Margaret Douglas

by Mary McGrigor

  The Provost had been as good as his word but to no effect, because, so he claimed, most people in Edinburgh ‘were so discontent with the present government that they desired a change’. This Melville passed on to the queen, through one of her ladies, who returned to tell him that Mary believed that her half-brother Lord Moray, in exile in Newcastle, had been sent for by those around her. On his arrival Melville was to tell him that he was to have nothing to do with the people she now knew to be her enemies.

  Moray did arrive the next day, when Melville gave him the queen’s message. Distraught, as she threw herself into his arms and kissed him, she told him that had he only been there she would not have been ‘so uncourteously handled’, and Melville, incredulous, saw him actually burst into tears. 7

  In the meantime, Henry, suddenly aware of how he had been used, promised to abandon the so-called friends who had threatened the life of his wife and their unborn child. Mary told him to discharge the guard at Holyrood, so that on the following night she and Henry, with an escort, escaped from the palace and rode for Dunbar.

  Melville then met them somewhere on the road returning from Dunbar to Haddington. The queen, having thanked him profusely for ‘my continual care of her honour and welfare’, then unburdened her mind to him of some of her sorrow and fear.

  That night in Haddington she subscribed divers remissions for my Lord Moray and his dependers, lamenting unto me the king’s folly, ingratitude and misbehaviour and also my Lord of Lennox’s part, which I supposed had been pardoned; and I excused the same as best I could, imputing it to his youth, and laid the blame upon George Douglas and others; praying Her Majesty, for many necessary considerations, to remove out of her mind all causes of ill-feeling against him, seeing that she had chosen him herself against the opinion of many, and promised him favour again of new. But I could perceive nothing but a great grudge that she had in her heart.8

  The depth of her resentment was shown by her treatment of Morton and his associates, whom Henry had revealed to her as the instigators of Rizzio’s murder. Put to the horn as a traitor, George Morton fled to England together with Ruthven, who was stricken with mortal disease. The castle of Tantallon, held by Morton since the death of Margaret’s father, Angus, and the houses of his relations were then seized and stripped by the some of the 5,000 soldiers whom the queen had under her command.

  Melville continued to describe how Henry Darnley had demanded to know what had become of Morton and his confederates; Melville had told him that he believed they had fled, whither he did not know. ‘As they have brewed,’ says he, ‘so let them drink.’9

  Henry, it seems, was unaware that the Douglasses would inevitably find some way to take their revenge. He continued to squabble with Mary, taking offence over trifles such as Moray sending a note to her which he thought should have come to him. Melville, summing up the situation and sensing impending tragedy for Henry, so plainly heading for disaster, did his best to intervene.

  I travailed earnestly to help matters betwixt them and was so importunate that I was thought so troublesome that Her Majesty desired my Lord of Moray to reprove me, and charge me not to be so familiar with the king; who went up and down all alone, and few durst bear him company. He was disliked by the queen and all as secretly favoured the late banished lords; so that it was a great pity to see that good young prince cast off, who failed rather for want of good counsel and experience than of evil will. It appeared to be his destiny to like better of flatterers and ill company than plain speakers and good men: which hath been the wreck of many princes, who with good company would have produced worthy effects. 10

  Notes

  * The town-house, meeting place of the burgh council.

  1 Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhilll, p.51

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid., p.50

  4 Ibid., p.52

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhilll, pp.53–4

  9 Ibid., p.54

  10 Ibid.

  37

  BROKEN DOWN WITH GRIEF

  Margaret Lennox had been in prison for twenty months, when, on the afternoon of 19 February 1567, she was told that she had two visitors, Lady William Howard* and Lady Cecil, both intimates of Queen Elizabeth. Hoping, yet hardly daring, to believe that they might be bringing news of her freedom, she anxiously awaited their coming. But at first sight of their black robes and sad faces, she knew that something was seriously wrong.

  At first she could hardly believe them. The words did not make sense. Henry and his father were dead, murdered with the connivance of Henry’s wife, the Queen of Scotland. Henry had been ill with smallpox, that she already knew. But this, this incomprehensible statement, was something she could not understand.

  She sat down, awkwardly, as the ladies, having expressed their sympathy, tactfully turned and left the room. Then, as the full realization of what they had told her became clear in her mind, she collapsed in such a frenzy of weeping that those with her believed they were seeing an onset of palsy, as a stroke was then termed.

  So intense was Margaret’s grief that Queen Elizabeth was told that she was dying; the queen sent her own physician, Doctor Huick, formerly in attendance on Catherine Parr, together with the Dean of Westminster, to minister to her, both physically and mentally, in the Tower.

  Cecil greatly pitied her, writing to Sir Henry Nares, ‘I hope her Majesty will have some favourable compassion for the said lady, whom any human nature must needs pity.’

  An agonising ten days went by before Cecil was able to tell Margaret that word had come from Scotland that Matthew was still alive. The original report that he had died with their son had been false. He could not possibly have been killed with Henry in Edinburgh, having been in Glasgow at the time. Cecil had probably heard this from Drury, still depute governor of Berwick, who sent him the famous drawing showing the near naked bodies lying in the garden with Ker of Fawdonside, Morton’s henchmen, his Douglas men, nearby. Passing on all that he knew of what had happened, from Sir James Melville who had just come from Scotland, he told Margaret that most suspicion was focussed on the Earl of Bothwell but that the queen ‘was not well spoken of’. 1

  Confident that Margaret herself was now so convinced that Queen Mary had murdered her son that she would not even attempt to communicate with her any more, Cecil advised Queen Elizabeth that she be released from the Tower.

  Before leaving she had to pay for the expenses of both herself and her servants for all the time she had been there. Having done so, she was left even poorer than she had ever been before.

  The Marquis of Winchester, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord-Treasurer, writing to Cecil, told him that although he greatly pitied her, ‘broken down with acute grief and utterly destitute’ as she was, he could not help her financially because the rents of the Lennox lands, which had been taken into receivership, were held in York, while the queen’s receiver was in London. He actually intended to borrow money for her so that she could at least settle her prison debts, and he urged Cecil to beg Queen Elizabeth to allow her to have her money back.2

  Subsequently, when at last released from the Tower on 12 March 1567, Margaret was once again sent into the custody of Lady Sackville at Sheen. She remained there until, after Mary Queen of Scots eloped with the Earl of Bothwell, Matthew returned to England and his wife.

  Notes

  * Wife of the brother of Charles with whom Margaret had been in love.

  1 Ibid. p.62

  2 State Paper Office MS, Domestic

  38

  THE FATHER’S STORY

  Matthew returned but it was a different Matthew, a man who, it seemed, she hardly knew. In the three years since she had seen him, his hair had turned white and he walked with the shuffling slowness of old age. It was not only his physical appearance that had changed. His mind was obsessed with hatred to the point where at times he seemed insane.

  Before leaving Scotland he is know
n to have instigated, if not actually organised, a hate campaign. Placards depicting Bothwell were posted up through Edinburgh labelled ‘Here is the murderer of the King.’ Others read ‘Farewell gentle Henry but a vengeance on Mary.’1 A ghostly figure prowled the town crying that Bothwell had murdered the king, while unearthly voices wailed for vengeance for his death.

  Slowly, haltingly, Matthew described all that had happened since, in that last letter, he had told her that Henry was well and Queen Mary, God bless them both, big with child.

  Now he barely could speak coherently of the woman, the Jezebel, as he called her, who he was convinced had betrayed their poor innocent lamb to his death.

  Piecing together what he told her, she realised that the trouble between Henry and Mary had begun shortly after Matthew had written to her in terms of such happiness. Hurt and increasingly resentful of her refusal to grant him the Crown matrimonial, he had become paranoid in his belief that her new favourite Bothwell was heading a cabal to have him killed. Convinced that they would dispose of him in the same manner as Rizzio, he had, with reason, or so Matthew claimed, refused to attend their son’s christening at Stirling Castle. Instead he had ridden off, heading for Glasgow, in their own land of the Lennox, to tell his father what was happening and to ask for his advice

  He had only gone a short way, however, when he had been seized with such terrible pain that it was only by gripping the pummel of his saddle that he had not fallen from his horse. It must have been poison, put into his food or drink by his enemies in Stirling, so Matthew was convinced. Carried in a litter to Glasgow, to his father’s house near the Cathedral, he had been plainly very ill.

  As Henry lay barely conscious with pain and fever, the physicians, unconvinced by Matthew’s suspicions, had eventually declared that he had smallpox, their diagnosis accepted when pustules broke out on his body, disfiguring his handsome face. The devoted Taylor had nursed him throughout his critical illness, sleeping on a camp bed by his side.

  Matthew, if he actually knew the real source of Henry’s illness, may have spared Margaret the misery of knowing that Henry had been suffering from secondary syphilis. Most probably he had contracted it in France, where an epidemic of the disease, rampant in Western Europe, had been raging at the time when he was there.

  He had been getting better, and Matthew was convinced of that, when the queen herself had appeared. She had ridden over from Edinburgh, coming by way of Stirling, from where a strong party of Hamiltons had escorted her into the land of their enemy, the Lennoxess.

  Defying the risk of contagion, she had sat beside Henry, telling him that if he returned with her to Edinburgh, she would sleep with him again as his wife. She had promised Matthew she would care for him herself, assuring him that just as she had nursed her first husband, the dauphin, now, for Henry, she would do the same.

  There had been no denying her. Matthew had pled, in fact beseeched her to let Henry remain with him until the doctors at least said he was well enough to travel. But Mary had been adamant and Matthew could have been arrested as a traitor had he refused her order to release his son into her hands. He had watched them leave – Henry, lying in a horse litter, his face covered by a taffeta mask – with the greatest apprehension.

  If only he had known the future. He would have faced both death and torture to save their son. The queen, that temptress, that sweet-tongued, beautiful woman, had lured him back to Edinburgh to have him killed.

  He should have known what would happen. As part of the christening celebrations, as was customary, Mary had granted pardons. Influenced by the Earl of Bothwell, who according to Melville ‘now ruled all in court’ 2, James, Earl of Morton, together with no less than eighty of his accursed Douglasses, was amongst those restored to their lands and titles. Henry’s fate had been inevitable. He had shouted out to his killers, recognisable in the light of flares, that they were his own kin. But they had shown no mercy, either to him or Taylor, as they had closed in to murder them in the garden of the house called Kirk o’Fields.

  Matthew could hardly bear to tell Margaret that some of her own relations had strangled their helpless son. With the sleeves of his own nightgown, they had brutally choked him to death. How bitterly they reviled at the villainy of the Douglasses, those very men to whom Margaret had given sanctuary after her father had begged her to save them from imprisonment in the Tower.

  Notes

  1 Guy, J., My Heart is my Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots, p.309

  2 Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhilll, p.62

  39

  ‘MY EARS HAVE BEEN SO ASTOUNDED’

  Queen Elizabeth, told of what had happened, was herself deeply shocked. Although Henry’s brutal death and the subsequent grief to his parents appalled her, it was the scandal of her cousin Queen Mary’s behaviour that really shook her to the core. At once a courier was sent off, galloping north on horses, frequently changed, bearing an urgent despatch.

  Madam

  My ears have been so astounded and my heart so frightened to hear of the horrible and abominable murder of your late husband and my slaughtered cousin, that I have scarcely spirit to write … I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend, if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge on those who have done you such pleasure, as most people say …1

  The Lennoxes remained together in London, presumably at Margaret’s apartments in the Palace of Whitehall, as although both were in deepest mourning, they are known to have been frequently at court.

  Queen Elizabeth had found a use for them once more. Now they could be witnesses against what appeared to be the guilt of her rival queen in conniving at the murder of her husband. Kneeling before Elizabeth, they poured out their accusations against their former daughter-in-law. Elizabeth, after some deliberation, then agreed to return them their Yorkshire estates.

  Early in the New Year of 1569 they reached Settrington, only to find that, as during their previous imprisonments, the robbers had been at work. Matthew, in a letter to Cecil, told him that ‘… my wife and I am owing the sum of three thousand pounds or more; our cattle and our provisions upon our land sold and dispersed, in a manner, for nothing; our jewels, with plate, already at gage [pawned].’ Knowing he must soon go back to Scotland, he begged Cecil to ask the queen for a loan of £1,000.2

  It was Leicester, not Cecil, who replied. The request for a loan was ignored but he told him to go to the Earl of Winchester, the Lord Treasurer, and tell him that the queen had graciously agreed that he and Margaret should receive the yearly rents of their land, albeit the property was to remain in the hands of the royal receivers.

  Leicester then gave them the news that did at least bring them some comfort in such a time of great distress. Henry’s son, their grandson, James VI, just a year old, had been crowned king of Scotland.

  More important still, his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was held prisoner on an island in Loch Leven. She had been forced by her brother, the Regent Moray, to sign a deed of abdication; the document, of such enormous political significance, was now in the hands of Queen Elizabeth.

  In proof of the queen’s favour, the Lennoxes were told that she was granting them the use of Cold Harbour Palace on the Thames. Sometimes known as Cole Harbour, it was one of the ports where coal was landed from barges to be carted into the city. The palace itself was dilapidated, much in need of repair. But after the Tower it meant freedom. At least they were together again. Margaret, however, was far from well. Writing to Cecil, ‘Good Maser Sekretory’, on 27 January 1567/8, she had already told him:

  I am sorry my hap was not to meet you at my last being at Court, and although I was not well in health at that time, I am worse at this present of my old colic, or else I had been in place of my letters, to have spoken with you concerning my lord’s great loss and mine in the sale of our goods, and the increase that should have arisen thereof, our grounds also unstored at this time [without stock or crops]. My serva
nt hath told me that ye have perused the Commission and Privy Seals, wherein ye may see such authority from the Prince [Queen Elizabeth]: as for letters, likewise, no mention thereof, but rather to have preserved, save that which wanted not help, and that to be sold, but not under value. I am sure the meaning was such, yet in all these wrongs I offered to take our goods again at the same price as was prased, as ye know and yet would, if we might obtain. Otherwise, of course must be the laws to have our own again, as all subjects doth. I send you a note of the sale of our goods, and as they were prased. Good Master Sekratory, as my trust is in you, show me favour in my reasonable suit, and that her Majesty may understand our wrongs and great loss, and I shall think myself, as I have done always, bound unto you, and thus scribbled in haste, and so ill I doubt ye can not read it without the help of my man, to whom I have read it.

  Your assured friend,

  Margaret Lennox.

  Endorsed by Cecil January 27, 1567.3

  Margaret signed herself only Lennox because Matthew and Henry between them, at about the time of Rizzio’s murder, had made a deal with her nephew James, Earl of Morton, by which they had signed away her lands and title in exchange for his sworn support. The bitterness of the knowledge as to where that had led them now only exacerbated her loathing of the man she felt mostly responsible for leading Henry to his death.

  Told by Cecil that Mary Queen of Scots was now in England, the Lennoxes hurried to court to repeat their demands for justice for her involvement in the murder of their son. Kneeling together before Queen Elizabeth, they both begged passionately for vengeance. Elizabeth, noticing that Margaret’s face was red and swollen with crying, tried to comfort her but nonetheless told them bluntly that she could not do anything to punish Mary without further proof of her guilt.