THE DEPARTURE.
Woe, woe to ye! ye haughty towers;
No sound of sweetest strain,
No music, song, nor roundelay
Shall haunt your halls again;
Naught--naught but sighs and groans,
And tread of slaves in grim affright,
Till, crush'd in dust and ashes,
Ye feel the avenger's might!--_Uhland._
In the pale grey of the morning, when the moon was waning and the
stars fading out of the sky, when the cold, heavy shadows lay deep in
the high and narrow wynds and alleys of the city, from whose towering
mansions so many generations have looked down on scenes of wonder,
awe and terror, broil, bloodshed, and disaster, the child-queen of
Scotland (still tenaciously grasping her favourite kitten) was placed
in her warm litter, and its curtains were carefully drawn. The
queen-mother, with the few nobles and ladies of her train, mounted;
the lackeys led all the spare and sumpter horses; and with a band of
some forty spearmen on horseback, an escort provided by the care of
the Earl of Mar, she set forth from Edinburgh.
The streets were still encumbered by crowds of fugitives and
terrified people, pale with weeping for the slain and watching in the
night. Many surrounded the train of the queen, and strove to keep
pace with it, crying for aid, advice, or protection from the coming
English.
"Alms--largess--largess!" cried many, while poor women held aloft the
babes, whom the strife of yesterday had made fatherless.
"For alms and largess ye shall have the first rents I receive from my
lordship of Monteith and my castle of Doune," replied the queen, who
was moved to tears by the scenes she saw; but among the dense masses
at the city gate were many Reformers, who on seeing her began to
shout,--
"Down with the league with France--no French alliance!"
"Woe to the day that Mary of Lorraine brought forth a female bairn!"
cried one.
"And that our gude auld Scottish crown fell from the sword to the
distaff!" added another.
"Down with the bloody house of Guise! A Hamilton--a Hamilton!"
The poor queen-mother grew deadly pale on hearing these hostile and
unexpected shouts from the populace, whose favour has ever been in
all ages variable as the wind; but Florence felt his blood boil! He
had been reared in a land where gallantry was a science; he had heard
Francis I.--the most splendid of European monarchs--declare that a
court without ladies was like a spring without flowers; he had stood
by his side, bearing the train of Anne of Albany, when Laura's tomb
at Avignon was opened, and when flowers and verses were cast upon her
bones, as a tribute to her past beauty and to Petrarch's love and
muse. The fourth and fifth Jameses were in their graves, and
Scotland no longer understood the sentiment of chivalry; but, filled
with indignation by the reiterated insults of a lank-haired fellow
who followed the queen's train, in a suit of sad-coloured clothes,
Florence drew his sword and would have smote him down, when she
quickly arrested his hand, and said, with one of her most alluring
smiles,--
"I pray you to spare the poor man, and I shall tell you a story. One
day some drunken archers of Paris, in my hearing, insulted Catherine
de Médicis, and said a hundred bitter and abusive things to her, as
she was proceeding on foot under her canopy through the Rue de
l'Arbre Sec towards the Louvre. Perceiving my kinsman, the Cardinal
de Lorraine, start angrily from her side, she grasped his scarlet
cope, saying,--
"'Whither goes your eminence?'
"'To see those poltroons hanged without delay!'
"'Nay, nay,' said she, 'not so; let them alone. I will this day show
to after-ages that, in the same person, a woman, a queen, and an
Italian, controlled both pride and passion.' If the terrible
Catherine could do this, why not may I, who have ever been deemed so
tender and gentle?"
"Most true, madam," replied Florence, bowing low as he sheathed his
sword; "your wish is law to me."
Her train left Edinburgh by the Lower Bow Porte, on the parapet of
which was a bare white skull, that seemed to grin mockingly at the
turmoil and terror of those who crowded the steep and winding street
below. Mary shuddered as she saw it, for this poor relic of
mortality was the head of the terrible "Bastard of Arran," Sir James
Hamilton of Finnard, whilom captain of Linlithgow, royal cup-bearer,
and grand inquisitor of Scotland, executed for treason against James
V.; and all who passed the old arch beneath were wont to sign the
cross, for it was alleged that this head, after it was cut off, had
thrice cried "_Jesus Christus_" as it rolled about the scaffold, and
that no blood came from it; moreover, on the day it was first spiked,
a certain honest farmer, the gudeman of St. Giles's Grange, when
passing under the gate with a cartload of turnips to market, beheld
them all turn into human heads, which winked and grinned at him for
the full space of three minutes.
As the royal train issued forth upon the western road that led to
Stirling, the sun arose in his ruddy splendour and shed a blaze of
yellow light across the eastern quarter of the sky; and against this
glow Edinburgh uprose, with its castles, towers, and spires, its
hills and mass of roofs, its strange piles of gables and chimneys, in
outline, strongly and darkly defined. Then the blue flag, with the
white cross of St. Andrew, was seen to wave upon the summit of King
David's keep; and the flash and boom of a culverin from the rampart
below it, as the light smoke floated away on the soft breeze of the
early morning, announced that the governor of the castle, Hamilton of
Stainhouse, had fired the first gun at the approaching foe.
A wail arose from the city beneath; for that hostile sound also
announced that the English, with sword and torch, flushed by victory
and fired by the spirits of rancour and devastation, were at hand;
but the queen and her train, warned by it of coming danger, added
spurs to their speed, as they galloped past the long shallow loch,
the ancient church, the rocky hills, and reedy marshes of
Corstorphine.