Mary, Queen of Scots by Eric Linklater

Author:Eric Linklater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2018-06-27T13:49:02+00:00

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6 It was Fauldonside who threatened Mary with a pistol in the turmoil of Riccio’s murder.

7 Herries’s Memoirs.

VIII

As Borderers the Hepburns had the advantage of two countries to rob and raid in. This richness of opportunity encouraged them in restlessness, independence, and ambition; and Mary’s Bothwell was not the first of his family to observe possibilities of fortune in a queen’s petticoat. A Hepburn was the reputed lover of Mary of Gueldres, a Hepburn was the captor of Jane Beaufort, widow of James I.

In his very young manhood Bothwell had actively supported the fortunes of Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise. Though a Protestant himself, he fought for her against the Protestant Lords, and is remembered for guerilla tactics and his interception of supplies from England. He travelled abroad, seduced a Norwegian lady, and in France impoverished his morals and improved his manners. He came back to Scotland, lively and quarrelsome, and discussed with Arran the possibilities of kidnapping their Queen. Arran told all—perhaps more than all—and Bothwell was con-fined on suspicion in Edinburgh Castle. He escaped, and was shortly recaptured by the English. In England he made a good impression, and when, by Mary’s intercession, he received permission to proceed to France, he left behind a reputation for honourable and courteous behaviour. In 1565 he returned to Scotland without permission, but fled again before Murray’s enmity, though it was apparent that the Queen bore him no ill-will. His fellow-Protestants were suspicious of her dormant favour, and feared that some day she would ‘shake him out of her pocket’ against them. Presently she did.

By October, 1565, Mary was said to ‘place Bothwell in honour above every subject that she hath,’ and after Riccio’s murder and their escape from Holyrood he may well have shone like a good deed in a naughty world. A year later he ‘carried all credit in the court,’ and was well hated for it by many of the nobles. But the Queen’s favour and most reasonable friendship, that were soon to be fantastically misconstrued, aroused no synchronous rumours of misconduct. The Privy Council, in September, 1566, told Darnley that he ought to thank God for giving him so wise and virtuous a wife: an admonition that hardly substantiates the description of her activities with which Buchanan subsequently provided her English judges. The story is worth repeating as an example of her enemies’ inventive malice, and it is worth repeating now when it may be compared with the strictly contemporary opinion of the Privy Council.

For a little while the Queen lived in the Exchequer House in Edinburgh. It had pleasant gardens. One of Bothwell’s servants had a house abutting on them. And the Queen had a lady-in-waiting: there are the elements of Buchanan’s imaginative tale. The lady-in-waiting was Lady Reres, who, he says, with a refreshing lack of snobbery ‘had from the gain of whoredom betaken herself to the craft of bawdry.’ She had a good figure for the part, being ‘very heavy, both by unwieldy age and massy substance.

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