Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  Lethington, perceiving the justice of what she urged, withdrew shamed and confused at once to remedy the matter by removing the guards from the passage and the stairs and elsewhere, leaving none but those who paced outside the palace.

  It was a rashness he was bitterly to repent him on the morrow, when it was discovered that in the night Mary had not only escaped, but had taken Darnley with her. Accompanied by him and a few attendants, she had executed the plan in which earlier that day she had secured her scared husband’s cooperation. At midnight they had made their way along the now unguarded corridors, and descended to the vaults of the palace, whence a secret passage communicated with the chapel. Through this and across the graveyard where lay the newly buried body of the Siegneur Davie — almost across the very grave itself which stood near the chapel door they had won to the horses waiting by Darnley’s orders in the open. And they had ridden so hard that by five o’clock of that Tuesday morning they were in Dunbar.

  In vain did the alarmed lords send a message after her to demand her signature of the security upon which she had duped them into counting prematurely.

  Within a week they were in full flight before the army at the head of which the prisoner who had slipped through their hands was returning to destroy them. Too late did they perceive the arts by which she had fooled them, and seduced the shallow Darnley to betray them.

  II. THE NIGHT OF KIRK O’ FIELD — The Murder of Darnley

  Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes of a lifetime in which mistakes were plentiful was the hesitancy of the Queen of Scots in executing upon her husband Darnley the prompt vengeance she had sworn for the murder of David Rizzio.

  When Rizzio was slain, and she herself held captive by the murderers in her Palace of Holyrood, whilst Darnley ruled as king, she had simulated belief in her husband’s innocence that she might use him for her vengeful ends.

  She had played so craftily upon his cowardly nature as to convince him that Morton, Ruthven, and the other traitor lords with whom he had leagued himself were at heart his own implacable enemies; that they pretended friendship for him to make a tool of him, and that when he had served their turn they would destroy him.

  In his consequent terror he had betrayed his associates, assisting her to trick them by a promise to sign an act of oblivion for what was done. Trusting to this the lords had relaxed their vigilance, whereupon, accompanied by Darnley, she had escaped by night from Holyrood.

  Hope tempering at first the rage and chagrin in the hearts of the lords she had duped, they had sent a messenger to her at Dunbar to request of her the fulfilment of her promise to sign the document of their security.

  But Mary put off the messenger, and whilst the army she had summoned was hastily assembling, she used her craft to divide the rebels against themselves.

  To her natural brother, the Earl of Murray, to Argyll, and to all those who had been exiled for their rebellion at the time of her marriage — and who knew not where they stood in the present turn of events, since one of the objects of the murder had been to procure their reinstatement — she sent an offer of complete pardon, on condition that they should at once dissociate themselves from those concerned in the death of the Seigneur Davie.

  These terms they accepted thankfully, as well they might. Thereupon, finding themselves abandoned by all men — even by Darnley in whose service they had engaged in the murder — Morton, Ruthven, and their associates scattered and fled.

  By the end of that month of March, Morton, Ruthven, Lindsay of the Byres, George Douglas, and some sixty others were denounced as rebels with forfeiture of life and goods, while one Thomas Scott, who had been in command of the guards that had kept Her Majesty prisoner at Holyrood, was hanged, drawn, and quartered at the Market Cross.

  News of this reached the fugitives to increase their desperate rage. But what drove the iron into the soul of the arch-murderer Ruthven was Darnley’s solemn public declaration denying all knowledge of or complicity in Rizzio’s assassination; nor did it soothe his fury to know that all Scotland rang with contemptuous laughter at that impudent and cowardly perjury. From his sick-bed at Newcastle, whereon some six weeks later he was to breathe his last, the forsaken wretch replied to it by sending the Queen the bond to which he had demanded Darnley’s signature before embarking upon the business.

  It was a damning document. There above the plain signature and seal of the King was the admission, not merely of complicity, but that the thing was done by his express will and command, that the responsibility was his own, and that he would hold the doers scatheless from all consequences.

  Mary could scarcely have hoped to be able to confront her worthless husband with so complete a proof of his duplicity and baseness. She sent for him, confounded him with the sight of that appalling bond, made an end to the amity which for her own ends she had pretended, and drove him out of her presence with a fury before which he dared not linger.

  You see him, then, crushed under his load of mortification, realizing at last how he had been duped on every hand, first by the lords for their own purpose, and then by the Queen for hers. Her contempt of him was now so manifest that it spread to all who served him — for she made it plain that who showed him friendship earned her deep displeasure — so that he was forced to withdraw from a Court where his life was become impossible. For a while he wandered up and down a land where every door was shut in his face, where every man of whatsoever party, traitor or true, despised him alike. In the end, he took himself off to his father, Lennox, and at Glasgow he sought what amusement he could with his dogs and his hawks, and such odd vulgar rustic love-affairs as came his way.

  It was in allowing him thus to go his ways, in leaving her vengeance — indeed, her justice — but half accomplished, that lay the greatest of the Queen’s mistakes. Better for her had she taken with Darnley the direct way that was her right. Better for her, if acting strongly then, she had banished or hanged him for his part in the treason that had inspired the murder of Rizzio. Unfortunately, a factor that served to quicken her abhorrence of him served also to set a curb of caution upon the satisfaction of it.

  This factor that came so inopportunely into her life was her regard for the arrogant, unscrupulous Earl of Bothwell. Her hand was stayed by fear that men should say that for Bothwell’s sake she had rid herself of a husband become troublesome. That Bothwell had been her friend in the hour when she had needed friends, and knew not whom she might trust; that by his masterfulness he seemed a man upon whom a woman might lean with confidence, may account for the beginnings of the extraordinary influence he came so swiftly to exercise over her, and the passion he awakened in her to such a degree that she was unable to dissemble it.

  Her regard for him, the more flagrant by contrast with her contempt for Darnley, is betrayed in the will she made before her confinement in the following June. Whilst to Darnley she bequeathed nothing but the red-enamelled diamond ring with which he had married her— “It was with this that I was married,” she wrote almost contemptuously. “I leave it to the King who gave it me” — she appointed Bothwell to the tutelage of her child in the event of her not surviving it, and to the government of the realm.

  The King came to visit her during her convalescence, and was scowled upon by Murray and Argyll, who were at Holyrood, and most of all by Bothwell, whose arrogance by now was such that he was become the best-hated man in Scotland. The Queen received him very coldly, whilst using Bothwell more than cordially in his very presence, so that he departed again in a deeper humiliation than before.

  Then before the end of July there was her sudden visit to Bothwell at Alloa, which gave rise to so much scandal. Hearing of it, Darnley followed in a vain attempt to assert his rights as king and husband, only to be flouted and dismissed with the conviction that his life was no longer safe in Scotland, and that he had best cross the Border. Yet, to his undoing, detained perhaps by the overweening pride that is usually part of a fool’s equipment, he did not act upon that wise resolve. He
returned instead to his hawking and his hunting, and was seldom seen at Court thereafter.

  Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death at Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again without any assurance that she would recover. But then the facts of her illness, and how it had been contracted, were not such as to encourage kindness in him, even had he been inclined to kindness.

  Bothwell had taken three wounds in a Border affray some weeks before, and Mary, hearing of this and that he lay in grievous case at Hermitage, had ridden thither in her fond solicitude — a distance of thirty miles — and back again in the same day, thus contracting a chill which had brought her to the very gates of death.

  Darnley had not only heard of this, but he had found Bothwell at Jedburgh, whither he had been borne in a litter, when in his turn he had heard of how it was with Mary; and Bothwell had treated him with more than the contempt which all men now showed him, but which from none could wound him so deeply as from this man whom rumour accounted Mary’s lover.

  Matters between husband and wife were thus come to a pass in which they could not continue, as all men saw, and as she herself confessed at Craigmillar, whither she repaired, still weak in body, towards the end of November.

  Over a great fire that blazed in a vast chamber of the castle she sat sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was swathed in a long cloak of deepest purple reversed with ermine. Her face was thin and of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of wistfulness amid the shadows which her illness had set about them.

  “I do wish I could be dead!” she sighed.

  Bothwell’s eyes narrowed. He was leaning on the back of her tall chair, a long, virile figure with a hawk-nosed, bearded face that was sternly handsome. He thrust back the crisp dark hair that clustered about his brow, and fetched a sigh.

  “It was never my own death I wished when a man stood in my road to aught I craved,” he said, lowering his voice, for Maitland of Lethington — now restored to his secretaryship — was writing at a table across the room, and my Lord of Argyll was leaning over him.

  She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes startled.

  “What devil’s counsel do you whisper?” she asked him. And when he would have answered, she raised a hand. “No,” she said. “Not that way.”

  “There is another,” said Bothwell coolly. He moved, came round, and stood squarely upon the hearth, his back to the fire, confronting her, nor did he further trouble to lower his voice. “We have considered it already.”

  “What have you considered?”

  Her voice was strained; fear and excitement blended in her face.

  “How the shackles that fetter you might be broken. Be not alarmed. It was the virtuous Murray himself propounded it to Argyll and Lethington — for the good of Scotland and yourself.” A sneer flitted across his tanned face. “Let them speak for themselves.” He raised his voice and called to them across the room.

  They came at once, and the four made an odd group as they stood there in the firelit gloom of that November day — the lovely young Queen, so frail and wistful in her high-backed chair; the stalwart, arrogant Bothwell, magnificent in a doublet of peach-coloured velvet that tapered to a golden girdle; Argyll, portly and sober in a rich suit of black; and Maitland of Lethington, lean and crafty of face, in a long furred gown that flapped about his bony shanks.

  It was to Lethington that Bothwell addressed himself.

  “Her Grace is in a mood to hear how the Gordian knot of her marriage might be unravelled,” said he, grimly ironic.

  Lethington raised his eyebrows, licked his thin lips, and rubbed his bony hands one in the other.

  “Unravelled?” he echoed with wondering stress. “Unravelled? Ha!” His dark eyes flashed round at them. “Better adopt Alexander’s plan, and cut it. ‘Twill be more complete, and — and final.”

  “No, no!” she cried. “I will not have you shed his blood.”

  “He himself was none so tender where another was concerned,” Bothwell reminded her — as if the memory of Rizzio were dear to him.

  “What he may have done does not weigh upon my conscience,” was her answer.

  “He might,” put in Argyll, “be convicted of treason for having consented to Your Grace’s retention in ward at Holyrood after Rizzio’s murder.”

  She considered an instant, then shook her head.

  “It is too late. It should have been done long since. Now men will say that it is but a pretext to be rid of him.” She looked up at Bothwell, who remained standing immediately before her, between her and the fire. “You said that my Lord of Murray had discussed this matter. Was it in such terms as these?”

  Bothwell laughed silently at the thought of the sly Murray rendering himself a party to anything so direct and desperate. It was Lethington who answered her.

  “My Lord Murray was for a divorce. That would set Your Grace free, and it might be obtained, he said, by tearing up the Pope’s bull of dispensation that permitted the marriage. Yet, madame, although Lord Murray would himself go no further, I have no cause to doubt that were other means concerted, he would be content to look through his fingers.”

  Her mind, however, did not seem to follow his speech beyond the matter of the divorce. A faint flush of eagerness stirred in her pale cheeks.

  “Ah, yes!” she cried. “I, too, have thought of that — of this divorce. And God knows I do not want for grounds. And it could be obtained, you say, by tearing up this papal bull?”

  “The marriage could be proclaimed void thereafter,” Argyll explained.

  She looked past Bothwell into the fire, and took her chin in her hand.

  “Yes,” she said slowly, musingly, and again, “yes. That were a way. That is the way.” And then suddenly she looked up, and they saw doubt and dread in her eyes. “But in that case — what of my son?”

  “Aye!” said Lethington grimly. He shrugged his narrow shoulders, parted his hands, and brought them together again. “That’s the obstacle, as we perceived. It would imperil his succession.”

  “It would make a bastard of him, you mean?” she cried, demanding the full expansion of their thoughts.

  “Indeed it would do no less,” the secretary assented.

  “So that,” said Bothwell, softly, “we come back to Alexander’s method. What the fingers may not unravel, the knife can sever.”

  She shivered, and drew her furred cloak the more closely about her.

  Lethington leaned forward. He spoke in kindly, soothing accents.

  “Let us guide this matter among us, madame,” he murmured, “and we’ll find means to rid Your Grace of this young fool, without hurt to your honour or prejudice to your son. And the Earl of Murray will look the other way, provided you pardon Morton and his friends for the killing they did in Darnley’s service.”

  She looked from one to the other of them, scanning each face in turn. Then her eyes returned to a contemplation of the flaming logs, and she spoke very softly.

  “Do nothing by which a spot might be laid on my honour or conscience,” she said, with an odd deliberateness that seemed to insist upon the strictly literal meaning of her words. “Rather I pray you let the matter rest until God remedy it.”

  Lethington looked at the other two, the other two looked at him. He rubbed his hands softly.

  “Trust to us, madame,” he answered. “We will so guide the matter that Your Grace shall see nothing but what is good and approved by Parliament.”

  She committed herself to no reply, and so they were content to take their answer from her silence. They went in quest of Huntly and Sir James Balfour, and the five of them entered into a bond for the destruction of him whom they named “the young fool and proud tiranne,” to be engaged in when Mary should have pardoned Morton and his fellow-conspirators.

  It was not until Christmas Eve that she signed this pardon of some seventy fugitives, proscribed for their participation in the Rizzio murder, towards whom she had hithe
rto shown herself so implacable.

  The world saw in this no more than a deed of clemency and charity befitting the solemn festival of good-will. But the five who had entered into that bond at Craigmillar Castle beheld in it more accurately the fulfilment of her part of the suggested bargain, the price she paid in advance to be rid of Darnley, the sign of her full agreement that the knot which might not be unravelled should be cut.

  On that same day Her Grace went with Bothwell to Lord Drummond’s, where they abode for the best part of a week, and thence they went on together to Tullibardine, the rash and open intimacy between them giving nourishment to scandal.

  At the same time Darnley quitted Stirling, where he had lately been living in miserable conditions, ignored by the nobles, and even stinted in his necessary expenses, deprived of his ordinary servants, and his silver replaced by pewter. The miserable youth reached Glasgow deadly sick. He had been taken ill on the way, and the inevitable rumour was spread that he had been poisoned. Later, when it became known that his once lovely countenance was now blotched and disfigured, it was realized that his illness was no more than the inevitable result of the debauched life he led.

  Conceiving himself on the point of death, Darnley wrote piteously to the Queen; but she ignored his letters until she learnt that his condition was improving, when at last (on January 29th) she went to visit him at Glasgow. It may well be that she nourished some hope that nature would resolve the matter for her, and remove the need for such desperate measures as had been concerted. But seeing him likely to recover, two things became necessary, to bring him to the place that was suitable for the fulfilment of her designs, and to simulate reconciliation with him, and even renewed and tender affection, so that none might hereafter charge her with complicity in what should follow.