I’ll tell you the best Scottish joke in history; Mary Stewart (AKA Queen of Scots), and her husband, Lord Darnley (AKA Henry Stewart), produced a child who became the King of England. That may not seem like a great gag, but you have to remember that she was a fool and he was an idiot and Scotland in the 16th century was the Cleveland of Europe. That their kid becoming a King of England could only happen in an episode of the "Beverly Hillbillies", performed with a brog.
Mary was a big girl, close to six feet tall, which in the 16th century made her a freak of nature, sort of like a sunny day in Scotland. She was the granddaughter of Robert the Bruce, and Henry VIII of England wanted her as his daughter-in law. But instead, when the girl was all of 5 years old, her mother sent her off to France, where she married Francis, the future King of France instead. That poor boy died of an ear infection in 1560, a year after he was promoted to King, and a year later, on 19 August, 1561, the 18 year old widow Mary returned to Scotland, a place she hadn't seen in a decade.
Unlike Queen Elizabeth to her south, Mary bowed under the pressure that she should wed. But she turned down any of the young men chosen by her protestant advisors, and even a man put forward by Elizabeth of England. The slub she finally chose in 1565 was her own cousin, Henry Stewart, the Lord of Darnley. Sir Walter Scott, a man who knew something about romance, described Darnley as “…remarkably tall and handsome…but unhappily destitute of sagacity, prudence…(and) extremely violent in his passions.”
Another observer sketched Darnley as “shallow, vain, weak, indolent, selfish, arrogant, vindictive and irremediably spoiled.” And those were his good features. But, not to worry. He was just Mr. Queen, and she was in charge.
In any case, Lord Darnley did fulfill his role as a royal sperm donor. Mary quickly became pregnant with a son. They named the boy James.
But I suspect that Mary chose Darnley mostly because Queen Elizabeth wanted her to marry Lord Bothwell. He was pure Scotsman,,Catholic, violent and vulgar. And smart. And that was reason enough for Mary to choose Darnley. Mary was always competing with Elizabeth, and she was always losing. And boy did she lose on this one. It is a bad idea to choose any mate just because they aren’t somebody else, even if they do have big feet.
That point was driven home for Mary a year later when, one Saturday night, a drunken Darnley and a few of his thugs broke into the Queen’s chambers and right in front of the Queen, who was 5 months pregnant, murdered one of her favorite’s, a little Italian poet named Rizzio, whom she kept around for entertainment. Then Darnely acted as if he had smashed his sister's stereo. When they were finished turning Rizzio into Italian sausage, Darnley told Mary, “I beg your pardon.” Somehow that failed to convince Mary to ever sleep with him again. Which, it turns out, was a very wise decision. Not to sleep with him, I mean.
Disappointed with his experiment in playing court politics, Darnley returned to his primary occupation of providing employment for every prostitute in Edinburgh and Glasgow, male and female, This task provided him with many hours of diversion and amusement along with a vicious case of syphilis.
I am told people develop syphilitic ulcers on their genitals within three weeks of being infected, and about two months later it develops into the secondary form, with a red rash on their torso, arms and legs, including the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet, accompanied by fever, sore throat, general malaise, weight loss, hair loss and a headache. Darnley suffered from all of those delightful symptoms, and ended up confined in bed in a small Glasgow room, and feeling very sorry for himself.
But when she heard about his condition, Mary did something rather curious; instead of gloating, she journeyed to Glasgow, and nursed Darnley until he was well enough to be brought back to Edinburgh. She even put him up in a little country house called Kirk O’Field right near her favorite church, where she visited his second floor room almost daily, washed his sores and read to him from the bible. Now why would she do that?
Interviews with the surviving servants revealed that Darnley had heard men moving about in the rooms below him, rooms normally used by Mary when she stayed over. Darnley had ordered the servants to open a window and lower him to the ground in a chair. Unfortunately Darnley had landed right in among the assassins who, instead of waiting for the fuse to reach the kegs of gunpowder stacked in the ground floor rooms, strangled the syphilitic slub. And while the were finishing up, who should slowly descend into their midst, but Darnley's servant. Well, two for the price of one, I guess. They then disappeared into the night before the explosion. The only question left was who did it?
There was no shortage of suspects. There were Darnley’s allies in the murder of Rizzio. Killing Darnley prevented him from spreading their names around when he got drunk. And then there the man who had comforted Mary after the murder of Rizzio, Lord Bothwell. He was just as rich and power hungry as Darnley was, but smarter. Killing Darnley made Mary an available widow again. And then there was Mary, herself
Mary was supposed to have been staying with her husband that night. Instead, luckily for her, at the last minute she had decided to attend a wedding. Of course, that might have been an alibi. And few would have blamed her, if she had wanted to choke the life out of Darnley, or even blow him up. After all, it was possible Darnley and his buddies had planned on killing Mary the night they had murdered Rizzio. Or maybe Darnley had just wanted Mary to miscarry the child she was carrying. This slub was a big baby, and probably saw the child in Mary's belly as competition. Either way, you could sympathize with the lady, if she had wanted to kill her arrogant, unfaithful, diseased and idiot slub of a husband. But did she do it?
We will never know. Forty days after Darnley’s death, the new man in Mary’s life, Lord Bothwell, conducted a traditional Highland Scottish wedding. He kidnapped the Queen, dragged her off to Dunbar Castle and raped her. Mazal Tov! Well, Bothwell had been Queen Elizabeth's choice for Mary. And now she had won. Sort of.
A month after this ‘wedding’ the Catholic nobles of Scotland rose up, arrested the Protestant Bothwell, and forced Mary to surrender her crown. They then started running Scotland for themselves, in the name of the infant James, of course. Bothwell died years later, insane, and locked up in a Danish prison. Mary eventually escaped south of the border to England, where Elizabeth had her locked up in one castle after another for the next 19 years.
Finally, in 1586 Mary got caught conspiring with some politically active Catholics to replace Elizabeth on the throne of England. That's the thing about Kings and Queens - they are always a threat until they are dead. With politicians, you just vote them out of office. Anyway, reluctantly the Virgin Queen signed Mary's death warrant, and the Queen of Scots was executed just 4 days later, on 7 February, 1587.
But even her death turned into a joke. First, it took three slices to kill her. And when the executioner held her head up as proof of her death, it slipped out of his hands and bounced across the floor. It seems the lady wore a wig to her own beheading. In any case the whole thing was a joke since the lady had done nothing but lose her head since she had set foot in Scotland.
But while the audience was still chuckling over this, Elizabeth died in March of 1603, without an heir. And by prearrangement, Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, product of the most mismatched coupling since Lott asked his family to pass the salt, became James I, King of England.
Who’d a thunk it?
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