Mary Queen of Scots (59 page)

Once within the castle of Dunbar, Bothwell made his second planned move – an equally characteristic one, although in this case the queen was not consulted beforehand. He decided to complete his formal abduction of her person by the physical possession of her body. His intentions in this aggressive act were as before perfectly straightforward: he intended to place the queen in a situation from which she could not possibly escape marrying him. Bothwell was certainly not in love with Mary, although he may have accompanied his actions with some sort of protestations, such as he thought suitable to the occasion. But in the course of the gratification of his ambitions, rape was not the sort of duty from which Bothwell was likely to shrink. Melville, who was present in the castle at the time, and only allowed to go free the next morning, was quite certain that the ravishment had taken place: ‘The Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against her will.’
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It was Melville who tells us that Bothwell had already boasted that he would marry the queen – ‘who would or would not; yea, whether she would herself or not’. A fortnight later Mary gave a very vivid description of her experiences to the bishop of Dunblane, who was instructed to explain her hasty marriage to Bothwell to the French court: first of all Bothwell ‘awaited us by the way, accompanied with a great force, and led us with all diligence to Dunbar’ and there, in words which seem positively touching: ‘Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle.’ Now Bothwell, not accepting her promise to marry him, refused to have the consummation of the marriage delayed, but kept up a continuous barrage of importunity, ‘accompanied none the less by force’ until ‘he has finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and such form as he thought might best serve his turn’.
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It is interesting to note that Bothwell’s and Mary’s
contemporaries believed instantaneously and strongly that the abduction scheme had been a rigged one and intended to save the queen’s face. Within three days Drury wrote that although the manner seemed to be forcible, it was known to be otherwise.
²⁷
But it was also widely believed that Bothwell had completed his scheme by ravishing the queen, and that this was probably against her will. These were the conclusions drawn by those able to observe at first hand the bold and scheming character of Bothwell, and the markedly straitlaced attitude of Queen Mary to matters of sexual morality.

It is sometimes suggested that Mary found a sexual satisfaction with Bothwell which she had not experienced with either of her previous husbands. This may or may not be true: it can certainly never be proved, since the queen herself certainly never ventured any opinion upon the subject, and to the end of her life always firmly attributed her marriage to Bothwell to reasons of state rather than the dictates of the heart. In fact, the events leading up to her marriage to Darnley point far more clearly to the workings of physical infatuation, than those leading up to the Bothwell marriage. In spring 1565 Mary Stuart was a young and beautiful woman, healthy and energetic, long widowed, eager to be married; in spring 1567 she was broken in health, distraught, nervously concerned about the future of her government in Scotland. Quite apart from the evidence of events, it seems extremely doubtful whether they were the sort of couple who would have been drawn to each other if political considerations had not been involved. Practical ambition had driven Bothwell to woo the queen: this elegant, coquettish, literary-minded, slightly cold woman, with her graceful, leaning figure, her red-gold hair, her laughing flirtatious ways, her demand for obeisance to which she had been accustomed from her earliest years, was not the type to appeal to Bothwell, the lover of the lusty Bessie Crawford, the dominating courtesan Janet Beaton or the plaintive submissive Anna Throndsen. Of all Mary Stuart’s qualities, her courage and gaiety, her ability to make quick decisions and pull herself rapidly out of an untenable situation were those most likely to appeal to Bothwell: but these had been strangely in abeyance since her virtual nervous breakdown at Jedburgh. The important fact about Mary Stuart in Bothwell’s eyes was that she was queen regnant of Scotland, with the power to make her husband king consort and effective ruler of the country.

Of course it would not be essential for Bothwell to love Mary for her to respond to him: she might even have experienced some perverse satisfaction in domination by this straightforward and brutal man, so different
from her other husbands, and her potential courtly lovers. Bothwell’s intellectual curiosity certainly extended into matters of sex. Apart from the common contemporary rumours of his vicious life, there was a
canard
that he practised homosexuality.
§
The feelings which Queen Mary felt for Bothwell can only be estimated in terms of the importance which as a woman she gave to the whole subject of sex. In early youth she naturally paid little attention to such questions, and during the period of her first widowhood also was remarkable for the discretion with which she conducted herself. Her disastrous marriage to Darnley, springing from physical attraction, gave her every reason to adopt an extremely suspicious attitude towards passion and its consequences. If, despite all these considerations, she experienced some genuine fulfilment in Bothwell’s embraces, it is remarkable how little effort she made to keep in touch with her husband, once she was in captivity: from the moment of her abdication onwards, she seems to have lost all interest in Bothwell, as though he belonged to some previous, unsuccessful, political phase in her life. Another interesting aspect of her captivity is that she made absolutely no attempt to quench any desires of the flesh, if indeed, she felt them, during the whole nineteen years: there is no rumour, which bears investigation, of the sort of liaison which would surely have occurred had she become, under Bothwell’s tuition, the
grande amoureuse
of so many imaginings. On the contrary, from the age of twenty-five onwards, the queen led a life of total chastity.

Whatever Mary’s inner feelings for Bothwell during the short period of their concubinage – three weeks from Dunbar to the marriage, and four weeks thereafter – their union was certainly not founded originally on the flimsy basis of passion. Mary’s confessor Mameret later solemnly swore to the Spanish ambassador in London that, until the question of her marriage to Bothwell was raised, he had never seen a woman of greater virtue, courage and uprightness – and he therefore, with all the intimate knowledge of her character gained in the confessional, utterly believed that Mary had only taken up with Bothwell in order to settle the religious situation in Scotland.
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In fact the queen had not one but three pressing and – as it seemed to her – good reasons for giving her consent to the marriage with Bothwell. In the first place he had succeeded in convincing her that he would at last provide her with the able and masterful consort whom she had so long sought to share with her the strains of the government of Scotland. He had subjugated her by the undoubted strength of his personality at a time when broken health had induced in her a fatally indecisive, even lethargic state of mind, so that faced with the reality of Bothwell and his positive aims, she was unable to see clearly where her own best interests lay. Secondly, Bothwell was able to show to Mary the Ainslie bond which proved to her satisfaction that the majority of her nobility – not only Seton and Huntly but also the more contumacious Morton and Argyll – were prepared to accept him as their overlord. Mary had married Darnley defiantly against the advice of most of her nobles: she did not intend to make the same mistake twice. The Ainslie bond, and the apparent approval of the nobility were worth more to Bothwell in furthering his suit than all the magic arts and enticements with which he was afterwards credited by Mary’s partisans in order to explain his seduction of her.
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Thirdly, Bothwell had effectively ensured that the queen would not be able to go back on her word once she was back in her capital, by the act of physical rape which he had performed at Dunbar. The union had already been consummated: it remained to transform it into a legal marriage.

Having secured the queen’s acquiescence, Bothwell now faced the problem of ridding himself of his existing wife, to whom he had been married just over two years before. This did not prove difficult, since Jean Bothwell seems to have raised no objections: her marriage had been brought about by political considerations, and she was now content to have it dissolved for the same good reasons. There were already rumours by the end of March that her brother Huntly had agreed in principle to the deal. On 3 May Lady Bothwell was given judgment against her husband in the Protestant commissary court, which had replaced the old church courts in matrimonial cases: the grounds given were his adultery with Bessie Crawford. In order to make assurance doubly sure, their marriage was then formally annulled on 7 May by the Catholic Archbishop Hamilton, on the grounds that they had not received a dispensation for their marriage, although they were within the fourth degree of consanguinity, Bothwell’s great-great-grandfather having married a Gordon. The cynicism of this gesture may be judged by the fact that not only had a dispensation actually been given, but it had been given by Archbishop Hamilton himself.
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Despite the ease of the divorce, Bothwell’s servants took the opportunity in the course of it to threaten violence to Master John Manderstoun, canon of Dunbar collegiate church, who was told that if matters did not move fast enough ‘there shall not fail to be noses and lugges [ears] cut, and far greater displeasures …’.
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On 6 May Bothwell brought the queen back into Edinburgh: at the end of April she had received an offer of rescue from Aberdeen, which she had rejected. She was now regarded as firmly committed to Bothwell’s rule. The couple entered Edinburgh by the West Port and then rode up the Bow towards the castle. Both Huntly and Maitland were in their train. Although the artillery of the castle shot off magnificently for the queen’s arrival, it was generally remarked that Bothwell’s power was now absolute. The Diurnal of Occurrents recorded that the Earl Bothwell led the queen’s majesty by the bridle of her horse, as though she were a captive.
³³

As Queen Mary moved in a trance towards her public union with Bothwell, already the forces of aristocratic reaction were coalescing against his meteoric rise. Furious at the realization that Bothwell – one of their own number – had made himself a virtual dictator, on 1 May a party of dissidents gathered at Stirling. They vowed in yet another communal bond to strive by all means in their power to set their queen at liberty, and defend her son Prince James. In this meeting at Stirling, it is significant that the key figures were Morton, Argyll and Atholl – all three of whom only a week before, out of either cunning or weakness, had signed the Ainslie bond promising to forward Bothwell’s suit of the queen. Bedford was now asked by Kirkcaldy to write to Moray and ask him to return, and Robert Melville wrote for English support against Bothwell, threatening French support if it was not forthcoming. The pattern of Scottish politics was forming once more into the same shapes of family alliances and feuds, in which the power of one noble could not be allowed to grow unchecked, and in which English help was like the joker in the pack of cards. The Stirling conspirators diverted themselves with a drama called The Murder of Darnley and the Fate of Bothwell – in which the boy actor who played the part of Bothwell was hanged so realistically that it took some time to restore him to life. These same nobles sent a message to Mary offering her their support against the Lord Bothwell. But since Bothwell was firmly governing all matters around her, the queen could scarcely credit that he had already lost the support of the fickle Scottish lords: it was after all only a few weeks since the signing of the Ainslie bond, which had convinced her that the majority of her nobility especially desired this Bothwell marriage.

The days passed with horrible speed towards her wedding-day. When
John Craig, Knox’s colleague in the parish church of Edinburgh, refused to proclaim the bans of their marriage without a writ from the queen, he was brought a command signed by her personally saying that she had been neither ravished nor yet retained in captivity. But when Craig did make his proclamation, he was still brave enough, on 9 May, to express contemporary disgust at the speed of events, by a denunciation in front of the Privy Council of Bothwell’s behaviour: ‘I laid to his charge, the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement, and proclaiming within the space of four days, and last the suspicion of the King’s death which her marriage would confirm.’
³⁴
Angrily Bothwell threatened to hang Craig: but Craig spoke no more than what the common people of Edinburgh, once so devoted to Mary, their dream figure, their beautiful young queen, felt themselves at seeing her thus recklessly and carelessly allow herself to be trampled in the mire of Bothwell’s ambition. On 12 May Mary created Bothwell duke of Orkney and lord of Shetland (titles once borne by his ancestor, the 1st earl) and placed the ducal coronet on his head with her own hands. Four of his followers were knighted, including Black Ormiston of Kirk o’Field fame. To many the queen seemed like a mindless zombie under the power of Bothwell’s authority: Beaton in Paris was naturally growing distracted at the madness or folly of his young mistress, but Clernault reported to him on 14 May that Mary neither listened to nor inspected any communication he brought her from Beaton or others of her advisers abroad.
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On the same day the queen officially pardoned those nobles who had signed the Ainslie bond.

On Thursday 15 May, twelve days after his own divorce, just over three months after the death of her own husband, Mary and Bothwell were married in the great hall at Holyrood. Lines from Ovid were posted upon the gates of the Palace –
‘Mense malas maio nubere vulgus ait’
– or as the people murmured significantly: ‘Wantons marry in the month of May’.
^a
A greater contrast to the two previous weddings of the queen could hardly be imagined. The very fact that the ceremony took place according to the Protestant rite showed how much the queen had lost control of her destinies, although it is possible that she herself heard a Mass earlier in the day, out of which her adherents later tried to construct a story that they had been married under both forms. At the service, Adam, bishop of Orkney, preached a sermon in the course of which he chose to announce Bothwell’s penitence for his former evil and wicked life. After the wedding, there were no masques as there had been at the Darnley wedding, or ‘pleasures and pastimes’ as there had always been before when princes married.
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There was merely a wedding dinner, at which the people were allowed to watch Mary eating her meal at the head of the table, with Bothwell at the foot.