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speaks for itself. Darnley's furred pelisse and pantouffles being near him, and unsinged, indicates the probability that, with the instinctive caution of an invalid dreading an exposure to the cold night-air in his shirt, he had snatched them up when he fled for his life on the first alarm, intending to put them on as soon as opportunity would allow, but that, ere he could do this, he was overtaken by the assassins, and suffocated in the manner described by Melville. A most remarkable confirmation of this conjecture is to be found in a letter from the Pope's nuncio, resident at Paris, communicating to his friend the Grand-duke of Tuscany the following important information on the subject, which he had obtained from Moretta, the Savoyard ambassador to the Court of Holyrood, who was in Edinburgh when this catastrophe occurred :

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"Yesterday arrived here the Père Emondo,1 in company with Monsignore de Moretta, and neither from the one nor the other can the state of things in Scotland be clearly understood, the which at this time are, by the death of their King, so strangely perplexed, that it is doubtful whether they can be soon composed again. . . As to the particulars of the death of the King, Monsignore de Moretta is entirely of opinion that this poor Prince, hearing the noise of people round the house trying false keys to open the outlets, rushed forth himself by a door that opened into the garden in his shirt with a pelisse, to fly from the peril, and there was strangled, and brought out of the garden into a little orchard beyond the wall of the grounds; and then the fire blew up the house to slay all the rest that were within, as they conjecture, because the King was found dead, with his pelisse by his side; and some women, whose sleeping-rooms adjoined the garden, affirm to have heard the King cry-'Ah, my kinsmen (fratelli miei), have mercy on me, for love of Him who had mercy on us all!'"'2

1 Father Edmonds, the Principal of the Society of Jesuits.

2 From the Italian, printed in Prince Labanoff's Recueil des Lettres de Marie Stuart, from the original document preserved in the Archives de Medici, dated March 16, 1567. The Bishop of Mondivi, Cardinal di Laurea, was the Nuncio appointed by the Pope for the Court of Scotland, whom Mary bad excused herself from receiving at the baptism of the Prince her son.

The endearing claim of consanguinity with which the unfortunate consort of Mary Stuart vainly endeavoured to move the hard hearts of the pitiless ruffians to whom he addressed his touching appeal for mercy, proves that they, the actual murderers, were the Douglas gang, his maternal kindred, led to the perpetration of this foul deed either by Morton or Morton's deputy, Archibald Douglas. That night Archibald Douglas went forth from the back-door of his dwelling-house, after supper, clad, under his gown, in a secret, or shirt of light defensive armour, with a steel bonnet on his head, and velvet mulis or slippers on his feet, accompanied by his two servitors, John Binning and Thomas Gairner. Fourteen years later, these men, when convicted of the crime of assisting in the murder of the late King Henry (Darnley), confessed the above particulars, and that they passed to the deed-doing with him,1 adding "that the said Archibald Douglas lost one of his mulis on that occasion"-a circumstance which excited some attention at the time, for, the said mule or slipper being found among the ruins of the King's lodgings at Kirk-of-Field, was known to be his.2 It was subsequently objected by Archibald Douglas, at his collusive trial in 1586, "that he could have no use for velvet slippers when clad in secret armour;" but their use was obviously to muffle his tread as he ascended the stone stairs to the chamber of his victim, which could thus be approached with noiseless steps. He was clearly one of the three whom Powrie mentions "meeting with Bothwell in the Cowgate, with cloaks about their faces and mulis on their feet."3"After Archibald Douglas's return from the perpetration of the deed, he changed his clothes, which were full of clay and foulness, and sent Binning on some errand to a house at the foot of Thropstow's Wynd."4 On the way there, Binning stated "that he met certain mussilit [veiled] men whom he knew not, but suspected to be another party of the assassins, because he thought he recognised the voice of Sir James Balfour's brother, the Provost of Kirk-of-Field, the

? Ibid.

1 Arnott's Criminal Trials. Powrie's Second Examination-in Anderson and Laing's Appendix. 4 Arnott's Criminal Trials.

man from whom the duplicate keys were obtained; and then Mr John Maitland, Abbot of Coldinghame, and brother to Lethington, came in, and, putting his two hands over his own mouth, made a sign to him to keep quiet." Here, then, were the three distinct parties whom Buchanan affirms "past by different ways to the execution of this foul midnight murder."1

A pen-and-ink sketch, slightly tinted with water-colours, of the scene of this startling historic tragedy, taken at

1 Morton, when many years later condemned by the tardy justice of his country to suffer the penalty of the offended laws for his share in the crime, being asked by his ghostly counsellors, Brand and Drury, to tell "whether the King were strangled or blown up by powder," refused to satisfy their curiosity. He had, however, said enough to convict himself of accompliceship, and when the ministers very properly observed, " that it was a dangerous thing for him that his servant and depender was to pass to see so wicked a purpose, and knowing thereof he stayed him not, seeing it would be counted his deed," he coolly answered," Mr Archibald was at that time a depender on the Earl of Bothwell, making court for himself, rather than a depender of mine." The following startling admission, however, proves the guilty intelligence between them-" Mr Archibald then, after the deed was done, showed to me that he was at the deeddoing, and come to the Kirk-of-Field yard with Bothwell and Huntley." On being asked if he received in his company Mr Archibald after the murder, he answered "I did indeed;" a thing too notorious to be denied, because, besides publicly colleaguing with him in many ways, he had made him, knowing he had assisted at Darnley's murder, a Lord of Session, a judge, and employed him in that capacity to assist in procuring the condemnation of the Laird of Ormiston, one of the less guilty followers of Bothwell. The ministers told Morton "they suspected his own part to be more foul than he admitted;" and when he asked "for what reason?" they answered, "Because you, being in authority, howbeit you punished others for that murder, punished not Mr Archibald, whom you knew to be guilty thereof." "I punished him not, indeed," was his prevaricating rejoinder, "neither durst I, for the cause before shown."-Morton's Confession-Bannatyne's Memorials. He had shown no other cause for not doing so, save his own foreknowledge of the design. Yet this was the man who, assuming the attitude of a righteous champion of justice and an avenger of innocent blood, led a rebel army against his hapless Queen, inhumanly displaying a banner before her eyes with the effigies of her murdered consort stretched in death, and the infant Prince kneeling and appealing to God for vengeance on the crime. It was by the hardihood of that device Morton contrived to transfer to the widow of his victim the odium of a crime of which he, having foreknowledge, uttered no word of dissuasion to deter his accomplices from perpetrating. And is it on the oath of a man like this, unsupported by the attestation of even his own servants, or the testimony of his tortured captive, Dalgleish, that the eight letters which he pretended were written by the Queen to Bothwell can be accepted in proof of her guilt? Is there a criminal court in Great Britain where evidence of so suspicious a nature would be received, emanating from such a source?

the time, is preserved in our State Paper Office, and has been engraved and published in Chalmers's "Life of Queen Mary," showing the position in which the dead body of Darnley was found, with his furred pelisse beside him and the corpse of his faithful servant Taylor close by. At a little distance appear the picturesque ruins of the Lady Kirk at Field, also the remains of the Blackfriars' monastery, and the desolate heap of scattered and disjointed stones to which the Provost's house was reduced by the explosive force of the gunpowder that had been lodged in the mines that had been sunk in the vaults and low dark places of the building. The trees, the gardens, and enclosures, and Gothic gateway, are apparently depicted with the most graphic minuteness, and are the more interesting, by enabling us to compare the local features of the place as it then was with its present aspect, the ground being now covered with the stately and commodious buildings of the Edinburgh University, devoted to the purposes of learning and science, and bearing ennobling witness to the progress of civilisation in the southern suburb of the good town of Edinburgh.

A legal document, recently discovered, contains information connected with Darnley's murder too curious to be omitted, proving that nineteen persons, at least, were among the actual murderers; also that they were divided into two parties, a third remaining in reserve. Barbara Martine,

one of the humble neighbours of the Provost's house at Kirkof-Field, being examined on oath before the Privy Council, deposed "that before the crack rose she past to the window of the house where she dwells in the Friar Wynd, near the Master of Maxwell's lodging, and heard eight men come forth to the Cowgate at the Friar Gate, and pass up the Friar Wynd. Thereafter the crack rose, and eleven men came forth, of whom two had clear things (bright armour, probably) on them, and past down the passage that comes from the Friar's, and so into the town. She cried upon the eleven as they past by, and called them traitors, and said

VOL. V.

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they had been at some evil turn.""1 Not less loyal and courageous than this stout-hearted Scottish matron of low degree was her neighbour," Meg Crokat, the spouse of John Skirling, servant to the Archbishop of St Andrews, dwelling under the Master of Maxwell's lodging,"2 who came forward on the same occasion to depose" that she was lying in her house betwixt her twa twins when the crack rose; she believed it had been the house above her, and came running to her door, in her sark, alone, and even as she came forth at the door, there came forth at the Friar Gate eleven men, and she past to speak to one of them, and clekit [caught] him by the gown, which was of silk; and speirit [inquired] at him where the crack was? But they made no answer, and ran fast away, four of them up the Friar Wynd, and the other seven down the Cowgate Port. When they past by her, Barbara Martine was flyting [scolding] with them, and calling them 'traitors."" After that, Meg Crokat deposed “that she ran down to the Cowgate and wakened the folks, and afterwards to the mansion of the Archbishop of St Andrews, where they appeared to be in some trouble." There is also a fragment of the examination of John Pitcairn, Chirurgeon to the Archer Guard, who, though dwelling in the Blackfriars' Wynd, declared " he neither heard nor knew anything of the matter till four o'clock in the morning, when the [servant] of Seigneur Francis,” whom he describes as "a little lean fellow, came and cried upon the deponent, and desired him to [hasten] to his master, which he did, and remained with him till about six" -and there the fragment ends.3

But while the manner of Darnley's death remained an inscrutable mystery to all honest men in Scotland, the particulars of his last moments were known to the English

1 Depositions for the King's Slaughter, Feb. 11, 1566-7-Hopeton MSS., General Register House, Edinburgh, inedited. Communicated by the late Alexander Macdonald, Esq. 2 Ibid.

3 The Seigneur Francis, who appears to have been taken suddenly ill, and requiring medical aid, was Queen Mary's Italian Master of the Household, Francisco Busso, who accompanied her from France, having lived in her service ever since her marriage with the Dauphin Francis, and was highly esteemed by her for his fidelity. His name was afterwards placarded among those denounced as accomplices in Darnley's murder, but the accu

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