The Husband Blown Up And Strangled In A Nightgown

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was tall, handsome, and a catastrophe. Mary, Queen of Scots married him for love in 1565 and regretted it almost immediately. He was arrogant, violently jealous, and a drunk. He demanded to be made king in his own right, and when Mary refused, he did something unforgivable: he helped a gang of armed nobles burst into her private supper room and murder her secretary, David Rizzio — stabbing him more than fifty times in front of her. Mary was six months pregnant, and a pistol was held to her belly while it happened. She never forgave him.

By early 1567, the marriage was finished in every way but law, and Darnley was one of the most hated men in Scotland. He had betrayed his fellow conspirators, insulted the nobility, and made enemies everywhere. Then he fell ill — probably with a venereal disease, often thought to be syphilis — and went to his father in Glasgow to recover. And Mary, who for months had spoken of her husband with nothing but contempt, suddenly did something completely out of character. She travelled to his sickbed, was tender with him, and persuaded him to come back to Edinburgh to convalesce under her care. She arranged his lodgings personally: an old house called Kirk o’ Field, just inside the town wall.

THE HORROR For about a week Darnley convalesced there. Mary visited him often and sat with him. On the evening of 9 February she was there again — but she left to attend a wedding masque at Holyrood. She kissed her husband, gave him a ring, and promised to see him in the morning.

At around two o’clock in the morning, Kirk o’ Field exploded.

It was not a fire or a collapse. Barrels of gunpowder had been packed into the room directly beneath Darnley’s bedchamber, and the blast was so enormous it was heard and felt across Edinburgh, waking the whole city. When people came running with torches, the house was simply gone — reduced to a heap of stones. Almost nothing was left standing.

They searched the rubble for the king’s body. It wasn’t there.

They found him instead in the garden of the neighbouring property, about fifty yards away, lying under a pear tree beside the body of his valet, William Taylor. He was dressed only in his nightshirt. And here is the detail that has haunted this case for more than four and a half centuries: there was not a clear wound on him. No burns. No broken limbs from falling masonry. No obvious injuries from the blast at all. Whatever killed him, it was not the explosion.

Scattered on the ground around the two bodies lay a strange collection of objects: a cloak, a dagger, a coat — and a chair, and a length of rope.

Those last two tell you the shape of the final moments. Darnley and his valet, awake in the night, must have heard men moving outside — the sound of footsteps and voices surrounding the house. They knew what that meant. They lowered themselves from a first-floor window using the rope and the chair as makeshift ladder, in their nightclothes, and slipped through a door in the town wall onto a lane called Thieves Row, trying to escape into the dark.

The conspirators were already waiting.

Neighbours, woken by the noise, later reported hearing a man’s voice outside, pleading for his life. Darnley, the King of Scotland, in his nightshirt in a garden, begging in the dark. Then silence. No obvious marks were found on his body afterwards, which suggests he and Taylor were killed by suffocation — smothered or perhaps strangled in a way that left little trace — rather than stabbed or shot. And then, with the man they had come to kill already lying dead in the grass, the conspirators blew the house up anyway.

THE MODERN RELIC Nobody in Europe thought it was an accident for a moment. Within days, painted placards and anonymous handbills were going up all over Edinburgh in what amounts to one of the earliest tabloid smear campaigns — openly naming Mary and James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, as adulterers and murderers. One famous image showed Mary as a mermaid, which in Edinburgh slang at the time meant a prostitute, catching Bothwell in her net. Mary passed a law banning the placards. They kept coming.

Then Mary did the one thing guaranteed to condemn her in the eyes of the world. Bothwell — the leading suspect — was tried in April in a rushed, one-day hearing with no effective witnesses called, and was acquitted. In May, barely three months after her husband was blown up and found dead in a garden, Mary married him.

That was the end. Scotland turned on her. Her nobles raised an army, and within weeks she was a prisoner at Lochleven Castle, forced to abdicate in favour of her one‑year‑old son, James. She fled to England and never saw Scotland — or her child — again. Twenty years later she went to the block at Fotheringhay. Darnley’s murder destroyed her too; it just took two decades to finish the job.

The relics survive, and they are extraordinary. Kirk o’ Field itself is gone, but the University of Edinburgh’s Old College now stands on the site; students walk every day over the ground where the king was smothered and his house was blown apart. Darnley lies in the royal vault at Holyrood Abbey, the roofless ruin beside Holyrood Palace, which you can visit. But the most remarkable relic is a drawing. In the days after the murder, someone at the scene sketched a bird’s‑eye view of it and sent it to Elizabeth I’s spymaster in London — showing the shattered house, the town wall, and, in the garden, the two bodies with the chair and the rope beside them. That sketch survives in the archives today. It is one of the earliest crime‑scene drawings in existence: the actual scene, recorded by someone who stood there, of the night that destroyed Mary, Queen of Scots.

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