CONFINEMENT AND ESCAPE

ary's captors carried her from Carberry, inflicting on her such humiliations as they could devise. In Edinburgh two soldiers carried before her a banner showing the body of Darnley and the infant James, calling on God to avenge his father's death. Crowds called for her blood. She was even forced to go via Kirk o'Field before lodging in the Provost's House. There she was kept for a night and a day, until fear and anxiety overcame her, and in a fit she tore madly at her own clothes. Then she was escorted to Holyrood.

She was not to enjoy these more familiar surroundings for long. From Holyrood she went almost immediately to Lochleven in Kinross-shire. This was the place picked out for her incarceration. Moray, her half-brother, was the chief of those who gained by her defeat. Lochleven was presided over by the Douglases, Sir William and his mother, Margaret Erskine, who had been mistress to
James V and was also Moray's mother.


Lochleven in Kinross-shire

he forces ranged against Mary appeared strong, but they had problems of their own. The desire to part Mary from Bothwell had united them. That to a large extent was now done, and many would have been happy to revert to their traditional loyalty to their rightful sovereign. But the initiative was seized by a more radical faction, who wanted Mary to abdicate in favor of her son, James, so that real power would pass to Moray, who would become regent.

Pressure was applied to this end. Moray himself came to Lochleven to promote his cause. Mary capitulated, though she must have known that a forced abdication could always be revoked. In the country at large, support for her remained surprisingly strong, as events would show. The kind of usurpation Moray sought to confirm was a comparative rarity in Scottish history. It was usually a safe assumption that a reigning monarch would resume power.

Lochleven was, as its name implies, in the middle of a loch. While she was not kept in harsh conditions, escape was no simple matter. However, Mary had a secret weapon: her fabled charm. It made her allies of George Douglas, Sir William's son, and Willie, an orphaned cousin. According to one story, a doomed escape attempt involved Mary dressing up as one of the washerwomen who took the household's laundry to the mainland to be washed. It was a somewhat unlikely ploy since Mary was particularly tall for a woman. In the end, however, it was not her height, but the whiteness of her hand that gave her away. The boatman, seeing hands of unusual whiteness and delicacy, was eager to see more of this well-muffled figure. He pressed his point, only to find he had been ogling his Queen.