The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (18 page)

Darnley was a pretty boy with some charm of manner, at least while things were going his way. His parents both adored him and had spoiled him, so that he became petulant and angry whenever crossed or denied his own way. He didn’t lack accomplishments: he was musical and wrote verses, danced and fenced well, and had a good seat on a horse. These were his good qualities and they were all that Mary saw. She fell in love with him and felt tenderly towards the boy when he contracted measles, nursing him as she had nursed her first husband, little Francis. It was the one sure romantic impulse of her life, the one time that she fell unreservedly in love. The English ambassador Sir Thomas Randolph reported that ‘great tokens of love daily pass’ between them, and believed that Mary was in thrall to ‘a fantasy of a man’. They were married on 29 July 1565; it was the first great blunder of Mary’s life.

The marriage soured relations with both Elizabeth and Moray, though some have argued that Elizabeth expressed her disapproval of the match in order to make sure it went ahead. Darnley had been brought up a Catholic. Moray objected to a marriage that might lead to the re-establishment of the Church of Rome in Scotland. This was not unreasonable; if Darnley was granted what was called ‘the Crown Matrimonial’, he might prove less moderate than Mary. Moreover, this marriage, unlike one Moray might have approved, would deprive him of power. Finding himself unable to prevent it, he raised his Protestant supporters in rebellion, subsidised by England, though less generously than he had hoped. Mary again rode with her troops. There was no real fighting – the incident became known as the Chase-about Raid – and Moray retired south of the border. The first significance of this inept rebellion is that it shows how insecure the Protestant party felt, how insubstantial their hold still appeared to be; the second is that Mary had turned for support to a Border nobleman, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, whom she now made Warden of the Marches, her lieutenant in the unruly borderlands.

Bothwell, who was some seven years older (and six inches shorter) than the Queen, was a rough, violent man and intensely ambitious. Most of his fellow nobles distrusted him. Some loathed him, others feared him. He was nominally a Protestant but stood apart from the Lords of the Congregation, for he detested Moray, and the feeling was reciprocated. His private life was scandalous. He had had an affair with Janet Scott, the Lady of Branxholm, who was nineteen years his senior and the mother of a quiver of children; and indeed no woman was said to be safe from his approaches. His enemies accused him also of sodomy, but this was a charge more often levelled than proved. He was said to have dabbled in witchcraft and the dark arts while a student in Paris. Yet he was not just a thug. He was fluent in French and knew some Latin and Greek, and Sir Henry Percy, an Englishman who had dealings with him in Bothwell’s capacity as Warden of the Marches, found him to be ‘wise and not the man he was reputed to be. His behaviour was both courteous and honourable.’
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Unlike most of the Protestant lords, he steered clear of English entanglements. He was loyal to Mary and would come to seem the one strong man she could trust. Her reliance on him would prove disastrous.

Meanwhile Mary had another confidant or favourite, an Italian called David Riccio or Rizzio. He had come to Scotland in the train of the ambassador of Savoy, and Mary had taken a fancy to him, because he was an accomplished musician and agreeable companion. When the ambassador went home, David remained behind and Mary made him her secretary with responsibility for her extensive correspondence with France. Before the Queen’s marriage, he was also friendly with Darnley, with whom he occasionally shared a bed. At a time when it was common enough for men to be required to lie together, beds being in short supply, this does not necessarily mean that they were lovers. Some have indeed thought Darnley bisexual, perhaps because his beautiful face was somewhat girlish, though there were also rumours that he frequented a male brothel in one of the closes off Edinburgh’s High Street.
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It was natural that Rizzio, as an intimate of both Mary and Darnley, should have favoured their marriage, but it was not long before the favour the Queen showed him, and her evident reliance on his advice, aroused anger and suspicion. He was rumoured to be a papal agent, an enemy of the True Religion, and Mary’s lover, this last despite his unprepossessing appearance; he was nearer fifty than forty, short, dark and ugly. The suspicion was without foundation. What the Italian offered Mary was agreeable, civilised company such as she had been accustomed to in France and now sorely lacked.

She was already disappointed in her husband. Darnley had a taste for what was called ‘low company’, and had already acquired a mistress. Nothing contradicts so clearly the picture of Mary as a great lover than her inability to hold the affection of her young husband for more than a few months. He was already piqued because he had been refused the Crown Matrimonial and excluded from government. The young fool was a fruit ripe for plucking by Mary’s enemies.

Wild rumours of plots and counter-plots were rife. Sir Thomas Randolph told the Earl of Leicester that Darnley and his father Lennox were conspiring against Mary: Rizzio would have his throat cut and Mary’s own life might be in danger. Lennox, he said, had assured Moray that if he supported Darnley, he would receive a pardon for his recent rebellion and be able to return to Scotland.

There was substance to this rumour. Indeed, Moray was in some urgency. A parliament was due to meet and the main item on the agenda would be his condemnation as a rebel and the forfeiture of his extensive estates. So the conspirators moved quickly. Darnley had already been persuaded that Rizzio was his wife’s lover, and was easily drawn into the plot. On the evening of 9 March 1566, a troop of men commanded by the earls of Morton and Lindsay, with Darnley in attendance, took possession of the palace of Holyroodhouse. Mary, well advanced in pregnancy, was at supper with her ladies and Rizzio when confronted by the rebel lords, led by Morton, Lindsay and the grim Lord Ruthven, who was said to be a warlock and who in his enthusiasm for murder had risen from a sick-bed, putting on armour over his nightshirt. They seized Rizzio and stabbed him repeatedly. He called out for mercy. So did the Queen. She was told to be quiet and threatened with being ‘cut in collops’ herself. The murder, performed in Moray’s interest and with his connivance and approval, was a direct challenge to her rule. It was a deed she could never forget or forgive.

She kept her nerve, however. That very night she made peace with her husband, despite the cruel and ignoble part he had played in the murder, and detached the silly young man from his confederates, telling him he was a fool if he thought them his friends, or men he could rely on. As her courage rose, his fell. One of her ladies slipped out of the palace carrying a message to Bothwell, who had earlier prudently made his own escape from Holyrood. Before dawn, the Queen, Darnley and a few servants left the palace by way of a secret staircase, then out through the kitchens and the abbey cemetery, to where horses were waiting for them. They rode hard for Dunbar. At one point they saw a detachment of soldiers lying, apparently, in wait. Darnley called for more speed, and when Mary protested that she feared she might miscarry, he told her crudely that they could well make another child if this one was lost. Fortunately, the soldiers proved to be Bothwell’s men, who accompanied them to Dunbar. After the night’s hard riding, the Queen cooked eggs for her companions’ breakfast.
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She then returned to Edinburgh, escorted by several hundred of Bothwell’s Border troops. Revenge may have been in her heart, but she was governed by her head. She sought once again to conciliate her enemies. The alternative was to risk civil war, which might invite English intervention. Furthermore, she could not be certain who was truly on her side and who against her. So pardons were granted. Moray was restored to favour. Darnley’s plea of innocence was accepted, doubtless with reservations on her part. Even evidence that the conspirators had received money from England was not pursued. Mary did not question Elizabeth’s bland assurance that she knew nothing of any such payment.

Three months later Mary gave birth in Edinburgh Castle to the child who would, as James VI and I, fulfil her own ambition and unite the crowns of Scotland and England. ‘My lord,’ she told Darnley, ‘God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you.’ When her ambassador, Sir James Melville, relayed the news to Elizabeth, she ‘laid her hand upon her haffet [cheek] bursting out to some of her ladies, how that the Queen of Scotland was lighter of a fair son, and that she was but a barren stock’.
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Mary may at this moment have hoped and intended to repair her marriage. Her good nature and kindliness inclined her to do so. In the will she made before her confinement she had left Darnley a diamond ring, noting, ‘it was with this that I was wed’. But whatever her intention, she could not trust him again, and nor could anyone else. His participation in Rizzio’s murder stuck in her gullet. His desertion of his confederates caused them to hate and despise him. Moray and Maitland of Lethington, restored to influence if not power, were eager to find ways to be rid of him; and so was the ambitious Earl of Bothwell.

It is possible to feel some sympathy for Darnley, though most historians and biographers of Mary have found it easy to resist any temptation to do so, and may not indeed have felt it.
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Much in his character was deplorable. He has been called vain, conceited, lazy, cowardly, weak-minded and treacherous, and on various occasions his behaviour merited all these derogatory epithets. But he was very young, had been spoiled by his parents, who reared him to think himself perfect, and was married to a wife who had fallen out of love with him very soon after their wedding and who now viewed him with what seemed a settled dislike. Worse still, he had been led into being at least an accessory to Rizzio’s murder by as violent and frightening a gang of cut-throats as can be imagined. Then, either because he was afraid or because, just possibly, his better nature asserted itself, he had betrayed them and accompanied his wife when she fled from the palace. If he was now terrified of Moray, Morton, Lindsay, Ruthven and the rest of the murderous gang, he can scarcely be blamed.

There was talk of a divorce, or, more exactly, an annulment. Mary was seemingly eager to be rid of him, but drew back when she realised that an annulment of the marriage would call into question the legitimacy of her son. That was unthinkable. The matter was shelved.

Darnley himself was eager to get away. He spoke of going to the Netherlands to fight in the Spanish army, then of commissioning a ship and making for France. He did neither, and in any case it would have been illegal to leave the country without the Queen’s permission. More sinister rumours surrounded him. He was known, or at least believed, to have been in communication with the Pope. There were again dark mutterings of a Catholic plot, headed by Darnley and his father, the Earl of Lennox. The Queen, it was said, would be set aside in favour of her son, Darnley would become regent, and the Roman Church restored. This was probably no more than wild talk. But the times were uneasy. Rome had put its house in order, and the Counter-Reformation was well under way. Spain was moving to crush a Protestant revolt in the Netherlands, while France was slipping into civil war. Moreover, men like Moray and Morton, who had fomented revolution and organised murder, were naturally wary. When Mary rejected proposals for an annulment, her secretary Maitland of Lethington said, with sinister obscurity, ‘We shall find the means that Your Majesty shall be rid of him.’

At Christmas 1566, Darnley fell ill in Glasgow. There was the usual talk of poison, for which there is no evidence, but it was probably smallpox.
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When he was out of immediate danger, Mary went to Glasgow to nurse him. If it was smallpox, she could do so without fear of infection, for she had contracted the disease while a child in France, though only lightly, as it had left her unmarked. Nursing him again, as she had before their marriage, a spark of affection may have revived. They agreed that he should return with her to Edinburgh as soon as he was well enough to travel in a litter. Her intention was to take him to Craigmillar Castle, a couple of miles beyond the city limits, but he preferred a lodging offered him in what was known as the Provost’s House of Kirk o’ Field, which abutted on the Flodden Wall on the south side of the city. It belonged to one Robert Balfour, a canon of Holyrood, and was made ready for Darnley by Robert’s brother, Sir James Balfour.

James Balfour was a conspicuous scoundrel, even by the standards of the time. Twenty years previously he had been one of the gang who murdered Cardinal Beaton, and like his fellow in that murder, John Knox, had served time in the French galleys. Knox, however, loathed him. He was ‘a man without God’, he said, and indeed he was known to many as ‘blasphemous Balfour’. If a man was wanted to commit a terrible crime, there could be no better choice than Sir James Balfour.

The murder of Darnley was the climactic moment of Mary’s life. It led to her ruin and was used to blacken her reputation throughout western Europe. Yet she was entirely innocent, innocent of the deed, ignorant of the plot, so ignorant indeed that her first response – and fear – was that she herself had been the intended victim. It is possible that she was. Major-General Mahon suggested in
Tragedy of Kirk o’ Field
, described by Antonia Fraser as ‘by far the most detailed investigation into the geography and circumstances of the event’, that Darnley, who had after all selected the house,
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himself planned to murder his wife. This is improbable – for one thing he was incapable of keeping any secret – but it is not improbable that the first devisers of the plot meant to kill both Darnley and the Queen.
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