Rosemary Goring reviews Andrew Greig’s “full-throttle adventure” novel set during the Lang Siege of Edinburgh Castle

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Review by Rosemary Goring

Edinburgh, during the castle’s Lang Siege, was a deadly place, even for those not caught up in politics. In 1573, when Andrew Greig’s novel opens, Mary Queen of Scots is imprisoned in England, but her supporters hold the castle, resisting the Protestant regime that has only been in power a handful of years.

William Fowler, the narrator of this full-throttle adventure, is the son of a money-lender and town burgess in the High Street. The pounding of cannons around the castle makes the houses quake. One day, when the fighting is worse than usual, the door to the family tenement is blown off by a blast.

“I’d best hae a look,” says his father, and on reaching the doorway, is shot dead. Whether he died by the hand of the Queen’s Men or the Reformers is never known but thereafter, as Fowler writes, “Our front door never closed rightly again.”

A poet, novelist and memoirist, Greig’s fictional tone sits somewhere between Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexander Dumas. He evokes the tumultuous capital – and much else – with swashbuckling brio: “Edinburgh … where kindness was delivered with a rough tongue, where sweetness came wi salt, and justice and injustice alike came swiftly, at dagger point or rope’s end.”

It’s not only the country that is at odds with itself, torn between secret adherents to the Old Faith and those in favour of John Knox and his ruthless Reformation. Fowler’s own family is a house divided. His kindly father was a Reformer, whilst his flint-hard mother is intent on helping to restore Catholicism. Until late into the century, this seemed a realistic prospect, and the multifarious plots and Sicilian allegiances that bolster this long-simmering hope fuel the rest of the story. Amid this unhappy state of affairs, the fatherless Fowler sails on one of his mother’s ships for the University of St Andrews, to begin his studies. Here, the turmoil he sought to escape is dramatically to deepen.

Rose Nicolson is subtitled “Memoirs of William Fowler of Edinburgh: Student, Trader, Makar, Conduit, would-be Lover in the early days of our Reform”. It is written in Fowler’s old age, in London, where this real-life character, a makar and translator, spends most of his career, close to the court. He has many memories on which to call, and Greig uses his pithy turn of phrase, and quick humour, to shape an engaging saga that is by turns impish, hectic, romantic, and spiritually inquiring.

The Rose of the title is the sister of Fowler’s student friend, Tom Nicolson, a brilliant Poor Scholar from the fisher-gait. By the harbourside, beautiful young Rose mends nets and guts fish while pondering Greek philosophers and Latin poets, and questioning theological certainties. That she has sufficient learning to do this is thanks to the Reformation. The universal education of all children, girls as well as boys, was a foundation stone of Protestantism, because it allowed believers to read and interpret the Bible for themselves without a priest’s intercedence.

Debating theology with her Calvinist-minded brother, Rose has an even keener and more inquiring mind: “God could be flawed, limited, even wicked!” she pronounces, citing the cruelties and injustices of the world. In so doing, she reveals herself as an Enlightenment thinker, long before it was safe to utter such ideas.

The novel’s arc is shaped by the outcome of Rose Nicolson’s heresies, which land her in desperate trouble, although Rose is absent for long stretches. The witch-hunting craze that Mary’s son, the boy king James VI will one day ignite, is not yet in its stride, but to doubt the existence or nature of the Almighty is to flirt with the sort of grisly execution with which the streets of St Andrews, scene of many martyrs’ pyres, are too familiar: “dark ragged circles as though Hell itself had leaned from the Pit and spat on the cobbles”.

Greig captures the penniless university and comfortless town with vigour and imagination. The place is an unlit cauldron, merely awaiting a spark:

“The town had become agitated and charged, as if the Creator had rubbed amber across His celestial sleeve and passed it over St Andrews. Rumours fizzed and crackled. Spaniards had poisoned the Castle well. Witches had been seen at the pier-ends of fishing burghs, raising storms. A French army had landed in Berwick to restore our Queen Mary in place of her son. Another Bartholomew Day’s Massacres of Protestants was planned.”

Rose Nicolson is divided into two parts, the first covering Fowler’s student years (1574-78). The second (1579-82) recounts his involvement with the great families trying to undermine or uphold the crown. Shifting inland from the coast, Greig carries readers deep into the Scottish Borders, in the company of the thuggish but charismatic reiver Walter Scott of Buccleuch, who is the least persuasive of Greig’s characters and plot lines.

The ambitious scope of the novel makes for a labyrinth of names and allegiances. Greig barely puts a foot wrong, in terms of history, although the date given for Darnley’s murder is November 1564 instead of February 1567, and he misuses the adjective lumpen, applying it to a melted candle. Lightly using Scots to pepper the telling, he adeptly handles the rolling roster of Regents and courtiers who held power while “Jamie Saxt” was young, and paints a rich portrait of the febrile, murderous atmosphere at court, where rivals jostle for influence, and Reformers of differing views find themselves almost as quarrelsome with each other as with the Catholic cause.

By far the most memorable scenes, however, are the events where Fowler learns who he is: crossing an ice-bound river with his cart horse, and hearing the ice creak; fighting for his life against the king’s foes in a tavern brawl; facing down his mother, as he acknowledges the religious chasm that has opened between them. Above all, learning what sort of woman Rose is, and how best to protect her.

Early in Fowler’s university career, his tutor gives him a copy of Dante’s Inferno. His advice resonates for our own intolerant and polarised days, which is perhaps why this novel feels so alive: “It begins in Hell,” the tutor tells him, “so you need do no more than look around ye, to better comprehend.”