By birth, James Hepburn was the fourth Earl of Bothwell and Hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland. He was a womanizer, adventurer, and risk-taker.

He is best known to history; however, as the lover; and later, husband, of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was her third husband. She was first married to the heir to the throne of France, was briefly Queen of France, and when her teenaged husband died, she returned to her homeland and married a cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Mary had known her third husband since she was in France, and even before her brief and turbulent marriage to Darnley, Bothwell became one of her closest advisors and protectors.

Loyal to a fault, he continued to serve Mary in a variety of important ways, possibly including the plotting and enacting of the murder of her second husband. During this time, Bothwell married Lady Jean Gordon. Mary attended the wedding. The marriage was brief, lasting just a little over one year. Bothwell and the queen were already very close, but when she heard he had been seriously wounded she rode through a forest at night just to be at his side. Her journey took place only weeks after she had given birth to James, the only child born to Mary and Darnley. At this point they were probably not yet lovers, but within months that would change.

Bothwell and his wife divorced three months after the death of Mary's husband, Lord Darnley. Bothwell and Mary were under suspicion of plotting Darnley's murder, and Darnley's father was at  that time actively seeking justice and vengance for the death of his son. The Scottish Privy Council acted, and entered into proceedings against Bothwell. Meanwhile, Mary formally and quite publicly declared that Scottish law would henceforth dictate that she and future rulers must marry a Scottish native. Bothwell held a prominent position in the fanfare associated with the announcement of the new law, which suggested that Mary was planning to marry him. Less than one week later, Darnley ostensibly "abducted" and "ravaged" the queen, bragging that he would force her to marry him.

Historians today believe that Mary was fully aware of Bothwell's "abduction" plans and that the appearance of taking her by force was but a cover to protect Mary from wedding the man who was the primary suspect in her late husband's murder. The marriage divided Scotland and civil war threatened. Bothwell fled weeks later. Mary never saw him again. Later the same year, the Scottish Parliament charged Bothwell with treason and forfeited his titles and property. Sadly, Bothwell and Mary came to a bad end. She was later imprisoned and then executed by her cousin, the English Queen Elizabeth I, and Bothwell fled to Scandinavia in hopes of raising an army to defend his and Mary's cause.

However, a romance he had years earlier in Denmark, wherein he had offended a young woman from a powerful family, came back to haunt him. The woman arranged to have charges filed against Bothwell. She, and the Danish government, likely would have eventually freed Bothwell, but once they learned of the charges against him in England and Scotland, he was imprisoned. Eventually he was housed in a notorious prison, where he was chained in a low, dark room where he could neither fully stand, nor fully sit. He spend the last ten years of his life there, and a pillar to which he was said to be chained may still be observed, along with a circular groove in the floor around it, where Bothwell, who by that time was mentally ill from the isolation and abuse he suffered, paced day and night.