and six days after the murder of her husband she became the
wife of her husband’s murderer. On the 11th of February she
wrote to the bishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in France, a
brief letter of simple eloquence, announcing her providential
escape from a design upon her own as well as her husband’s life.
A reward of two thousand pounds was offered by proclamation
for discovery of the murderer. Bothwell and others, his
satellites or the queen’s, were instantly placarded by name as
the criminals. Voices were heard by night in the streets of
Edinburgh calling down judgment on the assassins. Four days
after the discovery of the bodies, Darnley was buried in the
chapel of Holyrood with secrecy as remarkable as the solemnity
with which Rizzio had been interred there less than a year
before. On the Sunday following, Mary left Edinburgh for
Seton Palace, 12 miles from the capital, where scandal asserted
that she passed the time merrily in shooting-matches with Bothwell
for her partner against Lords Seton and Huntly; other
accounts represent Huntly and Bothwell as left at Holyrood in
charge of the infant prince. Gracefully and respectfully, with
statesmanlike yet feminine dexterity, the demands of Darnley’s
father for justice on the murderers of his son were accepted and
eluded by his daughter-in-law. Bothwell, with a troop of fifty
men, rode through Edinburgh defiantly denouncing vengeance
on his concealed accusers. As weeks elapsed without action
on the part of the royal widow, while the cry of blood was up
throughout the country, raising echoes from England and abroad,
the murmur of accusation began to rise against her also. Murray,
with his sister’s ready permission, withdrew to France.
Already the report was abroad that the queen was bent on marriage
with Bothwell, whose last year’s marriage with the sister of
Huntly would be dissolved, and the assent of his wife’s brother
purchased by the restitution of his forfeited estates. According
to the Memoirs of Sir James Melville, both Lord Herries and
himself resolved to appeal to the queen in terms of bold and
earnest remonstrance against so desperate and scandalous a
design; Herries, having been met with assurances of its unreality
and professions of astonishment at the suggestion, instantly fled
from court; Melville, evading the danger of a merely personal
protest without backers to support him, laid before Mary a letter
from a loyal Scot long resident in England, which urged upon her
consideration and her conscience the danger and disgrace of such
a project yet more freely than Herries had ventured to do by
word of mouth; but the sole result was that it needed all
the queen’s courage and resolution to rescue him from the
violence of the man for whom, she was reported to have said, she
cared not if she lost France, England and her own country, and
would go with him to the world’s end in a white petticoat before
she would leave him. On the 28th of March the privy council,
in which Bothwell himself sat, appointed the 12th of April
as the day of his trial, Lennox, instead of the crown, being
named as the accuser, and cited by royal letters to appear at
“the humble request and petition of the said Earl Bothwell,”
who, on the day of the trial, had 4000 armed men behind
him in the streets, while the castle was also at his command.
Under these arrangements it was not thought wonderful that
Lennox discreetly declined the danger of attendance, even with
3000 men ready to follow him, at the risk of desperate
street fighting. He pleaded sickness, asked for more time, and
demanded that the accused, instead of enjoying special favour,
should share the treatment of other suspected criminals. But,
as no particle of evidence on his side was advanced, the protest
of his representative was rejected, and Bothwell, acquitted in
default of witnesses against him, was free to challenge any
persistent accuser to the ancient ordeal of battle. His wealth
and power were enlarged by gift of the parliament which met on
the 14th and rose on the 19th of April—a date made notable
by the subsequent supper at Ainslie’s tavern, where Bothwell
obtained the signatures of its leading members to a document
affirming his innocence, and pledging the subscribers to maintain
it against all challengers, to stand by him in all his quarrels
and finally to promote by all means in their power the
marriage by which they recommended the queen to reward his
services and benefit the country. On the second day following
Mary went to visit her child at Stirling, where his guardian,
the earl of Mar, refused to admit more than two women in
her train. It was well known in Edinburgh that Bothwell
had a body of men ready to intercept her on the way back, and
carry her to Dunbar—not, as was naturally inferred, without
good assurance of her consent. On the 24th of April, as
she approached Edinburgh, Bothwell accordingly met her
at the head of 800 spearmen, assured her (as she afterwards
averred) that she was in the utmost peril, and escorted
her, together with Huntly, Lethington and Melville, who were
then in attendance, to Dunbar Castle. On the 3rd of May Lady
Jane Gordon, who had become countess of Bothwell on the 22nd
of February of the year preceding, obtained, on the ground of her
husband’s infidelities, a separation which, however, would not
under the old laws of Catholic Scotland have left him free to
marry again; on the 7th, accordingly, the necessary divorce was
pronounced, after two days’ session, by a clerical tribunal which
ten days before had received from the queen a special commission
to give judgment on a plea of somewhat apocryphal consanguinity
alleged by Bothwell as the ground of an action for divorce against
his wife. The fact was studiously evaded or concealed that a
dispensation had been granted by the archbishop of St Andrews
for this irregularity, which could only have arisen through some
illicit connexion of the husband with a relative of the wife between
whom and himself no affinity by blood or marriage could
be proved. On the day when the first or Protestant divorce was
pronounced, Mary and Bothwell returned to Edinburgh with
every prepared appearance of a peaceful triumph. Lest her
captivity should have been held to invalidate the late legal
proceedings in her name, proclamation was made of forgiveness
accorded by the queen to her captor in consideration of his past
and future services, and her intention was announced to reward
them by further promotion; and on the same day (May 12), he
was duly created duke of Orkney and Shetland. The duke, as a
conscientious Protestant, refused to marry his mistress according
to the rites of her Church, and she, the chosen champion of its
cause, agreed to be married to him, not merely by a Protestant
but by one who before his conversion had been a Catholic bishop,
and should therefore have been more hateful and contemptible
in her eyes than any ordinary heretic, had not religion as well
as policy, faith as well as reason, been absorbed or superseded
by some more mastering passion or emotion. This passion or
emotion, according to those who deny her attachment to Bothwell,
was simply terror—the blind and irrational prostration of
an abject spirit before the cruel force of circumstances and the
crafty wickedness of men. Hitherto, according to all evidence,
she had shown herself on all occasions, as on all subsequent
occasions she indisputably showed herself, the most fearless, the
most keen-sighted, the most ready-witted, the most high-gifted
and high-spirited of women; gallant and generous, skilful and
practical, never to be cowed by fortune, never to be cajoled by
craft; neither more unselfish in her ends nor more unscrupulous
in her practice than might have been expected from her training
and her creed. But at the crowning moment of trial there are
those who assert their belief that the woman who on her way to
the field of Corrichie had uttered her wish to be a man, that she
might know all the hardship and all the enjoyment of a soldier’s
life, riding forth “in jack and knapscull”—the woman who
long afterwards was to hold her own for two days together
without help of counsel against all the array of English law and
English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and
supported by the resentment of a nation—showed herself
equally devoid of moral and of physical resolution; too senseless
to realize the significance and too heartless to face the danger of
a situation from which the simplest exercise of reason, principle
or courage must have rescued the most unsuspicious and
inexperienced of honest women who was not helplessly deficient
in self-reliance and self-respect. The famous correspondence
produced next year in evidence against her at the conference of
York may have been, as her partisans affirm, so craftily garbled
and falsified by interpolation, suppression, perversion, or
Page:EB1911 - Volume 17.djvu/836
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
819