The Galliard (35 page)

He had answered the summons submissively, promising to appear, but in the meantime he had taken the precaution of turning out the Elliot who had supplanted him at Hermitage, had barricaded its gates and gathered round him in that fortress a stout company of dalesmen and moss-troopers. But a siege would land him nowhere, and he believed in the Bruce’s maxim for warfare, that the strongest walls were the woods and caves in the hillside.

One of his men, Gabriel Sempill, came galloping back from Edinburgh late one night at a panic-stricken pace and staggered exhausted into the great hall, where Bothwell was eating supper, to warn him that the Lord James with a great company of horsemen and all the clans of Scott and Kerr, the Hepburns’ hereditary foes on the Border, were marching upon Hermitage. Bothwell gave the order to horse, and his men took to the hill for that night.

The march on Hermitage proved a false alarm, but it had been prompted by facts. The Lord James was collecting a mighty force of six thousand armed men to support his charges against Bothwell at the trial; and his brother-in-law the Earl of Argyll was Lord Justice. Against such strong advocates for the prosecution Bothwell felt absence his best argument.

‘Let them convict me of treason! I’ll set my sail by the dog-star and be off again before they catch me.’

‘What are the charges?’ asked his mother coolly.

‘The old one, of “treasonable attempt against the Queen’s noble person”, revealed by Lord Arran. And some brand-new ones piping hot from Dandie Pringle of
lèse-majesté
. No, Willie, you young rascal, I’ll not ride you on my boot again. Off with you and play with the other puppies!’ He rolled the child over with his foot, and Willie shouted in delight and gnawed his boot in imitation of the hound puppies sprawling with him on the hearth.

‘
Lèse-majesté?
’ demanded his mother. ‘How did Dandie Pringle get that? I thought he had left your service.’

‘And is now servant to James Murray of Purdovis – though I never knew that, and thought Purdovis my friend, had him to dinner at my lodging in Paris, filled him up with plenty of good wine – filled myself too, I suppose, if I ever said the half of what he is now reporting, backed up by Pringle, who must have been couched at the keyhole.’

‘What did you, or they, say?’

‘That the two Queens of Scotland and England rolled together would not make one honest woman. That’s true enough, I remember saying it, and God’s blood! haven’t I had reason! Kicked out like a dog from Scotland, twice over, after all I’ve done—’

‘Your last words are more dangerous to you than any of
lèse-majesté
,’ said his mother quietly. ‘Once a man – or woman – begins to count up “all I’ve done”, they might as well hang themselves.’

He looked at her dark still face, and remembered he had once seen her crying when his father had divorced her so that he might be free to marry the Regent. That must have been the only time she had counted up all she had done for her husband and two young children.

He said hurriedly, ‘You’re right. I was a fool. But I can’t believe I was such a fool as to call the Queen the Cardinal’s whore, however drunk I was.’

‘Did you ever think it?’

‘Lord no, not really. They were together when I saw her first, walking down a street in Paris,
and
a very pretty pair they made, and he knew it.’

‘You were jealous.’

He stared at her astonished, it sounded so ridiculous. Could she be right? She generally was.

‘As a matter of fact, she’s had too little experience, not too much. She’s proving that fast enough now, running mad after her spring fancy, a conceited lad with not a hair on his baby face.’

For it was common property that Mary was head over heels in love with Darnley and did not care who knew it. She was dancing or hunting with him all the time, or singing or playing the lute, for he was an accomplished lad, and Meg Lennox, his mother,
had brought him up with an eye to this very business. Mary was throwing her bonnet over the windmill with a vengance playing outrageous pranks too, dressing up with her Maries as burghers’ wives, and teasing and coaxing the passers-by for contributions to a banquet; this she did in the streets of Edinburgh in broad daylight, not heeding who recognised her.

And now that Damley had fallen sick of the measles, as if to show what a child he was, Mary was nursing him so devotedly that she sat up with him all night when his fever was high, to the great scandal of Queen Elizabeth, who hoped that the report would be contradicted ‘for her dear sister’s own sake’.

Bothwell, who had seen her tenderness with the sick boy, King François, guessed that her nursing of Darnley, even through that unprepossessing illness, was probably the very thing to convince Mary of her love for him.

Elizabeth had taken alarm; she was performing one of her famous right-about turns and demanding his return to England. But opposition only inflamed Mary’s high spirits into angry resolve to take her own way. James had already opposed the match, and she had had her first open quarrel with him, in a blaze of white-hot rage on her part which ended in her sending dispatches to Lethington at the English Court, telling him to inform the Queen openly that she would follow her own choice in her marriage, and nobody else’s. To tell Elizabeth to mind her own business must have given her as much satisfaction as to lose her temper with James after keeping it for nearly four years, Bothwell remarked with a chuckle to his mother.

Her gossip was not all of royalty; some was from their own town. Haddington folk were annoyed that their ‘great little man’, John Knox, having failed to bring off his marriage to the Duke of Châtelherault’s eldest daughter, had fallen back on a fifteen-year-old girl, Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, and a distant cousin to the Queen. Here was a wedding of January and May with a vengeance; it had done him great discredit, and Bothwell asked sardonically if the Prophet’s powers had so failed him that he could not foretell his own horns. Haddington was supplying news
all round. The new schoolmaster evidently thought Knox had not gone far enough in his contempt of the sacraments; he had just baptized a cat in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

His time at Morham was necessarily short; it was the end of April and he must be well out of the country before the 2nd of May. He had achieved nothing by his dash to Scotland; he could not go near Edinburgh, so he had not even seen the Queen, and this preposterous report of his accusing her of incest had put her into a royal rage. She had sworn he ‘should never again receive favours at her hands’ – ‘And much odds
that’s
likely to make to me!’ he snorted. ‘All I’ve got by this jaunt is the loss of my Captaincy of the Archers.’

‘You seem to have lost some of your shirts too,’ remarked his mother. ‘Where are those two I wove for you on my hand-loom?’

She was annoyed, for they had taken her longer than any; the linen thread was so fine it was all but impossible to keep it from breaking, and moreover she had embroidered the front of them with gold thread to match the small gold buttons, an heirloom from the Sinclair family.

‘They were stolen, I suppose?’

‘Aye, by Wat Murray, my head groom. I found it out just after – and a parcel of dirty work with it that I can’t make head or tail of, except that there was a plot to murder me while I was in France, brewed by Lethington, they said, though I suspect the Bastard rather – not that Mother Tabbyskin would make any unnecessary effort to keep me alive. A compliment they should still so fear me, even in exile!’

‘They will fear you as long as you are alive. You are the only man strong enough to serve the Queen against them, if she is ever strong enough to call on your service. What was the plot?’

She sat on the edge of the bed where she had been laying out his linen in neat piles, while he lounged against the window. He looked at the fields outside under a late light fall of snow which sparkled almost pink in the sun between the brilliant blue shadows. Crows swooped down on it and strutted here and there, pecking for food; the small scarlet figure of Willie came hopping and hallooing in
among them, waving his arms round his head and shooing away the big black birds that rose flapping and cawing round him.

He said, ‘It was when I took the hill with the Liddesdale men from Hermitage near a month ago that Wat seized the chance to steal the shirts and sell ’em to a travelling packman. I threw him into prison and swore to hang him. I was angry,’ he added apologetically, fancying some disapproval in his mother’s silence. ‘He said he could tell of a plot against me if I’d promise to let him off – so I did, and out came this tale of our Michael Wily commissioning the Laird of Pittencrieff, then in France, to bribe my servants to poison me. My barber had the stuff all ready mixed to give me, but at the last moment his heart failed him – so Wat said. Then later they had another shot and tiptoed upstairs one night to stab me, the six of them, while I was sitting reading in my room. But there again they stuck, on the third stair up, shivering and whispering, the dirty cowards, until at last they slunk away – and I of course never knew a thing about it. For they didn’t try again.’

She looked at the alert forcible face, dark against the cold spring sunshine. She had told him to beware of the poison in a friendly cup, of the knife between his shoulder-blades, and it seemed he didn’t even have to fear these, so powerful was the effect of this man on those weak criminals as he sat in his room alone and unaware, his back to the door, leaning forward over his book by the light of the lamp. So she saw him, very clearly, for an instant, and said, ‘Was it your book of “One Hundred and Twenty Stories of Battle” that you were reading?’

He nodded, smiling. It was odd how she guessed things.

‘And they all stayed with you after that?’

‘All but Dandie Pringle, as you know, who left me and got this chance to poison the Queen’s ears against me, as he hadn’t the nerve to pour it into my mouth. The rest were there at Hermitage, and told a mass of contradictions when I questioned them on Wat’s story. I threatened torture, had it applied, to begin with, but what truth can one get from a coward when he’s shrieking from pain or fear? He’s only wondering which answer will save him a turn of the
rack. I got sick of the whole thing and let ’em all off. I’ve kept Paris in my service, since whatever part he played in it was from fear of the others – Wat admitted to threatening to cut his throat if he didn’t join them. There’s no doubt Wat was the ruling spirit.’

‘Yet you let him off too?’

‘Yes. Well, I’d promised to before he disclosed it. I’ve told you, I was sick of their whining lies, and I’d more important things to see to. And they of all men are the least likely to try that game on me again.’

The Highland woman looked rather strangely at the Hasty Hepburn who in a temper would hang his groom for stealing a couple of shirts, but whose rage cooled so quickly after discovering a plot of such concerted treachery.

She did not take after her sons as Bothwell noted four months later when he heard that Wat had been killed by one of his Sinclair cousins.

But by then he had still more important things to see to.

He sailed for France just before his trial at Edinburgh, where a Hepburn cousin, the Laird of Riccarton, pleaded that his personal absence should not be prejudicial to the Earl, ‘since he has so potent an enemy as the Lord James, Earl of Moray’. But in spite of the legal arguments supplied by Lord James’ six thousand armed supporters, the Earl of Argyll did not condemn Bothwell in his absence to be put to the horn. People said that this was due to the Queen, as hasty as any Hepburn in forgiveness as in anger; she still, they complained, wished well to that ‘blasphemous and irreverent speaker’.

His speech grew a deal more blasphemous and irreverent as he kicked his heels in Paris, waiting for the Queen’s summons that he was certain now would come, for the split between her and Lord James grew more and more open. A letter from her was actually sent at the beginning of July, but it never reached Bothwell, as the Laird of Riccarton, who bore it, was captured and detained by the English at Berwick. James was now in secret league with Elizabeth against the royal lovers, and sealed orders were out in
both countries to detain the Earl, ‘enemy to all honest men’, should he make a second venture home.

‘Mary’s second summons, by a more wary messenger, reached him at the end of August, and with it the news of all Scotland in arms. At last James was in open conflict against his half-sister and had raised an armed force, with the help of money and musketry from Elizabeth.

It was James, not Bothwell, whom Mary had ‘put to the horn’ – a piece of news that made Bothwell give such a yell of joy that Paris, now suffering a nervous and almost agonized devotion to his master, fled from the room in terror lest he had suddenly gone mad. But a following shout quickly recalled him.

‘Pack my things, you rabbit! Summon the rest of my scoundrels. I leave Paris today.’

And he left – ‘no man knows whither’, reported the English spies in Paris. He moved so fast as to outwit as well as outride them: to Brussels, then to Antwerp, then Flushing; bought guns and powder in the Netherlands, and laid a red-herring trail that hoodwinked them into thinking he intended a landing in Ireland to help O’Neill’s rebellion.

The English fleet were deployed to catch him as he sailed for Scotland with his munitions in two small pinnaces. Seven ships were not thought too many for the job. To make sure of the man so feared by the English Ministers, who a year ago had written him down as ‘of no force now’, four warships were sent to watch for him between Ireland and the west coast of Scotland, while two more waited for him off the east coast, and yet another pursued him under command of the great explorer, Anthony Jenkinson.

But the seamanship of the Lord High Admiral of Scotland proved a match for Elizabeth’s famous sailor, and his couple of little boats sped too fast for the warship to catch up with them. They reached the mouth of Tweed, where, however, two other ships were waiting to blockade him. As Bothwell’s pinnaces sailed up to Eyemouth, the wind fell dead just when they lay within range of the enemy guns, which started firing salvo after salvo, all wide of the mark; but the men began to panic, caught in that sudden
awful calm on the hot blue sea, with the cannonballs hissing and spluttering in the placid water all round them, and they helpless with their sails fallen limp and idle. Bothwell coolly ordered them to man the oars, and soon their light boats had run the blockade and were unloading in double-quick time at the harbour. In less than an hour he had got all his arms ashore, ordered horses, and was riding at the gallop towards Holyrood.