marriage is involved in doubt. Very likely the scandalous stories circulated about the Queen’s relations to Rizzio were mere inventions; and Rizzio, who moreover was deformed and ugly, far from being the Queen’s lover, was only ambitious; he hoped to have even a greater share of political authority under a nominal king, whom he recognized as an intellectual nonentity, but whose personal beauty diverted the young Queen’s thoughts from the cares of government.
During the first months after the wedding Rizzio’s expectations were fully realized. The young Queen in the transport of her passion for Darnley paid no attention to government affairs; her whole mind and soul seemed to be enwrapped in her love for her young husband; apparently she cared for nothing else but to caress him and to shower her favors upon him. She conferred upon him the title of king, without, however, giving him the attributes of royal power, which she reserved for herself. If Darnley had been a man of greater mental calibre he could very easily have made himself king in fact as well as in name; but he was a weakling in every respect. After the first few weeks had passed away in the closest intimacy with her consort, Mary’s extreme fondness, not to say idolatry, of him, entirely disappeared, and in a very short time her conduct toward him assumed a degree of estrangement and coldness which contrasted strangely with the cordiality which had preceded them. Mary’s full confidence and intimacy turned once more toward Rizzio, whose ascendency over her mind seemed to be greater than ever before. More than anybody else Darnley was dissatisfied with this turn of affairs. He saw that the chance of empire had slipped away from him, and he found that it was impossible for him to recover his former standing with the Queen. In vain he tried to be admitted to a direction of the government affairs and to perform some of the duties which seemed to pertain to his exalted station in the state; but Queen Mary obstinately refused to accede to these demands. Darnley, who ascribed this refusal, in part at least, to Rizzio’s influence, then joined the party of political malcontents who, either from motives of personal ambition or of religious antipathy, were anxious to bring about the overthrow of the Italian favorite and place a national and, if possible, a Protestant ministry in power. To carry out this plan they won Darnley over to their side, and filled his mind with dark insinuations and jealousy against Rizzio. It seems they also promised him a co-regency with the Queen, and full royal authority equal to hers in case the much-hated Italian should be removed.
These prospects were sufficient to inflame Darnley’s ambition and make him a willing tool in the hands of Rizzio’s enemies. He did not shrink even from murder, and committed it openly and defiantly. As soon as the conviction had been established in his mind that Rizzio stood in the way of his ambition, he resolved upon his assassination, which was not only to lead to his own aggrandizement, but also to punish Mary for having preferred the Italian to him. He did not wait long to carry his plan into execution; and the brutality and reckless ferocity with which the murder was committed were even more atrocious and repulsive than the crime itself. Only a brute and cowardly knave could have planned it.
The murder was committed on the evening of Sunday, the ninth of March, 1566, in the Queen’s private dining-room in the palace of Holyrood, adjoining her bedroom. The Queen was there with the Countess of Argyle, one or two other ladies, and Rizzio, her secretary. The best of feeling and humor prevailed in the little party. There was not the least indication or suspicion of impending trouble or danger. Nevertheless an armed force of five hundred adherents of the conspirators, under the lead of one of Darnley’s lieutenants, had been posted on the outside so as to surround the palace entirely. The greatest caution had been observed to avoid all noise, and the first intimation that something was wrong was conveyed to the little party in the dining-room by the sudden appearance of Darnley. With great familiarity he throws his arm around the Queen’s waist. He is almost immediately followed by Ruthven, one of his friends, who is clad in full armor and is ghastly pale from excitement and fear. The Queen haughtily commands him to leave the room; but before he can answer, her bedroom is filled with men bearing torches and brandishing their swords, nearly all under the influence of liquor, and calling with loud and threatening voices for Rizzio. The Italian knows immediately what this scene means. He jumps from his seat and takes refuge behind the Queen, clutching her gown with the grasp of despair and imploring her to save his life. Mary Stuart at this moment stands erect in the consciousness of her outraged dignity, her eyes sparkling with indignation and wrath, and trying to protect Rizzio against the crowd of aggressors who are pushing up to her, upsetting the table on which she leans her hand, and trying to push her aside in order to get at Rizzio. For a few moments she succeeds in keeping them at bay; but then it is Darnley who comes to their rescue. He seizes the Queen, tries to push her away, and takes hold of Rizzio’s hand in order to make him loose his grasp of Mary’s gown. In this struggle Mary has partly uncovered the Italian, and one of the conspirators, espying the opportunity, plunges a dagger over Mary’s shoulder into Rizzio’s breast. It is a signal for a general assault on the unfortunate victim. Like madmen they rush upon him from all sides; they drag him from behind the Queen, who is herself in danger of being slain; they beat him, they kick him, they plunge their swords, their knives, their daggers into his bleeding and mutilated body, they pull him by the hair, lifeless and maimed as he is, through the dining-room, through the bedroom, to the outer door of the antechamber, and only desist when they see that it is nothing but a corpse which they are maltreating.
The dead silence which suddenly follows gives notice to Mary that the horrid crime has been fully committed, that her favorite lies prostrate and silenced forever at the threshold of her bedroom. What wonder that in that terrible hour thoughts of revenge and hatred against Darnley, the leader of this gang of savages and murderers, arise in her brain, never to leave it again?
The assassination of Rizzio had opened a chasm between Mary Stuart and Darnley which nothing but his own blood could fill up. From the very first moment it became evident—and the Queen made no secret of it—that Mary Stuart intended to resent the foul murder of one who, if he had not been her lover, had enjoyed her confidence and her friendship, and whom not even her personal intercession had been able to save from a most cruel and entirely undeserved death. Immediately after the murder, when Ruthven came back to her presence, with the blood-stained dagger still in his hand, and demanded wine, she answered: “It shall be dear blood to some of you!” Nor would she permit the blood of Rizzio to be washed off the floor; she wished that it should forever remain as a mark of the murder which had been committed there, and she ordered a partition to be built between the grand staircase and the door of the antechamber leading to her bedroom, in order to protect the blood-stained floor from being desecrated by the feet of visitors. In this condition the Palace has remained for centuries and the stains caused by Rizzio’s blood have withstood the lapse of hundreds of years.
The halcyon days which Mary had tried to create for herself at Holyrood—the days and hours which she had hoped would console her by poetry, music, and song for her absence from France—had come to a sudden and cruel end. The conspirators were not satisfied with having slain Rizzio; his murder was only the unavoidable means to accomplish a certain purpose,—to get control of the government. They kept the Queen in close captivity and would not permit any of her friends, not even her ladies, to see or confer with her. It was then that Mary resorted to her great power of duplicity. Carefully concealing the profound horror and disgust with which the sight of Darnley filled her, she convinced him easily that her interests and his were identical, that his strength lay in his exalted station as consort of the Queen, and that their continued estrangement and enmity would only lead to the elevation of her half-brother, Lord Murray, or some other great nobleman. Darnley was only too easily persuaded; he fell readily into the trap which the deceitful Queen had set for him. In his overweening vanity, and convinced of his own invincibility, he ascribed the passionate appeals and the affectionate solicitations of the Queen for his support to a renewal of her former love and passion for him. Carried away by her tenderness and loveliness, he promised to release her from her captivity and to abduct her to Dunbar castle, where she would be secure from any plots of her enemies. Darnley induced a number of his personal friends and adherents to join him in this undertaking, and a few nights later the flight from Holyrood to Dunbar was effected with complete success.
Darnley, after having thus separated his cause from that of the enemies of the Queen,—who were seriously debating whether she should be imprisoned for life, exiled from the country, or put to death,—went a step further. He openly denounced the assassination of Rizzio as an inexcusable crime, and disclaimed all previous knowledge of and complicity in it. Nobody believed him,—neither the Queen, who had seen his active participation in the murder when he could easily have prevented it; nor the conspirators, who knew that he had planned all the details, had helped in its execution, and had promised to protect those who would take a hand in it. But Darnley’s lying declaration served the political aims of the Queen well. From Dunbar she issued an appeal to the loyal people and nobles of Scotland, imploring their assistance against the rebels who had driven her from Edinburgh and had insulted and threatened her in her own palace, and using the presence and the declaration of the King to contradict the stories and accusations circulated by the conspirators and “rebels” against her scandalous private life. Eight thousand loyal Scots responded to this appeal of their Queen, and at the head of this enthusiastic army Queen Mary and her husband returned to Edinburgh and once more took possession of Holyrood.
It was not long before the Queen threw off the mask of affection for Darnley, which she had assumed for political purposes, and openly again showed that aversion which she really felt for him. Not even the birth of her son, who afterwards as James the Sixth ruled over Scotland and as James the First over England, changed the strained relations between husband and wife. There seems to be no doubt that the new cause of these strained relations, which grew more apparent from day to day, was a criminal and adulterous love affair which had quite suddenly sprung up between the Queen and one of the noblemen of her court, the Earl of Bothwell.
The new favorite was a scion of one of the noblest and most renowned families of Scotland, but his personal history was far from being honorable. The mere fact that a man with such antecedents could appear at court and be received in the very highest society is a sad comment on the moral tone prevailing at that court and in that society. Bothwell was at that time no longer a young man. When quite young he had one day disappeared from the castle of his fathers and, on reaching the coast of the North Sea, had joined a gang of adventurers who, as pirates, infested those waters and were a terror to the merchant vessels of all the nations of Europe. By natural ability, unbounded courage and daring the young Scotchman had rapidly risen to a commanding position among the wild corsairs; his name was repeated with fear and awe from the coasts of Denmark to the west coast of Ireland. In one of the desperate engagements with warships of the Hanseatic League he had lost one eye, but had saved his life and his freedom. Many years of his life he had passed in this wild and adventurous career. Then the news of the death of his father reached him, and one morning he reappeared in his ancestral home to take possession of his vast domain. The turbulent condition of Scotland, the civil war between Protestants and Catholics, the struggles for supremacy between the crown and the nobility, were congenial to his adventurous and reckless spirit. He had been among the first to greet Mary Stuart on her arrival from France and had shown her, from the first day he saw her, an enthusiastic, almost worshipful devotion. He was a passionate adorer of female beauty, and the romantic halo of his past life which surrounded his brow had secured for him triumphs in love-affairs with some of the fairest women of the court. He was among those who escorted Mary from Holyrood to Dunbar, and again he was one of those who led her back in triumph from Dunbar to Edinburgh. During this return march Bothwell distinguished himself by the skill of his military dispositions, by his boldness and intrepidity, and attracted the personal notice of the Queen.