Cassell, 1975, 589 p, including 2p Map of mediæval Northern France and the Low Countries.

This is the sixth and last of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, following on from The Ringed Castle. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph in French and there are copious quotations/song lyrics in French throughout.

Among other incidental historical goings-on such as the French capture of Calais from the English, the French war against the Spanish (in both of which Lymond has a guiding role,) and the wedding of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, the main plot concerns the unravelling of Lymond’s seemingly uncertain parentage, an unravelling performed in the main by Philippa Somerville, whom Lymond married in The Ringed Castle to protect her honour, a union which remains unconsummated and from which Lymond is desirous of an annulment (as, to be fair, is Philippa.) The reasons for this desire are complicated and not entirely voluntary and obstacles continue to put in its way but both contract promises to future marriage, in Lymond’s case to Catherine d’Albon, daughter of the Maréchale de St André, in Philippa’s to Austin Grey.

Lymond is neither ashamed nor guarded about his past amours – he has a son, Kuzum, by the deceased Oonagh O’Dwyer; a former lover, Guzel, left behind in Russia, and in this book he beds the Maréchale (or, rather, she beds him) before the proposal to her daughter. When Catherine asks if she’s agreed to marry a libertine she gets the reply, “‘Everyone marries libertines,’ Lymond said. ‘But not everyone knows it beforehand.’”

A minor sub-episode reveals the young Scottish Queen, under the influence of her de Guise uncles and prospective father-in-law, King Henri II, secretly agreeing that if she died childless the throne of Scotland should pass to France. This does not go down well with delegation of Scottish nobles sent to witness Mary’s wedding, who are obliged to keep their knowledge of the pact secret but Lymond goes so far as to warn Mary that such an outcome would meet with all but universal opposition back home.

Also contributing to the proceedings, helpful in relieving Lymond of a burden of sickness as well as in the resolution of the parenting issue, is one Nostradamus.

While the level of research and historical detail are impressive and incident is never far away once again Dunnett’s writing and dialogue lacks clarity.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccoughing/hiccough (it’s not a cough; hiccuping/hiccup,) “Daedalus’ honeycomb” (Daedalus’s,) palinquin (palanquin.) “After Russia, campaigning in France, would be like” (that second comma is needless,) “the aesthetic figure one would have thought from his reputation” (‘ascetic’ makes more sense in context,) Luxembourg (sometimes here spelled Luxemburg, which may have been a rendering of the usage of the viewpoint character of the moment,) “the Vidame de Chartres’ voice” (the final ‘s’ in Chartres is not voiced so its possessive is certainly Chartres’s,) “like Crassus’ lamprey” (Crassus’s,) “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) alambic (usually spelled ‘alembic’,) “his language than had not been moderate” (his language then had not,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “there had been nothing demanded of Philippa which needed intrude on this relationship” (which need intrude; or, which needed to intrude.) “The pavilion of the Duke de Guise and that of his brother d’Aumale were empty” (The pavilions,) “was tinging the cloth” (tingeing; tinging is something bells do.) “One of the Count of Egmont’s foraging parties had acquired half a dozen wagons of grain and were occupying the village”  (One … was occupying,) “tell the prayers” (they were musicians, not supplicants: ‘tell the players’,) “a Brazilian dancer” (I wondered if Brazil was known as such in 1558 but the term is apparently from around 1506,) a missing full stop.

Polygon, 2021, 123 p.

This is another of Birlinn’s Darkland Tales which re-examine Scotland’s history from a modern perspective.

David Rizzio, secretary to the heavily pregnant Mary, Queen of Scots, was famously murdered in her presence by courtiers – and especially her husband Lord Darnley – jealous of Rizzio’s supposed influence on her.

This recounting of that incident is necessarily told in the present tense in order to underscore the inevitability of the ongoing rush of events once the assassins’ plot had been set in motion – and the inability of Mary or Darnley to affect those events.

Mina manages to invoke the feelings of the various characters she focuses on but usually by telling not showing. Hers is an omniscient narration laden with the benefit of hindsight.

The novella is perhaps mistitled, though. It is not primarily about Rizzio (he is dead by a third of the way through) but instead charts the relationship of Mary with Darnley and with her Lords. It is also of course an indictment of the misogyny of the times. In that respect Mary never stood a chance. She had flaws enough of her own even without that to contend with.

I note that at the back the description of the Darkland Tales project has Alan Warner’s then forthcoming contribution titled as The Man Who Would Not Be King. It was eventually published as Nothing Left to Fear From Hell.

Pedant’s corner:- “Here the change of seasons are dramatic” (the changes of seasons are,) “and snakes his arm right around her waist until his hand on her swollen belly” (is missing a verb after ‘hand’; rests? lies? settles? is?) “Lady Huntley” (Huntly, as it is always spelled elsewhere in the text.)

I meant to put this in one of my recent Linlithgow Palace posts but forgot. The statue is in the grounds of the Palace on the Linlithgow side.

Linlithgow in West Lothian is one of our favourite places. I could have sworn I had posted photos of the palace there,  Linlithgow Palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots was born in 1542, but a search on the blog proved fruitless.

The Palace is approached from the town up a short road and is partly obscured by St Michael’s Church on your right as you do so. As a result there is not a good angle to view the Palace facade. It opens out a bit at the top.

The Palace – with St Michael’s Church (the tower with crossed beams) behind – is best viewed as a whole from across Linlithgow Loch:-

Side view from the grounds surrounding the Palace:-

The interior courtyard is dominated by an elaborate fountain:_

Fountain and east range. The Palace’s original entrance  was on the east. The wall above taht enrtance would have been painted in bright colours:-

North range:-

Mary, Queen of Scots was held in custody in Oxburgh Hall and worked on tapestries there with Bess of Hardwick. The black lines are joins in the glass behind which the tapestries are displayed:-

Portraits of Mary and Bess. (The lighting conditions were not conducive to a good photo):-

This tree in the grounds of the Hall had a huge hole in its trunk:-

While I was away both Glenda Jackson and Cormac McCarthy died.

Jackson was without doubt one of the best actors of her time. I was only familiar with her televison and film work, particularly in the role of Elizabeth of England in the BBC’s Elizabeth R (which had a rerun on TV a few weeks ago) and the film Mary, Queen of Scots, where she played opposite Vanessa Redgrave, but her stage performances seem to have been exceptional. Unusually she turned from acting to stand for Parliament (representing the Labour Party) and spent 18 years as MP for Hampstead and Highgate before boundary changes meant she had to stand in Hampstead and Kilburn instead. Sshe won by 42 votes, standing down at the next election as she would be almost 80. A triumphant return to acting ensued. On the left-wing of the Labour Party she was not too enamoured of the Tony Blair era.

Glenda May Jackson : 9/5/1936 – 15/6/2023. So it goes.

Cormac McCarthy was highly regarded – Blood Meridian has been called the Great American Novel and The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize but I must confess I have not read any of his books. (Reading the obituary linked to above I would say I would most likely not find his work congenial.)

Charles Joseph (Cormac) McCarthy: 20/7/1933 – June 13/6/2023. So it goes.

When I discovered the late Queen’s cortege would be passing within twelve or so miles of my home on its way from Balmoral to Edinburgh I thought this is a bit of history (before her no monarch had died in Scotland since the father of Mary Queen of Scots) so we might as well go and see it. Something to tell the grandkid(s.) It would be the closest I’ll ever get to a reigning sovereign after all.

At first we tried to stand behind a crash barrier by the M 90 near Milnathort, Perth and Kinross, but a policewoman moved us on so we ended up on a motorway bridge. It wasn’t a good vantage point.

I did get a reasonable shot of the cortege approaching (the West Lomond Hill is in the background):-

However the close up I tried to get was too blurry. (The hearse was travelling at speed.)

I hurried to the other side of the bridge to snap this, which ended up very badly focused.

The convoy was actually quite large. This shows its tail end:-

It struck me when I downloaded it off the camera that it was fairly appropriate, though, as she was by that time gone. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor slipping inexorably into history (at 70 miles an hour.)

Memoirs of William Fowler of Edinburgh: Student, Trader, Makar, Conduit, would-be lover in the early days of our Reform.

Riverrun, 2021, 458 p

Greig has been described as Scotland’s first post-Calvinist writer. With this book it seems he has decided to run with that designation. In many ways a companion volume to Fair Helen, this is the second time he has examined the genesis of the country’s immersion in that stern, moralistic creed. We also find references to Montaigne again, not to mention Walter Scott of Branxholme and Buccleuch. For added measure we are given a glimpse of Giordano Bruno and extended encounters with George Buchanan, Jamie the Saxt and the political struggles of the times.

Above all though, as a novelist Greig is the great expositor of love, the grand theme that runs through all his prose work, but with a poet’s eye for its joys and sorrows. And of course, where would literature be without it?

The love in question here is that of narrator William Fowler of Anchor Close, Embra (“Fowler” always designates Edinburgh in this way,) for Rose Nicolson, the sister of his companion scholar, Tom, at the University of St Andrews, to whom he is drawn one day as he sees her mending fishing nets, down by the harbour. He becomes a friend of the family but Rose has an understanding with John Gourlay, a fisherman with boats and, more crucially, prospects. He also discovers Rose’s remarkable intellect, which distances her from her peers, and her unusual views about God, which could threaten her survival.

Given their times the book shows us debates about free will and predestination and Fowler says that “Humanism and the Reform were brothers locked in a deadly embrace, for one was destined to destroy the other.”

This historical era, for so long unexamined, has become ripe for novelistic consideration. It was a more foundational moment for Scotland than the Jacobite rebellions much more harped on by Scottish literature. It was the time when the country plunged into the dark umbra of Calvinism from which it has only emerged, blinking – and astonished at itself – during the last fifty years. As Will says in his last words to Rose, “‘But you’ll be back some day? …. When times are fit?’” She replies, “‘In five hunner years they may be fit.’”

The book also encompasses 16^th century Scotland’s JFK moment – hearing of the death of John Knox. Of that firebrand preacher’s style Tom says, “‘Aye, he was the great rebuker,’” before adding, “‘It’s a sair fecht, to keep men rightly building our New Jerusalem.’”

The politics were dark and messy. Adherents of the old faith – Will’s mother for one – have a strange belief they work towards that the exiled Queen Mary might return at the head of a French army and be restored, perhaps to share the throne with her son, Jamie Saxt. In his minority various regents had come and gone; most by violent or nefarious means. Even the great survivor, Regent Morton, will fall while Jamie Saxt is forever prey to threats of kidnap and manipulation.

The fanaticism of statements like, “‘This is now a Protestant nation. Dissent will not be tolerated,’” is contrasted with the situation in England. “We had no theatre in Scotland, on account of the Kirk.” Fowler asks, “A Reformed Kirk indeed, but of what kind? And who would limit its reach? The King?” On his trip to Paris he notes the sumptuousness and brilliance of the stained glass in Paris churches. All such fripperies had been stoned out of Scotland, and the Cathedral in St Andrews pillaged of its stone. The town’s once thriving economy, dependent on pilgrims, has vanished, the University is on its uppers.

Nevertheless, that reform, since it believed women had souls, had ensured the teaching of girls up to the same age as boys. (Much good it did them. They were still liable to be denounced as witches or pawns of the Devil.)

But human impulses always survive. “What a piece of work I am,” Will says, “that can encompass fleshly desire, tenderness, sorrow and soul, and the impulse to violence, all within one afternoon. Did Aristotle know of this? Did the risen Christ?” The melancholy that rests in the Scottish soul is expressively conveyed in his response to a song. “I kenned the bleak melody and the story, as did everyone in the hall, for it was ours.”

Though he denies it to his mother, “‘No. Absolutely not,’” the text could be read as if it was Will rather than Gourlay who fathered Rose’s child. “But a stranger I must be.” He certainly exhibits a fatherly interest in Lucy. But he was in love with her mother and notwithstanding her comment to him about her marriage, “‘There were pressing reasons,’” their later conversations argue against that interpretation.

Will’s life, though, and much of the narrative, becomes embroiled in the machinations of the high heid yins and affairs of state, his profession of trader allowing him to be a conduit (a spy in plainer terms,) Walter Scott of Buccleuch’s indebtedness to him for the loan of a dirk on their first meeting and for a subsequent intervention a major factor in his – and eventually Rose’s – fortunes. Lives can be messy and unpredictable. Only in fairy tales does everyone live happily ever after.

Yet some tranquillity can be found. Tom says, “‘Our Stoic masters spend o’er much attention to making a good death, and not enough to living beforehand.’” On which the later in life Will, narrating from the vantage point of old age, reflects, “I felt those words lodge, quivering, somewhere near my heart. Despite everything, they remain there still.”

There are sly allusions; such as to Shakespeare “‘I had not dreamed of such philosophy’” and Larkin “Love and memory remain, to hurt us into life” and many incidental pleasures, little vignettes of Scottish habits and attitudes. When greeted after a beating with, “‘Man, ye look an awfy mess,’” Fowler tells us, “This was what passed for affection in these parts.” It still is.

Greig is always good on what it is to be human. “Perhaps the course of one’s life is made by the particular manner in which we never quite resolve ourselves.”

Rose Nicolson is a magnificent, learned, wise book, imbued with sensitivity and grace, and in its elegiac sense of loss, Scottish to the core.

Pedant’s corner:- “One of the old woman” (women,) “Slainte var” (Usually spelled Slainte mhath.) “For a while I believed there was some sounds behind us” (were some sounds,) Averroes’ (Averroes’s,) “window of main house” (of the main house,) Lucretius’ (Lucretius’s,) “he’d auction his grannie were she were still alive” (that second ‘were’ is superfluous,) “before agreeing marry to young Bothwell” (either ‘before agreeing marriage to’ or, before agreeing to marry’,) “but none were her” (none was her.) “Now she truly looked me at me” (the first ‘me’ is superfluous,) “we all dreamed off” (of,) maw (used in the sense of mouth; a maw is a stomach,) our gang were back (was back,) a missing comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, a missing end quote mark at the end of another, “Kirk o Fields” (usually Kirk o Field,) uses the Scots word ‘baffies’ in its correct sense of ‘slippers’ in the text but the glossary has a baffie described as a golf club, Ulysses’ (Ulysses’s.) “The kirk had lost one of their own” (one of its own.) “The recent intake of Kirk ministers were poorly trained and credulous” (the … intake … was poorly trained,) “the Presbytery were resolved” (was resolved,) Tollbooth (Tolbooth,) “came through the St Andrews” (came through St Andrews.) “We crossed the Forth by boat” (the previous scene was set in St Andrews. Starting from there to go Perth – especially going via Falkland as they do – there is no need to cross the Forth. Indeed had they done it once, they would have had to do it again, in reverse,) a missing full stop.) In the glossary; supervisr (supervisor,) narow (narrow.)

I realised when I was composing this that I hadn’t posted any pictures of Holyrood Palace from the grounds surounding it other than from the front courtyard, so here are two.

Holyrood Palace from Grounds. Ruins of Holyrood Abbey to right:-

East facade:-

One of the most gruesome events that took place in Holyrood Palace was the murder of David Rizzio.

Rizzio was a favourite of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was thought by some to be too close to, and too much of an influence on, her.

A plot was hatched to kill him and he was duly murdered in front of the Queen.

One of the exhibits in the Palace is Rizzio’s “bloodstain”:-

I remember from my childhood visit to the Palace the story being told that there used to be what was said to be the remains of his clotted blood on the floor but that visitors would chip away at it on the sly to get a piece for themselves to take away. The curators got so fed up with replacing the ‘clot’ that they resorted instead to this red wash on the wooden flooring to mark the spot.

Towards the end of the Palace tour there is a room which contains royal memorabilia.

A display of British decorations (OBEs, CBEs etc):-

The regalia of the order of the Thistle:-

One of Queen Victoria’s dresses. She was not a big woman:-

There are memorials to two Queens in Peterborough Cathedral, Katherine of Aragon and Mary, Queen of Scots.

The cathedral actually contains the tomb of the first of those. She died in Kimbolton Castle and Peterborough was presumably the nearest viable option given Henry VIII would have wanted the whoel thing over with quickly:-

Tomb inscription. “Here lies the body of Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, who died at Kimbolton Castle on the (obscured) day of January 1535/6 aged 49 years.” Note the two pomegranates on the tomb. The pomegranate was Katherine’s personal symbol:-

Plaque on pillar to the side. “A Queen cherished by the English people for her piety, courage and compassion.”

Mary’s body was moved from Peterborough by order of her son King James VI (and I) so a stone inscription now lies on a pillar near where its location was