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Historic Love and Marriages From Hell

Khalid Elhassan September 22, 2020 31 min

Jerry Lee Lewis - Myra Gale Brown — Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride, back home after a disastrous overseas trip. The Commercial Appeal

12. Getting a New Love to Kill an Old One

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Pintrest

Queen Mary’s leading ally in the ensuing plot to get rid of Darnley was James Hepburn, 4^th Earl of Bothwell, who organized a plot to assassinate Darnley. On February 19^th, 1567, explosives were detonated beneath Darnley’s bedroom. He survived the blast, but upon staggering out of the wreckage, he was seized and strangled to death.

Soon thereafter, Mary married Bothwell. The marriage turned out to be extremely unpopular, and united both Catholics and Protestants in denouncing the queen for marrying the man who had murdered her husband.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.