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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.

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

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