588. Mary, Queen of Scots: The Mystery of the Exploding Mansion (Part 5)

0:10Madame, my ears have been so deafened, and my understanding so grieved, and my heart so affrighted, to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my slain cousin, that I scarcely have the wits to write about it. I cannot dissemble that I am more sorrowful for you than for him. Oh, madame, I would not do the office of faithful cousin or affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than employed myself in preserving your honour. I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about, which is that you will look through your fingers at the revenging of this deed, and that you do not take measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in doing it.

1:01I exhort you, I counsel you, and I beseech you to take this thing so much to heart that you will not fear to touch even him whom you have nearest to you, if the thing touches him, and that no persuasion will prevent you from making an example out of this to the world, that you are both a noble princess and a loyal wife. Praying the Creator to give you the grace to recognize this traitor and protect yourself from him as from the ministers of Satan. With my very heartfelt recommendations to you, very dear sister. So that is a letter, Tom written by Elizabeth the first on the 24th of February 1567 she's writing to Mary Queen of Scots she is writing following the murder two weeks previously of Mary's husband and Elizabeth's cousin Scotland's leading cock chick I believe is the technical term Lord Darnley so this is an amazing document making all kinds of slightly passive-aggressive allegations.

2:12And it's a document that led Antonia Fraser in her wonderful book about Mary, Queen of Scots, to describe the murder of Lord Darnley as the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history. Now, we always love a murder, and we love in particular a Scottish murder. A murder. Yeah. Just give us the outline of the crime before we get going. So we've done JFK, and I guess probably that would be the most celebrated murder in history, but it hasn't been around for centuries and centuries like this one has. Antonio Fraser is absolutely right. This is a murder people have been going over for century after century after century.

2:51And I think that the barest outline of the crime makes clear why. So at 2 a.m. on the 10th of February, 1567, the house on the edge of Edinburgh, where Lord Darnley, so Mary Queen of Scots husband, had been staying, was blown to smithereens, blown sky high. Strangely, however, Darnley had not perished in this explosion. Instead, he and his valet were found without any marks of injury in a nearby garden. They had been laid out very neatly and next to them was a chair, a rope and a thick fur cloak. So all the elements of an astonishing murder mystery. Agatha Christie style. Very. So some obvious questions.

3:47Who killed Darnley? How did they kill him? Where did they kill him? And what is going on with the chair and the rope and the cloak? But of course, the most sensitive question of all is the one that Elizabeth I in that letter you read has directly fixed on, which is, is Mary complicit in the murder? Because Elizabeth says, this is what people are saying and you have to take steps to ensure that this mud doesn't stick. Another specific point that Elizabeth is making in that letter. She is hinting at the gossip that Mary had not only planned the murder, but had done so in association with one particular accomplice, who Elizabeth doesn't name in her letter, but describes as being like a minister of Satan.

4:39And who Elizabeth is alluding to, we will come to in due course, because we're going to be doing a deep dive into the murder and then trying to solve the riddle of what happened. But just to emphasise, what Elizabeth is doing in that letter is echoing claims and counterclaims that are already raging like a live fire in Scotland and within only a few months will plunge the entire kingdom into civil war. And massive spoiler alert, it will ultimately result in the downfall of Mary, her imprisonment, her forced abdication, her flight to England, and I suppose in the very long run, her execution at Fothering A.

5:22So that argument about, did Mary do it, has raged for, well, for centuries effectively, hasn't it? And you made the point in your notes, Tom, that the two great books, well, two of the great books about Mary Green of Scots, I mean, there are multiple very good books, but one of them, Antonia Fraser's. Antonia Fraser that thinks that Mary is absolutely a brilliant person who would never have done it, doesn't she? That soft heart, that horror of bloodshed, that inclination towards mercy. I mean, blowing up her husband and then murdering him in a very Baroque way in a garden is the last thing that Mary would have done.

5:57On the other hand, somebody you've mentioned a lot in this series, Jenny Wormold, great historian of early modern Scotland. She absolutely despises Mary Queen of Scots. If there's a chance to stick the dagger in, she'll take it. Yeah. And she basically says, if she didn't murder Darnley, she was, and I quote, almost the only member of Edinburgh's political society who knew nothing about it. So basically, it reflects even more badly on her, if she didn't murder him, then if she did. Yeah, essentially. I mean, those two books kind of articulate the very polarised position. But since they were written, a third study of Darnley's murder has come out, which I think provides a solution to the crime that, if not exactly definitive, because at the distance of however long it is, it's hard to do that.

6:44But I think it is as definitive a solution as we are likely to get. This is an account in John Guy's biography of Mary, My Heart is My Own, which was published in 2004 and was the inspiration for the Saoirse Ronan film. What Guy did, he's a brilliant scholar of the Tudors and 16th century more generally, and he has gone back and looked at all the original documents in a way that hadn't been done before. Amazing to think of it. Most of these documents are English, reports written chiefly to Cecil. In the Victorian period, they were collected and bunged into the kind of enormous, vast, leather-bound volumes that Victorian archivists absolutely loved.

7:30Lots of them were miscatalogued, misinterpreted. The result of that has been that their provenance has often been obscured, the dates in which they were written, certain key texts have been overlooked. And so Guy has done the hard yards and we reap the benefits because essentially we will be drawing very heavily on Guy's work for our account of Darnley's murder. So before we get into the murder, Tom, let's set the scene a little bit. We ended last time, Mary has given birth to Lord Darnley's son. So I'm guessing most people will have heard the previous episodes in this series. So Mary, Queen of Scots, slightly beleaguered.

8:06Lord Darnley, an absolutely terrible man. You described him as one of the worst men we've ever talked about, I think. No, I didn't say that. So he's not one of the worst men as in kind of Himmler. Right. He's not like that. He's not in Himmler's League. Oh my gosh. That's high praise. But he's kind of like the worst kind of person that you'd meet at a university disco at St. Andrews. Yeah. Red trousers. You said, you know, cock chick. Yeah. That's what he is. He's probably the biggest cock chick in British history. By the way, that's not us being rude. That's Scottish. that's a Scottish source right yeah that's authentic 16th century slang yeah so anyway Mary has given birth to his son the future James VI of Scotland big friend of the rest of history tongue too big for his mouth loves a witch and she's done that she gave birth to him it was maximum security in Edinburgh Castle and the reason for that was that three months before the birth of James her secretary David Rizzio the Italian bloke had been murdered in Holyrood, in her private quarters, in ludicrous circumstances.

9:12And the conspirators had included her chancellor, who's this sinister and sort of conspiratorial Machiavelli called the Earl of Morton. There's her secretary of state, William Maitland. And then Lord Darnley, her own husband, has been in on it. And just to remind ourselves, she dealt with them in different ways. And she's So Morton, all of those guys, she'd exiled effectively to England. Then she'd confiscated their lands. Maitland has been disgraced because he didn't take part in the actual murder. So his punishment's not as harsh. And Darnley, I mean, this is bonkers. She basically used her feminine wiles to persuade him to change sides.

9:53She promised him access to her bedchamber and her person. Anyway, so all sweetness and light for Mary. She's won the day. Or has she? Or has she? I mean, the key problem she faces is that Darnley remains a complete nightmare. You know, he's a massive loose cannon. And also in his personal behaviour, he's terrible. He is very, very disrespectful to her, just a kind of awful person. So an example of this is that in August, so by now Mary has recovered from childbirth, she and Darnley, they want to go hunting and they go to a place called Tracker House in the borders centre of very famous hunting ground.

10:30But it turns out to be a disaster because actually the deer are vanishing. The woods are starting to be chopped down. There isn't enough for Darnley to enjoy a good hunt. And he gets very cross about this. And one night he just gets spectacularly drunk. I mean, he's always drunk, but this time he's really badly drunk. And he leans over to Mary and says, we're going to go bloody, you know, we're going to go hunt deer tomorrow and you're bloody well going to come, right? And Mary doesn't want to do it. And she whispers in his ear dramatic news. She says she thinks that she may be pregnant again.

11:01And Darnley doesn't care. He reveals this to everyone in the hall. He says, never mind, if we lose this one, we shall make another. And the Lord of Trakair, his host, is appalled by this and rebukes him and tells him that he doesn't talk like a Christian. And Darnley, he snaps his fingers in Lord Trakair's face. What, ought we not to work a mare well when she is with foe? And this goes down like a lead balloon with Lord Trakair, with Mary's attendants and with Mary herself. And she seems to have been so offended by this that she breaks the holiday off and leaves early. She's quite right. Yeah, I think she is.

11:39Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I thought he was a bad man, but now that I've heard him speak. That's exactly how he spoke. I think he's even worse than I had imagined. Not quite as bad as Himmler still, but maybe nudging up there. Yeah, he's in the medals. He's on the podium, isn't he? Anyway, so Mary, understandably, she goes back to Edinburgh, to Holyrood, and to her baby, little James, who is described by the English ambassador as being well proportioned and like to prove a godly prince. I mean, hasn't looked at his tongue, obviously. And Mary is so anxious about what Darnley might get up to that she moves him from Holyrood to Stirling.

12:16And en route, James is guarded by 500 musketeers. And of course, Stirling is the very castle where Mary's mother, Mary of Guise, had taken her to keep her for safekeeping. And what Mary is worried about, I think, is that Darnley might seize James and appoint himself as regent. And that would then enable him essentially, perhaps even to imprison Mary, certainly to kind of sideline her and effectively rule Scotland as regent until James comes of age. So if Mary has control of James, then essentially she's blocking that option off for Darnley. Mary recognises that the issue is what it's always been, which is that Darnley is not content with his status as a kind of a consort, that he wants to be king.

13:08He wants to be the King of Scotland, which Mary had promised him and then had kind of changed her mind. And because of this, Darnley is endlessly plotting. He's endlessly coming up with schemes. So he's not just plotting to make himself King of Scotland. Madly, he also wants to make himself King of England. He's come up with, I mean, just such a mad scheme. He wants to capture Scarborough. Like Harold Hardrada. Yeah. So Scarborough is a rather, I mean, it's very picturesque, very attractive. It has a wonderful cricket festival, but it's not one of the great strongholds of England. I think it's fair to say.

13:44It's a kind of fishing village on the Yorkshire coast. And the other stronghold he wants to get is the Scilly Isles, which are an archipelago off the southwest corner of Cornwall. And his plan is that he's going to capture these places and then he's going to import Catholic armies from Europe. And he will then launch an invasion of England with these armies from Scarborough and the Scilly Isles. And it's completely mad. We should actually remind listeners that Adanley is Catholic. So this is part of the mix as well. So this plot falls through, is absolutely stillborn. He's humiliated by this. And so he then has a massive strop and announces that he is going to leave Mary.

14:21He's had enough of her and he's going to go and settle abroad. And people might think, well, that's quite a good solution, isn't it? Well, it isn't. Firstly, because it would be very humiliating for Mary and by extension, Scotland. But also it would be a nightmare for the Protestant lords because the last thing that they want is a Catholic with a claim to the throne of Scotland, making mischief for them with the Catholic powers of France and Spain or whatever on the continent. And so they are irate about it. Mary is appalled. She spends a whole night trying to make him see sense, saying, you know, this is mad.

14:56Please don't do this. He refuses. And so she summons the Privy Council and she orders Darnley to appear before the Privy Council. And the Privy Council asks Darnley to explain, you know, What are you up to? What are you doing here? He can't really give a credible answer because basically his answer is, oh, you know, I'm cross. You know, you're not treating me right. Yeah, I'm going off on a gap yard. I mean, that's basically his pitch. And the Privy Council are so kind of stunned and appalled by what they've heard from him. They write officially to Catherine de' Medici in France and say, look, this guy is a lunatic, have nothing to do with him.

15:34And if he does come to France and tries to set up, a royal court in exile or to create mischief or whatever. Just do not touch him. And this, I think, is where the notion that he is a lunatic starts to come. Because Elizabeth, in that letter that you quoted, refers to him as being mad. And I think that this is becoming part of the diplomatic chatter. He's such an international embarrassment that saying that he's mad is less of a humiliation than saying, well, we just can't control him. So with Darnley moving towards the sort of margins, does that mean that Mary now has to rely on a lot of people that she's previously fallen out with?

16:11So for example, if she's talking to the French, her foreign policy expert is this bloke, Maitland, who was her Secretary of State, who had been disgraced after the Rizzio murder. Yeah, he had, but I think he'd always basically been Team Mary. And I think Mary knows that. And as you say, I mean, she needs his advice. So he's brought out of his disgrace. He's effectively pardoned and he's restored to his post as Secretary of State. But there is one condition and that is that Maitland is reconciled with the one Scottish lord on whom Mary is now relying more than any other because he has proved himself consistently loyal.

16:47and this is the Earl of Bothwell. And Bothwell is this swaggering, muscle-bound, got a tremendous ginger moustache. Very fond of a punch-up, I think it's fair to say. But he's been at Mary's back for a decade and more because he's stood behind Mary of Guise, her mother, when she'd been in trouble. Bothwell had rallied to her cause in the wake of Rizzio's murder and Bothwell had helped to drive Morton and his fellow conspirators into exile. Bothwell, though, a very formidable man, is on the receiving end, isn't he? That autumn. I mean, the most Scottish thing that's ever happened. He's been attacked, left with life-threatening injuries by a man who's called...

17:34Come on. What's he called, Dominic? Yeah. He's called Little Jock Elliot. Yeah. Surely he played for Dunferlin in the 1980s. Yeah. So Little Jock Elliot is a notorious reaver. Of course he is. The reavers are the bandits who infest the border regions between England and Scotland, and particularly this region called the Debatable Lands, which is a stretch of the border. and the hermitage which is bothwell's ancestral pile is absolutely at the center of the debatable lands i love the fact that after 700 episodes and people have been like when are you going to do scottish history do some scottish history we could have done the scottish enlightenment we could have chosen any element but instead we chose like people head-butting each other in debatable lands called little jock because we absolutely wanted to to lean into their to their sense of what Scotland is.

18:33I mean, just to reassure Scottish listeners, the debatable lands are the most lawless and bandit ridden corner, not just in Scotland, but in all of Britain. So we are emphasising that. And this clearly is why Bothwell is so given to violence, is that you have to be violent to hold your own in this kind of landscape. So yeah, so he's attacked and left for dead, covered with all kinds of wounds. The news is brought to Mary, who at the time is in Jedburgh, which is about 25 miles away to the east. She's on Assizes, so she's going around hearing complaints from her subjects, basically showing herself doing her royal duties.

19:09The gossip will be, that is reported later, is that the moment she hears the news that Bothwell has been attacked, she leaves Jedburgh and gallops off alone to the hermitage. This is not true. She waits for a week because she still has the Assizes to hear, and nor does she ride there alone. So, Morrie, her half-brother, he goes with her. Maitland is there, a large retinue. But even so, I mean, it is a startling feat of horsemanship because it's 25 miles there over really very rough terrain. I mean, I've been there and seen it and I respect Mary very highly for having travelled that far. She spends two hours by Bothwell's bedside and it becomes clear that Bothwell isn't going to die, that he's on the road to recovery.

19:49And then they ride back. So, that is a full and active day. It turns out to be too much for Mary. She gets back to Jedborough and she falls very, very dangerously ill. Whether it's overexertion, if she had been pregnant, she mentioned this to Darnley, I think by this point she's lost the baby, so it may be the after effects of a miscarriage. I'm not sure. Certainly, her life is feared for. At one point, she lies in bed for half an hour. I quote, eyes closed, mouth fast, and feet and arms stiff and cold. The Earl of Moray, her half-brother, who I think is consumed with resentment that she is the queen and he's not the king, you know, an accident of his illegitimacy.

20:29He starts laying hands on all her silver plate and rings. So it's like Henry V making off with the crown before his father is dead. And Mary doesn't die because she has a very skillful French doctor and he is able to kind of bring her back from the brink of death. And two weeks on from when it seemed like she was going to die. She's ready to continue on her way. And the impact of this near-death experience is very profound. I think for Mary, I think that she really starts to think, what kind of kingdom am I going to leave behind? It generates a massive anxiety spike among the Scottish nobility.

21:05They don't want a change of regime. They don't want Darnley on the loose. They are worried that it will result in anarchy. And so they are very committed to keeping Mary on the throne and ensuring that Darnley doesn't cause her too much trouble. And the question then is, well, how are we going to deal with Darnley? I mean, how are we going to make sure that Mary isn't kind of embroiled in endless trouble from him? What on earth could they possibly do? What could we do? And it is Maitland, the Secretary of State, who was the guy who had first suggested the murder of Rizzio in very kind of subtle, insinuating terms, who again now starts to broach the possibility maybe of another murder.

21:53So he even goes so far as to kind of put this into writing. So he writes to the Scottish ambassador in Paris shortly after Mary has had this brush with death. It is a heartbreak for her to think that he should be her husband and how to be free of him, she sees no way out. But obviously, he is suggesting that he might. He is travelling with Mary from Jedburgh and they go to a place called Craig Miller Castle. And they arrive there on the 20th of November. It's just south of Edinburgh. And it's laid as Catholic, which means that he is absolutely reliable. I mean, he's completely team Mary. And Mary gets there and she then falls ill again.

22:38And so all the lords in her retinue, which include Maitland, Moray, and by this time Bothwell, because he's risen up from his sickbed, he's covered in scars, but he's kind of rough and tough. They all have time while she's lying in her sickbed to discuss what might be done with Darnley. And when Mary recovers, they go to see her all except for Moray, who by this point is worried at the way in which the conversation is turning and doesn't really want to be a part of it. But Maitland and Bothwell and all the other lads, they go to Mary and they say, look, you have got to divorce Darnley. Moray does not think that she should divorce Darnley because that would just leave him on the loose.

23:20But all the others think, yeah, let's go for it. Mary listens to them and she kind of agrees in principle, but her anxiety obviously is that it wouldn't be damaging to James. She says, I will have it provided it is not prejudicial to my son. And then she asks, well, is Moray, does he agree to this? Because I noticed he's not here. And Maitland answers, I am assured he will look through his fingers there too, and will behold our doings saying nothing to the same. In other words, he's just going to let us kind of get on with it. Yeah. And obviously if it was just a divorce, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

23:57But that implies that this may be more than a divorce, that it may be a slightly more permanent separation, shall we say. That is a hint that Maitland then drops to Mary, which Mary becomes very agitated. And she presses Maitland, well, what exactly do you mean? And she goes on to say, I will that ye do nothing whereto any spot may be laid to my honour or conscience. And therefore, I pray you rather let the matter be in the state as it is, i.e. don't murder him. and for now let's leave the whole question of divorce to one side. But the clock is ticking a little bit, isn't it? Because they're going to christen James their son and I suppose if Darnley had turned up to that and sort of asserted himself as James' father that might have slightly changed the game but very foolishly it happens at Stirling, doesn't it?

24:4717th of December. Yeah. And Darnley has a massive tantrum and refuses to come because he's crossed that he's not king. Yes. such poor behaviour to miss the christening of your own son because you know you can't wear a crown yeah yeah so he's not there there is a man on hand who mary can turn to to take down his place and this is the much scarred and mustachioed earl of bothwell you know he's got to look smart for the occasion and so mary makes sure to provide him with a very fine outfit of kind of gorgeous blue clothes. And so Bothwell is strutting around looking tremendous. And of course, this is much noted.

25:26People observe that Darnley isn't there, but Bothwell's looking great in his suit. But even Bothwell refuses to attend the christening. And so does Moray, Bothwell's old rival, Mary's half-sister, because they're Protestants. And the ceremony, the baptism, is a Catholic one. So it might look as though the whole thing has been a disaster. Darnley's not there. Bothwell is, you know, creating gossip. Bothwell and Moray aren't attending the baptism. But actually, it's been a triumph behind the scenes. Because what has been happening while the Lords have been plotting what to do about Darnley is that Mary, you know, I said that, you know, her mind has really been concentrated.

26:05She's really thinking, well, what do I want from the future? And so she has written to Elizabeth in England, queen to queen, not going through Maitland, not going through Cecil. She says to Elizabeth, look, I've very nearly died and I've been worrying about my son. What I request is that if I die, would you become James's protector, which in effect means becoming James's foster mother. Elizabeth is very touched by this and she accepts. As a token of this, she agrees to be James's godmother, even though the baptism ceremony is a Catholic one. And she sends Mary this magnificent bejeweled font of solid gold.

26:47And the detente between the two queens, relations between them had been quite tense. It's now sufficient that they can continue to discuss policy without recourse to their respective ministers and begin privately negotiating over what had always been Mary's ultimate dream, namely to be acknowledged by Elizabeth as heir apparent to the throne of England. Wow, that's looking good for Mary. It is looking good for Mary. And it was her illness that precipitated this kind of diplomatic breakthrough, you know, this private conversation. And I think also as part of this, Mary is thinking, I'm reconciled with Elizabeth.

27:25Why don't I get everybody else to be reconciled? So on Christmas Eve, she formally pardons the Rizzio plotters. So that's Morton and all that gang. On the 6th of January, she allows Maitland to marry Posh Mary, the one of the four Marys who Maitland had been desperately in love with despite the 20-year age gap. And on the 9th of January, Morton crosses from Berwick into Scotland. He is home. And on the 14th of January, Morton and Maitland meet at a place called Whittingham Castle, which is again a few miles a ride from Edinburgh, all these castles dotted around the capital. and present for their meeting is their old adversary from the Rizzio plot, the man who Mary had turned to when Rizzio got murdered, the Earl of Bothwell.

28:13So amazing. Two different groups of people meeting up to discuss things. I mean, what could they be discussing, these three men? While all that's happening, what's happened to Darnley? He refused to come to the baptism of his own son. Has he just been off hunting or has he been plotting something more sinister? Well, he's returned to his plotting. His plot is exactly what Mary's been worried he might do, which is to abduct James and to imprison her. And so she laments this and writes to Maitland, for the king, our husband, always we perceive him occupied and busy enough to have inquisition of our doings.