Before the rise of a new moon, it was a very dark and cold night in Scotland on the 9th of February, 1567, with a frost encrusting the king’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. This medieval church stood on a hill less than a mile from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, the seat of power in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots and wife of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, wielded her royal authority. Lord Darnley, the 22-year-old king whom Mary had wed less than two years earlier and as a last resort, had never been given the royal power that he’d hoped would be his, the Crown Matrimonial, and as such had been estranged from the Queen of Scots for some time. However, recently, after being installed at Kirk o’Field while he recovered from a grave illness, it had appeared that Mary was of a mind to reconcile with him. She tended to him and slept in those lodging with him frequently while he recuperated. On the evening of the 9th, it was her intention to stay there as well, but she came out to Kirk o’Field early that evening to show the more and more recovered king her gown and mask, for she was to attend a masquerade that night back at the palace before returning to him. However, after spending longer than expected at Kirk o’Field, she decided that she would have to retire back at the palace after the masquerade, for she anticipated it would be too late to return. So Mary, Queen of Scots, the most beautiful young queen in all of Europe, left her husband, Lord Darnley, promising to see him the next day. Late that night, at 2am on Monday the 10th, a great blast shattered the night’s calm, waking up everyone near Kirk o’Field and even disturbing the sleep of the Queen three quarters of a mile away at Holyrood Palace. With the explosion still echoing in their ears, night watchmen arrived with lanterns at the source of the noise: the King’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. They heard a man crying out for help, and found a blackened figure, one of Lord Darnley’s servants, clinging to the top of a wall. The lodgings themselves had been reduced to rubble. Throughout the night, the watchmen dug frantically through the debris as snow fell all around them. Beneath the rubble, they eventually uncovered two mangled corpses, but failed to find the king. Not until 3 hours later did they search the orchard beyond the wall, where they found the dead bodies of both Lord Darnley and his valet, William Taylor. It was assumed that the king and his valet had been killed by the explosion as well, thrown from the lodgings into the orchard by the force of the blast. However, as the sun rose and made a closer examination of the scene possible, some details were observed that have turned the murder of Lord Darnley into an enduring mystery… not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit. For they found the corpses of the King and his valet had not a mark on them. Nearly naked in their nightshirts, there appeared no scorch marks, no bruises, no wounds or signs of strangulation. They looked as if they’d been laid out in the orchard, and around them were several undamaged items from the lodgings: a quilt, a chair, a piece of rope, and a dagger.

To tell of Lord Darnley’s murder, we must focus on Mary, Queen of Scots, for really, sadly, the story of his demise in large part is her story. She came to inherit the throne from her father, King James V of Scotland, whose two sons with Marie de Guise had died in infancy. It was said that upon hearing the news that he had fathered a daughter, the ailing king said, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.” He was referring to the fact that the Stewart dynasty had been established through the daughter of the great Scottish leader Robert the Bruce. You may remember my mention of the endless wars between England and Scotland in my episodes on Edward II, whom Robert the Bruce defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn, thereby settling his undisputed rule over Scotland. His daughter, Marjorie, bore the first male heir of their house, Robert II, the first Stewart king. Centuries later, as he died without a male heir, James V was leaving the fate of the Stewart dynasty with his own daughter. At six days old, she took the throne, and she represented a hope not only for the future of Scotland but for a united England and Scotland, for James V was the son of Margaret Tudor, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, giving Mary a strong claim to the English throne as well. This may have been on the mind of King Henry VIII in 1544 when he sought by treaty to marry his son to the infant Queen Mary. However, the Protestant Reformation made things far more complicated. Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, remained a loyal Catholic and refused to let her daughter marry the Protestant King Henry’s son, choosing instead to revive an ancient alliance with Catholic France, the perennial enemy of England. This perceived betrayal ignited the so-called War of the Rough Wooing, in which King Henry VIII’s forces laid waste to many Scottish villages and towns. During this war, there was one Scottish lord, Matthew Stuart, the 4th Earl of Lennox, who took up arms for the English. Invading his native Scotland, he took numerous child hostages, thereby forcing their fathers to serve under him. When these men escaped, he murdered their children, an act that would earn him the undying hatred of the Scottish. But eventually, through some unforeseen circumstances, this Earl of Lennox would find himself very close to the Scottish throne, for his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, would one day be betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary, Queen of Scots, depicted as a child. Public Domain artwork accessed from Art Institute Chicago.

As her mother, Marie de Guise, struggled with the Scottish lords who more and more pushed to make Scotland a Protestant country, and as James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and Governor of the Realm while Mary was in her minority, fought to expel the occupying English forces, one solution to their problems presented itself: they would marry the young queen to the Dauphin of France, putting Mary in line to rule as Queen of Catholic France as well as Scotland, and securing some immediate military aid from France to push back the English invaders. So in 1548, at five years old, Mary sailed to France, where she spent much of her youth in the royal court, surrounded by Rennaissance culture and art and exposed to the lax morals and promiscuous behavior of the French royals. There she grew into a most beautiful woman, red of hair and a statuesque six feet tall. Her French admirers called her la plus parfait, which translates as “the most perfect.” Her closest friend was Francis, the sickly Dauphin to whom she was promised. She spent her time reading and dancing and riding horse and playing all kinds of games. Her education was extensive, but does not seem to have extended to statecraft, as it was always assumed that others would govern Scotland on her behalf. Back in Scotland, by 1551, the English had finally been driven out, and Mary’s mother, the Queen Dowager Marie de Guise, finally took control as the Regent of Scotland and took steps to push back against the rising influence of Protestantism. What she managed to do was stir up a nest of vipers in Scotland, as Protestant noblemen formed a league against her, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ. In 1558, Mary and Francis were married at Notre-Dame in Paris, and some months later, the Catholic queen of England, who had been dubbed Bloody Mary because of her violent efforts at counter-reformation, died. To all of Catholic Europe, Mary, Queen of Scots, was believed to be her rightful heir, but instead, the crown passed to King Henry VIII’s daughter by his second wife, Elizabeth I. Viewing Elizabeth as a usurper, King Henry II of France, Mary’s new father-in-law, publicly declared that she and Francis were the true king and queen of England.

Not surprisingly, then, Queen Elizabeth supported the Protestant Lords of the Congregation in their efforts to resist the Catholic Regent Marie de Guise in Scotland. After signing a treaty with these rebel lords, Elizabeth sent troops in 1560 to drive out the French and overthrow Marie de Guise, who died later that year from dropsy. In the absence of both the queen and the regent, the country was governed by a council of Protestant Lords who illegally passed legislation to criminalize Catholicism without the queen’s approval. At the end of that year, still mourning the death of her mother and lamenting the betrayal of the Scottish lords, Mary also lost her husband, King Francis II, to a brain abscess. After considering her options, which were either to find another foreign marriage prospect or to return to Scotland and wrest back control of her realm, she bravely chose to go home, where all of her mother’s enemies awaited her return. Among the most powerful of the Protestant Lords arrayed against her were Sir William Maitland; James Douglas, the Earl of Morton; George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly; Patrick, the Earl of Ruthven; and her own bastard half-brother, Sir James Stewart, later the Earl of Moray. Another Protestant lord was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had never allied with the Lords of the Congregation against Mary’s mother and who would prove to be a lifelong ally of the Queen of Scots. The Lords of the Congregation feared that Mary’s return would signal a counter-reformation, and her half-brother Sir James travelled to France to negotiate her return to power, eager that she promise not to interfere with the newly established Protestant Church. Once they reached an agreement and the way was smoothed for the transfer of power, she sailed back home, arriving in August of 1561 to find her homeland far poorer and less populated than France. Nevertheless, she was well-received by the public, and her accommodations at Holyrood Palace were well befitting a queen. As she took the reins of government, she relied on the advice of the loyal Earl of Bothwell as well as that of William Maitland, whom she made her Secretary of State despite his involvement in the betrayal of her mother. Other members of the Lords of the Congregation also remained on her Privy Council. So utterly surrounded by Protestant lords was she that she found herself having to placate them that she did not mean to take steps to revive Catholicism in Scotland, while also leading on the Pope in Rome that she certainly would re-establish Catholicism as the faith of the land just as soon as was feasible.

A Protestant sermon attended by the Lords of the Congregation. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Mary’s return meant the rise of some and the downfall of others. Her half-brother Sir James used his influence over the queen to take the title the Earl of Moray and to take lands for himself from other lords through accusations of treason and military adventure. Chief among Moray’s enemies at court was Bothwell, who was in high favor with his sister. In order to discredit him, Moray instigated groundless rumors that Bothwell intended to abduct Mary in order to keep her as a sex slave, and to murder any other lords who got between him and power. Mary doesn’t appear to have believed the accusations, but in order to make peace, she had Bothwell imprisoned. Bothwell managed to escape his imprisonment by prying a bar loose from his cell window and climbing down the side of the castle in Edinburgh where he was being held, and he fled to Northumberland and afterward would take refuge in France, establishing a correspondence with Mary to assure her that he had never planned any treason. While Bothwell remained loyal to his queen and served her as best he could while in exile, Mary was now without her staunchest ally in the viper’s nest of her court. Eventually, though, she found another whom she trusted, not a lord but rather a lowly musician. David Rizzio, an Italian singer and lute player, had become a favorite of the queen and eventually served as her personal secretary, though he was not skilled at letters. In fact, so close did the two become that members of Mary’s Privy Council feared his influence over her and suggested he was a spy sent by the pope. More than this, some insinuated that the queen was sexually involved with the musician, even though he was often described as ugly or even deformed. The truth of this, whether Mary was sexually involved with Rizzio or simply found him loyal and witty and enjoyed his company, is unknown. Perhaps she was flirtatious with Rizzio, displaying some coquetry that she picked up among the French which her Scottish countrymen misconstrued. But it can’t be denied that she was intimate with him in the sense that they spent most of their time together, and he would keep her company in her chambers even late at night. Whatever unseemliness there might have been in Mary’s relationship with Rizzio and whatever agendas the musician might have harbored, what the Protestant lords could never forgive him was his vocal support of Mary’s marriage to another Catholic.

The second marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, was a matter of great interest not only to those in her court, but also to Queen Elizabeth. Mary, Queen of Scots, was intent on pressing her claim to the English throne. She did not seek to overthrow Elizabeth, but rather, since Elizabeth had not herself married, she pushed to be named Elizabeth’s rightful heir. However, the people of England largely saw in her the possibility of another Bloody Mary, someone who would try to reverse their Protestant Reformation, and therefore balked at the prospect that she should take the English throne. Seeing Mary as a potential threat, especially if she were to marry a powerful foreign Catholic figure and thereby give papistry a toehold in Scotland, Elizabeth sought to hold the succession rights over Mary’s head to ensure she would not seek a match with, for example, Don Carlos, the heir to Philip II of Spain. Making her declaration of Mary as her heir dependent on her approval of a match for Mary, Elizabeth suggested that she consider certain Protestant kings in Scandinavia. When Mary refused and persisted in seeking an alliance with Spain, Elizabeth went so far as to offer Mary her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley as a match. Elizabeth may have seen this as a great concession as well as a shrewd maneuver, since she was assured of Dudley’s loyalty, but as Dudley was of such a lower station than her and was surrounded by numerous scandals, Mary could not help but see this as an insult. When Mary’s hopes of marrying Don Carlos fell through, though, Elizabeth insisted that marrying Dudley was her only choice if she wished to be declared the heir to the English throne. Yet there was one other candidate who was both a loyal subject of Elizabeth and yet was a Catholic of Scottish blood: Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, who since the War of the Rough Wooing and his massacre of Scottish children had remained in England. Back when Mary’s husband had died in France, Lennox was already seeing an opportunity to marry his son to the Queen of Scots and thereby re-establish his family in Scotland in a position of power. He even took Darnley to France to press his suit while Mary was still grieving the deaths of her husband and mother. Aware of Lennox’s atrocities and disliking their grasping at power, Mary had vowed never to marry the boy, but years later, in Scotland, the match began to seem like her only option. After all, Darnley had something of a claim to the English throne himself, and he was Catholic, which meant Mary could still keep up at least the pretense that she eventually intended to bring the Catholic Church back into power in Scotland. With Elizabeth’s permission, he came to Mary’s court and did much to impress her. He was beardless, but handsome and tall enough to cut a striking figure standing beside Mary. He charmed both Mary and her close advisor, Rizzio, with his lute playing and his dancing, and the three of them enjoyed playing dice and cards. While the Protestant lords at court mistrusted him, Bothwell, still in exile, seemed to approve of the match. So on July 29th 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married Lord Darnley, kicking of several days of ostentatious banquets, balls, and masquerades.

A portrait of the youthful Lord Darnely. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Yet there was still much disapproval of Darnley as a match for Mary. Even Queen Elizabeth, who had seemed to be agreeing to the match when she granted Darnley permission to travel to Scotland, afterward acted as though Mary had chosen him to spite her. In truth, it seems Elizabeth got everything she might have wanted. Mary would not make an alliance with a hostile foreign power and would instead ally herself with a fallen family in a marriage that provided little benefits to her, and Elizabeth could act as if she’d been defied and could continue to deny Mary the right of succession. At court in Scotland, the most powerful of the Protestant lords, who of course believed that Mary’s new marriage to another Catholic meant an impending counter-Reformation, had made their opposition to Darnley clear. When Mary proceeded regardless and had Darnley proclaimed King of Scotland, several of these lords, led by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, went into open rebellion, leaving the royal court and amassing armies. Thus, as had happened with Edward II and many another monarch before her, Mary found herself facing a civil war with rebel earls who disliked her choice of advisors and relationships. Since Moray, who had been the principal enemy and accuser of Bothwell, stood now in defiance of her authority, she made immediate arrangements for the Earl of Bothwell to return from his exile, and less than a month after her nuptials, she rode out of Edinburgh at the head of an army, with a pistol on her hip and a helmet on her head, bent on bringing the rebels to heel. Eight days later, while Mary’s forces were in the east, near Glasgow, Moray attempted to occupy Edinburgh but was driven out after a day. Over the next month or so, as Mary led her forces all over Scotland trying to stamp out this rebellion, which would come to be called the Chaseabout Raid, the Earl of Moray, seeing the writing on the wall, wrote to Queen Elizabeth pleading for military intervention. Elizabeth, though, fearing that once again the French might land troops to prevent their invasion of Scotland, would only send warships up the coast to try to prevent Bothwell from returning and strengthening Mary. When this blockade failed and Bothwell returned to join his might with Mary’s, the only further help Elizabeth would offer Moray was protection. So Moray and Bothwell traded places; as Bothwell took up a place of honor in Mary’s court and council, Mary’s troublesome half-brother went into exile in England.

As Mary worked to resolve the threat of her rebel lords, another threat festered. Almost immediately after their marriage, Darnley began to show Mary his true colors. He insisted that she not waste time in proclaiming him king, and he began to resent her when she evaded his demands to be given the Crown Matrimonial, which would have given him the actual power of a king. It is unclear if Mary ever intended to confer royal authority to Darnley, but certainly when he began to reveal himself to be a spoiled, arrogant, jealous, and spiteful boy, she must have realized how dangerous it would be to empower him. He made few allies among the nobility at court, who all thought him reckless and haughty, scornful and paranoid. At first, besides Mary, it seemed only Rizzio was a friend and ally to Darnley, which made sense as the lords were equally resentful of the favor that Rizzio enjoyed. Indeed, just as the lords had whispered about Mary’s improper relations with Rizzio, some spread the rumor that Darnley as well had taken the Italian as a lover, and that three of them slept together. Soon though, Darnley turned against the only allies he had when he began to amplify the rumors about Rizzio and the queen, intimating that he suspected Mary and her secretary of cuckolding him. In truth, this would seem to disprove the rumors that he was sleeping with the both of them, since obviously then he would have more than suspicions about her sexual adventures. More likely, he was looking to remove Rizzio as an influence on the queen so that he could supplant him has her chief advisor and finally convince her to give him the Crown Matrimonial. Three months into their marriage, when Mary announced her pregnancy, far from being overjoyed, Darnley seemed to take it as a blow, realizing that an heir would mean even less chance that he would reign as a monarch in Scotland. During the first few months of her pregnancy, he made a spectacle of himself as a drunk and carried on affairs with other women. Then, ironically, he also made grand public displays of his devotion to the Catholic faith, perhaps in hopes that foreign Catholic powers would intervene and help him take the Crown Matrimonial hoping that he would move faster than Mary had to start a counter-Reformation. With Darnley so clearly estranged from the queen, some Protestant lords, including Ruthven and Morton, began to hatch a plot against Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, believing that without him whispering in Mary’s ear, she might be more amenable to forgiving her half-brother Moray and allowing his return. They spread the rumor that Mary was not pregnant with Darnley’s child but with Rizzio’s, and thus they drew the resentful young king into their scheme.

A portrait of David Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

On March 1st, 1566, the conspirators against Rizzio asked Darnley to sign a bond taking full responsibility for the plot against Rizzio. It may be that they had more planned than killing Rizzio, for if they were to assassinate Mary in the process, this document would incriminate Darnley, thereby ridding them of the king as well, whom in truth they detested. The same day, perhaps also at the insistence of these lords, Darnley wrote to the Earl of Moray, telling him as his king to await a summons, and a week later, he wrote again to promise Moray a safe return to Scotland. Thus it seems likely that Ruthven and Morton and maybe also Moray and the other conspirators were planning something of a coup. The next evening after writing this summons to Moray, Darnley let a group of assassins into Holyrood Palace and led them up a secret staircase from his chambers right into the queen’s bedchambers. Darnley appeared first from behind a tapestry and played nonchalant, sitting down with Mary. Then Lord Ruthven appeared, clad in armor, and demanded that David Rizzio come with him. Mary asked why, and Ruthven answered that he had caused her to banish nobility so that he might himself be ennobled, and that he had kept her from fulfilling her promises to the king. Mary turned to Darnley and asked if he knew about this, but Darnley feigned ignorance. Mary demanded that Ruthven leave or be arrested for treason, but Ruthven drew a pistol and a dagger and advanced on Rizzio, who cowered behind his queens skirts. A group of five other conspirators then entered the room, and a struggle ensued as they attempted to take hold of Rizzio. Ruthven threw the queen into Darnley’s arms, and the king held her firmly even as one of the conspirators seemed to purposely shove a chair into her stomach, perhaps trying to cause a miscarriage. Even more horrible is the account that, after the assassins had first stabbed Rizzio, seizing Darnley’s own dagger and thrusting very near to the queen herself, another conspirator aimed a pistol at Mary’s womb and pulled the trigger. It was said she was only saved because the pistol failed to fire. Dragging Rizzio down the secret stairs, the assassins stabbed him some 57 times, attacking so savagely that one of the assassins was accidentally stabbed in the process. The fact that they left Darnley’s dagger in the corpse seems to support the idea that they hoped the king would take the full blame for Rizzio’s death.

In the aftermath of this attack, the conspirators kept the queen captive in her rooms as they decided what to do with her. Slowly, as his own men were removed and the conspirator lords put their own guards around him, Darnley began to realize that he had been used and was a prisoner himself. He went up the secret stairs from his chamber to Mary’s and pleaded with her to let him in so that he could speak with her, and eventually she did, listening to his explanations that he had been manipulated and at least pretending to be sympathetic to his pleas to forgive him. Together, they began to hatch their own plans. She pretended to be ill and had her midwife sent to attend to her, and with her help, they managed to send a secret letter out to Bothwell to gather other lords loyal to her and await her imminent escape. While she refused to speak with her captors, Morton and Ruthven, she agreed to see Moray, who had recently returned to Scotland and been in hiding. In a tearful reunion, in which she appealed to him as her brother and he assured her he had had no part in the conspiracy to murder Rizzio, they were reconciled, and she turned Moray against the conspirators. Then, by promising a pardon to the rebel lords, she convinced them to remove their armed guards from the palace, and she and Darnley, by the dark of night, escaped by creeping down some service stairs, through the servants’ quarters, and out a wine cellar. Along the way, Mary tripped on a mound of dirt that turned out to be David Rizzio’s shallow grave. She and Darnley took horses and rode east out of Edinbugh. About ten miles on, they saw some men on horseback in the road, and Darnley panicked, begging the queen to ride fast lest they be killed by their enemies and even whipping her horse. When she begged him to consider her pregnant condition, he declared that they could always have another baby if this one died, to which she furiously suggested that he go on without her and worry for himself. To Darnley’s great dishonor, he did abandon her, riding off before realizing that the horsemen in the road were Bothwell and other loyal lords there to rescue them.

A depiction of the murder of Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Not surprisingly, Mary did not so easily forgive and forget Darnley’s betrayal, and as she went about putting her country’s affairs in order, forgiving some lords, such as Moray and Maitland, while executing some lowly assassins and declaring certain rebel lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, outlaws and driving them into exile, Darnley grew once again resentful and insolent. The queen’s supporters, unsurprisingly, rejected Darnley for his part in the recent attempted coup, and as he had publicly declared his own innocence in the affair, the lords in exile also considered him an enemy. Yet as the father of her child, for whom she desired an uncontested claim to the throne of Scotland, Mary felt she could not openly turn against him and in fact needed to protect him from himself. At one point, Mary had to take his pistols out of his bedchamber as she was afraid he would attempt suicide with them. When in June of 1566 she bore Darnley a son, James, the future king of Scotland England and Ireland, this did little to reconcile them. While they had been restored to the palace at Edinburgh, Darnley, resenting his diminished status, moved away to Glasgow and began threatening to leave the country and convince certain Catholic foreign powers that he had been wronged by Mary—a ridiculous notion, but with the rumors about the child’s paternity persisting, and other, even more absurd conspiracy theories cropping up, like that their child had been stillborn but replaced by a changeling just to prevent his taking the Crown Matrimonial, there was no telling whether some who were unhappy with Mary’s lack of progress initiating a counter-Reformation might have used these claims as an excuse to back Darnley in a coup. Other rumors suggested that Darnley planned to abduct their son, and when Mary became deathly ill, vomiting blood a few months after giving birth, it was suspected that Darnley had attempted to kill her by having her poisoned. While convalescing at Craigmillar, Mary appears to have consulted with her council about what should be done in regards to her troublesome husband, and they extracted from Mary the promise of a pardon for certain exiled lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, if they could devise some way to rid her of Darnley.

In retrospect, it of course appears that Mary was conspiring with her lords at Craigmillar to assassinate the king, and that is certainly how it was presented later, when Mary’s enemies moved to hold her guilty of the murder. However, in looking closer at the evidence, it can be seen that Mary may just have been looking for some lawful means of extricating herself from the marriage, some grounds for divorcement. She expressed concern that nothing be done that might affect the legitimacy and succession rights of their son. This ruled out an annulment of their marriage. A Protestant divorce was not likely to be recognized by Darnley or his foreign Catholic supporters. Arresting Darnley for treason because of his part in the Rizzio incident might have done the trick, but by a technicality of Scottish law, a king could not be guilty of treason. Perhaps realizing that the only other option was murder, Mary is recorded as saying, “I will that you do nothing, by which any spot may be laid on my honour and conscience; and therefore, I pray ye rather let the matter be in the estate as it is, abiding till God of his goodness put a remedy to it. That you believe would do me service, may possibly turn to my hurt and displeasure.” Thus, by this prescient statement, Mary seems to exonerate herself for what came later. But it is possible that she changed her mind when, shortly thereafter, Darnley insulted her by refusing to attend their son’s christening. According to later claims, a bond was signed at Craigmillar by numerous lords to undertake the assassination of Lord Darnley, but this document has never been found. Therefore, the great mystery of Darnley’s murder, besides how he ended up in the orchard without a mark on him after so great an explosion, is which Scottish lords undertook to kill him and why, and whether Mary, Queen of Scots, had any hand in it, as would later be alleged and contribute to her own death.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part One: The Vipers' Nest (A Royal Blood Mystery)

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