He raised an outcry. ‘The Earl of Bothwell! The Earl of Bothwell! How much more grace for this outlaw? Is it not enough that he return with his head on his shoulders?’
She replied that he had deserved well of both of them. He had scared her shameful brother out of Scotland, who would have gone for no other body. He had a stout heart, had promised her that Moray should die an alien or a felon, and would keep his word.
‘But this office is a promise to my father, madam,’ says the King. ‘I promised him that Lieutenancy six months since, and may no more go back upon my word than my Lord Bothwell upon his.’
Rather red in the face, she urged her reasons. ‘That is not convenient, dear friend. They do not love my Lord of Lennox in the West. There are other reasons—good reasons. Had you been here you would have heard them all. You must not vex me in this, now—of all times in my life.’
He looked her up and down curiously, without manners, without enthusiasm. Perhaps he did not understand her—he had a thick head. Then he signed the dockets and went out, not having seen that she had shut her eyes and was blushing.
Dreadfully jealous of his ‘prerogatives,’ he interposed in everything after this, had all state correspondence before him and saw all the replies, whether they were of home or abroad. Here the Italian angered him, whose habit had always been to converse with her Majesty in French: no frowns nor furious pacing of the closet could break him off it. The Queen, very gentle towards him, insisted that the secretary should paraphrase his letters into a kind of Scots; but the King, who was stupid at business, boggled over the halting translation, did not understand any more than at first, and suspected the Italian of deliberate mystification. He told the Queen that she should speak the vernacular with this hireling. She said, and truly, that she thought in French and spoke it better; when, nevertheless, she tried to gratify him, even he saw that it was absurd. Absurd or not, he loved David none the better for that.
He suspected everybody about her person, but chiefly this fat Italian; to whose score he laid his next rebuff, the very palpable hit that it was. The old Duke of Châtelherault, exiled for the late rebellion, was pining in England, it seems, and beginning to ail. Shallow old trickster as he might be, he loved his country and his kindred, and was (as the Queen could never forget) head of the Hamiltons, of the blood royal. He crept back in December over the Solway, and from one of his coast-castles sent humble messengers forward to her for pardon and remission of forfeiture. To these she inclined, on more grounds than one. She had some pity for the old hag-ridden man, haunted ever with the shadow of madness as he was; she remembered his white hair and flushing, delicate face. Then her new Earl of Huntly had married into that family; and she wished to keep a hold on the Gordons. And then, again, the blood royal! She forgot that if she could comfortably admit Châtelherault his share in that, her husband could never admit it without impeaching his own rights. So she inclined to the piteous letters, and allowed herself to be pitiful.
The King, on the first hint of this clemency, was moved beyond her experience. No sulking, brooding, knitting of brows; he fairly stormed at her before her circle. ‘What am I, madam? What silly tavern-sign do you make of me? You exalt my chief enemy, my hereditary enemy, enemy of my title to be here—and ask me to record it! King Henry is to declare his esteem for the Hamiltons, who desire to unking him! This is paltry work, the design too gross. I see foreign fingers at work in this. But I will never consent, never! Ask me no more.’
The Italian surveyed his august company at large, lifted his eyebrows, and blandly, patently, deliberately shrugged. My Lord of Bothwell himself had little stomach for this; but the King strangled a cry and turned upon his insolent critic. ‘White-blooded, creeping, fingering dog!’ He drew his dagger on the man, and for the moment scared the life out of him.
Lord Bothwell stepped in between, a broad-shouldered easy gentleman; the next step was the Queen’s, flame-hued now, and at her fiercest. ‘Put up your weapon, my lord, and learn to be the companion of your prince. Until this may be, the Council is dissolved. Farewell, sirs. David, stay you here. I have need of you.’