The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots

by Kate Williams

  Meanwhile, the husband-to-be was demanding the title King of Scotland and, despite Parliament’s complaints and her own uncertainty, Mary persuaded the Privy Council to assent and it was announced that Darnley would indeed be dubbed King of Scotland. Mary, so long occupying a sensible route, ruling with strength and courage, had given all to love. She pushed forth the wedding, even though Elizabeth had refused her consent and the papal dispensation (because of their ­relation as step-first cousins) had not yet arrived. Three weeks before the wedding, Mary pulled her fiancé into one of her favourite games: dressing up. She and the future king donned a disguise and wandered the town, amused by the reactions of those walking past. The future king and queen were playing happy, basking in the delight of the ordinary people.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘The Scots Proclaim Much But Their Threats Are Not Carried Out’

  On Sunday 29 July, Mary rose early and her ladies gowned her in a black dress and a white hood, to show that she came to her new marriage as a dowager queen. She was escorted by the Earl of Lennox, Darnley’s father, and the Earl of Argyll to the chapel at Holyrood, where she waited for her future husband to arrive. The groom wore a suit embroidered with jewels, the peacock, glittering centrepiece of the ceremony. They made a beautiful couple, both tall, handsome and young. The nobles in their finery tried to seem cheerful, the Lennoxes and their supporters gloried in their triumph.

  The pair exchanged rings and Mary received three, representing the Trinity. All the nobles were invited and, in a masterstroke of ceremony, Mary allowed each one to remove a pin holding her veil to her gown before she went to her ladies to change from her black clothes. Mary received the nuptial Mass alone, for Darnley hurried off to the royal apartments. He came out again for the endless balls, banquets and celebrations that followed. Mary showered him and his extensive entourage with gifts, even going so far as buying new blue bonnets for his fools. Elizabeth’s ambassador suffered in silence.

  Elizabeth was incandescent and confiscated the Lennox properties in England. She would not agree to the arguments of her Privy Council that she should declare war. Elizabeth was wise. Since many of her people still wished her to marry and could not understand why she did not, to attack another queen for doing so would have been an unpopular move. And Mary was feeling strong. Now she was a married queen, there was to be no more constant waiting and chasing of Elizabeth’s favour, holding on for scraps of attention or regard. She told her dear sister and cousin that she and her husband would not enforce their claim to the throne, ally with English rebels or work with foreign powers who wished to depose the queen. In return, Elizabeth would not associate with Mary’s rebels – and Mary’s and Darnley’s succession to her throne should be settled by an Act of Parliament.

  Philip of Spain had sent his assent to the marriage. When he congratulated Darnley’s mother, he suggested her son would be King of Scotland and ‘King of England, if this marriage is carried through’.

  Elizabeth’s lute player had come a long way.

  Any remaining goodwill for the marriage within the nobles dissipated when the proclamation was made that all documents would be signed jointly by ‘Queen Marie and King Henry’, ‘in the names of both their majesties as King and Queen of Scotland jointly’. They were scandalised at the idea of a dual monarchy. Even though they thought a woman too weak to be queen, the nobles didn’t want one of their rivals ruling over her and feared that he would turn his efforts to attempting to remove their power. They were sickened by the medals and coins that were created, bearing his name first.

  The nobles began to openly dissent, refusing to wait on the new king. The Earl of Moray still hated Darnley and saw in the marriage the end of all his hopes. Within a month of the wedding, he was raising forces against the queen, backed up by Arran. Mary told Arran and Argyll that they would be outlawed if they assisted Moray and she moved to confiscate his property. Moray totted up the various grievances: Darnley; that Catholicism would resurge under Darnley and Mary together; foreigners at court, including Rizzio; improper selling of church lands, and divisions of the funds from the church. He had wider problems with his half-sister’s reign than just her husband.

  The rebels gathered in Ayrshire and on the last day of August, Moray led them into Edinburgh for what became known as the Chaseabout Raid. Mary’s forces shot the cannons of Edinburgh Castle and the rebels retreated, sending Melville to beg Elizabeth for arms and men. There was no help forthcoming and so Moray and his men fled to England, where he had always been welcome. In October, he was called by Elizabeth to explain himself.

  Moray endured a lengthy telling-off from Elizabeth, in front of the French ambassadors. Elizabeth was outwardly all respect to Mary, declaring that no prince could think well of what he had done and he should understand the ‘duty which the subject ought to bear towards his monarch’.She was thinking of her position and putting on a show for the benefit of Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX: she feared that the newly powerful Mary would gain foreign support, particularly from France, who in turn would threaten her. Behind the scenes, Cecil and her ministers talked in friendly ways to Moray. He was Protestant, they could deal with him. He was allowed to remain in England for as long as he wished – which was significant. Elizabeth and Cecil shared his fear of Darnley and Catholic influence. They could not endorse open rebellion. But they could help him if he did something more backhanded. Elizabeth’s ambassador, Randolph, was instructed not to recognise Darnley’s authority and channel funds to Moray.

  Mary had created a public triumph. And by autumn 1565, she was pregnant. When she started taking to her bed with sickness, the English ambassador flew into a panic and started bribing her maids for information about Mary’s cycle. He dreaded having to tell Elizabeth the news.

  Despite the outward appearances of happiness, there was trouble in the marriage. Darnley had expected to be the king, with Mary as little more than his consort. He was not particularly interested in ­government or administration – instead he pressed Mary to spend more money and expressed anger that her name was written first on documents, rather than his. He wished to be a great king in Europe and he was growing increasingly frustrated that his wife would not bow to him as he expected. He wanted all the lords to be subordinate to him and demanded of some to take Mass. They refused and he flew into a rage.

  Darnley had little affection for the queen – preferring to spend his time in the taverns of Edinburgh with both men and women, behaving notoriously. The only person in the world the teenage king would listen to was his mother, Lady Lennox, and she was still in England, watched with a hawk eye by Cecil. Without his mother to upbraid him, he behaved wildly, unwisely, drinking and seducing. At the end of the night, he crawled back to Holyroodhouse, drunk and spoiling for a fight. He was high-handed and cruel and Mary stood up to him, resulting in terrible arguments. She had thought he would be grateful to her for raising him up. Instead, he expected her to submit to him and was furious when she would not. As he saw it, he had a greater claim to the throne than she, because he was a man.

  Mary was incensed by his insubordination and decided he had gone too far and that he should be demoted to the position of ‘the queen’s husband’. She might be pregnant with his child, but she was still the monarch, not him. She refused him the right to bear royal arms. He would not have the crown matrimonial and would have no claim to the throne after her death. It was all good news for England. As Randolph remarked, ‘this queen repenteth her marriage; that she hateth him and all his kin’.1 She no longer visited Darnley at night. Instead, she spent time with her friends, including the gentle secretary, David Rizzio. Darnley seethed with hatred for the secretary, believing that he had stolen the influence that should have been his.

  Mary’s husband was a disappointment but her pregnancy made her powerful and the lords certainly seemed better behaved. Moreover, the aged Pope Pius IV, who had refused to support her dynastic claim, had died at the end of 1565. His successor, Pius V
, was much more enthusiastic and he sent a personal letter to Mary not long after his election. If he threw his weight behind her as Queen of England, Wales and Ireland, then she could have all Catholic Europe at her fingertips.

  In early February 1566, foreign ambassadors were invited to a banquet before Darnley’s investiture. Mary hung a portrait of Elizabeth in the hall in advance. In the midst of the banquet, she stood and announced that ‘there was no other Queen of England but herself’. She had thrown down the gauntlet. Elizabeth had treated her badly and prevaricated and failed to behave to her as a sister. Now, she would take her revenge. Mary sent Randolph, Elizabeth’s ambassador, home, accusing him of having given money to Moray and his rebels.

  In the same month, Bothwell married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, and Mary supplied the silver cloth for the bride’s dress – a sign of great favour. Lady Jean was in love with Alexander Ogilvie – and had an unfortunate habit of wearing black for her loss of love. Still, she brought a big dowry and was a sensible, intelligent woman, so Bothwell could hardly complain. Mary paid for the lavish reception. Ogilvie married Mary Beaton two months later, the second Mary of the four to leave her mistress.

  In the shifting allegiances of Scotland, no moment of power lasted long. The nobles were already plotting to stop Mary. A new parliament was due, and in it Mary planned that Moray and his fellow Chaseabout rebels would lose their land and titles under a bill of attainder. All the lords, Protestant and Catholic, were opposed to this, for to them their claim was ancient and no mere monarch could overthrow it. The Protestants also feared that there would be a strengthening of Catholicism. Darnley had come to hate his wife and he too began to plot. His father told the Earl of Argyll that if Darnley were appointed King of Scotland, he would pardon the exiles and the religious order would be returned to the way it was before Mary arrived. But someone had to be blamed for Darnley’s previous suggestions that he was opposed to the Protestant lords and would seize their land – and everyone alighted on Rizzio. Powerless and Catholic, hated by the court for his influence and mistrusted as homosexual and a papal spy because he was foreign, he was the perfect candidate. The Chaseabout supporters blamed him for Moray’s continued exile – he had too much influence over the queen. Darnley, as high-handed, suspicious and easily manipulated as ever, listened to men who told him that Rizzio had betrayed him and had poisoned Mary against him, and grew convinced that it was the secretary’s influence that denied him the crown matrimonial. The gossip got so wild that there were whispers Rizzio was Mary’s lover and even the father of Mary’s child.

  The friendless secretary was surrounded by sharks on all sides. A plot had been growing during the early months of the year, led by nobles including the Earl of Morton – who Mary had honoured with the title of Lord Chancellor – and the Douglases, the Earl of Ruthven, the Earl Lindsay, all emboldened by winning over Darnley. They were Protestants, loyal to Moray who was in communication about matters behind the scenes, and the first three were related to Darnley and saw his advancement as creating theirs. Rizzio was just a small obstacle – what they really desired was to push the queen into a subordinate position, with Darnley as the ruler, while they pulled his strings.

  The post-Rizzio plan was simple: Mary would be taken to Stirling until the birth of her child and Darnley would be king, pardoning Moray and the others for the Chaseabout rebellion, recalling those in exile and then the lords would encourage him to pursue the Protestant Reformation on the basis that they had given him power. This would also head off the risk that when Mary reached twenty-five, the age of majority, she could rescind gifts of land – and many lords had helped themselves to choice spots of the Catholic church possessions. Cecil thought the plan was simply to despatch Rizzio, and he was not opposed to it. The wily statesman had been outfoxed by his old friend Moray, for had the council thought there was a possibility of Mary being pushed into subordination and Darnley brought forth as king, they would have refused to support it. Elizabeth would not countenance it, for it hardly reflected well on female sovereigns, and she thought Darnley unpredictable and wild. She had always refused to recognise Darnley as King of Scotland and she would have never accepted him as sole king.

  Morton and Ruthven thought Rizzio should be either put on trial on invented charges and publicly hanged, or killed while walking in the garden or playing tennis, a swift and easy death. But Darnley wanted him murdered in front of Mary, to teach her a lesson and make her afraid. The other lords balked – what if the queen was so distressed that she miscarried? Or got caught in the melee and injured? But Darnley was insistent. His wife must see her servant killed.

  The English ambassador wrote to Leicester that the plans were underway and Rizzio ‘shall have his throat cut within these ten days’. And it got worse. ‘Many things grievouser and worse are brought to my ears, yea, of things intended against her Majesty’s own person.’

  Heavily pregnant, Mary was too confident. When she was told that she should pardon Moray or the lords might take revenge, she shrugged it off. ‘What can they do? What dare they do?’ She said that her country­men tended to ‘proclaim much but their threats were not carried out’.2Parliament assembled on 7 March and Mary pressed for the bill to deprive Moray of his property. The date for the bill was set as 12 March.

  Melville tried to warn Rizzio, but he refused to listen and ‘disdained all danger’. A French astrologer told Rizzio to be careful and encouraged him to return home. But Rizzio was of one mind with his mistress. ‘What can they do?’3

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘I Would Have Taken My Husband’s Dagger and Stabbed Him with It!’

  On the night of Saturday 9 March 1566, three days before Moray was due to be deprived of everything, Mary was eating dinner at Holyroodhouse with a small group of friends, including her half-sister Jean, Countess of Argyll; the Countess’s mother (and former mistress to James V), Elizabeth Bethune; her half-brother Robert Stewart; the Master of the Household and the Master of the Horse; her French apothecary, and Rizzio. She was in the small dining room that led off her bedroom, which, along with the dressing room and presence chamber, constituted her apartments. Now that she was five months pregnant, Mary preferred to dine quietly at home with friends. She presumed her husband was out, behaving badly in taverns. She was wrong. Downstairs, in Darnley’s apartments, eighty conspirators were grouping together.

  The party were enjoying their meal when Darnley arrived in the chamber from the stairs below. Mary and her companions had not been expecting him but still, he was her husband and did come and go between the apartments. He sat beside Mary and started chatting, as if everything was quite normal. But then, the Earl of Ruthven, dressed in full armour and looking shockingly ill, staggered in and demanded Rizzio be given to him ‘for he has been overlong here’.1 Mary demanded Darnley explain and he, all cowardice, said he knew nothing. Ruthven declared that Rizzio had caused great offence to Mary, the king, the country and the nobility. He had promoted the Catholic religion and Catholic countries and denied the lords their lands. Ruthven told her that she had ‘ruled contrary to the advice of your nobility and counsel’ and said Rizzio had ‘offended your honour, which I dare not be so bold to speak of’. And he had denied Darnley the crown matrimonial and encouraged Mary to banish the nobility and lose their lands. The Italian servant was responsible for all of Scotland’s problems, it seemed.

  Mary defended him and said he should be tried in Parliament if he was guilty of any misdemeanours and told Ruthven to depart on pain of treason. But the earl lumbered forth in his armour, pale and sweating with the exertion and made to grasp at Rizzio. Screaming, the secretary backed against Mary and the queen’s attendants tried to pull Ruthven off but he waved his dagger and shouted, ‘Lay not hands on me’. At this, more conspirators burst into the room from the staircase, some bearing guns. Ruthven seized the queen and told her not to be afraid, pushing her towards Darnley. ‘Take the queen your sovereign and wife to you.’ In the ensuing f
ight, a candelabra smashed to the ground, near the tapestries and the Countess of Argyll had the presence of mind to pull it away – otherwise they all could have burned. Ruthven and another stabbed at Rizzio as he cowered behind Mary’s back and the dagger came so close to her that she felt the wind as it passed her. She was terrified that she would be killed next. As she now understood, the palace was filled with enemies, her servants and the palace guard had been overpowered and her husband was leading the way.

  The conspirators grabbed Rizzio. Mary again tried to protect him but Andrew Ker, a Douglas ally, threatened her with a gun to make her keep back. She said later that he pointed his gun at her womb and tried to shoot but failed, and another conspirator said that another man had offered to stab the queen. But even though she thought herself on the brink of death, Mary valiantly tried to save her secretary, as he screamed and held on to her skirts. The men prised his fingers away from her gown and dragged Rizzio through to the top of the stairs, where the other men were ready for them. There they fell upon him and stabbed him in a shocking scrum of bloodshed while the queen and her friends listened, powerless in frozen horror, to the secretary’s terrible screams. Darnley hung back but the men wanted his mark on the killing. One seized Darnley’s dagger and used it to give Rizzio the final blow of death – and then he left the dagger sticking out of the corpse. As Mary said later, the murderers ‘most cruelly took him forth of our cabinet and at the entry of our chamber gave him fifty-six strokes with whiniards and swords’. In her bloodstained chamber, she and her other guests heard it all – and feared the men were coming next for them. The reality was better, but not much. Mary was told she was now imprisoned.