The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

‘There’s my requiem,’ said Rothes.

  He went to bed, gasping and shivering; in a few days he died.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Very soon after his foursome on the links of Leith, Charles left Scotland. His visit, which Montrose had urged and Argyll had dreaded, had turned all to the advantage of Argyll and his party. Before he left he made him a marquis, Leslie an earl, Will Murray a Gentleman instead of a Groom of the Bedchamber, and Warriston a knight. ‘Rise, Sir Archibald Johnston’ – it sounded very odd to both King and knight.

  When one of the loyal lords heard of the honours list he remarked that he had better go to Ireland and join the rebels there, and then there might be some chance of his getting preferment.

  In his zeal to make friends with his enemies, the King suggested the appointment as Treasurer of the Earl of Morton, uncle, father-in-law, and former guardian to Argyll, whom he had brought up as his own son. But there Charles made a mistake, for Argyll declared in front of the old man’s face that his uncle was unfit and decrepit; and there was another family quarrel, though Morton gave in quite meekly, showing however an increasing tendency to quote blank verse from a play called King Lear.

  So the King left Scotland, still thinking that he could count on her as an ally; and went back to a country that was buzzing like an angry hive – where people began to say the King must have known, may even have planned the rising of the Catholics in Ireland. And they began to say it from that bitter day in the beginning of November when he finished his game on the links of Leith.

  Montrose and Napier were released. In Charles’ absence they were no longer dangerous; they had been discredited, and Argyll’s party was now supreme.

  The prisoners came out to find their country settling down under a cloud of religious oppression.

  No book was allowed to be printed until it had passed the censorship of Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston.

  Old ladies who had held to the former religion were harried into the Kirk or out of the country; spoilt young Lewis Gordon wept bitterly at having to say good-bye to his Papist grandmother, who was now chased into exile to say her last prayers beyond the seas.

  Even corpses were not safe; they were refused burial if they had not subscribed to the Covenant.

  To pick gooseberries during sermon time, to ‘sit up drinking in company’, to indulge in ‘promiscuous dancing’ or in minstrelsy which ‘tends to great deboshry’, to use profane words in private speech, to greet each other on Christmas Day or even to walk up and down together, talking as though it were a holiday – these were now criminal offences.

  With so many cheerful sounds now hushed, the human mind turned sour; old women conferred in low and ghostly voices with the devil in the person of their cats; more vigorous bodies found secret pleasure in unnatural ways.

  In such a deformed silence,

  Witches whisper their charms.

  Montrose read the words from a new London play book, illicitly smuggled into his library at Kincardine by Master Forrett, who had celebrated his lord’s return with as many new books as he could buy, chiefly poetry, ‘for then he will be happy, no matter what happens’ – so his old tutor plotted with his wife.

  The whole family was ‘at home at last’ as Magdalen called it, who had longed to be at Kincardine ever since their marriage. Now it was safe for them all to be there together, and have their friends to stay with them. Lord Napier came, much older since his imprisonment, and his children, now just growing up, replacing Montrose’s sisters – for Lilias scarcely ever left Rossdhu now – Margaret and poor pretty Dorothea were dead – and of Kat not one word had ever been heard by any traveller from abroad.

  A bitter flavour from Montrose’s memory of her crept into the wording of his deed of gift of twenty thousand marks to his youngest sister Beatrix, provided that she should keep her body undefiled, and not join herself in marriage against his consent.

  She and David Drummond of Madertie now agreed to marry in this lull of peace. He hoped to avoid public life and live quietly at Innerpeffray and there build a library for all students to use without payment, though no one had ever heard of so odd a notion as a free library. Benevolent, scholarly, unworldly, he was the happy complement to Beatrix’s brisk efficiency.

  There was another, much younger bridal couple in the house – Napier’s eldest son, Archibald, sixteen years old, and his Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Mar. She vied with her new young Napier sisters-in-law in adoring their handsome uncle, who entertained them so royally, yet whose face looked so stern in repose. He had a bevy of charming nieces to ride with him – laugh with him, hang on his opinion, and wind skeins of bright silk round their fingers to knit his stockings for him – carnation and orange tawny – where had he last heard of that colour? An old-fashioned name they were calling it.

  He sat watching the sparks fly up the great chimney, remembered their light glinting on a necklace of orange-yellow stones, and on Magdalen’s face, seen as for the first time. She was before him now, their boys were round them, Rob, the baby, trotting sturdily about, while Johnnie, the eldest, nearly twelve, was ‘the living image of his father at his age’, so all the people at Kincardine said – and might be himself again riding back from school in the days before the old lord died.

  Now it was his nephew’s wedding that filled the old castle with winter guests, and with their favourite dogs that lounged and yawned and rubbed against their legs and lay stretched out like corpses before that comfortable blaze, to yap in excited dreams, a hind leg ecstatically jerking in the air, while they lived over again the hunting they had done that day.

  The Spanish tables were set up again in the banqueting hall; the polished silver sconces and candlesticks gave a reflected light; new scarlet cushions were in all the chairs. Young Archie Napier and his cousins, Johnnie and James, carried in ivy and holly and mistletoe, and Magdalen helped the boys dress up the hall for Christmas, in spite of the Kirk’s disapproval. Over one whole wall was displayed a wedding present to the Napiers from the Southesk family, of a Belgian tapestry wherein ladies and gentlemen walked with exquisite gestures into a pale landscape of pink flowers and blue fountains.

  It was a blissful and dreamlike winter, and in it Magdalen gathered a new strength. Now at last, more than ever in his life, Jamie needed her. He was twenty-nine, and he had not had much time to do so before.

  He was ill more than once that winter; he had not got his trial, although his legal expenses had encumbered his estates with debt. He never had a chance to clear his honour; two months after his release, he was summoned back to Edinburgh at a moment’s notice, told the charges against him, and given only one clear day to prepare his answers; prepared them, including one or two apposite Latin quotations which gave him an absurd gleam of pleasure (he must tell that to old Forrett as soon as he returned) – and then after all was given no chance to deliver them.

  Letters of exoneration were issued instead, clearing him and Napier, without any hearing of their case. Argyll was not going to risk a trial. He had got all he wanted; changed places with Montrose in the public eye, had put himself in the position of the high-minded patriot whose life was in danger from enviou srivals, and Montrose in the position of the underhand plotter.

  Montrose had fought his first duel with Argyll, and Argyll had won. But the choice of weapons had been to his enemy.

  ‘When I cross swords with him again, it will be in actual fact on an open field,’ he told Magdalen.

  ‘Dear heart, you will never have the chance. Have you not heard? Argyll has fought his first fight – a duel. The Kirk, scandalized, rushed to prevent it – they found him, not crossing swords, but writing down his grievances!’

  His burst of uproarious laughter blew Argyll out of their thoughts.

  As his vigour returned, he spoke of emigration. Europe and her ceaseless bickering was played out – but there was still the New World, its very name a talisman of escape. Savages would not be as fearful as the snares of Argyll o
r the hesitations of the King. What she would once have dreaded, Magdalen now begged for – but not very hard, for like him at last in this, she was living only in the present, too glad to have Jamie home to look ahead, even a month or two.

  Here as in a charmed circle they were immune for the moment; no harsh silence muffled their songs or laughter or the majestic sound of words written for a player to proclaim to lords and fishmongers alike.

  What revenge for such rigour used the gods?

  None, but suffering us to live, and know we are no gods.

  ‘And that he will never know, nor others of him,’ she thought, looking across the circle of intent young faces at his proud lips shaping the words.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  There was a noise of scuffling in the hall. Young Archie Napier had chased Johnnie to chastise him for some impertinence to him, a grown and married man, four years his senior. There were yells and execrations – ‘Let go my arm – let go I say.’

  ‘Eat your words. Say you are sorry. Say you never meant it.’

  ‘Never meant it. Never said it. It never happened.’

  ‘What never happened?’

  ‘The King never played golf – never heard the news from Ireland – never told them not to put him off his game.’

  That would be untrue,’ said young James gravely – ‘he played better after than before.’

  ‘So he would, with twenty thousand Protestants out of the way – yow, ow!’ yelped the victim – and then ‘Oh!’ on a sudden low note, as he found in the same instant that Archie had released his arm, but that his father’s hand was on his shoulder, and swinging him round to face him. Johnnie’s eyes fell before him; he wished miserably that Archie was still twisting his arm, as he heard Montrose tell him never to say that again – ‘And you too, James. You are both old enough to know the harm you do your King by spreading tales against him.’

  ‘But you, my lord,’ stammered Johnnie, who had sworn vengeance on the King for leaving Scotland with his father still in prison, ‘what has he done for you?’

  ‘And is that to be the measure of your service? Will you make merchandise of your faith and loyalty – barter it for what it is worth?’

  The two boys had never seen him so angry. They learned their lesson. It was the last time they showed resentment against the King.

  James, a grave, slight child, not yet nine, who did not look nearly as old as Johnnie had done at his age, but who was apt to show a precocious wisdom, said to his mother, as he leaned against her side in the linen room, watching her sort out the sheets, ‘Minnie, my father will go and fight for the King now.’

  She stood still with the sheets on her arm, looking down at the serious face of the little boy, his ‘legal underlip’, as she had always laughingly called it, thrust out in an earnest pout. The tiny window above his head showed a slit of dull sky turned brown by the few white flecks of snow that wandered past it. Round them in the dark room the shelves of linen gleamed white and still. She had made them herself, these pillow cases, so smooth and fine and chill to touch; she put out a hand and touched them, then let it fall to her side. Young James, standing before her, had said something that struck chill on her heart, holding it in an unnatural stillness that seemed to last for years.

  ‘How do you know that, James?’

  ‘Because he is sorry for him. The King could not get him out of prison. The King is the weaker side now.’

  ‘And that,’ she murmured, putting the sheets back on to the shelf, ‘is why he is so happy.’

  She was right, Montrose was no longer in conflict. There was no more need to clear his thought to himself in prose, only to sing it to Magdalen:

  My dear and only love, I pray

  That little world of thee

  Be governed by no other sway

  Than purest monarchy.

  But if committees thou erect—

  ‘Jamie, you have deceived me. You promised this for me, but whoever brought the word “committees” into a true love song?’

  ‘And whoever brought the thing itself into a true government?’

  ‘At your old politics again! Shall I be jealous of Scotland?’

  ‘It is all you need ever be jealous of.’

  ‘It is a great all.’

  And she shivered as he sang:

  He either fears his fate too much,

  Or his deserts are small,

  That dares not put it to the touch,

  To win or lose it all.

  A vague, gracious letter, all in one long sentence, came from the King, thanking Montrose for all he had suffered, and always remaining his most assured friend, Charles R.

  Its bearer, one Mungo Murray, had more to tell. Things in England were as bad as they could be. The King had tried to arrest the five most troublesome members of his Parliament. But he arrived too late; ‘the birds had flown’, he remarked himself in the despondently fatalistic mood that always followed his abortive efforts; and the uproar that followed had forced him to leave London.

  ‘God knows when he will return,’ said Southesk when he heard it. A King’s man, he knew his King.

  ‘He will destroy everyone who befriends him, and all with the best intentions,’ he warned Magdalen, who warned Montrose, and saw that he knew it, and that it would make no difference.

  She saw the destinies that guided the two men approach each other, gradually but inevitably, like two stars that are fated to meet.

  By next summer civil war had begun to roll across England and Ireland. And Charles wrote to Montrose, ‘You are one whom I have found most faithful and in whom I repose greatest trust,’ and signed himself, ‘Your loving friend.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The king set up his standard at Nottingham on a cold and gusty day in August; it was blown to the ground by a gale from the north. A disheartening omen, but his wife thumped self-confidence into him with her brisk little French hands, reminded him that she was the daughter of Henry of Navarre, the strongest and wisest king France had ever had, and that she expected Charles to equal him.

  With admirable foresight she laid those same hands on the Crown jewels, and carried them off into Holland to sell them there and buy munitions with the money she raised on them. It was part of the inevitable bad luck that attended her at sea that these munitions, bought at such expense, were intercepted on their way to England by the Parliament’s ships, and used against instead of for the King.

  She had a terrible crossing on her return, continued to be violently seasick after her landing at Bridlington Bay, and that same night was driven out of her house on the shore by a bombardment from the sea.

  Raleigh was at last avenged, in the way he would least have wished. The navy had revolted against the son of the Stuart who had executed his greatest sailor.

  Charles’ Queen and her women had to fly out of the house in their nightclothes, while the roof tumbled about their heads, and seek shelter in the hedges and ditches. One of her ladies went mad from fright. The Queen herself showed an infuriating courage, for she remembered that her little dog had been left lying on the bed, and ran back herself into the house to rescue him.

  No sooner was she safe again than she was asked to see the Earl of Montrose, who had come south from Scotland in answer to an appeal from the King. He told her of fresh dangers in Scotland; Argyll, he said, was in touch with the English Parliament, who had already found the army of the Scottish Covenant so helpful in guarding the sittings at Westminster. That army had never been disbanded, and he believed it to be Argyll’s intention to sell its services to the English Parliament. He begged for authority to raise a counter army in Scotland for the King, and prevent that intention before it was carried out.

  He was hopeful, indeed certain that this could be done. He told her that he knew his man – Argyll would never fight except with a heavy majority, and at present the forces of King and Parliament were fairly evenly matched. But if Argyll were left unchecked, he would weigh down the balance against
the King by joining forces to the Parliament’s.

  ‘I can bear no more of it,’ she sobbed, ‘is there no chivalry, no kindness in any corner of these accursed countries?’

  And she turned for comfort to the ugly little mongrel dog she had rescued, addressing him repeatedly as ‘Mitte’ in terms of languishing endearment. Reaction from her heroism had set in; all her courage and strength of mind were debauched in an orgy of self-pity. It was the one quality she occasionally shared with her husband, and it now wrecked their best chance to save his kingdom.

  Montrose had married too young and too happily to know much about women; the grave sympathy of the young Scot was not nearly passionate enough to suit the Queen’s taste. He was a fine figure of a man, it was true; his eyes had a strange, searching power; she found she could neither meet them, nor look away from them – but holy virgin! was it for her to have to make the advances in such a situation as this? Queen she might be, but a queen insulted, attacked, all but murdered. Surely it was a time when a handsome young man might remember that a queen was only a woman after all?

  Petulantly she told him that Hamilton (who always remembered this) did not think matters near so bad in Scotland as he seemed to make out.

  Within a day or two there was Hamilton to speak for himself, having followed Montrose from Scotland in a great hurry; and Hamilton leaned over her, making her feel how small she was, how helpless, how desirable.

  With him, too, was Traquair, to endorse all he said of the situation in Scotland; Montrose meant well, but exaggerated; had always been a hothead, had shown himself a good soldier but a shocking bad politician. Look how he had burned his fingers with Argyll, had been accused of God knows what – imprisoned, discredited, had lost all his following.

  To raise the King’s standard in Scotland would only be to stir up trouble and provoke Argyll to action. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  They lay; they slept.

  The common opinion at Court was that ‘Montrose was a generous spirit, but had not so good a headpiece as Hamilton’.