the queen and the long boi
Or, why Lord Darnley is a candidate for the Dirtbag Hall of Fame, Part 1
Hi friends!
First, apologies for the long break. Everything was on fire for three weeks. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Second—and more excitingly—we did it! We now have more than 500 certified citizens of Dirtbag Nation! This may not seem like a lot of subscribers in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a lot for me, since I’m on record saying I’d be delighted if I got 14. So thank you for supporting and sharing this silly project!
Now, when the 500 subscriber mark was but a little glimmer in my eye, I asked my Twitter followers what I should do to celebrate. The results were, uh, decisive.
So let’s discuss arguably one of the worst men in the history of the British Isles:
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, AKA My Personal 1500s Nemesis and a Man Whose Grave I Would Spit On if I Were Nearer to It, Part 1 of 2
A brief disclaimer: I am not an impartial narrator of this story. I cannot emphasize enough how partial I am. I am a shameless Mary Stuart stan. I wrote a whole book that’s in part a love letter to that conniving bitch. (Seriously. Buy my book. I worked very hard on it.) So if there are any Darnley apologists in my readership, my apologies.
Except there obviously aren’t any Darnley apologists in my readership, because this man SUCKS SO BAD.
The Background
For Darnley’s story to make sense, we need to do a little digging into two of the dullest parts of history: family trees and Protestantism. I promise to be brief about it.
Basically, when Darnley was born in 1546, he represented a perfect storm for the established order of Britain. Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox, was third in line to the throne of Scotland—not, like, the most direct heir in the world, but not nothing.
And Darnley’s mother, Lady Margaret Douglas, was the niece of Henry VIII. Because King Henry had a habit of disowning and then re-owning his daughters, this left Margaret extremely high up on the list of “Potential People Who Might Rule England After King Henry VIII Kicks the Bucket With His Rotting, Pus-Leaking Leg.”
To complete the triple threat, Darnley and his family was Catholic. England’s Catholics were very feisty at this time, due to Henry VIII’s creation of a thing called the Church of England that basically made Catholicism illegal. So Darnley represented a single person who could rule over England and Scotland while restoring the old faith. In other words: very important, even after Queen Elizabeth I was crowned.
OK. I promise, no more family trees today.
Power Moms and Ear Murder
Now, Lady Margaret Douglas wasn’t just an important person succession-wise. She was also a messy bitch who lived for drama. And somewhere along the line, she hatched the plan that her son Darnley should marry Mary Stuart, his first cousin, to strengthen both their claims to the throne.
So as early as 1560, when Darnley was 16, she started coming up with ways to force a meet-cute. She sent Teenage Darnley to France to pay his respects to Mary after the death of the King of France—and, hopefully, to get his flirt on a little. This plan did not work.
It did not work because Mary was already married to the new King of France, a consumptive little dweeb named François whom we have already discussed in this newsletter.
But did that stop Margaret and her schemey husband Lennox? The fuck it did not.
They continued to scheme with every ounce of their being to bring the marriage about one way or another. It helped that François died of an ear infection a couple months after Darnley visited court. (Am I suggesting that Darnley poisoned François II by dripping poison in his ear Old King Hamlet-style so he could get it on with Mary Queen of Scots? No reputable historian has ever suggested such a thing, but I’m not a reputable historian, I’m a fiction writer who loves a good ear-murder.)
With the way cleared, Margaret and Lennox schemed so hard that in 1562, Queen Elizabeth’s spies arrested them for conspiring to form a Mary-Darnley superalliance and raise an army out of Scotland to take over England.
This probably would have been enough to convict the whole family of treason, but Elizabeth decided to release them from the Tower of London after only a few months. Maybe she didn’t want to piss off all of England’s Catholics. Maybe she knew that 500 years later I’d be writing a Substack about historical assholes and wanted to give me more material. Either way, by 1563, both Darnley and his mother were free and strutting around Queen Elizabeth’s court in London as if they owned the place.
May we all approach each day with the no-fucks-given audacity of Lady Margaret Douglas, is all I have to say about that.
Flirty Measles
In 1565, when Darnley was 19, he’d apparently had enough of being a nuisance in London and set out for Scotland to hang with his father. But guess who’d also recently come back to Scotland after her teenage husband died of ear-based malaise?
That’s right: our girl Mary Stuart! No longer Queen of France, but still Queen of Scotland! The superalliance remained on the table!
Darnley presented himself to Mary at her court at Wemyss Castle, and apparently their earlier unsuccessful meeting was completely forgotten, because Mary fell hard. One of her courtiers reported that “Her Majesty took well with him, and said that he was the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had seen.”
Which is ostensibly a reference to Darnley being six foot two, but. We all heard what we heard.
Mary Stuart was brilliant in many respects. Super clever. What she was not was good at picking men. But Darnley turned on the charm, hanging out in her entourage and making sure he was her dance partner at every opportunity. Then he did what I’m calling “pulling a Potemkin” and got dramatically, theatrically ill with the measles.
“But Allison!” I hear you say. “This is what, 1565? People got sick all the time! You can’t blame him for that!” OK, but what people did not do all the time was require the Literal Queen of Scotland to personally nurse them back to health while lounging suggestively beneath a sycamore tree as if they’re cosplaying the goddamn Lady of Shalott.
I don’t know what part of his whining and being a drama queen was attractive to Mary. I hope he was at least great in bed. But whatever the reason, Mary kept giving Darnley new titles, new honors, new earldoms, until it seemed obvious that the next step was marriage.
In Which No One Likes What’s Happening Right Now
Down in London, Queen Elizabeth was deeply concerned about the looming superalliance. She commanded Darnley to come back to England and stop trying to marry his first cousin. He ignored this, and Darnley and Mary were married in July 1565.
This made everything so much worse, for several reasons.
First, Mary and Darnley agreed to rule together as joint King and Queen of Scotland, rather than any Royal Consort business. This effectively made Darnley more powerful than his wife and handed him the country of Scotland. Which just makes me want to scream. Because he’s so dumb.
Second, the whole first-cousins thing usually required a dispensation from the pope, but Mary was so excited about Long Boi Darnley that she skipped that step and married him anyway. And a thing you don’t want to do as ruler of a Catholic country is be like “eh, who needs the pope.”
Third, Mary tried to retain a little power by refusing to give Darnley the Crown Matrimonial, which would’ve meant that if Mary died, Darnley would become king instead of any of their children. I have to believe this is the only reason he didn’t kill her, so good on her for keeping that bargaining chip. But Darnley was a nightmare about trying to get the Crown Matrimonial, hounding her abusively about it.
Fourth, the honeymoon period of this marriage lasted about fifteen minutes before Darnley showed his true colors as an insufferable nightmare man-child.
He was drunk basically all the time. He was rude and vulgar and made it his life’s mission to offend people. He used to spontaneously fistfight other nobles when he was drunk and pissed off. Did he abuse Mary? Probably. He wasted unfathomable amounts of money on fancy clothes and good wine, and he had affairs left and right with both men and women while being extremely possessive of Mary, contracting syphilis along the way.
(Brief aside: a lot of sources I consulted for this newsletter make Darnley’s queerness another sign of his overall shittiness, listing “homosexuality” in the same sentence as “drunkenness” and “petulance.” Darnley is not a shit because he was gay or bisexual. He is a gay or bisexual person who was a shit. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.)
Look at these two. Have you ever seen a more perfect encapsulation of a marriage than this portrait? At left, Darnley, sporting the single most punchable expression I’ve ever seen. Dressed in bright orange, pantaloons a-fluttering in the breeze, one hand on his hip. Everything about him saying “hello good day I am a dirtbag man-child, you may worship me at your leisure.”
And next to him, Mary, looking absolutely stunning, placing one tense hand on his arm as if to say “oh my god, you want me to touch my husband. Fine. Fucking fine. Is this enough. Are you happy.” Clenching her gloves in her other hand so hard I can see the whites of her knuckles. Her expression the 1560s equivalent of this:
I’ve been staring at this portrait for 15 minutes. It’s everything.
Pop Six Squish Uh-Uh Cicero Darnley
When Mary did the sensible thing and took a lover, her secretary David Rizzio, Darnley was furious. And so in March 1566, Darnley and a group of approximately 80 men interrupted Mary and Rizzio’s private dinner together. The conspirators held Mary up at gunpoint while the group of—again—eighty men attacked Rizzio and stabbed him fifty-six times before throwing his body down the stairs.
Darnley always claimed he had nothing to do with the murder of Rizzio, but when you and eighty of your closest friends stab your wife’s lover—and I cannot emphasize this enough—fifty-six times while she stands next to you and watches, there’s sorta only one conclusion a person can draw here.
What little affection Mary might still have had for this asshole was gone after the murder of Rizzio. As one ambassador reported, “I know for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage: that she hateth him and all his kin.” Say it with me, all: AS SHE SHOULD.
This, conveniently, was right about when Mary and Darnley had their first and only child. This child would eventually grow up to be the unhinged gay disaster known as King James I, and it is absolutely no secret whence the kid got his penchant for bullshit.
It’s early 1567 now, and the Mary-Darnley alliance had fully fallen apart. And Mary, bless her schemey little heart, was ready to get her revenge.
But that! Dear readers! Will have to wait! I promised you a two-parter, and Substack is warning me that if I add one more image of Jim from The Office this post will be too long for a single email, so keep an eye on your inboxes for Part Two. I promise you, this ending satisfies.
In the meantime, be well, and if you’re facing any difficulties in your life, ask yourself “What would Lady Margaret Douglas do,” and then so long as the answer isn’t “marry my dirtbag son to his first cousin” go forth and do it,
-Allison
PURE 🔥🔥🔥🔥
YES THE FUCK DARNLEY SUBSTACK
what makes his whole story with Rizzio much more complicated and interesting is that there's accounts of them being found together in bed so there was likely an affair happening there.
Mary Queen of Scots >>> everyone else truly!!