BETWEEN THE BAPTISM AND THE MURDER

Mary passed from Craigmillar and Edinburgh to the baptism of her son James at Stirling. The 17th December, 1566, was the crowning triumph of her life, and the last. To the cradle came the Ambassadors of France and England bearing gifts: Elizabeth, the child’s godmother, sent a font of enamelled gold. There were pageants and triumphs, fireworks, festivals, and the chanting of George Buchanan’s Latin elegiacs on Mary, the Nympha CaledoniÆ, with her crowns of Virtue and of Royalty. Above all, Mary had won, or taken, permission to baptize the child by the Catholic rite, and Scotland saw, for the last time, the ecclesiastics in their splendid vestments. Mary busied herself with hospitable kindnesses, a charming hostess in that dark hold where her remote ancestor had dirked his guest between the table and the hearth. But there was a strange gap in the throng of nobles. The child’s father, though in the Castle, did not attend the baptism, was not among the guests, while the grandfather, Lennox, remained apart at his castle in Glasgow.According to du Croc, who was at Stirling, Darnley announced his intention to depart, two days before the christening, but remained and sulked.

A month before the ceremony, du Croc had expected Darnley to sulk and stay away. At Stirling he declined to meet Darnley, so bad had his conduct been, and said that, if Darnley entered by one door of his house, he would go out by the other. It has been averred by Camden, writing in the reign and under the influence of James I., when King of England, that the English ambassador, Bedford, warned his suite not to acknowledge Darnley as King, and punished one of them, who, having known him in England, saluted him. Nau says that Darnley refused to associate with the English, unless they would acknowledge his title of King, and to do this they had been forbidden by the Queen of England, their mistress,[100] who knew that Darnley kept up a more or less treasonable set of intrigues with the English Catholics.[101] Bedford, a sturdy Protestant, could not be a persona grata to Darnley: and, as to Darnley’s kingship, his own father, in 1568, rather represented him as an English subject. On the other side we have only the evidence of Sir James Melville, gossiping long after the event, to the effect that Bedford, when leaving Stirling, charged him with a message to Mary. He bade her ‘entertain Darnley as she had done at the beginning, for her own honour and advancement of her affairs,’ which warning Melville repeated to her.[102] But there was an awkwardness as between ‘the King’ and the English, nor do we hear that Bedford made any advance to Darnley, whose natural sulkiness is vouched for by all witnesses.

As to what occurred at Stirling in regard to Darnley’s ill-treatment, the Lennox MSS. are copious. Mary, ‘after an amiable and gentle manner,’ induced him to go to Stirling before her, without seeing the ambassadors. At Stirling, ‘she feigned to be in a great choler against the King’s tailors, that had not made such apparel as she had devised for him against the triumph.’ Darnley, to please her, kept out of the way of the ambassadors. She dismissed his guards, Lennox sent men of his own, and this caused a quarrel.[103] Darnley flushed with anger, and Mary said, ‘If he were a little daggered, and had bled as much as my Lord Bothwell had lately done, it would make him look the fairer.’ This anecdote (about which, in June 1568, while getting up his case, Lennox made inquiries in Scotland) is given both in English and Scots, in different versions. The ‘Book of Articles’ avers that Bothwell himself was in fear, and was strongly guarded.

While all at Stirling seemed gay, while Mary played the hostess admirably, du Croc found her once weeping and in pain, and warned his Government that ‘she would give them trouble yet’ (December 23).[104] Mary had causes for anxiety of which du Croc was not aware. Strange rumours filled Court and town. A man named Walker, a retainer of her ambassador at Paris, Archbishop Beaton, reported that the Town Clerk of Glasgow, William Hiegait, was circulating a tale to the effect that Darnley meant to seize the child prince, crown him, and rule in his name. Now for months Darnley had been full of mad projects; to seize Scarborough, to seize the Scilly Islands, and the scheme for kidnapping James had precedents enough.

Darnley was in frequent communication with the discontented Catholics of the North and West of England, and his retainers, the Standens, were young men yearning for adventures. ‘Knowing I am an offender of the laws, they professed great friendship,’ wrote William Rogers to Cecil, with some humour.[105]

A rumour of some attempt against Mary reached Archbishop Beaton, in Paris, at the end of 1566, through the Spanish Ambassador there, who may have heard of it from the Spanish Ambassador in London, with whom the English Catholics were perpetually intriguing. There is a good deal of evidence that Darnley had been complaining of Mary to the Pope and the Catholic Powers, as insufficiently zealous for the Church. Darnley, not Mary, was the Scottish royal person on whom the Church ought to rely,[106] and Mary, says Knox’s continuator, saw his letters, by treachery. Consumed with anger at his degraded position, so unlike the royalty for which he hungered, and addicted to day dreams about descents on Western England, and similar wild projects, Darnley may possibly, at this time, have communicated to the English Catholics a project for restoring himself to power by carrying off and crowning his child. This fantasy would drift through the secret channels of Catholic diplomacy to the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, who gave Beaton a hint, but declined to be explicit. Mary thanked Beaton for his warning, from Seton, on February 18, nine days after Darnley’s death.[107] ‘But alas! it came too late.’ Mary added that the Spanish ambassador in London had also given her warning.

There may, then, have been this amount of foundation for the report which, according to Walker, at Stirling, Hiegait was circulating about mid-December 1566. Stirling was then full of ‘honest men of the Lennox,’ sent thither by Lennox himself (as he says in one of his manuscript discourses), because Darnley’s usual guard had been withdrawn. Mary objected to the presence of so many of Lennox’s retainers, and there arose that furious quarrel between her and her husband. Possibly Mary, having heard Walker’s story of Darnley’s project, thought that his Lennox men were intended to bear a hand in it.

In any case Walker filled Mary’s ears, at Stirling—as she wrote to Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in France, on January 20, 1567—with rumours of ‘utheris attemptatis and purposis tending to this fyne.’ He named Hiegait ‘for his chief author,’ ‘quha,’ he said, ‘had communicat the mater to hym, as apperyt, of mynd to gratify us; sayand to Walcar, “gif I had the moyen and crydet with the Quenis Majestie that ze have, I wald not omitt to mak hir previe of sic purpossis and bruitis that passes in the cuntrie.”’ Hiegait also said that Darnley could not endure some of the Lords, but that he or they must leave the country. Mary then sent for Hiegait, before the Council, and questioned him. He (probably in fear of Lennox) denied that he had told Walker the story of Darnley’s project, but he had heard, from Cauldwell, a retainer of Eglintoun’s, that Darnley himself was to be ‘put in ward.’ Eglintoun, ‘a rank Papist,’ was described by Randolph as never a trustworthy Lennoxite, ‘never good Levenax.’ His retainer, Cauldwell, being summoned, expressly denied that he ever told the rumour about the idea of imprisoning Darnley, to Hiegait. But Hiegait informed the Laird of Minto (a Stewart and a Lennoxite), who again told Lennox, who told Darnley, by whose desire Cauldwell again spoke to Hiegait. The trail of the gossip runs from Cauldwell (the estate of that name is in Eglintoun’s country, Ayrshire) to Hiegait, from him to Stewart of Minto, from him to Lennox, and from Lennox to Darnley. Possibly Eglintoun (the cautious Lord who slipped away when Ainslie’s band was being signed, and hid under straw, after the battle of Langside) was the original source of the rumour of Darnley’s intended arrest. This is a mere guess. If there was a very secret plot, at Craigmillar, to arrest Darnley, we cannot tell how it reached Hiegait. Mary ‘found no manner of concordance’ in their answers, and she rebuked Walker and Hiegait in her own name, and that of their master, Beaton himself.[108] These men, with Minto, were allied with Lennox, and one of them may have been his authority for the story of the second Craigmillar conference.

We now see why it was that, in the height of her final triumph, the christening festival at Stirling Mary wept and was ill at ease. Her husband’s conduct was intolerable: now he threatened to leave before the ceremony, next he stayed on, a dismal figure behind the scenes. His guard of Lennox men might aim at slaying Bothwell, or Mary might think, on Walker’s evidence, that they intended to kidnap her child. Worse followed, when she and her Council examined Walker. Out came the tale of Hiegait, and Queen and Council, if they had really plotted to arrest Darnley, knew that their scheme was discovered and was abortive. Finally, on December 24, either in consequence of Lennox’s warning, or because Morton, Lindsay, and the other Riccio conspirators whom he betrayed were pardoned, Darnley rode off to his father at Glasgow. There he fell ill, soon after his arrival, but Lennox’s MSS. never hint that he was poisoned at Stirling (as Buchanan declares), or that he fell sick when he had ridden but a mile from the town. That they deny.

After Darnley’s departure, Moray, with Bedford, the English Ambassador, went to St. Andrews, and other places in Fife. Till January 2, 1567, when she returned to Stirling, Mary was at Drummond Castle, and at Tullibardine, where, says Buchanan, she and Bothwell made love in corners ‘so that all were highly offended.’ After January 13, she visited Calendar House, and then went to Holyrood.

It is said that she never wrote to Darnley till after January 14, when she took her child to Edinburgh, with the worst purposes, Buchanan declares. Then she wrote to Darnley, the Lennox Papers inform us, excusing herself, and offering to visit him in his sickness at Glasgow. Darnley told her messenger verbally, say the Lennox MSS., that the Queen must judge herself as to the visit to him. ‘But this much ye shall declare unto her, that I wish Stirling to be Jedburgh, and Glasgow to be the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here, and then I doubt not but she would be quickly with me undesired.’ This was a tactless verbal message, and, if given, must have proved to Mary that Darnley suspected her amour. Moreover, this Lennoxian story, that Mary offered the visit, and that Darnley replied with reserve, and with an insult to be verbally delivered, agrees ill with what is said in the deposition (December, 1568) of Lennox’s retainer, Thomas Crawford. According to Crawford, ‘after theire metinge and shorte spekinge together she asked hym of hys lettres, wherein he complained of the crueletye of som.’ ‘He answered that he complained not without cause....’ ‘Ye asked me what I ment bye the crueltye specified in my lettres, yt procedeth of you onelye that wille not accept mye offres and repentance.’ Now, in the Lennox Papers this ‘innocent lamb’ has nothing to repent of, and has made no offers. These came from Mary’s side.[109]

The Lennox account goes on to say that later Mary sent ‘very loving messages and letters unto him to drive all suspicions out of his mind,’ a passage copied by Buchanan in his History. Darnley, therefore, after Mary’s visit to Glasgow, returned with her to Edinburgh, ‘contrary to his father’s will and consent.’ Lennox, however, here emphatically denies that either he or Darnley suspected any murderous design on the part of the Queen. Yet, in Letter II., she is made to say that he ‘fearit his liff,’ as the passage is quoted in the ‘Book of Articles.’[110] As to the story that Darnley’s illness at Glasgow was caused by poison; poison, of course, was suspected, but, if the Casket Letters are genuine, Mary therein calls him ‘this pocky man,’ and Bedford says that he had small-pox: a disease from which Mary had suffered in early life.[111] He also reports that Mary sent to Darnley her own physician, though Buchanan says ‘All this while the Queen would not suffer so much as a physician to come at him.’ In the ‘Book of Articles’ she refuses to send her apothecary. Bedford never hints at scandalous doings of Mary and Bothwell at Stirling.

On January 20, from Edinburgh, Mary wrote that letter to Archbishop Beaton in Paris, as to the Hiegait and Walker affair, which we have already cited. She also expressed her desire that her son should receive the titular captaincy of the Scots Guard in France, though, according to Buchanan, she determined at Craigmillar to ‘make away with’ her child. Nothing in Mary’s letter of January 20, to Beaton, hints at her desire of a reconciliation with Darnley. Yet, on or about the very day when she wrote it, she set forth towards Glasgow.

The date was January 20, as given by the Diary of Birrel, and in the ‘Diurnal.’ The undesigned coincidence of diaries kept by two Edinburgh citizens is fairly good evidence.[112] Drury makes her arrive at Glasgow on January 22. What occurred between Mary and her husband at Glasgow is said to be revealed in two of her Casket Letters written to Bothwell. Their evidence, and authenticity, are to be discussed later: other evidence to the point we have none, and can only say, here, that, at the end of January, Mary brought Darnley, his face covered with taffeta, to the house of Kirk o’ Field, just beside the wall of Edinburgh, where the University buildings now stand.

Here he was in an insecure and dangerous house, close to a palace of his feudal foes, the Hamiltons. The Lennox MSS. declare that ‘the place was already prepared with [undermining and] trains of powder therein.’[113] We return to this point, which was later abandoned by the prosecution.

Darnley, say the Lennox MSS., wished to occupy the Hamilton House, near Kirk o’ Field, but Mary persuaded him that ‘there passed a privy way [to] between the palace and it,’ Kirk o’ Field, ‘which she could take without going through the streets.’ The Lennox author adds that, on the night of the murder, Bothwell and his gang ‘came the secret way which she herself was wont to come to the King her husband.’ The story of the secret way recurs in Lennox MSS., and, of course, is nonsense, and was dropped. There was no subterranean passage from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field. Bothwell and the murderers, in their attack on the Kirk o’ Field, had no such convenience for the carriage of themselves and their gunpowder. It is strange that Lennox and his agents, having access to several of the servants of Darnley, including Nelson who survived the explosion, accepted at one time, or expected others to accept, this legend of a secret passage. Edinburgh tradition holds that there was such a tunnel between Holyrood and the Castle, which may be the basis of this fairy-tale.

The tale of the secret passage, then, is told, in the Lennox MSS., as the excuse given by Mary to Darnley for lodging him in Kirk o’ Field, not in the neighbouring house of the Hamiltons. But, in the ‘Book of Articles,’ we read that the Archbishop of St. Andrews was then living in the Hamilton House ‘onely to debar the King fra it.’ The fable of the secret way, therefore, was dropped in the final version prepared by the accusers.

Mary, whether she wrote the Casket Letters or not, was, demonstrably, aware that there was a plot against Darnley, before she brought him to a house accessible to his enemies. It is certain that, hating and desiring to be delivered from Darnley, she winked at a conspiracy of which she was conscious, and let events take their course. This was, to all appearance, the policy of her brother James, ‘the Good Regent Moray;’ and one of Mary’s apologists, Sir John Skelton, is inclined to hold that this was Mary’s attitude. He states the hypothesis thus: ‘that Mary was not entirely unaware of the measures which were being taken by the nobility to secure in one way or other the removal of Darnley; that, if she did not expressly sanction the enterprise, she failed, firmly and promptly, to forbid its execution.’ Hence she was in ‘an equivocal position,’ could not act with firmness and dignity, and in accepting Bothwell could not be accounted a free agent, yielded to force, and, with a heavy heart, ‘submitted to the inevitable.’[114]

THE OLD TOWER, WHITTINGHAM

That Mary knew of the existence of a plot is proved by a letter to her from Morton’s cousin, Archibald Douglas, whose character and career are described in the second chapter, ‘Minor Characters.’ In a letter of 1583, written by Douglas to win (as he did win) favour and support from Mary, during his exile in England, he says that, in January, 1567, about the 18th or 19th, Bothwell and Lethington visited Morton at Whittingham, his own brother’s place, now the seat of Mr. A. J. Balfour. The fact of the visit is corroborated by Drury’s contemporary letter of January 23, 1567.[115] After they had conferred together, Morton sent Archibald Douglas with Bothwell and Lethington to Edinburgh, to learn what answer Mary would make to a proposal of a nature unknown to Archibald, so he says. ‘Which’ (answer) ‘being given to me by the said persons, as God shall be my judge, was no other than these words, “Schaw to the Earl Morton that the Queen will hear no speech of the matter appointed to him,”’ i.e. arranged with him. Now Morton’s confession, made before his execution, was to the effect that Bothwell, at Whittingham, asked him to join the conspiracy to kill Darnley, but that he refused, unless Bothwell could procure for him a written warrant from the Queen. Obviously it was to get this warrant that Archibald Douglas accompanied Lethington and Bothwell to Edinburgh. But Bothwell and Lethington (manifestly after consulting Mary) told Douglas that ‘the Queen will hear no speech of that matter.’ Douglas, though an infamous ruffian, could not have reported to Mary, when attempting, successfully, to win her favour, a compromising fact which she, alone of living people, must have known to be false. Mary was not offended.[116] Taking, then, Morton’s statement that he asked Bothwell, at Whittingham, for Mary’s warrant, with Douglas’s statement to Mary herself, that he accompanied Lethington and Bothwell from Whittingham to Edinburgh, and was informed by them that the Queen ‘would hear no speech of the matter,’ we cannot but believe that ‘the matter’ was mooted to her. Therefore, in January, 1567, she was well aware that something was intended against Darnley by Bothwell, Lethington, and others.[117]

THE WHITTINGHAM TREE

(After a Drawing by Richard Doyle)

Yet her next step was to seek Darnley in Glasgow, where he was safe among the retainers of Lennox, and thence to bring him back to Edinburgh, where his deadly foes awaited him.

Now this act of Mary’s cannot be regarded as merely indiscreet, or as a half-measure, or as a measure of passive acquiescence. Had she not brought Darnley from Glasgow to Edinburgh, under a semblance of a cordial reconciliation, he might, in one way or another, have escaped from his enemies. The one measure which made his destruction certain was the measure that Mary executed, though she was well aware that a conspiracy had been framed against the unhappy lad. Even if he wished to come to Edinburgh, uninvited by her, she ought to have refused to bring him.

We can only escape from these conclusions by supposing that Archibald Douglas, destitute and in exile, hoped to enter into Mary’s good graces by telling her what she well knew to be a lie; namely that Bothwell and her Secretary had declared that she would not hear of the matter proposed to her. Douglas tells us even more. While seeking to conciliate Mary, in his letter already cited, he speaks of ‘the evil disposed minds of the most part of your nobility against your said husband ... which I am assured was sufficiently known to himself, and to all that had judgment never so little in that realm.’ Mary had judgment enough, and, according to the signed declaration of her friends, Huntly and Argyll (Sept. 12, 1568), knew that the scheme was, either to divorce Darnley, or convict him of treason, ‘or in what other ways to dispatch him.’ These means, say Huntly and Argyll, she ‘altogether refused.’ Yet she brought Darnley to Kirk o’ Field!

Shall we argue that, pitying his illness, and returning to her old love, she deemed him safest in her society? In that case she might have carried him from Glasgow to Dumbarton Castle, or dwelt with him in the hold where she gave birth to James VI.—in Edinburgh Castle. But she brought him to an insecure house, among his known foes.

Mary’s conduct towards Darnley, after Craigmillar, and before his murder, and her behaviour later as regards Bothwell, are always capable of being covered by one or other special and specious excuse. On this occasion she brings Darnley to Edinburgh that a tender mother may be near her child; that a loving wife may attend a repentant husband, who cannot be so safe anywhere as under the Ægis of her royal presence. In each and every case there is a special, and not an incredible explanation. But one cause, if it existed, would explain every item of her conduct throughout, from Craigmillar to Kirk o’ Field: she hated Darnley. On the hypothesis of her innocence, and accepting the special pleas for each act, Mary was a weak, ailing, timid, and silly woman, with ‘a heart of wax.’ On the hypothesis of her guilt, though ailing, worn, wretched, she had ‘a heart of diamond,’ strong to scheme and act a ClytÆmnestra’s part, even contre son naturel. The naturel of ClytÆmnestra, too, was good, says Zeus in the Odyssey. But in her case, ‘Love was a great master.’

THE WHITTINGHAM TREE

(External view)

Still, we have seen no contemporary evidence, or hint of evidence, that love for Bothwell was Mary’s master. Her conduct, from her recovery of power, after Riccio’s murder, to her reconciliation of Lethington with Bothwell, is, on the face of it, in accordance with the interests and wishes of her brother, Moray, who hated Bothwell. As the English envoy, Randolph, had desired, she brought Moray to Court. She permitted him to attend in the Castle while she was in child-bed, and ‘refused Bothwell.’ She protected Moray from Bothwell’s and Darnley’s intrigues. She took Moray’s side, as to the readmission of Lethington to favour, though Bothwell stormed. She even made Moray her confidant as to money received from the Pope: perhaps Moray had his share! Lethington and Moray, not Bothwell, seem to have had her confidence. At Moray’s request she annulled her restoration of consistorial jurisdiction to Archbishop Hamilton. Moray and Lethington, not Bothwell, opened the proposals at Craigmillar. Such is the evidence of history. On the other side are the scandals reported by Buchanan, and, in details, Buchanan erred: for example, as to the ride to Hermitage.If Mary knew too much, how much was known by ‘the noble, stainless Moray’?

As to Moray’s foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder, can it be denied? He did not deny that he was at Craigmillar during the conference as to ‘dispatching’ Darnley. If the news of the plan for arresting or killing him reached underlings like Hiegait and Walker, could it be hidden from Moray, the man most in Mary’s confidence, and likely to be best served by spies? He glosses over his signature to the band of early October, 1566—the anti-Darnley band—as if it were a mere ‘sign of reconciliation’ which he promised to subscribe ‘before I could be admitted to the Queen’s presence, or have any show of her favour.’ But, when he did sign, he had possessed Mary’s favour for more than three months, and she had even saved him from a joint intrigue of Bothwell and Darnley. In January, 1569, Moray declared that, except the band of early October, 1566, ‘no other band was proposed to me in any wise,’ either before or after Darnley’s murder. And next he says that he would never subscribe any band, ‘howbeit I was earnestly urged and pressed thereto by the Queen’s commandment.’[118] Does he mean that no band was proposed to him, and yet that the Queen did press him to sign a band? Or does he mean that he would never have signed, even if the Queen had asked him to do so? We can never see this man’s face; the fingers through which he looks on at murder hide his shifty eyes.

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