14

Enter Bothwell

Mary could not have been more focused or astute in dealing with Moray’s latest revolt. She first isolated her opponents politically, then took to the field to rout them. Her skill and courage were more than sufficient to disprove Knox’s stereotype of a Catholic woman ruler being too busy dancing or pursuing a life of material and sexual indulgence to rule her country properly.

She began by exposing the flaws in the rebels’ propaganda. They were claiming that her marriage to Darnley would mark the end of the religious status quo. From the outset they had sought to ignite sectarian hatred between Protestants and Catholics for their own political ends.

Their campaign had begun on Palm Sunday. A Catholic priest celebrating mass in Edinburgh was abducted in his vestments by a Calvinist gang and frogmarched to the Market Cross, where he was tied up and pelted with ten thousand eggs for four hours. Eggs, the Catholic symbol of Easter, were deliberately chosen for this act of ritual humiliation. Youths armed with cudgels then arrived to beat the victim senseless: he was freed only after a last-minute intervention by the Provost. The fact that so many free eggs were conveniently laid on shows that the attack must have been powerfully backed, although nothing can be proved to link it to Moray.

Mary had countered this shocking act of violence by confirming the religious status quo. A majority of the Protestants did not think their religion was under threat. Her policy of creating a broad coalition – in the Privy Council and the country at large – had so far worked. Even Knox did not believe there was a genuine threat to the Kirk this time, and he declined to speak out in Moray’s favour, a major prize for Mary and one she greatly relished.

To make sure that she kept bipartisan support, she put out further reassuring signals to the Protestants. She ate meat for the first time in Lent, defying the Catholic obligation to avoid it between Shrovetide and Easter. She did not hear mass as often as she usually did. She attended a Protestant baptism, and even volunteered to go to sermons if preachers could be found of whom she approved. She dropped broad hints to Randolph and others that her subjects should ‘live as they list’ following their own consciences.

A fortnight before she married Darnley, Mary wrote to the leading Protestants, reassuring them that they would always be free to worship according to their consciences. A month after the wedding, her religious proclamation of 1561 was confirmed for a second time, this time in the joint names of the King and Queen.

Mary, meanwhile, was mustering a royal army. By 19 July, ten days before the wedding, she had six to seven thousand troops within easy reach of Edinburgh. And in his abstracts of Scottish papers for the same day, Cecil made an entry that was brief but portentous: ‘The Earl Bothwell is sent for.’

No more formidable adversary, no more deadly rival of Moray, could be imagined. Like his father, Patrick, who had died in 1556, Bothwell was hereditary Lord Admiral and Sheriff of Edinburgh. In the Lowlands, the family held Crichton Castle just south of Edinburgh and Hailes Castle in East Lothian. Their main stronghold was the Hermitage, an almost impregnable fortress in the border region of Liddesdale not far from the ‘Debatable Land’.

Bothwell was seven years older than Mary and cut a dashing figure. He was of medium and even stocky build like his father, although his hair was darker and his complexion ruddier. He had a military bearing and sported a moustache in the French style. His eyes were darting and his gaze restless. The only known portrait of him is a miniature, one of a pair depicting himself and his wife, Lady Jean Gordon, to celebrate their marriage in 1566. The work is of modest quality, but Throckmorton, who met Bothwell at Orléans in late 1560, caught some aspects of his character. In a dispatch to Elizabeth, he described him as ‘a vainglorious, rash and hazardous young man’. His enemies should ‘have an eye to him and keep him short’.

Bothwell’s military and chivalric ethos is the key to his character. Like his father and grandfather, he saw himself as a ‘man of honour’ who favoured trial by combat and fought at least a dozen duels. He regarded violence as a perfectly valid method of settling disputes and an alternative to a judgement in a court of law. It is not exactly that he held civilian values in contempt. He had a rough and a smooth side. He could discipline soldiers and pirates but, like Mary, was educated in France. He had attended the University of Paris, where he learnt to write in a stylish italic hand neater than Mary’s own. He had dipped a toe into the world of learning, but always preferred action to words. He regarded honour and nobility as virtues conferred by birth and on the battlefield rather than acquired in libraries or the council chamber. He could swear profusely and profanely. And yet, he was far from being a philistine. He knew some classical history; but the books he collected were on mathematics, military strategy and chivalry, not moral philosophy, poetry, or literature.

Bothwell, unlike his father, was a Protestant. Or to be more precise, he was a non-ideological Protestant. Though he was a skilled swordsman, he was not an advocate of the spiritual weapons of prayer and repentance. That is why men like Throckmorton, whose civilian values caused them to loathe everything for which Bothwell stood, could describe him as ‘a man of no religion’. He was not, however, a Catholic sympathizer. If he did not take his Protestant beliefs too seriously, he refused to attend mass even when begged to do so by Mary.

Somewhat unusually for a Protestant, Bothwell was virulently anti-English. More consistently than his father who had flirted with England when it suited him, he had always been a nationalist and unwaveringly loyal to Mary and her mother. During the revolt of the Lords of the Congregation, he was the regent’s most stalwart supporter. When Cecil sent £3000 to assist the rebels in October 1559, it was Bothwell who intercepted the courier. This man was one of Randolph’s secret agents: Captain Cockburn, Laird of Ormiston. He was smuggling the first instalment of £1000 in untraceable gold coins across the border when Bothwell waylaid him in East Lothian, taking the money to Crichton. Although Moray and Arran promptly went there with a force, Bothwell had posted lookouts and half an hour before they arrived he fled with the money. The Lords occupied the castle and stripped it of its furniture. Bothwell challenged Arran to a duel, but Arran, an inveterate coward, refused to fight. From then on, Bothwell was excoriated by the Lords for putting their cause in jeopardy.

Shortly afterwards, Mary’s mother had sent Bothwell to command a special force of eight hundred French and Scots troops at Stirling. In April 1560, he and the Catholic Lord Seton had ambushed the commander of the English forces attacking Leith. As a border Lord used to dealing with the so-called Scottish riders, whose depredations were at their worst in his own region of Liddesdale, Bothwell was an expert in guerrilla warfare.

A few weeks later, he was sent to France carrying letters to a worried Mary. As he wrote to reassure her mother before he left, ‘I have made the greater haste to the effect I may return again with the army.’ He was planning to travel by way of Denmark, where he hoped to persuade Frederick II to lend Mary of Guise his fleet to transport five thousand German mercenaries to Scotland. Then the regent died and Bothwell’s commission expired. He dallied for several months in Denmark, where he had an affair with a beautiful dark-haired Norwegian girl, Anna Throndsen, the daughter of a retired nobleman and admiral, who later sued him for breach of promise.fn1

Presenting himself to Mary at Paris and Orléans, Bothwell was barely in time to deliver his letters and receive his reward before Francis II died. He was given six hundred crowns of the sun, a typically generous amount, the fee of a gentilhomme of the chambre du roi and essentially a pension. Lord Seton received a slightly higher amount, these rewards being for their loyalty to Mary’s mother, not for services to Francis. In Bothwell’s own words, ‘Amongst others she [Mary] rewarded me much more liberally and graciously than I had deserved, which angered my enemies to the greatest degree.’

Bothwell’s mortal enemy was Moray, who never forgave him for thwarting the Lords in 1559–60. While the council of twenty-four nobles ruled in Scotland, Bothwell avoided them by criss-crossing to and from France. He was in Scotland in February 1561, but was at Calais in the summer to assist in bringing Mary home. As he was Lord Admiral, it has been assumed that his role was to escort Mary. This is mistaken, because her official escorts on the voyage were French. Her galleys were commissioned by her uncles, and Bothwell’s role as Admiral was to organize the flotilla of chartered transport ships that carried the Queen’s baggage and animals.

After Mary had returned home, Bothwell’s feud with Moray intensified. As a leading Lord, he was appointed to the Privy Council but rarely took up his seat as Moray gave him no respite. In a series of incidents, he was attacked or set up by Moray. Then, in December 1561, Bothwell gave his rival a golden opportunity. He went out on what amounted to a stag night with Lord John of Coldingham. Lord John was about to marry Bothwell’s sister, Jane Hepburn,fn2 and they decided to pay a visit late at night to Arran’s mistress in Edinburgh, a woman named Alison Craik. On a previous occasion, they had been admitted and enjoyed themselves, but this time they were refused entry. They broke down the door, leading next day to a confrontation with Arran and his friends that sparked a riot. Just when things were hotting up, Moray appeared on the scene to restore order.

Bothwell was expelled from Edinburgh, but fresh conflicts arose with Arran, whose delusion had then been to marry Mary. Bothwell, the swashbuckling military officer who had loyally defended her mother, ridiculed Arran and insulted him for his presumption. The result was another round of feuding, because even if Mary regarded Arran with the utmost suspicion, he was still an ally of Moray.

At Mary’s insistence, the two men were cursorily reconciled, but Arran behaved like a man possessed. He was mentally disturbed, even calling for a saw to cut off his legs and for a knife to slash his wrists. Now he accused Bothwell of treason. In a series of increasingly incoherent depositions he claimed that Bothwell had advised him to abduct Mary as the prelude to marrying her. These were serious charges, even if they sprang from a delusion, and an investigation had to be conducted into this alleged conspiracy.

Bothwell had nothing to hide. He willingly surrendered and, when Arran accused him of treason, challenged him to a duel. In the end, every one of Arran’s charges was dismissed. But Moray would not free Bothwell. Instead, he used his power in the Privy Council to imprison him in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle. After three months, Bothwell decided to escape. Legend says that he broke the bars of his cell and scaled down the Castle Rock without a rope, but the more likely, if less romantic, explanation is that he bribed someone to let him out by the gate.

Bothwell fled to his mother’s house at Haddington and then took refuge at the Hermitage. He wrote to Mary offering to submit, but she was furious with him for breaking out of prison. Despite her own wicked sense of humour, any amusement or gratification she might have felt over his clumsy pranks at Arran’s expense was wiped out by his cavalier approach to justice. Banishment and exile were the penalties for aristocratic lawlessness, and this is what she had in mind for Bothwell. ‘Anything that he can do or say can little prevail’, wrote Randolph to Cecil, because ‘her purpose is at the least to put him out of the country’.

This was shortly before the Gordons were destroyed by Moray at the battle of Corrichie. Mary’s brother was at the height of his power. In Bothwell’s view, he was deceiving his sister by pursuing his personal and political vendettas under the cloak of enforcing law and order. Even Châtelherault had lost out, his stronghold at Dumbarton seized by Mary on her manipulative brother’s advice. Worried that he could be next, Bothwell decided to leave of his own accord, and in late December 1562 took ship for the Continent. When this was reported to Mary, she lost her temper and insisted that Bothwell would be punished.

It looked like the end for Bothwell. Moray appeared to have won hands down. But within a month, Mary had begun her marriage suit for Don Carlos. Moray was allowed to drift, then Maitland was sent on his mission to the Spanish embassy in London. Mary was taking a tougher line against English attempts to intimidate her. In that context, she started to view the nationalist and anglophobe Bothwell more favourably.

Randolph had been the first to spot the change. Mary was asking where Bothwell was. She wanted him back, to be ‘reserved, though it were in prison, in store to be employed in any kind of mischief that any occasion may move’. It is an illuminating insight that holds the key to Mary’s relationship with Bothwell over the next two years. As an irritant, both to England and to Moray, he could prove invaluable. His lawlessness in this respect was likely to be a positive advantage.

Matters are complicated by confusion over Bothwell’s movements. The usual story is that he stayed in exile until March 1565, when he briefly returned, only to be forced back to France. In reality, he was in and out of Scotland, especially in 1564, when he met Mary secretly at Dunbar. It would be tempting to try to mould this evidence to prove a romantic liaison between Mary and Bothwell even before Mary married Darnley, but this would be to fall into a trap.

Bothwell never reached France at the beginning of 1563, because he was shipwrecked. He was driven by a violent storm onto Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland and captured. Held first at Tynemouth Castle, he was taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower. He was in a confident, even brash mood, informing his captors (somewhat contradictorily) that he was sufficiently in favour with Mary to be on his way to visit her relations, but was on no account to be sent back to Scotland to face the wrath of his enemies. This was typical Bothwell, always bluffing his way out of trouble.

Mary asked for news of him just as Maitland was on his way to London. ‘Whatsoever they say against him,’ she said, ‘it is rather from hate of his person and love that they bear otherwise than that he hath deserved.’ She asked Randolph to write to Elizabeth to demand Bothwell’s return. ‘I do desire’, she said, ‘that he may be sent hither again into Scotland. So shall the pleasure be great and I will gladly requite the same.’ But if Bothwell had returned, she would have put him back in prison for breaking out of Edinburgh Castle. A summons had already been issued against him for this offence, which simply awaited his reappearance.

Bothwell had risen in Mary’s opinion because he was the perfect foil to Moray and his English friends. Randolph was well aware of this. ‘One thing I thought not to omit,’ he told Cecil, is ‘that I know him as mortal an enemy to our whole nation as any man alive, despiteful out of measure, false and untrue as a devil.’

By April, Mary was again demanding to know why Bothwell was in the Tower. ‘If he were here’, said Randolph from the vantage-point of Edinburgh, ‘he would be reserved for an evil instrument.’ A reply came that Bothwell was in custody for a legal dispute and that a trial was imminent. This seemed to satisfy Mary. By the end of June, Bothwell was released on parole. ‘Lock up your wives and daughters!’ was Randolph’s advice to Cecil.

As soon as Bothwell was freed, Mary forgot about him again. She was too busy negotiating for a match to Don Carlos and against one to the Archduke to worry about him. Just as before, Bothwell was in limbo. In desperation, he decided to petition Mary because he had no money and under the terms of his parole could not leave England. In December, he met Randolph near the border and suggested a deal. If Randolph would use his influence with Mary (proving of course that Bothwell as yet had none) to persuade Elizabeth to allow him to leave England, then in return he would go voluntarily into exile in France.

Randolph agreed. But it was at precisely this moment that Mary’s duelling with Elizabeth over her marriage was nearing its climax. She had just received Elizabeth’s advice to marry an English nobleman and Cecil’s even more insulting demand that her dynastic rights be tried in an English court of law. She did not intend to allow Elizabeth to keep any Scottish nobles in England against their wills, and therefore wrote to her, not once but twice, for Bothwell. So too did Mary Fleming, the chief of the Maries, who persuaded the lovesick Maitland to write as well. Even Randolph was induced to write, possibly at the intercession of his own lover, Mary Beaton.

By February 1564, Randolph knew he had been tricked. ‘Such as have written and I amongst the rest in favour of my Lord Bothwell,’ he advised Cecil, ‘saving the Queen and Mary Fleming, repent their haste. It is found out that this way it is purposed to bring him home.’ And sure enough, a week later, Bothwell slipped across the border and saw Mary at Dunbar. When the news got out, everyone thought Moray was in danger. ‘Bothwell’, said Randolph, ‘was come secretly to speak with the Queen with many horses’, and Moray, who would usually have accompanied her, was ordered to stay at home.

Then, Bothwell was off again to London on his way to France, carrying a packet of letters. It sounds highly conspiratorial until one realizes that this was one of Mary’s theatrical ploys to irritate Elizabeth. The rendezvous at Dunbar was so ‘secret’ that Randolph knew all about it. And the letters Bothwell carried were innocent. We know exactly to whom they were addressed: Elizabeth, Cecil, and Dudley! When Bothwell had delivered them, he was finally allowed to board his ship for France. He had been a convenient go-between on his way south to the Channel ports, and was not involved in a secret liaison with Mary.

One purpose of the rendezvous was to prove to Elizabeth that Mary had Lords who would champion her refusal to have the terms of her marriage dictated to her by England. Mary, said Knox’s friend Kirkcaldy of Grange, wanted to be sure that Bothwell was ‘at all times ready to shake out of her pocket’.

There was also a less melodramatic explanation. Mary placed a high premium on family ties, and one of the least known facts about Bothwell is that when his sister, Jane Hepburn, married Lord John of Coldingham, she became Mary’s sister-in-law. Lord John, another of James V’s illegitimate sons, was one of Mary’s most spirited and sophisticated courtiers, noted for his love of dancing. He was a great favourite of hers, and she granted him Dunbar Castle, an almost impregnable royal fortress on the edge of the cliffs of East Lothian. When Bothwell went to Dunbar, he had merely visited his sister with whom Mary happened to be staying.

The main purpose of his visit is likely to have been even more straightforward. Lord John had unexpectedly died a few weeks before. Bothwell’s sister was a grieving widow, and Mary had gone to comfort her. What could be more natural than that Bothwell, waiting close by on the other side of the border for his passport to travel to France, should want to see his sister before he finally embarked?

And there was a final connection. Bothwell’s grandmother had been James IV’s mistress. The rumour, almost certainly unfounded, that his father, Patrick, was the King’s son persisted. If it were true, then Mary and Bothwell were cousins. This explains something that greatly perplexed Randolph after Mary’s return to Scotland. ‘The Earl Bothwell’, he wrote, ‘hath given unto him old lands of his father’s in Teviotdale and the Abbey of Melrose. Some say that he is near sib unto her grace.’ Randolph could not understand why people were hinting that Mary and Bothwell were near siblings, but the old rumour about Bothwell’s grandmother was the reason.

After almost a year in France, Bothwell was restless again. In late February 1565, he addressed a petition to Mary asking her to allow him home. He was suitably humble in his request, offering to accept conditions as long as they were appropriate to ‘his calling and birth’. Mary’s reaction was mixed. ‘Of herself’, said Randolph, ‘she is not evil affected towards him, but there are many causes why he is not so looked upon as some others are.’

Bothwell, however, rarely stood on ceremony. He returned to Scotland without waiting for a reply. Moray called for him to be outlawed. ‘It is said the Queen hath granted it’, wrote the Earl of Bedford from Berwick, ‘but whether she will suffer it to be performed, some doubt.’

Bothwell went first to see his mother at Haddington, then quickly moved on. He feared for his safety, and was right to do so: Moray was out to get him. Bothwell, in Moray’s mind, was for ever a running sore. Moray would never forgive him for stealing that all-important first instalment of English gold from Captain Cockburn. ‘He followeth the matter so earnestly,’ continued Bedford in his next report, that ‘Scotland shall not hold them both.’

Soon Bothwell was back at the Hermitage. He was in yet more trouble, because his servants had reported ‘divers words’ he was said to have spoken in France. These included threatening to kill Moray, Maitland, and Cecil. He had also joked (allegedly) that Mary and Elizabeth between them ‘could not make one honest woman’. More dubiously (since Bothwell’s servants hoped to receive rewards for their information), he was said to have slandered Mary, calling her the ‘whore’ of her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine. Not deigning to reply to such charges, Bothwell counter-attacked by accusing Maitland of attempting to suborn his barber to poison him.

Mary was weary of this squabbling. The allegations and counter-allegations were levelled within days of Elizabeth’s bombshell that she would do nothing further on the subject of Mary’s dynastic claim until she herself had married or resolved to remain single. Darnley was now within Mary’s sights; Bothwell was a tiresome distraction. ‘She hath sworn’, said Randolph, ‘upon her honour that he shall never receive favour at her hands.’ His return was ‘altogether misliked’, and he was ordered to appear in court to answer the charge of breaking out of prison. Despite this, Mary set light terms. Moray wanted Bothwell arrested under pain of treason, but Mary intervened to make sure that he was given bail in a penalty of £200.

This made the outcome inevitable. Bothwell’s trial date was set for 2 May 1565. Moray arrived in Edinburgh with a large force in an attempt to overawe the jury and secure a ‘guilty’ verdict. But Bothwell absconded, possibly with Mary’s connivance. Once more she was keeping him up her sleeve. Maybe after all he had his uses. But until she was married to Darnley, he was to keep out of the way. ‘It is believed’, wrote one of Randolph’s spies, ‘that the Queen’s Majesty would [do] him good, but I trust her Grace will not declare the same at this present.’

Bothwell returned to France, where he stayed for just a few weeks. He was found guilty by a jury in his absence, but Mary intervened to prevent the Justice Clerk from giving sentence. Bothwell escaped without forfeiting his lands, but the verdict was left on the record in case he misbehaved in the future.

His position was transformed by Moray’s revolt against the Darnley marriage. Mary recalled Bothwell ten days before the wedding. She was determined to be revenged on her brother for his treachery, and could act with impunity because she was no longer dependent on his allies for support in her Privy Council. She knew that Bothwell would be ideal for the role of avenger. The enmity between him and Moray ran deep; and to complete the package, she also unleashed George, Lord Gordon, son and heir of the defeated Earl of Huntly, whose family had been virtually annihilated by Moray at the battle of Corrichie. When the Gordons were attacked and their lands and goods seized, Lord Gordon, a Protestant, was saved by the advocacy of his father-in-law, Châtelherault. Instead of being sent to the gallows, he was put under house arrest at Dunbar, where he stayed for over two years. A fortnight after Mary recalled Bothwell, she freed Lord Gordon on parole. His discharge was proclaimed in Edinburgh, and two days later he presented himself to Mary and Darnley at Holyrood. He returned to loyal service, and was restored first to the Lordship of Gordon and then to the Earldom of Huntly and to all the lands and dignities that had belonged to his father. His reinstatement still required an Act of Parliament to confirm it, but Mary had to all intents and purposes restored Huntly to his birthright.

And Huntly reciprocated. Not only did he help pursue Moray and his allies until they fled, but he also allied himself with Bothwell, becoming Bothwell’s closest friend and supporter, a friendship sealed by the ties of kinship the following year when Bothwell married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon.

When Moray and his allies rebelled, time was of the essence. Although Mary had recalled Bothwell, she did not wait for his return before launching her reprisals. The revolt had to be nipped in the bud, and since relatively few Lords rallied to the rebel cause, Mary seized her opportunity. Her musters were completed by 26 August and she pledged her jewels to pay her soldiers. She had an almost unique success in raising a royal army. She rode out of Edinburgh at the head of eight to ten thousand men, outnumbering her opponents by five to one. This time Moray was to discover that he did not face a middle-aged Dowager Queen who suffered from dropsy and had to rely on unpopular French troops, but an energetic, charismatic, and infuriated Queen who had the loyal and unstinted support of her own native Scots.

Since Moray had last been seen in Ayrshire, Mary rode in that direction across the central belt of the Lowlands. With Darnley at her side, she set a brisk pace in spite of the wind and driving rain. She sported a pistol in her saddle holster and a steel cap on her head, while Darnley wore a gilt breastplate. She was at ease and in her element. In a campaign aptly known as the Chase-about Raid, so called because Mary drove the rebels before her without stopping, she retained the initiative from the start. As Randolph reported, ‘the Queen followeth them so near with such forces – and so much the stronger by reason of her musketeers – that she giveth them no time to rest in any place’. Even Knox was forced to admit her gallantry. ‘Albeit the most part waxed weary,’ he wrote, ‘yet the Queen’s courage increased man-like so much that she was ever with the foremost.’

Moray was joined in Ayr by all the rebel Lords except Argyll. They stuck together, and when they heard that Mary was on the move went past her in the opposite direction. They entered Edinburgh on the 31st, hoping to capture the town while Mary’s troops were in pursuit. But the citizens were loyal and trained the castle guns on them. They withdrew much abashed some fifty miles to the west, reaching Dumfries by 5 September. Mary almost intercepted them on the 4th, but when they slipped past her again she let them go and returned to Edinburgh to consolidate her forces and allow them to rest.

Argyll had not merged his men with Moray’s. He ran his own campaign in the Highlands, where he was attacked by the Earl of Atholl and the Lennoxes. When they finally boxed him in, Mary left him there, sealing him off within his own enclave. She turned next to Moray’s base in Fife, cutting off his supply lines. On the 13th, she issued a manifesto at St Andrews attacking those who ‘under pretence of religion’ had raised ‘this uproar’ so that they might ‘be kings themselves’. Moray and his allies countered from Dumfries, denying they were traitors or rebels and claiming they acted in ways true to God, their Queen, and the ‘Commonwealth’. Their complaint was that Mary, by marrying Darnley and proclaiming him King without the consent of Parliament, had trampled on the legitimate rights of her nobles.

On the 17th, Bothwell landed at Eyemouth from France. Within a quarter of an hour, he was riding in search of Mary, whom he found at Holyrood on the 20th. Bedford, under orders from Cecil to arrest him at sea, had commissioned one Wilson, a notorious pirate, to seize him. Wilson had successfully tracked down Bothwell’s ship, but, daring as ever, Bothwell escaped with six or eight men in rowing boats. His equipment was lost, but he still had some armour and a few boxes of pistols.

Mary was delighted to see Bothwell, whom she later credited with the glory of her success. On the 28th, she restored him to the Privy Council. After Lennox and Atholl, he would become her most trusted adviser. Randolph greatly feared him. ‘His power’, he said, ‘is to do more mischief than ever he was minded to do good in all his life.’ But his return also delighted Randolph in that it provoked the first of many rows between Mary and Darnley over who should be lieutenant-general of the royal army. Mary wanted Bothwell in command, whereas Darnley wanted his father Lennox in the post. In the event, they split the role. Lennox was appointed to lead the vanguard, whilst Bothwell was to join Darnley at the head of the main battle army. In Argyllshire, the Earl of Atholl was named as Mary’s chief lieutenant.

By 4 October, Mary’s army had risen to between ten and twelve thousand men. Huntly, said Randolph, had brought ‘a great force out of the north’. He, too, wanted his revenge. He ‘imputeth the overthrow of his father only to my Lord of Moray, which is approved by the Queen’s self’. Bothwell, meanwhile, ‘taketh great things upon him and promiseth much’. Mary’s ‘chief trust’ was in Bothwell, Huntly, and Atholl.

They did not disappoint her. On the 8th, the main battle army left Edinburgh and marched towards Dumfries. Mary rode beside it, still wearing her steel cap.

But there was no battle. By the time the royal forces arrived, Moray and his allies had fled. They simply slipped across the border to Carlisle. After several days’ rest, they reached Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 16th. Moray’s appeals for English reinforcements had fallen on deaf ears. The Privy Council had debated the pros and cons, but finally decided that a military intervention in Scotland could lead to an open-ended commitment. Such aid as was received was purely financial. Randolph first slipped 3000 crowns to Lady Moray, after which Bedford handed over £1500.

Argyll, meanwhile, was trapped in Argyllshire. He expected Mary to turn on him next, but nothing happened. With Moray and the rest of the rebel Lords on the run in England, she was content to disband her forces. Her victory was complete. She had never been more powerful or more popular. She had married Darnley and thereby unified their claims to the English throne. She had routed her enemies in flight, with no bloodshed. And she had two loyal and devoted advisers in Bothwell and Huntly.

Mary had succeeded because she had snatched the initiative. While Elizabeth dithered and English policy was in disarray, she had acted decisively. She had shown great courage and untiring energy. Her assurances over religion had been masterful. She had stood aloof from England, and had seen Elizabeth and Cecil back away from assisting Moray to rebel a second time.

Elizabeth wanted another round of diplomacy, but Mary could not see the point. She would never allow another ruler to intervene in the internal affairs of her country or in her struggle with her rebels, whom she meant to punish severely. She had told the English Queen so in a strongly worded message handed to Randolph on 7 September. Her cousin had never been angrier and more frustrated with Mary than when this note arrived.

Elizabeth had expected Mary to defer to her wishes almost as a client Queen, unaware that she had now found the strength to stand up for herself in a way she had never been able to before. England, and especially Cecil, imagined Scotland to be a satellite state. But Mary was hardly going to revert to a policy of conciliation when she was winning. Moray’s overthrow was almost as complete as the elder Earl of Huntly’s three years before, and she did not intend to relent. She made just one exception. When Châtelherault humbly apologized for his role in the revolt and went into voluntary exile, he and his family were pardoned. But that was the full extent of Mary’s forbearance.

On 18 and 19 December, heralds appeared in full coat armour at the Market Cross in Edinburgh to summon Moray and his allies to appear in Parliament on 12 March 1566 ‘to hear and see the doom of forfeiture orderly led against them’.

Mary’s summoning of Parliament and this advance warning of her intention to confiscate the lands and goods of the rebel Lords would prove to be another watershed. It was also the prelude to one of the two most dramatic assassinations in Scottish and British history.