Mary Queen of Scots (66 page)

Yet within twenty-four hours of writing this anguished letter, the queen was able to escape from her prison largely by her own generalship, ably assisted by George Douglas and an orphan member of the Douglas household whom she had won over by her kindness and captivated with her charm. Her active temperament fortunately allowed her to cast about ceaselessly for some practical means of terminating her confinement, like the lioness pacing its cage to which Maitland had compared her, while at the same time pouring forth as many appeals for outside help as she could smuggle out of the island. In the end it was inside rather than outside assistance which proved effective. So long as George Douglas remained on the island itself, there was not a great deal he could do to help his heroine beyond organizing her correspondence by bribing the boatman. But in the spring George Douglas quarrelled with his brother the laird (they both seem to have had their share of the peppery Douglas temper) and was ordered out of the house and off the island. This gave him the necessary opportunity to alert on the queen’s behalf lords such as the faithful Lord Seton, on whose loyalty she knew she could rely. Not only did George Douglas incur his brother’s wrath, but his rumoured plans to marry the queen seem to have also brought down the anger of Moray on his head, so that he was in a mood of fair rebellion towards his family, and the established government of Scotland, by the spring. Queen Mary was able to turn this to full advantage. The attitude of his mother Lady Margaret was more ambivalent; Melville hinted that she had been ‘upon the counsel’ of the plot, although if Nau’s account is accepted, she was left in total ignorance of it all.
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As a mother, she would be torn between ambition for one son, George Douglas, and fear for the fate of another son, Sir William Douglas, if Mary escaped from his custody – for this would surely bring down the wrath of a third son, Moray the regent.

Queen Mary’s chief female companions during her incarceration were the laird’s wife, young Lady Douglas, who often slept in her room, and generally accompanied her throughout the day, old Lady Margaret Douglas, and two young Douglas girls of fourteen and fifteen, daughter and niece of the laird. These girls conceived a hero-worship of their captive, and the younger one especially was so obsessed by her presence that thoughts of the queen filled her imagination, even when she was asleep. In the late spring, however, young Lady Douglas gave birth to a child. This gave Queen Mary a little more liberty during the period of the lying-in; she determined to avail herself of the opportunity to effect her escape. One romantic attempt, variously placed at the end of March or the end of April, involved the queen disguising herself as a laundress, and escaping by
boat with a bundle of washing while Mary Seton took her place in the castle.
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Unfortunately one of the boatmen, mortified at the way she refused to show her face, tried to take down the muffler with which she kept it covered. Instinctively the queen put up her hand to stay him. The whiteness of the hand – that hand with its long fingers like five unequal branches which Ronsard had once praised – betrayed her. She was returned to her quarters, although the boatman kept his silence and did not report the attempt to the laird.

The key element in any escape was obviously the crossing of the water itself. Having suborned the boatman, George Douglas’s first idea was to carry off the queen in a box; but the boatman dissuaded him, and together they agreed that it would be far easier to abduct the queen in disguise. There was by now another spy within the castle dedicated to the queen’s cause – young Willy Douglas, an orphaned cousin of the house called ‘the little Douglas’, who was also by now devoted to her interests, won over by the charm and kindness she had shown to him. Willy became involved in smuggling out the queen’s correspondence, for which he received a number of gold pieces, and incurred suspicion as he flaunted them about. There were other similar minor hazards to overcome: the laird’s daughter noticed Willy Douglas delivering some letters to the queen, one of which she dropped on the ground; as a result the girl had a nightmare in which she saw Willy Douglas bringing a black raven into the house which flew away with her precious queen from the edge of the loch. The girl was so distressed at this that Mary was frightened she might arouse suspicion, and had to make her promise not to mention either the letters or the dream, on condition that the queen would take her with her when she escaped. But, Mary quickly added, of this escape she had at present neither hopes nor means. The laird of Markyston, a notorious wizard, also predicted that the queen would have escaped by the beginning of May and made a bet on it: as a result of which unhelpful piece of prophecy or sportsmanship her guard was increased.

George Douglas now asked permission to revisit Lochleven in order to say farewell to his mother, using the pretext that he intended to leave Scotland altogether and go to France. Both his mother and brother were deeply upset at this decision, and tried to persuade him to live instead with his half-brother the regent; they even enlisted the queen to write to him to this effect, and it was in this letter, which the queen obligingly wrote at their request, that she was able to send George Douglas a secret message urging the need to act swiftly before young Lady Douglas recovered from her confinement. The day fixed for the attempt was 2 May, but the fact
that Mary took the trouble to write to both Queen Elizabeth, quoted earlier, and Catherine de Medicis, appealing once more for assistance by French troops, on 1 May, shows that there was a great deal of doubt in her mind at least as to whether the escape would be successful. As spring stole towards summer, life on Lochleven became somewhat less bleak, and there were even modest boating expeditions on the lake; in the course of one of these, in which the laird accompanied the queen, her servants played a joke pretending their mistress had escaped, and in the ensuing fracas, half-playful, half-serious, some of the crowd on the shore of the island were wounded, and had to be attended to by the queen’s surgeons. This incident was later considered by the queen to have distracted attention from the plots of George Douglas in Lochleven village itself.
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As George Douglas remained on shore in this village, having alerted Lord Seton of what was on hand, Willy Douglas took charge of arrangements on the island. His first idea was that the queen should leap a seven-foot wall in the garden, but when a gallant lady-in-waiting attempted the drop as an experiment and severely injured her foot, the plan was abandoned. Willy Douglas decided that the only safe course was for the queen to march boldly out of the main gate of the castle. On 2 May he therefore organized a May-Day pageant, with himself as Abbot of Unreason; in the manner of such celebrations, the queen was made to swear to follow the abbot about all day; whereupon Willy Douglas gave a splendid exhibition of drunken fooling, as a result of which by the afternoon the queen declared herself to be so exhausted that she must sleep; she then flung herself down on her bed, not exhausted but desperately excited. As she rested, she heard a woman in the next room chattering and saying that a great troupe of horsemen had passed through the village of Lochleven that day, including Lord Seton, saying that they were going to an assize, and also that George Douglas had been seen in the village that day.

There were still some dramatic dangers to be overcome: for example Lady Margaret insisted on discussing the question of the queen’s escape, saying how she would ruin the Douglases if she did so and, in the midst of the actual conversation, noticed some horsemen on the shore: she would have raised an immediate outcry if the queen had not distracted her by fulminating bitterly against Moray. The laird himself looked out of the window and noticed Willy putting pegs into the bottoms of all the boats on the shore except one (to hole them against pursuit); he began to exclaim against Willy’s idiocy, without exactly understanding what he was up to, until the queen pretended to faint, and the laird was compelled to go and fetch her a glass of wine. He was still sufficiently suspicious to ask to be
near the window at dinner so that he could keep an eye on the loch and the village. Finally George Douglas bade farewell to his mother before his theoretical journey to France. One of the queen’s maids then brought her one of the pearl earrings which she habitually wore, saying that George Douglas had recovered it for her from the boatman who had found it and had wished to sell it to him; but George Douglas had recognized the earring as belonging to the queen. This little piece of by-play was the signal that everything was now ready for the escape.

The queen retired into her room an hour before supper and put on a red kirtle belonging to one of her women, and one of her own long mantles over it. Then she went into the garden to walk with Lady Margaret. The queen was served her own supper by the laird, according to custom; next the laird went across the courtyard into the main tower, to eat his own supper with his family. Drysdale, the chief soldier of the island’s guard, who generally stayed in the queen’s room, went too and played at handball (thus reinforcing contemporary suspicions that he was in the plot).
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The queen now had to rid herself of her faithful escort of the admiring young girls; she went to the upper room of her own tower, announcing that she wanted to say her prayers; this was not solely an excuse to absent herself, since she did indeed pray fervently for the success of her venture. Here she cast off her own mantle and put on a hood like those worn by the countrywomen; one of her
femmes-de-chambre
dressed herself similarly; the other stayed below and tried to allay the suspicions of the girls, who kept asking why the queen was so long upstairs.

In the meantime Willy Douglas dexterously removed the laird’s keys as he was handing him his evening drink at supper.
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He then gave a sign through the window to the queen’s woman that all was ready. The queen, in her disguise, boldly crossed the courtyard, although it was full of servants passing to and fro, and went out of the main gate; having relocked the gate, Willy Douglas threw the keys into a cannon near at hand. The queen and her attendant stood for a time in the shadow of the castle wall, fearing they might be seen from the windows of the house, before finally going to the boats. Here the queen laid herself down beneath the boatman’s seat, partly to be hidden, partly to avoid cannon shot. Several washerwomen by the boats recognized her, and one of them made a sign to Willy that she had done so; but the boy called out to the woman to hold her tongue. Even now the last hazard was not at an end: as they neared the opposite shore, Willy thought he saw an enemy lurking. It turned out to be one of George Douglas’s servants who was a stranger to him. Finally they landed.

Mary was welcomed by the faithful George Douglas and by John Beaton. By a piece of ironic justice, Beaton had with him the best horses belonging to the laird of Lochleven, stolen out of the laird’s own stables, which lay on the mainland. The queen mounted and taking only Willy Douglas with her – even her
femme-de-chambre
was left behind for the time being – she set off to meet Lord Seton, the laird of Riccarton and their followers, about two miles away. They then crossed the sea at Queensferry, and were at the Seton palace of Niddry by about midnight. The country people, who recognized the queen, cheered as she passed, and even the laird’s uncle, who saw her, did not try to stop her. The music of popular acclaim sounded sweetly in Mary’s ears after her confinement: there is a tradition that when she greeted her people outside Niddry the next morning, her long auburn hair was still flowing about her shoulders, for in her eagerness to show herself, she had not even paused to have it dressed.

Queen Mary was once more at liberty after ten and a half months of captivity on a tiny island. In the meantime a countryman of lesser loyalty had rowed back to Lochleven to report her escape. Her disappearance had already been made known by the eager young girls, who found the queen’s mantle in the upper room and thought she was hiding. The laird of Lochleven fell into such a passion of distress that he tried to stab himself with his own dagger.
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But it is pleasant to record that those two other Douglases, George and Willy, who had placed devotion to their queen above family interest, were duly rewarded by her continual gratitude in later life, for as Mary herself wrote later to Beaton, asking him to forward George Douglas’s cause in France,
‘tels services ne se font pas tous les jours
’
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(such services are not performed every day). The dashing George continued in Mary’s employ during her English captivity; although he did not succeed in winning the hand of the queen he loved, his romantic aspirations might not have been so quickly extinguished if she had remained longer at liberty in Scotland. As Moray’s brother, a Protestant and a member of the powerful Douglas clan, he would have represented a good compromise candidate as a husband. Willy Douglas, the boy Mary plucked from Lochleven, whom she called ‘her orphan’, remained attached to her service until death, and was mentioned in her last will at Fotheringhay.