The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  When the countess died, Mary said, “As soon as she came to learn of my innocence, she refrained from any further criticism of me, even going so far as to repudiate anything that was avowed against me in her name.” Since Bothwell’s confession is so obviously a forgery, the true significance of the countess’s reconciliation with Mary is to show how fragile and poorly documented the original proof against her must have been.

  The confession was to have a similar effect on Mary’s impressionable young son. James never saw his mother again after she kissed him goodbye the day before she was abducted by Bothwell. He remained with the Earl and Countess of Mar, who created a household for him at Stirling Castle and supervised his upbringing. He played regularly with Mar’s own children, who taught him to ride and hunt. These would be his favorite sports, but he also loved archery and was presented with innumerable sets of bows and arrows.

  James was given the best possible education. He was taught to speak Latin before he could speak Scots, becoming fluent in Greek, Latin and French. He was also brought up as a Protestant. One of his tutors was George Buchanan, who by now ranked among the chief of Mary’s vilifiers and whose scholastic regime included regular beatings as well as republican tirades against divine-right monarchy.

  James was repeatedly flogged to encourage him to study, which worked to the extent that he could quote classical authors by heart for the rest of his life. But what he must have remembered most vividly were the strictures he received from Buchanan against his mother, who he was assured had been a tyrant, an adulteress and the woman who had murdered his father.

  James was ten and a half years old when he suddenly noticed the Laird of Tullibardine avidly reading something and pointing out passages to his friends. James insisted on seeing for himself what was causing so much interest. It was a copy of Bothwell’s “confession.” At first the boy said nothing, but his mood changed to one of “bon visage.” Finally, he said, “Have I not reason to be glad after all the terrible accusations and calumnies against the queen my mother?” Then he added triumphantly to the laird: “I’ve now seen such a clear proof of her innocence!”

  On April 14, 1578, Bothwell died at Dragsholm. As was customary for state prisoners, his body was carried to the promontory that juts into the fjord a mile or so from the castle and buried at the parish church of Faarevejle. It was wrapped in a linen shroud and placed in a wide oak coffin. His head was wrapped in a white linen cloth lined with green silk and laid on a white satin pillow.

  We know this because the coffin was opened in 1858, when a mummified body was discovered in near-perfect condition. Aged forty-three at the time of his death, but said to look much older after a decade in prison, Bothwell had stood just over five and a half feet tall. His dark red hair could still be seen, liberally flecked with gray. An English antiquarian who came to view the body pronounced it as belonging to “an ugly Scotsman.” Others reserved judgment, not just over the deceased’s appearance, but also over his identity.

  Whether Bothwell’s or not, the head had posthumous adventures of the sort he would have appreciated. It was first displayed as a trophy on a writing desk at Dragsholm, then used by children as a football. By 1935, it had been reunited with the corpse and reburied in the crypt of the church. After the Second World War, the remains were once more exhumed, this time as a tourist attraction. Until 1975 or thereabouts, the body—by then no more than a bare skeleton—was exhibited in a glass case at Faarevejle until protests were received. Dragsholm Castle is now a hotel, where Bothwell’s ghost is said to walk at night. Such was the ironic end of a man who altered the course of history and aspired to be buried among kings.

  24

  The Lords’ Story

  WHEN BOTHWELL had been acquitted of Darnley’s murder in a rigged trial and he set about canvassing support for his marriage to Mary, a dramatic turnabout had taken place in the manner of the cover-up of the events at Kirk o’Field. Up to then, the lords had closed ranks to suppress any evidence that might help to solve the murder mystery, in particular that of the women living in the nearby cottages. But when Bothwell had abducted and seduced Mary, breaking his pact with Morton, the lords turned their full attention to accusing him, and uncovering as much evidence as possible to prove his involvement, before he became too powerful.

  Then, when Mary had been imprisoned at Lochleven and forced to abdicate, she too had to be implicated in the murder. The lords had deposed an anointed queen. It had to be justified, which was done by claiming that she was no longer fit to rule. She was not a proper queen. She had disqualified herself because she was guilty of “moral turpitude.” Knox’s stereotype that a Catholic woman ruler was by definition motivated by unbridled sexual lust provided the template. Mary’s “furious love” for Bothwell had “proved” that she was unable to control her passions. Carnal lust had led her first to commit adultery with a married man and then to conspire with him to murder her husband so that she could be free to marry her lover.

  Everything seemed to connect in a steamy story of sex and violence, adultery and murder, designed to titillate as well as to shock. The author chosen by the Confederate Lords to tell their tale was none other than George Buchanan. His credentials were perfect for the role. He was a Calvinist and a republican, the friend and “master” of Thomas Randolph, Elizabeth’s first ambassador to Scotland, in his student days in Paris. Later at Holyrood, he had read Livy with Mary in the afternoons. When commissioned to stage the entertainments on the theme of reconciliation for the baptism of Prince James at Stirling Castle, he had reached the pinnacle of his courtly career. Now Buchanan wrote not a masque but an anti-masque. Fact was mingled with fiction to create an artful piece of character assassination.

  Mary had rewarded Buchanan generously. How could he betray her so shamelessly? The explanation is that he was first and foremost a Lennox client. His loyalty to Darnley took priority over his allegiance to Mary. He was born in Gaelic-speaking Lennox territory near Glasgow, the son of an impoverished lairdly family. He owed his education to local philanthropy, for which he felt forever indebted.

  Buchanan had also kept up his links to his old Huguenot friends in Paris. He was close to Moray, to whom he had dedicated a book on educational reform. Moray in return gave him the lucrative post of principal of St. Leonard’s College, the richest, though never the most academically dynamic, of the three colleges of the University of St. Andrews. When Darnley was murdered, Buchanan was thunderstruck. His king was slain; his earliest fealties called him to action. He threw in his lot with the Confederate Lords, especially Moray, playing a key role as moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk after the battle of Carberry Hill, when he joined Knox and Craig in rallying the Protestants to justify Mary’s imprisonment. Then, when she was deposed and Moray became regent, Buchanan found that he had attached himself to the most powerful junta in Scottish politics.

  His close alignment to Moray enabled Buchanan to come into his own. For some time he had been striving to surpass Knox’s ideas and replace them with a more sophisticated theory that fused the classical concepts of ancient Greece and Rome with Protestantism. His ideal was republican Rome, with its tradition of civitas libera, the free state. He was repelled by the tyranny represented by the idea of empire and abhorred ideals of divine-right monarchy, dismissing the kings, popes and emperors of the Middle Ages as charlatans and tyrants. He showed a particular distaste for the colonial idea of empire in the New World, which he had first encountered while teaching languages at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

  His central premise was that rulers were chosen by the people to perform a set of defined functions. If they failed to carry out their obligations, they broke the terms of the contract laid down in their coronation oath. If this happened, the people had the right to depose them and appoint someone better qualified to fulfill the duties of the royal office. Buchanan skillfully reworked the theory of monarchy in a quasi-republican idiom to argue that rulers were accountable to those who elected
them. According to his model, the ruler, far from being above the law by royal prerogative, was subject to it at all times: to flout the law was not merely to oppose the will or welfare of the people, but to declare oneself a tyrant and an enemy of God.

  If Darnley had been crowned king and not been assassinated, Buchanan would have kept his radical ideas to himself. With a scion of the Lennoxes on the throne, his view of monarchy would have been different. But when his liege lord was savagely murdered, he spoke out. He heartily approved of Mary’s forced abdication, which he regarded as one of the best practical illustrations of his theory of royal accountability in eight hundred years of Scottish history.

  When Mary had lost the battle of Langside and fled to England, causing Cecil to ask the Confederate Lords to send him the “manner of the proofs” and other “evidence” against her, it was Buchanan whom Moray chose to compile the lords’ story. His report would take the form of a dossier: a compendium of the allegations against Mary citing all the relevant facts. Moray would then forward it to Cecil, who would use it to appease Elizabeth, who loathed rebels and was angry and incredulous at Mary’s deposition, for which she judged there had never been sufficient grounds.

  The dossier was to be the case for the prosecution. By collating all the evidence, Cecil meant to help Moray to destroy Mary. He knew it would be an uphill struggle. Elizabeth was not alone in disputing Cecil’s conspiratorial view of Mary or refusing to presume her guilt. The more traditional of the English landed nobles, led by the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Arundel and Lord Lumley, agreed with her. Although willing to conform outwardly to the Protestant religious settlement, they had deep-rooted Catholic sympathies. Norfolk, the grandson of Henry VIII’s commander who had routed the Scots at the battle of Solway Moss, was barely a Protestant: the merest scratch would reveal a Catholic underneath. His allies, Arundel and Lumley, were undeniably Catholics. They vociferously supported Elizabeth’s refusal to put religion ahead of hereditary right when considering the succession to the throne. They were convinced that an attack on Mary’s authority in Scotland would be the prelude to a similar attack on Elizabeth’s power in England.

  Norfolk and his allies viewed the Confederate Lords as the natural enemies of monarchy and royal government. They were deeply suspicious of Cecil and his inner circle. The future of divine-right monarchy in the British Isles hung in the balance if Mary’s forced abdication was upheld. Mary was not even English, so how could she be accountable to the queen of England or to English judges?

  Cecil evaded such awkward questions by arguing that Scotland was a satellite state of England, and therefore Elizabeth had jurisdiction because she was Mary’s feudal superior. It was a tenuous claim. But it was at least a way of justifying a quasi-judicial investigation into her “crimes,” which would certainly be necessary if Elizabeth was to be satisfied that the lords were not mere rebels but men of honor genuinely seeking to right a terrible wrong.

  For his part, Moray was crafty and circumspect, nudging Cecil into an irrevocable commitment to attack Mary. The Confederate Lords, he said at first, had all the evidence they needed to implicate Mary in Darnley’s murder. As soon as Cecil’s attention had been grabbed, Moray backtracked, asking if the judges to be deputed to hear the case in England could first be invited to examine the evidence in camera and give an informal prejudgment. Then the Scottish lords would know for certain if their case would stick, and if not, exactly what further material would need to be collected to make it do so.

  On June 22, 1568, a month after Mary’s flight across the Solway into England, Moray sent Cecil a copy of Buchanan’s dossier, which was written in Latin. No version of this Latin text can be found, but the dossier was shortly afterward translated into Lowland Scots for the Earl of Lennox, whose manuscript has been carefully preserved. It is entitled “An information . . . whereby it evidently appears that Mary, now Dowager Queen of Scots, not only was privy of the horrible and unworthy murder perpetrated on the person of the King of good memory, but also was the very instrument, chief organ and cause of that unnatural cruelty.”

  As a blend of fact and fiction, Buchanan’s story is a masterpiece. He claimed that Mary’s crimes were so far premeditated, she had first imagined them after the Rizzio plot, six months earlier than the Confederate Lords themselves had previously alleged. Her indiscretions had supposedly begun during her holiday at Alloa, just a few weeks after her son was born. Then, when she had returned to Edinburgh, instead of abandoning her liaison, she had intensified it. She had continued to gratify her infatuation for Bothwell while openly shunning her husband.

  Buchanan had fixed on the earliest possible date for the beginning of Mary’s alleged affair that avoided any imputation that Prince James was not Darnley’s legitimate heir. He claimed that Mary had flaunted herself while on holiday, leaping straight into Both well’s arms:

  What her usage was in Alloa needs not to be rehearsed, but it may be well so said that it exceeded measure and all womanly behavior . . . But even as she returned to Edinburgh [on September 6, 1566, after also visiting the Water of Megget and Glenartney] . . . what her behavior was, it needs not to be kept secret being in the mouths of so many: the Earl of Bothwell abused her body at his pleasure, having passage in at the back door . . . This she has more than once confessed herself . . . using only the threadbare excuse that the Lady Reres gave him access . . .

  The innuendo was deliberate. When Buchanan referred to Bothwell’s “having passage in at the back door,” he was echoing the main charge of Ane Ballat (a ballad), issued by the Confederate Lords, accusing the illicit lovers of the “beastly buggery Sodom has not seen.” And yet he had failed to check his facts. A closer investigation of those who had accompanied Mary to Alloa would have revealed that Moray had been there throughout. He had witnessed everything that happened there, but at the time had said nothing whatever about Mary’s supposed misbehavior (see chapter 17).

  Buchanan was never a man to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story. Mary, he brazenly continued, had relied on a pimp. She had used the services of Lady Reres, a niece of Cardinal Beaton. Reres was middle-aged, “corpulent” and overweight: the stereotype of a common bawd, who had led Bothwell secretly to Mary’s boudoir for their sexual encounters, one day meeting with a comic accident when she had been forced to climb a high garden wall, but had fallen off, tumbling into a lubberly heap on the ground.

  It was an incredible yarn, because far from helping Bothwell, Reres was one of his discarded mistresses. Drury, Bedford’s deputy at Berwickupon-Tweed, had warned Cecil in one of his handwritten reports that Reres was so jealous when Mary had taken Bothwell as her protector that she was banished from court, her place taken by Bothwell’s sister.

  Buchanan, meanwhile, was just hitting his stride. Poor Darnley, according to the dossier, had been denied his conjugal rights. All his threats, sulks, plots and paranoia were to be forgotten altogether. Instead, Mary’s “shamed” and “cuckolded” husband—who was, of course, the hero, victim and martyr of the Confederate Lords’ story—was depicted in this sanitized version of history as a saintly and statesmanlike figure who matched the image propagated by the Lennoxes on their placards and notices nailed to the doors of the churches and public buildings of Edinburgh.

  One of the important incidents in Buchanan’s narrative was the episode at Jedburgh in early October 1566, where Mary had ridden to preside at her Justice Ayre, or traveling court, and where Bothwell, who had preceded her by a couple of days, had been seriously wounded in a sword fight with his old enemies the Elliots of Liddesdale, a border bandit clan.

  According to the dossier, when Mary heard of Bothwell’s clash with the Elliots, she galloped furiously to Jedburgh and next day to the Hermitage. She arrived just in time to meet her supposed lover for a tryst before returning to Jedburgh the same day. Her desperate ride was “in the company of such a convoy as no private man of honest reputation would have entered among.”

  Buchanan simply refus
ed to report the facts accurately. Mary had actually waited a week, until the formalities of the Justice Ayre were completed, before riding to visit Bothwell, with Moray at her side for every step of the journey (see chapter 17). She saw Bothwell in the presence of her Privy Council and stayed for only two hours.

  Yet it was Buchanan’s version of events that was to come down in history. In the eighteenth century, his story was so popular it became the springboard for one of the most notorious Marian forgeries: the supposedly new or Crawford chronicle, which was concocted by a Presbyterian minister, who inserted his own voyeuristic material into an older source to provide graphic sexual detail.

  Back at Jedburgh, as Buchanan falsely alleged, Mary had moved Bothwell “from his accustomed lodging” and placed him “in the queen’s house in the chamber directly under her own.” There, in spite of his severe injuries and the fact that she had herself been close to death when her gastric ulcer burst, they carried on their sordid affair as if nothing untoward had happened, until the news reached a shocked and distraught Darnley. Filled with righteous indignation and knowing himself to be the wronged party, Mary’s lawful husband “delayed not but with all speed came to Jedburgh.”

  But there is no independent evidence that Bothwell had ever stayed in Mary’s house. And Darnley came to Jedburgh later and reluctantly, quarreling with his wife as soon as he arrived. Buchanan was out to create the strongest presumption of a motive for murder. He attempted to show how Mary had plotted to rid herself of Darnley: