Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of Darnley?

Question

How culpable do you think she really was? Did she deserve her fate?

Answer 1

Well she didn't get excuted because of the Darnley Murder,  that happened years earlier.  I'm not sure if she was responsible, but it may well have been done on her behalf.  She was Excuted because of her involvement in a plot against Queen Elizabeth I.  The proff being a letter she wrote to the leader of the plot.

Answer 2

She seems to have been genuinely shocked by Darnley's death, so it is probable that she knew nothing about it.  If she had wanted to get rid of her husband, she would probably have chosen poison, she had lived at the French court for years and was probably well aware of the use of poison for getting rid of inconvenient relatives.

Answer 3

The Murder of Lord Darnley at Kirk o' Fields, 1567

In February Lord Darnley, Mary's husband had been lodging at a house, Kirk 'o Fields, in the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, a few hundred yards from Mary at Holyrood Palace.

At 2 o'clock in the morning the night air was torn by an enormous explosion, and Kirk o' Fields was reduced to rubble. Darnley must have suspected something as he lay that night in his bedroom, for in the alarm that was raised after the explosion his body was found in the gardens and it was apparent that he had been killed by the explosion while trying to escape from the house.

Had he heard suspicious sounds under his room where large amounts of gunpowder had been secretly hidden? Perhaps he had heard the sound of the torch lighting the fuse. A chair and rope was also found in the garden; Darnley and his groom had used it to climb out of the first floor window. They both lay dead, clad only in nightgowns, one dagger between them.

The reverberations from that explosion were keenly felt by those implicated in the plot, and they have been echoing down the centuries ever since. Controversy has raged over how Darnley died and who killed him, but the crucial question is whether or not Queen Mary was an accomplice in her husband's murder. She certainly had motives enough to want to be rid of him, but so, too, did several other people, including most of the Scottish nobility. And Darnley himself, incredible as it may seem, was not above suspicion.

Darnley's murder ultimately led to Mary's ruin. One factor was the convenient discovery of a box of documents - the notorious Casket Letters - that her enemies claimed were proof of her guilt. But Mary was never allowed to see the letters, and they disappeared in 1584. The question of their authenticity has haunted historians ever since.