An Accidental Tragedy (34 page)

On 17 December the actual ceremony took place in the Chapel Royal of Stirling Castle. At six months, the prince was older than was usual for a Catholic baptism, but the various tumults in the court had caused unavoidable delays. The infant was lying in his private chamber, where he had his own household, supervised by the Earl of Mar as his guardian with the countess as his governess. His wardrobe was in the care of Alison Sinclair, and
there were five noble ladies who acted as James’s ‘rockers’ as he lay in his cradle being soothed by his personal musician. There is no proof that Alison Sinclair was the daughter of the Janet Sinclair who had been Mary’s nurse, but if she was it would create a charming symmetry. At five o’clock in the evening the young prince was carried to the chapel by the Comte de Brienne as Charles IX’s proxy and was attended by the Countess of Argyll on behalf of Elizabeth. Barons and lesser nobility lined the passages from the prince’s chamber to the chapel, all holding candles – directly reminiscent of Francois II’s christening at Fontainbleau. They were met at the chapel door by the Archbishop of St Andrews flanked by the Bishop of Dunblane, William Chisholm; Robert Crichton, Bishop of Dunkeld, and John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, with the entire complement of the Chapel Royal in full clerical vestments. The prince was christened James Charles Stewart – ‘James’ for the continuity of the Stewart name and ‘Charles’ to please his godfather, the King of France. He was created Prince and Steward of Scotland, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles and Baron Renfrew. At Mary’s request the practice of the priest spitting into James’s mouth was omitted, but in every other respect the ceremony was performed with the full pomp of the Catholic Church. In fact, it had been difficult to find Catholic nobles of sufficient rank to take part.

Huntly, Moray, Bothwell and Bedford – Protestants to a man – did not attend the service but stood outside the door of the chapel. They did, however, attend the state banquet afterwards during which Moray acted as carver and Huntly as butler, with the whole affair supervised by Bothwell. Even the banquet carried unmistakeable political overtones since care had been taken that Catholics served Protestants and vice versa. ‘There was dancing and playing in abundance’ and Bedford was persuaded that his male attendants should take part in the dancing, thus ensuring that England celebrated equally with Scotland. Next day there was a tournament, and on 19 December the climax came with another banquet. This was served at a round table by nymphs and satyrs on a movable stage. A child dressed
as an angel was lowered from the ceiling and recited a Latin poem by Patrick Adamson ending with the triumphal statement that ‘the crown of Mary awaits her grandsons’. Unfortunately, the machine controlling the moving table broke down halfway through the meal and the remaining courses were served more conventionally.

Later in the day the celebrations continued on the esplanade of the castle, where a mock fort had been built, representing Mary’s position as queen. There were Highlanders dressed in goatskins who threw fire-balls, while demons and Moors in lambskins attacked with fire-spears. Soldiers defended against all comers, but the royal castle remained intact, and fireworks were launched. These had been hauled up the walls and crags under the supervision of the controller of artillery in secret and put in place over a period of seven days. Mary had arranged a similar, but smaller, display for the wedding of Lord Fleming in May 1562, when a sea battle was fought with fireworks and artillery on Dunsappie Loch beside Holyrood. This time Bedford could report that he had witnessed ‘fireworks, artillery and all other things pleasant for the sight of man’. He had, however, been offended by one masque, devised by Sebastien Pagez, one of Mary’s valets, in which men appeared as satyrs and shook their tails at the English, while the Scots roared with laughter. Since the English knew of the traditional Scots (and French) canard that Englishmen had tails, it was clearly designed to shock them and one courtier named Hatton, a member of the English ambassador’s train, told Melville that ‘if it were not for the Queen’s presence, he would put a dagger to the heart of that French knave Sebastien’. But this was a trifling event during the triumphant three-day-long celebration.

The baptism had been a total success and Mary had ‘behaved herself admirably well’ and entertained ‘all the goodly company in the best manner’, although she was in pain most of the time, having had another riding accident and hurt one of her breasts, which was now swollen. What the fête celebrated may have been completely illusory, and the united loyalty of the nobility toward
the Stewart crown was merely a propaganda dream, but in terms of splendour it certainly approached the
triomphes
of the Valois, and Mary knew that her uncles would have approved totally. The fact that it resulted in huge debts and an increase in taxation was of no relevance, and the loss of a flowered tapestry and a Turkey carpet, discovered when the inventories were made, was of no consequence.

Darnley had been absent from the proceedings entirely; ‘His undecided mind had not determined whether to be present at the baptism of the child, or to remove to Glasgow, where he might enjoy the feeble communication of his father.’ In fact he was sulking in his own apartments at Stirling and summoned du Croc to visit him, something that du Croc’s master had expressly forbidden him to do. However, the ambassador did make the visit and reported one reason why Darnley did not wish to appear in public: ‘His bad deportment is incurable nor can there ever be any good expected from him for several reasons which I might tell was I present with you.’ In fact, Darnley was making the transition from secondary to tertiary syphilis, although his complaint was euphemistically referred to by the court as ‘smallpox’.

The disease had been evident since his arrival in Scotland, when it had been called ‘measles’. In this stage he would have had mucous lesions in his mouth and his breath would have smelled horrible. His ‘measles’ would have been suppurating pustules, or ‘gammata’, and it is a mark of Mary’s devotion to duty that she allowed him to impregnate her. She was fortunate not to have caught the disease herself. When du Croc visited Darnley he was being treated with mercury and medicinal baths filled with sulphur water. Du Croc noticed that he had lost most of his hair and teeth and the mercury treatment was causing him to over-salivate – in other words he dribbled involuntarily. Should the infant James die there could now be no brother as a royal safety net.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Some evil turn

On Christmas Eve 1566 Mary granted a pardon – ‘relaxation and dresse’ – to Morton and the other Rizzio plotters, extending her clemency even to Kerr of Fawdonside, who had held the pistol to her belly. George Douglas and Andrew Mar were excluded from this pardon although at Craigmillar the lords had asked her for clemency for all. They had promised to rid her of Darnley by ‘other means’ on receipt of such clemency and now, even though the pardon had only been partial, they felt a solemn obligation to carry out their part of the bargain, although Mary probably did not understand that by pardoning the plotters she was activating the Craigmillar Bond. By 10 January, Morton was at Berwick and wrote to Cecil thanking him for his courteous behaviour while he had been in exile. His missive reads like the sort of bread-and-butter letter sent to one’s hostess after a pleasant weekend in the country.

Mary wrote to Elizabeth on 3 January 1567 thanking her for examining the ‘supposed’ will of Henry VIII and promising to send some of her council to confer on these matters. Mary thanked Bedford for his attendance and gave him a chain set with diamonds worth 2,000 crowns, presumably treating du Croc and de Brienne with equal courtesy. She was well aware of Darnley’s ineffectual plotting, including a mad scheme to seize power by raising a force in France, and, although he had now moved to his father’s house in Glasgow, hysterically claiming he was being poisoned, he was still perilously near Stirling Castle and Prince James. So it was with some relief that on 14 January,
James’s household arrived at Holyrood and into the safety of his mother’s protection.

Darnley was now isolated and the queen seemed to move according to the will of the plotters as they began to implement their interpretation of the Craigmillar Bond.

Whittinghame Castle, just beyond Dunbar, belonged to Archibald Douglas, Morton’s brother and a kinsman of Bothwell’s, and it was there, on 14 January 1567, that Morton arrived to be met by Bothwell and Lethington. The fine details of Darnley’s murder were then agreed. The lords also realised that Mary was soon to become twenty-five years old and, under the prevailing Scots law, could, on her birthday, revoke all the grants of land she had made previously. With Darnley’s encouragement this could mean that Mary might impose a reversion on all grants made to Protestants, but now they had an opportunity to weaken this threat to their fortunes by carrying out the unspoken wishes of their queen.

Mary had sent her own physician to treat Darnley but was well aware that a rival power base to her own was developing among the Lennoxes in the west. William Heigate, Provost of Glasgow, brought her information of a plot by Darnley to seize Prince James and declare himself regent, imprisoning Mary. It would therefore be to her advantage to have Darnley under a closer watch in Edinburgh, and, accompanied by Bothwell and Huntly, she left for Glasgow. The escort was necessary since Darnley, who was now in his ancestral lands of the Lennox where he could expect support, might attempt a coup d’état. Realising that the earls’ presence in Glasgow would be interpreted as enemy action, the two noblemen took Mary as far as Callander and the final lap of the journey was made under the care of Châtelherault, whose Hamilton power base was nearby. Mary also took her own escort of halberdiers.

At Glasgow, Mary was met by Thomas Crawford, a servant of Darnley’s, who told her that the Earl of Lennox was afraid to meet her in person because of ‘sharp words’ exchanged at Stirling. Mary replied, ‘There is no medicine against fear’, and
Darnley and she met on 25 January. He was now bedridden and his smell at close quarters was revolting. A taffeta mask hid his face where pieces of flesh had rotted away and most of his nose had gone. He made an unctuous and feeble plea to Mary: ‘I am but young [twenty years old] and you will say you have forgiven me sundry times. May not a man of my age for lack of counsel, of which I am destitute, fall twice or thrice, and yet repent himself and be chastised by experience? . . . I desire no other thing but we may be together as husband and wife.’ Mary questioned him over Heigate’s allegations and he responded by telling her that he knew there had been some sort of agreement made at Craigmillar and that he was afraid he would be murdered in his sleep. Mary ignored this and promised that they would once again ‘be at bed and board’ when he was free of his sickness and that she would personally give him the sulphur baths when they were lodged at Craigmillar. Eventually, Darnley’s vanity defeated any common sense and he agreed to Mary’s proposal. Later, in private, Crawford told him that he would now be more like a prisoner than a free man.

Darnley arrived in Edinburgh on 31 January after a slow journey by horse litter and immediately complained that not only was Craigmillar too remote from the capital – it was three miles distant – but also that Holyrood was too damp. Immediately, Bothwell came up with a perfect alternative suggestion: a house in Kirk o’ Field was vacant and Darnley could lodge there. Darnley, who knew that Châtelherault had a house in the Kirk o’ Field area, and presumed that he would be lodged there, agreed at once. His presumption was wrong. The house in question was owned by Robert Balfour, brother to the Sir James Balfour who had drawn up the Craigmillar Bond and who was an employee of Bothwell’s. Robert Balfour himself lodged in the house next door. The warden of the house was Hepburn of Bolton – a blood relative of Bothwell’s – and having admitted Darnley and his party he immediately had all fourteen keys to the house and its rooms copied. Darnley was now, unwittingly,
in Bothwell’s power, and the final stage of the plot could be put into action.

The events of the next few days have been examined, disputed and denied to an extent probably equalled only by those surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. None of the evidence is impartial and the witnesses, many of whom only testified after torture, were all determined to avoid personal implication of any sort.

Kirk o’ Field was the residence of the Provost of the Church of St Mary-in-the-Fields. The church was in a quadrangle with a small garden, and the Provost’s house itself was in the south-west corner among the properties owned by Sir James Balfour. It was a two-storey building with a large reception room, or salle, on the ground floor giving on to a smaller room beyond, occasionally used as a bedroom. Beneath this was a cellar. On the first floor was a corridor reached by a turret stair with two small rooms used by servants as well as, at the eastern end, a larger room, some sixteen feet by twelve feet, with a small cabinet holding a velvet-covered
chaise percée
under a yellow silk canopy. This was the room occupied by Darnley, its window giving on to the town wall and an alleyway known as Thieves Row. Darnley’s bed was against the far wall, with a bath placed under the window, and, to stifle the smell of sulphur, the bath was covered by a door which had been unhooked from its hinges elsewhere. A small Turkey carpet, some cushions, a chair and a table completed the furnishings. There were some tapestries, one of a rabbit hunter, and a few other hangings – loot from Strathbogie after the conquest of the Gordons at Corrichie – but it was all somewhat makeshift. On the ground floor, directly under Darnley’s room, a small bed of yellow and green damask with a fur coverlet specially fetched by Nicholas Hubert on orders from Margaret Carwood had been installed, and Mary slept here on Friday, 7 and Saturday, 8 February. She spent her time with her husband or with Lady Reres, often singing to Darnley from the garden outside, presumably driven from the room by the combined smells of sulphur and the invalid himself. As long as Mary was
sleeping in Kirk o’ Field, Darnley was unreachable and therefore safe, but the assassins knew that on 9 February Mary would attend the marriage celebrations of Sebastien Pagez, her valet, to Christina Hogg, one of Mary’s gentlewomen. On that night, therefore, Darnley would be comparatively unattended. His attendants, George Dalgleish, William Powrie, James and Hob Ormiston, along with Patrick Wilson, were all in Bothwell’s pay, while John Hepburn and John Hay were blood relatives of Bothwell. In Darnley’s room, his valet, William Taylor, slept on a mattress on the floor, while Thomas Nelson and Edward Symonds, Darnley’s own servants, slept in the corridor outside, with only Taylor’s boy attendant and his two grooms elsewhere in the house. Here Darnley would be at his most vulnerable before any remission in the disease allowed him to return to Holyrood. Anticipating such a window of opportunity, Sir James Balfour had bought £60 Scots-worth of gunpowder which was now stored in his brother’s house next door. The choice of gunpowder provided the nearest thing to death by remote control that the technology of the time allowed, since it meant that no individual person could be identified at the scene of the murder.