Ten years after he had been conveyed a prisoner from St Andrews on board the French galley, Kirkaldy returned to Scotland, but not to repose under the laurels he had already won. Soon after this we find him married, in possession, through the death of his father, of his ancestral estates, the intimate friend of Maitland of Lethington and of Lord James, afterwards the Regent Moray, and a stanch supporter of the Lords of the Congregation. This period furnishes to us one of the most melancholy chapters of Scottish history. Mary of Guise, the queen-regent, on the one hand, was resolute to put down the growing heresy; on the other, the landed nobility were determined to overthrow the Catholic church. Knox, who had by this time returned from France, and other Reformed preachers, did their utmost to fan the flame; and the result was that melancholy work of incendiarism and ruin, which men of all parties must bitterly deplore. Then came the French auxiliaries under D'Oisel, wasting the land, ravaging the estates of the Protestants, and burning their houses and villages; a savage mode of warfare, from which Kirkaldy suffered much—Fife having been pillaged from one end to the other—but for which he exacted an ample vengeance. The details of this partisan warfare are given with much minuteness, but great spirit, by the chronicler; and it did not cease until the death of Mary of Guise.
A new victim was now to be offered to the distempered spirit of the age: on the 19th August 1561, the young Queen Mary arrived at Leith. She was then in the nineteenth year of her age, and endowed with all that surpassing loveliness which was at once her dower and her misfortune. Her arrival was dreaded by the preachers, who detested the school in which she had been educated, and the influence she might be enabled to exercise; but the great mass of the people hailed her coming with acclamations of unfeigned delight:—
"Despite the efforts of these dark-browed Reformers, agitated by the memory of her good and gallant father,—the king of the poor—by that of her thirteen years' absence from them, and stirred by that inborn spirit of loyalty which the Scots possessed in so intense a degree, the people received their beautiful queen with the utmost enthusiasm, and outvied each other in her praise.
"Her mother's dying advice to secure the support of the Protestants, and to cultivate the friendship of their leaders, particularly Maitland of Lethington and 'Kirkaldy of Grange, whom the Constable de Montmorencie had named the first soldier in Europe,' had been faithfully conveyed to Mary in France by the handsome young Count de Martigues, the Sieur de la Brosse, the Bishop of Amiens, and others, who had witnessed the last moments of that dearly-loved mother in the castle of Edinburgh; and Mary treasured that advice in her heart—but it availed her not."
Hurried on by her evil destiny, and persecuted by intrigues which had their origin in the fertile brain of Elizabeth, Mary determined to bestow her hand upon Darnley, a weak, dissolute, and foolish boy, whose only recommendations were his birth and his personal beauty. Such a marriage never could, under any circumstances, have proved a happy one. At that juncture it was peculiarly unfortunate, as it roused the jealousy of the house of Hamilton against that of Lennox; and was further bitterly opposed by Moray, a cold, calculating, selfish man, who concealed, under an appearance of zeal for the Protestant faith, the most restless, unnatural, and insatiable ambition. Talents he did possess, and of no ordinary kind: above all, he was gifted with the faculty of imposing upon men more open and honourable than himself. Knox was a mere tool in his hands: Kirkaldy of Grange regarded him as a pattern of wisdom. For years, this straightforward soldier surrendered his judgment to the hypocrite, and, unfortunately, did not detect his mistake until the Queen was involved in a mesh from which extrication was impossible. Moray's first attempt at rebellion proved an arrant failure: the people refused to join his standard, and he, with the other leading insurgents, was compelled to seek refuge in England.
All might have gone well but for the folly of the idiot Darnley. No long period of domestic intercourse was requisite to convince the unfortunate Queen that she had thrown away her affections, and bestowed her hand upon an individual totally incapable of appreciating the one, and utterly unworthy of the other. Darnley was a low-minded, fickle, and imperious fool—vicious as a colt, capricious as a monkey, and stubborn as an Andalusian mule. Instead of showing the slightest gratitude to his wife and mistress, for the preference which had raised him from obscurity to a position for which kings were suitors, he repaid the vast boon by a series of petty and unmanly persecutions. He aimed to be not only prince-consort, but master; and because this was denied him, he threw himself precipitately into the counsels of the enemies of Mary. It was not difficult to sow the seeds of jealousy in a mind so well prepared to receive them; and Riccio, the Italian secretary, was marked out by Ruthven and Morton, the secret adherents of Moray, as the victim. Even this scheme, though backed by Darnley, might have miscarried, had not Mary been driven into an act which roused, while it almost justified, the worst fears of the Protestant party in Scotland. This was her adhesion to the celebrated Roman Catholic League, arising from a coalition which had been concluded between France, Spain, and the Emperor, for the destruction of the Protestant cause in Europe. "It was," says Tytler, "a design worthy of the dark and unscrupulous politicians by whom it had been planned—Catherine of Medicis and the Duke of Alva. In the summer of the preceding year, the queen-dowager of France and Alva had met at Bayonne, during a progress in which she conducted her youthful son and sovereign, Charles IX., through the southern provinces of his kingdom; and there, whilst the court was dissolved in pleasure, those secret conferences were held which issued in the resolution that toleration must be at an end, and that the only safety for the Roman Catholic faith was the extermination of its enemies." To this document, Mary, at the instigation of Riccio, who was in the interest of Rome, and who really possessed considerable influence with his mistress, affixed her signature. The bond was abortive for its ostensible purposes, but it was the death-warrant of the Italian secretary, and ultimately of the Queen.
It is not our province to usurp the functions of the historian, and therefore we pass willingly over that intricate portion of history which ends with the murder of Darnley. It was notoriously the work of Bothwell, but not his alone, for Lethington, Huntly, and Argyle, were also deeply implicated. Bothwell now stands forward as a prominent character of the age. He was a bold, reckless, desperate adventurer, with little to recommend him save personal daring, and a fidelity to his mistress which hitherto had remained unshaken. Lethington, in all probability, merely regarded him as an instrument, but Bothwell had a higher aim. With daring ambition, he aimed at the possession of the person of Mary, and actually achieved his purpose.
This unhappy and most unequal union roused the ire of the Scottish nobles. Even such of them as, intimidated by the reckless character of Bothwell, had sworn to defend him if impeached for the slaughter, and had recommended him as a fitting match for Mary, now took up arms, under the pretext that he had violently abducted their sovereign. We fear it cannot be asserted with truth that much violence was used. Poor Queen Mary had found, by bitter experience, that she could hardly depend upon one of her principal subjects. Darnley, Moray, Morton, Lethington, and Arran, each had betrayed her in turn; everywhere her steps were surrounded by a net of the blackest treachery: not one true heart seemed left to beat with loyalty for its Queen. Elizabeth, with fiendish malice, was goading on her subjects to rebellion. The Queen of England had determined to ruin the power of her sister monarch; the elderly withered spinster detested the young and blooming mother. Why, then, should it be matter of great marvel to those who know the acuteness of female sensibility, if, in the hour of desertion and desolation, Mary should have allowed the weakness of the woman to overcome the pride of the sovereign, and should have opposed but feeble resistance to the advances of the only man who hitherto had remained stanch to her cause, and whose arm seemed strong enough to insure her personal protection? It is not the first time that a daring villain has been taken for a hero by a distressed and persecuted woman.
But Bothwell had no friends. The whole of the nobles were against him; and the Commons, studiously taught to believe that Mary was a consenting party to Darnley's death, were hostile to their Queen. Kirkaldy, at the instance of Moray, came over from his patrimonial estates to join the confederates, and his first feat in arms was an attack on Borthwick Castle, from which Bothwell and the Queen escaped with the utmost difficulty. Then came the action, if such it can be called, of Carberry Hill, when Bothwell challenged his accusers to single combat—a defiance which was accepted by Lord Lindesay of the Byres, but prevented from being brought to the test of combat by the voluntary submission of the Queen. Seeing that her forces were utterly inadequate to oppose those of the assembled nobles, she sent for Sir William Kirkaldy of Grange, as a knight in whose honour she could thoroughly confide, and, after a long interview, agreed to pass over to the troops of the confederates, provided they would again acknowledge and obey her as their sovereign. This being promised, she took her last leave of Bothwell, and her first step on the road which ultimately brought her to Lochleven.
We must refer our readers to the volume for the spirited account of these events, and of the expedition undertaken by Kirkaldy in pursuit of Bothwell, his narrow escapes, and sea-fights among the shores of Shetland, and the capture of the fugitive's vessel on the coast of Norway. Neither will our space permit us to dwell upon the particulars of the battle of Langside, that last action hazarded and lost by the adherents of Queen Mary, just after her escape from Lochleven, and before she quitted the Scottish soil for ever. But for the tactics of Kirkaldy, the issue of that fight might have been different; and deeply is it to be regretted that, before that time, the eyes of the Knight of Grange had not been opened to the perfidy of Moray, whom he loved too trustingly, and served far too well. It was only after Mary was in the power of Elizabeth that he knew how much she had been betrayed.
Under the regency of Moray, Kirkaldy held the post of governor of the castle of Edinburgh, and retained it until the fortress went down before the battery of the English cannon.