The Galliard

by Margaret Irwin

  She was bringing back the old gay Edinburgh of her grandfather’s day, so the old people said who could remember the city as it had been before Flodden, the booths of silks and gold thread worked on fine linen, the many-coloured processions of knights and ladies riding up from Holyrood to tournaments in the windy tiltyard before the Castle.

  Flodden had ruined the country, the Reformation dulled it. But this young girl from France was bringing back the old colour and gaiety, perhaps also the old greatness and splendour, so they said; and Knox, writing in his window, heard them; and watched his own servants (or the servants of God, it was the same thing), led away from him by the wiles of a woman, competing for her favours with each other and the fools she had brought from France, as they passed right under his window and never even troubled to look up and see if he were observing them.

  Never did he fail to observe them; his house at the top of the Canongate and foot of the Netherbow might have been built for the purpose, each story butting farther out over the street than the one below, so that the window of his study on the third floor had an excellent position both as an observation post and occasionally as an impromptu pulpit.

  He told his congregation at St Giles’ that the private Mass last Sunday was a worse disaster to Scotland than the landing of ten thousand armed enemies; he prayed God to ‘purge the heart of the Queen’s Majesty from the venom of idolatry and deliver her from the bondage and thraldom of Satan, wherein she has been brought up and yet remains’; and to allow ‘that this poor realm may escape the plague and vengeance which inevitably follows idolatry’.

  ‘This,’ exclaimed Mary, aghast when the words were repeated to her, ‘is a direct attempt to stir up rebellion. He ought to be arrested instantly for sedition.’

  But the rebellion, the sedition had taken place long before she set foot in Scotland. Knox had been virtual monarch for the last year; she could not uproot him so easily, they all told her, even Lethington, who shrugged and sneered at his ‘devout imaginations’; while the English Envoy warned her that the voice of the preacher ‘put more life into the Scots than six hundred trumpets continually blowing in their ears’.

  She sent for him to Holyrood, and once again James was on guard, while Beton and Seton stood in a window at some distance. She watched him curiously, this ‘little man who rules the roost’, as Bothwell had warned her; he was considerably shorter than herself, but made up for it by an inordinately long beard which gave him a gnome-like appearance. In the midst of all that dark grizzled hair his lips were surprisingly red and full, ‘like a ripe plum in the middle of a withered furze bush’, she thought on a spasm of distaste, remembering the dirty jokes she had heard about all the women who clamoured for his spiritual guidance. In odd contrast to the prophetic beard and fierce sunken eyes under heavy brows, he was natty, almost dapper, in his dress, his taffeta bands sewn with gold rings and even some jewels – a jauntiness that made her smile when she reflected how carefully severe had been her own choice of dress for this interview. But the thing that surprised her most was that voice of greater power than six hundred trumpets. It was not the least like a trumpet – unless it were a child’s tin trumpet, for it was high and weak, always a little hoarse and inclined to go into a husky croak when excited. It very soon got excited.

  He stared up at this tall slim secretly smiling creature. Unwomanly, he instantly dubbed the plainness of her dress – a queen masquerading as a young student; her hair drawn back and hidden under the little black-winged cap; her black dress fitting so closely to her lissome figure; the immensely long cuffs and collar of fine white muslin fluting out like tapering, transparent petals from the slender hands and throat. He would have enjoyed the challenge of a parade of her feminine charms and regality, and did not recognise how subtle was her concealment of them. Did she think to meet him on equal ground? Then she should learn her lesson!

  Certainly she invited it with manly frankness, for she charged him at once with stirring up sedition against her; not only on account of her religion but her sex, since he had published a book to prove how ‘monstrous’ it was that any woman should have ‘regiment’ over men.

  His denial was not so direct, but more invidious. If his country suffered no inconvenience from the rule of a woman, ‘I would be as well content to live under Your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero.’

  After which, as he himself recorded with satisfaction, she remained silent for nearly a quarter of an hour.

  During that time she heard his voice going on and on. If only the Cardinal were there to confute these interminable arguments, or rather attacks!

  He called her Church ‘that Roman harlot polluted with all kinds of spiritual fornication’.

  At which she blinked, and said her conscience did not tell her it was so.

  ‘Conscience,’ he replied, ‘requires knowledge, and I fear that of right knowledge you have none.’

  ‘But I have read and heard of it,’ she modestly suggested.

  ‘So had the Jews who crucified Christ.’

  And he proved to his satisfaction that even they were not as degenerate as the Catholics, until his voice cracked and had to clear itself with coughing.

  ‘You are too hard for me to answer you, but I know those who could,’ she murmured almost inaudibly. But James heard the sigh, and unexpectedly, even to himself, was by her side.

  ‘Your sermon last Sunday,’ he told Knox, ‘was a very untimely admonition.’

  It was hardly a severe condemnation to a man who in any other country would now be under arrest and probably sentence of death. Mary gave him a grateful glance but felt she could do better than that herself. Knox ignored Lord James and told Mary that Princes were often the most ignorant of God’s true religion, and that the highest dignity on earth was to obey His Church.

  ‘Which Church?’ she demanded innocently.

  He shot a furious look up at her from under those shaggy brows, and advised her to read the Scriptures.

  ‘But you interpret the Scriptures in one way, and the Church of Rome in another. Which am I to believe?’ she asked, still in that gentle voice.

  James began to wish he had not encouraged her by his support. It would have been far better for her to have remained silent. Knox, expounding the Scriptures, embarked on an alarming digression as to whether Melchizedek had brought bread and wine as an oblation to God or a gift to Abraham – a controversy that he had already argued with the Abbot of Crossraguel for three days. Mary began to tap the table, then at last broke in, half laughing.

  ‘Mr Knox! Mr Knox! Mr Knox!!!’ and she rapped out three knocks as she repeated his name. ‘You tell me to follow the Scriptures, but you reject them whenever you choose. Did you not disagree with Saint Paul himself, saying that you “greatly doubted whether those particular words of Paul’s were inspired by the Holy Ghost”? Are you then of God’s Privy Council that you alone shall determine which even of the Apostles has received His commandments?’

  ‘A proud mind’ – ‘a crafty wit’ – ‘an obdurate heart against God and His truth’, – Knox revolved all these phrases in his mind against this pert chit, not yet nineteen, who dared to confute him in argument because she happened to be called a Queen. He warned her that it was the duty of subjects to disobey their Princes when their conscience told them to do so; and smacked his full lips over this threat, shooting it savagely out of his thick beard, for he was greedy of his anger, it affected him voluptuously to taste the bitterness of his own words.

  Again she stood silent and very still, and this time even Knox was silent. A hush like death fell on the room that she had already made lovely with painted walls and curtains of Cyprus silk.

  ‘Why then,’ she said at last, so softly that the words were scarcely heard, ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you and not me…So must I be subject to them and not they to me.’

  Then, as if what she had just said had no significance, she held out her hand with a charming smile. The interview was over.

/>   Mary, her imprudent victory won, sobbed her heart out before her brother and her two friends.

  ‘What is the use?’ she wailed in answer to James’ judicial remarks that it was never wise to get the better of a man in argument, certainly not of a preacher who is accustomed to speak unanswered for three hours on end. ‘He hates me, he hated me long before he saw me. He doesn’t even want me to do what he wants. He wants me to fail, he is praying for it daily, nightly.’

  ‘Oh, Madam, Madam!’ moaned the gentle Seton, frightened by her hysterical words.

  Beton was instantly practical.

  ‘He is jealous of you, Madam, that is why. He looked at you like a woman whose lover you had stolen.’

  James softened it, but in agreement. ‘He has had absolute power this last year in Scotland. Now you have taken it from him and he is driven into opposition. He is great in making, in doing, but bitter in criticizing. You must deal gently with him.’

  ‘Gently? I would have him broken on the wheel if I only could!’

  James frowned, pulling at his thin black beard. She tried to justify herself.

  ‘Where is he great? Not as a Christian! Buchanan himself says he’s read every word he ever wrote, and not in any of them can you find any single reference to the sayings of Christ.’

  James inaudibly cursed Buchanan, that Learned Pig with little eyes sunk deep in the fat of his cheeks, currying favour with titbits of gossip and criticism.

  ‘You had best get Mr Buchanan to read you the Book of Discipline,’ he remarked dryly. ‘Even if you deny its Christianity you will have to admit its noble polity. Statecraft has never achieved anything greater than its ideal of Commonwealth, a Trinity which shall coordinate a National Church, National Schools, National care of the poor and sick. Your Church complains that the wealth of its religious houses has been seized, but it could be for no greater purpose than to provide every Scot, the wildest upland peasant lad as much as the Earl’s son, with the finest education in Europe.’

  Lord James spoke with such grave and disinterested enthusiasm that Mary could not bring herself to ask how it was, in that case, that he had enriched himself with the Church lands of Pittenweem and St Andrews. She put it more generally.

  ‘I thought that much of the Church property has passed into lay hands?’

  ‘To some extent,’ said Lord James in that vague yet severe statesman-like manner that she had often observed when men talk politics so as to obscure rather than explain them; ‘there are, naturally, various adjustments which will have to be made, slowly.’

  She was certain that in James’ case the adjustment would be at least as slow as his lifetime.

  The mixture of hypocrisy and sincerity in him baffled her clear young mind. If only people were all villainous or all virtuous it would make it so much easier. Perhaps there was something to be said even for Mr Knox – but she was sure she could never say it!

  Knox’s next move was to inspire the Provost and bailies with a proclamation coupling ‘priests friars and nuns’ with ‘whoremongers drunkards and other scandalous livers’ and banishing them from Edinburgh.

  The Queen, with the approbation of James, Lethington, and the rest of the Council, promptly had the Provost and bailies clapped into the Tolbooth, and ordered a new election of them.

  Mary had won the first round against Mr Knox.

  Chapter Four

  Bothwell went back to Crichton to see what more it needed in the way of replenishing from the furniture of his other castles; the main damage caused by Arran’s raid two years ago had already been repaired.

  It was a cold autumn day and all the firs were turning up their leaves in the wind with a rustle of steel among their dark thunder-green. He saw his sister Janet (Jan, he had always called her) come riding down the slope of the hill towards him on a tall bay horse, her short rough dark hair blown behind her like a fox’s brush. She was riding astride, in a pair of his old breeches and a leather-jack faded almost white with age and far too long and loose for her slight shoulders, buckled in with a broad scarlet belt. In his cast-off clothes, it might have been himself as a boy coming towards him; she was slim and long-legged like a boy – or the Queen, he thought, for the first time comparing them and realizing that Jan must be some months older than Mary – nineteen then, and what was she doing with herself all alone at Crichton instead of in their mother’s house at Morham?

  And for that matter, what had she been doing with herself all these years since their father’s death, when she had begged him to let her off her engagement to Robert Lauder of the Bass, ‘an old man at least thirty, and looks cross’. She’d not been quite fifteen then, and he had already thought it rather hard of his father to force the match, so sent her out of his way to live with their mother instead, and had since seen very little of her.

  Now, as they drew rein and swung out of the saddle at the same instant, he found himself looking into a pair of tawny-dark eyes and decided with satisfaction, ‘she’s like me, but pretty.’

  ‘Here’s a fine rapscallion stravaiging the country!’ he told her, taking her chin between his finger and thumb in a hard pinch as he tipped up her face for a kiss. ‘Where’s your manners to the head of the house? Can’t very well curtsy in my old breeks, can you? Why are you here?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be? It’s our house.’

  ‘Mine, you mean. You should be at Morham with your “ain minnie dear”.’

  ‘You’ve given her enough to do looking after your brat. She’s got no time for her own.’

  ‘What’s his mother doing?’

  ‘Crying mostly and writing verses, and then stitches up a petticoat with sequins and says what a great lady she is at home. I will say she can cook, though – all sorts of savoury side-dishes – and how she eats – pouf! Tell me, sir,’ she took his free arm confidentially as they strolled back towards the stables, leading their horses, ‘why did you take up with Anna? A fine figure of a woman, is that it? If I stuffed my chest with a cushion would I get a lord to my lover, do you think?’

  And she stuck out her chest, bending backwards like an acrobat, and burst into laughter all the more sudden and transforming because she had omitted any smile of greeting. He shook her arm roughly, pulling her upright again, and quieted her horse, which had plunged as she jerked backwards.

  ‘Whoa there! You’re both in need of the bridle – and the whip too, I fancy. So you’re wanting a lord to your lover – do you mean to tell me you’ve not had such a thing about you?’

  ‘Not seriously.’

  ‘Lightly then?’

  She laughed again; it had a more conscious sound than that first free shout of merriment.

  ‘You’d best answer,’ he said a trifle grimly. He had suddenly remembered a meaning smile on the astute face of ‘Michael Wily’ of Lethington at some mention of Bothwell’s female dependants; he had thought it directed at one or other of his mistresses, now for the first time it occurred to him that it might have been intended for his sister. ‘That canny cat!’ he burst out, thrusting off her hand on his arm. ‘Have you given him the chance to jeer at us?’

  ‘I’ve had no cat for a lover, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Whom then?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s over. I’m thinking of Archie Douglas now.’

  ‘Then you can stop thinking, if you ever did such a thing in your life. Archie Douglas! A useful fellow, would earn his hire, to stick someone in the back. Is that your notion of a match for our family?’

  ‘Well, he’s a man. T’other’s a boy.’

  ‘Who is t’other?’

  She looked round at him mutinously.

  ‘Nothing to do with you, since it’s not matrimony – ow!’ as he caught her arm again.

  ‘And now you’ll tell me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Not till you let go my arm.’

  He dropped it and she nursed it ruefully, with a sidelong glance at him to see if she mightn’t even now evade him, but his face showed her it was
useless. Five minutes home and he had got everything out of her! How had he done it?

  She gulped and said, ‘Well, it’s Johnnie Stewart.’

  He whistled. ‘That imp! Is he as old as yourself?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘Did he get you with child?’

  ‘No – luckily.’ She spoke with swaggering nonchalance and stole a look to see how he had taken it, but could not make out.

  He said carelessly, ‘And now he’s tired of you, and you’ve got no one better than Archie Douglas to fall back on?’

  She flared up. ‘He’s not tired of me; it’s t’other way round. Or is he? Have you seen him with anyone else? Is it true about that pink pudding – Alison Craig?’

  He flung back his head in a roar of laughter.

  ‘You damned little fool!’ was all he would say in answer to her startled and indignant eye. It was plain as a pikestaff that the little bitch was still in love with that young rascal. If he were too, a very pretty match might be made of it; bastard royalty wasn’t aiming as high as his father had done, but all the same it would suit his game to marry his sister to the Queen’s half-brother, and the one she was fondest of too. Bothwell liked the lad himself; Lord John was as unlike his eldest brother, the Lord James, as he was like the King his father – a fair, quick-glancing, lightly moving youth, with all his father’s gaiety and love of songs and dances, and none of his melancholy.

  He had shown himself eager to be friends with Bothwell, so much so that that cynic had begun to wonder what he wanted of him. If it were his backing for a match with Jan, why had he not mentioned it to her? He asked her, and found that Johnnie had done so, but there had been difficulties. James didn’t approve and kept him short of money, and she had wanted to show she didn’t care and so flirted with others, and so he did too, and they had quarrelled and he’d told her she’d the manners of a stable-boy (‘And so you have,’ growled her brother), and she’d told him he was an impertinent puppy aping royalty from a left-handed litter.