The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (50 page)

6
Lynch, op. cit.

7
Lord James’s surname is spelled in the old Scottish way, but his descendants, the earls of Moray, sign themselves ‘Stuart’ – in the manner of his half-sister and victim, Mary.

8
John Knox,
History of the Reformation in Scotland
.

9
Ibid.

10
Ibid.

11
Antonia Fraser,
Mary Queen of Scots
. Fraser’s biography remains the fullest and most intelligently sympathetic treatment of Mary’s life.

12
There is no firm evidence of Darnley’s bisexuality beyond talk of frequenting male brothels in Edinburgh. However, it does now seem to be generally accepted.

13
Fraser, op. cit.

14
Sir James Melville,
Scottish Diaries and Memoirs
(Eneas Mackay, Stirling, 1976) pp. 46–7.

15
His most recent biographer, Caroline Bingham, takes a more generous view than most. Roderick Graham, in his biography of Mary,
An Accidental Tragedy
, dismisses Darnley as ‘a vicious syphilitic bisexual’.

16
Some (see previous note) have suggested Darnley had contracted syphilis. There is no evidence for this. Others have thought he was suffering from scabies, but as Eric Linklater remarked, scabies, however irritating, do not usually require the sufferer to be confined to bed. The illness was probably smallpox, albeit, given the speed of his recovery, in a mild form; or perhaps chicken-pox.

17
The House of Kirk o’ Field no longer exists. It probably stood on the site of what is now the Old College of Edinburgh University, one of Robert Adam’s finest buildings.

18
That it was Darnley’s decision to convalesce in Kirk o’ Field lends some credence to the case for Mary’s innocence and to the possible existence of a Catholic plot to kill her. Whether there was indeed such a plot or not, there is little doubt that most of the leading Protestant lords saw an opportunity to rid themselves of Darnley. Bothwell may have lit the fuse himself, but the likes of Moray, Morton and Ruthven were in it up to their necks.

19
Fraser, op. cit.

20
The official explanation, given by the Lord Justice Clerk in his report, is incredible. According to it, two of Bothwell’s men made two trips from Holyroodhouse to Kirk o’ Field carrying the gunpowder in portmanteaus on the back of a horse. It has been calculated by Major-General R. H. Mahon (
The Tragedy of Kirk o’ Field
) that this would have weighed about 500 lb. ‘Now that quantity of powder, as made in the sixteenth century, was ludicrously insufficient to blow up such a solid building. But there is uncontested evidence that the house was totally demolished, and the implication – impossible to avoid – is that it had been prepared for demolition before that busy Sunday, and perhaps well before it. There were cellars under the whole width of the house and they must have been filled with such a weight of powder that when a fuse was lighted the explosion had the violence of a landmine.’ Eric Linklater,
The Royal House of Scotland
(Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), pp. 107–8.

21
Antonia Fraser, op. cit.

22
Far from achieving sexual satisfaction with Bothwell, all the evidence is that Mary was in misery, and often in tears, throughout the weeks of their marriage. ‘From her wedding day she was ever in tears and lamentations’: Maitland of Lethington. See Fraser, op. cit.

23
Mary told her brother-in-law, Charles IX of France, that Bothwell had taken her by force. Significantly, during her years in England, she kept miniatures of her first two husbands, Francis II and Darnley, but none of Bothwell.

24
Bothwell’s wife Jean Gordon brought the divorce suit in a Protestant court, while Bothwell, to make assurance doubly sure, sought an annulment from the Catholic Church. There is no doubt that the two were in collusion. Jean Gordon did well out of the settlement, getting rich estates. She was married twice subsequently, and did not die till 1629, in the reign of Mary’s grandson, Charles I.

25
Fraser, op. cit.

26
After Carberry Hill, Bothwell first tried to raise a new army in Scotland, failed and withdrew to Orkney. He then sailed to Denmark, where he was imprisoned, perhaps at the suit of his discarded Danish mistress, Anna Throndsson. At first he was held in honourable confinement, and Frederick II, King of Denmark and Norway, refused requests either to return him to Scotland to be tried again for the murder of Darnley or to have him executed. Eventually, being no longer of any political or diplomatic value, his imprisonment became harsher, and he died, mad, in the manner described.

27
Anna Throndsson, Bothwell’s Danish mistress, is the probable author of the doggerel verses. French being not only the language of polite love, but also that in which she and Bothwell may have usually conversed.

28
Linklater, op. cit., p. 111.

29
Fraser, op. cit.

30
There is a brilliant account of Buchanan and an analysis of his arguments in
The Invention of Scotland
, Hugh Trevor-Roper (Yale University Press, 2008).

31
John Cunningham,
Church History of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1882).

32
The plot was the work of an Italian merchant, Ridolfi, its intention to murder Elizabeth, set Mary on the English throne and marry her to the Duke of Norfolk. A vivid recent account is to be found in Robert Hutchinson,
House of Treason
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), pp. 188 ff.

33
After the final defeat of the Queen’s Scottish party in 1573, it was Englishmen, not Scots, who saw Mary as a figure of romance and plotted to free her.

34
‘The horrible manner of the age’: the penalty for treason was to be hanged, cut down before death might mercifully intervene, disembowelled, and then quartered.

35
Fraser, p. 622.

Chapter 10

1
Sir Anthony Weldon was a court offical (Clerk of the Kitchen, 1604, Clerk of the Green Cloth, 1609–17). He was knighted in 1617, but dismissed the same year, by his own account for satirising the Scots. He took his revenge by writing
The Court and Character of James I,
published in 1650, the year after its author’s death. Weldon is racy, scurrilous, amusing and unreliable, but everyone who has written about James and the Jacobean court quotes him.

2
The Danes were famous for heavy drinking. See
Hamlet
and the Prince’s remark that the drinking of toasts is ‘a custom more honour’d in the breach than in th’ observance’.

3
Any account of the Gowrie Conspiracy can only be conjectural. An old Scots lady once looked forward to the Day of Judgement in the hope that she would then learn the truth about it. My interpretation owes much to the researches of Christian, Lady Hesketh, in the course of which she discovered this curious sequel: in 1610, ten years after the dramatic events at Gowrie House, Henry IV of France was assassinated in Paris, stabbed by a lawyer called Ravaillac in the rue de la Ferronerie. The murder weapon was a richly decorated hunting knife with a coat of arms and motto engraved on the blade. The coat of arms was not French. Where had Ravaillac got the weapon? The question was put pressingly in the hope that it would lead to the discovery of an accomplice, but Ravaillac’s answer was unsatisfactory: he said he had stolen it in a tavern. The dagger was kept as a souvenir by the future Maréchal de la Force. Some fifty years ago his descendant, the Duc de la Force, made enquiries into its provenance. They led him to Scotland and to the genealogist, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that ilk. The motto read: ‘
Haec Dextera Vindex Principis et Patriae
’, and was accompanied by the initials I S R and an H surmounted by a coronet. Sir Iain identified the motto as that of John Ramsay, whom James VI and I had made Viscount Haddington in 1606. Ramsay is known to have travelled in France. Perhaps he boasted in an inn that this dagger had slain his king’s enemies, and Ravaillac, impressed by the story, stole it. If so, then the dagger that dispatched the Earl of Gowrie and his brother Alexander may have been employed to kill the King of France also.

4
Carey himself wrote an account of his ride north, quoted frequently.

5
Bacon’s judgement on his cousin smacks of resentment: ‘Fit to prevent things from growing worse but not fit to make them better’; Eric Linklater,
The Royal House of Scotland
(Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), p. 145.

6
Sir Walter Scott,
The Fortunes of Nigel
, numerous editions.

7
Arthur Melville Clark,
The Man Behind Macbeth and Other Essays
(Edinburgh, 1981).

8
Sir John Harington, quoted by Linklater, op. cit., p. 248. Harington’s miscellaneous writings were not published till 1769.

9
In departing from the family habit of naming his eldest son James, King James bore witness to his attachment to the Lennox side of his family. Henry was his father Darnley’s name, Charles that of Darnley’s younger brother. The choice of Elizabeth as his daughter’s name was a tribute to the English queen. To have called her Mary might have been regarded as provocative, especially since James’s succession to the English throne was not yet assured.

10
The humiliation to which Essex was subjected had sore consequences for the Stuarts. His resentment made him one of Charles I’s opponents and the commander of the parliamentary army in the Civil War.

11
Weldon (op. cit.) again.

12
Ibid. Lively and always quoted, but to be regarded with a degree of scepticism.

13
Anne Somerset,
Unnatural Murder
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 300.

14
For an examination of James’s homoerotic inclinations, see David M. Bergeron,
Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland
(Iowa City University Press, 1999) and Michael B. Young,
James VI & I and the History of Homosexuality
(Basingstoke and London, 2000).

Chapter 11

1
See J. E. Neale,
Elizabeth and her Parliaments
(1957),
passim
.

2
C. V. Wedgwood,
The King’s Peace
(1955).

3
Hester W. Chapman,
The Tragedy of Charles II
(Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 18.

4
John Aubrey,
Brief Lives
, various editions.

5
Henry Guthrie, Bishop of Dunkeld, in
Scottish Diaries and Memoirs
(Eneas Mackay, Stirling).

6
David Stevenson,
The Scottish Revolution 1637–44
(Edinburgh, 2003); pp. 116–26 are immediately relevant to this account.

7
The Revd James Kirkton, ‘The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland’, in
Scottish Diaries and Memoirs
, op. cit.

8
Impeachment was a legal process in which the House of Commons acted as the prosecution and the House of Lords as judges. In the sevententh century the threat of impeachment was the most effective means of exercising control over the king’s ministers. It fell into disuse in the eighteenth century. Two twentieth-century American presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, have been threatened with impeachment. The leaders of the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru talked of impeaching Tony Blair over the Iraq war. Nothing came of their threats.

9
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
History of the Rebellion
, various editions.

10
For an account of the Army Plot, see essay by Conrad Russell in
Unrevolutionary England 1603–42
(London, 1990).

11
Clarendon, op. cit.

12
Russell, op. cit.

13
Aubrey, op. cit, quoted in Anthony Powell,
John Aubrey and his Friends
(London, 1948).

14
Quoted by Eric Linklater,
The Royal House of Scotland
(Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), p. 192.

15
Ibid., p. 193.

16
John Buchan,
Montrose
(World’s Classics edition). Buchan is sometimes too generous in his treatment of his hero. Nevertheless his biography of Montrose remains an oustandingly good and readable work.

17
Ian Gentles,
The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland 1645–53
(Oxford, 1992), p. 170.