He asked Percy to use his influence to get his release, and offered no compliments nor explanations as to why Percy should do this for an enemy who had twice worsted him in war and plagued him while negotiating peace. This omission pleased Sir Henry as much as the last sentence in the letter annoyed him. ‘Excuse my homely writing’ wrote Bothwell in a fluent Italian hand, clearly and even beautifully formed, remarkable in a country where his fellow-nobles were apt to write vilely, if at all, yet he must needs point it out by this flamboyant piece of mock modesty.
Percy at once had Bothwell transferred to his charge at Tynemouth, and there he stayed till past the middle of March. Mary asked that he should be returned to Scotland for her ‘to deal with him as she thought fit’. That, however, was just what his enemies feared she might be able to do, so they urged Cecil to keep him prisoner in England. Rively was given bail and went to London to help Cecil concoct some charge against the Earl. The English Minister of State was only too willing; he had never forgiven ‘that unhonourable and thievish act’ of Bothwell’s in snatching his secret subsidy to the Scots rebels from John Cockburn.
‘I think all the hobgoblins of All Hallows’ E’en were out that night!’ Bothwell had burst out to Percy, ‘for I’ve been haunted by ’em ever since. Every enemy I’ve ever made goes back to that night. It wasn’t just John Cockburn I knocked on the head – it was John Knox and the Bastard and Arran and Michael Wily and Randolph and Cecil and Queen Elizabeth. They’ve been out for my blood ever since, every man-jack of them, and won’t rest till they get it.’
‘You have certainly chosen the most powerful persons in both countries for your foes.’ Sir Henry could no more flatter a man’s hopes than his person – to his face.
To a man’s enemies he took another tone, and wrote to Cecil in high praise of Bothwell’s sense and ability. Straight on top of reports from Edinburgh that described their fellow-countryman as ‘despiteful out of measure, false and untrue as the devil’, Cecil had to consider this letter from his English jailer which plainly told him that ‘the Earl is not the man he is reported to be’.
Percy did things thoroughly; he told his brother the Earl of Northumberland, then at Court, to insist that Elizabeth should see his letter to Cecil. The immediate result was that Percy was allowed to give his prisoner the greater freedom he had asked for him; his friends in Scotland were allowed to come and visit him, and Johnnie Stewart told him that Lethington, again riding south to London, had been given special written instructions from Mary to arrange his freedom – news, however, that only encouraged Bothwell to express his fears of the tabby’s claws.
He and Percy were summoned to London; they set off towards the end of March and had a delightful leisurely journey riding down through the Midlands, Bothwell exclaiming half in envy, half disgust at ‘all these fat meadows; you English are too rich in dirt, it may make for a heavy purse, but it would choke me to ride all day without seeing a hill or hearing the sound of the sea.’ Even the towns were flat: his eye pined for the jagged outrageous outline of Edinburgh and Stirling.
Percy was amused. Not all the anxiety of this doubtful mission in an enemy country, on top of a year of hostile plotting and imprisonment in his own, could dash James Hepburn’s spirits or subdue the vigour of his interest in everything he saw. He refused to be downed even when, at the end of the journey, they received orders that his destination was the Tower of London.
‘Hell and the Tower for good company!’ he said with a wry grin. ‘Your Queen pays me the compliment of sending me to her former lodging and her mother’s. Pray heaven I don’t come out of it by the same way as pretty Boleyn!’
The Earl of Northumberland was disgusted with the failure of his efforts on his former enemy’s behalf.
‘But we’ll get you out in no time, trust the Percies for that!’ he exclaimed in the exuberant fashion which made him seem so much younger than the still, short figure of his younger brother. ‘These new gentry at Court, these sons of the butchers and cheesemongers that King Harry delighted to honour, haven’t got it entirely their own way yet. I’m to be made Knight of the Garter – think of that for a man who’s had never a draper in the family! And France is working for you too; Philibert Du Croc has orders from the Guises to see to your just treatment – pity the Guise himself is dead. What, did you hear nothing of it on the way here? Shot by a Huguenot lad – one Poltrot, Poltroon I call him – at a range of nine or ten yards – three bullets notched with brimstone and spittle; they say he suffered tortures before the surgeons let him die.’
The Guise murdered! Bothwell was staggered by this piece of news; Sir Henry too, though he had never known him personally, was horrified: ‘the best general in all Christendom, and of the greatest courage, courtesy, liberality—’
‘Aye, it’s the lion that’s slaughtered; the wolves howl on,’ said his brother. ‘Assassination is a dirty way of running politics. It’ll lead to no good.’
His rosy eupeptic face, blue-eyed and fair-haired like a child’s, shook itself solemnly over the excellent dinner he had provided for his guest in Northumberland House, overlooking the Thames.
‘And war too is changing,’ he said. ‘Your Queen’s grandfather lost more than his army when he fell at Flodden. It wasn’t just the defeat of his country, it was the defeat of chivalry. Bungled, that battle was. Sheer lunacy, not to understand that the one thing in war is to defeat the enemy!’
‘If so,’ said Bothwell, ‘then treachery and savagery of every kind is to be excused – and is coming to be so excused. James IV was no fool, though he carried the logic of chivalry to its furthest extent. But your logic, carried to its full extent, would mean the end of mankind.’
‘What’s to be done? You’re a modern soldier like myself. In these days of guns we can’t still play the knight errant.’
‘What have guns to do with it?’ interpolated Sir Henry, as quietly as if he did not intend to be heard.
But Bothwell heard and said, ‘They have this to do with it – that war is getting more destructive, at the same time as men have lost all restraint of the rule of chivalry, all the old standards of keeping faith to each other, friend and foe. All that our precious new discoveries have brought us is the power to be devils rather than savages!’
Northumberland brought his fist down on the tablewith a thump that made the glasses ring. ‘God’s blood, young fellow, must you cut the throat of the whole world? If what you prophesy is true, I’d rather drink myself to death than live to see it.’
But it was Henry Percy, speaking at last, who gave the final word that evening.
‘Chivalry was thought of, and made a part of man’s nature, centuries before guns were invented. They are an accident of his brain, but chivalry is a part of his soul. He cannot lose that. So chivalry will win in the end, even over guns.’
The Percies kept faith. In two months Bothwell was released from the Tower, though on parole not to leave the country, and Randolph merrily warned Cecil to ‘take heed how you lodge such a guest’, begging him not to send the Earl to Dover Castle lest he should seduce Randolph’s mother and sister there, not to mention several nieces.
It was high summer. London was appallingly hot and stuffy; plague was rife and people were dying so fast in the poorer parts that they could scarcely get buried before they rotted. The city stank of corruption – and in every sense, for men were saying that bread made of bad corn was spreading the disease; threats of revolution were muttered in the stifling and sulphurous air that hung like a pall over what seemed a doomed city.
Now again Bothwell owed his release to the Percy. Sir Henry offered the hospitality of his huge and ancient Castle of Norham on the Border, which Bothwell had blamed d’Oysel for neglecting to burn on the occasion of the Haltwellsweir raid. He was not so sorry now for that omission, as he breathed the fresh northern air again, and hawked and hunted with jolly Jack Musgrave, Sir Henry’s deputy at Norham while he was down south.
The two young men became fast f
riends as they dined together on the salted eels and salmon, and pipes of malvoisie from the huge vats in the cellars. They found still better sport than hunting, for Musgrave had a quarrel with the Berwick officers; they marched to confiscate his goods, and found the Castle held against them, not only by their compatriot, but by the Scots Earl that they had seized in his bed in Rively’s vault last January, and now spoiling for a fight with them. Their assault failed; it was answered by a mysterious party of armed men who made a sudden flying attack on the city one night with squibs and fireballs, and the fiery influence of Musgrave’s guest was suspected. An order was sent for Bothwell to be transferred to Ainwick and the more sober charge of Sir John Forster.
Jack Musgrave was furious at losing his comrade. In his gratitude for the good times they had had together, he suggested that his men should ride with slack rein when they escorted Bothwell to Alnwick. With a wink and a tug at his scrubby straw-coloured moustache that gave a frost-bitten look to his red weather-beaten face, he said, ‘Then a quick glance over your left shoulder as you near the ford, and away with you across Tweed into the Cheviots. You’ve friends enough in Scotland to shelter you till you get a boat for France.’
‘And break the faith of a Borderer?’ demanded Bothwell furiously. ‘You can tempt your own men to march-treason if you will, but I’ll thank you not to think a Scot is likely to break parole.’
It was their only quarrel, and they made it up in a rollicking debauch of malvoisie the night before Bothwell left his charge for that of Sir John Forster, English Warden of the Middle Marches and Deputy Governor of Berwick, a splendid square rock of a man – and rocklike he stood, for he held the latter post for thirty-seven years.
Here too Bothwell made a real friend in his custodian. His horse-sense came in handy, and he amused himself choosing English geldings for sale in Scotland. They spent Christmas and New Year together with a fair amount of festivity, but it was saddened for Bothwell by news of the sudden death of his young brother-in-law, Johnnie Stewart.
Memories of Johnnie laughing, dancing, singing, on New Year’s Eve a year ago at Coldinghame, and two years ago at Crichton at his wedding, crowded in unbearably on his mind. Jan wrote a pathetic bewildered little letter, and Mary, she said, seemed almost as unhappy as herself. She had cried so bitterly; more even than for the Duc de Guise, whose murder had cast her down so terribly; she had sobbed out that God always took from her the people she loved best. She had given Jan a black knitted dress and a cape of squirrel fur. The baby Francis was well, but not in the least like Johnnie; he grew darker and more like a goblin every day.
‘Aye, she’s crying her heart out now but she’ll forget him and marry someone else in a year or two,’ so Bothwell told himself rather grimly. Woman’s love was of small account; he had had very literal token of that this last summer in his extreme poverty in London, when no Scots merchant there considered his securities sufficient to lend him any money, since all his lands were mortgaged, the command of Hermitage had been given to the head of the Elliots, and Haddington Abbey to Lethington. And at that moment, in his wretched lodging, arrived ‘a Portugal piece for a token’ from Anna Throndsen in her home in the far North, as if to mock his miserable fortunes.
He had less reason to complain of his Queen than of his mistress, for she now wrote personally yet again to her ‘Dearest sister and cousin,’ and urged her to grant the Scots Earl liberty to leave England for anywhere abroad where he might wish to go. And she contrived that Lethington and Randolph should write as well, their pens, under her control, being surer weapons than their spoken words. Her determined influence on Bothwell’s behalf, and the letters that passed between her and Alnwick, gave rise to wild reports of secret rendezvous between them, and plots for her to recall him to Scotland for a Catholic revival.
He was now said to be ‘a great Papist’, and ‘the Queen thinks to have Bothwell ready to shake out of her pocket against us Protestants. The Mass shall up. Bothwell shall follow with power to put all into execution, and then shall Knox and his preaching be pulled by the ears.’ Bothwell would have been astonished to hear it; all his hopes were now fastened on becoming Captain of the Scottish Archers in France, or, to give it its alternative title, of the Bodyguard of the Virgin Mary.
‘And they’re doing what they can to make it live up to its name,’ he chuckled to Henry Percy when at last he rode to Tynemouth again, this time as his guest, early in the March of 1564, on his way south once more to try his luck with Elizabeth. ‘They’ve brought in new regulations that no Archer is to lie on the floor beside the French maids of honour – only sit – and then only if he is married! As I’ve been twice married by report, with both wives living, I should have special privileges.’
It was good to be again with Percy, telling him all that had happened to him since the Tower gates had swung on him a year ago; of the plague in London and the fireballs at Berwick and the horse-dealing at Alnwick, of the fun he had had with ‘that mad demi-lance Cumberland Borderer’, Jack Musgrave, and how Sir John Forster had the great town bell of Carlisle ringing within half an hour of getting word that the rude Johnstones were riding into Cumberland.
For the past two years he had been a prisoner or fugitive or exile; they had not betrayed him into the final corruption of self-pity; his vitality was still taut and ringing; but they had made him harder and more cynical, and this Sir Henry noticed particularly when he spoke of his young Queen. He did not blame her that the reward of a loyalty unusual among his fellows had been ruin and exile, but he resented it, and it showed subtly in his tone about her.
He could not see what it was that drove men mad about her. That young fool Châtelard had lost his head over her all too literally; he had been caught hiding in her bedroom and dismissed with a severe warning, ‘but like all these French fops he thought himself irresistible, and a few nights later there he was again, and nearer the mark! I’ve asked when she’d ever have a man in her bed to teach her what the strange beast is like, but under the bed is the nearest she’s got to it, and a royal rage is all it taught her. She called to James to come and kill him, and snatched at his sword to do it herself, since he would not – wish I’d seen her!’ And his laugh, though admiring, was not pleasant.
‘Her brother was probably right,’ said Percy; ‘it would have caused great scandal for him to kill a man in her bedroom.’
‘It caused every bit as much to have him prancing on the scaffold sighing “Oh cruel fair!” and reminding the populace that he was a nephew of the Chevalier Bayard and like him “sans peur” though not “sans reproche”. I’ll swear he enjoyed that last hour as much as any in his life. Knox made good profit from it, of course; said his head was cut off so that it shouldn’t tell the secrets of his Queen. What do you think of it all?’ he asked, suddenly swinging round in the midst of his restless prowl up and down the room, and confronting the steadfast gaze of his host.
‘I think,’ said Sir Henry gravely, ‘that for a girl just twenty-one and of a rare charm, your Queen is very unhappy in having neither parents nor any disinterested friends and advisers. It will be a miracle if she escapes disaster.’
Bothwell somehow felt rather ashamed of himself, and anxious, to show that he agreed. He said, ‘Maybe that’s the reason she’s made this extraordinary appointment lately – taken that Italian fellow, a musician and a poet, not a gentleman, for her private secretary. Her last showed himself too familiar they say, and was discharged – the same old story, she smiled and so he pranced – and so now she feels it safer to take a low-born fellow like David Rizzio.’
‘Safer in one respect certainly,’ said Percy, ‘since he is a foreigner with no particular axe to grind in her country. But from what I have seen of your nobles, I should say that that appointment was full of danger.’
He picked up his clarinet and began to play again, the notes falling clear and round and perfect as drops of water, and with them fell a strange quiet on the whirlpool of hopes and fears, angers and jealousies
and suspicions in the young man’s restless mind. Could there ever be any harmony in the jangled confusion of his or anyone else’s affairs? Percy seemed to find it; was it in his music, his liking for old-fashioned poets, such as Chaucer, his refusal to be discouraged by the contorted actions of others? Most men wanted it; even Knox sought it, furiously, desperately, never seeing how one half of him destroyed what the other half intended.
And suddenly, as so often in these last three months, he was stabbed with a vision of Johnnie’s brief glancing happiness, leaping across the crowded scene of his life in one gay shout of song, and now of Jan left crying over the cradle of her ‘goblin baby’, in a black knitted frock and squirrel cape, when only a day or two ago it seemed she had come riding towards him in his old clothes, the autumn sunlight on her face, a creature so wild and childishly ignorant that she did not even know she was in love with her young lover.
Next day he rode south once more on his quest for an interview with Queen Elizabeth, his cause fortified not only by the letters of his Queen and her Ministers, but by those of his recent hosts. Sir John Forster, though proudly stating that ‘we that inhabit Northumberland are not acquainted with any learned or rare phrases’, had added his praise of his guest to Percy’s assurance that Bothwell’s behaviour ‘has been both courteous and honourable’, and, he emphasized, ‘keeping his promise’. He had heard from Jack Musgrave, not Bothwell, how that young man had ‘Kept trust’.
His journey south a year ago had ended in the Tower. This journey ended in nothing. For six months he kicked his heels in or near London, getting tantalizing glimpses of Elizabeth hunting, riding through the city, dancing, flirting, a stiff figure blazing with jewels, set about with wired ruffs and stuffed out skirts like the spread tail of a peacock. Sometimes he was near enough to catch the high vibrant tones of her voice, but he never got the interview he asked for until nearly the middle of September.
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