Bond of Passion Read Free Page B

England.
    In Scotland the Reformation was in full bloom. In no other country in all of Europe had Protestantism taken hold as hard as it did in Scotland. The clans in the north, and certain families, like the Gordons of Huntley and the Leslies of Glenkirk, held fast to the old faith despite the fact that the Reformed faith was declared law, and Catholicism outlawed under the influence of Master John Knox. Marie de Guise, a broad-minded woman who had allowed all faiths to flourish, even sheltering English Protestants from the Inquisition of Mary Tudor, was suddenly reviled for her faith.
    Weary with the responsibilities she had shouldered for twelve years, Marie died, leaving Scotland in the hands of her daughter’s half brother, James Stewart, the eldest illegitimate son of James V. In France the frail Francis died at the end of the same year. It seemed to Mary Stewart, now Stuart, that her mourning would never end. France’s new ten-year-old king was a figurehead behind which his mother, Catherine de’ Medicis, stood. She wanted the young dowager queen gone to her French estates, in obscurity. Instead Mary Stuart returned to Scotland to take up her throne there.
    Elizabeth would not give her cousin safe passage through England should her ship founder coming from France to Scotland. The lord high admiral of Scotland, James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, had come personally to escort his queen. John Knox preached virulently about women rulers being against God’s law, and he preached against Mary Stuart in particular. But Mary came home nonetheless, the swiftness of her passage surprising everyone, so that nothing was in readiness for the queen’s arrival. The fact that the port of Leith and all of coastal Scotland was shrouded in a thick fog, a fog that lasted for several days, but gave weight to John Knox’s words of doom.
    Mary, however, took for her closest advisers her half brother, James Stewart, whom she remembered with great fondness. Marie de Guise had wisely gathered her husband’s bastards into her own daughter’s nursery. James, the eldest, had been the big brother to whom the tiny queen turned in her troubles. Now he stood by her side as her chief minister, murmuring in her ear along with the man who had served her late mother as secretary of state, William Maitland, the laird of Lethington. Mary had chosen to reappoint him to serve her in the same capacity.
    While Mary persisted in maintaining her own Catholic faith, she proclaimed the law of the land to be freedom of worship for everyone in Scotland. It was a clever move, for it robbed John Knox of a major complaint against the queen, although her persistence in worshiping in the old Church infuriated him almost to apoplexy. Mary, unlike her predecessors, traveled Scotland visiting the Highlands, the Lowlands, and the borders, getting to know her people as no king since James IV had. The only place she did not journey to was the lordship of the isles.
    Angus Ferguson met her when she spent a single night at Duin one autumn. She was hunting and it was grouse season. He was astounded by her beauty, charmed by her intellect and wit. She rode astride, something she had learned since her return to Scotland. The Scots, it seemed—John Knox in particular—were shocked by her show of leg when she rode sidesaddle. The hunt had been successful, and the roasted birds were served for the evening meal.
    “You are indeed the handsomest man in the borders,” the young queen told him. “What a pity you have no royal blood in you, my lord, else I should consider you for a husband. Unlike my cousin Elizabeth I am eager to wed again, and have bairns.”
    “I am, of course, devastated by my unsuitability,” Angus Ferguson answered with a smile, “but a simple border lord such as myself could never be worthy of such a queen.”
    She laughed, but then she grew serious. “Who in Scotland is worthy of me, my lord?” she said softly. “Mayhap I should seek love