So many people were now involved in the plot against Rizzio that something was bound to leak out. Melville heard “dark speeches that we should have news ere Parliament was ended,” and tried to warn Mary that there might be unpleasant repercussions if she did not pardon Moray, but she still refused to do so. “What can they do? What dare they do?” she asked indignantly. She told him she herself had heard the rumours, but gave no credit to them, saying, “Our countrymen are great talkers but rarely put their bragging into effect.” However, she did reluctantly agree to postpone Parliament until 12 March. Melville then went to Rizzio to alert him to possible trouble, “but he disdained all danger and despised counsel.”67
Mary had now learned from a captured English spy that Randolph had conveyed English gold to the rebel Lords, and on 19 February she summoned him before the Council, coldly accused him of perfidy and ordered him to leave Scotland within three days. Outraged, he denied the charge, refused to accept a safe-conduct signed by Darnley, and stayed put in Edinburgh. The next day, Mary wrote to Elizabeth, complaining of Randolph’s conduct and informing her of his expulsion.68
A little light relief from Mary’s problems was provided on 24 February, when Bothwell married Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, thus cementing the political alliance between the two Earls. As they were among the Queen’s staunchest adherents, and represented the might of northern and southern Scotland, the marriage had her blessing and, indeed, had been made on her advice; she witnessed the marriage contract, provided the cloth of silver and white taffeta for the bride’s dress from her own Wardrobe,69and attended the celebrations that followed the Protestant wedding service in the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. David Chalmers was a witness.
Jean, then twenty, was a Catholic, and because the bride and groom were within the forbidden degrees of affinity, Archbishop Hamilton had granted a dispensation for the marriage.70Jean and Mary had wanted a Catholic marriage ceremony, but Bothwell had overruled them both.71 One presumes Jean was not too happy about marrying him because she was already in love with Alexander, Lord Ogilvy of Boyne, but, only weeks before, Ogilvy had jilted her and married Mary Beaton.72Bothwell had witnessed their marriage contract.
Jean brought with her a rich dowry, which Bothwell used to rescue himself from penury and clear his debts; in return, after it had been redeemed from his creditors, he gave her Crichton Castle, which she retained for life. She was a woman of strong character, well educated and with a good head for business; according to Sir William Drury, she was “a proper and virtuous gentlewoman.”
The Earl and Countess spent their honeymoon at Seton. Because Jean insisted on wearing black in mourning for her lost love, there was initially some friction, and Bothwell returned to Edinburgh on his own after a week. But the couple were soon reunited, and thereafter lived mainly at Crichton. Their servants, Cuthbert Ramsay and George Livingston, later testified that they had seen them living peaceably, “friendly and quietly” together. There were, however, no children of the marriage.
On 25 February, Randolph, still hanging on in Edinburgh, informed Cecil that the Queen’s marriage to Darnley had failed and that Darnley and Lennox were plotting against Mary and Rizzio; he also reported the astonishing alliance between Darnley and the exiled Lords.73
But Morton and Ruthven did not trust Darnley. According to Ruthven, “considering he was a young prince, and having a lusty princess to lie in his arms afterwards, who might persuade him to deny all that was done for his cause and to allege that others persuaded him to the same,” the Lords “thought it necessary to have security thereupon.” On 1 March, they made him sign a Bond in which he acknowledged that he was the chief author of the plot and assumed full responsibility for the punishment—the word “murder” was not used—of the “wicked, ungodly” Rizzio and of any who might try to prevent it, even though “the deed may chance to take place in the presence of the Queen”; he further promised to protect his fellow plotters from any repercussions of the murder.74That day, Darnley wrote to Moray, asking him to travel to Berwick to await the King’s summons.75On 8 March, Darnley signed a safe-conduct for Moray to return to Scotland, and promised to provide him with an escort headed by Lord Home.
On 2 March, a second Bond, between Darnley and the exiled Lords, was signed at Newcastle, according to which the Lords promised to obtain the Crown Matrimonial for Darnley in return for him securing their pardons and the restoration of their property, and undertaking to maintain the Kirk. Moray was not among the signatories.76
Threats of punishment forced Randolph to leave Edinburgh that day; he was conducted under escort across the border to Berwick, and remained there, still in touch with the Queen’s enemies and able to keep an eye on Scottish affairs. Elizabeth wrote to Mary criticising her treatment of both Randolph and Moray, and sent money to the latter at Newcastle.77But Mary was taking a hard line with those who had opposed her. On 4 March, she formally opened the Parliament that would see her rebels attainted.
Two days later, Randolph and Bedford provided Cecil with details of the Bonds and the names of the chief plotters, and—now that it was too late for her to intervene—asked him to inform Elizabeth of what was intended, telling her that the discord between Mary and Darnley was the result of her denying him the Crown Matrimonial and also “for that he hath assured knowledge of such usage of himself that altogether is intolerable to be borne, which, if it were not over well known, we should both be very loath to think that it could be true. To take away the occasion of slander, he is himself determined to be at the apprehension and execution of him who [has] done him the most dishonour that can be done to any man, much more being as he is.” They also claimed that Mary was determined to remove Morton from the office of Chancellor and replace him with Rizzio.78 There is, however, no official record of Morton’s removal from office.
Enclosed with the above was a letter to Elizabeth, informing her that “a matter of no small consequence is about to take place in Scotland” and that the attempt on Rizzio’s life was to be carried out “before Tuesday next” (i.e., before 12 March). For fuller details, they referred her to the letter to Cecil. Neither letter would have reached London in time for the Queen to alert Mary to the plot.
On 7 March, Mary, accompanied by Bothwell carrying the sceptre and Huntly the crown, attended the opening session of Parliament in the Tolbooth, in which Moray, Argyll, Glencairn, Rothes, Ochiltree, Boyd and Kirkcaldy of Grange were formally summoned to Edinburgh to be attainted on 12 March. The Queen also intended that Parliament should enact legislation allowing Catholics to practise their religion unhindered. In despite of Mary, Darnley had refused to attend because he was not to be granted the Crown Matrimonial, and spent the day with his cronies in Leith.79 Moray had already left Newcastle.
On the night of 8 March, Cecil visited Lady Lennox in the Tower and informed her that Rizzio was shortly to be slain.80 The conspirators had planned to carry out the murder on 12 March but, guessing that Randolph and Bedford had leaked too many details, and fearful of Elizabeth interfering, they decided to strike three days earlier. By now, over 120 people were involved in the conspiracy, among them some of the highest in the land, and there was every chance that some of them might have been loose tongued, yet neither Mary, nor Bothwell, nor Huntly had any inkling of what was afoot. Rizzio may have heard some of the rumours, for he consulted a French astrologer, Jean Damiot, who told him to beware of the bastard. Rizzio assumed he meant Moray, and told Damiot he would make sure that the bastard never again set foot in Scotland.81But Moray was not the only bastard involved in the plot—one of its promulgators had been George Douglas, the bastard of Angus. And when Damiot told him to return to his own country, Rizzio retorted, echoing Mary’s own sentiments, “Words, nothing but words! The Scots proclaim much, but their threats are not carried out.”82It would not be long before he found out, in the most horrific manner, how wrong he was.
8
“THIS VILE ACT”
ON THE AFTERNOON OF SATURDAY
, 9 March 1566, Darnley played tennis with Rizzio.1That evening, Rizzio was one of those present at a supper party given by the Queen in her closet at Holyrood Palace.2 The little room, measuring only about 12 feet by 10 feet, was crowded with guests: Mary’s half-sister, Jean, Countess of Argyll; Jean’s uncle, Robert Beaton, Laird of Creich, Master of the Queen’s Household; Lord Robert Stewart; Sir Arthur Erskine of Blackgrange, Mary’s Master of the Horse, Mar’s brother and, according to Knox, “the most pestilent papist in the realm”; the Queen’s French apothecary; a page, Anthony Standen the Younger; and a groom. Rizzio, who was wearing a splendid gown of furred damask over a satin doublet and russet velvet hose,3had not removed his cap, as was customary when a man was in the presence of his sovereign.4
Darnley was not present; he and Mary rarely dined together these days. Instead, he was busy admitting the conspirators to the palace. Morton was in charge of setting an armed guard of between 100 and 500 men (estimates vary)5around Holyrood, seizing the keys from the porter and securing all the gates and doors, so that none should enter or depart.6He also posted about twenty men on the stairs leading up to the Queen’s apartments.
At about six or seven o’clock,7as Mary and her friends were eating, to everyone’s surprise, Darnley emerged from behind the tapestry covering the door from the bedchamber, having come up via the secret stair from his rooms below. He appeared affable enough and said he had already eaten supper. Sitting next to Mary, he put his arm around her. As if on cue, Lord Ruthven suddenly appeared, wearing full armour and looking deathly pale as a result of his illness.
“May it please Your Majesty to let yonder man Davy come forth of your presence, for he has been overlong here,” he demanded.
“What offence hath he done?” Mary asked, astonished.
“Great offence!” was the angry reply. “Madam, he has offended your honour, which I dare not be so bold as 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 has caused Your Majesty to banish a great part of the nobility that he might be made a lord; he has been the destroyer of the commonwealth, by taking bribes, and must learn his duty better.”8Mary turned to Darnley and asked him what he knew of this matter, but he “denied the same.” In great indignation, Mary commanded Ruthven to leave the room or be arrested for treason.9He ignored her, and, outraged at such disrespect, Lord Robert, Creich, Erskine, the apothecary and a groom made to seize him, but he drew out his pistol and snarled, “Lay no hands on me, for I will not be handled.”10
Drawing his dagger, he advanced menacingly on Rizzio, who was cowering behind Mary in the window recess,11his dagger in his hand. At that moment, Lindsay and five heavily armed men—George Douglas, Patrick Bellenden, William Ruthven, Andrew Ker of Fawdonside and Henry Yair, a former priest who was now one of Ruthven’s retainers—burst into the room. As the conspirators lunged at the Italian, a violent struggle ensued in which the table was overturned and everything on it was sent crashing to the ground; Lady Argyll managed to save a single lighted candle, which, together with the firelight, illuminated the shocking scene. Ruthven manhandled the Queen out of the way and into Darnley’s arms, “entreating her not to be afraid” and assuring her “that all that was done was with the King’s own deed and assent.” He ordered Darnley, “Sir, take the Queen your sovereign and wife to you,”12whereupon Darnley kept a strong hold on Mary, despite her struggles, and lifted no finger to help her when Lindsay brutally rammed a chair towards her stomach.
As Ruthven laid hold of Rizzio, George Douglas, seizing Darnley’s dagger, thrust it across the Queen’s shoulder at the Italian, so close that she could feel the coldness of the steel on her throat. Mary was certain that Rizzio was wounded by this thrust, and Melville states that the dagger was left “sticking in him,” but Ruthven, trying to play down the enormity of the crime, later denied that this ever happened, insisting that David had “received never a stroke in Her Majesty’s presence.” Yet the death warrant for Henry Yair states that “they committed the said slaughter in her presence.”13 It seems likely, therefore, that Rizzio did sustain his first wound in the dining closet.
Anthony Standen later claimed that “one of Ruthven’s followers offered to fix his poniard in the Queen’s left side”; Standen grabbed it and turned it away from her. Many years afterwards he told James I that he had saved his life and that of his mother.14 Mary later stated, probably truthfully, although Ruthven denied this also,15 that Fawdonside had held a loaded pistol to her womb and would have killed her had not his gun “refused to give fire,” an act of such blatant treason that she could never bring herself to forgive it. Not unreasonably, she was convinced, and ever remained so, that she and her unborn child were the true targets of the conspirators.
Rizzio was on his knees, clawing at the Queen’s skirts16 or clinging on to her waist17 and crying, in Italian, “Justice! Justice! Save me, my Lady! I am a dying man. Spare my life!”18 But Darnley brutally bent back his fiingers19 and the others dragged him away, struggling and screaming, down the privy stair to the King’s bedchamber, where there waited a great number of armed men, “so vehemently moved against David that they could not abide any longer.” They hauled him back up the stairs, through the Queen’s bedchamber and as far as the outer door of the adjoining presence chamber,20where, assisted by Lindsay, Morton21 and over a dozen of the latter’s men, they gave vent to a frenzy of bloodlust and savagely stabbed him to death, with either Morton or George Douglas striking the first blow.22So furious was the attack that one of the killers was wounded.23 Care was taken to ensure that Darnley’s dagger was left embedded in Rizzio’s side,24to proclaim the King’s involvement in the deed.25It is unlikely that Darnley personally took part in the actual act of murder: although Randolph later reported a rumour that “he gave him one blow himself,” Ruthven implies that he remained in the dining closet, keeping Mary under restraint. As for the Queen, while all this was going on, she was, in her own words, “struck with great dread” and in “extreme fear of our life.”26
Some hours later, on Darnley’s orders, Rizzio’s lacerated body, bearing fifty-six stab wounds,27was hurled down the stairs and then thrown across a wooden chest in the porter’s lodge by the door. The porter, stripping the fine garments from the body in order to appropriate them for himself, observed, “This was his destiny, for upon this chest was his first bed when he came to this place, and now here he lieth again, a very ingrate and misknown knave.” The next day, Rizzio’s corpse was hurriedly buried in a pauper’s grave in the Canongate cemetery, near the door of Holyrood Abbey.
Shortly after Rizzio’s murder, Henry Yair vented his anti-Catholic resentment on Father Adam Black, a Dominican friar of the Queen’s household who had once been chaplain to Marie de Guise and had courted danger as a spy under the pseudonym John Noir. He was murdered in his bed, stabbed to death like Rizzio.28
After Rizzio had been dragged away, Mary and Darnley removed from the dining closet to her bedchamber.29 Mary had no way of knowing what had happened outside, or whether her own life was in peril. “She blamed greatly her husband, that was the author of so foul an act,”30 and when she angrily asked him why he had betrayed her so shamefully by this “wicked deed,” he made his speech about Rizzio having enjoyed more of her company—and, according to Randolph and Bedford, her body—than he himself had over the previous six months, and ended, “I am your husband, and you promised me obedience at the day of your marriage, and that I should be participant and equal with you in all things; but you have used me otherwise by the persuasion of David.”
“My Lord,” replied Mary bitterly, “all the offence that is done me you have the wit [knowledge] thereof, for the which I will be your wife no longer, nor lie with you any more, and shall never like well till I cause you have as sore a heart as I have at this present.” As will be seen, this proved an empty threat.
Ruthven, who had returned to the room31 but said nothing about what had taken place outside, i
nterrupted, “I beseech Your Majesty to be of good comfort, to entertain your husband and use the counsel of the nobility, and then your government will be as prosperous as in any king’s days.” Then “being sore felled with his sickness,” he sat down without leave in the Queen’s presence, and called to her servants, “For God’s sake, bring me a cup of wine.” Mary regarded this as “a great presumption”32 and, beginning “to rail” at him for his insolence asked, “Is THIS your sickness?” He nodded, saying, “God forbid Your Majesty had such a sickness.”
“If I die in childbirth as a result, or my commonwealth perish,” said the Queen, “I will leave the revenge thereof to my friends, to be taken of you, Lord Ruthven, and your posterity. I have the King of Spain and the Emperor my great friends, and likewise the King of France, my good brother, with my uncles of Lorraine, besides the Pope’s Holiness and many other princes in Italy.”
Ruthven replied, “These noble princes are over-great personages to meddle with such a poor man as I am, being Your Majesty’s own subject. If anything be done this night that Your Majesty mislikes, the King your husband—and none of us—is in the wit [know], which he confessed to be true.”33Mary had probably already suspected as much.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Edinburgh had been alerted to the disturbances at Holyrood and sounded the tocsin.34The Provost, Sir Simon Preston, and 400 members of the watch, all armed with spears, soon assembled below the Queen’s windows, asking to speak with her. Lindsay warned her, “If you speak to them, we will cut you into collops and cast you over the walls.”35 Darnley went to the window, assured the citizens that all was well and that the tumult had resulted from the just punishment of one who had been a papal agent, then ordered them to return to their homes, which they did.36
Mary was by now quite distraught, and begged to be told what had become of Rizzio, warning the conspirators, “It shall be dear blood to some of you if his be spilt.”37 Ruthven eventually admitted that David had been “put to death” and accused Mary of “taking his counsel for maintenance of the ancient religion, debarring of the Lords who were fugitives, and putting also upon counsel of the Lords Bothwell and Huntly, who were traitors and with whom he [Rizzio] associated himself.”38Much later, when Lady Argyll told the Queen that she had seen David’s mutilated body, Mary was in great distress, but quickly recovered her composure, saying, “No more tears. I will think upon a revenge.”39