by John Guy
Mary’s side of the story was that she had known nothing of the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond before Bothwell had secretly procured it. She claimed he had extracted the lords’ signatures deceitfully, pretending she had already sanctioned the bond and thus agreed to marry him:
And in the meantime, he went about by practicing with the lords secretly to make them his friends, and to procure their consent to the furtherance of his intents. And [he] so far proceeded by these means with them, before that ever the same came to our knowledge, that our whole estates being here assembled in Parliament, he obtained a writing subscribed with all their hands, wherein they not only granted their consent to our marriage with him, but also obliged themselves to set him forward thereto with their lives and goods, and to be enemies to all who would disturb or impede the same. This bond he obtained by giving them to understand that we were content therewith.
As soon as Bothwell had the bond in his possession, he began to hint at a possible marriage, but Mary rejected his suit:
And the same [bond] being once obtained, he began afar off to reveal his intentions to us and to assay if he might by humble suit purchase our goodwill. But finding our answer nothing corresponding to his desire and casting before his eyes all doubts that usually men use to resolve with themselves in similar enterprises . . . he resolved with himself to follow forth his good fortune.
Mary denied that her abduction at Almond Bridge had been collusive. She had known nothing about it until she was kidnapped:
He suffered not the matter long to sleep, but within four days thereafter, finding opportunity by reason we were passed secretly toward Stirling to visit the prince our dearest son, in our returning he awaited us by the way, accompanied with a great force, and led us with all diligence to Dunbar.
In what part we took that manner of dealing, but specially how strange we find it of him of whom we doubted less than of any subject we had, is easy to be imagined.
Mary claimed to have been surprised and shocked by her abduction. Once she had reached Dunbar, she had censured Bothwell for his unseemly behavior, but he had paid court to her and won her over:
Being there, we reproached him on account of the honor he had to be so esteemed of us, the favor we had always shown him, his ingratitude, with all other remonstrances which might serve to rid us out of his hands.
Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his answer and words but gentle: that he would honor and serve us and no wise offend us. He asked pardon of the boldness he had used . . . and there began to make us a discourse of his whole life, how unfortunate he had been to find men his enemies whom he had never offended; how their malice never ceased to assault him at all occasions, albeit unjustly; what calumnies had they spread upon him touching the odious violence perpetrated on the person of the king our late husband.
Bothwell had then produced his trump card, the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond:
And when he saw us like to reject all his suit and offers, in the end he showed us how far he was proceeded with our whole nobility, and what they had promised him in their own handwritings . . .
In the end, when we saw no hope to be rid of him, never man in Scotland once making an effort to procure our deliverance, for that it might appear by their handwritings and silence at that time, that he had won them all, we were compelled to mitigate our displeasure, and began to think upon that he propounded. And then [we] were content to lay before our eyes the service he had done in times past, the offer of his continuance hereafter, how unwilling our people are to receive a foreigner unacquainted with their laws and customs, that they would not allow us long to remain unmarried . . .
Mary’s account of her twelve-day stay at Dunbar is deeply disingenuous. She had been a fool for love. She knew she had done wrong in sleeping with a married man, and her excuse that no one had made the effort to rescue her can be countered by the fact that she made no attempt whatever to escape, even when Bothwell was away in Edinburgh, encouraging his wife to file her divorce petition.
Against this, her insistence that she had married Bothwell to seal his role as queen’s protector is persuasive. She could make a strong case for deploying him as an instrument against the noble factions, even if his treatment of her as a woman had bruised her dignity and sense of honor. Her explanation is that she felt she had no other option, wearied and broken as she had become by the relentless infighting of the lords and the threat of bloodshed:
[Finally, we realized] that this realm, being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man, who must take pain upon his person in the execution of justice and suppressing of their insolence that would rebel, the travail 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 returned to Scotland . . .
After he had by this means and many others brought us on the way to his intent, he partly extorted and partly obtained our promise to take him to our husband. And yet not content therewith, fearing ever some alterations, he would not be satisfied with all the just reasons we could allege to have the consummation of the marriage delayed as had been most reasonable . . .
But as by his act of bravado in the beginning he had won the first point, so ceased he never until by persuasions and importunate suit, accompanied none the less with force, he had finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and in such form as he thought might best serve his turn. We cannot dissemble that he has used us otherwise than we would have wished or yet have deserved at his hand . . .
Mary always refused to acknowledge the gusto with which she had raced into her third marriage. When it had quickly turned sour, she would be willing to confess that Bothwell had treated her brutally. And yet she had made her choice and would stick by it. Even while enumerating his faults, she still wrote of him in the way she wished him to be:
Now since it is passed and cannot be brought back again, we will make the best of it, and it must be thought, as it is in effect, that he is our husband whom we will both love and honor, so that all that profess themselves to be our friends must profess the like friendship toward him who is inseparably joined with us. And albeit he has in some points or ceremonies behaved imprudently, we are content to impute this to his affection toward us.
A single sentence in the bishop’s instructions would encapsulate Mary’s understanding of her plight: “We cannot dissemble that he has used us otherwise than we would have wished or yet have deserved at his hand.” This realization must, on deeper reflection, have torn her apart in her prison at Lochleven, where a month or so after her arrival she would miscarry twins, her issue by Bothwell.
Mary’s diplomatic efforts were doomed to failure. When the bishop reached Paris, he was coolly received. The same was true of Melville’s mission to London. In fact, by the time the ambassador presented himself to Elizabeth, Bothwell had already fled from Carberry Hill, making the visit irrelevant.
But if Mary’s story fell into oblivion, Elizabeth was utterly scandalized that a fellow ruler had been imprisoned in an island fortress by her rebellious lords. She could not yet bring herself to write to Mary in her own hand, but she dictated a letter in which she threw her weight behind her fellow monarch, cousin and close kinswoman. On the same day, she sent another to the lords, expressing her grief and anger at what they had done.
The difference in the approaches of Elizabeth and her chief minister over how to deal with Mary had never been more striking. Elizabeth sent Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Scotland as her crisis manager. He, like his former protégé, Leicester, and quite unlike Cecil, had become one of Mary’s lesser champions. He had even become a supporter of her claim to the English succession under the right conditions, and had been one of those backing Elizabeth’s offer to negotiate a new “treaty of perpetual amity” that would replace the offending clauses of the treaty of Edinburgh after Mary’s illness at Jedburgh.
Throckmorton was not welcome in Scotland. From the rebel lords’ standpoint, he had to be neutralized. For this they turned to Cecil, who wrote a memo of instructions for Throckmorton that greatly elaborated and substantially contradicted Elizabeth’s own. Whereas Elizabeth wanted Mary restored to the throne, Cecil laid down the only terms on which she might be freed. She was to be stripped of her authority, which would be vested in a council of nobles. She might be styled queen, but only nominally. In all other respects, Cecil planned to restore the quasi-republican “States of Scotland” that had governed after the deposition of Mary’s mother during the lords’ first revolt.
At the end of the memo, Cecil jotted down these words: “Athalia interempta per Joas[h] regem”—“Athalia was killed so that Joash could be king.” It is one of the most revealing comments he ever made. A quotation from 2 Chronicles in the Old Testament, it is the very same text that Knox used to justify the use of armed resistance against “idolatrous” female rulers. Athalia was the perfect exemplar. She (like Mary) ruled in person as queen of Israel for six years, but because of her moral turpitude, the high priest joined with the nobles to depose and kill her along with her idol-worshiping acolytes. The nobles made a covenant with God, installing the young Prince Joash, then seven years old (for whom read Mary’s own son, Prince James, then one year old), in her place. After Athalia was murdered, the nobles ruled in the name of King Joash until he reached the age of majority, just as successive regents and their allies would attempt to rule in Scotland.
When Cecil made that jotting, he had seen the hand of God in history. He read the biblical text (as Knox had done) as a prophecy applying to Mary. His note proves that regicide was already in his sights. For Cecil, the spider weaving his web in London, it was but the shortest of steps from a round tower at Lochleven to a scaffold draped in black at Fotheringhay. His mantra had always been Elizabeth’s “safety,” and he had regarded Mary as the instigator and intended beneficiary of an international Catholic conspiracy ever since her ushers had cried “Make way for the queen of England” as she walked to chapel with the dauphin.
Throckmorton was caught squarely between the conflicting policies of Elizabeth and Cecil. As he confided to the Earl of Bedford, “I never was in so busy and dangerous a legation in my life.” The lords endlessly told him that Mary “will not consent by any persuasion to abandon the Lord Bothwell for her husband, but avoweth constantly that she will live and die with him.” But he was never allowed to see her and hear this for himself, nor was she allowed to see him. What the lords said to Throckmorton was what they (and Cecil) wanted Elizabeth to hear. They several times promised that if Mary would divorce Bothwell, she might be restored to her throne. But this was less a serious proposal than a delaying tactic to appease Elizabeth, who was becoming more and more impatient and threatening to go to war to free Mary from her prison. All along, Morton and his staunchest ally, Lord Lindsay, Bothwell’s challenger, were set on deposing Mary or forcing her to abdicate.
On July 24, 1567, exactly three months after her abduction by Bothwell, she was lying on her bed, weak and despairing after her miscarriage, when she heard footsteps on the stairs of her tower. Through the door burst Lindsay with a delegation from the lords. Three documents were put before her. One declared that she was so depleted in body, mind and spirit by the responsibilities of government that she could no longer continue, and so abdicated in favor of her son, whose coronation she authorized. By the second document she was to appoint Moray, now hastening home from France, to be regent until Prince James reached the age of majority. By the third she nominated Morton and others to serve as interim regents until Moray took up the reins of power.
At first Mary refused to sign. Seeing her hesitate, Lindsay ordered her to rise from her bed and get ready to depart, swearing that she would be marooned for life on an island in the middle of the sea or else thrown into the loch. Finally, he swore a great oath and threatened to cut her throat.
Mary had no choice; she cannot have known of Elizabeth’s threat to go to war to defend her. She put her signature on each of the papers, but managed to blurt out, “When God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these, for it is done against my will.”
Five days later, the lords crowned Prince James in the parish church at Stirling. It was the worst-attended coronation in Scottish history. Morton swore the one-year-old child’s coronation oath for him, and Knox preached the sermon. Then the lords staged a spectacle. A thousand bonfires were lit in the towns and villages, and in Edinburgh the castle guns fired a salute. But the people were sullen. “It appeared,” Throckmorton noted wryly, “they rejoiced more at the inauguration of the new prince than they did sorrow at the deprivation of their queen.” But their reaction to the coronation had been so muted, it was clear that they were longing for some stability, and outside Edinburgh there was almost no support for the new regime.
When Elizabeth heard of Mary’s forced abdication, she sent at once for Cecil. When he arrived, he was harangued (as he informed Throckmorton) in a “great offensive speech” on the grounds that he had failed to do anything for Mary.
Elizabeth was almost speechless with rage. Cecil answered, he said, “as warily as I could.” But to no avail. Elizabeth was so incensed, she once more threatened to declare war on the Scots. She refused all Cecil’s protests and counterarguments. It was one of their classic rows, and it turned on the nature and power of monarchy. Mary was an anointed queen, accountable to God alone. Elizabeth wanted it demonstrated that no such coercion would be tolerated. She particularly had her own English subjects in mind. Now it was she and not Mary who was brooding over the potential for a domino effect.
Cecil artfully replied that a declaration of war might precipitate what Elizabeth most feared—Mary’s assassination in the dead of night. He was muddying the waters to help his Scottish allies, because he knew that with the passage of time Elizabeth’s anger would subside. He had the nerve to joke later that it usually took three to six weeks.
Mary was kept in stricter confinement after her abdication than before. Moray had returned to Edinburgh on August 11, and when he visited his sister a few days later, she reproached him for her treatment, weeping bitterly. Far from showing any sympathy or affection for her, he was as cold and calculating as ever, scolding her and giving her a lecture on good government. They talked until one in the morning, when she was too tired to go on.
Next day, they continued where they left off. Moray was gentler now, but out of cunning rather than kindness. His purpose was clear: he wanted his sister to promise not to try and escape or seek aid from England or France. He used every technique of psychological intimidation to induce a sense of gratitude in her, alternately threatening and comforting her, and promising to mitigate the worst plans of Lindsay and his friends if she cooperated, even though they were really acting on his behalf.
Moray got what he wanted. Mary “took him in her arms and kissed him, and showed herself very well satisfied, requiring him in any ways not to refuse the regency of the realm, but to accept it at her desire.” Such was the devious way in which her brother won her acquiescence in what she had previously agreed only under duress. On August 22, Moray was proclaimed regent. He had led the lords who deposed Mary’s mother eight years before, and now he had done it again. But the fight was far from over.
When Mary recovered from the trauma of her miscarriage and abdication and started to take stock, she knew she had been cheated. She was determined to recover her honor and her throne. She bided her time, resting and eating properly. She passed the days in sewing and embroidery, which she loved. She played cards. She even danced to the fiddle and the bagpipes. She had managed to obtain a small domestic staff: five or six ladies, four or five gentlewomen, a doctor, a cook and two chamber servants, one of whom was French. Mary Seton, the most faithful of the four Maries, was still continually by her side.
Mary put on weight through lack of exercise, but her wits were as sharp as ever. She began
to plan her escape. She sent a ring to Mary Fleming, now the wife of Maitland, himself wavering in his support for the lords. She contacted Mary Livingston, another of the four Maries, who had married John Sempill, the younger son of the Catholic Lord Sempill. Although Moray had won over Lord Sempill to his cause by bribery, his son was loyal to Mary and was at the center of an unsuccessful plan to rescue her by assaulting the castle by night.
Mary then turned to George Douglas, nicknamed “Pretty Geordie,” the dashing and handsome younger brother of the Laird of Lochleven. Nine years younger than Mary, he fell in love with her and offered to serve her. He had witnessed her forced abdication and was determined to help her, sending her secret messages through her gentlewomen, for which he was expelled from the castle by Moray and the laird and forbidden to return.
But George’s loyalty and Mary’s courage and ingenuity overcame such obstacles. On March 25, 1568, nine months after Mary had first been imprisoned at Lochleven, her first serious attempt to escape, in the disguise of a laundress, failed when she was recognized by one of the boatmen halfway across the loch. He tried to snatch at her muffler to see her face better, and when she threw up her hands, he noticed that they were “very fair and white”—the hands of a queen and not a washerwoman. He turned the boat back to the castle, but promised Mary he would not tell the laird about her scheme.