Your treasures were no safer than they stand
Now that I keep them not, and no man’s tongue
Can tax me with them as detained from you
By fraud or usurpation; which mine ear
Were loth to know was muttered.
QUEEN.
But you see
Nor they nor I have surety save in you;
Let it be seen of them that else may doubt
How thankfully I trust you; even for that
Do thus, to do me good in men’s report
When they shall see us at one; from mine own hand
Except you take them shall they not be rent
By craft or force of hidden or harrying hands
That could not wrest from yours what mine must yield
For fault of you to help me?
MURRAY.
As you will.
I would not cross you where I might content,
Yet willingly I cannot take on me
More charge than needs of privy trusts to keep
That brings men’s blame about them; but in this
My will shall be your servant.
Re-enter Lady Lochleven and George Douglas
For this time
I take farewell; be patient, and seek peace
Whence God may send it. - To your gentler hand,
While yet the Lady Mary lives in ward,
Behoves not me commend her, being but bound
As reverently as may beseem your son
In the state’s name to charge you that she find
At all men’s hands that guard her now about
Good usage with safe keeping; which to assure
Shall hardly need this young man’s service here,
For whom the state has other use, and I
A worthier work than still to keep such watch
As porters use or pages.
LADY LOCHLEVEN.
He and I
Stand at your bidding; yet were nowise loth
The state that gave should take this charge away
It laid upon us.
QUEEN.
Sir, the grace you brought
And comfort to me sorrowing and afraid
Go ever with you; and farewell.
MURRAY.
Farewell.
Exeunt Lady Lochleven and Murray.
QUEEN.
Will you not go?
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
Whither you bid, and when,
I will go swiftly.
QUEEN.
With your lord and mine,
I would have said; yet irks it me to say
My lord, who had none under heaven, and was
Of these my lords once lady. Said I not
You should do well to cast off care of me
Whom you must leave indeed now at command
More powerful of more potent lips than mine?
I would not have you set your younger will
Against his word imperial; nor, I think,
Doth he fear that who bids us come and go
And whose great pleasure is that you part hence
And I sit here: be patient, and seek peace,
You heard him bid me; patience we must have
If we would rest obedient; and for peace,
So haply shall we find it, having learnt
What rest is in submission.
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
Bid me stay,
And that my will shall part not hence alive
What need I swear?
QUEEN.
Alas, your will may stay,
Your will may wait on me to do me good,
Your loves and wishes serve me when yourself
Shall live far off; our lord forbids them not;
It is the service of your present hand,
The comfort of your face, help of your heart,
That he forbids me.
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
And though God forbade
Save by my death he should compel me not
To do this bidding; only by your mouth
Of all that rule in heaven and earth will I
Be willingly commanded.
QUEEN.
You must go.
Nay, I knew that; how should one stay by me?
There was not left me, by God’s wrath or man’s,
One friend when I came hither in the world;
And from the waste and wilderness of grief
If one grain ripen - from the stone and sand
If one seed blossom - if my misery find
One spring on earth to assuage its fiery lip -
How should I hope that God or man will spare
To trample or to quench it?
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
I am here
While you shall bid me live, and only hence
When you shall bid me but depart and die.
QUEEN.
There was a time when I would dream that men
There were to do my bidding; such as loved
And were beloved again, and knew not fear
Nor hope but of love’s giving; but meseemed
That in my dream all these were cast away,
And by God’s judgment or through wrath of men
Or mine own fault or change and chance of time,
I lived too long to look for love in vain.
Many there are that hate me now of men;
Doth one live yet that loves?
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
If one there were
That for your love’s sake should abhor his life,
Hating all hope save this, to die for you,
What should he do to die so?
QUEEN.
If I bade
That for my love’s sake he should love his life
And use its strength to cherish me, who knows
If he would heed? or say I gave command
To do some ill thing or of ill report -
Were it to slay our brother now gone hence -
Would one do that? I would not have it done,
Though I should bid him. Do not answer me,
As though I questioned with you seriously
Or spake of things that might be thought upon,
Who do but jest with grief as with my friend
That plays again familiarly with me,
And from the wanderings of a joyless wit
Turn to clasp hands with sorrow. You must go.
GEORGE DOUGLAS.
Ay, when you bid; but were my going from you
Part of your grief, which is more grief to me
Than my soul’s going from forth my body were,
I would not set my face from hence alive.
QUEEN.
I hold it not for no part of my grief
To bid you from me; yet being here bound in
As I with walls and waters, we should find
Less help than yet I hope for of your hand
Being hence enlarged. We will take counsel, sir,
And choose, with no large choice to make of friends,
To whom we shall appoint you, by what mean
To deal for our deliverance: as with one
Once of my household and this lady’s kin
Who here of all my Maries the last left
Partakes my bonds: the Laird of Ricarton,
My husband’s kinsman; and what readiest friends
Once more may be raised up, as when I fled
From shame and peril and a prison-house
As hateful as these bonds, to find on earth -
Ah, no such love and faith as yours in man.
Scene V. Holyrood
Murray and Morton
MURRAY.
I am vexed with divers counsels, and my will
Sees nor its way nor end. This act proclaimed
That seals the charge of murder on the queen
To justify our dealing had to it hands
That here first met; Kirkaldy with Glenca
irn,
Balfour with Maitland, Huntley with Argyle,
True man with traitor, all were as one mind,
One tongue to tax her with complicity,
Found art and part with them that slew her lord;
Men praised the council for this judgment given
As from a single and a resolute soul;
Scarce one withstood save Herries, and his voice
Was as a wind that sings in travellers’ ears
Unheeded; then the doom that gives to death
All that in act maintain the former faith
And writes for Catholic traitor, should have purged
The state of treacherous or of dangerous friends
Such as made protest then against this law
And fled from our part to the Hamiltons,
Caithness and Athol, with the bishop called
Of Murray, whom the Assembly met to judge
By one same doom has with Argyle condemned
To stand in sackcloth for adulteries past
At Stirling through the time of service held
Within the chapel royal; such men’s stay
It irks not me to lose, who by their loss
Were fain to win their enemies for my friends
More fast and faithful: but men’s sundering minds
Nor council nor assembly can reknit,
Though Knox there sit by Maitland, and Balfour
Touch sides with Craig; and while the state as now
Lives many-minded and distraught of will,
How shall its hope be stable?
MORTON.
Some there are
Have all their will, or more than we that rule
By secular wit and might; the preachers reign
With heavier hand than ours upon the state,
Who in this late assembly by their doom
Bade your fair sister of Argyle partake
The sackcloth penance of her slippery lord
For scandal to the Kirk done when last year
At the font’s edge her arms sustained our prince
For baptism of such hands as served the mass;
If it have leave long to sit lawgiver,
Their purity will pinch us.
MURRAY.
Have no fear;
It shall not Douglas: and we lack their help
Who sway the commons only with their breath,
Now most of all when our high counsels fail
And hopes are turned as ‘twere to running streams
That flow from ours to feed our enemies’ hands
With washings of our wreck, waifs of our strength,
That melts as water from us; those chief twain
Whose league I sought by marriage, and had hope
To bind them to us as brethren, when Argyle
With me should knit himself anew, to wed
His brother to the sister of my wife
With happier hope than he espoused mine own,
While Huntley’s son should lead my daughter home,
And with this fourfold knot our loves be tied
And fortunes with each other’s growth ingraffed -
Both these look back now toward the Hamiltons
To mingle factions with them, being assured
Our hands now lack the secret sword we had
To draw at need against them, since their names
Set at Craigmillar to the bond of blood
Are with that bond consumed, and no tongue left
To wag in witness of their part of guilt
Now Bothwell’s knaves are hanged that laid the train
And Hay with them, and one most near his trust,
His kinsman Hepburn, from whose mouth condemned
And Ormiston’s we have confession wrung
That marks with blood as parcel of their deed
More than Balfour that in the assembly sit
And must partake his surety; this, my lord,
Craves of us care and counsel, that our names
Be writ not fool or coward, who took in hand
Such trust to work such treason.
MORTON.
Nay, no Scot
Shall say we fell from faith or treacherously
Let men’s hopes fade that trusted us, and sank
Through feebleness of ours; yet have we strength
To lower the height of heart and confidence
That makes their faction swell, who were but late
Too faint of spirit, too fearful and unsure,
To be made firm with English subsidies;
Three thousand marks that Scrope by secret hand
Sent from Carlisle to Herries could not serve
To give or shape or sinew to their plots
Who are now so great their house’s heir must wed
No lowlier than a queen, and Bothwell’s wife,
For this divorced or widowed.
MURRAY.
Ay; we know
The archbishop his good uncle with this youth
Hath in Dumbarton fortified himself,
And while they there sit strong and high in hope
Our prisoner and our penitent late, we hear,
Grows blithe of mood and wanton; from her sight
Have I dismissed my mother’s youngest born,
Lest in her flatteries his weak faith be snared
And strangled with a smile; and for her hand
I have found a fitter suitor than Arbroath
When she shall wed again, within whose veins
Some drops of blood run royal as her own;
Methuen, whose grandsire was the third that set
His ring on that Queen Margaret’s wedded hand
From the seventh Henry sent ambassadress
To our fourth James, to bring for bridal gift
Her father’s love and England’s to her lord
And with the kiss of marriage on his lips
To seal that peace which with her husband’s life
Found end at Flodden from her brother’s hand
That split the heart of Scotland. So the queen,
If she wed Methuen, shall espouse a man
Whose father of the same queen’s womb was born
That bore her father; and whose blood as hers
Is lineal from the seed of English kings
Through one same mother’s sons, queen once of Scots
And daughter born and sister, though unqueened,
Of those twain Henries that made peace and war
With Scotland and her lord; and by this match
The Hamiltons being frustrate of their hope
Could yet not tax us with a meaner choice
Than they would make for her, who while she lives
Must stand thenceforth far off from their designs
And disallied from all that in her name
Draw now to head against us; and some help
We need the more to cross them now, that France,
To whom I thought to seek as to my friend
And thence find aid in this necessity
That else finds none, since England’s jealous craft
Puts in our enemies’ hands gold for a sword
More sharp than steel - France, that would send at need
The choice of all her sons that hold our faith
To live and die beside us here in arms,
Grows chillier toward us than the changing wind
That brings back winter: for the brood of Guise,
Our prisoner’s friends and kinsmen of Lorraine,
Prevail again on Catherine’s adverse part,
Whose hate awhile gives way to them, and yields
Our cause into their hands that were more like
To help this daughter of their dangerous house
Take up the crown resigned and through their strength
Renew this kingdom’s ruin with her reign,
Than send us aid and arms to guard its peace
Fro
m inroad as from treason: which I doubt
We shall hear news of from my brother’s tongue
Enter Sir William Douglas
Who comes without a herald.
SIR W. DOUGLAS.
Sir, the news
Is dashed with good and evil equally
That here I bring you; for the treasons laid
Have missed their mark and left unwounded yet
My house’s honour that retains in trust
So great a charge. You had word ere this of me
By what strange fortune was their plot made known
Who thought to fall upon us unaware
And find a ferry for some seventy swords
To cross the lake in mine own barge surprised
And smite those thirty guards that hold the walls
And make a murderous passage for the queen
To come forth free with feet that walked in blood;
And how by one a Frenchman of her train
Who being not in their counsel heard some speech
Of such a preparation, and conceived
This was a plot to take her from your hand
Laid by the fiercer faction of the Kirk
That sought to snare and slay her in your despite,
To me was all discovered; and betimes
I gave command no barge thenceforth should pass
Between the main shore and mine island walls,
But a skiff only that with single oars
Might be rowed over. Baffled thus, her friends
Were fain to buy the boatman’s faith with gold,
Whom on suspicion I dismissed, but since
Finding less trust and service in the knave
That had his place, called back and bade take heed
Of these that would have won to their device
A foundling page within my castle bred
And called by mine own name; who by this plot
Should have seduced for them my sentinels
And oped the gate by night; but yet I find
For all toils set and gins to take their faith
In him and them no treason; yet so near
Was treason to us, that not long since the queen
Had wellnigh slipped beyond our guard by day
In habit of a laundress that was hired
So to shift raiment with her; but being forth
Betimes as was this woman’s use to come
In the low light by dawn, at such an hour
As she was wont to sleep the morning out,
The fardel in her hand of clothes brought forth
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 240