CRICHTON.
The towers in different ages rose,
Their various architecture shows
The builders' various hands;
A mighty mass, that could oppose
When deadliest hatred fired its foes,
The vengeful Douglas bands.--MARMION.
Amid all the rejoicings on the occasion of this royal marriage the
heart of Gray was sad.
Time had not lessened his love for Murielle Douglas, and he grew
sick at heart when contemplating the apparent hopelessness of his
separation from her: yet she was his wife, whom no man could take from
him, while life remained; but so broken did he become in spirit, that
notwithstanding all the barbarity and wrong he had endured from the
Douglases and their chief, there were times when he resolved to seek
the presence of the latter, and, divested of sword, dagger, and armour,
make the desperate attempt of offering his ungloved hand, "which," as
the chancellor told him with a grimace, "he might as safely thrust into
the mouth of a hungry tiger."
The young monarch, who loved Gray and pitied him for his story, heaped
favours upon him, such as fine horses, rich armour, purses, and swords,
enabling him to appear to the best advantage among the brilliant
foreign chivalry by whom the Scottish court was then crowded--knights
who were the flower of France, Bretagne, Gueldres, and Burgundy--men
whose sons were to win the great battles of Charles the Bold, and to
die by his side on the field of Campo Basso.
To all whom he trusted the manner of James II. was most winning; it was
the old hereditary charm of his family, who seemed never to forget the
maxim,--the higher the head the humbler the heart.
For his diplomatic services in this marriage and other matters,
Crichton, as already mentioned, had been created a peer of the realm;
and when the beauty of the young queen and the dowry she brought are
considered, he had some reason to congratulate himself on a result so
successful.
Philip of Burgundy bound himself to pay his niece, the bride, sixty
thousand pounds in gold, as a portion merely of her dower, while James
settled upon her ten thousand crowns, secured on land in Atholl,
Methven, Stratharn, and Linlithgow; and he relinquished all claim to
the duchy of Gueldres, after which a league offensive and defensive was
concluded between that province, the kingdoms of Scotland, France, and
the dukedom of Burgundy.
A series of brilliant tournaments were held in honour of these events;
and the Dyck Graf of Bommel, with his brother, Messire Simon de Lalain,
with Messire Herré de Meriadet, Burg Graf of Sluys, three Burgundian
lords of high descent and esteemed valour, challenged "an equal number
of Scottish chivalry to joust with lance and sword, battle-axe and
dagger."
This defiance was promptly responded to by a knight named Sir James
Douglas, James Douglas, Lord of Lochlevin, and Sir John Ross of
Halkhead, constable of Renfrew. The latter was attended by Sir Patrick
Gray, while Sir Thomas MacLellan and Romanno of that Ilk attended the
other two, ready to take part in the _mêlée_ if the strife became a
bloody one. A space near the castle rock of Stirling was selected for
the lists, and gaily-decorated galleries were erected for the king, the
queen, and court, the lords and barons of parliament.
On the appointed day, the six champions, after hearing mass, presented
themselves, clad in velvet and cloth of gold, before the king, and
after each had made a low reverence, they retired to six painted
pavilions to arm; after which, lanced, horsed, and in full and splendid
armour, with closed helmets, they entered the lists at opposite
extremities; and when twelve brass trumpets made the summer sky and
castle rock re-echo to their united blast, the knights rushed on each
other, three against three.
"For Scotland!" shouted Ross and the Douglases.
"Vivat Burgundie!" replied Meriadet and the De Lalains.
Such were the war-cries on each side.
Their tough ash spears were splintered in an instant, the fragments
springing high in air from the ringing coats of tempered steel.
Panting and quivering, with flashing eyes and snorting nostrils, the
gaily-trapped horses recoiled upon their straining haunches, till
wheeled round, and urged forward again, by spur and knee, by voice and
bridle, and fiercely the combat was renewed, as the six knights closed
up, hand to hand, with flashing swords and swaying battle-axes.
Sir James Douglas and Sir John Ross, and the Dyck Graf and Simon de
Lalain, were so equally matched that not one of them could obtain the
least advantage over the other, though they fought till all their
armour was defaced, and, save Douglas's dagger, all their weapons were
broken; but Herré de Meriadet, by one blow of his battle-axe, unhorsed
the lord of Lochlevin, as he had formerly done the emir of Granada, and
hurled him to the ground.
On seeing this, and fearing the conflict might have a disastrous
termination, the king, at Crichton's request, threw down his truncheon,
and the jousts were ended, just as Gray, MacLellan, and Romanno were
about to join in the _mêlée_ with the three Burgundian squires.
So passed this year, and then came the next, in which rumour reached
the Scottish court of how the turbulent earl of Douglas and his
warlike followers comported themselves in the Eternal City, during
the festivities which opened with the year of the Jubilee, 1450; for
there the Scottish knights, who wore the red heart on their helmets
and surcoats, became involved in a brawl with the Roman populace on
the crowded bridge of St. Angelo, and betook them to their lances,
swords, and mauls as freely as if they had been in the High Street
of Edinburgh, or the Broad Wynd of Stirling, and played the devil in
the capital of his holiness, spearing and trampling the people under
foot; and they it was who caused that tremendous pressure by which, as
history records, ninety-seven persons were killed at the end of the
bridge, by being simply crushed to death.
Pope Nicholas V., who had lately succeeded the unfortunate Eugene, was
so inspired by indignation, that all hope of a fuller dispensation for
the earl and his countess was at an end. There too were dissipated
all the poor abbot of Tongland's expectations of having the prince of
darkness restored to favour, for, as he records in his papers, the
very name of "Douglace gart ye paip to scunner;" so, in despair, he
committed to the flames the memorial he had prepared on behalf of his
ubiquitous protégé, and abandoned his pet project for the time.
Then, to the infinite satisfaction of Murielle, the earl, separated
from the duke of Albany, and hearing how high his rival Crichton stood
in favour at the Scottish court, and that, under Romanno, troops had
been sent into Galloway to ravage the Douglas lands, and punish their
disorderly occupants, he returned secretly and with all speed homeward,
for the express purpose of cutting off the chancellor by the strong
hand, and more than ever determined on carrying out his old schemes of
vengeance.
Passing through England in the spring of the year, after some
treasonable correspondence with Henry VI., he arrived in Scotland,
and, unknown to Crichton, secretly ensconced himself at Dalkeith, the
castle of his kinsman, James, third lord of Dalkeith, while Achanna
and another follower, bribed by the proffer of a gauntlet filled with
silver crowns, watched the movements of the chancellor, who was then
suffering from ill health, his advanced years, and the cares of the
state, and who resided in the castle of Edinburgh. An opportunity for
mischief soon presented itself.
It chanced that on Lady Day, in March, the chancellor left his
residence to visit his own house of Crichton, which stands about
twelve miles south from the city. He was accompanied by Sir Patrick
Gray, Sir Thomas MacLellan, Romanno, constable of Edinburgh Castle and
master of the king's ordnance, Patrick Lord Glammis, and about twenty
gentlemen, all well mounted and armed.
The day was fine and clear, the sharp March winds blustered through
the hollows and swept the last year's leaves before it over the
uplands, where the fresh soil glittered in the sunshine, and where the
hoodie-crow searched in the furrows for worms; the birds were singing
in the hedgerows, where the buds were springing into greenness; the air
was mild and cool, the fields were assuming a verdant hue, though the
brown spoil of the departed year lay damp and rotting in the mountain
runnels, and along the sedgy banks of loch and stream. The rich aroma
of the land came on the passing breeze, that shook the old woods of
Drumshelch and Dalrigh.
Over miles of land now covered by the "modern Athens," for ages into
times unknown and far beyond the knowledge or record of man, the
oaks of these old woods shook down their autumn leaves upon the lair
of the elk, the snow-white mountain bull, and of those ferocious
Scottish bears, which in after-days, as Martial tells us, were used
by the pagan Romans to increase the torture of those Christians who
perished on the cross. Drumshelch was one of those old primeval
forests, from which the first dwellers in the land named themselves
Coille-dhoinean--CALEDONIANS, or the men of the woods.
Though the month was March, the season having been moist, the peasantry
were consigning the whins to the flames, though such was contrary to
the law of James I., and the white smoke of the muir-burn, as it was
named, rolled along the hills of Braid and the more distant slopes of
the Pentlands like a mimic conflagration.
It was spring, and one of the most delightful days of the season, when
men's hearts grow buoyant, they scarcely know why. Even Gray felt its
influence, for it gave him new emotions of pleasure and of hope. It was
little more than the commencement of a new year; but it was one the
end of which none could foresee. He had heard that the Douglases were
returning. How little could he imagine that Murielle was then only six
miles distant from him, where the strong old castle of Dalkeith, from
its wooded slope, overlooked the lovely Esks.
He conversed gaily with the knights and gentlemen of the chancellor's
train, as they rode down the steep winding street, named the Bow, and
passed to the eastward along a narrow way between hedgerows, which
bordered the city on the south in the long deep hollow, on the opposite
bank of which then stood only one edifice--the solitary church of St.
Mary-in-the-Field, surrounded by its burying-ground. It was a lonely
bridle-road this path through the hollow--a place where the birds
carolled by day, the glow-worms glittered by night, and the brown
rabbits started from side to side at all times.
Three crow-stepped and gable-ended edifices, then standing far apart,
were there. One belonged to Richard Lundy, then a monk, and afterwards
abbot of Melrose; another was a little chapel of Holyrood which stood
at the foot of St. Giles's churchyard; the third was an old farmhouse.
This narrow and solitary hedgerow was then the southgate and the future
Cowgate of Edinburgh.
As the chancellor and his train issued from it into the more open
country, they took no heed of two armed horsemen--for all men in
Scotland went armed--who left the city before them, and who, after
frequently looking back, as if reckoning their number and watching
their route, disappeared at full speed to the southward.
At a rapid pace our friends crossed the ridge of Kirk-Liberton,
passing between the fortlet of the Winrams and the holy well of St.
Catherine. They crossed both the wooded Esks, and ascended the long
line of cultivated hill, then an open waste, known as the Roman camp
of Agricola, where the mounds and trenches which his warriors dug
in the year 80 may still be distinctly traced; and then southward
in the distance, the chancellor's retinue could see his castle of
Crichton on the western slope of a green eminence, where its walls and
towers, a glorious relic of Scotland's stormy days, all built of red
coloured freestone, glowed ruddily in the light of the evening sun.
And this feudal fortress appeared to rise higher on its steep as the
proprietor's train descended into the deep and marshy valley which it
overhangs.
Crichton is a vast quadrangular fortress, exhibiting in its stone
staircases and arcaded court, wonderful architectural beauty and great
strength, as it adjoined that part of the wild and lawless border-land
which lay nearest to the Scottish capital. Toned down by time, its
corroded carvings, so rich and so florid in their details, impress with
astonishment the wanderer who comes suddenly in view of its mouldering
remains, as they stand in a lonely glen, remote and secluded alike
from road and railway, from tourist and traveller. A fallen tower has
now choked up the terrible _massy-more_ or secret dungeon, and the
chambers where Mary Stuart and Bothwell held high revelry--where the
lady of Hailes wept for the slaughter of her lord and all his kindred
at Flodden, and where the wily old chancellor wove his plans for the
downfall of the Douglases, are now roofless and windowless--the abode
of the fox and the fuimart--the ravenous gled and the hoodie-crow.
As the chancellor's train, all of whom being men of rank were in bright
armour, rode by the narrow bridle-path, between the green pastoral
hills, and entered Crichtondean, through which flows a sluggish
streamlet, known as the Scottish Tyne, but which becomes a rushing
river when it reaches the ocean at Dunbar, they were soon visible to
the inmates of the castle, several of whom waved their handkerchiefs
from the keep, where the great bell was rung and a banner displayed,
while the Milan plate and steel of the visitors were seen to glitter in
the sunlight, between the masses of alder tree which _then_ clothed the
now bare and desolate sides of the narrow valley.
Those white handkerchiefs were waved by the chancellor's lady, who
had so kindly nursed Sir Patrick Gray, his daughters, Agnes, wife of
Alexander, master of Glammis, and Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of
Huntly, two of the most beautiful women of the time, who were on the
bartizan with several of their friends and attendants. But as their
father, with his retinue, banner, and horsemen, disappeared where the
alder-woods grew thickest, they heard a tumultuous shout, the sound of
a trumpet, and the clamour of many voices, ascending to their ears on
the breeze of the valley.
Conversing merrily with Sir Patrick Gray, the old chancellor rode
his ambling nag at an easy pace, with a favourite hawk, the gift
of his neighbour, the Knight of Locharwart, perched on his bridle
hand. Trusting in the strength and character of his retinue, in his
diplomatic rank, to his many ripe years, and the supposed absence
of his enemies, he was without armour, and wore a long black velvet
cassock-coat, which was sufficiently open to show an undershirt
of white satin slashed with red, and secured at the waist by an
embroidered baldrick, at which hung a heavy sword and Parmese dagger,
the hilt of which was composed of a single crystal. His long white hair
escaped from under his Scottish bonnet of black velvet, and floated on
the tippet of miniver which covered his shoulders and was clasped at
the throat by a jewel.
He pointed to the great column of smoke which ascended from the chimney
of the kitchen-tower, and laughed while reminding his friends of the
good cheer which awaited after their ride over the hills on a clear
March day; but something less easy of digestion in the shape of cold
iron awaited them; for at the narrow part of the road, where it took an
abrupt turn, and where, as already stated, the alderwood grew thickest,
there arose a sudden shout, in front and on both flanks, while a band
of men-at-arms, lanced, horsed, and with closed helmets, rushed upon
them from an ambush.
"Jamais arrière! a Douglas! a Douglas! Revenge for the Black Dinner!"
These shouts made all acquainted with whom they had to deal. Gray,
MacLellan, Romanno, and others, shut down their helmets, and betook
them to sword, axe, and "morning star," as those ponderous maces borne
by knights at their saddle-bows were named.
Two of their unexpected assailants had coronets of jewels upon their
helmets, and all had their coats-of-arms, but chiefly the terrible _Red
Heart and three stars_, painted on their breastplates. All knew their
foes in an instant, as heraldry was a science in which every gentleman
was then well versed.
"To your swords, gentlemen; forward, and break through this pack of
knaves!" exclaimed the old chancellor, tossing his hawk into the air,
as he knew it would wing its way straight home. Then drawing his sword,
he added, "Help yourselves, sirs, and Heaven will help you!"
There was a tremendous shock in the rough and narrow pathway, a
clashing of swords, and the dull, dinting crash of iron maces and mauls
on steel casques and shoulder-plates; several men fell to rise no more,
and many were severely wounded. The chancellor was the aim of all the
Douglases. Gray and MacLellan stood nobly by his side, yet he received
many severe wounds, till he became almost maddened by pain and the
prospect of a cruel death at the hands of his bitterest enemies.
"Then," says Buchanan, "the Lord Crichton, though an aged peer, slew
the first man who assaulted him, passed his sword through a second, and
leading a charge of his retinue, broke right through the Douglases;"
but just as he was sinking with fatigue and loss of blood, Sir Patrick
Gray, by his battle-axe, broke the arm of one assailant, clove the
helmet of another, and drew the chancellor across the saddle of his
own charger, a powerful Clydesdale war-horse, presented to him by the
king, and calling to MacLellan, Lord Glammis, and Romanno, to "cover
his retreat, and keep the foe in check," he galloped up the steep and
winding path which led to the castle, and deposited his now senseless
friend in the arms of his terrified daughters. Pell-mell up the grassy
slope, fighting every foot of the way, but in full flight, their
friends were now driven by the victorious Douglases, who were more
than a hundred strong, till they reached the chancellor's fortress,
when its gates received them, and then a shot or two skilfully
discharged from a culverin by Gray and Romanno drove them off,
brandishing their weapons and shaking their mailed hands in token of
future vengeance. Ere they went one opened his helmet and displaying
the dark and swarthy face of the great earl, exclaimed hoarsely, "Hark
ye, my lord chancellor: I have drawn once more my father's sword, and
by St. Mary, and St. Bryde of Douglas, I will not leave James Stuart
one foot of Scottish ground--nay, not even the moat-hill of Scone. By
our blessed Lord, before whom this relic of St. Bryde is holy, I swear
it! so judge what shall become of _thee!_"
And with these terrible words, after kissing an amulet which hung at
his neck, he galloped away, and with his followers disappeared down
Crichtondean.
In this rough mode did Gray, for the first time, learn that the
Douglases were again in Scotland, and that Murielle must now have
returned.
He had now ample scope for thought, reflection, and for daring schemes,
which he knew not how to put in operation.
After this rash escapade, the Earl of Douglas retired to Thrave, in
Galloway, and for some time the chancellor remained in his stronghold,
until his wounds were healed and he could return to court.
By this epoch the reader must have begun to perceive what a pleasant
time a Scottish statesman must have had of it in those old feudal days.