Still, at the outset she could count upon a certain amount of aid. So conspicuous a struggle between a sovereign ruler and her people could not leave the other crowned heads of Europe indifferent. Elizabeth, above all, was strongly on the side of the cousin she had so often opposed. This change of front on the part of the Queen of England, her ardent espousal of the cause of her rival, is usually regarded as one more sign of Elizabeth’s inconstancy. No doubt the Tudor monarch was fickle, was a weathercock in petticoats, but in this instance her behaviour was consistent. If she now stood shoulder to shoulder with the Queen of Scotland and the Isles, this does not mean that she was siding with Mary Stuart the woman, the woman whose recent behaviour had naturally aroused so much suspicion. Elizabeth was a queen supporting another queen, supporting the principle that sovereign rights are inviolable, and therefore fighting for her own cause as well as Mary’s. She did not feel sure enough of the loyalty of her nobles to look on inert while rebellious subjects took up arms against the queen of a neighbouring kingdom and flung her into prison. In defiance of Cecil, whose inclination was to extend assistance to the Protestant Scottish lords, Elizabeth was determined to force these rebels to return to their allegiance, thus defending herself while defending her cousin. For once, her words had the ring of truth when she said she was profoundly moved by what had happened. She hastened to promise her sisterly support to the imprisoned Queen, while at the same time blaming Mary’s conduct as a woman. She drew a sharp distinction between her private views and the position she adopted as a crowned head.
Probably in July 1567, Elizabeth wrote to Mary as follows:
Madam, it hath been always held for a special principle in friendship that prosperity provideth, but adversity proveth friends; whereof at this time finding occasion to verify the same with our action, we have thought meet, both for our professions and your comfort, in these few words to testify our friendship, not only by admonishing you of the worst, but also to comfort you for the best … Madam, to be plain with you, our grief hath not been small, that in this your marriage so slender consideration hath been had, that as we perceive manifestly, no good friend you have in the whole world can like thereof—and if we should otherwise write or say we should abuse you, for how could a worse choice be made for you, than in great haste to marry such a subject, who besides other notorious lacks, public fame hath charged with the murder of your late husband, besides the touching of yourself also in some part, though we trust in that behalf falsely? And with what peril have you married him that hath another wife alive, whereby neither by God’s law nor man’s yourself can be his lawful wife, nor any children betwixt you legitimate! Thus you see plainly what we think of the marriage, whereof we are heartly sorry that we can conceive no better, what colourable reason soever we have heard of your servant to induce us thereto. We wish, upon the death of your husband, the first care had been to have searched out and punished the murderers; which having been done effectually—as easily it might have been in a matter so notorious—there might have been many more things tolerated better in your marriage than that now can be suffered to be spoken of. And surely we cannot but for friendship to yourself, besides the natural instinct that we have of blood to your late husband, profess ourselves earnestly bent to do anything in our power to procure the due punishment of that murder against any subject that you have, how dear soever you hold him.
These are plain words, and cutting as a knife. They show that Elizabeth, who had doubtless been kept well informed by her spies and Moray about all that happened at Kirk o’ Field, was convinced of Mary’s complicity in the murder of Darnley. With very little periphrasis, she pointed to Bothwell as the actual murderer, and did not try to wrap up the unpalatable assurance in courtly or diplomatic words. The above-quoted letter shows, beyond question, that Elizabeth Tudor was prepared to support Mary Stuart the Queen, and not her cousin Mary the woman, because in supporting the Queen she was fighting for her own hand. In this remarkable letter Elizabeth continues:
Now for your comfort in such adversity as we have heard you should be in—whereof we cannot tell what to think to be true—we assure you, that whatsoever we can imagine meet to be for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same; that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, a faithful friend; and so shall you undoubtedly always find us and prove us to be indeed towards you; for which purpose we are determined to send with all speed one of our trusty servants, not only to understand your state but also, thereupon, so to deal with your nobility and people, as they shall find you not to lack our friendship and power for the preservation of your honour and greatness.
Elizabeth kept her word. She charged her special messenger to enter the strongest possible protest against the measures the rebels were taking against Mary, and to let the Scottish lords know that in the event of their using any violence towards her cousin she was determined to declare war. She fiercely reproved them for their presumptuousness in proposing to hold judgement upon an anointed queen. There was nothing in Holy Writ to justify subjects in deposing their heaven-given ruler. In no Christian monarchy was there any law authorising subjects to touch the person of their prince, to imprison him, or hale him before a court of assize. Elizabeth had been as much outraged as had been the Scottish lords by the murder of her cousin, the late King, and as much outraged as they by the Queen’s marriage to Bothwell. But she could neither tolerate nor condone their subsequent behaviour towards their Queen. By God’s ordinance they were her subjects and she was their ruler, and they therefore had no right to call her to account, since it was opposed to nature to make the head subordinate to the feet.
For the first time, however, Elizabeth encountered open resistance on the part of the Scottish lords, although most of them had been for years in her pay. Since the murder of Rizzio, they had known well enough what they might expect should Mary regain power. Neither their threats nor their cajoleries had induced her to forsake Bothwell, and they still had a lively memory of the invectives and menaces of vengeance which she had shrieked at them during the ride from Carberry Hill to Edinburgh. They had not got rid, first of Rizzio, then of Darnley, and then of Bothwell, in order to become once more the powerless subjects of so incalculable a woman. It would suit them enormously better to have as monarch Mary Stuart’s little son James, for a child could not order them about, and during the long period of his minority they would remain undisputed rulers of the country.
Nevertheless, the Scottish lords would not have found courage to defy Elizabeth had not chance put into their hands an unexpected and deadly weapon against Mary. Six days after the affair at Carberry Hill, an act of despicable treachery to Bothwell on the part of his confederate Sir James Balfour gave them what they wanted. Balfour, rendered uneasy by the change in the political weather, saw a chance of saving his skin by fresh rascality. He informed the Scottish lords that Bothwell, now a fugitive, had sent a valet, George Dalgleish, to Edinburgh, in search of a casket containing important documents, which Dalgleish was to smuggle out of the capital. The valet was promptly arrested, was put to the torture and revealed the hiding place of the documents. Under a bed was thereupon found a silver casket which had been given to Mary by her first husband Francis, and which subsequently, with all her other treasures, she had made over to her lover Bothwell. In this coffer or casket, protected by cunningly devised locks, Bothwell had been accustomed to keep his private documents, Mary’s promise to marry him, her letters to him, and presumably certain papers which were compromising to the Scottish lords. One may suppose that he had thought it would be too dangerous to take this casket with him upon the flight to Borthwick. He had hidden it away in Edinburgh before leaving, intending to have it brought to him in due course by a trustworthy servant. His bond with the Scottish lords, the Queen’s promise to marry him and her private letters might serve him, some day, for blackmailing purposes or for self-exculpation. With the documents in his possession he could, on the one hand, bri
ng pressure to bear on the Queen should she prove fickle and, on the other hand, guard himself against the Scottish lords should they wish to accuse him of the murder of Darnley. His first thought when he found himself in temporary security after his flight from Carberry Hill was to get these important pieces of evidence once more into his own keeping. It was an almost incredible piece of luck for the Scottish lords to be able to seize them, since they were then in a position to destroy whatever might compromise themselves, while ruthlessly using against the Queen whatever was to her detriment.
For one night the Earl of Morton had charge of this precious find. Next day the other lords were summoned (it is important for the reader to note that among them were Catholics and friends of Mary Stuart), and in their presence the locked coffer was broken open. It contained the famous Casket Letters as well as the sonnets written or alleged to be written by Mary. Without troubling here to reopen the question whether the translations which have come down to us faithfully represent the original text, as far as the letters are concerned, or whether the sonnets were genuine—this much is certain, that the documents found or alleged to have been found in the casket had a disastrous influence upon the fate of Queen Mary. Thenceforward the Scottish lords became far bolder, more self-assured. In their jubilation they hastened to spread the news far and wide. The very same day, before there could have been time to copy the documents, and still less to falsify them, they sent a message to Moray in France giving him an oral summary of the most incriminating. They made the French ambassador acquainted with their discovery; they arrested and examined all of Bothwell’s servants they could lay hands upon, and took minutes of their evidence. Their general line of conduct after the opening of the casket would be incomprehensible had not its contents provided damnatory confirmation of Mary Stuart’s complicity. At one stroke the Queen’s situation had grown far worse.
For the discovery of the letters at this critical juncture could not but enormously strengthen the position of the rebels. It gave them, at last, the moral ground they needed to support them in their rebellion. Hitherto they had been content to talk of Bothwell as guilty of the late King’s murder, but had carefully avoided pressing him too hard lest the refugee should proclaim them to the world as confederates. The only grievance they had been able to allege against the Queen, so far, had been that she had married her husband’s murderer. Now, however, thanks to the opportune “discovery” of the letters and sonnets, they were able to convince the most unsuspicious that Queen Mary had been privy to the crime. Her (to say the least of it) extremely indiscreet written avowals gave the practised and cynical blackmailers the very lever they wanted for putting pressure upon the Queen and breaking her obduracy. Now they could compel her “of her own free will” to make over the crown to her son; or, if she refused, could publicly accuse her of adultery and of being accessory to her husband’s murder.
I should have written “arrange for her to be accused” rather than “accuse”. The Scottish lords knew that Elizabeth would never allow them to claim jurisdiction over the Queen. They therefore remained prudently in the background, pulling strings to secure that a formal trial should be instigated by a third party. The requisite inflaming of public opinion against Mary Stuart was gladly undertaken by a man who hated her, John Knox. After the murder of Rizzio, this agitator and fanatic had thought it wise to quit the country. Now, when his gloomiest prophecies concerning the “bloody Jezebel” and the disasters her misconduct would bring about had been fulfilled in every particular and even outdone, he returned to Edinburgh clad in the prophet’s mantle. From his pulpit came demand after demand that the sinful papist woman should be put upon trial; in the uncompromising vernacular of the Old Testament, the priest clamoured for an assize upon the adulterous Queen. Nor was Knox’s a solitary voice. Sunday after Sunday the sermons of the preachers of the reformed religion became more acrimonious. No more in the case of a queen than in that of the lowliest woman in the land were adultery and murder to be overlooked. They went so far as to demand the execution of Mary Stuart, and their perpetual incitation did not fail of its effect. Hatred soon spread from the kirk into the street. Excited at the thought of seeing a woman of such exalted position led as a sinner to the scaffold, the mob, which hitherto in Scotland had sung small, now began to insist upon the public trial of the Queen. “The women were most furious and impudent against her, yet the men were bad enough.” Every poor woman in Scotland knew that the pillory and the scaffold would have been her lot had she been proved guilty of adultery. Was this one woman, because she was called a queen, to lecher and to murder unpunished, and to escape the fire? More and more savage became the cries: “Burn the whore!” The English ambassador, honestly alarmed, reported to London his fear lest the tragedy which had begun with the murder of David the Italian and with the slaying of the Queen’s husband would end with the execution of the Queen.
The Scottish lords had all that they wanted. They could bring up their heavy artillery, to batter down Mary Stuart’s resistance to a “voluntary” abdication. The document had been already drawn up to fulfil John Knox’s insistence upon a direct accusation of the Queen, for “a breach of the law” and for “incontinence with Bothwell and others”. If she still refused to abdicate, the letters found in the casket, the letters which proved her to have been privy to the murder, could be read in open court, disclosing her shame. Therewith the rebels would have justified themselves before the world. They did not think that Elizabeth or any other monarch would in that case intervene on behalf of a woman whose own letters showed her to be a murderess and an adulteress.
Armed with this threat of a public trial, Sir Robert Melville and Lord Lindsay arrived at Lochleven Castle on 25th July 1567. They brought with them three parchments for the Queen to sign if she wished to avoid being put on her trial. In the first of them Mary was to declare that she was weary of queenship and was content to lay aside the burden of the crown, a burden which she had neither power nor inclination to sustain any longer. The second parchment announced her consent to the coronation of her son; the third, her approval of Moray’s appointment as regent.
Melville was the chief spokesman. He, of all the rebellious nobles, was most sympathetic to her. Twice he had intervened to avert open conflict, and to urge her to repudiate Bothwell. But on both occasions she had refused, knowing that if she gave way to his demands the child she carried in her womb, Bothwell’s child, would be born a bastard. Now, however, after the discovery of the Casket Letters, her position had become much more difficult. At first she passionately refused to sign the parchments. She burst into tears, declaring that she would rather forfeit her life than her crown. Ruthlessly, and in the crudest colours, Melville explained what awaited her if she persisted in her refusal: a public reading of the letters, the interrogation of Bothwell’s servants, her own examination and condemnation. With horror Mary began to realise the result of her heedlessness, and how she had involved herself in shame and disgrace. By degrees her stubborn resistance was overcome by her fears. After prolonged hesitation and fierce outbursts of indignation and despair, she gave way in the end and signed the three documents.
An agreement had been come to. But, as usual with the Scottish “bonds”, neither party to the contract had any intention of being bound by it. The Scottish lords would, nonetheless, read Mary Stuart’s letters in parliament and would trumpet to the world that she had been privy to Darnley’s murder, hoping thereby to make her return to the throne impossible. Mary herself did not for a moment regard herself as discrowned merely because she had affixed her signature to the pieces of parchment. To her, the divine right of a queen was as much a part of herself as the warm blood that coursed through her veins, oaths to the contrary notwithstanding. Considerations of her word of honour counted for nothing with her as compared with the only thing which gave the world reality to her.
A few days later the little King was crowned. The populace had to put up with a less impressive spectacle than an auto-dafé in
the public square. At the coronation the Earl of Atholl carried the crown, Morton the sceptre, the Earl of Glencairn the sword, and the Earl of Mar bore in his arms the little boy who was henceforward to be known as James VI of Scotland. Since John Knox preached the coronation sermon, the world was given to understand that the new-made King had for ever put away from him the errors and snares of papistical doctrines. There was great jubilation among the crowd outside the gates; the church bells pealed; bonfires were lit throughout the country. For the moment, and only for the moment, joy and peace were restored to Scotland.
Now, when the burden and heat of the day had been borne by others, Moray, the man of finesse, returned home in triumph. Once more his perfidious policy of absenting himself when danger was in the wind had been justified by results. He kept in the background during the murder of Rizzio, and again during the murder of Darnley; he took no active part in the rebellion against his sister; his loyalty was unsmirched and no blood bespecked his hands. Time had been working on his side. Since he knew how to wait and to hold aloof, there accrued to him without effort and without taint of dishonour what he had been artfully scheming for. Unanimously the Scottish lords offered him the regency.