‘He can’t really think that would endear him to me, but he doesn’t seem to mind what I feel for him as long as it is something – if it can’t be the old fondness, then let it be fear, or just irritation!’
‘And when you are stronger,’ he burst out, ‘will you then give him his demands?’
She met his eyes fairly. Her own were clear, with the silver-golden lights of the day reflected in them, and her hair blowing round her face as soft as thistledown.
‘No,’ she said in a voice so low he scarcely heard it. She had whispered a pledge to him.
She gave Darnley more presents and induced him to make official appearances with her. They rode together to Stirling to place the Prince under the charge of Lord and Lady Mar, with Bothwell in command of his bodyguard. There the young couple stayed for a little with their baby, and Mary carried him up and down the prim paths of the formal garden that James IV had made, and watched the white peacock, of the same breed that he had installed, spread its tail like a great mother-of-pearl fan in the sun, and tried to think her child was growing less like his father every day.
But his father grew more and more like himself, and by September she fled back alone to Edinburgh.
Work, that was the only thing for her now. Even then she could not really take in the problem of modern finance. She sat day after day in Exchequer House with Lethington, and heard how prices were rising and money falling with the influx of new gold through Spain from the Indies; how this vast increase of yellow metal, for which men went and killed each other, would in the long run ruin Europe. Why then had men made gold their master?
Lethington shrugged and advised her to ask his father.
But he was, as always, sympathetic over her own immediate problems; he had often complained at the Council that it was most unfair the Queen should have to pay the Protestant ministers’ stipend out of her own privy purse – if she were to meet all their demands, he told them, ‘she will not have enough at the end of the year to buy herself a pair of shoes.’
But what else could she do? The enormous wealth taken from the old Church, which was to have endowed the new, had found its way into the lay pockets of the Lords of the Congregation, and she could not let the poor ministers starve.
‘And has Your Grace understood so ungraceful a subject as your revenues?’ asked Mr George Buchanan with what he intended as a courtly smile.
‘I have understood the Council will vote twelve thousand for the Christening,’ she replied crisply; ‘with that, and Masques written by the finest Latin scholar in Europe, we should impress the foreign Ambassadors.’
The finest Latin scholar contorted both person and speech as he bowed over a return compliment so elaborate that he had difficulty in unwinding himself from its coils.
She came to his rescue with inquiries after the famous French pupils he had taught while holding the chair of Latin at the new College of Guienne at Bordeaux. For France had sheltered Mr Buchanan when both Scotland and England had turned him out, and he seldom missed a chance of telling Mary that her mother country was ‘summa hurnanitas’. Young Michel de Montaigne and Monsieur Scaliger owed their early eminence entirely to the fact that he had given them their first floggings, so he chuckled with reminiscent pleasure. Montaigne had been a pampered brat whose father had given orders he was to be awakened always by music, lest the tender brain of childhood should be injured by a more sudden process; but George Buchanan had soon put a stop to such nonsense. The ill effects of that early spoiling persisted, however; he was already, though a young man, wishing to retire to a life of ‘quiet and indifference to all things.’ To his former tutor, a shrewd and indefatigable man of business, passionately ambitious, this was the worst sign he had yet seen of the decadence of modern youth.
Montaigne had been made Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the French Court at a very early age, and King Henri II had delighted in his conversation; Mary herself, the thoughtful child King Henri had loved to have near him, had often leaned against her father-in-law’s chair and watched that strange young man with the melancholy smile looking at her under the heavy lids of his dreaming eyes, while he made little restless movements, kicking his feet together in a most unconventional manner for a royal audience, and talked and talked, and decided nothing.
But once he had left his ‘perhaps’ and ‘I think’ and ‘it is possible’ and all his gentle qualifications, and burst out in his rather loud voice at the news of fresh Spanish victories in Mexico. Politics! The greatness of Empire! The moral duty to civilize the savage and teach him true religion! What did it all amount to but that great cities were levelled to the ground, nations exterminated, the richest and most beautiful countries wrecked – to provide Europe with pearl and pepper! ‘Mechanic victories!’ shouted that odd young man.
‘King Henri thought him remarkable,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes.’ The stout black indignant form heaved himself up and down the room in agitation that was somehow pathetic, so helpless was all the talent and energy of the careerist in conflict with the man of genius. ‘I’ve told him again and again, he might get anywhere. And yet look at him! He wishes only to read old books, to talk with gardeners and carpenters, he who has entertained kings! That is the result of having “a well-born soul” as he calls it! A well-born purse, rather. All young men should be born poor, as I was. Vanity and egoism, they will ruin the most promising career ever launched. Scaliger, too, says Montaigne’s interest in everything that concerns himself will swamp all his energies. What will it matter to the rest of the world whether he likes radishes, must drink his wine from a glass, wears silk stockings winter and summer? Yet that is all he wishes to do, draw himself with a pen in his essays as painters draw their own portraits with a crayon. He cares nothing for worldly prospects nor fame, does not want to be read or quoted after he is dead, thinks learning nothing to be proud of, and the cleverest men apt to be foolish, the laws mere conventions, and habits and customs a timid convenience. He wishes only, he says, to be “a master of the art of life”.’
And he mopped his brow, which was damp with rage and a real concern for the pupil who might have done even better than himself.
Mary had never liked him so well as now, for he had forgotten he was speaking to a woman, that strange faintly unpleasant species that had to be approached in a particular manner with placatory smirks and compliments; for once he was speaking sincerely, and, though with disapproval, of one of the men who made France ‘summa humanitas’.
‘But,’ said he, ‘let us turn to more important matters,’ and he produced his Latin Masque. She looked at it as they walked in the garden at the back of Exchequer House that still, golden September day. Some very tall sunflowers had raised their heads over the wall from the next garden; Mary looked up and laughed to see their black faces framed in glistening gold peering down at her. ‘A whole row of Black Ladies for a Savage Knight to tilt for!’ she exclaimed. ‘Whose garden is that?’
Mr Buchanan, disgusted that her attention should be diverted from his Muse, replied with a touch of acid, ‘Is it possible Your Grace does not know? That is the garden of Mr David Chalmers, one of my Lord Bothwell’s creatures.’
‘His lawyer, you mean,’ she answered, and thought yes, it was true, he really was leering. It was strange that so much learning could not create the ‘âme bien née’.
Chapter Fifteen
Monsieur d’Oysel, over on a diplomatic visit to the French Ambassador, Philibert Du Croc, simply could not understand it. His fat pink hands flapped in the face of his old comrade in arms, the Earl of Bothwell, as he wheezed and panted his astonishment. He had left Scotland six years ago, and now he found it a different country. Then all had been darkness – war with England, civil war, and worse than all, war with those one believed friendly: ‘Never could one tell here the friend from the enemy, for he who was with us in the morning might go over to the other side before dinner. No wonder that poor gallant lady died of it. Yet her daughter, a young girl, comes, a
nd pouf! in five years she makes daylight. There has been no war with England. She has put down two civil wars against her as soon as they began. She escapes alone, enceinte, from five hundred armed guards. She crushes all her enemies within a week, then gives a natural birth to her infant and does not die. I tell you it is incredible, impossible!’
Bothwell quickly informed him that he had something to do with the crushing of her enemies and the squashing of the civil wars.
D’Oysel flapped away this information. ‘My friend, you are a fine soldier and you lead men gaillardement. It is known. Also you are seven years older than when you raided the English trenches and then lamented your Hobs and your Willies – it is possible you have learned some sense.’ (There was very nearly an explosion at this, but d’Oysel with a glance at his companion’s face did not wait for it.) ‘But that does not detract from the miracle of this young thing, with but one of her nobles both strong and loyal to her, making such headway in a country all but foreign to her, and the most part hostile. Who has she had to advise her? No one but her bastard brother and your Scots Machiavelli, who, it is now plain, have worked only for their own ends from the beginning. But she has refused to serve their ends – or that of others. She has refused to obey the Pope and put down Protestantism, refused even to give his Legate an official audience. On the other hand, she has refused to obey John Knox and turn Protestant, although she has been threatened with murder again and again in his sermons if she does not do so – and those threats of Knox, they arrive, it is known. Yet she holds her way between the two faiths, and will have tolerance for both, and, in spite of the ministers, she has succeeded. The country has answered for her and not for the Bastard. All Europe is impressed, the English Queen envious and afraid, her enemies cowed.’ He drew breath, then demanded,
‘How is it then, this miracle? She has no troops of her own, no great allies, since she will not join the Catholic League – no, it is her own, the miracle – her generosity, her wish for peace, her trust in her people; rather than her charm and beauty.’
He undid another button of his doublet and leaned back, contemplating his wisdom and Bothwell’s wine together with placid satisfaction. His face had grown more completely spherical in the six years since Bothwell had last seen it in the inn-garden at Paris: it was now a perfect harvest-moon with its attendant satellites of chins.
But suddenly its celestial calm was shattered by a convulsion from within; the blue eyes blazed, the fluffy tufts of eyebrows shot up into the pink forehead, the mouth opened in a round indignant O; he was confounded, he was outraged, he demanded of what were the men made in Scotland, and was their Queen indeed a woman and not a mermaid? How was it that even now she was nearly twenty-four there had been no real scandals about her in spite of all the attempts of the ministers, civil and religious, to work them up? Rizzio? Pouf! Cecil’s efforts to blacken her over that had made him a laughing-stock in France. Châtelard? Pah! She was not of the type to kill her lovers. It was seen.
No, she was cold; and he gave a furnace sigh at the reproach; compliments on her beauty, however subtle, did not amuse her (obviously his own vanity had been piqued); it delighted her far more ‘to hear of hardihood and valiancy’. She never heeded Ronsard’s warning to make the most of her young beauty before it faded like the rose. And in a rich surprising tenor, his hand to his heart, leaning amorously towards his companion, he chanted,
‘Cueillez, Cueillez votre jeunesse:
Comme _à cette fleur, la vieillesse
Fera tenir votre beauté.’
‘No need to goggle at me. I’ve always made the most of my beauty.’
D’Oysel ignored such triviality on a subject as serious as that of food. He wagged his fat finger and said reproachfully that the act of sex could give the Queen no pleasure, only disgust; it was evident in the repulsion she felt for Darnley. She could no more bear him even to lay a hand on her sleeve than if he were a gross spider.
‘Christ’s heart, and do you blame her?’ Bothwell broke out at last, suddenly moved from his silent amusement in those crisp, final, infinitely certain tones that put everything so neatly into categories for the sheer pleasure of arrangement.
‘Blame? How you confuse things, my friend. I say that one has never – but never – pleased her. It is seen. She could not hold him faithful to her for even a few weeks after their marriage, and why? Because she did not wish to. Nor does she wish to console herself. Again why? Because he has rendered her a great service: he has disgusted her with men. That is an advantage certainly, to a Queen. To a woman, no!’
‘Because a sickly cub has disappointed her, you think—’ but he could not go on.
‘Aha, you are touché! You are not then all stone.’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘Oh, you have your blacksmith’s and foreign admiral’s daughters, it is known. How goes it with your Norwegian lady? Is she the reason you have been too preoccupied this past year to make love to your beautiful young Queen?’
‘More likely that my Queen has been too preoccupied with a dangerous childbirth to allow me,’ said Bothwell, hoping his explanation was the true one.
D’Oysel was not to be steered off Anna. His infallible nose for gossip had already discovered that that importunate lady had made use of her passport to pay a second visit to Scotland this summer, encouraged thereto by the news she had obtained that Bothwell’s marriage was not a success. But neither was her attempt to revive the past. Bothwell was none too pleased at her return. To lodge her again on his mother’s estate would have made her far too conspicuous; he gave her one of his peel towers and visited her occasionally and in secret. Poor Anna, lonely, bored and disappointed, poured out her feelings in her sonnets, complaining of the pale tearful wife, in love with another, who had won from her ‘her true husband in the sight of God’. Had she not left her friends and country twice over for him, placed her son, her goods and her own subject heart in his absolute power? These complaints were easier to endure than her expressions of abject humility, when she ‘kissed his hands’ and told him she was trying to make herself worthy of his love.
But even if Bothwell shared her opinion of his wife’s ‘feigned tears’ and ‘writings rouged with learning’ (Lady Jean had recently been both plaintive and pedantic, in a belated attempt to win her husband’s affections), he had no intention of deserting her for Anna. So the Norwegian had now gone home again, and continued to write letters, mostly in verse. He did not answer them – but he kept them.
‘You are too fortunate, my friend, that is your trouble,’ the bland voice of his companion rounded off the troublesome episode. ‘You have a fair lady come sighing for you out of the far North and you are ungrateful. You have a beautiful young wife who now regrets her childish folly and wishes you to love her, it is seen; but you shrug, you say it is too late. My young friend, beware of women. They are more dangerous than serpents when they are scorned.’
‘Oh, God damn you for an old wiseacre!’ Bothwell answered.
And d’Oysel with mountainous tact spoke instead of Darnley’s odd behaviour politically.
‘He would cut off his nose to spite his face, that one, but that is dangerous, for with it would go some other noses too.’ He pressed a finger on the pudgy button in the middle of his own face, squashing it flat into his cheeks while his little eyes glared out on either side of it with an expression of appalling cunning.
‘Playing with a pup will end in a howl,’ observed Bothwell, ‘and there’s not a Scot now who doesn’t know it and fight shy of him.’
Darnley had indeed set to work to find fresh allies. In May, before his son was born, he had already tried to get away to Flanders, and the two comrades now debated this obscure move. Could it be that he had hoped to meet King Philip of Spain, who had been expected to arrive in Flanders in May with an army to crush the Netherland Protestants and their English backers? Bothwell had some evidence to support this notion.
‘The pup’s got in
to touch with some English spies, that I know. One of them was in the Tower with me and released later, a fellow called Arthur Pole, who talked big of being able to raise the Catholics for King Philip if he should invade England. He tried to get me into it, and couldn’t understand that though I was an enemy of Elizabeth I was no friend of Philip’s. He’ll find his mistake with the English Catholics too, I’m thinking – they’ll not fight for Philip, however much Elizabeth stamps on ’em; but these fish, who think wars are made only for words, forget there’s such a thing as flesh and blood. Pole’s furnished Darnley with a chart of the Scilly Isles and plans of Scarborough Castle which the young ass left lying about in his usual artless fashion. What’s the betting he means to join King Philip in a descent on the English Coast?’
‘Scarborough – Scilly – Flanders! Your pup roams wide.’
‘Maybe he’s heard that “a ganging fit will aye get something, if it’s only a thorn or a broken toe”,’ Bothwell remarked dryly.
There was no doubt about the ‘ganging fit’. Darnley had a ship ready manned in the Clyde to take him abroad. On Michaelmas night about ten o’clock he had ridden to Edinburgh, but hearing that the Queen was sitting with some of her great lords, refused to enter. She had run out herself into the raw foggy night air of the courtyard, taken him by the hand and let him in. That evening, alone with him, she had tried to discover what he intended to do on this mysterious voyage, but failed.
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