FEW SOULS WERE ABROAD IN Edinburgh after midnight on 9 February 1567. Not only was it bitterly cold with a light frosting of snow, but in an age of candles and rushlights, people tended to go to bed earlier than they do now. Anyone found on the streets at the dead of night was likely to be challenged by the watch.
To the south of the city lay a quadrangle of collegiate buildings attached to the adjacent ruined Kirk of St. Mary in the Fields. Here, all appeared to be quiet. An hour or so before midnight, Queen Mary and her retinue had departed from the quadrangle, bound for Holyrood Palace, leaving behind, in his temporary residence, the Old Provost’s Lodging, Mary’s convalescent consort, King Henry, better known to history as Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Darnley had retired for the night as soon as Mary left; he wanted to be up early the next morning. The only sign of life at Kirk o’Field, we are told, was a single light burning in the window of the imposing Duke’s House, which belonged to the powerful Hamilton family.
We now know, of course, that all was not quiet at Kirk o’Field on that night, and that the area was in fact the scene of a great deal of conspiratorial activity throughout the evening of the 9th and the small hours of the 10th. Who these conspirators were has been a matter of furious historical debate for four centuries, but what is certain is that, at two o’clock on the morning of 10 February, the Old Provost’s Lodging was blasted into rubble by a mighty explosion that reverberated across the city of Edinburgh, awakened most of its inhabitants, and sparked one of the greatest murder mysteries in history. For the chief victim was no less a personage than the King himself.
The reverberations from that explosion were keenly felt by those implicated—rightly or wrongly—in the plot during the months and years that followed, and they have been echoing down the centuries ever since. For over four hundred years, controversy has raged over who murdered Darnley and how he died. Many thought then, and still think now, that Queen Mary was an accessory before the fact to the murder of her husband, for she certainly had sufficient motives for getting rid of him. Yet so did several other people, including most of the Scottish nobility. And Darnley himself, incredible as it may seem, was not above suspicion.
The question of Mary’s guilt is crucial, and continues to provoke heated debate. It is time, therefore, for a fresh, objective reappraisal of the mystery of Kirk o’Field. Despite the conflicting nature of the contemporary evidence and the obscuration of centuries of theory, romantic myths, suppositions, speculation, prejudice and uninformed opinion, I believe that it is indeed possible to unravel what actually happened on that long-ago night in Edinburgh, and to point the finger at who was responsible.
ALISON WEIR
Scottish Borders
28 July 2002