Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  It was hardly likely that such untoward events in Scotland would pass unnoticed or undigested in England and France. Queen Elizabeth’s first reaction was strong distaste for such unmannerly treatment of queens, and her second characteristic reaction was to see what advantage could be obtained from the situation for England. She sent Throckmorton north to parley with the lords, and also to see if there would be a possibility of obtaining the wardship of the little Prince James whom she now suggested could be brought up conveniently in England by his grandmother the countess of Lennox, conveniently forgetting that day when Elizabeth had flung her into the Tower out of rage at the marriage of James’s parents. The French were animated with the same happy idea of bringing up the young prince; the discussions over his welfare were strongly reminiscent of the arguments over Mary’s own custody during her infancy. Throckmorton reached Edinburgh before the middle of July; his letters back to London provide a valuable insight into the state of affairs in the Scottish capital, since he brought the fresh mind of an outsider to his commentary. It is more difficult to assess Mary’s own state of mind during the crucial early weeks of her captivity: none of her own letters from this period has survived, with the exception of two or three smuggled out of the island towards the end of her stay there; it is more than probable that the strict conditions of her confinement simply did not permit her to write them. The narrative of her secretary, Nau, dictated by the queen while in captivity in England, is the only guide extant to her personal feelings, and it suffers from the obvious disadvantage of having been written many years after the events in question took place, by one who had not himself been present on the island.

  The first fortnight of Mary’s incarceration was an agonizing experience, not only on account of her wretched health. Throckmorton heard that the queen was kept ‘very straightly’; the lords did not intend that there should be any dramatic moonlight flittings from Lochleven. After a fortnight her total nervous collapse seems to have drawn to an end; Drury heard from Berwick that she was ‘better digesting’ her captivity, and could even take a little exercise. Bedford heard about three weeks later that her health was improving.6 With the return of her strength, some of her personal magnetism seemed also to be exerting itself, since Lord Ruthven, son of that Lord Ruthven who had appeared like a vengeful ghost at the murder of Riccio, was considered by his colleagues to be falling under her spell, and was removed from his post. According to the queen’s own account,7 he made advances to her, throwing himself on his knees near her bed, promising that he would free her if only she would love him. From the amorous behaviour of this former enemy of Mary’s can be deduced either the glamorous effect of her personal presence or, more cynically, the quickness of Ruthven’s wits. He may have realized already that the departure of Bothwell made the queen once more potentially marriageable, with all the advantages likely to ensue from such a match.

  The queen still absolutely refused to hear of divorcing Bothwell: her reasons for this, as before Carberry Hill, were twofold. Her pregnancy by Bothwell was now thoroughly established in her own mind, and she feared more than ever to compromise the legitimacy of her unborn child; secondly, her extreme suspicion of the intention of the lords towards her own person had only been deepened by their behaviour since Carberry Hill. Although Maitland told her that if she agreed to divorce Bothwell she would be restored to liberty and freedom, Queen Mary must have doubted whether the lords would have carried out their part of the bargain. Why should the same men who had planned to ward her in Stirling Castle eighteen months before have agreed to release her now, even if she put away Bothwell as they suggested? Her return could not fail to threaten their newly acquired power, as well as bringing out into the open once more the events leading up to the death of Darnley. Had the lords really wished to re-establish her, they had an excellent opportunity after Carberry Hill, instead of which they locked her up on Lochleven. The existence of the infant Prince James, held at Stirling Castle under the governorship of the earl of Mar, one of the principal confederate lords, which had once seemed to promise so much for Mary’s future, now told as strongly against her. A long royal minority, with a series of noble regents, was traditionally regarded by the Scottish aristocracy as a time for aggrandizement. It should be borne in mind that on 8th December, 1567 Mary herself was approaching her twenty-fifth birthday, on which date it was possible by custom for a sovereign to call back wardships and properties given out during his or her own minority. To the Scottish nobility, the rule of the thirteen-month-old James was an infinitely preferable prospect to that of his twenty-five-year-old mother, whether she divorced Bothwell or not.

  It is noticeable that Throckmorton was deeply shocked by the brutal attitude of the Scots towards their sovereign on his arrival from England. He was genuinely convinced that her life was in danger, and believed that it was his appearance and intervention which actually saved her; otherwise she too might have died as violently as Riccio and her husband. The common people too he found to be highly hostile to their queen, especially the women: Tullibardine took the opportunity of explaining to him that Mary would be in danger of death if they released her. But of course this attitude was only increased by the propaganda of the nobles in her enforced absence: what especially shocked Throckmorton was to find that noble families like the Hamiltons, who had a vested interest in the succession, were ready to join the lords if Mary died, and on 18th July he wrote to England that the Hamiltons would concur with the confederate lords in all things, ‘yea, in any extremity against the Queen’, as long as they were assured that Darnley’s younger brother, Charles, would not be preferred in the Scottish succession over them, if Prince James died.8 On 7th August Murray of Tullibardine went as far as to tell Throckmorton that the Hamiltons, Argyll, Huntly and others in their groups only refrained from joining the confederates because they had so inconveniently allowed the queen to live. The Hamiltons were ambitious enough to see how their chances of succession were greatly improved with the disappearance of Mary; there was now only the little king to be eliminated ‘and then we are home’.9 The behaviour of Maitland was as before highly ambivalent: Throckmorton accused him also of threatening the queen’s life, and pointed out to him that her death, apart from being an outrage, would only clear the way for the Hamiltons; Maitland in turn accused Throckmorton of having liberty in his mouth but not in his heart. At all events, by 9th August Throckmorton was convinced that his intervention had saved the Scottish queen’s life and that ‘this woefull Queen’ would not now die except by an accident, although he could not forbear from commenting, when he heard of the new agreement between the lords and the Hamiltons, that he hoped their accord would not be like that of Herod and Pilate who agreed to put Christ to death.10

  On one point the lords were adamant: Throckmorton should not visit the queen personally, despite his many requests to do so. He was thus compelled to depend on their own bulletin as to her state of mind. They assured him that Mary was still madly infatuated with Bothwell, and said in addition that she would be willing to abandon her kingdom for him and live like a simple damsel (a statement for which there was no other confirmation and on which Mary’s subsequent career casts considerable doubt). On 16th July Throckmorton heard that the queen was in great fear of her life, and had said to some of the lords about her that she would be well contented to live in a close nunnery in France or with her grandmother, Antoinette of Guise.11 These sentiments, if indeed Mary expressed them, must be regarded as coming out of the depths of her despair and physical weakness. More importance can be attached to her first communication to Throckmorton, which he reported on 18th July, when she sent word that she would in no way consent to a divorce from Bothwell ‘giving this reason, that taking herself to be seven weeks gone with child, by renouncing him she should acknowledge herself to be with child of a bastard and forfeit her honour’.12 It was now some eight weeks since the queen’s marriage to Bothwell: in her letter she therefore suggests that the baby had been conceived subsequen
t to the marriage. But at some date before 24th July, no doubt as a result of privations and stress, she miscarried the child, and according to Nau, who inserted the phrase very carefully as an afterthought on the page, found herself to have been bearing ‘deux enfants’. 13 If the twins had been conceived at Dunbar, on or about 24th April, they were about three months old at the moment of miscarriage, and the double gestation would have been easily recognizable. Even at eight weeks, the foetus is just over one inch in length; but at twelve to thirteen weeks, the foetus is three and a half inches long, which would have made the recognition of ‘deux enfants’ perfectly possible. On balance of probabilities, it seems likely therefore that the queen conceived the twins at Dunbar at the end of April, and that by Carberry Hill, at least, if not earlier, knew for certain that she was pregnant by Bothwell; uncertainty on the subject could have been a factor in hastening on her actual wedding date in May.

  What is virtually impossible is the suggestion, sometimes made since by historians, that the queen could have conceived twins by Bothwell in January before Darnley’s death, and carried them in complete secrecy, without the faintest contemporary report of her pregnancy, throughout the vital months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy. It was mid-June before Bedford heard that the queen was pregnant; although Guzman, the Spanish ambassador in London, wrote to Philip II on 21st June, saying that the Scottish queen was five months pregnant,14 he probably mistook five months for five weeks, since there is no reference of any sort through March, April and May to the royal pregnancy, which would have been becoming rapidly more apparent as the queen’s figure changed. This was an age in which such facts were speedily known by the accurate news service of servants’ gossip: as a girl queen in France, Mary’s prospects of becoming a mother had been intimately assessed by the ambassadors at the court. Randolph’s extraordinarily early reports of Mary’s pregnancy with James in the autumn of 1565 will be recalled – he heard the first rumours of her condition about five weeks after conception, giving as his reference such ‘tokens … annexed to the kind of them that are in that case’.15 The spring months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy were among the most critical of Mary’s existence, in which her every word and action were watched, checked and reported: how inconceivable is it then that an event of such moment as her growing pregnancy outside the bonds of marriage should have passed quite unnoticed until the sixth month, by observers who would certainly have grasped joyfully at such a convenient weapon to destroy, if not Mary, at least Bothwell, the child’s father.*

  The queen’s miscarriage proved a turning-point in her attitude to Bothwell, for it removed one important obstacle in the way of divorce. By 5th August Throckmorton no longer despaired of securing her consent to the divorce, as he had done previously.17 It has occasionally been supposed that Mary did not in reality miscarry the child, but merely concealed her pregnancy; according to this legend, she gave birth to the baby – a daughter – in the following February; the little girl was smuggled away to France and there grew up as a nun in the convent of Notre Dame de Soissons. Alas, nothing would have been more impracticable than for the Scottish queen to have concealed her condition in the confined space of Lochleven, quite apart from the fact that there is no contemporary evidence to back up the story.† It is also highly unlikely that Mary would have ignored the continued existence of such a daughter – next heiress after James to the Scottish and English thrones – in the later years of her captivity when she quarrelled with her son. Such a daughter could have been introduced with effect into her last testaments.

  It was while the queen was lying in bed after her miscarriage, by her own account ‘in a state of great weakness’ having lost a great deal of blood, and scarcely able to move, that Lindsay came to her and told her that he had been instructed to make her sign certain letters for the resignation of her crown. Mary now believed herself once more to be in great personal danger, on this tiny island, in the midst of an enormous lake, whose waters could claim any victim silently without the circumstances of their death being ever properly known. Despite her fears the queen was outraged at the monstrousness of the request, and continued to demand that she should be taken in front of her Estates for the parliamentary inquiry which had been promised to her; but Lindsay’s rough words on the subject, that she had better sign, for if she did not she would simply compel them to cut her throat, however unwilling they might be to do so, only convinced her further of her own personal danger. She had no allies to assist her, except the two femmes-de-chambre she had been allowed to bring from Holyrood. In a state of terror and despair, she declared that she refused to leave the house. When Lindsay threatened her with forcible removal she replied that she would have to be dragged out by the hairs of her head.

  It was at this point that Robert Melville hinted to Mary that by no means every member of the Douglas family was as hostile to her as the laird of Lochleven himself: his brother, for example, the young debonair George Douglas, was already showing himself susceptible to the charms of the beautiful if unfortunate prisoner: he showed his sympathies by persuading the servants of the house to rise up in rebellion at the project of her removal. But from the actual signing of the letters of resignation there was no escape. Mary told Nau later that Throckmorton had managed to smuggle her a note in the scabbard of a sword, telling her to sign to save her own life, as something so clearly signed under duress could never afterwards be held against her.19 Certainly if duress was ever held to affect questions of legality there could be no possible legality about such a document, by which Mary signed away the crown she had inherited twenty-four and a half years ago, in favour of her own son, and a regency of her half-brother, on a lonely island, without any advisers and surrounded by soldiers, under the command of the new regent’s own brother. Shortly afterwards, Mary fell seriously ill again: her body began to swell up, chiefly in one arm and leg; her skin turned yellow, and she broke out in pustules, so that she began to believe she might have been poisoned. This disease, which seems to have had something to do with the liver, was relieved by bleeding, and a potion which was said to strengthen the heart.

  As a result of the instruments which his mother had been compelled to sign in this manner, on 29th July James was crowned king of Scotland at the Protestant church, just outside the gates of Stirling Castle, at the tender age of thirteen months. The oath was taken on his behalf by Morton and Home. The circumstances strongly recalled those of Queen Mary’s own coronation twenty-four years before: once more the Scottish crown was in the grasp of a puny child, hedged round by a grasping nobility, whose powers seemed to have been curtailed very little in the intervening years. Letters of commission signed by the ex-queen were read out – one established a regency in the name of Moray, and after him Morton, during the king’s minority; one resigned the crown and kingdom on Mary’s behalf; a third appointed a Council to act with Moray. On the day of the coronation, the gloomy peace of Lochleven was disturbed by all the artillery of the house being discharged; the queen, sending to find out what the matter was, discovered that bonfires had been lit in the garden, and that the laird was celebrating riotously at the news. He asked her mockingly why she too was not making merry at the coronation of her own son, at which Mary started to weep and went indoors.20

  No further excitements disturbed the queen’s close imprisonment, until her half-brother returned to Scotland to assume the position of regent. Some of Mary’s supporters had hoped that Moray’s arrival would result in some amelioration of her condition, remembering the many benefits which she had bestowed upon him in the past. George Douglas, falling further under the spell of Mary’s charm, chose to remind Moray of how he had been used to call himself the queen’s ‘creature’. But Moray had now no call to term himself anyone’s creature, with the prospect ahead of him of at least twelve or fourteen years’ rule of Scotland, during his own nephew’s childhood. When he arrived at Lochleven, it was in a cold and punitive mood. To Mary’s surprise, her brother was now addressed as ‘Grace
’, a title usually reserved for kings or their children. In their first interview, he chose to harangue her in a tone of angry condemnation, which justified Throckmorton’s description of him as leading his people like the ancient prophets of Israel. It was true that Moray’s lofty sermon on Mary’s past imprudences, unattractive as it might be, contained many observations which were most applicable to her case: he told her that the Scottish people were dissatisfied with her conduct, and even though innocent before God, she should have had regard to her reputation in the eyes of the world, ‘Which judges by the outward appearance and not upon the inward sentiment’. On the subject of her marriage to Bothwell, and the rumours it had aroused concerning the death of Darnley, he observed perfectly correctly that it was not enough to avoid a fault, but also the occasions of being suspected of it. Such admirable pieces of advice would have been the more effective if the lords associated with Moray in the government of the realm had not been far more practically implicated in the death of Darnley than the unfortunate queen.

  Moray gave a full account of his interview to Throckmorton on his return to Edinburgh.21 Sometimes, he said, Mary had wept bitterly, sometimes she acknowledged her imprudence and misgovernment, some things she did confess plainly, some things she did extenuate. Almost certainly Moray went so far as to threaten Mary with execution, for their interview took place on two consecutive days, and the first night, as he told Throckmorton, he left her with the hope of nothing but God’s mercy. Throckmorton was impressed with Moray’s grave and pious character – as the English almost universally were – and praised his sincere qualities to Queen Elizabeth. But in fact there was little to admire in such cruel hectoring of his sister, who on Lochleven was totally at his mercy. Nevertheless the ruse worked. Mary once more passed a night of horror and fear; now even her own brother seemed to have turned against her; the next day she begged Moray to accept the regency. Moray told Throckmorton that Mary kissed him and asked him not to refuse it. She had of course extorted no concessions of any sort from him in return for the offer – neither the promise of liberty nor any other hint that she might enjoy freedom in the near future. In the meantime Moray was able to assure Cecil on 30th August that his new public state was neither welcome nor pleasing,22 and even repeatedly assured Mary herself that he had no personal wish to assume the regency for his own private tastes led him to shun such grandeur and ambition, as she well knew. He might, however, be able to be of service to her as regent, where another in the same position would ruin her. Mary’s own account of the interview to Nau put herself in a less desperate, more spirited light than Moray’s account to Throckmorton. Although more reliance should be placed on Moray’s account since it was delivered immediately, Mary did deliver herself of one significant aphorism on the subject of ruling Scotland. She warned Moray that if she, a born queen, was rebelled against by her people, how much more would the people rebel against him, a bastard by birth and origin. She quoted the maxim: ‘He who does not keep faith where it is due, will hardly keep it where it is not due.’23