The sallow Venetian trembled with horror and anger at these words, and raised his thin white tremulous hands to heaven.
"Sancta Maria!" he exclaimed; "silence, thou false peer, lest I have thee burned quick!"
Cassilis laughed aloud, till every joint in his armour rattled.
"I am Gilbert Kennedy," said he, "and can betake me to my auld house in the wilds o' Carrick; so send your faggots there; and, hark ye, sir legate, I, who have hanged a monk, may feed the crows with a patriarch."
Cassilis was a stern and ferocious lord, so none dared to reply. He was a tyrant over his vassals, who found his avarice insatiable; yet it was always exerted in form of feudal law. Thus, on the marriage of each of his daughters (he had two—Jean, married to the Earl of Orkney, and Catherine, to the Laird of Banburrow), or the knighting of his sons, the master, and Sir Thomas of Colzean; or for the maintenance of feuds with his neighbours, he had mulcted them heavily by the ordinance which made it "lesome to the lord to seek sic help frae his men conforme to their faculties and the quantitie of their lands;" in short, to tax them, and seize the best of the goods in stable, byre, roost, and cheese-room, whenever the lord pleased, or found an urgent necessity for so doing.
The arguments and energy of this avaricious peer, of Glencairn, Kilmaurs, and others, who were in secret the agents or adherents of Somerset, if they failed to convince the mass who heard them, of the advantages that might accrue from a nuptial and political union with England, succeeded at last in filling with undefined alarm the bosom of Mary of Lorraine, whose finely nervous and aristocratic, yet soft temperament, was as ill calculated to withstand the turbulence, cupidity, and savagery of these atrocious peers, as in after-times her daughter to withstand their sons. She knew the falsehood of those with whom she had to contend, and who were now collected in a gloomy group near the council-table. Her soft cheek, from having the pink tinge of a sea-shell, crimsoned; her beautiful eyes filled with light, and, with a hand white as marble, grasping an arm of her innocent daughter's throne, she rose to speak, and then all were hushed to silence, and every eye was turned towards her.
"My lords and gentlemen," said she, gathering courage from the emergency of the moment and the presence of M. d'Oysell and the patriarch of Venice, "the holy religion which was planted in this soil a thousand years ago, and which flourished so broadly and so well, yielding good fruit, has been all but uprooted! A cardinal priest, a prince of the Church, has been barbarously murdered in his own archiepiscopal palace, and, gashed by wounds, his naked corpse has been suspended from its ramparts in the light of noon! Already, by this tremendous act, the altar of God has been defiled and the temple shaken to its foundation. Through the dim vista of events to come, I look forward with fear and sorrow to the future reign of my little daughter, the child of the good King James V.—that King James whom Pope Julius made defender of the faith, and girt with a sword sharpened by his holy hand on the altar-stone of St. Peter, against all heretics, especially those of England,—that James V., whose young and noble heart was broken by the rebel spirit of his peers, by their treason to Scotland in the cabinet, and their cowardice at the battle of Solway. Nay, never frown on me, or rattle your swords, my lords of Cassilis and Glencairn," she added, waving her small white hand, on which the jewels flashed like the scorn that lighted up her eyes; "I am a woman, and claim a woman's privilege to speak; and thus I repeat again, that I anticipate the future of my daughter, a Stuart and a Guise, among you with grief and horror! The Earls of Bothwell and Glencairn have spoken well and plausibly; but apart from all, the Duke of Somerset's conditions, which are unworthy the Scottish crown and degrading to the Scottish people, what happiness could be my daughter's in wedding the son of the apostate Henry,—he who was the horror of all modest women,—he who espoused Anne Boleyn, knowing her to be his own daughter, and yet laid her head on the block; who violated his promises to Anne of Cleves, and sent her fair successor also to the block; who murdered the aged Countess of Salisbury, and sent more than seventy thousand of his subjects to await his appearance before the judgment-seat of God; he who, by his lusts, and by his treason to the Holy See, made all England turn, in one day, heretic! Yet it is to the son of this man you would wed her in helpless infancy; and to the custody of his creature Somerset you would yield her, the daughter of Scotland and of France!"
A deep silence succeeded this outburst. At last Arran spoke.
"Fear not, madam," said he; "being the next kinsman to the crown, I am, by the ancient custom of our mother country, the tutor or custodian of its infant sovereign, and, with God's will, I shall remain so!"
"None dare dispute this right, Lord Earl," said Mary.