In the same month, twenty-five years afterward, the execution of his
mistress, according to the verdict of her contemporaries in France,
avenged the blood of a lover who had died without uttering a word to
realize the apprehension which, according to Knox, had before his trial
impelled her to desire her brother "that, as he loved her, he would slay
Chastelard, and let him never speak word." And in the same month, two
years from the date of Chastelard's execution, her first step was
unconsciously taken on the road to Fotheringay, when she gave her heart
at first sight to her kinsman Henry, Lord Darnley, son of Matthew
Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who had suffered an exile of twenty years in
expiation of his intrigues with England, and had married the niece of
King Henry VIII, daughter of his sister Margaret, the widow of James IV,
by her second husband, the Earl of Angus. Queen Elizabeth, with the
almost incredible want of tact or instinctive delicacy which
distinguished and disfigured her vigorous intelligence, had recently
proposed as a suitor to the Queen of Scots her own low-born favorite,
Lord Robert Dudley, the widower if not murderer of Amy Robsart; and she
now protested against the project of marriage between Mary and Darnley.
Mary, who had already married her kinsman in secret at Stirling castle
with Catholic rites celebrated in the apartment of David Rizzio, her
secretary for correspondence with France, assured the English
ambassador, in reply to the protest of his mistress, that the marriage
would not take place for three months, when a dispensation from the Pope
would allow the cousins to be publicly united without offence to the
Church.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122