15

A Marriage in Trouble

Thanks to a stroke of luck in the archives, we know exactly what Mary was thinking and what drove her on to engage the rebel Lords in a military showdown after Bothwell’s return from exile. In a series of interviews at Holyroodhouse, she poured out her heart to Castelnau, the special ambassador whom Catherine de Medici and Charles IX had sent to Scotland. He first saw Mary and Darnley in their presence chamber and then privately in the palace garden, and wrote down everything they said in a ‘Discourse’ sent to Charles, which is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

After Castelnau had presented his diplomatic credentials and congratulated the King and Queen on their marriage, Mary declared her intention to crush the rebels. They had abandoned their lawful allegiance in the name of religion and wished to depose her. For this reason, her case touched every other ruler, since if her rebels were allowed to behave in this way, and seek the collusion of England in their crimes, there could be no stability or order in the world.

Mary was unflinching in her convictions. Moray and his allies were not just rebels with political grievances or an axe to grind, they were outright ‘republicans’ – she used the word herself – set on destroying the ‘ancient monarchy’. The rebels would depose and kill her and Darnley, and then create a ‘republic’ in which sovereignty was vested in the nobles. They had already deposed her mother. She was next on the list. Her view of republicanism was an early prototype of ‘domino’ theory. Once Scotland had fallen to the rebels, the subversion would spread to England, to the Netherlands, and to France.

As she talked, the tears welled from her eyes. She spoke with deep feeling, her outlook shaped by her memory of the events of 1559–60, when the Lords of the Congregation had deposed her mother and Elizabeth legitimized the government of the rebels by making the treaty of Edinburgh.

Mary reminded Castelnau of the long tradition of the ‘auld alliance’ and of her own Guise and Valois connections. She then demanded military reinforcements. ‘All my hope is in France,’ she said. Castelnau was appalled, because his charge was to persuade her to settle with Moray. A new French intervention could spark a protracted civil war that might spread to the whole of the British Isles. He urged Mary to compromise, but she flatly refused. ‘It is incompatible with my honour and with the safety of my person and that of the King my husband, because these rebellious subjects of their bad faith and evil will have decided to kill us both.’

Mary had redefined the issues. This struggle was no longer about her marriage, but had taken on an ideological dimension. She saw a clear antithesis between monarchy and republicanism, between divine-right rule by an anointed Queen and anarchy, between French and English influence in Scotland. She refused to listen to Castelnau’s pleas that ‘utility’, ‘prudence’, and ‘expediency’ obliged her to make concessions. Her rebels must be punished as a point of principle, otherwise it would not just be her own authority, but the institution of monarchy itself that would be undermined. Castelnau noted that Darnley, whose French was fluent, was even more insistent in his defence of the ideal of monarchy than Mary. The discussion lasted for four hours and ended up going round in circles.

Next day, Castelnau was summoned to the palace garden where Mary strolled with Darnley among the ornamental borders and fruit trees planted by her mother. She looked radiant and relaxed, and when Castelnau joined them, she turned all her charm on him, saying that one day she would ask her Council to consider everything he had suggested. Meanwhile, the time for talking was over and she intended to fight.

When Castelnau asked if she would risk everything in a battle, Mary did not flinch. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Because to play for time is no longer to be a Queen.’ He tried to argue that the amity with England was essential both for Mary’s authority in Scotland and to secure her claim to the English succession. Mary did not dispute this. ‘Yes,’ she said. She was willing to reinstate the amity and offer Elizabeth her affection and goodwill, ‘but only when she declares me to be her successor if she dies without children’.

Castelnau sensed a change in Mary. On his last visit, he had been struck by her sense of ‘grandeur’. His comment then was that she ‘had as big and restless a spirit as her uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine’. This time, it was not so much that she was proud or overconfident. She had become defiant, tending to dramatize her problems and generalize from them. Moray’s revolt, an uprising of a serious but not unfamiliar type in the age of the Wars of Religion, posed in her mind a general threat to European monarchy and so required some form of extraordinary aid. Mary saw Moray as a republican revolutionary, and was unable to comprehend Castelnau’s inability to agree with her.

Writing privately to Paul de Foix, the resident French ambassador in London, Castelnau said he found Mary ‘intractable’. Her courage and wilfulness were such that she had adopted an ‘all or nothing’ approach. She equated Protestantism with political revolution and would prefer to abandon her throne rather than treat with Moray.

Castelnau overstated the case. The changes in Mary were straws in the wind rather than an outright shift in her policy. A swing towards Catholicism was in the offing, but it had not yet begun and there is a better explanation for its appearance. Darnley, as Castelnau also observed, was throwing his weight about. He saw himself as King of Scotland with his own ideas and ‘enterprise’. He wished to visit France to impress Charles IX with his Catholic credentials. He was eager to be integrated into the European dynastic system and awarded the Order of St Michael, the highest badge of honour in France, which he asked Castelnau to obtain for him. He was engaged in a policy of courting the Catholic powers while attempting to persuade Mary to outlaw the Protestants after Moray’s revolt.

Darnley was not a devout Catholic. He was certainly not a Protestant, despite his well-timed visits to Knox’s sermons, but instead was cynically exploiting religion for his own political purposes – chiefly as a way of drawing attention to himself. His efforts to secure European influence and recognition were really just another aspect of his narcissism.

His ambition was truly overweening. Mary had allowed him to be styled King to appease his vanity. She was prepared to allow him to take an equal share in governing Scotland, but he expected her to cede all her power as a reigning Queen to him. He really believed that their marriage had made her his subordinate. He was now the King of Scots, and his primitive view of the sexual act led him to think that his authority was most clearly asserted in bed, where he might do what he liked when he liked. The fact that Mary was at first submissive in the bedroom was merely because she badly wanted a son and heir.

Now Darnley quizzed Castelnau about the recent meeting of the ruling families of France and Spain at Bayonne. In a spectacular gathering of the two courts in May and June 1565, Catherine de Medici had been reunited with her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, Mary’s childhood friend in Henry II’s nursery and for some years Queen of Spain. The meeting was attended by Charles IX and the Duke of Alba, one of Philip II’s trusted advisers; its purpose was to restore the close family links established by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. In reality, the meeting was a flop, because Philip never bothered to turn up. All over Europe, however, the Protestants were talking about the event. They feared that, in secret session, a Catholic League had been organized to crush them. It was this that so obviously interested Darnley.

He had been plotting to alter Scotland’s religion again from the day of his marriage. His confidants were Sir James Balfour, David Rizzio, John Lesley, David Chalmers, and Francis Yaxley: an ill-assorted but highly intriguing quintet.

Balfour was Darnley’s right-hand man. An unscrupulous lawyer who had attended Castelnau’s second interview in the garden at Holyrood, he had been an accessory to the plot to murder Cardinal Beaton all those years ago. He had been captured by the French at St Andrews Castle and rowed in the galleys with John Knox. Now a judge in the Court of Session in Edinburgh, he was notoriously unprincipled. His career was all that mattered to him, and he switched sides with bewildering rapidity.

Rizzio, Mary’s new confidential secretary, was already noted as Darnley’s ‘only governor’ and the man who ‘works all’ in his counsels. They were found in bed together, which in view of Darnley’s swing towards Catholicism led inevitably to the accusation that Rizzio was a papal spy.

Lesley and Chalmers were leading Catholic lawyers. Lesley (later Bishop of Ross) was to become one of Mary’s most active and prolific defenders after her flight to England. His name was linked to Balfour’s soon after the Darnley marriage. Chalmers was connected to Balfour in the Court of Session, and both of them to Bothwell as former advocates in the Admiralty Court over which he presided as Lord Admiral.

Yaxley was an oddball. He was an Englishman and an ardent Catholic who had served Philip II and Mary Tudor and was a protégé of the Countess of Lennox. He arrived in Scotland shortly after Darnley’s marriage and proclaimed himself a Scot. Regarded by the Countess as a bridge between her son and the English Catholics, he quickly won Darnley’s trust. He was employed as a special agent and sent to Philip II to say that Mary lacked confidence in her French relations and so wished to commit herself and her country to Philip’s protection. Naturally it did not occur to Darnley to ask Mary’s permission first.

Yaxley was a menacing character: he had once been Cecil’s servant and knew the identities of his foreign agents; he also had diplomatic accreditation throughout Europe. He claimed to know many Catholics ‘of good power’ in England ready to declare themselves for Spain if Mary were to displace Elizabeth as Queen.

Darnley also dabbled alarmingly in Ireland, where Spain wanted to extend its influence. A vibrant trade existed between Spain and the south of Ireland, and the country was overwhelmingly Catholic. The Gaelic chiefs were in revolt, and many would be willing to consider Mary as Queen of Ireland in place of Elizabeth. Philip II was starting to wonder whether his policy towards the English Queen had become just a little too cordial. If so, Ireland was far more likely to be the back door into England than Scotland. If Darnley stirred up trouble there, it would be of even greater interest to Philip than Mary’s claim to the throne of England, which remained ineffective, if not almost entirely useless, without the Pope’s backing.

Yaxley’s mission to Spain was successful. He obtained letters from Philip to Darnley, but was shipwrecked and drowned in the North Sea on his return journey. His body was washed up on Holy Island along with his document case and a vast sum of money in crowns and ducats. The letters he was carrying were addressed to the ‘King of Scots’ alone: no mention was made of Mary, who was invisible in Darnley’s diplomacy. Although Darnley had been Mary’s husband for less than six months, he was flexing his muscles and attempting to make his name as one of Europe’s greatest Catholic Kings.

At Christmas 1565, Darnley showed just how Catholic he meant to be. He attended Midnight Mass and then Matins, followed by High Mass, where he prayed ‘devotedly upon his knees’. No longer did he visit Knox’s sermons at St Giles Kirk, talking instead of restoring the mass in Scotland and granting ‘liberty of conscience’ to the Catholics at the next Parliament, due to assemble in the spring to attaint Moray and his allies.

Darnley was creating dangerous waves. His actions put in jeopardy the religious compromise that Mary had worked so shrewdly over the past four years to establish. She tried at first to distance herself from his campaign. Over Christmas, when he attended mass so conspicuously, she stayed up all night playing cards and went to bed at dawn, thereby missing the services. But he persisted, almost daring her to prove that she really was a true Catholic.

Darnley believed that as King he was above the law because, unlike Mary, he had no explicit permission to worship privately as a Catholic in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood. It did not even occur to him to ask whether his actions were likely to be divisive, and he was so arrogant and insensitive, he gloried in what he took to be a crusade against the Protestants.

He planned to bring his campaign to its climax during the week of the Catholic festival of Candlemas in early February 1566. He was then to be invested with the Order of St Michael, which Castelnau had secured. He eagerly looked forward to the ceremony, which he regarded as a vote of confidence by the Catholic powers.

A grand delegation arrived in Edinburgh for the investiture. Charles IX’s ambassador was accompanied by another from Mary’s uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who brought an extraordinary letter from the Pope congratulating her and Darnley on the official restoration of Catholicism. Of course, nothing of the sort had yet been attempted, and we know from a series of documents in the archives at Simancas that the Pope’s letter was the result of Yaxley’s visit to Spain, where Darnley had been touted as the man who would overturn the Scottish Reformation.

The day before his investiture, Darnley summoned as many of the Scottish Lords as he could find and invited them to attend mass. Only the Catholics accepted. The Protestants, and in particular Bothwell and Huntly, refused. Darnley lost his temper. He stalked out of the ground-floor room, locking the door and threatening to throw away the key. Mary came downstairs from her apartments to see why her husband had been shouting. Anxious to avoid a scene, she did her best to pacify Darnley, who was becoming distressingly abusive. She even took Bothwell and Huntly, her most loyal supporters, by the hand and tried to lead them to mass. Still they refused. Darnley then said loudly that he intended to restore high mass at St Giles Kirk in Edinburgh, an idea that would surely have driven Knox to apoplexy if he had heard about it.

Mary had finally become enmeshed. Although Darnley had championed the Catholic cause only because he felt it gave him international prestige, he had pricked her conscience. In effect, he had capitalized on her own devout Catholicism to plant in her mind the idea that she had failed her Church and fellow Catholics by accepting a religious compromise that had denied them the right of public worship, which must have rankled when her husband was flaunting his faux Catholicism in front of so many distinguished foreign diplomats.

Could there have been other reasons why Mary was persuaded to veer towards Catholicism? The influence of her Guise family was surely one. When her uncle’s ambassador, still under a misapprehension about her policy, warmly congratulated her on restoring the Catholic faith to Scotland, she would have known in her heart that she had let down her family as well as her co-religionists.

The second reason is that she was five months pregnant. Whatever Darnley’s personal failings, he had quickly fathered a child. Castelnau had been the first to pick up the rumours. He noticed that Mary was draping herself in a mantle even when indoors. She stopped riding her horse and was seen travelling in a litter. She had been suffering from sickness and abdominal pains, which Randolph called a recurrence of ‘her old disease’, but was this time the initial stages of pregnancy. She kept to her chamber for five days and stayed in bed. Even Randolph then guessed that the rumours might be true. He quickly began taking a prurient interest in Mary’s menstrual cycle, bribing his contacts among her female bedchamber staff for up-to-date information.

At the high mass on Candlemas day, Mary and Darnley bore candles to the altar in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood accompanied by Lennox, Atholl, and a congregation of some three hundred more. Darnley had finally got his way. Mary even promised that ‘she will have the mass free for all men that will hear it’. It was a highly significant statement, instantly seized on by the Protestants and causing consternation. A week after the investiture, Darnley and his friends swaggered up the High Street in Edinburgh, boasting that they had overturned the Scottish Reformation at a stroke.

But Mary was not in thrall to Darnley. What Randolph did not yet realize was that her marriage was in trouble. ‘Jars’ or quarrels had first arisen between the newly weds over the rivalry between Lennox and Bothwell to command the royal army against Moray. Lennox afterwards claimed that everything had come to a head ‘about November’ 1565, when Mary had ‘suddenly altered’ in her affection for his son. She knew then that she was pregnant; and it must have occurred to her that she would not need to indulge her husband’s every whim for very much longer now that he had served his sexual function.

Things had worsened in December, when Mary pardoned Châtelherault and his family, the ancient enemies of the Lennoxes, for their part in Moray’s revolt. The Lennoxes were furious about the pardon. Darnley told her bluntly that, as her husband and superior, he forbade any further remissions. No one had ever talked to Mary like that and got away with it. Her reaction was predictable. She would not be dictated to by a man she had raised up from nothing.

Mary’s estrangement from Darnley was apparent at Christmas 1565, when there had been a series of spectacular rows. Although the quarrels were conducted in their private apartments, news of them soon leaked. Whereas, said Randolph, ‘a while [ago] there was nothing but “King and Queen, His Majesty and Hers”, now “the Queen’s husband” is the most common word’. Quite simply, Mary had decided to demote him. In her proclamation after her marriage, she had conceded a dual monarchy in which power was exercised ‘conjointly’. In state papers and on a recently minted issue of coinage, Darnley’s name had even taken precedence. Now this arrangement was cancelled. Where in official documents Darnley’s name had previously appeared first, it was now placed second; and where the legend on the coinage had read (in Latin) ‘Henry and Marie, by the Grace of God, King and Queen of Scotland’, it was altered to say ‘Marie and Henry … Queen and King …’ By a profound irony, a motto on the coinage had read: ‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ This, too, was expunged, replaced by a text from the Psalms, ‘Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered’, to celebrate Mary’s victory over Moray. At Darnley’s investiture ceremony at Candlemas, Mary even denied him the right to bear the royal arms. Three days later, Randolph advised Dudley, ‘I know now for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage: that she hateth him and all his kin.’

Darnley’s drunkenness had become a flashpoint. Sir William Drury, who was Marshal of Berwick and the Earl of Bedford’s deputy there, told how, when Mary had asked her husband to moderate his drinking at a private dinner party in Edinburgh, he had snarled back at her and she had left the table in tears.

As quickly as Mary had granted Darnley a royal title, she decided to strip him of it. She could not prevent him from signing his letters ‘Henry R’fn1 if he chose to do so, but she could deny him the ‘crown matrimonial’. Fortunately for her, that could only be granted in Parliament; and if the ‘crown matrimonial’ were to be withheld, then Darnley could never be crowned. He would enjoy no legal status as King, and could make no claim to the succession should Mary die childless.

Mary meant business, because when she refused Darnley the right to bear the royal arms, she made it clear to him that the ‘crown matrimonial’ would be denied too. So the Lennoxes decided to wrest it from her without her consent. When Randolph excitedly described the ‘mislikings’ between the royal couple in his reports to Cecil, he knew that the chief cause was Darnley’s ambition for the crown, ‘which she is loathe hastily to grant, but willing to keep somewhat in store, until she know how well he is worthy to enjoy such a sovereignty’.

Mary’s mood lightened in the week of Darnley’s investiture. Suddenly, she was happy again. It could not have been Charles IX’s ambassador who was the cause of her delight. He had strongly advised her to pardon Moray and the exiled Lords on condition they promised to live ‘like good subjects’, the last thing she wanted to hear. She had already said, with an uncharacteristic degree of vitriol for her, that she hoped Moray would die in exile.

The clue is provided by two dispatches from Randolph to Throckmorton newly discovered in the archives in Edinburgh and describing the background to the ceremony. One was written on 7 February and the other on the 10th, the same day as the investiture.

Mary, as Randolph sensationally reported, was preparing to renew her immediate Catholic claim to the English throne. The third and final reason for her shift towards Catholicism was her conviction that her supporters in England were ‘never so great’. Perhaps Yaxley had told her this? Or perhaps her uncle’s ambassador had recycled some information that Yaxley had put about while in Spain? Or again, maybe Cecil had all along been correct in his prediction that the ‘people of England’ – whether Protestants or Catholics – would flock to Mary’s cause if she married and produced an heir?

Mary’s pregnancy must have greatly reinforced her self-esteem. With Elizabeth still unmarried, it would have made her think that she could vindicate her claim one way or the other. Despite the fragile state of her relationship with Darnley, their union had been a triumphant success in a dynastic sense, which was all that royal marriages were then intended to be, and she could begin planning a new campaign to assert her rights in England.

A few days before the investiture ceremony, a sumptuous banquet was held in the great hall at Holyrood in honour of the visiting ambassadors. Catching sight of a portrait of Elizabeth that had no doubt been deliberately set in position for the purpose, Mary rose and declared in the full glare of publicity that ‘there was no other Queen of England but herself’.

This was a step change. Ever since the Pope had failed to endorse her dynastic claim at the time of Elizabeth’s accession in November 1558, Mary had reluctantly accepted that her only viable option was to secure recognition as the English Queen’s successor. But then the Pope had died, as also had his immediate successor. A new Pope, Pius V, had recently been elected. Almost his very first public act had been to write the letter to Mary that was delivered by her uncle’s ambassador at the request of Philip II after Yaxley’s mission to Spain.

Mary’s claim at the banquet that she was the rightful Queen of England must have caused a furore. Randolph predicted disaster, saying ‘this court is so divided that we look daily when things will grow to a new mischief’. Whereas three years ago Randolph had assured Cecil that Mary was ‘not so affectioned to her mass that she will leave a kingdom for it’, now he found her ‘bent to the overthrow of religion’. She would stop at nothing in her desire to restore Catholicism. All her efforts were directed to this end, and linked directly to her dynastic claim. Since her victory over Moray, she had never been more powerful. She would now, as Randolph feared, seek to further her success through ‘her most idolatrous mass’. He concluded, ‘I pray you burn this letter.’

All this made for a highly confusing situation. When Mary denied Darnley the use of the royal insignia at his investiture, and at the same time tried to lead Bothwell and Huntly by the hand to mass, a massive contradiction arose in her policy. She was unwilling to be bullied by her dissolute and conspiratorial husband, and yet she had become embroiled in his ‘enterprise’ to restore Catholicism – not (as he wished) to impress a putative Catholic League, but because, after Pius V’s election, she believed she could use Catholicism to achieve a final recognition of her dynastic claim.

Meanwhile, Darnley was furiously plotting against his wife. Randolph knew that there were ‘practices in hand’, contrived between Lennox and Darnley, ‘to come to the crown against her will’. The new session of Parliament was imminent. It had always been intended that it would begin on 12 March, when the leaders of Moray’s revolt (other than the pardoned Châtelherault) would be punished and their lands forfeited to the crown. The Scottish Lords had an overwhelming motive for wishing to disrupt, or preferably even cancel, the new session. If Parliament were to meet as planned, Moray and his allies would be stripped of their lands and titles. They also feared that, as the next stage of Mary’s agenda, the mass would be restored. A plot was inevitable, not least because opposition to Mary’s aims extended more widely. The Catholic Lords intended to join with the Protestants to resist the forfeiture of the rebels on the grounds that such action might become a precedent for noble forfeitures generally. They were not affected at the moment, but might well be in the future.

All this rebounded on Mary. When she had struck out on her own, marrying Darnley as a fait accompli and abandoning her policy of conciliation, she had triumphed. But with the exiled Lords, their allies, and the Lennoxes all plotting against her, the balance of the factions tilted back against her. Mary’s position reverted from almost impregnable strength to dangerous isolation. Warned of a plot by her ever loyal servant Sir James Melville, she dismissed his fears. ‘She had’, she said, ‘also some advertisements of the like bruits, but that our countrymen were well worthy.’ If this was indeed Mary’s response, her confidence was ill-advised.

The plot was shaped, according to one of its leading participants, ‘about the 10th day of February’, the very same day as the investiture. Darnley lay at its heart; but he was pointed in the right direction by Maitland, whom Mary had marginalized in favour of her new confidential secretary, David Rizzio, and who was determined to get Moray and his allies pardoned and recalled from their dishonourable exile as the prelude to his own rehabilitation.

To forward the plot, Lennox went deep into Argyllshire for a secret rendezvous with the Earl of Argyll. He made Argyll what he hoped would be an irresistible offer. He was to contact Moray and the exiled Lords in England, and if they would agree to grant Darnley the ‘crown matrimonial’ in the next Parliament, and so make him lawfully King of Scots, then Darnley would switch sides, recall the exiles home, pardon them, and forbid the confiscation of their estates. Finally, he would perform the ultimate U-turn and re-establish the religious status quo as it had existed at the time of Mary’s return from France. By this route, everyone would get what they wanted at Mary’s expense. Darnley would become King with full parliamentary sanction, Moray and his allies would be reinstated as if they had never rebelled, and the Protestant Reformation settlement would be restored.

The plot took off when Moray accepted these terms. Its logic was crude, if devastatingly effective. But there had to be a scapegoat, someone to blame for misleading Darnley and orchestrating the recent swing towards Catholicism. The ideal candidate was Rizzio, once Darnley’s lover, but who Maitland, always the supreme insinuator, had falsely informed Darnley was sleeping with Mary and towards whom Darnley, with his patchy grasp of reality, developed murderous intentions.

Now everything started to fall into place. Rizzio, as Darnley became convinced, had not just betrayed him: he had done so by seducing his wife. And since Rizzio was already said to be a papal agent, thanks to his association with Darnley, it followed that he must be responsible for the swing towards Catholicism.

On 9 February, Maitland had written a letter to Cecil that has all the elements of a smoking gun. ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘is on either part so far past but all may be reduced to the former estate, if the right way be taken … I see no certain way unless we chop at the very root – you know where it lieth, and so far as my judgement can reach, the sooner all things be packed up the less danger there is of any inconveniences.’ If Maitland’s syntax was convoluted, his meaning was crystal clear. The clock had to be put back to where it had been before Mary married Darnley. The way to do that was to ‘chop at the very root’ – i.e. assassinate Rizzio. The sooner it was done, the better.

Just as Cardinal Beaton’s assassins had once sought Sir Ralph Sadler’s approval and indemnity before carrying out their plan, so Maitland courted Cecil. His letter, he assured Elizabeth’s chief minister, was ‘a gage of my correspondence to your disposition’: in other words, he asked Cecil to speak now if he disapproved, or for ever hold his peace.

Almost overnight, and by a masterful propaganda exercise, the unfortunate Rizzio was transformed into the Queen’s illicit lover and ‘evil counsellor’. He was the man everyone could agree to hate: excoriated as foreign, low-born, proud, ambitious, a papal agent, a spy, a sycophant, and a voluptuary. It was a perfect cover story, because the greater the marital estrangement between Mary and Darnley, the more Darnley suspected her of adultery; and the more she became politically isolated, the more she found herself relying on her private secretary, since Moray was in exile and Maitland was eclipsed and spending time plotting with Darnley.

If Maitland was the insinuator, the Earl of Morton, also avidly seeking Moray’s rehabilitation as well as a powerful position for himself when Darnley obtained the ‘crown matrimonial’, was the technocrat. Morton was the leader of the Douglas clan, and it was the Douglases and Lord Ruthven, Morton’s relative by marriage, who planned the assassination.

On 6 March 1566, Bedford and Randolph jointly wrote two letters to Elizabeth and Cecil. A ‘great attempt’ was to be made in Scotland. Darnley had persuaded the Protestant Lords to promise to make him King by the consent of Parliament. Bonds had been signed to this effect. He would obtain a grant of the ‘crown matrimonial’ in return for the restoration of the exiled Lords and of the Protestant settlement. ‘The time of execution and performance of these matters is before the Parliament, as near as it is …’

Randolph left Edinburgh a week before the assassination. Mary had belatedly discovered that he had covertly bankrolled Moray during his revolt. Two witnesses were produced who confessed to acting as intermediaries, smuggling bags of untraceable gold coins to Lady Moray. Although Randolph barefacedly denied the charges, he was ordered to leave the country. He was first accused on 19 February and offered a safe-conduct across the border, which he refused to accept. He later left under threat of forcible expulsion, but held out long enough to send Cecil his final reports on the plot.

Everything had so far gone like clockwork. Cecil was fully briefed about Rizzio’s assassination and did nothing to prevent it. The timing was ideal, as it would soon give Mary a great deal more to think about than reasserting her claim to the throne of England. Others also knew of the plot. Randolph wrote to Dudley: ‘I know that if that take effect which is intended, David [Rizzio], with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days.’ One of the few left completely in the dark was Mary. Others were Bothwell and Huntly, the closest of friends since Bothwell had married Huntly’s sister. They were staying at Holyrood on the night of the assassination and found themselves caught up in the middle of it.

The plot was planned for Saturday, 9 March. The previous evening, Randolph and Bedford wrote to Cecil and Dudley from Berwick to confirm that Morton was already in position and that Argyll would soon be there. Moray and the exiled Lords would arrive at Berwick next day from Newcastle and would be in Edinburgh on Sunday morning. The murder of ‘him whom you know’ would have been carried out by the time they rode through the main gates at Holyrood.

The night of Saturday, 9 March 1566 was to be one of the longest and most terrifying of Mary’s life. But this was to be only the first of a kaleidoscopic sequence of murderous events in her country.