Mary Queen of Scots (67 page)

PART THREE
The Captivity

19 In Foreign Bands

On Lochleven Mary had been compared by Maitland to a captive lion; the feelings of the Regent Moray on hearing that his sister had escaped from her prison may be compared to those of Prince John, regent of England, when he learnt that his brother King Richard was on his way home, and ‘the lion was unloosed’. The Regent Moray was sore amazed, said the Diurnal of Occurrents,
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more especially because he happened to be at Glasgow when he learnt the evil news, and by now Mary herself had reached near-by Hamilton from Niddry. The regent’s first instinct was to desert the unhealthy area of western Scotland – where such loyal Marian lords as Herries and Maxwell held sway in the south, and Argyll, now also a Marian, in the north, to say nothing of the menacing prospect of the key fortress of Dumbarton, still firmly held for the queen, to the west beyond Glasgow. But prudence prevailed: the regent decided to stand firm, rather than let the whole west unite for the queen; as it turned out, he was amply repaid for the steadfast nature of his decision.

Supporters were flocking to the queen, as a result of the series of proclamations in which she once more sought her subjects’ allegiance. On 8 May nine earls, nine bishops, eighteen lairds and over 100 other lesser supporters declared for her in a joint proclamation. Despite this impressive show of loyalty and strength, Mary was not without her problems. The Hamiltons seized this ripe opportunity of emphasizing their own claims to the succession if both Mary and James disappeared – and their right to act as governors if only Mary did. Another particularly virulent Marian proclamation, thought to be the work of Archbishop Hamilton, referred to
Moray as ‘an bastard gotten in shameful adultery’ and Châtelherault as the ‘Queen’s dearest father adoptive … head of the good house of Hamilton’. Although it is unlikely that this proclamation was ever published,
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its tone certainly makes it clear why Mary feared to remain overlong at Hamilton. Having escaped her Lochleven bonds, she did not wish to become the puppet of another Scottish house. She therefore determined to march towards Dumbarton and here on neutral ground try to draw her subjects back to her. Mary was certainly not particularly anxious to fight Moray before she reached Dumbarton, seeing no advantage in confronting him at the head of a Hamilton force when she might in the future be able to face him backed up by a more truly national army. In her desire to be restored to her throne at all costs, Mary was even prepared to treat with Moray; but the regent refused to enter into negotiations.

The Marian party had by now reached impressive proportions – twice as many as that of the regent, said the queen.
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Estimates vary from 6,000 royalists to Moray’s 4,000, to 5,000 and 3,000 respectively; but all agreed that Mary’s party had considerable numerical superiority. This preponderance had the fatal effect of encouraging the queen’s army to skirt Glasgow narrowly on their route to Dumbarton, in the hopes of drawing the regent into a fight and thus annihilating him. The Hamiltons had, after all, suffered much at Moray’s hands; his occupation of the regency was a flagrant insult to their ancient position in Scotland; they now saw an excellent opportunity of obliterating their enemy under what seemed to be ideally weighted conditions. As the Marians reached the small village of Langside, the vanguard under Lord Claud Hamilton stormed forward. Moray was established beyond Langside on the Burgh Muir. He appeared to accept their challenge, despite the Marian numerical superiority. But Moray was fortunate in having two experienced and skilful soldiers beside him – Kirkcaldy of Grange and Morton. Morton remained at Moray’s side, in charge of the main battle, while Kirkcaldy rode forward with his hagbutters to harry the royal troops as they entered the narrow main street of Langside.

Under the regent’s attack, the border horsemen under Lord Herries did valiantly, and Hamilton’s men fought their way gallantly forward. But by an evil chance, the main command of the royal army had been given to Argyll, now made ‘Lieutenant of the Kingdom’
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on the grounds that he had supplied by far the largest amount of men. And now the main body of the royal troops under Argyll’s personal command entirely failed to follow up their van. It was said afterwards, to explain his defection, that Argyll had actually fainted, or else had had an exceptionally ill-timed
epileptic fit; his enemies pointed out that as he was Moray’s brother-in-law and erstwhile comrade, his failure of generalship might have the less medical and more sinister explanation of pre-arranged treachery. Whatever its origin, the temporary suspension of Argyll’s faculties proved fatal to the cause of Mary Queen of Scots at Langside. As Kirkcaldy’s pikemen fell upon the Hamiltons, they found themselves totally unsupported by Argyll’s men who, leaderless and unable or unwilling to withstand a full charge, broke away from it, and fled back towards their native Highlands. The crossfire of the hagbutters, the depredations of the pikemen, and the failure of Argyll combined to bring about a colossal defeat for the queen in which only one member of Moray’s side was even killed by Herries’s gallant charge (although Lords Home and Ochiltree were injured). Over 100 of the queen’s party were slain, mainly Hamiltons, and over 300 were taken prisoner, including the faithful Lord Seton, Sir James Hamilton and many other members of his clan.

The queen watched this gloomy contest from a near-by hill. For once might had been allied with right; but sadly, the combination had worked out to the advantage of neither. Mary’s servant John Beaton told Catherine de Medicis later that Mary had mounted on her own horse, and like another Zenobia ridden into the battle, to encourage her troops to advance; she would have led them to the charge in person, but she found them all quarrelling among themselves, insensible to her eloquence and more inclined to exchange blows with each other than to attack the rebel host.
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Once the battle was clearly decided in favour of Moray, the queen had more pressing problems to deal with than the feuds of her own supporters. She had now to ride, not like Zenobia into battle, but like any fugitive away from the scene of her defeat, and away from the searing sweep of Moray’s men. Dumbarton was the obvious target for her – Dumbarton, from which French help could be introduced into the country, or from which France itself could be reached, if the situation became so desperate that the queen had to flee. But Dumbarton was cut off by hostile Lennox country and Moray’s forces; guided by Lord Herries, the queen decided to flee south instead, into the south-western territories of Scotland which were still extremely Catholic in feeling as well as loyal to Mary, under the feudal sway of two Catholic magnates, Herries and Maxwell.

The journey itself was rough and wild; the conditions of travel were primitive in the extreme. Afterwards the queen seemed to remember so little about this nightmare flight in her account of it to Nau, that his narrative, so free and detailed during the period of her captivity at Lochleven, degenerates into a mere list of headings. Once she was in captivity, perhaps
Mary preferred to throw a veil in her own mind over these last Scottish sufferings, which had been a prelude to the long years of English imprisonment. Immediately after the flight, in June 1568, she gave a description of it to her uncle in France: ‘I have endured injuries, calumnies, imprisonment,’ she wrote, ‘famine, cold, heat, flight not knowing whither, 92 miles across the country without stopping or alighting, 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….’
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Queen Mary fled first to Dumfries, a journey of about sixty miles; by tradition Lord Herries led her down through the unfrequented passes of the Glenkens and along the west bank of the River Ken. They paused to rest at the head of the valley of the Tarff, at a point now named Queen’s hill. The Dee was crossed just beyond the village of Tongland, where her escort destroyed the ancient wooden bridge to avoid pursuit; close by, at Culdoach, Mary received the reviving bowl of sour milk which she mentioned to her uncle.
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Having rested at Herries’s own castle of Corrah on the way, the queen finally reached the Maxwell castle of Terregles.

It was here at Terregles that the critical decision was taken to flee further on into England. The decision was made by the queen alone. She herself described dolefully to Archbishop Beaton in Paris how her supporters had cautioned her piteously not to trust Queen Elizabeth, since the English in the past had savagely imprisoned a Scottish sovereign, in the shape of James
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, and even her own father had not trusted himself to meet Henry
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at York. The general view was that she should either stay in Scotland – where Herries guaranteed that she could hold out for at least another forty days – or go to France and hope to rally some support there. In retrospect, either course would seem to have been more sensible than seeking an English refuge. We cannot tell what considerations weighed with Mary Stuart to choose it nevertheless, what dreams of friendship and alliance with Elizabeth still possessed her; yet the siren song of Elizabeth’s friendship, the mirage of the English succession, were still strong enough in this moment of decision to blot out the stable image of the proven friendship of France, where Mary had actually lived for thirteen years, and which could still be so easily sought from a western port of Scotland, the sea-route past Wales and Cornwall which Mary had taken years before as a child. In France Mary had the inalienable estates and incomes of a queen dowager of the country; as a Catholic queen fleeing from a Protestant country, she had every reason to expect the support of her brother-in-law, Charles
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, and Queen Catherine, to say nothing of her Guise relations, of whom the latest scion Henry, duke of Guise, was just rising into a manhood which promised to be as glorious as that of his father Duke Francis. Even if Elizabeth had shown stronger support for Mary against her rebels in the short interval since Carberry Hill than the French king, the patent fact that Mary was a Catholic whereas her insurgents were Protestants meant that the French would in the long run always have a vested interest to help the Scottish queen as their co-religionist.

In place of friendly France, Mary Stuart chose to fling herself upon the mercy of unknown England, a land where she had no party, no money, no estates, no relatives except her former mother-in-law, Lady Lennox, who hated her and Queen Elizabeth herself, whom she had never met personally, and whose permission she had not even obtained to enter the country. As decisions go, it was a brave one, a romantic one even, but under the circumstances it was certainly not a wise one. No human character is static. Different circumstances develop different aspects of the same personality. Perhaps ten months in prison had served to bring out in Mary’s nature that streak either of the romantic or of the gambler, which leads the subject fatally on ever to prefer hope and high adventure to the known quantity, and which Mary Stuart passed on so dramatically to many of her later Stuart descendants. From now on, like all captives, Mary Stuart was to live of necessity far more in the world of dreams, than in that of reality. Her confinement in Lochleven seemed to have already begun the process of attrition in her powers of judgement. The queen herself summed up the subject of her fatal decision in a sentence at the end of a letter to Beaton towards the end of her life as sad as any she ever wrote: ‘But I commanded my best friends to permit me to have my own way….’
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The decision once taken, Herries wrote to Lowther, the deputy governor of Carlisle, asking permission for the Scottish queen to take refuge in England. But Mary did not even wait for the return of the messenger. She was now in borrowed linen, and in clothes and a hood lent by the laird of Lochinvar. The hood was especially necessary because her head was shorn of its beautiful red-gold wealth of hair as a precaution against recognition: one of Nau’s most poignant headings reads: ‘How she caused her head to be shaved.’
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In this disguise she made her way west from Terregles to the abbey of Dundrennan, lying among trees in a secluded valley at the end of winding roads from Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas, which finally led down to the coast. Dundrennan, a twelfth-century Cistercian foundation,
was one of the most beautiful abbeys in Scotland: but the queen had little time to admire its beauties or even to listen to the soft roar of the sea a mile away. Her mind was on the future and on England. She sent yet another letter to Elizabeth from Dundrennan – ‘After God, she has now no hope save in Elizabeth….’
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But having so firmly fixed her earthly hopes on the English queen, Mary seemed to find no point in waiting for an answer to her letter.