Word: darnley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...three months after his violent death, marry the man who had not only plotted his murder but abducted and raped her, only to end up in prison a month later, abandoned and temporarily deranged? Yet that is the actual history of Mary and her last two husbands, Lord Henry Darnley and the Earl of Bothwell...
Antonia Fraser's approach to such goings-on is the one advocated by 19th Century Historian James Froude: "To look wherever we can through the eyes of contemporaries, from whom the future was concealed." With such handling, events achieve a fresh plausibility; Mary's behavior with Darnley and Bothwell, for example, becomes humanly understandable. Historic perspectives are foreshortened-a most notable defect in Miss Fraser's acerbic portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Nonetheless, the author marshals her evidence generously enough to allow for differing interpretations and briskly clears away the "cobwebs of fantasy" that have attached themselves...
...Blowup. All that is known for certain is that on the morning of Feb. 10, 1567, conspirators ignited a massive charge of gunpowder and demolished Kirk o'Field, a royal residence where Lord Darnley, Mary's dissolute young husband, lay recovering from a severe case of pox that most likely was secondary syphilis. But Darnley was not a victim of the blast. In some manner, which has always bemused and tantalized historians, he and a servant got away to a nearby garden, where they were waylaid and strangled...
...Davison's most startling thesis is that Mary, far from being a party to the gunpowder plot at Kirk o'Field, was really marked to be its victim. On the basis of meticulously constructed evidence, he charges that Darnley conspired with a faction of power-hungry lords to have the gunpowder planted in the residence, then touched it off himself, believing that Mary had returned to the house. Darnley fled to the garden, and there was strangled by his fellow conspirators...