The Outrageous Queens by Marc Alexander

Author:Marc Alexander [Alexander, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Willow eBooks
Published: 2012-12-11T08:00:00+00:00

Scotland – indeed the whole of Europe – was stunned. Mary must be mad. How otherwise could a Catholic queen marry the Protestant who had murdered her lawful husband? Many now regarded her as guilty as Bothwell. The Scottish nobles could not forgive Mary for making him the most powerful man in the kingdom, and they took up arms against the royal couple.

The queen and her new husband left Edinburgh for Borthwick Castle where Bothwell hoped to rally his Borderers to the royal standard. Instead the castle was surrounded by their enemies who sent a message to the queen saying that if she left Bothwell and returned to Edinburgh she would receive the respect due to a sovereign. She refused contemptuously and, disguised as a boy, escaped from the castle.

The armies of the queen and the rebel lords faced each other at Carberry on June 15. As the day wore on Mary’s forces melted away, and finally she surrendered without a shot being fired. In Edinburgh the queen was met with shouts of “Burn the murderess!” She was paraded behind a banner on which was a crude painting of Darnley’s body with her son James kneeling beside it saying in a cartoon caption: “Judge and revenge my cause, O Lord.”

When the procession was sadistically turned into Kirk o’Field, so the queen could gaze upon the ruined house, the fury of the mob was such that she was in danger of being lynched. She was hurried to the Provost’s House, where she was locked in a bare room. There was only one window, and outside this the Darnley banner waved mockingly. The next evening she was escorted to Holyrood House, but her relief was short-lived. Almost immediately she was put on a horse and the journey to her island prison in Lochleven began. Mary was carrying Bothwell’s child. She said that she was seven months pregnant, which, if it was true, meant that the child had been conceived before the death of Darnley. The mystery is what happened next. Did Mary have stillborn twins, as some traditions suggest, or did she give birth to a baby daughter who was smuggled to France?

Bothwell escaped to Norway. He was finally imprisoned by the King of Denmark at Dragsholm in Zealand. For five years he remained chained (in such a way that he could neither stand upright nor sit down) in conditions of revolting filthiness. No wonder he went insane before his death in 1578.

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