Authors: Margaret Irwin
She of course was laying all her triumph as a tribute at his feet. That was just what she would do in her generosity. ‘After four years he’s opened my cage and set me free at last,’ she said, and flapped her arms like wings ‘to see if it’s really true.’ It was her marriage had done this, since it had driven James into open revolt. It should also assure her of the English succession, and of the support of the Catholic powers. The Pope had quite overlooked her hasty dispensing with his Dispensation and had written his warm approval and congratulations; so had Philip of Spain: they had even sent some money to help her in the face of her subjects’ rebellion,
and promises of more. It was little Davie who had worked all that.
Who was Davie? Why, David Rizzio, of course. Davie should have been there at supper with them, but he was working so hard that he would not join them till later. ‘We owe everything to Davie,’ she said; her hand rested a moment on the young man’s beside her, and he caught at it.
‘I had wit enough to woo the prettiest girl in Europe without Master Davie to show me how,’ he cried.
Bothwell had heard that her secretary Rizzio had helped to work the affair more than anyone: but his look showed his surprise that the Queen should have asked him to supper – a singer. She answered it indignantly. Davie was their friend, and the best they had in Scotland. She had found she could trust him as she could not trust her Secretary of State, Lethington (‘And that’s no news to me,’ muttered Bothwell), and then when Darnley came they had made instant friends, Darnley staying at his lodgings, sleeping in his bed and playing tennis with him, and Davie had promised him to help him and had kept his word.
Bothwell was amused to see that Darnley did not like these reminders; ‘they don’t fit in with his picture of himself as a haughty young English nobleman – he doesn’t like to be beholden to an Italian singer for his lady’s favour’.
He expected to dislike Rizzio himself; it was intolerable that this beggar on horseback, possibly a Popish spy, should rise to such power.
But when the little man appeared in the dark doorway of their glowing room with the suddenness of a brightly painted jack-in-the-box in his over-gorgeous clothes sparkling with too many jewels, and his broad ugly face, all smiles, and brilliant black eyes beaming up at them, an enormous bouquet of deep red roses in his hand ‘for the Rose of all roses’, chattering in bad English and good French indiscriminately and equally fluently, joking, grinning, greeting the strange Scots lord with instant trustful friendliness as a friend of the young couple to whom he was obviously devoted – then Bothwell found to his great surprise that he did not dislike him at all.
He was so short as to be almost a dwarf, his shoulders were hunched, his head was big and his face pitted from the smallpox; but his misshapen ugliness had no effect on his spirit, he was a really merry fellow and his eyes sparkled with intelligence. He was delighted with himself, the position he had won, the rich clothes he wore, the services he had done his adored mistress and the splendid young Prince he had befriended and helped to marry to her, and now with this new arrival of the Queen’s strongest man of action, a fine soldier and man of the frontiers, who would set her safely and surely on the throne that she had only occupied till now as a stalking-horse for her half-brother.
‘There is only one thing to be done with that one,’ he said of James, and drew his hand across his throat with a sharp click, then laughed up into Mary’s face with the daring impudence of a child who has said something that the grown-ups may scold but will secretly like. The astonishing mixture of simplicity and subtlety was one that Bothwell had met before in those of his nation, but he saw that it baffled the English youth completely.
Darnley had seen Rizzio managing Mary’s foreign diplomacy, conducting her correspondence with the Pope and Philip of Spain, wary, cunning, sharp as a needle, and quite unscrupulous in his determination to get his dear mistress what she wanted by any means, boasting of them to Darnley to show how clever were his hints and lies and promises. He was greedy too of jewels and gifts and the fine clothes that only emphasized how unaccustomed he was to wear them; he took all he could get, chuckling with unabashed pleasure and calling it his booty. ‘I am as gay with trinkets as one of your Border wives after a raid!’
So that the English lad could not believe in the other side of the picture; the upstart, greedy, cunning adventurer, of the race that had become a byword for guile and treachery, could not be genuinely this merry little fellow who frisked and yapped round him and his lovely Mary; he must be playing a part – and what insolence to bring her roses! And then he played and sang so much too well; of course Darnley played and sang well too, but like a gentleman, whereas Rizzio was a professional who had
wormed his way up from the gutter by his gifts.
Mary had demanded music, and Rizzio was tinkling a very pretty and expensive guitar made of ebony and ivory inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl. With his broad face beaming blandly as the sun over his instrument, he told them that he had sung in the streets of Genoa as a ragged little boy and sold lucky charms to keep off the Evil Eye – ‘and a grand trade I did with them, for my back was more crooked then than now, and it’s lucky to deal with a hunchback – look at the luck I’ve brought these two young Princes – and myself too. I have had the best of luck ever since I was born.’
The disgusted pity that Bothwell was accustomed to feel for any weakness or deformity was impossible in this case; and he could have cheered the little man for making it so. Pity in a woman is of a different stuff; it was that quality, mixed with admiration of his gay courage, and her gratitude, that made Mary coax and pet him and chaff him tenderly; Darnley would be an ass if he didn’t see that.
The glow was fading from the little room, but Mary would not have candles put on the table; it was so pleasant to sit there in the half-dusk, talking desultorily and listening to Davie’s music that began as a wittily tripping accompaniment to his and their talk, an illustration of it, such as a solemn thrumming of the strings during any discussion of the Lords of the Congregation:
pom pom prrrom te pom
, here comes the Great Bastard and his ‘long love’ –
te wee tiddledly we wee
went the thin notes, somehow irresistibly like Lady Agnes – into whose rapacious hands Queen Elizabeth had actually disgorged £3,000 to help the rebellion, ‘and what’s the betting that Agnes helps herself to a good helping of it?’
Te wee
. Would Elizabeth (the guitar suddenly gave an extraordinarily clever imitation of a schoolgirl playing the virginals, the notes prancing up and down very ‘high and disposedly’ like the strutting of a peacock) really give the rebels more help and money? Lord James had her written promise, of which Davie’s spy work had obtained a copy; but all four were agreed that as the rebellion had failed so far –
prrimp presto prrimp
– the peacock stepped discreetly away.
Bothwell gave his advice that they should release Lord George
Gordon and restore him to his father’s titles and lands as Earl of Huntly.
‘I did that more than a month ago,’ cried Mary proudly, ‘the first moment that I broke with James.’
The guitar miraculously became the pipes, playing the Gay Gordons into the presence, exalted, hare-brained, magnificent.
It changed to a sinister note; the hoot of owls, the mew of cats were heard in the wild witches’ dance that whirled through the room as they discussed Darnley’s kinsman, that grey elderly savagely bad-tempered invalid, Lord Ruthven, who had shown his hand on their side. He was an adept in black magic; Mary had once complained that it was unsuitable that a sorcerer who practised the Black Mass should be a member of her Privy Council.
The talk died. The four of them sat in this dim tiny scented room with the clear green light of the September evening outside the little window, the shadowy figures on the tapestry behind them, and the music deepening, glowing, binding them now to silence.
After all his adventures, imprisonment, escapes and the attempts of murderers against him, James Hepburn was sitting here with the Queen, whose tip-tilted face beside him now shone grave and lovely like the young moon in the dusk. His body told him he was in love; he had been that many times, but never before had his mind and fancy flamed with it, telling him that life was a thing of greater beauty and danger than he had dreamed of.
It was the first time, too, that he had ever sat beside a woman with whom he had fallen in love, and felt her unconscious of him.
For Mary’s spirit had raced out of the room on the deep notes of Rizzio’s exultant song; the thrumming of his guitar was an echo to her of galloping horses and the blood tingling in her veins; she felt the furious wet wind again in her face as she braved the roaring torrent of the Carron, there where King Arthur had fought his last battle, and where she rode at the head of her troops to defend her right to reign, her right to love, to defend the man by her side that she had chosen herself in the teeth of her enemies.
He had faults as she had seen already, he was proud, violent-tempered – well but she had liked that, she was so herself though
she had learned to school her temper. Anyway, he had not had one single quarrel with herself; they had laughed about it, saying it was the right thing to have a quarrel. And he would not go on drinking now his life had suddenly become so full of new excitement and importance. She had insisted on his being given the title of King, on his being treated with all royal honours equally with herself.
She thought of all she would give and do for him, of all he would become as he grew to full manhood with power and responsibility in his hands. ‘My life, my lovely life,’ she murmured to herself in ecstasy as the music flowed over her, lifted her on a wave of glorious sound, and she saw her life unrolling before her like a bright tapestry away into a sunlit distance, and herself riding down it with the tall youth glittering in blue and gold beside her; then turned her head, saw the eyes of the man on her other side, saw them deep on her as he had never looked at her before, saw, stopped, caught her breath and wondered – what lies ahead?
Chapter Two
Bothwell’s life was moving at its old headlong speed. He at once sent his lawyer, Mr David Chalmers, to London with dispatches to the French Ambassador, and though Chalmers had just ridden to Eyemouth to meet him, and back to Edinburgh at his master’s own furious pace, he was now bidden to make the ride of four hundred miles in four days – ‘and I may allow you an extra half day for accidents, but no more,’ said his lord – and was obeyed.
In that time Bothwell was reinstated on the Council, and as Lieutenant of the Border; rallied the Border clans to his command; drew up plans for the coming campaign, in which he counted on collecting fifteen thousand men at Stirling to round up the rebels at Dumfries; and, also within those four days, followed up his commands to the clans in person, riding all through Teviotdale and Liddesdale, Nithsdale and Annandale, to assure himself of the exact strength of those ‘barons and gentlemen of the dales’ who had by now already sworn to him ‘truly to serve the King and Queen – and in especial James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell’.
The Johnstones and the Jardines, the Crabbed Kerrs, the Turnbulls and the Bold Rutherfords, names that have rung through a hundred ballads, flocked to follow him.
But the Elliots wouldn’ wi’ him ride,
And they rue it to this day.
For Rob Elliot of Redheugh had been turned out of his command
of Hermitage Castle by Bothwell on his brief and breathless visit to Scotland this last spring; and in his rage he had transferred his clan’s allegiance to the Queen of England, and got fifty pounds from Sir John Forster, the English Warden, for doing so. Bothwell threatened, but Sir John had bribed, and Bothwell won over only part of the clan to his Queen’s service. That put him in a furious temper as he rode back to Holyrood at the end of the four days, swearing that as soon as he could spare the time he would burn the Elliot’s peel towers and get Rob of Redheugh’s head.
His return did nothing to sweeten his mood, for he found that his Lieutenancy had been supplemented by the appointment of Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox, as Lieutenant of the Western Border, so as to cope with the special emergencies of these troubled times. That was the official explanation: the true one was that Darnley had been hotly indignant at Bothwell’s appointment; the Lieutenancy was the highest and most important office in the kingdom, it should therefore be held by the King’s father. Mary had flatly refused, and they had their first quarrel; and it was not the right thing! She could not bear it, to see him go red and angry and hear him shout at her, and such silly things; there was a dreadful moment when she wondered if she were really beginning to dislike her young ‘bluff King Hal’. If she saw her gay lad turn into a sulky lout, what would she do?
Her terror was lest she should lose her love for him; not lest he should lose his for her. To make herself see him again as she wished, she gave Lennox the supplementary appointment of the Western Marches; she told herself that it could not matter much, since Bothwell held the chief command.
But Darnley would not step back on the pedestal where she had placed him; he took her concession as a tribute to his firmness, and traded on it unexpectedly when Mary wanted to put Bothwell at the head of her army. She sat stunned while Darnley explained to the Council in a casual offhand manner that it was also his father’s right to lead an action against the rebels near Dumfries.
‘He may have the right to – he hasn’t the chance,’ exclaimed Bothwell. ‘He’s away keeping the Campbells off his lands.’
‘He’s preventing the Campbells from joining forces with the rebels’ cavalry,’ corrected Darnley with a haughty glance at the Borderer under half-shut eyes. Bothwell was imperturbable.
‘Whichever it is, he’s away, and can’t march on Dumfries.’