The burgesses, however, murmured among themselves that the law had been brought into contempt. Mary’s friends looked askance, with “sore hearts”. “It was pitiful,” writes Melville, her most loyal friend, “to watch this excellent princess hastening to destruction without anyone calling her attention to the danger she was running.” But Mary refused to listen and would accept no warning. A morbid delight in preposterous hazards drove her further and further. Circumspection became impossible to her; she would not ask and would not hearken, but could only rush to her doom, the slave of her feelings. The day after Bothwell flaunted his freedom in the streets of Edinburgh, she inflicted a humiliation on the whole country by conferring upon this notorious criminal the highest honour Scotland could offer. At the opening of parliament Bothwell bore the insignia of the nation, the crown and the sceptre. Who could doubt that this man who now carried the crown in his hands would tomorrow be wearing it? Bothwell, indeed, was not a man to hide his light under a bushel, and his boldness was one of his least unamiable characteristics. Impudently, energetically and frankly, he demanded his reward. Without shame, “for his great and manifold gud service”, he asked for the gift of the strongest castle in the country, Dunbar. Then, since the Scottish lords complied with his will, he determined to force from them their consent to his marriage with Mary Stuart. On the evening when the sittings of parliament closed, as dictator he invited the whole company of them to supper in Ainslie’s Taverne. The wine flowed freely, and when most of those present were already half-seas-over (we recall the famous scene in Wallenstein), he laid before the lords a bond which not only made them pledge themselves to defend him against every calumniator but also to approve him, “noble puissant lord”, as a worthy husband for the Queen. The bond ran as follows:
That James Earl of Bothwell, Lord of Hailes, Crichton and Liddesdale, Great Admiral of Scotland and Lieutenant of all the Marches, being calumniated by malicious report and divers placards, privily affixed on the Kirk of Edinburgh and other places, by evil-willers and privy enemies, as art and part in the heinous murder of the King, late husband to the Queen’s Majesty, and also by special letters sent to her Highness by the Earl of Lennox accused of the said crime, had submitted to an assize, and been found innocent of the same by certain noblemen his peers, and other barons of good reputation; the undersigned united to defend and bear him harmless against his privy or public calumniators bypast or to come.
The signatories to this instrument, including eight earls, among whom were the Earls of Morton, Huntly and Argyll (Justice General), Glencairn, Cassilis and Rothes, together with eleven barons, peers of parliament, united to declare that they considered Bothwell a proper person to recommend the widowed Queen to accept as husband, pledging themselves “on their honour and fidelity … to further, advance and set forward such marriage betwixt her Highness and the said noble lord.”
In pursuit thereof they would “spend and bestow” their “lives and goods, against all that live or die”, as they might “answer to God” upon their own “fidelities and conscience”.
Only one of the company, the Earl of Eglinton, misliking the bond, slipped away from the tavern before it was signed. The others obediently subscribed their names, for Bothwell’s stalwarts surrounded the houses—though many of the signatories were perhaps determined, when occasion offered, to break their pledged word. They knew that what is written in ink can be washed out with blood. Anyhow, no one entered a protest against signing. After this formality the company went on carousing gaily, and the merriest among them may well have been Bothwell, for now he had gained his ends. A few weeks later and the Queen of Scotland and the Isles would wed the murderer of her husband as heedlessly as did Hamlet’s mother wed Claudius. Quos deus perdere vult …
Chapter Fourteen
A Blind Alley
(April to June 1567)
AS THE BOTHWELL TRAGEDY advances towards its climax, we are again and again reminded of Shakespeare. The resemblance of the situation to that of Hamlet is obvious on the face of it. In both cases we have a king who has been murdered by his wife’s lover; in both cases the widowed Queen shows unseemly haste in marrying her husband’s murderer; alike in the tragedy of real life and in the tragedy conceived by the playwright, we note the enduring consequences of a murder whose concealment and repudiation demand more effort than was requisite for the performance of the crime. Even stronger, even more striking, are the analogies between many scenes of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy and those of the historical tragedy in sixteenth-century Scotland. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Macbeth was created in the atmosphere of the Mary Stuart drama; the happenings staged by Shakespeare’s imagination in Dunsinane Castle had previously been staged in fact at Holyrood Palace. In both cases, after the murder had taken place, there was the same isolation, the same oppressive spiritual gloom, the same ghastly festivals in which none dared to take pleasure and from which one after another slipped away because the ravens of black disaster were already circling round the house. Often we find it hard to distinguish whether it is Mary Stuart we are watching as she wanders by night through the apartments, sleepless, confused, tormented by pangs of conscience, or whether it is Lady Macbeth wailing: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” Is it Bothwell, or is it Macbeth, who becomes harsher and more resolute after he has committed his crime; who more and more boldly challenges the enmity of Scotland—though he knows well enough that his courage is futile, and that ghosts are stronger than a living man? In both cases alike, a woman’s passion is the motive power, but the man is appointed to do the deed; as extraordinarily similar are the atmospheres, the oppression that lours over the tormented spirits, husband and wife chained together by the crime, each dragging the other down into the same dark abyss. Never in history or in literature have the psychology of assassination and the mysterious power exerted after death by a victim upon a murderer been more magnificently depicted than in these two Scottish tragedies, one in the realm of fable and the other in that of real life.
Are such remarkable similarities the product of chance? Have we not good ground for assuming that, in Macbeth, Shakespeare was dramatising and sublimating the tragedy of Mary Stuart? The dramatist was three years old when the tragedy of Bothwell and Mary Stuart was played; he was a man of forty when he wrote Macbeth. The impressions of childhood exert an ineffaceable influence upon a poet’s mind, genius transmuting stimuli that have acted in childhood into imperishable realities. We cannot doubt that Shakespeare had been informed about the happenings in the palace at Holyrood. In his youth at Stratford he must have heard many details and legends about the Scottish Queen who had thrown away her kingdom and her crown in pursuit of a frenzied passion, and who, in punishment, had been imprisoned in one English castle after another. In 1587 Shakespeare had already been in London for a year, a play-actor, and probably trying his prentice hand as playwright, when the bells in the London churches pealed to announce that at length the head of Elizabeth Tudor’s chief adversary had been cut off, and that Henry Darnley had dragged his unfaithful wife down to join him in the tomb. When, in Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, the dramatist came to read the story of the Thane of Cawdor who slew Duncan and usurped the crown of Scotland, may we not suppose that he interwove his memories of the tragical fate of Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles into the substance of his drama? We cannot, indeed, either affirm or deny that Shakespeare, in writing his tragedy, was influenced by his knowledge of the life and death of Mary Stuart. This much, however, is certain, that only those who have studied and understood the psychology of Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan will be able fully to understand the moods and the actions of Mary Stuart during those dark days at Holyrood—to understand the torments of a woman strong of soul, who was yet not strong enough to face up to the darkest of her deeds.
The most amazing part of the resemblance between the two tragedies, that conceived by the playwright and that recorded by historian
s and biographers, is the resemblance in the changes which took place in Mary Stuart and in Lady Macbeth after the crime had been committed. Before the murder Lady Macbeth had been a loving, warm-hearted, energetic woman, strong of will and fired by ambition. Her supreme desire was to help the man she loved and lift him to greatness, and she might have penned many of the lines from Mary Stuart’s sonnet: “Pour luy ie veux rechercher la grandeure …”—I want to seek out greatness for him.
Ambition supplies her with abundant energy until the deed. Lady Macbeth is crafty, shrewd and resolute while the crime is still only willed, proposed and planned, while the hot, red blood has not yet flowed over her hands and over her soul. With cajoling words like those used by Mary to lure Darnley to Kirk o’ Field, she lures Duncan into the bedchamber where the dagger is awaiting him. But immediately after the crime she becomes a different woman, losing both strength and courage. Conscience burns within her like a furnace. Delirious, with rigid gaze, she wanders through the rooms of the castle, a horror to her friends and a terror to herself. Her brain is overwhelmed by one desire, the longing to forget, the morbid yearning for surcease from thought, the craving for death. So was it, likewise, with Mary Stuart after Darnley’s murder. She had been completely transformed, not only in mind, but in aspect as well, so that Drury, one of Elizabeth’s spies, reported to his royal mistress that never, without a severe illness, had a woman changed in outward appearance in so brief a time and so remarkably as had the Queen.
There was nothing now about her to recall the cheerful, talkative, self-confident woman she had been only a few weeks before. She was silent, and shunned company. Perhaps, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, she continued to hope that the world would be silent if she herself were silent, and that the black waves would recede. But when questioning voices became urgent; when, at night, from the streets of Edinburgh, the names of the murderers were shouted up at her windows; when Lennox, her slain husband’s father, and Elizabeth, her enemy, and Seton, her friend, made common cause with the rest of the world in insisting that the criminals must be called to account, she lost her head. She knew that she must do something to hide the crime, to exculpate herself. But she lacked the will for defence, and could not find words that would be convincing though deceptive. As if in a trance, she listened to the voices from London, from Paris, from Madrid, and from Rome, exhorting her and warning her, but none of them could awaken her from her stupor. She listened to them only as one buried alive might listen to the footsteps of those who passed by his grave—defenceless, impotent and despairing.
She knew that it was incumbent upon her to play the sorrowful widow, to shed the tears that might make people believe her innocent. But her throat was dry as well as her eyes; she could not speak and could not dissemble. Things went on in this way for week after week, until at length she could bear no more. As a hunted beast turns at bay, as Macbeth, seeking safety, added new murders to the murder which was already clamouring for vengeance, so Mary Stuart at length threw off her intolerable inertia. No longer did she care what the world thought of her, and whether her actions were wise or foolish. Movement had become essential to her, speedier and speedier movement, to outrun the warning and the threatening voices. On! On! Anything now but stillness and reflection, for self-communings forced her to recognise that no skill could save her. One of the mysteries of the human mind is that, for a brief time, speed can overcome anxiety. Just as a coachman who feels and hears the bridge breaking down beneath his carriage flogs his horses into the gallop which can alone rescue him from the danger, so Mary Stuart spurred the black charger of her destiny onward in her despair, hoping to outrun her thoughts, to escape from her own criticism. Neither to think nor to know nor to hear nor to see any more; only on and on into frenzy! Better a terrible end than terror without end. Just as a falling stone drops with a steadily accelerating velocity as it plunges deeper into the abyss, so do people act more hastily and more foolishly when they can see no issue from their troubles.
Mary Stuart’s actions during the weeks after the murder cannot be explained on reasonable grounds, but only as the outcome of unconquerable anxiety. One would have thought that even in her frenzy she might have told herself that she was flinging her honour to the winds and exposing herself to universal condemnation. That all Scotland, all Europe, would regard her marriage to the murderer of her husband within a few weeks of the crime as an outrage. If she had spent a year, or better two years, in retirement, since memories are short, the world might have forgotten. Then, by adroit diplomatic manoeuvres, various reasons might have been found for her choice of Bothwell as husband. But Mary was flying towards destruction when, without a decent interval of mourning, she was in such haste to set her murdered husband’s crown on the murderer’s head. Yet this was the crazy course she took.
Only one explanation of such behaviour is possible in the case of a woman who, in general, was shrewd and tolerably circumspect. Mary Stuart was under duress. Manifestly she could not wait, because waiting would disclose a shameful secret. To anyone with insight into such matters it must have been obvious that the only explanation of the way in which Mary rushed into marriage with Bothwell was that the unhappy woman knew herself to be with child. She knew herself to be with child, not with a posthumous son of King Henry, but with the fruit of an adulterous passion. A queen of Scotland must not give birth to an illegitimate child, least of all under conditions likely to proclaim from the housetops her complicity in her husband’s murder. For in that case it would inevitably be disclosed how voluptuously she had passed with her lover what should have been the days of her mourning for her husband, and even a poor reckoner could have counted up the months to decide whether Mary had become Bothwell’s mistress shortly before or shortly after the murder of Darnley. Either supposition would have been equally disgraceful. Nothing but a prompt legitimisation through marriage could save her child’s honour, and perhaps to some extent her own. If she were already Bothwell’s wife when the child came into the world, pre-conjugal relations with him might seem excusable. In any case the infant would bear Bothwell’s name, and Bothwell would know how to defend its rights. Not a month, not a week, must be lost. It was a horrible choice by which she was faced, but no doubt it seemed less shameful to her to marry in haste the murderer of her husband than to bring a fatherless child into the world. Only on such a supposition does the apparent unnaturalness of Mary’s behaviour during these weeks become comprehensible. Other interpretations serve merely to obscure the picture. At all times women suffering from this particular dread have been driven by it to foolish and criminal deeds. Mary, the Queen, was but one among millions of her sex rendered distraught by an unwelcome maternity. No other theory can explain the insensate, the tragical haste of her marriage to Bothwell.
She was in a dreadful situation, and no demon could have imagined a crueller one. On the one hand, knowing herself to be with child, she was in a desperate hurry; but this hurry proclaimed her complicity in Darnley’s murder. As Queen of Scotland, as widow, as a woman of the highest rank and station, watched closely by Edinburgh, by Scotland, by the whole European world, Mary must have known that so notorious a man as Bothwell, universally regarded as the murderer of Darnley, was the last whom she ought to marry; but, as a helpless woman, she knew him to be her only saviour. She ought not to marry him, and yet was compelled to marry him. That the real cause for haste might not be disclosed, some other reason for a speedy wedding must be invented. A pretext must be found which would outweigh the legal and moral objections to the proposed union.
But how can a queen be constrained to marry a man of lower degree? The code of honour of those days recognised only one possibility in such a case. If a woman had been forcibly robbed of her honour, it was the violator’s duty to re-establish her honour. Only if, as a wife, she had been raped, could Mary Stuart find the glimmer of an excuse for marrying Bothwell. Only in that case could the illusion be diffused among the populace that she had not married Bothwell from free will
, but under compulsion of the inevitable.
So fantastic a plan for escape could appeal only to a woman in a blind alley. Nothing but madness could engender such madness. Mary, who in general was courageous and resolute at decisive moments, shrank back when Bothwell proposed this tragical path to her. “I wish I were dead, for I see that all will turn out ill,” she wrote in her distress. But whatever moralists may think about Bothwell, he always remained a splendidly bold desperado. Little did he care that before the eyes of Europe he had to parade himself as a shameless robber, the ravisher of a queen, a villain who heeded neither law nor morals. Though the gates of hell should yawn in his path, he was not the man to hesitate when there was a crown to win. He was not appalled by any danger, resembling in this Mozart’s Don Giovanni who jeeringly invited the statue of the murdered Commander to the death feast. Beside him shuddered his Leporello, his brother-in-law Huntly who, for a few sinecures, had just consented to his sister’s divorce from Bothwell. Huntly, being less stalwart, soon took fright, hastened to the Queen and tried to dissuade her from the proposed venture. Bothwell, who was ready to defy a world in arms, was not troubled by the defection of this confederate. Nor did it affright him that the plan for the abduction of Mary had probably been blown upon. (In actual fact, one of Elizabeth’s spies reported the scheme to London in a dispatch sent the day before it was carried into effect.) Nor did it matter to the Earl whether the abduction would be regarded as genuine or spurious, so long as it brought him to his goal, the kingship. His only law was his own will, though death and the devil stood in the way; and he had power enough over Mary to drag her whithersoever he pleased.