Off with their heads! Camilla’s ill-fated relatives

AN ALARMINGLY large number of Camilla’s ancestors died a violent death.

Lord Darnley – married to Mary Queen of Scots, pictured right, alongside Darnley, and himself a contender for the English throne – was murdered, aged only 20, in February 1567.

Darnley was blown up with several barrels of gunpowder in a house in Edinburgh where he was staying while apparently battling syphilis. His naked body was found strangled in a nearby orchard, along with that of his valet.

His murder remains one of history’s most notorious unsolved crimes.

Next comes John Lyon,

Lord Glamis, also an ancestor of our Queen, accidentally killed in 1578 aged 34 in a street brawl in Stirling. He was Lord High Chancellor of

Scotland. He was shot through the head, and a contemporary ascribed his unfortunate death to

‘his height’.

Robert Douglas, Master of Morton, went missing in 1585 aged 23 somewhere off the Barbary Coast. Search parties were sent from England but he was never discovered. No one knows if the Scottish aristocrat was killed by pirates or ended his days in slavery in Algeria.

More detective work is still required to fill in the details of the unexplained murder of Agnes Fleming, Lady Livingston, an attendant to Mary Queen of Scots, who is linked to Camilla.

While travelling in England in 1597, she was murdered. No motive is known. Among her seven children was one of Camilla’s ancestors, Jean Lady Elphinstone. Another brutal death of one of the future Queen’s forebears was meted out to Robert, 1st Earl of Kingston during the English Civil War. The Royalist was accidentally killed by his own side in

July 1643. Captured by the Roundheads, he was being transported as a prisoner to Hull when Royalist forces fired at his captors and Kingston’s body was cut in two by a cannonball.

Another victim was Sir

John Gordon, executed, aged 34, in Edinburgh in

1644 for supporting King

Charles I in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

James Stewart, Earl of Moray, carries the dubious distinction of being the first person to be assassinated by a firearm, in 1592. He was shot by a supporter of Mary Queen of Scots.

Finally, another Civil War victim was Sir John Hotham, who married five times and had 16 children. He had backed the Parliamentarians against the Crown, but was accused of treachery and executed with his son at Tower Hill.