A Rediscovery of Witches, Part One: The Hammer and the Horned God

This transcript is incomplete. It does not contain material from my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins of Dig: A History Podcast. Listen to the episode for more.

Last October I explored the origins of the legend of werewolves, and during the course of that exploration, I was obliged to speak about accusations of witchcraft, as the two were intimately connected. Among all the iconic monsters that appear this time of year on dollar-store decorations, the vampire, the werewolf, and witches, it is the witch that people generally know has some basis in history and truth, as it is common knowledge that large numbers of accused witches were put to death, both here in America in New England and across Europe in the early modern period. But what do we really know about the women, and men, accused of witchcraft and what led to their trials? Is there any historical evidence to suggest that these people had actually done anything we might today think of as witchy? Or was it a moral panic that claimed the lives of many who were completely innocent? If so, what touched off this panic? Who and what were these accused witches, really, and why did they end up burned and hanged? You probably think you know the answers to these questions, but you may be surprised. For example, belief in witches may go all the way back to antiquity, when those believed to practice sorcery, incantations, and poisoning were punished under the law in many lands. However, it seems lesser known that during the Middle Ages, with the Christianization of Europe, authorities both divine and secular passed laws against persecuting others for witchcraft and even denied its existence. Medieval canon law declared that any who believed they did such things as witches were commonly accused of doing, such as riding on beasts by night in the train of the pagan goddess Diana, had simply been deluded by the devil to believe their dreams were real. A number of Catholic Popes expressly forbade the torturing and executing of those accused of witchcraft, such as Pope Nicholas I and Pope Gregory VII. However, by the 13th century, the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition was involved in crusades against heretics in France, the Cathars and Waldensians, and the accusations of devil worship leveled against them as well as their brutal extirpation hearkened back to witch purges of the past and presaged the witch-hunts to come. Even so, as late as 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared a bull that prohibited Inquisitors from investigating sorcery. A couple hundred years later, though, the Catholic Church essentially invented the idea of the witch as we know it today, not as a simple sorcerer or diviner or a pagan worshipper but as a servant of Satan, when they combined witchcraft accusations with accusations of heresy. Many see its beginnings in the late 15th century, when Pope Innocent VIII issued an infamous bull that acknowledged the existence of real witchcraft—not just dreams or visions but real sorcery—and empowered the Inquisition to prosecute its practitioners. We don’t know for certain the exact number of people tried and executed for witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, but surviving records indicate that around 40,000 were killed. Who were the accused? And what led to the accusations made against them?

I have always covered something a bit spooky around Halloween. In 2018, I spoke about Spring-Heeled Jack and the Devil’s Footprints in Devon, but most of my other Halloween episodes have really focused on moral panics having to do with accusations of monstrous behavior, and these episodes really culminate, I feel, with this series. At the end of my first year of podcasting, I did a 2-part series on the history of false accusations of devil worship, and last year, I did another 2-part series on werewolf trials. I’m proud of both of those and encourage you to listen to them this October if you’ve never heard them. The topic also flows well from episodes I’ve done this year. Starting with the patron exclusive I did on the suppression of the Knights Templar, and through my discussion of the supposed origin of magic and my look at heresy and heterodoxy in the Apocrypha, I can see a thread. My discussion of anti-Semitism through the ages certainly serves as a parallel to the witch-hunts I will be discussing, and even my series on Mary, Queen of Scots connects, for her son, James, as king, wrote his own book on witchcraft justifying the prosecution of witches under canon law. I even see a direct connection to my last episode, in which I drew a connection between Qanon conspiracy theories and longstanding conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. To clarify, the accusations made by Qanon believers owe a lot to witchcraft accusations, for they claim that the deep state is run by devil-worshipers who torture and kill children in order to harvest from them adrenochrome, a drug they enjoy, or simply to eat them. Anyone who has studied witchcraft accusations recognizes these claims. Witches were also accused of being devil-worshipers who ate children or sacrificed them or harvested fat from them to make their hallucinogenic flying ointment. One could argue in fact that Qanon is just another witch-hunt. But despite the progression from topics I’ve covered this year and throughout the lifetime of the show, I have found the witch-hunts of early modern Europe very difficult to parse and wrap my mind around. First of all, it feels wrong, somehow, to question what these women’s lives were like, what they might have done, for neighbors or authorities to target them for prosecution as witches, as if I’m engaging in victim-blaming, yet the more I look into this topic, the more a cut-and-dry claim that all accusations had sprung from the fevered imaginations of Inquisitors seems untenable. Yet neither can I entertain the notion that witch-hunters were justified in their prosecutions. So we must consider all sides… what did the Inquisitors believe of the accused, and what different views of them have historians taken, and what theories are there for why the witch purges of early modern Europe happened.

The 1669 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. Public Domain image, via Wikimedia Commons.

To understand how witches were defined in early modern Europe and made into the perennial horror icons we know today, we must look to the writings of one true believer, Dominican monk and Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Early in his career, this Inquisitor undertook a witch-hunt at Innsbruck, where a certain woman suspected of witchcraft challenged his authority, spitting on him in the street, calling him a “bad monk,” refusing to attend his sermons and suggesting that, because of his own rabid belief in literal witchcraft, he was the one in league with Satan. This set Kramer off on a rampage of a witch purge, putting this woman and others on trial not so much for practicing sorcery, although there were rumors of this, but rather for their sexual behavior, which he asserted proved that they worshipped and engaged in sexual contact with the devil. The local Bishop, however, disagreed, finding that Kramer asked leading questions, “presumed much that had not been proved,” and “clearly demonstrated his foolishness.” After the trial had been vacated, Kramer went home and stewed over it, and ended up, as a defense of his actions and a rebuttal to his critics, writing what turned out to be the most infamous witch-hunting manual of the era, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of the Witches.” Kramer’s was not the only witch-hunting manual used during the early modern witch-hunts, but it was the most influential in German-speaking regions, and this was the heart of the witch purges that followed, with a majority of the prosecutions taking place within 300 miles of the Rhineland city of Strasbourg (Leeson and Russ 2067). The Malleus Maleficarum serves as the perfect source for understanding the conception of witchcraft that became dominant during the ensuing witch craze. Although witchcraft had long been thought of as a practice of both men and women, and indeed, during the early modern panic, men too were accused and executed for it, for Kramer, witches were women. As at Innsbruck, Kramer blamed what he perceived as their lustful nature, as well as their supposed intellectual weakness, for their susceptibility to the devil’s charms. A witch, he argued, was not simply a woman who performs magic. To be considered a witch, they have to “deny  the  Catholic  faith  in  whole  or  in part through verbal sacrilege, to devote themselves body and soul [to the devil], to  offer  up  to  the  Evil  One  himself  infants  not  yet  baptized, and  to  persist  in diabolic filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons.” So we see these motifs, of sex with demons and the sacrifice of babies, not entering the discourse for the first time, but here cemented in a definition with criteria. And since, according to this definition, they were essentially heretics, he recommended torture in their prosecution and encouraged that they be burned at the stake, both standard Inquisitorial practices for rooting out heresy.

To think of Kramer’s understanding of witches as an artifact of a dark age of ignorance that disappeared with the Enlightenment would be erroneous, though, for even in the 20th century, at least one erudite and scholarly writer was giving them credence. The first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1928 by Montague Summers, a Catholic writer who perpetuated the witch-hunting manual’s notions as legitimate and true. In his books on witches, werewolves, and vampires, he presented the accusations of Inquisitors as completely reliable, even the supernatural parts. But more than this, he painted the picture of witchcraft practitioners as a vast conspiracy like unto the Illuminati, describing the witch as

an evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes; a bawd; an abortionist; the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants; a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.

Also like believers in an Illuminati conspiracy, he saw the Bolsheviks as a parallel, and even suggested that the actions of Inquisitors against such a conspiracy were justified, writing, “who can be surprised if, when faced with so vast a conspiracy, the methods employed by the Holy Office may not seem – if the terrible conditions are conveniently forgotten – a little drastic, a little severe?” And while acknowledging the misogyny of Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, he makes the loathsome suggestion that such persecution might be just what was needed for the women of his own day, stating, “I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they…divest themselves of such charm as they might boast.”

Photo of Montague Summers, attributed to DiscipulusMundi on WIkimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Regardless of his politics or misogyny, what is so striking about Montague Summers is that, as an Oxford educated man about town and fixture of the London literary scene, he actually believed the irrational things he claimed to believe. One might blame this on his religious background, but his religiosity may have been an affectation. He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church, but after a scandal in which he was accused of sexually assaulting boys, his career in the church came to an end. He converted to Catholicism after that and appears to have pursued ordination as a priest so single-mindedly that he travelled to Italy in search of a Cardinal who would be willing to ordain him in an unorthodox ceremony. So it seemed the pretension of being a clergyman was more important to him than any doctrine or faith. He was known to go about town in a cape and the black felt shovel hat typical of clergymen, presenting himself like an 18th-century Inquisitor. In fact, his interest in witchcraft too may have been an affectation. Originally, he had made a name for himself as a scholar of Restoration theater. After being approached by a publisher who requested he write a volume on the occult, Summers wrote the first work in what would end up being a large body of work on the topic, and after his first, more academic treatments of the topic, he pivoted into works on the occult aimed at popular audiences, and even into writing Gothic horror fiction. Montague Summers was a contemporary and acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, and it may be that he was influenced by Crowley’s own cultivation of a public image as an occultist and warlock. Some contemporaries believed Summers was himself an occultist and that he wrote of such things from experience, but based on Summers’s surviving letters and his work, it is much more likely that he had been attempting to cultivate an image of himself as a counterpart to Crowley, a modern witch-hunter to Crowley’s modern witch. On Montague Summers’s gravestone, the epitaph reads “Tell me strange stories,” and this suggests that, rather than being a true believer, perhaps he simply enjoyed a good dark tale, as do so many of us.

Bust of Margaret Murray housed at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Photo attributed to Midnightblueowl on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The case of Montague Summers mirrors in some ways the case of another academic, a contemporary of his, who spread a different, more rational view of the nature of witches, but whose view was no less problematic, whose methods were flawed in some of the same ways, and whose career followed a comparable trajectory. Her name was Margaret Murray. Essentially, Margaret Murray too believed that the women accused of witchcraft in early modern witch trials were part of a kind of vast conspiracy in that she asserted they were actually secretly practitioners of an ancient pagan fertility cult that operated like a secret society in Christian Europe. Yet her theory stands in opposition to Montague Summers’s, for she approached the subject of witches with a more skeptical and rational perspective. She claimed that everything witch-trial records spoke of witches doing had really been done, but had been misunderstood or misrepresented by prosecutors. Her theory evolved from her first book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, to her follow-up, The God of the Witches. At first, working from reports of witches being deluded by the devil into the worship of a goddess named Diana, she suggested this Diana was actually the ancient Roman two-faced male deity, Janus. In her later work, though, influenced by the comparative mythology work of James Frazer in The Golden Bough, she identified their deity with the “Horned God,” who had been mistaken for the devil by witch-hunters, but was really a representation of a syncretistic deity that could be found in many cultures, stretching back to the Ancient Greek Pan. Murray believed that a male priest or authority figure wore some headdress to act as a stand-in for their Horned God, and performed these sexual acts on the female adherents of the cult, using a prosthetic phallus when the physical demands were too much. And again drawing on James Frazer’s work, which identified the figure of the sacred king who must atone for his people as a sacrifice, she suggested this male figure was ritualistically or at least symbolically burned , which could be discerned in witch confessions that spoke of the devil disappearing in flames, and in the ultimate reversal of what is generally believed about early modern witch-hunts, she claimed that these pagan cultists actually provoked Christians into burning them alive in order to imitate their Dying God and effect the human sacrifice their cult required.

At first, the theory seemed promising in its rational view and even believable, and it spread widely when in 1929, Murray was invited to write Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on witchcraft and took the opportunity to present her theory as if it were historical consensus or fact. But it was not, for there were real problems with her ideas and her methods. For example, Murray cited witch trial records that recorded confessions describing intercourse with the devil as being cold as her only evidence that her cult’s priests used prosthetic phalluses for their ceremonies… and her insistence that descriptions of the devil disappearing in flames were proof of their burning sacrifice of their Horned God effigy seems a bit ridiculous since the association of the devil with the flames of hell seems a clearer origin for such details. So ironically, her supposedly rationalist view of witchcraft suffered from the one of very same problems as Montague Summers’ work. She presumed that the acts confessed to under duress had actually taken place. She may have sought a different, more naturalistic interpretation of the lurid descriptions than witch persecutors and Summers had taken, but she never stopped to ask whether the accused may have just been telling the witch-hunters what they demanded to hear.

A photo of the Dorset Ooser, a wooden head or mask of uncertain origin used in folk traditions in Dorset. This is one of many unconnected examples cited by Murray as support for her theory of a cult to a Horned God. Public Domain in the U.S., via Wikipedia.

Among the many criticisms of her work were doubts expressed about her “dubious etymology” in suggesting that the name Diana was derived from Janus, or that the word “sabbath,” used by witch-hunters and in the confessions of the accused to refer to their gatherings and rituals, was not used in mockery of Jewish customs, as was commonly believed, but must have been derived from a word for “frolic,” even though elsewhere in her own work she takes no issue with the Jewish term “synagogue” being used to refer to witches’ gatherings. Her principal historiological sins are that she was supremely selective in her use of primary sources, quoting only that which supported her claims and omitting all else, and she presents even her wildest assertions as if they were so clear and obvious as to be unquestionable. This quote from Jacqueline Simpson’s article on Murray in Folklore paints a clearer picture of her scholarship, criticizing the

…inclusion of many chunks of miscellaneous material from a huge variety of periods and cultures, flung together in a hotchpotch where a paleolithic cave painting, an Egyptian mask and the Dorset Ooser all are said to represent the same Horned God, and where Robin Hood, fairies, scrying, Merlin, Norse seers and Celtic saints are all swept up into the discussion. Precisely because the material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified, and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship which they dare not query. Her books, alas, are not alone in profiting from this effect.

This method and the reliance on dubious etymology reminds me of the style of another writer who argued that pagan traditions had secretly survived in modern times: the anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist Alexander Hislop, who in his book The Two Babylons argued that Catholicism was just a collection of pagan traditions from antiquity. Have a listen to my episode on him and his work, A Tale of Two Babylons, and I’m sure you’ll recognize the similarity.

It seems to me that, much like Montague Summers, Margaret Murray may have been bewitched, if you’ll excuse the pun, by the popularity of her work on witches and the prospect of further success among general audiences. Certainly, when academic historians and folklorists are generous enough to afford her any praise, it’s usually for her early work and not for her later books, which are generally considered to have gone entirely off the rails. Yet her work has had a major impact among feminists. And beyond the spread of her peculiar myth of a pagan cult in Western Europe persecuted as devil-worshippers by Christians, her work also contributed to other historical myths related to the nature of witches. We’ll discuss these further developments next time, in part two of A Rediscovery of Witches, and we’ll get down to brass tacks in discussing whether witches really were practicing some kind of magic, and what other reasons may have led to accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

Further Reading

Broedel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester University Press, 2003. OAPEN, library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/35002.

Clack, Beverly. “Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger 1486.” Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 83-92. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230212800_7.

Herzig, Tamar. "Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer’s Ties with Italian Women Mystics." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 1 no. 1, 2006, p. 24-55. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mrw.0.0038.

Hume, Robert D. “The Uses of Montague Summers: A Pioneer Reconsidered.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 3, no. 2, 1979, pp. 59–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43291376. Accessed 30 Sept. 2020.

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. Blackmask Online, 2001. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/godwitch/mode/2up.

———. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1921. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/20411/20411-h/20411-h.htm.

Regal, Brian. “The Occult Life of Montague Summers.” Fortean Times, January 2017. Magzter, www.magzter.com/article/Entertainment/Fortean-Times/The-Occult-Life-of-Montague-Summers.

Simpson, Jacqueline. “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?” Folklore, vol. 105, 1994, pp. 89–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260633. Accessed 14 Oct. 2020.

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part Two: The Order in America

As conspiracy theories about an American “deep state” have spread and gone viral over the last four years, they have been taken up by a particular online persona, combined with variety of other conspiracy theories, both modern and classic, and been transformed in the Coronavirus Era into a kind of cult. I am speaking, of course, about Qanon, a kind of anonymous prophet for today’s conservative conspiracy theorists. It all began back in early October, 2017, when Donald Trump posed for photos with a group of military leaders and, smirking, made a cryptic comment about a calm before a storm. Many assumed he was joking, or that if it was anything, it may have been in reference to some imminent military adventure, but to conspiracy enthusiasts, or those eager to dupe them, it was a perfect segue into wild theories. Before the end month, a post called “Calm Before the Storm” appeared on the “politically incorrect” board of the website 4chan, a home away from home for Nazis and incels where most users forego a username in favor of appearing “anonymous.” But this poster, who was claiming inside information about Hillary Clinton’s impending detainment and extradition, used the moniker Q, which many assumed was in reference to some clearance authorization for top secret data in the Department of Energy, though the contents of Q’s posts seem to claim White House access rather than any knowledge of nuclear materials. For all we know, the poster originally meant it as a reference to the omniscient character of Q in Star Trek the Next Generation, meant to indicate his or her being all knowing, and the connection to a top secret clearance authorization was a happy accident. The poster, or posters, as they often refer to themselves as “we,” certainly encouraged the idea that they had intimate knowledge of the goings on at the highest level of government, and they painted President Trump as a lone warrior against a deep state conspiracy, insisting, in fact, that he was winning this battle. They depicted him as being in total control, just biding his time until the forthcoming “storm,” or “great awakening,” when he will finally make his perfectly orchestrated move to checkmate the cabal of globalists that control everything. Who is this cabal? Well, Q remains cryptic, including actual ciphers in posts so that followers can see what they want, implicate who they want to implicate. Certainly the Clintons, who it was claimed were the real subject of Mueller’s investigation, and establishment Democrats generally, but the followers of Qanon were not satisfied with such a prosaic conspiracy. They wanted to fold in the greatest hits of every wild conspiracy theory for the last hundred years, so they embraced Pizzagate and made their deep state a pedophile ring, and they revived the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s to make them actual devil-worshipping eaters of children. They take up the Jewish World Conspiracy by arguing that Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds are behind everything, and they follow in the path of many who came before them in pointing at Freemasons and the Illuminati. Indeed, a key element of their theory, that the deep state cabal with whom Trump is doing battle engages in drinking the blood of children and harvesting adrenochrome from abused children’s brains, seems to echo directly some of the more outlandish claims John Robison made, without evidence, against the French scientists he hated and accused of being Illuminist conspirators before the French Revolution: Robison claimed that they would purchase children from the poor in order to dissect their living brains in search of a life force, a horrifying mad-scientist experiment that even the police were supposedly powerless to stop. So it seems nothing that Qanon spews is new. They’re just dredging up baseless conspiracy theories that have been around since the Enlightenment, and have been influencing U.S. politics since at least 1798.

In choosing a place to start with a discussion of the Illuminati’s presence in America, or its supposed presence, then the clearest starting point would be to discuss the Great Seal of the United States. This is image you see on the dollar bill. On one side, there is an eagle wearing a striped shield, grasping arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other, with a constellation of stars over its head and the Latin Motto E Pluribus Unum. On the other side is the iconic pyramid with a floating and radiant eye in its peak, with the Roman numerals for the year of our independence at its base and two Latin phrases: Annuit Coeptis above, meaning God has favored our undertakings, and Novus Ordo Seclorum below, meaning “a new order of the ages.” It is this second image that drives conspiracy theories about Illuminati influence at the dawn of our nation, especially since the phrase New World Order has come to be associated with the supposed worldwide conspiracy. In reality, the notion and phrase would not actually appear until the middle of the 20th century, with a push toward world governing bodies like the League of Nations. The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum can be traced back to the poet Virgil, who in a passage of the fourth Eclogue used similar language to describe the coming of a golden age of justice. So it was really a reference to the idea that the independence of America represented the dawning of a new age, which it was widely regarded as signaling. Many will say that the eye in the triangle is Illuminati iconography, but this is not accurate. The Illuminati used the symbol of an owl on a book. The radiant eye used on our seal is the Eye of Providence, supposed to represent God watching over mankind, and thus complementing the motto above it on the seal. The Eye of Providence would go on to become a common Masonic symbol, but it’s unclear whether it was common among Freemasons before its adoption on the Great Seal of the United States. Today, people try to claim that the triangle is an Illuminati sign, and this appears to have come from lore about the symbolism on our Great Seal. The problem with this is that the Eye of Providence was suggested as an element of the seal in August of 1776, during the first committee on the topic, which included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. At that time, the Bavarian Illuminati was just a fledgling club among university students in Ingolstadt, as I indicated in Part One. The inclusion of the Eye of Providence seems to be an earnest attempt to illustrate through symbolism that God approved of their democratic experiment and nothing more. As for the eye being enclosed in a triangle, that wasn’t because it was pictured as the tip of a pyramid, for we see even in early versions of the seal without the pyramid that the eye was in a triangle. It may be that the triangular shape of the seal’s eye was due to the importance of geometry and triangles specifically to Freemasons, as at least some on the committee certainly were Masons. This would have nothing to do with the Illuminati, however, as the Bavarian order had yet to spread among continental Masonic lodges, and the brand of Masonry in Revolutionary America was far different from continental Masonry anyway. The other possibility is that the triangular shape represents the trinity, making it simply a Christian symbol that ironically has encouraged a fear of a sinister anti-Christian conspiracy for decades.

The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons. (Use of this image is in no way meant to convey the false impression that any part of this article or podcast episode is sponsored or approved by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof)

Knowledge of the Bavarian Illuminati did not reach American shores until the work of John Robison and Abbé Barruel did. Interestingly, neither Robison nor Barruel suggested that the American Revolution had been orchestrated by the Illuminati as they claimed the French Revolution had been. However, they both vaguely and without evidence suggested that the Illuminati had begun infiltrating Masonic lodges there, Barruel by stating that “sects equally inimical to Royalty and Christianity are daily increasing in numbers and strength, particularly in North America,” and Robison by including America on a list of countries with lodges corrupted by the Illuminati, assuring his readers in parentheses that there were “several” there. As obscure and ambiguous as these claims were, they still touched off an Illuminati panic in America because of prevailing political and ecclesiastical conditions. For simplicity’s sake, it can be characterized as similar to modern America. At the time, there were two principal parties, the conservative Federalist party that held control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency under John Adams, and their more progressive rivals, the Democratic-Republican party, championed by Thomas Jefferson, who contrary to the sentiments of most Federalists believed that the French were our revolutionary brethren. In fact, the country was in the midst of a diplomatic and trade crisis with the revolutionary government of France when American editions of Robison’s and Barruel’s books were being published. Called the XYZ affair, it involved the refusal of an American diplomatic commission to pay off French officials, and it led to an undeclared naval war between our countries called the Quasi-War. To those with anti-French views at the time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory gave further reason to distrust and hate any post-revolution government of France and allowed the Federalists to paint themselves as the last bulwark against a further lawless and godless brand of revolution that, if the conspirators had their way, could consume our young republic the way that it had France. It was a perfect political barb to fling at their political rivals, as well, for rather than engaging in legitimate debate about our relationship with France, the Federalists could make a straw man of the Jeffersonians and say their sympathy for the French proved they were in on the Illuminati conspiracy. And just as conservatives in Britain had attempted to delegitimize the Irish rebellion by calling it an Illuminati plot, after the conspiracy theory reached America, the rural Whiskey Rebellion against a whiskey tax during Washington’s presidency was later recast as proof of Illuminati machinations in our country. Even George Washington, who was sympathetic to Federalist policies but had always tried to remain non-partisan, let himself be swayed by the conspiracy theory. While at first he expressed doubt that any Masonic lodges in America were “contaminated with the principles ascribed to the Society of the Illuminati,” only a month later he qualified that assessment and wrote that “individuals of them may have done it,” and the idea that some founders of lodges and democratic societies in America “actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view” he then characterized as “too evident to be questioned.” But it’s clear from his letters that the only evidence he is referring to is the work of John Robison, which was, of course, no evidence at all.

There were, however, more forces than just the political pushing the American people to believe in an active Illuminati plot in America in those years. Orthodox Congregational ministers of New England in that time had seen their power and influence wane with the rise of millennial doctrines and evangelical faiths after the Great Awakening (the historical one, not Qanon’s imagined “Great Awakening”). Predictably, these clergy attributed the changes to impiety and a widespread corruption of morals. To them, the works of Robison and Barruel explained the turning away from their brand of religion as the result of an anti-Christian plot. The appeal is understandable. Their flocks were only shrinking because Illuminati agents of the devil were secretly corrupting their society. Reverend Jedidiah Morse, famous for his work in American geography, was the most adamant in his preaching of the Illuminati conspiracy theory. From his Boston pulpit in May of 1798, Morse declared that there was a conspiracy “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.” Soon Morse was not the only one taking up the conspiracy claim. Congregationalist theologian and president of Yale Dr. Timothy Dwight preached it as well. This clerical campaign represents a concrete effort to move away from the enlightenment ideal of the separation of church and state and an effort to Christianize the nation. In the ramp up to the presidential election of 1800, these Congregationalists naturally threw their weight behind the party and candidate that had positioned themselves as being against the Illuminati threat by being anti-French: the Federalists and John Adams. So in an American election year, we have preachers at their pulpits convincing their parishioners that they must vote a certain way because of a false conspiracy theory. It’s just this sort of thing that the Johnson Amendment of 1954, which denied tax exemption to organizations involved in partisan politics, was meant to prevent, an amendment that the Trump administration has attempted to do away with recently through executive order and tax legislation. With the power of New England organized religion behind them, helping to convince even the less politically conscious that Thomas Jefferson was a threat to America, they likely would have succeeded in getting Adams reelected. But they didn’t count on their conspiracy theory being turned around on them.

Portrait of Jedidiah Morse. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

There is a strong argument to be made that the result of the election of 1800 owed a lot to a series of newspaper articles that appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper called the Aurora during the years leading up to the election. This anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian organ saw its circulation increase substantially after it began publishing the diatribes of a preacher named John Ogden, who spent many of his columns enumerating the offenses of the Federalist powers against, for example, an innocent congressman they had jailed for political reasons, or a poor widow that they had ruined. Rather than focusing his withering articles on only the politicians in power, though, he identified the orthodox Congregationalists of New England, especially Yale’s Dr. Dwight, as the pharisees that reinforced their power. He depicted Dwight as a popish figure and accused him of indoctrinating the youth at Yale, and he characterized the existing power structure as a blend of both priestcraft and aristocracy that was threatening to destroy the foundations of our new democratic republic. And when Morse and Dwight started their Illuminati disinformation campaign, Ogden flung their accusations right back at them, calling them the Clerical Illuminati of New England. By his reckoning, the Federalist brand of government looked far more like the authoritarianism of the Bavarian Illuminati, and the orthodox Congregationalist suppression of alternative doctrines showed that they were the true enemies of religion. Ogden’s Illuminati looked far more like the modern idea of a “deep state,” an entrenched power structure, but rather than a bureaucratic machine, it was a secret marriage of church and state. In the topsy-turvy, paranoid rhetoric of that election year, the fact that the Federalists and Congregationalists were so vehemently insisting that the Democratic-Republican Jeffersonians were the Illuminati was the clearest evidence that it was the other way around, since clearly the Illuminati would accuse their enemies of being the conspirators in order to hide the truth that they were the conspirators themselves. Ogden passed away before the election was decided, but his widely read counter-accusations appear to have been a decisive factor, helping to sweep Thomas Jefferson into office in 1800 despite the fact that many still suspected him of being a godless agent of chaos.

After the election of 1800, with no concrete evidence of the conspiracy ever coming out despite the Reverend Jedidiah Morse insisting that he had incontrovertible proof in his possession, the Illuminati scare just dissipated. President Jefferson clearly wasn’t going to abolish all religion and overthrow all civil government, and a few years later, the French appeared to be moving away from the fearful brand of democracy associated with the Illuminati conspiracy when their Senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor. Thus, the specter of the Illuminati faded into the background of political discourse for about a quarter century, until the kidnapping and suspected murder of one man once again dredged up the talk of a sinister Illuminati conspiracy in relation to Freemasonry. In 1826, a man named Captain William Morgan who had recently been involved with Masonry in upstate New York advertised his intention to publish a book revealing their initiation rites. In retaliation, some local Masons had him jailed on a minor debt then pulled him out of the jailhouse, after which he was never seen again. Outrage over this crime led to a political movement to suppress Freemasonry in America, not because of any specific Illuminati-esque plot, though. Rather, it was because many civil servants were also Masons, and it was argued that their vows of loyalty to their lodges and fellow Masons superseded their oaths of office, inviting corruption. Out of this movement grew an organized third political party in America for the first time, the Anti-Masonic Party, which in the 1830s was actually the first party to ever conduct a convention for the nomination of a presidential candidate. During these years of rampant anti-Masonic rhetoric, the word Illuminati was certainly tossed about frequently again, as if it were a slur synonymous with Freemason, for Barruel and Robison had effectively linked the two forever. If you want to know more about William Morgan and this chapter of American history, you can get yourself a copy of my historical novel, Manuscript Found, in which I go into far more detail. Maybe one day I’ll do an entire episode on the topic, but for our purposes in this study, suffice it to say that this was only a blip in the story of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in America, a short-lived and minor resurgence of the language rather than the theory itself.

A depiction of Captain William Morgan’s alleged murder at the hands of Freemasons. Public Domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

For a long time after the Anti-Masonic movement, conspiracy theory in America was more dominated by nativism, specifically positing that the Catholic Church was plotting to overthrow our democracy. As though taking up the legacy of his father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse’s son, Samuel Morse, the telegraphy pioneer, spread his own brand of conspiracy theory in Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Samuel Morse’s conspiracy theory was not about the Illuminati, but in some regards it shared themes with the theory his father had promulgated. Both postulated that a sinister cabal out of Europe was secretly acting to undermine American government and religion. Also, just like the Illuminati conspiracy theory, Samuel Morse’s Anti-Catholic conspiracy theory developed into a creed justifying bigotry, specifically against the Irish and other Catholic immigrant groups. As for the Illuminati conspiracy theory, it would eventually become inextricably linked to anti-Semitism, but that would not occur until the 19th century, after the emergence of forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ever since the Middle Ages and the rise of the Blood Libel, there had been some form of a conspiracy theory that Jews all over world conspired against Christians, but it wasn’t until the Protocols hoax that this conspiracy theory took a form undeniably similar to that of the Illuminati, spreading the idea that Jews were not just scheming to desecrate the host or commit ritual murder or poison wells… but that they were engaged in an organized worldwide plot to overthrow all governments and religions. Interestingly, the tendency to link Jews to the Illuminati conspiracy theory seems to have been present from the beginning. In 1806, Abbé Barruel received a letter from a Piedmontese soldier named Jean Baptiste Simonini that claimed it was really the Jews behind the Freemasons and the Illuminati. To his credit, after some further research, Barruel decided that this Simonini fellow was wrong, that although many Jews were Freemasons, it was the Freemasons generally, manipulated by the Illuminati, who had conspired to foment the French Revolution. And he even suggested that blaming the Jews was dangerous and could lead to a massacre.

It would not be until the work of one Nesta Webster that the Illuminati theory and the Jewish World Conspiracy theory would become more concretely combined. Daughter of a successful banker, Nesta Webster was a British woman of means who had travelled the world. Along the way, she developed the notion that she was the reincarnation of a French duchess who had been guillotined during the Terror. This started her interest in the French Revolution, which she began to research and write about, along the way, predictably, encountering the work of Abbé Barruel, which she accepted enthusiastically. In her book The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, she revived Barruel’s theory of an Illuminist-Masonic plot having orchestrated the French Revolution, and her work was accepted as credible by none other than Winston Churchill, who then helped spread the ideas of Barruel further, stating “This conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt... as a modern historian Mrs Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution.” But Nesta Webster did not just parrot Barruel’s ideas. She took them further, suggesting that Communism and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 were later examples of the Illuminati revolution machine at work, and that Bolshevism in Russia was the new Jacobinism, the latest evidence of the Illuminati plot. After developing this idea in her next book, The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism, she eventually made the leap to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, based on the idea promulgated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot, arguing that the Illuminati conspiracy to spark revolutions the world over had been a Jewish conspiracy plot all along, with the Rothschild Jewish banking family behind it. Unsurprisingly, Nesta Webster’s far right views led her to become involved with British fascist groups. And I’m not just labeling these organizations fascist; they were explicitly self-described fascist groups, like the British Fascisti, comprised of members of the British Conservative Party who were troubled by the Bolshevik Revolution, inspired by Mussolini, and described themselves as Christian patriots; and later, the British Union of Fascists, an actual fascist political party. By the 1930s, Nesta Webster was defending Nazi persecution of Jews and praising Hitler for fighting the supposed Jewish conspiracy.

Photo of young Nesta Webster. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

Returning to America and the influence of the Illuminati conspiracy in our own politics, it may come as no surprise that white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan discovered the writings of Nesta Webster and touted them as scholarly evidence of a Jewish plot against Christians. But it was Webster’s linking of the Illuminati and a Jewish World Conspiracy to Communism that really drove the resurgence of the theory in America. In the midst of the so-called Second Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against Communism in America, the John Birch Society was formed by a Massachusetts candymaker, and it was this group that would bring Nesta Webster’s revitalized version of Barruel and Robison’s Illuminati theory into modern U.S.  politics, and in the process reshape conservative politics in America. Named after a military intelligence officer killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist forces at the end of World War II, The John Birch Society made clear from the beginning that they believed the threat of Communism was far more than an economic model or political ideology. One quote from their founding meeting clarifies their view of Communism as a worldwide conspiracy, as there at the start of things, they asserted that “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’” Through their publications, Review of the News and American Opinion and later The New American, they spread their version of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, and folding Nesta Webster’s version of events into their own, it just became more and more massive and sinister. The version of history spread by the John Birch Society is that, after pulling off the French Revolution through their front groups, the Illuminati continued their orchestration of revolutionary activity through other secret societies, like the Carbonari in Italy and Masonic or Masonry-inspired societies across Europe. They saw only the machinations of the Illuminati leading up to the Springtime of the Peoples in numerous countries during 1848. Despite the fact that they were more like the American and French revolutions in that for the most part they sought the end of absolute monarchy and the establishment of representative democracy, the John Birch Society characterized them as the first Communist revolutions, kicked off by Karl Marx’s publication of The Communist Manifesto. And rather than admitting that Communism might have been a genuine historical development or a natural evolution of socialist thought, they said this too was part of the plot, reducing Marx to nothing more than a hireling paid by the Illuminati to write the manifesto in order to provide a new revolutionary philosophy for a new age. Of course, one can easily counter this idea by citing Marx’s work as a newspaper editor in the Rhineland years before he was supposedly hired by the Illuminati, as a clear progression of his theories can be discerned. But the John Birch Society was, to use Marx’s turn of phrase, haunted by the specter of Communism, seeing in every progressive, every liberal, even every moderate conservative, a secret agent of the Illuminati.

Thus the Illuminati came to be used, once again, as a tool of the conservative right, especially the far right, as a weapon against the far left that they feared or hated. But just as in the election of 1800, it would soon be taken up by their rivals and used against them. During the 1960’s, riding a cresting wave of counter-culture and civil disobedience, a new concept of the Illuminati was born. It started in the pages of Playboy Magazine, which published a letter about the Illuminati suggesting they might be behind the assassinations of King and Kennedy and giving a false background that the Illuminati could be traced to the Historical Arabic Order of Assassins, or Hashishim, though there is no clear connection between them or any other ancient mystical group, as discussed in my most recent patron exclusive, The Myth of Occult Illuminism. Then more letters appeared, each contradicting the last, more and more confusing the understanding of the Illuminati theory that I have tried to clarify in detail during this series. It turns out that these letters were fake, written by a Playboy staff member named Robert Anton Wilson, in collaboration with one Kerry Thornley, author of a little pamphlet called Principia Discordia. Thornley’s book parodied religious tracts and promoted a satirical religion in which the goddess of chaos is worshipped and adherents are encouraged to perpetrate hoaxes like the Illuminati letters to Playboy. Wilson, who would go on to adapt some of these ideas into a popular gonzo fiction series called the Illuminatus! Trilogy, explained that the goal of Discordianism was to fight authoritarianism by spreading disinformation in order to make people think. Their goal in their fake letters to Playboy was to flood readers with competing viewpoints in the hope that they would think critically in order to resolve the conflicts. Ironically, though, it had the opposite effect, increasing awareness of and belief in this baseless conspiracy theory. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is even sometimes mistaken as an exposé of Illuminati activity in modern times, like a sequel to the works of Robison, Barruel, and Webster, when it is clearly an absurdist satire. 

Satirical song about The John Birch Society from the 1960s, performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio, featuring John Denver.

So here we are in the 21st century, and conspiracy theories are a major component of American cultural and political life, playing perhaps the biggest part in a presidential election since 1800. And I would be remiss if I didn’t make it clear that belief in conspiracy theory is not exclusive to the far right. As the example from the pages of Playboy in the 1960s shows, plenty on the left see the Illuminati or similar shadowy groups as being behind the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Liberal proponents of the Illuminati conspiracy love to point to George H. W. Bush’s speech about the Gulf War in 1991, in which he mentions a New World Order, as proof of his involvement in the conspiracy, and 9/11 Truthers will suggest that the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush was secretly behind the September 11th attacks, perpetrating them in order to justify war in the Middle East. Indeed, Qanon paints itself as a non-partisan conspiracy theorist movement, since they see not only establishment Democrats but also establishment Republicans like the Bushes as part of the evil cabal they envision Trump heroically battling. To be clear, I am also not asserting that belief in conspiracy theory indicates stupidity or mental illness. A recent study shows that more than half of all Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory. And this is attributed to a specific mindset and psychological factors such as the cognitive biases that I listed at the end of Part One. Another factor that can encourage even very intelligent and level-headed people to engage in conspiracist thinking is narcissism, as the idea that we are privy to the truth when so many are deluded can be very appealing. Existential crises also seem linked to the development of this mindset. Feelings of personal anxiety and alienation, especially when combined with anxiety over the state of society, can draw us down the path of spiraling conspiracy theory, and doesn’t that just describe how we are all feeling right now in 2020? Nevertheless, another recent study does seem to suggest that this “conspiracy mindset” does disproportionately affect those on the right side of the political spectrum.

It used to be that conspiratorial thinking was more common among the right when the left were in power, and more common among the left when the right held the reins of government. Now, though, with a conspiracy theory salesman in the highest office of the land, this no longer seems accurate. Even The John Birch Society, purveyor of a Jewish World Conspiracy theory thinly veiled as anti-Communist conservative patriotism, has agreed that their brand of paranoid politics contributed to or even is responsible for the rise of Trump in their article “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” In the 1960s, when the JBS first came on the scene, true conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., decried their feverish paranoia as fringe madness and warned that “sincere conservatives” ought to distance themselves from their views, which he described as “far removed from reality and common sense.” Yet today, Bircherism has become the norm for the GOP, or at least for the version of it that Trump and his base have made dominant. One cannot help but see a parallel here of a political society convincing a large swathe of the common people that the powers that be must be overthrown… could the John Birch Society and Qanon be the real Illuminati? Of course it’s possible that Trump and the anonymous Q really believe the misinformation they’re spreading. One last psychological feature of conspiracy belief is projection, the idea that one assumes those in power have undesirable character attributes because of one’s own undesirable character, and this could well explain why the Trump administration, which has proven itself to be the most corrupt administration in modern history, might spread the idea that their political rivals are secretly so very corrupt. But to engage in a bit of tit-for-tat, as Ogden did back in the election of 1800, consider the notion that there is no “deep state” arrayed against Trump, but rather that, by taking over the Republican Party apparatus the way the Illuminati tried to take over Freemasonry, it is his own power that has become entrenched. Ponder a moment whether it’s possible that, rather than being engaged in a secret war against Satanic establishment powers as Q claims, Trump has already overthrown establishment powers to raise up an extremist, far-right New World Order. Just as it was once said that the Illuminati might point to their enemies and call them the Illuminati, couldn’t it also be said that Trump and his bootlickers in the John Birch Society and Qanon and all the far right madmen and talking heads, like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, are all agents of the real conspiracy, pointing their finger with one hand so you don’t pay attention to what the other hand is doing? And if that sounds too far-fetched for you, then you should find all of their massive conspiracy theories just as unbelievable.

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Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Briceland, Alan V. “The Philadelphia Aurora, The New England Illuminati, and The Election of 1800.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1976, pp. 3-36. PennState University Libraries, journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/view/43215/42936.

Buckley, William F. “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.” Commentary, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/william-buckley-jr/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/.

Calfas, Jennifer. “President Trump Warns of 'the Calm Before the Storm' During Military Meeting.” Time, 5 Oct. 2017, time.com/4971738/donald-trump-calm-before-the-storm-military-white-house/.

Coaston, Jane. “QAnon, the Scarily Popular Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory, Explained.” Vox, 21 Aug. 2020, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory-4chan-explainer.

Dickey, Colin. “Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson?” Politico, 29 March 2020, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/29/illuminati-conspiracy-theory-thomas-jeffersion-1800-election-152934.

Galer, Sophia Smith. “The Accidental Invention of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” BBC, 11 July 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

“The Great Seal of the United States.” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, July 2003, 2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf.

Griffin, Andrew. “What Is Qanon? The Origins of Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Spreading Online.” Independent, 24 Aug. 2020, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/qanon-explained-what-trump-russia-investigation-pizzagate-a8845226.html.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Martineau, Oaris. “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate — Only Worse.” New York, 19 Dec. 2017, nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-storm-conspiracy-explained.html.

Mason, Paul. “The QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Absurd but Dangerous. Politicians Must Confront It.” NewStatesman, 2 Sep. 2020, www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/09/qanon-conspiracy-theory-absurd-dangerous-politicians-must-confront-it.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Moyer, Melinda Wenner. “People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features.” Scientific American, Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 March 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/.

Newman, Alex. “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” The New American, 22 Nov. 2016, thenewamerican.com/is-trumpism-really-bircherism/.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Snell, Rachel A. “Jedidiah Morse and the Crusade for the New Jerusalem: The Cultural Catalysts of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy” (Thesis). The Honors College at the University of Maine, May 2006. DigitalCommons@UMaine, digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=honors.

Stanton, Gregory. “QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded.” Just Security, 9 Sep. 2020, www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Vittert, Liberty. “Are conspiracy theories on the rise in the US?” The Conversation, 18 Sep. 2019, theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-the-us-121968.

Wolf, Jessica. “Research Confirms Political Views Predict Whether People Trust False Information About Dangers, Even After Party Shift.” Phys.org, 18 Dec. 2018, phys.org/news/2018-12-political-views-people-false-dangers.html.

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part One: The Order's Origins

Four years ago, when Donald Trump was campaigning for the office of President, he ran on the idea that, as an outsider, he was best suited to clean up corruption in government, and he complained that, because of this, all the forces of establishment politics were arrayed against him. While this may have been true during the Republican primaries, it certainly was no longer the truth following his nomination, after which his party fell in line behind him as if he’d always been their first choice. Politics as usual. However, Trump never gave up his claims that an entrenched bureaucracy was sabotaging him and preventing him from doing the will of his constituents—an odd claim when he and his party held the executive office, the majority in both houses of Congress, and made history with the number of conservative judges they were appointing to federal courts and the Supreme Court. With what looked like a growing dominance over every branch of our government, it seems absurd to complain about his power being blocked. Nevertheless, every time something leaked from his administration or whenever one of his own was indicted for the very kind of corruption he had run on rooting out, his supporters blamed it on a so-called “deep state,” a kind of shadow government sabotaging their outsider president and limiting what he could do. Soon, Trump himself, already known to favor and amplify conspiracy theories like birtherism, climate change denialism, and anti-vaccination claims—began to use the term “deep state” to describe the nebulous forces he and his supporters claimed were actively foiling him. But the term did not originate here. It was originally used to describe those loyal to the secular nationalism of Turkey, who engage in violent resistance to the ruling party of President Tayyip Erdoğan. While in Turkey it refers to an actual conspiratorial network that did not shrink from murder, in America, it is used to refer to any resistance, from leakers in their own employ to negative press, none of which is uncommon or conspiratorial. Emails in which career bureaucrats expressed negative opinions of the new President were held up as proof of a plot against him, despite the fact that any new administration has to deal with holdovers from previous administrations who often don’t care for the new boss. None of this is proof of conspiracy, but that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongering during the last four years, which has seen the conservative conspiracy machine operated by such organizations as The John Birch Society folding this conspiracy into their already unwieldy conspiratorial view of world politics and history, suggesting this “Deep State” is just the façade of an even deeper state, composed of political think tanks and economic conferences, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, and the Trilateral Commission, and beyond them influential banking families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. And if you keep pulling back the curtain, they say, you’ll find an old and insidious conspiracy, one responsible for all the major political upheavals of the modern age: the Illuminati.

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I have covered historical conspiracy theories before, including the survival of the Templars in a patron exclusive podcast minisode, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a lengthy series, and numerous posts that address aspects of the false Jewish World Conspiracy theory. Perhaps only the last of these could possibly rival the scope of the claims about the Illuminati, and even then, it’s unclear that they can be separated. Certainly, Illuminati conspiracy theories contributed to the claims of a worldwide Jewish plot, but there are also claims that it preceded any such plots. Some conspiracists who argue that the Illuminati are bent on the subversion of all governments and the destruction of religion will claim that the Illuminati can be traced all the way back to antiquity, to the sorcerous magi of old, and the Gnostic secret societies within early Christianity that seemed bent on perverting orthodox doctrines. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, luckily I did episodes earlier this year about the Zoroastrian magi and Gnosticism that you can listen to for context. However, to simplify things, I can tell you that the Illuminati, first of all, were very real, and their origins, along with the origins of modern conspiracy theory as we know it, can be traced back to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, in the late 18th century. Because of this, my recent series on miracles purported to have occurred in Enlightenment France also serves as a perfect backdrop to this series. Also called the Age of Reason, this period is characterized by the spread of the philosophical notions that reason is the key to knowledge and that liberty is a human right. These beliefs led many to rebel against absolute monarchy as a system of government and to throw off the yoke of traditional religion. Thus we see the revolutions of the American colonies as well as the French Revolution in these years as an organic response to specific grievances as well as a swing toward ideals of freedom and democracy. But this was a time of frightening and sudden change, especially for the more conservative of the era. Many were looking for some simpler explanation of what was behind the violent upsets of established order that they saw transpiring around them. In 1797, almost a decade after the start of the French Revolution and nearly simultaneously, two books appeared, each written without knowledge of the other, that offered many the explanation for which they yearned. A French Jesuit priest named Abbé Augustin Barruel published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, and Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy John Robison published his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, both of which argued that a theretofore obscure secret society called the Illuminati was the prime mover responsible for the bloody revolution in France.

A cartoon that illustrates what many thought of the Age of Reason at the time. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe it stretches the imagination that these nearly identical theories appeared simultaneously, but it appears they did, much as the theory of evolution occurred separately to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace during the same years, but in this case it is not because the theory was accurate. That is not to say that this secret society was made up, though. Far from it. The Illuminati did exist, and not everything that Barruel and Robison claimed about their intentions can be dismissed as false. What we know is that the Order of the Illuminati was founded in the university town of Ingolstadt, in the Electorate of Bavaria, in 1776. Now before that year sends any of you spiraling into conspiracy theories about Illuminist Founding Fathers in America, let me assure you that in that year, it was but a fledgling club, with few members from recruited mostly from among the university student body. There are claims that the Illuminati eventually reached U.S. shores, though, and I’ll address those later, in part two of this series. At the time of its creation, its originator, a young Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, who had dreamed up the order before his thirtieth year, conceived of it as a tool for spreading Enlightenment ideals, a remedy for the twin evils of ignorance and superstition that plagued humanity. The idea was to create a network of likeminded men who were in influential positions, such as advisors to sovereign rulers, who could quietly whisper to the leaders of this world, pushing them and therefore everyone, away from vice and toward virtue, with an eye to remaking the social order according to republican principles and attaining liberty for all peoples.

These appear to have been the Order’s objectives when Weishaupt first discussed it with friends, back when he was still toying with calling them the Perfectibilists, a name which further indicates his desire for the betterment of the world. However, Weishaupt also believed that those in power would work against these ends, and so his idea was to work in secret, through a society structured like the Freemasons, with numerous degrees to keep secrets from all but the innermost circle, but designed more like the Jesuits, who centralized power in one man, which would be Weishaupt himself, Rex or king of the Illuminati—an ironic structure since the group’s stated objectives were to do away with such clerical authority and absolute power structures. At first, slow to spread and with few members of any influence, Weishaupt’s endeavor seemed doomed to failure, but then he met Baron Adolph von Knigge, who had some influence in Masonic circles and took an interest in the goals of Weishaupt’s Illuminati. It was resolved that, in order to accomplish their goals, they would need to essentially appropriate the existing infrastructure of the Freemasons, by presenting Illuminism as the final uppermost degree of Masonry to be attained, at which the true aims of the Freemasons would be revealed—a kind of top-down hostile takeover of Continental Freemasonry. This Baron von Knigge set about doing, travelling around to lodges throughout Europe and initiating Masons into the Illuminati until the numbers of Weishaupt’s order finally began to swell, and its reach to spread.

Portrait of Weishaupt. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to Abbé Barruel, the conspiracy really started before the organization of the Illuminati, though, with the writings of the philosophes of the French Academy. He argued that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot had commenced the plot with their popular writings advocating for reason and progress and denouncing organized religion. Indeed, Barruel had been a vocal critic of the philosophes long before the French Revolution and the formulation of his grand conspiracy theory. Rather than seeing them as proponents of liberty and equality, he believed them to be a band of rabble-rousers fomenting unrest by redefining words like reason and terms like public opinion in an effort to undermine hierarchy and make the will of the populace sovereign, which was tantamount to treason. While most of these thinkers were Deists, meaning that rather than espousing a particular religion they instead arrived at a belief in a creator god based on observation and reason, to Barruel and many other clergy, this was only atheism under a different name, so he saw the destruction of Christianity as part and parcel of the plot of the philosophes, making them, quite literally, anti-Christ. While Barruel was not the only person to suggest that the philosophes contributed to the revolutionary ideology of the Jacobins and other revolutionary groups in France—indeed this is widely agreed upon—he appears to be the first to suggest that the public politics their philosophy helped bring forth could not have possibly evolved organically from ideas in the zeitgeist but rather must have been a premeditated ploy thrust upon the public by wicked academics bent on overturning the natural order. Likewise, Robison was not the only observer at the time or since to suggest the organizational structures and memberships of French Freemasonry might have overlapped or provided a framework for the revolutionary clubs like the Jacobins, but he and Barruel were alone in seeing a concerted and premeditated plot by the Freemasons to manipulate the masses and incite them to revolt, not for the Enlightenment principles they preached but in reality to achieve their own secret ends. And certainly unique was the addition of the Illuminati as the central command, inspired by the philosophes to transform the world into a place with no order, no law, no religion, insinuating their way like a parasite into the massive lodge system of the Freemasons and through them playing the public like a puppet. By their reckoning, the Illuminati, through the Freemasons, made real the impious and apocalyptic dreams of the philosophes by overthrowing both church and state, toppling altar and throne alike to usher in a new age of chaos and bloodshed.

Much of what Barruel and Robison claimed cannot in good faith be denied. First, Adam Weishaupt and the likeminded men he initiated into his order were certainly inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the philosophes and other modern thinkers. Even their name, Illuminati, the illuminated or enlightened ones, seems to be a reflection of their Enlightenment principles. But more than this, their practices and stated goals were not as innocent as many apologists and debunkers often suggest in their efforts to discredit Barruel and Robison’s theories. The fact of the matter is that the public was eventually made privy to the innermost secret intentions of the Order of the Illuminati. In 1785, Charles Theodore, the Elector of Bavaria, concerned about the power wielded by secret societies whose memberships included many influential persons, outlawed all such orders. It was not long before the Illuminati came to his attention. According to Barruel, this transpired because a high-ranking member happened to be struck by lightning, and on his smoking body were found numerous papers and communiques that revealed the Illuminati and their plans. This story of Barruel’s isn’t supported anywhere else, though, and could well be fiction. Regardless, it is clear that, once the Elector began his campaign against secret societies, some low-ranking members betrayed the order out of resentment for never being raised to higher degrees, and soon raids were being conducted on members of Weishaupt’s inner circle. It wasn’t long before their papers were being published for all of Bavaria to read, and rather than revealing that they were just an idealistic group innocently promoting egalitarian ideals, they showed that they really were nefarious and deserved to be suppressed. Among the lower order members, they may have represented their aims as being this innocuous—to serve as a positive influence on mankind, especially to those in power, to encourage benevolence and discourage fanaticism—but among the inner circle, they emphasized a further end of establishing a world that had no need for monarchs and magistrates, princes and priests. While to many today this still seems a noble goal, the very fact that they kept their true objectives a secret even from their underlings goes to show that they were an untrustworthy group. Indeed, their papers show that they did not shrink from recommending criminal acts to seize power for their cause, like having members who were close to government officials steal and copy their seals in order to facilitate forgery. Their lofty ideals were tarnished by the very fact that they believed they could only be realized through manipulation and deceit. Believing that they knew better than the people what the people needed turned their democratic crusade into a plot for authoritarian control.

Portrait of Augustin Barruel. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Thus in 1785, four years before the French Revolution, the Order of the Illuminati was crushed, and Weishaupt and his lieutenants found themselves exiled. This turn of events serves as the central evidence against Barruel and Robison’s theses. The Illuminati had been shut down, its leaders scattered and forced into retirement, long before the events attributed to them in France. Weishaupt himself just devoted himself to writing various screeds defending his former endeavor, no longer even pretending at secrecy. And the very fact that he could not keep his order’s existence or its schemes a secret in Bavaria, whether because of a random act of god smiting someone with lightning or because of treachery from within, serves to demonstrate that a conspiracy of such a size is doomed to be revealed, and not by lone theorists in manifestos. Barruel and Robison claimed that the Illuminati had survived their exposure and suppression, but they offered no evidence. Indeed, using the telltale circular reasoning of a paranoid, they suggested that the very fact that there was no evidence of the conspiracy served as evidence of its existence. And beyond this conjecture presented as fact, Barruel and Robison also misrepresented the Illuminati’s objectives and practices in numerous ways. For example, even in their secret writings, the Illuminati did not encourage the incitement of violence. They intended to surround the powerful with men who would guide them toward establishing a perfect world, a global community, a eutopia, and they were very specific that revolutions were not to be fomented, as those simply replace one tyranny with another. They believed that wise counsel should have no recourse to violence. They did indeed seek a dramatic change in world order, abolishing property and authority, but they saw government as serving a role like that of a parent, necessary at first, but to be outgrown. In the case of humanity, they did not anticipate that these changes would happen for thousands of years and certainly did not intend to precipitate a hasty and violent reform. Barruel would argue that the truly evil plots were not made known beyond the highest degrees, but in truth, when Baron Knigge traveled among the Masonic lodges of Europe trying to grow their numbers, he readily offered the highest degrees in order to tempt Freemasons into the fold. Still, Abbé Barruel insisted, there were even higher degrees than the papers and testimonies revealed, the degree of the Magi, he called them, trying to conjure images of occult evil, and it was in those degrees, he assured his readers, that the really evil stuff happened. But there is no evidence of this.

All these things have been pointed out since the time Barruel’s and Robison’s books were published, in such authoritative refutations as Jean Joseph Mounier’s On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati, on the Revolution of France. Works such as this, and the continuing empirical scholarship of history that helps us understand more and more all the various contributing factors that culminated in the French Revolution, are why no serious historian entertains Barruel’s or Robison’s theories today, and why anyone who still relies on them as an academic proof of an Illuminati conspiracy theory is an outlier pretending at genuine historical analysis. If you challenge them on the reliability of these sources, they will likely resort to even wider conspiracy theories and suggest that historians everywhere are in on the plot to discredit Barruel and Robison. But the fact of the matter is that Barruel and Robison discredited themselves. As stated, Barruel was already a rabid opponent of the philosophes with an axe to grind, especially after the French Revolution forced him, as a clergyman, out of the country. He could not admit that the revolution had been a genuine grassroots phenomenon or that church and throne had done anything to precipitate it, so a shadowy cabal of godless provocateurs was the only natural answer. And when none of the Illuminati papers revealed an atheistic tenet, he said it must have been a closely held secret atheism, and he even, according to Mounier, mistranslated a passage discussing how to appeal to initiates that were enthusiasts of the theosophy of Swedenborg and Rosicrucianism, representing it instead as being about how to initiate people who suffer from “the fantasy of believing in God.” Mournier suggests this error is so egregious that either Barruel’s grasp of German was so tenuous that we cannot trust any of his analysis of Illuminati papers, or he was translating unfaithfully, and thus deceptively. As for Robison, he had previously been a man of strong reputation in the scientific community, but ever since a debilitating groin spasm had sent him into torturous isolation and drove him to abusing opium, he was known to suffer from paranoia and depression. It was in this state, that he read the constant barrage of news on the French Revolution. Add to this his resentment of French thinkers like Antoine Lavoisier who were revolutionizing Robison’s field of chemistry with notions that didn’t leave much room for God, and we have another reactionary seeing plots to overturn the natural order. Being a Freemason himself, and having visited Continental lodges and disliked the brand of Enlightenment atheism and licentious behavior he saw there, secret societies became a natural component of his theory, one that, as with Barruel, might reflect more on his own prejudices.

Portrait of John Robison. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the credibility issues of these authors and their books, the Illuminati conspiracy theory of the French Revolution gained quite a bit of traction among conservatives in Britain. When one considers why this was, though, it becomes clear that they were drawn to the theory for the same reasons that Robison and Barruel concocted it: namely that it jibed well with their prejudices and provided a simpler explanation than the messy reality. British conservatives harbored their own distaste for the philosophes of the French Academy, preferring to lionize their homegrown philosophers like Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, who always kept God at the center of their philosophy. The suggestion that the Enlightenment philosophers of France were actually demoniacal agents of evil struck them as reasonable because of the disdain in which they already held them. Moreover, this view of a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow God’s ordained systems of governance gave them ammunition against their own political opponents at home. Thus when the Society of United Irishmen, inspired by revolutionary movements abroad, rose up against British rule, conservatives declared that the Illuminati had stirred up yet another club of Jacobins, this time in their own backyard. And when a group of vocal advocates for women’s rights emerged under the leadership of Mary Wollstonecraft, they declared them to be “Illuminata,” or female adepts of the order, bent on seducing all British women into depravity as part of their grand conspiracy to overthrow all moral standards. In their minds, as in the minds of most conspiracy theorists, nothing ever just happens, at least not the things with which they’re uncomfortable. There are no liberal or progressive tendencies. People don’t just stand up for their rights, or for change, not even because they are inspired by others who have done the same. Instead, they must be pawns moved by the devil’s own hand.

There are more than a few reasons that a historian might cite to disprove the Illuminati theory of the French Revolution, such as all the social and cultural dominos that fell in the decades beforehand, some of the earliest of which I discussed in my series on the Old Regime’s response to Jansenist miracles. And if it does no good to cite the specific failures of the Old Regime to handle particular crises as an explanation for the grievances and motivations of revolutionaries, then there are the facts about philosophes about whom much has been written and Barruel and Robison are poor sources of information about them. For example, many philosophes, such as Voltaire, were sympathetic to and even had close ties with the monarchy and did not want to see them abolished; the most influential, including Voltaire and Rousseau, actually passed away years before the revolution; and numerous Enlightenment scientists, many of whom were also Freemasons, found themselves in the guillotine as well, including Robison’s hated Antoine Lavoisier. Indeed, this conspiracy theory struggles to explain why so many of the initial instigators and later influential figures in the Revolution ended up themselves being victims of their own revolution except to claim that they must have only been pawns as well and not above the fray like the Illuminati prime movers. To many who believe theories like these, it seems a simpler explanation, and in a way it is. Some will even cite Occam’s razor and claim their theory must be true because it is a simpler explanation. In truth, Occam’s razor actually states that among competing hypotheses, one should err on the side of the one with the fewest assumptions. By that yardstick, grand unifying conspiracy theories like this fail miserably. Yet they remain appealing. Psychologists will suggest that it is due to cognitive biases like proportionality bias, which causes one to assume that events with massive implications and effects, like the French Revolution, must have some equally massive cause or must have been caused purposely. Others will say that we are hardwired, through adaptation for survival because of so much time spent scanning our surroundings for danger, to find patterns, and so we sometimes see enemies that aren’t there. Confirmation bias predisposes us to believe a theory that reinforces our existing beliefs, as we have seen was the case among British conservatives, and may also be the case among conservative conspiracy theorists in America today.

In part 2, we will look further into how this theory of a powerful Illuminati conspiracy reached America and changed forever our culture and politics.

Cartoon illustrating the conservative view of the French Revolution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating The History Of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Graham, David A. “There Is No American ‘Deep State.’” The Atlantic, 20 Feb. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/why-its-dangerous-to-talk-about-a-deep-state/517221/.

Hafford, Michael. “Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory.” Rolling Stone, 9 March, 2017, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/deep-state-inside-donald-trumps-paranoid-conspiracy-theory-124236/.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part Two: The Casket Letters (A Royal Blood Mystery)

At the christening of her and Lord Darnley’s son, on the 17th of December, 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, seemed on the eve of accomplishing everything she had set out to accomplish since her return to Scotland. The christening was a grand affair, with all her noblemen present at the chapel royal in Stirling, in new finery that she had gifted them, for a Catholic ceremony that kicked off days of opulent celebration. Mary seemed to have recovered from her recent illness—rumored to have been a poisoning—or at least to be putting on a good face in spite of any continued suffering, and her mood must have been elevated by some good news. Just the day before, an envoy from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, arrived and informed her that the English monarch was finally willing to meet with Mary to negotiate her right of succession to the English throne. However, there were still manifold reasons to be uneasy. First, the archbishop performing the baptism was said to suffer from a pox, so Mary insisted he forgo the customary part of the ceremony in which he spit into the baby’s mouth. Second, her Protestant lords frowned upon the Catholic ceremony and refused to enter the chapel, among them her half-brother the Earl of Moray and even her stalwart supporter and advisor the Earl of Bothwell. Last and most scandalous was the absence of the king, her consort, Lord Darnley, who had travelled to Stirling but refused to attend the ceremony. There had been much talk of Lord Darnley conspiring against her during her illness, and this very public slight left Mary gloomy and brooding between smiles for her guests. Was she changing her mind about the options to rid herself of Lord Darnley at which her lords had lately hinted at Craigmillar? If so, some weeks later, when Lord Darnley himself became ill, she seems to have softened in her attitude toward him. He had run off to Glasgow with rumored plans of fleeing the country to gather some foreign power to his cause, but was struck down with some kind of pustules and wracking pains. It is not clear what illness laid the king so low. Some scholars suggest it was smallpox, while others argue that the majority of the evidence points to syphilis. Of course, at the time, as when Mary had been ill, suspicions were that Darnley had been poisoned, perhaps in retaliation. Darnley, however, doesn’t seem to have thought so, for he begged Mary to come and visit him, and Mary did, confronting him about his scheming against her and holding out the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation if he would return to Edinburgh with her. Darnley agreed and allowed himself to be carried back on a litter. It is said that a singular raven followed them all the way back to Edinburgh, perhaps a dark omen of what lay at the end of this journey for Darnley. The intention was to install the king at the well-fortified Craigmillar Castle to convalesce, but Darnley didn’t want to stay there, so instead they made their way to Kirk o’Field, where Darnley would meet his final fate, and as they installed the king in his lodgings, the raven that had followed them from Glasgow made its perch on the soon-to-be-demolished building’s rooftop. What were Mary’s intentions in bringing Darnley back to the vipers’ nest that was Edinburgh, where all his enemies would surround him? Was she trying to mend their marriage, or was she playing her part in a murder plot as would later be alleged?

Lord Darnley’s lodgings exploded in February 1567, but his barely clothed body was found in an adjacent garden without a mark on it, with a variety of unscorched items—a chair, a quilt or cloak, a slipper, and a dagger—strewn about him. Beyond the strangeness of this crime scene, there were further details the night before the blast and just after the explosion that must be scrutinized. When Mary had come to see Darnley earlier in the evening, dressed for the masquerade she was later to attend at the palace, she had with her a number of lords who were proven enemies of the king, leading some recent writers to suggest that Darnley himself had planned the explosion as a means of killing his rivals and perhaps Mary as well, and that he was afterward killed in the garden for his actions. But it doesn’t appear that Darnley had any foreknowledge that those lords would visit that night, and by the time the explosion occurred, he certainly knew that no one was around but himself and his servants. Now the idea that whoever prepared the gunpowder that destroyed the lodgings had in mind to murder Mary as well as Darnley is a possibility, since her plans had been to sleep there, not in Darnley’s chambers but in her own, below his, and she only changed her mind when the hour had drawn too late for her to make a suitable appearance at the masquerade and return. Or as her accusers would later spin it, this was her excuse for departing, knowing full well that the powder hidden below would detonate that night. The story of this plot is absolutely obscured in gossip and conflicting testimonies from those accused of being involved, but Mary’s accusers would later assert that the gunpowder had been smuggled into the queen’s chambers below Darnley’s, in a big pile, which could indicate Mary’s involvement, as the plotters wouldn’t have dumped gunpowder in her room if she were planning on retiring there. However, the fact that the building was entirely leveled would seem to indicate gunpowder had been placed among the foundations, perhaps in packed into barrels. Curiously, as Mary made to depart for her masquerade that evening, she noticed that the face of one of her valets, who had previously been Bothwell’s servant, had been blackened, and she commented on how begrimed he looked, to which he only turned red and made no answer. This is a recollection of Mary’s after the fact, but as it would seem to implicate not only herself, as the valet’s mistress, but also Bothwell, whom she was later to defend in the matter, it seems we can trust that it happened, and if we can trust this, it helps exonerate Mary, for if she were aware of a gunpowder plot, she certainly wouldn’t have commented on the sight of her servant being covered in gunpowder. As for Bothwell, this begrimed former servant would not be the last clue of his involvement.

A contemporary sketch of the murder scene at Kirk O’Field. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Just before the explosion decimated the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field, some lodgers staying near the orchard and garden adjacent to Kirk o’Field heard a man’s voice crying in despair, saying, “Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of Him who had pity on all the world!” Thus, in what may have been Lord Darnley’s final words, he once again acted the pious penitent, appealing fruitlessly to his assassins’ faith. Around this time, a local woman was woken up by the sounds of men running up her street. This would seem to indicate that Darnley had discovered he was in danger, perhaps because he also heard men outside his lodgings, or because he actually somehow discovered the gunpowder, and that he fled, maybe by climbing out a window into the garden with his servant, carrying some of the items that were found with them. Then the men heard running might have seen his escape and pursued him into the garden, where they killed him. Many theoretical versions of the murder had it that Darnley was strangled, but without a mark on him, it is more likely he was smothered, perhaps with the quilt found near him. So then the explosion seems superfluous, unless it was to destroy evidence. Nevertheless, at around 2am, the explosion did happen, so perhaps a fuse had already been lit and the deed could not be undone. Immediately after the blast, two other women, who were on the street, witnessed a group of eleven men running from the area. One of these women tried to grab hold of one of the men to ask where the sound of the explosion had come from, but the man shook off her hand and the group ran on, dividing in half and fleeing in two separate directions. These would seem to be the assassins themselves, as they weren’t described as members of the night watch, who would not be on the scene for a little while longer. Certainly one of the women who saw them thought them suspicious, for she called after them, “Traitors! You have been at some evil turn!” When the night’s watch did show up, they found a man under Bothwell’s command, Captain William Blackadder, already at the scene. This man’s presence was the first thing to implicate the Earl of Bothwell in the king’s murder, and soon, as the queen came to rely more and more on Bothwell’s counsel and defend him from the allegations of his involvement in the murder plot, the rumors took further shape, not only that Bothwell was behind the king’s murder but that he afterward had become, and perhaps previously had been, Mary’s lover.

The power of the Earl of Bothwell cannot be underestimated and must be considered when examining him as a suspect in the murder. The reason that the other Protestant lords and the English feared Bothwell’s return to Scotland during the Chaseabout Raid rebellion is that they understood how his support would strengthen Mary. He was Lord High Admiral of the Royal Scots Navy, and he had the support of many border clans, which meant military strength on land or sea. Such was Bothwell’s power that, when he had the queen’s favor, his rival lords believed him the chief threat to their own ascendancy. It is therefore understandable that they had wanted to see him thrown under the bus, as it were, for the murder plot, even though, if Bothwell did sign a bond at Craigmillar late in 1566 to undertake the king’s assassination, then surely he was not the only lord undersigned. So one wonders whether it was the people themselves or other lords, perhaps some of them among the conspirators, who were behind the smear campaign that commenced before a month was past, with placards placed anonymously on the doors of churches suggesting that Bothwell had murdered the king with an eye to marrying the queen, and that he had even poisoned his own wife to get her out of the way. As will be seen, there is certainly truth to Bothwell having designs on marrying the queen, but as for the rest of the allegations, no evidence seems to exist that supports them. Moreover, less than two months after the murder, Bothwell was indicted for involvement in the murder, stood trial, and was acquitted. Later accusers would suggest the jury was stacked in his favor, but Alison Weir, in my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, goes name by name through the jury to demonstrate that this was not the case. Throughout the trial and afterward, Bothwell remained the Queen’s favorite, which would appear to indicate she did not believe the allegations… or that she knew him to be guilty and defended him anyway… perhaps because she had conspired in the act herself.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Part One, I called the accusation made by Mary’s half-brother that the Earl of Bothwell planned to abduct the queen and hold her as a sex slave absurd, and certainly it must have seemed ridiculous at the time, at least to Mary, who trusted Bothwell. Moreover, I declared that Bothwell would prove to be a lifelong ally of Mary’s, and certainly there is one view of what happened that would allow one to see it that way. But what comes next, after Bothwell’s trial, casts his character in an entirely different light. On April 24th, not three months since the murder of her husband for which he had been credibly accused, the Earl of Bothwell kidnapped Mary, Queen of Scots. She was traveling with her retinue after visiting with the infant prince when Bothwell met her in the road with an army of 800 horsemen with swords drawn. He told her that there was danger of insurrection at the capital, and that she must come with him to Dunbar for her own protection. Now much is made of her compliance in this situation. Mary’s later accusers would insinuate that the entire abduction had been planned in advance with her own knowledge, but Mary insisted that she only went with Bothwell to save her small retinue from being slaughtered. Then, of course, there is the third option that she might have genuinely trusted this man who had saved her from rebellion before. Nevertheless, in this instance, Bothwell was lying, and back at Dunbar, he produced a bond, signed by numerous of her lords, among them Morton, Huntly, and her half-brother Moray, urging her to marry Bothwell. It appears that Bothwell may have coerced some of the signatories, but it also seems likely that the bond was signed with a view toward encouraging Bothwell to make a fatal mistake, which Bothwell did. Understanding what happened next depends largely on one’s opinion of Mary. Those who claimed that she and Bothwell had been lovers and were laying pretext for their marriage believed that Mary gave herself to Bothwell willingly, and called it a scandal that proved she was a wanton and a murderess. But those who took Mary for an honest woman believed her when she said she had been raped by Bothwell and held captive at Dunbar and not one of her lords raised an objection or a finger to aid her.

While the queen did agree to marry Bothwell, in her letters to the French court about her decision, she indicates that, while he had mistreated her at first, he thereafter treated her with gentleness and respect, and she believed he might be the only man with the strength to help her keep her kingdom from being taken by the Protestant lords who unceasingly schemed to take it from her. Another possibility that seems awful and absurd to modern sensibilities is that Mary felt she had to marry him because he had raped her, that indeed this was Bothwell’s purpose in assaulting her, to obligate her to marry him, for stupid as it may sound, in that era, the fact that a lady, especially a queen, might openly have sexual intercourse with a man without marrying him would irrevocably tarnish her character, even if that sexual encounter had been against her will. So she may have felt that Bothwell had given her no choice and played the part of a successfully wooed woman, making excuses to help save the reputation of the man who would be king. Or the letters may have been lies manufactured by a Bothwell who had utter control over her at Dunbar. Regardless, the lords who had signed Bothwell’s bond had no intention of placing him above themselves. They deftly turned the people against both Mary and Bothwell, painting them as libertines, he with a wife he only now divorced and who it was said he still lay with, and she with a husband only lately buried. More than that, they portrayed them as murderers, guilty of the worst kind of murder: regicide. On May 15th, Mary and Bothwell were married, and less than a month later, their enemies, who called themselves the Confederate Lords, assembled forces. They met Bothwell’s and the Queen’s forces at Carberry Hill, flying a flag that depicted Darnley’s murder. Bothwell declared that he would meet any of them in single combat, but when one by one, Confederate Lords came forth to challenge him, he kept refusing on the grounds the challengers were beneath his station, which indeed everyone was, now that he was king. Eventually, Bothwell just rode off, leaving Mary to surrender herself to her rebel lords. This would be the last Mary saw of her husband, who would end up sailing overseas to gather more forces, but he was taken captive in Norway, at the home town of his former wife, who promptly sued him for abandoning her without returning her dowry. Thereafter, he was given to the king of Denmark, where he rotted for ten years, chained to a pillar until his death.

The surrender of Mary at Carberry Hill. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary, on the other hand, was taken to Lochleven Castle and imprisoned while her half brother Moray moved to take her power and rule as regent in the name of his nephew James VI, the baby son that Mary would never see again. Within a fortnight of her capture, whisperings arose that a silver casket had been discovered with letters inside that proved everything the Confederate Lords alleged: Mary’s affair with Bothwell and her conspiring with him to murder Darnley so that they could marry each other. Just what did these letters prove, though? They were a series of letters and sonnets said to be a longstanding correspondence between herself and Bothwell, though they lacked any clear address proving to whom they’d been written. Moreover, the strange incoherence and changes in tone have suggested to many that different letters of Mary’s to different people had been spliced together to create a forgery. In fact the letter that was supposedly the most damning actually refers to the Earl of Bothwell in the third person, seeming to prove that the letter had not been written to him. Nevertheless, these letters seemed to be enough to compel Mary to abdicate the throne to Moray. Perhaps this was because their contents had been so widely advertised that the people had generally turned against their queen, believing her a harlot and a killer. Or perhaps it had something to do with the show trial that the Confederate Lords had held while they kept her in captivity awaiting a trial of her own. On the 27th of June, William Blackadder, Bothwell’s man who had been so unlucky as to have been first on the scene at Kirk o’Field after the explosion, probably because he had been out drinking nearby, was tried with a few other men and summarily executed in what is widely regarded by historians as a farce of a trial. Blackadder was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the various parts of his body were nailed to the gates of every major city in Scotland. With the Confederate Lords thus so crudely displaying their power and ruthlessness, it is perhaps not surprising that Mary gave them what they wanted and then, as soon as she was able, escaped Lochleven by means of a disguise and a little help. After a short-lived effort at once again reclaiming her throne, Mary finally was forced to flee to England and seek the protection of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth.

Does the evidence support the idea that Mary was complicit in the murder of her husband? Well, certainly a circumstantial case could be made. We know he had caused her much trouble and that she wanted him out of the way, no longer a threat to her rule or the succession of her son. And it certainly doesn’t look good that she dragged him out of the relative safety of Glasgow back to Edinburgh where she knew his enemies plotted against him. It seems highly suspicious that when Mary was promising to resume marital relations with the likely syphilitic Darnley, he was murdered before she would have to lay with him and expose herself to the disease. And she certainly did show much favor to Bothwell after the murder, despite the fact that Bothwell was among the lords who had at least intimated at Craigmillar that murder could be an advantageous course of action. Bothwell’s later machinations and his presence at Craigmillar when a secret agreement to murder Darnley was rumored to have been signed by various lords does seem to implicate his involvement, and the fact that he continued to enjoy Mary’s favor after the crime would seem to reflect poorly on either her character or her judgment. But this proves nothing. Her attempt at reconciling with Darnley may have reflected the fact that she dared not go as far as murder, and her favor of Bothwell may only have meant that she put great stock in him based on his years of loyalty to herself and her mother before her. She may not have had an inkling of Bothwell’s true character until the very day he abducted her. As for the allegations that they had long been secret lovers, this comes from the Casket Letters, which have been discredited as likely forgeries. The only other evidence was from the historian George Buchanan, formerly Mary’s tutor but lately elevated in position by the new regent, Moray. After Mary had fled to England, Moray took the Casket Letters there to convince Queen Elizabeth to try his half sister for the crime of regicide, and he also took Buchanan, who had written a document called Detectio Mariæ Reginæ, or “The Exposure of Queen Mary,” which painted Mary as an amoral and reckless libertine who had been carrying on with Bothwell since her return to Scotland and had colluded with him to do away with her pesky husband. This evidence too, though, is unreliable, as it appears to be completely unsubstantiated libel composed to suit the purposes of Moray, Buchanan’s patron. In my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, Alison Weir does a thorough job of pointing out nearly every falsehood that Buchanan invented, observing that much of what he alleged was never recorded as being observed in contemporary writings. For example, during a time when Buchanan says everyone was well aware that Mary and Bothwell were fornicating, contemporary records mention no such rumors or accusations, instead recording the suspicions that Mary was sleeping with poor David Rizzio. Thus it is clear that Buchanan’s purpose was only to defame, and in the end, there is no evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots.

A drawing of the later trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same might be said, though, for all the other prime suspects in the murder. Many were the accusations and testimonies sworn out that implicated this lord or the other, but little in the way of incontrovertible evidence was ever produced. Certainly Bothwell was not the only lord at Craigmillar throwing out options for ridding themselves of Darnley, nor was it said that his was the only name on the legendary bond to kill the king. First there was Morton, who had previously entered into a bond with Darnley before Rizzio’s murder and felt the king had betrayed him and his fellow conspirators. Among the many men suspected of being at Kirk o’Field that night was Morton’s kinsman, Archibald Douglas. It was said that the assassins wore silk over their armor and slippers over their boots to muffle the sounds of their movements that night, and that the slipper found near the king’s body actually belonged to Douglas, which implicates Morton. Then there was Maitland, who had previously enticed Darnley to enter a conspiracy to murder Rizzio with the intention of afterward implicating him and in this case may have enticed Bothwell to enter a conspiracy to murder Darnley with the same plan of afterward betraying him and making him the patsy, something he may have been doing later as well, when he signed Bothwell’s bond about marrying Mary. And lastly, there was Moray, the ever-scheming half-brother who had always wanted Darnley gone and never before shrank from treason to get what he wanted. The fact that afterward he doggedly pursued the escaped Mary into England with likely forged documents and false testimony hoping to see her executed so she could never take her crown back from him certainly paints him as a likely candidate for the prime mover in the plot. So who was it? Who dispatched assassins to blow up the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field? Was it just two of these men? Three? Was Mary in on it? We simply don’t know.

There was one other possibility, that Queen Elizabeth, who had long viewed Mary as a threat and resented her insistence on being named the successor to the throne of England, had sent the assassins herself. If that were the case though, she must have relented when Mary came to her for protection. No longer was her cousin in power, but rather she was in Elizabeth’s power. Thus when Moray came with his supposed evidence, Elizabeth refused to find Mary guilty or innocent, preferring to leave matters as they stood. Eventually, though, when Pope Pius V issued a bull encouraging English Catholics to overthrow her, Elizabeth placed Mary in prison, and after dealing with a succession Catholic assassination plots that aimed to supplant her with Mary, she took the queen off the board, so to speak, and had Mary beheaded. Moray, the treacherous half-brother, did had not lived to see her end, though. He had been killed just a few short years after his regency began, shot by a supporter of Mary’s who was perched in a window of a house that Moray was riding past in a procession. He was the first head of state to be assassinated by a firearm. His nephew, Mary’s son, James, would later become the first king of a unified Scotland, England and Ireland, finally fulfilling his mother’s ambitions. As for his father, when the so-called Marian civil war had first flared in Scotland, a mob opened Lord Darnley’s tomb at Holyrood Abbey, and someone stole his skull. Through the years, different skulls have turned up, one at Edinburgh University and another by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, each claiming theirs is the true skull of Lord Darnley. In modern times, using 3D modeling and comparing the images with portraits, experts have ruled one of these skulls out… but that doesn’t mean the other is genuine. As far as we know, the skull of Lord Darnley could be forever lost amid the rubble of history.

A eyewitness sketch of Mary’s execution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part One: The Vipers' Nest (A Royal Blood Mystery)

Before the rise of a new moon, it was a very dark and cold night in Scotland on the 9th of February, 1567, with a frost encrusting the king’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. This medieval church stood on a hill less than a mile from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, the seat of power in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots and wife of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, wielded her royal authority. Lord Darnley, the 22-year-old king whom Mary had wed less than two years earlier and as a last resort, had never been given the royal power that he’d hoped would be his, the Crown Matrimonial, and as such had been estranged from the Queen of Scots for some time. However, recently, after being installed at Kirk o’Field while he recovered from a grave illness, it had appeared that Mary was of a mind to reconcile with him. She tended to him and slept in those lodging with him frequently while he recuperated. On the evening of the 9th, it was her intention to stay there as well, but she came out to Kirk o’Field early that evening to show the more and more recovered king her gown and mask, for she was to attend a masquerade that night back at the palace before returning to him. However, after spending longer than expected at Kirk o’Field, she decided that she would have to retire back at the palace after the masquerade, for she anticipated it would be too late to return. So Mary, Queen of Scots, the most beautiful young queen in all of Europe, left her husband, Lord Darnley, promising to see him the next day. Late that night, at 2am on Monday the 10th, a great blast shattered the night’s calm, waking up everyone near Kirk o’Field and even disturbing the sleep of the Queen three quarters of a mile away at Holyrood Palace. With the explosion still echoing in their ears, night watchmen arrived with lanterns at the source of the noise: the King’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. They heard a man crying out for help, and found a blackened figure, one of Lord Darnley’s servants, clinging to the top of a wall. The lodgings themselves had been reduced to rubble. Throughout the night, the watchmen dug frantically through the debris as snow fell all around them. Beneath the rubble, they eventually uncovered two mangled corpses, but failed to find the king. Not until 3 hours later did they search the orchard beyond the wall, where they found the dead bodies of both Lord Darnley and his valet, William Taylor. It was assumed that the king and his valet had been killed by the explosion as well, thrown from the lodgings into the orchard by the force of the blast. However, as the sun rose and made a closer examination of the scene possible, some details were observed that have turned the murder of Lord Darnley into an enduring mystery… not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit. For they found the corpses of the King and his valet had not a mark on them. Nearly naked in their nightshirts, there appeared no scorch marks, no bruises, no wounds or signs of strangulation. They looked as if they’d been laid out in the orchard, and around them were several undamaged items from the lodgings: a quilt, a chair, a piece of rope, and a dagger.

To tell of Lord Darnley’s murder, we must focus on Mary, Queen of Scots, for really, sadly, the story of his demise in large part is her story. She came to inherit the throne from her father, King James V of Scotland, whose two sons with Marie de Guise had died in infancy. It was said that upon hearing the news that he had fathered a daughter, the ailing king said, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.” He was referring to the fact that the Stewart dynasty had been established through the daughter of the great Scottish leader Robert the Bruce. You may remember my mention of the endless wars between England and Scotland in my episodes on Edward II, whom Robert the Bruce defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn, thereby settling his undisputed rule over Scotland. His daughter, Marjorie, bore the first male heir of their house, Robert II, the first Stewart king. Centuries later, as he died without a male heir, James V was leaving the fate of the Stewart dynasty with his own daughter. At six days old, she took the throne, and she represented a hope not only for the future of Scotland but for a united England and Scotland, for James V was the son of Margaret Tudor, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, giving Mary a strong claim to the English throne as well. This may have been on the mind of King Henry VIII in 1544 when he sought by treaty to marry his son to the infant Queen Mary. However, the Protestant Reformation made things far more complicated. Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, remained a loyal Catholic and refused to let her daughter marry the Protestant King Henry’s son, choosing instead to revive an ancient alliance with Catholic France, the perennial enemy of England. This perceived betrayal ignited the so-called War of the Rough Wooing, in which King Henry VIII’s forces laid waste to many Scottish villages and towns. During this war, there was one Scottish lord, Matthew Stuart, the 4th Earl of Lennox, who took up arms for the English. Invading his native Scotland, he took numerous child hostages, thereby forcing their fathers to serve under him. When these men escaped, he murdered their children, an act that would earn him the undying hatred of the Scottish. But eventually, through some unforeseen circumstances, this Earl of Lennox would find himself very close to the Scottish throne, for his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, would one day be betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary, Queen of Scots, depicted as a child. Public Domain artwork accessed from Art Institute Chicago.

As her mother, Marie de Guise, struggled with the Scottish lords who more and more pushed to make Scotland a Protestant country, and as James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and Governor of the Realm while Mary was in her minority, fought to expel the occupying English forces, one solution to their problems presented itself: they would marry the young queen to the Dauphin of France, putting Mary in line to rule as Queen of Catholic France as well as Scotland, and securing some immediate military aid from France to push back the English invaders. So in 1548, at five years old, Mary sailed to France, where she spent much of her youth in the royal court, surrounded by Rennaissance culture and art and exposed to the lax morals and promiscuous behavior of the French royals. There she grew into a most beautiful woman, red of hair and a statuesque six feet tall. Her French admirers called her la plus parfait, which translates as “the most perfect.” Her closest friend was Francis, the sickly Dauphin to whom she was promised. She spent her time reading and dancing and riding horse and playing all kinds of games. Her education was extensive, but does not seem to have extended to statecraft, as it was always assumed that others would govern Scotland on her behalf. Back in Scotland, by 1551, the English had finally been driven out, and Mary’s mother, the Queen Dowager Marie de Guise, finally took control as the Regent of Scotland and took steps to push back against the rising influence of Protestantism. What she managed to do was stir up a nest of vipers in Scotland, as Protestant noblemen formed a league against her, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ. In 1558, Mary and Francis were married at Notre-Dame in Paris, and some months later, the Catholic queen of England, who had been dubbed Bloody Mary because of her violent efforts at counter-reformation, died. To all of Catholic Europe, Mary, Queen of Scots, was believed to be her rightful heir, but instead, the crown passed to King Henry VIII’s daughter by his second wife, Elizabeth I. Viewing Elizabeth as a usurper, King Henry II of France, Mary’s new father-in-law, publicly declared that she and Francis were the true king and queen of England.

Not surprisingly, then, Queen Elizabeth supported the Protestant Lords of the Congregation in their efforts to resist the Catholic Regent Marie de Guise in Scotland. After signing a treaty with these rebel lords, Elizabeth sent troops in 1560 to drive out the French and overthrow Marie de Guise, who died later that year from dropsy. In the absence of both the queen and the regent, the country was governed by a council of Protestant Lords who illegally passed legislation to criminalize Catholicism without the queen’s approval. At the end of that year, still mourning the death of her mother and lamenting the betrayal of the Scottish lords, Mary also lost her husband, King Francis II, to a brain abscess. After considering her options, which were either to find another foreign marriage prospect or to return to Scotland and wrest back control of her realm, she bravely chose to go home, where all of her mother’s enemies awaited her return. Among the most powerful of the Protestant Lords arrayed against her were Sir William Maitland; James Douglas, the Earl of Morton; George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly; Patrick, the Earl of Ruthven; and her own bastard half-brother, Sir James Stewart, later the Earl of Moray. Another Protestant lord was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had never allied with the Lords of the Congregation against Mary’s mother and who would prove to be a lifelong ally of the Queen of Scots. The Lords of the Congregation feared that Mary’s return would signal a counter-reformation, and her half-brother Sir James travelled to France to negotiate her return to power, eager that she promise not to interfere with the newly established Protestant Church. Once they reached an agreement and the way was smoothed for the transfer of power, she sailed back home, arriving in August of 1561 to find her homeland far poorer and less populated than France. Nevertheless, she was well-received by the public, and her accommodations at Holyrood Palace were well befitting a queen. As she took the reins of government, she relied on the advice of the loyal Earl of Bothwell as well as that of William Maitland, whom she made her Secretary of State despite his involvement in the betrayal of her mother. Other members of the Lords of the Congregation also remained on her Privy Council. So utterly surrounded by Protestant lords was she that she found herself having to placate them that she did not mean to take steps to revive Catholicism in Scotland, while also leading on the Pope in Rome that she certainly would re-establish Catholicism as the faith of the land just as soon as was feasible.

A Protestant sermon attended by the Lords of the Congregation. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Mary’s return meant the rise of some and the downfall of others. Her half-brother Sir James used his influence over the queen to take the title the Earl of Moray and to take lands for himself from other lords through accusations of treason and military adventure. Chief among Moray’s enemies at court was Bothwell, who was in high favor with his sister. In order to discredit him, Moray instigated groundless rumors that Bothwell intended to abduct Mary in order to keep her as a sex slave, and to murder any other lords who got between him and power. Mary doesn’t appear to have believed the accusations, but in order to make peace, she had Bothwell imprisoned. Bothwell managed to escape his imprisonment by prying a bar loose from his cell window and climbing down the side of the castle in Edinburgh where he was being held, and he fled to Northumberland and afterward would take refuge in France, establishing a correspondence with Mary to assure her that he had never planned any treason. While Bothwell remained loyal to his queen and served her as best he could while in exile, Mary was now without her staunchest ally in the viper’s nest of her court. Eventually, though, she found another whom she trusted, not a lord but rather a lowly musician. David Rizzio, an Italian singer and lute player, had become a favorite of the queen and eventually served as her personal secretary, though he was not skilled at letters. In fact, so close did the two become that members of Mary’s Privy Council feared his influence over her and suggested he was a spy sent by the pope. More than this, some insinuated that the queen was sexually involved with the musician, even though he was often described as ugly or even deformed. The truth of this, whether Mary was sexually involved with Rizzio or simply found him loyal and witty and enjoyed his company, is unknown. Perhaps she was flirtatious with Rizzio, displaying some coquetry that she picked up among the French which her Scottish countrymen misconstrued. But it can’t be denied that she was intimate with him in the sense that they spent most of their time together, and he would keep her company in her chambers even late at night. Whatever unseemliness there might have been in Mary’s relationship with Rizzio and whatever agendas the musician might have harbored, what the Protestant lords could never forgive him was his vocal support of Mary’s marriage to another Catholic.

The second marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, was a matter of great interest not only to those in her court, but also to Queen Elizabeth. Mary, Queen of Scots, was intent on pressing her claim to the English throne. She did not seek to overthrow Elizabeth, but rather, since Elizabeth had not herself married, she pushed to be named Elizabeth’s rightful heir. However, the people of England largely saw in her the possibility of another Bloody Mary, someone who would try to reverse their Protestant Reformation, and therefore balked at the prospect that she should take the English throne. Seeing Mary as a potential threat, especially if she were to marry a powerful foreign Catholic figure and thereby give papistry a toehold in Scotland, Elizabeth sought to hold the succession rights over Mary’s head to ensure she would not seek a match with, for example, Don Carlos, the heir to Philip II of Spain. Making her declaration of Mary as her heir dependent on her approval of a match for Mary, Elizabeth suggested that she consider certain Protestant kings in Scandinavia. When Mary refused and persisted in seeking an alliance with Spain, Elizabeth went so far as to offer Mary her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley as a match. Elizabeth may have seen this as a great concession as well as a shrewd maneuver, since she was assured of Dudley’s loyalty, but as Dudley was of such a lower station than her and was surrounded by numerous scandals, Mary could not help but see this as an insult. When Mary’s hopes of marrying Don Carlos fell through, though, Elizabeth insisted that marrying Dudley was her only choice if she wished to be declared the heir to the English throne. Yet there was one other candidate who was both a loyal subject of Elizabeth and yet was a Catholic of Scottish blood: Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, who since the War of the Rough Wooing and his massacre of Scottish children had remained in England. Back when Mary’s husband had died in France, Lennox was already seeing an opportunity to marry his son to the Queen of Scots and thereby re-establish his family in Scotland in a position of power. He even took Darnley to France to press his suit while Mary was still grieving the deaths of her husband and mother. Aware of Lennox’s atrocities and disliking their grasping at power, Mary had vowed never to marry the boy, but years later, in Scotland, the match began to seem like her only option. After all, Darnley had something of a claim to the English throne himself, and he was Catholic, which meant Mary could still keep up at least the pretense that she eventually intended to bring the Catholic Church back into power in Scotland. With Elizabeth’s permission, he came to Mary’s court and did much to impress her. He was beardless, but handsome and tall enough to cut a striking figure standing beside Mary. He charmed both Mary and her close advisor, Rizzio, with his lute playing and his dancing, and the three of them enjoyed playing dice and cards. While the Protestant lords at court mistrusted him, Bothwell, still in exile, seemed to approve of the match. So on July 29th 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married Lord Darnley, kicking of several days of ostentatious banquets, balls, and masquerades.

A portrait of the youthful Lord Darnely. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Yet there was still much disapproval of Darnley as a match for Mary. Even Queen Elizabeth, who had seemed to be agreeing to the match when she granted Darnley permission to travel to Scotland, afterward acted as though Mary had chosen him to spite her. In truth, it seems Elizabeth got everything she might have wanted. Mary would not make an alliance with a hostile foreign power and would instead ally herself with a fallen family in a marriage that provided little benefits to her, and Elizabeth could act as if she’d been defied and could continue to deny Mary the right of succession. At court in Scotland, the most powerful of the Protestant lords, who of course believed that Mary’s new marriage to another Catholic meant an impending counter-Reformation, had made their opposition to Darnley clear. When Mary proceeded regardless and had Darnley proclaimed King of Scotland, several of these lords, led by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, went into open rebellion, leaving the royal court and amassing armies. Thus, as had happened with Edward II and many another monarch before her, Mary found herself facing a civil war with rebel earls who disliked her choice of advisors and relationships. Since Moray, who had been the principal enemy and accuser of Bothwell, stood now in defiance of her authority, she made immediate arrangements for the Earl of Bothwell to return from his exile, and less than a month after her nuptials, she rode out of Edinburgh at the head of an army, with a pistol on her hip and a helmet on her head, bent on bringing the rebels to heel. Eight days later, while Mary’s forces were in the east, near Glasgow, Moray attempted to occupy Edinburgh but was driven out after a day. Over the next month or so, as Mary led her forces all over Scotland trying to stamp out this rebellion, which would come to be called the Chaseabout Raid, the Earl of Moray, seeing the writing on the wall, wrote to Queen Elizabeth pleading for military intervention. Elizabeth, though, fearing that once again the French might land troops to prevent their invasion of Scotland, would only send warships up the coast to try to prevent Bothwell from returning and strengthening Mary. When this blockade failed and Bothwell returned to join his might with Mary’s, the only further help Elizabeth would offer Moray was protection. So Moray and Bothwell traded places; as Bothwell took up a place of honor in Mary’s court and council, Mary’s troublesome half-brother went into exile in England.

As Mary worked to resolve the threat of her rebel lords, another threat festered. Almost immediately after their marriage, Darnley began to show Mary his true colors. He insisted that she not waste time in proclaiming him king, and he began to resent her when she evaded his demands to be given the Crown Matrimonial, which would have given him the actual power of a king. It is unclear if Mary ever intended to confer royal authority to Darnley, but certainly when he began to reveal himself to be a spoiled, arrogant, jealous, and spiteful boy, she must have realized how dangerous it would be to empower him. He made few allies among the nobility at court, who all thought him reckless and haughty, scornful and paranoid. At first, besides Mary, it seemed only Rizzio was a friend and ally to Darnley, which made sense as the lords were equally resentful of the favor that Rizzio enjoyed. Indeed, just as the lords had whispered about Mary’s improper relations with Rizzio, some spread the rumor that Darnley as well had taken the Italian as a lover, and that three of them slept together. Soon though, Darnley turned against the only allies he had when he began to amplify the rumors about Rizzio and the queen, intimating that he suspected Mary and her secretary of cuckolding him. In truth, this would seem to disprove the rumors that he was sleeping with the both of them, since obviously then he would have more than suspicions about her sexual adventures. More likely, he was looking to remove Rizzio as an influence on the queen so that he could supplant him has her chief advisor and finally convince her to give him the Crown Matrimonial. Three months into their marriage, when Mary announced her pregnancy, far from being overjoyed, Darnley seemed to take it as a blow, realizing that an heir would mean even less chance that he would reign as a monarch in Scotland. During the first few months of her pregnancy, he made a spectacle of himself as a drunk and carried on affairs with other women. Then, ironically, he also made grand public displays of his devotion to the Catholic faith, perhaps in hopes that foreign Catholic powers would intervene and help him take the Crown Matrimonial hoping that he would move faster than Mary had to start a counter-Reformation. With Darnley so clearly estranged from the queen, some Protestant lords, including Ruthven and Morton, began to hatch a plot against Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, believing that without him whispering in Mary’s ear, she might be more amenable to forgiving her half-brother Moray and allowing his return. They spread the rumor that Mary was not pregnant with Darnley’s child but with Rizzio’s, and thus they drew the resentful young king into their scheme.

A portrait of David Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

On March 1st, 1566, the conspirators against Rizzio asked Darnley to sign a bond taking full responsibility for the plot against Rizzio. It may be that they had more planned than killing Rizzio, for if they were to assassinate Mary in the process, this document would incriminate Darnley, thereby ridding them of the king as well, whom in truth they detested. The same day, perhaps also at the insistence of these lords, Darnley wrote to the Earl of Moray, telling him as his king to await a summons, and a week later, he wrote again to promise Moray a safe return to Scotland. Thus it seems likely that Ruthven and Morton and maybe also Moray and the other conspirators were planning something of a coup. The next evening after writing this summons to Moray, Darnley let a group of assassins into Holyrood Palace and led them up a secret staircase from his chambers right into the queen’s bedchambers. Darnley appeared first from behind a tapestry and played nonchalant, sitting down with Mary. Then Lord Ruthven appeared, clad in armor, and demanded that David Rizzio come with him. Mary asked why, and Ruthven answered that he had caused her to banish nobility so that he might himself be ennobled, and that he had kept her from fulfilling her promises to the king. Mary turned to Darnley and asked if he knew about this, but Darnley feigned ignorance. Mary demanded that Ruthven leave or be arrested for treason, but Ruthven drew a pistol and a dagger and advanced on Rizzio, who cowered behind his queens skirts. A group of five other conspirators then entered the room, and a struggle ensued as they attempted to take hold of Rizzio. Ruthven threw the queen into Darnley’s arms, and the king held her firmly even as one of the conspirators seemed to purposely shove a chair into her stomach, perhaps trying to cause a miscarriage. Even more horrible is the account that, after the assassins had first stabbed Rizzio, seizing Darnley’s own dagger and thrusting very near to the queen herself, another conspirator aimed a pistol at Mary’s womb and pulled the trigger. It was said she was only saved because the pistol failed to fire. Dragging Rizzio down the secret stairs, the assassins stabbed him some 57 times, attacking so savagely that one of the assassins was accidentally stabbed in the process. The fact that they left Darnley’s dagger in the corpse seems to support the idea that they hoped the king would take the full blame for Rizzio’s death.

In the aftermath of this attack, the conspirators kept the queen captive in her rooms as they decided what to do with her. Slowly, as his own men were removed and the conspirator lords put their own guards around him, Darnley began to realize that he had been used and was a prisoner himself. He went up the secret stairs from his chamber to Mary’s and pleaded with her to let him in so that he could speak with her, and eventually she did, listening to his explanations that he had been manipulated and at least pretending to be sympathetic to his pleas to forgive him. Together, they began to hatch their own plans. She pretended to be ill and had her midwife sent to attend to her, and with her help, they managed to send a secret letter out to Bothwell to gather other lords loyal to her and await her imminent escape. While she refused to speak with her captors, Morton and Ruthven, she agreed to see Moray, who had recently returned to Scotland and been in hiding. In a tearful reunion, in which she appealed to him as her brother and he assured her he had had no part in the conspiracy to murder Rizzio, they were reconciled, and she turned Moray against the conspirators. Then, by promising a pardon to the rebel lords, she convinced them to remove their armed guards from the palace, and she and Darnley, by the dark of night, escaped by creeping down some service stairs, through the servants’ quarters, and out a wine cellar. Along the way, Mary tripped on a mound of dirt that turned out to be David Rizzio’s shallow grave. She and Darnley took horses and rode east out of Edinbugh. About ten miles on, they saw some men on horseback in the road, and Darnley panicked, begging the queen to ride fast lest they be killed by their enemies and even whipping her horse. When she begged him to consider her pregnant condition, he declared that they could always have another baby if this one died, to which she furiously suggested that he go on without her and worry for himself. To Darnley’s great dishonor, he did abandon her, riding off before realizing that the horsemen in the road were Bothwell and other loyal lords there to rescue them.

A depiction of the murder of Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Not surprisingly, Mary did not so easily forgive and forget Darnley’s betrayal, and as she went about putting her country’s affairs in order, forgiving some lords, such as Moray and Maitland, while executing some lowly assassins and declaring certain rebel lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, outlaws and driving them into exile, Darnley grew once again resentful and insolent. The queen’s supporters, unsurprisingly, rejected Darnley for his part in the recent attempted coup, and as he had publicly declared his own innocence in the affair, the lords in exile also considered him an enemy. Yet as the father of her child, for whom she desired an uncontested claim to the throne of Scotland, Mary felt she could not openly turn against him and in fact needed to protect him from himself. At one point, Mary had to take his pistols out of his bedchamber as she was afraid he would attempt suicide with them. When in June of 1566 she bore Darnley a son, James, the future king of Scotland England and Ireland, this did little to reconcile them. While they had been restored to the palace at Edinburgh, Darnley, resenting his diminished status, moved away to Glasgow and began threatening to leave the country and convince certain Catholic foreign powers that he had been wronged by Mary—a ridiculous notion, but with the rumors about the child’s paternity persisting, and other, even more absurd conspiracy theories cropping up, like that their child had been stillborn but replaced by a changeling just to prevent his taking the Crown Matrimonial, there was no telling whether some who were unhappy with Mary’s lack of progress initiating a counter-Reformation might have used these claims as an excuse to back Darnley in a coup. Other rumors suggested that Darnley planned to abduct their son, and when Mary became deathly ill, vomiting blood a few months after giving birth, it was suspected that Darnley had attempted to kill her by having her poisoned. While convalescing at Craigmillar, Mary appears to have consulted with her council about what should be done in regards to her troublesome husband, and they extracted from Mary the promise of a pardon for certain exiled lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, if they could devise some way to rid her of Darnley.

In retrospect, it of course appears that Mary was conspiring with her lords at Craigmillar to assassinate the king, and that is certainly how it was presented later, when Mary’s enemies moved to hold her guilty of the murder. However, in looking closer at the evidence, it can be seen that Mary may just have been looking for some lawful means of extricating herself from the marriage, some grounds for divorcement. She expressed concern that nothing be done that might affect the legitimacy and succession rights of their son. This ruled out an annulment of their marriage. A Protestant divorce was not likely to be recognized by Darnley or his foreign Catholic supporters. Arresting Darnley for treason because of his part in the Rizzio incident might have done the trick, but by a technicality of Scottish law, a king could not be guilty of treason. Perhaps realizing that the only other option was murder, Mary is recorded as saying,  “I will that you do nothing, by which any spot may be laid on my honour and conscience; and therefore, I pray ye rather let the matter be in the estate as it is, abiding till God of his goodness put a remedy to it. That you believe would do me service, may possibly turn to my hurt and displeasure.” Thus, by this prescient statement, Mary seems to exonerate herself for what came later. But it is possible that she changed her mind when, shortly thereafter, Darnley insulted her by refusing to attend their son’s christening. According to later claims, a bond was signed at Craigmillar by numerous lords to undertake the assassination of Lord Darnley, but this document has never been found. Therefore, the great mystery of Darnley’s murder, besides how he ended up in the orchard without a mark on him after so great an explosion, is which Scottish lords undertook to kill him and why, and whether Mary, Queen of Scots, had any hand in it, as would later be alleged and contribute to her own death.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.