The Galliard

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Yet you let him off too?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I’d promised to before he disclosed it. I’ve told you, I was sick of their whining lies, and I’d more important things to see to. And they of all men are the least likely to try that game on me again.’

  The Highland woman looked rather strangely at the Hasty Hepburn who in a temper would hang his groom for stealing a couple of shirts, but whose rage cooled so quickly after discovering a plot of such concerted treachery.

  She did not take after her sons as Bothwell noted four months later when he heard that Wat had been killed by one of his Sinclair cousins.

  But by then he had still more important things to see to.

  He sailed for France just before his trial at Edinburgh, where a Hepburn cousin, the Laird of Riccarton, pleaded that his personal absence should not be prejudicial to the Earl, ‘since he has so potent an enemy as the Lord James, Earl of Moray’. But in spite of the legal arguments supplied by Lord James’ six thousand armed supporters, the Earl of Argyll did not condemn Bothwell in his absence to be put to the horn. People said that this was due to the Queen, as hasty as any Hepburn in forgiveness as in anger; she still, they complained, wished well to that ‘blasphemous and irreverent speaker’.

  His speech grew a deal more blasphemous and irreverent as he kicked his heels in Paris, waiting for the Queen’s summons that he was certain now would come, for the split between her and Lord James grew more and more open. A letter from her was actually sent at the beginning of July, but it never reached Bothwell, as the Laird of Riccarton, who bore it, was captured and detained by the English at Berwick. James was now in secret league with Elizabeth against the royal lovers, and sealed orders were out in both countries to detain the Earl, ‘enemy to all honest men’, should he make a second venture home.

  ‘Mary’s second summons, by a more wary messenger, reached him at the end of August, and with it the news of all Scotland in arms. At last James was in open conflict against his half-sister and had raised an armed force, with the help of money and musketry from Elizabeth.

  It was James, not Bothwell, whom Mary had ‘put to the horn’ – a piece of news that made Bothwell give such a yell of joy that Paris, now suffering a nervous and almost agonized devotion to his master, fled from the room in terror lest he had suddenly gone mad. But a following shout quickly recalled him.

  ‘Pack my things, you rabbit! Summon the rest of my scoundrels. I leave Paris today.’

  And he left – ‘no man knows whither’, reported the English spies in Paris. He moved so fast as to outwit as well as outride them: to Brussels, then to Antwerp, then Flushing; bought guns and powder in the Netherlands, and laid a red-herring trail that hoodwinked them into thinking he intended a landing in Ireland to help O’Neill’s rebellion.

  The English fleet were deployed to catch him as he sailed for Scotland with his munitions in two small pinnaces. Seven ships were not thought too many for the job. To make sure of the man so feared by the English Ministers, who a year ago had written him down as ‘of no force now’, four warships were sent to watch for him between Ireland and the west coast of Scotland, while two more waited for him off the east coast, and yet another pursued him under command of the great explorer, Anthony Jenkinson.

  But the seamanship of the Lord High Admiral of Scotland proved a match for Elizabeth’s famous sailor, and his couple of little boats sped too fast for the warship to catch up with them. They reached the mouth of Tweed, where, however, two other ships were waiting to blockade him. As Bothwell’s pinnaces sailed up to Eyemouth, the wind fell dead just when they lay within range of the enemy guns, which started firing salvo after salvo, all wide of the mark; but the men began to panic, caught in that sudden awful calm on the hot blue sea, with the cannonballs hissing and spluttering in the placid water all round them, and they helpless with their sails fallen limp and idle. Bothwell coolly ordered them to man the oars, and soon their light boats had run the blockade and were unloading in double-quick time at the harbour. In less than an hour he had got all his arms ashore, ordered horses, and was riding at the gallop towards Holyrood.

  The tourelles of the long grey palace, and behind them the glowing curves of the hills sweeping up to Arthur’s Seat, rose again before him, after nearly three years. Hot, tired, excited, his clothes dusty, sweating with the speed at which he had ridden in the baking mid-September sunshine, he came into the long gallery, heard the tinkling of music, and saw two figures. One of them, a tall fair young man, stood leaning over the back of the chair in which the other was sitting; but as Bothwell tramped towards them in his riding-boots she uprose in a sudden rush of silken skirts like the uprising of a fountain; she ran towards him with both hands outstretched.

  He knelt to kiss them, looked up, and fell in love.

  Part III

  LOVERS’ MEETING

  Chapter One

  He had not seen her for over two and a half years, and by now they had both changed.

  As he stood there looking down on her so strangely and intently, she felt an odd tremor, a new fear of this man who seemed so much older and more powerful than she remembered him, perhaps more sinister. She had counted so certainly on his ‘ruffianly fidelity’ (Who had said that of him?), but those who invoked the devil to their aid had to pay a price – and there was devil as well as Galliard now in this man; that earlier gaiety was still fiercer, more savage and cynical, and deeper – was it deeper in sin as well as in his dearly bought knowledge of the world, so much of it bought from her?

  All this she saw in that first instant, and never knew it till long after.

  And he, looking down on her, saw that gone was the douce young girl who bent over her embroidery in the Council chamber and was so gentle and obedient to her bastard brother. Now, when still three months short of twenty-three, she was a woman whose senses as well as affections had at last been roused, and stimulated by rage with her enemies. ‘The foundation of this marriage was despite and anger,’ said the English statesmen, but bodily passion had been added to her rapturous defiance of the distant Queen and the ever-present brother who had hemmed her in and hectored her ever since she had come to her kingdom.

  She was now free, a glorious creature, all fire and fierce spirit, fit to mate even with a Borderer, in the opinion of one of them.

  She had acted as boldly and promptly in the face of rebellion as he could wish, and was as eager to tell him of it as he to assure her that he had safely brought her all the munitions ‘that credit could buy’, and an offer from his old friend d’Oysel of two thousand men if needed.

  ‘But they won’t be needed,’ she cried. ‘I’ve my own men here, my own countrymen; even this wicked old town of Edinburgh with all its tottering houses leering down on me have sided with me against James. And that all happened only a fortnight ago – oh, there is so much to tell you.’

  She could hardly bear to let him go to wash and change his dusty clothes before supping with them, so she insisted; and the youth beside her looked rather sulky about it, but was very gracious and jolly later as he welcomed him at the little table (‘Had a drink or two in the meantime,’ Bothwell decided, noting his heightened colour and greater flow of speech).

  They sat in a small room where the life-size figures of huntsmen and stags on the tapestries wavered and shook with an odd appearance of coming to life every time the pages brushed against them with their heavy gold dishes, coming from the darkness of the narrow spiral stone stairway into the dazzle of reflected light from the sunset. It made that tiny room glow as though it were inside a hollow jewel; it struck red sparks on the dish of plain beaten silver that held dark grapes and polished red apples and green figs in the middle of the oval French table; it threw red shadows from the wine-glasses like long pools of blood on the white cloth; it winked and glittered on the emeralds and diamonds that studded the agate hilt of the dagger in Darnley’s belt. Bothwell had seen that dagger before, in Mary’s hand when she had dubbed him Lord of Misrule at Jan�
��s wedding; it was a present to her father from François I, ‘but nothing’s too fine for her to hand over to him’, he thought.

  Never had he seen her eyes so wide-open or so brilliant; gone was all their veiled, subdued look, the lazy eyes of a girl who loved to lie in bed all day. She was awake now and sparkling with an energy that was no mere girlish excitement, but concentrated on her purpose with a force and intensity unusual he thought in a woman.

  She had defied everyone, from Mr Knox to the Pope himself, for she had not waited to get his Dispensation for marriage between cousins before she married Darnley. On the other hand, she had dared to celebrate Easter quite openly this year, and to object when the priest was tied to the market cross and, as Knox jocosely proclaimed, ‘the boys served him with his Easter eggs’, pelting him for hours until he was insensible.

  She had outwitted James, who had opposed the marriage because he feared that Darnley ‘would do little to forward the cause of Christ’. In these pious interests he had planned to kidnap both the lovers at Loch Leven and hand them over to England. Mary heard of it, coolly made no change of plan, but got up extra early that morning and galloped with her company past Loch Leven while James was still in bed.

  ‘I must have had more kidnapping attempts against me than any woman in Europe, but you Scots are such bunglers, you never succeed.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ve not yet had the right incentive,’ remarked her guest, but refused to explain himself.

  That attempt, known as the Raid of Beith, had forced James’ hand into open rebellion. He calculated, with some reason on the face of it, that he had as good a chance to raise the country now in the name of religion against the Queen as he had had when he raised it against her mother the Regent. So he marched into Edinburgh with an armed force at the end of August, when the young couple had had just a month’s peaceful honeymoon; preached the glory of God and offered the people good pay to defend it. But to throw rotten eggs at a tied-up priest was one thing; it was another to take up arms against the young Queen whom they had enjoyed having in their midst for four years. They heard his exhortations in icy silence, and then frankly begged him and his men to leave the city. The Castle guns, opening fire on him, gave point to the appeal; also the news that Mary with her hastily improvised army was advancing on the town. James fled from Edinburgh in the middle of the night, as once before he had been forced to do. ‘This is the day of my cross and persecution,’ he announced.

  Knox also made himself scarce, with his accustomed dignity. ‘Although I have appeared to play the faint-hearted and feeble soldier,’ he wrote from Kyle, where he had established himself and family, ‘the cause I remit to God.’ This was perhaps a fair way of shelving his responsibility, since he had been charged with praying publicly for the rebels (and given the excellent answer that it was lawful to pray for all men); also for the most remarkable addition to his wedding sermons.

  The new young King, though a Catholic, had thought it well to try and propitiate Knox by attending his sermon at St Giles’ in a throne specially built for the purpose, and the preacher, by his own account, ‘took occasion to speak of the government of wicked Princes, who for the sins of the people were sent as tyrants and scourges to plague them’, the wicked Princes being specified as ‘boys and women’. Other words which, he complained, appeared bitter in the King’s ears, were that ‘God justly punished Ahab because he would not take order with that harlot Jezebel’.

  The sermon had lasted an hour and a half longer than the time appointed, and the young King was so late for dinner that he refused angrily to eat it at all, but went straight to his hawking. The Council punished Knox for his attack on the Royal Family by desiring him to abstain from preaching for a fortnight, and the preacher was publishing his sermon to show ‘upon how small occasions great offence is now conceived’. But on hearing that Darnley was advancing with the Queen’s army, absence struck him as the better defence.

  Yet he could admire the spirit of his enemy, ‘Mischievous Mary’. She rode at the head of her troops in more danger from storm and flood than from her foes, head-on against the raging wind and rain; she braved a torrent that had turned suddenly from a brook into a roaring river; several of her horsemen were drowned and many utterly exhausted, ‘Yet,’ declared Knox, ‘the Queen’s courage increased man-like so much that she was ever with the foremost.’

  She told Bothwell now of that adventure with pride and laughter – if he’d been there he’d have called her a good moss-trooper – ‘and better than some, who were shouting “The water winna ride, we’ll all be drowned.” But we swam it, horse and man, and Queen too!’ Drenched to the skin all over they were when they arrived at Callendar that night, and her hair such a tangled dripping coil she thought it would have to be cut.

  ‘Has that wicked old magician the power to raise tempests against me, and turn little streams into murderous torrents? – and what do I care if he has? He’s not been able to turn the hearts of my people. We rode into Edinburgh to be greeted rapturously as King and Queen – that was worth a wetting. And for the first time since I came home, I was Queen! Oh, I must show you! Wait! Look!’

  She sprang from the table and ran into the next room, returning with two scrolls – she could not wait for a servant to find them, she said in answer to Darnley’s annoyed question. They were copies of her Proclamations to her people – one at her wedding, the other at her triumphant entry into her capital. She spread them on the table, pointing out to him the sentences of which she was most proud.

  ‘Neither my conscience nor yours ought to be forced. You have entire freedom of religion – pray allow me the same privilege.’

  They had been signed by her the week before, ‘in the first and twenty-third year of our reign’, to mark that for the first time she would indeed rule, instead of allowing even her former privileges to be taken away from her. Bothwell could not help smiling as he read her indignant statement that ‘when We ourselves were of less age, and at our first returning into this our Realm, We had free choice of our Council, and now when We are at our full maturity, shall We be brought back to the state of pupils and be put under tutory?’

  James’ true intention in his rebellion was nothing but his own rule; ‘this is the “quarrel of Religion” they made you believe they had in hand; for which they would have you hazard your lands, lives and goods as rebels against your natural Prince. To speak plainly, they would be kings themselves.’

  ‘Plain as a pikestaff,’ was Bothwell’s comment, ‘though I never knew before that the “s” at the end of the name showed James to be a plural noun.’

  ‘Oh, that was Davie’s doing. He wouldn’t let me mention him by name, so he had to be “They” throughout. Don’t you like my last sentence?’

  This was a reminder to her people that ‘under our wings you have enjoyed the possession of your goods and lived at liberty of your conscience’, and should continue to do so. So she saw herself in her full maturity of twenty-two and three-quarter years as a mother-bird to the dour Edinburgh citizens! Well, she would certainly have to play that role with that great cock-chick beside her for some time yet, if she were ever to train him to anything more useful than crowing and flapping his wings. Harry, she called him, and when he got rumbustious, ‘Bluff King Hal’, but there was an implied compliment in her teasing, since it was a reminder not only of his new royal title but of his mother’s Tudor blood that made him an heir to the English Crown.

  He too was eager to show off about their adventures, though Bothwell could not see that he had done anything very much in them beyond annoying an unnecessary number of people. Of this he boasted with a boyish glee that was rather engaging – ‘I stirred ’em up a bit, there’s no doubt of that. I showed I wasn’t going to stand any nonsense – told the Great Bastard to his face that he owned too much land; that was before all the trouble began.’

  ‘It began soon after, I should imagine,’ remarked Bothwell. Mary was quick to put out a sheltering wing.

&nbs
p; ‘It was Rob’s fault. He showed the King a map of Scotland with all James’ possessions coloured red, so that it was startled out of him.’

  It sounded as though something of Johnnie Stewart’s impish spirit had descended on his brother Robert.

  Darnley had helped drive old Châtelherault into the opposite camp by threatening to get up from his bed to break his bald pate for him. Once again Mary contrived to let drop that this was when Darnley was feverish with measles. She would have a busy time of it covering up his tracks. Bothwell meanly wanted to see how she would explain Darnley’s behaviour in drawing his dagger on the Justice-Clerk, his own adherent, who had brought him disappointing news. Probably the real excuse would have been drink, for he was drinking fairly heavily now and as a matter of course. He tried to make Bothwell match him glass for glass, but though he had a head far stronger than the boy’s he refused to follow his lead.

  ‘I have had occasion to doubt what I have said in drink.’ He looked at the Queen as he spoke; it was an odd apology for lèse-majesté, but he thought that she accepted it.

  He listened to the eager boasting of these two children; they had done their job remarkably well so far, or rather she had. The vigour and promptness of her actions, the clear sense and sincerity of her proclamations, had at the very outset utterly disconcerted her powerful opponents. It was plain that James, for all that he was the leader of the popular – and profitable – Protestant party, did not hold the affections of the people as she had come to do.