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

by Sarah Gristwood

  Twenty-four

  When the queen swooned, her ladies just thought they’d seen this before. Never so sudden a fall, maybe. But while action was called for, while danger threatened, there she would be with her cheeks aglow and her heart aflame, doing more than anyone would ever dare ask of her with an almost inhuman energy.

  Then – once it was all over, after there had been a pause – came the collapse into abject misery. The slump that skewed her gaze and slowed her speech seemed like a veil to hide the real queen away.

  But this time it was different, and they knew it all too quickly. Lord Bothwell might as well have been casting his own pain and fever onto the queen by witchcraft – ‘And with him, anything is possible,’ added Seton to Fleming crossly.

  Early in the month Bothwell had gone thief-hunting in Liddesdale – you had to grant it to him, he did that sort of duty assiduously – and one robber had managed to shoot him in the hand, the head, the body. Word came from his castle of the Hermitage that he was like to die.

  The same day he was hurt, the queen arrived at Jedburgh to hold a justice eyre there. She too did duty assiduously. When she’d been sitting a week, and he’d been lying a week, she rode over to pay a visit, with a party of lords, and her ladies, and Lord Moray.

  It had been a long ride – thirty miles there and thirty miles back the same day, but when Seton looked back at the trek out it seemed almost like a respite, a holiday. Some of the bracken gold, and some still bright green; the pink ghosts of the willowherb and the grey-green of the gorse to make a tapestry. Coppery reeds standing up from the bogs, and maybe that’s what did the damage.

  On the way back the queen’s horse stumbled – maybe her hand on the bridle was lax from relief, that Bothwell would live to fight another day. She was thrown into a boggy mire, and they had to take refuge in a cottage to dry her clothes, before they could even continue on their way.

  But back in Jedburgh, first she fell sick, and then she fell sicker, and that’s when they really started to worry.

  Not just their usual worry when they nursed her Majesty. Worry what they could do for the pain in her side, worry that she seemed so low and dreary. The worries that lapped her in care – soft shawls for her shoulders and hot bricks for her feet, and any little thing that might cheer her, warm her, warm as the pastilles they burnt to drive out any miasma.

  This was different. This was ugly. Oh, the usual ills were frightening enough. But this was like a storm that ripped through her whole body. She cried out that the pain in her left side was like a boar spear, and as she cried out she choked, and red blood heaved up from her belly.

  She fainted as they got her to bed, and she never entirely came out of her swoon. The next day, great shudders took her body, like a poisoned dog, and when she tried to speak she couldn’t frame the words, though they strained to hear what she was trying to say. Outside the door of her chambers the vultures were gathering – a court full of men, knees flexed for the race to the top of the dunghill, if she should die and the world should change.

  The worst was when they realised – she seemed hardly to know it – that she could not see. When the candle flame passed before her eyes, they just stared blank, like an animal in pain, not flickering with the light to the smallest degree.

  It was Fleming’s eyes that filled with tears as, stricken, she looked across the queen’s body – like a corpse already – to Seton who, herself blinded by them, turned dumbly away. Nau, the queen’s French doctor, looked up from his work and told them to go – not unkindly. He’d had them chafing her Majesty’s limbs for so many hours Seton’s hands were stiff as an old lady’s.

  ‘Get some rest. You can’t help your mistress if you fall sick too. I will tell them to call you if there’s a change – either way.’

  That fourth day they woke, on the pallet bed they’d shared, to find they’d reached out for each other in the night, as a child might reach for a rag dolly. They missed Livy – Beaton too, maybe. Something about the queen’s illness made them all feel solitary – stranded, in the land of the sick – the ripples of loneliness spreading out, like a stone thrown in a pond.

  Seton sent the maid for fresh linen. They’d all been wearing the same clothes for days.

  They had woken also to hear that the queen was easier, that she was improving – though Seton couldn’t but notice that Nau still looked grave. It was a week after she fell ill, on the twenty-fourth of October, that suddenly she collapsed again, quite suddenly. For a moment, for those around her, there was a sense of outrage, as well as incredulity, as though Death had cheated in the great game he was playing with her Majesty.

  Then, sheer terror swept every other feeling away.

  She hasn’t made her confession, or had the last rites – she can’t go unshriven, was Seton’s thought as she looked down at her Majesty’s unbreathing body. She turned to snap out, ‘Fetch a priest, quickly!’ and half-moved to stop Nau, who was handling the poor corpse without reverence, roughly.

  ‘No – wait,’ said Fleming suddenly, and it seemed their own breath stopped in their chests as they realised what it must mean, that Nau still saw reason to work on her Majesty.

  Servants, the girl Morag, were already opening the windows, to let the queen’s poor spirit fly free. But Nau was bandaging her legs, her arms, her toes; rubbing them all the while. He snapped out an order for wine, which Fleming rushed to supply, and then, to Seton, ‘Help me.’

  Crouching behind the queen on the bed, Seton tried to haul upright the limp heavy body, while Nau forced open the jaws, like a tooth-drawer with a reluctant patient. He poured wine down her throat and, unmistakably, they saw her swallow.

  He signed to his assistant – ‘Enema. Quickly,’ and the young man fumbled for the syringe, as Nau turned the queen’s body. Seton bent low over her mistress’s head, cradling her as though she were awake to feel the indignity.

  What happened next was – ‘Well, a miracle, I suppose,’ but Seton’s voice tailed away, uncertainly. It seemed the wrong word to use, for anything so messy. But when the maids had cleared the soiled bed linen away, black with old blood and stinking like a privy, then soon after the queen opened eyes that actually saw her ladies; croaked a word as the beads of sweat began on her face. The fever had broken, on the ninth day.

  It was only afterwards, as she lay on her pallet too tired to sleep, that Seton remembered something else about those days. At the worst of it, while the queen was still conscious enough to know the torment she was in, it had seemed certain Death would come: the question was, how quickly. And Seton had said, hadn’t she, inside her head, it’s all right, you can go now, just go, easily? Like she’d said it to that caged bird, so desperate to be free.

  She’d been thinking of the queen’s good, of course she had – that she shouldn’t suffer longer than necessary, that her soul should fly free. Once before, in France, she’d held a long-loved dog, now fallen sick of a growth, praying that nature would step in; that she wouldn’t have to get the huntsman with his falchion to put the beast out of its misery.

  But – as fatigue, and something else, sent prickles along her skin – Seton understood two shameful truths. Shameful for her, anyway. The first was, that the queen could not let herself go. Oh, and it wasn’t about the country. How could she let herself go, with James still a baby in the nursery? The fat rose petal jelly feel of him, the first tooth in his gum, or the way he plunged into sleep as if sleep were a foreign country. She’d fought off Death when he was born – as any woman must do, tied to her baby long after the cord was cut. And how could she leave him to struggle as she’d struggled, knowing she had run away?

  I didn’t understand that, and I should have, Seton thought. I should have because, helpless in my arms, you – queen though you are – you are in a sense my charge, my baby.

  And the other truth? That was worse, Seton thought. If the queen had indeed died then her spirit wouldn’t have been the only one to find itself in some way freed.

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bsp; Twenty-five

  It was almost the end of November before the queen was recovered enough, but then they set out towards Stirling and the baby’s christening, at Craigmillar, Sir Simon Preston’s house. Preston, who was married to a sister of Maitland’s; know who’s who and you’ll know what’s what, the nun who taught them their history at Poissy used to say, crossly.

  The great castle stood apart from Edinburgh and yet almost within sight of the city. Blue views out to the Firth, the other way. No one there unless invited and yet everyone handy. No need to bring anyone in too conspicuously. A good place in which to brew a conspiracy. Indeed, it seemed to Seton later that everyone there had been conspiring in some way.

  Had she felt it at the time? Impossible to see back so clearly. At the time, surely, it just seemed there was a problem to be solved: the problem of Lord Darnley.

  He visited her Majesty’s sickbed in Jedburgh for just a single day. (Even Bothwell had himself carried there in a litter, and did the thing properly.) Darnley had holed up in Glasgow, the heartland of his family. Still writing to half the heads of Europe, amid fears, always, he’d kidnap the young prince; for it’s not as if that were a new idea, in the annals of Scottish monarchy.

  Hadn’t it felt almost cosy, how everyone, factions at an end at last, could unite in their disapproval of Lord Darnley?

  Perhaps not cosy, exactly. For the queen, after all, this was no palace power shuffle, but something that affected her most intimately. Something that made her life a living hell, as she cried out once to her ladies.

  She was ill again at Craigmillar, with something of the trouble she’d had at Jedburgh, but this time no one doubted it was brought on by melancholy. Even the roughest of the lords was clucking in sympathy. Seton thought, not without humour, so this is what it takes to get a castle full of men to take a woman’s domestic problems seriously. But illness in the queen’s body was an illness in the body politic… and the more blame could be heaped on Darnley, the more it suited everybody.

  But, what to do, precisely? It was Maitland who stitched the different elements together, like a woman piecing together the individual panels of an embroidery. Stitched the other lords into a concord that all the Rizzio conspirators had to be pardoned at last; yes, even the one who’d pointed his pistol at the queen’s pregnant belly. Maitland, of course, would be the one who was going to have to persuade the queen to agree.

  It was Maitland, too, who first started talk of a divorce – ‘Or an annulment,’ as he amended quickly. Divorce, after all, was a Tudor foible, too redolent of old King Henry. But an annulment – if the Holy Catholic Church had blessed the marriage, then the Holy Catholic Church could make it go away.

  Her Majesty’s great concern was that it shouldn’t prejudice her son’s legitimacy. It would be Bothwell who declared jovially his parents had been divorced, and it hadn’t hurt him any. But how, the queen pressed Maitland, might it be done; and did everyone agree, what, even Lord Moray?

  Lord Moray, Maitland assured her, would look through his fingers at anything they might do, even if he did not say so openly…

  And that’s where he betrayed himself, really.

  The queen beat her hands in panic on the carved arms of her chair, so hard her rings left a mark on the wood. Rather than have anything done to her honour and her conscience, she cried out, she would have her situation remain as it was. Forever, if necessary.

  Maitland soothed her; a good thick flow of words, like honey. But later, much later, Seton wondered if then, they had not both given themselves away.

  If the queen dreamt something might be done against her conscience, did she really think she could end the idea so easily? She must know ideas grow like weeds at court, their roots hidden away where no one can see. And yet she said nothing, nothing more. Was she that foolish, really?

  But nor did Seton herself say anything, after Maitland had gone away. Nothing as she stood there brushing the queen’s hair with long calming strokes, nothing as she put the hairpieces away. Nothing as she stirred spices into the queen’s warm wine and saw her settled comfortably.

  It was quite her own business if, at night, she thought of one of the queen’s ancestors, an English king, a King Henry of four centuries ago. He’d had a dear advisor, grown too proud, and one day the king said he wished he were rid of him. Four of his knights had taken him at his word, and when the advisor – Thomas Becket – was dead, then the king said he was very sorry…

  ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ he had said. Those words seemed to echo through Seton’s head, as clearly as if her Queen Mary had spoken them,

  Who will rid me? Who will rid me? Who will rid me?

  If the first conspiracy was a conspiracy of silence then nobody – no one at all – rode away from Craigmillar guilt free.

  *

  The second conspiracy was a good conspiracy, if you use that word when two queens agree. It had been in the worst throes of her illness, at Jedburgh, that she wrote herself, through her private secretary. Queen to queen, woman to woman. You couldn’t but admire her: there it was, again – use whatever tools you have to hand, even the weakness of your own body.

  She asked then that if she died, and it seemed all too likely, Elizabeth would stand her babe’s ‘protector’. Not guardian, or governor, precisely, but still… Elizabeth must have been flattered, and touched too. And who knows, perhaps it would have given her, too, a way out. A son without a husband, or the childbirth, and the blood, and the ropes. A virgin’s birth, you might say.

  Anyway, she actually agreed, in theory, to declare the queen and baby James her successors – with concessions on both sides, naturally. A woman’s, as well as a monarch’s, way of doing things: and for Elizabeth an heir still safely in the nursery.

  *

  There was, there must have been, a third, a real conspiracy. No one around the queen could ever be sure just who had gone how far. No one really wanted to be. But the thought was there: if not divorce, then what might be done, to be rid of Lord Darnley?

  That’s what Maitland had been hinting, surely? There were some who must have known, and others perhaps who took care not to know too clearly. Self-deception? Self-preservation? Or just policy? But it was one way in which they were all guilty.

  *

  Perhaps there was yet one more conspiracy at Craigmillar. Or one dream, one thought shared. Maybe what he planned and what he said would bind Maitland, newly forgiven Maitland, closer to the queen. Perhaps she would feel the warmer towards him for what he did not say.

  Because, let us not forget, there was something Maitland the man wanted, and it was in the gift of the Queen’s Majesty. The ups and downs of Craigmillar Castle – the modern new bedroom block, and the draughty old halls – were a maze Fleming trod with a new lightness in her step, as if she were of the element, airy.

  *

  When at last they rode away, Seton looked back at towering Craigmillar, craggy like its name, and thought for a moment in the odd winter light that its towers might suddenly fall on them, broken balustrades onto broken bodies, clouds of dust rising from the masonry. Brought down by the weight of all those thoughts, those plans, that secrecy.

  Then the vision changed, as the November sky grew fiery with the end of day, and she saw its cupped shape, the tall towers cradling the courtyard inside, as a giant crucible, in which to brew some alchemy.

  Twenty-six

  But the first thing the court had on its mind was a different sort of duty – ‘And do you suppose,’ said Seton to Fleming, ‘we’re the only ones knee-deep in problems one minute,’ – she’d hesitated, but shied away from the word, ‘plots’ – ‘and the next, we’re trying to plan this party?’

  Fleming only smiled. Truth was they both knew, as any courtier must do, that the two things were just sides of the same coin. Prince James was to be baptised at Stirling Castle. And there was a good reason the queen wanted to make this the greatest event Scotland had seen in a generation.

&
nbsp; A healthy male babe in the cradle; what a triumph! Elizabeth of England was racked with jealousy. So, three days of solid spectacle, ‘And stuffing our faces,’ said Fleming sourly, but then she’d been down in the Stirling kitchens, settling menus with the palace cooks, for what seemed like an eternity. The two remaining Marys felt as though they were doing the work of four – but then, it was a huge festivity.

  Masques, processions, a mock siege – at least no one would think of dumping that one on the ladies – and remembering to get the queen’s little dogs shut indoors before the final firework display. Loans had been begged from every merchant in Edinburgh to pay for it all, and if they or their wives came to Stirling to see what they were paying for, they’d better carry away with them the memory of a word and a smile – if not from the queen herself then at least from one of her famous ladies.

  *

  For the last night of the celebrations, a device was planned that had every man in the castle finding excuse to pass by the comptroller’s office and reach out to fiddle with the thing, till the harassed man swore the next meddler would leave without his fingertips, whatever his rank might be… An engine to carry in the supper dishes, as if by magic, while the waiters, dressed as nymphs and satyrs, stood ostentatiously by.

  ‘No, no one knows how it works.’ Seton was grasping after her patience, but her brother had brought his fascinated son to see the sights, and Seton wasn’t sure if she was glad or sorry that that made serious conversation unlikely.

  In the end the gadget had broken down as it carried in the final dishes, but, ‘—least of our worries,’ said Fleming briskly, after they’d checked that no one was hurt, and helped to usher the guests away.

  Seton only wished she could take it so calmly. It wasn’t only the engine’s failure, or the fact that one of the valets, Bastian Pages, had been waggling his satyr’s tail in the direction of the English envoys: perhaps it was actually just as well that the engine’s collapse caught every eye.