In any case Walker filled Mary’s ears, at Stirling--as she wrote to Archbishop Beaton, her ambassador in France, on January 20, 1567--with rumours of ‘utheris attemptatis and purposis tending to this fyne.’ He named Hiegait ‘for his chief author,’ ‘quha,’ he said, ‘had communicat the mater to hym, as apperyt, of mynd to gratify us; sayand to Walcar, “gif I had the moyen and crydet with the Quenis Majestie that ze have, I wald not omitt to mak hir previe of sic purpossis and bruitis that passes in the cuntrie.”’ Hiegait also said that Darnley could not endure some of the Lords, but that he or they must leave the country. Mary then sent for Hiegait, before the Council, and questioned _him_. He (probably in fear of Lennox) denied that he had told Walker the story of Darnley’s project, but he had heard, from Cauldwell, a retainer of Eglintoun’s, that Darnley himself was to be ‘put in ward.’ Eglintoun, ‘a rank Papist,’ was described by Randolph as never a trustworthy Lennoxite, ‘never good Levenax.’ His retainer, Cauldwell, being summoned, expressly denied that he ever told the rumour about the idea of imprisoning Darnley, to Hiegait. But Hiegait informed the Laird of Minto (a Stewart and a Lennoxite), who again told Lennox, who told Darnley, by whose desire Cauldwell again spoke to Hiegait. The trail of the gossip runs from Cauldwell (the estate of that name is in Eglintoun’s country, Ayrshire) to Hiegait, from him to Stewart of Minto, from him to Lennox, and from Lennox to Darnley. Possibly Eglintoun (the cautious Lord who slipped away when Ainslie’s band was being signed, and hid under straw, after the battle of Langside) was the original source of the rumour of Darnley’s intended arrest. This is a mere guess. If there was a very secret plot, at Craigmillar, to arrest Darnley, we cannot tell how it reached Hiegait. Mary ‘found no manner of concordance’ in their answers, and she rebuked Walker and Hiegait in her own name, and that of their master, Beaton himself.[108] These men, with Minto, were allied with Lennox, and one of them may have been his authority for the story of the second Craigmillar conference.