Kitabı oku: «The Captain of the Guard», sayfa 18
Again Douglas urged that he should be executed without delay; but grief and despair threw Gray into a burning fever, "ane het sicknesse," the abbot, his kinsman terms it; so the Dyck Graf declined to be precipitate, but kept him a close prisoner, and on the day after this affair, the earl of Douglas, with all his retinue, accompanied by the duke of Albany, left Bommel, and took the road by Ameldroyen, towards the frontier of France.
CHAPTER XXXIX
A GLANCE AT HISTORY
Visions of the days departed,
Shadowy phantoms fill my brain;
They who live in history only,
Seem to walk the earth again.
Longfellow.
The spring of 1443 was ripening into summer around the Scottish capital. The green corn was sprouting in the fields; the April gowans and the budding whins made gay the upland slopes and braes.
Many months had elapsed since Sir Patrick Gray should have returned to court with an account of his mission. The Regent Livingstone and the chancellor became impatient, and despatched Patrick Lord Glammis, Master of the Household, to the court of Gueldres, from whence he soon returned, with a duplicate of the letters entrusted to Gray, of whom no trace had been discovered, since Prince Adolphus and his retinue had separated from him at Wees, when on his way to the coast, and at the distance of twenty miles from the castle of Gueldres.
This was somewhat perplexing; the old chancellor, who had a strong friendship for Gray, now really mourned for him as one who was no more, believing that he had been slain in some mysterious manner, and the young king wept before the Lords of the Secret Council, to whom Glammis made his report. Crichton knew that the earl of Douglas had been in Flanders, with all his chosen followers, and their unscrupulous character made the friends of Sir Patrick fear the worst.
In those days, posts there were none, letters were few, travellers fewer, and one half of Europe knew nothing of the other; but, nevertheless, distant rumours informed the regent and chancellor of Scotland that Douglas and his train, with the forfeited duke of Albany, after a brief sojourn at the court of Charles the Seventh, had passed on towards Rome.
In his rage at the abbot John, the earl vowed "to raze Tongland Abbey to its ground-stone," and to do many other absurd and impossible things; but one threatening wave of the abbot's hand, and a denunciation from his otherwise good-natured lips, brought the superstitious noble on his knees, grovelling, and in prayer, which was invariably replaced by fury and maledictions as soon as his mentor retired. He promised to forgive Gray, and within the hour despatched Achanna with one of his many letters to the Dyck Graf of Bommel, urging his secret execution. He then ordered the abbot to return to Scotland, and in the same breath begged he would accompany him to Rome; and the abbot, being most anxious for a personal interview with the sovereign pontiff, silently consented to do so, though despising in his heart the titled penitent he followed.
John Douglas, abbot of the Premonstratensian monks of Tongland, held for the haughty earl, the keys of heaven and of hell, and made him writhe in his superstitious soul at the terrible conviction.
In 1444, as Crichton had arranged, the king took into his own hands the government of the nation, in a convention of the Three Estates, which met within the castle of Stirling, and at the same time, the papal legate came from beyond the sea, in great pomp and bravery, to exact a solemn oath of fealty to Rome from all the Scottish Bishops. Such oaths were beginning to be requisite now, for already had the smoke of those funeral fires, to which they had consigned Resby the Englishman, and Crawar the Bohemian, "infected all on whom it was blown."
The poor chancellor had his hands full of troublesome business, for the Scottish lords were again at their old hereditary occupations, rapine and slaughter.
Patrick Galbraith, a follower of the earl of Douglas, quarrelled with Robert Semple, of Fulwood, about who should command in the royal fortress of Dunbarton, where one was governor of the upper, and the other of the lower castle. The sword was speedily resorted to; Semple was slain, and a strong garrison of Douglas-men occupied the place. The Lindesays and Ogilvies fought the disastrous feudal battle of Arbroath to decide whose chief should be bailie of that regality; and there fell on that bloody field, Alexander, earl of Crawford, six knights, and six hundred men-at-arms.
Then Robert Boyd, of Doughal, ran his sword through Sir James Stewart, of Auchminto, at a lonely place near Kirkpatrick, where the summer woods grew thick and green, and carried off his wife to the castle of Dunbarton, where she brought forth a child prematurely, and died of grief and terror in two days after. Archibald Dunbar stormed the great castle of the earl of Hailes, slew the inmates, and gave it up to the Douglases, while the moss-troopers of Annandale, lest their weapons should rust, kept all the western marches in hot water by their raids and devastations, which were seldom confined to their own border.
The sisters of the king were actually considered in danger, so daring or so enterprising were the younger knights of the Douglas faction; thus the princesses Jane and Eleonora departed to visit their sister, the unhappy dauphiness of France, but arrived too late to see her. She had died of a broken heart, having sunk under the cruelty of her husband (afterwards Louis XI., of infamous memory) and shame at the false charges of Jamet de Tilloy. Eleonora became the wife of Sigismund, archduke of Austria; but the princess Jane returned to her first love, who was the Scottish earl of Angus.
"All the mischiefs at home," says Buchanan, "were imputed to the earl of Douglas, who did all he could to conceal the misdemeanour of his followers, while he studied to afflict the men of different parties; in consequence of the vastness of his power, it was almost a capital offence to call aught he did in question. His influence compelled Sir James Stuart, of Lorn, the king's uncle, to fly the realm, because he spoke freely of the desperate state of the people; and his ship was taken at sea by Flemish pirates, among whom he ended his life in misery."
Such was the hard fate of the Black Knight of Lorn, the husband of the Queen Dowager of Scotland – Jane Beaufort, the fair flower of Windsor.
The English, as usual, took advantage of these turmoils to enter Scotland and burn the tower of Dumfries; so in return for this piece of attention, the Scots, under Lord Balvenie, burned Alnwick, and laid waste to Northumberland, reducing it almost to a desert; and soon after fifteen thousand English, under the Lord Piercy, were cut to pieces on the frontier, as they were about to cross a second time.
The Cheviots, said by a modern writer, to be "a clasp riveting Scotland and England together," were then deemed, like the Tweed and Solway elsewhere, but a natural barrier placed by the hand of God between two rival kingdoms. War brought famine and disease in her ghastly train, and so closed the year 1448.
Previous to this, the chancellor taking advantage of the lull caused by the defeat of the English and the capture of their leaders, the earls of Northumberland and Huntingdon, assembled a suitable train and sailed for Flanders, to bring home the young king's betrothed bride, for whose reception, great preparations were made at court.
Crichton was long absent, as he went by the way of Tours, to renew the ancient league with France, which was again ratified by him and other Scottish ambassadors for James II.; and by Thibaud, bishop of Maillerais, the Sieur de Pretigni and Messire Guillaume Cousinat, on the part of Charles VII.
After this the lord chancellor rode towards Gueldres.
CHAPTER XL
THE PRISONER
It might be months, or years, or days,
I kept no count – I took no note;
I had no hope my eyes to raise,
And clear them of their dreary mote. —
Byron.
Meanwhile, during the occurrence of all these stirring events where was Sir Patrick Gray?
A prisoner of state in the castle of Bommel, detained there, to all appearance, hopelessly, by order of Jacques de Lalain, the Dyck Graf.
This official knew not whether to believe the information and reiterated statements of Sir Patrick, or those of the vindictive earl of Douglas. The secret manner in which Gray had resided in Bommel, and the disguise he had assumed, were denounced by the burgomaster, as unworthy the character of an envoy and the captain of a royal guard; they were declared suspicious, though no one could exactly say of what bad errand or object. Then, in that unexplained midnight brawl, concerning the origin of which Sir Patrick maintained an obstinate silence, he had wounded almost to death two citizens of good repute; and he was totally without papers or property to verify the account he gave of himself, as all he possessed had fallen into the hands of the Douglases, who had destroyed the former and appropriated the latter.
The hatred displayed by a noble so powerful as the earl and by his brilliant train of followers towards him, and their urgent demands for his execution, with or without a trial, convinced Jacques de Lalain that some great mystery was involved; that his prisoner was a man of considerable importance; and that it would be alike impolitic to hang or to release him. Hence he ordered, that he should be well attended, and comfortably lodged in the fortress of Bommel, but closely guarded and confined to the tower of Otho III.
Arnold d'Egmont, duke of Gueldres, had already begun to be embroiled by his unnatural son, Prince Adolphus, and was absent at the ducal court of Burgundy; thus to numerous letters on the subject of his unfortunate prisoner, the Dyck Graf received no explicit answer, so time rolled wearily and drearily on.
And what of Murielle? was the constant thought of Gray.
She was now his, irrevocably his, and while aware of his existence could not, either by force or fraud, become the wife of another. Amid all the misery of a protracted captivity, there was comfort in his conviction, till after-thoughts suggested how heartless was the existence to which their precipitate marriage had perhaps condemned her!
But might not their enemies, by forgeries and false statements, delude her into an idea of his death, as they had attempted to do before? Douglas dared not trifle with the power and terror of the Church; so Gray drew consolation from his memory of the earl's superstition, if not of his religion.
Yet there were times when his mental agony became great; for no news from Scotland or of the external world ever reached his prison.
Was Murielle still living? Had the wild schemes of Douglas and Albany prospered? Was the latter on the throne as Robert IV., with the terrible earl for his lieutenant-general, his ally in council and his right arm in war – crowned like Baliol of old, by domestic treason and foreign treachery? Was the young king dead, a prisoner, or an exile in France or England? Was Albany's betrothal to Mademoiselle Radegonde, the eldest daughter of Charles VII., annulled? What changes were taking place in his secluded mountain home? Who were dead – who living, and who wedded? Was he quite forgotten there?
Such were the questions ever in his heart and on his tongue.
Slowly passed the weary days till they became months, and then season succeeded to season. Five times had Gray, from his barred window in that old tower of Otho count of Gueldres, seen the golden grain gathered on the flat and distant fields; five times had he seen the land ploughed, and sown, and reaped; and five times covered with the white mantle of winter, when frost locked the waters of the Waal, and moored, harder than ever hempen cable and iron anchor did, the great brown-varnished barges in the sedge-bordered canals, when the storks forsook their nests on the snow-covered gables, when the holy water froze in the stone fonts of the churches, and when the bulbous-shaped Flemings put on at least six pairs of additional breeches. At such a season as this, the poor prisoner pictured in fancy the crackling yule-log that blazed in his father's hall at home – the old kirk of Foulis all bedecked with green bays and greener holly – his mother mourning by the winter hearth for the loss of her absent son; and then his heart grew sick as he thought of his blighted love, his wasted life, and all the thousand memories of his native land.
He thought, too, of what he had seen in more than one Flemish market-place, in Antwerp, at Gueldres, Endhoven, Bommel, and elsewhere; the cruel and periodical exhibition of a long-secluded prisoner, in whose heart hope, and even the memory of the outer world, were long since dead; "for there on particular days," says a certain writer, "these victims are presented to the public eye, upon a stage erected in the open market, apparently to prevent their guilt and punishment from being forgotten. It is scarcely possible to witness a sight more degrading to humanity than this exhibition: – with matted hair, wild looks, and haggard features, with eyes dazzled by the unwonted glare of the sun, and ears deafened and astounded by the sudden exchange of the silence of a dungeon for the busy hum of men, the wretches sit like rude images fashioned to a fantastic imitation of humanity rather than like living and reflecting beings. In the course of time we are assured they generally become either madmen or idiots, as mind or matter happens to predominate, when the mysterious balance between them is destroyed."
Gray remembered to have seen these miserable captives thus exhibited, and his heart died within him with terror, lest such might be the fate reserved for himself.
So the year 1448 was in its spring when he reckoned that Murielle was no longer a girl – that in fact she would be about her four-and-twentieth year. He strove to picture what the girl would be now, when expanded into a woman! Would he ever see her more, or be free to tread his native soil again? Alas! there were times when he feared his brain would turn.
Count Ludwig had long since been taken in the adjacent forest, after a hard conflict between the soldiers of De Lalain and his Brabanciones, many of whom, including Gustaf Vlierbeke, and the industrious Carl Langfanger, were slain, and gibbeted on the trees. The wretched count was broken alive on the wheel, before the Church of St. Genevieve. He survived the torture for three days, before the public executioner gave him the final coup with an iron bar, and his head on a spike now rendered the market-place of Bommel horrible to its frequenters.
Gray heard of this barbarous execution in his prison, and he almost envied the reckless robber, for death seemed a triumphant release from tyranny, misery, and mental suffering.
In February, 1448, on a dull morning, when the yellow winter fog hung like a pall over the level scenery of the Bommelerwaard, Gray was roused from sleep by the roar of twenty great bombards, the concussion of which shook the old castle of Count Otho to its foundations as they exploded in a salvo.
Had an enemy, the French or Burgundians, attacked it suddenly? His heart leaped with joy at the desperate hope. He rushed to the grated window of his room, and saw in the court-yard beneath, the Dyck Graf, with his sword and mantle, his knightly girdle and collar, mustering and arraying his garrison in their armour, pikemen, crossbowmen, arquebusiers, all steady Walloons and German lanzknechts. Then came the clangour of the church bells, and cheers of a multitude without, who seemed to be rushing through the streets towards the gate of the fortress, while still the great brazen bombards continued to belch forth flame and thunder from the battlements.
"What has happened?" asked Gray, as he rushed half dressed from his room to the court-yard. "Oh, Messire," he added to the Dyck Graf, "in pity tell me?"
"Only a salute, messire," replied the governor curtly, in French; but as Gray observed, with more politeness than usually was accorded to him.
"To whom?"
"A demoiselle of the highest-rank."
"But her name, Messire?" urged Gray.
"The young queen of Scotland, who comes this way with her train," replied the Dyck Graf.
Gray almost gasped with joy.
"The daughter of duke Arnold?" he inquired.
"Yes; of Monseigneur the duke of Gueldres; she has been married to your king at Brussels, and is now on her way to Scotland."
"I am saved – saved at last!" exclaimed Gray, in a burst of happiness, so genuine that even the grim De Lalain was impressed by it. "Oh, my God, I thank thee! (oh, my Murielle!) – and – and, messire, is the king here?
"Tonnere de ciel! how inquisitive you have become."
"Messire, after all I have endured you may excuse me, for many a sun has risen and set – many a tide has ebbed and flowed since I became a prisoner here, spending years, whose agony is known to Heaven and to myself only!"
"Well – the king is not here; the princess was married to him by proxy – the chancellor of Scotland being his representative, before the altar of St. Gudule."
"Sir William Crichton?"
"I think that is his name, messire; and by St. Genevieve!" he added as the clanking iron gates were rolled back by the warders, "she hath a brave retinue of lords and knights, and, as many of them are your countrymen, we shall now be able to verify the truth of your statements."
Within an hour after this, Sir Patrick Gray found himself a free man, and surrounded by his countrymen and friends, all loyal gentlemen of the court, who knew him well. He was cordially embraced by the old chancellor, who presented him to the young Queen Mary, and placed him by her side, as the captain of her husband's Royal Guard.
Messire Jacques de Lalain, on perceiving the turn matters took with his prisoner, began to fear that in the zealous execution of his office he had made a mistake. He offered innumerable apologies to Gray, and as he was not ungenerous, he presented him with a rich suit of Flemish armour, a fine Toledo, a Spanish gennet, and a catella or chain, having fifty links of fine gold, as an amende for all he had endured.
Of all who accompanied the chancellor, he inquired about the Douglases; but could only learn that they were at Rome, and probably would not return until after the great jubilee, which took place then every fiftieth year, in honour of the foundation of Christianity.
The young queen's train embarked at Sluys, in Scottish ships, and crossed the German sea in safety.
On the 1st of April, 1448, she landed at Leith, and as an illustration of "how dull and common-place fiction is when compared with truth," the Dyck Graf of Bommel, and Sir Patrick Gray, who had been so long and so hopelessly his prisoner, rode side by side, as she proceeded towards Edinburgh, and they bore over her head a canopy of cloth of gold upon the points of their lances.
Gray's noble horse and gorgeous armour were now as conspicuous as his soldierly bearing and manly beauty; for both had now returned, and in his five years of captivity the scars inflicted by the ghisarma of Douglas had disappeared, or nearly so.
Patrick Cockburn, of Newbigging, now provost of Edinburgh and governor of the castle, received the queen at the head of the magistrates and all the men of the city, in armour – "boden in effeir of weir," as it was then termed.
Mary was accompanied by the lord chancellor Crichton, John Raulston, bishop of Dunkeld, who was lord privy seal, and Nicholas Otterburn, a canon of Glasgow. The prince of Ravenstein, the marquis of Berg, and Englebert, count of Nassau, hereditary Burg Graf of Antwerp, who were each followed by a brilliant train of attendants, wore the collars and mantles of the Golden Fleece. The prince bore the banner of the bride's uncle, Philip III., surnamed the Good, duke of Burgundy.
Then came the bishops of Liege and Cambrai, riding upon white mules, with long footcloths.
The king's two brothers-in-law came next, Francis, duke of Brittany (a prince who slew his brother Giles), and the Archduke Sigismund of Austria, each attended by knights, banners, squires, and pages, in glittering costumes. With them came Louis II., duke of Savoy, prince of Piedmont, and husband of the princess royal of Cyprus, with his banner borne by the duke of Montferrat, who wore a scarlet tabard, with the silver cross of Savoy.
The lord of Campvere, a handsome and black-bearded man, the husband of Mary of Scotland (fifth sister of James), came next in a suit of armour glittering with gold carvings and precious stones. He bore a great banner —azure, with the lion or, crowned for Gueldreland, and azure a lion gules for Zutphen, impaled, with the lion of Scotland, within its double tressure of fleur-de-lis.
Herré de Meriadet, hereditary Burg Graf of the castle of Sluys, bore the banner of the count of Nassau, azure sprinkled with crosses argent. Meriadet, a tall and stately man, was then famous as one of the best knights in Europe, and the people received him with acclamation. He wore a silver helmet of great beauty and remarkable form, which he had struck in battle from the head of an emir of Granada, when he served the king of Castile in his wars against the Moors, and its snow-white plumes drooped upon his shoulders, and were reflected on the dazzling surface of his armour, which literally blazed in the noonday sunshine.
Bombards were fired, and bells were loudly rung in many a sacred edifice now numbered with the things that were; and so "with a grate traine of knights and ladeys" (as Balfour has it), the queen was conducted to the church of Holyrood, and there solemnly married to the young king, then in about the nineteenth year of his age, and in the bloom of youthful strength and comeliness; and Mary his bride charmed the people by her girlish loveliness. They were never tired of extolling her fair hair, which fell in golden masses on her snowy neck and shoulders; her violet-coloured eyes, and her full yet curved lip, which expressed the softness of love, with that firmness of character so needed in a queen of the turbulent Scots.
This was the second time that the houses of Scotland and the then powerful and independent dukedom of Gueldres had been connected by marriage.
Alexander, son of Alexander III., espoused Margaret, daughter of Guy de Dampierre, earl of Flanders; and had he lived, and she been queen of Scotland, the disastrous wars of the Edwards and the victories of Wallace and Bruce had never been heard of; but he died at Roxburgh, in 1283, when in his twentieth year. Margaret interred him at Lindores, in the old abbey church of St. Mary, and soon after became the wife of Reinald, the warlike duke and count of Gueldres.
