Knox stood up for him, but then Knox’s credit was involved; everyone was laughing at the result of his meddling; for once he had been proved wrong – it was a delectable change. Lethington was never tired of asking the preacher whom he proposed to reconcile next. No, in this case for once, Knox had little power to act.
Bothwell’s other partisan was infinitely more helpless, for it was the Queen. Mary refused to believe that Bothwell had meant to hand her over to Arran; the latter was insane, she declared, and his word should not be taken. Bothwell demanded his trial, but Lord James produced most admirable and public-spirited reasons against it. For once he could not get the Queen to listen to them; her growing irritation with him exploded in a violent burst of temper, and he left it to Lethington to manage the explanation.
His dry humour had made him increasingly a favourite of hers; moreover, he was all but betrothed to her dear Mary Fleming who thought him the wisest and gentlest as well as the most charming of men; he was in an excellent position to drop his quiet advice as to the best course to follow. It was perfectly true that a public trial and acquittal would be a disaster to the State, for if Arran were proved guilty of false accusation he must die on the scaffold, even if he were proved also to be now insane. The execution of the next heir to the throne would so rend the country that it would almost certainly lead to another civil war.
And was she so sure that the trial would prove Bothwell altogether innocent? He gave satirical yet half-admiring hints about Bothwell’s character: ‘A mild fellow like myself is naturally envious of the dashing way he and his house have always been able to use women – Queens, I should have said – as their stock in trade.’
He placed the tips of his long waxen fingers together in five slender arches (‘as though he were saying his prayers, the old humbug, when all he’s doing it for is to show off his beautiful hands!’ Mary observed in amused exasperation) and enumerated the royal scandals in the Hepburn family: James I’s widow and the Hepburn of the day; his son, Adam Bothwell and James II’s Queen, Mary of Guelders. To bring the story more up to date, there had been that vain, facile, fickle fellow, the Fair Earl, and his advances to her own mother, as well as to Elizabeth of England or alternatively her sister Mary of bloody memory. He made this ancestral gossip so entertaining that Mary could not help laughing, but she pulled him up.
‘A man’s forebears are not himself – you might as well call me a saint because my great-grandmother was one. Wherein has the present Earl of Bothwell used women (I won’t limit it to Queens) to advance his fortunes?’
‘There is a Norwegian lady living on his mother’s estate at Morham who might tell you more about that,’ the quiet voice answered her. ‘She is the daughter of an Admiral of high position in his own country. Her name is Anna Throndsen, and she had good reason to think it would be changed to the Countess of Bothwell when she left her home and country for him. The reason is now being dandled on his mother’s knee, a fine brat just over a year old.’
‘You should sing all that – it sounds exactly like a ballad.’ She always found herself speaking more abruptly than usual in contrast with Lethington’s smooth periods. She added, ‘But I can’t see wherein she advanced him.’
‘In Flanders eighteen months ago she helped pay his servants, so that he was enabled to come on to Your Grace’s Court in France – leaving her behind, of course.’
A hunt in the golden autumn forest of Fontainebleau and a bold stranger who rode up to her and her uncle the Cardinal, and turned out to be her mother’s most trusted servant; a talk in which he had brought the keen wind and fierce joy of a night-raid in midwinter on the Border into her warm room with painted walls; a State ball at Orléans when she had listened enthralled to him and her uncle de Guise talking as professional soldiers; – these things, then, had been paid for by that unknown woman in Flanders, to whom he had returned without a word of explanation at the very moment when she herself had had most need of him!
She resolutely shook off the remembrance; she must be fair.
‘Well, at least those old ruffians you spoke of wooed for themselves; but you accuse him of wishing to act pandar to my Lord of Arran, whom he has always loathed as I would a spider.’
‘M-mm,’ purred Master Michael Wily with a soft sidelong look at her; ‘if it’s a case of pandar, the boot may well have been on the other leg.’
He would not say more, nor did Mary dare probe too deeply, for she felt her face flaming; it was safer to take a leaf out of his own book, and remark sarcastically that he was the prince of romancers. But he only gave her his delightful smile, and contrived a few further hints that too close an inquiry might prove very inconvenient to the man she wished to benefit. It was a great mistake to make such an ugly business too public; ‘the more you stir a dung-heap, the worse it stinks. Leave it to settle down. Arran is a deal safer without his wits than when he had the half of them. He is comfortably shut up—’
‘And so is his victim,’ she broke out indignantly.
Again he gave her that quizzical eye. ‘I doubt the Earl of Bothwell would thank you for that description. The poor injured innocent won’t suffer too badly from a brief imprisonment. I should think he’d be glad of the rest. However young and bold and active he is, it must be a fatiguing life, baiting all the lords of Scotland. Let him cool his heels for a bit and slide out when the affair has blown over. If it’s justice you’re concerned with, Arran’s punishment is incomparably the heavier, since his will probably be a life-sentence.’
That was no consolation to Mary, who was already so sorry for the poor distraught creature that she had sent him her own carriage that he might take the air, now that it was no longer considered safe that he should ride. Nor could she bear to see the distress of old Châtelherault; it gave her no satisfaction that all his stupid insolence to her had flown; he cried like a child as he knelt before her and protested his innocence. Her belief in it made small odds to James, though he let the old man off with the loss of Dumbarton Castle, a forfeiture that greatly lessened his power. When Bothwell heard of it, he observed: ‘That carrion crow has got some fine pickings out of Arran’s daft fits!’
Or, as James himself put it, he had great reason to thank heaven for this singular opportunity. It had enabled him to strike a double blow, and ruin the strongest and most ambitious family in Scotland by the same means that he disgraced their former enemy and his own chief stumbling block – an example, as Lethington said on a note of praise that made James slightly restive, ‘of exquisite economy’.
Chapter Nine
It was the beginning of May when Bothwell was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and he remained there for the rest of that wet summer. There was something to be said for Lethington’s view of a term in prison as the best chance of rest and peace that a Scots noble was likely to get. Bothwell made good use of it as such; he slept about four times as much as he usually did, and composed verses about his chief adventures, accompanying them on his lute, though it never occurred to him to write down such trivial stuff. Nor was he always solitary; the Captain of the Castle was friendly and often played with him at draughts or dice; and he saw something of the other prisoners, among them some humble fellow-Borderers from Liddesdale whom he himself had sentenced for cattle-thieving to this very prison. They grinned at their former judge with no malice, only a pleased recognition of the equality of fate; they met on friendly terms and discussed the news from the Border. It was bad; Lord James had no one now to hold him in check, and moreover was determined to destroy all those ‘thieves and rovers from Teviotdale and Liddesdale’ who might prove useful to Bothwell if he got out of prison.
‘Hadn’t halters enough for ’em all,’ said Sym Scott of the Kirkhill, ‘but that didn’t stop him. Drowned ’em he did, two and twenty of ’em, kicked into the river with their hands bound.’
A deep snarl went up from his listeners; no words could speak their hate of the Bastard. The Queen had been furious, but what use was that? Lord James had
made himself twice as powerful as when she had come to Scotland; his policy in asking her to come and ‘rule’ it was now fully explained; it was the best blind to cloak his own rule.
After four months Bothwell realized how little hope there was of his getting an official release. He was not one to worry about formalities, and had begun to make plans for his escape when he received a surprising sanction of them in a message from the Queen, smuggled in by the Captain’s servant; it told him what he knew already, that she had found herself powerless to help him at present, but also that she hoped earnestly he would be able to help himself.
As he read it the bars rattled derisively in his window to the mad tune of the wind that hurled itself round the Castle rock. The rain sloshed down. He took hold of the lower bar and shook it; it was no wonder it rattled, for he had been loosening it gradually.
That night he got it out, squeezed himself through the gap, and in the thick dark of the rain climbed down the wet and slippery face of the Castle rock. It was well it was so dark; not only was he hidden, but the appalling steepness of the climb was hidden from himself. When at last he reached the foot of the cliff he drew himself up, flinging back his head to get the wind and rain full on his face, his bleeding hands outstretched to them; the enormous darkness of the rock towered above him, its summit lost in the rain. He was free, and he began to run, madly, downhill.
Exactly a year before, at the end of August, he had brought the Queen safely to Scotland. Now he was a fugitive, though not, he thought, in any immediate danger of re-arrest. That would be awkward for his captors, when the reason for his first arrest had never been proved. But he felt it as well to retreat to the Castle of Hermitage, now under his command, that hugely massive and ancient stronghold that could hold fifteen hundred men and horse at need. If that need were now at hand he must strengthen its fortifications and lay in provisions, and little enough money he had left for either. Help came unexpectedly.
He heard voices groaning louder and louder through his dreams early one morning. ‘No, no, no-o-o-o!’ they finally bellowed in his ear as he sprang up awake, to find that a herd of cows, lowing plaintive protest, was being driven up just underneath his window. He threw on his clothes and ran down into the courtyard, which was full of cattle pushing against each other and every object they encountered, with the blind bewildered obstinacy of their kind. A drover and his dog were marshalling them; a woman on horseback rode up with the rosy light of dawn glowing on her worn face and her shrewd, merry, experienced eyes. ‘She looks old,’ he thought, and ‘She’ll never look old,’ at the same instant.
It was Janet Scott of Buccleuch, who had once been Janet Beton, his former mistress and now very present friend in time of trouble, for she had brought him the cows to stock his larder. Here was a woman worth a dozen buxom young wenches such as the flaxen-haired Fleming or the exotic Anna! He laughed thankfully with her over her ‘love-token’ as they breakfasted together and sketched plans for his line of conduct, and gossiped over the news from the North.
The Gordons were up. Lord James had taken the Queen for a survey of her Northern counties, in which he had reported signs of trouble. What was more to the point, the Lord James had set his heart on the title and lands of the Earldom of Moray, which the Earl of Huntly held in irregular possession – ‘as if he had any chance to keep it, the poor old fat fool, with that one after it!’ Janet exclaimed.
There was also a respectable motive for James’ hostility (‘There always is,’ they agreed). A younger son of Huntly’s, Sir John, was a wild young man who seemed bent on proving the tag of the Gay Gordons:
Ken ye the Gordons’ Gramacie?
To curse and swear and damn and lee!
And that’s the Gordons’ Gramacie.
He had been imprisoned for the commonplace crime of stabbing an enemy in the street, had broken his ward and fled to the family stronghold at Strathbogie, where Huntly had the insolence to uphold his action and refuse to give him up. No doubt the old Cock o’ the North relied on the Queen’s favour to the only strong Catholic family in the kingdom.
‘He’ll soon learn what her favour’s worth,’ jeered Bothwell.
His companion looked at him with quizzical tenderness. ‘You’ve not had much luck yet with women, have you?’
It was so different from the usual opinion of him that the young man stared in astonishment.
‘If you mean by that that the Fleming girl is going to marry old Mother Tabbyskin instead of me, that’s not my ill-luck for I never asked her and when I saw you riding up just now I knew what luck it was that I hadn’t.’
‘No, it wasn’t that. You once made me think of an Eastern fable of a young man who was granted a wish, and chose the gift of pleasing women. But as he stepped out full of pride and plans of the beautiful Queens whose love he’d win, an old witch caught sight of him from the dungeon cell where she lived, and dragged him down to live there for the rest of his days. And so that’s all that came of his power to please women.’
‘That’s a fine tale, my Lady Aesop! And who’s the old witch?’
‘I can’t tell you – maybe it’s fate.’ She spoke carelessly, then wished she hadn’t, for both remembered her reputation for the second sight. She went on quickly, ‘I used to think it was myself, as I was twice your age – but then I’d the sense to let you go in time.’
He leaned across the corner of the table to kiss her, and she, pretending to misunderstand him, passed him the ale-jug. They were laughing and pledging each other when the sudden ring and clatter of harness and armed men filled the courtyard with uproar for the second time that morning, but with noise far less leisurely than that of the indignant cows.
Lord George Gordon had come to ask Hepburn’s aid in men and horses for the Gordon cause. Tall, superb, with that look about him of a lonely eagle, but no trace of his father’s pompous arrogance, he came clanking in his armour through the mighty archway into the hall. There he told Bothwell his errand, in front of the strange lady with the notorious reputation, to whom he showed his usual aloof courtesy, but no reserve about his plans.
The Bastard was pushing matters into open warfare, and Huntly and his sons determined in that event to defend Strathbogie against the forces of the Crown. Bothwell told Gordon to go back and tell his father not to be so mad, but the young man himself was plainly touched with a more dangerous madness. Huntiy had bragged from the beginning of his intention to marry the Queen to his eldest son; it might be the Gordon hoped to win by force of arms what his father’s diplomacy, or lack of it, had failed to achieve.
‘Am I to help every man in Scotland who is fool enough to fall in love with the Queen?’ Bothwell broke out to him. ‘And isn’t Arran’s fate sufficient warning to you?’
It was no use. Gordon had in his eyes the look which his own men would have called fey. He did not care what his fate might be, and only knew that he must follow it. He rode away, bearing his friend no ill-will for his refusal to join him, and left Bothwell ill at ease.
Had Gordon been at the head of this affair instead of his father it might have been another matter. But he had no confidence in Huntly – the Weathercock o’ the North, he called him, for Huntly had once turned against the Queen Regent. Besides, he had made up his mind; he would not be pushed either by his friends or his enemies into open rebellion against the Queen. He wrote to her to assure her of his loyalty, despite the fact that he, like the rebellious Sir John Gordon, had broken his ward; and he urged his friends and neighbours to keep the peace.
In the midst of such virtuous activities, it was a little irritating to get a message from John Knox urging him to the very course he was following, ‘so that his crime of prison-breaking might be the more easily pardoned’. But he was grateful for the prophet’s continued goodwill – ‘there’s some decency in the old ruffian after all’, was his irreverent comment.
By late autumn the news from the North was dark indeed. Mary had hoped to make peace with Huntly and proposed to stay at S
trathbogie, but she was warned of treachery there, and Huntly’s own behaviour gave colour to it, for his castle at Inverness closed its gates on her in open revolt.
That stung her to fury, and it was easy for James to rub salt into the wound by pointing out that it was the men of her own faith who were encouraging her troublesome subjects to rebellion against her. She would show her country that if Catholics disobeyed her, they should be punished equally with Protestant rebels.
In high excitement she took the field in person, sleeping and eating out on the open moors as if she were any old campaigner, and with a good deal more enjoyment.
‘I have always wished to be a man,’ she said, ‘to know what pleasure it is to lie all night in the fields and walk the causeway with a Glasgow buckler and broadsword by my side.’
Her words ran like a heath-fire through the ranks; the men were wild with enthusiasm for the lovely girl they had seen riding at their head, sharing the wind and the wet with them. Even Randolph, her quietly hostile English Envoy, was carried away by his admiration; he had ‘never seen her merrier, she was never dismayed’. The clans flocked to her aid; the castle at Inverness surrendered; and that, she hoped, was the end of the business.
But Huntly was driven into marching against Lord James’ forces and was defeated at Corrichie. The whole clan was crushed, the family ruined, Lord George Gordon imprisoned, and Huntly died of a fall from his horse in an apoplexy. Rumours were flying round the country. One of them, vouched for both by Knox and Buchanan, was that the Queen ‘glowmed’ when news was brought to her of her victory. Sir John Gordon, the chief occasion of the rebellion, was beheaded at Aberdeen, and the Queen fainted when forced by her brother to witness the execution from a window. It looked as though James’ sense of power were getting a little exuberant. But no doubt he felt he could afford it. He had already taken the coveted title of Earl of Moray with its revenues worth £26,000 a year, and laid hands on the splendid furnishings of Strathbogie, now forfeit to the Crown, which he was carrying south for his own apartments in Holyrood.
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