The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (26 page)

When I first arrived at the huge, sprawling army camp at Vlissingen, with its endless long rows of tents and its mounds of refuse, its stench of horse manure and gunpowder, spoiled food and unwashed bodies mingled with the more appetizing odors of roasting meat and beer, I was impressed with the armies Don John had assembled. Clearly he was, as everyone said, a miracle worker when it came to amassing men, although he was having a great deal of trouble paying them. The camp was alive with activity. Overloaded carts came and went along muddy pathways, whips cracking over the backs of the tired horses and bullocks that pulled them along. Everywhere soldiers lounged alongside the tents, eating around campfires, shooting at improvised targets, sparring with one another, grinning at the full-lipped, swaying-hipped camp followers in their boots and dirty petticoats.

Visible in the harbor just beyond the camp was the enormous fleet of galleys, rocking in the swell, small boats coming and going amid them. Flying from each masthead was the yellow banner of the Holy League.

Don John had prevailed upon his half-brother King Philip to lend him a dozen chests of Spanish gold, enough to get the expedition under
way, but the funds had not yet arrived. I had been at the camp for three weeks, and still no final orders had been given. Because of the promised Spanish loan nothing more had been said about my attempting to raise funds from the moneylenders in Bruges or Amsterdam, and this came as a relief to me. But other issues were weighing heavily on my mind—beyond the most serious issue of all, Jamie’s absence, which I tried my best to push aside, out of my thoughts, at least during the day.

The armies at Vlissingen, I had discovered during my weeks there, were assembled into tercios, groupings of thousands of pikemen and musketeers who were expected to fight together in precise formations. I had been hearing the colonels of the tercios complaining to Don John that they did not yet know their places within the brigades, which meant that they had no idea where to go or what to do once battle loomed.

What was worse, the commander had not informed the colonels which ships they and their men were to travel in once the army embarked. Each of the two hundred galleys was capable of transporting hundreds of men, and the embarkation had to be carefully planned and executed or there would be chaos in the harbor.

When I ventured to ask Don John where the fleet was to land once it was launched, he bristled.

“Why, on the enemy shore, of course,” he said.

“Yes, but where? England has a long coastline.”

“Where they least expect us,” was all he would say, but as we were conversing I noticed another odd thing: Don John had no pilot’s charts in his tent, no maps of southern England. No maps of any kind, in fact, or charts of the Sleeve such as sailors invariably consult in order to choose their best routes.

Where were his charts, his battle plans, not to mention his messengers and secretaries? Who was keeping track of what went on in the camp?

One day I heard shouting and a gun firing. I rushed outside to find an altercation under way.

Two wretched-looking men were being tied to posts in preparation to receive a whipping. They were jabbering in Spanish, pleading piteously for their lives, insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

Soldiers were collecting in clusters, some taking the side of the men to be punished, some crying for their blood to be spilt. Guns were drawn, harsh words were flying back and forth. I asked what was going on and was told there had been a spill of oats—precious fodder for the horses. The two men were blamed.

Don John strode up to the posts and viciously slapped each man’s face.

“Who paid you to do this evil thing?” he demanded.

The men, wincing from the blows, managed to shake their heads. “No one,” they said. “No one. We did nothing. We swear it on the cross of Our Saviour.”

“By the beard of Christ! You are liars. Oats do not spill themselves. You are spies. The English baron pays you.” He kicked one of the men, who cried out with pain and begged for mercy.

Turning his back, the commander ordered the whipping to begin.

I could not watch. I have never been able to witness cruel punishments without feeling terrible distress. I began to walk away, murmuring a prayer for the two men, when I heard another outcry.

“Your Lordship, there has been a mistake.” It was a mature man’s voice, low-pitched, the voice of one in authority. I turned back and saw one of the colonels, evidently an experienced officer, striding toward Don John.

“These men are not responsible for the hole in the oat sack, Your Lordship. I will vouch for their innocence. There were rats in the tent. They gnawed the hole. There has been no bribery, no spying.”

Don John stared at the man suspiciously.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, and ordered the punishment to proceed.

Something about Don John’s behavior was troubling me. I was impelled to intervene. I approached the colonel and Don John,
holding my skirts out of the mud in what I hoped was a modest gesture and walking toward them with my head lowered. I was intensely aware, at that moment, that I was the only woman in a growing crowd of unruly men.

“My lord prince,” I said to Don John, “will you, for my sake, show your mercy and release these good Christians? I will take them into my service, if you like. It is the rats that serve the enemy, not these men.”

I looked into his eyes, but I saw no mercy there, only resentment. I saw then that I had put him in an awkward position; he was gallant, and he would not allow himself to behave other than in a gallant manner. Yet his distrust of the men had not been dispelled, either by the colonel’s explanation of what really happened or by my generosity toward his prisoners.

He bowed to me, though I could tell that his muscles remained stiff.

“Take them then,” he said curtly, and left. The men were hastily untied and at once they fell at my feet, weeping with gratitude.

“Come with me,” I said to them, and they followed me until we were at some distance from the others. Don John was nowhere in sight, and the colonel who had tried to save the men from punishment had also disappeared.

I drew a coin from my pocket and gave it to the men.

“Take this,” I said in my halting Spanish, “and leave the camp. Go as far away as you can. You will not be safe if you stay here.”

With fervent cries of thanks they ran off, down the path that led out of the camp and toward the highroad to Bruges, leaving me to ponder the incident and worry over Don John’s state of mind and health.

Had the incident with the spilled oats been the only one of its kind I might have seen no reason to worry further. But there were others. One evening, in a burst of righteous anger, Don John swept through the camp, searching for men playing cards or gambling with
dice—a very common pastime among the soldiers. “Blasphemers!” he shouted when he found gaming going on, overturning the tables and throwing the cards and dice into the fire and ordering the men to be shut in deep underground pits and deprived of food.

(I could not help but think of Jamie. Where was he? Was he gambling in some noisy tavern? Was he surrounding himself with unworthy women? Had he forgotten me?)

Not long after this the German armament-makers, men who provided the soldiers with their weaponry and were, along with the provisioners, the most vital suppliers in the camp, laid siege to the commander’s quarters and demanded to be paid. I watched as Don John received them, solemnly handing one man after another a ripe orange drawn from a basket beside him.

The armorers, heavyset, barrel-chested men, their arms knotted with muscles from years of lifting and twisting and pounding masses of resistant metal into weaponry as artful and beautiful as it was deadly, were dumbfounded by the prince’s eccentric behavior. They looked at one another from under thick brows, spat on the oranges and threw them to the ground, then stalked out.

Word of this bizarre incident spread through the camp, and made the soldiers restive and suspicious.

“Is he going to pay us with oranges too?” I heard men say, some with an uneasy laugh, others with disgust. “We haven’t been paid for months. Is this what we are going to have to show for our labors? Fruit?”

I could not help but remember what I had heard about the odd behavior of Don John’s relatives, when I was a widowed queen in France and my grandmother was persuading me to consider King Philip’s son Don Carlos as a prospective husband. The crippled, hunchbacked Don Carlos, she told me, was said to keep to himself and was suspicious of everyone; he amused himself by watching small animals being roasted alive. His father King Philip was reputed to be morose and withdrawn, a terrible husband who persecuted and tormented
his wives. And Philip’s grandmother, Joan the Mad, had been infamous for refusing to let her late husband’s body be buried and keeping it with her, ordering the coffin opened from time to time so that she could embrace his stinking remains. Even Joan’s grandmother was rumored to have been insane.

Did Joan the Mad give people oranges instead of coins, I wondered. Had Don John taken leave of his senses? Ought I to write to Pope Gregory, to tell him what was going on in Vlissingen? Or should I heed the advice that I had been given, and remember that such things were not the proper concern of ladies?

I found that I had no need to answer these questions, for just as the men of the invasion force were losing faith in their commander’s sanity word arrived from Rome that the Turks, Don John’s old enemies and the enemies of all Christendom, were once again sending a huge fleet to invade the Mediterranean. Rome was threatened; if the Ottoman fleet was allowed to prevail, all Europe might come under Muslim rule.

The commander was needed. He had won a great victory over the Turks years earlier. Surely, with the aid of divine providence, he could turn them back once again.

Filled with a newfound sense of purpose, his puzzling eccentricities overcome, Don John went aboard his flagship and sailed for the south, after announcing that he meant to destroy the entire Turkish fleet so thoroughly that the Ottomans could never menace the Holy League again.

He said nothing to me at his leavetaking, so swift was his departure and so urgent its purpose. I watched as his galley was carried out to sea on the outgoing tide, sails unfurled, dipping and rising as it met the swells, banners waving in the freshening wind.

A part of me longed to go with him, for the start of a journey is always exciting and the prospect of remaining in the camp, with its increasing reek and filth and its air of neglect, deflated my spirits. Even before the galley was over the horizon and lost from view I could see
the campfires being doused and the soldiers striking their tents and packing their possessions.

The dream of a great invasion had dissolved, leaving me stranded on a cold and unfamiliar shore, with nothing but my courage and my hopes to sustain me against the storms to come.

Pulling a soldier’s hooded cloak over my untidy red hair and biting my nails from nervousness, I joined the long slow exodus from the military camp. No one seemed to be in charge, now that Don John had left; the heart had gone out of the enterprise and since the soldiers and armorers, the provisioners and carters had not been paid (the promised Spanish gold had never arrived), there was no reason for anyone to remain in the forlorn settlement. The few servants Don John had assigned to me during my stay in the camp—my own servants having been left behind in Rome—were among the first to depart. I was on my own.

I found a half-starved nag, saddled but lacking a rider, that had been tied to the back of a wagon. When no one was looking I untied her and mounted her. Together we began the plodding trek toward Bruges.

The road seemed long, the skies leaden. On we went, rain-sodden mile after weary mile, the old horse and I, sustained by the bread, hard cheese and oats I found in her saddlebags and by the hospitality of Walloon villagers who offered us the shelter of their barns to sleep in, amid the animals’ stalls.

At first I was fearful, as a woman traveling on my own (though I did my best to ride near officers or clusters of musketeers, acting as if I were one of their party). I kept my cloak pulled down over my face, spoke little, and hoped that I would be taken for a thin young man rather than a woman. No one scrutinized me too closely. After a few days my fear and wariness began to go away.

I crossed into France, intent on reaching my grandmother Antoinette’s farm at Saint-Cheron in Normandie. My last letter from her, which I had received while still in Rome, had come from Saint-Cheron, and I hoped she had not moved on to another estate and that the warfare then troubling France had not forced her to abandon the farm to seek safety.

I saw much evidence of conflict on my journey. Burned houses, barns and churches, scorched fields and destroyed orchards told much about the prevailing warfare between Protestant and Catholic factions. Grandmamma Antoinette had written me of this ugly contention, and of the many villagers made homeless by it, but until I saw the wreckage with my own eyes I could not realize what widespread harm had been done.

It was a relief to discover, when I finally reached Normandie, that the lovely valley surrounding Saint-Cheron was unblemished by the fighting, the stretches of lush meadow and thick forest just as I remembered them from my childhood, the view of the river still idyllic.

The farm too was as I remembered it: the thick-walled old buildings, their walls of soft mellow limestone, their roofs of red tiles drawn from a local quarry. The stone cottages where the farm laborers lived, each with its small garden neatly kept. The old well in the courtyard of the main farmhouse, its wood dark with age. And the comforting sounds of the horses whinnying in their paddocks, the ducks quacking softly to one another, the goats bleating to be milked. Sounds far different from those I had been hearing for many months—musketfire and
the pounding of guns, raucous laughter and shouted quarrels, the rough music of the army camp and the tortured squeals of animals being butchered for meat to feed the soldiers.

When I reached the brow of the little hill above the farm I reined in my bony mount and paused, savoring the tranquil scene, then touched her thin flank and eased her down into the courtyard to where a groom was waiting to help me dismount. He touched his cap in greeting, and I startled him by bursting into tears and embracing him as if he had been a long-lost relative.

“By all that’s holy, will you look at yourself!” Grandmamma Antoinette cried when I was shown into the house by a maid who gave me a dubious look before admitting me.

“Marie! Where have you been? Why are you wearing those filthy clothes? Why hasn’t Margaret arranged your hair?”

Her questions flew, but before I could answer them I caught sight of my lovely daughter coming into the room, and rushed to take her in my arms.

Laughing and crying, I admired Marie-Elizabeth, who had grown into a tall, slender child with my reddish hair and creamy skin, and with the look of her father in her large dark eyes and well-shaped nose, her pointed chin with its hint of defiance, her air of strength as well as budding beauty.

I could not speak, I shook my head in wonder at the sight of her. I had thought of her so very often, and prayed for her, and sent her messages to say that I loved her. But we had had so little time together. We barely knew one another.

She smiled at me and took my hand.

“Come and take some refreshment, mother. You look weary and hungry.” She led me into the large, warm farm kitchen that smelled of fresh-baked bread and spices and sat me down at a table before the fire. She brought me wine, and a bowl of thick clotted cream, a delicious compote of pears and quince apples and a savory meat pie.

I had not realized how hungry I was. I fell on the food like one
starved, ignoring my manners completely and reverting to animal instinct. I stuffed myself, then sank into a drowse. I was so tired I was barely aware of being led into a darkened chamber and put to bed.

I awoke to the sound of my grandmother’s tart voice.

“Come now, enough of this! You’ve been asleep for two days. Did you know that?”

I sat up, dizzy and disoriented. I was in a strange room, but grandmamma, sitting on the bed, her keen searching eyes peering into mine, was familiar.

“Now then, it’s time you remembered who you are and how you need to present yourself to the world.” She beckoned to two maids who took off my nightgown (I had no memory of putting it on) and helped me into a big wooden tub full of water more cold than warm. I shivered, but it felt good to have the women lather me and scrub me and wash out my long neglected hair.

“Where on earth have you been, child?” my grandmamma wanted to know.

“With Don John’s army, in a place called Vlissingen, waiting for him to invade England.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Don John had to leave. The camp disbanded. I didn’t know where else to go. Where is Jamie?”

“In Scotland. He is safe—for now. He sends letters and money every month to Marie-Elizabeth. She adores him, you know.”

I adore him too, I wanted to say, but I did not want to discuss what had happened with Jamie in front of the servants, so I waited until after I had had my bath and my hair had been combed out and was drying in front of the fire. When Grandmamma Antoinette and I were alone, I told her all that had occurred, how Jamie had left Rome and I had been drawn into Pope Gregory’s grand plans—plans for the conquest of England, and for my marriage to Don John and my accession to the throne still occupied by my cousin Elizabeth.

“At least you are no longer the prisoner of that hateful woman,”
Grandmamma Antoinette said, referring to my cousin. “She has not only robbed you of your throne, she has robbed you of your youth.”

She handed me a small looking-glass and I was shocked at how much older I looked than when I had last contemplated my image, in Rome, dressed in my finery and feeling admired and full of hope. Then I was still in the glory of my womanhood, or so I fancied; now I looked like a scrubwoman, my complexion dulled by neglect and anxiety, my hair limp and lusterless, the clean but simple garments I had been given to wear making me look like a poor villager rather than a queen.

I gazed into the looking-glass for a long time, then handed it back to grandmamma with a sigh.

“And to think I imagined that I could ever mount a throne again!” I remarked. “What foolish dreams!”

“None of that!” grandmamma snapped. “Remember who you are speaking to! A daughter of the Bourbon royal house. You may fancy that your standing in the world has changed, but I assure you mine has not. I live quietly here in the country for the sake of your daughter and my granddaughter, whose true identity I have kept hidden. I say that she is the orphaned daughter of a dear friend, and no one questions me further. No one wants to know the truth about her. As long as she stays here, in obscurity, we remain untroubled by Her Self-Importance, the dowager Queen Catherine. Your former mother-in-law.”

“Those days seem so long ago,” I mused. “How Queen Catherine loved Francis! How sad she was when he died!”

I continued to lift my damp hair and air it out in the warmth from the fire, lost in my memories.

“None of her children please her. My friends at court tell me that she has grown more hardened, more difficult as she ages. Poor weak Charles, when he was king, broke under the weight of his sorrow when all those innocent Protestants were killed, that horrible slaughter the queen dowager ordered. He claimed he was haunted by the screams of
the dying Protestants, poor boy—and when he complained that he was suffering, she called him a lunatic and walked away. No wonder he died so young.

“She liked his brother Henry better—until he began dressing in women’s clothes and dying his hair purple. Since then she has practically disowned him, but he is still king, after all, and has all the power a king can command. No one knows better than she does what a nasty side he has to him; she doesn’t dare shut herself off from him completely. What matters most to her, after all, is that she retain some power for herself.

“And now there is the youngest of her boys, Francis the Frog (or so your cousin Elizabeth calls him). He has courage, that one, and he’s not afraid of his mother. Your cousin likes him. He may become the next King of England, you know. But his mother spits when she sees him, because like her, he’s ugly. A poxy face, a puny body. The runt of her litter. All mothers despise the runt.”

I listened to my grandmamma’s shrewd, unsparing comments on the royal family and felt a rare calm come over my weary body. I was in good hands. We were in a rural enclave not far from the sea. I imagined that I could escape by boat if the worst happened, and agents of either Baron Burghley or Queen Catherine descended on Saint-Cheron. We were far from Paris, and the royal palaces that clustered nearby.

And Queen Elizabeth, it seemed, was intent on wooing Prince Francis the Frog. No one had any illusions about her true intentions, of course; it was not the puny, poxy Francis she wanted, it was an alliance with France itself—her way of counteracting the power of the Catholic Holy League, the might of Catholic Christendom.

But the great hero of Christendom, Don John, was no more.

I had not been at Saint-Cheron long before I learned that he had gathered his ships and led them into battle against the Ottoman fleet—and that for the first time his forces had been defeated.

The heroic Don John, champion of the Holy League, mighty
commander, had lost a major battle—and had not long survived that loss. According to what Grandmamma Antoinette’s informants at court wrote to her, he had retired to his camp, caught a fever, and died within sight of his beloved galleys, the name of the Holy League on his bloodless lips.

He was mourned. His death seemed to many to represent a major reverse to the Catholic cause, for there was no one to replace him as leader of that cause—no one, that is, except his dour half-brother King Philip of Spain. And no one expected King Philip, then entering his fifties, to lead an army, let alone a fleet. He was no commander, he knew little of ships, and above all, he was disliked, while Don John had been revered, indeed almost worshipped.

Although I had not loved him, I too mourned Don John, despite his arrogance and his excessive self-regard. For among the men I had known, he was the one with the broadest and highest vision. He was inspired, and inspiring. Jamie was my love, and ever would be. But Don John, for a brief time, had been my hero, my champion.

Who would be my champion now?