by John Guy
Drury was skeptical. 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 favor showed him in his absence and trouble, he intendeth to continue.”
Despite the furor 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 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. He told Cecil, “It was Captain Cullen’s persuasion”—i.e., his idea—“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 be doubly sure of the victim’s demise was made at the scene, it could explain why the Old Provost’s Lodging was 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 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 leveled 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 take revenge 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.*
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 as 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 seems likely, but it is also possible that the information was planted by the Lennoxes. Their propaganda machine was already in gear, its aim being to turn Darnley into a martyr. To that end, he was said to have been at prayer before his death, reciting Psalm 55:
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 dishonor, 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 colored 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 a fiction: there was 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 precise location, which Drury did not know.
We can now begin to refine our hypothesis. Darnley went to bed, but shortly afterward heard noises outside and the rattling of keys. He looked out a side window, where he caught sight of a group of men. Realizing his life could be in danger, he decided to escape. He grabbed his cloak 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, 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!” And Drury’s drawing shows how this might indeed have been possible. Built into the wall of the garden on the opposite side of Thieves Row from 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 neighboring cottages. Up until now, no one has managed to identify them. Amazingly, their original sworn depositions survived, tucked away in the archives. Barbara Martin testified that before the blast, she was looking out her window and saw thirteen men go past. 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 be able to say for sure 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 harbored suspicions about 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 neighbor 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. Drury’s drawing situates the cottages in Thieves Row, whereas the depositions say they were in the Friar Wynd, which is closer to the middle of the town. In one respect, it does not matter. Regardless of precisely where the women lived, everyone agreed that they were the nearest neighbors 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 center 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 of 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 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 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 the men who 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 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 stirring up gossip and feverish speculation about the explosion and its perpetrators.
And much of this conjecture turned toward Bothwell. In a short time, he had risen high in Mary’s favor. 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 talk sparked by the actions of his servants, who had been spotted rolling barrels about. Such rumors were inflamed by the fact that when he had arrived at Kirk o’Field in his capacity as sheriff of Edinburgh, he 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 February 16. This was done anonymously, in a series of placards and notices that were stuck to the doors and walls of churches and 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 February 19, 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 around. 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 at the baptism. Moretta, who had now reached Paris by way of London, was one of those who began to succumb to the force of the rumors, not yet condemning Mary, but failing to exonerate her.
Du Croc, who had left Scotland three weeks before the murder and 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 the 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 Saint 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 traveled no farther 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 dismis
s 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, the bishop steadfastly believed, was Mary’s own fault for throwing in her lot with the heretics.
Elizabeth delivered the coup de grace. Mary’s world collapsed when, a month after Darnley’s death, she read 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 later wrote to Cecil, “but by her words she seemed very doleful and did accept my sovereign’s letters [sic] 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 tears. Elizabeth’s letter, for once written by herself and not on her behalf by Cecil, did not mince 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 honor. 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 . . . I 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 . . .
