Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser [Fraser, Antonia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5258-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

* W. Armstrong Davison, in The Casket Letters, advances the further theory that Darnley was already suffering from syphilis when Queen Mary nursed him, apparently for measles, in April 1565. He states that it was by no means rare in the sixteenth century for a measleslike eruption to be succeeded by a smallpox-type eruption twenty-one months later, and for both to be symptoms of syphilis.3

† The only documents ever produced which were supposed to date from the period before the murder, to prove that the queen enjoyed an adulterous liaison with Bothwell, were the highly dubious Casket Letters. These will be considered in Chapter 20. In order to explain the many inconsistencies in these letters (whose originals have vanished) some sort of theory of interpolation has often been adopted, i.e. genuine letters from Mary interposed with passionate love letters to Bothwell from another woman. If this theory is correct, then the so-called Long Casket Letter, supposed to be written while at Glasgow by the queen to Bothwell (although containing the unnecessary reminder ‘remember you … of the Earl of Bothwell’) might be the draft of another similarly frank letter from Mary describing her feelings for Darnley, interpolated with a genuine love letter to Bothwell from another woman.

‡ There is no trace of St Mary, Kirk o’Field, its quadrangle and the little houses round it in modern Edinburgh. The site of Darnley’s last lodging lies somewhere beneath the Adam-designed quadrangle, which is the central establishment of the university of Edinburgh, off South Bridge Street.

§ By Major-General Mahon, whose Tragedy of Kirk o’Field, 1923, contains by far the most detailed investigation into the geography and circumstances of the events now to be related. Later writers, whether they agree with his conclusions or not, must acknowledge a debt of gratitude for his painstaking consideration of even the minutest aspect of the crime.

‖ It is characteristic of the confused nature of the evidence about Darnley’s death that Buchanan later in his History accused Mary of deliberately having her own bed changed in order to save it from the blast: this contradicted not only his own story in the Book of Articles, but also the deposition of Darnley’s servant Nelson (who said that it was Darnley’s bed the queen had changed). Nelson reported that a new black velvet bed was sent away in favour of an old purple-brown one; in fact the black bed was probably lying at the lodging when Darnley arrived at short notice, and was later changed for Darnley’s favourite royally-ornamented purple-brown bed. The inventories record that this was specially brought down from Holyrood; they record no other exchanges made on a later date.17

a Buchanan’s Book of Articles and his Detection, both luridly accusatory, later tried to turn the whole incident round to the queen’s disadvantage, accusing Mary of trying to work up a quarrel between Darnley and Lord Robert Stewart on this Friday, a fracas to which Moray also was supposed to have been a witness.19 Although the Book of Articles

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