THE REGENCY OF ARRAN.
Yet if the gods demand her, let her sail,--
Our cares are only for the public weal:
Let me be deem'd the hateful cause of all,
And suffer, rather than my people fall.
The prize, the beauteous prize, I will resign,
So dearly valued, and so justly mine.
_Iliad_, i.
It has already been stated that the Regent of Scotland at this time
was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, better known amid the civil wars
and woes of future years as the Duke of Chatelherault, a fief in
Poitou, and formerly capital of the duchy of Chatelheraudois. His
father was the first who obtained the earldom of Arran, and his
mother was Janet Beaton, of Creich, niece of the unfortunate cardinal
who was slain in the Castle of St. Andrew's. The French dukedom he
received for the spirit with which he maintained Scottish and French
interests against the valour of England and the machinations of that
degraded and anti-national party the Scottish peers of King Henry's
faction, a few of whom have already been introduced to the reader in
the preceding chapter.
The little queen was a child in her fifth year; and Henry VIII., that
wily and ferocious monarch, during his latter days left nothing
untried, by subtle diplomacy, by open war, by hired assassins, and by
bands of foreign _condottieri_ leagued with his own troops, to remove
from his path all obstruction to a marriage between his son Edward
and the young queen of Scotland. He proposed to Arran, if he would
deliver her person into his blood-imbrued hands, to assist him with
all the power of England and Ireland to make for himself a new
kingdom beyond the Forth, and to give his daughter Elizabeth, the
future queen of England, in marriage to Arran's heir, the young Lord
James Hamilton, then captain of the Scottish Archers in France; but
the Regent knew how little Henry's boasts would avail him at the foot
of the Grampians, or had patriotism enough to reject a proposal so
wild and so disastrous with the disdain it merited; and so, in time,
the English Bluebeard was gathered to his wives and to his fathers,
bequeathing to the Duke of Somerset, Protector of England during the
minority of Edward VI., the pleasant task of arranging, by fair means
or foul, a matrimonial alliance between that prince and the little
queen of "the rugged land of spearmen."
Cardinal Beaton, long a faithful and a formidable enemy to Scottish
treason and to English guile, had perished by the hands of assassins,
whose secret projects were better understood at Windsor than at
Holyrood. The invasion of Scotland, and the almost total destruction
of Edinburgh--the burnings and the devastations in the fertile
Lothians by Lord Hertford's army, with the rout of the English at the
bloody battle of Ancrum--ended for a time all hope of Somerset ever
accomplishing the perilous work so rashly bequeathed to him by his
grasping and imperious master; yet, being a brave and high-spirited
noble, he still continued the attempt in secret, as he could never
despair of having the nation ultimately betrayed while that faithless
class, its nobility, existed.
The Scottish peers were now, as usual, divided into two factions, one
who adhered to the old treaty with France, and the other--the basest,
most venal, and corrupt--composed of those who urged the advantages
of the matrimonial alliance between the infant Queen Mary and the boy
King Edward. These men, though bearing names of old historic memory,
the
"Seed of those who scorn'd
To stoop the neck to wide imperial Rome,"
were mean enough to receive in secret sums of money, first from Henry
of England, secondly from the Protector Somerset, and by written
obligations to bind themselves to further the selfish and aggressive
schemes of both; while, in the same spirit of political perfidy, they
gave to the Scottish Regent Arran the most solemn assurances of their
entire concurrence with him, in his conservative measures for obeying
the will of the late King James V.--whose noble heart they
broke,--and in defending the realm of his daughter against all
foreign enemies, more especially their ancient foemen of the south.
On one hand they openly announced their resolution to support the
Church of their fathers, and the faith that came from Rome; on the
other, they secretly leagued with those who slew the primate of
Scotland in his archiepiscopal castle at St. Andrews, and plotted for
the plunder of the temporalities.
The noble Earl of Huntly, with Arran and the more patriotic--the
unblemished and unbribed,--looked towards France for a husband for
their queen, and for troops to enable them to resist the combined
strength of Cassilis, Glencairn, Kilmaurs, and more than two hundred
titled Scottish traitors, when backed by the military power of
England, and those Spanish and German mercenaries under Don Pedro de
Gamboa and Conrad Baron of Wolfenstein, whom the Protector maintained
in Norham, Carlisle, and other strongholds near the border.
The weakness of Arran's government, the feeble power of the
newly-instituted courts of law, the licentious lives of a hierarchy
whose Church and power were nodding to their fall, the gradual
declension of an ancient faith, and the dawn of a new one divested of
all that was striking or attractive to the imagination, and which,
from its grim novelty, the people neither loved nor respected at
heart,--all tended to arrest the rapid progress which Scotland had
made in art and science, music and poetry, architecture, literature,
printing, and commerce, under the fatherly care of the six last kings
of the Stuart race. Hence there was generated, about the epoch of
our story, a greater barbarism among the feudal aristocracy and their
military followers, all of whom were ever but too fierce, turbulent,
and prone to bloodshed. Thus outrages, feuds, raids, and combats,
the siege and storm of castles and towers, were mere matters of
every-day life; and a fight of a few hundred men-at-arms a side, with
lance and buckler, sword and arquebuse, in the streets of Edinburgh,
Perth, or Aberdeen, occasioned less excitement among their warlike
citizens than an election row, a casual fire, or a runaway horse, in
these our jogtrot days of peace societies and Sabbatarian twaddle.
The more ancient laws of Scotland, by which a man's life might be
redeemed for nine times twenty cattle, or when for shedding blood
south of the Scottish Sea (_i.e._ Firth of Forth) a penalty of
twenty-five shillings was levied, or when, for committing the same
offence north of the same sea the value of six cattle was
exacted--had now been succeeded by a regular code of stricter
statutes, to be enforced by regular courts of law and justice. Yet
blood was shed and life taken more often than before, in sudden
quarrel and old hereditary feud, daily--yea, hourly,--without other
punishment or remedy than such as the nearest clansman or kinsman
might inflict with the sword and torch--and these were seldom idle.
The times were wild and perilous!
All men wore arms, and used them on the most trivial occasions. Even
James V., so famous for his justice and lenity, when a boy in his
eleventh year, with his little Parmese dagger, stabbed a warder at
the gate of Stirling Castle, because the man would not let him out to
ramble in the town.
Hence such outrages as the murder of Cardinal Beaton in his own
castle, the slaughter of Sir John Fawside by Claude Hamilton of
Preston, on the skirts of Gladsmuir. The besieging of John Lord
Lindesay, sheriff of Fife, when in the execution of his office, by
the lairds of Clatto, Balfour, and Claverhouse, with eighty
men-at-arms, while at the same time the Grants amused themselves by
sacking and burning the manor-house of Davy, in Strathnavern, and
making a clean sweep of everything on the lands of Ardrossiere. Even
the king's artillery, when _en route_ from Stirling to Edinburgh, in
1526, were attacked, the gunners killed or dispersed, and the guns
taken, by Bruce of Airth, who required a few field-pieces for his own
mansion. Hence the slaughter of the Laird of Mouswaldmains by Bell
of Currie, and of the Laird of Dalzel by the Lord Maxwell. Hence the
abduction of Lady Margaret Stewart, daughter of Matthew Earl of
Lennox, by her lover, the young Laird of Boghall, and the death of
her husband John Lord Fleming, great chamberlain of Scotland, by the
sword of John Tweedie, Baron of Drummelzier, who slew him when
hawking, on the 1st November, 1524. Hence the slaughter of the Laird
of Stonebyres by the rector of Colbinton; of two gentlemen named
Nisbet, in the king's palace and presence, by Andrew Blackadder of
that ilk; the murder of the Laird of Auchinharvie by the Earl of
Eglinton; the assassination of that fine old priest and poet, Sir
James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by the Baron of Tulliallan, in 1531,
and the firing of the thatched kirk of Monivaird, in Strathearn, by
the Drummonds, who destroyed therein "six score of the Murrayes, with
their wives and childraine, who were all burned or slaine except one."
These little recreations of the Scottish landed gentry and their
retainers were occasionally varied by branking scolding wives with
iron bridles, or ducking them in ponds; burning witches and Lollards;
hanging gipsies, and boring the tongues of evil-speakers with hot
iron;--so that seldom a day passed, in town or country, without some
stirring novelty of a lively nature.
One tract of land, where, in the year of Flodden, one thousand and
forty-one ploughs had usually turned up the teeming soil, was now, as
the Lord Dacre says, "clearly wasted, and had no man dwelling
therein,"--wasted by his wanton inroads; and this desolated tract lay
in the middle Marches, on the banks of the Leader, the Euse, and the
Ale--the lovely border-land,--the land of war and song--of the sword
and lyre; but there grew little grass, and less corn, where the hoof
of the moss-trooper's steed left its iron print in the soil.
Superstition was not wanting to add to the terror of warring clans
and those English devastators who, in 1544, laid Edinburgh in blazing
ruin, and swept all the fair Lothians, as if the land had been burned
up--tree, tower, and corn-field, hamlet, church, and hedgerow--by the
fire which fell of old on the cities of the plain. Lady Glammes, a
young and beautiful woman, was burned alive at Edinburgh, for
treason, and some say sorcery; and in the year of our story, 1547,
there was buried in the beautiful chapel of Roslin, Father Samuel,
the prior of St. Mary of Deir, who was deemed a wizard so terrible
that all the sanctity of the place could scarcely keep his bones from
rattling in their stone sarcophagus.
Wonderful things were seen and heard of in those quaint old times.
In 1570, a monstrous fish, having two human heads, each surmounted by
a royal crown of gold, swam up Lochfyne; and seven years after, a
swarm of fish, each having a monk's hood on its head, came up the
Firth of Forth. In Glencomie, a gentleman of the house of Lovat slew
a veritable scaly dragon, which vomited fire like that encountered by
St. George of old, and set the purple heather in a flame. The
northern sky was nightly brightened by ranks of glittering spears and
waving pennons. In the woful year of Pinkey-cleugh, a calf was
brought forth with two heads, on Robert Ormiston's farm, in Lothian;
and if other omen of evil to come were wanted, on the Westmains of
Fawside, a huge bull which belonged to our friend Roger the Baillie,
and was the pride of the parish, when browsing on the green
brae-side, turned suddenly into a black boulder-stone, which may yet
be seen by those who take the trouble of inquiring after it; while a
"fierce besom" or comet that blazed o' nights in the southern quarter
of the sky, portended evil coming from England, and made old men and
grandmothers cower with affright in their cosy ingles beyond the
fire, and tell their beads as their minds became filled with
forebodings of dolor and woe: for though hardy and brave, they were
simple souls--our Scottish sires, three hundred years ago.
Such was the state of the kingdom in the year of our story, and
during the regency of Arran.