The Galliard Read online

  The Galliard

  MARGARET IRWIN

  To

  my sister, EJ Irwin

  &

  my husband and collaborator,

  JR Monsell

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prelude

  Part I FIRST MEETING

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part II SECOND MEETING

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Interlude

  Part III LOVERS’ MEETING

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Postlude

  About the Author

  Also available from ALLISON & BUSBY

  Copyright

  Foreword

  This book was planned before I read Robert Gore-Browne’s vivid and forcible biography of Lord Bothwell, but owes a great deal to it, although some of the conclusions I have drawn are directly opposite to his.

  That does not lessen my gratitude to him for the first historical work I have seen on Bothwell that does not faithfully follow the view of him set down in his enemies’ propaganda, however inconsistent.

  The facts and incidents in this book are drawn from contemporary records, and so are much of the conversations. Practically everything John Knox says is in his own words, as he himself recorded them.

  The names of the four Maries were Beton, Seton, Fleming and Livingstone, not Hamilton and Carmichael as mentioned in the Ballad of Mary Hamilton – who was, in actual fact, executed in Russia at the Court of Peter the Great, at a much later date.

  There was never any Mary Hamilton at the Court of Queen Mary, nor any such execution.

  Prelude

  ON THE BORDER

  For the Galliard and the Gay Galliard’s men

  They ne’er saw a horse but they made it their ain.

  They were in the saddle again, out on a nightride again, but what a night for it!

  All Hallows’ E’en, when all honest folk should be either in bed safe from hobgoblins, or else ducking for apples in a bowl with the lassies and playing tricks on them when they sat brushing their hair in front of a burnished steel mirror and watching it to see the face of their future mate, or if they were bold enough, running out into the kailyard at midnight to pull a kail runt to see if it were straight or crooked, for so would be the shape of their man – and if it had plenty of earth on its roots that would be the best luck of all, since earth meant money.

  Some of the younger lads on this ride, Long Fargy and Dugall Quin and wee Willie Wallocky, out for the first time, had planned to black their faces and rig up some turnip lanterns and go round with the youngsters to all the neighbours’ houses at Haddington, singing their song of ‘the merry guisers’, which changed in the last verse to ‘the thirsty guisers’ as a broad hint for drink to be served them.

  But it was another sort of raid they were on now, called out on the instant by their lord, as was his way, and bad luck and a sore back to the lad who wasn’t in his steel bonnet, and his boots in the stirrups, within five minutes of hearing the order to horse. Their leatherjacks were all the armour on their bodies, nor did their lord wear more, except that his sleeves were of linked chain-mail and he wore a light modern sword where a few of his men carried the heavy two-handed weapon or for the most part a Jedburgh axe slung at the saddle-bow.

  They had been told to leave their dags and pistols behind – it was to be a quiet job, then, as was fitting to this eerie hour – and wee Willie was not the only one to stick a bunch of scarlet rowan berries in his cap as defence against the goblins known to be abroad on this last evening of October. Only the Galliard would choose such a night for a foray, a night moreover when the Merry Dancers, those spirits like streamers of red fire, were out riding the Northern Lights.

  So they grumbled to each other as they rode, but very low, in obedience to the order for silence, their stirrups and harness bound in rags to keep from jingling; it was as bad to be the Galliard’s disobedient servant as his enemy – worse, in fact, for he did not kill unnecessarily on a foray.

  But what foray could it be that even the Galliard would lead, now they were at peace with England? Their lord had won that French nickname for a gay reckless rake from a noted freebooter who ‘ne’er saw a horse but he made it his ain’. But only a year ago the Queen Regent of Scotland had made him her Lord Lieutenant of the Border, Warden of the Marches, Lord of Liddesdale and Keeper of Hermitage Castle, and he would hardly flout his royal appointment so far as to break truce with England, still less to ride on some private quarrel, least of all to lift his neighbours’ cattle. Only two dozen had been called out – on what errand?

  When they were clear of all walls and out on the wide moor, that dark figure at the head of their troop drew rein, and waited till they came up round him. It was too dark to see his face; but his height and broad shoulders showed up against the torn, stormy dusk of the sky above the hillside, and there was a faint glinting on the dark mail of his sleeves and on his steel helmet from those red flickering lights in the sky of the far North.

  A young man, not more than twenty-four years old, he was as stalwart as any of the older, hardened moss-troopers in his train, and one and all felt his eye upon them, even in the darkness, as he spoke in a low yet rather harsh vibrant voice.

  ‘Well, lads, we’re out for a bag of English gold! But don’t wag your jaws open, for it’s for none of our keeping. This is no march-treason, stealing English gear in time of truce. We are riding against traitors, and the gold is being brought from England to pay the rebel troops. Last week the Lords of the Congregation declared the Good Queen was no longer Regent, and stamped their declaration with a forged seal. They asked England for a thousand men to help them fight against their lawful ruler.’

  There was a deep angry growl at this last; it was worse than treason, worse even than march-treason against the Border law between the countries, for it was inviting the ancestral enemy of centuries to come and invade their homes yet again. There was not a man there who had not suffered from the last invasion just over a dozen years ago, when the English had tried to capture the baby Queen Mary of Scots as a bride for their boy King, Edward VI.

  The little Queen had been sent safe to France; King Edward had died in his sixteenth year; but the vale of Teviot and the fair fields o
f Merse and Lothian had been turned into a desert, and hundreds of villages and many market towns and castles and monasteries had been burnt and smashed to ruin.

  ‘Then let it be a killing job tonight, sir,’ said an older, gruffer voice. It came from the heavy shape of a man who leaned with bowed shoulders over his horse’s neck. ‘I’ll not hear it said that an Englishman lay under me and ever got up again.’

  ‘That’s old Toppet Hob’s growl, I’d know it a mile off. No hope of your lying tonight on top of an Englishman, Hob; it’s a neighbour we’re out after, John Cockburn, a far cousin of mine by marriage, and you’ll keep your grimy fists off his throat or you’ll have to reckon with his kinsman. Aye, John Cockburn’s a traitor, and double-dyed; he is taking English gold again and carrying English gold to his fellow-rebels, curse him! But we’ll lift that last burden from his conscience. We’ll wait for him in the wood below Hailes Castle as he skirts the bog on his way from Berwick, and spring an ambush on him. So wind your scarves well round your necks, my lambs, lest you get a sore throat from cold steel. When you get to the wood, keep silent as death, and remember that if you’re scared of the dark this All Hallows’ E’en, John Cockburn’s men will be more so when such ugly goblins as yourselves spring out on him.’

  He swung his horse round and thudded over the moor, his men after him in the same sweeping movement, for there was no dallying when the Gay Gailiard led a raid, and no wish for it. The wind was in their faces, sharp and damp from the east, with a salt tang in it from the sea. They sang low as they rode, in a curious laughing mutter of voices, the raiding song of their clan:

  ‘Little wot ye wha’s coming?

  Hob and Tam and a’s coming,

  Fargy’s coming, Willie’s coming,

  Little wot ye wha’s coming!’

  And so on through all the names of their company in turn over and over, until they came down the moor into the shelter of the hollow and saw the hill of Traprain rise above them, a black sleeping monster hunched against the dim sky and racing clouds. There in the scanty wood the Galliard halted his men, and their muttering song died on the wind.

  There was wild weather in the upper air, may all the saints hold it there and not let it come down on them in heavy rain and rack his old shoulders with cramp again, prayed Toppet Hob devoutly, wishing the New Religion didn’t prevent his vowing a candle to Our Lady if she’d keep the wet off his back. A chill comfortless business this New Religion, warning a man off the saints and any hope of driving a fair bargain with them.

  Now the men were all huddled together under the bare sootblack trees. An owl went blundering heavily up out of the low scrub of heather and whin, and Willie Wallocky let a screech out of him that he hoped to God would pass muster as that of the bird. It didn’t, but a muttered curse and warning was all that it called down on him for the moment.

  The sour smell of hot wet leather from the sweating horses cooled to a chill steam. The darkness settled on them, deepened slowly; the silence widened to an enormous gulf. Farther and farther off, the sounds of night reached out to them, the cry of a startled curlew, the sough of the wind in the sedges, the whisper and rush of dead leaves swirled up from the wet ground and scurrying on the wind.

  And always close round them were the sounds they made themselves for all their care, the stifled yawns that broke in a gasp, their whistling breath as they blew on their hands to keep them from stiffening with the cold and damp, the squelching of a horse’s hoofs in the mud, stamping and fidgeting, and once or twice, shatteringly, the sudden trumpet of his sneeze. But this was rare, for these small rough-coated beasts that could leap so nimbly over the peat-hags in the dark and find a foothold in the slippery morass knew on what sort of errand they were out.

  The wind whistled shriller; more than one man could have sworn he heard the thin cackling cries of witches in the upper air. But the furies that drove down on them were gusts and spurts of rain, swishing down on their heads and shoulders, trickling under the thick folds of the rough woollen scarves wound so closely round their necks for defence against sword thrusts, groping with icy fingers farther and farther down against their shrinking skins as they shivered in this wet chasm of utter darkness.

  To their leader all that mattered was that the night was all but past, and had he missed his prey.

  The rain stopped. The trees that had waited with him all these hours, so close to him that he could smell their wet mossy bark, now began to take their shape slowly with the dawn. The stars between the racing clouds were growing small and dull; the hump of Traprain was black once more against a rim of pewter; the night was over, then the quarry had escaped his grip. John Cockburn must have got some warning of his movements and smuggled his bag of gold safe across the Border to Edinburgh, into the hands of the ‘Bastard of Scotland’, Lord James Stewart, leader of the Lords of the Congregation, and of his prime agent, Mr John Knox.

  He heard the thudding of hoofs on the wet moor. At the distant sound every man tightened his horse’s girths and clambered into the saddle, stiff with cramp but ready before the scout reached them with news that their quarry was coming. The Galliard thrust a numbed foot into his stirrup, the fierce joy and heat of action already warming his blood. Not for nothing had he held his men in leash all this chill night.

  It was still quite dark in the little wood, but John Cockburn knew the ground almost as well as the kinsman lying in wait for him, and he and his men would be off their guard, nearing the end of the night and of the journey. That end would come quicker than Cockburn thought for; he would see these familiar trees suddenly come alive and moving, rushing round him like demons in the darkness.

  Now the Galliard could hear the creak of saddles, a clink of harness, and horses clumping heavily, slowly, tired with their journey. He stuck spurs into his horse, and Corbie sprang forward with a shrill whinny, as eager for the fray as his rider, who answered with a yell of joy, taken up by his men. They swung in among them, scattering them, a man shrieked that the devil was upon them, there were shouts and oaths and the clashing of steel.

  The Galliard’s eyes, said his men, could see in the dark, and they saw at first glance the heavy lump of the portmanteau jingling at Cockburn’s saddle-bow. With a blow of his sword he cut Cockburn down from his horse, another cut severed the strap that fastened that clanking bag, and the Galliard swung it on to his own saddle, and galloped off with a halloa to his men.

  ‘Hey, my night hawks,’ he called to them, laughing, ‘has that warmed your cold feet as it has mine?’

  Said Long Fargy, ‘That was a grand ding you gave him, sir.’

  Said Toppet Hob, ‘I’m thinking Your Lordship kept my hands off your kinsman for the pleasure of cracking his head yourself!’

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked wee Willie in an excited squeak, for he had not yet seen a man killed.

  ‘Not he,’ said his lord. ‘It takes more than that to cleave our family’s brain-pans.’

  They joked together, the men as much at ease with their lord as with each other, now that their job was over and he was well pleased.

  ‘There’ll be great cursing at Cockburn’s the night,’ they prophesied. ‘It’s they who’ll be crying this time “Fy, lads, cry a’, a’, a’, my gear’s a’ ta’en!”’

  ‘And Cockburn’s lost gear will cost him more than the lifting of a herd of cows.’

  ‘Aye, and it will cost his masters more,’ the Galliard told them. ‘We’ve put a good chapter of Lamentations into Johnny Knox’s next sermon.’

  ‘I mind him well as a lad in Haddington,’ growled old Toppet Hob, as though the worst thing that could be known of a man was his birthplace.

  ‘Will they raise the Hot Trod on us?’

  ‘They’ll not dare,’ said their lord, ‘they’ll have to keep this night’s work quiet. The Queen of England won’t thank them for bringing it into the open!’

  But he did not feel as sure as he sounded. And it was for his castle of Crichton, not the nearer one of Hailes, that he was
making.

  A streak of angry red had begun to fire the iron edge of the clouds; it showed the black shapes of horsemen riding fast up over the hillside, and far behind them, on the moorland path below the wood, a pair of seagulls swooping and screaming over a group of bent forms huddled round a prostrate figure.

  Big Bess was trying to whisk eggs to stir into her pan of Friar’s Chicken with the one hand while with the other she turned the spit on which a haunch of venison was frizzling and sputtering.

  ‘I have but the one pair of hands,’ she was wont to tell her mistress with untiring insistence on an indisputable fact.

  The kitchen door of the Laird of Sandybed’s house at Haddington stood open to the stonewalled passage that in its turn was open to an oblong slice of sky and running water. This was not because the kitchen was hot to suffocation and reeking of roast meat, fried fat and cinnamon, nor yet because Bess liked to get a hurried glimpse of the shallow Tyne that flowed outside her master’s back door, very convenient for the rubbish and slop-pails; but because the grey oblique light given her by those two doors was all she had to cook by.

  And suddenly that was obscured.

  ‘If that’s yourself, Simmy o’ the Syke, for the Lord’s sake have the sense to come in and not stand blocking the light on me,’ she yelped on a high yet full-throated note like that of a hound.

  ‘It’s not himself,’ said a strange voice, deep yet rather harsh, that sent the blood tingling through her veins.

  She swung round so quickly that she spun the bowl with the eggs on to the floor.

  ‘Mary have mercy!’ she breathed, crossing herself, before she remembered that both words and action were a legal offence.

  In the doorway was a tall stalwart young man, splashed with mud to his head and shoulders and with water dripping from him as he stood with his legs apart, his arms clutching a heavy portmanteau to his chest, his swarthy head cocked and his eyes scanning her with so merry yet ruthless a scrutiny that poor Bess felt hotter than the kitchen fire had made her. Only wee Simmy o’ the Syke knew that inside that great gawky frame was a timid and modest being that leaned on his tenderness for protection, although he barely reached her shoulder.