The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel

by Erickson, Carolly

  “My children,” he began, “it is no secret that we shelter among us one who has been wrongfully removed from the Scottish throne. The widowed Queen of France, and rightful Catholic Queen of England.”

  I held my head proudly at these words. It was good to hear my right proclaimed, and my royal self named without equivocation. Despite all that had happened to me over the many years since Francis died, I was who I was. Who I was born to be. I was and would always be a queen.

  I let my glance wander to where Jamie stood, at the forefront of the crowd, looking uncomfortable and shuffling his feet. I knew it was galling to him never to be thought of or recognized as my consort, or by his own title. He was ignored, a mere prop in the stage-set of my drama. Yet he sought his own stage, his own play. I often wondered, was I depriving him of the admiration and respect he deserved, by casting my larger shadow over him? The older we both grew, the more I asked myself this question, though it was only one of many things that occupied my mind.

  “Her presence brings us luck,” the pope was saying, “for we are about to embark on a great crusade. A crusade to rid our world of heresy and error. One man will lead this crusade—”

  Here the crowd interrupted the Holy Father with cries of “You will lead us, papa,” and “You, blessed one.” But the pope held up his hand once again to silence these partly sincere, partly flattering cries. Smiling, he shook his head.

  “Not I but one far more accomplished than I in the art of earthly warfare. One who will stand by the queen’s side as her champion, her conqueror—her husband!”

  A curtain was drawn back and Don John strode rapidly into the immense room, agile and athletic, a bright purple cloak swinging behind him jauntily as he walked. The onlookers cheered, loudly and lustily, and he bowed to them, right and left, looking both pleased and accustomed to the acclaim they offered. He did not look at me. When he took his seat in the empty large thronelike chair he swirled the beautiful purple cloak around him in a practiced theatrical gesture, and I smelled once again the strong musky cologne he wore.

  My husband! I nearly laughed, but checked myself. The Holy Father meant what he said, I realized. Don John had had the pope’s plan in mind when he spoke of sharing the new Rome with me. All fell into place in my thoughts; I had been rescued from my captivity and brought to Rome in order to play a key role in Pope Gregory’s scheme to reverse the spread of Protestantism and mend Catholic Christendom. I was to lend the weight of my royal blood to Don John’s conquests. Just as my cousin Elizabeth had wanted me to marry Thomas Howard, so the Holy Father had a marriage partner of his own in mind for me, Don John.

  I was shocked into silence.

  The applause for Don John was dying down, when I heard a deep male voice mutter, “It smells like a dead animal in here.”

  “Did someone speak?” the Holy Father asked.

  “I said, it smells like a dead animal in here.” Jamie stepped forward, his words loud and challenging. “Either that or some fool has put on too much bad cologne.”

  “Not again, old father.” Posed elegantly in his tall chair, Don John barely looked at Jamie. “Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”

  Titters greeted these mocking words, and I started to rise to defend Jamie against them, not knowing how I would do this.

  But Jamie was too quick for me. He covered the distance between himself and Don John so rapidly that the latter did not have time to react. In an instant Jamie had tipped over the tall chair, sending the prince in his purple cloak sprawling.

  “Stinking son of a mongrel bitch! I’ll see you dead before I watch you marry this woman!”

  Don John scrambled nimbly to his feet.

  “Enough of your petty insolence!”

  “Bastard! Whelp! Jumped-up knave!”

  The younger man lunged, but Jamie quickly took refuge behind the pope’s huge bulk and high miter.

  “Puking puppy!”

  A cry of “Canes! Canes!” came from the crowd. The repeated word became a chant.

  Spanish and Italian knights, I knew, liked to joust with long sticks, or canes. The cane combat could also be on foot.

  Long stout sticks were thrown to both men from out of the crowd—Pope Gregory dodging between them—and in a moment battle was engaged.

  The sticks slapped and struck one another in an intricate rhythm while the two men, the one quick, the other slower to react but stronger and angrier, thrust and parried their blunt weapons, spicing their blows with insults.

  “Old father, old father,” came the encouraging chant from some in the crowd. “Don John, Don John” came the answering cry, much louder and full of mirth. Jamie’s face was red, and I knew it was not only because of his exertions but because of his anger at being teased and taunted.

  Pope Gregory tried in vain to restore order and stop the mayhem, but his voice was lost in the din; the grooms quickly escorted him to safety, out of range of the scything sticks.

  Then Jamie’s cane snapped in pieces, leaving him hopelessly vulnerable to his opponent’s blows and unable to land any blows of his own.

  “I am betrayed!” Jamie roared, holding up the remains of his cane. “Who threw me this splinter?”

  Don John, with what I thought was commendable gallantry, had stopped fighting when Jamie found himself defenseless.

  “Show yourself!” Jamie was demanding. But no one responded.

  He threw the pieces of wood down on the marble floor and with a great oath, began to walk out of the room, then turned back toward me.

  He held out his hand toward me.

  “Are you coming, Orange Blossom?”

  I started to get up to follow him, then heard Pope Gregory’s voice, gentle and fatherly yet firm. The voice of the father I had never had.

  “No, Mary.”

  “But I must.”

  “You must do as I say. I am God’s vicar on earth.”

  “God’s vicar in hell!” Jamie burst out, and then he had to take to his heels, for nearly all the men in the room, save the pope and Don John, who sat in his thronelike chair and wrapped his purple cloak around him, were running after him.

  With a last despairing cry of “Mary!” Jamie dashed along the wide corridor that led from the audience chamber into the hall beyond, the furious Romans in urgent pursuit. I got up and tried to follow, but my feet were leaden, and besides, I could not possibly reach the sprinting Jamie. And had I caught up with him or his pursuers, what would I have done then?

  I stood where I was, shaking my head in sorrowful disbelief. I had just witnessed my dear but hotheaded husband creating havoc in the audience hall of the pope himself, the Bishop of Rome. He had disgraced himself beyond redress. I was his loyal wife, my place was at his side. But my future, and the future of my children, surely depended on Pope Gregory’s good will.

  What should I do?

  I turned to look back at the Holy Father and Don John, sitting in their tall chairs, absorbed in talking with one another. I hesitated, sad and more than a little bewildered, then slowly walked back toward them and took my place in the third chair.

  FORTY-NINE

  Jamie was gone.

  I wept, I grieved for him. I wished with all my heart that he would come back to me, or at least send me word where he was and how to relay a message to him.

  It was as if the earth had simply swallowed him up, and left me desolate.

  Not knowing what else to do, I stayed on in Rome, outwardly playing my role in the grand design of the papal crusade, allowing it to be assumed that I would marry Don John, though Pope Gregory, greatly to my relief, spoke of our future marriage as an event that would not happen for some time, not until the armies and the great fleet he was preparing were all in readiness, and the invasion was under way.

  As for Don John, he seemed to have little interest in me as a woman. He was always courteous and gentlemanly, but distant and preoccupied. There were no more moonlit trips through the monuments and ruins of Rome, no words of love, no tender e
xchanges. I was merely a part of his arsenal. His passion, I soon discovered, was all for his ships, the two hundred and seven immense galleys that, with a horde of lesser vessels, formed the armed fleet of the Holy League. Again and again I heard him talk at length of the power of the galleys, their cannon that shot straight and true, the crews that the prince trained himself (he had learned gunnery as a boy), the vast enemy losses his ships had inflicted.

  “We annihilated them!” he said, his handsome face alight with the happy memory of one victory or another. “We lost a few men ourselves, perhaps seven thousand, but they lost ten thousand, or even twenty! It was a very great victory.”

  He stayed in Rome, or in the nearby port of Ostia, throughout the surprisingly cold winter (I had not realized that it snowed in Rome, just as it did in Scotland and France), but when spring came he sailed north, to Flanders, where a huge force of Spanish infantrymen, supported by thousands of German and Walloon troops, were being readied to invade England.

  My spirits were low, yet I could not help being excited by the thought of the coming invasion. I remembered with keen pleasure my brief, exhilarating experience of warfare in Scotland, what it was like to gallop across the fields and meadows in pursuit of the rebels, how it felt to be victorious over them, even the ghoulish satisfaction of watching trophies being collected on the bloody battlefield and thrown carelessly into a reddened basket.

  My cousin, my enigmatic, maddeningly elusive cousin Elizabeth, was to be conquered while I would be exalted. My children would be reunited with me and given due honors. All the old wrongs would be righted, all broken faith restored. And surely, I thought in my most optimistic moments, surely Jamie would come back to me then, and sit at my right hand as my beloved consort, all his peevish quarreling forgotten.

  My happy daydream did not include Don John—except as the commander of the great invasion force. For that, I needed him. But once I was Queen of England and Scotland again, I could treat him as I liked.

  I tried to make the best of my situation, but in time I began to sour on Rome. The extreme heat enervated me, and the cold of the drafty papal palace when harsh storm winds blew gave me a rheum in my chest that would not go away. I could not safely leave the protection of the palace, as I feared to encounter more of Baron Burghley’s agents or assassins—and besides, the streets were full of hired ruffians and brawlers, drunken louts and thieves. Although I continued to venerate the papal city as the center of the true faith, and to heed the words and trust the good intentions of the Holy Father, the great monuments of the past no longer allured me; they reeked of age and decay, while I longed for the vital and new. New beginnings, new hope. Don John’s new and revitalized Christian world.

  Months passed, then more months, and still the grand invasion force was not launched. When I tried to find out why, I was given evasive answers or told that such things were not the proper concern of ladies.

  I sputtered. I smoldered. I endured.

  I had been in Rome nearly two years when I decided I could take no more of the tedium of waiting for the grand invasion to be launched. Don John had returned to the Eternal City from Flanders, not because of any pious obligations—he was not the sort of man to undertake a pilgrimage—but because he was running out of money.

  Rome was full of moneylenders, and he appeared to patronize them all.

  “It is a very costly venture, this crusade,” he remarked in my hearing. He was signing his name to documents as he spoke, and gold coins were being counted into a small chest on a table next to him by a roguish-looking man wearing a long brown robe with deep pockets.

  “His Holiness has been generous,” Don John went on, “and so has my brother King Philip. Yet more is needed. Much, much more.” He looked and sounded weary, his voice a dull monotone. Gone was the Don John I had first met on the night of the banquet at the Colonna palace, the inspired visionary, the flamboyant actor on the grand stage of the papal audience chamber.

  “When will the invasion begin?” I asked him bluntly.

  “When the men and ships are ready,” he said without looking at me, keeping his eyes on the coins going into the chest one by one.

  “You must have some idea how soon that day will come.”

  He was silent.

  “If I were to go to Flanders with you,” I said after a time, “I could speak to my bankers there. I could raise funds I imagine. But only if I could say when the armies and fleet will be fully trained and equipped.”

  I lied. I had no bankers in Flanders—though at one time, when I had been married to Francis, there had been hordes of bankers eager to make loans to the French court at extremely high rates of interest.

  Hearing me say that I might be able to take out some loans Don John looked up at me from under his beautiful long lashes, and I thought I saw a flicker of hope in his eyes. But when he spoke his tone was full of disdain.

  “And would you have me provide information about our plans to our enemies? They have ears everywhere, you know. They are listening even now, most likely,” he added glancing over at the man in the brown robe, whose face remained impassive, and on around the room where many financial transactions were taking place. “No one is to be trusted.”

  “Surely you don’t distrust me.”

  “Less than others, perhaps. But this room, this palace, is full of listening ears.”

  At length, using all my powers of persuasion, I convinced Don John to agree to allow me to come to his camp at Vlissingen, promising to borrow as much money as I possibly could, as soon as I possibly could, from any bankers who would lend to me, on the strength of my claim to the thrones of England and Scotland. I did not believe Don John to be mercenary, exactly. I did not feel that he was intent on exploiting me. Rather it was clear to me that his fleet and his army were of such vital importance to him that in his view, any source of funds could be tapped to support them.

  With my promise of financial help, a newfound spark of optimism seemed to animate the commander, and he began to speak of launching the invasion in a matter of weeks.

  “We are nearly ready, after all,” he confided to the men around him, as I stood by. “We only need a few more men, more horses and arms, spare sails and ropes—” He seemed to carry a long list of requirements in his head, a list so long I wondered whether it would ever be completely filled. “If only we had the funds . . .” His voice trailed off, his expressive face all at once bleak.

  “Will you be able to get the funds I need, Mary?” he asked me. “Do you think you will?”

  FIFTY

  When I first arrived at the huge, sprawling army camp at Vlissingen, with its endless long rows of tents and its mounds of refuse, its stench of horse manure and gunpowder, spoiled food and unwashed bodies mingled with the more appetizing odors of roasting meat and beer, I was impressed with the armies Don John had assembled. Clearly he was, as everyone said, a miracle worker when it came to amassing men, although he was having a great deal of trouble paying them. The camp was alive with activity. Overloaded carts came and went along muddy pathways, whips cracking over the backs of the tired horses and bullocks that pulled them along. Everywhere soldiers lounged alongside the tents, eating around campfires, shooting at improvised targets, sparring with one another, grinning at the full-lipped, swaying-hipped camp followers in their boots and dirty petticoats.

  Visible in the harbor just beyond the camp was the enormous fleet of galleys, rocking in the swell, small boats coming and going amid them. Flying from each masthead was the yellow banner of the Holy League.

  Don John had prevailed upon his half-brother King Philip to lend him a dozen chests of Spanish gold, enough to get the expedition under way, but the funds had not yet arrived. I had been at the camp for three weeks, and still no final orders had been given. Because of the promised Spanish loan nothing more had been said about my attempting to raise funds from the moneylenders in Bruges or Amsterdam, and this came as a relief to me. But other issues were weighing heavily on my mind—b
eyond the most serious issue of all, Jamie’s absence, which I tried my best to push aside, out of my thoughts, at least during the day.

  The armies at Vlissingen, I had discovered during my weeks there, were assembled into tercios, groupings of thousands of pikemen and musketeers who were expected to fight together in precise formations. I had been hearing the colonels of the tercios complaining to Don John that they did not yet know their places within the brigades, which meant that they had no idea where to go or what to do once battle loomed.

  What was worse, the commander had not informed the colonels which ships they and their men were to travel in once the army embarked. Each of the two hundred galleys was capable of transporting hundreds of men, and the embarkation had to be carefully planned and executed or there would be chaos in the harbor.

  When I ventured to ask Don John where the fleet was to land once it was launched, he bristled.

  “Why, on the enemy shore, of course,” he said.

  “Yes, but where? England has a long coastline.”

  “Where they least expect us,” was all he would say, but as we were conversing I noticed another odd thing: Don John had no pilot’s charts in his tent, no maps of southern England. No maps of any kind, in fact, or charts of the Sleeve such as sailors invariably consult in order to choose their best routes.

  Where were his charts, his battle plans, not to mention his messengers and secretaries? Who was keeping track of what went on in the camp?

  One day I heard shouting and a gun firing. I rushed outside to find an altercation under way.

  Two wretched-looking men were being tied to posts in preparation to receive a whipping. They were jabbering in Spanish, pleading piteously for their lives, insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

  Soldiers were collecting in clusters, some taking the side of the men to be punished, some crying for their blood to be spilt. Guns were drawn, harsh words were flying back and forth. I asked what was going on and was told there had been a spill of oats—precious fodder for the horses. The two men were blamed.