Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/820

806 to her native country; leaving the most refined and gay court in Europe, for the most turbulent and austere.

Soon after she was addressed with proposals of marriage from Charles, archduke of Austria. But Queen Elizabeth, hearing of it, desired she would not marry with any foreign prince, but chuse a husband out of her own nobility, and recommended to her the earl of Leicester, threatening upon refusal, to deprive her of the succession to the crown of England. The arms and title of which, the ambition of her uncles, the Guises, had made her imprudently assume while Queen of France. Yet she now wished to obtain the good graces of Elizabeth, who did not in reality wish her to marry at all; which Mary at length discovering, and being much in love with her cousin Henry, Lord Darnley, married him in 1565. By this husband she had one son, who was afterwards James VI. of Scotland, and I. of England. This union proved most unfortunate; the beauty of Darnley was his only merit, he was weak and cruel, and by the most capriscious and teizing conduct, made Mary bitterly repent the honour she had done him. Indifferent towards her, yet ambitious of power, he wished to extort from her the matrimonial crown, and was furiously jealous of the influence any other possessed. Bursting into her apartment, with some lords, devoted to his purpose, he seized and murdered Rizzio, an Italian musician, whom he had himself first distinguished, and then in a few days openly declared he had no knowledge of the action. He threatened frequently to leave the kingdom, though it appears he had no serious intentions, but merely to distress Mary, who dreaded the censures of foreign courts, and the manner in which it might be misrepresented; and absented himself from her, till an illness which happened to