An Accidental Tragedy by Roderick Graham

Author:Roderick Graham [Graham, Roderick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857904973
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This letter shows Elizabeth’s secret service at its most efficient. The repetition of the exact phrase ‘look through your fingers’ might be a coincidence, but it might also give a strong hint that an eavesdropping servant at Craigmillar had reported the substance of the Craigmillar Bond to Elizabeth. Also, as far as one sovereign queen could suggest to another, Mary was being told to arrest Bothwell – ‘those you have nearest to you’. At the same time, the erroneous rumour in London was that Mary’s nobility suggested to her that ‘being a lone and solitary woman . . . she would do well to make him [Bothwell] partaker of her bed’. Killigrew was also told that all appearance of ‘amity’ would cease and that ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh was once again paramount. In early March, Killigrew met with Mary ‘in a dark chamber and could not see her face’ but found her very doleful. The diplomatic clock had been put back seven years.

Moretta, the Savoy ambassador, also had suspicions of Mary’s direct involvement and reported that a placard had been posted outside Holyrood saying, ‘I, with the Earl of Bothwell and with others whose names shall shortly be declared, did this deed.’ Bothwell reacted to this typically by declaring that when he discovered the authors of these calumnies he would ‘wash his hands in their blood’. Drury said of him. ‘His hand when he talks to any that is not assured to him, [is] upon his dagger, with a strange countenance’.

At the beginning of March another placard had appeared, making yet another accusation of guilt and linking Mary directly to Bothwell. It showed a naked mermaid wearing a crown (in this period a ‘mermaid’ was street slang for a prostitute). In its right hand was a sea anemone, representing the female genitalia, and in its left hand was the rolled-up net used to trap unwary seamen. Since the mermaid was framed with the royal initials ‘MR’, there could be no doubt as to who it represented. Below it was a hare – the crest of Bothwell as a Hepburn – with the letter ‘H’, surrounded with drawn swords. To the sixteenth-century mind, attuned to the niceties of heraldry, the implication was clear: the whore Mary had seduced the brute Bothwell.

At this point Mary had the opportunity to show her power as a ruling queen and could have acted decisively. Diane de Poitiers would have easily persuaded her monarch to undertake mass arrests; Catherine de Medici would have given the instructions herself and, after carefully focused torture, a scenario clearing her of all blame would have become the accepted truth; Elizabeth would have denied all knowledge of the Craigmillar Bond and turned her theatrical wrath on the signatories, despatching them to the Tower. But Mary, seemingly inert and under the control of Bothwell, did nothing at all. Not so inert was Sir James Balfour: he was accused, probably justly, of having had one of his servants killed to prevent him from turning informer.

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