by Alex Nye
“Sound the tocsin.”
A bell began ringing as they raised the alarm. I could hear the dull tones of its clamour drifting on the night air, across the city.
Bothwell was staying at Holyrood that night, along with the rest of the royal party. He, being the sheriff of the town, was quick to take charge, and sent messengers ahead to investigate. He then followed them on foot, climbing up the hill to Kirk o’ Field to see for himself. I remained at Holyrood with my ladies-in-waiting, waiting anxiously for news. A sense of deep dread and foreboding had begun to fill the pit of my stomach. It made me nauseous with fear. I did not know what news would come, but I knew it could not be good.
It was much later that Bothwell told me what he had found on his arrival at Kirk o’ Field. It was still snowing as he left. The old Provost’s House where Darnley had been staying was utterly destroyed, reduced to a pile of rubble. There were scorch marks and ashes peppering the snow nearby – indeed, ashes still drifted on the air along with the falling snowflakes – but of the building itself, nothing remained. Neither was there any sign of my husband. Bothwell and those accompanying him searched the charred ruins in the darkness with the aid of torches, but found nothing.
“We dug with our bare hands, Ma’am,” he told me. “But Darnley is simply missing. It is to be hoped he escaped.”
“But how could he?” I said. “In his weakened state?”
Bothwell shrugged.
“And where is Maitland, my Secretary of State, when I need him?” I cried in agitation, furiously pacing my rooms.
“He has had to leave town, Ma’am,” someone informed me. “He was called away straight after the wedding celebrations.”
The wedding celebrations? I stared at the floor. The festivities of a few hours before seemed so long ago, as if they had taken place in a different world altogether. A line had been drawn in the sand at my feet. There was Before. And now there was After.
“There is not a stone remaining?” I asked Bothwell.
He shook his head.
“I stayed at that house as recently as two nights ago. I could have stayed there last night, had someone not warned me of Bastien’s wedding…”
I stopped short, arrested by this thought.
I raised my eyes and met Bothwell’s gaze. He did not turn away.
“Did you search the garden?” I asked.
“Every part of it, Ma’am.”
My husband had gone missing and the house he was staying in had been destroyed, not a brick or stone remaining.
Hours later I sat at my writing desk before the fire. The day had advanced and there was a weak winter sun in the sky. I was hastily dressed and over-wrought from lack of sleep when they brought me further news of what had happened.
By daylight they had searched a wider area and my husband’s body had been discovered, lying on the far side of the town wall, in a grassy area, stretched out in the snow.
Bothwell gave me the unwelcome details. “He was naked beneath his shift, but there was not a mark on him. No scorch-marks, no blood, no signs of a struggle. His poor valet, William Taylor, perished too, and was found alongside him, together with some household objects.”
“What objects?” I asked.
“A chair, a cloak, a small dagger and a length of rope. It was a group of my men who found him, Ma’am. Someone shouted out and by the time I got there a small crowd had gathered, people who lived nearby. We all stared in disbelief. The townspeople knew they were looking at the King. I ordered them all to leave and arranged to have the body sent here.”
I was silent.
“And my brother Moray, where is he?”
Bothwell shook his head. “He too had to leave Edinburgh on urgent business.”
I gazed at Bothwell. My next words were spoken so low that I am not sure if anyone present in the chamber heard them. “They did the deed, after all… and made sure they ‘looked through their fingers.’”
I was remembering Craigmillar and our discussion there, back in November when my councillors and advisers had gathered in secret to discuss the problem of my errant husband.
“Ma’am?” it was one of my ladies-in-waiting.
Bothwell glanced at me quickly as a servant entered the room to tend the fire.
“Your Majesty, you are in shock, and must rest.”
“Then leave me. All of you,” I cried.
My ladies-in-waiting stood at the door hesitating, unconvinced that they should follow my command, until I insisted.
Then I sat heavily at my writing-desk, the fire at my back, and stared at the writing materials which were always laid out neatly before me, in anticipation of performing the day’s business. I do not know how many minutes passed in this manner, but I neither moved nor spoke. I simply sat in silence, staring at the parchment and quills. At some point in the near future I would need to communicate with my relatives abroad, my fellow monarchs, the Pope in Rome, and I did not relish this task.
Nothing made any sense. An explosion that rocked the foundations of the town and destroyed the house in which my husband was staying? Why engineer or orchestrate such a dramatic end to Darnley’s life? This is a thought which has oft troubled me. There are easier ways to dispose of a troublesome king, surely?
Why not poison? It would be easy enough to slip a harmful medicament into his goblet of wine; no one would be the wiser. After all, he was already sickening.
But instead they – whoever they were – chose gunpowder; the most profoundly dramatic, cataclysmic method possible, and one which would be sure to draw the eyes of the world to my perilous kingdom. Now…why would they do that?
I argued as much with my councillors. I put this to them again and again in the weeks that followed. But they had no answers – at least none which they cared to share with me.
A profound silence seemed to hang over Edinburgh like an invisible veil. No one wanted to discuss the incident. Lips were sealed.
Later that morning Darnley’s body was brought to the Palace on a board. I stared at him, at his vanished youth, his wasted life. His features were white, as if cast in stone, fixed in an expression of peace – not fear – which would surely have been his real state of mind in his final moments.
I thought of his poor valet who had perished alongside him.
I had an apothecary and a surgeon attend to my husband’s body. He was to be cleansed, embalmed, then laid in state in the Chapel Royal with candles burning beside his open coffin.
I spent many hours beside him. It brought to mind other bereavements I had suffered. I could not help but think of Francois, my playmate in the nursery, to whom I had been betrothed ere I arrived in France.
This loss was different. It was tinged with regret, and perhaps some remorse at the relief I felt on being free. For so long I had worried over the problems Darnley caused me; the ever-constant threat of scandal or intrigue.
Now that he was gone, I still had no peace of mind. I could not help but dwell on the fact that I too could have perished in that explosion. How easy it would have been for the conspirators to make their way down to Holyrood, snatch my little son Prince James and then rule Scotland in his name.
Who were the real perpetrators of this plot, I wondered? Who had thought to gain the most?
I edged nearer to the coffin and gazed down on him. Candles guttered next to his body. The skill of the embalmer was evident; they had even managed to conceal the scars left by the pocks. His alabaster skin was tight across his bones.
His final resting-place would be beneath the stone flags of the abbey, down in the burial vaults through which we had crept on our escape from the Palace, the night of Rizzio’s murder. There, Darnley would join my own parents and ancestors. And there, perhaps, I too would lie one day… It was a sobering thought.
I have survived my husband Darnley by twenty years, and for twe
nty years he has haunted me. He appears as a vigorous young man in the prime of life, while I continue to grow older and weaker; my eyesight dims, my shoulders stoop and my posture shows visible signs of age, while Darnley’s ghost remains forever young, his youth preserved in death. The secret of who planted that gunpowder, who took his life at the last, died with him in his final moments. He has never shared those secrets with me since.
I bent down that day and kissed his cold lips. It was my final tribute to our dead love.
Then I locked myself in a darkened chamber to mourn, as was the custom. I was a widow again, at twenty-four years of age.
Bothwell was the only one of my councillors who remained steadfastly by my side. There was no ‘pressing family business’ for him to attend to which would require his sudden absence from the arena of power.
“Has my brother Moray returned yet?” I asked him.
Bothwell shook his head. “He has business to attend to, Ma’am. Family business, back on his estate.”
My brother Moray was a happily married man. I could not imagine that he had any very pressing business that his wife, Lady Agnes, could not attend to most competently in his absence, but I swallowed the lie – as I have swallowed so many others.
“How are things in the town?”
“The atmosphere is tense, Ma’am. Master Knox grows ever more voluble.”
I tried to stifle my anger. “Who do they say is guilty?” I asked.
“I do not listen to idle gossip and rumour-mongers, Ma’am. And neither should you.”
Bothwell was right. There was no point in listening to the vicious slanders that flew across the rooftops of Edinburgh.
I sealed myself away for three or four days – I do not remember exactly as my memories of that period fade – but I began to refuse visitors. I grew sick and pale. I held my son in my arms, but he became distressed quickly, perhaps sensing something of my agitation, so I handed him back to his wet nurse. I did not know what to do; I wanted only to hide from the world, and I longed to avoid my responsibilities as queen.
My doctors advised me that I was in shock and should rest, so at their advice I cut short my period of mourning and went into retreat, taking with me those few ladies-in-waiting and courtiers who could make my stay comfortable. Of my Secretary Maitland and my brother Moray there was still no sign.
Make of that what you will…
Edinburgh
March 1567
March was a tense and uneasy month. I called upon the services of Bothwell to protect my little son and looked about me to see what must be done in the aftermath of my husband’s assassination. Letters arrived from abroad, urging me to conduct a trial to establish the identity of the culprits and bring them to justice.
“That would be rather difficult,” I told my Secretary of State, Maitland, when I did next lay eyes upon him.
“And why is that Your Grace?”
“Well…I find that many of the chief suspects attended Darnley’s funeral and showed as much grief and sorrow at his death as if it were their own kinsman who had perished. One would have thought they all loved him dearly.”
For it was true. Men who had never been slow to show their loathing of my husband, and had met in secret to discuss how best to be rid of him, now clamoured to express their moral outrage at his death.
Although the funeral itself was a very Catholic affair, conducted by my own priest, Father Mamaret, in accordance with the rites of the Catholic Church, my Protestant advisers put aside their religious preferences in order to attend, to kneel in piety and pray for the soul of their murdered ‘sovereign’. The hypocrisy of this did not go unnoticed; it galled me deeply.
“Who do the townsfolk say is guilty, Maitland?”
He avoided my gaze.
I waited for him to speak.
“They say Bothwell must have had a hand in it, Ma’am.”
I struggled to maintain my composure. “Why do they focus on him in particular?”
“They say he had a lot to gain, Your Majesty.”
“Bothwell has been a loyal supporter of the crown, Maitland. I do not like to hear him vilified so. He was here at my side when the rest of you fled – on family business! I do not know how I would have managed else.”
Maitland said nothing, but I noted the change of tone. Courtiers are made easily jealous; rivalries spring up over nothing, and Darnley was not nothing. This was an event of magnitude which would have repercussions rippling into the future for a long time to come. I sensed my lords and councillors would be only too willing to find a scapegoat to blame.
I ordered another solemn requiem mass to be sung in the Chapel in order to mark the end of my forty days of mourning. When I informed Father Mamaret of the decision, he had the temerity to pass judgement
on my growing friendship with Bothwell.
“You must distance yourself from him, Ma’am. Can you not see that?”
“But I rely on him. He is the only one I trust.”
“He has been accused of your husband’s murder.”
“No one has yet openly accused him. I will not listen to rumour.”
“If you befriend him, you cast suspicion on yourself.”
“So my cousin Elizabeth in London advises also. But do you know – she knew of the planned assassination long before I did? London has its spies, and I do not doubt she and her ministers had some communication with the conspirators – whoever they may be!”
“But it is how it looks, Ma’am!”
“I do not care about how it looks. As a man of the cloth, nor should you! I care only about truth.”
Father Mamaret smiled. “Your Majesty presumes too far in advising me how best to perform my job. Careful, Marie! Remember, I did know you when you were thus high!”
I kept my temper and smiled.
“So,” he added, recovering his composure. “Your Majesty will have a Mass to mark the end of the mourning period?”
I nodded. “If it pleases you!”
“You feel you have mourned enough then, Ma’am?”
I glanced at him sharply. “It is customary. Forty days in the wilderness…”
“Forty days, Marie,” he said quietly. “You will be forty years in the wilderness if you persist in this reckless course of action.”
I was astounded at his temerity.
“I have no course of action, Father. I seek only to survive.”
And with that, I left him.
Relations between us were strained. I felt increasingly isolated within my own kingdom. I had but one friend and ally I could rely on at this time, and he had his enemies.
In my library at Holyrood I owned a pristine copy of The Prince by Machiavelli. I took it down from a shelf and scanned its pages. This was a title much loved by my erstwhile mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, and she – no doubt – operated always with its key principles in mind.
I have made my mistakes and I have lived to regret them.
But there is one line in Machiavelli’s volume which I take great comfort from.
“It cannot be called virtue to kill one’s fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be without fidelity, without mercy, without religion; such proceedings enable one to gain sovereignty, but not fame.”
I held the page with my finger, and gazed out of the window. The Palace was quiet at this time. There was little in the way of hubbub and activity. The mood had changed in Scotland. It has ever been a kingdom torn by faction, but there was something different about this atmosphere. I tried to pinpoint what it was. There was fear in the air, of course.
There were many who saw an opportunity opening up to snatch the crown from me, seize my baby son and use him as a pawn in the game of politics. I had to stop them from succeeding. And there was one man in my kingdom who I believed could assist me in this purpose. He had a retinue of armed follo
wers, and he had another highly-valued quality – loyalty to the crown.
A king had been assassinated. For weeks now, many of my own councillors and men of state had debated the problem that Darnley had posed.
He was scheming with conspirators abroad, it had been said. Fuelled by resentment and grievances, what would he not do to plot my own downfall? Or at the very least to ruin my reputation abroad as far as he was able? It was essential I should keep him under close surveillance, Moray and Maitland had urged me.
No one had loved Darnley; he was hated and despised by all, yet now they cried out in indignation at his death. They began to edge away from me and align themselves with each other, like a troupe of naughty schoolboys pointing the finger.
And I was left wondering how best to manage the bungled state of affairs my kingdom had become.
I glanced at my mother’s coat of arms above the window-frame, a bird pierced by three arrows, and wondered how she had managed. Marie of Guise was a woman of strength, stamina and intelligence. Her relatives in France had had no conception of how difficult her task had been, in keeping the kingdom safe for her daughter.
I mourned the passing of my mother. I mourn her still.
History repeats itself and strange demands are made of royal women. It is decreed that we must not nurture or cosset our young. We must be separated; kept apart from those we love.
I asked Bothwell to convey my little son to Stirling Castle and see him safely ensconced there, under the care of the Earl of Mar, which he did.
Holyrood seemed strangely empty in their absence, but I knew Stirling was the best place for my child.
I was beginning to grow fearful for my kingdom, uneasy in my mind about whom I could trust. Even my own confessor was proving himself to be less than loyal.
Men are changeable by nature. It was my brother Moray – with the backing of my Secretary of State, Maitland – who had urged me to pardon the exiled rebels, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay, back in December. They assured me that if Rizzio’s murderers were brought back out of exile where they languished in England, then all would be well in my kingdom. Darnley would be frightened enough to curb his behaviour and my closest advisers would stand by me throughout.