The Cradle King (5 page)

Most conspicuous by his absence was the proud father. King Henry was indeed at Stirling, and costumed by his wife all in gold, but his pride would not allow him to attend. He knew well that Elizabeth did not recognise his title and so her ambassador Bedford would not be allowed to greet him as King of Scots, only as Lord Darnley; he refused to be thus degraded in front of Mary. His fears were not unfounded: one English gentleman who happened to bump into Henry, taking the air, was severely reprimanded by Bedford for addressing him as King.
¹¹
It was not only England that refused to acknowledge Henry. On the very day of his son’s christening, Henry tried three times to summon Savoy’s proxy du Croc to his chamber: each time du Croc refused. Finally, the diplomat was forced to send a message to make the position cruelly plain: since he saw that Henry ‘was in no good correspondence with the Queen’ he had been told from his own master ‘to have no conference with him’. Moreover, Henry should know that du Croc’s chamber had two doors: if Henry came in one, he would be forced to leave by the other.
¹²
And so the King of Scots spent the day of his son’s christening in his chamber.

Mary herself, according to the French ambassador de Brienne, ‘behaved herself admirable well all the time of the baptism’, but failed to hide an underlying unhappiness. Answering a summons on 22 December to see the Queen, du Croc found her ‘laid on the bed weeping sore’, complaining of a ‘grievous pain in her side’, as well as the effects of an accident sustained on setting out from Edinburgh, when Mary ‘hurt one of her breasts on the horse, which she told me is now swelled’.
¹³
Despite any personal unhappiness, Mary continued to consolidate her power against her husband. Seven days after the baptism, on 24 December 1566, she pardoned Riccio’s murderers – with the pointed exception of Andrew Kerr of Fawdonsyde and George Douglas, whom she continued to claim had threatened her own life. The men Henry had betrayed to save his skin were thus back in royal favour; his life could not be safe again. Without taking leave of his wife, he left Stirling for his father’s home at Glasgow. A mile out of town, he fell suddenly sick with ‘very great pain and dolour in every part of his body’. By the time he had reached Glasgow, blue blisters had broken out and, according to Lord Herries, ‘his hair fell off’ causing the inevitable rumours of poison (modern biographers tend, perhaps equally inevitably, towards a diagnosis of syphilis).
¹⁴

Mary spent what was left of the year with her son, now approaching six months old, at Stirling, leaving him for two days to celebrate the New Year with her Comptroller Sir William Murray at his Perthshire estate of Tullibardine.
¹⁵
On returning to Stirling, however, she received disturbing news. A servant of Archbishop Beaton named William Walker asked to be admitted to her presence, and told her, as she later relayed to Beaton, that it was ‘openly bruited’ (rumoured) and backed by reliable sources ‘that the King, by the assistance of some of our nobility, should take the Prince our son and crown him; and being crowned, as his father should take upon him the government’. Pushed to reveal his sources, Walker named the town clerk of Glasgow, William Hiegait, who had told him, ‘If I had the means and credit with the Queen’s Majesty that you have, I would not omit to make her privy of such purposes and bruits that pass in the country’ – ‘bruits’ like the rumour the King would not abide some of the noblemen who formed Mary’s court. Taking the threat seriously, Mary sent for Hiegait and put him in front of the Privy Council. Abruptly he changed his tune, denying that any such conversation had occurred, and relaying instead another ‘bruit’, that the King was going to be put in prison, naming as
his
source a servant of the Earl of Eglinton named Cauldwell. Cauldwell was instantly summoned and flatly denied Hiegait’s story, just as Hiegait had denied Walker’s. ‘In fine,’ wrote Mary in exasperation, ‘we find no matter of concordance, every one disagreeing on the whole purposes spoken.’ To Beaton she admitted her worries about the intentions of Henry and his father, but concluded, ‘God moderates their forces well enough, and takes the means of execution of their pretences from them: for, as we believe, they shall find none, or very few approve of their counsels and devices imagined to our displeasure or misliking.’
¹⁶

As the New Year dawned Henry again fell ill, this time felled ‘full of the smallpox’. Mary finally attended to her husband, sending her physician to Henry on 9 January 1567. On 14 January she travelled to Edinburgh, carrying James and accompanied by ‘the whole nobility’; six days later, she set off for Glasgow,
¹⁷
taking an empty horse litter to bear Henry home. Henry greeted news of her arrival with satirical ennui: ‘If she come it shall be to my comfort and she shall be welcome. If she tarry, even as it pleaseth her so be it. But this much you shall declare unto her, that I wish Stirling to be Jedburgh, Glasgow to be the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here, and then I doubt not that she would be quickly with me, undesired.’
¹⁸
Asking why she had brought the litter, Mary explained that it was intended to make his journey more gentle than it would be on horseback. A sick man shouldn’t travel in such cold weather, he responded. Mary insisted that she would accompany him to take the waters at Craigmillar ‘to be with him and not far from her son’. Henry vetoed the Craigmillar suggestion, and insisted on returning to Edinburgh, a slow journey which took them four days, reaching the city on 30 or 31 January. Mary claimed that Holyroodhouse was not a suitable venue due to its bad air – which had not deterred her from placing James there, however – so Henry was lodged at the Old Provost’s House at Kirk o’ Field, an estate on Edinburgh’s south side, on higher ground, ‘a place of good air, where he might best recover his health’, as Sir James Melville put it.
¹⁹
Henry was unhappy about his lodging, but the Queen insisted he stay there, pointing out its handsome furnishings, many of them imported specially from Holyrood.

While Mary lodged with her son at Holyrood, she was a frequent visitor to Kirk o’ Field, sitting for hours at Henry’s bedside and often spending the night in a room below her husband. For ten days, the King and Queen seemed happier than they had ever been: on 7 February, Henry wrote to his father, celebrating the return of ‘my good health’ which he attributed to ‘the good treatment of such as hath this good while concealed their good will, I mean my love the Queen. Which I assure you hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife. I hope yet that God will lighten our hearts with joy that have so long been afflicted with trouble.’ As Henry finished the letter, Mary read it over his shoulder, put her arm around his neck and kissed him. But, as later Lennox wrote, Mary ‘kissed him as Judas did the Lord his Master This tyrant having brought her faithful and most loving husband, that innocent lamb, from his careful and loving father to his place of execution, where he was a sure sacrifice unto Almighty God.’
²⁰

By Sunday 10 February, the King had been given a clean bill of health. He expected to resume his full public life the following day. That morning, Mary visited Henry at Kirk o’ Field in the afternoon, and then returned to Holyroodhouse to attend the marriage festivities of her musician servant Bastien Pagès and Margaret Carwood, her principal bedchamber woman. After retiring for the night, Mary, along with most of Edinburgh, was shaken awake by a huge explosion, which appeared to come from Kirk o’ Field. ‘The blast was fearful to all about,’ wrote Herries. ‘Many rose from their beds at the noise, and came in multitudes to looke upon the dead corpses, without knowing the cause.’
²¹
The bodies of King Henry and his man William Taylor, who shared his bedchamber, were found in the garden of the house. It was obvious to all, from the state of the bodies, that the two men had been killed before the explosion, probably by strangulation.

In time, it would become clear that the murder was indeed Bothwell’s doing, although the precise sequence of events remains unclear. In one account, Bothwell and two associates strangled the King and his servant in their beds, carried the corpses down to the garden, and then fired some gunpowder stored under the King’s bedchamber, to make it appear that the house was blown up by accident, and the two corpses flung over the wall by the force of the explosion. But, as Herries notes, ‘neither were their shirts singed, nor their clothes burnt (which were likeways laid by them), nor their skins anything touched with fire’.
²²
Another scenario had the King awakened by the sound of the conspirators laying the explosives under his chamber, and attempting to escape through the window, only to meet his death outside.

Bothwell volunteered to the Queen to investigate the noise, and on his return, was the one to break the news of the King’s death. ‘The Queen was suddenly taken with grief,’ reports Herries.
²³
Writing to Beaton in Paris, Mary claimed that the attack was evidently aimed at her personally: ‘We assure ourself it was dressed always for us as for the King; for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and was there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town that same night at midnight, and of very chance tarried not all night, by reason of some masque in the Abbey.’ Her decision to leave Henry’s lodging must have been heaven-sent: ‘we believe it was not chance but God put it in our head.’
²⁴

The English ambassador Sir Henry Killigrew was not allowed audience with Mary until 8 March, when he delivered letters from Elizabeth. ‘I found the Queen in a dark chamber, and could not see her face; but by her words she seemed very doleful.’
²⁵
Elizabeth wrote to express her sorrow for the ‘horrible and abominable murder of your late husband and my killed cousin’, but also to advise Mary more pragmatically. ‘I cannot conceal that I grieve more for you than him,’ she wrote. As ‘a faithful cousin and friend’, she urged Mary to be seen to preserve her honour rather than merely ‘look through your fingers at revenge’. Mary should ‘take this matter to heart, that you may show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are. I write thus vehemently not that I doubt, but for affection.’
²⁶
Elizabeth’s advice was timely: Killigrew sensed ‘a general misliking among the commons and others which abhor the detestable murder of their King, a shame as they suppose to the whole nation. The preachers say, and pray openly to God, that it will please Him both to reveal and revenge; exhorting all men to prayer and repentance.’
²⁷

Early searches ordered by Edinburgh’s magistrate ‘for any suspicious people’ had only turned up one Captain William Blackature, who had been drinking wine in the house of William Henderson at the Trone. It was alleged that Blackature, on hearing the explosion, ‘run out and left the wine undrunk’, a detail that in itself was alleged to be suspicious behaviour for a captain; Blackature was arrested and hanged, ‘although no clear proof was brought against him’. Official investigations continued, with interrogations of ‘mean people’ who lived near the Kirk o’ Field, and of Henry’s servants. But these were largely irrelevant: ‘the streets were strown [strewed] full of libels and pamphlets, that divulged the contrivers and actors, with all the circumstances’ – namely, that Moray and Morton had planned it, and Bothwell carried out the act. Moray’s departure on the morning before the murder to see his heavily pregnant wife at St Andrews was denounced as a ruse.
²⁸

Mary may not have been strictly complicit in the murder, but at the very least it seems probable that she had foreknowledge of the conspirators’ plans: her recorded attempt to persuade Moray to stay on the morning of the murder suggests that she understood this to be a signal that the act was imminent. Now, however, the dangers to herself and to her baby son were clear. On 19 March Bothwell decreed that Prince James should be returned to Stirling Castle, and he was conveyed there by Argyll and Huntly. The Earl of Mar, ‘a trusty man’, according to Herries,
²⁹
was removed from Edinburgh Castle and presented with the governorship of Stirling Castle: James could now be raised by Mar at Stirling. Such an upbringing was by no means abnormal for a future King of Scots. Life expectancy of Scottish sovereigns was low: since the accession of Robert III in 1390, every monarch had come to the throne a minor. The upbringing and educating of Scottish heirs to the throne away from their parents was therefore an old, honourable and politically wise practice, to ensure the crown’s succession. Mary’s directions to Mar, dated 29 March 1567, have survived. James, ‘our dearest son, your natural Prince’, was to be placed in Mar’s hands ‘to be conserved, nursed and upbrought’ in Stirling Castle ‘under your tutill and governance’. Mar was expressly commanded to ‘suffer nor permit no noblemen of our realm or any others, of what condition soever that they be of, to enter or come within our said Castle or to the presence of our said dearest son, accompanied with any more persons but two or three at the most.’
³⁰
Such regulations would appear on the surface to be merely precautionary, and highly sensible: that no sizeable armed force should be allowed anywhere near the body of the young and highly vulnerable Prince. But there was another implication to these guidelines, as Mary well knew. For a nobleman to be accompanied by no more than ‘two or three at the most’ was deeply insulting, as nobility was often vouchsafed by a performance of strength in numbers. Mary’s rules meant that anyone wishing to be granted access to her son would have to humble themselves in a highly visible manner.