And there, in the ancient castle on an island in the centre of a lake, Mary Stuart came to the end of her turbulent reign, for that night she passed into the half-light, a prisoner. She was twenty-four years of age and had many years left to her, but her life as Queen was virtually over.
Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, had become Mary, the captive.
IT WAS the month of February, and in her apartment in Fotheringhay Castle the Queen was dividing her possessions into separate piles. There was a little money and some trinkets—not very much left after twenty years of prison—and there were so many to whom she wished to leave some token, some memory of herself.
She was very tired; she had lived little more than forty-four years but it seemed twice as long.
She looked at that dark corner in which one of her ladies—her dear Jane Kennedy—sat silently weeping, rocking her body to and fro in the agony of her grief.
Elizabeth Curie, another of those who had been with her in many of her doleful prisons and who loved her, did not weep, but her grief was manifest in every line of her body. The others had run from the chamber, for they could not control their sobbing.
“My children, my children,” said the Queen softly, “it is not a time to weep. You should rather rejoice to see me on a fair road of deliverance from the many evils and afflictions which have so long been my portion.”
They did not answer her; and her thoughts traveled back to that road along which she had come. So many years ago it had been since she had said good-bye to her lover. Twenty years! And she had not seen him since that day. He had become but a memory to her, a memory that was both sweet and bitter.
Life had been little kinder to him than to her. He had escaped to Denmark, but not to freedom. Anna Throndsen had forgotten the love she had once had for him and had sued him in the courts for money she had given him in the past. Mary’s family, the Guises, would not allow a man who had ruined their niece to regain his freedom. They had arranged with Denmark that he should be imprisoned in the Castle of Malmoe, and there he had spent ten weary years. He had died at length, of melancholy, it was said; half mad with frustration, he, the strong man, confined within four walls would dash his head in very desperation against those walls; he too had been glad to die. And before he had died he had written a confession declaring her innocent of Darnley’s murder although he himself had played a large part in it. That confession had brought great comfort to Mary in Chatsworth—where she had been imprisoned at that time—for it brought with it a vivid reminder of that immense strength which was without fear. Poor Bothwell! Poor lover, who had once believed the world was his to conquer and subdue. Ambition had ruined him as certainly as passion had ruined her.
But that was all long ago, and there was no need to dwell upon it, for soon she would be past all earthly pain.
Memories of Lochleven came to her—of George and Willie Douglas who had loved her and sought to help her escape from her prison. It came back to her in clear brief pictures: Lochleven where she had been forced to sign her abdication and had known that her son had become the King of Scotland; Lochleven where she had given birth to twins—hers and Bothwell’s—stillborn and so tragically symbolic; Lochleven from where she had all but escaped dressed as a laundress, and had been betrayed because a boatman had seen her beautiful hands which could never have belonged to a laundress. But it was at Lochleven that George and Willie Douglas had loved her and had determined to give their lives if need be for her sake, so that eventually, with their aid she had escaped, but alas! only to Langside and utter defeat at the hands of her brother Moray’s troops.
She had known then that her only hope was flight from Scotland, but where could she seek refuge? She must be a fugitive from her own land; her son was lost to her, brought up by her enemies to believe the worst of her; her own brother was determined on her defeat and offered her nothing but a prison or death.
Could she go to France? she had asked herself. She thought of her family there. But France was ruled by an evil woman, a woman who had never shown herself to be Mary’s friend. How could she throw herself on the mercy of Catherine de Médicis?
There was only one to whom she could appeal for mercy—the Queen of England; and so for more than eighteen years she remained the prisoner of Elizabeth. She had asked for hospitality and had been given captivity. And during those years there had been one subject which had always been raised when her name was mentioned: the subject of the Casket Letters.
She often thought of those letters, which had been read by all the important people of England and Scotland; the whole world discussed them. There were some who declared they were the actual letters and poems Mary had written to her lover; others insisted that they were forgeries. If they were authentic, then Mary was exposed as an adulteress and murderess; if they were false, then Mary’s story remained a mystery which none could ever solve. The testament of tortured men could count for little. Such confessions gave satisfaction to none but those who extorted them, and were worthless.
How clear it all became when she looked back on it. Moray, Maitland, Morton—they were the leaders and they were determined to destroy her. They would show her to her subjects as a murderess and adulteress, for only thus could they rouse the people against her.
Those men, who had certainly been more deeply concerned in the murder of her husband than she had, now banded together and self-righteously sought to force her—with Bothwell—to take all the blame. It was necessary to their policy that she and Bothwell should do so; they had sought to write her epitaph for her own generation and all generations to come: Mary Stuart who was involved with her lover in her husband’s murder for the sake of an adulterous passion.
Would they succeed? How could she know? She could only hope that after she was dead there would be those who sought to sift the truth from the lies and at least do her justice.
“Oh God,” she prayed aloud, “have mercy on me. The thief on the cross was forgiven; but I am a greater sinner than he was. Have mercy on me in this hour of my death as You had on him.”
Would her story have been different, she wondered, if Geordie Dalgleish had not produced the silver casket? Would it have been possible for her to return to her country and reign as its Queen, but for those incriminating letters?
Geordie had been arrested when all Bothwell’s servants had been taken up and tortured with the object of making them confess that Bothwell and Mary—and they alone—had been responsible for Darnley’s murder.
Geordie had been Bothwell’s tailor and, as a servant of the Earl, suspect. Perhaps to curry favor with his tormentors he had shown them the silver casket which he said had been found beneath his master’s bed.
Those revealing sonnets were exposed to the world. She had written to her lover of her innermost feelings; and now the whole world was reading what she had written for his eyes alone. She had written letters to her lover, and those letters must have conveyed her great passion for him; but she surely had never written those cruel words, those brutal words, which were said to have been penned while she sat by Darnley’s bedside!
How angry she had been, how shocked, how humiliated! She had wept tears of rage when she had heard that the poems and letters were being publicly read; but now even that seemed of little moment.
In those early days of captivity her hopes had been high. She had been taken from prison to prison—from Carlisle to Bolton, Tutbury, Coventry, Chatsworth, Sheffield, Buxton, Chartley and finally to Fotheringhay.
Buxton held a bittersweet memory for it was at Buxton that the last of her Marys to be with her—Seton—had come near to marriage with Andrew Beaton.