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year, trouble brewed between Elizabeth and Mary. Robert Dudley had been elevated to the rank of Earl of Leicester and was offered to Mary as a handsome bridegroom to seal amity between England and Scotland. Mary famously shunned Elizabeth’s dashing Master of the Horse. Instead, Mary had, it seemed, settled on a far worthier English subject, Henry Darnley.
    Darnley had been put forward as a potential husband for Mary years earlier by his scheming mother, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. The countess, Henry VIII’s elder sister and Elizabeth’s aunt, had been on the wrong side of Elizabeth’s temper once before. In 1562, the Lennox claims supposed that their son’s marriage to Mary of Scotland would ensure young Darnley’s accession as king of England in his own right. After all, Henry Darnley was the great-grandson of Henry VII.
    Yet despite Elizabeth’s understandable concern at Margaret’s overt scheming, resulting in both the Earl and Countess of Lennox being thrown into the Tower suspected of treason, in 1565, Elizabeth allowed the Earl of Lennox and Darnley to pass into Scotland to save their family’s substantial lands from falling into untrustworthy hands.
    Elizabeth had made a dire mistake. Still, it was an error undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of both her most trusted advisers, William Cecil and Leicester. But why? Leicester later avowed his own distaste for his proposed marriage to the Scots queen claiming that “the invention of that proposition proceeded from Mr. Cecil, his secret enemy.” 1 Cecil, for his part, must have preferred an English subject to any foreign prince as Mary’s husband and connived with Leicester for Darnley’s “one month sojourn” to Scotland in the hope that Darnley could become a replacement for the hapless Leicester. No wonder Elizabeth couldn’t bear the sight of either Leicester or Cecil for a while—it must have dawned on her that she had been well and truly hoodwinked by them both.
    Darnley and his father wasted no time in inserting themselves into Mary’s court in Edinburgh. At first Mary seemed indifferent to the handsome boy. Yet when Darnley came down with measles, Mary nursed him back to health. Suddenly, Mary became besotted by the tall, dashing, and athletic Darnley.
    What is unclear is if Cecil had expected that the rambunctious Scots lairds and courtiers would rise up against the likely Darnley marriage. Darnley was a Catholic, too, and in the lairds’ eyes, should the couple wed, this could only spell the doom of the fledgling Protestant Presbyterian realm of Scotland. Eventually, they enlisted the aid of their unflinching John Knox to preach against this ill-starred match from the pulpits. The English ambassador, Thomas Randolph, who had been a reliable, if gossipy, source of information about life at Mary’s court, asked to be recalled. Randolph sensed civil war on the wind. Mary’s two most trusted and influential ministers, Sir William Maitland and her half brother the Earl of Moray, took the Protestant line and let the queen know their feelings. Still, Mary chose to ignore them, sending Maitland south to London for Elizabeth’s obligatory permission to marry the English nobleman Darnley.
    When Maitland arrived in London on April 15, 1565, he and Cecil conferred privately for three weeks. No correspondence survives outlining the specific nature of those meetings, only whisperings picked up from the dispatches of the French and Spanish ambassadors. Naturally, Maitland asked Elizabeth for her permission for the match; she declined to respond directly, stating instead that she would send Sir Nicholas Throckmorton to Edinburgh with her reply. By May 21, Throckmorton delivered Elizabeth’s message taken down at the Privy Council meeting that a marriage with Darnley “would be unmeet, unprofitable and perilous.” The same letter also confirmed that there was