by John Guy
Darnley would not accompany the woman back to Edinburgh unless she would promise to have sex with him. The matter was argued back and forth, and she finally agreed as the only way to persuade him. She promised to sleep with him as soon as he was cured of his pockmarks.
Darnley was still somewhat suspicious, but since he was too afraid of the reprisals of the lords to take any chances, he decided to travel in the litter with her and they would lead a happy life together. “To be short,” said the woman, “he will go anywhere upon my word.”
She said that she would follow such instructions as she hoped to receive shortly from her lover. “And send me word what I shall do, and whatsoever happens to me, I will obey you.” She then added her own chilling suggestion: “Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also. And shall not come forth of long time.”
She still had deep misgivings about what she was doing. “I shall never be willing to beguile one that putteth his trust in me. Nevertheless, you may do all, and do not esteem me the less therefore, for you are the cause thereof. For my own revenge I would not do it.”
She did not visit Darnley on the second evening of her stay, as she was too busy finishing her lover’s bracelet. She had not found clasps for it yet. “Send me word whether you will have it and more money, and when I shall return and how far I may speak. Now as far as I perceive, I may do much with you. Guess you whether I shall not be suspected.”
Changing the subject again, the writer remarked that Darnley would become enraged whenever he heard any mention of his enemies among the lords. His father, Lennox, meanwhile, would not emerge from his room. Darnley himself had asked to see the woman again early the next morning.
She would send her letter by a messenger, who would also tell her lover the rest of the news. She ended with a grim warning: “Burn this letter, for it is too dangerous, neither is there anything well said in it, for I think upon nothing but upon grief if you be at Edinburgh.”
A second unexplained double-line space follows in Cecil’s transcript of the letter, after which is written a damning last paragraph:
Now if to please you my dear life, I spare neither honor, conscience, nor hazard, nor greatness, take it in good part, and not according to the interpretation of your false brother-in-law, to whom, I pray you, give no credit against the most faithful lover that ever you had or shall have . . . Excuse my evil writing and read it over twice . . . Pray remember your friend and write unto her and often. Love me always.
A second memo concludes the letter. The final headings are: “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh.” If letter 2 really had been written on two consecutive evenings, this second memo might not have raised so many suspicions, but the references to Bothwell and the “lodging” (we may assume this means the Old Provost’s Lodging at Kirk o’Field) tacked on at the end are too much to swallow. Of all these jottings, these are the only two that fail to match the contents of the letter.
According to the Confederate Lords, Mary was the author of letter 2, Bothwell was its recipient, and the messenger to whom it was entrusted was Paris. When she had stayed at Callander House on the first leg of her journey to see Darnley, she had allegedly told Paris to accompany her to Glasgow, where he was to wait to take letters back to Bothwell in Edinburgh.
After she had been two nights at Glasgow, she had supposedly given Paris a packet of letters, some for Bothwell and others for Maitland, which Bothwell was also to be shown. On reaching Edinburgh, Paris was said to have found Bothwell and delivered his letters. Bothwell ordered him back to Glasgow with the message that everything was ready and Mary was to lure Darnley to his fate at Kirk o’Field.
Viewed in conjunction with letter 1, this scenario becomes a farce. Mary had left Edinburgh on January 20 or 21. She did not arrive at Glasgow until the 22nd. Huntly and Bothwell had returned to Edinburgh after leaving her at Callander House. Bothwell then departed for Jedburgh on the evening of the 24th and continued the next day into Liddesdale.
If Mary had done no more at Glasgow than write letter 2 on the consecutive evenings of January 22 and 23, it might just have been possible for Paris to catch Bothwell in Edinburgh on the 24th before he left for Jedburgh. But the rest is beyond belief. Paris was supposed to have returned to Glasgow on the 25th to inform Mary that the “place” was to be Kirk o’Field, and then left Glasgow “this Saturday morning,” also the 25th, for Edinburgh to deliver letter 1. But Edinburgh and Glasgow are fifty miles apart, a hard day’s ride in each direction. He would have had to leave Glasgow on the 25th before he had even arrived. Moreover, had he achieved this miraculous feat, Bothwell would no longer have been in Edinburgh to receive letter 1, because he had already arrived at Jedburgh.
The lords’ allegations put Paris firmly in the spotlight. He had sought refuge in Denmark after Mary was taken to Lochleven, but after her defeat at Langside and flight to England, the lords set out to extradite him, and if that failed, to kidnap him. This was not to produce him as a witness before Elizabeth and Cecil. On the contrary, it was to make sure he never appeared to give his testimony. Dead men tell no tales.
Paris would be brought back to Scotland in June 1569. He was kept in prison until August 9 and 10, when he was secretly interrogated at St. Andrews by George Buchanan and Moray’s private secretary, John Wood. On the first day of questioning, Paris did not say what his inquisitors wanted to hear. On the second day he was tortured, and confessed to everything.
No sooner had Moray received a transcript of this confession than poor Paris was silenced forever. There was no trial: Mary’s loyal valet was summarily hanged. But he, and not Moray, had the last word. On the scaffold, he shouted out the truth to the assembled crowd. He denied everything he had said about carrying the two Glasgow letters from Mary to Bothwell.
Moray sent a copy of Paris’s confession to Cecil, who instantly wrote in Elizabeth’s name demanding that the execution be deferred. As soon as he had trawled through the confession, he must have realized how flimsy and far-fetched it was. He demanded that Paris be kept alive for further interrogation, presumably in England. But it was too late.
Despite the fabrications, lengthy passages of letter 2 can only have been taken from a genuine document Mary is likely to have sent to an unknown recipient while she was visiting Darnley. Several key extracts ring true:
“I thought I should have been killed with his breath, for it is worse than your uncle’s breath, and yet I was sat no nearer to him than in a chair by his bolster.”
“He desired much that I should lodge in his lodging. I have refused it. I have told him that he must be purged and that could not be done here.”
“I told him that so I would myself bring him to Craigmillar, that the physicians and I also might cure him without being far from my son.”
“To be short, he will not come but with condition that I shall promise to be with him as heretofore at bed and board, and that I shall forsake him no more, and upon my word he will do whatsoever I will, and will come.”
The first extract clearly relates to Darnley’s treatment for syphilis by salivation of mercury. After a while, the patient’s breath began to stink. But who was the mysterious uncle whose breath was almost as bad as Darnley’s?
Bothwell no longer had a living uncle, so this part of the letter could not possibly have been addressed to him.* Some historians have suggested that Mary had written a detailed report on Darnley’s condition to Moray, and that a whole run of paragraphs from this lost document were spliced into letter 2. If that is true, the “uncle” would have been the Earl of Mar, whom Mary entrusted with the care of her son. That, however, remains a matter of conjecture.
The other three extracts refer to Darnley’s characteristic demands for sex, first refused and then accepted by Mary. They confirm that she knew exactly how to handle her debauched and degenerate husband. Her tactics closely resembled her approach after the Rizzio plo
t, when she had offered to sleep with Darnley to win his affection, but knew he would be too drunk to take advantage of her offer.
If indeed these passages are true, it is less rather than more likely that Mary was involved in Darnley’s murder. Although afterward highlighted by Moray to claim that his sister was a party to the plot, the third extract severely undermines the charges against her. To make the fanciful chronology of the Glasgow letters somehow add up, Buchanan had asserted that Mary had “devised” with Bothwell to lure Darnley to Kirk o’Field before ever leaving Edinburgh for Glasgow.
But the third extract confirms that she sought to bring Darnley not to Kirk o’Field but to Craigmillar, even though the charge that she had plotted to lure him to Kirk o’Field was the crux of the case against her.
Other sections of letter 2 tell us just what it was that Darnley was thinking.
“He hath no desire to be seen, and waxeth angry when I speak to him of Walker, and saith that he will pluck his ears from his head and that he lieth.”
“I asked him of the inquisition [i.e., investigation] of Hiegate. He denied it till I told him the very words, and then he said that . . . it was said that some of the Council had brought me a letter to sign to put him in prison, and to kill him if he did resist.”
“I asked him . . . what cause he had to complain of some of the lords and to threaten them. He denieth it, and saith that he had already prayed them to think no such matter of him. As for myself, he would rather lose his life than do me the least displeasure.”
Such extracts fit hand in glove with what is known of Darnley’s plotting and Mary’s fears as expressed to her ambassador to France. They also suggest that Darnley had heard whispers of Morton’s rendezvous with Bothwell and Maitland at Whittingham Castle, and that he suspected a plot to imprison or kill him.
But even if this means that whole paragraphs of letter 2 are true, others are either forged or interpolated. In particular the final paragraph, where the writer castigates her correspondent’s “false brother-in-law,” cannot be genuine.
By “your false brother-in-law,” Mary was supposed to have referred to Huntly.* If so, the paragraph could not possibly have been taken from a genuine letter written in January 1567, because Huntly was then still her stalwart supporter. He did not quarrel with her until the last week in April 1567, when Bothwell’s divorce was pending.
And there is further evidence of cheating. The second memo ended with the jottings “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh.” We have already asked, Why would Mary, if she were already writing to Bothwell, have made such a note? Letter 2 runs to more than three thousand words, yet it contains not one word on Bothwell or the “lodging.” It seems that these final jottings were added in a blank space on the last page of the letter to make it appear more incriminating. We have already noted that letter 2 looks to be in two parts. It is becoming a distinct possibility that pages culled from different places were surreptitiously spliced together.
This line of inquiry can be pursued further. All the passages in which Mary is said to have openly admitted her love for Bothwell are curiously placed in the text. The woman had said she was “ill at ease and glad to write unto you when other folks be asleep, seeing that I cannot do as they do according to my desire, that is between your arms, my dear life.” She had asked her beloved to “Love me always.” Elsewhere in the letter, Lord Livingston had supposedly teased her. And yet only a few lines later, she could warn her lover to beware that “none of those that be here” ever saw him with the bracelet she was making for him.
Each of these “love” passages appears either just before or just after the jottings that Mary is supposed to have made when preparing her thoughts for the letter. We already know there are two sets of jottings, which reinforces the suspicion that perhaps the pages of more than one letter had been combined.
Still more suggestively, just before the curious remarks on the bracelet, and then again immediately before the concluding and (as we now know) interpolated paragraph in which the writer castigated “your false brother-in-law”—which also happens to be the very same section in which the words “Love me always” appear—there are unexplained double-line spaces in Cecil’s transcript of the letter. These have never been noticed before.
Although Cecil’s copy is an English translation of the document, its only gaps are in these two places. Since neither falls at the top or bottom of a page, it is likely that they represent blanks in the original (and unfortunately lost) French version of the letter. It is a remarkable coincidence that these double-line spaces appear exactly at points where the text seems to have been doctored. A plausible hypothesis is that these spaces also appeared in the original French text, possibly at page breaks or other places where spaces had been left on the paper, which enabled forged material to be inserted later. To prevent similar interpolations, it had been Elizabeth’s practice to draw hatch marks in pen across the blank spaces of her sensitive and important letters to prevent forged material from being added.
Returning to the charges leveled by the Confederate Lords, their case in the end rested on these passages:
“I do here a work that I hate much, but I had begun it this morning.”
“We are tied to with two false races. The good year untie us from them. God forgive me, and God knit us together forever for the most faithful couple that ever he did knit together. This is my faith. I will die in it.”
“His father hath bled this day at the nose and at the mouth. Guess what token that is?”
“You make me dissemble so much that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it were not for obeying you I had rather be dead.”
“Think also if you will not find some invention more secret by physick, for he is to take physick at Craigmillar and the baths also. And shall not come forth of long time.”
“Send me word whether you will have it and more money, and when I shall return and how far I may speak. Now as far as I perceive, I may do much with you. Guess you whether I shall not be suspected.”
“Burn this letter, for it is too dangerous, neither is there anything well said in it, for I think upon nothing but upon grief if you be at Edinburgh.”
If Mary wrote all of these extracts, she was involved in a plot that Darnley had good reason to think would put him in mortal danger. If the fifth extract in particular is authentic, it would seem to point to poison as a possible method of assassination, and Mary would rightly stand condemned of conspiracy to murder.
However, apart from the fifth extract, there is no reason to connect any of these passages to a murder plot. The first extract is compatible with an intention to fetch Darnley and keep him under house arrest. The second extract cannot have been written from Glasgow in January 1567, since the phrase “two false races” refers again to Darnley, who is “tied” to Mary, and to Huntly’s sister, Lady Jean Gordon, who is “tied” to Bothwell. But Huntly was not “false” until the end of April, which means this passage was interpolated.
Likewise, the fourth, sixth and seventh extracts do not add up. They would, of course, make sense if culled from the pages of genuine letters from Mary to Bothwell in late April or May 1567. Such pages could have been written after her abduction, when she was anxiously waiting at Dunbar for his return from Edinburgh, where he had gone to encourage his wife to file her divorce petition and while Mary was quarreling with Huntly, or they may have been written after she had returned to Edinburgh with Bothwell to call the banns for their marriage.
The sixth extract suggests that Bothwell needed money, possibly as pay for his soldiers or bribes for his divorce. And whereas the seventh extract suggests that Mary expected him to be in Edinburgh while they were apart, that is easier to credit if the letter was written three months after the Confederate Lords said it was. As has already been shown, Bothwell had left Edinburgh for Liddesdale on the evening of January 24. He was, however, in Edinburgh for sever
al days, filing his divorce papers at the end of April, when Mary was at odds with Huntly and anxious for reassurance.
That leaves the third and fifth extracts. The third is difficult to judge. Lennox, Darnley’s father, had suffered a nosebleed. What did it signify? Obviously it was some sort of omen. That was exactly Mary’s point, assuming the question was not itself interpolated. But since she did not venture an answer, the innuendo was hardly proof of a conspiracy to murder Darnley.
All along, it was the fifth extract that packed the punches. And yet this was far from being what it seemed to be. Although the extract was supposedly the proof that Mary had wanted Darnley to be poisoned at Craigmillar, the lords’ story—as scripted by Buchanan in his dossier and written with this very same letter on his desk (see chapter 24)—had made no mention whatsoever of this particular charge.
The whole force of the lords’ accusation, as it had been compiled by Buchanan, was not that Mary and Bothwell planned to poison Darnley at Craigmillar. It was that they had conspired to lure him to Kirk o’Field where he was to be blown up in a gunpowder plot. That was why it was so important to add the crucial words “Of the Earl of Bothwell” and “Of the Lodging in Edinburgh” to the jottings on the last page of the letter. Otherwise these details were not adequately covered.
The trouble with the lords’ story is that it was getting far too complicated for any one person to remember. An unnecessarily elaborate tale was becoming a mangled one in which plot was piled on plot, making it difficult to keep all the details under control.
The main objection to the genuineness of the fifth extract is that the suggestion that Darnley was to be poisoned at Craigmillar is wholly inconsistent with Buchanan’s principal accusation, which is that Mary and Bothwell had already “devised” with each other to lure Darnley to his death at Kirk o’Field before Mary traveled to Glasgow to fetch her errant husband. If the fifth extract really was a genuine passage by Mary, it would have been seized upon and given the highest priority in Buchanan’s original list of charges. As the most incriminating section of either of the two Glasgow letters, it would have been far too juicy to pass over.
