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Mary took his demand of speedy justice in a very literal sense, and allowing only fifteen days for the examination of this important affair, she sent a citation to Lenox, requiring him to appear in court, and prove his charge against Bothwell.[*] This nobleman, meanwhile, and all the other persons accused by Lenox, enjoyed their full liberty;[**] Bothwell himself was continually surrounded with armed men; [***] took his place in council;[****] lived during some time in the house with Mary;[v] and seemed to possess all his wonted confidence and familiarity with her. Even the Castle of Edinburgh, a place of great consequence in this critical time, was intrusted to him, and under him, to his creature, Sir James Balfour, who had himself been publicly charged as an accomplice in the king’s murder.[v*] Lenox, who had come as far as Stirling with a view of appearing at the trial, was informed of all these circumstances; and reflecting on the small train which attended him, he began to entertain very just apprehensions from the power, insolence, and temerity of his enemy. He wrote to Mary, desiring that the day of trial might be prorogued; and conjured her, by all the regard which she bore to her own honor, to employ more leisure and deliberation in determining a question of such extreme moment.[v**] No regard was paid to his application: the jury was enclosed, of which the earl of Caithness was chancellor; and though Lenox, foreseeing this precipitation, had ordered Cunningham, one of his retinue, to appear in court, and protest in his name against the acquittal of the criminal, the jury proceeded to a verdict.[v***] The verdict was such as it behoved them to give, where neither accuser nor witness appeared; and Bothwell was absolved from the king’s murder. The jury, however, apprehensive that their verdict would give great scandal, and perhaps expose them afterwards to some danger, entered a protest, in which they represented the necessity of their proceedings.[v****]
* Keith, p. 373. ** Keith, p. 374, 375. *** Keith, p. 405. **** Anderson, vol. i. p. 38, 40, 50, 52. v Anderson, vol. ii. p. 274. v* Spotswood, p. 201. v** Keith, p. 375. Anderson, vol. i. p. 52. v*** Keith, p. 376. Anderson, vol. ii. p. 106. Spotswood, p. 201. v**** Spotswood, p. 201. Anderson, vol. i p. 113.
It is remarkable, that the indictment was laid against Bothwell for committing the crime on the ninth of February, not the tenth, the real day on which Henry was assassinated.[*] The interpretation generally put upon this error, too gross, it was thought, to have proceeded from mistake, was, that the secret council by whom Mary was governed, not trusting entirely to precipitation, violence, and authority, had provided this plea, by which they insured, at all adventures, a plausible pretence for acquitting Bothwell.
Two days after this extraordinary transaction, a parliament was held; and though the verdict in favor of Bothwell was attended with such circumstances as strongly confirmed, rather than diminished, the general opinion of his guilt, he was the person chosen to carry the royal sceptre on the first meeting of that national assembly.[**] In this parliament a rigorous act was made against those who set up defamatory bills; but no notice was taken of the king’s murder.[***] The favor which Mary openly bore to Bothwell kept every one in awe; and the effects of this terror appeared more plainly in another transaction, which ensued immediately upon the dissolution of the parliament. A bond or association was framed; in which the subscribers, after relating the acquittal of Bothwell by a legal trial, and mentioning a further offer which he had made, to prove his innocence by single combat, oblige themselves, in case any person should afterwards impute to him the king’s murder, to defend him with their whole power against such calumniators. After this promise, which implied no great assurance in Bothwell of his own innocence, the subscribers mentioned the necessity of their queen’s marriage, in order to support the government; and they recommended Bothwell to her as a husband.[****] This paper was subscribed by all the considerable nobility there present. In a country divided by violent factions, such a concurrence in favor of one nobleman, nowise distinguished above the rest, except by his flagitious conduct, could never have been obtained, had not every one been certain, at least firmly persuaded, that Mary was fully determined on this measure.[v] 9 Nor would such a motive have sufficed to influence men, commonly so stubborn and untractable, had they not been taken by surprise, been ignorant of each other’s sentiments, and overawed by the present power of the court, and by the apprehensions of further violence from persons so little governed by any principles of honor and humanity. Even with all these circumstances, the subscription to this paper may justly be regarded as a reproach to the nation.
* Keith, p. 375. Anderson, vol. ii. p. 93. Spotswood, p. 201. ** Keith, p. 78. Crawford, p. 14. *** Keith, p. 389. **** Keith, p. 381. v See note I, at the end of the volume.
The subsequent measures of Bothwell were equally precipitate and audacious. Mary having gone to Stirling to pay a visit to her son, he assembled a body of eight hundred horse, on pretence of pursuing some robbers on the borders; and having waylaid her on her return, he seized her person near Edinburgh, and carried her to Dunbar, with an avowed design of forcing her to yield to his purpose. Sir James Melvil, one of her retinue, was carried along with her, and says not that he saw any signs of reluctance or constraint; he was even informed, as he tells us, by Bothwell’s officers, that the whole transaction was managed in concert with her.[*] A woman, indeed, of that spirit and resolution which is acknowledged to belong to Mary, does not usually, on these occasions, give such marks of opposition to real violence as can appear any wise doubtful or ambiguous. Some of the nobility, however, in order to put matters to further trial, sent her a private message, in which they told her, that if in reality she lay under force, they would use all their efforts to rescue her. Her answer was, that she had indeed been carried to Dunbar by violence, but ever since her arrival had been so well treated that she willingly remained with Bothwell.[**] No one gave himself thenceforth any concern to relieve her from a captivity which was believed to proceed entirely from her own approbation and connivance.
This unusual conduct was at first ascribed to Mary’s sense of the infamy attending her purposed marriage, and her desire of finding some color to gloss over the irregularity of her conduct. But a pardon, given to Bothwell a few days after, made the public carry their conjectures somewhat further. In this deed, Bothwell received a pardon for the violence committed on the queen’s person, and for “all other crimes;” a clause by which the murder of the king was indirectly forgiven. The rape was then conjectured to have been only a contrivance, in order to afford a pretence for indirectly remitting a crime, of which it would have appeared scandalous to make openly any mention.[***]
* Melvil, p. 80. ** Spotswood, p. 202. *** Anderson, vol. iv. part ii. p. 61.
These events passed with such rapidity, that men had no leisure to admire sufficiently one incident, when they were surprised with a new one equally rare and uncommon. There still, however, remained one difficulty which it was not easy to foresee how the queen and Bothwell, determined as they were to execute their shameful purpose, could find expedients to overcome. The man who had procured the subscription of the nobility, recommending him as a husband to the queen, and who had acted this seeming violence on her person, in order to force her consent, had been married two years before to another woman; to a woman of merit, of a noble family, sister to the earl of Huntley. But persons blinded by passion, and infatuated with crime, soon shake off all appearance of decency. A suit was commenced for a divorce between Bothwell and his wife; and this suit was opened at the same instant in two different, or rather opposite courts; in the court of the archbishop of St. Andrew’s, which was Popish, and governed itself by the canon law; and in the new consistorial or commissariot court, which was Protestant, and was regulated by the principles of the reformed teachers. The plea advanced in each court was so calculated as to suit the principles which there prevailed; in the archbishop’s court, the pretence of consanguinity was employed, because Bothwell was related to his wife in the fourth degree; in the commissariot court, the accusation of adultery was made use of against him. The parties, too, who applied for the divorce, were different in the different courts: Bothwell was the person who sued in the former; his wife in the latter. And the suit in both courts was opened, pleaded, examined, and decided, with the utmost precipitation; and a sentence of divorce was pronounced in four days.[*]
