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1.Kirk o’ Field Port 5.Ruins of Darnley’s House 8.Grounds of the Black Friars
2.Church of St. Mary-in-the-Fields 6.Darnley’s Body 9.Hamilton House
3.Thieves’ Row 7.Darnley’s Garden 10.Potter Row
4.Door from Darnley’s House into
Thieves’ Row		 11.Town Wall

The whole quadrangle lay amidst wide waste spaces of gardens and trees, with scattered cottages, and with Hamilton House, a hostile house, hard by. Such was the situation of Kirk o’ Field, Church and College quadrangle, as shown by the contemporary plan. The difficulties are caused by the wall, in the chart, running south to north, having Darnley’s house abutting on it at right angles. The old ruined wall, on the other hand, was to the south of the quadrangle, as was the wall of 1647. When or why the wall running from south to north was built, I do not know, possibly after 1559, out of the stones of the Black Friars.[127] The new work was done under James Lindsay, treasurer in 1559, and Luke Wilson, treasurer in 1560. Perhaps the wall running south to north was the work of these two treasurers. At all events, there the wall was, or there it is in the contemporary design, to the confusion of antiquaries, bewildered between the south to north wall of the chart, as given, and the new wall seen in the map of 1647, a wall which was to the south of Kirk o’ Field, while, in the map of 1647, there is no trace of the south to north wall of the chart of 1567.

Having located Darnley’s house, as forming the west side of a small college quadrangle among gardens and trees, we now examine the interior of his far from palatial lodgings.

The two-storied house (the arched vaults on which it probably stood not counting as a story?) was just large enough for the invalid, his servants, and his royal nurse. There was a ‘hall,’ probably long and not wide, there was a lower chamber, used by Mary, which could be entered either from the garden, or from the passage, opened into by the front door, from the quadrangle. Mary’s room had two keys, and one must have locked the door from the passage; the other, the door into the garden. If the former was kept locked, so that no one could enter the room by the usual way, the powder could be introduced, without exciting much attention, by the door opening on the garden. In the chamber above Mary’s, where Darnley lay, there were also a cabinet and a garderobe. There was a cellar, probably the kind of vaulted crypt on which houses of the period were built, like Queen Mary’s House in St. Andrews. From the ‘cellar’ the door, which we have mentioned, led through the town wall into the Thieves’ Row. Whoever has seen Queen Mary’s House at Jedburgh (much larger than Kirk o’ Field), or the Queen’s room at St. Andrews, knows that royal persons, in Scotland, were then content with very small apartments. A servant named Taylor used to share Darnley’s sleeping-room, as was usual; three others, including Nelson, slept in a ‘little gallery,’ which apparently ran at right angles from Darnley’s chamber to the town wall. He had neither his own guard, nor a guard of Lennox men, as at Stirling.

If the rooms were small, the tapestries and velvet were magnificent, and in odd contrast with Mary’s alleged economic plan of taking a door from the hinges and using it as a bath-cover. This last anecdote, by Nelson, appears to be contradicted by Hay of Tala. ‘Paris locked the door that passes up the turnpike to the King’s chamber.’[128] The keys appear to have wandered into a bewildering variety of hands: a superfluous jugglery, if Bothwell, as was said, had duplicate keys.

Mary often visited Darnley, and the Lennox documents give us copious, if untrustworthy, information as to his manner of life. They do not tell us, as Buchanan does, that Mary and the vast unwieldy Lady Reres used to play music and sing in the garden of Kirk o’ Field, in the balmy nights of a Scotch February! But they do contain a copy of a letter, referred to by Buchanan, which Darnley wrote to Lennox three days before his death.

‘My Lord,—I have thought good to write to you by this bearer of my good health, I thank God, which is the sooner come through the good treatment of such as hath this good while concealed their good will; I mean of my love the Queen, which I assure you hath all this while, and yet doth, use herself like a natural and loving wife. I hope yet that God will lighten our hearts with joy that have so long been afflicted with trouble. As I in this letter do write unto your Lordship, so I trust this bearer can satisfy you the like. Thus thanking almighty God of our good hap, I commend your Lordship into his protection.

‘From Edinburgh the vii of February,
‘Your loving and obedient son,
‘Henry Rex.’