Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley

by Alison Weir

  Three days later, Mary gave Paris letters to carry to Bothwell and Maitland in Edinburgh, and told him to observe their faces as they read them, adding that it was a matter of deciding whether the air was better for the King at Craigmillar or Kirk o’Field. This is an obvious invention, for Kirk o’Field was not suggested as a lodging for Darnley until about a week later. Yet, according to the depositions, Bothwell had been overseeing the final murder preparations at the King’s lodging before his departure for Liddesdale on 24 January. Paris states that Mary also told him to tell Bothwell that the King wanted to kiss her, but she did not want him to for fear of his illness.

  According to his first deposition, Paris arrived in Edinburgh on 25 January to find Bothwell gone. He claimed to have tracked him down at Kirk o’Field, but this was at a time when, in reality, Bothwell was already in the Borders. Paris says Bothwell read Mary’s letter, which is perhaps to be identified with Casket Letter II, then told him, “Commend me to the Queen and tell her that all will go well. Say that Balfour and I have not slept all night, that everything is arranged, and that the King’s lodgings are ready for him. I have sent her a diamond. You may say that I would send my heart too, were it in my power, but she has it already.” Paris then went to see Maitland, who said that he must tell the Queen to bring the King to Kirk o’Field. Paris’s deposition was made at a time when Moray was doing his best to bring about Maitland’s ruin; the earlier depositions do not incriminate him. Balfour is also incriminated with Bothwell, because he had recently abandoned Moray’s party and voted for the Queen’s return.

  However, in his second deposition, Paris tells another tale, saying he arrived in Edinburgh on the 25th to find Bothwell dining with Sir James Balfour. Bothwell read Mary’s letter, then told Paris to say to Mary that all would be well and that he was sending her a diamond in place of his heart. He then told Paris to go to Maitland “and ask him if he wishes to write to the Queen.” Paris found Maitland at the Exchequer House, where Maitland told him that Darnley would be better off at Kirk o’Field. Paris then returned to Glasgow with both messages, arriving before 27 January, which was the day Mary and Darnley departed for Edinburgh.

  Having listened to what Paris had to say and asked him many questions about his meetings with Bothwell and Maitland, Mary told him that she intended to appoint her servant Gilbert Curle as valet to Darnley in place of Sandy Durham, whom she did not trust.

  Paris rode with the King and Queen towards Edinburgh, and waited with Mary at Linlithgow to hear from Ormiston that Bothwell was on his way back from Liddesdale. When this was confirmed, Mary sent Paris to Bothwell with some bracelets, presumably those referred to in Casket Letter II, which was “discovered” two years before Paris’s deposition was obtained; she also sent Bothwell’s kinsman and retainer, John Hay, to the Earl with a private message, according to Hay’s deposition. John Hay was Laird of Talla in Peebles-shire, and had accompanied Mary on her journey from Glasgow; his mother was a Hepburn. Part of his deposition was suppressed, which suggests that the rest of it is unreliable.

  On arrival at Kirk o’Field, Mary became angry with Paris when he had her bed placed directly under where the King’s bed stood in the room above, which was, in effect, where Bothwell had decided that the gunpowder was to be lit. Paris had to move the bed to ensure that there was enough space for the barrel in which the powder was to be packed. Lennox claims that the house was already undermined when Darnley arrived there. Neither Paris nor Lennox can be correct, since the decision to use Kirk o’Field was made at the last minute, and, according to John Hepburn’s deposition, Bothwell did not decide to use gunpowder until 7 February.

  Bothwell allegedly told Paris that, while Darnley was at Kirk o’Field, he himself, through the good offices of Lady Reres, visited Mary’s room at Holyrood most nights, while his cousin, John Hepburn of Bolton in East Lothian, kept watch under the palace galleries. Because of this, Bothwell forbade Paris, on his life, to divulge to Mary the fact that his wife was staying with him at Holyrood. This argues either extraordinary forbearance or an unusual lack of curiosity on the part of the Countess, and suggests that Bothwell was using Mary in order to attain his ambitions; allegations to this effect had been made long before Paris made his deposition. Yet although Paris claims that Mary and Bothwell were indulging in regular illicit sex at this time, he also states that the Queen was suffering from pain and weakness, and the Earl from dysentery.

  Bothwell was feeling unwell during the Queen’s overnight stay at Kirk o’Field on 5 February. After dinner, he told Paris he found himself struck down by his “usual illness,” the bloody flux, and asked where he could “do my job.” Paris found him a place between two doors, helped Bothwell to undress, and stood watch. As Bothwell relieved himself, he chatted to Paris, but he was obviously brooding over the implications of the reconciliation between Mary and Darnley, and suddenly blurted out, “If the King has ever the advantage over us other Lords, he will want to dominate us, and we do not mean to put up with it. We mean to blow him up in this house with gunpowder. What think you of that?”

  Aghast, Paris replied, “You will pardon me if I do not tell you.” At this, Bothwell angrily retorted, “What are you saying? Do you want to preach at me?” Paris replied that Bothwell had often been in trouble but no one had helped him. “Now you propose to undertake this big enterprise, far bigger than any trouble you may have had, for they will call down the hue and cry on you.” Bothwell snapped that Paris was an utter fool if he thought he, Bothwell, would attempt such an enterprise on his own, and revealed that his chief accomplice was Maitland, “who is considered to have one of the best minds in the country; he is the presiding genius of it all. I have Argyll, Huntly, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay. I have the signatures of those men, written the last time we were at Craigmillar.” Paris asked if Moray was also involved, but Bothwell replied, “The Earl of Moray, the Earl of Moray will neither help nor hinder us, but it is all one.” Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay were in favour with Moray when this deposition was made, so the inclusion of their names is interesting, but there is no other evidence that Ruthven and Lindsay, who had just returned from exile, were involved in Darnley’s murder.

  Bothwell asked Paris to assist in his plans, and when Paris fearfully demurred, rounded on him angrily, demanding, “Why did I put you in the Queen’s service if not to help me?” Paris retorted that, during the six years he had been in the Earl’s service, Bothwell had known how to make him do his bidding, kicking him in the stomach until he capitulated. Perhaps fearing further violence, Paris reluctantly agreed to help.

  The following day, Bothwell approached John Hepburn of Bolton with a proposal to assassinate Darnley “in the fields,” which is at variance with Paris’s allegation that, two days earlier, Bothwell had already decided to blow up the house. Bothwell assured Hepburn that each of the Lords involved in the plot would send two underlings to assist. Like Paris, Hepburn was initially reluctant to join the conspiracy, but he too gave way to persuasion.

  On Friday, 7 February, Balfour apparently first heard of the murder plot, or so he later told the Lords.3Paris claimed that Bothwell and Balfour had spent a night at Kirk o’Field on 23/24 January, but, in the suppressed part of his deposition, Hepburn claimed that “my Lord Bothwell sent [him] to Sir James Balfour, desiring that he would come and meet my Lord at Kirk o’Field. To whom Sir James answered, ‘Will my Lord come then? If he come, it were better he were quiet.’ And yet they met not at that place, then or at no time thereafter, to the deponer’s knowledge.” Hepburn’s knowledge of the plot was, of course, limited.

  Morton, in his confession of 1581, stated that he learned of the murder plot “a little before,” through Archibald Douglas; this was possibly on Friday, 7 February.

  It was on that day, according to John Hay, that Bothwell resolved to carry out the assassination using gunpowder, and informed Hay of his intentions, saying, “John, 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.” The plan was to place the gunpowder in the Queen’s room, immediately below Darnley’s bedchamber.

  Why Bothwell or anyone else should choose to kill Darnley by the dramatic means of gunpowder, instead of by more common methods of assassination such as poison or suffocation, is a mystery. It may have been designed to ensure that any evidence of his involvement was destroyed, for the Queen had refused to sanction any violence against her husband, and if Bothwell really did wish to marry her, he could not have risked being associated in any way with the crime; yet there were now so many people involved in the plot that discovery was an ever-increasing possibility.

  This was the first gunpowder conspiracy against a European prince; it would not be the last, but it was the only one to be carried to its conclusion. There were similar plots to blow up Elizabeth I, the Prince of Parma, the Duke of Florence and James I. As a method of assassination, gunpowder was unreliable. Although it had been used in European warfare for two centuries, it was often of poor quality and unpredictable, and to achieve the destruction of the Old Provost’s Lodging, vast amounts of it would have been needed because it was much weaker in strength than it is today, and even then there was no guarantee that it would kill Darnley, let alone destroy the evidence.4

  Time was running out, as the King’s convalescence would soon be at an end. Bothwell’s original plan was to kill him on Friday night, but he was obliged to postpone the operation until Saturday because nothing was ready.5 That Friday, according to Sir William Drury, Bothwell arranged for supplies of gunpowder to be brought from Dunbar Castle.6He then summoned Paris and asked if he held a key to the Queen’s chamber in the Old Provost’s Lodging. Paris said he did not, but he would get one. Bothwell told him, “Do not fail. On Sunday, we will do it.” Paris left, his conscience troubling him. He contemplated fleeing abroad, but had no way of chartering a ship, so, after hanging around the docks at Leith, he despondently made his way back to Holyrood. The fact that Bothwell asked Paris, and not Mary, for the keys strongly suggests that Mary was innocent of what was going on.

  Meanwhile, Bothwell had persuaded his bailiff, James, Laird of Ormiston in East Lothian—known as Black Ormiston—to join the plotters, overcoming his reluctance by assuring him he “need not take fear, for the whole Lords have concluded the same long since at Craigmillar, all that were there with the Queen, and none dare find fault with it when it shall be done.” On that Friday evening, Bothwell outlined the details of his plan to Hepburn, Hay and Ormiston, and told them that, due to lack of time, the murder would now take place on the night of Sunday the 9th. The gunpowder was to be placed in a barrel in the Queen’s room, and the lint fuse was to be fed through a hole in the bottom of the barrel.

  Ormiston spent all day Saturday in bed in his lodgings in Blackfriars Wynd. It may or may not be significant that Morton’s house was in the same street, although Morton, of course, was not in residence, having been forbidden entry to Edinburgh. Bothwell, having learned that Lord Robert Stewart had warned Darnley of a plot against him, hastened to complete his preparations.7That evening, Bothwell dined with Mary and Darnley at Kirk o’Field, and afterwards he sought out Paris and again demanded the keys. When the Queen and her attendants had left, Paris slipped the key out of the door to her room and took it to Bothwell, only to be shown a box containing a full set of fourteen counterfeit keys, which, according to a placard that later appeared on the door of the Tron House in Edinburgh, had been cut by one of the city’s blacksmiths.8Bothwell told Paris to keep the key he had taken.9In his other deposition, Paris made the ludicrous claim that he had gone to the Queen and asked her to give him the key to her room because Bothwell wanted to blow up the King with gunpowder!

  A great deal of confusion surrounds the subject of the keys to the Old Provost’s Lodging. Buchanan states that, before Darnley arrived at Kirk o’Field, the keys were in the possession of the Queen’s servants, while Lennox claims that Mary herself held the keys, but neither of these accounts can be correct because, according to Thomas Nelson, who initially received the keys from Robert Balfour, they were held by the King’s servants, and when the Queen came to sleep at the house, her room was always kept locked and the keys to it and the postern gate were given into the keeping of the Usher of her Chamber, Archibald Beaton. Bonkil, the cook, kept the key to the door that led from the cellar to the alley. Buchanan says that, “whereas the other keys of the lodging were in custody of the King’s servants, Paris, by feigning certain fond and slender causes, had in keeping the keys which Bothwell kept back, of the back gate and the postern.” This cannot be correct because there was no lock on the door from the cellar to the garden, although it could be bolted on the inside. The Book of Articles states that Paris obtained the key to the Queen’s door and the key to the door to the staircase that led to the upper floor; it will be remembered that the door at the top of the stairs had been removed to serve as a cover for Darnley’s bath; it may have been rehung after the course of baths was completed.

  During Saturday evening, Margaret Carwood sent Paris to Kirk o’Field to fetch the fur coverlet from the Queen’s bed. When he reached the house, Sandy Durham asked him to return the key to Mary’s bedchamber, but Paris told him that Archibald Beaton had it, and that it was his duty to hand it over.

  On Sunday morning, Paris saw Moray taking leave of Mary, then took a walk to Restalrig, a village that lay to the north of Holyrood Palace. On his return, he found the Queen getting ready for Pagez’s wedding breakfast. That afternoon, he was amongst her entourage when she attended the farewell banquet for Moretta, and afterwards, as he presented a basin and towel to her, she asked if he had retrieved the coverlet, implying that she was concerned that it would be destroyed when the house was blown up. If that had been the case, she would surely have attempted to rescue the other, far more valuable items that were in the house and were lost in the explosion.

  By Sunday evening, two trunks, one of wood, one of leather, containing the gunpowder from Dunbar, had been delivered to Holyrood Palace and stored in the back hall of Bothwell’s lodgings. How they were carried past the sentries without arousing suspicion is nowhere explained. In an age in which rooms were lit by candles and flambeaux, and heated by large open fires in winter, Bothwell was risking disaster by keeping such explosive material secretly in his rooms.

  Early on Sunday evening, one of Bothwell’s men—either William Powrie or George Dalgleish—obtained a yard of lint for a fuse from a soldier of the guard, whose name he did not know. Powrie was Bothwell’s porter, Dalgleish his tailor, and while both were enlisted by the Earl to help the conspirators, neither had much inside knowledge of the plot.

  Around the same time, according to Hepburn, a servant of John Hay collected a large barrel that Hay had ordered from a merchant at the top of Sandy Bruce’s Close10and took it to Holyrood. It has been estimated that the barrel was the size of a 54-gallon cask,11much larger than a normal, full-size powder barrel, which held 100 pounds and had a diameter of 17 inches, and transporting it through the streets would have been impossible without assistance, but we are not told that Hay’s servant had a helper, or a horse.

  According to John Hay, from about 4 p.m. until dusk, Bothwell, Hay and Hepburn had been holding a meeting in the room where the powder was being stored. As soon as darkness fell, they walked to Black Ormiston’s lodging in Blackfriars Wynd to discuss the final details of the plot with him, and stayed there for over two hours. Ormiston’s uncle, Robert “Hob” Ormiston,12 was also present; until now, he had known nothing of the plan to kill Darnley, but he made no bones about offering his services. After this meeting, from about 8.30 until 10 p.m., Bothwell strolled up and down the Canongate while his henchmen moved the gunpowder to Kirk o’Field, then he joined the Queen and her courtiers there at around 10.15 p.m.

  Hepburn told another tale, claiming that Bothwell had stayed at Moretta’s banquet until around 7.45 p.m. At around 8 p.m., he called briefly at his mother�
��s house, with Paris, then went on to visit Ormiston. Half an hour later, he left; Hepburn did not know where he had gone, but it was probably to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.

  Ormiston claimed that, as the Queen was riding to Kirk o’Field after the banquet, Bothwell met him and his uncle in the Cowgate in order to check out the route by which the gunpowder was to be transported. After Bothwell had gone, Ormiston went down to the Blackfriars gate, negotiated his way through some ruinous houses, emerged on the other side and opened the gate. Paris, however, states that he and Bothwell went with the Ormistons to the Cowgate, where they met up with Hay and Hepburn. They discussed what was to be done, then Bothwell and Paris went to join the Queen at Kirk o’Field.

  The problem with all these stories is that, from about 4 p.m. until Mary returned to Holyrood around midnight, Bothwell was in attendance on her, both at Moretta’s banquet and at Kirk o’Field, and conspicuously dressed in masquing costume. He could not, therefore, have been meeting with his fellow conspirators at Holyrood early in the evening, nor could he have visited Ormiston’s lodgings, and it is very unlikely that, bent on murder, he made himself so visible by walking in his rich attire up and down the Canongate. Hepburn and Hay may well have met at Holyrood and at Ormiston’s house, and were probably coerced by their interrogators into claiming that Bothwell had also been present in order to incriminate him further.

  In the evening, William Powrie warned a friend, William Geddes, not to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh that night, a rash comment that would later be used to condemn him. Then, between 8.30 and 10 p.m.,13acting on Hepburn’s orders, he, Dalgleish and Patrick Wilson, the merchant who had abetted Bothwell in his trysts with Bessie Crawford, transported the barrel and the gunpowder, which was wrapped in leather bags called polks that were packed in the two trunks, openly through the streets from Holyrood to the gate of the Blackfriars monastery, which was about 200 yards from Kirk o’Field. Powrie first claimed that this task was completed in one journey with two horses belonging to Bothwell, but later changed his story and said that they had undertaken two journeys with one horse belonging to the Earl’s page, Hermon. This horse carried the trunks on its first journey and the barrel on the next. Powrie made no mention of the barrel in his first deposition. Both tales are suspect because even two horses could not have carried enough gunpowder to cause the explosion that was to follow.14Furthermore, the suspicious loads had to be conveyed past the sentries at the palace, two members of the town watch at the Netherbow Port, four near Kirk o’Field, and ten others patrolling the streets.15