by John Guy
History was repeating itself. Bothwell’s attitude toward Mary as a woman was fundamentally incompatible with her view of being a queen. As with her rows with Darnley, one of the bitterest was over a coveted animal. When she gave a particularly desirable horse to the younger brother of Bothwell’s old enemy the Earl of Arran, Bothwell ranted and raged, demanding the horse for himself. Mary, in a flood of tears, countered that Bothwell’s ex-wife still lived at Crichton Castle, the closest of his several homes to Edinburgh, where he was said to write to her and visit her as if they had never been divorced.
Mary was in turmoil. It was another of the occasions in her life when she said repeatedly, “I wish I were dead.” The difference is, this time she was not physically ill. As Drury had carefully noted, she was in great distress, but “without extremity of sickness.”
Two independent witnesses heard her threaten to kill herself. One was du Croc, whom Mary summoned late on the evening of her wedding day. “I perceived,” he informed Catherine de Medici, “a strange formality between her and her husband, which she begged me to excuse, saying that if I saw her sad, it was because she did not wish to be happy, as she said she never could be, wishing only for death.” Two days later, “being all alone in a closet with the Earl of Bothwell, she called aloud for someone to give her a knife with which to kill herself. Those who were in the room adjoining the closet heard her.”
One of those in the next room was Sir James Melville. He overheard Mary make her threat. “Or else,” she said, “I shall drown myself.” According to Sir James, Bothwell brutalized Mary after her marriage. He “mishandled” her in every way. “He was so beastly and suspicious” that he never allowed her a single day’s peace, causing her “to shed abundance of salt tears.”
There is plenty of evidence of Bothwell’s violent temper, but it is also possible that he told Mary the truth—or more likely an expurgated version of the truth—about Darnley’s murder. In that event, she would have felt betrayed by the very man whom she had trusted to protect her from the noble factions, whose role as queen’s protector she had sealed in marriage. Even if he denied or concealed his own part in the plot, as he certainly would have done, she could never have forgiven him for failing to confess what he knew before the murder, which had shipwrecked all her hopes of asserting her claim to the English succession.
But Mary behaved differently in public. After the wedding, she still took Bothwell’s arm. She dressed well and rode out with him. On May 23, she organized a belated celebration of their marriage. A water pageant was staged beside the shores of the Firth of Forth, followed by martial sports in which Bothwell “ran at the ring” and a group of soldiers enacted a mock skirmish. The court at Holyrood seemed as lively and convivial as ever, but a closer inspection showed that only a few nobles were present, and the majority of people who chatted or lounged in the courtyard or great hall were soldiers or Bothwell’s servants.
When others were around, Bothwell took care to treat Mary with courtesy and respect. He “openly useth great reverence to the queen,” said Drury, removing his hat in her presence, “which she seems she would have otherwise, and will sometimes take his cap and put it on.”
And yet in private his temper was unbearable. Mary still clung to him, partly still in love, partly not knowing what else to do, but she was a changed and unhappy woman.
It was a heartbreaking transformation, and it affected Mary’s own manners. She became coarser and harsher in her speech. When first told about the Confederate Lords, she even sounded like Bothwell. “For Argyll,” she said, “I know well enough how to stop his mouth, and for Atholl, he is but feeble. I will deal well enough with him. And for Morton, his boots are but now pulled off him and not made clean. I will return him again.” By this she meant that she would send him back into exile for breaking his promise, barely two months old, to be her loyal servant. Only one of these lords was given the benefit of the doubt. “And for the Earl of Mar,” she said, “he hath assured me to be mine and faithfully ever.” Despite her severe irritation with him since her last visit to Stirling, his offenses, she believed, were out of character, and perhaps she could even believe them to be in her son’s best interest now that she knew Bothwell better.
Of the other lords, Maitland and Huntly were still at Holyrood, but only just. Bothwell’s arrogance was too much for either man to stomach. Maitland, ever vacillating, was already making overtures to the Confederate Lords at Stirling. Huntly too asked Mary for permission to leave the court, but she refused. In a fit of pique she exclaimed, “Your desire is but to do as your father before you!” Nothing could have been more offensive to the leader of the Gordon clan after the destruction of his family at the battle of Corrichie and his loyalty to Mary since his recall to help in defeating Moray.
The greatest fear, even among Mary’s diehard supporters, was that Bothwell was plotting to be named governor and protector of Scotland, and if possible king. According to Drury, he meant to proclaim himself king as soon as he got his hands on the heir to the throne. It was said that this would be his next big political gamble.
Although Bothwell still had no official title, he was already behaving as if he were king. On May 19, he issued a decree against counterfeit brass money, because an influx of fake foreign coins was driving sound money out of circulation and so preventing him paying his troops. This was a sensible move, but others were more partisan. On the 22nd, he reintroduced an old regulation for the compulsory attendance of privy councilors at Privy Council meetings which sought to force lords boycotting Mary’s court to return there.
Next day, he made a blatant bid to win new friends. An act of the Privy Council annulled all religious dispensations obtained from Mary that permitted her nobles or servants to worship in private as Catholics. Here was the Protestant Bothwell attempting to ally with the Kirk. The Catholic clergy had petitioned Mary to restore the Mass, but Bothwell blocked their suit. He sent for Craig, whom he had recently threatened to hang, only to reassure him that he would do everything to assist the Protestants against the Catholics and even attend sermons himself.
What mattered most, however, was military power. The lords were gathering their forces; a civil war was in the offing. On May 20, Mary was seen with Bothwell weeping bitterly. The pressure was increasing; Drury heard from his spies that she was suffering from renewed bouts of vomiting. Two days later, she decided to confront the challenge. She issued a proclamation mustering troops to restore law and order on the borders. But, said Drury, everyone knew they were to form the nucleus of a royal army.
Bothwell, meanwhile, sought to establish his foreign credentials. He wrote to Elizabeth, Cecil and Throckmorton, all on June 5. His letter to Cecil was couched in an offensively regal tone. “Seeing God has called me to this place,” he began, “I heartily desire you to persevere in all good offices.” It might have been Darnley speaking! Bothwell was less presumptuous in his letter to Elizabeth, but still overconfident. He was aware, he said, of the evil reports she had received of him, but protested they were wholly undeserved. He wanted to restore the amity with England. Men of greater birth might have been preferred to the high estate he now occupied, but none could be more eager for Elizabeth’s friendship.
It was a clumsy exercise in diplomacy. Bothwell wrote too much as an equal to Elizabeth, something Mary herself rarely did. According to Drury, Bothwell’s aim was to persuade the English to be no more than “lookers on” while he delivered a knockout blow to the lords.
It was to be a vain hope. After a furious exchange with Bothwell, Maitland left Holyrood with his wife, Mary Fleming, and joined the rebels. He avoided saying goodbye to Mary, who was in tears at the defection of the chief of the four Maries, her former playmate and cousin. Her marriage to Bothwell was forcing her to choose between her husband and one of her lifelong companions. And yet for some reason she lacked the will to put Bothwell in his place. She had married him for better or worse, and she would stick by her decision. The Confederate Lords had
by now increased to around thirty. No one doubted that it would be a struggle to the death. The atmosphere was becoming like a performance of Macbeth. Rumors and prophecies swept the country from the Highlands to the Lowlands. “There is a witch in the north,” said Drury, “that affirms the queen shall have yet to come two husbands more.” Bothwell would live but a year, and Mary would be burned as a witch. These prophecies were reported to Mary, who dismissed them out of hand, “and as yet it is said that she fears the same.”
A serious problem for Mary was lack of money. Her income as dowager queen of France meant that she had never before had to stint on personal expenses, raising taxes only once in her reign to pay for the banquets and entertainments at the baptism of Prince James. But then, she had never before attempted to muster an entire army independently of the nobles, even during the Chase-about Raid. Bothwell wanted to recruit five hundred professional infantry and two hundred cavalry, which would cost 5000 crowns.
Mary did the unthinkable. She trimmed her household budget to raise money. She stripped her cupboards bare and sent large quantities of gold and silver plate to the mint. Even the font of solid gold that Elizabeth had presented for the baptism was to be melted down and turned into coins worth £3 each. Ironically, it was so big and heavy it refused to melt completely, despite several attempts to do so.
On June 6, Bothwell took Mary from Holyrood to Borthwick Castle to escape from Morton and the Confederate Lords, who were planning an attack. They left in such a hurry, Mary only had time to pack what for her were bare essentials: a silver basin to wash in, a silver kettle for heating water, a small cabinet with a lock and key for her papers and a large supply of pins to hold back her hair.
At first Bothwell meant to withdraw to the Hermitage, but decided to stay at Borthwick, where they would be within easy reach of Edinburgh. The castle was well fortified. It consisted of a single, bleak square tower, three stories high. The walls were thirteen feet thick at the base, narrowing to six feet at the top. The roof was paved, with crenelated battlements from which a lookout could see for up to two miles. Nestled in a hollow, the castle was surrounded on three sides by steeply rising ground and water. It was accessible only by a drawbridge and so impregnable to anyone without artillery, but difficult to provision in a siege.
On the evening of the 10th, when Bothwell was about to go to bed, the Confederate Lords attempted a raid. Unbeknown to them, he escaped through a postern gate, then galloped away to Haddington to summon reinforcements. The lords called for him to come out, crying “Traitor, murderer, butcher!” When they realized he had foiled them, they camped beside the castle. It was the height of summer, and remained light until almost eleven o’clock. Mary went up to the roof and leaned over the battlements, joining in a shouting match with her enemies below in which insults were traded and she comfortably held her own.
As Drury described it, the lords assailed her with “divers undutiful and unseemly speeches used against their queen and sovereign, too evil and unseemly to be told, which poor princess, she did with her speech defend, wanting other means for her revenge.” It is a sign of the almost sacral respect accorded to anointed queens that, having written these words, Drury was so embarrassed by them he attempted to obliterate them with a series of slash marks.
The Confederate Lords retired to nearby Dalkeith, then set out next day for Edinburgh with two thousand men. When they arrived, the gates were barred against them, but a small advance party climbed over the town wall, broke open the Cowgate Port and occupied the town. The provost surrendered and the lords took control, issuing a resounding call to arms:
That the Earl of Bothwell having put violent hands on the queen’s person and shut her up in the castle of Dunbar, having proceeded to a dishonest marriage with Her Majesty after obtaining a divorce from his former wife, having already murdered the late king, and now attempting by his gathering together of forces to murder the young prince also; therefore they command all the lieges to be ready on three hours’ warning to pass forward with them to deliver the queen’s person [from captivity] and take revenge on the Earl Bothwell.
On June 12, these lords convoked a “secret council” at the Tolbooth, where they declared Bothwell “to be the principal author and murderer of the King’s Grace of good memory and ravishing of the Queen’s Majesty.” It was, in effect, a quasi-judicial verdict reversing Bothwell’s acquittal of Darnley’s murder and paving the way for his “impeachment” or “trial by combat” on the battlefield.
Winning control of Edinburgh was the key to the lords’ campaign. When Huntly and his allies attempted to retake the town, they were forced to seek refuge in the castle, where they supposed they would be protected by Sir James Balfour, its new captain and Bothwell’s nominee. Except that, in a move as brazen as it was fatal to Mary, Balfour changed sides. He decided to support the Confederate Lords in return for a promise of a pardon for his part in Darnley’s murder. He had been seething with resentment ever since Bothwell’s acquittal. His defection ensured that Huntly was kept in the castle—perhaps all too conveniently, as he had burned his bridges with Bothwell—until it was too late for him to assist Mary and Bothwell at the final showdown.
The Confederate Lords were riding high. Argyll, whose military power was greater than that of the other lords, was expected to rendezvous with them shortly. Meanwhile, Morton allowed his men to sack the Abbey-Kirk and the royal mint, where they took what remained of the gold and silver plate that was waiting to be coined, including the font, which was still substantially in one piece.
In these straitened circumstances, Mary recovered her resolve and her wits. She snapped out of her daze and once more became her old daring self. On the night of the 11th, she fled from Borthwick Castle in disguise. She had often enjoyed dressing up and pretending to be a man. This time it was for real. As Drury reported, she put on men’s clothes and rode “booted and spurred . . . that same night from Borthwick to Dunbar, whereof no man knew save My Lord Duke [Bothwell] and some of his servants, who met Her Majesty a mile from Borthwick and conveyed her to Dunbar.”
Almost as soon as they arrived at his castle, Bothwell rode off again, this time to Melrose, to rendezvous with his border retainers. They were the mainstay of his infantry, but did not all show up. Drury had bribed the Elliots of Liddesdale, the brigands who had ambushed and wounded Bothwell the previous year, to intercept and harry them before they joined Mary’s forces. The move was a serious setback. More devastating still was Balfour’s treachery, since it was on his advice that Mary, apparently in Bothwell’s absence, would deem it safe to leave Dunbar and return to the capital.
On June 13, the Confederate Lords beat the drum in the streets of Edinburgh to levy troops in the name of the lords and Prince James, offering to pay the fabulous rate of 20 shillings sterling a month. When Argyll finally arrived with his Highlanders, an army of three thousand men was in place.
Next day, Mary retaliated. She issued a proclamation commanding her loyal subjects to muster early the next morning at Musselburgh, the eastern gateway to the capital. To encourage her troops, she declared that within twenty-four hours she would be in Edinburgh or Leith. She then rode at the head of some 600 men to Haddington, where Bothwell joined her with 2000 more. She had a force of only 260 men when she set out, but gathered her adherents on the way. She also had the advantage of artillery, bringing three or four brass cannons from the munitions store at Dunbar.
Mary was burning with defiance. No longer was she insulated by the trappings of monarchy. Her hair was in disarray and she wore borrowed clothes. According to Drury, they were “after the attire and fashion of the women of Edinburgh.” She wore a “red petticoat with sleeves tied with points, a partlet, a velvet hat and a muffler.” The captain of Inchkeith, a Frenchman in Bothwell’s service who kept a diary of these events, said that she wore “a red skirt which scarcely reached halfway down her legs.”
Mary and Bothwell rode on to Seton, leaving their troops to rest overnight in the fie
lds beside Prestonpans. When the lords learned of their approach, they mobilized their forces and marched through the night toward Musselburgh. Morton and Atholl were in command. Their banner, carried between two spears at the head of their column, was a picture of Darnley lying dead under a tree with a young child kneeling beside him and crying, “Judge and revenge my cause O Lord.”
By five the next morning, Mary and Bothwell were on the road. The date was Sunday, June 15, exactly a month after their wedding. Their banners bore the saltire and the lion rampant, emblems of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, and of the crown. The rival armies came in sight of each other at Carberry Hill, an elevated ridge close to Inveresk, almost two miles southeast of Musselburgh. Mary positioned her forces a mile or so to the northwest of the village of Elphinstone, inside earthworks thrown up by Protector Somerset during the final campaign of the Rough Wooings. The lords had just crossed the old bridge at Musselburgh when they spotted Mary’s army on the higher ground. They marched a few miles up the east side of the River Esk until they reached the vicinity of Cousland, a village nearly two miles southeast of Carberry Hill, where they too established themselves.
It was a very long, hot day. The armies were more or less evenly matched; neither side was willing to risk a charge. After three hours of stalemate, du Croc, who had followed the Confederate Lords’ army at a distance, stepped forward and offered to mediate between the two sides. Speaking through an interpreter, he implored the lords to avoid bloodshed, arguing that it was one thing to attack Bothwell but quite another to engage an anointed queen in battle.