Mary, Queen of Scots (67 page)

Moray sent back a brisk refusal.
⁴⁷
There was a high degree of self-interest involved in his decision, as well as political considerations. Too many of the Confederate Lords had received grants from Mary, and they were determined that she should never have the opportunity of cancelling them.

Nau claims that, at this time, Moray was scheming to make himself King, taking the view that he “could presently rid himself” of young James. “Many of his party were now earnest with him to declare himself King. With these views, Moray had employed various persons to discover how he might establish his legitimacy by proving the marriage which he was now advised to assert as having been secretly contracted between King James V and his mother, although she was then married to another man. This proposition was then abandoned, for Moray saw there was faint hope of the success which he had expected.”

Parliament met on 15 December, and passed an Act declaring that Mary’s abdication, James’s coronation and Moray’s Regency were all “lawful and perfect.” Another Act ratified “the retention of our Sovereign Lord’s mother’s person” and stated that the conduct of the Lords had been fully justified by her actions, “inasmuch as it was clearly evident, both by the evidence from divers her privy letters written wholly with her own hand to the Earl of Bothwell, and her marriage to Bothwell, that she was privy, art and part, of the actual devise and deed” of Darnley’s murder. The Act had effectively tried and condemned Mary without her being heard. There were objections from Huntly, Herries and others, but they were speedily overruled.
⁴⁸

Some historians have made much of the fact that the words “and subscribed,” which appeared in the Act of Council of 4 December, do not appear in the Act of Parliament. None of the Casket Letters that were later produced in evidence against Mary was signed, and it may be that the Lords noticed their error in the Act of Council and were quick to amend it in the Act of Parliament. It has also been suggested that the Act of Council found among Cecil’s papers is a forgery,
⁴⁹
but why such a document should have been counterfeited is a mystery. In addition it has been claimed that the signatures and addresses were removed from the Casket Letters between 4 and 15 December.
⁵⁰
Yet the discrepancy may be due to simple error: after all, Bothwell is referred to as “James, Earl of Bothwell” in the Act of Council, and as “James, sometime Earl of Bothwell” in the Act of Parliament.

A declaration by the Queen’s loyal nobles issued at Dumbarton in 1568 stated that “Her Majesty’s writing” was “produced in Parliament”;
⁵¹
in this document, the “writing” is constantly referred to as “it,” which suggests that only one piece of writing was produced. Yet there is no mention of this in any other source. If one or more of the Casket Letters were indeed produced in Parliament, no one questioned their veracity. There were too many vested interests involved and too many reputations to protect.
⁵²

Between 15 and 20 December, Parliament re-enacted the legislation of the Reformation Parliament of 1560, and restated the Protestant Confession of Faith, which was the cornerstone of the reformed Kirk. It also repeated the Act of 1564 that declared Mary of age, so that no one could say that the Lords had forced a minor to abdicate. On 20 December, Parliament ratified the forfeiture of Bothwell’s titles and estates and declared him guilty of treason. This Act stated that the Queen had “suspected no evil from any of her subjects, least of all from him,” which appeared to exonerate her of the crimes of which she had just been declared guilty.
⁵³
On the day this Act was passed, Caithness protested, on behalf of all the jurors at Bothwell’s trial, that the evidence had not been adequate to justify his condemnation.
⁵⁴

On 6 February 1568, Archbishop Beaton reported that Moray had been determined to prosecute Archbishop Hamilton in Parliament “on the plea that he had a hand in the murder, which is only a calumny.” If the report was true, Moray stayed his hand, but Lennox and his supporters certainly believed in the Archbishop’s guilt, which would have serious consequences for him later on.

When Mary heard of the Acts passed against her, she was horrified at these terrible slurs upon her honour, and fearful that she was in danger of death. In desperation, she appealed to both Elizabeth I and Catherine de’ Medici for help, but neither responded. In fact, each was more concerned to outbid the other for Mary’s black pearls, which, as has been noted, Moray finally sold to Elizabeth.

Around this time, Moray, Morton, Balfour and others visited Mary at Lochleven, but they showed her “such contempt and disdain that the breach ever afterwards grew wider. Moray could never bear her to insist, as she did earnestly and continually, that she ought to be discharged of the crimes imputed to her, about which she was much more solicitous than for her life and the re-establishment of her authority.” Mary showed herself particularly contemptuous of Balfour, who had betrayed her and Bothwell twice in June, and called him an “arch traitor” to his face, which caused him to hide himself behind the other Lords, “reddening excessively.”
⁵⁵

By 22 December, only seven of the sixty-two persons summoned for Darnley’s murder remained at liberty: the Ormistons, James Murray, Patrick Wilson, Paris and two others. Wilson had disappeared, and was never caught. The Ormistons were still hiding out in Liddesdale, in the house in which Ker of Fawdonside was being held under arrest. Murray was in exile in England, and Paris was probably in Denmark with Bothwell.

Argyll, Huntly and Herries formally recognised Moray as Regent on 29 December,
⁵⁶
but although it seemed that Mary’s former supporters had one by one fallen away, by the end of that fateful year of 1567, public opinion was changing in her favour.

The new year of 1568 began with a public spectacle in Edinburgh, calculated to satisfy the demands of the people for justice and retribution. On 3 January, Hay, Hepburn, Powrie and Dalgleish were tried for treason and condemned, then immediately hanged and quartered at the Mercat Cross. According to their depositions, neither Powrie nor Dalgleish had done anything to merit death, but these depositions may not reflect the real truth, and anyway the Lords were not concerned with such niceties. The dismembered corpses of the executed wretches were displayed on pikes above the gates of Glasgow, Hamilton, Dumbarton, Ayr and other western towns, where support for Mary was strongest.

Drury claimed that, on the scaffold, Hepburn had declared that Huntly, Argyll and Maitland had all signed the bond for Darnley’s murder,
⁵⁷
and the
Diurnal of Occurrents
claims that Hay also named Bothwell, Balfour and “divers other nobles of the realm” and said that “Balfour and Maitland were notoriously known as the principal advisers and counsellors”; but this dying testimony was never offered in evidence against any of those named. Archbishop Beaton informed the Cardinal of Lorraine that all four of the condemned “confessed that they had amply deserved the punishment of death, yet declared the Queen’s innocence, and accused the greatest and chiefest on [the] Council, who were at that time sitting beside [them], especially Morton, Lethington and Balfour, and their own master, the Earl.”
⁵⁸
This testimony gave rise to uncomfortable rumours in Edinburgh that the servants were being made scapegoats for the masters, as well as demands that the Lords named “should suffer for their demerits,” and a fresh series of placards and broadsheets began to appear. One was posted outside Moray’s town house, and another to the very wall of the Council Chamber in the Tolbooth, which asked, “why John Hepburn and John Hay were not compelled openly to declare the manner of the King’s slaughter, and who consented thereto?” This whispering campaign served to bolster the Queen’s cause, especially when it became known that the nobles named by the condemned men had “incontinently departed” from Edinburgh, “which [made] the charge against them all the more probable.”
⁵⁹

The Lennoxes were still convinced that Bothwell and Mary were the sole authors of their son’s slaughter, and in January 1568, they commissioned a memorial picture to proclaim to the world the deep sense of injustice they felt. Painted by a Dutchman, Livinius de Vogelaare, it shows Darnley’s mourning parents and younger brother kneeling before his armour-clad effigy in the chapel royal at Holyrood. In front of them kneels Darnley’s son, the infant James VI, and in the corner is a vignette of Mary’s defeat at Carberry Hill. The picture is littered with inscriptions, but most have been obliterated by time and clumsy restoration; one reads, “Arise, Lord, and avenge the innocent blood of the King my father.” The memorial was painted in London, and therefore does not give an accurate impression of Darnley’s real tomb, but its real impact was meant to be as a piece of powerful political propaganda, intended to provoke Queen Elizabeth to demand the ultimate penalty for Mary and the extradition of Bothwell, who was to suffer the same fate. Elizabeth’s petition to Frederick II to send Bothwell back to Scotland to face trial failed, and the Lennoxes did not live to see the execution of Mary on the English Queen’s orders, but
The Memorial of Lord Darnley
survives in the Royal Collection at Holyrood Palace as a searing testimony to their terrible and vengeful grief.
⁶⁰

In faraway Denmark, having just been transferred to Malmoë Castle, on the opposite shore of the Sound to Copenhagen, Bothwell was also stating his case, but in a different manner. On 5 January, he dictated his memoirs, in French, to a Danish secretary appointed by Frederick II; Bothwell himself wrote the subheadings that appear in the margin. These memoirs were later published as
Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel
. Naturally, this was a highly sanitised version of events, for it was written in the hope of securing Bothwell’s release, and its aim was to present its author in the best possible light and his enemies as utter villains. It named, as “the leaders and principal authors of all this trouble and sedition,” Moray, Atholl, Glencairn, Morton, Mar, Lindsay, Maitland, Bellenden, MacGill, Home, Ruthven, Tullibardine, Preston and Balfour, amongst others—just about all of the ruling élite in Scotland. Bothwell concluded: “I have been falsely accused, detained without justification, and prevented from going about the business I have in certain kingdoms with various princes and noblemen for the freeing of my Princess.”
⁶¹

On 13 January, Bothwell wrote to Frederick II explaining the factional strife in Scotland; it is clear from this letter that he was still corresponding with Mary, for he says that she has authorised him to offer Frederick the Isles of Orkney and Shetland in exchange for troops and ships. None of these letters between Bothwell and Mary has survived. It would appear that Mary was hoping that Bothwell would return at the head of an army and rescue her. But Frederick did not take up Bothwell’s offer—he was in fact hoping to get the Scottish government to give him Orkney and Shetland in exchange for his prisoner. In the meantime, “the Scottish King” was quite comfortably housed and allowed visitors and other privileges.

On 11 February 1568, Drury reported that Mary had been severely ill with “a disease in her side and a swelling in her arm, of whose sickness there ariseth divers bruits and reports in Scotland.”
⁶²
Because this illness occurred nine months after her abduction by Bothwell, there was talk that the Queen had secretly given birth to his child; her miscarriage the previous July was not common knowledge.

In 1659, Le Labourer, Louis XIV’s almoner, who edited and annotated the memoirs of the French diplomat, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière,
⁶³
claimed in a footnote—without citing his source—that Mary “was brought to bed of a daughter at Lochleven, who, being privately transported to France, became a nun in the convent of Soissons.” In the nineteenth century, the writer Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote a novel about this child (whom she called Bride), entitled
Unknown to History
; in this version, the ship carrying the little girl to France is wrecked, but Bride is rescued by a kinsman of the Earl of Shrewsbury who later marries her to his son, Sir Humphrey Talbot.

Since’s Nau’s account of the Queen’s miscarriage of twins could only have come from Mary herself or her physician, it must be reliable. Even if the miscarriage story had been invented in the 1570s in order to protect the identity of the unknown Princess at Soissons, Mary’s pregnancy would never have advanced to full term without being detected by her gaolers. Furthermore, Mary later referred to James VI as “my only child.” Her illness of January/February 1568 was without doubt a recurrence of the old pain in her side, which was almost certainly caused by a gastric ulcer exacerbated by stress. Bishop Gilbert Burnet, in his
History of My Own Time
(1724–34), claimed, without any foundation, that Mary had borne a son to George Douglas.

By March 1568, relations between England and Scotland were warmer, but there was dissension amongst the Lords, who were beginning to be divided in their attitude to Mary. Maitland in particular was becoming strongly disaffected, and secretly sent the Queen a ring in token of his support. M. de la Forrest, the French ambassador in London, was of the opinion that two-thirds of the people in Scotland would rise against Moray if an opportunity arose, for it was felt “that the said Regent and his chief supporters should clear themselves of the murder of the late King—a thing much to be desired, for, for a long time, it has been confidently asserted that these men were accomplices in the said murder.”
⁶⁴
Taking advantage of the increasing upsurge in the Queen’s popularity, Seton and the Hamiltons openly declared for her, and in April, encouraged by the way things were going, Mary herself formulated plans for escape.

Alarmed in case the growing clamour should prejudice the thawing relations with England, Moray sent Nicholas Elphinstone to London with a copy of the Act of Parliament that had pronounced Mary guilty of the murder of Darnley, along with the black pearls that Elizabeth had so much coveted, at a reduced price.
⁶⁵
But Elizabeth refused to become embroiled in Scottish affairs.