The Galliard (63 page)

Well, what of it? The true judges were the pikemen outside! Would it come to open violence? Bothwell rather wished it would; he was on surer ground there. But no, he knew that whatever happened this verdict must not go against him.

As he heard his indictment for ‘the treasonable and abominable slaughter’ of the King ‘under silence of night in his own lodging beside the Kirk o’ Field’, his face went dark.

Black Ormiston plucked at his cloak. ‘What the devil is this my lord?’ he whispered. ‘You might look so if you were going to the deed!’

‘Hold your tongue,’ muttered his master.

Lennox’s servant, Cunningham, answered to his master’s name, and pleaded for a postponement of forty days to collect evidence, the accused to stay in prison meantime; although Lennox’s own letters to the Queen, now read in court, demanded ‘immediate justice’. So the trial went on – not very long, for no evidence whatever was produced. The jury withdrew, and by seven o’clock that evening ‘acquitted the said Earl Bothwell of art and part of the said slaughter of the King’.

At that same hour Elizabeth’s letter was handed to Mary. Whatever her intention in sending it too late to serve any possible purpose, there was a strange note of truth in the urgency of its warning: ‘For the love of God, Madam, use such sincerity and prudence in this matter, which touches you so nearly, that all the world may believe you innocent of so enormous a crime.’

That
was not mere spite. It had come straight from the heart, as though, for once, the English Queen were trying to use her
own sorely won experience of life, not to damage but to help her much younger rival. Elizabeth had lost her reputation as the alleged mistress of Robert Dudley; had very nearly lost her throne by the report that she meant to marry him after his wife’s mysterious death.

But there could be no such report concerning herself and Bothwell. In any case, the letter could make no odds.

James Hepburn was out in the air again, and free, with ‘this jolly acquittal’; Lennox had hastily set sail in a ship down the west coast; and
now
he could whistle, ‘Wha dare meddle wi’ me?’

He felt he could defy the world, and did, by bills stuck up on the Tolbooth door, offering to ‘oppose his body to any gentleman born’ who dared now to charge him with the murder. To round it off, he also challenged Sir William Drury, the English Marshal at Berwick, for repeating the slanders made against him two years ago.

It stirred up a fresh crop of placards, offering to prove by force of arms that Bothwell was ‘chief and author of the foul and horrible murder’, helped by accomplices – and here followed a completely new list of fourteen names not mentioned before, including this time Captain Blackadder, young Hay of Talla, Sandy Durham, Black Ormiston and Harry Lauder. And still the doughty champion refused to disclose his identity.

Times were changing. Challenges weren’t what they had been. The whole thing had been made ridiculous, a thing more trying than any danger to the Galliard’s temper. He lost it, furiously, shockingly – with the Queen of all people!

Just at this moment of his relief and triumph, on the Sunday the very day after his trial, she must needs go and have a full blast of her infernal religious mummery, a special solemn Mass with dirges sung for the King’s soul in the Chapel Royal before a memorial bed of cloth of silver and crimson velvet, and a canopy of ancient cloth of gold cut from the pavilions of Edward II, captured by the Scots at Bannockburn. Very fitting that young Darnley should wear the gauds of that degenerate Southron King, but was he any
the warmer for them? A pity then he didn’t have ’em the night he lay naked in the snow at Kirk o’ Field!

But the climax of his disgust and wrath came when he found that Mary had sat up nearly all that night in the chapel, on her knees beside that painted gallimaufry – to pray for the soul of Henry Darnley.

‘As if all your prayers could pluck that trash out of hell!’

She turned on him in a white rage. ‘You have never known what pity is. At least show decency.’

So he’d knocked
that
spark out of her, for all she’d looked so listless and hollow-eyed! How dared she mourn him? He’d no pity for her making herself ill with such foolery – and for Darnley, ‘
Pity
, for the man who planned to blow you to pieces!’

‘I’ll not believe it. There’s no clear proof.’

‘There’s no clear proof of anything in this coil. It’s clear, though, that he knew of the gunpowder. And the horses—’

‘Yes, I know. All ready to take him away. But might he not have meant to take me away too in the confusion, to escape together as we did before? He was vicious, weak, helpless somehow – it’s not fair to judge him like other men. There was something in him would always have prevented him from growing up. But he was not a monster. He
couldn’t
have begged me to stay that night, intending me to die that horrible death. He did love me in a way.’

‘So they’ve made even you believe in their “gentle Henry”, “that innocent lamb!” You refuse then to be free – you’ll tie yourself even to his corpse!’

He was too angry to see that she was pleading so passionately, not to him but to herself. Those hours of kneeling in the chapel last night had come after weeks of nervous collapse. She could not write any letters, not even in answer to her uncle the Cardinal nor her grandmother. A strange apathy had overwhelmed her, a dull disbelief in all the world. She had hated Darnley so that her whole spirit seemed shrunk and withered by it. All last night she had prayed to be delivered from that hate. So she had tried to believe that her young husband was not wholly vile; but here was Bothwell dragging his soul down again into hell – and with it, hers.

Ruthlessly he stripped her of her illusions, reminded her that Darnley had planned her destruction as horribly, as treacherously, a year ago, and only helped to save her from it in order to save himself.

‘Did he not kiss you then, and beg you to take care of yourself the same night that he betrayed you? Did he not play tennis and joke with Davie just before he and his fellows worried him to death like a pack of hounds? Yet you still believe in his love for you. You pray for him, try to see good in him, cock him up and heap finery on him in death as in life, hang the Bruce’s battle spoils upon his tomb, bury him beside your own father among the Kings of Scotland! Nothing’s too good for this rat that should be left to rot in a sewer.’

She gave a cry of sheer physical anguish, her hands to her side. ‘Oh, you too! – you are hateful. It is true, you hurt both body and soul.’

Her cry went through him. He flung himself on his knees before her, and his arms round her body, locking her in his grasp. She could not see his face, for his head was pressed against her, that rough, leonine head; his great shoulders were shaking, some extraordinary emotion seemed to be convulsing him.

‘Yes, it is true,’ he was saying. ‘I am hateful. But don’t let us hate, or it will be the end of us both.’

Trembling, she said, ‘No, no, don’t let us hate. Hate is killing me. Remember he was the father of my son.’

He sprang up from her as violently as he had flung himself down, his face was terrible.

‘By the blood of Christ, I will remember it always!’

He went from her too quickly to see that she had fainted.

Chapter Twenty-Four

After that she could never see him again – never, never, never, she kept moaning low to herself, to the terror of Mary Seton’s tender heart, who did not know what had happened to throw her mistress back into this piteous state.

But she had to see him again, and at once. On Wednesday she had to attend Parliament, with Bothwell again bearing the sceptre before her. She noticed that the usual escort of Edinburgh bailies had been exchanged for solid ranks of hagbutters, doubtless by Bothwell’s command. So he still felt her to be in grave danger; but small odds would the soldiers make to her who had once found her safety in the hearts of her people. ‘God bless that sweet face!’ they had called when she rode to her first Parliament; but now it was ‘God save Your Grace – if you are innocent of the King’s death!’

So now they had said it – in the street in the open daylight, before the Lords of her Parliament, surrounded as she was by the muskets of her soldiers; they had cried out to her face what they had whispered behind their window-shutters, muttered in the dark of their doorways; this was the voice of her people, that Greek chorus in the drama of her life that had praised and blessed her, and now shouted aloud its hideous suspicion.

Bothwell had rapped out an order to the captain of the musketeers to arrest those who had shouted, but her temper, stung by the insult, flared up at him for giving the order without her leave, and her voice rang out forbidding it; he expostulated, and she said in a voice of ice, ‘Do you indeed wield the sceptre, my lord?’

She saw the anger in his face, knew herself a fool for all reasons to have said it, for indeed he was all-powerful now and knew it, and so did all else. Everything in that week’s Parliament was ordered by him, and no one opposed a syllable. The Assembly issued a proclamation that on pain of death no one should further calumniate him or his. An Act was passed against anonymous placards and the ‘liberty to back-bite’, which aimed at causing disturbance among the people.

But the only material advantage Bothwell reaped from this Parliament, that was utterly subservient to him, was that the lands of the old Church, already appointed to him and other Protestant lords, were confirmed in their possession. Mary let the measure pass with a small wry smile, and asked herself, did
she
indeed wield the sceptre?

But one Act came entirely from her, though it bore the stamp of his hearty approval. It removed any traces of the old Catholic laws that penalized the Reformed religion, it gave the Protestants ‘full surety’ in that religion, and promised that ‘no foreign person or other pretending jurisdiction may interfere with it’. She had snapped her fingers in the face of the Pope and Philip of Spain and their pious requests for the blood of her subjects! Nor was the Act merely negative; it commanded all her subjects to ‘live in perfect amity’, whatever might be their religious differences.

This was a law of universal toleration such as no other country in Europe had as yet even dreamed of passing; it expressed an ideal of freedom and of friendship as the only true bond of society. As she heard it read, she thought, ‘I have done one thing for my country, perhaps mankind.’ The warm pride that filled her veins went glowing up into her thin white cheeks; the men round her who had seen before them only a desperately tired girl, hardly conscious of what they were saying, now stared anew, amazed at this bright spirit. Touched to momentary recognition of the greatness of her hopes, the Parliament expressed their gratitude in a vote of thanks that ‘Her Highness ever since her arrival has attempted no thing contrary to the estate of religion which Her Majesty found here standing.’ Then on their knees they prayed
for her ‘long life and good and happy government’.

She rode back to the Palace of Holyrood in an exquisite late April evening of bird-song and budding daffodils in the gardens of the Canongate, a sky washed clear by showers, and wet roofs gleaming in the last rays of the sun. A child flung a bunch of primroses to her, she caught and kissed them and waved them, laughing as she rode on. A stump of rainbow made a splash of iridescent light low over Arthur’s Seat as she turned her horse into the gates of Holyrood, and the pear tree outside her turret was in blossom as on that evening a year ago when Davie had sung for the last time. Yet even that did not sadden her now. Whatever had happened, or might happen, even to the law she had just appointed, nothing could alter the fact that the desire for goodwill among all men had been expressed in the law of her land.

‘Madam!’ cried Seton in awestruck tones when she saw her, and burst into tears. ‘You look so – so happy!’

‘And is that a reason for crying?’ Mary kissed her, laughing, and added, ‘Yes, I am happy, and I am going straight to bed, and tomorrow down with you again to dear Seton.’

The Queen had looked so radiant, Seton told Fleming later that evening, ‘it was as though a star had passed. I fear she’s not long for this world.’

Fleming scoffed; happiness never killed anybody; the Queen had taken one of her sudden turns for the better, that was all. ‘You know how it is with her, she changes in a flash, one moment in the depths, and the next like all the birds in the air. I wish she could know some real happiness, God knows! There’s one bold fellow who I swear is longing to give it her.’

‘The Lord Bothwell?’ murmured Seton, shocked – ‘but you know they say – and indeed it looks very like—’

‘Indeed and it does – and so it does for at least a score of others. It’s my belief there’s not a man among our nobles who
didn’t
plan to kill the King, and that’s why they made such a mess of it, all jostling up against each other. So unless the Queen takes a foreigner, she’ll have to stay a chaste widow for ever.’

Poor Seton, shuddering, hid her face in her hands. These ghastly weeks were proving too much for her, to the more robust Fleming’s annoyance, for what possible help could it be to their darling to creep about like a frightened mouse instead of heartening her by a pretence that everything was normal?

So she spoke more flippantly than she felt when Seton asked, ‘How
can
you joke about such a thing?’ and replied, ‘I dare say the men who did it can. Listen!’

She opened the shutter and leaned from the window-seat where they were talking. The night was mild. A soft rain fell pattering in the garden. In the wall of the opposite tower a window blazed with yellow light, open to the warm night, and from it came the sound of men’s voices, many of them, loud and jovial, with every now and then a great burst of laughter.

‘What a noise!’ said Seton, leaning out beside her. ‘I hope the Queen can’t hear them from the other side. She wanted to sleep early. She’s not slept properly for so many nights. Someone must be giving a great dinner-party, but I’d heard nothing of it, had you?’