History Spotlight, 2/10

It was on this day in 1567 that Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was gruesomely (and ineptly) murdered, setting off the chain of events that would end up with Mary's head on the chopping block.

With an eye on the English throne (she was next in line) Mary chose a husband based on his place in the line of succession. That man was Henry Stuart, who was good looking, dynamic and a hell of a lot of fun at parties. He also had the benefit of having Tudor blood flowing through his veins, but, as the historian Simon Schama notes, "...a lot of whiskey was flowing through them as well."

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley

Darnley proved to be almost as useless as a husband as he was a monarch. From the start, Darnley was completely not interested in the day-to-day workings of government. He used his connections to get his pals good business deals but he mostly spent his time getting loaded and hunting. That wouldn't be so bad if that was the sum total of his ambitions, but he wanted Mary to give him the Crown Matrimonial. This would have made him the King of Scotland, rather than just the queen's husband. If Darnely was king, he'd be running Scotland because, in the Great Chain of Being, the husband outranks the wife and the king outranks the queen. (This is why Elizabeth wasn't into marriage.) On top of that, it would put him at number one with a bullet for the throne of England.

Mary, Queen of Scots, in a kicky hat

But Darnley wasn't just lazy and dissolute, he was mean-spirited and violent and Mary hated his guts. They had a son, but Darnley wouldn't have anything to do with him and constantly made smug comments about it not being his. Finally, the rumors got so bad that Darnely had to come out and make a public statement to the effect of, "The kid is mine." This was almost as bad, because it got people talking about just why Darnley had to make the statement in the first place. "What is the royal family trying to hide, anyway?" The appearance of impropriety was as important back then as it was now.
Things pretty much stayed like that until Darnley got into his head that Mary was having affair with her friend and secretary, the Italian Catholic David Rizzio. On March 9, 1566, Darnley and several of his drinking buddies stormed into the Queens dining room, held her at gunpoint (pointing the gun at her heavily pregnant belly), threw Rizzio down a flight of stairs and stabbed him 57 times. If the marriage hadn't been over before, it was certainly over now.

David Rizzio

The funny thing is that Mary couldn't divorce him or have him strung up or anything like that. She needed to present a unified family for the Scots and the English, especially as she either wanted to get herself or her son on the English throne.
But that didn't mean that she wasn't open the concept of Darnley having some kind of unfortunate accident. As we saw with Mary's imprisonment in England, she had a knack for batting her eyes and flirting with conspiracies, but never quite sealing the deal. And this is what she did when a group of nobles came calling with a plan to take care of the Darnley Situation once and for all.
On the night of February 10, 1567 a group of Scottish nobles placed many, many kegs of gunpowder in the basement of the house Darnley was staying in and lit the fuse. Darnley heard the noise and lowered himself from a window with a rope made of bedsheets (he really did). But it's not that easy. As he made his escape through the garden who should he run into, but the very nobles who were trying to blow him up. They strangled him and got the hell out of Dodge.

Obviously, a huge scandal. What always gets me is that the nobles left Darnley's stiff laying around to be discovered. Why not feed him to the pigs and say the body was vaporized in the blast? But, I'm not a 16th century Scottish noble, so nobody asked me. Unfortunately, Mary didn't adopt a position, of "grieving, outraged widow bravely carrying on." It was more like "barely-disguised glee." In fact, she later married the Earl of Bothwell, one of the very nobles who almost everyone believed to be one of the main Darnley-stranglers. It finally got so bad that there was open civil war in Scotland.

James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell

Bothwell proved to less capable on the field of battle than he was in the field of Darnley-strangling and Mary's side lost, hard. (Bothwell pretty much said, "I'm goin' for, uh, reinforcements" and bravely ran away.) She wound up fleeing to England, where she would get her head cut off 17 years later. Her son would later go on to be King of England after Elizabeth's death.