Mary Queen of Scots (20 page)

Randolph suspected they were having marital problems, noting that Henry remained mostly at Fife hunting after she became ill in mid-November. When Lennox wrote his wife in December that Mary was pregnant and that their son was in good health and favor, he was either personally deceived or more likely withholding news about their estrangement. Mary had conceived probably in late September, but the major symptom of her November illness was a recurrent pain in her side, which Randolph claimed she usually suffered at that time of year.

On 23 December Randolph related that she no longer favored her consort, that her attendants addressed him as the queen’s husband rather than king, and that contrary to recent practice her name preceded his on coins and documents. These assertions were only partially true, but they do indicate Randolph was aware of the council’s decision
to create a new coin, the Mary Ryall, which carried her name before Henry’s. Some writers, citing Randolph, have argued that their estrangement prompted its issuance, but public business rarely reflected shifting personal feelings. In 1565 the decision to mint the Ryall was prompted by a quest for profit, as it was valued at 30
shillings while its bullion value was only 22 shillings.
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It is significant that three of the councilors making the decision were Henry’s relatives: Atholl, Morton, who replaced Huntly as lord chancellor, and Patrick, third Lord Ruthven. The documentary placement of Mary’s and Henry’s names, moreover, did not change:
rex
continued to precede
regina
in the privy council register, for example. Meanwhile, Randolph noted other evidence of Henry’s and Mary’s estrangement, observing that Henry revealed his true faith by attending mass on Christmas Eve while Mary played cards until almost daybreak. Immediately after Christmas, Henry departed for Peebles to hunt only returning to court in mid-January.

The king’s celebration of Christmas mass; the queen’s selection of four Catholics to preach public sermons, among them John Black, a Dominican friar, and the royal couple’s urging of the courtiers to attend services at Holyrood may have been hints that she intended to seek a statute restoring the mass for all Catholics at the parliament scheduled to meet in March. On 1 February 1566, Candlemas Day, some individuals did agree to worship with them but others, including Bothwell, declined their invitation. It is noteworthy that these efforts to encourage their presence at mass occurred during the visit to Scotland of two Catholic envoys, Clernault de Villemont from the cardinal of Lorraine and John Thornton from Archbishop Beaton. The royal couple may have hoped to impress these visitors with their success in recruiting new converts to their faith. They could also have planned to provide information about the additional Catholic worshipers to Nicholas d’Angennes, seigneur de Rambouillet, who arrived on 4 February to invest Henry in the Order of St Michael.
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Elaborate festivities celebrated Henry’s installation on the 10th.
Disguised in male attire, Mary and her ladies presented gifts to Rambouillet and his attendants during a banquet that evening. At a later supper the royal couple and Riccio joined others in performing in a masque. On the final evening, according to the reports of Rambouillet’s attendants as translated by Sir William Drury, captain of
Berwick Castle, Henry enticed the Frenchmen to become drunk. They claimed that he was an alcoholic and that Mary had departed in tears from a merchant’s house after arguing with him about his drinking. It is possible that his decision to plot the death of Riccio was unnerving the young man, as Randolph seems not to have identified drunkenness as one of his vices, although Knox did later claim that he was partial to wine.

Henry’s installation may have raised issues that clinched his determination to move against Mary and Riccio. After investing Henry, when Rambouillet asked what arms should be emblazoned on the armorial, the council replied that since he did not possess the crown matrimonial, he should bear only his noble arms and not those of Scotland. This response as well as the council’s earlier approval of Randolph’s petition to omit the king’s name from his passport home could have been the immediate reasons Henry turned against his wife. He may have believed that if he possessed the crown matrimonial he would be able to force absolutely the recognition of his royal status.

Henry was also disturbed by the rumors, which he may have initially believed, that Riccio was the father of the child Mary was carrying. Born in 1534 near Turin, Riccio belonged to a poor, noble family of Piedmont, which formed part of the duchy of Savoy. After serving at the Savoyard court, he became the secretary of Robert Solaro, marquis of Moretta, and accompanied him to Scotland in 1561 to discuss Mary’s union with the duke of Ferrara. On Lorraine’s recommendation and with Elboeuf’s support, Mary persuaded Riccio to remain in Scotland when Moretta returned home. According to James Melville, she needed him to sing basso with three chamber musicians who took the other parts. In late 1564 Riccio replaced Raulet as her secretary for French affairs after he departed for France to join the cardinal of Lorraine’s household.

It was not until May 1565 when Moray lost favor that Randolph began complaining about Riccio’s undue influence at court. Wholly supportive of the Leicester match for Mary, Randolph accused Riccio and others, including Atholl, Ruthven, Balfour, and Bellenden, of promoting her marriage to Darnley. Because the ambassador, like most of his contemporaries, assumed that women were incapable of sustained personal initiative or autonomous political action, he sought to identify
the male advisor with the most input into her governmental decisions.
Later in 1565 noting Mary’s estrangement from her husband, Randolph mainly condemned Riccio for the other royal policies he deplored, although he also blamed Balfour. By early 1566 rumors about the influence of these two officials had even reached France.

James Melville recalled that when he warned both Riccio and Mary that Scotsmen did not take kindly to foreigners wielding so much influence, she denied that Riccio spent more time with her than had Raulet or that he meddled in her business except for French writing and affairs. That Melville remembered this exchange with her is interesting because of later occurrences in England. In 1574 at the death of Raulet, who had resumed these secretarial duties during her captivity, she confided to Archbishop Beaton that as her secretary was dead, her enemies could no longer suspect that he was greatly influencing her opinions.
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Women’s reputations were more susceptible to gossip than men’s, however, and Randolph’s repeated accusations in 1565 lent credibility to Riccio’s alleged importance to her. Indeed, James Melville later noted that in letters written to him and his brother Robert Melville, Throckmorton accused his countryman of deliberately causing political discord in Scotland.

Henry apparently believed that Mary’s failure to seek the parliamentary grant of the crown matrimonial for him diminished his manhood and deprived him of the headship of his household. His feelings of inadequacy made him receptive to the gossip blaming Riccio for his powerlessness. Given social and legal practices, it was far from absurd for him to reach this conclusion. Normally after marrying, early modern women ceased to have legal
personae
and generally their husbands controlled their movable property and even their rents from inheritable estates. Husbands also had custody of their wives and could decide their places of residence. A later English publication summed up contemporary beliefs about spousal relationships:

I would counsel women not to presume to command their husbands, and admonish husbands not to suffer themselves to be ruled by their wives; or in so doing I account it no otherwise than to eat with the feet, and travel with the hands, to go with their fingers, and to feed themselves with their toes.
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As good reputations were the keys to people’s social standing, their enemies sometimes gossiped about their sexuality to sully their honor.
Because female honor was considered fragile and once besmirched almost impossible to retrieve, numerous women sued slanderers in Kirk sessions or other courts to clear their names from sexual defamation. Few aristocratic women sought legal remedies, but they did sometimes adopt deep religious demeanor partly to protect themselves from slander. Female rulers often formed political alliances with ecclesiastics to forestall such gossip albeit sometimes unsuccessfully. In 1543 Sadler heard that James V had harbored suspicions about Mary of Guise’s intimacy with Cardinal Beaton. Twenty years later, the exiled Bothwell repeated rumors circulating in France that Mary had been Lorraine’s whore. Believing that Francis was impotent, some evil tongues even claimed that her uncle planned to impregnate her.

Since their contemporaries interpreted wives’ adultery as evidence of their husbands’ failure to maintain household authority, female immorality dishonored the men, called cuckolds, as well as the women.
The cuckolded husband, a name derived from the cuckoo’s practice of laying eggs in other birds’ nests, was expected to perform acts of prowess to recover his reputation; indeed, the honor code permitted all men to defend their reputations with swords. It was best for a man to maintain secrecy about his wife’s adultery. If knowledge of it became widespread, however, he needed other men to witness the violent acts that would restore his honor, since male networks confirmed and validated masculinity. Thus, Henry planned for his allies to attack Riccio in Mary’s presence to signal her disgrace and his vindication.

Men could only with difficulty distinguish personal honor from their family honor, as this trait descended to them through their collective blood inheritance. Therefore, Lennox probably promoted his son’s decision to murder Riccio and usurp his wife’s throne. George Buchanan later claimed that Lennox had actually advised Henry to seek out two of the co-conspirators, his cousin, the sixth Lord Lindsay, and Morton. Nisbet, Lennox’s master of the household, was also one of the assassins. Randolph certainly believed that both Lennox and his son conspired against Mary. Frequently at court during the winter of 1566, the earl served as one of the parliamentary lords of the articles on 7
March, two days before the attack on Riccio, and was elsewhere in the palace when it occurred.

Many of the assailants, including Morton, Ruthven, and George Douglas, postulate of Arbroath, were relatives of Henry’s mother, Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox. As Scottish women, who took their husband’s titles but not their family names, were considered more a link to their in-law’s kindred than a part of it, Henry normally would have sought Stewart assistance. Scotsmen, in fact, usually supported others with their surnames even if only distantly connected. Since Mary was also a Stewart, and since individuals with the same surname were not expected to fight against each other, her husband turned to his Douglas kin for assistance.

During the Order festivities, if not before, Henry began conspiring with them to murder Riccio and take his wife captive. On 13 February Randolph predicted both Riccio’s death and the usurpation of Mary’s crown, and by the 25th shortly before departing, he learned that the bands would soon be signed. The king had likely agreed orally to the conspiracy before witnessing the wedding of Huntly’s sister, Jean Gordon, to Bothwell in a Protestant service at Holyrood Abbey chapel on the 24th. Earlier, perhaps at Mary’s behest since Jean was a Catholic, Archbishop Hamilton, by virtue of his authority as papal
legate a latere
, issued a dispensation permitting her to marry in a Catholic ceremony the earl, who was related to her in the double fourth degree of consanguinity. Delighted with the match, Mary presented the bride with 11
ells of cloth-of-silver lined with taffeta for her gown. For five days the duplicitous king participated in the celebrations, including lavish banquets and tournaments.

In early March he signed two bands, the first with his relatives and associates for Riccio’s murder. It is possible, as Mary later claimed, that the motive of the signatories for removing her from the queenship was that she, as was her right after she reached her 25th year, would revoke some of the grants made to them during her minority. Additionally, Randolph passed on the absurd rumor that she would give to Riccio the chancellorship held by Morton. In the second band, which referred to Riccio’s death and was endorsed by Moray and the other noblemen with him, the king promised to pardon Moray and the Chaseabout raiders, who were mostly at Berwick, and to support the Protestant faith. In return, they pledged to assist him in obtaining the crown matrimonial and to petition Elizabeth for the release of his mother, imprisoned because of his marriage. Ironically, eight months after these
men rebelled against Mary because she wed Darnley, they agreed to empower him as king and aid him in usurping her realm. Aware of these bands, Bedford and Randolph at Berwick informed Elizabeth that Moray would soon return home. The date parliament was to meet scheduled the timing of the attack. On the 7th the king refused to accompany Mary to the opening of parliament, which among its other business, restored Huntly and Sutherland to their earldoms and ordered the raiders to appear on the 12th for the forfeiture of their lands.

Two days later about 7:00 p.m. the assault commenced as the queen, who was six months pregnant, supped in a small room just off her bedchamber on Holyrood’s second floor. The following account is based mostly on Mary’s letter of 2 April in which she described the events to Archbishop Beaton.
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It differs in some particulars from Ruthven’s apologia which was written on 23 March; however, a rehearsal of her statements is important because they reflect her recollections of the conspiracy that form the context for some of her later actions.

Seated at the center of the supper table, Mary was attended by Lady Argyll, Lord Robert, Arthur Erskine, master of the horse, Robert Beaton of Creich, Balfour, and other domestic servants, including Riccio at the sideboard. Meanwhile, the conspirators assembled, Morton, Lindsay, and his followers securing the courtyard gates and Ruthven and other murderers gathering in the king’s apartments on the first floor.