Authors: Margaret Irwin
That first straightforward official account had stated that ‘the authors of this wickedness failed but by a very little in destroying the Queen with the great part of the nobility and gentry in her suite who were with the King in his chamber until almost midnight. And by chance only Her Majesty did not remain there the whole night.’
‘But they did not think of mentioning the chair,’ Bothwell broke out.
‘What chair?’
‘The chair in the garden beside the two nearly naked bodies, and with it the quilt, the slippers, the furred velvet gown with belt and dagger, all neatly placed there in the snow. Nobody says anything about them, they are too trifling to be considered. But a sketch was made of the scene on the morning of the crime, before anything was touched. An artist does not muddle the evidence by thinking whether it’s important or not – he puts down what he sees. And he saw Darnley’s clothes ready to put on – and an oak chair, presumably to sit on while he puts them on. Careful fellow, Taylor, very useful valet – always takes a chair out into the snow at two in the morning when his master has a whim to dress there instead of in his room after a two months’ illness!’
‘You joke, always you joke, till you make the whole world seem mad.’
‘Seem? – it
is
mad! Or else – something frightened the King so badly in the middle of the night that he ran out of the house without even waiting for his gown and slippers. It frightened Taylor too, but not as urgently, since he stayed to collect all those things. He’d put on a cap and one of his shoes before his master must have yelled to him to come on at all costs.’
D’Oysel leaped from his chair with the effect almost of another explosion.
‘Listen, my friend! Either the King knew there was gunpowder
in the house, or he did not. It is agreed, yes? no? Very well, then, if he knew of it, and the two of them smelt smoke, the King would know that the danger was more immediate than that of fire; he would run out barefoot, all but naked. His servant, no!
He
thinks there is fire, but he does not think an explosion, so he waits to collect these things for his master and follows him more slowly. It is seen.’ His finger shot out:
‘But how does the King know of gunpowder in the house? In two ways only is it possible. First, does somebody warn him? No – for in that case he would have made it public, or at the least he would have moved at once and not stayed to be blown up. There remains only the second way. The King knew there was gunpowder in the house because
he himself had ordered – or allowed – it to be put there
.’
And having flung round eyes, tufted eyebrows and plump pink hands upwards, he collapsed into his chair again so violently that he bounced. He then observed Bothwell’s face, grinning, not in startled amazement at his friend’s brilliant piece of detective work, but in amused appreciation.
‘Do not tell me you thought of all this before!’ the Frenchman exclaimed in fury.
‘Certainly I thought of it. Remember I
saw
that chair before you only heard of it. Besides, I have now had some confirmation. All but two of the King’s servants survived, as you know. I wouldn’t have them examined by torture – you can get no truth from a man by that – he says only what he thinks you wish him to say. But they’ve talked. One of them did more than talk. Sandy Durham, you remember, was dismissed for setting fire to his bedding, certainly the quickest way to get his discharge from a house full of gunpowder! The others, who were there that night, tell you the usual things – the pious state of mind of the two victims just before their death; how Taylor sang psalms which proved singularly appropriate. Psalms always are, have you noticed? Then Darnley talked of Rizzio’s murder. It worried him badly that the Queen had mentioned it that evening. Then at last he drank goodnight to them and reminded them that his new horses were to be saddled
early the next morning for him to ride to Holyrood. But at what hour and in what place do you think he ordered them to stand ready for him? At five o’clock in the morning – and in the south garden, under the Flodden Wall, where there is the postern gate through which one can ride direct into the open country – without having to pass any of the city guards. That certainly strikes one as the more likely direction for his ride than Holyrood, in the pitch dark of a February morning at five o’clock after a severe illness.’
‘The horses are ordered for five o’clock,’ repeated d’Oysel. ‘The House blows up at two – three hours at least, then, before it was intended – by whom?’
‘Presumably by the man who also intended to ride away in time from it,’ said Bothwell.
Lord James, an astute psychologist, once observed that rumour was more powerful than fact. It was to prove so now.
The King had sung psalms just before his death (or his servant did; it made no odds); the King had been disturbed because the Queen had talked of Rizzio’s murder – and why had she done so on the very night when his slayer was to meet his death?
It was said that the Italian’s ghost no longer haunted the anteroom at Holyrood.
‘The spirit of a King has been sent to appease the ghost of a fiddler,’ said George Buchanan, low, glancing out of the corners of his little eyes.
But how long a train of ghosts would be sent trooping after him to appease the spirit of the royal victim? Bothwell had not spoken in joke when he said that half Scotland seemed to be implicated in this affair one way or another. Certainly there had been more than one plot afoot that dark February night, though in the public mind they were all confused together as one.
The first was the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Queen and leaders of her Government and so clear the way for a
coup d’état.
This was the ‘surprise’ of which the Archbishop of Glasgow had already received some vague warning in Paris, and had written to her to beware of it. The second was the plot to kill the King. It
could have no connection with the Gunpowder Plot, except in as far as it was probably precipitated by some discovery of it.
For evidence of the Gunpowder Plot one would need to question the Spanish Ambassador in Paris; Pope Pius V; King Philip II, who was known to be awaiting a convenient moment to invade England, and would certainly find it in the overthrow of the Protestant Government in Scotland and consequent confusion; also the Ambassador of his ally, Savoy, Signor di Moretta, who left Edinburgh for London the day after the crime.
Not only was it impossible to make inquiry of such persons; it would ruin Mary’s chances of any future help or alliance with the European Powers of her own faith. There was, as always, little hope of arriving at the truth of a piece of international villainy, conceived by foreign rulers.
But the secondary plot, to kill the King, involved so many to whose obvious advantage it was to kill him, that for many years to come there was a steady procession of victims to appease that hungry ghost of the lad who was to succeed, when dead, in killing far more people even than he had tried to kill when alive.
Bothwell saw clearly that it would now be a
sauve qui peut
among all those connected with the King’s death, to see how each could fasten the suspicion on someone else.
On the day following the crime the Queen wrote to Lennox, promised justice for his murdered son and invited him to Edinburgh to take part in the investigation. A whole week passed before he answered, with a request for a Parliamentary inquiry. Mary answered that she had already summoned Parliament ‘and would leave undone nothing which may further a clear trial’. But she had done far more than that, and immediately, having at once offered a reward of £2,000, a yearly rent, and free pardon to anyone who could give any information concerning the crime.
Balfours, Douglases, Hepburns, Hamiltons, all had been on or near the scene of the crime at the moment that it happened. A velvet slipper of Archibald Douglas was found in the garden and considered clear proof of guilt, though, as he was reported to have worn armour all that night, it was scarcely likely that he should
have kept on his dressing-slippers to walk all that distance from Douglas House in the snow. Slightly stronger evidence against the Douglases was provided by some humble neighbours who ran to their doors ‘when the crack raised’ and swore they heard Darnley pleading for his life in the garden, crying, ‘Pity me,
kinsmen
!’ – a term that could only have applied to that clan.
On the other hand, the sudden and convenient absence of the Lord James and Lethington was almost equally incriminating to such experts in ‘throwing the stone without seeming to move the hand’. James, however, as if to show that for once in his life even he could be incautious in this singularly blundering affair, was reported to have said on Sunday evening, ‘This night the King will be free of all his troubles.’
Such reports could lead nowhere; nor did the evidence.
The public, baulked of fresh sensations in the way of arrests, had to feed instead on rumours. High feeding they proved, for by now they were being artificially induced by hidden masters of propaganda, and engineered towards a given direction. There were no more whispers of James’ prophetic utterance, or his private interviews at St Andrews with Morton, the head of the Douglas clan.
Instead, people were saying how Bothwell had given Hay a brown horse and Jock Hepburn a white, and told his servants they ‘should never want so long as he had.’
They were saying that when the Queen rode down in brilliant torchlit procession to Kirk o’ Field that fatal night, if any of her Court had cared to look behind, they might have seen two pack-horses laden with bags of gunpowder led by two of Bothwell’s serving-men and, as if this were not a sufficiently open manner of advertising the crime, Bothwell himself helped to carry in the powder and lay it in the Queen’s bedroom underneath the King’s, before joining the gay party upstairs, his gala dress in no way deranged by so grubby a job.
The same did not apply to his page, who appeared before the company all covered with gunpowder, so that the Queen cried out, ‘Jesu, Paris, how begrimed you are!’ At which his master
showed distinct annoyance that Paris should not have taken the simple precaution of washing his face and hands.
At this point the story showed signs of breaking down, and it was easier to fall back on the pathos of Darnley’s fate when not yet twenty-one. People remembered instances of that ‘fair, jolly young man’, riding at full gallop, shouting to his huntsmen, drinking and dicing in the most friendly fashion at low taverns paying royally (with his wife’s money) for the women he procured there. No doubt his wife had borne him a grudge for it; that was the worst of women, they were jealous, even when they themselves gave cause of jealousy. She had never forgiven Rizzio’s murder.
That illness of the King, there had been something mysterious about it; many said it was not really small-pox. John Knox said and wrote outright (being still at a safe distance) that it was poison. He even proceeded to extol the dead youth whom, when alive, he had to his face compared with Ahab. He admitted that Darnley had been ‘from his youth mis-led up in Popery’; but laid great stress on that youth, his ‘tragical end’, and his ‘comely stature – none was like unto him within this island’; most admirable of all, he was ‘prompt and ready for all games and sports’. Yet no one had seen the Queen weep as a widow should. After four days’ darkness it was noted with horror that she had opened her windows for a time to let in light and air. The doctors had in fact ordered it, and declared that she was in danger of utter collapse. Exhausted, stunned, she gazed on the embalmed body of her husband as it lay in state, and gave ‘no outward sign of joy or sorrow’.
Knox’s literary rival, Buchanan, could do better than that, and declared that the Queen ‘greedily beheld the dead body’. It was buried by torchlight in the vault at Holyrood five days after the murder.
The next night an anonymous placard was pinned to the door of the Tolbooth, accusing as the King’s murderers ‘the Earl of Bothwell, Sir James Balfour, Mr David Chalmers, black Mr John Spens, who was the principal deviser of the murder, and the Queen assenting thereto, through the persuasion of the Earl of Bothwell and the witchcraft of the Lady Buccleuch’.
The Lady Buccleuch was Bothwell’s former love, Janet Scott, whose charms, in whatever sense, seemed as remote from this noisy deed of violence as John Spens, whom Knox admired for his piety and ‘gentle nature’. The anonymous accuser seemed indeed conscious that he might be shooting rather too much at random, for he ended with the qualification, ‘And if this be not true, ask Gilbert Balfour.’
Bothwell rode past the Tolbooth next morning, leaned from his saddle and tore the poster from the wall with his whinger. He went on to the Palace, demanded to see the Queen, and found her in her rooms that were again conventionally darkened, looking by candlelight at a copy of the same placard. She raised a white face to him, her eyes staring aghast from deep pits of shadow. He was across the room in one stride, snatched the paper out of her hand and threw it in the fire.
‘What shall I do?’ she said in a whisper.
‘Get out of this black hole and down to Geordie Seton’s place – with a strong bodyguard. I’ll appoint two hundred soldiers to attend you. I’ll meet you there this afternoon, on the links. What you need is a good game of golf.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Seton House, on the shore of the Firth of Forth, some miles from Edinburgh, lay in pleasant open pasture-land where the wind tasted salt from the sea. Mary Seton, the gentlest and most devoted of her four Maries, was the only one still unmarried; she had, in fact, determined that she would be a nun ‘when you no longer need me’, so she told her mistress, though every day that day seemed farther off, to them both. She was as proud as her long lean father to welcome the Queen yet again to their home.
The Protestant reporters noted with shocked glee how she ‘exercised right openly in the fields with golf’ in company with her hosts and Bothwell and Gordon. Golf had been put down by law, as it kept the players from practice at the long-bow and made the Scots inferior shots to the English; but as the gun was now gradually ousting the bow, golf would certainly come more and more into fashion – and one of the best things to be said for gunpowder, Bothwell declared. But just to show what law-abiding citizens they were, they gave archery its due too, and he and Mary won a contest with Gordon and Seton at the shooting-butts, of which the prize was a dinner given by the losing side. It was a merry dinner, and the pipers with more appropriateness than tact played a tune called ‘Well is me since I am free’.