Our plan must be, first, to compare the contemporary descriptions of the incident. Taking, first, the ‘Diurnal of Occurrents,’ we find that the explosion took place at ‘two hours before none;’ which at that time meant 2 A.M. The murderers opened the door with false keys, and strangled Darnley, and his servant, Taylor, ‘in their naked beds,’ then threw the bodies into a garden, ‘beyond the Thief Row’ (see the sketch, p. 131), returned, and blew up the house, ‘so that there remained not one stone upon another undestroyed.’ The names of the miscreants are given, ‘as alleged,’ Bothwell, Ormistoun of that ilk; Hob Ormistoun his uncle; Hepburn of Bowton, and young Hay of Tala. All these underlings were later taken, confessed, and were executed. The part of the entry in the ‘Diurnal’ which deals with them, at least, is probably not contemporary. The men named professed to know nothing of the strangling. For what it is worth the entry corroborates the entire destruction of the house, which would imply a mine, or powder in the vaulted cellars. The contemporary drawing shows the whole house utterly levelled with the ground.[132] Birrel, in his Diary, says, ‘The house was raised from the ground with powder, and the King, if he had not been cruelly strangled, after he fell out of the air, with his garters, he had lived.’ An official account says, ‘Of the whole lodging, walls and other, there is nothing remaining, no, not one stone above another, but all either carried far away, or dung in dross to the very groundstone.’[133] This could only be done by a mine, but the escape of Nelson proves exaggeration. This version is also in Mary’s letter to Archbishop Beaton (February 10, or 11), written in Scots, probably by Lethington, and he, of course, may have exaggerated, as may the Privy Council in their report to the same effect.[134] Clernault, a Frenchman who carried the news, averred that a mine was employed. Sir James Melville says that Bothwell ‘made a train of powder, or had one made before, which came under the house,’ but Darnley was first strangled ‘in a low stable,’ by a napkin thrust into his mouth.[135] The Lennox MSS. say that Darnley was suffocated ‘with a wet napkin steeped in vinegar.’ The Savoyard Ambassador, Moretta, on returning to France, expressed the opinion that Darnley fled from the house, when he heard the key of the murderers grate in the keyhole, that he was in his shirt, carrying his dressing gown, that he was followed, dragged into a little garden outside his own garden wall (the garden across the Thieves’ Row), and there strangled. Some women heard him exclaim, ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of him who pitied all the world.’[136] His kinsmen were Archibald and other Douglases. Buchanan, in his ‘Detection,’ speaks of ‘the King’s lodging, _even from the very foundation_, blown up.’ In the ‘Actio,’ or Oration, printed with the ‘Detection,’ the writer, whoever he was, says,