Lang Andrew
The Mystery of Mary Stuart
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.
Our plan must be, first, to compare the contemporary descriptions of the incident. Taking, first, the ‘Diurnal of Occurrents,’ we find that the explosion took place at ‘two hours before none;’ which at that time meant 2 A.M. The murderers opened the door with false keys, and strangled Darnley, and his servant, Taylor, ‘in their naked beds,’ then threw the bodies into a garden, ‘beyond the Thief Row’ (see the sketch, p. 131), returned, and blew up the house, ‘so that there remained not one stone upon another undestroyed.’ The names of the miscreants are given, ‘as alleged,’ Bothwell, Ormistoun of that ilk; Hob Ormistoun his uncle; Hepburn of Bowton, and young Hay of Tala. All these underlings were later taken, confessed, and were executed. The part of the entry in the ‘Diurnal’ which deals with them, at least, is probably not contemporary. The men named professed to know nothing of the strangling. For what it is worth the entry corroborates the entire destruction of the house, which would imply a mine, or powder in the vaulted cellars. The contemporary drawing shows the whole house utterly levelled with the ground.[132]
Birrel, in his Diary, says, ‘The house was raised from the ground with powder, and the King, if he had not been cruelly strangled, after he fell out of the air, with his garters, he had lived.’ An official account says, ‘Of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not one stone above another, but all either carried far away, or dung in dross to the very groundstone.’[133] This could only be done by a mine, but the escape of Nelson proves exaggeration. This version is also in Mary’s letter to Archbishop Beaton (February 10, or 11), written in Scots, probably by Lethington, and he, of course, may have exaggerated, as may the Privy Council in their report to the same effect.[134] Clernault, a Frenchman who carried the news, averred that a mine was employed. Sir James Melville says that Bothwell ‘made a train of powder, or had one made before, which came under the house,’ but Darnley was first strangled ‘in a low stable,’ by a napkin thrust into his mouth.[135] The Lennox MSS. say that Darnley was suffocated ‘with a wet napkin steeped in vinegar.’ The Savoyard Ambassador, Moretta, on returning to France, expressed the opinion that Darnley fled from the house, when he heard the key of the murderers grate in the keyhole, that he was in his shirt, carrying his dressing gown, that he was followed, dragged into a little garden outside his own garden wall (the garden across the Thieves’ Row), and there strangled. Some women heard him exclaim, ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of him who pitied all the world.’[136] His kinsmen were Archibald and other Douglases. Buchanan, in his ‘Detection,’ speaks of ‘the King’s lodging, even from the very foundation, blown up.’ In the ‘Actio,’ or Oration, printed with the ‘Detection,’ the writer, whoever he was, says, ‘they had undermined the wall,’ and that Mary slept under Darnley’s room, lest the servants should hear ‘the noise of the underminers working.’
The ‘Detection’ and ‘Actio’ were published to discredit Mary, long after the murderers had confessed that there was no mine at all, that the powder was laid in Mary’s room. In the ‘Book of Articles,’ the powder is placed ‘in the laich house,’ whether that means the arched ground floor, or Mary’s chamber; apparently the latter, as we read, ‘she lay in the house under the King, where also thereafter the powder was placed.’[137] This is made into conformity with the confessions of Bothwell’s men, according to whom but nine or ten were concerned in the deed. But Moray himself, two months after the murder, told de Silva that ‘it is undoubted that over thirty or forty persons were concerned’ (the fifty of the Lennox Paper) ‘and the house … was entirely undermined.’[138] When Morton, long afterwards, was accused of and executed for the deed, the dittay ran that the powder was under the ‘angular stones and within the vaults.’ In the mysterious letter, attributed to Mary, and cited by Moray and the Lennox Papers, the ‘preparation’ of the Kirk o’ Field is at least hinted at. The ‘Book of Articles’ avers that, ‘from Glasgow, by her letters and otherwise,’ Mary ‘held him’ (Bothwell) ‘continually in remembrance of the said house,’ which she did, in the letter never produced, but not in any of the Casket Letters, unless it be in a note, among other suspicious notes, ‘Of the ludgeing in Edinburgh.’[139] The Lennox MSS., as we saw, say ‘the place was already prepared with “undermining and” trains of powder therein.’ The whole of the narratives, confirmed by Moray, and by the descriptions of the ruin of the house, prove that the theory of a prepared mine was entertained, till Powrie, Tala, and Bowton made their depositions, and, in the ‘Actio,’ an appendix to Buchanan’s ‘Detection,’ and the indictment of Morton, even after that. But when the accusers, of whom some were guilty themselves, came to plead against Mary, they naturally wished to restrict the conspiracy to Bothwell and Mary. The strangling disappears. The murderers are no longer thirty, or forty, or fifty. The powder is placed in Mary’s own room, not in a mine. All this altered theory rests on examinations of prisoners.
What are they worth? They were taken in the following order: Powrie, June 23, Dalgleish, June 26, before the Privy Council. Powrie was again examined in July before the Privy Council, and Hay of Tala on September 13. A note of news says that Tala was taken in Fife on September 6, 1567 (annotated) ‘7th (Nicolas and Bond).’[140] Tala ‘can bleke [blacken] some great men with it’ – the murder. But as Mr. Hosack cites Bedford to Cecil, September 5, 1567, Hay of Tala ‘opened the whole device of the murder, … and went so far as to touch a great many not of the smallest,’ such as Huntly, Argyll, Lethington, and others, no doubt.[141] Even Laing, however, admits that ‘the evidence against Huntly was suppressed carefully in Hay’s deposition.’[142] In Dec. – Jan. 1567-68, anonymous writings say that, if the Lords keep Tala and Bowton alive, they could tell them who subscribed the murder bond, and pray the Lords not to seem to lay all the weight on Mary’s back. A paper of Questions to the Lords of the Articles asks why Tala and Bowton ‘are not compelled openly to declare the manner of the King’s slaughter, and who consented thereunto.’[143]
The authors of these Questions had absolute right on their side. Moray no more prosecuted the quest for all murderers of Darnley than Mary had done. To prove this we need no anonymous pamphlets or placards, no contradictory tattle about secret examinations and dying confessions. When Mary’s case was inquired into at Westminster (December, 1568), Moray put in as evidence the deposition of Bowton, made in December, 1567. Bothwell, said Bowton, had assured him that the crime was devised ‘by some of the noblemen,’ ‘other noblemen had entrance as far as he in that matter.’[144] This was declared by Bowton in Moray’s own presence. The noble and stainless Moray is not said to ask ‘What noblemen do you mean?’ No torture would have been needed to extract their names from Bowton, and Moray should at once have arrested the sinners. But some were his own allies, united with him in accusing his sister. So no questions were asked. The papers which, between Dec. – Jan. 1567-68, did ask disagreeable questions must have been prior to January 3, 1568, when Tala, Bowton, Dalgleish, and Powrie, after being ‘put to the knowledge of an assize,’ were executed; their legs and arms were carried about the country by boys in baskets! According to the ‘Diurnal,’ Tala incriminated, before the whole people round the scaffold, Bothwell, Huntly, Argyll, Lethington, and Balfour, with divers other nobles, and the Queen. On January 7, Drury gave the same news to Cecil, making Bowton the confessor, and omitting the charge against Mary. The incriminated noblemen at once left Edinburgh, ‘which,’ says the ‘Diurnal,’ ‘makes the matter … the more probable.’[145] Meanwhile Moray ‘looked through his fingers,’ and carried the incriminated Lethington with him, later, as one of Mary’s accusers, while he purchased Sir James Balfour!
What, we ask once more, in these circumstances, are the examinations of the murderers worth, after passing through the hands of the accomplices? On December 8, 1568, Moray gave in the written records of the examinations to the English Commissioners. We have, first, Bothwell’s servant, Powrie, examined before the Lords of the Secret Council (June 23, July 3, 1567). He helped to carry the powder to Kirk o’ Field on February 9, but did not see what was done with it. Dalgleish, examined at Edinburgh on June 26, 1567, before Morton, Atholl, the Provost of Dundee, and Kirkcaldy, said nothing about the powder. Tala was examined, on September 13, at Edinburgh, before Moray, Morton, Atholl, the Lairds of Loch Leven and Pitarro, James Makgill, and the Justice Clerk, Bellenden. No man implicated, except Morton, was present. Tala said that Bothwell arranged to lay the powder in Mary’s room, under Darnley’s. This was done; the powder was placed in ‘the nether house, under the King’s chamber,’ the plotters entering by the back door, from the garden, of which Paris had the key. Thus there would be no show at the front door, in the quadrangle, of men coming and going: they were in Mary’s room, but did not enter by the front door. Next, on December 8, Bowton was examined at Edinburgh before Moray, Atholl, Lindsay, Kirkcaldy of Grange, and Bellenden. He implicated Morton, Lethington, and Balfour, but, at Westminster, Moray suppressed the evidence utterly. (See Introduction, pp. xiii-xviii, for the suppressions). Next we have the trial of Bowton, Tala, Powrie, and Dalgleish, on January 3, 1568, before Sir Thomas Craig and a jury of burgesses and gentlemen. The accused confessed to their previous depositions. The jury found them guilty on the depositions alone, found that ‘the whole lodging was raised and blown in the air, and his Grace [Darnley] was murdered treasonably, and most cruelly slain and destroyed by them therein.’ When Mr. Hosack asserts that these depositions ‘were taken before the Lords of the Secret Council, namely Morton, Huntly, Argyll, Maitland, and Balfour,’ he errs, according to the documents cited. Only Powrie is described as having been examined ‘before the Lords of the Secret Council.’ Mr. Hosack must have known that Huntly and Argyll were not in Edinburgh on June 23, when Powrie was examined.[146] We can only say that Powrie’s depositions, made before the Lords of the Secret Council, struck the keynote, to which all later confessions, including that of Bothwell’s valet, Paris, correspond.[147] Thus vanish, for the moment, the mine and the strangling, while the deed is done by powder in Mary’s own chamber. Nobody is now left in the actual crime save Bothwell, Bowton, Tala, Powrie, Dalgleish, Wilson, Paris, Ormistoun, and Hob Ormistoun. They knew of no strangling.[148]
But on February 11, 1567, two women, examined by a number of persons, including Huntly, stated thus: Barbara Mertine heard thirteen men, and saw eleven, pass up the Cowgate, and saw eleven pass down the Black Friars wynd, after the explosion. She called them traitors. May Crokat (by marriage Mrs. Stirling), in the service of the Archbishop of St. Andrews (whose house was adjacent to Kirk o’ Field), heard the explosion, thought it was in ‘the house above,’ ran out, saw eleven men, caught one by his silk coat, and ‘asked where the crack was.’ They fled.[149] The avenging ghost of Darnley pursued his murderers for twenty years, and, in their cases, we have later depositions, and letters. Thus, as to the men employed, Archibald Douglas, that reverend parson and learned Lord of Session, informed Morton that he himself ‘was at the deed doing, and came to the Kirk o’ Field yard with the Earls of Bothwell and Huntly.’ Douglas, at this time (June, 1581), had fled from justice to England: Morton was underlying the law. Morton’s confession was made, in 1581, on the day of his execution, to the Rev. John Durie and the Rev. Walter Balcanquell, who wrote down and made known the declaration. On June 3, 1581, Archibald Douglas’s servant, Binning, was also executed. He confessed that Archibald lost one of his velvet mules (dress shoes) on the scene, or on the way from the murder. Powrie had ‘deponed’ that three of Bothwell’s company wore ‘mulis,’ whether for quiet in walking, or because they were in evening dress, having been at Bastian’s wedding masque and dance. Douglas, in a collusive trial before a jury of his kinsmen, in 1586, was acquitted, and showed a great deal of forensic ability.[150]
It is thus abundantly evident that the depositions of the murderers put in by Mary’s accusers did not tell the whole truth, whatever amount of truth they may have told. We cannot, therefore, perhaps accept their story of placing the powder in Mary’s room, where it could hardly have caused the amount of damage described: but that point may be left open. We know that Bothwell’s men were not alone in the affair, and the strangling of Darnley, and the removal of his body, with his purple velvet sable-lined dressing gown (attested by the Lennox MSS.), may have been done by the men of Douglas and Huntly.
The treatment of the whole topic by George Buchanan is remarkable. In the ‘Book of Articles,’ levelled at Mary, in 1568, Darnley is blown up by powder placed in Mary’s room. In the ‘Detection,’ of which the first draft (in the Lennox MSS.) is of 1568, reference for the method of the deed is made to the depositions of Powrie and the others. In the ‘History,’ there are three gangs, those with Bothwell, and two others, advancing by separate routes. They strangle Darnley and Taylor, and carry their bodies into an adjacent garden; the house is then blown up ‘from the very foundations.’ Buchanan thus returns to the strangling, omitted, for reasons, in the ‘Detection.’ Darnley’s body is unbruised, and his dressing-gown, lying near him, is neither scorched nor smirched with dust. A light burned, Buchanan says, in the Hamilton House till the explosion, and was then extinguished; the Archbishop, contrary to custom, was lodging there, with ‘Gloade,’ says a Lennox MS. ‘Gloade’ is – Lord Claude Hamilton![151] While Buchanan was helping to prosecute Mary, he had not a word to say about the strangling of Darnley, and about the dressing-gown and slippers laid beside the corpse, though all this was in the papers of Lennox, his chief. Not a word had he to say about the three bands of men who moved on Kirk o’ Field, or the fifty men of the Lennox MS. The crime was to be limited to Bothwell, his gang, and the Queen, as was convenient to the accusers. Later Buchanan brought into his ‘History’ what he kept out of the ‘Detection’ and ‘Book of Articles,’ adding a slur on Archbishop Hamilton.
Finally, when telling, in his ‘History,’ how the Archbishop was caught at Dumbarton, and hanged by Lennox, without trial, Buchanan has quite a fresh version. The Archbishop sent six or eight of his bravoes, with false keys of the doors (what becomes of Bothwell’s false keys?) to Kirk o’ Field. They strangle Darnley, and lay him in a garden, and then, on a given signal, other conspirators blow up the house. Where is Bothwell? The leader of the Archbishop’s gang told this, under seal of confession, to a priest, a very respectable man (viro minime malo). This respectable priest first blabbed in conversation, and then, when the Archbishop was arrested, gave evidence derived from the disclosure of a Hamilton under seal of confession. The Archbishop mildly remarked that such conduct was condemned by the Church. Later, the priest was executed for celebrating the Mass (this being his third conviction), and he repeated the story openly and fully. The tale of the priest was of rather old standing. When collecting his evidence for the York Commission of October, 1568, Lennox wrote to his retainers to ask, among other things, for the deposition of the priest of Paisley, ‘that heard and testified the last exclamation of one Hamilton, which the Laird of Minto showed to Mr. John Wood,’ who was then helping Lennox to get up his case (June 11, 1568).[152] Buchanan has yet another version, in his ‘Admonition to the Trew Lordis:’ here the Archbishop sends only four of his rogues to the murder.
Buchanan’s plan clearly was to accuse the persons whom it was convenient to accuse, at any given time; and to alter his account of the method of the murder so as to suit each new accusation. Probably he was not dishonest. The facts ‘were to him ministered,’ by the Lords, in 1568, and also by Lennox. Later, different sets of facts were ‘ministered’ to him, as occasion served, and he published them without heeding his inconsistencies. He was old, was a Lennox man, and an advanced Liberal.
Of one examination, which ought to have been important, we have found no record. There was a certain Captain James Cullen, who wrote letters in July 13 to July 18, 1560, from Edinburgh Castle, to the Cardinal of Lorraine. He was then an officer of Mary of Guise, during the siege of Leith.[153] In the end of 1565, and the beginning of 1566, Captain Cullen was in the service of Frederic II. of Denmark, and was trying to enlist English sailors for him.[154] Elizabeth refused to permit this, and Captain Cullen appears to have returned to his native Scotland, where he became, under Bothwell, an officer of the Guard put about Mary’s person, after Riccio’s murder. On February 28, 1567, eighteen days after Darnley’s murder, Scrope writes that ‘Captain Cullen with his company have the credit nearest her’ (Mary’s) ‘person.’ On May 13, Drury remarks, ‘It was Captain Cullen’s persuasion, for more surety, to have the King strangled, and not only to trust to the powder,’ the Captain having observed, in his military experience, that the effects of explosions were not always satisfactory. ‘The King was long of dying, and to his strength made debate for his life.’[155]
To return to honest Captain Cullen: after Bothwell was acquitted, and had issued a cartel offering Trial by Combat to any impugner of his honour, some anonymous champion promised, under certain conditions, to fight. This hero placarded the names of three Balfours, black John Spens, and others, as conspirators; as ‘doers’ he mentioned, with some companions, Tala, Bowton, Pat Wilson, and James Cullen. On April 25, the Captain was named as a murderer in Elizabeth’s Instructions to Lord Grey.[156] On May 8, Kirkcaldy told Bedford that Tullibardine had offered, with five others, to fight Ormistoun, ‘Beynston,’ Bowton, Tala, Captain Cullen, and James Edmonstone, who, says Tullibardine, were at the murder. On June 16, 1567, the day after Mary’s capture at Carberry, Scrope writes, ‘The Lords have taken Captain Cullen, who, after some strict dealing [torture], has revealed the King’s murder with the whole matter thereof.’[157] Scrope was mistaken. He had probably heard of the capture of Blackader, who was hanged on June 24, denying his guilt. He had no more chance than had James Stewart of the Glens with a Campbell jury. His jury was composed of Lennox men, Darnley’s clansmen. Our Captain had not been taken, but on September 15 Moray told Throckmorton that Kirkcaldy, in Shetland, had captured Cullen, ‘one of the very executors, he may clear the whole action.’[158]
Did Captain Cullen clear the whole action? We hear no more of his embarrassing revelations. But we do know that he was released and returned to the crimping trade: he fought for the Castle in 1571, was taken in a cupboard and executed. He had a pretty wife, the poor Captain, coveted and secured by Morton.
