But for the Hepburn to do so who for generations had been Lord of Hailes and Haddington was quite another matter. It is remarkable that this is the only time in all his numerous writings about himself that Knox has ever mentioned his forebears, and that he did so only to acknowledge Bothwell’s overlordship.
He had had warning of this visit, and also its motive, from his friend Mr Barron, a rich merchant to whom Bothwell was deep in debt, and he greeted him with a certain frank sympathy for his difficulties.
‘I have borne a good mind to your house, my lord,’ he said, ‘for my father and grandfathers have served Your Lordship’s predecessors. Some have died under their standards. This is a part of the obligation of our Scots kindness.’ And he removed Bothwell’s wet cloak and offered him a seat by the fire with a gesture more nearly respectful than any that had welcomed the Duke whose daughter he was proposing to marry.
Bothwell had never expected such homely recognition from the rebel who openly aimed at a world revolution of ideas, discarding all ancient loyalties that might interfere with those ideas. He was beginning to acknowledge the kindness when Knox, feeling that enough had been said of such earthly obligations, hastened to speak of God, whose messenger he was and whose majesty Bothwell had offended.
‘Therefore my counsel is that you begin at God.’
But if Bothwell had come here to be preached at, he might as well have gone to hear Mr Knox in St Giles’ on Sunday. He stretched out a hissing boot against the burning logs (very snug this little study was, with its new light deal panelling to keep out the draughts – the Town Councillors made their minister remarkably comfortable, he noticed) and spoke as man to man.
‘Barron told you how matters stand; poor Barron, it’s his best hope of seeing any of his money from me, for all I can tell him is, like Willie Dunbar,
I cannot tell how it is spended,
But well I wot that is is ended.’
‘Aye, he told me Your Lordship was his chief creditor.’
‘And am likely to remain it, as long as I have to keep a following of several hundred rascals in the city, to no profit to themselves or others, poor devils. If Arran and I made up our quarrel, I could live at Court with only a page and a few servants and so save expenses.’
His guest’s extremely practical estimate of his difficulties gave Knox no chance for the moment to resume the preacher, except to promise to serve His Lordship if His Lordship would promise to ‘continue in godliness’. Since godliness in this case appeared synonymous with economy, his Lordship was very ready to do so.
Unless he could begin to repair his estate it would soon be utterly destroyed, ‘and you’ll see me sitting in the pillory at the Market Cross wearing a bankrupt’s yellow hat!’ he chuckled.
Mrs Bowes hurried in with ‘a comfortable hot whisky posset to clear the cold night air from His Lordship’s stomach’ – and, incidentally, from his host’s, for she kept reminding him of ‘a salty rheum’ that had settled on it last week. A thin nervous female, there was still a sort of agitated good looks in her soft tremulous red mouth and eager eyes that opened wide and awed on the Wicked Earl, who ran the critical eye over her that he always accorded to any horse or woman.
Her former son-in-law cut short her chat about the posset and shooed her out of the room as though she were a hen; but not before she had scuttled aimlessly round the table, darted at the candles, and in her efforts to trim them put out one of them, then exclaimed that it would never do to have three candles on the table ‘as for a corpse’, blamed herself almost tearfully for her heathenish superstition while relighting it, then made a side-pass at the hearth and picked up the poker, but as the blazing fire could require no ministrations she dropped it again with a clatter, then apologized, fluttered, curtsied, departed.
A deep masculine repose settled on the little room, which now seemed much larger and less crowded. The hot whisky posset went down in silence to its appointed place.
‘And now,’ said Knox ungratefully, ‘will anyone deny my words that “it is more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign over men”?’
Bothwell didn’t deny it. He had too much on his hands at the moment to take on the relation of the sexes. His host got back to the business of the interview.
Bothwell had in no way acknowledged his fault. Arran’s enmity against him had been first aroused by the deadly blows Bothwell had struck at his party, and at Knox himself.
‘All I have suffered in the service of Christ Jesus, even those hideous months in the galleys’ (the encouraging effect of the posset almost tempted Bothwell to ask if complicity in the murder of his countryman was the service of Christ), ‘were as nothing compared to the hurt you did me when you robbed John Cockbum of the bag of gold he was bringing us for the pay of our soldiers. Mutiny followed straight upon it, defeat, flight. That night was the worst of all my memories, when the sword of dolour passed through our hearts.’
‘You mean the night of your retreat from Edinburgh?’ inquired the soldier, not unsympathetically, but a little puzzled by this description of a military manoeuvre.
But to Knox it was the night ‘when the wicked began to spew forth the venom that had lurked before in their cankered hearts. The rabble flung filth and stones at us, their spiteful tongues crying “Traitors!” “Heretics!” and even “Cut their throats!” I would never have believed that our own countrymen could have wished our destruction so unmercifully, and so rejoiced in our adversity.’
‘It was the fortune of war,’ said Bothwell.
‘Aye, you had it then. The Lord Arran gave chase to Crichton within a few hours of the robbery – but the bird had flown.’
‘To Big Bess’s kitchen, bless her,’ Bothwell chuckled, but to himself, for these happy reminiscences would not further the cause in hand. To Knox he said earnestly, ‘The hurt I did you was not personal to you – nor Arran – least of all to John Cockburn, a far kinsman, so that I gave orders he should not be killed. A man can as soon make friends with his enemy as with his neighbour – sooner more often. You, who are from the Border, like myself, must know that.’
He had leaned forward as he was speaking, his eyes fixed hard and hot upon the other. Old loyalties, old traditions stirred uneasily in the depths of the preacher who thought he had broken clean away from all such childish ties, into a realm where men held together only by what they thought.
But he could not always be sure of their thoughts, however much he strove to make them the same as his own. Of late he had felt much doubt and discontent with his allies. He had never liked ‘Michael Wily’ Lethington, a worldly mocking man who had been heard to say that the God of his fathers was nothing but a bogy of the nursery. As for those ‘young plants’, as he had called Lord James and Arran so tenderly two years ago, they were growing with a twist; James inclining more and more to Lethington’s worldly policy, while Arran’s zeal was becoming so lopsided that it threatened to uproot his reason.
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you are a frankly confessed opponent. To talk with such, openly, face to face, as I am used to do, is even something of a relief to me, for I have had to fight with shadows and owlets in the dark.’
‘Who hasn’t?’ said Bothwell, with a touch of exasperation at the self-pity he had already noticed when Knox spoke of the worst of his memories (God’s blood, did the man keep a diary only to put ‘bad’, ‘worse’ or ‘worst’ against his days?).
Knox wished to show that his ‘shadows and owlets’ were more sinister than any that this bold Borderer could have had to face, but it was unwise to complain of his allies, so he spoke instead of the monstrous scandals against him, all without any basis.
‘Then we’re in the same boat,’ said his guest cheerfully, ‘since my enemies not only accuse me of seducing more women than I could ever have had time for, but of sodomy as well – even as some of his enemies have accused Calvin.’
Knox’s eyes flashed; the approaching entente might have been in grave danger of dissolution, had n
ot Mrs Bowes popped her head in at the door to ask if they were indeed certain, but indeed truly certain, they would not have another hot whisky posset (‘No,’ said Knox), it would not take her a moment to prepare, it was all there ready, and – ‘Go away, woman!’ he exploded, and away she went, bearing with her so much of his wrath that he forgot to attack Bothwell at once. That acute fencer seized the opportunity to leave the subject of the scandalously misunderstood trio of himself, Knox and Calvin for the safer one of reconciliation. The country looked more like settling down into reasonable peace and prosperity than it had done for years; it was incumbent on all parties and their leaders to help that settlement.
‘Settlement? The only true settlement of the country, my lord, was last year, when Christ’s true Church was established under the rule of the Book of Discipline.’
‘Aye, you had your run of rule last year before the Queen returned, but was it so settled? There was open insurrection all the spring and summer, the prisons were chock-full of the common people, for rebelling against your Book of Discipline.’
‘The rascal multitude!’ exclaimed the democrat from the back street in Haddington.
The nobleman fired back: ‘Because they wear hodden grey, do you think their whole lives are to be made drab? They insisted on their old mumming plays and amusements—’
‘Abominations!’
‘It was Robin Hood against—’
‘Christ Jesus!’ proclaimed Knox.
‘“John Knox” was what I was going to say, but no doubt it’s the same thing. In any case, you’ve proved for yourself that the rule of this country is no easy matter. Think then how hard it is for the Queen, a girl, foreign-bred, and a Catholic ruling Protestants.’
‘It is not hard,’ said Knox, now quietly and finally, ‘it is impossible.’
‘You mean that you have decided to make it so?’
‘I? I have done nothing. I have let an idolatrous priest say Mass in the Chapel Royal and I have not raised my hand.’
‘You raised your voice, though, and pretty loud, the next Sunday.’
‘Nothing shall stop my preaching Christ Jesus to be the only Saviour.’
‘That was no news before you were born. What has it to do with preaching insurrection?’
‘If I had chosen insurrection I should have done more than preach. I have the power. I could have plunged this country into civil war.’
‘Another! It’s only two years since the last. And to what end? To put the Hamiltons in power?’
‘No, my lord. I am the servant of God, not the leader of a faction.’
‘Well, a faction is all you’d lead in a civil war today, for Arran may be discontented enough to follow you, but you’d not have the Bastard and Lethington as you had last time. They hope to find some way of compromise, as England is finding, with the bulk of the people Protestant, though their Queen has crucifixes in her chapel and some sort of modified Mass – and hates the clergy to marry,’ he added slyly.
‘The false whore!’ burst out Knox, touched evidently on a tender spot. ‘As I wrote to her, she is an infirm vessel.’
‘Maybe, but her seat on the throne is getting firmer. When she came to it, England was weak and divided at home, and all her foreign possessions lost. Yet each year it’s stronger, and Elizabeth’s position with it. With luck—’ he hastily changed it to, ‘With God’s help – and above all with toleration – the same might be done with Scotland and the Queen here.’
But toleration was not only impossible, but loathsome to Knox. The preacher was at his worst in argument, as Mary had proved, though more painfully, for he was also at his worst with women.
He had now been goaded into a state of excitement wherein nothing but uninterrupted eloquence could appease him, for eloquence, especially in anger, was to him what violent action or drink was to other men. He replied, ‘I utterly abhor the blasphemy that men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, whatever religion they profess.’
Righteousness, then, could not help the Queen, yet he was determined to prove her unrighteous.
‘I do not call her a whore, but she was brought up in the most arrant company of whoremongers.’ To prove this he repeated incredible stories of former festivities at Queen Catherine’s Court, where at an appropriate moment the lights were put out in order that her husband, King Henri, and the Cardinal de Lorraine and the rest of the company might amuse themselves with the ladies. ‘Sire,’ the Cardinal had said with a very proper respect, ‘the first choice is yours, and I must have the second.’ And Knox drew so vivid a picture of the orgy that Bothwell asked him with due innocence if he had been there, and what luck he had had.
The eyes opposite burned in their sockets.
‘Do you dare mock this horrible villainy, the direct fruit of the Cardinal’s religion?’
‘No, for I can’t believe it, and if I could, what has it to do with the Queen?’
‘This!’ said Knox loudly. ‘That it was in such pastimes that our Queen was brought up.’
‘And you are telling all Edinburgh that?’
‘That – and more. That this will now be the upbringing of the sons and daughters of the Scots nobles, with fiddlers and dancers at the Queen’s Court. They might as well be exercised with flinging upon the floor – and all the rest that thereby follows!’ – a heated interpretation of the stately Court dances that the reprobate opposite, now cocking a delighted eyebrow, had never imagined.
Knox made it even hotter; ‘the reward of dancers,’ he said, ‘was drink in hell.’ The Queen’s ladies wore long trains to their skirts that picked up all the dirt on the floor, and what’s more, they stuck targets or tassels on them. ‘The stinking pride of their targeted tails,’ he spat out, ‘will provoke God’s vengeance not only against these foolish women, but against the whole realm.’
This threat of God’s vengeance on the whole nation, for the crime of tolerating their Queen, struck Bothwell as the most dangerous weapon in Knox’s armoury. His reputation as a prophet would be used to the utmost among that ‘rascal multitude’ that he despised, yet knew so well how to inflame.
And what weapon could Mary ever find to withstand it?
The problem made him so thoughtful that he scarcely heard Knox’s thunder on yet another matter of national importance.
A chambermaid was with child by a married man, and this was in the Palace, ‘almost in the Queen’s lap’. Yet Mary would not have her executed as ordered by the Book of Discipline. He quoted a vulgar street song about it, to prove the disastrous effect of the Queen’s morals. Mary Livingstone was to marry the Master of Sempill, ‘and not before it’s necessary, for shame’ – though Bothwell, considerably more in the circle of Court gossips than Knox, had never heard any breath of scandal against the pair. Was Knox making a side-blow at another couple?
‘You are harsh on weddings,’ he remarked, ‘even on Lord James’. What had you to say to my sister’s?’
‘A sufficient woman for such a man,’ was the answer.
‘Aye, they suffice each other very well, thank you’; but there was a stony glint in his eye that was sufficient to silence Knox for the moment. That eye had seen something feminine and thwarted in the terrible prophet; he was more like a meddling auld wife of Haddington who should be put in the stocks to wear the scold’s bridle for his shrill slanders. Here he was complaining of scandals against himself when he was the worst scandalmonger of the lot! The streak of vulgarity, of cruel lack of chivalry, that he had shown in his exultation over the suffering of a dying woman, was now intensifying in his jealous rivalry with her daughter – the rivalry of an old man with a young girl, surely a ‘monster in nature’.
Yet, even as he saw this, Bothwell saw the face opposite change; the indignant eyes grew grave and ardent as they removed their gaze to a wider scene.
‘You blame my rule that it did not succeed,’ Knox said. ‘How can the rule of Christ succeed if men will not follow it in their hearts? Earth might be fair as Para
dise; no man need starve, whether of bread or learning; if only all men would wish it. But no rule on earth can make them wish it. We took the wealth of the old Church lands to better the lot of the poor, and set up schools with learned masters and ministers in the farthest and wildest places. Yet now the peasants all over the country are complaining that they were better off under their old masters; they are so ground down by their new landowners that many of the labourers are compelled by poverty to leave their land in the hands of their lords. And so the Reformed Church is deformed by the avarice of those very lords that helped to set it up.’
‘As always happens. How could you hope to avoid it?’
With a tremendous gesture the preacher swept aside such worldly sophistries – and with them his empty posset cup from the table, but never heard the crash.
‘I see no reason why men should not begin to express in their lives that which they have professed in words. If they plead, like dishonest merchants, “The world is evil, how can we live if we don’t do as others do?”, then it is they who make the world evil. It is the sin that has provoked God again and again to destroy strong realms and flourishing commonwealths. It is the rule of Satan, and as long as men follow it, this world will be hell.’
The cynical guest was uncomfortably impressed both by his passion and his honesty. The man was disappointed in his colleagues, but he would never be disillusioned of his ideals.
‘But what remedy can be found?’ Bothwell asked.
‘Let every man speak the truth with his brother. Let none oppress or defraud another in any business. Let the bowels of mercy appear, for the hatred of the heart is murder before God, and whoso loveth not his brother is a murderer.’
The weak husky voice now speaking was the voice of genius – a genius that brooded like a thunderstorm over the whole country, and could reveal in a lightning flash to every man the conviction that his soul was stronger than fate.
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