An Accidental Tragedy (35 page)

On Saturday, 9 February, Darnley was in high spirits. His pustules had, in fact, subsided, and he considered his cure complete, although the syphilis had merely reached one of its many plateaux. However, he no longer had to take his sulphur baths and he was looking forward to returning to Holyrood. This was, therefore, the plotters’ last chance of access to him. Mary was in a similar good state of mind since this was the last day before Lent began on Carnival Sunday. In the morning, Mary had attended Sebastien’s wedding ceremony at which she had presented the bride with her wedding dress, leaving with a promise to return for the party later in the day. At four o’clock in the afternoon she attended a formal lunch given by the Bishop of Argyll for Moretta, the returning ambassador of Savoy, then, at about eight o’clock, Mary came to visit Darnley accompanied by Bothwell, Argyll and Huntly. She would later keep her
promise to attend Sebastien’s wedding party and some sources say that she came to Kirk o’ Field in masquerade costume. Significantly, at this point Moray had to return urgently to his home in St Andrews to be with his wife, who had recently miscarried. While on the ferry crossing the River Forth, Moray remarked to Lord Herries and others who were standing beside him that ‘this night the King shall lose his life’. Lethington had equally urgent work to attend to at the palace and Morton was still under a curfew as a condition of his pardon. Alibis were now being thoroughly established.

Mary spent the evening with Darnley while the nobles passed the time playing cards and dice. Below them, Mary’s bed was moved out and William Powrie brought the gunpowder from Balfour’s house to be tightly stacked directly below Darnley’s room. To be effective, gunpowder needs to be ignited in a confined space and it seems that here the plotters used leather bags or ‘polks’. This work was supervised by James Cullen, a mercenary soldier experienced in the use of explosives and now in the garrison of Edinburgh Castle. The work done, Mary was reminded of her promise to attend Sebastien’s wedding masque and she prepared to leave. She reassured Darnley, who had grown affectionate during the evening and, to the horror of Bothwell and his friends, had begged her to stay. To their relief she bade him goodnight, giving him a ring and promising him access to her bed the next night. As she came out of the house into the quadrangle, Mary saw Nicholas Hubert, the page nicknamed ‘French Paris’, covered in black powder and called out, ‘Jesu, Paris, how begrimed you are!’ She was coming dangerously near to having to acknowledge that she was aware of what was taking place, but immediately rode to the wedding celebrations, herself taking part in the mildly bawdy ceremony of putting the bride to bed. Shortly after midnight Mary was safely asleep in Holyrood.

In Kirk o’ Field Darnley continued to drink alone with William Taylor until he himself settled down to sleep. Taylor, as was normal, fell asleep on the floor of his room. The household
was not entirely asleep, however, since Hay and Hepburn kept watch below beside the gunpowder.

What now took place can be pieced together from various reports, nearly all suspiciously similar in their incrimination of Bothwell. Just before two o’clock in the morning, Ker of Fawdonside, under orders from Morton and Bothwell, arrived beyond the walls of Kirk o’ Field with a detachment of mounted and armed men. The garden of the house itself was already filled with Archibald Douglas and his men, all carrying torches – there was no moon that night – and heavily armed. These Douglases were kinsmen to Bothwell, and it had been at Archibald Douglas’s castle at Whittinghame that the final details had been agreed. Their arrival was less than surreptitious and had wakened two local housewives, Barbara Martin and Margaret Crockett, who later testified that they had seen thirteen men arrive from the Cowgate. The noise also awakened Darnley and William Taylor, and, realising that danger was imminent, they made to escape. Hearing that going out by the front of the house would take them directly into the arms of Douglas and his men, they climbed out of their window, Darnley still in his nightshirt and covered with a fur wrap. The two men had used a contraption made from a rope and a chair to negotiate the drop of some sixteen feet, and then made for the garden wall, taking the chair and rope to help them climb over it. It was while attempting to scale the further garden wall of Thieves Row that the pair were spotted by Douglas’s men. They were swiftly caught and strangled on the spot. Ironically, had they managed to escape through the garden and climb the next wall, they would have been trapped by Kerr of Fawdonside and his men. Their assailants probably did not know who they had murdered, although Darnley seems to have recognised the livery of the Whittinghame Douglases. Douglas himself did not know immediately that two escapees had been killed. In any case he might at first have presumed that both dead men were simply servants.

At about the same time, Bothwell and two friends left
Holyrood and walked up the High Street, which runs exactly parallel to the Cowgate. They then entered Edinburgh proper at the Netherbow Gate and descended by Blackfriars Wynd to cross the Cowgate and come to Kirk o’ Field. They arrived just after Darnley had been strangled. Bothwell, coming directly to the house, found Hay and Hepburn by the door and the fuse lit. The men then locked the doors of the house and retired into the quadrangle. Bothwell felt that the fuse was taking so much time that it had probably gone out and was about to enter the house to check when Hepburn pulled him back – at that point the powder exploded under the now-empty room.

‘There remains nothing, all being carried to a distance and reduced to dross, not only the roof and the floors but also the walls down to the foundations so that there rested not one stone on another.’ Nothing was ‘unruinated’. In fact, Douglas’s men were lucky not to have been struck by falling masonry as they rode off, to be seen again by the two housewives who called them traitors and said that they had been at ‘some evil turn’. As another part of their evidence the good ladies also claimed to have heard Darnley calling for mercy from his kinsmen (since the Douglases were related to him). When the two housewives, the only impartial witnesses, gave their evidence, ‘some words escaped which the inquisitors expected not and they were dismissed as rash and foolish’.

As to the other occupants of the house, Nelson and Simmons, the two servants who were sleeping in the corridor, seem to have followed Darnley and Taylor out of the window, probably having heard the doors being locked, and Nelson himself was alive and well, halfway over the town wall when he was found later by the rescuing party. Two other servants were found dead in the rubble, but everyone else survived. Darnley was certainly dead but the explosion had been, in reality, unnecessary.

The explosion was compared to ‘a volley of 25 or 30 cannon, arousing the whole town’ and people rushed to the scene where the settling dust revealed total devastation. Captain William
Blackadder, a supporter of Bothwell’s, was found wandering nearby and promptly arrested, only to be released when he was found to be no more than a late-night reveller returning home from an evening’s drinking near the Tron, or public weighbridge. Bothwell, as sheriff of Edinburgh, was summoned to take charge. In a dubious statement made in 1568 he claimed to have been asleep in bed in Holyrood with his wife, ‘his first Princess, the sister of the Earl of Huntly’. Antonia Fraser, in her biography of Mary, wisely points out that this alibi is time-honoured among the criminal fraternity. Bothwell arranged for Darnley’s body to be duly inspected by those members of the Privy Council available in Edinburgh, most of whom had been involved in the plot – the foreign ambassadors who asked to see the body were refused access. It was then taken to Holyrood where Mary paid £42 6s Scots to have it embalmed. Although Mary looked at the corpse of her dead husband she ‘gave no sign by which the secret emotions of her heart could be discovered’. On 15 February 1567, Darnley was buried in Holyrood Abbey beside James V and a solemn Requiem Mass and dirge was sung over him. A week later Mary entered on the formal forty days of mourning, and for safety’s sake moved back into Edinburgh Castle.

Mary was, in fact, stunned by the all-too-evident result of the Craigmillar Bond and, apart from issuing a proclamation offering £2,000 Scots and a life pension for information, she had no idea what action to take. Almost in a trance she attended the marriage of her bedchamber woman Margaret Carwood on 12 February, the Tuesday after the murder. She then went to Seton, relaxing enough to take part in archery contests, partnered by Bothwell against Huntly and Seton. Huntly and Seton lost the contest and had to buy their opponents dinner in nearby Tranent.

There were no immediate arrests but rumours were rife, and the
Diurnal of Occurrents
reported, ‘It was said that many great men gave consent to this treasonable deed, the like of which was never heard or seen in this realm. The Earl of Bothwell is
more familiar with the queen than honesty requires.’ Evidence was gathered in June 1567, when official statements were taken from the main protagonists. All had been tortured with great efficiency and all of their testimony now had a suspicious similarity. They claimed that Bothwell had brought the gunpowder from Dunbar and stored it in his apartments at Holyrood. In fact, Balfour had bought the powder, and since his house was next to the Provost’s lodging and had a perfectly good cellar, the explosive would have been stored there. Hay testified that Bothwell had warned him to be ready on 7 February, then that Powrie, Hepburn, Hay and the two Ormistons were briefed by Bothwell at four o’clock on 9 February, and that at ten o’clock the powder was transferred to Kirk o’ Field in ‘trunks’ on horseback. Bothwell had returned to the palace having left Darnley and changed his silver-trimmed black clothes for more practical black velvet. He was seen entering Edinburgh at the Netherbow Port, so that fragment of the ‘evidence’, at least, is true. Bothwell was then said to have personally supervised the powder being carried in bags into the room below Darnley’s, although one version has the powder being transported in barrels which were too wide for the door and then having to be carried loose into the building. However, Mary saw French Paris with a blackened face when she left the house with Bothwell on the night of 9 February, so the powder must have been in place already. All the versions agreed that the powder was heaped loosely in a ‘mine’ or ‘bing’ on the floor. Gunpowder in this state is highly flammable but not explosive, and if a light had then been set to it, it would have flared briefly with a not-very-satisfying ‘phutt’. To have caused an explosion of such destructive power it must have been tightly packed by James Cullen, the mercenary soldier. Darnley and Taylor presumably slept through all this activity, and one version has the plotters wearing slippers over their shoes to muffle the sound of their feet. Hepburn then lit the fuse, locked the door and joined Bothwell in the garden until the explosion took place and the conspirators scattered, Hepburn dropping
the copied keys down the Quarry Hole, a nearby well, as he made his way home to Leith. Bothwell was challenged by the sentries at the palace but reassured them that he was ‘a friend of Lord Bothwell’ and then retired to bed in Holyrood. Half an hour later he was roused by George Hackett, a palace guard, with the news that ‘The King is blown up. I trow the King is slain!’ Testimony from French Paris on 9 August 1569 and Ormiston on 13 December 1573 confirmed these unlikely stories. The explosives expert Cullen was examined and confirmed everyone else’s story, after which he was allowed to escape.

Veracity was actually of no importance since all the testimonies placed the blame firmly on Bothwell’s shoulders and no other member of the nobility was mentioned. Clearly from the evidence obtained it could be stated that Bothwell had acted single-handedly and was solely to blame. Since all the others were under his direct command they were obliged to carry out his orders. It was a very satisfactory solution since, by the time the evidence was obtained, Bothwell himself had fled into exile.

Immediately after the assassination, the ripples of gossip as to Mary’s involvement spread. Guzmán, the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth’s court, heard that Mary was at Dunbar with Argyll, Bothwell and Morton. He made the immediate presumption that Mary had had prior knowledge of the assassination and concluded, ‘Even if the Queen clears herself from it the matter is still obscure.’ Mary was not, in fact, at Dunbar, but Guzmán had already linked her with the principal conspirators.

When news reached Elizabeth, she reacted with customary practicality by having the doors leading to all her apartments locked, with the keys removed, leaving only one available, but closely guarded, entrance. Elizabeth also voiced her doubts as to the real culprits to Guzmán and the vexed question of a remarriage was raised. She sent Killigrew to investigate the state of affairs in Scotland with a strongly worded letter to Mary:

Madame, my ears have been so astounded and my heart so frightened to hear of the horrible and abominable murder . . . yet I cannot conceal that I grieve more for you than him. I should not do the office of a faithful cousin and friend if I did not urge you to preserve your honour, rather than look through your fingers at revenge at those who have done you such service . . . I counsel you to take this matter so far to heart that you will not fear to touch even those you have nearest to you and may show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are.

This letter shows Elizabeth’s secret service at its most efficient. The repetition of the exact phrase ‘look through your fingers’ might be a coincidence, but it might also give a strong hint that an eavesdropping servant at Craigmillar had reported the substance of the Craigmillar Bond to Elizabeth. Also, as far as one sovereign queen could suggest to another, Mary was being told to arrest Bothwell – ‘those you have nearest to you’. At the same time, the erroneous rumour in London was that Mary’s nobility suggested to her that ‘being a lone and solitary woman . . . she would do well to make him [Bothwell] partaker of her bed’. Killigrew was also told that all appearance of ‘amity’ would cease and that ratification of the Treaty of Edinburgh was once again paramount. In early March, Killigrew met with Mary ‘in a dark chamber and could not see her face’ but found her very doleful. The diplomatic clock had been put back seven years.