It was a hasty wooing, and the queen herself was first of all the wooer.  Her quick imagination saw in Darnley traits and gifts of which he really had no share.  Therefore, the marriage was soon concluded, and Scotland had two sovereigns, King Henry and Queen Mary.  So sure was Mary of her indifference to Bothwell that she urged the earl to marry, and he did marry a girl of the great house of Gordon.

Mary’s self-suggested love for Darnley was extinguished almost on her wedding-night.  The man was a drunkard who came into her presence befuddled and almost bestial.  He had no brains.  His vanity was enormous.  He loved no one but himself, and least of all this queen, whom he regarded as having thrown herself at his empty head.

The first-fruits of the marriage were uprisings among the Protestant lords.  Mary then showed herself a heroic queen.  At the head of a motley band of soldiery who came at her call—­half-clad, uncouth, and savage—­she rode into the west, sleeping at night upon the bare ground, sharing the camp food, dressed in plain tartan, but swift and fierce as any eagle.  Her spirit ran like fire through the veins of those who followed her.  She crushed the insurrection, scattered its leaders, and returned in triumph to her capital.

Now she was really queen, but here came in the other motive which was interwoven in her character.  She had shown herself a man in courage.  Should she not have the pleasures of a woman?  To her court in Holyrood came Bothwell once again, and this time Mary knew that he was all the world to her.  Darnley had shrunk from the hardships of battle.  He was steeped in low intrigues.  He roused the constant irritation of the queen by his folly and utter lack of sense and decency.  Mary felt she owed him nothing, but she forgot that she owed much to herself.

Her old amorous ways came back to her, and she relapsed into the joys of sense.  The scandal-mongers of the capital saw a lover in every man with whom she talked.  She did, in fact, set convention at defiance.  She dressed in men’s clothing.  She showed what the unemotional Scots thought to be unseemly levity.  The French poet, Chastelard, misled by her external signs of favor, believed himself to be her choice.  At the end of one mad revel he was found secreted beneath her bed, and was driven out by force.  A second time he ventured to secrete himself within the covers of the bed.  Then he was dragged forth, imprisoned, and condemned to death.  He met his fate without a murmur, save at the last when he stood upon the scaffold and, gazing toward the palace, cried in French: 

“Oh, cruel queen!  I die for you!”

Another favorite, the Italian, David Rizzio, or Riccio, in like manner wrote love verses to the queen, and she replied to them in kind; but there is no evidence that she valued him save for his ability, which was very great.  She made him her foreign secretary, and the man whom he supplanted worked on the jealousy of Darnley; so that one night, while Mary and Rizzio were at dinner in a small private chamber, Darnley and the others broke in upon her.  Darnley held her by the waist while Rizzio was stabbed before her eyes with a cruelty the greater because the queen was soon to become a mother.