Mary Queen of Scots (54 page)

But of course the many seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of what followed at Kirk o’Field – the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history – have a deeper cause than the essentially makeshift nature of the crime. They arise principally from the extraordinarily untrustworthy nature of the evidence. The basic difficulty in the way of reconstructing the truth about Kirk o’Field is the fact that the lesser executive criminals were subsequently executed for the crime at the instance of the great nobles who had approved or inspired it. There is thus a veil of unreality over the depositions of these minor figures, as in the trial of criminals in some twentieth-century totalitarian state, since their words had to be carefully tailored not to incriminate the men then in power in Scotland. Equally it was desirable to throw all the blame possible on one noble who had vanished from the scene, after quarrelling with his former associates – Lord Bothwell. The evidence is affected further by the circumstances of Mary Stuart’s own trial in England in late 1568: as with her alleged adultery with Bothwell, it will be found that once again the
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related a series of demonstrable untruths, the intention of which was to keep her in captivity in England while Moray remained regent safely in Scotland. In short, the unreliability of the depositions, many of them made under torture, and the political ‘re-writing’ of history which went on at the time of Mary’s trial means that the detailed story of Kirk o’Field can only be guessed at, or pieced together, rather than established with total certainty.

The house in which Darnley now settled for the last days of his recovery was in many ways ideally suited for the state of convalescence. According to Nau, a raven had hovered over the royal caravan on its way from Glasgow, and now settled on the roof of the lodging. But there were certainly no other evil omens to be discerned in the actual structure of the building. The house lay on a slight eminence, overlooking the Cowgate, and the site was open and healthy compared to low-lying Holyrood; as Leslie said, the air was thought by the doctors to be the most salubrious in the whole town.
¹⁴
The quadrangle in which it lay and its recent connection with the university must have given the lodging something of the atmosphere of a house in a cathedral close in an English provincial town. It was far enough from Holyrood for the king’s illness not to be an embarrassment to him, yet it had the security of lying just within the town wall, which had been begun to be built round Edinburgh at the time of Flodden. Edinburgh during this period had a nightly town watch, numbering a total of thirty-two men, of whom twelve were stationed at the various gates, or the Leith Wynd gap in the wall, and ten perpetually perambulated the streets – providing a considerable sense of security to its citizens, and a continual threat to anyone who might stray in its streets by night without a lawful excuse to do so. This town wall, six feet wide at its base, and tapering to a flat top, skirted the back of the house; and the characteristic gallery which extended off the first floor chamber of the lodging rested on it.
‡
The house had its own east garden, with a door into it, and on the other side of the town wall lay further gardens and orchards, once part of the fields, but divided off by the building of the wall. All these details can be clearly distinguished in the sketch of the scene after the murder sent to Cecil in London, which is also vital to our own understanding of the geography of Kirk o’Field. From it, it can be seen that the old provost’s lodging lay on the south side of the quadrangle; two of the other sides were occupied by smaller houses, still standing in the sketch, and the third contained slightly larger houses such as Hamilton House. The quadrangle has been estimated to be eighty-six feet by seventy-three feet.
§

Although Buchanan tried to make out that the lodging itself was ruinous and uncomfortable – in order to blacken the character of Queen Mary who was erroneously stated to have chosen it – it was in fact a pleasant house of moderate size, by the standards of the day. Mahon calculated the house to have been about sixty-one feet long and twenty-five feet deep compared to King’s James’s Tower at Holyrood, containing all the state apartments, which is seventy-four feet by thirty-seven feet. Besides the door into the east garden already mentioned, the house had two other doors, into the quadrangle, and through the postern gate in the town wall (visible in the sketch) into the alleyway beyond. No trace has ever been found of a secret tunnel connecting the lodging with Holyrood: when Lennox furiously and crazily accused the queen of coming disguised in men’s clothing to witness his son’s murder by ‘secret ways’, in his Narrative,
¹⁵
he was presumably thinking not of a tunnel, but of the back streets of Edinburgh. The obvious route from Holyrood to the provost’s lodging lay down the Canongate, through the town wall at the Netherbow Port, down the Blackfriars Wynd, crossing the Cowgate, and so to the purlieus of St Mary’s. But sixteenth-century Edinburgh was a network of smaller streets, off the main thoroughfares, and it would have been possible to take an altogether more circuitous route, along the back wall of the south Canongate gardens to St Mary’s Port, and thence, where the town wall was as yet unbuilt, through the gardens and fields of the old Blackfriars Monastery to the east garden of the Kirk o’Field house. This would avoid the town wall, and the challenge of the watch; the only remaining problem would be the curious eyes of the ten watchmen nightly patrolling the streets of the city.

The lodging contained two bedrooms for Darnley and the queen, Darnley’s lying directly above that of his wife, a presence chamber (or
salle
), two
garde robes
, a kitchen and vaulted cellars beneath. The drop from the gallery, which extended out of Darnley’s bedroom on to the town wall, to the ground, was only about fourteen feet, since the level of the ground beyond the wall was higher than within the quadrangle. The house was not only pleasantly situated and healthy, with gardens, but it was also well if hastily furnished for Darnley’s benefit, once he had selected it, from the store of royal furniture at Holyrood. The inventories testify not only the suddenness of the decision to use the provost’s lodging, but also the amount of furniture and ornaments now brought down from Holyrood.
¹⁶
A series of seven pieces of tapestry representing the ‘Hunting of the Conies’ were brought for the
garde robe
, as well as a canopy of yellow taffeta to enclose the
chaise percée.
Five pieces of tapestry were brought for the
salle.
For Darnley’s bedroom, six pieces of tapestry,
originally taken from Strathbogie after the defeat of Huntly, were ordered, a little Turkish carpet, two or three cushions of red velvet, a high chair covered in purple velvet, and a little table covered with green velvet (which had also once belonged to Huntly), as well as a bed which had once belonged to Mary of Guise, which Mary had given her husband in the previous August – hung with violet-brown velvet,
‖
embroidered with ciphers and flowers, trimmed with cloth of gold and silver, and having three coverlets, one of them blue quilted taffeta. A bath stood beside the bed – baths being a necessary part of the convalescence – and one of the makeshift aspects of the visit was the fact that one of the doors of the house was taken off its hinges to serve as a lid when it was not in use. The chamber beneath that of Darnley, which had a window looking north over the quadrangle, contained a small bed of yellow and green damask with a furred coverlet, in which the queen could sleep if she so wished.

Darnley took up residence in his new dwelling on Saturday 1 February. The last week of his life was pleasant and almost domesticated. Queen Mary felt confident that her husband had for the time being no opportunity to weave any plots against her, especially as his father Lennox, so often his evil genius in feeding his childish vanity with praise, was still in Glasgow. The mass of courtiers, Privy Councillors and attendants who inevitably moved with the queen as she progressed through Edinburgh, settled into a routine of visiting Darnley at Kirk o’Field and then returning to the royal palace at Holyrood for the other formal ceremonies of court life. Relations at this point between Darnley and his wife were perfectly amicable. On the Wednesday the queen spent the night at Kirk o’Field in the chamber beneath Darnley’s. According to her own account, propinquity now led to newly friendly relations between them. They had certainly seen little enough of each other lately: when Mary fetched Darnley from Glasgow at the end of January she had not seen him since his abrupt departure from Stirling at the end of December; in October and November she had been ill, and separated from her husband. On the Friday 7 February Darnley was actually inspired by this novel amity to discuss with his wife some information he had of plots against her. He begged her in touching language to beware of the people who tried to make mischief between them, adding with self-righteous horror that it had even been suggested to him that he should take his wife’s life.
^a
This sort of volte-face was typical of Darnley: Mary, being the stronger character of the two, was always able to win his loyalty for the time being by force of personality, provided they were face to face, as the denouement of the Riccio affair had demonstrated. It was on this very Friday also, according to Lennox, that Darnley wrote to his father concerning the improvement of his health, which had occurred so much sooner than he had expected, through the kind treatment of ‘such as hath this good while concealed their good will, I mean my love the Queen, which I assure you hath all this while and yet doth use herself like a natural and loving wife’.
¹⁸
It would seem therefore that Friday, from the point of view of the husband and wife, was outwardly another day of uneventful convalescence. The Friday night was once more passed by the queen at the old provost’s lodging, under the same roof as her husband.

Is it possible to construct out of Darnley’s outburst of penitence to his wife, Mary’s suspicions and the warnings received from abroad, evidence of an actual plot by Darnley against Mary, based on his residence at Kirk o’Field? It has been suggested that Kirk o’Field was in fact a monstrous conspiracy against Mary, which reacted in the end against its own perpetrator, Darnley.
^b
Darnley was certainly by nature an intriguer and an ambitious one. But the fact that he was plotting in general is not evidence that he was plotting in particular at Kirk o’Field. He was here, impaired in health, virtually confined to his bed, with few of his supporters about him, surrounded by those of the queen, in the house of the brother of one of the nobles who hated him. Mary, far from being the immobile pregnant woman of a year back, was now active and energetic, flitting between Holyrood and Kirk o’Field, whereas Darnley was stationary. This was not a roundabout age in the manner of its killings. Kings and nobles died violently, but they died openly. The regent Moray died at the hand of an assassin, who shot out of the window into the street; the Riccio plot had aimed at the queen’s life in the crudest possible manner. Queen Mary, who rode freely and frequently among her people, would at all times present an excellent target for an assassin: if gunpowder had been in Darnley’s mind, it would have been aimed at a dwelling where there was not the faintest doubt that the queen would be present, at a time when he was in perfect command of himself. Kirk o’Field was so very far from being the ideal situation for Darnley to plan to kill Mary that, in the absence of concrete proof that he did so, it is surely more logical to regard the crime as aimed straightforwardly at the man it did in fact kill – Darnley. It is in the participants and the accessories to the crime, rather than the intended victim, that the complexities of the plot lie.

For while Darnley and Mary jogged through their last week of marriage in comparative peace, the conspirators had been hard at work to compass the death of one and the deliverance of the other. Friday seems to have been the critical day. Darnley could not be expected to stay in the lodging forever and Holyrood with its guards obviously presented more of a problem from the point of view of assassination than Kirk o’Field. Sir James Balfour told the lords in the summer, when he made his peace with them, that he first knew of the plot on Friday. Morton admitted in his own confession years later that he first knew of the plot from Archibald Douglas a little before, possibly on the Friday. The
Book of Articles
went further and said that this was the day originally intended to perform the murder, but the preparations were not ready. John Hay of Tallo in his deposition stated that it was on Friday that Bothwell said to him: ‘John, this is the matter. The King’s death is devised. I will reveal it unto you for if I put him not down, I cannot have a life in Scotland. He will be my destruction!’
²⁰
John Hepburn, Bothwell’s kinsman and henchman, deposed that the original purpose had been for certain of the nobles to kill the king by each sending two of their servants ‘to the doing thereof in the fields’ –
²¹
this corporate fate, so characteristic of gang vengeance, whether in Scotland or Sicily, would not only have wiped out Darnley’s treachery but would also of course ritually involve all the nobles in the act, much as Riccio himself had received over fifty dagger-wounds in his body including Darnley’s own dagger planted by George Douglas. It would thus not have been possible later for some of the nobles to have denied their involvement.

The dagger being the natural murder weapon of the time, it is interesting to speculate what made Bothwell change his plans and turn to the much less malleable weapon of gunpowder. The reason he gave John Hepburn was
probably the true one – because it was the obvious one. With servants openly at work, the death of Darnley in the fields would inevitably have been pinned upon the nobles who had concocted it. Bothwell was already in his agile opportunist’s mind aiming at the position of king. He knew Mary had formally indicated that she wanted no violence done to Darnley. It was no part of his plan to be blamed for the crime: he certainly did not wish to suffer for it, merely to enjoy the result. Ironically enough, the use of gunpowder, and the blowing-up of the house which gave its incredibly flagrant character to the crime – and made Mary’s cheerful tolerance of the perpetrators give such appalling scandal throughout Europe – seems to have been planned in simple good faith that a hearty explosion would cover the tracks of the killers, and make it impossible afterwards to prove who had done it, even if it was only too easy to guess. Such bold but straightforward reasoning was typical not only of Bothwell but of the age in which he lived.