Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Volume 2 (of 2). Bell Henry Glassford
have been felt. He had been to Scotland only a cause of civil war, – to his nobility an object of contempt, of pity, or of hatred, – and to his wife a perpetual source of sorrow and misfortune. Any praise he may deserve must be given to him almost solely on the score of his personal endowments; his mind and dispositions had been allowed to run to waste, and were under no controul but that of his own wayward feelings and fancies. Keith, in the following words, draws a judicious contrast between his animal and intellectual qualities. “He is said to have been one of the tallest and handsomest young men of the age; that he had a comely face and pleasant countenance; that he was a most dexterous horseman, and exceedingly well skilled in all genteel exercises, prompt and ready for all games and sports, much given to the diversions of hawking and hunting, to horse-racing and music, especially playing on the lute; he could speak and write well, and was bountiful and liberal enough. But, then, to balance these good natural qualifications, he was much addicted to intemperance, to base and unmanly pleasures; he was haughty and proud, and so very weak in mind, as to be a prey to all that came about him; he was inconstant, credulous, and facile, unable to abide by any resolutions, capable to be imposed upon by designing men, and could conceal no secret, let it tend ever so much to his own welfare or detriment.”56 With all his faults, there was no one in Scotland who lamented him more sincerely than Mary. She had loved him deeply; and whilst her whole life proves that she was incapable of indulging that violent and unextinguishable hatred which prompts to deeds of cruelty and revenge, it likewise proves that it was almost impossible for her to cease to esteem an object for which she had once formed an attachment. Murray must himself have allowed the truth of the first part of this statement; and for many days before his death, Darnley had himself felt the force of the latter. She had, no doubt, too much good sense to believe that Darnley, in his character of king, was a loss to the country; but the tears she shed for him, are to be put down to the account, not of the queen, but of the woman and the wife.
CHAPTER IV.
BOTHWELL’S TRIAL AND ACQUITTAL
During the whole of the day that succeeded her husband’s death, (Monday the 10th of February 1567), Mary shut herself up in her own apartment, and would see no one. Bothwell was anxious to have conversed with her, but overpowered with grief, she was unable to listen to any thing he wished to say.57 In the meantime all was confusion and dismay in Edinburgh, and wherever the news of this strange murder arrived, a thousand contradictory reports went abroad. Some suspected one thing, and some another; and it must be recollected, that although, at a subsequent date, facts came out sufficient to fix the guilt upon those who had really committed the crime, as yet there was nothing but mere vague conjecture. Mary herself was lost in wonder and doubt. Most of the nobility who were near her wished to persuade her, at Bothwell’s instigation, that her husband’s death was either the effect of accident, or that it had been brought about by the malice and villany of some obscure and ignoble traitors; and every endeavour being thus made to mislead her, she was the very last who could be expected to know the truth. Accordingly, it appears by a letter she wrote to the Archbishop of Glasgow, her ambassador at Paris, on Tuesday the 11th (two days after the murder), that she was still but very imperfectly informed even of the manner of Darnley’s death. This letter, at once so simple and natural, must not be omitted here. She had, the same morning, received a despatch from her ambassador, in which he had expressed a fear, that the pardon she had lately given to Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay and others, might involve her in trouble. Mary’s answer was as follows:
“Most Reverend Father in God, and trust Counsellor, we greet you well: We have received this morning your letters of the 27th January, by your servant Robert Dury, containing in part such advertisement as we find by effect over true, albeit the success has not altogether been such as the authors of that mischievous fact had preconceived in their mind, and had put it in execution, if God in his mercy had not preserved us and reserved us, as we trust, to the end that we may take a vigorous vengeance of that mischievous deed, which, before it should remain unpunished, we had rather lose life and all. The matter is horrible, and so strange, that we believe the like was never heard of in any country. This night past, being the 9th February, a little after two hours after midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown in the air, he lying sleeping in his bed, with such a vehemency, that of the whole lodging, walls, and other, there is nothing remaining, – no, not a stone above another, but all either carried far away, or dung in dross to the very ground-stone. It must be done by force of powder, and appears to have been a mine.58 By whom it has been done, or in what manner, it appears not as yet. We doubt not but, according to the diligence our Council has begun already to use, the certainty of all shall be obtained shortly; and the same being discovered, which we wot God will never suffer to lie hid, we hope to punish the same with such rigour, as shall serve for example of this cruelty to all ages to come. At all events, whoever has taken this wicked enterprise in hand, we assure ourself it was devised as well for us as for the King; for we lay all the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and were there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town, that same night at midnight, and of very chance tarried not all night, by reason of some masque in the Abbey; but we believe it was not chance, but God that put it in our head.59 We despatch this bearer upon the sudden, and therefore write to you the more shortly. The rest of your letter we shall answer at more leisure, within four or five days, by your own servant; and so, for the present, commit you to Almighty God. – At Edinburgh, the 11th day of February 1556-7. – Marie R.”60
In accordance with the resolution intimated in the above letter, to seek out and vigorously punish her husband’s murderers, a proclamation was issued upon Wednesday the 12th, immediately after an inquisition had been taken by the Justice-General, offering a reward of two thousand pounds, and “an honest yearly rent,” to whosoever should reveal “the persons, devisers, counsellors, or actual committers of the said mischievous and treasonable murder,” and promising besides to the first revealer, although a partaker of the crime, a free pardon. The same proclamation declared, that as “Almighty God would never suffer so horrible a deed to lie hid, so, before it should remain untried, the Queen’s Majesty, unto whom of all others the case was most grievous, would rather lose life and all.”61 In the mean time, not knowing but that the same traitors who had murdered her husband, might intend a similar fate for herself, Mary removed to the Castle, as a place of greater security than Holyrood Palace. There she remained shut up in a dark chamber, hung with black, till after Darnley’s burial. He lay in the Chapel at Holyrood, from the 12th to the 15th of February. His body having been embalmed, he was then interred in the royal vault, in which King James V., together with his first wife, Magdalene, and his two infant sons, Mary’s brothers, lay. Buchanan, and his follower Laing, have both insisted upon the nocturnal secrecy and indifference with which the funeral ceremony was conducted. “The nobles that were there present,” says Buchanan, “decreed, that a stately and honourable funeral should be made for him; but the Queen ordered it so, that he was carried by private bearers in the night-time, and was buried in no manner of state.” The interpretation to be put upon this insidious passage is, that the Protestant Lords proposed to bury Darnley after the Presbyterian form, and that Mary refused her consent, and, in consequence, only the Catholics attended. “The ceremonies indeed,” says Lesley, “were the fewer, because that the greatest part of the Council were Protestants, and had before interred their own parents without accustomed solemnities.”62 That Mary’s calumniators should have insisted upon this circumstance at all, only shows how eager they were to avail themselves of everything which they could pervert to their own purposes. Had Mary wished to act the hypocrite, nothing could have been easier for her than to have made a great parade at Darnley’s funeral.
Bothwell, in the mean time, kept as quiet as possible, attending, as usual, at court, and taking care always to be present at the meetings of the Privy Council. But he had lighted a torch which was not to be extinguished, till it had blazed over Scotland, and kindled his own funeral pyre. On whatever grounds the suspicion had gone abroad, (and it is difficult to say
Keith, p. 365.
Melville, p. 174.
The notion that the powder, with which the Kirk-of-Field was blown up, had been placed in a mine, dug for the purpose, was for a while very prevalent. Mary, of course, never suspected that it had been put into her own bedroom; but the truth came out as soon as the depositions of Bothwell’s accomplices were published. Why Whittaker should still have continued to believe that a mine had been excavated, it is difficult to understand. Laing very justly ridicules the absurdity of such a belief.
There is a sincere piety in this rejection of the word “chance.” Mary was steadily religious all her life, and certainly nothing but a pure and upright spirit could have induced her, on the present occasion, to appeal to her Creator, and say, “It was not chance, but God.”
Keith, Preface, p. viii.
Anderson, vol. i. p. 36.
Lesley in Anderson, vol. i. p. 23.