A Royal Society of Edinburgh panel have concluded that Mary Queen of Scots was not involved in the murder of her second husband Lord Darnley. Darnley was killed in Edinburgh 448 years ago while Mary was attending the wedding masque of one of her servants at nearby Holyrood Palace. The panellists, including a historian and a forensic pathologist, favoured the theory that Darnley was strangled or suffocated outside the house where he was staying, then dragged to a nearby orchard before the house was blown up. They also reasoned that Darnley's other family may have been the perpetrators.
Mary married Lord Bothwell just three months after her husband's death, and spent the rest of her life (and afterlife) suspected of the plot. She was thought to have motive: while she was pregnant with James VI of Scotland the 20-year-old Darnley and his friends had stabbed her private secretary David Rizzio to death. The murder and her third marriage turned out very poorly for her – the following year she fled to England, where her long imprisonment began. Here's an extract from The Other Queen where Mary explains her innocence:
They say that when my husband, the fool Darnley, killed David Rizzio, I swore vengeance and persuaded my next lover the Earl of Bothwell to blow him out of his bed with gunpowder and then to strangle him as he ran naked through the garden.
Madness! As if I should ever allow an assault on one of royal blood, even for my own vengeance. My husband must be as inviolable as myself. A royal person is sacred as a god. As if anyone with half a wit would commission such a ridiculous plot. Only an idiot would blow up a whole house to kill a man when he could easily smother him with a quiet pillow in his sottish sleep! As if Bothwell, the cleverest and wickedest man in Scotland, would use half a dozen men and barrels of gunpowder, when a dark night and a sharp knife would do the deed.
Finally, and worst of all, they say that I rewarded this incompetent assassination by running off with the assassin, the Earl of Bothwell, conceiving children in adulterous lust, marrying him for love, and declaring war against my own people for sheer wickedness.
I am innocent of this, and of the murder. That is the simple truth and those who cannot believe it have made up their minds to hate me already for my wealth, for my beauty, for my religion, or because I was born to greatness. The accusations are nothing but vile slander, calomnie vile.
Image: Mary, Queen of Scots during her imprisonment in England, late 16th century (1578?), National Portrait Gallery 429