Word: darnley
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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...
...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...
...Britain's House of Lords conservative, aristocratic Esme Bligh, Ninth Earl of Darnley, rose to propose a motion: "that this house hereby affirm its belief that peace will only be established ... by the adoption of the Christian commands of neighborly conduct." Viscount Addison felt "some regret that the noble Earl was not able to make some more practical and effective suggestion. . . ." The League of Nation's roommate, aging, disillusioned Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, could not believe that such a resolution would "advance the cause of peace in the very slightest...
Meekly and sadly, impractical Lord Darnley withdrew the motion. "I don't want to make any trouble," he said...