Elizabeth (24 page)

The others seemed unaware of the atmosphere between them. In the rejoicing over the Prince's birth and the entertainments for his christening, when the treacherous Elizabeth of England stood godmother to her rival's son, everyone seemed blind but Darnley, and no one would listen to him. They dared not, if they wished to keep in Mary's favour. And Mary was acting with diabolical cleverness, typified by the gesture in asking her deadly enemy to stand for her child. She had forced the English Queen into the position of her friend, and united the Catholic and Protestant factions in Scotland round the throne which now had a male heir.

By September Mary had summoned her brother and her Council and asked them plainly how she could secure a divorce from her husband who was so repugnant to her that she could not bear him to be in the same room; and the same brother and Council offered their sympathy and, some said, offered to save her the trouble of legal wrangling by putting him to death. The Queen had forbidden it, but he did not believe her; he spoke of leaving the country and she forced him to come before the Council and retract the threat. He knew it was only because he might make trouble for her abroad, or go to England and beg Elizabeth to forgive him. Mary could not allow him his liberty until she divorced him or the Lords had disobeyed her injunction and murdered him.

He was too discredited to be able to take advantage of the fact that these same Lords—Lord James in particular—were becoming as jealous of the Queen's favour for Bothwell as they had been of Rizzio, and to warn them that Mary only wanted to get rid of him and replace him with the Earl. He sank into the apathy of complete despair when his wife pardoned the actual murderers and allowed them to return on Christmas Eve. The apathy developed into sickness, and the sickness into smallpox. He lay in a house outside Edinburgh, a lodging chosen for him by the Queen who insisted he keep the infection away from the little Prince James. He was feverish and ill and haunted by fear and his fear brought him cringing to the woman who had once loved him so blindly. There was no other heart he could hope to touch. If he was dying, Darnley wanted to see her and be forgiven. It was one of the few genuine emotions he had ever felt. Mary came to him reluctantly, because her brother said she must for appearance sake. Another advocate of wifely forbearance was the Earl of Bothwell. And because Bothwell urged her to go to him, the Queen went, and allowed herself to be wept over and begged for forgiveness until the heart she had managed to steel in implacable hatred was touched with pity for the wretched wreck of a man lying in the bed, his disfigured face covered by a velvet mask. It was over between them; she made no secret of that, but she spared him the lash of her contempt and indifference. She was kind, and much of her leniency was due to the hope that he was going to die and free her without further complications.

She left him to attend a Ball at Holyrood, and he went to sleep wearing a ring she had given him as a token of her forgiveness.

At three in the morning the house of the Kirk o' Fields blew up like a firework under a massive charge of gunpowder, and Darnley's body, half naked and dead by strangulation, was found lying in the garden.

“What a fool!” Elizabeth said. “What a criminal fool!”

Leicester shrugged. “You can't expect all women to be as clever as you, Madam. And you did say you would have stabbed Darnley to the heart when you heard of the Rizzio murder.”

They were walking up and down the gardens at Whitehall Palace. It was spring but bitterly cold; the sky above them was the colour of lead and the river flowing past the parapet wall was swollen by rain. But the Queen insisted on a daily walk, and, wrapped to her chin in sables, she paced up and down the paths, followed by Leicester who was obliged to adopt her habits. Two of her ladies, Kate Dacre and Lady Knollys, trudged behind them, too far away to hear the conversation and too cold and uncomfortable to talk to each other.

“If she had killed the wretch then and there no one would have blamed her,” Elizabeth said. “If she had divorced him, the whole of Scotland and all of Europe would have supported her. But to make an open show of her hatred for him and her preference for this Earl of Bothwell and then have him blown up when he's sick and helpless.… Jesus, she must have gone out of her mind after the childbirth!”

“How fortunate,” he mocked, “that
I
didn't marry her. She might have lit a bonfire under me!”

Elizabeth nudged him sharply.

“Be thankful I saved you from your own ambitions,” she retorted. “By God, by this piece of folly she's lost all my sympathy, for what it was worth. I can just see Cecil rubbing his hands and saying that she's doomed by her own idolatry and I shan't have the heart to make fun of him. The mists of that damned country must have poisoned her brain—what can she hope to gain by this that couldn't have been got by patience for just a little longer?”

“You would know that best, Madam. You've always seen into her mind better than anyone else; you saw into it so well that you knew she'd marry Darnley in the first place and ruin herself as a result. Did you also foresee how it would end for him?”

“I neither thought nor cared,” Elizabeth said. “Dead or alive he was always worthless; the world is well rid of him. The point which has escaped you, my dear Robert, is that Mary is once more a widow, and if by some miracle she avoids the consequences of this murder and finds a suitable culprit, she will be in need of a husband again, and the old problem is revived.”

“Randolph said that Bothwell was the culprit,” he reminded her.

“Then she will have to punish him. As I would have punished you, for a much less heinous crime than killing a King Consort.”

Elizabeth turned and began to walk back. The ambassador in Scotland had last written three weeks before, describing the tumult which had broken out in Edinburgh after the explosion. Public sympathy, always ready to change like the wind, had suddenly taken the side of Darnley. His violent death had shocked the nobility and the people into forgetting the appalling ordeal he had inflicted on his wife a few months earlier. There was talk of a Papist plot, always a reliable bogy with which to frighten away impartial judgment; talk that the Queen was directly responsible for or at least aware of what was going to happen; rumours that her brother, Lord Moray, had threatened to lead another rebellion and depose her in her son's favour unless she allowed him the right to find the murderer and punish him according to the law. But public opinion agreed on one point; the murder had been done by one man, and that man stood at the Queen's right hand, as arrogant as ever and as favoured as ever, with his clansmen filling the streets of the City like an army, ready to strike down his enemies and establish him as the power behind Mary and her throne. The Earl of Bothwell was guilty, and regardless of the Queen's personal feelings and the wrongs she had suffered from Darnley, she was expected to abandon Bothwell and bring him to trial. Her fate depended on her decision, and Randolph gave his opinion that she would find it a better risk to deliver the Earl than support him against her entire kingdom and everyone in it.

“We'll go in,” the Queen said. “I see those two behind us shivering like a pair of plucked fowls. Look, by God, there's Cecil coming to meet us!”

The Secretary was hurrying up the path towards them, holding a cloak round his shoulders in competition against the stiff April wind which blew in from the Thames.

They stopped, and Elizabeth said quickly, “Nothing but an earthquake or news from Scotland would bring you out of the Palace today, Cecil. Which is it?”

“The last, Madam. I have just received a despatch from Randolph.”

Elizabeth's eyes narrowed on the Secretary's face.

“Queen Mary has acquitted Bothwell,” she said.

Cecil smiled one of his rare, slow smiles in which there was a frightening lack of humour.

“She has married him,” he said. “And an army led by the Earl of Atholl and all her nobles is marching out to destroy them both.”

CHAPTER NINE

It was June, 1567, and a warm sun blazed down over the rough ground of Carberry Hill, splashed with the bright colours of yellow gorse and budding heather. Mary Stuart raised her hand and wiped her forehead which was damp with sweat. She had sat for almost an hour on her horse, watching the disposition of the rebels' troops on the ground below, occasionally seeing Bothwell riding through the thinning ranks of their own men, cursing and threatening and exhorting, and she watched it all with the calm of someone who has lost all hope. Her wan, dull apathy had made Bothwell furious in the past weeks; he had told her bitterly that he had sooner spend his time with any hedge drab who could laugh and show a little animation than sit opposite to her looking as if she were walking in her sleep. The more Bothwell shouted at her, the less she responded. Her spirit had been broken, and broken by the man she had believed to be her only friend and with whom she had fallen in love when she rode away from Holyrood after poor David Rizzio's death.

Darnley had been right when he believed she meant to marry Bothwell. She had suffered enough from weaklings, and the strength and determination of her new champion had deluded her into thinking him as safe as the others had been false. She had imagined that they were a match in spirit and courage; she was so grateful for the security he had given her before the birth of her son that she believed herself in love for the first time in her life. She knew he had murdered Darnley and she did not care. The force of her own feelings made her reckless; she repaid Bothwell's loyalty with extravagant marks of favour and affection. When he came to his trial in Edinburgh and packed the hall with his clansmen, she ignored the protests of his enemies that he had secured his acquittal by force. In a few weeks she had forfeited the sympathy of her people and her nobles by her defence of Bothwell, but with some remnant of caution, she refused to marry him until the public clamour had subsided. If she trusted the Earl, he had not trusted her. On her way to visit her son at Stirling, he had met her with a troop of soldiers and escorted her to his own Castle at Dunbar with the excuse that he was protecting her from being kidnapped by their enemies. And at Dunbar, where she was helpless, Bothwell had come into her room the first night and locked the door and violated her.

The mental shock, more than the physical indignity, had broken her spirit; Bothwell's assault succeeded where the murder of Rizzio and the whole miserable history of her marriage to Darnley had failed.

And she had failed Bothwell. The beautiful, imperious Queen, who had promised the fulfilment of all his ambitions, was finally committed to the marriage he demanded, but not because she loved him, for she hated him and he saw her hatred in her red-rimmed eyes, forever avoiding his; not because he had aroused her passion as he had hoped, though he had subjected her to alternate caresses and brutality in the attempt to do so; but only because she was pregnant as a result of his outrage. He hated her for that as he hated her for her shivering inexperience. Stripped of her Royal estate, Mary had grossly disappointed him. He had left her after a few days at Dunbar and consoled himself with the wife he intended to divorce. He did it to insult the Queen, whom he blamed for making promises she could not fulfil; the circumstances in which he had claimed that fulfilment and her previous experience with a drunken degenerate made no difference to him. He had proved himself a ferocious, merciless animal, exactly as his enemies had described him to her all along, but if he no longer wanted the woman, he was determined to have the Queen. He had ruined her, as he pointed out, swearing his foulest oaths to try and shake her into anger or retaliation or anything but the sick resignation which goaded him beyond bearing; she had to marry him or bear his bastard and thereby resign her throne and be committed to her half-brother's mercies. And she knew what to expect from
him
.…

She gave her consent to that marriage in a voice that made him want to strike her; and he brought her back to Edinburgh in state, escorted by his clansmen, and married her on a brilliant spring morning.

They made a show of unity; she was so low in pride and so physically ill that the least sign of humanity might have driven her to Bothwell once again, but he showed none. He was coarse and vile tempered; he cared nothing for religion but forced her to marry him in the Protestant rite. The same morning she was heard to cry out for a knife to kill herself. But she was committed to him by the marriage which had condoned his abduction; they could not count upon one friend, and their natures prevented them, even at the last moment, from counting on each other. He could not forgive her for being a reproach; he was incapable of humbling himself by admitting that he had ruined her and himself; she could not go to him because her fear of his treatment was only equalled by her anxiety to hide it from their enemies. Moray and Morton and Lindsay and the rest saw Bothwell raised to the height of power through his marriage to her. They had killed Rizzio because they were jealous of him; they were ready to kill Darnley if Bothwell had not done it for them. Now they had exchanged a humble secretary and a drunken weakling for the one man who was strong enough to crush them all if he were given time.

And so, less than two months later, she waited at the head of a dwindling army to do battle with three-quarters of the nobility of Scotland. There was no hope of victory; there was no hope of anything. The rebels held her baby son; they demanded that Bothwell should be surrendered to them and the Queen place herself under their protection. Their courtiers assured her that she would not be harmed. Bothwell was insisting upon fighting; the French Ambassador had ridden out to try and mediate; he had urged her to submit, saying her cause was hopeless and that everyone knew she had been imprisoned and forced into marriage with the Earl. Her only hope was to surrender to her nobles and trust their affection for her when they heard in detail how she had been mistreated. And she knew that Bothwell would never agree to such terms and go unarmed to his enemies.