The Candlemass Road

George MacDonald Fraser

THE CANDLEMASS ROAD

Dedication

IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF JOSEPH BAIN EDITOR OF THE CALENDAR OF BORDER PAPERS

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Historical postscript

Glossary

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About Publisher Page

Chapter 1

A FELLOW OF CLARE HALL, being in that state where another hour’s tippling should render him swine drunk, asked me, if I had a choice of all mankind that ever lived, which would I choose to sit by me as a guest at the next college feast. I made excuse that I was not of his learned society, but he said all was one for that, and I must choose or be fined in stoupes for the company. Still I would have put him off, for I longed to be quiet in my corner by the fire, away from the babble and ass-laughter of him and his companions, and have no part in their silly conceits designed to show off their wit and learning (and little they had of either) in their cups. They (and I) had been at the great masque “Ignoramus” given before his majesty, to his seeming content if not mine, but it may be that his Latin was better than I knew, or that he laughed out of courtesy, for a windier piece of dullness I never saw than that masque, that was well titled for them that applauded it, being men of the colleges. His majesty clapped patiently, so I clapped too.

It put them in a learning mood afterwards that were in the buttery, with such follies as what folk lived on the stars, and what part of the anatomy was the seat of mirth, and anon to debating what cup companion they would choose for their feast. One said Julius Caesar, and another St Francis, and others Aristotle and Ptolemy and Roger Bacon, their vanity supposing they could have held equal discourse with these champions and sages, and then seeing me that sat withdrawn, cried out that the old Portingale should speak his mind, “for he hath travelled in his time, and been a priest, too, so sure he is ignorant enough.” Seeing their canary humour, I begged again to be let be.

“Nay, but ye shall answer, or be fined!” said they. “And after we’ll have the breeches off thee for a sullen old rascal that hops of his left foot. Choose, now, or pay forfeit!”

Seeing no help, I said if one must sit by me at any feast of theirs, it should be Attila the Hun, so should I be spared their rudeness and intrusion. Some accounted it a good answer, and laughed, but he that had speered at me scowled and said they had none at their feasts but those they might have good of, and I must name another, since Attila was a monstrous beast that none could have any good of, being curst and altogether abominable.

At this, I, being part drunk myself, said he lied, for good might be had of the worst that ever were, in certain cases. At this he swore that if I could not prove it by logic, I should pay double forfeit and swim in the Cam for my impudence, so let me say how one could have good of Attila or any like him. His fellows grinned and gleeked about me, and some cried, “At him, old Papist!” but others “Confound the Jesuit, he mocks us, to the river with him!” and bade me make good mine argument.

First, I told them, they should name any two from whom they might hope to have the greatest good (other than Our Lord, for it was not fit to name Him in such a question). They that had named Aristotle and St Francis as their chosen guests again cried out their names, and with those I was content, saying that against them I would justify Attila and another like him, as Chingis Khan or Hulagu (of whom I doubt these scholars had heard, though they cried aye to him). I would do it, I said, on an hypothesis, as thus:

“Here is anyone of you, in a lonely place, as a little cabin in the wilderness, with no neighbours or friends by, and ye are sick and feeble, and with you your wife and two fair daughters.”

Hereon they cried that being young they had no daughters, and would other men’s daughters do, to give them solace in that lonely place, whereof they doubted not they would soon be enfeebled if not sick! I let them bray it out, and when they were quiet, continued:

“As ye lie there helpless, there approach three great thieves and murderers that ye know to be crueller than any devils, who will surely torment and slay you and ravish your wife and fair daughters, and take and burn all besides. There is no help for you at all, being at their mercy if they come in, but as ye lie in terror for what is to come, a knock falls on the nether door of your poor cabin, as it may be some wayfarer seeking lodging or refreshment. Aye, and it may be he will lend you aid against your enemies approaching! You bid your wife open in haste. Now tell me, scholars, what men do you hope to see there when she opens? The learned, gentle Aristotle and St Francis the meek, or Attila the great Hun armed cap-a-pie with Chingis at his elbow? From which pair, in your sore need, shall you hope to have the greater good, the saintly philosophers or the lusty men of war?”

They cried out with scorn that between the enemies before and Attila at their back, it was all one, they should have nothing but evil at the hands of either.

“Not so,” says I, and bade them look in the chronicles, “for there you shall read that the Scythian and the Mungul both, though in their conquests they were monsters of cruelty that put whole nations to the sword, yet in their private and domestic ways were zealous for good order and discipline of law, being such as would not suffer weak or poor folk to be despoiled or hurt by thieves and ravishers. Aye, of that Chingis was it said that while he carpeted all Asia with bones, yet might a virgin with a bag of gold walk the length of his dominions without harm, so perfect was his governance. So, again I say, who shall better serve you in time of peril, the philosophers who wish you well but cannot front the murderers save with words, or the bloody ravagers of empires who are yet ready to turn their weapons against common spoilers?”

At this they fell to babbling and dispute, and one fell down drunk crying “Paradox! Paradox!” while another said that for all he knew Aristotle might be a right swashing boy when it came to a fray. I asked would he wager on him with sword and buckler against my two savages, let roaring Francis give what aid he might, and he said, no, not at any odds. And while a few of them held that such as Attila and Chingis would do no good service to any, the more held that I had made my case, and should not be fined or insulted, but pressed more drink upon me that I durst not refuse for fear of their rough merriment, and called me a jolly old Pope, and how I came home I know not, for they found me sodden among the cabbages in the almshouse garden, and I was two weeks abed thereafter with the sciatica.

And lying there, and not able to read more than a little for the infirmity of mine eyes that are worn with looking on the world’s wickedness four score years, I fell to meditating on the good that evil men may do, by design or more commonly by chance, and was vexed that I had not told the Clare fellows how this same Attila, through his ravaging of Lombardy, had caused the folk to flee to those lagoons where they made the town of Venice, which is now surely a great state that hath given much of commerce and art to mankind, and all because of Attila his wickedness! Which I doubt not would have confused their debate that was confused enough already with their bowsing. Howbeit, I say, I thought on the good of evildoers, and concluded to my satisfaction that it is not one-thousandth of the evil that good and wise men do with their blundering, well as they intend.

Thinking on this wise, and looking to mine own past, I remembered sundry instances that I had seen, and in especial the man Waitabout, that I knew only for a little season, yet it changed my life’s course, and indeed had been like to lose my poor life for me, yet was I spared, “by God’s grace”, a phrase I speak now but by habit and long use, for if He hath any grace (or indeed any being at all save in men’s minds only) I have long been removed from it. Which is a blasphemy, as they say, yet I have known worse. No, I am no priest, nor ever was except to the outer eye, for what priest ever doubted, and with long doubting, gave over his belief at last?

As to the Waitabout, he was no Attila yet had done ill enough in his time, and if he did good it was upon compulsion and for a brief hour only, and still I know not whether it was good or no. But certain it is he was no common man, though common seeming, a robber and slayer and broken wanderer that had in him, I think, the making of a sage if not a saint. He read me a lesson, aye, and so too did my Lady Dacre, though what it was I can hardly tell even now. Yet I would tell of them both that have been out of my mind these many years, saving that visit my lady paid me five years agone, fair and smiling still and brought me a gift of candles of fine Italian wax, though not scented, “for we shall burn no incense between us, nor make graven images neither,” as she said, which was an old jest between us. “A remembrance of Candlemass,” says she, “aye, of the Candlemass road,” and told me they had made a ballad of it, and of what befell betwixt the fires at Triermain, which I marvelled to hear her speak of so lightly. But of Waitabout she spake not at all.

If I am to tell of that road, I cannot come to it direct, for that would be to begin in medias res, as we clerks say when we mean in the midst of things but wish to awe the commonalty with our learning (give us a fourth tassel, good Lord, for vanity!), but must needs give some preamble, about myself, and then come in proper order to Waitabout, or Archie Noble as his name was, called Lang Archie, or Wait-about-him, or Master Noble as my lady styled him once or twice, I think to his content, for broken men are not used to such courtesies. Of myself first then, not out of pride, but for your better understanding of that which follows. And it is right, too, that the gown should take precedence of the renegado.

I, Luis Guevara, once a priest and ever a sinner, was born in Portugal, and came to England by a long road which it would weary you as much to hear as me to travel. It took me to the Americas, and the coasts of Barbary and Africa, in the service of God, and at last to London, no matter why, in the twenty-fourth year of the old Queen’s reign, where chance took me in the way of Ralph, Lord Dacre. We were as little like as could be, he the great noble, favoured of the Queen, with the honours of soldiery upon him and all trappings of wealth and power, which he carried like a conqueror, for he was a terrible man – and I, the little foreign priest that feared for my very life in a land where priests were welcome as the plague. It was the time of the great bill against the Jesuits, when to be a Roman priest was treason, and the harbouring of us a felony; there were many then burned for the Faith.

“A poor candle you would make,” says my lord. “Why, man, ye would not light me up the stair!” And laughed at me, a great bull of a man as he was, all in crimson save for the blue charge upon his breast that bare a bull indeed, the red bull of his house, and stood on legs like tree trunks, grinning from a face great as a ham, bald of crown with white hair to his shoulders. “Aye, we are tonsured, the two of us, but you can say Mass and I cannot nor would not, but since the half of my folk are recusant and will not be turned, needs must I a priest, go to!”

I told him it was treason, and that if he sheltered me, let alone gave employ, he would be liable before the law.

“The law! Pish on the law!” and put his head on one side. “Have ye heard o’ the Leges Marchiarum, priest – the Law of the Marches? No? It is the only law in my whereabouts, and says naught of religion. Let be, I make my own law, and if I take the Pope himself into my house to minister to my silly poor folk, not the Queen’s Grace herself shall say cheep! No, nor all the bishops. For I am Dacre. Will fifty shillings a year content you?”

I trembled to hear him, but asked sixty shillings and a chapel decently kept, whereon he laughed till he shook and said I should have them for my boldness. And gripped my hand in a hard clasp, looking narrowly on me, and said we would do well together being of a middle age and not loth to speak our minds one to the other, “but not of your old faith, for I’ll none of it. Keep it for my vassals.” Which I did and have ever done, without fear of the law, for all that he said was true. He had done such service against Scotch invaders and English rebels, and was in such fair regard of my Lord Burleigh and the Queen, who called him “cousin Dacre” and “my red steer”, there being some kinship through the Grays, I believe, that he might do as he pleased in his barony far off on the border. They had need of him yonder, and my Lord Cecil was wont to jest on the words of the King of France, that the Scotch frontier was worth a Mass so it was said quietly.

My Lord Ralph was down to London only to put his grandchild into the Court as ward of Her Grace. I saw the little maid but once, a sweet pretty child of four years, proper and toward and well grown, straight in her petty gown and proud of her kerchief of French point. “See my kercher,” says she. “’Tis white, and I keep it clean. You are my grandad’s Italian man, but you must not sing at me.” To her all Romans were Italians. She passed by with her head in air, playing with her kerchief.

So my lord went north to his estate in Cumberland hard by the border line, taking in his train his “Portingale preacher”, as he pleased to call me.

Now I have been about the world, as I said, and travelled far for the Faith in my nonage “and after. I was with those Spaniards who sought the Strait of Anian which men say lies beyond the Americas, and suffered shipwreck on that arid coast beneath Guaymas where I was captive of the wild Indians. I have been among their savage brethren of Mexico, and undergone the torments with which they afflict their prisoners before the great step-temples of the forest which rise higher than Salisbury spire, and so far forgot my vows to take part against them when Mendoza the Good defended the silver mines on the Compostela road. I have journeyed in the black lands of Lower Africa where the people cut their faces for adornment, and make sacrifice of their enemies and eat their flesh for meat. And for a time I was a slave of the Algerines, and saw such horrors as would blast the sight, of men ‘impaled and torn asunder and flung upon great hooks. All this I have seen among the heathen, but I have yet to see such savages as were in the Marches of England and Scotland when first I went there with my Lord Dacre.

You may think I have an old man’s memories that swell up with age, but you do not know, you who live in this green quiet country with its fair pleasaunces by the Cam, and the little towns and hamlets where they cry alarm if a deer is potched or a schoolboy robs an orchard. You may journey now, from York to the Kingdom of Fife, through what you have been taught to call the Middle Shires, and meet with nothing more fierce than a beggar crying for alms by the roadside. You forget, if you ever knew, that a bare five and twenty years since there were three realms in this country that we call Great Britain: there was England and Scotland – and the Borderland between. Two realms at peace, civil and quiet under their native laws, with good governance from London and Edinborough, the folk giving glad allegiance (for the most part) to royal Elizabeth and royal James – and where they joined, a land neglected and cursed, peopled by two-legged beasts who lived by robbery and feud and murder and terror, a country where reprisal followed raid by the clock, where every nightfall brought its toll of men butchered and dwellings burned and cattle reft and hostages carried away. It was spoil, spoil, spoil, from Tweed mouth to Sark; never a moment but there were thieves in the saddle, Scot against Englishman, Englishman against Scot, and both together against each and every, and no peace any way. I have gone a-horse-back one day east from Carlisle town, and seen thirty churches in ruin, and great abbeys tumbled down on the Scotch side, and the conies running through what had been fair hamlets a week before, and now all black and smoking, and bodies unburied on every hand, and women and babes wandering in the desolation.

And this was no war. It was, they said, the custom of the country, and no help for it. The laws of England and Scotland were clean withdrawn, and only the Leges Marchiarum, of which my lord spoke, that Border law, under which a great thief might compound for the most horrid crime with a fine and interest, and assurance of good behaviour, but no other punishment – and so to the next riding and slaughter. And this in Christendom, only a score of years ago.

When first I went there, I was told of a traveller who had inquired of the people, where the Christians dwelt, to which they made answer, “No Christians, sir, we are Elliots and Armstrongs.” I thought it a blasphemous jest, but it was true. God had forgotten the Borderland, or turned away from its wickedness in His despair.

You may wonder why my Lord Dacre, who had fair lands in the far south, such as this where I live out the winter of my time, should keep his home in such a den of strife and iniquity. But he was one who craved a hard life, and must be doing; it was in him to dare, and if there had been no Cumberland I believe he would have made his bed in Tartary. Moreover, his house had held their own on that stark border three hundred years, through the bitter Scotch wars in which the people of the Marches had their tempering – and this, I am assured, was why they must continue to live like warring nomads, for it was bred in their nature. He would not shrink from it, not for all the gold and quiet of the south country, which he might have had in plenty. “For I am Dacre,” he would say. “Shift me an ye can.”

It was as though the fiend had taken him at his word, for his estate of Askerton lay in the worst part of all the border, where the baddest of the thieves were wont to run their roads – for so they called their forays, raid and road being all one to them; in the same sort they called their going forth in any number a “gang”. He had broad acres, and many fat cattle, and fifteen score tenants in petty villages and farms about, all in that pretty land that lies fifteen miles or so north and east of Carlisle, where the rich champain ground runs to the foot of the fells. So close to Carlisle, the strongest hold in all the Marches, and the seat of what government there was on the English side, should have been safe enough, but it was not so. To the east lay the great Waste, the highway of the robbers, and beyond, Tynedale, a great haunt of English thieves, Charltons and Milburns and Robsons and the like, for they robbed as families, calling themselves “riding surnames”. To the west was the country of the Grahams, a barbarous nation, Scotch or English for all that any man knew, but mostly English. There too was the Debatable Land, that had been of neither country, and only lately divided between them jealously, and a great nest of outlaws. Yet to the north was worst of all, a scant ten miles away, for there on the very rim of the frontier lay the valleys of the most feared Scotch robbers, the Nixons and Armstrongs and Crosiers and Elliots, who dwelt in Liddesdale, and if there be a Hell, and it hath a mouth, then it gapes at the foot of that dark and terrible glen, and those within are devils incarnate.

When a man has such neighbours he goes to bed late and lies not long in the morning, but my lord throve on it as it were sport. And being an expert borderer and skilly soldier, he gave so much better than he took that in his last years we began to have some quiet in the lands about Askerton, though the rest of the frontier corrupted by the day. Even the hardiest freebooters, Armstrongs of Mangerton and Whithaugh, Elliots of Stobs and the Park, and Grahams of Brackenhill and Eden, began to look for their living otherwhere than on Dacre’s ground, and rode wide of the Red Bull’s pen. It was a grisly A.B.C. that he learned them. I have seen his great gallows beyond the barnekin, four ells high and four across the beam, loaded with such a cargo of dead thieves as would have gorged me every crow from Kelso to Caldbeck, and not a day but there was fresh fodder for them, swinging in the cold fell wind.

And if the meanest of his tenants was spoiled of so much as a hen, then out from Askerton’s gate would come the red steer banner, and my lord in his silver-studded jack, lance on thigh, and his grey locks streaming in the wind, and at his back fifty, aye, or a hundred riders, every man in his steel cap with sword or Jedburgh axe, and the turf of hot trod smoking on his esquire’s point. They would ride Liddesdale to Riccarton and back, to Smailholm Tower or the Rede banks, leaving red ruin behind them, and there would be widows crying in Teviotdale for their men on the Askerton gallows. And when those he had despoiled and punished cried to the Wardens to summons him to answer at the next truce day, he would give the officer who brought the bill such entertainment as would have contented an ambassador, and when he had eaten and drunk his fill Ralph Dacre would press the bill back in his hand, wrapped in a glove, and say:

“Bid Lord Scroop at Carlisle (or Carmichael at Dumfries, or the Keepers of Liddesdale or Tynedale, as it might be) good cheer, and tell them they may foul their bill against me, and who will collect their double and sawfey?” Which is to say, the threefold penalty of restitution imposed on one found guilty of offence. “I ride against none, nor never did, that has done me no hurt. Let the Wardens keep their border – but not ’twixt Hethersgill and Triermain, for that is my charge, and mine alone.”

And the Wardens, who had grief enough, were glad to let his bill be continued, or adjourned. They were driven lords, with not money nor equipment nor men enough to do any good in all that frontier of decay; they were content that one so rich and strong, that had the Queen’s ear, should stand as a rock of order in a sea of misrule.

You would suppose, in such a parish, that I was seldom idle, but for the most I was occupied with my lord’s tenants, the simple folk of the estate who clung to the faith of their fathers. They were few enough, the others taking their lead in the new religion from their lord, and in his household I was forbidden to meddle.

So for seventeen years I dwelt in Askerton Hall, doing my duty with a failing heart, for I saw nothing but the wickedness of the world about me, and knowing a dripping on my soul that wears away faith, more even than I had known in the pagan places. I was weary with the weight of evil and my more than three score years, but without the will to go elsewhere.

Then on a summer’s day my lord took him to the races at Carlisle, where one of his troopers won the Bell on my lord’s grey, Sandeman, wherefore he was in great fettle, as they say here, and gave entertainment at the Apple Tree on the Drover’s Lane to my lords Scroop, and Willoughby of the East March, and that good man Carmichael, and others less good, such as Hutcheon Graham the brigand, and Kerr of Cessford that they called “Fyrebrande”, and the young Buccleuch who had broken open Carlisle Castle but three years before – for the strangeness of these people is how they make company together, the lord and the peasant, the Scotch thief and the English constable, men that were at handstrokes o’ Thursday drinking together on the Saturday. I have seen that Kinmont Will, the bloodiest rogue on the West border, cheek by jowl with my Lord Hunsdon, who held the English Mid-March as the Queen’s Warden, as they made wagers on Hunsdon’s son, young Robin Carey who was his father’s deputy, when he played at football on the Bitts, whether he would win one goal or two. The thief and the catcher at game together, content each in company of the other. But it is their way, unless feud should fall between them, which it may as easily for a broken cup as for a broken head, and yet they forgive each other grievous wrongs, too. But deadly feud they pursue to the death, not only of the enemy but of all his kinsfolk. They take joy of their difference from mankind, Scot and English together, for though they are of both realms, they are first and last of the Border.