Skirting the lake, they struck into the horse-way, that, between thickets of fir, led straight to the venerable stronghold of the knights of Gourtoun, which they saw looming before them in the starlight, with its great square keep and double flanking towers, barbican, and ditch.
CHAPTER XX.
THE PLOT THICKENS—THE CONFERENCE OF CRAIGMILLAR.
There's many a feud still slumbering in its ashes,
Whose embers yet are red. Nobles we have
Stout as old Greysteel, and as hot as Bothwell.
Auchindrane.
The celebrated conference of Craigmillar, is recorded too particularly in our national history to be expatiated on here; nevertheless, a brief notice is necessary to preserve the unity of the Magister Absalom's narrative.
In the apartment of the Lord Argyle, in that old feudal fortress, met Bothwell and his brother-in-law Huntly, with Moray—openly their friend, and secretly their foe—for frequently had they conspired each other's death by secret fraud and open violence; and Moray had personally defeated, and caused the death of the old Earl, George of Huntly, at the recent battle of Corrichie. There, too, came the secretary of state, the great Sir William Maitland of Lethington, who, notwithstanding his skill in government and statecraft, lost his head in the desperate game of politics seven years after.
This conference was held around the dais on which stood the couch of Argyle, who was labouring under a severe illness.
Long and eloquently the talented secretary expatiated on the evils that had resulted to the Scottish people, from Mary's ill-assorted marriage with the young and profligate Lord of Darnley; the rebellion it had brought forth among the adherents of Chatelherault, in the west; among the Gordons in the north; and the general discontent it had occasioned by the peculiar religious tenets of the house of Lennox—a marriage against which Master Knox had bitterly and abusively inveighed, and which, to the loving, trusting, and devoted Mary, had become a source of hourly misery; for the passing love of the profligate, unmindful of her exalted rank, her matchless beauty, her sweetness of manner and charming vivacity, had wandered to many inferior and unworthy objects. Among these he had squandered his patrimony, and the revenues of a crown which he disgraced; thus, completely estranging the heart of the queen, by a career of insult, neglect, and riot; by the hourly scandals he committed in her palaces, and chief of all by the murder of her harmless secretary—thus, making the breach irreparable by his lacking the art and condescension to repair it.
He spoke, too, of those powerful barons who were still enduring banishment as accessories to the destruction of the hapless Rizzio, whose overweening pride and Italian birth had been his only crime; barons, noble in descent and venerated in name—the kinsmen of those he addressed; the veteran Kerr, whose ponderous ghisarma had done his country such service at Pinkiecleugh; Patrick Lord Ruthven, then lying ill of a deadly sickness in an English frontier village; the Laird of Pitarrow and the Tutor of Pitcurr all brave Scottish knights, who were enduring great misery in the land of our hereditary foes, by the seizure of their ancestral castles and the confiscation of their estates; and who, by the subversion of the house of Lennox, would be restored to their country and friends, and released from a degrading position among Englishmen—and the change he would propose, could only be effected by the divorce of the young queen from her cousin.
The Earl of Moray, (who, with Morton, had been the secretary's active colleague in the Rizzio murder,) for private and ambitious views of his own, from an early period had vehemently opposed her marriage, and even proceeded so far as to take up arms against it in 1565. He still, as we are told, "pursued the old conspiracy against the king's life," urging the divorce with all his eloquence; and it may easily be believed that, though his mortal foe, Bothwell seconded him on this occasion with an ardour the source of which the wily Earl was not slow in perceiving; and, together, they spared not the powers of invention and persuasion in obviating Argyle's many doubts that the queen "would consent to a measure so indelicate and unpleasant as a divorce."