589. Mary, Queen of Scots: Downfall (Part 6)

It was not the Darnley murder which brought Mary down. The fact was that an embarrassment had been removed, a problem resolved. There is no doubt whatsoever that Mary could have continued her reign free of the albatross, because that was precisely what people wanted. What she had to do, as Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici, both of whom stood by her in february fifteen sixty seven, begged her to do, was to preserve an appearance of innocence, allow the scandal to burn itself out, enable stability to return. Rulers did recover from great scandals in the sixteenth century, the Bartholomew's Day massacre, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots herself,

were headline news in Europe and infinitely more dangerous to their perpetrators than the murder of Darnley. The problem, therefore, was not the murder, it was the infinitely unwise behaviour of Darnley's widow. So that was the historian Jenny Wormold in her biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, which has the splendid title A study in failure. She hates Mary, Queen of Scots.

So in our last episode, Tom, we described the events leading up to the murder of Mary's second husband, Lord Darnley, who you don't rate as a man, I don't rate him either. We described the murder and we described the suspects and the aftermath. And we went through in true crime podcasting style. going through all the different conspirators and explaining, sort of exploring the moments that led up to the murder itself. And we identified the conspirators, a large cross section of the Scottish nobility.

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