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THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| THE SPELL SERIES |
| |
| _Each volume with one or more colored plates and |
| many illustrations from original drawings or special |
| photographs. Octavo, decorative cover, gilt top, |
| boxed._ |
| |
| _Per volume, net $2.50; carriage paid $2.70_ |
| |
| BY ISABEL ANDERSON |
| |
| THE SPELL OF BELGIUM |
| THE SPELL OF JAPAN |
| THE SPELL OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS AND THE PHILIPPINES |
| |
| BY CAROLINE ATWATER MASON |
| THE SPELL OF ITALY |
| THE SPELL OF SOUTHERN SHORES |
| THE SPELL OF FRANCE |
| |
| BY ARCHIE BELL |
| THE SPELL OF EGYPT |
| THE SPELL OF THE HOLY LAND |
| |
| BY KEITH CLARK |
| THE SPELL OF SPAIN |
| THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND |
| |
| BY W. D. MCCRACKAN |
| THE SPELL OF TYROL |
| THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES |
| |
| BY EDWARD NEVILLE VOSE |
| THE SPELL OF FLANDERS |
| |
| BY BURTON E. STEVENSON |
| THE SPELL OF HOLLAND |
| |
| BY JULIA DE W. ADDISON |
| THE SPELL OF ENGLAND |
| |
| BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE |
| THE SPELL OF SWITZERLAND |
| |
| THE PAGE COMPANY |
| 53 Beacon Street Boston, Mass. |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
[Illustration: _The Pass of Killiecrankie_ (_See page 195_)]
THE SPELL OF SCOTLAND
by
KEITH CLARK
Author of "The Spell of Spain," etc.
"A Traveller may lee wi authority." (Scotch Proverb)
[Illustration]
Illustrated
Boston
The Page Company
MDCCCCXVI
Copyright, 1916, by
The Page Company
All rights reserved
First Impression, November, 1916
The Colonial Press
C. H. Simonds Company, Boston, U. S. A.
TO
THE LORD MARISCHAL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HAME, HAME, HAME! 1
II. SCOTTS-LAND 24
III. BORDER TOWNS 53
IV. THE EMPRESS OF THE NORTH 82
V. THE KINGDOM OF FIFE 149
VI. TO THE NORTH 171
VII. HIGHLAND AND LOWLAND 194
VIII. THE CIRCLE ROUND 220
IX. THE WESTERN ISLES 252
X. THE LAKES 277
XI. THE WEST COUNTRY 314
BIBLIOGRAPHY 335
INDEX 339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE (_in full colour_)
(_See page 195_) _Frontispiece_
MAP OF SCOTLAND 1
JAMES VI 6
QUEEN MARY 15
JAMES II 25
MELROSE ABBEY 34
ABBOTSFORD (_in full colour_) 41
THE STUDY, ABBOTSFORD 45
ST. MARY'S AISLE AND TOMB OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, DRYBURGH ABBEY 51
JEDBURGH ABBEY 63
HERMITAGE CASTLE 66
NEWARK CASTLE 74
INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN 77
ST. MARY'S LAKE 80
EDINBURGH CASTLE (_in full colour_) 86
MONS MEG 90
GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD 96
MORAY HOUSE 102
INTERIOR OF ST. GILES 104
JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE 106
JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE 108
HOLYROOD PALACE 111
JAMES IV 115
MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV 124
BOTHWELL CASTLE (_in full colour_) 131
PRINCES STREET 134
JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE 142
TANTALLON CASTLE 157
ST. ANDREWS CASTLE 165
DRAWING-ROOM, LINLITHGOW PALACE, WHERE QUEEN MARY WAS BORN 184
HUNTINGTON TOWER 190
GLAMIS CASTLE 194
GLEN TILT 197
INVERCAULD HOUSE 200
BALMORAL CASTLE 205
MARISCHAL COLLEGE 207
DUNNOTTAR CASTLE 212
SPYNIE CASTLE 224
CAWDOR CASTLE (_in full colour_) 227
BATTLEFIELD OF CULLODEN 232
THE OLD MAN OF HOY 237
EARL'S PALACE, KIRKWALL 240
INVERGARRY CASTLE 248
KILCHURN CASTLE 258
AROS CASTLE 265
ENTRANCE TO FINGAL'S CAVE 267
CATHEDRAL OF IONA AND ST. MARTIN'S CROSS 273
DUMBARTON CASTLE 282
LOCH KATRINE 289
THE BRIG O' TURK 294
THE TROSSACHS (_in full colour_) 296
STIRLING CASTLE (_in full colour_) 304
DOUNE CASTLE 310
PORTRAIT OF THOMAS CARLYLE, BY WHISTLER 317
AYR RIVER (_in full colour_) 322
BURNS' COTTAGE, BIRTH-PLACE OF ROBERT BURNS, AYR 328
CAERLAVEROCK CASTLE 333
[Illustration: SCOTLAND]
THE
SPELL OF SCOTLAND
CHAPTER I
HAME, HAME, HAME!
"It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain wad I be,
And it's hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree!"
Time was when half a hundred ports ringing round the semi-island of
Scotland invited your boat to make harbour; you could "return" at almost
any point of entry you chose, or chance chose for you.
To-day, if you have been gone for two hundred and fifty years, or if you
never were "of Scotia dear," except as a mere reading person with an
inclination toward romance, you can make harbour after a transatlantic
voyage at but one sea-city, and that many miles up a broad in-reaching
river. Or, you can come up the English roads by Carlisle or by
Newcastle, and cross the Border in the conquering way, which never yet
was all-conquering. There is shipping, of course, out of the half
hundred old harbours. But it is largely the shipping that goes and
comes, fishing boats and coast pliers and the pleasure boats of the
western isles.
You cannot come back from the far corners of the earth--to which
Scotland has sent such majorities of her sons, since the old days when
she squandered them in battle on the Border or on the Continent, to the
new days when she squanders them in colonization so that half a dozen of
her counties show decline in population--but you must come to Glasgow.
The steamers are second-class compared with those which make port
farther south. They are slower. But their very lack of modern splendour
and their slow speed give time in which to reconstruct your Scotland,
out of which perhaps you have been banished since the Covenant, or the
Fifteen, or the Forty Five; or perhaps out of which you have never taken
the strain which makes you romantic and Cavalier, or Presbyterian and
canny. We who have it think that you who have it not lose something very
precious for which there is no substitute. We pity you. More clannish
than most national tribesmen, we cannot understand how you can endure
existence without a drop of Scotch.
Always when I go to Scotland I feel myself returning "home."
Notwithstanding that it is two centuries and a bittock since my clerical
ancestor left his home, driven out no doubt by the fluctuant fortunes of
Covenanter and Cavalier, or, it may be, because he believed he carried
the only true faith in his chalice--only he did not carry a
chalice--and, either he would keep it undefiled in the New World, or he
would share it with the benighted in the New World; I know not.
All that I know is that in spite of the fact that the Scotch in me has
not been replenished since those two centuries and odd, I still feel
that it is a search after ancestors when I go back to Scotland. And, if
a decree of banishment was passed by the unspeakable Hanoverians after
the first Rising, and lands and treasure were forfeited, still I look on
entire Scotland as my demesne. I surrender not one least portion of it.
Not any castle, ruined or restored, is alien to me. Highlander and
Lowlander are my undivisive kin. However empty may seem the moorlands
and the woodlands except of grouse and deer, there is not a square foot
of the twenty-nine thousand seven hundred eighty-five square miles but
is filled for me with a longer procession, if not all of them royal,
than moved ghostly across the vision of Macbeth.
Nothing happens any longer in Scotland. Everything has happened. Quite
true, Scotland may some time reassert itself, demand its independence,
cease from its romantic reliance on the fact that it did furnish to
England, to the British Empire, the royal line, the Stewarts. Even Queen
Victoria, who was so little a Stewart, much more a Hanoverian and a
Puritan, was most proud of her Stewart blood, and regarded her summers
in the Highlands as the most ancestral thing in her experience.
Scotland may at sometime dissolve the Union, which has been a union of
equality, accept the lower estate of a province, an American "state,"
among the possible four of "Great Britain and Ireland," and enter on a
more vigorous provincial life, live her own life, instead of exporting
vigour to the colonies--and her exportation is almost done. She may fill
this great silence which lies over the land, and is fairly audible in
the deserted Highlands, with something of the human note instead of the
call of the plover.
But, for us, for the traveler of to-day, and at least for another
generation, Scotland is a land where nothing happens, where everything
has happened. It has happened abundantly, multitudinously, splendidly.
No one can regret--except he is a reformer and a socialist--the absence
of the doings of to-day; they would be so realistic, so actual, so
small, so of the province and the parish. Whereas in the Golden Age,
which is the true age of Scotland, men did everything--loving and
fighting, murdering and marauding, with a splendour which makes it seem
fairly not of our kind, of another time and of another world.
You must know your Scottish history, you must be filled with Scottish
romance, above all, you must know your poetry and ballads, if you would
rebuild and refill the country as you go. Not only over fair Melrose
lies the moonlight of romance, making the ruin more lovely and more
complete than the abbey could ever have been in its most established
days, but over the entire land there lies the silver pall of moonlight,
making, I doubt not, all things lovelier than in reality.
We truly felt that we should have arranged for "a hundred pipers an' a'
an' a'." But we left King's Cross station in something of disguise. The
cockneys did not know that we were returning to Scotland. Our landing
was to be made as quietly, without pibroch, as when the Old Pretender
landed at Peterhead on the far northeastern corner, or when the Young
Pretender landed at Moidart on the far western rim of the islands. And
neither they nor we pretenders.
The East Coast route is a pleasant way, and I am certain the hundred
pipers, or whoever were the merry musicmakers who led the English troops
up that way when Edward First was king, and all the Edwards who followed
him, and the Richards and the Henrys--they all measured ambition with
Scotland and failed--I am certain they made vastly more noise than this
excellently managed railway which moves across the English landscape
with due English decorum.
We were to stop at Peterborough, and walk out to where, "on that
ensanguined block at Fotheringay," the queenliest queen of them all laid
her head and died that her son, James Sixth of Scotland, might become
First of England. We stopped at York for the minster, and because
Alexander III was here married to Margaret, daughter of Henry III; and
their daughter being married to Eric of Norway in those old days when
Scotland and Norway were kin, became mother to the Maid of Norway,
one of the most pathetic and outstanding figures in Scottish history,
simply because she died--and from her death came divisions to the
kingdom.
[Illustration: JAMES VI.]
We paused at Durham, where in that gorgeous tomb St. Cuthbert lies
buried after a brave and Scottish life. We only looked across the
purpling sea where already the day was fading, where the slant rays of
the sun shone on Lindisfarne, which the spirit of St. Cuthbert must
prefer to Durham.
All unconsciously an old song came to sing itself as I looked across
that wide water--
"My love's in Germanie,
Send him hame, send him hame,
My love's in Germanie,
Fighting for royalty,
He's as brave as brave can be,
Send him hame, send him hame!"
Full many a lass has looked across this sea and sung this lay--and shall
again.
The way is filled with ghosts, long, long processions, moving up and
down the land. A boundary is always a lodestone, a lodeline. Why do men
establish it except that other men dispute it? In the old days England
called it treason for a Borderer, man or woman, to intermarry with
Scotch Borderer. The lure, you see, went far. Even so that kings and
ladies, David and Matilda, in the opposing edges of the Border, married
each other. And always there was Gretna Green.
Agricola came this way, and the Emperor Severus. There is that
interesting, far-journeying Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the "Gil Blas of
the Middle Ages," who later became Pius II. He came to this country by
boat, but becoming afraid of the sea, returned by land, even opposite to
the way we are going. Froissart came, but reports little. Perhaps
Chaucer, but not certainly. George Fox came and called the Scots "a dark
carnal people."
With the Act of Union the stream grows steady and full. There is Ben
Jonson, trudging along the green roadway out yonder; for on foot, and
all the way from London, he came northward to visit William Drummond of
Hawthornden. Who would not journey to such a name? But, alas, a fire
destroyed "my journey into Scotland sung with all the adventures." All
that I know of Ben is that he was impressed with Lomond--two hundred
years before Scott.
And there trails Taylor, "water poet," hoping to rival Rare Ben, on his
"Pennyless Pilgrimage," when he actually went into Scotland without a
penny, and succeeded in getting gold to further him on his way--"Marr,
Murraye, Elgin, Bughan, and the Lord of Erskine, all of these I thank
them, gave me gold to defray my charges in my journey."
James Howell, carries a thin portfolio as he travels the highway. But we
must remember that he wrote his "Perfect Description of the People and
Country of Scotland" in the Fleet.
Here is Doctor Johnson, in a post chaise. Of course, Sir! "Mr. Boswell,
an active lively fellow is to conduct me round the country." And he's
still a lively conductor. Surely you can see the Doctor, in his high
boots, and his very wide brown cloth great coat with pockets which might
be carrying two volumes of his folio dictionary, and in his hand a large
oak staff. One tries to forget that years before this journey he had
said to Boswell, "Sir, the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees
is the highroad that leads him to London." And, was there any malice in
Boswell's final record--"My illustrious friend, being now desirous to be
again in the great theater of life and animated existence"?
The poet Gray preceded him a little, and even John Wesley moves along
the highroad seeking to save Scottish souls as well as English. A few
years afterward James Hogg comes down this way to visit his countryman,
Tammas Carlyle in London; who saw Hogg as "a little red-skinned stiff
rock of a body with quite the common air of an Ettrick shepherd."
There is Scott, many times, from the age of five when he went to Bath,
till that last journey back from Italy--to Dryburgh! And Shadowy Jeanie
Deans comes downward, walking her "twenty-five miles and a bittock a
day," to save her sister from death.
Disraeli comes up this way when he was young and the world was his
oyster. Stevenson passes up and down, sending his merry men up and down.
And one of the most native is William Winter--"With a quick sense of
freedom and of home, I dashed across the Border and was in Scotland."
There is a barricade of the Cheviots stretching across between the two
countries, but the Romans built a Wall to make the division more
apparent. In the dawn of the centuries the Romans came hither, and
attempting to come to Ultima Thule, Picts and Scots--whatever they were,
at least they were brave--met the Romans on the Border, as yet
unreported in the world's history and undefined in the world's
geography, and sent them back into what is England. The Romans in single
journeys, and in certain imperial attempts, did penetrate as far as
Inverness. But they never conquered Scotland. Only Scotland of all the
world held them back. And in order to define their defeat and to place
limits to the unlimited Roman Empire, the Great Wall was built, built by
Hadrian, that men might know where civilization, that splendid thing
called Roman civilization, and barbarism did meet. Scotland was
barbarism. And I think, not in apology but in all pride, she has
remained something of this ever since. Never conquered, never subdued.
The Wall was, in truth, a very palpable thing, stretching from the
Solway to the North Sea at the Tyne, with ample width for the constant
patrol, with lookout towers at regular and frequent intervals, with
soldiers gathered from every corner of the Empire, often the spawn of
it, and with much traffic and with even permanent villas built the
secure side of the barrier. If you meet Puck on Pook's hill, he will
tell you all about it.
Our fast express moves swiftly northward, through the littoral of
Northumberland, as the ship bearing Sister Clare moved through the sea--
"And now the vessel skirts the strand
Of mountainous Northumberland;
Towns, towers, and hills successive rise,
And catch the nun's delighted eyes."
_Berwick_
The voyager enters Berwick with a curious feeling. It is because of the
voyagers who have preceded him that this town is singular among all the
towns of the Empire. It is of the Empire, it is of Britain; but battled
round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began,
it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed,"
as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal
proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's town.
For it is an independent borough (1551) since the men who fared before
us could not determine which should possess it, and so our very own time
records that history in an actual fact. I do not suppose the present
serious-looking, trades-minded people of the city, with their dash of
fair Danish, remember their singular situation day by day. The tumult
and the shouting have died which made "the Border" the most embattled
place in the empire, and Berwick-upon-Tweed the shuttlecock in this
international game of badminton.
It is a dual town at the best. But what has it not witnessed, what
refuge, what pawn, has it not been, this capital of the Debatable Land,
this Key of the Border.
The Tweed is here spanned by the Royal Border Bridge, opened in 1850,
and called "the last Act of Union." But there is another bridge, a Roman
bridge of many spans, antique looking as the Roman-Moorish-Spanish
bridge at Cordova, and as antique as 1609, an Act of Union following
swiftly on the footsteps of King James VI--who joyously paused here to
fire a salute to himself, on his way to the imperial throne.
The walls of Berwick, dismantled in 1820 and become a promenade for
peaceful townsfolk and curious sightseers, date no farther back than
Elizabeth's time. But she had sore need of them; for this "our town,"
was the refuge for her harriers on retaliatory Border raids,
particularly that most terrible Monday-to-Saturday foray of 1570, that
answer to an attempt to reassert the rights of Mary, when fifty castles
and peels and three hundred villages were laid waste in order that
Scotland might know that Elizabeth was king.
It was her kingly father, the Eighth Henry, who ordered Hertford into
Scotland--"There to put all to fire and sword, to burn Edinburgh town,
and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it and gotten what you
can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the
vengeance of God lighted upon it for their falsehood and disloyalty.
Sack Holyrood House and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye
conveniently can. Sack Leith and burn it and subvert it, and all the
rest, putting man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception,
when any resistance is made against you. And this done, pass over to the
Fife land, and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and
villages whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting among the
rest, so to spoil and turn upside down the Cardinal's town of St.
Andrews, as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand
by another, sparing no creature alive within the same, especially such
as either in friendship or blood be allied to the Cardinal. The
accomplishment of all this shall be most acceptable to the Majesty and
Honour of the King."
Berwick has known gentler moments, even marrying and giving in marriage.
It was at this Border town that David, son of the Bruce, and Joanna,
sister of Edward III, were united in marriage. Even then did the
kingdoms seek an Act of Union. And Prince David was four, and Princess
Joanna was six. There was much feasting by day and much revelry by
night, among the nobles of the two realms, while, no doubt, the babies
nodded drowsily.
[Illustration: QUEEN MARY.]
At Berwick John Knox united himself in marriage with Margaret Stewart,
member of the royal house of Stewart, cousin, if at some remove, from
that Stewart queen who belonged to "the monstrous regiment of women,"
and to whose charms even the Calvinist John was sensitive. One remembers
that at Berwick John was fifty, and Margaret was sixteen.
There is not much in Berwick to hold the attention, unless one would
dine direct on salmon trout just drawn frae the Tweed. There are
memories, and modern content with what is modern.
Perhaps the saddest eyes that ever looked on the old town were those of
Queen Mary, as she left Jedburgh, after her almost fatal illness, and
after her hurried ride to the Hermitage to see Bothwell, and just before
the fatal affair in Kirk o' Field. Even then, and even with her spirit
still unbroken, she felt the coming of the end. "I am tired of my life,"
she said more than once to Le Croc, French ambassador, on this journey
as she circled about the coast and back to Edinburgh.
She rode toward Berwick with an escort of a thousand men, and looked
down on the town from Halidon Hill, on the west, where two hundred years
before (1333) the Scots under the regent Douglass had suffered defeat by
the English.
It was an old town then, and belonged to Elizabeth. But it looked much
as it does to-day; the gray walls, so recently built; the red roofs,
many of them sheltering Berwickians to-day; the church spires, for men
worshiped God in those days in churches, and according to the creeds
that warred as bitterly as crowns; masts in the offing, whence this last
time one might take ship to France, that pleasant smiling land so
different from this dour realm. At all these Mary must have looked
wistfully and weariedly, as the royal salute was fired for this errant
queen. She looked also, over the Border, then becoming a hard-and-fast
boundary, and down the long, long road to Fotheringay, and to peace at
last and honour, in the Abbey.
It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the
Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may
appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was
Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and
white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of
the late afternoon is coming up over England. In the backward of the
Border a plaintive curlew is crying in the West, as he has cried since
the days of Mary, and æons before.
_Flodden_
You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on
foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield,
where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in
ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of
Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by
Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and
prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the
guide-book. It should be carried with you, either in memory or in
pocket.
If the day is not too far spent, the afternoon sun too low, you can make
Norham Castle before twilight, even as Marmion made it when he opened
the first canon of Scott's poem--
"Day set on Norham's castle steep
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone;
The battled towers, the donjon keep,
The loophole grates, where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it sweep,
In yellow luster shone."
There is but a fragment of that castle remaining, and this, familiar to
those who study Turner in the National Gallery. A little village with
one broad street and curiously receding houses attempts to live in the
shadow of this memory. The very red-stone tower has stood there at the
top of the steep bank since the middle Eleven Hundreds. Henry II held it
as a royal castle, while his craven son John--not so craven in
battle--regarded it as the first of his fortresses. Edward I made it his
headquarters while he pretended to arbitrate the rival claims of the
Scottish succession, and to establish himself as the Lord Superior. On
the green hill of Holywell nearby he received the submission of Scotland
in 1291--the submission of Scotland!
Ford castle is a little higher up the river, where lodged the dubious
lady with whom the king had dalliance in those slack days preceding
Flodden--the lady who had sung to him in Holyrood the challenging ballad
of "Young Lochinvar!" James was ever a Stewart, and regardful of the
ladies.
"What checks the fiery soul of James,
Why sits the champion of dames
Inactive on his steed?"
The Norman tower of Ford (the castle has been restored), called the
King's tower, looks down on the battlefield, and in the upper room,
called the King's room, there is a carved fireplace carrying the
historic footnote--
"King James ye 4th of Scotland did lye
here at Ford castle, A. D. 1513."
Somehow one hopes that the lady was not sparring for time and Surrey,
and sending messages to the advancing Earl, but truly loved this Fourth
of the Jameses, grandfather to his inheriting granddaughter.
Coldstream is the station for Flodden. But the village, lying a mile
away on the Scotch side of the Tweed, has memories of its own. It was
here that the most famous ford was found between the two countries,
witness and way to so many acts of disunion; from the time when Edward
I, in 1296, led his forces through it into Scotland, to the time when
Montrose, in 1640, led his forces through it into England.
"There on this dangerous ford and deep
Where to the Tweed Leet's eddies creep
He ventured desperately."
The river was spanned by a five-arch bridge in 1763, and it was over
this bridge that Robert Burns crossed into England. He entered
the day in his diary, May 7, 1787. "Coldstream--went over to
England--Cornhill--glorious river Tweed--clear and majestic--fine
bridge."
It was the only time Burns ever left Scotland, ever came into England.
And here he knelt down, on the green lawn, and prayed the prayer that
closes "The Cotter's Saturday Night"--
"O Thou who pour'd the patriot tide
That streamed through Wallace's undaunted heart,
Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride
Or nobly die, the second glorious part,
(The patriot's God, peculiarly Thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian and reward!)
O never, never, Scotia's realm desert;
But still the patriot and the patriot bard,
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!"
Surely a consecration of this crossing after its centuries of unrest.
General Monk spent the winter of 1659 in Coldstream, lodging in a house
east of the market-place, marked with its tablet. And here he raised
the first of the still famous Coldstream Guards, to bring King Charles
"o'er the water" back to the throne. Coldstream is the Gretna Green of
this end of the Border, and many a runaway couple, noble and simple, has
been married in the inn.
Four miles south of Coldstream in a lonely part of this lonely
Border--almost the echoes are stilled, and you hear nothing but
remembered bits of Marmion as you walk the highway--lies Flodden Field.
It was the greatest of Scotch battles, not even excepting Bannockburn;
greatest because the Scotch are greatest in defeat.
It was, or so it seemed to James, because his royal brother-in-law Henry
VIII was fighting in France, an admirable time wherein to advance into
England. James had received a ring and a glove and a message, from Anne
of Brittany, bidding him
"Strike three strokes with Scottish brand
And march three miles on Scottish land
And bid the banners of his band
In English breezes dance."
James was not the one to win at Flodden, notwithstanding that he had
brought a hundred thousand men to his standard. They were content to
raid the Border, and he to dally at Ford.
"O for one hour of Wallace wight,
Or well skill'd Bruce to rule the fight,
And cry--'Saint Andrew and our right!'
Another sight had seen that morn
From Fate's dark book a leaf been torn,
And Flodden had been Bannockburn!"
The very thud of the lines carries you along, if you have elected to
walk through the countryside, green now and smiling faintly if deserted,
where it was brown and sere in September, 1513. One should be repeating
his "Marmion," as Scott thought out so many of its lines riding over
this same countryside. It is a splendid, a lingering battle picture--
"And first the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennon flew,
As in the storm the white sea mew,
Then mark'd they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war;
And plumed crests of chieftains brave,
Floating like foam upon the wave,
But nought distinct they see.
Wide ranged the battle on the plain;
Spears shook, and falchions flash'd amain,
Fell England's arrow flight like rain,
Crests rose and stooped and rose again
Wild and disorderly."
Thousands were lost on both sides. But the flower of England was in
France, while the flower of Scotland was here; and slain--the king,
twelve earls, fifteen lords and chiefs, an archbishop, the French
ambassador, and many French captains.
You walk back from the Field, and all the world is changed. The green
haughs, the green woodlands, seem even in the summer sun to be dun and
sere, and those burns which made merry on the outward way--can it be
that there are red shadows in their waters? It is not "Marmion" but Jean
Elliott's "Flower of the Forest" that lilts through the memory--
"Dule and wae was the order sent our lads to the Border,
The English for once by guile won the day;
The Flowers of the Forest that foucht aye the foremost,
The pride of our land are cauld in the clay.
"We'll hear nae mair liltin' at the eve milkin',
Women and bairns are heartless and wae;
Sighin' and moanin' on ilka green loanin'--
The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away."
I know not by what alchemy the Scots are always able to win our sympathy
to their historic tragedies, or why upon such a field as Flodden, and
many another, the tragedy seems but to have just happened, the loss is
as though of yesterday.