English money and skill honeycombed Scottish loyalty.  Darnley, vicious, vain, and passionate, was an easy prey to intrigue.  The tools of England whispered in his ear that his wife was too intimate with the Italian secretary Rizzio, who had conducted the correspondence with the Catholic powers.  Darnley, who had earned his wife’s contempt already, was beside himself with jealousy, and himself led the Protestant conspirators and friends of England, who murdered Rizzio in the queen’s presence at Holyrood (March 1566).  From that hour Darnley’s doom was sealed.

He had thought to be king indeed now, but Mary outwitted him; for she recalled her exiled lords, welcomed her brother Murray, and threw herself into the arms of Darnley’s Protestant foes, the very men who had risen in arms against the marriage.  As she fled by night with Darnley after Rizzio’s murder, to betray him, she swore over Rizzio’s new-made grave that a “fatter one” than he should lie there ere long.  Whether she knew of the plot of his foes to murder her husband is not proved, but she almost certainly did so, and welcomed the deed when it was done.  She made no pretence of love for him after Rizzio’s death, and her husband repaid her coldness by sulky loutishness and bursts of drunken violence.  Mary’s conduct toward Bothwell, too, began to arouse scandal.  By November 1566, matters had reached a crisis, and Mary, at Kelso, said that unless she was freed from Darnley she would put an end to herself.  She spoke not to deaf ears.  Morton, and the rest of Rizzio’s slayers and bitter enemies, were pardoned, and the deadly bond was signed.

IV.—­Dire Infatuation

On February 9, 1567, as the doomed consort lay sick and sorry outside Edinburgh at the lone house of Kirk o’ Field, he was, done to death by Bothwell and the foes of the Lennoxes; and Mary Stuart’s first true love affair was ended in tragedy.  But already the second was in full blast.  Bothwell had recently married; he was disliked by the Scottish nobles, and the queen’s constant association with him had already brought discredit upon her.  There had been a good political excuse for her union with Darnley, but Bothwell could bring no support to her cause; for his creed was doubtful, and he had no friends.  Nothing, indeed, but the infatuation of an amorous woman for a brutally strong man could have so blinded her to her own great aims as to make her take Bothwell, the prime mover of Darnley’s murder, for her husband.

As soon as the crime was known, all fingers were pointed to Bothwell and the queen as the murderers, and Protestants everywhere hastened to cast obloquy upon Mary for it.  But for the nobles’ jealousy of Bothwell, and the religious animus, probably Darnley’s death would soon have been forgotten or condoned; but as it was, Scotland blazed out in denunciation of it, and though Bothwell was put upon a mock trial and acquitted, the hate against him grew, especially when he arranged to divorce his wife in April 1567, and, ostensibly by force, but clearly by Mary’s connivance, abducted the queen and bore her off to his castle of Dunbar.