Bothwell wrote, and wrote French, in a firm, yet delicate Italic hand, of
singular grace and clearness.[11] His enemies accused him of studying none
but books of Art Magic in his youth, and he may have shared the taste of
the great contemporary mathematician, Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor
of Logarithms. Both Mary’s friends and enemies, including the hostile
Lords in their proclamations, averred that Bothwell had won her favour by
unlawful means, philtres, witchcraft, or what we call Hypnotism. Such
beliefs were universal: Ruthven, in his account of Riccio’s murder, tells
us that he gave Mary a ring, as an antidote to poison (not that _he_
believed in it), and that both she and Moray took him for a sorcerer. On a
charge of sorcery did Moray later burn the Lyon Herald, Sir William
Stewart, probably basing the accusation on a letter in which Sir William
confessed to having consulted a prophet, perhaps Napier of Merchistoun,
the father, not the inventor of Logarithms.[12] Quite possibly Bothwell
may really have studied the Black Art in Cornelius Agrippa and similar
authors. In any case it is plain that, as regards culture, the author of
_Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel_, the man familiar with the Court of
France, where he had held command in the Scots Guards, and had probably
known Ronsard and Brantôme, must have been a _rara avis_ of culture among
the nobles at Holyrood. So far, then, Mary’s love for him, if love she
entertained, was the reverse of ‘incredible.’ It did not need to be
explained by a common possession of ‘extreme vices.’ The author, as usual,
overstates his case, and proves too much: Lesley admits that Bothwell was
handsome, an opinion emphatically contradicted by Brantôme.
Bothwell had the charm of recklessness to an unexampled degree. He was
fierce, passionate, unyielding, strong, and, in the darkest of Mary’s
days, had been loyal. He had won for her what Knollys tells us that she
most prized, victory. A greater contrast could not be to the false
fleeting Darnley, the bully with ‘a heart of wax.’ In him Mary had more
than enough of bloom and youthful graces: she could master him, and she
longed for a master. If then she loved Bothwell, her love, however wicked,
was not unnatural or incredible. He had been loved by many women, and had
ruined all of them.
Among the other persons of the play, Moray is foremost, Mary’s natural
brother, the son of her whom James V. loved best, and, it was said, still
dreamed of while wooing a bride in France. Moray is an enigma. History
sees him, as in Lethington’s phrase, ‘looking through his fingers,’
looking thus at Riccio’s and at Darnley’s murders. These fingers hide the
face. He was undeniably a sound Protestant: only for a brief while, in
Mary’s early reign, was he sundered from Knox. In war he was, as he aimed
at being, ‘a Captain in Israel,’ cool, courageous, and skilled. That he
was extremely acquisitive is certain. Born a royal bastard, and trained
for the Church, he clung as ‘Commendator’ to the Church’s property which
he held as a layman. His enormous possessions in land, collected partly by
means that sailed close to the wind, partly from the grants of Mary,
excited the rash words of Darnley, that they were ‘too large.’
An early incident in Moray’s life seems characteristic. The battle of
Pinkie was fought in 1547, when he was sixteen. Among the slain was the
Master of Buchan, the heir-apparent of the Earl of Buchan. He left a
child, Christian Stewart, who was now heiress of the earldom. In January
1550, young Lord James Stewart, though Prior of St. Andrews, contracted
himself in marriage with the little girl. The old earl was extravagant,
perhaps more or less insane, and was deep in debt. His lands were
mortgaged. In 1556 the Lord James bought and secured from the Regent, Mary
of Guise, the right of redemption. In 1562, being all powerful now with
Mary, he secured a grant of the ‘ward, non-entries, and reliefs of the
whole estates of the earldom of Buchan.’ Now, by the proclamation made,
as usual, before Pinkie fight, all these were left by the Crown, free, to
the heirs of such as might fall in the battle. Therefore they ought to
have appertained to Christian Stewart, whom Moray had not married, her
grandfather being dead. Moray secured everything to himself, by charters
from the Crown. The unlucky Christian went on living at Loch Leven, with
Moray’s mother, Lady Douglas. In February 1562 Moray wedded Agnes Keith,
daughter of the Earl Marischal. His brother, apparently without his
knowledge, then married Christian. Moray wrote a letter to his own mother
complaining of this marriage as an act of treachery. The Old Man peeps out
through the godly and respectful style of this epistle. Moray speaks of
Christian as ‘that innocent;’ perhaps she was not remarkable for
intellect. He adds that whoever tries to take from him the lady’s estates
will have to pass over ‘his belly.’ And, indeed, he retained the
possessions. The whole transaction does seem to savour of worldliness, to
be regretted in so good a man.
Moray continued, after he was pardoned for his rebellion, to add estate to
estate. He was a pensioner of England; from France he received valuable
presents. His widow endeavoured to retain the diamonds which Mary had
owned, and wished to leave attached to the Scottish crown. His ambition
was probably more limited than his covetousness, and the suspicion that he
aimed at being king, though natural, was baseless. While he must have
known, at least as well as Mary, the guilt of Morton, Lethington, Balfour,
Bothwell, and Argyll, he associated familiarly with them, before he left
Scotland prior to Mary’s marriage with Bothwell, and he used Bothwell’s
accomplices, including the Bishop who married Bothwell to Mary, in his
attack on the character of his sister. Whether he betrayed Norfolk, or
not, was a question between David Hume and Dr. Robertson. If to report
Norfolk’s private conversation to Elizabeth is to betray,[13] Moray was a
traitor, and did what Lethington scorned to do. But Moray’s most
remarkable quality was caution. He always had an _alibi_. He knew of
Riccio’s murder--and came to Edinburgh next day. He left Edinburgh in the
morning, some sixteen hours before the explosion of Kirk o’ Field. He left
Edinburgh for England and France, twelve days before the nobles signed the
document upholding Bothwell’s innocence, and urging him to marry the
Queen. He allowed Elizabeth to lie, in his presence, and about her
encouragement of his rebellion, to the French Ambassador. His own account
of his first interview with his sister, in prison at Loch Leven, shows him
as an adept in menace cruelly suspended over her helpless head. The
account of Mary’s secretary, Nau, is much less unfavourable to Moray than
his own, for obvious reasons.
As Regent he was bold, energetic, and ruthless: the suspicion of his
intention to give up a suppliant and fugitive aroused the tolerant ethics
of the Border. A strong, patient, cautious man, capable of deep reserve,
in his family relations, financial matters apart, austerely moral, Moray
would have made an excellent king, but as a Queen’s brother he was most
dangerous, when not permitted to be all powerful. He could not have
rescued Darnley, or saved Mary from herself, without risks which a Knox or
a Craig would certainly have faced, but which no secular leader in
Scotland would have dreamed of encountering. Did he wish to save the
doomed prince? A precise Puritan, he was by no means like a conscience
among the warring members of the body politic. Mary rejoiced at the news
of his murder, pensioned the assassin, and, of all people, chose an
Archbishop as her confidant.
Reviled by Mary’s literary partisans, Moray to Mr. Froude seemed ‘noble’
and ‘stainless.’ He was a man of his time, a time when every traitor or
assassin had ‘God’ and ‘honour’ for ever on his lips. At the hypocrisies
and falsehoods of his party, deeds of treachery and blood, Moray ‘looked
through his fingers.’
Infinitely the most fascinating character in the plot was William
Maitland, the younger, of Lethington. The charm which he exercised over
his contemporaries, from Mary herself to diplomatists like Randolph, and
men of the sword like Kirkcaldy of Grange, has not yet exhausted itself.
Readers of Sir John Skelton’s interesting book, ‘Maitland of Lethington,’
must observe, if they know the facts, that, in presence of Lethington, Sir
John is like ‘birds whom the charmer serpent draws.’ He is an advocate of
Mary, but of Mary as a ‘charming sinner.’ By Lethington he is dominated:
he will scarcely admit that there is a stain on his scutcheon, a
scutcheon, alas! smirched and defaced. Could a man of to-day hold an
hour’s converse with a man of that age, he would choose Lethington. He was
behind all the scenes: he held the threads of all the plots; he made all
the puppets dance at his will. Yet by birth he was merely the son of the
good and wise poet and essayist, Sir Richard Lethington, laird of a rugged
tower and of lands in Lauderdale, _pastorum loca vasta_. He was born about
1525, had studied in France, and was a man of classical culture, without a
touch of pedantry. As early as 1555, we find him arguing after supper with
Knox, on the lawfulness of bowing down in the House of Rimmon, attending
the Mass. Knox had the last word, for Lethington was usually tactful; in
argument Knox was a babe in the hands of the amateur theologian. Appointed
Secretary to Mary of Guise, in the troubled years of the Congregation,
Lethington deserted her and joined the Lords. He negotiated for them with
Cecil and Elizabeth, and almost to the last he was true to one idea, the
union of the crowns of England and Scotland in peace and amity.
Through all the windings of his policy that idea governed him if not
thwarted by personal considerations, as at the last. Before Mary’s arrival
in Scotland he hastened to make his peace with her, and her peace and
trust she readily granted. Lethington was the spoiled child of the
political world, ‘the flower of the wits of Scotland,’ as Elizabeth styled
him; was reckoned indispensable, was petted, caressed, and forgiven. He
not only withstood Knox, in the interests of religious toleration, but he
met him with a smile, with the weapons of _persiflage_, which riddled and
rankled in the vanity of the Reformer. Lethington was modern to the
finger-tips, a man of to-day, moving among the bravos, and using the
poisoned tools, of an age of violence and perfidy.
Allied by marriage to the Earl of Atholl, in hours of peril he placed the
Tay and the Pass of Killiecrankie between himself and the Law.
From the time of his restoration to Mary’s favour after Riccio’s murder,
his part in the obscure intrigue of Darnley’s murder, indeed all his
future course, is a mystery. Being now over forty he had long wooed and
just before the murder had won the beautiful Mary Fleming, of all the Four
Maries the dearest to the Queen. His letter to Cecil on his love affair is
a charming interlude. ‘He is no more fit for her than I to be a page,’
says the brawny, grizzled, Kirkcaldy of Grange. His devotion is often
ridiculed by perhaps envious acquaintances. 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.
[Illustration: The Regent Morton
From the portrait in the collection of the Earl of Morton.
Walker & Cockerell. ph. sc.]
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 also a spectator of the opening of the Casket
(June 21, 1567), and so zealous and useful against Mary, that, after her
defeat at Langside, he received the forfeited lands of the Laird of
Corstorphine, near Edinburgh. In 1568 he became an Ordinary, or regular
Judge of the Court of Session, and, later obtained the parish of Glasgow.
The messenger of the Kirk, who came to bid him prepare his first sermon,
found him playing cards with the Laird of Bargany. He had previously been
plucked in the examination for the ministry: this was his second chance.
Being examined he declined to attempt the Greek Testament; and requested
another minister to pray for him, ‘for I am not used to pray.’ His sermon
was not thought savoury. After Morton became Regent, Archibald, for money,
took the Queen’s side, and is accused of an ungrateful and unclerical
scheme to murder his cousin, Morton. Just for the devilry of it, and a
little money, he was intriguing, a traitor to Morton, his benefactor, with
Mary’s party, and also acting as a spy for Drury and the English. He was,
later, restored to his place on the Bench of Scottish Themis, crowded as
it was with assassins, but he fled to England when Morton was accused and
dragged down by Stewart of Ochiltree (1581). Morton, in his dying
declaration, remembered his grudge against Archibald or for some other
reason freely confessed _his_ iniquities. Archibald had distinguished
himself as a forger of letters intended to aid Morton, but was denounced
by his own brother, also a judge, Douglas of Whittingham. The later career
of this accomplished gentleman was a series of treacherous betrayals of
Mary. In England his charm and accomplishments recommended him to the
friendship of Fulke Greville, who did not penetrate his character. His
letters reveal a polished irony. He was for some time ambassador of James
VI. to Elizabeth, was again accused of forgery, and, probably, ended his
active career in rural retirement. History sees Archibald in the pulpit, a
Stickit Minister: on the Bench administering justice: hobbling hurriedly
from Kirk o’ Field in one shoe; watching the bursting open of the silver
Casket; playing cards, spying, dancing, and winning hearts, and forging
letters: a versatile man of considerable charm and knowledge of the world.
His life, after 1581, is a varied but always sordid chapter of romance.
A grimmer and a godlier man is Mr. John Wood, secretary of Moray, with
whom he had been in France, an austere person, a rebuker of Mary’s dances
and frivolity. He, too, was a Lord of Session, and was wont to spur Moray
on against Idolaters. We shall find him very busy in managing the Casket
Letters. He was slain by young Forbes of Reres, the son of the corpulent
Lady Reres, rumoured to have been the complacent confidant of Mary’s amour
with Bothwell. Reres had certainly no reason to love Mr. John Wood. George
Buchanan, too, is on the scene, the Latin poet, the Latin historian, who
sang of and libelled his Queen, his pupil. Old now, and a devoted partisan
of the Lennoxes, no man contributed more to the cause of Mary’s innocence
than Buchanan, so grossly inaccurate and amusingly inconsistent are his
various indictments of her behaviour. ‘He spak and wret as they that wer
about him for the tym infourmed him,’ says Sir James Melville, ‘for he was
becom sleprie and cairles.’ Melville speaks of a later date, but George’s
invectives against Mary are ‘careless’ in all conscience.