Mary Queen of Scots (46 page)

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’,
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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 Island, too disgraceful to be named in a letter, that Mary now slept apart from her husband.
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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 suggestions 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 9 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’.
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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 13 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, yea, of things intended against her own person.’
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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 2 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 intention 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.’
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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 caught
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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 25 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 3 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.
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Elizabeth also sent £1,000 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 24 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.
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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.
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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 …’.
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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’.
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On Thursday 7 March Parliament assembled. Mary went personally to the Tolbooth 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 12 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 9 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’.
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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.
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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 2 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.
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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.
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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 second-hand 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.
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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,
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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 been 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 bed-room 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!’
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