The Galliard (49 page)

The cavalcade stopped in the High Street in front of the house of the Bishop of Dunkeld which had been prepared for her, for she could not face those haunted rooms in Holyrood. She would move up to the Castle as soon as it was got ready for her, and await her baby’s birth in the security of that mighty stronghold; in the meantime, Bothwell did his best to turn the episcopal mansion into a fortress by placing his field-guns before its doors and billeting his soldiers in all the nearest houses.

Mary was now living in the very heart of her capital, and made to feel every moment how her people adored her for her courage and resourcefulness, and with that mixture of amusement in their admiration that is more endearing than any holy awe. There was a lass for you, who could stand up to a murder when seven months gone and not miscarry, outwit even the Great Bastard, steal away under his very nose, long as it was (and not for the first time either!), and come riding back before a week was out at the head of an army! Her bairn should have the spirit of Wallace.

Sympathy also came from England. Elizabeth wrote at once to express it, and her admiration for her cousin’s magnificent spirit. That was sincere; a wistful envy peeped out between the lines from the older woman, whose lifelong struggle to fortify her position and her kingdom held no such spectacular adventure. Her indignation with Darnley was sincere enough too; she flatly refused to believe the protestations he wrote to her of his own innocence of the murder plot. ‘Damnable liar!’ she roared. ‘If I’d been in my cousin’s place I’d have snatched his dagger and stabbed him with it myself.’

Cecil, more consistently, still tried to wring some advantage by spreading the scandal that ‘a deformed and base menial’ had been killed ‘in her arms’.

Elizabeth’s practical sympathy showed itself in fact far more on behalf of the chief murderers who had taken refuge in her country; she refused to send them back for their trial, as requested. One never knew when Scottish rebels might come in handy – a consideration that weighed more than the Bastard’s secret intercessions. For James,
while declaring in Scotland his complete dissociation from them, wrote to England begging protection for his ‘dear friends’ who ‘for my sake have given this adventure’. So Morton and Lindsay stayed on safely in England; but Ruthven’s liver and kidneys quickly paid the price of his over-exertions; he died convinced that he was one of the Saved, by a vision of angels descending from heaven to bear his soul thither. His death-bed greatly encouraged his friend Morton in Calvin’s doctrine that by no sin of his could the sinner lose his place among the elect.

The charges against the criminals were read in court: of gathering five hundred men ‘armed with secret armour in the silence of night’ within the Palace, who ‘reft the keys of the porter, closed the gates, and slew the late Secretary David Rizzio in the presence of our Sovereign Lady; and put violent hands on her most noble person, held, detained and pressed the same most awfully and treasonably – giving to Her Majesty occasion by the sight of the said cruel slaughter and by the thrusting of her person in violent manner, to part with her birth.’

Only two of the most active ringleaders were executed. Darnley, zealously blackening others in order to whitewash himself, thought this insufficient, and succeeded in bringing two more prisoners, both safely obscure, a saddler and a merchant, to the foot of the gallows. But Bothwell called the Queen’s attention to the matter with his usual vigour.

‘Is it your wish, Madam, that the small fry should be sacrificed while all the big fish escape? It is not? Then give me your ring, quick.’

And he rode up with it himself in token of their pardon, just in time to save their lives.

He also saved from outlawry three fellow-lairds from Lothian; true, one of them, though a neighbour, was an old enemy, no less than that John Cockburn whose clinking money-bags from England had echoed so strangely in the crises of Bothwell’s life these last seven years – ‘But he gave me the best raid of my life, for all it’s given me the most trouble ever after.’

And so, not very logically, Cockburn also escaped the net. But
when it came to the big fish, Bothwell’s intentions were ruthless enough, though his opportunities were slight. The exiles in England were outlawed in their absence, that was all that could be done about them. And Darnley was an impossible case. Mary had used him to effect her escape; without him she could not have contrived it, and she insisted that he should not therefore be made to suffer by it. This was also politic, since to accuse him of the murder, was to strengthen the scandal that he had killed Rizzio out of jealousy of his wife’s lover, a scandal that aimed, of course, at throwing a doubt on the legitimacy of her child and its right to the succession. It was for this reason as much as for the hope of a miscarriage that the murder was planned for when Rizzio was with her – if possible alone, but Bothwell’s stern warning to her earlier had prevented that.

Darnley cooperated heartily by declaring before the Council that he had known nothing about the conspiracy and ‘never counselled, commanded, consented, assisted or approved the same’. He thought it would be a good idea to have that down in writing, and posted his signed declaration of innocence at the Market Cross. It was very annoying that just after he had done this his former confederates placed in Mary’s hand a copy of their bond to secure her Crown for himself, at the price of her dishonour and possible death. And there was his name topping the list. Luckily she didn’t seem to take much notice of it.

He was quite unprepared for this spitefulness on the part of his former friends. Even his father, now in exile on his Lennox estates for his share in the plot, was furious that Darnley had left him behind in Holyrood on the night of his flight – he might at least have warned him, he said. He swore a solemn oath that he would never look upon his son’s face again.

‘Lepers don’t care to look in the glass,’ was Bothwell’s comment.

Darnley’s high hopes of getting all he wanted out of Mary now Davie was out of the way were badly disappointed. He found himself farther off from the Crown Matrimonial than ever; he did not even have the authority he had had before all this fuss: she
allowed him no share now in the practical administration; he was being pushed further and further into the background.

‘John Thompson’s man’ who has to do as his wife bids, that was the servants’ name for him, as Anthony insolently let him know. Even Anthony had turned against him; he kept on making sneering reminders of Darnley’s ‘superb horsemanship’ on that cursed night when he made such remarkably good going.

The nobles at Court showed even more openly their contempt for his cowardice and treachery, and Mary did not seem able to bear him to come near her – it was monstrously unfair, when after all it was he who had helped her to escape.

Since everybody avoided him he tried to avoid them, pretended to be ill and went to bed so as not to have to greet the new French Ambassador, Philibert Du Croc; but even that would not do, for Du Croc came to him instead, reproached him for his behaviour, and then wrote home: ‘There is not one person in the kingdom, from the highest to the lowest, that regards him.’ He added, on the other hand, that everywhere ‘the Queen is beloved, esteemed, and honoured.’

It was the secret fountainhead of the conspiracy that Bothwell longed to quench. The Bastard’s head was already forfeit two or three times over, he told the Queen, and begged her to remove it. She had a horror of condemning her half-brother to death in cold blood, he knew that, but she owed it to herself, her throne, and her unborn child. James was skulking in the Highlands, along with Lethington and Argyll, powerless and discredited, but that would not last long.

‘This is his second open attempt to dethrone you,’ he warned her, ‘and within the past year. He’s failed this time, as he failed last summer. The third time he may be lucky.’

James had kept most discreetly in the background of the plot; his name did not appear in the list of conspirators, but Bothwell could procure definite proofs of his guilt from George Douglas, the other bastard, now in exile in England, who proposed to buy his pardon by the evidence he could furnish that James and Lethington too, together with ‘others that the Queen knew not of,
were the designers and purpose-makers of the slaughter of David.’ It would not be easy to get George Douglas back into Scotland, as Elizabeth, terrified of a full exposure of the plot, had ordered her Warden of the Marches to prevent it by putting him under a strong guard.

‘And do you hope to bring Elizabeth to book too?’ asked Mary, with that ironic flicker of her eyelids.

‘No, but I can bring her servant James,’ he answered doggedly. ‘That mad fellow Jack Musgrave would help me, I know. He’d have smuggled me across the Border if I’d agreed to break parole; well, he can smuggle George Douglas instead. We’ll manage it.’

But she still showed indifference, and he lost his temper. ‘I wish to save your throne, perhaps your life. Are you unwilling to attend to so slight a matter?’

‘Very,’ she replied with a strange smile.

He found her face inscrutable, especially now she looked so tired. Her eyes were veiled; she seemed to be brooding over some secret.

They were walking on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle, where she was now lodged. High up on that towering crag she could see the smoke of Auld Reekie rising far below in blue wreaths in the windy sunshine of early May. The blossoming fruit trees in the orchards were no bigger than dandelion clocks. Away in the distance, with the white foam flecking its blue, and here and there the flash of a white sail, the wide Firth of Forth broadened out towards the open sea.

‘Do you see that sail?’ she said. ‘A fishing-boat going straight out to sea on this stormy day, to catch mackerel and herring for the fishwives to sell and bawl out their wares down in that little ant-heap far below. Those tall spying houses used to hang over and oppress me when I lay below them in Holyrood – and now they’re nothing but an ant-heap beneath my feet. Wasn’t I right to prepare so high a nest for my eaglet’s eyrie?’

‘You were right to take the strongest fortress in Scotland for it. God’s blood, Madam, do you realize that that hour of your helplessness is just the one that James may seize to bring back
Morton and his crew, perhaps even to invite an invasion from England? What steps are you taking to guard against it?’

‘I am inviting James and Argyll to come and attend me here in the Castle with their wives.’

He was speechless.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it is not as mad as it sounds. It will be more difficult for them to plot against me under the same roof, even though I am occupied with an
accouchement
.’

‘With your midwife as your guard?’

‘Lord Erskine will command the guns here. They can do nothing while under his eye. And it will keep them clear of the Border, which you will guard.’

‘You are going to pardon James!’

‘It is what I promised him’

‘You never signed the promise.’

‘No, for heaven knows what they put in that paper for me to sign – a deal more than I ever said. But I did most solemnly promise James to forgive him and restore him to his estates.’

‘A promise wrung from you in such conditions – you were alone, with your back to the wall, fighting your battle single-handed against the most desperate odds. You had to snatch what weapons you could.’

‘That is an excuse that can always be given. If we use it for the spoken word we shall come to do so for the written one also. It will be the end of all faith and honour between men and men, nation and nation.’

‘It’s ended
now
! When has James ever kept faith with you? He’s been working against you from the beginning, long before you ever came back to the country. If you fight fair while he fights foul, he’s bound to get the better of you.’

‘Will you come indoors?’ she said. ‘I would like to show you something.’

They went into the Castle. One of the soldiers on guard peered at them round the buttress. Bothwell, who remembered faces, even when seen once in a troop, placed him as one of Lennox’s men, and therefore probably a spy of Darnley’s. He would speak
to Erskine and have him hanged if anything could be proved against him; if not, removed.

She led him into a little room, where an attempt had been made to disguise the fortress by hanging bright tapestries over the massive stone walls. The window was a small square of glass in a five-foot-deep embrasure; silken cushions had been spread over this stone window-seat; she sat down there, and picking up a book that lay open beside her, read out the following passage:

‘“Our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account. They have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who had relied upon their word.”’ She looked up and said:

‘I have just been wondering if Machiavelli were indeed right, and now you tell me that he is. If so, there is no hope for the world – not for a long long time, when men may begin at last to learn that such wisdom is the worst folly. And by that time the world may lie in ruins.’

Surely he had heard this before – not in her words, nor her voice, now low and clear beside him, but in a harsh yet weak and husky voice that breathed, ‘Let every man speak the truth with his brother. Let none oppress or defraud another in any business.’

He shook the memory from him. What had that old fraud to do with it? Let men practise what they preached, then indeed earth might be fair as Paradise!

‘But this,’ he said, ‘is all havers, it is part of your condition.’ ‘It is what you yourself have taught me – the faith of a Borderer.’

‘I’ve never spoken of any such thing to you.’ His voice sounded almost disgusted.

She laughed. ‘You had no need to. You’ve shown it. It’s there in the Hepburn motto, “Keep Trust”. You’ve just told me you refused Jack Musgrave when he wanted you to break your parole – and to your captors who held you in ward unjustly.’

He flushed a deep red. ‘That was different. On the marches if a man breaks his word to his enemy his own clan will put him to
death to wipe out the disgrace of march-treason. That is held by both sides.’