not deny that he was at Craigmillar during the conference as to
‘dispatching’ Darnley. If the news of the plan for arresting or killing
him reached underlings like Hiegait and Walker, could it be hidden from
Moray, the man most in Mary’s confidence, and likely to be best served by
spies? He glosses over his signature to the band of early October,
1566--the anti-Darnley band--as if it were a mere ‘sign of reconciliation’
which he promised to subscribe ‘before I could be admitted to the Queen’s
presence, or have any show of her favour.’ But, when he did sign, he had
possessed Mary’s favour for more than three months, and she had even saved
him from a joint intrigue of Bothwell and Darnley. In January, 1569, Moray
declared that, except the band of early October, 1566, ‘no other band was
proposed to me in any wise,’ either before or after Darnley’s murder. And
next he says that he would never subscribe any band, ‘howbeit I was
earnestly urged and pressed thereto by the Queen’s commandment.’[118] Does
he mean that no band was proposed to him, and yet that the Queen did press
him to sign a band? Or does he mean that he would never have signed, even
if the Queen had asked him to do so? We can never see this man’s face; the
fingers through which he looks on at murder hide his shifty eyes.
VI
_THE MURDER OF DARNLEY_
It is not easy for those who know modern Edinburgh to make a mental
picture of the Kirk o’ Field. To the site of that unhappy dwelling the
Professors now daily march, walking up beneath the frowning Castle, from
modern miles of stone and mortar which were green fields in Mary’s day.
The students congregate from every side, the omnibuses and cabs roll by
through smoky, crowded, and rather uninteresting streets of shops: the
solid murky buildings of the University look down on a thronged and busy
populace which at every step treads on history, as Cicero says men do at
Athens. On every side are houses neither new enough to seem clean, nor old
enough to be interesting: there is not within view a patch of grass, a
garden, or a green tree. The University buildings cover the site of Kirk
o’ Field, but the ghosts of those who perished there would be sadly at a
loss could they return to the scene.
In Mary’s time whoever stood on the grassy crest of the Calton Hill,
gazing on Edinburgh, beheld, as he still does, Holyrood at his feet, and,
crowning the highest point of the central part of the town, the tall
square tower of the church of St. Mary in the Fields, on the limit of the
landscape. In going, as Mary often went, from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field,
you walked straight out of the palace, and up the Canongate, through
streets of Court suburb, with gardens behind the houses. You then reached
the gate of the town wall, called the Nether Port, and entered the street
of the Nether Bow, which was a continuation of the High Street. By any one
of the lanes, or wynds, which cut the Nether Bow at right angles on the
left, you reached the Cowgate (the street of palaces, as Alesius, the
Reformer, calls it), running from the Castle parallel to the High Street
and its continuation, the Nether Bow. From the Cowgate, you struck into
one or other of the wynds which led to the grounds of what were, in Mary’s
time, the ruined church and houses of the Dominican monastery, or Black
Friars, and to Kirk o’ Field.
Beyond this, all is very difficult to explain and understand. The church
of Kirk o’ Field, and the quadrangle of houses tenanted, just as in Oxford
or Cambridge, by the Prebendaries and Provost of that collegiate church,
lay, at an early date, _outside_ of the walls of Edinburgh. This is proved
by the very name of the collegiate church, ‘St. Mary in the Fields.’ But
by 1531, a royal charter speaks of ‘the College Church of the Blessed
Virgin Mary in the Fields, _within the walls_ of the burgh of Edinburgh,’
the city wall having been recently extended in that direction.[119] The
monastery of the Black Friars, close to Kirk o’ Field, was also included,
by 1531, within the walls of the burgh. But the town wall which encircled
Kirk o’ Field and the Black Friars on the south, was always in a ruinous
condition. In 1541, we find the Town Council demanding that ‘ane honest
substantious wall’ shall be made in another quarter.[120] In 1554, the
Provost and Prebendaries of Kirk o’ Field granted part of their grounds to
the Duke of Châtelherault, because their own houses had been ‘burned down
and destroyed by their auld enemies of England,’ in the invasions of
1544-1547.[121] In 1544-1547, the town wall encircling Kirk o’ Field on
the south must also have been partially ruined. Châtelherault built on the
ground thus acquired, quite close to Kirk o’ Field, a large new house or
château from which, according to George Buchanan, Archbishop Hamilton sent
forth ruffians to aid in Darnley’s murder.
By 1557, we find that the town wall, at the point where it encircled the
Black Friars, in the vicinity of Kirk o’ Field, was ‘fallen down,’ and was
to be ‘reedified and mended.’[122] By August, 1559, the Town Council
protest against a common passage through the ‘slap,’ or ‘slop,’ the broken
gap, in the Black Friars ‘yard dyke’ (garden wall) ‘at the east end of the
block-house.’ This gap, therefore, is to be built up again, ‘conform in
work to the town wall next adjacent,’ but it appears that this was never
done. When Bothwell went to the murder, he got into the Black Friars
grounds, whence he made his way into Darnley’s garden, either by climbing
through a ‘slap’ or gap in the wall, or by sending an accomplice through,
who opened the Black Friars gate. This ruinous condition of the town wall
was partly due to the habitual negligence of the citizens: partly to the
destruction which fell, in 1559-1560, on the religious houses and
collegiate churches. So, in February, 1560, we find the town treasurer
ordered to pull down the walls of the Black Friars, and use the stones to
‘build the town walls therewith.’[123] On August 11, 1564, we again hear
of repairing slaps, or gaps, ‘and in especial _the new wall at the
college_, so that no part thereof be climable.’ The college may be Kirk o’
Field, where the burgesses already desired to build a college, the parent
of Edinburgh University. On the day after Darnley’s murder (Feb. 11, 1567)
the treasurer was ordered ‘to take away the hewen work of the back door of
the Provost’s lodging of the Kirk o’ Field, and to build up the same door
with lime and sand.’ Conceivably this ‘back door,’ now to be built up and
closed, was that door in Darnley’s house which opened through the town
wall. Finally, on May 7, 1567, the Treasurer was bidden ‘to build _the
wall of the town decayed and fallen down on the south side_ of the Provost
of the Kirk o’ Field’s lodging, to be built up of lime and stone,
conform to the height and thickness of the _new wall_ elsewhere [ellis]
builded, and to pass lineally with the same to the wall of the church yard
of the said church, and to leave no door nor entry in the said new
wall.’[124]
[Illustration: KIRK O’ FIELD SITE IN 1646
25 is the Town Wall. _w_ indicates the University, including Hamilton
House
_y_ indicates a rectangular ruin, Darnley’s house (?)]
All these facts prove that the old wall which enclosed Kirk o’ Field and
the Black Friars on the south had fallen into disrepair, and that new
walls had for some time before the murder been in course of building. Now,
in the map of 1647, we find a very neat and regular wall, to the south of
the site that had been occupied by Kirk o’ Field. Whereas, in Darnley’s
time, there had been a gate called Kirk o’ Field Port to the left, or
west, of the Kirk o’ Field, by 1647 there was no such name, but, instead,
Potter Row Port, to the left, or west, of the University buildings; by
1647 these included Hamilton House, and the ground covered by Kirk o’
Field. This wall, extant in 1647, I take to be ‘the new wall,’ passing
lineally ‘to the wall of the church yard’ of Kirk o’ Field. It supplied
the place of the wall which, in the chart of 1567 (p. 130), ran south and
north past the gable of Kirk o’ Field.
Thus Kirk o’ Field, in February, 1567, had, to the south of it, an old
decayed town wall, much fallen down, and was thus _within_ that town wall.
But ‘it is traditionally said,’ writes the editor of Keith, Mr. Parker
Lawson, in 1845, ‘that the house of the Provost of Kirk o’ Field’ (in
which house, or the one next to it, Darnley was blown up) ‘stood as near
as possible _without_ the then city walls.’[125] Scott follows this
opinion in ‘The Abbot.’ Yet certainly Kirk o’ Field was not without, but
within, the ruinous town wall mentioned in the Burgh Records of May 7,
1567. How are we to understand this discrepancy?
The accompanying chart, drawn from a coloured design sent to the English
Government in February, 1567, ought to be _reversed_, as in a mirror. So
regarded, we are facing Kirk o’ Field, and are looking from south to
north. At our left hand, or westward, is the gate or port in the town
wall, called ‘the Kirk o’ Field Port.’ If we pass through it, if the chart
be right we are in Potter Row. Just from the Port of Kirk o’ Field, the
town wall runs due north, for a few yards: then runs due east, enclosing
the church yard of Kirk o’ Field, on the north, and the church itself,
shown in ruins, the church, as usual, running from east to west. After
running west to east for some fifty yards, the town wall, battlemented and
loopholed, turns at a right angle, and runs due south to north, being thus
continued till it reaches the northern limit of the plan. Now this wall,
here running due south to north, is not the ‘wall of the town decayed and
fallen down on the south side of the Provost of Kirk o’ Field’s lodgings,’
as described in the Burgh Records of May 7, 1567. This wall, on the other
hand, leaves the collegiate quadrangle of Kirk o’ Field inside it, on the
_east_, and the ruined gable of Darnley’s house, a gable running from east
to west, abuts on this wall, having a door through the wall into the
Thieves’ Row. It is true that one of Darnley’s servants, Nelson, who
escaped from the explosion, declared that the gallery of Darnley’s house,
and the gable which had a window ‘through the town wall,’ ran _south_.
But, by the contemporary chart, the only part of Darnley’s house which was
in contact with the town wall ran east to west, and impinged on the town
wall, which here ran south to north. Again, in the map of 1647, the wall
of that date no longer runs south to north, but is continued ‘lineally’
from that short part of the town wall, in the chart of 1567, which _did_
run west to east, forming there the northern wall of the church yard of
Kirk o’ Field. This continuation was ordered to be made by the Town
Council on May 7, 1567, three months after Darnley’s murder. Further, in
1646, Professor Crawford wrote that the lodgings of the Provost of Kirk o’
Field, in 1567, ‘had a garden on the _south_, betwixt it and the _present_
town wall.’[126]
Now the ruins of Darnley’s house, in the map of 1647, have a space of
garden between them and ‘the _present_ town wall,’ the wall of 1647. But,
in 1567, the gable of Darnley’s house actually impinged on, and had a
window and a door through the town wall on, the _west_ according to the
chart.
The chart, then, _reversed_, shows the whole position thus. On our left,
the west, is the ruined Kirk o’ Field church, the church yard being
bordered, on the north, by the town wall, here running, for a short way,
east and west. After the town wall turns at a right angle and runs south
to north, it is continued west and east by a short prolongation of some
ten yards, having a gate in it. Next, running west to east, are two tall
houses, forming the south side of a quadrangle. These Crawford (1646)
seems to have regarded as the Provost’s lodgings. The east side of the
quadrangle consists of four small houses, as does the north side. The west
side of the quadrangle was Darnley’s house. It was in the shape of an
inverted L, thus Г. The long limb faced the quadrangle, the short limb
touched the town wall, and had a door through it, into the Thieves’ Row.
Beyond the Thieves’ Row were gardens, in one of which Darnley’s body and
that of his servant, Taylor, were found after the explosion. Mary’s room
in the short limb of the Г had a garden door, opening into Darnley’s
garden. Behind Darnley’s garden were the grounds of the Black Friars
monastery. On the night of the murder Bothwell conveyed the gunpowder into
the Black Friars grounds, entering by the gate or through the broken Black
Friars wall to the north side of the quadrangle, and thence into Darnley’s
garden, and so, by Mary’s garden door, into Mary’s chamber: as the
depositions of the accomplices declare.
[Illustration:
1. Kirk o’ Field Port
2. Church of St. Mary-in-the-Fields
3. Thieves’ Row
4. Door from Darnley’s House into Thieves’ Row
5. Ruins of Darnley’s House
6. Darnley’s Body
7. Darnley’s Garden
8. Grounds of the Black Friars
9. Hamilton House
10. Potter Row
11. Town Wall]
The whole quadrangle lay amidst wide waste spaces of gardens and trees,
with scattered cottages, and with Hamilton House, a hostile house, hard
by. Such was the situation of Kirk o’ Field, Church and College
quadrangle, as shown by the contemporary plan. The difficulties are caused
by the wall, in the chart, running south to north, having Darnley’s house
abutting on it at right angles. The old ruined wall, on the other hand,
was to the south of the quadrangle, as was the wall of 1647. When or why
the wall running from south to north was built, I do not know, possibly
after 1559, out of the stones of the Black Friars.[127] The new work was
done under James Lindsay, treasurer in 1559, and Luke Wilson, treasurer in
1560. Perhaps the wall running south to north was the work of these two
treasurers. At all events, there the wall was, or there it is in the
contemporary design, to the confusion of antiquaries, bewildered between
the south to north wall of the chart, as given, and the new wall seen in
the map of 1647, a wall which was to the south of Kirk o’ Field, while, in
the map of 1647, there is no trace of the south to north wall of the chart
of 1567.
Having located Darnley’s house, as forming the west side of a small
college quadrangle among gardens and trees, we now examine the interior
of his far from palatial lodgings.
The two-storied house (the arched vaults on which it probably stood not
counting as a story?) was just large enough for the invalid, his servants,
and his royal nurse. There was a ‘hall,’ probably long and not wide, there
was a lower chamber, used by Mary, which could be entered either from the
garden, or from the passage, opened into by the front door, from the
quadrangle. Mary’s room had two keys, and one must have locked the door
from the passage; the other, the door into the garden. If the former was
kept locked, so that no one could enter the room by the usual way, the
powder could be introduced, without exciting much attention, by the door
opening on the garden. In the chamber above Mary’s, where Darnley lay,
there were also a cabinet and a garderobe. There was a cellar, probably
the kind of vaulted crypt on which houses of the period were built, like
Queen Mary’s House in St. Andrews. From the ‘cellar’ the door, which we
have mentioned, led through the town wall into the Thieves’ Row. Whoever
has seen Queen Mary’s House at Jedburgh (much larger than Kirk o’ Field),
or the Queen’s room at St. Andrews, knows that royal persons, in Scotland,
were then content with very small apartments. A servant named Taylor used
to share Darnley’s sleeping-room, as was usual; three others, including
Nelson, slept in a ‘little gallery,’ which apparently ran at right angles
from Darnley’s chamber to the town wall. He had neither his own guard, nor
a guard of Lennox men, as at Stirling.
If the rooms were small, the tapestries and velvet were magnificent, and
in odd contrast with Mary’s alleged economic plan of taking a door from
the hinges and using it as a bath-cover. This last anecdote, by Nelson,
appears to be contradicted by Hay of Tala. ‘Paris locked the door that
passes up the turnpike to the King’s chamber.’[128] The keys appear to
have wandered into a bewildering variety of hands: a superfluous jugglery,
if Bothwell, as was said, had duplicate keys.
Mary often visited Darnley, and the Lennox documents give us copious, if
untrustworthy, information as to his manner of life. They do not tell us,
as Buchanan does, that Mary and the vast unwieldy Lady Reres used to play
music and sing in the garden of Kirk o’ Field, in the balmy nights of a
Scotch February! But they do contain a copy of a letter, referred to by
Buchanan, which Darnley wrote to Lennox three days before his death.
‘My Lord,--I have thought good to write to you by this bearer of my
good health, I thank God, which is the sooner come through the good
treatment of such as hath this good while concealed their good will; I
mean of my love the Queen, which I assure you hath all this while, and
yet doth, use herself like a natural and loving wife. I hope yet that
God will lighten our hearts with joy that have so long been afflicted
with trouble. As I in this letter do write unto your Lordship, so I
trust this bearer can satisfy you the like. Thus thanking almighty God
of our good hap, I commend your Lordship into his protection.
‘From Edinburgh the vii of February,
‘Your loving and obedient son,
‘HENRY REX.’
The Queen, we are told, came in while Darnley was writing, read the
letter, and ‘kissed him as Judas did the Lord his Master.’
‘The day before his death she caused the rich bed to be taken down, and a
meaner set up in its place, saying unto him that that rich bed they should
both lie in the next night, but her meanings were to save the bed from the
blowing up of the fire of powder.’[129] There has been a good deal of
controversy about this odd piece of economy, reported also by Thomas
Nelson, Darnley’s surviving servant. Where was the bed to be placed for
the marriage couch? Obviously not in Holyrood, and Mary’s own bed in the
room below Darnley’s is reported by Buchanan to have been removed.[130]
The lost bed which was blown up was of velvet, ‘violet brown,’ with gold,
had belonged to Mary of Guise, and had been given to Darnley, by Mary, in
the previous autumn.
Mary’s enemies insist that, apparently on the night of Friday, February 7,
she wrote one of the Casket Letters to Bothwell. The Letter is obscure, as
we shall see, but is interpreted to mean that her brother, Lord Robert
Stuart, had warned Darnley of his danger, that Darnley had confided this
to Mary, that Mary now asked Bothwell to bring Lord Robert to Kirk o’
Field, where she would confront him with Darnley. The pair might come to
blows, Darnley might fall, and the gunpowder plot would be superfluous.
This tale, about which the evidence is inconsistent, is discussed
elsewhere. But, in his MSS., Lennox tells the story, and adds, ‘The Lord
Regent’ (Moray) ‘can declare it, who was there present.’ Buchanan avers
that Mary called in Moray to sever the pair, in hopes that he would be
slain or compromised: not a plausible theory, and not put forward in the
‘Book of Articles.’
Mary twice slept in the room under Darnley’s, probably on the 5th and 7th
of February. In the Lennox MSS. the description of Darnley’s last night
varies from the ordinary versions. ‘The present night of his death she
tarried with him till eleven of the clock, which night she gave him a
goodly ring,’ the usual token of loyalty. This ring is mentioned in a
contemporary English ballad, and by Moray to de Silva (August 3, 1567),
also in the ‘Book of Articles.’ Mary is usually said to have urged, as a
reason for not sleeping at Kirk o’ Field on the fatal night, her sudden
recollection of a promise to be present at Holyrood, at the marriage of
her servant, Sebastian. This, indeed, is her own story, or Lethington’s,
in a letter written in Scots to her ambassador in France, on February 10,
or 11, 1567. But, in the Lennox MSS., it is asserted that Bothwell and
others reminded her of her intention to ride to Seton, early next morning.
Darnley then ‘commanded that his great horses should have been in a
readiness by 5 o’clock in the morning, for that he minded to ride them at
the same hour.’ After Mary had gone, he remembered, says Lennox, a word
she had dropped to the effect that nearly a year had passed since the
murder of Riccio, a theme on which she had long been silent. She was
keeping her promise, given over Riccio’s newly dug grave, that ‘a fatter
than he should lie anear him ’ere the twelvemonth was out.’ His servant
comforted him, and here the narrator regrets that Darnley did not
‘consider and mark such cruel and strange words as she had said unto him,’
for example, at Riccio’s grave. He also gives a _précis_ of ‘her letter
written to Bothwell from Glasgow before her departure thence.’ This is the
mysterious letter which was never produced or published: it will be
considered under ‘External Evidence as to the Casket Letters.’
After singing, with his servants, Psalm V., Darnley drank to them, and
went to bed. Fifty men, says the Lennox author, now environed the house,
sixteen, under Bothwell, ‘came the secret way by which she herself was
wont to come to the King her husband’ (a mere fairy tale), used the
duplicate keys, ‘opened the doors of the garden and house,’ and so entered
his chamber, and suffocated him ‘with a wet napkin stipt in vinegar.’ They
handled Taylor, a servant, in the same way, and laid Darnley in a garden
at some distance with ‘his night gown of purple velvet furred with
sables.’ None of the captured murderers, in their confessions, knew
anything of the strangling, which was universally believed in, but cannot
easily be reconciled with the narratives of the assassins. But had they
confessed to the strangling, others besides Bothwell would have been
implicated, and the confessions are not worthy of entire confidence.[131]
The following curious anecdote is given by the Lennox MSS. After Mary’s
visit to Bothwell at Hermitage (October, 1566) her servants were wondering
at her energy. She replied: ‘Troth it was she was a woman, but yet was she
more than a woman, in that she could find in her heart to see and behold
that which any man durst do, and also could find in her heart to do
anything that a man durst do, if her strength would serve her thereto.
Which appeared to be true, for that some say she was present at the murder
of the King, her husband, in man’s apparel, which apparel she loved
oftentimes to be in, in dancing secretly with the King her husband, and
going in masks by night through the streets.’ These are examples of the
sayings and reports of her servants, which, on June 11, 1568, Lennox urged
his friends to collect. This romantic tale proved too great for the belief
of Buchanan, if he knew it. But Lethington told Throckmorton in July,
1567, that the Lords had proof against Mary not only in her handwriting,
but by ‘sufficient witnesses.’ Doubtless they saw her on the scene in male
costume! Naturally they were never produced.
If an historical event could be discredited, like a ghost story, by
discrepancies in the evidence, we might maintain that Darnley never was
murdered at all. The chief varieties of statement are concerned (1) with
the nature of his death. Was he (_a_) taken out of the house and
strangled, or (_b_) strangled in trying to escape from the house, or (_c_)
strangled in the house, and carried outside, or (_d_) destroyed by the
explosion and the fall? Next (2), accepting any of the statements which
represent Darnley as being strangled (and they are, so far, unanimous at
the time of the event), who were the stranglers? Were they (_a_) some of
Bothwell’s men, (_b_) men of Balfour’s or Huntly’s, or (_c_) servants of
Archbishop Hamilton, as the Lennox faction aver, or (_d_) Douglases under
Archibald Douglas? Finally (3) was Kirk o’ Field (_a_) undermined by the
murderers, in readiness for the deed, before Darnley’s arrival from
Glasgow, or (_b_) was the powder placed in the Queen’s bedroom, under
Darnley’s, on the night of the crime; or (_c_) was it then placed in the
vaults under the room on the first floor which was occupied by the Queen?
The reader will find that each of these theories was in turn adopted by
the accusers, and that selections were made, later, by the accusers of
Morton, and Archibald Douglas, and Archbishop Hamilton, just as happened
to suit the purpose of the several prosecutors at the moment. Moreover it
is not certain that the miscreants who blew up the house themselves knew
the whole details of the crime.