‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me to do the same as yourself.’
‘I do ask it.’ She was vehement now, even commanding. ‘Does it amuse you to have enemies? I have read history, and I see that these private enmities between great families have been a greater curse to Scotland than the fiercest enemy from outside. How can I ever rule if my subjects will never unite? You could help me if you chose.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Make peace with Arran – friends with him if you can. You’ll find it easier than you think. He is terrified of you, and that is why he surrounds himself with an army, and so you have to do so too. It is absurd. How am I ever to have a civilized capital if all my nobles go about in it with a tail of several hundred men ready to fight each other at a moment’s notice?’
She faced him squarely this time and saw she had impressed him; he was looking very thoughtful.
‘Aye,’ he agreed soberly, ‘and the expense is terrible.’
He stared at her astonished as she bit her lip, made a sound like a suppressed sneeze, and then broke into a peal of irrepressible laughter. He had considered her opinion and come to the conclusion there was something in it; what on earth was there to laugh at?
In a flash of temper he said, ‘The Borderer’s a useful buffer for the nesh inland Scots against England. It’s in my mind, Madam, that you find me useful too as a buffer against your other nobles – to take the kicks you daren’t give them.’
And he stalked away.
She was furious; all the more so that he left her before she had the chance to show it. She had practically apologized to him for that very thing, and this was how he took it! Well, but she should not have laughed; she had known it, but could not stop herself. It was ridiculous of him to be angry at that, when he had not been at her public reproof.
But then it struck her – did she know how angry he had been – and was now? It was an uncomfortable thought; she turned sharply from it, turned from one to another in the crowd, joking and laughing with them so that they felt no strangeness with this elegant and lovely creature.
She won the heart of Black Ormiston of the Moss Tower, Bothwell’s bailiff, a swarthy stalwart ruffian who stared like an indignant bull, by praising his care of his lord’s estate; and learned from him the surprising fact that the reivers, both Scots and English, were apt to levy protection money or ‘blackmail’ from those on the Border who were willing to pay a yearly subsidy, so that they should be left in peace in the raids.
She heard a great deal from a stocky bow-legged fellow about horses, and the ‘gay geldings the English gave the lords at Berwick, that they cracked up as better than any we’d brought out of Scotland –!’ the man jerked up his short red beard and shut his mouth.
‘What was the matter with them?’ she asked.
‘Ah, nothing at all, Madam. They’d do fine – as meat for the hounds.’
A grizzled led-captain told her that the Lord’s favourite black horse, Corbie, and the Lord himself too (it took Mary an instant to discover, that this reverent title referred to Bothwell), were like a pair of mountain cats the way they could ‘see in the blackest night. In fact, his horse seemed to matter rather more to the Borderer than his life; as well it might, seeing that his life so often depended on his being well-mounted. All Eskdale was once lost and won for the sake of a bonny white horse, she was told; and pleased them by remarking that it was no wonder the Hepburn crest was a horse’s head: ‘And is the Hepburn motto “Horse-sense”?’ But there she went too far in jesting on a sacred subject: she was reminded gravely, with a knitting of shaggy brows, that it was ‘Keep trust’ – ‘and well the Lord has proved it to you and yours – Madam.’
That rebuke and belated ‘Madam’ brought home to her the family likeness between ‘the Lord’ and his men.
She talked with greybeards who told her escapades of her father when in disguise as the Goodman of Ballengeich; and from a minstrel with a white beard more prophetic than that of Knox, but a merry and irreverent blue eye, she heard how Harry VIII of England had tried to make her father suppress all of their calling, since they were always making comic ballads about him and his unlucky wives.
‘But your royal Da, a minstrel himself, knew better than to forbid the heather from growing or the birds from singing. Forbye he had no wish to, for I’ve seen him hold his sides with laughing at what the songs said of that wicked old sack of rotten guts down in London town.’
‘I wish I had known my father.’
‘You would have agreed well. Many’s the laugh you’d have had together.’
‘But all I did was to break his heart. The news that I was a girl, that killed him.’
‘Ah well,’ said the old man, ‘he has more sense now.’
She thought how good it was to be in a land that had never known serfdom like France, so that everyone she spoke to seemed as free and proud as a king.
It was growing late; even Johnnie admitted he ‘could not let one more leap or yap out of him’. But all called for one more song before they went to bed, and the minstrels gave them ‘Johnnie Armstrong’s Goodnight’. Bothwell would have stopped it because of its references to James V as a stern and cruel tyrant, but Mary would not let him.
‘You have just told me,’ she said haughtily, ‘that it’s Borderers like Armstrong who protect me from England, for all their unjust reward, so why should I not hear others sing it? Is no one to have the privilege of abusing me but yourself?’
‘No,’ he admitted, smiling at her.
She could not keep it up, especially when, as they reached the last verse, he said low to her, ‘I was a fool to speak so,’ and joined in the lines:
‘What I ha’e done through lack of wit
I never, never can recall.’
To which she sang with the rest, in answer:
‘I hope you’re all my friends as yet,
And so goodnight unto you all,’
and for an instant she laid her hand on his.
Yes, she was very forgiving; too much so, that was the trouble, for what was the use of her forgiving him, if she forgave his enemies too, and hers?
He saw her go up the great staircase to undress the bride, followed by her ladies, their shadows rising taller and taller against the wall as they left the light below. Their silk skirts rustled and swept behind them. In front of them went the Queen, her soft velvet dress like a wisp of smoke and as noiseless; her hair, bright against the grim stone. She too held up her skirts with one hand while the other rested on that majestic balustrade. She looked down and saw Bothwell watching her, and her hand left the stairway and touched her lips. He saw this without seeing that she did it till afterwards, and at the time he never moved.
Then he went to Johnnie’s room to join with d’Elboeuf in undressing the bridegroom.
Johnnie was not drunk, but he was very gay and affectionate, also inclined to reminiscence. He kept reminding them of their raid on Ramsay’s house, an unsuitable bachelor recollection, as they pointed out.
‘Well, we were bachelors then, though we’ll never be again.’ He put a hand on each of their shoulders and chanted:
‘For gear will come and gear will gang,
But three brothers again we’ll never be.
‘But we will. We’ve sworn to hold our next New Year Revels at Coldinghame all of us – yes, you too, d’Elboeuf, for you’ve vowed never to refuse a drink – and I’ll get Mary to promise to be with us again, and what’s the betting but there’ll be a fine young newcomer as well, a lad bred of Stewart and Hepburn stock? Which reminds me—’
And he started for the door.
‘He is charming, your Johnnie,’ said d’Elboeuf after they had left him in Jan’s room, ‘a child, but of the most delightful.’
He took his host’s arm as they walked down the passage. ‘What a wedding!’ he breathed, ‘I have never seen anything like it in France.’
And the Prince of the house of Guise who had seen his eldest brot
her’s wedding to Anne d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara and granddaughter of Louis XII, a wedding more royal than that of many kings, who had seen the wedding of his niece Mary to the Dauphin, ‘to describe which was to describe all the glories of the Renaissance’, spoke as sincerely as he spoke truly; for certainly he had never enjoyed any wedding in France half as much.
Yes, it had gone off well, Bothwell agreed, and told himself that it had been worth the outlay, though he would have to sell yet more land to meet his debts.
He went to his room, well pleased. The Queen was sleeping under his roof; they had quarrelled but they had made it up; there was no doubt but that she was friendly to him. And she had been quite sound about Arran; he could not afford, from any angle, to keep up that feud.
Yes, in spite of his enemies he had done pretty well for himself. Here he was, still three years under thirty, and already looked like becoming one of the most trusted friends and councillors of the Queen. It was a great thing that she liked Jan and that she was so fond of Johnnie; it all ought to help. Tomorrow morning she would ride away over the haugh to Borthwick Castle; would she ever sleep under his roof again? She might.
It was strange to think that she was there now, in the great room in the south wing, in the beautiful bed from Dunbar Castle in which, according to a family legend, Patrick Hepburn, Lord of Hailes, had slept a century ago with Queen Joan, widow of James I, when they defended Dunbar together against her subjects. He didn’t know if there were any truth in that tale of an amour during the siege; his father had liked to think there was – but then he would. He rather wished he had told the Queen of it and seen how she’d take it; he could still do so tomorrow, but breakfast was not so good a time.
He stretched his arms above his head in a cracking yawn. ‘Ah-a-ah well,’ he gaped, ‘that’s over. It was a wedding!’
Chapter Seven
Within a month there was another wedding in the family, that of the Lord James to Agnes Keith, daughter of the Earl Marischal – ‘And here comes James’ “long love”,’ whispered Johnnie wickedly as tall Lady Agnes, with long thin neck and nose rather blue on that raw day, came stepping high and mincingly like a crane in her gorgeous robes beside the husband whose tenacious affections were now at last rewarded ‘after long love’.
There was far more state at their wedding than at the other; many said low and significantly that it could scarcely have been more royal if he had been King. But the most outspokenly unfriendly criticism of it came from James’ chief friend. His pomp ‘caused great offence to the godly’, declared Mr Knox, meaning himself. He accused James of ‘growing cold’ and ‘seeking too much his own advancement’; he was busier over ratifying his new honours and lands than the new Church of Scotland, which had not yet been ratified by the Crown. He showed less penetration in his complaint that James ‘yielded to Mary’s appetite’; for he himself, far more direct and honest than James, was incapable of the deep subtlety of the Bastard’s game.
The wedding sermon gave Knox his best opportunity to hector his friend and patron. In his self-appointed task of ‘keeping all men right’ he had taken matrimony as his special prerogative; there was nothing he liked better than to hear complaints and settle differences between man and wife. In this instance he laid some fairly fruitful seeds for such differences, for he threatened the bride from the pulpit by telling the bridegroom that if he were ‘found fainter’ in his zeal for the Church after this, then ‘it will be said that your wife has changed your nature’.
The guests glanced sideways at each other with pursed lips; the wife looked down her nose as determinedly as the husband.
The Earl of Arran remained sunk in profound gloom all through the wedding feast, and said he wanted to go back to France. Instead of which he went to bed, though there did not seem to be anything the matter with him. The report went round that the real reason for his going to bed, as for his wish to go to France, was his fear of meeting Bothwell. Mary peremptorily summoned him to Court, disregarding his sick-bed, and ordered him to sign a formal bond of peace between himself and Bothwell then and there before the Privy Council, overcoming all his protests with a sharp command.
Bothwell had little faith in this, and told her so that evening when the Court were listening to some Italian songs. Four men were singing glees, and the bass had a particularly good voice; he was a very ugly little man, black-dark and misshapen, but with a face so vividly intelligent that Bothwell found himself watching it with interest even while he was telling his doubts to the Queen.
‘But what can be done?’ she asked.
‘I’ll see.’
A bold plan had occurred to him, but he would not tell her what it was.
‘Who is the bass?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t seen him before.’
‘No. My trio wanted a fourth to sing bass and told me of this man in Signor Moretta’s train, so I have engaged him. David Rizzio is his name, it’s quite well known in his country, for he’s a poet.’
‘He looks like a monkey.’
‘That is what you Scots nobles always think of poets and musicians. When will you tell me your peace plan?’
‘When it has succeeded.’
She was gaily confident that whatever it was it would succeed ‘if one really wants it to’, so certain was she that people preferred friendship to enmity.
‘I have just had good proof of it, as even you, my lord Timon of Athens, must agree when I tell you. You won’t believe that Queen Elizabeth wants to make friends with me, but what do you think! She has told Lethington in London that if there were no other way to meet me she would come back with him, disguised as his page!’
‘Charming! You must have felt yourself in the woods of Amboise again, acting romances with your sister-in-law.’
She took his sneer very well. ‘Yes, it was absurd, but she really is determined we shall meet this next summer. It is all being formally arranged, and I am to visit her at York. Don’t you think it a good plan?’
‘Admirable, Madam. You’ve everything to gain by showing yourself to the English, and giving them the chance to compare you with Elizabeth.’
‘Then it is all the more generous of her.’
‘If it happens. But it won’t.’
‘But I tell you it’s settled. How maddeningly provoking you are! She has sent me this token of it’ – she fingered a diamond locket in the shape of a heart that she wore round her neck; ‘she writes that it would be easier for her to forget her own heart than mine, “ce coeur que je garde”.’
His contemptuous laugh astonished her. James and Lethington and Randolph the English Ambassador had been deeply impressed by this gesture from Elizabeth – perhaps, it now struck her, because they knew how she hated to part with her jewels. She herself had returned the compliment by drinking Elizabeth’s health in an exquisite gold goblet fashioned by Benvenuto Cellini and had sent it to her as a present. But no, she would not tell Bothwell that.
‘And that awkward little affair of Your Grace’s ships detained by the English fleet on your voyage here has all been satisfactorily explained, I suppose?’ pursued the relentless ironic voice.
‘Yes, it has. It was all a complete misunderstanding. They were released as soon as it was cleared up.’
He was silent. She swung round on him so sharply that he thought she would have hit him.
‘Think – think – if you can!’ she exclaimed. ‘We are the smaller, weaker half of an island, split into two warring halves. That can’t go on. You’ve shown it me yourself. Scotland has had to fight to preserve her independence ever since she won it at Bannockburn. The war’s gone on ever since then – for two and a half centuries – growing more deadly as chivalry dies and hideous new weapons are created. War now means organized destruction – and we are the poorer country, the smaller population. How can we then, in the long run, survive?’
He was struck by her sense. ‘It’s true. The growing use of gunpowder is lengthening England’s odds against us, and they were al
ready about five to one.’
‘So our only hope is friendship with her, and, ultimately, union. We must – we are having it. Look!’
She took from her dangling waist-bag an unfinished letter to her uncle the Cardinal, telling him of Elizabeth’s assurances of service to the Guises; and pointed proudly to her triumphant sentence describing the feelings of their enemies ‘now that they see us, the Queen of England and myself, getting on so well that she orders her Ambassador to do as you direct him.’
He was baffled by the odd ignorance of human nature which he had always noticed in her, in spite of her grasp of affairs that so impressed the politicians, and, just now, himself. Did she really believe that Elizabeth would do what she wanted, just to please her? She was so used to being loved and adored that she simply could not understand the contrary. She would always trust – even Elizabeth.
Bothwell’s plan was this. To make a real peace with Arran he must approach him personally, and to arrange this he must have a mediator, one of Arran’s friends. But all Arran’s friends were Bothwell’s enemies, since, though he was of the same religion as they, he had fought for the Queen Regent two years ago and they had fought against her. Nevertheless he decided to go direct to the man who had been the prime mover in that rebellion. It was his way to attack the chief. Besides, John Knox had been a Haddington lad.
So it was to John Knox that he went that wintry night in March, with his hat pulled well down and his cloak pulled well up over his face against the stinging slap of the raw sleet that came whistling and hissing round the corners; also against recognition, since he had no mind that this interview should be known until he knew the result.
John Knox has left a full account of that interview. If Bothwell had also done so, it would probably have been very different. But one thing shows plainly through Knox’s account, and that is his pride that James Hepburn should have sought him out. It was no new thing to Knox to be sought out. Everybody came to ask his advice or influence – magistrates how to settle their differences with the craftsmen; burghers how to reclaim their runaway wives; while only last Sunday the Duke of Châtelherault himself had come to supper to meet the English Ambassador and discuss affairs of state.
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