THE FLIGHT.
The deeds of our sires if our bards should rehearse,
Let a blush or a blow be the meed of their verse;
Be mute every string, and be hush'd every tone,
That shall bid us remember the fame that has flown.
_Scott._
Such was this disastrous defeat on the 10th September; a defeat which
though less fatal than Flodden to a class whom Scotland well could
spare--her noble families--was severely felt by the commons; for
among the fourteen thousand dead, who lay on the field of Pinkey,
were no less than two thousand lesser barons and landed gentlemen.
The aspect of the plain next day, as the sun arose, was terrible,
when Master Posset and a few other good Samaritans, undeterred by the
dread of English plunderers and camp-followers, attempted the
herculean task of attending to the wants of the wounded and dying.
Great numbers of the English wounded had been borne to Pinkey House,
a fine old mansion of the Abbots of Dunfermline, which stands near
the field, embosomed among aged chestnuts and sycamores, above which
its round turrets and steep roofs still attract the eye of the
passer; and in one of its chambers, a place well suited to gloom and
spectral horrors, the blood of the wounded English could be traced
until effaced by some recent repairs.
Flowing from amid its coppiced banks towards the sea, the Esk lay
gleaming in the golden sunrise, but crimsoned still with the gashed
corpse of many an armed man, lying in its current, among the rocks,
the weeds, and sedges--the bread-winner of many a little brood,--the
pride and care of many a tender mother: for in its flood the fugitive
Scots perished by whole companies. The shock and din of the battle,
with the confused murmur of the flight that whilom sounded like a sea
chafing, or a multitude cheering at a vast distance, had now died
away, and under the rising sun the dewy landscape, from which the
morning mists were rising, lay placid, still, and calm. The green
clench of Pinkey in which the carnage had deepened most, the far
extent of stubble fields upon the upland slope over which the iron
squadrons of Gamboa's Spaniards and the demi-lancers of Vane and
Fitzwalter had swept yesterday, were silent and voiceless as the
roofless, windowless, black, and gaping ruins of the old tower of
Fawside on the hill; and where yesterday more than fifty thousand
gallant Britons had closed in the shock of battle, all was mournfully
still and deserted now.
On the pale upturned faces and glazed eyes of the dead, and the
distorted features of the dying, shone the level glory of the autumn
sun as he came up in his morning splendour from the German Sea. On
that field, planted thick with arrows, furrowed by iron shot, and
trodden by charging squadrons, strewed by so many dead bodies, and
covered still with broken arms, crushed helmets, pikes, and torn
banners, so thickly that it seemed as if the clouds had rained them
down, the merry mavis and the laverock were twittering and singing,
as before they had sung and twittered among the yellow summer corn;
but now the black gled and obscene raven were wheeling in low
circles, or alighting where so many troopers and their steeds were
lying dead in the muddy ditch, or in the scroggy cleuch, where more
than one abandoned Scottish cannon lay with wheels broken, and the
corpses of the gunners piled around it.
From under the dewy grass myriads of insects came forth to batten in
those horrid purple pools, that lay where human hands and human
bravery had formed the greatest heaps of slain; and all this carnage,
which shed a horror over that lovely autumn landscape, was to
gratify, as we have said elsewhere, the mad ambition, and to fulfil
the dying bequest, of one who had already gone to his terrible
account--Henry VIII. of England.
In the distance rose the smoke and flames of Leith and its shipping;
and at various parts of the horizon there towered into the blue sky
tall columns of dusky vapour, that indicated where the work of rapine
was still proceeding; while a cloud of the same sombre nature, like a
funeral pall, shrouded all the ancient capital--a pall, however,
streaked with sudden and incessant fire, as the castle of Edinburgh
was vigorously defended by Sir James Hamilton of Stainhouse, whose
cannon completely repulsed the enemy.
When the latter retreated, a week after the battle, they found most
of the dead lying still unburied. A few had been hastily covered up
by sods in the churchyards of Tranent and St. Michael at Inveresk;
and beside these uncouth graves the poor people "had set up," says
Master Patten, "a stick with a clout, a rag, an old shoe, or some
other mark thereon," by which the body within might be known, when
more leisure came for the rites of sepulture on the retirement of the
English from Scotland.
But to return to our hero.
On beholding the total rout of the army, he became heedless of all
that might ensue; and having now nothing that he cared to live for,
his first thought had been to seek death amid the masses of the
pursuing host; and hence the vigour and fury of the three desperate
charges, by which he was enabled for a time to repel the soldiers of
Don Pedro, of the Lord Fitzwalter, and of Sir Ralf Vane, and to cover
the retreat of Arran; nor was it until this was fully accomplished
that he perceived that, in this fortunate movement, he had put
himself at the head of the vassals of his enemy, Hamilton of Preston.
As the latter was nowhere visible, he was supposed to have perished
on the field or in the river. The order of Arran to attend to the
safety of Mary of Lorraine and her daughter, gave a new turn to the
desperate thoughts of Florence, and made him remember that, in the
fulfilment of his duty to the queen and country, he still had
something which made existence valuable; though the loss of Madeline,
of whom for days before the battle he could discover no trace,--the
miserable fate of his mother, who, with all her stern peculiarities
and bitter prejudices, had loved him well,--the destruction of his
ancestral home and all his household, together with the shame and
slaughter of that disastrous day, filled him with mingled horror,
rage, and despair.
Swept away by a tide of fugitives, horse and foot, pikemen, archers,
and men-at-arms, he crossed the Esk near the Red Craigs, leaping his
horse in at a place where the stream was deepest, and then forcing it
up the opposite bank, he escaped, though the Earl of Glencairn,
Findlay Mhor Farquharson of Invercauld, who bore the royal standard,
and several others who accompanied him, perished under the shot of a
few German arquebusiers and Kendal archers who lined the river's
eastern bank, and nestled in security among the thick furze, beech,
and hazel trees, that covered it. After this he found himself almost
alone, and rode slowly to breathe his horse, which, like himself, had
fortunately escaped without a wound. Occasionally there crossed his
path or fled before him a fugitive foot-soldier, making off by the
nearest way towards his own home or locality, but denuded of helmet,
corslet, arms, and all that might impede his flight; for in their mad
panic the Scots cast aside everything, and fell the readier victims
in the pursuit.
To conduct the queen-mother and little queen from Edinburgh, he
required an escort; and among these fugitives an efficient one could
scarcely be formed. The royal guard were all with the army; their
captain had been slain; and, like the army itself, his force had
doubtless been dissipated and disorganized.
Florence conceived he might obtain a few good men-at-arms from the
castles of Craigmillar, Dalkeith, or any other baronial fortress, for
the queen's service, and ride with them at once to Edinburgh, as
there was no time to lose now, and the sun was verging towards the
western horizon. Keeping in the wooded hollow through which the Esk
winds to the Forth, he was riding towards the Douglas's castle of
Dalkeith, when a loud outcry and the report of firearms warned him
that some of Gamboa's mounted arquebusiers were on his track, and
forced him to spur on at the fullest speed. Their ironical cheers,
taunting cries, and occasionally a shot, followed him; but still,
while rage filled his heart and made it beat with lightning speed,
Florence rode furiously on, intent on obeying the orders of Arran.
Closely the pursuers followed him; for after perceiving that his
armour and trappings were rich, they became intent on plunder, and,
being fleetly mounted on good Spanish horses, they easily kept pace
with the utmost speed of the animal he rode. Down through the deep
wooded dell, where the south and north Esks unite below the old
castle of Dalkeith, and insulate the quaint old town of the same
name--through swamp and bog--through copse and den, and up the
river's bank by the Thorny-cruick--they followed him close; while
others joined in the pursuit from various points--through the leafy
oak woods and beautiful haugh of Newbattle Abbey they swept on the
spur; still with a boiling heart the Scot rode on, and still the
pursuing Spaniards followed; till in a dark, woody, and secluded
hollow, through which the Esk flows, after he had totally failed to
gain a shelter in the castle of Dalhousie, they shot his horse, and
it sank beneath him in the middle of the stream. Fortunately it was
shallow there; he scrambled ashore, and sought a refuge in the
copsewood; but the Spaniards and the Kendal archers followed him
closely; and as the weight and joints of his armour impeded every
action, they gained upon him rapidly. He dreaded the clothyard
shafts of the Kendal men more than the large leaden bullets of the
Spaniards, who levelled their ponderous arquebuses over their horses'
heads, and almost invariably shot wide of the mark they aimed at.
Still the balls which whistled past him every minute, stripping the
bark from the trees, and flattening out like stars as they crashed
upon the rocks, added spurs to his speed; while ever and anon, with a
whizzing or a humming sound, a feathered English arrow would quiver
in the trunk of a tree close by.
Thus his flight and their pursuit was continued through the oak woods
of Dryden till he entered the deeper and more sequestered glen,
where, between walls of rock, and shrouded in the densest foliage of
every kind, the Esk chafes and gurgles over its stony bed beneath
that abrupt and precipitous cliff which is crowned by the ancient
castle of Hawthornden, then in ruins, as it had been left by the
English during Somerset's previous invasion in 1544, but in after
years the poetical home of the loyal and gentle Drummond, one of
Scotland's sweetest bards.
Perched on the brow of a grey, detached, and stormbeaten mass of
limestone, nothing remained then of the old castle but two square
towers and the high arched windows of the hall which faced the south.
The cliff starts to a vast height above the bed of the stream, and in
every cleft of it and of the adjacent rocks where rooting could be
found were those hawthorns from which the _den_ receives its name
growing in wild luxuriance; and there, too, were the pink foxglove
and the blue harebells tossing their cups upon the wind. The silver
hazel, the feathery ash, and the branching oak fringed all the cliffs
around the gorge--a gorge of rock that is undermined, or literally
honey-combed, by deep and tortuous caverns, which formed
hiding-places for the Scots of Lothian in the wars of other times;
and of their shelter, at this desperate crisis, Florence did not
hesitate to avail himself, as he knew the locality well. Having
eluded his pursuers, whose shouts had now died away, he sought the
entrance of one of these subterranean retreats, and having found it
immediately under one of the square towers of the old ruin, he dashed
through the natural screen of wild briars, hazel, and hawthorn which
concealed it, and entering the cavern, threw himself upon its stony
floor, breathless, weary, and prostrated in energy and strength.
The time was evening now; and without a horse, without men, money, or
adherents, with the whole surrounding country in possession of an
army flushed by a sudden and bloody victory, what hope had he of
obeying Arran's order, and achieving the safety of the two queens,
who might fall into the hands of the conqueror?
He took off his hot helmet, and pressing his hands upon his throbbing
temples, closed his eyes and strove to shut out thought, memory, and
even the dim twilight that struggled into the damp cavern where he
lay, prostrate and weary in body and in spirit.