‘they had _undermined the wall_,’ and that Mary slept under Darnley’s room, lest the servants should hear ‘the noise of the underminers working.’ The ‘Detection’ and ‘Actio’ were published to discredit Mary, long after the murderers had confessed that there was no mine at all, that the powder was laid in Mary’s room. In the ‘Book of Articles,’ the powder is placed ‘in the laich house,’ whether that means the arched ground floor, or Mary’s chamber; apparently the latter, as we read, ‘she lay in the house under the King, where also thereafter the powder was placed.’[137] This is made into conformity with the confessions of Bothwell’s men, according to whom but nine or ten were concerned in the deed. But Moray himself, two months after the murder, told de Silva that ‘it is undoubted that over thirty or forty persons were concerned’ (the fifty of the Lennox Paper) ‘and _the house ... was entirely undermined_.’[138] When Morton, long afterwards, was accused of and executed for the deed, the dittay ran that the powder was under the ‘angular stones and within the vaults.’ In the mysterious letter, attributed to Mary, and cited by Moray and the Lennox Papers, the ‘preparation’ of the Kirk o’ Field is at least hinted at. The ‘Book of Articles’ avers that, ‘from Glasgow, by her letters and otherwise,’ Mary ‘held him’ (Bothwell) ‘continually in remembrance of the said house,’ which she _did_, in the letter never produced, but not in any of the Casket Letters, unless it be in a note, among other suspicious notes, ‘Of the ludgeing in Edinburgh.’[139] The Lennox MSS., as we saw, say ‘the place was already prepared with “undermining and” trains of powder therein.’ The whole of the narratives, confirmed by Moray, and by the descriptions of the ruin of the house, prove that the theory of a prepared mine was entertained, till Powrie, Tala, and Bowton made their depositions, and, in the ‘Actio,’ an appendix to Buchanan’s ‘Detection,’ and the indictment of Morton, even after that. But when the accusers, of whom some were guilty themselves, came to plead against Mary, they naturally wished to restrict the conspiracy to Bothwell and Mary. The strangling disappears. The murderers are no longer thirty, or forty, or fifty. The powder is placed in Mary’s own room, not in a mine. All this altered theory rests on examinations of prisoners.