JOHN OF THE SILVERMILLS.
"I never met with an adept, or saw such a medicine, though I had
fervently prayed for it. Then, I said, 'Surely you are a learned
physician?' 'No,' said he, 'I am a brass-founder, and lover of
chemistry.'"--BRANDE.
The king was seated in one of the apartments of that stately tower of
Holyrood, that still bears his name, which until recently was visible
on the front thereof, carved and gilt in gothic letters,--
Jac. Rex. V. Scotorum.
One window opened towards the abbey hill, an eminence then covered
with apple-trees and other wood in full foliage; a path ran round its
base, and another crossed its summit. The first led to the castle of
Restalrig and St. Margaret's gifted well: the second was the ancient
Easter-road to Leith. It was then, and for long after, destitute of
houses; Gordon, in his View of Edinburgh, taken in 1617, represents
only eight small dwellings on this now populous eminence and the
Croft-an-Righ that lay between it and the walls of the abbey church.
The other window afforded a view of the Calton with its rocks of
basalt, then bare, desolate, and unfrequented, with the eagle
hovering over their summits, as if to show that his prey, the
ptarmigan, the red grouse, and the black cock, were not far off.
The sun was setting, and its warm light fell aslant upon the waving
orchards of Holyrood; the square towers and magnificent doorway of
its church, and the green coppice on which the king was gazing
listlessly, with one hand resting on the neck of his favourite old
hound Bash, and the other thrust among the thick curls of his auburn
hair, as a support to his head. The passers were few. A mendicant
friar, with his begging-box and staff, came slowly over the hill; a
knight, armed nearly cap-à-pié for travelling, spurred from the
Watergate, and his armour was seen flashing in the sunbeams, among
the foliage as he rode towards Restalrig. The king was lost in
reverie, and sat with his eyes fixed on the sparrows that twittered
on the massive gratings of the large window.
The illness of that fair young bride whom he loved so passionately
pressed heavy on his heart; the more painfully so, that from its
perplexing and apparently mysterious nature, it seemed utterly beyond
the reach of alleviation. She laboured under a rapid consumption, of
the nature of which Francis I. had repeatedly warned James V.; but
young, ardent, and impetuous, her royal lover would listen to nothing
save the dictates of his passion; and slighting the love of Mary of
Lorraine (his future wife), he had wedded Magdalene. Now, despite
all the skill of his physicians, and the care of her own attendants,
the young queen, within twenty days after her landing in Scotland,
was almost hovering on the brink of the tomb.
As day by day she sank more and more, the Countess of Arran declared
that the fairies were extracting all her strength; others averred
solemnly and gravely, that she was under the influence of witchcraft:
for it was an age fraught with the wildest superstition. An illness
such as hers, when the secret source of decay was unseen and unknown
to the quack physicians and astrologers who surrounded her couch,
made their restless credulity readily adopt the idea of mystic agency.
The time was full of fanciful terrors; the dispensations of God were
invariably attributed to magic invocations and demoniac maledictions;
to invisible shafts from the elves and fairies who peopled every
rock, hill, and tree, the only antidotes to which were the
prescriptions and the counter-charms of impostors and self-deluded
dabblers in the occult sciences. Dreams, in those days, the result
doubtless of ponderous suppers and morbid constitutions, were
received as visions of the future, as solemn forewarnings and divine
inspirations from God--fraught sometimes with happiness, but more
frequently with death and terror, war and woe.
Thus the poor young queen, whose orient eyes while they sank never
lost their lustre, and whose cheek while it grew hollow still
retained its rosy and transparently beautiful hue, continued to waste
and grow thinner; and the king with agony saw daily how her snowy
arms and infantile hands were wearing less and less, until the bones
became fearfully visible at last.
He sighed, he prayed, and he wept; but still the blasting, the
wasting, the terrible attenuation went on. Her skin was white as
marble, but ever hot and feverish; and though a gentle smile played
ever on her lips, there was a wild, sad earnestness in her large blue
eyes, in the quiet depths of which two orient stars--the stars of
death--were ever shining. Everything that love could prompt and
quackery advise, had been done; she was bathed repeatedly in the
waters of streams that ran towards the sun; and in those of blessed
and sanctified wells, which the saints had consecrated of old--but
unavailingly.
Barefooted, with bowed head, and candle in hand, the king had visited
many a holy shrine; but still Magdalene became worse; and it was
evident to all that the hand of death would soon be upon her--unless,
as many added, the _spell_ was broken.
Suddenly the arras (which was of green damask flowered with gold) was
shaken. The king started. It was raised, and there entered a man,
whom a few words will describe.
"Well, most worthy deacon and doctor," said James, springing eagerly
towards him; "what thinkest thou of the queen?"
The new comer mournfully shook his head and stroked his beard.
The young king clasped his hands, and, pushing a chair towards the
physician, sank into his own.
John of the Silvermills was an old man with keen grey eyes that
twinkled under bushy brows; a long hooked nose; a vast white beard
that flowed over his sad-coloured cassock-coat. He wore a black
velvet skull-cap, on the front of which were embroidered a cross and
a triangle within a circle--being the emblems of Religion, the
Trinity, and Eternity. His form was bent by age; his back was almost
deformed, and one of his tremulous but active hands clutched a long
silver-headed cane; the other, a small sand-glass, which supplied the
place of a watch with the physicians of that age.
Patronized by King James IV., who had been an eminent dabbler in
alchemy, he was the first deacon of the Barber Chirurgeons of
Scotland, whom that monarch had incorporated by royal charter in the
year 1505; when every guild brother was obliged to pay five pounds to
the altar of St. Mungo of Glasgow, and prove his knowledge of
"anatomie, the nature and complexioun of everie member of the human
bodie; and in lykwayis, all the vaynis of the samyn, that he may mak
flewbothamea in dew tyme; and alsua that he may know in quhilk member
the Signe has domination for the tyme;" for then astronomy,
astrology, and alchemy formed the principal part of a medical
education; and King James IV. spent vast sums on the wild experiments
of the learned John, at his laboratory, from which a district of our
capital then obtained and still retains the name of _Silvermills_.
"Ah, my God! and thou,--thou hast no good tidings for me, my
venerable friend?" said the young king, imploringly, as he seated
himself.
"The queen's grace is assuredly in great dolour and sore pain,"
replied the physician, resting his chin on the top of his cane, and
fixing his keen eyes on the anxious and beautiful face of the young
monarch; "she complains of an aching head, of a burning heart, and of
a constant weariness and lassitude which overwhelm her. There is
something in all this which perplexes me, and it seemeth----"
"Beyond thy skill, in short? But oh, say not that!"
"Nay, nay," continued the mediciner, who spoke slowly, while his keen
visage shook on the staff where he had perched it; "but I must give
it long and deep thought. I am assured--at least I hope--there is in
my pharmacopœia some simple that will restore her. That learned
apothegar and worshipful clerk (though I agree with him in few
things), Galen, the physician of Pergamus, possessed a manuscript
which enumerated fifty thousand families of the vegetable world, with
all their restorative or destructive qualities. Oh, for one glimpse
of that glorious volume! In all things following strictly the rules
laid down by the learned Artesius (who lived a thousand years by that
very elixir, the secret of which is, at this time, enabling
Paracelsus to work so many miraculous cures), in the year 1509, I
compounded my _nepenthe_, a drug which driveth away all manner of
pain, and my _opobalsamum_, which was powerful, even as the blessed
Balm of Gilead; to the queen's grace I have administered them both
for the past week, and yet, miraculous to relate, she daily groweth
worse."
"My wife! my heart!" said the king, again wringing his hands; "must I
see my poor dear little Magdalene perish thus? I love her too much,
and perhaps God is about to take her from me. Oh! canst thou do
nothing for her?"
"I was at the University of Basil in 1525, storing my mind with fresh
knowledge, when Paracelsus, by the recommendation of Œcolampadius,
was called to fill the chair of physic and surgery, and was present
on that day when he so presumptuously burned the works of Avicenna
and Galen, assuring us that the latchets of his shoes knew more of
physic than both these learned doctors; and that all the universities
and all the writers of the earth, past and present, knew less than
the smallest hair of his beard; for he had in his brain the mighty
secret which would prolong life for ever--yea, even unto the verge of
eternity--the secret of Artesius."
"This was the very madness of learning and vanity," said the king.
"Well?"
"Erasmus believed in him, and was cured of a grievous illness by one
drop of the principal ingredient."
"What, Desiderius Erasmus, of Rotterdam, the tutor of my brother
Alexander, who fell at Flodden? Well, well--and this----"
"Ingredient was a simple used of old by a king of Egypt, and it is
now written in hieroglyphics on the southern side of the great
pyramid."
"And those hieroglyphics?"
"None can read save sorcerers; for Paracelsus on that day, at Basil,
destroyed, with the works of Avicenna, the sole existing key thereto,
and which was written on a blank leaf thereof."
"May the devil confound thee, Paracelsus, and the great pyramid to
boot! I fear me much, thy musty magic will never cure the queen."
"I pardon your majesty's anger, for it hath its source in grief,"
replied John of the Silvermills, calmly; "nature is full of
mysteries. Our cradle and our coffin may be formed from the same
tree, and yet we be ignorant thereof. Paracelsus----"
"I say again, Mahound take Paracelsus! but what doth this trite
remark mean?"
"That, like the mass of the unlettered world, your majesty scoffs at
what appears incomprehensible, and----"
The apothegar paused, for the arras was raised by a hand covered by a
glove of fine scarlet leather, and Cardinal Beaton, who at all hours
had the _entrée_ of the king's apartments, stood before them, and
both king and subject knelt to kiss his ring.
"The peace of the Lord be with thee and with thy spirit!" said the
cardinal, seating himself, and looking kindly at the king, whose
grief and distress were marked in every feature of his fine face.
"In the ante-chamber I have heard how poorly her majesty is, and
Mademoiselle Brissac has just been imploring my prayers, poor child!
But proceed, my learned doctor," he added, with a slight smile; while
the deacon of the surgeons again perched his chin on the top of his
cane, which was half hidden by his long white beard, and thus
continued--
"Your majesty rails at the learned Paracelsus; I can afford to pardon
that, when I remember me that to him we are indebted for introducing
to the pharmacopœia, the mercurial, the antimonial, and
ferruginous preparations which act so beneficially upon the organs of
our system."
"But is not this Paracelsus, of whom thou boastest, an impure
pantheist," asked the cardinal, "who, while believing in the
existence of pure spirits which are without souls, receives aliment
from minerals and fluids, and whose physiological theories are a wild
mass of the most incoherent ideas, founded almost solely upon an
application of the damnable mysteries of the cabala to the natural
functions of the frame which God has given us?"
"I do not quite understand your eminence," replied John of the
Silvermills, turning, with as much asperity as he dared, to the
cardinal, whose towering figure and magnificent dress were imposing
enough, without the memory of that important position held by him;
"but I understand, and, with Paracelsus, believe (what certain
malevolent commentators have denied) that the sun hath an influence
upon the heart, as the moon hath upon the brain; that Jupiter acts
upon the liver, as Saturn doth upon the spleen, Mercury on the lungs,
Mars on the bile, and Venus on the kidneys and certain other organs.
Hence the true apothegar should know the planets of the microcosm,
their meridian, and their zodiac, before he attempteth to cure a
disease. By due attention to them, he attains the discovery of the
most hidden secrets of nature; for our human bodies are but a
conglomeration of sulphur, of mercury, and of immaterial salt, which
rendereth them peculiarly liable to planetary influences; and as each
of these three elements may admit of another, we may, without knowing
it, possess within us water that is _dry_, and fire that is _cold_."
"A subtle sophist," said the cardinal, with a smile.
The king listened in silence, and, full of Paracelsus, the doctor
continued--
"Thus, please your eminence, by identifying himself with the
celestial intelligences, hath this wondrous physician so nearly
attained a knowledge of the philosopher's stone, and, by curing all
diseases, raised to his fame a monument based on the four quarters of
the earth. And doubtless if he prolongeth his own life, as he doth
that of others, in time to come he will attain the secret of that
_other_ powerful ELIXIR, by which Adam and the patriarchs prolonged
their lives before the Deluge--yea, even unto nine centuries."
"Gramercy me!" said the cardinal; "and beware thee, John! this man
whom thou upholdest glories in the fame of his sorcery, and openly
boasts of receiving from Galen letters that are dated _from Hell_,
and also of his recent disputes held with Avicenna at the gate of
that dread abode--disputes on the transmutation of metals, the elixir
of the patriarchs, and the quintessence of the Mithridate; for I
heard of all these things when I was studying the canon law at Paris.
He blasphemously takes as his primary supports the writings of the
holy fathers; and while asserting that the blessed Gospels lead to
all manner of truth, dares to add, that magical medicine can be
learned by the study of the Apocalypse alone."
"Enough of this, lord cardinal," said the king, impatiently observing
that the doctor was angrily adjusting his velvet cap preparatory to
returning to the charge; "enough of this jargon, amid which my poor
Magdalene will probably die."
"It may be so, though God avert it; for the disease is all but beyond
my skill; and I dread to state my suspicions, now that both my
nepenthe and opobalsamum have failed."
"Thy suspicions?" reiterated the cardinal.
"I know them already," said the king, gloomily. "Like the Countess
of Arran, thou wouldest say that she is under a spell?"
"Which nothing but a counter-spell can break."
"Mother of God!" said the king, "I cannot believe in such things!
Lord cardinal, dost thou?"
"And what manner of charm, deacon?" asked the cardinal, affecting not
to hear the king; for he did not scoff at sorcery, though he did at
Paracelsus.
"A muild, as our peasants call it. She may have trod upon a muild,
which is a powder of potent effect, prepared from the bones of the
dead, and scattered by sorcerers in the path of their enemies. We
all know that, at the Sabaoth of the witches, sepulchres are
violated, corpses are dismembered, and the limy particles of the
bones pulverised to operate as mischiefs upon mankind. At this time
the queen hath all the symptoms of one who hath trod upon an
enchanted muild, or dieth of pricked images--for they are the same.
A swarting of the heart, a fluttering of the breast. When the
patients will merely sicken they turn red--when they will die, they
turn pale."
"And the queen is pale?" said the cardinal.
"Yea, even as death."
"The cure--the cure?" sighed the king.
"There are two: the first is, to find a certain reptile, forming one
of the six species of salamanders which are indigenous in southern
Europe, in the head whereof is a red stone, to be taken as a powder.
For it is written by Paracelsus----"
"Paracelsus again!" said James, stamping his foot; "the second cure?"
"Is to burn the sorcerer."
"Then Sir Adam Otterburn must sift this matter to its bottom."
"Ah, that reminds me," said the doctor, rising up, and clutching his
sand-glass; "I must now retire, with your majesty's leave."
"To visit Sir Adam? I knew not that he ailed."
"A sword-thrust."
"From whom?"
"Sir Roland Vipont."
"Vipont again!" said James V., knitting his brows; "thus it is my
friends are ever slaying each other. But he, my most valiant and
true friend, has been quite besotted by those Setons of Ashkirk."
"He knew not of their arrest," said the cardinal; "it was a sudden
rencontre--a quarrel."
"Oh, in that case, I have nothing to do with such little amusements.
The Countess of Ashkirk?"
"Is in Barncleugh's ward at Inchkeith."
"Where I will keep her as long as James I. kept Euphemia of Ross on
Inchcolin. An old intriguing limmer! And the Lady Jane?"
"Hath escaped to--no one knows where."
"Poor damsel! I feel some compunction for her, and fear that she
hath been sorely misled by that deep old Douglas her mother. And
then the earl?"
"Hath vanished too."
"To England?"
"Most probably."
"But is Redhall's wound severe!" asked James.
The cardinal turned to the doctor.
"A fair run through the body, at the shoulder," said the physician.
"'Twas well for him that Mercury, which influences the lungs, was not
in Abdevinam, or the lord advocate's gown had been vacant."
"Vipont goeth from bad to worse," said the king, as the cardinal
turned away to conceal his laughter. "Kincavil run through the body
one day, my lord advocate the next. We must restrain his vivacity.
In this spirit, Vipont will achieve little in Douglasdale; but let
him bear in mind the vow I made when Sir David Falconer, the captain
of my guard, was slain when covering the retreat of the artillery
from Tantallan!"
"I hope your majesty will remember as well your gracious promise
anent the charter, exempting our learned corporation from watching
and warding, and all manner of military service within the city, save
in time of siege."
"Does your eminence hear?" said James, with a smile, to the cardinal.
"It is just passing the seals," replied the chancellor; "and I will
send the Lord Lindesay with it to-morrow--so, meantime, farewell."
The cardinal, who had more sense than a thousand such as Paracelsus
or John of the Silvermills, wisely recommended the king to remove his
suffering bride to Balmerino (in Fifeshire), a Cistercian abbey,
founded by the queen of William the Lion, Ermengarde de Beaumont,
whose grave lay there, before the high altar. In this magnificent
old pile, which was dedicated to St. Mary, apartments were prepared
for the sickly Magdalene. In a rich and pastoral district, it
occupied a beautiful situation, among fruitful orchards and the
remains of an old primeval forest, sheltered on one side by verdant
hills, and fanned on the other by the cool breeze from the bright
blue basin of the Tay.
On a sunny morning in June, under a salute of cannon from the castle,
amid which the vast report of Old Mons or rather Monce Meg of
Galloway was conspicuous, the young queen, with her anxious husband
riding by her litter, and attended by a select number of courtiers
(forming, however, a long cavalcade of horse), was conveyed from
Holyrood to Leith, where Sir Robert Barton's ship received and landed
her two hours after, on the yellow sands of Fife. From thence they
crossed the deep and fertile glen called the Howe, and, descending
the Scurr Hill, approached Balmerino.
With many deep sighs and portentous shakes of the head, all
indicative of what no one could divine, John of the Silvermills had
to abandon his smoke-begrimed laboratory near the water of Leith, and
accompany the court; carrying his books of Paracelsus, Galen, and
Avicenna, and the anatomical works of Hippocrates, Herophilus, and of
the great modern, Vesalius (the exposer of the errors of Galen), with
all his retorts, crucibles, chafing-dishes, horoscopes, and other
scientific rubbish, packed on sumpter-horses, by which much
irreparable damage was sustained by certain glass phials and bottles
that contained--the Lord alone knew what; but one was said to be the
famous powder of _projection_, which when thrown upon heated mercury
or lead, turned them into silver or gold, and the loss whereof made
the patient John rend his long beard, and passionately bequeath
himself to the devil a hundred times.
"If Magdalene groweth well here," said the king to the cardinal, as
they dismounted at the gate of the monastery, "to your eminence alone
will Scotland and I be indebted for her recovery; but if she becometh
worse, and our suspicions are confirmed, then woe to the _authors_ of
her illness--woe!"