As to Moray’s foreknowledge of Darnley’s murder, can it be denied? He did not deny that he was at Craigmillar during the conference as to ‘dispatching’ Darnley. If the news of the plan for arresting or killing him reached underlings like Hiegait and Walker, could it be hidden from Moray, the man most in Mary’s confidence, and likely to be best served by spies? He glosses over his signature to the band of early October, 1566—the anti-Darnley band—as if it were a mere ‘sign of reconciliation’ which he promised to subscribe ‘before I could be admitted to the Queen’s presence, or have any show of her favour.’ But, when he did sign, he had possessed Mary’s favour for more than three months, and she had even saved him from a joint intrigue of Bothwell and Darnley. In January, 1569, Moray declared that, except the band of early October, 1566, ‘no other band was proposed to me in any wise,’ either before or after Darnley’s murder. And next he says that he would never subscribe any band, ‘howbeit I was earnestly urged and pressed thereto by the Queen’s commandment.’[118] Does he mean that no band was proposed to him, and yet that the Queen did press him to sign a band? Or does he mean that he would never have signed, even if the Queen had asked him to do so? We can never see this man’s face; the fingers through which he looks on at murder hide his shifty eyes.
VI
THE MURDER OF DARNLEY
It is not easy for those who know modern Edinburgh to make a mental picture of the Kirk o’ Field. To the site of that unhappy dwelling the Professors now daily march, walking up beneath the frowning Castle, from modern miles of stone and mortar which were green fields in Mary’s day. The students congregate from every side, the omnibuses and cabs roll by through smoky, crowded, and rather uninteresting streets of shops: the solid murky buildings of the University look down on a thronged and busy populace which at every step treads on history, as Cicero says men do at Athens. On every side are houses neither new enough to seem clean, nor old enough to be interesting: there is not within view a patch of grass, a garden, or a green tree. The University buildings cover the site of Kirk o’ Field, but the ghosts of those who perished there would be sadly at a loss could they return to the scene.
In Mary’s time whoever stood on the grassy crest of the Calton Hill, gazing on Edinburgh, beheld, as he still does, Holyrood at his feet, and, crowning the highest point of the central part of the town, the tall square tower of the church of St. Mary in the Fields, on the limit of the landscape. In going, as Mary often went, from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field, you walked straight out of the palace, and up the Canongate, through streets of Court suburb, with gardens behind the houses. You then reached the gate of the town wall, called the Nether Port, and entered the street of the Nether Bow, which was a continuation of the High Street. By any one of the lanes, or wynds, which cut the Nether Bow at right angles on the left, you reached the Cowgate (the street of palaces, as Alesius, the Reformer, calls it), running from the Castle parallel to the High Street and its continuation, the Nether Bow. From the Cowgate, you struck into one or other of the wynds which led to the grounds of what were, in Mary’s time, the ruined church and houses of the Dominican monastery, or Black Friars, and to Kirk o’ Field.
Beyond this, all is very difficult to explain and understand. The church of Kirk o’ Field, and the quadrangle of houses tenanted, just as in Oxford or Cambridge, by the Prebendaries and Provost of that collegiate church, lay, at an early date, outside of the walls of Edinburgh. This is proved by the very name of the collegiate church, ‘St. Mary in the Fields.’ But by 1531, a royal charter speaks of ‘the College Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Fields, within the walls of the burgh of Edinburgh,’ the city wall having been recently extended in that direction.[119] The monastery of the Black Friars, close to Kirk o’ Field, was also included, by 1531, within the walls of the burgh. But the town wall which encircled Kirk o’ Field and the Black Friars on the south, was always in a ruinous condition. In 1541, we find the Town Council demanding that ‘ane honest substantious wall’ shall be made in another quarter.[120] In 1554, the Provost and Prebendaries of Kirk o’ Field granted part of their grounds to the Duke of Châtelherault, because their own houses had been ‘burned down and destroyed by their auld enemies of England,’ in the invasions of 1544-1547.[121] In 1544-1547, the town wall encircling Kirk o’ Field on the south must also have been partially ruined. Châtelherault built on the ground thus acquired, quite close to Kirk o’ Field, a large new house or château from which, according to George Buchanan, Archbishop Hamilton sent forth ruffians to aid in Darnley’s murder.
By 1557, we find that the town wall, at the point where it encircled the Black Friars, in the vicinity of Kirk o’ Field, was ‘fallen down,’ and was to be ‘reedified and mended.’[122] By August, 1559, the Town Council protest against a common passage through the ‘slap,’ or ‘slop,’ the broken gap, in the Black Friars ‘yard dyke’ (garden wall) ‘at the east end of the block-house.’ This gap, therefore, is to be built up again, ‘conform in work to the town wall next adjacent,’ but it appears that this was never done. When Bothwell went to the murder, he got into the Black Friars grounds, whence he made his way into Darnley’s garden, either by climbing through a ‘slap’ or gap in the wall, or by sending an accomplice through, who opened the Black Friars gate. This ruinous condition of the town wall was partly due to the habitual negligence of the citizens: partly to the destruction which fell, in 1559-1560, on the religious houses and collegiate churches. So, in February, 1560, we find the town treasurer ordered to pull down the walls of the Black Friars, and use the stones to ‘build the town walls therewith.’[123] On August 11, 1564, we again hear of repairing slaps, or gaps, ‘and in especial the new wall at the college, so that no part thereof be climable.’ The college may be Kirk o’ Field, where the burgesses already desired to build a college, the parent of Edinburgh University. On the day after Darnley’s murder (Feb. 11, 1567) the treasurer was ordered ‘to take away the hewen work of the back door of the Provost’s lodging of the Kirk o’ Field, and to build up the same door with lime and sand.’ Conceivably this ‘back door,’ now to be built up and closed, was that door in Darnley’s house which opened through the town wall. Finally, on May 7, 1567, the Treasurer was bidden ‘to build the wall of the town decayed and fallen down on the south side of the Provost of the Kirk o’ Field’s lodging, to be built up of lime and stone, conform to the height and thickness of the new wall elsewhere [ellis] builded, and to pass lineally with the same to the wall of the church yard of the said church, and to leave no door nor entry in the said new wall.’[124]
