‘Get down, you fool!’ exclaimed Will. ‘They’re coming!’
There were two ministers among the Commissioners and two advocates with the Earl of Cassillis at their head, but all looked overpoweringly clerical in their high hats and severely plain clothes, representing as they did the extreme clerical party in Scotland. Their bearing towards Charles, once they had performed a fairly low bow, was not that of subjects towards their King but of ambassadors from an equal Power, and it was noted that they gave their formal condolences on the lamented ‘violent death’ of King Charles I, not his ‘murder’, as even the most severely Calvinistic of their sympathizers in Holland had not hesitated to call it.
They went straight from the King’s presence to his aunt the ex-Queen of Bohemia, where at least they should find sympathy, in the martyred saint of the Protestant cause, whose husband had died fighting the great powers of Rome.
But Elizabeth, with ruthless feminine logic, could see no connexion between this and the hostility she was expected to bear to Montrose.
‘What in God’s name has Rome to do with the matter?’ she exclaimed in her downright fashion that always managed to wear the appearance of a compliment, as if to say, ‘To sensible people like yourself I can afford to speak frankly.’ ‘Here on the Continent we see Rome where she is, and big and dangerous enough in all conscience. But in those cloudy islands of my home, and yours, you see her in impossible places, like an old maid looking under her bed every night for the man she’s never found there yet. You would suspect a poppy of wearing a Cardinal’s hat! What has Rome to do with the Marquis of Montrose, who is and has been a Presbyterian all his life?’
In a sharp swerve to a new point of attack Mr Robert Baillie answered by condemning the Popish practices in the Church of England Prayer Book and begging her to reclaim her own child the Princess Sophia and the young King her nephew from this insidious influence and to lead them back into the one true Presbyterian Church of Calvin.
‘And you can see what that means!’ she burst out to her faithful Craven as soon as she had rid herself of them, a little sooner than was quite decent. ‘Amelia has already got at them with tales against Sophie – met them at the Palace gates, no doubt, to tell them to marry Charles to her own pure Protestant girl. The presumption of these steeple crowns! What is Cassillis doing in a high hat? But the Kennedys have had to show themselves off as unco guid Reformers ever since they part-roasted an Abbot to get his lands. And so here’s this wizened elder of an earl complaining to me of my daughter going to the Church of England service with her own first cousin!’
‘Ah well,’ said little Lord Craven in his sleepy fashion, ‘it’s as good a place for meeting as any, now that the ice has melted.’
Elizabeth laughed wickedly. ‘True Towser’ could get in a shrewd nip on occasion.
But for all her mockery, her concern for Sophie’s hopes was more eager and personal than she had ever felt for any of her daughters. She could not imagine a more pleasant son-in-law than Charles – what jokes they would have together! – and then to think of her youngest daughter becoming the Queen of England, as she herself was intended to be by nature and had so nearly been by fate.
That plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up her father and brothers in Parliament and put herself, then a child of ten, on the throne, – horrible as it had been, she could not but admit now, looking back, that she would have made a far better business of it as Queen Elizabeth II than her brother had done as King Charles I. But now if poor Charles’ son and her daughter could reclaim the family fortunes and England together, what splendid justification it would give to all past failures!
‘And you and I, old friend, should then see dear England once again,’ she said to Craven, her eyes bright and tender with the vision of the England she had left at sixteen, the Merry England of her father King James’ heyday.
Martial law now ruled England, forbidding football and horse-racing and dancing round the maypole. The soldiers were rebelling against the preparations for the invasion of Ireland. They had set fire to the cannon foundries that were making munitions for it, and had arrested their officers and elected new ones under the principles of democracy.
But Oliver Cromwell had put all that down with an iron hand, and men were thrown into prison who dared to say that England was now under no law but that of the sword. The sword and the Code of Moses now reigned together over what had been so lately the most modern and enlightened nation in Europe.
The Scots Commissioners at The Hague were a sore reminder to Elizabeth of that alien rule, yet she was charming to them, both from policy and habit. She told the acid, prematurely withered Earl of Cassillis, nicknamed the Solemn, how well she remembered visiting his father in his lovely and ancient castle on the banks of the little river in the wooded valley on the way to Glasgow. (She had visited it, as it happened, at the age of one, but she did not mention that – what difference did it make if she remembered it or only remembered hearing about it afterwards?)
And she told the sturdy and loquacious Mr Robert Baillie (the only human being among the lot, she declared) how much interested she was to hear he kept a diary and hoped she might some day be allowed a glimpse of it. She would like to see his first impressions of London eight years ago at the beginning of the troubles, when he had gone there as Commissioner at Lord Strafford’s trial.
He gave her his impressions then and there very tersely; the London lodging-house keepers had grossly overcharged him and his fellows, he told her, and it was the first and he hoped the last time he would ever be charged 40 shillings Scots for a dish of partridges as small as sparrows.
She laughed herself into fits telling this afterwards to Montrose. Then suddenly her splendid eyes flashed in scorn and she reminded him how Mr Baillie’s cousin, General Baillie, had boasted publicly that he and Argyll had caught Montrose and his handful of Highlanders in a trap, and ‘if we get not the life of these worms chirted out of them, the reproach will stick on us for ever’.
‘And the reproach has stuck, and it was the life of some 3,000 of Argyll’s clan that was chirted out of them by “these worms”!’ So she now cried gleefully, declaring that it was no wonder these Brethren fled whenever they heard the very name of Jamie Graham.
‘I must have a portrait of you to be my rescuer when you are gone. I will get that fat lazy Gerard to do a large one that I can hang in my room to frighten away those carrion crows when they flap their black wings at me and caw their dismal prophecies and would peck if they dare.’
‘So Your Majesty dubs me your scarecrow,’ he said, smiling with pleasure at her laughter. He had never seen a woman who could laugh like this. It made no odds what happened to her, that ‘unhappy’, ‘unfortunate’ were what all men called her and her family; there was a rich world of happiness within her, wider than any circumstance without.
Her daughter Louise watched in amusement, annoyance and agony the rapid growth of the friendship between them. She too could recognize in her mother a true grandeur of spirit preserved through all the dragging poverty of her conditions. But a lifetime with her could make her see in it also that touch of exaggeration, of consciousness, that makes for travesty. There is no insurmountable gulf between the heroine and the charlatan, and the heroine who is everlastingly deprived of the natural exercise of her immense vitality, thwarted and suppressed, an empress in a lodging-house, is apt to be forced to play up to herself.
Elizabeth I made the England of the Elizabethan age; but she who might have been Elizabeth II, with a spirit equally imperial, had to bother about the butchers’ and the bakers’ bills. The inequality of her fate could not lower her pride, but it inclined her to caricature it. ‘I am still of my mad humour to be merry,’ she declared when things were at the worst with her, and her high spirits seemed at times uncomfortably excessive to her daughters. Why should she sit up so much later than they wished to do at any Court function, as though determined to show that five-in-the-morning had no terrors for a fifty-year-old? W
hy must she swear so often, make even that sour stick Cassillis and that podgy wind-bag Baillie her slaves, call her men friends such nicknames as ‘little ape’ or ‘ugly filthy camel’s face’?
‘And what does she call the Marquis of Montrose?’ asked Eliza dryly when Louey had burst out in these indignant questions.
‘No worse than “Jamie Graham” so far, or it may be – God forgive her! – “Gentle Jamie”. But he likes it – likes being praised and laughed at as though he were a little boy! And this is the “Great Marquis”, so grave and aloof, of whom everybody stands in awe, or rather fear!’
‘That is probably the reason of his liking it,’ said Eliza as though quoting from a Jesuit’s manual of psychology.
‘Oh, you are right! That is the secret of Mother’s success with men. She is never afraid of anybody or anything, least of all of the effect she might have upon them. And so they would give their lives for her. While I—’
‘While you—?’
‘Wish only that I could give my life for him,’ thought Louey.
But she did not say it. She smiled at her sister as they rode over the flat pasture lands beyond the town towards the sunset that lay in bars of cloud and fire above the flat horizon, and said, ‘Was one so able as a child to enjoy a sunset such as this, a little flat mud, and above us an immeasurable immensity of heaven, because one had then no thought of what to do with it? Artists are mere merchants after all; they muddy all their precious merchandise by bringing it to market. And the artist and the lover “Are of imagination all compact”.’
‘What do you want then, Louey?’
Louey did not answer.
But Eliza, even while putting her question, still heard only her sister’s low voice that had wandered so far away from this present moment. She thought that of all their family Louey was the most fascinating although the most unsure of herself, the gayest though the most troubled in spirit, because the waters of that spirit ran deeper and broader than the others’, more open to every wind of heaven to stir with its breath – and what word is that but inspiration?
X
Less than two miles from The Hague was the House in the Wood which Prince William’s father, Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, had begun to build before his death two years ago. It was the perfect summer palace, surrounded by woods and water, with long windows opening on to a lake of swans set among the curtains of great trees; it enshrined the most perfect treasures that had yet been acquired by Holland’s adventurous sea trade on the other side of the world.
There was to be an Indian room, a Japanese room, a Chinese room; huge jars of cloisonne filled with sweet-smelling spices stood about in corners; a rhinoceros horn set on a stand of carved ivory bore witness to the fable of the unicorn; a baby’s rattle showed six carved balls enclosed each inside the other so that only a miracle of the Eastern magicians could have placed them there. The floor was a spider-web pattern of inlaid woods, the walls were covered with enormous canvases representing Prince Henry’s victories, all by different artists, or indifferent, as Louey complained.
There was her Great-Uncle Henry fighting Hate, Envy and Calumny all at once while the skeleton figure of Death aimed his javelin at him; there he was again, making a triumphal entry into Bois-le-Duc, his red cheeks sagging rather than burly, and his figure rather small and insignificant, looking embarrassingly over-dressed in full Court armour among so many large naked females, allegorical of course, but painted so realistically in all their bulging curves that they looked like a party of good burghers’ wives taking a bathe, which God forbid they should ever do, especially in front of Great-Uncle Henry in full dress. And there too was the skeleton Death dodging through a welter of naked women, angels, magnificent horses and dogs, and the artist himself who leaned forward from a corner of his own picture in a blue cap and grey whiskers to gaze shrewdly at the scene he had conjured up.
Death, after pursuing Great-Uncle Henry through so many pictures, got him in the end after a banquet at which he would eat (and drink) all the things that were the worst possible for his gout, while his wife Amelia sat in helpless tears, obliged at last to give up even saying ‘Do remember!’
From the moment of his death the House in the Wood underwent a curious transformation; it was no longer Henry’s but Amelia’s. The same pictures remained on the walls, but others were added – of his son Prince William when a boy with his English child-bride, the Princess Mary; of Mary’s father, King Charles I of England, as Roman knight riding into a thundercloud – bad portraits all of these and hung in a very bad light.
But the pictures that now began to dominate the House in the Wood were the pictures of Amelia – Amelia as a blooming matron surrounded by her four daughters, blazoning her opulent maternity in ermine and yellow satin studded with jewels like the harness on a Flanders mare; Amelia as a solitary widow in black on a dark ground surrounded by white immortelles of an unpleasant greyish hue like rather dusty feathers moulting from angels’ wings; Amelia above all and in the middle of all, at the top of the dome that surmounted the whole vast structure, her hard eye staring down past the musicians’ gallery into the body of the Great Hall, supervising everybody and everything that went on there.
You could only see her by cricking your head back till it hurt your neck, but all the time she was seeing you. The very workmen felt the effect of the Dowager’s eye and worked more continuously in that central banqueting-hall than anywhere else, forbearing to slink off with their accustomed frequency for another pot of beer.
For the Summer Palace was by no means finished yet; it would not be finished for years, and for that very reason made the easiest and most informal rendezvous, since there was always the excuse to come out and see how such a room or picture or bulb garden was getting on.
And to the House in the Wood went Argyll’s Commissioners for an informal conference with King Charles and his counsellors and were most graciously received by the Dowager Princess, who told them it had always been her husband’s policy, and was now her son’s and her own, to uphold the united Church of Calvin as the one hope of peace in Europe.
‘They talk about the Thirty Years’ War that has now at last ended in Germany,’ she said, ‘but for us here in Holland it was the end of eighty years’ fighting for our faith, and not one jot or tittle of it must now be yielded to Rome, or to Rome’s jackal the Church of England. Calvin and his disciple John Knox – the man who swerves from them by as much as one syllable is a traitor to his God. My daughter Agnes here has never been inside any church but the Calvinist or, as you would say, Presbyterian.’
They were enchanted with her orthodoxy, the staunchest they had yet found in even this most Protestant country. King Charles had, of course, the appalling disadvantage of a Papist mother, though his youth, and sweet and virtuous disposition, coupled with severe training from now on, might reclaim him in time from even this error. But they admitted their disappointment in not finding more of Amelia’s spirit in that martyr to the Protestant cause, the Queen of Bohemia.
The Dowager smiled so witheringly at such expectations that even the early spring flowers she clenched in her hand hung their heads. Had not the Commissioners seen for themselves, even as she had warned them, that the Princess Sophia attended the Church of England services and, what was worse, led her cousin King Charles into accompanying her there? They even listened to Wishart’s preaching, Montrose’s chaplain who had written that book in praise of his master’s victories over the Covenanters in Scotland. Were the Commissioners going to suffer this insult in silence?
They were not. Mr Robert Baillie busily pulled out a little book and made a note that they should lodge a protest against Wishart and the Church of England services together.
But Amelia was not yet going to leave the subject of Elizabeth and her daughters’ unorthodoxy. It was not only a question of the Anglican services, but (and she dropped her voice to a hollow whisper) the Princess Louise had been seen coming out of the Queen Henrietta Maria’s Papis
t chapel after they had been saying Mass, her eyes red with crying.
‘But the Queen Henrietta Maria has not been at The Hague for seven years,’ said Mr Baillie innocently.
‘Seven years ago then,’ snapped Amelia; ‘what odds does it make? What’s begun early is continued ill. The Princess Louise worships her Papist aunt, and so does her sister Sophia.’
‘Oh, but, Mamma,’ her daughter Agnes expostulated, ‘Sophia said she was an ugly little woman with thin arms, and teeth sticking out of her mouth like guns out of a fort.’
Mr Baillie chuckled richly; even Lord Cassillis made a wry grin, for laughter at the enemies of the Lord might be permissible; but Amelia rapped her daughter over the knuckles, not for her pertness, as she said, but for taking Sophia’s part.
Agnes had not realized she was taking it, she had spoken only with her usual honesty and stupidity. She stood beside her mother in a blue-and-white striped dress, rather too tight across her full bosom, looked dully at these ugly old men in black and wondered if they could really help her to marry the young English King. Here they were talking for hours with her mother, who promised them the support of all the Continental Calvinist countries as though that painted eye of hers in the dome commanded the whole of Europe as well as the House in the Wood.
But it could not command the young King, and he, Agnes knew, was walking at this very moment with her cousin Sophia in the new tulip walk at the other side of the Palace.
For the last few weeks Sophie had been in process of having her head turned. She had always been popular as a butt for teasing, one who gave as good as she got, gave a good deal better in the case of slow-witted young men who were frankly terrified of her; the Prince de Tarente would fly at the sight of her, and the young Englishman Vane never forgave the verses she wrote on his ’shoe-horn chin’. But those were not the victories she was wishing for, or getting now.
The Bride Page 17