MARY’S EFFORTS TO reconcile her Lords, with the sole exception of Darnley’s co-conspirators, were genuine. In arranging this new phase of détente, she was assisted by Castelnau, who reappeared at Holyrood a month after Rizzio’s assassination and shuttled to and from Paris until a resident French ambassador was finally sent to replace him.
Castelnau had won everyone’s respect for his impartiality during the Chase-about Raid, which made him the perfect intermediary between the noble factions after the Rizzio plot, when the difficulty was not reconciling the Lords to Mary, but reconciling the factions to each other. But highest in Mary’s esteem were Bothwell and Huntly. Their credit soared because of their unquestioning loyalty to her. At this critical moment in her reign, she needed advisers she could trust, who could act as a foil to the rest of the Lords and keep an eye on Darnley.
So far, there was no sign of a romance between Mary and Bothwell. Although repelled by Darnley’s recent behaviour, Mary still considered herself to be married. In any case, Bothwell was unavailable. A fortnight before Rizzio’s murder, he had married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, by Protestant rites at Holyrood, followed by a reception that Mary herself attended to honour her two most loyal supporters and out of deep respect for Bothwell’s sister, the widow of her favourite half-brother, Lord John of Coldingham. Mary loved weddings and always came to those of the people she liked or wished to honour, usually bringing an expensive gift or paying for the bride’s dress or the wedding banquet. She gave Jean Gordon a gorgeous wedding-dress of cloth of silver lined with white taffeta and also paid for the banquet, a sumptuous feast that was followed by jousting and ‘running at the ring’.
Since his recall from France, Bothwell had made a remarkable political recovery. He had moved from the sidelines to the centre of events, incurring the jealousy of those he had eclipsed. He was Moray’s sworn enemy. Maitland also hated him. Relations reached their lowest point when Bothwell threatened to hunt down the disgraced Secretary of State and kill him because of his involvement in the Rizzio plot.
Under Castelnau’s auspices, such feuds were eased or appeased. The one person who consistently thwarted Mary’s attempts to pacify her country was her husband. When she learnt the full extent of his and Lennox’s treachery to obtain the ‘crown matrimonial’ behind her back, she banished Lennox from her court. Darnley would be much harder to manage, because she was pregnant and he was the baby’s father. She could barely believe that the man she had married could have acted in this way, conspiring with the Lords to murder her confidential secretary and then dissolving Parliament without consulting her. Darnley even had the cheek to continue denying his involvement after his exiled co-conspirators had posted Mary his own signed bond approving the assassination.
Darnley just carried on plotting. Shortly after Mary’s grand ceremony of reconciliation, he wrote letters to Charles IX and Catherine de Medici in which he called himself ‘King of Scotland’ and used a signet seal emblazoned with the royal arms. He protested his innocence of Rizzio’s murder and sought to ingratiate himself to Charles as his ‘dear brother’. Not content with this, he continued to pursue his Catholic policy despite his promises to his co-conspirators to restore the Protestant settlement. He wrote to Philip II and the Pope, complaining of the state of the country, which he claimed was ‘out of order’ because the mass and the Catholic religion had not yet been restored. This, he said, was entirely Mary’s fault.
More bizarre were his schemes to capture Scarborough and the Scilly Isles, both belonging to England but hundreds of miles apart. He plotted to take Scarborough Castle, a partially ruined fortress on the coast of Yorkshire some two hundred miles equidistant from London and Edinburgh, where ships could unload men and supplies in the adjacent harbour. He also studied maps of the Scilly Isles off the southernmost tip of Cornwall to which he staked a ridiculous claim encouraged by a small group of malcontent islanders and Cornish Catholic gentry. The Scillies were six hundred miles from Edinburgh. They had no connection with Scotland, but Darnley knew that they had been fortified in the reign of Edward VI, because he carefully noted on his maps the positions of several disused blockhouses and a fort – it was less than half finished – with trace italienne defences.
Darnley was cooking up some madcap scheme to invade England by landing Catholic armies from the Continent at what he believed to be strategically important locations in the British Isles. But he had given no thought as to how, even if a landing could be accomplished in the Scilly Isles, these troops were then to be transported to the mainland. And if troops were landed at Scarborough, how would they be supplied with food and munitions once they started their march to wherever Darnley supposed they were going?
Cecil’s spies knew of all these plans. However foolish and implausible, they had to be taken seriously. Mary’s popularity had soared in England on the news of her pregnancy, exactly as he had always predicted. Cecil was never shy of resorting to underhand methods where Mary was concerned. He next took an agent provocateur into his service, one Christopher Rokesby, whom he sent without Elizabeth’s knowledge – she detested such men – to try to inveigle Mary into a plot and so discover how far she was likely to be implicated in Darnley’s schemes.
Rokesby slipped into Scotland in May, securing access to Mary by posing as a loyal Catholic fleeing persecution in England and presenting her with an ivory carving of Christ’s crucifixion. Having got her attention, he told her that many of the leading Catholic nobles were weary of Elizabeth and willing to depose her, provided Mary would give her consent to a coup or assassination attempt. He urged her to give him some token, and dropped the names of those leading English landowners who would join the revolt if shown proof of her support.
Mary was not fooled by this. She was by now eight months pregnant and her baby was expected soon. No one knew exactly when she would enter her confinement chamber or when the child would be born. As medical understanding of gynaecology and human reproduction was so sketchy, even qualified doctors supposed that female foetuses spent longer in the womb than male ones because they were the weaker sex, and so the length of a pregnancy was thought to vary accordingly. But Mary was clearly approaching her time, staying in bed for much of the day and travelling only short distances in a horse litter. And with the hopes and fears of childbirth at the front of her mind, she was far too busy to get involved in plotting. She was also in too strong a position, with an heir on the way, to taint her claim to the English throne with dubious activities. She could be naïve and impulsive, but was rarely vindictive: in spite of her duelling and angry clashes with Elizabeth over the years, she had never yet conspired against her. She dismissed Rokesby, who returned to England, where he set about building up a dossier that seemed to prove that he was employed by the Catholic nobles in precisely the way that he had claimed. Armed with these documents, he crossed the border to try again.
But Mary was one step ahead. Rokesby had barely finished renting his accommodation in Edinburgh on the day of his return when he was arrested and his papers seized. Mary was positively gleeful when a highly incriminating letter from Cecil in cipher was found in his possession. When deciphered, it established Rokesby’s guilt and showed that Cecil had offered him a generous reward if he succeeded. The new English ambassador to Scotland, Henry Killigrew, Cecil’s brother-in-law, who had been sent to replace Randolph after his expulsion for covertly bankrolling Moray’s second revolt in the Chase-about Raid, was the one person to whom Elizabeth’s chief minister had confided his true relationship to Rokesby. And Killigrew was appalled at the letter’s discovery. He wrote instantly to Cecil to warn him to prepare for Mary’s reprisals.
It was an extraordinary, almost unique lapse of security on Cecil’s part. But Mary’s mind was concentrated on the birth of her child. Biding her time, she waited until it suited her to counterattack. She then sent one of the very few letters that she ever wrote to Cecil personally. ‘Since our first arrival within our realm of Scotland’, she began, ‘we ever had a good opinion of you, that you at all times had done the office of a faithful minister.’ Mary said that she had never doubted Cecil’s motives until her good opinion was shaken ‘by the strange dealings of an Englishman named Rokesby’. Since then, she ‘began a little to suspend our judgement, until we receive further trial therein’.
Mary’s rebuke was as dignified as it was measured. She explained how she had asked Robert Melville, her agent in London, to discuss the Rokesby affair with Cecil. He had reported that Cecil was ‘nothing altered’ from his former ‘good inclination’ towards Mary ‘of the which we were not a little rejoiced’. She urged Cecil to ‘persevere in nourishing of peace and amity’. In this way, she felt confident that he would ‘do acceptable service’ to Elizabeth. This was more than artful. It was a thinly veiled threat, because Mary – after Melville’s discreet enquiries – knew very well that Elizabeth would have been furious to hear of Cecil’s use of an agent provocateur.
On 3 June 1566, Mary went into her confinement chamber at Edinburgh Castle. She still feared for her safety after the Rizzio plot and insisted that the Earl of Argyll, whom she trusted to defend the Scottish monarchy with his last drop of blood, despite his quarrels with her and her mother, took up residence in the room outside and stayed there night and day. Her son, Prince James, was born between ten and eleven o’clock on the morning of Wednesday the 19th. It was a long and difficult labour. And yet Mary did not entirely lose her sense of humour, crying out half-way through that if she had known how painful it was going to be, she would never have got married in the first place.
The baby, when he finally arrived, was in excellent health. Mary was exhausted, but triumphant. She had produced a legitimate male heir and settled the succession to the throne in her country, exactly what women rulers were supposed to do. All this greatly strengthened her hand with Elizabeth, who pouted and sulked when she heard the news. The guns of Edinburgh Castle were fired to salute the birth, and there was spontaneous rejoicing. Some five hundred bonfires were lit in the town and its suburbs alone.
Killigrew visited Mary in her confinement chamber two days later. After he had congratulated her on a safe delivery, she thanked him but politely asked to be excused a lengthier interview. She was still in bed and troubled by pains in her breasts. She spoke very faintly on account of her extreme physical weakness, her voice interrupted by a hollow cough. Killigrew was taken to the nursery to see the baby. James was, he said in a phrase resonant of his predecessor, Sadler, when he first admired the infant Mary, ‘a very goodly child’. First he watched him ‘sucking of his nurse’, Margaret Little, and afterwards saw him ‘as good as naked, I mean his head, feet and hands, all to my judgement well proportioned and like to prove a goodly prince’.
Childbirth was a risky, life-threatening prospect in the sixteenth century, and women prepared for the worst. On 9 June, Mary had summoned her Lords to hear her will. Three copies were to be kept: one she sent to her Guise relations, one she retained herself, and a third she signed and sealed and gave to those who were to become regents if she died. No copy of the document now survives. Our only information about it is that the regency was vested in a committee. Either Darnley was not included, or else (and more likely) he was there, but counterbalanced by two independent regents, one of them Lord Erskine, a moderate Protestant and the captain of Edinburgh Castle, whom Mary promoted to the Earldom of Mar. The other was the Earl of Argyll, already completely rehabilitated. Later, Mary’s enemies claimed that she had nominated Bothwell to be regent, which was quite untrue. However much the swashbuckling border Earl had risen in her estimation, he was still a highly controversial figure whose violent temper and love of duelling made him less qualified than Mar and Argyll to protect the interests of her family and the monarchy. But Mar and Argyll were equally offensive to Darnley. He was furious: the terms of Mary’s will caused a smouldering resentment among the Lennoxes. Killigrew supposed that their taste for plots could only be further aroused.
There was an appendix to the will, a testamentary inventory of Mary’s jewels, which does survive. It has sixteen rubbed and water-damaged folios listing over 250 lots, beside which are marginal notes indicating the names of those to whom particular lots were to be given. The lists were compiled by Mary Livingston, one of the four Maries with responsibility for the Queen’s jewels, and Margaret Carwood, her favourite bedchamber woman. The marginal annotations are Mary’s own. Her handwriting is untidy, even for her. She several times complained of cramp during the final weeks of her pregnancy, although her handwriting since her adolescence regularly descended into scribbling.
Mary scrawled a note that her bequests should take effect if she and her baby died. She knew she might be close to death; her handwriting could be an indication of her mental as well as her physical state. The inventory certainly shows where her thoughts were, because it was not the Scottish nobles or even her husband who dominated the lists of beneficiaries, but her Guise family. Though she had been back in Scotland for almost five years, and must often have felt very alone, she would never forget her French links. Even a scribbled note from France brought her pleasure in later life, and she received letters from her family that brought tears of joy to her eyes. Out of fewer than sixty people named as beneficiaries, fourteen were members of the Guise family. They were uppermost in her mind, listed first after her bequests to the Scottish Crown, and taking the lion’s share of the most precious and glamorous items. One lot, a magnificent collection of rubies, pearls, brooches, collars, gold chains, earrings, and a belt with a gold buckle and studded with precious stones was to be handed down in the family in perpetuity.
After the Guises came Mary’s Scottish relatives and the four Maries and their families. Half a dozen of her relations were listed, with a preference for the women and children: first the Countess of Argyll, then Moray’s wife and eldest daughter, then Francis, the orphaned son of Lord John of Coldingham, to whom Mary was godmother. The four Maries were to receive less costly gifts, but more intimate ones that were a sign of their former playmate’s love.
Mary made typically generous bequests to her ladies-in-waiting, to the surviving parents of the four Maries, and to her bedchamber servants. Carwood was left one of Mary’s portrait miniatures framed with diamonds, and ‘une petite boîte d’argent’ (‘a small silver box’), perhaps the celebrated casket marked with the monogram of Francis II in which the Queen’s enemies later said they found her most incriminating letters.
Darnley appeared on the lists, but was not especially favoured. He was to receive up to twenty-six items, ostensibly a tenth of the inventory depending on how Mary’s annotations are interpreted. But the reality was far less. His legacies tended to be specific objects and not the whole collections of jewels left to her Guise family: for example, a watch decorated with diamonds and rubies, or a diamond ring enamelled in red. Of the ring, Mary wrote: ‘It was with this that I was married; I leave it to the King who gave it to me.’ Her terse comment is suggestive of her overwhelming sense of disappointment with her husband. A close examination of Darnley’s gifts suggests that very few items, if indeed any, were bequests over and above the return of gifts that he and his father, Lennox, had made to her.
The nobles, headed by Moray, Argyll, Atholl, and Mar, were to have lesser gifts, confirming the degree to which Mary saw her will as a family affair. Maitland’s name was omitted: he was still in disgrace; but Bothwell’s and Huntly’s were included. Bothwell was to get an ornamental jewel containing a diamond in a black enamelled setting and a badge or brooch with the figure of a deer set with eleven diamonds and a ruby. Much was made of these putative bequests after Mary’s forced abdication, but in 1566 they were thought unremarkable. Far from gaining special treatment, Bothwell had ranked in his usual place in the list of Privy Councillors. Moray and Mar were both ahead of him and no undue favour was shown. In fact, in view of his steadfast loyalty to Mary and her mother, the marvel is not how much, but how little he was to receive from Mary’s will had she died in childbirth.
Mary’s health was fragile after the birth. She needed to rest, and in July and early August she went on holiday. Her refuge was Alloa in Clackmannanshire, a quiet and picturesque spot that was only a short journey by boat along the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. She was a guest of the Earl of Mar and was accompanied by Moray and Bothwell. Castelnau, whose instructions from Catherine de Medici were to reconcile Darnley to Mary, also arrived. He had his work cut out. Relations between the royal couple were plummeting. There was a rumour of a split at the end of April, with Darnley twice threatening to go and live in the Netherlands.
When Mary had been preparing to go into labour, the couple had agreed to a purely nominal truce. This now imploded. Darnley arrived at Alloa independently, staying for only a few hours. Castelnau barely got to speak to him. Compiling a report for Cecil on 3 August, the Earl of Bedford wrote: ‘The Queen and her husband agree after the old manner, or rather worse.’ Mary seldom ate with Darnley any more, and never slept ‘nor keepeth no company with him’ (the euphemism for sexual intercourse), ‘nor loveth any such as love him’. Already the King and Queen led separate lives, and at Alloa, their quarrel intensified. Mary even swore at him. She used words, said Bedford fastidiously, that ‘cannot for modesty nor with the honour of a Queen be reported’.
On his way through England on one of his return journeys to Paris, Castelnau blithely assured Bedford that Mary and Darnley were reconciled. This was wishful thinking, or else a ploy to deceive the English. Bedford had his own spies and was well aware of Darnley’s jealousy and paranoia. ‘He cannot bear’, wrote one of these sources, ‘that the Queen should use familiarity either with men or women, and especially the ladies of Argyll, Moray and Mar.’ All her attention had to be on him for every second, or else he stormed out in a tantrum.
It was the little things that caused the most trouble. Mary loved dogs, and when Sir James Melville gave Darnley a fine water spaniel he was sent from England, Mary had an attack of pique. She berated her loyal Melville, calling him a ‘dissembler’ and a ‘flatterer’. She too adored spaniels, and was jealous that the dog had not been offered to her first. ‘How can I trust you if you can give something like this to someone I hate?’ she asked.
By the middle of August, Mary had moved on to Peebleshire, where she went stag-hunting in the hills close to the Water of Megget. Moray, Mar, and Bothwell were by her side, whilst Darnley put in sporadic appearances. Then, on the 22nd, she interrupted her holiday. Something had happened that immediately made her sense danger and brought back all the fears she had suffered since the Rizzio plot. She abruptly returned to Holyrood for two days. Up until now, Prince James had stayed with his nurse at Edinburgh Castle in the care of Mar and his wife. Mary believed he was about to be kidnapped and decided to move him to the greater security of Stirling Castle, the fortress on the rock to which her own mother had once taken her.
She feared that Darnley might try to kidnap James, because she knew the birth of their son had shifted the balance of power again. It strengthened her hand significantly, at least in the short term. She had produced a male heir and settled the succession in Scotland. The arrival of an heir also made her less dependent than before on the nobles. But, paradoxically, it also made her more vulnerable in the longer term, because if Darnley or the Lords chose to attack her, they could seize the heir to the throne and appoint a regent to rule during his minority, thereby giving themselves power for up to fifteen or twenty years. Taking no chances, Mary raised a force of five hundred musketeers, who surrounded Prince James’s litter as it was brought from Edinburgh to Stirling. She again left her son in the care of Mar and his wife. When they had safely arrived at Stirling, Mary returned to Perthshire, where she resumed her holiday. Now that James was well-protected, she even felt able to spend the rest of it hunting and hawking with her perfidious husband. She was keeping up appearances. In the last week of August they were in Glenartney, a lush red-deer forest in the vicinity of Loch Earn. From there, they moved on to Drummond Castle near Crieff, and afterwards returned to Stirling.
By the start of September, Mary felt more relaxed. She even yielded to the pleas of Moray and Atholl and allowed Maitland to reoccupy his former position as her secretary. He arrived at Stirling on the 4th, and the next day she dined with him alone. He made his humble submission, after which Mary returned to Edinburgh. Maitland was ordered to appear there on the 11th, where shortly afterwards he was reconciled to Bothwell. How deep this reconciliation went is open to doubt; but, as Maitland wrote jubilantly to Cecil, he was back at court and once more pulling the levers.
Darnley, however, was furious. Mary, he believed, was reconciling the Lords in order to build a consensus against him. There was no reason for him to think this. All she was doing was trying to restore order and harmony between the feuding factions after the upheaval of the Rizzio plot. But Darnley was recalcitrant. When she returned to Stirling to fetch him back to Edinburgh, he refused to leave. He was misbehaving shamelessly, even in front of the new resident French ambassador, Philibert du Croc, who had now been sent to Scotland in place of Castelnau.
Darnley then made a shock announcement. He intended to separate himself from Mary and go and live abroad. He avowed this in what du Croc called ‘a fit of desperation’. His tirade brought matters to a head. Mary ‘took him by the hand, and besought him for God’s sake to declare if she had given him any occasion for this resolution; and entreated he might deal plainly, and not spare her’. But Darnley pushed her aside. Even the Lords were appalled at this. They too wanted to keep him in Scotland, since apart from the dishonour that he would do to Mary by leaving her, it was clear that Darnley plotting abroad would be even more dangerous than Darnley plotting at home.
Du Croc was bewildered by this public fight. He had never seen anything like it, especially when Darnley conceded that he had no specific grievance beyond a sense of outrage that he was not adequately recognized as King. What rankled was Mary’s refusal to crown him. Despite innumerable attempts to calm him down, he refused to be silenced. At last he stalked out of the room, saying to Mary, ‘Adieu, Madame, you shall not see my face for a long space’, and to the Lords, ‘Gentlemen, Adieu.’
Mary returned to Edinburgh. When Darnley arrived at the gates of Holyroodhouse a week later, insisting that her councillors must be evicted before he would deign to enter, he was personally hauled inside by his wife. She spent most of the night trying to drum some sense into him, and when she failed, the Privy Council was summoned with du Croc as an independent witness. Darnley was then asked to explain exactly what it was that he complained of, and when he was unable to give any credible answer, but continued to ask for a separation from Mary, the Privy Council wrote officially to Catherine de Medici to set down a record of his insanity and to seek French co-operation should he attempt to establish a royal court in exile.
Mary’s health then collapsed. It happened while she was staying at Jedburgh, close to the English border. It had always been her intention to go there and preside at her Justice Ayre, a judicial circuit or travelling court that dealt with cases of crime and misdemeanour, spending a week or so in each location. The circuit, which included Teviotdale and Liddesdale, had been delayed on account of the late harvest, but was due to begin on 8 October. Bothwell, within whose jurisdiction these areas fell as lieutenant of the borders, left Edinburgh on the 6th to prepare for the Queen’s arrival.
Darnley, who was still threatening to go and live abroad, refused to accompany Mary. But Moray, Argyll, Maitland, Atholl, and Huntly were among the forty or so in her train. Scarcely had she passed Borthwick, eleven miles to the south-east of Edinburgh, when she heard that Bothwell had been violently ambushed by his old enemies the Elliots of Liddesdale, who were notorious for their brigandage throughout this whole region of the rough border terrain.
At first Bothwell was said to be dead; then it was confirmed that he was alive, but severely injured with sword wounds to his body, head, and hand. He was dragged on a sledge to the Hermitage, his nearby citadel in the valley of the Hermitage Water, where he lay critically ill. Mary came to visit him, but not for another week. The facts emerge from the reports to Cecil of Lord Scrope and Sir John Forster, the English officials who were closely monitoring these events from their respective vantage-points of Carlisle and Berwick. Since, like all the English, they loathed Bothwell, they are unlikely to have drawn a veil over any of his transgressions.
According to their accounts, Mary did go to the Hermitage, but not as soon as she arrived at Jedburgh. She first conducted the Justice Ayre in the usual way, which lasted a week. Only after the court adjourned on 15 October did she ride to visit Bothwell. She was concerned about his injuries: he was, after all, one of her most loyal Privy Councillors. And there was perhaps another reason. Bothwell, her border lieutenant with a commission to subdue the ‘riders’ and bandits of the region, was due to begin a new session of the Justice Ayre in Liddesdale on the 16th and Mary may have planned to attend it. Nor did she ride to Bothwell’s home alone. Contrary to later calumnies, she was accompanied by Moray and all her leading courtiers. Perhaps they had intended to stay overnight at the Hermitage? If so, they changed their minds. They stayed for only two hours, and then returned to Jedburgh the same day. The journey was up to thirty miles each way across rough country using the most direct paths. This seems astonishing, until one realizes that forty miles was then considered a normal day’s riding. A round trip of fifty miles was above the norm but nothing out of the ordinary. Sixty miles was pushing it, but feasible in good weather.
Mary’s ride was on the 15th or 16th according to whether Scrope or Forster’s date is accepted. Then, on the 17th, she fell dangerously ill. A few days earlier, she had complained of ‘spleen’. When she finally collapsed, she was in agony from the pain in her left side. She vomited blood several times, and then lost consciousness. Within two days she was suffering convulsions and had lost the power of speech. Next day she lost her sight. By the 24th, she had improved, but suffered a relapse next day. At the height of the crisis she lay apparently dead for half an hour: ‘eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold’.
She was saved by her French surgeon, Charles Nau, who was said to be ‘a perfect man of his craft’. He bandaged her big toes, her legs from the ankles upwards, and then her arms very tightly. He massaged all her limbs. After this, he forced open her mouth and poured wine down her throat. He also administered a clyster (or enema). This caused vomiting and diarrhoea, enabling her to discharge a large residue of ‘corrupt’ (old) blood. Within three hours, she had recovered her sight and speech and begun sweating. It was a bravura performance by her surgeon: no better treatment could have been given in the absence of a blood transfusion.
Whatever Mary’s precise illness, it could not have been acute intermittent porphyria, or any other type of porphyria. She had suffered severe internal bleeding and haemorrhagic shock – symptoms that have no connection with porphyria. It is possible that she had more than one disease, but the obvious diagnosis is a gastric ulcer that burst after the exertion of the long ride and the anxiety associated with Darnley’s treachery.23
The Lords had no interest in the medical causes of Mary’s illness, but were greatly alarmed by her condition. With Darnley on the loose, they had no appetite for a change of regime. They foresaw anarchy if their Queen died and for the moment wanted to keep her on the throne. While the factions in Scotland were always interested in the potential benefits of a long royal minority, they were not yet ready for a regency that would always be hotly disputed until the ambiguity of Darnley’s position as an uncrowned King consort was resolved.
Such fears concentrated their minds on the advantages of Mary’s rule while she was alive. Studiously ignoring their own conduct, they blamed Darnley for her breakdown. His behaviour had pushed her to the brink. Explaining their dilemma to the Scottish ambassador in Paris, Maitland put the case in a nutshell: ‘She has done him so great honour … and he on the other part has recompensed her with such ingratitude, and misuses himself so far towards her, that it is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no way out.’ Just as at the outset of the Rizzio plot, Maitland was hinting at the solution to a problem that Mary herself had not yet defined. Up until now, she was trying to live with the consequences of her marriage, keeping up appearances and balancing the advantages of a legitimate male heir against the disadvantages of Darnley. But the Lords, including Bothwell, saw things differently. By removing Darnley, they would be doing everyone a favour.
As the year 1566 moved towards its close, it seemed as if Darnley, with his manic obsession to be crowned King and his longing to make a name for himself in Catholic Europe by restoring the mass, was an intractable problem for everyone except his own family. It would be highly convenient to lose him. Nothing was in his favour, especially as he had served his purpose by fathering a male heir. His conduct was intolerable; he was politically expendable. He did not even bother to visit Mary at Jedburgh until she had almost recovered. Even then, he stayed for only one night, returning to Lennox’s stronghold at Glasgow the next day.
Bothwell was in Jedburgh a week before him, carried in a horse litter back to his lodgings. He was well enough to sit on the Privy Council, and within a week had ‘convalesced well’. He was in Mary’s retinue on 9 November when she left Jedburgh to begin a royal progress through Berwickshire and East Lothian. His role was to exercise his office of lieutenant of the borders, which he performed without mishap or adventure. The progress ended on the 20th, when Mary and her Privy Councillors arrived at Craigmillar Castle, three miles south of Edinburgh, where they stayed for almost a fortnight.
Mary had scarcely been at Craigmillar a week when she was ill again. It was the second time in her life when she said she had been close to death or wished she really were dead. The first was when she was struck by the viral disease known as the ‘sweat’ at the age of thirteen and a half. At Jedburgh, she had certainly been close to death, but her collapse was so sudden, she had been unable to think much about it. Now the narrowness of her escape was dawning on her. According to du Croc, who was an eyewitness, ‘she is in the hands of the physicians, and I do assure you is not at all well. I do believe the principal part of her disease to consist of a deep grief and sorrow.’ She was unable to shake off her mood. ‘Still she repeats these words, “I could wish to be dead.” ’
‘You know very well’, continued du Croc, ‘that the injury she has received is excessively great, and her Majesty will never forget it.’ Slowly but surely, the truth slipped out. There was more to this depression than Mary’s brush with death. Darnley had been to visit her. There had been further rows. ‘Things are going from bad to worse … I do not expect upon several accounts any good understanding between them.’ There were two overwhelming obstacles to a reconciliation. ‘The first is, the King will never humble himself as he ought. The other is, the Queen can’t countenance any of the Lords speaking with the King without immediately suspecting a plot between them.’
But if du Croc was brooding over Darnley’s deficiencies, Mary’s collapse at Jedburgh put a reconciliation of a quite different order within her grasp. When mortality was staring her in the face, she decided that, if she failed to recover, then ‘the special care of the protection of our son’ was to be given to Elizabeth, who should come to regard Prince James as her own child. It was now fairly obvious that Elizabeth did not intend to marry, in which case Mary could best protect her son’s life and dynastic rights in Scotland and England by making this extraordinary gesture. She knew that, despite their earlier duelling, Elizabeth would always respect the ideal of monarchy and give precedence to hereditary rights over religious differences. In England, James would be brought up as a Protestant, in which case his prospects in both countries would be unrivalled.
A message was sent to England, and Elizabeth reciprocated. Her reply, conveyed to Mary through Robert Melville, does not survive, but on 18 November during the final stages of the progress in East Lothian, Mary quoted from it. She wrote a letter to the English Privy Council, expressing her thanks for the ‘good offers’ she had received from her ‘dearest sister’, which she proposed to follow up without delay.
Although made on the spur of the moment, Mary’s offer to make Elizabeth her son’s ‘protector’ was a masterstroke. It was flattering enough to appeal to the English Queen and yet enigmatic enough not to pose a direct threat to the Scottish Lords, since a ‘protector’ in the sense meant by Mary was not the same as a ‘governor’ or ‘regent’ for which she had made provision in her will. And it kept Darnley out of the picture. The result was the prospect of a new accord giving genuine substance to the kinship ties between the two British Queens. Such ties had always underpinned their rhetoric, but had so far not amounted to much. As Mary herself once exclaimed, they were all just empty words! Her latest gesture enabled her to play the part of a ‘natural sister’ or ‘daughter’ to Elizabeth with real conviction. She had entrusted her son to Elizabeth’s ‘protection’. Although she did not die at Jedburgh, it did not mean she could not hope to benefit from the sudden thaw in their relations. When her cousin responded with her own ‘good offers’, the way was open for a fresh round of diplomacy in which Mary hoped to secure recognition of her claim to the English succession.
Elizabeth was willing to compromise. For once, she made her own decision untrammelled by Cecil’s interventions. Cecil had for some time been pressing her to marry the Archduke Charles, and the English Parliament had been summoned after a gap of three and a half years. In a series of heated debates and backroom deals, Parliament was vainly petitioning her to marry and settle the succession in her own country just as Mary had done so successfully in hers. Advised by Robert Melville in London, Mary knew exactly how and when to play her cards.
Elizabeth bitterly resented the lobbying of her councillors. She turned her rage first on a delegation of Lords and next on a committee of both Houses for discussing what she regarded as her personal affairs. Her ‘good offers’ to Mary came shortly after the crisis over the debates in Parliament. In a fractious minute, perhaps read only by Cecil, Elizabeth railed against the ‘lewd practices’ of those who had been lobbying. She turned to her own solution, negotiating on the level of Queen to Queen.
Her terms were breathtakingly simple. She would retract her demand that Mary ratify the original treaty of Edinburgh. Instead, a new ‘treaty of perpetual amity’ would be negotiated. This would leave the peace intact, but remove all clauses detrimental to Mary’s honour. ‘Our meaning’, said Elizabeth, ‘is to require nothing to be confirmed in that treaty but that which directly appertains to us and our children, omitting anything in that treaty that may be prejudicial to her title as next heir after us and our children, all of which may be secured to her by a new treaty betwixt us.’
Elizabeth was willing to acknowledge Mary’s rights as heir apparent. In return, those rights would be rigorously defined and narrowed down. If Elizabeth married and had children, Mary’s claim would lapse. And to remove for ever the threat of an attempted usurpation, an ‘engagement’ or ‘reciprocal contract’ would be signed. This would provide mutual guarantees whereby each party recognized the other to be a lawful ruling Queen, and neither would do anything to harm the other. As Elizabeth explained it, ‘this manner of proceeding is the way to avoid all jealousies and difficulties betwixt us, and the only way to secure the amity’.
Elizabeth would certainly have gained by these terms. They meant that Mary would ratify the substance if not the form of the treaty of Edinburgh, thereby tying up the loose ends of the last five years and guaranteeing Elizabeth’s security. But for Mary, the offer was still a breakthrough. She must have felt elated. True, the concessions were almost identical (as she was not shy to point out) to those of the ‘middle way’ first proposed five years before. A settlement on such lines could have been agreed on Mary’s side at almost any point since her return from France. What mattered was that the terms were now on offer. But Mary had read the fine print. To validate fully her dynastic claim, the obstacle of Henry VIII’s will remained. The will had excluded the Stuart line of succession, specifying that if Elizabeth died childless, then the offspring of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Duchess of Suffolk, should inherit the throne.
Mary recalled Robert Melville to advise her. She knew that her trump card was to secure a judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will, the validity of which had been contested. By the Third Act of Succession, passed in 1544, Parliament had empowered Henry to settle the succession by his ‘last will and testament signed with the King’s own hand’. Whether he had signed it was disputed. Although the will was ‘signed’, it was probably not with the King’s own hand, but with a stamp, a device used by Henry in the last months of his reign. When this stamp was used to sign documents, an impression of the King’s signature was made on the paper, and the signature inked in afterwards by a clerk. The procedure was meant to spare an increasingly restless Henry from the trouble of signing state papers. But the will was not a normal document: it was a unique legal instrument, which by the terms of the Act of Succession should have been signed by the King in person. So Mary’s argument was plausible. Henry VIII’s will is listed to this day in the official register of documents signed ‘by stamp’. And her claim that the witnesses and the stamp itself were ‘feigned’, meaning that they were affixed when the King was already dead or unconscious, is also credible, if unprovable. Nor was Elizabeth unsympathetic. She had never placed much reliance on her father’s will, which is why she had always preferred Mary’s claim to that of the remaining Grey sisters, each of whom made clandestine marriages.
On 3 January 1567, Mary wrote to say that she accepted the offer of her ‘dearest sister’, subject to a judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will. Since Elizabeth was known to be ready to dissolve Parliament, and had in fact done so on the 2nd, this review was to take place quickly. After one more frustrating exchange of letters, everything was agreed. This was to be the settlement of which Mary had always dreamed. On 8 February, she ordered Melville to return to London. Her health was recovering and she was happy and excited at the prospect of the new treaty.
Then, at two o’clock in the early morning of 10 February, while Melville was still packing his bags, Darnley was assassinated. From the moment the news reached London, Mary’s reconciliation with Elizabeth was a dead letter. When Melville reached London on the 19th, Cecil refused to let him into his house. No further talks took place between Mary and Elizabeth. There would be no judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will.
The theme of the autumn and winter of 1566–7 was reconciliation, and yet in a shocking act of terrorism, the King of Scotland and two of his personal servants were suddenly murdered. The prospect of a dynastic accord between the two British Queens is not in itself proof that Mary played no part in or had no foreknowledge of the assassination. But it makes it improbable. Nothing can be proved by circumstantial evidence. It does, however, create a compelling new context for a reinvestigation of Darnley’s murder, forcing us to consider afresh the true facts of the first British gunpowder plot.