Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  On the one hand, Darnley was pressing not only for more power, but also for Europe’s rulers to acknowledge his rights to hold the reins of the country. On the other, his unfitness for the role was becoming clearer every day. (Both his ambition and his outrages were reminiscent of the comportment of Margaret Tudor’s husband Angus.) And there were two more jokers in the pack. One was that before the end of 1565, Mary Stuart must have known that she was pregnant. The other was that people were starting to talk about the favour Mary was showing to her Piedmontese private secretary, David Rizzio. ‘To be ruled by the advice of two or three strangers, neglecting that of her chief councillors, I do not know how it can stand’, Randolph wrote disapprovingly, calling Rizzio ‘a filthy wedlock breaker’. Randolph warned Leicester: ‘Woe is me for you when David son shall be a King of England.’ This was surely an unfounded slander, but Mary’s attitude to Rizzio could not but show up her very different feeling towards Darnley.

  On 13 February 1566, Randolph told Leicester that ‘I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth the King [Darnley] and all his kin’ and that Darnley would be seeking to find a reason for that hatred. Darnley (prompted by a disaffected Scottish faction) had driven himself into a jealous fury, convinced Rizzio was the father of the child Mary now carried.

  ‘I know that, if that take effect which is intended, David, with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days’, Randolph predicted. It took a little longer, but on 9 March 1566 a party of nobles, Darnley among them, burst into Mary’s chamber and hacked Rizzio to death almost before her eyes.

  The bond signed by Lord Darnley declared:

  Be it known to all men by these present letters: We, Henry, by the grace of God, King of Scotland and husband to the Queen’s Majesty . . . have thought pity to suffer her to be abused or seduced by certain privy persons, wicked and ungodly, especially a stranger Italian called Davie.

  He and a group of lords had accordingly ‘devised to take these privy persona, enemies to her Majesty, us, the nobility and commonwealth, to punish them according to their demerits, and in case of any difficulty, to cut them off immediately . . .’ In this, as in many things, Darnley was the dupe of other, more resolute, men. But what was extraordinary was the insult to Mary.

  Mary rallied sufficiently to persuade Darnley that his life as well as hers would ultimately be in danger from his collaborators; over-mighty subjects who had dared to kill her servant, almost in her very presence. Slipping out of the palace of Holyrood she escaped, taking him with her – a daring ride across country, despite her pregnancy, reminiscent of the journey her grandmother Margaret Tudor had undertaken. With Bothwell swiftly at her side she returned to Edinburgh in triumph and managed to regain a measure of control.

  Elizabeth Tudor was genuinely horrified when she heard of the insults heaped upon Mary Stuart, telling the Spanish ambassador that Rizzio’s killers had broken into Mary’s chamber ‘as if it were that of a public woman’. If this could happen to one of the two queens in the isle, it was all the harder for the other to preserve any sense of invulnerability.

  While urging Robert Dudley on Mary, Elizabeth was half-heartedly contemplating her own marriage to the Archduke Charles, the emperor’s son, although braced only for marriage ‘as Queen and not as Elizabeth’. Then had come the suggestion of a French match – and there was always Robert Dudley. Even as Mary Stuart ordered her wedding clothes, Elizabeth Tudor was telling the Spanish ambassador that she would marry Robert if only he were ‘a king’s son’, while the Holy Roman Emperor was sending another envoy. It seems likely that by 1566 Robert must have suspected he would never get anywhere with his hopes of marriage to the queen but, with him and at least one other, Elizabeth’s matrimonial game had still some moves to be played.

  The tempting possibility of her hand had become one of the best tools of her diplomacy. Almost forty years earlier, a Venetian observer had noted that the English used the young princess Mary as a hunter uses a lure to draw in birds. Elizabeth used her own hand in the same way.

  In Scotland, incredibly, things were patched up after the debacle of Rizzio’s death. With Mary expecting Darnley’s child, they had to be. When she took to her birthing chamber in June, however, it was in Edinburgh Castle rather than any of her more commodious palaces. Edinburgh might indeed be a place steeped in Scottish history but it was also one of oft-proven security.

  On 9 June she summoned the lords to hear her will, a sensible precaution for any women embarking on childbirth. The birth was long and difficult; so difficult that Mary, in the throes of labour, cried out that had she known the whole, she would never have got married, while the Countess of Atholl tried by ‘incantations’ to cast her pains on to another woman. But on 19 June the birth of a healthy baby boy, Prince James, set the seal on Mary’s monarchy.

  The Scottish ambassador to England took care to give Elizabeth all the gory details of the birth, telling her his mistress had been ‘so sore handled that she wished she had never been married’. He did it, he said, ‘to give her a little scare’ off any marriage of her own. (It was obviously in Scotland’s interest that Elizabeth Tudor should die unmarried, leaving Mary Stuart – or Mary’s son – as her heir.) But that October, when in order to raise funds Elizabeth, was forced to summon parliament back after three years’ absence, the members returned to London even more determined to tackle the question of the succession than before they had gone away.

  Mary, when Darnley came to see his son, declared before witnesses that the baby was his. The extraordinary thing was that she should need to. Nevertheless, the summer of 1566, as Mary took time off to recover, saw some attempts at amity, sabotaged by the impossible Darnley. At Traquair there were plans for the royal couple to stag hunt the next day but Mary whispered in Darnley’s ear that she preferred not to ride out. Another pregnancy was already a possibility. Darnley said loudly that never mind, if she lost this baby they could make another. It was a tiny incident, but it dramatised Mary’s difficulties. His intransigence could only make her look favourably at other, more supportive figures.

  In the autumn Queen Mary went to Jedburgh to preside over the justice assizes; one of those tasks she regularly undertook and which showed she aspired to be more than a pretty figurehead. While there, in the middle of October, she rode over to the stronghold of the Hermitage, where Lord Bothwell was lying ill, having been injured by Border raiders. The incident was later used to blacken her name, with the suggestion of an illicit affair between the pair but in fact Mary had taken a large party with her, including her half-brother Moray. The journey back was marred when Mary’s horse threw her into a bog. The next day she fell ill, and soon her life was despaired of. The Bishop of Ross described it vividly: ‘her Majesty became dead, and all her members cold, eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold’.

  She was brought round. But what is interesting is what the Venetian envoy in France heard as she recovered: that ‘the illness was caused by her dissatisfaction at a decision made by the King, her husband’. Someone was going to have to do something about Lord Darnley.

  As Mary began to recover her strength she moved, with a number of her lords, to Craigmillar, just outside Edinburgh, and it was probably there that a conspiracy was launched. Or perhaps several different conspiracies. Mary was persuaded to pardon even the Rizzio plotters; there was now only one real enemy. When his son was baptised on 17 December at Stirling Castle, Darnley, although present in the palace, did not attend the ceremony. Instead, foreign guests were welcomed by Lord Bothwell, who was gaining an ever-increasing ascendancy.

  The first weeks of 1567 saw Darnley ill and undergoing medical treatment in Glasgow, heartland of his family’s territory. His illness was almost certainly syphilis, and the fact that she might soon be called on to resume sexual relations with him was a factor in Mary’s determination to be free. When Mary went to visit him there were huge concerns about her security and there had
long been talk that Darnley might try to kidnap the baby James and rule as regent himself while holding Mary in captivity.

  Just how far Mary’s desire to be free carried her was and is a source of huge controversy. The bare facts are easily stated. At the end of January Queen Mary persuaded Darnley to return to Edinburgh with her where, by his own choice, he lodged at the nearby house of Kirk o’Field until his cure was complete. Mary visited him frequently; on 9 February she was there with a cheerful company, although she left early to attend a page’s wedding party.

  At 2 am on the 10th February, Edinburgh was rocked by the sound of an explosion. Mary, at Holyrood, sent at once to inquire what had happened, and soon heard that Kirk o’Field was rubble. The day’s light, however, revealed Darnley’s dead body not in the house but strangled, in the garden, whence he had apparently been trying to flee.

  Volumes have been devoted to the murder of Lord Darnley and this is no place to weigh the evidence. Two things are important: Bothwell was immediately suspected by all sides of having cleared his rival out of the way and Mary was widely suspected of complicity. And perhaps a third: most historians today consider she was innocent at least of precise knowledge of the plan, although one of the skills of medieval or early modern monarchy might be to be able to express a desire that some obstacle be removed and take care not to know precisely how it would happen.

  At Craigmillar Maitland had suggested a divorce or annulment but Mary was concerned that might affect her son’s legitimacy. When Maitland seemed to say another way would have to be found, she cried out that nothing should be done against her reputation or her honour. To have failed subsequently to prevent what she should surely have guessed her lords were thinking was, if not a sin of omission, then at least an act of folly. But of folly, most would in the end have to declare Mary Stuart guilty.

  Certainly Mary did now act foolishly. Her very unpreparedness to deal with this crisis perhaps suggests she had not anticipated it precisely. Instead of observing the strictest mourning as a wife, and as queen distancing herself from those suspected of the deed, she vacillated. She ordered black drapes for her chamber at Edinburgh Castle but stopped off as she travelled there, to attend another wedding party. She went to nearby Seton, several times, for a few days’ holiday. She was observed, with the ever-present Bothwell, to be disporting herself at archery. Her mood was volatile, although she was distressed and angered by the placards blaming Bothwell for Darnley’s death. One depicted Mary herself as a mermaid, a notorious symbol of harlotry.

  Elizabeth, from England, wrote to her with extraordinary vehemence:

  My ears have been so astounded, my mind so disturbed and my heart so appalled at hearing the horrible report of the abominable murder of your late husband and my slaughtered cousin, that I can scarcely as yet summon the spirit to write about it . . . I will not conceal from you that people for the most part are saying that you will look through your fingers at this deed instead of avenging it . . . I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beg you to take this thing so far to heart that you will not fear to touch even him who you have nearest to you if he were involved . . .

  Elizabeth was clearly afraid that Mary’s actions would compromise the sisterhood of queens. If Mary failed to use such sincerity ‘and prudence’ that the world should pronounce her innocent, wrote Elizabeth on another occasion, then she would ‘deserve to fall from the ranks of princesses and rather than that should happen to you, I would wish you an honourable burial rather than a soiled life’.

  On 12 April, Bothwell was acquitted in a show trial; the verdict the surer both for the fact that Edinburgh was so packed with his men that Lennox, Darnley’s father, dared not appear, and that Mary had waved him off to the hearing. A week later Bothwell went further, summoning the lords to a supper at Ainslie’s Tavern. There, he demanded that they should all sign a bond. It called on the queen to marry and to marry a Scotsman. And who better than Bothwell himself?

  Mary’s next action was that of both a queen and a mother. She went to Stirling, where her son was being raised, to try to get possession of the baby. When Prince James’s official guardian refused to give him up, Mary was forced to set out once again towards Edinburgh. On 24 April she rode out from her birthplace, Linlithgow, to return to the city. The Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva (writing home on 3 May) described what came next:

  On arriving six miles from Edinburgh, Bothwell met her with four hundred horsemen. As they arrived near the Queen with their swords drawn they showed an intention of taking her with them . . . She was taken to Dunbar, where she arrived at midnight, and still remains. Some say she will marry him . . .

  Crucially, the ambassador continued: ‘It is believed that the whole thing has been arranged, so that if anything comes of the marriage the Queen may make out that she was forced into it.’

  Therein lay the rub. Although Mary’s first reaction – ordering her men to ride for help – suggests she had genuinely been ambushed by Bothwell, her subsequent reaction is harder to understand. She remained at Dunbar for twelve days, by the end of which, from later evidence, she would seem to have been pregnant. Bothwell was absent for part of the time, arranging a hasty divorce from his wife, so as to free himself for a more advantageous marriage, and the conditions of her ‘captivity’, if one can call it that, were not such as to preclude Mary’s escaping, if she really wished to.

  The dark suspicion, as Maitland’s friend Kirkaldy of Grange put it, was that Mary ‘was minded to cause Bothwell to ravish her’; that to avoid the blame she would incur if she openly took up with the man believed to be her husband’s murderer, she had helped to set up what was to be passed off as an abduction and ravishment.

  Perhaps a more likely explanation is that Mary was indeed surprised and outraged by Bothwell’s abduction but that he then won her round. She had, after all, come to feel in the last months that he was the only man in Scotland on whom she could really rely; who seemed to answer her desperate need for support and protection. If he told her he had been impelled to seize her for her own safety, and that her only hope lay in marrying him; if he showed her the Ainslie Tavern bond . . . That is the explanation Mary herself sent to her ambassador at the French court and the long circumstantial story makes convincing reading:

  . . . seeing ourselves in Bothwell’s power, sequestered from the company of our servants and others, of whom we might ask counsel . . . left alone, as it were, a prey to him, many things we resolved with ourself, but never could find a way out. And yet he gave us little space to meditate with ourself, ever pressing us with continual and importunate suit. In the end, when we saw no hope to be rid of him, never man in Scotland making a move to procure our deliverance we were compelled to mitigate our displeasure, and began to think upon that which he propounded.

  . . . Albeit we found Bothwell’s doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle. As by a bravado in the beginning he had won the first point, so ceased he never till by persuasions and importune suit, accompanied not the less with force, he has finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and in such form as he thought might best serve his turn . . .

  The conclusion that would best serve Bothwell’s turn was marriage with the queen, but she had her reasons for agreeing to the idea. Scotland ‘being divided into factions as it is’, she wrote (and it might have been her grandmother Margaret Tudor speaking), ‘cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man’.

  On 6 May they rode back into Edinburgh through sullen crowds, Bothwell leading Mary’s horse. On 12 May she formally pardoned him for abducting her, and raised him to Duke of Orkney. On 15 May they were married, in a Protestant ceremony.

  Once again, as with the marriage to Darnley, Mary’s feelings appear to have been in conflict. Within days, the French ambassador Du Croc was writing to Catherine de Medici: ‘The Queen’s marriage is too unhappy and begins already to be repented of.’ Mary had sent for him, after he had seen her a
nd her husband at odds, and told him that, ‘If you see me melancholy, it is because I do not choose to be cheerful; because I never will be so, and wish for nothing but death.’

  ‘Yesterday, when they were both in a room, she called aloud for a knife to kill herself; the persons in the ante-chamber heard it,’ De Croc reported. Bothwell, like Darnley but with greater force and abilities, was another man determined to rule as king. But the court was becoming a travesty from which men such as Maitland slipped away daily.

  On 6 June, knowing the Earl of Morton and the lords were planning an attack, and determined on his overthrow, Bothwell took Mary away from Edinburgh, to a place of greater safety. On 15 June, a scorching day, the royal forces and those of the lords faced each other at Carberry.

  Bothwell was ready to decide the matter by single combat. It was Mary who eventually intervened, knowing surely that this was no way to regain any useful control of her country. A deal was struck whereby she would be taken into honourable custody and Bothwell allowed to go free. But Mary was appalled by the reaction of the soldiers and, as the lords led her into Edinburgh, of the citizenry. Her dress torn, alternately sobbing and threatening, she listened to the crowds yelling, ‘Burn the whore’. Was this the real romance gone wrong; the love Elizabeth never wholly lost in all her long marriage to her country?

  On 17 June Queen Mary was taken, captive, from Holyrood to the island castle of Loch Leven, where she almost immediately miscarried, reportedly of twins.1 On 24 June, still weak, Mary was forced to sign a document of abdication. Five weeks later her baby son was crowned James VI, with her half-brother Moray to act as regent during his minority.