Mary, Queen of Scots (50 page)

The Countess of Bothwell had now recovered from her serious illness, and on 20 March, she made the first move towards divorcing her husband on the grounds of his adultery with Bessie Crawford:
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the first procuratory—a document authorising legal action—was signed on this day. What prompted this timely and accommodating gesture on the Countess’s part is uncertain. Bothwell’s affair with Bessie Crawford belonged to May 1566; why had the Countess waited so long to divorce him for it?

It is possible that Bothwell had told her of his ambitions and secured her agreement to a divorce that would benefit them both. The
Book of Articles
alleges that her brother Huntly persuaded her to it after Mary had restored his ancestral lands, but Parliament did not grant this until 19 April, a month after Jean had applied for a divorce, and Drury reported on 29 March that Huntly misliked the idea of Bothwell divorcing his sister and had only reluctantly agreed to it.

It is also possible that the Countess’s action had been prompted by fear for her life. Drury, when reporting that she was thought to be dying, had perhaps implied that foul play had been the cause of her illness, and on 29 March, Sir Henry Norris, the English ambassador in Paris, announced that Lady Bothwell had actually died after being poisoned, and that the marriage of the Earl to Queen Mary would soon follow.
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It is not beyond the bounds of credibility that Bothwell had tried to poison Jean: he had, after all, plotted Darnley’s murder in order to satisfy his ambitions. But the attempt on the Countess’s life—if attempt it was—failed, and with public opinion rising fiercely against him, Bothwell may not have dared to try again, for two convenient deaths would have been far too coincidental. According to Leslie, rumour had it that Bothwell had offered his wife the choice of divorce or a cup of poison. Whether he had tried to poison her or not, Jean may have believed he had, and it may have been this that impelled her to give him his freedom.

Accusations against Moray were by now more widespread, and on 21 and 30 March, Drury reported that the Earl had set up two challenges, offering to defend his honour by personal combat against any person defaming him as a regicide.
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There is no other record of these challenges, so it may be that Drury was again repeating idle gossip.

On 21 March, a Council was held at which Bothwell was present but not Balfour, who appears to have been maintaining a low profile.
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Two days later, after noon on Palm Sunday, at the Queen’s command, a solemn requiem Mass and dirge for the soul of the late King was sung at Holyrood;
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Mary was present, for this marked the end of her forty days of mourning, but Drury heard that she broke down during the Mass and that many people witnessed it.
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Buchanan, of course, claims that she was deliberately trying “to placate the popular indignation by simulating grief.”

On that day or the next, Mary replied to Lennox, informing him that she had received his letter “naming the persons you greatly suspect,” and agreeing to his demands:

For the convention of our nobility and Council, we have prevented [acted in anticipation of]
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the thing desired by you in your letter, and have sent for them to be at us in Edinburgh this week approaching, where the persons nominated in your letter shall abide and undergo such trial as by the laws of this realm is accustomed, and being found culpable in any wise of that crime and odious fact nominated in the tickets, and whereof you suspect them, we shall even, according to our former letter, see the condign punishment as rigorously and extremely executed as that fact deserves. For indeed, as you write, we esteem ourselves party if we were resolute of the authors. And therefore we pray you, be at us here in Edinburgh this week approaching, where you may see the said trial and declare the things which you know may further the same, and there you shall have experience of our earnest will and affectionate mind to have an end in this matter, and the authors of so unworthy a deed really punished.
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Had Mary been Bothwell’s partner in murder and adultery, it is extremely unlikely that she would have agreed to a private process that carried a high risk of public exposure. Yet she had willingly sought to meet Lennox’s demands all along, which gives the lie to Buchanan’s claim that she tried to evade them.

It has been said that Mary herself should have initiated the prosecution of Bothwell, yet she had no evidence against him but the accusations in the placards. For the Crown to have brought him to trial on this flimsy pretext might have satisfied public opinion, but would have been a travesty of justice. Nor do the Lords seem to have urged their sovereign to seek out and punish Darnley’s murderers; in fact they had abandoned their inquiry as soon as it became clear that it might reveal evidence prejudicial to themselves.

At this time, Queen Elizabeth was telling de Silva that there were “grave suspicions” about Bothwell, and about others near to Mary, but that people “did not dare to proceed against them [i.e., Bothwell and Mary] or make any demonstration in consequence of the influence and strength of Bothwell, both on account of his perpetual office of Admiral, and because the Queen has given him charge of five hundred men who formed her guard.”
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But Mary now had authorised the prosecution of Bothwell, and at his own urging, as Elizabeth would soon find out. De Silva also mentioned that Mary had spoken tentatively to Killigrew of sending the Prince to be brought up in England, which indicates how concerned she was for his safety and her own security in the current political climate. Elizabeth, however, had told de Silva that she was unsure whether she wanted the responsibility of Mary’s child, for “it would cause her anxiety, as any little illness it might have would distress her”; on the other hand, “she knew that the French would do their best to take the infant to France,” and that she could never allow.
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Around 25 March, Clernault apparently arrived back in Edinburgh, carrying letters to Mary from her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine. Drury later reported that Mary burned these letters because the Cardinal seemed “much to mislike with her for the death of the King,”
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but Clernault later told Beaton that Mary had neither read nor paid any attention to any communication he had brought her. According to Drury, Mary “has been for the most part either melancholy or sickly ever since” Darnley’s murder; she was unwell on 25 and 27 March, and fainted on both occasions.
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Yet, on the latter day, which was Maundy Thursday, she insisted on keeping vigil on her knees in the chapel royal from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.
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During that Holy Week, Mary presented Bothwell with some valuable church vestments that had originally come from Aberdeen Cathedral, but had been taken by the 4th Earl of Huntly to Strathbogie for safe keeping after the Reformation, and confiscated by the Crown on his attainder in 1563. These vestments were said to have been made from cloth of gold taken from the abandoned English royal pavilions after Robert the Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn in 1314. Mary had a number of these pieces in her possession: three she now gave to Bothwell, and the rest she used to furnish a memorial bed for her husband, which probably replaced the black hangings in her apartments as a symbol of her widowhood.
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In the circumstances, the gifts to Bothwell displayed a disturbing lack of judgement, but Mary was becoming increasingly dependent on him, and later evidence suggests that she at this time believed him innocent; these gifts may have been made in token of that belief, to sustain him during the trial to come. But some people took great exception to this gift of historic Catholic vestments to a Protestant Lord suspected of murder.

On Good Friday or the day after, the Council, with Bothwell himself among them, but not Balfour, enacted that Bothwell, with those other persons named by Lennox as his accomplices in the murder of the King, be tried on 12 April following. A formal letter of summons, signed by the Queen, was sent warning Lennox and any other accusers he might bring with him to appear in the Court of Justiciary on that day.
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According to an Act of James IV passed in 1493, fifteen days had to elapse between citation and trial; forty days were allowed where the accused was charged with treason.
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In Bothwell’s case, only fifteen days were allowed for. This was doubtless arranged so that the trial could take place before Parliament met on 14 April; Buchanan alleged that “the Queen wanted the inquiry settled by that day so that the accused, absolved by the verdict of the court, could be exonerated by the assent of the whole Parliament,” but in fact Lennox had told Mary that the matter was too important to be delayed until Parliament met, and she had merely complied with his wishes.

On 29 March, as soon as the Council had concluded its business, Mary set off again for Seton
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for the sake of her health: on 30 March, Drury reported that she was “troubled this last week with some sickness of which she is not yet all free of.” But the rumour-mongers were busy in the wake of news of the Countess of Bothwell’s divorce action. On the 29th, Drury wrote that the judgement of the people was that the Queen would marry Bothwell. The next day, Drury informed Cecil that Huntly misliked the idea of Bothwell divorcing his sister, but “has now condescended” to it.
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The Lords would later accuse Huntly of conniving at Bothwell’s marriage to Mary.
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In Paris, rumour was busy too, and de Alava now voiced a far-fetched suspicion that Darnley’s murder had been plotted by Mary and Catherine de’ Medici together!
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Mary had by now replied to Elizabeth’s urgent letter, but the reply is lost, and its contents are known only through a report of de Silva, who had discussed the letter with Elizabeth. According to this, Mary’s response was disappointing: her letter “only contained lamentations for the troubles she had suffered in her life, and a request that the Queen would pity her, especially in her present grief for her husband, which was greatly increased by the desire of wicked persons to throw the blame of such a bad act upon her. She therefore asked the Queen to help her in her troubles, as she could trust no one else, and begged her not to allow her to be calumniated in [England].”
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This pathetic communication was unlikely to impress Elizabeth, who had learned at an early age to deal with adversity, and whose wise advice had been apparently ignored. What it does reveal, though, is Mary’s fragile and emotional state of mind, which seems to have affected her physical health and rendered her incapable of decisive action. She had been ill almost continuously since Darnley’s death, which incidentally had occurred just eight months after her confinement, and may have triggered postnatal depression. There is plenty of evidence that the loss of her husband had caused her grief, which was no doubt mingled with regret that their life together had been so unhappy. She was also suffering the after-effects of shock and the trauma of realising—as she believed—that the murder plot had been intended for her. Furthermore, she had to live with the fear that her enemies would make a second attempt, which was why she was contemplating taking the drastic step of sending her baby to England. It must not be forgotten either that Darnley’s murder was the climax of a year in which Mary had had to deal with the horrific killing of Rizzio, a difficult childbirth, the disintegration of her marriage, a life-threatening illness, and rumours of plots and conspiracies, and that she had just begun to recover from all this when the tragedy happened.

We may discount the gossip of Drury and Buchanan concerning Mary’s activities at Seton as malicious, and even Drury had to concede at length that Mary was suffering from depression and fainting fits and was generally unwell. Her Council had quickly realised that her health might not withstand the rigours of secluded mourning, and since then she had retreated three times to the bracing air of Seton in the hope that it would restore her. There is other evidence that she was not functioning normally. Her voluminous foreign correspondence suddenly ceased, and there is no record of her communicating even with her Guise relatives. Most of the letters sent in her name were in Scots, and therefore not written by her personally but probably by her Council on her behalf, which suggests that she was unable to cope with affairs of state. She was said to be “too grievous and tormented” to reply in full to Archbishop Beaton’s letter, and Clernault declared that she had not read or listened to any of the letters he brought her. She had failed to thank both de Alava and de Silva for their warnings of a conspiracy. She had been almost too ill to receive Killigrew, had broken down in public at Darnley’s requiem Mass, and had failed to accompany her son to Stirling.

This all suggests a woman racked with shock, grief, stress and anxiety, and it is hardly surprising that some historians have concluded that Mary suffered a nervous breakdown at this time. Certainly she was at the mercy of her emotions and her poor health, which left her incapable of effort and rational judgement and rendered her an ineffective ruler. In this weakened state, she was easy prey for the predatory men who surrounded her. Being a woman who had always needed a strong man to lean upon, it was her tragedy that she now chose to rely on Bothwell, although her letter to Elizabeth suggests that she had doubts about even his trustworthiness. As for her other advisers, to whom she had entrusted the investigation of the murder, most had a hidden agenda and were determined that the truth of the Kirk o’Field conspiracy should remain hidden; Mary later revealed that she had been perturbed at their dilatoriness, but at the time she was probably incapable of calling it into question; because of this, however, it was she who was blamed for it.

From early April, a voice was heard every night in Edinburgh, crying out, “Vengeance on those who caused me to shed innocent blood! O Lord, open the heavens and pour down vengeance on me and those that have destroyed the innocent!”
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Once again, the Council concentrated its energies on pursuing this minor offender, rather than on investigating the King’s murder.