The high-spirited, pleasure-loving girl who had no check on her personal conduct ever since she was eighteen years old, naturally took this very badly; there were some violent scenes in which they stormed at each other like thunder and lightning. Often he made her cry, hated himself for it, swore that he knew her to be true to him, and then found that hot flare of rage take him in the throat again, longing to kill Lethington for laughing with her, Melville for gossiping with her, Gordon for walking in silence with her, John Hamilton because she gave him a horse, and all of them for looking at her, ‘as though they’d eat you – yes, even old Mother Tabbyskin thirsty to be lapping cream’.
She saw nothing in such looks; she had had them from childhood, and would have thought something had gone wrong if any man did not look at her in a kind of eager or pensive dream.
‘It is nothing to the way they paid court to me in France,’ and that made it no better; he was as jealous as he was proud that her young charm had dazzled the most brilliantly civilized Court in Europe.
‘And I am not civilized, I suppose. I can read Latin and talk French and Danish and write a better hand than most, but I can never give you what your fine French scholars and poets did – I who would give you the whole world if I could.’
‘And then lock me up so that no man should ever see me!’
It was true – but so was the other.
‘There is a torment in love, I think,’ he said, with a puzzled humility strange in him. ‘I have waited too long for you, and now I can never have enough. Sometimes I fear we’ll not have the time.’
‘We have all time. Nothing can part us now.’
‘A pretty fancy!’ he said bitterly, then caught her to him and swore that it was true – not fate itself could part them now.
Fear for her heightened the tension. He insisted on armed guards before her chamber door, and was watchful of whomsoever approached her. He felt he scarcely dared breathe until the marriage contract was signed the day before the wedding. It mentioned the nomination by ‘the most part of the nobility’ of ‘the noble prince, now Duke of Orkney’ as bridegroom to the Queen, in view of his ‘magnanimity, courage and constant truth which has preserved Her Majesty’s person from great dangers’. A clause was inserted by his orders that all documents should be signed by both Queen and Duke, and none by the Duke alone.
So there it was, signed now, and for a moment he could relax at ease as he sat drinking with Gordon after supper on the eve of the wedding. The Envoy, Sir James Melville, whose bright little eyes a year ago had spied out Elizabeth’s discomfort at the birth of Mary’s son, interrupted them with a congratulatory visit, but the Duke, with dangerous urbanity, had quickly got rid of him by progressively bawdy talk until the correct Melville went off to lodge his protest – in his diary.
‘So much for our squeamish busybody!’ Bothwell remarked with satisfaction as he leaned back in his chair. ‘His brother has just gone to England, and I’m pretty certain it’s to ask English aid against us. Melville himself has been tampering with Balfour and advising him not to give up his temporary command of Edinburgh Castle. I don’t trust Balfour – a bludgeon-faced lawyer.’
‘Why then,’ asked the Gordon in his deliberate way, ‘did you take the command from Sir James Cockburn? Was it because he fired the guns on you when you galloped the Queen past the Castle rock?’
‘God no! He’d heard she’d been captured and carried off, he was quite right to fire on me. He’s getting his reward, for I’m appointing him Controller of the Customs, a job he’s long been asking for.’
‘Still, what need was there to give the Castle to Balfour?’
‘The worst need in the world – blackmail. He asked for the temporary command and I had to shut his mouth till the wedding was over. I know enough to swing him ten times over, but he’s been clever enough to leave no proofs, trust the lawyer for that! But he knew—’ He put back his head and poured what was left in his glass down his throat, then rapped the glass back on the table and added quickly. ‘Well, it wouldn’t do if he chose the wedding eve, this very evening, to tell the Queen who lit the fuse of the gunpowder that blew up the Old Provost’s House at Kirk o’ Field!’
‘Who did?’
‘Myself, of course,’ said Bothwell.
There was silence for a minute. He poured out more wine for them both with a steady hand, but Gordon’s shook a little as he raised his glass to his lips. Then he said, ‘But you did not put the powder there?’
The Hepburn was hurt. ‘Would I lay down a cellarful of gunpowder to blow up a man – which didn’t, as it happened, kill him after all? I’d have done the job with a knife, and far better. No, you know what we all agreed upon, that as soon as he was divorced he should be arrested for treason and conveniently killed in the scuffle. All very neat and respectable. But I must needs go and spoil it by losing my temper!’
It was a blessed relief to be telling this to Gordon at last. He did not like his reason for keeping it from him before, but he told that too. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t back this marriage if you knew.’
And then he told what he had done on that February night of Carnival Sunday, when he, with a few of his followers, had gone down to investigate at Kirk o’ Field. He had found Sir James Balfour near the outside door into the cells, and questioned him searchingly. Balfour, seeing the game was up, had ratted and admitted there was a plot to blow up the Queen and leaders of her Government and set Darnley on the throne. Bothwell had insisted on seeing the cellars himself. There lay the proof of the story in the barrels of gunpowder that had been dragged during the day from the vaults of the adjoining empty house, through the connecting cellar doors. And upstairs lay Darnley, who was to escape in time on his famous ‘great horses’ through the postern gate and get off scot-free from the effects of his treachery.
Not if Bothwell knew it! He’d pay Darnley in his own coin and hoist him with his own powder! He lit the fuse himself. It took some time to burn. Impatient, he returned to the house to hurry it up, and at that moment the train took fire, and Jock Hepburn threw him back just in time to prevent the house falling on him. That pause had given Darnley time to smell the burning fuse and dash out of the house into the South garden only to be met there by his Douglas kinsmen. They had come on a separate murder plot against him. It was certain now that they had done the actual killing; but it was Bothwell’s firing of the gunpowder that sent him into their hands.
Ever since that night he had cursed himself, not for his crime, but his superfluous folly.
‘I’d meant to kill him, God knows, unless someone else did the job for me. That I knew to be best, because of the Queen. There were so many others determined to have his life. I had only to sit still and wait!’
‘The one thing you could not do – not when you saw red. No,’ Gordon repeated slowly. ‘God set you the one thing you could not do.’
‘I’d have excused Him for that if He hadn’t set me a nest of rats to deal with. They turn so fast to attack their allies, it’s a marvel they don’t bite off their own tails.’
The coalition forming against him at Stirling included practically all those lords who had recently signed his bond to support him in his marriage. But now they had just signed another, ‘by the faith and truth in their bodies, to put the Queen at liberty and punish the murderer of the King’.
‘A lot of good wine was wasted in getting them to sign mine first! And now they say it wasn’t even the wine, but that I had two hundred hagbutters outside the doors of Ainslie’s tavern to put the fear of God into them, and so they signed “for peril of their lives”!’
‘At Ainslie’s? But they dined here at Holyrood, not at Ainslie’s. All the Palace saw and heard it, and that there were no guards.’
What does that matter to them? Twenty-eight lies make a truth. Their sole idea of society is to sign a bond together to kill someone, and then another to kill the man who did it.’
The Stirling coalition had arranged a novel form of propagand
a, a play showing the ‘Murder of Darnley and the Fate of Bothwell’ – which fate was hanging, so vividly performed that the actor who represented Bothwell was all but strangled in good earnest.
Bothwell told this with savage amusement, but Gordon took it strangely. ‘A play to catch the conscience,’ he said slowly, ‘a play within the play of our tangled lives. What if those lives themselves should be nothing but a play, acted to give sport to God?’
This blasphemy was too much for his ‘blasphemous and irreverent’ friend.
‘If I thought that, I’d worship the Devil outright, as fools say I do.’
Gordon was pursuing his own thought.
‘You are both the hero and the villain of it. The Queen is your victim, but you too are one – love’s victims both of you, and a terrible beauty is born of this union, though few will have eyes to see it.’
Bothwell’s joke on this description of his possible progeny faded in uneasiness on Gordon’s account. He had noticed the strained look in his eyes as he signed the marriage contract with the other lords this morning; it had struck him then that he had been growing even more remote from his fellow-men these last days. Was Gordon to lose his wits for love of the Queen, as Arran had done? A stab of dismay shot through him at the notion, but he thrust it quickly from him. The cases were clean different; Arran would have gone mad anyway, but Gordon had a sound brain, afflicted only with too much imagination. He loved the Queen; this was a bad time for him.
He got up and laid a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘We’re all three of us love’s victims, I think, one way or t’other, but none of us would have it otherwise.’
They were married now; however morally irregular the proceedings, she was legally his: nothing could alter that. In spite of drinking late with Gordon the night before, he had been up before dawn on the day, so anxious was he to be on guard against anything that might even now prevent the ceremony. All that he found was one more placard on the gates of the Palace, a scholar’s this time, for it was a line from Ovid that he recognised from his schooldays: ‘Mense malas maio nubere vulgus ait.’
They say
That wantons marry
In the month of May.
He tore it down, and went to meet the Queen, who was ready for him by four o’clock. The wedding took place in the Great Hall at Holyrood, performed by the Protestant Bishop of Orkney and attended by a large number of nobles, both Protestant and Catholic; the Primate of Scotland and the Bishops of Ross and Dunblane representing the Catholic clergy, although Bothwell had insisted on the Protestant ceremony. It had cost him a half-day’s quarrel with the Queen; she had had to salve both conscience and pride by showing him her assurance to France that though she had had to give in to her husband in this, ‘she would never leave her Church for any man on earth’.
She must have seen or been told of that last detestable placard, for that evening after the public banquet he found her reading Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’, and as he leaned over her shoulder to look at it, she took his hand and pointed his finger to the words: ‘It giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May – and lovers then call again to their mind old gentleness and old service. Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May like as did Queen Guinevere, for while she lived she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end.’
‘And yet,’ said she, ‘men called Queen Guinevere a wanton too, and would have burned her for her love.’
For answer he in turn took her hand and led it farther down the page to the words: ‘anon we shall deface and lay apart true love for little or nought, that cost much thing; this is no wisdom nor stability, but it is feebleness of nature and great disworship’.
‘Let those bawdy tom-cats scatter their filth on the walls! The great gentleman who wrote this book long ago knew more about you than they do. And people will know it again, for time is the mother of truth.’
She laid her cheek down upon his hand. ‘You have come to my help always when I had need of you, as Launcelot did to Guinevere – I want all to know the truth about you.’
She felt that hard lean hand go rigid under her cheek. ‘Leave me out of it,’ he said gruffly.
They were ‘quiet and merry together’, so people observed when they went out; the gossips noticed an absurd little scene when he walked beside her, bare-headed in respect, and she snatched the cap from his hand, laughing, and clapped it on his head.
There was a water pageant at Leith, and she watched him ride at the ring in a tourney, and conduct a sham fight with those precious new troops, the five hundred horse and two hundred foot he had added to her guard of two hundred hagbutters, which were costing them more than their few simple shows.
As the month came to an end, and June danced in on them in showers of blown fruit blossom and gusts of flying rain and sudden sunshine, they seemed to have been married for years, so natural and inevitable was it that they should now be riding out together every day, sleeping in each other’s arms at night, dining informally with the citizens, who were increasingly friendly, planning and working together at the business of the State. For the sheer luxury of the contrast she would remember how difficult it was to get Darnley to give the smallest show of interest in such business, though demanding absolute power in it.
James Hepburn attended all five Council meetings in the week following the wedding. He at once overhauled the arrangements for the Council sessions, tightening up the number of attendances necessary, and hurried through a fresh Act against the false coinage from abroad that was being imported to ‘the great scathe and detriment of the commonweal’. ‘I mayn’t understand the Exchequer like your Michael Wily,’ he told Mary, ‘but this I do know, that the falsifying of money will lead to the ruin of the State. That redhaired vixen on the English throne is blamed for parsimony, but with money going rotten everywhere there will come a time when she, or her successors, can no longer keep the country going on it – and that she knows, even better than her Ministers.’
He had great plans too for the navy. The world was opening so wide and fast, a whole new continent piecing itself together, bit by bit, and were the Scots to be left mewed up in their half of this old island while the English made fresh hunting-grounds in the mighty river of Plate, and ranged along the coasts of Chili and Peru and all the backside of Nova Hispania?
Would they ever have time enough to carry out all they hoped? No matter; their hope was the greatest part of it. So Mary believed. That was why some years ago she had had those strange words embroidered on her Canopy of State: ‘In my End is my Beginning’.
His most difficult and delicate job was to announce the marriage to the Courts of France and England. Mr Secretary Lethington, anxiously conciliatory, offered his subtle pen for the purpose, but James Hepburn preferred to write unaided to his brother monarchs. ‘Now for ourselves,’ he wrote to France, ‘somewhat we speak though briefly. We cannot marvel indeed that this marriage, and the rumour that preceded it, appear right strange to you. The blame indeed we must confess and underlie, in so far as some things may appear omitted in ceremonies and counsel-taking as otherwise ought to have been done.’
This under-statement he read out with a quick glance at Mary, and was glad to see her smile. She laid her hand on his at the next sentence. ‘Her Majesty might well have married with men of greater birth and estimation, but never with one more affectionately inclined to do her honour and service.’
Was this so unsuitable a ‘kinsman’ for Charles IX of France and the Cardinal of Lorraine? The bold candour of his words, their simple and unconscious dignity, struck her as so manly as to be indeed kingly.
To the English Queen he admitted that he knew her to have been offended with him, yet allowed no trace in his letter of the servility that was almost a formula in such cases; neither was there any hint of arrogance; he merely mentioned ‘the misreports of my unfriends’, and declared himself ‘careful to see your two Majesties’ amity and intelligence continued by all g
ood offices’.
‘But it will never make amends to her, or to you either, for that unlucky remark that you two Queens wouldn’t make one honest woman!’
‘I think now,’ she said, ‘that one honest woman is worth more than two Queens. You say the false currency of money will bring ruin to the State. I say that false political ideas will bring even worse. I believe Machiavelli to have been not only a villain but a fool, though it may take hundreds of years to prove him so. To make friends, that is the only sane policy.’
‘Aye – with a standing army to back it!’
Gordon’s doubt had been justified. Balfour had politely refused the diplomatic overtures to make him give up his command of the Castle of Edinburgh. He still had the power to turn informer against him to the Queen, and Bothwell dared not take the risk of her learning from anyone else what he would give the world to hide from her for ever. So he himself now told her, as he had told Gordon, the whole truth of himself and Darnley’s death.
She sat very still. Only her fingers moved a little, pulling at a ring. At last she said in a dazed voice, ‘I think I’ve known it all along. Ever since that morning you told me so roughly of his death. But I would not know.’ And then presently, ‘You said at Seton you did not kill him—’ she raised her eyes as she spoke, and then again fell silent, looking at that lean rugged face. She saw how the hair had thinned and turned grey on the temples, the eyes sunk deep in their sockets, yet their fiery glance always on the alert. She had known how the tension of the last few months had told on him; now for the first time she knew how great that tension had been, and sought desperately to lighten it. ‘It was true,’ she said, ‘you did not. It was not the explosion that killed him.’
Bothwell gave a somewhat dubious grunt. ‘That’s what I said to myself, of course. But the main thing was that I couldn’t tell you that I was his murderer when I was asking you to marry me.’
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