Mary Queen of Scots (58 page)

On 8 March, the queen received a formal visit of condolence from Killigrew, Elizabeth’s envoy. He found her, by his own account, ‘in a dark chamber, so as I could not see her face, but by her very words, she seemed very doleful, and did accept my sovereign’s letters and messages in a very thankful manner….’
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On 14 March, an effort was made to punish the author of the defamatory placards, and James Murray of Tullibardine was accused of having ‘devised, invented and caused to be set up certain painted papers upon the Tolbooth door of Edinburgh, bending to her Majesty’s slander and defamation’.
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On 19 March, Bothwell began to show his mettle as director of Mary’s policies: it was time for Prince James to be returned to the royal nursery at Stirling, from which his mother had plucked him a month before, when there were rumours that Darnley was threatening his safety. While Argyll and Huntly conveyed him there, his
governor, Lord Mar, was presented with the governorship of Stirling Castle. This meant, in turn, that Mar could be deprived of the vital governorship of Edinburgh Castle – which he had held loyally for the queen in August 1565. This fortress Bothwell now bestowed on his own ally Sir James Cockburn, but later, even more fatally, gave to his associate Sir James Balfour – presumably as a reward for his part in the murder.

Bothwell’s ambitions to become effective ruler of Scotland, which one may conjecture he had nourished since the summer of 1566, had been given a further fillip at the end of February by the serious illness of his wife Jean Gordon: she hovered on the brink of death, and one ambassador went so far as to announce that she had actually died. There is no need to attribute poison to Bothwell to explain the illness, since divorcing Jean later proved extremely easy – but it must surely have had the effect of sending his thoughts racing forward to his future plans. His finances were also no better than before and in February he had to sell more land to Alexander Home, which gave him another powerful motive to press forward towards a position in which his finances would be at least unassailable. By the end of March, a story had reached the English ambassador in Paris that a marriage might be forthcoming between Mary and Bothwell and, at roughly the same date, Drury reported to Cecil in London that ‘the judgement of the people’ was that Mary would marry Bothwell.
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For once more in her history, as at her birth, and after the death of Francis, the queen’s new marriageability made her a target for any ambitious man who wanted to make himself a king. And Bothwell was certainly such a man inspired either by family tradition of advancement through queens, or plain personal ambition, unmarked by any trace of sentiment or sensitivity.

On 23 March, the fortieth day after Darnley’s death, the queen’s period of mourning officially came to an end with a solemn Mass of Requiem and a dirge for Darnley’s soul. In fact her sorrows were only just beginning. The vociferous demands of Lennox for vengeance had reached a pitch when even Mary, advised by Bothwell, felt herself unable to ignore them. In a letter of 24 March she agreed to allow him to bring a private process in front of Parliament against Bothwell as the slayer of his son, and the process was set up by an Act of the Privy Council on 28 March to take place on 12 April. It was hardly surprising that in two letters of 29 and 30 March, Drury reported the queen to be in continuous ill-health – ‘She has been for the most part either melancholoy or sickly ever since, and especially this week upon Tuesday or Wednesday often swooned … the Queen
breaketh very much.’
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The trial of Bothwell was not even instituted officially by the queen, but allowed to stand at the private petition of Lennox. But Lennox understandably shrank for appearing in Edinburgh with the six followers permitted to him by law, in view of the fact that the city was swarming with 4,000 of Bothwell’s adherents.

On the appointed day, Bothwell rode magnificently down the Canongate, with Morton and Maitland flanking him, and his Hepburns trotting behind. The queen, with Mary Fleming, now Maitland’s wife, watched them go from the window at Holyrood. Although the due processes of justice were observed at the trial – which lasted from noon till seven in the evening – the absence of the accuser Lennox meant that Bothwell was inevitably acquitted; the wily Morton excused himself from the jury, on the grounds that he was kin to the victim, and thus cunningly, with an eye to the future, did not partake in Bothwell’s acquittal. The Diurnal of Occurrents, written by a comparatively impartial court observer, commented sourly that Bothwell was ‘made clean of the said slaughter, albeit that it was heavily murmured that he was guilty thereof’.
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Another omen for the future was the fact that a last-minute messenger from Elizabeth arrived at Holyrood at 6
A
.
M
., and attempted to get the trial postponed, presumably until Lennox could be present. The messenger was, however, not admitted to the Scottish queen’s presence, and treated with little courtesy.

Bothwell reacted characteristically and braggartly to his acquittal: he sent a crier round the town, and had bills stuck on the town gates and the Tolbooth, emblazoned with his arms, offering to defend his innocence with personal combat. However, that night, an anonymous acceptor of his challenge on a placard offered to prove that Bothwell was the ‘chief author of the foul and horrible murder by law of arms’, showing that the Scots spirit was not to be bullied. The next Wednesday, the queen rode to Parliament, with Bothwell carrying the sceptre, Argyll the crown and Crawford the sword once more as a year ago: but on this occasion, her nerve had evidently gone sufficiently to surround herself with hagbutters, no longer trusting the bailies of Edinburgh. At this Parliament, the proceedings of Bothwell’s trial were officially declared to be just according to the law of the land; all subjects were ordered to live in unity, despite their religious differences, and even more significantly, grants of land towards certain nobles were confirmed – the lands that went with Dunbar Castle were confirmed to Bothwell, and Huntly and four other Gordons were confirmed in their estates, although unofficial restitution had been made two years before. These were the practical aspects of the fall of Darnley.

Bothwell’s next move was absolutely in keeping with his character and the conditions of the time: if he was to make his power even more effective by occupying the position of king, he needed the support of at least some of his fellow-nobles. The contemporary expedient of a bond was once more called into play, as twice before over the murder of Riccio and the murder of Darnley. In order to secure adherents for this new bond, on Saturday 19 April, at the end of the sitting of Parliament, Bothwell duly entertained twenty-eight of the nobles and prelates then in the capital to a lavish feast – contemporary reports differing as to whether this banquet took place in his own apartments at Holyrood, or in Ainslie’s Tavern in the town itself. What was sure was that at the end of this momentous supper party, Bothwell produced a long document, the main point of which, apart from his own innocence of the murder of Darnley, was that the queen was now ‘destitute of a husband, in which solitary state, the commonwealth may not permit her to remain’.
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It continued ingenuously: if the ‘affectionate and hearty service of the said Earl, and his other good qualities’ might move the queen to select him as a new husband – and the document suggested that another reason for such a choice, quite apart from Bothwell’s noble nature, might be the fact that Mary would prefer ‘one of her native-born subjects unto all foreign subjects’ – then the signatories were to promise themselves to promote the marriage by counsel, vote and assistance. To this remarkable manifesto, known by the name of the tavern as the Ainslie bond, eight bishops, nine earls and seven barons now put their signatures including Morton, Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Cassillis, Sutherland, Glencairn, Rothes, Seton, Sinclair, Boyd and Herries.
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Although the motives and loyalties of some of the signatories must be considered to be highly suspect – for surely to Morton and Maitland King James Hepburn would be no more acceptable than King Henry Stuart had been – nevertheless Bothwell now had in his pocket the document he considered he needed for his next bold move forward.

The queen having gone to her favourite Seton, Bothwell now followed her there with Maitland and Bellenden. According to Queen Mary’s own story, it was here that he first paid suit to her, suggesting both that she needed a husband, and that he was the best man to fill the role, since he had been selected to do so by her nobles. This direct request threw the queen into a state of confusion: ‘This poor young princess, inexperienced in such devices,’ wrote Nau,
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‘was circumvented on all sides by persuasions, requests, and importunities; both by general memorials signed by their hands, and presented to her in full council, and by private letters.’ We can certainly believe Mary’s account that she did not know what to do, especially when Maitland assured her what she knew only too well, that it had become absolutely necessary that some remedy should be provided for the disorder into which the public affairs had fallen for want of a head. Now her chief nobles were apparently pleading with her to accept Bothwell – ‘a man of resolution well adapted to rule, the very character needed to give weight to the decisions and actions of the council’. However, Queen Mary always asserted afterwards that she refused Bothwell’s proposals at this point, on the grounds that there were too many scandals about her husband’s death, despite the fact that Bothwell had been legally acquitted of complicity by Parliament.

With this refusal still uppermost in her thoughts, the queen proceeded to Stirling to pay a visit to her baby. She arrived on Monday 21 April, and spent the whole Tuesday enjoying the company of her child. James was ten months old. The queen played with him in peace, happily unaware that this was the last meeting she was ever to have with her son. While she was at Stirling, she also wrote to the former papal nuncio, the bishop of Mondovi, now back in Turin, protesting her devotion to Scotland, to the Pope, and the Holy Catholic Church – in which she intended to die.
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It is difficult to know for certain what thoughts of the future inspired this strange guilty little letter, but Mondovi’s reaction, written before he had heard news of her abduction and marriage to Bothwell, is significant: he prophesied that unless the queen of Scots was given strong support by the papacy, she might give way to the natural impulse of a young woman and seek support elsewhere from a husband instead; as a candidate for this post, Mondovi put forward the name of Bothwell ‘who has ever been the Queen’s most trusty and obedient adherent’.
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On the Wednesday Mary started back to Edinburgh. The visit to Stirling had ostensibly been a secret one, and she had with her only Maitland, Huntly, James Melville and about thirty horsemen. Mary’s health was still poor. On the road back she was seized with a violent pain and had to take rest in a roadside cottage. That night she slept at the palace of Linlithgow, the peaceful palace overlooking its lake, where she had been born. The next morning, Wednesday 24 April, the ninth anniversary of her marriage to Francis, the queen and her little troupe started back on the road for Edinburgh. But as they reached the Bridges of Almond, about six miles from Edinburgh, close to the point where the Gogar Burn joined the Almond River, and travellers were ferried across, Bothwell suddenly appeared with a force of 800 men. He had spent the night at the near-by
castle of Calder, apparently on his way into Liddesdale. Bothwell rode forward, put his hand on the queen’s bridle, and told her that since danger was threatening her in Edinburgh, he proposed to take her to the castle of Dunbar, out of harm’s way. Some of Mary’s followers reacted disagreeably to the sudden appearance of Bothwell, but the queen said gently that she would go with the Earl Bothwell rather than be the cause of bloodshed. Docilely, without more ado, she allowed herself to be conducted about forty miles across the heart of Scotland, skirting the capital itself; she seemed to accept Bothwell’s story so totally that she made no attempt to seek rescue from the country people as she passed. Her only positive action was to send one James Borthwick to Edinburgh to issue a warning of possible danger. When Borthwick told the provost what had happened, a very different view was taken of the disappearance of their sovereign. The alarm bell was rung and the citizens were begged to attempt a rescue. But by this time there was little that they, or anyone, could do. At midnight, the queen was within Dunbar Castle, surrounded by a force of Bothwell’s men. The gates of the castle were firmly shut behind her.

This abduction – if the word can truly be applied to anything so calm and placid as these proceedings at the Bridges – represented a typical example of Bothwell’s thinking. Even if earlier hints of Bothwell’s predilection for abduction, in Arran’s story, are disregarded, Bothwell clearly had the mentality which considered that a sufficiently public outrage covered in some curious way a multitude of sins. This had been his reasoning over Kirk o’Field. Now he confidently believed that an abduction would not only put an end to further consultation and discussion about the marriage – in which his reasoning was perfectly correct – but also distract public attention from his connection with Darnley’s death by the very flagrancy of the act; here of course his reasoning was disastrously wrong. Was Queen Mary enlightened in advance as to her prospective fate? Although we cannot have the certainty of definite proof, the contemporary evidence points strongly to the fact that Mary knew of the plan beforehand, and agreed to it weakly, as a possible way out of the morass in which despair brought on by ill-health seemed to have landed her. The intended abduction was certainly widely known about beforehand among her nobles. Lennox knew about it on the Tuesday, and Kirkcaldy of Grange, Bothwell’s bitter enemy, mentioned it on Wednesday, the day it actually happened.
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In a fury at Bothwell’s rising eminence, Kirkcaldy wrote to Bedford in the same letter that the queen had been overheard saying that she would go to the end of the world in a white petticoat with Bothwell – but as Kirkcaldy did not reveal by whom or under what
circumstances this extraordinary declaration had been overheard, and as he subsequently became one of Mary’s loyalest followers, it seems likely that he was allowing his dislike and jealousy of Bothwell to taint his imagination. Maitland must surely have known of the plan. Paris, in his deposition, said Bothwell’s man, Black Ormiston, came to Linlithgow Palace secretly the night before the abduction and had a long earnest conversation.
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It seems inconceivable that the scheme should not have been outlined also to the queen, if only to secure her cooperation. Mary, still envisaging Bothwell as her help and support among the nobles, and not as the reprobate adventurer whom his enemies later built up in their writings, felt in no position to withstand this latest proposition; it was presented to her by Bothwell, using the same arguments which he had used to himself, as a convenient solution to her difficulties.