‘My Lord,--I have thought good to write to you by this bearer of my good health, I thank God, which is the sooner come through the good treatment of such as hath this good while concealed their good will; I mean of my love the Queen, which I assure you hath all this while, and yet doth, use herself like a natural and loving wife. I hope yet that God will lighten our hearts with joy that have so long been afflicted with trouble. As I in this letter do write unto your Lordship, so I trust this bearer can satisfy you the like. Thus thanking almighty God of our good hap, I commend your Lordship into his protection. ‘From Edinburgh the vii of February, ‘Your loving and obedient son, ‘HENRY REX.’ The Queen, we are told, came in while Darnley was writing, read the letter, and ‘kissed him as Judas did the Lord his Master.’ ‘The day before his death she caused the rich bed to be taken down, and a meaner set up in its place, saying unto him that that rich bed they should both lie in the next night, but her meanings were to save the bed from the blowing up of the fire of powder.’[129] There has been a good deal of controversy about this odd piece of economy, reported also by Thomas Nelson, Darnley’s surviving servant. Where was the bed to be placed for the marriage couch? Obviously not in Holyrood, and Mary’s own bed in the room below Darnley’s is reported by Buchanan to have been removed.[130] The lost bed which was blown up was of velvet, ‘violet brown,’ with gold, had belonged to Mary of Guise, and had been given to Darnley, by Mary, in the previous autumn. Mary’s enemies insist that, apparently on the night of Friday, February 7, she wrote one of the Casket Letters to Bothwell. The Letter is obscure, as we shall see, but is interpreted to mean that her brother, Lord Robert Stuart, had warned Darnley of his danger, that Darnley had confided this to Mary, that Mary now asked Bothwell to bring Lord Robert to Kirk o’ Field, where she would confront him with Darnley. The pair might come to blows, Darnley might fall, and the gunpowder plot would be superfluous. This tale, about which the evidence is inconsistent, is discussed elsewhere. But, in his MSS., Lennox tells the story, and adds, ‘The Lord Regent’ (Moray) ‘can declare it, who was there present.’ Buchanan avers that Mary called in Moray to sever the pair, in hopes that he would be slain or compromised: not a plausible theory, and not put forward in the ‘Book of Articles.’