MARY SHAPED her own destiny by marrying Bothwell. Watching the downward spiral from afar, Cecil wrote that Scotland was “in a quagmire; nobody seemeth to stand still; the most honest desire to go away; the worst tremble with the shaking of their conscience.” 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.
On Mary and Bothwell’s wedding night, a new placard was nailed to the gates of Holyrood. Quoting Ovid, it declaimed:
As the common people say,
Only harlots marry in May.
Mary was stung by the insult, although a moment’s thought would have reassured her that, like the drawing of the mermaid and the hare, it could only have been the work of someone versed in Latin poetry, making it less hurtful to her than if it had come from the ordinary people.
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. Her biographers argue that her quarrels with Bothwell had already started before their wedding. Mary must therefore have known what she was taking on when she married him.
This is incorrect. Records show only a single row before the wedding: what Drury called a “great unkindness” lasting half a day when Bothwell returned to Dunbar after getting his wife to file for a divorce. Drury’s reports are a key source for Mary and Bothwell’s “jars,” but the handwritten folios of these important documents were muddled when they were bound into volumes in the nineteenth century. Parts of the same report were filed as different documents under different dates. A paragraph that begins on one folio breaks off in midsentence and may continue on a folio several hundred pages later. When extracts from the bound volumes were edited for publication, crucial passages were misdated. A close examination of all the handwritten reports shows that apart from their one big row at Dunbar, Mary and Bothwell’s quarrels all took place after their wedding.
Bouts of jealousy and mutual resentment were the cause. Mary wept because Bothwell “would not allow her to look at or be looked on by anybody, for he knew very well that she loved her pleasure and passed her time like any other devoted to the world.” Bothwell was “the most jealous man that lives.” On May 20, Drury wrote: “There hath been already some jars between the queen and the duke and more looked for. He is jealous and suspicious and thinks to be obeyed.” The strain was so great that Mary’s beauty was affected. “The opinion of many,” continued Drury, “is that the queen is the most changed woman of face that in so little time without extremity of sickness they have seen.”
History was repeating itself. Bothwell’s attitude toward Mary as a woman was fundamentally incompatible with her view of being a queen. As with her rows with Darnley, one of the bitterest was over a coveted animal. When she gave a particularly desirable horse to the younger brother of Bothwell’s old enemy the Earl of Arran, Bothwell ranted and raged, demanding the horse for himself. Mary, in a flood of tears, countered that Bothwell’s ex-wife still lived at Crichton Castle, the closest of his several homes to Edinburgh, where he was said to write to her and visit her as if they had never been divorced.
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. One was du Croc, whom Mary summoned late on the evening of her wedding day. “I perceived,” he informed Catherine de Medici, “a strange formality between her and her husband, which she begged me to excuse, saying that if I saw her sad, it was because she did not wish to be happy, as she said she never could be, wishing only for death.” Two days later, “being all alone in a closet with the Earl of Bothwell, she called aloud for someone to give her a knife with which to kill herself. Those who were in the room adjoining the closet heard her.”
One of those in the next room was Sir James Melville. He overheard Mary make her threat. “Or else,” she said, “I shall drown myself.” According to Sir James, Bothwell brutalized Mary after her marriage. He “mishandled” her in every way. “He was so beastly and suspicious” that he never allowed her a single day’s peace, causing her “to shed abundance of salt tears.”
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.
But Mary behaved differently in public. After the wedding, she still took Bothwell’s arm. She dressed well and rode out with him. On May 23, she organized a belated celebration of their marriage. A water pageant was staged beside the shores of the Firth of Forth, followed by martial sports in which Bothwell “ran at the ring” and a group of soldiers enacted a mock skirmish. The court at Holyrood seemed as lively and convivial as ever, but a closer inspection showed that only a few nobles were present, and the majority of people who chatted or lounged in the courtyard or great hall were soldiers or Bothwell’s servants.
When others were around, Bothwell took care to treat Mary with courtesy and respect. He “openly useth great reverence to the queen,” said Drury, removing his hat in her presence, “which she seems she would have otherwise, and will sometimes take his cap and put it on.”
And yet in private his temper was unbearable. Mary still clung to him, partly still in love, partly not knowing what else to do, but she was a changed and unhappy woman.
It was a heartbreaking transformation, and it affected Mary’s own manners. She became coarser and harsher in her speech. When first told about the Confederate Lords, she even sounded like Bothwell. “For Argyll,” she said, “I know well enough how to stop his mouth, and for Atholl, he is but feeble. I will deal well enough with him. And for Morton, his boots are but now pulled off him and not made clean. I will return him again.” By this she meant that she would send him back into exile for breaking his promise, barely two months old, to be her loyal servant. Only one of these lords was given the benefit of the doubt. “And for the Earl of Mar,” she said, “he hath assured me to be mine and faithfully ever.” Despite her severe irritation with him since her last visit to Stirling, his offenses, she believed, were out of character, and perhaps she could even believe them to be in her son’s best interest now that she knew Bothwell better.
Of the other lords, Maitland and Huntly were still at Holyrood, but only just. Bothwell’s arrogance was too much for either man to stomach. Maitland, ever vacillating, was already making overtures to the Confederate Lords at Stirling. Huntly too asked Mary for permission to leave the court, but she refused. In a fit of pique she exclaimed, “Your desire is but to do as your father before you!” Nothing could have been more offensive to the leader of the Gordon clan after the destruction of his family at the battle of Corrichie and his loyalty to Mary since his recall to help in defeating Moray.
The greatest fear, even among Mary’s diehard supporters, was that Bothwell was plotting to be named governor and protector of Scotland, and if possible king. According to Drury, he meant to proclaim himself king as soon as he got his hands on the heir to the throne. It was said that this would be his next big political gamble.
Although Bothwell still had no official title, he was already behaving as if he were king. On May 19, he issued a decree against counterfeit brass money, because an influx of fake foreign coins was driving sound money out of circulation and so preventing him paying his troops. This was a sensible move, but others were more partisan. On the 22nd, he reintroduced an old regulation for the compulsory attendance of privy councilors at Privy Council meetings which sought to force lords boycotting Mary’s court to return there.
Next day, he made a blatant bid to win new friends. An act of the Privy Council annulled all religious dispensations obtained from Mary that permitted her nobles or servants to worship in private as Catholics. Here was the Protestant Bothwell attempting to ally with the Kirk. The Catholic clergy had petitioned Mary to restore the Mass, but Bothwell blocked their suit. He sent for Craig, whom he had recently threatened to hang, only to reassure him that he would do everything to assist the Protestants against the Catholics and even attend sermons himself.
What mattered most, however, was military power. The lords were gathering their forces; a civil war was in the offing. On May 20, Mary was seen with Bothwell weeping bitterly. The pressure was increasing; Drury heard from his spies that she was suffering from renewed bouts of vomiting. Two days later, she decided to confront the challenge. She issued a proclamation mustering troops to restore law and order on the borders. But, said Drury, everyone knew they were to form the nucleus of a royal army.
Bothwell, meanwhile, sought to establish his foreign credentials. He wrote to Elizabeth, Cecil and Throckmorton, all on June 5. His letter to Cecil was couched in an offensively regal tone. “Seeing God has called me to this place,” he began, “I heartily desire you to persevere in all good offices.” It might have been Darnley speaking! Bothwell was less presumptuous in his letter to Elizabeth, but still overconfident. He was aware, he said, of the evil reports she had received of him, but protested they were wholly undeserved. He wanted to restore the amity with England. Men of greater birth might have been preferred to the high estate he now occupied, but none could be more eager for Elizabeth’s friendship.
It was a clumsy exercise in diplomacy. Bothwell wrote too much as an equal to Elizabeth, something Mary herself rarely did. According to Drury, Bothwell’s aim was to persuade the English to be no more than “lookers on” while he delivered a knockout blow to the lords.
It was to be a vain hope. After a furious exchange with Bothwell, Maitland left Holyrood with his wife, Mary Fleming, and joined the rebels. He avoided saying goodbye to Mary, who was in tears at the defection of the chief of the four Maries, her former playmate and cousin. Her marriage to Bothwell was forcing her to choose between her husband and one of her lifelong companions. And yet for some reason she lacked the will to put Bothwell in his place. She had married him for better or worse, and she would stick by her decision. The Confederate Lords had by now increased to around thirty. No one doubted that it would be a struggle to the death. The atmosphere was becoming like a performance of Macbeth. Rumors and prophecies swept the country from the Highlands to the Lowlands. “There is a witch in the north,” said Drury, “that affirms the queen shall have yet to come two husbands more.” Bothwell would live but a year, and Mary would be burned as a witch. These prophecies were reported to Mary, who dismissed them out of hand, “and as yet it is said that she fears the same.”
A serious problem for Mary was lack of money. Her income as dowager queen of France meant that she had never before had to stint on personal expenses, raising taxes only once in her reign to pay for the banquets and entertainments at the baptism of Prince James. But then, she had never before attempted to muster an entire army independently of the nobles, even during the Chase-about Raid. Bothwell wanted to recruit five hundred professional infantry and two hundred cavalry, which would cost 5000 crowns.
Mary did the unthinkable. She trimmed her household budget to raise money. She stripped her cupboards bare and sent large quantities of gold and silver plate to the mint. Even the font of solid gold that Elizabeth had presented for the baptism was to be melted down and turned into coins worth £3 each. Ironically, it was so big and heavy it refused to melt completely, despite several attempts to do so.
On June 6, Bothwell took Mary from Holyrood to Borthwick Castle to escape from Morton and the Confederate Lords, who were planning an attack. They left in such a hurry, Mary only had time to pack what for her were bare essentials: a silver basin to wash in, a silver kettle for heating water, a small cabinet with a lock and key for her papers and a large supply of pins to hold back her hair.
At first Bothwell meant to withdraw to the Hermitage, but decided to stay at Borthwick, where they would be within easy reach of Edinburgh. The castle was well fortified. It consisted of a single, bleak square tower, three stories high. The walls were thirteen feet thick at the base, narrowing to six feet at the top. The roof was paved, with crenelated battlements from which a lookout could see for up to two miles. Nestled in a hollow, the castle was surrounded on three sides by steeply rising ground and water. It was accessible only by a drawbridge and so impregnable to anyone without artillery, but difficult to provision in a siege.
On the evening of the 10th, when Bothwell was about to go to bed, the Confederate Lords attempted a raid. Unbeknown to them, he escaped through a postern gate, then galloped away to Haddington to summon reinforcements. The lords called for him to come out, crying “Traitor, murderer, butcher!” When they realized he had foiled them, they camped beside the castle. It was the height of summer, and remained light until almost eleven o’clock. Mary went up to the roof and leaned over the battlements, joining in a shouting match with her enemies below in which insults were traded and she comfortably held her own.
As Drury described it, the lords assailed her with “divers undutiful and unseemly speeches used against their queen and sovereign, too evil and unseemly to be told, which poor princess, she did with her speech defend, wanting other means for her revenge.” It is a sign of the almost sacral respect accorded to anointed queens that, having written these words, Drury was so embarrassed by them he attempted to obliterate them with a series of slash marks.
The Confederate Lords retired to nearby Dalkeith, then set out next day for Edinburgh with two thousand men. When they arrived, the gates were barred against them, but a small advance party climbed over the town wall, broke open the Cowgate Port and occupied the town. The provost surrendered and the lords took control, issuing a resounding call to arms:
That the Earl of Bothwell having put violent hands on the queen’s person and shut her up in the castle of Dunbar, having proceeded to a dishonest marriage with Her Majesty after obtaining a divorce from his former wife, having already murdered the late king, and now attempting by his gathering together of forces to murder the young prince also; therefore they command all the lieges to be ready on three hours’ warning to pass forward with them to deliver the queen’s person [from captivity] and take revenge on the Earl Bothwell.
On June 12, these lords convoked a “secret council” at the Tolbooth, where they declared Bothwell “to be the principal author and murderer of the King’s Grace of good memory and ravishing of the Queen’s Majesty.” It was, in effect, a quasi-judicial verdict reversing Bothwell’s acquittal of Darnley’s murder and paving the way for his “impeachment” or “trial by combat” on the battlefield.
Winning control of Edinburgh was the key to the lords’ campaign. When Huntly and his allies attempted to retake the town, they were forced to seek refuge in the castle, where they supposed they would be protected by Sir James Balfour, its new captain and Bothwell’s nominee. Except that, in a move as brazen as it was fatal to Mary, Balfour changed sides. He decided to support the Confederate Lords in return for a promise of a pardon for his part in Darnley’s murder. He had been seething with resentment ever since Bothwell’s acquittal. His defection ensured that Huntly was kept in the castle—perhaps all too conveniently, as he had burned his bridges with Bothwell—until it was too late for him to assist Mary and Bothwell at the final showdown.
The Confederate Lords were riding high. Argyll, whose military power was greater than that of the other lords, was expected to rendezvous with them shortly. Meanwhile, Morton allowed his men to sack the Abbey-Kirk and the royal mint, where they took what remained of the gold and silver plate that was waiting to be coined, including the font, which was still substantially in one piece.
In these straitened circumstances, Mary recovered her resolve and her wits. She snapped out of her daze and once more became her old daring self. On the night of the 11th, she fled from Borthwick Castle in disguise. She had often enjoyed dressing up and pretending to be a man. This time it was for real. As Drury reported, she put on men’s clothes and rode “booted and spurred . . . that same night from Borthwick to Dunbar, whereof no man knew save My Lord Duke [Bothwell] and some of his servants, who met Her Majesty a mile from Borthwick and conveyed her to Dunbar.”
Almost as soon as they arrived at his castle, Bothwell rode off again, this time to Melrose, to rendezvous with his border retainers. They were the mainstay of his infantry, but did not all show up. Drury had bribed the Elliots of Liddesdale, the brigands who had ambushed and wounded Bothwell the previous year, to intercept and harry them before they joined Mary’s forces. The move was a serious setback. More devastating still was Balfour’s treachery, since it was on his advice that Mary, apparently in Bothwell’s absence, would deem it safe to leave Dunbar and return to the capital.
On June 13, the Confederate Lords beat the drum in the streets of Edinburgh to levy troops in the name of the lords and Prince James, offering to pay the fabulous rate of 20 shillings sterling a month. When Argyll finally arrived with his Highlanders, an army of three thousand men was in place.
Next day, Mary retaliated. She issued a proclamation commanding her loyal subjects to muster early the next morning at Musselburgh, the eastern gateway to the capital. To encourage her troops, she declared that within twenty-four hours she would be in Edinburgh or Leith. She then rode at the head of some 600 men to Haddington, where Bothwell joined her with 2000 more. She had a force of only 260 men when she set out, but gathered her adherents on the way. She also had the advantage of artillery, bringing three or four brass cannons from the munitions store at Dunbar.
Mary was burning with defiance. No longer was she insulated by the trappings of monarchy. Her hair was in disarray and she wore borrowed clothes. According to Drury, they were “after the attire and fashion of the women of Edinburgh.” She wore a “red petticoat with sleeves tied with points, a partlet, a velvet hat and a muffler.” The captain of Inchkeith, a Frenchman in Bothwell’s service who kept a diary of these events, said that she wore “a red skirt which scarcely reached halfway down her legs.”
Mary and Bothwell rode on to Seton, leaving their troops to rest overnight in the fields beside Prestonpans. When the lords learned of their approach, they mobilized their forces and marched through the night toward Musselburgh. Morton and Atholl were in command. Their banner, carried between two spears at the head of their column, was a picture of Darnley lying dead under a tree with a young child kneeling beside him and crying, “Judge and revenge my cause O Lord.”
By five the next morning, Mary and Bothwell were on the road. The date was Sunday, June 15, exactly a month after their wedding. Their banners bore the saltire and the lion rampant, emblems of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, and of the crown. The rival armies came in sight of each other at Carberry Hill, an elevated ridge close to Inveresk, almost two miles southeast of Musselburgh. Mary positioned her forces a mile or so to the northwest of the village of Elphinstone, inside earthworks thrown up by Protector Somerset during the final campaign of the Rough Wooings. The lords had just crossed the old bridge at Musselburgh when they spotted Mary’s army on the higher ground. They marched a few miles up the east side of the River Esk until they reached the vicinity of Cousland, a village nearly two miles southeast of Carberry Hill, where they too established themselves.
It was a very long, hot day. The armies were more or less evenly matched; neither side was willing to risk a charge. After three hours of stalemate, du Croc, who had followed the Confederate Lords’ army at a distance, stepped forward and offered to mediate between the two sides. Speaking through an interpreter, he implored the lords to avoid bloodshed, arguing that it was one thing to attack Bothwell but quite another to engage an anointed queen in battle.
The lords heard him out, but replied that there were only two ways to avoid a battle. One was for Mary to leave Bothwell forever. The other was if he would come out into the open ground and fight in single combat.
Du Croc hesitated. Such terms amounted to an ultimatum. He attempted to conciliate the lords, who grew impatient. They protested that they would rather be buried alive in a pit than fail to avenge Darnley’s death. A rhetorical game was being played. Morton was particularly artful, saying “that they had not taken arms against the queen, but against the murderers of the late king; and if Her Majesty would either give [Bothwell] up to be punished or remove him from her company, she should find in them a continuation of all dutiful obedience.”
On Maitland’s urging, the ambassador rode across the open ground and up the hill. He was led straight to Mary, who was sitting on a stone talking to Mary Seton, still wearing her borrowed red dress. He kissed her hands and told her what was proposed. As she listened, her eyes lit with fire. She knew how these lords played their game. “It looks very ill of them,” she said, “to go against their own signed bond, after they themselves married me to him, having already acquitted him of the deed of which they would now accuse him.”
Mary called on the lords to submit. If they surrendered, she would be merciful. “If they ask me for a pardon, I shall be pleased to give it to them and receive them with open arms.”
At this moment Bothwell appeared. Du Croc greeted him, but refused to take his hand. Bothwell spoke loudly so everyone nearby could hear him, insisting on knowing what the lords had said. Du Croc answered just as loudly that they had assured him of their loyalty to Mary. He then lowered his voice and added that as to Bothwell himself, they were his mortal enemies.
Bothwell shouted back, “Is not the bond they gave to me well known to everyone?” Then he said, “I have never meant to offend any of them, but rather to please them all, and they only speak of me as they do out of envy of my high estate.” He then spoke the words that must surely be his epitaph: “Fortune is free to those who may profit from it, and there is not a single one of them who would not gladly be in my place.”
It seemed to be an impasse. Then Bothwell asked du Croc to return to the lords. He was to tell them that, although he was the queen’s husband, he would accept their challenge. He would fight any of them in single combat as long as they were of sufficient rank. “My cause is so just,” he said, “I am quite sure that God is on my side.”
At this Mary interposed. Fighting back tears, she insisted the quarrel was hers. Du Croc, who was fast getting out of his depth, also rejected single combat. Although he loathed Bothwell and would happily have seen him dead, his instructions were to advance French influence in Scotland, not to risk the overthrow of the monarchy. “In that case,” said Bothwell, “there is no need for further talk.” Then, making a joke, he gave the example of the unhappy envoy who had striven in vain to arbitrate between Scipio and Hannibal before the battle of Zama. He could do nothing and so stood aside. Before long he was rewarded with “the biggest show he was ever likely to see.”
Du Croc returned to the lords, informing them that Mary wished them to sue for a pardon. They too became angry. The Earl of Glencairn retorted, “We are not come here to ask pardon for any offense we have done, but rather to give pardon to those that have offended.” His answer confirmed the degree to which a compromise was impossible; du Croc turned on his heels and rode back to Edinburgh.
The standoff continued through the hottest part of the day, giving an advantage to the lords. Whereas the royal army had limited space to maneuver at the top of the hill, the lords could adjust their position below to gain some shade or avoid the glare of the sun in their eyes. They had brought supplies of drinks, probably “small ale,” or low-alcohol beer. They had also struck camp within easy reach of a stream.
Up on Carberry Hill, the temperature soared. When Bothwell’s scouts went in search of water from a nearby well, they were captured. About midday, some casks of wine arrived from Seton for the royal forces. The soldiers fell back to drink. But the alcohol only increased their dehydration. When ordered to return to their ranks, many disobeyed and slipped away. As they did so, the mood changed. Morale collapsed as numbers fell. Those who stayed began to complain that the quarrel was too personal. If the lords wanted Bothwell to fight in single combat, there was no reason why he should not do so. Why should they risk their lives for him unnecessarily?
Around two o’clock, Kirkcaldy of Grange arrived under a white flag to speak to Mary. Bothwell ordered a soldier to shoot him, but Mary gave a cry and ordered that “he should not do her that shame.” Although a friend of Knox and Buchanan, Kirkcaldy was far from an outright republican. In his heart, he was loyal to Mary. He begged her to leave Bothwell, assuring her that if she did so, the lords would disperse. They would honor and serve their queen, but first she had to divest herself of the man who had murdered her second husband.
On the likely assumption that Bothwell had by now given Mary his own expurgated version of the events at Kirk o’Field, she finally knew that it was always going to be his word as a “man of honor” against those of his former accomplices, and that word, she must have realized now, was worth little. When Bothwell stepped forward again, reiterating his offer to fight in single combat, Kirkcaldy nodded with approval. It was what the Confederate Lords had suggested. He would return promptly with their answer.
After the briefest discussion, the lords nominated Kirkcaldy as their champion. Bothwell, however, rejected him. He said that a mere laird was not his equal in honor or degree and “could not be his peer.” He made the same answer to Sir William Murray, the Laird of Tullibardine, the ousted comptroller of Mary’s household, whose brother was the suspected author of the placards denouncing Bothwell as Darnley’s murderer.
Bothwell demanded that he fight with Morton, his partner in Darnley’s murder and his ally for two months afterward until they fell out. Bothwell wanted Morton dead. He challenged him “to come forth and fight with him hand to hand between the two armies.”
Faced with a fight to the death, Morton blinked. He was fifteen years older than Bothwell and a lot less fit. He had not borne a sword in the heat of battle for twenty years, whereas Bothwell was a skilled swordsman, a man still physically and mentally in his prime.
Lord Lindsay, a relative of Darnley, volunteered to be Morton’s surrogate. He was some years younger than Morton and had fought with distinction at the battle of Co rrichie. He advanced, and in full sight of both armies knelt on the ground, praying that God would preserve the innocent and punish the cruel and evil assassin who had shed his kinsman’s blood.
Morton gave Lindsay his own double-handed sword, a weapon prized by his family as the one wielded by their ancestor the great Earl of Angus, nicknamed Archibald “Bell the Cat.” It was a trenchant gesture, since this same ancestor of the Douglas clan had been ousted from his birthright by Bothwell’s great-grandfather. This really was going to be a fight to the death.
Drury claimed that Bothwell drew back at the sight of Lindsay, and so proved himself a coward. This was shameless propaganda. Whatever his faults, Bothwell was a brave soldier. Moreover, he believed it was his best chance to vindicate himself from the charge of sole complicity in Darnley’s murder, since by the laws of trial by combat, the winner was acquitted of the crime by the “voice,” or judgment, of God.
Just when the combatants prepared to advance, Mary intervened. She had first agreed to, but in a split-second decision forbade, the combat with Lindsay. She stopped the fight because, whatever happened, she knew nobody would be satisfied. If Bothwell lost, she would be the lords’ prisoner and would have lost her protector. If he won, she would still lose, because she had come to know Morton for what he really was. He would never accept the result. Either the rebel lords would order their forces to charge or else they would send other champions to repeat the challenge until Bothwell collapsed from exhaustion or died of his wounds.
What Mary now intended is disputed. There are two conflicting reports. According to Sir James Melville, who hated Bothwell and wanted him dead, she summoned Kirkcaldy. She offered to surrender. She would separate herself from Bothwell and put herself under the lords’ protection if they would promise to guarantee her safety.
According to Bothwell’s man, the captain of Inchkeith, her reaction was the exact opposite. Although forbidding Bothwell to fight, she cried out to him to order their army to charge. She “desired nothing more than that her forces should do battle.”
It is impossible to judge between these versions. Neither is corroborated, and neither recorded Bothwell’s response to Mary’s order forbidding the man-to-man combat.
But whatever she intended to happen, her army did not charge and she surrendered. Her forces had melted away, reduced to some four hundred of Bothwell’s men. Even the captain of Inchkeith conceded that she and Bothwell were glancing around anxiously, looking for Huntly and his retainers, who they hoped might arrive at the last minute to save the day.
Using Kirkcaldy as her intermediary, Mary reached an agreement with the lords. Bothwell would be allowed to escape. He would be free to go where he pleased, fleeing with a handful of supporters without immediate fear of pursuit. She would then give herself up and return to Edinburgh in exchange for honorable treatment.
Mary was torn by conflicting emotions. She now resented Bothwell for his treachery over Darnley’s murder. She had been too trusting. It was in her nature, as she had shown since her teenage years. Far from rising above noble infighting by marrying him, she had become more embroiled in factionalism than ever. He had been dishonest and manipulative. Stirred by ambition and a desire to trump his old rivals, he had betrayed the queen to whom he had pledged loyalty and his heart.
She was also calculating the odds. She knew that if Bothwell escaped, he would be free to fight another day. Mary, at her most ingenious in a crisis, was keeping her options open. For all his faults, Bothwell was her protector. She had been born a queen and was not a woman to surrender her throne lightly, least of all to a junta of factious nobles.
When Mary parted from Bothwell, she was weeping. She was pregnant by him, the result of her sojourn at Dunbar. The fact may have been widely known. It was reported to Cecil on the same day as the battle, and so must have been talked about in Mary’s circle for a week or so. Her reluctance to allow Bothwell to engage in single combat might have been at least partly because he was the father of her new baby.
Now it was Bothwell’s turn to be agitated. He began to waver and protest, unsure of the conditions Mary had agreed to with her captors. Would he be allowed to escape only to be taken and killed when he was out of her sight? He appealed to her to tell him the truth. Would he have safe-conduct? She answered “Yes” and held out her hand.
Bothwell clasped it in farewell and, turning his horse’s head, rode at a gallop toward Dunbar, closely watched but still unopposed by the lords. He was flanked by a dozen or so followers. Only when they had ridden almost two miles and were slipping from view did Mary turn to the waiting Kirkcaldy.
The report of Mary and Bothwell’s parting is from du Croc. His account was compiled the next day from his conversations with eyewitnesses and is likely more accurate than anything put out for public consumption by the lords, who claimed that Mary kissed Bothwell passionately in full sight of both armies, and each promised to be true to the other.
Mary never saw Bothwell again. As she turned to Kirkcaldy, she said in a matter-of-fact way, “Laird of Grange, I give myself up to you on the terms you explained to me on the lords’ behalf.” He knelt and kissed her hand. She mounted her horse and rode down the hill at a walking pace. A few steps behind her, Mary Seton followed dutifully on her pony.
As Mary approached her captors, she held her head high. A colored drawing illustrating the scene was prepared for Drury and sent to Cecil. It shows her in her borrowed clothes, determined to keep her dignity as the soldiers stood motionless in awe, watching a spectacle they would one day tell to their children and grandchildren.
Mary’s reception was deferential at first, but once the spell was broken, the Earl of Atholl’s men and those of the Laird of Tullibardine cried out, “Burn the whore! Burn the murderess!” Such insults stunned Mary. She turned to the lords in bewilderment, but they looked away.
Mary’s honor and reputation had been dragged through the mud. No longer would she keep up a pretense. She hated the lords for the humiliation they had inflicted on her; she would do anything she could to destroy them. As she regained her confidence on the road back to Edinburgh, she “talked of nothing but hanging and crucifying them all.” In high dudgeon, she summoned Lindsay, Bothwell’s challenger, to present himself. When he arrived, she offered him her hand. As he took it, she snarled, “By the hand that is now in yours, I will have your head for this and therefore [I] assure you.”
Mary’s threats cost her dearly. She had betrayed her intentions at a moment when she and the Confederate Lords were locked in a struggle for survival. She reached Edinburgh between eight and nine in the evening. The lords had sent a message ahead, and onlookers packed the streets. It was a world apart from her triumphal entry into the town six years earlier, when she was cheered by civic dignitaries and welcomed by “Moors” in yellow taffeta. Then she had ridden in state. Now she was “all disfigured with dust and tears.”
The lords’ propaganda was in full flood. As Mary passed by, the mob shouted insults at her. As a final indignity, she was not taken to Holyrood, but billeted in the provost’s house opposite the Market Cross. “That same night,” said Sir James Melville, drawing on information supplied by the lords, she wrote to Bothwell, “calling him her dear heart, whom she should never forget nor abandon for absence.” She assured him that she had sent him away for his own safety. She urged him to be comforted, and warned him to be on his guard. She gave the letter to a messenger and paid him to carry it to Dunbar. He took the money, but gave the letter to the lords.
The story is quite improbable. Even Melville doubted it, adding a marginal note: “Some suspect this letter to be invented.”
Drury was fed the same story. Then he was told: “The queen hath made a vow she would not eat no flesh [i.e., fast] till she saw Bothwell again.” That may be true. It was entirely in character that Mary should refuse to eat when she knew she was cruelly deceived. The lords had promised her honorable treatment only to keep her under arrest. She would rather die than subject herself to such indignity.
Next day, said Drury’s spy, Mary appeared at a window and called to the people for help. “She came to the said window sundry times in so miserable a state, her hairs hanging about her ears, and her breast, yea the most part of all her body, from the waist up, bare and discovered, that no man could look upon her but she moved him to pity and compassion.” Seeing Maitland go past, Mary begged him to come and speak to her, but he pulled his hat over his ears and pretended not to hear.
Maitland told du Croc a different story. Mary had leaned out the window and demanded to know why she had been separated from Bothwell, “with whom she had hoped to live and die with the full approval of the world.”
In a dark intrigue lasting three hours, Maitland put out feelers to see how du Croc would react to Mary’s imprisonment or exile abroad while the lords ruled in the name of Prince James. A secret pact was reached. Du Croc agreed that France would not interfere, but only if England did not become involved. If Elizabeth intervened, then Charles IX would be forced to declare in Mary’s favor.
The truth was, as long as Mary was still queen, she had the support of a majority of her subjects. An otherwise reliable chronicler, one not in the pay of the Confederate Lords, gave by far the most credible account of this episode. His version was that when Mary leaned out the window and appealed for help, “the people of the town convened to her in great number, and perceiving her so afflicted in mind, had pity and compassion of her estate. The lords perceiving that, came unto her with dissimulate countenance, with reverence and fair speeches, and said that their intentions were no ways to thrall her.”
This fits the independently known facts. To disperse a large crowd, the lords had to make an announcement. Mary would be allowed to return to Holyroodhouse, where she would be free “to do as she list.” When Mary heard this, she “was so pacified that the people willingly departed.” That evening Mary was escorted to Holyrood by Morton and Atholl, one on either side of her, preceded by a force of musketeers carrying the banner of the murdered Darnley. At a prearranged signal, a carefully selected group of onlookers shouted out, “Burn her, burn her, she is not worthy to live, kill her, drown her.”
But the lords were treacherous. Mary was kept for just a few hours at Holyrood, and only then because it was unsafe to move her elsewhere in daylight. As night fell, she was told to make herself ready. With only a mantle thrown over her nightdress, the fearful Queen of Scots was taken by ferry across the Firth of Forth to Fife, and on to the island castle of Lochleven, near Kinross. Shortly after daybreak on Tuesday, June 17, she climbed into a boat and was rowed to the island in the middle of the loch. The castle loomed eerily out of the morning mist: a square tower four stories high with round projecting turrets at the corners, encircled by a loch that then was about fifteen miles in circumference and at least half a mile from the mainland at its narrowest point.
When Mary disembarked at the foot of the stairs leading to the fortress’s drawbridge, she was met by Sir William Douglas, the Laird of Lochleven, who took her to a sparsely furnished room on the ground floor. Later she was moved to a more secure place, the round turret at the southeast corner of the castle.
This was not a household in which Mary was likely to thrive. Sir William Douglas was one of Morton’s clan. If that were not enough, his widowed mother, who still lived in the castle, had been born Lady Margaret Erskine. She was one of James V’s former mistresses, none other than the mother of Mary’s half-brother Moray. The laird, himself Moray’s half-brother as well as Morton’s dependent, had two legitimate brothers and seven sisters, one of them married to Lindsay, Bothwell’s challenger whom Mary had threatened on the road back from Carberry Hill. Lady Erskine had more than once claimed to have been officially if clandestinely married to James V. She had said that her son, Moray, was not only legitimate but rightfully King of Scots in place of Mary.
The inference was inescapable. 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. The stakes soared when they asserted in their warrant for her arrest that she had “appeared to fortify and maintain” Bothwell in his crimes. She was, they claimed, a woman of “inordinate passion.”
For Mary, it was the beginning of the end of her tumultuous reign in Scotland. 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.