Rizzio: A Novella

What happened to Mary is so frightening that she never goes back after she leaves Holyrood with Darnley that night. She shudders at the memory of those rooms.

The doors to her apartments slowly close. They stay shut for over two hundred years. The entire floor is abandoned. There are no Queen’s apartments at Holyrood or anywhere else in Scotland because Mary is captured and taken to England. She is held prisoner until her execution on 8 February 1587. The next Scottish Queen doesn’t want to visit her rooms in Holyrood either because of what had happened that mad weekend.

It is an ignominious memory, baffling to an audience more distant from the Reformation and the binary mindset that framed everything as a clash of absolutes. A pall of collective shame falls over the lovely rooms and the memory of what happened there.

A Keeper of the Palace of Holyrood is appointed. It’s a hereditary post. They live in the Palace, and Mary’s apartments come to be used as a storage area for unwanted furniture. Old beds and cabinets, tables and commodes are stacked and abandoned, the space filled with all the things no one knows what to do with. Dust gathers and moths thrive. Mice nest in the dark corners. Broken chairs and woodwormed wardrobes sag.

Day follows day, season follows season.

After a hundred years, a small windowpane in the bed chamber snaps in the cold and falls out, but it is behind a tall cabinet and no one notices. The rain gets in, unseen, for decades. The wooden floor gets wet and swells up and rots. In the summer mould forms and makes the apartment smell of sweet mildew. Things fall apart, dovetailed joints snap, unique and priceless bits of furniture slowly melt into one another.

It takes two hundred years to lift the stink, and, when it is finally long enough in the past to morph into a romantic tale, it is the English who cherish the story of the beautiful, bullied Queen of Scots.

Walter Scott’s The Abbot is published in 1820, six years into his stratospheric writing career, and revives interest in Mary. Privileged Scott fans use their influence to inveigle a visit to Mary’s apartments. They come into her audience chamber, take the passage to her bed chamber. They stand in the door by the little supper room, go into the commode room, take the back stairs down to Darnley’s suites and the grand staircase back up. But they are disappointed. They find the rooms crammed with broken dusty crap. Damp mouldy things. You have to sidle through, and the floor is so rotten it doesn’t feel safe.

Still, relics of Mary are much sought after and they take things away anyway, supposing them mementos, not knowing they are mostly junk that had been dumped in her rooms after she left. Eventually no one knows what did and didn’t belong to Mary, Queen of Scots.

The apartment is ignored and then restored with the heavy-handed vigour of Victorian builders. The rotten floorboards are ripped out and replaced, the whole floor raised by six inches.

In the twenty-first century, her rooms have glass display cases with many items carefully labelled ‘Traditionally Associated with Mary, Queen of Scots’. Many were made long after her death. The curators are too honest to misdate them.

A brass plaque is screwed into the wooden panelling of a window nook in the old audience chamber.

It’s very low down. You have to stoop to read the words.

THE BODY OF

DAVID RIZZIO

was left here after his murder

in Queen Mary’s supper room,

9th March, 1566.

And the floorboards below it are stained red.

Blood, traditionally associated with Mary, Queen of Scots.