Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  The marriage of the two Catholics posed an immediate problem for the English queen and her council. It seemed that their union was a plain hint of their right to the succession of the English throne. The Catholics of England would consider them to be their natural and proper leaders. If the young couple also produced a son and heir, which seemed most likely, an already complicated situation would become infinitely worse. In the face of Elizabeth’s refusal to marry, many other of her subjects were also prepared to countenance Mary and Darnley as the least bad alternative to a virgin queen. One day in the spring of this year the French ambassador had come upon Elizabeth playing chess.

  ‘Madam, you have before you the game of life. You lose a pawn; it seems a small matter; but with the pawn you lose the game.’

  ‘I see your meaning. Lord Darnley is but a pawn, but unless I look to it I shall be check-mated.’

  Another reported conversation can be added to this account. Mary Stuart was discussing with some courtiers a portrait of the queen of England and debating whether it resembled the great original. ‘No,’ said Mary, ‘it is not like her. For I am queen of England.’

  The members of the council discussed the matter endlessly. They even prepared for war, but in the end nothing was done. Elizabeth declared that Mary ‘doth look for my death’. In this period the queen of England became seriously ill with a fever commonly known as ‘the flux’. The strain of her perilous situation, perhaps, was beginning to affect her.

  Yet by the end of the year it was apparent that all was not well with the marriage of Mary and Darnley. She had expected him to be pliant and tractable; instead he revealed himself to be foolish and obstinate. He carried himself like a king in role as well as name, and therefore became intolerable. Mary would not allow anyone to usurp her place, and by degrees began to demote him. He was now known as ‘the queen’s husband’ rather than king, and he was forbidden the use of the royal arms. He was drinking excessively and, when she once tried to remonstrate with him, he ‘gave her such words as she left the place in tears’. His demand for the matrimonial crown was refused. ‘I know for certain’, an English agent at the Scottish court wrote, ‘that this queen repents her marriage – that she hates him and all his kin.’

  A further complication arose in the shape of Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio or Riccio, a gentleman of charming and persuasive manners. He was an accomplished musician who enchanted her with love-songs; he soon became her closest adviser and confidant. It was he, perhaps, who counselled the queen to maintain a distance from Darnley. He had also offended many Scottish nobles, perhaps on the sole grounds that he was a foreigner who had more influence with the queen than did they. As a Catholic, too, he was cause of offence to the Protestant nobility. Those who had been chased out of Scotland by Mary, with the earl of Moray at their head, were seeking revenge.

  They decided to enlist the help of Darnley; he was, at least, of Scottish stock. They informed him that Rizzio was the sole cause of his decline in influence, and that the secretary had ‘done him the most dishonour that can be to any man’. He entered a bond of association with them where, in exchange for his support and assistance in the murder of Rizzio, they would assert his claim to the throne. In particular Moray and his followers were to be pardoned for their rebellion of the previous year. After the murder Mary was to be consigned to Stirling Castle; the queen was in fact already six months pregnant, but the noblemen seem to have convinced Darnley that the child was fathered by Rizzio.

  On the evening of Saturday 9 March 1566 Mary was entertaining Rizzio and some other friends in a small room next to her bedchamber in the royal palace of Holyrood; just after they had assembled Darnley led his fellow conspirators into the presence of the shocked company by means of his private staircase. When they thrust the queen aside and laid hands on Rizzio he cried out ‘Justice! Justice! Save me, my lady!’ He tried to cling to Mary’s skirts but the men dragged him away and hustled him into an adjoining room, where he was dispatched with fifty-six dagger wounds. His body was then dragged down a staircase and left at its foot.

  When Mary asked her husband why he had committed this crime he repeated the slander that Rizzio ‘had more company of her body’ than he did. She stayed in her private chambers for the next few hours but, within a short time, had managed to convince Darnley that he would be the next victim of the nobles. She had divined their malevolent intent very well. They had planned all along to lay the blame for Rizzio’s murder on Darnley alone, and to inform the queen that her husband had decided to commit the murder in front of her; he wished to disable her and perhaps the unborn child.

  Darnley was by now thoroughly alarmed, and at midnight on 11 March he and Mary left the palace by means of the servants’ quarters and fled on horseback to Dunbar. The other nobles, deserted by Darnley, dispersed; many of them took shelter across the border in Berwick. Mary returned in triumph to Edinburgh where she meditated vengeance on her feckless and unstable husband. But revenge would have to wait upon the birth of her child. That child was itself the subject of whispered report; it was claimed by some that Rizzio was the real father. The somewhat unattractive features of James VI of Scotland, who was to become James I of England, were enough to guarantee the longevity of such rumours.

  Elizabeth was shocked at the outrage of murder committed in the presence of a reigning queen. ‘Had I been in Queen Mary’s place,’ she told the Spanish ambassador, ‘I would have taken my husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it.’ As she was at the same time negotiating a marriage with the archduke Charles with the connivance of the Spanish, she hastened to add that she would not take any such action against him.

  In the early summer of the year Mary Stuart gave birth to a son. A messenger arrived at the palace of Greenwich in the course of a grand party; he went up to Cecil and whispered in his ear. Then Cecil went over to his mistress. She is reported to have slumped into a chair and told those around her that ‘The queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.’ The party came to an end. This at least is the story of Melville’s Memoirs. As Thomas Fuller once observed, ‘when men’s memories do arise, it is time for History to haste abed’. But if the queen’s words have been improved in the telling, they perfectly suit the situation.

  Only two months earlier Elizabeth had fallen sick of a strange disease and had grown so thin that ‘her bones may be counted’. It was whispered that she might be consumptive. ‘Her Majesty’, Cecil wrote to the English envoy in France, ‘suddenly sick in the stomach and suddenly relieved by a vomit. You must think such a matter would drive men to the end of their wits, but God is the stay of all that put their trust in Him.’ Despite the confident and indeed imperious demeanour of the queen, her first years of rule were undermined by a constant note of insecurity and danger.

  Yet she recovered and in the late summer of 1566 went on a progress to Oxford, stopping off at Woodstock, where she had been held prisoner during the reign of her sister. The dons came to meet her before she came into the town, calling out ‘Vivat regina! ’ She gave them thanks in Latin. Then she listened to a loyal address in Greek before replying to that oration in the same ancient tongue. She was as learned as any Oxford scholar.

  Her arrival at the university was the occasion for further orations and sermons, public lectures and public disputations, plays and debates. While she watched one drama, Palamon and Arcite, the stage collapsed; three people were killed and five were injured. She sent her own barber-surgeon to care for the afflicted, but then laughed heartily when the performance was resumed. She also expressed her instinctive dislike for the more doctrinaire reformers. On meeting one noted sectarian, of Puritan persuasion, she remarked ‘Mr Doctor, that loose gown becomes you mighty well. I marvel that you are so strait-laced in this point [of religion] but I come not now to chide.’ He had made the mistake of praying, in public, that the queen would allow further change within the Church. This was a subject on which her mind was closed. At the end of her visit s
he made another speech in Latin, on the dignity and worth of learning, and her litter was accompanied for 2 miles by a body of scholars and local worthies.

  The birth of James Stuart had alarmed Elizabeth, since the prospect of an heir materially increased Mary’s following in England. The Scottish ambassador in England told his mistress that many shires were ready to rebel and that the nobility had named the captains of the enterprise. Elizabeth’s envoy wrote to Cecil from the French court that ‘both the pope’s and the king of Spain’s hands be in that dish further and deeper than I think you know . . . I have cause to say to you vigilate!’ The ambassador was acute. Six months later Philip II wrote to the Vatican that the time would soon come ‘to throw off the mask and bestir ourselves’. He and the pope must consider the way in which they could assist Mary Stuart and promote the cause of God; the queen of Scots was the ‘gate by which religion must enter the realm of England’.

  It is probable, then, that Cecil helped to orchestrate the pressure placed upon Elizabeth by the parliament of 1566. He left a paper, or memorial to himself, in which he wrote that ‘to require both marriage and the stabilizing of the succession is the uttermost that can be desired’. Parliament assembled in the autumn of that year, unaltered since the last meeting of 1563; it had then been prorogued rather than dissolved. The clamour for the queen’s marriage had become more intense during the interval, and it was rumoured that the Commons would refuse to vote her ‘supplies’, or finances, unless she revealed her commitment to matrimony or at least named her successor. The debate went on for two mornings, in the course of which several members traded blows. The Lords then agreed to join the Commons in a petition to her.

  Elizabeth was furious with her councillors, who were suspected of collusion. She vented her anger first on the duke of Norfolk and, when another councillor tried to defend him, she said that he spoke like a swaggering soldier. Then she turned upon Leicester, her favourite. She accused him of abandoning her. He swore that he was ready to die at her feet. What, she asked him, has that to do with the matter? Before venting some further insults on those present, she left the room. Of the Commons she was disdainful. She told the Spanish ambassador that she did not know what those ‘devils’ wanted.

  She summoned a delegation of fifty-seven members of the Lords and Commons to Whitehall, and forbade the presence of the Speaker. It was only the queen who would talk. They presented her with a petition in which they expressed their wish that she marry ‘where it should please her, with whom it should please her, and as soon as it should please her’. She opened her harangue by accusing ‘unbridled persons in the Commons’ of contriving a ‘traitorous trick’. Then she accused the Lords of supporting them. ‘Whom have I oppressed?’ she asked them. ‘Whom have I enriched to other’s harm?’ But then she turned to the subject. ‘I have sent word that I will marry, and I will never break the word of a prince said in a public place, for my honour’s sake.’ A prince’s honour is of course a flexible commodity. There then followed what might be called an Elizabethan moment. ‘I am your anointed queen,’ she told them. ‘I will never be constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoats I were able to live in any place in Christendom.’

  Cecil read an edited version of her speech to the Commons in their chamber, and he was greeted with silence. The members were not impressed, and almost at once further calls for a petition on the marriage were being heard. The queen demanded to see the Speaker and commanded him to instruct parliament that ‘there should be no further talk of the matter’. When they remonstrated with her on the infringement of their ‘lawful liberties’ she wisely yielded. But it was in no sense a triumph. At the end of the session, in January 1567, Elizabeth rose from the throne and made her concluding speech. It was already dusk. ‘I have in this assembly’, she said, ‘found such dissimulation where I always professed plainness that I marvel thereat; yea, two faces under one hood, and the body rotten.’ She finished her peroration with ‘beware how you prove your prince’s patience as you have now done mine . . . My Lord Keeper you will do as I bid you.’

  The lord keeper rose in the fading light. ‘The Queen’s Majesty doth dissolve this parliament. Let every man depart at his pleasure.’ The queen proceeded to the royal barge and returned to the palace. Parliament would not meet again for another four years. Cecil noted ‘the succession not answered, the marriage not followed, dangers ensuing, general disorientations’.

  It may be noted, in parenthesis, that in this period the coach was introduced to England. John Taylor, the popular ‘water poet’, believed that it had been brought to England by the queen’s coachman, a Dutchman named William Booner. ‘A coach’, he wrote, ‘was a strange monster in those days, and the sight of it put both horse and foot in amazement. Some said it was a great crab-shell brought out of China; and some thought it one of the pagan temples in which the cannibals adored the devil. Soon an outcry was raised about the scarcity of leather, from the quantity used in coach building.’ So in the 1560s the monstrous carriage, as well as the queen’s marriage, was the talk of London.

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  The rites of spring

  Having alienated both his wife and the Scottish nobility, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, had every reason to leave Scotland; he spoke of escaping into England, although he would hardly have been welcomed at the court of Elizabeth. She would not even recognize him as king of Scotland, and he was deluded enough to believe that he had some claim upon the English throne. After the safe birth of her son Mary turned her face against him, believing him to be responsible for the murder of her Italian secretary. Mary neither ate nor slept with him and on one occasion, according to the English ambassador in Scotland, ‘used words that cannot for modesty nor with the honour of a queen be reported’.

  At the beginning of 1567 Mary was reliably informed that Darnley was proposing to kidnap their son and rule as regent in his name; the queen herself was to be confined in a secure castle. It was important that all his movements and meetings should be watched. When he fell ill, perhaps from a recurrent bout of syphilis, she visited his sickroom and remained with him for the next two or three days. At the end of January she brought him to Edinburgh in a horse litter.

  James, the fourth earl of Bothwell, now enters the plot. At the age of twenty-one he had become Lieutenant of the Border, and had served Mary’s mother during her regency of Scotland. He had been one of the lords who had accompanied the newly widowed Mary on her journey from Paris; soon enough he had caught the young queen’s attention. He had already become one of her principal counsellors, and one of those whose antipathy to Darnley was as great as that of the queen.

  He was part of a small group who now planned permanently to remove Darnley, and a bond or deed was drawn up between its members. It was later reproduced in Robert Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (1833). The conspirators stated that ‘such a young fool and proud tyrant [as the king] should not bear rule of them – for diverse causes therefore they had all concluded that he should be put forth [dispatched] by one way or the other’; they pledged to be true to one another, and all would take on the guilt of murder. It is uncertain what the Scottish queen knew of this, even though her own half-brother was aware of the plot. At a later date she asserted that she had told them to do nothing ‘to touch her honour and conscience’. Yet even if she had refused her consent to these proposals, by her own confession she had listened to them without reacting violently to the putative murderers of her husband. She could have accused them of treason, but she remained silent.

  As Mary and Darnley moved towards Edinburgh, Bothwell met them on the road. Their intended destination had been Craigmillar Castle, but now the earl directed them to new lodgings at the house of the provost of St Mary’s known as the ‘Kirk of Field’ or ‘Kirk o’ Field’. Darnley’s chambers had been properly furnished for a king in the west wing of the house, and it was here that Mary watched over her husband’s
convalescence; she did not sleep in the house but in the evening retired to the more palatial surroundings of Holyrood. An apartment was in fact made ready for her after a few days, directly beneath that of her husband, and she took particular care to have the bed situated. ‘Move it yonder,’ she said to her attendant, ‘to the other side.’ She spent the nights of Wednesday 5 and Friday 7 February there. It was later rumoured that this was part of her design, so that people might suspect the target of the conspirators was herself.

  At approximately ten o’clock on Sunday night two or three men brought some sacks of gunpowder into Mary’s chamber at Kirk o’ Field. Mary herself was with her husband in the chamber above, and at this juncture remembered that she was supposed to attend a masque and dance at Holyrood. As she left the room she said, as if as an afterthought, ‘It was just this time last year that Rizzio was slain.’ Darnley turned to an attendant and asked, ‘Why did she speak of Davie’s slaughter?’

  At two o’clock on the Monday morning a ‘crack’ was heard throughout Edinburgh. The old provost’s house of Kirk o’ Field was in ruins. Darnley had not perished in the explosion. His corpse and that of his page were found 40 yards away beneath a tree, on the other side of the town wall, with ‘no sign of fire on them’. Close by them was a chair, a rope and Darnley’s furred cloak. A dagger was also found, but neither victim had been stabbed.

  The mystery of their last moments persists. They may have been smothered in their sleep; they may have been pursued and taken in the garden. Or they may have lowered themselves from the first-floor window, after discovering that the doors to their chamber were locked, only to be dispatched near the scene of the crime. Within hours of the explosion placards had been fixed to the Tolbooth in Edinburgh accusing Bothwell and his associates of the crime. Bothwell’s antipathy to Darnley was notorious. Two days later Mary issued a proclamation in which she offered £2,000 for information against her husband’s murderers. But she knew well enough that the name of Bothwell was on everyone’s lips. His portraits were posted on the gates and walls of the city with the legend ‘Here is the murderer of the king’.