The Mystery of Mary Stuart. Lang Andrew
But, from September 20, 1566, Lethington was deep in every scheme against Darnley. He certainly signed the murder ‘band.’ He was with Mary at Stirling (April 22-23, 1567) when, if he did not know that Bothwell meant to carry her off (and perhaps he really did not know), he was alone in his ignorance among the inner circle of politicians. Yet he disliked the marriage, and was hated by Bothwell. On the day of Mary’s enlèvement, Bothwell took Lethington, threatened him, and, but for Mary, would probably have slain him. Passive as to herself, she defended the Secretary with royal courage. Days darkened round the Queen, the nobles rose in arms. Lethington, about June 7, fled first to Livingstone’s house of Callendar, then joined Atholl and the enemies of the Queen. We shall later attempt to unfold the secret springs of his tortuous and fatal policy.
Lethington had been the Ahithophel of the age. ‘And the counsel of Ahithophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God.’ But the Lord ‘turned the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.’ He wrought against Mary, just after she saved his life from the dagger of Bothwell, some secret inexpiable offence, besides public injuries. Fear of her vengeance, for she knew something fatal to him, drove him into her party when her cause was desperate. He escaped the gallows by a natural death; he had long been smitten by creeping paralysis. Mary hated him dead, as after his betrayal of her she had loathed him living.
Mary was sorely bested, then, between the Young Fool, the Furious Man, the Puritan brother, and Michael Wylie (Machiavelli) as the Scots nicknamed Lethington. She was absolutely alone. There was no man whom she could trust. On every hand were known rebels, half pardoned, half reconciled. Feuds, above all that of her husband and his clan, the Lennox Stewarts, with the nearest heirs of the crown, the Hamiltons, broke out eternally. The Protestants hated her: the Preachers longed to drag her down: the English Ambassadors were hostile spies. France was far away, the Queen Mother was her enemy: her kindred, the Guises, were cold or powerless. She saw only one strong man who had been loyal, one protector who had served her mother, and saved herself. That man was Bothwell.
Most inscrutable of the persons in the play is Bothwell’s wife, Lady Jane Gordon, a daughter of Huntly, the dead and ruined Cock of the North. If we may accept the Casket Sonnets, Lady Jane, a girl of twenty, resisted her brother’s scheme to wed her to Bothwell. She preferred some one whom the sonnet calls ‘a troublesome fool,’ and a note, in the Lennox Papers, informs us that her first love was Ogilvy of Boyne, who consoled himself with Mary Beaton. Still following the sonnets, we learn that the young Lady Bothwell dressed ill, but won her wild husband’s heart by literary love letters plagiarised from ‘some illustrious author.’ The existing letters of the lady, written after the years of storm, are businesslike, and deal with business. She consented to her divorce for a valuable consideration in lands which she held till her death, in the reign of Charles I. According to general opinion, Bothwell, as we shall see, greatly preferred her to the Queen, and continued to live with her after the divorce. Lady Bothwell kept the dispensation which enabled her to marry Bothwell, though he was divorced from her for the want of it. She married the Earl of Sutherland in 1573, and, after his death, returned à ses premiers amours, wedding her old true love who had wooed her in her girlhood, Ogilvy of Boyne. Their conversation must have been rich in curious reminiscences. The loves and hatreds of their youth were extinct; the wild hearts of Bothwell, Mary, Mary Beaton, Lethington, Darnley, and the rest, had long ceased to beat, and these two were left, Darby and Joan, alone in a new world.
II
THE MINOR CHARACTERS
Having sketched the chief actors in this tragedy, we may glance at the players of subordinate parts. They were such men as are apt to be bred when a religious and social Revolution has shaken the bases of morality, when acquiescence in theological party cries confers the title of ‘godly:’ when the wealth of a Church is to be won by cunning or force, and when feudal or clan loyalty to a chief is infinitely more potent than fidelity to king, country, and the fundamental laws of morality. The Protestants, the ‘godly,’ accused the Idolaters (the Catholics) of throwing their sins off their shoulders in the confessional, and beginning anew. But the godly, if naturally ruffians, consoled and cleared themselves by repentances on the scaffold, and one felt assured, after a life of crime, that he ‘should sup with God that night.’
The Earl of Morton is no minor character in the history of Scotland, but his part is relatively subordinate in that of Mary Stuart. The son of the most accomplished and perfidious scoundrel of the past generation, Sir George Douglas, brother of Angus the brother-in-law of Henry VIII., Morton had treachery in his blood. His father had alternately betrayed England of which he was a pensioner, and Scotland of which he was a subject. By a perverse ingenuity of shame, he had used the sacred Douglas Heart, the cognisance of the House, the achievement granted to the descendants of the Good Lord James, as a mark to indicate what passages in his treasonable letters might be relied on by his English employers. In Morton’s father and uncle had lived on the ancient inappeasable feud between Douglases and Stewarts, between the Nobles and the Crown. It was a feud stained by murder under trust, by betrayal in the field, and perfidy in the closet. Morton was heir to the feud of his family, and to the falseness. When the Reformation broke out, and the Wars of the Congregation against Idolatry, Morton wavered long, but at length joined the Protestants when they were certain of English assistance. Henceforth he was one of Mr. Froude’s ‘small gallant band’ of Reformers, and, as such, was hostile to Mary. His sanctimonious snuffle is audible still, in his remark to Throckmorton at the time when the Englishman probably saved the life of the Queen from the Lords. Throckmorton asked to be allowed to visit Mary in prison: ‘The Earl Morton answered me that shortly I should hear from them, but the day being destined, as I did see, to the Communion, continual preaching, and common prayer, they could not be absent, nor attend matters of the world, but first they must seek the matters of God, and take counsel of Him who could best direct them.’
A red-handed murderer, living in open adultery with the widow of Captain Cullen, whom he had hanged, and daily consorting with murderers like his kinsman, Archibald Douglas, the Parson of Glasgow, Morton approached the Divine Mysteries. His private life was notoriously profligate; he added avarice to his other and more genial peccadilloes. He intruded on the Kirk the Tulchan Bishops, who were mere filters, or conduits, through which ecclesiastical wealth flowed to the State. Yet he was godly: he was the foe of Idolaters, and the Kirk, while deploring his excesses, cast on him no unfavourable eye. He held the office of Chancellor, and, during the raids and risings which were protests against Darnley’s marriage with Mary, he was in touch with both parties, but did not commit himself. About February, 1566, there seems to have been a purpose to deprive him of the Seals. He seized the moment to join hands with Darnley in antagonism to Riccio: he and his Douglases, George and Archibald, helped to organise the murder of the favourite: Morton was then driven into England. At Christmas, 1566, after signing a band, not involving murder, against Darnley, he was pardoned, returned, was made acquainted with the scheme for killing Darnley, but, he declared, declined to join without Mary’s written warrant. His friend and retainer, Archibald Douglas, was present at the laying of gunpowder in Kirk o’ Field. Morton presently signed a band promising to aid and abet Bothwell, but instantly joined the nobles who overthrew him. His retainers discovered the fatal Casket full of Mary’s alleged letters to Bothwell, and he was one of the most ardent of her prosecutors. Vengeance came upon him, fourteen years later, from Stewart, the brother-in-law of John Knox.
In person, Morton was indeed one of the Red Douglases. A good portrait at Dalmahoy represents him with a common but grim set of features, and reddish tawny hair, under a tall black Puritanic hat.
A jackal constantly attendant on Morton was his kinsman, Archibald Douglas, a son of Douglas of Whittingham. In Archibald we see the ‘strugforlifeur’ (as M. Daudet renders Darwin) of the period. A younger son, he was apparently educated for the priesthood, before the Reformation. In 1565, he was made ‘Parson of Douglas,’ drawing the revenues, and also was an Extraordinary Lord of Session. Involved in Riccio’s murder, he fled to France (where he may have been educated), but returned to negotiate Morton’s pardon. He was go-between to Morton, Bothwell, and Lethington, in the affair of Darnley’s murder, and was present at, or just before, the explosion, losing one of his embroidered velvet dress shoes, in which he had perhaps been dancing at Bastian’s marriage masque. He was