Mary Queen of Scots and the massive land grab that set the scene for Scotland today
Scotland is more than a footnote to English history
Why is Scotland’s history so often presented to us through English eyes? I am not complaining that so many of the people who work for our institutions grew up in England. They could recognise the perspective they studied from and do some homework. Some do. But many don’t.
I came across a fresh example last week in Aberdeen Art Gallery. Currently on loan from the National Museum of Scotland is the French silver casket long associated with Mary Queen of Scots.
The labels and video explain the object – and repeat the old claim that the casket once held letters that were “evidence” that she was sleeping with the Earl of Bothwell and plotting with him to murder her husband, Lord Darnley.
But hang on. The original “casket letters” vanished centuries ago. Even at the time they were produced, Mary or her representatives were never allowed to look at them.
They are not credible. They were clearly forged or doctored, a propaganda exercise by the men who overthrew her. Yet this is what our national museum is still presenting as fact. (Note the disclaimer ‘allegedly” is about whether the letters were in the casket not about the letters themselves.)
In her biography, Antonia Fraser concludes that the copies that exist seem to be a mixture of pages from letters from Mary mixed in with other letters, such as one to Bothwell from another woman, perhaps a French mistress.
Antonia Fraser on the casket letters
“Mary writes on two separate occasions in the same letter of a bracelet she is making for her lover, a bracelet which she is staying up late to finish in secret, an amazing occupation for Queen Mary to adopt in the course of her critical mission to Glasgow. The pleading tone of the latter half of the letter is also strangely at variance with Mary’s character: ‘Alas, and I never deceived anybody but I remit myself wholly to your will, and send me word what I shall do, and whatever happens to me I will obey you. . . .’
“Bothwell is said to be almost making Mary a traitor - an odd phrase for a queen to use, who could hardly be accused of treason towards herself. Still more puzzling, if the whole letter had indeed been written by Mary, is the concluding sentence: ‘Remember your friend and write unto her and often.’ For not only have no love letters from Bothwell to Mary survived (it is surely strange that the allegedly reckless Mary should have been so much more prudent than the theoretically cold-blooded Bothwell), but also Mary was about to return to Edinburgh, where she would actually sleep under the same roof as Bothwell at Holyrood; Bothwell being here in constant attendance on her, she would surely have no need for these constant communications for which the writer cravenly begged.”
A massive land grab
What was going on in the background of Mary’s reign was a massive land grab. At the end of it, 85% of the land that had belonged to the Church was in private hands.
For the common people, the Reformation was about Reform. They were fired up by the rhetoric of preachers like John Knox; they were angered by the corruption of the church and the hierarchical society that deprived them of the basic means of existence.
But for the warlords who backed Knox, it was an opportunity. As Andy Wightman points out in “The Poor Had No Lawyers” a fair bit of the land that was stolen back then is still in the hands of the same families 500 years later, thanks to the system of primogeniture, which other countries have abolished.
He quotes Red Clydesider Tom Johnston:
“Not all the eloquence of Knox nor all the manifest sorrows of the working class could have caused the collapse of Roman ecclesiasticism in the sixteenth century had not our old nobility allied itself with the reformers, with fervour and enthusiasm generated by visions of immediate gain. The Church absorbed half the annual land revenue of Scotland: the nobles coveted revenue. That is the secret of the Reformation.”
Knox himself wrote years later:
“With the grief of our hearts we note that some gentlemen are as cruel over their tenants as ever were the Papists, requiring of them whatsoever they paid to the Church, so that the Papistical tyranny shall only be changed into the tyranny of the Laird.”
The killer kleptocrats
It was these land-hungry bandits who gathered together and convinced Mary’s young, and stupid consort Lord Darnley, that she was having an affair with Rizzio and he might be the father of her unborn baby.
She wasn’t. Rizzio was a courtier and social climber who lived to please the royals – playing music, managing petitions, flattering where required. Darnley let himself be convinced by the gang that this tame minstrel was his wife’s lover and the possible father of her unborn child. So they burst into her supper room, dragged Rizzio out and butchered him in front of her while one thug pointed a gun at her pregnant belly.
As she stood there with the entertainment dead at her feet, Mary immediately realised that she and her child were at risk - the conspirators needed Darnley so they could put him on the throne in her stead.
Over the next two days, she worked on detaching Darnley from the rebellion. She persuaded him to flee with her. They left Holyrood secretly at midnight with the help of Mary’s French servants. Her loyal equerry, Arthur Erskine, brought horses and she rode pillion behind him. Despite her advanced pregnancy, they rode all night to get away.
Darnley continually spurred his horse and whacked at Erskine’s shouting at Mary: “Come on! By God’s blood they will murder both you and me if they catch us.” When they reached Dunbar at dawn, Mary sent for eggs to make breakfast.
Rape was a strategy used by Scottish warlords to gain property
To understand what happened to Mary, it is important to recognise that rape was a strategy used to gain property. Here is an account of the technique as used by Simon Fraser “Lord” Lovat, a century later. Fraser wanted to secure the title and lands but there was a dispute over the succession. He raped and forcibly married Amelia, the widow of a previous “Lord” Lovat.
From Michael Fry’s ‘The Union”.
“Since he could not be sure of the dowager’s consent to a proposal of marriage, he raped her. At his later trial in absentia there appeared Lady Lovat’s servant, sixteen-year-old Amelie Rioch. She gave evidence how she had been summoned at two o’clock in the morning to assist as her swooning mistress, with hair and clothes already disordered, was stripped naked. A gentleman of the clan held her up while Fraser tore at her petticoats. They turned her face down on the bed and pulled her arms above her head so that another henchman could slit her buckram stays with his dirk, while a piper played to drown her screams. Then Simon had his evil way with her.
“All this went on in a chamber full of lairds and servants. True, some of them offered a different interpretation of the scene. It was supposed to represent authentic Highland tradition, including the custom that after a wedding the guests should accompany the happy couple to the bedroom amid much suggestive horseplay. Simon might have overdone it, but he was just that kind of guy.”
Back to Mary
After Mary arrived in Scotland, there were several attempts by various lairds to kidnap and rape her in order to force a marriage and gain power.
One of the first was by Lord Bothwell - his co-conspirator confessed. But the co-conspirator had mental health problems, he seemed psychotic, and his account was only half-belived. Later, Bothwell married one of the daughters of the Earl of Huntly so Mary may have believed she was safe from that quarter.
George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly also attempted to kidnap Mary and marry her to one of his nine sons when she was on a tour of the Highlands in 1562. Mary foiled the plot by refusing to go to Strathbogie, their Aberdeenshire stronghold and calling for reinforcements.
Huntly’s redoubtable wife, Elizabeth Keith seems to have encouraged her husband and his men to take on the royal troops in battle. Elizabeth regularly sought counsel from her Sennachies who prophesied that on the night after the battle, Huntly would lie in the Tolbooth of Aberdeen without a wound on his body.
But the stressed-out Earl suffered a heart attack during the Battle of Corrichie in 1562. He fell from his horse dead and was carried to the Tolbooth, thus fulfilling the prophecy. (1)
The plot thickens
Mary put an end to these attempts by marrying Darnley. But when Darnley was murdered by a conspiracy led by Bothwell in 1567, she was again at risk.
A key firsthand account is from Mary’s courtier James Melville. He wrote that Bothwell brought forward his murder plot after Darnley was warned about it.
This advertisement moved the Earl of Bothwel to haste forward his enterprize: he had before laid a train of Powder under the House where the King did lodge, and in the night did blow up the said House with the Pow∣der; but it was spoken that the King was taken forth, and brought down to a Stable, where a Napkin was stopped in his mouth, and he therewith suffocated.
A few months later, when the Queen was returning with her retinue from a visit to her infant son at Stirling, where he was being reared, she was intercepted by Bothwell and a large band of soldiers. He took her to Dunbar Castle, Melville was there and reported that:
“The Earl of Bothwel boasted he would marry the Queen, who would or who would not; yea whether she would her self or not.“
Later the Lords met and agreeed that: “the Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against her will.”
Melville writes that on the day of the marriage ceremony, Mary asked for a knife to kill herself, in front of Erskine. When he pleaded with her, she threatened to drown herself. There was not one day of her brief marriage when she was not in floods of tears. There was no hawking, hunting, dancing or lute playing when she was married to Bothwell.
Mary conceived, probably around the time of her rape at Dunbar Castle and was pregnant for much of her brief marriage to Bothwell, and so was in a difficult position - if she tried to divorce him it would make her child illegitimate. She had a miscarriage.
After a stand-off at Carberry Hill, Bothwell fled. The couple kissed on parting - but we know enough now of abusive relationships not to put the weight on that that previous historians have, ie making it evidence that there was no rape. Mary never tried to contact him again.
Mary was taken to Edinburgh, not to one of her castles and not with her waiting women, but alone to Craigmillar Castle, where she was seen by the people of the city at a window wailing and pleading for help, her hair dishevelled and her clothing ripped open. From there, she was taken to Lochleven and her long captivity began.
The men who had murdered her second husband, exposed her to rape and sexual violence, pushed her into a sham marriage and then used it against her, wrote the story that would justify it all. They seized her castles, her crown and the vast majority of the lands the Church once held in common.
The casket letters were part of that operation. They were curated, edited and staged by the men who had most to gain from Mary’s ruin. They were never produced, never scrutinised but for centuries some putative copies have been waved about to imply guilt.
What troubles me is that our national museum is still, in 2025, presenting the propaganda of a gang of 16th-century warlords as “evidence” - and that what’s important about it in their eyes is that it was believed at Westminster.
Mary’s story is often represented as a soap opera about a silly woman with bad taste in men. The underlying story is one of rape, imprisonment and a massive theft of land which set the scene for the Scotland we live in today. This is the story our national museum should explore, rather than take the Scotland-as-footnote-to-English history approach.
From Andy Wightman’s reports - Scotland today has about the most unequal land ownership in the world - 433 people own half of the privately owned land.
(1) The third son of the Earl, Sir John Gordon was executed. Mary had to attend the execution in order to scotsh rumours that she had encouraged him. The job was botched, he died in agony and the Queen had to be carried from the chamber.
A striking story that rings true to what we know of how power, greed and depraved behaviour affects woman (and other 'weaker' humans).
The Anglocentric perspective, which sees Scotland as the 'first colony' remains pervasive. The newly opened Perth Museum barely mentions Scotland and is clearly controlled by Anglocentric benefactors and Directors.
Historic Environment Scotland (HES), the deeply troubled custodian of our heritage, has a strong Anglocentric bias, with several board members from doon sooth (and the rest from Edinburgh). Beware English 'patronage'
History is written by the victors as they say, but not always now thankfully. I could go on but thanks for illuminating this tragic story, which I fear is only 'the tip of the iceberg!
This is a true horror story, when presented from this perspective. Maybe not the only “truth” of these times, but surely more valid than ones from the traditional “English” perspective.
Thanks again Jackie!