17

“NONE DARE FIND FAULT WITH IT”

WHO MURDERED DARNLEY? There can be no doubt that he was murdered, but the identity of the person or persons responsible is surrounded by great mystery, and there have been so many theories that the subject has become one of the most controversial in history. Was this a political assassination, or a crime inspired by passion or revenge?

All we can be certain of is that, by early February 1567, some people were conspiring to murder the King, and that the chief culprits must have been leading members of the establishment.

For the historian investigating this mystery today, the problems are manifold. As has already been made clear, there is a vast amount of conflicting and untrustworthy information. Most contemporary sources reflect religious and sexual prejudices, and much of the source material is suspect because it was written by people with reputations to protect and a revolution to justify. Most of the information about Mary’s role in the murder comes from her enemies, who had good cause for blackening her name, and whose works are not strictly contemporary, or from depositions by witnesses who were almost certainly intimidated into giving the politically correct version of events. Some of this “evidence” is very compelling and convincing, yet difficult or impossible to substantiate through strictly contemporary sources. In recent years, however, thanks to the painstaking work of objective historians and investigators, these hostile accounts have been exposed for the libels they undoubtedly were.

The mystery of Darnley’s death was never satisfactorily solved in the sixteenth century: any investigation of the matter was apparently subverted by the desire to protect the guilty and frame the scapegoats, and vital documents, such as the Casket Letters, have since disappeared. There is, it is true, a vast amount of evidence as to what happened on the night of 9–10 February 1567, but most of it lies in the above-mentioned unreliable depositions of suspects and witnesses made behind closed doors, on the orders of the Privy Council, to the Lords of the Secret Council, namely Maitland, Morton, Huntly, Argyll and Balfour, all of whom were probably involved in the plot to murder Darnley. These depositions were attested by Justice Clerk Bellenden, who was not present when they were taken; most of them were not properly witnessed and were perhaps extracted under torture¹by ruthless and powerful men who had good reasons for wanting the real truth suppressed. Neither were these depositions ever made public nor subjected to any independent examination. History was virtually rewritten to suit the party in power, and rewritten by clever men who knew how to make a forceful case.

The historian’s task therefore seems hopeless, and it has been said that it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile all the evidence and come up with a credible conclusion. Yet this is not necessarily the case, for amongst the gallons of spilled ink there are plenty of clues.

There were several people, or factions, who might have wanted Darnley dead, or stood to gain from his death. During the two years after his murder, the only two people who were formally accused of it were Bothwell and the Queen, and it was stressed that their motives were an indecent passion for each other and Bothwell’s overweening ambition. Mary herself had earlier made it clear that she wished to be rid of Darnley, and not without good reason; furthermore, most ways of doing so were closed to her. However, her accusers, the Protestant Lords, led by Moray and Maitland, had no time for Darnley, who was a constant embarrassment and a threat to their own influence, and they may have seen his murder as an opportunity of ridding themselves of another person who posed such a threat, namely Bothwell, and ultimately seizing power themselves, which was what in fact happened. Nor may their aims have been entirely political, for Morton and several others involved in Rizzio’s murder, who had been betrayed by Darnley, had every reason to seek revenge on him. As the years went by, and loyalties shifted, the Lords began accusing each other of the murder, until, in the end, most of the leading nobles of Scotland were among the suspects. There is a more recent theory that Darnley himself plotted the explosion at Kirk o’Field, with a view to killing his wife and most of the Protestant establishment and snatching power for himself, but that something went wrong. Some even pointed the finger at Archbishop Hamilton. There may also have been more than one plot, and more than one culprit or group of persons involved. All of these theories are, on the face of it, plausible.

The chief suspect, however, was Bothwell. Mary herself later came to believe in his guilt and, from 1568, referred to him several times as one of Darnley’s murderers. Along with Argyll and Huntly, Bothwell had been brought into the conspiracy against Darnley by Maitland and Moray early in December at Craigmillar. There is evidence that he knew all about the Bond for the King’s murder that was probably signed at Craigmillar. It was Bothwell who tried to draw Morton into this conspiracy, and Bothwell who asked Mary to sanction the King’s assassination, which Mary later did not deny. Bothwell was almost certainly driven by his ambition to marry the Queen himself and become King, a theory that is supported by his actions subsequent to the murder and by Melville, who states that “the Earl of Bothwell had a mark of his own that he shot at, . . . that he might marry the Queen.” That Bothwell acted alone, however, seems unlikely, but at the time, there was so much evidence against him that it appeared he was the prime mover in the plot, which, as we have seen, was not the case.

It is possible that Moray and Maitland, who had long been Bothwell’s enemies, planned to use his involvement in the murder as a means of getting rid of him, for not only did they detest him, but they also had good reason to fear that he would usurp their power—he was already far too influential for comfort. Back in August, Bedford had reported that Bothwell was the most hated amongst the Scots nobles and that there was a device to kill him. Since then, his influence had increased, and so had the other Lords’ bitter resentment. This would explain why Maitland and Moray brought this unlikely ally into the plot against Darnley. Yet, although Bothwell almost certainly planned Darnley’s murder, it is unlikely that he actually killed him.

Much of the evidence against Bothwell lies in the suspect depositions and confessions of his associates,²most of whom were certainly his men. As will be seen, these contain improbabilities and irreconcilable discrepancies; more tellingly, there are contradictions in different versions of the same deposition. These inconsistencies may have been the result of confusion on the night of 10 February, or of lapses in memory after the passage of time, but they also support the theory that information given to the interrogators was either manufactured or suppressed in order to isolate and reinforce the case against Bothwell and protect others who may have been involved. There is no doubt that some of these depositions were carefully edited for the same reasons; even Buchanan admits that information was suppressed. There may be an element of truth in these various accounts, for there are several points on which these confessions, obtained from different people at different times, agree, and it is possible that they were not total inventions. Furthermore, their evidence is that of minor players who were acting on the orders of powerful men whose motives and political agenda they were not made privy to and did not fully understand. These depositions were made before men who had no doubt already decided how the official version of events was to be written, and for that reason alone, they should be treated with extreme caution.

The story that these depositions tell is as follows.

Paris claimed that he first came into credit with the Queen on 21 January, when she was at Callendar on her way to Glasgow, and Bothwell was about to return to Edinburgh. Mary gave Paris a purse of money to carry to Bothwell, and when he delivered it, Bothwell said to him, “If you take care what you are doing, the Queen will give you letters to bring to me.” It seems strange that Mary should ask Paris to take Bothwell the purse when she could have given it to him herself; they were, after all, staying in the same house.

Three days later, Mary gave Paris letters to carry to Bothwell and Maitland in Edinburgh, and told him to observe their faces as they read them, adding that it was a matter of deciding whether the air was better for the King at Craigmillar or Kirk o’Field. This is an obvious invention, for Kirk o’Field was not suggested as a lodging for Darnley until about a week later. Yet, according to the depositions, Bothwell had been overseeing the final murder preparations at the King’s lodging before his departure for Liddesdale on 24 January. Paris states that Mary also told him to tell Bothwell that the King wanted to kiss her, but she did not want him to for fear of his illness.

According to his first deposition, Paris arrived in Edinburgh on 25 January to find Bothwell gone. He claimed to have tracked him down at Kirk o’Field, but this was at a time when, in reality, Bothwell was already in the Borders. Paris says Bothwell read Mary’s letter, which is perhaps to be identified with Casket Letter II, then told him, “Commend me to the Queen and tell her that all will go well. Say that Balfour and I have not slept all night, that everything is arranged, and that the King’s lodgings are ready for him. I have sent her a diamond. You may say that I would send my heart too, were it in my power, but she has it already.” Paris then went to see Maitland, who said that he must tell the Queen to bring the King to Kirk o’Field. Paris’s deposition was made at a time when Moray was doing his best to bring about Maitland’s ruin; the earlier depositions do not incriminate him. Balfour is also incriminated with Bothwell, because he had recently abandoned Moray’s party and voted for the Queen’s return.

However, in his second deposition, Paris tells another tale, saying he arrived in Edinburgh on the 25th to find Bothwell dining with Sir James Balfour. Bothwell read Mary’s letter, then told Paris to say to Mary that all would be well and that he was sending her a diamond in place of his heart. He then told Paris to go to Maitland “and ask him if he wishes to write to the Queen.” Paris found Maitland at the Exchequer House, where Maitland told him that Darnley would be better off at Kirk o’Field. Paris then returned to Glasgow with both messages, arriving before 27 January, which was the day Mary and Darnley departed for Edinburgh.

Having listened to what Paris had to say and asked him many questions about his meetings with Bothwell and Maitland, Mary told him that she intended to appoint her servant Gilbert Curle as valet to Darnley in place of Sandy Durham, whom she did not trust.

Paris rode with the King and Queen towards Edinburgh, and waited with Mary at Linlithgow to hear from Ormiston that Bothwell was on his way back from Liddesdale. When this was confirmed, Mary sent Paris to Bothwell with some bracelets, presumably those referred to in Casket Letter II, which was “discovered” two years before Paris’s deposition was obtained; she also sent Bothwell’s kinsman and retainer, John Hay, to the Earl with a private message, according to Hay’s deposition. John Hay was Laird of Talla in Peebles-shire, and had accompanied Mary on her journey from Glasgow; his mother was a Hepburn. Part of his deposition was suppressed, which suggests that the rest of it is unreliable.

On arrival at Kirk o’Field, Mary became angry with Paris when he had her bed placed directly under where the King’s bed stood in the room above, which was, in effect, where Bothwell had decided that the gunpowder was to be lit. Paris had to move the bed to ensure that there was enough space for the barrel in which the powder was to be packed. Lennox claims that the house was already undermined when Darnley arrived there. Neither Paris nor Lennox can be correct, since the decision to use Kirk o’Field was made at the last minute, and, according to John Hepburn’s deposition, Bothwell did not decide to use gunpowder until 7 February.

Bothwell allegedly told Paris that, while Darnley was at Kirk o’Field, he himself, through the good offices of Lady Reres, visited Mary’s room at Holyrood most nights, while his cousin, John Hepburn of Bolton in East Lothian, kept watch under the palace galleries. Because of this, Bothwell forbade Paris, on his life, to divulge to Mary the fact that his wife was staying with him at Holyrood. This argues either extraordinary forbearance or an unusual lack of curiosity on the part of the Countess, and suggests that Bothwell was using Mary in order to attain his ambitions; allegations to this effect had been made long before Paris made his deposition. Yet although Paris claims that Mary and Bothwell were indulging in regular illicit sex at this time, he also states that the Queen was suffering from pain and weakness, and the Earl from dysentery.

Bothwell was feeling unwell during the Queen’s overnight stay at Kirk o’Field on 5 February. After dinner, he told Paris he found himself struck down by his “usual illness,” the bloody flux, and asked where he could “do my job.” Paris found him a place between two doors, helped Bothwell to undress, and stood watch. As Bothwell relieved himself, he chatted to Paris, but he was obviously brooding over the implications of the reconciliation between Mary and Darnley, and suddenly blurted out, “If the King has ever the advantage over us other Lords, he will want to dominate us, and we do not mean to put up with it. We mean to blow him up in this house with gunpowder. What think you of that?”

Aghast, Paris replied, “You will pardon me if I do not tell you.” At this, Bothwell angrily retorted, “What are you saying? Do you want to preach at me?” Paris replied that Bothwell had often been in trouble but no one had helped him. “Now you propose to undertake this big enterprise, far bigger than any trouble you may have had, for they will call down the hue and cry on you.” Bothwell snapped that Paris was an utter fool if he thought he, Bothwell, would attempt such an enterprise on his own, and revealed that his chief accomplice was Maitland, “who is considered to have one of the best minds in the country; he is the presiding genius of it all. I have Argyll, Huntly, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay. I have the signatures of those men, written the last time we were at Craigmillar.” Paris asked if Moray was also involved, but Bothwell replied, “The Earl of Moray, the Earl of Moray will neither help nor hinder us, but it is all one.” Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay were in favour with Moray when this deposition was made, so the inclusion of their names is interesting, but there is no other evidence that Ruthven and Lindsay, who had just returned from exile, were involved in Darnley’s murder.

Bothwell asked Paris to assist in his plans, and when Paris fearfully demurred, rounded on him angrily, demanding, “Why did I put you in the Queen’s service if not to help me?” Paris retorted that, during the six years he had been in the Earl’s service, Bothwell had known how to make him do his bidding, kicking him in the stomach until he capitulated. Perhaps fearing further violence, Paris reluctantly agreed to help.

The following day, Bothwell approached John Hepburn of Bolton with a proposal to assassinate Darnley “in the fields,” which is at variance with Paris’s allegation that, two days earlier, Bothwell had already decided to blow up the house. Bothwell assured Hepburn that each of the Lords involved in the plot would send two underlings to assist. Like Paris, Hepburn was initially reluctant to join the conspiracy, but he too gave way to persuasion.

On Friday, 7 February, Balfour apparently first heard of the murder plot, or so he later told the Lords.³Paris claimed that Bothwell and Balfour had spent a night at Kirk o’Field on 23/24 January, but, in the suppressed part of his deposition, Hepburn claimed that “my Lord Bothwell sent [him] to Sir James Balfour, desiring that he would come and meet my Lord at Kirk o’Field. To whom Sir James answered, ‘Will my Lord come then? If he come, it were better he were quiet.’ And yet they met not at that place, then or at no time thereafter, to the deponer’s knowledge.” Hepburn’s knowledge of the plot was, of course, limited.

Morton, in his confession of 1581, stated that he learned of the murder plot “a little before,” through Archibald Douglas; this was possibly on Friday, 7 February.

It was on that day, according to John Hay, that Bothwell resolved to carry out the assassination using gunpowder, and informed Hay of his intentions, saying, “John, the King’s death is devised. I will reveal it unto you, for if I put him not down, I cannot have a life in Scotland. He will be my destruction.” The plan was to place the gunpowder in the Queen’s room, immediately below Darnley’s bedchamber.

Why Bothwell or anyone else should choose to kill Darnley by the dramatic means of gunpowder, instead of by more common methods of assassination such as poison or suffocation, is a mystery. It may have been designed to ensure that any evidence of his involvement was destroyed, for the Queen had refused to sanction any violence against her husband, and if Bothwell really did wish to marry her, he could not have risked being associated in any way with the crime; yet there were now so many people involved in the plot that discovery was an ever-increasing possibility.

This was the first gunpowder conspiracy against a European prince; it would not be the last, but it was the only one to be carried to its conclusion. There were similar plots to blow up Elizabeth I, the Prince of Parma, the Duke of Florence and James I. As a method of assassination, gunpowder was unreliable. Although it had been used in European warfare for two centuries, it was often of poor quality and unpredictable, and to achieve the destruction of the Old Provost’s Lodging, vast amounts of it would have been needed because it was much weaker in strength than it is today, and even then there was no guarantee that it would kill Darnley, let alone destroy the evidence.⁴

Time was running out, as the King’s convalescence would soon be at an end. Bothwell’s original plan was to kill him on Friday night, but he was obliged to postpone the operation until Saturday because nothing was ready.⁵ That Friday, according to Sir William Drury, Bothwell arranged for supplies of gunpowder to be brought from Dunbar Castle.⁶He then summoned Paris and asked if he held a key to the Queen’s chamber in the Old Provost’s Lodging. Paris said he did not, but he would get one. Bothwell told him, “Do not fail. On Sunday, we will do it.” Paris left, his conscience troubling him. He contemplated fleeing abroad, but had no way of chartering a ship, so, after hanging around the docks at Leith, he despondently made his way back to Holyrood. The fact that Bothwell asked Paris, and not Mary, for the keys strongly suggests that Mary was innocent of what was going on.

Meanwhile, Bothwell had persuaded his bailiff, James, Laird of Ormiston in East Lothian—known as Black Ormiston—to join the plotters, overcoming his reluctance by assuring him he “need not take fear, for the whole Lords have concluded the same long since at Craigmillar, all that were there with the Queen, and none dare find fault with it when it shall be done.” On that Friday evening, Bothwell outlined the details of his plan to Hepburn, Hay and Ormiston, and told them that, due to lack of time, the murder would now take place on the night of Sunday the 9th. The gunpowder was to be placed in a barrel in the Queen’s room, and the lint fuse was to be fed through a hole in the bottom of the barrel.

Ormiston spent all day Saturday in bed in his lodgings in Blackfriars Wynd. It may or may not be significant that Morton’s house was in the same street, although Morton, of course, was not in residence, having been forbidden entry to Edinburgh. Bothwell, having learned that Lord Robert Stewart had warned Darnley of a plot against him, hastened to complete his preparations.⁷That evening, Bothwell dined with Mary and Darnley at Kirk o’Field, and afterwards he sought out Paris and again demanded the keys. When the Queen and her attendants had left, Paris slipped the key out of the door to her room and took it to Bothwell, only to be shown a box containing a full set of fourteen counterfeit keys, which, according to a placard that later appeared on the door of the Tron House in Edinburgh, had been cut by one of the city’s blacksmiths.⁸Bothwell told Paris to keep the key he had taken.⁹In his other deposition, Paris made the ludicrous claim that he had gone to the Queen and asked her to give him the key to her room because Bothwell wanted to blow up the King with gunpowder!

A great deal of confusion surrounds the subject of the keys to the Old Provost’s Lodging. Buchanan states that, before Darnley arrived at Kirk o’Field, the keys were in the possession of the Queen’s servants, while Lennox claims that Mary herself held the keys, but neither of these accounts can be correct because, according to Thomas Nelson, who initially received the keys from Robert Balfour, they were held by the King’s servants, and when the Queen came to sleep at the house, her room was always kept locked and the keys to it and the postern gate were given into the keeping of the Usher of her Chamber, Archibald Beaton. Bonkil, the cook, kept the key to the door that led from the cellar to the alley. Buchanan says that, “whereas the other keys of the lodging were in custody of the King’s servants, Paris, by feigning certain fond and slender causes, had in keeping the keys which Bothwell kept back, of the back gate and the postern.” This cannot be correct because there was no lock on the door from the cellar to the garden, although it could be bolted on the inside. The Book of Articles states that Paris obtained the key to the Queen’s door and the key to the door to the staircase that led to the upper floor; it will be remembered that the door at the top of the stairs had been removed to serve as a cover for Darnley’s bath; it may have been rehung after the course of baths was completed.

During Saturday evening, Margaret Carwood sent Paris to Kirk o’Field to fetch the fur coverlet from the Queen’s bed. When he reached the house, Sandy Durham asked him to return the key to Mary’s bedchamber, but Paris told him that Archibald Beaton had it, and that it was his duty to hand it over.

On Sunday morning, Paris saw Moray taking leave of Mary, then took a walk to Restalrig, a village that lay to the north of Holyrood Palace. On his return, he found the Queen getting ready for Pagez’s wedding breakfast. That afternoon, he was amongst her entourage when she attended the farewell banquet for Moretta, and afterwards, as he presented a basin and towel to her, she asked if he had retrieved the coverlet, implying that she was concerned that it would be destroyed when the house was blown up. If that had been the case, she would surely have attempted to rescue the other, far more valuable items that were in the house and were lost in the explosion.

By Sunday evening, two trunks, one of wood, one of leather, containing the gunpowder from Dunbar, had been delivered to Holyrood Palace and stored in the back hall of Bothwell’s lodgings. How they were carried past the sentries without arousing suspicion is nowhere explained. In an age in which rooms were lit by candles and flambeaux, and heated by large open fires in winter, Bothwell was risking disaster by keeping such explosive material secretly in his rooms.

Early on Sunday evening, one of Bothwell’s men—either William Powrie or George Dalgleish—obtained a yard of lint for a fuse from a soldier of the guard, whose name he did not know. Powrie was Bothwell’s porter, Dalgleish his tailor, and while both were enlisted by the Earl to help the conspirators, neither had much inside knowledge of the plot.

Around the same time, according to Hepburn, a servant of John Hay collected a large barrel that Hay had ordered from a merchant at the top of Sandy Bruce’s Close¹⁰and took it to Holyrood. It has been estimated that the barrel was the size of a 54-gallon cask,¹¹much larger than a normal, full-size powder barrel, which held 100 pounds and had a diameter of 17 inches, and transporting it through the streets would have been impossible without assistance, but we are not told that Hay’s servant had a helper, or a horse.

According to John Hay, from about 4 p.m. until dusk, Bothwell, Hay and Hepburn had been holding a meeting in the room where the powder was being stored. As soon as darkness fell, they walked to Black Ormiston’s lodging in Blackfriars Wynd to discuss the final details of the plot with him, and stayed there for over two hours. Ormiston’s uncle, Robert “Hob” Ormiston,¹² was also present; until now, he had known nothing of the plan to kill Darnley, but he made no bones about offering his services. After this meeting, from about 8.30 until 10 p.m., Bothwell strolled up and down the Canongate while his henchmen moved the gunpowder to Kirk o’Field, then he joined the Queen and her courtiers there at around 10.15 p.m.

Hepburn told another tale, claiming that Bothwell had stayed at Moretta’s banquet until around 7.45 p.m. At around 8 p.m., he called briefly at his mother’s house, with Paris, then went on to visit Ormiston. Half an hour later, he left; Hepburn did not know where he had gone, but it was probably to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.

Ormiston claimed that, as the Queen was riding to Kirk o’Field after the banquet, Bothwell met him and his uncle in the Cowgate in order to check out the route by which the gunpowder was to be transported. After Bothwell had gone, Ormiston went down to the Blackfriars gate, negotiated his way through some ruinous houses, emerged on the other side and opened the gate. Paris, however, states that he and Bothwell went with the Ormistons to the Cowgate, where they met up with Hay and Hepburn. They discussed what was to be done, then Bothwell and Paris went to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.

The problem with all these stories is that, from about 4 p.m. until Mary returned to Holyrood around midnight, Bothwell was in attendance on her, both at Moretta’s banquet and at Kirk o’Field, and conspicuously dressed in masquing costume. He could not, therefore, have been meeting with his fellow conspirators at Holyrood early in the evening, nor could he have visited Ormiston’s lodgings, and it is very unlikely that, bent on murder, he made himself so visible by walking in his rich attire up and down the Canongate. Hepburn and Hay may well have met at Holyrood and at Ormiston’s house, and were probably coerced by their interrogators into claiming that Bothwell had also been present in order to incriminate him further.

In the evening, William Powrie warned a friend, William Geddes, not to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh that night, a rash comment that would later be used to condemn him. Then, between 8.30 and 10 p.m.,¹³acting on Hepburn’s orders, he, Dalgleish and Patrick Wilson, the merchant who had abetted Bothwell in his trysts with Bessie Crawford, transported the barrel and the gunpowder, which was wrapped in leather bags called polks that were packed in the two trunks, openly through the streets from Holyrood to the gate of the Blackfriars monastery, which was about 200 yards from Kirk o’Field. Powrie first claimed that this task was completed in one journey with two horses belonging to Bothwell, but later changed his story and said that they had undertaken two journeys with one horse belonging to the Earl’s page, Hermon. This horse carried the trunks on its first journey and the barrel on the next. Powrie made no mention of the barrel in his first deposition. Both tales are suspect because even two horses could not have carried enough gunpowder to cause the explosion that was to follow.¹⁴Furthermore, the suspicious loads had to be conveyed past the sentries at the palace, two members of the town watch at the Netherbow Port, four near Kirk o’Field, and ten others patrolling the streets.¹⁵

At the monastery gate, the three men found the other conspirators waiting; Ormiston was wearing a belted nightgown, which was totally unsuitable for the cold night. With them were two cloaked men wearing mules on their feet, whom Powrie, Dalgleish and Wilson did not recognise, and who have never been satisfactorily identified. Both Hepburn and Powrie claimed that Bothwell had left the Old Provost’s Lodging and come down to the gate to make sure that the men were speedy at their task. Hepburn says he told them sharply, “Hurry up and finish the job before the Queen comes out of the house, or you will not find it so convenient.” It is unlikely he stayed long, for his presence would have been missed.

As it was dark, Hepburn sent Powrie to get candles, which he purchased from a woman in the Cowgate. By the light of one candle, Powrie, Dalgleish and Wilson opened the trunks and carried the polks of gunpowder on their backs through the gate and uphill to the wall surrounding the east garden of the Kirk o’Field quadrangle. At this point, they were forbidden to go further, and Hepburn, Hay and Ormiston carried on with the task of heaving the bags over the wall.

Powrie claimed that this was when he and Wilson made the second journey to Holyrood to collect the powder and the barrel. On the way back to Kirk o’Field, Powrie grumbled, “Jesus! What kind of road is this we are going? I think it is no good.” Wilson, well aware of the danger they were in, muttered, “Wheesht! Hold your tongue!” Hob Ormiston was waiting for them at the Blackfriars gate, and he was equally pessimistic. “This is not good,” he said. “I do not believe this affair will come about tonight. I will go in and see what they are doing.” Then Black Ormiston appeared with Paris, and sent Powrie and Wilson with the empty trunks back to Holyrood. When the latter reached the Blackfriars gate, they found their horses gone, and had to shoulder the trunks and walk.

Soon, the conspirators had carried the barrel and the polks of gunpowder to the back door of the Old Provost’s Lodging, which Paris is said to have unlocked. He cannot have done so, however, because it had no lock and was bolted on the inside. The only other doors to the house were the front door, and the door from the cellar kitchen to the alley, to which Bonkil held the key; Paris apparently had a counterfeit.

The Ormistons are said to have gone in first, but the barrel was too large to go through the door and was left in the garden, by the wall. The powder bags were then carried into the house. Paris says he went to the kitchen and asked Bonkil for a candle. Both the back door and the side door opened into the kitchen, and Bonkil, who was not in the plot, must have concluded that something suspicious was going on, if he was in fact still on duty, which is doubtful. It seems strange, too, that Paris should be asking for a candle when Powrie had just bought six.

Paris lit his candle, and by its light, the gunpowder is said to have been emptied into a pile on the floor of the Queen’s chamber, directly under the spot where the King’s bed stood in the room above. Once this was done, the Ormistons went home, having ascertained that the rest knew how to light the fuse, and Hay and Hepburn remained in the room with the powder. Hay, Hepburn and Buchanan state that this all took place while the Queen and her courtiers were entertaining the King in the room above, but it is more likely that they were in the Prebendaries’ Chamber across the passage. However, Bothwell apparently heard muffled sounds, and hastened downstairs.

“My God! What a noise you are making!” he growled. “Everything you do can be heard upstairs.”

Apart from attracting attention, there were obvious risks in what the conspirators were supposed to have been doing. At any time, someone—even the Queen herself—could have come into the room to see what was causing the noise, or to fetch something, and found them there with the pile of powder. It is not inconceivable that cloaks were being stored in the Queen’s room that evening. Furthermore, the Queen and her Lords would have had with them a number of attendants, who would have been coming and going all evening. Someone surely would have noticed that something odd was going on. Most pertinent of all, had there been so much gunpowder in a heap on the floor, the dust from it would have permeated every part of the room, so that the lighting of even a single candle would assuredly have caused it to ignite.

After Bothwell had gone back to the gathering, Paris is supposed to have made sure that the back door and the door to the stairs were left unlocked. He then locked the door to the Queen’s room, left the keys to the downstairs doors with Hepburn, and went upstairs, or into the quadrangle,¹⁶where he signalled to Bothwell that all was ready. It was then that Mary noticed how begrimed he was.¹⁷Argyll patted Paris on the back, from which Paris inferred that he too was in the conspiracy; at the time his deposition was made, Argyll had just been forced to submit to the Lords after supporting Mary, so it is not surprising that Paris was allowed to imply his guilt.

The Queen then left Kirk o’Field with Bothwell and her other courtiers. As Powrie and Wilson emerged from Blackfriars Wynd into the Canongate with the empty trunks, they saw the torches lighting the royal entourage ahead of them.

After his midnight interview with Mary, Bothwell, with the help of Dalgleish, his tailor, changed out of his masquing costume into a canvas doublet, black hose and a thick German soldier’s cloak, then, armed with a sword and taking with him Powrie, Dalgleish, Wilson and a very reluctant Paris among others—Lennox says his party numbered sixteen, while the eyewitness, Mrs. Merton, counted eleven—he walked to Kirk o’Field, to supervise the killing of the King.¹⁸

As he and his men emerged from Holyrood, they were challenged by the palace guards, and said they were “my Lord Bothwell’s friends.” Finding the Netherbow Port closed for the night, Wilson woke up the porter, John Galloway, and made him open it “to friends of Lord Bothwell’s.” When the porter asked why they were all abroad at so late an hour, he received no answer. Bothwell then led his men up the High Street and down Blackfriars Wynd, where they knocked at Ormiston’s lodgings, only to find he was not at home; Ormiston later claimed that he had gone to the house of his friend, Thomas Henderson. Bothwell and his followers were almost certainly the men whom Mrs. Merton later saw coming up Blackfriars Wynd a short while before the explosion. Lennox claims that they approached Kirk o’Field by “the secret way” that Mary had used, which gave access from the monastery grounds. Once they arrived, Bothwell and Paris climbed over the town wall, the Earl having told the others to wait in the east garden and not stir, regardless of what they heard or saw. Dalgleish was apparently in ignorance of what was to happen, for he later swore before his execution that, “As God shall be my judge, I knew nothing of the King’s death before it was done.”

One of those who allegedly accompanied Bothwell was a Captain James Cullen, who had served as a mercenary in France, Denmark and Poland. In 1560, he had been an officer of the garrison in Edinburgh Castle, and in February 1567, he was the captain of a band of royal hagbuteers and was described by Cecil as a creature of Bothwell’s,¹⁹but he is more likely to have been answerable to John Stewart of Traquair, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. Moray later referred to Cullen as “one of the very executors” of Darnley’s murder, but the part he actually did play in it is uncertain. Captain Cullen is said to have advised Bothwell, before he scaled the wall, “for more surety, to have the King strangled, and not to trust to the train of powder alone, as he had known so many saved.” Given what probably happened to Darnley, this tale may have been contrived so as to pin all the responsibility on Bothwell.

In the Detectio and the Book of Articles, Buchanan claims that only one group of conspirators—Bothwell’s—was at Kirk o’Field that night. In his History, however, which was written after certain nobles had fallen from favour, he alleges that there were three groups. In fact, there were probably two.

There is little doubt that Bothwell and his henchmen were not the only band of conspirators to converge on Kirk o’Field that night. At some point, armed men of the Douglas faction arrived by stealth on the scene and stationed themselves near the Old Provost’s Lodging. Their purpose has been variously debated, one theory being that they were there, on behalf of Morton and the other Protestant Lords, to do away with Bothwell once he had laid the fuse, making it look as if he had perished in the explosion. That way the crime could neatly be attributed to him, and no one else would be implicated. Bothwell was hated by the Lords, but he was useful in his willingness to eliminate Darnley, their common enemy, and he could also be useful as a scapegoat for them all. For that reason, it would be better if he too were eliminated. But this hypothesis is not workable.

Another, more credible, theory is that Archibald Douglas, who had a deadly personal score to settle with Darnley for betraying his kinsman, Morton, was there to ensure that, if by some chance the King escaped the blast, he would not evade death. Thomas Wilson stated that there was “an ambushment before the door, that none should escape” and that the postern in the wall was left open so that the killers could make a quick getaway. Although Morton was not in Edinburgh that night, and had refused to become involved, he may privately have sanctioned this intervention. According to Morton’s confession of 1581, Bothwell knew the Douglases were there, for Archibald Douglas had told Morton he was “at the deed doing, and came to the Kirk o’Field yard with the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly.” There is no other evidence that Huntly was present that night, but as he was closely associated with Bothwell, it is possible that he was. He had, after all, been one of those taken into the Lords’ confidence at Craigmillar. Although one of Bothwell’s followers insisted he saw no one beside the Earl’s men at Kirk o’Field, “nor knew of no other companies,” his evidence was perhaps concocted to protect Morton and his faction.

That Archibald Douglas was at Kirk o’Field that night seems likely. His servant, John Binning, testified under torture in 1581 that Douglas was “art and part” of the murder and “did actually devise and perpetrate it,” which is substantiated by Douglas’s conduct at Whittinghame. Binning claimed that he and another man accompanied his master when he left Douglas House in St. Mary’s Wynd—which ran parallel with Blackfriars Wynd, but lay just outside the Netherbow Port—by the back door and made his way to Kirk o’Field. It was later said that Douglas had left his velvet mule at the scene of the crime, which Douglas denied, but the allegation may be true, for Binning stated that his master was wearing armour beneath his clothes, a steel helmet, and slippers over his boots, as were all his men, as an aid to stealth. Douglas and another man—Binning?—were perhaps the two cloaked men wearing mules whom Powrie had seen earlier at the Blackfriars gate; if so, they were certainly in league with Bothwell.

Hepburn, Hay and Dalgleish all claimed that there were “nine and no more at the deed”—themselves, Bothwell, the Ormistons, Paris, Powrie and Wilson—which became the official line, since it pointed to Bothwell alone as the culprit. Yet there is evidence in diverse sources that there were more than nine men at Kirk o’Field that night. The female witnesses in Blackfriars Wynd saw eleven men before the explosion and thirteen after it. Lennox states that fifty persons surrounded the house that night, of whom only sixteen were in Bothwell’s party, although he does not say who the others were. Cecil says there were thirty persons,²⁰and Moray later told de Silva he thought thirty to forty persons were involved in the crime.²¹There were certainly more than nine, for this estimate does not take account of Captain Cullen, Huntly (perhaps) and the Douglases. And who were the two cloaked men in mules whom Powrie noticed? It has been variously suggested that they were Huntly and Argyll, Balfour and his brother (of whom more later) or Douglas and Binning.

Further evidence of the Douglases’ presence at Kirk o’Field lies perhaps in the testimony of the women living nearby who heard a man crying out to his kinsmen to pity him. However, it is unlikely that it was the Douglases whom Mrs. Merton saw coming up Blackfriars Wynd because they would have had no reason to go along that street.

Moretta later informed Giovanni Correr, the Venetian ambassador in Paris, that “certain women who live in the neighbourhood declare, and from a window perceived, many armed men were round the house.”²²It was later claimed that the Lords had men waiting to ambush Darnley in the cottages that lay in the south garden, adjoining the Flodden Wall. Since the bodies of Darnley and Taylor were found in that garden, it is reasonable to suppose that Douglas positioned some of his men in these cottages. As late as 20 June, Drury informed Cecil that the delay in arraigning those already arrested for Darnley’s murder was “for that the three hosts [householders] out either of the which houses there came out eight persons that were all at the murdering of the King, cannot yet be gotten.”²³Nor does it seem that they were ever arrested.

In the English spy’s drawing, there appear four mounted men in an alleyway to the south of the south garden. Some writers have thought that their presence is significant. But they are unlikely to have been Douglas men, for they would have gone to ground long before morning, nor is it feasible that these horsemen had anything to do with the murder. They are probably citizens, come from further afield to view the scene of the crime, or they may even represent Bothwell and/or his men coming to investigate the explosion.

According to Lennox, “some said” that Mary herself “was present at the murder of the King, in man’s apparel, which apparel she loved sometimes to be in.” That Mary enjoyed disguising herself in male attire cannot be disputed, but there is no evidence to substantiate the rumour that she was at Kirk o’Field when Darnley was murdered. Lennox’s rumour is at variance with the other libels, which allege that the Queen was in bed when the explosion took place.

According to the depositions, once Paris had unlocked the door to the Queen’s chamber, Hay and Hepburn lit the slow-burning fuse,²⁴locked the doors through which Darnley might try to escape, and rejoined Bothwell and the others in the east garden, by the Flodden Wall, where they waited for the explosion. After a while, when nothing had happened, Bothwell asked if there was any window through which he could see if the fuse had gone out, for he was determined to check that it had been properly lit. Hepburn, aghast, told him that he would only be able to see that through the Queen’s window facing the quadrangle. To his horror, Bothwell began pulling him towards the house, but Hepburn pushed him back, just in time, for at that moment, there was a flash of flame in one of the windows, and in the next instant a great “crack,” and they all saw “the house rising” before their eyes.²⁵The conspirators scrambled over the wall to where Dalgleish and Powrie were waiting, and ran from the scene, through the precincts of the old Blackfriars monastery and into the Cowgate.

The main problem with this evidence is that, if the door to the Queen’s chamber was shut and the other downstairs doors locked, the only window through which the flame could have been seen was that in the Queen’s chamber, which looked out on to the quadrangle. There is no way that the conspirators could have seen this from the east garden. Moreover, would Bothwell have been so stupid as to risk going back to the house when it could blow up at any moment?

More pertinently, if gunpowder with weak and unpredictable properties was left in a heap, it might have quickly burnt itself out, or, if it did explode, it would never have destroyed the whole building down to the foundations. The damage would have been limited mainly to the room it was in and the floor above it. Therefore the Old Provost’s Lodging could not have been blown up by this means.

Bothwell and his men aimed to scale the Flodden Wall at Leith Wynd, a good way to the north, but it was too high, so they made their way back to the Netherbow Port, brazenly woke the porter and demanded admission, then split up into two groups: Bothwell and Paris went down the Canongate, while the rest returned via St. Mary’s Wynd and the Cowgate to the palace. They cannot therefore have been the men whom Mrs. Merton and Mrs. Stirling saw running up Blackfriars Wynd and splitting into two groups; these were probably members of the Douglas party. Why Bothwell and his men chose to go so far out of their way to Leith Wynd is a mystery; they could have got over the wall near the Blackfriars gardens, for a good stretch of it was ruinous there, as the city records testify.

When challenged, Bothwell and his followers gave the Earl’s name, not only to John Galloway, but also to the sentries at Holyrood, who also asked them, “What was that crack?,” to which they replied, “We know not.” In the circumstances, their indiscretion seems staggering, but neither the porter nor the sentries were ever brought forward as witnesses against them. At Holyrood, Bothwell “called for a draught,” undressed and went to bed, feigning innocence when he was disturbed half an hour later by George Halket with news of the explosion.²⁶Since there was widespread panic in the palace at the time of his return, it is hard to believe that he reached his lodgings without meeting anyone. It is also hard to accept that he walked all the way from Kirk o’Field to Leith Wynd, then back to the Netherbow Port and by the back route to the palace, then prepared for bed, in the time before he was disturbed, and without anybody knowing anything of his movements; most of the city had been aroused by the explosion.

At some point during the return journey, Hay’s conscience had begun to trouble him, and he muttered to Paris, “We have given offence to God, but there is nothing to be done save live virtuously and pray.”

“Alas!” wailed Paris, whereupon Hay shut him up by threatening him with a pistol. Once he reached Holyrood, Paris lay sleepless on a bed in Bothwell’s hall, then left when Hay invited him to spend the night at his house in the Canongate. When he returned to Holyrood in the morning, Paris gave way to terror, but Bothwell assured him that no one would trouble themselves with him when most of the great Lords of Scotland were involved in the plot. But Paris was not reassured, and Bothwell soon lost patience with him.

“Why do you look like that?” he snapped, and pointed out that the other conspirators had “lands, rents and revenues, wives and children, and were willing to give up everything in my service. If you think you have offended God, the sin is not yours but mine.”

Later on, still brooding, Paris saw the Queen, but when he told her that people were giving him odd looks, and asked her why she thought this should be, she merely told him not to worry.

That day, Hepburn dropped the counterfeit keys down a hole in a quarry between Holyrood and Leith. Bothwell later gave fine horses to Hay and Hepburn by way of reward for their services, and promised Powrie, Dalgleish and Wilson well-remunerated positions at Hermitage Castle. He assured all his accomplices that, if they held their tongues, “they should never want so long as he had anything.”

It is clear that the depositions on which this reconstructed sequence of events is based are so seriously flawed that they cannot be accepted as reliable evidence of what actually happened. All were carefully conjured and doctored so as to attach the responsibility for Darnley’s murder exclusively to Bothwell and, later, to Mary and to other persons who had fallen from favour in the interim. What incriminates Bothwell are not these contrived accounts, but the evidence that relates to the conferences at Craigmillar and Whittinghame and the events that took place after Darnley’s murder, of which we will shortly be hearing. Although it seems likely that Bothwell and his named followers did engineer the explosion at Kirk o’Field, there is serious doubt as to whether it was carried out in the manner described in the depositions, and as to whether Bothwell was acting alone. He himself told others that the Lords, and even the Queen, were involved in the conspiracy, and whether the latter was true or not, there is good evidence for the former; he must therefore have believed that no one could touch him.

The depositions reveal a plot that was ill conceived, careless and staggeringly amateurish. There was no reason why Hay and Hepburn could not have lit the fuse as soon as the Queen’s entourage was clear of Kirk o’Field, or at least as soon as the house was quiet. Nor did Bothwell and the others have any good cause for going back to the house to supervise matters. Going around Edinburgh in a large group at the dead of night and leaving clues to their identity in various places were the acts of fools who seemed to be deliberately trying to attract attention to themselves. Bothwell’s past record is one of efficiency and military expertise, and he had demonstrated good qualities of leadership in often difficult situations; it is therefore inconceivable that he had devised this shambles of a conspiracy. Even if he had believed himself so powerful that he did not need to cover his tracks—which does not appear to have been the case—he was certainly aware that he had influential enemies who would seize upon any excuse to destroy him, and that the penalty for regicide was death.

Hence, it is almost certain that Bothwell was not acting on just his own account at Kirk o’Field that night, and that the events that took place there were rather different from those recounted in the depositions.