The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  Then Warriston yapped – ‘A trick! Another trick! All this accursed trickery!’

  Accusations burst round him like musket fire. He was confronted with his own letters to the King. Sentences were read from his last, dated October nth, in which he had warned Charles of treachery in ‘a business which did concern the standing and falling of his crown’.

  It was Argyll who read it; as he finished, his uncertain squinting glance peered up over the letter to see how Montrose took it. Everyone was watching to see that.

  It was early in the afternoon, but the sky was already growing darker outside; he could hear the wind rushing through the trees, a leaf came tap-tapping at the window pane.

  ‘Oh God, shall I ever be on the hillside again?’ he thought.

  The room narrowed round him; the ring of suspicious, silent faces hemmed him in; he seemed to stand outside his body, to be looking down on it and on his King, dispassionate, removed.

  Then they began to speak again, and with the buzz and crack of angry voices, time rushed back round him, and all the immediate urgency of this moment. Will Murray must have betrayed him; and his letters were being used against Charles as well as himself. The two of them, King and subject, were practically charged with plotting together to destroy Hamilton and Argyll. He could not make it out. A crowd of enemies, a web of plots and cross-purposes bound them hand and foot and tongue. He was at last face to face with his King, and they could say nothing to each other.

  But could they not? What had this pack of little animals to do with them? His blood stirred quick and strong, and the undercurrent of his thought spun most oddly into rhyme:

  Can little beasts with lions roar,

  And little birds with eagles soar?

  He turned to the King, knowing only that he would speak to him direct. Something that he had said elsewhere came unintended to his lips – ‘Truth does not seek corners. It needs no favours.’

  The unexpected words put a hush upon the scene. The others looked uneasily upon him, wondering what manner of man was this, their prisoner, who had taken command of them.

  But Montrose did not notice what he had done to them. He was asking the King to tell him what was this plot, in which they were both supposed to be concerned, ‘for I know nothing of it.’

  ‘It is this,’ said the King, and told it, simply and straightforwardly, though his speech fell back once or twice into the slight stammer that he had outgrown.

  On the evening of II October (on the morning of that day, Montrose remembered, his last letter had been taken from his prison by Will Murray) Hamilton came to the King as he was walking in the dusk of the garden at Holyrood, with some quite unimportant petition – and then, ‘in a philosophical and parabolical way, began a very strange discourse.’

  A faint undercurrent of amusement ran through the room at this description, and sly glances shot in the direction of the Marquis’ self-conscious countenance.

  He complained, said Charles, of calumnies against him, and asked permission to leave the Court for a time. By next morning his dearest friend had betrayed him to the suspicion of his enemies, for he and Argyll had fled together to Kinneil Castle, a house of Hamilton’s about twenty miles off. Charles was then told that they had done this because they had heard of a plot to assassinate them in the King’s own drawing-room, which the murderers were to enter by a door from the garden.

  ‘But not one word of this plot did my lord Hamilton tell me in the garden,’ said Charles. ‘Once when he was accused of treason, I took him to sleep in my bedchamber, to show I had no doubts of him – and this is how he repays my trust, by suspecting me as a murderer.’

  Hamilton announced in a stately voice that he had always been very active in the King’s service.

  ‘My lord Marquis,’ replied the King, ‘has been very active in his own preservation.’

  There was an uncomfortable pause, while the two runaways tried to look like the injured patriots that the crowd had applauded on their return to Edinburgh from their flight.

  While in a day all Charles’ hard-won popularity had been snatched from him; he was looked on as a man too weak to play the tyrant, who had fallen back on the old treacherous methods of assassination. ‘Never was King so insulted,’ remarked a dispassionate observer. Worst of all, he had begun to expect insults.

  He had asked for an open inquiry, had demanded it of Parliament with threats that he could not carry out; he now begged it of these ‘examiners’, even as his grandmother, Mary Stuart, had begged, and was refused, until the time of her execution.

  Did he remember that now, as he appealed for a chance to clear his honour?

  ‘That chance is given to the meanest of my subjects. But you withhold it from your King, as you withhold it from his servant.’

  Montrose saw to his dismay that his eyes were swimming in tears. His King, who could never have quite ceased to be a child, was pleading to that company of hardened and wary men – ‘I have granted you more than any king ever granted yet – and what have any of you done for me?’

  It was a pitiful, an unkingly cry; only a bewildered simplicity in it prevented it from being abject. Charles was tasting that worst intoxicant, the tears of his ill-usage.

  ‘Why do you use me thus?’ he cried. Never would he see why, nor what manner of men were those with whom he had to deal.

  Argyll answered him in language as ‘philosophical and parabolical’ as Hamilton’s own. The ship of His Majesty’s kingdom in Scotland had long been tossing in a tempestuous sea; it only required that he should give way to those well-wishers who would lighten her by casting out the most dangerous of her crew.

  At that ominous warning, all glanced at Montrose, who seemed now to be following Strafford so closely, each step nearer to the scaffold.

  But Montrose himself scarcely attended to Argyll’s threat, or to the shudder that it gave even to his enemies. He had eyes only for Charles; and in them was sympathy, but also sternness, for they demanded of him that he should show himself their King.

  Under that resolute gaze, something of his old high temper was restored to Charles. He turned upon Argyll, and said, ‘You attack this man, and deny him an open inquiry, as you deny me. We ask for the truth, but you hide it in corners. All you have given me is a private inquiry by a few of your committee – I am not allowed to be present, and all the members are sworn to secrecy. You choose your own witnesses, you refuse even to make public what evidence you do extract. Your private inquiry is nothing but a private way to hell.’

  A nervous silence fell on the room; however much the King was in their power, it was tactless of him to express it so plainly, it made all the proper formulas sound absurd. They turned instead on Montrose, to see what admission they could wring out of him in the shock of his surprise that his private letters had been discussed by them all. Failing to get any admission of deeds against themselves, they inquired into his intentions.

  He answered slowly, and not to them. To his King, he said, ‘My resolution is to carry along with me fidelity and honour to the grave.’

  In such strange circumstances did he make his pact with Charles. Then the one prisoner was led back to the Castle; the other remained among his Court.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As the coach bumped and jolted back up the long hill to his prison, Montrose peered out through its windows at the wild evening sky, torn into rags of cloud and pale light by the west wind; at the houses, tottering up like witches; at the octagon of the Market Cross, where he had stirred the crowd to resist the King’s command. Now the Castle rose ahead of him, its outer wall blotted out the sky; his glimpse of the outside world was at an end.

  Yet in it he had tasted the freedom of his mountains and woods as he had not done in all his years of enjoyment of them – and the glimpse had been enough to set his heart singing:

  The misty mount, the smoking lake,

  The rock’s resounding echo,

  The whistling winds, the woods that shake,

/>   Shall all with me sing heigho!

  He was stringing rhymes in his head as he used to do in his schooldays; he stepped out of the coach between his guards, into the Castle courtyard, high up above the town that lay like a mist below, with that soft autumnal wind blowing all round him.

  Door after door clanged behind him. He stood in the chill silence of his cell, in the smell of damp stone – the dead smell of a church.

  There were his papers, just as he had left them, scattered and untidy, when he had been summoned without any warning at a quarter past one this very afternoon. He sat down, pulled them towards him, and read what he had last written:

  ‘And you great men – if any such be among you so blinded with ambition – who aim so high as the crown, do you think we are so far degenerate from the virtue, valour, and fidelity to our true and lawful sovereign as to suffer you with all your policy to reign over us?’

  The great men who aimed so high as the crown had it now in all but name. Across his words swam the crafty, sullen face of Argyll, the doubtful face of Hamilton, the two Kings of Scotland. He looked at the door, through which little Will Murray had pranced in a reek of perfume, flourishing his letter to King Charles, and had shown it to those two men.

  His mood, though now changed to despair, was still singing, still stringing rhymes; he tried to think of his newly formed theories of government, but when he began to write, his pen went over to the side of the page and dashed down in sprawling letters:

  Then break, afflicted heart, and live not in these days,

  When all prove merchants of their faith, none trusts what

  other says.

  But it was not as he had heard it in his head, and there was a vile smell of tallow. The wind that blew so fresh and sweet outside the Castle walls, was whistling through the door in a shrewish draught and blowing his candle so that it guttered all down one side, forming a shroud. As he leaned forward to pinch out the supposed omen, he knew the reason of his suddenly hopeless mood, deeper than any that Argyll or Hamilton could cause.

  In two pictures, seen in flashes, it came to him; the one, of Strafford lying on the scaffold, with his head severed from his body; the other, the face of King Charles that afternoon.

  As he had risen from kissing his hand, and looked into the face of his King, he had seen behind the slippery and rootless optimism that had been making Charles turn this way and that, thinking to charm even such ruthless wills as Argyll’s to his own purpose.

  He had seen that the King’s face was that of a man doomed, and knowing it. He had sent his servant, Strafford, to his death; and he would have to pay.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘James, you are stymied.’

  They were at the third hole; the course was only seven, but there were about five hundred yards between each of them. Charles, partnered by Rothes, led by one, in a foursome with Argyll and Hamilton, attended by a few of his gentlemen. It was the first raw week of November, the wind had turned cold, and the King, for all his short legs, strode out briskly.

  He was feeling cheerful. He was beating Argyll at his own game, for this was the only exercise that Argyll cared for; and it was the reward of virtue, since, for popularity’s sake, Charles had given up a hunt in order to march in sober procession in this national and democratic sport. His popularity was coming back; everyone in time would see he was right. Henderson had grown markedly sympathetic; even Argyll had sometimes seemed convinced by his arguments; Rothes was coming round wholeheartedly to his side. It was made well worth his while to do so, for he had been promised high office in England, and marriage to the rich Countess of Devon – and Rothes was not the man to reject these plums.

  It was unfortunate that he was apoplectic; his enormous face looked quite blue as he puffed his way over the links. With a cold eye, Charles calculated the improbability of any lasting support from his chief convert. At any moment a dinner, such as he had seen him eat, or rather drink, last night, might ensure Rothes’ neutrality for ever.

  But in the meantime, he and Rothes were winning, and exhilaration filled his veins as he watched James Hamilton play an heroic shot well past the hole. It was now his own turn to play; it was a long putt, and the ground uneven – a stone lay between him and the hole, and the sternly Calvinistic edict of Aberdeen had gone forth, allowing for no injustice of fate, and no remission of it: ‘No stones shall be removed when putting at the hole.’

  He chose a slender wooden spoon-faced club and was addressing himself to the ball when a man suddenly appeared at the top of the bunker. It was Traquair, who came stumbling down through the whin towards them, holding out papers to the King.

  Charles swore with great fluency. ‘Must even the links become a council board?’ he demanded through his profanity.

  On Traquair’s long face, heavy and inexpressive as it was, there yet showed signs of some dreadful calamity.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘there is bad news from Ireland.’

  Charles, who had once again raised his club, lowered it, and drew a deep breath.

  ‘When,’ he asked, ‘has the news from Ireland not been bad?’

  ‘Your Majesty – it may put an end to everything. It is the most hideous – it is the Papist Irishry—’

  He stumbled on with sledge-hammer obstinacy. The King should know the worst, but not until he had asked for it properly. Until at last, in spite of his exasperation, Charles did so.

  He was told that in a single night the Catholics had risen and murdered their Protestant neighbours. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of the peaceful inhabitants of King Charles’ possessions had been wiped out – and in the name of the religion which King Charles was believed to support in secret.

  The reaction to such a crime was bound to be unreasonable. There was nothing too bad for people to say. So the King must act at once, must return to England and reassure his country. But even before acting, and even more important, he must express his horror and amazement, must sever himself utterly from the accursed thing.

  This, Traquair had realized when he had tried, but with blundering tactlessness, to prepare Charles to show horror before he told its cause.

  The little group of men waited, white and aghast, for Charles to speak. But Charles did not speak. He showed neither horror nor amazement.

  He waited till Traquair had finished, then raised his club a third time. Traquair had done his best to put him off his game. He would not be put off. His slow and solitary mind was telling him to shut out the damning fact, reminding him of the refuge of the child who ‘has not taken it in yet’.

  So he kept his eye on the ball, and with precision played his stroke; his ball just skirted the stone, and wriggled back into its course from the uneven ground on that side, then, neatly, decisively, it dropped into the hole.

  He looked round on his company. They hastily sprang to attention and said it was a master stroke, as indeed it was. But he had seen their pale, abstracted faces, heard an anxious whisper or two.

  Still he ignored them, said blandly to Rothes, ‘Two up and four to play. Your turn to drive, my Lord Rothes.’

  Rothes, not so imperturbable, fluffed his drive.

  With determination as grim as if the game were the predestined act of God (as no doubt it was), Charles played it out to the end, dragging in his wake the three nobles who longed to be released from it to discuss this terrible disaster.

  Rothes pounded after the King, inwardly cursing the swiftness of the royal stride, and gasped out how urgent it was that he should return to London at once.

  Charles replied that he had given his promise to Montrose not to leave the country until he got his trial – ‘if I leave him, all the world will not save his life.’

  Rothes gave a sudden breathless snort, either curse or contemptuous exclamation, and ran hastily on into words.

  ‘He’ll not get his trial as long as Your Majesty is here.’

  ‘That may be,’ said Charles stubbornly, ‘but it would not be to my honour if I leave
before he is released.’

  Was he trying to make amends for Strafford, with Montrose? Rothes was shrewd enough to guess it, but he did not much care – the whole of the leaden sky seemed to have dropped into his stomach, which heaved and surged like a stormy sea, as he thundered on – was it the sound of his own steps that made that roaring in his ears?

  ‘Honour,’ he muttered, ‘who has it? “He that died o’ Wednesday.”’ More clearly he said, ‘Better go, sir. Montrose will do better without you.’

  The King’s proud, hurt glance went past him without his even seeing it.

  Principalities and powers, what were they worth now to Rothes? Not as much as a good feather bed. And who wanted a rich English countess in it, if he could get a French warming pan instead – and sleep – and sleep. And he had had enough to pay for that without his tithes. So what had all that bother been for?

  ‘Pother, bother, pother, bother,’ he muttered as he tramped, and each foot went down into the bowels of the earth, and had to be dragged up again – and why? It was earth to earth, wasn’t it? Or was that in the Prayer Book, that they had all made such a to-do against – and why? For they were good words, sound words, ‘earth to earth’.

  Stumbling on, not seeing where to avoid the furze bushes and the boulders, he thought of that young man he had loved, and God knows why, for he was of a high, heroic temper, which was not in his own vein, but there it was, and the young fellow could not help it that he was better than other people.

  Now he was in prison and in desperate case. But ‘what odds? what odds?’ muttered Rothes, for could any man, even in prison, be as miserable as he now was, who was to hold high office in England, and to marry the rich Countess of Devon? The young man he had loved would soon be dead, ‘like all the rest of us and then all’s one.’

  ‘Three up – and dormy,’ said Charles’ voice ahead of him.