The first efforts of Mary and the Council were to throw dust in the eyes of France and Europe. The Council met on the day of Darnley’s death. There were present Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, Atholl, Caithness, Livingstone, Cassilis, Sutherland, the Bishop of Galloway (Protestant), the Bishop of Ross, the treasurer, Flemyng, Bellenden, Bothwell, Argyll, Huntly, and Lethington. Of these the last four were far the most powerful, and were in the plot. They must have dictated the note sent by express to France with the news. The line of defence was that the authors of the explosion had just failed to destroy ‘the Queen and most of the nobles and lords in her suite, who were with the King till near midnight.’ This was said though confessedly the explosion did not occur till about two in the morning. The Council add that Mary escaped by not staying all night at Kirk o’ Field. God preserved her to take revenge. Yet all the Court knew that Mary had promised to be at Holyrood for the night, and the conspirators must have seen her escort returning thither with torches burning.[180] The Lennox MSS., in a set of memoranda, insist that Mary caused a hagbut to be fired, as she went down the Canongate, for a signal to Bothwell and his gang. They knew that she was safe from any explosion at Kirk o’ Field. On the same day, February 10 (11?), Mary, or rather Lethington for Mary, wrote, in Scots, the same tale as that of her Council, to Beaton, her ambassador in Paris. She had just received his letter of January 27, containing a vague warning of rumoured dangers to herself. The warning she found ‘over true’ (it probably arose from the rumour that Darnley and Lennox meant to seize the infant Prince). The explosion had been aimed at her destruction; so the letter said. ‘It wes dressit alsweill for us as for the King:’ she only escaped by chance, or rather because ‘God put it in our hede’ to go to the masque. Now all the world concerned knew that Mary was not in Kirk o’ Field at two in the morning, and Mary knew that all the world knew.[181] To be sure she did not actually write this letter. Who had an interest in this supposed plot of general destruction by gunpowder? Not Lennox and Darnley, of course; not the Hamiltons, not Mary and the Lords who were to be exploded. Only the extreme Protestants, whose leader, Moray, left on the morning of the affair, could have benefited by the gunpowder plot. In Paris, on February 21, the deed was commonly regarded as the work of ‘the heretics, who desire to do the same by the Queen.’[182]