Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley not together in early 1545 and a letter of March 1566, from Mary Queen of Scots, indicates Darnley was then nineteen years old. Therefore the date 1546 would seem probable. A descendant of both James II of Scotland and Henry VII of England, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was heir to two royal houses, the House of Stuart and the House of Tudor, thus he had claim to both the Scottish and English thrones, a claim that may have cost him his life. In 1545, his father, Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox was found guilty of treason in Scotland for
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley of Albany and King James V. In 1668 the vault was opened by mobs and sometime later between 1776-8 the vault was raided and the skull of Lord Darnley stolen. In 1928 a paper was published by Karl Pearson, detailing his vast research into the skull of Lord Darnley. In his paper, Pearson discussed the possibility of Darnley’s skull residing in the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum. In 2016 at the request of the University of Edinburgh research was undertaken to identify whether a skull in the University's collection could be Darnley's stolen remains. Pearson's skull and the University's were