Clan Elliot

On the morning of the seventh of October 1566, on a bridle-path running west of the Hermitage Castle keep above Hermitage Water in Liddesdale on the central Scottish Border, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, then thirty years old, the Lord Lieutenant of the Marches under Mary, Queen of Scots, met in single combat a Liddesdale reiver known by the Borders by-name Little Jock Elliot of the Park, of the Elliot of Park branch of the Elliot riding-clan family. Bothwell, riding the March in pursuit of the Elliot raid-band of the previous week, came on Little Jock Elliot on the path; the two men charged each other with horse-pistols. Bothwell fired first and hit Elliot in the thigh; Elliot, falling, fired his second pistol at point-blank range and hit Bothwell three times (in the head, the left arm, and the side). Bothwell was lifted from the saddle by his escort and carried bleeding to the Hermitage keep, where he was held in a tower-room for the next eight days, not expected to recover. Mary, Queen of Scots, on the news from Jedburgh on the fifteenth of October, rode the fifty miles from Jedburgh to Hermitage and back in a single day to attend to him, and contracted, on the return ride home in heavy rain, the near-fatal fever that nearly killed her at Jedburgh through the next ten days. The Mary-Bothwell political-and-personal entanglement that began at Hermitage in October 1566 would, by the Darnley murder of February 1567 and the Mary-Bothwell marriage of May 1567, run through to Mary's deposition in July 1567 and the eventual execution at Fotheringhay in 1587.

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