Men had lately been fined heavily for a careless oath in the company of their neighbours; they had been punished more severely for picking their own gooseberries on a Sunday than if they had stolen them on a weekday; in fact, it was safer not to go out at all on a Sunday lest they should be reported for taking any pleasure on that day.
And under this black oppression, since natural pleasures had no chance to live, unnatural ones were growing hideously frequent. The Devil, for all the warfare against him, seemed to be taking fresh life and power; the number of witches, male and female, was increasing everywhere in spite of all the tortures and burnings urged by the Kirk against them.
‘Religion!’ Hamilton flung out bitterly at last. ‘The Covenant is more than a religion, it is a superstition!’
Hyde was impressed by the distinction and prepared to question it, but was forestalled by Hamilton, who cried, ‘Can you not see? It is not fear of God but fear of the Devil that holds Scotland cowering together like children in the dark? The Covenant says that what they have sworn on earth God will bind in heaven, that they have power in excommunicating a man to condemn not only his body on the scaffold but his soul to hell. They have excommunicated Montrose. To you that is nothing more than banishment from the Presbyterian Kirk, and as you are not a Presbyterian yourself it is nothing to you. You think more of the fact that his estates and titles have been forfeited by the government of the Kirk and himself condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor to that Kirk – should his enemies ever get the chance to lay their hands on him. But in Scotland we do not talk of Presbyterians and the Church of England. There, there is one Church of God and one only, the Kirk as established by Calvin, and he who has belonged to it and been cast out of it, is damned to hell fire for ever. To his countrymen Montrose is a thing accursed, and whoever would join with him will be dragged down to hell with him.’
‘I see,’ said Hyde slowly, ‘that that foul-mouthed pamphleteer of Cromwell’s (I should, more correctly, say foul-penned) wrote the truth for once in his life in that line,
“New Presbyter is but old Vriest writ large.” ’
‘Who wrote that?’ exclaimed Hamilton.
‘A writer who was a charming poet till he took to politics, a Mr Milton.’
‘I never heard of him. But he never wrote a truer word than that. Good God, what am I saying? If you ever repeat a word of this to any soul alive—’
‘I shall not think of it,’ said Hyde, shutting his full lips firmly together as if not to let even his breath escape him from now on, his eyes bright, not to say beady, with satisfaction at the remarkable confidence he must have inspired in this well-meaning though excitable and unbalanced young man. People were astonishingly interesting, they were so weak, so foolish, so incapable of managing their lives to advantage. How was it that anyone so personable and intelligent as this young Scots noble should have got himself enslaved to an institution he loathed as much as the Kirk, and to a man so much his inferior as Lauderdale?
‘Yet Your Grace has taken the Covenant yourself?’ he suggested, ‘and I believe agrees publicly with most of the Earl of Lauderdale’s opinions on it?’
Hamilton’s answer was a curse which should have called down on him a specially heavy fine.
‘I wish to God I had never taken it,’ he added presently. ‘I detest it utterly. But I am caught and held in its bonds. And Lauderdale, I am in his hold too. I am tied and bound, there’s no way I can turn.’
He was turning though, this way and that, in a fury of restlessness.
‘He owes Lauderdale money – Lauderdale knows something against him – now I shall hear it,’ Hyde was saying to himself with complacent expectancy. But it was not fulfilled. When the wretched man in the bed began to speak again, he only said:
‘He is my cousin, you know.’
‘Ah yes, you set great store by that in Scotland,’ said Hyde, still hopeful.
‘And older, and wiser in some ways. You Englishmen may think him uncouth, for he has not lived in Courts like some of us, and the late King Charles’ Court is acknowledged, now it has ceased, to have been the best education for a gentleman in all Europe. But all the same, my cousin’s understanding is equal to any,’ he continued in the same oddly defensive manner, ‘and I have a great affection for him. Besides, he counts for more in Scotland than you can guess.’
‘I thought Argyll had managed to oust him from any share in the Government for some years to come,’ said Hyde with an almost surly note in his voice. This was a slippery fish after all; here he was sliding away as fast as Hyde had thought he was holding him.
‘Oh, but he’ll bob up again, you’ll see,’ said Hamilton almost cheerfully now. ‘Men like Lauderdale aren’t to be either ousted or squashed, and whatever happens to Argyll in the long run, you’ll find Lauderdale sitting on top, I’ll swear.’
Hyde gave it up. ‘Then you hold by him and would never be reconciled to serving by the side of Montrose?’ he said. ‘I suppose indeed it is impossible. You took up arms against him. You would hardly take a subordinate position under the man who had been your enemy.’
But there was no telling what Hamilton would do. Now, at the very moment that Hyde thought he had ‘placed’ him so that he knew exactly what he could and could not expect from him, Hamilton swerved again, started forward and declared with passionate intensity, ‘What do I care about a subordinate position? Would I be such a fool as to expect to command the greatest commander alive? I’d be glad and proud to serve as a sergeant under Montrose – would to God I could ever do sol’ he added on so wretched a note that it was like the sigh of a prisoner for free air.
The solid Englishman, trying to make consistent sense of all these contradictions, stared at him, determined to discover some evidence of the suave duplicity he had been accustomed to find in his brother, the first Duke of Hamilton. But his bright stare could detect no hint of it, the young man was obviously and even painfully sincere, so Hyde decided almost regretfully, for it would make everything much easier to understand if he were just a liar, and simpler for him to write about in his history. ‘But no,’ he said to himself, ‘I must do him justice, and I shall write him down as still the same man that he seems to be.’
Hamilton, unaware of the momentous phrase that was hanging over him like an inscription on his tombstone, could not think why the little man was staring and blinking so owlishly at him; in sudden exasperation he very nearly endangered his obituary notice by telling Hyde what a fool he looked.
Didn’t he understand what one soldier could feel about another, on whatever side he was, and even to whatever clan he belonged?
‘His house has always been the enemy of ours,’ he said, ‘and in Scotland we have an old saying,
‘From the pride of the Grahams,
Good Lord, deliver us!’
‘But it makes no odds, I would be proud to serve that pride.’
‘Umph,’ said Hyde. He began to think the young man was going too far to be quite sensible. There was no need to extenuate Montrose’s pride – Hyde had been a good deal annoyed by it himself; in fact, he had had more than one stiffish passage- at-arms with Montrose, though he was not going to admit that to Hamilton. But this high-flown Scot here was really making himself ridiculous by talking so exaggeratedly.
‘If you feel such admiration for him, why not flout your cousin and serve with him?’ he said bluntly. ‘You talk so eloquently you might even persuade Lauderdale to join you too.’
‘He would rather kill me than join with me,’ said Hamilton earnestly. ‘If he ever knew I had even discussed it—’ He broke off, his eyes dilated, he said low and hurriedly, ‘I should lose every friend I have, every bit of property, and most probably my head. They are too much for me, as they will be for everyone who is against them, mark that.’
He made a grimace that startled Hyde until he saw its purpose. The door just behind the bed was opening, there was the smell of tobacco, and the shapeless bulk of a stout man in a l
oose dark velvet nightgown was coming round the door, the purple face of Lauderdale puffing at a long clay pipe, his large clouded eyes blinking suspiciously at Hamilton’s visitor.
Hamilton hastily introduced them, forgetting they already knew each other, and began to talk about the Council meeting they were to have that day with the King, as though that had been the subject of their conversation.
But Hyde saw no reason to maintain the fiction; he began at once, ‘Since the Marquis of Montrose will be there, I have come on behalf of the King to express his earnest desire that you will meet the Marquis in a friendly spirit, since only so is there any chance of furthering His Majesty’s cause.’
For answer Lauderdale removed his pipe from his mouth and spat into the fire. Hyde got up in disgust and looked round for his hat. Hamilton gave him a despairing glance. Lauderdale’s bulky figure blocked the way to the door. He did not seem to notice that Hyde was wishing to pass him.
‘Ask me to make friends with Satan,’ he said, ‘and out of friendship to yourself I might try and do it. But with a man whose hands are stained with the blood of his countrymen, whose hideous barbarities have made his name the terror of Scotland—’
He was deliberately working himself up into a frenzy, his blood-shot eyes rolling in his head as though he had lost control of his reason, and yet they flickered out a sharp enough glance at Hamilton, to see if he were taking this as he should, without any sign of weakening.
Hyde determined to have this out and sat down to a judicial inquiry.
It being the unfortunate nature of civil war,’ he said, ‘that whoever fights in it must kill his countrymen, it seems highly ridiculous to all sober men that you should blame Montrose for what every general in the war was doing.’
‘Three thousand of the Clan Campbell in one field of battle!’ Lauderdale exclaimed, and flopped down on the edge of Hamilton’s bed to take breath.
Hyde patiently asked what atrocities had Montrose been guilty of apart from the field of battle.
‘Apart from the field – oh, well, I don’t know of any apart from that, but for what was done there Scotland will never pardon him,’ he finished, glaring at Hyde with such a glazed and bulbous stare from those protuberant eyes that the Chancellor was alarmed lest he should be called upon to witness the unpleasant spectacle of a fit.
Seeing that he had made an impression, Lauderdale hastened to follow it up by declaring that he wished for King Charles’ restoration above all things, ‘but for all that,’ said he, staring harder than ever, ‘I would much rather he were never restored than that James Graham should be permitted to come into his Court.’
This sounded so mad that Hyde nearly gave it up, but a dogged obstinacy, combined with a growing fear of a force so volcanically irrational, made him make one last effort on behalf of reason.
‘You know, then, of nothing but what was done by his soldiers in the heat of action?’
Lauderdale, unable to work up another explosion, took a pull at his pipe, spat again, but this time in an impartial manner, and at last had to say ‘No.’
‘Then,’ said Hyde, ‘may I beg you will observe how very absurd you have shown your objections to be?’
Not unnaturally, Lauderdale failed to make the required answer. He ignored his judge and shot another side-glance at the silent figure in the bed.
‘Argyll’s Commissioners,’ he said, ‘have just arrived at The Hague.’
The words were as much a threat as an announcement.
IX
King Charles held his formal reception of Argyll’s Commissioners in the house of his brother-in-law, Prince William of Orange, the only place, as he said to him, where he could still hold anything.
To this Dutch Prince of twenty-two, only four years his senior, he owed a comfortable roof over his head all this winter, good and regular meals, and even the clothes he was wearing. On the other hand, William with his pretty but proud and rather plaintive young English wife the Princess Mary, and his overpowering German mother the Princess Amelia and her brood of harassed daughters, owed to this dispossessed English lad, the son of a murdered king, more gaiety and amusement through these few months than he had had in the whole of his life.
William had a passion for amusement but no ability to provide it for himself; he needed someone like young Charles who could communicate to him his overflowing power of enjoyment. His delicate and melancholy beauty had a maternal effect on women which exasperated him. He had an excellent brain, which was often of good service to Charles, but he was not nearly as proud of this as of being almost as good a sportsman as his young brother-in-law; and sadly conscious that for all his determined pursuit of pleasure he would never be as natural and easy a rake.
How did this lad Charles, so much his junior, manage to be so casual, insolent, assured in all matters of the world? (William might have revised his judgement had he seen him with Montrose.)
Here he was just returned from a stroll to the lodgings of pretty Lucy Walters and discussing with some annoyance the fact that she was now as big as a barrel, ‘and she says, by me, but how do I know? It might as easily be Bob Sidney or even one or two others, possibly yourself, Will? Or what do you say to my young prig of a brother, James? He told me as solemnly as a judge just before he went off to Paris that she might be very good-looking but that he preferred women to be intelligent. Good for a fifteen-year-old, hey? Suspicious too, throwing me off the scent.’
And he would not take seriously any of William’s warnings as to the mischief Lucy might do with her reports as to the legitimacy of her baby.
‘It’s absurd,’ he said. ‘All the world knows she came here as Colonel Sidney’s mistress and left him – or didn’t leave him – for me. What point would there have been in my marrying her?’
And he nonchalantly passed on to his forthcoming reception of the Commissioners from Argyll as to a companion annoyance with that of Lucy’s bastard.
‘The glimpse I’ve had of those five old crows in steeples turned my stomach at the start. Think of it – no less than three lots of Scots here now, and all at each other’s throats!’
Prince William had thought of it and had already talked with the minister Mr Robert Baillie (who represented the Kirk, but showed far more comfortable common sense than the lay representative Lord Cassillis), to sound him as to their point of view. He had been very tactful in impressing on Mr Baillie the enormous weight of the ministers’ advice in the State, and in trying to modify it to some faint shadow of tolerance.
‘ “Malignant!”’ he now exclaimed to Charles. ‘I am sick of the very sound of that word, and, as I told him to his face, it has lost all meaning, for they call any man malignant that they please. As for your Marquis of Montrose, the Brethren can’t speak of him without abusing his “apostacy and unheard-of cruelty”.’
‘ “Unheard-of” is the correct term, I fancy. They’d had a “day of humiliation” at Delft, you know, before coming here – nothing like a day of humiliation to cocker up their pride. They’re own Brethren to Christ after it, and wouldn’t have a word to fling to the Holy Ghost.’
‘For God’s sake don’t be blasphemous in their hearing, Charles. You’ve made a good first impression – stick to it.’
‘What is it?’
‘ “Very sweet and courteous” – “the most gentle and innocent and virtuously inclined of princes.” Your only fault is your inclination to Montrose, and Mr Baillie thinks it would be the greatest pity in the world you should not be in good company.’
‘Very sound of him – it’s the greatest pity in the world I’ve had to leave Lucy’s company for his. I’d better take off this cravat she’s given me, it might give me away.’
‘You have a real chance in the way you charmed them, God knows how. They’d curse you to hell if they knew anything of you really.’
Charles gave his gay triumphant laugh as he stood at the mirror, untying Lucy’s cravat. It pleased him to think how well he could manage men, even these furious
ly pious fanatics. In spite of Montrose’s warnings, the chances were that he would find he could manage them even in Scotland. He asked Will his opinion as to this. Will, looking affectionately at the young rascal, thought it more than likely.
‘Montrose doesn’t,’ said Charles.
‘He knows them. But he doesn’t know you.’
‘Isn’t “charmed” by me, you mean. I wish I knew which of you is right.’
He did know. He didn’t wish to know. It was easier and pleasanter to believe the amused admiration of this quiet young man who assured him that – ‘set a foot in Scotland and you’ll have the whole country following you to a man – and, which counts as much, to a woman.’
Charles grinned back at him. ‘To the hips and haws of Scotland!’ he cried as he pulled off Lucy’s cravat and waved it round his head like a flag. ‘And now for the high hats! I can’t run to a steeple crown myself, but you’ll observe, dear Will, that there’s no trace left of frivolity in my dress.’
Will answered soberly in an attempt to draw Charles down to the real matter in hand: These Moderate Covenanters of Lauderdale’s and Hamilton’s party, they, I suppose, support the earlier, the National League and Covenant, that Montrose himself upheld at its beginning?’
But Charles was irrepressible. Mounting on a stool, in a high snuffling whine he intoned: ‘There is not one Covenant but three Covenants, all of them incomprehensible. First the Scots made a Covenant against the Pope and the Roman Mass, and nobody minded it. So then they made another, the National League and Covenant against the English Prayer Book, and nobody minded that. So Argyll made yet another and called it the Solemn League and Covenant because it had ceased to be national and grown a damned sight too solemn – and nobody minded that, but he said they’d go to hell if they didn’t, so they had to. Have I expounded this doctrine well and truly unto you, my feeble-minded brother?’
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