The case of Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley and Lord Bothwell: Initiating the literature of husband-murder in sixteenth-century England

ALICE ARDEN, Anne Saunders, and Eulalia Page were notorious in late sixteenth-century England as women who murdered their husbands, motivated by their adulterous desire to marry their lovers. In each case, the women were not directly involved in the act of murder, but orchestrated complex plots involving their lovers, friends, and servants that both resulted in successful murders and laid the ground for their discovery through the betrayal and confession of their co-conspirators. Each case produced multiple textual redactions across the forms of chronicle accounts, pamphlets, ballads and domestic tragedies, outlining the circumstances of each murder and presenting diverse, often surprising, approaches to feminine guilt and criminal agency. The complex textual afterlives of these cases can be read as early instances of the mode of early modern true crime, where certain crimes were rewritten in different forms across decades in extended publication events.