terms, and recommended that his offer should be accepted. Nevertheless the negotiations do not appear to have gone further. About June or July 1533 Bothwell and James Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews [q. v.], were shut up by the king in the castle of Edinburgh (Northumberland to Henry VIII, 26 July 1533, ib. vi. 895). No more extreme measures were taken, and his imprisonment was probably short. On 31 July 1538 he received a grant of various lands in the barony of Crichton, which belonged in conjunct fee to Robert, lord Maxwell, and his wife, Agnes Stewart, countess of Bothwell, and were in the king's hands by reason of non-entry (Reg. Mag. Sig. ii. entry 1814). In September of the same year he was compelled to resign the lordship of Liddesdale into the king's hands, and, according to Lindsay of Pitscottie, he and other gentlemen ‘were banished aff Scotland for certain crimes of lese majesty’ (Chronicles, ed. 1814, ii. 359). Bothwell is stated to have gone to Venice. He returned soon after the death of James V in 1542, and was present in the parliament 15 March 1542–3, when he successfully issued a summons of reduction of a pretended assignation of the lordship of Liddesdale and castle of Hermitage. When Sir Ralph Sadler arrived in Scotland on a special embassy, he found Bothwell in possession of Liddesdale. Sadler appears to have been specially directed by the king to secure Bothwell's support, but Bothwell was indisposed to the match between the infant Mary and Prince Edward of England, and was devoted to the French interest. Sadler describes him as ‘the most vain and insolent man of the world, full of folly, and here nothing to be esteemed.’ Bothwell joined the party opposed to the English interests who met at Perth to concert measures of resistance against the policy of the governor and the Douglases. A message for a compromise was sent to their opponents, but they obeyed the summons of a herald-at-arms sent to charge them to disperse on pain of treason. An alliance with England and a treaty of marriage between the Princess Mary and Prince Edward of England was agreed on at the ensuing parliament. Shortly afterwards Cardinal Beaton [see Beaton, David, (1494–1546)], who had for some time been under arrest, received his liberty on Bothwell and others becoming hostages for him (Lesley, Hist. Scotl., Bannatyne edit., p. 68), and at Beaton's instigation Bothwell and other catholic lords mustered their followers for the protection of their faith and the defence of the independence of the kingdom. Concentrating their forces with great rapidity they marched on Linlithgow, and brought the queen-dowager and the infant queen in triumph to Stirling.
Bothwell was one of those who assembled at Leith on 3 May 1544 to oppose the landing of the Earl of Hertford, but on account of the superior forces of the enemy he and his friends retired to Edinburgh. In June he signed the agreement to support the queen-dowager, Mary of Guise, as regent instead of the Earl of Arran [see Hamilton, James, second Earl of Arran and Duke of Châtelherault]. He now appeared at court as the rival of the Earl of Lennox [see Stewart, Matthew, fourth Earl of Lennox] for the queen-dowager's hand. Both earls strove to excel in the magnificence of their retinue and in courtly games, but Bothwell found the expenditure greater than he could afford, and ultimately left the court (Calderwood, Hist. i. 166; Herries, Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, p. 6).
In order, doubtless, to play this part of suitor Bothwell had, previous to November 1543, been divorced from his wife, Agnes Sinclair, lady of Morham, whom he married about 1535. The lady's mother was Margaret Hepburn, probably third daughter of Patrick, first earl of Bothwell [q. v.] (grandfather of the third earl), though some have supposed her to have been the first earl's sister. The excuse for the divorce was doubtless some prohibited degree of consanguinity. This seems confirmed by the reported statement of the son James, fourth earl [q. v.], at the Craigmillar conference, that the divorce of his father and mother had not injured his title or estate. Shortly after his retirement from court a summons was issued against him for entering into a treasonable correspondence with the king of England against James V in 1542, for a treasonable understanding with the Earl of Hertford when he landed at Leith, and for imprisoning the Bute pursuivant; but on 12 Dec. he was assoilzied in parliament from the summons.
According to Knox, Bothwell in 1543 threatened the Earl of Arran, governor of the realm, with deposition for befriending the reformers (Works, i. 100). When George Wishart [q. v.] in 1546 went to Haddington to preach, the people of the town and neighbourhood were inhibited by Bothwell, as sheriff of East Lothian, from hearing him. Notwithstanding, about a hundred persons assembled, but the same night Ormiston House, where Wishart was staying, was surrounded by a small force under Bothwell, who obtained the custody of Wishart on the promise that he would save him from Cardinal Beaton. Knox states that the bribes
