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

by Leslie Carroll

  Mary’s midwife showed up the following morning to warn that if she didn’t take some fresh air soon, she might miscarry for real. By now, Darnley, eager to save his own hide, had become his wife’s ally. Only fifty-two hours after Rizzio’s murder, Mary and Darnley escaped the rebels by tiptoeing down the privy stairs that led from her apartment to his, through the servants’ quarters, and out of the palace. All through the night, they rode to Dunbar Castle and safety, managing at breakneck speed a twenty-five-mile journey in five hours. Mary, riding pillion, urged Darnley to have more care for her condition, to which he angrily replied that if she lost the baby, they could just as easily make another.

  The courage Mary displayed during these dark and dangerous days rallied her subjects. By March 18, she had amassed eight thousand men behind her, and rode victoriously back into Edinburgh, taking up residence in the castle.

  Despite their escaping the rebels together, relations between the royal couple were now at an all-time low, and there was a rumored split in April 1566. Mary punished some of Rizzio’s assassins, executing two of them. Meanwhile her husband denied any role in the plot—an ill-advised move because the convicted killers produced incontrovertible detailed evidence of his involvement. Hoping it would reconcile them to the queen’s good graces, the rebel lords sent her the bond that Darnley had signed pledging his support for Rizzio’s murder in return for the crown matrimonial. Upon reading this treasonous document, Mary evidently heaved “so many great sighs that it was a pity to hear.” By now, Darnley had become a pariah at court. Even his own father blamed him for destroying the Lennox clan’s grand plans.

  On June 19, 1566, after a painful and difficult labor, Mary gave birth to a son, the future James VI. She intended to eliminate her husband’s participation in the governing of the kingdom as soon as it was clear that their heir was healthy.

  “Is this your answer to forgive and forget all?” Darnley demanded of Mary.

  “I have forgiven, but will never forget!” Mary raged, vowing to have as little to do with him as possible from then on.

  She kept her word. On August 3, the Earl of Bedford wrote to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil, informing him that Mary and Darnley rarely supped together and she never slept “nor keepeth company with him,” a euphemism for sex. In any case, Darnley was out “vagabondising” every night and insisting that the castle gates remain open in anticipation of his return, which posed a security risk to his wife and infant son.

  Mary had been in ill health ever since her son’s birth, collapsing in October 1566 with vomiting and convulsions, briefly losing consciousness as well as the power of sight and speech. Darnley did not even visit her sickbed. “She has done him so great honor . . . and he . . . has recompensed her with such ingratitude, and misuses himself so far towards her that it is an heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no way out,” Mary’s adviser William Maitland informed the Scottish ambassador in Paris.

  Toward the end of the year, Mary became gravely ill again. Her attendants heard her repeatedly lament, “I could wish to be dead.” The queen’s depression was as severe as her physical complaints—and the cause of her misery was Darnley. He visited only once during her recuperation and the couple had a dreadful argument. “Things are going from bad to worse,” wrote the French ambassador, Philibert du Croc. “I do not expect upon several accounts any good understanding between them.” Darnley had threatened to depart permanently for the Netherlands, where it would be even harder for the Scots queen and her advisers to control him, admitting to Mary in the presence of du Croc that he had a ship at the ready. When Mary asked why, her husband sullenly muttered something about not being given the crown matrimonial. He then strode out of the queen’s presence without first requesting her permission to withdraw.

  By then, Mary realized that the best way to protect her infant son’s life, as well as his dynastic rights, was to put James into Elizabeth’s care and protection if anything should happen to her. The English sovereign was delighted and the two women, queen to queen, began drafting a new treaty that would grant Mary and her heirs the rights of succession to the English throne, as long as there were no heirs of Elizabeth’s body. Things were going very well—until an explosive event would destroy everything Mary had strived to achieve.

  Mary was toying with the idea of divorcing Darnley, but the nobles would only consent to it if the queen would pardon the conspirators who had scattered to the four winds after Rizzio’s murder. Mary agreed—if it was formally stipulated that her son, James, was legitimate. The nobles thought this compromise would be feasible if Darnley could be arraigned on some trumped-up charges of treason, but Mary refused to do anything underhanded. At Stirling Castle on December 17, 1566, Mary and Darnley’s son was christened. Though she did not attend in person, Elizabeth I was his godmother. Darnley was conspicuous by his absence. At the end of the month he departed for Glasgow, a center of Lennox Stewart power, to spend some time in the bosom of his family. Sometime toward the New Year, he was diagnosed with secondary, if not tertiary, syphilis.

  Late in the year the Earl of Bothwell and a handful of other disgruntled nobles met with Mary to discuss the Darnley problem. According to the laird of Ormiston, “it was thought expedient and most profitable for the commonwealth . . . that such a young fool and proud tyrant should not reign or bear rule over them . . . and that he should be put off by one way or another.” Historians continue to argue whether Mary was aware of the plot to assassinate Darnley that was hatched by these lords, and if so, how much she knew and when she knew it.

  Mary visited Darnley on January 22, 1567—not out of love, but to checkmate his ability to stage a coup and kidnap their son. Her formerly handsome husband was covered with odiferous pustules and was being treated with mercury, which caused him to salivate uncontrollably. He had lost most of his hair and teeth.

  Darnley disingenuously pleaded with her, “I am but young and you will say you have forgiven me sundry times. May not a man my age for lack of counsel, of which I am destitute, fall twice or thrice, and yet repent himself and be chastised for experience? . . . I desire no other thing but we may be together as husband and wife.”

  It must have been hard for Mary to take his words seriously as he vouchsafed his eternal fidelity with his nose rotting off from venereal disease. During several visits she endeavored to convince him to return with her to Craigmillar Castle, where her advisers could keep an eye on him. But Darnley was reluctant to trust his wife, so Mary brought out the big guns and promised to sleep with him—at Craigmillar—as soon as his pustules healed. Convinced, as always, that Mary couldn’t live without his body, he agreed—but only if they returned to Edinburgh instead, because he didn’t trust the owner of Craigmillar to guarantee his safety.

  Rather than take up residence in the damp and drafty Holyrood, on February 1, 1567, Darnley chose to move to a modest house just inside the city wall, known colloquially as Kirk o’ Field. Mary stayed there with her husband, in a bedroom upstairs from his. In Darnley’s words she “hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife.” So congenial did Darnley feel toward the queen that he unburdened his conscience, informing Mary of certain plots against her, adding that even he had been approached by malfeasors who had suggested that he murder Mary himself! You can just hear the nervous laughter.

  There were three separate intrigues afoot by this point: Darnley was indeed conspiring with the Lennoxes to imprison Mary and rule Scotland for the next several years as regent for their infant son; Mary (correctly surmising that he was plotting against her and her throne) was scheming to convey Darnley to a convenient location where she might be able to keep tabs on him; and the Douglas clan, in tandem with the Earl of Bothwell—who hoped to step into Darnley’s shoes—were plotting to assassinate Darnley.

  On the night of February 9, Darnley was celebrating because his pustules had subsided, and was looking forwa
rd to hot sex with his compliant wife. Even in the privacy of his own room the vain Darnley wore a taffeta mask over his face to conceal the effects of his syphilitic pockmarks and decomposing features. Mary spent the early part of the evening with her husband, then departed to attend the masque in celebration of the marriage of a favorite valet. While she was out, Kirk o’ Field was filled with gunpowder. At two a.m. on February 10, the house was blown sky-high.

  Around the time when the long fuse was lit, Darnley had heard someone fumbling with keys in his locks—not trying to get inside, but to lock Darnley into the house. He peered out the window and saw the conspirators outside. Fearing that they were about to set the house afire with him in it, Darnley and one of his servants, William Taylor, tried to escape. They managed to scale the city wall adjacent to the property, but ran straight into another knot of conspirators.

  No one knows exactly what happened next but Darnley’s body, naked beneath his nightgown, was found in a little garden beyond the city wall. There were no burn marks on his body. He had been strangled to death, most probably with the sleeves of his nightshirt. He was only twenty-one years old.

  At Holyrood, where she had gone after remaining at the wedding masque past midnight, Mary was awakened with the news of Darnley’s death. Her gut reaction was relief at so narrow an escape, for she might just as well have slept at Kirk o’ Field that night. A few hours later she wrote to her ambassador in Paris, vowing to punish those who “have taken this wicked enterprise in hand,” since “we assure ourself it was dressed always for us as for the king; for we lay the most part all of the last week in that same lodging.” She ordered an immediate investigation into Darnley’s murder, offering a magnanimous £2,000 reward (nearly $640,000 today) to anyone willing to inform against the assassins.

  Whispers had begun almost immediately that James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, was at the head of the conspiracy, and after being tortured, the captured plotters all implicated him as the ringleader.

  Dashing, stocky, and sporting a mustache in the fashion of French courtiers, Bothwell had received a comprehensive education in France, but was a man of action, preferring the sword to the pen. And he was no saint. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, thought the earl “of great bodily strength and beauty, although vicious and dissolute in his habits.”

  Mary had recalled Bothwell from France ten days before she married Darnley, in order to check any rebellion on the part of her illegitimate half brother, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray. In the days after Darnley’s death, instead of arresting Bothwell, Mary showered him with political offices and other examples of preferment, believing him to be the only man she could trust. Bothwell’s power seemed to grow daily as her ill health and depression brought on by stress and grief increased her dependence on the Protestant earl.

  Seven years Mary’s senior and brimming with bravado, Bothwell was already Lord High Admiral, and one of Mary’s key advisers on matters relating to the border territories; now he began to act as her policy director as well. Mary even gave him her late husband’s best horses. Such favoritism caused tongues to wag even faster. Word on the Edinburgh High Street—probably encouraged by Bothwell himself, as Mary was not so inclined—was that they would soon marry.

  It boggles the mind that Mary heaped so many favors on Bothwell, and is all the more incredible that she eventually agreed to wed him, because he had always been a ruthless opportunist with a recognizable vicious streak. True, he had commendably led her armed forces into battle on more than one occasion, and had helped her escape Holyrood House after Rizzio’s murder, but his motives were never altruistic. Early in Mary’s reign he had been arrested for plotting against her, but managed to escape, fleeing to his own castle. And around the time she was considering the marriage to Darnley, Bothwell had openly called her “the Cardinal’s whore,” a reference to her being politically in bed with her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine. He vowed never to receive favor at her hands.

  How times had changed.

  Her increasingly close relationship to Bothwell cost the queen any good PR she had won after Darnley’s demise. At first, people had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt when it came to any connivance in her husband’s murder. But her preferential treatment of the earl, who was largely surmised to be the ringleader of the regicides (particularly when his trial for complicity in the king’s death was impending), caused suspicion to fall on the queen herself. Continental monarchs, Queen Elizabeth, Mary’s subjects, and even her own family in France grew quick to presume her guilt. Goodwill continued to plummet when Mary attended the wedding of her favorite bedchamber woman on the day after Darnley’s murder. Although the ceremony had been planned for some time, it didn’t look good for the newly widowed queen to be seen at a celebration. And on the night of February 14, when Darnley was buried without fanfare in the tomb of the kings in the old Abbey-Kirk at Holyrood, the modesty of his funeral did not go unremarked.

  On April 21, the twenty-four-year-old queen went to visit her son at Stirling Castle, unaware that on April 23 she would be kissing the ten-month-old boy good-bye for the last time. The following day, as Mary was en route from her birthplace of Linlithgow to Edinburgh, her party was intercepted by Bothwell and eight hundred of his men. He told Mary that her safety was in jeopardy, urging her to place her trust in him by permitting him to escort her, and several of her key attendants, including some of her male advisers, to Dunbar Castle. In order to avoid bloodshed, Mary assented. The incident was so odd and Mary’s conciliation so easily won that many people surmised (and still do) that she had been complicit in the “abduction.”

  At Dunbar, Mary may have been raped by Bothwell. Several historians believe so, yet others have a hard time accepting that a woman of Mary’s substantial mettle would ever agree to wed her rapist, an opinion that overlooks the mores of the era. If Mary had indeed been violated by Bothwell, it placed her in an untenable position. According to Sir James Melville, “the Queen could not but marry him, seeing he had ravished [seized] her and lain with her against her will.” It had been a cultural axiom for centuries that when a man raped a woman, he had ruined her, and whether or not she became pregnant, he was honor-bound to make her reputation whole again by wedding her—which is exactly what Bothwell intended.

  Mary allowed Bothwell to win her over in a matter of a couple of days, even as she admitted, “Albeit we found his doings rude, yet were his answer and words both gentle.” On April 26, Bothwell galloped for Edinburgh, where he achieved a hasty divorce from his wife, Lady Jean Gordon, on the grounds of consanguinity as well as adultery, seeing as he had publicly fornicated in Haddinton Abbey with Lady Jean’s maid, the “bonny little black-haired” Bessie Crawford. The judges delivered their decree on May 3, effective immediately. As an example of Mary’s participation in the scheme to wed Bothwell, on April 27, while his divorce decree was pending, she was busy requesting the Archbishop of St. Andrews to grant the earl an annulment of his marriage to Lady Jean.

  The poor, vulnerable queen had three reasons (two of which were political) for resigning herself to marrying Bothwell: he had convinced her that he was the skilled and masterful consort she needed to rule Scotland; he showed her a document, known as the Ainslie Tavern Bond, signed by several powerful nobles pledging their support to him as their overlord; and the rape (if there was one) had “consummated” their union, so that Mary could not go back on her word to marry him once they reached Edinburgh. Ironically, it served Mary better if Bothwell had raped her, because if the consummation had been consensual, then Mary had knowingly slept with a married man at Dunbar and was therefore an adulteress.

  In addition, Mary’s domestic policy had always been the pursuit of peace. She had a horror of violence, insisting that she would “rather pray with Esther than take the sword of Judith.” She had angered the nobles by marrying Darnley, against their advice. If they supported Bothwell, and her marriage to him, perhaps the civil strife would cease.

  On May 6, Mary a
nd Bothwell entered Edinburgh. He was leading her horse by the bridle as though she were his captive or a spoil of war. However, John Knox’s assistant John Craig refused to proclaim the banns without a royal writ signed by Mary, stating she had not been raped by Bothwell.

  Craig received his writ and read the banns, but only after publicly proclaiming that he deplored the impending royal marriage. On May 9, Bothwell called Craig to account for his remarks, but the cleric stood firm: “I laid to his charge the law of adultery, the ordinance of the Kirk, the law of ravishing, the suspicion of collusion between him and his wife, the sudden divorcement, and proclaiming within the space of four days, and last, the suspicion of the king’s death, which her marriage would confirm.”

  Two days later, Craig repeated his misgivings from the pulpit; Bothwell threatened to hang him. The following day, Mary pardoned Bothwell for abducting her, then elevated him to the peerage so that he would be a fitting king consort, creating him Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland.

  The marriage contract was signed on May 14, justifying the queen’s nuptials on the grounds that she was a young widow “apt and able to procreate and to bring forth more children.” On Thursday, May 15, 1567, in a Protestant ceremony conducted by one of his relatives, the Bishop of Orkney, Mary and Bothwell were married in the Great Hall at Holyrood Palace. Mary’s wedding gown, though covered by the white gauze mourning deuil, was cut from a sumptuous black-patterned velvet, lavishly embroidered with gold and silver thread. After the ceremony she changed into a gown of yellow silk, but few people saw her in it, as there was no wedding banquet, no dancing, and no masque to mark her third marriage. Instead of being in a celebratory mood, she remarked to the French ambassador that she “wanted only death.”