The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  This made the outcome inevitable. Bothwell’s trial date was set for May 2, 1565. Moray arrived in Edinburgh with a large force in an attempt to overawe the jury and secure a guilty verdict. But Bothwell absconded, possibly with Mary’s connivance. Once more she was keeping him up her sleeve. Maybe he had his uses after all. But until she was married to Darnley, he was to keep out of the way. “It is believed,” wrote one of Randolph’s spies, “that the Queen’s Majesty would [do] him good, but I trust Her Grace will not declare the same at this present.”

  Bothwell returned to France, where he stayed for just a few weeks. He was found guilty by a jury in his absence, but Mary intervened to prevent the justice clerk from sentencing him. Bothwell escaped without forfeiting his lands, but the verdict was left on the record in case he misbehaved in the future.

  His position was transformed by Moray’s revolt against the Darnley marriage. Mary recalled Bothwell ten days before the wedding. She was determined to be revenged on her brother for his treachery, and could act with impunity because she was no longer dependent on his allies for support in her Privy Council. She knew that Bothwell would be ideal for the role. Their enmity ran deep, and to complete the package, she also unleashed George, Lord Gordon, son and heir of the defeated Earl of Huntly, whose family had been virtually annihilated by Moray at the battle of Corrichie. When the Gordons were attacked and their lands and goods seized, Lord Gordon, a Protestant, was saved by the advocacy of his father-in-law, Châtelherault. Instead of being sent to the gallows, he was put under house arrest at Dunbar, where he stayed for over two years.

  A fortnight after Mary recalled Bothwell, she freed Lord Gordon on parole. His discharge was proclaimed in Edinburgh, and two days later he presented himself to Mary and Darnley at Holyrood. He returned to loyal service, and was restored first to the lordship of Gordon and then to the earldom of Huntly and to all the lands and dignities that had belonged to his father. His reinstatement still required an act of Parliament to confirm it, but Mary had to all intents and purposes restored Huntly to his birthright.

  And Huntly reciprocated. Not only did he help pursue Moray and his allies until they fled, but he also allied with Bothwell. He became Bothwell’s closest friend and supporter, a friendship sealed by the ties of kinship the following year when Bothwell married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon.

  When Moray and his allies rebelled, time was of the essence. Although Mary had recalled Bothwell, she did not wait for his return before launching her reprisals. The revolt had to be nipped in the bud, and since relatively few lords rallied to the rebel cause, Mary seized her opportunity. Her musters were completed by August 26, and she pledged her jewels to pay her soldiers. She had great success in raising a royal army. She rode out of Edinburgh at the head of between eight and ten thousand men, outnumbering her opponents by five to one. This time Moray would discover that he did not face a middle-aged dowager queen who suffered from dropsy and had to rely on unpopular French troops, but an energetic, charismatic and infuriated queen who had the loyal, unstinting support of her own native Scots.

  Since Moray had last been seen in Ayrshire, Mary rode in that direction, across the central belt of the Lowlands. With Darnley at her side, she set a brisk pace in spite of the wind and driving rain. She sported a pistol in her saddle holster and a steel cap on her head, while Darnley wore a gilt breastplate. She was at ease and in her element. In a campaign aptly known as the Chase-about Raid, so called because Mary drove the rebels before her without stopping, she retained the initiative from the start. As Randolph reported, “The queen followeth them so near with such forces—and so much the stronger by reason of her musketeers—that she giveth them no time to rest in any place.” Even Knox was forced to admit her gallantry. “Albeit the most part waxed weary,” he wrote, “yet the queen’s courage increased man-like so much that she was ever with the foremost.”

  Moray was joined in Ayr by all the rebel lords except Argyll. They stuck together, and when they heard that Mary was on the move, they went past her in the opposite direction. They entered Edinburgh on the 31st, hoping to capture the town while Mary’s troops were in pursuit. But the citizens were loyal and trained the castle guns on them. The rebels withdrew some fifty miles to the west, and were in Dumfries by September 5. Mary almost intercepted them on the 4th, but when they slipped past her again, she let them go and returned to Edinburgh to consolidate her forces and allow them to rest.

  Argyll had not merged his men with Moray’s. He ran his own campaign in the Highlands, where he was attacked by the Earl of Atholl and the Lennoxes. When they finally boxed him in, Mary left him there, sealing him off within his own enclave. She turned next to Moray’s base in Fife, cutting his supply lines. On the 13th, she issued a manifesto at St. Andrews, attacking those who “under pretense of religion” had raised “this uproar” so that they might “be kings themselves.” Moray and his allies countered from Dumfries, denying they were traitors or rebels and claiming they acted in ways true to God, their queen and the “commonwealth.” Their complaint was that Mary, by marrying Darnley and proclaiming him king without the consent of Parliament, had trampled on the legitimate rights of her nobles.

  On the 17th, Bothwell landed at Eyemouth from France. Within a quarter of an hour, he was riding in search of Mary, whom he found at Holyrood on the 20th. Bedford, under orders from Cecil to arrest him at sea, had commissioned one Wilson, a notorious pirate, to seize him. Wilson had successfully tracked down Bothwell’s ship, but, daring as ever, Bothwell escaped with six or eight men in rowboats. His equipment was lost, but he still had some armor and a few boxes of pistols.

  Mary was delighted to see him, later giving him the credit for her success. On the 28th, she reinstated him on the Privy Council. After Lennox and Atholl, Bothwell would become her most trusted adviser. Randolph greatly feared him. “His power,” he said, “is to do more mischief than ever he was minded to do good in all his life.”

  But his return delighted Randolph in that it provoked the first of many rows between Mary and Darnley over who should be lieutenantgeneral of the royal army. Mary wanted Bothwell in command; Darnley wanted his father, Lennox, in the post. In the event, they split the role. Lennox was appointed to lead the vanguard, and Bothwell was to join Darnley at the head of the main battle army. In Argyllshire, the Earl of Atholl was named as Mary’s chief lieutenant.

  By October 4, Mary’s army had risen to between ten and twelve thousand men. Huntly, said Randolph, had brought “a great force out of the north.” He, too, wanted his revenge. He “imputeth the overthrow of his father only to my Lord of Moray, which is approved by the queen’s self.” Bothwell, meanwhile, “taketh great things upon him and promiseth much.” Mary’s “chief trust” was in Bothwell, Huntly and Atholl.

  They did not disappoint her. On the 8th, the main battle army left Edinburgh and marched toward Dumfries. Mary rode beside it, still wearing her steel cap.

  But there was no battle. By the time the royal forces arrived, Moray and his allies had fled. They simply slipped across the border to Carlisle. After several days’ rest, they reached Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 16th. Moray’s appeals for English reinforcements had fallen on deaf ears. The Privy Council had debated the pros and cons, but in the end decided that a military intervention in Scotland could lead to an open-ended commitment. Such aid as was received was purely financial. Randolph first slipped 3000 crowns to Lady Moray, after which Bedford handed over £1500.

  Argyll, meanwhile, was trapped in Argyllshire. He expected Mary to turn on him next, but nothing happened. With Moray and the rest of the rebel lords on the run in England, she was content to disband her forces. Her victory was complete. She was more powerful and popular than ever before. She had married Darnley and thereby unified their claims to the English throne. She had routed her enemies in flight, with no bloodshed. And she had two loyal and devoted advisers in Bothwell and Huntly.

  Mary succeeded because she had snatched the initiative. While El
izabeth dithered and English policy was in disarray, she had acted decisively. She had shown great courage and untiring energy. Her assurances over religion had been masterful. She had stood aloof from England, and had seen Elizabeth and Cecil back away from assisting Moray to rebel a second time.

  Elizabeth wanted another round of diplomacy, but Mary could not see the point. She would never allow another ruler to intervene in the internal affairs of her country or in her straggle with her rebels, whom she meant to punish severely. She had told the English queen just that in a strongly worded message handed to Randolph on September 7. Her cousin had never been angrier and more frustrated with Mary than when this note arrived.

  Elizabeth had expected Mary to defer to her wishes almost as a client queen, unaware that Mary had now found the strength to stand up for herself in a way she had not been able to do before. England, and especially Cecil, imagined Scotland to be a satellite state. But Mary was hardly going to revert to a policy of conciliation when she was winning. Moray’s overthrow was nearly as complete as the elder Earl of Huntly’s three years before, and she did not intend to relent. She made just one exception. When Châtelherault humbly apologized for his role in the revolt and went into voluntary exile, he and his family were pardoned. But that was the extent of Mary’s forbearance.

  On December 18 and 19, heralds appeared in full armor at the Market Cross in Edinburgh to summon Moray and his allies to appear in Parliament on March 12, 1566, “to hear and see the doom of forfeiture orderly led against them.”

  Mary’s summoning of Parliament and this advance warning of her intention to confiscate the lands and goods of the rebel lords would prove to be another watershed. It was also the prelude to one of the two most dramatic assassinations in Scottish and British history.

  15

  A Marriage in Trouble

  THANKS TO A stroke of luck in the archives, we know what Mary was thinking and what drove her to engage the rebel lords in a military showdown after Bothwell’s return from exile. In a series of interviews at Holyroodhouse, she poured out her heart to Castelnau, the special ambassador whom Catherine de Medici and Charles IX had sent to Scotland. He first saw Mary and Darnley in their presence chamber and then privately in the palace garden, and wrote down everything they said in a “Discourse” sent to Charles, which is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

  After Castelnau had presented his diplomatic credentials and congratulated the king and queen on their marriage, Mary declared her intention to crush the rebels. They had abandoned their lawful allegiance in the name of religion and wished to depose her. For this reason, her case touched every other ruler, since if her rebels were allowed to behave in this way and seek the collusion of England in their crimes, there could be no stability or order in the world.

  Mary was unflinching in her convictions. Moray and his allies were not just rebels with political grievances or an ax to grind; they were outright “republicans”—she used the word herself—set on destroying the “ancient monarchy.” The rebels would depose and kill her and Darnley, and then create a “republic” in which sovereignty was vested in the nobles. They had already deposed her mother. She was next on the list. Her view of republicanism was an early prototype of the domino theory. Once Scotland had fallen, the subversion would spread to England, to the Netherlands and to France.

  As she talked, tears welled from her eyes. She spoke with deep feeling, her outlook shaped by her memory of the events of 1559–60, when the Lords of the Congregation deposed her mother and Elizabeth legitimized the government of the rebels by making the treaty of Edinburgh.

  Mary reminded Castelnau of the long tradition of the “auld alliance” and of her own Guise and Valois connections. She then demanded military reinforcements. “All my hope is in France,” she said. Castelnau was appalled, because his charge was to persuade her to settle with Moray. A new French intervention could spark a protracted civil war that might spread to the whole of the British Isles. He urged Mary to compromise, but she flatly refused. “It is incompatible with my honor and with the safety of my person and that of the king my husband, because these rebellious subjects of their bad faith and evil will have decided to kill us both.”

  Mary had redefined the issues. This struggle was no longer about her marriage, but had taken on an ideological dimension. She saw a clear antithesis between monarchy and republicanism, between divine-right rule by an anointed queen and anarchy, between French and English influence in Scotland. She refused to listen to Castelnau’s pleas that “utility,” “prudence” and “expediency” obliged her to make concessions. Her rebels must be punished as a point of principle; otherwise, it would not just be her own authority but the institution of monarchy itself that would be undermined. Castelnau noted that Darnley, whose French was fluent, was even more insistent in his defense of the ideal of monarchy than Mary. The discussion lasted for four hours and ended up going around in circles.

  Next day, Castelnau was summoned to the palace garden, where Mary strolled with Darnley amid the ornamental borders and fruit trees planted by her mother. She looked radiant and relaxed, and when Castelnau joined them, she turned all her charm on him, saying that one day she would ask her council to consider everything he had suggested. Meanwhile, the time for talking was over and she intended to fight.

  When Castelnau asked if she would risk everything in a battle, Mary did not flinch. “Yes,” she said. “Because to play for time is no longer to be a queen.” He tried to argue that the amity with England was essential both for Mary’s authority in Scotland and to secure her claim to the English succession. Mary did not dispute this. “Yes,” she said. She was willing to reinstate the amity and offer Elizabeth her affection and goodwill, “but only when she declares me to be her successor if she dies without children.”

  Castelnau sensed a change in Mary. On his last visit, he had been struck by her sense of “grandeur.” His comment then was that she “had as big and restless a spirit as her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine.” This time, it was not so much that she was proud or overconfident. She had become defiant, tending to dramatize her problems and generalize from them. Moray’s revolt, an uprising of a serious but not unfamiliar type in the age of the Wars of Religion, posed in her mind a general threat to European monarchy and so required some form of extraordinary aid. Mary saw Moray as a republican revolutionary, and was unable to comprehend Castelnau’s inability to agree with her.

  Writing privately to Paul de Foix, the resident French ambassador in London, Castelnau said he found Mary “intractable.” Her courage and willfulness were such that she had adopted an “all or nothing” approach. She equated Protestantism with political revolution and would prefer to abandon her throne rather than negotiate with Moray.

  Castelnau overstated the case. The changes in Mary were straws in the wind rather than an outright shift in her policy. A swing toward Catholicism was in the offing, but it had not yet begun, and there is a better explanation for its appearance. Darnley, as Castelnau also observed, was throwing his weight around. He saw himself as king of Scotland, with his own ideas and “enterprise.” He wished to visit France to impress Charles IX with his Catholic credentials. He was eager to be integrated into the European dynastic system and awarded the Order of Saint Michael, the highest badge of honor in France, which he asked Castelnau to obtain for him. He was engaged in a policy of courting the Catholic powers while attempting to persuade Mary to outlaw the Protestants after Moray’s revolt.

  Darnley was not a devout Catholic. He was certainly not a Protestant, despite his well-timed visits to Knox’s sermons, but was cynically exploiting religion for his own political purposes, chiefly as a way of drawing attention to himself. His efforts to secure European influence and recognition were just another aspect of his narcissism.

  His ambition was truly overweening. Mary had allowed him to be styled king to appease his vanity. She was prepared to allow him to take an equal share in governing Scotland, but he expected her
to cede all her power as a reigning queen to him. He really believed that their marriage had made her his subordinate. He was now the King of Scots, and his primitive view of the sexual act led him to think that his authority was most clearly asserted in bed, where he would do what he liked when he liked. The fact that Mary was at first submissive in the bedroom was merely because she badly wanted a son and heir.

  Now Darnley quizzed Castelnau about the recent meeting of the ruling families of France and Spain at Bayonne. In a spectacular gathering of the two courts in May and June 1565, Catherine de Medici had been reunited with her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Mary’s childhood friend in Henry II’s nursery and for some years queen of Spain. The meeting was attended by Charles IX and the Duke of Alba, one of Philip II’s trusted advisers; its purpose was to restore the close family links established by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. But the meeting was a flop, because Philip never bothered to turn up. All over Europe, however, the Protestants were talking about the event. They feared that in a secret session, a Catholic League had been organized to crush them. It was this that obviously interested Darnley.

  From the day of his marriage, he had been plotting to alter Scotland’s religion again. His confidants were Sir James Balfour, David Rizzio, John Lesley, David Chalmers and Francis Yaxley—an ill-assorted but highly intriguing quintet.