The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  The plot took off when Moray accepted these terms. Its logic was crude, if devastatingly effective. But there had to be a scapegoat, someone to blame for misleading Darnley and orchestrating the recent swing toward Catholicism. The ideal candidate was Rizzio, once Darnley’s lover, but who Maitland, the supreme insinuator, had falsely informed Darnley was sleeping with Mary and toward whom Darnley, with his patchy grasp of reality, developed murderous intentions.

  Now everything started to fall into place. Rizzio, as Darnley became convinced, had not just betrayed him; he had done so by seducing his wife. And since Rizzio was already said to be a papal agent thanks to his association with Darnley, it followed that he must be responsible for the swing toward Catholicism.

  On February 9, Maitland had written a letter to Cecil that has all the elements of a smoking gun. “Nothing,” he said, “is on either part so far past but all may be reduced to the former estate, if the right way be taken . . . I see no certain way unless we chop at the very root—you know where it lieth, and so far as my judgment can reach, the sooner all things be packed up the less danger there is of any inconveniences.” If Maitland’s syntax was convoluted, his meaning was crystal clear. The clock had to be put back to where it had been before Mary married Darnley. The way to do that was to “chop at the very root”—i.e., assassinate Rizzio. The sooner it was done, the better.

  Just as Cardinal Beaton’s assassins had once sought Sir Ralph Sadler’s approval and indemnity before carrying out their plan, so Maitland courted Cecil. His letter, he assured Elizabeth’s chief minister, was “a gage of my correspondence to your disposition.” In other words, he asked Cecil to speak now if he disapproved, and if not, then forever to hold his peace.

  Almost overnight and by a masterly propaganda exercise, the unfortunate Rizzio was transformed into the queen’s illicit lover and “evil counselor.” He was the man everyone could agree to hate: excoriated as foreign, lowborn, proud, ambitious, a papal agent, a spy, a sycophant and a voluptuary. It was a perfect cover story, because the greater the marital estrangement between Mary and Darnley, the more Darnley suspected her of adultery; and the more she became politically isolated, the more she found herself relying on her private secretary, since Moray was in exile and Maitland eclipsed and spending time plotting with Darnley.

  If Maitland was the insinuator, the Earl of Morton, also avidly seeking Moray’s rehabilitation as well as a powerful position for himself when Darnley obtained the crown matrimonial, was the technocrat. Morton was the leader of the Douglas clan, and it was the Douglases and Lord Ruthven, Morton’s relative by marriage, who planned the assassination.

  On March 6, 1566, Bedford and Randolph jointly wrote two letters to Elizabeth and Cecil. A “great attempt” was to be made in Scotland. Darnley had persuaded the Protestant lords to promise to make him king by the consent of Parliament. Bonds had been signed to this effect. He would obtain a grant of the crown matrimonial in return for the restoration of the exiled lords and of the Protestant settlement. “The time of execution and performance of these matters is before the Parliament, as near as it is.”

  Randolph left Edinburgh a week before the assassination. Mary had belatedly discovered that he had covertly bankrolled Moray during his revolt. Two witnesses were produced who confessed to acting as intermediaries, smuggling bags of untraceable gold coins to Lady Moray, and although Randolph barefacedly denied the charges, he was ordered to leave the country. He was first accused on February 19 and offered a safe-conduct across the border, which he refused to accept. He later left under threat of forcible expulsion, but held out long enough to send Cecil his final reports on the plot.

  Everything had so far gone like clockwork. Cecil was fully briefed about Rizzio’s assassination and did nothing to prevent it. The timing was ideal, as it would soon give Mary a great deal more to think about than reasserting her claim to the throne of England.

  Others also knew of the plot. Randolph wrote to Dudley: “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.”

  One of the few left completely in the dark was Mary. Others were Bothwell and Huntly, the closest of friends since Bothwell had married Huntly’s sister. They were staying at Holyrood on the night of the assassination and found themselves caught in the middle of it.

  The plot was planned for Saturday, March 9. The previous evening, Randolph and Bedford wrote to Cecil and Dudley from Berwick to confirm that Morton was already in position and Argyll would soon be there. Moray and the exiled lords would arrive at Berwick next day from Newcastle, and would be in Edinburgh on Sunday morning. The murder of “him whom you know” would have been carried out by the time they rode through the main gates at Holyrood.

  The night of March 9 was to be one of the longest and most terrifying of Mary’s life. And this was to be only the first of a kaleidoscopic sequence of murderous events in her country.

  16

  Assassination One

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK on the fatal Saturday evening, Darnley led Lord Ruthven and an accomplice through his private apartments in the James V Tower at the palace of Holyroodhouse. Partly feeling their way in the darkness, each man with only a candle to see by, they climbed a secret stairway within the walls. Through a door concealed in the paneling, they entered Mary’s bedroom on the floor above. Leading off the bedroom was a smaller adjoining chamber, or supper room, about twelve by nine feet, where Mary was eating with a group of friends, including Rizzio.

  Beyond the bedroom and through a door on the left was a larger room, the queen’s outer, or presence, chamber. At the far end of the outer room, a locked door opened onto the main staircase, which led down to the ground-floor lobby. Morton and the rest of the conspirators, around eighty in all, came up the main staircase to the door of the outer chamber, where they waited until it was unlocked from the inside by Ruthven’s man, who had passed through Mary’s bedroom.

  Darnley was the first to appear. He entered the supper room and spoke to Mary. She was surprised to see him, but not unduly perturbed. He offered her soothing words and put his hand on her waist. This was to give Ruthven—an ungainly man suffering from liver and kidney failure, from which he would die only a few weeks later—time to reach the supper room, and for his accomplice to unlock the door. The delay must have been at least five minutes, because Ruthven clanked up the stairs in heavy armor and yet could barely walk (as he said himself) twice the length of his own chamber.

  Ruthven finally staggered into the supper room looking ghastly. “It would please Your Majesty,” he spluttered, “to let yonder man Davie come forth of your presence.” Mary kept her wits and turned to Darnley. “What do you know about this?” she demanded. Darnley lamely professed ignorance.

  Mary turned to Ruthven. “What is his offense?” She was thinking on her feet, instantly guessing why Darnley and Ruthven had burst in, but equally aware that Darnley would be irresolute and therefore potentially manipulable.

  Ruthven said that Rizzio had done great offense to Mary, to the king, to the nobility and the country. “And how?” she asked.

  “If it please Your Majesty,” said Ruthven, “he hath offended your honor, which I dare not be so bold to speak of. As to the king your husband’s honor, he hath hindered him of the crown matrimonial, which Your Grace promised him . . . And as to the nobility, he hath caused Your Majesty to banish a great part of them, and to forfeit them at this present Parliament.”

  “Leave our presence under pain of treason,” ordered Mary. “If he hath offended in any sort, we shall exhibit the said David before the lords of Parliament to be punished.”

  Ruthven ignored her. Turning to Darnley, he said, “Sir, take the queen your sovereign and wife to you.” When Mary rose in anger, Rizzio hid behind her back, clutching the pleats of her skirt. Mary’s guests and chamber servants tried to grab Ruthven, who lurched forward and drew his dagger. There was a scuffle during which Morton and
his company charged into the room. In the commotion, the dining table and all its contents were overturned, and only the quick thinking of the estranged wife of the Earl of Argyll, Mary’s half-sister and one of the guests, avoided a disaster when one of the candelabra fell to the floor next to the tapestries on the adjacent wall: a blaze would have started had she not promptly snatched it up.

  Ruthven and another conspirator struck at Rizzio with their daggers behind Mary’s back. She later said that the blows had been so close to her, “she felt the coldness of the iron.” Darnley was distraught. It is sometimes alleged that one of the plot’s aims, if not to assassinate Mary, was at least to trigger a fatal miscarriage, as she was six months pregnant. This is implausible, because if anything had happened to Mary, Darnley’s plan would fail. He had not yet secured the crown matrimonial and was entitled to claim it only as long as he was married to Mary. If she was killed, his status as king consort would die with her. The throne would descend to the heir apparent, the exiled Duke of Châtelherault, the sworn rival of Lennox and Darnley. Only if the Rizzio plot had taken place after Darnley had been crowned, or after Mary’s child was born, would her death have made sense. Darnley could then have remained as king or been appointed governor, and so maintained his position. Otherwise, he and his father would not have survived for more than six months. The factions would have turned against them, murdering them or driving them into exile.

  Ruthven grabbed Mary and gave her to Darnley, telling her not to be afraid. “All that is done,” he tried vainly to reassure her, “is the king’s own deed and action.” Rizzio, cowering in an alcove, was then hauled from the supper room, watched by as many of Morton’s men as could fit into the small space, some of whom carried guns. One man pointed a cocked pistol at Mary to prevent her interposing herself between the hapless Rizzio and his captors while he was dragged out. Ruthven shouted an order to carry Rizzio down to Darnley’s apartments by the secret stairs, but his voice was drowned in the melee. The crush was intense. Rizzio was propelled in to the outer chamber, where the rest of the plotters were waiting. They surged forward and stabbed him in a frenzy, just short of the door beside the main staircase. Darnley refused to join in the butchery, so one of the conspirators seized his dagger and used it to deliver the final blow. Darnley’s dagger was left in the corpse, to signify his connivance in the plot.

  Mary, meanwhile, was paralyzed by fear. She really believed she would be killed too. We have her own account, sent to Paris. The assassins, she said, burst in, grabbed Rizzio and “most cruelly took him forth of our cabinet, and at the entry of our chamber gave him fifty-six strokes with whiniards [daggers] and swords.”

  When Rizzio was dead, the assassins fled and Morton went downstairs to seal the gates and doors of the palace. Guards were posted outside certain rooms, and Mary’s black box containing her ciphers and secret correspondence was retrieved from Rizzio’s room and returned to her.

  Where Mary’s own account differs from the rest is in the later plans of the conspirators. She was convinced that the plot was meant to have two stages: first Rizzio’s assassination, then a palace coup in which Bothwell, Huntly and the Earl of Atholl, the leaders of her forces during the Chase-about Raid, would be killed. Sir James Balfour, Darnley’s erstwhile protégé, was also said to be on the death list. He was to be “hanged in cords” to stop him from exposing the true extent of Darnley’s treachery.

  Bothwell and Huntly were lodging elsewhere in the palace. They heard the uproar in the James V Tower, guessed that their lives might be in danger and escaped out a back window by climbing down a rope. Atholl and Balfour also managed to slip away or talk their way out of trouble.

  Back in the supper room, Mary was given a lecture. Ruthven told her exactly what he and his supporters thought of her. According to Mary’s version, he said they “were highly offended with our proceedings and tyranny, which was not to them tolerable; how we were abused by the said David . . . in taking his counsel for the maintenance of the ancient [Catholic] religion, debarring of the lords which were fugitive, and entertaining of amity with foreign [Catholic] princes and nations with whom we were confederate; putting also upon [the Privy] Council the Lords Bothwell and Huntly.”

  Ruthven’s account of the speech is slightly different. In his narrative, the main charge was that Mary had ruled “contrary to the advice of your nobility and counsel, and especially against those noblemen who were banished.” To this Mary retorted with justified sarcasm that Ruthven had himself been one of her privy councilors since the overthrow of the elder Earl of Huntly three years before!

  Whichever account is correct, Mary was harangued, and her own summary proves that she understood the plotters’ agenda and what she was up against. She burst into tears, but refused to be dealt with in this manner. Turning to Darnley, she 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?”

  Darnley was consumed by jealousy. He indignantly assumed that he had been made a cuckold and so turned into an object of scorn. He complained that Mary had not “entertained” him since Rizzio came into her favor. Whereas before their marriage she used to visit him in his apartments, now she played cards with Rizzio until one or two in the morning. “And this is all the entertainment that I have had of you this long time.” Darnley became increasingly explicit. He had been denied sex by his wife. On the occasions he had come to visit her, “she either would not or made herself sick.” He had noticed the change last Christmas, and he wanted to know why.

  Mary fought back her tears. “It is not,” she said, “a gentlewoman’s duty to come to her husband’s chamber, but rather the husband to come to the wife’s.” Royal protocol required the husband to initiate all sexual advances, which is why, in the palaces of the sixteenth century, a private passage linked the king’s bedroom to the queen’s which was meant for the king’s use and rarely, if ever, hers. According to the courtly handbooks, a queen’s duty was to produce children and otherwise be “chaste, loyal and obedient.”

  Maitland had done his work well. Darnley was beset by his belief that Rizzio was Mary’s lover. He also harbored suspicions that Mary found him sexually inadequate. His ego was bruised. “Am I failed in any sort?” “What disdain have you of me?” “What offenses have I done you . . . seeing I am willing to do all things that becometh a good husband?”

  Now Darnley’s vicious streak came to the fore. He was stung by the reference to his social inferiority. “Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet am I your husband and your head, and you promised me obedience at the day of our marriage and that I should be participant and equal with you in all things.”

  Mary would never be told by anyone except a reigning monarch that she was someone’s equal, let alone inferior. “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 like well until I have caused you to have as sorrowful a heart as I have at this present.”

  Ruthven, a witness to this battle of words, interposed. His illness was so far advanced, his armor so heavy, he was desperate for a drink and a seat. He brought a note of almost grotesque comedy to the scene. Asking Mary’s permission, he “called for a drink for God’s sake!”

  He was served a cup of wine, which he downed in a single gulp. Mary looked at him in revulsion. “If I or my child die,” she threatened, “you will have the blame thereof.”

  Ruthven began to answer, but a messenger knocked at the door. Bothwell, Huntly and Atholl had escaped. Ruthven and Darnley departed, leaving Mary to pace up and down in her bedroom for several hours. Barely able to take in what had happened, she was further dismayed that Morton had stationed a sentry at the entrance to her outer chamber and that she was denied the comfort of her four Maries and domestic staff.

  Darnley at last returned to supervise the removal of Rizzio’s corp
se. It was dragged through the door of the outer chamber and unceremoni ously hurled down the main staircase. From there, it was carried to the porter’s lodge at the palace entrance, where it was stripped by the porter’s servant and Darnley’s dagger removed.

  For the whole of that long night Mary did not sleep. When Darnley returned at eight o’clock the next morning, she vented her rage on him in a quarrel that lasted two hours. Darnley then left in a fury. Before allowing him to depart, however, Mary persuaded him to let her gentlewomen return.

  Morton and Ruthven were ruffled by this news. They knew that Mary could be a skillful operator and an unflinching adversary. She would not wait to be carried along by events, but would seek to dominate them. She could act naively and impulsively, but in a crisis would always try to hold the initiative. She had kept her head at the start of Moray’s revolt. Her technique, then as now, was to appeal to men such as Bothwell and Huntly, on whose loyalty she knew she could rely. And in her present predicament, the way to contact them was through her gentlewomen.

  Mary frantically scribbled her instructions. She then sent her ladies away to turn them into letters for her loyal supporters. She also had a letter sent to Argyll, who despite his aid for Moray and his allies was someone she still largely trusted. Whatever his religious views, he was a royalist and anti-republican, who later opposed Mary’s forced abdication and was prepared to fight as her lieutenant. His catchphrase was “God first and then our prince in God, under God and by God’s laws.” The repudiation of an anointed queen, not to mention regicide, was something he found alien and abhorrent. Whatever her alleged offenses, Argyll held Mary to be a legitimate ruler, and for this reason she knew she could depend on him now.