The question of the queen's second marriage was, meanwhile, occupying the attention of both English and Scottish statesmen. The chief aim of the diplomacy of Mary and Maitland of Leth ington was a recognition by Elizabeth of the Scottish queen's claim to succeed her, in default of heirs of Elizabeth's own body. A marriage between Mary and a Habsburg prince was rendered impossible by Elizabeth's threat that, if Mary married a foreign prince, she would be debarred from the English succession. Eliza beth proposed as a suitor to the queen of Scots her own favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, the widower if not the murderer of Amy Robsart ; but she permitted Mary's cousin, Henry, Lord Darnley, to make a visit to Scotland. Darnley's mother, the countess of Lennox, was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV., by her second husband, the earl of Angus, and therefore the next heir to the English throne after Mary herself. She had been born and brought up in England, and had married the earl of Lennox, an exiled Scottish traitor of Mary's minor ity. Elizabeth knew that a marriage which would unite the two claims to the succession was a probable result of Darnley's visit, but she protested against the marriage. Mary, who had already married her kinsman, in secret, at Stirling Castle, with Catholic rites celebrated in the apartment of David Rizzio, her secretary for correspondence with France, assured the English ambassador, in reply to the protest of his mistress, that the marriage would not take place for three months, when a dispensation from the pope would allow the cousins to be publicly united without offence to the Church. On July 29, 1565, they were accordingly remarried at Holyrood. Protestant feeling was aroused, and Murray raised a rebellion. He entered Edinburgh with his forces, but failed to hold the town against the guns of the castle, and fell back upon Dumfries before the advance of the royal army, which was joined by James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, on his return from a three years' outlawed exile in France. Another new adherent was the son of the late earl of Huntly, to whom the forfeited honours of his house were restored a few months before the marriage of his sister to Bothwell. In Oct. 1565 the queen marched an army of i8,000 men against the malcontents; their forces dispersed in face of superior numbers, and Murray, on seeking shelter in England, was received with contumely by Elizabeth, whose half-hearted help had failed to support his enterprise, and whose intercession for his return found at first no favour with the queen of Scots. But the conduct of the besotted boy on whom, at their marriage, she had bestowed the title of king, began at once to justify the enterprise and to play into the hands of all his enemies alike. His father set him on to demand the crown matrimonial, which would at least have assured to him the rank and station of independent royalty for life. Rizzio, hitherto his friend and advocate, induced the queen to reply by a reasonable refusal to this hazardous and audacious request. Darn ley who professed to be jealous of Rizzio's intimacy with his wife, at once threw himself into the arms of the party opposed to the policy of the queen and her secretary, and the destruction of Rizzio was planned.
On March 9 the palace of Holyrood was invested by a troop under the command of Morton, while Rizzio was dragged by force out of the queen's presence and slain without trial in the heat of the moment. A parliament which had been summoned for the attainder of Murray and his fellow-conspirators was discharged by proclamation issued in the name of Darnley as king; and in the evening of the next day the banished lords returned to Edinburgh. On the day following they were graciously received by the queen, who undertook to sign a bond for their security, but delayed the subscription till next morning under plea of sickness. During the night she escaped with Darnley, whom she had already seduced from the party of his accom plices, and arrived at Dunbar on the third morning after the slaughter of her favourite. From thence they returned to Edin burgh on March 28 guarded by 2,000 horsemen under the com mand of Bothwell, who had escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder, to raise a force on the queen's behalf with his usual soldierly promptitude. The slayers of Rizzio fled to England, and were outlawed; Darnley was permitted to protest his inno cence and denounce his accomplices.
A reconciliation between husband and wife followed the birth of their son, James, on June 19, 1566, but it was only temporary.
Darnley refused to be present at the baptism of the prince in October, and soon afterwards, while suffering from a serious ill ness, he went to stay with his father in Glasgow. He had earned his doom at all hands alike, and if his wife and Bothwell were by this time plotting against him, his death was not to be the result of a mere domestic conspiracy, for Bothwell had other ac complices than the queen. On Jan. 22, 1567, Mary visited her
husband at Glasgow and proposed to remove him to Craigmillar Castle, where he would have the benefit of medicinal baths ; but instead of this resort he was conveyed, on the last day of the month, to the lonely and squalid shelter of the residence known as Kirk-of-Field. On the evening of Sunday, Feb. 9, Mary took her last leave of the miserable boy who had so often and so mortally outraged her as consort and as queen. That night the whole city was shaken out of sleep by an explosion of gunpowder which shattered to fragments the building in which he should have slept and perished; and the next morning the bodies of Darn ley and a page were found strangled in a garden adjoining it, whither they had apparently escaped over a wall, to be despatched by the hands of Bothwell's confederates.
Three months and six days after the murder of her husband Mary became the wife of her husband's murderer. On Feb.
she had written to the bishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in France, announcing her providential escape from a design upon her own as well as her husband's life. A reward of £2,000 was offered by proclamation for discovery of the murderer. Bothwell and others, his satellites or the queen's, were instantly placarded by name as the criminals. Gracefully and respectfully, with states manlike, yet feminine dexterity, the demands of Darnley's father for justice on the murderers of his son were accepted and eluded by his daughter-in-law. On March 28 the Privy Council, in which Bothwell himself sat, appointed April 12 as the day of his trial. Bothwell was acquitted in default of witnesses against him, and his wealth and power were enlarged by gift of the parliament which met on the 14th and rose on April i9—a date made notable by the subsequent supper at Ainslie's tavern, where Bothwell obtained the signatures of its leading members to a document affirming his innocence, and pledging the subscribers to promote the marriage by which they recommended the queen to reward his services and benefit the country. On the second day following Mary went to visit her child at Stirling, where his guardian, the earl of Mar, refused to admit more than two women in her train. It was well known in Edinburgh that Bothwell had a body of men ready to intercept her on the way back, and carry her to Dunbar—not, as was naturally inferred, without good assurance of her con sent. On April 24, as she approached Edinburgh, Bothwell accord ingly met her at the head of Boo spearmen, assured her (as she afterwards averred) that she was in the utmost peril, and escorted her, together with Huntly, Lethington and Melville, who were then in attendance, to Dunbar Castle. On May 3 Lady Jane Gordon, who had become countess of Bothwell on Feb. 22 of the year preceding, obtained a separation on the ground of her husband's infidelities. Mary and Bothwell returned to Edin burgh with every prepared appearance of a peaceful triumph. Lest her captivity should have been held to invalidate the late legal proceedings in her name, proclamation was made of for giveness accorded by the queen to her captor in consideration of his past and future services. Bothwell, as a conscientious Protes tant, refused to marry his mistress according to the rites of her Church, and she, the chosen champion of its cause, agreed to be married to him by a Protestant On May 12 Bothwell was created duke of Orkney and Shetland and the marriage was solemnized three days later. The confederate lords almost immediately took up arms and seized the town and the castle of Edinburgh. Proclamations were issued in which the crime of Bothwell was denounced, and the disgrace of the country, the thraldom of the queen and the mortal peril of her infant son, were set forth as reasons for summoning all the lieges of the chief cities of Scotland to rise in arms on three hours' notice and join the forces assembled against the one common enemy. On June 15, one month from their marriage day, the queen and Bothwell, at the head of a force of fairly equal numbers, but visibly inferior discipline, met the army of the confederates at Carberry hill, some 6m. from Edinburgh. Du Croc, the French ambassador, obtained permission, through the influence of Maitland, to convey to the queen the terms proposed by their leaders--that she and Bothwell should part, or that he should meet in single combat a champion chosen from among them. At last it was agreed that the queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar, with the few followers who remained to him.