Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  * In his own narrative, Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, Bothwell announced that he had spent the whole night in bed with his wife – the classic alibi of the criminal.4

  * The description of a mermaid was one which was thought especially applicable to Mary: Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he wrote of

  A Mermaid on a dolphin’s back

  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath …

  that Certain stars shot madly from their spheres

  To hear the sea-maid’s music.

  The stars were intended to represent Bothwell.

  * Although one contemporary report said that Moray also put his signature to the bond, this seems unlikely as he was by now in London.

  * A broadside ballad published in Edinburgh after Mary’s abdication, An Declaration of the Lord Just Quarrel, written by Robert Sempill, an extremist Protestant, exclaimed:

  Such beastly buggery Sodom has not seen

  As ruled in him who ruled Realm and Queen.28

  * Both Leslie and Lennox, from different sides, accused Bothwell of using black magic to seduce the queen. Today he would probably have been accused of drugging her. In his Confession, a suspect document, Bothwell admits to using magic to secure the queen’s affections.30

  * There was a rooted prejudice in Scotland against May marriages – or, as a similar Scottish saying had it: ‘Marry in May and regret it for ay’; and the records show a remarkable decline in the number of marriages practised during that month. Ovid’s line (from the fifth book of the Fasti) described the similar prejudice of the ancient Romans, said to have been due to the fact that the Lemuralia, or three-day feasts to appease the spirits of the dead, began on 9th May.

  * From this comment Mahon argues that the queen suffered from mild epileptic seizures all her life, citing her dementia, stupor and apathy after Kirk o’Field as signs of temporary post-epileptic insanity. But the evidence of her captivity – when her health was closely observed and recorded – does not confirm the epileptic diagnosis.42

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lochleven

  ‘How the Mouse for a pleasure done to her by the Lion, after that, the Lion being bound with a cord, the Mouse chewed the cord, and let the Lion loose….’

  Aesop’s fable of the mouse and the lion, quoted in the deposition

  of a servant after Queen Mary’s escape from Lochleven

  The confederate lords were aware that they were on extremely delicate ground with regard to the queen’s imprisonment, since this imprisonment had followed ruthlessly on her own voluntary surrender in the interest of civil peace. Mary herself had genuinely, if naïvely, expected a parliamentary investigation into the murder of Darnley to follow her surrender. Under these circumstances, the lords decided that it would be too dangerous to keep the queen in ward in Edinburgh itself. The people of the city regarded the queen’s wretched state with sad astonishment: it would certainly be easier to keep their moral disapproval of her behaviour at feverpoint during her absence, when rumours of her depravity could be spread without fear of contradiction. But even in extremis Mary retained enough of her former decisiveness to send a message to the captain of Edinburgh Castle, begging him to keep ‘a good heart’ towards her, and to preserve the fortress from the rebel lords. There is no proof that Mary wrote to Bothwell on the night of her arrival swearing to be true to him: Melville believed the story was invented by the lords themselves to lend colour to the theory of the queen’s infatuation;1 in any case no such letter has ever been found. The queen did succeed in having an interview with Maitland on Monday evening (she told Nau that, in the course of it, he was never able to meet her eyes) in which she continued to demand a full inquiry into the circumstances of the late king’s death.2 It was just this inquiry which Morton, Maitland and Balfour in particular had good reason to fear, and against the possibility of which they were so determinedly blackening the name of their former colleague Bothwell. All things considered, it was clearly in their interests to remove the queen as fast as possible to some secure prison, where she could no longer make these inconvenient demands, or if she did so, her utterances need not necessarily be reported accurately beyond the bounds of the four walls which would confine her.

  On the Monday evening, therefore, the queen found herself being taken down to her own palace of Holyrood, where she was reunited with her own women including Mary Seton and Mary Livingston (Sempill). Some supper was prepared for her. This was the first meal she had eaten since before her surrender at Carberry Hill, for she had been at first too upset, and later too frightened by the idea of poison, to eat anything while she was in the provost’s house. Morton stood behind her chair while she ate. In the middle of the supper he sent a message to find out if the horses were ready and, on hearing that they were, told the queen to leave her meal and get ready to ride on horseback. At this point, Mary had some vague idea that she was being taken to Stirling Castle, to join her son. She was not allowed to take any of her ladies-in-waiting with her, but only two femmes-de-chambre; nor was she allowed to take any clothes, not even a nightdress or linen. At this news, the women around her set up a great wailing. Against the background of this melancholy sound and under cover of darkness, the queen was once more conducted out of her palace.

  Mary found herself being taken at great speed not to Stirling, but fifty miles north, to Kinross-shire. The two lords whom she had most reason to fear for their previous boorish conduct to her – Ruthven and Lindsay – were put in charge over her. Still scarcely able to credit what was happening to her, Mary had got as far as Leith, which was posted full of soldiers, when a rumour reached her that the Hamiltons were going to mount a rescue attempt. The queen tried to slow down the pace of her horse, but the gesture was in vain, since her escorts whipped it on. Late at night Mary reached the vast waters of Lochleven. Here, on one of the four islands in the middle of the loch, lay the dour castle of Sir William Douglas. Douglas was a most trustworthy jailer from the point of view of the lords: he was the half-brother of Moray, being the son of Moray’s mother Margaret Erskine by her legal husband Robert Douglas; he was the nephew of the earl of Mar, Margaret Erskine’s brother; he was cousin and heir presumptive to Morton. The lords could certainly rely on his interests being bonded to theirs. The queen was now rowed across the bleak waters of the lake. On arrival she was conducted quickly and unceremoniously to the laird’s room; it had in no way been prepared for her visit, and lacked any sort of furniture, equipment or even bed suitable to her rank and condition. Mary sank once more into a stupor in which sickness, aggravated by pregnancy, despair and exhaustion, all played a part. She remained in this semi-coma for a fortnight, neither speaking to anyone nor, as she remembered afterwards, eating or drinking, until many of those within the house actually thought she would die.

  Beyond the laird himself, the inmates of Lochleven consisted of his mother Lady Margaret – ‘the old lady’ as she was known – who as the mother of the bastard Moray by Mary’s own father, James V, was said to bear a natural, if illogical, grudge against the queen for occupying the throne from which fate had debarred her own son. Also within the castle was one of the old lady’s younger sons, George Douglas who was nicknamed ‘pretty Geordie’, a handsome and dashing young man, very unlike his half-brother Moray both in appearance and in the romanticism of his character. Mary had visited the castle itself previously under happier auspices, using it as a centre from which to hunt in Kinross-shire: it was here in its great hall that she had debated with Knox in the spring of 1563. But by nature, Lochleven was indeed more suited to be a prison than a pleasure haunt.* In the sixteenth century, the island on which it stood was so small that it hardly extended beyond the walls and garden of the fortress – the present-day slightly larger island being the result of a considerable fall in the water level of the lake in the last century. Its dominating, square main tower, from which an excellent view of the shore was to be obtained, stuck up out of the lake like a signpost pointing to its i
nviolability. This tower had been built in the late fourteenth century, and contained five storeys, with the entrance only on the second floor; in this tower the laird and his family lived. The castle also contained another round tower, built in the corner of the courtyard, and here the queen was eventually incarcerated, on the grounds that this would make it more difficult for her to signal to the shore. The lake itself, then twelve miles across, was a bleak place even in August, with the Lomond hills lowering over it, and the flat grey waters punctuated only by the occasional dark trees of the islands; during the winter, the winds and rain would sweep across the lake and make it a desolate place indeed. It was certainly a prison from which escape would prove a virtual impossibility without connivance from the inside.

  On 16th June the warrant for the queen’s imprisonment was signed by nine lords including Morton, Glencairn and Home, who only eight weeks before had put their signatures to the Ainslie bond supporting the Bothwell marriage. The lords left in power in Edinburgh – for Lindsay and Ruthven remained at Lochleven to guard the queen – like robber barons, did not fail to take possession of the queen’s silver plate, jewels and other goods which she had involuntarily left behind her. Calderwood wrote that the lords went through her belongings, as well as overthrowing the religious furnishings of her private chapel, as soon as she was gone to her prison. Mary herself told Nau that the silver and furniture and her multitudinous wardrobe were handed over to the lords by the treachery of one of her Italian servants – who probably felt himself unable to resist the new powers in the land. Certainly by 10th July arrangements were made for twenty-seven pieces of the queen’s plate to be delivered over by her chamberlain, Servais de Condé, to be melted down into silver coin.’3 In view of the fact that the previous bond of the rebel lords had expressly referred to their intention of releasing Mary from the thraldom of Bothwell, and restoring her to liberty to rule as before, it was small wonder that the queen now felt herself totally betrayed – being in closer thraldom than ever, with her belongings sequestrated and her liberty far more grievously curtailed than it had ever been in the days of her marriage to Bothwell.

  In the meantime Bothwell himself was still at liberty. From Carberry Hill he had gone to Dunbar, but on hearing of the queen’s imprisonment, he sallied forth from the castle, and during his remaining two months within the bounds of Scotland attempted with great energy and singlemindedness to raise some sort of support for her. At first he enjoyed a certain success, with the Hamiltons at Linlithgow, and then at Dumbarton which Lord Fleming still held for the queen; Argyll and Boyd actually rejoined the royal cause, showing once more the chameleon-like character of Scottish family allegiances. The speed of Bothwell’s movements defied capture by the lords, even after 1000 crowns was offered for his apprehension as a result of the protests of the Assembly of the General Kirk; he was able to make a quick visit to the borders, where he hoped to be able to galvanize his family adherents.

  He was now called to the Tolbooth officially to answer for murdering Darnley, kidnapping the queen, and making her promise to marry him: having ignored the statutory three weeks’ notice to appear, Bothwell was formally declared an outlaw and a rebel, with his titles, offices and dignities forfeit. The outlawry cracked the somewhat weak nerves of the royalist party, who feared for their own possessions: Seton and Fleming withdrew from the connection; Huntly, whom Bothwell visited at Strathbogie, discerned how little backing Bothwell now had in the Lowlands and lost heart at the idea of raising the Highlands; his sister Jean Bothwell shortly afterwards abandoned the castle of Crichton and returned to her mother at Strathbogie, pausing on the way to inform the countess of Moray that she wished to have nothing more to do with her outlawed ex-husband. With the queen immured silently at Lochleven, the royalist party crumbled away, despite all Bothwell’s energetic foraging for support from one end of Scotland to the other. Bothwell was eventually compelled to withdraw to the palace of his kinsman, the bishop of Moray, at Spynie in the far north. Here he was betrayed to his enemies by the bishop’s illegitimate sons, but even so, managed to make his way to the Orkneys, where as their duke, and also as lord high admiral of Scotland, he hoped either to rally support once more by sea, or at least to continue to elude capture.

  Unlike Mary herself, the lords now took care to pursue with relentless ferocity those of Bothwell’s underlings who had been involved in the murder of Darnley. This process, which continued throughout the rest of the year, was intended to distract public attention from the complicity of the new governors of Scotland, Morton, Balfour and Maitland, in the crime. William Blackadder – he who maintained he had merely run out of a nearby tavern when he heard the explosion at Kirk o’Field – was the first to be captured; he was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his limbs posted up on the gates of the leading burghs of Scotland. William Powrie, who had been in charge of transporting that suspiciously small amount of gunpowder through the streets of Edinburgh, was caught; under threat of torture he provided two separate depositions, contradicting each other in many respects, and he was finally hanged. Bastian and Francisco Busso were imprisoned in the Tolbooth. Another of Bothwell’s men, John Spens, was given his life, in return for handing over the coffers full of his master’s money. John Hepburn and John Hay of Tallo were caught and executed before the turn of the year; in each case they made self-incriminatory depositions before the end. It was another year before the lords managed to lay their hands on ‘French’ Paris – he who described how he had been kicked and bullied by Bothwell into participation in the murder; by this time Mary was in an English prison and Moray securely installed as regent; Paris’s deposition therefore proved the most fruitfully damning of them all. But when Cecil sent a request from London that Paris should be sent down for cross-examination, the page was promptly hanged in Scotland. Black Ormiston was hanged in 1573, after making a highly dubious death-bed confession to a priest. Pat Wilson and Hob Ormiston were never caught.

  The most dramatic capture, from the point of view of the future, was that of the tailor, George Dalgleish, he who had watched Bothwell while he changed his carnival clothes to a cloak of ‘sad English cloth’; his seizure was afterwards said to have marked the first appearance of those most debatable of all controversial documents – the Casket Letters. The alleged circumstances of their discovery were not made public until eighteen months later, at the Conference of Westminster in December 1568, in a declaration given by Morton. But it is worth giving the declaration’s story in detail here, at the moment in history at which these events were afterwards said to have taken place, in order to see how far this later declaration fits in with the happenings of the time. The story of Dalgleish’s apprehension was given by Morton as follows.4 On 17th June Morton was dining with Maitland in Edinburgh Castle when a spy reported to them secretly that Dalgleish was known to have come into the castle from Dunbar, with the parson of Oldamstocks. Archibald Douglas was sent to catch the clergyman, but Dalgleish himself had almost escaped when his whereabouts were betrayed. Dalgleish protested that he had only arrived on a simple errand to fetch his master’s clothing, but after being threatened by torture he changed his story, and according to Morton’s statement, led his interrogators to a house in the Potterow where he produced from under his bed a silver casket. This was the first appearance of the famous silver casket in which the Casket Letters were said to have been discovered, and it will be seen how dubious the circumstances of its discovery were from the first, with the threat of torture playing a sinister role. Morton’s declaration went on to state how on 20th June he had the casket formally opened; the papers within it were presumably read, but no note was taken of their contents, beyond the fact that the documents pertained to Bothwell. There was absolutely no mention of the queen, or of letters in her handwriting. Morton sealed up the casket again and took it into his own possession, where it remained.

  The strange fact about this declaration, and the whole affair of George Dalgleish’s capture, was that absolutely no mention was
made of these remarkable facts at the time. According to Morton’s December 1568 statement, the lords were from 20th June, 1567 onwards in full possession of the vital evidence of the Casket Letters; but although these letters thoroughly incriminated Mary in Darnley’s murder, it was remarkable that the lords still made no mention of her guilt three weeks later when they made a series of accusations against Bothwell at the Tolbooth. As has been seen, throughout the summer of 1567, the blame for Mary’s downfall was heaped by the lords on Bothwell; the queen’s crime was considered to be her refusal to abandon him; there was no suggestion that she had participated personally in Darnley’s death. Yet the lords were nothing if not anxious to retain the queen in her prison at Lochleven; it seems inconceivable that they should not have used this damning evidence against her at this point, if indeed they possessed it. More extraordinary still, if Morton’s declaration was to be believed, was the matter of George Dalgleish’s deposition.5 The unfortunate tailor, although later described as so instrumental in its discovery, was asked no questions at the time about the silver casket, nor cross-questioned in any way about its contents. His interrogators concentrated entirely on the subject of Darnley’s murder. By the time the subject of the Casket Letters was raised in England, eighteen months later, George Dalgleish had long since been executed.