‘Let ’em! I’ve got a fortnight to prepare my case.’
‘Who will help you? What legal advisers?’
‘I can’t tell you their names, for they’ll be a fair number. The Good Lord James showed the way last time he called me to trial two years ago, and packed the town with six thousand of his armed troops to support the verdict. This time it’s my turn. I can count on four thousand.’
Lennox had urged the utmost speed in justice, but now, on receiving notice of the Act of Council appointing Bothwell’s trial, signed, rather oddly among the other names, by Bothwell himself, he pleaded that he had not had sufficient time to prepare his charges. Two months since the murder seemed a fair time, but perhaps ‘charges’ signified supporters for he had only mustered three thousand as against Bothwell’s four.
More ominous still, his new ally Lord James suddenly found that he wished to go abroad. He made his will, with surprising friendliness appointing Bothwell as secondary executor to Mary, and left Scotland for France via London, just three days before the date of the trial. Another ‘pregnant absence’? Lennox had some reason to fear it. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth to beg her to intercede for a postponement, and did not attend the trial himself.
Very early on the morning of April 12th a messenger from England, John Selby, arrived at Holyrood, sweating from the haste with which he had galloped with his guide since before dawn from Berwick. He bore a letter from his Queen which must be delivered at once to the Queen of Scots. The servants laughed at him; it was only six o’clock and the Queen still fast asleep. John Selby went to cool his heels in the Edinburgh streets and found them bristling with Hepburn pikes. The town was so full it was all but impossible to get breakfast at any tavern: there was no meat to be had, the Hepburns had snaffled the lot, and he had to make do with burnt porridge and coarse fish served half-cold.
Back he went to the Palace in a very bad temper about nine o’clock, and found the courtyard also full of Hepburns, men and horses, so full that he literally could not push his way through them, nor find anyone to take his letter into the Palace. They had guessed that his message was to postpone their master’s trial, and were not going to let him through if they could help it. Selby was furious, Selby was pompous (was he not Provost Marshal of Berwick?), but it was no use.
Then two men appeared in the doorway, the one tall and dark with a scar on his forehead, moving quick and impatient as he flung his cloak round him, the other slight, stooping, already huddled in his cloak; and at once all the lairds and gentry standing beside their horses sprang into the saddle. The guide told Selby that these two were Bothwell and Lethington; and the Provost Marshal, with a Herculean push, succeeded in getting through to them and once again explained his errand in a flood of outraged indignation.
‘Best wait until after the trial,’ was the brief comment of the taller man; ‘the Queen won’t be able to attend to any business till then.’
‘But, my lord –!’ Selby checked. He couldn’t very well explain to the Earl of Bothwell that his errand was precisely to get that trial postponed so as to collect more evidence against him.
But that the Earl knew it was shown by his genial aside, not very low, to the guide: ‘So it’s you, Rushety you rascal – you ought to be hanged for bringing him here at an awkward moment like this.’
‘Your Honour knows well I had no choice but to guide him,’ Rushety pleaded without any great sign of alarm.
‘Guide him – why not? Guide him into a peat-hag if you’d any sense.’
Lethington laid a hand on Bothwell’s arm to stop these scarcely diplomatic passages. ‘Is your letter,’ he asked suavely of John Selby, ‘from the Council, or from the Queen of England herself?’
‘From the Queen’s own august hand.’
‘In that case, I will deliver it with my own obsequious hand,’ and Lethington took it into the Palace.
All the men waited in the saddle, their horses champed and fidgeted, eager to be off. Half an hour passed like an eternity to Bothwell.
Then Lethington reappeared, gracefully apologetic. The Queen had been, and still was, very ill; she was in a deep sleep and the doctor said she must not be disturbed; he feared it was unlikely that Selby would get any answer now before the trial, especially as this delay had already made the accused half an hour late for it. He mounted, turned his horse’s head, and looked up at the Palace with a smile as he took off his hat and bowed. There at an upper window was his wife, formerly Mary Fleming.
Bothwell followed his example, and at that moment the Queen appeared beside Fleming, and both the women smiled and nodded to him.
‘The Queen must have woken up,’ was Lethington’s blandly superfluous comment to the scandalized Mr Selby.
It was just like her not to care who saw her nor what was thought, Bothwell reflected, and with gratitude, for that sign of goodwill heartened him greatly as he rode up towards the Tolbooth through the crowded streets.
A great noble going to his trial for the King’s murder was not a thing that happened every day. All the shops had stopped work, all the doors and windows were thronged with gaping faces, people were packed like herrings all the way up the outside staircases and on the roofs. They ought to cheer him for providing them with such entertainment. Once again the Gay Galliard, he turned in his saddle to see the pikes of his followers glittering in the April sunshine, rose in his stirrups and gave them a lusty cheer, which they answered in a roar like a breaking wave of the sea.
Then he asked Lethington, did the Queen know anything as yet of that business of the letter?
‘No,’ was the Secretary’s gentle answer. ‘It would only make for trouble to refuse the English Queen’s request to put off the trial. Elizabeth herself could hardly expect it when delivered, as is her wont, at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth moment. She has given her threat, or shall we call it “cousinly warning”, just too late, which was doubtless just what she’d intended.’
Bothwell gave a short but picturesque description of Elizabeth’s interference, but it did not relieve his feelings. Once again he was seeing the hand that he had kissed at Harrow-on-the Hill, the hand that had written this letter. Behind all the foes surrounding him and his Queen was this woman whom he knew to be more dangerous than all; and with her at this very moment was James, giving his account of Kirk o’ Field, of Mary and of Bothwell himself.
Lethington was being positively genial in his sly mocking way as he ambled along beside him on his palfrey (‘like a smug prelate’, in Bothwell’s irritable opinion) and assured him of the success of his trial. Success, that was the one hold he could have over such men. Let go of that and they would turn and rend him.
Inside the Tolbooth, stone-chill and dark, he looked on the faces of many such men. He knew Morton and Lindsay, whom he had outwitted after Rizzio’s murder, to be as really hostile to him as Lethington: the Lord Justice Argyll was no friend to him; John Hamilton was Arran’s brother and bore him a lifelong feud; Sandy Ogilvie, a grudge for marrying his sweetheart Jean; Caithness was James’ new ally; he had quarrelled with Herries; Pitcairn, MacGill, Balnaves, Rothes and Boyle, Sempill and Forbes had all come up against him in the old troubles when they had worked for England and he for the Queen Regent. Not more than a third of those present were friendly or even neutral, and yet people were repeating Buchanan’s saying that the judges were ‘not chosen to judge but to acquit’, a lie flatly disproved by the list of their names.
Well, what of it? The true judges were the pikemen outside! Would it come to open violence? Bothwell rather wished it would; he was on surer ground there. But no, he knew that whatever happened this verdict must not go against him.
As he heard his indictment for ‘the treasonable and abominable slaughter’ of the King ‘under silence of night in his own lodging beside the Kirk o’ Field’, his face went dark.
Black Ormiston plucked at his cloak. ‘What the devil is this my lord?’ he whispered. ‘You might look so if you were going to the deed!’
‘Hold your tongue,’ muttered his master.
Lennox’s servant, Cunningham, answered to his master’s name, and pleaded for a postponement of forty days to collect evidence, the accused to stay in prison meantime; although Lennox’s own letters to the Queen, now read in court, demanded ‘immediate justice’. So the trial went on – not very long, for no evidence whatever was produced. The jury withdrew, and by seven o’clock that evening ‘acquitted the said Earl Bothwell of art and part of the said slaughter of the King’.
At that same hour Elizabeth’s letter was handed to Mary. Whatever her intention in sending it too late to serve any possible purpose, there was a strange note of truth in the urgency of its warning: ‘For the love of God, Madam, use such sincerity and prudence in this matter, which touches you so nearly, that all the world may believe you innocent of so enormous a crime.’
That was not mere spite. It had come straight from the heart, as though, for once, the English Queen were trying to use her own sorely won experience of life, not to damage but to help her much younger rival. Elizabeth had lost her reputation as the alleged mistress of Robert Dudley; had very nearly lost her throne by the report that she meant to marry him after his wife’s mysterious death.
But there could be no such report concerning herself and Bothwell. In any case, the letter could make no odds.
James Hepburn was out in the air again, and free, with ‘this jolly acquittal’; Lennox had hastily set sail in a ship down the west coast; and now he could whistle, ‘Wha dare meddle wi’ me?’
He felt he could defy the world, and did, by bills stuck up on the Tolbooth door, offering to ‘oppose his body to any gentleman born’ who dared now to charge him with the murder. To round it off, he also challenged Sir William Drury, the English Marshal at Berwick, for repeating the slanders made against him two years ago.
It stirred up a fresh crop of placards, offering to prove by force of arms that Bothwell was ‘chief and author of the foul and horrible murder’, helped by accomplices – and here followed a completely new list of fourteen names not mentioned before, including this time Captain Blackadder, young Hay of Talla, Sandy Durham, Black Ormiston and Harry Lauder. And still the doughty champion refused to disclose his identity.
Times were changing. Challenges weren’t what they had been. The whole thing had been made ridiculous, a thing more trying than any danger to the Galliard’s temper. He lost it, furiously, shockingly – with the Queen of all people!
Just at this moment of his relief and triumph, on the Sunday the very day after his trial, she must needs go and have a full blast of her infernal religious mummery, a special solemn Mass with dirges sung for the King’s soul in the Chapel Royal before a memorial bed of cloth of silver and crimson velvet, and a canopy of ancient cloth of gold cut from the pavilions of Edward II, captured by the Scots at Bannockburn. Very fitting that young Darnley should wear the gauds of that degenerate Southron King, but was he any the warmer for them? A pity then he didn’t have ’em the night he lay naked in the snow at Kirk o’ Field!
But the climax of his disgust and wrath came when he found that Mary had sat up nearly all that night in the chapel, on her knees beside that painted gallimaufry – to pray for the soul of Henry Darnley.
‘As if all your prayers could pluck that trash out of hell!’
She turned on him in a white rage. ‘You have never known what pity is. At least show decency.’
So he’d knocked that spark out of her, for all she’d looked so listless and hollow-eyed! How dared she mourn him? He’d no pity for her making herself ill with such foolery – and for Darnley, ‘Pity, for the man who planned to blow you to pieces!’
‘I’ll not believe it. There’s no clear proof.’
‘There’s no clear proof of anything in this coil. It’s clear, though, that he knew of the gunpowder. And the horses—’
‘Yes, I know. All ready to take him away. But might he not have meant to take me away too in the confusion, to escape together as we did before? He was vicious, weak, helpless somehow – it’s not fair to judge him like other men. There was something in him would always have prevented him from growing up. But he was not a monster. He couldn’t have begged me to stay that night, intending me to die that horrible death. He did love me in a way.’
‘So they’ve made even you believe in their “gentle Henry”, “that innocent lamb!” You refuse then to be free – you’ll tie yourself even to his corpse!’
He was too angry to see that she was pleading so passionately, not to him but to herself. Those hours of kneeling in the chapel last night had come after weeks of nervous collapse. She could not write any letters, not even in answer to her uncle the Cardinal nor her grandmother. A strange apathy had overwhelmed her, a dull disbelief in all the world. She had hated Darnley so that her whole spirit seemed shrunk and withered by it. All last night she had prayed to be delivered from that hate. So she had tried to believe that her young husband was not wholly vile; but here was Bothwell dragging his soul down again into hell – and with it, hers.
Ruthlessly he stripped her of her illusions, reminded her that Darnley had planned her destruction as horribly, as treacherously, a year ago, and only helped to save her from it in order to save himself.
‘Did he not kiss you then, and beg you to take care of yourself the same night that he betrayed you? Did he not play tennis and joke with Davie just before he and his fellows worried him to death like a pack of hounds? Yet you still believe in his love for you. You pray for him, try to see good in him, cock him up and heap finery on him in death as in life, hang the Bruce’s battle spoils upon his tomb, bury him beside your own father among the Kings of Scotland! Nothing’s too good for this rat that should be left to rot in a sewer.’
She gave a cry of sheer physical anguish, her hands to her side. ‘Oh, you too! – you are hateful. It is true, you hurt both body and soul.’
Her cry went through him. He flung himself on his knees before her, and his arms round her body, locking her in his grasp. She could not see his face, for his head was pressed against her, that rough, leonine head; his great shoulders were shaking, some extraordinary emotion seemed to be convulsing him.
‘Yes, it is true,’ he was saying. ‘I am hateful. But don’t let us hate, or it will be the end of us both.’
Trembling, she said, ‘No, no, don’t let us hate. Hate is killing me. Remember he was the father of my son.’
He sprang up from her as violently as he had flung himself down, his face was terrible.
‘By the blood of Christ, I will remember it always!’
He went from her too quickly to see that she had fainted.
Chapter Twenty-Four
After that she could never see him again – never, never, never, she kept moaning low to herself, to the terror of Mary Seton’s tender heart, who did not know what had happened to throw her mistress back into this piteous state.
But she had to see him again, and at once. On Wednesday she had to attend Parliament, with Bothwell again bearing the sceptre before her. She noticed that the usual escort of Edinburgh bailies had been exchanged for solid ranks of hagbutters, doubtless by Bothwell’s command. So he still felt her to be in grave danger; but small odds would the soldiers make to her who had once found her safety in the hearts of her people. ‘God bless that sweet face!’ they had called when she rode to her first Parliament; but now it was ‘God save Your Grace – if you are innocent of the King’s death!’
So now they had said it – in the street in the open daylight, before the Lords of her Parliament, surrounded as she was by the muskets of her soldiers; they had cried out to her face what they had whispered behind their window-shutters, muttered in the dark of their doorways; this was the voice of her people, that Greek chorus in the drama of her life that had praised and blessed her, and now shouted aloud its hideous suspicion.
Bothwell had rapped out an order to the captain of the musketeers to arrest those who had shouted, but her te
mper, stung by the insult, flared up at him for giving the order without her leave, and her voice rang out forbidding it; he expostulated, and she said in a voice of ice, ‘Do you indeed wield the sceptre, my lord?’
She saw the anger in his face, knew herself a fool for all reasons to have said it, for indeed he was all-powerful now and knew it, and so did all else. Everything in that week’s Parliament was ordered by him, and no one opposed a syllable. The Assembly issued a proclamation that on pain of death no one should further calumniate him or his. An Act was passed against anonymous placards and the ‘liberty to back-bite’, which aimed at causing disturbance among the people.
But the only material advantage Bothwell reaped from this Parliament, that was utterly subservient to him, was that the lands of the old Church, already appointed to him and other Protestant lords, were confirmed in their possession. Mary let the measure pass with a small wry smile, and asked herself, did she indeed wield the sceptre?
But one Act came entirely from her, though it bore the stamp of his hearty approval. It removed any traces of the old Catholic laws that penalized the Reformed religion, it gave the Protestants ‘full surety’ in that religion, and promised that ‘no foreign person or other pretending jurisdiction may interfere with it’. She had snapped her fingers in the face of the Pope and Philip of Spain and their pious requests for the blood of her subjects! Nor was the Act merely negative; it commanded all her subjects to ‘live in perfect amity’, whatever might be their religious differences.
This was a law of universal toleration such as no other country in Europe had as yet even dreamed of passing; it expressed an ideal of freedom and of friendship as the only true bond of society. As she heard it read, she thought, ‘I have done one thing for my country, perhaps mankind.’ The warm pride that filled her veins went glowing up into her thin white cheeks; the men round her who had seen before them only a desperately tired girl, hardly conscious of what they were saying, now stared anew, amazed at this bright spirit. Touched to momentary recognition of the greatness of her hopes, the Parliament expressed their gratitude in a vote of thanks that ‘Her Highness ever since her arrival has attempted no thing contrary to the estate of religion which Her Majesty found here standing.’ Then on their knees they prayed for her ‘long life and good and happy government’.
The Galliard Page 49