Just a Queen (8 page)

The great oaken doors at the end of the room were thrown open and the delegation made their way up the long gallery, past the gathered courtiers and court functionaries, to the foot of my dais.

I signalled to a servant to accept the petition from the speaker and bring it to me. Once I had read enough, I let the cumbersome document fall to the floor and stood. Some of them gasped as they looked at my silver gown emblazoned with myriad exotic flowers in pearls, emeralds and rubies. I looked at the delegates slowly and deliberately for a full minute before I began to speak.

I called them unbridled and accused them of playing a traitorous trick. I beseeched them to tell me whom I had oppressed and whom I had enriched to another's harm (knowing full well they were forbidden to answer). I told them that I had already promised to marry and that I would never break my word as a prince, particularly when I had promised publicly.

‘I am your anointed queen,' I said, as they clasped their doffed hats and looked up at me. ‘I will never be constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoats I would be able to live in any place in Christendom.'

In other words, I conceded nothing.

Ten

‘Majesty! Your Majesty! Are you unwell? Unbar the door and let us enter!'

I am woken by a wild banging on my chamber door and loud voices calling out to me. I shake my head to banish the sleep that must have crept upon me unawares. My back is stiff from sleeping upon this cushion propped against the wall.

‘What ails you?' I shout back to them. ‘Did I not tell you to leave me in peace until I sent for you?' I hear mutters, rustlings and footsteps in response to the sound of my voice. There must be quite a crowd gathered outside my door, especially at so ungodly an hour.

‘But, good madam—' It is Blanche Parry's voice. She speaks through the keyhole. ‘You did cry out. Such terrible cries that we feared you had been taken ill or met with foul play.'

And then I remember and a cold sweat breaks upon my brow. I dreamt my old dream, the one that plagued me so often in my youth. The dream where I am again a small child held in the arms of a great lady. She wears a beautiful golden gown studded with precious stones that flash and wink at me in the candlelight. I turn my head to look up at the face of the woman who holds me with such affection. She is crooning a French song to me. My eyes travel up the expanse of her gown, and when they reach her décolletage I see the thin trickle of fresh blood that runs from the base of her neck down between the cleft of her breasts. As always, there is no wound that I can see; the blood simply oozes out of the pores of her skin, bubbling out of her of its own accord. I can smell her phantom blood still; the meaty, metallic whiff of it lingering in the night air. As my gaze rises, I am suddenly gripped by a great fear of whose head I will see upon the phantom lady's slender neck.

Inside my dream I struggle like a butterfly on a pin; I do not want to see, I do not want to see! It is as if I no longer have eyelids, or no longer any that I can close. My dream is inexorable. I must see that the head the phantom wears is my own.

That is when I must have screamed and brought my attendants scurrying to my locked door.

‘I am quite safe,' I say to them now, my voice hoarse and thick with tears. ‘It was merely a bad dream that caused me to cry out. Phantoms conjured by the cheese I ate for supper, no doubt. Return to your beds; all is well.'

‘May we not see you, Your Grace, to reassure ourselves that you are not ill or feverish? We are concerned for you, good madam, and yearn to see your face again.'

I find it hard to resist Blanche Parry. For love of her I hoist myself to my feet, run a hand through my untidy hair and smooth down my stained and crumpled gown. Then I pull back the bolt and open the door to my private chamber. Anxious faces appear in the light of the candles they hold: Blanche, Philadelphia Carey, Bess Throckmorton and others of my entourage and, to the rear, the looming shapes of the guards who man the outer chamber. I can see they are all shocked by my dishevelled appearance. Blanche takes a step towards me, but I hold my hand up to stop her coming any closer.

‘No, Blanche, I am not ready for company yet, not even yours. I am well enough in body, be assured of that, but I am still dismayed in spirit. I crave solitude and the space to make sense of what as yet does not make any sense at all.'

Then I close the door, more gently this time, and curl up once more upon my cushion. Despite my short slumber, my eyes are still sore from lack of sleep and weeping, so I close them to give them whatever ease I can. I will not sleep again (aye, and do not wish to either, given the horrors my fevered brain might conjure) but my imagination has no mercy. Sleeping or waking, faces from the past begin to appear in front of my closed eyelids.

The first face I see is that of my dissolute and foolish cousin, Mary's husband, Henry Darnley. I see him as I last saw him, well nigh twenty years past, a stripling still, full of excitement as he asked for permission to go to Scotland. I gave him that permission and curse myself now for my poor judgment then. If Henry and Mary had never met, could all that followed have been avoided? Would she now be sitting contentedly upon her throne, married to some other, wiser man, the mother of other, better natured children? But perhaps she would merely have married the Earl of Bothwell sooner and I cannot believe that would ever have ended well.

The Henry Darnley I see in my mind's eye is a physically well-favoured youth, with fair hair thick as thatch upon his head, rosy skin and full lips that would be the envy of many a maiden. He is tall and well shaped, but his physical beauty hides a darker soul.

‘I bid you farewell, Your Majesty, and thank you for your permission to travel to Scotland.' Darnley kneels at my feet and kisses my hand.

‘I wish you well on your journey, cousin. Will you visit our mutual relative, the Queen of Scots?'

‘I suppose I must, for courtesy's sake.' He smiles charmingly as he rises to his full height, dimples forming in his downy cheeks. Such is his youth, he is still as beardless as a boy.

‘Is it mere courtesy you offer to queens, then?'

‘To all other queens but you, Your Grace. They all pale by comparison.'

‘Do not say so until you have actually met other queens, my lord, otherwise I may think you full of courtesies only.'

‘Your wit is justly renowned, my cousin and liege lady.' His words are flattering enough, but his smile has disappeared. It has long been my observation that men of slow wits dislike being reminded of that fact by women with faster ones.

That handsome stripling is long dead now, as are so many others, but of all the fates that awaited so many of my kin, his was the strangest of all.

Some time after the awful murder of my cousin's Italian music master, Darnley fell ill with the pox. He had fulfilled the foul purpose that had caused the brutish Scots nobles to pander to him in the first place – namely the murder of the poor Italian, whom they hated for his influence on the queen and suspected was a Catholic spy. Darnley had been deserted by his former comrades and was forced to rely upon any crumbs of favour from his wife. The birth of Prince James had not raised his father's status at all. If anything, so our spies told us, it had increased the horror Mary had of her husband and made her determined to separate him from the infant prince as much as possible. Who could blame her? This was the man who had so disregarded her pregnancy that he had led a group of ruffians into her chamber and bloodily murdered a man who clung to her skirts!

Nevertheless, perhaps my cousin still felt some affection for her husband and felt some duty towards the father of her infant child. Perhaps she merely had a kind heart and took pity on him. Whatever her reasons, she nursed her estranged husband tenderly through his illness.

If my cousin murdered her husband, as so many believe, surely, while she was tending him in his illness it would have been easy to put a little foxglove in his medicine and hurry him on his way? Suspicion would have clung to her, no doubt, but he could easily have died naturally from his illness and his demise would have been regretted by few except his besotted mother and deluded father. It speaks to Mary's innocence that she resisted the easy temptation of poison.

When Darnley had recovered enough to be moved, Mary brought him to Edinburgh on a horse litter and lodged him for his convalescence in a provost's house called Kirk o' Field. This lodging for a royal consort was strange enough and many to this day remark upon it. Why so lowly a destination for the husband of the queen? Why did she not take him with her to Holyrood House? Worse – the peculiar accommodation was chosen by that infamous ruffian the Earl of Bothwell.

James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, was not a man I had heard much of prior to these events. A relatively minor Scottish nobleman, by all accounts he was something of a reprobate, having racketed around the world as a young man and, along the way married and divorced not one but two wives! The last he had shed a mere seven days before he married his third. During her travails, our spies informed us, Bothwell had become close to Mary, offering her a sympathetic ear. No doubt he saw an opportunity in a queen who now hated her husband and regretted most fervently her hasty marriage.

But I get ahead of my tale. It is at Kirk o' Field that the story becomes even more peculiar and more damning. A chamber was arranged for the queen in the same lowly and unsuitable lodgings, directly beneath her husband's. Good wife that she was, or was pretending to be, she came daily to see to a convalescent Darnley. Given how much she had appeared to hate him just a short time before, this sudden solicitous behavior is seen as evidence of her complicity in the plot against Henry Darnley's life. She even stayed the night in her designated chamber once or twice, taking great (and strange) care over the placement of her bed. An attendant swore on a stack of Bibles that she had asked for it to be moved to the opposite side of the room so that it did not lie directly below her husband's. This odd whim was remarked upon at the time in the servants' quarters.

According to the testimony of witnesses, at 10 o'clock
on the Lord's Day, Sunday 9th May, 1567 two sacks of gunpowder were placed in the queen's bedchamber. At the time, Mary was in the room above with her husband. Attendants then testified that the queen suddenly remembered that she had promised to attend a masque at Holyrood. As she took leave of her husband, attendants heard her say to him, ‘It was just this time last year that Rizzio was slain.'

Her husband, puzzled by this remark, turned to the same attendant after his wife had left the room and said, ‘Why did she speak of Davie's slaughter?' The likeliest answer to that, of course, is almost too horrible to contemplate. Was my cousin really a cold-blooded murderer? Was this gently nurtured French princess about to take revenge on her husband for the murder of the musician David Rizzio in such a brutal way? I do not know. I cannot tell. I never laid eyes upon my cousin. Hers is not a character I can judge firsthand, but – even as her killer in my turn – greedy for justification for what I have done, I find I cannot quite bring myself to believe it. I prefer to place the blame on brutal Bothwell and his desire to marry a queen. But is that right, or simply comforting? This is the question that has been plaguing me ever since I was first told the terrible tale of Darnley's death. Who was to blame? I still do not know.

At 2 o'clock in the morning (the details of this story have burned themselves into the very substance of my brain) all Edinburgh was woken by the sound of a great explosion and when the smoke cleared, they could see that the Kirk o' Field lay in ruins, thanks to the gunpowder carefully placed in the queen's chamber. But Darnley was not blown to kingdom come. His body and that of his page were found in the garden, intact and with no sign of fire upon them, as a witness later put it at the inquest. Nearby lay a chair, a rope, Darnley's cloak and a dagger. To this day no one knows exactly how Mary's husband died, except that there was nothing natural about it. He was murdered and, so all declared, by the Earl of Bothwell and perhaps, as many have argued in this very court, by his wife.

Why did they assume that Bothwell was responsible for the deed? It seems he made no secret of his desire to see the queen's husband dead and the queen herself free once more to marry. Mary and the earl were thick as thieves (or assassins) and Bothwell had set himself up as Mary's champion. It was Bothwell who decided to house the ailing Darnley in Kirk o' Field instead of Holyrood, and his men brought the gunpowder. I have never heard a soul dispute Bothwell's guilt, although the debate about Mary's role in the plot continues to this moment. Her response to her husband's murder did not help her cause.

All Europe waited to hear that she had ordered the arrest and trial of Bothwell, but they waited in vain – and rumour grew. Unable to stand by and watch my cousin's ignominy any longer, I did the only thing I could to try and influence the direction of events. I sent her a letter. I told her that she must not look through her fingers at the avenging of her husband's death. I went further, as close as I could to hinting at the rumoured relationship between her and the odious Bothwell. I wrote that she must see justice done even if it touched the one who was closest to her. I could not have put it more bluntly. I did not give such advice idly, because I had been in a similar situation myself only a few years previously. The man I wanted to marry was suspected of killing his wife. Perhaps the unspoken difference between my situation and hers is that I knew Robin was innocent, whereas it seems Mary knew Bothwell was guilty.

The Queen of Scots, once the adored idol of so many, then confirmed all the suspicions of those who believe women are not suited to rule. She let her heart rule her head. I was ashamed of her, because she was my closest living relative and because she was a queen. When she could no longer resist pressure for a trial, she set up a tribunal to try Bothwell for the crime, but made sure the judges were all beholden to the man. He was duly acquitted, but no one was convinced by the verdict, not the great nor the mean. Not satisfied with the shadow of an inquest, Mary then compounded her error with her public behaviour.

She went to a wedding feast in fine silken trappings the day after her husband had been so hideously killed. She gave her husband's horses and fine clothing to the man all believed was his killer. Her people began to speak openly of her as a harlot.

Just when we believed events could not possibly get worse, the Earl of Bothwell ‘abducted' the Scottish queen while she was out riding. So low had her reputation fallen and so quickly there were many who claimed that it was a planned assignation. They said Bothwell then ravished her against her will and that was why she had to marry him to save her honour. What honour? She had none, and yet she seemed blind to it all.

I know what it is to love a man you cannot marry, but God sends such temptations to forge our characters so we can lead. When she married Bothwell, the man accused of her husband's murder, she failed the test, lost her right to lead and shamed all of womankind. She also started her journey towards the scaffold.