588. Mary, Queen of Scots: The Mystery of the Exploding Mansion (Part 5)

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Madame, my ears have been so deafened, and my understanding so grieved, and my heart so affrighted.

To hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my slain cousin, oh, that I scarcely have the wits to write about it.

I cannot dissemble that I am more sorrowful for you than for him.

Oh, madame, I would not do the office of faithful cousin or affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than employed myself in preserving your honour.

I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about, which is, that you will look through your fingers at the revenging of this deed.

and that you do not take measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in doing it.

I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thing so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you if the thing touches him, and that no persuasion will prevent you from making an example out of this to the world, that you are both a noble princess.

and a loyal wife.

Praying the Creator to give you the grace to recognize this traitor and protect yourself from him as from the ministers of Satan.

With my very heartfelt recommendations to you, very dear sister.

So that is a letter, Tom, written by Elizabeth I

on the 24th of February, 1567.

She's writing to Mary, Queen of Scots.

She is writing following the murder.

two weeks previously of Mary's husband and Elizabeth's cousin, Scotland's leading cockchick, I believe is the technical term, Lord Darnley.

So, this is an amazing document making all kinds of slightly passive-aggressive allegations.

And it's a document that led Antonia Fraser in her wonderful book about Mary, Queen of Scots, to describe the murder of Lord Darnley as the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked-over murder in history.

Now, we always love a murder, and we love in particular a Scottish murder.

A murder.

Yeah.

Just give us the outline of the crime before we get going.

So we've done JFK and I guess probably that would be the most celebrated murder in history, but it hasn't been around for, you know, centuries and centuries like this one has.

Antonio Fraser is absolutely right.

This is a murder.

people have been going over for century after century after century and i think that the barest outline of the crime makes clear why so at 2 a.m on the 10th of February, 1567,

the house on the edge of Edinburgh where Lord Darnley, so Mary Queen of Scots' husband, had been staying

was blown to smithereens, blown sky-high.

Strangely, however, Darnley had not perished in this explosion.

Instead, he and his valet were found without any marks of injury in a nearby garden.

They had been laid out very neatly, and next to them was a chair, a rope, and a thick fur cloak.

So

all the elements of an astonishing murder mystery.

Agatha Christie style.

Very.

So some obvious questions.

Who killed Darnley?

How did they kill him?

Where did they kill him?

And what is going on with the chair and the rope and fur cloak?

But of course, the most sensitive question of all is the one that Elizabeth I in that letter you read has directly fixed on, which is, you know, is Mary complicit in the murder?

Because Elizabeth says, this is what people are saying, and you have to take steps to ensure, you know, that this mud doesn't stick.

Another specific point that Elizabeth is making in that letter, she is hinting at the gossip that Mary had not only planned the murder, but had done so in association with one particular accomplice, who Elizabeth doesn't name in her letter, but describes as being like a minister of Satan.

And

who Elizabeth is alluding to, we will come to in due course, because we're going to be doing a deep dive into the murder and then trying to solve the riddle of what happened.

But just to emphasise, what Elizabeth is doing in that letter is echoing claims and counterclaims that are already raging like a live fire in Scotland and within only a few months will plunge the entire kingdom into civil war.

And massive spoiler alert, it will ultimately result in a downfall of Mary, her imprisonment, her forced abdication, her flight to England, and I suppose in the very long run, her execution at Fotheringay.

So that argument about did Mary do it has raged for, well, for centuries, effectively, hasn't it?

And you made the point in your notes, Tom, that the two great books, well, two of the great books about Mary, Queen of Scots, I mean, there are multiple very good books, but one of them, Antonia Fraser's, Antonia Fraser thinks that Mary is absolutely a brilliant person and would never have done it, doesn't she?

That soft heart, that horror of bloodshed, that inclination towards mercy.

I mean, blowing up her husband and then murdering him in a very Baroque way in a garden is the last thing that Mary would have done.

On the other hand, somebody you've mentioned a lot in this series, Jenny Wormold, great historian of early modern Scotland, she absolutely despises Mary Queen of Scott.

If there's a chance to stick the dagger in, she'll take it.

Yeah.

And she basically says, if she didn't murder Darnelly, she was, and I quote, almost the only member of Edinburgh's political society who knew nothing about it.

So basically, it reflects it even more badly on her, if she didn't murder him than if she did.

Yeah, essentially.

I mean, those two books kind of articulate the very polarised position.

But since they were written, a third study of Darnelly's murder has come out, which I think provides a solution to the crime that, if not exactly definitive, because,

you know, at the distance of however long it is, it's hard to do that.

But I think it is as definitive a solution as we are likely to get.

And this is an account in John Guy's biography of Mary, My Heart is My Own, which was published in 2004 and was the inspiration for the the Sergei Ronan film.

And what Guy did, he's a brilliant scholar of the Tudors and the 16th century more generally, and he has gone back and looked at all the original documents in a way that hadn't been done before.

I mean, amazing to think of it.

And most of these documents are English, reports written chiefly to Cecil.

In the Victorian period, they were collected and kind of bunged into those, you know, the kind of enormous, vast, leather-bound volumes that Victorian archivists absolutely loved.

Lots of them were mis-catalogued, misinterpreted, and the result of that has been that their provenance has often been obscured, the dates in which they were written, certain key texts have been overlooked.

And so Guy has done the hard yards and we reap the benefits

because essentially we will be drawing very heavily on Guy's work for our account of Darnley's murder.

So before we get into the murder, Tom, let's set the scene a little bit.

We ended last time, Mary has given birth to Lord Darnley's son.

So I'm guessing most people will have heard the previous episodes in this series.

So Mary, Queen of Scots, slightly beleaguered.

Lord Darnley, an absolutely terrible man.

You described him as one of the worst men we've ever talked about, I think.

No, I didn't say that.

So he's not one of the worst men as in kind of Himmler.

Right.

He's not like that.

He's not in Himmler's league.

Oh, my gosh.

That's high praise.

But he's kind of like the worst kind of person that you'd meet at a university disco at St.

Andrews.

Yeah, red trousers.

You've said, you know, cock chick.

Yeah.

That's what he is.

He's probably the biggest cock chick in British history.

By the way, that's not us being rude.

That's Scottish, that's a Scottish source, right?

Yeah.

That's authentic 16th century slang.

Yeah.

So anyway, Mary has given birth to his son, the future James VI of Scotland.

Big friend of the rest is history, tongue too big for his mouth, loves a witch.

And she's done that.

She gave birth to him.

There was maximum security in Edinburgh Castle.

And the reason for that was that three months before the birth of James, her secretary, David Rizzio, the Italian bloke, had been murdered in Holyrood, in her private quarters, in ludicrous circumstances.

And the conspirators had included her Chancellor, who's this sinister and sort of conspiratorial Machiavelle called the Earl of Morton.

There's her Secretary of State, William Maitland, and then Lord Dardney, her own husband, has been in on it.

And just to remind ourselves, she dealt with them in different ways, hadn't she?

So Morton, all of those guys, she'd exiled effectively to England and she'd confiscated their lands.

Maitland, who's been disgraced because he didn't take part in the actual murder, so his punishment's not as harsh.

And Darnelly, I mean, this is bonkers.

She basically used her feminine wiles to persuade him to change side.

She promised him access to her bedchamber and her person.

Anyway, so all sweetness and life for Mary.

She's won the day.

Or has she?

Or has she?

I mean, the key problem she faces is that Darnelly remains a complete nightmare.

You know, he's a massive loose cannon.

And also in his personal behavior, he's terrible.

He is very, very disrespectful to her.

Just a kind of awful person.

So an example of this is that in August, so by now Mary has recovered from childbirth.

She and Darnley, they want to go hunting and they go to a place called Traker House in the borders, center of very famous hunting ground.

But it turns out to be a disaster because actually the deer are vanishing.

The woods are starting to be chopped down.

There isn't enough for Darnley to enjoy a good hunt.

And he gets very cross about this.

And one night he just gets spectacularly drunk.

I mean, he's always drunk, but this time he's really badly drunk.

And he leans over to Mary.

We're going to go bloody, you know, we're going to go for...

hunt deer tomorrow and you're bloody well going to come right and mary doesn't want to do it and she whispers in his ear dramatic news she says she thinks that she may be pregnant again.

And Darnelly doesn't care.

He reveals this to everyone in the hall.

He says, never mind, if we lose this one, we shall make another.

And the Lord of Traker, his host, is appalled by this and rebukes him and tells him that he doesn't talk like a Christian.

And Darnley...

he snaps his fingers in Lord Tracer's face.

What?

Ought we not to work a mare well when she is with Foe?

What?

And this goes down like a lead balloon with Lord tracker with mary's attendance and with mary herself and she seems to have been so offended by this that she breaks the holiday off and leaves early she's quite right yeah i think she is yeah i mean to be honest i thought he was a bad man but now that i've heard him speak that's exactly how he spoke i think he's even worse than i had imagined not quite as bad as himmler still but maybe nudging up there yeah he's in the medals he's in he's on the podium isn't he anyway so so mary understandably she goes back to edinburgh to holyrood and to her her baby, little James, who is described by the English ambassador as being well-proportioned and like to prove a godly prince.

I mean, hasn't looked at his tongue, obviously.

And Mary is so anxious about what Darnelly might get up to that she moves him from Holyrood to Stirling.

And en route, James is guarded by 500 musketeers.

And of course, Stirling is the very castle where Mary's mother, Mary of Guise, had taken her to keep her for safekeeping.

And what Mary is worried about, I think, is that Darnelly might seize James and appoint himself as regent.

And that would then enable him essentially, perhaps even to imprison Mary, certainly to kind of sideline her and effectively rule Scotland as regent until James comes of age.

So if Mary has control of James, then essentially she's blocking that option off for Darnley.

Mary recognises that the issue is what it's always been, which is that Darnelly is not content with his status as a kind of a consort, that he wants to be king.

He wants to be the king of Scotland, which Mary had promised him and then had kind of changed her mind.

And because of this, Darnley is endlessly plotting.

He's endlessly coming up with schemes.

So he's not just plotting to make himself king of Scotland.

Madly, he also wants to make himself king of England.

He's come up with, I mean, just such a mad scheme.

He wants to capture Scarborough.

Like Harold Hardrada.

Yeah.

So Scarborough is a rather, I mean, it's very picturesque, very attractive.

It has a wonderful cricket festival, but it's not one of the great strongholds of England, I think it's fair to say.

It's a kind of fishing village on the Yorkshire coast.

And the other stronghold he wants to get is the Scilly Isles, which are an archipelago off the southwest corner of Cornwall.

And his plan is that he's going to capture these places and then he's going to import Catholic armies from Europe and he will then launch an invasion of England with these armies from Scarborough and the Scilly Isles.

And it's completely mad.

We should actually remind listeners that Darnley is Catholic.

So this is part of the mix as well.

So this plot falls through.

You know, it's absolutely stillborn.

He's humiliated by this.

And so he then has a massive strop.

and announces that he is going to leave Mary, he's had enough of her, and he's going to go and settle abroad.

And people might think, well, that's quite a good solution, isn't it?

Well, it isn't.

Firstly, because it would be very humiliating for Mary and, by extension, Scotland.

But also, it would be a nightmare for the Protestant lords, because the last thing that they want is a Catholic with a claim to the throne of Scotland making mischief for them with the Catholic powers of France and Spain or whatever on the continent.

And so

they are irate about it.

Mary is appalled.

She spends a whole night trying to make him see sense, saying, you know, this is mad.

Please don't do this.

He refuses.

and so she summons the privy council and she orders darley to appear before the privy council and the privy council asks darley to explain what you know what are you up to what are you doing here he can't really give a credible answer because basically his answer is oh you know i'm cross you know you're not treating me right yeah i'm going off on a gap yard i mean that's basically his pitch and the privy council are so

kind of stunned and appalled by what they've heard from him.

They write officially to Catherine de' Medici in France and say,

look, this guy is a lunatic.

Have nothing to do with him.

And if he does come to France and tries to set up, you know, a royal court in exile or to create mischief or whatever, you know, just do not touch him.

And this, I think, is where the notion that he is a lunatic starts to come.

Because Elizabeth in that letter that you quoted refers to him as being mad.

And I think that this is becoming part of the diplomatic chatter.

He's such an international embarrassment that saying that he's mad is less of a humiliation than saying, well, we just can't control him.

So with Darnell moving towards the sort of margins, does that mean that Mary now has to rely on a lot of people that she's previously fallen out with?

So, for example, if she's talking to the French, her foreign policy expert has this boat, Maitland, who was her Secretary of State, who had been disgraced after the Rizzio murder.

Yeah, he had, but I think he'd always basically been Team Mary.

And I think Mary knows that.

And as you say, I mean, she needs his advice.

So he's brought out of his disgrace.

He's effectively pardoned, and he's restored to his post as Secretary of State.

But there is one condition, and that is that Maitland is reconciled with the one Scottish lord on whom Mary is now relying more than any other because he has proved himself consistently loyal.

And this is the Earl of Bothwell.

And Bothwell is this swaggering, muscle-bound, got a tremendous ginger moustache,

Very fond of a punch-up, I think it's fair to say.

But he's been at Mary's back for a decade and more because he stood behind Mary of Guise, her mother, when she'd been in trouble.

Bothwell had rallied to her cause in the wake of Rizzio's murder, and Bothwell had helped to drive Morton and his fellow conspirators into exile.

Bothwell, though, a very formidable man, is on the receiving end, isn't he?

That autumn.

I mean, the most Scottish thing that's ever happened.

He's been attacked, left with life-threatening injuries by a man who's called

go on what's what's he called dominic

he's called little jock elliot

yeah so surely he played for dumb ferlin in the 1980s yeah so um

he he is little jock elliott is a notorious reaver

of course he is and the reavers are the bandits who um yeah infest the border regions between England and Scotland, and particularly this region called the Debatable Lands, which is a stretch of the border.

And the Hermitage, which is Bothwell's ancestral pile, is absolutely at the center of the debatable lands.

I love the fact that after 700 episodes and people have been like, when are you going to do Scottish history?

Do some Scottish history.

We could have done the Scottish Enlightenment.

We could have chosen any element, but instead we chose like people head-butting each other in debatable lands called Little Jock because we absolutely wanted to lean into their sense of what Scotland is.

I mean, just to reassure Scottish listeners, the debatable lands are the most lawless and bandit-ridden corner, not just in Scotland, but in all of Britain.

So we are emphasising that.

And this clearly is why Bothwell is so given to violence, is that you have to be violent to hold your own in this kind of landscape.

So, yeah, so he's attacked and left for dead, covered with all kinds of wounds.

The news is brought to Mary, who at the time is in Jedborough, which is about 25 miles away to the east, and she's on Assizes, so she's going around hearing complaints from her subjects, basically kind of showing herself doing her royal duties.

The gossip will be, that is reported later, is that the moment she hears the news that Bothwell has been attacked, she leaves Jedborough and gallops off alone to the hermitage.

This is not true.

She waits for a week because she still has the Assizes to hear, and nor does she ride there alone.

So Maury, her half-brother, he goes with her.

Maitland is there, a large retinue.

But even so, I mean, it is a startling feat of horsemanship because it's 25 miles there over really very rough terrain.

I mean, I've been there and seen it, and I respect Mary very highly for having traveled that far.

She spends two hours by Bothwell's bedside, and it becomes clear that Bothwell isn't going to die, that he's on the road to recovery.

And then they ride back.

So that is a full and active day.

And it turns out to be too much for Mary.

She gets back to Jedborough and she falls very, very dangerously ill.

So whether it's overexertion, if she had been pregnant, she mentioned this to Darnelly, I think by this point she's lost the baby.

So it may be the after effects of a miscarriage.

I'm not sure.

But certainly, her life is feared for.

At one point, she lies in bed for half an hour, and I quote, eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold.

The Earl of Moray, her half-brother, who I think is consumed with resentment that she is the queen and he's not the king, you know, an accident of his illegitimacy.

He starts laying hands on all her silver plate and rings.

So it's like Henry V making off with the crown before his father is dead.

And Mary doesn't die because she has a very skillful French doctor and he is able to kind of bring her back from the brink of death.

And two weeks on from when it seemed like she was going to die, she's ready to continue on her way.

And the impact of this near-death experience is very profound.

I think for Mary, I think that she really starts to think, you know, what kind of kingdom am I going to leave behind?

It generates a massive anxiety spike among the Scottish nobility.

They don't want a change of regime.

They don't want Darnell on the loose.

They are worried that it will result in anarchy.

And so they are very committed to keeping Mary on the throne and ensuring that Darnley doesn't cause her too much trouble.

And

the question then is,

well, how are we going to deal with Darnelly?

I mean, how are we going to make sure that Mary isn't kind of embroiled in endless trouble from him?

What on earth could they possibly do?

What could we do?

And it is Maitland, the Secretary of State, who was the guy who had first suggested the murder of Rizzio in very kind of subtle, insinuating terms, who again now starts to broach the possibility maybe of another murder.

So

he even goes so far as to kind of put this into writing.

So he writes to the Scottish ambassador in Paris shortly after Mary has had this brush with death.

It is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband.

And how to be free of him, she sees no way out.

But obviously, you know, he is suggesting that he might.

He is traveling with Mary from Jedborough and they go to a place called Craig Miller Castle.

And they arrive there on the 20th of November.

It's just south of Edinburgh.

And its laird is Catholic, which means that he is absolutely reliable.

I mean, he's completely Team Mary.

And Mary gets there and she then falls ill again.

And so all the lords in her retinue, which include Maitland, Moray, and by this time Bothwell, because he's risen up from his sick bed.

He's covered in scars, but he's, you know, he's kind of rough and tough.

They all have time

while she's lying in her sick bed to discuss what might be done with Darnley.

And when Mary recovers, they go to see her, all except for Murray, who by this point is worried at the way in which the conversation is turning and doesn't really want to be a part of it.

But Maitland and Bothwell and all the other lads, they go to Mary and they say, look, you have got to divorce Darnelly.

Murray does not think that she should divorce Darnley because that would just leave him on the loose.

But all the others think, yeah, let's go for it.

Mary listens to them and she kind of agrees in principle, but her anxiety obviously is that it wouldn't be damaging to James.

She says, I will have it provided it is not prejudicial to my son.

Yeah.

And then she asks, well, is Moray, does he agree to this?

Because I notice he's not here.

And Maitland answers, I am assured he will look through his fingers thereto and will behold our doings, saying nothing to the same.

In other words, he's just going to let us.

kind of get on with it.

Yeah.

And obviously, if it was just a divorce, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

But that implies that this may be more than a divorce, that it may be a slightly more permanent separation, shall we say.

That is a hint that Maitland then drops to Mary, which Mary becomes very agitated.

And she presses Maitland, well, you know, what exactly do you mean?

And she goes on to say, I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honour or conscience.

And therefore I pray you rather let the matter be in the state as it is, i.e., don't murder him.

And for now, let's leave the whole question of divorce to one side.

But the clock is ticking a little bit, isn't it?

Because

they're going to christen James their son.

And I suppose if Darnelly had turned up to that and sort of asserted himself as James's father, that might have slightly changed the game.

But very foolishly, it happens at Sterling, doesn't it?

17th of December.

Yeah.

And Darnley has a massive tantrum and refuses to come because he's crossed that he's not king.

Yes.

It's such poor behaviour to miss the christening of your own son because, you know, you can't wear a crown.

Yeah.

Yeah, so he's not there.

There is a man on hand who Mary can turn to to take Danley's place.

And this is the much scarred and mustachioed Earl of Bothwell.

You know, he's got to look smart for the occasion.

And so Mary makes sure to provide him with a very fine outfit of kind of gorgeous blue clothes.

And so Bothwell is strutting around looking tremendous.

And of course, this is much noted.

Right.

Yeah.

People observe that Darnell isn't there, but Bothwell's looking great in his suit.

But even Bothwell refuses to attend the christening.

And so does Moray, Bothwell's old rival, Mary's half-sister, because they're Protestants and the ceremony, the baptism, is a Catholic one.

Right.

So it might look as though the whole thing has been a disaster.

Darnley's not there.

Bothwell is, you know, creating gossip.

Bothwell and Moray aren't attending the baptism.

But actually, it's been a triumph behind the scenes.

Because what has been happening while while the lords have been plotting what to do about Darnley is that Mary, you know, I said that, you know, her mind has really been concentrated.

She's really thinking, well, what do I want from the future?

And so she has written to Elizabeth in England, queen to queen, not going through Maitland, not going through Cecil.

And she says to Elizabeth, look, I've very nearly died and I've been worrying about my son.

So what I request is that if I die, would you become James's protector?

Which in effect means becoming James's foster mother.

And Elizabeth is very touched by this and she accepts.

And as a token of this, she agrees to be James's godmother, even though the baptism ceremony is a Catholic one.

And she sends Mary this magnificent bejeweled font of solid gold.

And the detente between the two queens, you know, relations between them had been quite tense, is now sufficient that they can continue to discuss policy without recourse to their respective ministers and begin privately negotiating over what had always been Mary's ultimate dream, namely to be acknowledged by Elizabeth as heir apparent to the throne of England.

Wow, that's looking good for Mary.

It is looking good for Mary.

And it was her illness that precipitated this kind of diplomatic breakthrough, you know, that this private conversation.

And I think also as part of this, Mary is thinking, I'm reconciled with Elizabeth.

Why don't I get everybody else to be reconciled?

So on Christmas Eve, she formally pardons the Rizzio plotters.

So that's Morton and all that gang.

On the 6th of January, she allows Maitland to marry Posh Mary, the one of the four Marys who Maitland had been desperately in love with despite the 20-year age gap.

And on the 9th of January, Morton crosses from Berwick into Scotland.

He is home.

And on the 14th of January, Morton and Maitland meet at a place called Whittingham Castle, which is again a few miles a ride from Edinburgh.

All these castles dotted around the capital.

And present for their meeting is their old adversary from the Rizzio plot, the man who Mary had turned to when Rizzio got murdered, the Earl of Bothwell.

So amazing.

Yeah.

Two different groups of people meeting up to discuss things.

I mean, what could they be discussing, these three men?

While all that's happening, what's happened to Darnell?

He refused to come to the baptism of his own son.

Has he just been off hunting or has he been plotting something more sinister?

Well, he's returned to his plotting.

His plot is exactly what Mary's been worried he might do, which is to abduct James and to imprison her.

And so she laments this and writes to Maitland, for the king, our husband, always we perceive him occupied and busy enough to have inquisition of our doings.

So in other words, he's trying to map out what her movements are so that he can abduct her.

And this is despite the fact that Darnelly hasn't been very well.

And actually, he gets really seriously ill with syphilis, obviously.

But of course, what else would he have?

And ominously, from Mary's point of view, his sick room is in Glasgow, which is the great power base of his father, the Earl of Lennox.

And this is alarming.

I mean, Mary doesn't want trouble from Lennox as well as from Darnley.

And so she thinks, I've got to get him back.

I can't allow him to be there with his father.

So I think very bravely, she rides to Glasgow.

She tends to him in his sick bed and she urges urges him to come back with her.

And specifically, she says, come back with me to Craig Miller Castle.

You'll be much better there.

You'll be nearer Edinburgh.

We can look after you properly.

Darnelly initially refuses.

He feels safe and secure in Glasgow.

But finally, he agrees, yes.

Why does he agree to do this?

So John Guy's theory is, and I quote, to win over Darnley, Mary had to prove her affection for him in the only way his carnal and degenerate nature understood.

This meant offering to have sex with him again as soon as he was cured.

He's very into the notion that Mary is endlessly promising Darnley sex as a way of kind of trying to rein him in.

I think there is another possible reason why Darnelly agrees to come back with Mary and basically try and be reconciled with her, which is, of course, that Morton is now back on the scene.

And Morton was the co-conspirator in the Rizzio plot, who Darnell spectacularly double-crossed.

And Morton is not the kind of guy who takes being double-crossed lying down.

I mean, he is a very, very menacing and dangerous opponent.

I think that Darnelly probably is thinking, you know, Mary, now I need her actually,

if I'm going to be kept safe from Morton.

He says, I'm not going to go to Craig Miller Castle because it's Laird, as we mentioned, is too team Mary.

It's too kind of pro-Suert.

So he's probably worried that Mary might lock him up in Craig Miller Castle.

You know, it's a place full of dungeons.

He also says, I'm not going to go to Holyrood because he's covered in weeping pustules and he's far too vain.

He doesn't want to be seen, you know, covered in spots.

It's not a very appetising prospect for her to sleep with.

I mean, so if she has made that offer, that's a big offer from her.

Yes, absolutely.

So Darnelly

probably

is going back with Mary and feeling slightly fonder towards her than he had previously done.

And Mary is obviously trying to be as nice to him as she possibly can because she's essentially trying to wrangle him.

And so she agrees to Darnelly's proposal, which is that rather than stay in Holyrood or in Craigmiller, he will stay in relative isolation on the the edge of Edinburgh.

And he suggests a house right next to the city wall.

The house is barely furnished and it stands beside the Kirker Field, a ruined medieval church.

It's simultaneously isolated so no one can see his spots, but it's near enough to Holyrood that Mary can come out and visit him.

So it seems perfect.

So on the 1st of February, Mary arrives in Edinburgh.

He's got Darnley in a horse litter.

Darnley is installed in the house at Kirker Field and there he is to wait while his treatment for syphilis is completed and his weeping pustules dry up.

The course goes very well.

A week and a half pass.

Darnley is almost ready to come out of the house at the Kirker Field.

And then in the early hours of the 10th of February, around two o'clock in the morning, Mary and most of Edinburgh are awakened by a massive flash of light

and then an enormous explosion.

And we're told that the sound of the explosion was equivalent to the firing of 30 cannons.

And the next day, Mary writes to her ambassador in France with news of what had happened.

The matter is horrible, she wrote.

And so strange as we believe the like was never heard of in any country.

Darnley, her husband, the man with more enemies probably than any man has ever had in Scotland, is dead.

By whom it has been done, Mary writes to the ambassador in France, or in what matter,

it appears not as yet.

Crikey.

Well, on that bombshell, Tom, I'm so excited.

I think we should take a break.

And when we return after the break, we will investigate.

We will don our true crime podcasting kilts and we will investigate what happened in the 24 hours leading up to Lord Darnley's murder.

Tom, I think we should name the key conspirators.

We should unmask the plotters and we will answer the crucial question.

Who did it and was it Mary Queen of Scots?

So we'll see you after the break.

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Welcome back to The Rest is History, exciting true crime podcasting with a Scottish twist.

So Tom, let's kick off in a place very close to your heart, which is Berwick on the Anglo-Scottish border.

Now, there's a bloke there called Sir William Drury, and he is England's eyes and ears.

He's the marshal of the town.

He's basically an intelligence officer.

And he thinks he knows what's been going on, doesn't he?

Because he sends a report within a day of Darnell's murder to Elizabeth I Chief Minister, William Cecil.

So take us into that bit of the story.

Yeah, so he has agents everywhere in Edinburgh.

And this initial report establishes the kind of parameters of the mystery, but he will continue to send increasingly detailed, increasingly forensic accounts of what he thinks happened.

And I think that these reports combined with we get confessions from participants in the conspiracy, testimonials from witnesses, and you put them all together.

And I think that it does enable a fairly accurate account of the events that culminated in the death of Darnelly to be drawn up.

So, when you look at these, what do they tell us?

So, let's look at Mary and Darnelly first.

Just to recap, Darnelly had arrived at the place of his murder on the 1st of February, 1567, and this is Kirker Field, which is a complex of houses built up beside an old ruined church on the southern fringes of Edinburgh.

And the wall that had been built in the wake of the Battle of Flodden to keep the English out runs right past it.

It's a very well-chosen location for an invalid to recuperate.

It's on a hill so it's above the kind of smoke and filth of Edinburgh.

It's surrounded by gardens so there's fresh air there.

Very much more salubrious than Holyrood.

And as we said by the 9th of February Darnelly has been convalescing there for a week and a half and he's pretty much ready to go.

The evening before Darnelly is due to come back to Holyrood Mary arrives in the evening with a whole train of lords and ladies, Bothwell very prominent among them.

And they're celebrating this.

They're celebrating the fact that Darnelly will be coming back to join Mary the following day.

And Mary is in an excellent mood.

She feels that she's got Darnley back under her influence.

He seems much more amenable than he had been.

And that evening, Darnelly is off his face on whiskey.

He's developed a real taste for it.

He starts groping her very publicly in front of everyone.

And rather than giving him a slap or telling him to leave her alone, she gives him a ring as a token of her affection.

So things seem to be looking up for the happy couple.

Yeah.

But I think the real reason that she's happy has nothing to do with Darnelly and everything to do with these ongoing private negotiations with Elizabeth in England.

It really looks now as though Mary's great dream of being publicly acknowledged as Elizabeth's heir might be on the verge of fulfillment.

I mean, very hard to know with Elizabeth because she's always kind of playing hard to get.

But Mary, I think, genuinely believes that her great dream might be close to fulfillment.

So Darnelly wants Mary to stay with him the night, but Mary doesn't because one of her favorite servants has got married that afternoon and is holding a great celebration, a kind of wedding mask.

And Mary has promised to go.

And Mary always keeps her promises to her servants.

And of course, also, you know, she likes to dance.

She doesn't want to miss out on that.

So she leaves Darnelly.

She arrives back at Holyrood about 11 o'clock.

She attends her servants' mask, but she doesn't stay too long.

She's in bed by half past midnight.

And then at two o'clock, so an hour and a half later, later she is woken by the destruction of darnley's house at kirker fields and having heard the explosion she summons bothwell who of course is the sheriff of edinburgh so it's his responsibility to investigate and bothwell goes off

and when he comes back and he says that the house has been blown up and that darnley has been found dead witnesses are pretty much agreed that she is appalled by the news and

in a way that one might think is perhaps typical of Mary, she's appalled less for Darnelly than by the thought that it might have been targeted at her.

She says this crime was dressed as well for us as for the king, for we lay the most part of all the last week in that same lodging and was there accompanied with the most part of the lords that are in this town that same night.

So it's all about her, basically.

But also...

And I think the, you know, an extra reason why she's devastated is that she knows how Darnley's murder murder is going to land across Europe.

You know, this is going to be seen by the crowned heads of Christendom as regicide, which they obviously view as being a terrible crime.

They rank him as a king, even though he isn't one.

He's married to a queen.

I mean, he's not officially a king, but they will see it as effectively being regicide.

And she knows that one person who will be absolutely appalled is her royal cousin, Elizabeth of England, with whom she has been in negotiations.

So that, I think, is the key point.

The timing timing of Darnley's murder for Mary could not have been worse.

So if Mary didn't authorize or approve the murder, then who did?

Well, by early May, you remember we've got this Englishman in Berwick, yeah.

Yeah, this guy, Sir William Drury, he thinks he has cracked the case.

And so he writes to Cecil and he names the two leading culprits.

And probably

the name of these two leading culprits will not come as a surprise to listeners.

Morton, Drury writes, is noted to have assured friendship to Bothwell,

which, to be the thankfuler now for his favour, showed him in his absence and trouble, he intendeth to continue.

And this is a brilliant piece of detective work.

Most people think that Bothwell and Morton are deadly enemies.

They'd been on opposed sides in the imbroglio around the murder of Rizzio.

But actually, what Drury has found out is that it was Bothwell who had pushed Mary to pardon Morton.

And the reason that he had done that was because Bothwell knew that even though he'd been opposed to Morton over the Rizzio plot, any resentment that Morton might feel towards Bothwell is as nothing compared to the utter loathing that Morton has for Darnley, who had double-crossed him over the Rizzio plot.

And so Bothwell and Morton and Maitland as well had met up on the 14th of January and they had had discussions.

And we left it hanging in the previous half.

What were these discussions about?

Well, Drury has found out what these discussions were about.

They were committing themselves to the murder of Darnley.

Very rapidly, they had succeeded in signing up large numbers of other prominent Scottish nobles.

What had motivated all of them?

So Morton is obviously motivated by personal resentment, but the number of people who are prepared to sign up to the murder of Darnley reflects the fact that he is seen as a massive massive problem to be eliminated and it's very telling for instance that one of the conspirators seems to have been the lead of track air who was the man who had witnessed darnley's terrible behavior at his house yeah darnley's residence in kirker fields provide the conspirators with the perfect opportunity but of course

The moment he leaves Kirker Field and goes back to Mary, it then becomes much harder to eliminate him without also killing Mary, which they don't want to do.

And Bothwell, who has been in close attendance on Mary throughout, I mean, he's absolutely keeping abreast of Darnell's potential movements.

And so that's why it's the night before he's due to leave that they realise, well, we've got to go for it.

It is also Bothwell who supplies the gunpowder for the explosion, and he can do that because he is the sheriff of Edinburgh.

And so people would expect to see him in charge of men who are kind of, you know, rumbling through the streets of Edinburgh with wagons or whatever.

so on the evening of the 9th of february as mary and darnley are partying in the rooms above them morton's men are mining the cellars of the house and in fact mary runs into one of these people he'd been a page of bothwell he's now become a valet to mary and he has the nickname of french paris and mary sees him and says jesus paris how begrimed you are oh what a what a thing to say to somebody i mean they're mad his face is streaked but mary can see through the dirt that he is blushing.

But he says nothing, just twists his cap.

How begrimed you are.

I'd like to use that.

I'm going to use that line.

You can use it to Arthur, surely, if he's...

I will.

Well, he's always begrimed, to be fair.

What I don't understand, right?

I get the explosion.

Begrimed people have mined this building and it's blown up.

What I don't get is why Darney didn't die in the explosion.

Why is he lying in the garden next to a chair, a rope and a cloak?

Are the Freemasons involved in some peculiar way before being founded?

Yeah, this is the whole Agatha Christie dimension to it, which has always so intrigued and fascinated people and I think complicated attempts to solve the murder.

Guy's explanation, which is essentially a refinement of the reports that Drury has been sending to Cecil.

So I think Drury is the guy who really nails it.

Drury reports to Cecil that on the night of Darnley's murder, he suspects nothing of what is to come.

He makes his farewells to Mary, and then he goes to bed.

And shortly shortly afterwards he's woken by the sounds of muffled footsteps from below.

He looks out of a side window and he sees kind of shadowy cloaked figures stealthily moving around and he is a guy who knows he has lots of enemies and so he assumes the worst and he reaches for a thick fur cloak.

He then wakes his valet and other servants and he goes to a window that looks directly out over the city wall which kind of adjoins the house in which he's in.

The servants get a chair and they tie a rope to this chair and they then lower Darnley and his valet into the street below.

So outside the city wall.

However,

disaster.

Drury's greatest investigative achievement has been to identify what happens next and in particular to identify the man who had been on patrol in the street in case of just such an eventuality.

And this is a guy we've already met.

He's a bloke called Andrew Kerr of Faldenside.

And he was the man who, in the course of the Rizzio murder, had pointed a loaded gun at Mary's pregnant belly.

Yep.

He, as one of the Rizzio conspirators, is as consumed with hatred for Darnelly as Morton.

And like Morton, is absolutely set on getting his revenge.

And this is despite the fact that Darnley is actually a kinsman of Andrew Kerr.

And to this end, Kerr, like Morton, has teamed up with Bothwell.

And Drury writes to Cecil and details what happened next.

The king was long of dying and to his strengths made debate for his life, which essentially means that he had tried to reason with Kerr and his men.

And this report is substantiated in a remarkable way by the testimony of old women who lived in cottages on the side of this road and who were interrogated by agents of the Scottish Scottish Privy Council.

And one of these women reported hearing Darnley cry out, Oh, my kinsman, have mercy on me, for the love of him who had mercy on all the world.

But it's no good.

Darnelly and his valet are both strangled, so that's why there are no marks on their bodies.

And then they are taken and laid out in a neighbouring garden.

And the chair, the rope, and the cloak are dumped beside them.

Now, the issue obviously is Darnley is dead, so do they need to blow up the house?

The problem is that there might be all kinds of evidence.

They don't really want the gunpowder to be found because then the lead might go back to Bothwell.

So they think, oh, well, let's just blow it up anyway.

So that's what they do.

And the fact that you have this kind of, you know, the chair and the rope and everything in the garden and the explosion is.

what has made it such an enduring and tantalizing mystery and why it's been so hard for people to solve.

But I think that that solution that Guy gives in his book, I mean, it seems to me the likeliest explanation for what actually happened.

So it's not a ritualistic killing and it's not been designed that way.

No.

It's just a result of him having tried to escape and this bloke Kerr

kind of finding him.

So they strangled him.

Why didn't they just stab him?

That worked with Rizzio.

Why the strangulation?

That's my question.

I suppose to make his death seem as mysterious as possible, to kind of throw people off the scent.

And also, you just want to mix things up a bit, don't you?

You don't want to just use the same method every time.

Yeah, exactly.

They've already done the whole stabbing stuff.

Right.

Yeah.

Try something different.

I mean, what would have been brilliant if they'd had kind of 56 stab wounds, like with Rizzio?

But yeah.

Yeah, but no.

All right.

So a couple of questions that are still hanging.

Number one, is it plausible that as Elizabeth sort of suggested in that letter that Mary had been looking through her fingers at the deed, that she, okay, maybe she didn't officially authorize it formally, but maybe she kind of knew that it was in the air and she just gave them a little wink or she just or she did nothing.

She knew it was coming, but she did nothing to stop it.

Well, it's a very good question.

And we know of someone who did exactly that.

And this is the Earl of Moray, whom Maitland, in a very suggestive prefiguring of Elizabeth's use of the same phrase in her letter to Mary, had correctly predicted that although he wouldn't participate in the plot against Darnley, he would look through his fingers at preparations for the murder.

So in other words, you know, he would give it a nod and a wink.

Basically, Moray knew what was going to happen and he didn't inform Mary.

And instead, aware that things were coming to a head, he had absented himself from Edinburgh and retreated to his estate in Fife so that he could say, look, nothing to do with me, mate.

Mary, of course, by contrast, I mean, she spends the evening before Darnelly's murder, you know, partying in a house that is absolutely packed with gunpowder, which seems to me a very strong circumstantial piece of evidence that she knew nothing whatsoever of the crime and also there was a slight hint of amusement when you read antonia fraser's account of mary's tender heart such a kind person you know i think that's right and in fact i mean you know from your perspective i would imagine yeah that's part of the problem with mary she is too tender-hearted don't play the game unless you're going to play it properly yeah exactly that's my take on history generally i think the conspirators feel like you do that's why they don't tell her that's why they don't even hint at it, because they're worried that she might step in and say, no, you're not allowed to do this.

And I think also another key piece of evidence that Mary didn't do it is her evident panic when she is told that Darnley had been killed, because she does genuinely, it seems to me, she's very, very worried that she had been the target.

So as Guy puts it, Mary was a good actress, but not this good.

So all of that, I think, kind of adds up to absolve Mary of the crime.

But just to reiterate, the key piece of evidence, I think, is that the timing for her is terrible in relation to her negotiations with Elizabeth, because she has everything to lose.

And actually, in the event she does, because that letter from Elizabeth, which we began this episode with, I mean, it's a warning shot across Mary's bows.

It's saying essentially, you know, solve the crime, arraign those who are responsible for it, or else there's no way that you are going to be my heir.

Does Mary solve the crime?

The answer, I guess, is no.

And this is disastrous for Mary.

Yeah.

And her failure to do that results, I mean, in her total ruin.

And that, of course, leads to the second puzzle, which is why doesn't she manage to solve the crime?

Because as we know, there are very detailed and effective investigations.

You know, there are people from the Privy Council who are interviewing the old women and taking down their records.

There's Drury's report that's gone to Cecil.

Why aren't these being collated and publicised rather than, as actually happens, being suppressed and in lots of cases, completely forgotten?

and the answer again i think is pretty obvious it's because those who commissioned these reports had every interest in suppressing them because the privy council i mean is absolutely full of people who had actually been responsible for darnley's murder so bothwell morton maitland

and of those three bothwell morton maitland two in particular have a real reason to lie low and allow the rumor to do its work because one of those three is being fingered for the crime and so the other two can say, well, you know, let's lie low and let him take the blame.

And the person who is being fingered for it is Bothwell.

And accusations against Bothwell are starting to be laid within a week of Darnley's murder by his father, the Earl of Lennox.

Placards and graffiti and cartoons start to appear across the streets of Edinburgh, charging Bothwell directly with the murder.

Kind of caricatures of Bothwell start appearing on buildings and they have the label, Here is the Murder of the king.

And this, of course, is very bad news for Bothwell, but it is also very, very bad news for Mary because rumors have been swirling throughout Scotland long before Darnelly's murder that Mary has got a real crush on Bothwell.

And some of the evidence for this is bogus.

So, for instance, the story that she had ridden alone to the Hermitage when Bothwell had been stabbed.

That wasn't true, but the fact the story was told is suggestive of how the trend of gossip is going.

And some of the stories are true.

So, for instance, Mary had given Bothwell a spectacular blue suit at the christening, and she had kind of basically employed Bothwell to take the place of Darnelly, her husband, who had refused to attend.

So you can kind of see how these rumors, they have legs.

And because of that, it doesn't take long for graffiti to start appearing on the walls of Edinburgh, charging that not only is Bothwell guilty of Darnley's murder, but Mary is as well.

And what about the English dimension to this, Tom?

Because we started the whole episode with Elizabeth I's letter.

What about Elizabeth and her chief minister Cecil?

What do they make of all this?

Are they preparing to use this against Mary effectively, sort of cynically?

Cecil, definitely.

We've been talking throughout this series how Cecil is Mary's great hidden enemy.

He's actively working to stop Mary succeeding to the English throne, but also he's pretty keen on toppling Mary from her own throne.

And so he sees a huge opportunity here.

Why on earth would he publish anything that might help to absolve Mary?

And I think definitely he is kind of pouring poison into Elizabeth's ear.

So remember that phrase, looking through fingers, that Maitland had applied to Moray and that Elizabeth writes in her letter to Mary.

I think it's very easy to imagine Cecil having dropped precisely that phrase into conversation with Elizabeth and Elizabeth then using it herself in her letter.

And then there is that anonymous traitor whom Elizabeth referred to in her letter comparing him to the minister of Satan.

She doesn't need to name him because it's so self-evidently Bothwell.

Now you ask, does Elizabeth, like Cecil, want to see Mary ruined?

No, she absolutely doesn't.

Quite the opposite.

So just to quote that letter again, I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thing so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you if the thing touches him.

What Elizabeth is trying to do is to help Mary safeguard her throne and not allow her reputation to be torched by this devastating accumulation of hostile rumour, of which two rumors in particular are the most lethal.

One, that she had joined with Bothwell in the plot to murder Darnley.

And secondly, that she had done this out of an adulterous passion for Bothwell.

And so Elizabeth is saying, for God's sake, you know, have nothing to do with Bothwell.

Arraign him,

convict him, execute him.

But the big question is, of course, will Mary listen to this self-evidently excellent advice?

Well, Mary has a history in this series of making very poor decisions.

So next time we will discover whether she redeems herself and makes the right choice or whether things get even darker for her.

Now, the only way to listen to that episode right now, because I imagine most people are gagging to find out the answer, the only way to do it is to join our own murderous conspiracy, the Restis History Club, at the restishistry.com.

And if you do that, you can hear right away what happened next in this extraordinary story.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.