Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. “Shortly before 2 a.m. on Monday, 10 February 1567, a Mrs Barbara Merton, who lived in Blackfriars Wynd [in Edinburgh, Scotland] … was awakened by running footsteps; she looked out and counted thirteen armed men, who … were … hastening up to the High Street. Around the same time, some women lodging near the south garden and orchard of Kirk o’Field, … heard a man’s voice crying desperately, “Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of Him who had pity on all the world!” Then there was silence. Suddenly [at about 2 hours after midnight] the air was rent with the crash of a massive explosion. … “The King’s lodging was, even from the very foundation, blown up in the air.” … at 5 a.m., three hours after the explosion, someone thought to look in the south garden and orchard …, and it was there that they found the bodies of the twenty-year-old King [Henry Darnley] and his valet, Taylor, lying “sixty to eighty steps from the house”. Both were nearly naked, being clad in short nightshirts, and neither body had a mark on it. Darnley was stretched out on his back, under a pear tree, with one hand draped modestly over his genitals … Those who saw the bodies were at a loss to know how they had died, for it did not look as if they had perished in the explosion. There were no burns, no marks of strangulation or violence, and “no fracture, wound or bruise”. (A. Weir, Mary, Queen of Scots and the murder of Lord Darnley [London 2003], p. 249 e.v.)