THE MURDER OF LORD DARNLEY is the most celebrated mystery in Scottish history; it has been endlessly recounted by numerous historians and writers, and the question that has most exercised all of them is this: was Mary, Queen of Scots the instigator of, or a party to, the murder of her husband? That is the question that I aim to answer in this book.
The circumstantial evidence against Mary is weighty, but it is not conclusive. Furthermore, there are other suspects. However, most writers focus upon Mary because she was a young and beautiful queen, whose life had already been touched by tragedy, murder and intrigue. Her character is an enigma that has never been solved, and during the four centuries in which she has been the subject of intense scholarly and popular scrutiny, every aspect of her life has become controversial.
Any study of Mary’s possible role in Darnley’s murder must take into account changing historical perceptions of her over the centuries. After the murder, which led to her enforced abdication and her long imprisonment in England, she became a contentious figure. Scottish Calvinists saw her as an adulteress and murderess, and for political reasons vigorously painted her as such, while Mary’s Catholic and loyalist supporters regarded her as a wronged heroine. As memories of the murder faded, and she became the hope of the Counter-Reformation and the focus for Catholic plots against Elizabeth I, Mary herself consciously fostered a pious image, which culminated in her calculated and dramatic appearance as a martyr for her faith at her execution in 1587. English Protestants, it should be remembered, found her an altogether more sinister figure, and not without reason.
Yet Mary’s dignified courage as she faced the block has had a profound effect on the way in which most of her biographers have portrayed her; this image has, to a great extent, swept away darker contemporary perceptions of her, and as time passed it helped to enshrine her in romance and legend. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, observers were more preoccupied with Mary’s religious and dynastic significance.
Predictably, most Catholic writers saw Mary as a Catholic martyr. Yet after the accession of her son, James VI of Scotland, to the throne of England in 1603, even Protestant historians began to find praise for her, mindful, no doubt, of King James I’s determination to rehabilitate the memories of both his parents. Mary, it was now agreed, had been unfortunate rather than immoral.
It was not until the eighteenth century—when much of the contemporary source material became available for the first time—that Mary was seen as a woman who allowed her emotions to rule her acts and was therefore responsible to a degree for her own destruction. Historians such as David Hume and William Robertson criticised her for succumbing to overt and unwise passions. This view gave rise to a trend, which continued into the nineteenth century, for portraying Mary as the frivolous victim of a licentious upbringing at the French court, whose unrestrained sexual intrigues brought about her downfall. Religion was still a factor: the eminent but prejudiced Victorian historian, James Anthony Froude, was grimly censorious of the Catholic Mary, and shamelessly massaged the facts in order to show her in the worst possible light. At the turn of the century, the controversy over Mary’s involvement in Darnley’s murder was kept alive by a spirited debate between the historians T.F. Henderson and Andrew Lang.
During the twentieth century, historians were kinder to the Queen of Scots. Thanks to the ongoing reappraisal of contemporary evidence, new theories about Darnley’s murder were put forward, and Mary came to be viewed in a more sympathetic light. After Antonia Fraser published what has become the standard biography of the Queen in 1969, most historians have concluded that Mary was an innocent and much wronged victim of the unscrupulous men around her. A virtually lone voice is that of the historian Jenny Wormald, who believes that Mary was an abject failure as both a queen and a woman, and that she was an accomplice in Darnley’s murder.
Anyone writing about Mary, Queen of Scots today has to penetrate beyond the several stereotypical images that have evolved throughout the centuries—the adulteress and murderess, the femme fatale, the romantic tragic heroine, the religious martyr and the foolish victim of her own passions—to look for the real Mary and attempt to establish some estimation of her true character in order to determine whether or not she was capable of murder.
Central to the issue of Mary’s guilt, seemingly, are the controversial Casket Letters. If genuine, they go a long way towards proving her involvement in Darnley’s murder, but many have argued that they are forgeries or genuine letters that have been deliberately altered by Mary’s enemies. It should be said, however, that Mary’s guilt or innocence can be determined by other evidence than the Casket Letters, and that their importance has been somewhat overstated.
As an English historian married for thirty years to a native of Edinburgh, I have long been entranced by Scottish history, and I have visited, on many occasions, most of the places mentioned in this book. It had long been my intention, following on from the success of The Princes in the Tower, to write about another historical mystery, and I was delighted to be given the opportunity to take a fresh look at one of Scotland’s most celebrated crimes.
I make no apologies for the long build-up to Darnley’s murder in this book. It is essential to establish the characters, motives and relationships between the various protagonists, and also to examine the sequence of events leading to Darnley’s violent death, in order to arrive at a full understanding of what took place at Kirk o’Field. It is equally important to trace the course of the relationship between Mary and Darnley, and also to examine the history of Mary’s policy on religion, because that may well shed light upon the murder.
Nor do I apologise for the length of the text. Every aspect of this case is controversial, and for any study to be credible and exhaustive, each piece of evidence that has a bearing on the conclusion needs to be fully examined and re-evaluated. There is, also, a large cast of suspects whose actions need to be tracked.
Above all, it is vital to become familiar with the bias in contemporary source material, because that is as relevant to solving the mystery of Kirk o’Field as the deeds of those who were there on that fateful night. The chief problem facing the historian is that most of the evidence about Mary comes from hostile later sources that were composed with the specific purpose of proving her guilt, such as propaganda written by the zealous Protestant scholar George Buchanan and by Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox.
Some scholars did write in Mary’s defence, notably John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who defended her against her Scottish accusers, and the intelligent and able Claude Nau, who became Mary’s Secretary in 1575 and wrote his Memorials of her reign in Scotland three years later. Nau’s informant was probably Mary herself: no one else in her entourage at that time could have had such an intimate knowledge of the details of her life in the 1560s; Nau’s work is therefore the closest to an official account that we have.
The memoirs of Mary’s third husband, the Earl of Bothwell, which were written in 1568 whilst he was a prisoner in exile in Denmark, have very little to say about Darnley’s murder. Bothwell was widely believed to have been the man who plotted Darnley’s death, so it is unlikely that he would have revealed anything incriminating, especially in a work that was written “to enable the King of Denmark to get a better and clearer idea of the wickedness and treason of those who are accusing me.”1
In the circumstances, I have preferred to rely on strictly contemporary sources such as diplomatic reports and letters, circumstantial evidence, and a source known as the Diurnal of Occurrents, a diary of events written by an anonymous observer living in Edinburgh, which is generally accurate, if biased against Mary. Where I have used prejudiced contemporary sources, I have done so with caution.