When they reached Edinburgh it was nearly dark and the Queen pulled a muffler round her face. The Lords marched in silence, continuing to carry in front of her the Banner with the two figures of father and son. She was now close enough to read on the scroll issuing from the child’s mouth the words, “Judge, and avenge my cause, O Lord.” It was the murderers themselves who carried this banner. She felt contempt for all of them, but unbidden, the austere image of Moray came into her mind. Was he not behind all this, moving warily, secretly? Had he not from the first warned her — he had said that he would make her a queen, but that if she left him for other men … She closed her eyes; it seemed that if Moray had not been her brother she might have loved him and he might have saved her from all this. But as love was forbidden, hate had taken its place.
The armed men cleared the streets of Edinburgh before her. She discovered that they were not taking her to Holyrood, but lodging her in the Provost’s House. She dismounted, still too proud to complain, still indomitable, and Morton led her up the stairway into a room that looked on the street.
“Is this for me?” she asked, peering in. The room was plainly furnished and she noted at once that it had no other exit than the door in which she stood.
“What will you do with me?” she asked.
“We must debate that.”
She faced him and struggled to recapture the brave words and gestures.
“You have broken your word to me — all of you — I am not to be treated as a queen as you promised. But I am the Queen nevertheless, and my last words shall be those of a queen.”
He smiled at her carelessly, then closed the door. Terror for a moment mastered her; she beat on the panels demanding liberty, or at least a woman, an apothecary, a priest. Then she controlled herself.
Of course she would not be left here long. Someone would rescue her — the Hamiltons, the Argylls, Atholl, Huntly. Then she thought of Lennox, the English, and Moray, and her spirits sank again.
There were no curtains at the windows, and forcing herself to walk slowly, she went to one of these and looked out. A flutter of white, vivid in the light of the torches burning below, met her as she pressed her face to the pane. It was the Banner again, the Banner of the rebellious Lords. She drew back from the window, and went to the door, turning the handle, uselessly, for it was bolted outside. She heard the ring of iron on iron which told her there were armed men on guard.
There was no mirror in the room, but she knew that her face was dirty, that her hair was in a tangle. She stared with disgust at her hands, blistered on the palms from the hard gauntlets and holding the reins so long.
There was a noise in the street and she went to the window again and looked out — the other window this time, not that before which they had hung the banner. The light from torches and lanterns filled the street, which was crowded with people. She could see clearly the upturned faces. What were they saying? She could not always understand the Scots tongue, but the meaning of the cry was clear enough:
“Kill! Kill! Burn! Burn! Slay the adulteress and murderess!”
The Queen was not afraid. She wanted to open the window, to call out to them, to justify herself, to say that she had no ill will to any of them, that she felt kindly towards Scotland, her ancient realm.
She fumbled with the bolt, but her weary fingers could not move it. She began to walk round the room. It was curious to be confined. She opened the chest in the corner and found it held the winter store of woollen hangings. She had no means of defence, no place to lie, no water; she beat on the door, asking for a drink of water. If only she could have Mary Seaton, the apothecary, or a priest. She went to the window again. A man was moving through the crowd which made way for him with respect. He looked up at her and she saw the worn face of Sir William Maitland. This time in her passionate flare of hope she found the force to burst the hasp of the casement open, and leaning out, she cried to Sir William to come up and speak to her, regardless of the hooting of the mob that went up at sight of her and the way they surged towards the door of the Provost’s House.
But he turned away, pulling his hat over his face, and passed through the crowd.
Then the Queen drew back from the window and fell on her knees, her body pressed against the wall. If only she could have got to Inchmahome with Lady Reres and the French girls — if only she could be hidden somewhere till the child was born. She thought of Claude, the girl whom they had hanged for murdering her baby. How women suffered … where could she find help, where? Pain lapped at her like rising water. Her senses blurred and she sank forward into unconsciousness.
*
When she came round she did not know if she had fainted or slept. It was dawn and light was growing in the half-furnished room.
No one had been near her, her lips were parched for lack of water, her hands dirty, her dress torn. She began to understand what was intended for her — the presence of Moray, implacable, monstrous, seemed to fill the room. She herself had signed the decree that gave death to the adulteress. Frenzy shook her — the stake, the axe, the rope.
She opened the window, the crowd was still below. She began to plead for pity, begging them to have mercy on her, to save her.
The door suddenly opened and she turned with such a vehement movement that she fell on to her knees.
It was Maitland who stood before her, and she remained on her knees staring at him and crying for pity. He made no attempt to comfort her and she began to threaten him as she had threatened Ruthven when David was killed.
“If you assist these rebels now, I shall know how to punish you. Ungrateful! Did I not save you from Huntly, and from my husband? I would I had let them slay you at my feet. You allow that flag to hang before my window, you allow them to keep me in this place, but you knew of it, you were an accessory to this murder of which there is such a clamour — you and Moray.”
“But it is not I nor he whom it will destroy,” replied Sir William.
“Let me go to my husband, only that! Where is he? At Dunbar?”
“Earl Bothwell has gone, perhaps to take farewell of his wife. He is a wise man and knows when he is defeated.”
“Farewell of his wife!” she repeated.
“Is it not known to all that the Earl still thinks himself married to Jane Gordon and holds the Queen’s Grace only as his concubine?”
The Queen did not answer that. The noise in the street increased as armed men tried to push their way through the crowd to drive the people back to their homes. “Where is my brother?”
“Madame, he has been sent for.”
She began to weep again and said it was cruel to separate her from her husband, with whom she expected much happiness. She repeated passionately that she was married, and it might be that she would have another child, which would be dishonoured by this separation.
“Married six weeks!” said Maitland.
She then asked him why he had come to visit her since he had no comfort to give, and said that the sight of him offended her.
He said:
“Madame, if you could forsake Lord Bothwell there might be some pity for you.”
“You told me, you yourself, that my one merit was in my fidelity to him.”
“So I think.”
“I love him and I shall be faithful to him.”
“If you only did, if you only could! But if that were in you, you were not in this plight now.”
“Yet to forsake him is my only hope of mercy?”
“Yes, madame, and therefore all the glorious action that is left you would be to cleave to him.”
She said to him, crying:
“What do you know of glorious actions? You are a liar, a traitor. I wish I had allowed my husband to kill you. You are a very mean creature.”
“Madame, I know it.”
Her thoughts turned swiftly to her own desperate need.
“What can you do for me?”
“I do not know, madame, everything is in the hands of Lord Moray.
I shall try to protect you till he comes.”
“How coldly you speak! What do the people want?”
“Revenge for the death of the young man.” Maitland added delicately: “Do you never weep for that?”
She laughed.
“There were so many young men who died bloodily. If I had begun to weep for them! Save me! I never harmed you. And Moray would not wish me hurt.”
“No, he would not wish that.”
“Nor shamed.” She seated herself on the edge of the bare bed. “You’ll think me shamed enough. But — worse might happen.” She forced herself to go on. “I need secrecy, rest, my women, my apothecary, do you understand? I was going to Inchmahome — but that is over. I am ready to die — but not that.”
“I understand,” said Sir William quietly. “I will do what I can.”
With no more than that he left her.
*
In the Privy Council chamber in Holyrood House, Morton and the Lords debated what was to be done with the Queen. They were in half a mind to let the people have their way with her, to avenge the murder of the King. Then the country would be in peace and they could crown the young King. But Sir William Maitland said that it was Moray’s wish that she should be saved. He was coming back and would himself decide her destiny. No one disputed Moray’s will for in all their minds he was master.
That night, obeying the commands that Moray had long since sent to Maitland in readiness for such an emergency, they took the Queen with Mary Seaton and two other gentlewomen, secretly, and heavily guarded, to a castle that belonged to Lord Moray’s mother, Margaret Douglas, called Lochleven.
In the tower of the castle the Queen lay for fifteen days desperately ill, only rousing now and then to drink a little water or a glass of wine.
She was housed pleasantly and most of her household had been allowed to attend her; she wanted for nothing. These had been Earl Moray’s commands — that she should want for nothing.
*
One night when the Queen had been at Lochleven for about three weeks, Lady Douglas, walking on the ramparts in the twilight, heard a French song coming from the tower where the prisoner was confined. It faded away into shrieks which were quickly muffled.
She moved away and shut herself in her own apartment, not being willing to see or hear more, but from her window that night she saw a figure which she knew to be that of the Queen’s apothecary trying to keep as close as possible to the shadow of the wall. Lady Douglas thought he had a bundle under his cloak.
*
John Knox returned to Edinburgh and after much conferring with Mr. Craig, the minister who had taken his place and who had refused, until he was forced, to obey the Queen’s express command to publish the banns of her marriage with the Earl Bothwell, they published a Proclamation.
“We take no pleasure,” said their Proclamation, “to deal with our Sovereign after this source as we are presently forced to do. We never were about in any wise to restrain her liberty, yet how horribly the King, Her Majesty’s husband, was murdered, is a common fable throughout Christendom. How shamefully the Queen our Sovereign was led by fear, force, and other extraordinary and more unlawful means, even to become bedfellow to another wife’s husband, to him who not three months before had in his bed most cruelly murdered her husband, is manifest to the world and to the great dishonour of Her Majesty, of us all, and this whole nation.
“What end think you could we have looked for the Earl of Bothwell in the progress of time, or in what bounds could his immoderate ambition have been concluded? What rested to finish the work begun, to accomplish the whole desire of his ambitious heart but to send the son after the father and it might be suspected, seeing him keep another wife in store, to make the Queen also drink of the same cup that in the end he might have possessed himself of the Crown of the Realm, which behoves to be the mark he shot at, so that though by wicked means this purchase must seem by the light of men’s favour.”
*
Towards the end of the month, Lord Lindsay and Sir Robert Melville went to Lochleven to obtain the Abdication of the Queen. This was Moray’s wish. She was to be completely overthrown, yet he would have no violence or force, and he commanded his wife, Agnes Keith, to go and attend on the Queen until his return.
The Queen lay in her bed, too weak to do more than raise herself on her elbow, which gave her a glimpse through the window of the grey waters of the lake, but she was relieved of her burden of shame and terror. She had not been able to save the child, but she had saved herself.
She tried to efface from her memory that awful night and the wretched creature that had never drawn breath as he lay ready to be buried. It had looked to her like Florestan, and she had cried out against their cruelty for murdering her son. She had meant to save the child, and have it secretly sent to France. But it had been born dead before its time; she believed that it had died within her while she was in the Provost House.
She had wept for the baby and begged them not to take it away. But as her strength returned she was glad to think that she had escaped the worse shame. She made no secret of her illness. The cruelty with which she had been treated had caused a miscarriage, she had lost her child, everyone ought to pity her distress.
While the Queen was still confined to bed a message was brought to her that she must instantly receive Lord Lindsay and young Lord Ruthven. She was told that they had come to receive her Abdication. She must sign three documents: One contained her consent to the government of her son and the total relinquishing of her own rights in Scotland. In the second she gave the Regency to the Earl of Moray, and the third named other Lords for this position in case Moray should refuse the dignity.
The Queen whispered from the bed: “What will they do if I will not sign?”
Agnes Keith slipped into her hand a letter in a cipher that was familiar to her — it was Sir William Maitland’s.
Propping herself upon her elbow she read it — a plea to her to do as the Lord asked in every respect. All her chances in the kingdom were totally lost and there was nothing she could save but her life, and that only by complete submission, while afterwards she could repudiate her Abdication as wrested from her by force.
The Queen put the letter down, puzzling over Maitland — was he friend or enemy? It hardly mattered, the advice was good and she thought that she saw Moray behind it — Moray, who did not wish her to be utterly destroyed.
If she would not sign the document they had, Lindsay told her bluntly, several expedients to destroy her. Had it not been for Moray’s device to send her to this water-ringed fortress, the people of Scotland would have destroyed her before. John Knox daily preached that a plague rested on the country while she lived, that the blood of Henry Stewart cried aloud for vengeance, and brought a curse on those who hesitated to kill his murderers.
“Oh, that!” said the Queen. “Have we not had many such murders in Scotland?”
“There is none,” replied Lindsay, “that has so shaken the mind of the people.”
He continued to speak against her, holding the papers through the bed-curtains, but she did not listen, for his voice was offensive to her. She peered over his shoulder at the young face of Ruthven. Mary Seaton had told her that this Lord was sorry for her, and had taken some of her messages to the English and the French envoys, and for that had been removed from among her guards.
She closed her eyes. They took her silence for an obstinate refusal, and Melville, who had smuggled in the warning from Sir William Maitland, was distressed at her stubbornness — he feared for her life. Who was there in Scotland who would blame these men if they killed her?
“You are rebels and traitors and cowards!” whispered the Queen, weakly, “and I will not give up the estate to which God called me. As for the murder of my husband—” She opened her eyes and looked up at them, still prone on the pillows, too weak to move: “I am innocent,” she said.
Lindsay glanced at Ruthven and said sourly:
“Madame, when
Earl Bothwell fled from Holyrood he left certain letters behind. They are in the possession of Earl Morton. You wrote them when you were at Glasgow with the King, the man who took them to Earl Bothwell was Nicolas Hubert.”
The Queen was silent. Then she said: “The letters are forgeries.”
“You would have to prove that,” said Lindsay, “and once they were published, I think it would matter very little whether you wrote them or no.”
Melville impatiently lifted the curtain higher and stared down at her:
“Sign, madame, for God’s sake.”
She called Mary Seaton to raise her up in bed. They put the papers on her knees and brought her an inkhorn and quill. She had never meant to do this, it had been her intention to die splendidly. If only they had let her go with Bothwell, to ride north beside him and take ship with him away from all of them. But she had not had that choice.
She signed her name three times. Then, while Lindsay took the documents, she lay down, gently assisted by Mary Seaton and hid her face in the pillows, without hope, almost without life.
*
“Madame,” whispered Mary Seaton, “Lord Moray is coming to Lochleven!”
These words came joyfully to the Queen, who since she had signed the Act of Abdication, had lain listlessly in bed.
“Oh, Mary!” Blood faintly tinged her face. “This is an answer to prayer, this is God’s protection of the innocent.”
“Why, madame, do you think my lord will do anything for you?”
“He has come!” said the Queen. “He cannot keep away, you see! He has everything, now, Mary, everything that was mine — the kingdom, the child, the affection of my subjects, my armed men, my forts and ships, all, all this and he has no need to think of me any more, but he has come, he has come, Mary!” She added, “What have we here for clothes and attire and jewels?”
“Very little, madame. There was one chest sent, but it has nothing but plain mourning robes and veils.”
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