THE DAY BEFORE Darnley’s assassination was one of the happiest Mary could remember. It was the feast of Quinquagesima: the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, one of the last opportunities before Easter for the banqueting and dancing that gave her so much pleasure. This particular Sunday had an atmosphere of carnival. At midday, she attended the wedding reception of Bastian Pages, her favourite valet and stage designer, whose satyrs at the masque for Prince James’s baptism had offended the English by wiggling their tails. He had married Christina (or Christily) Hogg, one of Mary’s gentlewomen and another of her favourites, that morning at Holyrood in the Chapel Royal. Mary presented the bridal gown, which was richly embroidered and expensive. The celebrations were expected to last until midnight.
Mary left the reception in mid-afternoon, promising to join in the dancing before the end of the evening. She then changed, ready for an official banquet at four o’clock in honour of the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador, who was returning home. The host was the Bishop of Argyll, John Carswell, who occupied one of the larger houses in the Canongate. When she left around seven o’clock in the evening, she was accompanied by Bothwell, Argyll, and Huntly, but not Moray, who had slipped away to Fife claiming that his wife was ill and likely to suffer a miscarriage. Maitland also found it prudent to absent himself, and Morton was still under a curfew. He was barred under the terms of his pardon from within seven miles of Mary or the court.
Around eight o’clock, Mary and her train of lords and ladies rode to Kirk o’Field for a party to mark the end of Darnley’s convalescence. There was perhaps music and some dancing, at the very least wine and conversation. As the evening drew late, Darnley became increasingly amorous. He wanted Mary to stay the night. He started touching her, but she had already promised Bastian and Christina that she would attend their wedding masque.
Mary always kept her promises to her favourite servants. Shortly before eleven o’clock, she rose to leave and called for the horses. Darnley tried to dissuade her, and to fend him off she drew a ring from her finger as a token, saying that on the following night she would sleep with him. Moray, later reporting this to Guzman de Silva, the Spanish ambassador in London, said that Mary ‘had done an extraordinary and unexampled thing on the night of the murder in giving her husband a ring, petting and fondling him after plotting his murder’. This, said Moray, who was himself in Fife and saw none of the events he so boldly claimed to be describing, had been ‘the worst thing’ about this cold-blooded deed.
In appeasing Darnley, Mary was playing for time. When he had foreseen the prospect of house arrest and refused to lodge at Craigmillar Castle, her objective was to get him back to Edinburgh under her control and away from the influence of Lennox and his retainers. How to deal with his sexual urges when he was at close quarters was something that time and adequate supplies of whisky – for which he had so obviously acquired a taste – might handle. She had, after all, played this game after the Rizzio plot. One step at a time would do for the moment.
As Mary took her leave of Kirk o’Field, she passed the entrance to her own bedroom. It was a tense moment for Sir James Balfour’s men, two of whom were hidden inside. In the quadrangle she saw Nicholas Hubert, a valet nicknamed ‘French Paris’,26 who by the light of the torches she noticed was unusually dirty. While everyone had been at the party upstairs, he had used his duplicate keys to give Balfour’s men the run of the lower floors. He had even helped them fill the sacks of gunpowder that were piled in a heap where Mary’s bed had once stood. She looked at him and exclaimed, ‘Jesu, Paris, how begrimed you are!’ He blushed.
Mary reached Holyrood around half past eleven. She did not stay long at the masque: the dancing had almost finished and it was time for the ladies to ‘put the bride to bed’, a courtly ritual of laughter and fun in which Mary played the leading part. She went to bed herself half an hour or so after midnight. Darnley continued drinking after she had left, then ordered his horses to be ready for early the next morning to take him back to Holyrood. He too retired around midnight, attended by William Taylor, his loyal bedchamber servant, who slept on a pallet in the same room. Two more of his chamber servants, Thomas Nelson and Edward Simmons, lay nearby. They slept in the gallery adjoining Darnley’s bedchamber, which overlooked the town wall and Thieves Row. They, in turn, were attended by Taylor’s page, Andrew McCaig. Lastly, another half a dozen servants and perhaps three or four grooms were sleeping downstairs.
Suddenly, a little after two o’clock in the morning, a bright flash lit the sky, followed by a huge explosion. The noise, a tremendous ‘crack’ resembling a volley of twenty-five or thirty cannon, startled everyone. Windows were flung open and candles hastily lit. Dogs barked and raced around in a frenzy. People rushed to their front doors and a small crowd congregated in the streets nearest to the blast. The night was black; it was only when dawn broke that the scale of the devastation could be seen. Everything within a radius of a hundred yards or more of Kirk o’Field was covered in a thick layer of dust. Large splinters and chunks of timber peppered the ground. The Old Provost’s Lodging where Darnley had been staying had been razed to its foundations. All that remained was a pile of rubble.
In a garden some forty feet away, on the opposite side of the town wall to the Old Provost’s Lodging and on the far side of Thieves Row, Darnley and William Taylor were found dead under a tree in their nightshirts. The extraordinary thing was, there was not a mark on their bodies. Close by were a chair, a rope and Darnley’s furred pelisse or cloak. A dagger was also found in the garden, adding to the mystery since neither man had been stabbed.
Of Darnley’s remaining servants, Nelson and Simmons survived the blast. Nelson was found clinging to the town wall. Simmons also escaped unscathed, unlike poor Andrew McCaig. He was found dead, but whether his body was extricated from the rubble or found in the garden next to those of Darnley and Taylor is disputed. Of the downstairs servants, at least one was killed. The others appear to have survived the blast.
How had Darnley and his servant not only left the house, but got across Thieves Row into a garden on the other side of the town wall? And why did men fleeing for their lives carry furniture? Had the victims made an improvised escape, or were they killed in the house and their bodies dragged outside? If they had indeed escaped, where were they killed and by whom? And why was the explosion needed?
The explosion woke Mary, who sent Bothwell and the captain of the guard to investigate. She was stunned by their report. As she scribbled to her ambassador in Paris later that same day, ‘The matter is horrible and so strange as we believe the like was never heard of in any country.’ The house had been ‘blown in the air … with such a vehemency that of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not a stone above another, but all either carried far away or dung in dross to the very groundstone. It must be done by force of powder, and appears to have been a mine. By whom it has been done, or in what manner, it appears not as yet.’
Mary thought the mine was detonated while Darnley ‘lay sleeping in his bed’. Her assumption, like everyone else’s at first, was that Darnley and Taylor were catapulted over the wall by the force of the explosion and landed in the garden. Only later did it emerge that this was impossible. If they had been hurled upwards into the air, they would have been burnt or scorched from the effects of the explosion and their bodies crushed or bruised from the impact of their fall.
Mary’s mind was racing. She had herself at one time regarded Darnley as the ‘King of Scots’, and was well aware that the murder would be interpreted in Europe as regicide. A more scandalous crime could hardly be imagined. While she could not wholly have mourned his passing, she was devastated that this had happened. The timing could not have been worse. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, she had ordered Robert Melville back to London to conclude the longed-for settlement with Elizabeth. She had even swallowed her pride and written a conciliatory note to Cecil. In sentences replete with irony, she wished him to accept her good opinion of him in spite of their differences. He would, she hoped, become a ‘well willer of all our good causes’ – as she had every right to expect after pardoning the Rizzio plotters. This was the letter that Melville was not at first allowed to deliver, because when he arrived at Cecil’s house, the news of the explosion had preceded him and he was forced to grovel for an audience.
As with the Rizzio plot, Mary believed this one had been aimed against her. She was convinced that whoever was guilty, the crime ‘was dressed as well for us as for the King; for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and was there accompanied with the most part of the Lords that are in this town that same night’. Had it not been for Bastian’s wedding, she would herself be dead.
Mary was a good actress, but not this good. She took a traditional view of the role of Divine Providence and believed God had personally intervened to save her from this appalling crime. Her thoughts were quite clear on the matter. She was an anointed Queen and God was on her side. Casting her mind back to what seemed with hindsight to be her almost miraculous decision to leave Kirk o’Field shortly before eleven o’clock in order to attend the wedding masque, she said: ‘It was not chance, but God that put it in our head.’
The true facts of the crime are more difficult to unravel than in the case of the Rizzio plot, but independent sources do exist. Darnley’s end is described by the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador, Signor di Moretta, and by the Cardinal of Lorraine’s agent, Monsieur de Clernault. They had both attended Prince James’s baptism and were about to return home. Thereafter, fresh evidence was collected by Drury, whose handwritten reports recorded the exact position of the house at Kirk o’Field and of the garden where the bodies were found, and who clearly relished the challenge of attempting to solve this astonishing murder mystery.
There are two versions of Moretta’s description. According to the first, Darnley heard a group of assassins trying to enter the house with duplicate keys on their way to kill him. Since it was a routine security measure to block a keyhole at night by leaving the key in the lock on the inside, some noise would be made until the genuine keys were dislodged. The doors could then be opened using the duplicates. Darnley peered out of the window of his bedchamber, which overlooked the side of the house. He saw armed men, realized his predicament, ran downstairs and tried to escape. But the house was surrounded. He was captured and strangled. The slow fuse to the gunpowder was then lit.
The trouble with this theory is that it wrongly assumes Darnley ended up in the garden of the Old Provost’s Lodging inside the town wall, whereas his body was found in a quite different location beyond Thieves Row outside the wall. It also seems distinctly odd that anyone would try to break into a house that was about to explode. And why blow up the house at all if Darnley were already dead?
Moretta’s first account is not very plausible, and is contradicted by the testimony of Bothwell’s cousin, John Hepburn. When interrogated by Moray, Hepburn confessed his role in the explosion, but always denied touching Darnley or even seeing him. He said that he and his accomplices lit the slow fuse, then locked all the doors to the house before retiring to a safe distance to wait for the bang. Darnley would have heard the noise of their keys jangling – not to break into the house, but to lock the doors from the outside. If the duplicate keys were left in the locks, the exits would be blocked, forcing him to escape through a window rather than waste precious time trying to open the doors.
Moretta himself arrived independently at a similar conclusion. He replaced his first version of events with another. ‘The King’, he said, ‘heard a great disturbance, at least so certain women who live in the neighbourhood declare, and from a window they perceived many armed men round about the house.’ (We will hear more later about these women.) ‘So he, suspecting what might befall him, let himself down from another window looking on the garden, but he had not proceeded far before he was surrounded by certain persons.’ His captors quickly strangled him, using the sleeves of his nightshirt. His body was then dragged to the garden where it was found.
This makes a lot more sense. It can lay the foundations of a hypothesis provided we add the qualification that the first-floor window from which Darnley escaped could not have been the one overlooking the garden of the Old Provost’s Lodging, but must have been the one in the adjoining servants’ gallery overlooking the town wall and Thieves Row.
In that case, Darnley heard the noise, grabbed his dagger, threw his pelisse over his shoulders against the cold night air, and then used the rope to climb down onto the chair below or else Taylor tied the chair to the rope and lowered Darnley who was sitting in the chair. Either way, the drop was at most sixteen feet, which with a rope would be feasible. It was this same method of ropes and chairs that Bothwell and Huntly had recommended to Mary as her way of escape from Holyrood after the Rizzio plot: it was a standard expedient in case of fire. Once Darnley was in Thieves Row, he was intercepted and killed by a second, as yet unidentified group of assassins.
In escaping through the window of the adjoining gallery, Darnley and Taylor must have awakened Nelson and Simmons, but since Nelson ended up stranded on the town wall, it is perfectly possible that he and Simmons were climbing through the window at the moment of the explosion, or perhaps they had looked down and witnessed the deaths of Darnley and Taylor, and so preferred to cling to the wall rather than risk the same fate. We do not know.
Clernault adds a few details. He said that Darnley was found ‘mort et étendu’, meaning his corpse was not crumpled or in a heap, but laid out. He did not think Darnley was killed where his body was discovered. He also said that McCaig’s body was found not in the rubble, but with those of Darnley and Taylor in the garden some sixty or eighty paces from the house, suggesting that he too had made his escape using the rope and chair.
The Frenchman believed Darnley had been suffocated, which is the best explanation of why no marks were visible on the body. But he thought asphyxiation was the result of smoke inhalation, which is unconvincing. Only if the gunpowder in the cellar had failed to ignite properly might this have happened, since even a long fuse was unlikely to create enough smoke to penetrate the upstairs floors.
Drury then takes up the story. Although based at Berwick some sixty miles south of Edinburgh, his spies were quickly on the scene and he managed to send his first report to Cecil the very next day after the murder. Darnley’s body, he said, ‘was found in the field and strangled as it should seem. His lodging after the death was blown up with powder.’ Drury knew within a matter of hours that Darnley had been strangled, and not catapulted into the air by the force of the blast. He claimed that Lennox’s body was found beside his son’s. This was a mistake, since Lennox was actually in Glasgow. Moretta had drawn the same conclusion at first, saying that as well as Darnley and Taylor, ‘the father of the King’ was killed. It was ten days before it was confirmed that Lennox was still alive.
Drury then started his detective work in earnest. By the end of February, he knew that John Hepburn was one of the murderers. Hepburn had watched the house after Mary’s departure for Bastian’s wedding masque, waiting until the candles were snuffed out and everything was quiet before deciding it was time to light the slow fuse. Drury also discovered that Balfour had supplied the gunpowder. His men had concealed the barrels in Edinburgh the week before the explosion. By this time, Bothwell, Balfour, and David Chalmers had been denounced as Darnley’s murderers in placards affixed to the Tolbooth. The rumour mill was in overdrive. Everyone was talking about the gunpowder plot and had their own theories. Chalmers, already linked to Balfour and Bothwell in the tight-knit circle around the Court of Session and the Admiralty Court, was unpopular, but there is no proof he was involved in killing Darnley. The cover-up had started: the finger was pointing only at Bothwell and his known associates.
Drury was sceptical. His particular interest was in Morton’s activities and the extent of his pact with Bothwell. He was determined to follow this up, and his tenacity and persistence would be rewarded. In late April or early May, he wrote triumphantly to Cecil: ‘Morton is noted to have assured friendship to Bothwell, which, to be the thankfuller now for his favour showed him in his absence and trouble, he intendeth to continue.’ Despite the furore caused by the explosion, Morton was so grateful to Bothwell for his role in obtaining his pardon that he was standing by him. This gave substance to Drury’s claim that Bothwell had all along been working in concert with the powerful Douglas clan.
Sir James Melville corroborated this assessment. He wrote in his memoirs that after the baptism, ‘the Earl Bothwell ruled all in court, and brought home some of the banished Lords, and “packed” up a quiet friendship with the Earl Morton’. To ‘pack’ in this sense, which is also used by Shakespeare, means to bring someone into a conspiracy, or else to plot, scheme, or intrigue using secret or underhand methods. Drury was convinced that Morton and Bothwell stood shoulder to shoulder before, during, and after the murder, only falling out later. He got increasingly excited, believing he had almost cracked the case. ‘It was Captain Cullen’s persuasion’,27 he told Cecil, ‘for more surety to have the King strangled and not only to trust to the train of powder.’
This largely adds up. If a decision to make doubly sure of the victim was taken at the very last moment, it could explain why the Old Provost’s Lodging was still blown up, even though Darnley had been strangled. A last-minute change of plan would have caused confusion, especially when Darnley complicated everything by escaping out of a window. At the very least, this is a better explanation than the alternative: that the house was blown up to throw the investigators off the scent.
James Cullen, an explosives expert, was the man in question. He had served as a mercenary in France, Denmark, and possibly Poland before returning to the garrison at Edinburgh Castle. He was Balfour’s henchman, denounced to the Privy Council as his accessory and interrogated. Although he was said to have confessed, mysteriously no charges were ever brought. He was released and allowed to seek refuge in the Orkney Islands. But he was plainly meant to stay there, since when he returned to the Lowlands after an absence of four years, he was summarily arrested by Morton and hanged.
‘Sir Andrew Ker with others’, continued Drury, were ‘on horseback near unto the place for aid to the cruel enterprise if need had been.’ This was Drury’s pièce de résistance. He had found out that Ker of Fawdonside, the man who had levelled a pistol at Mary during the Rizzio plot, was waiting in the wings at Kirk o’Field with a force. Hitherto a man who hedged his bets between the Lennoxes and the Douglases, Ker had switched his allegiance to Morton when Darnley betrayed the Rizzio conspirators. Apart from Morton, he was the man who had most openly avowed his intention to be revenged on Darnley.
That Ker and his men were lurking in the alley has always been a well-known fact. What no one knew was precisely why he was there and for whom he was working. This has led to various conjectures of which the least probable is that there may have been several plots to murder Darnley. It has even been claimed that the explosion at Kirk o’Field was organized by Darnley to kill Mary and that Ker and his men had been lined up by the Lennoxes to whisk Darnley back to Glasgow as soon as the deed was done.28 Such speculation can finally be set aside. The handwritten originals of Drury’s reports prove that Ker was working for Bothwell, for whom he was running errands. He was seen to be a ‘great carrier of intelligences and letters’ for him. And later, at the final showdown between Mary and her rebel Lords, Ker and his men would line up on Bothwell’s side.
Drury concluded, ‘The King was long of dying and to his strengths made debate for his life.’ In simple terms, he had tried to reason with his captors. This is likely to be true, but it is also possible that the information was planted by the Lennoxes. Their propaganda machine was already in gear, its aim to turn Darnley into a martyr. To this end, he was said to have been at prayer before his death, reciting the 55th Psalm:
Hear my prayer, O Lord, and hide not thyself from my petition. My heart is disquieted within me, and the fear of death is fallen upon me. Fear and trembling are come upon me, and a horrible death has overwhelmed me. It is not an open enemy that has done me this dishonour, for then I could have borne it.
This was disinformation. The idea that Darnley foresaw his fate is incredible, entirely of a piece with a remark attributed to Mary by the Lennoxes and allegedly spoken as she left Kirk o’Field for the last time. ‘It was about this time last year’, she was supposed to have said, ‘that David Rizzio was slain.’ (It was in fact eleven months.)
One of Drury’s finest contributions was to send a coloured drawing of the assassination to Cecil. It is magnificently detailed, almost a visual narrative of events. It marks the exact positions of the church of Kirk o’Field, the quadrangle, the Old Provost’s Lodging, the postern gate, the town wall, Thieves Row, and the garden where the corpses were laid out. It also shows Ker of Fawdonside and his men. In what seems to be a cul-de-sac on the far side of the garden where the bodies were found, armed horsemen can be seen. They are not in Thieves Row itself. A closer look shows that the ‘cul-de-sac’ lacks an entrance as well as an exit. The ‘cul-de-sac’ is in fact a fiction: there was in reality no passage at the place where these mounted men appear. This is a clue of a type that is well understood by art historians, who are used to dealing with narrative history paintings. The clue is there to indicate the secret presence of Ker’s men in the vicinity, not to indicate their exact location, which Drury did not know.
We can now begin to refine our hypothesis. Darnley went to bed, but shortly afterwards heard noises outside his lodging and the rattling of keys. He looked out of a side window, where he caught sight of a group of assassins. Realizing his life could be in danger, he decided to escape. He grabbed his pelisse and a dagger, then he and Taylor used the rope and chair to descend from the window of the adjacent gallery. This would enable them to reach Thieves Row on the opposite side of the town wall. But when they turned to flee, they were cut off by Ker’s men who emerged from the shadows and strangled them. Their bodies and the things they had been carrying were then left in the nearest garden.
Further evidence from Moretta fleshes out the hypothesis. He said that when Darnley had escaped through the window only to be captured in the darkness below, the women whose cottages were within earshot heard him cry out, ‘Oh, my kinsmen (Eh! fratelli miei), have mercy on me, for the love of Him who had mercy on all the world!’ Drury’s drawing shows exactly how this might indeed have been possible. Built into the wall of the garden on the opposite side of Thieves Row to Darnley’s lodging are several cottages.
It is easy to explain Darnley’s last words. The Douglases, hiding with Ker of Fawdonside, were Darnley’s kinsmen, because his mother, the Countess of Lennox, was born Lady Margaret Douglas. Moretta’s evidence makes it almost certain that Darnley was killed by the Douglases, whom at first he assumed to be his allies and willing to protect him, unaware that they had changed sides. He attempted to reason with them, which fits with Drury’s information. But their exile and forfeiture after the Rizzio plot had turned them into mortal enemies. They were in the wings at Kirk o’Field on Morton’s instructions to make sure that Darnley did not escape alive.
Moretta twice referred to ‘certain women’ in the neighbouring cottages. Up until now, no one has managed to identify them. Almost miraculously, their names can be discovered. Their original sworn depositions still survive, tucked away in the archives. Barbara Martin testified that before the blast, she was looking out of her window and saw thirteen men go past outside. After the ‘crack’, eleven came back the other way, two of whom had ‘clear things’ on them as they went by. She shouted at them, calling them traitors and saying they were up to no good. If only she had gone on to explain what these ‘clear things’ were, we might have been able to say for certain that these men were the murderers.
Meg Crokat was in bed with her two children when she heard the bang. She ran to the door stark naked, and looking out saw eleven men running past. She harboured suspicions as to their identity, because one of them wore silk. They were clearly important people, not ordinary Edinburgh citizens. She called out to ask what the ‘crack’ was, but they ignored her. Seven headed off in one direction, and the rest in another. Crokat was present when her neighbour, Martin, shouted to the eleven returning men that they were traitors.
There is a discrepancy between the locations of the cottages as shown in the drawing and as given in the women’s depositions. The drawing situates the cottages in Thieves Row, whereas the depositions say they were in the Friar Wynd, which is closer to the Cowgate and the town. In one respect, it does not matter. Wherever precisely they lived, everyone agreed that these women were the nearest neighbours to Kirk o’Field, and they knew something. During the cover-up, it slipped out that they had been ‘in doubt whether it were better for them to tell or hold their peace. Although they daintily tempered their speech, yet when they had blabbed out something more than the judges looked for, they were dismissed as fools.’
The women had identified someone close to the centre of power. But the key fact about their evidence is not that it raises new questions, but that it was suppressed. Although carefully filed away by the clerk to the Privy Council, it was never used. It was even brought to England in 1568 and shown to Cecil, but was quietly buried. By then, the cover-up story was more important than the truth to everyone involved in this drama, except to Mary herself.
The women’s depositions are dated ‘11 February 1567’, the very next day after the blast, which is hardly slow progress. Mary had called for a full investigation, demanding speedy and draconian retribution for the murderers. Unfortunately for her reputation, the criminal justice system in Scotland relied on the oversight of the Privy Council. It was unlikely that the Privy Council would act efficiently or impartially when up to half of its members were either the instigators of the very crime they were supposed to be investigating, or else had privately condoned it. In the case of the women from the cottages, it was these same Lords who suppressed the crucial evidence.
Mary was terrified. She feared she had been the target and would be the next to be assassinated. Since security at Holyrood was always fairly lax, she decided to move back into Edinburgh Castle, just as she had done after Rizzio’s murder. This move, which involved fetching a hundred mules and carts to transport her clothes, bed linen and furniture, to say nothing of her papers and personal effects, would have taken the best part of a day.
Only two days after the explosion, Mary ordered a proclamation to be read at the Market Cross in Edinburgh, offering a reward of £2000 to anyone prepared to inform against the murderers. On top of this, a free pardon was promised to the first guilty person willing to confess and turn Queen’s evidence. This followed a lengthy debate in the Privy Council at which Mary herself insisted on the offer of a pardon in the hope of solving the murder mystery. But the offer, generous as it was, elicited no further information. If anything, it backfired by raising public expectations and exciting a heightened degree of gossip and feverish speculation about the explosion and its perpetrators.
Much of this conjecture turned towards Bothwell. In a very short time, he had risen high in Mary’s favour. He was her most loyal and energetic champion; but for all that, he was arrogant and unpopular. It was soon whispered that he was one of Darnley’s assassins, the gossip sparked by the actions of his servants, who had been spotted rolling barrels about. Such rumours were inflamed by the fact that, when he arrived at Kirk o’Field in his capacity as Sheriff of Edinburgh, he had ordered everyone to return home and refused to allow onlookers to pick through the rubble in search of clues. He had also refused to allow anyone to make a detailed examination of Darnley’s corpse.
Bothwell’s vilification began on the night of 16 February. This was done anonymously, in a series of placards and notices that were stuck to the doors and walls of churches and other public buildings. To conjure an atmosphere of fear and expectation, strange voices were heard in the night, ‘crying penitently and lamentably’ for vengeance. A ghostly figure prowled Edinburgh’s streets calling out that Bothwell had murdered the King. The Lennox faction was behind this. It was the beginning of yet another blood feud, but the Lennoxes had tapped into a popular mood. To make their point as explicitly as possible, likenesses of Bothwell were posted on gateways and scattered through the backstreets and alleyways at night with the legend ‘Here is the murderer of the King.’ These were followed by more incendiary slogans, of which the worst was ‘Farewell gentle Henry, but a vengeance on Mary.’
Mary urged her ambassador in Paris to secure the goodwill of Catherine de Medici at all costs. This was easier said than done. The news of the murder reached Paris as early as 19 February, and for a fortnight or so Mary was said to be innocent. On the 21st, a Venetian source described the explosion as a Protestant plot to kill Mary as well as Darnley. Its purpose was to trigger a long royal minority, so that the rebel Lords could rule in the name of Prince James, whom they would bring up as a Calvinist.
But opinion quickly swung round. The explosion was such an outrage, it seemed hard to credit that Mary in her position of power did not have foreknowledge of it. The public denunciations of Bothwell made matters worse, especially in the eyes of diplomats who had seen him strutting around at the baptism. Moretta, who had now himself reached Paris by way of London, was one of those who began to succumb to the force of the rumours – not yet condemning Mary, but failing to exonerate her. Du Croc, who had left Scotland three weeks before the murder and who was now ordered back, was also suspicious. Hindsight had given him insights he had never had when he was in Scotland, and he started to put a more menacing gloss on what he so vividly remembered of Mary’s rows with Darnley.
Soon Mary herself was in the court of public opinion. The explosion, she was warned by her ambassador in Paris, had shocked and astonished all of Europe. The story was spreading that she was ‘the motive principal of the whole of all, and all done by your command’. Her role was keenly debated in France, and ‘for the most part interpreted sinisterly’. Catherine de Medici was no friend to Mary, and even her own Guise family were disowning her. It was essential, the ambassador urged, to show now ‘the great virtue, magnanimity, and constancy that God has granted you … [and] that you do such justice as to the whole world may declare your innocence … without fear of God or man’. Otherwise, it would have been better if Mary herself had been murdered. These were harsh words to speak to a Queen, but worse was to come. Catherine and her son, Charles IX, delivered an ultimatum. If Mary failed to avenge the murder, they would consider her as utterly disgraced. All the old enmity between Catherine and Mary had returned.
If this were not enough, Mary was betrayed by her own family, who failed to give her the benefit of the doubt. Already she had gently scolded the Duke of Nemours, who had attended her wedding to the Dauphin and recently married her widowed aunt Anne d’Este, that her relatives no longer wrote to her as often as they should. She must have felt stabbed in the back when her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, wrote a conciliatory letter to Moray. He offered to set aside their differences, suggesting they unite to restore order and decency in Scotland. The Cardinal sent his agent, Clernault, back to Edinburgh to deliver the letter personally. According to Drury, Clernault brought a secret message to Moray. In all of this, Mary was ignored by her uncle, just as she had been bypassed so many times before.
Even the Catholics deserted Mary in her hour of need. Encouraged by Darnley’s zeal at the time of his investiture with the Order of St Michael, the Pope had named the Bishop of Mondovi as the papal nuncio in Scotland. On her Privy Council’s advice, Mary had refused to receive him. The bishop travelled no further than Paris, where he was in limbo. On hearing of the murder, he sprang into action, convinced that Mary’s failure to restore the mass and to dismiss her Protestant advisers were the causes of her downfall. He had predicted it all, he said. If only Mary had joined the Catholic League agreed between France and Spain at Bayonne, ‘she would have found herself now completely mistress of her realm, with authority enabling her to restore entirely the Holy Catholic Faith. But she never had the will to listen to it.’ Everything that had happened, he steadfastly believed, was Mary’s own fault for throwing in her lot with the heretics.
Elizabeth delivered the coup de grâce. Mary’s world collapsed when, a month after Darnley’s death, she received a letter brought by Henry Killigrew, Cecil’s brother-in-law. He was received by Mary in her mourning clothes in a dark room in Edinburgh Castle. ‘I could not see her face,’ he wrote afterwards to Cecil, ‘but by her words she seemed very doleful and did accept my sovereign’s letters and message in very thankful manner as I trust will appear by her answer which I hope to receive within these two days.’
Either Killigrew was indulging in diplomatic newspeak, or the room was so dark, he could not gauge Mary’s true reaction. She was fighting back the tears. Elizabeth’s letter, for once written by herself and not on her behalf by Cecil, did not mince its words:
My ears have been so astounded, my mind so disturbed and my heart so appalled at hearing the horrible report of the abominable murder of your late husband and my slaughtered cousin, that I can scarcely as yet summon the spirit to write about it. And as much as my nature forces me to grieve for his death, so near to me in blood as he was, so it is that I must tell you boldly what I think about it, as I cannot hide the fact that I grieve more for you than for him. Oh madam! I should neither perform the office of a faithful cousin nor an affectionate friend if I studied more to please your ears than to preserve your honour. Therefore I will not conceal from you that people for the most part are saying that you will look through your fingers at this deed instead of avenging it, and that you don’t care to take action against those who have done you this pleasure … exhort you, I counsel you, and I beg you to take this thing so far to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you if he was involved …
A more stinging or vehement rebuke of one reigning Queen by another could scarcely have been imagined. Mary reeled from this latest blow, offended not least by the remark that she would ‘look through her fingers’, coincidentally the very phrase that Maitland had applied to Moray during the conversations at Craigmillar, when she had answered: ‘I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honour or conscience.’ Was the use of this phrase deliberate?
Worse still, Elizabeth advised Mary to arraign Bothwell (’him whom you have nearest to you’) if the Lennoxes were to accuse him of the murder. And then, most crushingly of all, she dictated her revised terms for the political settlement that Mary so eagerly desired. There was to be no more talk of reconciliation, of a ‘new treaty of perpetual amity’ to replace the offending clauses of the treaty of Edinburgh, or of Mary’s claim to the English succession. All that was now forgotten. Instead, Elizabeth insisted Mary ratify the original version of the treaty. This matter, said Elizabeth caustically, ‘has gone undone for six or seven years’. It was time to end it once and for all.
If Killigrew expected to have an answer within two days, he was sadly disappointed. Mary found Elizabeth’s letter so insulting, she refused to reply at all. Killigrew left Edinburgh a week later empty handed.
What must particularly have rankled was Elizabeth’s references to Bothwell. How had she learnt that he ‘whom you have nearest to you’ had already been accused of the crime? It was easy enough. Cecil had obtained full transcripts of the placards posted on the walls of Edinburgh. He had even got hold of the ‘sayings’ of the prowler who called nightly for vengeance on the murderers. He was corresponding with Lennox, who was furiously rebuilding his bridges. When Killigrew returned to London, he may not have brought a letter from Mary to Elizabeth, but he brought one from Lennox to Cecil offering to collaborate with him in avenging the murder of his son. Suddenly, history was to be rewritten. On the last occasion that Darnley had spoken to an English diplomat, he had repudiated his allegiance to the English Queen. Now, as Lennox reassured Cecil, his son had all along been her most loyal subject and his own particular ‘acquaintance’ and good friend.
Morton also looked to England. This most villainous of the Scottish Lords, who had written to Cecil in the most obsequious terms as he had crossed the border on his way to rendezvous with his allies at Whittingham Castle, now sought Cecil’s protection against the reprisals he knew would be sought by Lennox. He called himself ‘your assured friend’ and wrote to reiterate his offer to do ‘anything in my power to gratify you’.
At the beginning of 1567, Mary had been at the height of her powers and about to reach a final political accord with Elizabeth on mutually agreed terms. Two months later, she seemed more vulnerable than ever before. This had not been the aim of the Lords, but was a by-product of their short-sighted lust for revenge. What Mary urgently needed to do was to track down the murderers and bring them to justice.
Cecil, meanwhile, was unrelenting, preparing the case against her and seeking to move in for the kill. ‘I fear’, wrote Mary’s ambassador in Paris, ‘this to be only the beginning and first act of the tragedy, and all to run from evil to worse, which I pray God of his infinite goodness to avoid.’
It was an accurate prognosis, and yet not a single piece of uncontaminated evidence has ever been found to show that Mary had foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder.29 Everything depends on the assumption that she was already engaged in an adulterous affair with Bothwell. What wrecked her reputation was that, instead of throwing Bothwell to the wolves, she decided to defy the world and throw in her lot with him.