Mary Queen of Scots (57 page)

17 The Mermaid and the Hare

At the palace of Holyrood Queen Mary was woken from her sleep by a noise like twenty or thirty cannon. Shortly afterwards messengers brought her the news that the house at Kirk o’Field had been totally destroyed, and her husband’s dead body found lying at a distance of sixty to eighty paces. Her first reactions were horror and shock – horror at what had happened and shock at the feeling that she herself had had such a narrow escape. Bothwell described her in his narrative as
‘fort épleurée et contristée’.
¹
She wrote the same day – Monday, 10 February – to her ambassador Beaton in Paris, pouring forth her amazement and distress, although it is noticeable that her conventional grief for Darnley is outweighed by her conviction that the conspiracy had been aimed at her personally; shortly after the event, the Venetian ambassador in Paris also reported that the crime was the work of heretics (Protestants) who had intended to kill Mary too.
²
‘The matter is so horrible and strange,’ wrote the queen, ‘as we believe the like was never heard of in any country.’
³
She retailed Darnley’s fate (still apparently unaware that he had been strangled, and not killed by the blast) and reported the utter demolition of the building ‘with such a vehemency, that of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not a stone above another, but all carried far away, or dung in dross to the very groundstone. It must have been done with the force of powder, and appears to be a mine.’ The queen did not yet know who was responsible, but is certain that with ‘the diligence our Council has begun already to use … the same being discovered … we hope to punish the same with such rigour as shall serve for example of this cruelty to all ages to come’. She continued: ‘Always who ever have taken this wicked enterprise in hand,
we assure our self it was dressed always for us as for the King; for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging, and was there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town that same night at midnight, and of very chance tarried not all night, by reason of some mask in the abbey; but,’ the queen concluded piously, ‘we believe it was not chance but God that put it in our head.’

It is evident that at the moment when she wrote this letter, a few hours after the crime, it had not yet struck the queen that any of her chief nobles were involved in its execution. The sheer outrageousness of the explosion had distracted her from considering the known enmities between Darnley and many of the nobility – as Bothwell must have planned that it should; nervously convinced that she herself had only escaped death by a miracle, the queen was at first more inclined to ponder on her own enemies than on Darnley’s. The official letter sent to France by the lords of the Council on the same day also emphasized the danger to the queen. So far, then, Bothwell’s strategy had succeeded. He himself was officially notified of what had happened when George Hackett came and woke him from his bed at Holyrood, with the news that the king was dead. ‘Fie, treason!’ exclaimed Bothwell, jumping out of bed, and pulling on his clothes, which he had discarded only an hour before.
*
As sheriff of Edinburgh, it was now Bothwell’s duty to lead a party of soldiers from Holyrood to the scene of the crime; whereupon the king’s body, bearing as Knox said ‘no mark of fire’, was carried into the next door new provost’s lodging. Here it was inspected by surgeons, then members of the Privy Council, and also by the general public, who were allowed to exercise their natural curiosity. It was at this point that the news that Darnley had in fact been strangled began to spread abroad – the variety of rumours on the nature of the weapon included his own belt, the sleeves of his shirt, his garters, a serviette, a napkin steeped in vinegar (Lennox’s lurid contribution), and waxed cord. The old women in the Blackfriars Wynd – who were later examined by the Council and dismissed for involving too indiscreetly the names of the great – began to chatter of the men they had seen round the house and that last poignant cry of Darnley. His body was now carried on a board to Holyrood, embalmed by an apothecary and a surgeon, and laid formally in state for several days, before being buried in the vaults of the chapel royal, as was his due as a king of Scotland.

So far the royal widow had behaved with perfect correctness. She ordered the court into mourning, for which £150-worth of black was ordered. Although, according to Knox’s
History
Mary showed no outward sign of joy or sorrow when shown the corpse of Darnley, her strange composure – so unlike her usual ready tears – may well have been due to simple shock.
⁵
She herself embarked heavily on the traditional forty days’ mourning for her husband, permitting herself, however, to attend the wedding of Margaret Carwood, her favourite bed-chamber woman on the Tuesday after the murder; she had paid for the wedding-dress – £125 –
⁶
and either considered a promise to a beloved servant too important to break, or else was too dazed to realize the significance of what had just happened. Her spirits had never recovered properly from her Jedburgh illness; at the time of James’s baptism at the end of December du Croc had prophesied gloomily that her nerves would give them some trouble yet – ‘nor can I be brought to think otherwise so long as she continues to be so pensive and melancholy … She sent for me yesterday and I found her laid on the bed, weeping sore. She complained of a grievous pain in her side.’
⁷
Now her nervous health became so critically weakened by the shock of the crime that, according to Leslie, the Privy Council were earnestly exhorted by her doctors to let her get away from the tragic and gloom-laden atmosphere of Edinburgh for a while, lest incarceration in the closed chamber of the widow should cause a total breakdown – the doctors emphasized ‘the great and imminent dangers of her health and life, if she did not in all speed break up and leave that kind of close, solitary life and repair to some good wholesome air’.
⁸
Accordingly, the queen went to Seton, one of her favourite haunts close to Edinburgh, a week after the murder, and spent three recuperative days there. Although Mary’s enemies subsequently accused her of dallying at Seton with Bothwell, it was the task of Bothwell and Huntly, as chief nobles of the kingdom, to remain at Holyrood to guard the person of Prince James.

In the course of her further reflections, once the first distressing impact of the murder wore off, it could not fail to occur to Mary that this was no hideous outrage by unknown assassins, but a deliberately planned coup on the part of those nobles who had hated Darnley, and who had openly discussed his removal with her at Craigmillar. It must now have become apparent to her that she herself had been in no personal danger, but that Darnley had paid the penalty for his treachery in the violent and bloodthirsty manner which she had by now come to associate with Scottish vengeance. Possibly she taxed Bothwell with complicity or possibly she was informed of it from another source; but in any case by the mere process of reasoning she could hardly have been ignorant as to who were the authors of the crime, when the first shock had subsided. In the meantime
rumours as to the truth of the matter, and the fact that Mary’s chief nobles had been involved, began to reach both England and France. By March the Venetian ambassador in Paris had heard a comparatively accurate account of events from Moretta, the returning ambassador of Savoy, and commented further: ‘It is widely believed that the principal persons of the kingdom were implicated in this act, because they were dissatisfied with the King’, amongst whom he singled out Moray for having had a quarrel with Darnley.
⁹
Both Catherine de Medicis and Elizabeth reacted predictably to these rumours: a king had been killed; Mary’s leading subjects were said to be involved in the crime; it was now up to Mary herself to dispense public justice with a heavy hand, whether it was directed towards the true criminals or not being less important than the fact that justice should be seen to be done. The two queens, French and English, wrote long admonitory letters to the third Scottish queen to this effect.

Rumours were not only rife on the Continent and in England: they were also percolating rapidly round Edinburgh itself. A quantity of people, many of them servants, had been involved in the murder; it was hardly likely that an outrage of this magnitude would remain a total mystery for very long. Tongues wagged. There were dark hints, and others a good deal plainer. One story said that Sir James Balfour had had one of his underlings killed, because he threatened to reveal the truth out of a crisis of conscience.
¹⁰
Placards began to appear in the streets – the art of the anonymous placard having being recently imported from France. The first placard was nailed up on 16 February, a week after the murder, naming Bothwell and Balfour, and asserting that the queen had consented to the murder, as a result of the witchcraft of Janet Beaton, the lady of Buccleuch. The second placard on 18 February took a more xenophobic line, naming three foreigners in Mary’s household – Bastian, Francisco, and Joseph Riccio. In a letter of 28 February to Cecil, Drury spoke of other bills bestowed upon the church doors, even of one posted upon a tree which mentioned a smith who would step forward if necessary and say he was the maker of the false keys for the house (if the man existed, it casts further doubt on Paris’s deposition in which he said he was instructed to steal the keys of Kirk o’Field).
¹¹
The sound of voices crying that Bothwell was the murderer of the king was heard through the night in the streets of Edinburgh. On 1 March the most famous and most virulent of all the placards appeared: it showed Queen Mary as a mermaid, naked to the waist, with a crown on her head, and Bothwell as a hare – the crest of the Hepburns – crouching in a circle of swords. The implication behind the use of the mermaid was not romantic, as might appear to modern eyes,
but deliberately insulting, since the word was commonly used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to denote a siren, and thus by analogy a prostitute.
†

This was the supreme moment for Mary to show herself the prudent and ruthless sovereign, and benefit from the actions of others to make her own position thoroughly secure. Her Achilles’ heel in Scotland – her husband Darnley – had been eliminated from her path by her own nobility. She had not known of the crime beforehand, and was not implicated in its details. Now her best course was to pursue the so-called murderers with public vengeance, in order to establish once and for all her own innocence of any possible complicity. After all, once the nobles came to power they took good care to produce some criminals publicly, as we shall see, in order to exculpate themselves; Mary herself should have been at least as practical while she still had the opportunity. Even if she could not go so far as arraigning Bothwell himself, there were underlings to be sacrificed. As it was, her conduct bordered on madness. The Privy Council had announced a reward of £2,000 for the capture of the criminals, immediately after the deed; there had been vague questionings of Nelson and the old women; but beyond that no further steps were taken to secure any arrests. Neither the placards, the rumours, the letters from abroad, nor Lennox’s furious denunciations of his son’s murderers – about whose identity he was personally in no doubt – seemed to have the power of penetrating Mary’s passive state of despair and melancholy. Since health and shock had clearly robbed her of any shred of political judgement, she was exceptionally dependent upon her advisers. But the advisers who surrounded her were all for one reason and another incapable of pointing out the true facts of the situation; never was Mary Stuart’s pathetic lack of loyal disinterested consultants more disastrous to her than in the period immediately after Kirk o’Field.

Moray’s first concern was to clear himself of any possible guilt in the eyes of his English friends: Moretta, after all, had believed Moray implicated above all others because of his notorious hatred for Darnley. In a letter to Cecil of 13 March, Moray anxiously excused himself and also asked for a passport so that he could come to London.
¹²
In this crisis of his sister’s affairs, Moray was eager to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Scottish court, partly so that he should not be involved in the contentious struggle for power which he saw coming, in which the strength of the hated Bothwell seemed to be growing hourly, partly so that he could ingratiate himself in England. He departed for London at the beginning of April – incidentally making his sister guardian of his daughter, in his will. Queen Mary wept at his departure, and wished ‘he were not so precise in religion’.
¹³
Of the queen’s other possible advisers, Maitland had been involved in the plot, and could therefore scarcely advise her to pursue its punishment vindictively. Bothwell was hardly likely to counsel a course so alien to his own interests. There was thus no force to conjure the queen out of her mood of lassitude and melancholia. Her foreign correspondence ceased – that immense flood of letters to her Guise relations, in whom she had taken such a touching detailed domestic interest ever since she left France, dried up; there is no more poignant evidence that Mary Stuart had fallen into a state of despair. The Scotland of her dreams and early happiness now seemed to her a cruel and barbarous country where deeds of violence succeeded each other in remorseless succession; her secretary and now her husband had been done to death within a year, not by low assassins but by the chief men of the kingdom. The renewed bloodshed less than twelve months after the death of Riccio horrified her. In her sad passivity, she allowed herself to lean increasingly on the one man close to her who still showed strength of purpose, energy and determination – and was also only too anxious to direct the affairs of state. Unfortunately for Mary, that man was Bothwell, who, whatever his dominating qualities, was also the chief suspect of her husband’s murder.