CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Some of our subjects and council by their proceedings have declared manifestly what men they are … slain our most special servant in our own presence and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably.’
Mary Queen of Scots to Queen Elizabeth of England,
15th March 1566
In January 1566 Mary Queen of Scots was in her own estimation riding high, with her courage unimpaired and her resolution only strengthened by the recent ordeal through which she had passed with such success; the future, bringing with it the prospect of the birth of an heir, looked bright to a woman whose nature combined spirit and optimism with tenderness. But there was no denying that the opposition which was building up against her both within and without Scotland had an ugly aspect to it: if she had appreciated its real extent, even Mary in her most buoyant mood might have experienced some unquiet moments while she speculated just how and when such thunder clouds would break into the fury of the storm. First of all there were set steadily against her those Protestant lords temporarily in exile, such as Moray; their primary desire was to return to Scotland, but their hostility to Mary was given a new edge when she threatened, in addition to banishment, to attaint them and declare their properties forfeited at the forthcoming session of Parliament, to be held in the spring.
Then there were the Kirk and Knox who feared to see Mary take advantage of her new strength since the defeat of Moray to advance the claims of the Catholic Church; this they also suspected she might try to accomplish at the coming parliamentary session. As it happens, the contemporary rumours that Mary was about to join a Catholic League with other foreign Catholic powers have been shown to be groundless – no record having been found of such a League, let alone Mary’s intended participation in it* – and what plans if any Mary had for helping the Catholics at the forthcoming Parliament will never be known. At most she would probably have asked for toleration of the Mass for Scottish Catholics, rather than the rabid attacks to which the Mass and priests were subjected when detected; Mary was certainly modern enough in thought to wonder why the Catholics should not enjoy the free practice of their own religion, which she had so unquestioningly granted to the Protestants from the first moment of her arrival in Scotland. But of course Knox, like all those who have accomplished a revolution, was hysterically fearful to see its effects undone, and any ideas of mutual tolerance would have fallen on very deaf ears indeed. In January an emissary came from the new Pope Pius V, with an extremely friendly if somewhat over optimistic message for the queen on the subject of the recent revolt: ‘Most dear daughter – We have heard with the utmost joy that you and His Highness, your husband, have lately given a brilliant proof of your zeal by restoring the due worship of God throughout your whole realm. Truly, dearest daughter, you understand the duties of devout kings and queens …’ The Pope went on to encourage her to weed out completely ‘the thorns and tares of heretical depravity …’,1 and promised all the help possible in this worthwhile task. Although Pius V seemed to have but little idea of the true state of affairs in Scotland, Mary was quite acute enough to send her own emissary, the bishop of Dunblane, for the second time to ask for a papal subsidy – since the Pope’s mention of ‘all the kind offices that paternal love can suggest’ certainly spelled financial aid to Mary, always extremely conscious of this problem.
Added to these two groups were those other Protestant nobles within the confines of Scotland, such as Morton and Maitland, who hated to see Mary’s other ‘base-born’ advisers advanced to the detriment of their own position. It will be seen that Riccio, as chief representative of this despised and hated class, was the natural scapegoat for all the sections of the community opposed to the queen. He was also of course the obvious suspect on which Darnley could pour his rage and jealousy against his wife – if such a jealousy could be focused on the hunched figure of the little Italian. It was now the work of Mary’s opponents at court to incite the foolish bombastic Darnley into such a state of frenzy that he might be persuaded to join in their own more serious enterprises. In order to do so it was necessary to present to Darnley that in the opinion of many Scottish nobles he, not Mary, would make the most suitable ruler of Scotland. This was the notion which was now ‘buzzed’ in Darnley’s excitable brain.
The extreme cynicism of such behaviour should not be overlooked – the Scottish nobles, including Moray, were now proposing a scheme which involved the coronation of Darnley, the very man against whose elevation they had rebelled in August. Darnley was still nominally a Catholic, and since Christmas 1565, when he ostentatiously went to Mass to score a point over his wife, he had been flaunting his faith in the face of his compatriots for some reason of his own. On the Feast of the Purification, he processed through the streets of Edinburgh with lighted tapers, a notably Catholic gesture; on another occasion he asked Lords Fleming, Livingston and Lindsay whether they would be content to go to Mass with him ‘which they refusing, he gave them all evil words’.2 Bedford reported that Darnley would have liked to shut up the noblemen in their chambers and force them to go to Mass. Yet this Catholicism was apparently of no account to the Protestant Lords Moray, Ochiltree, Boyd and Rothes now that their persons and properties were threatened by the oncoming session of Parliament: Darnley’s qualities and religion, so distasteful in July that he could not be tolerated as a royal consort, were in February apparently sufficiently worthy to make a candidate for supreme power, with the backing of the Protestant lords.
It was now plainly suggested to Darnley that his wife was Riccio’s mistress, and the waning of his own power was due to the machinations of the Italian. It was not difficult to arouse the jealousy of a man of Darnley’s vain temperament, and Darnley’s cousin Morton seems to have done much of the trouble-making. Mary, conscious of her innocence, added fuel to the flames by openly finding pleasure in Riccio’s counsels and his company. Could there have been any truth in the story? Neither Riccio’s age, height nor his ugliness would have been any certain bar against a woman finding him desirable, since attraction follows its own rules. It is true that Mary Stuart herself did not appear to find men of this sort appealing – Darnley, young, elegantly beautiful and outwardly romantic, was the type she apparently admired; all we know of her relations with Riccio, including her behaviour at his death, seems to fit into the pattern of ruler and confidant, rather than mistress and lover. But what really militates against the possibility of Mary having had a love affair with David Riccio is the timing of it. Later the reproach was to be flung in the face of James VI that he was actually ‘Davy’s son’.* In January Randolph wrote dolefully to Leicester. ‘Woe is me for you, when Davy’s son shall be a King of England’,3 but as this was only a few weeks before he was asked to leave Scotland by Mary, and as ever since her marriage to Darnley his reports on her behaviour had been openly laced with spite, too much attention should not be paid to the scandalous prophecy. In order for the accusation to be true the queen would have to have been indulging in a secret love affair with Riccio throughout that same summer in which she was so obviously infatuated with Darnley; she would then have had to conceive a child by Riccio less than two months after her marriage to Darnley, when to outward observers she was still deeply in love with her husband. It seems that the worst that Mary can be accused of, with Riccio, as with Châtelard, is a certain lack of prudence which was very much part of her character, rather than some more positive indiscretion.
The character of Darnley was like a tinderbox, on which it was all too easy for the disaffected nobles to strike a flame, using Riccio as a flint. Early in 1566 the Order of St Michel was brought by a French envoy M. Rambouillet to Edinburgh, to bestow upon Darnley on behalf of the king of France. When asked what arms should be placed upon Darnley’s shield, Mary coldly ‘bade them give him his due’,4 as Knox’s narrative has it: the fact that she did not specify the royal arms was a further unwelcome indication that she did not intend to bestow the crown matrimonial upon Darnley in the coming Parliament. Darnley retaliated with a series of debauched and roistering parties, which caused considerable scandal in Edinburgh; in the course of them, he made several of Rambouillet’s suite hopelessly drunk. Quite apart from the intoxication he spread about him, Darnley’s own drunkenness was beginning to constitute a public problem. At the home of an Edinburgh merchant, he became so wild in Mary’s presence that she tried to halt his drinking, at which he insulted her, and she left the house in floods of tears. Nor was his drunkenness his only weakness: he searched for his pleasures in many different corners of human experience. On the one hand there were rumours of love affairs with court ladies; on the other, in a letter to Cecil in February, Sir William Drury hinted at something so vicious which had taken place at a festivity at Inch-Keith, too disgraceful to be named in a letter, that Mary now slept apart from her husband.5
Despite the anxiety caused by Darnley’s behaviour, Mary persisted in her plan to hold a Parliament in March at which the Protestant lords who had rebelled would be attainted and their properties forfeited. She turned a deaf ear to any suggestion that they should be pardoned, with the exception of Châtelherault, who had been forgiven on condition he went into banishment for five years. Under these circumstances the two-pronged conspiracy to restore these lords and give Darnley the crown matrimonial went forward. On 9th February Maitland, who now clearly despaired of the pardoning of Moray, and feared for his whole Anglo-Scottish policy, wrote to Cecil that since the rebels were not to be readmitted, there was nothing for it but ‘to chop at the very root’.6 This sinister phrase seemed to hint at least at the possibility of removing Mary from her throne – and it might of course mean something more violent directed towards her actual life. On 13th February Randolph sent a communication to Leicester on the whole subject, which casts an even more lurid light on the secret intentions of the conspirators: ‘I know for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth Darnley and all his kin,’ he wrote. ‘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, with the consent of the King [Darnley], shall have his throat cut within these ten days. Many things grievouser and worse than these are brought to my ears, yes, of things intended against her own person.’7 Let us not forget, what was surely ever-present in the minds of Lennox and Darnley, that if Mary vanished from the scene, and her unborn child never saw the light of day, Darnley had an excellent chance of becoming king of Scotland in his own right. It was a propitious moment for the Lennox Stewarts, since the head of the Hamiltons was abroad in disgrace; this might prove the ideal opportunity for them to stigmatize the Hamilton claim to the throne as illegal once and for all.
A bond was now drawn up by those conspirators active in Scotland; these included Morton, George Douglas the Postulate, his illegitimate half-brother, Ruthven and Lindsay, both married to Douglas wives. The former Protestant rebel lords who signed included Ochiltree, Boyd, Glencairn, Argyll and Rothes, as well as Moray, who signed it at Newcastle on 2nd March. Maitland did not actually sign the bond, from whatever motives of caution or self-preservation, although Randolph listed his name among the conspirators. In this bond, the declared intentions were to be the acquisition of the crown matrimonial for Darnley, and the upholding of the Protestant religion, and the return of the exiles. The lords were careful to obtain Darnley’s signature, in order that he should be as thoroughly implicated as themselves; but in all the clauses of the bond there was no mention of any sort of violence or of David Riccio – only Item Five had a faintly menacing ring: ‘So shall they not spare life or limb in setting forward all that may bend to the advancement of his [Darnley’s] honour.’8 One aspect of the conspiracy which seemed to rob it still further of any possible content of idealism was the fact that it was known about in London beforehand. In February Randolph’s known agent had been caughtflagrante supplying money to the rebels; Mary had sent for Randolph, furiously upbraided him, and then ordered him to leave Scotland; from Berwick, however, he still remained thoroughly in touch with the seething atmosphere of Edinburgh. On 25th February he was able to write a full report of the conspiracy and its known adherents to London; Elizabeth reacted characteristically to a situation which she saw was about to put Mary at a new disadvantage: on 3rd March she wrote her a threatening letter, criticizing Mary’s treatment of both Moray and Randolph, although one was an ambassador caught bribing rebels, and another a Scottish subject who had rebelled against his queen.9 Elizabeth also sent £1000 to Moray at Newcastle.
Yet Mary herself seemed to have no inkling of what was about to happen – or else she had gained sufficient self-confidence in the past year to believe that she would weather the storm. The spreading panoply of court life continued to flower on majestically, ignorant of the fact that its roots were threatened. On 24th February the marriage of Bothwell and Lady Jean Gordon, sister to Huntly, was celebrated with considerable pomp. The significance of the match was the dynastic union of two of Mary’s firmest adherents. In token of her approval, Mary herself supplied the eleven ells of cloth of silver for Lady Jean’s wedding-dress, although Bothwell firmly insisted on the marriage taking place according to the Protestant rite. Love does not seem to have played much part in the match: Lady Jean had a cool detached character, warmed by a masculine intelligence – ‘a great understanding above the capacity of her sex’ as her son later put it.10 Her long clever face with its firm nose and rather bulbous eyes lacked beauty and softness: she was hardly the type to appeal to Bothwell, judged from the standard of those women with whom he had been involved up to the present. She did, however, possess one definite attraction in her solid dowry, provided by her brother Huntly, and Lady Jean herself proved to have an excellent appreciation of the values of the property – later she managed to hold on to her lands through thick and thin despite Bothwell’s attainder. The real love of her life, the man for whom she reserved affections which Bothwell never touched, seems to have been Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne: two months after Lady Jean’s own marriage, he was wedded to the beautiful Mary Beaton.*
In the meantime the behaviour of Riccio, like that of Darnley, played into the hands of the conspirators. Froude has given the most sympathetic interpretation of Darnley’s fatal incursion into Scottish politics – he was ‘like a child who has drifted from the shore in a tiny pleasure boat, his sails puffed out with vanity …’.11 But if Darnley was a child, Riccio was like the bullfrog in Aesop’s fable, inflated by his own arrogance. The astrologer Damiot tried to warn him of the dangers of his situation, and told him to ‘Beware of the Bastard’; Riccio assumed this referred to Moray and replied confidently: ‘I will take good care that he never sets foot in Scotland again’ – forgetting that the description could apply to a number of other people in sixteenth-century Scotland. Damiot talked of his unpopularity, Riccio said grandly: ‘Parole, parole, nothing but words. The Scots will boast but rarely perform their brags.’ Mary took the same line. Melville tried to warn her also of what was going on, saying he had heard ‘dark speeches’, and that there were rumours current that they should hear some unpleasant news before Parliament was ended. Mary replied that something of the sort had also come to her own ears, but she had paid no attention since ‘our countrymen were well-wordy’.12
On Thursday 7th March Parliament assembled. Mary went personally to the tollbooth for the election of the Lords of the Articles, glittering in a silver head-dress. Bothwell bore the sceptre, Huntly the crown and Crawford the sword. Darnley pointedly did not accompany her, in token of his displeasure at not being granted the crown matrimonial. Parliament was put under considerable pressure by Mary to draw up a bill of attainder against Moray, and Tuesday 12th March was fixed as the date at which the bill was to be passed. The fixing of this date automatically induced the climax of the conspirators’ plans. On the evening of Saturday 9th March, the queen was holding a small supper party in her own apartments at the palace of Holyrood; advancing pregnancy and ill-health had made her increasingly disinclined to go about in Edinburgh, preferring the company of her intimates at home. Those present with her all fell into this cosy category – her half-brother Lord Robert Stewart, her half-sister and confidante Jean, countess of Argyll, her equerry Arthur Erskine, her page Anthony Standen, and of course her secretary and musician, David Riccio himself. Perhaps there was to be music later, or perhaps this was to be one of those evenings, which Darnley said he so much resented, when the queen and Riccio played at cards until one or two in the morning. At any rate, the atmosphere was innocuous and domestic rather than exciting. At the time of his death, Randolph reported that the dandyish Riccio was wearing ‘a night-gown of damask furred, with a satin doublet and a hose of russet velvet’.13 It used to be suggested by critics that the fact that Riccio was in his ‘night-gown’ proved an unlawful degree of intimacy with the queen, but in the sixteenth century the word ‘night-gown’ was used in its literal sense to denote informal evening dress, the sort that might be expected to be worn on this sort of occasion.*
The true story of the dramatic events which interrupted this supper party has to be pieced together from the many differing accounts of it. Two people among those present wrote their own eye-witness accounts of what happened, within a few weeks of the murder: Queen Mary wrote a letter to James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in Paris, on 2nd April giving her version of the affair, and Ruthven, one of the murderers, wrote an account of it with Bedford at the end of March for English consumption.14 Although both accounts must be expected to suffer from partiality, the queen to accuse and Ruthven to excuse, at least these letters represent fairly instantaneous reactions. Mary’s later account of it all, to be found in Nau’s Memorials of Mary Stuart,was told by her to her secretary when she was in captivity, long after the death of both Riccio and Darnley; although valuable for narrative detail, the motives it sometimes attributes to the participants must be regarded with reserve, since Mary’s emotion, recollected in tranquillity, has by no means decreased in fervour.* Of all other accounts it must be remembered that the writers concerned were not present (although Melville was in the precincts of Holyrood) and therefore dependent on secondhand information.
One of the most important aspects of the affair is the scene in which it was set. Mary’s apartments in Holyrood lay in the north-west corner of the palace, on the second floor; the rooms were four in number – a large presence chamber at the head of the main staircase, draped in black velvet, with the arms of Mary of Guise on the ceiling, a bed-chamber of considerable size lying directly off it, and off that again two very small rooms in each corner, not more than twelve foot square, one a type of dressing-room, the other a supper-room hung in crimson and green. Beneath these apartments, on the first floor of the palace, lay Darnley’s rooms, which were roughly equivalent to the queen’s. The two sets of apartments were connected by a narrow privy staircase which came out in the queen’s bedroom, close to the entrance to the supper-chamber. The intimacy of the occasion has already been stressed. But although in one sense the supper-room was totally cut off from the outside world, except for the privy staircase, in another sense it was not a very secure place to choose to perform a murder.* The heart of Mary’s apartment was indeed a curious place from which to choose to pluck one of her own servants, since there were the guards surrounding the queen’s person to be taken into account. How much simpler it would have been to kill a mere servant in some other less public place. After all Riccio went normally and unguardedly about his business in Holyrood. Earlier there had been some story that George Douglas had offered to Darnley to throw him over the side of the boat while they were fishing at Castle Douglas,15 but Darnley had jibbed at the idea; such a scheme, quick, secret and unprovable, would certainly have made more sense as regards the elimination of a mere servant. The question arises why the choice of the queen’s own rooms was deliberately made instead. Ruthven, in his narrative, attributed the choice of location to Darnley, who, he said, wanted to avenge the public insult to his honour by a public coup. But this time Ruthven was busy piling all the blame possible on Darnley. The king was after all a weak character, notoriously easy to sway. The fact that the murder was deliberately planned to take place in the presence of the queen when she was nearly six months pregnant points to some malevolent intentions towards her own person (as Randolph prophesied in February), as well as the elimination of a presumptuous servant.
Although it was Lent, meat was served at the queen’s supper party, since her condition permitted her to ignore the fast. As the supper was being served, to the great surprise of all those present, the figure of Darnley suddenly appeared up the privy staircase; although he was by now a comparative stranger to these domestic occasions, preferring to go his own way in pursuit of pleasure in the streets of Edinburgh, he was still welcomed as the king. But a few minutes later there was a far more astonishing apparition up the staircase – Patrick Lord Ruthven, with a steel cap on, and with his armour showing through his gown, burning-eyed and pale from the illness of which he was generally thought to be dying on his sick-bed in a house close to Holyrood. So amazing was his emergence at the queen’s supper party that the first reaction of those present was that he was actually delirious, and had somehow felt himself pursued, in his fever, by the spectre of one of his victims. Ruthven – who did in fact die three months after these events took place – was a highly unsavoury character, popularly supposed to be a warlock or male witch, or at any rate in Knox’s phrase to ‘use enchantment’. However, his first words left the queen in no doubt as to what had brought this death’s head to her feast. ‘Let it please your Majesty,’ said Ruthven, ‘that yonder man David come forth of your privy-chamber where he hath been overlong.’ Mary replied with astonishment that Riccio was there at her own royal wish, and asked Ruthven whether he had taken leave of his senses. To this Ruthven merely answered that Riccio had offended against the queen’s honour. On hearing these words, the queen turned quickly and angrily to her husband, realizing the Judas-like quality of his visit. She asked him if this was his doing. Darnley gave an embarrassed reply. Ruthven, by his own account, launched into a long and rambling denunciation of Mary’s relations with Riccio, reproaching her for her favour to him, and for her banishment of the Protestant lords. Riccio had shrunk back into the large window at the end of the little room, but when Ruthven made a lunge towards him Mary’s attendants, who seem to have been stunned into inaction, at last made some sort of protest. ‘Lay not hands on me, for I will not be handled,’ cried Ruthven, with his hand on his dagger: this was the signal for his followers, Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, Patrick Bellenden, George Douglas, Thomas Scott and Henry Yair, to rush into the room, also from the privy staircase. In the ensuing confusion the table was knocked over and Lady Argyll was just able to save the last candle from being extinguished by snatching it up as it fell (although presumably the flickering light from the large fireplace still filled the little room). While Riccio clung to the queen’s skirts, Ker and Bellenden produced pistols, and others wielded daggers. Finally the fingers of the little Italian were wrenched out of the queen’s skirts, and he was dragged, screaming and kicking, out of the supper-room, across the bedroom through the presence-chamber to the head of the stairs. His pathetic voice could be heard calling as he went: ‘Justizia, justizia! Sauvez ma vie, madame, sauvez ma vie!’16
Here he was done to death by dagger-wounds variously estimated at between fifty-three and sixty: a savage butchery for a small body. Mary was convinced later that the first blow had been struck over her shoulder: at all events, the first knife-wound was made by George Douglas the Postulate, Morton’s illegitimate brother, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Damiot concerning the Bastard; he carefully used Darnley’s own dagger for the bloody deed in order to involve him still further in the crime. Riccio’s serrated and bleeding corpse was now dragged down the winding main staircase. Here as it lay on a chest it was stripped of its belongings by a porter, who moralized as he did so in truly Shakespearian fashion: ‘This was his destiny,’ he soliloquized, ‘for upon this chest was his first bed when he came to this place, and there he lieth a very niggard and misknown knave.’ By now such commotion, such screams and cries had alerted the rest of the palace. Mary’s own domestics came rushing to her assistance from the outside, with their own weapons of sticks and staves, without knowing exactly what peril threatened her. At the same time, up the wider outside staircase could be heard cries of ‘A Douglas, a Douglas’ as the rest of the clan rushed to support the inner conspirators. Ruthven later blamed the ensuing commotion for the death of Riccio, saying that the assassins feared he would otherwise be rescued; he stated that their original intention had been to bring him before Parliament. But the excuse seems thin, in view of the violent nature of the attack. Mary herself, by her own account, originally offered in the supper-room to let Riccio appear in Parliament, if he had done wrong, yet Ruthven dismissed the notion as worthless.
For the rest of her life, Mary Stuart was to believe that her own life also had been threatened in the course of the tumult in the supper-room and that Darnley, her own husband, had intended to compass her own destruction, and that of her unborn child. It is indeed impossible to understand her later attitude to Darnley without taking into account this steadfast inner conviction on the queen’s part. After the birth of James, she burst out angrily to him: ‘I have forgiven, but will never forget! What if Fawdonside’s pistol had shot, what would become of him and me both? Or what estate would you have been in? God only knows, but we may suspect.’17 In her account of events, she laid great stress on the violence which had been shown to her personally. This violence she laid at the door of Darnley, believing that she and her child had been about to be sacrificed at the altar of his ambition to become king of Scotland. In her mind she obviously believed that she had only escaped this fate through her own resolution and because her will was stronger than Darnley’s – a conviction backed up by the fact that she was now to escape entirely through her own courage and daring. It was only too natural for a woman six months pregnant, having undergone such a traumatic experience of a pistol pointed at her stomach, to be imbued with these feelings. Even for us, the desperate circumstances of the murder make it hard to believe that something violent if unspecific was not meditated against her – perhaps it was hoped that the shock of the murder would cause her to miscarry and die (the death of the mother was then the end of most late miscarriages).
But at the time the quality of Mary Stuart’s spirit was proof even against such an appalling experience, despite her condition. Far from shrinking from the danger, she turned furiously on Darnley, now left with her in the supper-chamber, and upbraided him. Then Ruthven returned from the carnage and, sinking on to a chair, called for wine to revive him; although the queen herself was still standing she still did not lose her poise and defiance. Gazing at the wine, she inquired acidly: ‘Is this your sickness, Lord Ruthven?’ In the course of a three-cornered wrangle between herself, Ruthven and Darnley, in which Ruthven called in question once more her behaviour as a wife, the queen refused to be cowed in any way; if one report is to be believed, she even told Ruthven that she had ‘that within in her belly’ which would one day be revenged upon him.*18 In the course of the conversation, she had to deal with still further threats to her person: the disturbance at Holyrood had alerted the people of Edinburgh and the alarm bell of the city had been sounded. In order to quiet the townspeople, Darnley went to the window and spoke to them reassuringly in his familiar voice. When Mary strained to make her own voice heard, Lindsay brutally threatened to ‘cut her in collops’ if she made another move in the direction of the window. Finally Ruthven left and Darnley too departed. Mary sent one of her ladies for news of Riccio’s fate. When she was told that he was dead, she wept for a moment; but a moment later drying her tears, observed calmly: ‘No more tears now; I will think upon revenge.’19 She also retained her composure sufficiently to send a lady to Riccio’s room to recover a black coffer, with her ciphers and writings in it.
As Ruthven informed those left in Holyrood that the former Protestant rebels were now on their way back to Edinburgh, Mary was left to spend the night alone, without any sort of medical attention or a midwife, which might have been thought necessary, and only old Lady Huntly, widow of the 4th earl, to keep her company. So far, the conspirators seemed to be in complete outward command of the situation, except for the annoying fact that of their other intended victims, Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by jumping out of the back windows of the palace, past the lion pit. It had originally been projected to slay these two and Lords Livingston and Fleming as well as Riccio, and hang Sir James Balfour as being all adherents of the queen. Now they contented themselves merely with the death of a Dominican priest, Father Adam Black. This very night, when the conspirators’ triumph seemed certain, was crucial in the history of Mary Stuart. At some point in the course of it she took the bold decision to choke down her feelings of revulsion for Darnley and win him over on to her side, reasoning that the character of Darnley might now be the weakness of the conspirators’ cause, as it had once been the weakness of her own. Since she had survived the slaughter, it will never be known exactly what plans the lords now had for the queen. She herself, presumably getting the news from Darnley, afterwards said in her letter – and amplified it to Nau20 – that they intended to hold her in prison in Stirling until she gave birth to her child, and afterwards indefinitely; ‘in the meantime the king could manage the affairs of state with the nobles’. Lord Lindsay was supposed to have remarked callously that she would find plenty of pastime there at Stirling in nursing her baby and singing it to sleep, shooting with her bow in the garden, and doing her fancy work. Although Lord Lindsay added that he happened to know that such things delighted her much, it was a tame prospect for one who had been queen of Scotland all her life, and thoroughly enjoyed the business of ruling.
Therefore when at daybreak the next morning, Sunday, Darnley went once more to her chamber, he found his wife calm rather than tearful, resolute rather than reproachful. Darnley himself seems to have been comparatively hysterical as a result of Riccio’s death, and the queen told Nau that he pleaded with her with the old familiar endearments to forgive him for what had happened: ‘Ah, my Mary,’ he said (as he was wont to address her). In the meantime old Lady Huntly showed herself a resourceful companion of the first order, trained no doubt by the old days as the wife of the 4th earl. She offered to smuggle a rope ladder in between two plates and continued to suggest other schemes for escape until Lord Lindsay, breaking abruptly into the room (as the queen sat on herchaise percée), ordered her to depart. Even so Lady Huntly managed to take a letter to her son in her chemise (her outer clothing was searched), ordering him to stand by at Seton the following night. As escape by towels or ropes out of her window was clearly out of the question, because she was guarded above, Mary had a simpler and more intelligent plan. At some point in the course of Sunday she won back the facile Darnley by convincing him that his own prospects were as bleak as hers under the new régime, and that if he was not careful, they would both end up in ward in Stirling Castle. It was a triumph of a stronger character over a weaker one.
Armed with the knowledge of Darnley’s new treachery, Mary was able to greet the conspirators the next day, Monday, with composure and even charm. She promised pardon, and that she would overlook recent hideous events: she even drank to the compact, although she could not quite bring herself to drink to Ruthven. Moray, apprised of what was about to take place, had set off from Newcastle: he arrived back in Edinburgh on the Monday, the day before his attainder had been due to be passed by Parliament. At this point Mary was unaware of Moray’s complicity in the plot, and memories of their old intimacy, those early days in Scotland when the brother had seemed the natural loving protector of the younger sister, flooded back. Mary flung herself in his arms, crying: ‘Oh my brother, if you had been here, they had not used me thus.’ But when Moray in return chose to treat her to a sententious lecture on the virtues of clemency Mary not unnaturally fired up and pointed out tartly with reason that ‘ever since her earliest youth, her nobility and others of her people, had given her frequently opportunities of practising that virtue and becoming familiar with it’.21As she felt her indignation overcoming her, she was compelled to feign the pangs of labour in order to preserve secrecy about her intentions, and she ordered the midwife to attend to her, whom the lords themselves had appointed on Sunday. This midwife unwittingly played her part in helping Mary’s escape, for some of the lords remained suspicious of Mary’s true feelings, despite her promise of pardon; however, the woman, who was their nominee, assured them of her own accord that the queen was extremely ill and in danger of her life, as a result of what she had been through. At eight o’clock on the Monday evening Mary carried the second stage of her plan into effect by sending for Stewart of Traquair, the captain of the royal guard, Erskine, her equerry, and Standen, one of her pages; she then begged them in the name of chivalry to assist her not only as a defenceless woman, but also as the mother of the future king of Scotland. These gallant gentlemen proved susceptible to her appeal, and promised to stand by her escape, in the manner she now outlined.
At midnight the queen and Darnley made their way down the privy staircase up which the assassins had filed only fifty-two hours before. Darnley’s acquiescence meant that Mary could now use the staircase as an escape route; they then made their way through the back passages and servants’ quarters of Holyrood, where Mary’s French servants would not betray her escape, and finally past an outside cemetery, close to the abbey of Holyrood. Here, by Mary’s account, Darnley gave an involuntary sigh at the sight of a newly dug grave, and confessed to his wife that she was practically treading on the burial ground of the wretched Riccio* – ‘In him I have lost a good and faithful servant,’ said Darnley, ‘I have been miserably cheated.’ These gloomy reflections were checked by the need for silence. Outside the abbey to meet the royal couple were Erskine, Traquair, Standen and two or three loyal soldiers with horses. Mary mounted pillion behind Erskine. Darnley took a horse of his own. In a short while, under the friendly cover of darkness, they were clear of the town.
The plan was to go to Dunbar Castle, pausing at Seton to pick up the nobles who had been alerted via Lady Huntly. The ride was of necessity fast, and as furious as possible. Even so, Darnley, in a panic of fear at being hunted down by the men he had so recently betrayed, kept spurring his own horse and flogging that of the queen, shouting: ‘Come on! Come on! By God’s blood, they will murder both you and me if they can catch us.’ Mary pleaded with him to have regard to her condition, at which Darnley only flew into a rage and exclaimed brutally that if this baby died, they could have more.23 By the time they reached Dunbar Castle, on the coast, twenty-five miles from Edinburgh as the crow flies, the long night was almost over. For a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, a five-hour marathon of this nature must have been a gruelling ordeal. Even now, the queen’s formidable courage did not desert her: she is said to have sent for eggs to cook breakfast. Here at Dunbar* Mary set herself about the task of consolidating the advantage which her liberty had given her.
On 15th March she dictated a long and passionate description of her experience, to be sent to Queen Elizabeth in London. She described the butchery of her secretary before her very eyes. ‘Some of our subjects and council by their proceedings have declared manifestly what men they are … slain our most special servant in our own presence and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably …’24 She appealed to Elizabeth to beware of similar betrayals, which might lead to similar horrifying ordeals. She ended with the note that she had intended to write the letter in her own hand, to make it all seem more immediate, but ‘of truth we are so tired and evil at ease, what through riding of 20 miles in five hours of the night, as with the frequent sickness and evil disposition by the occasion of our child’ that the task had proved beyond her. Nevertheless, whatever physical reaction the queen was suffering after the event, she appeared to be once more triumphing over her enemies, as decisively as she had done in the previous August – and once more as a result of her own boldness and promptitude. The escape of Bothwell and Huntly proved decisive. Atholl, Fleming and Seton also came to her at Dunbar. Men began to flock to the queen’s side at Dunbar, stirred up by these loyal agents. Soon there were 4000 men at her command. On 17th March Mary issued a proclamation from Dunbar calling for the inhabitants of the surrounding districts to meet her at Haddington next day with eight days’ provisions. On 18th March she was able to re-enter Edinburgh victoriously at the head of 8000 men, only nine days after the murder which had caused her to flee from the city so precipitately.
Darnley rode beside her, like a sulky page. At the news of his defection, his fellow-plotters had fled from Edinburgh on the morning of 17th March realizing that their rebellion no longer had any focal point. Morton, Lindsay, Ker of Fawdonside and Ruthven went to England; Maitland, who had certainly known of the plot, although he had not wielded a dagger, went to Dunkeld; John Knox, who may not have known in advance what was proposed, but certainly applauded Riccio’s killing as a goodly deed, went to Ayrshire. Moray alone remained in Edinburgh since he had cunningly arrived in the city too late to be implicated in the bloody events of the night of 9th March, and the fact that he had signed the pre-murder bond was of course unknown to the queen. Mary was also reconciled to Glencairn and Argyll. In any case, in her new grim determination to avenge the butchery of Riccio and pursue his killers to the utmost limits of her power, Mary was now prepared to forgive the previous rebels of the Chaseabout Raid. Time’s revolutions – and the treachery of Darnley – had combined to effect the pardon of Moray, which Mary had once strenuously refused to grant, despite the pleadings of her own nobles, and the admonitions of the queen of England.
* See Pollen, Papal Negotiations, p. xxviii, where Mary’s involvement in a Catholic League, as a result of the meeting of the Catholic sovereigns at Bayonne in July 1565, has been shown to be a chimera of the Protestant imagination, just as any Protestant league in Europe was equally a figment of Catholic fancy.
* In later years King Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre) observed that James could indeed claim to be the modern Solomon, since he was the son of David.
* It is pleasant to relate that this relationship had a happy ending rare in the annals of the time: Lady Jean and her lover were finally united in marriage over thirty years later when both Mary Beaton and Lady Jean’s second husband, the earl of Sutherland, were dead.
* Ruthven suggested that Riccio was also wearing his cap in the presence of the queen – which does seem to denote remarkable familiarity. But it is significant that Randolph, who was at pains to find out the most suggestive details possible, does not mention this one. Ruthven is the only source which mentions the subject of the cap.
* Claude Nau did not join the queen’s service until 1575; his Memorials were written in 1578.
* Although Holyrood was restored and extended in the reign of Charles II, Queen Mary’s apartments can still be seen in much of their original state, as they were at the time of the murder: indeed, they form the most dramatic visual link to be found today with her life story, so many of the buildings connected with her now lying in ruins. But the staircase which can now be seen connecting the king’s apartments with the queen’s has no connection with the sixteenth-century privy staircase. This is still in existence, but concealed behind the Charles II panelling.
* If true, it was certainly an accurate prediction. It fell to the future James VI to put to death both Ruthven’s son and his grandson, the 1st earl of Gowrie, in 1548, and the 2nd earl in 1600, at the time of the Gowrie conspiracy.
* It seems inconceivable that Mary should then have told Darnley bluntly that he himself would go the same way before a year was out – as Lennox announced in his own narrative,22 written after Darnley’s death. Even if Mary nourished the thought, she would scarcely have chosen such a dangerous moment to give it expression, when she was still within the bounds of Holyrood, and still dependent on the goodwill of Darnley.
* It was at this moment in history that the important wardship of Dunbar Castle was transferred from the laird of Craigmillar to the earl of Bothwell, to punish the one and to reward the other for their respective roles in the Riccio affair – this transfer led to the dramatic part played by Dunbar Castle in Mary’s abduction by Bothwell in the following year.