Darnley, say the Lennox MSS., wished to occupy the Hamilton House, near Kirk o’ Field, but Mary persuaded him that ‘there passed a privy way [to] between the palace and it,’ Kirk o’ Field, ‘which she could take without going through the streets.’ The Lennox author adds that, on the night of the murder, Bothwell and his gang ‘came the secret way which she herself was wont to come to the King her husband.’ The story of the secret way recurs in Lennox MSS., and, of course, is nonsense, and was dropped. There was no subterranean passage from Holyrood to Kirk o’ Field. Bothwell and the murderers, in their attack on the Kirk o’ Field, had no such convenience for the carriage of themselves and their gunpowder. It is strange that Lennox and his agents, having access to several of the servants of Darnley, including Nelson who survived the explosion, accepted at one time, or expected others to accept, this legend of a secret passage. Edinburgh tradition holds that there was such a tunnel between Holyrood and the Castle, which may be the basis of this fairy-tale. The tale of the secret passage, then, is told, in the Lennox MSS., as the excuse given by Mary to Darnley for lodging him in Kirk o’ Field, not in the neighbouring house of the Hamiltons. But, in the ‘Book of Articles,’ we read that the Archbishop of St. Andrews was then living in the Hamilton House ‘onely to debar the King fra it.’ The fable of the secret way, therefore, was dropped in the final version prepared by the accusers. Mary, whether she wrote the Casket Letters or not, was, demonstrably, aware that there was a plot against Darnley, before she brought him to a house accessible to his enemies. It is certain that, hating and desiring to be delivered from Darnley, she winked at a conspiracy of which she was conscious, and let events take their course. This was, to all appearance, the policy of her brother James, ‘the Good Regent Moray;’ and one of Mary’s apologists, Sir John Skelton, is inclined to hold that this _was_ Mary’s attitude. He states the hypothesis thus: ‘that Mary was not entirely unaware of the measures which were being taken by the nobility to secure in one way or other the removal of Darnley; that, if she did not expressly sanction the enterprise, she failed, firmly and promptly, to forbid its execution.’ Hence she was in ‘an equivocal position,’ could not act with firmness and dignity, and in accepting Bothwell could not be accounted a free agent, yielded to force, and, with a heavy heart, ‘submitted to the inevitable.’[114] [Illustration: THE OLD TOWER, WHITTINGHAM]