Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley

by Alison Weir

  In the circumstances, I have preferred to rely on strictly contemporary sources such as diplomatic reports and letters, circumstantial evidence, and a source known as the Diurnal of Occurrents, a diary of events written by an anonymous observer living in Edinburgh, which is generally accurate, if biased against Mary. Where I have used prejudiced contemporary sources, I have done so with caution.

  PROLOGUE: KIRK O’FIELD, EDINBURGH, 10 FEBRUARY 1567

  FEW SOULS WERE ABROAD IN Edinburgh after midnight on 9 February 1567. Not only was it bitterly cold with a light frosting of snow, but in an age of candles and rushlights, people tended to go to bed earlier than they do now. Anyone found on the streets at the dead of night was likely to be challenged by the watch.

  To the south of the city lay a quadrangle of collegiate buildings attached to the adjacent ruined Kirk of St. Mary in the Fields. Here, all appeared to be quiet. An hour or so before midnight, Queen Mary and her retinue had departed from the quadrangle, bound for Holyrood Palace, leaving behind, in his temporary residence, the Old Provost’s Lodging, Mary’s convalescent consort, King Henry, better known to history as Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Darnley had retired for the night as soon as Mary left; he wanted to be up early the next morning. The only sign of life at Kirk o’Field, we are told, was a single light burning in the window of the imposing Duke’s House, which belonged to the powerful Hamilton family.

  We now know, of course, that all was not quiet at Kirk o’Field on that night, and that the area was in fact the scene of a great deal of conspiratorial activity throughout the evening of the 9th and the small hours of the 10th. Who these conspirators were has been a matter of furious historical debate for four centuries, but what is certain is that, at two o’clock on the morning of 10 February, the Old Provost’s Lodging was blasted into rubble by a mighty explosion that reverberated across the city of Edinburgh, awakened most of its inhabitants, and sparked one of the greatest murder mysteries in history. For the chief victim was no less a personage than the King himself.

  The reverberations from that explosion were keenly felt by those implicated—rightly or wrongly—in the plot during the months and years that followed, and they have been echoing down the centuries ever since. For over four hundred years, controversy has raged over who murdered Darnley and how he died. Many thought then, and still think now, that Queen Mary was an accessory before the fact to the murder of her husband, for she certainly had sufficient motives for getting rid of him. Yet so did several other people, including most of the Scottish nobility. And Darnley himself, incredible as it may seem, was not above suspicion.

  The question of Mary’s guilt is crucial, and continues to provoke heated debate. It is time, therefore, for a fresh, objective reappraisal of the mystery of Kirk o’Field. Despite the conflicting nature of the contemporary evidence and the obscuration of centuries of theory, romantic myths, suppositions, speculation, prejudice and uninformed opinion, I believe that it is indeed possible to unravel what actually happened on that long-ago night in Edinburgh, and to point the finger at who was responsible.

  ALISON WEIR

  Scottish Borders

  28 July 2002

  1

  THE THREE CROWNS

  TO EVERYONE’S DISMAY,1 THE BABY born to James V of Scotland and his second wife, Marie de Guise, on 8 December 15422at Linlithgow Palace was a girl. After the deaths of two infant sons in 1541, her father had hoped for another boy to succeed him, because Scotland needed a man’s strong hand to rule it. For James V was already mortally ill, and following a crushing defeat by the English at the Battle of Solway Moss on 24 November, he had taken to his bed at Falkland Palace. When news was brought to him of the birth of his daughter, he turned his face to the wall and, recalling that the crown had descended to the Stewart dynasty through Marjorie, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, muttered, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.”3Soon afterwards he died, “wherefore there was great mourning in Scotland.”4

  At only six days old, the infant Mary became Queen of Scots. Scotland was used to royal minorities, for every one of its monarchs since 1406 had succeeded as a child. As a result, the nobility had grown in strength and autonomy, having become used to long periods without royal interference during which they enjoyed the unfettered exercise of power. These minorities had also bred rivalries and factions, as different families struggled for power.

  In March 1543, Parliament appointed Mary’s cousin and next heir, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, as Second Person and Governor of the Realm until the Queen attained her majority at the age of twelve. Arran, then twenty-seven, was a Protestant, and head of the powerful Hamilton clan, whose lands straddled Clydesdale and central Scotland. An English envoy described the Hamiltons as a good looking race, but vicious, faithless and inept.5Arran’s claim to the succession was not undisputed, because there was uncertainty as to whether his parents had been lawfully married; hence his overriding purpose in life was to establish the legality of his claim. Self-interest and the advancement of his House dictated his political policies, but his indolence, instability and lack of decisiveness lost him the support of many nobles.

  The King of England at that time was Henry VIII, and he was resolved to marry his five-year-old son and heir, Prince Edward, to the little Queen of Scots, and thereby unite England and Scotland under Tudor rule. Arran, eager to secure the support of the English King for his claims, was willing to co-operate, and on 1 July 1543 a treaty was concluded at Greenwich, which provided for the marriage of Mary and Edward. Mary was to go to England when she was ten, and be married the following year.

  But the Catholic party in Scotland, led by Marie de Guise and Cardinal David Beaton, were opposed to the treaty. They removed Mary from Arran’s care, took her to Stirling Castle, and had her crowned there, in the Chapel Royal, on 9 September. In December, a Catholic-dominated Parliament repudiated Mary’s betrothal and renewed the ancient alliance between Scotland and France, England’s enemy.

  Henry VIII was incensed, and in 1544 retaliated by sending an army to Scotland. The savage campaign that followed became known as the “rough wooing”: in the course of it, scores of towns, villages and abbeys in the south-east were mercilessly sacked and burned, leaving vast swathes of devastation. Even the city of Edinburgh did not escape Henry’s fury: he had ordered his commanders to sack, “burn and subvert it, and put every man, woman and child to the sword.”6Far from bringing the Scots to heel, the barbarity of the English only strengthened them in their resolve.

  In 1543, there had returned to Scotland a man who was to play a prominent role in the drama of Mary, Queen of Scots. Matthew Stuart, 4th Earl of Lennox, whose power base was centred upon Glasgow, had been born in 1516 at Dumbarton, and had succeeded to his earldom at the age of ten, after the murder of his father by Arran’s bastard half-brother. This was cause enough for bad blood between Lennox and Arran, but they were also bitter rivals for the succession. Like Arran, Lennox was descended from Mary, daughter of James II, but only in the female line; unlike Arran, he had been born in undisputed wedlock. With such contentious issues dividing them, there could be no friendship between the Lennox Stuarts and the Hamiltons.

  In 1531, Lennox had gone to France, where he joined the royal guard, became a naturalised subject of the French King and changed the spelling of his surname from Stewart to Stuart. Twelve years later, to Arran’s consternation, he returned to Scotland and began paying court to Marie de Guise. Like most women, she found him handsome, charming and gallant: he was “a strong man of personage, well-proportioned with lusty and manly visage, and carried himself erect and stately, wherefore he was very pleasant in the sight of gentlewomen.”7A well-educated man, he spoke fluent French and was skilled at playing the lute. The Queen Dowager and Cardinal Beaton believed Lennox to be an ardent Francophile who would support them against the ambitions of Arran. But Lennox was unreliable, treacherous and driven by self-interest, and when Marie refused to marry him, he defected to the English in
search of better prospects. In return for his support against the Scots, Henry VIII bestowed on him the hand of his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas.

  The wedding took place in July 1544 at St. James’s Palace in London. Born in 1515, Margaret was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor (widow of James IV and grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots) by her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus; Margaret was therefore near in blood to the English throne, and a marriage between her and Lennox could only reinforce the dynastic claims of both parties. Yet although their union was politically advantageous, it was also a love match on both sides: he was said to be “far in love,”8and in his letters, he addressed his wife as “mine own sweet Madge” or “my Meg,” told her she was his “chiefest comfort,” and signed himself “Your own Matthieu and most loving husband.” Margaret was a devout Catholic, so Lennox, who had been reared in the old faith but recently converted to Protestantism, now tempered his spiritual views to please his wife and King Henry; religion was ever a matter of expediency with him.

  Margaret Douglas was a formidable woman. Beautiful, intelligent, domineering and relentlessly ambitious, she had an alarming talent for dangerous intrigue. She had spent much of her youth at the English court and become a great favourite of her uncle the King, but incurred his anger when she twice, in 1536 and 1541, became involved with unsuitable men; on each occasion Henry sent her for a spell in the Tower, a place with which she was to be become all too familiar during the course of her turbulent life. There can be no doubt that Margaret Douglas became the driving force in the Lennoxes’ marriage.

  In 1545, Lennox led an English army into Scotland in the hope of taking Dumbarton Castle for Henry VIII. It was during this campaign that he ordered the slaughter of eleven child hostages whose Scottish fathers had been forced into his ranks and then defected;9this earned him undying notoriety and a perpetually haunted conscience. His offensive ended in failure, and on 1 October the Scottish Parliament attainted him for treason and confiscated all his estates and titles, some of which were given to Arran. Lennox was now the most hated man in Scotland. For the next nineteen years, he remained an exile in England, living on the bounty of Henry VIII. The Lennoxes’ chief seat was Temple Newsham in Yorkshire, and they owned another house nearby at Settrington. When in London, they resided at the former royal manor of Hackney. Lennox never abandoned hope of regaining his lost lands and asserting his dynastic claims, his ambitions having been sharpened by his grand marriage and the birth of eight children, who inherited the royal blood of both Scotland and England.

  During the 1540s, the impact of the Protestant Reformation began to be felt in Scotland. For decades now, the Catholic Church in Scotland had been morally lax and corrupt, and there had been calls for its reform. Now, religious affiliations became identified with political issues, and two noble factions emerged: the Catholics, who favoured the “auld alliance” with France, and a growing number of Protestants, who wanted closer relations with England, whose King, although a Catholic, had severed links with the Church of Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England.

  Trouble began when a Protestant heretic, George Wishart, was burned on the orders of Cardinal Beaton in 1546. In reprisal, Wishart’s followers brutally murdered Cardinal Beaton, then held out for a year in St. Andrews Castle before the arrival of a French fleet forced them to surrender. Among those taken prisoner was the reformist preacher John Knox, who would one day become one of the prime movers in the Protestant Reformation. He was sentenced to two years as a galley slave.

  In 1547, when Henry VIII died and was succeeded by the nine-year-old Edward VI, England became a Protestant state. The Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was determined to carry on the war against Scotland, and ordered another invasion. On 10 September 1547, the Scots under Arran suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, which enabled the English to occupy south-eastern Scotland. On the day after the battle, the Scots hastily moved their little Queen to Inchmahome Priory for safety, and appealed to the French for aid.

  By January 1548, Arran, who had hoped to marry his own son to Mary, was negotiating with King Henry II of France for her marriage to Henry’s eldest son, the Dauphin Francis. Mary’s maternal uncles, Francis, Duke of Guise and Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, were rising men at the French court, and they, foreseeing great advantages to themselves through the marriage of their niece to the heir to the French throne, added their persuasions to Arran’s. Henry was more than amenable, as he realised that the match was of far greater benefit to France than Scotland, for it would ultimately bring Scotland under French control, since a wife, even a crowned queen, was always subject to her husband. Given the situation they were in, the Scots had little choice in the matter: whether they married Mary to a French or an English prince, they would be under threat of interference by a foreign power. In the circumstances, it seemed safer to ally with an old friend than a hostile enemy, and in February 1548, the Scottish Parliament gave its consent to the marriage. In return, the French promised to send troops to help expel the English garrisons from Scotland. At the end of the month, Mary was moved to the greater safety of Dumbarton Castle.

  In June, having cut a swathe through the occupying forces, a French army recaptured the strategic town of Haddington in East Lothian, and there, on 7 July, a treaty was signed formally providing for the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin, with provisions for safeguarding Scotland’s future political autonomy.

  Arran was now a spent force, although he was to remain Regent for six more years. Real power in Scotland now lay in the hands of the Queen Dowager, who was determined to protect her daughter’s interests and preserve her Catholic kingdom intact. In order to ensure Arran’s support, she persuaded the French King to grant him the dukedom of Chatelherault, and promoted his bastard half-brother, John Hamilton, Abbot of Paisley to the office of Archbishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland.

  The new Archbishop, who was one day to be accused of involvement in Darnley’s murder, was the most able and opportunist politician of all the Hamiltons, and a liberal conservative in religion. Wily and self-seeking, like all his family, “he spent the least part of his time in spiritual contemplations”10 and led “a life somewhat dissolute” 11with a “harlot” called Grizzel Sempill, who bore him at least three children, and was the widow of the Provost of Edinburgh. For his sins, Hamilton contracted syphilis, and in 1566 underwent an expensive course of mercury treatment. Marie de Guise ignored the scandals of the Archbishop’s private life; she hoped he would be the saviour of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

  On 7 August 1548, the five-year-old Mary said goodbye to her mother and her kingdom, and sailed to France. Amongst her attendants were four well-born girls of similar age to her own, all called Mary, who were to be her special companions, and to whom she became especially close: vivacious Mary Livingston, beautiful Mary Beaton, devout Mary Seton and enchanting Mary Fleming.

  When Henry II first saw Mary, he declared she was “the most perfect child that I have ever seen.”12From the first, he treated her as his own daughter, and placed her in the household of his children by his Florentine Queen, Catherine de’ Medici. Mary was to grow up in luxurious royal châteaux such as Blois, Chambord and Fontainebleau, surrounded by the art and culture of the Renaissance and the sophisticated, glittering life of the court, where she was petted and pampered by all who came into contact with her, and particularly by her magnificent Guise uncles, who hoped for great things from her in the future, and who guided her in all matters.

  Yet the French court was also a moral cesspit, and Mary was exposed from an early age to its promiscuity and corruption. Her own governess bore the King a bastard child. “Here, it is not the men who solicit the women, but the women the men,” observed the Queen of Navarre disapprovingly. 13The court was ruled by the King’s mistress, the elegant and cultivated Diane de Poitiers, who was nineteen years his senior yet still beautiful. An affro
nted Queen Catherine was relegated to the sidelines while Diane was given responsibility for arranging the education of the royal children. From Diane, Mary learned to regard Catherine with contempt, and consequently the Queen “had a great misliking” of her daughter-in-law. 14

  The moral laxity of the court is reflected in two paintings that apparently show a teenaged Mary, the future Queen of France, in the nude. Two figures in the erotic allegorical work The Bath of Diana, attributed to Francis Clouet (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen) are thought to be portraits of Mary, and she is almost certainly the bare-breasted sitter wearing a ruff and headdress in the portrait of A Lady at her Toilet by an artist of the School of Fontainebleau (now in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts).15It is not known whether Mary herself posed naked for these pictures, or whether her portrait was superimposed on the body of a nude model, but the portrayal of her in such poses belies the later image she fostered of a prim and virtuous princess.

  Even the royal children were tainted by the corruption of the court. Both their grandfathers had died of syphilis, and its effects were now tragically apparent in them. Of the ten children born to Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici, Francis was sickly and feeble, Charles suffered from hallucinations, Henry became a homosexual cross-dresser, and Marguerite a nymphomaniac who had an incestuous affair with her brother Hercule.

  Mary’s closest companion in childhood and youth was her future husband, the ugly little Dauphin Francis, for whom she early on conceived a tender affection. Born in January 1544, he was weak and sickly from birth. His growth was stunted, and he was afflicted not only by a permanently running nose but also, later on, by such terrible eczema that it was reported he had leprosy. 16 As a result, he was shy, moody and difficult, but he soon grew very fond of Mary, and she, in turn, referred to him as her “sweetheart and friend.”17