The Galliard (75 page)

Captain Blackadder had to pay with his life, and his brother’s, for leaving his wine to gape at a deserted street. Geordie Dalgliesh, Bothwell’s tailor, gave the important information that his master was wearing a workaday coat of ‘the new sad colour’ so as not to spoil his gala Sunday clothes when he went to murder Darnley; this proving inadequate, he tried to stave off further torture by the opportune discovery of a silver casket that held some of Bothwell’s papers. Black Mr John Spens got off with his life because he was able to tell his inquisitors where to get hold of two of Bothwell’s coffers which contained ‘not the least part of his wealth’. The page Paris was kept for months in a dungeon and then tortured, but could not learn to give all the answers satisfactorily, and was hastily hanged without any trial. The Primate Hamilton was executed solely on the evidence of a lighted window on the night of the murder: Black Ormiston, Hay of Talla, Powrie, Wilson and Captain Cullen went to the scaffold, among sixty-two of Bothwell’s followers alone.

But the ghost of the fiddler’s murderer was not to be appeased by these blood sacrifices. For years to come, the rulers of Scotland walked in terror, each never knowing when his turn would come to be accused by his colleagues of being ‘art and part’ of the killing of the King, and hurried to a hideous death. ‘From discord comes all desolation,’ Mary had said; and now they proved it.

The wolves devoured each other. ‘Friend’ betrayed ‘friend’.

The Lord James denounced Lethington when he had no more use for him, and imprisoned him in the Castle of Edinburgh under charge of Kirkaldy of Grange; but Grange, sickened by then of James’ and Morton’s rule, turned against them, held the Castle with Lethington for the Queen, and struck the last blow in Scotland for the cause that they had formerly betrayed. They had to surrender when Morton poisoned their wells. Lethington took poison rather than face execution. Morton hanged Grange to ‘pacify the clamour of the preachers’, chiefly John Knox, who had been Grange’s greatest friend, but now, while himself dying from the effects of apoplexy,
prophesied that Grange, ‘whom I have loved so dearly’, should be ‘hanged in the face of the sun’.

Years later a brother-in-law of Knox accused Morton of the King’s murder. Morton was then Regent, and had long held the supreme power, but he too was executed and his red head stuck up on a spike of the Edinburgh Tolbooth.

Darnley’s father, Lennox, had been his predecessor in the Regency and, after a few months, had been stabbed in the back.

The Lord James had met his fate much earlier. His reign had lasted barely two and a half years when he was assassinated by a Scots Borderer ‘to avenge the shame he had brought on the country’. The shame was his betrayal of the two English Borderers, Thomas Earl of Northumberland and his brother, Sir Henry Percy, who had risen against their own Queen in order to liberate Mary. They escaped across the Border when the rising was put down by Elizabeth with the slaughter in cold blood of eight hundred peasantry; and found refuge among their hereditary foes of the Scottish Border. James outraged their hospitality by handing the English lords over to Elizabeth for execution, and thus put himself beyond the pale of even the lawless ruffians he was accustomed to hang so plentifully. It almost seemed as though the few relics of chivalry they still preserved were a sounder policy than his expediency, when he himself was shot in the street at Linlithgow – ‘And we,’ cried Knox, ‘are left in extreme misery.’

Knox had helped more than any man to put James’ party in power, but was powerless to direct it when there. The ministers were poorer under a Protestant Regent than they had been under a Catholic Queen. The nobles plundered the Church livings and threatened to desert it if they did not get their way. Years of civil war, and its resulting famine and then plague, made a desert for many miles round Edinburgh. The substantial citizens that had formed Knox’s congregation had to evacuate the city, their houses were wrecked, their trades ruined. It was, as the English Envoy, Lord Hunsdon, observed, ‘a pleasant and profitable time for murderers, thieves, and such as live only by the spoils of true men’.

‘Extreme misery’ – ‘this desolation’ – was Knox’s description
of his victory. The last years of his life were soured not only by the public ruin and attempts on his life (an assassin’s bullet was fired through his study window), but by the personal attacks of his former friends; many of them turned against him, accused him of cowardice, threatening him with public ignominy at the Kirk Assembly, ‘providing he be not fugitive according to his accustomed manner’; of treachery in calling in the English troops ‘against his own native country and the liberty thereof’; of blasphemy in speaking of himself as God, and assuming powers of damnation greater than any claimed by a mediaeval Pope.

His cry of misery was such as all her twenty years of imprisonment, and final condemnation to a horrible death, were never able to wring from his victim, Mary. Indignation at her wrongs she showed, and violently; but she never descended to her victor’s level of self-pity.

Both she and Bothwell fought as long as they had life and senses. Years of imprisonment could not tame their spirit. They met death unconquered.

The same fate fell on them both that summer. Freedom ended for them both then, and all that was of their life, living – except the hope of it again.

Each had one more flight into free adventure to make, but apart from each other. Together, each flight might well have won success.

Bothwell’s lasted till the end of that summer. During that time he made desperate efforts to rescue the Queen, but he had not calculated for such instant and extreme treachery as the lords showed. By hurrying her the next night to an island fortress in the middle of a lake, they secured her from even his daring ingenuity. The other bad surprise for him was the helplessness of Gordon, who had suffered some sort of cerebral stroke, of the same nature as that which had killed his father. He recovered, but he was never again the same man, though it took his friend long to recognise it.

Bothwell had left Dunbar secretly in a fishing-boat and sailed up the Firth of Forth under cover of darkness; within a week of Carberry he rallied more than fifty names of note with their
retainers to his side, for now at last they saw the issue clearly. They were not being asked to fight, as they had thought, ‘to make James Hepburn King’, but to save the Queen. But what they could have done easily before was now too late to do. Her jailers let them know that if any attempt were made at her rescue, then she would most certainly die. This threat of her assassination in prison tied the hands of Bothwell and the loyalists; his enemies’ next moves separated them from him. Alarmed at the success he had already made in his campaign, the revolutionary Government now concentrated the whole force of the law and the Kirk against him.

He was outlawed; along with ‘thieves, foreigners and wolves’, for the crime of killing the King and ‘making the Queen promise to marry him, for fear of her life’. This was a remarkable charge, as it flatly contradicted the evidence of collusive abduction in the Casket Letters, which had been ‘discovered’ ten days previously by the tortured tailor. They were, however, not yet ready for publication – nor ever were, except in ‘translations’.

A reward of a thousand crowns was offered for Bothwell’s capture, and penalties of death and torture to all who helped him in any way; the continual spectacle of his followers’ mangled limbs issuing in baskets’ from the Tolbooth pointed the warning example. The Lowland lords, even when they remained loyal to Mary, feared to be associated with a man so interdicted; with their retainers, that fear was now being fanned to superstitious terror by threats of God’s judgement on the country hissed out from Knox’s pulpit.

Bothwell went north to Gordon and succeeded at first in stirring him to interest in his plan to raise a force of Highlanders to make a secret march to the Queen’s rescue. But it was no use; Gordon was too ill a man, and soon sank back into the lethargy of his fatalism.

His sister the Lady Jean was now a bosom friend of Lady Agnes, the Lord James’ ‘long love’. Their tenacity must have been a link in common; both loved and lived long; Jean secured her first love, Sandy Ogilvie of Boyne, many years later as a third husband, and outlived him as well as everybody else in this story. Even as Agnes refused to part with the Queen’s jewels she had embezzled, so Jean contrived to keep the castle and lands of Crichton, and its charter-chest,
through two successive marriages; kept also, in secret, the Dispensation that would iliegitimatize any child of Mary’s by Bothwell, not only for the eighty-four years of her life, but for three centuries after her death. Her care was wasted. There was no child.

At the end of July, Mary’s doctor recorded her miscarriage at Loch Leven of twins not quite three months gone. Those children that should have been so magnificent, the result of his vigour and her fineness, were destroyed by her terrible experiences before they came to birth. Her only child was that weak-legged abnormal-looking boy by the degenerate Darnley, a changeling who, by some queer anomaly of fate, lived to inherit not only the Crown of his mother’s enemy, Elizabeth, but also far more of her qualities, her caution, patience, and love of the crooked and devious ways of diplomacy, than any of his mother’s.

Bothwell still had no doubt that he would win Mary to him again; no doubt but that they would have other children together, would together rule their country – or another.

He now thought seriously of that wild fancy of hers on their last ride to Dunbar, that they should ‘make another kingdom’, an empire of the waves. If he set out to raise something of a fleet, he could scour the seas and get help for the Queen from Sweden or Denmark, until he was strong enough to come down upon Scotland, effect her rescue, and reconquer the country from the coast inwards, as his Viking ancestors had done centuries ago. His hereditary office of Lord High Admiral of Scotland gave him standing among sailors and even pirates; his new titles, but also hereditary in the past, of Duke of Orkney and the Shetland Isles, would have more weight with those remote islanders than his outlawry by the rebel lords; he should have a good chance to recruit his sailors from among their seafaring folk and make use of their harbours. He was in close touch too with the fishermen along the East Coast and
persona grata
with that queer secret brotherhood of theirs, the Free Fishers, invaluable for taking messages along the seaways of Europe.

He stayed with his great-uncle Patrick, the shocking old Bishop
of Spynie, while perfecting these plans. This disgraceful old man was now over eighty and looked like a eupeptic white walrus with his enormous snowy moustache and rosy cheeks; his little blue eyes, though sunk in fat, twinkled with unregenerate vitality. He had always felt a proud affection for his young rascal of a great-nephew, which his latest exploits in royal murder and rape had rather increased; when Bothwell had been ruined and imprisoned five years before, he had done his best to help him, and was eager to do so now, quite undeterred by the Government’s command in consequence to his tenants, forbidding them to pay their rents.

But his sins had had awkward consequences for his great-nephew, in the shape of rather more than a dozen bastards, most of them jealous of their encroaching cousin. With surprising lack of invention the Bishop had not found enough names to go round, or else he forgot the ones he had baptized before, and so Bothwell was confronted with three angry Patricks, two brace of Johns and Agneses, three Janets, three Adams, and a George. George and two of the Patricks took active measures and plotted together with the Captain of the garrison and an English spy to murder Bothwell. Lethington gave hearty encouragement to the scheme, and even the correct Sir Nicholas Throckmorton showed a cautious interest in it, but disapproved of the plotters’ gratuitous suggestion that while they were about it they might as well murder ‘the ould busshope’ too. But the only man killed was George, for Bothwell and his followers put up a fierce fight, drove his attackers out of the Castle, and replaced the garrison with his own men. This hurt his greatuncle’s feelings, since he did not know of the intention against his own life harboured by his unnatural son.

Bothwell felt that he might have outstayed his welcome. Fortunately he was now ready to leave, having collected five small ships and three hundred men to man them – good enough for a beginning. One of the ships he sent down the coast to collect munitions and stores from Dunbar, and take letters to his friends in the South; but the captain, Jock Hepburn, who had pulled him back from the explosion at Kirk o’ Field, was caught and executed. Only one regret could he be made to utter. ‘I had ships provided,’
he said on the scaffold, where so many fellow-victims had sobbed and moaned their remorse, ‘but I could not escape.’

The news gave a savage zest to Bothwell’s piracy of a Scots vessel carrying provisions of food for the Lord James; he ‘masterfully and violently’ seized it and its gear. Two more he chartered in proper legal fashion from their owners, a couple of Hanseatic merchants; one, the
Pelican
, from Bremen, he saw lading fish at Sumburgh Head and liked, a tall two-masted ship, well furnished with anti-pirate guns. He now had seven ships and got them over safely to the Orkneys, though the Government had detailed some of their fleet to intercept him, and tried to forestall him by warning the islanders against him. In spite of that, they gave him a warm welcome, and ‘began to lean on him’. His plan, only three weeks old, and interrupted by the domestic troubles at Spynie, was already maturing into a success that was badly alarming his enemies. But they held one trump card; Sir James Balfour’s brother, Gilbert, the sinister owner of the two Provosts’ houses at Kirk o’ Field, was sheriff of the Islands and held Kirkwall Castle. He temporized until he could get into touch with the Government and make his terms with them, then fired the Castle guns on the ships lying in the harbour. It looked as though wherever he went in Scotland, Bothwell would find a Balfour brother in the key position of a castle and guns.