Authors: Margaret Irwin
‘Will you dine with me, tomorrow, my lord? We might hunt together first.’
All the set speeches prepared by either side for the other to say were stricken dumb. The seconds continued to glare at each other for a bit, but it was of no use, for the principals had retired to a window to discuss the form of sport next morning. But one speech was not to be silenced, John Knox was determined not to leave them until his part in this happy event had been recognised.
‘Now, my lords,’ he admonished them, ‘God has brought you together by the labour of a simple man.’ No doubt that labour would be misconstrued by misreport, but he could patiently bear the wrongful judgements of men.
Sure enough, a flood of gossip poured through the town at the sudden amazing spectacle of the enemy Earls, whose rioting over a loose woman had lately been the scandal of Edinburgh, now reconciled by the Prophet, and hunting, dining, going to church together, and paying a friendly call together on Arran’s father. What the Duke of Châtelherault thought of it no one could say, but probably he was, as usual, not thinking. What McCrechane, a cook in the High Street, thought and said, was that now the two chief roysterers were allied, Knox would find himself in the cart, and his reputation ‘scourged through the town’. But it was the cook who was scourged and made to wear the scold’s bridle in the pillory for his blasphemy in speaking against Knox – a punishment that did not show the minister’s promised patience under misreport.
Arran clung to his new friend with the desperation of a drowning man, and so voluble and so plausible were the reasons that he gave for this that Bothwell did not guess that the true one was Arran’s fear of his own clouding mind.
He talked as they walked up the High Street, occasionally
tripping over his own feet in his shambling fashion as he peered round into the other’s face, and passers-by stared and shopkeepers peeped from their doors. He talked as they rode back from the hunt, his voice coming in spasmodic gusts, high and shrill, blown away on the wind like the cawing of the nesting rooks over the late March fields. He talked as they sat over dinner, and sobbed as he told Bothwell of ‘the beastliness of my father, who’s got more money than either faith or God’, and yet kept his son so short that he could make no proper show at Court before the Queen. And at mention of the Queen the tears ran down his sallow cheeks. He was betrayed, he said; his party had promised to support his pretensions to her, but they were secretly thwarting them. Baffled desire, and the sudden drop in his political importance, made him furious with his allies, frantic to assert himself.
He had had a royal marriage dangled before his nose ever since his childhood, when Henry VIII had offered his daughter Elizabeth to him. Had his father accepted, Arran would now be Queen Elizabeth’s husband.
‘And had mine been accepted, I’d now be her stepson,’ Bothwell retorted. ‘My father proposed for her when she was the Lady Elizabeth – her or her bloody sister Mary, it was all one to my dad as long as it was a princess, he having had a shot at the Queen Regent and missed.’
He flung back his head in a roar of laughter, glad of the chance to turn his companion from his lachrymose mood. ‘How many Queens do you want?’ he demanded. ‘You can’t have ’em both, you know.’
Arran took his chaff seriously. He was determined Bothwell should know what value had been set on him by the English Queen.
Elizabeth had sworn openly to ‘take a husband that would give the King of France a headache’, and everyone knew that she intended Arran, and a joint attempt with him on the Scots Crown. He had been induced to slip away from the French Court and smuggle himself into England; hide in a wood for a fortnight, living only on fruit; hide in Cecil’s own house in Westminster while Elizabeth
brightly denied that he was in her kingdom; travel north with a false passport from Cecil, and hide with the English Ambassador in Scotland, until he could openly join the rebel lords to fight against the Queen Regent, and send for subsidies from England through their secret agent, John Cockburn.
But then, as a sympathizer sang in Aberdeen,
‘Curtfoot Bothwell like a limmer lay
(And traitor tried, yea, and a tyrant too),
And unawares did wound thee on the way.’
From that moment of the Portmanteau Raid, Arran had dated his decline in importance, and hated and feared James Hepburn more than any other man; but now, in his disgust with his allies, he told him that he was the only man in Scotland he could trust.
Of which Bothwell took instant advantage. He meant to find out what lay behind that scare last autumn of Arran’s supposed intention to kidnap the Queen; by ‘gentling’ him as he would a nervous horse, he led him on to speak of his fantastic dreams of Mary. Arran got more and more excited; it was his ‘right’ to have her; he had given up Elizabeth and the hope of two kingdoms for her (‘Oho, so it’s that way round now, is it?’ thought Bothwell with sardonic amusement); he had been in love with her ever since he had seen her, he would go mad if he did not have her.
‘And how do you propose to get her?’ asked the practical voice on the other side of the little table. They were dining in comfortable privacy in a small room in Bothwell’s house, with only Paris to wait on them, and now that dinner was finished he noiselessly left the room. Arran’s eyes followed the thin form as it slipped like a shadow through the door, then shot back to the dark face opposite and opened wildly, staring not at Bothwell but at something just behind him, as though he saw a ghost.
The moment hung between them in the flickering candlelight, with the red wine glowing on the table, and Bothwell’s hard muscular hand raising his glass, but pausing as he caught that strange look on Arran’s face.
‘We can speak freely now, there’s not even my French page here – not that he’d matter. What is in your mind?’
‘The same as that which lurks behind your dark mind,’ was the unexpected answer.
Bothwell brought his hand down so sharply on the table that it cracked the stem of his wine-glass.
‘What the devil do you mean by that?’ he exclaimed in amazement. ‘Did I ever plan to kidnap the Queen?
Answer
me,’ he thundered, as the other cowered at his question.
‘No, but you will, you will,’ wailed Arran.
‘You have gone clean daft with fright.’ Then he forced himself to speak more kindly. ‘You’ve nothing to fear from, me. Why did you say that the same thing was in both our minds?’
Arran had plainly no idea by now why he had said it. But he made a violent effort to pull himself together and justify it.
‘Why should we not be of one mind? Hamiltons and Hepburns filled the town at Christmas when they were ready to fly at each other’s throats. If, instead, they had joined forces, the Queen’s men from Holyrood would have had no chance against us. You too hate that backslider James, traitor both to his religion and the Queen; you too hate her priests, servants of Satan, who are dragging her soul down into hell.’
‘Is it only her soul you’re concerned with?’ asked Bothwell dryly. ‘What of her body?’
‘In my arms, safe in Dumbarton Castle,’ cried Arran, beside himself now with excitement. Bothwell too seemed to have caught it, for he half rose from his chair with his hands clenched. But Arran never noticed the movement, he was rushing on: ‘With Gavin Hamilton and all our clan at my back I’d have power to do it – kill the Bastard, kill Lethington, hack them to pieces, and all else who oppose us – But
you’d
not oppose us?’ he demanded suddenly – ‘you’d help me? You’ll plan it out and put all things in execution?’
‘While you stand by and watch, hey? Until I hand the Queen over to you in Dumbarton Castle?’
Bothwell’s laugh was harshly disagreeable. Loathing had rushed
over him when he had half risen from his chair, but he had sat down again in time before he smashed his fist into that sickly white face before him. His horror had taken him by surprise, and that angry bark of laughter scared Arran off.
He began to disclaim all he had just said, and Bothwell had again to do the human equivalent to ‘Woa there, my beauty. Steady now, steady’, until he had reassured him, and then he added quite casually, ‘You’ve said how easy, it would be to capture the Queen out hunting. Is that what you mean to do?’
‘If you would help me.’
‘And what do I get out of it?’
‘You and I together will rule all,’ Arran said impressively.
‘Very pretty, but I haven’t said yet what I’ll do.’
Then, as the poor wretch flinched at his grim tone, he said, ‘Put it from you now. Do not speak, no, nor think of it again – do you hear? – until you speak again with me.’
He took him by the hand and looked into his eyes, compelling him to follow his will. Arran stared back, seeing him as the strong man that deep within himself he had despaired of ever being. But it would not be necessary if Bothwell would be it for him. He would only have to stand by while Bothwell put all things in execution.
Next day Mr Knox had another visitor. He had just preached his mid-week sermon, and was walking up and down his study, pulling at his beard while he dictated letters to his secretary, when Lord Arran rushed in, unannounced, having charged up the stairs ahead of the servant.
‘I am betrayed,’ he gasped out, ‘treasonably betrayed! My life is in danger.’
His eyes were full of tears, his twitching hands plucked at his dagger, he glared at the secretary as though he were accusing him of the betrayal, so that the youth, though goggling with curiosity, was thankful that his master curtly signalled to him to leave the room. Arran was incoherently accusing ‘one Judas or another’ of seeking his life by involving him in a plot against the Queen. Knox insisted on his giving Judas’ surname.
‘The Lord Bothwell,’ whispered Arran fearfully – ‘but if he knows I have told you, he will challenge me to combat. That wouldn’t be allowed in France,’ and he bewailed that he had not gone there as he had first intended.
Bothwell in a plot against the Queen! It sounded the most unlikely thing for that determined royalist. Knox demanded details, heard that the Hepburns were to join with the Hamiltons to murder Lord James and Lethington (that sounded more probable), seize the Queen and hand her over to Arran – ‘and so he and I together shall rule all,’ declared Arran on a wild note of triumph, then instantly cried that the whole thing had been planned only to ruin him, so that Bothwell could accuse him of treason.
‘If you refused, you cannot be held guilty.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, I shall be! You don’t understand. It is treason if I conceal it. I must tell it – no, I had best write it to the Lord James.’
‘You had best do no such thing,’ said his mentor in deep disgust. Here was a pretty coil! It would utterly discredit his efforts in bringing the two enemies together if this treason turned out to be the real motive of their friendship. It looked as though the impertinent cook McCrechane would be justified in his malicious opinion, and that Knox’s reputation for wisdom and judgement might get a nasty blow.
But he could not believe in it; even discounting all Bothwell’s previous record of loyalty, he would never be such a fool as to confide so dangerous a design to his former enemy, within only a few days of their making up their quarrel. It seemed clear that Arran had really gone off his head. He tried to soothe him, but the wretched creature only grew the more frantic and rushed out of the room before Knox could stop him.
All the minister could now do was to write to Lord James and warn him of Arran’s condition. He called back his secretary; the Earl had met him as he rushed downstairs and had promptly knocked him down; he was therefore not surprised when his master dictated the words that the Earl of Arran was plainly stricken with a frenzy, and that it would be a grievous mistake if over great credit were
given to his inventions.
But James’ notion of a grievous mistake did not agree with Knox’s. He proposed to take Arran’s accusations seriously. Bothwell and Gavin Hamilton were both arrested.
Arran had added a third traitor to his list, and was now accusing his father. The Duke wrote declaring his innocence, both of treason and his son’s madness – ‘he takes it off his mother’.
The accusations went further and embarrassed even James; for at a public examination Arran declared that he had been deluded by devils and witches, and when asked by what witches, replied,
‘Lord James’ mother.’
Sometimes he utterly denied all that he had said against Bothwell or Gavin or his father. But when confronted with Bothwell before the Council he again charged him with treason, imputing to him words he had himself used. Bothwell had offered to ‘put all things in execution’, to capture the Queen, ‘hack to pieces’ all who opposed him, and take her to Dumbarton for Arran ‘to keep her surely or otherwise demean her person’.
At that there was an uproar, for Bothwell was halfway across the Council-room before the other lords could fling themselves on him and hold him back.
‘Let me go,’ he roared. ‘I’ll squeeze the lying breath out of your throat, you rat!’
‘One of the liveliest Council scenes I ever remember,’ purred Lethington, who had not stirred from his comfortable seat.
Bothwell’s fury was choking his wits; nothing else mattered beside his longing to wipe out in blood that foul charge against him of offering to procure the Queen for Arran. He challenged him to a fight to the death, and Arran shrieked and claimed the protection of the Council.
Bothwell’s blind rage was put down as a mark against him; he could give no answer but threats of violence against his accuser – showing plainly that he had been touched on a sore spot; there was no smoke without a fire, etc.
There had been no witness to that fateful interview between him and Arran, and each accused the other of the very same words
of treasonable intent. The previous rumours of Arran’s intention to kidnap the Queen went against him; on the other hand, Lord James was reminding everyone that Bothwell was known to be a desperate fellow – one who would stick at nothing, and ready to fling himself into any bold adventure for the sheer love of the game. His fortunes were in a bad way; he had had to sell much of his lands and was still heavily in debt; he had little to lose. All Edinburgh had been amazed by his sudden reconciliation with Arran; the gossips had always known it must have been for some nefarious purpose.