Mary Queen of Scots (55 page)

The testimony of the page ‘French’ Paris (although extremely suspect, because it was wrung from him by torture) does at least confirm that Kirk o’Field was not a subtly planned crime.
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Paris, once Bothwell’s servant, was now in the queen’s service, and attended her at the old provost’s lodging. It was on the Wednesday or Thursday that Bothwell came into the queen’s chamber, below that of Darnley, and told Paris that he found himself ill of his ‘usual illness’ which was a flux of the blood. He asked Paris whereabouts in the house he could
‘faire mes affaires’
, and Paris, in view of the urgency of the situation, found Bothwell a corner; it was here, as Bothwell availed himself of the slight privacy to relieve himself, that Bothwell outlined to Paris that he had in mind to kill the king. Paris hesitated. Bothwell told him angrily that he was an utter fool if he thought that he Bothwell would enter such an enterprise all on his own – Bothwell then named Maitland, Argyll, Huntly, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay as his accomplices. Paris enquired about Moray. Bothwell replied that he was neutral.
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When Paris resisted Bothwell’s demands, Bothwell only exclaimed impatiently: ‘Why did I put you in the Queen’s service if not to help me?’ and it was at this juncture that Paris pointed out that Bothwell had bullied him for more than six years, kicking him in the stomach to make him do what he wanted. Paris was, however, insistent that Bothwell wanted the keys of the house of lodging from him – a point which incidentally points to the innocence of the queen, since she could presumably have provided them easily herself, had she been aware of the details of the plot. On Saturday, 8 February, Paris had apparently obtained these keys while no one else was in the room and taken them to Bothwell at Holyrood.

Sunday, 9 February was to be the last day of Darnley’s convalescence. It was announced that he would return to Holyrood early on the Monday. It was also the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, and, as such, a day of carnival and rejoicing; two events typical of the life of Queen Mary’s court were planned to take place. In the morning Mary’s favourite valet Bastian Pages married Christiana Hogg; being a Catholic it was his last opportunity to do so before the beginning of Lent. The wedding dinner took place at noon, and the queen was present: Bastian was an amusing high-spirited Frenchman, who shared the queen’s own love of masques. It was he who had devised that masque at the baptism of Prince James, with the satyrs wagging their tails, which had so much enraged the English visitors that Hatton exclaimed that if it had not been for the presence of the queen, he would have put his dagger in the heart of ‘that French knave Bastian’. The second court event was a formal dinner given at four o’clock by the bishop of the Isles in the house in the Canongate for the returning ambassador of Savoy. The queen attended this dinner, accompanied by her chief nobles, Argyll, Huntly, Bothwell and Cassillis – but not Moray. He had that very morning slipped out of Edinburgh, on the excuse that his wife was sick with a miscarriage. Maitland was also absent, and Morton was not yet sufficiently in the queen’s personal favour to be admitted to court events. This duty accomplished, the queen and her court rode down to the provost’s lodging again, in order to spend the evening with Darnley. The queen planned to sleep Sunday night at Kirk o’Field once more, at the end of her day of revelry, as she had done on the Wednesday and the Friday.

There was a crowded scene at Kirk o’Field, as there had been on many previous evenings there during the previous week. The royal entourage – ‘the most part of nobles then in this town’ said the queen
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– crowded into the king’s chamber. The nobles, including Huntly, who had been at the bishop’s dinner, played at dice on that little table with a green velvet cloth which had once belonged to Huntly’s father, still in their carnival costumes. Bothwell was an especially striking figure in black velvet and satin, trimmed with silver. The queen chatted pleasantly to the king. There was probably some music, a song in the background to the sound of the lute or the guitar. It was the sort of evening the queen much enjoyed whether at Holyrood or any of her other Scottish palaces: she may even have appreciated the comparative adventure of sleeping at the Kirk o’Field. But at ten
or eleven o’clock her intention to do so once more was forestalled. Something – or someone – reminded Queen Mary that it was the hour of Bastian’s wedding masque which she had promised to attend. Queen Mary was unable by nature to resist this sort of obligation and Bastian’s masque was of special importance in view of the fact that he had designed one for her only six weeks previously. It now seemed unnecessarily inconvenient to return once more to the provost’s lodging after the masque, to sleep there, since Darnley was coming back to Holyrood early the next morning, and the queen herself had also planned an early ride to Seton – according to Lennox’s Narrative, it was ‘Bothwell and others, who seemed to bear a good countenance’, who reminded her of this last point. Darnley was sulky at the idea of the change of plan, making the petulant demur of a sick man, from whom the centre of amusement was being suddenly swept away. According to Moretta, the Savoyard ambassador, the queen lightly gave him a ring as a pledge of her goodwill.
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She then bid him good-bye. Down the staircase went the queen, out to the door where the horses of the court were ready to bring her back to her palace. As she stood to mount her horse, she paused for a moment puzzled. She saw in front of her own page, Bothwell’s former servant, French Paris. ‘Jesu, Paris,’ said the queen. ‘How begrimed you are !’
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Little did the queen know that her innocent observation touched at the core of the secret happenings within the provost’s lodging. For at some point during the day which the queen had spent in the formal court ritual of a servant’s wedding and an ambassador’s dinner, with the prospect of another court masque ahead of her, enough gunpowder had been placed in the vaults of the cellar of the house to blow it sky-high, and reduce it to the heap of rubble to be seen in the Cecil sketch. It is impossible to be sure with any accuracy exactly when the gunpowder was introduced and by whom. The henchmen employed in carrying out the practical details of the plot were apparently nine in number: John Hepburn, John Hay of Talla, kinsman of Bothwell, William Powrie, his porter, George Dalgleish, his tailor, French Paris, his former servant, James (Black) Ormiston and Hob Ormiston, two further kinsmen, and Pat Wilson. At no point do their subsequent depositions seem more improbable than on the subject of the gunpowder.

According to the official story given by the arrested criminals later, the gunpowder was brought openly through the streets of Edinburgh by William Powrie, during the evening of Sunday, since it had been for some unaccountable reason stored in Bothwell’s apartments at Holyrood in a barrel. The gunpowder was supposed to have travelled in two trunks. But
William Powrie subsequently changed his story from one journey with two horses, to two journeys with one horse.
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There was incidentally no explanation given as to why Bothwell should have already brought gunpowder from Dunbar, well before the Friday when he was first supposed to have broached the idea of an explosion. Powrie took the gunpowder to the gate of the Blackfriars Monastery and helped to carry the gunpowder in ‘polks’ or bags over the wall. According to Paris’s story, the gunpowder was now placed openly in a heap on the floor of the queen’s chamber (with the entire court, in Buchanan’s words, ‘a great attendance’, revelling in the room above). Bothwell himself was even supposed to have come down in the course of the evening and seen how matters were progressing. Powrie now made his way back up the Canongate accompanied by Wilson; together they conveyed the empty trunks; as Powrie went, he saw the torches of the queen’s party flaring ahead of them, and heard the hooves of the royal horses clattering on the cobbles.

This whole story is so improbable that too much time need not be wasted in demolishing it: in any case it has been constructed out of depositions which are in many respects mutually contradictory. But certain salient points should be noticed: firstly the amount of gunpowder which could have been conveyed on horseback in two trunks was certainly not adequate to demolish the house at Kirk o’Field. At most, this amount could not have been more than two hundredweight.
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The strength of gunpowder in the sixteenth century was also considerably weaker than today. Yet it was suggested that this amount of gunpowder, loosely placed in a heap on the floor of the queen’s bedroom (the ground floor of the house), was sufficient to produce an explosion which by every contemporary account reduced the whole house to rubble. If the gunpowder was to produce any sort of blast, it would have had to have been tamped in rather than left in a heap; it would also have needed to be placed in the vaults of the house rather than on the ground floor. Left in a loose heap on the bedroom floor, there was no certainty it would have produced any sort of explosion at all: it might merely have flared and burnt itself out. It therefore becomes clear that the detail concerning the heap of gunpowder on the floor of the queen’s bedroom was particularly inserted in Paris’s deposition in order to incriminate her: for quite apart from the impossibility of producing an explosion from there, the heap of gunpowder would only too easily have attracted the attention of Darnley’s servants as they passed to and fro on their way to the kitchen. Not only Darnley’s attendants but the entire court were thronged into the room above, and there was no guarantee that they would all stay peacefully within the confines of
the upper room. Like Bothwell on a previous occasion, they might have searched out the
garde-robe.

The second point to notice in the depositions is that Holyrood Palace would have been an extraordinary place to choose to store gunpowder: not only was it patrolled by the royal guards, but the conspirators inevitably risked detection once more when they had to convey the gunpowder through the streets of Edinburgh, patrolled in turn by night watchmen, to the distant Kirk o’Field. Thirdly the movements attributed to Bothwell present him with an impossible schedule to fulfil, since he had already a full list of engagements to carry out in the course of the day, in official attendance on the queen. The figure who was far more involved in the practical details of the crime than the depositions revealed was Bothwell’s then close associate Sir James Balfour. The reason for the obscurity which was cast over his actions is not difficult to find: by June 1567 he had abandoned Bothwell’s side for that of the lords in power, and they therefore had an excellent motive for keeping his name out of trouble, and at the same time blackening that of Bothwell still further. This remarkable but unlikable man was later described by Queen Mary as ‘a traitor who offered himself first to one part and then to the other’
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and his career seemed certainly to justify her condemnation. Balfour had every reason to know the geography of the old provost’s lodging, since both it and the house next door (the new provost’s lodging) belonged to his brother.
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A few days after the explosion Drury reported to Cecil that James Balfour was known to have bought powder to the tune of £60 Scots.
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If any explosion was planned, it would certainly have been infinitely more practical to bring the gunpowder, in sufficient quantities, from some comparatively obscure house much nearer the provost’s lodging than from Holyrood Palace. The inconsistencies of the depositions make it clear that others involved were being shielded, and although it cannot be proved, Balfour seems the most likely candidate for the chief accomplice whose name was afterwards shielded. It would have been easy for Balfour to store the large quantity of gunpowder needed in the vaults of his brother’s house, and from there transfer it silently to the vaults of the house next door. With his knowledge of Darnley’s house and of the district, he could have chosen the time and place at his leisure, when he and his assistants were not likely to be detected.

Queen Mary, in happy ignorance that the house in which she had just spent a relaxed evening, was in fact heavily mined with gunpowder – if she had known, one can hardly believe that she would have rested in it so contentedly – now proceeded up the Canongate to Holyrood. Here she attended the masque in honour of Bastian’s marriage. She did not stay particularly long there, having made her
acte de présénce
, and in any case the party seems to have been almost over when she arrived: it was time to put the bride formally to bed, according to the custom of the period. Mary now went to her apartments, where she took part in a long and earnest conversation until about midnight with Bothwell and John Stewart of Traquair, the captain of her guard. What was the subject of this conversation? No record was ever kept, and no contemporary suggestion ever made. But of one thing we can be certain – Bothwell did not take this opportunity to impart his plans for the destruction of Darnley to the queen. There could be no conceivable point in doing so at this juncture. The conspirators had no need to drop the slightest hint to the queen, so long as she fell in unconsciously with their plans. What could be their motive in informing her of the conspiracy at this late hour? If Mary showed signs of lingering at Kirk o’Field, it took only a gentle reminder from a courtier to recall Bastian’s masque to her attention, a ceremony which she would be loath to miss. On the Friday the conspirators may have supposed that the masque would keep her away from the lodging altogether on the Sunday evening. Now that the lodging was heavily mined and Mary safely stowed at Holyrood, there could be no hitch in their plans – unless of course they chose to make a last-minute revelation to the queen. Mary, with that soft heart, that horror of bloodshed, that inclination towards mercy, to say nothing of love once felt towards Darnley, extinguished perhaps from the senses but not from the memory, might suddenly experience a last-minute feminine revulsion for what was proposed. She still had it in her power to wreck everything, with a lightening message of warning to Kirk o’Field. The arguments for not implicating her were now, as they had been previously at the conference at Whittingham, overwhelming. Queen Mary retired peacefully to sleep in her apartments in Holyrood. It was a cold evening; there had been a new moon at six o’clock that morning; outside a little snow powdered the streets and fields between Holyrood and the old provost’s lodging.