There were cries all round him against Montrose – ‘the cursh of our country’, as Lauderdale was spluttering from his already reeking lips (‘Brandy for Breakfast, that’s his motto,’ muttered Charles in a swift aside to his brother-in-law), Cassillis was grinding out accusations of Montrose’s barbarities, while Baillie, with the steadier persistence in oratory gained by long practice in the pulpit, wore down the rest as he declared in an encroaching roar that Montrose’s most heinous offence was that ‘he still to this day continues in the highest contempt against God, under the fearful sentence of excommunication without the least sign of repentance’.
Baillie won to the end of his sentence in a hush that gave him no small satisfaction; everyone was looking at him in positively frozen attention, even horror; never had he gained so triumphant an effect. But the triumph was short-lived, the company were not looking at him but just over his head to where, close behind him in the doorway, as he saw when he wheeled heavily round, there stood the Marquis of Montrose.
In a silence that after the recent uproar struck like the chill of sudden death, the Marquis came forward, knelt and kissed the King’s hand.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘since I knew that accusations were to be made against me to you and your counsellors, I have come to answer them myself. Have I your leave to do so?’
The King did not speak at once. These men had just insulted him to his face, and not only him but his father’s memory, and his mother. His policy of conciliation, of seeing what could be got out of all parties, howsoever opposed to each other, had already had a bad jar that day.
He had wanted to prove himself a man beside Montrose. Here was his chance; breathing rather quickly, he determined to take it.
‘My lord,’ he said, staring into the older man’s eyes as though his courage were holding on by them, ‘I had hoped to confer with you as with the rest of your countrymen to see what can be done for my return to my kingdom of Scotland. These gentlemen refuse to confer with you. But since they have given so frank an opinion of you, I may ask you in your turn to tell me with equal frankness your opinion of their proposals. The Chancellor will repeat them to you.’
He motioned him to take his seat with the rest while Hyde in a somewhat grumpy voice repeated the proposals, striving to modify them slightly in his rendering. But Cassillis would have none of such hedging; he rose to enforce the conditions of the King’s ‘good behaviour’ and ’submission to the Kirk’s censure’ as rigorously as before.
Montrose stood up as quickly as if a sword had been drawn: ‘Your Majesty, there can be but one motive for these proposals – that they shall be of such a nature as to prevent your ever accepting them. That will leave Argyll safe in his secret pact with Cromwell.’
‘It is a lie of the Devil’s,’ broke out Cassillis; ‘that pact has been broken by the late King’s trial and death.’
‘That pact,’ answered Montrose, ‘led to the late King’s trial and death. Argyll promised the King safety – and sold him to Cromwell. That treachery led to the King’s trial. It raised such outcry in Scotland that even Argyll was forced to bow to it and send protests to Cromwell’s Army.’
Baillie was on his feet again, his face redder than ever, his voice now too breathlessly eager to keep any of its organ notes. ‘I took those protests. I did all that could be done. My loyalty is beyond question. I even went as far as to say that it would indeed be shocking if my master Argyll were to desert the King in those straits! I offered to attend the King myself on the scaffold when my protests had failed.’
Montrose turned to Hyde. ‘Has the Chancellor kept the words of the protests from Argyll’s Government?’
‘They amount to this,’ Hyde answered: ‘that Argyll’s Government “declared their dissent from the taking away of His Majesty’s life” and their hope that they at any rate would be “free from all the evil consequences that might follow thereupon”.’
‘That amounts,’ said Montrose, ‘to no more than that King Charles I should have been kept always in prison, while Cromwell and Argyll should continue to rule England and Scotland. And that, in exact repetition, is what these proposals now amount to – with this difference – that King Charles II shall be kept in exile instead of prison.’
‘Man, are you daft?’ burst out Lauderdale. ‘The Chancellor of Scotland, old Loudoun himself, has proclaimed him King Charles II at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.’
‘In a proclamation so clogged with conditions he might as well have been proclaimed slave as king. You have today heard some of those conditions. What can they mean but that Argyll is to continue to govern, with the help of his brother dictator? It is Cromwell who is Argyll’s ally, it was Cromwell whose army invaded Scotland last summer—’
‘As your army invaded it like a raging fire – barbarian! – monster!’
There were two or three Scots voices calling out against him now. Montrose turned towards them.
‘Will you tell me what I did,’ he asked, ‘in comparison with your ally Cromwell, whose soldiers stripped some of their prisoners naked and put out their eyes, and were under orders to sell most of them for slaves to the Turks at two shillings apiece? That was a fitting judgement on a nation whose usurper had sold its king for £200,000.’
There was terror now in the outcry against him. Would this man make the King believe they were Cromwell’s agents?
‘Cromwell has foresworn our Covenant,’ cried Baillie, ‘he has told all the world how he loathes the Presbyterian religion – how can we have anything to do with Cromwell?’
‘Only this – that you have made him your ruler by upholding his deputy Argyll. You have given him the ultimate say in all your councils. You have betrayed your country into the hands of her enemy. It is for Cromwell that Argyll has beheaded Huntly, has banished you, my Lord Hamilton, and you, my Lord Lauderdale, though I do not think your banishment will be for long. You will soon go back in safety to Scotland, for you have your secret pact with Argyll, as he has his with Cromwell.’
Lauderdale raised his fists in the air as though he would hurl himself upon his enemy, but Cassillis held him back, telling him to have patience. As for Hamilton, who ‘would have been glad and proud to serve as a sergeant under Montrose’, he had avoided looking at him ever since the Marquis entered, and now sat as though stunned. All hopes that Hyde had had of reconciling these two men were crushed by Montrose’s attack. Mr Baillie, who had recovered his ringing pulpit voice, was calling down God’s judgement on ‘this ravening lion’.
Montrose answered:
‘You say “God, God,” and follow the Devil’s counsel. Is it God’s work to sell the King to death, to whom you had promised safety? To behead men for loyalty to their King? You have destroyed law in the name of the law of God, and you interpret God as you wish – a God who delights in blood sacrifices, in the smell of burning flesh. You bribe children to spy on their parents, and wives on their husbands; you have brought a darkness unutterable upon the land, where evil things crawl in the slime of men’s fearful hearts. You have broken away from Rome; but you have set up a tyranny as cruel and more private than the Inquisition. You have put your country in prison.’
There was no more hope for the conference after that. The King rose and left with Prince William; Montrose immediately went out of the Palace to where Sir John Hurry was waiting for him with his orderly and the horses; the Council and the Commissioners split up into separate groups, each talking with low and furious volubility, and soon, to Hyde’s deep dissatisfaction, Lauderdale found an occasion to thrust himself into talk with Cassillis and was not too ill received; Hamilton too was presently drawn in. It was just as Hyde had feared; their common hatred of Montrose would draw together the extreme and the moderate Covenanters.
Mr Baillie had not waited to hear these aftermaths of indignation. Mr Baillie was apt to be impatient and hasty of movement; for all his solid consistency of flesh, he could change his mind as quickly and frequently as men of more flimsy metal
: he had declared ‘Bishops I love’ not so very long before he had refused a bishopric as a snare of the devil; he had declared his nation to be ‘possessed of a bloody devil’ at the beginning of their rebellion against the King, and then become one of the clerical leaders of that rebellion; he had called Montrose ‘a generous and noble youth’ years ago, and now denounced him as ‘a ravening lion’.
It had not been his own choice that Robert Baillie had been led, thrust rather, right into the forefront of this troubled, angry, topsy-turvy time. All he had wanted had been to stay comfortably installed first as Parish Minister at Kilwinning in the county of Ayr and then Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, with all his busy duties and his collection of rare Dutch theological books and his wife, good soul, whom he instructed to read morning and evening prayers with the servants whenever he was away, and pray in private too (though that came second) and to buy him bobbin waistcoats and beware of lawyers’ ‘subdolous contracts’ and look after their boys Rob and Harry at school and teach them ‘some little beginnings of God’s fear’, and especially to ‘have a care of my little Lillie’. All this had made his life diligent enough to fill a century, but it was not enough for God, who had called him to take such an active part in public affairs.
God had marked him out from the very beginning of the troubles, had sent him down to London to share the great work of bringing King Charles I’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of Strafford, to his doom; so that it was only fit that he, Robert Baillie, who had seen Strafford, the King’s greatest servant, walking with his proud ‘glooming’ expression through the staring crowd at his trial, no man capping him, ‘before whom that morning the greatest in England would have stood uncovered’, – it was very fit that he should be God’s instrument to warn this equally proud nobleman.
And as he saw that free erect figure of the Marquis of Montrose turning away from them all, he remembered his former opinion of him in a flash of indignant regret that he should now be against them instead of with them. Could nothing be done to recall him to the fold? On a sudden impulse he left his colleagues who were fuming together over their wrath, padded after Montrose and even broke into the undignified motion of a trot in order to catch up with that swinging stride.
By the time Montrose had reached the terrace, that stout determined black figure was fairly scampering in such haste that he did not even observe the two young princes in deep consultation at the end of the terrace; but if he had, it would scarcely have deterred him from the mighty sense of his mission from God, which led to the somewhat unmannerly action of laying his hand on the Marquis’ cloak.
The Marquis swung sharply round to see Mr Baillie’s light blue eyes peering up at him, shrewd, canny, and almost glassy with excitement. At that quick movement of Montrose, and still more at sight of his face dark with anger so near his own, the minister flinched and his eyes fell; for an instant he wished heartily he had not been so impetuous. But was he not a minister of the Lord? Had he not the power to bind on earth what God would infallibly ratify in heaven? Not merely death but damnation was in his hands, and not only the Marquis’ splendid head, but his very soul to all eternity must hang upon the word of Robert Baillie.
‘Will Your Lordship show such hardness of heart, such contempt of God’s word and salvation?’ he demanded. ‘It is not too late to repent, remember.’
Montrose looked down on the short stout figure, whose black robes were flapping in the keen April air. He was of the same build exactly as the man’s cousin, General Baillie, whose rounded back Montrose had seen flying from one battlefield after another in that Year of Miracles four years ago.
Mr Robert Baillie grew uneasy under that cold, inflexible stare. Could nothing shake this man, stir him even?
He had been moved by a genuine impulse to heal (if that were possible) as well as rebuke the Marquis’ conscience, but now it was plain that sharper weapons must be used.
A sure instinct prompted him to probe now with forgiveness rather than threats. ‘Harden not your heart for ever, my lord. God is of infinite mercy and has forgiven crimes near as great as your own.’
That opaque blue eye rolled up again in a shrewd glance as he dealt his final thrust: ‘Your Lordship’s own brother-in-law, Sir John Colquhoun, has even now met forgiveness from the Kirk for his rape upon your youngest sister, his seduction of her, rather, with the help of witchcraft.’
He had succeeded just too well. If he had not stumbled as he leaped back in terror from the face before him, Montrose’s clenched fist would have crashed him down on to the stone flags. As it was, he suffered nothing worse than an ignominious roll on them, and it was the young King himself who came rushing forward to pick him up.
Montrose had already flung off in the opposite direction with Sir John Hurry.
‘Is this true?’ he demanded of the knight, who was doing his best not to look too well pleased at the minister’s tumble.
‘True for months past, my lord, but I would not trouble you with it. Sir John Colquhoun has taken the Covenant, had all his estates restored to him, and is about to marry again.’
A sideways glance at his Commander’s grim face made him wish he had not said so much even now. It was natural enough that Montrose should wish to stick a knife into his brother-in-law for being respectably reinstated in the country that had condemned himself, but Hurry knew that the hurt to his master had gone deeper than that. What the devil was the matter with the man that he should mind about a family scandal almost twenty years old? It was the present moment that he should mind, the King’s opinion, and the danger of it being influenced by these fellows.
There was a touch of exasperated affection in his concern as he laid a hand on his master’s arm. ‘Won’t you say something to the King, my lord, to get him away from the minister’s complaints?’
Montrose gave him the flash of a smile. ‘It’s no good, Hurry. I’m too angry for it to be any use.’
It was an apology, for he saw well enough what Hurry was thinking. The difference between them was admitted, and never had it mattered so little. Hurry knew he could not alter him – more, that he would never really wish to do so, howsoever it might affect both their fates.
He saw his master swing into the saddle and ride back towards the town.
‘There he goes, God damn him and save him!’ he said to himself, an odd emotion tugging at him that he, Jack Hurry, had never till now had any occasion to recognize. For, apart from any question of self-interest, or even recognition, he felt an almost painful desire to be of service to this man. He thought for a moment, then returned to the Palace to spread a scandal he had been hopefully inventing of Mr Baillie’s secret visits to a certain brothel in Slop Street behind the east canal.
XII
‘Our Court is full of distraction – our Court is full of Scots.’ So Hyde wrote despairingly that same morning to Rupert, telling him, though, that in spite of it all the King ‘keeps himself upon his guard – and really he carries himself very well.’
This tutorial touch was followed with a more encouraging piece of news than even Hyde’s approval of his King. ‘Here is likewise the Marquis of Montrose, who in truth is a very gallant person,’ (‘And did it take him till now to discover that?’ muttered Rupert when he came to read it), ‘and though the Presbyterians are as busy as ever, yet I believe the next news I shall send you will be that His Majesty entirely trusts Montrose and puts the business of Scotland wholly into his conduct – so that I doubt not the Covenanters’ design of having the King into Scotland will be disappointed.’
But that Hyde could not feel quite as confident as he wrote was shown in his last urgent request: ‘I beseech Your Highness, vouchsafe two or three lines to Charles II, who will be much encouraged by it.’
But would Rupert ‘vouchsafe two or three lines’? It was as hard to get blood out of a stone as a letter out of Rupert; even little Kate d’Aubigny had not been able to coax answers out of him when she had written him most urgently about the polit
ical intrigues in which she had then been engaged.
And Kate d’Aubigny herself could not help Hyde any more, for Kate had just died, quite suddenly and for no reason that anyone found it worth while to mention, and that gay, sad, active brain found at last a deeper rest than politics and plots could give it. The drawing-room meeting she had staged so prettily between Hyde and Hamilton had been her last dragonfly dart into history before she disappeared for ever from her crowded scene; people said, ‘Poor Kate,’ ‘Pretty Kate,’ for a little time and then no more of her.
But Ned Hyde sat thinking of her for several minutes in the bright morning sunshine that showed up all the dust in his dingy lodging, when he should have been telling Rupert how he had contracted with a merchant of Rotterdam to send corn into Ireland; sat thinking of her quick laughing ways, that yet hinted at something lost and appealing, like the flutterings of a bird whose wing is broken – as indeed the mainspring of her life had been broken in the young glorious body of George d’Aubigny, trampled underfoot in that cavalry charge at Edge-hill.
‘And now she’s dead too, and I, twice her age, go fumbling on,’ muttered Hyde, scratching a pattern with his pen on the table, for how odd it was that not only a young thing should die but that he too would one day be here no longer to make plans for his master, and send news and business to Prince Rupert, and hope for a jaunt to Spain, and think of that unsatisfied, unspoken longing he had had for Kate d’Aubigny’s delicate, eager body.
‘Compare you favourably with his mistress? Why, you silly child, that is a compliment most wives would give their ears for!’
Elizabeth, full of jovial tolerance for the weaknesses of gay young men, had none for the nervous qualms of young girls.
The Bride Page 19
