4. Correct: Mary’s second husband and royal consort, Lord Darnley, was murdered in bizarre circumstances, with his body discovered outdoors after an explosion hit Kirk O’ Field in 1567
Approximately eight months after the birth of Mary’s son James, on February 10, 1567, his father, Lord Darnley, suddenly died at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, where the royal consort had been staying. Brought back by Mary after a period of estrangement to recover from an illness, claimed at the time to be smallpox but more recently speculated to have been syphilis, around two in the morning on the night of the tenth an explosion rocked the foundations of Kirk o’ Field. The product of two barrels of gunpowder placed in a room beneath Darnley’s sleeping quarters, the assassination failed to immediately claim the life of Darnley.
Miraculously surviving by reasons unknown, lying in just a nightshirt Darnley’s body, alongside that of his valet, William Taylor, were found in a nearby orchard. Although official post-mortems claimed the explosion had taken his life, speculation circulated, including by surgeons who examined the body, that the consort had been strangled. Depicting the latter cause of death explicitly, Mary, Queen of Scots carefully treads the line of historical accuracy by strongly implying, but never explicitly stating, whether or not Mary herself was responsible for the murder. Never admitting wrongdoing, and denying it throughout her life, either way, Mary mourned little for her husband’s death.