The Galliard (57 page)

Lethington soothed her. ‘Madam, let us guide the matter. Your Grace shall see nothing but what is good and approved by Parliament.’

She was beyond coping with the matter any further. She must give all her strength and mind to the Christening. Some responsible person had to be at Stirling to attend the enormous
preparations, since Darnley would not. Some of the Ambassadors were already arriving and had to be received. So Bothwell set off there immediately after the Council, and she told him to write her full particulars of all the business.

Then, as decided, she had to set to work to meet Darnley and get him to join her at Craigmillar, overcome his threats and get him after all to accompany her to Stirling for the ceremony. So they had meals together as before, though she kept her bedroom barred.

She had some success, with the result that Darnley became very jaunty and jolly at her ‘making up to him’ again. He was jocose about Bothwell’s face wound and its probable effect on his
bonnes fortunes
, at which Mary fired up; looking at his flushed overfed face, she remarked that it wouldn’t do
him
any harm to be ‘daggered a little like my Lord Bothwell’, and was startled, not for the first time, by her fierce longing to snatch his knife from him and do it herself.

She had still to arrange her State entry into Stirling. She wrote to Bothwell rather peremptorily that he had promised to send her news, but ‘I can learn none. As for me, if I hear no other matter from you, according to my commission I bring the man Monday to Craigmillar. He is the merriest that ever you saw and does all he can to make me believe he loves me – wherein I take so much pleasure that I never come near him but the pain in my side takes me.’ She wanted Bothwell to know how Darnley sickened her. Then she prayed him to send her word from Stirling.

It was a rather curt letter, and it could no more strike her that it could ever be used against her than it could have occurred to Lethington that his jeer at the virtuous James, conveniently ‘looking through his fingers’ at the slight to his Protestant scruples, would be used as evidence that a murder had been openly discussed at the Queen’s Council table.

Only in one thing was the Queen’s letter unbusinesslike. It had no address, and was dated only ‘this Saturday’.

Chapter Nineteen

For the first time for two generations Stirling was cosmopolitan once again. French, Spanish, Italian, the accents of Savoy and Piedmont, the narrowed vowels of cultured English voices, the soft sound of Gaelic, were heard everywhere in the little streets. The great Castle on that mighty rock upspringing from the plain was ablaze with light in every window, and its ramparts carved up the sky against the December moon. From those starry windows in the enormous darkness there came the sound of Italian songs, the thin tingling music of foreign fiddles, the high sweet call of flutes, the beat and rhythm of dancing feet. The little town was packed; it was hard to find stabling for all the horses of the foreign retinues in the barns, for they were full of visitors from all over Scotland, even shaggy bare-legged Highlanders from the farthest mountains of the North-West, who had tramped all this way through the mid-winter snows to see the one great royal spectacle of their lives, and catch their only glimpse of the young lovely Queen.

They saw her riding full tilt down the steep path from the Castle, a gay, wild creature, her horse’s cloth-of-gold caparison streeling out in the wind of her speed like the sun itself flying through the wintry scene, her Court scattered far behind her like a hunting-field. Fresh air always went to Mary’s head; but inside the Castle the impression was the same, though quieter: the Ambassadors saw a young mother shining with serene happiness as she showed them the solemn slobbering baby, six months old. Here was the Mary of Delight who for years had been a legend in Europe; her subtle
eyes, her swift glancing smile that made all on whom it lighted feel they were her intimate friends, her free natural speech that held the dignity of a Queen because she never had to think of it. She wore the chain of diamonds and pendant from her baby’s godfather, Charles IX of France, that sad-eyed, excitable youth whose message after six and a half years was that he still envied his brother François, who ‘died young but lived happy since he was married to her’.

She had been Queen Consort of France, all her power and splendour dependent on François; here she was sole Sovereign in her own right, as was Elizabeth in England. But Mary held the future of both kingdoms in her arms.

It was the hour of her supreme triumph and she exulted in it, looking round her on the representatives of all the countries come to this cold Northern land so far away to do her honour. And with her own people she was triumphant; she had so won her way in the hearts of this fiercely Protestant country that no protest had been made against the Catholic Archbishop baptizing their Prince with the full ceremony of the Catholic Church.

Not quite the full ceremony, for she refused to allow the use of the spittle by the Archbishop, showing a sense of the superior importance of hygiene to that of the religious service. ‘I’ll not have a pocky priest spit in my child’s mouth!’

‘That’s a sound estimate of His Grace, seeing the Italian doctor got 1800 gold crowns off him for curing him of it.’

‘I didn’t know that. Anyway, it’s a filthy apish trick, rather in scorn than in imitation of Christ.’

‘Your Grace is no bigot, I’ll say that.’

‘My lord of Bothwell should know, since he’s still bigot enough to refuse to attend the Prince’s baptism.’

‘Bigot! I! Do you think I’m acting for my religion?’

‘What is your religion?’

‘To hell with the Pope!’ he grinned. ‘And with all foreign interference.’

He took her hand and swept her forward into the stately movement of the dance. Three steps to the right, three to the left, and he went on speaking: ‘Didn’t Your Grace yourself have the
Papal Legate intercepted in Paris so that he shouldn’t come on here to give you his master’s commands?’

She tapped out some little intricate steps in mocking answer.

‘And apart from foreign policy?’ she asked.

‘Why, I never fancied our home-grown monks in their long black petticoats, like a lot of old women lording it over the land. No man should play the master without a sword to make his title good.’

She floated round him as he spoke, a cloud of silver gossamer, their hands still touching, and as he swung her back to him, laughed up into his face.

‘Here’s flat treason, to decry petticoat government to me!’

‘That’s another matter. I’ve seen you wear the breeches better than most.’

His glance swept her, stripped her too, she felt; she blushed, and a new strange fear followed her unwonted shyness. She held up the great peacock fan from the Duke of Savoy, its colours painted in sapphires and emeralds, before a face grown very thoughtful for that bright occasion. Scandal said that the Lord Bothwell feared to encounter a crucifix or the Sign of the Cross because he had sold his soul to the devil.

The music drew to a close. On its last long-drawn notes he led her back to the side of the hall, and she said low, ‘When you lay at Hermitage, so ill you were thought to be dying, was your religion then still only protest?’

His eyes softened at the anxious note in her voice, but he would not ease it.

‘My gramercy was that of old Kennedy’s fifty years ago, before Protestantism was thought of—

I will no priests for me to sing,

Nor yet no bells for me to ring,

But ae bagpipe to play a spring.’

In the face of that pagan arrogance she shivered; was his pride so fierce that he scorned the need of even God’s help? She seemed to
be standing beside him, not in that hot crowded enclosed place, but alone with him on the wide moor under the windy sky – alone in all the world, with not a single ally, human or divine.

The vision passed swifter than the flash of a bird’s wing; the music died, the dancers bowed, the buzz of talk rose shrill and clattering against the storm-swept night outside, where the wind and hail drummed against the Castle rock.

She had to dance next with Sir Christopher Hatton, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s, and considered the best dancer in England; she had to meet Mr Carey, who was a great-nephew of Anne Boleyn’s, and so vain of the connection that he would scarcely admit any English family to be noble that had not contributed a member of it to the block; she had to look pleased with the Earl of Bedford’s ‘merry message’ from his Queen, who had sent a gold font studded with jewels as Christening present to her godson. It had been big enough when ordered at the baby’s birth, Elizabeth had said, but if he had outgrown it by now, well then it would do for the next! Bedford, an extraordinary little man, very short but immensely consequential, beamed with pride in Elizabeth’s genial wit, though he must have recognised the sting in it since she had also given him instructions to ignore Darnley completely and never address him as King.

It was easy to obey, since Darnley was nowhere to be seen. He was in Stirling Castle, that was all that was known; some said he was sulking, some that he was ill, some that the tailor hadn’t finished his coat of cloth of gold in time for the baptism – but as the King had expressly stated that he would not go to the baptism at all, why, asked the indignant tailor, should he fash himself to finish a coat that would not be needed, when all the new coats of the great lords were crying out to be finished in time?

It had been a pretty notion of the young Queen to have each noble and his retinue in a different colour: James in green with linings of red and gold, Argyll in red, and Bothwell in blue, the colour that in blazonry represents loyalty, as she reminded him; she did not add that the linings she had chosen for it, white and silver, were her own special colours.

All the barons of Scotland stood in two files from the door of the royal nursery to the door of the Chapel Royal, each holding an immense lighted candle of pure wax – no guttering stinking tallow to light the Prince! From under his bedspread of ten yards of patterned cloth of silver the Countess of Argyll lifted him up, placed him in a shallow basket like a broad-brimmed hat, and put this in the arms of His Excellency the French Ambassador. Monsieur Du Croc had now good occasion to feel his weight as he had prophesied, and the dapper little man wore an expression of portentous anxiety as the baby dribbled, rolled his large eyes, and made a sudden grab at the ambassadorial beard.

‘Goo?’ inquired the Prince, and with growing persistence, looking from left to right as they proceeded down the lane of baronial candle-bearers, ‘Goo goo guggug
goo
?’ Everyone agreed that he showed remarkable intelligence. The Catholic nobles followed, the Earl of Atholl and the Lords of Dunkeld and Dunblane bearing the great serge and cude-cloth, the Earl of Eglinton the salt-vat, Lord Ross the basin and ewer. In the chapel doorway stood the Archbishop in his mitre, with the great gold crozier in his hand; behind him candles glimmered on the rich vestments of the priests and an armoury of pastoral staves and gold crucifixes; incense swung to and fro, the chanting of Latin rose and fell; three bishops, the Prior of Whithorn, deans and archdeacons, stood in attendance to baptize in the Catholic faith, and in a Protestant font, this heir to two Protestant kingdoms.

The Countess of Argyll, acting as Queen Elizabeth’s proxy, received him from Du Croc’s arms (she had been warned by the Kirk she would have to do penance for this, but it was worth it): the Primate gave him the names of James and Charles, sponsored by the Sovereigns of England and France; the heralds proclaimed them three times and all his titles with a mighty blast of trumpets. The Protestant nobles, among them James Earl of Moray, George Gordon Earl of Huntly, Bothwell and the English Earl of Bedford, watched from the door. The music soared; the future King James VI of Scotland and James I of England was carried back to his crib. His father was nowhere to be seen.

‘The Queen’s brought her donkey to the water,’ said Bothwell, ‘but she can’t make him drink.’

He was not at the hawking nor any of the hunts, not even the hunting of the wild bull in the great park. He was not at the dancing, nor at the vast banquets (most of the tables in the great hall seated sixty apiece): he missed all the Latin Masques by George Buchanan, the French ones by Sebastian (Bastien) Pagez, Mary’s highly cultivated pastry-cook; and with them he missed a surprising impromptu effect which occurred in a woodland scene of singing naiads dragged in on a platform by satyrs up to the dining-tables. There the satyrs handed dishes of figs from Malaga and sugared fruits from Venice and Cyprus to the Queen and all her noble and ambassadorial guests. But when these furred and painted waiters, with cloven feet and shaggy tails, served the Earl of Bedford and his escort of eighty English gentlemen, they so far forgot their manners that they put their hands behind them and wagged their tails at the Englishmen.

There was nearly an international incident. It was well known by all the French and Scots there present that Englishmen had tails; had not ‘
tailard
’ always been the name for an Englishman all over Europe? And the knowledge was deeply resented by the English. Anne Boleyn’s haughty great-nephew had to be restrained from thrashing the nearest satyr with his own tail. Sir Christopher Hatton blamed the stage manager and told Sir James Melville that if the Queen were not present he would stick a dagger into the heart of that French knave Bastien. Melville made him drink more wine instead, and the stately Sir Christopher then decided that the most dignified protest he could make would be to sit on the floor behind the table where he should not see the rest of this shocking spectacle. He insisted on a Mr Linguish accompanying him in this aloof position; it took the combined efforts of the Queen and the Earl of Bedford to induce them to abandon it.

The festivities had their effect even on the Good Lord James’ austere wife, Lady Agnes, who kissed the Earl of Bedford, as the pompous little Englishman himself indignantly stated, ‘without his leave’.