The Queen's Caprice

by Marjorie Bowen

  “Here, I profess to God, and I shall answer to Him on the great Day of Judgment, is your son and no other man’s son. All here bear witness!” And then, as the King did not speak she added: “He is so much your son that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.”

  At this remark he had stirred slightly, the Queen had looked past him at Moray, saying:

  “Here is the Prince who shall unite Scotland and England.”

  “Why, madame, shall he succeed before Your Majesty and his father?”

  “Alas,” she had sighed, “his father has broken to me.”

  Then the King, not shifting his place nor raising his head, muttered:

  “Sweet madame, is this your promise you made to forgive and forget all?”

  “Ah,” said she, “I have forgiven all, but never will forget.”

  She had handed the child back to the nurse and sank back on to the pillows.

  “If one of those sword thrusts had gone awry what would have become of him and me, or what estate would you have been in? God only knows, but we may suspect.”

  The Queen had smiled at Moray over her husband’s shoulder and then she said: “Let all go.” The King, without further word to her or comment on the child, had left the bedchamber.

  Moray smiled to think that she had, despite his suspicions and sullenness, had her will with Henry Stewart. He had done what she wished, he had written to the King of France, and to her uncle, the Cardinal of Guise, asking them to be sponsors to the child. Moray believed that this tacit acknowledgement of paternity was the last service that the Queen would ever require from her husband.

  He puzzled a little as to what would become of the slighted, useless young man who had offended everyone, who was an enemy of his wife, who had outraged the nobility of Scotland by urging them on to the murder of Rizzio and then betraying them. Twenty years old and already in so desperate a plight! The Queen’s husband, too, and not to be rid of so easily.

  Moray’s thoughts travelled to the man whom the Queen had lately seemed to hold most in favour — Earl Bothwell, his own especial enemy, a man whom he detested, and a little feared as far as it was in his nature to fear anybody. He was now on the Border, the Governorship of which he had obtained against the wish of the King, who wanted that post for his father.

  Moray pondered, his fingers fumbling a piece of unicorn horn kept on his desk as an antidote to disease. Bothwell must be got rid of too — Bothwell and Henry Stewart, by some means, must be destroyed. Maitland might be able to suggest some plan that would involve neither of them. Unless — there was one way by which both of them might be rendered harmless. The Queen might be forced to pretend a reconciliation with her husband, to live with him quietly and dutifully, and Bothwell might be banished again to England or to France. If she would consent to that, all might be very simple. He tingled with impatience for the day when she would be well enough for him to sound her intentions.

  *

  Moray went up to the castle where the Queen had given him rooms, during his residence, for his private use. He intended to probe her mind and was confident of his errand. She had lately been civil towards him, admitting him to her presence when she refused Huntly and other friends of Bothwell. She had spoken to him gravely of Scottish affairs, she had even confided to him that she had money from the Pope, and said that all should be used for peaceful purposes, in making amities among her people. She had told him also, with what appeared to be a pathetic sincerity, that she mistrusted her husband, who, she thought, was making plots against her with his family and with such of the nobles as would listen to him. She said that he went in constant fear that she might recall Maitland, or some of the nobles implicated in the murder of David. He particularly dreaded Morton and the other Douglases. She did not say that she knew the reason of his fear — the fact that he had been the instigator of the murder and then betrayed his accomplices, but Moray could read that knowledge in her eyes.

  So Moray had begun to feel sure of her and had resolved that on this meeting he would insist at least on the recall of Maitland and his return to the Secretaryship. Quite soon he meant to insist on the return of Morton and the other Douglases. If that meant the end of the King he did not think the Queen would grieve overmuch.

  *

  But when Moray inquired for the Queen he found that she had gone. His amazement was extreme and was succeeded by a deep anger, not so much against her duplicity as against his own foolishness in trusting her. How many instances he had had of her inconstancy and fickleness, yet she had been able to deceive him again!

  She had gone to Alloa, Lord Mar’s castle, and she had not even taken Mary Seaton with her but had gone secretly. Her escort had been the new body of harque-busiers, and she had taken with her Lady Reres, Mary Beaton’s aunt, sister of a witch and Bothwell’s ex-mistress.

  Moray heard this in anger and self-reproach. This woman’s caprices were always overthrowing his careful plans. He saw Earl Bothwell as becoming suddenly important, and this filled him with fury, for of all the hates in Scotland then, and there were many, there was not a hate more intense than that of Moray for Bothwell, not even the hatred of the King for Morton.

  Moray went upstairs into the Queen’s chambers which were being dismantled, the tapestries taken down from the walls, the furniture unhung from the beds, chairs and cushions stacked up.

  He found Mary Seaton helping to take down the winged altar-piece, the statues and arras from the oratory, and called her away impatiently. He questioned her closely as to the Queen’s motives for this behaviour.

  “Why, she has run away before her month was up, quicker than any common woman. Had she not hesitated to leave her child?”

  “She does not love him,” said Mary Seaton loyally. “What does she know of him, why should she care about him? She said he looked like Florestan but was not so clean nor so clever, and it is true enough.”

  It instantly occurred to Moray that if the Queen proved an indifferent mother that might help his game — the child was more useful than she was, it would suit him to keep them apart.

  *

  When the Queen escaped from Edinburgh Castle, from all the paraphernalia of childbirth, the dark rooms, the priests and apothecaries, the women and servants, the medicines and ceremonies, the smells of incense and drugs and the wax candles, she felt like a new being. She shook off the castle, the city, the Abbey, the child, Moray, her husband, Lennox, like so much dust from the hem of her robe.

  Lady Reres was good company, it was agreeable to be with her after the pious prudery of Mary Seaton, the inane chatter of the French girls, and the gossip of the midwife. Lady Reres knew a great many things that it amused the Queen to hear. She had diverting tales of Earl Bothwell, she had been his lover once. She knew many secrets of magic, too, for her sister was a witch, the enchanted Lady of Braxholme, niece of the murdered Cardinal Beaton. She could tell tales of this uncle who, when the Queen was a little child, had been dragged out of his chamber at his castle of Saint Andrews and butchered by the Protestants, urged on by John Knox.

  The Queen walked the sands at Alloa, the wind in her hair and listened to the fat woman by her side. The refrain of her pleasant, humorous talk was always Bothwell. Bothwell was the man, and he alone. Didn’t the Queen’s Grace see that? There was no one like him.

  Look at the rescue from Holyrood. Who else had been able to think of that? He was powerful, too, he had the whole of the Border, Liddesdale, and other counties that touched on England as well as lands in Lothian. And, through the Huntlys he had the north. The Gordons were powerful, Lady Reres said, as powerful as the Douglas and the Hamiltons put together, if need be.

  “What need?” asked the Queen, throwing back her head and laughing.

  “He knows it,” replied the woman with a wink as she laboured over the salt-encrusted sands, and she continued to talk of Bothwell. Much of what she said the Queen knew, but she listened patiently all the same.

  The Hepburns, now, was it not an an
cient and a noble name? James Hepburn! He was not yet thirty years old, no, twenty-eight on his last name-day, yet there was nothing he had not accomplished.

  As a boy he had been in the field — “fighting for your mother, madame, as Your Grace well knows. Ay, at Kelso, when everyone had forsaken her he threw himself across the Border and drove the English back.”

  “Well, well, we have been grateful.”

  The Queen paused, still smiling. The day was so beautiful. The little waves of the Firth of Forth fell one over another while the sea-birds, white and grey, dipped away.

  The stout woman paused, out of breath, with her hands stuck on her hips, and stared across the gleaming water. Then she went on about Bothwell. The Queen listened, half-laughing.

  He had such a wonderful library of magic books; it was quite true that he knew all about spells and potions.

  “He can tie the four winds in a kerchief,” said the Queen smiling, “and set witches on a broomstick to stir the heavens to storm. It is as well to have such a man for a servant.”

  She asked Lady Reres in a friendly fashion if it were true what was said about Janet Beaton, the wizard lady of Braxholme. Could she really do all these tricks? Had she been married to Bothwell, and what about the Danish girl?

  Lady Reres laughed till she shook. What did any of that matter, old tales, all of them!

  “But,” she added, “he is a man whom few women, perhaps only one woman, could resist.”

  The Queen thought of Jane Gordon. “He loves his wife?” she remarked.

  The elder woman’s gusty laughter rang loud in the still air, and the Queen seemed pleased at the note of scorn in it.

  “He despises her, madame, he despises all of them! There is only one creature who would satisfy him—”

  The Queen did not check this impudence. She took off her flat, stout leather shoes and ran along the sands, the wind in her thin blue dress, in her thick hair.

  That night her spirits rose so high there were some of Lord Mar’s household said that the Lady of Braxholme’s sister had bewitched the Queen.

  *

  The King poured out his misery to his father.

  “What does she mean to do? I have no friends, not one. I do not know which to dread the most — Bothwell, Moray, Maitland, or the banished Lords. If she could call those back—”

  “She will not,” replied Lennox. “Is it not more to her interests than to yours to keep them away? She must loathe them.”

  “She loathes me more deeply. She only played with me till the child was born; she wanted me to acknowledge it and I did.”

  “You would have been a thrice damned fool if you had not,” snarled Lennox. “Is not that our best hold on her? Would it suit our plans to have you the wittol husband?” Then in his anger and disgust he began to abuse his son. “You should not have betrayed them. They are too powerful, there are too many of them, you signed those bonds and then betrayed them. What is there about this woman that she could persuade you to that?”

  “She might have been right,” replied the King doggedly, trying to cover up his disastrous mistake. “She said, that night at Holyrood, they meant to have me next. Perhaps it was true.”

  “Perhaps it was true,” sneered his father. “They mean certainly to have you now. All this clatter about the slaying of an Italian scullion! It should have been Moray whom you’d taken, ay, and Maitland with him.”

  “I thought of it,” said the King sullenly, “but I had no one to help me. He is too powerful, he’d leave too many behind to avenge him. It is difficult to come at — murder, I mean — I never was taught those tricks. Besides, she protects him. Several times lately I have found him in her presence. I told her once I’d endure no more of it. It is David over again — I am turned away while he is closeted with her. I said I’d break his neck and she warned him — he came and told me that she had. Don’t you see that if anything like that was attempted and discovered it would be an excuse for putting us both out of the kingdom? Though God knows, that would hardly break my heart. I loathe Scotland.”

  Softly, and with utter bitterness, Lennox began to abuse the Queen, stinging her name with his tongue, using the foulest words he could think of to besmirch her, doing this deliberately and viciously.

  “She is all that,” assented the young husband.

  “Yet, when she chooses,” cried his father bitterly, “she can have her will of you, you fool. What position have you got yourself into? You have the name of King but none of the respect, you are ringed round with enemies. You have neither power, money, nor retinue. And what can I do? We have everyone against us!”

  He began to curse Moray as the devil incarnate, and Maitland as a keeper of an outpost of Hell. The King listened with despair to his father’s railings. He was no match for any of the combinations formed against him in the court, and knew it. He bitterly regretted his treacheries, for he knew that his accomplices had sent the Queen the two bonds he had signed for Rizzio’s murder. Once, when she had allowed him into her chamber she had opened a jewel case lined with blue satin and he had seen lying there the red enamel wedding-ring and the two bonds. She had looked up at him and smiled, then closed the case, locked it, and given it to Mary Seaton, to guard well, as she said.

  Yes, he had betrayed his accomplices, and because of that they were ruined and banished, and she had betrayed him, making him leave Holyrood with her under the pretence that she loved him. How could he have believed that? How could he have allowed her a second time to persuade him?

  “She makes use of me again and again,” he muttered.

  “Ay, and will do so,” said his father, looking at him in contempt, “as long as there’s breath in her body. What of this Bothwell, what of this ruffian she now makes much of?”

  “I think he is my friend,” said the young King slowly. “He, too, hates Moray. He said he would stand by me to remove him.”

  But Lennox spat out abuse of Bothwell.

  “Believe nothing of such a rascal’s promises or friendship. And look to him and the Queen,” he added, “look to him and the Queen. She puts him above everyone, he is all in all at court. Your friend! — he’d slit your throat for a nudge from her. He has butchered more men already than any dare tell.”

  The King was wretched, overwhelmed by a fit of despair. He could see no help ahead; he really believed his position was so desperate that there was nothing for it but to leave Scotland, and he turned over in his unhappy mind how he might revenge himself on all of them and shame the Queen, leave her at a loss by withdrawing from the kingdom where he had met nothing but humiliation, perils, and pain.

  *

  At the end of the summer the King and Queen hunted in Meggatdale. They did not have much sport for the poachers had been among the deer on the wide moors. Nor was there any freedom and mirth in their conversation. They only met in public, and each kept spies on the other.

  Constantly in their company were Lord Moray and Earl Bothwell. Lennox had bid his son be patient and go cautiously, but the sunny, empty, hostile days galled the unhappy youth.

  It seemed to him that everyone was laughing at him, and when they returned to Edinburgh and the Queen suddenly gave him rich presents, rounds of brocade and lengths of cypress. silver-knobbed harness for a horse and the bed from Stirling, it seemed to him she laughed the loudest of all.

  By early autumn the Queen had brought back Sir William Maitland, and made him the Secretary of State again. Poor Giuseppe, she declared, she only kept for her small, private correspondence in French and Italian.

  She bade Maitland be amiable to Bothwell with whom he had long been at odds. She made Moray and Bothwell clasp hands and speak to each other civilly, and she gave them all to understand that they were equally her friends if they would band themselves against her enemies. They had no need to ask what enemies they were, they knew she meant Lennox and his son.

  *

  The King sulked at Stirling, and Lennox wrote a letter to the Queen, telling her it w
as their intention to leave the country and that they had a vessel ready to take them and their followers abroad.

  As the Queen stood staring at this letter, the King himself rode up through the pale, October weather and demanded to see her, but when he heard that Moray and Bothwell were in her company he would not go up.

  Thereupon the Queen, smiling, sent these Lords away and went down to meet him where he stood reluctant and hesitant, on the grand staircase.

  When she took his hand he said nothing, though her greetings were ready and civil. He followed her upstairs to the room which he had not entered since the night the body of the Italian had been dragged through it.

  She shut the door on everyone, even Mary Seaton. Then, very earnestly, she demanded of her husband his reasons for wishing to leave her and depart from the country. But though she kept him with her all night she could get nothing from him, for he put aside her wiles and entreaties and her gentle threats. “Ah,” she said, “I perceive you are indeed broken with me.”

  She spoke to him of the child, a flourishing prince likely to be of great importance in Europe, but he said nothing, only remained sitting heavily in the chair at the foot of her bed. All night she pleaded in vain, until at break of day she lay her down in her clothes and slept from sheer weariness.

  When she got up soon after, her agitation disturbing rest, she found him asleep in his riding-habit in the chair.

  She roused him and took him down to the Council Chamber where the French Ambassador was and there before them all she implored him to declare his grief and what he might have against her. The Lords seconded this request, calling her a wise and virtuous princess, and asked why he would leave her and this rich kingdom.

  So they goaded and baited this young man, who knew they were all banded against him. He had neither authority nor respect. He realized that the woman who had betrayed him before would do so again.

  Twice he made as if to speak and turned towards his wife. But each time he looked round at those smiling, hostile faces and was silent.