The Mystery of Mary Stuart

There was something ‘divine,’ Elizabeth said, in the face and manner which won the hearts of her gaolers in Loch Leven and in England. ‘Heaven bless that sweet face!’ cried the people in the streets as the Queen rode by, or swept along with the long train, the ‘targetted tails’ and ‘stinking pride of women,’ that Knox denounced.

She was gay, as when Randolph met her, in no more state than a burgess’s wife might use, in the little house of St. Andrews, hard by the desecrated Cathedral. She could be madly mirthful, dancing, or walking the black midnight streets of Edinburgh, masked, in male apparel, or flitting ‘in homely attire,’ said her enemies, about the Market Cross in Stirling. She loved, at sea, ‘to handle the boisterous cables,’ as Buchanan tells. Pursuing her brother, Moray, on a day of storm, or hard on the doomed Huntly’s track among the hills and morasses of the North; or galloping through the red bracken of the October moors, and the hills of the robbers, to Hermitage; her energy outwore the picked warriors in her company. At other times, in a fascinating languor, she would lie long abed, receiving company in the French fashion, waited on by her Maries, whose four names ‘are four sweet symphonies,’ Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming and Mary Livingstone. To the Council Board she would bring her woman’s work, embroidery of silk and gold. She was fabled to have carried pistols at her saddle-bow in war, and she excelled in matches of archery and pall-mall.

Her costumes, when she would be queenly, have left their mark on the memory of men: the ruff from which rose the snowy neck; the brocaded bodice, with puffed and jewelled sleeves and stomacher; the diamonds, gifts of Henri II. or of Diane; the rich pearls that became the spoil of Elizabeth; the brooches enamelled with sacred scenes, or scenes from fable. Many of her jewels – the ruby tortoise given by Riccio; the enamel of the mouse and the ensnared lioness, passed by Lethington as a token into her dungeon of Loch Leven; the diamonds bequeathed by her to one whom she might not name; the red enamelled wedding-ring, the gift of Darnley; the diamond worn in her bosom, the betrothal present of Norfolk – are, to our fancy, like the fabled star-ruby of Helen of Troy, that dripped with blood-gouts which vanished as they fell. Riccio, Darnley, Lethington, Norfolk, the donors of these jewels, they were all to die for her, as Bothwell, too, was to perish, the giver of the diamond carried by Paris, the recipient of the black betrothal ring enamelled with bones and tears. ‘Her feet go down to death,’ her feet that were so light in the dance, ‘her steps take hold on hell… Her lips drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.’ The lips that dropped as honeycomb, the laughing mouth, could wildly threaten, and vainly rage or beseech, when she was entrapped at Carberry; or could waken pity in the sternest Puritan when, half-clad, her bosom bare, her loose hair flowing, she wailed from her window to the crowd of hostile Edinburgh.

She was of a high impatient spirit: we seem to recognise her in an anecdote told by the Black Laird of Ormistoun, one of Darnley’s murderers, in prison before his execution. He had been warned by his brother, in a letter, that he was suspected of the crime, and should ‘get some good way to purge himself.’ He showed the letter to Bothwell, who read it, and gave it to Mary. She glanced at it, handed it to Huntly, ‘and thereafter turnit unto me, and turnit her back, and gave ane thring with her shoulder, and passit away, and spake nothing to me.’ But that ‘thring’ spoke much of Mary’s mood, unrepentant, contemptuous, defiant.

Mary’s gratitude was not of the kind proverbial in princes. In September 1571, when the Ridolfi plot collapsed, and Mary’s household was reduced, her sorest grief was for Archibald Beaton, her usher, and little Willie Douglas, who rescued her from Loch Leven. They were to be sent to Scotland, which meant death to both, and she pleaded pitifully for them. To her servants she wrote: ‘I thank God, who has given me strength to endure, and I pray Him to grant you the like grace. To you will your loyalty bring the greatest honour, and whensoever it pleases God to set me free, I will never fail you, but reward you according to my power… Pray God that you be true men and constant, to such He will never deny his grace, and for you, John Gordon and William Douglas, I pray that He will inspire your hearts. I can no more. Live in friendship and holy charity one with another, bearing each other’s imperfections… You, William Douglas, be assured that the life which you hazarded for me shall never be destitute while I have one friend alive.’

In a trifling transaction she writes: ‘Rather would I pay twice over, than injure or suspect any man.’

In the long lament of the letters written during her twenty years of captivity, but a few moods return and repeat themselves, like phrases in a fugue. Vain complaints, vain hopes, vain intrigues with Spain, France, the Pope, the Guises, the English Catholics, succeed each other with futile iteration. But always we hear the note of loyalty even to her humblest servants, of sleepless memory of their sacrifices for her, of unstinting and generous gratitude. Such was the Queen’s ‘natural,’ mon naturel: with this character she faced the world: a lady to live and die for: and many died.

This woman, sensitive, proud, tameless, fierce, and kind, was browbeaten by the implacable Knox: her priests were scourged and pilloried, her creed was outraged every day; herself scolded, preached at, insulted; her every plan thwarted by Elizabeth. Mary had reason enough for tears even before her servant was slain almost in her sight by her witless husband and the merciless Lords. She could be gay, later, dancing and hunting, but it may well be that, after this last and worst of cruel insults, her heart had now become hard as the diamond; and that she was possessed by the evil spirits of loathing, and hatred, and longing for revenge. It had not been a hard heart, but a tender; capable of sorrow for slaves at the galley oars. After her child’s birth, when she was holiday-making at Alloa, according to Buchanan, with Bothwell and his gang of pirates, she wrote to the Laird of Abercairnie, bidding him be merciful to a poor woman and her ‘company of puir bairnis’ whom he had evicted from their ‘kindly rowme,’ or little croft.

Her more than masculine courage her enemies have never denied. Her resolution was incapable of despair; ‘her last word should be that of a Queen.’ Her plighted promise she revered, but, in such an age, a woman’s weapon was deceit.

She was the centre and pivot of innumerable intrigues. The fierce nobles looked on her as a means for procuring lands, office, and revenge on their feudal enemies. To the fiercer ministers she was an idolatress, who ought to die the death, and, meanwhile, must be thwarted and insulted. To France, Spain, and Austria she was a piece in the game of diplomatic chess. To the Pope she seemed an instrument that might win back both Scotland and England for the Church, while the English Catholics regarded her as either their lawful or their future Queen. To Elizabeth she was, naturally, and inevitably, and, in part, by her own fault, a deadly rival, whatever feline caresses might pass between them: gifts of Mary’s heart, in a heart-shaped diamond; Elizabeth’s diamond ‘like a rock,’ a rock in which was no refuge. Yet Mary was of a nature so large and unsuspicious that, on the strength of a ring and a promise, she trusted herself to Elizabeth, contrary to the advice of her staunchest adherents. She was no natural dissembler, and with difficulty came to understand that others could be false. Her sense of honour might become perverted, but she had a strong native sense of honour.

One thing this woman wanted, a master. Even before Darnley and she were wedded, at least publicly, Randolph wrote, ‘All honour that may be attributed unto any man by a wife, he hath it wholly and fully.’ In her authentic letters to Norfolk, when, a captive in England, she regarded herself as betrothed to him, we find her adopting an attitude of submissive obedience. The same tone pervades the disputed Casket Letters, to Bothwell, and is certainly in singular consonance with the later, and genuine epistles to Norfolk. But the tone – if the Casket Letters are forged – may have been borrowed from what was known of her early submission to Darnley.

The second dramatis persona is Darnley, ‘The Young Fool.’ Concerning Darnley but little is recorded in comparison with what we know of Mary. He was the son, by the Earl of Lennox, a royal Stewart, of that daughter whom Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII., and widow of James IV., bore to her second husband, the Earl of Angus. Darnley’s father regarded himself as next to the Scottish crown, for the real nearest heir, the head of the Hamiltons, the Duke of Chatelherault, Lennox chose to consider as illegitimate. After playing a double and dishonest part in the troubled years following the death of James V., Lennox retired to England with his wife, a victim of the suspicions of Elizabeth.[6] The education of his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, seems to have been excellent, as far as the intellect and the body are concerned. The letter which, as a child of nine, he wrote to Mary Tudor, speaking of a work of his own, ‘The New Utopia,’ is in the new ‘Roman’ hand, carried to the perfection of copperplate. The Lennox MSS. say that ‘the Queen was stricken with the dart of love by the comliness of his sweet behaviour, personage, wit, and vertuous qualities, as well in languages[7] and lettered sciencies, as also in the art of music, dancing, and playing on instruments.’ When his murderers had left his room at midnight, his last midnight, his chamber-child begged him to play, while a psalm was sung, but his hand, he replied, was out for the lute, so say the Lennox Papers. Physically he was ‘a comely Prince of a fair and large stature, pleasant in countenance … well exercised in martial pastimes upon horseback as any Prince of that age.’ The Spanish Ambassador calls him ‘an amiable youth.’ But it is plain that ‘the long lad,’ the gentil hutaudeau, with his girlish bloom, and early tendency to fulness of body, was a spoiled child. His mother, a passionate intriguer, kept this before him, that, as great-grandson of Henry VII., and as cousin of Mary Stuart, he should unite the two crowns. There were Catholics enough in England to flatter the pride of a future king, though now in exile. This Prince in partibus, like his far-away descendant, Prince Charles Edward, combined a show of charming manners, when he chose to charm, with an arrogant and violent petulance, when he deemed it safe to be insulting. At his first arrival in Scotland he won golden opinions, ‘his courteous dealing with all men is well spoken of.’ As his favour with Mary waxed he ‘dealt blows where he knew that they would be taken;’ he is said to have drawn his dagger on an official who brought him a disappointing message, and his foolish freedom of tongue gave Moray the alarm. It was soon prophesied that he ‘could not continue long.’ ‘To all honest men he is intolerable, and almost forgetful of her already, that has adventured so much for his sake. What shall become of her or what life with him she shall lead, that already taketh so much upon him as to control and command her, I leave it to others to think.’ So Randolph, the English Ambassador, wrote as early as May, 1565. She was ‘blinded, transported, carried I know not whither or which way, to her own confusion and destruction:’ words of omen that were fulfilled.

Whether Elizabeth let Darnley go to Scotland merely for Mary’s entanglement, whether Mary fell in love with the handsome accomplished lad (as Randolph seems to prove) or not, are questions then, and now, disputed. The Lennox Papers, declaring that she was smitten by the arrow of love; and her own conduct, at first, make it highly probable that she entertained for the gentil hutaudeau a passion, or a passionate caprice.

Darnley, at least, acted like a new chemical agent in the development of Mary’s character. She had been singularly long-suffering; she had borne the insults and outrages of the extreme Protestants; she had leaned on her brother, Moray, and on Lethington; following or even leading these advisers to the ruin of Huntly, her chief coreligionist. Though constantly professing, openly to Knox, secretly to the Pope, her desire to succour the ancient Church, she was obviously regarded, in Papal circles, as slack in the work. She had been pliant, she had endured the long calculated delays of Elizabeth, as to her marriage, with patience; but, so soon as Darnley crossed her path, she became resolute, even reckless. Despite the opposition, interested, or religious, or based on the pretext of religion, which Moray and his allies offered, Mary wedded Darnley. She found him a petulant, ambitious boy; sullen, suspicious, resentful, swayed by the ambition to be a king in earnest, but too indolent in affairs for the business of a king.

At tennis, with Riccio, or while exercising his great horses, his favourite amusement, Darnley was pining to use his jewelled dagger. In the feverish days before the deed it is probable that he kept his courage screwed up by the use of stimulants, to which he was addicted. That he devoted himself to loose promiscuous intrigue injurious to his health, is not established, though, when her child was born, Mary warned Darnley that the babe was ‘only too much his son,’ perhaps with a foreboding of hereditary disease. A satirist called Darnley ‘the leper:’ leprosy being confounded with ‘la grosse vérole.’ Mary, who had fainting fits, was said to be epileptic.

Darnley, according to Lennox, represented himself as pure in this regard, nor have we any valid evidence to the contrary. But his word was absolutely worthless.

Outraged and harassed, broken, at last, in health, in constant pain, expressing herself in hysterical outbursts of despair and desire for death, Mary needed no passion for Bothwell to make her long for freedom from the young fool. From his sick-bed in Glasgow, as we shall see, he sent, by a messenger, a cutting verbal taunt to the Queen; so his own friends declare, they who call Darnley ‘that innocent lamb.’ It is not wonderful if, in an age of treachery and revenge, the character of Mary now broke down. ‘I would not do it to him for my own revenge. My heart bleeds at it,’ she says to Bothwell, in the Casket Letter II., if that was written by her. But, whatever her part in it, the deed was done.

Of Bothwell, the third protagonist in the tragedy of Three, we have no portrait, and but discrepant descriptions. They who saw his body, not yet wholly decayed, in Denmark, reported that he must have been ‘an ugly Scot,’ with red hair, mixed with grey before he died. Much such another was the truculent Morton.[8] Born in 1536 or 1537, Bothwell was in the flower of his age, about thirty, when Darnley perished. He was certainly not old enough to have been Mary’s father, as Sir John Skelton declared, for he was not six years her senior. His father died in 1556, and Bothwell came young into the Hepburn inheritance of impoverished estates, high offices, and wild reckless blood. According to Buchanan, Bothwell, in early youth, was brought up at the house of his great-uncle, Patrick Hepburn, Bishop of Moray, who certainly was a man of profligate life. It is highly probable that Bothwell was educated in France.

‘Blockish’ or not, Bothwell had the taste of a bibliophile. One of two books from his library, well bound, and tooled with his name and arms, is in the collection of the University of Edinburgh. Another was in the Gibson Craig Library. The works are a tract of Valturin, on Military Discipline (Paris, 1555, folio), and French translations of martial treatises attributed to Vegetius, Sextus Julius, and Ælian, with a collection of anecdotes of warlike affairs (Paris, 1556, folio). The possession of books like these, in such excellent condition, is no proof of doltishness. Moreover, Bothwell appears to have read his ‘CXX Histoires concernans le faite guerre.’ The evidence comes to us from a source which discredits the virulent rhetoric of Buchanan’s ally.

It was the cue of Mary’s foes to represent Bothwell as an ungainly, stupid, cowardly, vicious monster: because, he being such a man, what a wretch must the Queen be who could love him! ‘Which love, whoever saw not, and yet hath seen him, will perhaps think it incredible… But yet here there want no causes, for there was in them both a likeness, if not of beauty or outward things, nor of virtues, yet of most extream vices.’[9] Buchanan had often celebrated, down to December 1566, Mary’s extreme virtues. To be sure his poem, recited shortly before Darnley’s death, may have been written almost as early as James’s birth, in readiness for the feast at his baptism, and before Mary’s intrigue with Bothwell could have begun. In any case, to prove Bothwell’s cowardice, some ally of Buchanan’s cites his behaviour at Carberry Hill, where he wishes us to believe that Bothwell showed the white feather of Mary’s ‘pretty venereous pidgeon.’ As a witness, he cites du Croc, the French Ambassador, an aged and sagacious man. To du Croc he has appealed, to du Croc he shall go. That Ambassador writes: ‘He’ (Bothwell) ‘told me that there must be no more parley, for he saw that the enemy was approaching, and had already crossed the burn. He said that, if I wished to resemble the man who tried to arrange a treaty between the forces of Scipio and Hannibal, their armies being ready to join in battle, like the two now before us, and who failed, and, wishing to remain neutral, took a point of vantage, and beheld the best sport that ever he saw in his life, why then I should act like that man, and would greatly enjoy the spectacle of a good fight.’ Bothwell’s memory was inaccurate, or du Croc has misreported his anecdote, but he was certainly both cool and classical on an exciting occasion.

Du Croc declined the invitation; he was not present when Bothwell refused to fight a champion of the Lords, but he goes on: ‘I am obliged to say that I saw a great leader, speaking with great confidence, and leading his forces boldly, gaily, and skilfully… I admired him, for he saw that his foes were resolute, he could not be sure of the loyalty of half of his own men, and yet he was quite unmoved.’[10] Bothwell, then, was neither dolt, lout, nor coward, as Buchanan’s ally wishes us to believe, for the purpose of disparaging the taste of a Queen, Buchanan’s pupil, whose praises he had so often sung.

In an age when many gentlemen and ladies could not sign their names, Bothwell wrote, and wrote French, in a firm, yet delicate Italic hand, of singular grace and clearness.[11] His enemies accused him of studying none but books of Art Magic in his youth, and he may have shared the taste of the great contemporary mathematician, Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor of Logarithms. Both Mary’s friends and enemies, including the hostile Lords in their proclamations, averred that Bothwell had won her favour by unlawful means, philtres, witchcraft, or what we call Hypnotism. Such beliefs were universal: Ruthven, in his account of Riccio’s murder, tells us that he gave Mary a ring, as an antidote to poison (not that he believed in it), and that both she and Moray took him for a sorcerer. On a charge of sorcery did Moray later burn the Lyon Herald, Sir William Stewart, probably basing the accusation on a letter in which Sir William confessed to having consulted a prophet, perhaps Napier of Merchistoun, the father, not the inventor of Logarithms.[12] Quite possibly Bothwell may really have studied the Black Art in Cornelius Agrippa and similar authors. In any case it is plain that, as regards culture, the author of Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, the man familiar with the Court of France, where he had held command in the Scots Guards, and had probably known Ronsard and Brantôme, must have been a rara avis of culture among the nobles at Holyrood. So far, then, Mary’s love for him, if love she entertained, was the reverse of ‘incredible.’ It did not need to be explained by a common possession of ‘extreme vices.’ The author, as usual, overstates his case, and proves too much: Lesley admits that Bothwell was handsome, an opinion emphatically contradicted by Brantôme.

Bothwell had the charm of recklessness to an unexampled degree. He was fierce, passionate, unyielding, strong, and, in the darkest of Mary’s days, had been loyal. He had won for her what Knollys tells us that she most prized, victory. A greater contrast could not be to the false fleeting Darnley, the bully with ‘a heart of wax.’ In him Mary had more than enough of bloom and youthful graces: she could master him, and she longed for a master. If then she loved Bothwell, her love, however wicked, was not unnatural or incredible. He had been loved by many women, and had ruined all of them.

Among the other persons of the play, Moray is foremost, Mary’s natural brother, the son of her whom James V. loved best, and, it was said, still dreamed of while wooing a bride in France. Moray is an enigma. History sees him, as in Lethington’s phrase, ‘looking through his fingers,’ looking thus at Riccio’s and at Darnley’s murders. These fingers hide the face. He was undeniably a sound Protestant: only for a brief while, in Mary’s early reign, was he sundered from Knox. In war he was, as he aimed at being, ‘a Captain in Israel,’ cool, courageous, and skilled. That he was extremely acquisitive is certain. Born a royal bastard, and trained for the Church, he clung as ‘Commendator’ to the Church’s property which he held as a layman. His enormous possessions in land, collected partly by means that sailed close to the wind, partly from the grants of Mary, excited the rash words of Darnley, that they were ‘too large.’

An early incident in Moray’s life seems characteristic. The battle of Pinkie was fought in 1547, when he was sixteen. Among the slain was the Master of Buchan, the heir-apparent of the Earl of Buchan. He left a child, Christian Stewart, who was now heiress of the earldom. In January 1550, young Lord James Stewart, though Prior of St. Andrews, contracted himself in marriage with the little girl. The old earl was extravagant, perhaps more or less insane, and was deep in debt. His lands were mortgaged. In 1556 the Lord James bought and secured from the Regent, Mary of Guise, the right of redemption. In 1562, being all powerful now with Mary, he secured a grant of the ‘ward, non-entries, and reliefs of the whole estates of the earldom of Buchan.’ Now, by the proclamation made, as usual, before Pinkie fight, all these were left by the Crown, free, to the heirs of such as might fall in the battle. Therefore they ought to have appertained to Christian Stewart, whom Moray had not married, her grandfather being dead. Moray secured everything to himself, by charters from the Crown. The unlucky Christian went on living at Loch Leven, with Moray’s mother, Lady Douglas. In February 1562 Moray wedded Agnes Keith, daughter of the Earl Marischal. His brother, apparently without his knowledge, then married Christian. Moray wrote a letter to his own mother complaining of this marriage as an act of treachery. The Old Man peeps out through the godly and respectful style of this epistle. Moray speaks of Christian as ‘that innocent;’ perhaps she was not remarkable for intellect. He adds that whoever tries to take from him the lady’s estates will have to pass over ‘his belly.’ And, indeed, he retained the possessions. The whole transaction does seem to savour of worldliness, to be regretted in so good a man.

Moray continued, after he was pardoned for his rebellion, to add estate to estate. He was a pensioner of England; from France he received valuable presents. His widow endeavoured to retain the diamonds which Mary had owned, and wished to leave attached to the Scottish crown. His ambition was probably more limited than his covetousness, and the suspicion that he aimed at being king, though natural, was baseless. While he must have known, at least as well as Mary, the guilt of Morton, Lethington, Balfour, Bothwell, and Argyll, he associated familiarly with them, before he left Scotland prior to Mary’s marriage with Bothwell, and he used Bothwell’s accomplices, including the Bishop who married Bothwell to Mary, in his attack on the character of his sister. Whether he betrayed Norfolk, or not, was a question between David Hume and Dr. Robertson. If to report Norfolk’s private conversation to Elizabeth is to betray,[13] Moray was a traitor, and did what Lethington scorned to do. But Moray’s most remarkable quality was caution. He always had an alibi. He knew of Riccio’s murder – and came to Edinburgh next day. He left Edinburgh in the morning, some sixteen hours before the explosion of Kirk o’ Field. He left Edinburgh for England and France, twelve days before the nobles signed the document upholding Bothwell’s innocence, and urging him to marry the Queen. He allowed Elizabeth to lie, in his presence, and about her encouragement of his rebellion, to the French Ambassador. His own account of his first interview with his sister, in prison at Loch Leven, shows him as an adept in menace cruelly suspended over her helpless head. The account of Mary’s secretary, Nau, is much less unfavourable to Moray than his own, for obvious reasons.