Mary Queen of Scots (37 page)

The Gordons were traditionally skilful horsemen. With this force, Sir John now proceeded impudently to harry the queen’s train as she proceeded north. He later admitted that this was done with the deliberate intention of abducting her and, unlike Arran, he seems to have been gaily certain that the queen would accede to the arrangement. His confidence in his powers of physical attraction was unfortunately misplaced. This flagrant defiance of her royal authority enraged the queen, who promptly refused to visit the Huntly stronghold of Strathbogie, on her road to Inverness. Caution as well as anger may have played its part in the decision: for it was highly uncertain what might befall her once inside the Gordon stronghold, in the grasp of the unstable Huntly, to say nothing of the mercurial Sir John. It was afterwards suggested that had Mary stopped at Strathbogie, Huntly would have had Lord James, Maitland and Morton killed and established a Catholic coup. He would most likely have completed the operation by marrying off Mary – to be ‘kept at the devotion of the said Earl of Huntly’ – to his son. Mary certainly told Randolph indignantly later that among Huntly’s crimes had been the fact that he would have married her off ‘where he would’.
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In the meantime Huntly was given no chance to put these dastardly plans, if indeed he held them, into effect. Queen Mary by-passed Strathbogie, and taking a more western route to Inverness, she stopped instead at Darnaway Castle. Here in this stronghold a few miles from the sea, set aloft amid surrounding forests in the centre of the earldom of Moray (‘very ruinous’ complained Randolph, except for the hall which was ‘fair and large’) she took the opportunity to announce that Lord James had been granted the earldom in place of that of Mar. She also issued an order against John Gordon for his efforts to ‘break the whole country, so far as is in his power’, as well as failing to return to ward.
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When Mary finally reached Inverness on 11 September, she had brusque confirmation of Huntly’s attitude towards her. The keeper of the castle, Alexander Gordon, another of Huntly’s numerous offspring (he had nine sons and three daughters), refused her entrance, although it was a royal, not a Gordon, castle, being only committed into Huntly’s charge by virtue of his position as
sheriff of Inverness. This was not so much insolence as actual treason, whether by Huntly’s specific orders or not, and in the queen’s mind certainly lent colour to what he would have done if Mary had stopped at Strathbogie. Huntly, on hearing that the rest of the Highlanders were rallying behind the queen, took alarm at the situation, and sent orders to his son to admit the queen. Mary Stuart then entered Inverness Castle, and its captain was promptly hanged over the battlements for his defiance.
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Installed at Inverness Castle, Mary was now able to taste the sweets of Highland life, which has commended itself to so many royalties since: the sport, the freedom, the beauty of the scenery all appealed to her romantic temperament. She felt a childish happiness to feel herself among this strange people dressed in their skins (half of whom only spoke Gaelic, a language she could not speak), so tough that they habitually slept out in the heather, said Leslie, but now came down from their distant glens to gaze on this beautiful young creature they were told was their queen. In order to please them, not only did the queen herself adopt Highland dress, some of it acquired hastily in Inverness according to the royal accounts, but plaids were also purchased locally for several of her courtiers. To Inverness came the local lords: the young gentlemen of the Fraser clan were presented to her, at their head their seventeen-year-old chief Lord Hugh of Lovat, nephew of that Lord Lovat who had perished with his eldest son and so many of the Fraser men eighteen years before in a clan battle on the Field of Shirts at Loch Lochy. The newly be-plaided courtiers were impressed by this muster of Highlanders, having never seen such an abundance of them before, and the queen showed particular favour to the good-looking young boy. As a result young Lord Hugh, ‘not a little vain’ of the dash which he had cut, offered the services of his Frasers to the queen against the Gordons, in order to avenge the deaths of his forbears at the Field of Shirts. The queen tactfully replied, however, that she was loath to give cause for a further quarrel between the clans. When Queen Mary departed from Inverness, Lord Hugh and his Frasers merely conveyed her to the banks of the Spey – and sad to relate for the self-confidence of youth, a number of Frasers ended by fighting against the queen for the Gordons.
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Although Randolph grumbled dreadfully at the appalling journey from Stirling to Inverness, and though the surrounding power of the Gordons was to say the least of it menacing, all in all Mary Stuart had never seemed more blithe. She evidently looked on the Highlanders as noble savages, a category she found more sympathetic than their opposite numbers, the savage nobles, in the south. Randolph was amazed at her happiness and her health: ‘In all these garbullies,’ he wrote, ‘I never saw her merrier, nor
dismayed, nor never thought that stomache to be in her that I find! She repenteth but, when the lardes and other at Inverness came in the mornings from the watch, that she was not a man to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a jack and knapscall [helmet] a Glasgow buckler and a broad sword.’
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In short, Rosalind was in her element: the very spice of danger, provided by the fact that Sir John still hovered impudently in her wake, far from upsetting, merely stimulated the queen.
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From Inverness, Mary still dogged by Sir John proceeded to the seat of the Catholic bishop of Moray at Spynie. It was suspected that Sir John might finally choose to attack as the royal party crossed the Spey, and Mary’s scouts reported that up to 1,000 Gordon horsemen were concealed in the woods. But no attack came. As the queen passed the castle of Findlater, the former Ogilvie stronghold, she called on it to surrender; but since there was no response, and the castle could not be captured without cannon, owing to its sea-girt position, she abandoned the effort, and passed on back to Aberdeen. Here, on 22 September, she was received with a rapturous and loyal welcome, whatever intrigues Huntly might be meditating at near-by Strathbogie. The great question which now faced the queen and the new earl of Moray
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was how next to proceed against Huntly: was he to be allowed to maintain this mighty sway over the north of Scotland, so complete that his son temeritously dared to defy the queen outside her own castle of Inverness, and another son, an escaped criminal, harried the queen’s troops, with impunity, while he himself apparently planned a state of near-independence? Mary, spurred on by Moray, now sent for 120 harquebussiers, and experienced soldiers such as Lord Lindsay, Kirkcaldy of the Grange and Cockburn of Ormiston (all incidentally keen Protestants), as well as some cannon. She also forwarded a message to Huntly asking him to surrender his own formidable cannon, which stood in the courtyard at Strathbogie, in order to menace the Highlanders into subjection.

A prolonged game of cat-and-mouse now ensued with Huntly; the earl himself drawn two ways, was clearly not yet quite sure in his own mind whether he was engaged in a rebellion or not; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would’, he temporized by sending his eldest surviving son Lord Gordon to consult Gordon’s father-in-law Châtelherault in the south. Knox wrote later that Gordon actually tried to raise the south to the same effect as his father was raising the north, and to this effect even contacted Bothwell, who had just escaped from his own imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle. But in the meantime Huntly offered to join with the queen to pursue his errant son John Gordon, provided he could appear with an armed force to support him. The queen understandably did not trust the appearance of Huntly surrounded by his Gordons, and Huntly equally declined to appear alone. Frightened of being captured, the great earl now took humiliatingly to sleeping every night under a different roof (easy enough in Gordon territory) but spending his days at Strathbogie. When the queen’s army got to hear of this, Kirkcaldy set out from Aberdeen with a small party of twelve men in order to surprise Huntly at his midday dinner and hold the entrance to Strathbogie until reinforcements arrived. Unfortunately the reinforcements proceeded both too quickly and too noisily, and Kirkcaldy was still parleying with the porter for an entrance to the castle when the clatter of their approach alerted the watchmen. Huntly had time to abandon his half-eaten meal, rush through the castle to the back and escape over a wall on to a waiting horse, without boots and without sword, but nevertheless still free. And on this fresh horse he soon outdistanced his pursuers.

Lady Huntly was now compelled to welcome the royal emissaries in Strathbogie at last: they found it stripped bare, except, rather touchingly, for the chapel, which had been left completely furnished with all its candles, ornaments and altar-books, in readiness for the queen’s visit, when it had been expected that she would use it. But as Huntly and John Gordon had both now disappeared, and the latter had recently captured fifty-six harquebussiers from a company near Findlater, which rendered him still more dangerous, it was considered by the government that the final stage of rebellion had been reached. On 16 October, by orders of the Privy Council, both Huntly and John Gordon were ‘put to the horn’ or outlawed; although the keys of both Findlater and Auchendown were sent, the queen was not to be placated. In a grim mood, she commented that she had other means to open the Gordon doors; in the meantime she demanded the surrender of Strathbogie itself, which was refused. The 4th earl promptly retired to the hills, in his fastness in the wilds of Badenoch, and might have tasted the pleasures of guerrilla warfare indefinitely, had he remained there.

Lady Huntly, however, was not content to leave the situation in this unsatisfactory state. First of all she attempted to have a further interview with the queen outside Aberdeen, which was denied to her. She then returned to Huntly’s side, and persuaded him that in his present critical state the best defence was attack. She seems to have been encouraged in her advice by the prophecy of her tame witches that by nightfall Huntly would be lying in the Tolbooth at Aberdeen, without any wound in his body. Egged on by his martial and optimistic wife, the earl now abandoned his stronghold, and marched militantly towards Aberdeen. Randolph at any rate was in no doubt as to his intentions: he believed that Huntly intended to ‘apprehend the Queen, and do with the rest of his will’. Knox put Huntly’s force at seven or eight hundred men, although other estimates made it over a thousand.
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Clearly, from the speech which he made to his men before battle, Huntly believed that many of the queen’s host would desert to his cause when the fighting began. In any case, he was able to take up a commanding position on the Hill of Fare, above the field of Corrichie.

Even at this stage, Huntly’s fatal indecision struck him again: according to Knox, when he saw the determined numbers falling thin, he intended to retire from the scene before the battle could begin the next morning. However, his ill-health and corpulence prevented him from rising before ten o’clock in the morning, by which time it was too late. By now Maitland had made ‘a vehement orison’ to the queen’s troops, urging them to remember their duty and not to fear the multitudes before them. Huntly addressed his vehement orison, on the other hand, to God: falling on his knees, he addressed Him in the following prayer, which he considered appropriate to the occasion: ‘O Lord I have been a bloodthirsty man, and by my means has mekle innocent blood been spilt; but wilt thou give me victory this day and I shall serve Thee all the days of my life….’
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But the prayer was not granted. As the day went on, the royal harquebus-fire raked Huntly’s troops on the hill, forcing them off their eminence, and as a swamp lay at the bottom they found themselves virtually cut off in a trap. Moray and his men hacked down the Gordons, and Huntly and two of his sons, Sir John and seventeen-year-old Adam Gordon, were captured and brought before him. At this dramatic moment in his fortunes, the great northern earl finally found the strain of the situation too much for him. There and then he dropped down off his horse in front of his captors, stone dead from either heart failure or apoplexy, brought on by strain and overweight – or as the Diurnal of Occurents vividly put it, ‘he burst and swelled’.
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The sudden departure of Huntly’s wayward spirit from his all too solid
flesh did not prevent his lifeless body from undergoing prolonged indignities. Immediately after the battle his unmarked body was thrown roughly over a pair of ‘crealles’ (fish baskets), and as it was late, taken to the Tolbooth at Aberdeen to lie there for the night – thus fulfilling the witches’ prophecy in true ironical and Delphic fashion. His corpse was then disembowelled and shipped south from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, £50 having been spent on a French doctor in Aberdeen and a surgeon in Edinburgh, together with spices, vinegar,
aqua vitae
and other necessities for the embalming of the body.
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It was all the more important to guard against the putrefaction of the late Huntly since the corpse itself was destined to be brought to trial by an ancient law, which provided for the presence of the offender, living or dead, for trial in front of Parliament, in cases of treason against the queen.
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In May 1563, seven months after his death on the field of Corrichie, the embalmed corpse of Huntly was set up in front of the full session of Parliament, with Queen Mary sitting on the royal throne. The grisly relic was then solemnly declared guilty of treason, and sentence of forfeiture passed upon it and its erstwhile belongings, with the title of the earldom of Huntly declared to be attainted. The body, still unburied, was then deposited in the Blackfriars Monastery in Edinburgh, and it was not until April 1566 that it was allowed to be carried back to the north, to be laid in the family tomb of the Gordons in Elgin Cathedral. The fate of the gay young Sir John Gordon was shorter and sharper. On 2 November he was executed, in the presence of the queen herself, who was compelled to attend in order to give the lie to stories that she had encouraged him in his affections and his wild matrimonial schemes. Having a horror of bloodshed, she was extremely reluctant to do so, and as it turned out the reality was even worse than her imaginings. Sir John cried out that the presence of the queen solaced him, since he was about to suffer for love of her. But the executioner was clumsy at his task and the spectacle reduced the queen to passionate weeping; she was indeed so horrified by her ordeal which resulted that she ended by breaking down completely, and had to be carried to her chamber, where she remained all the next day, in a state of nervous collapse.