Not quite the full ceremony, for she refused to allow the use of the spittle by the Archbishop, showing a sense of the superior importance of hygiene to that of the religious service. ‘I’ll not have a pocky priest spit in my child’s mouth!’
‘That’s a sound estimate of His Grace, seeing the Italian doctor got 1800 gold crowns off him for curing him of it.’
‘I didn’t know that. Anyway, it’s a filthy apish trick, rather in scorn than in imitation of Christ.’
‘Your Grace is no bigot, I’ll say that.’
‘My lord of Bothwell should know, since he’s still bigot enough to refuse to attend the Prince’s baptism.’
‘Bigot! I! Do you think I’m acting for my religion?’
‘What is your religion?’
‘To hell with the Pope!’ he grinned. ‘And with all foreign interference.’
He took her hand and swept her forward into the stately movement of the dance. Three steps to the right, three to the left, and he went on speaking: ‘Didn’t Your Grace yourself have the Papal Legate intercepted in Paris so that he shouldn’t come on here to give you his master’s commands?’
She tapped out some little intricate steps in mocking answer.
‘And apart from foreign policy?’ she asked.
‘Why, I never fancied our home-grown monks in their long black petticoats, like a lot of old women lording it over the land. No man should play the master without a sword to make his title good.’
She floated round him as he spoke, a cloud of silver gossamer, their hands still touching, and as he swung her back to him, laughed up into his face.
‘Here’s flat treason, to decry petticoat government to me!’
‘That’s another matter. I’ve seen you wear the breeches better than most.’
His glance swept her, stripped her too, she felt; she blushed, and a new strange fear followed her unwonted shyness. She held up the great peacock fan from the Duke of Savoy, its colours painted in sapphires and emeralds, before a face grown very thoughtful for that bright occasion. Scandal said that the Lord Bothwell feared to encounter a crucifix or the Sign of the Cross because he had sold his soul to the devil.
The music drew to a close. On its last long-drawn notes he led her back to the side of the hall, and she said low, ‘When you lay at Hermitage, so ill you were thought to be dying, was your religion then still only protest?’
His eyes softened at the anxious note in her voice, but he would not ease it.
‘My gramercy was that of old Kennedy’s fifty years ago, before Protestantism was thought of—
I will no priests for me to sing,
Nor yet no bells for me to ring,
But ae bagpipe to play a spring.’
In the face of that pagan arrogance she shivered; was his pride so fierce that he scorned the need of even God’s help? She seemed to be standing beside him, not in that hot crowded enclosed place, but alone with him on the wide moor under the windy sky – alone in all the world, with not a single ally, human or divine.
The vision passed swifter than the flash of a bird’s wing; the music died, the dancers bowed, the buzz of talk rose shrill and clattering against the storm-swept night outside, where the wind and hail drummed against the Castle rock.
She had to dance next with Sir Christopher Hatton, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s, and considered the best dancer in England; she had to meet Mr Carey, who was a great-nephew of Anne Boleyn’s, and so vain of the connection that he would scarcely admit any English family to be noble that had not contributed a member of it to the block; she had to look pleased with the Earl of Bedford’s ‘merry message’ from his Queen, who had sent a gold font studded with jewels as Christening present to her godson. It had been big enough when ordered at the baby’s birth, Elizabeth had said, but if he had outgrown it by now, well then it would do for the next! Bedford, an extraordinary little man, very short but immensely consequential, beamed with pride in Elizabeth’s genial wit, though he must have recognised the sting in it since she had also given him instructions to ignore Darnley completely and never address him as King.
It was easy to obey, since Darnley was nowhere to be seen. He was in Stirling Castle, that was all that was known; some said he was sulking, some that he was ill, some that the tailor hadn’t finished his coat of cloth of gold in time for the baptism – but as the King had expressly stated that he would not go to the baptism at all, why, asked the indignant tailor, should he fash himself to finish a coat that would not be needed, when all the new coats of the great lords were crying out to be finished in time?
It had been a pretty notion of the young Queen to have each noble and his retinue in a different colour: James in green with linings of red and gold, Argyll in red, and Bothwell in blue, the colour that in blazonry represents loyalty, as she reminded him; she did not add that the linings she had chosen for it, white and silver, were her own special colours.
All the barons of Scotland stood in two files from the door of the royal nursery to the door of the Chapel Royal, each holding an immense lighted candle of pure wax – no guttering stinking tallow to light the Prince! From under his bedspread of ten yards of patterned cloth of silver the Countess of Argyll lifted him up, placed him in a shallow basket like a broad-brimmed hat, and put this in the arms of His Excellency the French Ambassador. Monsieur Du Croc had now good occasion to feel his weight as he had prophesied, and the dapper little man wore an expression of portentous anxiety as the baby dribbled, rolled his large eyes, and made a sudden grab at the ambassadorial beard.
‘Goo?’ inquired the Prince, and with growing persistence, looking from left to right as they proceeded down the lane of baronial candle-bearers, ‘Goo goo guggug goo?’ Everyone agreed that he showed remarkable intelligence. The Catholic nobles followed, the Earl of Atholl and the Lords of Dunkeld and Dunblane bearing the great serge and cude-cloth, the Earl of Eglinton the salt-vat, Lord Ross the basin and ewer. In the chapel doorway stood the Archbishop in his mitre, with the great gold crozier in his hand; behind him candles glimmered on the rich vestments of the priests and an armoury of pastoral staves and gold crucifixes; incense swung to and fro, the chanting of Latin rose and fell; three bishops, the Prior of Whithorn, deans and archdeacons, stood in attendance to baptize in the Catholic faith, and in a Protestant font, this heir to two Protestant kingdoms.
The Countess of Argyll, acting as Queen Elizabeth’s proxy, received him from Du Croc’s arms (she had been warned by the Kirk she would have to do penance for this, but it was worth it): the Primate gave him the names of James and Charles, sponsored by the Sovereigns of England and France; the heralds proclaimed them three times and all his titles with a mighty blast of trumpets. The Protestant nobles, among them James Earl of Moray, George Gordon Earl of Huntly, Bothwell and the English Earl of Bedford, watched from the door. The music soared; the future King James VI of Scotland and James I of England was carried back to his crib. His father was nowhere to be seen.
‘The Queen’s brought her donkey to the water,’ said Bothwell, ‘but she can’t make him drink.’
He was not at the hawking nor any of the hunts, not even the hunting of the wild bull in the great park. He was not at the dancing, nor at the vast banquets (most of the tables in the great hall seated sixty apiece): he missed all the Latin Masques by George Buchanan, the French ones by Sebastian (Bastien) Pagez, Mary’s highly cultivated pastry-cook; and with them he missed a surprising impromptu effect which occurred in a woodland scene of singing naiads dragged in on a platform by satyrs up to the dining-tables. There the satyrs handed dishes of figs from Malaga and sugared fruits from Venice and Cyprus to the Queen and all her noble and ambassadorial guests. But when these furred and painted waiters, with cloven feet and shaggy tails, served the Earl of Bedford and his escort of eighty English gentlemen, they so far forgot their manners that they put their hands behind them and wagged their tails at the Englishmen.
There was nearly an international incident. It was well known by all the
French and Scots there present that Englishmen had tails; had not ‘tailard’ always been the name for an Englishman all over Europe? And the knowledge was deeply resented by the English. Anne Boleyn’s haughty great-nephew had to be restrained from thrashing the nearest satyr with his own tail. Sir Christopher Hatton blamed the stage manager and told Sir James Melville that if the Queen were not present he would stick a dagger into the heart of that French knave Bastien. Melville made him drink more wine instead, and the stately Sir Christopher then decided that the most dignified protest he could make would be to sit on the floor behind the table where he should not see the rest of this shocking spectacle. He insisted on a Mr Linguish accompanying him in this aloof position; it took the combined efforts of the Queen and the Earl of Bedford to induce them to abandon it.
The festivities had their effect even on the Good Lord James’ austere wife, Lady Agnes, who kissed the Earl of Bedford, as the pompous little Englishman himself indignantly stated, ‘without his leave’.
The official climax to the jollities was a sham fight out in the churchyard under the glittering December stars; the whole company trooped out to see a fortress attacked by centaurs, demons and Highlanders, lanzknechts and Moors. Fire-balls and fire-spears were the weapons, shooting in flame against the night; finally, in a furious explosion, amid a roar of cheers and laughter, the fort was blown up by gunpowder. At the end of this gorgeous firework display, which had taken six weeks to prepare at a cost of £190 17s. 5d., the laughing, chattering, shivering party returned indoors, to be met by scared servants important with news.
Darnley had received a message from his father and within the last few minutes had fled from Stirling.
Chapter Twenty
Stirling Castle was an island cliff looking down on an eddying sea of blown mist; when the wind tore it apart for an instant, a strip of brown woods or gleaming water showed small and clear, framed in cloud. ‘This is my life,’ thought Mary. ‘I can see only glimpses here and there of what is going on in it, knowing nothing of what is round me.’
News and rumours came flying every hour, giving a sudden brief picture of little groups of men going about their business, some of it straightforward, some mysterious, some sinister, all of it affecting herself, though she did not know how.
One was of the Catholic Consistory Court, restored the day before Darnley fled from Stirling, that it might find a convenient formula for the Queen’s divorce.
Another was of a company of men riding over the snow-scarred hills of the Border, at their head a stout man whose small pig’s eyes flickered out with a look of gross cunning above his bushy red whiskers. This was the Earl of Morton and his Douglas kinsmen returning from exile after the pardon that the Queen had given them, as was agreed, immediately after the baptism. The Douglases, Darnley’s kinsmen, were now his deadly enemies, and had sworn to avenge his betrayal of them after Rizzio’s murder.
There was that rumour that the Council were planning to arrest him and kill him if he resisted. So one of Lord Eglinton’s servants told the Town Clerk of Glasgow, and the Town Clerk told the Provost, and the Provost told Lennox, and Lennox sent a messenger to tell Darnley, and that, on top of Morton’s approach, and the re-establishment of the Archbishop’s Court, was enough to send him flying from Stirling, and behind him the hosts of men with which Lennox had filled the little city.
That scene of urgent flight quickly melted into one more passive: of Darnley lying mysteriously ill in his father’s house at Glasgow. There were whispers of poison; the doctors said small-pox, but the symptoms seemed to be the same as he had shown when ill some months before. At that time the report had reached England that Darnley had the pox, and this recurrence of the disease seemed to confirm it. The wretched youth who had been so proud of his looks lay in bed in a darkened room and wore a silk mask to hide the spots on his face; this picture was unbearably painful, and Mary turned away from it to send her own doctor to him and order fine linen to be made up into night-shirts for him and a blue satin coat to wear in bed.
But another scene near by that darkened sickroom impinged upon it, the grey outline of a tall English ship riding at anchor in the wintry fogs of the Clyde. What was that ghost-ship still waiting for, what orders from Darnley, even now that he lay so desperately ill? Helpless as he might be, the plans that he had helped contrive were going forward; here and there in other countries, the mist that surrounded her lifted a corner of its thick curtain to show a distant warning.
The Duchess of Palma in the Netherlands, the Spanish Ambassador in London, had heard from Paris of a plot forming in Scotland against the Queen; the Archbishop of Glasgow, now in Paris, sought an interview with Catherine de Medici to discover what she knew of it. It would take a very wily man to discover what Catherine chose to conceal. But her ironic praise of Mary’s mercifulness to her enemies suggested that she might find good reason to regret it. The Archbishop paid attention to that hint, vague as it was, and dispatched one of the Scottish archers to urge Mary ‘to take heed to yourself’ and see that her guards were ‘diligent in their office’, as he feared ‘some surprise to be trafficked to your contrary’.
Ambassadors and Archbishops sitting at their inlaid escritoires in foreign capitals, their ringed hands in their furred sleeves, their big quill pens and the serpentine trail of pointed Italian handwriting staining the white paper for centuries to come with dark warnings of what might happen within the next few weeks, or even days – these minute vignettes could be discerned for an instant, but threw no light on the hidden scheme.
That she must discover herself; no other could do it. They all told her so, even Bothwell, though he plainly loathed the thought of her going near Darnley; but the danger was too great to think of that. At any moment he might die, and the plot in which he was involved march on without him, and their one possible source of information on it would die with him.
Mary must go to Glasgow, and under strong guard, for it was a stronghold of the Lennoxes, and get Darnley away from it as soon as he was well enough to be moved. Together with Gordon, towards the end of January he escorted her part of the way there, but not all, for Darnley was more nervous and jealous of Bothwell than of all the other lords, and she must allay his fears. Besides, the Elliots were giving serious trouble again in Liddesdale. So, halfway on their ride west between Edinburgh and Glasgow, he swung off towards Hermitage. He had but just come from Whittinghame, the house of one William Douglas, where he had met Morton and Lethington, and all he would say to Mary about that oddly mixed company for him was that they had had a pleasant walk in the garden – a strange pleasure for this icy foggy January!
At Lord Livingstone’s house he took his farewell.
‘Write to me,’ he said.
‘And if I discover nothing?’
‘Then write that. But you must discover what he is up to. You must get him away from Glasgow and under our watch till your divorce rids you of him.’
‘Must – must!’ – it had a strange echo from a subject.
She did not see that his very hatred of the work he was forcing on her made him so harsh and peremptory. Fear too, for could he trust her to carry out this business? She was pitiful, tender; she must not be so now or she would mar everything. Nursing him through measles without any thought to her own danger had first won her to this rotten-hearted boy. Would the pox have the same effect? he asked himself savagely. It was not thought to be infectious, that was one consolation; all the same – ‘Take care,’ he urged her, ‘don’t kiss him, however much he begs you,’ and the scar above his eye seemed to turn livid as he said it. ‘Short of that, use all means. Promise him anything – everything.’
‘Even myself?’ she asked very low.
‘Even that. You shall never keep the promise. I swear it.’
She shuddered, sick at the hateful task before her. At that moment she hated the man that now knelt to her, kissed her hand in farewell, outwardly courteous and subservient, yet mastering her with his insistent comma
nd that she should do this thing against her nature. Was it indeed the Gay Galliard that they had danced together? They seemed now to be dancing between swords.
She watched him ride off to the clean air of the hills, to the Border fighting that he loved, to open enemies, and danger only to the body.
Then she rode on, it seemed quite alone, in the midst of her guards through the dense grey air.
Just outside Glasgow she was met by Thomas Crawford, a servant of Darnley’s. He had a message from Lennox, apologizing for his failure to escort her himself into the city; he was afraid to do so, Crawford said, because of her displeasure at the extraordinary number of his men he had installed in Stirling at the time of the Christening. She sat silent; erect and still on her horse, while under her cold level eyes the glib fluency of the messenger broke up into nervous stammering.
At last she said, ‘There is no recipe against fear.’
Lennox’s fear, said the messenger, was only because she had shown anger.
‘He would not be afraid if he were guiltless,’ she replied.
‘The Earl of Lennox wishes nothing better than that the secrets of every man’s heart were written on his face.’
The eyes of the Queen glittered like ice; sitting there before him so straight and alert she had the look of an unsheathed blade.
‘Have you any further commission?’ she demanded.
‘No, Madam.’
‘Then hold your peace’; and she rode on through the frosty mist.
In some ways she found her task all too easy. That was the most horrible thing to her about this creature of wax that seemed to have no centre, no soul of its own at all, but lay ready to be moulded by whatever hands touched it. Darnley might be plotting her downfall, even her death, but now that he was ill and miserable he was as genuinely thankful to see her as a sick child that has been naughty, but knows his mother will now forgive him everything. All his excuses and pleas were on that ground.
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