Mar and Bothwell were by her side, and Darnley came and went.

  Then, on the 22nd, she interrupted her holiday. Something had happened that immediately made her sense danger and brought back all the fears she had suffered since the Rizzio plot. She abruptly returned to Holyrood for two days. Up until now, Prince James had stayed with his nurse at Edinburgh Castle in the care of Mar and his wife. Mary believed he was about to be kidnapped and decided to move him to the greater security of Stirling Castle, the fortress on the rock to which her own mother had once taken her.

  She feared that Darnley might try to kidnap James, because she knew the birth of their son had shifted the balance of power again. It strengthened her hand significantly in the short term. She had produced a male heir and settled the succession in Scotland. The arrival of an heir also made her less dependent than before on the nobles. But paradoxically it also made her more vulnerable in the longer term, because if Darnley or the lords chose to attack her, they could seize the heir to the throne and appoint a regent to rule during his minority, thereby giving themselves power for up to fifteen or twenty years.

  Taking no chances, Mary raised a force of five hundred musketeers, who surrounded Prince James’s litter as it was brought from Edinburgh to Stirling. She again left her son in the care of Mar and his wife. When they had safely arrived at Stirling, Mary set out for Perthshire, where she resumed her holiday.

  Now that James was well protected, she allowed herself to spend the rest of it hunting and hawking with her perfidious husband. She was keeping up appearances. In the last week of August they were in Glenartney, a lush red-deer forest in the vicinity of Loch Earn. From there they moved on to Drummond Castle near Crieff, and afterward returned to Stirling.

  By the start of September, Mary felt more relaxed. She even yielded to the pleas of Moray and Atholl and allowed Maitland to reoccupy his former position as her secretary. He arrived at Stirling on the 4th, and the next day she dined with him alone. He made his humble submission, after which Mary went back to Edinburgh. Maitland was ordered to appear there on the 11th, where a short time later he was reconciled to Bothwell. How deep this reconciliation went is open to doubt. But as Maitland wrote jubilantly to Cecil, he was back at court and once more pulling the levers.

  Darnley, however, was furious. Mary, he believed, was reconciling the lords in order to build a consensus against him. There was no reason for him to think this. All she was doing was trying to restore order and harmony between the feuding factions after the upheaval of the Rizzio plot. But Darnley was recalcitrant. When she returned to Stirling to fetch him back to Edinburgh, he refused to leave. He was misbehaving shamelessly, even in front of the new resident French ambassador, Philibert du Croc, who had now been sent to Scotland in place of Castelnau.

  Darnley made a shocking announcement. He intended to separate himself from Mary and go and live abroad. He avowed this in what du Croc called “a fit of desperation.” His tirade brought matters to a head. Mary “took him by the hand, and besought him for God’s sake to declare if she had given him any occasion for this resolution; and entreated he might deal plainly, and not spare her.” Darnley pushed her aside. Even the lords were appalled at this. They too wanted to keep him in Scotland, since apart from the dishonor that he would do to Mary by leaving her, it was clear that Darnley plotting abroad would be more dangerous than Darnley plotting at home.

  Du Croc was bewildered by this public fight. He had never seen anything like it, especially when Darnley conceded that he had no specific grievance beyond a sense of outrage that he was not adequately recognized as king. What rankled was Mary’s refusal to crown him. Despite her innumerable attempts to calm him down, he refused to be silenced. At last he stalked out of the room, saying to Mary, “Adieu, madame, you shall not see my face for a long space,” and to the lords, “Gentlemen, adieu.”

  Mary returned to Edinburgh. When Darnley arrived at the gates of Holyroodhouse a week later, insisting that her councilors must be evicted before he would deign to enter, he was personally hauled inside by his wife. She spent most of the night trying to drum some sense into him, and when she failed, the Privy Council was summoned with du Croc as an independent witness. Darnley was then asked to explain exactly what it was that he complained of, and when he was unable to give any credible answer, but continued to ask for a separation from Mary, the Privy Council wrote officially to Catherine de Medici, setting down a record of his insanity and seeking French cooperation should he attempt to establish a royal court in exile.

  Mary’s health then collapsed. It happened while she was staying at Jedburgh, close to the English border. It had been her intention to go there and preside at her Justice Ayre, a circuit or traveling court that dealt with criminal cases and spent a week or so in each location. The circuit, which included Teviotdale and Liddesdale, had been delayed on account of the late harvest, but was due to begin on October 8. Bothwell, within whose jurisdiction these areas fell as lieutenant of the borders, left Edinburgh on the 6th to prepare for the queen’s arrival.

  Darnley, who was still threatening to go and live abroad, refused to accompany Mary. But Moray, Argyll, Maitland, Atholl and Huntly were among the forty or so in her train. Scarcely had she passed Borthwick, eleven miles southeast of Edinburgh, when she heard that Bothwell had been violently ambushed by his old enemies the Elliots of Liddesdale, who were notorious for their brigandage throughout this region of rough border terrain.

  At first Bothwell was said to be dead; then it was confirmed that he was alive but severely injured, with sword wounds to his body, head and hand. He was dragged on a sledge to the Hermitage, his nearby citadel in the valley of the Hermitage Water, where he lay critically ill.

  Mary came to visit him, but not for another week. The facts emerge from the reports to Cecil of Lord Scrope and Sir John Forster, the English officials who were closely monitoring these events from their respective vantage points of Carlisle and Berwick. Since, like all the English, they loathed Bothwell, they are unlikely to have drawn a veil over any of his transgressions.

  According to their accounts, Mary did go to the Hermitage, but not as soon as she arrived at Jedburgh. She first conducted the Justice Ayre in the usual way, which lasted a week. Only after the court adjourned on October 15 did she ride to visit Bothwell. She was concerned about his injuries: he was, after all, one of her most loyal privy councilors.

  And there was perhaps another reason. Bothwell, her border lieutenant with a commission to root out the “riders” and bandits of the region, was due to begin a new session of the Justice Ayre in Liddesdale on the 16th. She may have planned to attend the new session. Nor did she ride to Bothwell’s home alone. Contrary to later calumnies, she was accompanied by Moray and all her leading courtiers. Perhaps they had intended to stay overnight at the Hermitage. If so, they changed their minds. They stayed for only two hours and then returned to Jedburgh the same day. The journey was
up to thirty miles each way across rough country using the most direct paths. This seems astonishing until one realizes that forty miles was then considered a normal day’s riding. A round trip of fifty miles was above the norm but not out of the ordinary. Sixty miles was pushing it, but feasible in good weather.

  Mary’s ride was on the 15th or 16th, according to whether Scrope’s or Forster’s date is accepted. Then, on the 17th, she fell dangerously ill. A few days earlier, she had complained of “spleen.” When she finally collapsed, she was in agony from the pain in her left side. She vomited blood several times and then lost consciousness. Within two days she was suffering convulsions and had lost the power of speech. Next day she lost her sight. By the 24th, she had improved, but suffered a relapse the next day. At the height of the crisis she lay apparently dead for half an hour: “eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold.”

  She was saved by her French surgeon, Charles Nau, who was said to be “a perfect man of his craft.” He tightly bandaged her big toes, her legs from the ankles up, then her arms. He massaged all her limbs. After this, he forced open her mouth and poured wine down her throat. He also administered a clyster, or enema. This caused vomiting and diarrhea, enabling her to discharge a large residue of “corrupt” (old) blood. Within three hours, she had recovered her sight and speech and begun sweating. It was a bravura performance by her surgeon: no better treatment could have been given in the absence of a blood transfusion.

  Whatever Mary’s precise illness, it could not have been acute intermittent porphyria or any other type of porphyria. She had suffered severe internal bleeding and hemorrhagic shock. These symptoms have no connection with porphyria. It is possible that she had more than one disease, but the obvious diagnosis is a gastric ulcer that burst after the exertion of the long ride and the anxiety associated with Darnley’s treachery.*

  The lords had no interest in the medical causes of Mary’s illness, but were alarmed by her condition. With Darnley on the loose, they had no appetite for a change of regime. They foresaw anarchy if their queen died and for the moment wanted to keep her on the throne. While the factions in Scotland were interested in the potential benefits of a long royal minority, they were not yet ready for a regency that would be hotly disputed until the ambiguity of Darnley’s position as an uncrowned king consort was resolved.

  Such fears concentrated their minds on the advantages of Mary’s rule while she was alive. Studiously ignoring their own conduct, they blamed Darnley for her breakdown. His behavior had pushed her to the brink. Explaining their dilemma to the Scottish ambassador in Paris, Maitland put the case in a nutshell: “She has done him so great honor . . . and he on the other part has recompensed her with such ingratitude, and misuses himself so far toward her, that it is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no way out.”

  Just as at the outset of the Rizzio plot, Maitland was hinting at the solution to a problem that Mary herself had not yet defined. Up to now, she was trying to live with the consequences of her marriage, keeping up appearances and balancing the advantages of a legitimate male heir against the disadvantages of Darnley. But the lords, including Bothwell, saw things differently. By removing Darnley, they would be doing everyone a favor.

  As the year 1566 moved to its close, it seemed as if Darnley, with his manic obsession to be crowned king and his longing to make a name for himself in Catholic Europe by restoring the Mass, was an intractable problem for everyone except his own family. It would be very convenient to lose him. He had served his purpose by fathering a male heir. His conduct was intolerable; he was politically expendable. He did not bother to visit Mary at Jedburgh until she had almost recovered. Even then, he stayed for only one night, returning to Lennox’s stronghold at Glasgow the next day.

  Bothwell was in Jedburgh a week before him, carried in a horse litter back to his lodgings. He was well enough to sit on the Privy Council, and within a week had “convalesced well.” He was in Mary’s retinue on November 9, when she left Jedburgh to begin a royal progress through Berwickshire and East Lothian. He performed his job of lieutenant of the borders without mishap or misadventure. The progress ended on the 20th, when Mary and her privy councilors arrived at Craigmillar Castle, three miles south of Edinburgh, where they stayed for almost a fortnight.

  Mary had scarcely been at Craigmillar a week when she was ill again It was the second time in her life when she said she had been close tc death or wished she really were dead. The first was when she was struck by the viral disease known as “the sweat” at the age of thirteen and a half At Jedburgh, she had certainly been close to death, but her collapse was so sudden, she had been unable to think much about it. Now the narrowness of her escape was dawning on her.

  According to du Croc, who was an eyewitness, “she is in the hands of the physicians, and I do assure you is not at all well. I do believe the principal part of her disease to consist of a deep grief and sorrow.” She was unable to shake off her mood. “Still she repeats these words, ‘I could wish to be dead.’”

  “You know very well,” continued du Croc, “that the injury she has received is excessively great, and Her Majesty will never forget it.” Slowly but surely, the truth slipped out. There was more to this depression than Mary’s brush with death. Darnley had been to visit her. There had been further rows. “Things are going from bad to worse . . . I do not expect upon several accounts any good understanding between them.” There were two overwhelming obstacles to a reconciliation. “The first is, the king will never humble himself as he ought. The other is, the queen can’t countenance any of the lords speaking with the king without immediately suspecting a plot between them.”

  But if du Croc was brooding over Darnley’s deficiencies, Mary’s collapse at Jedburgh put a reconciliation of a quite different order within her grasp. When mortality was staring her in the face, she decided that if she failed to recover, then “the special care of the protection of our son” was to be given to Elizabeth, who should come to regard Prince James as her own child. It was fairly obvious that Elizabeth did not intend to marry, in which case Mary could best protect her son’s life and dynastic rights in Scotland and England by making this extraordinary gesture. She knew that despite their earlier dueling, Elizabeth would always respect the ideal of monarchy and give precedence to hereditary rights over religious differences. In England, James would be brought up as a Protestant, in which case his prospects in both countries would be unrivaled.

  A message was sent to England, and Elizabeth reciprocated. Her reply, conveyed to Mary through Robert Melville, does not survive, but on November 18, during the final stages of the progress in East Lothian, Mary quoted from it. She wrote a letter to the English Privy Council, expressing her thanks for the “good offers” she had received from her “dearest sister,” which she proposed to follow up without delay.

  Although made on the spur of the moment, Mary’s offer to name Elizabeth as her son’s “protector” was a masterstroke. It was flattering enough to appeal to the English queen and yet enigmatic enough not to pose a direct threat to the Scottish lords, since a protector, in the sense meant by Mary, was not the same as a governor or regent, for which she had made provision in her will. And it kept Darnley out of the picture.

  The result was the prospect of a new accord giving genuine substance to the kinship ties between the two British queens. Such ties had always underpinned their rhetoric, but had so far not amounted to much. As Mary herself once exclaimed, they were all just empty words! Her latest gesture enabled her to play the part of a “natural sister” or “daughter” to Elizabeth with real conviction. She had entrusted her son to Elizabeth’s protection. Although she did not die at Jedburgh, it did not mean she could not hope to benefit from the sudden thaw in their relations. When her cousin responded with her own “good offers,” the way was open for a fresh round of diplomacy in which Mary hoped to secure recognition of her claim to the English succession.<
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  Elizabeth was willing to compromise. For once, she made her own decision untrammeled by Cecil’s intervention. Cecil had for some time been pressing her to marry Archduke Charles, and the English Parliament had been summoned after a gap of three and a half years. In a series of heated debates and backroom deals, Parliament was vainly petitioning her to marry and settle the succession in her own country, just as Mary had done so successfully in hers. Advised by Robert Melville in London, Mary knew how and when to play her cards.

  Elizabeth bitterly resented the lobbying of her councilors. She turned her rage first on a delegation of lords and next on a committee of both houses of Parliament for discussing what she regarded as her personal affairs. Her “good offers” to Mary came shortly after the crisis over the parliamentary debates.

  In a fractious minute, perhaps read only by Cecil, Elizabeth railed against the “lewd practices” of those who had been lobbying. She turned to her own solution, negotiating on the level of queen to queen.

  Her terms were breathtakingly simple. She would retract her demand that Mary ratify the original treaty of Edinburgh. Instead, a new “treaty of perpetual amity” would be negotiated. This would leave the peace intact but remove all clauses detrimental to Mary’s honor. “Our meaning,” said Elizabeth, “is to require nothing to be confirmed in that treaty but that which directly appertains to us and our children, omitting anything in that treaty that may be prejudicial to her title as next heir after us and our children, all of which may be secured to her by a new treaty betwixt us.”

  Elizabeth was willing to acknowledge Mary’s rights as heir apparent. In return, those rights would be rigorously defined and narrowed down. If Elizabeth married and had children, Mary’s claim would lapse. And to remove forever the threat of an attempted usurpation, an “engagement” or “reciprocal contract” would be signed. This would provide mutual guarantees whereby each party recognized the other to be a lawful ruling queen, and neither would do anything to harm the other. As Elizabeth explained it, “This manner of proceeding is the way to avoid all jealousies and difficulties betwixt us, and the only way to secure the amity.”