by Linda Porter
Yet there was a good measure of self-interest on the part of the conspirators and, in this respect, the timing was crucial. For the other major piece of legislation to be enacted was the permanent forfeiture of the earl of Moray and his associates in the Chaseabout Raid. This combination of an apparent attempt to restore Catholicism by a newly confident queen, who increasingly ignored her traditional advisers from the upper echelons of the nobility, while at the same time ruining prominent upholders of the Protestant religion, was too much to be borne. Maitland, Lennox and the earl of Morton, to whom Darnley’s mother had handed over her claim to the Douglas inheritance in return for his support for her son’s marriage to the queen, came together to put an end to Mary’s plans. The queen, perhaps distracted by the discomforts of pregnancy and troubled by the collapse of her marriage, failed to read the warning signs. In particular, she totally misjudged the jealousy and viciousness of which her husband was capable. And Darnley’s support would be key to the successful outcome of the plot that certainly meant to control the queen and possibly remove her altogether.
So was forged an alliance between the exiled rebels (Moray, the earls of Glencairn, Argyll and Rothes, and Lords Ochiltree and Boyd) and the disgruntled earl of Morton, his illegitimate half-brother, George Douglas, and Lords Ruthven and Lindsay. Also party to the plot were Maitland of Lethington, in theory still part of Mary’s administration but a man who now saw his personal influence with the queen seriously diminished, and the earl of Lennox, who despite his difficult relations with his son in the autumn of 1565 still loved him and wished to see Henry granted the crown matrimonial. The conspirators, who began plotting seriously in February 1566, needed to draw the young king into their web. However much they may have disliked him, his many failings meant that he could easily be encouraged to play along and be used as a figurehead, his vanity satisfied by the promises made to him. So Darnley signed a bond with those who sought to challenge his wife, promising to restore them and defend Protestantism in Scotland in return for being granted the crown matrimonial. At the time, the bond must have seemed to hold the promise of a much more glorious future for Henry Stewart. Real power, or so he thought, beckoned and the demons of his marriage, along with his growing conviction (encouraged, of course, by Maitland and the conspirators) that he was being cuckolded by a base-born foreigner, would be exorcized by the dagger he intended to thrust into Riccio’s body. It was Darnley himself who suggested that the assassination should be carried out in Mary’s presence. He could easily persuade himself that the child Mary was carrying was not his at all. His allies may not have had the visceral hatred of Riccio that characterized Henry’s attitude to the plot but they were in agreement that only a dramatic gesture would intimidate the queen and her supporters into submission. Riccio was the obvious sacrifice. It was easier to justify the violent removal of an unhealthy influence on their monarch than it was to admit that they were largely motivated by concern for their own positions and livelihoods. The bill of forfeiture against them was due to be passed on 12 March and the conspirators now needed to move fast.
On the evening of 9 March, Mary was at supper in her private apartments in the James V Tower at the palace of Holyrood, in the company of her half-sister, Lady Jean Stewart, countess of Argyll, and her half-brother, Lord Robert Stewart. Clearly Mary was still close to these two siblings, who had shown her much support since her return. She also had much in common with her feisty and quick-witted sister, whose own marriage had run into insoluble difficulties. A few other close friends, including the master of her horse, Arthur Erskine, and the ubiquitous Riccio were also in attendance. The small supper room adjoining Mary’s bedchamber, in which the group was dining, offered an intimate space for a group of friends to chat over a meal but its very restrictiveness also made it a place of deadly peril if ill-intentioned people entered. There could be no escape.
When Darnley suddenly appeared, uninvited, to join the guests at Mary’s table, the queen did not, at first, realize what might be about to follow, though she had already been warned of plots against her. But the king had already led Ruthven and a servant through his own apartments and left them to climb the secret stairway into Mary’s bedchamber while he went on ahead to distract attention. So when Ruthven, clad in full armour under his nightgown and ghastly of appearance (he was dying of liver and kidney disease and had only two months to live) burst into the queen’s presence and demanded that ‘yonder man Davie come forth of your presence’, Mary, alarmed, was instantly suspicious of her husband but he denied all knowledge of what was happening. Ruthven continued to lecture Mary on her current failings, all of which he attributed to Riccio: ‘He hath offended your honour, which I dare not be so bold to speak of. As to the king your husband’s honour, he hath hindered him of the crown matrimonial, which your Grace promised him … And as to the nobility, he hath caused your majesty to banish a great part of them, and to forfeit them at this present Parliament.’4 This succinct rehearsal of the plotters’ grievances laid all at the feet of David Riccio but provoked in Mary only the curtly dismissive order that Ruthven should leave her presence under pain of treason. If real cause of offence could be found against her servant, she would ensure that he was dealt with by parliament.
Such a promise was never going to be good enough for the conspirators. As Riccio clung to the queen’s skirts in terror and Mary’s guests and the servants tried to grab hold of Ruthven, there was a scuffle as Morton and his cronies burst into the little room. Only the presence of mind of the countess of Argyll, who rescued a candelabra knocked over in the fracas, prevented fire taking hold of the tapestries. While a pistol was held to Mary’s side, Riccio was dragged from the room and stabbed to death in the outer chamber. By the queen’s own account his body had fifty-six stab wounds. He had paid a terrible price for his pretensions, and his failure to appreciate the very real danger that faced him in the weeks preceding his death shows that both he and Mary were out of touch with key developments in Scottish politics.
If Mary had perhaps been overconfident, she was now in fear for her life. Although she did not actually witness the death of her servant, she heard his screams and the terror that these bloodthirsty assassins might turn their daggers on her was very real. She had been restrained by Darnley, who had, when the time came, been too overwrought or too scared to join in the assault on the hapless Riccio. But the conspirators were unwilling to let him remain a mere spectator to the murder of the man they had encouraged him to believe was sleeping with his wife and, grabbing his dagger, they plunged it, as the coup de grâce, into Riccio’s twitching body and left it there as a public witness of his part in the plot.
Mary was six months pregnant and in mortal terror. Whether her husband and father-in-law had ever harboured hopes that such a daring and brutal act would cause her to miscarry or even kill her is open to question. They undoubtedly had a claim to the throne in such circumstances but, by law, Mary’s heir at the time was Châtelherault, not the Lennox Stewarts. A civil war might have followed with no automatic assurance of success. It seems more likely that the Lennox family’s priority was to secure the crown matrimonial and for that they needed Mary alive, not dead. But that such violence should be openly carried out in the queen’s presence was an affront even in a troubled kingdom like Scotland. Confined to the palace by Darnley, who answered the concerns of the provost of Edinburgh for the queen’s safety by parading his wife in front of a window, Mary had to recover her equilibrium as quickly as she could if she was to safeguard her own position and that of her unborn child.
But though Darnley had at least kept part of the pact with Morton and the others by dissolving the parliament and thus ensuring that Moray and the exiles were not forfeited, he completely underestimated his wife. Mary, perhaps sensing his indecision and noting his refusal to get physically involved in the murder of Riccio, swiftly realized that the most effective way for her to capitalize on her husband’s weakness was to remove him from the influence of the plotte
rs. This involved play-acting (she pretended to be having a miscarriage in order to buy time and allow her gentlewomen, who could carry messages to her supporters, access to her that had been severely restricted), making up to Henry and finally spelling out to him that he stood to lose as much by her detention as she did. It also required a reconciliation, at least superficially, with her brother, the earl of Moray, who had been waiting at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England for word of the plot’s success. He arrived back in Edinburgh on the evening of 10 March, barely twenty-four hours after Riccio’s murder. Mary pardoned the Chaseabout rebels and promised to pardon the perpetrators of this most recent outrage as well. Then, with promises of support from the earls of Huntly and Bothwell, two key nobles who were opposed to her brother Moray and to Morton, Mary made a daring night-time escape from Holyrood, despite the restrictions of her pregnancy, and rode with Henry to Dunbar, an impressively fortified castle on the south-east coast of Scotland. From there, she intended to face down this new set of rebels, re-establish her hold on Scotland and prepare for the birth of the child that she believed would secure her position once and for all.
* * *
FROM DUNBAR, as she and her weak-willed, changeable husband waited for her two principal supporters, the earls of Bothwell and Huntly, to sweep her back into power in Edinburgh, Mary wrote to Elizabeth. She did not mince words:
Did we not know the power of the evil and wrongous report made to you by our rebels, we could not think nor almost bear with the strange devised letter which we have lately received of you … marvelling greatly how ye can be so inclined rather to believe and credit the false speaking of such unworthy to be called subjects, than us, who are of your own blood, and who also never thought nor made occasion to use such rigour and menacing of us as ye do … Whereas ye write to us that we in our former letters blamed them that kept not promises, but think one thing and do another, would ye should remember the same … Last of all, some of our subjects and Council have manifestly shown what men they are – as first have taken our house, slain our most special servant in our own presence, and thereafter held our proper person captive treasonably, whereby we were constrained to escape straightly about midnight out of our palace of Holyroodhouse, to the place where we are for the present, in the greatest danger, fear of our lives and evil estate that ever princes on earth stood in.
She went on to warn Elizabeth against offering succour or aid to the rebels, saying she would look for help elsewhere if the English queen continued in this course, and closed by regretting that she had not written this letter in her own hand, adding ‘but of truth we are so tired and evil at ease, through riding twenty miles in five hours of the night, and the frequent sickness and evil disposition, by the occasion of our child, that we could not.’5
Elizabeth would not have been pleased by Mary’s tone, which was prompted by a criticism in an earlier letter she had sent to the Queen of Scots. But there were other reasons for Elizabeth’s displeasure, beyond the very real quandary of what to do with Morton and Ruthven when they fled to England. Her interference in the French religious wars had not endeared her to Catholic Europe and there were signs of a new Catholic League being formed that might favour Mary’s claim to the English throne. She was also concerned about the support being given by the Scots to the rebellion of Shane O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, in Ireland. For Elizabeth was not without rebels in her own dominions, though they were not so near to her person as Mary’s were in Scotland, nor so numerous. Yet a Catholic revival, spearheaded by Philip II of Spain and encouraged by a revived papacy under Pope Pius V at the Council of Trent, could well give encouragement to Elizabeth’s subjects in northern England, where Catholicism remained a significant force and Mary Stewart an attractive alternative as queen of England.
This spat between the two queens was soon glossed over. Elizabeth sent Sir Robert Melville, brother of the Scottish ambassador, to reassure her cousin. This caused Mary to change her tune completely, at least in the correspondence she now addressed to Elizabeth, who, Mary said, had ‘shown that the magnanimity and good nature of your predecessors surpass every other passion in you and thus placed me under such an obligation that I do not know how I shall ever repay it, unless it be by placing myself and all my power at your disposal, could these be of service to you.’ There is something almost tongue-in-cheek about these sentiments. The ‘magnanimity and good nature’ of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, towards Scotland did not bear much scrutiny and the best service Mary could have done Elizabeth would surely have been to go quiet about her place in the English succession. As was her custom, the English queen wavered about what to do with the earl of Morton. The French had asked her to return him to Scotland but though Elizabeth first issued vague instructions that the earl and his associates should absent themselves from England in some unnamed foreign country, she never, in fact, expelled them and Morton would return to Scotland by the end of 1566. Elizabeth had put on a fine show for Guzman de Silva, the Spanish representative in London, when they discussed Mary’s misfortunes and the dastardly murder of Riccio. With a portrait of her Scottish cousin hanging from a gold belt around her waist, she told him that ‘she, herself, in her [Mary’s] place would have taken her husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it, but she did not want your majesty to think she would do this to the archduke if he came.’6 The long-running discussions about a marriage between the English queen and Philip’s nephew were turned to witty effect by Elizabeth in this exchange. Whether she would, indeed, have stabbed Darnley had she been in Mary’s shoes on the night of 9 March 1566, is an interesting question.
By early April, Mary was back in Edinburgh and concentrating her thoughts firmly on the immediate future. As she prepared for her lying-in, she instructed Mary Livingston to draw up her will. This sounds morbid to a modern ear but was common practice for well-off expectant mothers in the sixteenth century. Childbirth was a dangerous experience and many who came through the delivery successfully succumbed to puerperal fever in its aftermath. The most notable lady of high degree to suffer this fate was Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, whose final marriage to Sir Thomas Seymour ended in her death after giving birth to a daughter in 1548. No copy of the will Mary made at this time survives but an inventory of her jewellery, which lists bequests, does. Of the 253 pieces, intended for over sixty recipients, the largest number went to Henry, her husband, and her Guise relatives received as many as the faithful four Marys, though the bequests intended for the Guises were of higher value. To her parents-in-law she left three diamond rings. None of these gifts was to be made, she stipulated, if the child was living. And in the end, her fears proved unfounded. Both she and her son survived.
Prince James (later King James VI of Scotland and I of England) was born in the secure fortress of Edinburgh Castle at mid-morning on Saturday, 19 June 1566. The labour was long and difficult and throughout Mary was supported entirely by women: her midwife, Margaret Houston, and various aristocratic ladies headed by the countess of Atholl. The earl of Mar, who would become the prince’s guardian the following year, fired the castle guns and the citizens lit the customary bonfires of rejoicing. The same day, Henry, the king, wrote ‘in great haste’ to his wife’s uncle, the cardinal of Lorraine, to give him the news. ‘The Queen, my wife, has just been delivered of a son, which circumstance, I am sure, will not cause you less joy than ourselves.’ Both he and Mary wrote to young Charles IX of France asking him to stand as one of the child’s godparents. The child’s other godfather was the duke of Savoy. Elizabeth had already agreed to act as godmother. She gave considerable thought to her choice of proxy and eventually settled on the queen’s sister, the countess of Argyll. Elizabeth also provided a magnificent christening gift – a gold font worth over £1,000 – though with typical tardiness, it arrived too late for the ceremony itself. The English queen pointed out it could always be used for further offspring. Her oft-quoted reaction to the news of the Scottish heir was that Mary was delivered of a fair son whi
le she, Elizabeth, was ‘barren stock’.
Elizabeth sent Sir Henry Killigrew, an experienced diplomat and a man close to both the earl of Leicester and William Cecil (who would later become his brother-in-law), to offer congratulations and, perhaps of even greater importance for her own peace of mind, to see if he could detach the earl of Argyll from his support for Shane O’Neill. Killigrew could not see the Queen of Scots immediately; he was told he ‘should have audience as soon as she might have any ease of the pain in her breasts.’ Following the custom of the day, Mary did not contemplate feeding the prince herself. Her breasts would have been tightly bound to stop the production of milk and it is no wonder that she was still, on 23 June, in considerable discomfort. Killigrew was invited to supper with the leading nobles – Moray, Argyll, Mar, Huntly and Crawford – but though ‘the birth has bred much joy here – the Queen is in a good state for a woman in her case, and the prince is a very goodly child’, he also noted ominous signs: ‘I find here an uncertain and disquiet sort of men – especially the nobility divided in factions, of which I will write more again. Argyll, Moray, Mar and Atholl … be linked together and Huntly and Bothwell with their friends on the other side.’ Killigrew’s astuteness cut to the heart of growing difficulties for Mary. How could she keep above these factions and what impact would they have on her ability to rule effectively?
