The Galliard (56 page)

What could she say to that face so distant from her all her life, now soon to be divided for ever by death? But perhaps death was not the great division; life was that.

When James lay dying as she now lay, would he not know what she now knew – would not any man or woman, even Elizabeth, know this in death: that to triumph by stirring up hate and discord
must
fail in the end? In death, as with God, only love counted: and hate and fear drifted away impalpable as clouds. What did it matter now to her that her husband had tried to kill their child, that her brother had worked with her enemies to bring about her ruin? She was free of them now, and nothing they had done now mattered to her – only what she had done.

‘If you knew, if you only knew—’ she began to say, and then her voice failed, the darkness swept over her again, but presently she heard herself speaking through it, speaking of ‘love, unity and charity. All goodness comes of unity and concord, and from discord all desolations.’

She placed her son in their care, begging them to see that he did not take any harm ‘through either his father or his mother’: strange words, but how else could she warn them of his father? or ask that they should not punish her son for his mother’s religion?

‘I have never tried to press your conscience,’ she whispered, ‘nor troubled you to worship any other way than you thought right. I beg you will do the same with those of the Old Faith.’

It was what they had never done; why should they then when she lay dead? But they would do it if they only knew—

‘If you knew what it is to be in extremity, as I am – and have to render count of your faults, as I do, then you would never press them.’

The faint words fell in the stillness, hardly to be heard even in that dim shell of quiet. It was growing very dark; she could see no face near her now. Her hand groped out and touched a long cold hand, heavily ringed; she clutched it desperately before she should sink for ever into that dark. Her voice came again, clearer now, calling him: ‘I pray you, brother, Earl of Moray, that – you – trouble –
none
.’

Then her hand died in his; her eyes were closed. They laid a feather to her lips but it did not stir. Her limbs grew cold and stiff, all the beauty of her face was carved in marble.

‘She is dead,’ they said, and the word ran through the house and the little town, out into the countryside. Candles were lit in the small still room, and her maids filled it with weeping. They opened the window wide to let her spirit go free out over the moonlit hills.

Chapter Eighteen

Once again she was not to have ‘such easy victory’.

She passed through the gates of death – and came back.

She was dead, and for several hours; all the doctors said it, for the heart had ceased to beat, there was no breath, no pulse of life in any vein, and it was recorded that ‘Her Majesty became dead’, but that her surgeon, Nau, ‘a perfect man of his craft, would not give the matter over’. For more than four hours he worked to restore the circulation to that cold and rigid body, by continuous rubbing, drawing of her limbs and tight bandaging, until at last the blood rushed back in a sudden great sweat, and he knew that she lived.

When she recovered consciousness she found that James had already collected her jewels. He returned them in hasty confusion giving several disinterested reasons for his action.

Some days later she was out of danger, and then at last Darnley was induced by his companions to leave his hunting to pay a visit of kind inquiries to his wife. He remarked that she was always ill – first there had been that baby, and now this. If she were really getting better, when was he going to bed and board with her again? She had better make up her mind to it or she might be sorry. So there was no room for him and his retinue in this poky little house? That was why she had chosen it, he supposed, even though it had let her in for being ill in a room the size of a cupboard! Very royal!

He stayed in an old house in the town, royally large and spacious, and departed next morning, leaving her considerably the
worse for his visit. His swaggering air of mysterious confidence had worried her far more than his heartlessness.

Within a couple of days she learned the reason for it.

For months past Darnley had been busy, as even Knox knew and noted down, ‘complaining of the state of the country that it was out of order, and giving the whole blame to the Queen for not managing the Catholic cause aright’. He had now informed Spain, France and Pope Pius V that it was no use to attempt their Counter-Reformation in Scotland as long as Mary was on the throne.

She had, while ill at Jedburgh, to make a formal protest to the Spanish Embassy in London to try and clear herself of the charge that ‘she was dubious in the Faith’. The Pope had been gravely disappointed that she had not shown more ‘good and holy resolution’ by executing her half-brother, and the other Protestant rebels, even when warned that His Holiness would withdraw his subsidies if no better use were made of them ‘for the service of God in Scotland’. It was just what the Papal Nuncio, Vincenzo Laureo, had already feared; ‘the danger’, he had written, ‘is that the Queen in her excessive kindness would not consent to such an act’. He made a stronger attempt at blackmail. If Mary would not work more actively for the destruction of heretics in her country, she was told, then ‘the King himself could execute it’.

So Darnley had offered to take her place on the throne as the necessary figurehead for the Catholic Powers in Scotland! This was the reason of his defiant swagger and threat that she ‘might be sorry’; the reason too of his attempts to get abroad and into personal touch with King Philip.

She was left defenceless; those great distant figures in the background of her life, the Pope and Philip of Spain, whom she had never seen but always counted on as her friends, had now grown strange and sinister. They even had a disquieting resemblance to John Knox.

All these months Darnley had been setting spies on her and her correspondence; she knew that now, and could see the meaning for a hundred little unexplained happenings. Fear fell on her of these new unseen enemies, and loathing of her husband. She lay back on
her pillows and heard the autumnal evening song of the birds and envied them, wishing that God had never given man a soul to be so abused against Him.

Then there came another visitor, and with him the wind outside, keen and rough from the hills, blowing away those darkening shadows. This was the Earl of Bothwell, who had got himself carried to Jedburgh in a horse-litter across the pathless moors rather sooner than his wounds were fit for such painfully rough going. His left arm was in a sling and his body wound still troubled him a good deal, especially after this reckless journey; the bandages still covered the scar on his forehead near the left eye; that would stay for life: ‘Luckily, my eye isn’t hurt, so it’s only yours, Madam, that will be offended by it.’

‘Oh, you are monstrous!’

‘So my mirror told me – but d’Oysel assures me that I need not lose all hope of favour from women. An honourable scar—’

‘You deserve another for talking so. Fair rewards Your Lordship has got in my service!’

‘I’ll get others,’ he said low, and that forbidding eye under the bandage looked rather strangely at her.

She told him how she’d followed his example and ‘stabled herself’ in the moss like Tam o’ the Linn – ‘a fine pair of mosstroopers we’ve made!’

‘Well, you’ve made the bog famous already. I hear they’re calling it Queen’s Mire now.’

‘That’s a muddy compliment! And I lost my prettiest spur there, chased silver it was. Is there any chance it will ever be found?’

‘Maybe – this year, next year, a hundred years hence. You’ll win more spurs than you lose. And we’ll not let this couple of silly accidents spoil our plans either; we’ll carry out that Royal Progress through the Border towns as soon as you’re well enough. Have you got the gauds you promised yourself for it? You must make old Forster open his eyes when you get to Berwick and swear there’s a fairer Queen on this side of the Border than on his own.’

Was it still possible? Yes, of course it was, he told her.

He got her to walk with him, at first just in the orchard, and
then down on to that humped bridge, where they leaned over and counted the rippling circles of the rising trout, and he told her how the barricades at both ends of the bridge had been put up to defend the town from the English in the last invasion, and showed her the deep tree-shaded pool where witches were tested to see if they sank innocently or floated unholily – that was Jedburgh Justice for witches!

By the second week in November she was well enough to ride out in royal state from Jedburgh, with Bothwell and Gordon, James and Lethington close behind her, a glittering train of white and scarlet and black velvet. To Kelso and Home Castle, Langton and Wedderburn they went, and up on Halidon Hill above Berwick, where the English guns thundered out the royal salute from the frontier town, and that sturdy old bulldog, Sir John Forster, now in command there, rode out to meet her at the head of sixty captains and chief citizens, and fell so deep in love in five minutes that he rode all the way to Eyemouth beside her, to the great amusement of his former guest, Lord Bothwell.

In spite of their illnesses and the escapes of the Armstrongs and Elliots, ‘in spite even of Your Grace’s incurable clemency’, Bothwell told her, the main object of the Assizes had been achieved – to squash the plot to bring the Earl of Morton back to power on a
coup d’état.

But there were other plots. No one could make out what Darnley and his old fox of a father were now brewing between them (for Lennox had long ago swallowed his paternal indignation). As before, those farthest away seemed to know most about it. D’Oysel got word from home of a rumour that was flying round Paris of a design of theirs to seize the baby Prince, imprison Mary and set up a Regency. Any such attempt would certainly be seized on by Morton’s crew as the chance to attack from over the Border, probably with an English army. It would be safer to have them back in the country, as even Bothwell now agreed.

She had her best chance yet to unite all her nobles together at the Christening. The day was getting very near, December 17th. She would hardly dare breathe till it was over, so important was it
that it should be a success, so dangerous the many forces working against it.

Darnley wrote and told her flatly that he was not going to attend it. This would amount to a public declaration of the child’s bastardy by his father. He had conceived a dislike of his son, due indeed to jealousy, but not of Rizzio. This goggling slavering brat, that in some revolting way did remind him of his own image in the glass, had cut him for once and all out of the direct line of the succession. He had lost his chance of the Crown Matrimonial, and now, even if Mary died, it was his son and not himself who would be heir.

His letter threw Mary into a paroxysm of despair; she cried out that she was chained to this hateful boy, and that if she could not escape she must kill herself. ‘There will be little need for her to lay hands on herself,’ declared her doctor, Nau; ‘her husband is doing all that is necessary.’

Others were getting desperate about Darnley. At the pleasant Castle of Craigmillar, two miles from Edinburgh, where Mary, again avoiding Holyrood, went for a fortnight’s convalescence at the end of November, there were continual conferences for ‘the putting forth by one way or other of the young fool and proud tyrant’. A King ‘who denied his heir’s legitimacy and intrigued with foreign Powers against his wife, Sovereign and country, was an impossibility for all concerned. But Lord James, at the head of the proceedings, was determined that they should go cannily. It was not safe to kill a King. Once divorced, he would no longer be King; it would then be constitutional to arrest him on some very obvious charges of high treason; and if he should happen to resist arrest (or even if he didn’t), then nobody could be blamed if he unfortunately got killed in the tussle.

This happy
dénouement
was discussed privately; the divorce openly in Council with the Queen. The Protestant Church had made adultery a ground for divorce (it had also made it a capital crime, to be punished by hanging, but nobody paid much attention to that). Darnley had obligingly furnished innumerable grounds, but Mary doubted lest her Catholic Church would, against its usual
custom, recognise them. An annulment was then suggested, since the Pope’s Dispensation for the Queen’s marriage to her cousin had not arrived in time for their wedding. But again Mary saw the flaw; to declare her marriage illegal would logically declare her child illegitimate.

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Bothwell; ‘my parents’ marriage was annulled on grounds of consanguinity, but no man shall call me a bastard.’

She was too shaken to be encouraged. Darnley divorced, at liberty to wander about Europe blackening her name and their son’s birthright to the two kingdoms, would be as sinister a danger as his presence in the country. She could see no way out anywhere, and felt too ill and nervous to try. She had better give it all up to retire to France. She began to speak of this, but encountered a furious look from the Earl of Bothwell.

Lethington’s smooth voice poured oil on the troubled waters. If the Catholic Archbishop’s judicial Court were re-established, it could arrange a divorce that would satisfy both religions. There would be violent protests from the Kirk at legalizing a Catholic body, but James Earl of Moray could be trusted to bribe them with his usual discretion. He told the Queen to rest assured that ‘we shall find the means that Your Grace shall be quit of him without prejudice to your son.’ He smiled sidelong at James, unable to resist a scratch at that determinedly stainless character. ‘Although my Lord of Moray, here present, be little less scrupulous for a Protestant than Your Grace is for a Papist, I am assured he will
look through his fingers
at it.’

James stiffened. Mary, sensitive to his air of disapproval and Lethington’s jibe, was uncertain what they meant, and insisted that they should arrange nothing contrary to her honour.