Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542-1587; Queens -- Scotland -- Biography; Scotland -- History -- Mary Stuart, 1542-1567
He says: ‘How she used him (Darnley) at Craigmillar, my said Lord Regent
(Moray), who was there present, can witness. One thing I am constrainit to
declare, which came to my knowledge by credible persons, which was that
certain of her familiar and privy counsellors, of her faction and
Bothwell’s, should present her a letter at that house, subscribed with
their hands, the effect of which letter was to apprehend the King my son’s
person, and to put him in ward, and, _if he happened to resist them, to
kill him_: she answered that the ambassadors were come,[99] and the
christening drew near, so that the time would not then serve well for that
purpose, till the triumph was done, and the ambassadors departed to their
country.... Also I, being at Glasgow about the same time, and having
intelligence of the foresaid device for his apprehension at Craigmillar,
did give him warning thereof;’ consequently, as he was also ill-treated at
Stirling, Darnley went to Glasgow, ‘where he was not long till he fell
sick.’ Lennox here adds the plot to kill Darnley if he resisted arrest.
His reference to certain of Mary’s Privy Council, who laid the plot,
cannot have been grateful to Lethington, who was at York, where Lennox
meant to deliver his speech.
The final form taken by Lennox’s account of what occurred at Craigmillar
looks as if it were a Scots draft for the ‘Brief Discourse’ which he
actually put in, in English, at Westminster, on November 29, 1568. He
addresses Norfolk and the rest in his opening sentences. The Privy Council
who made the plot are they ‘_of thay dayis_,’ which included Moray,
Argyll, Huntly, Lethington, and Bothwell. These Lords, or some of them,
either subscribe ‘a lettre’ of warrant for Darnley’s capture alive or
dead, or ask Mary to sign one; Lennox is not certain which view is
correct. She answered that they must delay till the ambassadors departed.
‘But seeing in the mean time this purpose divulgate,’ she arrested the
‘reportaris,’ namely Hiegait, Walker, the Laird of Minto (we do not
elsewhere learn that he was examined), and Alexander Cauldwell. Perceiving
‘that the truth was like to come to light, she left off further
inquisition.’
This version does not state that Lennox, or any one else, revealed the
Craigmillar plot for his arrest to Darnley. It later describes a quarrel
of his with Mary at Stirling, and adds, ‘Being thus handled, at the end of
the christening he came to me to Glasgow.’ This tale of a plot to arrest,
and, if he resisted, to kill Darnley, corresponds with Paris’s statement
that Bothwell told him, ‘We were much inclined to do it lately, when we
were at Craigmillar.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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