Jean Gordon and James Hepburn, Lady and Lord Bothwell
Initially it was rumoured that Bothwell was planning to use Janet Beton as co-repondent in court, where she would say that her handfast marriage to him meant that his later marriage to Jean Gordon was invalid. Jean refused to consent to this, unsurprisingly, and vowed to "die with the name Lady Bothwell". [1]
So on 29th April 1567 the four members of the Protestant commissary court (which had replaced the old Church Courts in matrimonial cases) heard evidence that Bothwell had committed adultery with Bessie Crawford, the sewing maid. The affair was said to have taken place between May and June of 1566, liaisons occurring in the Abbey at Haddington. Bothwell's lawyers denied the charge, for form's sake, and so Jean's witnesses (including Patrick Wilson, George Dalgleish and Gabriel Sempill) testified on the following two days. On the 3rd of May judgement was given in favour of Lady Jean.
To make doubly sure, Bothwell had already begun annullment proceedings before the Catholic Consistory. This Archbishop's court had been restored in the recent past, possibly with a view to dissolving Mary's marriage to Darnley. On Saturday 27th April 1567 Archbishop Hamilton, the Primate of Scotland granted a commission to hear Bothwell's case that the marriage be annulled on the grounds of consanguinity. Bothwell's great-great grandfather had married a Gordon, and so the couple were within the fourth degree of consanguinity; however, Bothwell had obtained a dispensation prior to the marriage. He denied this - a seemingly pointless denial, given that the dispensation had been granted by Archbishop Hamilton himself only a little more than a year previously! His memory was surely worsened by thedesigns his family had on the Scottish throne: "The Hamiltons are furtherers of the divorce hoping to attain the sooner to their desired end"[2]
The hearing began on the 3rd of May, and was a lacklustre affair, poorly attended. Neither of the bishops charged with hearing the case ever took his seat. The same lawyers represented the couple as had appeared before the Protestant court.
The witnesses included the Bishop of Galloway who had performed the marriage; Sir John Bellenden; and David Chalmers. On Wednesday 7th May the marriage was declared null and void due to a lack of dispensation for marriage within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity.
When Lady Jean remarried, she took the suppressed dispensation with her. Buchanan insisted it existed in his 'De Maria Scotorum Regina', but it remained obscure until the publication of 'A Lost Chapter' by John Stuart [3]
It is unlikely that Mary knew of the illegality of the annullment. When it would have suited her to annul her marriage to Bothwell, no mention was made of the dispensation for his marriage to Lady Jean.
Jean wascertainly complicit in arranging for a divorce which freed her as much as Bothwell. Once they were separated, Bothwell granted her the estate and village of Nether Hailes in Haddingtonshire - she probably enjoyed the income more than she had the company of her ex-husband.
ReferencesBack to 'I Will Marry the Queen'