Authors: Margaret Irwin
He naturally could not understand that in her physical and emotional exhaustion she found his enormous vigour overpowering, and shrank from it as she would at this moment from a nor’-east gale.
‘Have you never been ill or tired yourself?’ she asked. ‘If you were, I suppose you’d feel as weak as a horse!’
What was she driving at? He was not asking her to do anything. No, the thing was plain enough; she’d fallen in love with him and now fallen out again.
He did not see that she had fallen out of love with love itself; that any sexual emotion was abhorrent to her for the time being, after all she had suffered from it in body and mind. He told himself that he had served her turn, and now that he was no longer immediately necessary he was being pushed again into the background. He was damned if he’d stand that.
It was very hot; Erskine of Mar offered the Queen the hospitality of his castle of Alloa; she longed to be on the moors again and by the sea, but dreaded the effort of the journey. Bothwell suggested that one of his sea-captains, William Blackadder, and his crew should take her by boat up the Firth of Forth, and she would then have nothing to do but lie on deck, he added crossly, for he was disgusted at her not making a quicker recovery. Anger, pity, and fear for her, he could never look at her now without a mixture of those uncomfortable emotions, and the last two were painfully unaccustomed. But for a moment he was won to something tenderer by the delight and gratitude in her face.
‘To sail up the coast in one of your ships! It’s what I’ve always longed for. And you will be in charge, my Lord High Admiral, as you were when you stole me away from France!’
But he would not come. Her ‘watchdog James’ would be with her as well as Mar – he’d not spoil so harmonious a company. The next instant he regretted his sneer and said Blackadder would manage the voyage perfectly, he was a useful fellow (‘and would have been more so if I’d got the chance to use him!’ he added to himself). For Lethington, before his pardon, had planned to go to France, and Bothwell had blithely detailed Blackadder to pursue him at sea, capture his ship, and drop him overboard. George Buchanan was not entirely libellous for once when he described Bothwell’s sea-captains as ‘famous pirates’.
But that happy opportunity had been missed, the wind
taken out of Bothwell’s piratical sails, and Blackadder left with the gentle task of transporting a sick girl and her baby to ‘the sweet seat of Alloa.’
By mid-August she was strong enough to ride again, and Bothwell saw her at a grand royal hunting-party, which James and Darnley also attended, on the high downs of Ettrick Forest. The sight of her once again on horseback, with the quick colour in her cheeks and the light in her eyes as of old, brought back his unbearable longing for her. He had thought her cold, ungrateful, uncertain, weak, preferring a lot of tame treacherous cats to himself, but when he saw her in front of him he could not go on hating her; they rode together for a time over the waving bent, now in pearly flower, and there they were talking as though they had never parted and he had never been angry with her.
As they sat their horses waiting for the others to come up, watching the silver lights and shadows chasing each other over the rolling hills, she told him that Darnley was giving trouble. While in Edinburgh he had ‘vagabondized every night’, and she had scarcely seen him, but when she was at Alloa he had suddenly turned up and made a scene, demanding ‘bed and board’ with his wife, ‘just as though I were a lodging-house keeper!’ she said with a desperate little laugh. The doctor had told him it was impossible, and he had flung away in a temper within a couple of hours of his arrival. He simply could not understand why everything should not be just the same between them as before Rizzio’s murder; and now that he found her so unforgiving, he was writing abroad to the Catholic Princes complaining of her lack of zeal for the faith; that she was getting their sympathy and protective interest on false pretences.
‘He can’t really think that would endear him to me, but he doesn’t seem to mind
what
I feel for him as long as it is something – if it can’t be the old fondness, then let it be fear, or just irritation!’
‘And when you are stronger,’ he burst out, ‘will you then give him his demands?’
She met his eyes fairly. Her own were clear, with the silver-golden lights of the day reflected in them, and her hair blowing round her face as soft as thistledown.
‘No,’ she said in a voice so low he scarcely heard it. She had whispered a pledge to him.
She gave Darnley more presents and induced him to make official appearances with her. They rode together to Stirling to place the Prince under the charge of Lord and Lady Mar, with Bothwell in command of his bodyguard. There the young couple stayed for a little with their baby, and Mary carried him up and down the prim paths of the formal garden that James IV had made, and watched the white peacock, of the same breed that he had installed, spread its tail like a great mother-of-pearl fan in the sun, and tried to think her child was growing less like his father every day.
But his father grew more and more like himself, and by September she fled back alone to Edinburgh.
Work, that was the only thing for her now. Even then she could not really take in the problem of modern finance. She sat day after day in Exchequer House with Lethington, and heard how prices were rising and money falling with the influx of new gold through Spain from the Indies; how this vast increase of yellow metal, for which men went and killed each other, would in the long run ruin Europe. Why then had men made gold their master?
Lethington shrugged and advised her to ask his father.
But he was, as always, sympathetic over her own immediate problems; he had often complained at the Council that it was most unfair the Queen should have to pay the Protestant ministers’ stipend out of her own privy purse – if she were to meet all their demands, he told them, ‘she will not have enough at the end of the year to buy herself a pair of shoes.’
But what else could she do? The enormous wealth taken from the old Church, which was to have endowed the new, had found its way into the lay pockets of the Lords of the Congregation, and she could not let the poor ministers starve.
‘And has Your Grace understood so ungraceful a subject as your revenues?’ asked Mr George Buchanan with what he intended as a courtly smile.
‘I have understood the Council will vote twelve thousand for the
Christening,’ she replied crisply; ‘with that, and Masques written by the finest Latin scholar in Europe, we should impress the foreign Ambassadors.’
The finest Latin scholar contorted both person and speech as he bowed over a return compliment so elaborate that he had difficulty in unwinding himself from its coils.
She came to his rescue with inquiries after the famous French pupils he had taught while holding the chair of Latin at the new College of Guienne at Bordeaux. For France had sheltered Mr Buchanan when both Scotland and England had turned him out, and he seldom missed a chance of telling Mary that her mother country was ‘
summa hurnanitas
’. Young Michel de Montaigne and Monsieur Scaliger owed their early eminence entirely to the fact that he had given them their first floggings, so he chuckled with reminiscent pleasure. Montaigne had been a pampered brat whose father had given orders he was to be awakened always by music, lest the tender brain of childhood should be injured by a more sudden process; but George Buchanan had soon put a stop to such nonsense. The ill effects of that early spoiling persisted, however; he was already, though a young man, wishing to retire to a life of ‘quiet and indifference to all things.’ To his former tutor, a shrewd and indefatigable man of business, passionately ambitious, this was the worst sign he had yet seen of the decadence of modern youth.
Montaigne had been made Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the French Court at a very early age, and King Henri II had delighted in his conversation; Mary herself, the thoughtful child King Henri had loved to have near him, had often leaned against her father-in-law’s chair and watched that strange young man with the melancholy smile looking at her under the heavy lids of his dreaming eyes, while he made little restless movements, kicking his feet together in a most unconventional manner for a royal audience, and talked and talked, and decided nothing.
But once he had left his ‘perhaps’ and ‘I think’ and ‘it is possible’ and all his gentle qualifications, and burst out in his rather loud voice at the news of fresh Spanish victories in Mexico. Politics! The greatness of Empire! The moral duty to civilize the savage and teach
him true religion! What did it all amount to but that great cities were levelled to the ground, nations exterminated, the richest and most beautiful countries wrecked – to provide Europe with pearl and pepper! ‘Mechanic victories!’ shouted that odd young man.
‘King Henri thought him remarkable,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes.’ The stout black indignant form heaved himself up and down the room in agitation that was somehow pathetic, so helpless was all the talent and energy of the careerist in conflict with the man of genius. ‘I’ve told him again and again, he might get anywhere. And yet look at him! He wishes only to read old books, to talk with gardeners and carpenters, he who has entertained kings! That is the result of having “a well-born soul” as he calls it! A well-born purse, rather. All young men should be born poor, as I was. Vanity and egoism, they will ruin the most promising career ever launched. Scaliger, too, says Montaigne’s interest in everything that concerns himself will swamp all his energies. What will it matter to the rest of the world whether he likes radishes, must drink his wine from a glass, wears silk stockings winter and summer? Yet that is all he wishes to do, draw himself with a pen in his essays as painters draw their own portraits with a crayon. He cares nothing for worldly prospects nor fame, does not want to be read or quoted after he is dead, thinks learning nothing to be proud of, and the cleverest men apt to be foolish, the laws mere conventions, and habits and customs a timid convenience. He wishes only, he says, to be “a master of the art of life”.’
And he mopped his brow, which was damp with rage and a real concern for the pupil who might have done even better than himself.
Mary had never liked him so well as now, for he had forgotten he was speaking to a woman, that strange faintly unpleasant species that had to be approached in a particular manner with placatory smirks and compliments; for once he was speaking sincerely, and, though with disapproval, of one of the men who made France ‘
summa humanitas
’.
‘But,’ said he, ‘let us turn to more important matters,’ and he produced his Latin Masque. She looked at it as they walked in the
garden at the back of Exchequer House that still, golden September day. Some very tall sunflowers had raised their heads over the wall from the next garden; Mary looked up and laughed to see their black faces framed in glistening gold peering down at her. ‘A whole row of Black Ladies for a Savage Knight to tilt for!’ she exclaimed. ‘Whose garden is that?’
Mr Buchanan, disgusted that her attention should be diverted from his Muse, replied with a touch of acid, ‘Is it possible Your Grace does not know? That is the garden of Mr David Chalmers, one of my Lord Bothwell’s creatures.’
‘His lawyer, you mean,’ she answered, and thought yes, it was true, he really was leering. It was strange that so much learning could not create the ‘
âme bien née
’.
Chapter Fifteen
Monsieur d’Oysel, over on a diplomatic visit to the French Ambassador, Philibert Du Croc, simply could not understand it. His fat pink hands flapped in the face of his old comrade in arms, the Earl of Bothwell, as he wheezed and panted his astonishment. He had left Scotland six years ago, and now he found it a different country. Then all had been darkness – war with England, civil war, and worse than all, war with those one believed friendly: ‘Never could one tell here the friend from the enemy, for he who was with us in the morning might go over to the other side before dinner. No wonder that poor gallant lady died of it. Yet her daughter, a young girl, comes, and pouf! in five years she makes daylight. There has been no war with England. She has put down two civil wars against her as soon as they began. She escapes alone, enceinte, from five hundred armed guards. She crushes all her enemies within a week, then gives a natural birth to her infant and does not die. I tell you it is incredible, impossible!’
Bothwell quickly informed him that he had something to do with the crushing of her enemies and the squashing of the civil wars.
D’Oysel flapped away this information. ‘My friend, you are a fine soldier and you lead men
gaillardement
. It is known. Also you are seven years older than when you raided the English trenches and then lamented your Hobs and your Willies – it is possible you have learned some sense.’ (There was very nearly an explosion at this, but d’Oysel with a glance at his companion’s face did not wait
for it.) ‘But that does not detract from the miracle of this young thing, with but one of her nobles both strong and loyal to her, making such headway in a country all but foreign to her, and the most part hostile. Who has she had to advise her? No one but her bastard brother and your Scots Machiavelli, who, it is now plain, have worked only for their own ends from the beginning. But she has refused to serve their ends – or that of others. She has refused to obey the Pope and put down Protestantism, refused even to give his Legate an official audience. On the other hand, she has refused to obey John Knox and turn Protestant, although she has been threatened with murder again and again in his sermons if she does not do so – and those threats of Knox, they arrive, it is known. Yet she holds her way between the two faiths, and will have tolerance for both, and, in spite of the ministers, she has succeeded. The country has answered for her and not for the Bastard. All Europe is impressed, the English Queen envious and afraid, her enemies cowed.’ He drew breath, then demanded,