THE QUEEN’S QUAIR
OR
THE SIX YEARS’ TRAGEDY

THE
QUEEN’S QUAIR
OR
The Six Years’ Tragedy

BY
MAURICE HEWLETT

‘Improbus ille puer, crudelis tu quoque Mater’

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1904

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1903,
By MAURICE HEWLETT.

Copyright, 1903, 1904,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up, electrotyped, and published May, 1904.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

BY
HIS PERMISSION
AND WITH GOOD REASON
THIS TRAGIC ESSAY
IS INSCRIBED
TO
ANDREW LANG

CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S PROLOGUE

If one were in the vein for the colours and haunted mists of Romance; if the thing, perhaps, were not so serious, there might be composed, and by me, a Romance of Queens out of my acquaintance with four ladies of that degree; among whom—to adopt the terms proper—were the Queen of Gall, the Queen of Ferment, and the Queen of Wine and Honey. You see that one would employ, for the occasion, the language of poets to designate the Queen-Mother of France, the Queen-Maid of England, and the too-fair Queen of Scots: to omit the fourth queen from such a tale would be for superstition’s sake, and not for lack of matter—I mean Queen Venus, who (God be witness) played her part in the affairs of her mortal sisters, and proclaimed her prerogatives by curtailing theirs. But either the matter is too serious, or I am. I see flesh and spirit involved in all this, truth and lies, God and the Devil—dreadful concernments of our own, with which Romance has no profitable traffic. La Bele Isoud, the divine Oriana, Aude the Fair (whom Roland loved)—tender ghosts, one and all of them, whose heartaches were so melodious that they have filled four-and-twenty pleasant volumes, and yet so unsubstantial that no one feels one penny the worse, or the better, for them afterwards. But here! Ah, here we have real players in a game tremendously real; and the hearts they seem to play with were once bright with lively blood; and the lies they told should have made streaks on lips once vividly incarnate—and sometimes did it. Real! Why, not long ago you could have seen a little pair of black satin slippers, sadly down at heel, which may have paced with Riccio’s in the gallery at Wemyss, or tapped the floor of Holyroodhouse while King Henry Darnley was blustering there, trying to show his manhood. A book about Queen Mary—if it be honest—has no business to be a genteel exercise in the romantic: if the truth is to be told, let it be there.

A quair is a cahier, a quire, a little book. In one such a certain king wrote fairly the tale of his love-business; and here, in this other, I pretend to show you all the tragic error, all the pain, known only to her that moved in it, of that child of his children’s children, Mary of Scotland. What others have guessed at, building surmise upon surmise, she knew; for what they did, she suffered. Some who were closest about her—women, boys—may have known some: Claude Nau got some from her; my Master Des-Essars got much. But the whole of it lay in her heart, and to know her is to hold the key of that. Suppose her hand had been at this pen; suppose mine had turned that key: there might have resulted ‘The Queen’s Quair.’ Well! Suppose one or the other until the book is done—and then judge me.

Questions for King Œdipus, Riddle of the Sphinx, Mystery of Queen Mary! She herself is the Mystery; the rest is simple enough. There had been men in Scotland from old time, and Stuarts for six generations to break themselves upon them. Great in thought, frail in deed, adventurous, chivalrous, hardy, short of hold, doomed to fail at the touch—so ventured, so failed the Stuarts from the first James to the fifth. There had been men in Scotland, but no women. Forth from the Lady of Lorraine came the lass, born in an unhappy hour, tossing high her young head, saying, ‘Let me alone to rule wild Scotland.’ They had but to give her house-room: no mystery there. The mystery is that any mystery has been found. Maids’ Adventure—with that we begin. A bevy of maids to rule wild Scotland! What mystery is there in that? Or—since Mystery is double-edged, engaging what we dare not, as well as what we cannot, tell—what mystery but that?

A hundred books have been written, a hundred songs sung; men enough of these latter days have broken their hearts for Queen Mary’s. What is more to the matter is that no heart but hers was broken in time. All the world can love her now; but who loved her then? Not a man among them. A few girls went weeping; a few boys laid down their necks that she might walk free of the mire. Alas! the mire swallowed them up, and she must soil her pretty feet. This is the nut of the tragedy; pity is involved rather than terror. But no song ever pierced the fold of her secret, no book ever found out the truth, because none ever sought her heart. Here, then, is a book which has sought nothing else, and a song which springs from that only: called, on that same account, ‘The Queen’s Quair.’

BOOK THE FIRST
MAIDS’ ADVENTURE

CHAPTER I
HERE YOU ARE IN THE ANTECHAMBER

It is quite true that when they had buried the little wasted King Francis, and while the days of Black Dule still held, the Cardinal of Lorraine tried three times to see his niece, and was three times refused. Not being man enough to break a way in, he retired; but as he knew very well that the Queen-Mother, the King, the King of Navarre, and Madame Marguerite went in and out all day long, he had a suspicion that they, or the seasons, were more at fault than the hidden mourner. ‘A time, times, and half a time,’ he said, ‘have good scriptural warrant. I will try once more—at this hour of high mass.’ So he did, and saw Mary Livingstone, that strapping girl, who came into the antechamber, rather flushed, and devoutly kissed his ring.

‘How is it with the Queen my niece?’

‘Sadly, Eminence.’

‘I must know how sadly, my girl. I must see her. It is of great concern.’

The young woman looked scared. ‘Eminence, she sees only the Queen-Mother.’

‘The more reason,’ says he, ‘why she should see somebody else. She may be praying one of these fine days that she never see the Queen-Mother again.’

Livingstone coloured up to the eyes. ‘Oh, sir! Oh, Lord Cardinal, and so she doth, and so do we all! They are dealing wickedly with our mistress. It is true, what I told you, that she sees the Queen-Mother: that is because her Majesty will not be denied. She forces the doors—she hath had a door taken down. She comes and goes as she will; rails at our lady before us all. She, poor lamb, what can she do? Oh, sir, if you could stop this traffic I would let you in of my own venture.’

‘Take me in, then,’ said the cardinal: ‘I will stop it.’

In the semi-dark he found his niece, throned upon the knee of Mary Beaton for comfort, in heavy black weeds, out of which the sharp oval of her face and the crescent white coif gleamed like two moons, the old within the new. Two other maids sat on the floor near by; each had a hand of her—pitiful sentinels of spoiled treasure. When the gentleman-usher at the curtain was forestalled by the great man’s quick entry, four girls rose at once, as a covey of partridges out of corn, and all but the Queen fell upon their knees. She, hugging herself as if suddenly chilled, came forward a little, not very far, and held out to the cardinal an unwilling hand. He took it, laid it on his own, kissed, and let it drop immediately. Then he stood upright, sniffed, and looked about him, being so near the blood royal himself that he could use familiarity with princes. It was clear that he disapproved.

‘Faith of a gentleman!’ he said: ‘one might see a little better, one might breathe a little better, here, my niece.’

‘The room is well enough,’ said the Queen.

It was dark and hot, heavy with some thick scent.

As she pronounced upon it the cardinal paused half-way to the shutter; but he paused too slightly. The Queen flushed all over and went quickly between him and the window—a vehement action. ‘Leave it, leave it alone! I choose my own way. You dare not touch it.’ She spoke furiously; he bowed his grey head and drew back. Then, in a minute, she herself flung back the shutters, and stood trembling in the sudden glory revealed. The broad flood of day showed him the waves of storm still surging over her; but even as he approved she commanded herself and became humble—he knew her difficult to resist in that mood.

‘I thought you would treat me as the Queen-Mother does. That put me in a rage. I beg your pardon, my lord.’ As she held out her hand again, this time he took it, and drew her by it along with him to the open window. He made her stand in the sun. Far below the grey curtain-wall were the moat, the bridges, the trim gardens and steep red roofs of Orleans, the spired bulk of the great church; beyond all that the gay green countryside. A fresh wind was blowing out there. You saw the willows bend, the river cream and curd. The keen strength of day and the weather made her blink; but he braced her to meet it by his words.

‘Madam,’ said he, ‘needs must your heart uplift to see God’s good world still shining in its place, patient until your Majesty tires of sitting in the dark.’

She smiled awry, and drummed on the ledge with her long fingers, looking wilfully down, not choosing to agree. The maids, all clustered together, watched their beloved; but the cardinal had saner eyes than any of them. As he saw her, so may you and I.

A tall, slim girl, petted and pettish, pale (yet not unwholesome), chestnut-haired, she looked like a flower of the heat, lax and delicate. Her skin—but more, the very flesh of her—seemed transparent, with colour that warmed it from within, faintly, with a glow of fine rose. They said that when she drank you could see the red wine run like a fire down her throat; and it may partly be believed. Others have reported that her heart could be discerned beating within her body, and raying out a ruddy light, now fierce, now languid, through every crystal member. The cardinal, who was no rhapsodist of the sort, admitted her clear skin, admitted her patent royalty, but denied that she was a beautiful girl—even for a queen. Her nose, he judged, was too long, her lips were too thin, her eyes too narrow. He detested her trick of the sidelong look. Her lower lids were nearly straight, her upper rather heavy: between them they gave her a sleepy appearance, sometimes a sly appearance, when, slowly lifting, they revealed the glimmering hazel of the eyes themselves. Hazel, I say, if hazel they were, which sometimes seemed to be yellow, and sometimes showed all black: the light acted upon hers as upon a cat’s eyes. Beautiful she may not have been, though Monsieur de Brantôme would never allow it; but fine, fine she was all over—sharply, exquisitely cut and modelled: her sweet smooth chin, her amorous lips, bright red where all else was pale as a tinged rose; her sensitive nose; her broad, high brows; her neck which two hands could hold, her small shoulders and bosom of a child. And then her hands, her waist no bigger than a stalk, her little feet! She had sometimes an intent, considering, wise look—the look of the Queen of Desire, who knew not where to set the bounds of her need, but revealed to no one what that was. And belying that look askance of hers—sly, or wise, or sleepy, as you choose—her voice was bold and very clear, her manners were those of a lively, graceful boy, her gestures quick, her spirit impatient and entirely without fear. Her changes of mood were dangerous: she could wheedle the soul out of a saint, and then fling it back to him as worthless because it had been so easily got. She wrote a beautiful bold hand, loved learning, and petting, and a choice phrase. She used perfumes, and dipped her body every day in a bath of wine. At this hour she was nineteen years old, and not two months a widow.

All this the cardinal knew by heart, and had no need to observe while she stood strumming at the window-sill. His opinion—if he had chosen to give it—would have been: these qualities and perfections, ah, and these imperfections, are all very proper to a prince who has a principality; for my niece, I count greatly upon a wise marriage—wise for our family, wise for herself. He would have been the last to deny that the Guises had been hampered by King Francis’ decease. All was to do again—but all could be done. This fretful, fair girl was still Queen of Scotland, allons! Dowager of France, but Queen of Scotland, worth a knight’s venture. Advance pawns, therefore! He was a chess-player, passionate for the game.

He surveyed the maids of honour, bouncing Livingstone and the rest of them, too zealous after their mistress’s ease, and too jealous lest the world should edge them out; and found that he had more zest for the world and the spring weather. ‘Ah, madam,’ he said, ‘ah, my niece, this cloister-life of stroking, and kindly knees, is not one for your Majesty. There are high roads out yonder to be traversed, armies to set upon them, cities and towns and hill-crests to be taken. But you sit at home in the dark, nursed by your maids!’

She raised her eyebrows, not her eyes. ‘Why,’ says she, ‘the King, my husband, is dead, and most of his people glad of it, I believe. If my kingdom lies within these four walls, and my government is but over these poor girls, they are my own. What else should I do? Walk abroad to mass? Ride abroad to the meadows? And be mocked by the people for a barren wife, who never was wife at all? And be browbeat openly by the Apothecary’s Daughter? Is this what you set before me, Lord Cardinal?’

The cardinal put up his chin and cupped his beard. ‘The rich may call themselves poor, the poor dare not. You have a realm, my niece, and a fair realm. You stand at the door of a second. You may yet have a third, it seems to me.’

Queen Mary looked at him then, with a gleam in her eyes which answered for a smile. But she hid her mind almost at once, and resumed her drumming.

‘King Charles is hot for me,’ she said. ‘He is a brave lad. I should be Queen of France again—of France and England and Scotland.’ She laughed softly to herself, as if snug in the remembrance that she was still sought.

The cardinal became exceedingly serious. ‘I have thought of that. To my mind there is a beautiful justice——! What our family can do shall be done—but, alas——!’

She broke in upon him here. ‘Our family, my lord! Your family! Ah, that was a good marriage for me, for example, which you made! That ailing child! Death was in his bed before ever I was put there. My marriage! My husband! He used to cry all night of the pain in his head. He clung to the coverlet, and to me, lest they should pull him out to prayers. Marriage! He was cankered from his birth. What king was Francis, to make me a queen?’

The cardinal lifted his fine head. ‘It was my sister Marie who made you a queen, madam, by the grace of God and King James. Through your parentage you are Queen of Scotland, and should be Queen of England—and you shall be. God of gods, you may be queen of whatso realm you please. What do I learn? The whole world’s mind runs upon the marrying of you. The Archduke Ferdinand hath here his ambassadors, attendant on the Queen-Mother’s pleasure—which you allow to be yours also. Don Carlos, his own hand at the pen, writes for a hope of your Majesty’s. The Earl of Huntly, a great and religious prince in Scotland, urges the pretensions of his son, the Lord of Gordon. Are these to be laid before the Queen-Mother? To the duchess, your grandmother, writeth daily the Duke of Châtelherault concerning his son, the Earl of Arran. On his side is my brother the Constable. More! They bring me word from England that the Earl of Lennox, next in blood to your Majesty, next indeed to both your thrones, is hopeful to come to France—he, too, with a son in his pocket, young, apt, and lovely as a love-apple. All these hopeful princes, madam——’

Queen Mary coloured. With difficulty she said: ‘I hear of every one of them for the first time.’

‘Oh, madam,’ cried the cardinal, ‘so long as you sit on your maids’ knees and give the keys of your chamber to the Queen-Mother, you will only hear what she please to tell you. And more’—he raised his voice, and gave it severity—‘I take leave to add that so long as your Majesty hath Mistress Livingstone here for your husband, your Majesty can look for no other.’

‘I am never likely to look on a better,’ says Queen Mary, and put her hand behind her. Mary Livingstone stooped quickly and snatched a kiss from the palm, while the cardinal gazed steadily out of doors. But he felt more at ease, being sure that he had leavened his lump.

And so he had. The sweet fact of great marriages beyond her doors, and the sour fact of the Queen-Mother within them, worked a ferment in her brain and set her at her darling joy of busy scheming. What turned the scale over was the mortifying discovery that Catherine de’ Medici was in reality dying to get rid of her. She flew into a great rage, changed her black mourning for white, announced her departure, paid her farewells, and went to her grandmother’s court at Rheims. Queen Catherine watched her, darkling, from a turret as she rode gaily out in her troop of Guises. ‘There,’ she is reported to have said, I know not whether truly or not, ‘there goes Madam Venus a-hunting the apple. Alas for Shepherd Paris!’ The reflection is a shrewd one at least; but it was not then so certain that Orleans had seen the last of Queen Mary. It was no way to get her out of France to tell her there was nothing you desired so much.

The old duchess, her grandam, talked marriages and the throne of Scotland, therefore, into ears only half willing. The little Queen was by no means averse to either, but could not bring herself to lose hold upon France. ‘Better to be Dowager of France than an Empress in the north,’ she said; and then ‘Fiddle-de-dee, my child,’ the old lady retorted; ‘give me a live dog before a dead lion. Your desire here is to vex La Medicis. You would make eyes at King Charles, and we should all lose our heads. Do you wish to end your days at Loches? The Duke of Milan found cold quarters there, they tell me. No, no. Marry a king’s son and recover England from the Bastard.’ Thus all France spake of our great Elizabeth.

Queen Mary, though she loved her grandmother, pinched her lip, looked meek, and hardened her heart. She had obstinacy by the father’s mother’s side—a Tudor virtue.

It was just after she had gone to Nancy, to the court of her cousin of Lorraine, that she veered across to the side of the Guises and determined to adventure in Scotland. Two Scots lords came overseas to visit her there: one was the Lord James Stuart, her base-brother, the other a certain Father Lesley, an old friend of her mother’s. The priest was a timid man, but by good hap and slenderness of equipage gained her first. She might have been sure he was a faithful friend, though doubtful if a very wise one. Faithful enough he proved in days to come: at this present she found him a simple, fatherly man, of wandering mind, familiar, benevolent, soon scared. He was enchanted with her, and said so. He praised her person, the scarlet of her lips, the bright hue of her hair. ‘A bonny brown, my child,’ he said, touching it, ‘to my partial eyes.’ She laughed as she told him that in Paris also they had liked the colour. ‘They will call it foxy in Scotland,’ he said, with a sniff; and she found out afterwards that they did. At first she was ‘madam’ here, and ‘your Majesty’ there; but as the talk warmed him he forgot her queenship in her extreme youth, had her hand in his own and patted it with the other. Then it came to ‘Child, this you should do,’ or ‘Child, I hope that is not your usage’; and once he went so far as to hold her by the hands at arms’ length and peer at her through his kind, weak eyes, up and down, as he said to himself, ‘Eh, sirs, a tall bit lassie to stand by Bruce’s chair! But her mother was just such another one—just such another.’

She thought this too far to go, even for a churchman, and drew off with a smile and shake of the head—not enough to humiliate him.

He cautioned her with fearful winks and nods against the Lord James Stuart, her half-brother, hinting more than he dared to tell. ‘That man hath narrow eyes,’ he said; then, recollecting himself, ‘and so hath your Majesty by right of blood. All the Stuarts have them—the base and the true. But his, remark, are most guarded eyes, so that you shall not easily discover in what direction he casts his looks. But I say, madam,’—and he raised his wiry voice,—‘I say that the throne is ever at his right hand; and I do think that he looks ever to the right.’

The Queen’s eyes were plain enough at this—squirrel-colour, straight as arrows. Being free-spoken herself, she disliked periphrasis. ‘Does my brother desire my throne? Is this your meaning?’

He jumped back as if she had whipped him, and crossed himself vehemently, saying, ‘God forbid it! God forbid it!’

‘I shall forbid it, whether or no,’ said the Queen. ‘But I suppose you had some such meaning behind your speech.’ And she pressed him until she learned that such indeed was the belief in Scotland.

‘Your misborn brother, madam,’ he said, whispering, ‘will tell you nothing that he believeth, and ask you nothing that he desireth; nor will he any man. He will urge you to the contrary of what he truly requires. He will take his profit of another man’s sin and rejoice to see his own hands clean. My heart,’ he said, forgetting himself,—and ‘Ah, Jesu!’ she records, ‘I was called that again, and by another mouth,’—‘My heart, if you tender the peace of Holy Church in your land, keep your brother James in France under lock and key.’

She laughed at his alarms. ‘I wish liberty to all men and their consciences sir. I am sure I shall find friends in Scotland.’

He named the great Earl of Huntly and his four sons; but by now she was tired of him and sent him away. All the effect of the poor man’s speeches had been to make her anxious to measure wits with her base-brother. He came in two or three days later with a great train, and she had her opportunity.

What she made of it you may judge by this, that it was he and no other who spurred her into Scotland. He did it, in a manner very much his own, by first urging it and then discovering impossible fatigues in the road. This shows him to have been, what he was careful to conceal, a student of human kind.

A certain French valet of the Earl of Bothwell’s—Nicolas Hubart, from whose Confessions I shall have to draw liberally by-and-by, and of whom, himself, there will be plenty to say—made once an acute observation of the great Lord James, when he said that he was that sort of man who, if he had not a black cloak for Sunday, would be an atheist or even an epicurean. There was no one, certainly, who had a more intense regard for decent observance than he. It was his very vesture: he would have starved or frozen without it. It clothed him completely from head to foot, and from the heart outwards. Much more than that. There are many in this world who go about it swathed up to the eyes, imposing upon those they meet. But this man imposed first of all upon himself. So complete was his robing, he could not see himself out of it. So white were his hands, so flawless of grit, he could never see them otherwise. Supposing Father Lesley to have been right, supposing that James Stuart did—and throughout—plot for a throne, he would have been the first to cry out upon the vice of Brutus. It may well be doubted whether he once, in all his life, stood alone—so to speak—naked before his own soul. Perhaps such a man can hardly be deemed a sinner, whatever he do. There are those at this hour who say that the Lord James was no sinner. How should he be? they cry. His own soul never knew it.

This tall, pale, inordinately prim nobleman, with his black beard, black clothes, and (to the Queen’s mind) black beliefs, seemed to walk for ever in a mask of sour passivity. He never spoke when to bow the head could be an answer, he never affirmed without qualification, he never denied or refused anything as of his own opinion. He was allowed to have extraordinarily fine manners, even in France, where alacrity of service counted for more than the service itself; and yet Queen Mary declared that she had never seen a man enter a doorway so long after he had opened the door. He seldom looked at you. His voice was low and measured. He cleared his throat before he spoke, and swallowed the moment he had finished, as if he were anxious to engulf any possible effect of his words. Of all the ties upon a man he dreaded most those of the heart-strings: she never moved him to natural emotion but once. But, at this first coming of his, he paid her great court, and bent his stiff knees to her many times a day: this notwithstanding that, as Mary Seton affirmed, he had water on one of them. She said that she had that from his chaplain, but her love of mischief had betrayed her love of truth. The Lord James always stood to his prayers.

When the Queen saw him first it was in the presence of her women, of Lord Eglinton, of the Marquis D’Elbœuf, and others—persons who either hated him with reason or despised him with none. He moved her then, almost with passion, to go ‘home’ to Scotland, saying that it behoved princes to dwell among their own people. But at a privy audience a few days later, he held to another tune altogether, pursing his lips, twiddling his two thumbs, looking up and down and about. Now he said that he was not sure; that there were dangers attending a Popish Queen, and those not only within the kingdom but without it. She begged him to explain himself.

‘Better bide, madam,’ said he, ‘until the wind change in England.’

Any word of England always excited her. The colour flew to her face. ‘What hath my sister in England to do with my kingdom, good brother?’

‘Why, madam,’ he said, ‘it has come to my sure knowledge that you shall get no safe-conduct from the English Queen, to go smoothly to Scotland.’

He never watched any one, or was never observed to be watching; but his guarded eyes, glancing at her as they shifted, showed him that, being angry now, she was beautiful—like a spirit of the fire.

‘I should be offended at what you report if I believed it possible,’ she said after a while. ‘And yet England is not the only road, nor is it the best road, to my kingdom.’

‘No indeed, madam,’ he agreed; ‘but it is the only easy road for a young and delicate lady.’

‘Let my youth, brother, be as God made it,’ she answered him; ‘but as for my delicacy, I am thankfully able to bear fatigue and to thrive upon it. If my good sister, or you, my lord’—she spoke very clearly—‘think to keep me from my own by threats of force or warnings of danger, I would have you understand that the like of those is a spur to me.’

This was a thing which, in fact, he had understood perfectly.

‘I am not a shying horse,’ she continued, ‘to swerve at a heap of sand. I believe I shall find loyalty in my country, and cheerful courage there to meet my own courage. There be those that laugh at danger there, as well as those who weep.’

He said suavely here that she misjudged him, that only his tenderness for her person was at fault. ‘We grow timid where we love much, madam.’

At this she looked at him so unequivocally that he changed the subject.

‘If your Majesty,’ he pursued, ‘knows not the mind of the English Queen, or misdoubts my reading of it, let application be made to Master Throckmorton. I am content to be judged out of his mouth.’

Master Throckmorton was English Ambassador to the Queen of Scots, a friend of the Lord James’s. His lordship, indeed, had the greater confidence in giving this advice in that he had already convinced Master Throckmorton of what he must do, and what say, if he wished to get Queen Mary into Scotland—as, namely, decline to help her thither; decline, for instance, a letter of safe-conduct through English soil.

‘Let application be made presently, brother,’ said the incensed young lady, and gladly turned to her pleasures.

She had been finding these of late in a society not at all to the mind of the Lord James. Three days before this conversation the Earl of Bothwell, no less, had come to court, making for the North from Piedmont.

In years to come she could remember every flash and eddy of that shifting garden scene when first he came to her. A waft of scented blossom, the throb of a lute, and she could see the peacock on the wall, the gay June borders, the grass plats and bright paths in between, quivering with the heat they gave out. There was a fountain in the midst of the quincunx, on the marble brim of which she sat with her maids and cousin D’Elbœuf, dipping her hand, and now and then flicking water into their faces. A page in scarlet and white had come running up to say that the Duke was nearing with his gentlemen; and presently down the long alley she saw them moving slowly—crimson cloaks and bared heads, the Duke in the midst, wearing his jewelled bonnet. He was talking, and laughing immoderately with some one she knew not at all, who swung his hat in his hand, and to whom, as she remembered vividly, the struck poppies bowed their heads. For he hit them as he went with his hat, and looked round to see them fall. The Duke’s tale continued to the very verge of the privy garden; indeed he halted there, in the face of her usher, to finish it. She saw the stranger throw back his head to laugh. ‘What a great jowl he hath,’ she said to Mary Fleming; and she, in a hush, said, ‘Madam, it is the Earl Bothwell.’ A few moments later the man was kneeling before her, presented by the Duke himself. She had time to notice the page to whom he had thrown his hat and gloves—a pale-faced, wise-looking French boy, who knelt also, and watched her from a pair of grey eyes ‘rimmed with smut-colour.’ His name, she found out afterwards, was Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des-Essars. She liked his manly looks from the first—little knowing who and what he was to be to her. Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des-Essars! Keeper of the Secret des Secrets—where should I be without him?

The Earl of Bothwell—whom she judged (in spite of the stricken poppies) to be good-humoured—was a galliard of the type esteemed in France by those—and they were many—who pronounced vice to be their virtue. A galliard, as they say, if ever there was one, flushed with rich blood, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with a laugh so happy and so prompt that the world, rejoicing to hear it, thought all must be well wherever he might be. He wore brave clothes, sat a brave horse, kept brave company bravely. His high colour, while it betokened high feeding, got him the credit of good health. His little eyes twinkled so merrily that you did not see they were like a pig’s, sly and greedy at once, and bloodshot. His tawny beard concealed a jaw underhung, a chin jutting and dangerous. His mouth had a cruel twist; but his laughing hid that too. The bridge of his nose had been broken; few observed it, or guessed at the brawl which must have given it him. Frankness was his great charm, careless ease in high places, an air of ‘take me or leave me, I go my way’; but some mockery latent in him, and the suspicion that whatever you said or did he would have you in derision—this was what first drew Queen Mary to consider him. And she grew to look for it—in those twinkling eyes, in that quick mouth; and to wonder about it, whether it was with him always—asleep, at prayers, fighting, furious, in love. In fine, he made her think.

Mary Livingstone liked not the looks of him from the first, and held him off as much as she could. She slept with her mistress in these days of widowhood, but refused to discuss him in bed. She said that he had a saucy eye—which was not denied—and was too masterful.

‘You can tell it by the hateful growth of hair he hath,’ she cried. ‘When he lifts up his head to laugh—and he would laugh, mind you, at the crucified Saviour!—you can see the climbing of his red beard, like rooted ivy on an old wall.’

It is true that his beard was reddish, and gross-growing; his hair, however, was dark brown, thick and curling. Mary Livingstone sniffed at his hair. He stayed ten days at Nancy, saw the Queen upon each of them, and on each held converse with her. She liked him very well, studied him, thought him more important than he really was. He laughed at her for this, and taxed her with it; but so pleasantly that she was not at all offended. The Lord James would not speak of him, nor he of the Lord James: he shrugged at any reference to him.

‘Let it be enough, madam, to own that we do not love each other,’ he said when she pressed him. ‘We view the world differently, that lord and I; for I look on the evil and the good with open face and what cheer I can muster, and he looks through his fingers and sadly. We speak little one with the other: what he thinks of me I know not. I think him a——’

‘Well, my lord? You think my brother a——?’

‘A king’s son, madam,’ he said, demurely; but she saw the gleam in his eye.

He spoke fluent French, and was very ready with his Italian. He was a latinist, a student of warfare, had read Machiavelli. He scared away a good many poetasters by a real or an affected truculence; threatened to duck one of them in the fountain, and proved that he could do it by ducking another. The effect of this was, as he had intended, that Queen Mary for a day laughed with him at the art of poetry, which was no art of his. That day he had a private half-hour, and spoke freely of himself and his ventures.

‘A man rich in desires,’ he confessed himself, ‘and therefore of great wealth. Put the peach on the wall above me, madam, and I shall surely grow to handle it. And this other possession is mine, that while I strive and stretch after my prize I can laugh at my own pains, and yet not abate them.’

She considered every word he said, and dubbed him Democritus, her laughing philosopher.

‘You will have need of my sect in Scotland, madam,’ he replied with a bow. ‘Despise it not; for in that grey country the very skies invite us to mingle tears. You have a weeper beside you even now—the Lord Heraclitus, a king’s son.’

She had no difficulty in discovering her stiff brother James under this thin veil.

All was going on thus well with my Lord of Bothwell when Mary Livingstone heard him rate his page in the forecourt one morning as she came back from the mass. She caught sight also of ‘his inflamed and wicked face,’ and saw the little French boy flinch and turn his shoulder to a flood of words, of which she understood not half. She guessed at them from the rest. ‘They must needs be worse; and yet how can they be? And oh! the poor little Stoic with his white face!’ The good girl snapped her lips together as she hurried on. ‘He shall see as little of my bonny Queen as I can provide for,’ she promised herself. ‘I have heard sculduddery enough to befoul all Burgundy.’ Being a wise virgin, she said little to her mistress save to urge her to beg the French boy from his master.

‘Why do you want him, child?’ the Queen asked.

‘He hath a steadfast look, and loves you. I think he will serve your needs. Get him if you care,’ was all the reply she could win.

The thing was easily done, lightly asked and lightly accorded.

‘Baptist, come hither,’ had cried my lord; and the boy knelt before the lady. ‘I have sold thee, Baptist.’

‘Very good, monseigneur.’

The Queen sparkled and smiled upon him. ‘Wilt thou come with me, Jean-Marie?’

‘Yes, willingly, madam.’

‘And do me good service?’

‘Nobody in the world shall do better, madam.’

‘But you are positive, my boy!’

‘I do well to be positive, madam, in such a cause as your Majesty’s.’

She turned to the Earl. ‘What is his history?’

He shrugged. ‘The Sieur Des-Essars—a gentleman of Brabant—disporting in La Beauce, accosts a pretty Disaster (to call her so) with a speaking eye——’

Jean-Marie-Baptiste held up his hand. ‘Monseigneur, ah——!’

‘How now, cockerel?’

‘You speak of my mother, sir,’ he said, his lip quivering.

‘By the Mass, and so I do!’ said the Earl.

The Queen patted the lad’s shoulder before she sent him away. ‘You shall tell me all about your mother, Jean-Marie, when we are in Scotland.’

Jean-Marie-Baptiste Des-Essars quickly kissed her sleeve, and became her man. More of him in due time, and of what he saw out of his ‘smut-rimmed’ eyes.

When English Mr. Throckmorton was reported as within a day’s ride of Nancy, my Lord Bothwell thought it wise to take leave. His odour in England was not good, and he knew very well that the Lord James would not sprinkle him with anything which would make it better. So he presented himself betimes in the morning, said his adieux and kissed hands.

‘Farewell, my lord,’ says Queen Mary. ‘Lorraine will be the sadder for your going.’

‘And ever fare your Majesty well,’ he answered her gaily, ‘as in Scotland you shall, despite the weepers.’

‘Do you go to Scotland, my lord?’

‘Does your Majesty?’ says he, his little eyes all of a twinkle.

‘My question was first, my lord.’

‘And the answer to mine is the answer to your Majesty’s.’

‘My Lord Democritus, am I to laugh when you leave me?’

‘Why, yes, madam, rather than to lament that I outstay my welcome.’

She showed her pleasure; at least, he saw it under the skin. So he left her; and Mary Livingstone, as she said, could ‘fetch her breath.’

Now, as to Mr. Throckmorton—if the Lord James had desired, as assuredly he did, to get his sister to Scotland, unwedded and in a hurry; if the Queen of England desired it—which is certain,—neither could have used a better means than this excellent man. The Queen was in a royal rage when he, with great troubles and many shakings of his obsequious head, was obliged to own the safe-conduct through England refused. She shut herself up with her maids, and endlessly paced the floors, avoiding their entreating arms. They besought her to rest, to have patience, to sit on their knees, consult her uncles of Lorraine. ‘I shall sit in no chair, nor lie in any bed, until I am at sea,’ she promised them, and then cried: ‘What! am I a kennel-dog to the Bastard in England?’

Nothing in the world should stop her. She would go to her country by sea, and as soon as they could fit out the galleys. And she had her way—with suspicious ease, if she had had patience to observe it; for it happened to be the way of three other persons vitally interested in her: the Queen-Mother of France, who wished to get rid of her; the Queen of England, who hoped she would get rid of herself; and the Lord James Stuart, uncomfortably illegitimate, who hid his designs from his own soul, and looked at affairs without seeming to look.

Two galleys and four great ships took her and her adventurous company from Calais, on a day in August of high sun and breeze, with a misty brown bank on the horizon where England should lie. Guns shot from the forts were answered from the ships; to the Oriflamme of France the Scots Queen answered with her tressured Lion, and the English Leopards and Lilies. Of all the gallant company embarked there was none who looked more ardently to the north than she who was to sit in the high seat at Stirling. Let Mary Fleming look down, and Mary Beaton raise her eyebrows; let Mary Seton shrug and Mary Livingstone toss her young head; they are greatly mistaken who suppose that Mary Stuart went unwillingly to Scotland, or wetted her pillow with tears. She cried when she bade adieu to her grandmother—tears of kindness those. But her heart was high to be Queen, and her head full of affairs. How she judged men! What measures she devised! Ask Mary Livingstone whether they two slept of nights, or whether they talked of the deeds of Queen Mary—what she should do, what avoid, how walk, how safeguard herself. She lay in a pavilion on the upper deck, and turned her face to where she thought Scotland should be. But Mary Livingstone showed Scotland her back, and sheltered her Queen in her arms.

CHAPTER II
HERE YOU STEP INTO THE FOG

Now, when they had been three days at sea, standing off Flamborough in England, the wind veered to the southeast, and dropped very soon. They had to row the ships for lack of meat for the sails to fill themselves; the face of the world was changed, the sun blotted out. It became chilly, with a thin rain; there drew over the sea a curtain of soft fog which wrapped them up as in a winding-sheet, and seemed to clog the muscles of men’s backs, so that scarcely way could be made. In this white darkness—for such it literally was—the English took the Earl of Eglinton in his ship, silently, without a cry to be heard; but in it also they lost the Queen’s and all the rest of her convoy. Rowing all night and all next day, sounding as they went in a sea like oil, the Scots company drew past St. Abb’s, guessed at Dunbar, found and crept under the ghost of the Bass, came at length with dripping sheets into Leith Road by night, and so stayed to await the morn. They fired guns every hour; nobody slept on board.

That night which they began with music, some dancing and playing forfeits, was one of deathly stillness. The guns made riot by the clock; but the sea-fog drugged all men’s spirits. The Queen was pensive, and broke up the circle early. She went to bed, and lay listening, as she said, to Scotland. As it wore towards dawn she could have heard, if yet wakeful, great horns blown afar off on the shore, answering her guns, the voices of men and women, howling, quarrelling, or making merry after their fashion; steeple bells; sometimes the knocking of oars as unseen boats rowed about her. Once the sentry on the upper deck challenged: ‘Qui va là?’ in a shrill voice. There was smothered laughter, but no other reply. He fired his piece, and there came a great scurry in the water, which woke the Queen with a start.

‘Was that the English guns? Are we engaged?’

‘No, no, madam; you forget. We are in our own land by now, safe between the high hills of Scotland. ’Twas some folly of the guard.’

She was told it had gone six o’clock, and insisted on rising. Father Roche, her confessor, said mass; and after that Mary Seton had a good tale for her private ear. Monsieur de Bourdeilles, it seems, the merry gentleman, had held Monsieur de Châtelard embraced against his will under one blanket all night, to warm himself. This Monsieur de Châtelard, a poet of some hopefulness, owned himself Queen Mary’s lover, and played the part with an ardour and disregard of consequence which are denied to all but his nation. A lover is a lover, whether you admit him or not; his position, though it be self-chosen, is respectable: but no one could refuse the merits of this story. Monsieur de Bourdeilles was sent for—a wise-looking, elderly man.

‘Sieur de Brantôme,’ says the Queen—that was his degree in the world—‘how did you find the warmth of Monsieur de Châtelard?’

‘Upon my faith, madam,’ says he, ‘your Majesty should know better than I did whether he is alight or not.’

‘I think that is true,’ said Queen Mary; ‘but now also you will have learned, as I have, to leave him alone.’

The Grand Prior—a Guise, the Queen’s uncle and a portly man—came in to see his niece. He reported a wan light spread abroad: one might almost suppose the sun to be somewhere. If her Majesty extinguished the candles her Majesty would still be able to see. It was curious. He considered that a landing might be made, for news of the ships was plainly come ashore. Numberless small boats, he said, were all about, full of people spying up at the decks. Curious again: he had been much entertained.

‘You shall show yourself to them, madam, if you will be guided by me,’ says Mary Livingstone. The Grand Prior was not against it.

‘Well,’ says the Queen, ‘let us go, then, to see and be seen.’

One of the maids—Seton, I gather—made an outcry: ‘Oh, ma’am, you will never go to them in your white weed!’

‘How else, child?’

Seton caught at her hand. ‘Like the bonny Queen Mab—like the Fairy Vivien that charmed Tamlane out of his five wits. Thus you should go!’

The Queen turned blushing to the Grand Prior.

‘How shall I show myself, good uncle?’

‘My niece, you are fair enough now.’

‘Is it true?’ she said. ‘Then I will be fairer yet. Get me what you will; make a queen of me. Fleming, you shall choose.’

Mary Fleming, a gentle beauty, considered the case. ‘I shall dress your Majesty in the white and green,’ she declared, and was gone to get it.

So they dressed her in white and green, with a crown of stars for her hair, and covered her in a carnation hood against the cold. Then she was brought out among the four of them to lean on the poop and see the people. A half-circle of stately, cloaked gentlemen—all French, and mainly Guises—stood behind; but Monsieur de Châtelard, shaking like a leaf, sought the prop of a neighbouring shoulder for his arm. It was modestly low, and belonged to Des-Essars, the new page.

‘My gentle youth,’ said the poet, after thanking him for his services, ‘I am sick because I love. Do you see that smothered goddess? Learn then that I adore her, and so was able to do even in the abominable arms of Monsieur de Brantôme.’

‘I also consider her Majesty adorable,’ replied the page with gravity; ‘but I do not care to say so openly.’

‘If your wound be not kept green,’ Monsieur de Châtelard reproved him, ‘if it is covered up, it mortifies, you bleed internally, and you die.’

Des-Essars bowed. ‘Why, yes, sir. There is no difficulty in that.’

‘Far from it, boy—far from it! Exquisite ease, rather.’

‘It is true, sir,’ said Des-Essars. ‘Well! I am ready.’

‘And I, boy, must get ready. Soothsayers have assured me that I shall die in that lady’s service.’

‘I intend to live in it,’ said Des-Essars; ‘for she chose me to it herself.’

Monsieur de Châtelard considered this alternative. ‘Your intention is fine,’ he allowed; ‘but my fate is the more piteous.’

Whether the people knew their Queen or not, they gave little sign of it. They seemed to her a grudging race, unwilling to allow you even recognition. She had been highly pleased at first: watched them curiously, nodded, laughed, kissed her hand to some children—who hid their faces, as if she had put them to shame. Some pointed at her, some shook their heads; none saluted her. Most of them looked at the foreign servants: a great brown Gascon sailor, who leaned half-naked against the gunwale; a black in a yellow turban; a saucy Savoyard girl with a bare bosom; and some, nudging others, said, ‘A priest! a priest!’—and one, a big, wild, red-capped man, stood up in his boat, and pointed, and cried out loud, ‘To hell with the priest!’ The cold curiosity, the uncouth drab of the scene, the raw damp—and then this savage burst—did their work on her. She was sensitive to weather, and quick to read hearts. Being chilled, her own heart grew heavy. ‘I wish to go away. They stare; there is no love here,’ she said, and went down the companion, and sat in her pavilion without speaking. She let Mary Livingstone take her hand. At that hour, I know, her thought was piercingly of France, and the sun, and the peasant girls laughing to each other half across the breezy fields.

Barges came to board the Queen’s galley; strong-faced gentlemen, muffled in cloaks, sat in the stern; all others stood up—even the rowers, who faced forward like Venetians and pushed rather than pulled the slow vessels. Running messengers kept her informed of arrivals: the Provost of Edinburgh was come, the Captain of the Castle, the Lord of Lethington, Maitland by name, secretary to her mother the late Queen; her half-brothers, the Lords James and Robert Stuart, and more—all civil, all with stiff excuses that preparations were so backward. She would see none but her brothers, and, at the Lord James’ desire, Mr. Secretary Maitland of Lethington. Him she discerned to be a taut, nervous, greyish man, with a tired face. She was prepared to like him for her mother’s sake; but he was on his guard, unaccountably, and she too dispirited to pursue. Des-Essars, in his Secret Memoirs, says that he remembers to have noticed, young as he was, how this Lethington’s eyes always sought those of the Lord James before he spoke. ‘Sought,’ he says, ‘but never found them.’ Sharply observed for a boy of fourteen.

Well, here was a dreary beginning, which must nevertheless be pushed to some kind of ending. Before noon she was landed—upon a muddy shore, the sea being at the ebb—without cloth of estate, or tribune, or litter, with a few halberdiers to make a way for her through a great crowd. She looked at the ooze and slimy litter. ‘Are we amphibians in Scotland?’ she asked her cousin D’Elbœuf. His answer was to splash down heroically into the mess and throw his cloak upon it. ‘Gentlemen,’ he cried out in his own tongue, ‘make a Queen’s way!’ He had not long to wait. A tragic cry from Monsieur de Châtelard informed all Leith that he was wading ashore. Fine, but retarding action! His cloak was added late to a long line of them—all French: the Marquis’s, the Grand Prior’s, Monsieur D’Amville’s, Monsieur de Brantôme’s, Monsieur de La Noue’s, many more. There were competitions, encouraging cries, great enthusiasm. The people jostled each other to get a view; the Scots lords looked staidly on, but none offered their cloaks.

Thus it was that she touched Scottish soil, as Mr. Secretary remarked to himself, through a foreign web. A little stone house, indescribably mean and close, was open to her to rest in while the horses were made ready. Thither came certain lords—Earls of Argyll and Atholl, Lords Erskine, Herries, and others—to kiss hands. She allowed it listlessly, not distinguishing friend from unfriend. All faces seemed alike to her: wooden, overbold, weathered faces, clumsy carvings of an earlier day, with watchful, suspicious eyes put in them to make them alive. Her ladies were with her, and her uncles. The little room was filled to overflowing, and in and out of the passage-ways elbowed the French gallants shouting for their grooms. No one was allowed to have any speech with the Queen, who sat absorbed and unobservant in the packed assembly, a French guard all about her, with Mary Livingstone kneeling beside her, whispering French comfort in her ear.

Above the surging and the hum of the shore could be heard the beginnings of clamour. The press at the doors was so great they could scarcely bring up the horses; and when the hackbutters beat them back the people murmured. Monsieur D’Amville’s charger grew restive and backed into the crowd: they howled at him for a Frenchman, and were not appeased to discover by the looks of him that he was proud of the fact. There was much sniffing and spying for priests,—well was it for Father Roche and his mates that, having been warned, they lay still among the ships, intending not to land till dusk. How was her Majesty to be got out? It seemed that she was a prisoner. The Master of the Horse could do nothing for his horses; the Master of the Household was penned in the doorway. If it had not been for the Lord James, Queen Mary must have spent the night on the sea-shore. But the people fell back this way and that when, bareheaded, he came out of the house. ‘Give way there—make a place,’ he said, in a voice hardly above the speaking tone; and way and place were made.

Two or three of the French lords observed him. ‘He has the gestures of a king, look you.’

‘You are right; and, they tell me, a king’s desires. Do you see that he measures them with his eye before he speaks, as if to judge what strength he should use?’

They brought up the horses; the Queen came out. Up a steep, straggling street, finally, they rode in some kind of broken order, in a lane cut, as it were, between dumb walls of men and women. Monsieur de Brantôme remarked to his neighbour that it was for all the world as if travelling mountebanks were come to town. Very few greeted her, none seemed to satisfy any feeling but curiosity. They pointed her out to one another. ‘Yonder she goes. See, yonder, in the braw, cramoisy hood!’ ‘See, man, the bonny long lass!’ ‘I mind,’ said one, ‘to have seen her mother brought in. Just such another one.’ Some cried, ‘See you, how she arches her fine neck.’ Others, ‘She hath the eyes of all her folk.’ ‘A dangerous smiler: a Frenchwoman just.’

She did not hear these things, or did not notice them, being slow to catch at the Scots tongue. But one wife cried shrilly, ‘God bless that sweet face!’ and that she recognised, and laughed her glad thanks to the kindly soul.

Most eyes were drawn to the French princes, and missed her in following them and their servants. The Grand Prior made them wonder: his stateliness excused him the abhorred red cross; but chief of them all seemed Monsieur de Châtelard, very splendid in white satin and high crimson boots, and a tall feather in his cap. Some thought he was the Pope’s son, some the Prince of Spain come to marry the Queen; but, ‘Havers, woman, ’tis just her mammet,’ said one in Mary Beaton’s hearing. The Queen laughed when this was explained to her, and remembered it for Monsieur de Brantôme. But she only laughed those two times between Leith shore and Holyroodhouse.

Her spirits mended after dinner. She held an informal court, and set herself diligently to please and be pleased. She desired the Lord of Lethington, in the absence of a Lord Chamberlain, to make the presentations; he was to stand by her side and answer all questions. He spoke her language with a formal ease which she found agreeable, betrayed a caustic humour now and again, was far more to her taste than at first. She saw the old Duke of Châtelherault and his scared son, my Lord of Arran.

‘Hamiltons, madam,’ said Lethington tersely, and thought he had said all; but she had to be told that they claimed to stand next in blood to herself and the throne of Scotland.

‘The blood has been watered, it seems to me,’ she said. ‘One can see through that old lord.’

‘Madam, that is his greatest grief. He cannot, if he would, conceal his pretensions.’

‘Explain yourself, sir.’

‘Madam, you can see that he is empty. But he pretends to fulness.’

‘And that white son of his, my Lord of Arran? Does he too pretend to be full—in the head, for example?’

She embarrassed Mr. Secretary.

Mary Livingstone, at this point, came to her flushed and urgent: ‘Madam, madam, my good father!’ A jolly gentleman was before her, who, in the effusion of his loyalty, forgot to kneel. ‘Your knees, my lord, your knees!’ his daughter whispered; but the fine man replied, ‘No, no, my bairn. I stand up to fight for the Queen, and she shall e’en see all my gear.’

Queen Mary, not ceremonious by nature, smiled and was gracious: they conversed by these signs of the head and mouth, for he had no French.

To go over names would be tedious, and so might have proved to her Majesty had not Lethington fitted each sharply with a quality. Such a man was of her Majesty’s religion—my Lord Herries, now; such of Mr. Knox’s—see that square-browed, frowning Lord of Lindsay. Mr. Knox had reconciled this honourable man and his wife. It was whispered—this for her Majesty’s ear!—that all was not well between my Lord of Argyll and his lady, her Majesty’s half-sister. Would Mr. Knox intervene? At her Majesty’s desire beyond doubt he would do it. The Duke of Châtelherault held all the west as appanage of the Hamiltons, except a small territory round about Glasgow, to which her Majesty’s kinsman Lennox laid claim. The claim was faint, since the Lennox was in England. It was supposed that fear of the Hamiltons kept him there; but if her Majesty would be pleased she could reconcile the two houses.

The Queen blinked her eyes. ‘Reconciliation seems to be your Mr. Knox’s prerogative. I have not yet learned from you what mine may be.’

‘Yours, madam,’ said Lethington, ‘is the greater, because gentler, hand—to put it no higher than that! Moreover, the Stuarts of Lennox share your Majesty’s faith; and Mr. Knox——’

‘Ah,’ cried the Queen, ‘I conceive your Mr. Knox is Antipope!’

Mr. Secretary confessed that some had called him so.

‘And what does my cousin Châtelherault call him?’ she asked.

He explained that the Duke paid him great respect.

‘Let me understand you,’ said Queen Mary. ‘The Duke is master of the west, and Mr. Knox of the Duke. Who is master of Mr. Knox?’

‘Oh, madam, he will serve your Majesty. I am sure of him.’

She was not so sure: she wondered. Then she found that she was frowning and pinching her lip, so broke into a new line.

‘Let us take the south, Monsieur de Lethington. Who prevails in those parts?’

He told her that there were many great men to be considered there: my Lord Herries, my Lord Hume, the Earl of Bothwell. This name interested her, but she was careful not to single it out.

‘And is Mr. Knox the master of these?’

‘Not so, madam. My Lord Herries is of the old religion; and my Lord of Bothwell——’

‘Does he laugh?’

‘I fear, madam, it is a mocking spirit.’

‘Why,’ says she, ‘does he laugh at Mr. Knox?’

Mr. Secretary detected the malice. ‘Alas! your Majesty is pleased to laugh at her servant.’

‘Well, let us leave M. de Boduel to his laughter. Who rules the north?’

‘The Earl of Huntly is powerful there, madam.’

‘I have had intelligence of him. He is a Catholic. Well, well! And now you shall tell me, Mr. Secretary, where my own kingdom is.’

‘Oh, madam, it is in the hearts of your people. You have all Scotland at your feet.’

‘Let us take a case. Have I, for example, your Mr. Knox at my feet?’

‘Surely, madam.’

‘We shall see. I tell you fairly that I do not choose to be at his. He has written against women, I hear. Is he wed?’

‘Madam, he is twice a widower.’

‘He is severe. But he should be instructed in his theme. He may have reason. Where is my brother?’

‘The Lord James is at his prayers, madam.’

‘I hope he will remember me there. I see that I shall need advocacy.’

Her head ached, her eyes were stiff with watching. She said her good-night and retired. At that hour there was a great shouting and crying in the courtyard, and out of the midst there spired a wild music of rebecks, fiddles, scrannel-pipes, and a monstrous drum out of tune. The French lords said, ‘Tenez, on s’amuse!’ and raised their eyebrows. The Queen shivered over a sea-coal fire. Now at last she remembered all fair France, saw it in one poignant, long look inwards, and began to cry. ‘I am a fool, a fool—but, oh me! I am wretched,’ she said, and rocked herself about. The comfort of women—kisses, strokings, mothering arms—was applied; they put her to bed, and Mary Livingstone sat by her. This young woman was in high feather, surveyed the prospect with calmness, not at all afraid. Her father, she said, had put before her the desires of all those gentry: he had never had such court paid him in his long life. This it was to be father to a maid of honour. The Duke had taken him apart before dinner, urging the suit of his son Arran for the Queen’s hand. The Lord James had spoken of an earldom; Lethington could not see enough of him. ‘Hey, my lamb,’ she ended, stroking the Queen’s hot face, ‘we will have them all at your feet ere this time seven days; and a lass in her teens shall sway wild Scotland!’ The Queen sighed, and snuggled her cheek into the open hand.

Just as she was dozing off there was to be heard a scurry of feet along the corridor, the crash of a door admitting a burst of sound—in that, the shiver of steel on steel, a roar of voices, a loud cry above all, ‘He hath it! He hath it!’ The Queen started up and held her heart. ‘What do they want of me? Is it Mr. Knox?’ Livingstone ran into the antechamber among the huddling women there. Des-Essars came to them bright-eyed to say it was nothing. It was Monsieur D’Elbœuf fighting young Erskine about a lady. The duel had been arranged at supper. They had cleared the tables for the fray.

CHAPTER III
SUPERFICIAL PROPERTIES OF THE HONEYPOT

When they told her what was the name Mr. Knox had for her, and how it had been caught up by all the winds in town, Queen Mary pinched her lip. ‘Does he call me Honeypot? Well, he shall find there is wine in my honey—and perchance vinegar too, if he mishandle me. Or I may approve myself to him honey of Hymettus, which has thyme in it, and other sane herbs to make it sharp.’

A honey-queen she looked as she spoke, all golden and rose in her white weeds, her face aflower in the close coif, finger and thumb pinching her lip. She seemed at once wise, wholesome, sweet, and tinged with mischief; even the red Earl of Morton, the ‘bloat Douglas,’ as they called him, who should have been cunning in women, when he saw her preside at her first Council, said to his neighbour, ‘There is wine in the lass, and strong wine, to make men drunken. What was Black James Stuart about to let her in among us?’ It was a sign also of her suspected store of strength that Mr. Knox was careful not to see her. He had called her ‘Honeypot’ on hearsay.

No doubt she approved herself: those who loved her, and, trembling, marked her goings, owned it to each other by secret signs. And yet, in these early days, she stood alone, a growing girl in a synod of elders, watching, judging, wondering about them, praying to gods whom they had abjured in a tongue which they had come to detest. For they were all for England now, while she clung the more passionately to France. If she used deceit, is it wonderful? The arts of women against those half-hundred pairs of grudging, reticent eyes; a little armoury of smiles, blushes, demure, down-drooping lids! Was it the instinct to defend, or the relish for cajolery? She had the art of unconscious art. She looked askance, she let her lips quiver at a harsh decree, she kissed and took kisses where she could. She laughed for fear she should cry, she was witty when most at a loss. She refused to see disapproval in any, pretended to an open mind, and kept the inner door close-barred. Never unwatched, she was never found out; never off the watch, she never let her anxiety be seen. Alone she did it. Not Mary Livingstone herself knew the half of her effort, or shared her moments of dismay; for that whole-hearted girl saw Scotland with Scots eyes.

But she succeeded—she pleased. The lords filled Holyroodhouse, their companies the precincts; every man was Queen Mary’s man. The city wrought at its propynes and pageants against her entry in state. Mr. Knox, grimly surveying the company at his board, called her Honeypot.

There were those of her own religion who might have had another name for her. One morning there was a fray after her mass, when the Lord Lindsay and a few like him hustled and beat a priest. They waited for him behind the screen and gave him, in their phrase, ‘a bloody comb.’ Now, here was a case for something more tart than honey—at least, the clerk thought so. He had come running to her full of his griefs: the holy vessels had been tumbled on the floor, the holy vestments were in shreds; he (the poor ministrant) was black and blue; martyrdom beckoned him, and so on.

‘Nay, good father, you shall not take it amiss,’ she had said to him. ‘A greater than you or I said in a like case, “They know not what they do.”’

‘Madam,’ says the priest, ‘there spake the Son of God, all-discerning, not to be discerned of the Jews. But I judge from the feel of my head what they do, and I think they themselves know very well—and their master also that sent them, their Master Knox.’

‘I will give you another Scripture, then,’ replied she. ‘It is written, “By our stripes we are healed.”’

‘Your pardon, madam, your pardon!’ cried the priest: ‘I read it otherwise. St. Peter saith, “By His stripes we are healed”—a very different matter.’

She grew red. ‘Come, come, sir, we are bandying words. You will not tell me that you have no need of heavenly physic, I suppose?’

‘I pray,’ said he, ‘that your Majesty have none. Madam, if it please you, but for your Majesty’s kindred, the Lord James and his brethren, I had been a dead man.’

‘You tell me the best news of my brothers I have had yet,’ said she, and sent him away.

She used a gentler method with Lord Lindsay when he next showed her his rugged, shameless face. He told her bluntly that he would never bend the knee to Baal.

‘Well,’ she said, with a smile, ‘you shall bend it to me instead.’ And she looked so winning and so young, and withal so timid lest he should refuse, that (on a sudden impulse) down he went before her and kissed her hand.

‘I knew that I could make him ashamed,’ she said afterwards to Mary Livingstone.

‘I would have had him whipped!’ cried the flaming maid.

‘You are out, my dear,’ said Queen Mary. ‘’Twas better he should whip himself.’

Although she took enormous pains, she succeeded not nearly so well with her bastard brothers and their sister, Lady Argyll, the handsome, black-browed woman. James, Robert, and John, sons of the king her father, and Margaret Erskine, all alike tall, sable, stiff and sullen, were alike in this too, that they were eager for what they could get without asking. The old needy Hamilton—Duke of Châtelherault as he was—let no day go by without begging for his son. These men let be seen what they wanted, but they would not ask. The vexatious thing with their sort is, that you may give a man too much or too little, and never be sure which of you is the robber. Now, the Lord James greatly coveted the earldom of Moray. Would he tell her so, think you? Not he, since he would not admit it to his very self. She received more than a hint that it would be wise to reward him, and told him that she desired it. He bowed his acceptance as if he were obedient unto death.

‘Madam, if it please your Majesty to make me of your highest estate, it is not for me to gainsay you.’

‘Why, no,’ says the Queen, ‘I trow it is not. You shall be girt Earl of Mar at the Council, for such I understand to be your present desire.’

It was not his desire by any means, yet he could not bring himself to say so. Her very knowledge that he had desires at all tied his tongue.

‘Madam,’ he said, sickly-white, ‘the grace is inordinate to my merits: and, indeed, how should duty be rewarded, being in its own performance a grateful thing? True it is that my lands lie farther to the north than those of Mar; true it is that in Moray—to name a case—there are forces which, maybe, would not be the worse of a watchful eye. But the earldom of Moray! Tush, what am I saying?’

‘We spake of the earldom of Mar,’ she said drily. ‘That other, I understand, is claimed by my Lord of Huntly, as a right of his, under my favour.’

He added nothing, but bit his lip sideways, and looked at his white hands. She had done more wisely to give him Moray at once; and so she might had he but asked for it. But when she opened her hands he shut his up, and where she spoke her mind he never did. She ought to have been afraid of him, for two excellent reasons: first, she never knew what he thought, and next, everybody about her asked that first. Instead, he irritated her, like a prickly shift.

‘Am I to knock for ever at the shutters of the house of him?’ she asked of her friends. ‘Not so, but I shall conclude there is nobody at home.’

Healthy herself, and high-spirited, and as open as the day when she was in earnest, she laughed at his secret ways in private and made light of them in public. It was on the tip of her saucy tongue more than once or twice to strike him to earth with the thunderbolt: ‘Did you hasten me to Scotland to work my ruin, brother? Do you reckon to climb to the throne over me?’ She thought better of it, but only because it seemed not worth her while. There was no give-and-take with the Lord James, and it is dull work whipping a dead dog.

Meantime the prediction of Mary Livingstone seemed on the edge of fulfilment. Queen Mary ruled Scotland; and her spirits rose to meet success. She was full of courage and good cheer, holding her kingdom in the hollow of her palms. Honeypot? Did Mr. Knox call her so? It was odd how the name struck her.

‘Well,’ she said, with a shrug, ‘if they find me sweet and hive about me, shall I not do well?’

She made Lethington Secretary of State without reserve, and remarked that he was every day in the antechamber.

The word flew busily up and down the Canongate, round about the Cross: ‘Master Knox hath fitted her with a name, do you mind? “She is Honeypot,” quoth he. Heard you ever the like o’ that?’ Some favoured it and her, some winked at it, some misfavoured; and these were the grey beards and white mutches. But one and all came out to see her make her entry on the Tuesday.

One hour before she left Holyrood, Mr. Knox preached from his window in the High Street to a packed assembly of blue bonnets and shrouded heads, upon the text, Be wise now therefore, O ye Kings—a ring of scornful despair in his accents making the admonition vain. ‘I shall not ask ye now what it is ye are come out for to see, lest I tempt ye to lie; for I know better than yourselves. Meat! “Give us meat,” ye cry and clamour; “give us meat for the gapes, meat for greedy eyes!” Ay, and ye shall have your meat, fear not for that. Jags and slashes and feathered heads, ye shall have; targeted tails, and bosoms decked in shame, but else as bare as my hand. Fill yourselves with the like of these—but oh, sirs, when ye lie drunken, blame not the kennel that holds ye. If that ye crave to see prancing Frenchmen before ye, minions and jugglers, leaping sinners, damsels with timbrels, and such-like sick ministers to sick women’s desires, I say, let it be so, o’ God’s holy name; for the day cometh when ye shall have grace given ye to look within, and see who pulls the wires that sets them all heeling and reeling, jigging up and down—whether Christ or Antichrist, whether the Lord God of Israel or the Lord Mammon of the Phœnicians. Look ye well in that day, judge ye and see.’

He stopped, as if he saw in their midst what he cried against; and some man called up, ‘What more will you say, sir?’

Mr. Knox gathered himself together. ‘Why, this, my man, that the harlotry of old Babylon is not dead yet, but like a snake lifteth a dry head from the dust wherein you think to have crushed her. Bite, snake, bite, I say; for the rather thou bitest, the rather shall thy latter end come. Heard ye not, sirs, how they trounced a bare-polled priest in the house of Rimmon, before the idol of abomination herself, these two days by past? I praise not, I blame not; I say, him that is drunken let him be drunken still. More becomes me not as yet, for all is yet to do. I fear to prejudge, I fear to offend; let us walk warily, brethren, until the day break. But I remember David, ruler in Israel, when he hoped against hope and knew not certainly that his cry should go up as far as God. For no more than that chosen minister can I look to see the number of the elect made up from a froward and stiff-necked generation. Nay, but I can cry aloud in the desert, I can fast, I can watch for the cloud of the gathering wrath of God. And this shall be my prayer for you and for yours, Be wise, etc.’ He did pray as he spoke, with his strong eyes lifted up above the housetops—a bidding prayer, you may call it, to which the people’s answer rumbled and grew in strength. One or two in the street struck into a savage song, and soon the roar of it filled the long street:

The hunter is Christ, that hunts in haste,

The hounds are Peter and Paul;

The Pope is the fox, Rome is the rocks,

That rubs us on the gall.

A gun in the valley told them that the Queen was away. It was well that she was guarded.

Des-Essars, the Queen’s French page, in that curious work of his, half reminiscence and half confession, which he dubs Le Secret des Secrets, has a note upon this day, and the aspect of the crowd, which he says was dangerous. ‘Looking up the hill,’ he writes, ‘towards the Netherbow Port, where we were to stop for the ceremony of the keys, I could see that the line of sightseers was uneven, ever surging and ebbing like an incoming sea. Also I had no relish for the faces I saw—I speak not of them at the windows. Certainly, all were highly curious to see my mistress and their own; and yet—or so I judged—they found in her and her company food for the eyes and none for the heart. They appeared to consider her their property; would have had her go slow, that they might fill themselves with her sight; or fast, that they might judge of her horsemanship. We were a show, forsooth; not come in to take possession of our own; rather admitted, that these close-lipped people might possess us if they found us worthy—ah, or dispossess us if they did not. Here and there men among them hailed their favourites: the Lord James Stuart was received with bonnets in the air; and at least once I heard it said, “There rides the true King of Scots.” My Lord Chancellor Morton, riding immediately before the Queen’s Grace, did not disdain to bandy words with them that cried out upon him, “The Douglas! The Douglas!” He, looking round about, “Ay, ye rascals,” I heard him say, “ye know your masters fine when they carry the sword.” He was a very portly, hearty gentleman in those days, high-coloured, with a full round beard. But above all things in the world the Scots lack fineness of manners. It was not that this Earl of Morton desired to grieve the Queen by any freedom of his; but worse than that, to my thinking, he did not know that he did it. As for my lords her Majesty’s uncles, their reception was exceedingly unhappy; but they cared little for that. Foolish Monsieur de Châtelard made matters worse by singing like a boy in quire as he rode behind his master, Monsieur d’Amville. This he did, as he said, to show his contempt for the rabble; but all the result was that he earned theirs. I saw a tall, gaunt, bearded man at a window, in a black cloak and bonnet. They told me that was Master Knox, the strongest man in Scotland.’

It is true that Master Knox watched the Queen go up, with sharp eyes which missed nothing. He saw her eager head turn this way and that at any chance of a welcome. He saw her meet gladness with gladness, deprecate doubt, plead for affection. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness: but she is too keen after sweet food.’ She smiled all the while, but with differences which he was jealous to note. ‘She deals carefully; she is no so sure of her ground. Eh, man, she goes warily to work.’

A child at a window leaped in arms and called out clearly: ‘Oh, mother, mother, the braw leddy!’ The Queen laughed outright, looked up, nodded, and kissed her hand.

‘Hoots, woman,’ grumbled Mr. Knox, ‘how ye lick your fingers! Fie, what a sweet tooth ye have!’

She was very happy, had no doubts but that, as she won the Keys of the Port, she should win the hearts of all these people. Stooping down, she let the Provost kiss her hand. ‘The sun comes in with me, tell the Provost,’ she said to Mr. Secretary, not trusting her Scots.

‘Madam, so please you,’ the good man replied, clearing his throat, ‘we shall make a braver show for your Grace’s contentation upon the coming out from dinner. Rehearse that to her Majesty, Lethington, I’ll trouble ye.’

‘Ah, Mr. Provost, we shall all make a better show then, trust me,’ she said, laughing; and rode quickly through the gate.

She was very bold: everybody said that. She had the manners of a boy—his quick rush of words, his impulse, and his dashing assurance—with that same backwash of timidity, the sudden wonder of ‘Have I gone too far—betrayed myself’ which flushes a boy hot in a minute. All could see how bold she was; but not all knew how the heart beat. It made for her harm that her merits were shy things. I find that she was dressed for the day in ‘a stiff white satin gown sewn all over with pearls.’ Her neck was bare to the cleft of the bosom; and her tawny brown hair, curled and towered upon her head, was crowned with diamonds. Des-Essars says that her eyes were like stars; but he is partial. There were many girls in Scotland fairer than she. Mary Fleming was one, a very gentle, modest lady; Mary Seton was another, sharp and pure as a profile on a coin of Sicily. Mary Livingstone bore herself like a goddess; Mary Beaton had a riper lip. But this Mary Stuart stung the eyes, and provoked by flashing contrasts. Queen of Scots and Dryad of the wood; all honey and wine; bold as a boy and as lightly abashed, clinging as a girl and as slow to leave hold, full of courage, very wise. ‘Sirs, a dangerous sweet woman. Here we have the Honeypot,’ says Mr. Knox to himself, and thought of her at night.

After dinner, as she came down the hill, they gave her pageants. Virgins in white dropped out of machines with crowns for her; blackamoors, Turks, savage men came about her with songs about the Scriptures and the fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. She understood some, and laughed pleasantly at all. Even she took not amiss the unmannerly hint of the Lawn Market, where they would have burned a mass-priest in effigy—had him swinging over the faggots, chalice and vestment, crucifix and all. ‘Fie, sirs, fie! What harm has he done, poor soul?’ was all she said.

The Grand Prior was furiously angry; seeing which, the Earl of Morton cut the figure down, and then struck out savagely with the flat of his blade, spurring his horse into the sniggering mob. ‘Damn you, have done with your beastliness—down, dogs, down!’ The Lord James looked away.

At the Salt Tron they had built up a door, with a glory as of heaven upon it. Here she dismounted and sat for a while. Clouds above drew apart; a pretty boy in a gilt tunic was let down by ropes before her. He said a piece in gasps, then offered her the Psalter in rhymed Scots. She thought it was the Geneva Bible, and took it with a queer lift of the eyebrows, which all saw. Arthur Erskine, to whom she handed it, held it between finger and thumb as if it had been red hot; and men marked that, and nudged each other. The boy stood rigid, not knowing what else to do; quickly she turned, looked at him shyly for a moment, then leaned forward and took him up in her arms, put her cheek to his, cuddled and kissed him. ‘You spake up bravely, my lamb,’ she said. ‘And what may your name be?’ She had to look up to Lethington for his reply, but did not let go of the child. His name was Ninian Ross. ‘I would I had one like you, Ninian Ross!’ she cried in his own tongue, kissed him again, and let him go.

People said to each other, ‘She loves too much, she is too free of her loving—to kiss and dandle a bairn in the street.’

‘Honeypot, Honeypot!’ said grudging Mr. Knox, looking on rapt at all this.

Des-Essars writes: ‘She believed she had won the entry of the heart; she read in the castle guns, bells of steeples, and hoarse outcry of the crowd, assurance of what she hoped for. I was glad, for my part, and disposed to thank God heartily, that we reached Holyroodhouse without injury to her person or insult to cut her to the soul.’

I think Des-Essars too sensitive: she was fully as shrewd an observer as he could have been. At least, she returned in good spirits. If any were tired, she was not; but danced all night with her Frenchmen. Monsieur de Châtelard was a happy man when he had her in his arms.

‘Miséricorde—O Queen of Love! Thus I would go through the world, though I burned in hell for it after.’

‘Thus would not I,’ quoth she. ‘You are hurting me. Take care.’

They brought her news in the midst that the Earl of Bothwell was in town with a great company, and would kiss her hands in the morning if he might.

‘Let him come to me now while I am happy,’ she said. ‘Who knows what to-morrow may do for me?’

She sent away Châtelard, and waited. Soon enough she saw the Earl’s broad shoulders making a way, the daring eyes, the hardy mouth. ‘You are welcome, my lord, to Scotland.’

‘But am I welcome to your Majesty?’

‘You have been slow to seek my welcome, sir.’