Authors: Margaret Irwin
‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you are a frankly confessed opponent. To talk with such, openly, face to face, as I am used to do, is even something of a relief to me, for I have had to fight with shadows and owlets in the dark.’
‘Who hasn’t?’ said Bothwell, with a touch of exasperation at the self-pity he had already noticed when Knox spoke of the worst of
his memories (God’s blood, did the man keep a diary only to put ‘bad’, ‘worse’ or ‘worst’ against his days?).
Knox wished to show that his ‘shadows and owlets’ were more sinister than any that this bold Borderer could have had to face, but it was unwise to complain of his allies, so he spoke instead of the monstrous scandals against him, all without any basis.
‘Then we’re in the same boat,’ said his guest cheerfully, ‘since my enemies not only accuse me of seducing more women than I could ever have had time for, but of sodomy as well – even as some of his enemies have accused Calvin.’
Knox’s eyes flashed; the approaching entente might have been in grave danger of dissolution, had not Mrs Bowes popped her head in at the door to ask if they were indeed certain, but indeed truly certain, they would not have another hot whisky posset (‘
No
,’ said Knox), it would not take her a moment to prepare, it was all there ready, and – ‘Go
away
, woman!’ he exploded, and away she went, bearing with her so much of his wrath that he forgot to attack Bothwell at once. That acute fencer seized the opportunity to leave the subject of the scandalously misunderstood trio of himself, Knox and Calvin for the safer one of reconciliation. The country looked more like settling down into reasonable peace and prosperity than it had done for years; it was incumbent on all parties and their leaders to help that settlement.
‘Settlement? The only true settlement of the country, my lord, was last year, when Christ’s true Church was established under the rule of the Book of Discipline.’
‘Aye, you had your run of rule last year before the Queen returned, but was it so settled? There was open insurrection all the spring and summer, the prisons were chock-full of the common people, for rebelling against your Book of Discipline.’
‘The rascal multitude!’ exclaimed the democrat from the back street in Haddington.
The nobleman fired back: ‘Because they wear hodden grey, do you think their whole lives are to be made drab? They insisted on their old mumming plays and amusements—’
‘Abominations!’
‘It was Robin Hood against—’
‘Christ Jesus!’ proclaimed Knox.
‘“John Knox” was what I was going to say, but no doubt it’s the same thing. In any case, you’ve proved for yourself that the rule of this country is no easy matter. Think then how hard it is for the Queen, a girl, foreign-bred, and a Catholic ruling Protestants.’
‘It is not hard,’ said Knox, now quietly and finally, ‘it is impossible.’
‘You mean that you have decided to make it so?’
‘I? I have done nothing. I have let an idolatrous priest say Mass in the Chapel Royal and I have not raised my hand.’
‘You raised your voice, though, and pretty loud, the next Sunday.’
‘Nothing shall stop my preaching Christ Jesus to be the only Saviour.’
‘That was no news before you were born. What has it to do with preaching insurrection?’
‘If I had chosen insurrection I should have done more than preach. I have the power. I could have plunged this country into civil war.’
‘Another! It’s only two years since the last. And to what end? To put the Hamiltons in power?’
‘
No
, my lord. I am the servant of God, not the leader of a faction.’
‘Well, a faction is all you’d lead in a civil war today, for Arran may be discontented enough to follow you, but you’d not have the Bastard and Lethington as you had last time.
They
hope to find some way of compromise, as England is finding, with the bulk of the people Protestant, though their Queen has crucifixes in her chapel and some sort of modified Mass – and hates the clergy to marry,’ he added slyly.
‘The false whore!’ burst out Knox, touched evidently on a tender spot. ‘As I wrote to her, she is an infirm vessel.’
‘Maybe, but her seat on the throne is getting firmer. When she came to it, England was weak and divided at home, and all her foreign possessions lost. Yet each year it’s stronger, and Elizabeth’s
position with it. With luck—’ he hastily changed it to, ‘With God’s help – and above all with toleration – the same might be done with Scotland and the Queen here.’
But toleration was not only impossible, but loathsome to Knox. The preacher was at his worst in argument, as Mary had proved, though more painfully, for he was also at his worst with women.
He had now been goaded into a state of excitement wherein nothing but uninterrupted eloquence could appease him, for eloquence, especially in anger, was to him what violent action or drink was to other men. He replied, ‘I utterly abhor the blasphemy that men who live according to equity and justice shall be saved, whatever religion they profess.’
Righteousness, then, could not help the Queen, yet he was determined to prove her unrighteous.
‘I do not call her a whore, but she was brought up in the most arrant company of whoremongers.’ To prove this he repeated incredible stories of former festivities at Queen Catherine’s Court, where at an appropriate moment the lights were put out in order that her husband, King Henri, and the Cardinal de Lorraine and the rest of the company might amuse themselves with the ladies. ‘Sire,’ the Cardinal had said with a very proper respect, ‘the first choice is yours, and I must have the second.’ And Knox drew so vivid a picture of the orgy that Bothwell asked him with due innocence if he had been there, and what luck he had had.
The eyes opposite burned in their sockets.
‘Do you dare mock this horrible villainy, the direct fruit of the Cardinal’s religion?’
‘No, for I can’t believe it, and if I could, what has it to do with the Queen?’
‘This!’
said Knox loudly. ‘That it was in such pastimes that our Queen was brought up.’
‘And you are telling all Edinburgh that?’
‘That – and more. That this will now be the upbringing of the sons and daughters of the Scots nobles, with fiddlers and dancers at the Queen’s Court. They might as well be exercised with flinging upon the floor – and all
the rest that thereby follows
!’ – a heated
interpretation of the stately Court dances that the reprobate opposite, now cocking a delighted eyebrow, had never imagined.
Knox made it even hotter; ‘the reward of dancers,’ he said, ‘was drink in hell.’ The Queen’s ladies wore long trains to their skirts that picked up all the dirt on the floor, and what’s more, they stuck targets or tassels on them. ‘The stinking pride of their targeted tails,’ he spat out, ‘will provoke God’s vengeance not only against these foolish women, but against the whole realm.’
This threat of God’s vengeance on the whole nation, for the crime of tolerating their Queen, struck Bothwell as the most dangerous weapon in Knox’s armoury. His reputation as a prophet would be used to the utmost among that ‘rascal multitude’ that he despised, yet knew so well how to inflame.
And what weapon could Mary ever find to withstand it?
The problem made him so thoughtful that he scarcely heard Knox’s thunder on yet another matter of national importance.
A chambermaid was with child by a married man, and this was in the Palace, ‘almost in the Queen’s lap’. Yet Mary would not have her executed as ordered by the Book of Discipline. He quoted a vulgar street song about it, to prove the disastrous effect of the Queen’s morals. Mary Livingstone was to marry the Master of Sempill, ‘and not before it’s necessary, for shame’ – though Bothwell, considerably more in the circle of Court gossips than Knox, had never heard any breath of scandal against the pair. Was Knox making a side-blow at another couple?
‘You are harsh on weddings,’ he remarked, ‘even on Lord James’. What had you to say to my sister’s?’
‘A sufficient woman for such a man,’ was the answer.
‘Aye, they suffice each other very well, thank you’; but there was a stony glint in his eye that was sufficient to silence Knox for the moment. That eye had seen something feminine and thwarted in the terrible prophet; he was more like a meddling auld wife of Haddington who should be put in the stocks to wear the scold’s bridle for his shrill slanders. Here he was complaining of scandals against himself when he was the worst scandalmonger of the lot! The streak of vulgarity, of cruel lack of chivalry, that he had shown
in his exultation over the suffering of a dying woman, was now intensifying in his jealous rivalry with her daughter – the rivalry of an old man with a young girl, surely a ‘monster in nature’.
Yet, even as he saw this, Bothwell saw the face opposite change; the indignant eyes grew grave and ardent as they removed their gaze to a wider scene.
‘You blame my rule that it did not succeed,’ Knox said. ‘How can the rule of Christ succeed if men will not follow it in their hearts? Earth might be fair as Paradise; no man need starve, whether of bread or learning; if only all men would wish it. But no rule on earth can make them wish it. We took the wealth of the old Church lands to better the lot of the poor, and set up schools with learned masters and ministers in the farthest and wildest places. Yet now the peasants all over the country are complaining that they were better off under their old masters; they are so ground down by their new landowners that many of the labourers are compelled by poverty to leave their land in the hands of their lords. And so the Reformed Church is deformed by the avarice of those very lords that helped to set it up.’
‘As always happens. How could you hope to avoid it?’
With a tremendous gesture the preacher swept aside such worldly sophistries – and with them his empty posset cup from the table, but never heard the crash.
‘I see no reason why men should not begin to express in their lives that which they have professed in words. If they plead, like dishonest merchants, “The world is evil, how can we live if we don’t do as others do?”, then it is they who make the world evil. It is the sin that has provoked God again and again to destroy strong realms and flourishing commonwealths. It is the rule of Satan, and as long as men follow it, this world will be hell.’
The cynical guest was uncomfortably impressed both by his passion and his honesty. The man was disappointed in his colleagues, but he would never be disillusioned of his ideals.
‘But what remedy can be found?’ Bothwell asked.
‘Let every man speak the truth with his brother. Let none oppress or defraud another in any business. Let the bowels of mercy appear,
for the hatred of the heart is murder before God, and whoso loveth not his brother is a murderer.’
The weak husky voice now speaking was the voice of genius – a genius that brooded like a thunderstorm over the whole country, and could reveal in a lightning flash to every man the conviction that his soul was stronger than fate.
That voice was still echoing in his ears when Bothwell went out of the warm house into a changed world. The wind had dropped while he was inside, the sleet had turned to a brief but heavy fall of snow, and the moon had risen. The dark gusty street on the hillside was quiet now and white, the jagged outline of the tall houses white against the black sky. Snow had covered the mud and smells of the middens, the air was as pure as on the moor; nature seemed to have a sign to show that ‘earth might be fair as Paradise’.
‘But what odds?’ said the young man in the street. ‘It will all be trampled black again tomorrow.’
Paris came up to him, his nose peaking up against the moon as he flung back his head in a half-suppressed yawn.
‘Are you asleep already, you lazy dog?’
‘Yes, my lord. The entertainment in the kitchen was very poor.’
‘Well, I’d not say that of the study.’
He had heard the call of a trumpet which, if he followed, and others, would awaken the world from its haunted sleep. For an instant he saw the nightmare wherein men struggle blindly; clutch at an insensate metal and call it riches, at uneasy domination and call it power, and die even while they wrangle in the dark.
Then he gave a harsh laugh and swung his cloak round him. Earth might be fair, might it, if men only practised what they preached? A fine one Knox was to preach that, to plead on behalf of mercy, and against the hatred of the heart, when he himself never ceased to preach that ‘the idolater shall die the death’! He hated Mary, and would hate her to the death if he could compass it.
Bothwell turned sharply to Paris behind him.
‘Where’s that new brothel you’d heard of? I need a rest from family prayers and blood-feuds.’
Chapter Eight
That odd, not unfriendly interview bore its fruit, though its ripening was delayed a little by a brush between Bothwell and a son of Arran’s protégé, John Cockburn, who, said the Hepburns, fired his pistol unprovoked in the face of his father’s enemy, missed, and galloped off hell for leather, ‘but the Lord’s was the better horse’. The Cockburn version was that the young man was out hunting when Bothwell gave chase to him shouting, ‘If he’s out for a hunt, let him have it!’
In either case, young Cockburn suffered no worse by his adventure than being taken to Berwick and back and then released; but he was a pupil of Knox, so in some sort sacred, and the preacher was gravely displeased. In a short time, however, he, like his forebears, did the service Lord Bothwell had asked of him.
So the enemy Earls met in his presence and that of their friends, who looked forbidding. The truculent Gavin Hamilton whispered scowling instructions to Arran as Bothwell and his company entered. But Arran paid no heed to him, nor to Knox’s introductory speech; he was staring at Bothwell and came up to meet him, holding out his hand.
‘Words do little,’ he said in a low voice. ‘If the hearts are upright, no ceremony is needed.’
His sudden gentleness was like that of an animal anxious to make friends; as those startled hare’s eyes looked into the other’s face, he seemed to be asking reassurance, not merely of Bothwell’s enmity but of his own secret fears. Bothwell’s astonishment was
shot through with both pity and triumph. He had had to set his teeth to come to this meeting, but how easy it was all being made for him! Now that he was face to face with this erratic trembling creature, he knew that he could get him to feed out of his hand. Arran’s own hand was clammy and cold, poor wretch – he’d soon show him he had no need to worry. He said: