Dacre's War

by Rosemary Goring

  The elm shivered in the late afternoon breeze, and her maids draped themselves in shawls. Margaret picked up the letter and, turning on her side, reread its criss-crossed page.

  Let me not bore you with an account of what you owe me, or I you. In a friendship such as ours, there is no abacus of debt. Yet it must be plainly acknowledged that my obligation is greater than yours. Even so, I feel confident I can make another claim on your good nature. If I tell you that aiding me in this matter will ultimately be to your advantage as well as mine, perhaps that might secure your answer. Although with one so generous as your highness, no sweetener is required, I feel sure, when appealing to your better nature.

  Margaret rolled onto her back, the letter pressed to her bodice. Save for passing him information lately that had prevented the regent Albany from marching his army into England, she had done little to earn his gratitude. On her side, the tally of what she owed was as long as a bishop’s homily. The slate had begun when Dacre found her dead husband on the battlefield. Without his word that he had seen James’s corpse, she might have believed the rumours that the king had survived and gone into hiding. Enduring the weeks after his death had been hard enough. She did not like to think what condition she would have been in had she hoped, in vain, for his return.

  In the long months after Flodden, Dacre had proved a friend. Margaret had been appointed regent, but many in the council, and beyond, wanted her gone. It was not just that she was a woman, though for most that was reason enough. Their misgivings lay in the letters that passed between her and her brother Henry VIII, a busy correspondence that saw her named the Tattler. She did not care. Without James at her side, Scotland was an alarming place for a widow with young princes in her care. Henry’s support and advice were a comfort. And Dacre, no doubt seeing the advantage in being the counsellor of his sovereign’s sister, became her staunchest ally. She never doubted that he acted from motives of self-interest, but then so did she.

  Only once did their friendship falter. Less than a year after Flodden, she had secretly married her lover, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. A few weeks before, she had hinted to Dacre that Angus and she were close. His lips had thinned, and he had taken her by the elbow beyond earshot of the rest of the room. ‘Bed him if ye must, milady, and no one will blame you for your needs. But marry him and you will seal your own ill fortune, and that of your country. Angus is a fool, as witless as he is pretty. He cannot make any woman happy.’ He caught her raised eyebrow. ‘Leastwise, ma’am, not for longer than an hour at a time.’

  Nevertheless she married the earl, and swiftly regretted it. Angus’s ardour dimmed before the year was out, his honeyed words growing more tart. Where once he had been content to lounge at her side, listening to her chatter while he toyed with her fingers, now he could think of nothing but who would run the country.

  It was little wonder. Their marriage not only ended Margaret’s regency, as they had feared, but brought Scotland under the control of her late husband’s cousin John Stewart, Duke of Albany. That Albany’s father had tried to usurp James III from the throne and been banished for life, and his associates executed, was conveniently forgotten, but Margaret had her suspicions of him from the start. As the years passed, he proved a presence unlike any she had encountered before. A handsome, haughty courtier, whose Scottish roots lay hidden beneath a veneer of Gallic charm, the scent of the French court was so overpowering whenever he walked into a room that he must surely have marinated himself in cologne overnight.

  That a man of such elegance could be so dangerous had never surprised her. Nobody was a greater threat to his ambitions that she. But others also wanted her gone. As resentment grew among a cabal of ill-wishers, led by the Earl of Arran who sought the throne for himself, she began to fear for her life. On a night she did not now like to recall, she had been obliged to ride for the borders, seeking Dacre’s protection. That was nine years ago, when a daughter was kicking in the womb, ready to make her arrival. More like bandits than royalty, Margaret and her servants had fled through the night to Harbottle, escaping before Albany and his gaolers knew she had crept out of Linlithgow Palace. Leaving her boys behind, she had taken the hill roads to safety.

  It was the last she saw of her younger son. Even now, the fear that little Alexander might have thought she had abandoned him tormented her. From Harbottle, and then Morpeth Castle, where Dacre insisted she retire for comfort, she had written to her boys each week, sending gifts of candied fruits and toys. She told them about their new little sister, Meg who, she promised, would be the perfect playmate for Alexander.

  Young Margaret was a strapping child who’d given her mother no worries except with her temper. But at the memory of her green-eyed boy, dying without her at his side to hold his hand, her throat tightened. James IV had not been a perfect husband, but she missed his laughter, his persuasive professions of undying love. He was obliged to say so many Hail Marys to atone for his constant straying, she marvelled he found time to attend council. Yet cruel as his infidelities were, she had learned to ignore what she did not, or ought not, observe. When he was taken from her, the unborn Alexander – her husband’s parting gift – promised in some measure to make up for his loss. But within two years the adorable boy, like his father, was also gone.

  Margaret tossed the letter onto the grass and closed her eyes, but even from a distance her maids saw the tears washing her powdered cheeks clean.

  The following day, the castle gaoler was ushered into the dowager queen’s apartment. His hair had been whipped into a tangled cloud, and his face was hot from his unaccustomed ride. The smell of straw and beer and well-worn hose entered the room with him and Margaret reached for a pomander, breathing deep before cupping it in her lap, as if she might require it urgently at any moment. The gaoler flushed and sweat pooled under his wilted ruff, deepening the scent that he exuded.

  The dowager queen did not offer him a chair. Though the furniture in this room was carved from wood, the palace’s silks and brocades kept for her private quarters, she could not have this begrimed man soiling her seats. Instead, she inclined her head in unsmiling welcome, and waved Dacre’s letter at him.

  ‘Keep your distance, my good man, and tell me what prisoners you have in your keep.’

  ‘All ae them, yer majesty?’ the gaoler asked. ‘The castle holds a hunerd and mair.’

  Margaret thought for a moment. ‘Very well. Those who are not yet old, and are able-bodied.’

  Rocking back on his heels, the gaoler lifted his eyes to the painted ceiling, coughed into his fist, and began to describe his charges. As he intoned his list a parade of ne’er-do-wells entered the small, stylish room, uninvited guests who made the dowager queen shiver. No wonder this man smelled so bad, keeping such company.

  It seemed the castle’s dungeons were brimful with killers and thieves. The hangman and executioner were kept so busy, there was a long queue for their services. Among them, she learned, there was a cut-throat who murdered scullery maids once they’d given him the key to the larder; a wet nurse who had smothered one too many of the infants in her care; a robber who bound and gagged his victims and threw them onto their own hearth fire to roast their way to the next life; and a religious maniac who believed in doing away with the pope, and would have died at the hands of the outraged folk of Leith had the military not taken him into custody for his heresy.

  ‘And then,’ the gaoler continued, warming to his task, ‘there’s a gang of pirates, your majesty, who’re for the scaffold next month. As nasty and vicious a pack as ye’ve ever met. Stealing, murdering, ravishing – there’s nothing they haven’t turned their hands to. Happy I’d be to twist the rope round their necks mysel. I seen what they done to one poor merchant’s family. Bloody beasts, they are. A shame on the good name ae Scotland.’

  Margaret leaned forward. ‘Tell me more about them,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A week or so earlier, a fleet of French ships sailed within view of the Gal
loway hills late in the afternoon. The day was mild and the water calm, still as a frozen pond. Marbled with the opal greens of an early autumn sea, its colours shifted and changed as currents dragged beneath its skirts. By the time the vessels had glided into the sheltered inlets that brought them far inland, night was close and mist was rising around the prows of these painted men-of-war, the blue and gold of the French court’s livery catching the dying light. Weighed down with their cargo of armoured men and horses, the fleet moved slowly, each ship reaching the Gare Loch and finding its harbour as if guided by a celestial hand.

  Long before they had dropped anchor, word of their arrival had licked along the Scottish coast by beacon and messenger. As they sailed into the cupped hand of this hill-bound port, the soaring masts and long-haired crew carried an echo of earlier visitors, butter-faced northerners who had once stepped ashore with swords at the ready and torches that turned the thatch of the first hovels they passed into bonfires announcing their presence.

  The loch’s new arrivals came not from the north but the south. There were blond heads among them, but more were dark, and none had a face of russet or whey. In the first ship, a gaunt, dark-eyed man leaned on the rails to watch as his men coiled chains around the dockside posts and lowered the narrow ramp. He was John Stewart, Duke of Albany, Scotland’s temporary, reluctant and often absent ruler. French by birth, manner and allegiance, the regent spoke the language of his father’s land with hesitation and distaste, as if each word were a crust that needed softening.

  Dressed more for an evening’s entertainment than for the gruelling march he planned into the borderlands, he wore a leather tunic over sleeves so puffed they might have been put to work as sails. On his bonnet bobbed a feather any peacock would have envied, and there was a flush high on his cheeks that, in the absence of a chafing breeze, was the only clue he was fathered by a Scot. When angered, which was often, Albany’s complexion turned from rose to red and swiftly into a sunset crimson.

  Now, however, the regent was in contemplative mood, and he looked out on this lonely harbour and its tipsy wooden houses with resignation. He sucked his teeth, suggesting he was already hungry for home. But for all his faults, Albany was a dutiful man, and he had never yet shirked the obligations his unwelcome regency imposed. Though he had taken on the role with Francis I’s blessing – rather, indeed, at his prompting, the French king seeing how useful Scotland might prove if governed by his protégé – it was his ceaseless demands that kept the Duke shackled at Fontainebleau, or in Paris, or in charge of the French army. Slipping from Francis’s grasp needed a tongue as oiled as a mackerel and persuasive as a priest, but the exhilaration of being freed from the king’s grip was some compensation for the misery of his days at the cold Scottish court, at the head of a fractious, anxious, vulgar people in a country where rain and the north wind were in a constant duel.

  Countless times in the past ten years he had sailed to Scotland. When the lords of the council had voted him regent in 1514, he had thought it would be a simple task to keep this diminutive land under control until the infant King James V was old enough to ascend the throne. Scotland, so soon after Flodden, was in a pitiful state, weak and woebegone after its leaders had been butchered, and worried as Henry VIII growled at their gates. All he need do, the regent initially thought, was remind Henry – a sensible man – of the advantages of maintaining good relations with his neighbour.

  He had not bargained for Francis’s desire to foment trouble with England, nor for James’s mother Margaret, who bitterly resented being ousted as regent. Nor had he anticipated the venom of the Douglases, in the person of the Earl of Angus, Margaret’s second husband, who believed his claim to power far exceeded the duke’s. As the son of a man charged with treason against his brother, the Scottish king, Albany sympathised with Angus’s view, though this he never betrayed. Raised among French courtiers and statesmen, where dissembling and deceit were as necessary to survive each day as bread and ale, he had learned young how to act as if entitled to a seat at the king’s table, even if there was no coat of arms over the family’s door, nor a sou to spare in its purse.

  He had never met the cousin into whose shoes he had stepped, but his father had spoken of him until the day he died. Where he left off, Albany’s mother took up the story, reciting the old litany of complaints as if they had never been aired before. Yet from what Albany had learned, Alexander was lucky to have lived to beget him. A less generous monarch than James III would have had him hunted down and executed for trying to remove him from the throne, and more than once. Instead, the old duke was banished, under sentence of death should he ever return. Had it not been for an ill-fated joust, where a splinter of spear pierced his helmet and entered his eye, he would have been allowed to grow old and objectionable in the company of his wife and her haughty kin in Auvergne. As it was, he was dead before young John could remember more of him than the roughness of his beard and the sour smell of his gloves, soaked in sweat after a hard day’s hunting.

  Albany lowered his gaze from the Gare Loch hills to a callus on his thumb, which he began to pick. He scowled, as if this blemish was what most worried him, rather than the ranks of enemies and naysayers he must soon face. There were as many in this country as over the border. Nor did the Scots make simple foes. They changed sides faster than a gambler turns cards.

  He winced as he peeled off a sliver of skin. When, to signal an end to their quarrel some years before, the dowager queen had taken his hand, she had looked startled, and examined the rough skin with a frown. ‘James’s palm was the same,’ she said, ‘from the way he gripped the reins. He never had a light touch, always clutching as if he feared they’d slip through his fingers.’ She looked up and, to his surprise, cupped his hand against her cheek, eyes closed as if she had forgotten whom she was with.

  The regent was that day invited into her bedchamber, where for some months he was a frequent visitor. On that first occasion he was eager but wary, mistrusting a woman who until that meeting had appeared to wish him dead; then, when those fears were assuaged, he hoped she would not misconstrue their liaison as anything more than a dalliance. He was soon to realise that Margaret was the one in control, in this and all her relationships. Passionate and abandoned she might at times be, but there was iron in her soul. Mercury too, he guessed, given her shifting moods and grievances. Albany found her quixotic, unfathomable and fascinating – family traits, if one were to believe what they said of her brother, the English king. Their soft conversations, cocooned in her canopied bed, would have beguiled him utterly had he not remembered the other Margaret, the woman he had met on his first arrival at Holyrood Palace, whose eyes had narrowed at the sight of him.

  On the day the court gathered to welcome their new ruler, he bowed, and she curtseyed with a sarcastic flourish. Courtiers and council looked on, eyes shifting from one player to the other. The hall took on the air of a cockpit when the crowd is waiting for the spurs to be removed. While the privy councillors appeared cordial – some preening with delight at his appearance – Margaret’s head was held high, her netted coif quivering with pearls. At her side was her husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Striking in a tunic of gold and green, his legs were like stalks of ripe wheat. His smile held no warmth, and although the earl would have offered no serious challenge to the duke had they met in combat, the regent was not accustomed to such naked loathing, and his colour rose.

  ‘Your grace,’ said Margaret, before Albany could speak, ‘you honour us with your presence, come all the way from France, in such style. It is your first visit to this land, I am told. How extraordinary! Yet Scotland looks forward to making your acquaintance.’ She turned to face the court, her fury encompassing everyone in the hall. ‘As you will appreciate, it is not easy for me to meet my usurper, nor to tolerate the disloyalty of those in this room who unseated me.’ Her voice began to rise, and she pressed her hands on her bodice, steadying herself. ‘My beloved late husband James designated me regent
should he die. That his court saw fit to overturn his wishes and have me stripped of office is not merely a humiliation for me, but dishonour to his name. Those who have played a part in this deed ought never sleep easy again.’

  A muttering was heard from among the courtiers, and heels rasped on the flagstones.

  ‘Queen Margaret,’ said Albany, appalled to see her wipe away a tear, ‘no one meant you any ill-will. Surely one in your position must recognise better than most that my appointment is expedient, not treacherous.’ He looked at the Earl of Angus, who stared at a point above the regent’s head as if measuring the beam. ‘Had you not remarried,’ he continued, ‘you would have retained the role until young James’s accession.’

  ‘So you say,’ sniffed Margaret, ‘but I have reason to doubt that.’ She raised a hand to silence his reply. ‘Enough. I am not one to hold a grudge. I leave it to our holy father in heaven to weigh the scales and settle scores in the next life if not in this. Meanwhile, I ought to warn you that you will find this country very different from your homeland. It will take years to learn her ways.’

  Her glance took in Albany’s fur-lined cloak and Italian boots, the earring tickling his collar, and her words were heavy with contempt. ‘And yet I hear you are not planning a long visit. Such a pity. There is so much work for one in your role, it is difficult to understand how it could be done from France. Scotland cannot be governed from afar, you know. When trouble arises here, it spreads fast. That you will very quickly discover.’

  Before he could respond she turned and left the hall, her stiff gown swaying like a tolling bell, her husband at her heels. A burst of brittle laughter came from the passageway as the door closed behind them, but whether it was from Margaret or Angus the regent could not tell.

  Once she was gone the Scottish court gathered around him, clucking with excitement, and keen to sound him out on more subjects than could be discussed in a year. After an hour, when it was evident even to the clansmen from the western isles that Albany was flagging, an equerry led him to his rooms, where a table was laid with wine and biscuits. ‘You will wish to rest, your grace,’ said the servant. ‘Dinner will commence in the great hall at the hour of four. Until then I will see you are not disturbed.’