Game of Queens (48 page)

Just how far Mary's desire to be free carried her was and is a source of huge controversy. The bare facts are easily stated. At the end of January Queen Mary persuaded Darnley to return to Edinburgh with her where, by his own choice, he lodged at the nearby house of Kirk o'Field until his cure was complete. Mary visited him frequently; on 9 February she was there with a cheerful company, although she left early to attend a page's wedding party.

At 2 am on the 10th February, Edinburgh was rocked by the sound of an explosion. Mary, at Holyrood, sent at once to inquire what had happened, and soon heard that Kirk o'Field was rubble. The day's light, however, revealed Darnley's dead body not in the house but strangled, in the garden, whence he had apparently been trying to flee.

Volumes have been devoted to the murder of Lord Darnley and this is no place to weigh the evidence. Two things are important: Bothwell was immediately suspected by all sides of having cleared his rival out of the way and Mary was widely suspected of complicity. And perhaps a third: most historians today consider she was innocent at least of precise knowledge of the plan, although one of the skills of medieval or early modern monarchy might be to be able to express a desire that some obstacle be removed and take care not to know precisely how it would happen.

At Craigmillar Maitland had suggested a divorce or annulment but Mary was concerned that might affect her son's legitimacy. When Maitland seemed to say another way would have to be found, she cried out that nothing should be done against her reputation or her honour. To have failed subsequently to prevent what she should surely have guessed her lords were thinking was, if not a sin of omission, then at least an act of folly. But of folly, most would in the end have to declare Mary Stuart guilty.

Certainly Mary did now act foolishly. Her very unpreparedness to deal with this crisis perhaps suggests she had not anticipated it precisely. Instead of observing the strictest mourning as a wife, and as queen distancing herself from those suspected of the deed, she vacillated. She ordered black drapes for her chamber at Edinburgh Castle but stopped off as she travelled there, to attend another wedding party. She went to nearby Seton, several times, for a few days' holiday. She was observed, with the ever-present Bothwell, to be disporting herself at archery. Her mood was volatile, although she was distressed and angered by the placards blaming Bothwell for Darnley's death. One depicted Mary herself as a mermaid, a notorious symbol of harlotry.

Elizabeth, from England, wrote to her with extraordinary vehemence:

My ears have been so astounded, my mind so disturbed and my heart so appalled at hearing the horrible report of the abominable murder of your late husband and my slaughtered cousin, that I can scarcely as yet summon the spirit to write about it . . . I will not conceal from you that people for the most part are saying that you will look through your fingers at this deed instead of avenging it . . . I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beg you to take this thing so far to heart that you will not fear to touch even him who you have nearest to you if he were involved . . .

Elizabeth was clearly afraid that Mary's actions would compromise the sisterhood of queens. If Mary failed to use such sincerity ‘and prudence' that the world should pronounce her innocent, wrote Elizabeth on another occasion, then she would ‘deserve to fall from the ranks of princesses and rather than that should happen to you, I would wish you an honourable burial rather than a soiled life'.

On 12 April, Bothwell was acquitted in a show trial; the verdict the surer both for the fact that Edinburgh was so packed with his men that Lennox, Darnley's father, dared not appear, and that Mary had waved him off to the hearing. A week later Bothwell went further, summoning the lords to a supper at Ainslie's Tavern. There, he demanded that they should all sign a bond. It called on the queen to marry and to marry a Scotsman. And who better than Bothwell himself?

Mary's next action was that of both a queen and a mother. She went to Stirling, where her son was being raised, to try to get possession of the baby. When Prince James's official guardian refused to give him up, Mary was forced to set out once again towards Edinburgh. On 24 April she rode out from her birthplace, Linlithgow, to return to the city. The Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva (writing home on 3 May) described what came next:

On arriving six miles from Edinburgh, Bothwell met her with four hundred horsemen. As they arrived near the Queen with their swords drawn they showed an intention of taking her with them . . . She was taken to Dunbar, where she arrived at midnight, and still remains. Some say she will marry him . . .

Crucially, the ambassador continued: ‘It is believed that the whole thing has been arranged, so that if anything comes of the marriage the Queen may make out that she was forced into it.'

Therein lay the rub. Although Mary's first reaction – ordering her men to ride for help – suggests she had genuinely been ambushed by Bothwell, her subsequent reaction is harder to understand. She remained at Dunbar for twelve days, by the end of which, from later evidence, she would seem to have been pregnant. Bothwell was absent for part of the time, arranging a hasty divorce from his wife, so as to free himself for a more advantageous marriage, and the conditions of her ‘captivity', if one can call it that, were not such as to preclude Mary's escaping, if she really wished to.

The dark suspicion, as Maitland's friend Kirkaldy of Grange put it, was that Mary ‘was minded to cause Bothwell to ravish her'; that to avoid the blame she would incur if she openly took up with the man believed to be her husband's murderer, she had helped to set up what was to be passed off as an abduction and ravishment.

Perhaps a more likely explanation is that Mary was indeed surprised and outraged by Bothwell's abduction but that he then won her round. She had, after all, come to feel in the last months that he was the only man in Scotland on whom she could really rely; who seemed to answer her desperate need for support and protection. If he told her he had been impelled to seize her for her own safety, and that her only hope lay in marrying him; if he showed her the Ainslie Tavern bond . . . That is the explanation Mary herself sent to her ambassador at the French court and the long circumstantial story makes convincing reading:

. . . seeing ourselves in Bothwell's power, sequestered from the company of our servants and others, of whom we might ask counsel . . . left alone, as it were, a prey to him, many things we resolved with ourself, but never could find a way out. And yet he gave us little space to meditate with ourself, ever pressing us with continual and importunate suit. In the end, when we saw no hope to be rid of him, never man in Scotland making a move to procure our deliverance we were compelled to mitigate our displeasure, and began to think upon that which he propounded.

. . . Albeit we found Bothwell's doings rude, yet were his words and answers gentle. As by a bravado in the beginning he had won the first point, so ceased he never till by persuasions and importune suit, accompanied not the less with force, he has finally driven us to end the work begun at such time and in such form as he thought might best serve his turn . . .

The conclusion that would best serve Bothwell's turn was marriage with the queen, but she had her reasons for agreeing to the idea. Scotland ‘being divided into factions as it is', she wrote (and it might have been her grandmother Margaret Tudor speaking), ‘cannot be contained in order unless our authority be assisted and set forth by the fortification of a man'.

On 6 May they rode back into Edinburgh through sullen crowds, Bothwell leading Mary's horse. On 12 May she formally pardoned him for abducting her, and raised him to Duke of Orkney. On 15 May they were married, in a Protestant ceremony.

 

Once again, as with the marriage to Darnley, Mary's feelings appear to have been in conflict. Within days, the French ambassador Du Croc was writing to Catherine de Medici: ‘The Queen's marriage is too unhappy and begins already to be repented of.' Mary had sent for him, after he had seen her and her husband at odds, and told him that, ‘If you see me melancholy, it is because I do not choose to be cheerful; because I never will be so, and wish for nothing but death.'

‘Yesterday, when they were both in a room, she called aloud for a knife to kill herself; the persons in the ante-chamber heard it,' De Croc reported. Bothwell, like Darnley but with greater force and abilities, was another man determined to rule as king. But the court was becoming a travesty from which men such as Maitland slipped away daily.

On 6 June, knowing the Earl of Morton and the lords were planning an attack, and determined on his overthrow, Bothwell took Mary away from Edinburgh, to a place of greater safety. On 15 June, a scorching day, the royal forces and those of the lords faced each other at Carberry.

Bothwell was ready to decide the matter by single combat. It was Mary who eventually intervened, knowing surely that this was no way to regain any useful control of her country. A deal was struck whereby she would be taken into honourable custody and Bothwell allowed to go free. But Mary was appalled by the reaction of the soldiers and, as the lords led her into Edinburgh, of the citizenry. Her dress torn, alternately sobbing and threatening, she listened to the crowds yelling, ‘Burn the whore'. Was this the real romance gone wrong; the love Elizabeth never wholly lost in all her long marriage to her country?

 

On 17 June Queen Mary was taken, captive, from Holyrood to the island castle of Loch Leven, where she almost immediately miscarried, reportedly of twins.
¹
On 24 June, still weak, Mary was forced to sign a document of abdication. Five weeks later her baby son was crowned James VI, with her half-brother Moray to act as regent during his minority.

Queen Elizabeth wrote yet again to her ‘sister Sovereign': ‘whatsoever we can imagine meet for your honour and safety that shall lie in our power, we will perform the same [so] that it shall well appear you have a good neighbour, a dear sister, and a faithful friend'. Elizabeth was aware that a blow to one monarch, and a female monarch, damaged any monarchy. ‘You shall plainly declare to the lords that if they shall determine anything to the deprivation of the Queen their sovereign lady of her royal estate . . . we will make ourselves a plain party against them, for example to all posterity', she wrote to her ambassador in Scotland.

It may have been the fear of Elizabeth's wrath that kept Mary's lords from proceeding to any lethal extremity. Nonetheless, in Elizabeth Tudor's eyes Mary Stuart had committed an unforgivable crime. She had made all female rulers look foolish – exactly as men like John Knox had always suspected them to be.

41

‘daughter of debate'

The Netherlands, France, England, 1566–1571

In continental Europe too, religious divisions were hardening. In the Netherlands Margaret of Parma, acting as regent for her half-brother Philip of Spain, had from the start faced a situation even more difficult than that which had plagued her aunt Mary of Hungary when she was regent for
her
brother Charles V.
¹

Charles V, who had been reared in the Netherlands, spent much of his reign moving around his vast territories. Philip, although too painstaking not to pay due tribute to the Netherlands and its culture, was every inch a Spaniard, determined to rule from Madrid, or from the vast new palace he was building nearby, the Escorial. This left the Netherlands dissatisfied with their position as, effectively, a mere colony and Philip with little real understanding of the seventeen very different provinces that made up his northern holding. But it also left Margaret of Parma, given far less authority than her predecessors, trying to implement instructions sent from Philip, many weeks' journey away.

No one as yet spoke of the dissent in the Netherlands as a struggle for independence. Instead, the trouble was cast in religious terms. The Netherlands Council of State was coming under the leadership of the Stadtholder William of Orange, who had been raised partly under the influence of Mary of Hungary and was much trusted by her and by Charles V. Now William, brought into alliance with the German Protestant princes through a marriage with Anna of Saxony, electrified the Council by expressing his continued opposition to Philip on religious grounds. Himself a Catholic, he could not concede that a monarch had the right to decide his subjects' beliefs. Philip, horrified by the growing power of the Protestants in France, had earlier ordered Margaret of Parma to strictly enforce Charles V's
Placarten
, edicts imposing harsh penalties against heresy. William told the council that ‘the king errs if he thinks that the Netherlands, surrounded as they are by countries where religious freedom is permitted, can indefinitely support the sanguinary edicts'.

In April 1565 a Confederacy of noblemen, William's younger brother Louis prominent among them, presented a petition to Margaret of Parma, requesting an end to the persecution of Protestants. The next year saw a wave of iconoclasm, as Protestants of various denominations swept through the Netherlands destroying Catholic images; exactly the kind of news most certain to appal Philip of Spain. Religious discontent was fostered by economic hardship: as one observer put it, ‘It is folly to enforce the edicts while corn is so dear.'

Margaret's instinct was to agree to the demands of the Confederacy, as long as its members joined her in restoring order. In Italy, the counselling of the Jesuits' founder, Ignatius Loyola, had mediated in Margaret's troubled marriage to Farnese and her patronage had been vital in getting Loyola's nascent Society of Jesus off the ground. But, like Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth of England, she seems to have made a distinction between religious belief and civil disobedience. Also like Catherine de Medici, however, she would be thwarted in the attempt to act on any such belief. Elizabeth, in England, would hold out for longer.