The Queen's Caprice

by Marjorie Bowen

  “A ring, a pledge, after the manner of lovers, to assure you of my faith.”

  Reassured, happy in his returning strength, the young man gazed at her as she stood there in the candlelight. Then she spoke, and her words were as unexpected as they were horrible to the listener.

  “It is nearly a year since the slaying of David.”

  “Is this your reconciliation?” he cried reproachfully.

  “I do not know why it came into my mind.”

  She smiled at him again, renewed her promises for the morning, and was gone, leaving him staring at the red enamel ring in the palm of his hand.

  He heard her leave and the house seemed very silent, so that he called up the chamber-boy and asked where the Antony Standens were.

  They had gone to the ball at Holyrood given for the marriages of Sebastian Page and Christine Hogg, so that the King had only five servants with him in the lonely house.

  He called them all in for company’s sake and asked them to fetch wine. Then he drank their health, saying that they had been faithful to him in his sickness and he would see they were rewarded, for happier days were coming when they should see him as King.

  They pledged him and left, going to their sleeping apartments which were in a corridor at right-angles to his room. Only John Taylor remained. It was late, but the King did not want to sleep.

  He got out of bed and walked up and down the room, while the English boy, half-asleep, sat on the bedstep and waited his master’s pleasure.

  The King took up a lute and began to sing. He broke off in the middle and said moodily:

  “The Queen’s Grace spoke of the slaying of Rizzio to-night. It is a long time since she has mentioned that.”

  “Sir, it would be because it is nearly a year ago,” replied the boy. “Will you not get into bed, sir, and rest? The doctor said you should not force your strength.”

  “Did that letter go to my father?” asked the King restlessly. “The one wherein I told him that my dear love, the Queen and I, were reconciled.”

  “Sir, I sent it as you bid me — at once. My lord should have had it two days ago.”

  “I must try to sleep.”

  The young man sat on the edge of the bed, but instead of getting in it he said:

  “We will sing the fifth Psalm.”

  The page looked at him in surprise. But obediently found the book where the Psalms were set to music in English, a version which Henry Stewart liked.

  The page propped up the book against a chair, took another lute, and in the silence of the lonely house the two young men began to sing.

  There was a tap on the door and the King called out to whoever it was to enter. Another of his English servants came in, holding a candle in one hand and under his arm a shoe of satin. He put it down on the chair in front of the open Book of Psalms.

  “I found that in the grass just now. See, sir, it is covered with dew or rain.”

  “Well,” asked the King, “what of it? What is this mystery?”

  “I do not know, sir, God forgive me! Twenty minutes or so ago I heard a noise and looked out very quietly from my casement. I saw one without whom I knew to be William Powrie, Earl Bothwell’s porter — I recognized him in the light in the porch — but when I went down to see what his business was, he was gone and I could find no one. And I went out, looking round, and then in the grass I came upon this. It is a man’s dancing slipper.”

  “It is one belonging to one of the Lords in attendance on the Queen, probably,” said the King. “Take it away.”

  The man hesitated.

  “Sir, why should Earl Bothwell’s porter be here?”

  “I expect you are mistaken,” replied the King indifferently, “but if it were he, he might have come about some of the furniture which they moved beneath.”

  “Ay, sir, that’s it,” said the Englishman. “What is it they do move beneath? There’s no getting into the room, it is locked on either side, and the window is curtained from within.”

  “What should be in there?” replied the King with contempt. “What fancies have you got now?”

  “Sir, the place is very lonely and we are strangers here; you, sir, as much as I.”

  The King was silent, and the other two looked at him anxiously in the light of the candles. Then he said to himself, frowning:

  “I declared that I would trust her and that God must judge between us.”

  Then he told the servant to go to bed and leave him for he wanted to finish singing his psalm.

  But the anxious manservant, still holding the gentleman’s shoe, broke in:

  “Sir, Earl Bothwell’s Frenchman was here to-night. He was in that room underneath, and when the Queen was mounting her horse, he came out, and she said to him, laughing: ‘Jesu, Paris, how grimed you are!’ and then he blushed red.”

  “What was he grimed with?” asked the King.

  “I do not know, sir. He is always painted, and to-night over the red and white was a certain black — I thought it gunpowder.”

  The three listened intently. It was a still night and there was no sound.

  “I hear nothing,” said the King.

  But the servant insisted that he could detect, though faintly, footsteps below.

  “It is one of the others moving about. Go and see what it is,” said Henry Stewart.

  As the man left the room on tiptoe, leaving the door open behind him, the King rose, telling the boy to shut up the Book of Psalms and put away the lute.

  “Everything is absolutely still, I hear nothing. Why was that fellow so disturbed?”

  “Sir, I do not know,” replied John Taylor, trying to master his own agitation and wondering why the King was so calm. “It is true the place is very lonely. Hark, sir! There is someone below.”

  The King stood erect, listening.

  Yes, there could be no mistake now, there were footsteps to be heard — those, he thought, of several men.

  He looked sharply at John Taylor and saw that the boy had run to the window.

  “Sir, quickly! There is someone coming up! This way! We can get through to the orchard!”

  “If they have come for me,” said the King, “they have ringed the house and there will be no escape.”

  He went to the window and opened it, feeling on his face the sudden cold of the winter night. As he leaned over the bent figure of the page trying to see what was below, the boy looking round suddenly shrieked. The King turned.

  In the doorway that his servant had left open he saw Archibald Douglas, one of the murderers of David, wearing a dark mantle and with one shoe. Behind him showed the face of Giuseppe Rizzio, and behind both of them, picked out of the shadow by the light of the candles were the pale eyes of Earl Bothwell.

  *

  The Queen had left the marriage festivities early and was walking up and down the Presence Chamber sometimes pausing before the door of her oratory, though she never opened it.

  About two o’clock, she went into her bedchamber where a bright fire was burning. Mary Seaton had fallen asleep in a deep chair beside the hearth, and as the Queen entered with the lightest of steps, she sprang up. The Queen stood rigid, though with no sign of terror. A sound like a cannonade penetrated the seven-foot-thick walls of the tower.

  Mary Seaton fell on her knees. What had happened? The English! A surprise attack! Rebels! Firing from the castle! The Queen put her hand over the girl’s mouth.

  “Listen! It does not come again. It is an accident — an explosion somewhere.”

  “Oh, God! Oh, madame! Oh, Jesu! Oh, Holy Virgin!”

  “Go,” said the Queen under her breath, “out to the head of the stairs and listen.”

  “Madame, I dare not, on my soul I dare not!”

  “Then I will go.”

  The Queen crossed the Chamber of Presence and the ante-room, and came out on the head of the stairs. There were people running about, crying in fright, issuing incoherent orders in the confusion. The echoes of the tremendous sound sti
ll hung about the palace.

  The Queen went back into her rooms and shut the doors on this hubbub. When they came to search for her they found her seated on the throne. All the light she had came from the torches in the courtyard that flickered across the open windows.

  At first the group that broke in on her were frightened and fell back as if they had seen a dead woman enthroned there, she was so pale, and it seemed such a strange place for her to be at this hour, but she spoke calmly and asked why they had left her so long alone and in some peril, as she might suppose? What was the tumult and the noise? She looked at them carefully as they came forward, one of them holding a large lantern the light of which fell on the hem of her gown trailing down the steps of the throne.

  Argyll, Huntly, and Atholl, the wives of the Earls of Mar and Atholl, Sir William Maitland were there: it was he who held the lantern. He was fully dressed but the others were in their nightgowns except for Bothwell, who wore a heavy cavalry cloak over his clothes.

  Lady Mar fell on her knees on the steps of the throne and began to ask if Her Majesty could bear ill news?

  “I am used to it,” said the Queen, and looked past the kneeling woman to the men. She beckoned Bothwell forward. “Can you speak?” she asked. “I have not usually found you tongue-tied.”

  “Madame, there has occurred a monstrous chance which everyone wonders at. The King’s lodging, even to the very foundations, has been blown in the air. All the building is ruined.”

  “Ah! And the King?”

  “Everyone,” breathed Maitland, taking the words from Bothwell, “is in such terror, there are such fearful rumours — the whole house has fallen, the very stones ground into powder from what can be seen by torchlight.”

  “And the King?” repeated the Queen, rising and holding on to the arms of the throne as if she took command not only of them, but of all the actions of the night.

  “Madame,” said Bothwell, “we went there on the instant and found him in the orchard beyond Thieves Row, with his page boy, under a tree — and both were dead. Dead and naked.”

  The Queen came slowly down the steps, ignoring the kneeling woman on the steps, who was crying. She stared at Bothwell’s hands as if she pictured the work they had been about a short time before.

  “It was a pity for the boy,” she said. “A very willing, pleasant lad, who never did any harm.”

  “And for the King, madame?” cried Lady Mar, incredulous.

  “That passes pity,” replied the Queen. She looked at Bothwell. “What friend has he to speak for him? What champion to take his part?”

  “Madame,” said Bothwell, “all is a mystery. How is one to judge anything in the dark and the confusion?” The Queen noticed that two of the buttons had been wrenched from his coat. By whose hand?

  She saw the faces that stared in the flickering light, Bothwell’s steady eyes, the torn coat, his white hands. Nothing beyond this, nothing.

  “I’d like a drink,” she said. “It is so hot.”

  Lady Mar rose to take her under the arm and support her to her bedroom door.

  “See,” remarked Bothwell to Maitland, “the courage of a great princess.”

  “A paragon,” said Sir William daintily, as the door closed on the Queen. “She bears this great disaster nobly. After their reconciliation, too, that was hard. So young a man! To be murdered like that—”

  His voice was dry and brittle, he remarked that the Chamber of Presence was cold and that they might as well get back to their beds.

  The Queen, in her room, took her arm from Lady Mar, passed Mary Seaton, and went into the little closet, closing the door behind her.

  There she stayed in the silence and darkness of the place where David had been dragged away nearly a year ago.

  Part 3

  THE ROSE TREE AT LOCH LEVEN

  “It is too frequent with noblemen to be dishonest; piety, chastity, and such-like virtues are for private men, not much to be looked for in great Courts.”

  Democritus Junior.

  3: The Rose Tree at Loch Leven

  THE Earl of Moray waited in France. Outwardly he seemed ruined — a statesman without a government, a warrior without an army, a prince without a kingdom. But he was not worried. He knew that he had only to wait, and he did not think it was likely that he would wait long. News from Scotland arrived regularly from Sir William Maitland, who remained with the Queen.

  Everything had gone as he had arranged it; just as Henry Stewart had been used to destroy Rizzio, so Earl Bothwell had been used to destroy Henry Stewart, and now he in his turn must go.

  Bothwell’s ascendancy after the removal of the King had been brilliant and sudden, and Moray, without a farewell to his sister, had gone to France, leaving the conduct of Scottish affairs to other men. He was glad that he had such an able instrument as Maitland, who continued to move among these dangerous intrigues, and to keep close to the Queen’s side. Morton, too, and his influence with Knox was invaluable to Moray.

  Moray watched how all Europe recoiled from the murder of King Henry, and how warnings and advice from England, France, and from her own Ambassador in Paris, had been sent to the Queen that she should at once search out the assassins and show no favour to the man who was judged the chief of them — Earl Bothwell. He gathered up all the gossip and tried to sift truth from lies.

  What of the Queen throughout this? Moray had sought an exact knowledge of her behaviour. But it was not easy, for she lived sometimes in the castle, sometimes in Holyrood, sometimes away in the hills, and the reports as to her conduct differed. Maitland, who kept close to her and whose delicate curiosity could probe the minds of most people, wrote in his cautious cipher to Moray that even he did not quite know what to say of the Queen. It was believed that she would marry Bothwell, yet that seemed hard to credit. All Europe deplored her choice.

  Moray, watching from afar, saw her light as a bubble on a wave riding to annihilation. She no longer concerned him, nor his politics, aims, and ideals. These now concentrated on the child, the Protestant Prince who should rule Scotland and perhaps England.

  He had all his schemes prepared. He would be Regent. Quite soon, when Bothwell had run his lunatic course, the Lords would send for him, and he and Maitland would rule Scotland, wise, justly, cautiously, not binding the country over-much to either France or England but building it up to independence.

  For what had passed he had no regret. He knew that the crime in Kirk o’ Field could be turned to considerable account, first to destroy Bothwell, then to keep Huntly, Morton, even Maitland, in their places. The only one who was under no suspicion was he who had stood apart and designed it all — Moray himself.

  He had been a little astonished, used as he was to murder, that this crime had so resounded in Europe. King Henry had not been popular; he had been of no use to anyone, nor could Moray think whom there might be to miss him. Yet even those who had disliked him, or never seen him, or thought of him with complete indifference, now clamoured for vengeance on the king, only twenty-one years old, brutally murdered.

  Moray himself, in public, joined in the outcry, expressing the deepest horror, the greatest alarm. It had made a useful excuse for his withdrawal from Scotland: he declared that he held the whole country shamed until the murderers were discovered. In secret, he thought the thing was clumsily done and blamed Bothwell. It should have been sudden, all over in a flash of fire, the King and his servants tossed into the air and killed instantly. But the murderers must have been noisy, and discovered. Moray was astonished that Archibald Douglas at least had not managed better than that. The King had evidently escaped from the house and they had had to pursue him into the orchard, strangle him with the sleeves of his dressing-gown, stuff a handkerchief steeped in vinegar into his mouth — ugly, clumsy, and stupid.

  They had been careful to murder the page boy, John Taylor; no doubt he had seen too much. But they had allowed other servants to escape who might, even in the dark and confusion, have seen more than the
y should have.

  Then, the explosion after the murder. Moray considered that a foolish destruction of valuable property. But perhaps it had served some purpose since it had inflamed the public mind against the assassins and impressed them with something almost supernatural about the deed, which suited Moray’s purpose very well, but he was sorry not to have saved the Queen. Her doom was in herself, and nothing could rescue her. He had tried long and diligently to protect her; even after the murder of David he had thought that it might have been done, but now it was too late. It did not matter much, he thought, the actual degree of her guilt. It was not likely that even Bothwell had discussed with her the details of her husband’s murder. But she had done all she had been asked to do — she had decoyed the poor young man from safety and placed him in the hands of his enemies.

  Moray wondered at her audacity, her remarkable courage. She dared to flout all Europe to favour Bothwell.

  But only when Moray heard that Jane Gordon was to be divorced both according to the Protestant and the Roman Catholic laws did he believe that it was the Queen’s intention to marry that lawless and bloody man.

  When Moray heard this news he came to Paris, awaiting his recall. The Lords were forming themselves up against Bothwell as they had formed themselves against the King, and no one believed that the Queen could hold the throne long after her marriage with the Earl.

  Maitland sent reports of her behaviour. Sometimes she was in the depths of misery and wished that she was dead; sometimes she was ill and kept her bed for days together, complaining of her old malady — the pain in her side. Sometimes she was gay and spent hours on horseback, riding. But always she remained resolute in her favours to Bothwell.

  *

  In April came the news of the Queen’s abduction — a farce at which everyone laughed. Bothwell had carried her off with a few of her escort to Dunbar, and when she had been released she had entered Edinburgh with Bothwell leading her bridle.

  Soon after, he had commanded John Craig, Knox’s substitute in the Church, to publish his banns with the Queen.