Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Kirk o’ Field: The Assassination of Lord Darnley

  When Mary became Queen of Scots, she was more than aware that she needed to marry and provide heirs to the Scottish throne. In July 1565, she made the fateful and as it turned out very destructive decision to marry her cousin, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, a weak and vain young man. Why Mary chose Darnley remains a mystery, as he was evidently too headstrong, volatile and unstable to occupy the extremely sensitive role of a prince consort, a king in name only. He was admittedly tall, superficially charming and fond of courtly amusements, but he never showed affection for her and from the beginning asked for more power than she was willing to allow him.

  Less than a year after the wedding, Darnley became overwhelmed with jealousy because Mary was spending much of her time with a musician called David Rizzio. Rizzio had come to Scotland from Italy some years earlier on a diplomatic mission but remained at the Scottish court as a lute player and subsequently as Queen Mary’s secretary. The more outraged Mary became over her husband’s stupid, childish and licentious behaviour, the more she looked to Rizzio for consolation and support.

  This was happening at a time when many Scottish Protestant lords were becoming restless under Mary’s rule, and some of these noblemen claimed that Rizzio had usurped their proper places beside the queen – even that he was a secret agent of the Pope. They easily persuaded the gullible Darnley into believing that Mary and Rizzio were sexual partners, an accusation that seems to have no foundation in truth, not least because Mary was six months pregnant with Darnley’s child. They nevertheless succeeded in inflaming Darnley’s jealousy and persuaded him to take part in a plot to murder the Italian, and do it in front of the heavily pregnant queen. In fact, it may be that the conspirators intended to distress her so much by making her watch the brutal murder that she would miscarry. Given that this was the sixteenth century, a miscarriage would probably have resulted in her own death. Mary herself believed that Darnley was so angry because she had denied him the crown matrimonial that he wanted to kill her and the child. Making her witness a brutal murder would bring about her death and allow Darnley to succeed as King of Scots.

  On the night of Saturday 9 March 1566, Lord Ruthven and a group of accomplices burst into Mary’s chamber in Holyrood House. Rizzio was seated at her supper table and the assassins dragged him screaming from her side, stabbing him repeatedly, both in front of her and once they had succeeded in dragging him out onto the staircase. It is not clear whether Darnley himself inflicted any of the injuries, but he was certainly incriminatingly present in the chamber, as the queen’s own vivid account of the murder makes very clear.

  We were in our chamber at our supper. The King [Darnley] came into our chamber and stood beside us. Lord Ruthven, dressed in a warlike manner, forced his way into our chamber with his accomplices. We asked our husband if he knew anything of the enterprise. He denied it. Ruthven and his accomplices overturned our table, put violent hands on Rizzio and struck him over our shoulder with daggers. One of them even stood in front of our face with a loaded pistol. They most cruelly took him out of our chamber and gave him fifty-six blows with daggers and swords.

  Following this outrageous crime, the nobles kept Mary prisoner at Holyrood Palace. She was desperate to escape. Somehow she won Darnley over and they escaped together. But Darnley’s decision to help Mary to escape infuriated the nobles who had conspired to kill David Rizzio; now they wanted Darnley out of the way as well. Mary pretended to forgive Darnley and cleverly managed to separate him from the group of treacherous nobles who had organized the assassination of Rizzio, but she must have realized that she could no longer trust him. With Rizzio still fresh in the minds of the court, another threat to Darnley’s fragile self-esteem soon took centre stage – another man.

  James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, rushed to Mary’s aid in putting down a rebellion of Protestant conspirators, even though he was a Protestant himself. Bothwell was Lord Admiral of Scotland. He had a reputation as a brave man of action, but he also had a reputation for lechery, brutality and lust for power. Tired of the vicious weakling at her side, Mary saw Bothwell, the strong new man, as her rescuer and he soon became her most trusted advisor. He gave her security. Under his protection, Mary was safely ensconced in Edinburgh Castle, where she had to face a strange rebellion from the Scottish lords. The lords who had been involved in the murder of Rizzio asked for her forgiveness. She gave it, not from her heart but from the sheer political need to maintain some measure of control over her kingdom. She never forgave Darnley himself, but for the moment she was prepared to put up with Darnley as a necessary evil. The forgiven lords were unhappy about Darnley because of his distinctly two-faced performance during the murder of Rizzio; he was supposed to be present at the murder to give Ruthven and the other assassins support, but when the moment came he did not give it wholeheartedly. The lords were therefore disenchanted with Darnley as well as Mary.

  By the time Mary gave birth to James VI in June 1566, Darnley had slid back into his habitual life of debauchery, neglecting his royal duties and sullenly watching Mary’s relationship with Bothwell develop. He disappeared from court for a time and this prompted talk of a possible annulment of the royal marriage. At Craigmillar Castle in December 1566, the Scottish lords openly proposed to Mary that she should get rid of Darnley; she should either divorce him or arrange his death. Her response, which could mean anything or everything, was that she was not prepared to consider either option.

  When the queen learned that Darnley was seriously ill in Glasgow, she uncharacteristically showed great concern by travelling to his bedside and then arranging for a horse-litter to carry him back to Edinburgh to convalesce at Holyrood Palace. For some reason, perhaps fearing that he was being set up for assassination, Darnley decided not to move into Holyrood. Instead he quartered himself in a house at Kirk o’ Fields in the Royal Mile, a few hundred yards from Mary’s residence. For months Mary had spoken of her husband with nothing but contempt, and this apparently kindly gesture was out of character. It may be that she wanted her unreliable husband close at hand where she could see what he was doing. It may be that she was cold-bloodedly preparing his death.

  A recent apologist for Mary has said that she would have to be a duplicitous character indeed to have constantly rejected all suggestions of assassination, and to have sent Darnley her own doctor if she had been secretly planning to have him murdered. But this level of cunning and duplicity is of course well within the possibilities of Mary’s complex personality, and indeed well within the norms of high-level power politics in the sixteenth century. Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were all capable of behaving with the same deadly duplicity when the occasion demanded. It must be regarded as highly significant that the letter Mary wrote to Archbishop Beaton, on the eve of her journey to fetch Darnley from Glasgow, showed absolutely no indication that she planned a reconciliation with her husband.

  At two o’clock one February morning in 1576 there was an enormous explosion, and Kirk o’ Fields was reduced to a heap of rubble. It looks as Darnley may have had some warning, as after the explosion his body was not found in the house but some distance away in the gardens. It was apparent from the lack of damage to the body that he had not been killed by the explosion, but had been murdered while trying to escape from it. Perhaps he heard suspicious sounds under his bedroom where large amounts of gunpowder had been secretly hidden, perhaps the sounds of unfamiliar activity on the floor below, the voices of strangers, or a tip-off from a servant.

  A chair and a length of rope were found in the gardens; Darnley and his groom had used them to climb out of the first floor window and reach the ground. They both lay dead with just one dagger between them. A contemporary drawing vividly shows the bodies of Darnley and servant, just as they were found lying in the gardens. They were wearing nightgowns, but the garments were pulled up, exposing the naked lower halves of their bodies, as if the two men had struggled with their assailants on the ground
as they were overpowered and throttled. On the right hand side of the drawing of the crime scene is a touching little invention, the infant James VI, Darnley’s son, sitting up in his crib and praying, ‘Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord.’

  There is still, after centuries of discussion and re-examination of the evidence, no definite proof of who murdered Lord Darnley. At the time, most people assumed that Bothwell organized it; the only question was whether he did so with or without Mary’s knowledge and complicity. Most modern historians take that same line too.

  The incident scandalized Scotland, and there were calls for Bothwell to be brought to trial for the king’s murder. The scandal spread across Europe. It was after all the most flagrant of assassinations. The exploding house covered the tracks of the assassins, making it impossible to prove anything. Indeed, when it came to court it was impossible to prove Bothwell’s guilt, and he had to be acquitted. But most people knew that Bothwell was a ruthless opportunist, aiming at nothing less than the throne of Scotland; everyone knew that he was capable of murder.

  But whether Mary herself was involved is less clear. In the wake of the murder she appeared apathetic, and this was taken at the time to indicate her guilt, though their were also reports that when she first heard of her husband’s death she was grief-stricken. Even more incriminating were the famous ‘Casket’ letters, which were supposed to have been written by Mary to Bothwell in the three months leading up to Darnley’s death. These were allegedly found under Bothwell’s bed. There is contemporary evidence that at least two of them were forgeries commissioned by Protestant lords who were busily trying to entrap her; some of them may have been genuine, but they had their dates tampered with. Mary herself was never allowed to see them, which strongly suggests that they were not in her handwriting and she would have been able to disprove their authenticity. They disappeared altogether in 1584 and so never became available for scrutiny by historians. They cannot really be used as evidence against Mary.

  But even if Mary had wanted her husband dead, that was no more than many of the rest of the Scottish nobility wanted, as they made clear to her at Craigmillar Castle, and therefore it still did not directly implicate her in his murder. She may have appeared apathetic because she was taken by surprise and shaken, and because she felt powerless to do anything about the situation developing round her.

  The events following Darnley’s murder were almost as spectacular and dramatic as the murder itself. In the immediate aftermath, Bothwell met Mary about six miles outside Edinburgh; whether by chance or by pre-arrangement is not known, but if the meeting was pre-arranged Mary must have known about Bothwell’s intention to kill her husband. He had 600 men with him and he asked to escort Mary to his castle at Dunbar; he told her she was in danger if she went to Edinburgh. Unwilling to cause further bloodshed, and now terrified, Mary did as Bothwell asked.

  According to Mary, Bothwell kidnapped and raped her before marrying her. Within days of her marriage, Mary was suicidal with despair at the abuse she had to endure from Bothwell. In the eyes of many people, in England as well as Scotland, her marriage to Bothwell made Mary guilty by association of the murder of Darnley. Marrying her murdered husband’s murderer made her as good as (or as bad as) a murderess. Yet it is easy to see that her marriage to Bothwell was a practical necessity; ironically, behaving as if she was an accomplice before and after the fact by throwing in her lot with Bothwell was the only thing that she could do to ensure her safety.

  Mary had enemies in the Scottish nobility and she needed a strong ally to protect her from them. Even with Bothwell’s forceful help, it was less than a year before the Scottish lords forced Mary to abdicate and flee to England. For the next two decades she was held prisoner by Queen Elizabeth I and finally executed in England at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587, compromised and betrayed first by her enemies in Scotland, then by her enemies in England.

  Three months later the baby who would become James VI of Scotland was born. Mary now had an heir, which strengthened her position somewhat. The unmarried and childless Elizabeth of England, ten years older than Mary, watched these events beadily from south of the border. She was intelligent enough to see that although Mary herself might be a doomed monarch, Mary’s son would be not only her cousin Mary’s heir but her heir as well.

  Mary might have produced the next king of Scots, but the Scottish lords were still dissatisfied. They were angry that Bothwell would be all-powerful and decided to take up arms against him. Not long after the (possibly forced) marriage, the rebel nobles and their armies met Mary’s troops at Carberry Hill, not far outside Edinburgh. The rebel nobles demanded that Mary must abandon Bothwell. She refused and reminded them of their own earlier advice, which had been to marry Bothwell. Seeing little alternative now, Mary turned herself over to the rebel nobles, who took her first to Edinburgh and then to Lochleven Castle, where she was held captive. With justification she feared for her life, and she was forced to abdicate in favour of her son.

  Within weeks, the infant prince was crowned king and James Stewart, Earl of Moray, Mary’s unscrupulous bastard half-brother, became regent. The appalling Moray seems to have been the architect of the plan to murder Rizzio. He also spread the unfounded and dangerous rumour that Rizzio and the king were plotting against him, in order to deflect suspicion. But the Earl of Moray got his just deserts when he himself was murdered just three years later. The next regents were also to meet sudden deaths; in fact, James himself as a teenager had one of his regents executed in 1580. The Scottish political landscape was a minefield – and not just for the Queen of Scots. Meanwhile, the Earl of Bothwell’s extraordinary later life must have looked to many Protestant (and other) Scots like God’s just reward for the murder of Darnley. He managed to escape from Scotland but ended his life in 1578, languishing in a Danish prison, virtually insane.

  Fighting for The Succession: The Gowrie Conspiracy

  On the afternoon of 5 August 1600, two men were murdered, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother the Master of Ruthven. Exactly what happened may never be known, as much of the evidence was destroyed at the time. The one contemporary account that survives, written by King James VI of Scotland, is unlikely to be true, not least because King James went out of his way to suppress any alternative scenarios.

  The Ruthvens had never been on friendly terms with the Stuarts. Patrick, Lord Ruthven, had been one of the ring-leaders in the murder of David Rizzio, and during that episode he had handled Mary Queen of Scots roughly. Patrick’s son William was the Ruthven who had kidnapped James VI at the age of sixteen in the Ruthven Raid and kept him prisoner in Gowrie House until he agreed to sign a statement saying that he was there under his own free will. The young prince had managed to escape and turn the tables on William. He induced William to write a private confession on James’s promise of a pardon. James then treacherously used the confession to have William executed.

  The next generation of Ruthvens consisted of the twenty-two-year-old John, Earl of Gowrie, and the nineteen-year-old Alexander Master of Ruthven. These two young men naturally saw the thirty-four-year-old James VI as the murderer of their father. In mitigation, James had tried to explain that at the time he was not his own master, and he had restored the confiscated family estates to them. He wanted to show that he was a man of good faith. At the same time, James had good reason to fear and distrust the young Ruthvens. He owed them £80,000. The older brother had also formally opposed James’s request for 100,000 crowns to pursue his negotiations for his succession to the English throne. Gowrie himself had a claim to the throne of England. Gowrie’s direct descent from Henry VII through his mother made him the next in succession to the English throne after James and his heirs. It has emerged that Gowrie was in London in April 1600, and while he was there Elizabeth I granted him the guard and honours appropriate to a Prince of Wales, which suggests that she was nominating him as her heir. Or, as is more likely with the ageing Elizabeth, she was mischievously playing at naming her successor. On top
of that, the Gowries were thought to be involved with witchcraft. James hated them – for all of these reasons.

  In July 1600, James wrote secret letters to each of the Ruthven brothers. The letters were destroyed, so it is not known what they contained. Possibly the Ruthvens’ sudden return to Gowrie House in Perth from their castle in Atholl was in response to instructions in James’s letters. Another unexplained journey was the Master of Ruthven’s early morning ride from Perth to Falkland on 5 August. He rose at four that morning, rode to Falkland and had a secret conversation with the King at the stables, before the King started his day’s hunting. James VI’s version of this meeting was that the Master had come to inform him that he had imprisoned in a secret room at Gowrie House a stranger ‘with a great wide pot full of coined gold in great pieces.’ Ruthven had found this stranger wandering in the fields the previous evening.

  Ruthven had ridden to tell James so that he should be the first to know about it. James said that the gold had not been found, so it was not treasure trove and the Crown had no right to it. Ruthven argued that if James would not take it, somebody else would. James said that as the coins were foreign they were probably brought in by Jesuits and the stranger was probably a priest in disguise. James said he would send a servant back with a warrant and that the magistrates could question the stranger about the treasure. The hunt went on until eleven, with Ruthven continually pestering James to ride to Perth with him.

  When James recounted this bizarre novella to Lennox, Lennox said bluntly and with considerable courage, ‘I like not that, sir, for it is not likely.’ It was as polite a response as James deserved. The story was absurd from start to finish. Even if Ruthven had genuinely found the stranger and the gold as he said, why on earth would have he ridden at four in the morning to see the king, who was no friend, to tell him about it? If Ruthven had made it all up, James suggested, then he might be mad. Lennox rejected this interpretation. ‘I know nothing of him but as an honest discreet gentleman.’ Lennox must have suspected that it was James who had made the story up – the entire story. James’s interpretation of it was that it suggested a ‘treasonable device’. The implication (which James intended Lennox to draw) was that Ruthven had made efforts to draw James into some sort of trap or ambush.