The Galliard (25 page)

The wedding sermon gave Knox his best opportunity to hector his friend and patron. In his self-appointed task of ‘keeping all men right’ he had taken matrimony as his special prerogative; there was nothing he liked better than to hear complaints and settle differences between man and wife. In this instance he laid some fairly fruitful seeds for such differences, for he threatened the bride from the pulpit by telling the bridegroom that if he were ‘found fainter’ in
his zeal for the Church after this, then ‘it will be said that your wife has changed your nature’.

The guests glanced sideways at each other with pursed lips; the wife looked down her nose as determinedly as the husband.

The Earl of Arran remained sunk in profound gloom all through the wedding feast, and said he wanted to go back to France. Instead of which he went to bed, though there did not seem to be anything the matter with him. The report went round that the real reason for his going to bed, as for his wish to go to France, was his fear of meeting Bothwell. Mary peremptorily summoned him to Court, disregarding his sick-bed, and ordered him to sign a formal bond of peace between himself and Bothwell then and there before the Privy Council, overcoming all his protests with a sharp command.

Bothwell had little faith in this, and told her so that evening when the Court were listening to some Italian songs. Four men were singing glees, and the bass had a particularly good voice; he was a very ugly little man, black-dark and misshapen, but with a face so vividly intelligent that Bothwell found himself watching it with interest even while he was telling his doubts to the Queen.

‘But what can be done?’ she asked.

‘I’ll see.’

A bold plan had occurred to him, but he would not tell her what it was.

‘Who is the bass?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t seen him before.’

‘No. My trio wanted a fourth to sing bass and told me of this man in Signor Moretta’s train, so I have engaged him. David Rizzio is his name, it’s quite well known in his country, for he’s a poet.’

‘He looks like a monkey.’

‘That is what you Scots nobles always think of poets and musicians. When will you tell me your peace plan?’

‘When it has succeeded.’

She was gaily confident that whatever it was it would succeed ‘if one really wants it to’, so certain was she that people preferred friendship to enmity.

‘I have just had good proof of it, as even you, my lord Timon of Athens, must agree when I tell you. You won’t believe that Queen
Elizabeth wants to make friends with me, but what do you think! She has told Lethington in London that if there were no other way to meet me she would come back with him, disguised as his page!’

‘Charming! You must have felt yourself in the woods of Amboise again, acting romances with your sister-in-law.’

She took his sneer very well. ‘Yes, it was absurd, but she really is determined we shall meet this next summer. It is all being formally arranged, and I am to visit her at York. Don’t you think it a good plan?’

‘Admirable, Madam. You’ve everything to gain by showing yourself to the English, and giving them the chance to compare you with Elizabeth.’

‘Then it is all the more generous of her.’

‘If it happens. But it won’t.’

‘But I tell you it’s settled. How maddeningly provoking you are! She has sent me this token of it’ – she fingered a diamond locket in the shape of a heart that she wore round her neck; ‘she writes that it would be easier for her to forget her own heart than mine, “
ce coeur que je garde
”.’

His contemptuous laugh astonished her. James and Lethington and Randolph the English Ambassador had been deeply impressed by this gesture from Elizabeth – perhaps, it now struck her, because they knew how she hated to part with her jewels. She herself had returned the compliment by drinking Elizabeth’s health in an exquisite gold goblet fashioned by Benvenuto Cellini and had sent it to her as a present. But no, she would not tell Bothwell that.

‘And that awkward little affair of Your Grace’s ships detained by the English fleet on your voyage here has all been satisfactorily explained, I suppose?’ pursued the relentless ironic voice.

‘Yes, it has. It was all a complete misunderstanding. They were released as soon as it was cleared up.’

He was silent. She swung round on him so sharply that he thought she would have hit him.

‘Think – think – if you can!’ she exclaimed. ‘We are the smaller, weaker half of an island, split into two warring halves. That can’t go on. You’ve shown it me yourself. Scotland has had to fight to
preserve her independence ever since she won it at Bannockburn. The war’s gone on ever since then – for two and a half centuries – growing more deadly as chivalry dies and hideous new weapons are created. War now means organized destruction – and we are the poorer country, the smaller population. How can we then, in the long run, survive?’

He was struck by her sense. ‘It’s true. The growing use of gunpowder is lengthening England’s odds against us, and they were already about five to one.’

‘So our only hope is friendship with her, and, ultimately, union. We must – we
are
having it. Look!’

She took from her dangling waist-bag an unfinished letter to her uncle the Cardinal, telling him of Elizabeth’s assurances of service to the Guises; and pointed proudly to her triumphant sentence describing the feelings of their enemies ‘now that they see us, the Queen of England and myself, getting on so well that she orders her Ambassador to do as you direct him.’

He was baffled by the odd ignorance of human nature which he had always noticed in her, in spite of her grasp of affairs that so impressed the politicians, and, just now, himself. Did she really believe that Elizabeth would do what she wanted, just to please her? She was so used to being loved and adored that she simply could not understand the contrary. She would always trust – even Elizabeth.

Bothwell’s plan was this. To make a real peace with Arran he must approach him personally, and to arrange this he must have a mediator, one of Arran’s friends. But all Arran’s friends were Bothwell’s enemies, since, though he was of the same religion as they, he had fought for the Queen Regent two years ago and they had fought against her. Nevertheless he decided to go direct to the man who had been the prime mover in that rebellion. It was his way to attack the chief. Besides, John Knox had been a Haddington lad.

So it was to John Knox that he went that wintry night in March, with his hat pulled well down and his cloak pulled well up over his
face against the stinging slap of the raw sleet that came whistling and hissing round the corners; also against recognition, since he had no mind that this interview should be known until he knew the result.

John Knox has left a full account of that interview. If Bothwell had also done so, it would probably have been very different. But one thing shows plainly through Knox’s account, and that is his pride that James Hepburn should have sought him out. It was no new thing to Knox to be sought out. Everybody came to ask his advice or influence – magistrates how to settle their differences with the craftsmen; burghers how to reclaim their runaway wives; while only last Sunday the Duke of Châtelherault himself had come to supper to meet the English Ambassador and discuss affairs of state.

But for the Hepburn to do so who for generations had been Lord of Hailes and Haddington was quite another matter. It is remarkable that this is the only time in all his numerous writings about himself that Knox has ever mentioned his forebears, and that he did so only to acknowledge Bothwell’s overlordship.

He had had warning of this visit, and also its motive, from his friend Mr Barron, a rich merchant to whom Bothwell was deep in debt, and he greeted him with a certain frank sympathy for his difficulties.

‘I have borne a good mind to your house, my lord,’ he said, ‘for my father and grandfathers have served Your Lordship’s predecessors. Some have died under their standards. This is a part of the obligation of our Scots kindness.’ And he removed Bothwell’s wet cloak and offered him a seat by the fire with a gesture more nearly respectful than any that had welcomed the Duke whose daughter he was proposing to marry.

Bothwell had never expected such homely recognition from the rebel who openly aimed at a world revolution of ideas, discarding all ancient loyalties that might interfere with those ideas. He was beginning to acknowledge the kindness when Knox, feeling that enough had been said of such earthly obligations, hastened to speak of God, whose messenger he was and whose majesty Bothwell had offended.

‘Therefore my counsel is that you begin at God.’

But if Bothwell had come here to be preached at, he might as well have gone to hear Mr Knox in St Giles’ on Sunday. He stretched out a hissing boot against the burning logs (very snug this little study was, with its new light deal panelling to keep out the draughts – the Town Councillors made their minister remarkably comfortable, he noticed) and spoke as man to man.

‘Barron told you how matters stand; poor Barron, it’s his best hope of seeing any of his money from me, for all I can tell him is, like Willie Dunbar,

I cannot tell how it is spended,

But well I wot that is is ended.’

‘Aye, he told me Your Lordship was his chief creditor.’

‘And am likely to remain it, as long as I have to keep a following of several hundred rascals in the city, to no profit to themselves or others, poor devils. If Arran and I made up our quarrel, I could live at Court with only a page and a few servants and so save expenses.’

His guest’s extremely practical estimate of his difficulties gave Knox no chance for the moment to resume the preacher, except to promise to serve His Lordship if His Lordship would promise to ‘continue in godliness’. Since godliness in this case appeared synonymous with economy, his Lordship was very ready to do so.

Unless he could begin to repair his estate it would soon be utterly destroyed, ‘and you’ll see me sitting in the pillory at the Market Cross wearing a bankrupt’s yellow hat!’ he chuckled.

Mrs Bowes hurried in with ‘a comfortable hot whisky posset to clear the cold night air from His Lordship’s stomach’ – and, incidentally, from his host’s, for she kept reminding him of ‘a salty rheum’ that had settled on it last week. A thin nervous female, there was still a sort of agitated good looks in her soft tremulous red mouth and eager eyes that opened wide and awed on the Wicked Earl, who ran the critical eye over her that he always accorded to any horse or woman.

Her former son-in-law cut short her chat about the posset and shooed her out of the room as though she were a hen; but not before she had scuttled aimlessly round the table, darted at the candles, and in her efforts to trim them put out one of them, then exclaimed that it would never do to have three candles on the table ‘as for a corpse’, blamed herself almost tearfully for her heathenish superstition while relighting it, then made a side-pass at the hearth and picked up the poker, but as the blazing fire could require no ministrations she dropped it again with a clatter, then apologized, fluttered, curtsied, departed.

A deep masculine repose settled on the little room, which now seemed much larger and less crowded. The hot whisky posset went down in silence to its appointed place.

‘And now,’ said Knox ungratefully, ‘will anyone deny my words that “it is more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign over men”?’

Bothwell didn’t deny it. He had too much on his hands at the moment to take on the relation of the sexes. His host got back to the business of the interview.

Bothwell had in no way acknowledged his fault. Arran’s enmity against him had been first aroused by the deadly blows Bothwell had struck at his party, and at Knox himself.

‘All I have suffered in the service of Christ Jesus, even those hideous months in the galleys’ (the encouraging effect of the posset almost tempted Bothwell to ask if complicity in the murder of his countryman was the service of Christ), ‘were as nothing compared to the hurt you did me when you robbed John Cockbum of the bag of gold he was bringing us for the pay of our soldiers. Mutiny followed straight upon it, defeat, flight. That night was the worst of all my memories, when the sword of dolour passed through our hearts.’

‘You mean the night of your retreat from Edinburgh?’ inquired the soldier, not unsympathetically, but a little puzzled by this description of a military manoeuvre.

But to Knox it was the night ‘when the wicked began to spew forth the venom that had lurked before in their cankered hearts.
The rabble flung filth and stones at us, their spiteful tongues crying “Traitors!” “Heretics!” and even “Cut their throats!” I would never have believed that our own countrymen could have wished our destruction so unmercifully, and so rejoiced in our adversity.’

‘It was the fortune of war,’ said Bothwell.

‘Aye, you had it then. The Lord Arran gave chase to Crichton within a few hours of the robbery – but the bird had flown.’

‘To Big Bess’s kitchen, bless her,’ Bothwell chuckled, but to himself, for these happy reminiscences would not further the cause in hand. To Knox he said earnestly, ‘The hurt I did you was not personal to you – nor Arran – least of all to John Cockburn, a far kinsman, so that I gave orders he should not be killed. A man can as soon make friends with his enemy as with his neighbour – sooner more often. You, who are from the Border, like myself, must know that.’

He had leaned forward as he was speaking, his eyes fixed hard and hot upon the other. Old loyalties, old traditions stirred uneasily in the depths of the preacher who thought he had broken clean away from all such childish ties, into a realm where men held together only by what they thought.

But he could not always be sure of their thoughts, however much he strove to make them the same as his own. Of late he had felt much doubt and discontent with his allies. He had never liked ‘Michael Wily’ Lethington, a worldly mocking man who had been heard to say that the God of his fathers was nothing but a bogy of the nursery. As for those ‘young plants’, as he had called Lord James and Arran so tenderly two years ago, they were growing with a twist; James inclining more and more to Lethington’s worldly policy, while Arran’s zeal was becoming so lopsided that it threatened to uproot his reason.