Des-Essars, watching the Queen’s face under this recital, saw the clouds gather for a storm. Lord Huntly had listened to it with unmoved face. At the end he said gravely, ‘He was long dying’; and no one spoke or moved for some minutes until the Queen suddenly hid her face and sobbed, and cried out that she wished she herself were dead. Lord Bothwell, at that, put his arms about her with rough familiarity, lifted her half out of bed to his own breast, kissed her lax lips, and said, ‘That wilt thou unwish within these few days. What! when thou art thine own mistress and all? No, but thou wilt desire to live rather, to be my dear comfort and delight. For now, look thou, my honey-Queen, thou and I are to get our bliss of one another.’ She, not responding by word or sign, but struggling and striving to be free of his arms, presently he put her down again, and left her. Huntly followed him; and they went up to the Council, which was set for noon.
‘I remained kneeling by her,’ says Des-Essars, ‘while she lay without motion, until presently I found that she was in a heavy sleep. When I went downstairs I heard that Mistress Livingstone had left the Court and gone to her husband, Sempill, at Beltrees.’
The silence of the town during those first few days of doubt was a terrifying thing, enough to try the nerves of the stoutest man; it drove the Queen to such dangerous excesses of exaltation and despondency that all her friends were on tenterhooks to get her away before the storm (which all knew must be brooding) should burst. For what could it portend but a storm, this fatal silence, this unearthly suspense of clamour and judgment? It was not that the citizens merely held their tongues from rumour: it was more literally silence; they talked not at all. If you walked up the Netherbow or round the porch of Saint Giles’; if you hung about the Luckenbooths at noon or ventured any of the Wynds at sun-setting—wheresoever you went about Edinburgh, you heard the padding of feet sparsely on the flagstones; but no voices, no hawkers’ cries, no women calling their children out of the gutters, nor bickering of men in the ale-shops, nor laughter, nor bewailing. The great houses were closely shut and guarded; the Lords of the Privy Council transacted their business behind close doors; messengers came and went, none questioning; the post came galloping down the hill with a clatter which you would have thought enough to open every window in the High Street and show you every pretty girl at her best. But no! So long as the King remained above ground, Death kept his wrinkled hand upon Edinburgh and made the place seem like a burying-ground, whose people were the mourners, crouched, whispering, against the walls—and all together huddled under the cold spell of the graves.
This continued until the day of the funeral, by which time it was absolutely necessary that the Queen should be got away. She agreed—was eager to go; and, before she went, saw the body of the King, which lay in the Chapel Royal, upon a tressle bed, dressed up in the gilt cuirass and white mantle which in life it had worn so bravely. Mary Seton and Des-Essars, who took her in, were so relieved to find their anxieties vain that they had no thought to be surprised. ‘Not only did she stand and look upon the corpse without change of countenance or any sign of distress, but she had her wits all at command. The first thing she said was, “He looks nobly lying there so still: in life he was ever fidgeting with his person,”—which was quite true. And the next thing was, “Look you, look you, he lies just over Davy’s grave!” And then she remembered that we were within one month of the anniversary of that poor wretch’s undoing by this very dead; she reminded us of it. Without any more words, she remained there standing, looking earnestly at him and round about him; and bade one of the priests who watched go fetch a new candle, for one was nearly spent. So far as I could ascertain, she did not kneel or offer any prayer; and after a time she walked slowly away, without reverence to the altar—a strange omission in her—or any looking back. Nor did I ever hear her, of her own motion, speak of him again; but he became to her as though he had never been—which, in a sense that means he had touched or moved her, he never had. Before the funeral celebrations she went to my Lord Seton’s house, and there remained waiting until the Earl of Bothwell could find time to visit her, full of projects, very sanguine and contented. She said to me one day, “You think my maids have forsaken me; you grieve over Livingstone and Fleming. Of the last I say nothing; but I can fetch Livingstone back to me whenever I choose. You shall see.” And she did it before very long.’
On the night following the funeral the profound silence of Edinburgh was broken by a long shrill cry, as of a wandering man. Several people heard him, and shivered in their beds; only one, bolder than the rest, saw him in a broad patch of moonlight. He came slowly down the midst of the Canongate, flap-hatted and cloaked; and as he went, now and again he threw up his head towards the moon, and cried, like one calling the news, ‘Vengeance on those who caused me to shed innocent blood! O Lord, open the heavens and pour down vengeance on those that have destroyed the innocent!’ Upon the hushed city the effect was terrible, as you may judge by this, that no windows were opened and no watchman ventured to stop the man. But next morning there was found a bill upon the Cross which accused Bothwell by name of the deed. It drew a crowd, and then, as by one consent, all tongues were loosened and all pens set free to rail. The Queen was not spared; pictures of her as the Siren, fish-tailed, ogling, naked, malign, made the walls shameful. The preachers took up the text and shrieked her name; and every night the shrouded crier went his rounds. The Red Bridegroom was on all tongues, the Pale Bride in all men’s thoughts.
The Earl of Bothwell, strongly guarded as he was, took, or affected to take, no notice of the clamour; but Archie Douglas became very uneasy, and induced his cousin Morton to have the nightly brawler apprehended. He was therefore taken on the fourth night, and shut up in a pestilential prison called the Thief’s Pit, where no doubt he shortly died. But his words lived after him, and he testified through all men’s tongues. Among the many thousand rumours that got about was one, intolerable to Bothwell, that the Earl of Moray was about to return to Edinburgh, and, in the absence of the Queen, act for the general good of the realm. It was said also that Morton was in correspondence with him, and that it was by his orders that Mr. James Balfour, parson of Fliske, was to be arrested and confined to his own house. Adding to these things the daily letters of the Earl of Lennox to the Privy Council, appealing, in a father’s name, to the honour of Scotland; adding also the Queen’s letters to himself, my Lord Bothwell judged it wise to depart the town; so went down to her Majesty in the country, to Lord Seton’s house, where she still lay. And as he rode out of town, close hemmed in the ranks of his own spearmen, he heard for the first time that name which had been his ever since tongues began to wag: ‘Ay, there he goes for his wages, the Red Bridegroom.’
The night of his coming, old Lady Reres made mischief, if any were left to be made; for after supper, fiddlers being in the gallery, what must she to do but clap her hands to them and call for a tune. ‘Fiddlers,’ says she, ‘I call for “Well is me since I am free”‘; and she got it too. Lord Bothwell gave one of his great guffaws, and held out his hand at the signal; the Queen laughed as she took it and was pleased. They danced long and late. But next morning my Lord Seton made some kind of excuse, and left his own house, nor would he come back to it until the Court had removed. With him went the Earl of Argyll.
These departures were the signal for the most insensate revelry—led by the Queen, insisted upon by her, satisfying neither herself nor her lover, nor any of her friends. Des-Essars and the few faithful of the old stock looked on as best they could, always in silence. Not one of them would talk to another, for fear he should hear something with which he would be forced to agree. Le Secret des Secrets is extremely reticent over this insane ten days, in which the Queen—it must be said—was to be seen (by those who had the heart to observe) wooing a man to sin; and when he would not, after torments of deferred desire, of mortification, and of that reproach which never fails a baffled sinner, springing hot-eyed to the chase next day, following him about, wreathing her arms, kissing and whispering, beckoning, inviting, trying all ways to lure him on; heart-rending spectacle for any modest young man, but, to a worshipper-at-a-distance like our chronicler, an almost irremediable disaster, since it kept an open sore in the fair image he had made, and showed him horrible people, with eyesight as good as his own, leering at it. Yes! French Paris, Bastien, Carwood, Joachim, the baser sort—grooms, valets, chamber-women, scullions of the kitchen, saw his flame-proud Queen craving, and craving in vain. He ground his teeth over the squalid comedy. His pen is as secret as death; but it is said that, on one occasion, when he had seen Bothwell stalk into the labyrinth, and soon afterwards the Queen, her head hooded, steal lightly after him, the comments of other beholders roused him to vehement action. It is said that he heard chuckling from the base court, and a ‘Did you mark that? She is close on his heels—a good hound she!’ and saw two greasy heads hobnobbing. He waited, blinking his eyes, until one began to whistle the ramping tune of ‘O, gin Jocky wad but steal me!’ then flashed into the court and drubbed a grinning cook-boy within a few inches of his life. What satisfaction this just exercise may have been was spoiled by the reflection that the flogged rascal knew why he had been made to smart: enough to make our young knight cut off the avenging hand.
These things weighed and considered, I think that what little he does say is curiously judicial. He remarks that the Queen his mistress, restless and miserable as she was, invited oblivion by eating and drinking too much, by dancing too much, by riding too hard; that she suffered from want of sleep; that, as for her love-affair, it was no joy to her. ‘Hers was a plain case of mental love. But I say, Hum!—where the Lover makes an eidolon of the Beloved, and is happiest contemplating that, adorning it with flowers of fancy, and planning delights which can only be realised in solitude,—then the bodily presence of the adored creature effectually destroys the image: a seeming paradox.
‘Thus, however, it was with my mistress. Never was man less suited to lady than this burly lord; never did lady contrive out of material so clumsy master of her bosom so divine. But his presence marred all, because it led her to indulge the monstrous reality instead of the idea. She was generous to a fault (all her faults, indeed, were due to excess of nobility), and most injudicious. Her submission to him tempted him all ways—to domineer, to be overbearing, insolent, a brute; to treat her on occasion as I am very sure my Lady Bothwell would never have allowed herself to be treated. But the Queen bowed her head for still greater ignominy, although more than once I saw her flinch and look away, as if, poor soul, she turned quickly, to comfort herself, from the hateful, real Bothwell of fed flesh to that shining Bothwell of her heart and mind. In all this she was her own enemy; but (by a misfortune two-edged) in other ways she contrived enemies for him. Thus it was an act of madness to make him presents of the late king’s stud, of his dogs and horse-furniture. She added—O doting, most unhappy prodigal!—the gilt armour and great golden casque with crimson plumes, by which the dolt king had been best known. Nothing that she could have done could have been worse judged. Quem Deus vult perdere! Alas and alas!