Bothwell meeting the Queen,
Siezes her and conducts her as his prisoner to Dunbar
(By Robert Hartley Cromek, after Thomas Stothard
Etching, published 1798)
The Queen rode to Stirling to visit ten month old Prince James, arriving on Monday 21st April 1567. It was a private visit and she took only thirty men, along with Huntly, Melville and Maitland. She set out to return to Edinburgh on Wednesday 23rd, but was taken ill, complaining of excruciating pain, and had to seek shelter in a roadside cottage. She recovered sufficiently to continue on to Linlithgow Palace, where she spent the night.
William Drury wrote to Cecil that Bothwell was also in Linlithgow that night, trying in vain to gain the assistance of Huntly in carrying out his plans. Huntly refused, apparently. If it ever happened. Bothwell then rode off to Calder, and if any of this is true, then that certainly was a strange place to use as a base for raiding Liddesdale, since it is west of Edinburgh.
The next morning Mary and her entourage continued for Edinburgh, but were intercepted along the way by Bothwell and his 800 men. The site of the meeting is disputed, but Bothwell positioned his men near to where the Gogar Burn joins the Almond River, at a place known as Foulbridges, from where he could see whichever route Mary decided to take. Once he spotted the Royal cavalcade, he halted it and warned Mary that she was in danger and should ride with him immediately. Some of her guard started to intervene, but she stopped them, saying that she would go peacefully, so they all traipsed off to Dunbar Castle. Mary sent James Borthwick to Edinburgh to warn them of possible danger. He doubted Bothwell's story, and had the city alarm bells rung as he begged the citizens to attempt to rescue their sovereign. But there was little they could do against Bothwell, although some shots were fired at him from the city walls.
By midnight Mary was 'captive' in Dunbar Castle, along with her entourage.
This whole 'abduction' scenario is just mad. There's no way Bothwell would have abducted Mary without her consent, and no way her nobles would have stood for it - if it WERE without her consent. The plan wasn't even particularly secret. The Earl of Lennox apparently knew of it on the Tuesday, and Kirkaldy of Grange was writing to Drury of it on the Wednesday. He was convinced that Mary was a willing party to the pantomime and expressed his opinion in a letter to Bedford on Thursday, the day of the abduction, saying that Mary had been overheard declaring "that she cares not to lose France, England and her own country for [Bothwell], and will go with him to the world's end in a white petticoat".
The most likely explanation for the whole abduction farce is that it was a back-covering exercise for Mary. She had already decided that the best way to outwit Moray was to marry Bothwell and secure the border. However, she was well aware that this meant marrying the man who was being blamed for Darnley's murder. Doing it this way meant that at a later date she had a cop-out ready - 'he made me do it!'. This was, indeed, her line in her letter to the French court after her marriage.
Bothwell was loyally playing his role in this in a manner worthy of a Medieval Oscar, swaggering about Dunbar Castle boasting that, 'I will marry the Queen, who would or would not. Yea, whether she would herself or not.'
So the story goes that Bothwell then raped her, thus forcing her to marry him to save her honour. Mary may have sent secretly to the Provost of Dunbar for assistance - if she did, none was forthcoming. By the time James Melville was freed after one night's detention, he had heard from William Blackadder that the abduction was with the Queen's consent, and he was inclined to believe it.
He was doubtless glad to have escaped the other fracas that were erupting in the castle too. That first night Huntly had some kind of disagreement with Maitland and attempted to kill him. Only Mary's intervention prevented this from happening. She obviously wasn't totally and utterly under Bothwell's control then.
It didn't take Bothwell long to get Mary to 'agree' to the marriage; by Saturday his wife was beginning divorce proceedings.
Were Mary and Bothwell in love? This is only a personal opinion, but I think that initially it was an affair brought about by circumstances. Mary was devastated following the attempt on her life which Kirk o' Field truly was. Bothwell was a loyal man she could depend on, and he had the makings of an excellent king - he was certainly her best chance at keeping her throne and maintaining an ability to govern effectively. If he had evidence of her involvement in the Craigmillar plotting, this would have given her even further pause. Bothwell was doomed if Mary didn't maintain power. Scotland under Moray had already proved itself to be incompatible with Bothwell's well-being. This was his one chance to see Scotland as he wanted to see it - independent of England. He knew he was the only noble who could deliver this. Both had pressing reasons to come together irrespective of emotion. But given their long acquaintance and probable affection, the way they were forced together, and the dramatic way that events unfolded, I think that their mutual reliance turned to love, and probably was such before Dunbar. We're unlikely ever to know.