Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  When Sir James Melville, Mary’s Scottish envoy, first saw the six-foot-one-inch-tall Darnley, his impression was that “No woman would make choice of such a man that was liker a woman than a man, for he is very lusty, beardless, and lady-faced.” He was wrong.

  Mary first met Darnley on February 17, 1565, at Wemyss, a tiny coastal village near Fife, before he went to greet his returning father at Dunkeld. She declared the nineteen-year-old urbane fop to be “the best proportioned lang [tall] man [she] had ever seen.” Darnley remained at Mary’s court in Edinburgh while bad weather kept everyone snowed in. While she awaited Elizabeth’s reply regarding her agreement to wed the Earl of Leicester as long as she was named Elizabeth’s heir, Mary made no outward show of any interest in Lord Darnley. But her attempt at subterfuge didn’t fool the gossips. It was widely thought that “if she take fantasy to this new guest, then they shall be sure of mischief,” because a marriage to Darnley would give the Lennox branch of the Stewarts additional status, potentially reigniting the rivalry between his family and some of Scotland’s other powerful clans.

  After Elizabeth informed Mary that “nothing shall be done until Her Majesty [Elizabeth] shall be married, or shall notify her determination never to marry,” Mary realized she had been checkmated. Since Elizabeth declined to name a successor, Mary refused to marry Leicester and stubbornly proceeded with her plans to wed Darnley. By the first week of April 1565, the pair were clearly courting. They spent most of their time together, and Mary nursed Darnley back to health when he became ill with a cold that developed into a “marvelous thick” skin rash—which was probably the onset of syphilis, contracted in England.

  Fearing that Mary’s marriage to Darnley could result in a civil war between Protestants and Catholics if he chose to raise an army in support of the latter’s cause, Elizabeth instructed her Privy Council to find a way to thwart it. They reminded her that Darnley was an English subject, and therefore she could conceivably step in and refuse her consent to Mary’s marriage. It would have been disastrous for Elizabeth if the Scots Catholics invaded England, asserting Mary’s claim to the English throne, galvanizing their English coreligionists, and rallying them to the cause. The Privy Council ultimately demanded that Mary renounce Darnley to marry Robert Dudley or some other English noble instead.

  Although Darnley was English, he was not a noble. So in the space of one afternoon Mary knighted him, made him a Scottish baron, and then created him Earl of Ross. But in ennobling her intended groom, Mary had created a monster. Eager to be made Duke of Albany, as Mary had promised, he drew his knife on the lord who brought news of a delay in the ceremony. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was so angry at Mary’s elevation of Darnley, which was tantamount to a betrothal, that she confiscated his English estates.

  During the three brief months that Mary and Darnley had known each other, he had been on his best behavior, but the prospect of marriage to the queen had broadened his arrogant streak and his true colors were beginning to emerge; he was roundly described at court as being “proud, disdainful, and suspicious.”

  It’s remarkable that Mary refused to be put off by his behavior, which included frequent drunkenness and rumors of dubious sexual proclivities. Darnley’s flamboyant bisexuality at Elizabeth’s court had earned him the reputation as a “great cock chick.” And according to a dispatch from Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to Scotland, Darnley was on an intimate footing with Mary’s personal secretary David Rizzio (also spelled Riccio by some scholars). Rizzio had come to the Scottish court as a musician in the train of the ambassador from Savoy and stayed on in Edinburgh initially to sing bass in Mary’s choir. But he soon became a particular favorite of Darnley’s as well. According to Randolph, “They would lie sometime in one bed together.”

  Despite her awareness of Darnley’s conduct, by the third week in May, Mary had convinced herself that she was in love with him. Yet just a few weeks later, by the third of June, the bloom was off the rose and the scales had fallen from her eyes. Unfortunately, by then she was stuck. To renounce her intention to wed Darnley, even if the decision was predicated on his arrogance and unpleasant personality, would have been to play into Elizabeth’s hands. Mary had to stand firm. She would marry Darnley—but it would not be a love match; it would be a marriage of convenience that would place her in a better political position. Not only would she be Elizabeth’s plausible heir in her own right, laying claim to the English throne should Elizabeth remain childless, but unlike the “Virgin Queen,” Mary stood to produce heirs through her marriage to Darnley—thereby securing the continuation of the Stuart dynasty.

  Although she embraced the fate she’d so stubbornly chosen for herself, according to Ambassador Randolph’s dispatches, Mary remained so disturbed by Darnley’s “intolerable” behavior that she plummeted into depression. “Her Majesty is laid aside,” Randolph wrote to Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, “her wits not what they were, her beauty another than it was, her cheer and countenance changed into I wot not what.” The alteration in Mary’s appearance was so dramatic that in Randolph’s opinion, she was “a woman more to be pitied than any that I ever saw.”

  Despite her melancholy, Mary vigorously defended her right to choose her own husband, angrier than ever at Elizabeth’s continual interference. And when Randolph had the nerve to suggest that if Mary converted to Protestantism Elizabeth might have a more favorable reaction to her proposed marriage, Mary exploded. “Would you that I should make merchandise of my religion, or frame myself to your ministers’ wills?” she demanded of Randolph. “It cannot be so,” she announced with finality and left the room.

  According to Mary’s twenty-first-century biographer Roderick Graham, the queen and Darnley were secretly wed before about seven witnesses on July 9, 1565, in an informal ceremony—probably a handfasting—conducted most likely in David Rizzio’s apartments at Stirling Castle. Afterward, the newlyweds consummated their clandestine union at Lord Seton’s house.

  Outwardly, however, the official wedding plans continued apace. On Sunday morning, July 22, the banns were read in St. Giles Kirk. That afternoon, Mary created Darnley Duke of Albany. The following Saturday it was proclaimed at the Market Cross in Edinburgh that the queen would marry Darnley the following day, after which he would be made King of Scotland. Unfortunately, she should have allowed her Parliament to do their duty and vote on the subject, since they were usually consulted before such titles were bestowed. In acting by royal fiat, Mary began to annoy some of the lords who had finally agreed to make Darnley king.

  The sun was not yet up on the morning of July 29, 1565, when Mary was led down the aisle of the Chapel Royal at Holyrood by Darnley’s father, Lord Lennox, and the Earl of Argyll. Over her wedding gown she wore her deuil blanc, a white gauze sack that covered her from head to toe—the traditional mourning garment for French queens—emblematic of her status as a widow, and by extension, the Dowager Queen of France.

  Darnley entered the chapel and the bridal couple exchanged vows. Since they were first cousins, a papal dispensation was necessary in order for them to marry. It had not arrived in Edinburgh by July 29, but Mary blithely assumed the document was en route, and therefore, she married Darnley without it. Although the dispensation finally made it to Scotland, the July 29 marriage was technically not legal because it had been performed while the bride and groom remained within a proscribed degree of affinity.

  After the rings were exchanged, despite the fact that he, too, was a Catholic, Darnley quit the chapel to avoid being charged with “idolatry,” leaving his bride at the altar to continue the mass. As soon as the ceremony was over, Mary invited her guests to help her cast aside her mourning garments by each removing one of the pins that affixed the deuil blanc to her wedding gown.

  Thomas Randolph noted that the newlyweds headed for the ballroom, rather than the bedroom; they “went not to bed, to signify unto the world that it was no lust [that] moved them to marry, but only the necessity of her country, not lon
g to leave it destitute of an heir.” Little did the ambassador know that the reason the royal couple didn’t dash off to the boudoir to have their first sexual encounter with each other was that they had secretly consummated their nuptials twenty days earlier.

  On the day after the wedding the heralds proclaimed Darnley King of Scotland. From then on, power would be “conjointly” exercised. All state papers would bear the words “Henry and Marie, King and Queen of Scotland.”

  The news was greeted with sullen silence. A cluster of dissident nobles, led by Mary’s bastard half brother, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, was already raising an army. Mary’s marriage to the objectionable Darnley, followed by his proclamation as their king, had provided the perfect excuse to rebel. But Mary reacted swiftly to their uprising. She raised an army of eight to ten thousand men, and, leading the charge in her steel cap, put the fractious nobles on the run in what would come to be known as the Chase-About Raid.

  Unbeknownst to Mary, in a behind-the-scenes effort to become a player alongside the Catholic big boys—the monarchs of France and Spain—her husband had begun plotting to restore Catholicism as Scotland’s institutional religion, cutting deals with Moray and the other exiled nobles. The ultimate goal was to effect a coup and seize power from Mary. If the next Parliament would vote to award him the “crown matrimonial,” which would grant him full governmental rights as king, then Darnley would overturn the Scottish Reformation. But that was only the first part of his treacherous plot. As soon as he accomplished his initial goal, he would then perform an about-face, recall the exiles, and return the kingdom’s official religion to Protestantism—as long as he still got to remain the sovereign. Darnley had no interest in either faith, nor in the impact his scheming would have on the delicate religious compromise it had taken his wife four painstaking years to craft. Immature and vain, all he sought was power and prestige. His ultimate aims were to be king in his own right, preferably with his wife out of the picture, and to earn the respect of the Catholic sovereigns on the Continent. Darnley didn’t care what religion his coconspirators practiced as long as they helped him achieve the crown, and he had no qualms about promising something to one faction, only to rescind his pledge as soon as their usefulness was over, and supporting the interests of their enemies if it achieved his ends.

  Mary’s half brother, Moray, accepted Darnley’s terms; but to make the scheme work the lairds needed a plausible scapegoat—someone who could be accused of feeding Mary the disastrous political advice that diminished the nobles’ clout and therefore jeopardized the health of the realm, and who could conceivably have persuaded Darnley to embrace Catholicism. His sometime bedfellow, David Rizzio—long (but incorrectly) rumored to be a papal spy—made the perfect foil.

  One of the conspirators, William Maitland, already had Darnley in his confidence and handily managed to convince the vain and gullible king consort that Rizzio was Mary’s lover, easily piquing Darnley’s sense of vengeance. It was a masterful stroke of propaganda, and one that Queen Elizabeth’s closest advisers were well aware of. On February 13, 1566, Elizabeth’s ambassador, Thomas Randolph, wrote to the Earl of Leicester: I know for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth Darnley and all his kin. I know there are practices in hand contrived between father and son to come by the crown against her will. I know that if that take effect which is intended, David [Rizzio], with the consent of the king shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many things . . . worse than these are brought to my ears, yea, of things intended against her own person.

  During the Christmas season in 1565 the royal couple had quarreled loudly and frequently in the privacy of their apartments, but soon everyone at court knew that the marriage was on the rocks. According to Randolph, Mary had demoted her husband. Whereas, for “a while there was nothing but ‘King and Queen, His Majesty and Hers,’ now ‘the Queen’s husband’ is the most common word.” A new silver coin called a “ryl” worth about thirty shillings Scots had been issued to commemorate the royal wedding. It depicted Darnley and Mary facing each other with their names engraved in Latin around the perimeter: “Henricus et Maria (D)ei Gra(tia) R(ex) et R(egina) Scotorum,” clearly giving preference to Darnley by listing his name first. That coin was taken out of circulation and a new ryl was minted with the order of the names reversed.

  What had changed? Well, apart from her disgust at Darnley’s dissolution, drunkenness, and infidelity, she was pregnant. He’d done his marital duty and Mary no longer needed to humor him. It’s also likely that she regretted her decision to have him styled as king; but he had insisted on it and Mary had to keep him happy, at least for a while, because like all monarchs, she needed an heir for the security of her realm. But now he’d done his job, and had outlived his usefulness.

  At Holyrood Palace on the night of March 9, 1566, Rizzio and Mary were in her supper room enjoying a game of cards amid servants, guards, and other companions, when a group of men, led by Patrick Lord Ruthven, sneaked up the privy stairs from Darnley’s apartment below. Around 150 armed men had secretly been admitted to the palace. Darnley entered alone, surprising Mary, but he acted affectionately to her, his arm encircling her waist. This was Ruthven’s cue to batter at the door, demanding, “Let it please Your Majesty that yonder man David [Rizzio] come forth of your Privy Chamber where he hath been overlong.”

  Mary turned to her husband and asked Darnley if he had anything to do with the unwanted intrusion. He muttered an incoherent and sheepish demurral. She refused to open the door, insisting that Rizzio was there by her invitation. A quintet of assassins then barged into the room, knocking over a table. Mary’s card-playing companion Lady Argyll caught a candle as it was about to fall and snuffed it out, leaving the room illuminated only by the fire in the hearth. Mary accused the men of treason and ordered them to leave, but Ruthven told Darnley to “take the queen your sovereign and wife to you.” Darnley restrained Mary while Rizzio hid behind her skirts. Ruthven and another conspirator then stabbed Rizzio in the back with their daggers. Mary later admitted that the blows had come so close to her own person that “she felt the coldness of the iron.”

  “All that is done, is the king’s own deed and action,” Ruthven told the queen.

  As Ker of Fawdonside leveled his pistol at Mary’s swollen belly, Rizzio was dragged into the next room, pleading for his life. According to Mary, “at the entry of our chamber [the assassins] gave him fifty-six strokes with whiniards [daggers] and swords.” Rizzio’s bloody, battered body was tossed down a staircase.

  Turning to Darnley, Mary demanded, “Why have you caused to do this wicked deed to me, considering I took you from a low estate and made you my husband? What offense have I made you that you should have done me such shame?”

  Utterly convinced that Rizzio had been her lover, Darnley’s weak defense (since he couldn’t very well admit that he was plotting a coup) was that Mary hadn’t had sex with him in ages, and on the occasions when he came to visit her for that purpose, she “either would not or made herself sick.” Ever since the previous Christmas she had been cold to him and he wanted to know why.

  A tearful Mary reminded him that “it is not a gentlewoman’s duty to come to her husband’s chamber, but rather the husband to come to the wife’s.” According to royal protocol, it was incumbent upon the husband to initiate all sexual advances.

  But Darnley countered, “How came ye to my chamber at the beginning and ever, until within these few months that Davie fell into familiarity with you? Or am I failed in any sort with my body? Or what disdain have you at me? Or what offense had I made you that you should not use me at all times alike? What offenses have I done you, seeing that I am willing to do all things that becometh a good husband? Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet I am your husband and your head, and you promised me obedience on the day of our marriage and that I should be participant and equal with you in all things. I suppose you have used me otherwise at the persuasions of Davie.”

&nb
sp; Enraged at his collusion in the murder of her secretary and by his refusal to defend her life when one of Rizzio’s assassins held her at knifepoint, the twenty-three-year-old Mary then dropped a marital bombshell: “For all the offense that is done to me, my lord, you have the weight thereof, for the which I shall be your wife no longer nor sleep with you any more, and shall never be well until I have caused you to have as sorrowful a heart as I have at this present.” It was a decision she should have made months earlier, but she needed to conceive an heir. For good measure Mary warned, “If I or my child die, you will have the blame thereof.”

  The assassination of David Rizzio was only step one of the plotters’ coup. On Sunday morning, March 10, although Mary was essentially under house arrest for ruling contrary to the advice of her Privy Council (which included at least one of Rizzio’s killers), she affected a placid and composed demeanor. She pardoned the conspirators, and when the rebels from the Chase-About Raid showed up, she made a grand show of affection with her bastard half brother, Moray, after which she suddenly cried out hysterically that she was going into early labor. Embarrassed and freaked out by the subject of gynecology, the men beat a hasty retreat.

  But Mary had faked the miscarriage, which bought her some time to plot and threw the assassins off guard. Then, over the course of the next several hours, by pointing out his own expedience to Rizzio’s murderers, she convinced Darnley that his life was as endangered as hers. As an assurance that her affection for him had not altered, she pretended to appeal to her husband’s vanity by inviting him to spend the entire night in her chamber—counting on the fact that by the time he showed up for sex he’d be piss drunk and ready to pass out. But when Darnley boasted to some of his coconspirators about how easily he had swayed his wife, they derided him for having grown “effeminate again” by giving in to Mary’s desires, even as he was supposed to be opposing her. So he never made it to her boudoir—although he did pass out drunk.