The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power...

by Sarah Gristwood

  As they drew nearer to Inverness, no one had thought for anything but the business in hand. They rode straight to the castle; an army of ambassadors and ladies. The captain refused to open the gates without instruction from the earl. Of course he proved to be yet another son of the arrogant Huntly.

  This was flat treason. The castle was royal property, and no door in the land should be closed to her Majesty. But she took it quietly and they rode away. Another lodging in town was found for her that night, while her Marys slept on pallets around her bed, and the rest of the court made shift as best they may.

  The queen was silent but bright-eyed; almost happy. Seton was proud of her – and a little in awe, maybe.

  Next day, when they returned, the castle gates were open. Instruction had come from Huntly. Clearly, he had not quite mustered the stomach yet for a full-blown rebellion. The queen rode in with her head held high, and a spot of high colour in each cheek.

  As they dismounted and passed into the hall, she beckoned to Lord Moray and gave an instruction. He looked startled, if not entirely displeased. It was Beaton who explained, later, that she had given instruction the captain should be hung from the battlements for his insolence of yesterday.

  That expedition north, thought Seton afterwards, changed all of them in some way – and yet, it’s not any thrill or qualm of danger that she remembered most clearly, nor riding through the woods and valleys as wary as a soldier in enemy territory. Not even the sight and sound of the Highlanders who flocked to Inverness to support her Majesty, sleeping in the heather in their plaids and skins by night, and clustering the streets talking their strange archaic language by day. ‘Wild Scots’, Randolph wrote in his report. (‘What, as opposed to tame ones?’ giggled Livy.)

  No, clearest in her memory was the face on the Inverness tailor, when told to create a ‘Highland dress’ for her Majesty. She ordered it for her Marys too, needless to say.

  Livy looked like a badly tied parcel in hers; her plump figure needed something more corseted. Fleming looked romantic and fey. Beaton was the surprise; she alone looked like a genuine Highlander, as much part of the moors and heath as they.

  Seton pulled hers on with a sigh and told herself the nuns at Poissy had preached at the four young Marys about the mortification of their vanity.

  *

  The weather was cooling as they set out from Inverness again, back towards Aberdeen, pursuing their quarry. The day was sunny, but under it you could feel the chill, like bones under a cat’s fur. Even before they left, Lord James came to the queen with an important face, and warnings the Gordons were waiting to kidnap her as she crossed the River Spey.

  She just thrust the warning away, and in her presence her court took the warning as lightly as she.

  But that night, Seton couldn’t get to sleep. She lay there for what felt like hours, so taut with the effort of trying to lie still it felt as if ants were scrabbling under her skin.

  Finally she gave up, no longer caring if she woke the others and, pulling on a robe, slipped out of the door into the court, signing the guard not to call out.

  Up on the battlements she could breathe at last, but the chatter in her head wouldn’t go away. Tomorrow it could all come crashing down like a bird from the sky, caught by a boy’s stone. It wasn’t likely, of course it wasn’t, but tomorrow she could die. All the things she hadn’t done…

  It was so quiet beyond the walls, she heard a vixen scream and shivered a little, looking out. There were wolves in the hills out there.

  ‘Mary! What are you doing up here?’

  Seton spun round so fast that for a second she felt dizzy. She’d known, of course, that her brother was coming to join their force – the queen herself had told her so, approvingly. But finding him here when she hadn’t been prepared for it, she felt tears prickle in her eyes, and dashed them away before he could see.

  George must have felt something too, although he’d been in battle before, because he came straight as an arrow and took her in his arms, hands sliding up her arms under the wide furred sleeves.

  All the time they’d been back in Scotland, he hadn’t ever actually embraced her. But now, with his mouth against her hair, he murmured that it would be all right, that nothing would really happen, that all Seton had to do was stick close to her Majesty. ‘Look after her, Mary.’

  Chilled, Seton straightened a little in his arms.

  ‘Of course – the queen. She has been extraordinary.’

  ‘Hasn’t she? Hasn’t she? The men tell me it puts heart into them every time she comes by.’

  It was the bond between them, of course it was, their joint allegiance to her Majesty. But now she felt the tears rise in her eyes again, quite absurdly.

  Early next morning they rode bravely out of the city, with heads held high and pennants flying. The burghers knelt to kiss her Majesty’s hand as she smiled, radiantly. That would always be her way.

  But with every beat of the horse’s hooves it seemed as if a little of Seton’s courage drained away.

  George was ahead with the men, but glancing sideways under her lashes she saw that Fleming too was licking dry lips. She caught Seton’s glance and they exchanged a constrained smile. From what they could see of the queen as she rode just ahead, she alone was still as cheerful as if she were riding out to hunt.

  As they drew close to the choppy grey waters, rumour passed back along the column that a thousand men were hiding in the scrubby wood of pine and birch not two miles distant.

  ‘Why bother?’ Livy laughed nervously. ‘We wouldn’t see them if they were two feet away!’

  The bracken around was dead and brown by now, but it still stood high as a forest around the silver trunks of the young trees. But their force had grown until it was three times any number the other side could muster – if, indeed this fear itself weren’t the real secret weapon of the enemy.

  They splashed across the ford in a tense silence – Seton only realised how tense later, when, that night, she had to ask Beaton to rub her shoulders, which were tight as if someone had bound and locked them with a key. Later, George told her that war was one part action to nine parts anticipation. If ambushers there had ever been this time, they simply melted away.

  They were greeted at Aberdeen with a heroes’ welcome, and the town fathers fell to with a will and set about creating a whole new set of pageants (or at least, putting new garments on the old ones) with which to entertain her Majesty.

  There wasn’t much anyone could do about the shortage of lodging: Randolph had to share a bed with Maitland, sulkily. And that was before someone told him Huntly planned to assassinate Maitland by burning down the lodging where he lay.

  They were odd, exciting days spent there, with all the usual court rituals – fans and festivities – sketched out against this background of urgency. It seemed almost shocking at first that the life of the town went on as usual underneath the ripple of their passage, with the smell of the fish, and the noise of market day, and the barley harvest still being carted to the distilleries.

  One day as October drew towards a close, Beaton met Seton with a glowing face.

  ‘They’re carrying the Corn Queen through the town! Come on, quickly.’

  They could hear the squalling of pipes in the distance, and the streets were packed, with children held high on their parents’ shoulders or else pushing their way through the forest of stuff skirts and frieze breeches to offer up trays of baked apples and spiced pasties. The mulled ale was selling briskly.

  As the procession came into view, Seton caught her breath on a gasp of laughter. Wobbling on its platform, carried on the shoulders of four tall men, was a monstrous effigy.

  A tall sheaf of corn, caught at the waist, had been turned into the travesty of a woman with a cabbage for a head, and a plait of straw hair dangling down behind. Someone had tied hawthorn berries into the rope, so the hair looked red as her Majesty’s. Beside this Corn Queen capered the Hobby, who flourished his padded horse’s h
ead at all the prettiest girls, and tipped his wooden body suggestively.

  For a second, Seton thought she saw a familiar face in the crowd – Beaton’s maid Morag, surely? But the next wave of mummers were coming up now, circling a second figure born aloft and made of straw. This one was obviously meant to be a man since someone had stuck a large carrot, rudely upright, just where the junction of his legs would be.

  Seton caught Beaton’s eye. ‘Remember Lord Bothwell?’ They snorted with laughter, guiltily. The thought just flashed through Seton’s mind that it might have been good to have Bothwell with them in those frightening moments at the ford – but he was away exiled in France, these days.

  ‘Shove out of the way, ma, John Barleycorn’s coming through,’ one of the carriers called out, to a group of matrons in their way.

  Seton looked with fresh interest. They’d only once seen the harvest ceremonies in France. They hadn’t seemed suitable to the nuns at Poissy. But there, there had been no John Barleycorn – it was King Vine who had to be wooed and threatened into fertility so that the grapes next year would grow.

  Feted – placated – and sacrificed as well: the priest who visited the convent twice a week to oversee their classical education had told them of old Greek mythology, and of how, in one barbarous country, every year the king himself had to die.

  What were they singing? Seton strained to make out the words borne on the night air.

  ‘Hobby to lover him

  Cracky to cover him

  Cut off his head

  And then he’ll be dead!’

  Eight

  The four Marys weren’t the ones closest to the queen these days, not as at Holyrood, in tranquillity. But they were there in position around her, like some strange Amazonian guard, to wave off Lord James (Lord Moray, they should say) as he rode out at the head of an army near two thousand strong.

  George went with it, of course, and Seton had not been able to see him alone to say goodbye. So she just stood straight-backed to watch him ride away.

  Huntly was camped on the hilltop at Corrichie, and messengers brought word back to the queen – as she paced round the town, too restless to keep still – throughout the next long day. They heard how Maitland had addressed her troops, movingly; how Huntly had been chivvied down from his vantage point by the royal artillery.

  You couldn’t say it was really a surprise when they heard, at last, of victory; this was the putting down of an insurgency, not the contest of equal armies. The relief, Seton thought, was that no one she cared for had been hurt in the fray.

  There was still a frisson of oddity about the proceedings. Huntly had been captured, with two of his sons – Sir John himself, the whole cause of the trouble, and one of the youngest, a mere boy.

  But the old man had died in the saddle as they reached for him, and the surgeon who did the disembowelling, afterwards, said that his heart had burst, whether from sickness or from rage, no one could really say.

  They threw his corpse over two fish creels and brought it back to Aberdeen, to the Tollbooth, to be preserved in vinegar and aqua vitae until all the processes of justice had run their course. The queen blanched a little when they told her she’d be expected – maybe months from now – to preside over a trial of the dead body, but she seemed to have no thought of omitting the ancient ceremony.

  But that wasn’t even the strangest thing. ‘Did you hear?’ Beaton said, the next day –

  her smooth face had an unusual tinge of colour – ‘Lady Huntly’s familiars predicted the whole story.’

  The whole world knew that Lady Huntly consulted witches, but she was hardly alone in that. It was even said Bothwell, in his time on the Continent, had studied sorcery. Then there was Beaton’s aunt, Lady Reres; and a few in Fleming’s family… Seton tried not to think of how close Beaton and her Reres aunt had seemed to be growing, recently. She sometimes thought Beaton had changed, since their return to Scotland.

  ‘What—’ she said dismissively, now, ‘they saw how the battle would end? Well, I suppose the chances of their being right had to be better than evens!’

  ‘No, they told her that by night Lord Huntly would be lying dead in the Tollbooth, without a single wound on his body!’

  But it was not the case of the dead, but the fate of the living that concerned them, really.

  The queen readily agreed to pardon those Gordons who had not been directly involved in the fray. The young boy, too… But Sir John, that was another story.

  He had to die, that much was clear. And even Maitland backed Lord Moray when he said the queen must be present at the death, to put an end to any rumours that she might have encouraged his romantic pretensions in some way.

  ‘She’ll want you all there with her, too. I’m sorry,’ Maitland said to the Marys later, privately. He knew a little of the queen’s horror of bloodshed, but he could not know, as they did, the nightmares she had from her French days.

  How the Guise brothers hunted down Huguenot rebels by their hundred and had them dragged back to the castle tied to horses’ tails, to be flung into the Loire in sacks, to die on the wheel or by disembowelment, as the court watched – and the royal ladies had to stay and watch too. The fact that she had not then ordered their attendance was one for which Seton would always thank her Majesty. This could not be as bad, surely?

  *

  In fact it was both better, and worse. Better, in that though Sir John had to die, no one wanted him to suffer more than was necessary. They’d all met him, laughed with him and at him, liked him in happier times.

  And that’s why it was worse, of course. It took all the Highland plaids to stop the queen from shivering as they dressed her on the bitter, damp, autumnal day.

  They splashed silently through the streets, damp seeping through their clothes – a reminder that winter was now on its way.

  He was to die in the town marketplace, as publicly as may be, but the waiting crowds were sullen and gloomy. The blame hanging heavy as a fog in the air, and it seemed to touch even the queen herself, for all that Sir John was one declared guilty.

  In fact, as his dapper figure was led out, he came the closest of any of them to being cheerful. Seton peered through the gloom to see his face, as he stood on the hastily made wooden scaffold. His farewell speech was full of a boy’s bravado – he said the queen’s gracious presence would make his dying easy.

  Everything in Seton revolted from the thought. What must it feel like to be led out to die like this, with the health still coursing in your veins, and know you were to behave as if you were going to a party?

  To give the executioner your forgiveness and a coin, to kneel down and lay your head on the block, when every instinct screamed at you to fight, to run away?

  Her gaze was drawn, steel on a magnet, to one still figure – Sir John’s mother, Lady Huntly – eyes hooded, upright, like a wounded hawk, hiding the hurt behind its curved hard breast. Seton found she was holding her breath, as if that motionless figure could send a curse at them across the square.

  As if it should do, maybe.

  It would have been a better death if only the headsman, overawed by the occasion, had not been so clumsy. It wasn’t one clean blow, or one blow at all, to take the handsome head from the body.

  As the axe came down, the prone figure gave a cry, and the headsman battled to wrench his blade free.

  As it came down again and the first blood dripped down into the sawdust, it was the queen who gave a scream and fainted, the heavy clothes collapsing around her so that she sank slowly down as if into a pile of plumage.

  Lady Huntly just turned, and walked silently away.

  PART II

  Autumn 1562 – Summer 1563

  Nine

  It was in a chastened mood that they rode back to Edinburgh. When they’d got her back from the marketplace in Aberdeen, the queen had collapsed.

  She’d kept to her bed the whole next day, weeping. The doctors dosed her with tincture of rosemary and with the loca
l aqua vitae, which they call whisky. The truth is they’d all developed something of a taste for it. Its strange peaty taste seemed to keep the horrors at bay.

  So much for the Highland holiday. But at Holyrood, a matter was waiting that turned the queen’s thoughts immediately.

  A letter had been handed to her in Aberdeen, on the day of the battle of Corrichie – a letter from England. That was no new occurrence. Seton heard that while she’d been away from court, the Queen of England and the Queen of Scotland had been corresponding almost weekly – and heard, too, that Queen Mary had been carrying her ‘sister’s’ missives next to her heart, letting them show when there was anyone there to see.

  But this latest letter was different, in several ways. There was a postscript, of which Queen Mary spoke only to Randolph, quietly. Elizabeth would have written longer, she said, ‘but for the burning fever that holds me in its grip’. By the time they reached Holyrood it was known the Queen of England was gravely – some said mortally – sick of smallpox.

  It was not the English Queen’s illness that kept them busy, those first few days back. Queen Mary too fell sick of a fever – what the doctors had taken to calling influenza – and she kept to her own bed for six days.

  They prescribed the froth of snails, served up in woman’s milk, but she pushed the goblet away. But she let her Marys massage her temples with oil of lavender to drive out the cold humours, as they loaded the quilts on her shivering body. None of them said as much, but they’d never longed for France more fervently.

  But in the midst of her own tremors, Queen Mary called out to hear each new report from London – of how Elizabeth’s heat rose until her life was despaired of, how her council stuck to her chamber night and day.

  Once – in the small hours, when a patient is worst – the queen reached out a burning hand, staring fixedly into Seton’s eyes.