He named the great Earl of Huntly and his four sons; but by now she was tired of him and sent him away. All the effect of the poor man’s speeches had been to make her anxious to measure wits with her base-brother. He came in two or three days later with a great train, and she had her opportunity.
What she made of it you may judge by this, that it was he and no other who spurred her into Scotland. He did it, in a manner very much his own, by first urging it and then discovering impossible fatigues in the road. This shows him to have been, what he was careful to conceal, a student of human kind.
A certain French valet of the Earl of Bothwell’s—Nicolas Hubart, from whose Confessions I shall have to draw liberally by-and-by, and of whom, himself, there will be plenty to say—made once an acute observation of the great Lord James, when he said that he was that sort of man who, if he had not a black cloak for Sunday, would be an atheist or even an epicurean. There was no one, certainly, who had a more intense regard for decent observance than he. It was his very vesture: he would have starved or frozen without it. It clothed him completely from head to foot, and from the heart outwards. Much more than that. There are many in this world who go about it swathed up to the eyes, imposing upon those they meet. But this man imposed first of all upon himself. So complete was his robing, he could not see himself out of it. So white were his hands, so flawless of grit, he could never see them otherwise. Supposing Father Lesley to have been right, supposing that James Stuart did—and throughout—plot for a throne, he would have been the first to cry out upon the vice of Brutus. It may well be doubted whether he once, in all his life, stood alone—so to speak—naked before his own soul. Perhaps such a man can hardly be deemed a sinner, whatever he do. There are those at this hour who say that the Lord James was no sinner. How should he be? they cry. His own soul never knew it.
This tall, pale, inordinately prim nobleman, with his black beard, black clothes, and (to the Queen’s mind) black beliefs, seemed to walk for ever in a mask of sour passivity. He never spoke when to bow the head could be an answer, he never affirmed without qualification, he never denied or refused anything as of his own opinion. He was allowed to have extraordinarily fine manners, even in France, where alacrity of service counted for more than the service itself; and yet Queen Mary declared that she had never seen a man enter a doorway so long after he had opened the door. He seldom looked at you. His voice was low and measured. He cleared his throat before he spoke, and swallowed the moment he had finished, as if he were anxious to engulf any possible effect of his words. Of all the ties upon a man he dreaded most those of the heart-strings: she never moved him to natural emotion but once. But, at this first coming of his, he paid her great court, and bent his stiff knees to her many times a day: this notwithstanding that, as Mary Seton affirmed, he had water on one of them. She said that she had that from his chaplain, but her love of mischief had betrayed her love of truth. The Lord James always stood to his prayers.
When the Queen saw him first it was in the presence of her women, of Lord Eglinton, of the Marquis D’Elbœuf, and others—persons who either hated him with reason or despised him with none. He moved her then, almost with passion, to go ‘home’ to Scotland, saying that it behoved princes to dwell among their own people. But at a privy audience a few days later, he held to another tune altogether, pursing his lips, twiddling his two thumbs, looking up and down and about. Now he said that he was not sure; that there were dangers attending a Popish Queen, and those not only within the kingdom but without it. She begged him to explain himself.
‘Better bide, madam,’ said he, ‘until the wind change in England.’
Any word of England always excited her. The colour flew to her face. ‘What hath my sister in England to do with my kingdom, good brother?’
‘Why, madam,’ he said, ‘it has come to my sure knowledge that you shall get no safe-conduct from the English Queen, to go smoothly to Scotland.’
He never watched any one, or was never observed to be watching; but his guarded eyes, glancing at her as they shifted, showed him that, being angry now, she was beautiful—like a spirit of the fire.
‘I should be offended at what you report if I believed it possible,’ she said after a while. ‘And yet England is not the only road, nor is it the best road, to my kingdom.’