ABSTRACT
The Darnley marriage quickly turned out a mistake. That young man, twenty when he became king of Scots, combined in himself all the worst features of the Stuart character-stupidity, arrogance, moodiness, obstinacy, licentiousness, unreliability. Mary's genuine
love for him barely survived the year, but it sufficed to infect her with his wilful pride; she altered her sensible policy of peace ,vith the congregation and circumspection towards protestants. In 1565 the earl of Murray, leader of the protestant lords, was forced to flee abroad, and Mary began to display her attachment to catholicism and dislike of the restraint so far put upon her. But in that queen's life politics were ever intermingled with private affairs. Disgusted with her husband, alienated from the Scottish politicians, she began to put her trust in a private secretary, the Italian David Riccio, with whom her relations may have been innocent. Darnley, wild with jealousy, broke into the queen's chamber with a gang, dragged Riccio out, and murdered him (1565). Mary was then with child, the later King James. She determined to be avenged. Dissembling sufficiently to extract from the idiot to whom she was married the details of the affair, she drove out his accomplices and welcomed back Murray. But when the year 1566 proved clearly that Darnley's one remaining usefulness-his help in asserting the Stuart claim to the English throne-was not likely to be great in view of the English parliament's attitude to the succession, his fate was sealed. He fell ill towards the end of the year; in February 1567 his devoted wife conveyed him to the house of Kirk 0' Field near Edinburgh and left him there to be murdered and his body blown up with the house by a conspiracy of Scottish lords led by the wildest of them all, James Bothwell. Her complicity in the plot has never been proved or disproved; that she wished Darnley dead and suspected he might not return from Kirk 0' Field is the least one must say.
