The Galliard (14 page)

Whatever happened to this girl, she would certainly ‘know what pleasure means’

‘My dear,’ said the old lady, ‘I hope you will always be able to “thank Love”. I think you will, for you are of a generous spirit.’

‘New adventure’ – Mary had just seen what that might open for her. Since six years old she had thought of herself only as the predestined wife of François; but now, with the ruin of her former position, there had opened new prospects from a new unrealized source of power – her own attractions in the marriage market.

To be Queen of Spain, of the New World and half the old, would she have love to thank for that? For, as was suitable in a proud Princess, love, in her mind, was only the handmaid to ambition. A sharp flick on her cheek recalled her attention. The Duchesse Antoinette was telling her, ‘What I should have told before, but that I did not want you to worry your head over the matter before it arrives.’

‘Before what arrives, Grand’mère?’

‘Why, these visitors from Scotland.’

She had no reason now to complain of Mary’s inattention. The girl’s white face flamed, her, eyes opened aghast and with more than astonishment; there was startled anger in those usually cool depths.

‘He is come back! Without a word to ask if it is my wish? How dare he?’

‘Are you not being unreasonable? You must remember that he expected to be made Regent instead of your mother, that to her he owed no personal loyalty. But his action in coming here to urge your return to Scotland seems to show an honest loyalty to yourself.’

‘But, Madam, what are you saying? Are we all gone mad? He never can have hoped for the Regency, not even his impudence could go so far.’

‘I should advise you to bear in mind,’ the old lady answered dryly, ‘that he is not only your elder, but very nearly your legitimate brother. If your father had been able to contrive the Lady Margaret Erskine’s divorce, then the Lord James, and not yourself, would
have been the Sovereign of Scotland. That must be very galling for a proud and ambitious man, and you should the more welcome any sign of his goodwill.’

‘O-o-oh!’ Mary’s sigh was so long-drawn that it blew the dandelion clock she had plucked in her nervous agitation into a cloud of airy dancers. ‘You are speaking of my half-brother, the Lord James!’

‘And of whom in the name of heaven could I have been speaking?’

‘Oh, I – I don’t know, Madam.’ She rallied herself under the old lady’s severe scrutiny. ‘But yes I do, and I am so glad it is not he. I thought you meant the Lord Bothwell.’

‘And how has he offended you?’

But Mary with sudden animation was asking questions about the proposed visit of the Lord James, to which the old lady crisply replied, ‘Let us walk. This stone seat is finding its way through the cushion to my old bones.’

For the first time in her life Mary was experiencing jealousy, though she naturally did not recognise it as such. She had lately heard the true reason why the Earl of Bothwell had left her in her hour of worst need, within a few hours of François’ certain death. It was not to go straight back to Scotland to work for her cause, as she had thought, but to the woman in Flanders whom he had kept there for months. That was why he had ridden off, in such a hurry, though she had actually begged him to stay. No wonder that he had asked her forgiveness ‘that I must go’. He had left her to go to a woman in Flanders, and taken her back to Scotland and kept her there ever since.

‘How many more of these half-wives has he in Scotland?’ Mary demanded indignantly of her own Maries. ‘He’s both right and left hand-fasted – a case, I suppose, of not letting his right hand know what his left hand doeth!’

She could joke about it, for it was not that that was hurting her, waking her sometimes in the night with a sudden little cry like an angrily startled bird. The reason for that pain she told to no one,
it was too deeply mixed with shame and self-reproach; she could not bear to remember (and was always doing so) that she had sent him those verses on François’ death. She had exposed their tender companionship, now sacred because sealed by death, to the man whose hard reckless eyes had scanned her up and down, stripping her, as she now felt, of all she had ever believed and wished herself to be.

More and more stories of him were being brought to her ears, stories of debauchery, of ‘terrible vices’, the more terrible to her since these were left vague and unexplained. She listened eagerly to them, from her Maries who saw that she had developed an unwonted taste for scandal where Lord Bothwell was concerned, and even from Queen Catherine, who told them with the impartial zest she always gave to any dirty story.

But most she listened to the contemptuous silence of Lord James.

The Lord James was thirteen years older than the Queen, his half-sister; and his father had been only eighteen years old at the time of his birth. All his life James had seemed older than his father, whom he in no way resembled. He had inherited his mother’s black hair and the dark pallor of her skin, also her solid gravity, which was utterly different from his father’s wild melancholy, shot through with a gaiety as wild. James was never melancholy nor gay; he was unchangeably, imposingly grave. He made a deep impression in France by this unalterable gravity and the dignified composure of his bearing. He was the Bastard of Scotland, and no man could look less like the result of light love.

But it had not been light love that his father had borne for Margaret Erskine, wife of Sir William Douglas of Lochleven. He had done his best to marry her, and had remained faithful to her after his fashion, through scores of other mistresses and a couple of wives.

James as a sallow, solemn youngster had seen his father bring home to Scotland a fragile little Princess, Madeleine, daughter to King François I, whom he adored as he never adored even Margaret
Erskine. For Madeleine, just sixteen, already doomed to death by consumption, King James V had loved with the hopeless agonizing tenderness of one who knows that the thing he loves cannot last. She lasted in Scotland only a few weeks, and when she died it was with difficulty that James could be persuaded to take another wife, by the necessity for an heir. Those words struck a sardonic mirth in the precocious mind, of the King’s eldest bastard, so nearly his heir.

Every available Princess had been suggested for the King of Scotland: among them Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary Tudor; and the Pope’s niece Catherine de Medici, then a child of fourteen. But the Pope considered the expense of posts to Scotland a barrier, thrift which won Mary Stewart’s shuddering gratitude whenever she considered the possibility that her former mother-in-law might have been her mother.

But the King turned again to France for his bride, to the tall young widow with the calm eyes and smiling mouth, eldest daughter of the house of Guise. Two fine sons she bore him, but they died of smallpox within a few weeks of each other. All the hopes of James the Bastard, now a prematurely wise youth of twelve, destined for the Church, that comfortable sanctuary for the inconvenient sons of royalty, raised themselves anew.

His father was only just past thirty, but his restless spirit was burning his frail body like a flame; he had always had to fight to keep his kingdom from the ruffianly nobles who hated him as they hated any check to their power; from his dread uncle, Harry of England; and from poverty, the most grinding, humiliating struggle of all. Ten thousand sheep in Ettrick forest were all the wealth he possessed with which to build up again the splendour that Scotland had begun to show in his father’s day, when James IV had made her a European Power; to turn the rude old fortresses of his kingdom into palaces as fair as those of France; to mine the vein of gold that had been found on Crawford Moor; to explore the uncharted Northern seas that roared beyond his kingdom, and bring those savage isles beneath his sway.

He never drank; his wine was his poetry, his mad adventures
in disguise, his snatched fleeting love-affairs. But now through his furious pursuit of life he was showing signs that death had already beckoned him. Old ‘wise women’ to whom the Bastard listened avidly (though he said, and even thought, that it was only for the purpose of collecting information against the Black Arts) told him that his father was ‘fey’; even as his grandfather James IV had been when he rode to Flodden Field.

And James V, that gay lover and ‘good poor man’s King’, whose dearest joy was to make his escape, or ‘outgate’, as he called it, for a few hours from his royal duties to taste life in disguise as pedlar or beggar – James V who had such sovereign remedies for the disease of sovereignty now abjured them all, and lived like a hermit among his courtiers, shut off from them in a cloud that dimmed his quick light eyes, those ‘twa merry winking e’n’, a ghost walking among living men.

The defeat of his armies at Solway Moss gave him his
coup de grâce
. The King who wrote ‘The Jolly Beggar’ died of grief. Yet he died on a little smile of laughter, as though when he saw those sad anxious faces crowding round his bedside he knew suddenly in that last moment what small reason there was for sadness or anxiety in this transient flash of sunlight and shadow that is called life.

Three days before his death, his only surviving legitimate child was born, his daughter Mary.

The Bastard, now thirteen, saw his hopes dashed to the ground yet again. A girl baby had made void those aching ambitions, inextricably woven into the day dreams of childhood – ‘if I were King’. But James was not King. He was made instead the Commendator of St Andrews.

In compensation, his manner, speech and behaviour became more judicially royal than ever his father’s or grandfather’s had been. The English Minister, Cecil, had his own reasons, and those of his royal mistress, for his opinion that James’ person and qualities would fit him admirably to be a king. Mary, whom he accompanied on her journey to France when she was a small child and he already a young man, looked on him with awe except when she laughed at him for being seasick.

She had seen him again only as one of the myriad faces that had crowded round her and François at their wedding three years ago; she thought she scarcely remembered him, but when she saw two tall figures walking towards her on the terrace at Joinville she knew instantly that the dark one beside the Cardinal de Lorraine was the Lord James.

He stood before her, a man just over thirty and looking older, with a sparse black beard narrowing his sallow face; he had kissed her hand as his Sovereign, then embraced her, and now stood looking at her with grave, deep-set eyes. She felt she had done him an injustice in being born to be Queen of Scotland.

‘We must do what we can for him,’ she said later to her uncle, who firmly agreed with her – from quite different motives. The Lord James had behaved abominably towards the Cardinal’s sister, the Regent of Scotland, but there was no sense in remembering that now. What was far more to the point was that he had a brain of the statesmanlike calibre of Cecil’s, which might be used against the Englishman instead of in alliance with him, especially if he could be induced to revert to the old religion. As a Prince of the Church ruling Scotland for his sister when she became Queen of Spain, his power would be as great as that of any monarch.

The Cardinal exercised all his charm in painting this happy prospect. Mary saw the two talking together, her brother so grave, deliberate, and downright, as though determined to be honest whatever it might cost him – or anyone else; her uncle with his light graceful gestures and magic eloquence, the more insidious in that it was so airy and casual. It was impossible that he should not win James over to whatever he wanted.

But even he could not persuade James to accept a Cardinal’s hat.

‘He speaks of loyalty to the new faith and old friends,’ the Cardinal told his niece in some exasperation, ‘but I fancy what is more to the point is that he has a mind to marry. One should not blame this too severely, since he has passed the age of thirty without a mistress – incredible, but he is determined to play for virtue. Lacking any positive impulse to it, he can only deny
himself those vices for which he feels no temptation.’

He advised his niece to be guided by her brother at present, return with him to Scotland and follow his direction there, especially in religious matters, since all that could be done as yet was for her to ‘serve the time’. The Earl of Huntly, ‘Cock o’ the North’, wanted her to throw in her lot with himself as the most powerful Catholic noble in her kingdom, to land on his shores and march with an armed force against Knox and the church-wreckers.

But Mary refused to enter her kingdom with an army to promote civil war. Nor did her uncle advise it (a more important factor than her sentimental objections); he thought Huntly an ‘old wind-bag’ – he had given the Queen Regent a deal of trouble – and the Catholic party in Scotland was too weak at present. The Lord James had a far longer head than Huntly’s, and his alliance with Knox had brought him into line with the burghers, a newly powerful middle class whose importance in Scotland the Cardinal dimly guessed.

He encouraged Mary to make friends with her brother, in the confidence that her charm would win him as it had won all the men with whom she had to deal in France, including the cautious English Ambassador, Throckmorton, obliged though he was to work against her in the interests of his own Queen – including also himself. He could not suspect that the half-brother, so inexperienced in women, would prove less susceptible than the practised and worldly uncle. For it was Mary who was charmed by James’ inaccessibility. It was her first experience of the dour Scot, and she saw him as a tragic figure, fitted to play the highest role in the State but doomed to a lesser by the accident of his birth; whose thwarted ambition had led him to act wrongly towards her mother, but who now nobly strove to make amends to herself. Her romantic imagination, while it coloured her opinion of her brother, had no effect on his opinion of her. All that she confided to him he passed on to Throckmorton, who reported it to Elizabeth.

Monsieur d’Oysel was sent to Elizabeth’s Court to ask for a passport of safe conduct through England in case Mary was forced by storm or sickness or the shipwreck of any of her fleet to land
on English shores. It was the mere formality of courtesy between two countries at peace with each other; the French Court could scarcely believe it when they heard that Elizabeth had flown into a blazing rage at d’Oysel’s request and flatly refused it. She gave no reason for this extraordinary scene until later; and then complained that Mary had not yet ratified the Treaty of Edinburgh. The Treaty required alterations which Mary must first discuss with her Scottish Council; it enjoined her to lay aside all claim to the English throne, not merely for herself, but for her heirs. Nobody therefore expected it to be signed as it stood. It was no excuse for this insult, which startled Mary’s enemy Catherine as much as her friends.