At midnight the queen and Darnley made their way down the privy staircase up which the assassins had filed only fifty-two hours before. Darnley’s acquiescence meant that Mary could now use the staircase as an escape route; they then made their way through the back passages and servants’ quarters of Holyrood, where Mary’s French servants would not betray her escape, and finally past an outside cemetery, close to the abbey of Holyrood. Here, by Mary’s account, Darnley gave an involuntary sigh at the sight of a newly dug grave, and confessed to his wife that she was practically treading on the burial ground of the wretched Riccio* – ‘In him I have lost a good and faithful servant,’ said Darnley, ‘I have been miserably cheated.’ These gloomy reflections were checked by the need for silence. Outside the abbey to meet the royal couple were Erskine, Traquair, Standen and two or three loyal soldiers with horses. Mary mounted pillion behind Erskine. Darnley took a horse of his own. In a short while, under the friendly cover of darkness, they were clear of the town.
The plan was to go to Dunbar Castle, pausing at Seton to pick up the nobles who had been alerted via Lady Huntly. The ride was of necessity fast, and as furious as possible. Even so, Darnley, in a panic of fear at being hunted down by the men he had so recently betrayed, kept spurring his own horse and flogging that of the queen, shouting: ‘Come on! Come on! By God’s blood, they will murder both you and me if they can catch us.’ Mary pleaded with him to have regard to her condition, at which Darnley only flew into a rage and exclaimed brutally that if this baby died, they could have more.23 By the time they reached Dunbar Castle, on the coast, twenty-five miles from Edinburgh as the crow flies, the long night was almost over. For a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, a five-hour marathon of this nature must have been a gruelling ordeal. Even now, the queen’s formidable courage did not desert her: she is said to have sent for eggs to cook breakfast. Here at Dunbar* Mary set herself about the task of consolidating the advantage which her liberty had given her.
On 15th March she dictated a long and passionate description of her experience, to be sent to Queen Elizabeth in London. She described the butchery of her secretary before her very eyes. ‘Some of our subjects and council by their proceedings have declared manifestly what men they are … slain our most special servant in our own presence and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably …’24 She appealed to Elizabeth to beware of similar betrayals, which might lead to similar horrifying ordeals. She ended with the note that she had intended to write the letter in her own hand, to make it all seem more immediate, but ‘of truth we are so tired and evil at ease, what through riding of 20 miles in five hours of the night, as with the frequent sickness and evil disposition by the occasion of our child’ that the task had proved beyond her. Nevertheless, whatever physical reaction the queen was suffering after the event, she appeared to be once more triumphing over her enemies, as decisively as she had done in the previous August – and once more as a result of her own boldness and promptitude. The escape of Bothwell and Huntly proved decisive. Atholl, Fleming and Seton also came to her at Dunbar. Men began to flock to the queen’s side at Dunbar, stirred up by these loyal agents. Soon there were 4000 men at her command. On 17th March Mary issued a proclamation from Dunbar calling for the inhabitants of the surrounding districts to meet her at Haddington next day with eight days’ provisions. On 18th March she was able to re-enter Edinburgh victoriously at the head of 8000 men, only nine days after the murder which had caused her to flee from the city so precipitately.
Darnley rode beside her, like a sulky page. At the news of his defection, his fellow-plotters had fled from Edinburgh on the morning of 17th March realizing that their rebellion no longer had any focal point. Morton, Lindsay, Ker of Fawdonside and Ruthven went to England; Maitland, who had certainly known of the plot, although he had not wielded a dagger, went to Dunkeld; John Knox, who may not have known in advance what was proposed, but certainly applauded Riccio’s killing as a goodly deed, went to Ayrshire. Moray alone remained in Edinburgh since he had cunningly arrived in the city too late to be implicated in the bloody events of the night of 9th March, and the fact that he had signed the pre-murder bond was of course unknown to the queen. Mary was also reconciled to Glencairn and Argyll. In any case, in her new grim determination to avenge the butchery of Riccio and pursue his killers to the utmost limits of her power, Mary was now prepared to forgive the previous rebels of the Chaseabout Raid. Time’s revolutions – and the treachery of Darnley – had combined to effect the pardon of Moray, which Mary had once strenuously refused to grant, despite the pleadings of her own nobles, and the admonitions of the queen of England.
* See Pollen, Papal Negotiations, p. xxviii, where Mary’s involvement in a Catholic League, as a result of the meeting of the Catholic sovereigns at Bayonne in July 1565, has been shown to be a chimera of the Protestant imagination, just as any Protestant league in Europe was equally a figment of Catholic fancy.
* In later years King Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre) observed that James could indeed claim to be the modern Solomon, since he was the son of David.
* It is pleasant to relate that this relationship had a happy ending rare in the annals of the time: Lady Jean and her lover were finally united in marriage over thirty years later when both Mary Beaton and Lady Jean’s second husband, the earl of Sutherland, were dead.
* Ruthven suggested that Riccio was also wearing his cap in the presence of the queen – which does seem to denote remarkable familiarity. But it is significant that Randolph, who was at pains to find out the most suggestive details possible, does not mention this one. Ruthven is the only source which mentions the subject of the cap.
* Claude Nau did not join the queen’s service until 1575; his Memorials were written in 1578.
* Although Holyrood was restored and extended in the reign of Charles II, Queen Mary’s apartments can still be seen in much of their original state, as they were at the time of the murder: indeed, they form the most dramatic visual link to be found today with her life story, so many of the buildings connected with her now lying in ruins. But the staircase which can now be seen connecting the king’s apartments with the queen’s has no connection with the sixteenth-century privy staircase. This is still in existence, but concealed behind the Charles II panelling.
* If true, it was certainly an accurate prediction. It fell to the future James VI to put to death both Ruthven’s son and his grandson, the 1st earl of Gowrie, in 1548, and the 2nd earl in 1600, at the time of the Gowrie conspiracy.
* It seems inconceivable that Mary should then have told Darnley bluntly that he himself would go the same way before a year was out – as Lennox announced in his own narrative,22 written after Darnley’s death. Even if Mary nourished the thought, she would scarcely have chosen such a dangerous moment to give it expression, when she was still within the bounds of Holyrood, and still dependent on the goodwill of Darnley.
* It was at this moment in history that the important wardship of Dunbar Castle was transferred from the laird of Craigmillar to the earl of Bothwell, to punish the one and to reward the other for their respective roles in the Riccio affair – this transfer led to the dramatic part played by Dunbar Castle in Mary’s abduction by Bothwell in the following year.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Breakdown
‘He misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.’
Maitland: On the relations between Mary and Darnley,
October 1566
It was easy enough, once Mary was back in Edinburgh, to rescue the body of Riccio from its common grave and have it reburied according to the Catholic rite he had professed, in her own chapel royal.* Ten days later Riccio’s brother, Joseph, a boy of eighteen, was made French secretary in his place. Mary, being anxious not to rule over a torn kingdom on the eve of the birth of her child, also took the trouble to reconcile Moray, Glencairn, and Argyll, recently allowed back into her favour, with Huntl
y, Bothwell and Atholl; together these two groups were now to make up the effective body of the Privy Council. Mary’s vengeance was thus officially reserved for the brutal murderers of her servant who had actually burst into her apartments – Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay and their minions. But as they were now safely escaped to England, the only two lives which were actually forfeited for the crime were those of two of Ruthven’s retainers: Tom Scott, under-sheriff of Perth, whose official position of ‘warding the Queen within Holyrood’ made his crime especially reprehensible, and Henry Yair who had killed the Dominican priest Father Black shortly after the murder of the Italian, and was executed the following August. Two other underlings, Mowbray and Harlaw, were released at the scaffold when the queen, characteristically moved by mercy, ‘gave them their lives’.1 Yet the murder of the Italian had marked a turning-point in the affairs of Mary Queen of Scots, and the memories of the affair were not so easily laid in peace and forgotten, as his poor lacerated corpse.
The most obvious result of the affair was Mary’s abiding hatred of Darnley. She had either concealed this in order to escape from Holyrood or else she did not at this point realize the full extent of her husband’s complicity. Although she told Nau that Darnley had admitted to her on the Sunday that he had signed a bond to procure the crown matrimonial, and Leslie repeats the story, she did not mention the fact in her letter to Beaton of 2nd April. Whether Mary knew beforehand or not, the conspirators now took the understandable if vindictive step of sending the bond to the queen, so that she should see for herself the full extent of her husband’s treachery. Yet once more Mary was obliged to put a good face upon the situation for the time being, and issue a public statement of his innocence at the market cross. It was not within the compass of her thoughts to take any action against her husband before the birth of her child, since Darnley was quite capable of casting doubts upon the child’s legitimacy, if it suited his purpose. Although there were already rumours of a divorce between the two by the end of April – Randolph said Thornton had gone to Rome to treat about it – Mary, like all the Scots, had heard far too many arguments over the legitimacy of heirs, as the result of the subsequent divorces of their parents, to risk considering the subject before her child was actually born. In May there was another rumour from Randolph that Darnley would leave Scotland after the birth of the baby, and go to Flanders. He described Darnley’s new situation thus: ‘He is neither accompanied for, nor looked for by any nobleman, attended by certain of his own servants, and six or eight of his guard, he is at liberty to do or go what or where he will.’2 In his reflective moments Darnley must have realized that this aimless freedom might in fact be the deceptive liberty in Scotland – the queen, Moray and his associates, Bothwell and the loyalist nobles, he had betrayed them all or tried to attack them at one or other point in his career. Should these potential enemies flag, there was also a whole new ferocious band of them headed by Morton, now in England, who might not stay there forever.
Mary’s relations with Darnley settled down into an uneasy truce until the birth of her child. Darnley had not reformed his behaviour: during her confinement he ‘vagabondized every night’.3 In these circumstances it was natural that Mary should come to rely increasingly for political advice on those nobles who had proved themselves loyal to her throughout the two crises which she had faced in the past year.* Into this category fell notably James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, who as he leapt clear of the lion-pit at Holyrood, and rode off to summon Mary’s subjects successfully to her assistance, seemed to display that combination of resource, loyalty and strength which Mary had so persistently sought among her Scottish nobles. Now that he was reconciled with Moray, and firmly allied by marriage to Huntly, he seemed set in Mary’s estimation to form a useful loyal member of the Scottish polity. Yet Bothwell in his character seemed to sum up those very paradoxical contrasts which made it so difficult for anyone not brought up among them to understand the nature and behaviour of the Scottish nobles. For whereas Darnley by reason of his English royal blood and English upbringing was atypical of the Scottish nobility, Bothwell shared the turbulent contentious characteristics of his class – and it was this class whose motives and actions Queen Mary was never able to predict successfully. In the past she had been baffled and angered by Huntly, puzzled and hurt by Moray, appalled and shocked by Morton. Now she was once again, by the unwitting fault of her French upbringing, to make a mistake of judgement, and see in Bothwell the mirage – it was no more than that – of a strong wise protector, able to solve her problems by holding down the other nobles under his heel.
Bothwell was not a stupid man; he had been well educated by his kinsman the bishop of Moray, as his letters and writing show, and his books included volumes on both mathematics and the arts of war. He was well travelled: in Denmark he had picked up a Norwegian mistress, Anna Throndsen, whom he had seduced under promise of marriage; and it was seeking funds to support himself on this occasion that he had first met Queen Mary at the French court. He had made several expeditions to France, and spoke French himself. He was adventurous by nature, and his life (he was at this date about thirty) had already been full of ups and downs; apart from his imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle he had done a spell in the Tower of London in 1564 while trying to escape to France. When Mary sent for him at the time of the Chaseabout Raid, he arrived in a fishing boat from Flushing, eluding capture by the English. He came of the great border family of Hepburns, and in feudal terms his power stretched across the south-east of Scotland, with certain specifically family dominions, and the wardship of other royal castles (such as Hermitage and Dunbar) dependent on royal favour. Bothwell, like all his class, was keenly interested in the acquisition of such royal castles for the family interest, and official positions such as lieutenant of the borders had the natural corollary for him of the extension of his family’s power. His family, and indeed he himself, suffered from the proverbial pennilessness of the contemporary nobles, and his marriage contract to Jean Gordon shows that he was heavily in debt at the time. In the past there had been something amounting to a family tradition for the Hepburns to attempt to improve their fortunes by favour of widowed queens. Bothwell’s own father, Patrick, the Fair Earl, had courted Mary of Guise throughout the winter of 1543* in a ludicrous competition for her affections with Lennox (by a curious coincidence, to be Mary Stuart’s father-in-law) in which fine clothes played an important part. An earlier Patrick Hepburn had been linked with the widow of James I, and an Adam Hepburn with Mary of Guelders. After the battle of Pinkie Cleugh Bothwell’s father even negotiated with the English to marry an English princess in return for handing over the castle of Hermitage. In their marriage projects Hepburns had tried without success to become the Habsburgs of Scotland.
Yet the effect of Bothwell’s concentration on the possibilities of the main chance was in fact to give him a far better record of loyalty to the central government – in the shape of Mary of Guise and her daughter – than most of his contemporaries. In the same way his religious attitudes showed a real degree of consistency. He refused to marry Jean Gordon according to the Catholic rite, despite Queen Mary’s pressure, and was described by Randolph as being one of those very strong against the Mass.6 His critics retaliated by accusing him of being interested in the black arts which he was thought to have acquired during his education in France. La Mothe Fenélon told Charles IX that Bothwell had principally used his time at the schools in Paris to read and study sorcery and magic. At any rate his ambition was certainly boundless: as the memoirs of Lord Herries put it, he was a man ‘high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition’.7 But his brain and methods were the reverse of Machiavellian, and to consider his political acumen in the same category as that of Cecil, in the sense that he now became the adviser on whom Mary relied, as Elizabeth relied on her secretary, is to demonstrate how very retarded sixteenth-century Scotland was, in political terms, compared to sixteenth-centu
ry England.
It was significant that at two crucial moments in his career – in November 1560 serving Mary of Guise against the insurgents under Châtelherault, and in June 1567 before Carberry Hill – Bothwell issued a challenge for personal combat with his enemies; as a feudal baron, and primarily a soldier, he was apt to choose the quick, if bloody, solution to any problem. It was true that during his brief spell as the queen’s husband Bothwell showed signs of a certain administrative ability, as a soldier can sometimes make a successful politician in a crisis; in the same way the coarse-grained Morton made not a bad showing as regent from the administrative point of view. But Bothwell’s personal qualities negated his usefulness in any delicate situation, and made him the last person to unite successfully that essentially disunited and suspicious body, the Scottish nobility. For one thing, Bothwell’s violence and his boastfulness (when Throckmorton called him a ‘glorious, rash and hazardous young man’ he was of course using the word glorious in the derogatory sense of vainglorious) scarcely led to popularity. Violence in matters of policy was accompanied by a streak of roughness, verging on bullying in private life. His servant Paris testified that he had kicked him in the stomach when Paris tried to argue with him.8 He was certainly not a man who was prepared to try using charm to gain his objectives: as Mary told Nau, ‘he was a man whose natural disposition made him anything but agreeable or inclined to put himself to much trouble or inconvenience to gain the goodwill of those with whom he had been associated’.9 Bothwell’s relations with women fell into the same adventurous but straightforward pattern as his career. Although interested in women, he drew a sharp and effective distinction between sex and marriage: Anna Throndsen never did secure the marriage contract she desired and departed disconsolately to her home some time in 1563. His name was also linked with that of the legendary Janet Beaton, aunt of the queen’s Marie, made famous as Sir Walter Scott’s Wizard Lady of Branxholm, who could bond to her bidding ‘the viewless forms of air’: this remarkable lady enjoyed five husbands – the last at the age of sixty-one – and a number of lovers in the course of a long and full life. When she became Bothwell’s mistress, he was twenty-four and she many years older, her unfading beauty generally attributed to the practice of magic, a subject she may have had in common with her lover. Despite the difference in their ages, they may have gone through some sort of ceremony of ‘hand-fasting’, Bothwell being fascinated by her combination of audacity, determination and sexuality. But it was finally Jean Gordon, the comparatively rich sister of the powerful Huntly, whom Bothwell actually married, the marriage contract making it clear that it was the bride who was making the settlement on the groom rather than the other way round. Bothwell evidently regarded lust as a simple sensation to be quickly gratified. The deposition of Thomas Craigwallis at the time of his divorce gave an evocative picture of his relations with his mistress, pretty little black-eyed Bessie Crawford, the blacksmith’s daughter – a fifteen-minute rendezvous in the steeple of the abbey at Haddington, and another tryst in a mid-chamber of the kitchen tower at Crichton (Thomas remaining at the door); a subsequent encounter took place ‘in a chamber within the cloister’ according to Pareis Sempill’s evidence, ‘and when my lord came forth his clothes were loose, and Patrick Wilson helped him up therewith’.10 Marriage on the other hand was a more serious business to be undertaken for the positive motive of gain.