The Galliard (77 page)

He wrote a full account of the series of conspiracies against the Queen ever since her landing in Scotland, and showed the assassinations and risings to be no mere isolated and haphazard deeds of violence, but the work of a small secret society of men who had made many hidden, and three open attempts to dethrone the Queen and seize the government; and, the third time, succeeded.

Frederick may have been interested when not too fuddled. He certainly paid less attention to the propaganda of Bothwell’s enemies than to the opinion of one who had heard many speak of him from their personal knowledge as ‘all his lifetime a faithful servant of the Crown, a man valiant and for magnanimous powers above all others; a man ready to undertake and more ready to put into execution’.

But whether Bothwell were faithful or faithless, or Frederick drunk or sober, the Danish King had a clear head for the one point essential to him in the case. Bothwell was useful as his prisoner.

He never came out.

Mary had her last wild meteoric flight into freedom the following May. She had already made an attempt to escape from Loch Leven disguised as a laundress, but though her face was hidden, the hand that Ronsard had sung, ‘longue et gresle et délicate’, too fair a hand for any but the Queen, betrayed her. The boatmen took her back to
captivity. But her courage and determination were unquenchable, and so was her incalculable magic in winning both men and women to her. Even that grim old lady, Lord James’ mother, was not proof against it, for she connived at the next attempt, due to the splendid sense of adventure in a schoolboy of fourteen. Willie Douglas scuttled all the boats of the Castle but one, locked the doors, dropped the keys in the loch, where they were not discovered till two and a half centuries later, and rowed Mary to the farther shore himself. For eleven days her suddenly risen star shot across the sky, then sank into darkness.

Her first move was to send Bothwell word, as she had succeeded in doing even while at Loch Leven through the secret services of the fishermen. No prison, she felt, could be strong enough to hold James Hepburn once he knew that she had broken ward! But he was now in Malmö Castle, two previous prisons having been thought insufficient to hold so, fiery a spirit. Even the man who broke the stanchions of his window and scaled the Castle Rock of Edinburgh in the wet dark, could not escape past a sentry, through a guard-room always occupied, and connected with the Governor’s quarters, and a courtyard filled with the garrison.

His tragedy was Mary’s, for the battle he would certainly have won with her present forces (the people flocked to her this time) was lost for lack of a strong leader. The Hamiltons had always been doubtful as to whether their best policy were to marry or murder her; Geordie Seton was faithful as always, but though a good subordinate soldier he was hopeless in higher command; Argyll, the chief of her leaders, collapsed on the battlefield.

Mary saw her army break and fly. She had ‘a man’s soul in a woman’s body’; but she knew that if she rode into that lost battle she would not be cut down among the hordes of the flying; her enemies would be careful to take her prisoner, and lead her again in triumph into Edinburgh to undergo again that torment she had endured less than a year ago – and this time it would end in being burnt alive. For the first and last time in her life she took panic and fled, with only five persons, and soon even that small company had to divide to elude pursuit – fled ‘for ninety-two miles across
country without stopping or alighting; then slept upon the ground and ate oatmeal without bread and was three nights like the owls, without a female to aid her’. At the end she crossed the Solway Firth in a fisherman’s boat and entered Elizabeth’s country.

All this past year Elizabeth had been expressing her indignation with the rebel lords; and, since Mary’s escape, an Envoy had been sent to Scotland with congratulations to her and instructions to do his utmost to restore her to her throne. Mary had not fully realized that what had chiefly aroused Elizabeth’s indignation was the bad example to her own subjects of a neighbouring Queen deposed and imprisoned by a revolutionary Government.

Mary had been bred up in policy; but her instincts had remained simple. She believed in Elizabeth’s protestations of friendship and took her at her word. Elizabeth kept her prisoner for nineteen years and then beheaded her.

She was never allowed to see Elizabeth. All her life she had counted on doing that, with her incurable trust in the essential kindness of the individual. But the individual was not considered of importance in this matter: the State was all.

The hate of one old man had wrought her ruin in Scotland: in England it was not hate, but a thing more false to all human values, called political necessity. This it was that made Cecil seek her death unceasingly.

The Casket Letters were used as the pretext to prevent a personal interview between Mary and Elizabeth: they were produced very briefly at an inquiry held in England seven months after Mary’s arrival there. No expert in handwriting was permitted to be present; no witnesses were called; and the accused herself was kept at four days’ distance from the trial, and not allowed either to see the evidence against her, or to be heard in her own defence, according to English law. Even so, the verdict was Not Proven – but it was decided that Elizabeth could not meet anyone accused, whether correctly or not, of ‘such foul stuff’.

So she served a life-sentence (twenty years in all from her capture at Carberry) on an unproved allegation; and then was sentenced to death on the charge of plotting against the woman who had
jailed her, in a trial in which, this time, she could speak in her own defence, but was allowed no advocate, and was permitted neither to hear nor see the evidence against her. It took more than three months after the trial to make Elizabeth give the
coup de grâce
to her victim by signing the death-warrant; but they were months of agony to her rather than to Mary.

Death had given Bothwell his release ten years earlier. His  young nephew, who was also Mary’s nephew, Francis, the last and Wizard Earl of Bothwell, inherited their fire; he told King James VI to his face that he deserved to be hanged if he did not try to rescue his mother; then buckled on his armour as the only fit mourning, and led a raid into England.

Raids, rescue plots attempts to escape, all now were only part of that long illusion that was fading fast from her.

The death-knell to her hopes of freedom and of Bothwell’s had really sounded sixteen years before, though few realized it, in the tocsin that Catherine de Medici had sounded for the massacre of all the Huguenots in Paris on the Eve of St Bartholomew. Mary had thought she had escaped Catherine for ever when she left France; but neither she nor Bothwell nor myriads of others could escape the effects of that hideous power of insensitiveness to individual life and suffering, the devilish inhumanity of putting policy above all human values. Mary’s form of religion linked her to the perpetrators of that massacre, and so cut away the support she had begun to win on all sides. She could have won freedom and power by changing that form, but she still refused to ‘make merchandise of her religion’; to her it was always a matter for the individual soul, as she had wished to make it in her country. But to others it was a political creed.

The forces of bigotry and cruelty that destroyed these lovers were the same, whether they masked themselves under the name of Catholicism or Protestantism; as they have masked themselves under other names, religious or political, throughout history; but remain the forces of evil. She and her lover stood for the freedom of the spirit, and were therefore denied all freedom – except that of the spirit, which no one could take from them.

Behind her long captivity blazed the fire of their life at its fullest, in which she had never lost faith, but known always that it was theirs eternally. All the early years of their friendship had prepared the fuel for that fire. Its consuming fierceness was due to the very sense of breathless danger and uncertainty. People say she had little joy of her lover, less peace in which to enjoy it – not seeing that in its very desperation, knowing it might at any moment be snatched from them, lay its terrific power.

Love is not measured by time: nor by safety; nor by comfort. A few months she knew she loved Bothwell: a few weeks she enjoyed that love, though shot through with anguish, terror, anger, heartbreak of all kinds. Yet in that love – and not in those few weeks, which it far transcended and overflowed – she knew the height of her life. In proof and reward of this, the twenty years of captivity that followed dwindled in retrospect to an insignificant moment, fugitive as a nightmare, compared with those few weeks.

All that happened in those twenty years, and did not happen; the anguished hopes, the bitterness, the frantic beating of wings against the bars, the devotion of boys and girls who rushed to death to set her free, the plans of marriage to English dukes and foreign princes – even to that magnificent prince of adventure, Don John of Austria, who rode to war like a clear flame in the midst of hidden treacheries, and died with the vow to rescue her on his lips – all these were but thin wraiths of smoke in the light that still smouldered within her from that early fire. Again and again there were plans to divorce her, and she began to acquiesce in them in the hopes of achieving Bothwell’s freedom as well as hers; but she never brought them to fruition. She remained wedded to him till his death divided them, ten years before her own.

Their prisons had not prevented their letters to each other; they came by hidden means, generally through the secret service of the fishermen that travelled along the coasts of England and Denmark as well as Scotland. She had heard of his ghastly imprisonment at the end, chained as a mad beast to the pillar, where his steps could make only a half-circle round it. But he had been dead now for ten years, his spirit long since freed from that chained carcass. To her
he had been always as she had seen him last, looking proudly at her on Carberry Hill ‘There is no man here that does not wish himself in my place’ – and then riding up over the crest of the hill till his long shadow touched the flaming pine. With that parting, their life here together ended, and all that came after did not count. The rest was waiting for their order of release.

It did not matter that the end of a life was wretched any more than its beginning. In eternity is neither end nor beginning: it is there at the highest moment of one’s life, rather than the last.

‘In my end is my beginning,’ ran her motto in its strange hopefulness, for she knew that death was not the end, but the beginning of her real life again. The Latin verses that she wrote in those last weeks are like a carillon of bells, a conquering peal of triumph in her deliverance. As her father had died ‘on a little smile of laughter’, so her soul went singing to its freedom.

About the Author

M
ARGARET
I
RWIN
(1889–1969) was a master of historical fiction, blending meticulous research with real storytelling flair to create some of this century’s best-loved and most widely acclaimed novels, including
The Galliard, The Stranger Prince
and
Young Bess.

Also available from
A
LLISON
& B
USBY

Young Bess
Elizabeth, Captive Princess
Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain
That Great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh

Have you read Margaret Irwin’s trilogy
about the life and times of
Queen Elizabeth I?

If not, turn the page and read on
for a taste of the pleasures to come…

Y
OUNG
B
ESS

T
HE
FIRST
INSTALMENT
OF
M
ARGARET
IRWIN
’
S
MASTERFUL
TRILOGY

Growing up in the shadow of her mother, the infamous Anne Boleyn, young Princess Elizabeth has learnt to be continuously on the watch for the political games played out around her. It is never certain when one might rise in, or precariously fall out of, royal favour.

When her distant father, Henry VIII, dies, the future brightens for Elizabeth. She is able to set up a home with Henry’s last wife, Katherine Parr, who now has a new husband, Tom Seymour. Tom, however, is playing a risky game. Marrying a widowed queen is one thing, flirting with the king’s daughter and second in line to the throne is another. As the adolescent Elizabeth finds herself dangerously attracted to him, tragedy looms ahead for her and the kingdom…