CHAPTER XXIII.
RETRIBUTION.
Vanish'd each pleasure—vanish'd all his woes,
Nor Hope nor Fear disturb his long repose;
He saw the busy world—'twas but to-day!
A keen spectator of life's motley play—
The curtain falls—the scene is o'er.
Hallor's Eternity.
The summer wore away—and the winter approached.
By order of Frederick II., the conqueror of the Ditmarsians, Bothwell had been transmitted, heavily ironed—an insult under which his proud spirit writhed in agony—from the great castle of Kiobenhafen to that of Malmö, a strong and gloomy fortress on the Swedish coast, washed by the waters of the Sound, and overlooking a little town then possessed by the Danes.
There he was kept, in sure and strict ward, by a knight named Beirn Gowes, captain of Malmö and governor of Draxholm, in a vaulted apartment, with windows grated, and doors sheathed with iron, grooved in the enormous granite walls, to prevent escape; and there, the long and weary days, and weeks, and months, rolled on in dull and unchanging monotony.
Of those stirring events that were acting at home he knew nothing, for never a voice fell on his ear in that far-northern prison; and thus he heard not of Mary's escape from the isle of Lochleven—her futile flight to seek succour of the false Elizabeth, and that she, too, was pining a captive in the castle of Nottingham. He knew not that all his sounding titles, and those old heraldic honours which, by their good swords, his brave forefathers had acquired, and borne on their bucklers through many a Scottish battle-field, had been gifted away with his lordly castles, his fertile fiefs, and noble baronies, to the upholders of the new régime—the Lords of the Secret Council. Of the fury of the Douglas wars—of Moray's death, and Lennox's fall—of Morton's power and pride, his lust and wrath, under which the capital languished and the country writhed. Of all these he heard not a word; for he was utterly forgotten and deserted by all. Even Jane of Huntly, his countess, that gentle being who had once loved him so well, after their divorce had soon learned to forget him in the arms of her former lover, the Earl of Sutherland, and to commit to oblivion that she had once been the happy bride of the splendid Bothwell.
He knew not, too, of the terrible vengeance that had fallen upon his numerous adherents,—how their heads were bleaching on the battlements of Edinburgh—how their castles were ruined, their families forfeited, their names proscribed; while James, Earl of Morton, the mainspring and prime mover of all these plots and conspiracies, of which his (Bothwell's) frantic love and mad ambition had made him the too ready tool, was flourishing, for a brief term, in unrestricted pride and plenitude of power, as Regent and Governor of Scotland.
Black Hob of Ormiston, Bolton, Hay of Tallo, with French Paris and others, who had been transmitted by Anna Rosenkrantz to Scotland, were solemnly arraigned as traitors and regicides before the supreme legal tribunal at Edinburgh, and sentenced to be decapitated and quartered.
In that grated chamber of the old tower of Holyrood, in which Konrad had been confined, young Hepburn of Bolton sat counting the minutes that yet remained to him between time and eternity.