by Linda Porter
Five days later he presented himself to the Queen of Scots at Wemyss Castle in Fife. Melville’s later assertion that Mary was immediately taken with Darnley, saying that he was ‘the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had ever seen; for he was of a high stature, long and small, even and erect, and from his youth well instructed in all honest and homely exercises’, was probably written well after their first meeting. Randolph, watching carefully but no doubt bringing his own prejudices to bear (he felt let down by Leicester), reported that Mary did not, initially, show Darnley any particular favour. Things changed, however, with the reception of Elizabeth’s letter dashing any remaining hopes of an official recognition for Mary as her heir. For, in truth, there was nothing new about the idea of the Scottish queen marrying Lord Darnley. It had been mentioned several years earlier and made perfectly good dynastic sense. Mary believed that it would give her freedom to rule Scotland as she saw fit, without being constantly beholden to Elizabeth, while at the same time strengthening her claim to the English throne. Marriage to Darnley would unite two branches of the Stewart family who could, together, work towards the more glorious goal of uniting Britain.
Still, Mary waited before committing to Darnley. At the same time that she was showing him favour by sending him food from her own table while he recovered from a bout of measles in April, Maitland was in London with secret instructions to obtain Elizabeth’s permission for the match but also to ascertain, one last time, if there was any possibility remaining of marrying Don Carlos. He got no joy of either and when his report reached Stirling on 3 May, Mary’s decision to proceed with the Darnley match appears to have been made irrevocably. It was only now that the English queen and Privy Council suddenly appreciated the problems that such a marriage would mean for them. Elizabeth sent Throckmorton, who knew Mary from her time as queen of France, to try to dissuade her but this probably hardened her attitude. Randolph, an even more helpless witness of events than he had always been, suspected that Throckmorton had earlier made matters worse by encouraging approval of Darnley’s return with precisely the outcome of marriage to Mary in mind. ‘If,’ Randolph threatened Throckmorton, ‘you were as innocent as our lord Jesus Christ, if any evil come to me, I will make you partaker.’20
The divisions among English politicians on the fraught subject of a husband for the Queen of Scots were more than matched by the opposition it provoked among the Scottish nobility. A watershed in Mary’s reign had been reached. She would lose the support of Moray, her half-brother; of Maitland, her clever secretary, who made a dangerous enemy; of the Hamiltons and the influential earls of Argyll and Glencairn. There was still no clear Catholic/Protestant split and the religious views of Lennox and his son were opaque (both had lived as Protestants in England) but the fear of a move towards a more overtly Catholic monarchy grew. None of this deterred Mary. At six in the morning on 29 July 1565, she and Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, were married in a Catholic service conducted in Mary’s private chapel at Holyrood. After the service, Darnley left and Mary heard the nuptial Mass alone. A declaration the previous day had announced that government would be in the joint names of the King and Queen of Scots and silver coins were issued in the names of Henry and Mary. Custom and practice at the time should have meant that Henry would take precedence over his wife but being proclaimed King Henry was not the same thing as the granting of the crown matrimonial and this would speedily become a source of friction between the newlyweds. Mary soon discovered, if she did not know it already, that her nineteen-year-old husband was every bit as immature as Melville had suggested to Elizabeth. Darnley’s handsome face could not long conceal his lack of confidence and experience. His was a turbulent and, upon occasion, vicious heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Downfall
‘Oh Madam! I should neither perform the office of a faithful cousin nor an affectionate friend if I studied more to please your ears than to preserve your honour. Therefore I will not conceal from you that people for the most part are saying that you will look through your fingers at this deed instead of avenging it.’
Elizabeth I to Mary Queen of Scots, 24 February 1567
‘If you have not pity on me now, I may say with reason that it is all over with my son, my country and myself.’
Mary Queen of Scots to her uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, 21 June 1568
ELIZABETH’S IMMEDIATE REACTION to the marriage of her two distant cousins was to confine the countess of Lennox in the Tower of London. Darnley’s brother, Charles, was left in Yorkshire without either of his parents, although supported by loyal servants. His brother’s triumph had been dearly bought for this boy of ten. Margaret was not, however, cowed into silence or inaction by her incarceration, the second in a period of four years. From the Tower she maintained contact with the French and Spanish ambassadors and was in regular correspondence with her husband, sending messages to him via the earl of Bedford, who was frequently used by Elizabeth as her senior representative on diplomatic missions to Scotland at this time. If, in retrospect, it seems astonishing that Margaret should have been able to get away with all this, it should be remembered that being held in the Tower, especially if you were a noblewoman, did not mean confinement in some dank dungeon on a diet of bread and water. It certainly entailed loss of liberty but for someone as resourceful and determined as Margaret Lennox it was more of an inconvenience than a disaster. Long accustomed to running her own network of contacts and spies, she would not be stopped so easily.
The English Privy Council, now faced with the full implications of their approval of the queen’s ill-judged decision to let Darnley go to Scotland, pondered a more aggressive response. Based on Cecil’s mistaken belief that Mary was losing the support of her subjects, they discussed the possibility of removing the Scottish queen from her throne through direct invasion. In September 1565 plans for war were drawn up but they came to nothing.1 Instead, a wait-and-see policy was followed, perhaps because there was, in truth, no other viable alternative. But this was a period of embarrassment and anxiety for the English queen and her advisers.
So Mary had nothing immediately to fear from London. The response in Scotland, however, proved much more of a problem. Elevating the Lennoxes offended key members of the nobility and led to a split within her own family that became irreparable. For now the earl of Moray, who had left the court in May, refusing to give his consent to the wedding, became the focus of armed opposition to the queen and her new husband. Though it is far too simplistic to say that the Darnley marriage was the cause of Mary’s downfall, its impact on her relations with her half-brother is undeniable and the rift with Moray would become permanent, despite an apparent reconciliation the following year. Yet in the early autumn of 1565, as he tried to spearhead a rebellion against his sister, hoping for English support (which did not come) and initially attracting the disgruntled Hamiltons to his cause, not even his acknowledged role as the chief aristocratic defender of Protestantism in Scotland could unite the Protestant nobility to his cause. His attempt at a coordinated uprising was met head on by a determined queen who was able to outmanoeuvre him, both politically and militarily. While the forces of the queen and Moray pursued each other sporadically, without ever actually clashing, Mary was able to depict her brother and his associates as greedy, unpatriotic, power-hungry rebels, men who were attempting to subvert the established order of things with false claims about threats to the Protestant religion: ‘For what other is this,’ she demanded, reprising her argument with John Knox, ‘but to dissolve the whole policy and in a manner to invert the very order of nature to make the prince obey and the subjects to command.’2
Moray’s rebellion, subsequently labelled the Chaseabout Raid because of its almost farcical nature, did not seem amusing to Mary at the time and there is a sense in her correspondence that her resentment of her brother’s role in Scottish politics had been growing. She had heaped honours and money on him and this was how he showed his gratitude. In a letter to P
aul de Foix, the French ambassador at Elizabeth’s court, she laid out the background to her quarrel with Moray. ‘You must understand’, she wrote, ‘that when the said earl of Moray perceived that I wished to marry the son of the earl of Lennox, he came and told me that, since I had so resolved, he would contrive so well that all the nobility and rest of my subjects should approve of it, provided that he might manage the business himself alone and that my said subjects should know that he was the leader in it.’ But this approach (which may well have seemed too controlling to Mary in itself) was to come at a price the queen was not prepared to pay, namely, the necessity of banishing the Roman Catholic religion from Scotland. Mary was willing to reiterate her proclamation made soon after she returned to Scotland, safeguarding Protestantism as the state religion of Scotland and to guarantee liberty of conscience. She even announced that she would listen to Protestant preaching. But she would have her marriage to Darnley on her own terms, not Moray’s. ‘It appeared to me,’ she told de Foix, ‘very singular that a subject, upon whom I had bestowed so much honour and wealth, should compel me by his underhand dealing, to undertake nothing except through the medium of him, if I wished to marry.’3
Moray then put about rumours that the Lennoxes wished to kill him. He might genuinely have believed this, of course, and it must be the case that both the earl of Lennox and his son would have welcomed Moray’s demise, but Moray refused to supply proof and ignored repeated summons from his sister to come to court. In August 1565 Moray was ‘put to the horn’, a traditional process whereby rebels were publicly proclaimed by three blasts of the instrument. By early October he had sought asylum in London – the most that Elizabeth was prepared to offer – and was given a dressing down by the English queen, more for form’s sake than out of genuine conviction. Elizabeth’s advisers, and perhaps even the monarch herself, were sorry that he had not succeeded.
Mary had crushed her rebels and shown herself skilful in using patronage as a means of dividing her enemies. She had lost Moray but, for the time being, retained Maitland and Morton, whose support had been secured through a deal that saw the countess of Lennox withdraw her claim to the Douglas lands in Morton’s favour. The Scottish queen’s marriage to Darnley was dynastically sound, though it had compromised her relationship with England. But that relationship had, in reality, been on the downward path for some years and she was weary of Elizabeth’s delays and lies. No doubt she hoped to deal with England and her claim to its throne from a position of strength following her assertion of her own decision-making powers and the reinforcement of her rule in Scotland. Alas, such hopes were fading rapidly. Even as her brother knelt before Elizabeth to be chastised in London, the Darnley marriage was falling apart.
The reasons for this lay in Henry Stewart’s character and upbringing. He was a very young nineteen-year-old, immature in outlook and, though well educated, hopelessly indulged by his adoring parents, who put him on a pedestal and encouraged him to think that his birth in itself entitled him to the thrones of the two kingdoms of Britain. Both the Lennoxes, but particularly Margaret, were blind to his failings. They simply could not see that they had raised a vain and shallow youth who had all the outward trappings of regality – the good looks, the height, the carefully acquired manners of the courtier, learned in both England and France – but none of the substance. Darnley was self-absorbed, easily bored and wilful. On top of this, as time was to show, he possessed a decidedly sadistic streak. Some of his behaviour may be attributable to the likelihood that he was already ill with syphilis, a complaint that he had picked up during his time in France.
It has been suggested that Mary was already aware of his failings (but not, presumably, the fact that he was diseased, with its potential dangers for her own often precarious health and any children she and Henry might produce) before the marriage ceremony. Despite this, she decided to go ahead. By July 1565 she was running out of options in the choice of a husband and the dynastic imperative was too strong to be resisted. Nor was Darnley entirely to blame for the disasters that overtook him and his wife. In a more stable environment and with appropriate training and encouragement, he might have grown into a useful and fulfilled consort but circumstances and time were not on his side. He knew nothing of Scotland and failed to appreciate that he could easily be manipulated by resentful or ambitious men who saw his frustration with his role and realized how his wounded pride could be used to their advantage. Darnley’s demand that he be given the crown matrimonial and thereby enjoy, in practice, superiority in ruling Scotland over Mary, was firmly resisted by the queen. She would not promote him to power because she did not trust his judgement or his intentions. And in this, as in her handling of Scottish affairs before her marriage, Mary proved her astuteness. It is true that her first husband, Francis II of France, had been given the crown matrimonial but that was in a different time, when Scotland was a client state of France and the real power lay with her father-in-law, Henry II.
It did not take Henry Stewart long to grasp that, for at least the foreseeable future, he was only going to be an appendage, the queen’s husband rather than a power-wielding King of Scots. By November 1565 there were reports of rows between the royal pair. Mary was a conscientious queen and took the business of government seriously. This meant that she could not be constantly at her husband’s side, as he seemed to expect, and the more he complained and became insolent, the less she was inclined to humour him. Neglected and angry, Darnley took to drink, which only added to the concerns of many that he was entirely unfit to share the Scottish throne. Two further circumstances added to Darnley’s woes. During the autumn of 1565 his father, the earl of Lennox, dismayed by the realization that the marriage had run into serious trouble so soon and unable to exert any positive influence over the disgruntled young man, felt it best to leave court. He retired to his estates near Glasgow and the rift between father and son was never fully healed. This increased Darnley’s sense of isolation, and his feeling of being utterly irrelevant was further fuelled by the knowledge that Mary was pregnant. Darnley, believing that the birth of an heir would deprive him of the Scottish throne should Mary die, was a most unhappy father-to-be. The queen had conceived in September. By November her marital difficulties were well known and in December she removed from circulation the silver coin with the heads of Darnley and herself on it. And as the king’s grievances grew, he believed he knew where to apportion blame; the fault lay in the queen’s household and with one individual in particular – Mary’s secretary for her French correspondence, the Savoyard, David Riccio.
After the Chaseabout Raid and the flight of Moray and his fellow conspirators to England, Mary had used a policy of conciliation and patronage towards those of the nobility who remained loyal to her. This approach was an essential part of her personal rule in Scotland and generally served her well. It demonstrated a grasp of political and social complexities in her realm that is at odds with the view of an incompetent queen. But she also consulted with members of her household and this led to tensions with the wider Scottish polity that threatened to get out of control if not carefully managed. The nobility as a class believed that the monarch should take counsel from them, not from low-born, upstart foreigners. Riccio was not the sort of man that they respected and he was believed to have the ear of the queen. Certainly she does seem to have enjoyed the company of this erstwhile musician, who had come to Scotland on the strength of his success as a singer at the court of the duke of Savoy. Mary was sufficiently impressed to hire him as a bass to make up a quartet who sang regularly for her. Thereafter, his rise was swift. By early 1562 he was a gentleman of the queen’s privy chamber and at the end of 1564 he became her French secretary when she fell out with the previous holder of the post.
Riccio was probably in his early thirties and his general appearance did not match the beauty of his voice. Small of stature and unprepossessing, he made up for his ugliness by wearing very expensive clothes. Now frequently in the queen’s company, this proxim
ity seems to have gone to his head as much as it annoyed Darnley and offended courtiers who did not want to go to ‘Seigneur Davie’ for favours. Upset as Mary undoubtedly was by the behaviour of her husband, she was unwise to allow Riccio as much latitude as she did. His arrogance was a match for her husband’s, a conflict that did not bode well for the future.
The relationship between the two men had not always been so acrimonious. Some have even suggested that they were secret lovers when Darnley first came to Mary’s court but there is no real evidence that either man was homosexual. It was common for men – and women – to share beds in the sixteenth century. Randolph had once noted with some displeasure that he had been obliged to share a bed with Maitland during one of Mary’s progresses in northern Scotland, when accommodation was scarce. Such was not the case, presumably, at Holyrood when Darnley first arrived from England and Riccio ingratiated himself with the young newcomer. While it is tempting to interpret Darnley’s growing hatred of Riccio as the ire of a jilted lover, it seems more likely that the king, like many others, quickly came to despise Riccio’s pretensions and the fact that he never seemed to leave the queen’s side, staying up late in the night with her playing cards and generally getting under everyone else’s skin by ostentatious displays of his newly acquired wealth.
Nevertheless, too much has been made of Riccio’s role in the events of March 1566. The little Italian, overly impressed by his own importance, certainly failed to recognize his peril and put too much faith in the queen’s power. This left him dangerously exposed. There were few, apart from Mary, ready to defend him. But what happened on the night of 9 March should be seen in a wider context. It has been called an attempted putsch and was intended as an assault on the queen and her methods of government. Mary had tried to set her own stamp on the administration of Scotland by choosing conservative Protestants as advisers and increasing the number of Catholics on the council. She also announced that in the parliament called for March 1566, she would introduce legislation to legalize the Mass. This caused great alarm among more extreme Protestants.
