The Galliard (51 page)

Sir James Melville came back loaded with congratulations and gossip. All the Catholics in England were of course overjoyed; the Moderates too were well pleased, and far more eager now to give Mary their support than before. But there was tough opposition from the new gentry created by Henry VIII’s Reformation, whose power and property might be jeopardized by a Catholic succession – although even Bloody Mary, with all her Parliament re-converting themselves Catholic on their knees, had never been able to get back from them a single foot of Church lands.

Queen Elizabeth herself, at Melville’s interview, had declared the news gave her such happiness that it had instantly cured her of a dangerous sickness. This was rather odd, as when Melville arrived the night before at Greenwich Palace on the river Thames, he had found Elizabeth in the midst of her Court, dancing in her usual indefatigable fashion. Melville, still in his riding-boots and dusty travelling-dress, had not dared enter the ballroom, but sought out Cecil, who was working in an antechamber (‘I believe the little man never stops writing even in his sleep – if he ever sleeps!’), and told him to give Her Majesty the news.

With small precise steps the Minister threaded his way through the dancers and whispered in the Queen’s ear, while Melville watched from the doorway.

She tottered to a seat and turned her face away from the room, leaning it against her hand. The music fell silent, the dancers still. Her ladies gathered anxiously round her. In that fateful, questioning pause, a harsh high voice was heard sobbing out, ‘The Queen of Scots is mother of a fair son, while I am but a barren stock.’

It was, as Bothwell remarked, a strange assumption for a virgin.

And the more militant of her subjects were determined she should not assume it. She was at once besieged with demands,
indeed commands, to marry and produce an heir, or else to nominate her successor. The first, she said, was her own business and nobody else’s; the second, was to ask her to dig her grave before she was dead. She told the House of Lords that they were a knot of hare-brains: the House of Commons, that they were a lot of inexperienced schoolboys; and a deputation of bishops, that they were merely ‘her creatures – doctors, not bishops, avaricious and immoral, who had once dared call her a bastard’.

And while she roared at them, her Parliament roared back that papers were being printed calling the Scottish Queen’s son ‘Prince of Scotland and England’ – and
Scotland
before
England
! Whoever heard or read
that
before this time?

Chapter Fourteen

The brutal occupation of pain was over; all emotion and excitement were over. Here she lay, and the faces moved round her and went away, swam over her and went away, the voices hummed far, far away. One face stayed, thoughtful, mocking, of rare but irregular beauty. Something of herself looked down at her through those questing eyes, something of herself was always just about to speak with those mobile, delicate lips. It was an oval face, framed in bright hair under a velvet cap; against the dark robe a fine hand was raised, holding a small white carnation; he was a little amused at having to do this, he told her – for he was speaking with her all the time, though no sound came from those secret smiling lips.

The portrait was by Holbein, of her grandfather James IV, the king who had been denied the grave of a beggar, the scientist who believed the fairy-tale that men could learn to fly, the heretic who wished to lead a Crusade to the Holy Land, the philosopher who found no answer to his questions, the man whose passionate curiosity of mind and body bridged the gulf between two ages.

She had been only semi-conscious for a long time after the effort of her speech to Darnley; and when she revived again, that first shock of his son’s close likeness to himself passed into anxiety for the odd little creature. Born whole and sane almost by a miracle, it was too much of a miracle that he should be strong. His legs were particularly weak; his sloping bulbous head had the look of an infant prematurely born – odd, as his birth was not premature, as had been expected. His tongue was too large for his mouth,
which slobbered in consequence even more than most babies. He showed great intelligence, but more timidity, and cried with terror when Mary dangled a, bright jewel before his eyes to make him ‘take notice’.

‘Illegitimate!’ his wet-nurse exclaimed to her friends. ‘It’s my belief he is. That one is no son of the Queen – the King must have given birth to him when we weren’t looking!’

She was Margaret, Lady Reres, younger sister of Bothwell’s early love, Janet Scott of Buccleuch, a plump jolly coarse woman, an excellent nurse to both mother and baby; she understood Mary’s utter physical weakness well enough to keep her attention on the next short stage only, on the coming Christening. It would be an affair of the highest international importance. Elizabeth, as godmother, had promised a gold font in which to baptize the heir to both Crowns, and it was passionately hoped through the kingdoms that she would then make a public statement recognizing him as this. The silken banners with the Leopards of England, taken from Edward II at Bannockburn, would decorate the chapel at Stirling; to Mary this was a symbol that the wars that had been waged almost continuously since then between the two countries would be exorcized by the holy water that baptized the future King of them both.

This was no fancy: it had grown to be the backbone of her policy, as it had been of that young man with the carnation in his hand. She must carry on his work. He had made Scotland a European Power, as she had been told she was doing in her marriage as a child with France. But now the Auld Alliance was dead, and she had known it, finally, when she had drunk warmed ale in a blacksmith’s forge. Alliance with England was what Scotland
must
have now.

If only she and Elizabeth could meet! She had acted as Mary’s most insidious enemy, ‘but that is because we don’t know each other’, said Mary. If only they could sit together at a table and talk things over perfectly frankly, saying what they wanted of each other, they would surely do more for their countries than by scratching at each other in the dark.

Strength lay in agreement; division was death. ‘She is a cleverer
woman than I, she must know that too. We could work together then for a real victory, this whole island to be one country, just as my grandfather united the Isles and Western Highlands to Scotland, and got all the nobles together to join with him, and sought friendship with Henry VIII by marriage with his sister.’

‘And was refused Christian burial by his brother-in-law, after dying in battle against him,’ finished old Sir Richard Maitland in his silvery voice.

This delightful octogenarian was the father of ‘Michael Wily’ Maitland of Lethington and resembled him in his refinement of looks and intellect, the gentle suavity of his manner and the deadly cynicism of his remarks. Sir Richard, like his son, had for convenience adopted the new formula of the Protestants, but detested them for having burnt the libraries and charter-chests in the monasteries. Lethington had carried his father’s disillusionment a stage further, in his contempt for old-fashioned notions of honour as well as of religion. Both father and son were agnostic and unmoral, but Sir Richard still held that there were certain things a man could not do and consider himself a gentleman; he regretted that his cleverest son had a crude strain of folly in him somewhere that made him ambitious.

Sir Richard was himself entirely devoid of that quality. He could not see why a Maitland should ever wish to add anything to his name. To want power was merely to add to your labours and decrease your pleasures. And what more money could one want than would pay for dainty cooking, good wine, a sheltered garden, and the leisure to collect and copy old manuscripts? This last almost amounted to a passion with him; not quite, for he had never been so unbalanced as to endure any discomfort for his pursuit. That he left to his daughter, a thin austere devoted woman who would ride all day in the rain for the chance of finding some hitherto unknown poem in a neighbour’s muniment-chest.

Sir Richard told Mary there was only one invention in this past century that really mattered. ‘What does it matter
how
men kill each other? They will always do it. Your grandfather tried to band all the countries of Europe together in a league of Christendom –
but why? To defend it against the advances of the Turks. Nations will only make peace with each other in order to make war on someone else. When I was a boy I watched the building of his fleet down here, below in Leith Harbour, the ships coming in with logs for it from Norway, and all the trees in Fife cut down for the
Great Michael
alone, the largest ship in the world. He made Scotland a sea-power – but he lost it all. The
Great Michael
was sold after Flodden, and his greatest Captain, Sir Andrew Barton, was killed by King Henry’s sailors; his name is now nothing but an old song.
That
has lasted, though his ships haven’t. None of these things last. But your grandfather did something really useful when he got Walter Chepman to set up a printing press here in the High Street, and he knew it. More than once I’ve seen him there, for I was always in the place myself when I came home as a young man of twenty; and the King would stroll in to see what was being printed, and even help set up the type with his own fingers, just as in the dockyard he helped build his ships himself, and practised surgery as well as he played the lute.’

With those long fingers that rather disdainfully held up a white carnation – yes, she could see the young man in the portrait doing all that.

She lay back on her cushions on the battlements where she had been carried that she might feel the sea-wind from the Firth of Forth, and heard the precise amused old voice telling her of the plays and poems of that time; but most had already disappeared, because no copy had been made of them. ‘And so it comes that out of all his earlier fellows that Willie Dunbar mentions in his lament for dead poets, almost a dozen have vanished clean out of present memory.

Timor mortis conturbat me,

so he sang, for the fear of death troubled him. It troubles me worse for the death of their poems.’

‘A poem can’t die,’ she answered.

‘Is this a new creed of immortality? Please convert me, Madam.’

She smiled, but could not say it. She had watched that big white cloud sail past in the high summer sky, gracious and proud as a tall ship at sea, and believed that nothing that had happened after to the
Great Michael
could matter as much as the fact that it had been built. Ships, poems, the League of Christendom itself, the minds of men that wished and planned these things would not die. That was why for many years in Scotland people had refused to believe that James IV had fallen in battle: he had been spirited away, they said, and would return to bring the Golden Age again.

They were right, she thought. He had not died.

Sir Richard Maitland did not show any sentimental yearning to see his son again before his own presumably near demise (‘At eighty, one does not take long views’), though he admitted that the young rogue’s conversation amused him more than most. But he suggested that Mary would show sense in getting his wits to work for her instead of against her. She admitted frankly that she desperately needed Michael Wily’s brains to straighten out the tangle of the kingdom’s finances. But could she trust him not to work against her whenever it was to his own advantage?

‘No, you could not,’ was the reply in that sweet, faint old voice, ‘nor any other of those clever brains you have about you. Only for his own advantage. The boy would not work against you for the sheer pleasure of destroying a lovely thing.’

‘But who would, and why?’

‘Your tutor, Mr George Buchanan, for one, now busily writing praises of your chaste motherhood to the hope of two great nations. His Latin is the only part of it that comes easily to him. He would much rather write some of those virulent satires of his, wherein he gambols as playfully as an elephant, and against you. So he will, the moment you are down, and so will hundreds of other clever men of the same calibre, who may never have seen you, may live long after you are dead, but will hate you nevertheless. It is your own fault, Madam, in being charming. That is a crime such men can never forgive.’

She thought the old gentleman must be senile after all. She had never really liked Mr George Buchanan; he had always been fulsome to her, and his fat red cheeks wobbled with joy whenever he could tell or hint at some dirty piece of scandal. He had been a small farmer’s son and a pauper scholar; nevertheless she had given him the Abbey of Crossraguel with its temporalities worth £500 a year, and only a month ago created him the Principal of St Leonard’s. How could he hate her?

‘Feminine charm such as Your Grace’s,’ those silvery tones answered her, ‘is a challenge that his perverse instincts are unable to accept, and therefore resent. He, and his kind, wish to avenge their own thwarted natures by revenging themselves on you.’

‘Oh,’ said Mary as a light dawned, ‘I remember now what my lord of Bothwell once called him.’ And she gleefully repeated his pothouse phrase.

‘My lord of Bothwell has his own way of putting things,’ said Sir Richard, ‘one that is scarcely compatible with feminine charm.’

She was quite pleased to find that she could shock him.

So Michael Wily, like a faithful Mordecai, returned, and there was to be a banquet to help on a reconciliation between them and Bothwell. She explained to him how she needed Lethington for her diplomacy and finance, as she needed Bothwell’s strong arm in war to protect herself and the baby Prince.

‘Very pretty,’ he growled, ‘and you think we can all make friends by dining together!’

He saw the difficulty, all but impossibility, of Mary’s doing without them – unless, as he wished, she would put them to death. Deeply as he hated James, he was even more consumed with jealousy of Lethington. It had extended to his father, ‘since you no longer wish to speak with anyone under eighty!’