The Mystery of Mary Stuart. Lang Andrew
Darnley, who had betrayed him. Meanwhile Mary’s dislike of Darnley must have increased, after her fear of dying in child-birth had disappeared. When once the nobles’ were knitted into a combination, with Lethington restored to the Secretaryship (for which Moray laboured successfully against Bothwell), with Morton and the Douglases brought home, Darnley was certain to perish. Lennox was disgraced, and his Stewarts were powerless, and Darnley’s own Douglas kinsmen were, of all men, most likely to put their hands in his blood: as they did. Mary was his only possible shelter. Nothing was more to be dreaded by the Lords than the reconciliation of the royal pair; whom Darnley threatened with the vengeance he would take if once his foot was on their necks. But of a sincere reconciliation there was no danger.
A difficult problem is to account for the rise of Mary’s passion for Bothwell. In February, she had given him into the arms of a beautiful bride. In March, he had won her sincerest gratitude and confidence. She had, Lennox says, bestowed on him the command of her new Guard of harquebus men, a wild crew of mercenaries under dare-devil captains. But though, according to her accusers, her gratitude and confidence turned to love, and though that love, they say, was shameless and notorious, there are no contemporary hints of it in all the gossip of scandalous diplomatists. We have to fall back on what Buchanan, inspired by Lennox, wrote after Darnley’s murder, and on what Lennox wrote himself in language more becoming a gentleman than that of Buchanan. If Lennox speaks truth, improper relations between Mary and Bothwell began as soon as she recovered from the birth of her child. He avers that Mary wrote a letter to Bothwell shortly after her recovery from child-bed, and just when she was resisting Bothwell’s and Darnley’s plot against Moray and Lethington. Bothwell, reading the letter among his friends, exclaimed, ‘Gyf any faith might be given to a princess, they’ (Darnley and Mary) ‘should never be togidder in bed agane.’ A version in English (the other paper is in Scots) makes Mary promise this to Bothwell when he entered her room, and found her washing her hands. Buchanan’s tales of Mary’s secret flight to Alloa, shortly after James’s birth, and her revels there in company with Bothwell and his crew of pirates, are well known. Lennox, however, represents her as departing to Stirling, ‘before her month,’ when even women of low degree keep the house, and as ‘taking her pleasure in most uncomely manner, arraied in homely sort, dancing about the market cross of the town.’
According to Nau, Mary and her ladies really resided at Alloa as guests of Lord Mar, one of the least treacherous and abandoned of her nobles. Bedford, in a letter of August 3, 1566, mentions Mary’s secret departure from Edinburgh, her intended meeting with Lethington (who had been exiled from Court since Riccio’s death), at Alloa, on August 2, and her disdainful words about Darnley. He adds that Bothwell is the most hated man in Scotland: ‘his insolence is such that David [Riccio] was never more abhorred than he is now,’ but Bedford says nothing of a love intrigue between Bothwell and Mary.[71] The visit to Alloa, with occasional returns to Edinburgh, is of July-August.
In August, Mary, Bothwell, Moray, and Darnley hunted in Meggatdale, the moorland region between the stripling Yarrow and the Tweed. They had poor sport: poachers had been busy among the deer. Charles IX., in France, now learned that the royal pair were on the best terms;[72] and Mary’s Inventories prove that, in August, she had presented Darnley with a magnificent bed; by no means ‘the second-best bed.’ In September she also gave him a quantity of cloth of gold, to make a caparison for his horse.[73] Claude Nau reports, however, various brutal remarks of Darnley to his wife while they were in Meggatdale. By September 20, Mary, according to Lethington, reconciled Bothwell and himself. This was a very important event. The reconciliation, Lethington says, was quietly managed at the house of a friend of his own, Argyll, Moray, and Bothwell alone being present. Moray says: ‘Lethington is restored to favour, wherein I trust he shall increase.’[74] This step was hostile to Darnley’s interests, for he had attempted to ruin Lethington. It is certain, as we shall see, that all parties were now united in a band to resist Darnley’s authority, and maintain that of the Queen, though, probably, nothing was said about violence.
At this very point Buchanan, supported and probably inspired by Lennox, makes the guilty intimacy of Mary and Bothwell begin in earnest. In September, 1566, Mary certainly was in Edinburgh, reconciling Lethington to Bothwell, and also working at the budget and finance in the Exchequer House. It ‘was large and had pleasant gardens to it, and next to the gardens, all along, a solitary vacant room,’ says Buchanan. But the real charm, he declares, was in the neighbourhood of the house of David Chalmers, a man of learning, and a friend of Bothwell. The back door of Chalmers’s house opened on the garden of the Exchequer House, and according to Buchanan, Bothwell thence passed, through the garden, to Mary’s chamber, where he overcame her virtue by force. She was betrayed into his hands by Lady Reres.[75]
This lady, who has been mentioned already, was the wife of Arthur Forbes of Reres. His castle, on a hill above the north shore of the Firth of Forth, is now but a grassy mound, near Lord Crawford’s house of Balcarres. The lady was a niece of Cardinal Beaton, a sister of the magic lady of Branksome, and aunt of one of the Four Maries, Mary Beaton. Buchanan describes her as an old love of Bothwell, ‘a woman very heavy, both by unwieldy age and massy substance;’ her gay days, then, must long have been over. She was also the mother of a fairly large family. Cecil absurdly avers that Bothwell obtained his divorce by accusing himself of an amour with this fat old lady.[76] Knox’s silly secretary, Bannatyne, tells us that the Reformer, dining at Falsyde, was regaled with a witch story by a Mr. Lundie. He said that when Lady Atholl and Mary were both in labour, in Edinburgh Castle, he came there on business, and found Lady Reres lying abed. ‘He asking her of her disease, she answered that she was never so troubled with no bairn that ever she bare, for the Lady Atholl had cast all the pain of her child-birth upon her.’[77] It was a case of Telepathy. Lady Reres had been married long enough to have a grown-up son, the young Laird of Reres, who was in Mary’s service at Carberry Hill (June, 1567). According to Dr. Joseph Robertson, Lady Reres was wet-nurse to Mary’s baby. But, if we trust Buchanan, she was always wandering about with Mary, while the nurseling was elsewhere. The name of Lady Reres does not occur among those of Mary’s household in her Etat of February 1567. We only hear of her, then, from Buchanan, as a veteran procuress of vast bulk who, at some remote period, had herself been the mistress of Bothwell.
A few days after the treasonable and infamous action of Bothwell in violating his Queen, we are to believe that Mary, still in the Exchequer House, sent Lady Reres for that hero. Though it would have been simple and easy to send a girl like Margaret Carwood, Mary and Margaret must needs let old Lady Reres ‘down by a string, over an old wall, into the next garden.’ Still easier would it have been for Lady Reres to use the key of the back door, as when she first admitted Bothwell. But these methods were not romantic enough: ‘Behold, the string suddenly broke, and down with a great noise fell Lady Reres.’ However, she returned with Bothwell, and so began these tragic loves.
This legend is backed, according to Buchanan, by the confession of Bothwell’s valet, George Dalgleish, ‘which still remaineth upon record,’ but is nowhere to be found. In Dalgleish’s confession, printed in the ‘Detection,’ nothing of the kind occurs. But a passage in the Casket Sonnet IX. is taken as referring to the condoned rape:
Pour luy aussi j’ai jeté mainte larme,
Premier, quand il se fist de ce corps possesseur,
Duquel alors il n’avoit pas le cœur.
In the Lennox MSS. Lennox himself dates the beginning of the intrigue with Bothwell about September, 1566. But he and Buchanan are practically but one witness. There is no other.
As regards this critical period, we have abundant contemporary information. The Privy Council, writing to Catherine de’ Medici, from Edinburgh, on October 8, make Mary, ten or twelve days before (say September 26), leave Stirling for Edinburgh, on affairs of the Exchequer. She offered to bring Darnley, but he insisted on remaining at Stirling, where Lennox visited him for two or three days, returning
Stevenson,
Cheruel,
Robertson,
Bain, ii. 300.
Bain, ii. 440.
Bannatyne,