AT EIGHT O’ CLOCK on the fatal Saturday evening, Darnley led Lord Ruthven and an accomplice through his private apartments in the James V Tower at the palace of Holyroodhouse. Partly feeling their way in the darkness, each man with only a candle to light his way, they climbed a secret stairway hidden within the walls to emerge, one by one, into Mary’s bedroom on the floor above through a door concealed in the panelling. Leading off the Queen’s bedroom was a smaller adjoining chamber, or supper room, about twelve feet in length and nine in breadth, where Mary was eating with a group of friends, including Rizzio.
Beyond the bedroom, and through a door on the left, was a larger room, the Queen’s outer or presence chamber. At the far end of the outer room, a locked door opened onto the main staircase from which access to the royal apartments was obtained from the ground-floor lobby. Morton and the rest of the conspirators, around eighty in all, came up the main staircase to the door of the outer chamber, where they waited until it was unlocked from the inside by Ruthven’s man, who had passed through Mary’s bedroom.
Darnley was the first to appear. He entered the supper room and spoke to Mary. She was surprised to see him, but not unduly perturbed. He offered her soothing words and put his hand on her waist. This was to give Ruthven – an ungainly man suffering from liver and kidney failure, from which he would die only a few weeks later – time to reach the supper room and for his accomplice to unlock the door. The delay must have been at least five minutes, because Ruthven clanked up the stairs in heavy armour and yet could barely walk (as he said himself) twice the length of his own chamber.
Ruthven finally staggered into the supper room looking ghastly. ‘It would please your Majesty’, he spluttered, ‘to let yonder man Davie come forth of your presence.’ Mary kept her wits and turned to Darnley. ‘What do you know about this?’ she demanded. Darnley lamely professed ignorance.
Mary turned to Ruthven. ‘What is his offence?’ She was thinking on her feet, instantly guessing why Darnley and Ruthven had burst in, but equally aware that Darnley would be irresolute and therefore potentially manipulable.
Ruthven said that Rizzio had done great offence to Mary, to the King, the nobility, and the country. ‘And how?’ she asked.
‘If it please your Majesty,’ said Ruthven, ‘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.’
‘Leave our presence under pain of treason,’ ordered Mary. ‘If he hath offended in any sort, we shall exhibit the said David before the Lords of Parliament to be punished.’
Ruthven ignored her. Turning towards Darnley, he said, ‘Sir, take the Queen your sovereign and wife to you.’ When Mary rose in anger, Rizzio hid behind her back, clutching the pleats of her skirt. Mary’s guests and chamber servants tried to grab Ruthven, who lurched forward and drew his dagger. There was a scuffle during which Morton and his company charged into the room. In the commotion, the dining-table and all its contents were overturned, and only the quick thinking of the estranged wife of the Earl of Argyll, Mary’s half-sister and one of the guests, avoided a disaster when one of the candelabra fell to the floor next to the tapestries on the adjacent wall and threatened to start a blaze had she not promptly snatched it up.
Ruthven and another conspirator struck at Rizzio with their daggers behind Mary’s back. She later said that the blows had been so close to her, ‘she felt the coldness of the iron’. Darnley was distraught. It is sometimes alleged that one of the plot’s aims, if not to assassinate Mary, was at least to trigger a fatal miscarriage, as she was six months pregnant. This is entirely implausible, because if anything had happened to Mary, Darnley’s plan would fail. He had not yet secured the ‘crown matrimonial’ and was only entitled to claim it as long as he was married to Mary. If she were killed, his status as King Consort would die with her. The throne would descend to the heir apparent, the exiled Duke of Châtelherault, the sworn rival of Lennox and Darnley. Only if the Rizzio plot had taken place after Darnley had been crowned, or after Mary’s child was born, would her death have made sense. Darnley could then have remained as King or been appointed Governor, and so maintained his position. Otherwise, he and his father would not have survived for more than six months. The factions would have turned against them, murdering them or driving them into exile.
Ruthven grabbed Mary and gave her to Darnley, telling her not to be afraid. ‘All that is done’, he tried vainly to reassure her, ‘is the King’s own deed and action.’ Rizzio, cowering in an alcove, was then hauled from the supper room, watched by as many of Morton’s men as could fit into the small space, some of whom carried guns. One man pointed a cocked pistol at Mary to prevent her interposing herself between the hapless Rizzio and his captors while he was dragged out. Ruthven shouted an order to carry Rizzio down to Darnley’s apartments by the secret stairs, but his voice was drowned in the mêlée. The crush was intense. Rizzio was propelled into the outer chamber, where the rest of the plotters were waiting. They surged forward and stabbed him in a frenzy, just short of the door beside the main staircase. Darnley refused to join in the butchery, so one of the conspirators seized his dagger and used it to deliver the final blow. Darnley’s dagger was left in the corpse, to signify his connivance in the plot.
Mary, meanwhile, was paralysed by fear, really believing she would be killed too. We have her own account sent to Paris. The assassins, she said, burst in, grabbed Rizzio and ‘most cruelly took him forth of our cabinet, and at the entry of our chamber gave him fifty-six strokes with whiniards19 and swords’.
When Rizzio was dead, the assassins fled and Morton went downstairs to seal the gates and doors of the palace. Guards were posted outside certain rooms and Mary’s black box containing her ciphers and secret correspondence was retrieved from Rizzio’s room and returned to her.
Where Mary’s own account differs from the rest is in the later plans of the conspirators. She was convinced that the plot was meant to have two stages: first Rizzio’s assassination, and then a palace coup in which Bothwell, Huntly, and the Earl of Atholl, the leaders of her forces during the Chase-about Raid, would be killed. Sir James Balfour, Darnley’s erstwhile protégé, was also said to be on the death list. He was to be ‘hanged in cords’ to stop him exposing the true extent of Darnley’s treachery. Bothwell and Huntly were lodging elsewhere in the palace. They heard the uproar in the James V Tower, guessed that their lives might be in danger, and escaped out of a back window by climbing down a rope. Atholl and Balfour also managed to slip away or talk their way out of trouble.
Back in the supper room, Mary was given a lecture. Ruthven told her exactly what he and his supporters thought of her. According to Mary’s version, he said they ‘were highly offended with our proceedings and tyranny, which was not to them tolerable; how we were abused by the said David … in taking his counsel for the maintenance of the ancient [Catholic] religion, debarring of the Lords which were fugitive, and entertaining of amity with foreign [Catholic] princes and nations with whom we were confederate; putting also upon [the] Council the Lords Bothwell and Huntly’. Ruthven’s account of the speech is slightly different. In his narrative, the main charge was that Mary had ruled ‘contrary to the advice of your nobility and counsel, and especially against those noblemen who were banished’. To this, Mary retorted with justified sarcasm that Ruthven had himself been one of her Privy Councillors since the overthrow of the elder Earl of Huntly three years before!
Whichever account is correct, Mary was harangued, and her own summary proves that she understood the plotters’ agenda and what she was up against. She burst into tears, but refused to be dealt with in this manner. Turning to Darnley, she demanded, ‘Why have you caused to do this wicked deed to me, considering I took you from a low estate and made you my husband? What offence have I made you that you should have done me such shame?’
Darnley was consumed by jealousy. He indignantly assumed that he had been made a cuckold and so turned into an object of scorn. He complained that Mary had not ‘entertained’ him since Rizzio came into her favour. Whereas before their marriage, she had used to visit him in his apartments, now she played cards with Rizzio until one or two o’clock in the morning. ‘And this is all the entertainment that I have had of you this long time.’ Darnley became increasingly explicit. He had been denied sex by his wife. On the occasions on which he had come to visit her, ‘she either would not or made herself sick’. He had noticed the change last Christmas, and he wanted to know why.
Mary fought back her tears. ‘It is not’, she said, ‘a gentlewoman’s duty to come to her husband’s chamber, but rather the husband to come to the wife’s.’ Royal protocol required the husband to initiate all sexual advances, which is why, in the palaces of the sixteenth century, a private passage linked the King’s bedroom to the Queen’s that was meant for the King’s use and rarely if ever hers. According to the courtly handbooks, a Queen’s duty was to produce children and otherwise be ‘chaste, loyal and obedient’.
Maitland had done his work well. Darnley was beset by his belief that Rizzio was Mary’s lover. He also harboured suspicions that Mary found him sexually inadequate. His ego was touched. ‘Am I failed in any sort?’ ‘What disdain have you of me?’ ‘What offences have I done you … seeing I am willing to do all things that becometh a good husband?’ Now Darnley’s vicious streak came to the fore. He was stung by the reference to his social inferiority. ‘Suppose I be of the baser degree, yet am I your husband and your head, and you promised me obedience at the day of our marriage and that I should be participant and equal with you in all things.’
Mary would never be told by anyone except a reigning monarch that she was someone’s equal, let alone their inferior. ‘For all the offence that is done to me, my Lord, you have the weight thereof, for the which I shall be your wife no longer nor sleep with you any more, and shall never like well until I have caused you to have as sorrowful a heart as I have at this present.’
Ruthven, a witness to this battle of words, interposed. His illness was so far advanced, his armour so heavy, that he was desperate for a drink and a seat. He brought a note of almost grotesque comedy to the scene. Asking Mary’s permission, he ‘called for a drink for God’s sake!’ He was served with a cup of wine, which he downed in a single gulp. Mary looked at him in revulsion. ‘If I or my child die,’ she threatened, ‘you will have the blame thereof.’
Ruthven began to answer, but a messenger knocked at the door. Bothwell, Huntly, and Atholl had escaped. Ruthven and Darnley departed, leaving Mary to pace up and down in her bedroom for several hours. Barely able to take in what had happened, she was further dismayed that Morton had stationed a sentry at the entrance to her outer chamber and that she was denied the comfort of her four Maries and domestic staff.
Darnley at last returned to supervise the removal of Rizzio’s corpse. It was dragged through the door of the outer chamber and unceremoniously hurled down the main staircase. From there, it was carried to the porter’s lodge at the entrance to the palace, where it was stripped by the porter’s servant and Darnley’s dagger removed.
For the whole of that long night Mary did not sleep. When Darnley returned at eight o’clock the next morning, she vented her rage on him in a quarrel that lasted for two hours. Darnley then left in a fury. Before allowing him to depart, however, Mary persuaded him to let her gentlewomen return.
Morton and Ruthven were ruffled by this news. They knew that Mary could be a skilful operator and an unflinching adversary. She would not wait to be carried along by events, but would seek to dominate them. She could act naively and impulsively, but in a crisis would always try to keep the initiative. She had kept her head at the start of Moray’s revolt. Her technique, then as now, was to appeal to those men such as Bothwell and Huntly on whose loyalty she knew she could rely. And in her present predicament, the way to contact them was through her gentlewomen.
Mary frantically scribbled her instructions. She then sent her ladies away to turn them into letters for her loyal supporters. She also had a letter sent to Argyll, who despite his aid for Moray and his allies, was someone she still largely trusted. Whatever his religious views, he was a royalist and anti-republican, who later opposed Mary’s forced abdication and was prepared to fight as her lieutenant. His catchphrase was, ‘God first and then our Prince in God, under God and by God’s laws.’ The repudiation of an anointed Queen, let alone regicide, was something he found alien and abhorrent. Whatever her alleged offences, Argyll held Mary to be a legitimate ruler, and for this reason she knew she could depend on him now.
Her plan shaped in her mind, Mary turned next to Darnley. She decided to stage a piece of theatre for his benefit. When in the afternoon he returned, she pretended that she was about to miscarry. Morton and Ruthven had reimposed the ban on her gentlewomen. Mary was determined to get them back. So she played her part and the midwife was summoned. Mary had already primed this woman to confirm that she was about to go into labour. With his child’s life, and therefore his own position at stake, Darnley rushed a message to Morton and Ruthven, who reluctantly withdrew the ban, and Mary’s ladies returned.
But the Lords were suspicious. They told Darnley to beware lest Mary change clothes with one of her Maries and flee leaving her stand-in behind. Darnley took the point. The guard at the entrance to the outer chamber was redoubled. Orders were issued that no one would be allowed to leave the Queen’s apartments who wore a muffler over their face or whose identity was suspected.
By eight o’clock in the evening, Moray and the exiled Lords, with the important exception of Argyll, had returned to Holyrood. Darnley welcomed them, after which they retired to supper at Morton’s house in the Canongate. When Mary learnt of Moray’s return, she sent one of her ushers to bring her half-brother to see her. When he arrived, she received him with open arms. She embraced him, saying that if he would be content to be reconciled, she would gladly accede to his request. According to Sir James Melville, she also said that if he had been there the previous night, he would not have allowed her to be so roughly treated as she had been, a sentiment causing the duplicitous Moray to weep.
The chief concern of the exiled Lords of the Chase-about Raid, however, was their forfeitures. Darnley had to deal with this urgently, as Parliament was due to meet in two days’ time. His first public act after Rizzio’s murder was to discharge Parliament. He ordered the heralds to proclaim at the Market Cross that everyone summoned to the new session should leave the town of Edinburgh within three hours under penalty of treason. When, therefore, Moray and the exiled Lords duly appeared at the Tolbooth on the 12th ‘to hear and see the doom of forfeiture’ against them, the building was almost deserted.
Mary knew of Darnley’s proclamation. She believed it to be a bad mistake on his part, and one which played into her hands. She would split the Lords in two, pardoning Moray and the exiles, but striking against Morton, Ruthven, and the Douglases. Morton’s role in the Rizzio plot was clear. She would deprive him of his post of Chancellor, which she would give as a reward to Huntly. Maitland she could not quite pin down, but she meant to punish him. She had warned him when he had sought her favour in France in the months before her return to Scotland that she would hold him accountable as the ‘principal instrument’ of any ‘practices’ against her. She would give his lands to Bothwell, then leave him to stew in his own juice.
That left just Darnley to account for. Mary knew him to be stupid, cowardly, vain, drunken, dissolute, and narcissistic. He was also violent, vindictive, and an inveterate liar. His plot could hardly have been clumsier. And yet it might still succeed if she did not act quickly.
Mary was now twenty-three, still extremely young, but no longer on such a steep learning curve. She had been back in Scotland for over four years and was able to confront the challenge of controlling the noble factions. She had learnt that the way to deal with the Lords was to divide and rule. To do this now, she needed to keep the feckless and murderous Darnley on side, turning him into a weapon against his former allies, who in return for his treachery would become his mortal enemies.
Her next move was brilliantly attuned to Darnley’s primitive psychology. She waited until Moray had returned to his supper at Morton’s house. When she and Darnley were alone, Mary offered to have sex with him to prove that her affection for him had not changed as he had claimed. She said that he could come to her later in the evening, and she would sleep with him all night. She had a pretty good idea that he would be incapably drunk by bedtime. She meant to buy time, so that she could find a way to deal with him and make her escape from Holyrood.
Darnley accepted the offer. The assignation was fixed and Darnley withdrew to his apartments to ready himself. He met Morton and Ruthven, to whom he boasted of his forthcoming tryst. This, he declared, was the way to handle women. The Lords were more sceptical. Darnley, they said, ‘grew effeminate again’. The possibility of a reconciliation between Mary and her husband was the plotters’ nightmare, but as they still had Darnley’s bond consenting to Rizzio’s murder and bearing his signature, they were not yet unduly anxious. Darnley had persuaded them that he would conquer Mary, making victory and the ‘crown matrimonial’ almost a certainty. Morton and Ruthven knew, however, that their lives would be in jeopardy if Mary held her ground.
As Mary had predicted, Darnley failed to turn up for the assignation. It was something Randolph and Bedford could not understand. In their report to Cecil, they explained: ‘We know not how he foreslow20 himself, but [he] came not at her, and excused himself to his friends that he was so sleepy that he could not wake in due time.’
Ruthven’s version was more or less the same. He said that he had waited in Darnley’s dressing-room for so long, he finally went to bed himself. George Douglas, Morton’s cousin and a half-brother of Ruthven’s wife, then came to tell him that, despite repeated attempts to wake Darnley from his drunken stupor, he was too far gone to be roused.
At dawn, Ruthven reproved him. ‘You did not keep your promise to the Queen’s Majesty to lie with her all that night.’ Crestfallen, Darnley replied, ‘I was fallen on such a dead sleep, I could not be awakened.’ Naturally he blamed someone else: his faithful bedchamber servant William Taylor.
‘But’, said Darnley, ‘I will take my nightgown and go up to the Queen.’ Ruthven, who despite the gravity of his illness still had a sense of humour, riposted, ‘I trust she shall serve you in the morning as you did her at night!’
And so it was. Darnley climbed the secret stairway for the second time in three days to emerge at Mary’s bedside. She was asleep or pretending to be asleep, so he was forced to sit and wait for an hour until she was ready to speak to him.
‘Why did you not come up yesternight?’, she finally asked. Darnley said that he was so deeply asleep, he had not stirred before six o’clock. ‘Now’, he continued, ‘am I come, and offer myself to have lyen down by you.’
But Mary said she felt too unwell to make love. She proposed to get up straight away.
Darnley did not argue. Instead, he changed the subject, asking when Mary would pardon the exiled Lords. He also said that he expected a full pardon for everyone involved in the Rizzio plot. Mary beguiled him with soothing words. She was winning him over, and at eight o’clock he returned downstairs ‘very merrily’. He began to swagger, boasting to Morton and Ruthven that everything was in hand. They urged him not to underestimate Mary. She had been trained in France by her Guise uncles, both masters of political deception. ‘Trust me,’ said Darnley. ‘Let me alone, and I will promise to bring all to a good end.’
Later that morning, Darnley attended a secret council with Moray, Morton, Ruthven, and the leaders of the Rizzio plot. The Faustian pact was sealed. Darnley would get Mary to grant full pardons to the Lords, he would confirm the religious status quo, and they would offer him the ‘crown matrimonial’ in the next session of Parliament. Darnley was utterly confident that he had pulled off a coup. But the Lords wanted a guarantee. They knew Mary better than to think she would agree without a fight. They asked for written proof, signed by Mary, confirming her intention to grant their pardons.
Darnley returned to Mary, who had carefully prepared her lines. She told him the facts of political life in Scotland. As soon as the Lords had obtained their pardons and their forfeitures were dropped, they would ditch Darnley, who would never secure the ‘crown matrimonial’ at their hands. Why should they give it to him when they had already got what they wanted? And when would he receive it? Had he not himself just discharged Parliament without setting a date for its recall?
Mary had never been more independent or self-reliant, the more so because, despite all the stress and anxiety, her health held up. If she really suffered from acute intermittent porphyria, it mercifully left her alone. True, she was pregnant and often felt sick, but her mind was as nimble as ever. She explained to Darnley how badly he would be treated if the exiled Lords and his co-conspirators were allowed to get their way. Were they not all Protestants? If he failed to convert to Protestantism, he would be toppled. And yet, if he did convert, he would be reviled by the very European rulers he had so recently been eagerly courting.
Step by step, Mary persuaded Darnley to retreat. The way to rule Scotland, she said, was to rise above and then balance the rival factions, not to ally with any one of them ‘and so become enslaved’. ‘By this persuasion, he was induced to condescend [i.e. agree] to the purpose taken by us.’ He agreed to escape that night with Mary to Dunbar, the nearest impregnable royal fortress and the home of Bothwell’s widowed sister. Already Mary had received replies from Bothwell and Huntly to the letters she had sent through her gentlewomen. They advised her to escape over the walls of the palace if necessary by means of ropes and chairs,21 and then ride through the night.
The question was how to relax the guard at the entrance to Mary’s apartments. To this she also had the answer. They should not disguise their intention to leave Holyrood, but should mislead the Lords as to the date of their departure. They would be gone before the Lords realized they had been duped.
On cue, the midwife reappeared to inform Darnley that if Mary were not quickly allowed a change of air, she would miscarry. Her Maries and other gentlewomen dutifully confirmed this. Darnley hastened downstairs to tell the Lords and to seek permission for Mary to depart next day. Her French doctor then arrived to emphasize the urgency of the request. Mary, he confidently claimed, would miscarry if she did not leave Holyrood soon.
The Lords reluctantly agreed, provided Mary signed a paper confirming their pardons. Shortly after four o’clock, Moray, Morton, and Ruthven went upstairs with Darnley to visit Mary. The Lords waited until Darnley fetched her from her bedchamber. They all knelt and Morton made their petition, after which each spoke individually. Mary heard them out, then gave a gentle answer: ‘I was never bloodthirsty nor greedy upon your lands and goods since my coming into Scotland, nor will I be upon you.’
Mary invited them to draw up whatever document they liked, and she would sign it. She then took Darnley in one hand and Moray in the other, and walked about the room for an hour in conversation. Afterwards, she withdrew to her bedroom. She sent for Maitland, who arranged to remove the guards. It was also agreed that the Lords would voluntarily leave Holyrood after supper that night. Even as they spoke, the Lords were drafting their articles of pardon, and the document had only to be signed by Mary for the formalities to be completed.
The guards disappeared, and at six o’clock the Lords handed Darnley their articles. They agreed to leave Holyrood and withdraw to Morton’s house as soon as they were assured that Mary had actually signed.
Darnley, now won back to Mary’s side, saw no reason to hurry. He first ate a leisurely supper, and by the time Archibald Douglas, Morton’s cousin, returned to collect the signed articles, it was already late. Darnley lied that he had shown the document to Mary, who had pronounced it ‘very good’. But she was feeling sick, he said, and not up to dealing with paperwork. She was taking an early night and would sign the articles next morning.
Shortly after midnight, when all was quiet, Mary and Darnley slipped out of Holyroodhouse through a subterranean passage leading off a wine cellar, where they met half a dozen of her most trusted servants who had fetched her horses from the stables. Without further delay they rode hard through the night to Dunbar, a 25-mile journey that took them five hours and which the pregnant Mary found gruelling. Several times on the way she had to dismount to be sick.
At dawn next day, the Lords were appalled to find Mary had flown the coop. By then, it was no secret where she had gone. They dispatched a messenger to Dunbar to ask her to fulfil her pledge by signing their articles of pardon. But Mary made no immediate reply. She kept the messenger waiting for three days, by which time the exiled Earls of Glencairn and Rothes had separately made their peace with her and obtained their pardons. This opened the flood gates: Argyll had been joined by many of the exiled Lords of the Chase-about Raid at Linlithgow, where they debated the terms on which they would settle with Mary and decided to open negotiations. Only Moray still held back, hedging his bets and waiting for something to happen.
As the Lords’ party began to collapse, so Mary’s increased. Bothwell and Huntly had already shaped the nucleus of an army. This increased when Mary ordered the landowners of the Lothians and the adjoining counties to muster their levies in her defence at Haddington and Musselburgh.
Early on the morning of Sunday, 17 March, Moray left Edinburgh to confer with Argyll and his allies at Linlithgow. Mary – with Darnley safely in tow – left Dunbar the same day, entering Edinburgh with her forces on the 18th. She had between three and five thousand troops – more than enough to occupy the town. Rather than return to Holyrood in case any of the Lords were still there, she lodged in a house in the High Street, later moving to a larger one closer to Edinburgh Castle. A fortnight later, after suitable improvements had been made and her clothes and personal effects delivered, she moved into the castle itself, where she could finally feel secure and await the birth of her baby.
The day after Mary returned to Edinburgh, she sent Sir James Balfour to Linlithgow to offer terms to the rebels of the Chase-about Raid. They would be pardoned and their estates returned to them, provided they withdrew temporarily to their own houses and made no attempt to intercede for Darnley’s co-conspirators in the Rizzio plot.
Argyll accepted on the spot, while Moray decided that it was not worth risking another revolt. Once they had received their pardons and waited for ten days, they were allowed to return to court. By the end of April, they were restored to the Privy Council and a grand ceremony of reconciliation staged. Atholl, Bothwell, and Huntly on the one side, and Moray, Argyll, and Glencairn on the other, stood before Mary and joined hands. Maitland was excluded from this ceremony. He was still firmly under a cloud, living at Dunkeld under house arrest.
Bothwell gained most from his role in organizing Mary’s escape. For his unflinching loyalty, she rewarded him with the captaincy of Dunbar, granting him both the castle and its surrounding estates in succession to her late half-brother, Lord John of Coldingham.
Morton and the remaining conspirators lost the most from the Rizzio plot. All eighty of them were denounced as rebels, proclaimed to be outlaws, and their goods forfeited to the crown. Their houses were stripped bare and Morton was forced to surrender Tantallon Castle, his fortress on the cliffs at the entrance to the Firth of Forth.
Mary took great satisfaction at his fall. She intended to be for ever unremitting to the Douglases. She saw Morton as the principal villain after Darnley, not least because it was Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, a noted Douglas client, who had levelled the pistol at her as Rizzio was dragged to his death.
Morton, Ruthven, Ker and the rest fled to England. Morton and Ruthven wrote a grovelling letter to Cecil, protesting the justice of their cause and assuring him that they had only acted on Darnley’s orders and for the ‘preservation of the state and the Protestant religion’. But their position was undercut. A week earlier, Darnley had shamelessly denied his role in the Rizzio plot ‘upon his honour, fidelity and the word of a Prince’. He had not, he said, even known of the conspiracy, ‘whereof he is slanderously and sakelessly22 traduced’. He confessed to exceeding his powers by inviting the exiled Lords of the Chase-about Raid to return home without Mary’s knowledge, but that was the full extent of his crime.
By issuing this barefaced denial, Darnley dug his own grave. The first act of revenge by the Rizzio plotters was to post to Mary the bond he had signed that committed him to the assassination of those ‘who abused the kindness of the Queen’ and especially ‘one stranger Italian called David’. The bond had even stated that the deed might ‘chance to be done’ in Mary’s private apartments or elsewhere within her palace of Holyrood. If this were not enough, Moray showed his sister the bond of the exiled Lords signed at Newcastle, which promised Darnley the ‘crown matrimonial’ without her prior consent. Mary now had all the proof she needed of her husband’s treachery, but the motive of those who denounced Darnley was to publicize their own blood feud with him, not to admit their guilt.
Mary had shown extraordinary daring and presence of mind during the Rizzio plot. At the very height of the crisis, she had kept her nerve. Her enemies were the first to concede that she had shown amazing coolness. If she was a winner, the main losers were Darnley, whom she for ever afterwards despised, and the Douglases, who were in dire straits. Elizabeth was especially furious when the Douglases fled across the border. Their plot had failed, and she disowned them. She advised Morton to find ‘some place out of our realm’ where he might hide until Mary’s wrath had eased or he was acquitted in a legal trial. He duly left for the Netherlands. But Mary’s letters had preceded him. He was denied entry and slipped back into England within a month. He was then ordered to ‘convey himself to some secret place, or else to leave the kingdom’.
As to Lord Ruthven, he died at Newcastle six weeks after he was outlawed. On his death bed, he exclaimed ‘that he saw Paradise opened, and a great company of angels coming to take him’. As his days had been numbered before the plot, his personal sacrifice was limited, but his family lost all their property when he was outlawed.
By the end of April 1566, Mary was back in control. The theme of her policy would be reconciliation. But the effect of the Rizzio plot would prove to be corrosive. Darnley’s instability and folly had shown that, with friends like him, no one lacked for enemies. Lennox was furious with his son, who had brought all his plans of the last twenty years to the verge of catastrophe. Darnley might still survive as long as Morton stayed in exile and could not get his hands on the man who had so brazenly double-crossed him. His best hope was Mary’s baby, which was due in June. Once he was the father of the heir to the throne, he might think it possible somehow to stage a comeback. If, however, the leader of the Douglases ever returned to Scotland, Darnley’s life would be in peril. By assassinating Rizzio, he had let the genie out of the bottle. Nothing he could do would ever make it possible to put it back again.