Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

by John Guy

Bedford was one of Cecil’s closest allies and particularly susceptible to his views. He was to talk privately to Mary during the baptism celebrations and persuade her to pardon Morton and the rest, allowing them to come home. In return, Cecil would not hinder the reconciliation of the queens. This does not mean that Cecil had changed his attitude toward Mary. His move was deeply cynical. He was double-crossing Mary, because he was well aware that as soon as the pardoned Douglases returned to Scotland, they would demand their revenge on Darnley, and the resulting feud would put more on Mary’s plate than she could handle and so doom any chances of an understanding with Elizabeth. Cecil’s intuition was correct.

Fortunately Drury, Bedford’s deputy and right-hand man at Berwick had his spies in Scotland and was watching events closely. He too was alert to the rendezvous. His reports, previously known only from brief printed extracts, prove that Morton and Bothwell were the joint ringleaders, not Bothwell on his own. When those responsible for the cover-up rewrote history to exonerate themselves, Morton’s role was airbrushed out of the picture. Always the invisible man where assassinations were concerned, he was agile enough to cast the blame on others. But the handwritten originals of Drury’s reports show that he was always there.

Moray prudently stood aloof. He was a conniver, because he knew when the explosion would take place and made sure to be away at his house in Fife that night. He had foreknowledge of the murder, but decided to “look through his fingers.” He had always loathed Darnley, whom he blamed for his exile in England after the Chase-about Raid. It was typical of his self-serving ambition that Moray made no attempt to warn his sister of her peril.

Fearing that Darnley was plotting a coup d’état, Mary went to Glasgow on her own initiative. But she was deceitfully encouraged by Bothwell and Huntly, who escorted her and provided her bodyguards on the first stage of her journey. They supported her plan to confront Darnley and bring him back to Edinburgh. Of course they did, because Mary had unwittingly played into the hands of her conspiring lords. She was about to become the instrument whereby Morton would be revenged on her husband for his treachery in the Rizzio plot.

She had a motive to keep Darnley under house arrest, but certainly not to kill him. If Darnley was to be murdered, everything Mary had yearned for since her return from France would be lost, because Elizabeth would instantly end their talks and even demand reprisals. Darnley, for all his failings, was her kinsman too.

It was afterward said that this house was Mary’s choice. This is false. The house was the Old Provost’s Lodging, one of a group of dwellings leading off a quadrangle belonging to the old and partly ruined collegiate church of Kirk o’Field, on a site occupying high ground on the southern fringes of the capital. It was Darnley’s decision to stay there, and there is evidence to prove it. One of his own servants, later employed by Lennox, testified that “it was devised in Glasgow that the king should have lain first at Craigmillar, but because he had no will thereof, the purpose was altered and conclusion taken that he should lie beside the Kirk o’Field” (italics added).

Darnley was not stupid. He refused to lodge at Craigmillar because he loathed and feared Sir Simon Preston and had already heard whispers of a plot. But until Darnley was cured, he did not want to return to Holyrood. He was prodigiously vain and could not bear the thought of people seeing his pocks and pustules. Until his treatment was completed and his skin back to normal, he wished to remain in seclusion. Even in the privacy of his upstairs bedroom at Kirk o’Field, he wore a taffeta mask over his face.

As with the Rizzio plot, Mary believed this one had been aimed against her.

By this time, Bothwell, Balfour and David Chalmers had been denounced as Darnley’s murderers on placards affixed to the Tolbooth. The rumor mill was in overdrive. Everyone was talking about the gunpowder plot and had their own theories. Chalmers, already linked to Balfour and Bothwell in the tight-knit circle around the Court of Session and the Admiralty Court, was unpopular, but there is no proof he was involved in killing Darnley. The cover-up had started: the finger was pointing only at Bothwell and his known associates.

The women had identified someone close to the center of power. But the key fact about their evidence is not that it raises new questions, but that it was suppressed. Although carefully filed away by the clerk of the Privy Council, it was never used. It was even brought to England in 1568 and shown to Cecil, but was quietly buried. By then, the cover-up story was more important than the truth to everyone involved in this drama, except to Mary herself.

The women’s depositions are dated “11 February 1567,” the day after the blast, which is hardly slow progress. Mary had called for a full investigation, demanding speedy and draconian retribution for the murderers. Unfortunately for her reputation, the criminal justice system in Scotland relied on the oversight of the Privy Council. It was unlikely that the council would act efficiently or impartially when up to half of its members were either the instigators of the very crime they were supposed to be investigating or the men who had privately condoned it. In the case of the women from the cottages, it was these same lords who suppressed the crucial evidence.

Soon Mary herself was in the court of public opinion. The explosion, she was warned by her ambassador in Paris, had shocked and astonished all of Europe. The story was spreading that she was “the motive principal of the whole of all, and all done by your command.” Her role was keenly debated in France, and “for the most part interpreted sinisterly.” Catherine de Medici was no friend to Mary, and even the Guise family were disowning her.

Everything that had happened, the bishop steadfastly believed, was Mary’s own fault for throwing in her lot with the heretics.

Suddenly, history was to be rewritten. On the last occasion that Darnley had spoken to an English diplomat, he had repudiated his allegiance to the English queen. Now, as Lennox reassured Cecil, his son had all along been her most loyal subject and his own particular “acquaintance” and good friend.

At the beginning of 1567, Mary had been at the height of her powers and about to reach a final political accord with Elizabeth on mutually agreed terms. Two months later, she seemed more vulnerable than ever before. This had not been the aim of the lords, but was a byproduct of their shortsighted lust for revenge. What Mary urgently needed to do was to track down the murderers and bring them to justice.

It was an accurate prognosis, and yet not a single piece of uncontaminated evidence has ever been found to show that Mary had foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder.* Everything depends on the assumption that she was already engaged in an adulterous affair with Bothwell. What wrecked her reputation was that, instead of throwing Bothwell to the wolves, she decided to defy the world and throw in her lot with him.

Mary really was alone after the explosion. Even the Guises found her to be such a liability that her uncle made terms with Moray behind her back, provoking an angry response. Mary’s usually prolific correspondence with her family abruptly stopped. She felt she had no one to trust. Looking back on the months since her illness at Jedburgh, she must have guessed that most if not all her lords had known of the plot to kill her husband.

When Killigrew had arrived to present Mary with Elizabeth’s letter of rebuke, he was entertained to dinner by Moray and the lords and assured that every effort would be made to arrest the guilty parties. Mary herself promised Killigrew that the assassins would be unmasked. But how was she to give substance to her promise when the very same lords who dined with Killigrew were the leading conspirators? They stuck together and had already suppressed the testimony of the women in the cottages beside Thieves Row.

Mary’s psychology is crucial. She had been brought up in the luxury and safety of Henry II’s court and never felt completely secure after she had left the shores of France. The factionalism of the lords was relentless and on a scale beyond anything she could have imagined. Violence was endemic in Scotland. Politics were tribal, based on organized revenge and the blood feud. An anointed queen she might be, but the monarchy lacked the financial resources and centralized institutions of France.

She wanted Bothwell to protect her by controlling the noble factions. A poacher was to be turned into a gamekeeper. She did this because, rightly or wrongly, she saw him as the monarchy’s champion and the only man who could save her from a fate similar to Darnley’s.

Darnley was not given a state funeral.

Mary’s disregard for convention can only suggest that even though she played no part in Darnley’s death, she must at some level have been happy to see him gone. Even when her bales of taffeta had finally arrived and the blackout was in place, she could not escape the charge that it was more for show than substance.

Long before the end of the official forty days of mourning, Mary and Bothwell were seen outdoors together. She had decided to trust him, which was perhaps prudent as a security measure but politically very unwise.

Previously known for its “joyousity” and lighthearted atmosphere, Mary’s court was acquiring menacing and militaristic overtones as he recruited more and more soldiers to guard her palaces.

Moray was shunned by his sister. His disgrace sprang from his refusal either to declare in favor of Bothwell and Morton or to denounce them openly to Mary. This time his attempts to hedge his bets had undone him. Mary suspected him to be the chief instigator of the explosion, for once doing him an injustice.

Whereas Mary sought to soothe conflict, Bothwell was overweening and puffed up with pride, behaving as if he were king already. He was never in love with Mary. His efforts to woo her were minimal. He dominated their relationship to the point of brutality, yet she accepted and even seemed to welcome her subordinate role. Mary could be strong and masterful, but it now looked as if she wanted to surrender all her worldly cares to Bothwell, who took the opportunity to usurp her power and authority at every turn. Why this should have happened remains a mystery. Mary’s correspondence dried up in these crucial weeks. Later she gave her reasons. She said that her country, “being divided in factions as it is, cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man.” She needed Bothwell to deal with the sheer “insolence” of lords, who would otherwise constantly be in rebellion against her.

No longer did Mary seek advice on her marriage from France, Spain or England. Her focus had narrowed to her own realm, and she seemed happy to be known as Bothwell’s wife and to accept that the Guise family looked down on her for it.

Only three months and five days had passed since Darnley was murdered. Only fifteen months had passed since Bothwell and Lady Jean Gordon had been married with the “advice and express counsel” of Mary, who had signed their marriage contract, paid for the reception and presented the bride with her wedding dress.

But the pattern was clear. Morton had allied with Darnley in a Faustian pact to murder Rizzio. When Darnley betrayed him, Morton allied with Bothwell to take his revenge. Then Bothwell became too powerful. When he threatened the interests of the other lords, Morton broke with him, leading a revolt that was all the more deadly in that Bothwell had enough inside information to condemn all of his accomplices in Darnley’s murder, while he himself had been acquitted of the crime. There could be only one survivor of this, Bothwell’s final feud with Morton.

But Mary could not think straight. Whatever Bothwell had told her during their twelve days at Dunbar, she was distraught to realize soon after their marriage that he did not really love her. His protestations had been insincere.

History was repeating itself. Bothwell’s attitude toward Mary as a woman was fundamentally incompatible with her view of being a queen.

Mary was in turmoil. It was another of the occasions in her life when she said repeatedly, “I wish I were dead.” The difference is, this time she was not physically ill. As Drury had carefully noted, she was in great distress, but “without extremity of sickness.” Two independent witnesses heard her threaten to kill herself.

According to Sir James, Bothwell brutalized Mary after her marriage. He “mishandled” her in every way.

There is plenty of evidence of Bothwell’s violent temper, but it is also possible that he told Mary the truth—or more likely an expurgated version of the truth—about Darnley’s murder. In that event, she would have felt betrayed by the very man whom she had trusted to protect her from the noble factions, whose role as queen’s protector she had sealed in marriage. Even if he denied or concealed his own part in the plot, as he certainly would have done, she could never have forgiven him for failing to confess what he knew before the murder, which had shipwrecked all her hopes of asserting her claim to the English succession.

Although Bothwell still had no official title, he was already behaving as if he were king.

The lords had promised her honorable treatment only to keep her under arrest. She would rather die than subject herself to such indignity.

Moray intended to return to Scotland from his self-imposed exile in France to rule in one capacity or another. The Confederate Lords had justified their revolt as a moral crusade to avenge Darnley’s murder and secure Mary’s release from the “captivity” and “thralldom” of Bothwell. This was pure humbug. What they did after her surrender at Carberry Hill was to imprison her themselves. By way of an excuse, they tried to implicate her in Darnley’s murder.

She had been queen for all but the first six days of her life, and a reigning queen for six years. She was now a prisoner, guarded night and day by her enemies. Apart from a few short but intoxicating weeks in the following year, the rest of her life would be spent in captivity.

History is written by the winners, and after her incarceration, she was to be a spectacular loser. The villainy and cunning of the lords are shown by their willingness to accuse her of the crimes they had themselves committed, rewriting history to make theirs the official story.

When the lords wove their damning fiction, Mary’s version of history was forgotten. What may come as a surprise is that her story—told in her own words—can be retrieved. She has rarely been allowed to tell it. Few biographers have given it more than a brief mention, and the documents recording it have not been quoted at full length since 1845. Perhaps because her story is so different from the supposedly official version, it was not thought worthy of examination.

Mary always refused to acknowledge the gusto with which she had raced into her third marriage. When it had quickly turned sour, she would be willing to confess that Bothwell had treated her brutally. And yet she had made her choice and would stick by it. Even while enumerating his faults, she still wrote of him in the way she wished him to be:

But if Mary’s story fell into oblivion, Elizabeth was utterly scandalized that a fellow ruler had been imprisoned in an island fortress by her rebellious lords. She could not yet bring herself to write to Mary in her own hand, but she dictated a letter in which she threw her weight behind her fellow monarch, cousin and close kinswoman. On the same day, she sent another to the lords, expressing her grief and anger at what they had done.

Whereas Elizabeth wanted Mary restored to the throne, Cecil laid down the only terms on which she might be freed. She was to be stripped of her authority, which would be vested in a council of nobles. She might be styled queen, but only nominally. In all other respects, Cecil planned to restore the quasi-republican “States of Scotland” that had governed after the deposition of Mary’s mother during the lords’ first revolt.

What the lords said to Throckmorton was what they (and Cecil) wanted Elizabeth to hear. They several times promised that if Mary would divorce Bothwell, she might be restored to her throne. But this was less a serious proposal than a delaying tactic to appease Elizabeth, who was becoming more and more impatient and threatening to go to war to free Mary from her prison. All along, Morton and his staunchest ally, Lord Lindsay, Bothwell’s challenger, were set on deposing Mary or forcing her to abdicate.

Mary had no choice; she cannot have known of Elizabeth’s threat to go to war to defend her. She put her signature on each of the papers, but managed to blurt out, “When God shall set me at liberty again, I shall not abide these, for it is done against my will.”

Five days later, the lords crowned Prince James in the parish church at Stirling. It was the worst-attended coronation in Scottish history. Morton swore the one-year-old child’s coronation oath for him, and Knox preached the sermon. Then the lords staged a spectacle. A thousand bonfires were lit in the towns and villages, and in Edinburgh the castle guns fired a salute. But the people were sullen. “It appeared,” Throckmorton noted wryly, “they rejoiced more at the inauguration of the new prince than they did sorrow at the deprivation of their queen.”

Elizabeth was almost speechless with rage. Cecil answered, he said, “as warily as I could.” But to no avail. Elizabeth was so incensed, she once more threatened to declare war on the Scots. She refused all Cecil’s protests and counterarguments. It was one of their classic rows, and it turned on the nature and power of monarchy. Mary was an anointed queen, accountable to God alone. Elizabeth wanted it demonstrated that no such coercion would be tolerated. She particularly had her own English subjects in mind. Now it was she and not Mary who was brooding over the potential for a domino effect.

Such was the devious way in which her brother won her acquiescence in what she had previously agreed only under duress. On August 22, Moray was proclaimed regent. He had led the lords who deposed Mary’s mother eight years before, and now he had done it again. But the fight was far from over.

When Mary recovered from the trauma of her miscarriage and abdication and started to take stock, she knew she had been cheated. She was determined to recover her honor and her throne. She bided her time,

Moray was in Glasgow when he heard the news of her escape. The lords were at first incredulous; then, seeing the danger, they immediately ordered their forces to muster at Glasgow.