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Authors: Antonia Fraser
Mary Queen of Scots (56 page)
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’.
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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 near-by 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.
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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.
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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.’
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At distant Holyrood, the queen in her bed was wakened as by the sound of thirty or forty cannon and sent messengers to find out what had happened. Her guards heard it, and said: ‘What crack was that?’ People in the near-by 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 near-by 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 it
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– 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.
e
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 lodging 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 near-by 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 …’
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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 measleslike 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.
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a
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.
19
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.
b
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.
c
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.
d
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’.
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e
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.
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