It was here, too, that she wrote her first English letter to her custodian, Sir Francis Knollys—her schoolmaster, as she called him, who had been giving her lessons, apparently without any marked success.
"It is sed Seterday my unfrinds wil be wth zou; y sey nething, bot trest weil. An ze send one to zour wiff ze may asur her schu wold a bin weilcom to a pur strenger.... Thus affter my commendations I pray God heue you in his kipin.
"Your assured gud frind,
"Marie R.
"Excus ivel vreitn furst tym."
Mary's rooms have lately been restored; but this plain stone fireplace is the same by which she sat shivering while the news of the Westminster Conference was so long in coming through the snow, hoping against hope that the English Queen would not "make her lose all"; turning over in her mind the scheme for marrying her to Don John of Austria; reading specious letters from Elizabeth pleading "the natural love of a mother towards her bairn"; and smiling upon Knollys till he credited her with "an eloquent tongue, a discreet head, a stout courage, and a liberal heart adjoined thereunto." This is the window through which she looked out over Wensleydale, luminous in the August sunshine or white with snow, and realised gradually that she was indeed a prisoner, she who "loved greatly to go on horseback." She was allowed to ride in the park, it is true; but her riding was a mockery with twelve soldiers at her horse's heels.
Yet she was not always sad. She had her lighter moments and pastimes other than knitting. "The Queen here is merry, and hunteth," wrote Knollys, "and passeth her time in pleasant manner." She even coquetted with the Reformed Faith, and "grew into a good liking of the Liturgy"; and she took pleasure (of a more convincing kind) in having her hair busked by Mistress Mary Seaton, whom she declared to be the finest busker in any country. Knollys, apparently, was not insensible to the charms of a coiffure. "This day she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of hairdressing, without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well."
Here, up these steps upon which Mary's skirts have trailed, is the room where Mistress Seaton set such a curled hair upon the lovely head, the room where the Queen slept, or more often lay awake. There had been some difficulty in making her rooms ready to receive her. The Scropes were not luxurious, it seems. Her bedding and hangings came from Sir George Bowes' house, near Barnard Castle; pewter vessels and a copper kettle were hastily borrowed from the Court of England; and the neighbours lent some furniture with rather a bad grace. There is a very strong local tradition that Mary once escaped from Bolton Castle. The "Queen's Gap" on Leyburn Shawl is pointed out as the scene of her recapture, and this little bedroom window as the way of her escape. I cannot find the least evidence that the story is true. But it was in this room that she lay sick for days, before she was dragged reluctantly away in the dusk of a January dawn, bitterly cold and bitterly angry, to her next prison at Tutbury.
This castle held for the king in the Civil War, and that is why it has lost its north-west tower. The actual fall was in a storm, a hundred years later than the siege that weakened the masonry.