Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (36 page)

“How did poor old Jupiter feel about Bess of Hardwick?” asked Catherine, her inner animal lover showing through.

“He sensed her disapprobation of him, and it distressed him. He made his distress known the way dogs usually do.”

“Shoe chewing?” asked Catherine.

“No,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“Nipping?” Catherine inquired.

“No.”

“Spite peeing or spite pooping, then?” I asked, figuring somebody had to.

“Exactly, Dolly, and usually on or near Bess’s shoes. Bess would get so upset if the animal came into the room when she was present! I can hear her now, addressing that poor little dog.”

“What would she say?” asked Catherine, getting ready go all PETA if the need arose.

“She’d shake her fist at that dog,” Mary, Queen of Scots, recollected, “and say, ‘Out, damned Spot!’”

Chapter Ninety-Five

In the Stir with the Green-Eyed Monster

“Out, damned Spot!” I echoed. “That is Lady Macbeth’s tagline! ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?’” I continued, quoting Lady Mac at her guilt-ridden, hand-washing best, or maybe worst.

“Three times around, Dolly,” said Mary Grey. “You’ve said the
M
word again.”

“I’ll have to send for Kat Ashley to wash your mouth out with soap if you can’t control yourself better than that, Dolly,” Elizabeth said.

I declined to quote Lady Mac further, not wanting to put any more ideas about ways to discipline me into Elizabeth’s head.

“Are you telling us, Mary, that Lady Mac, as I will call her, is connected somehow to Bess of Hardwick?”

“It wouldn’t be inaccurate at all, Dolly, to say that Lady Mac
is
Bess of Hardwick!”

“You never told me that!” said Elizabeth. “I think that the attribution is, if I may say so,
spot
-on,” said Elizabeth.

“Nice pun!” I commented.

“And if Lady Mac was Bess, Mac himself, of course, must have been poor old George Talbot,” said Elizabeth, naming the erstwhile sixth Earl of Shrewsbury.

The Scottish queen nodded in affirmation. “I lived with Bess of Hardwick and her husband, George Talbot, for fifteen years,” said Mary, Queen of Scots. “Thrown together as we were, a royal prisoner and her keepers, we got to know each other quite well.
I watched day after day, year after year, as Bess henpecked poor old Talbot pretty much into the ground. Her husband was a good man and a strong man—but not strong enough to outman Bess.”

“What man possibly could be?” Catherine asked.

The assembled ladies gave a synchronized shoulder shrug, having trolled the collective database and come up with no contenders.

“So you based the Macs, both the ambitious but wavering husband and the ambitious and unwavering wife, on the Talbots, George and Bess,” I recapped.

“Well, Dolly, the characters’ actions and fates are out of the pages of history. However, the nuances of their individual emotional tenors, and that of their relationship, were pure Bess and George.”

“It
was
awfully naughty of you to send them up that way,” Elizabeth said, herself now the one giggling behind a hand held over the mouth.

“I don’t usually like to be meanspirited, but Bess really started getting on my wick after the first ten years or so,” Mary admitted.

“The fact that you held out that long is a testament to your endurance,” said Margaret Douglas.

“‘Like patience on a monument, smiling at grief,’” I suggested.

“Indeed, Dolly! ‘Grief’ was the word for what both I and poor old George Talbot got, at least in the end. Bess and I managed to be companionable enough over the early years. You know how it is when women do needlework together. It’s easier to let go of certain things when you are working on a common project and randomly sharing your thoughts.”

“Hen therapy is cheaper than any other kind, and with stitchin’ and bitchin’, you get textiles when all is said and done,” I said.

“Yes, and I can imagine who most of the bitching was about,” said Elizabeth, bringing her plume out of retirement and giving her cousin a playful slap across the face with it.

“Actually, Dolly has a point. Our shared craftsmanship made Bess’s…shall we say, personality tolerable for quite a long time. Toward the end of our tenure together, though, things changed,” the Scottish queen admitted.

“The ‘green-eyed monster,’ wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes. After all our peaceable years together, Bess inexplicably took it into her head that her husband was interested in me romantically. If he was, he certainly didn’t make it known to
me
. But you know how Bess is; once she has an idea in her head, there is no talking her out of it.”

Everyone in the room nodded in synch. It was an impressive testament to the fact that Bess of Hardwick’s head was as hard as her ass.

“And so, with Bess being jealous and her henpecked husband not having enough starch in his ruff to handle his wife, relations between the three of us became quite strained. I am afraid I took out my frustration about it all in my delineations of Lord and Lady Mac.”

“Well, Bess is such a priceless character, I think it is marvelous that she’s been captured in cameo to survive the ages,” I said, quite taken with the whole Bess-Lady Mac connection. “I presume Bess does not know about the little, shall we say, literary liberty that you have taken with her and her husband?”

“No, she does not; at least I have no reason to think she does,” said Mary, Queen of Scots.

“I do think it best that we keep it that way,” Mary Tudor suggested, eliciting another one of those impressive synchronized group nods.

“You know how Bess can be, and as a needlewoman, she always has access to sharp objects and scissors. I think keeping her cameo appearance in the Scottish play a secret would prevent a lot of storm and strife, if not actual bloodshed,” said Mary, Queen of Scots, shuddering.

“You’d certainly have more reason than most to abhor gore,” I said, thinking as I did so of the Rizzio murder to which Mary was a witness.

“What you say is true, Dolly,” the Scottish queen acknowledged. “The irony of the fact that I penned three of the goriest works of the Shakespearian lot is not lost on me.”

Chapter Ninety-Six

Gore in Store and Walking the Floor

“Well, when the words
goriest
and
Shakespeare
come up in the same sentence, the words
Titus
and
Andronicus
cannot be far behind,” I reasoned aloud.

“It was my final work, Dolly, penned in haste during the last few weeks of my life while I pondered my imminent execution at Fotheringay. I’m afraid it wasn’t the most polished of works, given the compressed time frame. I am certain the rush showed in the final product.”

“Literary history agrees on that point,” I said. “One Shakespearian critic used the words ‘heap of Rubbish,’ with a capital “R,” no less, and went on to say, ‘’tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works.’ From my own viewpoint,” I added, not wanting to end on so critical a note, “I think I can say that the execution overlay is definitely robust.”

“Thank you,” Mary said proudly.

“Nine revenge-driven onstage murders, several others off stage, and one man buried alive. Not too shabby for an evening’s worth of drama. And then of course, the tragic rape and dismemberment that is central to the action of the play.”

Titus Andronicus’s story is driven by revenge on numerous levels. His daughter, Lavinia, is raped in an act of vengeance and has her tongue and hands cut off in an unsuccessful effort to prevent her from identifying her assailants. She does, however, get her own back, at least somewhat, by using her stumps to hold the bowl that her father uses to drain the blood of her assailants
when he slits their throats, preparatory to grinding them up and serving them to their evil mother in a pie. Sadly, Lavinia is eventually killed by her father, who is himself killed as well; in fact, by the end of the play, only about three from a full cast of characters are left standing.

“I would guess that your experience with Bothwell informed this play as well,” I conjectured, recalling the rape-kidnapping that became one of the most controversial crimes in history.

“You could say that,” was all Mary said.

“Bothwell’s ending was like something out of
Titus Andronicus
, when you think about it,” I continued.

While Mary, Queen of Scots, languished in her relatively comfortable English captivity, Bothwell did time in the much less well-appointed Draghsolme dungeon in Denmark. He was reportedly short-chained to a pillar in appalling conditions and died insane after ten years. They say that the groove he wore in the floor, pacing the arc of his tether, can still be seen in the dungeon.

“True,” Mary said. “But the Bothwell saga is a tale for another night; compressed time frame, Dolly.”

It occurred to me that the motif of Lavinia’s being so signally restricted in telling her story must have been especially compelling to the Scottish queen. Surely she herself had a hands-tied feeling during her trial at Fotheringay, where her guilt was a foregone conclusion and her ability to advocate for herself was limited. We did not get to discuss the details, though, as Mary was so all about moving things along.

“You may be disappointed of learning more about the Bothwell story, Dolly, but you can, at least, have a little bit of the
Lord Darnley experience. That particular Mr. Wrong’s antics formed the basis for my two remaining plays.”

Margaret looked a bit pained at Mary’s mention of her son but said nothing. Jane poured Margaret a nice, big glass of wine, and the Scottish queen embarked on a little well-deserved former-husband bashing.

Chapter Ninety-Seven

About a Lout

Lord Darnley, Margaret Douglas’s eldest son, was a lightweight pretty boy thrust suddenly into a position of rank and privilege when he became the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots.

“Being the husband of the queen of Scotland went to Darnley’s head a bit,” his widowed wife admitted.

“Did you say
a bit
?” I asked, finding her restraint surprising, given the history. The jumped-up lord and would-be king ticked off pretty much everyone at the Scottish court, including his wife, with an arrogance fostered by his unearned power and prestige. Proclivities for both the high life and the low life also emerged, further deteriorating the man’s judgment and standing.

“I wasn’t at all surprised when things went to Darnley’s head,” Elizabeth said, doing a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking. “After all, there was plenty of free space available in there.”

“Are you referring to my son having a big head or an empty head?” asked Margaret, her inner mama bear having
its
head. I cringed for her mother’s heart as I anticipated the obvious answer.

“Both,” Elizabeth said.

“Don’t take it too hard, Margaret,” said Mary, Queen of Scots. “There is no denying that Darnley wasn’t emotionally or mentally up to the position he found himself in as my husband. But that doesn’t mean that he mightn’t have emerged as a better person, a more successful person, had circumstances been different.”

“I didn’t realize you recognized that, Mary,” said Margaret, wiping another of those single tears from her eye.

“I had a lot of time to think during my imprisonment,” Mary said. “An inventory of what one did right and what one did wrong in one’s life is inevitable. From the perspective of years, I occasionally wondered if I had not wronged Darnley by inadvertently putting him into an untenable position when I married him. Maybe I should have realized that life in the hotbed of the Scottish court would have been too much for him to handle.”

“I’ve often wondered if I should have realized the same thing as well before I talked him into pursuing marriage to you,” Margaret said.

Margaret’s wine glass was empty, but Jane did not attempt to refill it. Clearly, she knew that there was not enough wine in the entire world to wash away mother-guilt.

Mary and her erstwhile mother-in-law hugged over their mutually admitted little secrets. “I feel like I can let go of some of the anger I’ve harbored against you, dear, now that I know how you’ve felt about the matter of my son,” Margaret said to the Scottish queen.

“And I was able to let go of a lot, if not all, of my feelings about the man through the catharsis of the two plays I wrote about my experiences with him,” Mary said.

I considered what Mary, Queen of Scots, might want to be letting go of, metaphorically speaking, when it came to that second husband of hers. He’d screwed up in so many ways that she was pretty much spoiled for choice, but I thought I could identify the one thing that must have rankled the most.

“Darnley, drunk with power, or the illusion of it, after he married you, indulged in some pretty nefarious behavior,” I
recollected. “Drinking, whoring, antagonizing and alienating the rich and mighty, being abusive, and in general embarrassing him and you, Mary. But surely the worst of it all was what he did to Rizzio.”

David Rizzio was the right-hand man of Mary, Queen of Scots. An Italian musician for starters, he eventually assumed the role of Mary’s secretary, and she put a great deal of faith and trust in him. Driven by jealousy of the man, Darnley was instrumental in his murder; Rizzio was stabbed a grand total of fifty-six times by Darnley and a crew of henchmen. The murder took place as the diminutive Rizzio clung pitifully to the skirts of a heavily pregnant Mary.

“I don’t want to dwell on what happened to David,” Mary said, very understandably. “But we will talk about the emotions that were at the bottom of what happened there and what drove so much of the rest of Darnley’s behavior as well: jealousy and insecurity. I bemoaned the price of them in both my Darnley plays.”

“Jealousy and insecurity?” I said. “Well-o, well-o, I think I know the fellow!”

Chapter Ninety-Eight

Moor and More

“
Othello
!”

“Yes, Dolly, I did retell the story of Othello, with Darnley in mind. I had a copy of Cynthio’s work available to me at Wingfield, and the idea suggested itself.”