by Linda Porter
Neither Throckmorton nor de Villeroy, the emissary sent by Catherine de Medici, was allowed to see Mary at Lochleven during the crucial five-week period during which the Scottish lords considered what was to be done about their queen. Throckmorton’s instructions were to fight for Mary’s restoration but he never seems to have regarded this as a realistic or even desirable prospect. The most likely outcome of the discussions between the queen’s supporters and opponents was abdication in favour of her baby son, but whether this would also involve exile or long imprisonment, as well as trial for murder over Darnley’s death and even possible execution, was not clear. Throckmorton, who knew Mary well from her time as queen of France, felt that the queen’s best hope lay in agreeing to divorce Bothwell. But this she absolutely refused to do. On 19 July, in a letter to Elizabeth, Throckmorton explained why:
I have also persuaded [advised] her to conform herself to renounce Bothwell for her husband and to be contented to suffer a divorce to pass between them; and she has sent me word that she will in no ways consent … but rather die; grounding herself upon this reason, taking herself to be seven weeks gone with child, by renouncing Bothwell she should acknowledge herself to be with child of a bastard and to have forfeited her honour which she will not do to die for it. I have persuaded her, to save her own life and her child, to choose the least hard condition.24
She was probably more than seven weeks pregnant but did not want to give the impression that conception had taken place before the marriage. She would still not acknowledge that she had been raped. Only a week later, her concern for her honour had a sad dénouement. She miscarried, reportedly of twins, and in her extremity of grief, depression and illness was apparently visited by her sister-in-law, the countess of Moray, in what was the only humane gesture made towards her at this time.
Mary was now forced to accept that abdication was the only course open to her. It would save her life and safeguard the succession of her son, her rightful heir. She had been bullied into submission and on 24 July 1567, she signed the abdication document, having been told by Lords Lindsay and Ruthven that she would be killed if she did not agree. Her dilemma in some respects recalls that of Princess Mary Tudor in 1536, compelled, under similar threats, to agree that she was a bastard and that her mother, Katherine of Aragon, was never legally married to her father. Like her namesake, Mary Queen of Scots was advised (in this case by Throckmorton) that a deed signed under duress was invalid. There might, perhaps, be a way back.
But, for the time being, Mary’s cause seemed lost. James VI of Scotland was crowned king on 29 July. Moray returned from France via England and on 11 August rode into Edinburgh to assume the regency. He had waited long for it. Visiting his sister at Lochleven, he lectured her on her failures during what must have been a harrowing interview. He then departed, promising neither freedom nor any hope of restitution. Mary was left alone.
* * *
SHE HAD NOT, however, given up. As the winter of 1567–8 wore on and spring returned to Scotland, she continued to send secret messages to supporters. Though her health recovered somewhat she was still far from robust when, on 2 May 1568, having charmed the brother and cousin of her jailer, she effected a daring escape by boat from Lochleven. Horses were waiting for her on the shore and she crossed the Forth at Queensferry, riding on to Lord Seton’s castle at Niddry in West Lothian. Some members of the Hamilton family and the earl of Argyll rallied to her cause and she joined them at Hamilton House, near Glasgow.25 Two days after her escape she repudiated her abdication, offering Moray a settlement which he refused. The earl preferred to try and maintain power on his own terms rather than face an uncertain future on conditions dictated by his sister. But his treatment of her had disturbed many men of both Protestant and Catholic persuasions and the queen was able to put together a substantial force, commanded by Argyll, even as Moray scrambled to put his own supporters in the field. Though taken by surprise, he had the advantage of being in the Glasgow area himself, attending a justice ayre.
The Marian army, now numbering about six thousand men, planned to move the queen to the great fortress of Dumbarton Castle but their attempt was foiled when, on 13 May 1568, Moray’s smaller force of about four thousand confronted them at Langside, then a village just outside Glasgow. Overconfident because of their superior numbers, the queen’s supporters believed that Moray would not fight them. They were wrong. After an unsuccessful cavalry charge the two sides fought hand-to-hand and for a while the outcome appeared in doubt. It was decided by the oddest of occurrences. Argyll fainted – he may have had a mild stroke or heart attack – and could not, at a crucial moment, reinforce his advance guard. Although the numbers of those killed on the queen’s side was small (about three hundred), the sudden loss of leadership caused confusion among the queen’s supporters, many of whom broke and fled.
Watching the battle from the hillside, Mary believed that her cause was now utterly lost. Having so recently regained her freedom, she could not cope with the idea of surrendering it again. The prospect of even closer confinement, perhaps of death at her brother’s hands, was unbearable. Fearful and desperate, Mary now made what was perhaps her greatest mistake, far more significant than the half-hearted attempts to bring Darnley’s killers to justice or even the decision to marry Bothwell, unavoidable as that had been in her own mind. She would flee Scotland and seek the support of her cousin Elizabeth in England. Her supporters were appalled. They reminded her of the unhappy precedent of James I of Scotland, who had been a prisoner in England for eighteen years at the start of the fifteenth century. The outcome of Langside, as they realized, was by no means a decisive defeat for Mary. She was urged to stay, to rally her supporters and encourage them to regroup. Guided by Lord Herries, she and her small party travelled south and west at night, until she reached the relative safety of Herries’s home near Dumfries. But Mary was worn out by the tribulations of the last two years; she was weary of trying to remain above the factions, of the duplicity and desertion of men she had trusted, like Maitland, who abandoned her after the Bothwell marriage. Above all, she could no longer face the sheer effort of being a woman ruler in Scotland. Though only twenty-four years old, she felt unequal, for the present, to the challenge of fighting any longer.
It was a desperate time. ‘God tries me severely,’ she wrote, a few weeks later, ‘for I have endured injuries, calumnies, imprisonment, famine, cold, heat, flight … and then I have had to sleep upon the ground and drink sour milk and eat oatmeal without bread and have been three nights like the owls.’26 Yet she could not be persuaded to turn back. She spent her last night in Scotland at Dundrennan Abbey near Kirkcudbright, having written to the deputy governor of the town of Carlisle, just across the border in England, saying she was being forced into exile and requesting permission to enter Elizabeth’s kingdom. She included in her letter a ring that Elizabeth had given her, as a token of her affection for the English queen and a plea for help.
Mary did not intend to wait for a reply. On 16 May she crossed the Solway Firth in a fishing boat, landing four hours later near what is now Workington in Cumbria. She hoped Elizabeth, a fellow monarch and one of her own kindred, would help her to regain her throne. That this was a disastrous misjudgement soon became apparent. Only six weeks later, the implications of her precipitate flight were already apparent. Writing to her uncle in France, a country itself blighted by civil war, she lamented that she was ‘little else than a prisoner’. And so, through nineteen long years of increasingly dismal confinement, a prisoner she would remain.
Epilogue
LONDON, 7 MAY 1603
King James VI of Scotland and I of England rode into London on a Saturday, to be greeted by the Lord Mayor and City aldermen, resplendent in scarlet and gold, and large crowds of onlookers who pushed and shoved to get a glimpse of the Scot who had become England’s king after fifty years of female rule. They saw a man aged thirty-seven, of medium height and with the colouring of his Stewart ancestors. He was a good h
orseman (that also ran in the family) and generally fit, though he had never walked properly since childhood. Bearded but with short hair, his was an intelligent face with a resemblance to both his parents. Though his gait may have been awkward and his manner of eating messy, James was supremely confident about his intellectual abilities and his capacity to rule in two kingdoms. ‘My right,’ he said, ‘is united in my person … my marches are united by land and not by sea, so there is no difference betwixt them … but my course must be betwixt both.’1
He had been in no hurry to come south after Elizabeth I died on 24 March, pointing out to the astonished and concerned ministers of the late queen that he could not suddenly drop everything in Scotland, the country which he had ruled, as he was wont to remind people, from his cradle. Failing to understand the obsession of the English government with form and precedent, he felt that surely the country could survive without him for a few weeks while he put things in order north of the border. When he did set off in April he moved south at a leisurely pace, indulging his passion for hunting whenever he could and awarding knighthoods with almost unseemly generosity.
James arrived in London without his feisty, blonde wife, Anna of Denmark. She was four months pregnant and until arrangements for their joint coronation in Westminster Abbey were well underway, he preferred her to avoid the rigours of a royal progress and the dangers of a particularly virulent outbreak of the plague that had already hit the English capital. It would kill one quarter of London’s population before it burned itself out later in 1603. Anna eventually arrived at Windsor on the last day of June, where all the ladies of the English nobility were waiting to greet her. On 25 July, James and Anna were crowned in Westminster Abbey and a new era dawned.
His mother had died on the scaffold at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire in 1587, bludgeoned to death with an axe by an incompetent executioner. It was the end of a long journey of despair. For the first few years of her detention in England, she did not lose sight of her long-term goal: to regain the Crown of Scotland and ensure official recognition for herself as Elizabeth’s heir. Yet it soon became apparent that her very presence made her a figurehead for Elizabeth’s opponents and that she would be increasingly seen not so much as the heir but as a very real alternative to Elizabeth herself. Initially, it also seemed that Mary’s cause might not be lost in Scotland. The country was plunged into civil war and the loyalty of Scottish politicians remained as changeable as ever, with William Maitland of Lethington and even Kirkcaldy of Grange rediscovering their support for the exiled queen. In England, meanwhile, one of the leading noblemen, the duke of Norfolk, harboured thoughts of marrying the Queen of Scots himself and was actually encouraged by the earl of Leicester but not by Cecil, who was horrified at the thought of a successful Mary, married to Norfolk and challenging Elizabeth for the English throne. Norfolk lost his nerve but others did not. Continued support for Catholicism and Mary’s claim in the north of England came to a head in 1569 when the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland rose in rebellion against Elizabeth. This revolt, a disurbing reminder of the Pilgrimage of Grace thirty years earlier, was ruthlessly suppressed and around eight hundred of those involved were hanged. Northumberland fled to Scotland but was handed over by the regent Morton to Elizabeth in 1572 and executed at York. Westmorland escaped to Flanders, where he died in penury.
The passage of time, which must have sat so slowly on Mary’s hands, turned a queen who had pleaded for help, and who only thought to be in England for a short while, into a plotter against her cousin’s life. There was not, eventually, any other way out. If Elizabeth would not, or could not, restore her in Scotland, then she would aim to displace her cousin in England. Support came from the papacy when Elizabeth was excommunicated (very belatedly, some might have said) in 1570 but nothing was to be expected any longer from France or from Spain. Eventually, the Scottish queen was manipulated into treason by Elizabeth’s redoubtable spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Mary’s last letter, written on the evening before her execution, was to Henry III of France, who had been a little boy in the far-off days when she had left France for Scotland. In death, she represented herself as a Catholic martyr. ‘I am to be executed like a criminal at eight o-clock in the morning’, she wrote, ‘… the Catholic faith and the defence of my God-given right to the English throne are the two reasons for which I am condemned and yet they will not allow me to say that it is for the Catholic faith that I die.’2 As the red of her petticoats was stained with her blood on the floor of Fotheringay, there was also born the legend of the doomed, romantic Mary Queen of Scots, the only woman ever to occupy the throne of Scotland.
The men who had variously supported and betrayed her, who longed for power but also, in some cases, to bring good government to Scotland, did not in general prosper for long. Moray was assassinated in 1570 and Matthew Stewart, earl of Lennox, who became regent after him, died fighting an insurrection in support of Mary the following year. As the civil war continued, John Erskine, earl of Mar, who had been James VI’s keeper and defied Mary at Stirling, also died, after supping with the earl of Morton in 1572. Mary’s old opponent then became regent himself, lasting until 1581, when his own enemies, of whom there were many, finally put him on trial for the murder of Lord Darnley. Morton, who had for so long evaded the consequences of his past, was executed in Edinburgh. William Maitland of Lethington had died in mysterious circumstances in prison in 1573, perhaps by his own hand, though possibly of natural causes as he was not in good health. Mary requested the pope issue an annulment of her marriage to Bothwell in 1576 but though it appears to have been granted, no actual documentation has ever been found. When Mary’s cause in Scotland seemed incontrovertibly lost, King Frederick of Denmark had no further use for her husband. Bothwell was moved to the castle of Dragsholm on the island of Zealand and kept in solitary confinement. He died insane in 1578. It is ironic that all these men predeceased Mary herself.
Her son, James VI, grew up in a strict and loveless environment, having never known either of his parents. His tutor, George Buchanan, tried to poison the reputation of Mary Queen of Scots but the boy’s own attitude towards his mother remains something of a mystery. He learned early on the advantages of independence and self-reliance. But one person, at least, who had been implacably opposed to Mary changed her tune. This was Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, who was reconciled to the Scottish queen shortly after Matthew Stewart’s death. She had lost much but was now committed to protecting the future of her grandson, the little boy whom she believed, with increasing confidence, would one day become king of England as well as Scotland. Margaret died in 1578, having outlived her second son, Charles.
When Mary Queen of Scots was at last executed on the orders of her cousin, the triumph of the Tudors over the Stewarts must have seemed complete. William Cecil could at last breathe freely. Yet the triumph, at least from the dynastic perspective, was hollow. Those who hated Mary most in England knew that the days of the Tudors were numbered. While she would never rule in England, it was only a matter of time before her son would gain the throne. As Elizabeth’s reign ended amid rebellion, economic uncertainty and divisions within Protestantism, a bored aristocracy eyed James VI with increasing anticipation. His succession was unopposed. When he entered London for the first time on that spring morning in 1603, he was fulfilling the hopes of the marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor a century before that the two crowns might, one day, be united.
James IV as a young monarch, holding a falcon. Hunting was one of his favourite pastimes. Restless, energetic and physically brave, his charisma inspired loyalty and affection.
Henry VII. The first Tudor king was an unlikely victor at Bosworth in 1485. He had no previous experience of government and years of exile meant that he was unfamiliar with England. This portrait hints at the personal cost of surviving the many challenges he faced.
Margaret Tudor. The elder daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York married James IV of Scotland in 1503, aged onl
y thirteen. Despite James’s philandering and Margaret’s temper, the marriage was a success. Only one of their six children, the future James V, survived, but it was Margaret’s great-grandson, James VI and I, who united the Crowns of England and Scotland a century later.
Henry VIII, Margaret Tudor’s younger brother, aged about twenty-eight and still some years from seeking to divorce his wife, Katherine of Aragon. His rivalry with his sister exacerbated strained relations between England and Scotland.
This beautifully illuminated Book of Hours is thought to have been a wedding gift from James IV to his English bride. The illustration shows Margaret at prayer.
James V of Scotland came to the throne aged seventeen months and survived a troubled minority to become a competent ruler. Cultured and pro-French, his adult rule was characterized by a deepening rivalry with his uncle, Henry VIII. He died of illness contracted during the Solway Moss campaign in 1542.
