There was much bustle in Edinburgh during the week, and more suitors to the Earl of Moray than he had time to see. Mr. Secretary got no joy out of him; he was kind to the Earl of Morton and spoke him many hopeful words; he shook his finger at Lord Ruthven. ‘Fie, my lord,’ he said, ‘you should wear a finer face. Turn you to your God, Lord Ruthven, and store up grain against the lean years to come. Root up these darnels from your garden-plot, lest they choke the good seed sowed in you. Let stout Mr. Knox be your exemplar, then; behold how he can harden his brows. Farewell, my lord: be sure of my friendship; take kindly to the soil of England. There are stout hearts in Newcastle, a godly congregation, to which I commend you.’
Ruthven turned away from him without a word to say, and never saw him again. With Morton, Lindsay, and the rest, he took the English road. Mr. Secretary Lethington went to my lord Atholl’s in the west; my lord of Argyll became a Queen’s man. Within the bare week after the flight to Dunbar the ragged corse of the Italian lay as untrodden by enemies as if Jerusalem had been his sepulture. But we are out-running our matter: we must be back at Dunbar with Queen Mary.
From that castle Lord Bothwell wrote to his wife, to this effect:—
Attend me not these many days. The alders may bud by Hermitage Water before I kiss the neck of my dear. For such business as here we have was never done in the Debatable Land since Solway Moss was reddened; such a riding in and forth of messengers, such a sealing of dooms, rewards and forfeitures—no, nor such a flocking of lords anxious to prove their wisdoms in their loves.... She is hearted like a man. She rises early every day, and sets to her blessing and banning of men’s lives with as sharp an edge as I to my beef at noon. She has a care for all who have served or dis-served her, and is no more frugal of her embracing than of her spurning heel. One man only she hath clean out of mind; for him she hath neither inclination nor disgust. She asketh not his company, neither seeketh to have him away. He is as though he were not—still air in the chamber, for which you ope not the window, as needing more of it, nor shut-to the window, for fear of more. Doth he enter her presence—why not? the room is wide. Doth he go out—why not? the world is wider. How this came about it were too long to tell you; this only will I say, that it came late, for at her first alighting here she feared him mortally, as if she viewed in him the ghost of her old self. That was a sickness of the mind, not against nature; now gone, and he with it. Needs must I admire her for the banishment....
But to return. Business ended—more sharply than you would believe by any young head but your own—she wins to the open weather. She walks abroad, she takes my arm. Yes, and indeed, I am grown to be somewhat in this realm. She rides o’er the brae; your servant at her stirrup; she sails the sea, your lover at the helm. You belie your own courage when you doubt this princess’s, my dear heart. For, to say nothing of her trust in me, which you will own to be bold in any lady (and most bold in herself), she has the mettle of a blood-horse, whom to stroke is to sting. She is far gone with child, and you may guess with what zest, seeing her regard for her partner in it. In truth, she hath a horror; because her aim is to forget what she can never forgive, and so every drag upon her leaping spirit seems to remind her of him and his deeds. Oh, but she suffers and is strong!... I hear you say to me, ‘Fie, you are bewitched. A spell! A spell!’—but I laugh at you. There is a still-faced, raven-haired witch-wife in Liddesdale working upon me under the moon. Aha, Mistress Sanctity, watch for me o’ nights.
Yestreen the Q. spake of your Serenity. ‘She hates me,’ quoth she, ‘for her father’s sake, in whose cruel disgrace I vow I had no part; but I shall make her love me yet.’ And when I laughed somewhat, she gave a thring of the shoulder. ‘I’ld have you know, Lord Bothwell,’ saith she, ‘that there’s no wife nor bairn in this land can refuse the kisses of my mouth.’ Thinks I, ‘You are bold to say it. You may come to crave them.’ Quant à moy, ma doulce amye, je te bayse les mains.
You can see that he had been laughing at her in the old way, not boisterously this time, but under the beard, in his little twinkling eyes; and that, in the old way, she had been braced by his bravery. He had guessed—you can see that too—that she had some need of him, and how necessary it was that her loathing for her husband should pass into mere indifference. But he had no notion at that time how pressing that need was. Not she herself had realised the horror she had until the night after reaching Dunbar, when the King, by Standen, had renewed certain proposals, frustrate before by his laches. It may have been sudden panic, it may have been a trick of memory—God knows what it was; but she had flooded with scarlet, then turned dead white, had murmured some excuse, and with bowed head and feeble, expostulating hands, had left the room. She did not come back that night. She had called Des-Essars, fled with him into the turret, found an empty chamber under the leads, had the door locked, a great coffer jammed against it—and had stayed there so till morning. The young man, writing a word or two upon it, says that she was almost rigid at first, in a waking trance; and that she sat ‘pinned to his side’ while the maids and valets hunted her high and low. ‘I did what I could,’ he writes; ‘talked nonsense, told old tales, sang saucy songs, which by that time of my life I had been glad to have forgotten, and, affecting a nonchalance which I was far from feeling, recovered her a little. She began to be curious whether they would find her, judged by the ear how the scent lay, laughed to hear Mistress Seton panting on the stair, and Carwood screaming—“There’s a great rat in my road!” Presently she slept, with her head on my knees and my jacket over her shoulders. I took her down to bed before morning, and in the daylight she had partly recovered herself. She transacted business, ate a meal; but I remarked that she trembled whenever the King entered the room, and faltered when she was obliged to reply to him—faltered and turned up her eyes, as fowls do when they are sleepy. Fortunately for her, he was sulky, and did not renew his advances.’
I suspect that she found out—for she was rigid in self-probing—that if she allowed herself to abhor him for an unspeakable affront, she would have to scorn herself even more for having given him the means of affronting her. Right punishment: she would admit that she had deserved it. She had been the basest of women (she would say) when she offered that which was to her a sacrament, in barter for mere political advantage. Why, yes! she had prepared to sell herself to this wallowing swine in order to escape her prison; and if he snored the bargain out of his head it was because he was a hog,—but then, O God! what was she? So, from not daring to think of that night of shame, she passed to fearing to think of the shameful recreants in it; and as we ever peer at what we dread, it came about that she could think of nothing else, and was in torment. Des-Essars gives none of this; it was not in his power to get at it; but he saw, what we can never see, that she suffered atrociously, that her case grew desperate. Hear him. ‘One day I came with a message to her chamber door, early; the door was half-open. I had a shocking vision of her abed, lying there in a bed of torture, like one stung; on her face, writhing and moaning, tossing her hands—short breath, tearless sobbing, sharp cries to God; while Mary Seton read aloud out of Saint-Augustin by the fog-bound cresset light. She read on through everything—pausing only to put our Mistress back into the middle of the bed, for fear lest she might fall out and hurt herself.’
If this is true—and we know that it is—why, then, out of such waking delirium, out of anguish so dry, Queen Mary must have been delivered if she were not to die of it.
The Earl of Bothwell was not a man of imagination, though he had a quick fancy. He read his Queen in this state of hers with interest at first, and some amusement, not then knowing how dire it was. He saw that she would turn white and leave any room into which King Darnley entered; he knew that she would ride far to avoid him, and sometimes, indeed, under sudden stress, would use whip and spur and fly from him like a hunted thief. When he found out something—not very much, for Des-Essars would not speak—of the events of the night in the turret, moved by good-nature, he put himself in the way to help her. He got more maids fetched from Edinburgh—Fleming and Mary Sempill—and himself stayed with her as long as he dared, and longer than he cared. And then, one day by chance, he got a full view of her haunted mind—a field of broken lights indeed! and saw how far he might travel there if he chose, and with what profit to himself.