Game of Queens (47 page)

This begs the question of why Elizabeth Tudor had agreed to let Darnley and his father Lennox go north to Scotland when they had asked permission the year before. The plausible reason was that Lennox needed to deal with his Scottish lands, but surely Elizabeth must have guessed what might happen? The idea of a match between Mary and Darnley had first been mooted long ago. Is it conceivable that Elizabeth was purposely handing Mary a poisoned chalice, knowing that Darnley would make Mary the worst of husbands?

It was Elizabeth Tudor herself who – inadvertently or otherwise – put the seal on the affair. Mary Stuart had been pressing for some definite commitment from Elizabeth regarding her place in the succession. In the middle of March Elizabeth's answer arrived; that ‘nothing shall be done until her Majesty (Elizabeth) shall be married, or shall notify her determination never to marry'. No wonder it took the English ambassador Thomas Randolph two days to brace himself to deliver the message.

Within weeks Mary and Darnley were openly courting, with Mary defying convention to nurse him herself when he fell ill. When Elizabeth sent orders recalling Lennox and Darnley to England, Mary commanded them instead to remain. She was strengthened in her resolve by France's support, and by that of her former mother-in-law Catherine de Medici, whom it suited to have Elizabeth under pressure at this time.

Before the marriage, Darnley began to show himself as ‘proud, disdainful and suspicious', drunken and violent. The question is whether or not Mary knew this; whether any infatuation she felt for him had already died. Throckmorton, sent to the Scottish court to bring Darnley home, found a queen ‘seized with love in ferventer passions than is comely' even for ‘mean persons'. But Randolph wrote to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, that Mary showed so much change in her nature ‘that she beareth only the shape of the woman she was before'. A fool for love, or one already seeing love slip away?

‘What shall become of her, or what life with him she shall lead, I leave it to others to think', Randolph prophesied gloomily. As Throckmorton quoted to Leicester and Cecil: ‘Majesty and love do not sit well together, nor remain on one throne.' But Randolph was a partial witness, and royal marriages were not made for pleasure; and this one was going ahead whatever anybody said. Mary was unmoved by the disapproval of both her half-brother Lord James (now Earl of Moray) and Maitland. She was understandably disenchanted with their pro-English policy, while the fickle and ambitious Earl of Morton, another powerful player in Scottish affairs, was a kinsman of Darnley's.

‘Greater triumphs there never were in time of Popery than were this Easter at the resurrection and at her high mass', reported Randolph grimly to Cecil at the end of April: ‘She wanted now neither trumpet, drum, nor fife, bagpipe nor tabor . . . Upon Monday she and divers of her women apparelled themselves like burgesses' wives, went upon their feet up and down the town, and of every man they met they took some pledge of money towards the banquet.'

Mary was riding high.

Elizabeth Tudor's attempt to forbid the match was countered by Mary Stuart with a mixture of wilful misunderstanding: Elizabeth had always said that Mary should marry an Englishman, hadn't she? and outright anger. ‘You can never persuade me that I have failed your mistress', Mary told Randolph, ‘but rather she to me; and some incommodity it will be as well for her to lose my amity as hers will be to me.'

The wedding took place on 29 July 1565, in Mary's private chapel, with Mary wearing the white dress of her widowhood. The ceremony was Catholic, although Darnley removed himself before the nuptial Mass. The heralds proclaimed him now King of Scotland: ‘. . . this Queen is now become a married wife', Randolph wrote to Leicester, ‘and her husband, the self-same day of his marriage, made a king'. A king, however, ‘so proud and spiteful, that rather he seemeth a monarch of the world than he that no long since we have seen and known the Lord Darnley'.

Darnley's kingship was in many ways an empty title. Mary never managed to procure him the Crown Matrimonial, which would have secured his position as a monarch of Scotland, independent of Mary, even in the event of her death. The great problem for reigning queens – the position of a consort – had caught out Mary. But it had also caught out Darnley.

In the first months of their marriage Mary and Darnley were able to subsume any anxieties into activity. They set out in force (and, in Darnley's case, in a specially-made gilt breastplate) to pursue and punish those lords who, under the leadership of her half-brother Moray, were now in open rebellion. Since battle was never really engaged with a fleeing foe, this became known as the Chaseabout Raid. But Mary showed to advantage, with loyal Scotsmen flocking to join her cause, more of them every day.

She sent Elizabeth word that she wanted no more interference in the affairs of her country; that she hoped she and her cousin could be the best of friends once more but only after Elizabeth had declared Mary her heir, she and Darnley. She reconciled most of the lords to her cause and split off the few rebels who held to Moray. When, at Mary's invitation, the Earl of Bothwell returned to the country and took command of the army, the rebels simply melted away. This, however, left the divisions in the royal marriage all the plainer to see.

On the one hand, Darnley was pressing not only for more power, but also for Europe's rulers to acknowledge his rights to hold the reins of the country. On the other, his unfitness for the role was becoming clearer every day. (Both his ambition and his outrages were reminiscent of the comportment of Margaret Tudor's husband Angus.) And there were two more jokers in the pack. One was that before the end of 1565, Mary Stuart must have known that she was pregnant. The other was that people were starting to talk about the favour Mary was showing to her Piedmontese private secretary, David Rizzio. ‘To be ruled by the advice of two or three strangers, neglecting that of her chief councillors, I do not know how it can stand', Randolph wrote disapprovingly, calling Rizzio ‘a filthy wedlock breaker'. Randolph warned Leicester: ‘Woe is me for you when David son shall be a King of England.' This was surely an unfounded slander, but Mary's attitude to Rizzio could not but show up her very different feeling towards Darnley.

On 13 February 1566, Randolph told Leicester that ‘I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth the King [Darnley] and all his kin' and that Darnley would be seeking to find a reason for that hatred. Darnley (prompted by a disaffected Scottish faction) had driven himself into a jealous fury, convinced Rizzio was the father of the child Mary now carried.

‘I know that, if that take effect which is intended, David, with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days', Randolph predicted. It took a little longer, but on 9 March 1566 a party of nobles, Darnley among them, burst into Mary's chamber and hacked Rizzio to death almost before her eyes.

The bond signed by Lord Darnley declared:

Be it known to all men by these present letters: We, Henry, by the grace of God, King of Scotland and husband to the Queen's Majesty . . . have thought pity to suffer her to be abused or seduced by certain privy persons, wicked and ungodly, especially a stranger Italian called Davie.

He and a group of lords had accordingly ‘devised to take these privy persona, enemies to her Majesty, us, the nobility and commonwealth, to punish them according to their demerits, and in case of any difficulty, to cut them off immediately . . .' In this, as in many things, Darnley was the dupe of other, more resolute, men. But what was extraordinary was the insult to Mary.

Mary rallied sufficiently to persuade Darnley that his life as well as hers would ultimately be in danger from his collaborators; over-mighty subjects who had dared to kill her servant, almost in her very presence. Slipping out of the palace of Holyrood she escaped, taking him with her – a daring ride across country, despite her pregnancy, reminiscent of the journey her grandmother Margaret Tudor had undertaken. With Bothwell swiftly at her side she returned to Edinburgh in triumph and managed to regain a measure of control.

Elizabeth Tudor was genuinely horrified when she heard of the insults heaped upon Mary Stuart, telling the Spanish ambassador that Rizzio's killers had broken into Mary's chamber ‘as if it were that of a public woman'. If this could happen to one of the two queens in the isle, it was all the harder for the other to preserve any sense of invulnerability.

While urging Robert Dudley on Mary, Elizabeth was half-heartedly contemplating her own marriage to the Archduke Charles, the emperor's son, although braced only for marriage ‘as Queen and not as Elizabeth'. Then had come the suggestion of a French match – and there was always Robert Dudley. Even as Mary Stuart ordered her wedding clothes, Elizabeth Tudor was telling the Spanish ambassador that she would marry Robert if only he were ‘a king's son', while the Holy Roman Emperor was sending another envoy. It seems likely that by 1566 Robert must have suspected he would never get anywhere with his hopes of marriage to the queen but, with him and at least one other, Elizabeth's matrimonial game had still some moves to be played.

The tempting possibility of her hand had become one of the best tools of her diplomacy. Almost forty years earlier, a Venetian observer had noted that the English used the young princess Mary as a hunter uses a lure to draw in birds. Elizabeth used her own hand in the same way.

In Scotland, incredibly, things were patched up after the debacle of Rizzio's death. With Mary expecting Darnley's child, they had to be. When she took to her birthing chamber in June, however, it was in Edinburgh Castle rather than any of her more commodious palaces. Edinburgh might indeed be a place steeped in Scottish history but it was also one of oft-proven security.

On 9 June she summoned the lords to hear her will, a sensible precaution for any women embarking on childbirth. The birth was long and difficult; so difficult that Mary, in the throes of labour, cried out that had she known the whole, she would never have got married, while the Countess of Atholl tried by ‘incantations' to cast her pains on to another woman. But on 19 June the birth of a healthy baby boy, Prince James, set the seal on Mary's monarchy.

The Scottish ambassador to England took care to give Elizabeth all the gory details of the birth, telling her his mistress had been ‘so sore handled that she wished she had never been married'. He did it, he said, ‘to give her a little scare' off any marriage of her own. (It was obviously in Scotland's interest that Elizabeth Tudor should die unmarried, leaving Mary Stuart – or Mary's son – as her heir.) But that October, when in order to raise funds Elizabeth, was forced to summon parliament back after three years' absence, the members returned to London even more determined to tackle the question of the succession than before they had gone away.

Mary, when Darnley came to see his son, declared before witnesses that the baby was his. The extraordinary thing was that she should need to. Nevertheless, the summer of 1566, as Mary took time off to recover, saw some attempts at amity, sabotaged by the impossible Darnley. At Traquair there were plans for the royal couple to stag hunt the next day but Mary whispered in Darnley's ear that she preferred not to ride out. Another pregnancy was already a possibility. Darnley said loudly that never mind, if she lost this baby they could make another. It was a tiny incident, but it dramatised Mary's difficulties. His intransigence could only make her look favourably at other, more supportive figures.

In the autumn Queen Mary went to Jedburgh to preside over the justice assizes; one of those tasks she regularly undertook and which showed she aspired to be more than a pretty figurehead. While there, in the middle of October, she rode over to the stronghold of the Hermitage, where Lord Bothwell was lying ill, having been injured by Border raiders. The incident was later used to blacken her name, with the suggestion of an illicit affair between the pair but in fact Mary had taken a large party with her, including her half-brother Moray. The journey back was marred when Mary's horse threw her into a bog. The next day she fell ill, and soon her life was despaired of. The Bishop of Ross described it vividly: ‘her Majesty became dead, and all her members cold, eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold'.

She was brought round. But what is interesting is what the Venetian envoy in France heard as she recovered: that ‘the illness was caused by her dissatisfaction at a decision made by the King, her husband'. Someone was going to have to do something about Lord Darnley.

As Mary began to recover her strength she moved, with a number of her lords, to Craigmillar, just outside Edinburgh, and it was probably there that a conspiracy was launched. Or perhaps several different conspiracies. Mary was persuaded to pardon even the Rizzio plotters; there was now only one real enemy. When his son was baptised on 17 December at Stirling Castle, Darnley, although present in the palace, did not attend the ceremony. Instead, foreign guests were welcomed by Lord Bothwell, who was gaining an ever-increasing ascendancy.

The first weeks of 1567 saw Darnley ill and undergoing medical treatment in Glasgow, heartland of his family's territory. His illness was almost certainly syphilis, and the fact that she might soon be called on to resume sexual relations with him was a factor in Mary's determination to be free. When Mary went to visit him there were huge concerns about her security and there had long been talk that Darnley might try to kidnap the baby James and rule as regent himself while holding Mary in captivity.