Chapter II: Griefs and Consolations of Adonis

In these dark February days the King was prone to regard his troubles as the consequence, and not the verification, of certain words spoken by Archie Douglas on the braeside by Falkirk—that being a trick of the unreasonable, to date their misfortunes from the time when they first find them out. And yet it was an odd thing that Archie should have spoken in his private ear shortly after Michaelmas, and that here was Candlemas come and gone, with everything turning to prove Archie right. Now, which of the three was the grey-polled youth—prophet, philosopher, or bird of boding?

Consider his Majesty’s affairs in order. The Queen, before marriage and at the time of it, had been as meek as a girl newly parted from her mother, newly launched from that familiar shore to be seethed in the deep, secret waters of matrimony. Something of that exquisite docility he had discerned when he experienced, for instance, the prerogatives of a man. One name before another is a very small matter; but it had given him a magnanimous thrill to read HENRICUS ET MARIA upon the white money, and to feel the confidence that HENRICUS ET MARIA, in very fact, it was now and was to be. Little things of the sort swelled his comfort up: the style royal, the chief seat, the gravity of the Council (attendant upon his), the awe of the mob, the Italian’s punctilio, his father’s unfeigned reverence. Even Mr. Randolph’s remarked abstention was flattering, for it must have cost the ambassador more to ignore the King than the King could ever have to pay for the slight. Now, a man needs time to get the flavours of such toothsome tribute; he must roll it on his tongue, dally over it with his intimates. Little Forrest, the chamber-child, could have told a thing or two: how the King used to wear his gold circlet in private, and walk the room in his crimson mantle. Antony Standen knew something. Yes, yes, a man needs time; and such time was denied him—and (by Heaven!) denied him by the Queen herself.

By the Queen! From the hour when she heard the news from Argyll, that the rebels, her brother at their head, had called out the clans of the west—Campbells, Leslies, Hamiltons—against her authority, she was a creature whom her King had never conceived of. He was told by Archie Douglas then, and partly believed, that she was slighting him; but the plain truth is, of course, that all her keen love for him was running now in a narrow channel—that of strenuous loyalty to the young man she had chosen to set beside her. These hounds to deny his kingly right! Let them learn then what a King he was, for what a King she held him! She strained every nerve, put edge to every wit in his vindication. While he lay abed, stretching, dreaming—sometimes of her, more often of her love for him, most often of what he should do when he was fairly roused: ‘Let them not try me too far, little Forrest! I say, they had best not!’ etc.—at these times she was in her cabinet with the Italian, writing to her brother of France, her father of Rome, her uncles and cousins of Lorraine, promising, wheedling, threatening, imploring. Or she was in audience, say, with George Gordon, winning back his devotion with smiles and tender looks, with a hand to the chin, or two clasping her knee—with all the girlish wiles she knew so well and so divinely used. For his sake—that slug-abed—she dared see Bothwell again; and greater pride hath no woman than this, to brave the old love for the sake of the new. Finally, when cajolery and bravado had done their best for her, she sprang starry-eyed into battle, headed her ragged musters in a short petticoat, and dragged him after her in gilded armour. That is what a man—by the mass, a King!—may fairly call being docked of his time to get the flavours.

He went out unwillingly to war, with sulky English eyes for all the petty detriments. He sniffed at her array, her redshanks armed with bills, her Jeddart bowmen, haggard hillmen from Badenoch and Gowrie. Where were the broad pavilions, the camp-furniture, the pennons and pensels, the siege-train, the led horses, the Prince’s cloth of estate? Was he to huddle with reivers under a pent of green boughs, and with packed cowdung keep the wind from his anointed person? King of kings, Ruler of princes! was _she_ to do the like? How she laughed, tossed back her hair, to hear him!

‘Hey, dear heart, you are in wild Scotland, where all fare alike. O King of Scots, forget your smug England, and teach me, the Queen, to laugh at stately France! Battle, my prince, battle! The great game!’

She galloped down the line, looking back for him to follow. Line! it was no line, but a jostling horde of market-drovers clumped upon a knowe. There were no formation, no livery, no standard—unless that scarecrow scarf were one. Why should he follow her to review a pack of thieves?

Hark, hark, how the rascals cheered her! They ran all about her, tossing up their bonnets on pikes. They were insulting her.

‘By God!’ he cried out, ‘who was to teach them behaviour? Was this the King’s office?’

‘It is the Queen’s, my good lord; she will teach them,’ said the Italian at his elbow. ‘And what her Majesty omits the enemy will teach them, at his own charges. I know your countrymen by now. Manners? Out of place in the field. Courage? They have never wanted for that.’

The King grew red, as he tried in vain to stare down this confident knave; then turned to his Archie Douglas. ‘A company of my Lord Essex’s horse,’ he said, ‘would drill these rabble like a maggoty cheese.’

Archie excused his nation. ‘They will trot the haggs all day, sir, on a crust of rye-bread, and engage at the close for a skirl of the pipes. Hearken! they are at it now. ’Tis the Gordons coming in.’ The thin youth drew himself up. ‘Eh, sirs, my heart warms to it!’ he said, honestly moved by an honest pride.

But the King sulked. ‘Filthy work! Where are my people? Ho, you! my cloak!’

‘Ay, there comes a spit o’ rain,’ said Archie Douglas, nosing the weather. This was no way for a man to get the flavours of kingship.

In the chase that followed—forced marches on Glasgow after old Châtelherault, the scouring of the Forth valley, the view-halloo at Falkirk, and much more—the Queen had to leave him alone, for so he chose it; and there was no time to humour him, had there been inclination. But truly there was none. She had the sting of weather and the scurry in her blood; she was in perfect health, great spirits, loving the work. Hunter’s work! the happy oblivion of the short night’s rest, the privations, the relish of simple fare, the spying and hoping, the searching of hillsides and descents into sombre valleys, your heart in your mouth; all the trick and veer of mountain warfare, the freedoms, the easy talk, the laughing, the horseplay; she found nothing amiss, kept no state, and never felt the lack of it. The Italian and his letter-case, Lethington and his dockets, were behind. Atholl watched Edinburgh Castle for her, Bothwell was coming home; she had none with her but Mary Seton for countenance, Carwood for use, one page (Adam Gordon), one esquire (Erskine), and Father Roche. For the rest, her cousin and councillor and open-air comrade was George Gordon, late in bonds. So sometimes a whole day would pass without word to the King; later, as at Falkirk, where the scent had been so hot, three or four days; and she never missed him!

This was the occasion when Archie Douglas, riding with his kinsman, had pointed to the head of the valley, saying, ‘There goes a man in good company, who lately was glad of any.’ The King scowled, which encouraged him. ‘Ay,’ he went on—‘ay, the favour of the prince can lift up and cast down. Who’d ha’ thought, sirs, that yon Geordie Gordon should be son of a disgraced old body, that must be dug free from the worms before he could be punished enough? And now Geordie’s in a fair way for favours, and hath his bonny earldom almost under his hand. Eh, sirs, that put your trust in princes, go warily your ways!’

Ruthven, by his side, nudged him to be done with it.

‘No, no, my lord,’ cries Archie, ‘I’ll not be silenced when I see my kinsman slighted; him and his high rights passed over for an outlaw!’

These words were used, ‘slighted,’ ‘passed over.’ The words rankled, the things signified came to pass, as surprisingly they will when once you begin to look for them.

First sign:—Early in the winter, so soon as the war was over and Scotland ridded for a time of declared enemies, the Earl of Bothwell came home whilst the King was at Linlithgow, was received by her Majesty, and (it seems) made welcome. No doubt but he made use of her kindness to line his own nest; at any rate, one of the first things asked of the returning monarch was to appoint this Bothwell Lieutenant-General of the South and Lord Admiral of Scotland. The parchments came before him for the sign-manual. O prophet Archibald! he found the Queen’s name already upon them.

He raised an outcry. ‘The Earl of Bothwell! The Earl of Bothwell! How much more grace for this outlaw? Is it not enough that he return with his head on his shoulders?’

She replied that he had deserved well of both of them. He had scared her shameful brother out of Scotland, who would have gone for no other body. He had a stout heart, had promised her that Moray should die an alien or a felon, and would keep his word.

‘But this office is a promise to my father, madam,’ says the King. ‘I promised him that Lieutenancy six months since, and may no more go back upon my word than my Lord Bothwell upon his.’

Rather red in the face, she urged her reasons. ‘That is not convenient, dear friend. They do not love my Lord of Lennox in the West. There are other reasons—good reasons. Had you been here you would have heard them all. You must not vex me in this, now—of all times in my life.’

He looked her up and down curiously, without manners, without enthusiasm. Perhaps he did not understand her—he had a thick head. Then he signed the dockets and went out, not having seen that she had shut her eyes and was blushing.

Dreadfully jealous of his ‘prerogatives,’ he interposed in everything after this, had all state correspondence before him and saw all the replies, whether they were of home or abroad. Here the Italian angered him, whose habit had always been to converse with her Majesty in French: no frowns nor furious pacing of the closet could break him off it. The Queen, very gentle towards him, insisted that the secretary should paraphrase his letters into a kind of Scots; but the King, who was stupid at business, boggled over the halting translation, did not understand any more than at first, and suspected the Italian of deliberate mystification. He told the Queen that she should speak the vernacular with this hireling. She said, and truly, that she thought in French and spoke it better; when, nevertheless, she tried to gratify him, even he saw that it was absurd. Absurd or not, he loved David none the better for that.

He suspected everybody about her person, but chiefly this fat Italian; to whose score he laid his next rebuff, the very palpable hit that it was. The old Duke of Châtelherault, exiled for the late rebellion, was pining in England, it seems, and beginning to ail. Shallow old trickster as he might be, he loved his country and his kindred, and was (as the Queen could never forget) head of the Hamiltons, of the blood royal. He crept back in December over the Solway, and from one of his coast-castles sent humble messengers forward to her for pardon and remission of forfeiture. To these she inclined, on more grounds than one. She had some pity for the old hag-ridden man, haunted ever with the shadow of madness as he was; she remembered his white hair and flushing, delicate face. Then her new Earl of Huntly had married into that family; and she wished to keep a hold on the Gordons. And then, again, the blood royal! She forgot that if she could comfortably admit Châtelherault his share in that, her husband could never admit it without impeaching his own rights. So she inclined to the piteous letters, and allowed herself to be pitiful.

The King, on the first hint of this clemency, was moved beyond her experience. No sulking, brooding, knitting of brows; he fairly stormed at her before her circle. ‘What am I, madam? What silly tavern-sign do you make of me? You exalt my chief enemy, my hereditary enemy, enemy of my title to be here—and ask me to record it! King Henry is to declare his esteem for the Hamiltons, who desire to unking him! This is paltry work, the design too gross. I see foreign fingers at work in this. But I will never consent, never! Ask me no more.’

The Italian surveyed his august company at large, lifted his eyebrows, and blandly, patently, deliberately shrugged. My Lord of Bothwell himself had little stomach for this; but the King strangled a cry and turned upon his insolent critic. ‘White-blooded, creeping, fingering dog!’ He drew his dagger on the man, and for the moment scared the life out of him.

Lord Bothwell stepped in between, a broad-shouldered easy gentleman; the next step was the Queen’s, flame-hued now, and at her fiercest. ‘Put up your weapon, my lord, and learn to be the companion of your prince. Until this may be, the Council is dissolved. Farewell, sirs. David, stay you here. I have need of you.’

Bothwell and Huntly, they say, fairly led him out of the presence. Good lack, here was Proof the Second! The companion of his prince! He would certainly have killed the Italian had not the Queen taken care that he should not.

Once more he went away, and stayed away. He would wait until she felt the need of him, he said to his friends Archie Douglas and Ruthven, who never left him now. On this occasion the Master of Lindsay was of the party, which rode into the Carse of Gowrie, hunting the fox. Hacked son of a fighting father, worse companion he could not have had—saving the presence of the other two—than Lindsay of the burnt face and bloodshot eye. ‘The King with many friends!’ said Bothwell when he heard how they set out. ‘Smarthering Archie to stroke him tender, Ruthven to scrape him raw, and now Lindsay with his fire-hot breath to inflame the part! Geordie, we must fend for the Queen.’ Huntly, sublimely in love, conscious of his growth in grace, said that he was ready.

With the aid of these two advancing noblemen her Majesty’s government went on. She gave the Hamiltons hard terms, which they took abjectly enough; she pardoned Argyll, because he must be separated from his former friends; the rest of the rebels were summoned to surrender to her mercy at the Market Cross; failing that, forfeiture of lands and goods for my Lord of Moray. The day fixed for him was the 12th March. Huntly was sure he would not come, but Bothwell shook his head. ‘Keep your eye on Mr. Secretary’s letter-bag, madam, and let him know that you do it. I shall feel more restful o’ nights when we are over the 12th March. Another thing you may do: throw him into the company of your brown-eyed Fleming. Does your Majesty know that property of a dish of clear water—to take up the smell of the room you set it in? Your Lethington has that property, therefore let him absorb your little Fleming; you will have him as dovelike as herself.’ The advice was taken, and Mr. Secretary rendered harmless for the present.

Then came news of the King’s return; but not the King. He was certainly at Inchkeith, said gossip—Inchkeith, an island in the Firth; but when she asked what he did there, she got confused replies. Bothwell said that he was learning to govern. ‘He has been told, madam, do you see? that if he can rule Lindsay and Ruthven in three roods of land he will have no trouble with Scotland afterwards.’

The Queen, although she suffered this light-hearted kind of criticism without rebuke, did not reply to it, nor did she let Bothwell see that she was anxious. The Italian saw it, however, whether she would or no, and took care to give her every scrap of news. She learned from him that the King was drinking there, fuddling himself. He was holding a Court, where (as Bothwell had guessed) he was easily King, throned on a table, with a ‘lovely Joy’ on either hand. She had the names of his intimates, with exact particulars of their comings and goings. The Earl of Morton was not above suspicion; he went there by night always, cloaked and in a mask. The Queen, more conscious of her power since the rebellion, conscious now of her matronly estate, grew sick to have such nasty news about her—it was as if the air was stuck with flies. Presently she fell sick in good truth, with faintings, pains in her side, back-soreness, breast-soreness, heart-soreness. It did not help her to remember that she must be at Linlithgow at Christmas, and meet the King there.

Lying in her bed, smothered in furs, shivering, tossing herself about—for she never could bear the least physical discomfort—she chewed a bitter cud in these dark days, and her thoughts took a morbid habit. She fretted over the Court at Inchkeith, imagined treasons festering there and spreading out like fungus to meet the rebels in England; distrusted Bothwell because he did not choose to come to her, Huntly because he did not dare; she distrusted, in fact, every Scot in Scotland, and found herself thereby clinging solely to the Italian; and of him—since she must speak to somebody—she consequently saw too much. The man was very dextrous, very cheerful, very willing; but he had a gross mind, and she had spoiled him. To be kind to a servant, nine times in ten, means that you make him rich at your own charges, and then he holds cheap what his own welfare has diminished. So it was here: Davy was not the tenth case. She had been bountiful in friendship, confidence, familiarity—of the sort which friends may use and get no harm of. He had always amused her, and now he soothed and strengthened her at once by sousing her hot fancies in the cold water of his common-sense. She had learned to fear the workings of her own mind, informed as it was by a passionate heart; she would lean upon this honest fellow, who never looked for noonday at eleven o’clock, and considered that a purge or a cupping was the infallible remedy for all ailments, including broken hearts. It is not for you or me, perhaps, to complain where she did not. Queen Mary was no precisian, to expect more than she asked. If she loved she must be loved back; if she commanded she must be obeyed; if she was hipped she must be amused. I believe Signior Davy gave himself airs and made himself comfortable. She found the first ridiculous and the second racial. She knew that chivalry was not a virtue of that land where bargaining is at its best, and that where her Italian saw a gate open he would reasonably go in. The odds are that he presumed insufferably; certain it is that, though she never saw it, others saw nothing else, and, gross-minded themselves, misread it grossly. The tale was all about the town that Signior Davy was the Queen’s favourite, and where he was always to be found, and what one might look for, and who was to be pitied, etc. etc. The revellers at Inchkeith advised each other to mark the end, and some were for telling the King. But Archie Douglas was against that. ‘Tell him now,’ he said, ‘and see your salmon slip through the net. Wait till Davy’s in the boat, man, and club him then.’

Nevertheless, the deft Italian, by his cold douches, his playing the fool, his graceless reminiscences and unending novels, cured the Queen. Late in December she astonished the Court by holding a council in person—in a person, moreover, as sharp and salient as a snow-peak glittering through the haze of frost, and as incisive to the touch. There were proclamations to be approved: ‘The King’s and Queen’s Majesties considering,’ etc., the common form. These must be altered, she said. ‘The Queen’s Majesty by the advice of her dearest husband’: she would have it thus for the future. Tonic wit of the Italian! for to whom else, pray, could you ascribe it? The word went flying about that the style was changed, and was not long in coming to Inchkeith. ‘The Queen’s husband!’ Ill news for Inchkeith here.

Yet, the night he had it, he gloomed over it—being in his cups—with a kind of slumberous gaiety stirring under his rage.

‘The Queen’s husband! By the Lord, and I am the Queen’s husband. Who denies it is a liar. Archie Douglas, Archie Douglas, if you say I am not the Queen’s husband you lie, man.’

‘I, sir?’ says Archie, very brisk. ‘No, sir, I am very sure of it. By my head, sir, and her Majesty knows it.’

‘She ought to know it. She shall know it. I’m a rider, my lords; I ride with the spur.’

‘’Tis the curb you lack,’ says Ruthven, with a harsh laugh.

The blinking youth pondered him and his words. ‘I’m for the spur and a loose rein, Ruthven. I get the paces out of my nags. I have the seat.’

‘Half of it, say, my lord!’

Everybody heard that except the King, who went grumbling on. ‘You shall not teach me how to sit a horse. I say you shall not, man.’

‘My lord,’ cried Lindsay, who never would call him ‘sir,’ ‘the talk is not of horse-riding. If we use that similitude for the Queen’s government, I tell your lordship it is unhappy. For on that horse of government there be two riders, I think; and of what advantage is the loose rein of your lordship when your fellow uses the curb?’

‘Ay my good lord, you hit the mark. Two riders, two riders, by God’s fay!’

The same voice as before—heard this time by the King. No one knew who had spoken, nor were the words more explicitly offensive than Lindsay’s; but the pothouse tone of them caught the muzzy ear, hit some quick spot in the cloudy brain, and stung like fire. The King lifted up his head to listen; he opened his mouth and stared, as if he saw something revealed beyond the window, some warning or leering face. Then he rose and held by his chair. ‘Two riders? Two riders? Two! Who said that? By heaven and hell, bring me that man!’

The pain, the horror he had, the helpless rage, made a dead hush all over; nobody stirred. Ridiculous he may have been, as he raised his voice yet higher and mouthed his words—worthless he was known to be—and yet he was tragic for the moment. ‘I say it is damnable lying,’ he said, swaying about. ‘I say that man shall go to deep hell.’ He stared round the hall, at his wits’ end. His wits made a pounce. ‘Archie, thou black thief, ’twas thou!’

‘No, sir; no, upon my soul.’

‘Ruthven, if you have dared—Lindsay—Fleming! Oh, mercy and truth!’

The rest was hideous.

They got him to bed between them, while little Forrest cried and made a fuss, praying them to kill him sooner than leave him with his master in the raving dark. No one took any notice of the anguish of a boy.

* * * * *

With time came counsel, and friends very free with it. Even prudence made herself heard in that brawling house. The King should meet his consort at Linlithgow, do his duty by her, observe the Christmas feast.

‘You will do well, sir—though I am sore to say it—to hear the popish mass,’ he was advised: ‘with reservation of conscience, the stroke would be politic.’

He agreed with all such advice; he intended to be wise. But the grand stroke of all was the Earl of Morton’s, to devise a way by which the injured husband could point the King’s demands with that undoubted right of his. The Crown-Matrimonial, resounding phrase! let him ask her to give him that. Nobody was prepared to say what was or was not this Crown-Matrimonial, or whether there was such a crown. The term was unknown to the law, that must be owned; and yet it had a flavour of law. It was double-armed, yet it was hyphenated; you could not deny part of it in any event. Why, no, indeed! cried Inchkeith at large, highly approving.

Archie Douglas cheered his noble kinsman: ‘Hail, King-Matrimonial of Scotland!’

Ruthven grinned, it was thought, approvingly; but Lord Morton, remembering that he was still the Queen’s Chancellor and should not go too far, made haste to advise the utmost delicacy. Above all things, let no breath of _his_ dealings be heard.

‘I need not affirm my earnest hope,’ he said, ‘that peace and good accord may come out of this. The wish must find acceptance in every Christian heart. As such I utter it. I am not in place to do more. I cannot admonish; I serve the State.’

The King nodded sagely.

‘Good, cousin, good. I take your meaning. It is a fair intent, for which I am much beholden to you.’ Adonis, the proud rider, was chastened just now.

They met, therefore, at Linlithgow, heard mass together, made their offerings, and to all the world were friends again. The Crown-Matrimonial lay hidden until the spring of the year. Not even the new coinage—MARIA ET HENRICUS, ‘the dam before the sire’—tempted it out; but there were reasons for that. A week after the Epiphany, as they were in the Queen’s closet with a small company, she took his hand and said: ‘My lord, you shall hereafter give me what worship you can; for now I know of a certainty that I have deserved well of you and Scotland.’ Her pride in the fact and something of pity for herself made her voice quiver.

He started and flushed quickly. ‘Is it true, madam? Is that the case? Oh, I thank God for it!’

He would not let go of her hand, but waited impatiently until those present took the hint and retired; then took her, kissed her, and called her his Mary again.

She cried contentedly enough, her cheek against his heart; and he, at once triumphant and generous, father and lover, stayed by her for a whole day and night.

There was much talk, as you may suppose. The maids went about with their heads in the air, as if they had achieved something. But apart from them, all the talk was not of this complacent kind. Mr. Randolph, for instance, wrote to his patron, Mr. Cecil, of England: ‘The Queen is with child beyond a doubt. She informed the King in my hearing. Now, woe is me for you when David’s son shall be King in England!’ And there is no doubt that what Mr. Randolph took leave to report was no news to the late revellers of Inchkeith.