Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (25 page)

Or perhaps because there was. The disciples of Calvin had indeed
become strong in France; the Huguenots, in their tightly disciplined
"cells," provided almost an alternative government to the royal one
moving restlessly from chateau to chateau in search of game. The
Guises the Duc, who had been appointed Minister of War, and the
Cardinal, who was Minister of Finances encouraged the King to hunt and
leave the governing of the realm to them. They knew how to deal with
the Huguenots: exterminate them. Blow them up. Massacre them.

The King did not agree, and although Mary became upset and tried to
interfere with the plans of her elders, they merely had to wait for
Francois to have yet another attack of his many recurrent illnesses,
and she would be diverted into what was becoming her main role:
nursemaid to her husband. With the King either on horseback or in
sickbed, the Guises did as they pleased.

Now Francois had tired of the hunting near Orleans and decided he
wanted to remove to the dense forest near Chambord. The weather was
cold for November, but although Francois was clearly unwell red
blotches had broken out all over his cheeks, and the rest of his skin
was lead-powder white he was feverishly eager to keep hunting. Just so
had Francois I been, as he had pursued the game with glittering eyes
and dying body in the last stages of syphilis.

The furnishings of the hotel in Orleans were sent ahead to Chambord;
but on the morning they were to have ridden forth, Francois had an
excruciating pain in one ear, and could not move. He was hastily laid
on a pallet on the floor, for the room had been stripped of its
furniture and there was no bed. Fever set in, and he lay delirious and
with chattering teeth, tossing on the pallet.

Mary took her place by his side, as she had so many times before.
Francois had had this earache frequently, and always it had been
soothed with a mixture of egg yolk, oil of roses, and turpentine,
heated and poured into the ear canal. She did this, and laid
compresses on his brow, and his eyelids fluttered open and he smiled at
her.

"The boar will get away," he said. But he said it tenderly, as if to
assure her that he was still in command of himself and his senses.

"They but wait for you," she said. "The biggest boar in the forest of
Chambord knows that he is doomed to be served at Christmas to the
court. His fate is merely postponed. Lucky boar!"

"Unlucky Frangois," he groaned. "Oh, Marie, I feel so ... dizzy. And
weak."

"Soon you will recover. Already the oil is soothing your ear."

"It hurts .. . behind the ear."

The King did not speak intelligibly again. He closed his eyes, and the
fever confused him and made his face erupt in sores in the next few
days. Mary never left his side, going without sleep, lying down beside
him on a pallet, playing her lute for his un hearing festering ears,
holding his hand.

The doctors gave him a compound of rhubarb, making a paste of it and
forcing it down his throat. He seemed to rally for a few hours, but a
relapse swiftly followed.

Queen Catherine, who had hurried to the scene, called Ambroise Pare,
the King's surgeon. "Save him!" she commanded.

"The physicians "

"It is beyond physicians," she replied.

The surgeon knelt down and examined the King carefully, turning his
head and blowing gently in each ear. There was a large swelling behind
the infected ear.

"This must be lanced," he said, and the two queens agreed.

But although he successfully lanced the swelling and extracted a great
deal of fluid, the King was not relieved. On the contrary, he grew
worse in the next few days.

"I am afraid the only remedy is to operate, to remove part of the
skull," said Pare. "There is an abscess in the brain, and it will
spread, and "

"Cut open his head?" cried Catherine.

Pare looked at Mary, the King's wife.

"Do whatever is necessary, but save him!" the girl said softly.

"Are you that cruel?" said Catherine. "Would you have his brains
exposed? How could he live, then? No one can live with his head open!
Do you have some miracle substance with which to patch it, then?" She
turned on Pare.

"No, alas," he admitted. "But perhaps something can be found. Ivory,
or a sheep's intestine .. . and I can dull the pain with a mixture we
use for soldiers on the battlefield, opium and henbane, so he will not
feel the cutting."

"A King with a sheep's intestine covering his brain!" shrieked
Catherine. "So you propose to offer France such a King, such an
abomination! And he " she looked at her firstborn son lying in
extremis "he could never hunt again, would have to live like an old
man, shuffling about in cleansed rooms, wearing a wet turban about his
head ... no, he would not want that."

"How do you know what he would want?" said Mary.

"I bore him, I know him, and I know what is consistent with kingly
dignity." She turned to Pare. "No operation. But remove his pain, I
beg you. Use your battlefield mixture."

Pare looked at her, and saw the anguish in her eyes. No mothers were
present at his battlefields; they never had her choices.

"I will mix it straightway, Your Majesty. And there is another device
I know, to induce sleep and calmness. The sound of falling rain is
soothing. If you will provide a large kettle on the far side of the
room, and have a servant pour water from high above it .. ."

"It is done," said Catherine.

Francois received the mixture of opium and henbane, and fell asleep to
the sound of artificial rain in the cold, bare chamber. Mary held his
hand, never relinquishing it, as it gradually grew cold in hers. She
held it long after he had passed from life to death.

"Our Francois is gone, my mother," she finally said to Catherine, who
was dozing in a chair. Gently Mary let go of his hand and arranged his
hands on his breast. She kissed his forehead. The red splotches on
his face were fading, and his lips were parted as if he would speak.

"Adieu, Francois, my love, my husband, my friend."

Catherine burst into tears, but Mary had none left. She was beyond
tears; she felt that her life had departed with Francois.

"Adieu, Francois," she whispered. "Adieu, Marie."

In Edinburgh, as soon as he heard the news about the death of Francois
II, John Knox wrote, "For as the said King sat at mass, he suddenly
perished of a rotten ear that deaf ear that would never hear the truth
of God."

TWENTY

It was Mary's eighteenth birthday, and she was a new widow, keeping i
mourning in an artificially darkened chamber at Orleans. Once again
she was wearing white, and it seemed a cruel mockery. They were right;
I should never have worn it on my wedding day, she thought. It is the
colour of death and sorrow. I will never wear it again. If I had not
worn it then, perhaps Francois .. .

No, that is foolish. He did not die of a dress colour, she told
herself. He died because he had always been weak, because he was born
sickly, because his mother took those myrrh pills to help her conceive,
because he was born at an eclipse of the sun. Perhaps he would not
have lived so long, had I not helped him, nursed him, played with him,
loved him.

An ache shot through her. She loved him, her companion, her confidant,
her best friend. She could hardly remember a time when she had not
known him, and he had loved her utterly.

Now she was completely alone. Her mother and Francois, both dead
within half a year. There was no place for her, suddenly, upon this
earth. France was no longer a safe haven. Francois's little brother,
ten-year-old Charles, ruled as Charles IX, but his mother ruled as
regent. Meticulous Catherine, who observed every rule .. . just as she
had stood aside to give Mary precedence ten minutes after Henri IPs
death, just so quickly had she demanded that Mary return the crown
jewels after Francois II's death. There were no lingering niceties, no
courtesies. Mary, whose mother was French, whose language was French,
and who had been brought up in France, was being told subtly and
unsubtly to forget France and return to Scotland.

But she was not welcome there, either. Her subjects had rebelled and
formally deposed her mother, the regent. A council of lords now ruled
the land, enacting laws that abolished Catholicism and made attending
mass a crime.

She had no country, no welcome anywhere. After these forty days of
mourning were over, then what? Where would she go, what would she
do?

And yet a pervasive lethargy seized her. She cared, and did not care.
Her loss of Francois was so gripping that in her pain she only sought
surcease: to sleep, to weep, to remember. His presence was everywhere,
half comforting her, half torturing her. She, who had so often been
entertained by the poetry of the court, now sought to alleviate her
pain by writing of her loss.

Over my life's early spring, And over its opening bloom, My deadly
sorrows fling The darkness of the tomb; My star of hope is set In
yearning and regret.

When day's long toil is over,

And dreams steal round my couch,

I hear that voice once more

I thrill to that dear touch;

In labour and repose,

My soul his presence knows.

But who would read her poem, who would understand? Only Frangois, and
he was gone, in all the ways that mattered .. . except as a gentle,
ghostly presence.

They spoke to her of marrying. In the first two weeks of her
widowhood, when she was in deepest mourning, with the only light in her
white-draped chamber provided by flickering and smoldering candles, the
Guises were admitted, as befitted her closest relatives, and
immediately began to suggest a remarriage. There was Don Carlos, the
heir of Philip of Spain. There was Charles IX, her brother-in-law, who
had developed an abnormal, childish passion for her. She must stay in
power. These bridegrooms immature, unbalanced children would enable
her to do so.

She sat, hearing them out. Indeed, what else could she do? She was
trapped in the deuil chamber. But, although she had loved Francois,
another child-groom did not appeal to her. Instead, what increasingly
appealed to her was escape. Escape to Scotland, far away from the
suffocating Guises and the watchful Queen Regent.

Would I rather be a dowager queen in France, pensioned off to live in
tranquil obscurity on my estates, of no importance to anyone although
comfortably and safely housed or would I rather be queen in a small,
faraway country?

I am too young to be housed in obscurity, she answered herself. I have
learned statecraft from my uncles, my grandmother, and Queen Catherine
and to what purpose, if I retire to a country estate in my youth? God
gave me a throne in Scotland as my birthright. Am I meant to take this
sceptre? It is even more urgent since the country is so lost, so mired
in confusion and errors. I know I am very young and unknowledgeable in
deeper matters of theology, but my task would only be to set a good
living example of my own faith, not to rival Saint Augustine or some
other Doctor of the Church. Perhaps that is what God requires of me to
help my country.