O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note, to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.
Shakespeare
In the weeks after Mary Queen of Scots’ husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered, placards and posters sprang up all over Edinburgh. They pointed to the murderers: Mary herself, and the man who would become her third husband, the Earl of Bothwell.
This is a very famous one, featuring Mary portrayed as a mermaid, and it has all sorts of themes here that are worth talking about. It first appeared in Edinburgh on March 1, 1567, and it shows Mary as a mermaid with the Earl of Bothwell (represented by his initials JH for Hames Hepburn) as a hare (the family coat of arms had featured a hare).
The picture is filled with imagery. First, the mermaid. Since ancient times mermaids were seen as beguiling and dangerous creatures. They would lure men off their ships, and if you turned down their advances the consequences could be dire. In this case, historians have argued that Mary is holding a whip in her right hand, making any attempt to escape her siren call even more difficult. By Elizabethan times, mermaids were a symbol of prostitution. The swords are surrounding Bothwell, and also pointing to Mary, which evokes both the actual murder, and are also phallic symbols. The hare was also a symbol of lust. This poster both implicates Mary in the death of her second husband, and also portrays her as a whore.
This imagery of Mary as an adulterous prostitute would stick. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare wrote:
I sat upon a promontory,
Shakespeare
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
For those who are on the lookout for the political in Shakespeare, the dolphin can easily refer to the French Dauphin, Mary’s first husband, and the stars refer to Bothwell.
There are other readings, though. In a 2015 article in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Vol. 78, Michael Bath and Malcolm Jones argue that the hare symbol was used in other pamphlets. Two of which, from Claude Paradin’s Devices heroices, in the 1557 edition, shows drawings that are very similar. One of which is captioned, “For the wicked man, destruction on all sides.”
Mary was familiar with emblems of the time, so the meaning would have been clear to her, even if we are still arguing about it. And no matter what each symbol meant then, or means to us now, it’s clear that this was not good for Mary. People thought she was guilty of murder, or at the very least, associating with the murderer.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.