Though your body be confined
And soft love a prisoner bound,
Yet the beauty of your mind
Neither check nor chain hath found.
Look out nobly, then, and dare
Even the fetters that you wear.
FLETCHER.
ON a soft sunny morning in the genial month of May I made an excursion
to Windsor Castle. It is a place full of storied and poetical
associations. The very external aspect of the proud old pile is enough
to inspire high thought. It rears its irregular walls and massive
towers, like a mural crown around the brow of a lofty ridge, waves its
royal banner in the clouds, and looks down with a lordly air upon the
surrounding world.
On this morning, the weather was of that voluptuous vernal kind which
calls forth all the latent romance of a man’s temperament, filling his
mind with music, and disposing him to quote poetry and dream of beauty.
In wandering through the magnificent saloons and long echoing galleries
of the castle I passed with indifference by whole rows of portraits
of warriors and statesmen, but lingered in the chamber where hang the
likenesses of the beauties which graced the gay court of Charles
the Second; and as I gazed upon them, depicted with amorous,
half-dishevelled tresses, and the sleepy eye of love, I blessed the
pencil of Sir Peter Lely, which had thus enabled me to bask in the
reflected rays of beauty. In traversing also the “large green courts,”
with sunshine beaming on the gray walls and glancing along the velvet
turf, my mind was engrossed with the image of the tender, the gallant,
but hapless Surrey, and his account of his loiterings about them in his
stripling days, when enamoured of the Lady Geraldine--
“With eyes cast up unto the maiden’s tower,
With easie sighs, such as men draw in love.”
In this mood of mere poetical susceptibility, I visited the ancient keep
of the castle, where James the First of Scotland, the pride and theme of
Scottish poets and historians, was for many years of his youth detained
a prisoner of state. It is a large gray tower, that has stood the brunt
of ages, and is still in good preservation. It stands on a mound which
elevates it above the other parts of the castle, and a great flight of
steps leads to the interior. In the armory, a Gothic hall furnished with
weapons of various kinds and ages, I was shown a coat of armor hanging
against the wall, which had once belonged to James. Hence I
was conducted up a staircase to a suite of apartments, of faded
magnificence, hung with storied tapestry, which formed his prison, and
the scene of that passionate and fanciful amour, which has woven into
the web of his story the magical hues of poetry and fiction.
The whole history of this amiable but unfortunate prince is highly
romantic. At the tender age of eleven, he was sent from home by his
father, Robert III., and destined for the French court, to be reared
under the eye of the French monarch, secure from the treachery and
danger that surrounded the royal house of Scotland. It was his mishap,
in the course of his voyage, to fall into the hands of the English,
and he was detained prisoner by Henry IV., notwithstanding that a truce
existed between the two countries.
The intelligence of his capture, coming in the train of many sorrows and
disasters, proved fatal to his unhappy father. “The news,” we are told,
“was brought to him while at supper, and did so overwhelm him with grief
that he was almost ready to give up the ghost into the hands of the
servants that attended him. But being carried to his bedchamber, he
abstained from all food, and in three days died of hunger and grief at
Rothesay.” *
* Buchanan.
James was detained in captivity above eighteen years; but, though
deprived of personal liberty, he was treated with the respect due to
his rank. Care was taken to instruct him in all the branches of useful
knowledge cultivated at that period, and to give him those mental and
personal accomplishments deemed proper for a prince. Perhaps in this
respect his imprisonment was an advantage, as it enabled him to apply
himself the more exclusively to his improvement, and quietly to imbibe
that rich fund of knowledge and to cherish those elegant tastes which
have given such a lustre to his memory. The picture drawn of him in
early life by the Scottish historians is highly captivating, and seems
rather the description of a hero of romance than of a character in real
history. He was well learnt, we are told, “to fight with the sword,
to joust, to tourney, to wrestle, to sing and dance; he was an expert
mediciner, right crafty in playing both of lute and harp, and sundry
other instruments of music, and was expert in grammar, oratory, and
poetry.” *
* Ballenden’s translation of Hector Boyce.
With this combination of manly and delicate accomplishments, fitting him
to shine both in active and elegant life, and calculated to give him an
intense relish for joyous existence, it must have been a severe trial,
in an age of bustle and chivalry, to pass the spring-time of his years
in monotonous captivity. It was the good fortune of James, however, to
be gifted with a powerful poetic fancy, and to be visited in his prison
by the choicest inspirations of the muse. Some minds corrode, and grow
inactive, under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid
and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and
imaginative in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey
of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in
melody.
Have you not seen the nightingale,
A pilgrim coop’d into a cage,
How doth she chant her wonted tale,
In that her lonely hermitage!
Even there her charming melody doth prove
That all her boughs are trees, her cage a grove.+
+ Roger L’Estrange.
Indeed, it is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is
irrepressible, unconfinable--that when the real world is shut out,
it can create a world for itself, and, with a necromantic power, can
conjure up glorious shapes and forms and brilliant visions, to make
solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. Such was the
world of pomp and pageant that lived round Tasso in his dismal cell at
Ferrara, when he conceived the splendid scenes of his Jerusalem; and we
may consider The King’s Quair,* composed by James during his captivity
at Windsor, as another of those beautiful breakings forth of the soul
from the restraint and gloom of the prison-house.
The subject of the poem is his love for the lady Jane Beaufort, daughter
of the Earl of Somerset, and a princess of the blood-royal of England,
of whom he became enamoured in the course of his captivity. What gives
it a peculiar value, is, that it may be considered a transcript of
the royal bard’s true feelings, and the story of his real loves and
fortunes. It is not often that sovereigns write poetry or that poets
deal in fact. It is gratifying to the pride of a common man, to find
a monarch thus suing, as it were, for admission into his closet, and
seeking to win his favor by administering to his pleasures. It is a
proof of the honest equality of intellectual competition, which strips
off all the trappings of factitious dignity, brings the candidate down
to a level with his fellow-men, and obliges him to depend on his own
native powers for distinction. It is curious, too, to get at the history
of a monarch’s heart, and to find the simple affections of human nature
throbbing under the ermine. But James had learnt to be a poet before he
was a king; he was schooled in adversity, and reared in the company of
his own thoughts. Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts
or to meditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up
amidst the adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in all
probability, have had such a poem as the Quair.
* Quair, an old term for book.
I have been particularly interested by those parts of the poem which
breathe his immediate thoughts concerning his situation, or which are
connected with the apartment in the Tower. They have thus a personal and
local charm, and are given with such circumstantial truth as to make the
reader present with the captive in his prison and the companion of his
meditations.
Such is the account which he gives of his weariness of spirit, and of
the incident which first suggested the idea of writing the poem. It was
the still mid-watch of a clear moonlight night; the stars, he says, were
twinkling as fire in the high vault of heaven, and “Cynthia rinsing her
golden locks in Aquarius.” He lay in bed wakeful and restless, and took
a book to beguile the tedious hours. The book he chose was Boetius’
Consolations of Philosophy, a work popular among the writers of that
day, and which had been translated by his great prototype, Chaucer. From
the high eulogium in which he indulges, it is evident this was one of
his favorite volumes while in prison; and indeed it is an admirable
text-book for meditation under adversity. It is the legacy of a noble
and enduring spirit, purified by sorrow and suffering, bequeathing to
its successors in calamity the maxims of sweet morality, and the trains
of eloquent but simple reasoning, by which it was enabled to bear
up against the various ills of life. It is a talisman, which the
unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or, like the good King James,
lay upon his nightly pillow.
After closing the volume he turns its contents over in his mind, and
gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune, the
vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him even
in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to matins, but
its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems to him like a
voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of poetic errantry
he determines to comply with this intimation; he therefore takes pen in
hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to implore a benediction,
and sallies forth into the fairy-land of poetry. There is something
extremely fanciful in all this, and it is interesting as furnishing
a striking and beautiful instance of the simple manner in which
whole trains of poetical thought are sometimes awakened and literary
enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem, he more than once bewails the peculiar
hardness of his fate, thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, and
shut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world in which the meanest
animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness, however, in his very
complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable and social spirit at
being denied the indulgence of its kind and generous propensities; there
is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated; they flow with a natural and
touching pathos, and are perhaps rendered more touching by their
simple brevity. They contrast finely with those elaborate and iterated
repinings which we sometimes meet with in poetry, the effusions of
morbid minds sickening under miseries of their own creating, and
venting their bitterness upon an unoffending world. James speaks of his
privations with acute sensibility, but having mentioned them passes on,
as if his manly mind disdained to brood over unavoidable calamities.
When such a spirit breaks forth into complaint, however brief, we
are aware how great must be the suffering that extorts the murmur. We
sympathize with James, a romantic, active, and accomplished prince, cut
off in the lustihood of youth from all the enterprise, the noble uses,
and vigorous delights of life, as we do with Milton, alive to all the
beauties of nature and glories of art, when he breathes forth brief but
deep-toned lamentations over his perpetual blindness.
Had not James evinced a deficiency of poetic artifice, we might almost
have suspected that these lowerings of gloomy reflection were meant as
preparative to the brightest scene of his story, and to contrast with
that refulgence of light and loveliness, that exhilarating accompaniment
of bird and song, and foliage and flower, and all the revel of, the
year, with which he ushers in the lady of his heart. It is this scene,
in particular, which throws all the magic of romance about the old
castle keep. He had risen, he says, at daybreak, according to custom, to
escape from the dreary meditations of a sleepless pillow. “Bewailing in
his chamber thus alone,” despairing of all joy and remedy, “for, tired
of thought, and woe-begone,” he had wandered to the window to indulge
the captive’s miserable solace, of gazing wistfully upon the world from
which he is excluded. The window looked forth upon a small garden which
lay at the foot of the tower. It was a quiet, sheltered spot, adorned
with arbors and green alleys, and protected from the passing gaze by
trees and hawthorn hedges.
Now was there made fast by the tower’s wall,
A garden faire, and in the corners set
An arbour green with wandis long and small
Railed about, and so with leaves beset
Was all the place and hawthorn hedges knet,
That lyf* was none, walkyng there forbye,
That might within scarce any wight espye.
So thick the branches and the leves grene,
Beshaded all the alleys that there were,
And midst of every arbour might be seen,
The sharpe, grene, swete juniper,
Growing so fair with branches here and there,
That as it seemed to a lyf without,
The boughs did spread the arbour all about.
And on the small grene twistis+ set
The lytel swete nightingales, and sung
So loud and clear, the hymnis consecrate
Of lovis use, now soft, now loud among,
That all the garden and the wallis rung
Right of their song----
* Lyf, Person.
+ Twistis, small boughs or twigs. NOTE--The language of the
quotations is generally modernized.
It was the month of May, when every thing was in bloom, and he
interprets the song of the nightingale into the language of his
enamoured feeling:
Worship, all ye that lovers be, this May;
For of your bliss the kalends are begun,
And sing with us, Away, winter, away.
Come, summer, come, the sweet season and sun.
As he gazes on the scene, and listens to the notes of the birds, he
gradually relapses into one of those tender and undefinable reveries,
which fill the youthful bosom in this delicious season. He wonders what
this love may be of which he has so often read, and which thus seems
breathed forth in the quickening breath of May, and melting all nature
into ecstasy and song. If it really be so great a felicity, and if it be
a boon thus generally dispensed to the most insignificant beings, why is
he alone cut off from its enjoyments?
Oft would I think, O Lord, what may this be,
That love is of such noble myght and kynde?
Loving his folke, and such prosperitee,
Is it of him, as we in books do find;
May he oure hertes setten* and unbynd:
Hath he upon oure hertes such maistrye?
Or is all this but feynit fantasye?
For giff he be of so grete excellence
That he of every wight hath care and charge,
What have I gilt+ to him, or done offense,
That I am thral’d, and birdis go at large?
* Setten, incline.
+ Gilt, what injury have I done, etc.
In the midst of his musing, as he casts his eye downward, he beholds
“the fairest and the freshest young floure” that ever he had seen. It is
the lovely Lady Jane, walking in the garden to enjoy the beauty of that
“fresh May morrowe.” Breaking thus suddenly upon his sight in a moment
of loneliness and excited susceptibility, she at once captivates the
fancy of the romantic prince, and becomes the object of his wandering
wishes, the sovereign of his ideal world.
There is, in this charming scene, an evident resemblance to the early
part of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, where Palamon and Arcite fall in
love with Emilia, whom they see walking in the garden of their prison.
Perhaps the similarity of the actual fact to the incident which he had
read in Chaucer may have induced James to dwell on it in his poem. His
description of the Lady Jane is given in the picturesque and minute
manner of his master, and, being doubtless taken from the life, is a
perfect portrait of a beauty of that day. He dwells with the fondness
of a lover on every article of her apparel, from the net of pearl,
splendent with emeralds and sapphires, that confined her golden hair,
even to the “goodly chaine of small orfeverye” * about her neck, whereby
there hung a ruby in shape of a heart, that seemed, he says, like a
spark of fire burning upon her white bosom. Her dress of white
tissue was looped up to enable her to walk with more freedom. She was
accompanied by two female attendants, and about her sported a little
hound decorated with bells, probably the small Italian hound of
exquisite symmetry which was a parlor favorite and pet among the
fashionable dames of ancient times. James closes his description by a
burst of general eulogium:
In her was youth, beauty, with humble port,
Bounty, richesse, and womanly feature:
God better knows than my pen can report,
Wisdom, largesse,+ estate,++ and cunning& sure.
In every point so guided her measure,
In word, in deed, in shape, in countenance,
That nature might no more her child advance.
* Wrought gold.
+ Largesse, bounty.
++ Estate, dignity.
& Cunning, discretion.
The departure of the Lady Jane from the garden puts an end to this
transient riot of the heart. With her departs the amorous illusion
that had shed a temporary charm over the scene of his captivity, and he
relapses into loneliness, now rendered tenfold more intolerable by this
passing beam of unattainable beauty. Through the long and weary day he
repines at his unhappy lot, and when evening approaches, and Phoebus,
as he beautifully expresses it, had “bade farewell to every leaf and
flower,” he still lingers at the window, and, laying his head upon the
cold stone, gives vent to a mingled flow of love and sorrow, until,
gradually lulled by the mute melancholy of the twilight hour, he lapses,
“half-sleeping, half swoon,” into a vision, which occupies the remainder
of the poem, and in which is allegorically shadowed out the history of
his passion.
When he wakes from his trance, he rises from his stony pillow, and,
pacing his apartment, full of dreary reflections, questions his spirit,
whither it has been wandering; whether, indeed, all that has
passed before his dreaming fancy has been conjured up by preceding
circumstances, or whether it is a vision intended to comfort and assure
him in his despondency. If the latter, he prays that some token may be
sent to confirm the promise of happier days, given him in his slumbers.
Suddenly, a turtledove of the purest whiteness comes flying in at the
window, and alights upon his hand, bearing in her bill a branch of red
gilliflower, on the leaves of which is written, in letters of gold, the
following sentence:
Awake! Awake! I bring, lover, I bring
The newis glad, that blissful is and sure
Of thy comfort; now laugh, and play, and sing,
For in the heaven decretit is thy cure.
He receives the branch with mingled hope and dread; reads it with
rapture; and this he says was the first token of his succeeding
happiness. Whether this is a mere poetic fiction, or whether the Lady
Jane did actually send him a token of her favor in this romantic way,
remains to be determined according to the fate or fancy of the reader.
He concludes his poem by intimating that the promise conveyed in the
vision and by the flower, is fulfilled by his being restored to liberty,
and made happy in the possession of the sovereign of his heart.
Such is the poetical account given by James of his love adventures
in Windsor Castle. How much of it is absolute fact, and how much the
embellishment of fancy, it is fruitless to conjecture; let us not,
however, reject every romantic incident as incompatible with real life,
but let us sometimes take a poet at his word. I have noticed merely
those parts of the poem immediately connected with the tower, and have
passed over a large part which was in the allegorical vein, so
much cultivated at that day. The language, of course, is quaint and
antiquated, so that the beauty of many of its golden phrases will
scarcely be perceived at the present day, but it is impossible not to
be charmed with the genuine sentiment, the delightful artlessness and
urbanity, which prevail throughout it. The descriptions of Nature too,
with which it is embellished, are given with a truth, a discrimination,
and a freshness, worthy of the most cultivated periods of the art.
As an amatory poem, it is edifying, in these days of coarser thinking,
to notice the nature, refinement, and exquisite delicacy which
pervade it; banishing every gross thought, or immodest expression, and
presenting female loveliness, clothed in all its chivalrous attributes
of almost supernatural purity and grace.
James flourished nearly about the time of Chaucer and Gower, and was
evidently an admirer and studier of their writings. Indeed, in one of
his stanzas he acknowledges them as his masters; and in some parts
of his poem we find traces of similarity to their productions, more
especially to those of Chaucer. There are always, however, general
features of resemblance in the works of contemporary authors, which are
not so much borrowed from each other as from the times. Writers, like
bees, toll their sweets in the wide world; they incorporate with their
own conceptions, the anecdotes and thoughts current in society; and thus
each generation has some features in common, characteristic of the age
in which it lives.
James belongs to one of the most brilliant eras of our literary history,
and establishes the claims of his country to a participation in
its primitive honors. Whilst a small cluster of English writers are
constantly cited as the fathers of our verse, the name of their
great Scottish compeer is apt to be passed over in silence; but he
is evidently worthy of being enrolled in that little constellation of
remote but never-failing luminaries who shine in the highest firmament
of literature, and who, like morning stars, sang together at the bright
dawning of British poesy.
Such of my readers as may not be familiar with Scottish history (though
the manner in which it has of late been woven with captivating fiction
has made it a universal study) may be curious to learn something of the
subsequent history of James and the fortunes of his love. His passion
for the Lady Jane, as it was the solace of his captivity, so it
facilitated his release, it being imagined by the Court that a
connection with the blood-royal of England would attach him to its own
interests. He was ultimately restored to his liberty and crown, having
previously espoused the Lady Jane, who accompanied him to Scotland, and
made him a most tender and devoted wife.
He found his kingdom in great confusion, the feudal chieftains
having taken advantage of the troubles and irregularities of a long
interregnum, to strengthen themselves in their possessions, and place
themselves above the power of the laws. James sought to found the basis
of his power in the affections of his people. He attached the lower
orders to him by the reformation of abuses, the temperate and equable
administration of justice, the encouragement of the arts of peace, and
the promotion of every thing that could diffuse comfort, competency,
and innocent enjoyment through the humblest ranks of society. He
mingled occasionally among the common people in disguise; visited
their firesides; entered into their cares, their pursuits, and their
amusements; informed himself of the mechanical arts, and how they could
best be patronized and improved; and was thus an all-pervading spirit,
watching with a benevolent eye over the meanest of his subjects. Having
in this generous manner made himself strong in the hearts of the common
people, he turned himself to curb the power of the factious nobility;
to strip them of those dangerous immunities which they had usurped; to
punish such as had been guilty of flagrant offences; and to bring the
whole into proper obedience to the Crown. For some time they bore
this with outward submission, but with secret impatience and brooding
resentment. A conspiracy was at length formed against his life, at the
head of which was his own uncle, Robert Stewart, Earl of Athol, who,
being too old himself for the perpetration of the deed of blood,
instigated his grandson, Sir Robert Stewart, together with Sir Robert
Graham, and others of less note, to commit the deed. They broke into his
bedchamber at the Dominican convent near Perth, where he was residing,
and barbarously murdered him by oft-repeated wounds. His faithful queen,
rushing to throw her tender body between him and the sword, was twice
wounded in the ineffectual attempt to shield him from the assassin; and
it was not until she had been forcibly torn from his person, that the
murder was accomplished.
It was the recollection of this romantic tale of former times, and of
the golden little poem, which had its birthplace in this tower, that
made me visit the old pile with more than common interest. The suit
of armor hanging up in the hall, richly gilt and embellished, as if to
figure in the tourney, brought the image of the gallant and romantic
prince vividly before my imagination. I paced the deserted chambers
where he had composed his poem; I leaned upon the window, and endeavored
to persuade myself it was the very one where he had been visited by
his vision; I looked out upon the spot where he had first seen the Lady
Jane. It was the same genial and joyous month; the birds were again
vying with each other in strains of liquid melody; every thing was
bursting into vegetation, and budding forth the tender promise of the
year. Time, which delights to obliterate the sterner memorials of human
pride, seems to have passed lightly over this little scene of poetry and
love, and to have withheld his desolating hand. Several centuries have
gone by, yet the garden still flourishes at the foot of the tower. It
occupies what was once the moat of the keep; and, though some parts have
been separated by dividing walls, yet others have still their arbors
and shaded walks, as in the days of James, and the whole is sheltered,
blooming, and retired. There is a charm about the spot that has been
printed by the footsteps of departed beauty, and consecrated by the
inspirations of the poet, which is heightened, rather than impaired, by
the lapse of ages. It is, indeed, the gift of poetry, to hallow every
place in which it moves; to breathe around nature an odor more exquisite
than the perfume of the rose, and to shed over it a tint more magical
than the blush of morning.
Others may dwell on the illustrious deeds of James as a warrior and a
legislator; but I have delighted to view him merely as the companion
of his fellow-men, the benefactor of the human heart, stooping from his
high estate to sow the sweet flowers of poetry and song in the paths of
common life. He was the first to cultivate the vigorous and hardy plant
of Scottish genius, which has since become so prolific of the most
wholesome and highly flavored fruit. He carried with him into the
sterner regions of the north, all the fertilizing arts of southern
refinement. He did every thing in his power to win his countrymen to the
gay, the elegant, and gentle arts, which soften and refine the character
of a people, and wreathe a grace round the loftiness of a proud and
warlike spirit. He wrote many poems, which, unfortunately for the
fulness of his fame, are now lost to the world; one, which is still
preserved, called “Christ’s Kirk of the Green,” shows how diligently he
had made himself acquainted with the rustic sports and pastimes, which
constitute such a source of kind and social feeling among the Scottish
peasantry; and with what simple and happy humor he could enter into
their enjoyments. He contributed greatly to improve the national music;
and traces of his tender sentiment and elegant taste are said to exist
in those witching airs, still piped among the wild mountains and lonely
glens of Scotland. He has thus connected his image with whatever is most
gracious and endearing in the national character; he has embalmed his
memory in song, and floated his name to after-ages in the rich streams
of Scottish melody. The recollection of these things was kindling at my
heart, as I paced the silent scene of his imprisonment. I have visited
Vaucluse with as much enthusiasm as a pilgrim would visit the shrine
at Loretto; but I have never felt more poetical devotion than when
contemplating the old tower and the little garden at Windsor, and
musing over the romantic loves of the Lady Jane, and the Royal Poet of
Scotland.