Darnley was in frequent communication with the discontented Catholics of the North and West of England, and his retainers, the Standens, were young men yearning for adventures. ‘Knowing I am an offender of the laws, they professed great friendship,’ wrote William Rogers to Cecil, with some humour.[105]
A rumour of some attempt against Mary reached Archbishop Beaton, in Paris, at the end of 1566, through the Spanish Ambassador there, who may have heard of it from the Spanish Ambassador in London, with whom the English Catholics were perpetually intriguing. There is a good deal of evidence that Darnley had been complaining of Mary to the Pope and the Catholic Powers, as insufficiently zealous for the Church. Darnley, not Mary, was the Scottish royal person on whom the Church ought to rely,[106] and Mary, says Knox’s continuator, saw his letters, by treachery. Consumed with anger at his degraded position, so unlike the royalty for which he hungered, and addicted to day dreams about descents on Western England, and similar wild projects, Darnley may possibly, at this time, have communicated to the English Catholics a project for restoring himself to power by carrying off and crowning his child. This fantasy would drift through the secret channels of Catholic diplomacy to the Spanish Ambassador in Paris, who gave Beaton a hint, but declined to be explicit. Mary thanked Beaton for his warning, from Seton, on February 18, nine days after Darnley’s death.[107] ‘But alas! it came too late.’ Mary added that the Spanish ambassador in London had also given her warning.
There may, then, have been this amount of foundation for the report which, according to Walker, at Stirling, Hiegait was circulating about mid-December 1566. Stirling was then full of ‘honest men of the Lennox,’ sent thither by Lennox himself (as he says in one of his manuscript discourses), because Darnley’s usual guard had been withdrawn. Mary objected to the presence of so many of Lennox’s retainers, and there arose that furious quarrel between her and her husband. Possibly Mary, having heard Walker’s story of Darnley’s project, thought that his Lennox men were intended to bear a hand in it.
In any case Walker filled Mary’s ears, at Stirling—as she wrote to Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in France, on January 20, 1567—with rumours of ‘utheris attemptatis and purposis tending to this fyne.’ He named Hiegait ‘for his chief author,’ ‘quha,’ he said, ‘had communicat the mater to hym, as apperyt, of mynd to gratify us; sayand to Walcar, “gif I had the moyen and crydet with the Quenis Majestie that ze have, I wald not omitt to mak hir previe of sic purpossis and bruitis that passes in the cuntrie.”’ Hiegait also said that Darnley could not endure some of the Lords, but that he or they must leave the country. Mary then sent for Hiegait, before the Council, and questioned him. He (probably in fear of Lennox) denied that he had told Walker the story of Darnley’s project, but he had heard, from Cauldwell, a retainer of Eglintoun’s, that Darnley himself was to be ‘put in ward.’ Eglintoun, ‘a rank Papist,’ was described by Randolph as never a trustworthy Lennoxite, ‘never good Levenax.’ His retainer, Cauldwell, being summoned, expressly denied that he ever told the rumour about the idea of imprisoning Darnley, to Hiegait. But Hiegait informed the Laird of Minto (a Stewart and a Lennoxite), who again told Lennox, who told Darnley, by whose desire Cauldwell again spoke to Hiegait. The trail of the gossip runs from Cauldwell (the estate of that name is in Eglintoun’s country, Ayrshire) to Hiegait, from him to Stewart of Minto, from him to Lennox, and from Lennox to Darnley. Possibly Eglintoun (the cautious Lord who slipped away when Ainslie’s band was being signed, and hid under straw, after the battle of Langside) was the original source of the rumour of Darnley’s intended arrest. This is a mere guess. If there was a very secret plot, at Craigmillar, to arrest Darnley, we cannot tell how it reached Hiegait. Mary ‘found no manner of concordance’ in their answers, and she rebuked Walker and Hiegait in her own name, and that of their master, Beaton himself.[108] These men, with Minto, were allied with Lennox, and one of them may have been his authority for the story of the second Craigmillar conference.
We now see why it was that, in the height of her final triumph, the christening festival at Stirling Mary wept and was ill at ease. Her husband’s conduct was intolerable: now he threatened to leave before the ceremony, next he stayed on, a dismal figure behind the scenes. His guard of Lennox men might aim at slaying Bothwell, or Mary might think, on Walker’s evidence, that they intended to kidnap her child. Worse followed, when she and her Council examined Walker. Out came the tale of Hiegait, and Queen and Council, if they had really plotted to arrest Darnley, knew that their scheme was discovered and was abortive. Finally, on December 24, either in consequence of Lennox’s warning, or because Morton, Lindsay, and the other Riccio conspirators whom he betrayed were pardoned, Darnley rode off to his father at Glasgow. There he fell ill, soon after his arrival, but Lennox’s MSS. never hint that he was poisoned at Stirling (as Buchanan declares), or that he fell sick when he had ridden but a mile from the town. That they deny.
After Darnley’s departure, Moray, with Bedford, the English Ambassador, went to St. Andrews, and other places in Fife. Till January 2, 1567, when she returned to Stirling, Mary was at Drummond Castle, and at Tullibardine, where, says Buchanan, she and Bothwell made love in corners ‘so that all were highly offended.’ After January 13, she visited Calendar House, and then went to Holyrood.
It is said that she never wrote to Darnley till after January 14, when she took her child to Edinburgh, with the worst purposes, Buchanan declares. Then she wrote to Darnley, the Lennox Papers inform us, excusing herself, and offering to visit him in his sickness at Glasgow. Darnley told her messenger verbally, say the Lennox MSS., that the Queen must judge herself as to the visit to him. ‘But this much ye shall declare unto her, that I wish Stirling to be Jedburgh, and Glasgow to be the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here, and then I doubt not but she would be quickly with me undesired.’ This was a tactless verbal message, and, if given, must have proved to Mary that Darnley suspected her amour. Moreover, this Lennoxian story, that Mary offered the visit, and that Darnley replied with reserve, and with an insult to be verbally delivered, agrees ill with what is said in the deposition (December, 1568) of Lennox’s retainer, Thomas Crawford. According to Crawford, ‘after theire metinge and shorte spekinge together she asked hym of hys lettres, wherein he complained of the crueletye of som.’ ‘He answered that he complained not without cause....’ ‘Ye asked me what I ment bye the crueltye specified in my lettres, yt procedeth of you onelye that wille not accept mye offres and repentance.’ Now, in the Lennox Papers this ‘innocent lamb’ has nothing to repent of, and has made no offers. These came from Mary’s side.[109]
The Lennox account goes on to say that later Mary sent ‘very loving messages and letters unto him to drive all suspicions out of his mind,’ a passage copied by Buchanan in his History. Darnley, therefore, after Mary’s visit to Glasgow, returned with her to Edinburgh, ‘contrary to his father’s will and consent.’ Lennox, however, here emphatically denies that either he or Darnley suspected any murderous design on the part of the Queen. Yet, in Letter II., she is made to say that he ‘fearit his liff,’ as the passage is quoted in the ‘Book of Articles.’[110] As to the story that Darnley’s illness at Glasgow was caused by poison; poison, of course, was suspected, but, if the Casket Letters are genuine, Mary therein calls him ‘this pocky man,’ and Bedford says that he had small-pox: a disease from which Mary had suffered in early life.[111] He also reports that Mary sent to Darnley her own physician, though Buchanan says ‘All this while the Queen would not suffer so much as a physician to come at him.’ In the ‘Book of Articles’ she refuses to send her apothecary. Bedford never hints at scandalous doings of Mary and Bothwell at Stirling.
On January 20, from Edinburgh, Mary wrote that letter to Archbishop Beaton in Paris, as to the Hiegait and Walker affair, which we have already cited. She also expressed her desire that her son should receive the titular captaincy of the Scots Guard in France, though, according to Buchanan, she determined at Craigmillar to ‘make away with’ her child. Nothing in Mary’s letter of January 20, to Beaton, hints at her desire of a reconciliation with Darnley. Yet, on or about the very day when she wrote it, she set forth towards Glasgow.
The date was January 20, as given by the Diary of Birrel, and in the ‘Diurnal.’ The undesigned coincidence of diaries kept by two Edinburgh citizens is fairly good evidence.[112] Drury makes her arrive at Glasgow on January 22. What occurred between Mary and her husband at Glasgow is said to be revealed in two of her Casket Letters written to Bothwell. Their evidence, and authenticity, are to be discussed later: other evidence to the point we have none, and can only say, here, that, at the end of January, Mary brought Darnley, his face covered with taffeta, to the house of Kirk o’ Field, just beside the wall of Edinburgh, where the University buildings now stand.