THE FALL OF THRAVE.
Song sinks into silence,
The story is told;
The windows are darken'd,
The hearthstone is cold.
Darker and darker
The black shadows fall;
Sleep and oblivion reign over all.
LONGFELLOW.
"When your majesty's ancestor, Malcolm III., of valiant memory,
received the keys of the castle of Alnwick, remember what occurred,"
said the wary and suspicious old chancellor.
"Malcolm was slain," replied the king.
"By foul treachery. The Saxon garrison yielded, and the keys were to be
presented on the point of a knight's lance; but at the moment of doing
so, the knight, like a mansworn traitor, pierced King Malcolm's eye and
brain with his weapon and slew him on the spot. He escaped, but from
the deed assumed a name--hence comes the Pierce-eye of Northumberland."
"But what of all this? I do not think I have much cause to fear our
poor countess now."
"She has one hand left, and it can hold a dagger, I doubt not."
"Oh, good my lord, I shall not be unprepared for any emergency," said
James laughing, as, accompanied by Sir Patrick Gray and fifty selected
men-at-arms of his guard, he rode forward to Thrave, the earl of Errol
following closely with at least a thousand knights and gentlemen,
mounted and armed in full panoply.
The armour of the young king was beautifully engrained with gold. He
wore a casquetel, which in lieu of visor had two oriellets, or oval
plates, to protect the ears. It was encircled by a gold coronet, and
had a crenel, or spike, in which a plume of scarlet and yellow feathers
waved, and to which the queen's glove was tied. The hanging sleeves
of his surcoat were richly embroidered by Mary's hands; and his whole
arms, costume, and horse-trappings glittered with singular brilliance
in the sunshine of the evening, as he caracoled over the green sward
towards the embattled gate of Thrave.
On his breast sparkled the collar and jewel of the Golden Fleece of
Burgundy, which Duke Philip the Good had just sent to him, in charge
of Messire Jacques de Lalain, Dyck Graf of Bommel, who with his train
had reached the camp only on the preceding evening. This order had been
instituted by Philip himself in 1429.
When the king was within twenty paces of the gate of Thrave, it
was unclosed, and a lady, attended by a group of the countess's
bower-maidens, the tall and dark-eyed Maud of Pompherston, the Caillean
Rua, and the fair-haired daughters of Sir Alan Lauder, the castellan,
all clad in dule-weeds of black cloth with white crosses on their
breasts in memory of the late earl, and all wearing hoods and veils,
came slowly and timidly forward, like a procession of nuns.
On seeing them, James at once sprung from his horse, the reins of
which he gave to the Master of Crichton, his page. Gray, and other
attendants, immediately dismounted, and leading their horses by the
bridle, kept near the king, before whom the principal lady, after
advancing a pace or two in front of her companions, knelt, saying in a
low and broken voice, "In the name of mercy and St. Bryde of Douglas,
receive these keys."
She bowed her graceful head, at the same time upholding, with hands of
charming form and whiteness, the three great iron keys of the castle of
Thrave.
"And in the name of good St. Bryde, and of gentle mercy, sweet lady,
we accept of them," said the king, handing them to his master of the
ordnance; "and once again we pledge our royal word for the promised
terms--life, liberty, and fortune--to all who have withstood our cannon
here in Thrave. But rise, madam," added the king, "it ill becomes a
gentleman to receive a lady thus."
With one hand he raised her, and with the other lifted up her long
black veil,--for James II. was not devoid of that admiration of beauty,
which was one of the chief characteristics of his chivalrous family.
"MURIELLE!" exclaimed Sir Patrick Gray, starting forward on beholding
her face.
"Your long-lost wife?" said James, with surprise.
"My wedded wife--Oh, Murielle----"
"Then to your wardship, Sir Patrick, I must consign this rebel Douglas,
but on one condition----"
"Oh name it, your majesty!" said Gray, who was almost speechless with
emotion.
"That you keep her for life, either at court or in your tower of
Foulis," replied the king, laughing, as he placed Murielle's hand in
that of Gray, amid murmurs of applause and satisfaction, in which all
the knights, nobles, and even the grim old chancellor joined.
Murielle Douglas was beautiful as ever; but the pure breeze of early
autumn that came down the vale of the Dee, the exciting scene, and
the great presence in which she stood, alike failed to impart a red
tinge to her pale cheek, and even her rosebud lip had lost its usual
carnation hue.
In short, poor Murielle had evidently suffered much in mind and body;
for the years of blight and anxiety she had spent in gloomy Thrave had
not been without a natural influence upon a spirit so timid and gentle;
and now, as she wept upon her husband's breast, she neither heard nor
heeded the acclamations which rose from the king's camp, with the roar
of culverins from Knockcannon and the Carlinwark, as they greeted the
appearance of the royal standard which Sir John Romanno hoisted on the
great keep of Thrave, the now humbled stronghold of her forefathers,
the mighty lords of Galloway.
EPILOGUE.
Not long after these events the new earl of Douglas was reconciled
to James II., and though both parties were insincere--their mutual
injuries being too deep and too recent--there was peace in the kingdom
for a time.
Inspired by a sentiment of revenge for the death of their chief in
Thrave, the MacLellans long refused to lay aside their swords, and for
years continued to commit such dreadful outrages upon the Douglases and
their adherents that James outlawed the new laird of Bombie and all his
followers; but during his reign they re-won their possessions in the
following remarkable manner.
A band of outlaws or wild rovers, said by some authorities to have
been Saracens or Moors, but who were more probably Irishmen, as their
leader was named Black Murrough, landed in Galloway and committed
such devastations that the king, by a royal proclamation, offered
the forfeited lands of Bombie to any knight or man, however humble,
who could kill or capture this terrible stranger, of whose stature,
strength, and ferocity the most startling stories were told, for the
marvellous was a great element in those days.
In a wild place, near where the old castle of Bombie stood, there
is a spring which flows now, as perhaps it flowed a thousand years
before the epoch of our story. The bare-kneed and bare-armed Celts of
Galwegia, and the helmeted and kilted warriors of Rome, have drunk of
it. With its limpid waters, St. Cuthbert, whose church was built close
by, baptized the first Christians of the district in the name of Him
who died on Calvary; and in later and less-peaceful times, the fierce
Lag and Claverhouse have drunk of it, with their gauntleted hands, when
in pursuit of the persecuted Covenanters, by hill and loch and the
shores of the Solway.
It chanced that Sir William, the outlawed nephew of Sir Thomas
MacLellan, was wandering near this well, on a day when the banks of
the Dee were changing in tint and aspect under the genial sunshine and
warm showers of spring, when the trees were putting forth their young
and fragrant blossoms, and when the blackbird and the rose-linnet sang
among the thickets that overhung the river.
Full of those sad and bitter thoughts which were naturally induced by
the outlawry and proscription of his family, the young heir of Bombie
approached the spring to drink, and lo! near it there lay, fast asleep,
a rough and gigantic man, whose form exhibited wondrous strength and
muscle, and by his side lay an Irish war-club, the knotty head of which
was studded with sharp iron spikes. He was the leader of the strange
devastators,--he, for whose life King James had offered the castle and
heritage of Bombie.
MacLellan drew near, and by a single stroke of his double-handed sword,
shred off the great head of the terrible sleeper, and grasping it by
its thick black locks of matted hair, he conveyed it without delay to
the king, who, in terms of his proclamation, immediately restored to
him the forfeited lands of Bombie, and from that day the MacLellans
assumed as a crest, the head of a savage on the point of a sword, with
the motto--"Think on." The scene of this episode bears to this day the
double name of Bombie's Well, and the Wood of Black Murrough.
Broken in spirit, the proud Countess Margaret, whilom the Fair Maid of
Galloway, condescended at last to seek the forgiveness and protection
of King James II., after which, as she was still the loveliest woman of
her time, he bestowed her in marriage upon his half brother, John, earl
of Athole, son of the late Queen Jane and of the Black Knight of Lorn,
who perished so miserably in Flanders.
Robert, duke of Albany, died in exile, and no man in Scotland ever
knew where he found a grave; but Sir Patrick Gray and Murielle lived
long and happily. We know not which survived the other. He was created
a peer of the realm by the title of Lord Balronald, and received the
captaincy of the royal castle of Lochmaben, which he defended valiantly
against the English in the year 1460, during that war in which James
II. perished by the bursting of a cannon at the siege of Roxburgh, when
standing by the side of Sir John Romanno, near the old Thorn Tree, at
Fleurs.
William Lord Crichton, the wily and somewhat unscrupulous old
chancellor, died in peace in 1455, at his own stately castle in
Lothian, and lies interred in the old church near it.
His aged compatriot, Sir Alexander Livingstone, died about the same
time, after securing a peerage for his son, the captain of Stirling,
who was created Lord Livingstone of Callendar, and Great Chamberlain of
Scotland.
We need scarcely inform the reader that the worthy abbot of Tongland
never succeeded in his great project concerning the Master of Evil,
whom he wished to destroy as an enemy by making him a friend; though in
after-years a poor Capuchin of Venice revived the idea, by petitioning
the states of that republic, and also the pope, on the same subject,
and had the reward of being viewed by both as a--madman.
The beautiful young queen, Mary d'Egmont of Gueldres, only survived her
husband three years.
It was our strange fortune to behold her remains, previous to their
re-interment at Holyrood, in May, 1848, when nothing remained of those
charms which she inherited from the houses of Cleves, Burgundy, and
Gueldres, save her teeth, which, after having been three hundred and
eighty-five years in the grave, were singularly white and regular.
THE END.