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The rift between Mary and Darnley had become a chasm too wide to bridge. But as Mary grew cold toward Darnley, she grew fonder of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. It was Bothwell who organised the baptism of Mary’s son according to the rites of the Catholic Church, while Darnley was ill with syphilis. It didn’t go u
However, the problem for the queen was that she couldn’t risk divorcing Darnley, because it might lead to James being declared illegitimate. A better idea was to remove Darnley altogether. At the end of January 1567, Darnley, an ill man, was brought to Edinburgh and housed in a house at Kirk o’Field. On the night of 9 February, while Mary attended a masked wedding ball at Holyrood, the house was blown up. But this is where the mystery begins.
Although the property was blown to pieces, Darnley and his servant, dressed in their nightshirts, were found some way from the house, showing no marks of having been touched by the explosion. Darnley had been smothered. Who did it? Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain. There is a mass of speculation but little hard evidence. The finger could have been pointed at a number of characters, not the least of whom was Bothwell. He was the popular villain of the piece, along with Mary. When she entered Edinburgh, the women didn’t shout, ‘Burn the papist!’ – they shouted, ‘Burn the whore!’
Bothwell was made to stand trial for Darnley’s murder in Edinburgh on 12 April. He clearly had supplied the gunpowder, but it never came out because the trial never took place! On the day of the trial, Bothwell packed Edinburgh with his men and prevented the prosecutor from entering the city. No one came forward in support of the charge, so the jury acquitted him.
With that little problem out of the way, a marriage was arranged with Mary, who was pregnant at the time by Bothwell. A divorce authorised by Mary was rushed through between Bothwell and his wife, Lady Jane Gordon, and they were married in May 1567. The marriage was according to the rites of the Reformed Church, which is proof that Mary was not a devout Catholic, but it did little to appease the opposition. They saw the marriage as scandalous and proof, if ever it was needed, that Mary was untrustworthy and immoral. That was the spark to set off another rebellion by the lords of the congregation.
The opposition and those loyal to Mary and Bothwell met at Carberry Hill, near Musselburgh, on 15 June. There was no battle, and no one was killed. In return for allowing Bothwell to escape, the queen was imprisoned on the island in Loch Leven, Fife, branded the ‘Scottish whore’ by Knox. Bothwell ended up in Demark where he died ten years later a madman in a Danish jail. His departure from Scotland was timely – five days later, the so-called Casket Letters were discovered in Edinburgh Castle, which implicated Bothwell and the queen in Darnley’s murder. Whether the letters were forgeries is open to question. The only copies that survive are English ones, so your guess is as good as anyone else’s.
However, the impact was hugely adverse for Mary. She was forced to abdicate in favour of her son on 24 July. James VI, who was only 1 year old, was crowned the first Protestant king of Scotland at Stirling on 29 July in what was the least attended coronation in Scottish history. By December, the Protestant Confession of Faith was made a test for anyone who wanted to hold crown office.
A revolution had taken place in which a monarch was deposed by the people – even if ‘the people’ in this instance were the noble elite. So, there was a major difference between the Reformation in England (which was pushed through by the monarch, Henry VIII) and the Reformation in Scotland (where it took place in spite of and against the monarch). As Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker said, ‘the people are the orderers of things’.
The queen fights back
Mary wasn’t completely devoid of support. On 2 May 1568, 18-year-old William ‘Willie’ Douglas rescued her from Loch Leven and she joined up with those lords sympathetic to her, such as Argyll and Hamilton. A force of 5,000 to 6,000 men was raised quickly. At Langside, near Glasgow, on 13 May they faced a much smaller army of around 4,500 led by Moray. But it ended badly for Mary and her supporters – 300 of her men were killed, and Mary was forced to flee to England, never to return to Scotland and never to see her son again.
Elizabeth I of England was faced with quite a dilemma. Mary was her cousin and heir presumptive to the English throne, so Elizabeth couldn’t deny her shelter. Elizabeth also didn’t like rebellions, and if she recognised the government of Moray, it would appear to be condoning the overthrow of the monarchy.
The solution was to hold an inquiry at York in October 1568 in which Moray was allowed to state the case for rebellion. The Casket Letters were used to blacken Mary’s character, but she was able to point out that her marriage to Bothwell had the support of most of the Scottish nobility, whereas Moray had only managed to attract one-tenth of the same nobles to the coronation of James VI. Plus, Bothwell had been acquitted of the charge of murder by a Scottish court.
The inquiry moved from York to Westminster – a clear sign that Mary was wi
Although she was effectively under house arrest, Mary nevertheless proved a nuisance to Elizabeth, mainly because unhappy Catholics in England saw Mary as kind of rallying figure. Now divorced from Bothwell, Mary fell in love with the Catholic Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and secretly arranged to marry him – until Elizabeth got wind of it and threw him in the Tower.
Mary became involved in all sorts of plots to overthrow Elizabeth and have herself declared queen of Scotland and England. She supported a rising against Elizabeth in the north of England in November 1569 and conspired with Norfolk and the duke of Alva in the early 1570s to overthrow her. The plot was discovered, and Norfolk was executed for high treason in January 1572.
Mary has to go
For her part in the Norfolk plot, Mary was deprived of any claim to the English throne and was warned that she would be made to stand trial if she was involved in any more plotting. But Mary couldn’t resist it. So, a trap was laid for her.
A young nobleman, Anthony Babington, was the chosen vehicle for the conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth, with the help of the Spanish, and put Mary on the throne. The long-term goal was an invasion by the European Catholic powers to re-establish the old faith. It became known as the ‘Babington plot’.
Babington wrote to Mary on 7 July 1586, outlining his plans, which included a rescue scenario. Mary rather stupidly replied to him in her own handwriting, agreeing to be rescued but stressing that Elizabeth was not to be harmed. Little did Mary know that her letters were being intercepted and read by Elizabeth’s chief spymaster, Walsingham, who added a few forgeries. Elizabeth’s spy network accumulated enough material to arrest the conspirators, among whom was Mary herself.
Babington and his fellow conspirators were tried and executed in September 1586, and Mary was arrested and taken to Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire. The ‘trial’ was a foregone conclusion. Mary was found guilty of plotting to harm the queen of England. But the court had no power to pass the death sentence – that was the monarch’s decision. Elizabeth, who strangely enough had never met Mary, hesitated but signed the death warrant on 1 February 1587. It was said that she had the warrant placed among a batch of state papers requiring her signature so that it could be claimed she had signed it by accident.
Mary died at the age of 44, a Catholic, wearing under her gown a deep red shirt, the colour of martyrdom. The axe had to be used twice to behead her. The last words she spoke were in Latin: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’
On Elizabeth’s instruction, Mary’s clothes were burned and her body and severed head were encased in a casket of lead and taken to Peterborough Cathedral. Mary had left instructions for her body to be buried at Rheims, France, with her Guise relatives. When her son, James VI, assumed the throne of England, he had Fotheringhay Castle pulled down and built a magnificent monument to Mary in Westminster Abbey.
What can we make of perhaps the most famous woman in Scottish history? Was her fall and ultimate death of her own doing? People remain divided on the question.
For the best part of 200 years or so after her death, Protestants saw her as an immoral tyrant rightly overthrown by Scottish defenders of liberties. Catholics saw it differently. To them, Mary was more si
The Reign of James VI
James may have been only a year old when he was crowned king, but in spite of all the upheaval and unrest, the kingdom held together. James proved to be an astute politician who was able to play one faction off against another and, by doing so, reign for longer than any other Scottish monarch. In 1603, he became the first king of England and Scotland. As a committed centraliser, he tried to unify the countries under his rule, first through a policy to unite the Churches of England and Scotland, and later through the parliaments. But the key aspect of his unifying policy was that it was pragmatic that there was never any intention to force the Scots or the English into a marriage they didn’t care for.
Civil war and revolution
James VI was only a year old when he came to the throne, and his minority involved the establishment of regency, which along with Mary’s forced abdication plunged Scotland into a civil war. Mary’s forces had been defeated at Langside in 1568, but her defeat and flight into England didn’t exactly bring peace to Scotland – far from it. The civil war lasted for nearly 20 years, until Mary’s execution. During that time, Scotland had four regents, three of whom were murdered and one of whom was executed. James VI was the subject of nine attempted kidnappings!
The first regent was the earl of Moray who was assassinated by James Hamilton at Linlithgow on 23 January 1570. The house where the shot was fired from belonged to the archbishop of St Andrews, John Hamilton, who was hanged without a trial for his part in the assassination plot at Stirling.