The True Life of Mary Stuart: Queen of Scots

by John Guy

  Her plan shaped in her mind, Mary turned next to Darnley. She decided to stage a piece of theater for his benefit. When in the afternoon he returned, she pretended that she was about to miscarry. Morton and Ruthven had reimposed the ban on her gentlewomen. Mary was determined to get them back. So she played her part and the midwife was summoned. Mary had already primed this woman to confirm that she was about to go into labor. With his child’s life and therefore his own position at stake, Darnley rushed a message to Morton and Ruthven, who reluctantly withdrew the ban, and Mary’s ladies returned.

  But the lords were suspicious. They told Darnley to beware lest Mary change clothes with one of her Maries and flee, leaving her stand-in behind. Darnley took the point. The guard at the entrance to the outer chamber was redoubled. Orders were issued that no one would be allowed to leave the queen’s apartments who wore a muffler over her face or whose identity was suspect.

  By eight in the evening, Moray and the exiled lords, with the important exception of Argyll, had come back to Holyrood. Darnley welcomed them, after which they retired to supper at Morton’s house in the Canongate. When Mary learned of Moray’s return, she sent one of her ushers to bring her half-brother to see her. When he arrived, she received him with open arms. She embraced him, saying that if he would be content to be reconciled, she would gladly accede to his request. According to Sir James Melville, she also said that if he had been there the previous night, he would not have allowed her to be so roughly treated as she had been, a sentiment causing the duplicitous Moray to weep.

  The chief concern of the exiled lords of the Chase-about Raid, however, was their forfeitures. Darnley had to deal with this right away, as Parliament was due to meet in two days’ time. His first public act after Rizzio’s murder was to discharge Parliament. He ordered the heralds to proclaim at the Market Cross that everyone summoned to the new session should leave the town of Edinburgh within three hours under penalty of treason. When, therefore, Moray and the exiled lords duly appeared at the Tolbooth on the 12th “to hear and see the doom of forfeiture” against them, the building was almost deserted.

  Mary knew of Darnley’s proclamation. She believed it to be a bad mistake on his part, which played into her hands. She would split the lords in two, pardoning Moray and the exiles but striking against Morton, Ruthven and the Douglases. Morton’s role in the Rizzio plot was clear. She would deprive him of his post of chancellor, which she would give as a reward to Huntly. Maitland she could not quite pin down, but she meant to punish him. She had warned him when he had sought her favor in France, in the months before her return to Scotland, that she would hold him accountable as the “principal instrument” of any “practices” against her. She would give his lands to Bothwell, then leave him to stew in his own juice.

  That left just Darnley to account for. Mary knew him to be stupid, cowardly, vain, drunken, dissolute and narcissistic. He was also violent, vindictive and an inveterate liar. His plot could hardly have been clumsier. And yet it might still succeed if she did not act quickly.

  Mary was now twenty-three, still young but no longer on such a steep learning curve. She had been back in Scotland for over four years and was able to confront the challenge of controlling the noble factions. She had learned that the way to deal with the lords was to divide and rule. To do this now, she needed to keep the feckless and murderous Darnley in her power, turning him into a weapon against his former allies, who in return for his treachery would become his mortal enemies.

  Her next move was brilliantly attuned to Darnley’s primitive psychology. She waited until Moray had returned to his supper at Morton’s house. When she and Darnley were alone, Mary offered to have sex with him to prove that her affection for him had not changed as he had claimed. She said that he could come to her later in the evening, and she would sleep with him all night. She had a pretty good idea that he would be incapably drunk by bedtime. She meant to buy time so that she could find a way to deal with him and make her escape from Holyrood.

  Darnley accepted the offer. The assignation was fixed and he withdrew to his apartments to ready himself. He met Morton and Ruthven, to whom he boasted of his forthcoming tryst. This, he declared, was the way to handle women. The lords were skeptical. Darnley, they said, “grew effeminate again.” The fear of a reconciliation between Mary and her husband was the plotters’ nightmare, but as they still had Darnley’s bond consenting to Rizzio’s murder and bearing his signature, they were not yet unduly anxious. Darnley had persuaded them that he would conquer Mary, making victory and the crown matrimonial almost a certainty. Morton and Ruthven knew, however, that their lives would be in jeopardy if Mary held her ground.

  As Mary had predicted, Darnley failed to turn up for the assignation. It was something Randolph and Bedford could not understand. In their report to Cecil, they explained: “We know not how he foreslow himself, but [he] came not at her, and excused himself to his friends that he was so sleepy that he could not wake in due time.”

  Ruthven’s version was more or less the same. Ruthven said that he had waited in Darnley’s dressing room for so long, he finally went to bed himself. George Douglas, Morton’s cousin and a half-brother of Ruthven’s wife, then came to tell Ruthven that, despite repeated attempts to wake Darnley from his drunken stupor, he was too far gone to be roused.

  At dawn, Ruthven reproved him. “You did not keep your promise to the Queen’s Majesty to lie with her all that night.” Crestfallen, Darnley replied, “I was fallen on such a dead sleep, I could not be awakened.” Naturally he blamed someone else: his faithful bedchamber servant William Taylor.

  “But,” said Darnley, “I will take my nightgown and go up to the queen.” Ruthven, who despite the gravity of his illness still had a sense of humor, said, “I trust she shall serve you in the morning as you did her at night!”

  And so it was. Darnley climbed the secret stairway for the second time in three days to emerge at Mary’s bedside. She was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, so he was forced to sit and wait for an hour until she was ready to speak to him.

  “Why did you not come up yesternight?” she finally asked. Darnley said that he was so deeply asleep, he had not stirred before six o’clock. “Now,” he continued, “am I come, and offer myself to have lyen down by you.”

  But Mary said she felt too unwell to make love. She now wanted to get out of bed.

  Darnley did not argue. Instead, he changed the subject, asking when Mary would pardon the exiled lords. He also said that he expected a full pardon for everyone involved in the Rizzio plot. Mary beguiled him with soothing words. She was winning him over, and at eight o’clock he returned downstairs “very merrily.” He began to swagger, boasting to Morton and Ruthven that everything was in hand. They urged him not to underestimate Mary. She had been trained in France by her Guise uncles, both masters of political deception. “Trust me,” said Darnley. “Let me alone, and I will promise to bring all to a good end.”

  Later that morning, Darnley attended a secret meeting with Moray, Morton, Ruthven and the leaders of the Rizzio plot. The Faustian pact was sealed. Darnley would get Mary to grant full pardons to the lords, he would confirm the religious status quo, and they would offer him the crown matrimonial in the next session of Parliament. Darnley was utterly confident that he had pulled off a coup. But the lords wanted a guarantee. They knew Mary better than to think she would agree without a fight. They asked for written proof, signed by Mary, confirming her intention to grant their pardons.

  Darnley returned to Mary, who had carefully prepared her lines. She told him the facts of political life in Scotland. As soon as the lords had obtained their pardons and their forfeitures were dropped, they would ditch Darnley, who would never secure the crown matrimonial at their hands. Why should they give it to him when they had already gotten what they wanted? And when would he receive it? Had he not himself just discharged Parliament without setting a date for its recall?

  Mary had never been more independent or
self-reliant, the more so because, despite all the stress and anxiety, her health held up. If she really suffered from acute intermittent porphyria, it mercifully left her alone. True, she was pregnant and often felt sick, but her mind was as nimble as ever. She explained to Darnley how badly he would be treated if the exiled lords and his co-conspirators were allowed to get their way. Were they not all Protestants? If he failed to convert to Protestantism, he would be toppled. And yet if he did convert, he would be reviled by the very European rulers he had so recently been eagerly courting.

  Step by step, Mary persuaded Darnley to retreat. The way to rule Scotland, she said, was to rise above and then balance the rival factions, not to ally with any one of them “and so become enslaved.” “By this persuasion, he was induced to condescend [i.e., agree] to the purpose taken by us.” He agreed to escape that night with Mary to Dunbar, the nearest impregnable royal fortress and the home of Bothwell’s widowed sister. Already Mary had received replies from Bothwell and Huntly to the letters she had sent through her gentlewomen. They advised her to flee, over the walls of the palace if necessary by means of ropes and chairs,* and then ride through the night.

  The question was how to get past the guard at the entrance to Mary’s apartments. To this she also had the answer. She and Darnley should not disguise their intention to leave Holyrood, but should mislead the lords as to the date of their departure. They would be gone before the lords realized they had been duped.

  On cue, the midwife reappeared to inform Darnley that if Mary was not quickly allowed a change of air, she would miscarry. Her Maries and other gentlewomen dutifully confirmed this. Darnley hastened downstairs to tell the lords and to seek permission for Mary to depart next day. Her French doctor then arrived to emphasize the urgency of the request. Mary, he confidently claimed, would miscarry if she did not leave Holyrood soon.

  The lords reluctantly agreed, provided Mary sign a paper confirming their pardons. Shortly after four o’clock, Moray, Morton and Ruthven went upstairs with Darnley to visit Mary. The lords waited until Darnley fetched her from her bedchamber. They all knelt and Morton made their petition, after which each spoke individually. Mary heard them out, then gave a gentle answer: “I was never bloodthirsty nor greedy upon your lands and goods since my coming into Scotland, nor will I be upon you.”

  Mary invited them to draw up whatever document they liked, and she would sign it. She then took Darnley in one hand and Moray in the other and walked about the room for an hour in conversation. Afterward, she returned to her bedchamber. She sent for Maitland, who arranged to remove the guards. It was also agreed that the lords would voluntarily leave Holyrood after supper that night. Even as they spoke, the lords were drafting their articles of pardon, and the document had only to be signed by Mary for the formalities to be completed.

  The guards disappeared, and at six o’clock the lords handed Darnley their articles. They agreed to leave Holyrood and withdraw to Morton’s house as soon as they were assured that Mary had actually signed.

  Darnley, now won back to Mary’s side, saw no reason to hurry. He first ate a leisurely supper, and by the time Archibald Douglas, Morton’s cousin, returned to collect the signed articles, it was already late. Darnley lied that he had shown the document to Mary, who had pronounced it “very good.” But she was feeling sick, he said, and not up to dealing with paperwork. She was turning in early and would sign the articles next morning.

  Shortly after midnight, when all was quiet, Mary and Darnley slipped out of Holyroodhouse through a subterranean passage leading off a wine cellar, where they met half a dozen of her most trusted servants, who had fetched her horses from the stables. Without delay they rode hard through the night to Dunbar, a twenty-five-mile journey that took them five hours, which the pregnant Mary found grueling. Several times on the way she had to dismount and vomit.

  At dawn, the lords were appalled to find Mary had flown the coop. By then it was no secret where she had gone. They dispatched a messenger to Dunbar to ask her to fulfill her pledge by signing their articles of pardon. But Mary made no immediate reply. She kept the messenger waiting for three days, by which time the exiled Earls of Glencairn and Rothes had separately made their peace with her and obtained their pardons. This opened the floodgates: Argyll had been joined by many of the exiled lords of the Chase-about Raid at Linlithgow, where they debated the terms on which they would settle with Mary and decided to start negotiations. Only Moray held back, hedging his bets and waiting for something to happen.

  As the lords’ party began to collapse, so Mary’s increased. Bothwell and Huntly had already shaped the nucleus of an army. This increased when Mary ordered the landowners of the Lothians and the adjoining counties to muster their troops in her defense at Haddington and Musselburgh.

  Early on the morning of Sunday, March 17, Moray left Edinburgh to confer with Argyll and his allies at Linlithgow. Mary—with Darnley safely in tow—left Dunbar the same day, entering Edinburgh with her forces on the 18th. She had between three and five thousand troops, more than enough to occupy the town. Rather than return to Holyrood, in case any of the lords were still there, she lodged in a house in the High Street, later moving to a larger one closer to Edinburgh Castle. A fortnight later, after suitable improvements had been made and her clothes and personal effects delivered, she moved into the castle itself, where she could finally feel secure and await the birth of her baby.

  The day after Mary returned to Edinburgh, she sent Sir James Balfour to Linlithgow to offer terms to the rebels of the Chase-about Raid. They would be pardoned and their estates returned to them, provided they withdrew temporarily to their own houses and made no attempt to intercede for Darnley’s co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot.

  Argyll accepted on the spot, while Moray decided that it was not worth risking another revolt. Once they had received their pardons and waited for ten days, they were allowed to return to court. By the end of April, they were restored to the Privy Council and a grand ceremony of reconciliation was staged. Atholl, Bothwell and Huntly on the one side, and Moray, Argyll and Glencairn on the other, stood before Mary and joined hands. Maitland was excluded from this ceremony. He was still firmly under a cloud, living at Dunkeld under house arrest.

  Bothwell gained most from his role in organizing Mary’s escape. For his unflinching loyalty, she rewarded him with the captaincy of Dunbar, granting him both the castle and its surrounding estates in succession to her late half-brother, Lord John of Coldingham.

  Morton and the remaining conspirators lost the most from the Rizzio plot. All eighty of them were denounced as rebels and their goods forfeited to the crown. Their houses were stripped bare, and Morton was forced to surrender Tantallon Castle, his fortress on the cliffs at the entrance to the Firth of Forth.

  Mary took great satisfaction at his fall. She intended to be unremitting to the Douglases. She saw Morton as the principal villain after Darnley, not least because it was Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, a noted Douglas client, who had leveled the pistol at her as Rizzio was dragged to his death.

  Morton, Ruthven, Ker and the rest fled to England. Morton and Ruthven wrote a groveling letter to Cecil, protesting the justice of their cause and assuring him that they had only acted on Darnley’s orders and for the “preservation of the state and the Protestant religion.”

  But their position was undercut. A week earlier, Darnley shamelessly denied his role in the Rizzio plot “upon his honor, fidelity and the word of a prince.” He had not, he said, even known of the conspiracy, “whereof he is slanderously and sakelessly traduced.” He confessed to exceeding his powers by in viting the exiled lords of the Chase-about Raid to return home without Mary’s knowledge, but that was the full extent of his crime.

  By issuing this barefaced denial, Darnley dug his own grave. The first act of revenge by the Rizzio plotters was to post to Mary the bond he had signed that committed him to the assassination of those “who abused the kindness of the queen,” and especially “one stranger
Italian called David.” The bond had even stated that the deed might “chance to be done” in Mary’s private apartments or elsewhere in Holyrood.

  If this were not enough, Moray showed his sister the bond that the exiled lords signed at Newcastle, which promised Darnley the crown matrimonial without her prior consent. Mary now had all the proof she needed of her husband’s treachery, but the motive of those who denounced Darnley was to publicize their own blood feud with him, not to admit their guilt.

  Mary had shown extraordinary daring and presence of mind during the Rizzio plot. At the height of the crisis she had kept her nerve. Her enemies were the first to concede that she had shown amazing coolness.

  If she was a winner, the main losers were Darnley, whom she forever afterward despised, and the Douglases, who were in dire straits. Elizabeth was especially furious when the Douglases fled across the border. Their plot had failed, and she disowned them. She advised Morton to find “some place out of our realm” to hide until Mary’s wrath had eased or he was acquitted in a legal trial. He duly left for the Netherlands. But Mary’s letters had preceded him. He was denied entry and slipped back into England within a month. He was then ordered to “convey himself to some secret place, or else to leave the kingdom.”

  As to Lord Ruthven, he died at Newcastle six weeks after he was outlawed. On his deathbed, he exclaimed “that he saw Paradise opened, and a great company of angels coming to take him.” As his days had been numbered before the plot, his personal sacrifice was limited, but his family lost all their property when he was outlawed.

  By the end of April 1566, Mary was back in control. The theme of her policy would be reconciliation. But the effect of the Rizzio plot would prove to be corrosive. Darnley’s instability and folly had shown that with friends like him, no one lacked for enemies. Lennox was furious with his son, who had brought all his plans of the past twenty years to the verge of catastrophe.