Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [263]
He had said a great deal else that afternoon, and so had she. She had been so sure. It was true, she had hoped for his craft and strength only; she had refused him, out of very fear for her own eminence and her own policies, any exercise of his other abilities.
Thirteen years before, she had been married by proxy here on the Loire at Châteaudun to the King of Scotland, and for thirteen years had made Scotland her home. Châteaudun had not changed; but coming back, long-widowed, hungry for troops, for money, for power to fashion and maintain an undisputed and orderly throne for the grandson who one day, surely, would reign over Ireland, Scotland and France, she had found that in thirteen years France had altered.
With her eyes on the riches of Italy, and with her old enemy England weak and busy with internal struggles for power, France was no longer so tender towards Ireland or towards Scotland itself. France would have been content, she found, to have her abandon her self-imposed, stormy exile and stay with her child, while a Frenchman governed in Edinburgh in her place and Frenchmen remained inexpensively garrisoning the country’s best forts, without pouring gold and promises, as she was doing, into the pockets of her Scottish nobles to buy their allegiance for their Queen.
Her brothers opposed that; but her brothers’ power, though great, was not unlimited. The King was obstinate; there were times when neither the Duke nor the Constable, when not Diane herself, could move him. She had been right, whatever happened, to take her own measures, in secret, to safeguard Mary; there had been no one in this, her own country, to whom she could give absolute trust.
And few enough in Scotland. The Erskines: plain, honest, undemanding—she did not need to be told what she owed to her Chief Privy Councillor and Special Ambassador. Ten days ago at the kirk of Norham in England her well-beloved Thomas, Master of Erskine, with Lord Maxwell and the Bishop of Orkney and the French emissary de Lansac, had concluded a peace treaty between Scotland and England with the Bishop of Norwich and Sir Robert Bowes. In it, England contracted to give up the southern fortresses and her Tweed fishings within Scotland; had engaged that the debatable land in the west marches between the two nations should be neutral as before; and had agreed to release without ransom the hostages lying in English prisons since the fateful battle of Solway Moss nearly ten years before. Erskine, writing wryly, had quoted the English preamble. Though England, by conquest might justly claim enlargement of its own limits; yet the King agrees to a friendly and indifferent view of the old, true bounds; and that these should be the same as before the late wars.’ Thus England in four years had shrunk.
But at the same time, England had become the refuge of the new religion, and a greater temptation to her own unsettled nobles—for intriguers like Balnaves, for so long a prisoner in Rouen himself; for Kirkcaldy of Grange, whom she knew to be in France, earning English pay. Douglas’s allegiance she had, temporarily at least. Maxwell, though discomfited, was at the moment hers. Lord Chancellor Huntly was staunchly Catholic and a present support, but his ambitions were great. The Governor had been soothed with a dukedom, and a post for his young heir in France, but it would be hard to reconcile him, she knew, to abandoning his title to her.
The Earls of Glencairn and Drumlanrig were both of uncertain loyalty, and both had been displeased with their stay in France. Cassillis also was unhappy with his rewards, but might have enough to do, together with Maxwell and Huntly and the Douglases, in settling their own long-standing feuds at home. Livingstone, the stalwart guardian of her daughter,