The Cradle King (2 page)

Despite the protests, Mary was adamant on her choice, and on 29 July 1565 she made her second marriage. Now Henry was to feel the hatred Mary aroused. On Sunday 19 August, the King attended a sermon by John Knox at Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Church that lasted ‘an hour and more longer than the time appointed’. Knox did not subscribe to the policy of mutual appeasement between Kirk and Queen. Mary, he thought, should either convert or die. Added to his distaste for the Queen was his firmly held and oft expressed belief that a woman should not rule, the subject of his notorious
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
He had even turned down Mary’s offer to seek his private counsel. ‘If your Grace please to frequent the public sermons,’ he retorted, ‘then doubt I not that ye shall fully understand both what I like and dislike, as well in your Majesty as in all others.’
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By now Knox was a shrunken old man who had to be helped into the pulpit by two men, and who started his sermon leaning; but by the time he was done with his sermon, wrote one admiring onlooker, ‘he was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding that pulpit in blads [seemed likely to beat the pulpit to pieces] and fly out of it!’
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Knox’s text on this occasion was Isaiah 26: 13–21: ‘O Lord our God, other lords than thou have ruled over us.’ In it, Knox focused on how wicked princes were sent by God because of the sins of the people, to act as tyrants and scourges to plague them, and more particularly ‘that God sets in that room – for the offences and ingratitude of the people – boys and women’. Henry and Mary were tacitly likened to Ahab and Jezebel, with Knox pointing out ‘that God justly punished Ahab and his posterity, because he would not take order with that harlot Jezebel’. Moving on, Knox compared Henry to Julian the Apostate, and concluded with a prayer that ‘we may see … what punishment he [God] hath appointed for the cruel tyrants’. Unsurprisingly, the King was ‘so moved at this sermon, that he would not dine; and being troubled with great fury he passed in the afternoon to the hawking’, an inappropriate Sabbath activity guaranteed to confirm Knox in his low opinion of the King. The Council ordered Knox to abstain from preaching for ‘a season’, because ‘the King’s majesty was offended’.
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But John Knox was not the newlyweds’ only problem. Mary was no sooner married than she found herself once more under attack from Moray, who launched a rebellion citing Mary’s ‘danger’ to the Protestant religion, supported by the Earl of Argyll, who wielded considerable influence in the west of the country. Failing to answer a summons to appear before Mary, Moray was ritually ‘put to the horn’, or outlawed, on 6 August 1565, and eight days later his properties were seized.
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As Moray gathered his forces at Ayr, Mary mustered her troops, and from late August to the beginning of October the rebel and the royal forces (the latter led by the King’s father Lennox and Mary’s Lord Chancellor James Douglas, fourth Earl of Morton, with Henry and Mary in the rearguard) engaged in a tiresome standoff in often appalling weather during which the rival troops never met, a non-event aptly dubbed ‘the Chaseabout Raid’. Mary, carrying a pistol, and wearing a steel cap, was remarked upon for her fortitude: while ‘the most part waxed weary’ in the tempestuous weather, ‘yet the Queen’s courage increased manlike so much that she was ever with the foremost’.
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After rebel forces were expelled from Edinburgh on 1 September, the royal forces gained the upper hand and forced the rebels south. By 6 October, defeat was inevitable, and Moray fled over the border to seek asylum in England.

Despite her vigour during the Chaseabout Raid, Mary’s health was fragile, and it was often reported that the Queen was ill. In November 1565, for example, she took to her bed complaining of a pain in her side, but newsmongers were keen for the newlywed’s condition to be something more romantic than her ‘old malady’. As the winter drew on, word spread that the Queen was expecting her first child, a report only fanned by her decision to ride in a litter, rather than on horseback as usual, from Edinburgh to Linlithgow in December.
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While an early pregnancy boded well for the marriage, frequent quarrels suggested that all was not well between the King and Queen. In September, Mary had welcomed back from exile a Protestant nobleman, James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, earlier banished on charges of planning to abduct her. Bothwell, the hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland, wielded considerable power in the Borders. Contemporary opinion was remarkably consistent on the Earl: he was, according to the English agent in Scotland Thomas Randolph, ‘a blasphemer and irreverent speaker both of his own sovereign and the Queen my mistress’; another English observer, the ambassador Nicholas Throckmorton, saw him as a ‘[vain]glorious, rash and hazardous young man’.
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In the words of Sir John Maxwell, fourth Lord Herries, a loyal supporter of Mary, Bothwell was ‘a man high in his own conceit, proud, vicious, and vainglorious above measure; one who would attempt anything out of ambition’.
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Mary, knowing that Bothwell nurtured a longstanding enmity towards Moray, wanted him to lead her forces; Henry wanted his father to have the position, but Mary prevailed; she soon came to rely increasingly on Bothwell in military matters.
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There were other signals of marital tension. In December, a coin reading ‘Henricus et Maria’ was recalled from circulation, and reissued with the inscription ‘Maria et Henricus’.
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By the end of the year, the change of priority was clear: Randolph reported that ‘a while [ago] there was nothing but “King and Queen, his majesty and hers”; but now the “Queen’s husband” is more common’.
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Mary was also upsetting many Scottish lords who saw their traditional influence waning, while that of the Queen’s personal entourage, which included several foreign servants who had followed her from France, waxed remarkably. They complained that ‘the Queen had now a certain resolution to tyrannise over the country; for what could be more grievous than to mistrust her own subjects, and commit her person to the guard of Italians, strangers, and papists!’ Look at her secretary David Riccio, ‘Signor Davy’, ‘one whom the Queen gave greater trust unto than her own husband, one without whose counsel the Queen did nothing. He was an Italian himself, and would make these Italians do what he pleased!’
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David Riccio had come to the Scottish court in 1561 in the retinue of the ambassador of the Duke of Savoy, and had entered the Queen’s Household as a singer, before becoming her personal secretary. This post, one of great intimacy with the Queen, was one to set tongues wagging. When Henry withdrew from court to spend time hunting in Peebles, the Queen’s party blamed it on his ‘wilfulness’ and anger at the curbing of his power and deferring of his coronation. Others, however, claimed that Mary had forced him to retire, openly expressing her distaste for his company. At the same time, according to Lord Herries, ‘she raised every day Signor Davy higher in her favour, and used him with greater familiarity than was fit. It was openly said that she took more pleasure in his company than in the King’s, her husband’s; that she made him sit at table with her, and [he] had free access to her bedchamber, at all hours.’ Her friends protected Mary by saying that Riccio was ‘witty and faithful’ but that ‘it was nothing likely that she would fancy his person’ since he was ‘neither handsome nor well-faced’.
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(Mary’s apologist Adam Blackwood confirms that ‘He was a man of no beauty or outward shape, for he was misshapen, evil favoured, and in visage very black; but for his fidelity, wisdom, prudence, virtue and his other good parts and qualities of mind he was richly adorned.’)
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Henry’s father Lennox, on the other hand, was certain that Mary was ‘using the said David more as a lover than a servant. Forsaking her husband’s bed and board very often, liking the company of David, as appeared, better than her husband’s.’
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Whatever the truth of the rumours, Lord Herries concluded, ‘they were by her enemies cried out with open mouth, to defame her and incense her husband’.
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Henry was soon provoked by more than simply sexual jealousy. In order to prevent her husband handing out gifts without her authority, Mary decreed that all papers had to be signed first by her, with her own hand, and then by Henry – or rather, by Henry’s signature. She then had a seal made bearing Henry’s signature, and gave it to Riccio.
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This infuriated Henry. Not content with curbing his role as King–husband, Mary was now handing what was left of it to her Italian secretary – a foreigner and a papist, arrogant and conspicuously extravagant in his dress. Rumour had it that Mary wanted to appoint him as Secretary of State or even replace Morton as Chancellor.

Although Mary had appointed Morton Lord Chancellor, and he had helped lead her forces during the Chaseabout Raid, she had never fully trusted the man, who was a staunch Protestant with family ties to Henry’s family the Lennoxes, and with reason. It was Morton who fed Henry’s suspicions about Riccio and encouraged his ambitions to assume his full powers as King. Henry should take on sole government of the country, Morton urged, drawing on the deeply ingrained misogyny of the time: it was ‘a thing against nature that the hen should crow before the cock; yea, against the commandment of the eternal God, that a man should be subject to his wife, the man being the image of God, and woman the image of man’. If Henry would guarantee to pardon past misdemeanours and restore his estates, Morton would guarantee the support of his faction, and of the English Queen Elizabeth.
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Soon a plan to kill Riccio had been devised by Morton, along with Patrick, sixth Lord Lindsay and Patrick, Lord Ruthven, ‘to become that way masters of the Court’. The courtier and diarist Sir James Melville claims that it was Morton’s cousin, George Douglas, a kinsman and perpetual companion of Henry’s, who ‘put in his head such suspicion against Riccio that the King was won to give his consent over easily to the slaughter of Signor David’.
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Also drawn in was the fugitive Earl of Moray, who needed to escape the sentence that the forthcoming Parliament would doubtless pass against him; if Henry were to assume sole government, then the Parliament could be cancelled.

Patrick, third Lord Ruthven, was one of the first men drawn into the plot. In his own account of the affair, written at the end of April 1566, he told of how he had doubts, especially concerning the killing of Riccio in front of Mary’s eyes. Several of the conspirators were ‘very loath to grant’ this, pointing out that this might prompt ‘sundry great persons’ in Mary’s company to intervene, causing considerable bloodshed. It was Henry who insisted on this detail: ‘Notwithstanding no reason might avail, but the King would have him [Riccio] taken in her Majesty’s presence, and devised the manner himself.’
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Although Henry did not sign the bond until 1 March 1566,
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news of the plot had already leaked by 13 February, when Thomas Randolph reported back to England that ‘I know that … David with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days.’
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Randolph was slightly premature, but the planned attack became a matter of urgency when it was announced that Parliament would move to bring about the arrest and trial of Moray and his confederates on 12 March: since the conspirators hoped to avoid this, action had to be taken before then. Sir James Melville claims (perhaps with the pathos of hindsight) that he tried to warn both Riccio and Mary of the dangers to them. The secretary ignored his advice: ‘he disdained all danger, and despised counsel’. Mary dismissed the rumours, calmly assuring Melville ‘that our countrymen were talkative’.
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The events of the evening of 9 March 1566 were so extraordinary that several local observers felt compelled to pen full accounts of the bloody proceedings, including Ruthven and Mary herself.
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While differing in minor details, as one might reasonably expect in telling such a sudden and violent encounter, these narratives are remarkably consistent in what they tell. The Queen was at supper with Riccio and her half-sister Janet, Countess of Argyll, in a small room leading off her bedchamber. She was mildly surprised when Henry came in and made awkward small talk, but she was astonished when, in full armour and backed by six men with drawn swords, Lord Ruthven burst into the room.

‘What strange sight is this, my Lord, I see in you?’ she asked. ‘Are you mad?’

‘We have been too long mad,’ Ruthven retorted.

But the secretary knew why they were there. Each account tells how Riccio, terrified, moved away from Ruthven and tried to take refuge behind the Queen, clasping his arms around her pregnant belly. This last detail is crucial. Riccio assumed that his best defence lay in being protected not just by the Queen, but by the unborn heir to the throne. He did not know that, by all accounts, Henry wanted his wife to miscarry, perhaps believing, as many would after him, that the child was not his but Riccio’s. Mary took hold of the secretary, and refused to let go until one of Ruthven’s men, Andrew Kerr of Fawdonsyde, placed a pistol to her breast. After a struggle Kerr pulled Riccio away, and dragged him to the next room where other conspirators waited. There the Earl of Morton struck the first blow with his dagger: fifty-two more were to follow. The King’s own dagger was belatedly thrust into the ruined corpse, to seal his complicity.