Mary Queen of Scots (53 page)

For Darnley, with his teeth drawn, and threatened from so many quarters, was still in some respects a dangerous animal. He did not cease to intrigue as well as boast. He was clever enough to see that he had a possible line of attack against Mary in her determinedly
laissez-faire
policy towards the Scottish Catholic Church: he was unscrupulous enough to contemplate blackening her reputation in the eyes of the Catholic powers abroad with the aim of elevating himself, as the champion of the Catholic faith, in Scotland. In the summer of 1566 there had been some crazy story that he contemplated inhabiting the Scilly Isles and from there attacking England.
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On 22 October Robert Melville reported to Beaton in Paris that Darnley was trying to use his threat to leave the country to demand the dismissal of Maitland, Macgill and Bellenden, all strong Protestants, from the queen’s counsels.
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On 13 November, de Silva, the Spanish ambassador
in London, reported to Philip
II
that Queen Mary had heard in Scotland that Darnley had written to Philip, the Pope, the king of France and the cardinal of Lorraine, that she was ‘dubious in the faith’.
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Nearly a year before Darnley had pictured himself in possession of the coveted crown matrimonial. Now his ambitions were strong enough still to picture himself set up as Catholic king of Scotland, at the will of a strong foreign Catholic power, ruling as guardian of his infant son – with his wife of course overthrown.

It will never be known exactly how much of this ‘Catholic’ plot existed in the imagination of Darnley, or indeed Darnley’s enemies, and how much reality there was behind the rumours and the suspicions. But certainly at the turn of the year there were whispers that Darnley was once more intriguing against his wife which were loud enough to reach not only the queen’s ears in Edinburgh, but also those of Beaton in Paris. In the words of the historian F.W. Maitland, it is very hard to remember that events now long in the past, were once in the future. In January 1567 it was Darnley, out of the royal couple, who had been shown to be the plotter, who had aimed at the crown matrimonial and perhaps more, by a conspiracy. So far Queen Mary had only been plotted against during her reign, and ever since the Riccio affair had kept, as du Croc pointed out, an extremely wary eye on Darnley for ‘further contrivances’. Now she believed she had stumbled on news of such contrivances: she wrote to Paris in January to tell Beaton that there was a rumour of a plot by Darnley to seize the person of Prince James, and thus control the reins of government.
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The story had been brought to her at Stirling by a servant William Walker: ‘How it was not only openly bruited, but also he had heard by report of persons whom he esteemed lovers of us [the Queen] that the King, by assistance of some of the nobility, should take the Prince our son and crown him, and being crowned, as his father, should take upon him the government….’ Walker gave as his reference another servant, William Hiegate. But Hiegate, when questioned, denied the whole thing, and merely repeated a rumour to the opposite effect, that he had heard how the king was about to be put in ward by the nobles.

The queen duly conveyed this atmosphere of plot and counter-plot to Beaton in Paris. But at the end of her letter she merely concluded rather dourly that God knew how her husband had behaved towards her, and the outside world knew as well as God: as for her subjects, she did not doubt that they too, in their hearts, condemned him for the way he had treated her. Darnley was always enquiring for news about her doings, and in Mary’s view, both he and his father Lennox, with their adherents, would
be delighted to do her some mischief, if their strength were equivalent to their wishes. Luckily, wrote Mary, God had seen to it that their power was moderated, so that they had little means to execute their evil intentions. In any case Mary declared herself sceptical as to whether any in Scotland – beyond the immediate Lennox party – would truly approve of an action against their queen. Despite Mary’s boasted self-confidence, she did take one precaution against the possible malevolence of Darnley: she had the little Prince James brought out of Stirling Castle, where he was considered to lie too close to the dangerous Glasgow area. On 14 January he was installed with his mother in the palace of Holyrood. Other rumours of danger to the queen had already reached Beaton in Paris, before the arrival of her letter; these came in the form of a hint from the Spanish ambassador that ‘there be some surprise to be trafficked to the Queen’s contrary’. The Spanish ambassador in London heard from the same source that there was a plot forming in Scotland against the queen.
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Beaton’s reaction to these innuendoes was to send Mary a warning letter, in which he begged her to re-establish good relations with her husband, lest some peril ensue from him in the future to destroy her. Unfortunately this letter, full of good sense, reached Mary too late, when Darnley was already dead.

On 20 January Queen Mary set off for Glasgow to bring back her sick husband on a litter to Edinburgh, to finish off his convalescence in her own company. In view of the dispassionate contempt which she quite openly expressed for him in her letter to Beaton, written on the very day of her departure, it is necessary to consider exactly what prompted her to make the journey. It is true that Mary had always displayed courteous kindness towards Darnley’s sufferings; but some more compelling argument than sheer humanity must be advanced to explain her actions – and also to explain what is every bit as mysterious, why Darnley so readily agreed to follow her back. One must therefore examine the actions of the conspirator nobles during the period in January leading up to the queen’s expedition. It was on 6 January – the last Twelfth Night that the queen of Scots who loved these celebrations so much was ever to spend outside prison walls – that Maitland at last achieved his wish and married the voluptuous Mary Fleming in the chapel royal at Stirling. By this marriage to the chief of the Maries, the queen’s own kin, Maitland was further entwined in Mary’s inner court circle, to which he had been re-admitted in the previous September. In January also some sort of conference took place at Whittingham, one of the Douglas castles, between Bothwell, Morton, newly returned to Scotland, his cousin Archibald Douglas, and Maitland. The exact truth of what happened at this conference is impossible to establish,
since afterwards, once the nobles concerned were on different political sides, each accused the other of having raised the subject of Darnley’s murder.

Morton, in his confession, some fifteen years later, said that Bothwell suggested the killing of Darnley to him, at which Morton begged himself off on the grounds that he had only just recovered from his disgrace over Riccio – ‘I am but newly come out of a great trouble….’ According to Morton, Archibald Douglas was then despatched to Edinburgh to see if the queen would give some written authority for the despatch of her husband, but Douglas returned with the quite definite answer: ‘Show to the Earl of Morton that the Queen will have no speech of the matter.’
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Bothwell, on the other hand, represented himself as being anxious ‘for rest and a peaceful life after the imprisonment and exile I had suffered’, whereas it was Morton who was determined to spur him forward to annihilate Darnley, as a revenge on him for his treachery.
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There is little to choose between these two versions of the same story, and it is hardly necessary to decide which of these two ambitious and daring men should be given the honour of first broaching the subject. But it is important to notice that neither party suggested that the queen had any foreknowledge of their plans; according to Douglas, she had even gone further and specified that she wanted to hear nothing more about such a blood-thirsty enterprise. The queen’s dissent, combined with her known merciful character and clemency, which made her ever ready to pardon those who were sometimes best left unpardoned, gave the conspirators a strong motive for the future in not involving her in their plans. She had a horror of violence: as she said of herself years later, she would rather pray with Esther than take the sword with Judith. Yet the nobles had every reason to believe, after the conference at Craigmillar, that she would approve the end result. The argument for proceeding with their plans without informing the queen further was overwhelming.

There was, however, one detail in which the queen could help them: their plan did demand that Darnley should be in Edinburgh or thereabouts, rather than Glasgow; there he was surrounded by his own Lennox Stewart adherents, in feudal fashion, but Morton’s Douglases and Bothwell’s Hepburns were at a distance. It is possible that Maitland indicated to Mary that in practical terms it was unwise to allow Darnley to remain in Glasgow where he might manage to work up an effective conspiracy against her. During the period leading up to the murder, according to Nau, a man called John Shaw came to the queen and told her that Ker of Fawdonside, whom she particularly loathed for his part in the Riccio
murder – it was he who had held the pistol to her stomach – was back in Scotland: ‘He having boasted to certain persons … within fifteen days he assured them, there would be a change at court, and he would be more than ever in credit; and then he enquired boldly how their queen was.’
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Or it may have been Bothwell who dropped the hint – Bothwell, whose record of loyalty was impeccable in the last two years. Equally the queen herself may have needed no particular prompting to see that it was safer to have Darnley under her own eyes where experience had taught her that it was easier to control him, than loose in the countryside, either plotting or breeding dissension with his wild schemes. At all times during the past year, she had shown herself to be extremely upset when Darnley broke loose from the court and wandered off by himself presumably because she trusted him even less, once he was outside the sphere of her influence. Her journey to recall the errant Darnley made sense in terms of her own personal security, whether prompted or not by one of her nobles. But being both frank and feminine, or in her own phrase ‘undissembling’, Mary, in her letter to Beaton, made no attempt to pretend a passionate love for Darnley which she was by now far from feeling.
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If her motives are plentiful enough, the question still arises exactly how Mary induced her husband to accompany her back to Edinburgh: for it is clear that once Mary arrived in Glasgow, she experienced no difficulty in persuading him to make the move. Darnley freely consented to the plan, and this despite the fact that he had heard some rumour of what had transpired at Craigmillar, as his servant Crawford later deposed. Darnley had learned apparently that something had been plotted against him in the autumn, but that Mary had refused to be a party to it: in Crawford’s words,
¹²
he knew that ‘a letter was presented to her in Craigmillar, made by her own device, and subscribed by certain others, who desired her to subscribe the same, which she refused to do. And he [Darnley] said that he would never think that she [the queen] who was his own proper flesh, would do him any hurt….’ Darnley’s confidence in the gentle nature of his wife on eighteen months of marriage is significant. However, this confidence in itself would not have been enough to persuade him to return from Lennox-dominated Glasgow to Edinburgh, inhabited not only by the queen but by many nobles with far from gentle natures. The promise which Mary seems most likely to have held out to Darnley was the resumption of full marital relations on his return to Edinburgh. Mary’s coldness as a wife had been one of Darnley’s complaints against her: it wounded his vanity as a man, and also, he felt, threatened his status as a king, there being more to the embraces of a queen than the mere feel of her arms around him. This promise would have been enough to rouse Darnley’s ambitions all over again, to rekindle his hopes of future grandeur as king: in this way he went willingly out of his own feudal domain of influence into hers. The attitude of Mary to the journey was totally different: convinced that Darnley was once more plotting against her, convinced also that Darnley had once attempted her own death and might do so again, she felt little love or any emotion of any sort for her husband, as her letter to Beaton shows. Nevertheless it still seemed safer for herself and her child to have him lodged in Edinburgh under her own eyes, than let him loose in the west of Scotland, free to plot. Mary led Darnley to Edinburgh with kind words and hints of happiness as once before she had won him over on the dramatic day after Riccio’s murder, for the same cogent reasons of self-preservation.

The only subject on which the queen and king now disagreed was the place where Darnley should spend the rest of his convalescence: he needed constant baths to improve his condition, and his face was still shrouded with a piece of taffeta. Mary had intended to bring him to the castle of Craigmillar a little way outside Edinburgh, that same castle where the bond had been signed. Darnley, however, declined to enter the stronghold, as his own servants testified. Perhaps he was afraid to do so. He chose instead – and once again there is general agreement that the choice was his, not the queen’s – a house of moderate size on the outskirts of Edinburgh town proper, but still lying just inside the town wall. It was situated within the quadrangle attached to the old collegiate church of St Mary-in-the-Field, as it had once been called, which was now known as the Kirk o’Field, and it was about three quarters of a mile distant from Holyrood palace, along hilly streets. This house, known as the old provost’s lodging, because it had once been the house of the provost of the collegiate church, now actually belonged to Robert Balfour, brother of Sir James Balfour, but was often said to belong to Sir James himself. Within the same quadrangle lay the considerably larger Hamilton House, belonging to the duke
of Châtelherault. Darnley’s servant Nelson, while agreeing that Darnley himself made the choice of Kirk o’Field, stated in his deposition that Darnley had then expected to be lodged in Hamilton House and was surprised to find himself in the old provost’s lodging.
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But no other mention is made of Darnley’s surprise, whereas there is general agreement that Darnley made the choice after the royal cortège left Glasgow. In addition one may doubt whether Darnley would actually have wished or expected to be lodged in the house of his hereditary family enemies, the Hamiltons. The main point to be grasped about the old provost’s lodging, apart from the Balfour connection of the house, is that the venue of Darnley’s lodging had been changed suddenly and unexpectedly at his own request: therefore any plans centred on his dwelling would necessarily have an improvised and makeshift quality, since they could not have taken longer than a few days to both plot and put into action. This need for speed at the cost of efficiency may explain some of the confusion of the tangled events which followed.