Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  On Thursday 7th March Parliament assembled. Mary went personally to the tollbooth for the election of the Lords of the Articles, glittering in a silver head-dress. Bothwell bore the sceptre, Huntly the crown and Crawford the sword. Darnley pointedly did not accompany her, in token of his displeasure at not being granted the crown matrimonial. Parliament was put under considerable pressure by Mary to draw up a bill of attainder against Moray, and Tuesday 12th March was fixed as the date at which the bill was to be passed. The fixing of this date automatically induced the climax of the conspirators’ plans. On the evening of Saturday 9th March, the queen was holding a small supper party in her own apartments at the palace of Holyrood; advancing pregnancy and ill-health had made her increasingly disinclined to go about in Edinburgh, preferring the company of her intimates at home. Those present with her all fell into this cosy category – her half-brother Lord Robert Stewart, her half-sister and confidante Jean, countess of Argyll, her equerry Arthur Erskine, her page Anthony Standen, and of course her secretary and musician, David Riccio himself. Perhaps there was to be music later, or perhaps this was to be one of those evenings, which Darnley said he so much resented, when the queen and Riccio played at cards until one or two in the morning. At any rate, the atmosphere was innocuous and domestic rather than exciting. At the time of his death, Randolph reported that the dandyish Riccio was wearing ‘a night-gown of damask furred, with a satin doublet and a hose of russet velvet’.13 It used to be suggested by critics that the fact that Riccio was in his ‘night-gown’ proved an unlawful degree of intimacy with the queen, but in the sixteenth century the word ‘night-gown’ was used in its literal sense to denote informal evening dress, the sort that might be expected to be worn on this sort of occasion.*

  The true story of the dramatic events which interrupted this supper party has to be pieced together from the many differing accounts of it. Two people among those present wrote their own eye-witness accounts of what happened, within a few weeks of the murder: Queen Mary wrote a letter to James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in Paris, on 2nd April giving her version of the affair, and Ruthven, one of the murderers, wrote an account of it with Bedford at the end of March for English consumption.14 Although both accounts must be expected to suffer from partiality, the queen to accuse and Ruthven to excuse, at least these letters represent fairly instantaneous reactions. Mary’s later account of it all, to be found in Nau’s Memorials of Mary Stuart, was told by her to her secretary when she was in captivity, long after the death of both Riccio and Darnley; although valuable for narrative detail, the motives it sometimes attributes to the participants must be regarded with reserve, since Mary’s emotion, recollected in tranquillity, has by no means decreased in fervour.* Of all other accounts it must be remembered that the writers concerned were not present (although Melville was in the precincts of Holyrood) and therefore dependent on secondhand information.

  One of the most important aspects of the affair is the scene in which it was set. Mary’s apartments in Holyrood lay in the north-west corner of the palace, on the second floor; the rooms were four in number – a large presence chamber at the head of the main staircase, draped in black velvet, with the arms of Mary of Guise on the ceiling, a bed-chamber of considerable size lying directly off it, and off that again two very small rooms in each corner, not more than twelve foot square, one a type of dressing-room, the other a supper-room hung in crimson and green. Beneath these apartments, on the first floor of the palace, lay Darnley’s rooms, which were roughly equivalent to the queen’s. The two sets of apartments were connected by a narrow privy staircase which came out in the queen’s bedroom, close to the entrance to the supper-chamber. The intimacy of the occasion has already been stressed. But although in one sense the supper-room was totally cut off from the outside world, except for the privy staircase, in another sense it was not a very secure place to choose to perform a murder.* The heart of Mary’s apartment was indeed a curious place from which to choose to pluck one of her own servants, since there were the guards surrounding the queen’s person to be taken into account. How much simpler it would have been to kill a mere servant in some other less public place. After all Riccio went normally and unguardedly about his business in Holyrood. Earlier there had been some story that George Douglas had offered to Darnley to throw him over the side of the boat while they were fishing at Castle Douglas,15 but Darnley had jibbed at the idea; such a scheme, quick, secret and unprovable, would certainly have made more sense as regards the elimination of a mere servant. The question arises why the choice of the queen’s own rooms was deliberately made instead. Ruthven, in his narrative, attributed the choice of location to Darnley, who, he said, wanted to avenge the public insult to his honour by a public coup. But this time Ruthven was busy piling all the blame possible on Darnley. The king was after all a weak character, notoriously easy to sway. The fact that the murder was deliberately planned to take place in the presence of the queen when she was nearly six months pregnant points to some malevolent intentions towards her own person (as Randolph prophesied in February), as well as the elimination of a presumptuous servant.

  Although it was Lent, meat was served at the queen’s supper party, since her condition permitted her to ignore the fast. As the supper was being served, to the great surprise of all those present, the figure of Darnley suddenly appeared up the privy staircase; although he was by now a comparative stranger to these domestic occasions, preferring to go his own way in pursuit of pleasure in the streets of Edinburgh, he was still welcomed as the king. But a few minutes later there was a far more astonishing apparition up the staircase – Patrick Lord Ruthven, with a steel cap on, and with his armour showing through his gown, burning-eyed and pale from the illness of which he was generally thought to be dying on his sick-bed in a house close to Holyrood. So amazing was his emergence at the queen’s supper party that the first reaction of those present was that he was actually delirious, and had somehow felt himself pursued, in his fever, by the spectre of one of his victims. Ruthven – who did in fact die three months after these events took place – was a highly unsavoury character, popularly supposed to be a warlock or male witch, or at any rate in Knox’s phrase to ‘use enchantment’. However, his first words left the queen in no doubt as to what had brought this death’s head to her feast. ‘Let it please your Majesty,’ said Ruthven, ‘that yonder man David come forth of your privy-chamber where he hath been overlong.’ Mary replied with astonishment that Riccio was there at her own royal wish, and asked Ruthven whether he had taken leave of his senses. To this Ruthven merely answered that Riccio had offended against the queen’s honour. On hearing these words, the queen turned quickly and angrily to her husband, realizing the Judas-like quality of his visit. She asked him if this was his doing. Darnley gave an embarrassed reply. Ruthven, by his own account, launched into a long and rambling denunciation of Mary’s relations with Riccio, reproaching her for her favour to him, and for her banishment of the Protestant lords. Riccio had shrunk back into the large window at the end of the little room, but when Ruthven made a lunge towards him Mary’s attendants, who seem to have been stunned into inaction, at last made some sort of protest. ‘Lay not hands on me, for I will not be handled,’ cried Ruthven, with his hand on his dagger: this was the signal for his followers, Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, Patrick Bellenden, George Douglas, Thomas Scott and Henry Yair, to rush into the room, also from the privy staircase. In the ensuing confusion the table was knocked over and Lady Argyll was just able to save the last candle from being extinguished by snatching it up as it fell (although presumably the flickering light from the large fireplace still filled the little room). While Riccio clung to the queen’s skirts, Ker and Bellenden produced pistols, and others wielded daggers. Finally the fingers of the little Italian were wrenched out of the queen’s skirts, and he was dragged, screaming and kicking, out of the supper-room, across the bedroom through the presence-chamber to the head of the stairs. His pathetic voice could be heard
calling as he went: ‘Justizia, justizia! Sauvez ma vie, madame, sauvez ma vie!’16

  Here he was done to death by dagger-wounds variously estimated at between fifty-three and sixty: a savage butchery for a small body. Mary was convinced later that the first blow had been struck over her shoulder: at all events, the first knife-wound was made by George Douglas the Postulate, Morton’s illegitimate brother, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Damiot concerning the Bastard; he carefully used Darnley’s own dagger for the bloody deed in order to involve him still further in the crime. Riccio’s serrated and bleeding corpse was now dragged down the winding main staircase. Here as it lay on a chest it was stripped of its belongings by a porter, who moralized as he did so in truly Shakespearian fashion: ‘This was his destiny,’ he soliloquized, ‘for upon this chest was his first bed when he came to this place, and there he lieth a very niggard and misknown knave.’ By now such commotion, such screams and cries had alerted the rest of the palace. Mary’s own domestics came rushing to her assistance from the outside, with their own weapons of sticks and staves, without knowing exactly what peril threatened her. At the same time, up the wider outside staircase could be heard cries of ‘A Douglas, a Douglas’ as the rest of the clan rushed to support the inner conspirators. Ruthven later blamed the ensuing commotion for the death of Riccio, saying that the assassins feared he would otherwise be rescued; he stated that their original intention had been to bring him before Parliament. But the excuse seems thin, in view of the violent nature of the attack. Mary herself, by her own account, originally offered in the supper-room to let Riccio appear in Parliament, if he had done wrong, yet Ruthven dismissed the notion as worthless.

  For the rest of her life, Mary Stuart was to believe that her own life also had been threatened in the course of the tumult in the supper-room and that Darnley, her own husband, had intended to compass her own destruction, and that of her unborn child. It is indeed impossible to understand her later attitude to Darnley without taking into account this steadfast inner conviction on the queen’s part. After the birth of James, she burst out angrily to him: ‘I have forgiven, but will never forget! What if Fawdonside’s pistol had shot, what would become of him and me both? Or what estate would you have been in? God only knows, but we may suspect.’17 In her account of events, she laid great stress on the violence which had been shown to her personally. This violence she laid at the door of Darnley, believing that she and her child had been about to be sacrificed at the altar of his ambition to become king of Scotland. In her mind she obviously believed that she had only escaped this fate through her own resolution and because her will was stronger than Darnley’s – a conviction backed up by the fact that she was now to escape entirely through her own courage and daring. It was only too natural for a woman six months pregnant, having undergone such a traumatic experience of a pistol pointed at her stomach, to be imbued with these feelings. Even for us, the desperate circumstances of the murder make it hard to believe that something violent if unspecific was not meditated against her – perhaps it was hoped that the shock of the murder would cause her to miscarry and die (the death of the mother was then the end of most late miscarriages).

  But at the time the quality of Mary Stuart’s spirit was proof even against such an appalling experience, despite her condition. Far from shrinking from the danger, she turned furiously on Darnley, now left with her in the supper-chamber, and upbraided him. Then Ruthven returned from the carnage and, sinking on to a chair, called for wine to revive him; although the queen herself was still standing she still did not lose her poise and defiance. Gazing at the wine, she inquired acidly: ‘Is this your sickness, Lord Ruthven?’ In the course of a three-cornered wrangle between herself, Ruthven and Darnley, in which Ruthven called in question once more her behaviour as a wife, the queen refused to be cowed in any way; if one report is to be believed, she even told Ruthven that she had ‘that within in her belly’ which would one day be revenged upon him.*18 In the course of the conversation, she had to deal with still further threats to her person: the disturbance at Holyrood had alerted the people of Edinburgh and the alarm bell of the city had been sounded. In order to quiet the townspeople, Darnley went to the window and spoke to them reassuringly in his familiar voice. When Mary strained to make her own voice heard, Lindsay brutally threatened to ‘cut her in collops’ if she made another move in the direction of the window. Finally Ruthven left and Darnley too departed. Mary sent one of her ladies for news of Riccio’s fate. When she was told that he was dead, she wept for a moment; but a moment later drying her tears, observed calmly: ‘No more tears now; I will think upon revenge.’19 She also retained her composure sufficiently to send a lady to Riccio’s room to recover a black coffer, with her ciphers and writings in it.

  As Ruthven informed those left in Holyrood that the former Protestant rebels were now on their way back to Edinburgh, Mary was left to spend the night alone, without any sort of medical attention or a midwife, which might have been thought necessary, and only old Lady Huntly, widow of the 4th earl, to keep her company. So far, the conspirators seemed to be in complete outward command of the situation, except for the annoying fact that of their other intended victims, Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by jumping out of the back windows of the palace, past the lion pit. It had originally been projected to slay these two and Lords Livingston and Fleming as well as Riccio, and hang Sir James Balfour as being all adherents of the queen. Now they contented themselves merely with the death of a Dominican priest, Father Adam Black. This very night, when the conspirators’ triumph seemed certain, was crucial in the history of Mary Stuart. At some point in the course of it she took the bold decision to choke down her feelings of revulsion for Darnley and win him over on to her side, reasoning that the character of Darnley might now be the weakness of the conspirators’ cause, as it had once been the weakness of her own. Since she had survived the slaughter, it will never be known exactly what plans the lords now had for the queen. She herself, presumably getting the news from Darnley, afterwards said in her letter – and amplified it to Nau20 – that they intended to hold her in prison in Stirling until she gave birth to her child, and afterwards indefinitely; ‘in the meantime the king could manage the affairs of state with the nobles’. Lord Lindsay was supposed to have remarked callously that she would find plenty of pastime there at Stirling in nursing her baby and singing it to sleep, shooting with her bow in the garden, and doing her fancy work. Although Lord Lindsay added that he happened to know that such things delighted her much, it was a tame prospect for one who had been queen of Scotland all her life, and thoroughly enjoyed the business of ruling.

  Therefore when at daybreak the next morning, Sunday, Darnley went once more to her chamber, he found his wife calm rather than tearful, resolute rather than reproachful. Darnley himself seems to have been comparatively hysterical as a result of Riccio’s death, and the queen told Nau that he pleaded with her with the old familiar endearments to forgive him for what had happened: ‘Ah, my Mary,’ he said (as he was wont to address her). In the meantime old Lady Huntly showed herself a resourceful companion of the first order, trained no doubt by the old days as the wife of the 4th earl. She offered to smuggle a rope ladder in between two plates and continued to suggest other schemes for escape until Lord Lindsay, breaking abruptly into the room (as the queen sat on her chaise percée), ordered her to depart. Even so Lady Huntly managed to take a letter to her son in her chemise (her outer clothing was searched), ordering him to stand by at Seton the following night. As escape by towels or ropes out of her window was clearly out of the question, because she was guarded above, Mary had a simpler and more intelligent plan. At some point in the course of Sunday she won back the facile Darnley by convincing him that his own prospects were as bleak as hers under the new régime, and that if he was not careful, they would both end up in ward in Stirling Castle. It was a triumph of a stronger character over a weaker one.

  Armed with the knowledge of Darnley’s new treachery, Mar
y was able to greet the conspirators the next day, Monday, with composure and even charm. She promised pardon, and that she would overlook recent hideous events: she even drank to the compact, although she could not quite bring herself to drink to Ruthven. Moray, apprised of what was about to take place, had set off from Newcastle: he arrived back in Edinburgh on the Monday, the day before his attainder had been due to be passed by Parliament. At this point Mary was unaware of Moray’s complicity in the plot, and memories of their old intimacy, those early days in Scotland when the brother had seemed the natural loving protector of the younger sister, flooded back. Mary flung herself in his arms, crying: ‘Oh my brother, if you had been here, they had not used me thus.’ But when Moray in return chose to treat her to a sententious lecture on the virtues of clemency Mary not unnaturally fired up and pointed out tartly with reason that ‘ever since her earliest youth, her nobility and others of her people, had given her frequently opportunities of practising that virtue and becoming familiar with it’.21 As she felt her indignation overcoming her, she was compelled to feign the pangs of labour in order to preserve secrecy about her intentions, and she ordered the midwife to attend to her, whom the lords themselves had appointed on Sunday. This midwife unwittingly played her part in helping Mary’s escape, for some of the lords remained suspicious of Mary’s true feelings, despite her promise of pardon; however, the woman, who was their nominee, assured them of her own accord that the queen was extremely ill and in danger of her life, as a result of what she had been through. At eight o’clock on the Monday evening Mary carried the second stage of her plan into effect by sending for Stewart of Traquair, the captain of the royal guard, Erskine, her equerry, and Standen, one of her pages; she then begged them in the name of chivalry to assist her not only as a defenceless woman, but also as the mother of the future king of Scotland. These gallant gentlemen proved susceptible to her appeal, and promised to stand by her escape, in the manner she now outlined.