by John Guy
And then the pact between Bothwell and Morton suddenly disintegrated. Morton resented Bothwell’s good fortune, and Bothwell suspected Morton of plotting against his intended marriage. It was a classic falling-out among thieves. Although Morton was willing to sign the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, he did so only on terms that severely restricted Bothwell’s powers and prevented him from ever being styled king. Argyll was also deeply offended by Bothwell’s presumption, telling his friends that he would soon leave Holyrood for good.
Bothwell had to act precipitately, before the rest of his supporters melted away. With Morton no longer to be relied on, and with Argyll plainly about to withdraw, the gamble was all now on his side. He had to make a move if his bid for power was to succeed, and that meant staging a coup.
On Monday, April 21, Mary rode to Stirling to fetch her son. To her dismay, the Earl of Mar refused to deliver him. A moderate politician with his finger on the pulse of the lords, he knew they would rebel if Bothwell got his hands on the heir to the throne. When Mary entered the castle, Mar would allow her to be accompanied by only two female attendants. To deny the monarch and her entourage access to her own fortress was considered treasonable by Mary, who threatened to punish Mar severely.
Two days later, she kissed her ten-month-old son goodbye. It was the last time she ever saw him. She rode to her birthplace at Linlithgow, where she spent the night. On the 24th, she rose early. Her thoughts were back in France, as it was the ninth anniversary of her wedding to the dauphin. Her plan was to return to Holyrood, but as she crossed the bridge over the River Almond, a few miles outside Edinburgh, Bothwell intercepted her. He took her forcibly to Dunbar, where she was “ravished.”
Bothwell was no better than Darnley. He believed that to assure his position, he must own Mary sexually, and if she would not yet marry him, he must conquer her.
His conduct was outrageous. To seize the person of an anointed queen was considered to be sacrilegious as well as treasonable, even in a country so lax in its interpretation of law and order as Scotland. A scandalized Sir James Melville claimed such an act could only have been collusive. One of Bothwell’s men was said to have admitted that it was done “with the queen’s own consent.” Drury, with his resolutely English point of view, took the same line: “The manner of the Earl Bothwell’s meeting now last with the queen which though it appeared to be forcible, yet it is known to be otherwise.” Kirkcaldy of Grange was most explicit: “She was minded to cause Bothwell to ravish her, to the end that she may the sooner end [his] marriage, which she promised before she caused [the] murder [of] her husband.”
But all three hated Bothwell and feared his malign influence on Mary. Kirkcaldy was already an official spokesman for the lords: his comment shows the direction their propaganda was taking. The price she would have to pay if she went ahead and married Bothwell was guilt by association in Darnley’s murder.
Some details of the “abduction” can be checked. When Bothwell unexpectedly jumped out and grabbed Mary’s horse by the bridle, she was startled and appalled. She instantly ordered her servants to ride to Edinburgh and summon a rescue party. She was definitely abducted against her will. The evidence later produced by the lords to “prove” otherwise would be doctored, which even Cecil could hardly have failed to notice when it was put in front of him. (The annotation of Cecil’s secretary on this “evidence” is discussed in chapter 26.)
But was she also raped? The difference is between a woman who was becoming a fool for love and one who was already a political pawn.
Mary was a woman of spirit: high-minded and fully conscious of her “grandeur” as a queen. It is entirely out of character that she would have married Bothwell if he had raped her. It is sometimes claimed that he was the first man who satisfied her sexually. That is quite possible, given the dauphin’s ill-health and puny physique and Darnley’s sheer selfishness. And yet even if it is true, it is a world apart from saying that Mary could ever have forgiven Bothwell for forcing her into bed against her will.
Despite the heavy pressure exerted on Mary by Bothwell’s use of the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, she had not yet decided to marry him, because if she had already given her consent, there would have been no need for him to abduct her. It follows that the sequel at Dunbar was more critical than the kidnapping at Almond Bridge.
Mary stayed with Bothwell in his castle for twelve days and not just a single night. As he was not there the whole time, it cannot seriously be maintained that she was prevented from leaving if she had really wanted to escape. No one else at Dunbar was going to hold their queen a hostage if she had given them an outright command.
Mary and Bothwell were lodged in the state apartments, but they occupied separate rooms. As a chronicler sardonically remarked, there was “no great distance between the queen’s chamber and Bothwell’s.” But while the sexual innuendo is unambiguous, the rooms were indeed apart, so that Mary could have locked or barricaded the door to her own room if she had wanted Bothwell kept at bay. She could have shouted for help to her servants, but did not.*
The most likely sequence of events is that Mary was genuinely ambushed by Bothwell on the road at Almond Bridge. She was taken to Dunbar against her will. When they arrived, she was frightened and angry, but he protested his love to her and pleaded with her to marry him. If he had not already done so, he would also have shown her the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, which appeared to be a petition from the lords indicating the unanimity of their support. We cannot know what she answered, but within one or two days, he had won her over. (We will see further evidence of Mary’s state of mind at Dunbar in chapters 22 and 26.)
It probably took two days. On April 26, Bothwell galloped at high speed to Edinburgh. There he arranged for his wife, Lady Jean Gordon, to lodge her suit for a divorce in the Protestant court. She filed her petition that very same day. Since her case was set out in graphic detail, it suggests that Bothwell had prepared the documents in advance. He was said to have enjoyed himself in the precincts of Haddington Abbey in broad daylight with the “bonny little black-haired” Bessie Crawford, his wife’s maid. He cheerfully confessed to his adultery.
On May 3, the judges issued a decree of divorce. Its effect was immediate, since Huntly had grudgingly been bought off and had already agreed to the terms of his sister’s financial settlement with Bothwell.
In parallel, Mary asked the Archbishop of St. Andrews to grant Bothwell an annulment in the Catholic court. Her request was made on April 27, and the decree followed on May 7, issued on the grounds that his marriage to Lady Jean had been invalid from the start for lack of a canonical dispensation.
If Huntly had so far condoned his sister’s divorce, he had his limits. When Bothwell returned to Dunbar, he discovered that Huntly and Mary had quarreled. Despite signing the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, Huntly wavered in his support for Bothwell. By the end of May, his reluctance to take up his erstwhile brother-in-law’s cause in arms against the rebel lords would be unconcealed.
The lords had first gathered at Stirling three days after Mary’s abduction. Morton, Argyll, Atholl and Mar were the instigators, and after four days a new bond was signed. They called themselves the Confederate Lords, denying that they were in revolt but admitting they were in an association to free their queen from “captivity.” They pledged to strive by all possible means to set Mary “at liberty,” to “preserve the prince and the commonwealth” and to kill Bothwell, whom they now called “that barbarous tyrant” and “cruel murderer.”
Bothwell had simply become too powerful. His increasing monopoly of military power was especially feared. He had, claimed the Confederate Lords, “the strengths, munitions and men of war at his commandment.” While this was something of an exaggeration, it is true that he had seriously threatened the independent positions of these lords, and so stepped into Darnley’s shoes in a way quite different from the one he had imagined.
On May 6, Mary and Bothwell processed in triumph to Edinburgh. On their arrival at the gate
called the West Port, the castle guns fired a salute and Bothwell dismounted. He then led Mary’s horse by the bridle as they slowly advanced up the hill to the castle. But the crowds were sullen. Mary and Bothwell were visibly displeased, and yet it is hard to see how they could have expected anything else. Mary’s popularity did not extend to marrying Bothwell, and his position as her protector was secured at a heavy price.
The same day, Knox’s assistant at St. Giles Kirk, John Craig, was asked to proclaim the banns of marriage between Mary and Bothwell. This he bravely refused to do. He demanded a royal writ, which arrived next day, in which Mary volunteered the information that she had been neither raped nor held as a prisoner by Bothwell.
She ordered Craig to make the proclamation. If, however, she had not been raped, as she maintained, she must have willingly consented to sleep with Bothwell at Dunbar, which meant she had committed adultery with a married man. She could not have it both ways.
Craig read the banns the following day, but only after calling heaven and earth to witness that he abhorred and detested the proposed marriage.
On May 9, Bothwell privately summoned Craig, demanding an explanation of his remarks. But far from apologizing, the fearless minister admonished Bothwell. “I laid to his charge,” he said shortly afterward, “the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement, and proclaiming within the space of four days, and last, the suspicion of the king’s death, which her marriage would confirm.”
On Sunday the 11th, Craig repeated his rebuke from the pulpit. Bothwell fell into a frenzy. He summoned the minister again, this time before the Privy Council, accusing him of exceeding his authority. But Craig answered, “The bounds of my commission, which was the word of God, good laws and natural reason, was able to prove whatsoever I spake.”
Here was a second Knox! But Bothwell, unlike Mary, refused to bandy words. He silenced the minister and ordered him to leave, threatening to hang him summarily with a cord.
Next day, Mary pardoned Bothwell for abducting her at Almond Bridge, then raised him high enough in the peerage for her to marry him. Heralds in their coat armor led the procession into the Abbey-Kirk at Holyrood. They were followed by the Earl of Rothes, who carried the sword of state, the Earl of Crawford carrying the scepter, and Huntly, who bore the crown. Mary, resplendent in her royal robes and seated on a gilded throne beneath her cloth of state, placed the ducal coronet on Bothwell’s head with her own hands. He was clad in a scarlet robe lined and edged with ermine, and was attended by Cockburn, Laird of Skirling, carrying a blue banner with Bothwell’s arms emblazoned on it. He was created Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland by a seemingly rapturous Mary. After the ceremony, four of his retainers were knighted.
But Bothwell’s meteoric rise was likely to be brief. The Confederate Lords were occupying Stirling, where they established a rival court in the name of Prince James. They staged a masque in which Bothwell was tried for Darnley’s murder, convicted and hanged. It might have gone unreported, but the poor boy playing Bothwell was hanged so realistically, he was almost suffocated and had to be frantically revived. Bothwell was beside himself with rage when he heard of the masque. He swore a foul oath and threatened to be revenged on the rebel lords.
On Wednesday the 14th, the marriage contract was signed. It justified the wedding on the grounds that Mary was a young widow, “apt and able to procreate and bring forth more children” to maintain the dynasty, who had been petitioned and advised by the “most part of her nobility” to marry. It quoted from the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond, justifying Mary’s decision to “so far humble herself” as to marry one of her subjects. It noted that Bothwell had been recommended to her by the nobles, and claimed that Mary had “graciously accorded” to their petition.
No longer did Mary seek advice on her marriage from France, Spain or England. Her focus had narrowed to her own realm, and she seemed happy to be known as Bothwell’s wife and to accept that the Guise family looked down on her for it.
The next morning, Mary and Bothwell were married in the great hall at Holyrood by Protestant rites. Du Croc, the French ambassador, organized an official boycott, which even some of those attending Bothwell’s creation as Duke of Orkney joined in. The ceremony was thinly attended. There were few witnesses beyond the four Maries and Mary’s and Bothwell’s own servants.
Nevertheless this was no tawdry occasion. The element of spectacle was provided by Mary herself. She wore the deuil, as for her marriage to Darnley, yet these were no ordinary widow’s weeds. Her dressmakers and embroiderers must have been working furiously night and day for a week.
She had married Darnley in white, but this time she wore a magnificent flowing gown of black patterned velvet in the Italian style, richly embroidered with gold strapwork and gold and silver thread. Her dress was so eye-catching, it hardly seemed to be a mourning dress at all.
She was in the prime of life. She was taller than Bothwell, and they must have looked a slightly odd couple, she with her exceptional height and thin waist, he with his stocky build, mustache and ruddy complexion. It was said that he had never looked more handsome, and yet his language at supper on the eve of the wedding was so profane that Sir James Melville walked away in disgust.
The service was conducted by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, one of Bothwell’s relatives. First he preached a sermon on a text from Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Next he declared the bridegroom’s repentance for his former sins and wicked life, and affirmed his resolve to make amends and conform to the discipline of the Kirk. Finally, the bride and groom were “handfasted.” This may well have been done without an exchange of rings, as the Protestants objected to the use of the wedding ring, which they considered to be a “popish” superstition.
When Mary returned to her apartments, she changed into another new gown, this time of shimmering yellow silk. She did not get the chance to show it off. Unlike at her previous marriages, there was to be no “balling, dancing and banqueting,” no cries of “Largesse” from heralds as they showered money on the guests, because there was no wedding banquet or masque, the most obvious sign that the ceremony had been hastily arranged.
Only three months and five days had passed since Darnley was murdered. Only fifteen months had passed since Bothwell and Lady Jean Gordon had been married with the “advice and express counsel” of Mary, who had signed their marriage contract, paid for the reception and presented the bride with her wedding dress.
While Bothwell and his servants were moving into Darnley’s old apartments at Holyrood, the Confederate Lords were mustering their forces at Stirling. If what had happened in the past few months was not sensational enough, the most breathtaking and dramatic events of Mary’s life were about to unfold.
21
Denouement in Scotland
MARY SHAPED her own destiny by marrying Bothwell. Watching the downward spiral from afar, Cecil wrote that Scotland was “in a quagmire; nobody seemeth to stand still; the most honest desire to go away; the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience.” But the pattern was clear. Morton had allied with Darnley in a Faustian pact to murder Rizzio. When Darnley betrayed him, Morton allied with Bothwell to take his revenge. Then Bothwell became too powerful. When he threatened the interests of the other lords, Morton broke with him, leading a revolt that was all the more deadly in that Bothwell had enough inside information to condemn all of his accomplices in Darnley’s murder, while he himself had been acquitted of the crime. There could be only one survivor of this, Bothwell’s final feud with Morton.
On Mary and Bothwell’s wedding night, a new placard was nailed to the gates of Holyrood. Quoting Ovid, it declaimed:
As the common people say,
Only harlots marry in May.
Mary was stung by the insult, although a moment’s thought would have reassured h
er that, like the drawing of the mermaid and the hare, it could only have been the work of someone versed in Latin poetry, making it less hurtful to her than if it had come from the ordinary people.
But Mary could not think straight. Whatever Bothwell had told her during their twelve days at Dunbar, she was distraught to realize soon after their marriage that he did not really love her. His protestations had been insincere. Her biographers argue that her quarrels with Bothwell had already started before their wedding. Mary must therefore have known what she was taking on when she married him.
This is incorrect. Records show only a single row before the wedding: what Drury called a “great unkindness” lasting half a day when Bothwell returned to Dunbar after getting his wife to file for a divorce. Drury’s reports are a key source for Mary and Bothwell’s “jars,” but the handwritten folios of these important documents were muddled when they were bound into volumes in the nineteenth century. Parts of the same report were filed as different documents under different dates. A paragraph that begins on one folio breaks off in midsentence and may continue on a folio several hundred pages later. When extracts from the bound volumes were edited for publication, crucial passages were misdated. A close examination of all the handwritten reports shows that apart from their one big row at Dunbar, Mary and Bothwell’s quarrels all took place after their wedding.
Bouts of jealousy and mutual resentment were the cause. Mary wept because Bothwell “would not allow her to look at or be looked on by anybody, for he knew very well that she loved her pleasure and passed her time like any other devoted to the world.” Bothwell was “the most jealous man that lives.” On May 20, Drury wrote: “There hath been already some jars between the queen and the duke and more looked for. He is jealous and suspicious and thinks to be obeyed.” The strain was so great that Mary’s beauty was affected. “The opinion of many,” continued Drury, “is that the queen is the most changed woman of face that in so little time without extremity of sickness they have seen.”