The Last Tudor

CHEQUERS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE,

SPRING 1567

Lord Darnley, that wildly vicious son of my cousin Margaret Douglas, is dead. The boy that no one ever thought would make good has made a terrible end, naked and strangled in the garden, his house in ruins behind him. Someone—and everyone is saying that it is the Protestant lords—blew up his house, Kirk o’ Field, with gunpowder and caught him as he fled. He was not a youth who was ever going to die in his bed—a murderer who threatened his own unborn son and wife, a twisted child spoiled by his mother’s ambition—but everyone is shocked that he should die such a death, and horrified by what this means for the Queen of Scots, only just recovered from her illness and now widely suspected of murdering her husband.

Elizabeth, hardly concealing her delight at the disaster that has blown up the agreement between her and the Scots queen, just as the house Kirk o’ Field has been blown apart, is now ostentatiously filled with pity for the vicious boy’s heartbroken mother. Our cousin Lady Margaret Douglas is released from the Tower and allowed to stay with Thomas Sackville at Sackville Place. Her little boy Charles joins her, to comfort her in her terrible loss. The death of her syphilitic murderer son somehow excuses her own treason. Lady Margaret is set free; Katherine and I, innocent of anything, are kept imprisoned. Elizabeth can think of nothing but how she should respond to our cousin Queen Mary.

While the rabid Scots preachers declare that no woman can hold power, Elizabeth is driven to support her cousin. But she cannot do it wholeheartedly. She publishes advice to the Scots queen pointing out the contrast between herself—the celibate queen—and the scandalous newly widowed, twice-married queen. A copy of this letter even reaches me at Chequers, and I read it, amazed that the queen calls herself a faithful cousin and friend, says that she is more sorry for the danger to Mary than for the death of Darnley, and that Mary must preserve her honor rather than look through her fingers at those who have done her the favor of murdering her husband, “as most people say.”

I don’t know whether or not “most people” ever said that Mary was the murderer of Darnley before Elizabeth’s damning defense, but I am very sure that everyone will say it now. I see the hand of William Cecil all through this: the murder in the nighttime garden, the smearing of the reputation of the papist queen, the sudden leap of Elizabeth into confidence and pretend pity. The death of Darnley has ruined Mary, just as her marriage to him ruined her. It has ruined the agreement that she was making with Elizabeth, just as William Cecil planned.

This was not a quiet murder done on an out-of-the-way shallow flight of stairs with a packed jury to return a verdict of accidental death. This was a huge explosion in the heart of Edinburgh in the middle of the night, with the queen having refused to sleep with her husband in the doomed house that very evening. As if she knew, people say. As if the gunpowder was packed by someone she knew.

Even locked in my room, even confined to the garden, the rumors reach me. The kitchen at Chequers is sizzling with gossip, the stable yard lads are great supporters of the Scots lord: James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who has always fought for the Protestant cause, whose ways are simple and direct and violent. The laundry maids are filled with pity for poor Lord Darnley, blown up in his bed, or strangled by the barbarian Scots lords at the behest of his wicked wife. All spring the scandal gets more and more outrageous and elaborate until in April we hear that Mary Queen of Scots has run away from her capital city, and in May that she has married the man who killed her husband: James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell.