Yet once long ago he had burned to ‘stand or fall, to be happy or ruined, with Montrose’.
Never again, since Montrose’s death, could Charles have said anything like that. The adventurer had taken the place of the hero. The world had grown tired of tragedies, too tired for heroes. It was no longer the day for remorse, for executions of those who met death proud and glad, – no more black swans (‘Oh rare black swan,’ – once Montrose had called her that!)
A new air blew across the world like an east wind, it took all the deep colours out of the landscape and the sky and tempered them to a uniform grey.
Sophia’s visit brought her the first cold blast of that new rational air of the eighteenth century, that grey blight of certainty that descended on England, cynical, comfortable, and, in strange but necessary corollary, with a higher percentage of suicides than ever before.
Sophia went back to Hanover and left Louise at Maubuisson; both lived to see their rich century fade in a neutral sunset, and the country of England, in which they took more interest than any other, settled itself more and more to suit the interests of its landed gentry and attach less and less importance to its Church and King. They lived to see it depose Charles II’s brother James and call in his Dutch nephew, William of Orange, the son of poor pretty Mary Stuart who had so adored her father, Charles I, to rule them instead. They lived to see the rending furies of Cavaliers and Puritans settle down comfortably into the modern politics of Tories and Whigs, lived finally to see the advancing shadow of the English throne fall on George, the squat gross Hanoverian whom his own mother, Sophia, while working for his English interests with all the passion of her vigorous nature, could not endure.
Was this then the end of it all? If so, then indeed life was not enough. Life itself withered, turned tasteless and foul, if there were nothing beyond to give it sense and form.
Security in itself was nothing to live for; ‘only dead things are secure’, Louise had found. She was free of possession and therefore of loss; free of hope and therefore of fear; she had never been Montrose’s bride, but she was a bride of Christ. ‘My love and charity to you all’ – Montrose’s words on the scaffold had become the mainspring of her life.
In the hour of his death they had been together; his spirit had winged to her by that ‘low road’ of the ancient Scottish belief, on which a man’s soul, when it leaves his body, travels to its true home. They had met then, in certainty as clear as if she had seen him before her, in that
‘country
Far beyond the stars.’
And through all the years since, they had been together, as she walked in her orchards and saw the apple-blossom fall and the fruit ripen, and dynasties fall and new ones come into being, and she lived to be older than any of her family. It was under the apple trees that they found her, a very old woman, who had fallen asleep, it seemed, over her book, ‘at her devotions’, the nuns breathed in awe.
But the book was Wishart’s later version of his Deeds of Montrose. On the page where it lay open on her knee was the passage: ‘True love is drowned by no billows of mischance: true love fears no thunderbolts of fate: true love abides immortal, firm, unchangeable. To have loved once is to love for aye.’
A Note on the Author
Margaret Irwin (1889-1969) was educated at Clifton High School in Bristol, and then at Oxford University. She began writing books and short stories in the early 1920s. She married children’s author and illustrator John Robert Monsell in 1929.
Irwin was praised for her historical accuracy in her novels, and she wrote passionately about the English Civil War. In The Proud Servant she caused generations to fall in love with the ill-fated but charismatic Earl of Montrose, Charles I’s Commander in Scotland.
Discover books by Margaret Irwin published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/MargaretIrwin
A Royal Cinderella
Bloodstock and Other Stories
Knock Four Times
None So Pretty
Royal Flush
Still She Wished for Company
The Bride
The Proud Servant
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in 1939 by Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Copyright © 1939 Margaret Irwin
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
The moral right of the author is asserted.
eISBN: 9781448210893
Visit www.bloomsburyreader.com to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for
newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.
The Bride Page 44
