Bothwell’s Lodging Facade, showing the diamond-faceted red stonework added by Bothwell in 1588-9, inspired by his earlier travels to Europe (© Undiscovered Scotland: The Ultimate Online Guide)
[H]e [Arran] is in such fear of the earl of Bothwell, that he knows not what to do, for he is the only man that he stands in awe of, and the earl of Bothwell menaces very evilly; the Master of Gray, the secretary [John Maitland] and all of them cannot have the voice that the earl of Bothwell may have in the king’s presence, without he agreeing with the Earl of Arran, which he will never do.
In October 1585 Bothwell was induced into marching against James VI and Arran, reaching Stirling with around 10,000 men the following month. Forced to parley for terms with the rebels after Arran fled the castle, it is hardly surprising that James offered his trusted first cousin no reward for his betrayal.
Bothwell soon worked his way back into the king’s favour, and exactly a year following his rebellion he was ‘proposed as ambassador… in an attempt to secure the life of his aunt Queen Mary’, though Elizabeth I refused to grant any earl the necessary passport to undertake such a duty. Bothwell’s response to Mary’s death in February 1587 was typically bloody, raiding the English borders for some time until he was granted the revenues of Coldingham Priory, which appeared to cool his fury. Unsurprisingly though, he was caught up in a quarrel again the following year that resulted in the murder of William Stewart in an Edinburgh cellar, a crime for which Bothwell went unpunished.
Bothwell kept himself occupied during the winter of 1588-89 when he had the striking Renaissance-style stonework seen in the above image added to his castle at Crichton, but by April 1589 he was again marching with troops in support of the Brig o’ Dee rebellion – a venture cut short when, on 11 May, James faced down the rebels and soon had Bothwell, along with the earls of Huntly and Crawford, indicted on charges of treason; Bothwell’s fall was characteristically brief, for by the end of the summer he was released from prison together with his co-conspirators.
The roots of Bothwell’s more lasting troubles are found in the events surrounding James’ marriage to Princess Anne of Denmark. Although James was married by proxy to Anne in Copenhagen on 20 August 1589, with the earl of Marischal standing in for the king, it would be months later until the two were joined in person. News first reached the king that ‘the Queine wes in denger upone the seas’ whilst he was staying at Seton House on the coast as he awaited the arrival of his bride. On 22 October James resolved to sail to Norway himself, where Anne was stranded after her fleet’s attempts to reach Scotland were thwarted on three occasions by a combination of severe gales and a series of leaks that sprung on the flagship, Gideon. ‘James was taking events into his own hands,’ write Normand and Roberts, ‘for his present situation was slightly emasculating: he was a husband waiting patiently and safely for his wife, who was risking a dangerous sea crossing to reach him’ (32). His voyage proved far less turbulent than expected, however – he landed on the Norwegian coast on 11 November, and he and Anne were married in Oslo on the 23rd. It was Bothwell who oversaw preparations for the royal couple’s return to Scotland, where they arrived safely on 1 May 1590.
With the king absent from the country for more than half a year, the fifteen-year-old duke of Lennox was made president of the council, assisted by Bothwell. The period during which this interim government ruled over Scotland was remarkably peaceful, but ‘around Lennox and Bothwell there formed a corporeal Stewart faction and once the king returned, this led to greater distrust between the royal cousins.’ These tension erupted when, in January 1591, Bothwell was accused of consulting with witches. The charges were damaging, and on June 22 he was acquainted of the terms for his exile; taking matters into his own hands, the earl escaped his prison the following night, and spent the next few months moving freely about the country in open defiance of the forces pursuing him. He even brazenly invaded the palace at Holyroodhouse in December 1591, making it as far as the bedchamber doors of the King, the Queen, and Chancellor Maitland with a band of sixty men. One account of the incident reads: ‘[Bothwell] and his complices came to the king’s door, and the queen’s, and the chancellor’s; and at one tyme with fire to the king’s doore, and hammers to the queen’s doore.’ The earl is eventually forced to retreat, but the incident proved both alarming and embarrassing to James, who penned a number of sonnets in response to the scare. In one of these, he writes:
How long shall Furies on our fortunes feede
How long shall vice her raigne possesse in rest?
How long shall Harpies our displeasure breede
And monstrous foules sitt sicker in our nest?
In tyme appointed God will suirlie haue
Eache one his due rewarde for to resaue
Contrary to James’ expectations, Elizabeth I began supporting the protestant rebel earl throughout 1593 as she sought to counterbalance the threat of Scottish Catholicism – particularly following the discovery in December 1592 of the so-called Spanish blanks. Despite his new and unexpected influence, Bothwell nevertheless submitted himself personally before James, and there ‘promised to stand trial for treason by witchcraft, and offered the king his own sword and encouraged the monarch to strike off his head if that would satisfy him’. The king declined the offer, and by August 1593 Bothwell was completely cleared of his outlawry. The king’s favour was short-lived however, and on 3 April 1594 royal forces marched out of Edinburgh against the earl, forcing him eventually to retire to northern England; with the king’s position now consolidated, Elizabeth abandoned her earlier support for Bothwell and aligned herself wholeheartedly with James.
Bothwell’s fall from here was swift – in February 1595 the Edinburgh presbytery excommunicated him, and on the following month he set sail on ships pirated for him by his half-brother. Between 1595 and 1600 Bothwell moved around Europe, before he settled in Spain, converted to Catholicism, and acquired several mistresses along the way. His health remained poor however, and he spent much of 1611 receiving treatment in Naples, where he died the following year – ’suspected of necromancy and in abject poverty.’

Macbeth on horseback being set upon
by furies (witches), by Raffaele Pontremoli;
dated 1840-1870 (AN470216001;
© The Trustees of the British Museum)
When Shakespeare was writing Macbeth in the middle of the first decade of the seventeenth century, James had ascended to the English throne and was vying for the unification of England and his native Scotland. Britain’s self-styled ‘Solomon’ had also re-published his tract on witchcraft, Daemonologie, for a London readership upon the year of his ascension in 1603, thus marking out Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish’ play as a particularly pertinent statement. But the above background I have provided points to a much more personal resonance for the King in this tragic tale of regicide and dark sorcery.
The obvious parallel between Macbeth and Bothwell comes in their dealings with witches – explicit in the drama, alleged in the case of the earl. But in each case the consultation is marked by a desire on the behalf of the trusted noble to ascend beyond his rank; the allegations lodged against Bothwell rest on the assumption that he held a claim to the throne in the event of James’ death, and sought information concerning the date of the king’s demise. Unlike Macbeth, he does not act on that information – if he ever had it, or even sought it in the first place – but the threat posed by Bothwell at the height of his powers was palpable, as testified by James’ above sonnet. The threat is amplified by the former closeness of these cousins, a closeness matched in the play by Duncan’s reverence for his victorious “valiant cousin” – though the title does not necessarily signify a familial bond in the play, the implication is significant in the Scottish context.
As already stated, Macbeth does indeed act upon the knowledge granted to him by the witches – he kills the king. Unlike the events at Holyroodhouse in December 1591, Macbeth succeeds in entering the King’s chamber, and there does the deed; the nightmare of James’ Scottish history is played out in bloody detail on the English stage. Bothwell, still roaming the Continent at the time of Macbeth’s first performances, was but a shadow of his former self, but the warning seems to be stark – in the wake of the Gunpowder plot just a year before, the king should never let his guard down, least of all against gentlemen on whom he had built an absolute trust.
Macpherson, Rob. ‘Stewart, Francis, first earl of Bothwell (1562–1612)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oct 2006. Web.
Normand, Lawrence, and Gareth Roberts, eds. Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies. Ed. S. Greenblatt et al. W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. Print.



John Tradescant the younger died in April 1662, and less than a month later Elias Ashmole preferred a Bill of Complaint in Chancery against Hester, who disputed the lawyer’s claim to her late husband’s treasures. The suit was heard in 1664 and adjudicated in Ashmole’s favour, reiterating his claim that the collection was granted to him in recognition of his efforts in compiling the catalogue. Although the Ark was entrusted to Hester until the time of her death, a commission was set up to check the condition of its items against their representation in the Musaeum Tradescantianum; William Dugdale, one of the two men who sat on this commission, married his daughter Elizabeth to Ashmole in 1668, seven months after the death of Lady Mainwaring.




