CHAPTER I

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ROYAL EDINBURGH

HER SAINTS, KINGS, PROPHETS AND POETS

'Mine own romantic town.' MARMION

BY

MRS. OLIPHANT

AUTHOR OF 'MAKERS OF FLORENCE,' 'MAKERS OF VENICE,' ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BY

GEORGE REID, R.S.A.

LONDON

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1891

_All rights reserved_

* * * * *

_First Edition (Medium 8vo) 1890_

_Second Edition (Crown 8vo) 1891_

* * * * *

[Illustration: ST. GILES'S FROM THE LAWNMARKET]

* * * * *

TO MY OLD FRIEND

ALEXANDER MACMILLAN

CONTENTS

PART I

PAGE

MARGARET OF SCOTLAND, ATHELING--QUEEN AND SAINT 1

PART II

THE STEWARDS OF SCOTLAND

CHAPTER I

JAMES I. POET AND LEGISLATOR 38

CHAPTER II

JAMES II: WITH THE FIERY FACE 80

CHAPTER III

JAMES III: THE MAN OF PEACE 126

CHAPTER IV

JAMES IV: THE KNIGHT-ERRANT 155

CHAPTER V

JAMES V: THE LAST OF THE HEROIC AGE 200

PART III

THE TIME OF THE PROPHETS

CHAPTER I

UNDER THE QUEEN REGENT 258

CHAPTER II

UNDER QUEEN MARY 310

CHAPTER III

THE TRIUMPH AND END 350

CHAPTER IV

THE SCHOLAR OF THE REFORMATION 374

PART IV

THE MODERN CITY

CHAPTER I

A BURGHER POET 435

CHAPTER II

THE GUEST OF EDINBURGH 471

CHAPTER III

THE SHAKSPEARE OF SCOTLAND 491

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

ST. GILES'S FROM THE LAWNMARKET _Frontispiece_

ROYAL EDINBURGH xiv

QUEEN MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE 1

PILLAR IN NAVE, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 5

DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 7

WEST TOWER, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 11

THE NAVE, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY--LOOKING WEST 13

QUEEN MARGARET'S CAVE 15

WEST DOORWAY, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY 17

INTERIOR OF QUEEN MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE 25

ARMS OF QUEEN MARGARET OF SCOTLAND 37

THE BASS ROCK 53

HOLYROOD 77

EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE SOUTH-WEST 81

INNER BARRIER, EDINBURGH CASTLE 87

EDINBURGH CASTLE FROM THE VENNEL 97

ST. ANTHONY'S CHAPEL AND ST. MARGARET'S LOCH 115

MONS MEG 123

THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH 127

ARMS OF JAMES IV OF SCOTLAND 155

OLD HOUSE IN LAWNMARKET 161

ST. ANTHONY'S CHAPEL 165

OLD HOUSES AT HEAD OF WEST BOW 171

BAKEHOUSE CLOSE 183

WHITE HORSE CLOSE 195

SALISBURY CRAGS 201

REID'S CLOSE, CANONGATE 211

DOORWAY, SIR A. AITCHESON'S HOUSE 217

LINLITHGOW PALACE 227

FALKLAND PALACE 253

ST. ANDREWS 287

KNOX'S HOUSE, HIGH STREET 307

HOLYROOD PALACE AND ARTHUR'S SEAT 311

LOCHLEVEN 331

QUEEN MARY'S BATH 335

WEST DOORWAY, HOLYROOD CHAPEL 341

DOORWAY, HOLYROOD PALACE 349

MORAY HOUSE, CANONGATE 359

THE PENDS, ST. ANDREWS 365

INTERIOR OF ST. GILES'S 369

KNOX'S PULPIT 372

NORTH DOORWAY, HERIOT'S HOSPITAL 381

STIRLING CASTLE 417

GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD 433

EDINBURGH: GENERAL VIEW 437

ALLAN RAMSAY'S SHOP 439

CROWN OF ST. GILES'S 445

SMOLLETT'S HOUSE 453

ALLAN RAMSAY'S HOUSE 461

ALLAN RAMSAY'S MONUMENT 469

DOORWAY, LADY STAIR'S CLOSE 471

LADY STAIR'S CLOSE 477

DUGALD STEWART'S MONUMENT 483

BURNS'S MONUMENT 489

ST. GILES'S FROM PRINCES STREET 493

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 497

PLAYFAIR'S MONUMENT, CALTON HILL 503

SIR WALTER SCOTT'S HOUSE 515

GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH 519

SIR WALTER SCOTT 520

[Illustration]

ROYAL EDINBURGH

[Illustration: QUEEN MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE.]

PART I

MARGARET OF SCOTLAND, ATHELING--QUEEN AND SAINT

It is strange yet scarcely difficult to the imagination to realise the

first embodiment of what is now Edinburgh in the far distance of the

early ages. Neither Pict nor Scot has left any record of what was going

on so far south in the days when the king's daughters, primitive

princesses with their rude surroundings, were placed for safety in the

_castrum puellarum_, the maiden castle, a title in after days proudly

(but perhaps not very justly) adapted to the supposed invulnerability of

the fortress perched upon its rock. Very nearly invulnerable, however,

it must have been in the days before artillery; too much so at least for

one shut-up princess, who complained of her lofty prison as a place

without verdure. If we may believe, notwithstanding the protest of that

much-deceived antiquary the Laird of Monkbarns, that these fair and

forlorn ladies were the first royal inhabitants of the Castle of

Edinburgh, we may imagine that they watched from their battlements more

wistfully than fearfully, over all the wide plain, what dust might rise

or spears might gleam, or whether any galley might be visible of reiver

or rescuer from the north. A little collection of huts or rude forts

here and there would be all that broke the sweeping line of Lothian to

the east or west, and all that width of landscape would lie under the

eyes of the watchers, giving long notice of the approach of any enemies.

"Out over the Forth I look to the north," the maidens might sing,

looking across to Dunfermline, where already there was some royal state,

or towards the faint lines of mountains in the distance, over the soft

swelling heights of the Lomonds. No doubt Edinburgh, Edwinesburgh, or

whatever the antiquaries imagine it to have been, must have been sadly

dull if safe, suspended high upon the rock, nearer heaven than earth. It

is curious to hear that it was "without verdure"; but perhaps the young

ladies took no account of the trees that clothed the precipices below

them, or the greenness that edged the Nor' Loch deep at their feet, but

sighed for the gardens and luxuriance of Dunfermline, where all was

green about their windows and the winding pathways of the dell of

Pittendreich would be pleasant to wander in. This first romantic aspect

of the Castle of Edinburgh is, however, merely traditional, and the

first real and authentic appearance of the old fortress and city in

history is in the record, at once a sacred legend and a valuable

historical chronicle, of the life of Margaret the Atheling, the first of

several Queen Margarets, the woman saint and blessed patroness of

Scotland, who has bequeathed not only many benefits and foundations of

after good to her adopted country, but her name--perhaps among

Scotswomen still the most common of all Christian names.

No more moving and delightful story was ever written or invented than

the history of this saint and Queen. She was the daughter of Edward,

called the Outlaw, and of his wife a princess of Hungary, of the race

which afterwards produced St. Elizabeth: and the sister of Edgar

Atheling, the feeble but rightful heir of the Saxon line, and

consequently of the English throne. The family, however, was more

foreign than English, having been brought up at the Court of their

grandfather, the King of Hungary, one of the most pious and one of the

richest Courts in Christendom; and it was not unnatural that when

convinced of the fact that the most legitimate of aspirants had no

chance against the force of William, they should prefer to return to the

country of their education and birth. It was no doubt a somewhat forlorn

party that set out upon this journey, for to lose a throne is seldom a

misfortune accepted with equanimity, and several of the beaten and

despondent Saxons had joined the royal exiles. Their voyage, however,

was an unprosperous one, and after much beating about by winds and

storms they were at last driven up the Firth of Forth, where their ship

found shelter in the little bay at the narrowing of the Firth, which has

since borne the name of St. Margaret's Hope.

Lying here in shelter from all the winds behind the protecting

promontory, with perhaps already some humble shrine or hermit's cell

upon Inchgarvie or Inchcolm to give them promise of Christian kindness,

with the lonely rock of Edinburgh in the distance on one side, and the

soft slopes of the Fife coast rising towards the King's palace at

Dunfermline on the other, the travellers must have awaited with some

anxiety, yet probably much hope, the notice of the barbaric people who

came to the beach to stare at their weather-beaten ships, and hurried

off to carry the news inland of such unwonted visitors. It is the very

spot which is now disturbed and changed by the monstrous cobwebs of iron

which bear the weight of the Forth Bridge and make an end for ever of

the Queen's Ferry, which Margaret must have crossed so often, and by

which a personage more familiar, Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, once, as we all

know, made his way to the North; but these are modern reflections such

as have nothing to do with that primitive morning, fresh no doubt as

to-day with sun and dew, when Malcolm's messengers came hurrying down to

see what were these intruders, and what their purpose, and whether

anything was to be apprehended from a visit apparently so unusual. The

eager and curious emissaries had apparently no warrant to board the

strangers, but gazed and wondered at the big ship and all its

equipments, so unlike their own rude galleys; then hastened back again

with an excited and exciting description of the greatness of the

passengers on board and all their splendid array. Malcolm, cautious yet

excited too, sent forth, as we are told in the _Scotichronicon_, "his

wisest councillors" to make further inquiries. They too were astonished

by the splendour of all they saw, and especially by the mien of a

certain lady among these strangers, "whom, by her incomparable beauty,

and the pleasantness of her jocund speech, I imagined to be the chief of

the family," said the spokesman; "nor was it wonderful," adds the

chronicler, "that they should believe her to be the chief who was

destined to be Queen of Scotland and also heir of England." Perhaps it

was the after light of these events that conveyed that high appreciation

of Margaret's qualities into the story, for she must have been quite

young, and it is very unlikely that in presence of her mother, and the

brother whom they all considered as the King of England, a young girl,

however gifted, would have taken upon her the chief place.

[Illustration: PILLAR IN NAVE, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY]

The report he received, however, had so much effect upon King Malcolm

that he went himself to visit the strangers in their ship. He was not a

mere barbaric prince, to be dazzled by the sight of these great persons,

but no doubt had many a lingering recollection in his mind of Siward's

great house in Northumberland, where he had taken refuge after his

father's murder. It is curious and bewildering to go back in that dawn

of national life to familiar Shaksperian regions, and to think that this

primitive King who had so much in him of the savage, along with all his

love and gentleness, was the son of that gracious Duncan who addressed

his hostess like a kingly gentleman though her hospitality was to be so

fatal. King Malcolm came down, no doubt with such state as he could

muster, to see the wandering foreign princes. He was not unlearned, but

knew Latin and the English tongue, though he could not read, as we are

afterwards told. He had already reigned for fourteen years, after about

as long a period of exile, so that he could not now be in his first

youth, although he was still unmarried. He came down with his suite to

the shore amid all the stir of the inquiring country folk, gathered

about to see this strange thing--the ship with its unusual equipments,

and the group of noble persons in their fine clothes who were to be seen

upon the deck. The Athelings were carrying back with them to Hungary all

the gifts with which the Emperor, Henry III, had loaded their father

when he went to England, and had jewels and vessels of gold and many

fine things unknown to the Scots. And Margaret, even though not so

prominent as the chroniclers say, was evidently by the consent of all a

most gracious and courteous young lady, with unusual grace and vivacity

of speech. The grave middle-aged King, with his recollections of a

society more advanced than his own, which probably had made him long for

something better than his rude courtiers could supply, would seem at

once to have fallen under the spell of the wandering princess. She was

such a mate as a poor Scots King, badgered by turbulent clans, could

scarcely have hoped to find--rich and fair and young, and of the best

blood in Christendom. Whether the wooing was as short as the record we

have no means of knowing, but in the same year, 1070, Margaret was

brought with great rejoicing to Dunfermline, and there married to her

King, amid the general joy.

[Illustration: DUNFERMLINE ABBEY]

The royal house at Dunfermline, according to the chronicle, was

surrounded by a dense forest and guarded by immense cliffs. The latter

particular, however, it is difficult to accept, for the dell in which

the ruins of the mediaeval palace (a building much more recent, it is

needless to say, than that of Malcolm) still stand, though picturesque

in its acclivities and precipices, is as far as possible from including

any cliffs that could be called immense. The young Queen made a great

change in the internal arrangements of what was no doubt a grim

stronghold enough, soft as was the country around. Probably the absence

of decoration and ornament struck her painfully, accustomed as she was

to palaces of a very different kind--for almost the first thing we hear

in the contemporary history written by her confessor Theodoric,

afterwards a monk at Durham, is of the workshops and rooms for

embroidery and all the arts which were established in Dunfermline,

presumably in the palace itself under Margaret's own eye, for the

beautifying of the great church which she founded there, and also no

doubt for her own house. Certain women of good birth were judged worthy

to share the Queen's work, and lived with her, it would seem, in a kind

of seclusion, seeing only such chosen visitors as Margaret brought with

her to cheer their labours, and forswearing all idle talk and frivolity.

The Queen had such austerity mingled with her graciousness and such

grace with her severity, says her monkish biographer, loving an

antithesis, that all feared and respected her presence. "Her life was

full of moderation and gentleness, her speech contained the very salt of

wisdom; even her silence was full of good thoughts."

This biographer--according to the conscientious and painstaking

investigations of the Bollandist Fathers, who examine in their careful

way all the guarantees and traditions of the manuscript with a jealousy

worthy of the most enlightened historians--is not Turgot, who is usually

credited with it, but Theodoric, a monk of Durham, who must have shared

with Turgot, at some period of his life, the office of spiritual

director and confidant to the Queen. It is curious that both these

writers should have passed from the northern Court to the community at

Durham, of which Turgot was prior and Theodoric a simple brother; yet

not so strange either, for Durham was largely patronised and enriched by

Margaret and her husband, their kingdom at this period reaching as far

south. Of Turgot's Life, which was presumably written in the vernacular,

there seems nothing existing; but that of Theodoric is very full, and

contains many details which set before us the life of the simple Court,

with its many labours and charities: the King full of reverence and

tender surprise and admiration of all his wife's perfections; the young

saint herself, sweet and bright in modest gravity amid a tumultuous

world little respectful of women, full of the excessive charity of the

age and of her race, and of those impulses of decoration and

embellishment which were slow to develop among the ruder difficulties of

the north. Theodoric himself must have been more or less of an artist,

for in speaking of the "golden vases" and ornaments for the altars of

her new church which Margaret devised, "I myself carried out the work,"

he says. These must have been busy days in Malcolm's primitive palace

while the workmen were busy with the great cathedral close by, the mason

with his mallet, the homely sculptor with his chisel, carving those

interlaced and embossed arches which still stand, worn and gray, but

little injured, in the wonderful permanency of stone, in the nave of the

old Abbey of Dunfermline: while the Queen's rooms opened into the hall

where her ladies sat over their embroidery, among all the primitive dyes

that art had caught from herbs and traditional mixtures, on one

hand--and on the other into noisier workshops, where workmen with

skilful delicate hammers were beating out the shining gold and silver

into sacred vessels and symbols of piety. Margaret along with her stores

of more vulgar wealth, and the ingots which were consecrated to the

manufacture of crucifix and chalice, had brought many holy relics: and

no doubt the cases and shrines in which these were enclosed afforded

models for the new, over which Father Theodoric, with his monkish cape

and cowl laid aside, and his shaven crown shining in the glow of the

furnace, was so busy. What a pleasant stir of occupation and progress,

the best and most trustworthy evidences of growing civilisation, must

have arisen within the shelter of the woods which framed that centre of

development and new life: the new abbey rising day by day, a white and

splendid reality in the clearing among the trees; the bells, symbols of

peace and pleasantness, sounding out over the half-savage country; the

chants and songs of divine worship swelling upward to the skies.

Margaret's royal manufactory of beautiful things, her tapestries and

metal work, her adaptation of all the possibilities of ornament latent

in every primitive community, with the conviction, always ennobling to

art, that by these means of sacred adornment she and her assistants and

coadjutors were serving and pleasing God, no doubt consoled her ardent

and active spirit for the loss of many comforts and graces with which

she must have been familiar. At the same time her new sphere of

influence was boundless, and the means in her hand of leavening and

moulding her new country almost unlimited--a thing above all others

delightful to a woman, to whom the noiseless and gradual operation of

influence is the chief weapon in the world.

[Illustration: WEST TOWER, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY]

There is nothing, however, in this history more charming than the

description of the relations between the royal pair. King Malcolm had

probably known few graces in life except those, a step or two in advance

of his own, which were to be found in Northumberland in the house of

Earl Siward; and after the long practical struggle of his reign between

the Scots and Celts, who had already so far settled down together as to

constitute something which could be called a kingdom, he had no doubt

fallen even from that higher plane of civilisation. Such rude state as

the presence of a queen even in those primitive days might have procured

had been wanting, and all his faculties were probably absorbed in

keeping peace between the unruly chieftains, and fostering perhaps here

and there the first rising of a little community of burghers, strong

enough by union to defend themselves. Uneasy, there can be little doubt,

was often the head which bore the circlet of troubled supremacy among

all those half-subdued tribes; and his dwelling in the heart of the

"dense forest," amid all the noisy retainers in the hall and jealous

nobles in the council chamber, would leave little room for beauty or

sweetness of any kind. When the stranger princess suddenly came in like

an enchantment, with her lovely looks and "jocund eloquence"--full of

smiles and pleasant speech, yet with a dignity which overawed every rude

beholder--into these rude and noisy halls, with so many graceful ways

and beautiful garments and sparkling jewels, transforming the very

chambers with embroidered hangings and all the rare embellishments of a

lady's bower, with which no doubt the ship had been provided, and which

mediaeval princesses, like modern fine ladies, carried about with

them--the middle-aged man of war was evidently altogether subdued and

enraptured. To see her absorbed in prayer--an exercise which Malcolm had

perhaps felt to be the occupation of monks and hermits only--to see her

bending over her beautiful book with all its pictures, reading the

sacred story there, filled him with awe and a kind of adoration. He

could not himself read, which made the wonder all the more; but though

incapable of mastering what was within, he loved to handle and turn over

the book from which his beautiful wife derived her wisdom, touching it

with his rude hands with caressing touches, and kissing the pages she

loved. When he found one manuscript which she particularly esteemed, he

"sent for his goldsmith" and had the vellum encased in gold and

ornamented with jewels; then carried it back to her with such fond

pleasure as may be easily imagined. Margaret on her part did what she

could to secure to her King some of the punctilios of reverential

respect due in her knowledge to a monarch. She suggested the formation

of a royal guard to protect the King's person and surround him with

honour and observance. She filled the palace with her wealth, adorning

it in every way, providing fine clothes for the retainers and so

enriching the house that the table was served with dishes of gold and

silver. And it would seem that the reputation of a new and splendid

Court thus suddenly evolved among the northern mists got abroad, and

brought merchants with their wares up the Firth, and quickened, if it

did not altogether originate, the first feeble current of trade which

was the precursor and origin of all our after wealth in Scotland.

[Illustration: THE NAVE, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY--LOOKING WEST]

[Illustration: QUEEN MARGARET'S CAVE]

This was not all, however, that Margaret did for the commonwealth. If we

may trust her biographer, it was she who established that great

principle of reform so important in all states, and generally one of the

later fruits of civilisation, that the soldiers should be prevented from

exacting or putting under requisition the peaceful people about, and

that all they had should be honestly paid for, which was the last thing

likely to be thought of by a mediaeval prince. Altogether Margaret's

influence was exerted for the best purposes to induce her husband "to

relinquish his barbarous manners and live honestly and civilly," as the

chronicler says. It was perhaps not so good an exercise of her power

when she opened arguments, apparently through Malcolm as interpreter,

with the native clergy of Scotland, the hermits and ecclesiastics of

Columba's strain, and the mysterious Culdees of whom we know so little.

The one certain fact fully established concerning them being, that they

kept Easter at a different date from that appointed by Rome. The King,

though no scholar, would seem to have been a linguist in his way, since

he spoke both languages, that is the Saxon, and the Celtic or Pictish,

again a most difficult question to determine--with a smattering of

Latin; and was thus able to act as Margaret's mouthpiece in her

arguments. She found fault with the Celts not only for the date of their

Easter, but for their habit of not communicating at that festival. It is

very curious to note in their answer the very same reason which has

prevailed in later days among all the changes of faith and ceremonial,

and is still put forth in Highland parishes as an excuse for the small

number of communicants. The Celtic priests and bishops defended their

flocks by producing the words of St. Paul, in which that Apostle says

that those who eat and drink unworthily eat and drink condemnation to

themselves. So, according to Theodoric, the Celtic party in the Church

answered Margaret, and so would their descendants, the "Men" of the

Highlands, answer at this day. The integrity of the tradition is very

remarkable. On the other hand, they offended the devout Queen by their

neglect of Sunday, a reproach which cannot be addressed to their

descendants.

[Illustration: WEST DOORWAY, DUNFERMLINE ABBEY]

These theological discussions between the fair and learned Queen and the

Highland ecclesiastics and anchorites, carried on by means of her chief

convert the warrior King, whom love for her had taught to respect and

share in her devotion, must have afforded many picturesque and striking

scenes, though unfortunately there was no modern observer there to be

interested and amused, but only Theodoric standing by, himself very hot

upon the atrocity of a miscalculated Easter, and perhaps helping his

royal mistress here and there with an argument. Naturally his story is

especially full upon the religious side of Margaret's life--her much

prayer, her humility and reverence during the services of the Church, an

intent and silent listener to all teachings, only a little disposed to

rebel now and then when her confessor passed too lightly over her

faults. As for her charities, they were boundless. It was not for

nothing that the blood of St. Ursula, and that which was to give life to

still another saint, Elizabeth of Hungary, was in her veins. It is

needless to say that nobody in those days had discovered the evil of

indiscriminate almsgiving, which was, on the contrary, considered one of

the first of Christian virtues. Margaret was the providence of all the

poor around her. Her biographer tells us naively, with no sense that the

result was not one to be proud of, that the fame of her bounty and

kindness brought the poor in crowds to every place where she was. When

she went out they crowded round her like children round their mother.

When she had distributed everything she had of her own she took garments

and other things from her courtiers and attendants to give away, a

spoliation to which they consented willingly, knowing that the value of

everything thus appropriated would be returned to them--an excellent

reason for acquiescence. This "rapine of piety" was so strong in her

that she sometimes even appropriated to her poor certain of the gold

pieces which it was the King's custom to offer at Easter to the

Church--a pious robbery which Malcolm pretended not to perceive until he

caught her in the act, when he accused her with a laugh of tender

amusement for her rapacity. In all the touches by which the sympathetic

priest delineates the union of this pair there is something at once

humorous and pathetic in the figure of the King, the rough old warrior,

always following with his eyes the angelic saintly figure by his side,

all believing, half adoring, and yet not without that gleam of amusement

at the woman's absolute unhesitating enthusiasm--an amusement mingled

with admiration and respect, but still a smile--a delighted surprise at

all her amazing ways, and wonder what she will do next, though

everything in his eyes was perfect that she did--such as may still be

seen in the eyes of many a world-worn husband looking on at the

movements of that directer, more simple, yet more subtle being, and the

quick absolutism and certainty of the bright spirit at his side. The

grey-bearded old soldier, leader of many a raid and victor in many a

struggle, with this new revelation of beauty and purity bursting upon

his later life, becomes to us a recognisable and friendly human soul in

these glimpses we have of him, unintentional and by the way. Theodoric

himself must have liked Malcolm, half-barbarian as he was, and even

admired the look of ardent supplication which would come into the King's

face, "a great intentness and emotion," such as seemed to him

extraordinary in a secular person, and which his wife's beautiful

example and the contagion of her piety alone could have developed.

Among Margaret's many duties there was one which throws a very strange

light upon the time. Just before her arrival in Scotland, King Malcolm

had been carrying fire and sword through Northumberland in one of the

many raids over the Border which were the commonplace of the time--if

indeed we may speak of the Border at such an unsettled and shifting

period when the limits of the kingdoms were so little certain. The issue

of this raid was that Scotland, probably meaning for the most part

Lothian, the southern portion of the country, was filled with English

captives, apportioned as slaves, or servants at least, through the

entire population, so that scarcely a house was without one, either male

or female. The Queen interested herself particularly in these captives,

as was natural; sometimes paying the ransom exacted for them, and in all

cases defending and protecting them. Her emissaries went about among

them inquiring into their condition and how they were treated, visiting

them from house to house: and all that Margaret could do to mitigate the

evils of their captivity was done. Nothing can be more strange than to

realise a time when Northumbrian prisoners of war could be house slaves

in Lothian. No doubt what was true on one side was true on the other,

and Scotch captives had their turn of similar bondage.

In those days the ancient county which her children love to call the

Kingdom of Fife was far more than Edinburgh, then a mere fortress

standing up on an invulnerable rock in the middle of a fertile plain,

the centre of the national life. Not only was the King's residence at

Dunfermline, but the great Cathedral of St. Andrews was the

ecclesiastical capital, gradually working out that development of Roman

supremacy and regularity which soon swept away all that was individual

in the apostleship of St. Columba and the faith of his followers. That

the King and Queen were frequently at Edinburgh is evident from the fact

that Margaret had her oratory and chapel on the very apex of the rock,

and had there established a centre of worship and spiritual life. St.

Andrews, however, was the centre of influence, the shrine to which

pilgrims flowed, and the pious Queen, in her care for every office of

religion and eagerness to facilitate every exercise of piety, gave

special thought to the task of making the way easy and safe towards that

holy metropolis. The Canterbury of the north was divided from the other

half of Malcolm's kingdom by that sea which in these later days, at much

cost of beauty, money, and life, has been bridged over and

shortened--"the sea which divides Lothian from Scotland" according to

the chronicler, "the Scottish Sea" as it is called by others, the mighty

Firth, which to the rude galleys of the little trading villages along

its shores must have been a sea dangerous and troubled, full of risks

and perils. The Queen, we are told, erected houses of shelter on either

side of this angry strait, and established what we should call a line of

passenger boats to take the pilgrims over at the expense of the State.

One wonders how much or how little of State policy might mingle in this

pious act, for no doubt the establishment of an easy and constant means

of communication between the wealthy Lothians and the then centre of

national life must have been of unspeakable use in consolidating a

kingdom still so imperfectly knit together and divided by the formidable

line of the great estuary. It is one drawback of a religious chronicler

that no such motive, large and noble as it might be, is thought of,

since even national advantage counted so much less than the cultivation

of piety. And it is very likely that Margaret thought of nothing else,

and reckoned a prayer at the shrine of the patron saint as far more

important than the intercommunications thus established and the

knowledge of each other thus acquired by the different parts of a

kingdom which still retained the differences of separate nationalities.

A mingled aim, a practical motive, might not have accomplished half so

much; but no doubt among Malcolm's men, his greybeards pondering in

council, or perhaps himself thinking of many things as he protected all

his wife's schemes, there was a dawning perception, along with the

undoubted advantages of piety, of a national use in the quickened

intercourse and securely established communications. If so he would

probably blame himself for a mixed motive by the side of Margaret's pure

and absolute heavenly-mindedness, yet take pleasure in the secondary

unacknowledged good all the same.

Thus their life went on for nearly a quarter of a century in a course of

national development to which everything contributed, even the love of

splendour which Margaret brought with her, and her artistic tastes, and

the rage for decoration and beautiful surroundings which had then begun

to be so strong an element in national progress. She had many children

in the midst of all these labours and public interests, seven sons and

two daughters, whom she brought up most carefully in all the perfection

of her own faith. Three of these sons succeeded one after the other to

the Scottish throne, and proved the efficacy of her teaching by piety as

strong and as liberal as her own. It was in the year 1093 that

Margaret's beautiful and touching life came to an end, in great sorrow

yet triumph and pious victory over trouble. Before this time, but at a

date not indicated in the narrative, she had parted with her friend and

biographer Theodoric, probably not very long before her own death, as we

are told that she was oppressed by forebodings, or rather premonitions

of death and sorrow, of which she spoke to him with tears. When the

moment of separation came both penitent and confessor so long united in

the closest bonds of sympathy wept sore. "Farewell," said the Queen; "I

shall not live long, but you will live long after me. Remember my soul

in your prayers, and take care of my children; cease not to teach and

admonish them, especially when they are raised to great estate." He made

the promise with tears, not daring to contradict her by happier

auguries, and in this way took his last farewell of the Queen, and never

saw her more. He continues his story, however, taking it from the lips

of a priest who remained with her during the rest of her life, probably

also a Saxon, since he became a monk of St. Cuthbert's on Margaret's

death.

The narrative goes on with an account of the declining health of the

Queen. For more than six months she had been unable to mount a horse, or

sometimes to rise from her bed, and in the midst of this illness the

King set forth upon one of his raids into England, on what provocation

or with what motive it is difficult to tell, except that the provocation

was perpetual and the motive persistent the leading rule of life. His

two elder sons accompanied him on this expedition, which for some reason

Margaret had opposed, "much dissuading" him from going; but this time,

unfortunately, had not been hearkened to. Probably she set out along

with him, on her way to Edinburgh to pass the time of his absence there,

which was a place where news could be had more readily than beyond the

sea in Fife. The solitary castle, high perched upon its hill, whence

messengers could be seen approaching, or, better still, the King's

banners coming back, was a fitter home for an anxious wife than the

palace over the Firth among its woods. How long she remained there we

are not told, and there are now unhappily no articulate remains at all

of the old stronghold which must have risen upon that height, with its

low massive walls and rude buildings. The oldest relic in Edinburgh is

that little sanctuary, plain and bare as a shed, deprived of all

external appearance of sanctity, and employed for vulgar uses for many

centuries, which has been at length discovered by its construction, the

small dark chancel arch and rude ornament, to have been a chapel, and

which there seems no doubt is at least built upon the site consecrated

for Margaret's oratory, if not the very building itself. It is small

enough and primitive enough, with its little line of toothed ornament,

and its minute windows sending in a subdued light even in the very flush

of day, to be of any antiquity. I believe that even the fortunate

antiquary who had the happiness of discovering it does not claim for

this little chapel the distinction of being the very building itself

which Margaret erected. Yet it must have been one very similar,

identical in form and ornament, so that the interested spectator may

well permit himself to picture the sick and anxious Queen, worn out with

illness and weighed down by sore forebodings, kneeling there in the

faint light before the shadowed altar, trying to derive such comfort as

was possible from the ministrations of the priests, and following with

her prayers her husband and her boys, so young still and not hardened to

war, who might be falling by the hands perhaps of her own kindred, in

the country which was hers, yet which she scarcely knew. In the

intervals of these anxious prayers, when her failing strength permitted,

how wistfully the Queen and her ladies must have gazed from the walls

far around on every side to watch for the first appearance of any

messenger or herald of return. From the woods of Dunfermline and its

soft rural landscape, and the new abbey with its sweet singing and all

its magnificence, it must have been a change indeed to dwell imprisoned

so near the sky, within the low, stern rugged walls of the primitive

fort, with a few rude houses clinging about it, and the little chapel on

the rock, small and dark, as the only representative of the stately

arches and ornate services which she loved. But the little chapel is

deeply involved in all the later history of Margaret's life.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF QUEEN MARGARET'S CHAPEL, EDINBURGH CASTLE]

One day her attendants remarked that she was even more sad than her

wont, and questioning her received a reply which must have made them

tremble. "Perhaps to-day," she said, "a great evil has fallen upon the

Scots, such as has not happened to them for years." Her hearers, however

it alarmed them, made as light as they could of this prophetic

foreboding, which might be but a deepened impression of the prevailing

despondency in her heart. No doubt it was a melancholy night in the

fortress, where the women who had husbands or sons or brothers in the

distant army would cluster together in the antechamber and watch for the

attendants who came and went behind the curtain into the sick chamber

where the Queen, visibly sinking day by day, lay sleepless and sad,

listening for every sound. Terrors surrounded the castle for the

personal safety of its occupants as well as for their brethren in the

wars; and no doubt there would be whispers of the King's brother, Donald

Bane, and of the watchful jealous Celtic chiefs all ready to rise with

him, should an opportunity occur, and dash the stranger brood from the

throne. All these sad prognostications were quickly realised. Next

morning brought messengers in fear and distress from the army to say

that the King had fallen at Alnwick in Northumberland, and to prove that

Margaret's prophecy had been fulfilled at the very time it was spoken.

It was November, dark and cheerless both within and without, and the

Queen would seem to have been prostrated for a day or two by the sad

news: but on the fourth day she rose from her bed and tottered to the

little chapel on the rock to hear mass for the last time, and receive

the Holy Sacrament in preparation for death. She then returned to her

rooms with the pallor of death already on her face, and bidding all

around--"me," says the priest, "and the others who stood by"--to

recommend her to Christ, asked that the black rood should be brought to

her. This was the most holy of all the relics which she had brought with

her to Scotland. It was a case of pure gold in the form of a cross,

ornamented with marvellous work, bearing the image of the Saviour

curiously carved in ivory, and enclosing a portion of the true cross

(proved to be so by many miracles). The Queen took it in her hands,

pressed it to her dying breast, and touched with it her eyes and face.

While thus devoutly employed, with her thoughts diverted from all

earthly things, Margaret was brought back to her sorrow by the sudden

entrance of her son Ethelred, who had returned from the defeated army to

carry to his mother the dreadful news of the death not only of his

father but of his elder brother. The sight of his mother in extremity,

almost gone, no doubt confused the poor boy, still little more than a

stripling, and with that weight of disaster on his head--and he answered

to her faltering inquiry at first that all was well. Margaret adjured

him by the holy cross in her arms to tell her the truth: then when she

heard of the double blow, burst out in an impassioned cry. "I thank

Thee, Lord," she said, "that givest me this agony to bear in my death

hour." Her life had been much blessed; she had known few sorrows; it was

as a crown to that pure and lovelit existence that she had this moment

of bitterest anguish before God gave to His beloved sleep.

While this sad scene was enacting within, the country was full of tumult

and conspiracy without. Donald Bane, the brother of Malcolm, had no

doubt chafed at the Saxon regime under which the King had fallen, for

years, and struggled against the influences brought in from abroad in

the retinue of the foreigner, as has been done in every commonwealth in

history at one time or another. He represented the old world, the Celtic

rule, the traditions of the past. Some of the chroniclers indeed assert

that Malcolm was illegitimate and Donald Bane the rightful heir to the

crown. He was, at all events, a pretender kept in subjection while

Malcolm's strong hand held the sceptre, but ready to seize the first

opportunity of revolution. No doubt the news of the King's death, and of

that of his heir, would run like wildfire through the country; but it

would seem that the attempt of Donald must have been already organised,

since his siege of Edinburgh, where most of his brother's children were

with their mother, placed there for safety in the King's absence, had

already begun. Upon the death of the Queen, Donald was not likely to

have treated the royal children who stood in his way with much mercy;

and the state of affairs was desperate when young Ethelred, the third of

her sons, not yet arrived at man's estate, closed his mother's eyes, and

found himself at the head of the weeping family shut up within the

castle, surrounded by precipices on every side except that upon which

his angry uncle lay with all the forces of the discontented in Scotland

at his back, all the lovers of the old regime and enemies of the

stranger, and with a fierce contingent from Norway to support his Celtic

horde. In the simplicity of the narrative we hear not a word of the

troubled councils which must have been held while the boy prince in his

sorrow and the sudden dreadful responsibility laid on his young

shoulders turned to such wise advisers as might have followed Margaret

into the stronghold, and took thought how to save the children and carry

off the precious remains of the Queen. The expedient to which they had

recourse was one which their assailants evidently thought impossible.

That the rock upon which Edinburgh Castle stands should have been

considered inaccessible by practical mountaineers like the followers of

Donald Bane seems curious: but in those days the art of climbing for

pleasure had not been discovered, and it had no place in the methods of

warfare. It seemed enough to the assailants to hold the gates and the

summit of the eastern slopes, where probably there must already have

been some clusters of huts or rough half-fortified dwellings descending

from the Castle Hill, foreshadowing a Lawnmarket at least if not yet a

Canongate. No one would seem to have thought of the possibility of any

descent on the other side from that perpendicular rock.

But despair sharpens the wits, and no doubt after many miserable

consultations a desperate expedient was found. Even now nothing but a

goat, or a schoolboy, or perhaps a young private fearful of punishment,

could find a way down the wonderful curtain of rock which forms the west

side of Edinburgh Castle; and to guide the children and their

attendants, a sorrowful little group of mourners, distracted with grief

and fear, and Margaret's body in its litter, down those rocks where

there was scarcely footing for an alert and experienced climber, must

have been one of the most difficult as it was one of the boldest of

undertakings. While the rebel host raged on the other side, and any

traitor might have brought the enemy round to intercept that slow and

painful descent, it was accomplished safely under cover of "a great

myst," Heaven, as all thought, helping the forlorn fugitives by that

natural shield. Mists are no rare things, as everybody knows, on these

heights. Perhaps it was the well-known easterly haar, the veil of salt

sea fog which Edinburgh so often wraps round her still, which, blowing

up from the mouth of the Firth, enveloped the travellers and hid them in

its folds of whiteness, impenetrable by the closest watcher, till they

had safely reached the level ground, and stealing down to the Queen's

Ferry escaped to loyal Fife and their home in Dunfermline. Needless to

say that this mist was a miraculous agency to all the family and

servants of the Queen. To us it adds a touch of local colour, the

well-known symbol of a familiar scene. Edinburgh was then nothing but a

castle upon a rock, and now is one of the fairest and most celebrated of

historical cities; but still its perpendicular crags rise inaccessible

against the setting sun, and still the white mist comes sweeping up from

the sea.

It is to the credit of the priests that this is the only miracle that is

connected with the name of Margaret, if we except the pretty legend

which tells how a hundred years later, when her descendants removed the

remains of the saint from the place where they had been deposited to lay

them before the high altar in Dunfermline, the coffin in which they were

placed could not be carried past the humble spot in which lay, brought

back from Northumberland, the bones of her King. The cortege stopped

perforce, the ceremonial had to be interrupted, for all the force of all

the bearers could not carry even in death the faithful wife from her

husband; and the only thing it was found that could be done was to

transport Malcolm along with the partner of his life to the place of

honour, to which on his own account that rude soldier had but little

claim. Many saints have had whims as to the place of their interment,

and showed them in a similar way, but this is all sweetness and tender

fidelity and worthy to be true. The royal pair were carried off

afterwards, stolen away like so much gold or silver, by Philip of Spain

to enrich his gloomy mausoleum-palace, and can be traced for a long time

in one place or another receiving that strange worship which attaches to

the most painful relics of humanity. But where they now lie, if in the

bosom of the kindly earth or among other dreadful remains in some

sanctuary filled with relics, no one knows.

Margaret had done in her lifetime great things for Scotland. She had

introduced comforts and luxuries of every kind, and the decorative arts,

and a great deal of actual wealth, into a very poor and distracted

country. The earliest charter which is found in the Scottish archives is

one of Malcolm and Margaret, showing how the time of settlement and

established order began in their reign. She had helped to give the

distracted and divided kingdom, made up of warring sects, that

consolidation and steadiness which enabled it to take its place among

recognised nations. She turned the wavering balance between Celt and

Saxon to what has proved to be the winning side, the side of progress

and advancement. The Donalds and Duncans were swept away after a brief

and bloody interval and were no more possible in Scotland after her, and

the reign of the Anglo-Saxon was assured. She was apparently the

instrument too, though there is little information on this subject, of

drawing the Church of Scotland into that close union with Rome which had

been already accomplished in England; a step which, if it lost some

doubtful freedom and independence in ecclesiastical matters, secured

still more completely a recognised place in Catholic Christendom to the

northern kingdom. "The pure Culdee" of whom we know so little did not

survive, any more than did the Celtic kings, her influence and the

transformation she effected. Her life and legend formed the

stepping-stone for Scotland into authentic history as into a

consolidated and independent existence. The veil of fable and

uncertainty cleared away before the mild shining of her name and story.

Like Edinburgh coming suddenly into sight, as in some old and primitive

picture, high upon its rock, with the slope of the Castle Hill on one

side and the precipices round, and the white mist sweeping up from the

sea, Scotland itself becomes recognisable and grows into form and order

by the light of her peaceful and gracious presence.

And it is something worth noting that this image of purity and

excellence was no monkish vision of the purity of the cloister, but that

more complete and at the same time more humble ideal of the true wife,

mother, and mistress, whose work was in and for the world and the

people, not withdrawn to any exceptional refuge or shelter--which has

always been most dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The influence of such an

example in a country where manners and morals were equally rudimentary,

where the cloister proved often the only refuge for women, and even that

not always a safe one--was incalculable, and the protection of a

virtuous Court something altogether novel and admirable. The gentlewomen

who worked at their tapestry under Margaret's eye, and learned the

gentler manners of other Courts and countries of old civilisation by her

side, and did their wooing modestly with the sanction of her approval,

must have changed the atmosphere of the north in the most wonderful way

and quickened every current of national development though the influence

was remote and the revolution unperceived. The chroniclers go back with

a fond persistence to the story of Margaret and her sons, and the number

of her family and the circumstances of her marriage and of her death.

Before her there is little but fable; after her the stream of history

flows clear. The story of Macbeth, which is, yet is not, the

Shakspearian drama, and accordingly takes quite a curious distinct flow

of its own, like a new and imperfect version of something already

familiarly known, is the only episode of secular history that has any

reality before we come, in the next generation, to herself and her King.

The earlier annals of Adamnan, the life of Columba and the records of

his sacred isle, belong to those ever-living ever-continuing legends of

the saints in which the story of the nations counts for little. But

Margaret was fortunately secular, and though a saint, a great and

influential personage in the front of everything, and also a woman in

the fullest tide of life to whom all human events were happening; who

lived by love and died of grief, and reigned and rejoiced and triumphed

as well as suffered and prayed.

There followed, however, a terrible moment for that new Scottish-Saxon

royal family, when both their parents were thus taken from them. Donald

Bane set up a brief authority, restoring the old kingdom and banishing,

after the familiar use and wont of such revolutions, his brother's

children from Scotland. Of these children, however, but three sons are

mentioned: Edgar, Alexander, and David, who must all have been under age

at the time. Ethelred, who had the dangerous office of conveying his

brothers and sisters along with his mother's body to Dunfermline, died

or was killed immediately after this feat, and was laid with the King

and Queen before the rood altar in Dunfermline; and of Edmund, an elder

son, we have but a confused account, Wynton and Fordun both describing

him as "a man of gret wertu," who died in religion, having taken the

cowl of a monk of Cluny; whereas William of Malmesbury accuses him of

treachery and complicity in the murder of his base-born brother Duncan.

However this might be, he was at least swept from the succession, in

which there is no mention of him. Malcolm's lawful heirs were thus

reduced to the three boys whom their uncle, Edgar Atheling, had received

in England. But Donald Bane was not long permitted to enjoy his conquest

in peace. Duncan, the illegitimate son (but this counted for little in

those days) of Malcolm, who was a hostage in England, after his uncle

had held the sovereign power for six months, made a rush upon Scotland

with the help of an English army, and overcame and displaced Donald; but

in his turn was overcome after a reign of a year and a half, Donald Bane

again resuming the power, which he held for three years more. By this

time young Edgar, Margaret's son, had come to man's estate, and with the

help of the faithful Saxons who still adhered to his uncle, Edgar

Atheling, and encouraged by dreams and revelations that the crown was to

be his, came back to Scotland and succeeded finally in overcoming Donald

and securing his inheritance. The period of anarchy and trouble lasted

for five years, and no doubt the civilisation and good order which

Malcolm and Margaret had toiled to establish were for the moment much

disturbed. But after Edgar's succession the interrupted progress was

resumed. "He was a man of faire havyng," says old Wynton, and in his

time the Saxon race came again to great honour and promotion, at once by

his own firm establishment upon the Scottish throne, and by the marriage

of his sister Maud to the new King of England, Henry I., which restored

the Saxon succession and united right to might in England. Thus after a

moment of darkness and downfall the seed of the righteous took root

again and prospered, and the children of St. Margaret occupied both

thrones. Edgar, like so many of his race, died childless; but he was

peacefully succeeded by his brother Alexander, who, though as much

devoted to church-building and good works as the rest of his family, was

apparently a more warlike personage, since he was called Alexander the

Fierce, an alarming title, and was apparently most prompt and

thoroughgoing in crushing rebellion and other little incidents of the

age. He was succeeded in his turn by the youngest of Margaret's sons,

David, that "sair sanct for the crown," who covered Scotland with

ecclesiastical foundations.

"He illumynyd in his dayes

His landys wyth kirkis and abbayis;

Bishoprychs he fand bot foure or three,

Bot or he deyd nyne left he."

Among the many other foundations made by King David was the house of the

Holy Rood which has been so familiar a name in Scottish history--built

low in the valley at the foot of the surrounding hills and that castle

in which the Queen died pressing the black rood--most precious

possession--to her dying breast. Whether a recollection of that scene,

which might well have impressed itself even on the memory of a child,

and of the strange wild funeral procession, with all its associations of

grief and terror, which had stumbled down the dangerous rocks in the

mist thirty-five years before, was in David's mind, it would be vain to

inquire. The black rood of itself, besides these touching and sacred

associations, was a relic of almost unequalled sanctity, and well

warranted the erection of a holy house for its guardianship and

preservation. How far the street, which would be little more than a

collection of huts, had crept down the Castle Hill towards the new

monastery in the valley there is no evidence to show, but no doubt both

the castle and the religious house were soon surrounded by those humble

scattered dwellings, and David's charter itself makes it plain that

already the borough of Edinburgh was of some importance. Part of the

revenues of the monastery were to be derived from the dues and taxes of

the town, and it was also endowed with "one half of the tallow, lard,

and hides of the beasts slain in Edinburgh," an unsavoury but no doubt

valuable gift. The canons of the Abbey of Holyrood, or Holyrood House as

it is called from the beginning with a curious particularity, had also

permission to build another town between themselves and Edinburgh, which

would naturally cluster round the Canon's Gate--the road that led to St.

Cuthbert's, at the farther end of the North Loch, where every man could

say his mass; or more directly still to the dark little chapel upon the

castle rock, made sacred by all its memorials of the blessed Margaret.

The nucleus of the future capital is thus plainly apparent between the

two great forces of that age, the Church, the great instrument of

congregation and civilisation, and the Stronghold, in which at any

moment of danger refuge could be taken. It is curious to realise the

wild solitude of this historical ridge, with its rude houses coming into

being one by one, the low thatched roofs and wattled walls which in the

course of time were to give place to buildings so stately. The Canongate

would be but a country road leading up towards the strong and gloomy

gate which gave entrance to the _enceinte_ of the castle--itself like

some eagle's nest perched high among the clouds.

The line of Margaret went on till her sons held their Courts and dated

their charters from Holyrood House, and Parliaments were held and laws

made in the Castle of Edinburgh, and the scattered huts upon the Castle

Hill had grown into a metropolis. They were a pious and in many respects

an enlightened race, and they came to great honour and renown on both

sides of the house. Maud, Margaret's daughter, became Queen of England,

and her grand-daughter Empress, while Scotland developed and flourished

in the hands of the saintly Queen's sons and their descendants. There

are unfortunate individuals in the most prosperous races, and Scotland

never sustained greater humiliation than in her attempts to rescue

William called the Lion, a sorry lion for his kingdom, when he allowed

himself to be caught in a trap and made the prisoner of the English

king. But the children of Malcolm and Margaret retained their character

through many generations, and were a Godfearing house, full of faith and

devotion, careful of their people's interests, and dear to their hearts.

They prospered as the virtuous and excellent so often do even in this

world, and covered Scotland with endowments--endowments which indeed

proved a snare to the church on after occasions, but which at that

period were probably the best means in which money could be invested for

the benefit of the people, since alms and succour and help and teaching

in every way came from the monks in the primitive circumstances of all

nations. They were not only the guardians of learning; they were

examples in husbandry, in building, in every necessary craft; nursing

the sick, receiving the stranger, and, as the very title-deed of their

existence, feeding the poor. In those uncomplicated times there was no

such fear of pauperising the natives of the soil as holds our hands now,

and everything had to be taught to the primitive labourer, who might

have to leave the plough in the middle of the furrow and be off and away

on his lord's commands at any moment, leaving his wife and children to

struggle on with the help of the good fathers who taught the boys, or

the gentle sisters who trained the girls to more delicate work, feeding

the widow and her brood. David and his brothers, and the devout kings

who immediately followed, probably did what was best for their agitated

kingdom in establishing so many centres of assured and quiet living,

succour and peace, even if what was salvation for their age became the

danger of another time. Those foundations continued through the whole of

the period during which the lineal descendants of Margaret held the

throne. Her lineage, it is true, has never died out: but the strain

changed with the death of the last Alexander, and another change came

over Scotland not so profound as that which attended the coming of the

Saxon princess, yet great and remarkable--the end of an age of

construction, of establishment, of knitting together; the beginning of a

time disturbed with other questions, with complications of advancing

civilisation, nobles and burghers, trade and war.

[Illustration: ARMS OF QUEEN MARGARET OF SCOTLAND

(From the Ceiling of St. Machar's Cathedral, Old Aberdeen)]

PART II

THE STEWARDS OF SCOTLAND

CHAPTER I

JAMES I. POET AND LEGISLATOR

The growth of Edinburgh is difficult to trace through the mists and the

tumults of the ages. The perpetual fighting which envelops the Scotland

of those days as in the "great stour" or dust, which was Sir Walter

Scott's conception of a battle, with gleams of swords and flashes of

fire breaking through, offers few breaks through which we can see

anything like the tranquil growth of that civic life which requires

something of a steady and settled order and authority to give it being.

The revolutions which took place in the country brought perpetual

vicissitude to the Castle of Edinburgh, and no doubt destroyed and drove

from their nests upon the eastern slopes of the rock the settlers who

again and again essayed to keep their footing there. When the family of

St. Margaret came to a conclusion, and the great historical struggle

which succeeded ended in the establishment of Robert Bruce upon the

throne, that great victor and statesman destroyed the Castle of

Edinburgh with other strongholds, that it might not afford a point of

vantage to the English invader or other enemies of the country's

peace--a step which would seem to have been premature, though probably,

in the great triumph and ascendency in Scotland which his noble

character and work had gained, he might have hoped that at least the

unanimity of the nation and its internal peace were secured, and that

only an enemy would attempt to dominate the reconciled and united

country. The Castle was, however, built up again and again,

re-established and destroyed, a centre of endless fighting during the

tumultuous reigns that followed, though it is only on the accession of a

new race, a family so deeply connected with the modern history of Great

Britain that no reader can be indifferent to its early appearances, that

Edinburgh begins to become visible as the centre of government, the

royal residence from whence laws were issued, and where the business of

the nation was carried on. Following what seems to be one of the most

wonderful rules of heredity--a peculiarity considerably opposed to the

views which have been recently current on that subject--Robert Bruce was

too great a man to have a son worthy of him: and after the trifling and

treacherous David the inheritance of his kingdom came through his

daughter to a family already holding a high place--the Stewards of

Scotland, great hereditary officials, though scarcely so distinguished

in character as in position. The tradition that their ancestor Banquo

was the companion of Macbeth when the prophecy was made to him which had

so great an effect upon that chieftain's career, and that to Banquo's

descendants was adjudged the crown which Macbeth had no child to

inherit, is far better known, thanks to Shakspeare, than any fact of

their early history. It is probably another instance of that inventive

ingenuity of the original chroniclers, which so cleverly imagined a

whole line of fabulous kings, to give dignity and importance to the

"ancient kingdom" thus carried back to inarticulate prehistoric ages. In

this way the Stewarts, actually a branch of a well-known Norman family,

were linked to a poetic and visionary past by their supposed

identification with the children of Banquo, with all the circumstantial

details of an elaborate pedigree. According to the legend, the dignity

of Grand Steward of Scotland was conferred by Malcolm Canmore upon a

descendant of the ancient thane, and the lineage of the family is traced

through all the dim intervening ages with scrupulous minuteness. The

title of Steward of Scotland was enough, it would seem, to make other

lordships unnecessary, and gradually developed into that family surname

with which we are now so familiar, which has wrought both Scotland and

England so much woe, yet added so intense an interest to many chapters

of national history. The early Stewards are present by name in all the

great national events: but have left little characteristic trace upon

the records, as of remarkable individuals. They took the cross in

repeated crusades, carrying their official coat with its chequers, the

brand of the Chief Servitor of the Scottish Court, through the wars of

the Holy Land, till they came finally into the highest favour and

splendour in the days of Bruce, whose cause, which was also the cause of

the independence of Scotland, they maintained. Walter, who then held the

office of Steward, was knighted on the field of Bannockburn. He was

afterwards, as the story goes, sent to receive on the Border, after

peace had been made, various prisoners who had been detained in England

during the war, and among them Marjory Bruce, the daughter of the

patriot-king. It would be easy to imagine the romance that followed: the

young knight reverently escorting the young princess across the

devastated country, which had not yet had time to recover its cruel

wounds, but yet was all astir with satisfaction and hope: and how his

account of what had happened in Scotland, and, above all, of that

memorable field where he had won from the Bruce's own famous sword the

touch of knighthood, would stir the maiden's heart. A brave young

soldier with great hereditary possessions, and holding so illustrious an

office, there was no reason why he should despair, however high-placed

his affections might be. It takes a little from the romance to be

obliged to acknowledge that he was already a widower; but marriages were

early and oft-repeated in those days, and when Marjory Bruce died her

husband was still only about twenty-three. It was thus that the crown

came to the family of the Stewards of Scotland, the Stewarts of modern

times: coming with a "lass" as her descendant said long afterwards, and

likely to "go with a lass" when it was left to the infant Mary: though

this last, with all her misfortunes, was the instrument not of

destruction but transformation, and transferred that crown to a more

splendid and enlarged dominion.

It was in the reign of Marjory's son, the grandson and namesake of the

Bruce, and of his successors, that Edinburgh began to be of importance

in the country, slowly becoming visible by means of charters and

privileges, and soon by records of Parliaments, laws made, and public

acts proceeding from the growing city. Robert Bruce, though he had

destroyed the castle, granted certain liberties and aids to the

burghers, both in repression and in favour pursuing the same idea, with

an evident desire to substitute the peaceful progress of the town for

the dangerous domination of the fortress. Between that period and the

reign of the second Stewart, King Robert III, the castle had already

been re-erected and re-destroyed more than once. Its occupation by the

English seemed the chief thing dreaded by the Scots, and it was again

and again by English hands that the fortifications were restored--such a

stronghold and point of defence being evidently of the first importance

to invaders, while much less valuable as a means of defence. In the year

1385 the walls must have encircled a large area upon the summit of the

rock, the _enceinte_ probably widening, as the arts of architecture and

fortification progressed, from the strong and grim eyrie on the edge of

the precipice to the wide and noble enclosure, with room for a palace as

well as a fortress, into which the great castles of England were

growing. The last erection of these often-cast-down walls was made by

Edward III on his raid into Scotland, and probably the royal founder of

Windsor Castle had given to the enclosure an amplitude unknown before.

The Scots king most likely had neither the money nor the habits which

made a great royal residence desirable, especially in a spot so easily

isolated and so open to attack; but he gave a charter to his burghers of

Edinburgh authorising them to build houses within the castle walls, and

to pass in and out freely without toll or due--a curious privilege,

which must have made the castle a sort of _imperium in imperio_, a town

within a town. The little closets of rooms which in a much later and

more luxurious age must have sufficed for the royal personages whom fate

drove into Edinburgh Castle as a residence, are enough to show how

limited were the requirements in point of space of the royal Scots. The

room in which James VI of Scotland was born would scarcely be occupied,

save under protest, by a housemaid in our days. But indeed the Castle of

Edinburgh was neither adapted nor intended for a royal residence. The

abbey in the valley, from which the King could retire on receipt of evil

tidings, where the winds were hushed and the air less keen, and gardens

and pleasant hillsides accessible, and all the splendour of religious

ceremonies within reach, afforded more fit and secure surroundings even

for a primitive court. The Parliament met, however, within the fortress,

and the courts of justice would seem to have been held within reach of

its shelter. And thither the burghers carried their wealth, and built

among the remains of the low huts of an earlier age their straight steep

houses, with high pitched roofs tiled with slabs of stone, rising gray

and strong within the _enceinte_, almost as strong and apt to resist

whatever missiles were possible as the walls themselves, standing out

with straight defiant gables against the northern blue.

King Robert III was a feeble, sickly, and poor-spirited king, and he had

a prodigal son of that gay, brilliant, attractive, and impracticable

kind which is so well known in fiction and romance, and, alas! also so

familiar in common life. David, Duke of Rothesay, was the first in the

Scotch records who was ever raised to that rank--nothing above the

degree of Earl having been known in the north before the son and brother

of the King, the latter by the fatal title of Albany, brought a new

degree into the roll of nobility. Young David, all unknowing of the

tragic fate before him, was then a daring and reckless youth, held

within bounds, as would appear, by the influence of a good and wise

mother, and if an anxiety and trouble, at least as yet no disgrace to

the throne. He was the contemporary of another madcap prince, far better

known to us, of whose pranks we are all more than indulgent, and whose

name has the attraction of youth and wit and freedom and boundless

humour to the reader still. David of Scotland has had no one to

celebrate his youthful adventures like him whose large and splendid

touch has made Prince Hal[1] so fine a representative of all that is

careless and gay in prodigal youth, with its noble qualities but half in

abeyance, and abounding spirit and humour and reckless fancy making its

course of wild adventure comprehensible even to the gravest. Perhaps the

licence of the Stewart blood carried the hapless northern prince into

more dangerous adventures than the wild fun of Gadshill and Eastcheap.

And Prince David's future had already been compromised by certain sordid

treacheries about his marriage when he first appears in history, without

the force of character which changed Prince Hal into a conquering leader

and strong sovereign, but with all the chivalrous instincts of a young

knight. He had been appointed at a very early age Lieutenant of the

Kingdom to replace his father, it being "well seen and kenned that our

lorde the Kyng for sickness of his person may not travail to govern the

realm," with full provision of counsellors for his help and guidance;

which argues a certain confidence in his powers. But the cares of

internal government were at this point interrupted by the more urgent

necessity of repelling an invasion, a danger not unusual, yet naturally

of an exciting kind.

[1] We here take Shakspeare's Prince Hal for granted, as we feel disposed

at all times to take the poet's word in defiance of history; though no

doubt the historical argument is calculated to throw a chill of doubt

upon that gay and brilliant image.

On this occasion the invader was Henry IV of England, the father of the

other prodigal, whose object is somewhat perplexing, and differs much

from the usual raid to which the Scots were so well accustomed. So far

as appears from all the authorities, his invasion was a sort of

promenade of defiance or bravado, though it seems unlike the character

of that astute prince to have undertaken so gratuitous a demonstration.

He penetrated as far as Leith, and lay there for some time threatening,

or appearing to threaten, Edinburgh Castle; but all that he seems to

have done was to make proclamation by his knights and heralds in every

town they passed through, of the old, always renewed, claim of

allegiance to the English crown which every generation of Scots had so

strenuously and passionately resisted. The fact that he was allowed to

penetrate so far unmolested is as remarkable as that the invasion was an

entirely peaceful one and harmed nobody. When Henry pitched his camp at

Leith, Albany was within reach with what is called a great army, but did

not advance a step to meet the invader--in face of whom, however, young

David of Rothesay, and with him many potent personages, retired into

Edinburgh Castle with every appearance of expecting a siege there. But

when no sign of any such intention appeared or warlike movement of any

kind, nothing but the gleam of Henry's spears, stationary day by day in

the same place, and a strange tranquillity, which must have encouraged

every kind of wondering rumour and alarm, the young Prince launched

forth a challenge to the English king and host to meet him in person

with two or three hundred knights on each side, and so to settle the

question between them and save the spilling of Christian blood. Henry,

it is said, replied with something of the sarcasm of a grave and

middle-aged man to the hasty youth, regretting that Prince David should

consider noble blood as less than Christian since he desired the

effusion of one and not the other. The position of the young man shut up

within the walls of the fortress in enforced inactivity while the hated

Leopards of England fluttered in the fresh breezes from the Firth, and

Henry's multitudinous tents shone in the northern sun--an army too great

to be encountered by his garrison and noble attendants alone--while dark

treason and evil intent in the person of Albany kept the army of

Scotland inactive though within reach, was one to justify any such

outbreak of impatience. David must have felt that should the invader

press, there was little help to be expected from his uncle, and that he

and his faction would look on not without pleasure to see the castle

fall and the heir of Scotland taken or slain. But King Henry's object or

meaning is more difficult to divine. Save for his proclamations, and the

quite futile summons to King Robert to do homage, he seems to have

attempted nothing against the country through which he was thus

permitted to march unmolested. The little party of knights with their

attendant squires and heralds riding to every market-cross upon the way,

proclaiming to the astonished burghers or angry village folk the

invader's manifesto, scarcely staying long enough to hear the fierce

murmurs that arose--a passing pageant, a momentary excitement and no

more--was a sort of defiant embassage which might have pleased the fancy

of a young adventurer, but scarcely of a king so wary and experienced;

and his own stay in the midst of the startled country is still more

inexplicable. When the monks of Holyrood sent a mission to him to beg

his protection, lying undefended as they did in the plain, his answer to

them was curiously apologetic. "Far be it from me," he said, "to be so

inhuman as to harm any holy house, especially Holyrood in which my

father found a safe refuge.... I am myself half Scotch by the blood of

the Comyns," added the invader. The account which Boece gives of the

expedition altogether is amusing, and strictly in accord with all that

is said by other historians, though they may not take the same amiable

view. I quote from the quaint translation of Bellenden.

"A schort time efter King Harry came in Scotland with an army.

Howbeit he did small injury to the people thairof, for he desirit

nowt but his banner to be erected on their walls. Alwayis he was ane

plesand enneme, and did gret humaniteis to the people in all places

of Scotland where he was lodgit. Finally he showed to the lords of

Scotland that he come in their rialm more by counsel of his nobles

than ony hatred that he bore to Scottes. Soon efter he returnit

without any further injure in England."

It is very seldom that a Scotch historian is able to designate an

English invader as "a pleasant enemy," and whether there was some scheme

which came to nothing under this remarkable and harmless raid, or

whether it was only the carrying out of Henry's own policy "to busy

giddy minds with foreign quarrels"

"Lest rest and lying still might make them look

Too near unto my state,"

it is difficult to say. The nobles pent up in Edinburgh Castle with the

hot-headed young Prince at their head did not know what to make of the

pleasant enemy. The alarm he had caused, compelling their own withdrawal

into the stronghold, wrath at the mere sight of him there in the heart

of Scotland, the humiliating inaction in which they were kept by a foe

which neither attacked nor withdrew, must have so chafed the Prince and

his companions that the challenge thrown forth like a bugle from the

heights to break this oppressive silence and bring about the lingering

crisis one way or another must have been a relief to their excitement if

nothing else. One of the bewildered reasons alleged for the invasion is

that young David had written letters to France in which he called

Bolingbroke a traitor--letters which had fallen into Henry's hands; but

this is as unlikely to have brought about the invasion as any other

frivolous cause, though no doubt it might make the young Prince still

more eager to take upon himself the settling of the quarrel. We have no

reason to suppose that any foreboding of his fate had crossed the mind

of the youth at this period of his career, yet to watch the army of

England lying below, and to know his uncle Albany close at hand, and to

feel himself incapable--with nothing but a limited garrison at his

command and no doubt the wise Douglas and the other great noblemen

holding him back--of meeting the invader except by some such fantastic

chivalrous expedient, must have been hard enough.

And how strange is the scene, little in accordance with the habits and

traditions of either country: the English camp all quiet below, as if on

a holiday expedition, the Scots looking on in uneasy expectation, not

knowing what the next moment might bring. The excitement must have grown

greater from day to day within and without, while all the inhabitants,

both citizens and garrison, kept anxious watch to detect the first sign

of the enemy's advance. Henry, we are told, was called away to oppose a

rising in Wales; not indeed that rising which we all know so well in

which Prince Hal, more fortunate than his brother prodigal, had the

means of showing what was in him; but even the suggestion approaches

once more strangely and suggestively the names of the two heirs whose

fate was so different--the one almost within sight of a miserable

ending, the other with glory and empire before him. Prince Henry did not

apparently come with his father to Scotland, or there might perhaps have

been a different ending to the tale, and it would not have needed Harry

Hotspur to rouse his namesake from his folly. There was, alas! no such

noble rival to excite David of Scotland to emulation, and no such happy

turning-point before him. No one, not even a minstrel or romancer, has

remembered it in his favour that he once defied the English host for the

love of his country and the old never-abandoned cause of Scottish

independence. Already it would seem a prodigal who was a Stewart had

less chance than other men. Whether some feeble fibre in the race had

already developed in this early representative of the name, or whether

it was the persistent ill-fortune which has always pursued them, making

life a continual struggle and death a violent ending, the fatal thread

which has run through their history for so many generations comes here

into the most tragic prominence, the beginning of a long series of

tragedies. It adds a softening touch to the record of David's unhappy

fate that the death of his mother is recorded as one of the great

misfortunes of his life. In the same year in which these public

incidents occurred the Queen died, carrying with her the chief influence

which had restrained her unfortunate son. She was Annabella Drummond, a

woman of character and note, much lamented by the people. And to add to

this misfortune she was followed to the grave within a year by the great

Earl of Angus, David's father-in-law, and the Bishop of St. Andrews, to

whom, as the Primate of Scotland, the young Prince's early instruction

had probably been committed, as his loss is noted along with the others

as a special disaster.

Thus the rash and foolish youth was left to face the world and all its

temptations with no longer any one whom he feared to grieve or whom he

felt himself bound to obey. His father, a fretful invalid, had little

claim upon his reverence, and his uncle Albany, the strong man of the

family, was his most dangerous enemy, ever on the watch to clear out of

his path those who stood between him and the throne: or such at least

was the impression which he left upon the mind of his time. Thus

deprived of all the guides who had power over him, and of the only

parent whom he could respect, the young Duke of Rothesay, only

twenty-three at most, plunged into all those indulgences which are so

fatally easy to a prince. It is supposed that the marriage into which a

false policy had driven him was not the marriage he desired. But this

was a small particular in those days, as it has proved even in other

times less rude. He ran into every kind of riot and dissipation, which

the councillors appointed to aid him could not check. After no doubt

many remonstrances and appeals this band of serious men relinquished the

attempt, declaring themselves unable to persuade the Prince even to any

regard for decency: and the ill-advised and feeble King committed to

Albany, who had been standing by waiting for some such piece of good

fortune, the reformation of his son. The catastrophe was not slow to

follow. Rothesay was seized near St. Andrews on the pretence of stopping

a mad enterprise in which he was engaged, and conveyed to Falkland,

where he died in strict confinement, "of dysentery or others say of

hunger" is the brief and terrible record--blaming no one--of the

chroniclers, on Easter Eve 1401. It would be vain to attempt to add

anything to the picture of the young unfortunate and his end which Sir

Walter Scott has given. We can but rescue out of obscurity the brief

moment in which that young life was at the turning-point and might have

changed into something noble. Had his challenge been accepted, and had

he died sword in hand outside the castle gates for Scotland and her

independence, how touching and inspiring would have been the story! But

fortune never favoured the Stewarts; they have had no luck, to use a

more homely expression, such as falls to the lot of other races, and

what might have been a legend of chivalry, the record of a young hero,

drops to the horror of a miserable murder done upon a victim who foils

even the pity he excites--a young debauchee almost as miserable and

wretched as the means by which he died.

There was this relic of generosity and honour about the unfortunate

Prince, even in his fallen state, that he refused to consent to the

assassination of the uncle, who found no difficulty, it would appear, in

assassinating him; thus showing that wayward strain of nobleness among

many defects and miseries which through all their tragic career was to

be found even in the least defensible of his race.

King Robert, who had for some time been retired from the troubles of the

throne, a poor man, infirm in health and in purpose, virtually deposed

in favour of the son who was Lieutenant or the brother who was Regent of

the kingdom, and from whom all his domestic comfort had been taken as

well as his power, was driven to desperation by this blow. He had lost

his wife and his best counsellors; he had never been strong enough to

restrain his son, nor resist his brother. David, his first-born and

heir, the gay and handsome youth who was dazzling and delightful to his

father's eyes even in his worst follies, had been, as no doubt he felt,

delivered over to his worst enemy by that father's own tremulous hand;

and the heart-broken old man in his bereavement and terror could only

think of getting the one boy who remained to him safe and out of harm's

way, perhaps with the feeling that Albany might once again persuade him

to deliver over this last hope into his hands if he did not take a

decisive step at once. The boy-prince was at St. Andrews, pursuing his

studies, under the care of the bishop, when his brother was murdered;

and from thence he was sent, when the preparations were complete, across

the Firth to the Bass, there to await a ship which should take him to

France. It was a forlorn beginning for the Prince of Scotland to be thus

hastily taken from his books and the calm of a semi-monastic life and

hurried off to that wild rock in the middle of the waves, probably with

his brother's awful story thrilling in his ears and his terrible uncle

within reach, pushing forward a mock inquiry in Parliament into the

causes of Rothesay's death. How easy it would have been for that uncle

with the supreme power in his hands to seize the boy who now stood alone

between him and the throne; and with what burning at the heart, of

impotent rage and fierce indignation, the little Prince, old enough to

know and feel his father's helplessness, his own abandonment, and his

brother's terrible end, must have been conveyed away to the sea

stronghold among the bitter eastern blasts. James, the first of the

name, was not one of the feeble ones of the family. With all the romance

and poetry of his race he conjoined a great spirit and a noble

intelligence, and even at twelve, in the precocious development of that

age of blood, when even a royal stripling had to learn to defend himself

and hold his own, he must have had some knowledge why it was that he had

to be sent thus clandestinely out of his native country: he, the hope of

Scotland, in terror for his life.

The little garrison on the rock and the governor to whom the Prince's

safety was confided must have watched with many an anxious vigil among

the trading vessels stumbling heavily down the Firth from Leith, for

that sail which was to carry their charge, into safety as they thought.

Whether there was any navy belonging to the Crown at this period, or

whether the King himself possessed some galley that could venture on the

voyage to France, we are not told. But no doubt the ship when it arrived

bore some sign by which the Prince's guardians, and unfortunately others

besides, could recognise it. It could not be in any way a cheerful

embarkation. It was in the dark days of Lent, in March, when the north

is most severe: and the grey skies and blighting wind would be

appropriate to the feelings of the exiles as they put forth from their

rock amid the wild beating of the surf, anxiously watched by the

defenders of the place, who no doubt had at the same time to keep up a

vigilant inspection landward, lest any band of spearmen from Albany

should arrive upon the adjacent shore in time to stop the flight. The

grey rock, the greyer leaden sea, the whirling flight of wild sea birds

white against the dark horizon, the little boat, kept with difficulty

from dashing against the cliffs and rocky boulders, the attendant ship,

driven up and down by the waves, and distant Fife, with its low hills in

tones of neutral tint upon the horizon--would all increase the sadness

of the parting: but no doubt there was a long breath of relief breathed

by everybody about when the vessel continued its course, and slowly

disappeared down the Firth. Whatever might happen elsewhere, at least

the heir was safe.

[Illustration: THE BASS ROCK]

But this hope soon proved futile. Whether it was some traitorous

indication from Albany, or information from another source, or pure

hazard, which directed the English ships to this one vessel with its

royal freight, it had but rounded the headland of Flamborough when it

fell into the hands of the enemy. Palm Sunday 1405 was the date of this

event, but it was not till the end of Lent 1423, almost exactly eighteen

years after, that James came back. The calamity seemed overwhelming to

the nation and to all who were not pledged to Albany throughout

Scotland. It was the death-warrant of poor old King Robert in his

retirement. He lingered out a weary year in sickness and sorrow, and

when the anniversary of his son's loss came round again, died at

Rothesay, in Bute, amid the lovely lakes and islets of western

Scotland--a scene of natural peace and tranquillity, which, let us hope,

shed some little balm upon the heart of the helpless superseded

sovereign. Perhaps he loved the place because it had given his title to

his murdered boy, the hapless David, so gallant and so gay. There is

something more than ordinarily pathetic and touching in the misfortunes

of the feeble in an age of iron. As civilisation advances they have

means of protecting themselves, but not in a time which is all for the

strongest. One son buried, like any peasant's son, ignobly in the Abbey

of Lindores: the other in an English prison, at the mercy of the "auld

enemy," whom Scotland had again and again resisted to the death: and his

kingdom entirely gone from him, in the hands of his arrogant and

imperious brother; there was nothing left for poor King Robert but to

die.

Thus James became at thirteen, and in an English castle, the King of

Scotland. His prison, however, proved a noble school instead of an

ignoble confinement to his fine and elevated spirit. The name of Stewart

has never been so splendidly illustrated as by this patriotic and

chivalrous Prince. No doubt it is infinitely to the credit of the

English kings, both Henrys, IV and V, that he received from them all the

advantages of education that could have been given to a prince of their

own blood--advantages by which he profited nobly, acquiring every art

and cultivation that belonged to his rank, besides that divine art which

no education can communicate, and which is bestowed by what would seem a

caprice, were it not divine, upon prince or ploughman as it pleases God.

For above all his knightly and kingly qualities, his studies in chivalry

and statesmanship, which prepared him to fill the throne of Scotland as

no man save his great ancestor Bruce had yet filled it, James Stewart

was a poet of no mean rank, not unworthy to be named even in the

presence of Chaucer, and well worthy of the place which he has kept in

literature. We need not enter here into that part of his history which

concerns another locality full of great and princely associations--the

noble Castle of Windsor, where the royal youth first saw and sang the

lady of his love, "the fairest and the sweeteste yonge flour," of whom

he has left one of the most tender and beautiful descriptions that is to

be found in all the course of poetry. It is more to our present purpose

to tell how, amid all the charms of that courtly residence, so far

superior to anything which primitive Scotland could offer in the way of

dignity or luxury, the boy-king remained faithful to his country, and

maintained the independence for which she had so long struggled. It is

said that the one advantage taken of his captivity and youth was to

press the old oft-repeated arguments concerning the supposed supremacy

of England, and the homage due from the kings of Scotland, upon the boy

who bore that title sadly amid the luxury and splendour of what was

still a prison, however gracious and kind his jailers might be. No

circumstances could have been better suited to impress upon James's mind

the conviction that submission was inevitable: and it would have been

almost more than mortal virtue on the part of his captors had they not

attempted to bring about so advantageous a conviction. King Henry V,

under whom it is said the attempt was made, had been most generously

liberal to and careful of the boy. He was a man so brilliant in

reputation and success that a generous youth might well have been led by

enthusiasm into any homage that was suggested, too happy to feel himself

thus linked to so great a king; and James was very young, distant from

his own country and all native advisers, his very life as well as his

liberty in the power of those who asked this submission from him, and

the force of circumstances so great that even his own people might have

forgiven, and Holy Church could scarcely have hesitated to dispense him

from keeping, an obligation entered into under such pressure. But the

royal youth stood fast, and was not to be moved by any argument. Boece,

whose authority is unfortunately not much to be depended upon, has a

still more distinct and graphic story of judgment and firmness on the

part of the young captive. He had been, according to this account, taken

to France in the train of King Henry, who after the defeat the English

had sustained near Orleans, chiefly through the valour of the Scots who

had joined the French army, sent for James, and desired him "to pass to

the Scots, and to command them to return to Scotland. King Harry

promised, gif the said James brought this matter to good effect, not

only to remit his ransom but to send him to Scotland with great riches

and honour." James answered courteously, with expressions of goodwill

and gratitude for the humanity shown towards him, but "I marvel not

little," he said, "that thou considerest not how I have no power above

the Scots so long as I am ane private man and holden in captivity." The

chronicler adds: "Then said King Henry, 'Maist happy people shall they

be that happens to get yon noble man to their prince.'" It is a pity

that we have no more trustworthy proof of this charming story.

As a matter of fact James attained his freedom only after the death of

Albany, when the resistance or the still more effectual indifference to

his liberation of the man who alone could profit by his death in prison,

or by any unpopular step he might be seduced into making to gain his

freedom, was dead, and had ceased from troubling. It would perhaps,

however, be false to say that his imprisonment had done him nothing but

good. So far as education went this was no doubt the case; but it is

possible that in his subsequent life his reforms were too rapid, too

thorough-going, too modern, for Scotland. The English sovereigns were

richer, stronger, and more potent; the English commonalty more perfectly

developed, and more capable of affording a strong support to a monarch

who stood against the nobles and their capricious tyranny. James might

not have been the enlightened ruler he was but for his training in a

region of more advanced and cultivated civilisation; but had he been

less enlightened, more on the level of his subjects, he might have had a

less terrible end and a longer career.

He returned to Scotland--with the bride of whom he had made so beautiful

a picture, preserving her lovely looks and curious garments, and even

the blaze of the Balas ruby on her white throat, to be a delight to all

the after generations--in 1423, during Lent; and on Passion Sunday,

which Boece calls _Care_ Sunday, entered Edinburgh, where there was "a

great confluence of people out of all parts of Scotland richt desirous

to see him: for many of them," says the chronicle, "had never seen him

before, or else at least the prent of his visage was out of their

memory." There must indeed have been but few who could recognise the

little prince who had been stolen away for safety at twelve in the

accomplished man of thirty in all the fulness of his development, a

bridegroom, and accustomed to the state and prestige of a richer Court

than anything that Scotland could boast, who thus came among them full

of the highest hopes and purposes, and surrounded by unusual splendour

and wealth. It is true there was the burden behind him of a heavy ransom

to pay, but her English kindred, we may well believe, did not suffer the

Lady Jane to appear in her new kingdom without every accessory that

became a queen; and a noble retinue of adventurous knights, eager to try

their prowess against the countrymen of that great Douglas whose name

was still so well known, would swell the train of native nobles who

attended the sovereign. Old Edinburgh comes to light in the glow of this

arrival, not indeed with any distinctness of vision, but with something

of the aspect of a capital filled to overflowing with a many-coloured

and picturesque crowd. The country folk in their homespun, and all the

smaller rank of gentlemen, with their wives in the French hoods which

fashion already dictated, thronged the ways and filled every window to

see the King come in. It was more like the new setting up of a kingdom,

and first invention of that dignity, than a mere return: and eager

crowds came from every quarter to see the King, so long a mere name, now

suddenly blazing into reality, with all the primitive meaning of the

word so much greater and more living than anything that is understood in

it now. The King's Grace! after the long sway of the Regent, always

darkly feared and suspected, and the feeble deputyship full of abuses of

his son Murdoch, it was like a new world to have the true Prince come

back, the blood of Bruce, the genuine and native King, not to speak of

the fair Princess by his side and the quickened life they brought with

them. From the gates of the castle where they first alighted, down the

long ridge--through the half-grown town within its narrow walls, where a

few high houses, first evidences of the growth of the wealthy burgher

class, alternated with the low buildings which they were gradually

supplanting--through the massive masonry of the Port with its

battlements and towers to the country greenness and freshness of the

Canon's Gate which led to the great convent of the valley, there could

be no finer scene for a pageant. Holyrood was one of those great

monastic establishments in which kings could find a lodgment more

luxurious than in their own castles, and though there would scarcely

seem as yet to have been any palace attached to that holy house, it was

already a frequent residence of royalty, and with all its amenities of

parks and gardens would be more fit for the reception of a young queen

coming straight from princely Windsor than the narrow chambers in the

castle. Among the many presents which she is said to have brought with

her from England there is a special mention of fine tapestries for the

adornment of her new habitation.

Thus the royal pair took possession of their kingdom, and of the

interest and affection of the lively and eager crowd for which Edinburgh

has always been famous--a populace more like that of a French town than

an English, though with impulses sometimes leading to tragedy. James

would scarcely seem to have been settled in that part of the ancient

establishment of the abbey which was appropriated to the lodging of the

King, or to have exhausted the thanksgivings of Easter and the

rejoicings of the restoration, when he set himself to inquire into the

state of the country and of the royal finances, to which he had been so

long a stranger. There was no Civil List in those days nor votes of

supply, and the state of the Crown lands and possessions, "the King's

rents," was doubly important in view of the ransom yet to be paid, of

which only a fourth part had been remitted as the portion of the Queen.

The result of this investigation was anything but satisfactory. It was

found that during the reign of Albany many of these possessions had been

alienated, made into fiefs, and bestowed upon the leaders of the faction

which supported the Regent. "There was nothing left to sustain the

Crown," says Boece, "except the customs of burrows. He was naething

content of this," adds the chronicler with pithy conciseness, "howbeit

he shewed good will (gud vult) for the time." James had already griefs

enough against the family of his cousin without this startling

discovery; and his "gud vult" would seem rather to have been the serious

self-control of a man who was biding his time than any pretence of

friendliness with his unfaithful relations and stewards. Amid the early

pageants and festivities it is indeed recorded that he knighted Walter

Stewart among the other candidates for that honour, the flower of the

noble youth, a band of twenty-six gentlemen of the best houses in

Scotland; but this was probably a step which was inevitable, as it would

have been impossible to leave his own nearest relative out of the list

until he had finally made up his mind how the family of Albany was to be

treated. It is stated that the complaints and grievances of the people

brought him to a decision on this point, and helped him to carry out his

revenge upon the house which had, in popular belief at least, the guilt

of his brother's blood upon it as well as that of his own long

confinement. Walter Stewart, whose only other appearance in history is

that of a rebellious and undutiful son whom his father was incapable of

keeping in subjection, was arrested in Edinburgh Castle about a year

after James's restoration, and after an interval of several months his

arrest was followed by that of Duke Murdoch and his son Alexander, both

of whom were also seized in Edinburgh Castle, where they had probably

retired for safety. A few of their retainers arrested with them were

speedily liberated, and it became apparent that upon this doomed family

alone was King James's wrath directed. They were tried at Stirling, by a

court of their peers, under the presidency of the King himself. The

offences charged against them were misgovernment and oppression of the

people, the greatest of public sins: but it was no less the end of a

long tragedy. The younger branch of the race had been engaged in a

struggle with the elder for the last two generations at least: and it

had been the royal line that had suffered most during that period.

Bitterly, in blood and heartbreak and long suppression, they had been

weighed down under superior force: but now the time of reprisals had

come. As they stood there confronting each other, the stern young King

on one side and his kinsmen on the other, with a quarter of a century of

wrong between them, the shadow of the young prince at Falkland, and the

old father at Rothesay, and the eighteen years of captivity full in the

minds of all, what a day of reckoning at last! It makes the retribution

almost more tragic, like the overwhelming fate of the Greek drama, that

the men upon their trial had nothing to do with these crimes, unless it

might be the last. Murdoch of Albany had not exerted himself to liberate

James, but that was his only evident offence, and his sons were not

instrumental, so far as appears, in any injury to their royal cousin.

The sins of the fathers were to be visited upon the children. We are

told that the two sons, young men in the flower of their youth, were

executed one day, and their father and maternal grandfather, a very old

man, the Earl of Lennox, whose share in the matter it is difficult to

make out, on the next. Thus James settled summarily the question between

himself and his kinsmen. The house of Albany ended upon the scaffold,

and however just their doom might have been, there was something

appalling in this swift and sweeping revenge, carried out rigorously

without a sign of hesitation by a young king, a happy bridegroom, an

accomplished and gay cavalier.

It must indeed be allowed, notwithstanding his poetry and his evident

love of everything that was lovely and of good report, that the reign of

the first James was a stern one. Every witness agrees as to his

accomplishment, and that he was the flower of knighthood, of splendour

and courtesy, the most chivalrous, the most daring, the most graceful

and gracious of all his Court: and his genius as a poet is even more

generally acknowledged. The King's "Quhair" as a poem is quite capable

of standing on its own merits, and needs no additional prestige as the

performance of a king. Had he been but a wandering minstrel Chaucer

would have had no need to be ashamed of his pupil. It is full of

delightful descriptions of nature and love and youth: the fresh morning

as it rises upon the castled heights, the singing of the birds and

fluttering of the leaves, the impulse of a young heart even in the

languor of imprisonment to start up and meet the sun, with all the

springs of new life which at that verdant season come with every new

day--the apparition of the beautiful one suddenly appearing in the old

immemorial garden with all its flowers, herself the sweetest and the

fairest of flowers, all are set before us, with a harmony and music not

to be excelled. The young Prince chafing at his imprisonment, dreaming

of all the fantastic wonderful things he might do were he free, yet

still so full of irrepressible hope that his impatience and his longings

are but another form of pleasure, takes shape and identity as distinct

as if he had been one of the figures in that famous pilgrimage to

Canterbury, which had been part of his training in this delightful art.

If James had never reigned at all he would still have lived through all

these centuries in the guise in which he stood at his window on that May

morning, and suddenly, amid his youthful dreams, beheld the lovely

vision of the Lady Jane emerging from under the young spring verdure of

the trees. There is a certain window not generally supposed to be that

at which the royal captive stood--a window in the Norman Tower of

Windsor Castle, now fitly garnished and guarded by sympathetic hands,

from which the spectator looking out upon the deep moat-garden

underneath in the circle about the old donjon will scarcely be able to

withstand the thrill of feeling which attends a poetic scene and

incident fully realised. Nothing could be more green, more fresh, more

full of romance and association, than this garden where all is youthful

as the May, yet old in endless tradition, the garden of the Edwards and

Henrys, where Chaucer himself may have thought over his accounts or

taken the delightful image of his young squire "synging" who was, "or

flouting all the day" from among some group of bright-faced lads in

their bravery, where the countess who dropped her garter may have

wandered, and the hapless Henry, the mild and puny child who was born

there while James was undergoing his far from harsh captivity, played.

James Stewart's name, had he been no king, would have been associated

with this place, as that of his master in poetry is with the flowery

ways of Kent.

Nor was his inspiration derived alone from the well of English

undefiled. A still more wonderful gift developed in him when he got home

to his native country. Though the tones of Scotch humour were much less

refined, and its utterances at that early period could be scarcely more

than the jests and unwritten ballads of the populace, yet his early

acquaintance with them must have lingered in the young Prince's mind,

acquiring additional zest from the prepossessions of exile and the

longing for home. And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair"

found himself again in his native land he seems to have burst forth with

the most genuine impulse into the broad fun, rustical and natural and

racy of the soil, which perhaps was more congenial to his Scottish

audience. "Peblis to the Play" and "Christis Kirk on the Green" are

poems full of the very breath of rural life and the rude yet joyous

meetings of the country folk at kirk and market, which with wonderfully

little difference of sentiment and movement also inspired Burns. He must

have had a mind full of variety and wide human sympathy almost

Shakspearian, who could step from the musings of Windsor and the

beautiful heroine, all romance and ethereal splendour, to the lasses in

their gay kirtles, and Hob and Raaf with their rustic "daffing," as true

to the life as the Ayrshire clowns of Burns, and all the clumsy yet

genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the most curious

and least to be expected transformations of poetic versatility--for it

is even amazing how he could know the life into which he thus plunged

joyous, as if he had been familiar with it from his childhood. King

James was not without an object amid all the laughter and the pranks of

his holiday. The King's cheerful ridicule of the clumsy fellows who

could not draw the bow was intended, with a prick of scorn under the

laughter, to rouse up his rustic lieges to emulation, not to be behind

the southern pock-puddings whose deadly arrows were, in every encounter

between Scots and English, the chief danger to the fighting men of the

north. It is curious that this difference should have existed and

continued with such obstinacy through all these fighting centuries; the

Scotch spearmen were all but invulnerable in their steady square, like a

rock, but they had little defence against the cloth-yard shafts of the

English bowmen, which neither exhortation nor ridicule, neither prizes

to win nor disaster to fear, could teach them to adopt. James laboured

hard, in ways more practical than his poems, to introduce this new arm,

but in vain. It was kept up languidly in holiday contentions, like that

of Christis Kirk on the Green, while his life lasted; but when his reign

was over and the momentary stimulus withdrawn the bows were all thrown

away.

The King's command of this humorous vein, so dear to his people, with

its trenchant sketches from the life and somewhat rough jests, is

wonderful, when his courtly breeding and long separation even from such

knowledge of rustic existence as a prince is likely to obtain is

considered. And the many-sided nature which made these humours so

familiar and easy to him is a strange discovery in the midst of all the

tragic circumstances of his life and reign. The union of the most

delicate poetry and romance with that genial whim and fancy is unusual

enough: but it is still more unusual to find the stern Justiciar,

avenger of blood and redresser of wrong, the reconstructer of a

distracted country, capable not only of the broad fun of the rustic

ballad-maker, but of so tolerant and humorous a view of the humble

commons, the underlying masses upon which society is built. For the

first aspect of affairs in Scotland could not be a cheerful one:

although it was rather with the nobles and gentlemen, the great

proprietors of the country, who had to be summoned to exhibit their

charters and prove their titles, partly no doubt with the view of

discovering what Crown lands had been alienated by the Albany party,

that the King's quarrel was, than with the humbler subjects of the

nation.

Yet there is no doubt, with all these lights and softening influences of

character and genius, that his reign was a stern one. James had

everything to reform in the country to which he came with so many new

ideas and so enlarged a knowledge of what the internal economy of a

nation might be made. It is rather against the general historical

estimate of the talents and power of the Regent Albany that the new King

should have found, as appears, so much to do for the reorganisation of

the commonwealth--regulating the laws, appointing courts of justice,

inquiring into the titles of property, and in every other way giving

consistency and order to the affairs of Scotland. However, the lavish

grants made to the great Scots lords and the licence given them to rule

their vassals as they pleased arose not from weakness but from Albany's

deliberate policy of securing a strong party on his side, a policy

exactly opposed to that of James, whose heart was set on subduing these

fierce nobles, and perhaps of developing the people at large, the nation

itself, if that is not too modern an ambition. The reign of Law, broken

and disturbed by a hundred storms, but still henceforward with a

statute-book to fall back upon and some fitful authority at its command,

began in Scotland in his day.

There are some curious details in the _Scotichronicon_ about the taxes,

now, it would seem, for the first time levied upon the general mass of

the people. In 1424, the year after James's return, a tax of twelvepence

in the pound was imposed by the Parliament at Perth, for the maintenance

of the King's state and payment of his ransom, upon all goods, lands,

and annual revenues of whatever description, both spiritual and

temporal, which was passed with the consent of the estates, no doubt

under the stimulus of the general rejoicing at the King's return. This

impost was to last for two years. An income tax so general and

all-embracing could scarcely be expected to be popular, but for the

first year it was paid, we are told, with readiness, certain of the

greatest nobles in the kingdom being appointed in their various

districts to the office of collecting. That the Church should have taken

her share in the payment of this tax says much for the loyalty of the

Scotch priesthood and their unity with the people at this crisis of the

national history. In the second year, however, grumblings arose. It is

comprehensible that a nation unaccustomed to this pressure should

respond to it in a moment of enthusiasm, yet become uneasy under the

repetition when the enthusiasm had probably died away, especially if a

fear arose that it might become permanent. King James, however, adopted

a course not at all usual with governments when the power to exact has

once been placed in their hands. When the popular murmur came to his

ears he stopped at once the unpopular demand. How the paying of the

ransom was carried on, and how the maintenance of the King's state we

need not inquire. The Crown lands were no doubt extensive still. Some

years later another experiment of the same kind was made; the new tax,

however, being only twopence in the pound, and its object the payment of

expenses of a mission sent to France to negotiate a marriage between the

baby-princess Margaret and the equally juvenile dauphin--an object which

does not appear to have appealed to the sympathies of the people, since

we are told that it was the cause of immediate murmurs, the King not

only stopped the unpopular tax but returned the money to those who had

paid it--a most admirable but seldom followed example.

The curious system afterwards employed by all the Scots kings of tours

or "raids" of justice throughout the kingdom seems to have originated in

James's energetic reign, but he carried not only the officers of the

law, but occasionally his entire Parliament with him, moving about to

the different centres of Scotland with great impartiality. Sometimes

they met at Edinburgh, in the Great Parliament Hall in the Castle, and

made "many good laws if they could have been kept," says the chronicler;

sometimes at Perth, a favourite residence of the King; and on one

memorable occasion so far north as Inverness, where, impatient of

continual disquietude in the Highlands, James went to chastise the

caterans and bring them within the reach of law. This he did with a

severe and unsparing hand, seizing a number of the most eminent chiefs

who had been invited to meet him there, and executing certain dangerous

individuals among them without mercy. These summary measures would seem

to have borne immediate fruit in the almost complete subjugation of the

Highlands. But it was hard to reckon with such a restless element as the

clans, and hanging and heading were very ineffectual measures among

people with whom "another for Hector" was the simplest suggestion of

natural law.

It was after this stern Parliament of Inverness that there occurred at

Edinburgh one of the most curious and picturesque scenes that it is

possible to imagine. One of the chiefs tried at that assize was the

greatest and most important of all, the Lord of the Isles, sometimes

called Donald and sometimes Alexander by the chroniclers, who on his

promise to amend his ways, and no longer harbour caterans or head

forays, was, no doubt out of respect for his almost princely position,

set at liberty. But no sooner was the fierce chieftain set free, "within

a few days after," says the chronicler, than he took and burnt the town

of Inverness, in which the Parliament had been held, and showed his

impenitence by an utter abuse of the mercy accorded to him. When,

however, he heard that the King himself with all the forces of the

kingdom was coming against him, Donald hastily disbanded his men and

took refuge in the watery fastnesses of his islands: and it would seem

that he must have felt the tide of national sentiment to be against him,

and his power not equal to make any stand against all the force of

peaceful and law-abiding Scotland under the energetic new King. The wily

Highlander made his submission in the way which, no doubt, he thought

most likely to disarm authority and gain exemption. He choose Easter

day, the greatest of religious festivals, for his appearance as a

penitent, and in the middle of the service in the Chapel of Holyrood

appeared suddenly, almost without clothing, and knelt down before the

King "where he was sittand at his orison," praying for grace in the name

of Him who rose from the dead that day. So strange an interruption in

the midst of all the glories of the Easter mass throws a strange and

wild light upon the varieties of national life in Scotland. That

half-savage figure, with plaid and weapons cast aside, defenceless, at

the King's mercy, in all the primitive abandonment yet calculation of

early patriarchal times; while all that the art and culture of a

splendid age could do to give magnificence to the most imposing

ceremonial of the Church surrounded this strange apparition, the incense

rising, the music pealing, the Court in all its glory of flashing jewels

and splendid stuffs filling the lofty area. Like some wild god of the

mists suddenly gleaming through the fragrant smoke between the bishop's

white robes and the kneeling King, what a strange interruption to the

mass! The King, at the request of the Queen we are told, gave him his

life, as the adjuration addressed to him and all the force of the

surroundings gave James little choice but to do; for he could not have

offended the sentiment of his people by refusing the boon which was

demanded in that Name, however doubtful he might be of the expediency of

granting it. "Then the King began to muse," says Boece. He must have

been devout indeed to have been able to return to the course of the

service with the Islesman before him on his knees, and all that wild

half of the kingdom, with its dangerous habits and fierce tribal laws,

thus suddenly made visible--a spectre which had often before troubled

the King's peace. James had not to learn for the first time that

apparent submission from such a suppliant did not necessarily mean any

real change, and must have thoroughly felt the hollowness of that

histrionic appearance and all the difficulties which beset his own

action in the matter. The conclusion was, that the life of the Lord of

the Isles was spared, but he was committed to safe keeping in the strong

Castle of Tantallon, with, however, the unfailing consequence, that his

brother took the field with all his caterans in his stead.

James reigned in Scotland for thirteen years--a reign full of commotion

and movement, by which many in high place were humiliated, the spoils of

the feudal tyrants taken from them, and the wrongs of the suffering

commonalty redressed, proceedings which procured for the King many

enemies among the nobility before the force of popular sentiment was

strong enough to balance this opposition by its support. He began in

Scotland that struggle which for some time had been going on in England

against the power of the nobles, who were still in the north something

like a number of petty kings ruling in their own right, making little

account of national laws, and regarding the King with defiance as almost

a hostile power. One of the greatest risks of such a struggle is that it

raises now and then a fiery spirit stung by the sense of injury and the

rage of deprivation into a wild passion of revenge which bursts every

restraint. The Grahams of Strathearn in the north had fallen specially

under the rectifying process of James's new laws of property: and out of

this house there suddenly arose the tragic figure of an avenger whose

brief but terrible career occupies but a single page in history, yet

contains all the elements of a fatal drama. Sir Robert Graham, of whose

antecedents there is little record, was not the head of the house, but a

younger brother of daring character, and one of those fanatics of race

to whom the glory of their house is a religion. The first we hear of him

is a sudden appearance in the Parliament of January 1435, when he made a

fiery and violent speech, ending by an impeachment of the King himself

for injustice and robbery. Such an assault would find little support in

the public assembly of the States, in the awe of the royal presence, and

Graham had to escape for his life, finding means of flight into the

Highlands, the ever-ready refuge for rebels. There he launched wild

threats against James, which the King, probably well accustomed to

missiles of the kind, paid little attention to. The monarch was warned

too, we are told, by another wild apparition, which suddenly appears out

of the mists for this purpose--a Highland witch of the order of those

who drove Macbeth's ambition to frenzy, but whose mission now was to

warn James of the mischief brewing against him. The King was brave and

careless, used to the continual presence of danger, keeping his

Christmas merrily at Perth with all the sports and entertainments with

which it was possible to cheat the gloomy weather, and made little but

additional mirth both of the prophecy and the threats. Evidently the

Court found pleasure in the fair city on the Tay. They were still

lingering there, having taken up their residence in the monastery of the

Black Friars, at the end of February. In Scotland as elsewhere the great

religious houses seem to have been the best adapted to give hospitality

to kings. It was long after this date before anything that could be

called an independent royal residence was built at Holyrood itself: for

generations the King and Court were but guests in the stately abbey,

which was, like the monastery of the Black Friars, so convenient and

commodious a house both for entertainment and shelter that its great

chambers became the natural, as they were the most stately and pleasant,

lodging that could be provided for a monarch.

The tragedy that followed is well known. At the end of a pleasant

evening when there had been music--in which James himself was the first

connoisseur in Scotland, inventing, some say, the national lilt, the

rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so

adaptable to mirth--"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and

disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the

conventual stillness outside and the cheerful talk of the friendly group

within. The King was taken at a disadvantage, apparently without even a

gentleman of his Court near him, nothing but his wife and her ladies

lingering for a last moment of pleasant conversation before they went to

bed. It is easy to imagine the horror with which the little party must

have listened to the rush of the savage band, hoping perhaps at first

that it was but some tumult in the street, or affray between the

townsfolk and the caterans--never very far off and often threatening St.

John's town--till the cries and clashing of the arms came nearer, and

wild torch-light flared through the high windows and proved the fatal

object of the raid. The groans of a few easily despatched sentinels, the

absence of any serious opposition or stand in defence, the horrible

discovery of bolts and bars removed and the King at the mercy of his

enemies, must have followed in a few terrible moments. No incident in

history is better known than that piteous attempt of one distracted

girl, a Douglas, born of a heroic race, to bar the door with her own

slim arm, thrusting it through the holdfasts from which the bolt had

been taken away: poor ineffectual bar! yet enough to gain a moment when

moments were so precious, and while there was still a chance of saving

the King.

The narrative of the death struggle, and the distracted attempts to find

a place of concealment for the victim, are too heartrending to be

repeated here. James fell, it is said, with sixteen wounds in him,

hacked almost to pieces, yet facing his murderers so desperately that

some of them bore the marks of his dying grip when they were brought to

the scaffold to be killed in their turn with every circumstance of

horror conceivable some time later. The execution of these miserable

traitors, one of them the King's own uncle Athole, took place at

Edinburgh for the greater solemnity and terror of the punishment, which

was accomplished by every kind of torture. The Queen, too, after the

horrible scene of which she had been a witness, and almost more than a

witness--for she had thrown herself before her husband and had been

wounded in the terrible struggle--gathered her children and fled to

Edinburgh Castle to put the little heir of the kingdom, now James II, in

security. The hapless child was sadly crowned at Holyrood at six years

old, with a hastily adapted ceremonial, the first of many such

disastrous rites to come.

The time of James's reign had been one of rising prosperity throughout

the realm. Law and order had been established in recognised courts and

tribunals, the titles of property had been ascertained and secured, not

without loss, no doubt, to many arrogant lords who had seized upon stray

land without any lawful title, or on whom it had been illegally bestowed

during the Albany reign--but to the general confidence and safety. And

the condition of the people had no doubt improved in consequence. It is

difficult to form any estimate of what this condition was. All foreign

witnesses give testimony of an unpleasing kind, and represent the

country as wretched, squalid, and uncivilised: but on the other hand

nothing can be more unlike this report than the most valuable and

unintentional evidence furnished by King James's own poems, with their

tale of village merry-makings and frays which convey no impression of

abject poverty, nor even of that rudest level of life where material

wants are so pressing as to exclude all lighter thoughts. "On Mayday,"

says King James, "when everybody is bound to Peblis to the play,"

"At Beltane quhan ilke bodie bownis

To Peblis to the play,

To heir the singing and sweit soundis,

The solace suth to say.

Be firth and forest furth they found,

They graythit them full gay;

God wot that wald they do that stound,

For it was thair feist day

They said

Of Peblis to the Play."

All the lasses of the west, he goes on to tell us, were up at cockcrow,

and no men might rest for the chatter and the noise of their

preparations. One cried that her curch was not starched enough, another

that a hood was best, another bewailed herself as "so evil sunburnt"

that she was not fit to be seen. The young folk stream along "full bold"

with the bagpipes blowing, and every village adding its contingent, "he

before and she before to see which was most gay."

"Some said that they were mercat folk,

Some said the Quene of May

Was cumit

Of Peblis to the Play."

When they arrive at the "taverne hous" they give orders that the board

be served, and to see that the napery is white, "for we will dyn and

daunce." At "Christis Kirk on the Green" there is a similar description,

the lasses coming out as before, "weshen clean," in their new grey

kirtles "well prest with many plaits," with their gloves of doeskin and

morocco shoes. All these incidental traits, and the atmosphere of the

merry ballads, though both end in a fray, contradict with vigour the

cold and wretched picture given by outsiders of a country where the

people warmed themselves by burning sulphureous stones dug out of the

ground, where the houses had a cow's hide stretched for a door, and all

was squalid misery and nakedness. There was plenty of fighting going on

it is evident--not a lowland fair without its broken heads (a habit

that, according to Sir Walter Scott, no mean authority, lasted into the

nineteenth century)--and much oppression, the great lords reigning like

absolute tyrants in the midst of subjects without resource or

protection; but the case of the peasantry notwithstanding all these

evils does not seem to have been a bad one. A certain vigorous capacity

of revival, which history shows us continually as existing on the broad

level of the soil, must have brought them back to rough ease and

comfort, and the freedom of the natural healthful atmosphere which makes

itself apparent in transcripts of life so little likely to be forced or

optimistic. In all times and circumstances there can be little doubt

that the amount of simple enjoyment to be got out of life, especially by

the young, who form at least the half of every community, far exceeds

the elements of wellbeing which outsiders see in it. And the protection

of the Church, the comparative quiet to be enjoyed on church lands, the

charities and succour of the cloister, must have made an incalculable

addition to the possibilities of existence. Everything in James's reign

was calculated to increase the stability and good order which are the

best guarantees of national life; even his severities cultivating a

sense of security in the weak and a wholesome consciousness of the

necessity of self-restraint in the strong. For the first time for many

generations the nobles were kept within bounds, and exceptional

cruelties became if not impossible, yet of so certain discovery and

punishment that lesser tyrants at least must have trembled. The law that

might makes right fell into temporary disuse, and a better law, that of

the courts that sat periodically over all the kingdom, and--appealing

still more strongly to the imagination--a king that shut his ears to no

petition and interfered with a strong hand to right the wronged, began a

new era for the commonalty of Scotland. Even the unfavourable

description so often quoted of Eneas Silvius, reports the common people

as having "abundance of flesh and fish," no small ingredient of

wellbeing, and records rather a complete absence of luxuries than that

want which reduces the vital strength of a nation. The same authority

tells of exportations of "hides, wool, salt fish, and pearls," the

latter a curious item, although there were as yet no manufactures, and

even such necessaries as horse-shoes and every kind of harness had to be

imported from Flanders. But the Scots in their farmhouses and cottages

made the cloth with which they were clothed, and their "blew caps," the

well-known blue bonnet which has lasted to our own days. And they

retained the right which, according to her monkish chronicler, St.

Margaret had been the first to secure for them--of immunity from all

military requisitions, and even, which is a curious contradiction of the

supposed tyrannies of the nobles, held an absolute property in their own

goods which out of the island of Great Britain no peasantry in the world

possessed. The French allies who were in Scotland in the end of the

fourteenth century were struck with angry consternation to hear

themselves hailed by a set of clodhoppers, and bidden to keep the paths

and not trample down the growing corn, and to find that, however willing

the Scots men-at-arms might be to harry England when occasion offered,

not the greatest lord in the French contingent could carry off a cow or

a brace of pullets without compensation. We cannot but think that the

country in which the peasant's barnyard was thus defended was at least

as forward in the best elements of civilisation as those in which there

were hangings of arras and trenches of silver, but no security for

anything in homesteads or workshop which might be coveted by the

seigneur.

[Illustration: HOLYROOD]

Edinburgh, as has been said, never seems to have been a favourite

habitation of this enlightened and accomplished Prince. Perhaps Queen

Jane found the east winds too keen on the heights, or the Abbey of the

Holy Rood too low in the valley. The heir was born there it is true, and

we have note of various Parliaments and visits, but no settled residence

in the capital. One incident is mentioned by the chroniclers which must

have afforded a picturesque scene, when the King himself presided,

before the gates of Edinburgh Castle, at a duel between a knight called

Henry Knokkis or Knox (curious precursor in the dimness of distance of

another of his name!), who had been accused by an Edinburgh burgess of

treasonable speeches against the King--and his accuser. But who this

accuser was, and by what privilege he was allowed to meet a gentleman

and knight in single combat we have no information. Perhaps he was

himself of noble blood, a younger son, a man before his time, seeking

the peaceful profits of trade instead of those of the marauder, as it

has become the fashion of a later age to do. It is almost impossible not

to fancy that there must have been a touch of the burlesque in this

combat, which James himself interfered to stop, separating the

combatants. He was very careless it would seem of treasonable speeches,

apt to treat them lightly and very probably smiled a little at the zeal

of the citizen who was more jealous of his honour than he was himself.

The platform before the gates would still make a splendid area for any

feat of arms, if the winds did not interfere before the King and blow

the combatants away: and the old-world crowd with their many colours,

the jerkins slashed and embroidered with the blazon of all the great

families in Scotland, the plumed caps and dazzling helmets of courtier

and knight, the border of blue bonnets outside, and all the shining

array of fair ladies around and behind the throne, would present a more

striking picture than the best we could do nowadays. Let us hope the sun

shone and warmed the keen clear air, and threw into high relief the

towers and bastions against the northern blue.

Edinburgh by this time had grown into the proportions of a town. The

houses which the citizens had the privilege of building within the

castle precincts would appear to have been low, to secure the protection

of the walls; and by certain precautionary regulations for their

preservation from fire it would seem that many of them were still

thatched. The King's residence there, judging from the straitened

accommodation, which was all that existed in a much more advanced

period, must have been small and poor, though there already existed a

Parliament Hall, in which probably other great assemblies were held. The

city walls were continued along the crest of the ridge in narrow lines,

deflecting a little only on the south side, where the limits were broken

by several wealthy and well-cultivated enclosures where brotherhoods

were established--White and Black Friars, sons of Augustine and Dominic,

with their great detached houses, their gardens always an example of

husbandry, and chapels filling the air with pleasant sound of bells.

King James had himself endowed, besides many existing foundations, a

monastery for the Franciscans or Grey Friars, which has always continued

to be one of the chief ecclesiastic centres of Edinburgh. It was so fine

a building, as the story goes, that the humble-minded Minors declined at

first to take possession of it as being too magnificent for an Order

vowed to poverty; though as their superior was a monk from Cologne, sent

for by the King on account of his learning and sanctity, and accustomed

to the great convents of the Continent, such an objection is curious. On

the south side of the town, at some distance outside the walls, on the

platform afterwards occupied by the buildings of the old High School,

stood amid its blossoming gardens the Church of St. Mary in the Field,

afterwards so fatally known as the Kirk of Field, a great house so

extensive and stately that it had already served on several occasions as

a royal lodging. St. Giles's, one of the oldest foundations of all,

stood among its graves, at the foot of the Castle Hill in the centre of

the life of ancient Edinburgh, as it does still. These clusters of

sacred buildings, encircled by their orchards and gardens, made a fringe

of verdure, of charity and peace, sanctuaries for the living and

resting-places for the dead, round the strong and dark fortifications of

the little royal town, which hitherto had held for its life upon that

ridge of rock, a dangerous eminence lying full in every invader's way.