The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (19 page)

What happened was simple enough. Around two o’clock on the morning of Monday, 10 February, a huge explosion utterly destroyed Kirk o’ Field. ‘The blast was fearfull to all about,’ remembered John Maxwell, Lord Herries, ‘and many rose from their beds at the noise.’ It is easy to understand why Mary should have thought the plot aimed at her. After dining with some of her nobles, among them Bothwell and the earls of Huntly and Argyll, she had passed the Sunday evening with Darnley and had intended to spend the night in the house, sleeping in the chamber below his, as she had done more than once in his week of convalescence. It was only at about ten or eleven o’clock that she was reminded that she had promised to dance at the wedding party of Bastien, one of her French servants, who had been married that morning to one of her maids. Darnley, with whom relations had been friendly, even affectionate, since his arrival in Edinburgh, begged her to stay. She might well have done so, but said she must keep her promise to Bastien. Those determined to have Mary as an accomplice in the crime may present her departure to go to the dance as evidence that she knew Kirk o’ Field was no place in which to remain. To believe this is to make her a hypocrite as well as a murderess, for she gave Darnley the present of a ring before she left and made arrangements that the next day he would return with her to Holyrood. It is also pertinent to observe that Darnley had written to his father two days previously to tell him that his recovery from illness had been quicker than he expected, thanks to Mary, who had behaved ‘like a natural and loving wife’.

Mary was not alone in thinking, as she told the Archbishop of Glasgow, that the explosion had been meant to kill her as well as Darnley. The Venetian ambassador in Paris received information that the murder was the work of heretics ‘who designed the same for the Queen’. The charges cannot be easily discounted. Moray and the murderers of Rizzio had cause to wish to be rid of both King and Queen, Darnley because he had betrayed them (as they thought), Mary because they could not believe she had forgiven them. Moreover, despite Mary’s tolerance of Protestantism, the fear of a Catholic counter-revolution was real enough.

Darnley, though, was not apparently killed by the explosion. His body, naked under his nightshirt, was found in the garden some way from the ruined house. Beside him was his valet, Taylor, who was also dead, and beside them a chair, a length of rope, a furred cloak and a dagger. There was no mark on the King’s body. According to some accounts he was strangled, according to others smothered. I say ‘apparently’ because it is possible that both men, chair and rope were thrown there by the force of the blast. As Eric Linklater, advancing this theory in an essay, remarked, stranger things were recorded after bombing raids in the 1939–45 war. The more commonly held theory is that

Something frightened Darnley, as he lay within the mined house, and frightened him so badly that he escaped out of the Provost’s Lodging in only a nightgown and attempted to make his way across the gardens beyond the town wall to safety. He had had no time to dress himself, and although his servant picked up a cloak, Darnley was not wearing it when he died. They had one dagger between them. The chair and the rope indicate the improvised method of their escape – a chair let down by a rope out of the gallery window into the alleyway…
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The explanation is persuasive, yet not quite cogent. First, why was the chair near the bodies? Second, if there was indeed no mark on Darnley’s body, and he was killed, as is surmised by some of the Douglas men in the service of the Earl of Morton, neither strangling (which would have left marks) nor smothering (which wouldn’t) was a mode of murder likely to occur to Morton’s men. Use of the sword or dagger would have been more their style.

Some women who lived nearby in Blackfriars Wynd affirmed that they had heard Darnley crying out for mercy: ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the sake of Jesus Christ, who pitied all the world.’ They may have heard such cries, but it sounds like an invention after the fact.

The mystery of Kirk o’Field is likely never to be solved.
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Various alleged accomplices, mostly servants or associates, eventually confessed to their part in the plot, or to knowledge of what had happened. But their confessions were all made under torture or the threat of torture, and though earlier historians who lived in gentler times than ours may have taken them at face value, we have learned that men who are tortured will mostly say in the end what their torturers want them to say. Some of their accounts, designed to incriminate Bothwell – and Bothwell alone – are incredible. In particular, what became the official version of how and when the gunpowder was brought to Kirk o’ Field makes no sense at all. There can be no serious doubt that it was stored in the cellars of the house before Darnley arrived there; and in that case the man responsible for arranging this must have been Sir James Balfour, at that time an ally of Bothwell, very soon his enemy.

Bothwell himself was almost certainly the man immediately responsible for lighting the fuse, but he acted, for once, in concert with other nobles: Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Ruthven, Morton and Lindsay, with Moray cautiously in the background. All had reasons either to hate Darnley or want to be avenged on him for his treachery at the time of Rizzio’s murder, or to fear that he was indeed the figurehead, if not the prime mover, of a projected Catholic
coup d’état
. As for Bothwell himself, his subsequent actions make it clear that he intended to take Darnley’s place as the Queen’s husband. Foreigners had no doubt that many of the leading Scottish nobles had been behind the conspiracy. The ambassador of Savoy, Moretta, pointed the finger at Moray. Both Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici wrote to Mary saying it was imperative that suspects be put on trial and found guilty.

Darnley’s bereaved father, the Earl of Lennox, was angrily calling for justice – or vengeance – and had no doubt that Bothwell was the guilty man. Meanwhile placards were posted in the streets of Edinburgh naming Bothwell and Balfour as the murderers. One showed Mary as a mermaid, stripped to the waist, with Bothwell crouched by her side. In contemporary iconography, a mermaid meant a siren, even by extension a prostitute; the implication was all too clear and damning.

The Queen herself was at a loss, near despair, sunk in passivity. It was as if she had suffered a nervous collapse. She could hardly be blamed. She was isolated. One must remember that Darnley was murdered less than twelve months after Rizzio had been stabbed in her presence. Both murders had been the work of members of her nobility, the men with whose help she was supposed to govern the country. She may no longer have believed that she herself had been the intended victim, but she cannot have been sure whom she should trust. The English agent Sir William Drury reported to his master, William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary of state, that Mary had been ‘melancholy or sickly’ ever since the murder and had fainted several times.

The Earl of Lennox brought a private petition accusing Bothwell of the crime. Mary agreed that he should stand trial before Parliament, and he declared himself willing, even eager to do so, that he might establish his innocence. On the appointed day, 12 April 1567, he rode into Edinburgh at the head of a troop of armed men, with Maitland and Morton on either side of him. The formalities of justice were observed, but Lennox failed to appear to make the case for the prosecution, presumably because he was afraid, and so Bothwell was acquitted. Rumours persisted, accusations still flew, one placard denouncing Bothwell as ‘the chief author of the foul and horrible murder’, but for the moment he was in the clear. He rode to Parliament the following day at the Queen’s side, and heard it pronounced that his trial had been just according to the law of the land. The way was now open for his next step: marriage to Mary and the Crown.

For this he needed support, and he had little doubt that he could obtain it. When Mary at Craigmillar Castle the previous December had spoken of her wish for a divorce from Darnley, and Maitland had assured her that they would find the means to free her from her husband in a manner approved by Parliament, it was then thought ‘expedient’, according to one account, ‘and most profitable for the common wealth, by the whole nobility and lords under scribed, that such a young fool and proud tyrant should not reign or bear rule over them; and that for diverse causes, therefore, that these all had concluded that he should be put off by one way or another; and whosoever should take the deed in hand, or do it, they should defend and fortify as themselves’.
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Actual evidence of this bond has been lost, but it was reputedly signed by Bothwell, Maitland, Argyll, Huntly and James Balfour, later also by Morton, while Moray, according to Maitland, ‘looked through his fingers’, neither dissenting nor putting his name to it. Bothwell now attempted the same device. He held a supper party at Ainslie’s Tavern in the high street. There were twenty-eight guests – noblemen and bishops. At the end of the meal Bothwell produced a document in which, after declaring again his own innocence of Darnley’s murder – this must have caused many of the company to smile knowingly – he demanded that if the Queen were to choose him as her new husband, those present were to promise to support and approve the marriage by all means. Eight bishops, nine earls and seven barons obligingly signed. Some may have been drunk, some afraid, some indifferent; a few possibly sincere. Most would soon disclaim or choose to forget their participation, among them Maitland and Morton. Moray was not present at this remarkable supper party, being in London courting Elizabeth’s favour.

Mary was in truth at Bothwell’s mercy. All the contemporary evidence as to her state of mind in the weeks following Darnley’s murder points to the same conclusion: that she was at a loss, incapable of coherent thought or independent action, and frequently in tears. She was still a young woman, not yet twenty-five, and her experiences in the last year had been horrible. If she was now willing to rely on Bothwell, it was because he alone of her nobility had not yet betrayed her. Even so, she must have suspected that he had indeed had a hand in Darnley’s murder.

Novelists and playwrights, and some romantically minded historians, have portrayed Bothwell as the great love of her life, even suggesting that she experienced with him a sexual satisfaction she had not known before.
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There is no evidence of this. She married Bothwell because she could see no alternative, because she was constrained, not because she loved him. First, he was a strong man, and she desperately needed such a husband, one with whom ‘she sought to share the strains of the government of Scotland’. He seemed capable of providing her with that necessary support, and he reinforced this opinion by presenting her with the ‘Ainslie bond’, or a copy of it. Even so, she twice refused his proposal of marriage, till by her account, he forced himself upon her and raped her.
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She submitted. Bothwell quickly arranged to be divorced. His wife – Lady Jean Gordon, Huntly’s sister – obligingly accused him of adultery, and asked the court to be ‘no longer reuted flesh of his flesh’. It was, however, his counter-suit pleading for an annulment that was approved, on the grounds that the marriage had been ‘null from the beginning in respect of their contingence in blood, without a dispensation obtained before’. This judgement was delivered by the Roman Catholic Archbishop Hamilton; in the eyes of both the Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Kirk, Bothwell was at liberty to marry again.
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So, on 15 May 1567, a mere four months after Darnley’s murder, Mary and Bothwell were married by Protestant rites, something of which Mary would later be bitterly ashamed. Whatever she hoped for, she found neither happiness nor security. In the weeks after the marriage – the few weeks in which they were together – she was often in tears, and once asked for a knife so that she might kill herself.

Worse still, it was soon clear that his fellow nobles would not submit to Bothwell’s authority. The assurance offered by the Ainslie bond proved delusory, its signatories reneging on their word. Mary and Bothwell were faced with armed rebellion. The two armies met at Carberry Hill outside Musselburgh on 15 June, and Bothwell’s melted away. Mary submitted to the opposition lords on a promise of safe conduct for her husband, a promise scarcely worth the air it was spoken in. Her spirit was not yet altogether broken. When she caught sight of the Earl of Morton, she called out, ‘How is this, my lord? I am told that all this is done in order to get justice against the king’s murderers. But I am told also that you are one of the chief of them.’ Morton turned away, but this was the last show of spirit from the Queen for a long time. Much worse was to follow for her. She was led back to Edinburgh as a prisoner, with an angry mob surging around her shrieking insults and calling out ‘burn the hoor’. She was alone, afraid and compelled to realise that she had lost the love of her people as surely as the loyalty of the nobility. In the city she was lodged in the Provost’s house rather than in the castle or at Holyrood. The next morning, after a miserable night, she appeared at the window, calling out that she was being held a prisoner by subjects who had betrayed her. She was hauled away, but the people had already seen their young Queen, her hair disordered, her clothes torn open, distraught, looking like a madwoman.

The nobles, Moray and Morton chief among them, were determined to be rid of her. They too were nervous. Bothwell was still at large. He might raise troops. The Hamiltons, in the west, were still loyal to Mary, and were Moray’s sworn enemies. The fickle Edinburgh mob might turn against them, especially if they learned that the Queen was now demanding a parliamentary inquiry into Darnley’s murder. That was something Morton, Maitland and Sir James Balfour, all party to the conspiracy, were anxious to avoid. Better to remove Mary from Edinburgh to some secure place where she would be alone, unprotected, without friends, at their mercy.