The Galliard (74 page)

Instead, his army began to advance, and at the same time a large body of their horse, about two hundred, under Kirkaldy of Grange, left the main body and proceeded on a flanking movement which would hem in the loyal army between cross-fires in the ravine. At once she sent a messenger to Grange to demand a parley, and he arrived before her just as Bothwell galloped up, in a black fury.

He had been appealing to his men, urging them to fight, and found he could do nothing with them. The preparations for the duel had been nothing but a feint on the enemy’s part to make their dispositions of troops under cover of it, and cause further disheartening delay. The rot that had begun earlier in the day had now set in irretrievably. He was as mad with rage as a baited bull, and at sight of Grange, who had treacherously begun this flanking movement during the truce appointed for the duel, was blind with desire for his blood. He went straight for him, drawing his sword. Grange’s men quickly intervened, while the Queen flung herself on Bothwell’s sword-arm.

‘He has come here under safeguard,’ she cried.

‘Under the safeguard of his own treachery!’ and to Grange he shouted, ‘Fight the duel your leaders have shirked. It was put up as a blind. You shall have it in earnest.’

Grange flatly refused to fight. He had come under safe-conduct to discuss terms with the Queen. He knelt to her, protested his real loyalty, and that all the nobles on his side would certainly surrender and kneel before her if she would separate from the Duke. He bore their offer to agree that the Duke should ride off the field without pursuit, and his army be allowed to depart unharmed.

He was obviously sincere; in the eyes of this rough grizzled
soldier was the look that Mary had seen again and again, of a man surprised and captured by her unawares.

While he spoke with her, d’Oysel pleaded with Bothwell that he should give up this now hopeless contest for her sake – ‘the hardest thing to a galliard like yourself, my friend, that you can do. But none who knows you can doubt your courage. And nothing else can now be done to preserve her safety.’

Bothwell stared with bloodshot eyes while the sun beat fiercely off his armour. Sweating, dog-tired, he had reached the end of the meanest battle ever
not
fought in history, and knew that his enemies would accuse him of sheltering behind his wife. ‘Let them call me a coward! Those here know the contrary. But it is for her –
her
– to go alone with them! What may they not do to her before I can get hold of her again?’

‘We are in a civilized country. She is their Queen. They have sworn to serve and respect her. They have given their oath that their only quarrel is against you.’

The Queen left Grange and joined her entreaties to d’Oysel’s arguments. This was the only thing that could be done, and she was glad of it, for she could never bear it if a battle were fought that might have been spared. She would win the rebel lords round to her again as she had twice done before. She said nothing of her chief motive, her terror for himself.

There was a sudden movement near them. A boy had scrambled up out of some whin bushes, torn and breathless. He told Bothwell that he had run nearly all the way from Edinburgh with a message from the Castle.

‘From
whom
in the Castle?’ rapped out the eager demand.

‘From the Earl of Huntly.’

From Gordon at last!

The message was brief. It said only that Gavin and Archbishop Hamilton (both loyalists) were with Gordon in the Castle, and the three would now have the command of it.

That settled it. Gordon would be able to keep a check on the rebels’ action towards the Queen, and he himself would soon be in touch with him. So he agreed at last to the Queen’s acceptance of
the terms, and insisted that Grange should give her a formal safe-conduct as well as his sworn oath.

Then he took his leave of her in the sight of the two armies, thousands of men, every one of whose lives were spared by this decision, but whose blood would be shed in useless slaughter if the courage of the two lovers failed at the supreme test.

It nearly failed. They clung together with many long kisses and did not know how to part, and wild fancies flashed through both their desperate hearts of hurling themselves on their enemies and cutting a way through, either to life or death, it did not matter which, as long as it was together. But he drove them away, forced both her and himself to be cool and sensible, told her, ‘It won’t be for long,’ and she nodded, unable to speak, but knowing out of an even deeper faith that their parting would not be for long.

The clank of arms and harness all round them, the thousands of staring eyes, the brassy glare of those outrageous guns, invented that men should kill each other the more inhumanly because more blindly and impersonally than any previous weapon – all the heat and noise and aching sunlight of this dreadful day-dream would pass away; and the night come.

‘We shall have moonlight again,’ she whispered on a little broken smile.

She looked so lovely even now with the tears running down her white drawn face, and in that funny childish, almost peasant dress; there was a kind of fragile splendour about her that filled his heart with anguished dread. How could he hope to keep so exquisite a creature?

‘You will be true to me?’ he asked. ‘Swear that you will be true.’

She put her hands between his. ‘I will go with you to the world’s end.’ Yes, whatever that end might be, together or apart. ‘I am with you, I am part of you, always.’

D’Oysel came to tell them that they must not delay. The sun was going down. Grange had warned him that he could not answer for his men if the Duke’s army stayed longer. The Frenchman was weeping unashamedly. ‘It is true, my friend,’ he said to Bothwell.
‘All men envy you, and always will.’

He drew back while Bothwell kissed Mary once more. ‘It won’t be for long,’ he said again; then put her resolutely from him and walked slowly towards his charger, not once turning his head.

She stood looking after him as he leaped into the saddle and rode east towards Dunbar, followed by about a dozen friends, their shadows stretching before them on the moor that glowed in the sunset.

They rode up the side of a hill where a single pine stood on the crest, its trunk as red as flame beneath its night-black branches. His shadow touched that flaming tree, his black charger reached the crest, then he drew rein for an instant, turned and looked back; then was gone.

Postlude

‘
N
O
M
ORE
A-R
OVING
’

He never saw her again.

That is why this story ends there – where their life together ended.

With a treachery which, at that date, had no parallel in history, the confederate lords broke every one of their terms of safe-conduct to the Queen the instant they had her in their power.

They took her, not to Holyrood as they had sworn, to reinstate her in her palace, but to a very old fortified house in the High Street known as the Black Turnpike. They led her there as a prisoner, the banner of Darnley’s murdered body held up before her all the way; the route was lengthened so as to lead her past the ruined house of Kirk o’ Field, and the soldiers were encouraged to break their ranks to throng round her horse, shouting ‘Burn the whore! Burn her! Burn her!’

Kirkaldy of Grange alone tried to restrain them, and rode among them at the risk of his life, laying about him with his sword; but in vain. They were not to be baulked of their sport; nor was the mob of Edinburgh, whose blood-lust had been worked up all that day by the preachers. Prentices, fishwives, loafers and scourings of every nation from the Leith docks had been waiting till ten o’clock that night to see the beautiful ‘adulteress and murderess’ publicly abased before them. They thronged so thick round her horse that the soldiers had to ride very slowly and in single file; they danced and yelled with laughter to see the Queen’s face ‘all disfigured with
dust and tears’; it seemed at any minute they would tear her from her horse, and to pieces. When at last she was taken into the house they lit bonfires under her window and shrieked that she should be burnt alive.

Her spirit had been unbroken by the treachery of her captors. She had caught Lord Lindsay’s hand and swore by it, ‘I will have your head for this!’

But that spirit broke before the hideous madness of the mob. She had been without food or shelter from five in the morning; nor did she get any that night; she was put in a room thirteen feet square, without any water to wash her hands or convenience of any kind; her women were kept from her, and the men-at-arms stayed inside the room all night. All night she saw the light of the flames outside leaping on the walls, and heard those horrible cries demanding that she should be thrown to them. Delirium fell on her, and of a curious kind, for she believed that even those wild beasts outside were more human than her captors; she cried to them from her window, as once she had tried to do in captivity at Holyrood, either to kill her outright or to save her. That instinctive trust of hers in the common people was justified; they turned suddenly to pity and indignation, and forced Lethington to go up and visit her when he was trying to pass by her window unobserved, his hat jammed over his eyes.

The lords, ‘fearing the anger of the people’, moved her secretly from Edinburgh, in the darkness of the following night, to the island fortress in the middle of Loch Leven under the nominal chaperonage of Lord James’ mother, the Lady Douglas. Lord Seton got wind of it, and pursued the troops with a body of cavalry, but could not overtake them. At Loch Leven she fell into a practically unconscious state which lasted a fortnight. When she recovered her senses, though still desperately ill, the lords forced their demands on her, but, so Cecil’s agent wrote to him, ‘though her body be restrained, yet her heart is not dismayed’. She could not be moved by any threats to be divorced ‘from a husband with whom she thought to live and die with all the contentment in the world’. If her enemies would let her, she would ‘leave her kingdom and
dignity and live as a simple demoiselle with him’. But she would ‘never consent that he shall fare worse than herself’. And she wrote him a letter, which they seized, calling him ‘her dear heart whom she would never forget, nor abandon for absence’.

‘Who are your friends?’ Bothwell had once asked insolently. She thought now she knew. The Pope said plainly that he would have nothing to do with one who had worked for religious toleration; in France, the two captains, d’Oysel and his old comrade in arms, the gallant Martigues, appealed for three thousand arquebusiers, with which they were certain they could restore her to freedom and power. Catherine de Medici would not allow her son’s consent to the plan.

Only Elizabeth showed herself Mary’s friend; she refused publicly to believe in the convenient discovery of the incriminating letters of Mary’s, of which there was a great deal of talk, but not even copies could yet be shown – ‘Rank as stale fish!’ was her comment to the Spanish Ambassador. She sent her Envoy, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, to Scotland to tell the nobles that whatever Mary’s faults, their behaviour was ‘strange, unjust and scandalous’.

He found great difficulty in seeing any of the lords. He was never allowed to see the prisoner. He had even to smuggle a letter to her in the scabbard of his messenger’s sword, and urged her in it ‘for her own sake’ to give up her husband. She sent back word that ‘she would rather die’. He believed that his presence in the country did indeed save her from being put to death, though it endangered his own life, since the preachers incited the mob to take their own course against him.

For by now that master-demagogue, John Knox, had felt it safe to return, and was once again firmly in the pulpit. He threatened excommunication to all enemies of the Good Lord James; he preached that death itself, even by fire, was too lenient a punishment for the Queen, ‘her iniquity deserves more than ten deaths’; he prophesied ‘the Great Plague to this whole nation if she is spared’; he prayed God to ‘put it into the hearts of the multitude to take the same vengeance upon her that has been taken of Jezebel’.

The multitude took the hint. The Palace of Holyrood was 
looted, the chapel defiled; its priceless ancient missals made another bonfire.

Lindsay used physical force to make the Queen sign an abdication of her throne to her infant son, but he could not intimidate her by his threats to throw her to the fishes in the loch; nursing her bruised arm, she told him calmly that she did not regard this forced abdication as valid. So did her Keeper of the Seals (Bothwell’s kinsman, Thomas Sinclair), who was held down while Lindsay seized his arm to impress the royal seal on the document.

By the end of June Mr Buchanan was given the highest ecclesiastical office in the Scots Kirk, and was later appointed tutor to the little King so as to instruct him in the depravity of his mother and turn him against her. He succeeded.

Posterity has also proved the success of his boast; his scandals have formed the base of ninety per cent of English and French opinions of Mary Stewart and of Bothwell.

By early August the Lord James returned to Scotland and told his half-sister (by his own account) that she could ‘hope for nothing but God’s mercy’. Later he relented so far as to think he might save her life; would try to preserve her honour; but for her freedom, she must not hope for it, ‘nor was it good for her to have it’. He assumed the Regency, professing great dislike of the responsibility, took charge of his sister’s jewels (of which his wife quickly took a still firmer hold) except her famous pearls, which he sold to Elizabeth at reduced prices.

The ‘reign of blood and indecency’ was over. Not one man had been killed to maintain it.

The reign of the Good Lord James had begun, in an orgy of long-drawn-out executions of the victims who had been filling the torture-chambers since midsummer. They were mostly bonnet lairds, sailors and poor men, servants, tailors. Their confessions regarding the King’s murder were extorted by red-hot pincers and hooks, flaying-knives, the rack and the iron boot that crushed the legs to pulp. Even so, the evidence thus produced often proved inconvenient, sometimes even incriminating Lord James; so that it had to be hastily suppressed and the victims hurried to instant
trial, sentence and execution, all in the same day. Their broken limbs were packed into wicker baskets and stuck up on the gates of all the chief towns.