AN OLD SCOTTISH MATRON.
Can Christian love, can patriot zeal,
Can love of blessed charity--
Can piety the discord heal,
Or stanch the death feud's enmity?
_Scott._
Lady Alison of Fawside had been a beauty in her youth, when the stout
and buirdly knight Sir John had wooed and won her, in the Castle of
Calzean; and in memory of this alliance, the cognisance of the
Kennedys, a chevron _gules_, between three cross-crosslets, fitched
sable, may still be traced on the roof of the hall; but in the year
when our story opens few traces remained of those charms which
Huchown Clerk of Tranent, the old macker (_i.e._ troubadour) extolled
in his poems, and for which he was rewarded yearly by a silver chain
an ell long, three French crowns, and a camlet gown lined with
Flemish silk, until his death, which happened about the close of the
reign of King James V.
The widow was of great stature, yet her figure was graceful, noble,
and commanding; her features were fine; her nose was straight; and
her black eyebrows, which met above it, together with the peculiar
lines of her mouth and chin, expressed firmness and unflinching
resolution. Her complexion was deadly pale. Her once-black hair was
grey and escaped in grizzled locks from under her escallop or
shell-shaped cap, which was made of thick point-lace, like her
close-quilled ruff and ruffles. Her attire was always a black damask
dress, buttoned by small silver knobs, from the lower peak of her
long stomacher, up to her ruff. She wore a rosary and cross of
ebony, and a black locket containing the hair of her late husband and
his slaughtered son; but no other ornament. Her pocket sun-dial, or
perpetual almanac, a brass plate inscribed, "This table beginneth in
1540, and so on for ever," with her keys (and huge antique keys they
were), her scissors and huswife hung at her girdle; and she used a
long ivory-mounted cane to assist her in walking, and as gossips
averred, wherewith to chastise her lacqueys and serving-men. Her
busk was of hard wood, and contained a bodkin. This was literally a
dagger seven inches long, and worn for defence in those stirring and
perilous times.
Four-and-thirty years ago this stern woman, without shedding a tear,
had seen her husband and all his kinsmen ride forth on that invasion
of England which terminated at Flodden; but she welcomed him with
transports of joy when he returned. Alas! old Westmains, covered
with wounds, was the sole representative of forty stout men of
Lothian, well horsed, with jack and spear, who had followed Fawside's
pennon to the field. After this catastrophe, they had a few years
peace with the Hamiltons of Preston, whose men had all escaped, being
a portion of those many thousand Scots who melted away a week before
the battle, and left King James with his knights and nobles to
confront the foe alone.
Lady Alison was a Scottish matron of a very "old school" indeed, and
possessed a stern and Spartan spirit incident to the times of war and
tumult, raid and feud, amid which she had been born and bred. The
annals of her country record the names of many such, who, in
extremity of danger, possessed that resolute spirit with which Scott
has gifted his imaginary Helen MacGregor, and the coolness of the
Lady of Harden, who, when the larder was bare, placed a pair of Ripon
spurs in her husband's plate at dinner, as a hint to mount and ride
for England, where the fat beeves browsed on the green hills of
Cumberland. There was black Agnes Randolph, the Countess of March,
who, for five months defended her castle of Dunbar against the troops
of Edward III., and foiled them in the end; there was the Lady of
Edinglassie, who, after her husband had been slain by the Laird of
Invermarkie, had the head of the latter cut off, in September, 1584,
and conveying it "by its hoar locks" to Edinburgh, cast it at the
feet of the startled James VI., as a token that she could avenge her
own wrongs without appeal to Lowland judge or jury; there was the
Lady Johnstone, of Annandale, who, after the battle of the
Dryffesands, where, in 1593, seven hundred Maxwells fell beneath the
spears and axes of her clan, is accused of dashing out the Lord
Maxwell's brains with her own white hand, when she found that brave,
humane, and courteous noble lying mortally wounded on the field, and
when his silver locks were exposed by the loss of his helmet, which
had been struck off in the _mêlée_; and this terrible deed she is
said to have perpetrated with the ponderous iron key of Lochmaben
Kirk, at the old thorn tree on the green holm of Dryffe. There was
also that grim patriot, the old Marchioness of Hamilton, who, when
her son entered the Firth of Forth, in 1639, at the head of six
thousand Englishmen, rode to the beach with a pair of pistols at her
saddlebow, vowing to God that she would shoot him as a traitor and a
parracide, if he dared to land on Scottish ground under a foreign
flag--a hint, which the recreant marquis, her son, fully understood
and obeyed.
We believe few men now-a-days would relish having such fiery "and
termagant Scots," as the partners of their bed and board; but the
spirit and nature of these women were the development of the age in
which they lived--an age when every house was a barred or moated
garrison,--when every man was a trained soldier, and when a day
seldom passed in city or hamlet without blood being shed in public
fray or private feud; but these grim matrons, and such as these, were
the mothers of the brave who led the line of battle at Ancrumford and
Pinkey-cleugh, at Sark and Arkinhome, at Chevy Chase, Bannockburn,
Haldenrig, and Northallerton, and on a thousand other fields, where
Scottish men without regret--yea, perhaps, with stern joy--gave their
swords, and lives, and dearest blood for the mountain-land that bore
them.
It was this feudal and warlike spirit which made the resolute Lady
Alison prosecute the quarrel against Preston with such determination
and vindictiveness.
She wept in secret for her slaughtered son; but his death seemed to
be only one other item in that heavy debt of hatred and thirst for
vengeance which every drop of blood in the veins of Claude Hamilton
could not assuage, even if poured out at her feet--a debt which she
had no object in life but to pay with all the interest of her stern
soul.
Tiger-like, she panted with eagerness for the return of her second
son, Florence, doubting not that when the death of his father and
brother were added to the old and inborn hatred of the House of
Preston, his younger and more skilful hand could never fail in the
combat to which she had resolved the slayer should be invited and
goaded by every taunt, if he proved unwilling.
To her confessor, the old vicar of Tranent, who strove in vain to
soothe this unchristian spirit, she would say fiercely,--"Peace! am I
to forego my just feud at the behest of a book-i'-the-bosom monk? I
trow not! I am a Kennedy of Colzean. Oh that this boy were back to
me, that he might unkennel and slay the old wolf who bydes in yonder
tower,--even as his ancestor slew the wolf of Gulane." "_He_ has no
son," she was wont to say with savage exultation, while grinding her
strong white teeth and beating the floor with her cane; "his wife
left him childless--he has no cub to transmit his blood with the feud
to future times; so with him it must end. The sword of my Florence
will end the strife with Preston's godless career and grasping
race--black dool and pyne be on them!"
"But he has a niece," urged the white-haired vicar gently.
"A niece----" a
"His ward and heiress,--a ward of the crown, too."
"Mean ye that moppet the Countess of Yarrow, whose father drew the
sword in pure wantonness on the day my husband fell?"
"Yes, Claude Hamilton's sister was an earl's wife."
"Why tell me that? what care I for his niece's coronet? We were
belted knights and landed barons ere surnames were known in the
North,--yea, a hundred years and more before a Hamilton was heard of.
And this niece--what of her?"
"She may marry."
"Well--well."
"And her husband may--though Heaven forfend it--take up the feud."
"Had she a hundred husbands, we'll find cold iron for them all,
priest--and in the sword is all my trust."
"Alas, lady! trust alone in God," replied the vicar, shaking his
head; "He giveth much, and yet hath nought the less."
"Oh that my brave bairn were back. The French are skilful masters of
the sword; and Anne of Albany promised me that Florence should have
the best; that his hand should--if my Willie's failed--redress the
wrongs of ages."
But, as already related, several days elapsed after the arrival of
the ship, yet there came to Fawside tower no tidings of her son,
whom, as he bears a part of some importance in our history, we must
now introduce to the reader.