by John Guy
A plot was then hatched in which young Willie Douglas, a page in the castle known as “little Willie” or “orphan Willie”—he was possibly an illegitimate son of Sir William Douglas, the Laird of Lochleven—agreed to row Mary across the loch. Willie was barely sixteen, but was more than willing to help rescue the charismatic queen. He joined forces with George Douglas, who waited patiently at Kinross on the mainland with Lord Seton and a small force.
On the afternoon of Sunday, May 2, while the sun was high in the sky and the Douglas family were enjoying their May Day weekend, Willie Douglas sabotaged all the boats moored beside the castle jetty except one. Then, shortly after seven, when the laird and his family were at supper, he stealthily made off with the key to the main gate of the castle, which the laird had left on the table. He signaled to Mary’s turret and she came down to the courtyard. She had exchanged clothes with Mary Seton, who stayed behind to impersonate her in case the alarm was raised.
After they passed through the main gate, Willie locked it behind him and threw the key into the mouth of a nearby cannon. He helped Mary into the boat and rowed her across the loch. They were met as they landed by George Douglas, who had stolen the Laird of Lochleven’s best horses, conveniently stabled on the mainland.
Mary rode off at a gallop through Fife to North Queensferry, where she crossed the Firth of Forth. When she arrived on the southern shore, she was escorted to Niddrie, one of Lord Seton’s fortresses situated between Edinburgh and Linlithgow, where she rested for the night.
After almost eleven months of captivity, Mary was free again. She was exultant, enjoying every moment of the ride and the late-spring evening. At Niddrie, she scribbled several hasty letters to her friends. She also sent a messenger to Dunbar with orders to fortify the castle in her name.
Early the next day, Mary rode west to Hamilton, where her supporters rallied to her and she established a temporary court. Moray was in Glasgow when he heard the news of her escape. The lords were at first incredulous; then, seeing the danger, they immediately ordered their forces to muster at Glasgow.
Mary was reluctant to engage in a battle. The memory of Carberry Hill was too painful. But she was still popular. The lords’ propaganda had been effective only as long as she was in their clutches. Within a week, six thousand men rallied to her cause. Huntly, Seton and the Hamiltons, the family of Châtelherault, were beside her. They urged her to fight, and she agreed. “By battle let us try it,” she declared. Already several of the lords were defecting from Moray and joining her camp. They included Argyll, who had been shocked by his queen’s deposition but had not dared to oppose it alone.
When Mary rode toward Dumbarton at the head of her army, her forces outnumbered Moray’s by a third. When the two armies clashed at Langside, just outside Glasgow, on the morning of Thursday, May 13, the result appeared to be a foregone conclusion. It was not. Moray threw all he could into his attacks. He knew everything turned on this day. Mary now hated her half-brother even more than Morton for his role in her downfall. She was determined to be avenged. She would never forgive him for the way he had played on her fears and emotions at Lochleven. She had been thinking it over repeatedly as she feigned resignation at her captivity. It was plain to her that all along he had wanted her throne for himself. If the victory was hers, Moray would be put on trial for treason.
The result was a crushing defeat for Mary. The battle got off to a disastrous start. Argyll had long suffered from a recurrent illness called “the stone,” an omnibus term in the sixteenth century for a variety of internal ailments. Now he collapsed from a sudden fit, throwing Mary’s command structure into disarray.
On Moray’s side, by contrast, Kirkcaldy of Grange organized a brilliant ambush of her vanguard as it passed along a narrow lane. The fighting lasted only three quarters of an hour. Staring defeat in the face from her vantage point on a nearby hill, Mary fled to Dumfries, riding sixty miles at a stretch. After that, she took cover during the day and emerged only at night; such was her terror of falling again into her brother’s hands.
Mary covered the last thirty miles to Dundrennan at night. She hid in the abbey, from where she wrote an urgent appeal for aid to Elizabeth, enclosing the diamond ring that her “sister queen” had sent her in 1563 as a token of love and friendship to be redeemed. What she could not know was that as she put the finishing touches to her letter, Elizabeth was gloating over the most precious of Mary’s pearls, plundered from the royal cabinet at Holyrood and sold to her by Moray.
Mary did not wait for Elizabeth’s reply. She was too afraid. On the 16th, she embarked on a fishing boat to cross Solway Firth, landing in England at about seven in the evening, close to Workington, about thirty miles from Carlisle.
At dawn, she wrote a second letter to Elizabeth. She asked to see her cousin and to have her aid and support in recovering her throne and defeating her rebels. She expected to gather fresh troops and return shortly to Scotland. But her decision to cross the border was a catastrophic mistake. It precipitated a crisis in England, where it was feared that the northern and overwhelmingly Catholic counties would rise to support her, leading to civil war in both countries. Elizabeth was still acutely sympathetic to Mary; what Moray and the rebel lords had done was unconscionable. They had imprisoned and deposed an anointed queen, a crime against God that was no less heinous than Darnley’s assassination, perhaps more so from a monarch’s point of view.
But Cecil got there first. He saw instantly the danger posed by Mary’s unexpected arrival and had her placed under strict guard in the castle at Carlisle. Her movements were to be closely watched. He was determined that the lords’ charges of adultery and complicity in Darnley’s murder should be investigated, because his goal, unlike Elizabeth’s, was to keep her off the throne.
In another of his unremitting memos, Cecil set out his case in detail. A trial of Mary’s crimes, he argued with almost hairsplitting logic, would lead to one of two outcomes. If she was acquitted, conditions must be placed on her return to Scotland. They were none other than his old favorites. Mary would be required to forge a permanent (and Protestant)
alliance in which she acknowledged Scotland’s status as a satellite state by ratifying the treaty of Edinburgh in its original form.
If she was found guilty, she might—if her culpability was minor—be allowed to go into exile, but only if Moray was permitted to continue as regent in Scotland and rule in the name of Prince James. If her guilt was greater, then the punishment must fit the crime. Mary must “live in some convenient place without possessing of her kingdom, where she may not move any new troubles.” By this Cecil meant a prison in England.
For Cecil, Mary’s flight to England was an almost providential finale to the reign of the woman he always regarded as his sinister antagonist. For Mary, now confined to her “lodgings” at Carlisle, it was heads he wins, tails she loses. She wrote again to Elizabeth. “Do not,” she pleaded, “[be] as the serpent that stoppeth his hearing, for I am no enchantress but your sister and natural cousin.” But where Cecil was concerned, it was Mary who was the serpent and the enchantress.
Within a fortnight of her arrival, Mary knew that her whole future lay in Cecil’s hands. She wrote to him on May 29 in the vain hope of throwing herself on his mercy:
Mester Ceciles. The renown that you enjoy of being a lover of equity, and the sincere and faithful service you give to the queen, madame my good sister, and consequently to those who are of her blood and high dignity, invite me to write to you above all others, in my just quarrel, at this time of trouble, in the hope of obtaining the assistance of your good counsel.
She had briefed her messenger to appeal to Cecil’s sense of honor and fair play, and her letter ended with the words “Recommending myself to you and your wife, I pray God to keep you in his holy care. Your very good friend, Marie.”
When Cecil read this letter, all he could do was laugh. He was already in touch with Moray, from whom he now demanded the “manner of the proof
s” and other “evidence” against Mary. Her trial was fast approaching and the spider’s web all but complete.
23
Bothwell’s Story
BOTHWELL ALSO GAVE his side of the story in the months following his flight. He dictated a full if often unreliable account of everything he alleged had happened to him, starting with Mary’s return to Scotland and ending with his flight from the field at Carberry Hill. He then vividly described his escape into exile and his imprisonment in Denmark, a tale of such daring and bravado it excelled his theft of the gold coins sent covertly by Cecil to aid the rebel Lords of the Congregation in 1559.
In many respects, Bothwell’s story is an anticlimax: its chief value is to confirm our impression of his self-serving duplicity. But his account is still worthy of our attention. He had always been a man with a rough side and a smooth side, and to allow him the opportunity to tell his own story is at least to refrain from condemning him unheard.
After leaving Mary at Carberry Hill, Bothwell had galloped with a handful of his followers to Dunbar. There he was left alone for a fortnight. He was lulled into a false sense of security; the vengeful and implacable Morton was in no hurry to begin the chase. But the Confederate Lords meant to hunt him down. On July 17, 1567, they outlawed him as a rebel. A bounty of 1000 crowns was offered to anyone who would bring him back a prisoner to Edinburgh.
By then he had already sailed north to Banff, in Aberdeenshire, in the hope of raising troops. This was Gordon country, where Huntly, Bothwell’s erstwhile brother-in-law, dominated the local retinues. But Huntly refused to assist him, saying that “he heartily wished both his sister and the queen rid of so wicked a husband.” Bothwell withdrew to Spynie Castle, just north of Elgin, the home of his great-uncle Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, who had supervised his early education.
When Spynie became too hot to hold him, he fled farther north to Kirkwall, the capital of the Orkney Islands, where he planned to levy a fleet. Since Bothwell was Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland, Kirkwall Castle belonged to him, but its keeper, Gilbert Balfour, another of the siblings of his former ally Sir James Balfour, denied him entry and trained the castle guns on his ships.
Bothwell stayed for only two days. He sailed northward again to the Shetland Islands, where Olaf Sinclair, his mother’s kinsman, provided him with money and supplies. Bothwell now planned to escape to France, hoping to rally Guise support for Mary.
The lords began the pursuit. On August 19, Kirkcaldy of Grange and Sir William Murray, the Laird of Tullibardine, set sail from Dundee. Their warships were the fastest in Scotland, fitted with cannons and carrying no fewer than four hundred musketeers. Their orders were to seize Bothwell, if they could find him, and execute him on the spot. The last thing Morton wanted was for his deadly enemy to be brought back alive to testify against him in a trial for Darnley’s murder. Until this point, Bothwell could not have denounced his co-conspirators without admitting his own guilt, but now he had nothing to lose.
Six days later, the pursuers found their prey. They sailed into Bressay Sound, close to Lerwick, the chief port of the Shetland Islands, where Bothwell’s ships lay at anchor.
When Kirkcaldy came into view, Bothwell and many of his men were ashore. Kirkcaldy saw his chance and raced forward, but Bothwell leaped aboard his own ship and cut the anchor cable. With reckless pluck, he sailed over some sunken rocks, grazing the hull, but tempting Kirkcaldy to follow him so that his vessel was holed and sunk.
Bothwell escaped to Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, where his squadron regrouped. But Kirkcaldy kept coming. He had three warships left. The rivals met in a battle lasting three hours. All seemed to be over when Bothwell’s mainmast was shot away by a cannonball, but no sooner had Kirkcaldy sent a boarding party to capture him than a violent gale blew up.
Bothwell, an expert seaman, escaped with three of his ships. Kirkcaldy chased him for 60 miles, but Bothwell sailed southeast before the storm, putting an increasing distance between himself and his pursuers and covering the 250 miles of the North Sea between the Shetlands and Norway in record time.
Kirkcaldy had to return home empty-handed. Bothwell had gotten safely away. He hove to at Karmøy Island, twenty miles northwest of Stavanger. No sooner had he put down his anchor than he was arrested and his vessels brought north to Bergen. He was first detained on a charge of piracy The rulers of Europe were watching every stage of the crisis in Scotland. The governor of Bergen Castle, Eric Rosencrantz, believing he might have Bothwell in his clutches, revealed nothing and entertained him lavishly while awaiting instructions from above.
By an amazing coincidence, who should be living in Bergen with her mother but Anna Throndsen, the beautiful Norwegian girl with whom he had dallied seven years earlier (see chapter 14). Anna confirmed Bothwell’s identity and promptly sued him for breach of his promise to marry her. Seeing greater troubles ahead, he settled out of court. He promised her an annuity, to be paid in Scotland, and gave her the smaller of his two remaining ships. This was enough to halt the legal proceedings so that he could concentrate on his next hurdle.
Soon Rosencrantz received his orders from the king of Denmark and Norway, Frederick II. He was to arrest Bothwell, whom Frederick wished to exploit as a lever to recover the Norse-speaking Orkney and Shetland Islands from Scotland. The islands had belonged to Denmark until 1469, when they had been pledged as the dowry of Margaret, daughter of Christian I of Denmark, who was to marry Mary’s greatgrandfather James III. The Scottish Parliament had legally annexed them in 1472.
At first Bothwell denied possessing any jewels or valuables, or any letters or papers. Then, when he realized he would not be allowed back to his flagship, he admitted to hiding certain papers in the ballast. When his letter case was opened, it was found to contain Mary’s parchment creating him Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland, as well as proclamations and other documents denouncing him as a murderer and traitor. There was said to be a letter from Mary, written after her return to Edinburgh in the hands of the lords, lamenting the treatment she had received. Since the document was never transcribed or filed away, it is impossible to tell if it had ever existed.
On September 23, Bothwell was examined by the magistrates of Bergen, after which he was put on board one of Frederick’s ships and taken south to Denmark. He was sent to the castle of Copenhagen, to be held as a state prisoner. The Confederate Lords were pressing for his extradition, and Frederick was caught in the middle.
Bothwell insisted that he was on his way to France to seek help for Mary, to which end he appealed to Charles IX. This time the letter did survive. It is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, written in fluent French and in Bothwell’s immaculate italic script. He asked for urgent aid for Mary and himself, but Moray had beaten him to it. He had already denounced Bothwell as a pirate, a murderer and a traitor. He had also reassured Charles of the entente that existed between the Confederate Lords and France, which he said could prosper only if Charles pressed Denmark to repatriate Bothwell for trial.
Charles decided to stay neutral, and so did Frederick, who treated Bothwell generously. He allowed him to live in comfort, to wear velvet clothes, to read books, and occasionally to go hunting or shooting under guard, although he was otherwise confined to his rooms.
It was then that Bothwell decided to write his memoirs. He believed that Frederick was unduly influenced by the Confederate Lords’ propaganda. He was out to justify himself, shaping his story to create the most favorable impression. The main action began with his recall from France ten days before Mary’s marriage to Darnley. Bothwell saw himself as the chivalrous knight of medieval romance, hurrying home to rescue his lady from her wicked barons:
But the seditious lords did all they could to oppose her, because they wished above everything else that the queen should have no children, and because they could not bear that anyone should exercise authority in the realm beside themselves. They could clearly foresee that their own influence would be severely r
educed by such a marriage.
On Bothwell’s return, Mary gave him an opportunity to prove himself:
The queen put me in command of an army composed of her loyal subjects and my own particular friends, with whom I did my utmost to drive the Earl of Moray out of Scotland into England. After I had achieved this, Parliament was summoned to enquire and determine as to what goods and estates were to be forfeited to the crown.
Bothwell had fully appreciated that a principal motive of the Rizzio plotters had been to preempt the forfeitures in Parliament of the rebels of the Chase-about Raid:
In order to avert these sentences of forfeiture, those of the Earl of Moray’s allies who were still at the queen’s court stirred up fresh troubles by organizing the murder of Signor David, an Italian, which was done at suppertime in the queen’s cabinet at Edinburgh Castle [Bothwell’s mistake: it was Holyroodhouse], when none of her guards was present or even her usual attendants. And if (to avoid danger) some others including myself had not escaped through a back window, we should have been no better dealt with . . . at the very least, we should have been forced to connive at so villainous a deed.
Bothwell did not hesitate to emphasize his loyalty and service to Mary, but in doing so made a Freudian slip: