Borthwick Castle

Almost every retelling of the escape, ours included, dressed Mary as a page boy. The contemporary documents do not. Beaton's letter of 17 June 1567 says "in men's clothes, booted and spurred" — the clothes of someone about to ride more than twenty miles in the dark. The Diurnal of Occurrents, written in Scots at the time, says she was "cled in menis clething". The page arrives in the nineteenth century, and it can be watched arriving inside a single book. In The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (1826) Walter Scott prints Beaton's letter accurately in his antiquarian section, "in men's clothes, booted and spurred"; and in his descriptive prose about the Great Hall, in the same volume, he writes of Mary "finally obliged to escape in the disguise of a page". Elsewhere in the same work he has her "closely pursued by Lord Home", which no document supports. When the New Statistical Account reached the parish in 1839, its footnote fused the two voices into what reads like a quotation: the queen escaped "butit and spurred, and in the guize of a page". Nothing stands behind that sentence. It is Beaton's document plus Scott's imagination, inside quotation marks. Everything downstream inherits the page: a 1997 magazine feature, the castle's own website, the travel writing, and until now this page. The siege is the second thing we had wrong. There was no assault on Borthwick in 1567, and by the time Mary left there was nothing to escape from. Scott, reading his own document, said so plainly: when Bothwell's escape became known "the blockade of Borthwick was instantly raised, although the place had neither garrison nor means of defence". The lords came on the 10th and were in Edinburgh on the 11th; Mary rode out that night. The two contemporary sources do not even agree on how many men came — five or six hundred in the Diurnal, "nine hundred or a thousand horse" in Beaton — which is a fair measure of how thin the record is beneath a story everyone tells with confidence. The gouged stonework is the third. This page used to attribute it to the 1567 siege and place it on the south-east tower; both halves are wrong and no source says otherwise. The lords of 1567 brought horsemen, not guns, and stayed one day. The damage was made by Cromwell's battery on or about 18 November 1650; it is on the eastern wall, at the point thinned by a chimney; and the attribution is identical in the minister's account of 1839, in the statutory listing LB805 — "circa 1650 the 10th Lord Borthwick refused to leave the castle when requested to do so by Oliver Cromwell, the damage which still remains being the result" — and on the castle's own website today. The ghost can be dated, and it is not old. The Rev. Thomas Wright wrote 18,673 words on the parish of Borthwick in October 1839. He names the castle sixty-nine times, Mary ten, Bothwell ten, Cromwell five. He is not shy of folklore: he uses the word tradition seven times and prints a tragic tradition of the neighbouring Catcune, a tradition about the building of the mill and a traditional story of the Whytes' Highland descent. He never once writes ghost, spectre, apparition, superstition or legend, and the single occurrence of "haunt" in his whole account is a denial: "It is pleasing to recollect, that the castle, of whose occupants we have been detailing the history, has not been stained or rendered in any respect horrible to the imagination by the perpetration of any of those darker and more atrocious crimes... Scarcely any recollection, accordingly, haunts the visitant of this castle, but such as is genial and pleasant to be indulged." J. Douglas Borthwick's Borthwick Castle; or, Sketches of Scottish History (Montreal, 1880) runs to 71,246 words and names the castle 248 times; its two occurrences of "ghost", three of "haunt" and one of "phantom" are all quotations from Shakespeare, a ballad by Scott, and a metaphor about Darnley. The oldest haunting we have been able to read is Betsa Marsh's feature in British Heritage in 1997, the text the castle later quoted on its own site — and her ghosts are not Mary. They are an unnamed servant girl said to have borne a Borthwick child and to have been put to the sword with it in the Red Room, and a family chancellor said to have been burned to death for embezzlement. They walk "the stony spiral staircases", and visitors report "invisible presences in the Great Hall". There is no queen on the stair and no cold bedroom in any source we could find: that detail, which this page used to carry, belongs to the stock vocabulary of haunted-castle writing rather than to Borthwick. The distance between the night of 11 June 1567 and the oldest haunting anyone can date here is four hundred and thirty years. One last correction runs against our own sources rather than for them. Scott in 1826, and the New Statistical Account copying him in 1845, both make Mary's host "John, the fifth Lord Borthwick". John was dead by then: his son William had succeeded as sixth Lord in 1566, and it is William who sheltered her. The 1997 magazine feature, which gets the page boy wrong, gets the lord right. It is worth saying plainly, because the temptation with a source as good as Scott is to stop checking once he has produced the document.