CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘I’ll pity thee as much’ he said
‘And as much favour I’ll show to thee
As thou had on the Queen’s chamberlain
That day you deemedst him to die’
Bothwell to Darnley, from the ballad Earl Bothwell
In October at Jedburgh Mary Queen of Scots had nearly died. At Glasgow in the New Year Darnley in his turn fell extremely ill. At the time it was given out that he had smallpox, but it seems more likely that he was actually suffering from syphilis. Bothwell, on his own narrative of events written during his captivity in Denmark, Les Affaires du Conte de Boduel, took the trouble to cross out the words petite vérole (smallpox) and insert roniole (syphilis) in his own handwriting. The Diurnal of Occurrents, a contemporary diary probably written by a minor official of the court, referred to the ‘pox’, a word often used at the time for syphilis, and Pitscottie stated that the king was stricken with ‘a great fever of the pox’.1 Darnley’s skull, now in the Royal College of Surgeons at London, was analysed by Sir Daniel Wilson, at the request of Dr Karl Pearson, and discovered to be pitted with traces of ‘a virulent syphilitic disease’.*2 The queen did not immediately visit her husband, but she did show her habitual humanity: she sent him her doctor to Glasgow, and in early January, according to the accounts, gave orders for the royal linen to be cut into ruffs for the king’s nightshirt.
Yet despite Mary’s careless kindness – so typical of her nature – clearly she was still pondering in her mind legal ways and means of ridding herself of this degenerate creature as a husband. On Christmas Eve she duly pardoned Morton and his associates – a fact which lends conviction to the story of the Protestation that Mary believed herself to have struck a bargain with Maitland and other nobles: now that she had allowed Morton to return, it was up to these nobles to rid her of Darnley in such a way as would be ‘approved by Parliament’. The return of Morton and his friends also of course substantially increased the numbers of Darnley’s potential enemies within the boundaries of Scotland. A further step taken by the queen before Christmas shows that she was still considering the question of a divorce: the Catholic Archbishop Hamilton of St Andrews was temporarily restored to his consistorial jurisdiction from 23rd December until some date before 9th January, when the privilege was again removed. The intention was presumably to allow the archbishop to pronounce decrees of nullity between the queen and her husband. The brief restoration suggests that the queen was still casting around for ways to come about a decent divorce which would not compromise Prince James, and did not regard the subject as totally closed by Maitland’s adverse advice; after all as a Protestant Scot he did not necessarily represent the views of Catholic Rome, which had not yet been officially sounded. In any case the marriages of royal persons were by Canon Law reserved for the consideration of the Pope himself, as causae majores. However, divorce for royal personages was by no means unthinkable in the sixteenth century, even within the structure of the Catholic Church. There had been some significant divorces in the French royal house. Mary and Darnley’s mutual grandmother, Margaret Tudor, had been divorced from her second husband, the earl of Angus; and the marital problems of Henry VIII, which he had originally attempted so hard and so long to solve within the structure of the Church, were only a generation away.
For Darnley, with his teeth drawn, and threatened from so many quarters, was still in some respects a dangerous animal. He did not cease to intrigue as well as boast. He was clever enough to see that he had a possible line of attack against Mary in her determinedly laissez-faire policy towards the Scottish Catholic Church; he was unscrupulous enough to contemplate blackening her reputation in the eyes of the Catholic powers abroad with the aim of elevating himself, as the champion of the Catholic faith, in Scotland. In the summer of 1566 there had been some crazy story that he contemplated inhabiting the Stilly Isles and from there attacking England.4 On 22nd October Robert Melville reported to Beaton in Paris that Darnley was trying to use his threat to leave the country to demand the dismissal of Maitland, Macgill and Bellenden, all strong Protestants, from the queen’s counsels.5 On 13th November, de Silva, the Spanish ambassador in London, reported to Philip II that Queen Mary had heard in Scotland that Darnley had written to Philip, the Pope, the king of France and the cardinal of Lorraine, that she was ‘dubious in the faith’.6 Nearly a year before Darnley had pictured himself in possession of the coveted crown matrimonial. Now his ambitions were strong enough still to picture himself set up as Catholic king of Scotland, at the will of a strong foreign Catholic power, ruling as guardian of his infant son – with his wife of course overthrown.
It will never be known exactly how much of this ‘Catholic’ plot existed in the imagination of Darnley, or indeed Darnley’s enemies, and how much reality there was behind the rumours and the suspicions. But certainly at the turn of the year there were whispers that Darnley was once more intriguing against his wife which were loud enough to reach not only the queen’s ears in Edinburgh, but also those of Beaton in Paris. In the words of the historian F. W. Maitland, it is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future. In January 1567 it was Darnley, out of the royal couple, who had been shown to be the plotter, who had aimed at the crown matrimonial and perhaps more, by a conspiracy. So far Queen Mary had only been plotted against during her reign, and ever since the Riccio affair had kept, as du Croc pointed out, an extremely wary eye on Darnley for ‘further contrivances’. Now she believed she had stumbled on news of such contrivances: she wrote to Paris in January to tell Beaton that there was a rumour of a plot by Darnley to seize the person of Prince James, and thus control the reins of government.7The story had been brought to her at Stirling by a servant, William Walker: ‘How it was not only openly bruited, but also he had heard by report of persons whom he esteemed lovers of us [the Queen] that the King, by assistance of some of the nobility, should take the prince our son and crown him, and being crowned, as his father, should take upon him the government …’ Walker gave as his reference another servant, William Hiegate. But Hiegate, when questioned, denied the whole thing, and merely repeated a rumour to the opposite effect, that he had heard how the king was about to be put in ward by the nobles.
The queen duly conveyed this atmosphere of plot and counterplot to Beaton in Paris. But at the end of her letter she merely concluded rather dourly that God knew how her husband had behaved towards her, and the outside world knew as well as God; as for her subjects, she did not doubt that they too, in their hearts, condemned him for the way he had treated her. Darnley was always inquiring for news about her doings, and in Mary’s view, both he and his father Lennox, with their adherents, would be delighted to do her some mischief, if their strength were equivalent to their wishes. Luckily, wrote Mary, God had seen to it that their power was moderated, so that they had little means to execute their evil intentions. In any case Mary declared herself sceptical as to whether any in Scotland – beyond the immediate Lennox party – would truly approve of an action against their queen. Despite Mary’s boasted self-confidence, she did take one precaution against the possible malevolence of Darnley: she had the little Prince James brought out of Stirling Castle, where he was considered to lie too close to the dangerous Glasgow area. On 14th January he was installed with his mother in the palace of Holyrood. Other rumours of danger to the queen had already reached Beaton in Paris, before the arrival of her letter; these came in the form of a hint from the Spanish ambassador that ‘there be some surprise to be trafficked to the Queen’s contrary’. The Spanish ambassador in London heard from the same source that there was a plot forming in Scotland against the queen.8Beaton’s reaction to these innuendoes was to send Mary a warning letter, in which he begged her to reestablish good relations with her husband, lest some peril ensue from him in the future to destroy her. Unfortunately this letter, full of good sense, reached Mary too late, when Darnley was already dead.
On 20th January Queen Mary set off for Glasgow to bring back her sick husband on a litter to Edinburgh, to finish off his convalescence in her own company. In view of the dispassionate contempt which she quite openly expressed for him in her letter to Beaton, written on the very day of her departure, it is necessary to consider exactly what prompted her to make the journey. It is true that Mary had always displayed courteous kindness towards Darnley’s sufferings; but some more compelling argument than sheer humanity must be advanced to explain her actions – and also to explain what is every bit as mysterious, why Darnley so readily agreed to follow her back. One must therefore examine the actions of the conspirator nobles during the period in January leading up to the queen’s expedition. It was on 6th January – the last Twelfth Night that the queen of Scots who loved these celebrations so much was ever to spend outside prison walls – that Maitland at last achieved his wish and married the voluptuous Mary Fleming in the chapel royal at Stirling. By this marriage to the chief of the Maries, the queen’s own kin, Maitland was further entwined in Mary’s inner court circle, to which he had been re-admitted in the previous September. In January also some sort of conference took place at Whittingham, one of the Douglas castles, between Bothwell, Morton, newly returned to Scotland, his cousin Archibald Douglas, and Mary. The exact truth of what happened at this conference is impossible to establish, since afterwards, once the nobles concerned were on different political sides, each accused the other of having raised the subject of Darnley’s murder.
Morton, in his confession, some fifteen years later, said that Bothwell suggested the killing of Darnley to him, at which Morton begged himself off on the grounds that he had only just recovered from his disgrace over Riccio – ‘I am but newly come out of a great trouble …’ According to Morton, Archibald Douglas was then dispatched to Edinburgh to see if the queen would give some written authority for the dispatch of her husband, but Douglas returned with the quite definite answer: ‘Show to the Earl of Morton that the Queen will have no speech of the matter.’9 Bothwell, on the other hand, represented himself as being anxious ‘for rest and a peaceful life after the imprisonment and exile I had suffered’, whereas it was Morton who was determined to spur him forward to annihilate Darnley, as a revenge on him for his treachery.10 There is little to choose between these two versions of the same story, and it is hardly necessary to decide which of these two ambitious and daring men should be given the honour of first broaching the subject. But it is important to notice that neither party suggested that the queen had any foreknowledge of their plans; according to Douglas, she had even gone further and specified that she wanted to hear nothing more about such a blood-thirsty enterprise. The queen’s dissent, combined with her known merciful character and clemency, which made her ever ready to pardon those who were sometimes best left unpardoned, gave the conspirators a strong motive for the future in not involving her in their plans. She had a horror of violence: as she said herself years later, she would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith. Yet the nobles had every reason to believe, after the conference at Craigmillar, that she would approve the end result. The argument for proceeding with their plans without informing the queen further was overwhelming.
There was, however, one detail in which the queen could help them: their plan did demand that Darnley should be in Edinburgh or thereabouts, rather than Glasgow; there he was surrounded by his own Lennox Stewart adherents, in feudal fashion, but Morton’s Douglases and Bothwell’s Hepburns were at a distance. It is possible that Maitland indicated to Mary that in practical terms it was unwise to allow Darnley to remain in Glasgow where he might manage to work up an effective conspiracy against her. During the period leading up to the murder, according to Nau, a man called John Shaw came to the queen and told her that Ker of Fawdonside, whom she particularly loathed for his part in the Riccio murder – it was he who had held the pistol to her stomach – was back in Scotland: ‘He having boasted to certain persons … within fifteen days he assured them, there would be a change at court, and he would be more than ever in credit; and then he inquired boldly how their queen was.’11 Or it may have been Bothwell who dropped the hint – Bothwell, whose record of loyalty was impeccable in the last two years. Equally the queen herself may have needed no particular prompting to see that it was safer to have Darnley under her own eyes where experience had taught her that it was easier to control him, than loose in the countryside, either plotting or breeding dissension with his wild schemes. At all times during the past year, she had shown herself to be extremely upset when Darnley broke loose from the court and wandered off by himself, presumably because she trusted him even less once he was outside the sphere of her influence. Her journey to recall the errant Darnley made sense in terms of her own personal security, whether prompted or not by one of her nobles. But being both frank and feminine, or in her own phrase ‘undissembling’, Mary, in her letter to Beaton, made no attempt to pretend a passionate love for Darnley which she was by now far from feeling.*
If her motives are plentiful enough, the question still arises exactly how Mary induced her husband to accompany her back to Edinburgh: for it is clear that once Mary arrived in Glasgow, she experienced no difficulty in persuading him to make the move. Darnley freely consented to the plan, and this despite the fact that he had heard some rumour of what had transpired at Craigmillar, as his servant Crawford later deposed. Darnley had learned apparently that something had been plotted against him in the autumn, but that Mary had refused to be a party to it: in Crawford’s words,12he knew that ‘a letter was presented to her in Craigmillar, made by her own device, and subscribed by certain others, who desired her to subscribe the same, which she refused to do. And he [Darnley] said that he would never think that she [the queen] who was his own proper flesh, would do him any hurt …’ Darnley’s confidence in the gentle nature of his wife on eighteen months of marriage is significant. However, this confidence in itself would not have been enough to persuade him to return from Lennox-dominated Glasgow to Edinburgh, inhabited not only by the queen but by many nobles with far from gentle natures. The promise which Mary seems most likely to have held out to Darnley was the resumption of full marital relations on his return to Edinburgh. Mary’s coldness as a wife had been one of Darnley’s complaints against her: it wounded his vanity as a man, and also, he felt, threatened his status as a king, there being more to the embraces of a queen than the mere feel of her arms around him. This promise would have been enough to rouse Darnley’s ambitions all over again, to rekindle his hopes of future grandeur as king: in this way he went willingly out of his own feudal domain of influence into hers. The attitude of Mary to the journey was totally different: convinced that Darnley was once more plotting against her, convinced also that Darnley had once attempted her own death and might do so again, she felt little love or any emotion of any sort for her husband, as her letter to Beaton shows. Nevertheless it still seemed safer for herself and her child to have him lodged in Edinburgh under her own eyes, than let him loose in the west of Scotland, free to plot. Mary led Darnley to Edinburgh with kind words and hints of happiness as once before she had won him over on the dramatic day after Riccio’s murder, for the same cogent reasons of self-preservation.
The only subject on which the queen and king now disagreed was the place where Darnley should spend the rest of his convalescence: he needed constant baths to improve his condition, and his face was still shrouded with a piece of taffeta. Mary had intended to bring him to the castle of Craigmillar a little way outside Edinburgh, that same castle where the bond had been signed. Darnley, however, declined to enter the stronghold, as his own servants testified. Perhaps he was afraid to do so. He chose instead – and once again there is general agreement that the choice was his, not the queen’s – a house of moderate size on the outskirts of Edinburgh town proper, but still lying just inside the town wall. It was situated within the quadrangle attached to the old collegiate church of St Mary-in-the-Field, as it had once been called, which was now known as the Kirk o’Field, and it was about three-quarters of a mile distant from Holyrood palace, along hilly streets. This house, known as the old provost’s lodging, because it had once been the house of the provost of the collegiate church, now actually belonged to Robert Balfour, brother of Sir James Balfour, but was often said to belong to Sir James himself. Within the same quadrangle lay the considerably larger Hamilton House, belonging to the duke of Châtelherault. Darnley’s servant Nelson, while agreeing that Darnley himself made the choice of Kirk o’Field, stated in his deposition that Darnley had then expected to be lodged in Hamilton House and was surprised to find himself in the old provost’s lodging.13But no other mention is made of Darnley’s surprise, whereas there is general agreement that Darnley made the choice after the royal cortège left Glasgow. In addition one may doubt whether Darnley would actually have wished or expected to be lodged in the house of his hereditary family enemies, the Hamiltons. The main point to be grasped about the old provost’s lodging, apart from the Balfour connection of the house, is that the venue of Darnley’s lodging had been changed suddenly and unexpectedly at his own request: therefore any plans centred on his dwelling would necessarily have an improvised and makeshift quality, since they could not have taken longer than a few days to both plot and put into action. This need for speed at the cost of efficiency may explain some of the confusion of the tangled events which followed.
But of course the many seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of what followed at Kirk o’Field – the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history – have a deeper cause than the essentially makeshift nature of the crime. They arise principally from the extraordinarily untrustworthy nature of the evidence. The basic difficulty in the way of reconstructing the truth about Kirk o’Field is the fact that the lesser executive criminals were subsequently executed for the crime at the instance of the great nobles who had approved or inspired it. There is thus a veil of unreality over the depositions of these minor figures, as in the trial of criminals in some twentieth-century totalitarian state, since their words had to be carefully tailored not to incriminate the men then in power in Scotland. Equally it was desirable to throw all the blame possible on one noble who had vanished from the scene, after quarrelling with his former associates – Lord Bothwell. The evidence is affected further by the circumstances of Mary Stuart’s own trial in England in late 1568: as with her alleged adultery with Bothwell, it will be found that once again theBook of Articles related a series of demonstrable untruths, the intention of which was to keep her in captivity in England while Moray remained regent safely in Scotland. In short, the unreliability of the depositions, many of them made under torture, and the political ‘re-writing’ of history which went on at the time of Mary’s trial means that the detailed story of Kirk o’Field can only be guessed at, or pieced together, rather than established with total certainty.
The house in which Darnley now settled for the last days of his recovery was in many ways ideally suited for the state of convalescence. According to Nau, a raven had hovered over the royal caravan on its way from Glasgow, and now settled on the roof of the lodging. But there were certainly no other evil omens to be discerned in the actual structure of the building. The house lay on a slight eminence, overlooking the Cowgate, and the site was open and healthy compared to low-lying Holyrood; as Leslie said, the air was thought by the doctors to be the most salubrious in the whole town.14 The quadrangle in which it lay and its recent connection with the church must have given the lodging something of the atmosphere of a house in a cathedral close in an English provincial town. It was far enough from Holyrood for the king’s illness not to be an embarrassment to him, yet it had the security of lying just within the town wall, which had been begun to be built round Edinburgh at the time of Flodden. Edinburgh during this period had a nightly town watch, numbering a total of thirty-two men, of whom twelve were stationed at the various gates, or the Leith Wynd gap in the wall, and ten perpetually perambulated the streets – providing a considerable sense of security to its citizens, and a continual threat to anyone who might stray in its streets by night without a lawful excuse to do so. This town wall, six feet wide at its base, and tapering to a flat top, skirted the back of the house; and the characteristic gallery which extended off the first floor chamber of the lodging rested on it.* The house had its own east garden, with a door into it, and on the other side of the town wall lay further gardens and orchards, once part of the fields, but divided off by the building of the wall. All these details can be clearly distinguished in the sketch of the scene after the murder sent to Cecil in London, which is also vital to our understanding of the geography of Kirk o’Field. From it, it can be seen that the old provost’s lodging lay on the south side of the quadrangle; two of the other sides were occupied bysmaller houses, still standing in the sketch, and the third contained slightly larger houses such as Hamilton House. The quadrangle has been estimated to be eighty-six feet by seventy-three feet.*
Although Buchanan tried to make out that the lodging itself was ruinous and uncomfortable – in order to blacken the character of Queen Mary who was erroneously stated to have chosen it – it was in fact a pleasant house of moderate size, by the standards of the day. Mahon calculated the house to have been about sixty-one feet long and twenty-five feet deep compared to King James’s Tower at Holyrood, containing all the state apartments, which is seventy-four feet by thirty-seven feet. Besides the door into the east garden already mentioned, the house had two other doors, into the quadrangle, and through the postern gate in the town wall (visible in the sketch) into the alleyway beyond. No trace has ever been found of a secret tunnel connecting the lodging with Holyrood; when Lennox furiously and crazily accused the queen of coming disguised in men’s clothing to witness his son’s murder by ‘secret ways’, in his Narrative15, he was presumably thinking not of a tunnel, but of the back streets of Edinburgh. The obvious route from Holyrood to the provost’s lodging lay down the Canongate, through the town wall at the Netherbow Port, down the Blackfriars Wynd, crossing the Cowgate, and so to the purlieus of St Mary’s. But sixteenth-century Edinburgh was a network of smaller streets, off the main thoroughfares, and it would have been possible to take an altogether more circuitous route along the back wall of the south Canongate gardens to St Mary’s Port, and thence, where the town wall was as yet unbuilt, through the gardens and fields of the old Blackfriars Priory to the east garden of the Kirk o’Field house. This would avoid the town wall, and the challenge of the watch; the only remaining problem would be the curious eyes of the ten watchmen nightly patrolling the streets of the city.
The lodging contained two bedrooms for Darnley and the queen, Darnley’s lying directly above that of his wife, a presence chamber (or salle), two garde robes, a kitchen and vaulted cellars beneath. The drop from the gallery, which extended out of Darnley’s bedroom on to the town wall, to the ground, was only about fourteen feet, since the level of the ground beyond the wall was higher than within the quadrangle. The house was not only pleasantly situated and healthy, with gardens, but it was also well if hastily furnished for Darnley’s benefit, once he had selected it, from the store of royal furniture at Holyrood. The inventories testify not only the suddenness of the decision to use the provost’s lodging, but also the amount of furniture and ornaments now brought down from Holyrood.16 A series of seven pieces of tapestry representing the ‘Hunting of the Conies’ were brought for the garde robe, as well as a canopy of yellow taffeta to enclose the chaise percée. Five pieces of tapestry were brought for the salle. For Darnley’s bedroom, six pieces of tapestry, originally taken from Strathbogie after the defeat of Huntly, were ordered, a little Turkish carpet, two or three cushions of red velvet, a high chair covered in purple velvet, and a little table covered with green velvet which had also once belonged to Huntly, as well as a bed which had once belonged to Mary of Guise, which Mary had given her husband in the previous August – hung with violet-brown velvet, embroidered with ciphers and flowers, trimmed with cloth of gold and silver, and having three coverlets, one of them blue quilted taffeta.* A bath stood beside the bed – baths being a necessary part of the convalescence – and one of the makeshift aspects of the visit was the fact that one of the doors of the house was taken off its hinges to serve as a lid when it was not in use. The chamber beneath that of Darnley, which had a window looking north over the quadrangle, contained a small bed of yellow and green damask with a furred coverlet, in which the queen could sleep if she so wished.
Darnley took up residence in his new dwelling on Saturday 1st February. The last week of his life was pleasant and almost domesticated. Queen Mary felt confident that her husband had for the time being no opportunity to weave any plot against her, especially as his father Lennox, so often his evil genius in feeding his childish vanity with praise, was still in Glasgow. The mass of courtiers, Privy Councillors and attendants who inevitably moved with the queen as she progressed through Edinburgh, settled into a routine of visiting Darnley at Kirk o’Field and then returning to the royal palace at Holyrood for the other formal ceremonies of court life. Relations at this point between Darnley and his wife were perfectly amicable. On the Wednesday the queen spent the night at Kirk o’Field in the chamber beneath Darnley’s. According to her own account, propinquity now led to newly friendly relations between them. They had certainly seen little enough of each other lately: when Mary fetched Darnley from Glasgow at the end of January she had not seen him since his abrupt departure from Stirling at the end of December; in October and November she had been ill, and separated from her husband. On the Friday, 7 February, Darnley was actually inspired by this novel amity to discuss with his wife some information he had of plots against her. He begged her in touching language to beware of the people who tried to make mischief between them, adding with self-righteous horror that it had even been suggested to him that he should take his wife’s life.* This sort of volte-face was typical of Darnley: Mary, being the stronger character of the two, was always able to win his loyalty for the time being by force of personality, provided they were face to face, as the denouement of the Riccio affair had demonstrated. It was on this very Friday also, according to Lennox, that Darnley wrote to his father concerning the improvement of his health, which had occurred so much sooner than he had expected, through the kind treatment of ‘such as hath this good while concealed their good will, I mean my love the queen, which I assure you hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife’.19 It would seem therefore that Friday, from the point of view of the husband and wife, was outwardly another day of uneventful convalescence. The Friday night was once more passed by the queen at the old provost’s lodging, under the same roof as her husband.
Is it possible to construct out of Darnley’s outburst of penitence to his wife, Mary’s suspicions and the warnings received from abroad, evidence of an actual plot by Darnley against Mary, based on his residence at Kirk o’Field? It has been suggested that Kirk o’Field was in fact a monstrous conspiracy against Mary, which reacted in the end against its own perpetrator, Darnley.* Darnley was certainly by nature an intriguer and an ambitious one. But the fact that he was plotting in general is not evidence that he was plotting in particular at Kirk o’Field. He was here, impaired in health, virtually confined to his bed, with few of his supporters about him, surrounded by those of the queen, in the house of the brother of one of the nobles who hated him. Mary, far from being the immobile pregnant woman of a year back, was now active and energetic, flitting between Holyrood and Kirk o’Field, whereas Darnley was stationary. This was not a roundabout age in the manner of its killings. Kings and nobles died violently, but they died openly. The regent Moray died at the hand of an assassin, who shot out of the window into the street; the Riccio plot had aimed at the queen’s life in the crudest possible manner. Queen Mary, who rode freely and frequently among her people, would at all times present an excellent target for an assassin: if gunpowder had been in Darnley’s mind, it would have been aimed at a dwelling where there was not the faintest doubt that the queen would be present, at a time when he was in perfect command of himself. Kirk o’Field was so very far from being the ideal situation for Darnley to plan to kill Mary that, in the absence of concrete proof that he did so, it is surely more logical to regard the crime as aimed straightforwardly at the man it did in fact kill – Darnley. It is in the participants and the accessories to the crime, rather than the intended victim, that the complexities of the plot lie.
For while Darnley and Mary jogged through their last week of marriage in comparative peace, the conspirators had been hard at work to compass the death of one and the deliverance of the other. Friday seems to have been the critical day. Darnley could not be expected to stay in the lodging forever and Holyrood with its guards obviously presented more of a problem from the point of view of assassination than Kirk o’Field. Sir James Balfour told the lords in the summer, when he made his peace with them, that he first knew of the plot on Friday. Morton admitted in his own confession years later that he first knew of the plot from Archibald Douglas a little before, possibly on the Friday. The Book of Articles went further and said that this was the day originally intended to perform the murder, but the preparations were not ready. John Hay of Tallo in his deposition stated that it was on Friday that Bothwell said to him: ‘John, this is the matter. 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!’20 John Hepburn, Bothwell’s kinsman and henchman, deposed that the original purpose had been for certain of the nobles to kill the king by each sending two of their servants ‘to the doing thereof in the fields’21 – this corporate fate, so characteristic of gang vengeance, whether in Scotland or Sicily, would not only have wiped out Darnley’s treachery but would also of course ritually involve all the nobles in the act, much as Riccio himself had received over fifty dagger-wounds in his body including Darnley’s own dagger planted by George Douglas. It would thus not have been possible later for some of the nobles to have denied their involvement.
The dagger being the natural murder weapon of the time, it is interesting to speculate what made Bothwell change his plans and turn to the much less malleable weapon of gunpowder. The reason he gave John Hepburn was probably the true one – because it was the obvious one. With servants openly at work, the death of Darnley in the fields would inevitably have been pinned upon the nobles who had concocted it. Bothwell was already in his agile opportunist’s mind aiming at the position of king. He knew Mary had formally indicated that she wanted no violence done to Darnley. It was no part of his plan to be blamed for the crime: he certainly did not wish to suffer for it, merely to enjoy the result. Ironically enough, the use of gunpowder, and the blowing-up of the house which gave its incredibly flagrant character to the crime – and made Mary’s cheerful tolerance of the perpetrators give such appalling scandal throughout Europe – seems to have been planned in simple good faith that a hearty explosion would cover the tracks of the killers, and make it impossible afterwards to prove who had done it, even if it was only too easy to guess. Such bold but straightforward reasoning was typical not only of Bothwell but of the age in which he lived.
The testimony of the page ‘French’ Paris (although extremely suspect, because it was wrung from him by torture) does at least confirm that Kirk o’Field was not a subtly planned crime.22 Paris, once Bothwell’s servant, was now in the queen’s service, and attended her at the old provost’s lodging. It was on the Wednesday or Thursday that Bothwell came into the queen’s chamber, below that of Darnley, and told Paris that he found himself ill of his ‘usual illness’ which was a flux of the blood. He asked Paris whereabouts in the house he could ‘faire mes affaires’, and Paris, in view of the urgency of the situation, found Bothwell a corner; it was here, as Bothwell availed himself of the slight privacy to relieve himself, that Bothwell outlined to Paris that he had in mind to kill the king. Paris hesitated. Bothwell told him angrily that he was an utter fool if he thought that he, Bothwell, would enter such an enterprise all on his own – Bothwell then named Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay as his accomplices. Paris inquired about Moray. Bothwell replied that he was neutral.* When Paris resisted Bothwell’s demands, Bothwell only exclaimed impatiently, ‘Why did I put you in the Queen’s service if not to help me?’ and it was at this juncture that Paris pointed out that Bothwell had bullied him for more than six years, kicking him in the stomach to make him do what he wanted. Paris was, however, insistent that Bothwell wanted the keys of the house of lodging from him – a point which incidentally points to the innocence of the queen, since she could presumably have provided them easily herself, had she been aware of the details of the plot. On Saturday, 8th February, Paris had apparently obtained these keys while no one else was in the room and taken them to Bothwell at Holyrood.
Sunday, 9th February, was to be the last day of Darnley’s convalescence. It was announced that he would return to Holyrood early on the Monday. It was also the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, and, as such, a day of carnival and rejoicing; two events typical of the life of Queen Mary’s court were planned to take place. In the morning Mary’s favourite valet Bastian Pages married Christiana Hogg; being a Catholic it was his last opportunity to do so before the beginning of Lent. The wedding dinner took place at noon, and the queen was present: Bastian was an amusing high-spirited Frenchman, who shared the queen’s own love of masques. It was he who had devised that masque at the baptism of Prince James, with the satyrs wagging their tails which had so much enraged the English visitors that Hatton exclaimed that if it had not been for the presence of the queen, he would have put his dagger in the heart of ‘that French knave Bastian’. The second court event was a formal dinner given at four o’clock by the bishop of the Isles in the house in the Canongate for the returning ambassador of Savoy. The queen attended this dinner, accompanied by her chief nobles, Argyll, Huntly, Bothwell and Cassillis – but not Moray. He had that very morning slipped out of Edinburgh, on the excuse that his wife was sick with a miscarriage. Maitland was also absent, and Morton was not yet sufficiently in the queen’s personal favour to be admitted to court events. This duly accomplished, the queen and her court rode down to the provost’s lodging again, in order to spend the evening with Darnley. The queen planned to sleep Sunday night at Kirk o’Field once more, at the end of her day of revelry, as she had done on the Wednesday and the Friday.
There was a crowded scene at Kirk o’Field, as there had been on many previous evenings there during the previous week. The royal entourage – ‘the most part of nobles then in this town’, said the queen23 – crowded into the king’s chamber. The nobles, including Huntly, who had been at the bishop’s dinner, played at dice on that little table with a green velvet cloth which had once belonged to Huntly’s father, still in their carnival costumes. Bothwell was an especially striking figure in black velvet and satin, trimmed with silver. The queen chatted pleasantly to the king. There was probably some music, a song in the background to the sound of the lute or the guitar. It was the sort of evening the queen much enjoyed whether at Holyrood or any of her other Scottish palaces: she may even have appreciated the comparative adventure of sleeping at the Kirk o’Field. But at ten or eleven o’clock her intention to do so once more was forestalled. Something – or someone – reminded Queen Mary that it was the hour of Bastian’s wedding masque which she had promised to attend. Queen Mary was unable by nature to resist this sort of obligation and Bastian’s masque was of special importance in view of the fact that he had designed one of hers only six weeks previously. It now seemed unnecessarily inconvenient to return once more to the provost’s lodging after the masque, to sleep there, since Darnley was coming back to Holyrood early the next morning, and the queen herself had also planned an early ride to Seton – according to Lennox’sNarrative, it was ‘Bothwell and others, who seemed to bear a good countenance’ who reminded her of this last point. Darnley was sulky at the idea of the change of plan, making the petulant demur of a sick man, from whom the centre of amusement was being suddenly swept away. According to Moretta, the Savoyard ambassador, the queen lightly gave him a ring as a pledge of her goodwill.24 She then bid him goodbye. Down the staircase went the queen, out to the door where the horses of the court were ready to bring her back to her palace. As she stood to mount her horse, she paused for a moment, puzzled. She saw in front of her her own page, Bothwell’s former servant, French Paris. ‘Jesu, Paris,’ said the queen. ‘How begrimed you are!’25
Little did the queen know that her innocent observation touched at the core of the secret happenings within the provost’s lodging. For at some point during the day which the queen had spent in the formal court ritual of a servant’s wedding and an ambassador’s dinner, with the prospect of another court masque ahead of her, enough gunpowder had been placed in the vaults of the cellar of the house to blow it sky-high, and reduce it to the heap of rubble to be seen in the Cecil sketch. It is impossible to be sure with any accuracy exactly when the gunpowder was introduced and by whom. The henchmen employed in carrying out the practical details of the plot were apparently nine in number: John Hepburn, John Hay of Tallo and John Spens, kinsmen of Bothwell, William Powrie, his porter, George Dalgleish, his tailor, French Paris, his former servant, James (Black) Ormiston and Hob Ormiston, two further kinsmen, and Pat Wilson. At no point do their subsequent depositions seem more improbable than on the subject of the gunpowder.
According to the official story given by the arrested criminals later, the gunpowder was brought openly through the streets of Edinburgh by William Powrie, during the evening of Sunday, since it had been for some unaccountable reason stored in Bothwell’s apartments at Holyrood in a barrel. The gunpowder was supposed to have travelled in two trunks. But William Powrie subsequently changed his story from one journey with two horses, to two journeys with one horse.26 There was incidentally no explanation given as to why Bothwell should have already brought gunpowder from Dunbar, well before the Friday when he was first supposed to have broached the idea of an explosion. Powrie took the gunpowder to the gate of the Blackfriars Monastery and helped to carry the gunpowder in ‘polks’ or bags over the wall. According to Paris’s story, the gunpowder was now placed openly in a heap on the floor of the queen’s chamber (with the entire court, in Buchanan’s words ‘a great attendance’, revelling in the room above). Bothwell himself was even supposed to have come down in the course of the evening to see how matters were progressing. Powrie now made his way back up the Canongate accompanied by Wilson; together they conveyed the empty trunks; as Powrie went, he saw the torches of the queen’s party flaring ahead of them, and heard the hooves of the royal horses clattering on the cobbles.
This whole story is so improbable that too much time need not be wasted in demolishing it: in any case it has been constructed out of depositions which are in many respects mutually contradictory. But certain salient points should be noticed: firstly, the amount of gunpowder which could have been conveyed on horseback in two trunks was certainly not adequate to demolish the house at Kirk o’Field. At most, this amount could not have been more than two hundredweight.27 The strength of gunpowder in the sixteenth century was also considerably weaker than today. Yet it was suggested that this amount of gunpowder, loosely placed in a heap on the floor of the queen’s bedroom (the ground floor of the house), was sufficient to produce an explosion which by every contemporary account reduced the whole house to rubble. If the gunpowder was to produce any sort of blast, it would have had to have been tamped in rather than left in a heap; it would also have needed to be placed in the vaults of the house rather than on the ground floor. Left in a loose heap on the bedroom floor, there was no certainty it would have produced any sort of explosion at all: it might merely have flared and burnt itself out. It therefore becomes clear that the detail concerning the heap of gunpowder on the floor of the queen’s bedroom was particularly inserted in Paris’s deposition in order to incriminate her: for quite apart from the impossibility of producing an explosion from there, the heap of gunpowder would only too easily have attracted the attention of Darnley’s servants as they passed to and fro on their way to the kitchen. Not only Darnley’s attendants but the entire court were thronged into the room above, and there was no guarantee that they would all stay peacefully within the confines of the upper room. Like Bothwell, on a previous occasion, they might have searched out the garderobe.
The second point to notice in the depositions is that Holyrood Palace would have been an extraordinary place to choose to store gunpowder: not only was it patrolled by the royal guards, but the conspirators inevitably risked detection once more when they had to convey the gunpowder through the streets of Edinburgh, patrolled in turn by night watchmen, to the distant Kirk o’Field. Thirdly, the movements attributed to Bothwell present him with an impossible schedule to fulfil, since he had already a full list of engagements to carry out in the course of the day, in official attendance on the queen. The figure who was far more involved in the practical details of the crime than the depositions revealed was Bothwell’s then close associate Sir James Balfour. The reason for the obscurity which was cast over his actions is not difficult to find: by June 1567 he had abandoned Bothwell’s side for that of the lords in power, and they therefore had an excellent motive for keeping his name out of trouble and at the same time blackening that of Bothwell still further. This remarkable but unlikeable man was later described by Queen Mary as ‘a traitor who offered himself first to one part and then to the other’28 and his career seemed certainly to justify her condemnation. Balfour had every reason to know the geography of the old provost’s lodgings, since both it and the house next door (the new provost’s lodging) belonged to his brother.* A few days after the explosion Drury reported to Cecil that James Balfour was known to have brought powder to the tune of £60Scots.30 If any explosion was planned, it would certainly have been infinitely more practical to bring the gunpowder, in sufficient quantities, from some comparatively obscure house much nearer the provost’s lodging than from Holyrood Palace. The inconsistencies of the depositions make it clear that others involved were being shielded, and although it cannot be proved, Balfour seems the most likely candidate for the chief accomplice whose name was afterwards shielded. It would have been easy for Balfour to store the large quantity of gunpowder needed in the vaults of his brother’s house, and from there transfer it silently to the vaults of the house next door. With his knowledge of Darnley’s house and of the district, he could have chosen the time and place at his leisure, when he and his assistants were not likely to be detected.
Queen Mary, in happy ignorance that the house in which she had just spent a relaxed evening was in fact heavily mined with gunpowder – if she had known, one can hardly believe that she would have rested in it so contentedly – now proceeded down the Canongate to Holyrood. Here she attended the masque in honour of Bastian’s marriage. She did not stay particularly long there, having made her acte de présence, and in any case the party seems to have been almost over when she arrived: it was time to put the bride formally to bed, according to the custom of the period. Mary now went to her apartments, where she took part in a long and earnest conversation until about midnight with Bothwell and John Stewart of Traquair, the captain of her guard. What was the subject of this conversation? No record was ever kept, and no contemporary suggestion ever made. But of one thing we can be certain – Bothwell did not take this opportunity to impart his plans for the destruction of Darnley to the queen. There could be no conceivable point in doing so at this juncture. The conspirators had no need to drop the slightest hint to the queen, so long as she fell in unconsciously with their plans. What could be their motive in informing her of the conspiracy at this late hour? If Mary showed signs of lingering at Kirk o’Field, it took only a gentle reminder from a courtier to recall Bastian’s masque to her attention, a ceremony which she would be loath to miss. On the Friday the conspirators may have supposed that the masque would keep her away from the lodging altogether on the Sunday evening. Now that the lodging was heavily mined and Mary safely stowed at Holyrood, there could be no hitch in their plans – unless of course they chose to make a last-minute revelation to the queen. Mary, with that soft heart, that horror of bloodshed, that inclination towards mercy, to say nothing of love once felt towards Darnley, extinguished perhaps from the senses but not from the memory, might suddenly experience a last-minute feminine revulsion for what was proposed. She still had it in her power to wreck everything, with a lightning message of warning to Kirk o’Field. The arguments for not implicating her were now, as they had been previously at the conference at Whittingham, overwhelming. Queen Mary retired peacefully to sleep in her apartments in Holyrood. It was a cold evening; there had been a new moon at six o’clock that morning; outside a little snow powdered the streets and fields between Holyrood and the old provost’s lodging.
It was now time for Bothwell, released from the royal presence, to join his underlings at the scene of the crime to supervise the lighting of the fuses. Going to his room, he changed out of his splendid silver and black carnival costume; his black velvet hose ‘trussed with silver’ were exchanged for a sober plain black pair, and a canvas doublet. He wrapped his riding cloak around him: George Dalgleish, with his tailor’s eye, added in his deposition that it was of that ‘sad English cloth, called the new colour’.31 He collected the unwilling Paris, who by his own account showed no enthusiasm for the dangerous project. He now had the problem of reaching Kirk o’Field undetected, or at any rate comparatively so. We may dismiss the stories given in the depositions, which related that Bothwell now marched boldly down the Canongate and through the town wall at the Netherbow port. Here he was supposed to have answered the challenge of ‘Who goes there?’ from the watch with the piece of blatant self-advertisement: ‘My lord Bothwell’s men.’ Bothwell, who had abandoned the dagger and turned to gunpowder, had obviously no desire to have the crime pinned on him. It is more likely that Bothwell went to Kirk o’Field by back streets, perhaps availing himself of the unbuilt section of the town wall, and thus approaching the lodging through the east garden, into which, as we have seen, the house had its own door; of this door, Bothwell had either been given the keys by Paris as the servant deposed, or else had had false keys made by an Edinburgh blacksmith, as one of the anonymous placards after the murder suggested. Bothwell was now ready to supervise the lighting of the fuses. He was not the only nobleman present among the gang of conspirators. The movements of Sir James Balfour are obscure, but from the nearby Douglas house came Archibald Douglas and some of his men; although the Douglases were kinsmen to Darnley (through his mother Margaret, born a Douglas) they were under the leadership of Morton, and were sworn to the destruction of the man who had betrayed them over Riccio. It was said that Archibald Douglas left one of his velvet slippers – ‘his mule’ – at the scene of the crime, but at Douglas’s trial in 1586, his servant John Binning said that after supper, Douglas, wearing secret armour and a steel helmet, took Binning and another servant by the back door of his house to the scene of the crime and Douglas was rightly able to pour scorn on the idea of wearing velvet slippers with armour.32 It is far more probable that the gang of Douglases were heavily armed as they thronged round the house, either in the east garden, or the alleyway beyond the town wall.
Meanwhile within the doomed house, Darnley sulkily made preparations for his early departure the next morning to Holyrood. He ordered the ‘great horses’ for 5 a.m. For an account of how he spent his last hours we are dependent on the narrative of his father Lennox.33 Lennox paints an affecting picture of the lonely young boy (his ‘innocent lamb’) reciting the Fifth Psalm with his servant, ‘My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.’ It is, however, a picture which ill accords with Darnley’s known tastes during the rest of his life. More in keeping with his character was the fact that he called for wine from the kitchen downstairs, presided over by the cook Bonkil. Did he repeat to his servant, as Lennox suggested, some ominous words of the queen’s that evening – ‘It was about this time of year that David Riccio was killed …’? It seems likely that, as with the psalm, this dramatic detail sprang from Lennox’s imagination. They were not at Holyrood, after all, where Riccio was killed, and it was a full month off the Riccio anniversary. There would have been little point in the queen taunting her husband on the subject, and in any case there is general agreement that their last interview was polite and friendly. One of his servants suggested that he should play the lute, but Darnley said that his hand was not given to the lute that night. They compromised on ‘a merry song’. Darnley then retired for the night, with Taylor his valet sleeping in the same room, and Nelson, Symonds and Taylor’s boy sleeping in the adjoining gallery, which overhung the town wall. Two grooms, Glen and MacCaig, were in attendance. There was a light burning in the window of Hamilton House, within the quadrangle, otherwise outward calm and silence over the Kirk o’Field.
At two o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts, the silent air was rent by an explosion of remarkable proportions. The Keeper of the Ordnance afterwards likened it to thunder. Paris said that the air was rent by the ‘crack’, and that every hair of his head stood on end. The Memoirs of Herries described it thus: ‘The blast was fearfull to all about, and many rose from their beds at the noise.’34 At distant Holyrood, the queen in her bed was wakened as by a sound likened at the time to that of a cannon fire and sent messengers to find out what had happened. Her guards heard it, and said: ‘What crack was that?’ People in the nearby Blackfriars Wynd came rushing out into the streets in fear to see what had transpired. We know from the Cecil sketch the sight which met their eyes – the house in which their king was lodged, totally reduced to a pile of rubble. Obviously the first immediate reaction was to imagine that the king had been killed. The first man to rush out into the street – a Captain William Blackadder, a henchman of Bothwell – was promptly arrested, although he swore he had merely been drinking in the nearby house of a friend. But now it was seen that on the top of the town wall, which was still standing, stood Nelson, one of Darnley’s servants, who had survived the blast, calling to the people for help. If Nelson had survived, why, so might the king. The next discoveries put an end to this hope. In the garden outside the town wall lay the dead bodies of the king and his servant Taylor. The king was still in his nightgown, and naked beneath it. Beside him was a furred cloak, a chair, a dagger and some rope. There was no mark or mutilation on either body, ‘no fracture, wound or bruise’ as Buchanan put it35 – and no sign of the work of the blast. The king and his servant had been strangled.
The famous gunpowder plot of Bothwell had proved in the end all in vain – although Bothwell himself may not have known it as he returned to Holyrood once more. Indeed, he himself looked like perishing in the ruins of Kirk o’Field at one point, alongside Darnley. Having lit the fuses, he retired to watch the explosion; but, according to John Hepburn, as the train of gunpowder did not ‘take fire so quickly as the Earl had expected’, Bothwell impatiently began to approach the house once more. ‘Thereupon the train suddenly emitted fire’, and Hepburn, noticing it, was able to drag back his master in the nick of time, before the whole house collapsed upon him.* With the explosion completed, it was time for Bothwell to return to Holyrood once more; if the depositions are to be believed, Bothwell answered the challenges of the watch with the same self-advertisement, as he made his way through the town back to the royal palace. According to Paris, the keys of the house were dropped down a deep well the day after the murder. But Bothwell scarcely needed to perform this symbolical action to expunge any guilty feelings concerning the death of Darnley. From the point of view of a border adventurer and bold warrior, it had been a satisfactory night’s work, in which an eye – Darnley’s – had been given for an eye – Riccio’s. Bothwell’s own personal fortunes also stood to gain from the enterprise. The paradoxical almost ludicrous element in the whole situation – that Bothwell had not actually killed Darnley by his mighty explosion – was probably unknown to him at the time when he sank thankfully into his bed at Holyrood.
For Darnley in fact died at other hands than those of the earl of Bothwell. Something frightened Darnley, as he lay within the mined house, and frightened him so badly that he escaped out of the provost’s lodgings in only a nightgown, and attempted to make his way across the gardens beyond the town wall to safety. He had had no time to dress himself, and although his servant clearly picked up a cloak, Darnley was not wearing it when he died. They had one dagger between them. The chair and rope indicate the improvised method of their escape – a chair let down by a rope out of the gallery window into the alleyway, a drop of only fourteen feet as we have seen, and so through the next gate into the garden. There had been no time to alert the grooms (who died in the explosion) or the other servants. Darnley acted with the speed of panic.
The most likely explanation of Darnley’s precipitate departure would be that he was originally wakened by some noise (possibly the laying of the gunpowder trail within the bowels of the house); he then looked out of his window, and saw the gathering of Bothwell’s men and the Douglas faction in the east garden, on to which the window looked directly. Gunpowder would not have immediately sprung to mind (unless some hint of it had Already been dropped, which now fell into place in his conjectures) but fire would. Burning the enemy’s house over his head was a comparatively common sixteenth-century Scottish practice. The sight of Bothwell and his Hepburns and the hostile Douglases milling outside his house would certainly have suggested some imminent danger of fire, if not assassination to Darnley. Put at its mildest, there were no arguments to linger. But for Darnley, even once outside the house, there was no escape. The fleeing figures in their white nightgowns were discerned by some of the Douglas men who pursued them into the gardens. Here they were quietly and efficiently strangled, even as the house itself exploded in a roar of flames and dust. Some women living in the nearby houses said afterwards that they overheard the wretched last plea of Darnley for mercy to the Douglas men who were after all his relations: ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who pitied all the world …’37 The plea went unanswered. Darnley died, a boy of not yet twenty-one, as pathetically and unheroically as he had lived.
* W. Armstrong-Davison, in The Casket Letters, advances the further theory that Darnley was already suffering from syphilis when Queen Mary nursed him, apparently for measles, in April 1565. He states that it was by no means rare in the sixteenth century for a measles-like eruption to be succeeded by a smallpox-type eruption twenty-one months later, and for both to be symptoms of syphilis.3
* The only documents ever produced which were supposed to date from the period before the murder, to prove that the queen enjoyed an adulterous liaison with Bothwell, were the highly dubious Casket Letters. These will be considered in Chapter 20. In order to explain the many inconsistencies in these letters (whose originals have vanished) some sort of theory of interpolation has often been adopted, i.e. genuine letters from Mary interposed with passionate love letters to Bothwell from another woman. If this theory is correct, then the so-called Long Casket Letter, supposed to be written while at Glasgow by the queen to Bothwell (although containing the unnecessary reminder ‘remember you … of the Earl of Bothwell’) might be the draft of another similarly frank letter from Mary describing her feelings for Darnley, interpolated with a genuine love letter to Bothwell from another woman.
* There is no trace of St Mary, Kirk o’Field, its quadrangle and the little houses round it in modern Edinburgh. The site of Darnley’s last lodging lies somewhere beneath the Adam-designed quadrangle, which is the central establishment of the university of Edinburgh, off South Bridge Street.
* By Major-General Mahon, whose Tragedy of Kirk o’Field, 1923, contains by far the most detailed investigation into the geography and circumstances of the events now to be related. Later writers, whether they agree with his conclusions or not, must acknowledge a debt of gratitude for his painstaking consideration of even the minutest aspect of the crime.
* It is characteristic of the confused nature of the evidence about Darnley’s death that Buchanan later in his History accused Mary of deliberately having her own bed changed in order to save it from the blast: this contradicted not only his own story in the Book of Articles, but also the deposition of Darnley’s servant Nelson (who said that it was Darnley’s bed the queen had changed). Nelson reported that a new black velvet bed was sent away in favour of an old purple-brown one; in fact the black bed was probably lying at the lodging when Darnley arrived at short notice, and was later changed for Darnley’s favourite royally-ornamented purple-brown bed. The inventories record that this was specially brought down from Holyrood; they record no other exchanges made on a later date.17
* Buchanan’s Book of Articles and his Detection, both luridly accusatory, later tried to turn the whole incident round to the queen’s disadvantage, accusing Mary of trying to work up a quarrel between Darnley and Lord Robert Stewart on this Friday, a fracas to which Moray also was supposed to have been a witness.18 Although the Book of Articles made out that Mary’s intention was to get her husband killed accidentally, it is notable that Moray made no mention of this remarkable scene, at which he was alleged to have been present, either at the time, or in any later indictment against Mary.
* Principally by Major-General Mahon, op. cit. R. Gore-Brown, in Lord Bothwell, follows Mahon in believing that Darnley planned the explosion against Mary, while admitting that Bothwell actually ignited it, having discovered Darnley’s treachery in the nick of time, and determined to pay Darnley out with his own coin.
* By the date this deposition was made, later in 1568, it must be remembered that Moray was regent of Scotland: Paris’s interrogators would have a strong motive for not wishing to incriminate their ruler.
* The Continuator of Knox’s History, writing at a later date, had come to believe that Balfour himself owned the house where Darnley died, having ‘lately bought it’.29
* Related by John Hepburn in prison ‘in the very agony of death’ to a fellow-prisoner, Cuthbert Ramsay. Ramsay told this story nine years later, when he was giving evidence in Paris for the nullification of Bothwell’s marriage to Mary.36