HOLYROOD, THE PALACE AND THE ABBEY:
THE SIX ROYAL JAMESES; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; AND PRINCE CHARLIE
The moon passed out of Holyrood, white-lipped, to open sky;
The night wind whimpered on the Crags to see the ghosts go by;
And stately, silent, sorrowful, the lonely lion lay,
Gaunt shoulder to the Capital and blind eyes to the Bay.
WILL H. OGILVIE.
There are two Holyroods--Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth
century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the
Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always
contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in
turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be
retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old
Abbey. Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined
fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the
large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller
seventeenth-century building.
[Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM THE CASTLE
In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the
Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of
Tolbooth Church. On a lower level of the Castle, to the spectator’s
left, is an iron cage used for beacons. Above this cage and facing the
Mound are the Royal Institution and National Gallery, and immediately
above the latter is the Scott Monument. The row of trees fronting the
tall buildings denote the position of Princes Street running east
towards Calton Hill, which appears crowned by the Nelson Monument and
backed by the Firth of Forth exactly in the centre of the picture. To
the right of Calton Hill on the distant horizon appears the Bass Rock,
to the left the coast of Fife with a portion of the island of
Inchkeith.]
When Edinburgh was only a castle rising out of woods and morasses, with
a cluster of wooden, thatched huts below it, all the land lying between
the Castle and Arthur’s Seat was part of the unhewn forest of
Drumsheugh; and there, where the red elk and the Caledonian boar roamed
under primeval oaks, the pious Celtic kings of Scotland were wont to
take their pleasure in the chase. David, the last of Malcolm’s five sons
who reigned, rode out from the Castle one day, followed by his
courtiers, to go a-hunting--this in spite of the protests of his
confessor, for it was the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and a
day rather for vigil than for sport. Good fortune could not attend the
King in so rebellious a mood. He became separated from the “noys and dyn
of bugillis” of the royal hunt, and suddenly found himself alone and
confronted by a huge white stag, which, furious and at bay, turned and
attacked him. King David defended himself with his short hunting sword,
and would have fared but ill had not a miracle happened--a hand from the
clouds placed a cross in his hand, before which sacred emblem the white
stag fled. And that night, as the awed and wearied monarch slept in the
Castle, St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, appeared to him, and
told him to found yet another monastery on the scene of the miracle. So
Holyrood Abbey was founded, and the canons lived in the Castle till
their Abbey was ready for them, in all its beauty, in the valley close
at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. But David I. of Scotland must not be
remembered only as a “sair sanct for the crown,” chidden by his
confessor and founding abbeys in obedience to dreams, but as “the
beld[6] of all his kyn,” who by his munificence to the Church protected
the land from ravage, and fostered arts and learning; who fought with
England till Scotland included Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland;
and who left Scotland peaceful and prosperous. It was in his reign that
St. Giles’s assumed the dignity of a parochial Church. The little rough
huts of the dwellers in the town, which would naturally have clustered
near the Castle to the east--its one not precipitous side, and where was
its main entrance--would now tend to straggle down towards the Church
and the Abbey, and so began that long street from the Castle to
Holyrood--that curious steep mediæval street down the ridge, so
characteristic of Old Edinburgh to this very day.
The Celtic dynasty had inherited from Saint Margaret their dutiful
generosity to the Church; and in their reigns Holyrood Abbey became very
rich and important, and the Augustine canons of Holyrood were permitted
to build the Canongate round about, and to rule it as a separate burgh.
But, with the death of Alexander III., the last of the Celtic dynasty,
troubled times began for Scotland. First came the patriotic struggle of
Sir William Wallace against the English oppression. Then came days of
civil wars of the Bruce and that splendid hero the Black Douglas, and
all the selfish tyranny of Edward I. of England, ending in the legacy
he left to Scotland--a century and a half of incessant war.
Those were days when no man had time to lay his hand to the plough, and
no woman bore a son but he was reared a fighter and a hater; when
English armies or rude bands of raiders would trample down the growing
grain; when, the sound of the axes scarcely still, the little thatched
homes of the wooden city would be wantonly kindled and left in smoking
ashes and desolation. During all this time, neither was the Abbey of
Holyrood spared by the “auld enemy.” In 1322 Edward II. laid it in
ashes; and when David II., son of the Bruce, was buried before the High
Altar, the silver shrine above it no longer held the miraculous Cross,
for it had fallen into the hands of the English at Durham, and had there
remained, a venerated exile in their Cathedral.
With the Stuart dynasty, in Holyrood as everywhere else, the age of
romance began.
It was in 1429, five years after King James I. had come to Scotland,
that a very dramatic scene took place in the Abbey. The King and Queen
and Court were present at Mass in Holyrood Church on the Feast of St.
Augustine. Suddenly the chanting of the priests broke off as the solemn
ceremony was interrupted by the apparition of a half-clad man before the
High Altar, who, holding a naked sword by the blade, knelt and presented
it to the amazed King. This was the Lord of the Isles, one of the most
powerful of the wild Highland chieftains whom James had been trying to
subdue, and who had lately taken arms against the King, and burnt
Inverness to the ground. In this savage and poetic way did the great
ruined Chieftain give in his desperate submission, and tradition
continues the poetry by insisting that it was at the intercession of
Queen Jane that his life was spared.
In the same year the twin infant sons of James I. were born in Holyrood
Abbey; and, seven years later, when Queen Jane had fled to Edinburgh
Castle with her eldest son after the murder of the King at Perth, it was
at Holyrood Abbey that the little James II. was hastily crowned. It was
at Holyrood Abbey that James II. was married to Mary of Gueldres. Their
son, James III., was also married at Holyrood Abbey, to that Margaret of
Denmark who sailed into Leith with her Danish fleet, and made Scotland
the richer by the Orkneys and Shetlands as her marriage portion.
In the brilliant reign of their son, James IV., Edinburgh consisted of a
steep ascent of “stane-sclated” houses climbing the mile and a quarter
of ridge from Holyrood to the Castle; and the closes and the pleasure
gardens of the “lands” ran down to the edge of the Nor’ Loch, which lay
dark and deep, and guarded the town on the north. The city wall, built
in 1240 to keep out the “auld enemy,” guarded the town to the south, and
climbed over the ridge and met the loch, leaving Holyrood out in the
cold,--for consecrated ground was considered safe, and in no need of lay
assistance. And here Holyrood lay, the huge Norman Abbey with its open
arches, Salisbury Crags and the green slopes of Arthur’s Seat behind
it, and country in front of it stretching down to the shores of the
Forth.
James IV. was crowned at Scone; but it was at Edinburgh he usually held
his Court, and what a brilliant Court it must have been! To Edinburgh,
as in Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days,
knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments
held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to
try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King
rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of
James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men
of art, and men of learning. Up at the Castle, Borthwick, the Master
Gunner, was forging the “Seven Sisters” under James’s supervision. Down
at Leith the King delighted in visiting the shipping yards, and seeing
the great progress of Scottish trade. At the Provost’s house at St.
Giles’s, young Gavin Douglas, son of the great Earl of Angus, was
translating Virgil into Scottish verse. In the city, Walter Chepman and
Andro Myllar were sending forth that new wonder into the land,--printed
books. James not only granted them a patent to print, but endowed their
types and bought their books; and in 1510 he granted the estate of
Priestfield[7] to Walter Chepman, who paid the crown suit for it by
“delivery of a pair of gloves on St. Giles’s day.”[8] Sir Andrew Wood,
that splendid old sailor and gallant figure in Scottish history, must
have been often seen about the streets of Edinburgh and at the Court,
and must often have held consultation with the King about James’s
darling scheme of a Scottish Navy. Lingering with groups of courtiers in
the beautiful precincts of Holyrood, there were many of the great
Scottish nobles whose town houses were in the Edinburgh closes,--Angus
and Argyle, Mar and Morton, and fifty more. There was the much-travelled
friar and Laureate, William Dunbar, “flyting” with his rival poet, “gude
Maister Walter Kennedy.” “As a courtier,” writes Mr. Oliphant Smeaton in
his _Life of Dunbar_,[9] “Dunbar boarded at the King’s expense, and
received each year his robe of red velvet fringed with costly fur. He
was required to be present at every public function, and, if it
presented scope for poetic treatment, to render it into verse. This was
the office of a ‘King’s Makar’ or Laureate.” There was Warbeck, the
pretended Duke of York, plotting in the shadows and wearying the
chivalry of James. There was Don Pedro de Ayala, the courtly Spanish
Ambassador (who had come on the pretext of offering James a Spanish
princess as his Queen, well aware that there was no Spanish princess),
and who was writing home to Ferdinand and Isabella enthusiastic
descriptions of King James, Scotland, and the Scottish people. “The
kingdom is very old, and very noble, and the king possesses great
virtues, and no defects worth mentioning.”[10] “An open and magnificent
court,” Drummond of Hawthornden acknowledges it; and Dunbar gives a
picture of the diversity of men that James IV.’s many interests brought
round him:--
Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine,
Doctors in jure and medicyne:
Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours:
Astrologists, artists, and oratours:
Men of armes and valliant knights:
And mony other goodly wights:
Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers,
Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars,
Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters,
Builders of barks and ballingars,
Masouns, lying upon the land,
And ship wrights hewing upon the strand,
Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris,
Printers, paintours, and potingaris.
And the King who presided over all this, if but half of De Ayala’s
praises be true, was himself as skilled in the arts of peace as of war,
spoke eight languages, and said “all his prayers.”[11] Holbein’s
miniature is a witness of his personal beauty. All agree that he was a
fearless rider, a chivalrous knight, and a brave man. But he was
sensitive, subject to sudden fits of depression alternating with his gay
humour, and it is told of him that, though he had been but a boy when
his father’s estranged nobles had used him as a figure-head for their
rebellion, yet he always wore to the day of his death a hidden chain
round his body, in constant penance for his father’s death.
In his thirtieth year King James married little Margaret Tudor, daughter
of Henry VII. of England. The marriage was brought about by the
persistence of Henry VII., and was nowise according to the inclinations
of the Scottish King, who evaded it for several years after it was first
proposed to him. But State reasons prevailed, and at last James gave
way. The bridegroom was thirty and the bride was fourteen. But, if James
was a tardy wooer, the florid little Tudor had nothing to complain of in
the chivalry of the welcome she received from the courteous and
sensitive Stuart.
In August 1503 she was brought to Scotland, with a train of knights and
nobles, and James rode as far as Dalkeith to meet her, “gallantly
dressed in a jacket of crimson velvet bordered with cloth of gold.”[12]
Before the procession entered the city the King mounted in front of his
bride on her palfrey--his own charger being too restive to bear a double
burden--and so they rode into the decorated and expectant capital, where
the people filled the windows, and gaily dressed ladies thronged the
“fore-stairs”--open stairways outside the houses,--and all shouted or
waved their loyalty and their welcome. Tournaments and shows took place;
and, when they were alone, the king played to the little princess on the
virginal, and
[Illustration: HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE PUBLIC GARDENS UNDER CALTON HILL
Holyrood Palace stretches across the picture east and west, and is
dominated by Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags. The dark turret at the
west end of the nearest and north wing contains the private supper-room
of Queen Mary, the room from which the Italian Rizzio was taken to his
death. The end of the south wing shows beyond, and through a gap in the
mean buildings, occupying the foreground of the picture, is seen the
open space in front of the Palace, the restored fountain, and the
entrance to a carriage road called the Queen’s Drive. The conical roofs
of the towers of the Guard House appear to the extreme right. The gable
and east window of the Chapel Royal (part of the ancient Abbey),
together with the tower, show at the eastern extremity of the north
wing.]
then listened with bent knee and bared head whilst she sang and played
to him. The marriage took place at Holyrood with much magnificence; and
Dunbar the Laureate wrote “The Thristle and the Rois.” All this life and
poetry and splendour glowed in Holyrood, in a braver and a warmer time
than ours,--perhaps the brightest age Edinburgh has known. Little wonder
that Dunbar pitied his royal master when he had to leave it even for a
visit to Stirling, and wrote greeting to him from--
We that here in Hevenis glory
* * * * *
I mean we folk in Paradyis
In Edinburgh with all merriness.
But bright things come quickly to confusion. As always, the undoing of
the brave little land was brought about by England. Ten years after that
marriage day at Holyrood there gathered at midnight, in the moonshine at
the city Cross of Edinburgh, a spectral throng of heralds and
pursuivants. Trumpets sounded, and the terrified spectators heard a
ghostly voice read “the awful summons” to King James and to his Scottish
chivalry: the long death-roll of all who were to fall at Flodden.
Outside the city, on the Boroughmuir (part of the old hunting-ground of
the forest of Drumsheugh, now a built-over suburb, but whose every inch
is historic ground) lay the whole encamped host of the Scottish army.
When the sun next morning rose in the August sky, it lit up a thousand
pavilions white as snow, a thousand streamers flaunting over them, and
reared in their midst the huge royal banner of Scotland, with its “ruddy
lion ramped in gold,”--all in readiness to start on the fatal march
towards Flodden. The army moved on southward, leaving every home, from
the palace to the hovel, bereft of father and sons: and the women
waited.
Suddenly the stillness was broken, as the first wind whispers over the
land and troubles the trees with warning of a storm; and the people--the
women and the old men and the children--looked into one another’s
blanched faces and ran out into the street to learn the truth. One man,
escaped from the field of carnage, had brought the tidings to Edinburgh.
And then the storm burst.
Woe, and woe, and lamentation!
What a piteous cry was there!
Widows, maidens, mothers, children,
Shrieking, sobbing in despair!
Through the streets the death-word rushes,
Spreading terror, sweeping on--
“Jesu Christ! Our King has fallen--
O Great God, King James is gone!
Holy Mother Mary, shield us,
Thou who erst did lose thy Son!
O the blackest day for Scotland
That she ever knew before!
O our King--the good, the noble,
Shall we see him never more?
Woe to us, and woe to Scotland!
O our sons, our sons and men!
Surely some have ’scaped the Southron?
Surely some will come again?”
Till the oak that fell last winter
Shall uprear its shattered stem,
Wives and mothers of Dunedin,
Ye may look in vain for them![13]
All this Edinburgh has seen and known and felt. Remember it, as you walk
in her streets to-day--it is not good for us for the heroic to be
forgotten.
And how did Edinburgh take the blow? The first sound the people heard,
breaking through their cries of grief, was a Proclamation that “all
maner of personis ... haue reddye thair fensible geir and wapponis for
weir,” for defence of the town, and that “wemen of gude pas to the kirk
and pray.”[14] An indomitable race, that nothing could crush! The arms
in readiness were not needed, however; England was too crippled to move.
After another long minority, such as had occurred with each of the
Jameses, the wax candles at Holyrood once again lit up Court scenes. The
royal palace, the building of which had been begun about 1503 by James
IV.,[15] had been inhabited in the interval by the Duke of Albany, the
Regent, during his sojourns in Scotland, who had, no doubt, brought his
French ideas of elegance to bear on it. James V.,--the “Red Tod” of so
many adventures,--who had been born within its walls, held his councils
and his Court there, and, between 1529 and 1535, completed the building
begun by his father, and spoilt by the English soldiers. To Holyrood,
when he was but two-and-twenty, James V. brought his fragile little
French bride, Madeleine, daughter of Francis I., whom he had married in
Nôtre Dame at Paris. The poet Ronsard was a twelve-year-old page in the
Queen’s train when she came to Holyrood; and another in her train was
the founder of the great Scottish family of Hope, including that Sir
Thomas Hope who was King’s Advocate in Charles I.’s time. The gentle
French princess, when she landed with James at Leith on the 19th of May
1537, was already dying of consumption. She stooped and kissed the
“Scottis eard” when she set foot on it; and seven weeks afterwards,
within Holyrood Abbey, she was laid pitifully beneath the same kindly
“Scottis eard.”
Thief! saw thou nocht the great preparatives
Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?
Thou saw the people labouring for their lives
To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:
Sic pleasour never was in this regioun
As suld have been the day of her entrace,
With great propinis given to her Grace.
Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,
The Senatours, in order consequent,
Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;
Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,
With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,
In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:
But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.[16]
James V. had not a happy reign. His boyhood had been one of restraint
under the tyranny of nobles; and, after eight years of putting his
kingdom into order and subduing the troublesome Douglases, his journey
to France to seek a bride had thus ended tragically in her death. The
vagaries of his mother, Margaret Tudor, who, after her husband’s fall at
Flodden, had emulated her brother Henry VIII. in her marriages and
divorcings and remarryings, must have made her a domestic trouble to her
son; and abroad, constant wars with England broke his spirit. Four years
after his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, had landed at Crail to become
Queen of Scotland, James V., though not yet thirty years old, was a
miserable, half demented, sorely stricken man, dragging himself home on
the tidings of the disastrous defeat of Solway Moss, first to Edinburgh,
and then to the greater seclusion of Falkland. There, hearing of the
last trouble of all, that the child to whom Mary of Lorraine had given
birth at Linlithgow was a daughter, he, like Ahab of old, turned his
face to the wall. “It cam’ wi’ a lass, and it’ll gang wi’ a lass,--and
the deil gang wi’ it!” he cried: and so the Red Tod died.
The next scene at Holyrood is twenty years after, and the palace in the
plain, and the Castle on the height, and the city between, are all
covered with a thick, heavy white mist, like that which shrouded Malcolm
Canmore’s children as they escaped from the Castle with their mother’s
coffin. The “haar” has crept up from the Firth of Forth, and the Firth
of Forth is lost in impenetrable fog; but this time it is not a
ferry-boat bearing a dead Queen across to Dunfermline, but a State
galley bringing a living Queen home from France.
Mary Stuart, surrounded by her Scottish and French retinue, and with
three of her French Guise and Lorraine uncles on board, and her four
Scottish Marys in attendance, sailed up the Firth of Forth on Tuesday,
19th of August 1561, in so dense a mist that none could see from the
stern of the vessel to her prow. “Si grand brouillard,” the horrified
Sieur de Brantôme called it. Truly, if Queen Margaret’s haar was
miraculous, Queen Mary’s haar was prophetic; for little indeed did the
Stuart Princess see of what lay before her in Scotland.
The people of Leith and Edinburgh were taken by surprise, not having
expected their Queen for another week, and nothing was ready for her
reception,--except the haar. She rode in state to Holyrood next day. The
“grand brouillard” would have prevented her from seeing anything except
a vista of mist and drizzle, and no doubt she was glad to dismount and
find herself in the light and warmth of the palace, with her four Marys
and her French-speaking courtiers gazing curiously about them at their
new surroundings.
It was not many hours before Queen Mary was to learn to how different a
Scotland she had come from the Catholic Scotland her father and
grandfathers had known. After she had supped, and whilst the bonfires
still burnt on Arthur’s Seat, and the crowds were dispersing home
through the foggy streets, the weary Queen wished to rest. Suddenly a
noise;--a crowd of about five hundred people had gathered below the
palace windows, and were serenading the Catholic Queen by singing her
Protestant psalms to the accompaniment of fiddles. “Vile fiddles and
rebecks,” Brantôme designates them; and adds that the crowds sang “so
ill and with such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what
music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Yes, Sieur de Brantôme! And
what a different picture from that of James IV. kneeling bareheaded
before little Margaret Tudor whilst she played to him on the virginal!
So, with a “grand brouillard,” with a serenade of psalms ill sung to
fiddles, and with a riot in her chapel during Mass, Queen Mary’s life
and troubles at Holyrood began.
Although the first stress of the religious revolution had greatly
changed the daily life and the characters of the people, it had as yet
not spoilt Holyrood Abbey, and Queen Mary saw it as the royal Jameses
had seen it, in all its grandeur of size and its grace of early Norman
architecture, as it had been built by David I. The armies of Henry
VIII., it is true, had recently plundered and burnt it; but English fire
never made much impression on Scottish stone.
The palace of Holyrood adjoining the Abbey was built round a great
square court, with a towered and pinnacled frontage facing a huge outer
courtyard separating the palace precincts from the fringes of the town,
and at the back meeting the Abbey. The whole palace and its extensions
and smaller courts were set in walled grounds, stretching to the base
of Arthur’s Seat. These included pleasure gardens, plantations, and
buildings, among which was the quaint building still called “Queen
Mary’s Bath.” The north-west corner of the palace proper terminated in a
turreted tower which contained Queen Mary’s rooms, and this tower,
rebuilt by James V. on the foundations of James IV.’s building, still
forms part of the modern Holyrood, and in it, to-day, Mary’s life stands
revealed. In these rooms she moved and smiled, spoke and wept. Here it
was that she tried, with her beauty and her wit and her courtesy and her
wonderful power of forbearance, to soften her rude nobles and turn their
harsh disapproval into loyalty. Here, in the audience chamber, the first
two of her famous interviews with John Knox took place. In Queen Mary’s
day most of the ground now devoted to the formal grass and gravel of
unused palace gardens was covered by the great Abbey. It was at the High
Altar of this Abbey, where the Royal Jameses had led their very youthful
brides, that Queen Mary, dressed in a robe of black velvet, was married,
between five and six o’clock one Sunday morning in July, to her cousin
Lord Darnley, a dissipated boy of nineteen. It was in the tiny little
room leading off the Queen’s room, where the lifted tapestry still shows
the entrance to the secret stair between her room and Darnley’s, that
she sat at supper on the night of Riccio’s murder. With her were her
sister the Countess of Argyle, and several of the Household, including
the lay Abbot of Holyrood, and the Queen’s Secretary, the doomed Riccio.
Darnley entered and seated himself. At that signal suddenly there broke
in upon them the brutal Lord Ruthven, followed by the other assassins,
and seized the Italian favourite who was clinging to the Queen’s skirts
for protection and crying “Sauve ma vie, Madame! sauve ma vie!” The
table was thrown down on the Queen as they struggled, and one of the
murderers levelled a pistol at her. They dragged the bleeding body out,
across the Queen’s bedroom to the entrance of the presence chamber,
where they despatched him with “whingers and swords,” and the blood from
his fifty-six wounds soaked through the wooden floor. All that night the
outraged Queen was a captive in her own palace, whence the Earls of
Bothwell and Huntly had escaped by ropes from the back windows. The
Provost and town “caused ring their common bell,” and came to see to the
safety of their Queen; but the Queen was told by her lords, her
husband’s accomplices, that they would “cut her into collops and cast
her over the wall if she attempted to speak to them.” All this a few
months before the birth of her child.
Stern swords are drawn, and daggers gleam--her words, her prayers are vain--
The ruffian steel is in his heart--the faithful Rizzio’s slain!
Then Mary Stuart brushed aside the tears that trickling fell:
“Now for my father’s arm,” she said, “my woman’s heart, farewell!”[17]
A year later, on the night of Sunday, 9th February 1567, there were
doings grave and gay in Edinburgh. Darnley lay “full of small-pox in a
velvet-hung bed in an upper storey of the Prebendaries’ chamber at
Kirk-o’-Field. The infant Prince James slept in his carved cradle at
Holyrood. Bastian, one of the Queen’s servants, was celebrating his
marriage in the palace. The “Queen’s Grace” went from her husband’s
sick-room, afoot under a silken canopy, with a guard of Archers, “with
licht torches up the Blackfriar Wynd,” to attend the masque at Holyrood
in honour of the marriage. Lord Bothwell, disguised in “a loose cloak
such as the Swartrytters wear,”[18] skulked with his accomplices in the
shadows of the Cowgate. And then--“a little after two hours after
midnight, the house wherein the King was lodged was in an instant blown
in the air,”--and Darnley was dead.
It was to Holyrood that Darnley’s body was brought, and the Queen lay in
a darkened room and her voice sounded “very doleful.” Well it might, for
the vicious Darnley dead and embalmed was to prove a greater curse to
her than had proved the vicious Darnley living.
It was in the old Chapel at Holyrood, at two o’clock on a May morning
three months later, that Queen Mary was married to Bothwell, “not with
the Mass, but with preaching,” by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. “At
this marriage there was neither pleasure nor pastime used, as use was
wont to be used when princes were married.”[19] There were at least two
causes and
[Illustration: THE APARTMENTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS IN HOLYROOD PALACE
An ancient bed hung with faded crimson silk stands in Queen Mary’s
bed-chamber, together with chairs and other furniture of a later date.
Under the raised tapestry on the far side of the room is an open door,
through which is entered the private supping-room of Queen Mary, and
from which the Italian Rizzio was dragged to his death by the
conspirators. They gained admittance to the apartments by the small door
closely adjoining the supping-room. The ceiling of the bedroom is of
wood, divided into panels, decorated with initials and coats-of-arms.]
just impediments why those two persons should not have been joined
together in holy Matrimony; but none declared them.
It was to Holyrood that Queen Mary was brought on foot at eight o’clock
on the evening of the day after the battle of Carberry Hill; after the
parting with Bothwell; after the hootings and hideous insults of the
mobs gathered in the windows and on the fore-stairs as she rode
vanquished through her capital. She had spent the night “in the
Provost’s lodging” in the town. Thence she was brought to Holyrood for a
wretched interval before she was forced to ride, “mounted on a sorry
hackney,” at a furious pace all the June night, between the coarse and
brutal Ruthven and Lindsay, “men of savage manners, even in that age,”
says Mignet, to Lochleven and captivity.
After the days of the hapless Queen Mary the history of Holyrood
consists only of a series of more or less dramatic scenes. The first
three of these are in James VI.’s reign, and end the days when Holyrood
was the home of a Royal race. James VI.’s two sons, Prince Henry,
afterwards the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Charles,
afterwards Charles I., were christened at Holyrood. All the earls of
James VI.’s creation were created at Holyrood. And it was into the
courtyard of Holyrood, on Saturday evening the 26th of March 1603, when
the King and Queen had supped and retired, and “the palace lights were
going out one by one,” that Sir Robert Carey clattered, half dead with
fatigue and excitement, having ridden from London to Edinburgh in three
days, and dropt on his knees before the King and cried, “Queen Elizabeth
is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”
Did the shades of all the brave and splendid Scottish kings hover near
as the words were spoken? Bruce, who fought at Bannockburn--Bruce, whose
daughter Marjory was the mother of the first Stuart king; all the
Stuarts, down to the gallant James who had ridden into his capital with
his Tudor bride behind him on the palfrey, and had fallen on the field
of Flodden; their son who, with Tudor blood in his veins, had died
cursing England, and whose daughter the English Elizabeth had
beheaded--did all their shades hover near as the words were spoken in
Holyrood? James VI., eighth of the line from the High Steward of
Scotland, knew himself to be King of the “auld enemy”--and the lights of
Holyrood went out one by one.
But as, at the end of the play, the curtain is raised once or twice
after it has fallen, and the scene-shifters stand back in the wings
whilst the gaily dressed figures bow before an applauding audience, so
the curtain has been raised once or twice on Holyrood to the sound of
the multitude huzzaing. One such occasion was when Charles I. was
crowned at Holyrood. A brilliant day for Edinburgh--a revival of the
royal pageantries once so familiar in her streets; a long procession
from the Castle to Holyrood between lines of soldiers in white satin
doublets and black velvet breeches and plumed hats; a long procession of
nobles on horseback, of heralds and trumpeters, of bishops with lawn
sleeves, of civic dignitaries in scarlet and ermine; a flash of colour
winding down the mediæval street, as of old, from the Castle to the
Palace--and then Charles returned to England, and the curtain fell.
It was Charles II., the Merry Monarch, who rebuilt Holyrood and gave it
its present aspect. His own desire was to erect a large new palace, such
as Charles I. had contemplated building. In the Bodleian Library at
Oxford is a plan of the second storey, dated October 1663, and endorsed
“the surveyes and plat mead by John Mylne, his Majestie’s Mr. Massone,”
and to it is attached by sealing-wax a piece of paper, on which is
written: “This was his Majesties blessed fatheres intentione in anno
1633.”[20]
James VII., while Duke of York, held Court in Holyrood and restored the
Abbey Church, and had Mass celebrated in it for his Catholic subjects.
News of the landing of William of Orange gave lawlessness the leave, and
the Presbyterian mob sacked the Chapel, burnt the Altar and organ at the
City Cross, and desecrated the royal vault, tearing open the leaden
coffins of the dead Kings and Queens of Scotland. But in 1745 the
curtain rose once again, and for the last time, on the Stuart drama.
Edinburgh was filled with loyal Highlanders, was noisy with the skirling
of pipes and the din of bugles, and Edinburgh folk went decorated with
white cockades, and the air was charged with excitement. There rode up
to the door of Holyrood that “gallant and handsome young Prince, who
threw himself on the mercy of his countrymen, rather like a hero of
romance than a calculating politician.”[21] How did they receive him?--
As he cam’ marching doon the street,
The pipes played loud and clear;
And a’ the folk cam’ rinnin’ oot
To meet the Chevalier!
Oh, Charlie is my darling!...
Holyrood again sheltered a Stuart, and all was hope and enthusiasm. It
was in the long picture-gallery of Holyrood Palace that Scotland’s
capital gathered her beauty and her chivalry, and gave her ball in the
Prince’s honour,--that ball immortalised in _Waverley_.
Again the curtain fell, and the scene-shifters peopled the stage.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the ruinous roof of the Abbey,
ill repaired, fell in, carrying with it the ancient arches. The ruins
were desecrated, filled with rubbish and insulted, the coffins of the
dead were stolen, and the skulls and bones of kings and queens lay
exposed, exhibited--were carried away, and lost. Among them was the
gentle Madeleine who had kissed the “Scottis eard.” Holyrood Abbey had
survived over six centuries the invasions of the wanton English, only to
be laid in ruins by the citizens of Edinburgh themselves.