The Wisest Fool

by Nigel Tranter

  Riding beside Heriot, near but not too near the Queen—who no doubt would prefer her own company just then—Lennox agreed with his friend that this was all very unfortunate. Particularly on top of the Jowler business. Jowler, it seemed, was another of the King's best deer-hounds, and after yesterday's hunt had disappeared. Theobalds had been in a stir over it half the night, with search-parties out and dire threats emanating from the Crown, James asserting that it was no mischance but all some dire malice against himself. Anne had therefore been doubly unfortunate with her arrow. Lord knew what repercussions there might be, now!

  However, after a mile or so, a single horseman came trotting back down the long line of tired riders threading the woodlands— James himself. He rode up to the Queen, and tipped a bloodstained finger to his bonnet

  "Och, yon was a pity, Annie," he said. "Aye, a pity. I was maybe a mite hasty. Och, we'll forget it, just Shall we?"

  Anne was stiff. "I cannot forget being miscalled, like some fishwife, in front of all!" she declared. "Especially the new Swedes. If my being a king's wife means so little to you, then recollect, I pray, that I am also a king's daughter and sister!"

  "Ooh, aye—you're that, a' right. Or I wouldna hae wed you!

  And a right unwise-like king to be sister to! To be attacking the same Swedes, in war! A fell fool ploy! And you auld farther was no' much better. I never saw him sober!" "Sir... !"

  "Uh-huh. Weel—we'll forget that too, eh? Aye, Geordie—is that yoursel’ ? Back frae yon troublesome northern realm o' mine! I hear you had your way ower the Hartside nonsense. A deep pouch is fell usefu', eh?"

  Heriot blinked. "You did, Sire? Hear? So soon!"

  "I hae ears, Geordie! On baith sides o' my heid! And a wheen wits in between! Come and gie me your crack anent Scotland, man. But—nae need to shout it oot for a' this country to hear !"

  So, riding close beside the King, through the winding woodland trails, Heriot told all that he considered relevant and important arising from his trip. As ever, how much of it was news to his monarch he could not gauge. He said nothing about the Casket Letters.

  James seemed little interested in most of what he told him, but definitely so over the suggestion that the Master of Gray was at present, if not actually co-operating, at least not opposing the Earl of Dunbar, Lord Treasurer of Scotland. "We'll hae to see aboot that," he commented. "Would you jalouse that Doddie Home was a match for Patrick Gray, Geordie? I wouldna like the one to swallow up the other, mind"

  "A match in some respects, Sire, I think. Not in others. In unscrupulousness, yes. In wits, no."

  "Ho—so that's the way o' it! You dinna like my guid servant the Earl o' Dunbar, Geordie Heriot ?"

  "Say that I would not like him to owe me money, Sire. Or anything else! I'd count my life short"

  "Aye—life's a chancy business, is it no' ? Short or lang. As it seems yon George Sprott discovered! Hominis est errare"

  "That was... judicial murder, was it not, Sire ?"

  'You think so ? Your worthy cousin, Tam o' the Coogate, my Advocate, didna so advise me! Maybe you ken the law better? We'll see what Jamie Elphinstone says, shall we? When he arrives."

  "Elphinstone? My Lord Balmerino—he is coming? Here?"

  "I've summoned him, aye. To gie an account o' his stewardship, just. Holy "Writ says 'It is required o' a man that he be found faithfu'', mind. Aye—we maim a' mind it Mysel’—and even you! Maist times I account you faithfu', Geordie—forby the fact that whiles you canna see mah'n an inch beyond your nose I That's the trouble, eh ? The honest are gey apt to be dull in the uptak—and the lads wi' the wits I canna trust. Who'd be a king, Geordie? Who'd be a king ?"

  "Not me, She—thank God! Nor anything other than a simple tradesman."

  "A simple tradesman, eh? You?" James looked at him cynically. "And who's the honest man, now ?"

  They had come to the approaches to Salisbury's huge mansion, and were heading for the stableyards. There was some commotion in front, with shouting for the King. Riding up, James found some of his party in a circle around a forester who held a hound on a lead.

  "Jowler!" the monarch cried. "Guidsakes—it's Jowler. And fit as a flea, after a'! Here's a right blessing. Whaur d'you find him, man?"

  "Your Majesty," the forester faltered, "I didn't rightly find him, as you might say. Three men brought him to the kennels— rough, country fellows. Then ran off. This 'ere paper I found tucked in Jowler's collar." Bobbing a bow he held out a folded paper.

  James took it, peering. "What's this, what’s this?" he demanded. "Ill writing. Uncouth. You read it, Vicky."

  Scanning the paper briefly, Lennox grinned, then schooled his features to a proper solemnity. He read out, "Good Mr. Jowler, We pray you speake to the King (for he hears you every day, and so doth he not us) that it will please his Majestie to go back to London, for els the contry will be undoon; all our provition is spent already, and we are not able to intertayne him longer."

  There was a snigger from sundry of those well to the rear which stopped quickly at James's scowl.

  "What means this?" he asked. "If any ken the meaning o' this screed and perceive wit in it—inform me. Inform me, I say."

  None was bold enough to elaborate. Young Carr soothingly declared that it was some bumpkin's half-witted haverings, no more.

  "What does it mean?" James said again, ignoring him, eyes narrowed.

  Only the Queen dared raise her voice to answer him. "It means, Sire, that the people of this land tire of your so frequent hunting. As indeed do I. Nor just the country bumpkins—for it is to London this would have you return. Where your parliament and government frequently require your presence. That is what it means."

  The King sat his horse, very still—and Heriot, close to him, saw knuckles gleam whitely in that hand covered in dried blood. He looked, from his wife, slowly round the circle of faces, and back to her—and the silence was a tangible tiring. Then abruptly, his features relaxed, he licked wet lips, and chuckled aloud.

  "A jest I" he exclaimed. "Sakes—a notable guid jest! I like that —aye, like it I There's wit, here—eh, Jowler! I carina seemly reward thae three limmers, for they've bolted, it seems. But Jowler shall hae double meat for his pairt! Aye—see to it- Come, then..."

  As they rode on, Lennox's glance met Heriot’s, and neither smiled.

  When they were dismounted, and the horses being led away to the stables, the King beckoned Heriot over to him, turning his back on Carr, who ever hovered nearby.

  "Geordie," he whispered, "a diamond, for my Annie. Aye, a fair diamond, set in gold. Och, you'll ken what she likes. We maun keep her happy, I'm thinking "

  * * *

  In the months that followed, much that was significant for Scotland, the Scots and their monarch, developed, to build up a new pattern in the governance of that ancient kingdom. The Chief Secretary of State, the Lord Balmerino, duly arrived in England, and after being kindly enough received in St. Albans, and privately questioned by the King, found himself in a steadily deteriorating position, practically a prisoner indeed, having to appear before the English Privy Council strangely enough—and, more strangely still, having to put up with being represented and counselled by none other than Home, Earl of Dunbar, now his chief enemy. There were many charges against him and his regime in Scotland—but the principal one was the old story that, back in 1599, he had so manipulated certain papers for the King's signature that a letter to the Pope, requesting a cardinal's hat for his own cousin, Bishop William Chisholm of Vaison, had been signed and sent. Now, Cardinal Bellarmine was gleefully boasting in various Courts of Europe that King James was sufficiently Papist himself to seek preferment from the Vatican to encourage his Scots Catholics, and this was harming his reputation and efforts as the peacemaker of Christendom. It was a tangled ten-year-old story—for James, in fact, was not the man to sign anything unread, but in violently anti-Catholic England it made a fair stick to beat Balmerino with. The hearings went on for weeks, with the King fre
quently hiding behind the arras, listening in. Finally, Balmerino made a "voluntary" confession of treasonable guilt, was deprived of all offices and sent back to Scotland for trial and sentence—although allegedly with a private assurance from James that the worst would not befall him. No reference was made throughout to Robert Logan's estates, debts or the Casket Letters, to the Master of Gray nor even the Gowrie Conspiracy. Dunbar returned North with the prisoner—and took over for himself the forfeited Restalrig estates.

  In Scotland a parallel, if slightly less concentrated process had been going on. Spottiswoode, the Archbishop of Glasgow, put before the Scottish Privy Council that its chairman, the Chancellor Dunfermline, had been guilty of undermining the authority of the King, Council and Church by numerous misdemeanours, but markedly by encouraging extreme Presbyterian elements of the Kirk to hold an illegal General Assembly at Aberdeen in 1605—the same affair in which the Reverend James Melville had been accused of taking part—to counter the royal rule in Church and State—this, in order to split the godly forces of Reform. This enquiry was also long-drawn and less decisive than Balmerino's in that no confessions were forthcoming; and indeed it all collapsed for lack of evidence. But it had results nevertheless, for it was now only too clear that the Crown's confidence in the Chancellor was withdrawn. Dunfermline resigned certain offices, though not the Chancellorship, and most clearly was now a marked man.

  Balmerino was duly found guilty of high treason and condemned to death, his body to be drawn and quartered. Sentence was, however, to await the King's pleasure—and in fact was never carried out. The former Chief Secretary and Lord President of the Court of Session retired in disgrace and restricted freedom, to private life.

  From four hundred miles distance it was not entirely clear what was gained by all this—with Dunbar now apparently supreme in the governance of Scotland, and with the new title of Great Commissioner. Lennox conceived it all to the King's advantage, with the Master of Gray losing heavily, but Heriot was not so sure.

  Two further items tended to support his doubts. The Earl of Orkney had suddenly made a strange, secret and unexplained visit to mainland Scotland, was captured and flung into ward in Edinburgh Castle. This seemed to be so unlikely a happening for that tough and savage island despot that it could be explained only by some major betrayal—and his brother-in-law, the Master, was the prime suspect And very shortly afterwards the old Lord Gray died, at last—and Patrick became sixth Lord and immediately applied for his father's long unoccupied seat on the Privy Council, which the Chancellor promptly granted. Accordingly, to George Heriot, while King James might seem to have swept away Balmerino and largely neutralised Dunfermline, the two Catholic leaders, replacing them with his Protestant minion Dunbar, Patrick Gray was now in a position to sway, if not dominate the Scots Privy Council, with Dunfermline's hands tied, and Dunbar no match for him in wits. He had all Catholic Scotland more or less mobilised and at odds with the King. And he had the King's awkward and dangerous cousin Orkney, with all his menacing potentialities, safely under lock-and-key, to use as he would. The fact that all was done in the King's name was neither here nor there. As a man used to summing up debits and credits, Heriot was not prepared to suggest that James was winning.

  Moreover, the King had other matters than Scotland to take up his attention. A distinct and growing lack of popularity with his ordinary English subjects was not a matter to worry James, for whom the popularity or otherwise of God's Anointed held little relevance; but parliament did in some measure tend to reflect popular sentiment, and parliament's grip on the royal purse-strings was as strong as it was infuriating. Young Carr was always on about a suitably dignified landed estate and mansion where he might entertain his beloved liege lord in a fitting fashion, with a park large enough for hunting, of course; and James, on Salisbury's advice, gave the youth Sir Walter Raleigh's estate of Sherborne. Raleigh was still a denizen of the Tower of London —where, however, he was not uncomfortable, had a good suite of rooms and entertained quite lavishly; indeed the Queen on occasion visited him there, and young Prince Henry, who hero-worshipped him, was a frequent caller. Unfortunately Henry was not the only hero-worshipper of Raleigh, and though the man himself had never had any use for parliament or the common folk, both now were loud in their protests at ill done to one of the most distinguished Englishmen alive. Salisbury hated both Raleigh and Carr and it was suggested that he had advised the .King to this course in order to infuriate both, having found a legal slip in Raleigh's charter of the estate which enabled it to be confiscated by the Crown. Cecil was ill, and ageing, but not done yet James was highly indignant when he was booed in London streets.

  Then a larger matter loomed. Rebellion broke out in the North of Ireland. This had been a normal occurrence in Elizabeth's reign, and Henry's before her; and both had always put down such revolts with a heavy hand and a sharp sword. But that was not James's way; and by compromise, patience and playing off one faction against another, Protestant against Catholic, he had been able to preserve approximate peace there, under the joint oversight of the Catholic, Irish Earl of Tyrone and the Protestant English Earl of Devonshire—formerly Mountjoy. Now this happy state of affairs was shattered and James was much hurt The more so when he heard that Devonshire was putting down revolt in the time-honoured fashion, with vehement fire and sword. He sent immediate commands for the killing and burning to cease— and set himself furiously to think.

  It took some time for the fruits of the royal cognition to become evident, in Ireland as nearer at hand. When George Heriot heard the details of the new statecraft, the King's policy of mercy and wisdom, he was lost in a species of wonder, to put it mildly. It was all so very reasonable, so typically James Stewart The trouble in Ireland was basically both religious and ethnic. A vast Catholic majority had had superimposed on it an English Protestant aristocracy, with nothing in common, in blood, language or faith, between the two. This had been the Tudor policy; but James decided that it would never work. He was worried, too, that the religious infection might spread to Scotland—for the two Celtic countries had always had close links, the Ulster and Scots coasts being in places little more than a dozen miles apart. Moreover, warfare within his kingdoms damaged his pacific image. So he devised a mighty and noble scheme. The Irish Catholics of the northern counties, particularly the land-owner class, as far as possible were to be moved out therefrom, to the South, and their lands planted with new Protestant colonists, mainly from Scotland and northern England. The deportees would be given land in the southern counties confiscated from rebellious chiefs and earls now in revolt —there was never any lack of empty land in Ireland, however much of it bog, as a result of endless wars, massacres, famines and the like. There, all would be allowed to practise their Catholic religion in peace, government adjusted thereto. The Catholic South. But the fertile North was to be firmly Protestant—no question of that A Judgement of Solomon.

  That was the new policy. But it was the details of implementation which left Heriot, and others, gasping. Somehow Protestant Scots and English must be persuaded to go to Ireland, and to stay there. Only one thing would serve for that—the elementary hunger for land, status, position. The northern counties therefore would be parcelled out into large estates of, say, one or two thousand acres each. Hah-a-million acres would be set aside, in the first instance, to start the scheme. These would be sold at very attractive terms, by the Crown, to all Protestant comers. But a more potent inducement the hereditary knighthoods scheme, would be put into operation. James had found a name for these, since they could by no means be termed knights, and borrowed from English Edward the Third—baronets, or little barons. For a payment of three thousand, two hundred and forty pounds Sterling to the Crown, ostensibly towards the maintenance of the army in Ireland but actually into the royal pocket, the buyers of these Irish estates would receive the title of Baronet of Ulster, would call themselves Sir and their wives Lady, their eldest sons to succeed thereto, and they would bear the Red Ha
nd of Ulster in a badge of augmentation on their arms. They would be responsible for planting the lands gained with Protestant settlers. Ulster would thereafter blossom like the rose, religious warfare would be a thing of the past—and the money would roll in. This was something which parliament could not interfere with, for it had no jurisdiction in Ireland. How much did five hundred times three thousand, two hundred and forty pounds amount to, for a start... ?

  James Stewart by no means neglected his ancient kingdom of Scotland in his calculations, that year of 1609; but he was scarcely to be blamed if his so active mind tended to be otherwise preoccupied.

  22

  AT LEAST IT did not stink so badly as on the last occasion. Nor, of course, was the King present in person. But the full panoply of the law was invoked again, and the Parliament Hall in Edinburgh was almost as crowded. George Heriot sat beside his father-in-law to be, no more than an interested spectator.

  As on the earlier occasion, nine years earlier, no less, Heriot's bulky and coarsely genial cousin, Sir Thomas Hamilton, Lord Advocate, was the principal actor in the drama, if not exactly the centre of attention. That role was filled, not by the illustrious bench of the King's Lords of Sessions, as judges, nor yet by the Earl of Dunbar, Great Commissioner, strangely enough clad in the magnificent robes of an English Knight of the Garter, in the throne-like chair, as representing the monarch himself; undoubtedly the focus for all eyes, most of the time, was the accused himself, propped up before the Bar, Robert Logan of Restalrig. The fact that he had been dead now for three years inevitably added a piquancy to the entire proceedings.

  The remains, unfortunately, were neither one thing nor another, neither a body nor yet a skeleton. Three years interment is an awkward period, insufficient for all fleshy matter to have disappeared from the bone structure but too long for the least semblance of humanity to have survived. The remaining tissue was in a sort of jellified state, and had come away in places to reveal white bone. Grave clothing was patchy also, and a new shroud had been wrapped loosely round much of the relic, more to keep all together than for purposes of decency. What was so consistently fascinating however, was the fine head of hah, greying but plentiful, which topped all—except for one patch over the right ear which had come off; that and the wide, gap-toothed grin which the accused maintained. Logan had always been a fleeringly cheerful scoundrel. As has been said, the smell was not nearly so bad as when the Ruthven brothers, Earl and Master of Gowrie, had been tried in the same Court of Parliament in 1600 —but then, they had been dead only six weeks, at that time.