In High Places

by Bonny G Smith

  Lord George turned to Sir Henry. “My abject apologies, sir,” he said. “My wife is an excitable woman, and confident of her opinions. I will inform the Queen of Scotland of the situation, and see to it that she is prepared for her journey.” Lord George arose, inclined his head to Sir Henry, walked to the same door Bess had just exited, and closed it softly behind him.

  Sir Henry poured himself another goblet of wine and walked to the same window that the Countess of Shrewsbury had been standing at as she contemplated her gardens and the rolling hills beyond. He was secretly relieved that it would be Lord George who was to confront Mary Stuart about the fact that she was to be sent back to Scotland to stand trial for her crimes there. Queen Elizabeth might deplore the fact of a trial for treason for the Queen of Scotland, and the execution of an anointed queen, but only insofar as the deed would be seen to be her own; if Her Grace could arrange for others to do the deed for her, then her conscience was apparently remarkably flexible on the issue.

  For that was what had transpired; Sir Henry had been summoned to a meeting so secret just after the news of the massacre in France had reached the English court, that only Sir William Cecil, the Earl of Leicester, and the queen herself had been present. Elizabeth was unmarried and had no living parent; Lord Cecil was as a father to Her Grace, and Lord Robert was as a husband. If all others deserted her, yet these men could be trusted to remain steadfast. In that most secret of meetings, Sir Henry was informed that he was to go on a mission to the Scottish court. He was to convince the Regent of Scotland, Sir John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, that he should be seen to beg the Queen’s Majesty to deliver Mary back to Scotland to stand trial for her crimes in her own land. The Protestant Lords of the Congregation had demanded the Scottish queen’s return years ago, just after her escape across the border into England, but Elizabeth had been loath to send her cousin back for fear of what they might do to her. Now the Queen of England desired that very thing, and wished the Scottish Regent to assist her. It was a most delicate commission; but Sir Henry was a wise choice. He had vast experience with Scotland and the Scottish court.

  In 1566, he had been sent by Elizabeth to Mary, to talk sense into Her Grace regarding her treatment of her husband, Darnley, and her brazen infatuation with the Earl of Bothwell. Elizabeth was incandescent with rage that she must kowtow to her wayward cousin simply because Mary had married and produced an heir. An heir who might very well one day sit on the throne of England! That Mary was a wanton all knew, but for the sake of God and all that was holy, must she flaunt her wicked ways before all of Europe? Sir Henry’s words, spoken to the Queen of Scots on Elizabeth’s behalf, seemingly had had little effect; he was sent again by Elizabeth to speak to Mary the following July, after Darnley’s murder. His message from the queen on that occasion was so secret that it had not been committed to paper. Again, his words on behalf of the Queen of England fell on deaf ears.

  But as with so many others, Sir Henry had fallen under the strange spell of Mary of Scotland. On the occasion of his first meeting with her, all the while he had been repeating Elizabeth’s pleas to Mary that she must needs be more discreet in her doings, another part of him had been picturing Mary riding wildly on her stallion from Jedburgh to Hermitage in the driving rain to nurse the Earl of Bothwell, the gale blowing her auburn hair behind her, her cape flying in the wind. This was not, could not be, a flesh and blood woman; this was a goddess, come down from the heavens to live a mortal life, to which, unfortunately, it appeared that she was little suited.

  The second time he was sent to meet with the beguiling Queen of Scotland, after Darnley’s death, in which she was suspected of complicity, Mary had again enthralled him even as he had harangued her with her cousin’s reproaches and reprimands. Why did no one see that here was a sublime creature, not human at all; how could she be expected to behave as a mere mortal woman? So brave, so adventurous, so fearless, so courageous! But he had fulfilled his duty to the letter, never letting on that he thought Elizabeth’s messages to her cousin to be beside the point. After all, how can one expect to tame the wind?

  And now here he was once again, and for all intents and purposes, the instrument of her death; but must one not also consider the circumstances? Old Queen Mary Tudor had burnt nearly three hundred Protestants in three years; the French had butchered ten thousand in only three days of frenzied blood lust! Both the Scots and the English feared what a Catholic queen of the British Isles would mean for them. Elizabeth’s delicate sensibilities and reverence for an anointed queen was not the Scottish way; if one wanted to kill the serpent, one must strike at the head. If Mary Stuart were spirited away back over the border to Scotland, her head would not remain on her shoulders for an hour after her foot touched Scottish soil.

  But perhaps it was for the best; such a one as Mary Stuart had never really belonged to this world. He would do his duty; but he did not want to have to be the one to tell Mary of her fate.

  ###

  Seton sat winding silks and Mary was putting Kinsey through his paces with the bribe of gobbets of meat when Lord Shrewsbury rapped upon the door to her rooms. Unlike Bess, who simply bade the guards open the doors without ceremony whenever she must visit the queen, Lord George vouchsafed Mary the deference not of a gaoler, but of a gracious host.

  Seton bade him enter without words or expression; she was long past being civil to either the earl or the countess. Her nobility prevented her from being overtly rude, but be friendly with the queen’s gaolers she would not.

  Mary looked up and smiled. She stood, smoothed her skirts, and cried, “Lord George! What joy! I have been hoping for another game of chess. My game has much improved, you know.” She gestured prettily towards the board, which always lay hopefully set on a table by the window. So few were her diversions!

  The weather was cold; it had been a cool summer. The harvest had been meagre; the poor would be sure to hunger this winter.

  A fire blazed on the hearth, and the room had a pleasant aroma of apples. That was one of the many things Lord George did that vexed Bess to the point of constantly accusing him of being in love with the queen; several of his own properties boasted vast orchards, and whenever the older trees must be culled to make way for new saplings, he had the wood sent to his homes. Bess was indifferent to how her fire smelt, but the Queen of Scots had finer sensibilities and appreciated the gesture of the apple wood for the hearths in her rooms.

  Lord George stood wringing his hands; he must tell her, but he could not find the words.

  Mary studied his face, and observed his nervous gestures. That he was there to impart news that would not be to her liking seemed fairly obvious. What could it be? They had not been at Chatsworth long, and Mary had assumed that Bess meant to abide there through the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations; but perhaps they were being ordered by the queen to move? The uproar over the recent events in France had barely died down, and Chatsworth was less defensible than…oh, dear! It could not be Sheffield, from which they had just come; that place was still being sweetened.

  “Are we to remove to Tutbury again?” she asked, as calmly as she was able. At least Tutbury, with its noisome marshes and moat, was less offensive in the fall and winter than it was in the spring and summer.

  “I…no,” Lord George replied. Still he stood, nervously working his hands together as if he were washing them.

  Seton stood as still as a statue; what ailed the man, she wondered? She caught Mary’s eye, who cocked her head towards the sideboard. Perhaps some Hippocras would serve to loosen Lord George’s reluctant tongue. Seton poured goblets for them all from the flagon on the sideboard and handed them about. At least it gave Lord George something to do with his hands.

  Mary realized that none of them could be seated until she herself sat down. Perhaps that would help Lord George to come to the point.

  Once seated, Lord George took a long pull from his goblet; he rolled the wine around on his tongue. Hippocras! Also known as the Blood of Juda
s. How appropriate! He set it aside, began that nervous kneading of the hands once again, and then after a moment or two, jumped up and began pacing the floor. Kinsey yapped at his heels, begging for a treat.

  “Kinsey!” snapped Mary. For all she was indulgent with animals, they knew who was master; Kinsey retreated to the hearth, curled up, yawned, and went to sleep.

  Mary extended her hand as if to comfort Lord George, who was obviously distressed, but he was too far away for her to lay a comforting hand on his arm. “Lord George,” she said. “I pray you, if we must remove back to Tutbury, I understand. I trow that such distresses your lordship as much as it does myself!” She laughed her little tinkling laugh. But he did not respond; he was standing by the window, his face in the shadows of the elaborate draperies that graced all the windows at Chatsworth.

  And then a thought struck her; what he had to tell her must be far worse than something as simple as a move to an undesirable location in cold weather. A wave of deadly fear swept over her. Her great friend and supporter, Thomas Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, had been executed just two months before. He who had admired her so blatantly in her heady days at Carlisle Castle, when she had first come to England, was no more. He had been captured by her great enemy, the Earl of Morton, during the Rising of the North, and had been languishing in her own former prison at Loch Leven Castle ever since. His fate was sealed when Elizabeth demanded his return to England as a condition of assisting Regent Mar and the Protestant Scottish lords in the retaking of Edinburgh Castle, which against all odds was still being held in the name of the Queen of Scotland by the faithful Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange and her secretary, Maitland of Lethington. The Scots could not hope to retake the castle without English help; they needed cannon, ordnance and men skilled in its handling. And so Percy had been taken from his prison and sold to the English for two thousand pounds, and then promptly beheaded at York. The news had devastated her; first Norfolk, now Percy! And to add to her distress, Good Percy had been offered his life if he would refute his Catholic faith; this he refused to do, and he had been executed.

  Perhaps what Lord George had to tell her was that Sir Charles Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland, had also been captured, and had suffered a similar fate. She knew that war raged in the Netherlands, to where the earl had escaped; perhaps he, too, had been captured and sold to the English?

  Lord George eyed the goblet of wine. He would need its fortification. He sipped his wine and wrung his hands. He simply could not tell her. What ate at his vitals was that perhaps it was he who was responsible for visiting this horrible punishment upon her. After Norfolk was executed, Mary had screamed and cried, torn her clothes and her hair, and had shouted the most terrible things about Elizabeth. She had called curses down upon her cousin, and much of what she uttered was treasonous in the extreme. There was not a person in the castle, high or low, who had not heard her; finally, Bess had put her foot down and demanded that he write and tell Elizabeth and Cecil of Mary’s dire threats to engage the Catholic powers of Europe to descend upon their island to wipe Elizabeth and all her loyal men from the face of a scorched earth. In her extremity, Mary had threatened to call in the Inquisition to murder every Protestant in both Scotland and England, and to cause the Scottish lords still loyal to her to sweep across the border into England and attack. Her hysterical denunciations and expressions of hatred for Elizabeth had been so vitriolic that they had truly alarmed him.

  Finally, he had had no choice but to write to Cecil and warn him, in case there were any substance to what the Queen of Scots was saying. For his own part, he doubted it; Ridolfi’s plot had been foiled, and it was unlikely that another plan had been formulated so quickly. Mary was simply lashing out in impotent fury, something he often wished that he himself was capable of doing. Bess’s tirades and accusations often left him feeling so frustrated that he longed to relieve himself with just such a display of temper; but such would have been unseemly in a peer of the realm, and would serve no useful purpose. Indeed, it might do him a great deal of harm. So he kept his thoughts to himself, and his temper at bay.

  Mary’s reaction when the evil tidings of Northumberland’s execution reached her was the opposite of her response to Norfolk’s demise; she had moped about, been tearful and quiet; she refused to eat, and had said nothing for days on end.

  But when the news reached them of the great massacre of Protestants in France, Mary had become so animated that the transformation was astonishing; she sang, she danced about, she laughed, played merry tunes on her lute, and had been so joyous that he was both shocked and embarrassed for her. Such ebullient behavior in response to the deaths of thousands of innocent people appalled him. But still, he could not dislike her; he thought he understood her. She was powerless in her prison, and the impotent fury that she harbored must needs have an outlet. But her conduct had been duly reported to Cecil and the queen, this time by Bess herself, who was disgusted by Mary’s display of jubilation at the cold-blooded murder of helpless, innocent women and children.

  Word had spread of Mary’s unseemly celebrations at the murder of the Protestants, and the public outcry for her head had been tremendous. Reports of Mary’s behavior, combined with the news that Pope Gregory had struck a medal commemorating the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and praising God for it, and that King Philip of Spain had for once abandoned his staid Spanish reserve and danced about his rooms in the Alcazar in celebration, had caused the demands for Mary’s execution to redouble in the capital. The Queen of Scots should not be allowed to live to visit her bloody-minded ways upon England. The Bishop of London urged that all the Catholic bishops in the Tower be summarily executed, and that Mary Stuart also be brought to the block forthwith.

  For in the back of everyone’s mind was the fact that Elizabeth had once again refused to sign Parliament’s bill depriving the Queen of Scots of her place in the succession to the throne of England. The bill had been duly drafted and presented to the queen, as she had requested; but all they could get from Her Grace was a promise to take the bill under advisement. With that, she had promptly prorogued Parliament until the first of November. The result was that if anything should happen to Elizabeth, the Queen of Scots would likely ascend the throne of England, and wreak vengeance upon them all. It was not a pleasant prospect.

  Now Lord George understood Elizabeth as he never had before; he had thus far been too straightforward a man to comprehend Her Grace’s subtle ways, but now it was all very clear. The Queen of England wished the Queen of Scotland dead, but not at her own hands; if she acted thus precipitately in haste, she might very well find herself repenting at leisure. The risk of the backlash of Catholic Europe against England was simply too great. Let her cousin’s disaffected Protestant Scots murder their own queen! That would suit her very well, and all the people of England. This was an opportunity not to be missed. So Sir Henry Killigrew had been sent to Regent Mar to gain his agreement to make Mary Stuart the victim of the transgressions of her French brethren. She had always been more French than Scottish; and it was the French who had just perpetrated a deed that was the most heinous anyone had ever seen or heard of since the Crucifixion. Someone must pay for the rivers of blood and the hacked, flayed bodies of the French Protestants; let it be the Queen of Scotland, who after all, had many sins of her own to answer for, if even half of what was said of her were true.

  And suddenly Lord George remembered something that had seemed insignificant to his pragmatic mind at the time, but that now took on ominous meaning; a great comet had been seen that summer in the skies. And all knew that a comet presaged the death of some great personage. Perhaps it was the Queen of Scotland’s death that the comet had foretold?

  Suddenly it all fell into place for him; since Mary Stuart had fled Scotland to the protection of her queenly cousin, the premier peer of realm, head of the English nobility, had transferred his allegiance to her, and lost his head for it; the north had risen in rebellion; and she had plotted against El
izabeth, seeking to bring a foreign army to English shores to depose her cousin and take both her life and her throne. For all of these offences, the Queen of Scotland must die.

  But still he could not bring himself to be the harbinger of her doom.

  Both Mary and Lord George drew breath to speak at the same time; each reached a comforting hand out to the other, albeit from across the room.

  At that very moment a knock sounded upon the door.

  Both heads swiveled to the door; Lord George, relieved at any distraction that would keep him from his grisly task, strode to the door and opened it.

  Sir Henry Killigrew took in the scene at a glance; the pained expression on Shrewsbury’s face and the puzzled one on the Queen of Scotland’s told their own tale. So the coward had not yet had the courage to tell her. Thank God!

  “I am sorry, My Lord, but you are urgently needed in the Hall,” said Sir Henry.

  The color drained from Lord George’s face, his knees turned to butter, and he felt an absurd desire to simply sink to the floor where he stood. Reprieved! But he must tell her something.

  Lord George found his tongue and said, “I regret to inform Your Gracious Majesty that your staff is to be reduced.” It was all he could think of to say.

  Mary had been expecting much worse, and her relief was profound. Poor Lord George; always being tasked with imparting to Her Grace any bad news. She was surprised that Bess had not seized the opportunity to tell her that she was to lose yet more of her dwindling staff. How the Countess of Shrewsbury would have enjoyed bringing her such tidings! How she would have gloated!

  “Dear Lord George,” said Mary, with a sweet, gentle smile. “Do not distress yourself. I expected as much. Indeed, I am not surprised. My French revenues have been interrupted by the dire happenings on the Continent; my purse is light. Perhaps it is for the best.” How she would choose who was to stay and who to go, she knew not; but that was a problem for another day. If Lord George was needed in the Hall upon an urgent matter, she must not detain him any further. She extended her hand; Lord George took it, brushed it with his lips, turned on his heel and departed.