My own impression is that Mary, Morton, and Randolph were right in their opinion. Lethington, under a mask of gratitude and loyalty, was urging, after his escape, the strongest measures against Mary, till circumstances led him to advise ‘a dulce manner,’ because (as he later confessed to Morton)[196] Mary was likely to be restored, and to avenge herself on him. Mary, he knew, could ruin him by proving his accession to Darnley’s murder. His hold over her would be gone, as soon as the Casket Letters were produced before the English nobles: he had then no more that he could do, but she kept her reserve of strength, her proof against him. His bolt was shot, hers was in her quiver. This view of the relations (later to be proved) between Lethington and the woman whose courage saved his life, explains the later mysteries of Mary’s career, and part of the problem of the Casket Letters.
Meanwhile, in the first days of May, the Queen rushed on her doom. Despite the protestations of her confessor, who urged that a marriage with Bothwell was illegal: despite the remonstrances of du Croc, who had been sent from France to advise and threaten, despite the courageous denunciation of Craig, the Protestant preacher, Mary hurried through a collusive double process of divorce, proclaimed herself a free agent, created Bothwell Duke of Orkney, and, on May 15, 1567, wedded him by Protestant rites, the treacherous Bishop of Orkney, later one of her official prosecutors, performing the ceremony.[197] To her or to Lethington’s own letter of excuse to the French Court, we return later.
Mary, even on the wedding-day, was miserable. Du Croc, James Melville, and Lethington, who had not yet escaped, were witnesses of her wretchedness. She called out for a knife to slay herself.[198] Mary was ‘the most changed woman of face that in so little time without extremity of sickness they have seen.’ A Highland second-sighted woman prophesied that she should have five husbands. ‘In the fifth husband’s time _she shall be burned_, which death divers speak of to happen to her, and it is said she fears the same.’ This dreadful death was the legal punishment of women who killed their husbands. The fires of the stake shone through Mary’s dreams when a prisoner in Loch Leven. Even Lady Reres, now supplanted by a sister of Bothwell’s, and the Lady of Branxholme, ‘both in their speech and writing marvellously rail, both of the Queen and Bothwell.’[199]