Mary Queen of Scots (64 page)

What is virtually impossible is the suggestion, sometimes made since by historians, that the queen could have conceived twins by Bothwell in January before Darnley’s death, and carried them in complete secrecy, without the faintest contemporary report of her pregnancy, throughout the vital months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy. It was mid-June before Bedford heard that the queen was pregnant; although Guzman, the Spanish ambassador in London, wrote to Philip
II
on 21 June, saying that the Scottish queen was five
months
pregnant,
¹⁴
he probably mistook five months for five weeks, since there is no reference of any sort through March, April and May to the royal pregnancy, which would have been becoming rapidly more apparent as the queen’s figure changed. This was an age in which such facts were speedily known by the
accurate news service of servants’ gossip: as a girl queen in France, Mary’s prospects of becoming a mother had been intimately assessed by the ambassadors at the court. Randolph’s extraordinarily early reports of Mary’s pregnancy with James in the autumn of 1565 will be recalled – he heard the first rumours of her condition about five weeks after conception, giving as his reference such ‘tokens … annexed to the kind of them that are in that case’.
¹⁵
The spring months following the Kirk o’Field tragedy were among the most critical of Mary’s existence, in which her every word and action were watched, checked and reported: how inconceivable is it then that an event of such moment as her growing pregnancy outside the bonds of marriage should have passed quite unnoticed until the sixth month, by observers who would certainly have grasped joyfully at such a convenient weapon to destroy, if not Mary, at least Bothwell, the child’s father.
†

The queen’s miscarriage proved a turning-point in her attitude to Bothwell, for it removed one important obstacle in the way of divorce. By 5 August Throckmorton no longer despaired of securing her consent to the divorce, as he had done previously.
¹⁷
It has occasionally been supposed that Mary did not in reality miscarry the child, but merely concealed her pregnancy; according to this legend, she gave birth to the baby – a daughter – in the following February; the little girl was smuggled away to France and there grew up as a nun in the convent of Notre Dame de Soissons. Alas, nothing would have been more impracticable than for the Scottish queen to have concealed her condition in the confined space of Lochleven, quite apart from the fact that there is no contemporary evidence to back up the story.
‡
It is also highly unlikely that Mary would have ignored the continued existence of such a daughter – next heiress after James to the Scottish and English thrones – in the later years of her captivity when she quarrelled with her son. Such a daughter could have been introduced with effect into her last testaments.

It was while the queen was lying in bed after her miscarriage, by her own account ‘in a state of great weakness’ having lost a great deal of blood, and scarcely able to move, that Lindsay came to her and told her that he had been instructed to make her sign certain letters for the resignation of her crown. Mary now believed herself once more to be in great personal danger, on this tiny island, in the midst of an enormous lake, whose waters could claim any victim silently without the circumstances of their death being ever properly known. Despite her fears the queen was outraged at the monstrousness of the request, and continued to demand that she should be taken in front of her Estates for the parliamentary enquiry which had been promised to her; but Lindsay’s rough words on the subject, that she had better sign, for if she did not, she would simply compel them to cut her throat, however unwilling they might be to do so, only convinced her further of her own personal danger. She had no allies to assist her, except the two
femmes-de-chambre
she had been allowed to bring from Holyrood. In a state of terror and despair, she declared that she refused to leave the house. When Lindsay threatened her with forcible removal she replied that she would have to be dragged out by the hairs of her head.

It was at this point that Robert Melville hinted to Mary that by no means every member of the Douglas family was as hostile to her as the laird of Lochleven himself: his brother, for example, the young debonair George Douglas, was already showing himself susceptible to the charms of the beautiful if unfortunate prisoner: he showed his sympathies by persuading the servants of the house to rise up in rebellion at the project of her removal. But from the actual signing of the letters of resignation there was no escape. Mary told Nau later that Throckmorton had managed to smuggle her a note in the scabbard of a sword, telling her to sign to save her own life, as something so clearly signed under duress could never afterwards be held against her.
¹⁹
Certainly if duress was ever held to affect questions of legality there could be no possible legality about such a document, by which Mary signed away the crown she had inherited twenty-four and a half years ago, in favour of her own son, and a regency of her half-brother, on a lonely island, without any advisers and surrounded by soldiers, under the command of the new regent’s own brother. Shortly afterwards, Mary fell seriously ill again: her body began to swell up, chiefly in one arm and leg; her skin turned yellow, and she broke out in
pustules, so that she began to believe she might have been poisoned. This disease, which seems to have had something to do with the liver, was relieved by bleeding, and a potion which was said to strengthen the heart.

As a result of the instruments which his mother had been compelled to sign in this manner, on 29 July James was crowned king of Scotland at the Protestant church, just outside the gates of Stirling Castle, at the tender age of thirteen months. The oath was taken on his behalf by Morton and Home. The circumstances strongly recalled those of Queen Mary’s own coronation twenty-four years before: once more the Scottish crown was in the grasp of a puny child, hedged round by a grasping nobility, whose powers seemed to have been curtailed very little in the intervening years. Letters of commission signed by the ex-queen were read out – one established a regency in the name of Moray, and after him Morton, during the king’s minority; one resigned the crown and kingdom on Mary’s behalf; a third appointed a Council to act with Moray. On the day of the coronation, the gloomy peace of Lochleven was disturbed by all the artillery of the house being discharged; the queen, sending to find out what the matter was, discovered that bonfires had been lit in the garden, and that the laird was celebrating riotously at the news. He asked her mockingly why she too was not making merry at the coronation of her own son, at which Mary started to weep and went indoors.
²⁰

No further excitements disturbed the queen’s close imprisonment, until her half-brother returned to Scotland to assume the position of regent. Some of Mary’s supporters had hoped that Moray’s arrival would result in some amelioration of her condition, remembering the many benefits which she had bestowed upon him in the past. George Douglas, falling further under the spell of Mary’s charm, chose to remind Moray of how he had been used to call himself the queen’s ‘creature’. But Moray had now no call to term himself anyone’s creature, with the prospect ahead of him of at least twelve or fourteen years’ rule of Scotland, during his own nephew’s childhood. When he arrived at Lochleven, it was in a cold and punitive mood. To Mary’s surprise, her brother was now addressed as ‘Grace’, a title usually reserved for kings or their children. In their first interview, he chose to harangue her in a tone of angry condemnation, which justified Throckmorton’s description of him as leading his people like the ancient prophets of Israel. It was true that Moray’s lofty sermon on Mary’s past imprudences, unattractive as it might be, contained many observations which were most applicable to her case: he told her that the Scottish people were dissatisfied with her conduct, and even though innocent before God, she should have had regard to her reputation in
the eyes of the world, ‘which judges by the outward appearance and not upon the inward sentiment’. On the subject of her marriage to Bothwell, and the rumours it had aroused concerning the death of Darnley, he observed perfectly correctly that it was not enough to avoid a fault, but also the occasions of being suspected of it. Such admirable pieces of advice would have been the more effective if the lords associated with Moray in the government of the realm had not been far more practically implicated in the death of Darnley than the unfortunate queen.

Moray gave a full account of his interview to Throckmorton on his return to Edinburgh.
²¹
Sometimes, he said, Mary had wept bitterly, sometimes she acknowledged her imprudence and misgovernment, some things she did confess plainly, some things she did extenuate. Almost certainly Moray went so far as to threaten Mary with execution, for their interview took place on two consecutive days, and the first night, as he told Throckmorton, he left her with the hope of nothing but God’s mercy. Throckmorton was impressed with Moray’s grave and pious character – as the English almost universally were – and praised his sincere qualities to Queen Elizabeth. But in fact there was little to admire in such cruel hectoring of his sister, who on Lochleven was totally at his mercy. Nevertheless the ruse worked. Mary once more passed a night of horror and fear; now even her own brother seemed to have turned against her; the next day she begged Moray to accept the regency. Moray told Throckmorton that Mary kissed him and asked him not to refuse it. She had of course extorted no concessions of any sort from him in return for the offer – neither the promise of liberty nor any other hint that she might enjoy freedom in the near future. In the meantime Moray was able to assure Cecil on 30 August that his new public state was neither welcome nor pleasing,
²²
and even repeatedly assured Mary herself that he had no personal wish to assume the regency for his own private tastes led him to shun such grandeur and ambition, as she well knew. He might, however, be able to be of service to her as regent, where another in the same position would ruin her. Mary’s own account of the interview to Nau put herself in a less desperate, more spirited light than Moray’s account to Throckmorton. Although more reliance should be placed on Moray’s account since it was delivered immediately, Mary did deliver herself of one significant aphorism on the subject of ruling Scotland. She warned Moray that if she, a born queen, was rebelled against by her people, how much more would the people rebel against him, a bastard by birth and origin. She quoted the maxim: ‘He who does not keep faith where it is due, will hardly keep it where it is not due.’
²³

On 22 August James Stewart, earl of Moray, was proclaimed regent of
Scotland. One side-effect of his new status was the opportunity which it gave him to take possession of Mary’s rich hoard of jewellery. It was a subject on which the queen felt strongly, and continued to do so for the rest of her life: the rape of her jewels by Moray caused her as much indignation as any other single injury he did to her. Moray was cunning enough to tell Throckmorton that Mary had actually begged him to take charge of her jewels on Lochleven in order to preserve them for herself and her son: but Mary afterwards accused Moray of simply stealing them. According to Nau, Mary pointed out to her brother not only that she wanted many of the jewels to be permanently united with the crown of Scotland (as she had specified in her will of 1566) but also that a preponderance of the jewels had been given to her by King Henry of France, or her husband Francis, and were therefore her own private property. Strong feelings on all sides were roused by the thought of this glowing prize. On 10 September Melville reported that Moray’s acquisition of the jewels had ‘colded many stomaches among the Hamiltons’.
²⁴
The one thing which Moray did not do with the jewels was to unite them permanently to the honour of the Scottish crown, as Mary intended. He gave some to his wife. Others he sold to Queen Elizabeth the following April in order to remedy his forlorn finances. The latter action may perhaps be justified, if not excused, as an act of state – but the former cannot. The pearls, which were shown to Elizabeth on 1 May 1568, in front of Pembroke and Leicester, consisted of six rows, strung like rosaries, and separate pearls as large as black grapes. They were thought to be of ‘nonpareiled’ beauty; there were also rings of lesser value, and a piece of heavily bejewelled narwhal tooth; the pearls seem to have been those intended in Mary’s will to be divided between the crown of Scotland and the house of Guise, and the narwhal tooth for her favourite nephew Francis Stewart. From France Catherine de Medicis scented out the secret disposal of the pearls she had once admired and envied round her daughter-in-law’s white throat at Fontainebleau, and tried in vain to obtain them for herself.

The proclamation of Moray as regent, coupled with the disappearance of Bothwell from the Scottish scene, led to a period of comparative calm on the little island of Lochleven. The queen’s health gradually returned, after her privations and her miscarriage, since the enforced seclusion, however odious, did at least ensure her the rest which she so grievously needed. With health and the sinking away of hysteria returned also resolution and calm positive thinking. By the beginning of September, she was able to write to Robert Melville far more in her old vein of practical decisiveness, as though the year from the birth of James onwards had been lived under
some black and disastrous shadow, now fortunately rolled away. She asked for materials, silks to embroider, and clothes for her ladies including her favourite Mary Seton who had recently been allowed to join her – ‘for they are naked’.
²⁵
On 23 September Moray was able to tell Bedford that her health was good, and she herself was ‘merrily disposed’.
²⁶
The question of her clothes was now better resolved: much of her gilded wardrobe was gone forever, seized by the confederates, and not a great deal of attention seems to have been paid to her luggage-less state until after the arrival of Moray, when Mary accused him of bringing her some old and mean garments, very roughly made up, in place of her own clothes.