Read Mary Queen of Scots Online
Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots (48 page)
Darnley rode beside her, like a sulky page. At the news of his defection, his fellow-plotters had fled from Edinburgh on the morning of 17 March realizing that their rebellion no longer had any focal point. Morton, Lindsay, Ker of Fawdonside and Ruthven went to England; Maitland, who had certainly known of the plot, although he had not wielded a dagger, went to Dunkeld; John Knox, who may not have known in advance what was proposed, but certainly applauded Riccio’s killing as a goodly deed, went to Ayrshire. Moray alone remained in Edinburgh since he had cunningly arrived in the city too late to be implicated in the bloody events of the night of 9 March, and the fact that he had signed the pre-murder bond was of course unknown to the queen. Mary was also reconciled to Glencairn and Argyll. In any case, in her new grim determination to avenge the butchery of Riccio and pursue his killers to the utmost limits of her power, Mary was now prepared to forgive the previous rebels of the Chaseabout Raid. Time’s revolutions – and the treachery of Darnley – had combined to effect the pardon of Moray, which Mary had once strenuously refused to grant, despite the pleadings of her own nobles, and the admonitions of the queen of England.
*
See Pollen,
Papal Negotiations
, p. xxviii, where Mary’s involvement in a Catholic League, as a result of the meeting of the Catholic sovereigns at Bayonne in July 1565, has been shown to be a chimera of the Protestant imagination, just as any Protestant league in Europe was equally a figment of Catholic fancy.
†
In later years King Henry
IV
of France (Henry of Navarre) observed that James could indeed claim to be the modern Solomon, since he was the son of David.
‡
It is pleasant to relate that this relationship had a happy ending rare in the annals of the time: Lady Jean and her lover were finally united in marriage over thirty years later when both Mary Beaton and Lady Jean’s second husband, the earl of Sutherland, were dead.
§
Ruthven suggested that Riccio was also wearing his cap in the presence of the queen – which does seem to denote remarkable familiarity. But it is significant that Randolph, who was at pains to find out the most suggestive details possible, does not mention this one. Ruthven is the only source which mentions the subject of the cap.
‖
Claude Nau did not join the queen’s service until 1575; his Memorials were written in 1578.
a
Although Holyrood was restored and extended in the reign of Charles II, Queen Mary’s apartments can still be seen in much of their original state, as they were at the time of the murder: indeed, they form the most dramatic visual link to be found today with her life story, so many of the buildings connected with her now lying in ruins. But the staircase which can now be seen connecting the king’s apartments with the queen’s has no connection with the sixteenth-century privy staircase. This is still in existence, but concealed behind the Charles
II
panelling.
b
If true, it was certainly an accurate prediction. It fell to the future James
VI
to put to death both Ruthven’s son and his grandson, the 1st earl of Gowrie in 1584, and the 2nd earl in 1600, at the time of the Gowrie conspiracy.
c
It seems inconceivable that Mary should then have told Darnley bluntly that he himself would go the same way before a year was out – as Lennox announced in his own narrative,
22
written after Darnley’s death. Even if Mary nourished the thought, she would scarcely have chosen such a dangerous moment to give it expression, when she was still within the bounds of Holyrood, and still dependent on the goodwill of Darnley.
d
It was at this moment in history that the important wardship of Dunbar Castle was transferred from the laird of Craigmillar to the earl of Bothwell, to punish the one, and to reward the other for their respective roles in the Riccio affair – this transfer led to the dramatic part played by Dunbar Castle in Mary’s abduction by Bothwell in the following year.
15 Breakdown‘He misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.’
MAITLAND
:
On the relations between Mary and Darnley, October 1566
It was easy enough, once Mary was back in Edinburgh, to rescue the body of Riccio from its common grave, and have it reburied according to the Catholic rite he had professed, in her own chapel royal.
*
Ten days later Riccio’s brother, Joseph, a boy of eighteen, was made French secretary in his place. Mary, being anxious not to rule over a torn kingdom on the eve of the birth of her child, also took the trouble to reconcile Moray, Glencairn, and Argyll, recently allowed back into her favour, with Huntly, Bothwell and Atholl; together these two groups were now to make up the effective body of the Privy Council. Mary’s vengeance was thus officially reserved for the brutal murderers of her servant who had actually burst into her apartments – Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay and their minions. But as they were now safely escaped to England, the only two lives which were actually forfeited for the crime were those of two of Ruthven’s retainers – Tom Scott, under-sheriff of Perth, whose official position made his crime of ‘warding the Queen within Holyrood’ especially reprehensible, and Henry Yair who had killed the Dominican priest Father Black shortly after the murder of the Italian, and was executed the following August. Two other underlings, Mowbray and Harlaw, were released at the scaffold when the queen, characteristically moved by mercy, ‘gave them their lives’.
1
Yet the murder of the Italian had marked a turning-point in the affairs of Mary Queen of Scots, and the memories of the affair were not so easily laid in peace and forgotten, as his poor lacerated corpse.
The most obvious result of the affair was Mary’s abiding hatred of Darnley. She had either concealed this in order to escape from Holyrood or else she did not at this point realize the full extent of her husband’s complicity. Although she told Nau that Darnley had admitted to her on the Sunday that he had signed a bond to procure the crown matrimonial, and Leslie repeats the story, she did not mention the fact in her letter to Beaton of 2 April.
2
Whether Mary knew beforehand or not, the conspirators now took the understandable if vindictive step of sending the bond to the queen, so that she should see for herself the full extent of her husband’s treachery. Yet once more Mary was obliged to put a good face upon the situation for the time being, and issue a public statement of his innocence at the market cross. It was not within the compass of her thoughts to take any action against her husband before the birth of her child, since Darnley was quite capable of casting doubts upon the child’s legitimacy, if it suited his purpose. Although there were already rumours of a divorce between the two by the end of April – Randolph said Thornton had gone to Rome to treat about it – Mary, like all the Scots, had heard far too many arguments over the legitimacy of heirs, as the result of the subsequent divorces of their parents, to risk considering the subject before her child was actually born. In May there was another rumour from Randolph that Darnley would leave Scotland after the birth of the baby, and go to Flanders. He described Darnley’s new situation thus: ‘He is neither accompanied for, nor looked for by any nobleman, attended by certain of his own servants, and 6 or 8 of his guard, he is at liberty to do or go what or where he will.’
2
In his reflective moments Darnley must have realized that this aimless freedom might in fact be the deceptive liberty of the marked man. Of the powers that then existed in Scotland – the queen, Moray and his associates, Bothwell and the loyalist nobles, he had betrayed them all or tried to attack them at one or other point in his career. Should these potential enemies flag, there was also a whole new ferocious band of them headed by Morton, now in England, who might not stay there forever.
Mary’s relations with Darnley settled down into an uneasy truce until the birth of her child. Darnley had not reformed his behaviour: during her confinement he ‘vagabondised every night’.
3
In these circumstances it was natural that Mary should come to rely increasingly for political advice on those nobles who had proved themselves loyal to her throughout the two crises which she had faced in the past year.
†
Into this category fell notably James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, who as he leapt clear of the lion-pit at Holyrood, and rode off to summon Mary’s subjects successfully to her assistance, seemed to display that combination of resource, loyalty and strength which Mary had so persistently sought among her Scottish nobles. Now that he was reconciled with Moray, and firmly allied by marriage to Huntly, he seemed set in Mary’s estimation to form a useful loyal member of the Scottish polity. Yet Bothwell in his character seemed to sum up those very paradoxical contrasts which made it so difficult for anyone not brought up among them to understand the nature and behaviour of the Scottish nobles. For whereas Darnley by reason of his English royal blood and English upbringing was atypical of the Scottish nobility, Bothwell shared the turbulent contentious characteristics of his class – and it was this class whose motives and actions Queen Mary was never able to predict successfully. In the past she had been baffled and angered by Huntly, puzzled and hurt by Moray, appalled and shocked by Morton. Now she was once again, by the unwitting fault of her French upbringing, to make a mistake of judgement, and see in Bothwell the mirage – it was no more than that – of a strong wise protector, able to solve her problems by holding down the other nobles under his heel.
Bothwell was not a stupid man; he had been well educated by his kinsman the bishop of Moray, as his letters and writings show, and his books included volumes on both mathematics and the arts of war. He was well travelled: in Denmark he had picked up a Norwegian mistress, Anna Throndsen, whom he had seduced under promise of marriage; and it was seeking funds to support himself on this occasion that he had first met Queen Mary at the French court. He had made several expeditions to France, and spoke French himself. He was adventurous by nature, and his life (he was at this date about thirty) had already been full of ups and downs; apart from his imprisonment in Edinburgh Castle he had done a spell in the Tower of London in 1564 while trying to escape to France. When Mary sent for him at the time of the Chaseabout Raid, he arrived in a fishing boat from Flushing, eluding capture by the English. He came of the great border family of Hepburns, and in feudal terms his power stretched across the south-east of Scotland, with certain specifically family dominions, and the wards-ship of other royal castles (such as Hermitage and Dunbar) dependent on royal favour. Bothwell, like all his class, was keenly interested in the acquisition of such royal castles for the family interest, and official positions such as lieutenant of the borders had the natural corollary for him of the extension of his family’s power. His family, and indeed he himself, suffered from the proverbial pennilessness of the contemporary nobles, and his marriage contract to Jean Gordon shows that he was heavily in debt at the time. In the past there had been something amounting to a
family tradition for the Hepburns to attempt to improve their fortunes by favour of widowed queens. Bothwell’s own father, Patrick, the Fair Earl, had courted Mary of Guise throughout the winter of 1543
‡
in a ludicrous competition for her affections with Lennox (by a curious coincidence, to be Mary Stuart’s father-in-law) in which fine clothes played an important part. An earlier Patrick Hepburn had been linked with the widow of James
I
, and an Adam Hepburn with Mary of Guelders. After the battle of Pinkie Cleugh Bothwell’s father even negotiated with the English to marry an English princess in return for handing over the castle of Hermitage. In their marriage projects the Hepburns had tried without success to become the Habsburgs of Scotland.
Yet the effect of Bothwell’s concentration on the possibilities of the main chance was in fact to give him a far better record of loyalty to the central government – in the shape of Mary of Guise and her daughter – than most of his contemporaries. In the same way his religious attitudes showed a real degree of consistency. He refused to marry Jean Gordon according to the Catholic rite, despite Queen Mary’s pressure, and was described by Randolph as being one of those very strong against the Mass.
6
His critics retaliated by accusing him of being interested in the black arts which he was thought to have acquired during his education in France. La Mothe Fenélon told Charles
IX
that Bothwell had principally used his time at the schools in Paris to read and study sorcery and magic. At any rate his ambition was certainly boundless: as the memoirs of Lord Herries put it, he was a man ‘high in his own conceit, proud, vicious and vainglorious above measure, one who would attempt anything out of ambition’.
7
But his brain and methods were the reverse of Machiavellian, and to consider his political acumen in the same category as that of Cecil, in the sense that he now became the adviser on whom Mary relied, as Elizabeth relied on her secretary, is to demonstrate how very retarded sixteenth-century Scotland was, in political terms, compared to sixteenth-century England.
