at Stirling. The 17th December, 1566, was the crowning triumph of her
life, and the last. To the cradle came the Ambassadors of France and
England bearing gifts: Elizabeth, the child’s godmother, sent a font of
enamelled gold. There were pageants and triumphs, fireworks, festivals,
and the chanting of George Buchanan’s Latin elegiacs on Mary, the _Nympha
Caledoniæ_, with her crowns of Virtue and of Royalty. Above all, Mary had
won, or taken, permission to baptize the child by the Catholic rite, and
Scotland saw, for the last time, the ecclesiastics in their splendid
vestments. Mary busied herself with hospitable kindnesses, a charming
hostess in that dark hold where her remote ancestor had dirked his guest
between the table and the hearth. But there was a strange gap in the
throng of nobles. The child’s father, though in the Castle, did not attend
the baptism, was not among the guests, while the grandfather, Lennox,
remained apart at his castle in Glasgow.
According to du Croc, who was at Stirling, Darnley announced his intention
to depart, two days before the christening, but remained and sulked.
A month before the ceremony, du Croc had expected Darnley to sulk and stay
away. At Stirling he declined to meet Darnley, so bad had his conduct
been, and said that, if Darnley entered by one door of his house, he would
go out by the other. It has been averred by Camden, writing in the reign
and under the influence of James I., when King of England, that the
English ambassador, Bedford, warned his suite not to acknowledge Darnley
as King, and punished one of them, who, having known him in England,
saluted him. Nau says that Darnley refused to associate with the English,
unless they would acknowledge his title of King, and to do this they had
been forbidden by the Queen of England, their mistress,[100] who knew that
Darnley kept up a more or less treasonable set of intrigues with the
English Catholics.[101] Bedford, a sturdy Protestant, could not be a
_persona grata_ to Darnley: and, as to Darnley’s kingship, his own father,
in 1568, rather represented him as an English subject. On the other side
we have only the evidence of Sir James Melville, gossiping long after the
event, to the effect that Bedford, when leaving Stirling, charged him with
a message to Mary. He bade her ‘entertain Darnley as she had done at the
beginning, for her own honour and advancement of her affairs,’ which
warning Melville repeated to her.[102] But there was an awkwardness as
between ‘the King’ and the English, nor do we hear that Bedford made any
advance to Darnley, whose natural sulkiness is vouched for by all
witnesses.
As to what occurred at Stirling in regard to Darnley’s ill-treatment, the
Lennox MSS. are copious. Mary, ‘after an amiable and gentle manner,’
induced him to go to Stirling before her, without seeing the ambassadors.
At Stirling, ‘she feigned to be in a great choler against the King’s
tailors, that had not made such apparel as she had devised for him against
the triumph.’ Darnley, to please her, kept out of the way of the
ambassadors. She dismissed his guards, Lennox sent men of his own, and
this caused a quarrel.[103] Darnley flushed with anger, and Mary said, ‘If
he were a little daggered, and had bled as much as my Lord Bothwell had
lately done, it would make him look the fairer.’ This anecdote (about
which, in June 1568, while getting up his case, Lennox made inquiries in
Scotland) is given both in English and Scots, in different versions. The
‘Book of Articles’ avers that Bothwell himself was in fear, and was
strongly guarded.
While all at Stirling seemed gay, while Mary played the hostess admirably,
du Croc found her once weeping and in pain, and warned his Government
that ‘she would give them trouble yet’ (December 23).[104] Mary had causes
for anxiety of which du Croc was not aware. Strange rumours filled Court
and town. A man named Walker, a retainer of her ambassador at Paris,
Archbishop Beaton, reported that the Town Clerk of Glasgow, William
Hiegait, was circulating a tale to the effect that Darnley meant to seize
the child prince, crown him, and rule in his name. Now for months Darnley
had been full of mad projects; to seize Scarborough, to seize the Scilly
Islands, and the scheme for kidnapping James had precedents enough.
Darnley was in frequent communication with the discontented Catholics of
the North and West of England, and his retainers, the Standens, were young
men yearning for adventures. ‘Knowing I am an offender of the laws, they
professed great friendship,’ wrote William Rogers to Cecil, with some
humour.[105]
A rumour of some attempt against Mary reached Archbishop Beaton, in Paris,
at the end of 1566, through the Spanish Ambassador there, who may have
heard of it from the Spanish Ambassador in London, with whom the English
Catholics were perpetually intriguing. There is a good deal of evidence
that Darnley had been complaining of Mary to the Pope and the Catholic
Powers, as insufficiently zealous for the Church. Darnley, not Mary, was
the Scottish royal person on whom the Church ought to rely,[106] and Mary,
says Knox’s continuator, saw his letters, by treachery. Consumed with
anger at his degraded position, so unlike the royalty for which he
hungered, and addicted to day dreams about descents on Western England,
and similar wild projects, Darnley may possibly, at this time, have
communicated to the English Catholics a project for restoring himself to
power by carrying off and crowning his child. This fantasy would drift
through the secret channels of Catholic diplomacy to the Spanish
Ambassador in Paris, who gave Beaton a hint, but declined to be explicit.
Mary thanked Beaton for his warning, from Seton, on February 18, nine days
after Darnley’s death.[107] ‘But alas! it came too late.’ Mary added that
the Spanish ambassador in London had also given her warning.
There may, then, have been this amount of foundation for the report which,
according to Walker, at Stirling, Hiegait was circulating about
mid-December 1566. Stirling was then full of ‘honest men of the Lennox,’
sent thither by Lennox himself (as he says in one of his manuscript
discourses), because Darnley’s usual guard had been withdrawn. Mary
objected to the presence of so many of Lennox’s retainers, and there arose
that furious quarrel between her and her husband. Possibly Mary, having
heard Walker’s story of Darnley’s project, thought that his Lennox men
were intended to bear a hand in it.
In any case Walker filled Mary’s ears, at Stirling--as she wrote to
Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in France, on January 20, 1567--with
rumours of ‘utheris attemptatis and purposis tending to this fyne.’ He
named Hiegait ‘for his chief author,’ ‘quha,’ he said, ‘had communicat the
mater to hym, as apperyt, of mynd to gratify us; sayand to Walcar, “gif I
had the moyen and crydet with the Quenis Majestie that ze have, I wald not
omitt to mak hir previe of sic purpossis and bruitis that passes in the
cuntrie.”’ Hiegait also said that Darnley could not endure some of the
Lords, but that he or they must leave the country. Mary then sent for
Hiegait, before the Council, and questioned _him_. He (probably in fear of
Lennox) denied that he had told Walker the story of Darnley’s project, but
he had heard, from Cauldwell, a retainer of Eglintoun’s, that Darnley
himself was to be ‘put in ward.’ Eglintoun, ‘a rank Papist,’ was described
by Randolph as never a trustworthy Lennoxite, ‘never good Levenax.’ His
retainer, Cauldwell, being summoned, expressly denied that he ever told
the rumour about the idea of imprisoning Darnley, to Hiegait. But Hiegait
informed the Laird of Minto (a Stewart and a Lennoxite), who again told
Lennox, who told Darnley, by whose desire Cauldwell again spoke to
Hiegait. The trail of the gossip runs from Cauldwell (the estate of that
name is in Eglintoun’s country, Ayrshire) to Hiegait, from him to Stewart
of Minto, from him to Lennox, and from Lennox to Darnley. Possibly
Eglintoun (the cautious Lord who slipped away when Ainslie’s band was
being signed, and hid under straw, after the battle of Langside) was the
original source of the rumour of Darnley’s intended arrest. This is a mere
guess. If there was a very secret plot, at Craigmillar, to arrest Darnley,
we cannot tell how it reached Hiegait. Mary ‘found no manner of
concordance’ in their answers, and she rebuked Walker and Hiegait in her
own name, and that of their master, Beaton himself.[108] These men, with
Minto, were allied with Lennox, and one of them may have been his
authority for the story of the second Craigmillar conference.
We now see why it was that, in the height of her final triumph, the
christening festival at Stirling Mary wept and was ill at ease. Her
husband’s conduct was intolerable: now he threatened to leave before the
ceremony, next he stayed on, a dismal figure behind the scenes. His guard
of Lennox men might aim at slaying Bothwell, or Mary might think, on
Walker’s evidence, that they intended to kidnap her child. Worse followed,
when she and her Council examined Walker. Out came the tale of Hiegait,
and Queen and Council, if they had really plotted to arrest Darnley, knew
that their scheme was discovered and was abortive. Finally, on December
24, either in consequence of Lennox’s warning, or because Morton, Lindsay,
and the other Riccio conspirators whom he betrayed were pardoned, Darnley
rode off to his father at Glasgow. There he fell ill, soon after his
arrival, but Lennox’s MSS. never hint that he was poisoned at Stirling (as
Buchanan declares), or that he fell sick when he had ridden but a mile
from the town. That they deny.
After Darnley’s departure, Moray, with Bedford, the English Ambassador,
went to St. Andrews, and other places in Fife. Till January 2, 1567, when
she returned to Stirling, Mary was at Drummond Castle, and at
Tullibardine, where, says Buchanan, she and Bothwell made love in corners
‘so that all were highly offended.’ After January 13, she visited Calendar
House, and then went to Holyrood.
It is said that she never wrote to Darnley till after January 14, when she
took her child to Edinburgh, with the worst purposes, Buchanan declares.
Then she wrote to Darnley, the Lennox Papers inform us, excusing herself,
and offering to visit him in his sickness at Glasgow. Darnley told her
messenger verbally, say the Lennox MSS., that the Queen must judge herself
as to the visit to him. ‘But this much ye shall declare unto her, that I
wish Stirling to be Jedburgh, and Glasgow to be the Hermitage, and I the
Earl of Bothwell as I lie here, and then I doubt not but she would be
quickly with me undesired.’ This was a tactless verbal message, and, if
given, must have proved to Mary that Darnley suspected her amour.
Moreover, this Lennoxian story, that Mary offered the visit, and that
Darnley replied with reserve, and with an insult to be verbally delivered,
agrees ill with what is said in the deposition (December, 1568) of
Lennox’s retainer, Thomas Crawford. According to Crawford, ‘after theire
metinge and shorte spekinge together she asked hym of hys lettres, wherein
he complained of the crueletye of som.’ ‘He answered that he complained
not without cause....’ ‘Ye asked me what I ment bye the crueltye specified
in my lettres, yt procedeth of you onelye that wille not accept mye
_offres_ and repentance.’ Now, in the Lennox Papers this ‘innocent lamb’
has nothing to repent of, and has made no offers. These came from Mary’s
side.[109]
The Lennox account goes on to say that later Mary sent ‘very loving
messages and letters unto him to drive all suspicions out of his mind,’ a
passage copied by Buchanan in his History. Darnley, therefore, after
Mary’s visit to Glasgow, returned with her to Edinburgh, ‘contrary to his
father’s will and consent.’ Lennox, however, here emphatically denies that
either he or Darnley suspected any murderous design on the part of the
Queen. Yet, in Letter II., she is made to say that he ‘fearit his liff,’
as the passage is quoted in the ‘Book of Articles.’[110] As to the story
that Darnley’s illness at Glasgow was caused by poison; poison, of course,
was suspected, but, if the Casket Letters are genuine, Mary therein calls
him ‘this pocky man,’ and Bedford says that he had small-pox: a disease
from which Mary had suffered in early life.[111] He also reports that Mary
sent to Darnley her own physician, though Buchanan says ‘All this while
the Queen would not suffer so much as a physician to come at him.’ In the
‘Book of Articles’ she refuses to send her apothecary. Bedford never hints
at scandalous doings of Mary and Bothwell at Stirling.
On January 20, from Edinburgh, Mary wrote that letter to Archbishop Beaton
in Paris, as to the Hiegait and Walker affair, which we have already
cited. She also expressed her desire that her son should receive the
titular captaincy of the Scots Guard in France, though, according to
Buchanan, she determined at Craigmillar to ‘make away with’ her child.
Nothing in Mary’s letter of January 20, to Beaton, hints at her desire of
a reconciliation with Darnley. Yet, on or about the very day when she
wrote it, she set forth towards Glasgow.
The date was January 20, as given by the Diary of Birrel, and in the
‘Diurnal.’ The undesigned coincidence of diaries kept by two Edinburgh
citizens is fairly good evidence.[112] Drury makes her arrive at Glasgow
on January 22. What occurred between Mary and her husband at Glasgow is
said to be revealed in two of her Casket Letters written to Bothwell.
Their evidence, and authenticity, are to be discussed later: other
evidence to the point we have none, and can only say, here, that, at the
end of January, Mary brought Darnley, his face covered with taffeta, to
the house of Kirk o’ Field, just beside the wall of Edinburgh, where the
University buildings now stand.
Here he was in an insecure and dangerous house, close to a palace of his
feudal foes, the Hamiltons. The Lennox MSS. declare that ‘the place was
already prepared with [undermining and] trains of powder therein.’[113] We
return to this point, which was later abandoned by the prosecution.
Darnley, say the Lennox MSS., wished to occupy the Hamilton House, near
Kirk o’ Field, but Mary persuaded him that ‘there passed a privy way [to]
between the palace and it,’ Kirk o’ Field, ‘which she could take without
going through the streets.’ The Lennox author adds that, on the night of
the murder, Bothwell and his gang ‘came the secret way which she herself
was wont to come to the King her husband.’ The story of the secret way
recurs in Lennox MSS., and, of course, is nonsense, and was dropped. There
was no subterranean passage from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field. Bothwell and
the murderers, in their attack on the Kirk o’ Field, had no such
convenience for the carriage of themselves and their gunpowder. It is
strange that Lennox and his agents, having access to several of the
servants of Darnley, including Nelson who survived the explosion, accepted
at one time, or expected others to accept, this legend of a secret
passage. Edinburgh tradition holds that there was such a tunnel between
Holyrood and the Castle, which may be the basis of this fairy-tale.
The tale of the secret passage, then, is told, in the Lennox MSS., as the
excuse given by Mary to Darnley for lodging him in Kirk o’ Field, not in
the neighbouring house of the Hamiltons. But, in the ‘Book of Articles,’
we read that the Archbishop of St. Andrews was then living in the Hamilton
House ‘onely to debar the King fra it.’ The fable of the secret way,
therefore, was dropped in the final version prepared by the accusers.
Mary, whether she wrote the Casket Letters or not, was, demonstrably,
aware that there was a plot against Darnley, before she brought him to a
house accessible to his enemies. It is certain that, hating and desiring
to be delivered from Darnley, she winked at a conspiracy of which she was
conscious, and let events take their course. This was, to all appearance,
the policy of her brother James, ‘the Good Regent Moray;’ and one of
Mary’s apologists, Sir John Skelton, is inclined to hold that this _was_
Mary’s attitude. He states the hypothesis thus: ‘that Mary was not
entirely unaware of the measures which were being taken by the nobility to
secure in one way or other the removal of Darnley; that, if she did not
expressly sanction the enterprise, she failed, firmly and promptly, to
forbid its execution.’ Hence she was in ‘an equivocal position,’ could not
act with firmness and dignity, and in accepting Bothwell could not be
accounted a free agent, yielded to force, and, with a heavy heart,
‘submitted to the inevitable.’[114]
[Illustration: THE OLD TOWER, WHITTINGHAM]
That Mary knew of the existence of a plot is proved by a letter to her
from Morton’s cousin, Archibald Douglas, whose character and career are
described in the second chapter, ‘Minor Characters.’ In a letter of 1583,
written by Douglas to win (as he did win) favour and support from Mary,
during his exile in England, he says that, in January, 1567, about the
18th or 19th, Bothwell and Lethington visited Morton at Whittingham, his
own brother’s place, now the seat of Mr. A. J. Balfour. The fact of the
visit is corroborated by Drury’s contemporary letter of January 23,
1567.[115] After they had conferred together, Morton sent Archibald
Douglas with Bothwell and Lethington to Edinburgh, to learn what answer
Mary would make to a proposal of a nature unknown to Archibald, so he
says. ‘Which’ (answer) ‘being given to me by the said persons, as God
shall be my judge, was no other than these words, “Schaw to the Earl
Morton that the Queen will hear no speech of the matter appointed to
him,”’ _i.e._ arranged with him. Now Morton’s confession, made before his
execution, was to the effect that Bothwell, at Whittingham, asked him to
join the conspiracy to kill Darnley, but that he refused, unless Bothwell
could procure for him a written warrant from the Queen. Obviously it was
to get this warrant that Archibald Douglas accompanied Lethington and
Bothwell to Edinburgh. But Bothwell and Lethington (manifestly after
consulting Mary) told Douglas that ‘the Queen will hear no speech of that
matter.’ Douglas, though an infamous ruffian, could not have reported to
Mary, when attempting, successfully, to win her favour, a compromising
fact which she, alone of living people, must have known to be false. Mary
was not offended.[116] Taking, then, Morton’s statement that he asked
Bothwell, at Whittingham, for Mary’s warrant, with Douglas’s statement to
Mary herself, that he accompanied Lethington and Bothwell from Whittingham
to Edinburgh, and was informed by them that the Queen ‘would hear no
speech of the matter,’ we cannot but believe that ‘the matter’ was mooted
to her. Therefore, in January, 1567, she was well aware that
_something_ was intended against Darnley by Bothwell, Lethington, and
others.[117]
[Illustration: THE WHITTINGHAM TREE
(_After a Drawing by Richard Doyle_)]
Yet her next step was to seek Darnley in Glasgow, where he was safe among
the retainers of Lennox, and thence to bring him back to Edinburgh, where
his deadly foes awaited him.
Now this act of Mary’s cannot be regarded as merely indiscreet, or as a
half-measure, or as a measure of passive acquiescence. Had she not brought
Darnley from Glasgow to Edinburgh, under a semblance of a cordial
reconciliation, he might, in one way or another, have escaped from his
enemies. The one measure which made his destruction certain was the
measure that Mary executed, though she was well aware that a conspiracy
had been framed against the unhappy lad. Even if he wished to come to
Edinburgh, uninvited by her, she ought to have refused to bring him.
We can only escape from these conclusions by supposing that Archibald
Douglas, destitute and in exile, hoped to enter into Mary’s good graces by
telling her what she well knew to be a lie; namely that Bothwell and her
Secretary had declared that she would not hear of the matter proposed to
her. Douglas tells us even more. While seeking to conciliate Mary, in his
letter already cited, he speaks of ‘the evil disposed minds of the most
part of your nobility against your said husband ... which I am assured was
sufficiently known to himself, _and to all that had judgment never so
little in that realm_.’ Mary had judgment enough, and, according to the
signed declaration of her friends, Huntly and Argyll (Sept. 12, 1568),
knew that the scheme was, either to divorce Darnley, or convict him of
treason, ‘or in what other ways to _dispatch him_.’ These means, say
Huntly and Argyll, she ‘altogether refused.’ Yet she brought Darnley to
Kirk o’ Field!
Shall we argue that, pitying his illness, and returning to her old love,
she deemed him safest in her society? In that case she might have carried
him from Glasgow to Dumbarton Castle, or dwelt with him in the hold where
she gave birth to James VI.--in Edinburgh Castle. But she brought him to
an insecure house, among his known foes.
Mary’s conduct towards Darnley, after Craigmillar, and before his murder,
and her behaviour later as regards Bothwell, are always capable of being
covered by one or other special and specious excuse. On this occasion she
brings Darnley to Edinburgh that a tender mother may be near her child;
that a loving wife may attend a repentant husband, who cannot be so safe
anywhere as under the ægis of her royal presence. In each and every case
there is a special, and not an incredible explanation. But one cause, if
it existed, would explain every item of her conduct throughout, from
Craigmillar to Kirk o’ Field: she hated Darnley. On the hypothesis of her
innocence, and accepting the special pleas for each act, Mary was a weak,
ailing, timid, and silly woman, with ‘a heart of wax.’ On the
hypothesis of her guilt, though ailing, worn, wretched, she had ‘a heart
of diamond,’ strong to scheme and act a Clytæmnestra’s part, even _contre
son naturel_. The _naturel_ of Clytæmnestra, too, was good, says Zeus in
the Odyssey. But in her case, ‘Love was a great master.’
[Illustration: THE WHITTINGHAM TREE
(_External view_)]
Still, we have seen no contemporary evidence, or hint of evidence, that
love for Bothwell was Mary’s master. Her conduct, from her recovery of
power, after Riccio’s murder, to her reconciliation of Lethington with
Bothwell, is, on the face of it, in accordance with the interests and
wishes of her brother, Moray, who hated Bothwell. As the English envoy,
Randolph, had desired, she brought Moray to Court. She permitted him to
attend in the Castle while she was in child-bed, and ‘refused Bothwell.’
She protected Moray from Bothwell’s and Darnley’s intrigues. She took
Moray’s side, as to the readmission of Lethington to favour, though
Bothwell stormed. She even made Moray her confidant as to money received
from the Pope: perhaps Moray had his share! Lethington and Moray, not
Bothwell, seem to have had her confidence. At Moray’s request she annulled
her restoration of consistorial jurisdiction to Archbishop Hamilton. Moray
and Lethington, not Bothwell, opened the proposals at Craigmillar. Such is
the evidence of history. On the other side are the scandals reported by
Buchanan, and, in details, Buchanan erred: for example, as to the ride to
Hermitage.
If Mary knew too much, how much was known by ‘the noble, stainless Moray’?