Night in Edinburgh! The traveller may have seen the sun set over
the lagoons of Venice; he may have watched the moon rise behind the
Acropolis of Athens; but he has seen nothing finer or more inspiring
than is shown him by the sparkle of the frosty stars in this grey
metropolis of Scotland. From the terraced pavement of Princes Street,
that unmatched boulevard of the modern city, looking across the dark
chasm where once surged the waters of the North Loch, he sees the
form of the Old Town rise, from Holyrood Palace low in the eastern
meadows to the castled rock high at the western end, a dark mass all
against the southern sky. Yellow lines of light mark the modern bridges
spanning the abyss below, and windows still glowing--dim loopholes in
the perilously high old houses beyond--bespeak the inhabitants there
not yet all asleep. But these are forgotten in the witchery of the
sight, when the clouds part, and the silvery starlight is shaken down
upon the ancient city; when behind the broken sky-line of roofs and
gables the clear moon comes up, and hangs, a lustrous jewel, among the
pinnacles of St Giles’.
Nor is it only the magic of the sight that stirs strange pulses in the
blood. Standing at night in the Roman Coliseum, it seems still possible
to hear majestic echoes of an older world. But the Scotsman under the
shadow of “high Dunedin” is moved, as nowhere else, by memories of old
glory and old sorrow. Here to a Scottish heart the past comes back.
Here sighed the fatal sweetness of Rizzio’s lute. Here rang the wild
clan-music of Lochiel. Among these old walls, however, something more
is to be remembered than the deeds of high fame. Ever and again, it
is true, amid the gloom of half-forgotten centuries, there is caught
the glitter of some historic pageant. Out of the silence about the
Cathedral one seems to catch the chime of fuming censers and the roll
of coronation litanies, with, perchance, the sonorous accents of a
Gavin Douglas, poet-bishop of Dunkeld; and one thrills again to hear
the boom of the Castle cannon as the Fourth James rides gallantly
away to his death. But behind all this a more tender interest touches
the heart. What of the real inner life of those centuries bygone--the
loves and sorrows, burning once, and poignant as ours are to-day, which
have passed out of sight among the years, and been forgotten? Of some
of these, indeed, Sir Walter Scott has written the story on the dark
curtain of the past with a pen of fire. But for countless others there
is not even the poor consolation of a recorded name. Occasionally,
however, amid the seething of history, or in some half-remembered old
song, a reference occurs, and a glimpse all too brief is had into some
tender and mournful story. And so one sees that, behind the glitter
of a Stuart chivalry, of brave and splendid deeds before the world,
sometimes there lay a shadow, the sigh of a breaking heart, the stain
of unavailing tears.
Who knows the early history of that Lady of Loch Leven, mother of the
Regent Murray? Grimly enough she is painted by Scott in her old age as
the keeper of Queen Mary. Yet assuredly once she was lovely and young,
and had strange beatings of heart as she listened to the whispers of
her Royal lover, that all too gallant James V. What was their parting
like, when the parting came? Was there the last touch of regretful
hands, a remorseful caress from the royal lips, a passionate farewell?
Or was there only the cruel news by alien mouths that her place was
filled by another, that she had been forsaken? No one can tell us now.
Then what of the Lady Anne Campbell of Argyle, at one time betrothed
to Charles II.? The youthful Prince, aged twenty, had been crowned
gorgeously, after the ancient manner of the Scottish Kings, at Scone.
But King only in name, with England still under the iron rule of
Cromwell, and only a faction in Scotland devoted to his cause, his
immediate fortunes were entirely in the hands of the Scottish leader,
the crafty, covenanting Marquis of Argyle. Reaching ever higher in
ambition, and dazzled by the weird vision of the race of MacCallum
More mounting the throne, Argyle proposed that Charles should marry
his daughter. Needy and reckless, and eager to attach Argyle to the
Royalist cause by the golden bands of hope, the King pretended consent.
Alas for the Lady Anne! What maiden could keep still her heart when
wooed by so royal a lover? For wooing there must have been, to keep
up the pretence of betrothal, and how was the maiden to know that
those words and looks, and, it may have been, those warmer caresses,
were all no more than a diplomacy? And when the crash came, with
Cromwell’s defeat of the covenanting army at Dunbar, and the revelation
that she had given up her all and had been deceived--how bitter, how
cruel the discovery! The contemporary Kirkton relates circumstantially
that “so grievous was the disappointment to the young lady, that of a
gallant young gentlewoman, she lost her spirit, and turned absolutely
distracted.”
Then there is a pitiful little song, unprinted and all but
forgotten,[A] sung to a quavering, pathetic old tune, and relating in
quaint ballad fashion something of the story of one Jeanie Cameron,
an adherent of Prince Charles Edward in the rebellion of 1745. It
narrates how the maiden, having fallen sick, not without a suspicion
of its being heart-sickness, and all cures of the leeches failing, was
prescribed “ae bricht blink o’ the Young Pretender.” So she sate her
down and wrote the Prince “a very long letter, stating who were his
friends and who were his foes.” This letter she had closed, and was
just “sealing with a ring,” when, as used to happen in ballad story,
“ope flew the door, and in came her King.” Poor young lady!--
She prayed to the saints and angels to defend her,
And sank i’ the arms o’ the Young Pretender.
Rare, oh, rare! bonnie Jeanie Cameron!
Nor is this pretty romance merely an invention of the poet’s brain.
One of the family by whom the song has been preserved happened, it
seems, in the latter part of last century, to be buying snuff in a
shop in Edinburgh, when a beggar came in. Nothing was said before the
stranger; but the shopkeeper, as if it were an accustomed dole, handed
the beggar a groat. Afterwards, in reply to a remark of his customer
as to the delicacy of the beggar’s hand which had received the coin,
the shopkeeper revealed the fact that the recipient of his charity was
no man, but a woman, and no other than Jeanie Cameron, a follower of
the Chevalier. Her story, so far as he knew it, was sad enough. She
had followed the Prince to France, hoping, no doubt, poor thing! to
resume there something of the place she had believed herself to hold
in his affections. Alas! it was only to find herself, like so many
others, forgotten, cast off, an encumbrance to a broken man. And then,
with who can tell how heavy a heart, she made her way home, only to
discover that her family had shut their door upon her, and cut her
adrift. So, for these many years, she had wandered about forlorn and
lonely, supported by a few charitable bourgeois in the streets of
Edinburgh--she who could look back upon the day when she had loved and
been loved by a Stuart Prince.[B]
[A] It has now been included in “Ancient Scots Ballads with
their Traditional Airs.” Glasgow: Bayley & Ferguson, 1894.
[B] This account of the latter days of “Mrs Jean Cameron”
finds corroboration in a footnote to the second volume of
Chambers’s “Traditions of Edinburgh.”
Such are some of the stories which find no place in history, but whose
consciousness sheds a tragic and tender interest about this grey old
capital of the North. Who will say that they are not as well worth
thought as the trumpetings of herald pursuivants and the clash of
warlike arms?