Mary Queen of Scots

by Antonia Fraser

  Although Buchanan tried to make out that the lodging itself was ruinous and uncomfortable – in order to blacken the character of Queen Mary who was erroneously stated to have chosen it – it was in fact a pleasant house of moderate size, by the standards of the day. Mahon calculated the house to have been about sixty-one feet long and twenty-five feet deep compared to King James’s Tower at Holyrood, containing all the state apartments, which is seventy-four feet by thirty-seven feet. Besides the door into the east garden already mentioned, the house had two other doors, into the quadrangle, and through the postern gate in the town wall (visible in the sketch) into the alleyway beyond. No trace has ever been found of a secret tunnel connecting the lodging with Holyrood; when Lennox furiously and crazily accused the queen of coming disguised in men’s clothing to witness his son’s murder by ‘secret ways’, in his Narrative 15, he was presumably thinking not of a tunnel, but of the back streets of Edinburgh. The obvious route from Holyrood to the provost’s lodging lay down the Canongate, through the town wall at the Netherbow Port, down the Blackfriars Wynd, crossing the Cowgate, and so to the purlieus of St Mary’s. But sixteenth-century Edinburgh was a network of smaller streets, off the main thoroughfares, and it would have been possible to take an altogether more circuitous route along the back wall of the south Canongate gardens to St Mary’s Port, and thence, where the town wall was as yet unbuilt, through the gardens and fields of the old Blackfriars Priory to the east garden of the Kirk o’Field house. This would avoid the town wall, and the challenge of the watch; the only remaining problem would be the curious eyes of the ten watchmen nightly patrolling the streets of the city.

  The lodging contained two bedrooms for Darnley and the queen, Darnley’s lying directly above that of his wife, a presence chamber (or salle), two garde robes, a kitchen and vaulted cellars beneath. The drop from the gallery, which extended out of Darnley’s bedroom on to the town wall, to the ground, was only about fourteen feet, since the level of the ground beyond the wall was higher than within the quadrangle. The house was not only pleasantly situated and healthy, with gardens, but it was also well if hastily furnished for Darnley’s benefit, once he had selected it, from the store of royal furniture at Holyrood. The inventories testify not only the suddenness of the decision to use the provost’s lodging, but also the amount of furniture and ornaments now brought down from Holyrood.16 A series of seven pieces of tapestry representing the ‘Hunting of the Conies’ were brought for the garde robe, as well as a canopy of yellow taffeta to enclose the chaise percée. Five pieces of tapestry were brought for the salle. For Darnley’s bedroom, six pieces of tapestry, originally taken from Strathbogie after the defeat of Huntly, were ordered, a little Turkish carpet, two or three cushions of red velvet, a high chair covered in purple velvet, and a little table covered with green velvet which had also once belonged to Huntly, as well as a bed which had once belonged to Mary of Guise, which Mary had given her husband in the previous August – hung with violet-brown velvet, embroidered with ciphers and flowers, trimmed with cloth of gold and silver, and having three coverlets, one of them blue quilted taffeta.* A bath stood beside the bed – baths being a necessary part of the convalescence – and one of the makeshift aspects of the visit was the fact that one of the doors of the house was taken off its hinges to serve as a lid when it was not in use. The chamber beneath that of Darnley, which had a window looking north over the quadrangle, contained a small bed of yellow and green damask with a furred coverlet, in which the queen could sleep if she so wished.

  Darnley took up residence in his new dwelling on Saturday 1st February. The last week of his life was pleasant and almost domesticated. Queen Mary felt confident that her husband had for the time being no opportunity to weave any plot against her, especially as his father Lennox, so often his evil genius in feeding his childish vanity with praise, was still in Glasgow. The mass of courtiers, Privy Councillors and attendants who inevitably moved with the queen as she progressed through Edinburgh, settled into a routine of visiting Darnley at Kirk o’Field and then returning to the royal palace at Holyrood for the other formal ceremonies of court life. Relations at this point between Darnley and his wife were perfectly amicable. On the Wednesday the queen spent the night at Kirk o’Field in the chamber beneath Darnley’s. According to her own account, propinquity now led to newly friendly relations between them. They had certainly seen little enough of each other lately: when Mary fetched Darnley from Glasgow at the end of January she had not seen him since his abrupt departure from Stirling at the end of December; in October and November she had been ill, and separated from her husband. On the Friday, 7 February, Darnley was actually inspired by this novel amity to discuss with his wife some information he had of plots against her. He begged her in touching language to beware of the people who tried to make mischief between them, adding with self-righteous horror that it had even been suggested to him that he should take his wife’s life.* This sort of volte-face was typical of Darnley: Mary, being the stronger character of the two, was always able to win his loyalty for the time being by force of personality, provided they were face to face, as the denouement of the Riccio affair had demonstrated. It was on this very Friday also, according to Lennox, that Darnley wrote to his father concerning the improvement of his health, which had occurred so much sooner than he had expected, through the kind 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’.19 It would seem therefore that Friday, from the point of view of the husband and wife, was outwardly another day of uneventful convalescence. The Friday night was once more passed by the queen at the old provost’s lodging, under the same roof as her husband.

  Is it possible to construct out of Darnley’s outburst of penitence to his wife, Mary’s suspicions and the warnings received from abroad, evidence of an actual plot by Darnley against Mary, based on his residence at Kirk o’Field? It has been suggested that Kirk o’Field was in fact a monstrous conspiracy against Mary, which reacted in the end against its own perpetrator, Darnley.* Darnley was certainly by nature an intriguer and an ambitious one. But the fact that he was plotting in general is not evidence that he was plotting in particular at Kirk o’Field. He was here, impaired in health, virtually confined to his bed, with few of his supporters about him, surrounded by those of the queen, in the house of the brother of one of the nobles who hated him. Mary, far from being the immobile pregnant woman of a year back, was now active and energetic, flitting between Holyrood and Kirk o’Field, whereas Darnley was stationary. This was not a roundabout age in the manner of its killings. Kings and nobles died violently, but they died openly. The regent Moray died at the hand of an assassin, who shot out of the window into the street; the Riccio plot had aimed at the queen’s life in the crudest possible manner. Queen Mary, who rode freely and frequently among her people, would at all times present an excellent target for an assassin: if gunpowder had been in Darnley’s mind, it would have been aimed at a dwelling where there was not the faintest doubt that the queen would be present, at a time when he was in perfect command of himself. Kirk o’Field was so very far from being the ideal situation for Darnley to plan to kill Mary that, in the absence of concrete proof that he did so, it is surely more logical to regard the crime as aimed straightforwardly at the man it did in fact kill – Darnley. It is in the participants and the accessories to the crime, rather than the intended victim, that the complexities of the plot lie.

  For while Darnley and Mary jogged through their last week of marriage in comparative peace, the conspirators had been hard at work to compass the death of one and the deliverance of the other. Friday seems to have been the critical day. Darnley could not be expected to stay in the lodging forever and Holyrood with its guards obviously presented more of a problem from the point of view of assassination than Kirk o’Field. Sir James Balfour told the lords in the summer, when he made his peace with them, th
at he first knew of the plot on Friday. Morton admitted in his own confession years later that he first knew of the plot from Archibald Douglas a little before, possibly on the Friday. The Book of Articles went further and said that this was the day originally intended to perform the murder, but the preparations were not ready. John Hay of Tallo in his deposition stated that it was on Friday that Bothwell said to him: ‘John, this is the matter. The King’s death is devised. I will reveal it unto you for if I put him not down, I cannot have a life in Scotland. He will be my destruction!’20 John Hepburn, Bothwell’s kinsman and henchman, deposed that the original purpose had been for certain of the nobles to kill the king by each sending two of their servants ‘to the doing thereof in the fields’21 – this corporate fate, so characteristic of gang vengeance, whether in Scotland or Sicily, would not only have wiped out Darnley’s treachery but would also of course ritually involve all the nobles in the act, much as Riccio himself had received over fifty dagger-wounds in his body including Darnley’s own dagger planted by George Douglas. It would thus not have been possible later for some of the nobles to have denied their involvement.

  The dagger being the natural murder weapon of the time, it is interesting to speculate what made Bothwell change his plans and turn to the much less malleable weapon of gunpowder. The reason he gave John Hepburn was probably the true one – because it was the obvious one. With servants openly at work, the death of Darnley in the fields would inevitably have been pinned upon the nobles who had concocted it. Bothwell was already in his agile opportunist’s mind aiming at the position of king. He knew Mary had formally indicated that she wanted no violence done to Darnley. It was no part of his plan to be blamed for the crime: he certainly did not wish to suffer for it, merely to enjoy the result. Ironically enough, the use of gunpowder, and the blowing-up of the house which gave its incredibly flagrant character to the crime – and made Mary’s cheerful tolerance of the perpetrators give such appalling scandal throughout Europe – seems to have been planned in simple good faith that a hearty explosion would cover the tracks of the killers, and make it impossible afterwards to prove who had done it, even if it was only too easy to guess. Such bold but straightforward reasoning was typical not only of Bothwell but of the age in which he lived.

  The testimony of the page ‘French’ Paris (although extremely suspect, because it was wrung from him by torture) does at least confirm that Kirk o’Field was not a subtly planned crime.22 Paris, once Bothwell’s servant, was now in the queen’s service, and attended her at the old provost’s lodging. It was on the Wednesday or Thursday that Bothwell came into the queen’s chamber, below that of Darnley, and told Paris that he found himself ill of his ‘usual illness’ which was a flux of the blood. He asked Paris whereabouts in the house he could ‘faire mes affaires’, and Paris, in view of the urgency of the situation, found Bothwell a corner; it was here, as Bothwell availed himself of the slight privacy to relieve himself, that Bothwell outlined to Paris that he had in mind to kill the king. Paris hesitated. Bothwell told him angrily that he was an utter fool if he thought that he, Bothwell, would enter such an enterprise all on his own – Bothwell then named Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay as his accomplices. Paris inquired about Moray. Bothwell replied that he was neutral.* When Paris resisted Bothwell’s demands, Bothwell only exclaimed impatiently, ‘Why did I put you in the Queen’s service if not to help me?’ and it was at this juncture that Paris pointed out that Bothwell had bullied him for more than six years, kicking him in the stomach to make him do what he wanted. Paris was, however, insistent that Bothwell wanted the keys of the house of lodging from him – a point which incidentally points to the innocence of the queen, since she could presumably have provided them easily herself, had she been aware of the details of the plot. On Saturday, 8th February, Paris had apparently obtained these keys while no one else was in the room and taken them to Bothwell at Holyrood.

  Sunday, 9th February, was to be the last day of Darnley’s convalescence. It was announced that he would return to Holyrood early on the Monday. It was also the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, and, as such, a day of carnival and rejoicing; two events typical of the life of Queen Mary’s court were planned to take place. In the morning Mary’s favourite valet Bastian Pages married Christiana Hogg; being a Catholic it was his last opportunity to do so before the beginning of Lent. The wedding dinner took place at noon, and the queen was present: Bastian was an amusing high-spirited Frenchman, who shared the queen’s own love of masques. It was he who had devised that masque at the baptism of Prince James, with the satyrs wagging their tails which had so much enraged the English visitors that Hatton exclaimed that if it had not been for the presence of the queen, he would have put his dagger in the heart of ‘that French knave Bastian’. The second court event was a formal dinner given at four o’clock by the bishop of the Isles in the house in the Canongate for the returning ambassador of Savoy. The queen attended this dinner, accompanied by her chief nobles, Argyll, Huntly, Bothwell and Cassillis – but not Moray. He had that very morning slipped out of Edinburgh, on the excuse that his wife was sick with a miscarriage. Maitland was also absent, and Morton was not yet sufficiently in the queen’s personal favour to be admitted to court events. This duly accomplished, the queen and her court rode down to the provost’s lodging again, in order to spend the evening with Darnley. The queen planned to sleep Sunday night at Kirk o’Field once more, at the end of her day of revelry, as she had done on the Wednesday and the Friday.

  There was a crowded scene at Kirk o’Field, as there had been on many previous evenings there during the previous week. The royal entourage – ‘the most part of nobles then in this town’, said the queen23 – crowded into the king’s chamber. The nobles, including Huntly, who had been at the bishop’s dinner, played at dice on that little table with a green velvet cloth which had once belonged to Huntly’s father, still in their carnival costumes. Bothwell was an especially striking figure in black velvet and satin, trimmed with silver. The queen chatted pleasantly to the king. There was probably some music, a song in the background to the sound of the lute or the guitar. It was the sort of evening the queen much enjoyed whether at Holyrood or any of her other Scottish palaces: she may even have appreciated the comparative adventure of sleeping at the Kirk o’Field. But at ten or eleven o’clock her intention to do so once more was forestalled. Something – or someone – reminded Queen Mary that it was the hour of Bastian’s wedding masque which she had promised to attend. Queen Mary was unable by nature to resist this sort of obligation and Bastian’s masque was of special importance in view of the fact that he had designed one of hers only six weeks previously. It now seemed unnecessarily inconvenient to return once more to the provost’s lodging after the masque, to sleep there, since Darnley was coming back to Holyrood early the next morning, and the queen herself had also planned an early ride to Seton – according to Lennox’s Narrative, it was ‘Bothwell and others, who seemed to bear a good countenance’ who reminded her of this last point. Darnley was sulky at the idea of the change of plan, making the petulant demur of a sick man, from whom the centre of amusement was being suddenly swept away. According to Moretta, the Savoyard ambassador, the queen lightly gave him a ring as a pledge of her goodwill.24 She then bid him goodbye. Down the staircase went the queen, out to the door where the horses of the court were ready to bring her back to her palace. As she stood to mount her horse, she paused for a moment, puzzled. She saw in front of her her own page, Bothwell’s former servant, French Paris. ‘Jesu, Paris,’ said the queen. ‘How begrimed you are!’25

  Little did the queen know that her innocent observation touched at the core of the secret happenings within the provost’s lodging. For at some point during the day which the queen had spent in the formal court ritual of a servant’s wedding and an ambassador’s dinner, with the prospect of another court masque ahead of her, enough gunpowder had been placed in the vaults of the cellar of the house to blow it
sky-high, and reduce it to the heap of rubble to be seen in the Cecil sketch. It is impossible to be sure with any accuracy exactly when the gunpowder was introduced and by whom. The henchmen employed in carrying out the practical details of the plot were apparently nine in number: John Hepburn, John Hay of Tallo and John Spens, kinsmen of Bothwell, William Powrie, his porter, George Dalgleish, his tailor, French Paris, his former servant, James (Black) Ormiston and Hob Ormiston, two further kinsmen, and Pat Wilson. At no point do their subsequent depositions seem more improbable than on the subject of the gunpowder.

  According to the official story given by the arrested criminals later, the gunpowder was brought openly through the streets of Edinburgh by William Powrie, during the evening of Sunday, since it had been for some unaccountable reason stored in Bothwell’s apartments at Holyrood in a barrel. The gunpowder was supposed to have travelled in two trunks. But William Powrie subsequently changed his story from one journey with two horses, to two journeys with one horse.26 There was incidentally no explanation given as to why Bothwell should have already brought gunpowder from Dunbar, well before the Friday when he was first supposed to have broached the idea of an explosion. Powrie took the gunpowder to the gate of the Blackfriars Monastery and helped to carry the gunpowder in ‘polks’ or bags over the wall. According to Paris’s story, the gunpowder was now placed openly in a heap on the floor of the queen’s chamber (with the entire court, in Buchanan’s words ‘a great attendance’, revelling in the room above). Bothwell himself was even supposed to have come down in the course of the evening to see how matters were progressing. Powrie now made his way back up the Canongate accompanied by Wilson; together they conveyed the empty trunks; as Powrie went, he saw the torches of the queen’s party flaring ahead of them, and heard the hooves of the royal horses clattering on the cobbles.