The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (20 page)

They fixed on Loch Leven Castle. It was ideal in several ways. First, the castle itself was situated on a little island in the middle of the loch. This would make any attempt at rescue by Mary’s friends difficult, well nigh impossible. Second, it was the property of Moray’s half-brother, Sir William Douglas. He was the son of Moray’s mother (James V’s mistress) Margaret Erskine by her lawful husband, Robert Douglas; also the nephew of the Earl of Mar to whom the Council had given charge of the baby Prince James, and Morton’s cousin. His mother, old Lady Douglas, was resident there and known to dislike Mary.

The Queen was now isolated. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who had been the English ambassador in Paris when Mary was Queen of France, and who had now been sent to Edinburgh by Elizabeth to report on how matters stood, was not only disgusted by the insults he heard levelled at the Queen but convinced that her life was in danger. He seems to have believed that if Elizabeth had not sent him to express her disapproval of the rebellion and the imprisonment of the Queen, Mary would have been murdered like Darnley and Rizzio. His contempt for the rebel lords was acute.
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Mary was indeed in danger of losing her life. The rebels had come to a decision: she should be compelled to divorce Bothwell (who had been declared an outlaw) and then to abdicate in favour of her infant son, with Moray to be appointed regent. She refused the first demand, for she was pregnant, and it was only when she miscarried of twins that she was ready to abandon Bothwell. As to the abdication, it was forced on her, the brutal Earl of Lindsay telling her that if she did not sign the paper, they would have no choice but to cut her throat and achieve their ends in that manner. So on 24 July 1567 she submitted, after Moray, the half-brother on whom she had once relied, also threatened her with, as he charmingly put it, being left only with the hope of God’s mercy, for there would be none from men.

Gradually her health recovered, her spirits revived, her resolution returned, and she began once more to be capable of exercising her magnetic charm. Even old Lady Douglas softened towards the captive. More importantly Mary made two new conquests: first, the young George Douglas, her jailer’s brother, a handsome young man known as ‘pretty Geordie’; second, a younger boy, Will Douglas. George fell in love with her – William Cecil later said he was ‘in a fantasy of love’ – and may have nursed ambitions to be more than her knight. Why not? Bothwell was off the scene, out of Scotland, on the way, though none yet knew it, to his own terrible doom, a prisoner in Denmark chained to a pillar where he would subsequently die raving mad, covered in hair and filth.
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If Mary was once free and restored to her throne, might she not in gratitude marry her rescuer, who was after all well born, eligible enough, the half-brother of her half-brother? As for young Will, he conceived a romantic devotion to the captive Queen and would continue to serve her for many years. Together the two plotted her escape.

It was neatly and boldly managed. George Douglas found a reason to leave the island, and, once off it, procured horses from stables on the mainland. Meanwhile, young Will found a boat, removed stoppers from the other boats to hinder a pursuit, and obtained the keys of the castle gate from his master as he served him wine. When night fell and the castle was quiet, the Queen, who had given out that she felt unwell and had retired early, slipped out from her room and into the courtyard, where the boy was waiting for her. He led her to the boat and rowed out across the loch. They found George there with the horses and rode hard for the west, where her allies, the Hamiltons, had already been alerted.

Mary still had supporters. The Hamiltons especially were opposed to the new regime. The head of the house, the former governor, Duke of Châtelherault, was, after the infant Prince James, Mary’s presumptive heir. His eldest son, Arran, her former suitor, was mad beyond hope of recovery, but there were three other sons. The Hamiltons could not be pleased by Moray’s usurpation of power. Mary was able to gather an army quickly, and it was larger than that which the rebel lords brought against them. On 13 May 1568, they met at Langside, just south of Glasgow, on ground now known as the Queen’s Park. The advantage seemingly lay with Mary, but her battle was mismanaged, lost, and she had to flee. Dumbarton Castle was still held by her supporters, and offered a refuge from which she might be able to take a ship to France. But to reach Dumbarton she would have to cross hostile Lennox country. The risk was too great. Following the advice of the faithful Lord Herries, she made for the south-west, still strongly Catholic. There she might hope to find a vessel in the Solway Firth if her supporters failed to muster a new army.

They rode hard, the Queen disguised. It was now clear there was no chance of continuing armed resistance. All the company urged her to make for France, where she would be safe; from there she might hope to be restored to her throne by French arms. But Mary, with that poor judgement and obstinacy that were to seem characteristic of the later Stuarts, insisted on crossing over to England. Surely her ‘sister and cousin’ Elizabeth could be trusted to defend her rights.

She arrived in England as a refugee, confident that a meeting with Elizabeth would lead to her restoration. She would remain there a prisoner for nineteen years, always denied that interview she first demanded, then begged for.

What Mary did not realise was that her enemies had been busy blackening her name, portraying her as an adulteress and murderer. She saw herself as an innocent victim of rebellion that Elizabeth could not be expected to approve. That might be so, but the men around Elizabeth, notably Cecil and Leicester, saw things differently. From their point of view, what had happened in Scotland was to England’s advantage. A Catholic queen had been replaced by a Protestant coup. A queen with close connections with France had been forced to abdicate and a regime eager for an English alliance and dependent for its survival on English goodwill established in Scotland. Whatever their queen’s view of the wickedness of rebellion, no matter what sympathy she might feel for her cousin, her advisers saw nothing to be gained by restoring Mary to the Scottish throne.

Elizabeth herself was in a quandary and characteristically played for time. She refused to receive Mary, but at first insisted that she should be kept as a guest rather than a prisoner, to be treated with respect, watched over and guarded. She declared that Moray, whom she knew and for whom she had some regard, must be given the opportunity to explain and defend his actions, while Mary herself must satisfactorily answer any accusations brought against her before there could be any thought of restoring her to her throne. It was accordingly now up to Mary’s enemies in Scotland to provide evidence of her guilt.

They were ready to do so, and the evidence they produced came in two forms, both dubious.

While Mary was still a prisoner on Loch Leven, Maitland and Morton, dining together in Edinburgh, had been told that some of Bothwell’s former servants were in town. They ordered them to be seized, and one, a tailor called George Dalgleish, after being threatened with torture, told them of a casket – a locked silver box – that he had taken from the castle and which was now in his possession. When this was produced and opened, it was found to contain eight letters written in French and some French sonnets, allegedly composed by Mary. These were subsequently sent to England to be read and examined by the commissioners appointed by Elizabeth to consider the accusations levelled at Mary. If genuine, they seemed to indicate that Mary had committed adultery with Bothwell while Darnley was still alive, that she had foreknowledge of the plot to murder her husband and was therefore complicit in it, and that her alleged subsequent abduction by Bothwell was no abduction but a meeting planned by Mary herself. If they were genuine, that is…

Certainly there is no reason to doubt that the papers belonged to Bothwell, but beyond that point formidable doubts rear up. The question is complicated by the fact that the originals disappeared long ago – no one has seen them since the execution in 1584 of the Earl of Gowrie, into whose possession they had come. What we have are copies – English and Scots translations, and also translations from these back into French. The poems, in a clumsy, almost doggerel French, are certainly not Mary’s work. They bear no resemblance in style to her acknowledged poetry, and both Ronsard and Brantome, who knew her poetry well, denied that she could have written them. They were most probably written to Bothwell by one of his many mistresses.
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As for the letters themselves, they are made up of some passages that were very probably written by Mary, but other sections have been interpolated, again clumsily and not always coherently. They are forgeries intended to prove her guilt. This probability is enhanced by a question Moray’s secretary, John Wood, put to Elizabeth and her Council: ‘If the French originals are found to tally with the Scots translations, will that be reckoned good evidence?’
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The inference is that the Scots translations had already been supplied, and that the French originals could be altered if necessary.

As it happened, the Casket Letters, over which historians have pored, convinced nobody except those who were already sure of Mary’s guilt. Elizabeth herself thought the evidence altogether insufficient. One of the commissioners, Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, summed up the situation astutely. If Mary was allowed to appear before the tribunal, she would obviously deny that she had written the letters, and could not be convicted on their evidence. Elizabeth would then have to set her free. If, however, she was not permitted to appear, then the whole thing could be, as he put it, ‘huddled up’:
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Moray and his confederates would not be exposed as forgers, but Mary’s innocence would not be established, and so Elizabeth could keep her in prison. This was indeed precisely what happened.

The response of another commissioner, the Duke of Norfolk, was more interesting still. He professed himself horrified by the letters. If they were authentic, then Mary must certainly be convicted. But a few days later he changed his mind. He had meanwhile had a conversation with Maitland, who had by now fallen out with Moray and was on his way to being the leader of the Marian party in Scotland. The assumption must be that Maitland had told him that the letters were not what they purported to be, but were indeed in large part forgeries. Soon afterwards, Norfolk proposed himself as a husband for Mary. It is unlikely he would have done so if he believed she had had a hand in Darnley’s murder.

However, the case against Mary was also made in another form, one that had both a more immediate and a more lasting effect on her reputation. This was a narrative written by George Buchanan.

Buchanan was the most famous Scotsman of the day, a humanist scholar, poet and playwright. Since he wrote in Latin, despising like other humanists the vernacular language, his work is now little read. But it was highly admired in his own day and for two hundred years after. He was acclaimed as the greatest Latin poet since Virgil. As a writer of Latin prose he was considered the equal of Tacitus. Joachim du Bellay, after Ronsard the finest French poet of the age, said that Buchanan was the first man to demonstrate that a Scotsman need not be a savage. Montaigne, who was his pupil in Bordeaux, called him simply ‘this great Scots poet’.
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He displayed his virtuosity by translating the Psalms into twenty-nine different Latin metres.

Buchanan was born in 1506 in Killearn in Stirlingshire and probably grew up as a Gaelic speaker. Killearn was in Lennox country and this was to be of some significance. He was educated first at St Andrews University, then at the Sorbonne in Paris, in both places studying under the Scots humanist historian John Mair (or Major). Returning to Scotland, he was briefly made the tutor of the King’s illegitimate son, Lord James Stewart, later the Earl of Moray. A satire on the Franciscans cost him the post and his liberty, but he escaped, or was released, from prison and made his way to France. For almost thirty years he taught there, in Paris and Bordeaux, and also briefly in Portugal, where he attracted the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition. Back in France, he found employment as tutor to the son of the Catholic Marshal de Brissac, and wrote poems in praise of the Catholic rulers of France and in particular of the leaders of the extreme Catholic party, the great House of Guise. One poem was composed in celebration of the Duc de Guise’s recapture of Calais from the English in 1558, another in celebration of Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin. When Mary returned to Scotland in 1561, she invited him, as the favourite poet of her Guise relations, to accompany her. He was the chief intellectual ornament of her court, granted a pension of £250 a year. He would read and discuss Livy and other Roman historians with the Queen after dinner, and was appointed principal of St Andrews University.

Little in Buchanan’s history to date – and he was now in his middle fifties – suggested he had Protestant leanings. By his own account he began to study the arguments advanced by the reformers only when he was middle-aged. Yet he would soon emerge as one of the chief apologists in Scotland of ‘the true Reformed religion’ and Mary’s most bitter and effective critic.

What caused the change? There seem to have been several reasons. First, there was his own temperament, combative, intellectual, responsive to ideas, and, like many intellectuals, ready to fly from one extreme to another, to move in his case from being the laudator of the Duc de Guise to the propagandist of Calvinism. Sir James Melville, Mary’s ambassador to the English court, remarked on this tendency. Buchanan, he said, ‘was so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted for the time, which made him factious in his old age’. This need not surprise us, for in our own age there have been many examples of intellectuals who moved from left to right, or right to left, with comparable facility, displaying the same vehemence and certainty in the promulgation of their new opinions as they had in advancing their previous ones.