WHEN BOTHWELL HAD been acquitted of Darnley’s murder in a rigged trial and set about canvassing support for his marriage to Mary, a dramatic turnabout had taken place in the manner of the cover-up of the events at Kirk o’Field. Up until then, the Lords had closed ranks to suppress any evidence that might help to solve the murder mystery, in particular that of the women living in the nearby cottages. But when Bothwell abducted Mary and seduced her, breaking his pact with Morton, the Lords turned their full attention to accusing him of the crime, and uncovering as much evidence as possible to prove it, before he became too powerful.
Then, when Mary was imprisoned at Lochleven and forced to abdicate, she too had to be implicated in the murder. The Lords had deposed an anointed Queen. It had to be justified, which was done by claiming that she was no longer fit to rule. She was not a proper Queen. She had disqualified herself because she was guilty of ‘moral turpitude’. Knox’s stereotype that a Catholic woman ruler was by definition motivated by unbridled sexual lust provided the template. Mary’s ‘furious love’ for Bothwell had ‘proved’ that she was unable to control her passions. Carnal lust had led her first to commit adultery with a married man, and then to conspire with him to murder her husband so that she could be free to marry her lover.
Everything seemed to connect in a steamy story of sex and violence, adultery and murder, designed to titillate as well as to shock. The author chosen by the Confederate Lords to tell their tale was none other than George Buchanan. His credentials were perfect for the role. He was a Calvinist and a republican, the friend and ‘master’ of Thomas Randolph, Elizabeth’s first ambassador to Scotland, in his student days in Paris. Later at Holyrood, he had read Livy with Mary in the afternoons. When commissioned to stage the entertainments on the theme of ‘reconciliation’ for the baptism of Prince James at Stirling Castle, he had reached the pinnacle of his courtly career. Buchanan now wrote, not a masque, but an antimasque. Fact was mingled with fiction to create the most artful piece of character assassination ever devised in Scotland.
Mary had rewarded Buchanan generously. How could he betray her so shamelessly? The explanation is that he was first and foremost a Lennox client. His loyalty to Darnley took priority over his allegiance to Mary. He was born in Gaelic-speaking Lennox territory near Glasgow, the son of an impoverished lairdly family. He owed his education to local philanthropy for which he felt himself to be for ever indebted. Buchanan had also kept up his links to his old Huguenot friends in Paris. He was close to Moray, to whom he had dedicated a book on educational reform. Moray in return gave him the lucrative post of Principal of St Leonard’s College, the richest if never the most academically dynamic of the three colleges of the University of St Andrews. When Darnley was murdered, Buchanan was thunderstruck. His King was slain; his earliest fealties called him to action. He threw in his lot with the Confederate Lords, especially Moray, playing a key role as moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk after the battle of Carberry Hill, when he joined Knox and Craig in rallying the Protestants to justify Mary’s imprisonment. Then, when she was deposed and Moray became regent, Buchanan found that he had attached himself to the most powerful junta in Scottish politics.
His close alignment to Moray enabled Buchanan to come into his own. For some time he had been striving to surpass Knox’s ideas and replace them with a more sophisticated theory that fused the classical ideas of ancient Greece and Rome with Protestantism. His ideal was republican Rome, with its tradition of the civitas libera (’free state’). He was consistently repelled by the ‘tyranny’ represented by the idea of empire and abhorred ideals of ‘divine-right’ monarchy, dismissing the kings, popes, and emperors of the Middle Ages as charlatans and tyrants. He showed a particular distaste for the colonial idea of ‘empire’ in the New World, which he had first encountered while teaching languages at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
His central premise was that rulers were chosen by the people to perform a set of defined functions. If they failed to carry out their obligations, they broke the terms of the contract laid down in their coronation oath. If this happened, the people had the right to depose them and appoint someone better qualified to fulfil the duties of the royal office. Buchanan skilfully reworked the theory of monarchy in a quasi-republican idiom to argue that rulers were accountable to those who elected them. According to his model, the ruler, far from being above the law by royal prerogative, was subject to it at all times: to flout the law was not merely to oppose the will or welfare of the people, but to declare oneself a ‘tyrant’ and an ‘enemy to God’. If Darnley had been crowned King and not assassinated, Buchanan would have kept his radical ideas to himself. With a scion of the Lennoxes on the throne, his view of monarchy would have been different. But when his liege lord was savagely murdered, he spoke out. He heartily approved of Mary’s forced abdication, which he regarded as one of the best practical illustrations of his theory of royal accountability in eight hundred years of Scottish history.
When Mary lost the battle of Langside and fled to England, causing Cecil to ask the Confederate Lords to send him the ‘manner of the proofs’ and other ‘evidence’ against her, it was Buchanan whom Moray chose to compile the Lords’ story. His report would take the form of a dossier: a compendium of the allegations against Mary citing all the relevant facts. Moray would then forward it to Cecil, who would use it to appease Elizabeth, who loathed rebels and was angry and incredulous at Mary’s deposition, for which she judged there had never been anything even approaching sufficient grounds.
The dossier was to be the case for the prosecution. By collating all the evidence, Cecil meant to help Moray to destroy Mary. He knew it would be an uphill struggle. Elizabeth was not alone in disputing Cecil’s conspiratorial view of Mary or refusing to presume her ‘guilt’. The more traditional of the English landed nobles, led by the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Arundel, and Lord Lumley, agreed with her. Although willing to conform outwardly to the Protestant religious settlement, they had deep-rooted Catholic sympathies. Norfolk, the grandson of Henry VIII’s commander who had routed the Scots at the battle of Solway Moss, was barely a Protestant: the merest scratch would reveal a Catholic underneath. His allies, Arundel and Lumley, were undeniably Catholics. They vociferously supported Elizabeth’s refusal to put religion ahead of hereditary right when considering the succession to the throne and were convinced that an attack on Mary’s authority in Scotland would be the prelude to a similar attack on Elizabeth’s power in England.
Norfolk and his allies viewed the Confederate Lords as the natural enemies of monarchy and royal government and were deeply suspicious of Cecil and his inner circle. The future of divine-right monarchy in the British Isles would hang in the balance if Mary’s forced abdication were to be upheld. An anointed Queen was accountable to God alone. Mary was not even English, so how could she be accountable to the Queen of England or to English judges? Cecil evaded such awkward questions by arguing that Scotland was a satellite state of England, and therefore Elizabeth had jurisdiction because she was Mary’s feudal superior. It was a tenuous claim; but it was at least a way of justifying a quasi-judicial ‘investigation’ into her ‘crimes’, which would certainly be necessary if Elizabeth were to be satisfied that the Lords were men of honour, genuinely seeking to right a terrible wrong, and not merely rebels.
For his part, Moray was crafty and circumspect, nudging Cecil into an irrevocable commitment to attack Mary. The Confederate Lords, he said at first, had all the evidence they needed to incriminate Mary in Darnley’s murder. As soon as Cecil’s attention had been grabbed, Moray backtracked, asking if the judges to be deputed to hear the case in England could first be invited to examine the evidence in camera and give an informal pre-judgement. Then, the Scottish Lords would know for certain if their case would stick, and if not, exactly what further material would need to be collected to make it do so.
On 22 June 1568, a month after Mary’s flight across the Solway into England, Moray sent Cecil a copy of Buchanan’s dossier, written in Latin. No version of this Latin text can be found, but the dossier was shortly afterwards translated into Lowland Scots for the Earl of Lennox, whose manuscript has been carefully preserved. It is entitled ‘An information … whereby it evidently appears that Mary, now Dowager Queen of Scots, not only was privy of the horrible and unworthy murder perpetrated on the person of the King of good memory, but also was the very instrument, chief organ and cause of that unnatural cruelty.’
As a blend of fact and fiction, Buchanan’s story is a masterpiece. He claimed that Mary’s crimes were so far premeditated that she had first imagined them after the Rizzio plot, six months earlier than even the Confederate Lords themselves had previously alleged. Her indiscretions had supposedly begun on holiday at Alloa, just a few weeks after her son was born. Then, when she returned to Edinburgh, instead of abandoning her liaison, she had intensified it and had continued to gratify her infatuation for Bothwell while openly shunning her husband.
Buchanan had fixed on the earliest possible date for the beginning of Mary’s alleged affair that avoided any imputation that Prince James was not Darnley’s legitimate heir. He claimed that Mary had flaunted herself while on holiday, leaping straight into Bothwell’s arms:
What her usage was in Alloa needs not to be rehearsed, but it may be well so said that it exceeded measure and all womanly behaviour … but even as she returned to Edinburgh57 [after also visiting the Water of Megget and Glenartney] … what her behaviour was, it needs not to be kept secret being in the mouths of so many: the Earl of Bothwell abused her body at his pleasure, having passage in at the back door … This she has more than once confessed herself … using only the threadbare excuse that the Lady Reres gave him access …
The innuendo was deliberate. When Buchanan referred to Bothwell ‘having passage in at the back door’, he was echoing the main charge of Ane Ballat (a ballad) issued by the Confederate Lords accusing the illicit lovers of the ‘beastly buggery Sodom has not seen’. And yet, he had failed to check his facts properly. A closer investigation of those who had accompanied Mary to Alloa would have revealed that Moray had been there throughout. He had witnessed everything that had happened there, but at the time had said nothing whatever about Mary’s supposed misbehaviour.58
But Buchanan was never a man to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story. Mary, he brazenly continued, had relied on a pimp. She had used the services of Lady Reres, a niece of Cardinal Beaton. Reres was middle-aged, ‘corpulent’, and overweight, the stereotype of a common bawd, who had led Bothwell secretly to Mary’s boudoir for their sexual encounters, one day meeting with a comic accident when she had been forced to climb a high garden wall, had fallen off, and tumbled into a lubberly heap on the ground. It was an incredible yarn because, far from helping Bothwell, Reres was one of his discarded mistresses. Drury, Bedford’s deputy at Berwick-on-Tweed, had warned Cecil in one of his handwritten reports that, rather than conniving in their alleged adultery, Reres was so jealous when Mary had taken Bothwell as her protector that she was banished from court, her place being taken by Bothwell’s sister.
Buchanan, meanwhile, was getting into his stride. Poor Darnley, according to the dossier, had been denied his conjugal rights. All his threats, sulks, plots, and paranoia were to be forgotten altogether. Instead, Mary’s ‘shamed’ and ‘cuckolded’ husband – who was, of course, the hero, victim, and martyr of the Confederate Lords’ story – was depicted in this sanitized version of history as a saintly and statesmanlike figure exactly matching the image propagated by the Lennoxes in their placards and notices affixed to the doors and walls of the churches and public buildings of Edinburgh.
One of the key incidents in Buchanan’s narrative was the episode at Jedburgh in early October 1566, where Mary had ridden to preside at her Justice Ayre or travelling court and where Bothwell, who had preceded her by a couple of days, had been seriously wounded in a sword-fight with his old enemies the Elliots of Liddesdale, a border bandit clan. According to the dossier, when Mary heard of Bothwell’s clash with the Elliots, she galloped furiously to Jedburgh and next day to the Hermitage, arriving just in time to meet her supposed lover for a tryst before returning to Jedburgh the same day. Her desperate ride was ‘in the company of such a convoy as no private man of honest reputation would have entered among’. But Buchanan simply refused to report the facts accurately. Mary, in reality, had waited a week until the formalities of the Justice Ayre were completed before riding to visit Bothwell with Moray at her side for every step of the journey.59 She saw him in the presence of her Council and stayed for only two hours. And yet, it was Buchanan’s version of events that was to come down in history. In the eighteenth century, his story would become so popular that it provided the springboard for one of the most notorious Marian forgeries: the supposedly ‘new’ or ‘Crawford’ chronicle that was counterfeited by a presbyterian minister who inserted his own voyeuristic material into an older source to provide graphic sexual detail.
Back at Jedburgh, as Buchanan falsely alleged, Mary had moved Bothwell ‘from his accustomed lodging’ and placed him ‘in the Queen’s house in the chamber directly under her own’. There, in spite of his severe injuries and the fact that she had herself been close to death when her gastric ulcer burst, they carried on their sordid affair as if nothing untoward had happened, until the news reached a shocked and distraught Darnley. Filled with righteous indignation, and knowing himself to be the wronged party, Mary’s lawful husband ‘delayed not but with all speed came to Jedburgh’. But there is no independent evidence that Bothwell had ever been lodged in Mary’s house; and Darnley had come to Jedburgh later and reluctantly, quarrelling with his wife as soon as he arrived. Buchanan was out to create the strongest possible presumption of a motive for murder. He attempted to show how Mary had plotted to rid herself of Darnley:
About the fifth day of November, removing from Jedburgh to Kelso … she said that unless she were quit of the King by any means or other, she could never have one good day in her life, and rather than that she should fail therein, she would rather be the instrument of her own death.
Returning to Craigmillar beside Edinburgh, where she rested until the end of November, she renewed the same purpose which she spoke of before at Kelso in an audience with my Lord of Moray, the Earl of Huntly, the Earl of Argyll and Maitland, propounding that the way to be quit of the King and make it look best was to begin an action of divorce against him … whereunto it was answered how that could not goodly be done without hazard, since by the doing thereof the Prince her son should be declared [a] bastard … which answer, when she had thought over it, she left that conceit and opinion of the divorce and ever from that day forth imagined and devised how to cut him away as by the sequel of this discourse more plainly shall appear …
Buchanan was distorting the known facts to create an interpretation of almost complete fantasy. The truth was that the Lords had suggested a divorce to Mary, not the other way round. She had said that she wished herself dead at Craigmillar Castle, but not at Kelso. And she had never asked to be quit of Darnley ‘by any means or other’. When Maitland’s plan to offer her a divorce from Darnley had been put to her at Craigmillar, she had replied: ‘I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honour or conscience, and therefore I pray you rather let the matter be in the state as it is.’60
None of this was of any concern to Buchanan. He was determined to establish a motive for Darnley’s murder and, according to his account, Mary had slept with Bothwell after her son’s baptism for eight successive nights, ‘using that filthiness almost without cloak or respect of shame or honesty’. While in bed with her lover, she had plotted a ‘device’ to kill her husband, choosing a deserted house at Kirk o’Field as the place where the murder would be committed. She had then ridden to Glasgow to fetch her doomed spouse, all the while conveniently laying down a paper trail for posterity in her letters to Bothwell, who had stayed behind in Edinburgh to bait the trap:
Her mind, as well appears by her letters,61 [was] to bring him to Edinburgh to his fatal end and final destruction, which she would never attempt not having her son in her own hands. She left [Prince James] at Holyroodhouse. She then left [for Glasgow] accompanied by the Hamiltons62 and such others as bore her husband no favour.
Buchanan had got into his stride. He was enjoying himself, but paying insufficient attention to the chronology of the events he purported to describe. In reality, Mary had been escorted by Huntly and Bothwell as far as Callander House on the first stage of her journey to Glasgow to fetch her husband. It was only on the second stage that the Hamiltons had been her bodyguards. And no sooner had Bothwell returned to Edinburgh than he departed again for Liddesdale on the border, which means he could not have been in Edinburgh receiving Mary’s final instructions to prepare the scene of the crime at Kirk o’Field at the time Buchanan claimed he was.63
Perhaps aware of a possible chronological discrepancy, Buchanan again alleged that Mary had ‘devised’ with Bothwell to lure Darnley to his death at Kirk o’Field even before leaving Edinburgh for Glasgow:
In the meantime, the Earl of Bothwell, according to the device appointed between them, prepared for the King the lodging where he ended his life. In what place it stood, enough [people] know and enough thought even that it was a ruin unsuitable to have lodged a prince into, standing in a solitary place at the uttermost part of the town, separate from all company …
He was lodged at Kirk o’Field [for the good air] howbeit in Scotland at the beginning of February a sick man will be better content with a draught-proof and warm chamber as [with] any air in the fields.
Lay she not in the house [in the room] under his on the Thursday and Friday before he was murdered to give the people the impression that she was beginning to entertain him?
Once Darnley had been ensnared at Kirk o’Field, Mary kept him sweet. Then, supposedly on a signal from her trusted servant Nicholas Hubert, whom she nicknamed ‘French Paris’, she returned abruptly to Holyrood on the pretext of attending the masque in honour of Bastian Pages and his bride:
As soon as she saw [French Paris],64 she knew that the powder was put in the lower [part of the] house under the King’s bed, for Paris had the keys both of the front and back doors of that house, and the King’s servants had all the remaining keys of the lodging. And so with feigned laughter she said, ‘I have given offence to Bastian by not attending the masque in honour of his marriage tonight, for which purpose I will return to Holyrood’.
She then departed, allegedly spending the rest of the evening with Bothwell,65 who later ‘passed to his chamber and there changed his hose and doublet and put his side cloak about him and passed up to the accomplishment of that most horrible murder’.
Mary, insisted Buchanan, was unable to sleep as she was so animated and excited at the prospect of Darnley’s murder. She had scarcely moved even when she heard the fatal ‘crack’: ‘for she needed not, understanding the purpose as she did’.
Hearing the shock of the explosion, Bothwell quickly rose from his bed,66 and accompanied by Huntly, Argyll and others came to her to explain ‘how the King’s lodging was raised and blown in the air and himself dead, [at] which news her passions were not so great nor her face so heavy as one in her state ought to have been – not even if he had not been her husband but an ordinary man – for the unworthiness and strange example of the deed’. Mary supposedly received the news of her bereavement in silence. She then ‘took her rest with no sorrowful countenance for anything that had happened’. Belatedly, she ordered her household into mourning, but could not keep up the pretence for very long: ‘Of the forty days deuil she could not tarry at Holyroodhouse above ten or twelve days, and that with great difficulty being in most great hard case how to counterfeit deuil and nothing less in her mind.’
In the relaxing surroundings of Seton, Mary disported herself with Bothwell as if the explosion had never happened. Using her customary guile, she placed her lover in a set of rooms adjacent to the kitchens so that he could creep along a servants’ passage used for the delivery of food to her apartments to cavort with her. But Bothwell was already married and rumours of his affair were seeping out. To avert a scandal, it was time for him to divorce his wife and marry the Queen. Since a subterfuge would be required to justify such outrageous conduct, Mary had allegedly planned a collusive abduction in which she would pretend to be kidnapped and ravished. As with her initial conspiracy to murder Darnley, she would herself create the evidence needed by her enemies. One of her own ‘letters’ written ‘out of Linlithgow’, according to Buchanan’s dossier, would prove her intentions:67
It could not be without scandal that the Queen should go openly to bed with the Earl of Bothwell, who had a married wife of his own. Howbeit of before and then, they spared no time to fulfil their ungodly appetite, yet somewhat to cover her honesty she pretended to be ravished. This was brought to pass shortly after she returned from Stirling to Edinburgh, and whether it proceeded of herself or not, her letter written to the Earl of Bothwell out of Linlithgow can declare.
As soon as the lovers had reached Dunbar, Bothwell began the proceedings to divorce his wife. After his wedding to Mary, many of the Lords went into internal exile; and yet Mary was by then a changed woman: even those Lords who stood by her were badly treated.
Being conveyed by him to Dunbar, without delay they caused a divorce [to] be moved in double form against his lawful wife … [When they returned to Edinburgh] she declared she was at liberty, and so within eight days passed to the consummation of that ungodly marriage that all the world counts naughty and a mocking of God.
The time was not long between the same pretended marriage which was made on 15 May 1567, and the 15th day of June thereafter, when after the said Earl’s fleeing, she came to the Lords [who had] assembled for revenge of the murder, and yet in that month’s space what confusion and corruption was there to behold – it was marvellous! All noblemen for the most part had withdrawn themselves, and such as stayed behind, how affectionately that ever they showed themselves to her Majesty, yet were they in no better grace than the others that utterly abandoned the court …
Wrong facts apart, the Confederate Lords’ story would be clear and consistent. It set out the charges plainly. There were three counts directed at Mary:
(1) adultery with Bothwell, both before and after Darnley’s murder;
(2) conspiracy to murder Darnley in January 1567;
(3) collusive abduction to enable Mary and Bothwell to justify their marriage.
The sensational evidence in the form of eight incriminating ‘letters’ from Mary to Bothwell that Moray would produce as the proof of the allegations in Buchanan’s dossier are almost evenly split between these topics. Two letters would be about Darnley’s murder, three would be love letters, and three would relate to the abduction. Of the love letters, two would also refer to the murder, and of the murder letters, one would also be a love letter.
Moray first told Cecil he had these letters on the same day as he sent his secretary to London with the dossier. ‘We have’, he said, ‘such letters [of Mary’s] … that sufficiently in our opinion proves her consenting to the murder of the King her lawful husband.’ He would make ‘copies’ of them, translated into Scots, and it was these that he wished the judges who were to consider Mary’s ‘guilt’ in England to examine in camera and comment on before the original documents in French were finally laid on the table.
The case against Mary had taken on a dramatic new twist. How and when did these seemingly devastating documents come into the possession of Moray and the Confederate Lords? What did they actually say? And could they be genuine letters by Mary? To these, the most searching and momentous questions about the life of Mary, Queen of Scots we must now turn, for it is upon them that her honour and reputation both then and now depend.