But the strangest had been when she said goodbye to Queen Catherine. The two Dowagers of France had confronted each other, the one in her white robes like a young willow tree in the snow, the other a wedgeshaped block of blackness, peering up into the tall girl’s face with those bulging short-sighted eyes.
‘You have been crying,’ she said, ‘but think how fortunate you are that you may cry. Only the slim and lovely may do that. When I came to France I had to learn to laugh.’
For one shamed instant Mary had realized that though she was suffering exquisite grief it was certainly satisfactory to be so constantly assured that she herself was exquisite – that the ‘gift of tears in the voice’ had been cited as one of her rarest charms. Whatever she might have to endure, she would never know the agony of being the dumpy, pop-eyed, entirely friendless bride of fourteen that Catherine had been when she came to France to marry a boy already devoted to his beautiful mistress. Catherine had ‘learned to laugh’ to please his father, that jovial satyr, François I; of her husband she had been always too much afraid.
A horrid memory, from which Mary had always turned her mind away in disgust, came back to her in a sudden new light; she had heard it said that Catherine used to lie on the floor and look through the chinks between the boards at the room below, where her husband was with his Diana, that crystal goddess whose moon never waned, nor hold on him slackened, until the day he died.
‘But I,’ Catherine said, on a note as flat and dull as if a lump of earth had fallen from her mouth, ‘have never been loved at all.’
Chapter Three
There was no need of the lamp at the mast-head, said young Châtelard, for the eyes of their Queen were bright enough to light them through the darkness.
It was an unfortunate moment for his metaphor, for her eyes were red and dim with crying. She had stayed up on deck to look her last on the shores of France, luxuriating in her sadness with the rich youthful egotism of one who must taste every sensation to the full. The galley-slaves toiling below, chained to their oars, filled her with unbearable pity; there was too much misery in the world; at least she would lessen what she could of it, and she ordered her sailor uncle, the General of the Galleys, in nominal charge of the voyage, to see to it that not one of them should be struck by the slave-master’s whip, however lightly.
She would not go below even when it was dark, neither for supper nor bed. She had a salad brought her on deck and a great golden melon, like the August full moon that had swung mistily over the edge of the sea, and she was nearly as greedy of this as she had been of her homesick tears. Another exquisite sensation she would enjoy, and that was to sleep on deck. She had her bed made up there, and lay listening to the lap, lap of the waves and oars, the creak of the ropes, the occasional flap of a sail, until she saw the clouds floating like islands in the golden dawn. Its light did not reach the edge of the sea: that distant water was cold as moonlight, corpse-light, the twilight at the edge of the world.
Were these the islands she had longed to see again? She knew they were not, that they were mere wraiths of mist, disappearing even as she watched; but what did it matter if they were of land or water? They were lovelier than any she remembered, her own as much as if she looked on them to say, ‘I am Queen of Orkney and the Isles.’
Her hair was all wet and curling from sea-mist; four Maries could not get the tangles out of it. But she continued to sleep – or not – on deck for the five nights of the voyage. She composed some charming verses in farewell to the pleasant land of France, in obedience to family tradition, remembering the sad little Princess Margaret, poet daughter of the poet King James I, who had also sung her homesickness – in her case for Scotland, which she had left to be the bride of the cruel Louis XI; had kissed the ugly mouth of the Court poet as he lay asleep in a garden, ‘because it had uttered the fairest words in France’; and, so the chronicle briefly related, ‘died of scandal’.
Girls must have been more sensitive a hundred years ago, Mary decided. No Princess now would die of scandal. Certainly not Elizabeth. There were shocking scandals about her. Gone was that Good Princess who had always been so tiresomely held up as an example to her own childhood, so much older and cleverer than herself; gone was the poor motherless girl who had succeeded in making all her four stepmothers so fond of her. From the moment she became Queen, Elizabeth did not care to possess a single woman friend; in fact, you might have thought there was no other woman at her Court. She played all her lovers off against each other, refused none of her suitors, and had managed to avoid both war and matrimony with Philip of Spain.
And Elizabeth would now be her nearest and, it seemed, her most dangerous neighbour. Mary accepted the challenge with a tingling of excitement. Elizabeth was almost twenty-eight, an appalling age to eighteen; it was high time now for her to give way before the younger and fairer rival.
And Mary thought with a spice of malice of all the red and orange-coloured sails of the princely suitors that came up the Thames to woo the Queen of England; now she would be taking, had already taken, the wind out of those sails!
As if in prompt revenge for these mischievous imaginings. Elizabeth’s fleet managed to capture two of Mary’s ships, the two containing all her stud of horses and most of her possessions, and detained them for something over a month. Short of capturing Mary herself, the revenge was perfect, since it prevented her making the triumphal entry into her capital on which she had counted. Riding down the Royal Mile in her white robes on her white thoroughbred, Madame la Réale, followed by the gorgeous chivalry of France, she would have made a dazzling first impression on her subjects, and knew it.
But now there were no horses, no jewelled harness.
Everyone had been taken by surprise by her swift arrival; there were no preparations for it, and she had to sit in a bare shabby house on the quayside at Leith and wait while a messenger went to inform her brother; and there was a thick east wind sea-fog, so that though it was past nine o’clock on a mid-August morning she could scarcely see across the squalid streets of the little port.
Night had fallen on her, as her uncle had prayed it never should – and fallen before noon. It frightened her unwontedly, that unnatural darkness. She was miserably angry – with Elizabeth for spoiling her very first move in the game, with James for not being ready for her, with her younger uncles for showing the obvious disgust that she was trying to hide in front of her impromptu host, with herself for finding the tears running down her cheeks as she sat among her luggage, with Bothwell for striding in on her, obviously in the blackest of tempers himself, and scolding her for crying.
‘But I’ve been sitting here for hours and nobody’s arrived to welcome me, and they can only find some wretched hackneys for us to jog to the Palace like a party of tinkers – is this the way to welcome a Queen? – and it’s so cold and dark it might be night.’
‘It’s a haar, that’s all. You’ll get plenty such in Scotland. What if it is night? If you can’t be a Scot, Madam, you can be a Guise, and remember that it was the night that brought out your uncle’s star.’
She blew her nose furiously, preparatory to snubbing him, but had no time. ‘Good,’ he said, grinning, ‘that’s a fine trumpet call; now follow it. The Lennoxes’ envoy is coming down the street; let him see you are as good a Queen on a packing-case as on a throne.’
She shot him a dagger glance, flinging up her head, and he chuckled, almost restored to good humour himself by seeing how royal she was the moment he put her in a rage.
She told herself she would have no peace unless she quelled him or let him rule all, and that last was impossible and he would have to see it. But all the same, she set herself to charm Lennox’s envoy, and her host, Captain Lambie (‘But no, it has been so refreshing to rest here before riding into Edinburgh; and your wife’s porridge is delicious – I remember the taste of it in childhood and have always wanted to eat it again.’) and even Lord James, whom she would not allow to apologize (‘But how could you k
now, dear James? We have done the voyage far more quickly than was thought likely – you must give thanks to the Lord High Admiral for that.’).
So she continued to charm and be charmed by everybody; she made her State entry into her capital on a dreadful little hackney, and treated it all as the greatest joke, and though nobody called her an angel from heaven, a fishwife did call out, ‘God bless that sweet face!’
She listened to the pipes and the melancholy chanting of psalms and begged to hear such sweet music yet again, and when her uncles chaffed her for her hypocrisy she indignantly protested that it was true, as far anyway as the pipes were concerned – ‘I have been longing to hear that wild skirling.’
She watched pageants prepared in her honour but far from complimentary, since they contained strong hints as to her future conduct, showing ‘worshippers of idols’ burnt in effigy, children who presented her with a Bible in the Scots tongue, more children who sang a petition to her to put away ‘that wicked idol’ the Mass. The three Guise brothers were astounded at the insult; Mary only told the actors, and truthfully, that she had never seen such a show in France.
But she had a chance to show real sincerity when the Edinburgh prentices begged her royal pardon; they had been put to the horn for breaking into the Tolbooth to rescue one of their company condemned to be hanged last May, and had imprisoned the whole Burgh Council in their own prison; in fact, there had been a first-class riot dispelled only by Lord Arran’s guards, and all owing to the ruling of the ministers of the Kirk to prevent the prentices’ traditional right to act their mumming play of Robin Hood on May Day.
‘But why shouldn’t they be allowed to act it?’ she demanded, and was told that Mr Knox’s Book of Discipline had expressly forbidden such heathen mummeries.
‘Condemned to death for a mumming play? Are they all mad? Indeed it’s time I returned to my country!’
She granted the pardon and told them she wished she’d been there to see their play. ‘I am certain I should have liked it better than any in Scotland!’
The ministers grumbled, but her action restored quiet to the city, which had been in a state of insurrection all this spring and summer. The prentices rushed out of their shops to cheer her wherever she went.
‘I shall be Queen of the Commons as my father was King,’ she told Bothwell who, more canny than usual, remarked, ‘The ministers are more powerful than the people. Keep in with God.’
‘Keep up my Latin rather – they might be good for that.’
And she asked one of their chief lights, the learned Mr George Buchanan, to read Livy with her every afternoon.
It was like a game, seeing how quickly she could get these dour Scots to eat out of her hand, as Bothwell called it, laughing at her small triumphs and telling her to beware of getting her fingers nipped. And he would not stay to watch the triumphs, he went straight off to his Border fortress ‘to see what the rascals have been up to’. Many of them had been up to no good, but he soon stopped that.
On her first Sunday at Holyrood she attended her own private Mass in her private chapel as James had promised, and, as he had also promised, with himself to safeguard it. At the most sacred moment of the Mass, when the priest was in the act of elevating the Host, rioters burst into the chapel with drawn swords, shouting, ‘Death to the Idolater!’
And above those shouts of fanatics and ruffians, led by the ferocious Lord Lindsay, was another wilder cry that held more suffering than the screams of the women, ‘Save her – save my darling from the power of the dog!’ Mary had a glimpse of the very tall shambling figure of a young man who was flinging his limbs in all directions, of a distraught face and eyes pale and glistening like two protruding bits of glass; it was the young Earl of Arran whom she had not seen for over a year; he seemed to have changed for the worse.
In a moment the Lord James’ quiet efficiency had driven out that shocking rabble, and the service proceeded, though with a shaking priest and sobbing women. Mary herself showed no sign of nerves until they left the chapel, her two younger bastard brothers, the Lords Robert and John Stewart, themselves escorting her priest with their servants. She found Lord James with his sword drawn, guarding the door, and laughed, with a catch in her throat that turned the laugh into a sob as she caught his arm and gasped out, ‘“The trusty watchdog!” Who said that of you? Oh, I know now. But it’s true for all that, it’s true!’
He put his arm round her very tenderly. ‘Little sister, you are overwrought – it is no wonder.’
There was a genuine quality in his kindness. His sense of decency had been outraged by the vulgar row in the Chapel Royal and the effect it must have on all those noble guests from France, outraged too by the perverted workings of Arran’s mad passion for this lovely girl. Lust was unseemly enough in itself, it was doubly so when cloaked by religion. With Mary clinging to his arm, her eyes shining with tears, looking up to him (as they ought to look), James became conscious of a new feeling towards his half-sister. If she continued to be modest and humble (as a woman ought to be), to acknowledge his superiority, be grateful for his protection, and do all that he told her, then he would serve her faithfully, and so he now promised.
‘It’s true I’m your watchdog – what else should I be?’
She heard the bitterness in that question. What could she do to show she would stand by him as he had just stood by her?
James smiled rather sheepishly and hesitated. She urged him eagerly; amused, incredulous. Could James be bashful? It seemed he could.
‘You could help me to marry after long love,’ he blurted out at last. ‘Her father is proud.’ He let the bitterness creep into his voice again, this time slightly overdoing it. ‘A bastard, even a king’s, isn’t good enough for his daughter.’
‘Oh, James, who is she?’
‘Agnes Keith, the Earl Marischal’s daughter.’
‘The Lady Agnes!’ Mary hoped her exclamation had not shown her disappointment. It would have been so delightful if James had wanted to marry a gay and charming girl, one of her Maries for example, who would have warmed and softened him. But Lady Agnes’ chill manner and rapacious eye did not encourage such hopes. And how could James have had ‘long love’ for anyone whose chest was flat as a board? But perhaps that was why, and poor Agnes had grown thin and cold and wary under the stress of her long engagement. Mary was instantly sympathetic again. She would speak to the Earl Marischal herself. Now that she had just made James the Earl of Mar, he would surely think the match good enough.
But her brother shook his head. The Earl Marischal was a great noble on the Border, and only a Border dignitary would impress him sufficiently. He had as good as told James that he wanted his son-in-law to hold the Lieutenancy of the Border.
‘He surely doesn’t hope to marry Agnes to the Earl of Bothwell!’ exclaimed Mary in an uncontrollable burst of laughter. Bothwell – and that cold acquisitive eye upon him – that would indeed be incredible!
James thought so too, from another angle.
‘That unprincipled ruffian! Indeed he would not wish or allow it. But Bothwell has been Lieutenant of the Border for three years now, and the office is one that should be changed constantly.’
He gave a great many further reasons why he should now be made Lieutenant instead of Bothwell, but his instinct had been sound in giving that of his marriage project first. It was that that made her agree in the end, though reluctantly, and all the time she thought of Bothwell’s twisted smile when he heard that he was to be supplanted by his enemy. Would he understand how she must work in friendship with her brother? How all her advisers had told her it was the one thing she could do at present?
And in return James was now eager to work in friendship with her and so was William Maitland of Lethington, the ‘Michael Wily’ who had also hitherto backed Arran and Elizabeth. It was very gratifying to hear them discussing instead their plans for her advancement as against the English Queen, talking so wisely and interminably in the Council while she sewed at h
er embroidery, catching every now and then a glance of amused superior pleasure from these men who were well content to have so pretty and docile an audience. Often they appealed to her merely for the pleasure of hearing that low magical voice – ‘vox Dianae!’ the Parliament exclaimed after her speech at its opening, as much moved by its music in French-toned Scots as the French had been when she gave her Latin orations as a schoolgirl.
Of more comfort than all his other support, Mary found James standing shoulder to shoulder with her against the storm of protest aroused by her service of the Mass. James, ‘whom all the godly did most reverence’, was severely reprimanded by them; but he stuck to his guns and declared that, while he would never consent to a public Mass, ‘for the Queen to hold it privately, who had the right to stop her?’ Many asserted that right; eminent Protestants from all over the country hurried to Edinburgh to protest against the Queen’s infringement of the law laid down in Knox’s Book of Discipline that the Mass should be abolished; with death as the penalty for the third offence of hearing or celebrating it.
Yet once they came to Court there was a strange slackening of their indignant resolution. The more they saw of the Queen, the less they protested; old Campbell of Kinyeancleuch, a purblind misogynist, simply could not understand what had happened to all his ardent colleagues. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘there be some enchantment whereby all men are bewitched.’
Not all. Mr Randolph, the English Envoy, writing of that same enchantment which was drawing all men round the Queen, added: ‘There is not one who absents himself, saving John Knox who thunders out of the pulpit.’
Never had he thundered louder than on the Sunday following the Mass. All that past week he had been waiting hopefully for the Lords of the Congregation to rebuke the Queen and banish her priest; instead of which he saw them dancing attendance on her, jostling their horses against each other to get the nearest to her as she rode up the Royal Mile, swarming about her, as he bitterly remarked, ‘like flies about a honeypot’.
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