ON THE NIGHT of Saturday 9 March 1566, three days before Moray was due to be deprived of everything, Mary was eating dinner at Holyroodhouse with a small group of friends, including her half-sister Jean, Countess of Argyll; the Countess’s mother (and former mistress to James V), Elizabeth Bethune; her half-brother Robert Stewart; the Master of the Household and the Master of the Horse; her French apothecary, and Rizzio. She was in the small dining room that led off her bedroom, which, along with the dressing room and presence chamber, constituted her apartments. Now that she was five months pregnant, Mary preferred to dine quietly at home with friends. She presumed her husband was out, behaving badly in taverns. She was wrong. Downstairs, in Darnley’s apartments, eighty conspirators were grouping together.
The party were enjoying their meal when Darnley arrived in the chamber from the stairs below. Mary and her companions had not been expecting him but still, he was her husband and did come and go between the apartments. He sat beside Mary and started chatting, as if everything was quite normal. But then, the Earl of Ruthven, dressed in full armour and looking shockingly ill, staggered in and demanded Rizzio be given to him ‘for he has been overlong here’.1 Mary demanded Darnley explain and he, all cowardice, said he knew nothing. Ruthven declared that Rizzio had caused great offence to Mary, the king, the country and the nobility. He had promoted the Catholic religion and Catholic countries and denied the lords their lands. Ruthven told her that she had ‘ruled contrary to the advice of your nobility and counsel’ and said Rizzio had ‘offended your honour, which I dare not be so bold to speak of’. And he had denied Darnley the crown matrimonial and encouraged Mary to banish the nobility and lose their lands. The Italian servant was responsible for all of Scotland’s problems, it seemed.
Mary defended him and said he should be tried in Parliament if he was guilty of any misdemeanours and told Ruthven to depart on pain of treason. But the earl lumbered forth in his armour, pale and sweating with the exertion and made to grasp at Rizzio. Screaming, the secretary backed against Mary and the queen’s attendants tried to pull Ruthven off but he waved his dagger and shouted, ‘Lay not hands on me’. At this, more conspirators burst into the room from the staircase, some bearing guns. Ruthven seized the queen and told her not to be afraid, pushing her towards Darnley. ‘Take the queen your sovereign and wife to you.’ In the ensuing fight, a candelabra smashed to the ground, near the tapestries and the Countess of Argyll had the presence of mind to pull it away – otherwise they all could have burned. Ruthven and another stabbed at Rizzio as he cowered behind Mary’s back and the dagger came so close to her that she felt the wind as it passed her. She was terrified that she would be killed next. As she now understood, the palace was filled with enemies, her servants and the palace guard had been overpowered and her husband was leading the way.
The conspirators grabbed Rizzio. Mary again tried to protect him but Andrew Ker, a Douglas ally, threatened her with a gun to make her keep back. She said later that he pointed his gun at her womb and tried to shoot but failed, and another conspirator said that another man had offered to stab the queen. But even though she thought herself on the brink of death, Mary valiantly tried to save her secretary, as he screamed and held on to her skirts. The men prised his fingers away from her gown and dragged Rizzio through to the top of the stairs, where the other men were ready for them. There they fell upon him and stabbed him in a shocking scrum of bloodshed while the queen and her friends listened, powerless in frozen horror, to the secretary’s terrible screams. Darnley hung back but the men wanted his mark on the killing. One seized Darnley’s dagger and used it to give Rizzio the final blow of death – and then he left the dagger sticking out of the corpse. As Mary said later, the murderers ‘most cruelly took him forth of our cabinet and at the entry of our chamber gave him fifty-six strokes with whiniards and swords’. In her bloodstained chamber, she and her other guests heard it all – and feared the men were coming next for them. The reality was better, but not much. Mary was told she was now imprisoned.
Darnley had shuffled back in after the murder and she turned to her husband and demanded why he would see her treated thus – after she had taken him from a ‘low estate and made you my husband’. ‘What offence have I made you that you should have done me such shame?’ Darnley started complaining, moaning that she had not ‘entertained’ him ever since she took to Rizzio and never visited him anymore. Mary dismissed his words, still brave, despite the horror and said it was his responsibility to visit her. But Darnley, bursting with adrenalin and furious about being treated as merely the queen’s husband, launched into a tirade, saying she had promised obedience, and even if he had been from a ‘baser degree’, marriage made him her husband and her ‘head’. Mary was almost speechless. His behaviour, the murder, the blood, his jealousy, was all too much. She told him, ‘I shall be your wife no longer nor sleep with you anymore’ and would not rest until he too had a heart as sorrowful as hers. Ruthven trudged back into Mary’s presence, demanding a cup of wine because he was exhausted after the frenzy of fighting and killing. Mary shook her head at him. ‘If I or my child die, you will have the blame.’2
The people of Edinburgh had heard the commotion and had assembled under the queen’s windows, asking to speak with her. Lord Lindsay marched into her chamber and told her that if she spoke to them, ‘we will cut you into collops and cast you over the walls’. Darnley told the men that it had been a minor domestic disturbance and all was well now. In the blink of an eye, Mary had become a prisoner.
Ruthven and Darnley finally left. Darnley had the men drag the corpse out of the chamber, throw it down the stairs and drag it off to the porter’s lodge, where it was stripped of its belongings, Rizzio’s beloved fine clothes taken away and sold. Next day, Rizzio’s body was bundled into a grave at Holyrood. Bothwell, who had been elsewhere in the palace and whom the gang had also hoped to murder, fled with Huntly.
Mary was under strict surveillance and was isolated in her rooms, allowed only a few female attendants, with threatening men standing guard outside her door and patrolling the palace gates. High on his own success, Ruthven declared that if she tried to escape, ‘we will throw her to them piecemeal, from the top of the terrace’.3 Mary was on her own, entirely at the mercy of the conspiring lords. She feared they might use her as a puppet queen, to front their rule – or they might imprison her, unseat her and kill her. They hoped, above all, that the child would be a girl – for then what legitimacy could the queen have? All the power would be theirs.
Darnley dissolved parliament so that Moray’s goods were safe, but he was having second thoughts. He was unnerved that the conspirators had been so eager to see his dagger in Rizzio and, now that they had won, none of them seemed very enthusiastic about listening to his plans for kingship. He began to worry that they had only used him and would throw him aside.
Mary spent all night unable to sleep and next morning wrote to the thirty-four-year-old Earl of Argyll, begging for his help. Although he had been an ally of Moray and a keen Protestant, he was married to her half-sister, who had been forced to witness the murder as Mary’s companion and he was a man who was traditional and supportive of the monarchy. She gambled correctly in writing to him. She decided that the only way to escape was by getting Darnley onside, even though he had killed a man in front of her and humiliated her. That afternoon, when Darnley visited, she berated him for his betrayal. ‘You have done me so grievous an injury within the last twenty four hours that I shall never be able to forget it’ – and she ignored his protestations that he had been dragged into the plot. She played on his paranoid nature, planting the seed of possibility that the lords might be double-crossing them both, that he too might be locked up with her. Darnley, beginning to panic that Moray and the others might exclude him or imprison him too, told her that the plan was to confine her at Stirling and govern without her and she realised she had to act fast. She understood that the whole plan had been about her, not Rizzio. Yes, he was unpopular and disliked, but killing him in front of the queen had been a way of bringing her to heel and an excuse for imprisoning her, forcing her under their control. Mary instructed her errant husband that he had to save her: ‘you have placed us both on the brink of the precipice, you must now deliberate how we shall escape the peril’.4
That afternoon, she declared she was about to miscarry and needed her gentlewomen. Without an heir Darnley was nothing, so he forced Ruthven to allow the doctor and midwife to visit the captive. They said that the queen was delicate and should be attended by her ladies as normal. Ruthven agreed to send away some of the guards, convinced that Mary couldn’t escape. Mary’s ladies were immediately on her side, took letters to Bothwell and Huntly, who advised her to escape from Holyroodhouse however she could, leaping over the walls by ropes and chairs if she had to, and then flee. The enterprising Countess of Huntly even managed to smuggle a rope ladder to the queen, hidden between two dinner plates – but as Mary would have to clamber out of the window in full view of the guards, she decided it was impossible.
Moray was already widely suspected of being involved. The fact he’d been away wasn’t fooling anyone. He popped up again, having returned fortuitously on the day after the murder, visited Mary and pressed for a pardon for all the lords. Mary made gestures to please him, accepting that he had not been involved but she refused to acquit all the lords. She said that she felt she had been too lenient in the past, and this had emboldened the nobles to misbehave. She saw herself, the queen, as the dispenser of justice and said she owed it ‘to everybody’ and so could not give them a ‘full pardon the minute you ask’. She would, however, if they behaved well and loyally, ‘endeavour to forget’. When Moray reported back, the lords were furious. She could still prosecute them for the murder in the future and they still felt she could take back the church lands. The lords refused the offer. Mary was stuck.
Mary believed that she had to escape. She might have done better to stay and attempt to rule the lords by dividing and conquering – being friendly to Moray and those who had backed his Chaseabout Raid while punishing Ruthven and the murderers. The news was slowly leaking out to the public that Rizzio had been brutally killed and their queen was being held and the uneasy alliance between conspirators was already crumbling.
She continued to persuade Darnley to help her flee. She offered to come to him as a wife and he was won over. Mary spoke to him cleverly, telling him that he couldn’t trust the lords and they would never give him the crown. She told him that the best way to govern was to be above the various factions. He was entirely convinced and agreed to help her escape to Dunbar, the nearest royal fortress and the home of the sister of Bothwell.
Mary used her pregnancy again. She, Darnley and her ladies said she needed air otherwise she might miscarry. The lords had to assent. She said she would sign paperwork pardoning them and they duly prepared it. That night, she said – using her health just as Elizabeth so often did – that she did not feel well enough to sign documents but would do it in the morning. She had, of course, been feeling perfectly well and that night, at midnight, she left her rooms clandestinely, through the servants’ quarters and out, over the land where poor Rizzio was buried, onto horses prepared by her servants. It was a long, dark journey of five hours to Dunbar – and Mary suffered through it. But she was free.
The lords had been outwitted. They guessed where she had gone and wrote to her asking for the pardons to be signed. Mary did not reply. Instead, she wrote at length to Elizabeth of the miseries of her treatment, drawing a parallel between them both as queens, the dreadful treatment that Mary had suffered and Elizabeth might yet experience.5 As the days ticked on and Mary still did not sign the collective exoneration, some nobles lost their nerve and asked for individual pardons and made overtures to Argyll about discussing a settlement. The queen knew, then, that she had her power back. Bothwell and Huntly gathered an army for her and on the morning of 18 March, Mary returned to Edinburgh with nearly 8,000 men, as well as Darnley, Bothwell, Huntly and her older supporters – and was welcomed with enthusiasm by her people. She took a house in the High Street rather than Holyroodhouse, because for her it was still tainted, her old home a bloodstained prison.
Mary sent messages to Moray’s Chaseabout rebels that they would be pardoned as long as they did not attempt to assist the murderers of Rizzio. All of the Rizzio conspirators were declared outlaws and Mary pronounced that everything they owned should be given to the Crown. Darnley declared that he had nothing to do with the plot and hadn’t even known about it, thus undermining the rebels at a stroke. Morton, Ruthven and Andrew Ker – who had waved the gun at her – fled to England and begged Cecil for his protection, declaring they had only been following Darnley’s orders. Elizabeth was less than pleased to have the plotters in her realm and sharply told Morton to go elsewhere; Ruthven, long sickly, died in Newcastle soon after being denounced as a rebel. Knox, who expected to be caught up in the recriminations, dashed to Ayrshire, where he wrote his history of the Reformation in Scotland. Mary, it seemed, had won, even if it meant Bothwell now thought he had power over her.
Poor Rizzio was forgotten in his makeshift grave, all his possessions forfeit. The lords had genuinely disliked him and thought he had too much influence with the queen. But Mary had a goodly number of French and Italian servants. And if it had simply been about him, they would have killed him and that would have been that. But they wanted to confine her, reduce her, rule instead of her. The attempt was upon her, the ultimate end to imprison her at Stirling as Darnley had confessed. The queen had used all her courage, ingenuity and strength to escape and it had been a brilliant coup.
Mary had Rizzio reburied in a Catholic ceremony and she even appointed his brother, Joseph, young and very inexperienced, as secretary in his place to show them she could not be cowed. But she saw her reign was weakened, that she did not have enough support to pursue a policy of Catholic reform and she would have to be careful of the lords thenceforth. And the lords had sent her evidence that Darnley had signed the document taking responsibility for the plot against Rizzio and promising pardons for all concerned. She could have had Darnley executed for treason, but it would be a terrible scandal, half the aristocracy would be implicated, and she needed him to assent to the legitimacy of their child. She had to tolerate him but she resolutely excluded him from court business, which only made him angrier, drunk every night, ruing how he had been tricked by everybody. But with the rest of the lords, Mary had reached an uneasy truce. Even though Moray had led one rebellion against her and failed to save her from imprisonment post-Rizzio, she was attempting to trust him again. He was her half-brother, she thought, her old friend and surely would be loyal to her from thenceforth.
Elizabeth’s spies told her of the events of 9 March and the aftermath. She read the reports and Mary’s letter in shock. She would never be treated so! ‘Had I been in Queen Mary’s place, I would have taken my husband’s dagger and stabbed him with it!’6 Perhaps Mary would have been better off if she had. Elizabeth was keen that no one thought she had any knowledge or involvement with the plot and was seen wearing a miniature of Mary at her waist. She hated what Darnley had done and was delighted by Mary’s request to act as godmother to the forthcoming baby. It seemed that one benefit had been born of the horror: a rapprochement between the queens.