The Proud Servant Read online

  THE PROUD SERVANT

  MARGARET IRWIN

  CONTENTS

  Book One

  THE GREEN YEARS 1612-1636

  Book Two

  THE LEAN YEARS 1636-1644

  Book Three

  ANNUS MIRABILIS 1644-1645

  Epilogue

  THE ETERNAL THINGS 1651

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘The King sits in Dunfermline town

  Drinking the blude-red wine.’

  THE KING’S face is ugly, puckered, nervous and comical. He spills the blood-red wine when he drinks, to the disgust of his wife, who is a Danish woman, fair, with no thoughts beyond her next new dress. The King is James VI of Scotland, the inappropriate son of Mary Queen of Scots. Daggers flashed in front of her eyes just before he was born; and he was born frightened. Swaddled in padded coats against any possible assassin’s steel, he played a cannily cautious part all his life, fought neither on his mother’s behalf nor on his own, content that her imprisonment, followed by her execution, should give him the Scottish throne.

  And now he has only to wait for another throne to fall into his misshapenly padded lap. While the King of Scotland sits in Dunfermline town, the old Queen of England lies dying at Richmond. The old Queen with a nose like a witch and a golden wig and a face red and white like a dish from China, sits on the floor in her palace and refuses to go to bed; because she knows that when she does she will never get up again, and that that half-century we now call the Elizabethan age will then be over.

  She dies, and now King James VI of Scotland is also King James I of England. He travels south through his new possessions, slowly, royally, receiving homage from his new subjects; and with him go his Danish wife and his two elder children, and later the youngest, Baby Charles, a child nearly four years old, but so sickly and backward that he can neither walk yet nor talk, and as all prophesy, is not likely to see more than another year or two of life.

  Lucky for England that the King’s elder children, the Prince Henry and the Princess Elizabeth, are a splendidly strong upstanding pair of young rascals. They make friends everywhere, they get into scrapes, they get into debt, they run a farm of their very own, they demand plays, picnics, water tournaments for their entertainment; they fall into the river and are not drowned, they ride horses too wild for them and are not thrown – the like of them has as many lives as a cat, say the nurses, who are daily expecting Baby Charles to die.

  If he had died, or if Prince Henry had not, then the story of James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, would not have been the same. But it was Henry who died, of a feverish chill, caught when heated after tennis, in the midst of the preparations for his sister’s wedding to the Elector Palatine.

  Henry died, Elizabeth sailed away, and the Baby Charles was left alone to fight his way up to manhood as best he might. And because of a dim, obstinate courage that never forsook him, the sickly child managed to grow up to be King Charles I of England and Scotland. Before this, and more wonderful still, he made himself a master of horsemanship by the time he was twelve.

  At which time, in the year of 1612, the Lord James Graham was born at his father’s house of Old Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland.

  ‘From the pride of the Grahams,

  Good Lord, deliver us!’

  Old Saying

  ‘I never had passion upon earth so strong

  as to do the King, your father, service.’

  Letter from James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, written Jan. 28th, 1649, to Prince Charles, two days before the execution of the King, his father.

  Book I

  THE GREEN YEARS

  1612–1636

  Chapter One

  No baby, unless it were heir to a throne, could have been more eagerly welcomed. The Lord James Graham was indeed heir to a family of almost royal importance. His father, the fourth Earl of Montrose, was made President of the Privy Council. His grandfather had been Chancellor and Treasurer of Scotland, then Viceroy – kicked upstairs, said his critics, because he had not enough learning as Chancellor. His great-grandfather had fallen in the famous field of Pinkie; his great-great-grandfather in the still more famous one of Flodden; a yet remoter ancestor, at Falkirk by the side of William Wallace. There was even an ancestor that had had something to do with the Roman wall of Antoninus. In short, of all the families that guarded the Highland line of Scotland, the family of the Grahams was foremost, so that there was good reason that the Lord James should be born, the only son among five daughters, three of whom had been born before himself.

  His father led the placid life of a country gentleman as few of his forbears had done – shooting, playing golf, smoking and breaking hundreds of clay pipes and sampling every known variety of tobacco. He ordered his estates with the thrift of a careful husbandman, had full accounts kept, never backed bills nor pledged his land nor speculated in the new commercial companies in soap or tanning that were springing up everywhere in this new crazy search for wealth that had seized on the country in these peaceable times.

  He married the Lady Margaret Ruthven, sister to the mysterious young Earl of Gowrie, on whose murdered body had been found a little parchment bag, full of magical characters and words of enchantment. He had been killed by King James’ servants, in defence of their royal master, it was said; and the dead body was propped up at the delinquents’ bar in Edinburgh to stand its trial for high treason. Small eloquence could it show on its own behalf; it was found guilty, and its head condemned to be set on the Tolbooth, ‘there to stand till the wind blow it away’.

  This was done on the very day in the year of 1600 that Prince Charles was born at Holyrood Palace; and some thought it an unfortunate omen, both for the royal baby and for the new seventeenth century.

  From then on, the Lady Margaret Ruthven walked with a defiant carriage and looked out on the world with implacable eyes. All the friends and relatives of the gentle Graham, who became the fourth Earl of Montrose, expressed wonder at his rashness in marrying her.

  Only once before had he had occasion to show the courage of his race, and that was when he had set on Sir James Sandilands in the High Street of Edinburgh, and avenged a kinsman’s murder by a fight to the death with broadswords. And in this, his single act of violence, he also avenged the fact that King James had given to young Sandilands, in token of his fatuous affection for him, the lands that had belonged to the late Earl of Gowrie.

  Into whose disgraced, disinherited and dangerous family, the fourth Earl of Montrose was bold enough to marry. For not only did he make himself brother-in-law to the head of a warlock on the Tolbooth, but his wife’s grandfather had been noted as a necromancer. The lovely Queen Mary – bred up as she had been among the Italian sorceries and juggleries of the French Court under Catherine of Medici – fearless and curious as she was in all matters – had yet not dared in her youth to accept a ring from Lord Ruthven, the Lady Margaret’s grandfather. So she had said to some of her suite while hawking near Kinross, ‘for’, she said, ‘I know him to use enchantments – and yet he is made one of my Privy Council.’

  But nothing untoward happened in Lady Margaret’s marriage – ‘as far as one knows,’ the gossips added hopefully.

  She was inhuman, said the many women who rather feared her – a coolly indifferent wife, a careless mother. She had the eyes of a mermaid, and the step of a young stag; there was no man who could keep up with her when she walked over the hills, and often she would walk alone, as no woman should – till far into the night, no man knew where. So that she did not allay the uneasy reputation of her family; and the old, dreadful stories began to be told again when at the birth of her son, the Lord James, it leaked out that she had consulted witches as to his future. This in itself was chargeable as
a crime.

  No one knew what Lady Margaret learned from it of her son’s fate; whatever it was, she faced it in greater and lonelier pride than ever. She gave birth to two more daughters, Katherine and Beatrix, but she lived less and less in the present; the company round her would slide away and become invisible to her clear and intent gaze. She died rather suddenly, without warning, when her son was just six years old, and left her cheerful and kindly husband very melancholy. He would sit for hours puffing at his pipe, staring through the clouds of smoke with round, sad eyes.

  But there were his estates, his children – he wrote letters to hurry the dressmakers who had not finished his youngest daughter’s frocks – and he had so many friends, he had always given so many shooting and hunting parties, hospitality could not be neglected, any more than his cattle and crops, the best tended in Scotland. His castles at Mugdock and Old Montrose and Kincardine were fast taking on the character of country houses, with antlers on the walls, and fishing rods and golf clubs stacked in the corners, and rows of tobacco jars and pipes beside the chimney corner.

  His two elder daughters were well married to rising men – the eldest, Lilias, to Sir John Colquhoun of Luss, who had lately been given the new title of baronet; and the second, Margaret, to Archibald Napier, soon to be created Lord Napier for his wise and useful service at Court to King James. The younger children, Dorothea, Jamie, Kat (for Katherine) and little Beatrix (whom her father always called ‘the bairn’ as though he had not had five other bairns before her), stayed with their elder sisters in turn, and with their father.

  At twelve years old, Jamie was old enough to go and study with a tutor in Glasgow. He lodged with the Lord Justice-Clerk and his wife, Sir George and Lady Elphinstone, in one of the old canons’ houses near the Cathedral; and his two cousins, who were his pages, and his sister Kat, who was a year younger than he but would never obey him, lived there too. The little girl and the three boys all did lessons together with Master William Forrett, MA, in a room with red curtains and a red table-cloth, on which Kat at once made a large ink blob, to Master Forrett’ s regular lamentation whenever they sat down to lessons – though Lord James assured him that that was what it had been sent for.

  All his treasures were crowded into that little red room in the old canonry, his golf clubs jumbled up with his fencing foils in the corner, and on the walls hung his cross-bow, inlaid with mother o’ pearl, and his brazen hagbut and his new gilded sword, his first real sword, a present from his brother-in-law, Archie Napier, in a silk and silver scarf with belt and hangers, a present from his father, and a gun with which he had shot several roebuck on the shores of Loch Lomond, when staying at the Colqu-houns’ house of Rossdhu near Luss. And there was a whole shelf-full of books that his father had chosen for him from his own library, and silver spoons and cups for his table, carefully packed and sent by his father’s orders, and linen napkins and table-cloths, and counter-cloths red and green, and cushions of red embroidery and green velvet and two of tapestried peacocks and one of plain brown velvet to kneel on in the kirk, for all that the Kirk was beginning to call it a Popish and heathenish superstition to kneel at prayers.

  ‘But let you show as good manners to your God as to your father,’ said the Earl of Montrose, when his son Jamie knelt to receive his blessing before riding back with Willy and Mungo Graham to the narrow streets and wynds of the little country town of Glasgow.

  In spite of King James’ passionate efforts to suppress the vicious new habit of smoking, the back streets managed to wink at prohibition, and drove a thriving trade with America in tobacco. Jamie loathed the smell of these back streets, for he had once tried to smoke a pipe, and it had made him very sick; but he was drawn to them by the sight of sailors from the Port of Glasgow standing about their low doorways, with black beards and gold rings in their ears, chewing and spitting out the Indian weed. Then if he were lucky was the time to hear tales of savages who were painted blue and scarlet, and emperors who wore crowns of feathers three feet high, and mountains beyond which there lay nothing but the setting sun. One day he too would see these things; in the meantime it did not seem that this life at Glasgow would ever end.

  But it ended on a day early in November, when for a whole month Jamie had been fourteen, and Kat was staying with her sister Lilias and Sir John Colquhoun at Luss, twenty miles away. There came a servant from Kincardine to say that the Earl of Montrose was very ill, and that his son must come home at once. His white horse, Torrey, was saddled for him; with his pages dressed in scarlet and he himself in dark green and mulberry, he rode out of the Elphinstones’ gates. The gardener was waiting there to hand up a bunch of late red roses and sweet-smelling thyme to pin between his horse’s ears. He was always there on Sundays to hand the Lord James a nosegay on his way to church to pin into his cloak, against the smell of the congregation. Today his sense of the occasion amounted to a bouquet, and the young lord’s, in response, to a tip of twelve shillings Scots.

  So Master Forrett anxiously ascertained, spurring his nag after him to inquire, and also how much he had given the blind Highlander who sang the time of dinner last night – and how many coins he had just flung to the group of ragged poor children that always gathered as fast as crows round a corn stook to see the young lord mount his horse and clatter away up the narrow street. All these uncounted alms to the poor at his mounting and dismounting, and tips to the servants at his numerous visits, to say nothing of the endless expenses of stray drummers and pipers and fiddlers and morrice-dancers and ballad-singers and jugglers, whose services Lord James commanded, not merely for his own amusement in the old monastic house at Glasgow, but all over the country, wherever he happened to be staying – no wonder the methodical and thrifty Master Forrett often felt he had been put in charge of a dragonfly.

  The Lord James darted here, darted there, on visits to his three homes at Mugdock, Kincardine or Old Montrose, visits to his married sisters and to friends and relations, at what seemed an absurd distance and often for only two or three days. He wore out his horse’s shoes unconscionably, and sadly had Master Forrett noted down the charge every time his young lordship’s nags were shod since he was seven years old.

  The little tutor’s thinly covered bones got very tired with all the jolting over rough roads; and his irritably sensitive ear could not abide the pipes which Lord James would order first of all the musicians. He could already imagine their barbarous skirling at Kincardine and the eldritch keening of the women, if the old earl should indeed die.

  Would he die?

  ‘Shall we never jog this road back to Glasgow again after all? Will my lord give up his studies there and go straight to college at Saint Andrews, and I have to find a new pupil?’ thought Master Forrett.

  All at once he knew that he did not care how far or how often he jogged on the road, or how shrilly the pipes assaulted his ears, if only he could continue to see his young lord’s puzzled frown over some difficult passage in Caesar’s commentaries break into a dazzling smile as he triumphantly construed it wrong – so fantastically and ingeniously wrong, that Master Forrett sometimes doubted whether his pupil’s intentions were serious.

  Willy and Mungo Graham occasionally talked low to each other, and their tones and looks had a new respectful awe in them when they addressed their young lord, which pulled him up short whenever he began to whistle. He began again and again, for he always wanted to whistle with pleasure when he heard the rhythmical creek of the saddle under him answering to the throbbing, willing muscles of his horse as it sprang forward beneath the press of his knees.

  But he must not whistle when everyone around him was thinking – ‘The old lord may be dying, and then the Lord James will be Earl of Montrose.’ He tried to think it himself – ‘My father may be dying.’ – To die, to go under the earth – ‘To bear the red rose company,’ the ballads called it, but he could not believe it, for the sunshine was so bright, the shadows that chased it were so sharp and sudden, the hills in the distance,
brilliant as blue icebergs, looked so close that he could distinguish every scar of rock and stream upon them.

  Then up came the big grey clouds again, shouldering their way up over the round-shouldered hills that stood surly now and black, humping their sodden backs against the rain, until in a flash they were blotted out, invisible. And here came the rain on themselves, marching over the mountains, dipping and trailing its long grey skirts over the plains, till it fell plump on their heads, and turned his pages’ scarlet sleeves to purplish black on the windward side.

  He flung back his wet, stinging face to look at the scarlet berries of a mountain ash that glistened above his head. The mountain ash flew past him; there was nothing ahead of him now but moorland peat and heather, dark in the flying wings of the storm that had begun to outstrip him. In a watery break of the clouds there tossed a broken banner of iridescent light, the bitten-off stump of a rainbow that sailors call a wind-dog; there were iridescent lights in the rain on his eyelashes as he blinked them against the wild and fugitive loveliness of the scene.

  He felt his horse share his happiness, gallant, responsive – ‘On with it, Torrey, gallop through it now – with a fol de diddle lalley – fol de diddle lalley—’ But there he was off again, forgetting it all, while his father might be dying – and he would have to go up into his room and stand by the great bed and hold on to the curtains and prod his finger into the threads of a woven beast or fruit and say the right things that must be said to someone who was very ill, while all the time that cloud of nauseating smoke would wreath above his father’s good-humoured face that curved chubbily above its beard, and puff slowly up into his own nostrils. Perhaps though, if his father were so very ill, the doctors, who were apt to call tobacco a dangerous drug, would not allow him to smoke this time.