The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  And there were others. Two months after the Coronation, Laud had been made Archbishop of Canterbury, and had at once appointed a majority of bishops on the Scottish Privy Council. With arrogant simplicity, he believed that devout Churchmen must make the best rulers; but the nobles expressed a blasphemously opposite view, for they found themselves out-voted by the bishops, who were safe to vote only as the King wanted, since they held their appointments from the Crown.

  All that King Charles wanted was ‘to promote, first, the good and peace of the Church, and, second, the increase of religion’. To do this, he proposed to uproot the aforesaid Church, and remodel it without sanction from Scotland.

  He had all the less right to meddle with Scotland, since he was never the formal head of her Church, as he was of the Church of England. But he, the dilettante art-collector, and ‘the clothier’s son’, with his doubly hereditary liking for a neat and elegant appearance, had both been shocked by the Scottish churches – not merely by the lack of beauty and music and fine vestments, but often by the sheer filth and squalor, the deliberate disorder, the loud, irreverent voices of people who refused to kneel to their God even when they received communion, but stared critically at the preacher as if challenging him to speak any better than they.

  So Charles, on leaving his native country, ordered prayers to be held in the King’s Chapel at Holyrood, as in England, with surplices and a monthly Communion, to be received kneeling, that there might be this single oasis in the desert of Scottish self-conceit and stubbornness before their God. He had restored the tithes to the Kirk, and given it financial independence. But of what use was material aid? It was the soul of religion he longed to save, all through his kingdoms.

  This he now set out to do, with the romantic enthusiasm of a Crusader. And beside him, urging him on whenever his dilatory spirit slackened, was Laud, his new Archbishop of Canterbury, of whom old King James had years ago complained that he loved to toss and change and to bring matters to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain’.

  A book of instructions in the new form of Church government was published in England and sent up to Scotland. It was called the Book of Canons; it promised that a new Prayer Book would arrive shortly, which must be read on pain of high treason in all Scottish churches, in place of John Knox’s Book of Common Order, or the improved Liturgy of Aberdeen, or any version ordained by the Kirk. And the English Archbishop, ‘assisted’ by some English and two or three Scottish bishops in London, had prepared this book, in insult to the national religion.

  English bishops were the enemy, Scottish bishops the traitors, and all bishops the villains of the piece.

  To threaten a people with high treason for not using a book which was not yet published, struck Napier as a safe prophecy of a national crisis.

  He sat down in his house at Merchiston to write to Montrose, with a greater urgency than he had used since the young man had left home three years before.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Belatedly, as always in the case of any severe shock, Montrose began to suffer the effect of his disillusionment with his sister. He went to France in search of her and her Frenchman, and found no chance to trace them. He lost hope, not only of finding her, but of there being any use in doing so. She had chosen her way, and it was not his; it was the way of Carlippis, who pursued his own ends. His end had been a comfortable passage to Italy; hers had been adventure, devoid of any further purpose. Passionless, except in her wild egoism, she could rejoice in setting out to sea in a sieve, without rudder or anchor.

  She had destroyed Montrose’s first and best chance to make friends with his King; and this was to affect the lives of both men until the end.

  Yet still more important to them both, later on, was her effect now upon her brother’s spirit; which had accepted the good things of this life so gaily and unthinkingly, and was for the first time overcast with doubt and question. Kat had chosen her way, and he only wished he knew where to choose his.

  But his disillusionment did not prevent him from having a very good time. He distinguished himself in the school of arms at Angers; he stayed at the delightful châteaux on the Loire, joining in the royal hunting and boating parties; he was well accepted at Court, for Louis XIII liked superb young horsemen with good looks, and would invite him to ride beside him in the hunt, reminding him of the close alliance there had always been between their countries. The name of Scotland’s lovely and unhappy Queen Mary was still remembered in these woods for her fearless riding.

  Queen Anne of Austria, whose beauty had been wasted on a cold husband, and abortive, unhappy love-affairs that could satisfy little more than her vanity, was coyly appreciative of Montrose’s qualities. And the Dowager Queen, Marie de Medici, moaned to him about her darling daughter, Henrietta Maria, the only one of her children who really understood her – ‘She longs for me to visit her in England, that peaceful and prosperous country, where there are no wars nor troubles, as everywhere else in Europe.’

  The news from Scotland did not sound so peaceful. Napier, who was a good letter writer, kept him in touch with them from time to time, but it was all a great way off, and all the news had happened a long time ago; and Scotland was not as exciting as ‘the rarities of the East’, which he had longed to see ever since he had been a boy.

  And now he met his chance of far distant travel in a Genoese sea-captain, who was on business in Paris, and in a few days would join his ship at Havre and set out for India to trade in spices, silks and jewels. He found the young Scottish noble restless and anxious for some new adventure, and persuaded him to join them. Leaning across the rough oak table in the inn corner, lithe, laughing, taut with the continued expectation of danger, the Genoese promised that Montrose should see heathen temples hidden in the jungle, and gods carved out of gold and silver, with a hundred breasts and arms, should ride an elephant and shoot a tiger.

  An overland route to India would lead Montrose through Persia and Turkey as well as half the countries of Europe, but when he put this to his new friend, the captain countered him with the advantage of his new galéasse, the fastest flying vessel ever yet built.

  ‘For please,’ he said, ‘on the road, it is not convenient that you make something always. The night, he come, you sleep – or you do not sleep. Ah those inns! The fleas! The robbers! The women! The pox! In any case, you make nothing. But with me, you sleep, and the ship makes something. You wake up, you are many miles nearer India. It is more convenient.’

  His dazzling smile lit up his lean, dark, rugged face; enormous earrings dangled on either side of his short black beard; his hair was as stiffly bushy as an Ethiopian’s. A son of the ancient Ligurian race, its blood mingled with that of Saracen pirates, he belonged not only to the keen commercial Italy of the present day, but to an age ‘when the world had not yet adored Rome, nor the ocean yielded the precedence to Tiber’. That sentence from an adventure story Jamie had read at school now convinced him more than his companion’s eloquence. And when he diffidently admitted to talking Italian, the matter was decided, so clear was it that more than all else in life it was ‘convenient’.

  But when he returned to his lodgings, he found letters come from home, and one was from Magdalen.

  She never urged his return, never even asked about it. She gave him news of the estates, and the improvements her father was making in the policies, and news of the children. James the younger (for James had refused to be a daughter, and her reprisal for that was to call him by his father’s name, but never by the diminutive that all used for him) – James was growing stronger every day, though he was not near as big as Johnnie had been at his age. And Johnnie, aged five, was so forward that Master Forrett had taught him to read from a horn-book; and he rode his pony gallantly, had good hands and an easy seat; he saluted his father’s portrait every morning, and it was remarkable how like it he himself was growing.

  Her restraint struck her young husband for the first time. He knew the difficulty she always
found in writing a letter, not in the actual writing and spelling, for she had been taught better than many young women of her rank, but in choosing her words, and even her subject. She would sit biting the fronds off her quill, stroking it against her chin, frowning till her brows nearly met together. ‘There is no need to say that,’ she would answer to most suggestions.

  Suddenly she had felt the need to tell him all this. His sons were growing, and he had not even seen the younger; and all that the boys could know of their father was that portrait that Jameson had painted of him when he was seventeen, just before his wedding.

  And in a flash he remembered coming in out of a windy autumn night, and sitting at Morphie’s table, and not listening to a word the old man was saying about that portrait, his wedding present to them, but crumbling his bread and marshalling the pellets beside his plate into regiments and emplacements, while in his head there sang a high wild song without words, because he was to be married to Magdalen tomorrow.

  He turned sharply to the other letter that the post had brought him. It was from Archie Napier; and for no reason Jamie felt a keen anxiety as he broke the seal. Had Magdalen fallen ill since she had written?

  More than a year ago, Napier had written to tell Montrose of the death of his own wife, ‘dear Margaret’, as all thought of her. The shock of that news had made Montrose search his letters first for any personal names before reading them through. So that he was immediately relieved to find the troubles he feared were only public, not private.

  But then he grew disturbed, as he followed more closely the fine, upstanding strokes of Napier’s handwriting. It was not like Archie to be an alarmist, but what was all this about an English book of rules for Scotland’s worship? What right had any foreigner to meddle in the way that Scots addressed their God?

  ‘Oh wha dare meddle wi’ me?’ he whistled, but his anger was grave enough. His ancestor and namesake, James Graham, had saved Scotland three times from the power of England. Now that would be in vain. This bugbear that Scotland had fought against from the beginning of time, spilling her dearest blood to escape it, had come once again suddenly, insidiously near at hand. Was Scotland after all to suffer English rule, to pay her money to England, to have even her religion, the trophy she had won from Rome, dictated by an English priest?

  If so, his true adventure lay at home. He would return by London, and at last see Charles, this time in his Court at Whitehall. Napier hoped for this, it was plain, for he told him that the best person to introduce him to his sovereign was the great Scottish Marquis of Hamilton, Charles’ closest and most trusted friend.

  Now was his chance, far more than at the Coronation; now that he had seen the world, was an experienced man, and not a raw home-bred youth, might he not now be the means of reconciling his King with his country, and liberty with loyalty?

  Once again the crowded foreground of his life shivered and broke up. All the plans of his Eastern voyage scurried away like so much sea-drift. So did the invitation of King Louis to hunt with him for several days at his ‘absurd little box of a place at Versailles’; and a more embarrassing invitation from Queen Anne to meet her as by accident one evening in the gardens of the Louvre, and there walk with her and talk of his country, ‘for she finds the English type extremely sympathetic,’ said the pretty waiting-maid who so discreetly submitted the invitation, after a preliminary altruistic flirtation that Montrose had ingenuously supposed to be conducted only on her own account.

  None of these things needed now to be considered. His narrow Parisian lodgings went whirling about him – that book of Montaigne’s essays must be returned to the old doctor at the Sorbonne – that bill for his new stirrups must be paid at once – that tedious letter from the French savant, inquiring into his ancestry from Antoninus, could now be left unanswered.

  Suddenly he was free again, at large, and starting on his adventure.

  ‘Willy,’ he shouted, flinging open the door on to the staircase, to be greeted by the rich, garlic-haunted smell of cooking that was so soon to become first strange and then forgotten – ‘Willy, are you there? Have you brought all my things from Angers?’

  ‘Why yes, my lord,’ answered Willy’s voice. ‘Are we to start so soon for the Indies?’

  ‘Not the Indies this time. We start for home tomorrow.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Montrose’s impression of the French Court had been that of a perpetual family quarrel; his impression of the English was that of domestic bliss. Domesticity was all the fashion, in piquant contrast with the scandals of the last reign. Those obscure, unhappy vices of the old King James, that ugly son of a beautiful mother, whose instincts had been somehow frightened and twisted before he was born, were now in the shade; and the royal nursery held instead the public eye.

  The little Princess Elizabeth, the little Prince Charles, the Princess Mary, and the baby Prince James, were continually seen in their nurses’ arms in varieties of lace caps, and, later, playing with their spaniels, riding their ponies, running through the Home Park, and being rowed in little boats at their river palace at Hampton Court. Their sharp sayings and engaging pranks were quoted throughout the kingdom.

  And presiding over these infant angels was the devotion of their parents to each other. King Charles was so handsome and dignified and so adored his charming Queen, their children were so pretty and quaintly precocious, that it seemed as though this English royal family were that in a fairy tale, who must all live happily ever after.

  Charles was indeed like a certain prince in a fairy tale, one that was begun by Kat, and ended at its first sentence: ‘There was once a prince that was enchanted, but did not know in what respect he differed from other men.’

  For here was this prince who had youth and looks and courage and perseverance; whose opinions were often sound, and intentions excellent; whose family life was beyond reproach. But was that because he was beyond temptation?

  That shrewd Frenchwoman, his wife, had declared petulantly (jealous as she would have been if taken at her word) that she wished Charles had managed to fall in love with some other woman once or twice, whether before or after matrimony – it would have made him more like other men.

  For he never seemed quite to belong to their world, and that not because he created another, as poets do, or seers. He was too facile; even in his dreams everything had to be made easy for him. ‘If I were only—’, ‘if it could so happen—’, with these opiates in the place of an active desire, he would lie on his day-bed, looking out through the little window panes on to the lawns and flower-beds of Hampton Court, and see the trees waving that Henry VIII had planted, and think in some confused way how odd it was that Henry was dead, and he was alive; but indeed he was not thinking – he was seeing, minute after minute, hour after hour, a picture of that beloved scene before him – which, if only he could paint—’

  But no creative pulse throbbed in those sluggish veins. He was not an artist, but a collector. It needed someone from outside – a friend, or his Queen, always urging him to something, or a despairing messenger, sent to remind him yet again that this or that was waiting to be settled – to tell him that he must do something.

  Dully he rose, wishing he were a hermit of old, so that his lethargy could be called contemplation. But kings must be decisive, and he could show himself as good a king as any – and the result of that was often some disconcertingly sudden action, made without any reference to his counsellors, who knew nothing about it till it was over.

  For no man had less of the social sense than Charles; he was a unit, moving blindly in his own circuit, incapable of teaching or learning from others. Someone must stand between him and them.

  As a child all his trust and admiration were placed in his brother Henry, six years older than himself. He watched Henry ride at tournaments and take a toss, and spring up muddy and laughing to catch his horse; he heard his gay, conquering shouts at fencing or tennis when he pushed his rolled-up shirt-sleeve across his hot face. T
he pale timid child resolved that he too would one day do these things, so that Henry should no longer treat him as a baby with rough tolerant kindness, but as a man and a brother.

  He did it. The child who at four years old was too feeble to walk or talk, had become a remarkably fine horseman by the time he was twelve. But well before that time, his magnificent brother had died; and Charles had to carry on alone.

  He could not do that. All his strength and determination were needed to make a man of himself; he had none over to expend on the world round him. People seemed to him now dark, now light, without reason. He never saw why they said this or that; their actions were those of a puppet show – and someone must act the showman to him.

  After Henry’s death, the young Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, came to fill his place. How impudently silly was ‘Steenie’s’ behaviour in Spain, when he and Charles went together to woo the Spanish Infanta, incognito, as Mr Thomas Smith and his servant! And there was his outrageous indiscretion with the beautiful young Queen of France, Anne of Austria!

  Yet young Charles, modest, shy, reserved, had been enviously dazzled by it. As long as Buckingham lived, he saw the world only through those bright and dissipated eyes, so unlike his own. But with the same dragon-fly inconsequence as he had lived, Buckingham died, stabbed by an assassin. His death was more sudden than any of his actions.

  They brought the news to Charles in the Chapel at Hampton Court; and he continued to repeat the chanting words of the Service, his face unaltered, unaware. By finishing whatever it was he was doing, by refusing to take in what he had heard, his mind could creep back for a little space into the black mercy of unconsciousness.

  But the world forced its way in; forced him to know that the rudder of his life was broken.

  Gradually, however, substitutes were found.