Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  In the ensuing days, when others were present, Bothwell treated Mary with deference and respect, but privately, “not one day passed” that the new bride was not in tears. Bothwell prohibited her from participating in the leisurely pursuits she had once enjoyed—hawking, hunting, and music—accusing her in the crudest language of frivolity and wantonness. He allowed her no contact with other males and replaced her female servants with his own retainers. He issued proclamations as though he were the king, while Mary meekly acquiesced. And he continued to regularly visit Jean Gordon, who still resided at his seat, Crichton Castle.

  According to Sir William Drury, an English statesman and an eyewitness to events, “There hath been already some jars [quarrels] between the queen and the duke and more looked for. He is jealous and suspicious and thinks to be obeyed. . . . The opinion of many is that the queen is the most changed woman of face that in so little time without extremity of sickness they have seen.” Only twenty-four years old, Mary seemed to have aged overnight.

  It was not long before the rebels turned on their leader. Bothwell had become even more of a tyrant than the man they’d assassinated, and now he was cutting them out and making a power grab on his own, with no intention of sharing it. The lords didn’t think twice about eliminating him. They arrived at Borthwick Castle on the night of June 10, 1567, looking for blood. Bothwell managed to flee, unchivalrously leaving Mary to fend for herself. She was able to break free the following night, disguised as a man. Astride a servant’s horse she met up with Bothwell at three a.m., taking refuge in Dunbar Castle while he mustered an armed defense.

  Meanwhile, Mary’s Privy Council declared that as she was now a prisoner, all steps must be taken to liberate her. They accused Bothwell of “ravishing and invading the Princess’s body,” and of having “put violent hands on [Mary] and that he seduced [her] into an unhonest marriage and murdered Darnley.”

  Mary and Bothwell both rode into battle against his former coconspirators. By then, he had admitted to a certain degree of complicity in Darnley’s assassination. But Mary had wed him for better or worse and he was her only protector; therefore, she was determined to make his cause her own.

  Mary’s Privy Council urged her to abandon Bothwell to save herself, leaving him to fight on his own, but she refused—for two reasons. She did not trust the conspirators to see her safely restored to her throne (she was right; they were already hastily forging documents to implicate her in Darnley’s murder), and by now she realized she was pregnant by Bothwell.

  On June 15, 1567, at Carberry Hill, Bothwell was deserted by his supporters, leaving him to face the rebels alone. Mary negotiated a deal with the lords permitting him to escape, with the knowledge that she would then become their captive. The weeping queen passionately kissed her husband and bid him farewell. He had enjoyed the perquisites of power for only five weeks. Bothwell galloped north toward Dunbar Castle to amass more troops. Mary never saw him again.

  In Edinburgh, Mary was briefly detained at a modest home owned by a brother-in-law of one of the conspirators. From there, she was taken to Lochleven Castle. Cast as Darnley’s assassin and Bothwell’s mistress, the story was spun that Mary was a murderous adulteress who was unfit to reign.

  But Mary had her own side of the story: she sent envoys to the courts of England and France defending her conduct after Darnley’s murder and explaining her hasty marriage to Bothwell on the grounds that her fractured kingdom needed healing, and that the lords who had been most irksome had demonstrated by their signatures on the Ainslie Tavern Bond that they wanted her to wed a native Scot—specifically Bothwell. She also admitted she had been hoodwinked by him, and became the victim of his brutality and duplicity.

  On June 16, 1567, the warrant for Mary’s imprisonment was signed by a number of the rebels. The initial charges included the murder of Darnley—for which the conspirators themselves were guilty—and governing her realm under Bothwell’s undue influence. But it was hard to make the latter allegation stick with Bothwell out of the picture.

  Her captors pressured Mary to divorce him, but she resisted, fearing that if she agreed to do so, the child she was carrying would be denounced as a bastard.

  Mary miscarried on July 24 with some accounts referring to twin fetuses. That day, she was compelled to abdicate her throne in favor of her infant son, James, who was immediately crowned at Stirling. Mary’s bastard half brother, James Stewart, whom she had created the Earl of Moray in 1562, was made regent. She would subsequently renounce her abdication, claiming it had been made under duress, and she continued to consider herself the true ruler of Scotland until James reached his majority.

  Mary finally escaped Lochleven on May 2, 1568, with the aid of some of her more sympathetic captors. Within days she amassed an army, and faced Moray’s men at Langside on May 13, where her troops were soundly routed. But rather than sail for her foster country of France, she fled south, making the fatal decision to escape into England, in the romantic hope that Elizabeth would receive her.

  However, Elizabeth would not see her until she had been purged of the taint of Darnley’s murder—and only she could decide whether Mary was sufficiently innocent.

  For the next nineteen years, Mary remained in Elizabeth’s custody, moved from castle to castle, her deprivation increasing, her treasures and possessions looted and destroyed, and each jailer crueler than his predecessor. As the years wore on, Mary, who had always made religious tolerance a hallmark of her reign, recast herself as a Catholic martyr incarcerated for her convictions. Eager to do anything to secure her release, she began corresponding with another Catholic monarch, Philip II of Spain, England’s greatest enemy during the 1580s.

  In October 1584, when Mary was forty-one years old, and had already been in prison for sixteen years, the English Parliament enacted a law called the Bond of Association that rendered Mary guilty of any plot instigated in her name, whether or not she knew of it. The groundwork thus in place, Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s brilliant spymaster, began to spin the web that would ensnare the Scottish queen. Anthony Babington, a young Catholic zealot, sent Mary a letter in which he outlined the details of a plot to dispatch “the usurping competitor,” Elizabeth. A desperate Mary approved his plans and the drums began to rumble with her death march.

  On August 14, 1586, Babington was captured and taken to the Tower, where four days later he confessed everything.

  Mary was arrested and brought to Fotheringhay Castle, seventy miles from London. On October 11, the commissioners began to arrive for her trial, and the following day Mary spoke to a delegation of lords deputized to convince her to testify in person. With great dignity, she told the nobles, “I am myself a Queen, the daughter of a King, a stranger [foreigner], and the true kinswoman of the Queen of England. I came to England on my cousin’s promise of assistance against my enemies and rebel subjects and was at once imprisoned. . . . As an absolute Queen, I cannot submit to orders, nor can I submit to the laws of the land without injury to myself, the King my son and all other sovereign princes. . . . I do not recognize the laws of England nor do I know or understand them. . . . I am alone, without counsel, or anyone to speak on my behalf. My papers and notes have been taken from me, so that I am destitute of all aid, taken at a disadvantage.”

  The five-month trial was utterly illegal, for all the reasons Mary enumerated. It was no surprise that she was convicted and sentenced to death. On the morning of February 8, 1587, Mary Stuart, the forty-four-year-old Dowager Queen of Scotland and France, was executed in the Great Hall at Fotheringhay Castle.

  An eyewitness, Robert Wynkfielde, wrote a famous account of Mary’s final minutes, describing her forgiveness of the executioner, her devotions on the block, and the ritual she and her maids performed before the witnesses, removing her black garments to reveal a crimson underskirt and sleeves, the symbolic color of Catholic martyrs.

  But the executioner’s blow missed, striking the back of Mary’s skull through the knot of her bl
indfold, after which she was allegedly heard to have whispered, “Sweet Jesus.” It took a few more tries to hack off her head, and when the headsman triumphantly displayed the severed appendage, Mary’s white cap and red wig came off in his hand and the queen’s head, with its scraggly gray locks, tumbled to the floor. Then, according to Wynkfielde: . . . one of the executioners, pulling off her garters, espied her little dog which was crept under her clothes, which could not be gotten forth but by force, yet afterward would not depart from the dead corpse, but came and lay between her head and her shoulders . . .

  Mary’s body was wrapped in the green fabric that had covered her billiard table during her lengthy incarcerations. Several months later, her coffin was entombed within Peterborough Cathedral across the aisle from the final resting place of another queen who was betrayed, then disgraced by her husband—Katherine of Aragon.

  After Bothwell had departed from Mary on Carberry Hill, he traveled north to Scandinavia, where he intended to raise another army. In Norway, a former paramour, Anna Throndsen, accused him of pledging to wed her and never returning her dowry. Bothwell was about to face imprisonment for breach of promise, when the Danish king, Frederick II, learned that he was wanted for Darnley’s murder. Frederick brought Bothwell back to Denmark. At first he was treated as a prisoner of state, but after a few years, Frederick sent him to the dank and remote fortress of Dragsholm Castle, where he remained for a decade, drinking copiously and dying—allegedly of madness—on April 14, 1578, at the age of forty-three.

  On the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley became James VI of Scotland and James I of England, ruling both realms. Only then did James decide that a proper monument should be erected for his mother. Mary’s body now reposes in Westminster Abbey beneath a white marble tomb.

  One of Mary’s greatest problems as a sovereign and as a woman was that she wanted things both ways, simultaneously pursuing incompatible policies with equal sincerity. As a teenage queen in France she signed away her kingdom to the French while also supporting Scottish autonomy. Once she returned to Scotland she was as adamant about Catholic tolerance as she was about maintaining the realm’s religious status quo by respecting the Protestant Reformation. During her imprisonment in the 1580s she kept several international plates spinning at once as she tried to broker deals with Spain, France, and England; each set of plans, had they ever materialized, would have been detrimental to the other nations. And Mary genuinely desired to be Elizabeth’s friend; yet she did plot against her.

  Mary’s personal tragedy is that she was every inch a queen— noble, glamorous, charismatic, fair-minded—with a traditional mind-set when it came to the roles of the sexes. She wanted a consort to rule beside her, but none of her three husbands was worthy of her, not even François, who was born to rule. She also wanted to love and be loved, and in marriage those aims eluded her as well. For personal as well as political reasons she desired to be mated. As she told the English ambassador Sir Thomas Randolph at St. Andrews, shortly before she wed Lord Darnley, “Not to marry—you know it cannot be for me.”

  GEORGE I 1660-1727

  ELECTOR OF HANOVER: 1698-1727

  RULED ENGLAND: 1714-1727

  and

  SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF CELLE

  1666-1726

  married 1682-1694

  “I will not marry the pig snout!”

  —Sophia Dorothea to her parents, 1682

  YOU KNOW THERE’S TROUBLE AHEAD WHEN THE IN-LAWS hate each other long before the betrothal even takes place.

  Sophia Dorothea of Celle was a love child, the daughter of George William, the Duke of Brunswick Lüneburg, who ruled the postage-stamp-sized Celle portion of the duchy, and his mistress Eleanore Desmier d’Olbreuse, an exiled French Protestant aristocrat.

  George William had been all set to inherit the far more prestigious duchy of Hanover, but it came with strings attached: he had to marry the mannish-looking bluestocking his father had selected for him, Princess Sophia, daughter of the Palatine King of Bohemia.

  Evidently Sophia was so repugnant to George William that he ceded part of his inheritance, offering his Hanoverian claim to his younger brother, Ernst Augustus, if he would take the homely Sophia off his hands. The ambitious Ernst Augustus agreed, as long as George William promised never to marry and sire heirs, because they would end up rivaling their own first cousins for the Hanoverian throne.

  There was only one major problem with this fraternal bride swap: Sophia had been in love with George William and didn’t much appreciate his foisting her on his kid brother.

  Seven years later, in 1665, George William fell head over heels for the dark bouncing curls, enchanting smile, and sparkling eyes of Eleanore d’Olbreuse. He had to have her, but there was that pesky promise to his brother. He got around it by arranging a sort of unofficial morganatic marriage to Eleanore, meaning that she derived no title, nor would their offspring have any claims to their father’s property.

  But when Sophia Dorothea was born out of formal wedlock in 1666, Eleanore worried about the difficulties of securing a husband for a bastard daughter and began campaigning for the girl’s legitimization and for a proper marriage to George William. The process took years. By 1676, because Ernst Augustus and Duchess Sophia already had plenty of sons as potential successors to the duchy of Hanover, they no longer perceived the daughter of George William and Eleanore as a threat. Their original objections to the marriage mooted, little Sophia Dorothea was legitimatized, and her parents were legally wed.

  Sophia Dorothea grew up to resemble Snow White, with thick dark hair, doelike eyes, an ivory complexion, and tiny hands and feet. With her stunning figure, she was grace personified. Flirtatious and vivacious, she excelled in all the womanly arts and talents of music, dance, singing, and needlework. To most suitors for her hand, her birthright mattered little. Besides, she had been declared retroactively legitimate.

  Although Duchess Sophia despised her sister-in-law Eleanore, she recognized that the best way to get control of Celle was to keep it in the family. So she saddled up her horse and rode over to visit her in-laws, proposing that they wed Sophia Dorothea to her eldest son, George Ludwig, six years the girl’s senior. A perfect match! the elder Sophia urged. No other could be considered! Not only that, Sophia Dorothea would eventually be duchess of a far vaster domain than she would if she wed any of her other prospects.

  George Ludwig had already distinguished himself as a soldier. His two talents revolved around killing things, as his greatest extracurricular passion was hunting, if you don’t count his ardor for his invariably hideous mistresses. His union with Sophia Dorothea would certainly not be the love match her parents enjoyed. It was closer to Beauty and the Beast, minus the transformation and the happy ending. Nicknamed “the pig snout,” George Ludwig lacked looks, culture, intellect, and regal bearing. Where Sophia Dorothea was lively, charming, and musical, George Ludwig was slow and sullen with a chilly disposition that masked a vindictive core.

  Even his mother didn’t like him. As she cheerfully looked forward to receiving the annual installments of Sophia Dorothea’s substantial dowry, the Duchess Sophia wrote to one of her other nieces: One hundred thousand thalers a year is a goodly sum to pocket . . . without speaking of a pretty wife, who will find a match in my son George Ludwig, the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived, and who has round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in them. He does not care much for the match itself, but one hundred thousand thalers a year have tempted him as they would have tempted anybody else.

  When young Sophia Dorothea learned she would have to wed her twenty-two-year-old first cousin, she rebelled, declaring “I will not marry the pig snout!” as she hurled his miniature portrait, encrusted with diamonds, across the room. But it was a fait accompli; the Hanovers were waiting downstairs. Sophia Dorothea’s father was adamant about the match and Eleanore was powerless to stop him, even as she anti
cipated clashes between Sophia Dorothea and the mother-in-law from hell. When the sixteen-year-old sacrificial bride-to-be was escorted down to meet Duchess Sophia and kiss her jeweled hand, she fainted. She had the same reaction a few days later when she was presented to her betrothed.

  George Ludwig was just as insulted by the match. In his eyes, his luscious cousin’s looks were nothing compared to her initial bastardy.

  Nonetheless, the young couple’s wishes were ignored in favor of dynastic and political goals. So on November 22, 1682, each looking like a prisoner en route to the scaffold, the pale and trembling Sophia Dorothea was wed to the chilly and distant George Ludwig in the chapel of Celle Castle. The bride’s mother sobbed loudly during the entire ceremony. The groom’s mother, having sacrificed her ego to politics, looked grim. Only the fathers were smiling at the thought of the sizeable double duchy that would be created by the uniting of their adjoining realms. Ernst Augustus in particular couldn’t wait to have Celle added to his Hanoverian holdings. The more land his family acquired, the more power they would have, and the better his chances of convincing the Holy Roman Emperor to make him an Elector, one of the German rulers with the prestigious privilege of selecting the emperor.

  The newlyweds formally resided at the Leine Palace in Hanover. Sophia Dorothea was immediately made miserable not only by her husband’s remoteness but also by her mother-in-law’s perpetual scolding regarding her ignorance of court etiquette. Luckily for Sophia Dorothea, George Ludwig became literally distant when he embarked on various military campaigns for significant stretches of time. But he kept au courant with his wife’s activities through the reports of spies he had placed among her servants, who chronicled everything she did or said, particularly when she turned her wit on him, shredding his personality in public.