Asked as to familiarities between Bothwell and Mary, he said, on Bothwell’s information, that Lady Reres used to bring him, late at night, to Mary’s room; and that Bothwell bade him never let Mary know that Lady Bothwell was with him in Holyrood! Paris now remembered that, in the long conversation in the hole between two doors, Bothwell had told him not to put Mary’s bed beneath Darnley’s, ‘for that is where I mean to put the powder.’ He disobeyed. Mary made him move her bed, and he saw that she was in the plot. Thereon he said to her, ‘Madame, Monsieur de Boiduel told me to bring him the keys of your door, and that he has an inclination to do something, namely to blow the King into the air with powder, which he will place here.’
This piece of evidence has, by some, been received with scepticism, which is hardly surprising. Paris places the carrying of a letter (about the plot to make Lord Robert kill Darnley?) on Thursday night. It ought to be Friday, if it is to agree with Cecil’s Journal: ‘Fryday. She ludged and lay all nycht agane in the foresaid chalmer, and frome thence wrayt, that same nycht, the letter concerning the purpose of the abbott of Halyrudhouse.’ On the same night, Bothwell told Paris to inform Mary that he would not sleep till he achieved his purpose, ‘were I to trail a pike all my life for love of her.’ This means that the murder was to be on Friday, which is absurd, unless Bothwell means to wake for several nights. Let us examine the stories told by Paris about the key, or keys, of Mary’s room. In the first statement, Paris was asked by Bothwell at the Conference between Two Doors, for the key of Mary’s room. This was on Wednesday or Thursday. On Friday, Bothwell asked again for the key, and said the murder was fixed for Sunday, which it was not, but for Saturday. On Saturday, Bothwell again demands that key, after dinner. He says that he has duplicates, from James Balfour, of all the keys. Paris takes the key, remaining last in Mary’s room at Kirk o’ Field, as she leaves it to go to Holyrood. Paris keeps the key, and returns to Kirk o’ Field. Sandy Durham, Darnley’s servant, asks for the key. Paris replies that keys are the affair of the Usher. ‘Well,’ says Durham, ‘since you don’t want to give it to me!’ So, clearly, Paris kept it. On Sunday night, Bothwell bade Paris go to the Queen’s room in Kirk o’ Field, ‘and when Bowton, Tala, and Ormistoun shall have entered, and done what they want to do, you are to leave the room, and come to the King’s room and thence go where you like.... The rest can do without you’ (in answer to a remonstrance), ‘for they have keys enough.’ Paris then went into the kitchen of Kirk o’ Field, and borrowed and lit a candle: meanwhile Bowton and Tala entered the Queen’s room, and deposited the powder. Paris does not say that he let them in with the key, which he had kept all the time; at least he never mentions making any use of it, though of course he did.
In the second statement, Paris avers that he took the keys (the number becomes plural, or dual) on Friday, not on Saturday, as in the first statement, and not after the Queen had left the room (as in the first statement), but while she was dressing. He carried them to Bothwell, who compared them with other, new, false keys, examined them, and said ‘They are all right! take back these others.’ During the absence of Paris, the keys were missed by the Usher, Archibald Beaton, who wanted to let Mary out into the garden, and Mary questioned Paris aloud, on his return. This is not probable, as, by his own second statement, he had already told her, on Wednesday or Thursday, that Bothwell had asked him for the keys, as he wanted to blow Darnley sky high. She would, therefore, know why Paris had the keys of her room, and would ask no questions.[168] On Saturday, after dinner, Bothwell bade him take the key of Mary’s room, and Mary also told him to do so. He took it. Thus, in statement II., he has his usual De Foe-like details, different from those equally minute in statement I. He takes the keys, or key, at a different time, goes back with them in different circumstances, is asked for them by different persons, and takes a key twice, once on Friday, once on Saturday, though Bothwell, having duplicates that were ‘all right’ (elles sont bien), did not need the originals. As to these duplicates, Bowton declared that, after the murder, he threw them all into a quarry hole between Holyrood and Leith.[169] Tala declared that Paris had a key of the back door.[170] Nelson says that Beaton, Mary’s usher, kept the keys: he and Paris.[171]
Paris, of course under torture or fear of torture, said whatever might implicate Mary. On Friday night, in the second statement, Paris again carried letters to Bothwell; if he carried them both on Thursday and Friday, are both notes in the Casket Letters? The Letter of Friday was supposed to be that about the affair of Lord Robert and Darnley. On Saturday Mary told Paris to bid Bothwell send Lord Robert and William Blackadder to Darnley’s chamber ‘to do what Bothwell knows, and to speak to Lord Robert about it, for it is better thus than otherwise, and he will only have a few days’ prison in the Castle for the same.’ Bothwell replied to Paris that he would speak to Lord Robert, and visit the Queen. This was on Saturday evening (au soyr), after the scene, whatever it was or was not, between Darnley and Lord Robert on Saturday morning.[172] As to that, Mary ‘told her people in her chamber that Lord Robert had enjoyed a good chance to kill the King, because there was only herself to part them.’ Lennox in his MSS. avers that Moray was present, and ‘can declare it.’ Buchanan says that Mary called in Moray to separate her wrangling husband and brother, hoping that Moray too would be slain! Though the explosion was for Sunday night, Mary, according to Paris, was still urging the plan of murder by Lord Robert on Saturday night, and Bothwell was acquiescing.
The absurd contradictions which pervade the statements of Paris are conspicuous. Hume says: ‘It is in vain at present to seek improbabilities in Nicholas Hubert’s dying confession, and to magnify the smallest difficulty into a contradiction. It was certainly a regular judicial paper, given in regularly and judicially, and ought to have been canvassed at the time, if the persons whom it concerned had been assured of their own innocence.’ They never saw it: it was authenticated by no judicial authority: it was not ‘given in regularly and judicially,’ but was first held back, and then sent by Moray, when it suited his policy, out of revenge on Lethington. Finally, it was not ‘a dying confession.’ Dying confessions are made in prison, or on the scaffold, on the day of death. That of Paris ‘took God to record, at the time of his death’ (August 15), ‘that this murder was by your’ (the Lords’) ‘counsel, invention, and drift committed,’ and also declared that he ‘never knew the Queen to be participant or ware thereof.’ So says Lesley, but we have slight faith in him.[173] He speaks in the same sentence of similar dying confessions by Tala, Powrie, and Dalgleish.
I omit the many discrepant accounts of dying confessions accusing or absolving the Queen. Buchanan says that Dalgleish, in the Tolbooth, confessed the Exchequer House fabliau, and that this is duly recorded, but it does not appear in his Dying Confession printed in the ‘Detection.’ In his, Bowton says that ‘the Queen’s mind was acknowledged thereto.’ The Jesuits, in 1568, were informed that Bowton, at his trial, impeached Morton and Balfour, and told Moray that he spared to accuse him, ‘because of your dignity.’[174] These statements about dying confessions were bandied, in contradictory sort, by both sides. The confession of Morton, attested, and certainly not exaggerated, by two sympathetic Protestant ministers, is of another species, and, as far as it goes, is evidence, though Morton obviously does not tell all he knew. The part of Paris’s statement about the crime ends by saying that Huntly came to Bothwell at Holyrood, late on the fatal night, and whispered with him, as Bothwell changed his evening dress, after the dance at Holyrood, for a cavalry cloak and other clothes. Bothwell told Paris that Huntly had offered to accompany him, but that he would not take him. Morton, in his dying confession, declared that Archibald Douglas confessed that he and Huntly were both present: contradicting Paris as to Huntly.
The declarations of Paris were never published at the time. On November 8, 1571, Dr. Wilson, who was apparently translating something—the ‘Detection’ of Buchanan, or the accompanying Oration (‘Actio’), into sham Scots—wrote to Cecil, ‘desiring you to send unto me “Paris” closely sealed, and it shall not be known from whence it cometh.’ Cecil was secretly circulating libels on Mary, but ‘Paris’ was not used. His declarations would have clashed with the ‘Detection’ as written when only Bothwell and Mary were to be implicated. The truth, that there was a great political conspiracy, including some of Mary’s accusers, and perhaps Morton, Lindsay, and Ruthven (for so Paris makes Bothwell say), would have come out. The fact that Moray ‘would neither help nor hinder,’ and sneaked off, would have been uttered to the world. The glaring discrepancies would have been patent to criticism. So Cecil withheld documents unsuited to his purpose of discrediting Mary.[175]
The one valuable part of Paris’s declarations concerns the carrying of a Glasgow letter. And that is only valuable if we supply the accusers with possible dates, in place of their own impossible chronology, and if we treat as false their tale[176] that Bothwell ‘lodged in the town’ when he returned from Calendar to Edinburgh. The earlier confessions, especially those of Tala, were certainly mutilated, as we have seen, and only what suited the Lords came out. That of Paris was a tool to use against Lethington, but, as it also implicated Morton, Lindsay, and Ruthven, with Argyll and Huntly, who might become friends of Morton and Moray, Paris’s declaration was a two-edged sword, and, probably, was little known in Scotland. In England it was judiciously withheld from the public eye. Goodall writes (1754): ‘I well remember that one of our late criminal judges, of high character for knowledge and integrity, was, by reading it [Paris’s statement], induced to believe every scandal that had been thrown out against the Queen.’ A criminal judge ought to be a good judge of evidence, yet the statements of Paris rather fail, when closely inspected, to carry conviction.
Darnley, in fact, was probably strangled by murderers of the Douglas and Lethington branches of the conspiracy. On the whole, it seems more probable that the powder was placed in Mary’s room than not, though all contemporary accounts of its effects make against this theory. As touching Mary, the confessions are of the very slightest value. The published statements, under examination, of Powrie, Dalgleish, Tala, and Bowton do not implicate her. That of Bowton rather clears her than otherwise. Thus: the theory of the accusers, supported by the declaration of Paris, was that, when the powder was ‘fair in field,’ properly lodged in Mary’s room, under that of Darnley, Paris was to enter Darnley’s room as a signal that all was prepared. Mary then left the room, in the time required ‘to say a paternoster.’ But Bowton affirmed that, as he and his fellows stored the powder, Bothwell ‘bade them make haste, before the Queen came forth of the King’s house, for if she came forth before they were ready, they would not find such commodity.’ This, for what it is worth, implies that no signal, such as the entrance of Paris, had been arranged for the Queen’s departure. The self-contradictory statements of Paris can be torn to shreds in cross-examination, whatever element of truth they may contain. The ‘dying confessions’ are contradictorily reported, and all the reports are worthless. The guilt of some Lords, and their alliance with the other accusers, made it impossible for the Prosecution to produce a sound case. As their case stands, as it is presented by them, a jury, however convinced, on other grounds, of Mary’s guilt, would feel constrained to acquit the Queen of Scots.