THE EMPRESS OF THE NORTH
I suppose the Scotsman who has been born in Edinburgh may have a
pardonable reluctance in praising the town, may hesitate in appraising
it; Stevenson did; Scott did not. And I suppose if one cannot trace his
ancestry back to Edinburgh, or nearly there, but must choose some of the
other capitals of the world as his ancestral city, one might begrudge
estate to Edinburgh.
I have none of these hesitations, am hampered by none of these half and
half ways. Being an American, with half a dozen European capitals to
choose from if I must, and having been born in an American capital which
is among the loveliest--I think the loveliest--I dare choose Edinburgh
as my dream city. I dare fling away my other capital claims, and all
modification, ever Scotch moderation, to declare without an "I think" or
"they say," Edinburgh is the most beautiful, the most romantic, the
singular city of the world.
Those who come out of many generations of migration grow accustomed to
choosing their quarter of the world; they have come from many countries
and through nomadic ancestors for a century, or two, or three. And
perhaps they, themselves, have migrated from one state to another, one
city to another. Every American has had these phases, has suffered the
sea change and the land. Surely then he may adopt his ancestral capital,
as correctly as he adopts his present political capital.
It shall be Edinburgh. And while Constantinople and Rio and Yokohama may
be splendid for situation, they have always something of foreign about
them, they can never seem to touch our own proper romance, to have been
the setting for our play. Edinburgh is as lovely, and then, the chalice
of romance has been lifted for centuries on the high altar of her
situation.
Edinburgh is a small city, as modern cities go; but I presume it has
many thousands of population, hundreds of thousands. If it were Glasgow
numbers would be important, fixative. But Edinburgh has had such a
population through the centuries that to cast its total with only that
of the souls now living within her precincts were to leave out of the
picture those shadowy and yet brilliant, ever present generations, who
seem all to jostle each other on her High street, without respect to
generations, if there is very decided respect of simple toward gentle.
Edinburgh is, curiously, significantly, divided and scarce united, into
Old Town and New Town. And yet, the Old Town with its ancient _lands_ so
marvelously like modern tenements, and its poverty which is of no date
and therefore no responsibility of ours, is neither dead nor deserted,
and is still fully one-half the town. While New Town, looking ever up to
the old, looking across the stretch to Leith, and to the sea whence came
so much threatening in the old days, and with its memories of Hume and
Scott who are ancient, and of Stevenson, who, in spite of his immortal
youth, does begin to belong to another generation than ours--New Town
also, to a new American, is something old. It has all become Edinburgh,
two perfect halves of a whole which is not less perfect for the
imperfect uniting.
There is no city which can be so "observed." I venture that when you
have stood on Castle Hill--on the High Street with its narrow opening
between the _lands_ framing near and far pictures--on Calton Hill--when
you have been able to "rest and be thankful" at Corstorphine Hill--when
you have climbed the Salisbury crags--when you have mounted to Arthur's
Seat and looked down as did King Arthur before there was an
Edinburgh--you will believe that not any slightest corner but fills the
eye and soul.
There is, of course, no single object in Edinburgh to compare with
objects of traveler's interest farther south. The castle is not the
Tower, Holyrood is a memory beside Windsor, St. Giles is no Canterbury,
St. Mary's is not St. Paul's, the Royal Scottish art gallery is meager
indeed, notwithstanding certain rare riches in comparison with the
National. But still one may believe of any of these superior objects, as
T. Sandys retorted to Shovel when they had played the game of matching
the splendours of Thrums with those of London and Shovel had named Saint
Paul's, and Tommy's list of native wonders was exhausted, but never
Tommy--"it would like to be in Thrums!" All these lesser glories go to
make up the singular glory which is Edinburgh.
_The Castle_
And there is the castle. Nowhere in all the world is castle more
strategically set to guard the city and to guard the memories of the
city and the beauty.
For the castle is Edinburgh. It stood there, stalwart in the plain,
thousands and thousands of years ago, this castle hill which invited a
castle as soon as man began to fortify himself. It has stood here a
thousand years as the bulwark of man against man. Certain it will stand
there a thousand years to come. And after--after man has destroyed and
been destroyed, or when he determines that like night and the sea there
shall be no more destruction. Castle Hill is immortal.
[Illustration: _Edinburgh Castle_]
Always it has been the resort of kings and princes. First it was the
keep of princesses, far back in Pictish days before Christian time, this
"Castell of the Maydens." From 987 B. C. down to 1566, when Mary was
lodged here for safe keeping in order that James might be born safe and
royal, the castle has had royalties in its keeping. It has kept them
rather badly in truth. While many kings have been born here, few
kings have died in its security; almost all Scottish kings have died
tragically, almost all Scottish kings have died young, and left their
kingdom to some small prince whose regents held him in this castle for
personal security, while they governed the realm, always to its
disaster.
There is not one of the Stewart kings, one of the Jameses, from First to
Sixth, who did not come into the heritage of the kingdom as a baby, a
youth; even the Fourth, who rebelled against his father and won the
kingdom--and wore a chain around his body secretly for penance. And
these baby kings and stripling princes have been lodged in the castle
for safe keeping, prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme.
History which attempts to be exact begins the castle in the seventh
century, when Edwin of Deira fortified the place and called it Edwin's
burgh. It was held by Malcolm Canmore, of whom and of his Saxon queen
Margaret, Dunfermline tells a fuller story; held against rebels and
against English, until Malcolm fell at Alnwick, and Margaret, dead at
hearing the news, was carried secretly out of the castle by her devoted
and kingly sons.
After Edward I took the castle, for half a century it was variously
held by the English as a Border fortress. Once Bruce retook it, a
stealthy night assault, up the cliffs of the west, and The Bruce razed
it. Rebuilt by the Third Edward, it was taken from this king by a clever
ruse planned by the Douglass, Black Knight of Liddesdale. A shipload of
wine and biscuits came into harbour, and the unsuspecting castellan,
glad to get such precious food in the far north, purchased it all and
granted delivery at dawn next morning. The first cart load upset under
the portcullis, the gate could not be closed, the cry "A Douglass," was
raised, and the castle entered into Scottish keeping, never to be
"English" again until the Act of Union.
Henry IV and Richard II attempted it, but failed. Richard III entered it
as friend. For three years it was held for Mary by Kirkcaldy, while the
city was disloyal. Charles I held it longer than he held England, and
Cromwell claimed it in person as part of the Protectorate. Prince
Charles, the Third, could not take it, contented himself with the less
castellated, more palatial joys, of Holyrood; a preference he shared
with his greatest grandmother.
To-day perhaps its defense might be battered down, as some one has
suggested, "from the Firth by a Japanese cruiser." But it looks like a
Gibraltar, and it keeps impregnably the treasures of the past; as
necessary a defense, I take it, as of any material treasure of the
present.
If you are a king you must wait to enter; summons must be made to the
Warder, and it must be certain you are the king; even Edward VII, most
Stewart of recent kings had to prove himself not Edward I, not English,
but "Union." If you are a commoner you know no such difficulties.
First you linger on the broad Esplanade where a regiment in kilts is
drilling, perhaps the Black Watch, the Scots Greys. No doubt of late it
has been tramped by regiments of the "First Hundred Thousand" and later,
in training for the wars.
As an American you linger here in longer memory. For when Charles was
king--the phrase sounds recent to one who is eternally Jacobite--this
level space was a part of Nova Scotia, and the Scotsmen who were made
nobles with estates in New Scotland were enfeoffed on this very ground.
So close were the relations between old and new, so indifferent were the
men of adventuring times toward space.
Or, you linger here to recall when Cromwell was burned in effigy, along
with "his friend the Devil."
You pass through the gate, where no wine casks block the descent of the
portcullis, and the castle is entered. There are three or four points of
particular interest.
Queen Margaret's chapel, the oldest and smallest religious house in
Scotland, a tiny place indeed, where Margaret was praying when word was
brought of the death of Malcolm in battle, and she, loyal and royal
soul, died the very night while the enemies from the Highlands, like an
army of Macbeth's, surrounded the castle. The place is quite authentic,
Saxon in character with Norman touches. I know no place where a thousand
years can be so swept away, and Saxon Margaret herself seems to kneel in
the perpetual dim twilight before the chancel.
There is Mons Meg, a monstrous gun indeed, pointing its mouth toward the
Forth, as though it were the guardian of Scotland. A very pretentious
gun, which was forged for James II, traveled to the sieges of Dumbarton
and of Norham, lifted voice in salute to Mary in France on her marriage
to the Dauphin, was captured by Cromwell and listed as "the great iron
murderer, Muckle Meg," and "split its throat" in saluting the Duke of
York in 1682, a most Jacobite act of loyalty. After the Rising of the
Forty Five this gun was taken to London, as though to take it from
Scotland were to take the defense from Jacobitism. But Sir Walter Scott,
restoring Scotland, and being in much favour with George IV, secured the
return of Mons Meg. It was as though a prince of the realm has returned.
Now, the great gun, large enough to shoot men for ammunition, looks,
silently but sinisterly, out over the North Sea.
[Illustration: MONS MEG.]
History comes crowding its events in memory when one enters Old
Parliament Hall. It is fitly ancestral, a noble hall with an open
timbered roof of great dignity, with a collection of armour and
equipment that particularly re-equips the past. And in this hall, under
this roof, what splendour, what crime! Most criminal, the "black dinner"
given to the Black Douglasses to their death. Unless one should resent
the dinner given by Leslie to Cromwell, when there was no black bull's
head served.
By a secret stair, which commoners and Jacobites may use to-day,
communication was had with the Royal Lodgings, and often must Queen Mary
have gone up and down those stairs, carrying the tumult of her heart,
the perplexity of her kingdom; for Mary was both woman and sovereign.
The Royal Lodgings contain Queen Mary's Rooms, chiefly; the other rooms
are negligible. It is a tiny bedchamber, too small to house the eager
soul of Mary, but very well spaced for the niggard soul of James. One
merely accepts historically the presence of Mary here; there is too much
intertwining of "H" and "M." No Jacobite but divorces Darnley from Mary,
even though he would not effect divorce with gunpowder. King James I,
when he returned fourteen years after to the place where he was VI, made
a pilgrimage to his own birth-room on June 19, 1617. I suppose he found
the narrow space like unto the Majesty that doth hedge a king.
Mary must have beat her heart against these walls as an eagle beats
wings against his cage. She never loved the place. Who could love it who
must live in it? It was royally hung; she made it fit for living, with
carpets from Turkey, chairs and tables from France, gold hangings that
were truly gold for the bed, and many tapestries with which to shut out
the cold--eight pictures of the Judgment of Paris; four pictures of the
Triumph of Virtue!
Here she kept her library, one hundred and fifty-three precious
volumes--where are they now? "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner,"
wrote Randolph, English envoy, to his queen, "instructed by a learned
man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie."
And I wondered if here she wrote that Prayer which but the other day I
came upon in the bookshop of James Thin, copied into a book of a hundred
years back, in a handwriting that has something of Queen Mary's quality
in it--
"O Domine Deus!
Speravi in te;
O care mi Iesu!
Nunc libera me:
In dura catena,
In misera poena
Desidero te;
Languendo, gemendo,
Et genuflectendo
Adoro, imploro,
Ut liberes me!"
Her windows looked down across the city toward Holyrood. Almost she must
have heard John Knox thunder in the pulpit of St. Giles, and thunder
against her. And, directly beneath far down she saw the Grassmarket.
Sometimes it flashed with gay tournament folk; for before and during
Mary's time all the world came to measure lances in Edinburgh.
Sometimes it swarmed with folk come to watch an execution; in the next
century it was filled in the "Killing Time," with Covenanter mob
applauding the execution of Royalists, with Royalist mob applauding the
execution of Covenanters; Mary's time was not the one "to glorify God in
the Grassmarket."
At the top of the market, near where the West Bow leads up to the
castle, was the house of Claverhouse, who watched the killings. At the
bottom of the market was the West Port through which Bonnie Dundee rode
away.
"To the Lords of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke,
Ere the king's crown go down there are crowns to be broke,
So each cavalier who loves honour and me,
Let him follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.
Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle my horses and call up my men,
Fling all your gates open, and let me gae free,
For 'tis up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee."
And to-day, but especially on Saturday nights, if you care to take your
life, or your peace in hand, you can join a strange and rather awful
multitude as it swarms through the Grassmarket, more and more drunken as
midnight comes on, and not less or more drunken than the mob which
hanged Captain Porteous.
It is a decided relief to look down and find the White Hart Inn, still
an inn, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lodged, on Thursday night,
September 15, 1803--"It was not noisy, and tolerably cheap. Drank tea,
and walked up to the Castle."
The Cowgate was a fashionable suburb in Mary's time. A canon of St.
Andrews wrote in 1530, "nothing is humble or lowly, everything
magnificent." On a certain golden gray afternoon I had climbed to
Arthur's Seat to see the city through the veil of mist--
"I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Harkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind."
It was late, gathering dusk and rain, when I reached the level and
thinking to make a short cut--this was once the short cut to St.
Cuthbert's from Holyrood--I ventured into the Cowgate, and wondered at
my own temerity. Stevenson reports, "One night I went along the Cowgate
after every one was a-bed but the policeman." Well, if Scott liked to
"put a cocked hat on a story," Stevenson liked to put it on his own
adventures. The Cowgate, in dusk rain, is adventure enough.
Across the height lies Greyfriar's. The church is negligible, the view
from there superb, the place historic. One year after Jenny Geddes
threw her stool in St. Giles and started the Reformation--doesn't it
sound like Mrs. O'Leary's cow?--the Covenant was signed (Feb. 28, 1638)
on top of a tomb still shown, hundreds pressing to the signing, some
signing with their blood. The Reformation was on, not to be stopped
until all Scotland was harried and remade.
I like best to think that in this churchyard, on a rainy Sunday, Scott
met a charming girl, fell in love with her, took her home under his
umbrella, and, did not marry her--his own romance!
Because no king shall ever wear the crown again, nor wave the scepter,
nor wield the sword of state, the Regalia, housed in the Crown Room, and
guarded from commoner and king by massive iron grating, is more
interesting than any other appanage of royalty in the world. The crown
which was worn by Bruce, and which sat rather uneasily on the very
unsteady head of Charles II at what time he was crowned at Scone and was
scolded, is of pure gold and much bejeweled. The scepter, made in Paris
for James V, carries a beryl, come from Egypt three thousand years ago,
or, from a Druid priest in the mist of time. The sword was a gift
from Pope Julius to James IV; in those days the Scottish sovereign was
surely the "Most Catholic Majesty."
[Illustration: GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD.]
England has no ancient regalia; hers were thrown into the melting pot by
Cromwell. The Protector--and Destructor--would fain have grasped these
"Honours," but they were spirited away, and later concealed in the
castle. Here they remained a hundred and ten years, sealed in a great
oak chest. The rumour increased that they had gone to England. And
finally Sir Walter Scott secured an order from George IV to open the
chest (Feb. 4, 1818).
It was a tremendous moment to Scott. Could he restore the Honours as
well as the country? There they lay, crown of The Bruce, scepter of
James V, sword of Pope and King. The castle guns thundered--how Mons Meg
must have regretted her lost voice!
And still we can hear the voice of Scott, when a commissioner playfully
lifted the crown as if to place it on the head of a young lady
near--"No, by God, no!" Never again shall this crown rest on any head.
That is assured in a codicil to the Act of Union. And--it may be that
other crowns shall in like manner gain a significance when they no
longer rest on uneasy heads.
The view from the King's bastion is royal. Where is there its superior?
And only its rival from Calton Hill, from Arthur's Seat. The Gardens lie
below, the New Town spreads out, the city runs down to Leith, the Firth
shines and carries on its bosom the Inchkeith and the May; the hills of
Fife rampart the North; the Highlands with Ben Lomond for sentinel form
the purple West; and south are the Braid hills and the heathery
Pentlands--the guide has pointed through a gap in the castle wall to the
hills and to the cottage at Swanston.
"City of mists and rain and blown gray spaces,
Dashed with the wild wet colour and gleam of tears,
Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate faces
Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years.
Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?
Cometh there not as a moon (where blood-rust sears
Floors a-flutter of old with silks and laces)
Gilding a ghostly Queen thro' the mist of tears?
"Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendour
Throned in his northern Athens, what spells remain
Still on the marble lips of the Wizard, and render
Silent the gazer on glory without a stain!
Here and here, do we whisper with hearts more tender,
Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain;
Rainbow-eyes and frail and gallant and slender,
Dreaming of pirate isles in a jeweled main.
"Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft a-sunder
Raggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea,
Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder,
Nay, for the City is throned in Eternity!
Hark! from the soaring castle a cannon's thunder
Closeth an hour for the world and an æon for me,
Gazing at last from the martial heights whereunder
Deathless memories roll to an ageless sea."
_High Street_
If the Baedeker with a cautious reservation, declares Princes Street
"Perhaps" the handsomest in Europe, there is no reservation in the
guide-book report of Taylor, the "Water Poet," who wrote of the High
Street in the early Sixteen Hundreds, "the fairest and goodliest streete
that ever my eyes beheld." Surely it was then the most impressive street
in the world. Who can escape a sharp impression to-day? It was then the
most curious street in the world, and it has lost none of its power to
evoke wonder.
A causeway between the castle and Holyrood, a steep ridge lying between
the Nor' Loch (where now are the Princes' Gardens) and the Sou' Loch
(where now are the Meadows, suburban dwelling) the old height offered
the first refuge to those who would fain live under the shadow of the
castle. As the castle became more and more the center of the kingdom,
dwelling under its shadow became more and more important, if not secure.
The mightiest lords of the kingdom built themselves town houses along
the causeway. French influence was always strong, and particularly in
architecture. So these tall _lands_ rose on either side of the long
street, their high, many-storied fronts on the High Street, their many
more storied backs toward the Lochs. They were, in truth, part of the
defense of the town; from their tall stories the enemy, especially the
"auld enemy," could be espied almost as soon as from the castle. And the
closes, the wynds, those dark tortuous alleys which lead between, and
which to-day in their squalor are the most picturesque corners of all
Europe, were in themselves means of defense in the old days when cannon
were as often of leather as of iron, and guns were new and were little
more reaching than arrows, and bludgeons and skene dhus and fists were
the final effective weapon when assault was intended to the city.
The ridge divides itself into the Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the
Canongate; St. Giles uniting the first two, and the Netherbow port, now
removed, dividing the last two.
The Lawnmarket in the old days was near-royal, and within its houses
the great nobles lodged, and royalty was often a guest, or a secret
guest. The High Street was the business street, centering the life of
the city, its trade, its feuds--"a la maniére d'Edimborg" ran the
continental saying of fights--its religion, its executions, its burials.
The Canongate, outside the city proper and outside the Flodden wall and
within the precincts of Holyrood, therefore regarded as under the
protection of Holy Church, became the aristocratic quarters of the later
Stewarts, of the wealthy nobles of the later day.
I suppose one may spend a lifetime in Edinburgh, with frequent days in
the Old Town, wandering the High Street, with the eye never wearying,
always discovering the new. And I suppose it would take a lifetime, born
in Old Town and of Old Town, to really know the quarter. I am not
certain I should care to spend a lifetime here; but I have never and
shall never spend sufficient of this life here. It is unsavoury of
course; it is slattern, it is squalid, danger lurks in the wynds and
drunkenness spreads itself in the closes. If the old warning cry of
"Gardey loo!" is no longer heard at ten o' the night, one still has need
of the answering "Haud yer hand!" or, your nose. Dr. Samuel Johnson,
walking this street on his first night in Edinburgh, arm in arm with
Boswell, declared, "I can smell you in the dark!" No sensitive visitor
will fail to echo him to-day. There are drains and sewers, there is
modern sanitation in old Edinburgh. But the habits of the centuries are
not easily overcome; and the Old Town still smells as though with all
the old aroma of the far years. Still, it is high, it is wind-swept--and
what of Venice, what of the Latin Quarter, what of Mile End, what of the
East Side?
But there is still splendour and power, bequeathed as Taylor said, "from
antiquitie to posteritie," in spite of the decline and the decay. If the
palace of Mary of Lorraine on Castle Hill is fallen and the doorways are
in the Museum--Mary who was mother to Mary Queen, and contemporary
worthy to Catherine of Medici--there are still, at the end of the long
street, Moray House and Queensberry House. Moray is where Cromwell
lodged in 1648, and gave no hint of what was coming in 1649; if he had,
history might have been different; to-day Moray House is the United Free
Church Training college! Queensberry House is where lived those
Queensberry marquises of fighting and sporting renown, and where the
Marquis lived who forced through the Act of Union--"There ended an
old song"; and now it is the Refuge for the Destitute!
[Illustration: MORAY HOUSE.]
There is still beauty shining through the dust and the cobwebs; here a
doorway with bold insignia and exquisite carving, leading to--nowhere;
here a bit of painting, Norrie's perhaps, or a remnant of timbered
ceiling; and everywhere, now as then--more now than then, since sanitary
destruction has had its way here and there--glimpses of the city and the
moors and the mountains.
It is invidious to compare, to choose from these closes. Each has its
history, its old habitations, its old associations, its particular
picturesqueness; Lady Stair's, Baxter's, Byer's, Old Stamp Office, White
Horse, and many more.
Through this street what glory that was Scotland has not passed and what
degradation, what power has not been displayed and what abasement? To
see it now, filled with people and with marching troops in honour of the
visiting king, is to get back a little of ancient history, of greater
glory. It lends itself to such majesty, dull and deserted as it is for
the most part.
When the King came to Edinburgh following on his coronation, making a
pilgrimage of his realm, he came to St. Giles, as has come every
sovereign of Scotland, from Malcolm who may have worshiped in the Culdee
church, to George in whose honour the chapel of the Thistle and the Rose
was unveiled.
"For noo, unfaithfu' to the Lord
Auld Scotland joins the rebel horde;
Her human hymn-books on the board
She noo displays,
An' Embro Hie Kirk's been restored
In popish ways."
On a Sunday morning I hurried to St. Giles to see the trooping of the
colours. (Later, listening to Dr. White, in a recently built reformed
church on Princes Street, I heard a sermon from the text, "You shall see
the king in all his beauty." But, no mention of King George! It was even
as it was in the old days.)
In truth it was a brave sight to find the High Street thronged with
people, and the regiments marching down from St. Giles to Holyrood. The
king did not enter town till next day. (I saw, with some resentment,
over the door of a public house, the motto, "Will ye no come back
again?") But, somehow, so many kings gone on, the play was rather better
staged with the sovereign not there. I learned then how gorgeous the
old days must have been with their colour and glitter and flash.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ST. GILES.]
I suppose there was a tall _land_ where in my day stood and still stands
Hogg's hotel, just above the Tron Kirk; the _lands_ on the south side
the High burned a century ago. But, to the American gazing down on
ancient memories and present sovereignties, there was a wonderful
courtesy shown by the hotel. I had interrupted their quiet Sabbath; it
can still be quiet in Edinburgh notwithstanding that a tram car carried
me on my way hither. The dining-room of this hotel looked out on the
High, and it was breakfast time for these covenanting-looking guests
from the countryside. But I, an invader, was made welcome and given the
best seat on the balcony; a stranger and they took me in. Sometime I
shall take up residence in this Latin Quarter, and if not in Lady
Stair's Close, then in Hogg's hotel. The name sounds sweeter if you have
just come up from Ettrick.
Nor did I miss the King. For
"I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd--'La Belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!'"
It was the Belle Dame, it was the Queen, I saw most often on the High
Street, riding to and fro from the time of the "haar" on her return
from France, till that last terrible night and the ride to Loch Leven.
After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for
your edification its motto. "Lyfe God aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi
Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular
pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the
poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.
After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that
Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled--"I hope in the highway."
After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St.
Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.
There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for
me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the
rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the high
_lands_ there look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the
moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of
Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquis of Lorne has just been celebrated,
there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up
the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom--"fyne
scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with
taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"--stands the
Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.]
After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the
flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to
Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the
Tron.
His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who
thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes
of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.
His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are
sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen,
Inverness.
But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in
those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is
king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug
up out of the Boroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters
are reassembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A
procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the
Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of
Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the
cathedral sanctuary.
Even though when search was made at the restoring of the church and the
erection of the effigy the remains could not be found, there has been
that justification by procession and by faith, that justification of
loyalty that we remember when we remember Montrose--
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all."
_Holyrood_
Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can
house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly
Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign;
in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty
but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the
Bourbons.
[Illustration: JAMES GRAHAM, MARQUIS OF MONTROSE.]
Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right--and only
one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but
substitute; but he left a Stewart descent) failed to pay the penalty for
such assertion. It was the splendour which was Stewart while they lived,
the tragedy that was Stewart when they came to die, which makes them the
royal race.
There were born in Holyrood not one of them, unless it be James V. But
almost all of them were married in Holyrood, held here their festive
days, and, not one of them died in Holyrood. It is their life, the vivid
intense flash of it, across those times that seem mysterious, even
legendary in remembered times north of the Border. Life was a holiday to
each of the Stewarts, and he spent it in the palace and in the pleasance
of Holyrood.
The Abbey, with the monastery which was attached to it, begins far back
before the Stewarts. It was founded by David I, the abbey-builder.
Legend has it that he went a-hunting on a holy day, and straying from
the "noys and dyn of Bugillis," a white stag came against him. David
thought to defend himself, but a hand bearing a cross came out of the
cloud, and the stag was exorcised. David kept the cross. In dream that
night within the castle he was commanded to build an abbey where he had
been saved, and the hunting place being this scant mile and a quarter
from the castle--then a forest where now it is treeless--David placed
this convenient abbey where it has stood for six centuries, defying fire
and war and reformation, until the citizens of Edinburgh ravaged it when
the roof fell in in the middle of the eighteenth century.
There is a curious feeling when one crosses the Girth stones at the
lower end of the Canongate. It is a century and more since this was
sanctuary. But it is impossible to step across these stones, into the
"Liberty of Holyrood," and not wonder if there may not perhaps be some
need in your own soul of sanctuary. Thousands and thousands of
men--"abbey lairds" as they were pleasantly called--have stepped across
this line before me, through the centuries. Who am I to be different,
unneedful? May I not need inviolate sanctuary? May it not be that at my
heels dogs some sinister creditor who will seize me by the skirts before
I reach the boundary beyond which there is no exacting for debt? A
marvelous thing, this ancient idea of sanctuary. It made an oasis of
safety in a savage world. Surely it was super-christian. And here, at
Holyrood, as the medieval statute declares, "qukilk privelege has
bene inviolabie observit to all maner of personis cuman wythin the
boundes ... past memorie of man." What has the modern world given
itself in place of ancient sanctuary? Justice, I suppose, and a jury
trial.
[Illustration: HOLYROOD PALACE.]
But, once across the Girth, one becomes, not a sanctuarian, but a
Stewart.
The situation is a little dreary, a little flat. And the palace, as a
palace, is altogether uninteresting to look on. It is not the building
of David or of the earlier Stewarts. But of that Merry Monarch who
harboured so long in France, when England was determining whether it
would be royal or republican, and Scotland was determining whether it
would be covenanted or uncovenanted. The Merry Monarch was ever an
uncovenanted person, not at all Scottish, although somewhat like the
errant James--whose errancy was of his own choosing. Charles had
acquired a French taste at the court of his cousin, Louis the Grand. So
the new Holyrood was built in French baronial style. And no monarch has
ever cared to inhabit it for any length of time. Only King Edward VII,
who would have been a happy successor to James, but Edward was very
studious in those days of 1859, when he lodged here and studied under
the direction of the Rector of the Royal High School. Still I can but
think that it was in this Stewart place that Edward developed his
Stewartship.
There is not a stone to speak of the magnificence, of the strength, of
David. The Abbey was burned and burned again, by Edward and Richard the
Second, and entirely rebuilt when the Stewarts were beginning to be
splendid and assured. Over the west doorway, high-arched and
deep-recessed, early English in its technique, Charles I, who was
crowned here in 1633, caused the stone to be placed.
"He shall build ane House for my name and I will stablish the
throne of his kingdom forever."
The tablet still stands above the doorway. But Charles is lying for his
sins in a vault at St. George's chapel at Windsor far in the south,
having paid his penalty on the scaffold in Whitehall. And the House is
in ruins, "bare ruined choir," where not even "the late birds sing."
Although Mendelssohn in speaking of the impression the Abbey made on
him, does say, "I think I found there the beginnings of my Scotch
symphony."
This "magnificent Abbey-Kirk of Halirude" was no doubt very splendid;
although in architectural beauty it cannot compare with Melrose, not
even the great east window with its rich quatrefoil tracing. But what
scenes have been staged in that historic drama, that theatrical piece,
we call the history of the Stewarts!
Before the high altar, under that east window, when James I was kneeling
before God in prayer, there appeared the Lord of the Isles, come
repentant from burning Inverness and other rebellion, to kneel before
the king, his own sword pointed at his breast.
Before this altar James II was married to Mary of Gueldres. James III
was married to Margaret of Denmark, who brought the Orkneys as her
dower. James IV was married to Margaret Tudor, the union of the "Thistle
and the Rose." James V was not married here, he went to France for his
frail bride, Magdalene, who lived but seven weeks in this inhospitable
land, this hospitable Holyrood. She was buried in Holyrood chapel, only
to be dug up and tossed about as common clay when the Edinburgh citizens
made football of royal skulls.
The two sons of James VI, Henry who should have been king and who might
have united royalist and commoner had fate granted it, and Charles who
was to become king, were both christened here. James VII, brother to
Charles II, restored this Chapel Royal and prepared it for the Roman
ritual. James VIII was never here, or but as a baby. Charles III--did
the Bonnie Prince in that brief brilliant Edinburgh moment of his, ever
kneel before this then deserted altar and ask divine favour while he
reasserted the divine right of kings?
Here--or was it secretly, in Stirling?--the Queen--one says The Queen
and all the world knows--gowned in black velvet, at five o'clock on a
July morning, was married to her young cousin, Henry Darnley. A marriage
that endured two long terrible tumultuous years.
Here--or was it in the drawing-room?--at two o'clock on a May morning,
the Queen was married to Bothwell, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney,
not with mass as she had been wed to her boy-cousin, but with preaching
as she wed the Bishop's cousin. And "at this marriage there was neither
pleasure nor pastime used as use was wont to be used when princes were
married." So says the Diurnal Occurents of Scotland. A marriage that
endured a brief, perhaps happy, tragedy-gathering month.
And the Queen beautiful was destroyed, by the Reformation, like an
Abbey.
[Illustration: JAMES IV.]
The bones of Darnley were ravaged by the citizens of Edinburgh out of
the ruins of this chapel. Or were they carried to Westminster by that
unroyal son who was so laggard in caring for the remains of his queenly
mother? I hope that Darnley does not rest beside her. For I think those
exquisite marble fingers of the effigy in Henry VII's chapel, looking I
fain believe as those of Mary looked, tapering, lovely, sinister, would
not so fold themselves in prayer without unfolding through the long
centuries.
In the old palace the most glorious days were those when James IV was
king. As the most glorious days of Scotland were those which are almost
legendary. The palace still had the grandeur that was Norman and the
grace that was early English under David. Its front, towered and
pinnacled, suggesting more fortress security than this dull château,
opened upon a great outer court that lay between the palace and the
walls. Coming down the Canongate from the castle it must have looked
very splendid to James. And yet he did not care to remain in it long.
All the Stewarts had errant souls, and they loved to wander their
kingdom through. It presented ample opportunity for adventure; scarce a
Stewart ever left Scotland. That last Prince, who flashed across
Scotland in one last Stewart sword thrust--"My friends," he said in
Holyrood the night before Prestonpans, "I have thrown away the
scabbard"--was but treading in the steps of his royal forebears, the
royal fore-errants.
In the days of James IV--we say it as one should say in the days of
Haroun al Raschid, and indeed Edinburgh was in those early years of the
Fifteen Hundreds the Bagdad of the world, and her days as well as her
nights were truly Arabian--the world must have looked much as it does on
the pleasant morning when we make our royal entry into Holyrood.
The Abbey grounds, a regal area then, and still a regality, were rich
with woodland and orchard, and terraced and flowered into southern
beauty. The red crags of the Salisbury ridge rose bold above as they do
to-day, and crowning the scene the leonine form of Arthur's Seat above
the green slopes, the lion keeping guard against the invading lion of
England! I think James must often have climbed to that height to look
forth over his domain, over his city, to watch the world, as King
Arthur--whom he did not resemble--did legendary centuries before.
It was a busy time in Edinburgh; men's hands and wits were working. In
Leith, then as now the port, then as now a separate burgh, there was
much shipping and much building of ships; King James dreamed of a navy,
and he had an admirable admiral in Sir Anthony Wood. In the castle there
was the forging of guns, the "seven sisters of Brothwick," under
direction of the king's master gunner, while Mons Meg looked on, and
perhaps saw the near terrible future when these sisters of hers should
be lost at Flodden.
In the city there was the splendid beginning of that intellectual life
which has ever been quick in Edinburgh. It was a joyous time; witness
the account from the lord High treasurer--
"On the 11th of February, 1488, we find the king bestowing nine pounds
on gentil John, the English fule; on the 10th of June we have an item to
English pipers who played to the king at the castle gate, of eight
pounds eight shillings; on the thirty-first of August Patrick Johnson
and his fellows, that playit a play to the king, in Lithgow, receives
three pounds; Jacob the lutar, the king of bene, Swanky that brought
balls to the king, twa wemen that sang to his highness, Witherspoon the
foular, that told tales and brought fowls, Tom Pringill the trumpeter,
twa fithelaris that sang Grey Steill to the king, the broken-bakkit
fiddler of St. Andrew's, Quhissilgyllourie a female dancer, Willie
Mercer who lap in the stank by the king's command."
Oh, a royal and democratic and merry time. It was Flodden that made men
old, that tragic climax to this splendour.
"In the joyous moneth tyme of June," in the pleasant garden of the
town-house of the great Earl of Angus, looking down on the still waters
of the Nor' Loch, and across the woods and moors to the glittering blue
Firth, there sat the pale stripling, Gavin Douglass, third son of
Douglass, Archibald Bell-the-Cat, late in orders at Mony musk, but now
come up to St. Giles as prior in spite of his youth, and more absorbed
in poetry than men.
"More pleased that in a barbarous age
He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishopric of fair Dunkeld."
Here I would dispute Scott. After all, Dark Ages are not always as dark
as they look to those who come after. And if the "Dark Ages" of Europe
were brilliantly luminous in Moslem capitals, Bagdad and Cordova, so
"rude Scotland" was more polished under James IV than England under
Henry VII, or France under Louis XII.
As Gavin has recorded in "The Palice of Honour," he had interview with
Venus in her proper limbo, and she had presented him with a copy of
Virgil, bidding him translate it. And so, quite boldly, before any
Englishman had ventured, and all through the winter, forgetful--except
when he wrote his prefaces of
scharp soppis of sleit and of the snypand snaw
he had worked over his translation, from the Latin into the Scottish,
and now it was nearly ready "to go to the printer," or more like, to be
shown to the king. In sixteen months he had completed thirteen books;
for he had added a book of Maphæus Vegius, without discrimination.
He was certain of the passage _facilis descensus Averni_, for Gavin was
Scotch, the time was Stewart. It ran in this wise--
"It is richt facill and eithgate, I tell thee
For to descend, and pass on down to hell,
The black zettis of Pluto, and that dirk way
Stand evir open and patent nicht and day.
But therefore to return again on hicht
And heire above recovir this airis licht
That is difficul werk, thair labour lyis,
Full few thair bene quhom hiech above the skyis,
Thare ardent vertue has raisit and upheit
Or zit quhame equale Jupiter deifyit,
Thay quhilkie bene gendrit of goddes may thy oder attane
All the mydway is wilderness unplane
Or wilsum forest; and the laithlie flude
Cocytus, with his drery bosom unrude
Flows environ round about that place."
But he was not quite certain that he had been splendid enough, and
daring enough, in his application of the royal lines--
"Hic Cæsar et omnis Iuli
Progenies, magnum caeli ventura sub axem."
So he had sent for his friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, laureate to
the sovereign. And Dunbar was never loath for a "Flyting," a scolding.
He had them on every hand, with every one, and not only those he held
with "gude maister Walter Kennedy," and published for the amusement of
the King and his Court. It was a more solemn event when the future
Bishop of Dunkeld summoned him. Though Gavin was fifteen years younger
than William, he was more serious with much study, and under the shadow
of future honours, and then, too, he was a Douglass.
So Dunbar came, striding up the Canongate between the tall inquisitive
houses--even he found them "hampered in a honeycaim of their own
making"--a very handsome figure, this Dunbar, in his red velvet robe
richly fringed with fur, which he had yearly as his reward from the
King, and which I doubt not he preferred to the solemn Franciscan robe
he had renounced when he entered the King's service.
James was away at Stirling. James was a poet also. Surely, on internal
evidence, it is the Fourth James and not the Fifth, who wrote those
charming, and improper poems, "The Gaberlunzieman" and "The Jolly
Beggar."
"He took a horn frae his side, and blew baith loud and shrill,
And four and twenty belted knights came skipping o'er the hill.
"And he took out his little knife, loot a' his duddies fa';
And he was the brawest gentleman that was amang them a'."
"And we'll gang nae mair a roving,
So late into the night;
And we'll gang nae mair a roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne'er so bright."
Dunbar, official Makar, would fain secure the criticism of young Gavin
on this joyous lament he had writ to the King in absence--
"We that here in Hevenis glory ...
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness."
And perhaps the young Gavin and the old Dunbar in their common
fellowship of poetry, would drink a glass of red wine in memory of
friends passed into death's dateless night--_Timor Mortis conturbat me_.
"He has Blind Harry and Sandy Traill
Slaine with his schour of mortall haill....
In Dunfermelyne he had done rovne
With Maister Robert Henrisoun."
And Dunbar, who was so much more human than Gavin, if older, would quote
those immortal new lines of Henryson--
"Robene sat on gude grene hill
Kepand a flok of fe,
Mirry Makyne said him till,
Robene, thow pity on me."
While Gavin, so much elder than his looks, and mindful of Scottish as
well as of Trojan history, would quote from Blind Harry in the name of
Wallace--
"I grant, he said, part Inglismen I slew
In my quarrel, me thocht nocht halff enew.
I mowyt na war but for to win our awin (own).
To God and man the rycht full weill is knawin (known)."
Then Dunbar would wrap his rich red robe about him--I hope he wore it on
ordinary days, or were there any when James the Fourth was king?--and
stride back, through the Canongate to Holyrood, back to the court, where
he would meet with young David Lindsay, of a different sort from young
Gavin Douglass. And they would chuckle over "Kitteis Confessioun," a
dialogue between Kitty and the curate, which Lindsay had just
written--and would not Dunbar be gracious and show it to the King?
Quod he, "Have ye na wrangous geir?"
Quod scho, "I staw ane pek o' beir."
Quod he, "That suld restorit be,
Tharefore delyver it to me."
Quod he, "Leve ye in lecherie?"
Quod scho, "Will Leno mowit me."
Quod he, "His wyfe that sall I tell,
To mak hir acquentance with my-sell."
Quod he, "Ken ye na heresie?"
"I wait nocht quhat that is," quod scho.
Quod he, "Hard he na Inglis bukis?"
Quod scho, "My maister on thame lukis."
Quod he, "The bischop that sall knaw,
For I am sworne that for to schaw."
Quod he, "What said he of the King?"
Quod scho, "Of gude he spak naething."
Quod he; "His Grace of that sall wit,
And he sall lose his lyfe for it."
Perhaps Warbeck was listening, Perkin Warbeck who pretended to be Duke
of York, pretended to the English crown. So Scotland harboured him, and
Holyrood was hospitable to him. James married him to Lady Jane Gordon,
and for years, until he wearied of it, maintained a protectorate over
this pinchbeck Pretender.
I am certain that Dom Pedro de Ayala did not linger in the court to
gossip with Dunbar, or with the hangers-on. Dom Pedro had come up from
Spain on a strange ambassadorial errand, to offer to James in marriage a
Spanish princess, knowing well that there might be no Spanish princess
(Maria was betrothed to Portugal); but no doubt believing that there
ought to be, since James was slow in marrying, and surely a Spanish
princess would best mate this royalest of the Stewarts. Dom Pedro better
liked the extravagant kingly court at Holyrood than the niggardly court
at Windsor. He wrote home to Ferdinand and Isabella, "The kingdom is
very old, and very noble, and the king possessed of great virtues, and
no defects worth mentioning." No defects! Certainly not. James had the
qualities of his defects, and these were royal. James could speak--not
keep still--in eight languages, and could and did say "all his prayers."
So Dom Pedro reports to his Most Catholic Majesty.
When he was thirty years old, this King Errant married, not the
hypothetical daughter of Spain, but the substantial youthful Margaret
Tudor, aged fourteen. The Scottish king would none of the alliance for
years; James preferred hypothetical brides and errant affairs. But
the English king saw the advantage and pressed it. He had united the
roses, red and white, of England; he would fain join the thistle to the
rose.
[Illustration: MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.]
So James, in August, 1503, journeyed out to Dalkeith, whither Margaret
had come. He returned to "hys bed at Edinborg varey well countent of so
fayr a meetyng." A few days later, Margaret made her entry into
Edinburgh, James having met her, gallantly dressed in "a jacket of
crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold." Leaving his restive
charger, "mounting on the pallefroy of the Qwene, and the said Qwene
behind hym, so rode throw the towne of Edinburgh." Their route lay
through the Grassmarket up to the Castle Hill, and down the High Street
and the Canongate, to the Abbey. Here they were received by the
Archbishop of St. Andrews. Next day they were married by the Archbishop
of Glasgow, the Archbishop of York joining in the solemn and magnificent
celebration.
It is the most splendid moment in Edinburgh history, within the Abbey
and the palace, and within the city. The Town Cross ran with wine, the
high _lands_ were hung with banners and scarlet cloth, and morality
plays were performed before the people. In the palace there was a royal
scene. And our friend, William Dunbar, Kynges Makar, read his allegory
of "The Thrissl and the Roiss," which is still worth reading, if Chaucer
is worth reading.
But, at night, in the royal apartment, the night before the wedding,
perhaps in the fragment of the old palace which remains, the gallant
king played to the little princess upon the virginal; and then, on
bended knee and with unbonneted head, he listened while she played and
sang to him. Out of the dark of the time it is a shining scene; and out
of the splendour of the moment it brings a note of tenderness.
Another decade, another August, and the Boroughmoor (where now run the
links of Burntland) was covered with the white of a thousand tents,
Scotland was gathered for war, the "ruddy lion ramped in gold" floated
war-like over all, and James and all Scotland prepared to march down to
Flodden, heeding not the warning which had sounded at midnight in
ghostly voice at the Town Cross; a warning no doubt arranged by
Margaret, never a Stewart, always a Tudor. And--all Scotland was turned
into a house of mourning.
Half a century later the history of Scotland came to a climax, and Mary
Stewart came to Holyrood; that queen who then and ever since held half
the world in thrall, like another Iseult. The covenanted world has
rejected her, as no doubt it would reject Iseult.
Shrouded in a gray "haar" from off the North Sea, rising like a Venus
out of the mists of the sea, Mary Stewart, Dowager of France, Queen of
Scotland, Heiress of England, came unto her own. And, her own received
her, and, received her not.
The castle hanging high in air no longer hung there. The palace lying
low on the plain was not there, on that August 19, 1561. There was
nothing but what was near at hand; Mary could not see a hundred feet
into her kingdom. In truth she arrived at port a week before the ship
was expected--and Mary also flashed through her kingdom; witness the
ride across the Marches to the Hermitage, and the ride through the North
to punish Huntley. Hers was a restless soul, a restless body.
On her return to the kingdom she was accompanied by a great retinue,
three of her French uncles of Guise and of Lorraine, her four Maries,
and many ambassadors. It was a suspended moment in the world, the sixth
decade of the sixteenth century. And nowhere were affairs in such
delicate balance, or so like to swing out of balance as in Scotland;
where religion, sovereignty, feudalism, morality, were swaying dizzily.
So all the world sent their keenest ambassadors to observe, to foresee
if possible, to report.
Yet Mary rode through the mists.
"Si grand brouillard," says the Sieur de Brantome, that gossipy
chronicler, and Mary and her French courtiers and Scotch Maries, rode
through the "haar," from Leith up whatever was the Leith Walk of that
day to Holyrood.
The palace must have rung with French chatter, of these wondering and
inquisitive and critical folk; for all the cultured world was French in
those days, and Mary and her Maries had been only five or six when they
left stormy Scotland for the pleasant smiling land of France.
Not for long was she permitted to believe she had brought France back
with her and there was no reality in Scotland but as she made it.
Reformation pressed in upon her, even through the windows of this turret
where again she seems to listen to that prophetic and pious serenade,
Scottish protestant psalms accompanied by fiddles and sung to a French
Catholic queen. "Vile fiddles and rebecks," complains Brantome,
hesitating to call vile the mob of five hundred gathered in the Scotch
mists; but they sang "so ill and with such bad accord that there could
be nothing worse. Ah, what music, and what a lullaby for the night!"
The rooms of Mary are still inclosed, the walls still stand about them,
and a romantic care withholds the ravages of time from those tapestries
and silken bed hangings, dark crimson damask, which Mary drew about her
on that night of her return. And here hangs a picture of Queen
Elizabeth, authentic, Tudoresque, which did not hang here when Mary
returned; but what dark shadow of Elizabeth lurked behind these
hangings! The very guard to whom you protest the picture understands--"I
think it an insult to her memory."
It is here that Queen Mary still reigns. All the old palace was burned,
carelessly, by Cromwell's soldiers, at what time men were caring nothing
for palaces, and less for royalty. But, fate was royal, was Jacobite,
and this gray turret of the northwest corner a building of James V on a
foundation of James IV--perhaps where he had listened in the evening to
Margaret and her virginal--was saved from the wrath of the Commonwealth.
Within these very walls Mary played on the virginal, perhaps on the
rebeck, and many sought to know her stops--"you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me."
Here she was loved, as she still is loved. Here she made love, the
mystery!--as always. Here she flashed those bright eyes on courtiers and
commoners and straightway these fell into bondage--the Stewarts never
drew the line of division. Here those eyes battled with John Knox as he
met her in Dialogues, as John has faithfully recorded. And here those
bright eyes filled with a storm of tears at his denunciation; but Knox
felt their power. Here she met Darnley, in the chapel married him, and
Knox called after dinner to declare that the Reformation did not
approve. Here by the very stairs of the turret Darnley led the murderers
on Rizzio, from his private apartments to hers. (I find it fit that Ker
of Fawdonside, one of the murderers, should have married later the widow
of Knox.) Mary was held here a prisoner; they would "cut her into
collops and cast her over the wall" if she summoned help. But Mary could
order that the blood stains of the fifty-six wounds of Rizzio should
remain "ane memoriall to quychen her revenge." They quicken our thought
of Mary to-day--if we accept them. From Holyrood Mary went to Kirk o'
Field on a Sunday night in February to visit Darnley who lay "full
of the small pox." He had come back from Bothwell castle on Mary's
urging; but he had gone to Bothwell to escape her revenge for Rizzio.
She returned to Holyrood--"the Queen's grace gang and with licht torches
up the Black Friar's Wynd"--where the wedding festivities of a member of
her household were in progress. And, I doubt not, devoted to Mary as I
am, that she was the merriest of the company.
[Illustration: _Bothwell Castle_]
Then the dark.
Then, at two in morning, an explosion that shook all Edinburgh, that
astonished the world, that still reverberates through the world.
Then--the dark.
A marriage, at two in the morning, a flight to Borthwick, a meeting at
Carberry, one more night in Edinburgh, in a house as mean as that of
Kirk o' Field, a day at Holyrood, and a forced ride with ruffian nobles,
Lindsay and Ruthven on each hand, to Loch Leven, thirty miles in the
night of June 16, 1567--and Edinburgh and Holyrood and the Crown of
Scotland know her no more.
"Helen's lips are drifting dust,
Ilion is consumed in rust."
And Mary. And Holyrood.
There is one more Holyrood scene descending from this. On a Saturday
evening, March 26, 1603, the son of Mary, the King of Scotland, supped
with the Queen, perhaps in that small supper room where Rizzio was
supping with a queen; and they had retired. "The palace lights were
going out, one by one." And Sir Robert Carey, three days out from
London, clattered into the courtyard, the King was roused, Sir Robert
knelt before him--
"Queen Elizabeth is dead, and Your Majesty is King of England!"
James I of England, James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, son of Darnley,
son of the ninth generation from Bruce, The Bruce. The "auld enemy" is
finally defeated; and to borrow again from Rosaline Masson, "the lights
of Holyrood went out, one by one."
In the long picture gallery of this dull modern palace, nothing of which
either Mary or James ever saw, there hangs a series of portraits, one
hundred pictures of Scottish kings, painted under order of Charles II in
1680, by the Fleming, DeWitt, who agreed to furnish the pictures in two
years for one hundred and twenty pounds. They begin with Fergus I, 330
B. C. They are the kings who passed before the prophetic vision of
Banquo. Enough to frighten Macbeth!
One brief brilliant ghost of Stewart glory returns. In this gallery was
held the ball of Prince Charles Edward, described in "Waverley."
And after this theatric moment, and after the Prince had defeated the
"royalists" at Falkirk, Hardy's dragoons slashed these pictures of
Scottish kings, since the Prince they could not reach.
_Princes Gardens_
There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so
enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I
take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a
common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the
air.
Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens.
I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights
that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern
night never quite descends, but a romantic gray twilight veils
everything, and evokes more than everything. For any lengthened visit in
Edinburgh I dare not inhabit a hotel room on the Garden side, since all
my time would be spent at the window. For a shorter visit, such a room
lengthens the day, defies the closed gate of the Gardens.
It was from such a window as this, "From a Window in Princes Street"
that Henley looked forth--
"Above the crags that fade and gloom
Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat;
Ridged high against the evening bloom
The Old Town rises, street on street;
With lamps bejeweled, straight ahead,
Like rampird walls the houses lean,
All spired and domed and turreted,
Sheer to the valley's darkling green;
Ranged in mysterious array,
The Castle menacing and austere,
Looms through the lingering last of day;
And in the silver dusk you hear,
Reverberated from crag and scar,
Bold bugles blowing points of war."
Princes Street is, I believe, not a mile long, a half-mile the part
which is gardened. It is the loveliest street in the world. It seems
infinite instead of half-mile.
Of course to the loyal American that praise is received half-way. For he
remembers Riverside Drive with the majesty of the Hudson, North Shore
Drive with the shoreless infinity of Lake Michigan, Summit Avenue with
the deep gorge of the Upper Mississippi, Quebec and its Esplanade.
But even these "handsome streets" cannot match Princes for history and
beauty in one, for the old and the new, for the Old Town and the New
Town.
[Illustration: PRINCES STREET.]
Princes Street, to speak briefly of its geography, is a broad
thoroughfare, with a medley of buildings on the north side, but uniform
in gray stone, where hotels and shops furnish the immediate life of the
city. There are electric cars running the full length of the street; and
it is the only street I know which is not spoiled through the presence
of these necessary carriers.
There are cabs, and there are sight-seeing cars, from which in high
advantage, and in half a day, you can see everything in Edinburgh.
Yes, actually. I who speak to you have done it, partly for the
greed of seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, and partly for the
comment of these Scotch coach drivers and guards, who are not merely
Scottish but the essence of Scotland. I shall never forget how
an American traveler--of course they are all Americans in these
tally-hos--commenting on the driver's remark that the "Old Queen" wanted
to build a palace where Donaldson's Hospital now stands and she was
refused--"but she was the Queen!" Nevertheless, asserted Mr. Sandy
Coachman, "She was refused." Not so in the old days of Queenship.
The entire life of Edinburgh, of Scotland, streams through this broad
straight street.
On the opposite side lie the Gardens, stretching their way parallel with
the street, a wide, green-lawned, tree-forested purlieu, terraced and
flowered, with a "sunken garden" near the Castle-side, through which
trains are conveyed. The smoke, so much lamented, does often rest with
grace and gray loveliness in the hollows of the place, so that one does
not miss the waters of the Nor' Loch that once flowed here as moat.
Above rises the castle in greater majesty than from any other point.
Down from the castle runs the ridge of the High Street, and the high
_lands_ with flags of washing hanging out the windows which answer the
flags red and leoninely rampant, on the buildings of Princes Street. The
crown of St. Giles and the spire of the Tronkirk hanging above all.
To the west is St. John's, where in the graveyard Raeburn is buried; and
old St. Cuthbert's, where in the graveyard De Quincey is buried. There
are Raeburns in the Royal gallery which stands on the island dividing
the Gardens, and there are many Raeburns here and there, in private
rooms of banks and other institutions, rare Raeburns with that casual,
direct, human look he could give men and women. The galleries are worth
a visit both for their best, and for their not-best. There are statues
of famous Scotsmen on the terraces, and of course the Scott monument,
beautifully Gothic, and as sacred as a shrine.
There are goods to be bought in the shops, pebbles and cairngorms in
jewelry and kickshaws of that ilk; rugs and plaidies, sashes and ties,
and Scott and Stevenson books bound in the Royal Stewart silk. Unhappy
the traveler who has not provided himself beforehand with a tartan.
Almost every one can if he will. And there is always the college of
heraldry to help one out. Or the audacity of choosing the tartan you
like best; an affront, I assure you, to all good Scots. For however
unlovely a Scotch tartan may be in the eyes of the world--nominations
are invidious--in the eyes of the clansman there is nothing so "right"
as his own particular tartan. He would not exchange it for a Douglass or
a Stewart.
These tartans have exerted a very marked effect on the Scottish sense of
taste. On Princes Street you may not find such richly dressed women as
on Regent Street, but the harmony of colouring will please you better.
While no doubt this is due to the fact that for several hundred years
the Scottish taste has had the benefit of intimate association with the
French, it can also be traced to the longer centuries during which
tartans have brought an understanding of colour harmonies. Because there
has been this love of colour, there has come with it vanity. With vanity
there has come that rare ability of the women of the race to maintain a
unity, a harmony, a complete relationship between skirts and waists.
There is no country in Europe where the "act of union" at the feminine
waistline is so triumphant as in Scotland, particularly in Edinburgh.
The universal American achievement has been equaled in Europe only in
Scotland.
There are teashops which invite you in, when the wind sweeps too
harshly, or the rain beats itself into more than a Scotch mist, or even
when the sun shines too hot. There is a garden tea place on top of a
high hotel which confronts the Castle. Even in this Far North there is
much open air dining, and more especially open air tea-ing. I am not
certain that Dr. Johnson would have much cared for this modern tea room,
where he might review the world. It seems that he drank much tea when
he was the guest of Boswell, especially when he was the guest of Mrs.
Boswell, in James Court the other side the Gardens. "Boswell has
handsome and very spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of
the house, and the other four stories high." And Boswell says of
Johnson, "My wife had tea ready for him, which it is well known he
delights to drink at all times, particularly when sitting up late." From
this roof tea garden one can see James's Court at the top of the Mound,
although the Boswell lodgings are burned down. And one can almost see
Holyrood, where tea was introduced by James VII.
After you have shopped and had your tea, and the past retakes
possession, you will return to the green valley of the Gardens, to
forget the clang of the tram cars, to look up at the great Castle Hill,
green until it meets the buff-coloured stone and the buff-coloured
buildings that seem to grow out of the stone, if it is a clear day;
while the ramparts seem temporarily to have blossomed with red
geraniums, if red coats are leaning over the edge.
A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days,
and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might
turn to a purple wonder, and the deep blue shadows sink over it, and
the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in
truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But
it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the
gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. In
Edinburgh the gray is luminous, a shifting playing colour, with deep
shadows turning to deep blue, with rifts or thinnings of the cloud,
through which yellow and brown glimmers make their way.
Above all, Edinburgh is never monotonous. That is perhaps its charm, a
something that every feminine city knows; Edinburgh is feminine, and
Paris, and Venice, and New Orleans.
And there hangs the castle, sometimes in midair--
"Hast thou seen that lordly castle, that castle by the sea?
Golden and red above it the clouds float gorgeously."
Sometimes standing stalwart and stern, a challenge to daring, a
challenge to history. That farther edge of the Castle Hill as it is
silhouetted against the west sky--if you walk around on Lothian Street
you can see the full face of the Rock--has invited many an adventurer,
both from within and without.
It was down that steep hill that the sons of Margaret carried their
queen mother, when the hosts of Donalbane were besieging the place, and
a Scotch "haar" rolling in from the sea and shutting off the castle
enabled the little procession to pass safely with its precious burden,
and swiftly down to the Queen's ferry, and across to Dunfermline.
Up the face of that Rock when The Bruce did not hold this stronghold
there stole in the night of a thirteenth century winter--it must have
been much colder, even in Edinburgh, in the thirteenth century--a picked
band of men; picked by Randolph afterward Earl of Moray, and led by
Frank, who, years before when he had been a soldier in the castle
garrison and night leave was forbidden, used to make his way down this
cliff to visit a bonnie lassie in the West Bow. Now, on a wind-swept
night, which can be very windy around that castle profile--the wind has
not abated since the thirteenth century--Frank led the remembered way. I
wonder if he remembered the lassie. But his footing was sure. Once, it
is true, the sentinel seemed to have discovered them. But it was only
the boast the sentinel makes to the night when he makes his last round.
The men huddled against the face of the Rock. Then they moved onward.
The ladders were too short to reach the rampart. Two were bound
together. The men over, the cry "A Moray!" rings in the castle. Scotland
has won it again.
Another century, and James III is king. This least royal of the
Stewarts, jealous of his more royal brother, locked the Duke of Albany
in the castle, and felt secure. But the Duke had friends. A French
clipper came into Leith. It brought wine to Albany, and the wine cask
contained a rope. Inviting his guardians to sup with him, he plied them
with heated wine, perhaps drugged wine, then, the dagger. Albany's
servant insisted on going down the rope first. It was short, he fell the
rest of the distance. Albany hurried back for the sheets from his bed,
made his safe way down. He carried the servant man all the way to
Leith--he had just "whingered" the guard--found the boat, and safety,
and France.
Up the Rock, in Covenanting days, stole Claverhouse, the Bonnie Dundee,
to a secret conference with the Duke of Gordon, hoping to win him away
to Stewart loyalty and the North.
I cannot remember that any of Scott's characters went this way. He
thought it "scant footing for a cat." But Stevenson knew the way.
Perhaps not actually, but he sent more than one of his characters up
or down the Rock--St. Ives with a rope that was long enough to reach.
[Illustration: JOHN GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE, VISCOUNT DUNDEE.]
_Calton Hill_
Perhaps the best view of Edinburgh--only perhaps, for each view differs,
and you have not seen the whole city unless you have seen it from the
various vantage points--is that from the Calton Hill. For a very good
reason. The Hill itself is negligible enough, although it is impossible
to understand Edinburgh, to understand Scotland, unless you have looked
on the architectural remnants on this Hill, and considered them
philosophically. But, as Stevenson said--"Of all places for a view, the
Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the castle, which you
lose from the castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from
Arthur's Seat." An excellent reason, which also places the castle and
Arthur's Seat.
Calton Hill does not tower so high over the city as these other two
points; one may still look up to Arthur's Seat, one may look across to
the castle. Yet, the city lies near. Yet, the country rolls out to the
Firth, and out to the Pentlands. Perhaps a gray-sea haze dulls the far
edge of the far Kingdom of Fife. Perhaps a blue haze hangs over the
Pentlands. Perhaps a smoke-cloud makes a nearer sky for the town itself,
this Auld Reekie. Not only perhaps, but very probably. There are clear
days in Edinburgh. They are to be treasured. There is no air more
stimulating in all the world. October sometimes slips into the other
months of the year, fills the air with wine, clears the air of filament.
But, not often, not often for the tourist from beyond seas who makes
Edinburgh in the summer. But still it is possible from Calton Hill to
catch the farthest glory of the encircling hills, and the near glory of
the ever glorious city.
The Hill itself is a place of monuments, and a very pretentious place.
Also, very absurd. I suppose it is possible to be of two minds about the
remnant of the Parthenon which stands so conspicuously on the highest
plateau, a construction dating back to that royal time when George the
Fourth came to this northern capital, and was--alas!--received as though
he were Bonnie Prince Charlie himself; and was received--again alas!--by
Sir Walter clad in a Campbell plaid, and as loyal to the Regent, the
florid Florizel, as he had been to Prince Charles in the "Waverleys."
Because of all these loyalties this never finished monument, with its
twelve columns and architrave spread above, looks sufficiently pathetic,
and sufficiently absurd. "A very suitable monument to certain national
characteristics," said a later Scots writer, who perhaps never ceased
being a Jacobite.
There are monuments; one to Dugald Stewart, and the visitor not
philosophical is apt to ask, Who was Dugald Stewart? There is a memorial
to Burns whose friend Willie that brewed a peck o' malt lies in the Old
Calton burying ground near by. Hume lies there, too, and Dr. John Brown,
and Stevenson's dead.
"There on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the House of Kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the dust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence."
There is a monument to Lord Nelson. And looking as though he belonged
there is a bronze figure of Abraham Lincoln.
All this lies about, with casual sheep cropping the grass.
But, there lies the city. And there lies the country.
To the south rises Arthur's Seat, the lion. The much castellated jail,
is beneath you, another absurd elaborate building, a castle after
castle-days. Farther a-city lies Holyrood, with the ruined abbey, the
Queen Mary wing, and the scarlet patch of the sentinel moving to and fro
and guarding all this vanished greatness. Nothing more appeals than this
sentinel-watch of the ghosts of the past.
Turn but a little and the Old Town lies before you, the castle splendid,
still the guardian, the long ridge of the High Street with its jagged
buildings that from here rise almost to the purple edge of the hilly
Pentland background, with the spire of the Tolbooth and the crown of St.
Giles breaking against the sky. And down at the foot of the vantage Hill
stretches Princes Street with the Scott monument rising athwart the haze
of city and sky.
From the north edge of Calton there is a more empty panorama, but still
significant. Now it is bound in with tenements high and thick, but in
the golden days it was a steep hillside leading down to a jousting
ground. Tradition has it that Bothwell launched his horse down its
almost-precipice, and so entered the tilting ground, while ladies'
bright eyes rained influence and gave the prize; but most glowing were
the eyes of Mary.
Beyond, the suburbs fill in the two miles that stretch to Leith, and to
the Firth, glittering out to the far sea.
At night, if you have no fear of hobgoblins or of hooligans, Calton Hill
is an experience. It is a still place, the silence the greater because
the city lies so near, and looks so busy with its twinkling lights. A
gulf of gloom lies between. The night is velvet black, a drop curtain
against which is thrown the star-pricked map of the city. One can well
believe how the young Stevenson, in those romantic days when he carried
a lantern under his jacket, used to climb this hill venturesomely, and
with the dog in "Chanticler," exclaim, "I shall never forget the first
night I lapped up the stars." It is something to lap stars from the
black pool which is Edinburgh by night.
If you have, happily, lived in a high city, Boston, Seattle, Duluth,
Denver, St. Paul, San Francisco, with water and land combined, you, too,
have lingered upon a heaven-kissed hill on such a night as this, and
Edinburgh seems native.
Scott, of course, must have known Calton Hill, although Salisbury Crags
under Arthur's Seat, with its more feasible promenade, better appealed
to him when he was writing the "Waverleys." There is an American who has
written of the Hill, a young inland American whom the gods loved to an
early death. I remember hearing Arthur Upson talk of days and nights on
the Calton, and his sonnet catches the note--
"High and alone I stood on Calton Hill
Above the scene that was so dear to him
Whose exile dreams of it made exile dim.
October wooed the folded valleys till
In mist they blurred, even as our eye upfill
Under a too-sweet memory; spires did swim,
And gables, rust-red, on the gray sea's brim--
But on these heights the air was soft and still,
Yet, not all still; an alien breeze will turn
Here, as from bournes in aromatic seas,
As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearn
With incense of rich earthly reveries.
Vanish the isles: Mist, exile, searching pain,
But the brave soul is freed, is home again."