by John Guy
When we [Bothwell and Huntly] had escaped from the queen’s lodging and gotten to safely, we mustered some of our best friends and Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, in order to rescue her and the king her husband from the captivity in which they were detained. We did this partly by guile and partly by force.
Next day, Their Majesties set out together for Edinburgh with a goodly force, pursuing Moray and his allies so actively that they were forced to flee into exile. The queen, moreover, was so indignant at such an assassination, she held them in great hatred, as did also the loyal nobility and the rest of her subjects. But the king she hated the most of all.
Bothwell had forgotten that it was not Moray but Morton whom Mary had harried into exile after the Rizzio plot. Moray had returned to Holyrood in triumph on the day after Rizzio’s murder and did not leave Scotland again until after Darnley’s assassination. Bothwell’s account of the noble factions is strangely simplistic. Maitland and Argyll are left out, most likely because they were swinging back to Mary’s side after her forced abdication. And while Morton’s thirst for revenge after Darnley’s treacherous betrayal of his co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot is touched on, it is subordinated to Moray’s grander project to usurp the throne. This was to become the key theme of Bothwell’s story: that Moray, the archvillain, had schemed from the beginning to depose his sister. In his eagerness to embellish his account, Bothwell muddled up Morton with Moray, forgetting that Moray had been welcomed home with open arms by his sister after the Rizzio plot.
In his overriding bid to demonize Moray, Bothwell decided not to mention Morton, his then ally and leading accomplice, even in his description of Darnley’s murder. Instead, he gave a fanciful account of his own allegedly altruistic efforts to buttress the monarchy in Scotland by nurturing a spirit of reconciliation among the feuding lords. He even tried to pretend he had considered leaving the hurly-burly of politics:
After I had negotiated for these exiled lords the favor they sought, and in particular their permission to return to court,* I thought about retiring to lead a quiet life after the imprisonments and exile I had suffered. I was tempted to remove myself from this scene of blood feud and revenge.
Only after the failure of Bothwell’s efforts to bring about a lasting reconciliation between the lords did the murder plot begin. His description of the explosion and its aftermath is trite and unconvincing:
A little while afterward, the king, who was suffering an attack of syphilis,† lodged at a place called Kirk o’Field while he convalesced to avoid danger to the health of the queen and her child. This was done by the common consent of the queen and of the members of her council, who wished to ensure the health of all three.
The traitors saw this as their opportunity. They placed a large quantity of gunpowder under the king’s bed, then lit the fuse, blowing him up and killing him. This was done at a house of Sir James Balfour . . .
On the night of the explosion, several of her councilors were lodged as usual at her palace of Holyroodhouse. I was also lodged there, in the quarter where the guard of fifty men is usually stationed. And while I was still in bed with my first wife, the Earl of Huntly’s sister, her brother came in the morning to inform me of the king’s death, at which I was sorely grieved and many others with me . . .
Bothwell claimed that he had striven tirelessly to uncover the truth, never imagining for a moment that he should himself be suspected. His name, he sought to argue, had been mentioned only when his enemies and rivals had conspired with each other to prevent him from loyally serving Mary by solving the abominable crime.
All this is simply incredible, as is Bothwell’s account of his trial:
When the charges against me had been read, and my accusers (especially their principal, the Earl of Lennox, who had been summoned but did not attend),‡ were convinced that there was no just cause of complaint against me touching either my person, property or honor, I was, according to the laws and customs of the realm, by the direction of my judges and with the consent of my accusers then present, declared innocent and found not guilty of all that of which I had been accused . . .
Bothwell then claimed—as had Mary herself—that he had married the queen at the behest of the very same lords who were now demanding his extradition. He invoked the Ainslie’s Tavern Bond to vindicate himself, arguing that the marriage was forced on him by the nobility. But his account is far more disingenuous than Mary’s. Hers, at least in the more candid version given to the Bishop of Dunblane, was tinged by regret at Bothwell’s deception, whereas he brazened it out with a barefaced lie. He invented a tale in which the signatories of his bond came willingly and eagerly to his house to urge their petition on him:
After I had won my case as I have stated, twenty-eight members of the Parliament came to me at my own house of their own free will and without being asked . . .
Each of them thanked me particularly for the friendly manner in which I had behaved toward them, adding that the queen was now a widow, that she had only one child, a young prince; that they would not consent that she should marry a foreigner; and that I appeared to them to be the man most suitable to be her husband.
The reality could not have been more different. Bothwell had been forced to entertain his reluctant “supporters” and had struggled the next day to extort their signatures. Argyll, Maitland and Atholl each refused to sign. Nor could Moray have consented, as Bothwell falsely insinuated, since he had already left the country, on his way to voluntary exile.
Bothwell even managed to describe his marriage to Mary without saying anything about his abduction or seduction of her. And his version of the final showdown with the Confederate Lords is unashamedly self-justifying:
The queen and I marched out of Dunbar with as many men, her loyal subjects, as we could muster in so short a time. We came to within a short distance of Edinburgh, whereupon the rebel forces sallied out and positioned themselves opposite to us at a distance of roughly a cannon shot.
After a short delay, they sent a mediator to us, who presented us with a written statement of the causes that had brought them there. These were firstly to liberate the queen from the thralldom in which I was said to hold her, and secondly to revenge the murder of the late king of which I and mine were accused, as I have already described.
I replied to the first point that I was not in any way holding the queen in thralldom, but on the contrary that I loved and honored her as she deserved, appealing to her to confirm the truth of what I said.
To the second point, I answered that I continued to deny having participated in, or consented to, the late king’s murder. I added that although I had already been plainly and sufficiently acquitted, I was still ready, if anyone of sufficient honor and noble birth was still inclined to accuse me of such a deed, immediately to defend my honor and my life in single combat in the presence of both armies, as promised in the challenge which I had formerly caused to be published in Edinburgh, and according to the ancient laws of war.
It was subsequently answered that Lord Lindsay, one of the lords, was prepared to meet me on the field . . . I so persuaded the queen and all of them by the many reasons I advanced, that they eventually agreed to allow the single combat to begin.
Bothwell could never bear to admit that despite Lindsay’s acceptance of his challenge, Mary in a split-second decision had changed her mind and forbidden the man-to-man combat. Instead, he claimed he had waited patiently until late evening for his cowardly adversary to arrive. “He did not, however, turn up.”
Finally, Bothwell stated that while he was still ready to fight to the death for his queen and his honor, he had no choice but to accept her desire to avoid unnecessary bloodshed:
As night approached, I prepared to give battle to the enemy, putting my battle line in order, while they did the same on the other side.
The queen, seeing me and her loyal subjects on the one side, and the rebel lords on the other, ready to begin a battle . . . , was anxious to avoid bloodshed at all costs and so surrende
red to them. She crossed the field and went to them, escorted by Kirkcaldy of Grange in order to discuss things and see if matters could be resolved peaceably. And, believing that she might go over to them in safety, without fear of treachery, and that no one would presume to lay hands on her, she asked me not to advance further with my troops.
His efforts at self-exoneration complete, Bothwell ended his dictation on or shortly before January 5, 1568. After correcting his secretary’s work, he had it copied out in duplicate. One of these copies was sent to Frederick II, who cannot have found it convincing: his reaction was to ship Bothwell across the Sound to the greater security of Malmö Castle, then in Denmark but now belonging to Sweden.
He was lodged in the north wing of the castle, where he occupied a large, oblong vaulted chamber on the ground floor beneath the royal apartments. The main room had two large south-facing windows opposite the inner courtyard. The bedroom faced the Sound, but there was no window for this most experienced of escapees to climb through.
As long as Bothwell was a piece on Frederick’s diplomatic chessboard, his requests for luxuries would be met. There was little that was inhumane about his treatment, except he was not free. Of course, Bothwell was not a man who easily bore such a restriction. However often he was allowed to go out shooting, he felt he was locked up in a cage.
He still kept his wits about him. When the Confederate Lords commissioned Captain John Clark, a Scottish mercenary serving in the wars of the Danish king, to negotiate his extradition, Bothwell turned the tables. He told Frederick that when Clark had returned to Scotland in 1567 to enlist more troops, he had misappropriated the king’s money, using it to pay reinforcements to line up on the side of the lords at Carberry Hill. The accusation was true, and Clark would later be convicted by a court-martial in Denmark.
The Confederate Lords then sent Thomas Buchanan, the nephew of the brilliant classical scholar and poet who had written Mary’s masques, to Copenhagen. He attempted to reinvigorate the lords’ demand for Bothwell’s extradition by disclosing how Mary had sent Bothwell “certain writings” from England, including the evidence that had helped him to seal Clark’s fate. The report is vague and uncorroborated, as Buchanan steadfastly refused to name his sources. Although said to be “men of great estimation” and “worthy of trust,” their identities are impossible to pin down. Moreover, since all they ever appear to have said is that Mary had urged Bothwell “to be of good comfort, with sundry other purposes,” it is distinctly possible that his “sources” were fabricated.
Bothwell was said to have sent spies to England, who were to try and speak to Mary in her captivity. Their instructions were to procure the documents Bothwell needed in his efforts to trade his freedom for the Orkney and Shetland Islands. If this was true, it described the actions of a desperate man. The Confederate Lords would never have allowed the islands to be handed back to Denmark, even in exchange for their most wanted enemy.
One of these alleged spies was Bothwell’s Danish-born page, a man reputed to be easily mistaken for a Scot, as he could speak Lowland Scots like a native. He was said to have carried documents to Mary, whom the reporter described as “that woman.” But once again, the details are nebulous and confused.
Intriguingly, the younger Buchanan knew without asking that it was his job to send a copy of his final report to Cecil. There was no solid evidence to justify his claims. And yet the mere rumor of a secret correspondence between Mary and Bothwell was enough to create alarm. In the eyes of the Confederate Lords, any form of communication between them would be “prejudicial and hurtful to both our countries and to the discontentment of the Queen’s Majesty of England.”
Clark was imprisoned at Dragsholm Castle, a solitary fortress on the edge of Kalundborg Fjord, on the northwest coast of Zealand some sixty miles west of Copenhagen. In June 1573, by which time five years had elapsed since Mary’s flight and imprisonment in England, Bothwell was himself sent there. Legend says that he died there insane after five years of solitary confinement, chained to a wall. But Bothwell was always larger than life. He was an opportunist, a gambler who knew that fortune favored the brave and who profited from life as he found it. He and Clark, both Scots and professional military men, buried the hatchet and drowned their sorrows in wine. It is unlikely that Clark ever admitted that his more nefarious activities had included acting as one of Cecil’s spies, writing him reports and accepting English pay. If he had, Bothwell—depending on his mood—would have roared with laughter or killed Clark on the spot.
By July 1575, the unbridled revelry at Dragsholm had taken its toll. Clark died of excessive drinking, and even Bothwell’s ox-like constitution had started to collapse. As their names were always linked in the bulletins emanating from Denmark, it was reported that Bothwell too was dead. It took another four months for proof to arrive in Paris and London that he “is but great swollen and not yet dead.” He was the victim of liver or kidney failure, but not quite ready to die.
The merest whisper of Bothwell’s death was enough to animate Mary’s supporters on the Continent. They began to claim that he had made a deathbed confession in which he had exonerated her of all responsibility for Darnley’s murder and taken the blame himself.
When Mary heard this, she clutched desperately at the chance to prove her innocence. She wrote to her ambassador in Paris, “I have been told of the death of the Earl of Bothwell, and that before he died he made a full confession of his sins, and among the rest, that he acknowledged himself guilty of the murder of the late king my husband . . . I pray you, therefore, investigate the truth of it by all available means.”
She managed to scrape together 500 French crowns to pay a courier to travel to Denmark and secure a transcript. The man pocketed the money and did nothing. A full-length copy of the “confession” was, meanwhile, sent by Frederick II to Elizabeth, who deposited it in the royal library from which it later disappeared. Mary was furious that Elizabeth refused to share with her or publish a document that she believed could restore her honor and reputation. She was still complaining about this two years later. Catherine de Medici instructed her ambassador to Denmark to obtain a copy, but if it reached her, she too kept its contents to herself.
Only short abstracts now survive. According to what seems to be the superior fragment, Bothwell swore that Mary “never knew nor consented to the death of the king.” The murder was the work of Bothwell and his friends; it was engineered “by his appointment, divers lords consenting and subscribing thereunto, which yet were not there present at the deed doing.” Their names were Moray, Morton, Lord Robert Stuart and John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, “with divers others, whom he said he could not remember at that present.”
Bothwell confessed that “all the friendship which he had of the queen, he got always by witchcraft and the inventions belonging thereunto.” He had drugged her eau sucrée to seduce her, and then “found means to put away his own wife to obtain the queen.” A slightly fuller variant of this passage says that he had “bewitched the queen to fall in love with him, and so invented means to get rid of his own wife.” Then, “after the marriage was consummated, he sought all means how to destroy the infant prince and the whole nobility that would not fall in with him.”
Bothwell’s “confession” is a blatant forgery. The version that appears to have once been in Cecil’s archive and is now in the British Library used these words: he “forgave all the world and was sorrowful for his offenses, and did receive the sacrament that all the things he spoke were true, and so he died.”
Leaving aside the fact that Bothwell was a Protestant who did not believe in receiving the last rites and had refused to attend Catholic services even when Mary took him by the hand, he did not die. He was alive for almost three more years. One of the copies of the confession says that Bothwell lay “sick unto death in the castle of Malmö.” That is also incorrect—he had left Malmö for Dragsholm two years before. Whoever faked these documents did not even check the basic histor
ical facts.
If that were not proof enough, the roster of Darnley’s murderers does not add up. Morton is named correctly, while Moray had foreknowledge of the assassination and “looked through his fingers.” But Sir James Balfour and the Douglases are not mentioned, whereas Lord Robert Stuart, another of James V’s illegitimate children and Mary’s half-brother, and John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, went down in history only because they attended Mary and Bothwell’s wedding and because the archbishop granted Bothwell a decree annulling his marriage to Huntly’s sister in the Catholic court. Neither was involved in Darnley’s murder, but as both were known to be Bothwell’s supporters, their names were put on the list.
One of the great ironies is that Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox and Darnley’s mother, was so impressed by Bothwell’s confession, she decided that Mary was the victim of a foul injustice. In the same month as the abstracts of the confession were making the rounds, the countess wrote a letter of reconciliation to Mary from her house in Hackney, adding a postscript in her own hand. “I can,” she said, “but wish and pray God for Your Majesty’s long and happy estate, till time I may do Your Majesty better service . . . I beseech Your Highness pardon these rude lines and accept the good heart of the writer, who loves and honors Your Majesty unfeignedly.”
The countess sent Mary a token of her affection. It was a small but delicate and costly piece of point tresse embroidery, which Mary would regard as one of her prized possessions. To achieve the intricate, glittering effect of point tresse, the pattern had to be painstakingly worked with soft silvery hair that was mixed with the finest silk or flax thread. The countess had used strands of her own hair, so it was a very special gift. Nothing could have been a more powerful signal of the reconciliation between Darnley’s mother and her daughter-in-law.
