Mary Queen of Scots (47 page)

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 flung 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 never will 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.’
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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 onto 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 enquired 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.
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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.’
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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 Livingstone 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 Nau
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– 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 her
chaise 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’.
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As 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
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– ‘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.
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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
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Mary set herself about the task of consolidating the advantage which her liberty had given her.

On 15 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 they are … slain our most special servant in our own presence and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably….’
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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 4,000 men at her command. On 17 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 18 March she was able to re-enter Edinburgh victoriously at the head of 8,000 men, only nine days after the murder which had caused her to flee from the city so precipitously.