Here he was in an insecure and dangerous house, close to a palace of his feudal foes, the Hamiltons. The Lennox MSS. declare that ‘the place was already prepared with [undermining and] trains of powder therein.’[113] We return to this point, which was later abandoned by the prosecution.
Darnley, say the Lennox MSS., wished to occupy the Hamilton House, near Kirk o’ Field, but Mary persuaded him that ‘there passed a privy way [to] between the palace and it,’ Kirk o’ Field, ‘which she could take without going through the streets.’ The Lennox author adds that, on the night of the murder, Bothwell and his gang ‘came the secret way which she herself was wont to come to the King her husband.’ The story of the secret way recurs in Lennox MSS., and, of course, is nonsense, and was dropped. There was no subterranean passage from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field. Bothwell and the murderers, in their attack on the Kirk o’ Field, had no such convenience for the carriage of themselves and their gunpowder. It is strange that Lennox and his agents, having access to several of the servants of Darnley, including Nelson who survived the explosion, accepted at one time, or expected others to accept, this legend of a secret passage. Edinburgh tradition holds that there was such a tunnel between Holyrood and the Castle, which may be the basis of this fairy-tale.
The tale of the secret passage, then, is told, in the Lennox MSS., as the excuse given by Mary to Darnley for lodging him in Kirk o’ Field, not in the neighbouring house of the Hamiltons. But, in the ‘Book of Articles,’ we read that the Archbishop of St. Andrews was then living in the Hamilton House ‘onely to debar the King fra it.’ The fable of the secret way, therefore, was dropped in the final version prepared by the accusers.
Mary, whether she wrote the Casket Letters or not, was, demonstrably, aware that there was a plot against Darnley, before she brought him to a house accessible to his enemies. It is certain that, hating and desiring to be delivered from Darnley, she winked at a conspiracy of which she was conscious, and let events take their course. This was, to all appearance, the policy of her brother James, ‘the Good Regent Moray;’ and one of Mary’s apologists, Sir John Skelton, is inclined to hold that this was Mary’s attitude. He states the hypothesis thus: ‘that Mary was not entirely unaware of the measures which were being taken by the nobility to secure in one way or other the removal of Darnley; that, if she did not expressly sanction the enterprise, she failed, firmly and promptly, to forbid its execution.’ Hence she was in ‘an equivocal position,’ could not act with firmness and dignity, and in accepting Bothwell could not be accounted a free agent, yielded to force, and, with a heavy heart, ‘submitted to the inevitable.’[114]
THE OLD TOWER, WHITTINGHAM
That Mary knew of the existence of a plot is proved by a letter to her from Morton’s cousin, Archibald Douglas, whose character and career are described in the second chapter, ‘Minor Characters.’ In a letter of 1583, written by Douglas to win (as he did win) favour and support from Mary, during his exile in England, he says that, in January, 1567, about the 18th or 19th, Bothwell and Lethington visited Morton at Whittingham, his own brother’s place, now the seat of Mr. A. J. Balfour. The fact of the visit is corroborated by Drury’s contemporary letter of January 23, 1567.[115] After they had conferred together, Morton sent Archibald Douglas with Bothwell and Lethington to Edinburgh, to learn what answer Mary would make to a proposal of a nature unknown to Archibald, so he says. ‘Which’ (answer) ‘being given to me by the said persons, as God shall be my judge, was no other than these words, “Schaw to the Earl Morton that the Queen will hear no speech of the matter appointed to him,”’ i.e. arranged with him. Now Morton’s confession, made before his execution, was to the effect that Bothwell, at Whittingham, asked him to join the conspiracy to kill Darnley, but that he refused, unless Bothwell could procure for him a written warrant from the Queen. Obviously it was to get this warrant that Archibald Douglas accompanied Lethington and Bothwell to Edinburgh. But Bothwell and Lethington (manifestly after consulting Mary) told Douglas that ‘the Queen will hear no speech of that matter.’ Douglas, though an infamous ruffian, could not have reported to Mary, when attempting, successfully, to win her favour, a compromising fact which she, alone of living people, must have known to be false. Mary was not offended.[116] Taking, then, Morton’s statement that he asked Bothwell, at Whittingham, for Mary’s warrant, with Douglas’s statement to Mary herself, that he accompanied Lethington and Bothwell from Whittingham to Edinburgh, and was informed by them that the Queen ‘would hear no speech of the matter,’ we cannot but believe that ‘the matter’ was mooted to her. Therefore, in January, 1567, she was well aware that something was intended against Darnley by Bothwell, Lethington, and others.[117]
THE WHITTINGHAM TREE
(After a Drawing by Richard Doyle)