by Jane Dunn
This was the popular verdict too. It had been common knowledge for months that Mary and her husband were estranged, it was thought irreconcilably so. The queen made no secret of the fact that she could hardly bear to spend a couple of hours in Darnley’s company. There had been many rumours, some of a plot to kill the king, one reaching the ears of the Cardinal of Lorraine who sent a letter to Mary at about the time of the murder urging her ‘to take heed whom she trusted with her secrets’, warning her ‘that her husband would shortly be slain’.29 Her ambassador in Paris, Archbishop Beaton, had also written at the end of January of a similar but vague threat of ‘some surprise to be trafficked in your country’.30 Although in her reply to Beaton’s letter on the day following the murder Mary expressed her fear that she too had been the target of the assassins, popular opinion did not share her interpretation of events. Already it was bruited that Bothwell was the main perpetrator of this murder. It was even suggested that he would similarly rid himself of his own inconvenient spouse so that he could pursue his main purpose, his marriage with the queen. Local anger was beginning to build and Mary’s nobles were eddying around the drama, collecting into rival factions and building their defences.
Apart from the much publicized antipathy Mary bore her husband, there was one act of hers so seemingly incriminating it added pathos to the king’s position and apparent malice aforethought to the queen’s. As Darnley had hurried away from Stirling Castle to return to his father’s stronghold in Glasgow he had immediately fallen ill. It was thought initially he was poisoned but then pustules erupted on his skin and smallpox was diagnosed (although there was a possibility it was secondary syphilis). During his convalescence, Mary came to visit him, bringing with her a horse-litter with which to return him to the environs of Edinburgh, she said the better to nurse him back to health.
The sudden and remarkable change in the queen’s demeanour towards her loathed husband was hard enough to explain without suggesting some ulterior motive on her part. Perhaps Mary feared a plot by Darnley against her – and there had been rumours of this in the general mill of speculation – and so felt safer if she had her husband in sight and under her influence. Then again, there were even more insistent rumours of a plot against the king: the plotters would have required that he be removed from his Lennox power base before they could act against him. Least likely was the possibility that Mary had suddenly experienced a Pauline conversion on the road to Glasgow and decided to save her marriage. Therefore, to extract Darnley from the relative safety of his own family demesne and carry him back to the bosom of his enemies, for whatever reason, required a certain inducement. Mary used her considerable charms, and the naivety and concupiscence of her young husband as her means of persuasion. There was little doubt that she promised Darnley they would resume sexual relations if he agreed to accompany her back to Edinburgh.
Mary may not have known that the plot to kill her husband was about to be enacted. She may have known that something was in the wind but have chosen not to enquire too closely what it might be. It is hard to believe, though, that Mary, at the centre of a small and gossipy court, should have been entirely ignorant of something known to all Europe, that the King of Scots was about to be murdered. Certainly she had bewailed in public and in private her anguish at being married to the man and had expressed in spirit at least Henry II’s notorious rant against the thorn of Thomas Becket, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’
Whatever Mary in anger and despair might have wished, when faced with the actual fact there was little doubt that she was shocked by the deed. Bothwell reported that he found Mary ‘sorrowful and quiet’,31 a natural reaction to such an extraordinary and violent event and yet also entirely in keeping with any foreknowledge that some murderous plot was in train.
This situation psychologically mirrored Elizabeth’s shock and grief when she finally gave permission for the long-expected execution of Mary herself. The momentous act of regicide always caused a seismic shock, with ramifications much deeper and wider than the purely personal tragedy. As her cousin would be required to do two decades later, Mary now had to face her responsibilities and placate her conscience over a similarly unnatural act: a king was dead and, directly or indirectly, by her will. The rebellion of her subjects and loss of her crown were not inevitable, but to reverse the vortex that had swept her up she would have to prove her wit as a politician and her self-discipline as a prince.
Elizabeth, liking always to be in control, found the rapid and anarchic procession of events in Scotland alarming. She was made uneasy by the unnatural act of insurgency against any monarch, even though she had given her share of support to Mary’s rebels in the past. She was never so secure that she did not seek promptly to disarm rebel activity in her own realm. Still unwilling to believe that Mary had any part in the violence against her husband, Elizabeth feared that it might have been due to a general lawlessness that could infect her own nobility. She increased the guard on her palace and ordered that all the doors leading to her private rooms were to be locked, save one, and the keys put in safe keeping.
Despite the shock and rumours rife in Scotland and throughout Europe, there was a general belief that Mary’s reputation could still be salvaged. Her crown was still safe, as long as she acted prudently and acted fast. What she did next was of critical importance. Lord Herries, one of Mary’s supporting nobles, arrived promptly in Edinburgh with fifty mounted men, as protection against Bothwell, for what he had come to say concerned the rumours that Mary was to marry the murderer of her husband. Herries fell on his knees before her and begged her not to marry the earl but ‘to remember her honour and dignity and the safety of the prince, which all would be in danger of loss’ if she was to proceed on this calamitous path.32
Guzman de Silva, sympathetic to Mary and a confidant of Elizabeth, wrote to Philip II, ‘every day it becomes clearer that the Queen of Scotland must take steps to prove that she had no hand in the death of her husband, if she is to prosper in her claims to the succession here’.33 The advice, however, expected to carry most weight came from the one woman Mary had always sought to impress with her credentials to be named first in line for the English throne. Elizabeth was jealous of her reputation as a prince and expected Mary to show the same scrupulous care of what she believed to be a role given to her by God. Cool in matters of religion the English queen may have been, but for her the burden of monarchy was a sacred calling that involved personal sacrifice and solitary duty.
Elizabeth had learnt much from the scandal of the death of Amy Robsart, Lord Robert’s wife, six and a half years before. She knew then how important it had been for her own probity to distance herself immediately from her favourite, and make sure that an enquiry was initiated and justice seen to be done. Although it might have been expected that Elizabeth would now be pleased to see her rival so undone, her reaction to Mary’s parlous situation was much more human and magnanimous. Her letter to her cousin sent on 24 February was one of the most vivid she wrote, urgent in its concern and sincere in its emotional force. She wrote in French, to ally herself with Mary and to imbue her words with a visceral immediacy: ‘Madame’, she addressed her without embellishment, before launching straight into one of the best opening sentences in Elizabethan prose:
My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely have the wits to write about it.
She then expressed her particular concern for Mary’s reputation and welfare, surrounded as she was by so much ugly rumour. Aware that the Queen of Scots was singularly lacking in good advice, with ‘no wiser counselors than myself’, Elizabeth excused her frankness on the grounds that she was a ‘faithful cousin’ and ‘affectionate friend’ determined to preserve Mary’s honour. With this in mind she offered the nub of her advice in the most ringing of tones: ‘I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thi
ng so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you [Bothwell] if the thing touches him, and that no persuasion will prevent you from making an example out of this to the world: that you are both a noble princess and a loyal wife.’34
With this letter Elizabeth showed how important she thought it that the supreme status of monarchy should not be besmirched by the human failings of those called to rule. It revealed too how she needed Mary’s solidarity in ‘making an example to the world’ that queens could exercise their power with all the courage and rational decisiveness of kings, defusing some of the oppressive weight of prejudice against them both.
Sadly, Mary, from this point on, was not only bound to fail to impress anyone as to her ability as a monarch, she failed so spectacularly that she only reinforced every sixteenth-century stereotype of women as weak-willed, intellectually challenged and emotionally corrupt. Even in the confused aftermath of Darnley’s death she seemed to be increasingly in Bothwell’s thrall. He was a strong man with a sense of mission when she was feeling at her most bereft and in need of guidance, but he was also the main suspect in the conspiracy against her husband. He was popularly denounced as the murderer of the king. Her blindness to this moral impediment to her continued relationship with him could most easily be explained by her being in the grip of some great sexual passion, as contemporary rumour was not slow to assert once the king was dead.
However there may have been more subtle imperatives at work. Bothwell was known and feared as a man with personal qualities of great ruthlessness and ambition. A naturally forceful leader, he was quick to assert his power and, with at least 500 armed men at his immediate command, he scared the opposition. Mary had spent the whole twenty-five years of her life having abdicated her own authority as queen to a series of men. Hoping for the childhood ideal of her uncle, the heroic Duc de Guise, she ended up more often with weak or self-serving specimens like her half-brother Moray, Riccio and Darnley.
Bothwell at least seemed to have the character and courage for the job, but was so universally disliked and latterly feared, his name indelibly contaminated by the murder of the king, that there was little likelihood of his reinstatement as a nobleman of virtue. Undoubtedly, Mary found him attractive on more than one level; he was militarily effective, politically authoritative and sexually dynamic. There was plenty of evidence, however, that she was suffering one of her intermittent depressions, and had been since the birth of her child. In her debilitated state she may not have had the will to oppose him, and certainly not the strength to bring the most powerful man in the country to account. By the end of March 1567, Elizabeth recognized that Mary was pretty much in thrall to Bothwell’s power and unlikely to proceed against him.35
Mary’s half-brother Moray, who could have offered advice and support to her, was himself implicated in the murder and so was busier protecting his own back. Absence had always been his best defence and passivity his best form of attack. He quickly organized his flight abroad, to bide his time until he could take advantage of the power vacuum created by the actions of others. When he arrived in London he explained that he ‘thought it was unworthy of his position to remain in a country where so strange and extraordinary a crime went unpunished’.36 However he did not think it unworthy of his position to flee, leaving his queen and half-sister without support. Mary wept as she said goodbye to Moray, telling him how she wished he was not so committed to his Protestantism. This parting comment expressed a personal rather than a political regret, that Mary in need of greater intimacy and solidarity felt she could not find in her half-brother the familial closeness she so desired.
Despite the calls from the streets for justice (there were posters characterizing Bothwell as a murderer and Mary, in the form of a mermaid, as a whore), the queen continued to procrastinate, still favouring Bothwell with new grants of land and influence, among them the captaincy of Dunbar Castle. Whether in the grip of malaise, madness or passion, she still refused to act despite the disapproval, threats even, from her French connections whose good opinion and support had mattered so much in the past. Catherine de Medici had written ‘very severely to the Queen [of Scots] affirming that if she performed not her promise to have the death of the King revenged to clear herself, they would not only think her dishonoured, but would be her enemies’.37 Crafty political animal that she was, Catherine could not have been more frank or uncompromising in her threat to withdraw the powerful friendship of France. Even Mary’s old friend, Archbishop Beaton, in Paris as her ambassador, was brutal in his disapproval, suggesting with all the authority of his office that as God had preserved her to ‘take a rigorous vengeance’ on the assassins of the king, should she fail to do so it would have been preferable if she too had died alongside him.38
As a former Queen of France, Mary might have expected kinder treatment from her traditional allies but in fact it was Elizabeth who emerged at this time as the most sympathetic voice, showing more concern for Mary’s plight than outrage at what the world was whispering. Prior to Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, Elizabeth was more than ready to treat her as if she was innocent. Even in her first reaction to the news of the murder of Darnley, Elizabeth had written to his widow, ‘I cannot dissemble that I am more sorrowful for you than for him’, a remarkable statement of sympathy and solidarity, borne out by her subsequent heartfelt advice to look to her honour and distance herself from the scandal.39
Elizabeth explained the source of the authority of her plainspoken advice: ‘You see, Madame, I treat you as my daughter, and assure you that if I had one, I could wish for her nothing better than I desire for you … the one for whom one wishes the greatest good that may be possible in this world.’40 Mary appeared to respond to her concern and self-appointed position as chief adviser and mother substitute. She wrote a letter to Elizabeth which the Spanish ambassador in London reported ‘contained a lamentation for the troubles she had suffered in her life and a request that the Queen should pity her, especially in her present grief at the wicked death of her husband, which was greatly increased by the desire of wicked people to throw the blame of such a bad act upon her. She therefore asked the Queen to help her in her troubles as she could turn to no one else.’41
This very lack of trustworthy advisers within her closest circle was perhaps the greatest part of Mary’s ill fortune. Elizabeth might rail against Cecil, and sometimes make him ill with despair, but she never failed to appreciate just how loyal, astute and tireless he was in prosecuting her interests and her country’s security. Leicester too, although more obviously self-interested, and nurturing still a lingering hope of claiming Elizabeth as his wife and becoming king, was kept by the queen all his life as a loyal friend and confidant for whom she maintained the warmest affection. Sir Francis Walsingham was yet to take his prominent place in Elizabeth’s government, although as a more austere individual he was never to come so close to her heart as Cecil. But he exhausted himself with the diligence of his intelligence gathering and foreign diplomacy which effectively protected Elizabeth and her realm.
It was a sign of Elizabeth’s good judgement and luck that she managed to surround herself with men of the highest calibre who devoted their lives to her and her government. She maintained a continuity of familiarity and excellence when her old friends handed on their responsibilities, in Cecil’s case to his brilliant son Robert, and in Leicester’s to his stepson, the showy Earl of Essex. She united them all in a great enterprise bonded by a sense of family feeling. Unmarried, childless, her parents and siblings long dead before her, these men and their heirs became the closest Elizabeth had to family.
The paucity of good advisers in Mary’s own reign may have been partly due to her semi-detached attitude to the country of her birth, which undermined the mutual bands of loyalty. Certainly it did not help that her avowed Catholicism was opposed to the newly adopted and hard won religion of her country. Mary’s religion had incurred constant vilification, to her face, not only from preachers like
Knox, but also from members of her nobility. Her Protestant lords petitioned her in April 1567 praying for ‘the abolishment of the contrare religioun (or rather supersticion) quihilk [which] is papistrie’42, and this was in an official document. The Scottish Protestants were passionately engaged in their religion and Mary’s insistence on practising what they considered a depraved, idolatrous, subversive form was inevitably alienating. The fact too that she appeared to be more French than Scottish, and had a propensity to put her country’s affairs in the hands of a series of favourites, also undermined the natural allegiances her nobles felt for her. They ended the same petition with their demand ‘that the cruel murder of the late King “be so dilligently triet and circumspectlie handlit, as the lawe of God in Deuteronome* requiris”, and also the law of man, so that the wicked committers thereof may be punished as they deserve’.
Recognizing the clamour for justice would not fade away spontaneously, the council, with Bothwell at its head, called for a hearing of the accusations against the murder suspects, the main one being the earl himself. The date was set for 12 April. Edinburgh was packed with armed Bothwell supporters: the Earl of Lennox, Darnley’s father, had to present his case against Bothwell in person, but was limited to no more than six retainers. Not unreasonably, he feared for his life and wrote to Elizabeth requesting that she intervene with Mary on his behalf, asking for the hearing to be postponed for forty days to allow him to gather his proof. Elizabeth sat down to write to the Queen of Scots, making a point of dispensing with the services of a secretary and writing herself to stress the importance of what she had to say, and dispatched her letter with a messenger post haste.
A letter from Elizabeth in her own handwriting always carried an extra freight of significance and intimacy. In the early years after Mary’s return to Scotland, when she still nursed hopes of a close emotional relationship with her sister queen, she used to plead plaintively for Elizabeth to write to her in her own hand. The following exhortation, written to Mary in French, her mother tongue, in Elizabeth’s distinguished and speedy hand, could not have been more affecting: ‘For the love of God, Madame, use such sincerity and prudence in this matter, which touches you so nearly, that all the world may feel justified in believing you innocent of so enormous a crime, which, if you were not, would be good cause for degrading you from the rank of princess, and bringing upon you the scorn of the vulgar.’43 Nor could it have been more prophetic. Elizabeth’s messenger arrived early on the morning of the show trial but Bothwell’s henchmen would not let him deliver the letter to Mary until the proceedings were over. When told of this Elizabeth was irate at having her will so slighted and her messenger so ‘violently used, deluded’.44 There was not much doubt, however, that even such impassioned intervention from Elizabeth would have had little effect on the rapid procession of astounding events that followed. An irresistible momentum was building, driven by Bothwell’s will and with Mary, strangely complicit, at his side.