Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

by Margaret George

  He did have a secret scarlet nightshirt that he wore when he and Mistress Cullen met, when her husband the Captain was away.… At the thought of Mistress Cullen he felt excited. At the same time he laughed to himself. It had been so much fun to be morally outraged by Bothwell and the Queen’s adultery and to demand that they be punished for it.

  The Captain was becoming a nuisance. He was home too much. Perhaps it was time the Lords of the Congregation gave him an assignment out of town. Or perhaps it was even possible that the Captain was a traitor and therefore not fit to live.

  Morton pulled out an embroidered topcoat that had little scarlet flowers on it, albeit on a dull, earth-coloured background. He pulled it on, noting with satisfaction that his beard now only grazed the starched ruff.

  There was a sudden knock on the door. “Lord Morton!” an excited voice called, and Archibald Douglas stepped in. His eyes were glittering. “There’s been a find! A real find, for us.… Bothwell’s servant has been caught by Balfour breaking into Bothwell’s rooms in the Castle. He escaped, but we caught up with him.”

  “And? Who was it?”

  “Geordie Dalgleish, his tailor. He came to get Bothwell’s clothes, so he said. But the night in ‘little ease’ in the Tolbooth changed his mind. Or perhaps it was the sight of the Spanish collar … or the iron boots … or maybe it was the Scavenger’s Daughter.…”

  Archibald was growing dreamy-eyed; he was a delighter in cruelty and enjoyed the ingenuity of torture instruments, each one attuned to a different faculty or limb.

  “And?” Morton prodded.

  Archibald snapped out of his reverie. “He took us to a little house on the Potterow outside the walls and there gave us this!” Archibald produced an ornate silver casket, with entwined initial Fs on it. He set it down reverently.

  “Why, what’s this?” said Morton, bending to examine the lock-box.

  “Something very precious to the Lord Bothwell, evidently. Also stored in another box were the royal patents creating him Duke, and his various land grants and inheritances from his father. I think it must be valuable, else he would not have risked his servant’s life to obtain it.”

  “He did not know he was risking his life,” said Morton. “Remember, he does not know the Lord Balfour has gone over to us. Undoubtedly he assumed that Dalgleish could come and go unhindered.” Morton turned the box upside down. He could hear some contents, which sounded like papers, thump inside. There were no jewels, then, or he would have heard them clink.

  “Smash it open!” said Archibald.

  “No,” said Morton. “Perhaps it would be wiser to have a little ceremony in which we broke open the lock in front of witnesses and recorded the contents. Our own witnesses, of course. Go and tell the Lords to assemble here as soon as possible.”

  While he was waiting, Morton took the silver casket and put it on a marble table on the first floor. He paced the room, looking anxiously out the window. The crowds of the day before were gone, and Edinburgh looked normal. Removing the Queen had been the correct thing to do. Now she could not be touched, either by the mob or by her warrior rescuer, Bothwell. There she could stay until they had decided what to do, and until the Lord James returned to help them decide. Bothwell would have to be executed speedily in order to shut his mouth. Even though the paper with the names he so stupidly gave the Queen had been destroyed, he carried in his head enough information about the King’s murderers to undermine the Lords’ position of innocent outrage.

  Morton paced up and down the room. He loved his town house, loved everything about it, from the way the sun slanted into the upper rooms to the inlaid wood pattern of the hall downstairs. He had surely been blessed.

  * * *

  That afternoon, eleven of the Lords of the Congregation gathered around his marble table. There was Maitland, of course, and three earls: the earls of Atholl, of Mar, and of Glencairn. The Lords Home, Sempill—father of Lusty’s husband—and Sanquhar looked on, along with the Master of Graham and the Laird of Tullibarden, and Andrew Douglas. The silver strongbox sat gleaming like a miniature trunk; it was even shaped like one.

  Morton tried several keys that he had obtained from an Edinburgh locksmith, but none opened the lock, as it appeared to be a foreign one. So he took up a hammer and file and broke open the box. He dented the lid slightly, but that did not hinder his lifting it up to reveal a pile of folded papers and letters lying inside.

  “Ah!” he said. “Documents. Let us see what they are!” Quickly he began unfolding them. His face fell with disappointment.

  “A long French poem,” he said. He laid it aside and took out another.

  “A letter. In French. It pertains to … something about a servant.” He put it aside, too.

  “Now this…” It was yet another French letter. His eyes skimmed it. It was even duller than the other one, with classical allusions to Medea.

  Love letters. His heart sank, and he felt like a fool for having summoned all the Lords to come and see a stack of love letters.

  He picked up another. This one, also in French, mentioned the Earl of Lennox. It had to do with his retainers.

  The next piece of paper proved to be a marriage contract. It was dated April fifth, 1567; in it Mary promised to marry Bothwell. Naturally it, too, was in French. Well, no wonder he had kept it. It was a legal document proving her intent.

  “What was the date?” Maitland asked.

  “April fifth,” he replied, then it hit him. “Three weeks before the ‘abduction.’ This proves it was false! He and the Queen planned it! They were in collusion together!”

  Eagerly he pulled out another letter. This time the phrases leapt out at him. “‘And thereupon hath preached unto me that it was a foolish enterprise, and that with mine honour I could never marry you, seeing that being married you did carry me away.’” He looked around at the other Lords.

  He grabbed another letter out, a very long one, written on several sheets of paper. His face turned first white, then pink. He stammered with excitement.

  “Oh! This letter—it is a strange nightmare, all feverish and full of fits and starts, but it—it proves—O Holy God—”

  “Read it!” said Maitland.

  “I cannot. It is too long! But you can each read it, taking care not to harm or smudge it. It says—oh, listen to this: ‘Alas! I never deceived anybody, but I remit myself wholly to your will; and send me word what I shall do, and whatsoever happen to me, I will obey you. To be short, I have learned that he is suspicious, and yet he trusts my word.’”

  Maitland snorted. “This means nothing. No names are mentioned. For that matter, is it addressed, dated, or signed?”

  “No,” Morton admitted.

  “If you were writing an adulterous love letter, would you sign it?” asked the Earl of Atholl with a smirk.

  “No,” said Morton, who had written many. “But there is more. The King is mentioned. ‘The King sent for Joachim and asked him, why I did not lodge nigh to him.’”

  “Altogether too vague,” said Erskine. “It could refer to anything. It could be written by a servant, for that matter.”

  “Not this!” Morton said triumphantly. “‘But now to make him trust me I must feign something unto him; and therefore when he desired me to promise that when he should be well we should make but one bed I told him feigning to believe his fair promises, that if he did not change his mind between this time and that, I was contented.’”

  “So?” argued Erskine. “This only proves it was written by the Queen, then.”

  “And why was she writing such things to Bothwell? Here is why: ‘I am glad to write unto you when other folk be asleep, seeing that I cannot do as they do, according to my desire, that is between your arms my dear life whom I beseech God to preserve from all ill.’”

  “So they were lovers, and she seems to regard God as some sort of celestial procurer,” said Glencairn. “Amusing, but everyone suspected as much.”

  “Suspected and proved are not th
e same thing! This proves they were lovers before Darnley’s death! And that she went to Glasgow with secret motives. That was why she brought him back. It was a plan!”

  “It does seem to tend that way,” admitted Atholl. He held out his hand to receive one of the documents.

  The Lords spent the rest of the afternoon perusing the letters, quoting suitable phrases with great glee, as if they had discovered hidden treasures.

  “‘Being gone from the place where I had left my heart, it may be easily judged what my countenance was.…’”

  “‘But fear not but the place shall continue till death.’”

  “‘Now if to please you, my dear life, I spare neither honour, conscience, nor hazard, nor greatness, take it in good part, and not according to the interpretation of your false brother-in-law, to whom I pray you, give no credit against the most faithful lover that ever you had or shall have.’”

  The men tittered. “It sounds like a lovesick child,” said Lord Home. “But then, Bothwell seemed to inspire such passion in the female breast. How do we know all of these are from the Queen? He had many conquests, and it would have been like him to have kept all the letters and gloated over them. Or left them out to make whoever it was of the moment jealous. I suspect that was their real function.”

  “Well, whatever their original function for the Earl, they’ll serve quite another for us. With these, gentlemen, we can justify keeping the Queen in captivity.”

  “Oh, listen to this! It cannot be the Queen who wrote this one, it’s too servile and whiny: ‘God forgive you and give you, my only friend, the good luck and prosperity that your humble and faithful lover doth wish unto you, who hopes shortly to be another thing to you, for the reward of my pains. I have not made one word, and it is very late, although I should never be weary in writing to you, yet I will end, after kissing of your hands.’ It was probably that Norwegian woman who followed him here and hung about, neglected,” said Erskine. He laughed.

  “Gentlemen, I think it is of greatest importance that we let the world know about this shocking proof, and in the Queen’s own handwriting, of the plot between her and Bothwell to murder the innocent King,” said Morton sternly. “Are we agreed?”

  All the men nodded solemnly.

  * * *

  After the main party of them had left, Maitland and Archibald lingered on. Maitland put his arm around Morton’s neck familiarly. “Let us not forget that it is we who planned the King’s death, or at least were considering it. It would be easy to forget, and thereby confuse our stories and our evidence.”

  “We may have signed that paper, and we may have met at Whittingham, but the truth is we didn’t kill the King,” Morton insisted stubbornly.

  “Well, then,” said Maitland, “I wonder who did? I mean, really?”

  * * *

  The Lords marched in solemn procession down the Canongate, their singing hearts at variance with their long faces. They were going to the royal apartments at Holyrood to cleanse them, clear them out. The Queen’s reign was over.

  There were six of them: Maitland, Morton, Erskine, Atholl, Glencairn, and Douglas. Word had spread, and soon a crowd fell in behind them, hoping for some spoils or at least a diversion this bright June day. Since the Kirk had banished May Day revels, Robin Hood, and the riotous fairs accompanying holy days, the populace had been hungry for high jinks.

  The Lords left the crowd behind when they entered the palace itself, but encouraged them to remain in the courtyard. Once inside, the Lords ascended the grand staircase and began happily honouring various sites of violence or humiliation, creating a Protestant Stations of the Cross. “Look, here’s the trunk where Riccio’s body lay after it was stripped.” “Here’s the landing where they threw him down.” “Here’s the room where John Knox made the Queen cry.” “Here’s where he admonished the silly Marys on their vanity.” “This is where Riccio was first stabbed.” “And look, here’s the staircase where Darnley came up!”

  The three rooms that had been Mary’s private domain stood empty, with everything still in its place. There was the supper table (“the one that got overthrown and hit the Queen’s belly”) in the little room, polished and bare except for two candlesticks. Her bed was made, its green and yellow silk cover with its green silk fringe hanging neatly down to the floor. Her little desk, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, held a locked writing cabinet and an ivory box for pens and ink. There was also a silver box with a green velvet cover resting to one side. Everything had been precisely arranged and they knew, before even looking, that the contents of the box would be in order and held with scarlet ribbon.

  Against one wall was a crucifix with a kneeler under it, flanked by two candles. A small framed painting of the Virgin was nearby.

  Large studded trunks were against another wall, locked. And there were two smaller cabinets, painted with flowers and birds, with a mirror lying atop one.

  The men looked around silently. Habit made them want to speak softly, to give honour, to watch how they stood and held their hats. Mary’s presence filled the room; for a moment it seemed impossible that she was not there. Then the fact that she was not rushed over them, and it seemed bizarre and unnatural.

  All this was theirs, to do with as they would.

  All this.

  Glencairn was the first to take action. He grabbed the little writing cabinet, the one with the story of Cupid and Psyche painted on it, and twisted its handles. When it did not open, he lifted it over his head and smashed it on the floor.

  “It’s French!” he said, “Something the French whore would have brought with her!”

  Maitland grimaced. “It is not necessary to destroy it.”

  “Let’s see what’s in it!” Glencairn bent down and tried to pull out the drawers. When they still refused to open, he kicked it with his studded boots and splintered the delicate wood. “Ah!” He emptied it. A pile of papers and letters fell out.

  “French dung!” he cried. “Look, they’re all in French!”

  “Yes, Glencairn. That is customary when writing to the French,” said Maitland. “Most people can read French,” he added pointedly, knowing Glencairn could not. He picked up the letters and skimmed them.

  “This one is a copy of one written to Catherine de Médicis—this is to her goddaughter, little Marie d’Elboeuf—this is to her aunt the Abbess—”

  Glencairn was pulling out other papers. “Now here it is—her ciphers! Look at them!” His voice rose in genuine amazement. “There must be sixty codes here!”

  Maitland grabbed a handful. “So that’s what Riccio did. Translate all these. A boring, tedious job. No wonder she missed him. There wasn’t anyone else patient enough to do it. I certainly wasn’t. We didn’t use all these when I was still principal secretary.”

  “What I want to know is, why is it necessary to use codes at all?” growled Morton. “I mean, only spies and people who are involved in underhanded things need to resort to codes.” He shuffled around the room, a look of distaste on his face, stopping to finger the tapestries and the velvet covering of one table. This embroidery might go well in his hall.

  “She ought to have used codes in the letters to Bothwell!” crowed Glencairn. “Where were they when she needed them?”

  “Oh, passion put them out of her head,” laughed Atholl. “Can you imagine writing about ‘my heart, my blood, my soul, my care, you promised we should be together all night at our leisure’ and having to think, ‘let’s see, I substitute 2 for y, and a for r, and so on.”

  The men howled with laughter, and Atholl fell on the bed. He grabbed a pillow and embraced it passionately. Then he rolled over on top of it and began thrusting at it, while crying in falsetto, “Oh, my Lord Bothwell, oh, oh, stop, stop, oh, oh, don’t stop.…”

  “Where do you suppose it first happened?” asked Erskine suddenly. “Was it here?”

  “This chamber has had a surfeit of evil, so perhaps it was,” said Maitland. “I cannot help but think that it was a d
oomed day that she ever set foot in it. Almost as if it dragged her down into evil, instigated it.”

  Morton folded a tapestry neatly and put it down to take away later. “Oh, come now. You can’t imply that if she had just used Falkland Palace or Edinburgh Castle for her main residence, things would have been different?”

  “I know not what I imply. I only know there is something overwhelming about the events that have happened in here.” Maitland turned to the window, the one overlooking the courtyard. The people were still out there, hoping for excitement of some sort. “This is where she listened to the music the people played for her when first she arrived.” He shook his head. “It seems that she tried.”

  “Lust undid her,” said Morton righteously.

  “It is not that simple.” Maitland glared at him. “A marriage ceremony turned the lust into legal wedlock. If lust alone could bring a person down, there’s not a one of us that wouldn’t also be imprisoned in Lochleven.”

  “Only the Lord James would still be free!” said Mar, trying to regain the lightheartedness that Maitland was ruining.

  “Not even Knox would escape,” chimed in Atholl. “He wears out his young wife, so I hear. And when he was courting, he dandied himself up like a French whore himself!”

  “Look!” Morton was prying open the locked drawers of the painted chests, and extracting jewel chests, also locked. He broke the locks and dumped the contents out on the velvet table cover.

  They were all there: her personal jewellery, her watches and rings and brooches and necklaces; her heirlooms, the Great Harry and the rope of black pearls. In reverent awe, Morton looped the pearls over his paw-like hands, holding them up. They were so long he had to spread his arms out as far as they could go to stretch them out to their full length.

  “I remember her wearing these. God, how she treasured them!” said Erskine.

  “And now they are ours. Or, rather, Scotland’s,” said Morton, licking his lips. “Think of the money they will fetch.”

  Suddenly Maitland had an idea. “I know one person who likes pearls even more than our own Queen,” he said. “The Queen of England! I’ll warrant she will pay well for them. We must offer them to her!”