The Galliard (38 page)

‘He can when he returns.’

‘And give the rebels time to escape?’

Mary reminded Darnley that she had recalled Bothwell expressly to put him at the head of their army; that he had already collected that army from his Borderers, as large as all the rebel forces at Dumfries.

‘He hasn’t got the Elliots though,’ said Darnley.

Mary looked at him in a dull wonder: he seemed really pleased with his score.

So he was. There they all were yammering away at this deadly Council table on this glorious September morning when they might be out hawking; if he couldn’t get any other fun he’d put a spoke in their wheels, he’d show them that he could make a decision and stick to it as well as they. He had liked Bothwell, a bold adventurer, with a good pair of hands for a horse; useful at need, no doubt. But it would never do to let him get the upper hand; Mary couldn’t see that, of course, a girl wouldn’t, and all these men round her only said, ‘Yes, yes’ to whatever she suggested.

All this he told himself, but rather uneasily, while deep down beneath his manly firmness a small child lay on the floor and kicked and screamed to be noticed. Certainly everybody had to notice Darnley; their plans held up while they argued, tried to persuade him, and finally had to leave the Council in despair.

They collected together in little groups after it, grumbling in low tones, and the older men said that the young ass was the spit and image of his grandfather the Earl of Angus, whom Margaret Tudor had married after the death of her first husband, James IV. For Angus also had been a handsome haughty fool, who also, oddly enough, had married a Queen of Scotland when he was only nineteen, and had had his head badly turned by it.

‘Aye,’ they chuckled, ‘and she spelt his name Anguish to the end of her life – and good reason he gave her for it, and Scotland too.’

‘Well, she got rid of him at last, and so may this Queen.’

Mary was hoping only to win Darnley over. Would she succeed with him? Bothwell doubted it. She was not the type of
maîtresse femme
, for all that she had twice over proved herself an inspiring leader in a campaign. But that was as a warrior, not a woman. Those very qualities of courage and generosity, that had served her so well with men in action, went against her in the feminine battle she now had to wage, of getting what she wanted out of a man in love with her. There was little of the coquette in her and much of the Queen; her desire was not to conquer, but the deeper and more passionate one, to be conquered; hers was the love royal, the wish not to take but to give.

And to Darnley, as many of her followers had already for some time complained, she had given ‘all honour that can be given to a man by a wife, all praises, all dignities as to her husband and King’, and what was more, ‘given over to him her whole will to be ruled and guided as he likes’.

‘Yet one thing she has not given him, I’ll swear,’ said Bothwell, as his friend Gordon told him of these earlier reports; he would not say what that was. There kept echoing in his head the line that Harry Percy used to quote from Chaucer where the humane old poet says:

Men say, I not, that she gave him her heart.

He did not believe in Mary’s love for that pink and white jackanapes; she was trying too hard to love him: she was too eager to overload him with honours and gifts (the tailor’s bill she was running up for him must be pretty heavy, with all those curled feathers and silver lace). In all this he guessed that she was trying to persuade herself, rather than Darnley, of her love for him. Passion there had been, that was certain, but he doubted that it had survived in her after the first night; that selfish cub was sure to have disappointed her, though she was too proud and probably too ignorant to admit it even to herself. It was her imagination that had fallen in love with this tall young Prince of her dreams, mad on horses as she was –
‘He should never have dismounted,’ said Bothwell to Gordon.

The two were greater friends than ever. Gordon’s three years’ imprisonment had been as lenient as Mary could contrive, but it was a crippling experience for a young man in the height of his vigour. But neither time nor circumstance seemed to have the power to affect that grave yet reckless young Highlander. His first act on his release was to bring his mother, Lady Huntly, to Court, with a bodyguard of four younger brothers and his sister Jean. Neither mother nor brothers laid the blame on the Queen for the way their house had been crushed and the old lord done to death ‘The poor lassie was helpless,’ said Lady Huntly. No one knew what Jean thought, but she was only a girl, and the youngest, just twenty, and did not count.

Gordon was as much in love with the Queen as before, and in the same aloof way. He had the air of a spectator at a play, waiting to see what would happen, and knowing that he could not influence it. Neither he nor Bothwell spoke of their love for Mary.

In spite of all Mary’s vehement support of Bothwell as the better man, Darnley won the contest, and the army had to wait for Lennox as its Commander-in-Chief. He was to command the vanguard, Bothwell the main body, together with the young King; and George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, the rear.

‘So we get our sops thrown to us to soothe our tender feelings, and the line of march was drawn up in order of rank as if it were a State banquet! God’s blood! We’ve lost a week by this fooling, and the rebels are withdrawing to Carlisle without a scratch. I’d have wiped them out by now if she’d stuck to my having the command.’

‘It’s not her doing that you haven’t,’ said Gordon.

‘Don’t I know it! It’s never her doing. It used to be the Bastard’s doing, and now it’s this spoilt mother’s darling – wife’s darling. We’re ruled by whatever man rules her, and she’s made a rotten choice.’

‘There was no other.’

That was true, as he grudgingly admitted. Darnley was no fit match in rank to the Queen, but Arran had been the only other
diplomatic possibility for her in two kingdoms. Darnley’s claim as heir to them was thinner than Arran’s, yet a child born of him and Mary would certainly be in the direct succession to them both. Mary’s headlong fancy for the only young man who had any right to make open love to her had been prompted in the first place by her policy of union with England.

The campaign was very pretty, in Bothwell’s sardonic comment, a sartorial success. Darnley was undoubtedly the chief triumph for the tailors, in a gilded corselet over his chamois-leather riding-suit, and overcoat of buffalo hide to keep out the chill of an early October cold spell. He was already wearing his new winter gloves, another present from Mary, perfumed and velvet-lined. She herself was not so elaborate, though she had been advised to wear a light breastplate under the plaid she loved as a riding-cloak, and was very proud of the brace of pistols at her holster. She wore a steel cap and let her hair fly free from under it, for it was impossible to keep it pinned up.

They rode over Crawford Moor, where her father had hoped to find gold – ‘but all the gold here is growing on the whin,’ she laughed as she gazed out over the bright hillside. They held a Council of War at Castlehill, a rude old fortress of Robert the Bruce, whose daughter had married a Stewart and so brought that family to the throne of Scotland. ‘It came with a lass, it will go with a lass,’ James V had murmured on his death-bed when he heard that his child was a girl. But it should not go; she was riding at the head of her armies to see to that.

Her enemies were already on the road to Carlisle, and Bothwell pleaded vehemently at the Council of War that he should go after them with a couple of thousand men, cut off their line of retreat and exterminate their whole army. It was not allowed; but all the same, his speed and the size of the army he had so instantly collected caused the utter collapse of the rebels. Their followers deserted and scattered; their ringleaders fled ignominiously out of the country to the protection of the Queen of England. And all with practically no bloodshed; that was what delighted Mary!

‘
I
think it’s been a glorious campaign,’ she said haughtily, in answer to Bothwell’s disparaging remarks.

‘Do you so, Madam?
I
think it’s been no campaign at all. It was just a chase-about raid.’

And the Chase-about Raid it was called ever after.

Cecil and Elizabeth cursed the day when James Hepburn had so coolly run the gauntlet of their ships and out-sailed one of their greatest captains. For eighteen months they had had him in their hands, and let him go as ‘of no force now’ – and here he was back in Scotland, thwarting all their plans. There was nothing to be done but one of Elizabeth’s complete right-about turns. Those £3,000 that she had smuggled to James’ wife had apparently been nothing but a premature christening gift for Lady Agnes’ expected baby (a safe assumption, as she was generally expecting one). As to it being sent for the rebel troops, Elizabeth ‘never meant any such thing in that way’. James had to retract his angry reminders of her Ambassador’s ‘faithful promises’ and ‘
your own handwriting, confirming the same
’, and play a carefully rehearsed comedy with her for the benefit of the French Ambassador, who was concealed behind a curtain while James solemnly told Elizabeth that she had never given him either money or promises, and Elizabeth told James to ‘get you out of my presence for an unworthy traitor’. She was then immensely surprised to see the French Ambassador step forward and coyly admit that he had heard every word. She knew that he knew that she knew he had been there all the time; but that did not matter, appearances were preserved; and some money was sent in secret after the ‘unworthy traitor’ to make the curtain lecture worth his while.

‘Note diligently,’ wrote Knox in the margin of his page describing James’ strange reception by his ally; and three times over: the second time, ‘Note diligently Queen Elizabeth,’ and the third, ‘Here mark either deep dissimulation or a great inconstancy.’

Mary could scarcely believe her triumph. After four years of servitude in her own kingdom she now reigned supreme. Scotland was hers at last, and England must become hers in time. She had kept her word to Elizabeth, married an English subject, and
by choosing the one nearest the throne had assured the English succession for their heir.

By honourable dealing, she had actually outmanoeuvred the tricky English Queen; she had the best proof of this in its recognition all through England itself. Important members of Elizabeth’s own Court, more, of her own Council, were already trying to come to terms with Mary, assuring her of their loyal service when she should be their royal mistress.

There was even an overture from Cecil.

Elizabeth had made a surprising success of her eight years’ reign, but she was nearing her middle thirties and still a childless spinster and reputed sickly: it was rumoured that she was incapable of child-bearing. Her star had now begun to set, while Mary’s, so long kept in such dark eclipse, was suddenly shooting up the sky. The mightiest powers in Europe, the Papacy and Spain, were delighted with her, and almost embarrassing in their offers of support. And all the Catholics in England, some said the greater part of the population, were of course in wild jubilation, many of them beseeching Mary not to wait for the death of her cousin, ‘Boleyn’s bastard’, but march south now to ‘her rightful inheritance’; the great Catholic lords of the North offered full help of arms and men and money. But this would mean a civil war, the very thing that Mary dreaded with more than her adult reason, for her loathing of it was a legacy from the horrors of her childhood in France. All she wanted of her enemies was their absence.

Her ‘desire to have all men live as they wish, which so offends the conscience of the godly’, appeared to them after all to have its points.

The rebels began to make peace overtures. They recognised that their best mediator would be Rizzio; James climbed down so far as to write him a very humble letter from England, with the present of a fine diamond; the little Italian promptly stuck it in his cap and capered about, with some outrageously merry remarks about James’ advances to him. Lethington too was making a careful cat-like approach to him; and it was Rizzio who got a pardon for Châtelherault, to Darnley’s disgust.

The young man began to complain that this precious Master Davie had finer horses than himself. The nobles scowled at the little upstart and shouldered him out of their way, but all the notice Davie took of that was to mimic their lordly bad manners to Mary so comically that she sobbed with laughter.

Neither guessed that he was being used as a weapon against her. Her enemies could still work her harm from a distance. In England, James began to spread the report that ‘his sister hated him because he knew that concerning her which respect would not suffer him to reveal.’ Elizabeth repeated these dark hints to the French Ambassador. They spread slowly nearer and nearer home, in reversal to the usual process of scandal.

But the seed had been sown there too. At the very beginning of their acquaintance, James had contrived to suggest suspicions of Rizzio to Darnley. The youth ignored them while he was certain of Mary’s obvious passion for himself. When he was not so certain, he would begin to remember them again.

Bothwell did not hear the faint breath of scandal that was creeping up against the Queen like a wreath of fog from outside her kingdom. He was far too busy to be much at Court. He had first remained at Dumfries in command of his Borderers, to keep watch all along the Border against the rebels; he had all the fords across the rivers guarded, and the hill passes, so that there should be no communication between them and Scotland.

When it was clear that ‘the rats have not a tooth left to gnaw with’, he turned his vigorous attention to working up the Queen’s artillery. Now at last he was able to carry out his plan of putting all artillery into double equipage to serve both as siege guns and field batteries; he appointed a Controller of Artillery, with authority to place wrights and gunners near all the fortresses, to cut timber for the wheels and platforms, supply iron for the mountings, and lead and stone for the ammunition. Timber was felled all that winter on the Tay and sent down by sea to Leith Harbour. He arranged for continuous labour and regular wages, and ensured the exact number of draught oxen to be sent by each stock-owner to Leith for drawing the timber.