The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  A more stinging or vehement rebuke of one reigning queen by another could scarcely have been imagined. Mary reeled from this latest blow, offended not least by the remark that she would look through her fingers, coincidentally the very phrase that Maitland had applied to Moray during the conversations at Craigmillar, when she had answered: “I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honor or conscience.” Was the use of this phrase deliberate?

  Worse still, Elizabeth advised Mary to arraign Bothwell (“him whom you have nearest to you”) if the Lennoxes were to accuse him of the murder. And then, most crushingly of all, she dictated her revised terms for the political settlement that Mary so eagerly desired. There would be no more talk of reconciliation, of a “new treaty of perpetual amity” to replace the offending clauses of the treaty of Edinburgh, or of Mary’s claim to the English succession. All that was now forgotten. Instead, Elizabeth insisted Mary ratify the original version of the treaty. This matter, said Elizabeth caustically, “has gone undone for six or seven years.” It was time to end it once and for all.

  If Killigrew expected to have an answer within two days, he was sadly disappointed. Mary found Elizabeth’s letter so insulting, she refused to reply at all. Killigrew left Edinburgh a week later, empty-handed.

  What must have especially rankled was Elizabeth’s references to Bothwell. How had she learned that he “whom you have nearest to you” had already been accused of the crime? It was easy enough. Cecil had obtained full transcripts of the placards posted on the walls of Edinburgh. He had even gotten hold of the “sayings” of the prowler who called nightly for vengeance on the murderers. He was corresponding with Lennox, who was furiously rebuilding his bridges.

  When Killigrew returned to London, he may not have brought a letter from Mary to Elizabeth, but he brought one from Lennox to Cecil, offering to collaborate with him in avenging the murder of his son.

  Suddenly, history was to be rewritten. On the last occasion that Darnley had spoken to an English diplomat, he had repudiated his allegiance to the English queen. Now, as Lennox reassured Cecil, his son had all along been her most loyal subject and his own particular “acquaintance” and good friend.

  Morton also looked to England. This most villainous of the Scottish lords, who had written to Cecil in obsequious terms as he had crossed the border on his way to rendezvous with his allies at Whittingham Castle, now sought Cecil’s protection against the reprisals he knew would be sought by Lennox. He called himself “your assured friend” and wrote to reiterate his offer to do “anything in my power to gratify you.”

  At the beginning of 1567, Mary had been at the height of her powers and about to reach a final political accord with Elizabeth on mutually agreed terms. Two months later, she seemed more vulnerable than ever before. This had not been the aim of the lords, but was a byproduct of their shortsighted lust for revenge. What Mary urgently needed to do was to track down the murderers and bring them to justice.

  Cecil, meanwhile, was unrelenting, preparing the case against her and seeking to move in for the kill. “I fear,” wrote Mary’s ambassador in Paris, “this to be only the beginning and first act of the tragedy, and all to run from evil to worse, which I pray God of his infinite goodness to avoid.”

  It was an accurate prognosis, and yet not a single piece of uncontaminated evidence has ever been found to show that Mary had foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder.* Everything depends on the assumption that she was already engaged in an adulterous affair with Bothwell. What wrecked her reputation was that, instead of throwing Bothwell to the wolves, she decided to defy the world and throw in her lot with him.

  20

  A Love Match?

  FOR MARY, the weeks and months after the explosion were the most critical of her life. Her integrity was on the line. What happened then tarnished her reputation forever, and rightly so. She made no serious effort to bring Darnley’s murderers to justice. The worst that could be proved before the murder is that she wanted the depraved and dangerously conspiratorial Darnley safely under house arrest at Craigmillar Castle and that she had gone to Glasgow, the stronghold of the Lennoxes, to fetch him. It is not what happened before the murder that precipitated her downfall, but the astonishing events that followed it.

  Mary really was alone after the explosion. Even the Guises found her to be such a liability that her uncle made terms with Moray behind her back, provoking an angry response. Mary’s usually prolific correspondence with her family abruptly stopped. She felt she had no one to trust. Looking back on the months since her illness at Jedburgh, she must have guessed that most if not all her lords had known of the plot to kill her husband.

  When Killigrew had arrived to present Mary with Elizabeth’s letter of rebuke, he was entertained to dinner by Moray and the lords and assured that every effort would be made to arrest the guilty parties. Mary herself promised Killigrew that the assassins would be unmasked. But how was she to give substance to her promise when the very same lords who dined with Killigrew were the leading conspirators? They stuck together and had already suppressed the testimony of the women in the cottages beside Thieves Row.

  Moray was the most farsighted of the bunch: he would choose to go voluntarily into exile until the dust settled, which only served to reinforce Mary’s suspicions of his guilt. He realized that Darnley’s murder was not the end but just the beginning of a catastrophic downward spiral in which violence and retribution would reach a frenzy.

  Bothwell, with his typical bluster and lack of subtlety, saw it very differently. He had a “mark of his own that he shot at.” He planned to step into Darnley’s shoes and Mary’s bed. For this he would reap the vengeance of the lords for seeking to overawe them. He would be the scapegoat for Darnley’s murder, but as yet this dramatic turn of events was still several months away. Until then, the pact between Morton and Bothwell (as Drury had noticed) held fast, which was long enough for an isolated and confused Mary to make her own mistakes.

  Mary’s psychology is crucial. She had been brought up in the luxury and safety of Henry II’s court and never felt completely secure after she had left the shores of France. The factionalism of the lords was relentless and on a scale beyond anything she could have imagined. Violence was endemic in Scotland. Politics were tribal, based on organized revenge and the blood feud. An anointed queen she might be, but the monarchy lacked the financial resources and centralized institutions of France.

  As for her recent ordeals, she had been publicly insulted by Knox, who had compared her to Nero, the worst of the Roman tyrants, but when she had called on him to explain himself, she had been forced to back down. She had discovered Chastelard under her bed, armed with a sword and dagger. Her uncle Francis had been assassinated by the Huguenots. Her secretary had been dragged from her in her apartments and brutally murdered in the next room. A loaded pistol had been pointed at her by Ker of Fawdonside, and now she had escaped death in a gunpowder plot by what seemed like a hairsbreadth.

  Mary saw a common thread linking all these events. Her conversations with Castelnau eighteen months before had shown that she had an ideological understanding of politics. She had claimed then that the rebel lords sought to depose and kill her in order to create a “republic.” She had long believed that her mother’s deposition was the beginning of a trend, and the murderous events at Kirk o’Field proved just how right she had been.

  When she picked herself up after the initial shock of the murder, she shaped her own destiny. In what she saw as desperate circumstances, she took a breathtaking political gamble. She wanted Bothwell to protect her by controlling the noble factions. A poacher was to be turned into a gamekeeper. She did this because, rightly or wrongly, she saw him as the monarchy’s champion and the only man who could save her from a fate similar to Darnley’s.

  As she went over and over everything in her mind, her priorities switched from identifying the murderers to deciding what they were likely to do next—this time to her and perhaps her child
as well. Her chief suspect in the explosion was always Moray, her illegitimate halfbrother. It was in this mistaken belief that she would make a tragic, pragmatic decision to protect herself and her son, believing that whatever else she did, she would be surrounded by treachery and deceit.

  She had another reason to think this way. She was approaching her twenty-fifth birthday, the age when Scottish rulers by tradition revoked the grants and rewards they had improvidently made in their youth. Mary would be expected to reassert the power of the monarchy against the nobles, and yet Darnley’s murder had crippled her ability to do so. With the dynastic settlement with Elizabeth a dead letter, she decided to claw back her power by supporting Bothwell. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

  Such impulsiveness was characteristic of her. When she had put on her steel cap and mounted her charger to defeat Moray in the Chase-about Raid, Castelnau had said she was adopting an “all or nothing” approach. This is how she reacted again, and she did so consciously, and not in a daze of lethargy or bewilderment. Mary was a gambler, and this was to be her biggest throw of the dice.

  On Bothwell’s side, ambition was never far away. Now thirty-one, he was the epitome of tough masculinity. He appeared on the surface to be the military gallant with an insolent swagger and a bristling mustache. He could be suave when it suited him, even if he upset people with his freebooting ways and obscenities. Beneath the surface he was no better than any of the other lords. Mary had not yet seen him as he really was. Her wicked sense of humor may have misled her into finding his past misdemeanors to be more like schoolboy pranks than criminal acts of lawlessness. He may have seemed diverting to her as well as unswervingly loyal. But his single biggest attraction was that, apart from a brief interlude of reconciliation for which Mary herself was responsible, he had always been Moray’s mortal foe.

  When Bothwell had married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, he arguably became the most powerful lord after the Earl of Argyll. He had already made a pact with Morton and the Douglases. Of the other leading power blocs, Châtelherault, the leader of the Hamiltons, was in voluntary exile after the Rizzio plot. Atholl was vulnerable to Argyll, who was keen to score points off his nearest neighbor and rival in the western and central Highlands, and the Lennoxes were in turmoil after Darnley’s death.

  Bothwell’s alliance with Huntly brought him a vast military retinue to add to his own border forces. On top of this, his right as Lord Admiral to a share of the profits of all vessels wrecked off the coast of Scotland meant that he was one of the few Scottish nobles who was financially independent. As sheriff of Edinburgh he had the legal profession and many of the judiciary on his side. He must have calculated that he could protect Mary for as long as she asked him to, provided his pact with Morton and the Douglases could be kept alive.

  The day after the murder, Mary emerged from her apartments looking pale and drawn to join the wedding feast of Margaret Carwood, her favorite bedchamber woman. Carwood had married John Stuart, one of Mary’s distant relatives, at Holyrood that morning. It was Shrove Tuesday, the last day it was possible to marry by Catholic rites until Easter. The bride’s dress was given by Mary, who also paid for the banquet. No doubt she was fulfilling a long-standing promise to her loyal gentlewoman by attending her wedding, but it came at some cost to her reputation.

  Mary’s attendance made it clear that she had dispensed with the strict rules of court protocol. She should have put the court into mourning for forty days immediately after the murder, but waited for five days before ordering her deuil attire and large quantities of black taffeta to cover the walls and windows of her apartments. To some degree, the lapse may be attributed to her decision to move into Edinburgh Castle. But she drew attention to it by attending Carwood’s wedding.

  Darnley was not given a state funeral. He was buried without pomp or ceremony during the night of Friday, February 14, 1567, his corpse laid to rest in the tomb of the kings in the old Abbey-Kirk at Holyrood. It must have been an eerie occasion; it certainly attracted unfavorable comment. An Edinburgh chronicler recorded that the former king of Scotland was interred “quietly in the night without any kind of solemnity or mourning heard among all the persons at court.”

  The following Sunday, Mary left Edinburgh for Seton, by the shore of the Firth of Forth some eleven miles east of Edinburgh. She stayed with Lord Seton, the half-brother of one of her Maries and a Catholic who had fought alongside Bothwell in the guerrilla war against the Lords of the Congregation. She was said to be following the advice of her doctors, who felt she had been in a dark and stuffy room for long enough and needed a change of scene. Yet there is no independent evidence that she traveled on medical advice, and far from having spent the previous week in somber mourning, her blackout had been in place for just a day.

  Mary’s disregard for convention can only suggest that even though she played no part in Darnley’s death, she must at some level have been happy to see him gone. Even when her bales of taffeta had finally arrived and the blackout was in place, she could not escape the charge that it was more for show than substance.

  When first departing for Seton, Mary left her son in Bothwell and Huntly’s care. She traveled with her other lords, returning to Edinburgh three days later, where she lived in seclusion for a week. She then set off again for Seton, this time with Bothwell as her escort. They stayed at Lord Wharton’s house on February 26, dining at nearby Tranent. There an archery contest was held in which Mary partnered Bothwell against Huntly and Argyll. To Mary’s delight, she and Bothwell won, and the losers paid for dinner.

  Long before the end of the official forty days of mourning, Mary and Bothwell were seen outdoors together. She had decided to trust him, which was perhaps prudent as a security measure but politically very unwise. He took command of the royal bodyguards, who from then on were constantly within Mary’s sight. Bothwell himself was guarded when he walked through the open streets. If he spoke to anyone he did not know, he kept his hand firmly on his dagger.

  There was an acute sense of danger and foreboding in the air. Before leaving for Seton, Bothwell swore an oath that if he ever found the authors of the placards accusing him of Darnley’s murder, he would wash his hands in their blood. Previously known for its “joyousity” and lighthearted atmosphere, Mary’s court was acquiring menacing and militaristic overtones as he recruited more and more soldiers to guard her palaces.

  On March 7, Morton was brought secretly by Bothwell to see Mary late at night. He humbly apologized to her for his part in Rizzio’s murder and made his peace with her; she relaxed his curfew and allowed him back to court.

  Now the cards were stacking up. Bothwell and Morton were in the top positions. Their closest allies were Huntly and Argyll. Maitland was for the moment siding with Bothwell, nudging Moray aside. Argyll was trying to restore a semblance of normality to government. Atholl had receded into the background, deliberately squeezed out by Argyll.

  Moray was shunned by his sister. His disgrace sprang from his refusal either to declare in favor of Bothwell and Morton or to denounce them openly to Mary. This time his attempts to hedge his bets had undone him. Mary suspected him to be the chief instigator of the explosion, for once doing him an injustice. While Bothwell and Morton preened themselves, Moray prepared to travel to exile in France. When he finally left the country, Bothwell danced for joy.

  Step by step, Bothwell was seizing control of the available military power. On his advice, Mary dismissed the Earl of Mar as governor of Edinburgh Castle, replacing all the officers and gunners with Bothwell’s nominees. She appointed James Cockburn, the Laird of Skirling, Bothwell’s servant, as the new captain of the castle. She also made him comptroller of her household, thereby fusing military and civil power in the Edinburgh region. As comptroller, Cockburn ousted Sir William Murray, the Laird of Tullibardine, a noted Lennox supporter whose brother was suspected of being the author of the placards denouncing Bothwell.

  And yet Bothwell did not always trus
t his own men. A month later, he had Cockburn removed from the castle, bringing in Sir James Balfour instead. Almost at once, large supplies of food and munitions were requisitioned as if to prepare against a possible siege, and Bothwell levied fresh companies of soldiers for the royal bodyguard.

  Mary was not yet wholly in thrall to Bothwell. She still trusted Mar, with whom she had stayed at Alloa the previous year and to whom she had given her son when she suspected a plot by Darnley and the Lennoxes to kidnap him. Now she put Mar in charge of Stirling Castle. And on March 20, Prince James was again left in his safekeeping. It was almost as if Mary knew that she should do what her own mother had done with her as a baby, when the lords posed a threat to her life.

  She then wrote to Lennox, inviting him to file his charges against those he suspected of Darnley’s murder. She promised that they would be sentenced to the fullest extent of the law if a jury found them guilty.

  Lennox put Bothwell at the top of his list, but Mary was unimpressed. She detested Lennox, well aware that his son’s ambition for the crown matrimonial had been the cue for Rizzio’s death. She was relying on Bothwell to protect her, and as a signal of her confidence gave him some old church vestments of cloth of gold to recycle to make new suits. Later he got some of her mother’s Spanish furs for a nightgown, and she gave him Darnley’s horses and finest clothes.