by John Guy
It was, however, even as Mary and Darnley laughed and talked on the evening of Sunday, February 9, while Bothwell played dice with Argyll and Huntly nearby at the table with the green velvet cover, that a group of men, working surreptitiously below them, mined the house with gunpowder. The explosive was supplied by Sir James Balfour. A dozen or so barrels were brought in the side door or the postern gate or through an underground passage cut into the cellar from the house next door, which was also owned by the Balfours. The explosive was packed into the foundation, with the residue poured into sacks that were heaped on the floor of Mary’s bedroom.
In the charges later filed by Moray, it was claimed that two days before, Mary had ordered a bed and some tapestries to be taken from Darnley’s chamber and replaced with less valuable ones, returning the more costly objects to Holyrood. One of Darnley’s servants testified that a brand-new bed of black velvet was replaced with an old purple one.
Unfortunately for Moray, these facts can be checked. The inventory of items destroyed in the blast proves that neither the bed nor the tapestries were changed. Darnley’s bed at Kirk o’Field on the night of the murder was all along the one he would be expected to have used.
By Sunday the 9th, Darnley was celebrating because his pustules had disappeared. His recovery, as he supposed, was complete. The very next day, he planned to return to Holyrood. On the 7th, he had written to Lennox in an optimistic vein. He also spoke of his reconciliation and “love” for Mary, whom “I assure you hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife.” When fresh rumors of plots had reached him, he had reported them to Mary. She had immediately investigated them, but nothing could be discovered. Darnley’s was hardly a trusting nature, but Mary had boosted his confidence.
Darnley’s vanity had been appeased. His thoughts are characteristically luminous. The following night, he planned to climb the secret stairway at Holyrood and enjoy his conjugal rights once more, thereby reestablishing himself as king of Scotland in the way he knew best. And yet, even as Bothwell rolled the dice with Argyll and Huntly, Sir James Balfour’s men were at work.
Back in London, Cecil watched and waited. Unlike Mary, he was entirely prepared for what was about to happen in her country.
19
Assassination Two
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 a carnival atmosphere. At midday, she attended the wedding reception of Bastian Pages, her favorite 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 favorites, 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 midafternoon, promising to join in the dancing before the end of the evening. She then changed clothes for an official banquet at four o’clock in honor 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 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 bound by a curfew. Under the terms of his pardon, he was barred from coming 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 favorite servants. Shortly before eleven, 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 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 now.
As Mary left Kirk o’Field, she passed the entrance of 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” (previously Bothwell’s servant), 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 floor. He had also 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. Another half-dozen servants and perhaps three or four grooms were sleeping downstairs.
A little after two 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 cannons, startled everyone for miles around. 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 had been razed to its foundation. All that remained was a pile of rubble.
In a garden some forty feet away, on the other side of the town wall 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 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, unlik
e 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 into the air, they would have been burned or scorched by 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 wilier 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 be dead too.
Mary was a good actress, but not this good. She took a traditional view of the role of 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 in 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 men trying to enter the house with duplicate keys. 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 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. A slow fuse to the gunpowder was then lit.
The trouble with this theory is that it wrongly assumes that Darnley ended up in the garden of the Old Provost’s Lodging inside the town wall, whereas his body was found beyond Thieves Row outside the wall. It also seems 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 was 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 denied touching Darnley or even seeing him. He said that he and his accomplices lit the slow fuse, then locked all the doors of the house before going a safe distance away 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 neighborhood 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 seems a lot more credible. It has the makings of a hypothesis, except that the second-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, which overlooked the town wall and Thieves Row.
In that case, Darnley heard the noise, grabbed his dagger, threw his cloak over his shoulders against the cold night air and then used the rope to climb down onto the chair below, or 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 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 was
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 on the 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 a week before the explosion. By this time, Bothwell, Balfour and David Chalmers had been denounced as Darnley’s murderers on placards affixed to the Tolbooth. The rumor 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.
