Under the great eastern oriel at Melrose, where the high altar of the
abbey once stood, lies buried the heart of King Robert the Bruce.
Elsewhere, far off at Dunfermline, in Fife, the body of the Scots King
was entombed. Some seventy years ago, when workmen in that ancient
Scottish capital were repairing the ruined church, they came upon a
marble monument, broken and defaced. Digging below, amid the mould
of the sepulchre, they found the skeleton of a tall man. Fragments
of cloth-of-gold lay about it, and the breast-bone had been sawn
through; and by these signs the workmen knew that they had found the
resting-place of the King. There, as one who was present has said,
after the silence and darkness of five centuries, was seen the head
that had planned and changed the destinies of Scotland; there lay
the dry bone of the arm that on the eve of Bannockburn had at one
blow slain the fierce De Bohun. But the Bruce’s heart, embalmed and
cased in silver, bearing its own strange romantic story, lies apart
in the Border Abbey. Around the place of its rest, in that fallen and
mouldering fane, lie the race that took from the heart their armorial
cognisance--the lords of the great house of Douglas.
Hot and stirring was the Douglas blood, and hardly a battlefield of
the Middle Ages in Scotland but was stained with some of its best.
Derived far back amid the mists of antiquity, none could tell how the
race arose, and it was wont to be a boast with the house that none
could point to its “first mean man.” There is a tower in Yarrow by
the Douglas (_dhu glas_, black water) Burn which is said to have been
the stronghold of “the Good Lord James”; and amid the fastnesses of
Cairntable in Lanark there is another Douglas Water and Douglas Castle.
From one of these, no doubt, in ancient Scots fashion, the family
took its name; but when that happened, and what the story was of its
early days, must remain a tale untold. The house’s mediæval greatness
began, however, with the rise of Robert the Bruce, and from that time
onwards its deeds mark with stain or blazon every page of Scottish
history. Lords of the broad Scottish Border, east and west, their
hands were sometimes stronger than the King’s. At one time a Douglas
could ride to the field with twenty thousand spears at his back, and
the gallop of the Douglas steeds sometimes was terrible alike on the
causeway of Edinburgh and on the moorland marches of Northumberland.
Douglas Earls and Knights fought as leaders through all the wars of
David Bruce. A dead Douglas in 1388 won the famous fight with Hotspur
on the moonlit field of Otterbourne. At Shrewsbury, in the days of
Robert III., Henry IV. of England himself ran close to being hewn in
pieces by the Earl of Douglas; and for gallantry on the battlefields of
France this same great Earl was invested by the French King with the
Dukedom of Touraine. The fame of Scottish chivalry for three hundred
years was blown abroad under the Douglas name; for courtesies and blows
alike were exchanged by the race on many battlefields besides those
of the northern Borderland. Not that dark deeds are lacking in their
history. Dark deeds belonged to their times. But in the tilting-yard
or on the tented field were to be met no fairer foes. Nor was their
heroism all of the sword-and-buckler order, or confined to one sex.
The finest thing recorded of the race, after all, was done by a woman.
On that dark February night in 1437, when James I. was murdered in the
Blackfriars Abbey at Perth, when the noise and clashing was heard as of
men in armour, and the torches of the coming assassins in the garden
below cast up great flashes of light against the windows of the King’s
chamber, was it not a Catherine Douglas who, for lack of a bolt, thrust
her own fair arm into the staples of the door?
The fortunes of the family culminated in the reign of James II.
Whatever its origin had been, in that reign the race had attained an
eminence more dazzling, perhaps, than that of any subject before or
since. Earls of Douglas and Wigton, Lords of Bothwell, Galloway, and
Annandale, Dukes of Touraine, Lords of Longueville, and Marshals of
France, they had inter-married more than once with the Scottish Royal
House itself. Members of the family also held the Earldoms of Angus,
Ormond, and Moray. What wonder that they lifted haughty heads, and
began to look askance at the Royal power? Then it was that the Stuart
King stooped to treachery, and then was done the darkest deed that
ever sullied the Stuart name.
Already, in the boyhood of James, a youthful Earl of Douglas and his
brother had been betrayed and slain by the King’s Ministers. For this
transaction, however, the King was in no way to blame. The young Earl
was his guest in the Castle of Edinburgh, and when at the treacherous
feast the black bull’s head, the sign of death, was placed upon their
table, James had wept piteously and begged hard for the lives of his
friends. It was later, when another Earl was lord upon the Border, that
the King made murder his resource. For this act, it must be said, James
had strong provocation. Douglas had been honoured by him, had been made
Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and had abused that honour. He had
flouted the King’s authority, and slain the King’s friends, and, having
been commanded by letter to deliver up to James’s representative the
person of a subject unjustly imprisoned by him, he delivered him up
“wanting the head.” Finally, with two great Earls of the North, he had
entered into an open league against the King. All this, however, cannot
palliate the King’s resource, cannot absolve the tragic scene in
that little supper-chamber in the Castle of Stirling. There the great
Earl was under the protection of the King’s hospitality, when James,
bursting into rage at his taunts and at his refusal to abandon the
treasonous compact, suddenly cried, “By Heaven, my Lord, if you will
not break the league, this shall!” and, drawing his dagger, stabbed
Douglas to the heart.
This deed brought the family fortunes to a climax, and for three years
Scotland was blackened by the raging of the Douglas Wars. From Berwick
to Inverness the country was wasted by the struggles of the partisans.
Stirling and Elgin were burned, and, amid famine and pestilence, the
troubles of the wars of Edward seemed come again on Scotland: so great
had grown the power of these Border lords. At last, however, the King
and the Earl came face to face. Each led an army of forty thousand men,
and only the small river Carron ran between them. By the combat of the
morrow, it seemed, would be known whether James Stuart or James Douglas
should wear the Scottish crown. But the Earl’s heart was seen to fail,
and on the morrow, when he awoke, he found his camp deserted. Of all
his host of the previous day not a hundred followers remained. Nothing
was left him but flight; and, turning his back, as a Douglas had never
done before, he made his way to England. Twenty years later, having
been captured by one of his own vassals in a petty skirmish on the
Border, he was sent to end his days as a monk in the Fifeshire Abbey of
Lindores.
Thus ended the great line of the Earls of Douglas, a race whose history
for three hundred years had been the history of Scotland, and whose
foot had twice, at least, been set upon the step even of the throne.
From the house’s latter days of turbulence and ambition there is
pleasure in turning back to those earlier years when the Good Lord
James rode at the Bruce’s saddle-bow, and the patriotism of groaning
Scotland rallied round the coupled names of Douglas and the King. No
later deed can dim the lustre of those years, and nothing in history
can outshine the last scene in the life of the Knight who strove to
carry the Bruce’s heart to the Holy Land. Himself hemmed round by the
Moors on that Spanish plain, in his effort, it is said, to succour a
friend, the Earl took from his neck the casket containing the King’s
heart. “Pass first in fight,” he cried, “as thou wert wont to do!
Douglas will follow thee, or die!” Then, throwing the casket far among
the enemy, he rushed forward to the place where it fell, and was there
slain. Well would it have been for the race of Douglas had they ever
remained true as that ancestor to the service of their King!