Lang Andrew
The Mystery of Mary Stuart
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]
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]
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.’
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’?
As to Moray’s foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder, can it be denied? He did 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]
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.
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.’
