The Galliard

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘The horses are ordered for five o’clock,’ repeated d’Oysel. ‘The House blows up at two – three hours at least, then, before it was intended – by whom?’

  ‘Presumably by the man who also intended to ride away in time from it,’ said Bothwell.

  Lord James, an astute psychologist, once observed that rumour was more powerful than fact. It was to prove so now.

  The King had sung psalms just before his death (or his servant did; it made no odds); the King had been disturbed because the Queen had talked of Rizzio’s murder – and why had she done so on the very night when his slayer was to meet his death?

  It was said that the Italian’s ghost no longer haunted the anteroom at Holyrood.

  ‘The spirit of a King has been sent to appease the ghost of a fiddler,’ said George Buchanan, low, glancing out of the corners of his little eyes.

  But how long a train of ghosts would be sent trooping after him to appease the spirit of the royal victim? Bothwell had not spoken in joke when he said that half Scotland seemed to be implicated in this affair one way or another. Certainly there had been more than one plot afoot that dark February night, though in the public mind they were all confused together as one.

  The first was the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Queen and leaders of her Government and so clear the way for a coup d’état. This was the ‘surprise’ of which the Archbishop of Glasgow had already received some vague warning in Paris, and had written to her to beware of it. The second was the plot to kill the King. It could have no connection with the Gunpowder Plot, except in as far as it was probably precipitated by some discovery of it.

  For evidence of the Gunpowder Plot one would need to question the Spanish Ambassador in Paris; Pope Pius V; King Philip II, who was known to be awaiting a convenient moment to invade England, and would certainly find it in the overthrow of the Protestant Government in Scotland and consequent confusion; also the Ambassador of his ally, Savoy, Signor di Moretta, who left Edinburgh for London the day after the crime.

  Not only was it impossible to make inquiry of such persons; it would ruin Mary’s chances of any future help or alliance with the European Powers of her own faith. There was, as always, little hope of arriving at the truth of a piece of international villainy, conceived by foreign rulers.

  But the secondary plot, to kill the King, involved so many to whose obvious advantage it was to kill him, that for many years to come there was a steady procession of victims to appease that hungry ghost of the lad who was to succeed, when dead, in killing far more people even than he had tried to kill when alive.

  Bothwell saw clearly that it would now be a sauve qui peut among all those connected with the King’s death, to see how each could fasten the suspicion on someone else.

  On the day following the crime the Queen wrote to Lennox, promised justice for his murdered son and invited him to Edinburgh to take part in the investigation. A whole week passed before he answered, with a request for a Parliamentary inquiry. Mary answered that she had already summoned Parliament ‘and would leave undone nothing which may further a clear trial’. But she had done far more than that, and immediately, having at once offered a reward of £2,000, a yearly rent, and free pardon to anyone who could give any information concerning the crime.

  Balfours, Douglases, Hepburns, Hamiltons, all had been on or near the scene of the crime at the moment that it happened. A velvet slipper of Archibald Douglas was found in the garden and considered clear proof of guilt, though, as he was reported to have worn armour all that night, it was scarcely likely that he should have kept on his dressing-slippers to walk all that distance from Douglas House in the snow. Slightly stronger evidence against the Douglases was provided by some humble neighbours who ran to their doors ‘when the crack raised’ and swore they heard Darnley pleading for his life in the garden, crying, ‘Pity me, kinsmen!’ – a term that could only have applied to that clan.

  On the other hand, the sudden and convenient absence of the Lord James and Lethington was almost equally incriminating to such experts in ‘throwing the stone without seeming to move the hand’. James, however, as if to show that for once in his life even he could be incautious in this singularly blundering affair, was reported to have said on Sunday evening, ‘This night the King will be free of all his troubles.’

  Such reports could lead nowhere; nor did the evidence.

  The public, baulked of fresh sensations in the way of arrests, had to feed instead on rumours. High feeding they proved, for by now they were being artificially induced by hidden masters of propaganda, and engineered towards a given direction. There were no more whispers of James’ prophetic utterance, or his private interviews at St Andrews with Morton, the head of the Douglas clan.

  Instead, people were saying how Bothwell had given Hay a brown horse and Jock Hepburn a white, and told his servants they ‘should never want so long as he had.’

  They were saying that when the Queen rode down in brilliant torchlit procession to Kirk o’ Field that fatal night, if any of her Court had cared to look behind, they might have seen two pack-horses laden with bags of gunpowder led by two of Bothwell’s serving-men and, as if this were not a sufficiently open manner of advertising the crime, Bothwell himself helped to carry in the powder and lay it in the Queen’s bedroom underneath the King’s, before joining the gay party upstairs, his gala dress in no way deranged by so grubby a job.

  The same did not apply to his page, who appeared before the company all covered with gunpowder, so that the Queen cried out, ‘Jesu, Paris, how begrimed you are!’ At which his master showed distinct annoyance that Paris should not have taken the simple precaution of washing his face and hands.

  At this point the story showed signs of breaking down, and it was easier to fall back on the pathos of Darnley’s fate when not yet twenty-one. People remembered instances of that ‘fair, jolly young man’, riding at full gallop, shouting to his huntsmen, drinking and dicing in the most friendly fashion at low taverns paying royally (with his wife’s money) for the women he procured there. No doubt his wife had borne him a grudge for it; that was the worst of women, they were jealous, even when they themselves gave cause of jealousy. She had never forgiven Rizzio’s murder.

  That illness of the King, there had been something mysterious about it; many said it was not really small-pox. John Knox said and wrote outright (being still at a safe distance) that it was poison. He even proceeded to extol the dead youth whom, when alive, he had to his face compared with Ahab. He admitted that Darnley had been ‘from his youth mis-led up in Popery’; but laid great stress on that youth, his ‘tragical end’, and his ‘comely stature – none was like unto him within this island’; most admirable of all, he was ‘prompt and ready for all games and sports’. Yet no one had seen the Queen weep as a widow should. After four days’ darkness it was noted with horror that she had opened her windows for a time to let in light and air. The doctors had in fact ordered it, and declared that she was in danger of utter collapse. Exhausted, stunned, she gazed on the embalmed body of her husband as it lay in state, and gave ‘no outward sign of joy or sorrow’.

  Knox’s literary rival, Buchanan, could do better than that, and declared that the Queen ‘greedily beheld the dead body’. It was buried by torchlight in the vault at Holyrood five days after the murder.

  The next night an anonymous placard was pinned to the door of the Tolbooth, accusing as the King’s murderers ‘the Earl of Bothwell, Sir James Balfour, Mr David Chalmers, black Mr John Spens, who was the principal deviser of the murder, and the Queen assenting thereto, through the persuasion of the Earl of Bothwell and the witchcraft of the Lady Buccleuch’.

  The Lady Buccleuch was Bothwell’s former love, Janet Scott, whose charms, in whatever sense, seemed as remote from this noisy deed of violence as John Spens, whom Knox admired for his piety and ‘gentle nature’. The anonymous accuser seemed indeed conscious that he might be shooting rather too much at random, for he ended with the qualification, ‘A
nd if this be not true, ask Gilbert Balfour.’

  Bothwell rode past the Tolbooth next morning, leaned from his saddle and tore the poster from the wall with his whinger. He went on to the Palace, demanded to see the Queen, and found her in her rooms that were again conventionally darkened, looking by candlelight at a copy of the same placard. She raised a white face to him, her eyes staring aghast from deep pits of shadow. He was across the room in one stride, snatched the paper out of her hand and threw it in the fire.

  ‘What shall I do?’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘Get out of this black hole and down to Geordie Seton’s place – with a strong bodyguard. I’ll appoint two hundred soldiers to attend you. I’ll meet you there this afternoon, on the links. What you need is a good game of golf.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Seton House, on the shore of the Firth of Forth, some miles from Edinburgh, lay in pleasant open pasture-land where the wind tasted salt from the sea. Mary Seton, the gentlest and most devoted of her four Maries, was the only one still unmarried; she had, in fact, determined that she would be a nun ‘when you no longer need me’, so she told her mistress, though every day that day seemed farther off, to them both. She was as proud as her long lean father to welcome the Queen yet again to their home.

  The Protestant reporters noted with shocked glee how she ‘exercised right openly in the fields with golf’ in company with her hosts and Bothwell and Gordon. Golf had been put down by law, as it kept the players from practice at the long-bow and made the Scots inferior shots to the English; but as the gun was now gradually ousting the bow, golf would certainly come more and more into fashion – and one of the best things to be said for gunpowder, Bothwell declared. But just to show what law-abiding citizens they were, they gave archery its due too, and he and Mary won a contest with Gordon and Seton at the shooting-butts, of which the prize was a dinner given by the losing side. It was a merry dinner, and the pipers with more appropriateness than tact played a tune called ‘Well is me since I am free’.

  Among her friends, in the clean sea-winds and frosty sunshine, she could almost believe it as she swung her golf club and sent the ball flying over the green sheep-nibbled turf. Her eyes began to lose their haunted look: there were even moments when she was wildly gay and quite forgot the world outside all round her, the forces that were making history, indifferent to her fate.

  She was soon reminded. She had to go back at times to Edinburgh to receive the envoys from other countries, to listen to their shocked condolences and know that they were watching avidly for any signs of guilty conscience. For Catherine de Medici had at once expressed her conviction that her former daughter-in-law had been at the bottom of the crime, and would have dissolved the Scottish Guard in France in token of her virtuous indignation, had her son Charles allowed it. Du Croc, now in Paris, wrote to warn Mary that she was being ‘wrongously calumniated’, and to beg her to take speedy and furious vengeance in proof of her innocence.

  Elizabeth wrote letters that seemed full of generous frankness, perhaps were really so, despite the scratch in begging her to take ‘revenge on those who have done you tel plaisir, as most people say. Show the world what a noble princess and loyal woman you are.’

  But her ignoble and disloyal cousin refused to avert suspicion by having even a few helpless commoners tortured, hanged and quartered. ‘Damned careless of you,’ was Bothwell’s comment, but his grin was admiring.

  She broke out in sudden passion, ‘The whole world is ruled by hate. I’ll never submit to it. Do what they will, I will go my own way.’

  ‘One’s own way is the only way,’ he said.

  Each had drawn a sword in challenge to the world, and knew they stood together against it.

  That world was closing in on her, nearer and nearer. Once she had feared one old man spying down on her from his eyrie in Edinburgh. Now all those tall crooked houses were conspiring against her; there were faces peeping from behind the window-shutters instead of leaning out to gaze frankly on her, figures in doorways muttering suspicion. The very wind whispered and shrieked against her, scurrying round corners with its foul breath of middens and stale fish and blown onion skins and sour rags and old men’s envious rage, screaming and hissing against what they might not enjoy.

  No light had been thrown on the murder by the Board of Inquiry. Darkness took up the theme. A voice was heard in the streets at midnight, calling down vengeance on the murderer of the King; anonymous posters were pinned night after night on the Market Cross, on church doors, on the city gates, then even on the gates of Holyrood Palace.

  They offered to disclose all, even the name of the writer, if the reward of £2,000 were immediately placed in the hands of an intermediary. They blackened more and more names; there were rough drawings of a man with a scar on his forehead, and beneath them the words, ‘Here is the murderer.’ Then came a drawing of an arm brandishing a sword, and above it the letters, very large, M. R.; a mermaid was shown luring her lovers down beneath the sea: Bothwell succeeded in tracing it to the hand of James Murray of Purdovis, the professional libeller who had spread slanders against him when he was exiled in France. But he had already made his escape, leaving behind him the most outspoken of all the libels: ‘Farewell, gentle Henry, but a vengeance on Mary.’

  Lennox took up the publicity campaign and had a broadsheet circulated which pointed the undeniable truth:

  The farther in filth ye stamp, no doubt

  The fouler shall your shoes come out.

  It also promised God’s vengeance for

  The slaughter of that innocent lamb:

  to which someone unkindly added a verse about the lamb’s father,

  That bleating old bell-wether ram.

  A Tragical Ballad of Earl Bothwell that found its way up by word of mouth from England told how

  Lord Bothwell kept a privy watch

  Underneath his castle wall,

  and in reply to the young King’s cry for pity,

  ‘I’ll pity thee as much,’ he said,

  ‘And as much favour I’ll show to thee

  As thou had on the Queen’s chamberlain

  That day that thou doomed him to die.’

  That Darnley’s murder had been in revenge for Rizzio’s, appealed strongly to the public’s sense of drama; it made tragedy simple and coherent, an artistic whole, and something they could all understand.

  ‘What the devil is this, my lord?’ asked one of his Hepburn kinsmen, ‘that everyone suspects you and cries a vengeance?’

  They did not like the look of things. Was their lord, the strongest man now in Scotland, to be hounded to death by a pack of invisible foes? These voices at midnight, these verses, these painted papers found in the morning no one knew where next, it was not canny. And they were having effect on their master; he swore he would wash his hands in the blood of these poison-pen men, but he could not catch them any more than the birds that drop filth on one’s head.

  His hand went too easily to his dagger these days. He kept a bodyguard of fifty round him – extravagant, so it seemed to his clansmen, who did not know all his reasons for it,.

  For the Lord James had got in touch with Lennox, and the Protestant leaders were holding secret conclaves with the Catholics; it looked as if the heads of both the murder plots would now combine to use Darnley’s death as a means to ruin both Bothwell and the Queen. And from the Border he got word that Cecil’s spies were at work again, rounding up all those ‘who seem to mislike Bothwell’s greatness’. Worse, his enemies showed a dangerous amity. He was invited by Lord James to the dinner he gave to the English Envoy, and never had the Bastard shown himself so genial to him. After that, it was no surprise to his guest to hear that assurances had been sent to England that ‘Bothwell and his accomplices should lose their lives ere mid-summer’.

  Lennox was demanding the trial of those mentioned in the anonymous placards. Mary asked which, since there were so many inconsistent names, all ‘so different and contrarious�
�. Lennox chose out eight, with Bothwell at the head.

  She showed his letter to Bothwell, who barely glanced at it, flung it on the table and said, ‘Tell him to come to the Tolbooth and prosecute me, and I’ll stand my trial as he asks. I’ll broach it to the Council tomorrow. Fifteen’ days’ notice have to be given’ (he was counting on his fingers, drumming them on the table). ‘What’s today? March 27th. That brings it to Saturday the 12th of April for the hearing.’

  He drew himself up, squaring his shoulders with a sigh of relief. ‘By the faith of my body, it will be good to get down to it in the open, and get it over!’

  ‘But it will give all your enemies their opportunity,’ she cried. ‘They are certain to find their way into the jury, among the judges.’