Mary Stuart (23 page)

“I am weary, and am a sleepe, and yet I cannot forbeare scribbling so long as ther is any paper … Excuse it, yf I write yll; you must gesse the one halfe; but I am glad to write unto you when other folkes be a sleepe, seeing that I cannot doo as they doo, according to my desyre, that is betwene your armes my dear lyfe.” With overwhelming impressiveness she describes how delighted Darnley has been by her unexpected coming. One can fancy oneself looking at the poor youth, his face flushed with fever, and still disfigured by the eruption. He has been alone, languishing for a sight of his fair young wife. Now, of a sudden, he finds her sitting by his bedside. “He said that he did dreme, and that he was so glad to see me that he thought he shuld dye.” Again and again, indeed, the old suspicions flame up in him. Her coming seems incredible, but he has been too sore at heart, and is now too glad to see her to dwell on the possibility of further deception, often though she has deceived him. It is sweet for a man who is weak and ill to believe in loving assurances, so easy to persuade a vain man that he is loved. Ere long Darnley was once more her slave, just as he had become during the night after Rizzio’s murder, and he begged her forgiveness for everything he might have done to displease her.

Once more we look through this letter into the shadowy room that is so distant both in time and space. We picture Mary Stuart sitting by the sick man’s bed and listening to this outburst of love and humility. Now she ought to rejoice, for her scheme has been successful; she has once more made the simple-minded lad soft and yielding. But she is too much ashamed of her deceit to rejoice. At the climax of her success she is overcome with loathing as she contemplates her own deed. Gloomily, with averted eyes, with disordered senses, she sits beside her husband, so that even Darnley is at length struck by something obscure, something incomprehensible, in this beloved woman. The poor dupe tries to console the deceiver! He wants to help her, to cheer her up, to make her happy. He implores her to stay the night in his room, dreaming, poor fool, once more of love and tenderness. It is heartbreaking to a reader of this letter to note how the weakling again clung trustfully to his wife, again felt sure of her. He could not turn away his eyes from her, or cease from enjoying the delight of renewed confidential association from which he had so long been debarred. He begged her to cut up his meat for him. In his folly, he blurted out secret after secret, revealing the names of those whom he had been employing to spy upon her. Not knowing of her passion for Bothwell, he told her of his own fierce hatred of Bothwell and Lethington.

Naturally enough, the more he gave himself away, the harder he made it for his wife to betray him, unsuspecting and helpless. Despite herself, she was touched by the credulity of her victim. She found it difficult to go on playing this despicable comedy. “You have never heard him speake better nor more humbly; and if I had not proofe of his hart to be as waxe and if myne were not as a dyamant, no stroke but coming from your hands could make me but to have pitie of him.” We see that she no longer hated Darnley, that she had forgotten all the ill the poor deceitful creature had done her. At the bottom of her soul she would gladly have spared him. She shifted the burden of vengeance onto Bothwell’s shoulders. “You are the cause thereof. For, my own revenge, I wold not doo it.” It is Bothwell’s command, which she must obey in defiance of her conscience. For love’s sake, and for no other reason, she must do this horrible thing, must turn the childlike trust of her husband to account. She burst out angrily: “You make me dissemble so much that I am afrayde thereof with horrour, and you make me almost to play the part of a traitor. Remember that if it weare not for obeyeng I had rather be dead. My heart bleedith for yt.”

But a thrall cannot defy orders. He can but groan when the lash drives him forward. Once more she insists that what she does is done by Bothwell’s will and not her own: “Alas! and I never deceived anybody; but I remitt myself wholly to your will. And send me word what I shall doo, and whatsoever happen to me, I will obey you. Think also yf you will not fynd som invention more secret by phisick, for he is to take physick at Cragmillar and the bathes also.”

We see that she would at any rate be glad to secure an easier death for her unhappy husband, and to avoid the gross act of violence that had been planned. Had she not become so completely subordinate to Bothwell, had there still remained in her a spark of moral independence, she would, even at this late hour, one feels, have saved Darnley. But she will not venture on disobedience, being afraid that this will cost her Bothwell, whose wishes she has pledged herself to carry out; and also afraid (this is a brilliant flash of psychological insight, which no forger could have imagined) that Bothwell would, in the end, despise her for having shown compassion. “I shall never be willing to beguile one that puttith his trust in me. Nevertheless you may doo all, and doo not estyme me the lesse therefor, for you are the cause thereof.” She flings herself, figuratively, on her knees before him in a last despairing appeal that he will reward by his love the torment that she is now suffering for his sake.

One who listens to the unhappy woman’s tortured heart speaking out of this letter will not term her a murderess, although throughout these days and nights she was serving the cause of murder. We feel, as we read, that her reluctance is really stronger than her will. We feel that her honest spirit has been besmirched by these deceptions; perhaps during many of these hours she was much nearer suicide than murder. But herein lies the disaster of such subjection as hers. One who has surrendered his will to another’s keeping can no longer choose his own path; he can only serve and obey. She therefore stumbled onward, bondmaid of her passion, unwitting and yet at the same time cruelly aware, towards the abyss of her deed.

On the second day Mary Stuart made the prescribed arrangements; the more subtle, the more dangerous part of the scheme had been carried through. She had allayed the suspicions in Darnley’s mind, so that the ailing, stupid youth was now “the merriest that ever you saw”. Though still feeble, still disfigured by the marks of the recent smallpox, he ventured on little endearments. He tried to kiss her, to put his arms round her, and she found it hard to conceal her disgust and impatience. Obedient to Mary’s wishes, as obedient as she was to Bothwell’s commands, this thrall of a thrall declared himself ready to return with her to Edinburgh. Trustfully he allowed himself to be carried out of his safe retreat and installed in the litter, his face wrapped in a linen cloth to hide its disfigurement. Now the victim was on the way to the slaughterhouse, and Mary had fulfilled her cruel task. The rough and bloody deed was to be Bothwell’s affair, and that harsh borderer would find it a thousand times easier than Mary Stuart had found the preceding acts of deception.

The litter advanced slowly, accompanied by a guard of riders, along the wintry road. The royal pair, seemingly reconciled after months of severance and dissension, were returning to Edinburgh. Edinburgh? Yes, but where in Edinburgh? To Holyrood Palace, one might suppose, the royal residence, a comfortable abode. No, Bothwell, the all-powerful, had made other arrangements. The King should not return to his own home at Holyrood, for there might still be danger of his spreading the infection. Why not, then, send him to Stirling, or to Edinburgh Castle, an impregnable fortress, or house him as guest in some other princely dwelling, or perhaps in the episcopal palace? No, and yet again no! Strangely enough there was chosen for his residence a modest and isolated building that no one would have dreamt of; not a princely habitation at all, but a house “in a solitar place at the outmost part of ye town, separat from all companie—ane maist rewynous hous quhair no man had dwelt seven yearis of befoir”—a house hard to watch and to protect. One cannot but ask who had chosen for the King this suspiciously remote house in Kirk o’ Field, to which the approach was by an alley bearing the ominous name of Thieves’ Row. Bothwell had chosen it, Bothwell who was now “all in all”. Again and again one comes across the same red thread in the labyrinth. Again and again, in letters, documents and utterances, the trace of blood leads us back to this sinister figure.

A small habitation, unworthy of a king, it lay among untilled fields, the nearest adjoining residence being that of one of Bothwell’s henchmen. It contained no more than an anteroom and four rooms. On the ground floor a bedroom was made ready for the Queen, who now expressed a strong desire to care tenderly for the husband she had of late neglected. One of the rooms on the upper storey was set in order for the King, and the other of the two first-floor rooms was allotted to his three serving men. Certainly the place was richly furnished for the occasion, carpets and tapestries being brought from Holy-rood, and one of the fine beds which Mary of Guise had imported from France. Another of these beds was supplied for the Queen’s bedroom.

Now Mary could not do enough to display her affection for Darnley. Though she slept only two nights in the Kirk o’ Field house, she came over frequently to companion him, attended by her train—and we must not forget that for months before this she had sedulously avoided him. The nights she slept in the room under Darnley’s were probably the fifth and seventh of February. Everyone in Edinburgh was to know that the King and the Queen were once more a loving couple, the reconciliation being thus advertised to the world. This change of mood must have produced a strange impression upon the Scottish lords who, only a few days before, had discussed with the Queen the removal of Darnley by all possible means. Now had come this overemphasised affection! The ablest of the nobles, Moray, was quick to draw his conclusions. He did not doubt for a moment that, in the sequestered house, evil was to befall the King of Scotland, and diplomatically he made his preparations.

Perhaps there was only one person in Scotland who honestly believed in Mary’s change of heart—Darnley himself, the unhappy husband. His vanity was tickled by the attention she paid him; he was proud to find that the Scottish lords, who for so long had treated him with contempt, now visited him in his sickbed making low obeisances and showing concern in their faces. In a letter to his father, dated 7th February, he assured Lennox how rapidly his health was improving under “the loving care of my love the Queen, who doth use herself like a natural and loving wife.” Within a few days the last traces of the dreaded and usually disfiguring disease had disappeared. His doctors had assured him of this, and that he would be able to remove to his palace. The horses had been ordered for next Monday. Another day, and he would be back in Holyrood, to share bed and board with his wife and, once more, to be King in his own country and lord of his wife’s heart.

But before this Monday, 10th February, came Sunday, 9th February 1567, and that evening high festival was to be held in Holyrood. Two of Queen Mary’s most faithful servants were to be married; there were to be a banquet and a dance, at which the Queen had promised to appear with her ladies. But this manifest affair was not to be the main event of the day. There was something else in the wind, as time would show. On Sunday morning, the Earl of Moray took leave of his sister for several days, ostensibly to visit his wife, who was lying ill at one of his castles. This departure was a bad sign. Whenever Moray suddenly withdrew from the political scene, he had good reason for the step. Always his disappearance foreshadowed a rising or some other misfortune, and always on his return he was able to produce an alibi, to show that he had had nothing to do with the affair, although he would not fail to reap any advantages that were derivable from it. Not a year had elapsed since, on the morning after the murder of Rizzio, he had ridden into Edinburgh as innocently as he was now riding away from it the morning before a still more horrible crime was to be perpetrated, leaving to others the deed and the danger, while intending to garner the honour and the profit.

Something else happened which might have given reason for thought. We learn that Mary had already issued orders for the removal of her costly bed with its fur covering from her bedroom in Kirk o’ Field back to Holyrood. This seemed natural enough, since she proposed to sleep in Holyrood that night, and not in Kirk o’ Field; the next day there would be an end to the separation. Yes, that is a natural way of accounting for the order, but subsequent events were to throw an ominous light upon the removal of the costly bed on this particular day. At the time, however, neither in the afternoon nor in the evening of Sunday were there signs that anything was amiss, and the Queen’s behaviour was as ordinary as possible. During the day, accompanied by her friends, she visited her husband, now almost recovered. In the evening she sat with Bothwell, Huntly and Argyll among the wedding company and made merry with them. Still, once again, after night had fallen, though it was cold and wintry, she visited the forsaken house in Kirk o’ Field to see Darnley. What a touching demonstration! She bade farewell to the festal party at Holyrood, merely that she might sit a little longer with her husband and converse with him. She stayed at Kirk o’ Field until eleven. Let the reader carefully note the hour. Then she returned to Holyrood on horseback, well attended, the little procession being made conspicuous by the torches that were carried to light it on its way. The doors of the palace were opened wide, for Edinburgh was to see that the Queen had returned from her loving visit to her husband, was to hear the skirl of the bagpipes to which the wedding company was dancing. Conversing in the most friendly way with all and sundry, the Queen moved among the company. Not till after midnight did she retire to her sleeping apartment.