Mary, Queen of Scots (45 page)

With his brother owning the Old and New Provost’s Lodgings, Balfour would have been able to gain access to Darnley’s house in order to position explosives beneath it. Robert Balfour had delivered the keys to the house to Thomas Nelson, but there would almost certainly have been a duplicate set; Hepburn alleged that Balfour had one made. John Binning, Archibald Douglas’s servant, later claimed that one of the Balfour brothers was seen at the foot of Thraples or Throplows Wynd (which no longer exists) near Kirk o’Field on the night of Darnley’s death. Binning also named Robert Balfour as one of the conspirators. Balfour not only had the opportunity to commit murder, he had a motive, which was the identification of his interests with those of the powerful Lords who were his co-signatories to the Craigmillar Bond.

Morton’s indictment of 1581 asserted that he himself had “placed and input” the gunpowder “under the ground and angular [i.e., sloping] stones, and within the vaults in low and secret places,” which is at variance with what the depositions and the
Book of Articles
had hitherto claimed, which was that the gunpowder had been placed in the Queen’s room, an allegation that was almost certainly invented in order to incriminate her.

On 28 February, Drury informed Cecil that “one from Edinburgh” had affirmed that Balfour had “bought of him powder as much as he should have paid three score pounds Scottish.”
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It has been suggested that this powder was stored in the New Provost’s Lodging, and later moved to the house next door. Bothwell claimed that, once the “traitors” had seen that the Old Provost’s Lodging “would suit their purpose admirably, they collected a whole lot of gunpowder and stacked it under his [Darnley’s] bed,” which is what was alleged in the Queen’s indictment of 1568. This does not necessarily mean that the powder was placed immediately under the bed, but probably that it was positioned two floors below; Mondovi was told by Clernault that a mine had been “laid under that apartment only where the King slept.”
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Significantly, Bothwell added that “this was done at the dwelling of Sir James Balfour,”
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which suggests that the powder was stored at Balfour’s own house, not the New Provost’s Lodging belonging to his brother. At the time Bothwell made this allegation, he had good reason to calumniate Balfour, who had callously abandoned him in order to preserve his own life and career.

In order to bring about the destruction that occurred at Kirk o’Field, it would have been necessary for the gunpowder to be packed into the foundations of the house. A pile of gunpowder loose in a ground floor room would not have had such a devastating effect, and many people were of the opinion that Darnley’s house had been mined. On the day after the murder, the Council informed Catherine de’ Medici, “It is well seen that this unhappy affair proceeded from an underground mine,” while the Queen told Archbishop Beaton that “it must have been done by the force of powder, and appears to have been a mine.” Clernault echoed this in his first report of the murder: “It is very clear that this wicked enterprise was occasioned by an underground mine,” and later, in Paris, he declared, “Some scoundrels fired a mine, which they had already laid under the foundation of the said lodging. The house was reduced to ruins in an instant.” Mondovi refers to a mine exploding,
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and Moray told de Silva on 19 May that the house had been “entirely undermined.”
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The Diurnal of Occurrents, Thomas Wilson and Melville were all of the same opinion, while Lennox claimed that “the place was already prepared with undermines and trains of powder.” Buchanan, in his
Detectio
, states that the assassins had retained the key to the lower room, “where they had undermined the wall and filled the holes with gunpowder”; elsewhere he says that the powder was put under the foundations of the house”; this all runs counter to the evidence of the depositions, which Buchanan prints in the English edition of the same work.

It seems fairly certain, therefore, that the house was mined, and that, as Morton’s indictment stated, the gunpowder was buried under the ground and packed in between the stones of the vaults; the ceiling was low and the powder was hidden in secret places. Bothwell and Clernault both averred that the powder had been laid beneath the King’s bedroom, that is, in the cellar kitchen of the Old Provost’s Lodging. This could not have been done until the evening before the murder, for Bonkil and his assistants would have been on duty for much of the time that Darnley was at Kirk o’Field, and there must of necessity have been at least an open fire for cooking, which could have ignited the powder dust at any time. The kitchen staff would probably have left early on the evening of the 9th, having given their master his supper; their services were not needed any further, for the Queen and her entourage would not have required any food, having just attended Moretta’s banquet. After Bonkil and his assistants had gone, Bothwell’s henchmen would have got speedily and stealthily down to work, conveying the powder from Balfour’s house to Darnley’s, and putting it in place. This was no doubt how Paris became very “begrimed,” as Mary herself noticed, and it was probably the reason why the explosion was delayed for two hours after the Queen’s departure.

Because part of the eastern gable wall of Darnley’s house was left standing and the back door of the New Provost’s Lodging was damaged, it is possible that the vaults beneath the eastern end of the Prebendaries’ Chamber, where the ceiling was higher, were also mined, so as to effect the greatest possible damage. The Prebendaries’ Chamber was destroyed in the explosion.

For more than four centuries, there has been speculation that Mary, Queen of Scots was a party to her husband’s murder, or at least had foreknowledge of it. Even today, the matter is controversial, with Mary’s detractors insisting she was guilty and her partisans proclaiming her innocence, much as happened during her own lifetime.

It is indeed possible to construct a convincing case against Mary, even without reference to the Casket Letters and the works of Buchanan and Lennox, for the circumstantial evidence is strong. Mary did want to be rid of Darnley. His treasonable conspiracies were grounds enough to justify his murder. The most telling evidence against Mary is the fact that she took him from the safety of his father’s power base at Glasgow to Edinburgh, where he had powerful enemies who had good reason to seek vengeance on him or even kill him; she herself had sanctioned the return of some of these men from exile less than two months earlier. According to the later libels, she was having an adulterous affair with Bothwell at the time, and wanted to marry him, but whether this was true or not, and there is no contemporary evidence to show that it was true, she certainly continued to show favour to Bothwell after he had asked her to sanction the murder of Darnley; Bothwell had earlier told Morton that Mary had given her consent to it.
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Mary had agreed to a surprising reconciliation with Darnley, which may have been a pretence calculated to divert suspicion from herself. It was perhaps more than coincidence that the syphilitic Darnley was murdered the very night before he had been due to resume carnal relations with his wife. Mary herself had fortuitously—or deliberately—left Kirk o’Field about two hours before the explosion. Finally, she was quite capable of sanctioning the murder of someone who had become inconvenient: there is no escaping the fact that, in 1586, she authorised the assassination of Queen Elizabeth by Anthony Babington and his associates as a preliminary to seizing the throne of England.

On the face of it, this is all pretty damning, but it is not the whole picture. There is no evidence that Mary ever contemplated freeing herself from Darnley by other than legal means. When Maitland suggested that other ways might be found, she insisted that they must not conflict with her honour and conscience. When Mary took Darnley away from Glasgow, she was in possession of compelling evidence that he was plotting against her in order to seize power and rule through their child; she was therefore in some peril, and it would have been unthinkable for her to have left him where he was, with an English ship waiting in the Clyde and his father at hand to raise troops. That Darnley was dangerous was later confirmed by de Alava, who later opined that Mary had had to get rid of him, otherwise he would have killed her.
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But Mary would hardly have connived at the killing of her husband, who was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, on the eve of the hoped-for settlement of the English succession question. In bringing him back to Edinburgh, however, she unwittingly gave his enemies the opportunity of bringing their plans to fruition.

Mary had indeed recalled the exiles who were out for Darnley’s blood, but only after months of being pressured to do so by their friends; she must have known that these men posed a danger to Darnley, but she took measures to prevent them from coming anywhere near him, banning them from court for two years. She may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the fact that Bothwell and other Lords accompanied her on her visits to cheer the invalid at Kirk o’Field.

Mary did continue to show favour to Bothwell after he asked her to sanction Darnley’s murder; she also continued to favour Maitland and Moray, even though they had hinted at getting rid of Darnley by underhand means. She was no innocent, and knew the turbulent nature of her nobles. In both cases, she had made it categorically clear that she did not approve of the suggestions put to her, and she doubtless naïvely expected her embargo to be sufficient. Bothwell’s loyalty had been proven again and again; she could have imputed his suggestion to an excess of zeal for her welfare, and even if she had taken offence at it, she could not have afforded to alienate him.

With regard to her reconciliation with Darnley, this is in keeping with other evidence that suggests that Mary had come to realise that there was no lawful means of ridding herself of her husband and that, given the imminent hoped-for accord with England, it would be more advantageous to her to stay married: her union with Darnley had greatly strengthened her claim to the English succession, since many members of the English Parliament felt that he had the better claim. Without him, she would have been far less acceptable to Elizabeth’s subjects. This apart, it is unthinkable that Mary would have prejudiced these longed-for negotiations by committing murder just as they were about to begin. Instead, she had probably resolved to make the best of her marriage. She had forgiven men who had committed worse crimes against her, so there was no reason why she should not have been reconciled to Darnley. The reconciliation may not have been heartfelt, but Mary may have hoped that, as a result of it, she would be able to wean her husband away from his plotting and prevent him from going abroad, for his abandonment of her at this time would have been a serious embarrassment.

Mary may have left the gathering at Kirk o’Field at a fortuitous time, but she herself would always maintain that she had been the intended victim, and that it was only by a lucky chance that she had not returned to the Old Provost’s Lodging to stay the night. In the letters written the day after the murder, both she and the Privy Council stated this belief, and it would be repeated in a report sent to Cecil on 19 March,
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although soon the official line would change. Mondovi was of the opinion that Mary, by “being too prone to pity and clemency,” had become “a prey to those heretics, with danger even to her life.”
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Bishop Leslie, who was in Mary’s confidence, later recalled, “She returned thanks to God for her preservation from so great a peril, for it looked as though the contrivers of the plot had expected that she would pass the night there with the King, and they planned the destruction of them both.” Even after Mary’s death, the belief that she had been the intended victim persisted, as was manifest in the funeral sermon preached in Notre-Dame de Paris by Renauld de Beaulne, Archbishop of Bourges, in March 1587.
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As for Mary’s capacity for murder, by the time she connived in the plot to assassinate Elizabeth, she had been a prisoner in England for eighteen frustrating and miserable years, during which she had plotted ceaselessly for her release and her elevation to her cousin’s throne. She was then an ageing, embittered woman, worn down by injustice and ill health, and a shade of the girl of twenty-four she had been in 1567. In addition, after 1570, the Pope had sanctioned and urged the assassination of Queen Elizabeth as a means of furthering the counter-reformation. Moreover, while there is good evidence of Mary’s complicity in the Babington Plot, there is no reliable evidence of it in the Kirk o’Field plot, and prior to 1567, nothing to show that she had the makings of a murderess. She had seen murder and bloodshed at first hand, and been profoundly shocked by it.

There are other good reasons for believing Mary innocent. She did not choose Kirk o’Field as a lodging for Darnley. She had intended that he stay at Craigmillar, where he would be more secure from his enemies. Bothwell allegedly asked Paris, rather than Mary, to bring him the keys to the Old Provost’s Lodging; had Mary been in league with Bothwell, it would have been easier, and more logical, for her to supply them. If Mary had been involved in the conspiracy allegedly described by Lord Robert Stewart to Darnley, she would hardly have allowed Darnley to confront Lord Robert. It is also highly unlikely that she would have consented to become involved in a Protestant plot against a fellow Catholic, because, given Darnley’s highprofile protestations of faith, the outcry among her co-religionists would have been great. Furthermore, if Moray and Maitland were behind the conspiracy, which seems almost certain, they would hardly have taken Mary into their confidence; she was certainly in ignorance of it when Maitland warned her not to remain at Kirk o’Field on 9 February. It has been suggested that, as so many people were involved in the plot against Darnley, Mary could not have failed to be aware of it; but even more people were involved in the conspiracy against Rizzio, and she, Bothwell and others had still remained in ignorance of it. With the murder of a king being high treason, the conspirators had even more compelling reasons for maintaining secrecy. Finally, Hay, Hepburn and others had “declared the Queen’s innocence” in their confessions,
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and, in July 1567, her own confessor confided to de Silva that she had had no knowledge of Darnley’s murder and was greatly grieved by it.
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