BOTHWELL ALSO GAVE his side of the story in the months following his flight. He dictated a full, if often unreliable account of everything he alleged had happened to him, starting with Mary’s return to Scotland and ending with his flight from the field at Carberry Hill. He then vividly described his escape to exile and imprisonment in Denmark, a tale of such daring and bravado, it excelled even his theft of the gold coins sent covertly by Cecil to aid the rebel Lords of the Congregation in 1559. In many respects, Bothwell’s story is an anticlimax: its chief value is to confirm our impression of his self-serving duplicity. But his account is still worthy of our attention. He had always been a man with a rough side and a smooth side, and to allow him the opportunity to tell his own story is at least to refrain from condemning him unheard.
After leaving Mary at Carberry Hill, Bothwell had galloped with a handful of his followers to Dunbar. There, he was left alone for a fortnight. He was allowed to gain a false sense of security – the vengeful and implacable Morton was in no hurry to begin the chase. But the Confederate Lords meant to hunt him down. On 17 July 1567, they outlawed him as a rebel. A bounty of 1000 crowns was offered to anyone who would bring him back a prisoner to Edinburgh.
By then, he had already sailed north to Banff in Aberdeenshire in the hope of raising troops. This was Gordon country, where Huntly, Bothwell’s erstwhile brother-in-law, dominated the local retinues. But Huntly refused to assist him, saying that ‘he heartily wished both his sister and the Queen rid of so wicked a husband’. Bothwell then withdrew to Spynie Castle, just north of Elgin, the home of his great-uncle, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, who had supervised his early education. When Spynie became too hot to hold him, he fled further north to Kirkwall, capital of the Orkney Islands, where he planned to levy a fleet. As he was Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland, Kirkwall Castle belonged to him, but its keeper, Gilbert Balfour, another of the siblings of his former ally Sir James Balfour, denied him entry and trained the castle guns on his ships. Bothwell stayed for only two days. He sailed northwards again to the Shetland Islands, where Olaf Sinclair, his mother’s kinsman, provided him with money and supplies. Bothwell now planned to escape to France, hoping to rally Guise support for Mary.
The Lords began the pursuit. On 19 August, Kirkcaldy of Grange and Sir William Murray, the Laird of Tullibardine, set sail from Dundee. Their warships were the fastest in Scotland, fitted out with cannons and carrying no fewer than four hundred musketeers. Their orders were to seize Bothwell, if they could find him, and execute him on the spot. The last thing Morton really wanted was that his deadly enemy should be brought back alive to testify against him in a trial for Darnley’s murder. Until this point, Bothwell could not have denounced his co-conspirators without admitting his own guilt, but now he had nothing to lose.
Six days later, the pursuers found their prey. They sailed into Bressay Sound, close to Lerwick, the chief port of the Shetland Islands, where Bothwell’s ships lay at anchor. When Kirkcaldy came into view, Bothwell and many of his men were ashore. Kirkcaldy saw his chance and raced forwards, but Bothwell leapt aboard his own ship and cut the anchor cable. With almost reckless pluck, he sailed over some sunken rocks, grazing the hull, but tempting Kirkcaldy to follow him so that his vessel was holed and sank.
Bothwell escaped to Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, where his squadron regrouped. But Kirkcaldy kept going. He had three warships left. The deadly rivals met in a battle lasting three hours. All seemed to be over when Bothwell’s mainmast was shot away by a cannonball, but no sooner had Kirkcaldy sent a boarding-party to capture him than a violent gale blew up. Bothwell’s expert seamanship now came into its own and he escaped with three of his ships. Kirkcaldy chased him for sixty miles, but Bothwell sailed south-east before the storm, putting an increasing distance between himself and his pursuers and covering the 250 miles of the North Sea between the Shetlands and Norway in record time.
Kirkcaldy was forced to return home empty-handed. Bothwell had got safely away. He hove to at Karm Island, twenty miles north-west of Stavanger. No sooner had he put down his anchor than he was arrested and his vessels brought north to Bergen. He was first detained on a charge of suspected piracy, which forced him to claim his true identity. The rulers of Europe were watching every stage of the crisis in Scotland. The governor of the castle, Eric Rosencrantz, believing he might have Bothwell in his clutches, hedged his bets and entertained him lavishly while awaiting his instructions from above.
By an amazing throw of the dice, Bothwell’s past suddenly came back to haunt him. Who should be living in Bergen with her mother but Anna Throndsen, the beautiful Norwegian girl with whom he had dallied seven years earlier.51 Anna confirmed Bothwell’s identity, and promptly sued him for breach of his promise to marry her. Seeing greater troubles ahead, he settled out of court. He promised her an annuity, to be paid in Scotland, and gave her the smaller of his two remaining ships. This was enough to get the legal proceedings stopped so that he could concentrate on his next hurdle.
Soon Rosencrantz received his orders from the King of Denmark and Norway, Frederick II. He was to arrest Bothwell, whom Frederick wished to exploit as a lever to recover the Norse-speaking Orkney and Shetland Islands from Scotland. The islands had belonged to Denmark until 1469, when they had been pledged as the dowry of Margaret, daughter of Christian I of Denmark, who was to marry Mary’s great-grandfather James III. The Scottish Parliament had legally annexed them in 1472.
At first, Bothwell denied possessing any jewels or valuables, or even any letters or papers; then, when he realized he would not be allowed back to his ships, he admitted to hiding certain papers in the ballast of his flagship. When his letter case was opened, it was found to contain Mary’s letters patent creating him Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland, as well as proclamations and other documents denouncing him as a murderer and traitor. There was even said to be a letter from Mary written after her return to Edinburgh in the hands of the Lords and lamenting the treatment that she had received. As the document was never transcribed or filed away, it is impossible to tell if it ever really existed.
On 23 September, Bothwell was examined by the magistrates of Bergen, after which he was put on board one of Frederick’s own ships and brought south to Denmark. He was sent to the castle of Copenhagen, to be held as a state prisoner. The Confederate Lords were pressing for his extradition, and Frederick was caught in the middle.
Bothwell insisted that he was on his way to France to seek help for Mary, to which end he appealed to Charles IX. This time the letter has survived. It is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, written in fluent French and in Bothwell’s immaculate italic script. He asked for urgent aid for Mary and himself, but Moray had beaten him to it. He had already denounced Bothwell as a pirate, a murderer, and a traitor. He had also reassured Charles of the entente that existed between the Confederate Lords and France, which he said could only prosper if Charles were to press Denmark to repatriate Bothwell for trial.
Charles decided to stay neutral, and so did Frederick. He treated Bothwell generously. He allowed him to live in comfort, to wear velvet clothes, to read books, and occasionally to go hunting or shooting under guard, although he was otherwise confined to his rooms. It was then that Bothwell decided to write his memoirs. He believed that Frederick was unduly influenced by the Confederate Lords’ propaganda. He was out to justify himself, shaping his story to create the most favourable impression. The main action began with his recall from France ten days before Mary’s marriage to Darnley. Bothwell saw himself as the chivalrous knight of medieval romance, hurrying home to rescue his Lady from her wicked barons:
But the seditious Lords did all they could to oppose her, because they wished above everything else that the Queen should have no children, and because they could not bear that anyone should exercise authority in the realm beside themselves. They could clearly foresee that their own influence would be severely reduced by such a marriage.
On Bothwell’s return, Mary gave him an opportunity to prove himself:
The Queen put me in command of an army composed of her loyal subjects and my own particular friends, with whom I did my utmost to drive the Earl of Moray out of Scotland into England. After I had achieved this, Parliament was summoned to enquire and determine as to what goods and estates were to be forfeited to the crown.
Bothwell had fully appreciated that a principal motive of the Rizzio plotters had been to pre-empt the forfeitures in Parliament of the rebels of the Chase-about Raid:
In order to avert these sentences of forfeiture, those of the Earl of Moray’s allies who were still at the Queen’s court stirred up fresh troubles by organizing the murder of Signor David, an Italian, which was done at supper-time in the Queen’s cabinet at Edinburgh Castle,52 when none of her guards was present or even her usual attendants. And if (to avoid danger) some others including myself had not escaped through a back window, we should have been no better dealt with … at the very least, we should have been forced to connive at so villainous a deed.
Bothwell did not hesitate to emphasize his loyalty and service to Mary, but in doing so made a Freudian slip:
When we [Bothwell and Huntly] had escaped from the Queen’s lodging and got to safety, we mustered some of our best friends and her Majesty’s loyal subjects, in order to rescue her and the King her husband from the captivity in which they were detained. We did this partly by guile and partly by force.
Next day, their Majesties set out together for Edinburgh with a goodly force, pursuing Moray and his allies so actively that they were forced to flee into exile. The Queen, moreover, was so indignant at such an assassination, she held them in great hatred, as did also the loyal nobility and the rest of her subjects. But the King she hated the most of all.
Bothwell had forgotten that it was not Moray, but Morton whom Mary had harried into exile after the Rizzio plot. Moray had returned to Holyrood in triumph on the day after Rizzio’s murder, and did not leave Scotland again until after Darnley’s assassination. Bothwell’s account of the noble factions is strangely simplistic. Maitland and Argyll are left out, most likely because they were swinging back towards Mary’s side after her forced abdication. And while Morton’s thirst for revenge after Darnley’s treacherous betrayal of his co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot is touched on, it is subordinated to Moray’s grander project to usurp the throne. This was to become the key theme of Bothwell’s story: that Moray, the arch-villain, had schemed from the beginning to depose his sister. In his eagerness to embellish his account, Bothwell muddled up Morton with Moray, forgetting that Moray had been welcomed home with open arms by his sister after the Rizzio plot. In his overriding bid to demonize Moray, Bothwell decided not to mention Morton, his then ally and leading accomplice, even in his description of Darnley’s murder. Instead, he gave a fanciful account of his own allegedly altruistic efforts to buttress the monarchy in Scotland by nurturing a spirit of reconciliation among the feuding Lords. He even tried to pretend he had considered leaving the hurly-burly of politics for a quiet life on his estates:
After I had negotiated for these exiled Lords the favour they sought, and in particular their permission to return to court,53 I thought about retiring to lead a quiet life after the imprisonments and exile I had suffered. I was tempted to remove myself from this scene of blood feud and revenge.
Only after the failure of Bothwell’s efforts to bring about a lasting reconciliation between the feuding Lords did the murder plot begin. His description of the explosion and its aftermath is trite and unconvincing:
A little while afterwards, the King, who was suffering an attack of syphilis,54 lodged at a place called Kirk o’Field while he convalesced to avoid danger to the health of the Queen and her child. This was done by the common consent of the Queen and of the members of her Council, who wished to ensure the health of all three.
The traitors saw this as their opportunity. They placed a large quantity of gunpowder under the King’s bed, then lit the fuse, blowing him up and killing him. This was done at a house of Sir James Balfour …
On the night of the explosion, several of her councillors were lodged as usual at her palace of Holyroodhouse. I was also lodged there, in the quarter where the guard of fifty men is usually stationed. And while I was still in bed with my first wife, the Earl of Huntly’s sister, her brother came in the morning to inform me of the King’s death, at which I was sorely grieved and many others with me …
Bothwell claimed that he had striven tirelessly to uncover the truth, never imagining for a moment that he should himself be suspected. His name, he sought to argue, had only been mentioned when his enemies and rivals had conspired with each other to prevent him loyally serving Mary by solving the abominable crime. All this is simply incredible, as is Bothwell’s account of his trial:
When the charges against me had been read, and my accusers (especially their principal, the Earl of Lennox, who had been summoned but did not attend),55 were convinced that there was no just cause of complaint against me touching either my person, property or honour, I was, according to the laws and customs of the realm, by the direction of my judges and with the consent of my accusers then present, declared innocent and found not guilty of all that of which I had been accused …
Bothwell then claimed – as had Mary herself – that he had married the Queen at the behest of the very same Lords who were now demanding his extradition. He invoked the Ainslie’s Tavern bond to vindicate himself, arguing that the marriage was forced on him by the nobility. But his account is far more disingenuous than Mary’s. Hers, at least in the more candid version given to the Bishop of Dunblane, was tinged by regret at Bothwell’s deception, whereas he brazened it out with a barefaced lie. He invented a tale in which the signatories of his bond came willingly and eagerly to his house to urge their petition on him:
After I had won my case as I have stated, twenty-eight members of the Parliament came to me at my own house of their own free will and without being asked …
Each of them thanked me particularly for the friendly manner in which I had behaved towards them, adding that the Queen was now a widow, that she had only one child, a young prince; that they would not consent that she should marry a foreigner; and that I appeared to them to be the man most suitable to be her husband.
The reality could not have been more different. Bothwell had been forced to entertain his reluctant ‘supporters’ to supper and had struggled the next day to extort their signatures. Argyll, Maitland, and Atholl had each refused to sign. Nor could Moray have consented as Bothwell falsely insinuated, since he had already left the country on his way to voluntary exile. Bothwell even managed to describe his marriage to Mary without saying anything about his abduction or seduction of her. And his version of the final showdown with the Confederate Lords is unashamedly self-justifying:
The Queen and I marched out of Dunbar with as many men, her loyal subjects, as we could muster in so short a time. We came to within a short distance of Edinburgh, whereupon the rebel forces sallied out and positioned themselves opposite to us at a distance of roughly a cannon-shot.
After a short delay, they sent a mediator to us, who presented us with a written statement of the causes that had brought them there. These were firstly to liberate the Queen from the thraldom in which I was said to hold her, and secondly to revenge the murder of the late King of which I and mine were accused, as I have already described.
I replied to the first point that I was not in any way holding the Queen in thraldom, but on the contrary that I loved and honoured her as she deserved, appealing to her to confirm the truth of what I said.
To the second point, I answered that I continued to deny having participated in, or consented to, the late King’s murder. I added that although I had already been plainly and sufficiently acquitted, I was still ready, if anyone of sufficient honour and noble birth was still inclined to accuse me of such a deed, immediately to defend my honour and my life in single combat in the presence of both armies, as promised in the challenge which I had formerly caused to be published in Edinburgh, and according to the ancient laws of war.
It was subsequently answered that Lord Lindsay, one of the Lords, was prepared to meet me on the field … I so persuaded the Queen and all of them by the many reasons I advanced, that they eventually agreed to allow the single combat to begin.
Bothwell could never bear to admit that, despite Lindsay’s acceptance of his challenge, Mary in a split-second decision had changed her mind and forbidden the man-to-man combat. Instead, he claimed he had waited patiently until late evening for his cowardly adversary to arrive. ‘He did not, however, turn up …’
Finally, Bothwell stated that, while he was still ready to fight to the death for his Queen and his honour, he had no choice but to accept her desire to avoid unnecessary bloodshed:
As night approached, I prepared to give battle to the enemy, putting my battle-line in order, whilst they did the same on the other side.
The Queen, seeing me and her loyal subjects on the one side, and the rebel Lords on the other, ready to begin a battle … was anxious to avoid bloodshed at all costs and so surrendered to them. She crossed the field and went to them, escorted by Kirkcaldy of Grange in order to discuss things and see if matters could be resolved peaceably. And, believing that she might go over to them in safety, without fear of treachery, and that no one would presume to lay hands on her, she asked me not to advance further with my troops …
His efforts at self-exoneration complete, Bothwell ended his dictation on or shortly before 5 January 1568. After correcting his secretary’s work, he had it copied out in duplicate. One of these copies was sent to Frederick II, who cannot have found it convincing: his reaction was to ship Bothwell across the Sound to the greater security of Malmö Castle, then in Denmark but now belonging to Sweden. He was lodged in the north wing of the castle, where he occupied a large, oblong vaulted chamber on the ground floor beneath the royal apartments. The main room had two large south-facing windows opposite the inner courtyard. The closet faced outwards towards the Sound, but wisely had no window for this most experienced of escapees to climb through.
As long as Bothwell was still a piece on Frederick’s diplomatic chessboard, his requests for luxuries would be met. There was little that was inhumane about his treatment, except he was not free. Of course, Bothwell was not a man who easily bore such a restriction. However often he was allowed to go out shooting, he still felt he was locked up in a cage.
Yet he kept his wits about him. When the Confederate Lords commissioned Captain John Clark, a Scottish mercenary serving in the wars of the Danish King, to negotiate his extradition, Bothwell turned the tables. He told Frederick that when Clark had returned to Scotland in 1567 to enlist more troops he had misappropriated the King’s money, using it to pay reinforcements to line up on the side of the Lords at Carberry Hill. The accusation was true, and Clark would later be convicted by a court martial in Denmark.
The Confederate Lords then sent Thomas Buchanan, nephew of the brilliant classical scholar and poet who had written Mary’s masques, to Copenhagen. He attempted to reinvigorate the Lords’ demand for Bothwell’s extradition by disclosing how Mary had sent him ‘certain writings’ from England, including the evidence that had helped him to seal Clark’s fate. The report is vague and uncorroborated, as Buchanan steadfastly refused to name his sources. Although they were said to be ‘men of great estimation’ and ‘worthy of trust’, their identities are impossible to pin down. Moreover, as all they ever appear to have said is that Mary had urged Bothwell ‘to be of good comfort, with sundry other purposes’, it is distinctly possible that his ‘sources’ were fabricated.
Bothwell was said to have sent spies to England, who were to try to speak to Mary in her captivity. Their instructions were to procure the documents Bothwell needed in his efforts to trade his freedom for the Orkney and Shetland Islands. If this were true, it described the actions of a desperate man. The Confederate Lords would never have allowed the islands to be handed back to Denmark, even in exchange for their most wanted enemy. One of these alleged spies was Bothwell’s Danish-born page, a man reputed to be easily mistaken for a Scot as he could speak Lowland Scots like a native. He was said to have carried documents to Mary, whom the reporter described as ‘that woman’. But once again, the details are nebulous and confused. Intriguingly, the younger Buchanan knew without asking that it was his job to send a copy of his final report to Cecil. There was no solid evidence to justify his claims; and yet the mere rumour of a secret correspondence between Mary and Bothwell was enough to create alarm. In the eyes of the Confederate Lords, any form of communication between them would be ‘prejudicial and hurtful to both our countries and to the discontentment of the Queen’s Majesty of England’.
Clark was imprisoned at Dragsholm Castle, a solitary fortress on the edge of Kalundborg Fjord on the north-west coast of Zealand, some sixty miles west of Copenhagen. In June 1573, by which time five years had elapsed since Mary’s flight and imprisonment in England, Bothwell was himself sent there. Legend says that he died there insane after five years of solitary confinement, chained to a wall. But Bothwell was always larger than life. He was an opportunist, a gambler who knew that fortune favoured the brave and who profited from life as he found it. He and Clark, both Scots and both professional military men, buried the hatchet and drowned their sorrows in wine. It is unlikely that Clark ever admitted that his more nefarious activities had included acting as one of Cecil’s spies, writing him reports and accepting English pay. If he had, Bothwell – depending on his mood – would have roared with laughter or else killed Clark on the spot.
By July 1575, the unbridled revelry at Dragsholm had taken its toll. Clark died of excessive drinking, and even Bothwell’s ox-like constitution had started to collapse. As their names were always linked in the bulletins emanating out of Denmark, it was reported that Bothwell himself was dead. It took another four months for proof to arrive in Paris and London that he ‘is but great swollen and not yet dead’. He was the victim of liver or kidney failure, but not quite ready to die.
The merest whisper of Bothwell’s death was enough to animate Mary’s supporters on the Continent. They began to claim that he had made a deathbed confession in which he had exonerated her of all responsibility for Darnley’s murder and taken the blame himself. When Mary heard this, she clutched desperately at the chance to prove her innocence. She wrote to her ambassador in Paris, ‘I have been told of the death of the Earl of Bothwell, and that before he died he made a full confession of his sins, and among the rest, that he acknowledged himself guilty of the murder of the late King my husband … I pray you, therefore, investigate the truth of it by all available means.’
She managed to scrape together 500 French crowns to pay a courier, who was to travel to Denmark and secure a transcript. The man pocketed the money and did nothing. A full-length copy of the ‘confession’ was, meanwhile, sent by Frederick II to Elizabeth, who deposited it in the royal library from which it later disappeared. Mary was furious that Elizabeth refused to share with her or publish a document that she believed could restore her honour and reputation. She was still complaining about this two years later. Catherine de Medici instructed her ambassador to Denmark to obtain a copy, but if it reached her, she too kept its contents to herself.
Only short abstracts now survive from it. According to what seems to be the superior fragment, Bothwell swore that Mary ‘never knew nor consented to the death of the King’. The murder was the work of Bothwell and his friends; it was engineered ‘by his appointment, divers Lords consenting and subscribing thereunto, which yet were not there present at the deed doing’. Their names were Moray, Morton, Lord Robert Stuart, and John Hamilton Archbishop of St Andrews, ‘with divers others, whom he said he could not remember at that present’. Bothwell further confessed that ‘all the friendship which he had of the Queen, he got always by witchcraft and the inventions belonging thereunto’. He had drugged her eau sucrée to seduce her, and then ‘found means to put away his own wife to obtain the Queen’. A slightly fuller variant of this passage said that he had ‘bewitched the Queen to fall in love with him, and so invented means to get rid of his own wife’. Then, ‘after the marriage was consummated, he sought all means how to destroy the infant Prince and the whole nobility that would not fall in with him’.
Bothwell’s ‘confession’ is a blatant forgery. The version that appears to have once been in Cecil’s archive and is now in the British Library used these words: he ‘forgave all the world and was sorrowful for his offences, and did receive the sacrament that all the things he spoke were true, and so he died’. Leaving aside the fact that Bothwell was a Protestant who did not believe in receiving the last rites and that he had refused to attend Catholic services even when Mary took him by the hand, he did not die. He was alive for almost three more years. One of the copies of the ‘confession’ says that Bothwell lay ‘sick unto death in the castle of Malmö’. That is also incorrect. He had, in fact, left Malmö for Dragsholm two years before. Whoever faked these documents did not even check the most basic historical facts.
If that were not proof enough, the roster of Darnley’s murderers does not add up. Morton is named correctly, while Moray had foreknowledge of the assassination and ‘looked through his fingers’. But Sir James Balfour and the Douglases are not mentioned, whereas Lord Robert Stuart, another of James V’s illegitimate children and Mary’s half-brother, and John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews, went down in history only because they attended Mary and Bothwell’s wedding and because the archbishop granted Bothwell a decree annulling his marriage to Huntly’s sister in the Catholic court. Neither was involved in Darnley’s murder, but as both were known to be Bothwell’s supporters, their names were put on the list.
One of the great ironies is that Margaret Douglas, the Countess of Lennox and Darnley’s mother, was so impressed by Bothwell’s ‘confession’, she decided that Mary was the victim of a foul injustice. In the very same month as the abstracts of the ‘confession’ were making the rounds, the Countess wrote a letter of reconciliation to Mary from her house in Hackney, adding a postscript in her own hand. ‘I can’, she said, ‘but wish and pray God for your Majesty’s long and happy estate, till time I may do your Majesty better service … I beseech your Highness pardon these rude lines and accept the good heart of the writer, who loves and honours your Majesty unfeignedly.’ The Countess also sent Mary a token of her affection – a small, but extremely delicate and costly piece of point tresse embroidery, which Mary would regard as one of her most prized possessions. The technique was exceptionally difficult. To obtain the glittering effect that its admirers so coveted, the pattern had to be worked with soft, silvery hair that was mixed with the finest silk or flax thread. As the Countess had worked with strands of her own hair, it was to be a very special gift. Nothing could have been a more powerful signal of the reconciliation between Darnley’s mother and her daughter-in-law.
When the Countess died, Mary said that ‘as soon as she came to learn of my innocence, she refrained from any further criticism of me, even going so far as to repudiate anything that was avowed against me in her name’. As Bothwell’s ‘confession’ is so obviously a forgery, the true significance of the Countess’s reconciliation with Mary is to show how fragile and poorly documented the original proof against her must have been.
Bothwell’s ‘confession’ was to have a similar effect on Mary’s impressionable young son. James had never seen his mother again after she had kissed him goodbye the day before she was abducted by Bothwell. He had remained with the Earl and Countess of Mar, who created a household for him at Stirling Castle and supervised his upbringing. He played regularly with Mar’s own children, who taught him to ride and hunt. These would be his favourite sports, but he also loved archery and was presented with innumerable sets of bows and arrows. James was given the best possible education. He was taught to speak Latin before he could speak Scots, becoming fluent in it as well as in Greek and French. He was also brought up as a Protestant. One of his tutors was George Buchanan, who by now ranked among the chief of Mary’s vilifiers56 and whose scholastic regime included regular beatings as well as republican tirades against divine-right monarchy. James was repeatedly flogged to encourage him to study, which worked to the extent that he could quote classical authors by heart for the rest of his life. But what he must most vividly have remembered were the strictures he received from Buchanan against his mother, who he was assured had been a tyrant, an adulteress, and the woman who had murdered his father.
James was ten and a half years old when he suddenly noticed the Laird of Tullibardine avidly reading something and pointing out passages to his friends. James insisted on seeing for himself what was causing so much interest. It was a copy of Bothwell’s ‘confession’. At first, the boy said nothing, but his mood changed to one of ‘bon visage’. Finally, he said, ‘Have I not reason to be glad after all the terrible accusations and calumnies against the Queen my mother?’ Then, he added triumphantly to the Laird: ‘I’ve now seen such a clear proof of her innocence!’
On 14 April 1578, Bothwell died at Dragsholm. As was customary for state prisoners, his body was carried to the promontory that juts into the fjord a mile or so from the castle and buried at the parish church of Faarevejle. It was enveloped in a linen shroud and placed in a wide oak coffin. His head was wrapped in a white linen cloth lined with green silk and laid on a white satin pillow. We know this, because the coffin was opened in 1858, when a mummified body was discovered in near perfect condition. Aged forty-three, but said to look much older after a decade in prison, Bothwell stood just over five and a half feet tall. His dark-red hair could still be seen, liberally flecked with grey. An English antiquarian who came to view the body pronounced it as belonging to ‘an ugly Scotsman’. Others reserved judgement, not just over the deceased’s appearance, but also over his identity.
Whether Bothwell’s or not, the head had posthumous adventures of the sort he would have appreciated. It was first displayed as a trophy on a writing desk at Dragsholm, then used by children as a football. By 1935, it had been reunited with the corpse and reburied in the crypt of the church. After the Second World War, the remains were once more exhumed, this time as a tourist attraction. Until 1975 or thereabouts, the body – by then no more than a bare skeleton – was exhibited in a glass case at Faarevejle until protests were received. Dragsholm Castle is now a hotel, where Bothwell’s ghost is said to walk at night. Such was the ironic end of a man who altered the course of history and aspired to be buried amongst kings.