Mary Stuart (24 page)

At two o’clock in the morning there came a thunderous crash, a frightful explosion “as if five-and-twenty cannon had been fired simultaneously.” Immediately thereafter, suspicious-looking figures were seen rushing away from the house where the King lodged. A wave of terror swept through the awakened city. The gates were opened and messengers hastened to Holyrood to report the terrible news that the lonely house in Kirk o’ Field had been blown up, together with the King and his servants. Bothwell, who had been present at the wedding festivities (wishing, like Moray, to have an alibi) while his henchmen were preparing for the deed, was awakened from his sleep, or at any rate was roused from the bed where he was pretending to sleep. Hastily donning his clothes, accompanied by armed men, he made his way to the scene of the crime. The corpse of Darnley and that of the servant who slept in his room were found in the garden, clad only in their shirts. The house had been completely destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder. Bothwell contented himself with ascertaining these details, making as if he was greatly surprised at what had happened. Since he knew the real undercurrent of the affair better than anyone else, he did not try to elucidate the truth. He merely commanded that the corpses should be laid out on a bier, and after half-an-hour returned to the palace. There he told the Queen, likewise, as it seemed, just aroused from sleep, the bare fact that her husband the King, Henry of Scotland, had been murdered by unknown malefactors in an incomprehensible way.

P
ASSION CAN WORK WONDERS
. It can awaken superhuman energy. By its irresistible pressure it can evoke titanic forces from a previously tranquil soul and can drive a hitherto well-regulated and law-abiding person to crime. The nature of passion is, however, such that, after intense ebullitions and wild outbreaks, a phase of exhaustion ensues. That is what distinguishes one who becomes a criminal through passion from a born, or a habitual criminal. The casual and passionate criminal is, as a rule, only equal to the occasion as regards the commission of the crime, but proves unable to deal with its consequences. Acting under stress of impulse, with his mind concentrated on the deed that is to be done, his energies are tensed upon this one and only aim. Thereafter, as soon as the deed is done, his impetus fails, his resolution subsides, at the very time when a cool and calculating criminal devotes himself to a purposive struggle against the representatives of law and morality. The energies of the habitual criminal are held in store for dealing with what will come after the crime.

Mary Stuart (and we think the better of her for this) was unfitted to cope with the situation into which her thraldom to Both-well had brought her. Though she was a criminal, she had only become one through irresponsible passion, under the promptings of another will than her own. She had lacked the strength to forbid her husband's murder, and after it she was in a state of collapse. Two possibilities were open to her. She might break off all relations with Bothwell, who had done more than, at the bottom of her soul, she had desired. Or, on the other hand, she might help to conceal the crime, feigning sorrow in order to avert suspicion from him and from herself. Instead, Mary did the stupidest thing anyone in so suspicious a situation could possibly do. She did nothing. She betrayed herself through dull inaction. Like a mechanical toy, having been wound up by the influence of a stronger nature than her own, she had, as if in a trance, automatically done whatever Bothwell wanted. She had gone to Glasgow, beguiled Darnley, brought him back with her to Kirk o' Field. Now the clockwork mechanism had run down, and she made no further move. At the very time when skilful play-acting was needed to convince the world of her own and her lover's innocence, she dropped the mask. As if petrified, she displayed a horrible rigidity and nonchalance which could not fail to concentrate suspicion upon her.

Such spiritual numbness, such passivity and indifference, at the very time when active misrepresentation, vigorous defensive, and extreme presence of mind are essential, are by no means uncommon. Inertia of this sort is a reaction from excess of tension, the outcome of a revenge taken by nature on those who have unreasonably overtaxed their forces. On the evening after Waterloo, Napoleon's demonic energy of will was in abeyance. He was mute and passive, could give no instructions to anyone, although in that hour of catastrophe it was essential for him to take active measures to avert the crowning disaster. Strength seemed to have run out of him as wine runs out of a barrel when the spigot has been removed. In like manner, Oscar Wilde collapsed in the hours before his arrest. Friends had warned him; there was still time for him to escape; he had funds, could have taken train to Dover and crossed the Channel. But, frozen stiff, he sat in his room waiting and waiting—as if for a miracle or for annihilation. Only by such analogies, which could be multiplied a thousandfold by students of history and biography, can we explain Mary Stuart's foolish passivity, which concentrated suspicion upon her during the weeks following her husband's murder. Before the murder, no one had suspected her intimacy with Bothwell, and her visit to Darnley at Glasgow might easily have been supposed to be the outcome of a desire for reconciliation. After the crime, however, the widow became the centre of interest. It was incumbent upon her to make her innocence plain by brilliant misrepresentation. Yet the unhappy woman would appear to have been seized with loathing at the thought of such hypocrisy. Instead of doing her best to avert natural suspicion, she made herself seem more culpable than she actually was by manifesting the most callous indifference to her husband's death. Like a woman who has determined to drown herself, she closed her eyes while flinging herself into the water, that she might see nothing more, feel nothing more, hoping only for the oblivion of non-existence. Criminology can hardly find a more signal example of the person who has become a criminal through passion, and in whom, after the crime, complete paralysis ensues.
Quos deus perdere vult
… Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

What would an innocent, an honest, a loving woman, be she queen or commoner, do when, at dead of night, tidings are brought that her husband has been murdered by unknown miscreants? Would she not rage and storm? Would she not scream for the immediate arrest of the guilty? If a queen, she would instantly cast into prison those upon whom a glimmer of suspicion rested. She would appeal to her subjects to help her; she would ask neighbouring sovereigns to seize any that attempted to cross her frontiers. As in France, when her boy-husband Francis II had died, she would have gone into seclusion, showing no inclination for social amusements until weeks, months or years had elapsed and, above all, never resting until every participant in the crime had been brought to justice.

Such would have been the behaviour, in these circumstances, of an affectionate widow, innocent of her husband's murder. Logically, therefore, such also should have been the behaviour of a guilty widow. From calculation she would have played the innocent, for what can safeguard a criminal better than to act as if he had neither part nor lot in the crime? Instead, after Darnley's murder, Mary Stuart displayed a callousness that could not fail to arouse dark suspicions in the minds even of her well-wishers. She showed neither the gloomy wrath she had shown after the assassination of Rizzio, nor yet the seemly melancholy prescribed for her by French court etiquette after the premature death of Francis II. She had penned a touching elegy on Francis, but she did not consecrate her poetic talent to enshrining the memory of Darnley. Instead, during the first hours after the crime, she calmly signed lengthy and confused dispatches to the courts of Europe—an account of the murder so worded as to avert suspicion from herself. In this remarkable tale the facts were so distorted as to imply that the crime had not been primarily directed against the King but against herself. According to the official version of the story, the conspirators had intended the nocturnal explosion at Kirk o' Field to destroy both the wedded pair, and nothing but the chance that she had left the house in order to participate in the wedding festival at Holy-rood had saved the Queen from perishing with the King. Her hand did not tremble as she signed the following statement: “The matter is horrible and strange, as we believe the like was never heard in any country … By whom it was done, or in what manner, appears not yet. We doubt not but, according to the diligence which our Council has begun already to use, the certainty of all shall be known shortly and the same discovered, which we wot God will never suffer to lie hid; we hope to punish the same with such rigour as shall serve as an example … for all ages to come.”

This distortion of the facts was, of course, too great to mislead public opinion. For in reality, as all Edinburgh knew, the Queen had left Kirk o' Field at eleven pm, attended by a great train and numerous torch-bearers, while Darnley remained in the lonely house. Everyone in the capital was aware that she was not spending the night with her husband, and therefore the murderers, hiding in the darkness, could not possibly have had any designs upon her life when, three hours later, they blew up the house. Besides, the explosion was nothing more than a smokescreen, intended to hide the fact that Darnley was strangled or smothered (probably before the explosion). Thus the stupidity of the official account served only to intensify the conviction of Mary's complicity.

Strangely enough, little hubbub was raised about the matter in Scotland, and the indifference of her subjects, as well as Mary's own, served during these days to intensify the animus of the foreign world. For this much is true in the above-mentioned report, that the affair was horrible and strange, so that the like had never been recorded in the bloodstained annals of history. The King of Scotland had been murdered in his own capital; his house had been blown up. What happened? Did the town quiver with excitement and indignation? Did the Scottish lords hurry from their castles to Edinburgh in order to defend the Queen, who was also declared to have been endangered by the plot? Did priests denounce the crime from their pulpits? Did the law courts do their utmost to discover and condemn the criminals? Were the gates of the city closed? Were hundreds of suspects arrested and racked? Was the border guarded? Were the ports watched? Was the corpse of the slain King carried through the streets, attended by a mournful procession of the nobles of the land? Was a catafalque erected in one of the public squares, surrounded by guards and torchbearers, so that the deceased King could lie in state? Was parliament summoned, to be informed about the crime and to take the necessary steps to avenge it? Did the Scottish lords, the defenders of the throne, solemnly swear to punish the assassins?

Nothing of the kind happened. Nothing happened. An incomprehensible silence followed the thunderclap. The Queen secluded herself in her apartment instead of making a public utterance. The Scottish lords were silent. Neither Moray nor Lethington raised a finger, not one of those who had bowed the knee before their King. They neither blamed the deed nor extolled it. With dour quietude they waited upon events. It was plain that open discussion of the King's murder would be inconvenient, since nearly all of them had been accessories before the fact. The burghers, in their turn, stayed quietly at home, not venturing to do more than mutter their suspicions. They knew it was inexpedient for such as they to meddle in the affairs of the great.

To begin with, therefore, what happened was precisely what the assassins had hoped. No one seemed to look upon the murder as anything more than a petty and undesirable incident. Perhaps there has been no other occasion in European history when a court, a nobility, the population of a capital, has made so little stir about the killing of a king. Even the most obvious and simple measures for the elucidation of the crime were conspicuously neglected. There was no official or legal inquiry at the site of the murder. No report was called for. No proclamation was issued. Everything, as if designedly, was left shrouded in darkness. No post-mortem examination was made by such experts as then existed. Even today we do not know whether Darnley was strangled, smothered, stabbed or poisoned before the house was blown up in order to hide the traces of the crime. This much only is certain, that his corpse, with a blackened face, was found at some distance from the house. By Bothwell's orders, the body was interred with unseemly haste, lest too many people should have a chance of examining it. Let the earth quickly cover the remains of Henry Darnley. Let the dark affair be speedily shuffled out of sight, before it stank to heaven.

The world became convinced, therefore, that persons of high standing must have been responsible for the murder. Such was the reason why Henry Darnley, King of Scotland, had not been vouchsafed a burial worthy of a king. Not with pomp and circumstance was the coffin borne through the streets of the city, followed by a mournful widow, by earls and other persons of rank and station. No royal salutes were fired nor were the bells tolled in the church towers. Secretly, and by night, the entombment in the chapel took place. Dishonourably and hastily was the body of Henry Darnley, King of Scotland, lowered into the grave, as if he himself had been a murderer, instead of the victim of hate and greed. Read one Mass over him, and that will suffice! His tormented soul will no longer disturb the peace of Scotland! …
Quos deus perdere vult
…

Mary Stuart, Bothwell, and the other Scottish lords hoped that, with the nailing-on of the coffin lid, the whole matter would be hushed up. Lest, however, inquisitive folk should make trouble, lest Queen Elizabeth should complain that nothing had been done to throw light upon the crime, it was decided to show a semblance of activity. To obviate a serious inquiry, Bothwell commanded a spurious one. A bogus search was to be made for the “unknown assassins”. True, the whole city knew their names. Too many confederates had been needed to surround the house, to buy large quantities of gunpowder and to store it in sacks at the site of the explosion for them to pass unobserved. The sentries at the gates knew only too well who had made their way back into Edinburgh that night after the explosion. Since, however, the Queen's council was now practically reduced to Bothwell and Lethington, the prime actor and the chief confederate, who needed only to look in the mirror to see the guilty parties, the council sedulously maintained the pretence that the crime had been the work of “unknown miscreants”, and issued a proclamation offering a reward of two thousand pounds Scots to anyone who would put the authorities upon the track of the guilty. Two thousand pounds Scots, equivalent to one hundred and sixty five English pounds, was a respectable sum in those days, and a fortune for any poor citizen of Edinburgh, but everyone knew that if he should blab he would be more likely to have a dirk between his ribs than the two thousand pounds in his pouch. Bothwell established a military dictatorship. His retainers, the borderers, masterfully patrolled the streets, armed to the teeth, a plain menace to whosoever might think of trying to earn the reward by indiscreet revelations.

When attempts are made to repress truth by force, it seeks an outlet by cunning. What could not be said in the open and by day could be posted on the walls during the night. The morning after the issue of the proclamation, placards were pasted up in the marketplace and even on the gates of the royal palace at Holyrood. These placards denounced as the murderers Bothwell, his accomplice Sir James Balfour, together with the Queen's servants Bastien and Joseph Rizzio. Other names were mentioned in other lists. Two names, however, were found in them all, Bothwell and Balfour, Balfour and Bothwell.