[Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL
West from the Hill shows the picturesque and irregular mass of the
Castle, immediately behind the classic monument to Dugald Stewart, which
occupies the foreground of the picture. On the right of the monument and
the south side of Princes Street appear in succession the tower of the
North British Railway Hotel, and the monument to Sir Walter Scott. On
the left of the picture is seen part of the Old Town, with the Imperial
Crown of St. Giles’s, the spire of the Tolbooth Church, and the dome of
the Bank of Scotland, forming a well-assorted trio. Under these, and
over the railway, stretches the North Bridge; below lies the Calton Old
burial-ground, with its obelisk. In the near foreground of the picture
is a rustic stone seat much used by weary sightseers.]
EDINBURGH
PAINTED BY
JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I.
DESCRIBED BY
ROSALINE MASSON
WITH
TWENTY-ONE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
[Illustration]
LONDON: ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK COMPANY, LTD.
1904
Contents
PART I--THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
PAGE
EDINBURGH CASTLE: ITS LEGENDS AND ROMANCES 1
CHAPTER II
HOLYROOD: THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY 22
(The Six Royal Jameses; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Prince Charlie)
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES 45
(Gavin Douglas; John Knox; and Jenny Geddes)
CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS 62
CHAPTER V
SOME NOTABLE INHABITANTS, AND THEIR DWELLINGS 83
CHAPTER VI
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS 102
PART II--THE NEW TOWN
CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR 119
CHAPTER VIII
THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE 129
CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY 147
CHAPTER X
THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 156
CHAPTER XI
EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 163
INDEX 169
***On page 88, line 2, _for_ James III. _read_ James V.
List of Illustrations
1. Edinburgh from Calton Hill _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The Castle from the Esplanade 8
3. The Castle from the Terrace of Heriot’s Hospital 16
4. Edinburgh from the Castle 22
5. Holyrood Palace from the Public Gardens under Calton
Hill 30
6. The Apartments of Mary Queen of Scots in Holyrood Palace 40
7. St. Giles’s Cathedral from the Lawnmarket 46
8. St. Giles’s Cathedral from the Courts 54
9. John Knox’s House, High Street 62
10. Lady Stair’s Close 70
11. The Canongate Tolbooth, looking West 80
12. North Front of George Heriot’s Hospital 84
13. Quadrangle of George Heriot’s Hospital 90
14. The Martyrs’ Monument in the Graveyard, Greyfriars’ 96
15. Old Houses in Canongate 108
16. Princes Street from the Steps of the New Club 120
17. The High School and Burns’s Monument from Jeffrey Street 130
18. Sir Walter Scott’s Monument from the East Princes Street Gardens 154
19. Arthur’s Seat from the Braid Hills 160
20. The Water of Leith from Dean Bridge 162
21. The National Monument on Calton Hill 166
_The Illustrations in this volume were engraved in England by the
Hentschel Colourtype Process._
PART I
THE OLD TOWN
CHAPTER I
EDINBURGH CASTLE: ITS LEGENDS AND ROMANCES
There, watching high the least alarms,
Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar;
Like some bold veteran, gray in arms,
And marked with many a scamy scar;
The ponderous wall and massy bar,
Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,
Have oft withstood assailing war,
And oft repelled the invader’s shock.
BURNS.
The great line of east coast lying between the two headlands of Norfolk
and Aberdeenshire is nowhere broken by another so bold and graceful
indentation as that of the Firth of Forth. The Forth has its birth among
hills that look down on Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; flows thence in a
pretty tortuous course towards the east, forming a boundary-line between
the countries of the Gael and the Sassenach; is replenished by the Teith
from the Trossachs and by the Allan from Strathmore; meanders at the
foot of Stirling Castle, and seems never to weary of weaving its silver
windings into that green expanse of country where most the Scottish
imagination loves to linger; until at last, when there is poured into it
the Devon from the Ochils, its channel widens to the sea somewhat
suddenly. But even here the diverging banks, once so near, show an
occasional friendly inclination to meet; and at one point there is only
a mile of blue water and white waves between them, and then the view
widens and the shores part irrevocably, the one stretching away to the
extreme “east neuk” of Fife, and looking
To Norroway, to Norroway,
To Norroway ower the faem!
and the other rolling with softer curves to the South and England, while
the great German Ocean ebbs and flows between.
The point where the banks of the Forth are but a mile apart is now
spanned by that triumph of engineering, the Forth Bridge,--the largest
bridge in the world; but in olden days there was here a famous crossing,
and the names of the villages on the opposite banks, North Queensferry
and South Queensferry, still carry the mind back to the days when
Malcolm Canmore’s stately Saxon Queen, Saint Margaret of Scotland, was
ferried across here on her way between the palace of Dunfermline and the
Castle of Edinburgh. Edinburgh was not then, nor for centuries after,
the Capital of Scotland, but merely a useful stronghold near the
Borders,--a great rock rising abruptly among woods and lochs and hills,
on which, from before the earliest legends of history, a fortress had
stood,--an impregnable castle, built so long ago that none knows its
origin, nor even the origin of its name. Stow’s _Chronicle_, indeed,
dates the foundation of the “Castell of Maydens” 989 B.C., which is a
sensational date to mention lightly to the inquiring tourist from the
newer world. It is supposed that the name “Castell of Maydens” was
gained because, in legendary days, certain Pictish princesses were kept
there for safety; and certainly, from those hazy times right on till the
time of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was sent to the Castle for
security before the birth of King James, Edinburgh Castle has always
been a useful place of safety to which to send royalties and rebels.
The earliest authentic romance of Edinburgh Castle is that of Malcolm
Canmore and Queen Margaret; and the oldest building extant in Edinburgh
is Queen Margaret’s chapel in the Castle.
The well-known story of Queen Margaret, the grand-niece of Edward the
Confessor, is that she and her brother Edgar Atheling and her sister
Christian all fled from England and William the Conqueror, and were
wrecked in the Firth of Forth. The King of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore,
was the son of that Duncan whom Macbeth put out of the way--in Scottish
history as well as in Shakespeare’s play,--and he had fled from the
usurper, and had spent his years of exile at the Saxon Court of Edward
the Confessor.
The son of Duncan
From whom this tyrant holds the due of birth
Lives in the English court; and is received
Of the most pious Edward with such grace
That the malevolence of fortune nothing
Takes from his high respect.
Little wonder that he received the Saxon exiled royal family hospitably.
He was a widower, and much older than the Princess Margaret, and a
warrior-prince; and he married her at Dunfermline. It all reads like an
old-fashioned fairy story,--the Queen, lovely and pious, washing the
feet of the poor, founding abbeys and endowing the Church, and filling
the Scottish Court with luxury of gold plate and rich raiment, and the
pomp of royal guards: the King, brave, warlike, and unlearned, kissing
his wife’s missals he was unable to read, and sending for his goldsmith
to bind one of them in vellum incased in gold and set with jewels, and
then hurrying off to the wars with England, and bringing back English
captives to serve as slaves in Scottish homes. The fairy story ends as
romantically as it began, for the last chapter tells of the winter days
when King Malcolm and his two eldest sons were laying siege to Alnwick
Castle to revenge a Scottish garrison, and Queen Margaret, dangerously
ill, watched and waited with her group of younger children and her
Confessor, Bishop Turgot, at Edinburgh Castle. Bitterly cold it must
have been in the Castle, where the bleak wind would howl at night, and
the snow melt as it fell on the rough masonry jutting out of the rougher
rock. Below, the leafless winter woods skirted wild morasses and lochs,
and stretched over hill and dale to the line of sea--that sea where the
Queen had been wrecked nearly a quarter of a century before, and which
she had crossed so often by ferry. But, in spite of cold and suffering,
the ascetic Queen spent her time in the little stone oratory in prayer
and vigil for her absent lord. On the fourth day Prince Edgar, the
second son, returned, and told his dying mother that her husband and her
firstborn son had both been killed. Queen Margaret, with words of prayer
and resignation, died almost immediately after hearing the news. This
was on the 16th of November 1093. Hardly had Bishop Turgot and the royal
orphans closed the mother’s eyes before they were roused by new
troubles. They looked down over the fortress walls and saw the Castle
hill surrounded by what must have seemed to them a horde of howling
savages,--men dressed in the skins of deer, with “hauberks of jingling
rings.” These were the Highlanders from the Hebrides, whither Donald
Bane, Malcolm’s younger brother, had fled when Malcolm had gone to
England. The Hebrides and the Saxon Court had educated the two brothers
somewhat differently; and now, after long years, Donald Bane had come
hopefully and cheerfully forth to kill his nephews and make himself
King. But not in vain had Queen Margaret lived the life of a saint. Up
from the Firth of Forth on that November day in 1093 there came a
crawling white mist, creeping over the woods and morasses, covering the
hills, leaving white density in its trail, till it blotted the whole
Castle out of sight of the enemy below. And who are these figures that
come stealing out of the western postern into the white woolly mist? And
what is the burden they bear so reverently? These are the royal orphan
children and the faithful Confessor, Bishop Turgot; and the burden is
the dead queen in her coffin. Safely down the precipitous rock, step by
step, they carry it,--awe-stricken by the miraculous mist sent by Heaven
to help them. Heaven sends many such mists from the Forth into
Edinburgh. It sent another to greet Mary, Queen of Scots, when she first
landed from France; but then it was not by a Catholic Confessor called a
miracle, but by a Presbyterian Reformer an omen. Nowadays they are
called “easterly haars.”
And so Queen Margaret made her last journey from Edinburgh Castle across
the Forth by ferry to Dunfermline, to the Abbey she had built, where, a
century and a half later, silver lamps were kindled on her tomb, for she
had been canonised by Pope Innocent IV. Of the group of children who
helped to carry their mother’s coffin down through the mist that day,
four of the five sons were Kings of Scotland in their turn, and one of
the two daughters became a Queen of England.
The Castle was always a safe royal residence; and, though the Scottish
Kings had palaces and castles elsewhere, they all lived from time to
time in this Castle of Edinburgh. Also, because of its impregnable
strength, it was used as a place of safety in which to stow away such
things as monks and nuns, political
[Illustration: EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE ESPLANADE
Immediately beneath the Half-Moon Battery is the entrance to the Castle.
To the extreme right of the picture on the north side of the Esplanade
shows a bronze statue of the Duke of York, whilst the Celtic cross in
its foreground was erected to the memory of the 78th Highlanders, behind
which is the Forewall Battery. Men of the Black Watch in khaki occupy
the south side of the Esplanade, with a drummer in the foreground.]
prisoners, royal brides-elect, young widowed queens, and the coveted
persons of infant princes. Scottish sovereigns, especially in the Stuart
days, seldom died peaceful deaths; and so there were generally left a
youthful queen-widow and a little crowned boy chafing under a long
minority in the Castle. Weary days must all these semi-prisoners have
spent there, looking out over wooded and hilly country to the Forth.
One such fretted treasure kept in the Castle was Margaret, the daughter
of Henry III. of England, when she was betrothed to Alexander III. The
King was only ten years old when he married her at York; so the little
Queen could not have been very aged, and she complained in letters to
her father of the sad and solitary place she was kept in, and that it
was “without verdure,” and, “by reason of its vicinity to the sea,
unwholesome.”
In the days of Wallace, and of Bruce and Balliol, Edinburgh Castle was
the scene of many a fight and many a siege. Edward I. of England, whose
name must ever be a black one in Scotland, garrisoned the Castle with
English soldiers and took away all the documents of national interest to
the Tower of London; and he also stole Queen Margaret’s Black Rood of
Scotland; and it was in Queen Margaret’s own little oratory that he
received the enforced oaths of fealty from a small band of five Scottish
clergy, among them the Abbot of Holyrood, and a Prioress. Sir William
Wallace recaptured the Castle, and the English took it again; and then
comes a romantic incident of the days of Bruce. The Bruce had entrusted
the retaking of Edinburgh Castle to Sir Thomas Randolph of Strathdon.
Among Randolph’s soldiers was one named Frank, who, long before this,
when he had been stationed at the Castle, had found out a way of getting
up and down the Castle Rock in order to visit a sweetheart who lived in
the town below. Frank undertook to lead a small body of men up the
perilous path he had so often traversed alone. Randolph consented; and,
one dark and stormy night in March 1314,--March has ever been a fateful
month in Scottish history,--when the howling wind and lashing rain would
help to cover the sounds of stealthy climbing, thirty men crept after
Frank up the precipitous cliffs, the walls were silently scaled, the
English garrison was overpowered, and Edinburgh Castle was once more in
the hands of Scots. Randolph, to prevent further fighting, dismantled
the whole place; and for twenty-four years the proud old fortress stood
silent and deserted,--neither clash of arms nor call of bugle, neither
shout of command nor shriek of dying,--only the rain and the sunshine,
day after day, high above the city. But this was not to last; and, after
all the English garrisons had been driven out, Edinburgh became the
favourite residence of David II., the Castle was refortified, and
“David’s Tower” built, in which King David II., the last of the Bruce
line, died. Since then, no king has died in Edinburgh,--though in
Edinburgh many a king has been born and many a king has been married.
When Henry IV. of England besieged the Castle, the young Duke of
Rothesay, eldest son of Robert III., was in command,--that gallant and
fascinating and profligate prince who was afterwards, tradition and Sir
Walter both aver, starved to death at Falkland. From the Castle he
looked down on the hated English hosts, and the story is that he sent a
challenge to Henry to meet him in mortal combat, with a hundred men of
good blood on either side. Although it was the month of August, the
invaders had been troubled with excessive rain and cold. The climate of
Edinburgh had risen to the occasion; and the chilly Plantagenet on the
plain sent a verbal message to the hot Stuart on the height, and hurried
home amid dripping banners and rusty lances.
The first of the royal Stuart widows who watched over a baby king in the
Castle was Queen Jane,--that gentle consort of the poet King James I.,
who had seen her first from the window of his English prison, as she
walked in the gardens of Windsor.
And therewith cast I down mine eyes again
Where as I saw, walking under the Tower
Full secretly, new comen her to playn,
The fairest and the freshest youngé flower
That ever I saw, methought, before that hour:
For which sudden abate anon astart
The blood of all my body to my heart....
King James had married Jane Beaufort in London at St. Mary Overie,[1]
and had brought her back to Scotland with him as his Queen. Thirteen
years later he was assassinated in her presence at Perth. It was to
Edinburgh Castle that she fled with her little son for safety after the
tragedy. But “Fair and false and fickle is the South”; and, less than a
year after the murder of the poet King, his “fairest and freshest youngé
flower” married Sir John Stuart, the Black Knight of Lorn, and so passed
out of view, leaving her little son to be wrangled over by the great
rival barons of Scotland.
And now there took place in the Castle one of the most tragic scenes
ever enacted there,--the “Black Dinner.” The old Earl of Douglas, head
of the great house of Douglas--ever in the history of Scotland
struggling for supremacy with the royal house of Stuart--died, and was
succeeded by his son, a youth of seventeen. When the young earl
surpassed the King in the splendour of his state, and rode out with a
retinue of two thousand lances, and sent ambassadors to the Court of
France, the ten-year-old King “admired his bold and haughty ways”; but
the King’s guardians thought it time to interfere. On the 24th of
November 1440 the Earl of Douglas and his only brother and their old
adviser, Sir Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, were invited to a banquet
at Edinburgh Castle, and their retinue were excluded. Whilst they
feasted with the boy King and the Court, suddenly a black bull’s head
was set before them. The warlike young Douglases instantly recognised
and understood the ancient Scottish symbol of the death-doom, and sprang
up, drawing their swords, but were overpowered by armed men, the poor
little King being powerless to save them. After a form of trial for
treason, the two brothers and Sir Malcolm Fleming were executed on the
Castle Hill.
Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sinne!
And that even for the black dinoir
Erl Douglas gat therin.
Another story of the Castle is that of the escape of the Duke of Albany,
the brother of James III. Albany, imprisoned in the Castle on suspicion
of treason, was to die next day. But Albany was twenty years old and
full of life and daring; he had a faithful “chalmer chield”[2] in the
Castle with him, and he had a strong castle at Dunbar, and knew he would
be safe could he reach it. What more was needed? Just what was brought
to him concealed within two flasks of French wine--a rope, and an
unsigned message that a vessel lay awaiting him in the roads of Leith.
The Captain of the Guard and three soldiers were invited to taste the
French wine, and “the fire was hett and the wine was strong.” At a late
hour Albany “lap from the board and stak the captain with ain whinger.”
The drunken soldiers were then despatched, and Albany stole out and
knotted the rope over two hundred feet of jagged cliff. The Groom of the
Chamber went down first; but the rope was too short, and he fell. The
young Duke returned from the cool night air to the hot scene of the
butchery, and brought sheets to lengthen the rope. When he reached the
bottom of the Castle Rock, this young Stuart who had just killed four
men, and who was doomed to death next day, would not forsake a “chalmer
chield” with a broken thigh-bone, but carried him on his shoulder the
two perilous miles to Leith and safety.
And there to-day stands the Castle, so grim and old and full of
memories; but down that northern cliff dangles no rope, and the two
miles between the Castle and Leith are two miles of busy, crowded
streets.
A few years later, James III. was himself a prisoner in the Castle; and,
by a strange irony of fate, it was this same brother, the Duke of
Albany, who helped him to escape,--not in the same picturesque fashion
he had adopted in his own case, for this time it was the provost and
citizens who assisted in place of one “chalmer chield.” For their
loyalty, the provost was rewarded with the “Golden Charter,” giving the
city magistrates right of Sheriffdom within burgh, and the citizens
received their “Banner of Blue,” embroidered by the Queen and her women.
But not all the Castle prisoners had the luck to escape; and some of the
memories of the Castle are of dark and dreadful tragedies. Numberless
wretches must have languished, their miseries and tortures unknown and
unrecorded, in dungeons cut out of the rock, or in noisome dens and
cells. The fates of some of those of higher rank are matters of history.
It was on the Castle Hill, in the reign of James V., that the beautiful
Lady Glammis, on an accusation of treason too readily believed against a
Douglas,[3] was burnt alive at the stake in sight of her husband and her
little son, Lord Glammis, who were imprisoned in the Castle. The
husband, mad with grief and horror, tried to escape during the night
that followed, and was dashed to pieces on the cliffs.
The Castle is associated with the name of Mary, Queen of Scots, as
closely as with that of Saint Margaret,--two Queens so very different,
and yet both Queens of Scotland, and each the mother of a race of Kings.
The tourist, when he passes from the dark little Oratory into the room
in which James VI. was born, steps across the centuries from the
beginning of Scottish history to the close of Scottish history.
It was amid all the unhappiness of Queen Mary’s life and the troubles of
her reign, shortly after the brutal scene of Riccio’s murder in her
presence, that the Queen was advised, by the Lords of Council, to remain
in the Castle until after the birth of her child. Here, then, in the
palace of the Castle, can still be seen the tiny, irregularly shaped
chamber, scarcely nine feet square, in which King James VI. of Scotland
and I. of England was born. And here, from the one small window
overlooking the Grassmarket, tradition says that the new-born infant was
lowered in a basket to the Catholic friends waiting for him below.
In the days of the last Stuarts, the two Argyles, father and son, were
both prisoners in the Castle before their executions; and, after the
Stuart dynasty had fallen, the Jacobites often felt the hospitality of
Edinburgh Castle. The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in
their leanings and sympathies,--Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a
woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture,
imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were
among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to
the fallen race.
With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that
its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly
different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would
have known. But still, looking up at the perpendicular cliffs of the
Castle Rock and the strong walls and towers and fortifications that seem
part of them, one can picture all those stirring scenes,--the imprisoned
“maydens” of dim, legendary days; Queen Margaret and the escape through
the miraculous mist; the many sieges; the starving patriotic garrisons;
the prisoners in their dungeons; the wild escapes ending in liberty or
in death; the brilliant scenes during the reign of James IV., that royal
“knight errant,” who sat amid his knights and ladies to watch the
tournaments below the Castle walls, and presented a lance tipt with pure
Scottish gold to the winner.
Within the Castle much remains. Queen Margaret’s chapel is the oldest
bit; but there are also the palace
[Illustration: THE CASTLE FROM THE TERRACE OF HERIOT’S HOSPITAL
The opening in the terrace on the left of the picture shows a staircase
descending to the playground of the school. Most of the Castle is seen,
including the Half-Moon Battery, and part of the south retaining wall of
the Esplanade. A figure in a master’s gown occupies the foreground.]
and the great hall. This great hall was used for all State ceremonials,
banquets, and gatherings. It was here, in all likelihood, that Alexander
III. held that Council in the Castle on that stormy day in March 1286
before he took horse and rode through the darkness and storm towards
Kinghorn, where the bride he had married a few months before awaited
him,--rode till, close to his journey’s end, his horse stumbled--a
stumble that cost Scotland dear, for it plunged her into two and a half
centuries of incessant war.
Quhen Alysander oure Kyng wes dede
That Scotland led in luve and lé
Away wes sons off ale and brede
Off wyne and wax, off gamyn and glé;
Our gold wes changed in to lede,
Cryst, born in to Vyrgynyté,
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stad is in perplexyté.
It was in the great hall of the Castle that the treacherous “Black
Dinner” was held in James II.’s minority. It was in the great hall that
many of the Scottish Parliaments met, for they were always held wherever
the King happened to be at the moment, and the King often happened to be
in Edinburgh Castle. Here, then, gathered all those grave or stormy
Parliaments of Scottish nobles, presided over by a gallant Stuart. Here
they discussed the affairs of the brave and troubled kingdom; here they
doomed men to death or exile; here they planned wars with the “auld
enemy”; here they passed those laws which were “good laws, had they been
kept.”
It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish
and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given
by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at
Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the
Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting
lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend,
“For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.”
There is another room in the Castle, a smaller room, in which tangible
symbols of the days of Scottish independence can be seen. There, under a
vaulted roof, on a table covered with glass and set within an iron cage,
are the Scottish Regalia. The dim light reveals the rubies and sapphires
and diamonds and the big pearls set in the ancient golden diadem of the
crown, of date unknown, but which must have rested on the head of the
Bruce and have been worn by each of the Stuarts. It was James V., the
“Red Tod,” who added to the old diadem the two arches of gold,
surmounted by globe and cross; and it was in 1685 that, the former cap
of purple having become faded and threadbare during the concealment of
the Regalia in the Civil War times, the rather theatrical tiara of
crimson velvet, ermine, and pearls was substituted. This is the crown
worn by the hapless Mary, Queen of Scots, and that crowned her infant
son, James VI., after her forced abdication. This is the crown that was
set on the head of Charles I. at Holyrood; and this is what was so
pointedly alluded to by the preacher as “a tottering crown,” the last
time it was ever worn by a king of Scotland--when Charles II. was
crowned and scolded and lectured at Scone. “The Presbyterian solemnity
with which it was given to Charles II.,” says Mr. Robert Chambers,[4]
“was only a preface to the disasters of Worcester; and, afterwards, it
was remembered by this monarch, little to the advantage of Scotland,
that it had been placed upon his head with conditions and restrictions
which wounded at once his pride and his conscience.”
By the side of the cushion on which the crown rests lies the slender
chased sceptre, three little statues on the top--the Virgin, St. Andrew,
and St. James--surmounted by a crystal globe. This sceptre, in the hands
of the Chancellor of Scotland, has touched each of the acts of the
Scottish Parliaments, in token of royal assent. The mace has also a
crystal globe, said to have decorated a still more ancient Scottish
sceptre. A crystal or beryl of this kind, called in Gaelic
“Clach-Buaidh” (stone of victory), tradition avers to have been the
badge of the Arch Druid. Its position on the mace and sceptre is,
therefore, a symbolic emblem of dateless antiquity. The rich Italian
sword of State was a gift from Pope Julius II. to James IV. in 1507.
“Taking these articles in connection with the great historical events
and personages that enter into the composition of their present value,”
writes Mr. Robert Chambers,[5] “it is impossible to look upon them
without emotions of singular interest; while at the same time their
essential littleness excites wonder at the mighty circumstances and
destinies which have been determined by the possession, or the want of
possession, of what they emblematise and represent.”
One other romance of the Castle remains to tell--a stout and tangible
romance--“the great iron murderer, Muckle Mag,” as Cromwell’s list has
it. Mons Meg is thirteen feet long, and weighs four thousand stones. She
is the most ancient cannon but one in Europe, and she is a travelled
cannon. She accompanied James IV. in 1497 to the siege of Norham (James
IV. was fond of ordnance, and forged the “seven sisters of Borthwick”
lost at Flodden), and in the Lord High Treasurer’s accounts of her
travelling expenses on this occasion she is spoken of with an easy
familiarity--
Item, to the menstralis that playit befoir
Mons down the gait XIIjs.
Item, giffen for VIIj of cammas, to be
Mons a clath to covir hir IXs. IIIjd.
Item, for ijc spikin nalis, to turs with
Mons IIjs.
In 1758 she laboriously journeyed as far as England under the mistaken
impression that she had become unserviceable, and there for seventy-five
years formed one of the sights shown in the Tower of London. In 1829 Sir
Walter Scott personally insisted on the return home of what was so dear
to the national pride, and the portly prodigal was met at Leith by three
troops of cavalry and the 73rd Regiment, and escorted back to the
Castle in triumph to the tune of the pipes. With seven huge stone
cannon-balls lying beside her, “after life’s fitful fever” she stands on
the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looks across the new city to the
Forth.