INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS--AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF
MACBETH.
The sunshine and the green leaves embrace not all that we should know
of physical nature. Storm and darkness have their signs, which we do
well to study; and in the tempests of the tropics, or the long winter
darkness of the poles, we have types of the character of different
sections of the globe, more marked than the varying warmth of the sun,
or the character of the vegetation--but not perhaps so pleasing. Even
so, the storm and darkness of the human soul--the criminal nature of
man, provide their peculiar food for the thinker and inquirer. The
annals of virtue have their own elevations and delights; but those of
vice are no more to be passed over than the dark and stormy hours in
the history of each revolution round the sun. "While some affect the
sun, and some the shade," there may even be those whose most deeply
cherished associations are with these unlit hours--who prefer the
night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to
different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may
profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a
nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest
brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and
subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer
view--like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes:
the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they
rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The _ordinary_
vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great
crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among
whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy.
It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to
pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has
re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The
country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most
amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved
and was beloved wherever she went; so sensitive, so sympathising, so
sedulous, so studious of the wants of those by whom she was
surrounded, so disinterestedly patient; she had but one peculiarity to
distinguish her from an angel of light--it was an unfortunate
propensity to poison people! We read in the _Causes Célèbres_, of a
Bluebeard who slew a succession of wives by tickling them till they
died in convulsions; and at once we are reminded of that populace who
are said to partake of the natures of the ape and the tiger. The
people who, for more centuries than are included in the events of
European history, have been resolved into the mysterious
classification of castes, produced those equally mysterious criminals
the Thugs, for whose deeds our so utterly different habits and ideas
are quite incapable of finding or conceiving a motive. Our own country
produced the assassinations of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and Archbishop
Sharpe--all pregnant with marked national characteristics;
aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong, and fanatical fury. We propose
to offer for the amusement or instruction--which he pleases--of our
reader, a few more records of Scottish crimes, not probably all so
conspicuously known to the general reader as the three we have just
alluded to, yet not, we trust, without something to commend them to
notice, as characteristic of the country and the age in which they
were respectively enacted.
The raw materials from which we propose to work out our little groups,
are the records of our criminal trials; and yet we feel an insuperable
inclination to begin with a name not certainly unknown, yet not to be
found in the proceedings of the Court of Justiciary--Macbeth, King of
Scotland. Perhaps we might consider it a sufficient reason for holding
his case equivalent to a trial, that before a tribunal called the
Public Opinion, he has been tried, and that at the instance of such a
public prosecutor as never opened his lips in any court of law--one
whose accusation has carried a conviction deep into the very heart of
literature, whence no archæological evidence, and no critical pleading
will ever eradicate it. Nor would we desire to touch it: let Macbeth
the murderer remain to all time the most powerful picture of
temptation, leading its victim through crime into the hideous shadows
of remorse, that human pen has ever drawn. But there was an actual
prose Macbeth, as different from the ideal as the canvass bought by
Raphael of some respectable dealer in the soft line, was from the
Transfiguration which he afterwards painted on it. With _him_, being
but a simple historical king, we may take liberties; and the liberty
we propose to take on the present occasion is that of vindicating his
character. Vindications are fashionable; and since Catiline and
Machiavelli, Richard III., and Philip II. have been vindicated, why
not Macbeth? We shall say 'tis our humour to whiten him, and no man
can say it is a criminal or mischievous one.
The main question is, did Macbeth murder Duncan? It was an older story
in Shakspeare's time than the murder of Darnley is now, and he may
have taken a false view of it. We shall approach the question by an
inquiry who Duncan and Macbeth were, and in what relation they stood
to each other. About the end of the eleventh century, there reigned in
Scotland a king called Kenneth III. Like all the other Scottish
monarchs of the period, the chroniclers have given him his own
peculiar tragic history, in this wise: he was induced to poison the
young prince Malcolm Duff, who might possibly show a title to the
throne enabling him to compete with Kenneth's own offspring. This
troubled his conscience. He "ever dreaded in his mind," in the
expressive words of old Bellenden, that it "should come some time to
light: and was so full of suspicion, that he believed when any man
rounded to his fellow, that they spake evil of him; for it is given by
nature to ilk creature, when he is guilty of any horrible crime, by
impulsion of his conscience, to interpret every thing that he sees to
some terror of himself." He was one night appalled by a terrific
vision, and next morning making his confession, he was sentenced to a
pilgrimage to the tomb of St Palladius at Fordun. When the pilgrimage
was over, he was invited to partake of the hospitalities of a lady
named Fenella--a very neat name for a romance--at her fortalice of
Fettercairn. In the civil conflicts or the administration of justice
during his reign, some of the relations of this lady had been slain;
among the rest her son. Having got the king into her toils, she
resolved to put him to death; and the method which the chroniclers
make her adopt, shows a superfluous ingenuity ridiculous enough to
strip a murder of all its horrors. Kenneth was taken to see a tower of
the castle "quhilk was theeket with copper, and hewn with maist subtle
mouldry of sundry flowers and imageries, the werk so curious, that it
exceeded all the stuff thereof." In the middle of this tower stood an
image of Kenneth himself, in brass, holding in his hand a golden apple
studded with costly gems. "That image," said the lady, "is set up in
honour of thee, to show the world how much I honour my king; the
precious apple is intended for a gift for the king, who will honour
his poor subject by taking it from the hand of the image." Now matters
were so arranged, that the removal of the apple caused certain springs
to touch the triggers of a series of bent cross-bows pointed to the
spot, and so, when the unsuspecting monarch went to take the gift, a
whole sheaf of arrows penetrated to his heart. On the death of this
king, though he left a son called Malcolm, the succession went to a
rival line. His immediate successor was Constantine, who was killed by
another Kenneth, called IV., who in his turn was killed by Malcolm,
who thus regained the throne his father had filled. "The gracious
Duncan" was the son of a daughter of this Malcolm. His father,
strangely enough, appears to have been a priest; he is called in the
old dry chronicles, which are the only ones to be depended on, Duncan
the son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld. Now the Kenneth IV. of
the rival line, who had been slain by Duncan's grandfather, left
behind him a son, and that son left a daughter, whose name was Gruach,
and in whom the reader, though certainly in an unusual shape, must
welcome Lady Macbeth herself. There being thus two rival races,
alternately seizing the throne: while Duncan was the son of a daughter
of one king, _she_ was the daughter of the son of another. This gave
her no contemptible title to the throne, and when she married Macbeth,
or Machaboedth, as he is called by the chroniclers, she had a husband
who, possessing the almost independent principality of Ross, might be
able to fight her battles. It is somewhat remarkable that, in an
ecclesiastical record still preserved, in which a royal grant is made
to a religious house, dedicated to St Servanus, Macbeth's wife appears
along with himself, as granter of the deed; and they are called,
"Machabet filius Finlach, et Gruach filia Bodhae--Rex et Regina
Scotorum;"[L] an equal juxtaposition, only to be accounted for by the
supposition that Macbeth was king in right of his wife. As to Macbeth
himself, his origin, save in the supernatural legend we shall
hereafter notice, appears not to have been known; but Fordun seems to
intimate, that he was a descendant of that same Fenella who had so
curiously murdered Duncan's great-grandfather. If we were disposed,
indeed, to take a proper antiquarian partisanship of the one dynasty
against the other, we might speak of Duncan as a treacherous usurper,
and Lady Macbeth as an injured and insulted queen, whose cause is
heroically adopted and vindicated by a true knight, who, while
redressing her wrongs, wins her heart and hand.
[L] _Registrum Prioratus Sancti Andreæ_, 114.
Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken
of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St
Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been
upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other
age,--perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers
judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of
success:--Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of
genius, in these two lines:--
"He murthrified him in Elgyne,
His Kynrik he usurped syne."
This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room
for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct,
for he speaks of the slain monarch as _occisus scelere_. But these
chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event
they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day
as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not
contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest
possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that
Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the
multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are
often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed
officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply
states, that Duncan _interfectus est_. It is true that the Latin
language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished
from other kinds of slaughter. _Trucido_ is the verb we have been
accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination;
but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that
of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth
himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers
had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive _murdrum_ and
the verb _murdrare_; equally creditable to their good taste in
Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the
Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they
cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had
occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a
condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough
voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion
troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake
through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were
justifiable slaughters and unjustifiable; but the practice of single
combat had not arisen to draw a strong and distinct line between death
in a fair tournament or duel, and secret assassination. A recollection
that this was also the social state of Scotland in the days of
Macbeth, will help us far better towards the truth than a criticism on
the ambiguous Latin words. It was between that age and the period of
Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat chivalry and the laws of honour
had grown up; so, while the older chroniclers had simply to say that
the man was killed, without troubling themselves about the manner,
those of later date were moved to divide the deaths into two
departments--the killed in combat and the murdered. More, probably, by
chance than design, the fate of Duncan was put into the latter
category; and then a super-structure of particulars was raised upon
it--for it must be observed, that the romantic incidents of the
slaughter were added at a still later period than that of Fordun or
Wyntoun--by Boece and Hollinshed. Here, then, is our case, as lawyers
say: Macbeth, in right of his wife, was a claimant of the crown. He
kills the existing holder; but there is nothing in the older accounts
of the affair to show that he did so otherwise than in the fair course
of war. It was what the old civilians would have called a _casus
belli_,--an expression which, by the way, we find some accomplished
editors using as the Latin for a justification of war. The murder is
found only in the later chronicles, which, in all parts of their
narrative, have covered their more sober predecessors with a coating
of fabulous details like the stalactites of a dripping cave. However
the real fact may have stood, we have no _statement_ of Macbeth having
murdered Duncan until between three and four centuries after the
event. Why,--the case looks vastly better than we thought it did when
we began with it; we have some thoughts of believing our own theory,
which is more than ever we knew a historical critic do, within the
range of our personal observation.
Having so disposed of this question, we are inclined to amuse our
readers with some further notices--real and unreal--about Macbeth.
Wyntoun gives us a strange wild legend of his supernatural parentage,
beginning
"Bot, as we fynd be some stories,
Gotten he was in fairly wys;
His modyr to woods made oft repaire,
For the delyte of halesome air;
Swa sho passed upon a day
'Til a wood her for to play,
Scho met of cas with a fair man
(Never nane so fair as sho thought than
Before than had sho seen with sight)
Of beauty pleasand, and of hycht
Proportioned wele in all measure,
Of limb and lyth a fair figure."
Such is the description of the putative father of Macbeth. In the
sententious explanation of Wyntoun, who scorned expletives, "he the
devil was;" and so he told the wandering damsel--
"And bade her nought fleyed to be of that,
But said that her son should be
A man of great state and bounty;
And na man sould be born of wife
Of power to reve him of his life.
And of that deed in taknyng,
He gave his leman then a ring,
And bade her that sho sould keep that wele,
And hald for his love that jewel."
Wyntoun's melodious verses were lying in a dusty parchment manuscript
when Shakspeare wrote; we know not if he had access to the volume, nor
have we any strong reason for presuming that he would have perused it
if he had. It would be too adventurous to predict whether, knowing the
legend, he would have considered any reference to it as consistent
with the character of his drama; but it is curious to observe, that
the tale appears to have been in the eye of Sir Walter Scott, when he
wrote the history of Brian the Hermit, in the _Lady of the Lake_,
beginning--
"Of Brian's birth strange tales were told:
His mother watch'd a midnight fold."
We shall now indulge our readers with a glance at a totally different
feature in the career of Macbeth. It appears that he was a very able
financier. We presume that he was his own First Lord of the Treasury
and Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in his days there was no pressure
on the money-market; there was no drain of gold; there was no
restriction of issue; no great houses suspended payment; there were
no rumours of turns-out and distress in the manufacturing districts;
there was no Highland destitution. Our proof of this position lies in
two lines of our illustrious poet Wyntoun, which contain as much as a
smaller genius could have crowded into a volume on "The state and
progress of Scotland during the reign of Macbeth; with an account of
the arts, industry, and manufactures of the country; returns of the
exports and imports, and of the goods entered for home consumption,
with the annual gross and net revenue from customs and excise,
post-office, assessed taxes, hereditary revenue, and other
miscellaneous sources, during that reign: dedicated, by permission, to
the Statistical Society." Wyntoun's simple statement is--
"All his time was great plenté,
Abundant both by land and sea."
What more is necessary? It is true, that on another occasion we have
repudiated Wyntoun as an authority; but it is the privilege of the
antiquarian speculator to found on an author when he is right, and
repudiate him when he is wrong.
We now come to a subject on which really, jocularity apart, we stand
upon firm and secure ground--the spot where Macbeth fell. All the
chroniclers with one voice state that it was at a place called
Lunfanan. Even Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it is universally
admitted, was the one perused by Shakspeare,--after he tells how the
beleaguered fugitive beheld the miraculous forest with which his doom
was involved approaching him, continues to say--"Nevertheless, he
brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly:
howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when
Macbeth, perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom
Macduff pursued with great hatred, even till he came to Lunfannane."
Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed
that it was some spot close to Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden
his action with the particularity of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan
is, however, north of the Dee, and distant full fifty miles in a
straight line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains of the Braes of
Angus lying between the two places; so that the two parties must have
had a pretty long running fight, and Macbeth stood out even harder
game than he has generally credit for. Our favourite poet describes
the chase across the broad valley of Strathmore, through the rocky
glens of Clova, over the Isla and the Esk, down through the hoary
forest of Glentanner, across the raging Dee, and up again through
mountain and forest, in this sententious and emphatic couplet,
"And our the Month they chaised him than
'Till the wood of Lunfanan."
When the victory was completed, we are told that they cut off his
head, and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine--a pleasant village on
the banks of the Dee, about ten miles from Lunfanan.
This same Lunfanan is a spot which it requires particular taste to
love, and yet we have perambulated it not without interest. The
Chroniclers speak of it as a forest, but the highest elevations are
now generally bare of trees, save where in a few sheltered hollows the
birches cling to the rocks. The hills are of considerable height, but
round and bare, with few precipices, and little character of outline;
but the glens between the hills are sheltered and well cultivated,
each is enlivened by a small stream, and still more enlivened by the
scanty population seeking the shelter of the recesses of the glen, and
making it populous amid the waste. But we shall afford a better
description than our own, in a few lines from "The Fortunate
Shepherdess," by a poet who lived in a glen not far distant--Alexander
Ross. It will be admitted, by the way, that our poetical quotations
to-day are not of a hackneyed kind, whatever other censure they may
incur.
"The water keely on a level sleed,
Wi' little din, but couthy what it made:
On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang,
And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang;
On ev'ry side, a full bow-shot and mair,
The green was even, gowany, and fair;
With easy sklent, on ev'ry hand, the braes,
To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise,
Wi' goats and sheep aboon, and ky below,
The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go."
Occasionally, when the new earth is turned up, strange uncouth warlike
instruments are found in this district--remnants of ancient strife, so
unlike any weapons recorded in the genuine history of the military
art, that it were hard to say whether they belong to the age of
Macbeth, or to unknown anterior centuries. Flint arrow-heads, stone
hammers and axes,--such is their general character, though we have
also seen among these mysterious discoveries, such a thing as a long
flat mass of decomposed iron, which may have once been the blade of a
dagger, or short sword. Here the knowing reader, who has been induced,
on the field of Waterloo, to purchase a ball-perforated cuirass and
helmet, which he afterwards discovers to have been made at a
manufactory of Waterloo relics, will curl his lip in scorn; but he is
wrong. Lunfanan is no relic-collecting district. We question if the
inhabitants ever made a shilling of any one, the present company
excepted, by the military stores discovered by them when ploughing
their tough peat soil. We did not require there to practise the method
of self-defence which we adopted on a visit to the field of Waterloo;
and by the way--as we are inclined to recommend it strongly to our
friends, as an effectual preservative from the main annoyance to which
the hero-worshipper is subjected--we may here describe our method. On
hiring our guide, we desired him to procure for us a fragment of an
old kettle. Carrying this conspicuously in our hard, to each band of
relic-sellers who came up, we stated that we were in the trade
ourselves, that we had just acquired a very valuable article, and were
willing to part with it at a moderate price. The cuirassiers did not
look more ridiculous, when they attempted to storm the squares, than
our assailants, when we fortified ourselves behind this piece of
defensive armour. But to return to Lunfanan.
In one of the narrow glens, near the old parish-church, there is an
oblong solid turf bank, or mound, of considerable height, and regular
construction, as clean and sharp in its outline as the glacis of a
modern fortification. A neighbouring stream has been diverted round
it, or rather the waters have been divided and distributed on either
side, so as to surround it with a fosse. This curious antiquity is
called "the Peel Bog," or Castle Bog. "The course," says the author of
the statistical account of the parish, "by which the water was
conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan may still be traced; the measure
of the circumvallation by which the water was confined may still be
made; the situation of the drawbridge is still discernible; the path
leading from the fosse to the top of the mound may still be trodden;
and the sluice by which the water issued from the moat, was laid bare
by the flood of 1829."[M] Even the sceptical Lord Hailes ventured to
associate Macbeth's name with the spot; "as no remains of buildings,"
he says, "are to be seen, it is probable that the fortress was
composed of timber and sod. In this solitary place, we may conjecture
that Macbeth sought an asylum." At some distance from the Peel Bog, a
low thin rampart of earth and stone encircles the summit of a conical
hill; it is an inferior specimen of the old British hill-fort, well
known both in Scotland and the north of England. But on the brow of
one of the hills, there is a still more emphatic memorial of the
monarch's fate. There a heap of gray stones, considerably larger than
many others surrounding it, is still called, and is represented in the
county maps as _Cairn Beth_. We must admit that, were it in a
tourist's district, or were it the spot which popular literature, of
any kind had marked as the grave of Macbeth, this would be suspicious.
But no tourist's footstep seeks the quiet uninviting wilds of
Lunfanan. There is no railway line, not even a stage-coach
communication, between it and the world. You have but to see the
rough, primitive, granitic air of the Lunfananers assembled at the
parish church, to know that they are incapable of any imposition.
Legends we always distrust, especially when they are connected with
any spot sanctified by poetry. At Dunsinane, we believe, some
vestiges are shown as marking the spot of the usurper's death, the
"genuine" spot, "all others being spurious imitations;" but we suspect
this legend is not even so old as Shakspeare's day, that it is no
older than the revival of Shakspearean literature, and the rise of a
general public interest in the spots illuminated by his genius.[N] For
more than one castle, Cawdor included, has the merit been claimed of
being the identical edifice in which Duncan was slain, and undoubted
four-posted bedsteads have been shown in actual existence to put
scepticism to scorn. But any popular association of the actual events
of Macbeth's career with quiet remote Lunfanan has been barred by the
silence of Shakspeare, and the unwillingness of topographical critics
to break the spell of the accepted localities. Though legends spring
up like rumours, with a breath, the _names_ of places which they have
received from historical incidents are generally of long standing,
and, indeed, a large proportion of the lowlands of Scotland is full of
places which to this day bear Celtic names, given them by tribes who
cannot have inhabited the districts for a thousand years at least. The
old chroniclers, without exception, lay Macbeth's death in Lunfanan;
the people of the spot, who never read these chronicles, and never,
perhaps, heard of Macbeth, or if they did, heard the popular account
of his death in Dunsinane, call a certain monumental tumulus Cairn
Beth--this, we think, is very nearly conclusive.[O] And yet, sitting
on that Cairn, with the fresh breeze blowing round one, and the blue
heavens above, and the blooming heather-bells around, or reclining on
the smooth green turf of the Peel Bog, on a summer day, with the sun
shining hot upon the hills, and the babbling brook singing its "quiet
tune," it is not easy to associate the spot with that history of blood
and horror, or to feel that its features are ancient, or that they
ever were connected with warfare. In the gloomy, galleries of Glammis
or Cawdor, with their grim old portraits, their armour, their secret
staircases, their mysterious hidden chambers, and iron hooks in the
wall--the idea of the haggard murderer, and all the associations of
his deeds and his remorse creep more vividly on that imaginative
conscience, which more or less makes cowards of us all in such places.
Yet the history of the arts tells us that not one stone of these
edifices, ancient though they be, can have stood upon another till the
history of Macbeth was as old as that of Queen Mary is now. Why, then,
should they retain their hold on us? They are contemporary with
Shakspeare's Macbeth, though not with the historians', and are the
style of edifice in which he cast his tragedy. It must be a feudal
stronghold, heavily arched, buttressed, fortified, and gloomy,--where
the lady in a vaulted half-lighted chamber may say:
"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
[M] New Statistical Account, Aberdeenshire, 1089.
[N] Of the many spots traditionally connected with Ossian, we have no
doubt that the association is no older than the days of James
Macpherson. Yet, to show how fearlessly we adopt our theory, we shall
here state a circumstance appearing to establish a genuine Ossianic
tradition of no common interest, which we wonder never to have seen
introduced in the controversy. The wild glen running from the
neighbourhood of Crieff towards Loch Tay, called Glen Almond or Glen
Almain, is the traditional resting-place of the bones of Ossian. The
reader will remember it from Wordsworth's lines:--
"In this still place remote from men
Sleeps Ossian in the narrow glen,
In this still place where wanders on
But one lone streamlet, only one," &c.
Early in last century, a military road was carried through this glen,
by a set of men brought up in the stiff formal engineering of the
period, who went straight to their end, caring neither for scenery,
nor for legends, for the graves of bards, nor for big stones, as one
of their number--Captain Burt, a very matter-of-fact but clear
narrator, who was present--shows.
"A small part of the way through the glen had been marked out by two
rows of camp colours, placed at a good distance one from another,
whereby to describe the line of the intended breadth and regularity of
the road by the eye. There happened to lie directly in the way, an
exceedingly large stone, and, as it had been made a rule from the
beginning, to carry on the roads in straight lines, as far as the way
would permit, not only to give them a better air, but to shorten the
passengers' journey, it was resolved the stone should be removed, if
possible, though, otherwise, the work might have been carried along on
either side of it.
"The soldiers by vast labour, with their levers and picks, or
hand-screws, tumbled it over and over till they got it quite out of
the way, although it was of such enormous size, that it might be
matter of great wonder how it could ever be removed by human strength
and art, especially to such who had never seen an operation of that
kind; and upon their digging a little way into that part of the
ground, where the centre of the base had stood, there was found a
small cavity about two feet square, which was guarded from the outward
earth, at the bottom, tops, and sides, by square flat stones. This
hollow contained some ashes, scraps of bones, and half burned ends of
stalks of heath; which last we concluded to be a small remnant of a
funeral pile."
Burt, returning to the spot after a short absence, asked the officer
in charge "what had become of the sarcophagus." "He answered that he
had intended to preserve it in the condition I left it, till the
commander-in-chief had seen it, as a curiosity, but that it was not in
his power so to do; for soon after the discovery was known to the
Highlanders, they assembled from distant parts, and, having formed
themselves into a body, they carefully gathered up the relics, and
marched with them in solemn procession to a new place of burial, and
there discharged their fire-arms over the grave, as supposing the
deceased had been a military officer."--BURT'S _Letters_, ii. 188. The
engineer officer, desirous to account for so unaccountable a
proceeding naturally drew on the etiquette of his own profession. We
make the supporters of Ossian a free gift of this anecdote, not
doubting that they will appreciate our liberality.
[O] Alas! it is a world of change. While correcting the press, we have
just heard that some learned antiquary has enlightened the
Lunfananers, and that they have set up a tavern called "The Macbeth
Arms!"
The timber edifice on such an eminence as the Peel Bog--probably, as
the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines, the true character of the edifices
possessed by Macbeth--would no more fill up the true architectural
wants of the drama, than a marble Grecian temple, or a Canadian
settler's log-house.
Crimes briefly told without details have no interest, unless they can
be put in the shape of statistics--some people will be inclined to
deny that the exception is the reverse of the rule. We are not writing
history, and if we were, the historical details which go no further
than that A stabbed B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated F, are not
such as we are inclined to believe our readers would thank us for. It
is very clear that the death of Duncan, if we had no more than
authentic annals to deal with--if it had been a question merely of
history, and not in some measure incidentally connected with the
highest rank of human intellectual effort--would have formed a very
meagre object of comment. The society of antiquaries might have
endured a paper on it--for such endurance is the martyrdom they have
chosen--but no other person would. In looking, then, down through
Scottish history from the accession of Macbeth's successor, we find
little that can be noticed with any applicability to our particular
purpose, until we reach the time when the records provide us with some
of the details.
Yet there is one very early tragic incident, which appears to us to
have considerable interest, as one of the first striking instances
where the fierce spirit of clan animosity--the burning desire to
avenge the wrongs of the chief--was exhibited by the Highlanders. It
occurred about the year 1242. A tournament was held on the English
Border, at which two young knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and Walter
de Bysset, a cadet of the family who were lords of the great northern
districts, subsequently the patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered each
other. Bysset was unhorsed. Not long afterwards, the building in which
the Earl of Athole lived, in Haddington, was burned to the ground, and
he, with several of his followers, died in the flames. By some
accounts the Earl was previously murdered, and the house was burned to
conceal the deed. Let us here have recourse to the distinct and
considerate account of the incident in our favourite poet:--
"Whether it was of recklessness,
Or it of forethought felony was,
Into the Inns, lang ere day,
Quhare that the Earl of Athole lay
A fell fire him to coals brynt,
Thus suddenly was that Earl tynt.
And with him mony ma
There houses and men were brunt alswa."
Some Highland gillies from Bysset's country had been seen in the
neighbourhood, and suspicion immediately fell upon the head of that
house. He tried to prove an alibi--that he was, at the time of the
tragedy, in Forfar, some eighty miles distant from Haddington, doing
the honours of hospitality to the Queen. As our historical poet says:
"But this Sir William at Forfar
That night was late at the supper
With the Queen, and her to chamber led,
And in his own chamber yhed till his bed,"
like a good old country gentleman. But an alibi went for little in a
Highland feud.
"To purge him for this the Queen
Profered her to swear bodily,
But that assythed not the party,
That was stout and of great might,
They said--Wherever he was that night
Bathe his armouries and his men
Intil Haddington were seen then,
When this earl was brynt with fire:
They said the Byssets in their ire
Of auld feud and great discord
That was between them and that lord,
Did that in forethought felony."
It was still the age of ordeals. The hot ploughshares were, perhaps,
obsolete, but single combat was in full practice; and even jury trial
was considered a species of ordeal rather than a deliberate judgment
upon evidence. The accused party in the one case appealed to the
chances of war--or, taking the reference in its more solemn aspect, he
left his cause to be vindicated by the God of battles: in the other,
he threw himself upon the suffrages of his peers. Both ordeals were
considered about equally reasonable and fair; and if the man who
preferred the ordeal of battle were a gigantic warrior, unconquered,
and terrible in the lists, he was, to the true believer in ordeals,
not more formidable than the feeblest of his contemporaries, for a
just Deity might wither his uplifted arm; and if he retained the
physical superiority he had previously indicated, it was because the
All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of his cause. Now Bysset, who seems
to have been somewhat of a sceptic in ordeals, had no objection to
trust the issue to single combat, and challenged whomsoever would dare
to stand forth against him. But he would not submit to an assize or
jury, for he said the whole country had prejudged him. His opponents
had, somehow or other, greater faith in the ordeal of an assize than
that of battle, and would not accept his challenge. In the meantime,
to show his sincerity, he requested the northern clergy to curse and
excommunicate the perpetrators of the deed.
"Sir William Bysset gert for thi,
His chaplain in his chapel,
Denounce cursed with book and bell,
All they that had part
Of that brynnin, or any art.
The Bishop of Aberdeen alswa,
He gart cursed denounce all tha
That either by art or part, or swike,
Gart burn this time that Earl Patricke,
In all the kirks halely
Of Aberdeen's diocesy.
Sir William Bysset this process
Gart be done."
Wild justice began to be enforced in the country of the Byssets, which
was overrun by their enemies: in the pathetic language of our poet--
"His landis quite,
Was for that burning all herryet,
Bathe of nowt, and sheap, and kye,
And all other goods halely."
At length, the Byssets agreed "to come into the king's will," or abide
by his arbitration. They came under an obligation to depart to the
Holy Land, and there for the remainder of their days pray for the soul
of the murdered man. Their broad estates were forfeited, and a portion
of them coming into the hands of a family named Frezelier or Frazer,
they planted the roof-tree of the great chiefship of that name in the
northern Highlands.
There is little doubt that the murder of Athole was a piece of
clannish vengeance over which the chief had no control. His wild
Highland followers saw him unhorsed: it was enough. Into such puerile
refinements as the law of chivalry, which bound him to take the
unhorsing with the meekness of those who turn the left cheek when the
right is smitten, they could not enter. The more they believed in the
high spirit of their chief, the more they would be confident, that he
would exult in a signal vengeance for the insult. Of course, when the
vengeance was accomplished, it would rouse an unquenchable desire of
retaliation in the men of Athole; and indeed it may be conjectured
from the circumstances of the whole proceeding, that the king believed
the Byssets personally innocent, but dared not, for the peace of the
country, allow them to remain in Scotland. And yet, what is on the
whole the most remarkable feature of the Highland feuds of the
day,--neither the Athole nor the Bysset family were old hereditary
patriarchs of the people. They were foreign adventurers, but recently
rooted in the country. The Celtic races seem to have at once rallied
round such intruders, in the strongest and fiercest spirit of
devotion. When a chief had descendants, his race held, of course,
generally a position which a stranger could not shake. But if the
people had quarrelled with their chief, or if from other circumstances
the headship were vacant, they clung with instantaneous tenacity to
the first Norman adventurer to whom the monarch assigned their
territory; and the descendants of these refined sons of chivalry by
degrees assimilated themselves to the people among whom they were
cast; becoming ostensibly of the same race as that over which they
held rule.
The banishment of Bysset was connected with important historical
results. Instead of going to Palestine, per agreement, to pray for the
soul of the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he went, according to Matthew
Paris, to a nearer and more agreeable place, the court of England.
There he fostered in Henry III., those notions of the feudal vassalage
of the Scottish kings to England, which produced the invasion of his
successor, Edward I. Bysset had a considerable personal interest in
this question; for, if the king of England had a paramount superiority
over Scotland, his banishment and forfeiture might be reversed. Such
conduct shocks all historical notions of patriotism; but what better
claim had Scottish nationality on the Norman adventurer, than the
respectability of Juggernaut has on a member of the supreme council of
Calcutta? The ancestors of the house probably came over with William,
a century and a half earlier; the banished lord was perhaps brought
over from England with his father or grandfather, to accept the
chiefship of a portion of the Highland wastes, over which the King of
Scots professed to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement was the sole
object among the barbarians of the north; and when they ceased to
derive a territorial revenue within Scotland, their connexion with the
country where they lived was as completely closed, as that of the
governor of a colony when he is recalled.
The subsequent history of this race was as strange and eventful as
their first appearance in the Scottish annals. They became great lords
in Ulster; and early in the fifteenth century they were again
represented by a Scotsman, Donald Balloch, the hero of the battle of
Inverlochy, whose mother was the heiress of the Byssets. For some time
after this, we might trace their descent, like the track of a wild
beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder; and at a later period we
finally lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets, in Montrose's
celebrated ally, Kilkittoch.
Few of the incidental notices connected with those minor offences
which mark the general character of the people, can be found anterior
to the commencement of the criminal records. Hector Boece and our
friend the poet occasionally tell wondrous incidents; but they are not
to be depended on, and few of them have enough of dramatic spirit to
be interesting as fables. We are inclined, however, to mention, in
passing, the judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph, whom the
poet maintains to have been the greatest of law reformers; in
testimony whereof, he adduces a case in point, far beyond the nicety
of modern juridical philosophy. The regent hanged a man for stealing
his own property. There was a law, that the community should make good
every theft, the perpetrator of which could not be discovered.
Founding on this law, a husbandman secreted his plough-irons, and
received compensation.
"A gready earl soon after was,
Burnin' in sik greediness,
That his plough irons himself stall,
And hid them in a peet pot all.
He playned to the sheriff sare,
That stolen his plough irons were;
The sheriff than paid him shillings twa,
And after that he done had sa,
Soon a great court he gart set,
Wytting of that stelth to get."
The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged.
The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the
commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account,
circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.[P] Few historical
tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which
the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which
it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of
the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We
would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part,
especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great
iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust
her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and
her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder,
and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts
of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been
so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no
excuse for here repeating it.[Q]
[P] It may be found at the end of vol. i. of Pinkerton's _History of
Scotland_, and in vol. ii. of the collection of reprints called
_Miscellanea Scotica_.
[Q] See Tytler's History, iii. 307, _et seq._
There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two
instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the
particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of
mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are
unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little
more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers
was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July
1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier,
charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis
her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it
doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were
then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed
them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial
is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having
preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were
inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done,
to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the
instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with
intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of
her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her
relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their
intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same
juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that
they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit
in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a
design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It
was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as
Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of
his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took
upon them to fire at kings--very different from the maudlin wretches
whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised
age--knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They
were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the
attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice,
tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the
present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and therefore,
when any wretch takes into his frenzied brain a design to fire at a
Louis Philippe, he gets confused and makes a bungle of it. It is not a
practice suited to the age, and no man of any sense would adopt it.
The earliest of the Scottish criminal records that have been preserved
begin in the reign of James IV., about the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who
has generously laid these early records before the public, not at the
expense of the record commission but at his own, says of them,--"The
books of adjournal and minute books of the supreme criminal tribunal
of Scotland, as well as the records of the Justice Aires, &c. at these
remote periods, were kept in an obscure forensic Latin. This
circumstance, added to the well-known difficulty of deciphering the
ordinary MSS. of these centuries, and the fact of the books now
preserved being generally mere scrolls and memoranda, written with
many contractions and evidently during the hurry of the court
proceedings, have hitherto rendered the task of examining them, and
presenting the public with the more important cases, a labour of a
peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind." We do not doubt it, and hence
our gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only deciphering these
discouraging manuscripts, but translating the Latin into English.
Those indeed who, like ourselves, have perused his volumes--if any
other person _has_ perused them--owe a double debt of gratitude to Mr
Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to read, in excellent type, what we
would otherwise have had to decipher in distressing MS., and he has
given us the means of pursuing the task of research by our own
fireside, instead of in the interior of the Register House; while we
have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing his quartos, that the
number of people to whom, in common with ourselves, they have laid the
field open, is a very limited one indeed--so limited, that we shall
consider every quotation we make from his volumes as select and
valuable as if we were able to subjoin MS. _penes auct._ to it.
The earliest of these translations from the old Latin records contain
the minutes of circuit courts on the Borders. The entries are as like
each other as those of a police charge book. Plunder of cattle is the
perpetual theme, and the quantity of business done by individuals is
sometimes startling. Here is an ordinary specimen:--
"Walter Scott of Howpaslot, allowed to compound for treasonably
bringing in William Scott, called _Gyde_, John his brother, and other
traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of Harehede. Item, for theftuously
and treasonably resetting of Henry Scott and other traitors of Levyn:
item, for the treasonable stouthrief of forty oxen and cows, and two
hundred sheep, from the tenants of Harehede, at the same time. Robert
Scott of Quhitchester became surety for his entry at the next Justice
Aire."
Such were the gentry who, in the words of the namesake of Howpaslot,
"Drove the beeves that made their broth,
From England and from Scotland both."
Another entry like the former, containing more names that will sound
not unfamiliar, may be given as a further specimen. The two, from
their similarity, will satisfy the reader that it would tend little to
edification to make a more extensive selection.
"John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed to compound for art and part of the
resetting of John Rede and John Scott in Tushielaw in his theftuous
deeds; and especially the time that the said John Scott stole a
'drift' of sheep from Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop. _Item_, for
treasonably resetting Hector Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his
theftuous deeds and treasons, &c. &c. _Item_, for common oppression of
the lieges, in taking and plundering them of their horses and goods by
his own authority. _Item_, for intercommuning with the English in
treasonable manner. _Item_, for common reset of the thieves of
Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and Ewesdale. _Item_, for slaughter of one
called Colthride, &c. &c. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety
to satisfy the parties."
The reader of Scottish history knows that, in the year 1530, James V.,
finding that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary he produced little more
effect upon these Border depredators than if he had made a gratuitous
distribution of _Cicero de Officiis_ among them, made war on them, by
leading an army through their country, and destroyed their
strong-holds, as the German free cities destroyed the castles of their
professional brethren on the Rhine. It was on this occasion that
Johnny Armstrong visited him with twenty-four armed "gentlemen,"
according to Pitscottie, "very richly apparelled," and that the king,
turning haughtily round from the freebooter's proffered courtesy said,
"What wants yon knave that a king should have?" There is something sad
in Armstrong's fate. He appears almost to have considered the king one
of his own class,--a leader of men, but a greater leader. Somewhat
pompous and conceited he appears to have been;--somewhat too trustful
in the effect of his hearty hail-fellow-well-met way of approaching
the royal presence. In fact, Johnny Armstrong "did not know his
place," and treated the king too much like a brother freebooter, of a
higher standing than himself. But, in his apprehension and execution,
there is something that makes the nearest possible approach to
treachery; and we can imagine a blush rising in the royal cheek, when
the robber captain turned haughtily round and said, "I am but a fool
to seek grace at a graceless face." The entry regarding the redoubted
leader, in these records, is as brief as it is humiliating, for the
lion had not the telling of the tale;--"John Armstrong, alias BlakJok,
and Thomas his brother, convicted of common theft, and reset of theft,
&c., hanged."
During the same reign, outbreaks in the Highlands assumed a somewhat
similar character to those of the Border rievers; but the Celts
conducted their operations on a much larger scale, and we intend to
devote to them a separate paper.
The disturbances connected with the Reformation are essentially a part
of the history of the kingdom, and in that shape too well known to
have a place here: but a considerable time before these great
convulsions, some smaller offences occasionally connected themselves
with the priesthood, and their relation to the rest of the community.
Even in the days when the church of Rome was so far Catholic as to be
almost co-extensive with Christianity, Scotland was not without
occasional ebullitions, in which the savage nature burst the spiritual
bonds that, in its ordinary moments, held it in subjection. Boece
relates an affair of this sort, and its consequences, with a rapidity
almost unmatched, when we consider the quantity and the serious
character of the business transacted. It was in the reign of Alexander
III. that, according to his translator, "The men of Caithness burnt
Adam, their bishop, after that he had cursed them for non-payment of
their teinds. King Alexander hearing sic terrible cruelty done to this
noble prelate, ceased not till four hundred of the principal doers
thereof were hanged." "King Alexander," continues the chronicler, "for
this punition was gretumly beloved by the Pope." No wonder! Nearly
contemporary with the crusade of James V. against the Border rievers,
was the murder of James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by Blacater baron of
Tullyallan, and William Lothian, a priest, both of whom were found
guilty and beheaded, while others were acquitted. The trial seems to
have excited much interest, for Bishop Leslie tells us that the
ceremony of the degradation of the priest, previously to his being
handed over to the civil power, took place upon "ane public scaffold
in the toun of Edinburgh," "the King, the Queen, and a great multitude
of people being present." A year or two afterwards we find the
somewhat singular circumstance of a whole list of priests charged with
an act of violence;--"John Roull, prior of Pittenweem; Patrick and
Bartholomew Forman, and six other canons; Mr Alexander Ramsay, rector
of Muckart; Sir John Ramsay, and three other chaplains, and John
Blackadder, parish clerk of Sawling." They were re-pledged to be tried
by their own ecclesiastical court. It appears that, in the course of a
dispute regarding the right to the produce of the land of Pittenweem,
an officer of the court was appointed to reap the crop. When he
repaired to the spot, the sub-prior and an assemblage of followers
threatened him with violence. He found himself placed in a very
curious position, and made an equally curious request. When a
messenger is deforced, those who have used violence are liable to
damages. The messenger on this occasion, being a shrewd and
calculating man, surveyed the forces of his opponents before making a
"return of deforcement." To his mortification he perceived that, to
use an expression of modern origin, "they were not worth powder and
shot." There were none among them "but religious men and priests,
hinds' wives and bairns, which were not responsal to our sovereign
lord gif he had taken deforce." He made a request that they should
"send for Andrew Wood in Pittenweem, John Brown of Anstruther, the
laird of Balcasky, or some other responsal persons, to stop him, so
that he might indorse his deforcement and depart, which they plainly
refused." The request was about as reasonable as if a gentleman,
knocked down by a ragged ruffian, were to ask him to get some
capitalist, able to pay respectable damages, to come and aid in the
operation. The prior, meanwhile, came to the assistance of his
subordinates, and put himself at the head of a truly formidable array:
three hundred men, who "with hagbuts, culverings, cross-bows,
hand-bows, spears, halberts, axes, and swords, came in arrayed battle,
with convocation and ringing of their common bell," and, falling on
the messenger's party, "shot divers pieces of artillery at them." The
ecclesiastical people were removed to their own court, so that we lose
trace of the proceedings against them. Some of the laymen were charged
with the slaughter of the messenger's followers, and others outlawed
for failing to appear.
The same Spartan brevity that characterises the early portions of the
criminal records, sometimes reduces the history of bloody family
feuds, the particulars of which might fill volumes of romance, to the
most tantalising dimensions. They are rather inventoried or enumerated
by head-mark, than even recorded, and generally present no more
satisfactory detail than the following:--
"1554, Oct. 26.--Robert Henry, alias _Deill amang us_,
convicted of art and part of the cruel slaughter of Thomas
Bissate, young laird of Querrel. Beheaded."
"1532, July 3.--Rolland Lindesay, Alan Lokhart of Lee, and
William Mosman, convicted of art and part of the cruel
slaughter of Ralph Weir. Beheaded."
That one of the parties might be a magistrate administering the law,
was no impediment to the prosecution of a feud, but rather served to
give solemnity and importance to the perpetration of some act of
vengeance: thus--
"1527, October 8.--George Ramsay of Clatty, John Betoune of
Balfour, James Betoune Of Melgum, John Grahame of
Claverhouse, and others, found caution to underly the law at
the first Justice Aire of Fife, for convocation of the
lieges, to the number of 80 persons, and in warlike manner
invading John Lord Lindesay, Sheriff of Fife, in the
execution of his office, in a fenced court within the
Tolbooth of Cowper, the doors being shut, and the assize
inclosed; and for breaking up the said doors."
The meagreness of these entries whets one's appetite for some detail
of the stirring and tragical events of which they form the bare
indexes. With the exception of the great Highland feuds, which burned
on so large a scale as to be in a manner historical, the earliest
detailed account of a crime arising in family animosity is connected
with the feud between the Drummonds and the Blairs in the year 1554.
The crime which brought the feud within the notice of the law, was the
murder of George Drummond of Leadcrieff and William his son. The
perpetrators, besides a long list of Blairs, include several other
names still known in the Braes of Perthshire--such as Chalmers,
Butter, Smyth, and Robertson. They were charged with assembling to the
number of eighty, "with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets,
lance-staffs, long culverings with lighted lints, and other weapons
invasive." The day on which this tumultuous assembly proceeded to
their work of vengeance was a Sunday, and the place chosen for the
perpetration was the church of Blair. Being apparently afraid of the
number of friends and retainers by whom their victims happened to be
surrounded during the performance of divine worship, it is stated that
they were obliged to postpone their purpose, and that "they passed to
the Laird of Gormok's place, and their dyned with him:" a pretty large
dinner-party, certainly. Leaving spies to watch the enemy's motions,
they were soon afterwards summoned to their task, and their victims
became an easy prey. The occupation of Drummond and his son--when we
remember that it was a Sabbath afternoon--might, perhaps, be scarcely
considered so characteristic of Scottish habits as their
assassination. They were "alane, at their pastime-play, at the
row-bowles, in the high market-gate, beside the kirk of Blair, in
sober manner, trusting na trouble nor harm to have been done to them,
but to have lived under God's peace."
The retribution on the offenders is certainly not the least curious
part of the affair. That eighty armed men should seize, and put to
death, two individuals, either in or out of a church, appears to have
been a matter with which the law and the public were under no
obligation to interfere, if the parties immediately interested could
come to terms. Accordingly, we find on the record some fragments of a
negotiation between the head of the Drummonds and the murderers. Some
of them, among other more substantial offers, agree "to gang, or cause
to gang," the four head pilgrimages of Scotland; to do penance for the
souls of the dead for any reasonable number of years; and, thirdly,
"to do honour to the kin and friends" by kneeling and offering the
handle of a naked sword held by the point. These offers are treated
with some disdain, as too "general and simple" to require an answer. A
further offer of a thousand merks is treated with more attention; but
the kin declare that it is far too small a fine "for the committing of
so high, cruell, and abominable slaughters and mutilations of set
purpose." To heighten the picture, the deed of the murderers is set in
contrast with the peaceable and inoffensive conduct of the deceased,
whose great merit was his "never offending them, neither by drawing of
blood, taking kirks, tacks, steadings, or rooms, over any of their
heads, or their friends'." Thus the murder would have been considered
less unjustifiable, if the victim had ever been concerned in ejecting
his assailants from their holdings, or offering to take them "over
their head:" a doctrine of the sixteenth century in Scotland, which
events of the nineteenth, in other parts of the empire, have made only
too intelligible. The negotiation was not quite successful, for some
of the parties were beheaded. One of them, Chalmers of Drumlochie,
along with an offer to let his son marry Drummond's daughter, and his
cousin marry his sister, "without any tocher,"--an arrangement which
he seems to have thought might be equivalent to "lands, goods, or
money," of none of which was he possessed,--proclaimed himself "ready
to do any other thing quhilk is possible to him, as please my lord and
friends to lay to his charge, except his life and heritage." He bound
himself to Lord Drummond as a personal vassal and follower, by a "band
of man-rent:" an instrument well-known in old Scottish jurisprudence,
and perpetually cropping out in connexion with any historical
events--such as the murder of Rizzio,--in which many persons united
themselves together for the perpetration of a great crime. It was a
curious feature of national character,--the form of law running down
through every thing, even to the very document framed for setting law
at defiance. Chalmers' bond was merely one of general partisanship and
following, and he bound himself to the Drummonds, and their heirs, to
"take their true and one-fold part, in all and sundry their actions
and causes, and ride and gang with them therein upon their expenses,
when they require me or my heirs thereto, against all and sundry
persons, our sovereign lady and the authority of this realm alanerly
excepted. And hereto I bind and oblige me and my heirs to the said
noble and mighty lord and his heirs in the straitest form and sicker
stile of band of manrent that can be devised, no remeid nor exception
of law to be proponed nor alleged in the contrair." It might be no
small consolation to the chief who had lost a vassal to get a slave in
his stead; but the public peace would not be much benefited by this
method of settlement.
Some of the precautions against turbulent offences are not less
curious than this method of dealing with them when they were
committed. An heiress might be compelled to find security, or enter
into recognisances that she shall not give her hand and fortune to an
outlaw or scapegrace. Thus, on the 13th of September 1563, Mariene
Carruthers, being "ane of the twa heretrixes of Moweswald," produced
two landed proprietors who became bound that she "shall not mary ane
chief traiter nor other broken man of the country, nor join herself
with any sic person, under the pain of ane thousand pounds."
Whatever it may have been in England, there was little divinity
hedging a Scottish king of the sixteenth century. Perhaps, as a rich
peer and a poor peer are very different things in popular estimation,
though equal in the Lord Chamberlain's list of precedence, so it may
have been with kings. The Scottish king was poor, ill-housed,
parsimoniously served, meagerly guarded. His pulse might beat with the
blood of a hundred monarchs; but the far-stretching palaces, the long
gorgeous trains of attendants, the wealth at command, were wanting,
and divine right was but a theory, that could neither give parasites
rich offices, nor dazzle the eyes of worshippers. Thus it happens
that, side by side with the most magnificent theoretical assumptions
of regal prerogative, stand the most ludicrous instances of the
crown's weakness and smallness. On the 11th July 1526, Robert Bruce of
Airth and others are respited for having committed a highway robbery
on his Majesty's artillery--"for art and part of the stouthrief of
certain manganels and artillery coming from the castle of Stirling to
the king's Majesty, at his burgh of Edinburgh, for the defence of his
person; and for art and part of the stouthrief of the king's letters
from his officers, and laying violent hands on them." We have not far
to wander for like instances, making the monarch a simple human being,
against whom one commits, not the majestic crime of high treason, but
the vulgar offences of theft and robbery. Thus, in the very next
entry, we find "Walter Drummond acquitted by an assize of art and part
of the theft and concealment of the king's crown from his crown-room,
with the precious stones therein contained, forth of the palace and
monastery of Holyrood."
Every petty laird dined and slept within the walls of his thick square
tower; isolated by moat or precipice, by long dark passages and iron
grated door. In an age when individuals thus protected themselves, it
naturally astonishes one to observe how accessible the royal person
generally appears to have been--how slightly protected from contact
with the people, how easily approached by the assassin. One man was
able to remove all the impediments which stood in the way of the
Highland band who slew James I. at Perth. The murder of Rizzio, with
all its circumstances of cool premeditation, and calm, steady, bitter
insult, need not be recalled to the reader, among the other incidents,
which show how thin a partition separated the sovereign from rude
violence. The various forms in which that turbulent and most
pertinacious of rebels, Francis Earl of Bothwell, assailed King James,
are fraught with a ludicrous versatility in the art of haunting and
tormenting a king. The official act of forfeiture characterised it as
"invading, assieging, and persuing of his Majesty's most noble person,
by fire and sword, breaking up his chalmer doors with fore hammers,
and cruelly slaying his Highness' servants coming to his Majesty's
rescue." "Ane treason and cruelty," continues the indignant document,
"not heard nor seen committed by subjects so highly obliged to their
native king and prince." The contemporary chronicler, Birrel,
characterised the outrage as "a stoure," which the rebel created by
striking "with ane hammer at his Majesty's chamber door." In his more
renowned and successful attempt, the pathway to the person of royalty
was so completely cleared for him by a courageous female, the Duchess
of Athole, whose house was next door to the palace, that the weapons
of the guard were removed; the queen's bed-room, to which the
beleaguered monarch might have fled, was locked; and the prime
conspirator and his assistant were comfortably lodged behind the arras
of the ante-room to the king's sleeping apartment. What might not a
boy Jones have accomplished in those days? Should we, however, pursue
this subject further, we would be trespassing on that ground of
established history which it is our desire on the present occasion to
avoid.