by Simon Schama
But if the plotters assumed that the violence would reduce Mary to a weepy, cringing wreck, pathetically dependent on the hard men, they were about to be disabused. Instead of throwing herself on Darnley’s mercy, she kept cool, correctly confident that all the suspicions of her among the Scots would disappear once the story of the murder got out, including the detail of a pistol being pointed at her heavily pregnant belly. Faced with her resolution, it was Darnley whose fire turned to water, his brief exultation replaced by quaking guilt. Deploying a nicely calculated combination of intimidation and wifely sympathy, Mary persuaded Darnley to abandon the conspirators, if only to save his own neck. Beyond the palace walls, trading on her pregnancy and the assault on it by the plotters, Mary rapidly assumed the status of a persecuted heroine and mother of Scotland’s future: quite her favourite part. Nine days after Riccio’s murder she re-entered Edinburgh at the head of 8000 soldiers.
The plot was not yet played out. Mary, who had once been so besotted with Darnley, now became consumed by an equally violent hatred. She wanted to be rid of him. It is possible that all she meant by this was that she wished to be rid of him as a husband and consort. Once her child was born, perhaps Darnley could be persuaded into a divorce and his many transgressions could be used to bring the Church round to an annulment. But there were those among her devotees, including the Earl of Bothwell, who took her sighs and words to mean something altogether more decisive.
Bothwell was not some sort of primitive desperado. He came from the great magnate clan of the Hepburns, whose territorial base lay in southeast Scotland. He was rich and sophisticated, he spoke good French, and he could turn on the gallantry copiously enough to make Mary turn to him in her distress as a protector. Comforted by his solicitude, she returned Bothwell’s loyalty, even riding 20 miles to see him after he had suffered a riding accident. On 19 June 1566 she gave birth to the child who would be King James VI of Scotland and James I of England. On hearing the news Elizabeth cried out operatically as if she had been struck with a dagger: ‘Alack the queen of the Scots is lighter of a bonny son and I am but of barren stock.’
With a healthy baby boy in the cot, Darnley was expendable, and Mary turned ingeniously Machiavellian. Instead of aggressively hunting down the principal culprits in Riccio’s death, she let them sweat out their guilt and then implied, through intermediaries, that they could beat one murder charge by committing another. Homicide, after all, seemed to be their thing. So although the grandest of the grandees, like Morton and Maitland, had some misgivings about signing on for another murder having barely escaped punishment, human or divine, for the first, and even greater misgivings about Bothwell, whom they feared and hated, a contract was duly drawn up with Darnley as the target.
On the evening of 9 February 1567 Darnley was lying in bed at the house of Kirk o’ Fields on the outskirts of Edinburgh, a nice little place, thoughtfully suggested by the queen (although he wanted to be at Holyrood) as somewhere he might convalesce from a grave fever, probably a side-effect of his galloping syphilis. She did not want to take any chances, she said, with the health of the infant prince. The atmosphere between husband and wife seemed to have warmed a little, and he was grateful to her for her concern for his illness and looked forward to returning to the court once he was well. The queen had dressed for a masque to be held in honour of the marriage of one of her most trusted servants. Darnley was unhappy about her going, an interruption to what had become a surprisingly cosy routine of bedside readings and games of cards, but she went anyway. At a pre-arranged moment, Bothwell left the masque, removed his silver and black costume and, somewhere in the vicinity of Kirk o’ Fields, supervised the lighting of a fuse.
At two o’clock in the morning an immense explosion was heard throughout the city, as loud as thirty cannon firing all at once. When they eventually found Darnley’s body, dressed only in a nightshirt, amid the rubble of what had been Kirk o’ Fields, there were no signs of scorch. It turned out that just minutes before the detonation he had heard some disturbance in the garden and had had himself lowered from a window to the ground on a chair hanging by a rope. Running through the garden in his nightshirt, he had collided with a group of the plotters completing their preparations. They had strangled him to death as the sound and fury rocked Edinburgh.
If Riccio’s murder had energized Mary, Darnley’s end seemed to have the opposite effect. Whether she had truly wanted it or not, it was a death too many. She had carried her baby through the carnage and managed to see him safely into the world. Now, though, Mary was well beyond the limit of her equanimity and was losing control of that much fought-over body. She would retch uncontrollably for long periods, black and bloody mucus issuing from the pale face, and her temper swung between exhaustion and hysterics. She needed help, and James Bothwell was there to give it.
For if Mary’s sense of direction faltered, Bothwell knew exactly where he was going: straight to the top and into her bedroom. A farcical trial, the verdict influenced by the presence of thousands of Bothwell’s armed followers, delivered an acquittal. The queen’s dependence on him deepened. He summoned a meeting of Scottish nobles at Ainslie and, striking the unlikely pose of statesman, declared that for the proper government of the country, it was essential that the queen take a husband. Very decently he offered himself for the job. The little criminals, compromised by their association with at least one if not two murders, meekly signed on. All that remained were what, for someone like Bothwell, were technicalities: overnight divorce from his inconvenient wife and the ‘persuasion’ of Mary herself. While en route to Edinburgh the queen’s train was ambushed by Bothwell and his men, and they led Mary, still in her weird trance-like state of passive fatalism, to his grim pile of a castle at Dunbar. There, the formalities over, Bothwell planted his flag as prospective king of Scotland by planting himself inside her body.
This was Bothwell’s version of a marriage proposal. He assumed that she would have no choice but to marry her rapist, and the assumption was correct. A few weeks later the pair were united at Holyrood, this time according to Protestant rites. There were some brave souls who said out loud just what they thought. John Craig, one of John Knox’s colleagues in the Kirk, for example, refused to publish the banns until Mary affirmed that she had not been raped or held against her will. Even then, Craig publicly supplied a list of objections to the match: ‘the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement and proclaiming within the space of four days and at last, the suspicion of the king’s death which her marriage would confirm.’
Her predicament was, in a peculiar way, the mirror image of Elizabeth’s trouble with Dudley, but the response of the two women could not have been more different. Amy Dudley’s death, whether or not Robert had anything at all to do with it, translated into Elizabeth’s temporary repugnance for, and anger at, him. Instead of it bringing her pastoral dream closer to realization, it ruled it out. Darnley’s murder, on the other hand, actually made Bothwell not desirable but, in some monstrous way, necessary for Mary’s own survival. It not only made her violently sick; it made her slightly crazy. Given every possible option, she now invariably took the worst. If she had had no foreknowledge of the murder plot, it was still possible for her to restore her legitimacy by tracking down the assassins and bringing them to justice. Instead, she married their ringleader.
The result was the same rebellion that Elizabeth would have faced had she followed her heart and married Dudley. On 15 June 1567, at Carberry Hill, near Musselburgh, Mary and Bothwell’s army faced their opponents. The rebels’ banner was itself a brilliant propaganda device: white for murdered innocence and featuring a green tree beneath which lay the body of the murdered king. Beside the body was the baby James and the legend ‘judge and avenge my cause O Lord’. Bothwell affected not to notice this and issued a challenge to the opposition leaders to settle the issue in personal combat, an invitation that (sinc
e the numbers were on their side) they declined. While all the shouting was going on, Bothwell’s own troops were disappearing into the woods. With his army disintegrating, Bothwell turned his own horse around and galloped away for reinforcements from Dunbar, leaving Mary the defenceless prisoner of the rebels. It was the last she saw of him. Years later he died in a Danish prison, tied to a stone pillar, befouled with his own excrement.
Mary’s humiliation began immediately. By the time she got back to Edinburgh, she was filthy and weepy. The city crowds turned on her, shouting, ‘Burn the whore, she is not worthy to live. Drown her.’ Handbills featuring Mary as a mermaid (the euphemism for a whore) appeared on walls and doors. The next day she appeared at a window, pleading with the hissing crowds for help. La belle des belles now resembled an alehouse slattern: her chemise torn open to the waist, her breasts exposed, her hair hanging in dirty hanks, her face streaked with tears and grime. A forced abdication swiftly followed, as Mary renounced the throne in favour of her infant son and established her Protestant half-brother, the Earl of Moray, as the regent during James’s minority. She was twenty-five years old. Her history seemed done.
It was not, of course. Banished to the castle of Lochleven in the midst of a cold, deep lake, Mary used her last weapon: her air of tragically damaged beauty. Her jailer, one of the usually hard-bitten Douglas clan, melted in a puddle of adoration. Ten months after being locked up, in May 1568, Mary made a dramatic getaway across the loch and set about raising an army against the regent. This she managed with an ease that would be surprising were it not for the fact that Moray was almost as disliked as the ex-queen. In any case, having got herself an army, she carelessly threw it away in an inglorious defeat at Langside, near Glasgow.
Now there was only one way back, and it was a route she must have had deep anxieties about: a return to Scotland via England. Mary undoubtedly knew that Elizabeth’s disgust with the murder of Darnley was exceeded only by her profound horror at rebellion and abdications under duress. She extrapolated from that the notion that Elizabeth would be prepared to help her, militarily if necessary, recover her throne. So when she planned a flight across the border Mary thought of it as merely a temporary refuge, pending the triumphal return. She must have supposed that her stay in England would last perhaps months, a year at most?
Had she known the real answer, nineteen years, she would surely have avoided the passage across the Solway Firth. But there she was, a bedraggled, dead-tired figure, the famous auburn tresses cropped for disguise, sitting in an open boat, hunched up against the raw northern wind, her eyes fixed on the disappearing shoreline of Scotland. At her back was the little Cumbrian fishing port of Workington and her cousin Elizabeth’s kingdom. Halfway across she was said to have had a sudden premonition that something was wrong; that she should have fled to France, not England; that she might never see Scotland again.
Mary’s abrupt appearance in England threw Elizabeth’s government into turmoil. It was one thing to have made routinely cousinly noises, sympathizing with her plight and condemning rebellion; it was quite another to know what to do about it, especially since the regent of Scotland was, of course, a committed Protestant. Cecil himself went into a spasm of indecisiveness, relieved only by one of his famous pro-and-con memoranda: ‘come of her own accord’, ‘deposed against her will’, etc., etc. Perhaps he hoped that no matter how awkward Mary’s presence, it would at least have the effect of at last concentrating his procrastinating queen’s mind on the matter of her future, which was also the country’s. Elizabeth was, after all, not getting any younger – she was thirty-five in 1568. The royal laundresses were still sending monthly evidence of her capacity to produce children, but her will seemed more stubborn than ever. If she would not discuss marriage, surely she had a duty to provide for the succession. If she did not grasp this nettle herself, others would, and since Mary was well known to have the greatest claim, these others might create an alternative court somewhere up there near the border.
But it took a brave man to make Elizabeth face facts. When she thought Dudley was still badgering her, she turned on him, exclaiming: ‘If you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forthcoming. I will have but one mistress and no master.’ In the same year, 1566, when parliament had tried to do just that by threatening to deny her money unless she dealt with the matter, she threw a major royal tantrum, insisting that these things were her own personal affair or, at most, an item for discussion in council, not in parliament. And if they wanted discussion about personal matters, well everyone knew that the Duke of Norfolk was, more or less, a traitor and as for the Marquis of Northampton, he had fouled his marriage nest so badly he needed a statute to sort it out. There was a lot more in this vein. Aghast, Cecil attempted to prorogue the session: ‘It seemeth very uncomfortable to the Queen’s Majesty to hear of at this time.’
She knew not ‘seemeth’. On 5 November 1566, her poise somewhat restored, Elizabeth addressed a specially summoned parliamentary delegation. After criticizing the Commons for not observing correct procedure but instead attempting blackmail, she went on to deliver one of the great perorations in the history of British oratory. It was also one of the slyest, using the classic tactic of refuting a charge that no one had, in fact, laid at her door: that she was recklessly indifferent to the fate of her subjects. Do you, she asked in effect, take me for some stranger?
Was I not born in the Realm? Were my parents born in any foreign country? Is not my kingdom here? . . . Whom have I oppressed? Whom have I enriched to another’s harm? What turmoil have I made in this Commonwealth that I should be suspected to have no regard to the same? How have I governed since my reign? I will be tried by envy itself. I need not use many words, for my deeds will try me . . . I will never break the word of a prince spoken in a public space for my honour’s sake. And therefore I will say again that I will marry as soon as I can conveniently . . . And I hope to have children, otherwise I would not marry.
It got even better. Laying on the guilt, Elizabeth reminded her audience of what she had suffered under Mary because of her proximity to the succession and said she would never inflict that on anyone else.
As for my own part, I care not for death for all men are mortal. And though I be a woman, yet I have as good courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.
When she judged it safe and proper she would inform them about the succession, not be dictated to about it, ‘for it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head’.
This was vintage Elizabethan rhetoric, so dazzling that no one noticed the usual non sequiturs: I am a petticoated woman who wants to marry and have children, but then again I’m not just a woman, so no one will give me orders as to when and whom I might wed; in fact, I am both king and queen, so just pipe down and go away and I’ll let you know all about it when I’m good and ready.
It solved nothing. Eighteen months later, Mary’s unlooked-for appearance brought home the real costs of not having these critical matters properly settled. Now, certain questions were unavoidable. Was Mary Stuart her heir or wasn’t she? If not her, then who? How was she to be treated? As the next-in-line or as a temporary guest and ally? Not exactly. Mary’s first request from her cousin was for some clothes and ornaments befitting her rank to replace the rags she had arrived with. What she got, after much complaining, was a chest of linen. It may have been just as well that Mary did not know Elizabeth was already wearing the ropes of pearls that had been stolen by Moray and sent as a sweetener to the English queen!
Elizabeth was, in fact, deeply torn about what to do. Her strong sense of princely obligation disposed her to help Mary, but she still suspected Mary’s complicity in the murder of her other cousin, Darnley, and her grip on realpolitik told her that she had no interest at all
in replacing a friendly, grateful Protestant regime in Scotland with a Catholic queen, who probably could not be trusted not to open up the country to the French once again. As usual, when conflicting matters of state arose, Elizabeth did nothing and hoped it would all go away.
When her personal appeals for a meeting with Elizabeth went unheeded, Mary was puzzled, assuming that perhaps her letters had been intercepted. But when Elizabeth’s chosen messenger, Sir Francis Knollys, explained that Mary would not be received at court until her case had been thoroughly examined and her conduct exonerated, Mary began to understand that she was a captive not a guest and, not surprisingly, went into a state of high dudgeon. In vain. The more she raved, the deafer Elizabeth became to her entreaties. By October 1568, when the commission of inquiry opened at York, most of Elizabeth’s council were hoping that Moray would present such a damning case against Mary that her cause would be doomed. He did just that, bringing an incriminating casket of letters, perhaps forged, perhaps not, written by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley’s death, urging him to kill her husband.
As she would for the rest of her life, Mary disdained to answer to any charge of wrongdoing or even to accept the jurisdiction of an English court to try the conduct of a queen of Scotland. She had a point. But after the commission she could be under no illusion that she was anything except a prisoner. She was shuttled from house to house under the guard of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who had the unenviable job of being her jailer. Some houses, like Tutbury in Staffordshire, were little more than rain-soaked ruins. Others, like South Wingfield in Derbyshire, were more tolerable, and she was allowed to ride to hunt and make tapestries for Shrewsbury’s wife, the formidable Bess. But Mary was always watched, for she had become, as both Cecil and Francis Walsingham (now Elizabeth’s Secretary of State) insisted to the queen, her most dangerous security problem.
