Rival Queens: The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots by Kate Williams

Author:Kate Williams [Williams, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornerstone Publishing

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘They Have Robbed Me of Everything I Have in This World’

THE LORDS HAD expected that the people would attack and mock their queen, but the people of Edinburgh were outraged to see her so treated and flocked to the Provost’s house to shout that she should be freed. And even those they expected to be loyal were complaining that she had been promised good conduct and was instead being treated as a common prisoner.

From her awful captivity, Mary spotted Maitland in the crowd and managed to persuade him to speak to her, even though he was too ashamed to meet her eye. Her old friend, Secretary of State and husband of her beloved Mary Fleming rebuffed her cruelly, telling her that ‘it was suspected and feared that she meant to thwart the execution of the justice demanded on the death of the late king’. He talked on about the sins of Bothwell. Mary countered that the lords were engaging in ‘false pretexts’ and trying to hinder ‘justice done for the murder which they themselves had committed’. As she had with Morton, she revealed to Maitland that she knew he was guilty: ‘She told him that she feared that he, Morton and Balfour, more than any others, hindered the inquiry into the murder, to which they were the consenting and guilty parties.’ She told Maitland that Bothwell had shown her the bond. If she was treated thus for attempting to prevent the investigation into Darnley’s murder, how much harder would the inquiry be against Maitland, ‘with how much greater certainty could they proceed against him, Morton, Balfour and the rest who were the actual murderers?’1

Again, Mary rushed to speak when she should have stayed quiet. She should have published the truth herself, engaged her lawyers or used the knowledge she now had to get other lords on her side before going public. Instead, she gave the lords even more reason to try to silence her and lock her away. Maitland, the man she had thought of as a friend, was terrified. He told the queen that if she said he was responsible, it would ‘drive him to greater lengths than he yet had gone in order to save his own life’. He suggested too that her own life was under threat but that he could save her – he blackmailed her to stay quiet. She was making a great mistake in telling them what she knew.

It does not seem, however, that Mary told them she was pregnant. Even if she had not been with child, arguing that she was would have been a protection for her. If it had reached the public that the queen was pregnant with an heir to the throne – even by the hated Bothwell – there would have been a heavy surge of support for her. For Mary could do the one thing that the lords could not: give birth to a future king. And James was still only a toddler. He had not reached the golden age of five, when the mortality rate was much reduced.

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