Mary twice slept in the room under Darnley’s, probably on the 5th and 7th of February. In the Lennox MSS. the description of Darnley’s last night varies from the ordinary versions. ‘The present night of his death she tarried with him till eleven of the clock, which night she gave him a goodly ring,’ the usual token of loyalty. This ring is mentioned in a contemporary English ballad, and by Moray to de Silva (August 3, 1567), also in the ‘Book of Articles.’ Mary is usually said to have urged, as a reason for not sleeping at Kirk o’ Field on the fatal night, her sudden recollection of a promise to be present at Holyrood, at the marriage of her servant, Sebastian. This, indeed, is her own story, or Lethington’s, in a letter written in Scots to her ambassador in France, on February 10, or 11, 1567. But, in the Lennox MSS., it is asserted that Bothwell and others reminded her of her intention to ride to Seton, early next morning. Darnley then ‘commanded that his great horses should have been in a readiness by 5 o’clock in the morning, for that he minded to ride them at the same hour.’ After Mary had gone, he remembered, says Lennox, a word she had dropped to the effect that nearly a year had passed since the murder of Riccio, a theme on which she had long been silent. She was keeping her promise, given over Riccio’s newly dug grave, that ‘a fatter than he should lie anear him ’ere the twelvemonth was out.’ His servant comforted him, and here the narrator regrets that Darnley did not ‘consider and mark such cruel and strange words as she had said unto him,’ for example, at Riccio’s grave. He also gives a _précis_ of ‘her letter written to Bothwell from Glasgow before her departure thence.’ This is the mysterious letter which was never produced or published: it will be considered under ‘External Evidence as to the Casket Letters.’ After singing, with his servants, Psalm V., Darnley drank to them, and went to bed. Fifty men, says the Lennox author, now environed the house, sixteen, under Bothwell, ‘came the secret way by which she herself was wont to come to the King her husband’ (a mere fairy tale), used the duplicate keys, ‘opened the doors of the garden and house,’ and so entered his chamber, and suffocated him ‘with a wet napkin stipt in vinegar.’ They handled Taylor, a servant, in the same way, and laid Darnley in a garden at some distance with ‘his night gown of purple velvet furred with sables.’ None of the captured murderers, in their confessions, knew anything of the strangling, which was universally believed in, but cannot easily be reconciled with the narratives of the assassins. But had they confessed to the strangling, others besides Bothwell would have been implicated, and the confessions are not worthy of entire confidence.[131]