For the first time a lambent ray was shed upon the background of this tragical landscape; the scene was flooded with light by Mary’s frenzied avowals. Bothwell had possessed her in a casual way as he had possessed so many others and, so far as he was concerned, that would have sufficed. Queen Mary, however, a thrall to him both with her soul and her senses, all fire and ecstasy, wanted to bind him to her for ever. Now, for this ambitious man, happy in his recent marriage, a mere liaison had no charm. At most, Bothwell might have thought it advantageous to remain, for a while, on terms of intimacy with the woman in whose gift were the supreme honours and dignities of Scotland, to have Mary as concubine without disturbing his relations towards his legal wife. This did not suffice the Queen, who was of a regal disposition; nor the woman, who cared not to share a lover, but wanted him for herself alone. Yet how could she bind him to her side, this wild and unbridled adventurer? Her promises of fidelity, her asseverations of humility, could not be particularly alluring to Bothwell. They were more likely to bore him, for he must have heard them too often from other feminine lips. Only one prize was calculated to attract so greedy and ambitious a man: the highest, which so many had coveted—the crown. However disinclined Bothwell may have been to go on playing the part of lover to a woman whom he did not love, he could not but find it a seductive thought that this woman was a queen, and that by her will he might become King of Scotland.
At the first glance such a notion must have seemed preposterous. Mary Stuart’s lawful spouse, Henry Darnley, was alive and bore the title of King. There was no room for another bearing that title. Yet this preposterous thought was the only link that could keep Mary and Bothwell together, the former yearning for love and the latter for power. He was a strong man, craving for freedom and independence; she was completely under his spell; nothing could permanently bind him to her but the crown. In her infatuation, forgetting honour, prestige, dignity and law, she was ready to pay the price. Even though she could bestow the crown on Bothwell only through committing a crime, she would not shrink from crime.
Just as Macbeth could fulfil the witches’ demoniacal prophecy, could become King, only by the slaughter of a whole royal kinship, so Bothwell’s path to the throne must lead him over Darnley’s corpse. Blood must be spilt before his blood and Mary’s could mingle.
Moral scruples never troubled Bothwell. We cannot doubt that so bold a man as he must have been ready enough to slay a king in order to wear a crown. Even if the written promise, said to have been found among the papers in the casket, the letter in which Mary avers in so many words that she will marry Bothwell in defiance of objections that might be raised by her relatives and others, were ultimately proved to be a forgery, yet the earl was so sure of his ground that he needed no signed and sealed document to force the Queen to carry out any plan that might mature in his mind. Often had she complained to him, as to all and sundry, that the thought of her irreparable union with Darnley oppressed and mortified her; over and over again, in her love verses (and we may well surmise in private interviews too), she assured Bothwell that her one and only desire was to bind herself to him for ever; why, then, should he hesitate to risk the most foolhardy deeds when he knew himself to be backed up by such plain-spoken assurances?
He knew, likewise (though nothing was openly said in the matter), that he could count upon the support of the Scottish lords, since they were unanimous in their hatred for their tiresome and vicious young master who had not kept faith with them but had shamelessly betrayed them in the Rizzio and in other affairs. Nothing would please them better than that by some means the King could be got out of the country. Bothwell was present too at Craigmiller Castle during the famous conference, attended by the Queen, when all conceivable ways of freeing Mary and Scotland from Darnley were discussed. The highest dignitaries of the realm, Moray, Lethington, Argyll, Huntly and Bothwell, were agreed in trying to strike a bargain with their sovereign lady. If she would recall Morton, Lindsay and Ruthven, who had been banished on account of their complicity in Rizzio’s murder, they, for their part, would “find the means that Your Majesty shall be quit of him.” At the time they merely spoke of getting “quit of him” by legal measures, such as a divorce. Mary herself made the riddance conditional on its not bringing any slur upon her son. Lethington hinted that she could leave ways and means to her faithful servants, and that they should so act as to bring no “prejudice to your son”. Moray too, who as Protestant was even less scrupulous in such questions, is reported as saying that he would “look through his fingers and will behold our doings, saying nothing of the same.” The proposals, however, made Mary uneasy, so that she insisted: “I will that ye do nothing through which any spot may be laid upon my honour or conscience.” Behind these dark sayings there lurked a sinister meaning, which Both-well was the last man in the world to misconstrue. This point comes out perfectly clear—Mary Stuart, Moray, Lethington and Bothwell, the star performers of the tragedy, were determined to rid themselves of Darnley. One problem alone remained to be solved—how was the deed to be executed? Was it to be done by gentle means or by force?
Bothwell, since he was the boldest and the most impatient member of the Scottish aristocracy, preferred force. He could not and would not wait, since he was not, like the others, moved merely by the wish to sweep the troublesome youngster out of the path, but by the determination to succeed to crown and realm. Though the others might be satisfied to wish, while watching the progress of events, he had to act resolutely. There is reason to suppose that, on the quiet, at this juncture he was already on the lookout for confederates among the Scottish lords. Once more, however, the lights of history burnt low, since the preparations for a crime are naturally made in dark places. We shall never know how many of the lords were implicated in this matter, whether as confederates or acquiescent onlookers. It seems possible that Moray knew of the scheme, but refrained from active participation. Lethington, on the other hand, appears to have behaved less cautiously. The most trustworthy information is derived from Morton’s dying confession. He had just returned from outlawry full of hatred for Darnley, the traitor. Knowing this, Bothwell bluntly proposed that they should co-operate in the murder of Darnley. Morton’s experience after the assassination of Rizzio, when his associates left him in the lurch, made him cautious. He insisted upon safeguards. Was the Queen privy to the affair? Bothwell, eager for Morton’s aid, did not hesitate to answer in the affirmative. But Morton knew that verbal assurances were apt to be repudiated when a plot such as this had achieved its goal, so he refused to move in the matter without the Queen’s written approval. He demanded one of those famous bonds, wherewith he could exonerate himself in case of need. Bothwell promised that a bond should be forthcoming. Manifestly, however, the pledge was futile, for the Queen would be able to marry him after the murder only if she remained in the background and could affect surprise when the deed was done.
Once more then Bothwell was thrust back on his own resources, and proved equal to the occasion. Still, the way in which Morton, Moray and Lethington had received his approaches showed him that they were nowise opposed to the scheme, and that he might consider himself to have a free hand. If not by their signatures to a document, they had at least declared their assent by a silence full of meaning and by a friendly aloofness. Now that Mary and Bothwell and the Scottish lords were of one mind, Darnley’s fate was sealed.
Everything was prepared. Bothwell made arrangements with a few hardy caitiffs, agreeing with them as to the place and method of the murder. One thing was lacking—the victim. Darnley, however much of a nincompoop, must have had an inkling of what awaited him. For several weeks he refused to go to Holyrood so long as the Scottish lords were there. He did not feel safe at Stirling Castle, now that Rizzio’s assassins, those men with whom he had broken troth, had been readmitted to Scotland by Mary’s act of clemency. Refusing invitations and firmly resisting lures, he stayed in Glasgow. His father, the Earl of Lennox, was there with other trusty friends and
allies. Here he had a stronghold. On the Clyde was a vessel, and in case of need he could embark and make his escape by sea. Then, as if at the most dangerous hour fate wanted to protect him, during the early days of January 1567 he fell ill of smallpox, this providing him with a welcome pretext for staying weeks longer in safe harbourage at Glasgow.
The King’s illness interfered with the plans made by Bothwell. He was waiting impatiently in Edinburgh. For some unknown reason the Earl was now in a hurry. Perhaps he was eager for the crown; perhaps he thought there were too many initiates, so that the scheme would soon be blown upon; anyhow he wished to bring matters speedily to a head. Yet how could Darnley, already suspicious and now ill in bed, be attracted to the place of slaughter? An open summons would warn him. Neither Moray nor Lethington nor anyone else at court was in the young monarch’s good graces, or likely to be able to persuade him to return. One person in the world had power over the poor weakling, one to whom he was devoted, and who had twice succeeded, ere this, in making him subservient to her will. Mary, if she feigned affection for the man who wanted nothing but her love, might perhaps lull his suspicions to sleep. None other could achieve this colossal deception. Since she herself was no longer mistress of her will, but blindly obeyed the orders of him to whom she had given her heart, Bothwell had merely to issue his commands and the incredible happened, or that happened which our modern feelings make incredible. On 22nd January, Mary Stuart, who for weeks had avoided any contact with her husband, rode to Glasgow, ostensibly to visit the young fellow, but really to entice him back to Edinburgh, where death awaited him.
Chapter Twelve
The Path to Murder
(22nd January to 9th February 1567)
THE CURTAIN NOW RISES on the most sinister act in the tragedy of Mary Stuart—the most sinister and the most obscure. Yet there is no conflict of testimony as to the journey she made to Glasgow to visit her ailing husband when the conspiracy to murder him was in full swing. It is one of the most incontestable actions of her life. Here, as so often, arises the question whether Mary Queen of Scots was really an Atrides figure, was, like Clytemnestra, able with well-feigned wifely care to make ready the bath for her husband on his return from Troy, while Ægisthus, her paramour, with whom she had planned the murder of Agamemnon, was waiting in the shadow with the sharpened axe. Was she a second Lady Macbeth, who with gentle and flattering words led King Duncan to the bedroom in which Macbeth was to slay him? Was she one of those fiendish criminals whom the unruly passion of love will often produce out of women who have been devoted wives? Or was she a mere tool in the hands of the brutal bully Bothwell, unconsciously (in a trance, as it were) obeying an irresistible command; a puppet, unaware of the preparations that were being made for the dreadful deed? Modern sentiment rises in revolt against the theory that she was a deliberate criminal, that a woman who had previously shown herself animated with humane sentiments could have been party to the butchering of her husband. Repeated attempts have been made, and will still be made, to put another, a kindlier interpretation upon her journey to Glasgow. Again and again one tries to regard as untrustworthy the utterances and documents which incriminate her. One scrutinises the Casket Letters, the verses, the sworn testimony, in the honest hope of convincing oneself that the exculpations devised by Mary’s defenders are satisfactory. In vain! With the best will in the world to believe them, we find that these special pleadings have no convincing force. The more closely we scrutinise the exonerations, the more futile do they seem when confronted with the iron chain of fact.
How can anyone imagine that loving care impelled Mary to seek out her husband on his sickbed that she might withdraw him from a safe refuge in order to have him better tended at home? For months the wedded couple had lived apart. Darnley had been “in a manner exiled from her presence” … though “with all humilitie he requiryth hir favour, to be admitted to hir bed as hir husband.” She bluntly refused to allow him his conjugal rights, and there is ample evidence that such conversations as she had of late had with Darnley were disfigured by hatred and contentions. The Spanish, the English and the French ambassadors write at great length in their reports about the estrangement as insuperable, inalterable, a thing which must be taken as a matter of course. The Scottish lords had publicly advocated a divorce and yet more forcible means of solving the difficulty. So indifferent had the pair become to one another that, when Darnley received tidings that Mary lay dangerously ill in Jedburgh, and that the last sacrament had been administered, he made no immediate move to visit her. Not even with a microscope can the observer find any intact filaments of love in this marriage at the stage the rupture had now reached. Tenderness was over and done with. Preposterous, therefore, is the assumption that loving care instigated Mary’s journey to Glasgow.
Still, we have to consider the last argument of those who wish to defend the Queen through thick and thin. Perhaps her journey was designed to put an end to the breach between herself and her husband? Perhaps she visited him in order to become reconciled to him? Unfortunately even this last straw breaks in the hands of her uncompromising defenders; or, rather, it is broken by a document in her own writing. Only one day before she set out for Glasgow, in a missive to Archbishop Beaton, she unreflectingly (for Mary Stuart never dreamt that her letters would continue to testify against her long after she was dead) gave vent to the most acrimonious utterances concerning Darnley.
And for the King our husband, God knows always our past towards him, and his behaviour and thankfulness to us is likewise well known to God and the world. Always we perceive him occupied and busy enough to have inquisition of our doings which, God willing, shall aye be such as none shall have occasion to be offended with them, or to report of us in any ways but honourably, howsoever he, his father and their abettors seek, which we know was no good will to make us have ado, if their power were equivalent to their mind—but God moderates their forces well enough, and takes the means of execution from them; for, as we believe, they shall find none, or very few, approvers of their counsels or devices imagined to our displeasure.
Is that the voice of reconciliation? Are those the sentiments of a loving wife who, full of distress, is hastening to her sick husband’s bedside? But here is another incriminating circumstance. Mary undertook the journey, not simply to visit Darn-ley and come home again, but with the fixed intent of having him conveyed forthwith to Edinburgh. Surely this was excess of zeal? Was it not contrary to the rules of medical art and the prescriptions of reason to take a man not yet convalescent from smallpox out of his bed in midwinter, and to convey him on a two-day journey in a litter? In her “loving care” for him she intended to carry him off in this way, as is shown by her having brought a litter along with her, that Darnley might have no cause for objection to the removal, and could be transported as soon as possible to Edinburgh, where the conspiracy to get rid of him was in active progress.
Still, lest we should unjustly accuse a fellow mortal of murder, let us ask whether there can be found any justification for her defenders’ contention that she was not privy to the conspiracy. Unfortunately there is extant a letter sent by Archibald Douglas which effectually disposes of this hypothesis. Unless she had forcibly closed her eyes to what was going on, she could not fail to be aware of it. She knew that the pardoned lords were deadly enemies of Darnley and that they had sworn vengeance against him. They had shown her the bond in which Darn-ley pledged himself to join them in Rizzio’s murder. Furthermore, Lethington told her that means would be found, without tarnishing her honour, to free her from the “proud fool and bloody tiranne”. The aforesaid letter shows that Archibald Douglas, the chief agent of the conspirators, sought Mary out on her journey to secure her plain assent to the plot for Darnley’s assassination. Even if we may suppose that she refused such assent, and declined to be a party to the affair, what are we to think of a wife who keeps silent when she has been informed that her husband’s murder is being planned? Why did she not warn Darnley? Why, above all,
though she must now have been convinced that his enemies intended to slay him, did she bring him back into the region where his murder would be comparatively easy? In such circumstances silence is something more than mere complicity; it is the tendering of secret aid, for one who is informed of a conspiracy and does not try to prevent its being carried out is at least guilty of failure to intervene.
No unprejudiced investigator can fail to recognise Mary’s complicity in her husband’s murder. However, if this complicity was a crime, it was a “crime passionnel”—one of those terrible actions for which not the individual but his passion is responsible, at a time when passion has full sway.
One who wishes to plead extenuating circumstances can only do so on the ground of “diminished responsibility” through passion, and not on the ground that she knew nothing of the matter. She was not acting boldly, joyfully, in full awareness, and under the promptings of her own will, but at the instigation of an alien will. I do not think it can be justly said that Mary went to Glasgow in a spirit of cold calculation in order to bring Darnley back into the danger zone; for, in the decisive hour (as the Casket Letters prove), she was filled with repulsion and horror at the thought of the role which was imposed on her. Doubtless she had beforehand talked over with Bothwell the plan of removing Darnley to Edinburgh, but one of her letters shows with remarkable clearness how, as soon as she was a day’s journey away from her controller, and thus partially freed from the hypnotic influence he exercised upon her, the slumbering conscience of this magna peccatrix began to stir. We must draw a clear distinction between her, as one of those who are driven into crime by mysterious forces, and those who are criminals through and through; for at the moment when Mary began the actual carrying out of the plan, when she found herself face to face with the victim whom she was to lead to the slaughter, she was no longer inspired by hatred or by vengeful sentiments, and her innate humanity struggled desperately against the inhumanity of her commission. At the moment of the crime, and even when she was engaged in transferring Darnley to the place of assassination, the true womanliness of her nature surged up. But this revulsion of feeling came too late. In the Kirk o’ Field affair, Mary was not only the huntress cunningly seeking her prey; she herself was also the quarry. Behind her she could hear the crack of the huntsman’s whip. She trembled at the thought of the bullying wrath of her lover Bothwell should she fail to lead the victim to the sacrifice, and she trembled, likewise, lest through weakness she should forfeit the arl’s love. Only on the ground that Mary was suffering from a paralysis of the will, and did not at the bottom of her soul will her own deed, only when we recognise that she was inwardly in revolt against the actions that were forced upon her, can we at least sympathetically understand a deed which, from the outlook of abstract justice, was unpardonable.