by John Guy
Elizabeth would certainly have gained by these terms. They meant that Mary would ratify the substance if not the form of the treaty of Edinburgh, thereby tying up the loose ends of the past five years and guaranteeing Elizabeth’s security.
But for Mary, the offer was still a breakthrough. She must have felt elated. True, the concessions were almost identical (as she was not shy to point out) to those of the “middle way” first proposed five years before. A settlement on such lines could have been agreed on Mary’s side at almost any point since her return from France.
What mattered was that the terms were now on offer. But Mary had read the fine print. To validate fully her dynastic claim, the obstacle of Henry VIII’s will remained. The will had excluded the Stuart line of succession, specifying that if Elizabeth died childless, then the offspring of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Duchess of Suffolk, should inherit the throne.
Mary recalled Robert Melville to advise her. She knew that her trump card was to secure a judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will. Its validity had been contested. By the Third Act of Succession, passed in 1544, Parliament had empowered Henry to settle the succession by his “last will and testament signed with the king’s own hand.” Whether he had signed it was disputed. Although the will was “signed,” it was probably not with the king’s own hand but with a stamp, a device used by Henry in the last months of his reign. When this stamp was used to sign documents, an impression of the king’s signature was made on the paper and the signature inked in later by a clerk. The procedure was meant to spare an increasingly restless Henry from the trouble of signing state papers. But the will was not a normal document: it was a unique legal instrument, which by the terms of the Act of Succession should have been signed by the king in person.
Mary’s argument was plausible. Henry VIII’s will is listed to this day in the official register of documents signed “by stamp.” And her claim that the witnesses and the stamp itself were “feigned,” meaning that they were affixed when the king was already dead or unconscious, is also credible, if unprovable.
Elizabeth was not unsympathetic. She had never placed much reliance on her father’s will, which is why she had always preferred Mary’s claim to that of the remaining Grey sisters, each of whom made clandestine marriages.
On January 3, 1567, Mary wrote to say that she accepted the offer of her “dearest sister,” subject to a judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will. Since Elizabeth was known to be ready to dissolve Parliament and had in fact done so on the 2nd, this review would take place quickly.
After one more frustrating exchange of letters, everything was agreed. This was to be the settlement of which Mary had always dreamed. On February 8, she ordered Melville to return to London. Her health was recovering and she was happy and excited at the prospect of the new treaty.
Then, at two o’clock in the early morning of February 10, while Melville was still packing his bags, Darnley was assassinated. From the moment the news reached London, Mary’s reconciliation with Elizabeth was a dead letter. When Melville reached London on the 19th, Cecil refused to let him into his house. No further talks took place between Mary and Elizabeth. There would be no judicial examination of Henry VIII’s will.
The theme of the autumn and winter of 1566–67 was reconciliation, and yet in a shocking act of terrorism, the king of Scotland and two of his personal servants were suddenly murdered. The prospect of a dynastic accord between the two British queens is not in itself proof that Mary played no part in or had no foreknowledge of the assassination. But it makes her complicity improbable. Nothing can be proved by circumstantial evidence. The imminent dynastic accord does, however, create a compelling new context for a reinvestigation of Darnley’s murder, forcing us to consider afresh the true facts of the first British gunpowder plot.
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Plot and Counterplot
DARNLEY’S MURDER involved three distinct elements: a conspiracy, a crime and a cover-up. Part of the fascination of this murder mystery has always been to unravel the mass of almost bewildering evidence surrounding it. There are as many accusations or disclaimers as there are actors in the drama. In a debate lasting over four hundred years, no one has given a wholly satisfactory explanation of what happened on that night or why. The fundamental facts are still contested, such as who killed Darnley, precisely where he died and why it was decided to kill him in a gunpowder plot at the house where he was staying—and yet he was apparently strangled in a nearby garden after vaulting a wall at two o’clock in the morning clutching a chair.
Since there was no unbiased report, all accounts of Darnley’s death must to some extent be hypothetical. Beyond this, the who, where and why in the equation have been confused. The details of the murder, as reinvented afterward by those eager to cast the spotlight on others, have been muddled with those of the conspiracy and crime itself. To orchestrate the cover-up, fact was mingled with fiction, creating fresh stories, each with their own internal logic. Such stories are not the true facts of the events they purport to describe, though they will be important to us, because they tell us about the motives of those who attempted to conceal their deeds or blame them on others. In the end, the stories about Darnley’s death took on a life of their own.
First we have the conspiracy to consider. We need to understand how it came about that Mary’s husband ended up staying not in his usual apartments at Holyrood, but in a borrowed house on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, its cellars mined with gunpowder. It sounds simple, but there are layers to this conundrum.
The most basic is archival. The key documents for Darnley’s murder are all resolutely English, presenting problems of bias and selectivity. But in this case such problems are greatly magnified, because when the archives were catalogued and bound into large leather volumes in the nineteenth century, they were jumbled up. The idea was to select the most important papers and rearrange them in chronological sequence, but this was easier said than done.
The papers are kept in London, split between different collections. One, itself subdivided between the British Library and the Public Record Office, contains the bulk of Cecil’s working papers as Elizabeth’s chief minister. The other consists of the reports of the Earl of Bedford, the most senior English border official and the governor of Berwick, and those of his deputy and military adviser, Sir William Drury, and their subordinates.
But when these papers were catalogued in the nineteenth century, documents were pulled out of Bedford’s and Drury’s papers and added to Cecil’s to fill in gaps. Others were shifted about to suit the dictates of the new bound volumes, causing their provenance to be obliterated. So an enclosure sent with a covering letter may be separated from the letter itself, or vice versa. Worst of all, many documents were rearranged under incorrect dates, in which mistaken order they were edited for publication, thereby misleading generations of otherwise responsible historians.
Lastly, whereas most of Cecil’s collections were printed at some length, those from Berwick were dealt with in a cursory fashion, their potential largely overlooked. Up until now, no historian has fully digested their contents, which means deciphering the often intractable handwriting folio by folio. But the task is rewarding: it is in this portion of the archives that the most exciting new facts about Darnley’s death will be discovered.
The conspiracy began after Mary’s breakdown at Jedburgh, for which the lords blamed Darnley. When Maitland wrote of her “heartbreak . . . that he should be her husband,” he had taken the first step. The lords brooded over the problem while Mary lay ill at Craigmillar Castle. They had followed her there on November 20, 1566, staying for almost a fortnight and then accompanying her to Holyrood for a few days before she set out for Stirling to celebrate the baptism of Prince James.
At Craigmillar the outlines of a plot were shaped. The lords hated Darnley, but they also feared the Lennoxes. They wanted Mary to pardon Morton and the exiled Rizzio conspirators and recall them to Scotland, where their forces,
combined with those of the other lords, would keep the Lennoxes in their place. As at the start of the Rizzio plot, it was the supremely devious Maitland who set events in motion. The question was how to induce Mary to grant the pardons.
Maitland began by talking to Moray and Argyll. He said the first step would be to obtain a divorce for Mary, freeing her of her greatest liability while reducing the threat of an attempted coup by Darnley. She would be so grateful, she would reward those who had helped her by pardoning the exiles.
Moray was unpersuaded, as was Huntly, whom Maitland sounded out next. We do not know why, but most likely they made the point that a divorce would still leave Darnley dangerously on the loose and that something more sinister would be required to silence him.
Maitland pressed ahead. Argyll was willing to join the conspiracy, and Huntly dropped his objections. Naturally they named their price: they wanted their tenure of their ancestral lands to be confirmed by act of Parliament, making all previous forfeitures null and void in law and preventing a challenge to their territorial rights in the future.
Bothwell was approached last. He expressed similar doubts to Moray and Huntly, but agreed to support the plan. Everyone then went to see Mary in her private room to urge her to separate herself from Darnley.
The lords said afterward that she had agreed to a divorce in principle, as long as it was legal and “not prejudicial to her son.” This is entirely possible. As a devout Catholic, she would have wanted an annulment of her marriage rather than a divorce, but provided it could be obtained in a way that guaranteed her son’s legitimacy and rights of inheritance, it was not unthinkable.
Maitland said that if Moray still dissented, “I am assured he will look through his fingers thereto and will behold our doings saying nothing to the same.”
At this Mary became agitated. What did Maitland mean? She quickly replied: “I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honor or conscience, and therefore I pray you rather let the matter be in the state as it is.”
Obviously, all along there had been more to Maitland’s plan than he had disclosed. At this stage, Maitland intended Parliament to play a crucial role in exonerating the conspirators, and the most credible interpretation is that he envisaged a divorce for Mary in conjunction with a trial or legislation in Parliament in which the lords declared Darnley guilty of treason on trumped-up charges.
Mary forbade this. She preferred to leave things the way they were than get involved in anything disreputable. Although frustrated and distracted by Darnley’s increasingly reckless, unpredictable behavior, her own priority was Elizabeth’s latest offer of a final dynastic accord. She was negotiating with Elizabeth at the level of queen to queen through her ambassador, and wanted nothing to interfere with the diplomacy that would at last recognize her claim to the English succession. She could handle Darnley in her own way in her own time. She was, after all, his wife and the queen.
Maitland ended artfully, promising Mary, “You shall see nothing but good and approved by Parliament.” And there the matter was left.
After a few days’ rest at Holyrood, Mary and the lords rode to Stirling on December 10. The royal baptism took place a week later. Prince James was almost six months old, much older than the usual age for a Catholic baptism then, because the ceremony had been delayed by Mary’s illness and by the travel arrangements of the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador. The event was choreographed as a glittering three-day fête, modeled on the festivities on the theme of reconciliation staged at Bayonne by Catherine de Medici the previous year. This was not a coincidence. The sequence of entertainments, masques, a mock siege and banquets, ending with a spectacular fireworks display on the last day, was to be the culmination of the process whereby Mary reconciled her lords and salved the wounds caused by the Rizzio plot.
Nothing like this had ever been seen before in Scotland. The cost was well beyond Mary’s private means, far exceeding the annual receipts of her income as dowager queen of France. To pay for the special effects, she raised taxes and borrowed £12,000 from the merchants of Edinburgh.
The expenses of the royal household soared to more than £5500 per month from the time the baptism was planned, an increase of fifty percent over previous levels. Costumes had to be paid for and craftsmen employed to build the stages and paint the scenery for the masques. Vast quantities of fine foods and wines had to be requisitioned and transported to Stirling. The comptroller of the royal artillery spent six weeks preparing for the fireworks display. Cannons, gunpowder, saltpeter and much more were brought to Stirling from Edinburgh, Dundee and elsewhere. They were hauled from the river up the side of the steep Castle Rock by night so the final spectacle would be a surprise. This fête would rival anything Mary had known, even the one when she was seated beside her mother and future first husband in Henry II’s pavilion at Rouen fifteen years before.
The baptism was performed according to Catholic rites. Charles IX’s representative, the Count of Brienne, and the resident French ambassador, du Croc, were much impressed, but the Protestant lords boycotted the service. Moray, Bothwell and Huntly stood outside the chapel door, “because it was done against the points of their religion.” Elizabeth acted as the child’s godmother, choosing the Countess of Argyll as her proxy. The English queen was so serious about her role, she presented Mary with a font of solid gold weighing 333 ounces. Bedford, sent to Stirling by Elizabeth as her ambassador, was instructed to play down its size. He was to speak of it modestly, pretending that it would be too small for a child of six months, but commending it to Mary for her next baby.
The Countess of Argyll played her part to perfection. Although a Protestant, she took her place beside the font, for which she was later rebuked by John Knox. Bedford, a staunch Protestant, refused to attend the service and stood outside talking to Moray and Bothwell. This was embarrassing, but nothing in comparison to Darnley’s absence. Although in residence at Stirling, he spurned everyone and everything, his pride still pricked by the fact that he had not been crowned king. “His bad deportment,” wrote du Croc to Mary’s agent in Paris, “is incurable, nor can there be ever any good expected from him . . . I can’t pretend to foretell how all may turn; but I will say that matters can’t subsist long as they are without being accompanied by several bad consequences.”
With Darnley sulking, it fell to Bothwell to welcome the ambassadors. “All things for the christening,” wrote Sir John Forster sneeringly to Cecil, “are at his appointment and the same scarcely well liked of with the rest of the nobility as it is said.” Bothwell’s elevation was a reflection of Mary’s great favor and of the fête’s unifying theme. His own reconciliation to Moray and Argyll had been one of the most remarkable events of 1566, because it ostensibly ended his bitter feud with the two former leaders of the Lords of the Congregation, whose gold he had stolen in his ambush seven years before.
The diplomats of Europe had been invited to the baptism; Mary was unwise to allow Bothwell so much prominence. Alongside Moray and Huntly, he stood behind her chair at the state banquets, which gave him ideas above his station. Sir James Melville said that afterward Bothwell “had a mark of his own that he shot at,” taking his metaphor from archery: a “mark” is a target. This was a shrewd insight.
Perception can be as important as reality, and Bothwell’s role caused a good deal of talk as he strutted about in his new clothes. Mary had given Moray a suit of green, Argyll a suit of red, Bothwell one of blue. These were just three of the costly outfits she distributed to her courtiers, but the greatest expense was lavished on the banquets. At the supper on the last day, the food was not carried into the great hall as usual by waiters in costume, but served from an extraordinary mechanical “engine.” No one knows today how it worked, but the first two courses, comprising fifty or so separate dishes, were brought in on a moving platform operated by twelve satyrs and six nymphs, and the third course was delivered by a “conduit,” some kind of mechanical belt. Before the fourth and last course, a
child dressed as an angel recited verses after being lowered from the ceiling in a golden globe.
All was in place for the serving of the final course when the moving platform collapsed, bringing the banquet to a premature close. Perhaps it was just as well. Bastian Pages, one of Mary’s favorite valets who had helped Buchanan to stage the masques, had been taunting the English delegation. Dressed as satyrs with long tails and whips in their hands, he and his fellow Frenchmen had been wiggling their tails in gestures said to be obscene. A fracas ensued when one of the Englishmen told Bastian it was only out of respect for Mary that he did not stab him through the heart. On hearing the hullabaloo, everyone turned around. By then tempers had flared and order was not restored until Mary and Bedford intervened.
If Darnley had so far gotten away (literally) with murder, he soon had reason to fear for his life. On Christmas Eve, Mary pardoned Morton and over seventy more of the exiled Rizzio plotters. She even pardoned Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, who had leveled a pistol at her as Rizzio was hauled from her supper room. More remissions followed on January 12, 1567, the last day of her stay at Stirling before she returned to Edinburgh with her son.
Bedford had managed to coax Mary into issuing the pardons after the baptism. He attributed his success to the mediation of the lords, especially Moray and Bothwell. They had joined forces to persuade her. Finally, she was browbeaten into agreeing. She had still not fully recovered from her illness at Jedburgh, when her gastric ulcer had burst. She was mentally and physically exhausted, making it easier to talk her around. Two days before she granted the pardons, the French ambassador du Croc found her in bed again, “weeping sore” and complaining “of a grievous pain in her side.”
