The Galliard (34 page)

‘And they’re doing what they can to make it live up to its name,’ he chuckled to Henry Percy when at last he rode to Tynemouth again, this time as his guest, early in the March of 1564, on his way south once more to try his luck with Elizabeth. ‘They’ve brought in new regulations that no Archer is to lie on the floor beside the French maids of honour – only sit – and then only if he is married! As I’ve been twice married by report, with both wives living, I should have special privileges.’

It was good to be again with Percy, telling him all that had happened to him since the Tower gates had swung on him a year ago; of the plague in London and the fireballs at Berwick and the horse-dealing at Alnwick, of the fun he had had with ‘that mad demi-lance Cumberland Borderer’, Jack Musgrave, and how Sir John Forster had the great town bell of Carlisle ringing within half an hour of getting word that the rude Johnstones were riding into Cumberland.

For the past two years he had been a prisoner or fugitive or exile; they had not betrayed him into the final corruption of self-pity; his vitality was still taut and ringing; but they had made him harder and more cynical, and this Sir Henry noticed particularly when he spoke of his young Queen. He did not blame her that the reward of a loyalty unusual among his fellows had been ruin and exile, but
he resented it, and it showed subtly in his tone about her.

He could not see what it was that drove men mad about her. That young fool Châtelard had lost his head over her all too literally; he had been caught hiding in her bedroom and dismissed with a severe warning, ‘but like all these French fops he thought himself irresistible, and a few nights later there he was again, and nearer the mark! I’ve asked when she’d ever have a man in her bed to teach her what the strange beast is like, but under the bed is the nearest she’s got to it, and a royal rage is all it taught her. She called to James to come and kill him, and snatched at his sword to do it herself, since he would not – wish I’d seen her!’ And his laugh, though admiring, was not pleasant.

‘Her brother was probably right,’ said Percy; ‘it would have caused great scandal for him to kill a man in her bedroom.’

‘It caused every bit as much to have him prancing on the scaffold sighing “Oh cruel fair!” and reminding the populace that he was a nephew of the Chevalier Bayard and like him “
sans peur
” though not “
sans reproche
”. I’ll swear he enjoyed that last hour as much as any in his life. Knox made good profit from it, of course; said his head was cut off so that it shouldn’t tell the secrets of his Queen. What do you think of it all?’ he asked, suddenly swinging round in the midst of his restless prowl up and down the room, and confronting the steadfast gaze of his host.

‘I think,’ said Sir Henry gravely, ‘that for a girl just twenty-one and of a rare charm, your Queen is very unhappy in having neither parents nor any disinterested friends and advisers. It will be a miracle if she escapes disaster.’

Bothwell somehow felt rather ashamed of himself, and anxious, to show that he agreed. He said, ‘Maybe that’s the reason she’s made this extraordinary appointment lately – taken that Italian fellow, a musician and a poet, not a gentleman, for her private secretary. Her last showed himself too familiar they say, and was discharged – the same old story, she smiled and so he pranced – and so now she feels it safer to take a low-born fellow like David Rizzio.’

‘Safer in one respect certainly,’ said Percy, ‘since he is a foreigner with no particular axe to grind in her country. But from what I
have seen of your nobles, I should say that that appointment was full of danger.’

He picked up his clarinet and began to play again, the notes falling clear and round and perfect as drops of water, and with them fell a strange quiet on the whirlpool of hopes and fears, angers and jealousies and suspicions in the young man’s restless mind. Could there ever be any harmony in the jangled confusion of his or anyone else’s affairs? Percy seemed to find it; was it in his music, his liking for old-fashioned poets, such as Chaucer, his refusal to be discouraged by the contorted actions of others? Most men wanted it; even Knox sought it, furiously, desperately, never seeing how one half of him destroyed what the other half intended.

And suddenly, as so often in these last three months, he was stabbed with a vision of Johnnie’s brief glancing happiness, leaping across the crowded scene of his life in one gay shout of song, and now of Jan left crying over the cradle of her ‘goblin baby’, in a black knitted frock and squirrel cape, when only a day or two ago it seemed she had come riding towards him in his old clothes, the autumn sunlight on her face, a creature so wild and childishly ignorant that she did not even know she was in love with her young lover.

Next day he rode south once more on his quest for an interview with Queen Elizabeth, his cause fortified not only by the letters of his Queen and her Ministers, but by those of his recent hosts. Sir John Forster, though proudly stating that ‘we that inhabit Northumberland are not acquainted with any learned or rare phrases’, had added his praise of his guest to Percy’s assurance that Bothwell’s behaviour ‘has been both courteous and honourable’, and, he emphasized, ‘
keeping his promise
’. He had heard from Jack Musgrave, not Bothwell, how that young man had ‘Kept trust’.

His journey south a year ago had ended in the Tower. This journey ended in nothing. For six months he kicked his heels in or near London, getting tantalizing glimpses of Elizabeth hunting, riding through the city, dancing, flirting, a stiff figure blazing with jewels, set about with wired ruffs and stuffed out skirts like the
spread tail of a peacock. Sometimes he was near enough to catch the high vibrant tones of her voice, but he never got the interview he asked for until nearly the middle of September.

Then, at a little place some miles north of London called Harrow-on-the-Hill, he waited to see her, in company with a farmer who wished to obtain the royal leave to build a school on his land there. He had been applying for this leave for years, but the Queen had a passion for keeping people in suspense – and well Bothwell knew it too after these eighteen months!

At last he knelt before her and kissed her hand, a hand as beautiful as that of his own Queen, but older, thinner, harder, longer, so long that it looked dangerous; those white fingers flashing with rings in the sunlight would be claw-like in age, nor would they ever let go of anything or anyone that had fallen into their power. The sinister impression left him at the sound of her hearty voice, one that would carry across the hunting-field as well as any man’s, and now ringing with amusement.

‘Is this the naughty fellow that my sister of Scotland was so anxious to have returned to her for punishment? He doesn’t look as though he would be much afraid. Yet she has shown how severe she can be to a rash young man.’

Châtelard’s unlucky attempt on Mary’s virtue was plainly of great interest to her, for she referred to it again while commissioning Bothwell to take letters to her Ambassador in France. But he did not by any means get the popular impression of a frivolous young woman ‘entirely given over to love, hunting, hawking and dancing, consuming day and night with trifles’.

The tiny Tudor mouth had tightened. Those quick bright eyes were as wary as when he had had his first glimpse of her years ago as a powerless girl beset with enemies and dangers; they were also of a remarkable steadiness. For all their alert apprehension it would be very difficult to frighten her or to put her off her course; it would be still more difficult to discover what that course really was. He thought that the astute Lethington had for once shown a rather foolish optimism when he had laughed at her timid and vacillating nature, and declared that he would soon ‘make her sit
upon her tail and whine like a whipped hound’.

For once he found himself considering these points before those of her person, which he then admitted, but dispassionately, to be handsome.

So now he was free, and not as a fugitive, for the first time for two and a half years. He went to France; was made Captain of the Scottish Archers; six months later, in the March of 1565, he suddenly appeared in Scotland, to the astonished consternation of his friends and foes alike. What could have possessed him to throw away his hard-won security and his new honours to make this reckless dash home into the midst of a host of enemies agog to clap him into prison?

The Cardinal de Lorraine had summoned him in February to ask his opinion on some disturbing rumours he had had concerning his niece. Young Lord Henry Darnley, of Catholic upbringing, had just been permitted by Elizabeth to cross the Border into Scotland. His busily intriguing mother, Countess Meg, was the daughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, by her second marriage with Lord Angus, and was therefore Elizabeth’s first cousin. She had been imprisoned in the Tower of London, but a year ago Elizabeth had released her, summoned the whole family to the English Court and made a great deal of them, especially the boy Darnley, who was officially recognised everywhere as first Prince of the blood. It was said that she had secretly acknowledged him as her heir. His father, the Earl of Lennox, had been exiled from his Scottish estates for his treachery to Mary’s mother, and was now restored to them by Elizabeth’s special request to Mary, which she had immediately after revoked in her usual way; but Mary had coolly obeyed the first request and not the second or third.

‘And now here’s that great chick been sent crowing cock-a-hoop after the old rooster!’ The Cardinal had no opinion of young Darnley, a spoilt mother’s darling, reared on an exaggerated sense of his importance as heir, though remotely, to the English and Scots Crowns. He was tall, fair and good-looking in ‘a vacant English way’, the Cardinal said unkindly, a jolly youth, mad on
pleasure, good at games, a keen horseman and the women all liked him. Elizabeth had done so, or had seemed to, though that might be part of her game – ‘and God knows what that really is’. What disturbed him was that Mary had seemed to take to him when she welcomed him at Wemyss Castle on the Firth of Forth.

The Cardinal was furious with his niece. Was the loveliest Princess of her day, and not merely Princess, for ‘I have never seen her equal, either among high or low,’ declared the connoisseur, to throw herself away on this insignificant lad? She had won the admiration, no, the adoration of her subjects; her beauty, birth and position had led the greatest Princes in Europe to woo her. ‘Spain, France, Sweden, they are all on the cards. She might marry anyone.’

‘But she hasn’t – that’s the trouble,’ Bothwell answered bluntly. ‘For four years she’s had unseen lovers dangled before her, while all she’s had to content her eyes have been dour Protestants, or ruffians like Ruthven – or myself! She’s sick for someone of her own kind and upbringing – the Châtelard business showed that. There’s no such easy prey as a virgin.’

The Cardinal could hardly boggle at such plain speaking, having invited it. He was beside himself with personal anxiety, for Mary’s marriageable asset was the trump card in his suit; he was also fearful that she was in a mood to be rash enough to marry Darnley, which would provoke Elizabeth. However much the two Queens might play at friendship, it was bound to come to a life-and-death struggle between them.

To Bothwell ‘there came a sudden painful vision of Mary speaking to him with triumphant pleasure in that friendship; behind the memory of her eager face there now hovered the image of the thin hand that he had kissed at Harrow-on-the-Hill.

He sprang to his feet. ‘I’ll go back now, Your Highness, and find out what’s afoot.’

The Cardinal was foolish enough for one moment to show his amazement, although this was exactly what he had been hoping to contrive. ‘Is it safe enough?’ he asked.

‘I’ll soon see!’

And he left Paris next day.

No sooner was the news out of his landing in Scotland than the Lord James ran to the Queen in a rage that showed his terror.

‘Is it by your will or your advice that my enemy’s back? He has sworn to be the death of me and of Lethington on his return. Scotland will not hold us both. Either he or I must leave it.’

Those delicate arched brows of his half-sister, so maddeningly like their father’s, nearly reached her ash-gold hair. ‘In that case, dear James,’ – but no, she must not say it, whatever happened she must not drive him into open enmity just now. Tonight there was to be a banquet and ball in honour of their distinguished guest, Lord Darnley; things must go on smoothly for a few days, a few weeks – was it so much to ask, even in Scotland?

‘Lord Bothwell has always done me good service. I cannot hate him as you do.’

‘He has never answered for his crimes.’

‘How could he, since he was never given the trial he demanded?’

‘Give it him now, then, and put him to the horn.’

Mary took up the plan of the tables at the banquet that evening, and asked his advice on a question of precedence.

He stormed at her; his bullying had of late grown much more open. ‘You do not mind threats against my life, that’s plain enough. But you shall hear what else he’s said in France, against yourself. There is solid proof of it from Dandie Pringle.’

To his disgusted bewilderment she began to giggle. ‘Oh your Scottish names!’ she gasped through her irrepressible laughter. ‘Are they always those of little dogs?’

She scored as usual, but as usual James won.

A few weeks later Bothwell suddenly arrived at his mother’s house at Morham.

‘The hunt is up,’ he told that impassive lady. ‘I’ll be put to the horn in a few days now.’

Along with ‘thieves, foreigners and wolves’ he was to be, with three blasts of the horn, proclaimed outlaw and at the mercy of any citizen who could kill or capture him, if he did not give himself
up on the 2
^nd
of May to justice in the Edinburgh Tolbooth, from whichever of his houses he was now occupying – Crichton, Hailes, Morham, Haddington, Duns, Lauder, Selkirk, Hawick, Hermitage or Jedburgh.