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The opportunity was Mary's again to renew plot and counterplot for a political marriage. But, at last, she was madly in love. Her lover was the Earl of Bothwell, recently married and known to have been implicated in her husband's murder. He was broad of shoulder, stout of limb, shaggy, stern, a hawk-headed man. To yield to this passion was fatal; but she yielded, conniving in her own abduction to hasten the marriage. Sir James Melville puts it bluntly: "The queen could not but marry him, seeing that he had ravished her." She was 25.
Bitterly was the marriage rued. The whole court was witness of her unhappiness. Bothwell disdained her openly, visited his former wife, was so cruel that she threatened kill herself. Her people and her nobles united against her; she fled Edinburgh with Bothwell. With Mary beside him, his forces and the enemy ultimately came face to face at Carberry Hill. She could make terms for herself, none for him. Bothwell's outnumbered troops wavered and muttered. He waited no longer; with a hasty word to her he mounted and fled, to die an exile, in prison.
At the island castle of Loch Leven, Mary's charm brought her a rescuer, George Douglas, who loved her, and later, in an English prison, she was wooed by the Duke of Norfolk and pledged herself to him. These were the last despairing attempts of a doomed woman to regain her freedom, to save her life, to win a crown.
The Significance. Pedant, poet, playwright and teller of tales, each after his manner has dealt more or less faithfully with the tragic story of the pitiful Queen of Scots. Mr. Hume applies the scientific method; avoids the Charybdis of sentimentality and the Scylla of puritanism; achieves clarity and justice. The men who loved her were beyond counting, she had many suitors—but once only, as it seems, Mary had a love affair of her own. The others were merely scarlet threads woven into the texture of her ambition to succeed Elizabeth as England's queen and to restore the Catholic church to Britain.
The Author. Martin Hume of England brings scholarly documentation to his task. He was the official editor of the Spanish State Papers of the period (Public Record office), a careful student of all other relevant material, some of it newly accessible. He is author also of The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth, currently republished to match this volume. "Infernal Searchers"