Chapter 31

THE MARRIAGE

She is mine own;
And I as rich in having such a jewel,
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
Their water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

SHAKSPEARE.

The threads were spun, warp and woof laid on, and Fate busily took up the shuttle, which was to entwine the histories of two beings, at whose birth pomp and royalty stood sponsors, whose career was marked by every circumstance that least accorded with such a nativity. A thousand obstacles stood in the way; the king, with all his fervour, hesitated before he proposed to the earl of Huntley to bestow his daughter, of whom he was justly proud, on a fugitive sovereign, without a kingdom, almost without a name. Fortune, superstition, ten thousand of those imperceptible threads which fate uses when she weaves her most indissoluble webs, all served to bring about the apparently impossible.

The earl of Huntley was a man of a plain, straightforward, resolved ambition. His head was warm, his heart cold, his purpose one—to advance his house, and himself at the head of it, to as high a situation as the position of subject would permit. In the rebellion which occasioned the death of James the Third, he had vacillated, unable quite to ascertain which party would prove triumphant; and when the rebels, rebels then no more, but lieges to James the Fourth, won the day, they looked coldly on their lukewarm partizan. Huntley grew discontented: though still permitted to hold the baton of Earl Marshal, he saw a cloud of royal disfavour darkening his fortunes; in high indignation he joined in the nefarious plot of Buchan, Bothwell; and Sir Thomas Todd, to deliver his sovereign into the hands of Henry of England, a project afterwards abandoned.

Time had softened the bitter animosities which attended James at the beginning of his reign. He extended his favour to all parties, and reconciled them to each other. A wonder it was, to see the Douglases, Hamiltons, Gordons, Homes, the Murrays, and Lennoxes, and a thousand others, at peace with each other, and obedient to their sovereign. The earl of Huntley, a man advanced in life, prudent, resolute, and politic, grew into favour. He was among the principal of the Scottish peers; he had sons, to whom the honours of his race would descend, and this one daughter, whom he loved as well as he could love anything, and respected from the extent of her influence, and the perfect prudence of her conduct; she was his friend and counsellor, the mediator between him and her brothers; the kind mistress to his vassals, a gentle, but all-powerful link between him and his king, whose value he duly appreciated.

Her marriage was often the subject of his meditation. Superstition was ever rife in Scotland. James the Third had driven all his brothers from him, because he had been told to beware of one near of kin; and his death, of which his sou was the ostensible agent, fulfilled the prophecy. Second-sight, in the Highlands, was of more avail than the predictions of a Lowland sibyl. The seer of the house of Gordon had, on the day of her birth, seen the Lady Katherine receive homage as a queen, and standing at the altar with one, on whose young brow he perceived, all dim and shadowy, “the likeness of a kingly crown.” True, this elevation was succeeded by disasters: he had beheld her a fugitive; he saw her stand on the brow of a cliff that overlooked the sea, while the wild clouds careered over the pale moon, alone, deserted; he saw her a prisoner; he saw her stand desolate beside the corpse of him she had wedded—the diadem was still there, dimly seen amid the disarray of his golden curls. These images haunted the earl’s imagination, and made him turn a slighting ear to Sir Patrick Hamilton, and other noble suitors of his lovely child. Sometimes he thought of the king, her cousin, or one of his brothers: flight, desolation, and death, were no strange attendants on the state of the king of Scotland, and these miseries he regarded as necessary and predestined; he could not avert, and so he hardly regarded them, while his proud bosom swelled at the anticipation of the thorny diadem, which was to press the brow of a daughter of the Gordon.

Lord Huntley had looked coldly on the English prince. Lord Bothwell, as he called himself, otherwise Sir John Ramsay, of Balmayne, his former accomplice, tampered with him on the part of Henry the Seventh, to induce him to oppose warmly the reception of this “feigned boy,” and to negative every proposition to advance his claims. King Henry’s urgent letters, and Ramsay’s zeal, awakened the earl’s suspicions; a manifest impostor could hardly engender such fears, such hate; and, when midnight assassination, or the poisoned bowl, were plainly hinted at by the monarch of wide England, Huntley felt assured that the enemy he so bitterly pursued was no pretender, but the rightful heir of the sceptre Henry held. He did not quite refuse to join with Bothwell, especially when he heard that he was listened to by the bishop of Moray and the earl of Buchan; but involuntarily he assumed a different language with regard to York, became more respectful to him, and by his demeanour crushed at once the little party who had hitherto spoken of him with contempt. The king perceived this change; it was the foundation-stone of his project. “Tell me, you who are wise, my lord,” said the monarch to his earl marshal, “how I may raise our English prince in the eyes of Scotland. We fight for him in the spring—for him, we say—but few of ours echo the word; they disdain to fight for any not akin to them.”

“They would fight for the Foul Fiend,” said Huntley, “whom they would be ill-pleased to call cousin, if he led them over the English border.”

“Ay, if he took them there to foray; but the duke of York will look on England as his own, and when the nobles of the land gather round him, it will be chauncy work to keep them and our Scots from shedding each other’s blood; they would spill Duke Richard’s like water, if no drop of it can be deemed Scotch.”

“It were giving him a new father and mother,” replied the earl, “to call him thus.”

“When two even of hostile houses intermarry, our heralds pale their arms; the offspring pale their blood.”

“But what Scottish lady would your grace bestow on him whose rank were a match for royalty? There is no princess of the Stuarts.”

“And were there,” asked James, quickly, “would it beseem us to bestow our sister on a King Lackland?”

“Or would your majesty wait till he were king of England, when France, Burgundy, and Spain would compete with you? I do believe that this noble gentleman has fair right to his father’s crown; he is gallant and generous, so is not King Henry; he is made to be the idol of a warlike people, such as the English, so is not his rival. Do you strike one stroke, the whole realm rises for him, and he becomes its sovereign: then it were a pride and a glory for us, for him a tie to bind him for ever, did he place his diadem on the head of a Scottish damsel.”

“You are sanguine and speak warmly,” replied the king: “see you beyond your own words? to me they suggest a thought which I entertain, or not, as is your pleasure: there is but one lady in our kingdom fitting mate for him, and she is more Gordon than Stuart. Did your lordship glance at the Lady Katherine in your speech?”