Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

by Margaret George

  The Cardinal laughed with a laugh as thin as his beard.

  “His curses are terrible,” Mary said. Was he wishing such evil on her mother? And on her, simply because she was Catholic?

  “But not original. They are lifted intact from the Old Testament. The prophets—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum—really knew how to curse in the name of Yahweh. This fellow is a pale shadow of them.”

  “But a shadow that darkens Scotland. This Knox continually refers to himself as a prophet,” said the Duc. “Someone ought to do to him what Herod did to John the Baptist. Where is he now?”

  “In hiding, somewhere in Geneva. He was actually in France for two months last year, from October to December. I am ashamed to tell you that he wrote The First Blast on our soil.”

  “I notice he did not stay here for its publication,” said the Duc. “That was wise of him.”

  “Oh, he’s clever. He hides his cowardice under the instruction that Christ gave to his disciples: ‘But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another.’ He leaves others to do his fighting for him, and fulfill his curses.”

  “Words to frighten children in the nursery,” scoffed the Duc.

  “Somewhere in the Old Testament someone is cursed with ‘emerods,’” said the Cardinal. “Now that’s something to fear!” He laughed depreciatively. “Perhaps I should wish them on master Knox? I must practise my cursing. All I know is the formula for excommunication.” Again, the tinkling laughter.

  Mary took back the document and continued reading it, slowly. It took her a long time. But at length she reached the ending:

  I fear not to say that the day of vengeance, which shall apprehend that horrible monster Jezebel of England and such as maintain her monstrous cruelty, is already appointed … when God shall declare Himself to be her enemy, when He shall pour forth contempt upon her according to her cruelty, and shall kindle the hearts of such as sometimes did favour her with deadly hatred against her, that they may execute His judgements.

  For assuredly her empire and reign is a wall without foundation; I mean the same of the authority of all women.

  But the fire of God’s word is already laid to those rotten props (I include the Pope’s law with the rest), and presently they burn.… When they are consumed, that rotten wall—the usurped and unjust empire of women—shall fall by itself in despite of all man, to the destruction of so many as shall labour to uphold it. And therefore let all men be advertised, for the trumpet hath once blown.

  Praise God, ye that fear Him.

  “He rejects the authority of royal blood,” she finally said.

  “No, he rejects women as rulers,” the Cardinal corrected. “You see here.” He took the manuscript and read, “‘For assuredly her empire and reign is a wall without foundation; I mean the same of the authority of all women.’ You have misunderstood.”

  “No, good Uncle, you have misunderstood,” she said in a quiet, clear voice. “Or else you are trying to shield me. When Master Knox harangues the people and says they should not have taken Mary for their Queen, then the hidden message is that they need not have taken her, if they so chose. And it follows from that that the people have the freedom to choose their ruler—that it is not royal blood that determines who has the right to rule, but the people’s will. If they have the power to reject royal blood, then what power does royal blood possess? None, if Knox has his way. He says here”—she snatched the manuscript back—“that ‘the insolent joy, the bonfires, and the banqueting which were in London and elsewhere in England when that cursed Jezebel was proclaimed Queen did witness to my heart that men were … rejoiced at their own confusion and certain destruction.… And yet can they not consider that where a woman reigneth and papists bear authority, that there must needs Satan be president of the council?’”

  “Satan in skirts. I like that,” said the Cardinal.

  Mary refused to laugh. “‘I say that the erecting of a woman to that honour is not only to invert the order which God hath established, but also is to defile, pollute, and profane the throne and seat of God.’ The people are the ones with the duty to discern God’s will and choice, that is what he is saying.”

  The Cardinal sighed grievously. “Yes, I admit that is one interpretation, at least by implication. You have a searching wit, my child.”

  “Then Knox is my enemy!” said Mary.

  “Indeed he is!” the Duc burst out. “For above all things, your royal blood makes you special and entitles you to rule.”

  “Shall we leave the table?” Mary suddenly rose, and the servitors descended on the leavings like crows.

  She ushered the two men into her privy chamber, and then dismissed the valets de chambre and her attendants.

  “There are too many ears out there,” she said. “Now we may speak more freely.”

  The Duc and the Cardinal raised their eyebrows—the Duc’s, thick and dark, and the Cardinal’s, light and perfectly arched—simultaneously.

  “You have gotten quite adept at politics,” the Cardinal said. “You must have a natural talent for it. Someone should have warned us.” He gave his brother a knowing look.

  “I have learned much from the Queen,” said Mary. “For example, always to use a cipher in my correspondence. I have some sixty codes I employ in my letters.” She smiled brightly.

  “How laborious,” said the Cardinal. “Remember, a code is only as ingenious as its holders are at hiding the key to it. And there are many agents who are geniuses at breaking codes.” He enjoyed the look of disappointment on her face. She had felt wise, secure, adult. Time to educate her further. How much did she know about the Queen?

  “What else have you learned from her?” he continued. “Do you keep an expert carpenter in your employ?” Seeing the blank look on her face, he answered her unasked question.

  “Why, to make secret drawers for all your silly ciphers and magic potions, like the room at Blois where she has over two hundred of them, some of them dummies. She thinks no one knows how to open them by pressing a panel at the baseboard. But of course everyone knows. Or perhaps to drill secret holes in the floor of your bedroom, like the ones she has at St.-Germain-en-Laye, where she watches the King making love to Diane on the floor directly below her.”

  Mary gasped, then giggled. “She does?”

  “Indeed.” The Cardinal laughed, and the Duc began to guffaw.

  “What would Master Knox say?” The Duc roared with laughter.

  “He would say it was their royal blood that compelled them to act so!”

  The Cardinal had to sit down, he was laughing so hard. Tears flowed from his eyes, and he dabbed at them with a lace handkerchief. “Catherine is insanely jealous,” he gasped between laughs. “But instead of poisoning Diane, as a good Medici should do, she just resorts to magic spells. Evidently they don’t work! The King still takes to Diane’s elderly bed, with Catherine watching. What a ménage à trois!”

  “I think I would kill her,” said Mary, who was not laughing. “I could not stand to share my husband. It is a mockery. Or, perhaps, I would kill him. It would depend … on the circumstances.”

  As if François, that lily-livered, timorous thing, would ever be capable of taking any woman to his bed, except in trembling duty, thought the Cardinal. Mary need fear no rivals. But he said, “No, you would not. If you were jealous, then that would mean you loved him. And if you loved, love would stay your hand from evil.”

  “Much evil is done in the name of love,” said Mary.

  “Which brings us back to Master Knox,” said the Duc. “True enough he’s safe in Geneva, hiding under Calvin’s coattails, but the moment he steps out—I’ll see to it he’s silenced. Permanently. Odd that Calvin shelters him; Calvin and his men advocate obedience to rulers.”

  “All that means is that he’s wily enough to let others do his fighting for him. Those wretched Calvinists have infiltrated France; they are all over. They slink away to their heretical meetings under the cover of night. ‘Night spectres,�
�� we call them—Huguenots. Calvin sends them books and preachers; he just won’t buy them muskets and cannon. Not yet.”

  “I’ll blast them to their Kingdom come,” said the Duc. “They won’t take root here.”

  “They already have, but their roots are not very deep,” said the Cardinal. “We must uproot them, pull them out.”

  “After the English are vanquished,” said the Duc.

  “Knox will not stay in Geneva,” said Mary suddenly. “He will return to Scotland, and there trouble my dear mother.”

  “’Tis true, he has written her a most hateful letter,” the Cardinal agreed. “I happen to have a copy. Master Knox does not use a cipher; he publishes everything he writes.” He handed her a printed copy, its title, Letter to the Regent of Scotland, in bold type.

  Mary read it, her face growing more and more angry as she went along.

  “‘I do consider that your power is but borrowed, extraordinary, and unstable, for ye have it but by permission of others.’” She shook her head angrily. “He means me! He means she has it from me!”

  She continued.

  “Impute not to fortune that first, your two sons were suddenly taken from you within the space of six hours, and after, your husband reft, as it were, by violence from life and honour, the memorial of his name, succession, and royal dignity perishing with himself.

  “For albeit the usurped abuse, or rather tyranny, of some realms have permitted women to succeed to the honour of their fathers, yet must their glory be transferred to the house of a stranger. And so I say that with himself was buried his name, succession, and royal dignity; and in this, if ye espy not the anger and hot displeasure of God, threatening you and the rest of your house with the same plague, ye are more obstinate than I would wish you to be.

  “Ye may, perchance, doubt what crimes should have been in your husband, you, or the realm for the which God should so grievously have punished you. I answer: the maintenance and defence of most horrible idolatry.”

  “Yes, he compares us to Ahab and all the evildoers in Israel,” said the Cardinal. “You need not read it all; it is quite redundant. He never makes a point but he feels he may reiterate it twenty-eight times.”

  Mary kept reading, captive to all the venom and invective. “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars’—”

  “That is us, my dear,” said the Cardinal, in a light, mocking tone.

  “—‘shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.’” She shuddered.

  “I should be the one to tell you this,” said the Cardinal. His face grew serious for almost the first time that day. “I do not want you to hear it from anyone besides your family. Your French family,” he emphasized. Shaking his ginger-coloured little beard, he said, “Your brother James, who is coming here to attend your wedding, has joined them. He has become a Protestant. He follows Knox now.” He ground out the words one by one like a man turning a crank. “He is one of them.”

  XI

  Mary lay awake, listening to the faint sounds of birds stirring. It was yet too early for birdsong; the sky was still night-dark. But she could not sleep.

  This is the last night I pass unmarried, she thought. This is my last night as a maiden.

  But what did that mean? she wondered. Did it mean that she and François would lie together as a man and wife tomorrow night? They would lie in bed together, that she knew. That was part of the ceremony. But when they were alone?

  François has kissed me, she thought. But only in the same way as Uncle le Balafre and Uncle the Cardinal; or as the Marys and I kiss one another to say bonjour or au revoir. It is exactly the same. Indeed, how can it be any different tomorrow? I know there is special knowledge that comes to men, but François is not yet a man.

  She sighed and rolled over. The light covers felt comforting in the chilly April air of predawn. François had remained small; he barely reached her shoulder. Moreover, he had never been well; he suffered from coughs and colds and fevers, and had the puffy, pale face of an invalid. And the whining, cantankerous nature of one as well, more was the pity. The only person he seemed to regard as a friend and not an enemy was Mary, his designated partisan and protector. For her alone he managed a smile and an attempt at fetching his own toys. The rest he ordered about languidly.

  Poor François, thought Mary. How I wish his body would grow strong!

  But her thoughts did not follow where that would inevitably lead. If François had been a normal fourteen-year-old, with widening shoulders and deepening voice, with eyes that followed women, the promise of her forthcoming marriage would be altogether changed.

  A chorus of birdsong now sprang up outside the windows, which began to reveal their outline against the fading purple sky. The pale stones, the pointed arches, looked like a church window; and indeed, this was an old cloister, now the palace of the Archbishop of Paris. Outside the windows were blooming branches, trees just getting their April leaves. The birds sat chittering in them, ever more shrilly.

  She drifted partly to sleep, the birdsong drowning her senses. She dreamed, or pictured, a man in the branches outside, crouching there, balancing on the limb as easily as a monkey. His face was dark—or was it merely begrimed? He smiled, slowly, making an ivory slot in the shadowy visage. Then he moved, and with such grace and power he seemed more than a mortal man, or perhaps less—perhaps an animal.

  He was beckoning her, wordlessly. Or rather, she felt compelled to rise and follow him, to leave the safety of the stone floor and protective windows and come out onto the swaying branch with him. She approached, and felt the chill wind blowing in the open window, and saw the lightening green haze outside, a haze made of the rising sun shining through a hundred thousand baby leaves, translucent and tender. The sun, behind him, made an aureole around his head, and she could not see to whom she was going.

  She blinked awake. The covers had fallen away, and the chill breeze in her dream was merely the loss of a blanket. The sun was just rising, but it shone through empty branches. Mary left her bed and looked out at the black limb directly beneath her window, strong enough to support a person, but there was no one there.

  She was left feeling both uneasy and perplexed. I should go back to bed, dream again, and then wake up, she thought. But it is late already. It will not be long until they come in to dress me.

  Her bridal gown and mantle were draped over a wooden stand at the far end of the chamber, where she had slept alone by her own insistence this night.

  Now she made her way to the bridal dress, and stood looking at it as it fell in liquid folds over the wooden form. It was dazzling white; she had had her way absolutely. When she had summoned the court tailor, Balthazzar, and described the dress she wanted, he too had argued. “No, no, Your Royal Highness, here in France white is the colour of mourning. It will not do for a wedding gown!” Balthazzar prided himself on his knowledge of materials, how they draped, and even the history of each fabric and colour. “May I suggest blue, the blue of the skies of the Loire in May—”

  “You may suggest,” she had said with a smile, “but I insist on white.” So together they had selected a fine white silk the shade of snowdrops and lily-of-the-valley, and he had made the bodice to gleam with pearls like morning dew.

  Draped to one side was the mantle and enormously long train, blue-grey velvet embroidered with white silk and more pearls. It weighed many pounds, it was so covered with precious stones. It would take two people to bear it after her.

  On a table of inlaid mother-of-pearl lay the crown-royal, made especially for her of the finest gold and set with emeralds, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. Next to it, in an ivory box, lay the Great Harry, her inheritance from her grandmother, Margaret Tudor. She had not been allowed to possess it until now.

  She took it from the box and held it up to the light. The sunlight penetrated the blood-red mystery of the stone�
��s inner fire and flashed it on the stone wall of the room. It winked and throbbed in bursts of colour. Its beauty stunned her.

  My grandmother was given this as a wedding gift from her father, she thought. When she was even a year younger—fourteen!—than I am now. And she was going to a husband she had never seen, a man much older than she. Did the stone protect her in any way at all?

  How lucky I am, she thought, that I am not being sent away to some foreign country to marry a man I’ve never seen. I can stay in France and marry my friend.

  Marry a friend.

  There are those who marry for love, she suddenly thought. My grandmother, Margaret Tudor, she married once for politics and once for love. And my great-great-grandfather, Edward IV of England, married a commoner secretly. She was older than he, and a widow besides. And then there was my great uncle, Henry VIII, who married for love—not once, but three times! And made a mess, leaving those disinherited daughters.

  She smiled at the thought of the English lover-King. No, her way was the normal way—an arranged, political marriage, as soon as the bride was old enough. So it had been with Katherine of Aragon, with Catherine de Médicis, with Margaret Tudor, with Margaret Beaufort, with Madeleine of France, her father’s first, frail wife.…

  Yet all the love matches, scandalous in their time, had been made by her blood relatives, and she found the idea curious. She could not imagine it.

  * * *

  The sun was bright and the sky empty of clouds, piercingly blue over the huge crowds of merchants, shopkeepers, apprentices, and workmen thronging the Paris streets. The fates had granted Mary Stuart a perfect, clear wedding day in notoriously fickle April. Much of the ceremony was to be held outdoors, on a specially constructed pavilion in front of Notre-Dame, called a ciel-royal, hung with blue cypress silk embroidered with gold fleurs de lys and emblazoned with the arms of Scotland. A velvet carpet repeated the same colours and patterns beneath their feet. Not for two hundred years had the people of Paris been able to witness the wedding of a dauphin, and the city was in a fervour of anticipation—of the costumes, the music, the ceremony, and the traditional largesse to be thrown to the crowds. They were hungry to be dazzled.