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

by Sarah Gristwood

  Almost every lord in Scotland got to scratch an itch of enmity with Darnley’s death. Every patriot thought if Darnley were gone, it would be better for the country. Yes, but who might gain enough, to risk all the consequences of his dying this way? Who else, but someone with his eye on a prize – the great prize that was Queen Mary.

  Not that the queen would have dreamt of his plans, of course, Seton told herself convincingly.

  *

  Five minutes later, she was clutching her conviction round her like a cloak, as she stood aghast in the doorway of the royal apartments, from which all order seemed to have fled. Piles of clothes on the bed, dismaying maids who’d never before been asked to pack so hastily.

  ‘You know the attack was meant for me, Seton? Of course they thought I’d still be in the house. It was meant for me.’ Hanging onto her arm as if it were a lifeline, the queen seemed to be continuing a conversation she’d begun already. Perhaps we all look the same to her at the moment, thought Seton, guiltily.

  ‘It’ll be my brother behind it. Lord Moray,’ – as if Seton might have forgotten his name. ‘We’re moving from here into the castle. For,’ – and she was parroting another’s words – ‘for our own security.’

  Of course, Seton thought, she’s trying to convince herself. But all the same it is a possibility.

  Looking around at the mess on the floor, she thought it looked like a party of criminals, fleeing the country. But she found she was patting the queen’s hand, and murmuring consolingly.

  *

  Yes, but in the end you felt like a tennis ball, Seton thought, batted from one side of the court to another, from reluctant blame to a more reluctant pity, and then back again. On the very way to Edinburgh Castle – on that desperate flight to safety – the queen had only gone and stopped off for a party.

  Another wedding, the bride was one of her favourite serving women and she’d promised, and this was the kind of promise she always kept.

  But all the same didn’t she think how it would play? With men even now hanging the black draperies she’d ordered for her apartment in the castle, where she should stay secluded for forty days, mourning Lord Darnley? Bat the ball: admit in your heart the queen is wrong. Think, even, how much better Elizabeth in England might have managed it. Had managed it, when her favourite Robert Dudley was suspected of murdering his wife Amy.

  But then, no sooner had they reached the castle than – the old pattern again – the queen collapsed. Bat the ball away again, it’s back to sympathy. They buried Darnley at night, six days after he died, and with scant ceremony, but the queen’s ladies were too busy to worry. And then two days after that, it was suddenly off to Seton Palace for a few days’ recuperation.

  ‘Lovely to go home, Seton, won’t it be?’ demanded the queen, with febrile gaiety.

  *

  In a way, it was lovely, or nearly. In Edinburgh, everyone had known too little or too much. The queen was on display like a beast in a menagerie, labelled a widow who wouldn’t mourn properly.

  Out at Seton, above the Forth, where the air was just softening towards the faintest hint of spring, the queen could be who and what she really was – and oddly enough, that was sorry.

  She couldn’t mourn Darnley but she could mourn the marriage she’d once hoped to have with him. She could be sorry, heaven knows, for the wreck of her rapport with Elizabeth. Scottish embassies had been scurrying to every court in Europe, expressing her Majesty’s shock and horror, and describing how it was only by chance she herself had escaped injury.

  But the letter Elizabeth sent back was scandalised in every syllable. ‘Madam,’ she began it coldly:

  ‘My ears have been so astounded, my mind so disturbed and my heart so appalled at hearing the horrible report that I can scarcely summon the spirit to write. I cannot but tell you what all the world is thinking…’ Yes, Queen Mary could be sorry things had turned out this way.

  Not quite sorry enough, maybe.

  *

  Seton was outside by the archery butts in the hopeful morning air, watching the queen’s graceful figure bend the bow and take aim.

  ‘Her Majesty is quite recovered, I see.’ Seton hadn’t heard George come up behind her; anyone watching them at that moment would have seen the family resemblance clearly.

  Seton opened her mouth to make some excuse, about doctor’s urging, and the exercise being healthy – but the words died within her. A sound almost like a hiss was forced out of George.

  ‘You know what they’re saying in the city?’

  Seton didn’t answer. Everyone knew, or at least could guess. They’d ridden out of Edinburgh through a forest of placards that seemed to have sprung up overnight, every one of them proclaiming Bothwell guilty. And him riding beside them, as escort to Queen Mary.

  The queen had been distraught. ‘How can they? How can they?’ But she hadn’t heeded the warning – if anything, it had made her keep him the closer, as her sole protector. Elizabeth had warned her already.

  ‘Men say that instead of seizing the murderers, you are looking through your fingers.’ No one had ever known Elizabeth write so vehemently. ‘I exhort, I counsel, I beg you deeply to consider – at once, even if it be the nearest friend you have, to lay your hands upon the man who has been guilty of the crime…’

  But to Queen Mary, Bothwell appeared in a different guise – as the only man strong enough to protect her against the rest of the nobility.

  There was a ripple of applause from the figures by the butts. This had been a contest: the queen and Bothwell against Argyll and Huntly. Who had lost, gracefully. Now the queen was exclaiming that they should all dine out, and that the losers should pay. There was a family resemblance in the set of their shoulders as Seton and her brother both turned away.

  Seton sneezed – aware suddenly of the February damp seeping through her shoes – and remembered what her nurse Bridie used to say. Call a blessing when anyone sneezes, because all that air going out will leave them empty. And where there’s a space something will come to fill it – God or the devil, as maybe.

  Seton shook her head. This wasn’t devil’s magic made this mess. The gunpowder that blew up Kirk o’Field was laid by human agency.

  Man and magic – they could work hand in hand. Standing there above the Firth, with her face to the wind and the water a grey drone below, Seton thought of Beaton, absent from court almost a year now.

  Of Beaton.

  And of Bridie.

  Twenty-nine

  ‘The thing about Bothwell is, he knows what he wants.’

  ‘They all know what they want,’ said Seton dismissively. But she was glad, very glad, to be talking it over with Livy. Who’d have guessed Livy – the first to leave, the least committed – would be the one who’d come back to court so frequently? Or that Livy’s down-to-earth practicality would seem so valuable, suddenly?

  ‘Yes, but he goes straight out and gets it, doesn’t hang around brooding like Lord Moray. Anyhow, he’s got it all now, Bothwell, hasn’t he? Commander of the royal bodyguards, Governor of Edinburgh Castle, Comptroller of the Household.’ But Livy fell silent – even Livy.

  True, she hadn’t been around these last few weeks, to see the way the queen was around Lord Bothwell. The way she let him be. But this was a matter she’d understand, Livy.

  ‘I can see why soldiers follow him,’ said Seton suddenly. They were walking in the palace gardens, despite the whipping wind, where the brave shoots of bulbs were already thrusting from the earth, this early March day. ‘He’s a lucky man, or one who makes his luck, and men like to follow someone lucky.’ But, women, on the other hand… That was what Seton didn’t say.

  ‘She has to have someone, doesn’t she?’ For once Livy was speaking seriously. ‘I mean, remember how it was in France.’

  They both paced silent, looking back to a time when court politics seemed just a game for a lady to play, and a whole circle of protective, proscribing men stood around Queen Mary.

 
‘I suppose that’s still how she’s trying to play it,’ Seton said thoughtfully. ‘But—’ She darted a sideways glance at Livy, not quite liking to ask too openly.

  But Livy knew the question, and the answer, too. ‘Oh yes,’ she said with confidence. ‘There’s that about him too. For better or for worse.’

  It was as if Livy – ‘Livy the Lusty’, as Randolph once called her; Livy who knew all the men of the court – were opening Seton’s eyes to a world she didn’t know if she wanted to see.

  *

  Lent was never easy. Seton and Livy urged the queen that this year, surely, she might be allowed to eat meat in this endless season of fast days. Even her confessor agreed – but the queen was determined to obey every rule, as if she were punishing herself in some way.

  On Palm Sunday, right at the start of April, she collapsed in chapel, swooned clear away. It was a requiem mass for Lord Darnley – and what a waste, Seton found herself thinking cynically, even as they waved burnt feathers under her nose and she began to come around, like someone climbing out of a deep pit with the utmost difficulty.

  If only the queen had shown that much distress earlier, perhaps – just perhaps – they wouldn’t be in quite so much trouble today.

  *

  The queen had tried to do the right thing. She’d written to Lennox, Darnley’s father, promising a full and fair trial of whomever he believed guilty. But when Lennox’s answer came back – ‘Bothwell’ – what was Queen Mary going to say?

  It wasn’t Lennox, the baby’s grandfather, she’d asked to watch over James, while she journeyed to and fro at Seton. It was Bothwell, and Huntly, who she’d trusted to guard him. He was back in the safety of fortress Stirling, today. Fear makes strange bedfellows – the queen had even allowed Bothwell to bring Morton to see her, secretly. No wonder her brother Moray had left for France, no wonder Maitland had been there just enough to satisfy Lord Bothwell – and then stayed away.

  If she had seen Maitland, Seton wouldn’t have known what to say. If she wanted to speak to anybody it was probably George, or even Livy. At least she knew they all felt the same way.

  It was Livy, tight-lipped, who’d helped Seton sort through the chest of fine furs, stored since Marie of Guise’s day. The queen wanted to give some to Bothwell, to trim his nightgown; she’d given the order crisply, her head held high.

  The queen had even told Seton to give Bothwell some old church vestments to cut up for the fabric, as well as Darnley’s horses and the best of his clothes. Seton didn’t think she could have borne it, if it hadn’t been for Livy. She handed them over to the tailor with rebellion churning like bad fish in her belly.

  The man said, with a bold toss of the head, that it was fitting the goods of the victim should be given to the executioner.

  Seton should have reproved him – if not given him over into charge. Instead, silent again, she once more turned away.

  *

  On Good Friday, five days after the queen’s collapse, she went to chapel again with Seton and Livy, her two remaining Marys. And stayed there – four hours?, thought Seton, incredulously.

  Church is the place you don’t only pray, you think, quietly. If that isn’t prayer, in a way. And there was a lot to think about – for the queen, and for Seton.

  She didn’t know about Livy.

  For herself, Seton found her thoughts kept straying to what had happened at her home recently. Not the archery contest: it was a later visit. She could swear the court was beating a path between Seton Palace and the city.

  They’d been walking in the gardens, looking out over the blue view, when an old man approached, bowing respectfully. A former servant of Lord Darnley’s now fallen on hard times, he said. Could her Majesty relieve him in any way?

  Seton was already fumbling for the purse at her side – no question what the queen’s answer would be – when Bothwell was upon the man, beating him until the red blood spurted from his mouth. Seton was still ashamed to think they’d none of them intervened – but it had happened so quickly. (And, be honest, weren’t they all frightened, at the sight of so much savagery?)

  The man limped home. George sent to enquire, when Seton told him the story; but the old man had succumbed to his injuries. His daughter, with reproach in her eyes, repeated his words before he died – ‘I have served in France, England and Scotland but the like was never done to me.’

  When Seton told the queen, her Majesty said nothing but to order the daughter should be sent some money.

  Seton wondered if the old man was in her Majesty’s thoughts, as they sat in chapel that day. Queen Mary had captured one of her hands, and one of Livy’s. And there bloomed, between the three of them, the image – lush, effulgent, insulting – of the placard that had appeared most recently.

  It showed a mermaid and a hare – the hare was Bothwell’s family symbol, of course, and a cipher identified the naked crowned mermaid as Queen Mary. She held a rolled net in her left hand, and in the other a sea anemone. Sceptre and orb; but the net was also what mermaids, prostitutes, used to catch the unwary. And while the hare was mounted with hard thrusting swords, the sea anemone above it – pink, glistening, its tentacles waving around its gaping mouth – looked like, well, like a woman’s…

  ‘They’re saying it’s from Ovid. We all know what sort of stories he wrote!’ Livy had giggled in almost her old way.

  *

  The queen hadn’t laughed when she heard of it. But nothing seemed to change her mind about the path she was taking – or perhaps it was just that she couldn’t see any other way.

  Easter Sunday brought the end of Lent; they moved from the castle back into Holyrood, and celebrated with dancing, and all the usual ‘joyousity’, as one of the ambassadors put it sourly. And to be an inmate of Queen Mary’s bedchamber now – to see her strange manic shifts of mood – was to think of the fay, that led men to their deaths with their fairy dancing across the marshes.

  Though whether Queen Mary was the leader or the fairy-led, Seton couldn’t say.

  *

  It was agreed Bothwell should stand trial, since he was accused of a crime – but he didn’t seem worried, exactly. Wasn’t likely to be, when he’d attended the Privy Council meeting to arrange his own trial, and had coerced or co-opted half the jury. Even Lennox, when he came to Edinburgh and saw Bothwell’s men patrolling the streets, had turned tail, back to his own territory. No one could doubt what the verdict would be.

  Sure enough, three days after Easter, the jury acquitted Bothwell completely. He posted the decision as a notice on the Tollbooth, and took the queen riding in triumph through the city.

  The common people weren’t convinced – but that wasn’t the danger he failed to see. That came from men like Balfour and Morton – men who’d agreed with him that Darnley had to go. Men who now – with Bothwell riding high by the queen’s side – now felt they’d been left high and dry.

  Remember how Darnley abandoned them after Rizzio? Remember how that left them feeling towards Darnley? But Seton was having to hide her tongue behind her teeth a lot these days; and this was just one of the things she couldn’t say.

  The other was that now, surely, Bothwell the married man was openly courting Queen Mary.

  It was Livy brought the news he’d talked to his wife about divorce. Even Livy was now pumping her acquaintances round the court for rumour and – Seton had to admit – doing it quite expertly.

  *

  Bothwell would always be a man to bully an alliance out of his fellow peers, if he couldn’t get the support he needed any other way. Seton and Livy agreed – in the corners where they had a private chance to talk – that he was never going to take the lords’ rumblings quietly. But there was nothing they could do, except wait and see how the game would play.

  The next move came just a week after the trial: he was always one to move quickly. It was late at night in the middle of April when Seton, passing through the palace, found her eye caught by a man in her family’s livery.
A lift of her chin told him to follow, to somewhere they couldn’t be overheard.

  It was a message from George. There were things, these days, you didn’t write too readily. Bothwell had invited all the lords to a supper at Ainslie’s Tavern. They’d dined well, and drunk well – and then it was time to pay.

  Bothwell had produced a bond, a document he demanded that they all sign. It declared they were convinced he was clear of Darnley’s murder, that they would defend his innocence if necessary. That if the queen, being now destitute of a husband would humble herself to wed one of her own subjects, the others would support him all the way… George had obviously been angry enough to repeat the very words, and the man had remembered them clearly.

  It wasn’t the obvious question Seton asked – she didn’t know why. Instead – ‘You said all of the lords? Did they all sign?’ she demanded sharply.

  ‘Well, Lord Moray is abroad, of course. And Maitland of Lethington stayed away. But—’ He was too well trained to ask, don’t you want to know who that lucky subject might be? Or perhaps he was a realist; any hawker in the streets could have answered that question easily.

  ‘But, mistress, Lord Seton wanted me to remind you…’ He faltered, torn between the drama of the moment, and the knowledge that advising one of the queen’s ladies went well beyond a servant’s duties. ‘He told me to remind you the Earl of Bothwell is a Protestant. There was no choice but to sign, for the lords there, but the only hope is to be sure the queen will not agree.’

  Seton nodded the man away. George meant, remember this must at all costs be avoided. Remember it could mean disaster for our family.

  But what George didn’t know is, there was nothing she could do. Other than sit back and watch this play.

  *

  She discussed it with Livy – well, discussed wasn’t quite the word, maybe. She’d said to Livy, ‘Do you think? Can we? Say anything to the Queen’s Majesty?’ And got back a quick shake of the head: no way. The queen wasn’t listening, or thinking, these days. She was all about doing; moving onwards like a horse on a mill wheel, blinkered so it shouldn’t look off to the side, and see green fields stretching temptingly.