The prolific Scottish historian Alison Weir, in her new book Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of
Lord Darnley, grapples painstakingly with a mystery that has dogged history for centuries. At midnight
on February 9 1567, a violent explosion ripped apart Kirk o.Field, the Edinburgh residence of Lord Darnley,
the 20-year-old King and second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. His unmarked body was found lying under
a tree, together with that of his valet. The cause of his death and its perpetrators have remained obscured
since that night, though Mary was a prime suspect in her husband's murder. Her apparent apathy regarding
the murder investigation was regarded with deep suspicion but more incriminating were the infamous "Casket"
letters, said to have been written by her to her lover Lord Bothwell, the supposed architect of Darnley.s
assassination. Yet if Mary had good reasons for wanting her (Catholic) husband dead, then so had much of
Scottish nobility.

Using contemporary evidence Weir argues exhaustively that the letters could have been the work of forgers
employed by Protestant lords "laying snares for the queen". Sympathetic to Elizabeth I, intent on justifying
Mary's subsequent imprisonment and forcing her abdication, the prospect of a young foreign Catholic queen,
unversed in diplomacy, refusing a Protestant alliance through marriage was anathema to the Scottish lords.
Weir's book claims that Mary.s fate was sealed as much by the country of which she was monarch as by
Elizabethan England.

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