Alexander Scott, a poet of that time, sometimes called the Scottish
Anacreon, because he sung so much of love, sent _Ane New Year Gift_ to
the queen, in the form of a poetical address in twenty-eight stanzas.
‘Welcome, illustrate lady, and our queen!’ it begins. ‘This year
sall richt and reason rule the rod’--‘this year sall be of peace,
tranquillity, and rest!’ says the sanguine bard, speaking from his
wishes rather than a contemplation of known facts. He calls on Mary to
found on the four cardinal virtues, to cleave to Christ, and be the
‘protectrice of the puir.’ ‘Stanch all strife’--‘the pulling down of
policy reprove.’
‘At Cross gar cry by open proclamation,
Under great pains, that neither he nor she
Of haly writ have ony disputation,
But letterit men or learnit clerks thereto;
For limmer lads and little lasses low
Will argue baith with bishops, priests, and frier;
To danton this thou has eneuch to do,
God give thee grace against this guid new year!’
Mary would probably feel the force of the seventh line of this stanza.
With commendable prudence, seeing he was addressing a papist queen,
honest Alexander says:
‘With mess nor matins noways will I mell,
To judge them justly passes my ingine;
They guide nocht ill that governs weel themsel.’
Yet he deems himself at liberty to remark--doubtless suspecting that
Mary would not be much displeased--that instead of old idols has now
come in another called _Covetice_, under whose auspices, certain
persons, while
[Sidenote: 1561-2]
‘Singing Sanct David’s psalter on their books,’
are found
‘Rugging and ryving up kirk rents like rooks.’
‘Protestants,’ he goes on to say,
‘takes the friers’ antetume,[14]
Ready receivers, but to render nocht.’
On this Lord Hailes remarks: ‘The reformed clergy expected that the
tithes would be applied to charitable uses, to the advancement of
learning and the maintenance of the ministry. But the nobility, when
they themselves had become the exactors, saw nothing rigorous in the
payment of tithes, and derided those _devout imaginations_.’[15]
In one verse of his poem, Scott makes pointed allusion to certain
prophecies which seemed to assign a brilliant future to Mary:
‘If saws be sooth to shaw thy celsitude,
What bairn should brook all Britain by the sea,
The prophecy expressly does conclude
The French wife of the Bruce’s blood should be:
Thou art by line from him the ninth degree,
And was King Francis’ perty maik and peer;
So by descent the same should spring of thee,
By grace of God against this good new year.’
The poet here undoubtedly had in view a prediction which occurs in
a rude metrical tract printed at Edinburgh by Robert Waldegrave in
1603, under the title, ‘The Whole Prophesies of Scotland, England, and
somepart of France and Denmark, prophesied by mervellous Merling, Beid,
Bertlingtoun, Thomas Rymour, Waldhave, &c., all according in one.’[16]
These so-called prophecies are unintelligible rhapsodies about lions,
dragons, foumarts, conflicts of knights, of armies, and of navies--how
there should be fighting on a moor beside a cross, till by the
multitude of slain the crow should not find where the cross stood--how
the dead shall rise, ‘and that shall be wonder’--how
‘When the man in the moon is most in his might,
Then shall Dunbarton turn up that is down,
And the mouth of Arran both at one time,
And the lord with the lucken hand his life shall he lose--’
and much more of the like kind.
[Sidenote: 1561-2.]
From the style of the verse, which is in general alliterative, as well
as some of the allusions, it may be surmised that these prophecies
were written in the minority of James V., on the basis of obscure
popular sayings attributed to Merlin, Rymour, and other early sages.
The special passage which Alexander Scott refers to was in Rymour’s
prophecies, but also given in a slightly different form in those of
Bertlingtoun:
‘A French wife shall bear the son,
Shall rule all Britain to the sea,
That of the Bruce’s blood shall come,
As near as to the ninth degree.’
There can be no doubt that it is applicable to Queen Mary, who was a
French wife, and in the ninth degree of descent from Bruce; and did we
know for certain that it formed a part of the prophecies made up in the
minority of her father, it would be remarkable. But the probability
is, that the verse was a recent addition to the old rhymes, a mere
conjecture formed in the view of the possibility and the hope that
a child of Mary would succeed to the English crown at the close of
Elizabeth’s life. What makes the allusion of Scott chiefly worthy of
notice, is the knowledge it gives us of the public mind being then
possessed by such soothsayings. It certainly was so, to a degree and
with effects beyond what we now may readily imagine.[17]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1561-2.]
While Scotland was noted in the eyes of foreigners as a barren
land--Shakspeare comparing it for nakedness to the palm of the
hand[18]--its own people were fain to believe and eager to boast
that it was rich in minerals. In 1511, 1512, and 1513, James IV. had
gold-mines worked on Crawford Muir, in the upper ward of Lanarkshire--a
peculiarly sterile tract, scarcely any part of which is less than a
thousand feet above the sea. In the royal accounts for those years,
there are payments to Sir James Pettigrew, who seems to have been
chief of the enterprise, to Simon Northberge, the master-finer,
Andrew Ireland, the finer, and Gerald Essemer, a Dutchman, the melter
of the mine. Under the same king, in 1512, a lead-mine was wrought
at Wanlock-head, on the other side of the same group of hills in
Dumfriesshire. The operations, probably interrupted by the disaster of
Flodden, were resumed in 1526, under James V., who gave a company of
Germans a grant of the mines of Scotland for forty-three years. Leslie
tells us that these Germans, with the characteristic perseverance of
their countrymen, toiled laboriously at gold-digging for many months in
the surface alluvia of the moor, and obtained a considerable amount of
gold, but not enough, we suspect, to remunerate the labour: otherwise
the work would surely have been continued.
We shall find that the search for the precious metals in the
mountainous district at the head of the vales of the Clyde and Nith,
did not now finally cease, but that it never proved remunerative work.
On the other hand, the lead-mines of the district have for centuries,
and down to the present day, borne a conspicuous place in the economy
of Scotland. It must be interesting to see the traces of the first
efforts to get at
‘the wealth
Hopetoun’s high mountains fill.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Jan. 23.]
John Acheson, master-cunyer, and John Aslowan, burgess of Edinburgh,
now completed an arrangement with Queen Mary, by virtue of which they
had licence to work the lead-mines of Glengoner and Wanlock-head, and
carry as much as twenty thousand stone-weight of the ore to Flanders,
or other foreign countries, for which they bound themselves to deliver
at the queen’s cunyie-house before the 1st of August next, forty-five
ounces of fine silver for every thousand stone-weight of the ore,
‘extending in the hale to nine hundred unces of utter fine silver.’
Acheson and Aslowan were continuing to work these mines in August 1565,
when the queen and her husband, King Henry, granted a licence to John,
Earl of Athole, ‘to win forty thousand trone stane wecht, counting six
score stanes for ilk hundred, of lead ore, and mair, gif the same may
guidly be won, within the nether lead hole of Glengoner and Wanlock.’
The earl agreed to pay to their majesties in requital fifty ounces of
fine silver for every thousand stone-weight of the ore.--_P. C. R._
How the enterprise of Acheson and Aslowan ultimately succeeded does
not appear. We suspect that, to some extent, it prospered, as the name
Sloane, which seems the same as Aslowan, continued to flourish at
Wanlock-head so late as the days of Burns.
A similar licence, on similar terms, was granted by the king and queen
to James Carmichael, Master James Lindsay, and Andrew Stevenson,
burgesses of Edinburgh, referring, however, to any part of the realm
save ‘the mine and werk of Glengoner and Wanlock.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1561-2.